Lloyd Dupont

As I am watching Lindybeige explaining the fine art of spear fighting...

I keep wondering to myself...
Could I model all of that with BRP? To how much depth?

Care to share your personal approach of tactical combat?
(It's not my string point, I want to improve! ) 

Hey Good point Atgxtg!

The idea that is emotional and not rational crossed my mind.. but I scratched it out with the personal belief the subconscious (hence emotions) does (roughly) the same calculation... 
But one can argue it's slightly different indeed...

By skirmish I mean a few (1,2,3?6?) vs a few.... (like often happen when it's player party vs a bunch of enemies)

Clearly if there are lots of yous.... you might not die in vain, might be "worth" it.... And you might have no choice as well... (deserter are not liked much, to say the least...)

I didn't carefully read all the messages here... But just picking on the "moral as skill"...

In skirmishes, clearly, there is little to gain in staying in a lost fight, if you gonna die, retreating is the most sensible option! So I wouldn't make that sort of morale go higher as your skill increase hey?

Morale is a complicated thing, it has has self-preservation (which might be the smart thing to do), arrogance (which might be warranted or not), awareness (see how the combat is going), peer pressure (some sergeant have the duty to shoot deserters, and one often will do anything for their brother in arms), opportunity (is fleeing obviously doomed or feasible)....

Which leads me to: most of my NPC flee or beg for their lives when they see the battle going very badly against them... No need to roll anything....

mmm.. that way, come to think of it, oversimplifying morale could be modelled as a resistance roll (if needed)
perceived personal power vs perceived enemy power
and you could approximate each size by counting the number of protagonist, each one counting as 2 (full health) or 1 (wounded)

Although.. machine and undead would never retreat unless ordered...

It's also in the original, long forgotten, D&D, played with 2D6.

At any rate, I haven't played original D&D in a while, nor have I ever played wargames.

I usually retreat or stay in a rather predictable fashion depending in the creature and circumstance... The thought never occurred to me to make that a game stat 😮 

6 hours ago, SharpPointyStick said:

Hello. Old gamer but new to these forums. 50 years old & been a gamer for about 40 of them. 

Having fun at myself here. Reading that I thought, hey this guy is so old! 😮
But then I reflected I am (almost) 49 meself... hahahah

4 hours ago, rsanford said:

Started with blue box D&D

Me too!

Typically consecutive attack have a -5 rank malus. I.e. first attack is done at DEX rank. and then DEX-5 and DEX-10.

An alternative home rule could be to split the DEX rank into the numbers of attack, in your case that would be DEX, 2/3DEX 1/3DEX. Which is how attack rank is modified after moving MOVx1~2

8 hours ago, NewbieSalmon said:

there's no difference between 1/2 and ½?

well 1/2 is 3 characters, but  ½ is only 1! 😮

I think I wanted to challenge the natural awe and reverence player have toward royalty... But that probably not works, since it contains reasonable wariness of power...

The string of coup would be mostly a (vast) family affair, with an emperor having lived for few hundreds of years...
Me think now, I will start with a bloodbath... follow by 1 or 2 more coup and a fracture of the empire that will be more or less stable for the players game period afterwards...

I have some open ended campaigns end ideas... one of them might be helping one of the .. contenders? pretenders? something....  

There will be independentist raising to the occasion as well... but it's another story...

Still working on my scifi campaign ( I think I have maybe 3 month before it starts)

It will start in an orderly, albeit militaristic, space civilisation... That will shatterwith a coup.. (that was the plan)
But then I watched some episode of Horrible History.. and I learn how there was like... 40 emperor? in a row in a short time after Julius Caesar death, in a string of coup...

And I am wondering.. why just one coup? Why not a string of them?
But then it's different, it's the future, with better information, technology, vast distance between protagonist.... Such political madness seems to only have happened in the distant past....

In a few words I wonder.. How many coup in a row would be realistic? What say you?

counter argument to this exploratory spirit.. (I know, it's a game, we are not here to be Debbie Downer, just doing it for the sake of rationale informed argument):

Exploring / Colonising Antarctica would be vastly, hugely, ginormously easier and cheaper to colonise than, say Mars. One can breathe air in Antarctica, it has lot of sunlight (compare to Mars), easy resource (rich soil that can grow things, water,), easily accessible, warm temperature hospitable to life, perfect gravity, so easy to bring in stuff by mere boats, acceptable radiation level,.. the list of advantage goes on....

Yet.. not much colonisation happening to Antarctica....

Me thing it might takes sometimes.. but we might eventually colonise the asteroid belt.. lots of easily accessible resources there.. no gravity issue (that prevent resource to be brought back, that is).. and maybe build beautiful asteroid habitats!

Oops missed that.... like it too ^^

At any rate... I am thinking to go with a very small number of item slots... (like 5?) with the caveat that a 1 backpack can contain a big number of item slot itself  

OK, I have to admit this is video from a D&D guy.. 😕 
But this is a topic this is dear to me, as in as I am still trying to figure out a way to use it...

I think it's a style...

I am in the camp that have a hard time killing players.... Though I plan to be more merciless for my upcoming scifi campaign... but I plan t have lots of NP kind of around the NPC.. and good hospital...

A player killer need good social skill to have player coming back.. but I guess if everybody is expecting it and on board... plus it's real horror that way  
As long as the story is good hey?  

it doesn't mater if the random armor goes very high.. sometimes it just block all the damage, what's important is that sometimes it goes down, and then the damage could be anything (high or low).. and also the player is aware that happens and that increase the drama and reduce the felling of invincibility...

He is not planning to kill the character, me think, he is just trying to be a realist!  

23 hours ago, Nozbat said:

Some of the description can be obtained from the Monster section which quote Lovecraft's own description... but a quick way is to show a picture of the creature (and there are some great pieces of artwork available) and add a few words about how it moves, smells, size etc... and let the players call it something ...they are generally good at making up names.. saves the Keepers creativity for other things...

My players have an abject fear of goats and a pathological hatred of trees after playing Dark Offerings.. and I tend to wind them up between sessions by posting ambiguous statements alongside pictures of their enemies, monsters, or scenes... to be fair to them they play along with it

The mythical goat tree has been found! 😮

I had a quick read this weekend.... It seems the setting is a strong selling point of the (Toxandria) book.... with even a mini adventure in the first 34 page of the rule book! And lots of text, even about the afterlife if I remember that right and not confused with something else...

Anyway I was mostly curious about the magic system, so I jumped to it....

The magic system is very simple and very similar to BRP: Magic and mostly consist of a list of spell...
That said... 3 things struck me:
- Still the same balance "issue" with elemental spells (personal pet peeve of mine that might not be shared, related to game balance, fireball and real life fire behaviour) (to be fair, it's a tricky one)
- Some new, well  thought, original spells which give a welcome additional variety to BRP Magic (I guess a few possibly or seemingly inspired by CF or D&D)
- Some welcome tweaks (IMHO), like weapon damage boost last 10 rounds

3 hours ago, Spence said:

And I really wish I knew why this forum randomly forces posts to be double spaced for no apparent reason.

This is one great mystery I have also been pondering! 😮 

I just checked this thread out of bored curiosity at work...

And now, Smiorgan, you sold me, gotta buy it (it's only $7 ) 

mass is multiplied (or divided) by 2 every 8 points, and chance go from 50% to 90% or 10% when the difference increase from 0 to 8...

Seem fair enough?

I never realised that, ideally, there is this precise relation between SIZ and weight.

That implies that body significant length (height for human) is somewhat proportional to 2^(SIZ/24) (and also depends on the geometry). Hence every +24 SIZ  point should be a doubling in height or length.... 

Cool new precise perspective on that characteristic  

On 8/9/2020 at 6:23 AM, Atgxtg said:

Yup. If we keep the average values close to the fixed armor values used in other BRP games we should get somewhat similar results to the fixed armor. So if Plate armor is 8 points in the fixed system, it should arage around 8 points in a  variable system. So 2d6 (7), 2d8 (9), 3d4 (7.5) would be the sort of die roll we want. Maybe 2d6+1 (8) or 2d4+3 (8)? The important thing is to have it average about 8 points, and to be better than "lesser" armors".

The thing is in that fixed armor value version old BRP 8 point armor will usually  (87.5%) stop a sword that does 1D8+1 damage, and even when it doesn't only a point gets through, barring a special success or critical. With variable armor as written, armor rated at  1d10 will only stop that same sword about half the time, but could let as much as 8 points through. That's a huge difference. With 2d8, or 2d6, or one of the other variants noted above, the results are much close to the fixed hit point system, while still keeping armor variable.

As long as the variable ratings average out close to the old fixed ratings, we will get results more in line with the fixed ratings. 

 

 

Since I've been getting a lot of likes to this post, I threw together a tentative table of variable armor values. TO keep things simple and consistient, I just rated the armor by fixed AP score rather than by type. I put samples of the BRP variable ratings too, so we can see just how much things varied in the past, as well as how of an increase in protection we'd get compared to the old values.

 

Fixed AP	Random AP	New Random AP
1	1D6-1 or 1D2-1	1D3-1
2	1D6	1D3
3	2D3	2D2
4	1D4	2D3
5	1D6	2D4
6	1D8-1 or 1D6+2 or 2D4-1	1D6+1D4
7	1D8	2D6
8	2D6 or 1D10	2D6+1 or 1D8+1D6
9		2D8
10	2D4+2 or 1D10+2	2D8+1 or 2D6+3
11		2D10
12		2D10+1
13		2D10+2
14	2D6+2	4D6
15		4D6+1
16	4D4	4D6+2
17		4D8-1
18		4D8

Note that these are just what I consider to be good possible values, we could alter things around if we want to play with the bell curve. For instance we could use 4d4 instead of 2D8+1 or some such. It all depends on just how much we want the armor to vary. We could even factor in for coverage this way, with better coverage resulting in less variable armor, with half plate (7) being 2D6, while full plate (8) might be 3D4 or 2D4+3

 

 

 

 

I wanted to try Random AP but it seems just too bad to give it a go... But this new table make it attractive again!  

How about  helmet though? What's your suggestion?

4 hours ago, soltakss said:

RQ3 SR, but with 12 SR per round and 3 SRs between actions.

After trying various system.. I am looking forward to the simplicity of 1 action at DEX/INT (+D6) rank for my next GMing....
But.. mmm...this system makes me think again about initiative... it might be simple, yet allow some variable attack speed, without it being too much of an OP advantage...

Might give it a go and change.. by now my players are used to change!