Search the Community

During the playtest of Basic Roleplaying, my group and I converted tons of settings and characters to see how the system held up. While many were uploaded here years ago, most have disappeared. I thought my own copies had been lost to the corrupted hard drives of time, but some have recently be discovered on an old flash drive. None of these were actually intended to be shared outside my group, and many were nothing more then an impulse conversion, an experiment so to speak. Here's hoping they will be of interest to someone out there. I will be using this thread to link to them in the Downloads section. The first is an adaption of John Carter of Mars roughly after the events of book three. Rod

What is the degree of skill complexity that you, as a player and/or GM prefer? I have seen systems that break skills and attributes down into basically mental, physical and social blocks (although I would posit that Spiritual should be in there as well) so that a PC would basically only be rated numerically in those 4 areas. Also there are games that are attribute based like AD&D where skills basically acted as attribute modifiers of +1 or +2 on a roll of a D20, although interestingly enough weapons and magical skills and capabilities were very well defined and far more integral to the game. There are games like Cyberpunk that make attributes and skills equal in value. Then there are games that fix skills to attributes and attributes modify skills such as in D20, where having bad stats can be overcome with enough training... Then there are skill based games like BRP and Palladium, where skills are far more important that attributes in most cases. Attributes in this case serve as minimal baseline combat attributes like damage and hitpoints and possibly giving a very small bonus to certain skills. With regard to number of skills a character has, we have: The three or four big categories of mental, spiritual, physical and social, or Large swathes of capability like Science, Firearms, Melee, Engineering, Technology, etc., or More specialized skills like rifle, pistol (both firearms), dagger, polearms (both melee), physics, biochemistry, (both science), automotive repair, computer hacking (both technology), pilot helicopter, pilot space freighter (both piloting) etc., or Even more specialized like katana, bastard sword (both hand and a half swords), pilot F-18, pilot Mig-17 (both jet aircraft) shoot M1911, shoot Single Action Army (both pistols), computer network attack, computer forensics (both computer hacking?) The third part of this is how many skill slots a PC should have depending on the skill breadth...for the first option it would be 3 or 4 since that is all a PC has...or the big skill categories maybe about 10? For the smaller skills (dagger, physics, pilot jet) maybe 20, and for the most specialized version maybe 40? There is the option of building out a skillweb like Shadowrun where big skill categories are progressively necked down into more specialized skills such as Physical (27%), Firearms (31%), Pistol (43%), Single Action Army (62%) and with each level of focus the skill increases... Thoughts? -STS