Old Man Henerson

Lightsabers should probably be the most powerful melee weapon that cuts through most things with few exceptions as that is how they were portrayed in the films. Though I can always include a few items and or armors that are resistant to light sabers just to mix things up with the players. (These would be rare though since, like the lightsabers, they would have to be relics of Old Terra or powerful alien technology in the setting)

Might that be in the free Mythrass Imperative book? Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate for a lightsaber. Thanks for the info.

These are all good ideas. Thanks for the suggestions. I think the first suggestion would work for specials and criticals while the second option could work great for all normal hits.

I have the Rune Quest Star Wars conversion pdf, and I think it does mention Sundering, but there was no other information on how it worked. I will definitely look into the Mythras Firearm thing since it is free.

Being a topic about specials, I also have a question. The campaign that I want to run is very star wars themed and I am going to have players be able to use the energy sword from the BGB with the very impressive 2D10 damage. I am not sure about the special though as it is listed as Impaling. While Impaling is certainly possible, I am not sure it is the appropriate sort of special damage for something like a lightsaber. In fact, I am not sure that bleeding, knockback or any of the other special damages fit with this weapon so I am not sure what to do with it other than saying something like "You completely bisect the stormtrooper". Any thoughts?

Yeah, that is mostly my concern, if it happens all the time things will get weird really fast. Now I just need to figure out if I want to transfer all the powers into psychic abilities or leave them as they are. Another thing I need to figure out is how these force powers work, for example: There are some similar rules for boosting magic powers in the BGB but the difficulty grade seems to go beyond making difficult roles. Here, there are several levels of difficulty ranging from none, hard, formidable, and herculean. There is nothing in the BGB that corresponds to this very well, so I am just thinking that I will turn these into skills that you can add Power Points to like how psychic powers work. It does seem to get rather silly considering how little of a threat that death can be in D&D. I never played so extensively so as to revive anyone from the dead, but a lot of D&D can become silly it seems, like for instance, forgetting how magic works after you use it. Me too, thanks for all the help sir!

I did think of time dilation as being part of the back story of an important NPC, but I am not sure I will use it. It might end up being some sort of affect under special circumstances. I will probably work on a table for travel like you said though, that will be very useful. This was very useful. Combat does not have to be nearly as "balanced" as in D&D like you said since it is basically already balanced around your fixed hit points. I do recall however, talking to you a long time ago as you were suggesting lowering the combat percentages of enemies so the party would not get destroyed as often. About that, I got a PM from soltakss yesterday and he gave me the apparently legendary Star Wars conversion for RQ6. It was pretty good and had the great Force abilities I was looking for. It even had the Dark Side Points and corruption like we were talking about. Now I am wondering if I even need to buy M-Space anymore since with this and the Big Golden Book, I have about everything I need to create a campaign. M-Space's star ship and vehicle creation sections still call to me a little. I could of course wait until the potential BRP Spaceships book comes out, but I have no idea how long that will be. LOL, that is funny with you and the treant. I do agree with you though that enemies do not have to get better or skills become useless. I like that RQ/BRP ensures that there is no such thing as a useless weapon or skill. Yeah, I will have to start playtesting here with all of this new material, thanks again for the advice, I will be sure to keep it real with my players as well.

I suppose that you are right, Dark Side Points are already negative KI, so there is no need to make multiple point systems like that. I still have to get used to how long that can take, but I think it will be okay, most of the games I have run so far have probably been closer to one shots and the only real game of BRP that I ran for awhile was a pretty fast passed adventure as well. I was probably going to wing it and just decide what the jump distance was for each world they went too, no jump would be the same unless the players went back to the same world from the same jump point. As for Star Wars ships, the setting is more inspired by Star Wars than directly copying it, so ship travel will be vastly different than in the movies and games. I will definitely have to review everything that has been said in this forum before I finalize my mechanics. I have a lot of material to work with now thanks the help of you and the others. My original idea was that the dark side points/allegiance would do their own thing like we discussed while the "Light Side" allegiance would give you benefits like increased skill points and/or HP so that you would be more likely to succeed, kind of like the Ki points. These are good suggestions that I will have to think about. Of course, being BRP, this problem is somewhat negated as critical hits are still definitely a danger to all characters. BRP actually does a great job of keeping everything grounded in that regard. That and player creativity is always a wild card. Would you mind explaining this a bit please. Are you saying that I should only send enemies that are 25% of the party's strength? That is definitly a good idea. I was thinking I would purchase M-Space in a few days and I know from you and others that they have some meditation powers that I was going to look at and see what they did and if they could be adapted like this. DSP subtracting from MP regeneration is great too! These are some pretty good ideas too. I will have to think on all of these as this makes a great way to be attracted to the dark side. Yeah, it is definitely a challenge to unlearn what little D&D I have experienced. I do like that that fixed HP does keep the payers from growing overconfident and being completely unafraid of combat. I literally remember a D&D story where someone was holding a Player or NPC hostage at knife point and all the players realized that it was pointless since a dagger only did 1d4 of damage. LOL, this is a stormtrooper we are talking about, so he probably has -50% to hit anything. Getting to the point though I think the fixed HP and lethal weapons almost keeps the game grounded and story driven rather than becoming a hack & slash game. If everything can kill you, the players have to use more tactics and mabey even avoid combat and use other skills to get to their objective. Thanks a lot to you and everyone else who posted here. Don't worry about information overload, I would be pretty lost with out this information. I will probably copy everything here and sift through it later. I am starting to get a pretty good idea about what I want to do in this game now.

I most certainly will! Eastern medicine is vastly superior when it comes to healing and maintaining the body. I think we in the West get to hung up on the philosophical problems when a lot of Eastern ideas are more focused on observing and caring for mans body holistically. The Force being derived from that sort of thought, a mixture of BGB psychic powers, super powers, magic, and Ki abilities would probably best represent the spiritual nature of these powers and the Energy Field (for lack of a cooler name) that fills the setting of my game. I also believe like you said that this does explain the dark side abilities like Force Lighting as being so malignant and corrupting thanks to their torturous and destructive nature. That of course, has not stopped people form thinking that they can be "balanced" in light and dark and use wicked powers of Force Lighting for good, which is precisely what I hope to avoid with this tread. Perhaps we should add some sort of "Dark/Corrupted Ki" skill to use dark side abilities like Force Lightning. Or might also be better just to stick with some sort of Dark Side Points and allegiance like we discussed earlier in the thread. Or it could be another lightsaber form like you were saying. I think I am still in D&D mode and get antsy when I think of long periods of time. Of course, I was thinking that traveling warp speed between the stars would take a week or to of time depending on the distance, so there is plenty of time to do such training while flying between the stars. Separating allegiance from powers (at least in the beginning) might be a better implementation. We may even just remove allegiance altogether and make the Dark Side just a sanity type pool that gives you power but messes you up in the process while being "Light Side" means just getting the abilities straight but without any debilitating side effects or taking your character away. It all does fit the Samurai/Ninja stories, and it also fits the lethality of lightsaber combat as well. Now my only problem is giving non-psychic a way to be relevant, other than giving them copious amounts of power armor and weapons or cybernetics ala Starship Troopers or Metroid. That is rather overpowered lol. Spending MP and starting out with low critical chances should be a way to keep everything balanced. Another thought I just realized however, is that if dark side characters can just use their DSP to either re-roll near misses or get MP to power their Ki skill, Dark Siders would truly become over powered. Perhaps Jedi type characters could use something like a Battle Meditation to even the odds? It is weird because I do feel that pull that wants me to think D&D in this game and just fight it out instead of seeking advantage wherever I can. As a GM I also have to make sure that the players do not go into those sorts of battles, although it is easier to let the players be tactical rather than be tactical myself. These rules sound wonderful and put some more balance to the game Thanks alot!

I was planning on using the Big Golden Book and M-Space together for the game so I can always just use BGB rules and weapons if I need to do so. I am not too worried about any big differences.

Wow, that is all cool material! Thanks for retrieving it all! I will see what of it I can adapt to the setting. A lot of the Ki stuff does map pretty well to Jedi abilities. A few psychic powers might fit better in places, but for the most part these work swimmingly. If we wanted to cut down on training times, we could make some of these abilities alignment score rewards too. It will be hard enough to resist taking on DSP to achieve some of these levels anyway. My only potential concern is that some of these abilities (like always landing critical hits) might be overpowered. Presumably, the dark siders would have some level of comparable power to match our heroes, but it might be easy to cut through everyone if they are always criting their attacks. I can see now how this game would be more deadly than BRP now. You must have quite a few extra character sheets on hand while playing this. You definitely have to unlearn what you have learned to play BRP as a D&D player. The fortunate thing for me is that, other than a few times with some friends playing 5E D&D, I mostly played with an old copy of AD&D or a homebrew system my sister made up that was percentile based. Half the reason I got BRP in the firs place was that it's character stats were very similar to AD&D's unlike many of the other generic systems that I had looked at. The similarities and easy percentile system has made getting acquainted with BRP much more enjoyable, especially now that I am finally starting to understand the rules.

Yeah, it is easy to have that assumption. Reading into what inspired Lucas when creating the Force yields some interesting insights into how the Force really works, especially when you learn how Eastern Medicine defines balance as being whole and healthy while anything that makes you sick is seen as imbalance, i.e. balance is not being equally well and sick. The particular sect of Buddhism that Lucas used for inspiration had that same view of balance when it came to evil within the universe as well, evil being a cancer or imbalance that would have to be removed before the universe could once again be in balance; a view not too dissimilar to the Christian view of evil and which probably resonated with the original audience when the movies first came out. I have not played too much of BRP yet, but reading through the rule book, I can also see the power levels of this game are way less than in D&D. The raised lethality however does seem to promote more tactical thinking and, in my opinion, ironically makes the game much more story driven when you don't have to constantly be looting dungeons for levels. Thanks for the offer! I would like hearing more about the rules if you have the time. I do think though from what you have told me about ki rules so far that the BGB probably has everything I need to make sufficient Jedi type characters for the game. I guess you could also give force sensitive characters skills over 100% to represent a similar level of training like the Galactic Knight character in the back of the BGB.

Thank you sir, that is just what I needed to hear! I thought I had read it somewhere on these forums earlier, I might have it backwards though so I do not really know. It does not particularly matter though since I am planning on using M-Space in tandem with my Big Golden Book for running other things like a sanity/dark side corruption meter. As an unrelated question, does M-Space's weapon list include something light a lightsaber?

I think I am pretty sold on getting M-Space now, (unless BRP Spaceships comes out soon) but I have a few more questions. I have heard that the weapon damage and health stats in M-Space are higher than in the Big Golden Book, I have also seen that M-Space uses hit locations. So I was wondering if would it be very difficult to convert between the two damage systems and/or hit locations and total hit points?

It is surprising how many people do not seem to get the nature of the Force and the Dark Side, hence why we have seen the "gameification" of the Force in all the Star Wars video games. No one really seems to understands it and then you get things like "Gray Jedi" that just want to use dark side powers while still being good. Wow, just wow. That guy was completely and unironically replaying Revenge of The Sith. On the one hand, it would have been interesting to see where the story would have went, but on the other hand, your description of that guy makes it sound like this game would have ended up on r/rpg horror stories. How did the other players interact with him? Yeah, this is what I was thinking. The allegiance system in the Big Golden Book has suggestions for one bonus that add temporary skill and HP boosts that I thought would make some good Force bonuses. It would be a hard path and one where you would have to refuse some dark side points, but it will ultimately be more powerful. Where might I find Ki Skills and the RQ Land of the Ninja supplement?

Okay, I see what you mean here. It makes sense based on the Star Wars cannon itself, and it is a clever and a good way to tempt people to the Dark Side or to be more mindful of their power use. I can see that you were good at it. Did you manage to get any of your players to fall? Now the only thing that remains for this game is to figure out the benefits of the Force/Light Side, which unlike the Dark Side, should be slow and difficult, but a ultimately more rewarding path than giving into the temptations of the Dark Side.

Is the POWx5 thing for your starting allegiance score? The only potential problem I see is that if you use your powers a lot, your allegiance will constantly be in flux, and thus, you would never be able to achieve apotheosis. I was originally leaning towards giving out free points for taking Dark Side Points, but rerolling for a few DPS is also pretty cool. Perhaps doing both would be good where taking that reroll/extra power points gives you more Dark Side Points in your allegiance score to draw upon later while also pushing your Dark Side Score closer to your WILL/SAN score. I am not sure what you mean. Are you saying that they could keep their powers running longer but not regain any Power Points while they do so? Would they be able to cancel their powers?

Yeah, as far as the force is concerned I am a George Lucas purist. The setting I am working on is going to somewhat similar to Star Wars, but set in the future of our galaxy instead where the players will live in the fractured husk of Humanity's great empire among the other races that have moved in. The plan so far for the setting is that psychics will utilize their latent powers to interact with the sort of unconscious thoughts and energies of all created things that together up a sort of energy field that permeates the universe and touches upon the edge of the Divine realm of the Creator. This field provides increased skill boosts drawing upon knowledge of all creatures to those who are in harmony with this psychic field. The psychic field also provides limited precognition describing what others are thinking and are about to do (I.E. telling you when someone is going to shoot you with a blaster so you can deflect it with you lightsaber or dodge) and the ability to increase healing rates (but not regenerate limbs) and increase strength and endurance (temporarily increasing Character rolls and HP). The dark side comes in as "The Voices" which are the negative thoughts and energies polluting and corrupting the psychic field along with the dark spiritual enemies of the Creator that are constantly offering the promises of power and indulgence to those who are not constantly tuning them out. The corrupting power of the "dark side" comes from twisting the psychic field to your own destructive whims and using it to increase your own power points and the potency of your psychic skills rapidly, often (though not always) at the cost of your physically characteristics. I was planning on using power points, but this method is also intriguing. Perhaps I will use both.

Not that I have played Call of Cthulhu, but I was thinking that succumbing to the dark side/corruption/voices would be like the sanity system since it could capture the sense of spiraling into villainy in a way that the players could not ignore without consequence like in many of the Star Wars videogames. When a psychic becomes fully corrupt, the character would become an evil NPC. The dark side/voices is something that should not be played with lightly and it will consume those who use it. I like these ideas, especially the passion rolls and meditation ideas, meditation could be made into a psychic power/skill. Would gathering Dark Side Points add those points to your Dark side allegiance or would it count up backwards on the sanity meter until it reached and overcame your max WILL/SAN score?

I for one would be most interested if BRP Space came out. Is there by chance a PDF still in circulation on this site?

Thanks for the additional info on psionic powers, I will have to think hard, on weather to purchase the books or just roll with what I have got. The setting was mostly original, but I was attempting to add a Force like psychic system as well, and maybe have some cool space ships as well.

Thanks for the ideas and the forum posts, They will be most helpful.

I read a thread on this site where you had some of the same ideas as in your blog, this however is much more detailed and useful, thanks for the help. I will still have to figure out some specific benefits for both the "Force" allegiance and the "Dark Side" allegiance that fit my setting but this is a great start and is close to what I had in mind to begin with even down to the mechanics of redemption. Thanks a lot! :)

This works brilliantly! The dark side of psionics will offer easier yet more addictive and long term destructive powers and abilities up front while the "Light Side" will offer difficult but more powerful abilities later on like high skill buffs and defensive/regenerative abilities. I do love passions affecting your abilities, it would fit into my Star Wars like campaign vary well, although I am not sure how it could work with the sanity/corruption concept unless we combine it will allegiance. This is great, but I am not sure how we would create "Dark Side Sanity" with out the POW X5 value. What sort of personality traits would you use?

Yeah, I will probably look into this game then. If only a third would be redundant and it has plenty of psionic powers Thanks for the advice. Alternatively though, I did snag the free version of Stars Without Number and it seems to have some interesting ship design process, yet, as you said, It might just be better to look into something more BRP like.