NickMiddleton

IIRC match the "damage" against target's CON on the resistance table - if the damage overcomes the targest CON, the target is stunned (see Stunning Spot rule) for a few (1d3+1?) rounds, if the target resists they take minimum damage and are still conscious. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Currently can't decide between: 1) Tales of the Long Night (baroque fantasy project) 2) After the Scouring (converting my RQIII Post-Apocalypse game from last summer) 3) Jorune (finishing the coversion I started three or four years back) 4) Children of Leviatahn (lost colony SF project)... So SF or Fantasy, but not sure which (so I can't Vote as you have to pick one...) Cheers, Nick Middleton

If I special and he crits, I reduce his crit to a normal success, but if I critical, but still lose to his "better" critical, he still criticals... Don't think that works. If the most "downgrading" can do is reduce the winners success level to a normal success I think it works well: If I special and he crits, I reduce his crit to a normal success, and likewise if I crit and he crits. I can't make him fail. Cheers, Nick Middleton

No, I don't believe so (see post above). I think there's a clause missing that regardless of the losers degree of success, the winner's result can't be made worse than a normal success. So, in effect, tied successful results always mean a normal success for the winner. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Agreed, I just reread the play test draft (see post above) and it's NOT explicitly stated. Same again I'd say: I.e. that downgrading can ameliorate the winners advantage but not remove it: they will always have succeeded (i.e. have at least a normal level of success), but can be downgraded from critical or special. Cheers, Nick Middleton

My undertsanding is that you are conflating two steps: 1a) Best success level wins 1b) Iff success levels tied, highest roll wins 2) Having determined who won by method 1, if the loser has rolled a success they get to down grade the winners degree of success by one step for each step above failure that they achieved. So downgrading ONLY comes in to play AFTER determining who "won". The only rough spots for me are that highest roll doesn't feel right (for all I know it's simpler and mathematically the same as calculating the margin) and it's not explicitly stated that 2) cannot reduce a winners success beyond "normal" success, which is what I assume is the case. Cheers, Nick Middleton

You are reading your own interpretations into the word I think - I regularly fondle my cat - he's a short hair mongrel, but he has very soft fur and I'm very fond (that word again) of him, especially since he survived being hit by a car back in september (bar the loss of one eye...). Most people (even in the phrase "Gun fondler" / "Gun fondling") I'd suggest just mean "excessive emotional attachment" when they use the term. Nothing sexual in that. And Zane used the term first, albeit it scare quotes: He didn't get called anything, at least not by me. I sarcastically (and without the scare quotes) re-used a term he'd already used, in response to his original post (which he himself described as harsh). Cheers, Nick Middleton

To be blunt Atgxtg, Zane set the tone (and openly acknowledged that he did): In reponse, I explained why I thought the lack of detail in the core book wasn't a problem, and could be addressed by supplements. I acknowledged that SOME BRP fans would like a detailed fire arms system (and name checked a couple of previous RPG supplelmwes along precisely those lines). In response to what I may have misread (but see his opening comments) as a rather snarky list from Zane I also made one sarcastic reference to "gun fondling" - but his own description of his group indicates, to me anyway, an unusual level of interest in firearms and their accurate portrayal in RPG's. I say this as someone who has regularly gamed with (serving and ex) military and with (minor) personal experience of shotguns, black powder long arms and pistols: and (leaving aside special cases that I acknowledged in my original post), my exepience has been that most gamers just aren't that interested in the details of firearms (or accept that RPG rules have to make aproxiamations). And Call of CThulhu's sales are relevant becuase it is the most successful set of BRP firearms rules published to date - which rather suggests that, contrary to Zane's groups opinion, a lot of BRP gamers aren't that bothered by the inaccuracies in its firearms. And whilst you were busy taking offence at one comment in my post, you didn't offer a counter argument to my main point: that a detailed and more accurate treatment of firearms doesn't seem necessary in the core rulebook, but WOULD make sense in a supplement. Cheers, Nick Middleton

And yet Coc has sold home many copies? I can quite believe it's unacceptable to your group: I am, forgive me, skeptical that one can quite so straightforwardly generalise this to a universal statement. Certainly, it doesn't bother any of the gamers I know - if we were playing a modern special forces game where modern firearms performance was directly relevant, it might but frankly for ANY specialist setting like that we'd expect to supplement what's in the core rulebook with our own research or a supplelment specifically about the topic. There are a number of RPG supplements specifically for those who care about more detail in their modern weapons - whilst the Pagan Publishing supplement is currently OOP it may yet re-appear, and Charles Ryan's well regarded Ultramodern Firearms (originally for Millenium's End IIRC but reworked as a d20 supplement a few years back) is relatively easy to get hold of and is quite usable with BRP. Plus of course there is a clear opening for a BRP supplement on modern firearms and all the added rules complexity one would need to model their effects sufficiently accurately for most gun fondlers - penetration, recoil, round type, loads, maintenance etc etc. I'm sure a section of the market would dearly love a BRP Guns!Guns!Gun! / Fire, Fusion & Steel - I'm also reasonably sure such a thing wasn't part of Jason's brief, and wouldn't appeal to the majority of BRP players (especially as part of the new default core rules). Jason's brief, I believe, was for a core BRP rule book - not the BRP Gun-fondler's bible. For much of the playtest the playtesters didn't have the weapons tables, we were using weapon tables from previous BRP games as they would be mostly compatible. I got sight of the weapons tables last year and whilst I was a bit disappointed at the lack of detail, saw nothing problematic in them as a base set of tables to get people playing. Whilst modern era firearms might be a little shortchanged for some people, I'd rather that than have had other era's weapons poorly served: if the modern firearms get the detailed treatment, why not the mediaval melee weapons? Or the futuristic weapons? As a baseline the tables give simple stats for weapons of every era the game covers. Adding details for a specific era / technologies is, as I've already suggested, a role for supplements in my opinion. Cheers, Nick Middleton

So we probably crossed over then - I was at Warwick 1986/-/1989 (Phil Lit), and lived in Coventry until 1995 Actually, now you described it, it doesn't sound as bad as I remembered it... Eerily well suited to running big games in weren't they? I always assumed it was one of those blackly ironic consequences of the idiotic wide eyed optimism of the post war rebuilding when they came up with names like that... Funnily enough a largish chunk of my gaming crowd stayed on in Coventry after they finished at Warwick, so we were still all gaming together through the early '90's at various friends houses in Earlsdon and Tile Hill until my job was abolished during rail privatisation and I relocated to York. :focus: It's strange thinking back on gaming then actually - I had far fewer RPG books, and made minimal use of computers to aid with the role playing (I'd dabbled using my Amiga to keep notes, but the screen was crap and printing a bugger - I actually had more joy with the Amstrad PCW8512 I "inherited" from my in laws), albeit we'd experimented with using walky-talky radios for a dual GM campaign (it hadn't worked), and on another occasion had run a multi-threaded campaign that climaxed with four GM's running four interrelated games in the same house at the same time (and with characters occasionally slipping between them...) - THAT would have been hugely easier in a typical modern house with four computers and a network! I do like having electronic versions of stuff that I can reference at work or easily print extracts from for players etc. but remain both firmly attached to books for actual reading and reference when I'm writing material; and I must confess I remain some what sceptical that PDF releases are automatically a good idea in all circumstances for the RPG publishers. But, having said that, I can't help feeling it's time Chaosium did something a bit more substantial on the PDF front than simply re-issuing old OOP material via DTR. Cheers, Nick Middleton

But you CAN run BRP with all those features - and someone who prefers their BRP far lighter and less crunchy can run with DEX ordering in combat, only THP / MWL, no skill categories etc. from the same core rule book. No more than D&D (or Traveller, or Shadowrun, or GURPS...) gets competition from earlier editions. And, given the extent to which the new BRP synthesises prior BRP games in to a single coherent rule book, probably less. The new BRP rule book lets me play an ElfQuest-like game one night, a Cthulhu-esue game the next and a Stormbringer / Hawkmoon style game the next - from one rulebook and without having to lug my treasured copies of any of those old games across town in a ruck sack... I think one of the positive things that is going to emerge from the new BRP (especially if it is reasonably well supported) is a realisation amongst the wider gaming community and even some of the more blinkered BRP fans as to just how flexible and adaptable BRP can be: it's not just gritty fantasy that it handles well... Cheers, Nick Middleton

:eek: When was that? When I was at Warwick (many years ago now) Northamptonshire was an awkward prospect via public transport IIRC. Damn straight! Young 'uns today... More seriously, I'd also be wary of "reference paralysis", which is what has killed a lot of d20 for me: that creeping knowledge that the correct detail is somewhere in that mountain of rule books... Only having the essential notes / rules to hand means I feel free to improvise and keep the game flowing. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Also, what he (and others) seem to be confusing is a particular mechanic in the new BRP with a general rule. RQI/-/III had opposed skill mechanics - they were just implicit and inconsistent: attack vs. parry worked one way, most skills worked another and some (such as move silently vs. listen or Hide vs. Spot) had yet a third method of resolution. There's a lot of criticism that to me seems to boil down to the fact that people's preferred method of opposed skill resolution hasn't been adopted as the default rule: but since (anecdotally) most of those in favour of more explicit opposed skill mechanics seem to want more (and more consistent) details than the implicit method in RQI/-/III, the new method seems like the best way forward. It's easily ignored by those who don't want to use it, but makes a lot of sense to those who do. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Because in the vast majority of circumstances that one would model via opposed skill rolls the outcome would be to the advantage of one side or the detriment of the other, if only marginally. Noughts and crosses (or tic-tac-toe) regularly ties - most situations one would be attempting to emulate in an RPG DON'T: someone wins the duel, the guard spots the intruder or the intruder sneaks past the guard, one person performs the best poem in the bardic competition, one person catches more food... And the opposed roll rule allows for ties with the rule as written anyway: both rolls fail, thus achieving the same degree of success... Precisely the point about opposed rolls is that whilst one wouldn't use them all the time, there are some (relatively common situations) where the best description of what is happening is that there is a direct competition between two skills - and BRP has never (in any prior Chaosium edition) had an explicit generalised rule for resolving such contests of opposed skills. And whilst it may not be to some people's taste the rule in the new BRP looks remarkably serviceable to me (it is as I said a close variant of my own house rule) and is a fairly common "fix" to the "Dodge problem" in RQIII. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Precisely the point is that the new BRP DOES have "...meaningful rules for effects based on differences between levels of success..." for every skill. The new BRP opposed skill rule is basically the fairly well known fix used by a lot of RQIII fans for the percieved weakness of Dodging (i.e. that a normal successful Dodge was bugger all use againsts a special or critical hit, unlike a normal Parry which had some effectiveness...) Certainly was in the playtest draft and from what I've seen / read about edition zero that's still the case. Arguably, the default should perhaps have been the Stormbringer first edition scheme (Fumble / Failure / Success / Critical on 10% thresholds), but AFAIK it's the RQIII scheme that's assumed throughout. Are you really suggesting that given a two rolls against two percentile targets you find it that hard to give an order of magnitude approximation? "I only made my sneak by twenty odd" "That's too bad, the guard is very alert - he made the spot by about forty odd so he's spotted you". In very few cases will the exact margin be relevant. And, as has been said repeatedly, "highest roll wins on same success level" is mathematically equivalent to the subtraction, so the rule as written DOESN'T require even the terrifying complexities of basic two digit integer subtraction... Nick Middleton

The "hard maths" bit baffles me: Better level of success wins (but losers success ameliorates the winners success a bit). If success levels are equal, best roll wins (I use margin i.e. target-roll, as a personal preference, but higher roll is equivalent). The only "quirk" (assuming that the amelioration ONLY occurs after determining who wins) is that on a tie of normal successes, the win is cancelled by the losers right to down grade the winners success by one level from normal success to normal failure; but that's basically what happens with a normal successful attack vs a normal successful parry anyway. One could then rule in that case that the winner achieved a "partial success". As I say, when success levels are tied I use "best margin" (i.e. target - roll) as it feels more easthetically appropriate to the main BRP paradigm of rolling low on d100 is always better, and frankly it's usually obvious without maths who has the margin, so the subtraction is rarely necessary. But, as pointed out, "roll under, but as high as possibly" is mathematically equivalent, so I really don't see what the fuss about the opposed roll mechanic is - it's simple, straighforward and doesn't involve any significant maths. Plus there were three optional variants in the playtest draft IIRC... Cheers, Nick Middleton

Err, actually in Space:1889 the Martians referred to the white Europeans as "the Red Men", because in the thin air when they exerted themselves they went red in the face... Specifically, the usage is in reference to the ex-patriot earthmen who fly aerial flyers on Mars - the so called "Red Captains". Reminds me, when I get the book, must do a BRP Space:1889 write up for d100.org and here... Cheers, Nick Middleton

Bear in mind that what you currently have is effectively a proof copy - please DO nit pick, in the sense of letting SOMEONE (either Jason or Chaosium) know about any of these inconsistencies as then there is some chance they'll get fixed before the book goes to print. I'm hoping that these sorts of glitches will have been caught by the proof readers for whom the proof edition was originally intended, but drawing Chaosium's attention to them (perhaps with a stickied list here, rather than swamping them with emails?) can't hurt. Cheers, Nick Middleton

I think "crap" is a bit harsh - I successfully ran and played Jorune using both 2nd and 3rd edition and whilst 2nd was a bit clunky and counter intuitive, and 3rd was rushed into print and thus rather saddled with some glaring omissions and errors, it's a fabulous setting and (with the addition of the Sholari Pack that patched the errors) I'd happily play or run 3rd edition again in a heartbeat. Admittedly, I'd prefer to finish the conversion to BRP I've been tinkering away at for several years now - I stopped work when the BRP play test started as what I had was predicated around "monograph" BRP. When I get a copy of the published rules I probably restart the project though. The draft of the Dysha's system is up at d100.org Personally, I hope Chaosium do a lot of things like Jason's Planetary (but hopefully with scenarios as well) - stuff that will help games actually happen but that don't worry about licensing specific IP, as licensing is expensive and challenging to manage. Cheers, Nick Middleton

My understanding is that initially Chaosium and TSR came to a perfectly civilised agreement that the next printing of D&DG would acknowledge Chaosium's license, and that Chaosium would do something similar in return, but the deal was scotched by a senior TSR executive who refused to sanction a deal that required TSR to "promote a competitors products." My understanding is that Moorcock WAS paid a royalty from the very first - maybe not a huge one, but there WERE payments. However, from the mid nineties Chaosium had severe financial difficulties (the CCG collapse, the collapse of the relationship with AH and the loss of RuneQuest, the departure of Greg Stafford and Glorantha, the Wizard's Attic debacle). During that time payments to Mike Moorcock were not as timely as they should have been, and there was an ongoing dispute over some payments, involving third party sub-licensed rights as well. Almost entirely inaccurate, according to what Matt Sprange of Mongoose has said. IIRC his accounts went something like this: Mongoose knew, from discussions with Chaosium, that Chaosium were prepared to sell their EC license. Mongoose approached Moorcock and offereed to buy the EC license off Chaosium, and would then re-negotiate an approvals and royalties deal with Mike Moorcock direct. MM was happy, Chaosium agreed, and the license "transferred" to Mongoose. Chaosium have the right to "sell through" their existing stock of EC material (at least for a period of time) I believe, but that's fairly standard in these sorts of situations. Whatever the exact details of the dispute in recent years, he was for a large portion of the life of the license at Chaosium paid the agreed fees - and frankly, reading back through internet archives of public postings there's a lack of clarity in accounts from BOTH sides that rather suggests that things fell apart as much from a mutual lack of communication as for any other reason. Albeit, given some of the things that M's sycophant's were saying at one point a few years ago, I find it deliciously ironic that one of the main writers at Mongoose for the EC license is Lawrence Whitaker... *shrug* I think Leiber, Burroughs, Howard, de Camp, Anderson, Smith and others did more than enough work to ensue that Gygax & co. had a rich heritage of Sword & Sorcery fiction to draw on. The "anti-hero" doesn't reality dominate RPG's until the late '80's / early '90's and then it's primarily as a result of Cyberpunk and Anne bloody Rice. Moorcock is in many ways a difficult influence for RPG's to adapt, as he is (often willfully) inconsistent even between books ostensibly in the same series about the same character in the same setting - the likes of Leiber and Tolkien and Burroughs and Howard did at least all try (to varying degrees) to build consistent worlds. Sadly true. I love the original core Elric saga (the short stories in Stealer of Souls and the novel Stormbringer) and whilst some of the later stuff is quite fun, almost every addition sapped my enthusiasm to some degree. It took a real act of will to read anything after Fortress of the Pearl (which I thought was rather rote) and whilst I enjoyed Revenge of the Rose I really can't be bothered with the rest. I much prefer Hawkmoon or Corum: same pace and energy, same imaginative flair and succinct storytelling, but they END properly. And I think the best thing MM's written is actually Mother London... :focus: SB5 is a compete BRP Sword and Sorcery fantasy game. With a little effort one can file the serial numbers of the Moorcock setting and use it for whatever one wishes. And it's currently $29.95 from Chaosium. It's a good value game - but it's not an essential purchase. If you are getting the new BRP book, put SB5/Elric! on your eBay "watch out for" list, but ahead of them put the Bronze Grimoire, a great magic supplement for Elric!/SB5 that will easily work with the new BRP book and greatly enhance the Sorcery system. Cheers, Nick Middleton

This I heartily agree with: Elric! is a very well present book, nice crisp layout, well organised and accessible. The Stormbringer 5th edition book is much the same content wise, but spreads that content out much more and is I think the poorer for it. It's still an excellent S&S RPG rule book, but compared to Elric! I've never found it as easy to use. I have TWO copies of Elric! and only one of SB5... Cheers, Nick Middleton

To my knowledge they've not made any public statement about any general license. They hinted a while back they were looking at developing some, but no ones heard anything since. Seraphim Guard negotiated their license for Deadworld directly with Chaosium as I understand it, after Ben Monroe made necessary introductions. Yuo could try emailing / phoning Charlie Krank direct; as discussed elsewhere, he's better at direct communication by all accounts. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Ahh, Space Opera starships - glorious stuff. To be honest, I usually just pinch what's is SO for ships and planets - it has the right feel, works well, is reasonably coherent and fun to play an dis easy to interface to BRP... Cheers, Nick Middleton

Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. LeGuin's Earthsea series, Hainish Cycle (especially the Left Hand of Darkness, the Dispossessed and Rocannon's World), always coming home and Searoad. Susan Cooper's the Dark Is Rising sequence. C J Cherryh's Alliance-Union-Compact books, especially Cyteen, Merchanter's Luck and Rimrunners. The Chronicles of Morgaine. Michael Moorcock's original Elric Saga (i.e. everything up to ~1980), History of the Runestaff and the Chronicles of Castle Brass, the Warhound and the World's Pain. Brian Aldiss's Helliconia. Iain M Banks's Culture books, especially Use of Weapons. Ken McLeod's Fall Revolution books, especially the Star Fraction and the Stone Canal. Learning the World Alastair Reynold's Chasm City and Century Rain. HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. William Hope Hodgson's House on the Borderlands. Steve Erikson's Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, especially Garden's of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates and Midnight Tides. that'll do for the moment... Nick Middleton

Not as far as I am aware. Theplay test draft didn't include such genre specific subsystems as Planet generation or Starship design systems. You can stat a starship usin the guidance in the equipment chapter, but it's not a system a la MegaTraveller, nor is there the equivalent of a full planetary generation system either. Find a set of SF rules (for Planets, Starships etc - Google Cthulhu Rising and ignore the tentacles for example...) that do th ebits not in BRP{ and use BRP for the Character orientated stuff - its what I do. Cheers, Nick Middleton