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boradicus

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Everything posted by boradicus

  1. 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.
  2. Thank you, Roger. Where can one find the original at a reasonable price?
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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?"
  6. 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.
  7. D.C. Heroes looks a bit hard to find in an inexpensive format. I have some Rolemaster already, and I have wishlisted the others.
  8. Thanks to you both :D. How exactly does the Harn system work and differ from the ones that JonL mentioned above? Thanks again.
  9. 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.
  10. I don't have Pendragon. How does it handle skills > 20? And how does HQ and BRP handle skills > 20?
  11. 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.
  12. So, the table is a roll versus roll table rather than a roll versus a Target Number table?
  13. 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.
  14. Ironically, Orwell did seem to be paying attention.
  15. Would this have been true in Thomas of Beckett's time?
  16. This is awesome! I am a little confused as to what the rows vs. the columns are, however. Are the columns the Target Number?
  17. I suppose that in order to see how each system really stacks up against the other it would be helpful to graph the probability for each column (opposed ability) for each row (ability) a row at a time; or you could probably generate a 3d graph as well. Then you could see how the curves for each method look side by side.
  18. D&D's CR system is useful. It is useful for designing modules & scenarios for players to level up while avoiding the unfortunate possibility of being killed by the level-up-machine of combat with "monsters," which were, of course, invented for said purpose.
  19. I agree with you. Even though I have not actually played RQ, per se, I have played CoC, and the basics of the Chaosium system, per my understanding, are essentially the same. Game play is much smoother and realistic: and this is because Chaosium's game system is designed to be that way. Rather than an amalgamation of rules that eventually sort themselves into something more playable, the Chaosium system was designed with playability in mind from the very beginning - or so I have read. Although even the 5e system of D&D has become more streamlined in some ways, it still comes from a bottom-up game design tradition, rather from than an integrative top-down approach. I think a lot of the spirit of D&D's agglomerative design approach can be seen in the way that enthusiasts would create new character classes, and expansions of the rules, which would then be shared with the community through Dragon Magazine, White Dwarf Magazine, etc (in the early decades of the game's history). There is nothing wrong with this - in fact, it has been an earmark of the game's creativity. But it can make the game more difficult to streamline for ease of play. I honestly don't know if Chaosium has publications where game enthusiasts add new classes with various bonuses and special abilities that are not already somewhere accounted for in the Chaosium system or not; neither do I know whether or not Chaosium supplements, and milieu expansions are written in such a way as to avoid the pitfalls of trying to add disparate sets of rules and character archetypes together, but I do suspect that Chaosium is much better at this than WotC, if only for the reason that the artifice of the "character class" does not exist for the Chaosium system. In fact, I would say that D&D's class system is simultaneously a creative inspiration for describing special abilities hitherto not described, and a continual source for departure from any centralized rule-set. If we rest our case for Chaosium's system being simpler than that of D&D's on this one factual difference between the two, I think the argument is a reasonably strong one.
  20. Trust is not the issue. The DM necessarily maintains a fourth wall throughout the game, and there are often times when due to the DM's creative license, it would be helpful to have knowledge about the particulars of the players' characters, and the DM might not always want to broadcast what he is doing by asking his players questions. Although broadcasting that something is going on is certainly a tool in the DM's toolbox, it really isn't much of a tool if you are doing all the time. This really has a lot more to do with play style and having the room to orchestrate things for the players in such a way that they have a great game. Sometimes, in order to achieve the desired effect, the DM might not ever want any of the players to know what went on behind the curtain, or he might only want a few to have some gleaning. Combat is a little more opaque - but combat is not the end-all, be-all of the rules. When combat takes place, the players are obviously aware of various sorts of events, effects, actions, etc. But even during combat there might be things you don't want your players to know about - such as an enemy rogue sneaking to a certain part of the room (a passive perception check). There also many kinds of passive checks that could potentially have a list of various bonuses added to them. An app would would probably help a lot if it was written in such a way to account for all such cases. Otherwise, it is probably best to just get a succinct stat block for each player's character which will cover all of the necessaries.
  21. Even though in D&D the rules may mostly now be on a player's character sheet, the DM will want to have all of his player's character sheets in front of him if he wants to run the game properly (and not be beholden to the players, needing to continuously ask them questions about their character's abilities) and that can take up a lot of space behind the DM screen where the go-to rules are supposed to be efficiently organized and summarized. So, no, in my opinion, pouring the rules into the character sheets is not a substitute for a well thought-out and appropriately streamlined-for-play gaming system.
  22. That is a great example! I think when AD&D first came out, the various options for rules that might conflict was such a novelty that it was actually fun to search for that kind of stuff - in a way - because it was exciting to see what you could do in the AD&D game setting. That was part of its charm. But once the wonder has worn off a bit, it starts to become a bit tedious - especially, if there is some rule that was overlooked in the moment, and a lively "discussion" ensues. Ergo, the DM is "always right." Ideally, I think a game system should be as simple or complex as the DM/GM and players want it to be - sort of like how many of today's college courses are designed to challenge students far beyond the first standard deviation of the normal distribution for ability with the subject matter should they be so challenged. Currently, no single system handles this variation inherently in either an entirely smooth or satisfying way. For this reason, we have home-brew systems aplenty.
  23. Are you referring to Rolemaster?
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