boradicus

A '67 Impala? RQ isn't *that* old! How about a classic late 70s sophisticated sports car? The system is a classic, but it is also both streamlined and sophisticated.

Thank you, Roger. Where can one find the original at a reasonable price?

Thanks!

I also found these, but am not sure if the are related to any of the Hero Games (HQ, DC) that you suggested: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/107799/Champions-Complete https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/207058/Champions-The-Super-Role-Playing-Game-4th-edition https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/207333/Hero-System-Rulesbook-4th-edition

I was looking for a reasonably (or dirt cheap) priced Torg Rule book, and I came across these: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/216248/Torg-Eternity--Core-Rules https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/215400/Torg-Eternity--Free-RPG-Day-Special https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/28828/Torg-Introductory-Pack The first looks like the standard Rule Book, but would either of the two other options be sufficient for my purpose? -Many thanks

Thanks - however, I I did not find anything on Amazon after searching for "Bloom of Heroes 2" that resembled a TTRPG. Do you have a specific link? Did you, perchance, mean "Blood of Heroes?"

D&D went through a similar quandary when it added, and later removed, the Comeliness Attribute. The problem, of course, is that both physical appearance and personality attractiveness tend to overlap each other in subtle ways that are difficult to draw boxes around. If we try to say, for instance, that a physically attractive female who has a horrible and irascible personality has no charismatic influence over people, we are confounded by the fact that somehow she still does indeed have a charismatic affect on others - and even might have people seemingly irrationally bending obsequiously to her every whim, whether they actually enjoy doing so or not (perhaps such followers would feel less abused - or not abused at all - if she also had a high charisma: food for thought). One example of such a character might be the role that Meryl Streep played in The Devil Wears Prada (and here we can get into trouble again with those blurred lines, because Streep is older in that film, and although she has an element of being physically attractive, I would say that the efficacy of her physical appearance has more to do with the way in which she carries herself than with raw physical appeal; and yet she severely struggles with truly connecting with others throughout the entire film - is that what we would expect from someone whose influence comes from their "charisma?"). On the other hand, it may be a little easier for us to understand the effect that someone has through their personal charm or animal magnetism even though they may not appear to be very physically attractive - yet, it does seem that there must be some rudimentary physical attractiveness for their charm to "leverage" - otherwise, they effect can be quite the opposite! Further complications arise when once considers physical attractiveness as it relates to mate selection. Now, physical attractiveness is not simply a simple attribute to be considered as an effect that can be objectively measured when checking for someone's reaction. Instead, it becomes a game in itself that involves the self-perception of the person who would be affected by the attractiveness of someone else. For example, a woman sees a man who has a certain level of attractiveness, but, she is also attractive, and based other interactions she has had before with other men, she might consider herself to be able to do better, even though he has a certain level of attractiveness. So, in such a case as this, we might model a check for reaction on the man's score for attractiveness (is this a composite of physical attractiveness and charisma - this is still undecided for now) and then account for the woman's confidence in her ability to potentially do better by a simple attribute bonus subtraction or by an attribute vs. attribute chart comparison (using some statistical curve). But even then, we hit upon yet another problem: how do we measure the woman's confidence? Would it be some composite of her overall appeal (charisma and physical appearance) modified by her intelligence/power/(wisdom?)...? My point, overall, is that it is both a subtle and complex question. PS - I also forgot to mention the effect of financial and physical power (even intellectual power) that factors into attractiveness/appeal. Streep's character was a successful fashion mogul, and this certain had an effect on her followers. Women can often find men who are physically powerful to be more physically attractive. And let's not forget the appeal that Leonard Nimoy had in his role as Spock: he had more female fan mail that William Shatner, and yet, in a within the constraints of a gaming system, we might easily be led to think that Spock would have less charisma or even physical attractiveness than Kirk.

D.C. Heroes looks a bit hard to find in an inexpensive format. I have some Rolemaster already, and I have wishlisted the others.

Thanks to you both :D. How exactly does the Harn system work and differ from the ones that JonL mentioned above? Thanks again.

That is cool. I like the idea of Mastery in HQ. What I would like to do is to design a bell-ish system where the ability/skill progression is virtually open-ended at the top, yet has an ease of playability that scales well as the "bell" simultaneously stretches and becomes shaped to reflect a weightedness toward higher levels of mastery. Being that I am not a statistics genius, I think that the logical approach to doing this would be to incorporate the repetition of a simple two-stage process until a result with good balance has been obtained. The first stage would be determining ways in which the "bell" could be "extended" (obviously it will start to look more like a wave than a bell at some point), and the second stage would be looking at various ways to make the system easy and fun to play (e.g. charts, roll comparisons, electronic aids/apps - such as electronic dice which could include complex calculations not seen by the player/GM, etc). I think that such a system would be useful for a number of purposes. Monsters, animals, machines, etc, could be more proportionally designed with respect to PC characters (which usually humanoid); skill progression could be asymmetrical (for instance, certain classes of skills might have an easier or harder learning curve; also, certain skills could have different ranges or "caps" where after a certain point, further progression would become trivial with respect to how good someone could become at something); simulation could be more realistic; critical successes and critical failures could be dealt with entirely within the scope of the curve rather than via the addition of an ad hoc rule-set such as rolling one's score or a natural 1 or a natural 20. While I am partial to actual dice, I don't at all think that it is unreasonable to assume that "electronic dice" will continue to gain in popular appeal, and in fact, gaming platforms such a roll20 already make use of "electronic dice." Therefore, it would naturally be the next step in the evolution of advancing the use of chance in gaming to go beyond the mere representation of physical dice. Of course, there will always be people who will want a more portable (and reasonably affordable) system when they are not using platforms such as roll20 to play. Such devices and apps can be built - and of course one of the keys to their distribution will be good marketing - and, of course, good design: just think like Steve Jobs !! I'm not stuck on migrating to "electronic dice," by any means, but, I thought that I should include this brief argument in their favor rather than to leave my inclusion of their consideration unsupported. I know that various dice systems have been experimented over the past few decades, including the use of dice pools. Dice pools are interesting, and they do offer a way to extend the curve by adding dice (and, if so desired, one can subtract 1 for each die added to normalize the lowest result to still being a 1). I'm not necessarily sold on dice pools, however, because, for one, polyhedra do not scale in their number of faces linearly. Additionally, adding more dice does tend to rather quickly decrease the potential for outlying results. This makes me more partial toward using charts and tables. But, then the question becomes: how does create a chart or a table that is virtually/indefinitely extendable (without going to a Rolemaster like system - which has a chart for everything and an exploding dice system that I think leaves quite a lot to be desired)? I would be interested to have your thoughts on these ideas! I am currently inching (millimeter-ing, if we are talking progress via page thickness!) my way through a book on statistics in order to catch up on the topic, being that I never took a such a course when in school.

I don't have Pendragon. How does it handle skills > 20? And how does HQ and BRP handle skills > 20?

Thanks! I've got it now. This is actually very nice, indeed. It is quite bell-ish, and even though there are some odd dips here and there, overall, they don't really affect the aggregates too much - in fact, you could say that they add "character." Is there a way to add modifiers? When adding modifiers, what happens to the curves? I like the fact, that as the basic d20 vs d20 roll statistics stand - without modifiers - that the curve still encompasses the full gamut of possible outcomes; whereas, I would be concerned that after adding in modifiers that the curve would shift so that some outcomes become either partially or fully truncated. Now, I suppose, that if the outcomes are only partially truncated that it really would not make that much of a difference, because despite the fact that the curve might shift beyond a certain set of die roll outcomes, that the success/failure descriptions would not be entirely occluded.

So, the table is a roll versus roll table rather than a roll versus a Target Number table?

No, that wasn't the gist, actually. I was more interested in the tensions between Becket and the Crown over who could try and judge the clergy. I thought perhaps that those relations might have been more inflamed due to the tradition you mentioned.

Ironically, Orwell did seem to be paying attention.