fmitchell

It's on my list, although I'm saving up for the dead tree version. In the game I'm planning, though, the "elves" are mysterious, external threats: a dying people who are more than happy to take others down with them. (Inverting a few tropes, there are *no* female elves, and they can't interbreed with humans.) These are Melniboneans from the perspective of the Young Kingdoms.

Eightway arrows of Chaos, probably. Hm, your Eldren are still smaller than humans, although I guess that fits the Erekose saga. Looking at the height-weight charts in the latest BRP book, it looks like SIZ has more to do with height/length than actual weight. I'd probably give my elves at least the same SIZ range as humans, if not a few points more: taller, but more slender.

Not really. The Aldryami of RQ are motile plants, and they're the basis (stat-wise) for BRP elves: smaller than the average human (SIZ 9 vs SIZ 13), and quicker. Tolkien's elves were taller than humans and generally "better", somewhat like the Melniboneans. However, from the stats posted, it looks like I could get a quick approximation for my version of elves by using the STR, CON, and SIZ for humans, and the INT, POW, and DEX of BRP elves. (Melniboneans have a higher POW, but my version of elves aren't necessarily more magically powerful. Also, in the riitual magic system I'm devising, more POW doesn't make you a better magician, it just allows you to survive the consequences of your rituals.) Thanks to everyone.

From RQ3, I vaguely recall that it was to escape having a sapient creature have an INT less than 8, or an adult human have a SIZ less than 8. In RQ2, I think every stat was a straight 3D6. I haven't opened those books in ages, though; I can double-check when I get home.

The elves in BRP (and RuneQuest before it) are smaller but faster than humans. I'm working on a new campaign, and I'd like a race of "elves" that look more like Tolkien's (but act more like Melniboneans). 1. Would anyone who has Stormbringer or Elric! handy mind telling me what the STR, CON, SIZ, INT, POW, and DEX of a Melnibonean is? 2. Has anyone done any work on Tolkien-style "High Elves" in BRP? (Warhammer-style, Pratchett-style, or bloody-nearly-any-fantasy-novel-style would also work.) Thanks, Frank P.S. If anyone's interested: in the campaign, the PCs are orcs, who once had a mighty civilization laid low by their own hubris and now live a barbaric lifestyle. Renaissance-level humans and the mysterious ruin-dwelling "elves" are their enemies. Orcs have a complicated relationship with the Forest Folk, who take the forms of animals or short -- dare I say dwarfish? -- humanoids.

One thing about advantages and disadvantages is that they're yet more tweaks and special cases. I'm OK with GURPS but the plethora of advantages/disadvantages gets overwhelming. Feats and especially Powers in D&D are "exception-based" rules run amok. Even Stunts in Spirit of the Century get a little confusing at times; a former character had Inner Strength, and I kept having to look up exactly what that meant. There's something refreshing about having the exact number you need to roll for any situation on a one-page character sheet.

As I understand it, "Time Fugue", as described, is like "Time Stop" from That Other Game: the world is temporarly frozen, while the character can take extra actions. I'm not sure of the power cost or the point cost, but one technique to avoid abuse is to regard the character's time frame as a bubble around him. Touching an object pulls that object into his time frame, and releasing it puts it back into "frozen time". So, for example, he could fire an arrow (or a gun), but the shot wouldn't be resolved until time unfroze again. (To prevent point-blank shots, perhaps the time bubble has a radius of 3m/1yd/one hex) By extension, a physical attack would pull the target into his time frame ... and the opponent would then get to counter-attack. Perhaps the Fugue is limited to a specific area, rather than to the individual. In that case, he can take any action that doesn't involve moving from that spot. The moment he does, the fugue ends. That would eliminate the possibility of walking over to someone frozen, and capping them. Or maybe "freezing" time is too drastic. From an external point of view, the Time-Fugued individual might be blurred, perhaps with several "selves" super-imposed on each other during that eternal second ... but an observer could still see an attack coming his way, and take evasive manoevers. Or maybe we stick to the letter of the power: any attack directed at another person or thing ends the fugue. Why that would be so I don't know ... but time is a ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Note that That Other Game, Fourth Edition, reduces "Time Stop" to extra actions a round, so that may be the way to handle it ... with an asymptotic power cost for each action taken while the world is "stopped".

An interesting idea, which I first heard in a description of a Mercedes Lackey book, is that magic entails a debt to the Powers That Be. Mechanically, every time a magician performs magic he incurs a "burden"; the GM (in the guise of the PTB) can offer to ease the burden in return for some task, anything from "dig this ditch" to "go into this cave and kill the creature within". For example, someone casts a divination spell, which has a burden of, say, 5 points. Later in the adventure, the character feels a prompting to go to a village along the way and help an old lady draw water from the well ... that forgives one point. Or, perhaps more directly, the divination tells him to kill "beasts" in a cave to find the answer he seeks: that forgives all five points (if he and his companions live), and slays the family of ogres terrorizing a town. Someone who uses a lot of magic, then, becomes the tool of Fate as much as its master.

Actually, I'd like a BRP Lite, much like the COC Quickstart, that I can pass out to players who are wholly unfamiliar with the system. Then again, I'm planning to run an (initially) minimalist Fantasy game, so perhaps my idea of a quickstart is someone else's idea of useless.

You could always treat illusions like a waking dream. While the illusion is in effect, a character can take damage and even "die" ... but at the end, he wakes up, alive, with the illusory damage gone. Some treatments of Celtic Myth insist all illusions have to have a supporting reality: faerie gold is rocks and leaves, not air, and a mighty throne has to be a rock or hillock to be sat upon. It all depends how powerful you want illusions to be. In The Fantasy Trip illusions could do real, permanent damage (leading to death) unless disbelieved, which made them only slightly less powerful than individual summoning spells, and far easier to remember. Also, the mage could "see through the illusion's eyes"; in one adventure I used successive illusions of a swift bird to do recon on a castle. Illusions can be the swiss-army-knife spell if you're not careful to set limits. (Of course, a magic system built entirely on illusions would be interesting.)

Is this a dead horse or a dead pony? Sorry. I think the thread is officially over.

How about "The d100 System"? It's five times better than d20! (Or five times more random ... whatever.)

FATE and especially PDQ operate on a principle that any ability not listed is rolled at "average", since skills/qualities are bonuses on a die roll. (PDQ uses 2d6, FATE uses Fudge dice which are essentially 4d3-8.) FATE and PDQ also eschew the usual STR, DEX, INT, etc. stats; if you're notably smarter, stronger, etc. than most people, one of your Qualities (in PDQ) or Skills or Aspects (in FATE) will cover it. Compare to BRP, where every skill has a listed "base percentage" even if you've never trained for it. (Except for Knowledge(X), Pilot(X), Speak Language (X), etc. where the possibilites for X are effectively unlimited.) You can usually write a PDQ character's "stats" on an index card front, and a FATE character might take a half-sheet of paper. Apart from the BRP pamphlet, I've never seen a BRP player character sheet less than a page (although you can compress the writeup for NPCs). :focus: Honestly, if a D&D designer or WotC executive sneezes, the forums will buzz with speculation about what that means for future releases. Like it or not, D&D is the 800lb gorilla (and Vampire is a 300lb gorilla with eyeliner and silver jewelry). Anyone who plays BRP or anyone else will have to hunt for players willing to try something else. Whether BRP released a year ago or is postponed for yet another month won't really matter to BRP sales, which will be a very small fraction of D&D's.

Same here. I fondly remember a TFT campaign I was in at college. Really, the only critique I have of TFT is that, by today's standards, it's too small and limited. "Dark City Games" has reverse engineered some rules in small, free PDFs, and extended the system to Science Fiction and Westerns ... but at it's heart it's mainly a combat system with a few noncombat abilities grafted on. You could always add more bells and whistles to TFT, but then you'd have GURPS. Back to BRP (sort of): after playing FATE and PDQ, I find games with fixed statistics like BRP (and GURPS, D&D, etc.) somehow too old-school. It's about the lightest-weight old-school game I know, but there's something compelling about a concise description of how a character departs from "average", rather than a sheet filled with primary stats, derived stats, and every skill a character could potentially use.

In Pendragon, a single player can play multiple characters, as multiple generations of a family. In that case, some personality mechanics can help the player keep characters separate. Also, men (and women) driven by their passions to do stupid things, and conversely knights rewarded for virtuous behavior, are a big part of the Arthurian legends. In another genre, though, the same mechanics can feel overly constraining. Certainly in a Cthulhu or science fiction game, the emphasis is on characters as investigators, explorers, scientists, and other cool-headed types. Another medieval or pre-medieval fantasy game with different premises (say, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Elric) might require little or no mechanics.

Note, though, that the Aspect rules I quoted were from Spirit of the Century. The FATE 2.0 PDF has a different take on Aspects. If you don't want to plunk down cash for the book, there's an SRD with all the rules (but no examples).

Harshax gets 1/3 of his wish. I've seen a few different types of Personality Mechanics: Mental Disadvantage: Present in HERO, GURPS, and other point-buy systems, a character gets extra character points in exchange for assuming a weakness, usually expressed as a die roll to avoid succumbing. (Example: An "Impulsive" character in GURPS must make a Will roll to engage in any sort of deliberation.) In some systems, the character must take a weakness, or the weakness is a penalty to any related action (e.g. the required "Poor" Quality in PDQ). Opposed Personality Traits: A staple of Pendragon, a character has two opposed personality traits, e.g. Lusty and Chaste, or Courageous and Cowardly. If the rating for one trait goes up, its opposed trait will go down, and vice versa. The GM may call for a roll against one or another trait if the player wants his character to do something covered by those traits, e.g. the character must succeed in a Chaste roll to refuse the advances of a beautiful woman. Aspects: In FATE, personality traits use the Aspect rules; you don't get "points" for personality traits, because they're a double-edged sword. For example, a Cowardly person might be first to turn tail, but also has a habit of finding safe places to hide. (The best Aspects are those which have built in upsides and downsides.) Mechanically, in Spirit of the Century, Aspects have three uses: A player can Invoke an Aspect to add a bonus to a dice roll or reroll a bad roll by spending a Fate Point. The GM can Compel an aspect to prevent the character from acting by bribing the Player with a Fate Point. Other players and the GM can also Tap a relevant Aspect of another character, or a situation, also by spending a Fate Point. (Note that I prefer the "Aspect" version, since it still permits player choice.) Any others?

Not to disagree with your main point, but ... A role-playing experience depends heavily on the DM/GM and the adventure. If you were using one of WotC's crap adventures, or your DM hadn't gained much experience since those halcyon 2nd ed. days -- and I have no way of knowing either -- then your D&D experience will disappoint. I've been fortunate enough to find a great GM, and we ran through a d20-based Midnight campaign that rocked. That being said, the aforementioned GM house-ruled a number of skills (notably Diplomacy) and added his own roleplaying-dependent "bonus-point" system to supplement experience points. I also felt that the game crawled when we entered combat: "uh oh, time to suspend the story while we move minis around and calculate bonuses/penalties/AoOs ... and of course that one guy always wants to grapple ..." So, I'll have to echo the assessment upthread that D&D 3.5 is mainly a skirmish-level combat game with a unified conflict resolution system, but as a platform for roleplaying it leaves much to be desired. Then again, I was never enamored of previous editions, although at least OD&D/BD&D/AD&D left a big blank that individual groups could fill in with whatever they wanted. In contrast, BRP -- hey, remember that one? -- and newer generations of RPGs have simple and unified conflict resolution mechanics so you can get back to the story. The same GM who ran Midnight now runs a Spirit of the Century campaign, where non-combat conflicts involve only one or two die-rolls per scene, combat moves a lot faster, and characters move all around the area despite not having an actual board. He's also a big fan of BRP, which despite its "simulationist" roots basically involves simple or opposed skill rolls and characters defined more by what they know than how they fight.

This almost sounds like an existential version of Midnight. Instead of a Dark Lord and his evil minions, you have to contend with apathy and ignorance, with a little nudge from supernatural entities.

Sorry for being snarky earlier. While I've only leafed through Bio-Tech so far, I believe it also contains medical equipment, superdrugs, and the like. Probably not as much portable gear as Ultra-Tech, but it might be worth a look.

Yeah, biologically engineered androids and nanotech healing aren't science fiction at all.

Chiming in late, but if you want whole books worth of gear, you could take a look at GURPS Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech (preferably 4th edition, but the earlier editions are $9 or less these days). GURPS uses only D6 for damage, and states muscle-powered weapons in terms of "thrust" or "swing" damage plus a modifier (rather than BRP's base damage plus Damage Bonus). However, the average GURPS character has 10-12 hp, so the ranges are about right. You'd probably need to do some skill conversion as well.

I'd rather see a fantasy world that got a reasonable distance away from D&D, one with its own character. Glorantha was a little too strange and convoluted, but maybe something with its own distinct flavor ... or maybe a neglected sub-genre, like: Sword and sorcery (admittedly already handled by Conan) Non-european fantasy (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Arabian Nights, Ancient Greek, Indian, African, Central/South American) Modern or historical fantasy (e.g. Mythago Wood, Neverwhere, the Lord Darcy series, nearly everything by Tim Powers) Pre-Tolkien fantasy literature (e.g. Oz, Gormengast, the worlds of Lord Dunsany) I just get tired of pseudo-medieval Europe with elves, dwarves, orcs, etc.

The Keeper's Companion vol. 1 has a simpler "bell-curved" table based solely on the difference between numbers. I don't have it handy, though. In that case, I believe it was explicitly designed so that a STR 10 character had a miniscule but nonzero chance against a STR 40 character.

(On porting HeroQuest Mastery to BRP.) Every level of an opponent's Mastery cancels a level of the player's Mastery in the relevant skill, and vice versa. Example 1: if Fredrik the Bold has a Sword of 33% Mastery 1 (33m for short), and Sontar the Cruel has a Battleaxe of 28 Mastery 1 (28m), they'd roll 33% vs. 28% for attacks and parries. Example 2: if Fredrik had 33m and Sontar had 28m2 (28% Mastery 2), then Sontar has an extra level of mastery to beat down Fredrik with. Fredrik is in deep trouble. Also, in HeroQuest characters go from 20 to 1m, so it's likely that a character would be rolling 1% to 10% for a little bit after gaining Mastery. I'd also rule that skills that have Mastery don't improve with normal Experience Rolls, only with training or some sort of Experience Point system.