Shaira

Thanks for the clarification - I'm going to have a serious think about this and see how it can gel with the main BRP rules. At first glance it sounds very useful indeed. BTW - the PDF link doesn't seem to work. No worries, I think I've got the gist, but just FYI I'm getting a dodgy file error when I try to open it. Cheers, Sarah

Excellent - thanks very much for the response Jason, that's an enormous help! Cheers, Sarah

Well, I'm STILL waiting for my copy to arrive - 4 weeks after ordering, 2 weeks after shipping! Could anyone answer a quick question for me? In the new rules, what's the situation with the Dodge skill? What's the base chance for critters - is it something like DEX x 3%, or is there a fixed base? If someone could post the defensive capabilities of, say, a lion or a wolf, something like that, that would be very useful! I'm limping along with a combination of RQ3 and SB5 at the mo, but would like to try and make what I'm working on as close to BRP as possible. Cheers, Sarah

Hi Pete, hi all, I'm just dipping into this discussion from time to time - this bit has piqued my interest quite a bit. Just to clarify - are you saying that if the winner (in the sense of biggest success margin where both attacker and parryer make their rolls) of an opposed combat roll is the attacker, the parry effectively fails? I'm asking as the default SB5 behaviour (I still haven't received my BRP copy!) is obviously that if both attacker and defender succeed, the parry or dodge takes precedence over the attack. Your suggestion would obviously go a heckuva long way to break the combat deadlock which would otherwise occur between your 1st and 7th dan fighters. Cheers, Sarah

Well, I wouldn't say I was immersed in anime culture at all - I generally avoided it like the plague! I lived in western Tokyo (Setagaya-ku) for about 5 years in the early nineties, working as a translator and interpreter. As you'll doubtless know from your time in Niigata, manga are everywhere in Japan - porno manga on the metro, kiddy manga on the TV first thing in the morning till last thing at night, loud and blaring and generally badly drawn and animated, blockbuster manga of "working in an office" to buy on your way to work, etc, etc. I think ultimately I found the entire manga "art" "style" (I use both words advisedly) to be very limiting - it was very hard finding something, either line art or animation, which didn't look like everything else. Admittedly it's one of Japan's "great contributions" to pop culture (along with the French), but it doesn't turn me on at all. I found the same trend an absolute killer in Japanese RPG world as well. Most of the Japanese RPGers I met were otaku - teenage boys locked in their rooms which make Fear of Girls look like a feminist tract . I don't want to game with a load of Sailor Moon fans... :eek: I remember several times buying one of the Japanese RPG mags - it had some stuff on Glorantha in it - and being terrified by the manga-effect on Dragon Pass. Suddenly my land of herodom and Truly Great Adventures had turned into an episode of Buffy... Ahem. Seem to have gone off on one rather, there. Apologies Don't get me wrong - so much of Japan was marvellous, some of the subculture life there makes Cyberpunk roleplaying look dated. It's just the manga thing. Ack. Splutter. Cough. Cheers! Sarah

To be honest, personally I'd disagree with you on all three points you make, at least as far as my own gaming goes! I particularly dislike the anime influence - I lived in Japan for a number of years and the manga influence was just too sickly sweet, prurient, and overdone to take seriously, and even now the sight of a picture with eyes twice the size of the mouth and a ">" sign for a nose brings me out in a rash... I also like open-form adventures, and am happily still as lethal as I ever was with my GMing. If there has been a notable trend in RPGing over the past (gulp) 30 years or so, it's been to incorporate far more of the narrativist approach within the rules of the RPG itself, rather than leaving this up to the individual GMs to "wing" on the fly. At the same time this has often gone hand in hand with a loosening up of the "rules-heavy" mindset, which has tended to take PC fate away from the dice and the scenario and put it more in the hands of the GM and players "creating the story" - I guess this is where your point of PCs dying less often come in: when playing HeroQuest, for example, I was frequently distressed that pretty much the only way to actually KILL a character (as opposed to really, really, really Defeat him) was for me to decide to do so. That can lead to a sense of arbitrariness which I for one as a GM am not particularly comfortable with - I still like to feel like I'm playing a game, with concrete rules with crunchy results rather than some freewheeling group huggy session of "Let's Pretend" - just IMHO of course, and I'm aware that others have a ball with the heavily narrative approach, which is great. One other major change of course has been computer RPGs. Solo stuff like Neverwinter Nights or Morrowind, online stuff like... well, wow, where do I begin! - have blurred the lines somewhat between tabletop and computer play. One thing I haven't tried yet is the over-the-net RPGing with tools like Klooge, although I mean to at some point - that looks kind of cool. I think also - dare I say it - RPGing has become a bit more mainstream. When I was a wee slip of a lass, practically nobody but nobody without milk bottle bottom specs or an overbite played RPGs (I had the specs), whereas now it's hard to work out who are the bikers, who the goth rockers, and who the RPGers. Which is nice. If a bit scary sometimes. Good topic though, Enpeze - I'd be interested to hear everyone else's opinions, especially as the whole Exalted / Werewolf: the Anagram / Anime RPG genres seem to have efficiently passed me by. :-) Sarah

I saw the Paizo ad this morning too and thought of Interplanetary - there look to be some cracking stories there, and quite a few I'd never heard of. I didn't know anything about Moorcock's Mars stuff, for example, nor had I heard of Northwest of Earth - two omissions I'll be remedying shortly!

My gut feeling on producing supplements, adventures, etc, for BRP is that they should take into account some of the optional rules for usability, but in general they should stick to the core rules for brevity - I still remember with a bit of a shiver the pages and pages of creature statistics all with marginally different hit location stats... oooohhh... :shocked: Pity the poor trees! ;-( So, for example: in an adventure, opponent stats would be presented in line without hit location / strike rank / etc stats. However, if a new creature was being presented (ie a "new creature description" rather than a simple stat block for an inline monster), then hit location should be addressed. Note that this could simply say something like "Hit locations are figured as for a standard quadruped"; you'd only need to point out the actual hit locations if the body form of the creature was not included in the BRP rules (9 legged 2-headed chaos monster, anyone?) Strike ranks aren't so crucial - GMs can always derive these from the existing rules. Benchmarking starts to get a bit more tricky when you get to magic. Which system to you use? Again, my gut feeling is that magic systems for fantasy supplements will default to "setting specific" (so my own Chronicles of Future Earth campaign uses a modified MagicWorld system, and scenarios for it therefore assume that system), whereas "generic" fantasy adventures or critter sourcebooks will probably settle on a consensus, which IMHO may well end up being the MagicWorld-derived system due to its similarity to "other magic systems" out there. >:-> Fundamentally, though, regarding the Core Powers systems, etc, I see nothing wrong with a brief paragraph at the start of any supplement or adventure just stating the assumed rules conventions - Traveller used to do something pretty similar in the early days, when Basic Traveller, Mercenary, High Guard, and Striker all coexisted. Referees will usually chop and change what they don't like anyway! Sarah

Thanks for the analysis, Ray - I think you're spot on with the statement that there are actually several different issues all on the table here. My own interest is principally in using BRP to model higher level play - what happens to characters after 100% skill (after Rune Lord Priest in RQ). Therefore this post is mostly going to be about game mechanics, rather than the philosophy and game concepts behind HeroQuesting per se - I want to tackle the nuts and bolts before building further, so to speak. One of the issues we've identified here is actually benchmarking what constitutes high-level skill: we've had campaigns which felt themselves "high-level" at 150-250% skill, others that topped 500-1000%. Clearly designing a unified game mechanic should take into account such potentially wide ranges of skill. What has your experience been with skill magnitudes in high-level play, particularly with reference to RuneQuest? One thing that has become apparent in our discussions on this thread has been the massive impact of certain Rune Spells (such as Arrow Trance and Berserk) which double skill levels, which further distorts the potential skill range (150% becomes 300%, but 400% becomes 800% and 600% becomes 1200%, all from a single Rune Spell); another has been the removal of the "4-point stackable limit" of Rune Spells in RQ2, which meant in RQ3 you could happily have 40 points of Shield, Crush, whatever, giving you killer armour or a +400% to hit bonus! The thing which has been clearest is that pretty much everyone has had to houserule to get playable games at this level, to the extent that high-level BRP play almost splits into lots of different games - making it very difficult to generalise about high-level play. It'd be very interesting to hear your input on this! Cheers, Sarah

I'd agree with you, with the caveat that rules should also deal with high-power interactions on the current plane - not all interaction with myth has to be supposed to take place on a different plane of existence (Middle-earth is a good example here - battles with Sauron, the Balrog, etc, are things we should consider modelling also). Sarah

Hi Triff - sorry about that, I must have missed your question the first time round! Specialisation in Ringworld is pretty straightforward. Looking at the Athletics example again as a Root skill in the Agility Category, it has a maximum percentage equal to the character's STR + DEX - so let's say 25%. During chargen or during play (it doesn't matter), any improvements to Athletics are permissible up to 25%. Once you get to 25%, you must choose a Branch skill - in other words, you are forced to specialise. Let's say you've still got 5% you wanted to put into Athletics: you've just got to your 25% maximum, so you choose "Swim" as your Branch skill, and put the additional 5% into that. Now, you have 30% Swim, which improves separately as a new, unique skill, and 25% for all other Athletics attempts (Run, Climb, etc). Again, if you get a skill check for Athletics (ie not Swim), you have to put your 5% into a Branch skill - in other words, start a new Branch skill. Personally I'd expect the new Branch skill to at least have some bearing on the character's recent activities - no sudden development of Swim skill after 6 months backflipping in the desert, for example. Hope that makes sense! Always happy to answer Ringworld questions - ahhh, if only there was an option for a BRP sourcebook again...

Sorry - just got to jump in with a geeky comment. The BBC website was reporting today on Bill Gates' prediction about those new-fangled touchscreen PCs being in every house in 5 years, or some such. It's just occurred to me how cool those are going to be for RPGing! You can actually have all your minis, scenarios, etc, all stacked up and ready to go, and the table everyone's sitting around can effectively be the game board / miniatures layout / etc. Just touch your mini to move it directly on the dungeon map, etc - sound effects, animated monsters, the whole shebang. Yee-hah! Sorry - geeky moment over. Calmer now... Sarah :focus:

I recall Maelstrom having some very well researched Elizabethan-era occupations, plus a groovy magic system. I think the game system itself was rather creaky though - excellent opportunity to fill in with BRP!

Hi Simon, Thanks for your replies! It's really interesting to see how we both played long-term campaigns of the same game and came out with completely different results! It's also extremely interesting to me the way you really pushed some of the rules to get the results you wanted - fair play to you, absolutely. It's also made me realise that what I thought was a pretty high power RQ campaign (185% Broadsword!) was in fact nothing of the sort! A key difference for us was the amount of experience checks given, I think. The rules said one check "per adventure", to be taken in the downtime post-adventure, which we pretty much stuck to, and of course with RQ3 the average increase went down from 5% to about 3%, which made a significant difference. During campaigns, when there was lots of travelling (often for weeks), I allowed one check per skill per week, kind of playing travelling as a sort of semi-downtime. That would certainly make a major difference. Definitely a different style of play to our own! You guys could have eaten Ralzakark several times over for breakfast! Plus some of those exponential doubles really kick in at high level, don't they! I tended to give magical items which emulated spells and added to abilities rather than provided multiples. IIRC, I think even with enhancements no one ever got beyond 250-300 with a skill, although with Truesword applied the weapon damage sometimes got a bit minimaxy. Several of our high-levellers were Humakti also, so that rules out Berserking. Again, clearly a question of style, how frequently you give experience checks, what kind of bonuses magical items give, and so on. I think somewhere around 50-75MP was the maximum power battery any of our guys had, and that was exceptional (Ralzakark was our benchmark - he had 180MP and was a Hero). Incidentally, your Babeester Gor initiate could get +4000% skill with those 400MP, although she'd be limited to more or less defending her temple and doing nothing else for the 15 minutes the spell was effective. Yowza. I do take your point though that with the right combination of spells (specially the "double-your-skill" ones like Berserk and Arrow Trance) you can achieve some very nasty (albeit temporary) effects indeed - even in our case 400% skill would not have been out of reach if Storm Bull and Babeester had been our cults of choice. Agree absolutely. It does make it a bit of a challenge to construct a decent set of rules for high-level play, however, if you're playing at a magnitude something like 5 times mine, and we both think we're doing high-level play! (Although, interesting, the "Masteries cancel out" approach may be worth thinking about more on that score - although the "Heroic Criticals" clearly wouldn't hold water if you had 12 Mastery bumps for a non-opposed skill!) Onward!

Agreed. As I mentioned in my post to Frogspawner above, I don't have a problem with HeroQuesting the concept at all - there are some cool essays written, we know much more than we did in the old "Coming Soon" days, and - for me at least - I have what I need to run HeroQuests. My interest is primarily in very high level character advancement - in RQ terms, what happens after you're a Rune Lord Priest; in BRP terms, what happens after 100% skills. I addressed this in my first reply above, but I'll quickly mention it again: I agree absolutely with the need for higher granularity than just "Critical" for skills above 100%. However, I'm surprised at the very high threshold - 1/500th of a skill and 1/1000th of a skill. Did you actually have PCs with 500% and 1000% skills in your campaign? How did they achieve that with the rules as written? I get the feeling we're playing experience checks very differently! I like this a lot. How did they gain Heroic Casting? Was it a HeroQuest reward? Was there a specific HeroQuest to get it? That's it for now - I haven't responded to your HeroQuest comments, cos basically I think I pretty much agree with them all Cheers, Sarah

Absolutely - and from board games like Dragon Pass, we always knew there were Heros and Demigods charging around the land. Dang, some of them individually were more powerful than whole _regiments_ in DP - our question was always "how do you get to be as powerful as those guys?" "Houseruling" is the magic word there. I'd agree in principle though - the BRP engine is capable of pretty much everything. For some reason, we never cottoned on to this technique. I guess the PCs were always gung-ho maniacs on quests to harrow hell, etc, rather than focussed on enchantments. Did you actually use this in play? Was it a common approach? I like both these ideas, and will probably steal them immediately :happy:. The first definitely does feel like something you'd come back from a HeroQuest with; the second like the "powering up" preparation a true quester would do before entering on a major adventure. Excellent - I shall add these to my arsenal of "how to do very high level play". Cheers, Sarah

Hi Simon! I thought this was going to be an interesting thread! I agree absolutely with your point about needing more granular results above the critical for very highly-skilled individuals - hopefully you saw my other posts above on that point, so I won't reiterate here. As for "Munchkinism", I think what I mean by that is characters with stupendously high skills as a result of bending the rules, sort of GM fiat demigods with 2500% broadsword and Oratory 15% The longest running player character I had in one of my campaigns was a certain Tryfan Ironsword, who started in or around 1981 and whose last game was around 1992. By that time he was a Rune Lord Priest of Humakt, and witness to countless other PCs who'd risen and fallen while he'd (remarkably) remained alive. I suppose on average he got something between 15-20 sessions a year over an 11 year period, sessions being all day jobs, sometimes multiple days in a row. We used the rules as written, and he ended up with his best skill as Broadsword 185%. That's after a decade of reasonably active play, without cheating the experience rolls. If we'd been playing HQ, with more or less 1 point increase per session, he'd probably have ended up with Sword & Shield 20W11 by that time - but the pace of improvement in RQ was always hugely lower. Hopefully you see my point. As far as I can see - and I've been BRPing since about 1980 - you'd have to fudge massively to get a character with 500% in a skill, let alone 2000%. That's fine if that's the game you want to run, but if memory serves even the Crimson Bat and Ralzakark only got skills in the 300-400% range (correct me if I'm wrong there - I've a sneaking suspicion that the Crimson Bat may have had something excruciating like Swallow Everything 1500%, haven't got the books to hand just now). Maybe "Munchkinism" is the wrong word, but having PCs with skills approaching 1000% seems to me to involve disregarding the BRP rules-as-written to some extent. I'm happy to be proved wrong though! But I DO definitely agree with the need for Supercriticals (or whatever) - it's just that from my experience I envisage them becoming necessary far earlier than 400% skill, if I'm not to wait another ten years before I get to use them!

Sorry - just had to step in with a health warning as soon as I saw this! Be careful with Hero Wars! It's actually a bit "confusing", not to put too fine a point on it. It's basically the first edition of what's now called HeroQuest, and was a bit rushed to press to say the least. I think it came out around 1999/2000 (can't remember off the top of my head...) and many of us spent a year or two trying to work out how to play it. It's a VERY different beast to RQ / BRP, as I'm sure you've realised by now, and although you _can_ play the rules as written, you'll probably find questions bubbling up in your head whilst reading it. To be honest, the HeroQuest rules (basically HW 2nd edition) are MUCH better, much more clearly written with heaps of examples, and actually a very sophisticated and elegant ruleset. Even then they aren't everyone's cup of tea, though - they are a very narrative-oriented ruleset - you won't find anything like hit points or weapon damages, or even skill or spell descriptions. It does require a massive readjustment of mindset to work out what the rules are trying to do. I think the effort is worth it. My RPG gaming has improved because of my experience of HQ - I've become a little less obsessed with nuts and bolts, and more open to having everyone, GM and players, collaborate in determining, for example, what effect a spell might have in a given situation, or allowing one skill to enhance another. I still like more chrome and crunch in my gaming than HQ can provide, however. Good luck - I'm sure there'll be a few of us here happy to answer any questions, and there's a whole bunch of eGroups where people do nothing but! BTW - the RQ history is somewhere on Pete Maranci's site, I think. I'm sure you can Google it. Cheers! Sarah

Well, I certainly wouldn't - criticals happen more than 1% of the time, which means pretty normal people are going to be jumping all over the place with regularity! The point of a "Heroic" critical (or whatever) and higher results is to actually map superhuman activity into the game system neatly. Taking "Jump" as an example, you wouldn't expect Olympic-level results for 1 in 100 jumps by ordinarily skilled people; however, for superskilled people (say, 175%+), you could perhaps expect something approaching Olympic / world record results on rare occasions. The point is, for very highly skilled people, it's not sufficient to be achieving a critical result more often, when a relatively normally skilled person can achieve that same critical result less often; you want a very highly skilled person to be able to achieve a result which an ordinarily skilled person, no matter how lucky, is simply not going to be able to achieve. Imagine a 250% Jump heroic character leaping (for example) 5 metres from a standing jump: this is superhuman, and an ordinarily skilled person, regardless of luck, is never going to be able to jump that high. That's what I'm trying to achieve with a "very high level" skill system. (BTW - remember I haven't seen the new rules yet. I'm interested to see if it provides for some smooth progression into the Super Power rules - there may be an avenue there.) Remember also that in the case of opposed rolls (I'm treating combat as opposed in this sense), the Mastery "bump" system in HQ first bumps your own result up to critical, then bumps the opponent's result down to fumble. I'd be tempted to use this as the default behaviour in opposed rolls, and only if you STILL have bumps left would you bump up into Heroic and Superheroic Criticals (ie if you have over 100% and you roll a Critical and your opponent Fumbles, then you have a Heroic Critical - but not otherwise). Hope that makes sense! Incidentally, your breakdown of the results misses 2 results: 150% Jump as 50% plus 1 Mastery gives you: 99-00: Failure (Fumble bumped up to Failure) 51-98: Success (Failure bumped up to Success) 11-50: Special (Success bumped up to Special) 03-10: Critical (Special bumped up to Critical) 01-02: Heroic Critical (Critical bumped up to Critical) Likewise 250% Jump as 50% plus 2 Masteries gives you: 99-00: Success (Fumble bumped up twice to Success) 51-98: Special (Failure bumped up twice to Special) 11-50: Critical (Success bumped up twice to Critical) 03-10: Heroic Critical (Special bumped up twice to Heroic Critical) 01-02: Superheroic Critical (Critical bumped up twice to Superheroic Critical) My numbers may be off as I'm working from memory, but you get the idea. I'm aware there may be a quality leap between, say 99% and 101% - I haven't analysed that - but it's the principle I'm trying to establish. Also, it makes a less than 100% swordsman facing a 210% swordsman truly outclassed - far more than simply increasing Critical and Special chances would result in. That's a campaign power decision for individual GMs, I guess. For me, I want to have a path to superhuman levels of power available in the game system. Well, not so much a "plateau" - but certainly a qualitative improvement in ability levels rather than "more of the same", but not specifically to "ignore" lesser mortals - that's not the intent. It's meant to be a way to allow superhuman results to be achieved by extremely highly-skilled individuals using (more or less) the current system. As I mentioned, think Hercules, Gandalf, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc. Big Evil Monster. Absolutely. Gawd bless 'em!

Really? Can you point me to where he did that? I must admit I haven't looked at any of the 3 Steve's HQ systems for a good 10-15 years, so my memory may be rusty, but I don't recall any system of upscaling or bumps done by Steve Perrin. It's certainly not in the SPRQ bits currently freely available. Do you mean perhaps the Hypercrit system done by Steve Maurer in the late 80s / early 90s? The one where you divide your skill level by 400 or 1000 to get your Supercrit or Hypercrit chances? That's a heckuva Munchkin system if there ever was one! ;-)

Howdy Sarge. Did you ever come across a little paperback game called "Maelstrom", published in the UK by Penguin or some such, IIRC. It was set in the time of Shakespeare or thereabouts, and was quite evocative, with some crazy underground chaos nastiness going on, lots of intrigue, cold war type secrecy and rather nice John Speed maps. I don't know whether it's still available, but that was quite a neat milieu. As I remember it also had tons of information about herbs and alchemy, and quite an innovative magic system.

Blimey... I'm replying to myself, now... ;-) Just had a thought. How about, if we had a kind of Mastery system, and a character criticalled, it might be possible to bump up that critical into something like a Heroic Critical, and achieve a superhuman effect? Mechanically: - character has 150% Jump - equates to 50% Skill with 1 Mastery "bump" - character rolls a critical on the 50% - say 01 for argument. - critical is bumped up from Critical to Heroic success - character is able to jump, say, double the height or distance he normally would. If you wanted, you could also have levels above Heroic Success, just to get really mad (Superheroic Success, Godlike, etc). Any thoughts? Sarah

This could be an interesting thread :thumb: Firstly, my take on this is that there's no need to reinvent the wheel. It's clear that HeroQuesting-as-we-know-it is fairly well understood, and doesn't require mega-high-powered characters to do it. It's more a ritual / worship / pathwalking thing than fighting The Big Ugly Monster, and there are a lot of good essays around on how to do it. Yes, it would be very profitable to discuss the concept of HeroQuesting in milieu other than Glorantha - Arthurian, Faerie, Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian, Japanese, Chinese, etc, etc, would all be interesting to look at. Secondly, my own interest is in how we _used_ to approach HeroQuesting when we thought it was a kind of Super RuneQuest, or indeed a follow-on from RuneQuest and next logical stage in development of your character after Rune Lord Priest. This is high-power gaming with the BRP rules, and, yes, it does involve transcending conventional human limitations (and this is where crossover with HeroQuesting the activity comes in). IMHO, BRP does an excellent job at mapping human beings and their capabilities into RPG terms. Again IMHO, it's the best system out for the gritty gaming of low-to-medium power gamers, and it also deals with the move into high-powered gaming admirably. The area it hasn't traditionally addressed is the next step - the heroic level play, where Gandalf takes on the Balrog, where Orpheus enters the Underworld, where Percival wins the Grail and Hercules completes his Seven Great Labours, Odysseus... well, you get the picture. ;-) I think there are some excellent mechanisms already in the BRP system, largely born from Stormbringer gaming, which express higher power for characters. These include: 1.) Multiple Attacks for 100%+ skilled characters. 2.) High number of parries for skilled characters. 3.) Divine intervention and divine "favour". Also, related to BRP but separate, the "Mastery" system from HQ by Greg could be very useful for 100%+ skilled characters, especially coupled with a good Augmentation system. I'll try and write something up if no one has already when I (eventually) get hold of the Zero Edition... :ohwell: However, there are two areas in the BRP system I think are still potentially weak for high-level gaming: 1.) Hit Points. Even the most heroic character is going to have about, say, 20HP. As a result, combat with BEMs like the Balrog always must revolve around Not Getting Hit In The First Place - even with the best armour, any hit from a Balrog is likely to result in defeat, especially if it's a critical. Whilst this is fine in itself as a mechanism, it could lead to a rather lacklustre combat, where blow after blow fails to land, no one is wounded, until - SPLAT - something finally happens. This could be a matter of mindset, but it would be nice to think how high-level combat could be more spicy. 2.) Magic. High level spell casters just end up getting loads and loads and loads of spells. In RQ, you could have buckets of Shield and Truesword spells, so that every combat was enhanced in pretty much the same way. I've never really used RQ sorcery, and don't know what the new BRP magic systems offer, but there is no real equivalent of Very High Level Magic available for PC use. I'm not talking Munchkin gaming here, remember - I'm trying to envisage what a character does after reaching Rune Lord Priest (or whatever) level, and wants to go further. That is, of course, assuming that Hercules is not just a bloke with 21 STR and 500% in Sword... Apologies for the long post! Cheers, Sarah

I don't know if the new rules say anything (still waiting for mine...) but I'd be tempted to rely on the old Gamma World trope of a 3D6 radiation intensity, which you can then resist with your CON or take damage and possibly gain a mutation (haven't seen the mutation rules yet either, so winging it here). The GW1 radiation rules weren't that realistic, but they played extremely well, and were fun to use, and they fit quite well with the BRP paradigm (a bit like poison POT).

Absolutely Triff! Gamers are just.... oooh, I just go all wobbly and lose my dice at the thought of them.... Actually, I've found more girl gamers outside Europe than inside. There was one other girl gamer when I was at high school, and a couple at uni, but I really only began to find fellow gamer girls when working in the States or in Japan. Never mind - it's kinda nice being a rarity, although the pressure to wear chainmail bikinis when GMing sometimes becomes hard to resist... On a related note, I just watched the second episode of "Fear of Girls" on youtube today. The one with the girl gamers... Gaaaahhhhhdddd, it was just awful, though I couldn't tear my eyes away. My other half (also a gamer) is also a muzo, and he said it was as bad as Spinal Tap for him. Go-go-girl gamers! Sarah Warrior Princess