NickMiddleton

Plus of course, the RQIII magic systems are still available in print from Chaosium as the BRP Magic Book monograph...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

You can make it as complicated as you want, to cover many eventualities, but it basically boils down to "Shoot, Dodge, Absorb Hit"...

Only at such an abstract level that you lose any setting specific colour from including starship combat in the first place: in which case, why bother?

Star Trek space battles involve large damage control crews rushing about the ship, and critical command decisions about angling deflectors (or shields) in particular directions, energy allocation and involve primarily beam weapons: it feels rather like naval warfare of the late nineteenth century. Babylon 5 space combat on the other hand has predominantly projectile based weaponry (with preposterously short ranges, but that's a separate topic), and no forcefields / shields (on earthforce ships at least), plus small fighter craft providing screens for the larger capital ships: it feels like WWII mixed naval and air engagements (BSG goes even further and explicitly models Naval aircraft carriers directly).

If it's worth the effort of including Starship design and Combat in the game with rules, then those rule sshould surely capture the distinctive features of the Starships in the setting that make them interesting? One of (few) things they got right in the Serenity RPG was the extent to which Ships have personalities. But the same rules would be entirely inappropriate for say a B5 game, where ships are treated as technological tools. And rules that would work for B5 or Serenity would struggle to represent starships from Blake's 7 or Dune.

Starships need a bespoke solution, tied to the setting IMO: a BRP Space book would need, as the core book does with "powers", to provide several different but easily adaptable example systems that all build on the core BRP systems but address some of the different archetypes of Starships from SF. A Star wars/Babylon 5/BSG "small fighters, dog fighting combat" type setting, a Star Trek / Honour Harrington "navies of sail in Space" feel, a CJ Cherryh-esque "Jump-riders and FTL distortion universe", a Niven / Reynold's style NOT FTL universe and maybe a Dune style "starships never fight" set up should cover it...

So, who wants to write it then?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

That's the best idea I've read all week. It's so simple, it makes me wonder why no one brought it up before. :thumb:

I've noodled away at something on that basis, actually based of the stuff in the RQIII GM's book, which also formed the basis of the stuff in Sailor on the Seas of Fate and IIRC I believe Jason has also done the same briefly at some point.

The problem comes when you try and apply the rules to multiple settings. How do you generalise from those rules in such away that they are useful for most SF settings? Even ignoring setting with no ships, or where ships are irrelevant in immediate play (there's no starship combat in Dune for example...), how do you generalise a set a rules to cover Babylon 5, Star Wars, Farscape and Alastair Reynold's The Prefect?

The answer is you don't, because you can't. Any combination of Starship design and combat system has to make assumptions about ship and weapon performance, irrespective of the techno-babble used to justify how the ships behave. Small ships in the B5 need to use Jump gates to enter and exit Jump space; in the Revelation Space setting no human faction in the main timeline has FTL (well, Skade's Conjoiners try to experiment with it with disastrous results).

I think a far better approach to trying to come up with generic systems that are inevitably NOT generic is to design some example systems: spell out some criteria (both from a setting point of view and from a a game play point of view) and then provided a BRP compatible system that meets those criteria: that's always been BRP's strength in the past, that it has concrete solutions that are easily adapted or rebuilt for different situations...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I don't know how I forgot Other Suns, given I used to know Nicolai.

He's popped up on the RQ Rules mailing list a couple of times and seems a thoroughly decent chap - I love Other Suns back in the mid-eighties and was completely oblivious to the whole "furry" issue at the time - but I was never comfortable with the excessive mathematics in places, nor the starship system.

I think both it and Space Opera suffer from being rather more complicated in execution than most people probably want to deal with in BRP typically, though.

Actually, the "ancillary" SF subsystems in Space opera (Starships, Starship Combat, Planetary generation etc) are pretty good and not excessively baroque IMO, its the rest of the game that's bizarrely complex. But then, I'm one of those people who don't think starship design and combat systems are essential for an SF game...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

On a slight detour of the main thread subject, does anyone have a suggestion for a published set of starship construction/combat that would fit a BRP game?

FGU's Space Opera - the rest of the game is an archetypal FGU mess of over complexity and ad hoc design, but the Starships are glorious pulp SF creations: Trans-gravitic Inter-phase Sub-space Anomaly (TISA) drives! Star Torpedo's! Blast cannons! Star ships blatting around asteroid belts at (non-relativistic!?!) large portions of C. Ah me, happy memories. They're also far more approachable as I recall than the more sober (and excessively mathematical) equivalents in Niall Shapero's Other Suns (the other BRP SF game).

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I'm sorry if this has already been answered, I have been reading, I promise, but now the conversation is right here...

What about Battle Magic a.k.a. Spirit Magic type magic?

And is there any corollary for Divine Magic / Holy Warriors?

In the Play test draft I saw there were only the five systems Jason's listed (Magic, Sorcery, Psychics, Mutations and Supers).There was no specific Spirit / Battlemagic like system (albeit the Sorcery system, derived from the Elric! / Stormbringer 5th edition magic system isn't hugely dissimilar), and the explicit assumption in the character generation and setting chapters IIRC was that if Priestly backgrounds granted access to powers those powers would be modelled off one of the provided systems.

Having said that, the BRP Magic Book monograph is currently in print from Chaosium, fully compatible with the BRP book and contains three (technically four) magic systems for use with BRP - and since it's the Magic Book from the boxed Deluxe RuneQuest you may well already have a copy...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

If I was that bothered I'd prefer to see variable armour done as follows:

fixed - variable

1 - 1d2

2 - 1d3

3 - 2d2

4 - 2d3

5 - 2d4

6 - 2d5

7 - 2d6

8 - 2d6+1

which a) puts the average on a par with the fixed value, and second puts all remotely substantial armour (3+) on a multiple dice roll, thus biasing the armour value significantly towards that average value.

What always bothered me about some of the SB values was that they were single dice, with entirely flat distributions. Having fought steel weapon re-enactment battles in full harness, that variability flatly contradicts the subjective experience of where the variability lay in the outcomes of combat - one could, in the vast majority of circumstances, rely on the full harness (within its limitations - mostly visibility, audibility and heat retention), it was ones own skill (and ones opponents) and our mutual luck with our weapons that determined if, where and how hard we hit each other...

But mostly, if I want "gritty" I use fixed AV and hit locations, if I want slightly more heroic I use variable armour and MWL, and that has always seemed to work out with my previous "lash-up" BRP, so I see no reason they won't work with the new BRP.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton.

Have to say I agree with Jason, don't like the "off centre" look, and much prefer it either with stuff down both sides, or only on the left... Personal settings would be ideal.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

I'm lazy, anyone know where I can find RQ3 character sheets for printing, preferably pdfs?

Try Ben Monroe's Yahoo Group - http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rq3

or the RQAddicts Group - http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rqaddicts

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Not sure how much conversion you'd need to do on "Thieve's World/Sanctuary,"

as there's already an official RQ version of it (albeit out of print).

Which I have, but I also have all of the stuff Green Ronin did for their d20 conversion, and it would at least need some thinking through of the power levels and magic available to PC's... But its one of the easier settings to just pick up and run BRP in, I agree.

Cheers,

Nick

Your Alastair Reynolds/Future*World mix sounds quite the interesting idea (to me)... I'd think those were pretty divergent flavors to have in the same bowl...

It's the basic FTL mechanism and a couple of races from Future*World, and some of the background texture from the Revelation Space books - the planet Sky's Edge (as shown in Chasm City) is the closest thing to a direct influence from Reynolds. Mostly its the contrast between the planet bound cultures and the space borne ones: the Ultras and Conjoiners particularly; the sense of not so much different branches of the species as different stages along divergent evolutionary paths co-existing and interacting.

Plus I have fond memories of reading Heinlien's Tunnel in the Sky as a teenager and I'm a firm believer that the best RPG SF settings are like good TV SF settings: they are not weird, high concept extrapolations of obscure bits of current science, but rather take place "20 minutes into the future..." Perhaps not literally, but somehow, the technology and cultures are familiar enough to be quickly grasped. This is even more important in an RPG where several players and a GM need to have a shared understanding of the parameters of the world for the game to flow smoothly.

Cheers,

Nick

In no particular order of likelihood to be actually done in any form:

• Tales of the Long Night - high fantasy Island sailing through the void between worlds
  
• Children of Leviathan - Gritty science fantasy battletech-ish set in the asteroid field containing Earth's last colony
  
• The Shattered Lands - high fantasy post-apocalyspe in the Underdark
  
• Nations of the New Blood - a relatively conventional Sword and Sorcery fantasy setting
  
• Realm of Yrethe - Planetary romance Mars reimagined as the central Asian plateau and points east
  
• The Last Refuge - Nightland meets the Sunset Warrior
  
• Ulfland - my 1980's RQIII campaign setting, Mount Lookithat as a fantasy land...
  
• Gate Warden Universe - a hard edged re-imagining of Future*World with liberal doses of Alastair Reynold's
  
• After the Scouring - my current RQIII campaign, a near future SF/F post-apocalyspe game set in England
  

Most of these are conversions - I ran "After the Scouring" over the summer and, once we've finished the winter run of Call of Cthulhu, I'm expecting to go back to it next year, but we agreed that over the winter I'd rework it from RQIII with tweaks to BRP. Similarly, Ulfland was my RQIII campaign setting back at university in the late eighties, and was resurrected around 2001 for a D&D game, so porting it to BRP should be a synch.

Others however are just ideas I've been noodling away at but have very little concrete material (e.g. Children of Leviathan).

Plus of course there are existing worlds / settings that I've regularly said I'll run with BRP but have done little or no conversion work on (Actually, that's a fib, I've quite a lot on converting DS to RQIII and all my Gwenthia notes for actual play are for RQIII):

• Gwenthia
  
• Freeport
  
• Thieves World / Sanctuary
  
• Ptolus
  
• Star Trek (based of the FASA stuff)
  
• Dark Sun
  
• Space:1889
  
• Skyrealms of Jorune
  

Cheers,

Nick

Fatigue Points & the fatigue rules of RQ3 worked very poorly. Way to much book-keeping. I ended up with saying "Don't carry more ENC than you have FP", and left it with that. Still it was somewhat unsatisfying.

I did like the idea from RQ:AiG, with a CON roll every fifth MR, the multiplyier dependent on how many ENC you carried compared to your STR.

Have anyone of you used a houseruled fatigue system you where satisfied with and would like to share?

SGL.

I use a system of fatigue levels like RQIV:AiG, but rather than tying tests to specific events, apply them fluidly. For example, if you've just marched across the desert when the ambush starts, everyone can drop a fatigue level before we start and make a Stamina roll (CON x 5) to avoid loosing an additional Fatigue level...

I have notes on it and will get it posted up somewhere soon.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Both depend on context - what's the setting like? What technology / magic etc is available.

But as a general rule of thumb in my BRP games a character drops unconscious if THP are reduced to <=3 (but First Aid / Medicine can bring them round again). THP <=0 means the character is dying - bleeding from major wounds, in deep shock etc. Magic or trained paramedics might stabilise them, but if so they will still need substantial treatment rapidly, and I usually penalise such characters a hefty reduction in their CON which takes weeks or possibly months to recover.

As for resurrection, again, depends on the tech or magic available. I don't see any particular reason why Divine miracles should be hampered by anything as trivial as the absence of physical remains, and if sufficiently high technology is available and has scanned the individuals brain sufficiently recently, I don't see why in a tech setting a blank clone can't be force grown and have the individuals personality and memory uploaded. But equally, there is that wonderful sense of resonance that says the soul cannot return to a broken house (and the dark legends of what the Queen wrought when she defied the priest and had her son the Prince restored to life despite his missing arm...). And there are reams os SF and philosophical speculation about whether a cloned body, recreated personality and copied memories is the same individual or just a good copy...

So, as I said: it's all about the setting, really.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

Hit locations are optional unfortunately, so does choseing to play with hit locations will have to calculate those for all enemies in future supplements probably.

Only those supplements that choose NOT to use that optional rule though...

It's more like Stormbringer where locations are only rolled on a major hit. The magic systems will be psionics from elfquest, summonings from stormbringer & magic spells from magic world. They are not supposed to be used in the same setting though.

Err, IIRC the playtest manuscript had the SPELLS and brief notes on summoning from Stormbringer 5, the Magic from Magic World, A Psychic Powers system elaborated from ElfQuest, a mutations system elaborated from Hawkmoon and a Super Powers system, um, "rationalised" from Super World. And IIRC there were notes on how one as a GM MIGHT mix them (the "Opposed Powers of Different Types" section).

I certainly don't recall seeing any HUGE issues with using Sorcery and Magic (would still rather it was called Wizardry though... ) as alternative paths for magicians, and I think you could probably also have Mutation and Psychics in the same setting (Psychics might make life a bit awkward though). MY intuition is that the only one that won't "play nice" with the others is the Super Powers section, simply because it includes powers that duplicate their effects and role of the other powers, so the overlap would just be a mess.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

The FileMaker Pro database I use prints the %, the critical chance, and the fumble chance, each in a different color, so it's right there for ya.

I still have some GW RQII sheets with little spaces for those... *sniff* happy memories...

I've always preferred the asymmetry of crit/special/success/failure/fumble precisely becuas it feels like it accentuates the positive for characters.

Also I've used the RQII/III scheme so long that the mental arithmetic is second nature, but I would never be too hard on old fogeys# like Grampa Whitaker who can't keep up

More seriously, the obvious simplification isthe original SB 10% for crits, as it's very easy.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

# he is after all at least months older than me...

And you could wing combat and character generation, too, but like those, the nature of a mecha is a bit to close to the point in the game for this to serve most people well. So I think either one has to argue that _any_ subsystem can be done without, or that for some sorts of games, vehicle construction systems are, indeed, necessary.

One of the settings I am noodling away at for BRP is a Mecha setting, and I have no plans for a Mecha design system for it - it would take far too much time and effort to create and check, whereas a set of predefined mechs is perfectly feasible. And I played a LOT of Battletech in the late eighties and never used a Mech design sequence#.

BRP games / settings in general tend not to be detail oriented, and complex design sequences (GURPS, MegaTraveller) by defintion ARE, so I think in general they are a poor fit with BRP.

On the other hand, Classic Traveller Book 2 has a very simple, almost abstract design system for Starships that is far closer to the BRP approach ("Put logical number on what must have numbers only"). The difficulty comes in building a similar system for other technologies. Personally I much prefer what I saw in the equipment chapter in the playtest to any elaborate design system, but its clearly a potential supplement that someone could pitch to Chaosium.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

#indeed, I don't remember there being one in the set we used: there must have been I suppose, but I remember none of the features of it at all.

Haven't tried Bootcamp yet, but then I'd pretty much decided I was going to wait for Leopard and then try it... But I'd prefer an OS X native tool, or at least a platform independent one really.

Did some Googling and predictably found loads of PC/Windows stuff.

Some of the existing ones:

For Windows:

http://www.edu-web.de/roleplaying/chaosium_brp_en.html

Call of Cthulhu specific version:

http://www.edu-web.de/cthulhu/cthulhu.html

Hugh Fosters stuff:

http://home2.btconnect.com/hughfoster/Downloads/Downloads.htm

Peter Keel's site:

http://seegras.discordia.ch/Roleplay/BRP/Software/

Matti Järvinen's

http://www.nysalor.net/runequest/generator.html

Paul Sommer

http://hjem.get2net.dk/royalpanto/rq4.zip

There's a couple of programs (again PC based IIRC) in the files of the RQAddicts Yahoo Group (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rqaddicts) and one if the files section of Ben moroe's RQIII group (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rq3)

Then it all gets a bit thin on the ground really...

Found this project on source forge (not touched for over two years):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rq4gen/

This Java Call of Cthulhu CG:

http://www.io.com/~jwtlai/CoC/CoCchar.html

Byakhee is now available from the Downloads section of Yog-sothoth.com

And that's it. Looks like there was a Mac native Call of Cthulhu character generator, but couldn't find a download site with a copy...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

OK, I know of a few Windows PC based Character generators for RQIII and Call of Cthulhu, and one rather good one that styles itself as for "monograph" BRP.

But does anyone know of any for the Mac, or even better cross platform ones?

When I've run d20 in the past I dabbled with e-Tools and PCGen, but both were somewhat burdened by the complexities of the rule system they were trying to model (and the Byzantine complexities of the licensing...), whereas BRP seems like it ought to be far more straight forward to do.

IIRC there was some talk a few years back at the Tavern, but nothing came of it alas...

SO, anyone got any ideas?

Cheers,

Nick Middleton

In some ways I wish they'd do just that. Have a core and stick to it.

It's the constant accretions to D&D that turn me off.

I'm still regularly playing and running D&D 3.0, Arcana Unearthed/Evolved and Stargate d20 in my two game groups and moderately enjoying it precisely because whilst we've added LOTS of setting variation from published material, core rules-wise we haven't added much beyond the original core 3.0 books...

Now, I think from what I've seen that the new BRP will support layers from detailed combat to simple and/or simplistic.

Indeed. Assuming the published version is close to the playtest draft we saw, one could run a game with BRP that from a rules point of view resembled the original BRP pamphlet. Alternatively, pick the right options, and you could have something that is nearly indistinguishable from RQIII, but has X-Men level powered Super-hero's...

Talk to Jason, the sidebars/optional rules and so on will allow you have your own modular house ruleset and yet stay within the BRP canon and use anything from the past or future.

My immediate plans for BRP are to re-work my (currently on hiatus) "After the scouring..." post-apocalypse England RQIII setting in to a BRP form, plus further work on the "Gate Warden" SF setting I used during the playtest, and a few fantasy settings(Gwenthia, what I used to call "fantasy Mars" and a Fantasy/Horror hybrid called "the Last Refuge"). How far I'll get with any of course is another matter (fewer 9.45pm nights at work would probably help...).

Personally, I don't see huge need to revise BRP, as I'm very happy with the synthesis and development of prior work Jason has achieved - but once the core book is published, it wouldn't be a tabletop RPG if people didn't start house ruling and changing it.

As for forums here - can't really comment fully as I don't get here enough at present. Given the title of the site, I don't think a HeroQuest section makes sense:its different game and has support; what nest, a GURPS or d20 forum? Once the BRP book is out, adapting to the interests of subscribers as to which settings they use and discuss makes sense - I'm not personally convinced that many will use BRP with Glorantha (if they are that keen on the old way they have RQIII, otherwise they have MRQ which has it's own forums, which is also where discussion of new MRQ Glorantha material will tend to gravitate), but if it IS a setting people use with BRP don't see it being a problem.

Cheers,

NDM

Any old RQII/RQIII fans able to comment on how the system compares?

Pick the right optional subsystems (Skill category modifiers, Hit locations, strike ranks) and you will have something virtually indistinguishable from RQIII in how it plays (albeit there are a lot of nice refinements in defining skills, levels of success, and other details e.g. opposed skills). Pick a different set of options and you will have something very like Call of Cthulhu, or Stormbringer.

The big difference is in the "powers" - the playtest had two magic systems (modelled from Magic World and Stormbringer), a mutations system (Hawkmoon), a super powers sytem (Superworld) and a Psychic Powers system (ElfQuest). The RQIII Magic Book is currently available from Chaosium as the BRP Magic Book, and is pretty compatible with the new BRP imo, although whether it will remain available after BRP sees print I don't know - I hope so.

Cheers,

Nick Middleton