How Could BRP Be More Popular...?

[Nightshade]

I'm running a Pathfinder game right now in grim dark fantasy setting I've been working on. Everyone has a 'handy haversack'. It's like Walmart had a going-out-of-business sale. Granted, I'm to blame. But creating encounters using Pathfinder/3.5's system of determining Challenge Rating assumes the party has a certain level of magic items in its possession. The mystique of magic is hard to maintain under these circumstances.

Well, to be honest, the mystique of magic is hard to maintain in any game where PCs have access to it, and in any high magic game at all. OD&D was always weird about magic items; they were all over the place, but it was astoundingly hard to make them. At least post 3.0 was somewhat consistent about this...

[Nightshade]

You came up with that? Who is this masked man?

If you happen to have a digital copy of Hero 4th or 5th (or for all I know, 6th, but I don't know specifically if the text is there), do a search for "Wayne Shaw" some time...

[Nightshade]

Possibly. I know I "offed" a lot of PCs in Morrow Project.

And there they at least have halfway useful body armor...

My suggestion for adapting BRP to handling something like this would be to swipe Hero Point system from the James Bond RPG. Each Hero Point would allow a character to shift the die result by one level of success (or failure). So a character with a few HPs could use them to avoid the occasional lucky hit.

Yeah, a decent hero point style mechanic can do a lot to mitigate this problem. The Fate Point system is just too conservative to be up for the job.

A very minor modification, as far as tweaking goes, with a very major impact on game play.

Quite.

[threedeesix]

A Sci-Fi setting where everyone walks to the stars (via gates)?? Sci-Fi needs Starships. It's a no-brainer.

Not really, SciFi's Stargate SG1 lasted for 10 years just traveling from planet to planet via gates. They (we) did finally develop starships after about 5 seasons, but that was just to maintain a military presence in space. Almost all troop movements were done through the stargates.

The show did well enough to spawn two spin off series, Stargate Atlantis, which lasted 6 years I believe and a new series Stargate Universe which just began a few months ago. Granted Stargate Universe is set on a giant ancient starship, so it's use as an example is limited. But a combined total of about 16 seasons worth of stories tells me starships aren't all that necessary for space travel.

Rod

[Mister Apocalypse]

And there they at least have halfway useful body armor...

I don't now, I think the 8 AP vest in BRP is probably more useful than Morrow Project's resistaweave.

[qoute]

Yeah, a decent hero point style mechanic can do a lot to mitigate this problem. The Fate Point system is just too conservative to be up for the job.

[LivingTriskele]

If you happen to have a digital copy of Hero 4th or 5th (or for all I know, 6th, but I don't know specifically if the text is there), do a search for "Wayne Shaw" some time...

Yep, there you are--thanks for your contributions!

[frogspawner]

It occurs to me that all these fine ideas - Points-Buy Mechanics, Non-Con Hero Points, Spaceship Design Sytems - deserve a better fate than to be lost, then forgotten, in this now ludicrously over-long thread.

We should be able to type them up, even if just into very rough unfinished form, and publish them... somewhere. So others can appreciate and maybe enhance (or finish!) them.

But where is best? The downloads area seems more for finished articles (and doesn't invite modifications). The wiki is good for making mods, but putting stuff there seems a bit presumptuous. Could/should we have a "Works In Progress - Please Enhance" section in the wiki?

And when no longer 'In Progress', maybe they could go for publication in Uncounted Worlds #X? (Just like the good old days of White Dwarf...<sigh>)

[LivingTriskele]

We should be able to type them up, even if just into very rough unfinished form, and publish them... somewhere. So others can appreciate and maybe enhance (or finish!) them.

I'd love to be involved, it's just a matter of finding the time (I have two unfinished monoliths, grad school, band, work and parental duties to contend with as well...)

I will see how far I can get with my point-buy project and keep the forum posted.

Monographs... I meant monographs.

Edited December 18, 2009 by LivingTriskele
Sleep Deprivation

[NickMiddleton]

It seems to me the lack of enthusiasm for FutureWorld is an opportunity. We could make of it what we will. Or, rather, Nick - as the only author I know of who's published anything for it (?) in the last 25 years - you can make of it what you will. With some guidance from the guys here, perhaps...

What IS the relationship between the Gate Warden universe and FutureWorld setting, in your view? Is it the same place? Or a slightly-different (or vastly different) parallel? Is GW the future of FW? (Whatever you can tell us without spoilers would be great).

I know the terms has horribly associations but it's a "re-imagining". Key features (some of the Alien races, the core FTL technology of the gates) are present (or at least, their names are re-used), but the fine detail is pretty much all different, and a significant amount of new and different stuff is also present.

IMHO, the old FutureWorld was a stinker. (Let's politely forget the grossly stupid 'City of Wonder' bolt-on, but even so...) A Sci-Fi setting where everyone walks to the stars (via gates)?? Sci-Fi needs Starships. It's a no-brainer.

*meh* Spaceship rules take up lots of space and frankly in 99% of SF are badly handled anyway - they are a huge drain on the gaming resources for frequently little gain (for every one fun trading campaign in Traveller there are about a dozen that were abandoned because of the tedious book keeping involved in tracking trade, commerce and mortgage repayments...). In an awful lot of SF they are a convenient prop that's rarely central to the action, but in SF gaming they frequently take up a disproportionate amount of space.

Don't get me wrong - if we revert back to the "Classic SF" setting idea, absolutely there must be spaceships (and hovercraft, to paraphrase Joss Wheedon), but not every SF setting needs them, or needs them to be remotely central - Dune largely glossed over them for example...

However the setting could be salvaged. I'd favour some sort of technological advance, that renders the gates obsolete (difficult) or somehow unusable, perhaps due to a cataclysm (hinted at in the setting already). (Obviously not because of "things from beyond", though ) Suddenly everyone would have to rediscover the (largely lost?) space-travel technology from the First Terran Empire.

Which would fundamentally wreck a fundamental aspect of the setting...

But I notice O19 already has at least some proper space-travel - so, how does it tackle the problem?

Bulk inert matter gets transported by FTL ships - sentient creatures (except the sauriki and the cyborgs of the pilot's guild) can't survive FTL translation. Sentient creatures have to travel FTL via the gates, and gates cannot transfer large masses and any gate transfer requires the present of a sentient conscious being...

The Gate Warden Universe as I conceived it is very specifically built around the facts that people travel via gate, material by FTL Ship and changing those baseline assumptions would impact the setting quite significantly.

Out of curiosity, did you do updated versions of their specs for that? The ones in Future*World aren't quite compatible with modern BRP (mostly because they were done with the assumption of the old 3D6 straight rolls for Int and Size for humans). How about the tech assumptions?

(I'm interested because I've got a campaign idea based on Future*World called Doorways in the Sky (yes, its more or less a Heinlein reference) that I'd like to do at some point and if you've saved me some of the conversion work...)

There are no stats in O19 for Sauriki or Quertzl per se - there are stats for Quertzl "like" species. There is much about Heinlien I don't like, but Tunnel in the Sky was a favourite book of my juvenile SF reading and distinctly present when I was writing and running Outpost 19.

Not really, SciFi's Stargate SG1 lasted for 10 years just traveling from planet to planet via gates. They (we) did finally develop starships after about 5 seasons, but that was just to maintain a military presence in space. Almost all troop movements were done through the stargates.

The show did well enough to spawn two spin off series, Stargate Atlantis, which lasted 6 years I believe and a new series Stargate Universe which just began a few months ago. Granted Stargate Universe is set on a giant ancient starship, so it's use as an example is limited. But a combined total of about 16 seasons worth of stories tells me starships aren't all that necessary for space travel.

Indeed - and in many ways, SG-1 (the original Stargate TV series) is almost the near perfect paradigm of an RPG campaign - a small (typically play sized...) group of exceptionally competent characters are equipped and sent to deal with a problem and given significant latitude to do so... I've played a fair bit of Stargate d20 and the format works very well for and RPG.

If Chaosium were remotely in a position to pursue licensed settings, Stargate is absolutely one SF one I'd recommend - the other would be Sliders, which also pretty much entirely lacks ships (albeit the third would be either Space: Above and beyondor Farscape...)

Nick

Edited December 19, 2009 by NickMiddleton

[rust]

*meh* Spaceship rules take up lots of space and frankly in 99% of SF are badly handled anyway - they are a huge drain on the gaming resources for frequently little gain (for every one fun trading campaign in Traveller there are about a dozen that were abandoned because of the tedious book keeping involved in tracking trade, commerce and mortgage repayments...).

Still, spaceship material is among the - if not the - most common and best

selling Traveller material, and there is far more fan stuff about spaceships

than any other element of Traveller.

[Nightshade]

There are no stats in O19 for Sauriki or Quertzl per se - there are stats for Quertzl "like" species. There is much about Heinlien I don't like, but Tunnel in the Sky was a favourite book of my juvenile SF reading and distinctly present when I was writing and running Outpost 19.

Well, it wasn't really that much like Tunnel, except my campaign used some ideas from that to substitute for some of the concepts of FW. I actually liked a lot that was there, it was simply terribly underdeveloped.

Indeed - and in many ways, SG-1 (the original Stargate TV series) is almost the near perfect paradigm of an RPG campaign - a small (typically play sized...) group of exceptionally competent characters are equipped and sent to deal with a problem and given significant latitude to do so... I've played a fair bit of Stargate d20 and the format works very well for and RPG.

If Chaosium were remotely in a position to pursue licensed settings, Stargate is absolutely one SF one I'd recommend - the other would be Sliders, which also pretty much entirely lacks ships (albeit the third would be either Space: Above and beyondor Farscape...)

Nick

Well, I think you were dead on about the fact generally the spaceship systems, even when well designed, tend to get in the way of the game rather than help it. Only cases I recall where this wasn't the case was the WEG Star Wars game and to some extent the original Star Trek game.

[Nightshade]

Still, spaceship material is among the - if not the - most common and best

selling Traveller material, and there is far more fan stuff about spaceships

than any other element of Traveller.

Note, however that the gearhead part of Traveller fandom is almost a separate beast from the RPG part, and that's been true ever since the time of Trillion Credit Squadron.

[RosenMcStern]

Yeah, a decent hero point style mechanic can do a lot to mitigate this problem. The Fate Point system is just too conservative to be up for the job.

Don't say that if you have not really tried Fate Points intensively. They may seem weird but they do their job, in a setting that does not use powers a lot. BRP Mecha will use Fate a lot, and the base mechanics will be a slight variation of the core BRP mechanics.

Lots of things in the current version of BRP work better than they look. I discovered this fact while designing giant robots. You will see.

[rust]

Note, however that the gearhead part of Traveller fandom is almost a separate beast from the RPG part, and that's been true ever since the time of Trillion Credit Squadron.

If this is true, it is just one more reason to produce a spaceship design sys-

tem.

The "gearhead part" of the fandom also buys the core rules, and / or the

science fiction genre supplement, and if it is indeed separate from the "RPG

part" of the fandom, these are additional customers and sales.

[Guest Vile Traveller]

I think the point to note (and others in this thread have) about spaceships in film as well as RPG is that they are primarily there as setings or setting flavour. Space combat is rarely important. Even Traveller seems to have very little space combat from what I know of most people's games, if you discount wargames-style games specifically played for that purpose.

Therefore I think the primary point of spaceships in an RPG is as part of the setting. They fundamentally affect the feel of the game and I personally much prefer the feel of space travel to the feel of gate travel. That's why I think a spaceship design system is important, even if there is no space combat system. Whether the design system is to allow the players, the games master or even only the game writers to build consistent ships is another matter.

[SDLeary]

The idea is definitely there with the superpowers component, though I'm inclined to rebuild from the ground up.

I've started (creating a point-buy system), using GURPS 4th Edition (Advantages/Disadvantages) as a model. The hardest part is just finding the time (I'm looking at 200 to 300 pages). There is some transcription work as GURPS functions on a 3d6 bell curve and BRP is a straight percentage. My idea has been to leave the generation of Characteristics as it is, and offer this as an optional modular component, though I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to branch of into all aspects of character creation.

At this point, my biggest concern (aside from finding the time) is in regards to legality-- I'm changing the wording but the idea is still taken from another game system. Then again, GURPS was heavily inspired by Champions (as was BRP's superhero component).

Pick up the PDF of Superworld. Its already there and been done, just had to be cleaned up and modified a bit for different settings... and a few loopholes closed.

SDLeary

[LivingTriskele]

Pick up the PDF of Superworld. Its already there and been done, just had to be cleaned up and modified a bit for different settings... and a few loopholes closed.

It's more comprehensive than what was included in the BRP core rulebook? If so, I'll check it out. Thanks.

[Atgxtg]

It's more comprehensive than what was included in the BRP core rulebook? If so, I'll check it out. Thanks.

Significantly so. Back when I was playing WOW Superworld, we ended up dropping WOW Superworld in favor if the Boxed Superworld set.

[SDLeary]

Significantly so. Back when I was playing WOW Superworld, we ended up dropping WOW Superworld in favor if the Boxed Superworld set.

And if you decide to use the powers for magic, look carefully at the descriptions. There were some loopholes in the way things could be bought and paid for that made for some extremely powerful characters for little cost.

SDLeary

[threedeesix]

Yeah, a decent hero point style mechanic can do a lot to mitigate this problem. The Fate Point system is just too conservative to be up for the job.

Quite.

I thought this when I first read them a few years ago. However after using them continuously now for that same amount of time, I have to say they are some of my favorite. You never have enough to completely rely on them for the entirety of the combat, instead you have to really pace their spending. Do you spend 6 points and make that failure a success, or spend 5 points and re-roll.

These coupled with Total Hit Points and our group has not lost a character playing bi-weekly for a year and a half*. It's been close, and I have to say from experience that fate points can give you just enough of a false sense of security that you can get in way over your head in the blink of an eye.

The only thing I am thinking of changing about them for Classic Fantasy, where a typical dungeon is a string of one deadly encounter after another, is to allow them to replenish after each encounter. Otherwise, you could get a situation of metagaming, where a player says "OK, the battles over, I'm gonna rest here for 6 hours until my power points replenish, and if the wizard casts sleep on me, I'll get them back in only 3 hours".

Edit: I forgot, because CF is heavy on the spell casting, I decided to keep fate points and magic points as two separate pools as well.

And just so people don't get the idea that we only use them in fantasy settings and not against high powered weapons, we also play BRP Star Frontiers and BRP Fallout. That gives you laser pistols that can be cranked up to 10D6 damage and chain guns firing 20 rounds at a time. Still no deaths.

You may have tried them and found them not able to give you the kind of game your looking for, and thats fine, but if you haven't really put them to the test, play out a few sessions first. They may grow on yeah, they did our group. You can always tweek them to taste.

* We did lose one during our Halloween horror adventure, but we don't use fate points or Total Hit Points for that.

Edited December 19, 2009 by threedeesix

[threedeesix]

Therefore I think the primary point of spaceships in an RPG is as part of the setting.

When I ran D6 Star Wars back in the day, we had space battles in more than 75% of the adventures we ran. But they really designed a space combat system that was easy to integrate as it played just like the character combat system.

The old FASA Star Trek space battle system was probably my favorite of all time, as most players were part of the bridge crew and had a unique control sheet in front of them representing his station control panel. The engineer would send energy to the shields as well as Helm and Navigation, who would in turn use the power to charge and fire weapons (Helm) and plot the ships course and make piloting rolls (Navigation). Even the player playing the ships doctor would be making first aid rolls and medicine rolls to try to save the causalities being reported by the science officer player.

In some settings your right, starships and space battles should be back drop, like mass combat rules in a fantasy game, Stargate SG1 comes to mind here, but if done well they can really complement any system. The problem with most is they seem to be two separate games set in the same universe.

Rod

[threedeesix]

At this point, my biggest concern (aside from finding the time) is in regards to legality-- I'm changing the wording but the idea is still taken from another game system. Then again, GURPS was heavily inspired by Champions (as was BRP's superhero component).

As long as your re-writing everything in your own words you should be ok. GURPS cant copyright Berserk, nor the fact that it makes you disregard your own safety or attack your own friends any more than Wizards of the Coast can claim copyright infringement if Classic Fantasy happens to have a Fireball spell with a 3 meter radius.

You just have to stay away from things that show product identity. Lucily for you, advantages and disadvantages don't, like some D&D spells do. There is no "Tenser's Eidetic Memory" advantage, just Eidetic Memory.

Rod

Edited December 19, 2009 by threedeesix

[NickMiddleton]

Therefore I think the primary point of spaceships in an RPG is as part of the setting. They fundamentally affect the feel of the game and I personally much prefer the feel of space travel to the feel of gate travel. That's why I think a spaceship design system is important, even if there is no space combat system. Whether the design system is to allow the players, the games master or even only the game writers to build consistent ships is another matter.

Having been pointing out why they aren't needed, I should probably fess up that the gate Warden Universe cheats of course - ships ARE present, both as the FTL transports of the Pilot's Guild (combination of the Guild Liners from Dune and Alastair Reynold's Light Huggers) and as smaller, low tech in system vessels in parts of the setting - one of the relatively unique features of the Tripoint Facility (from where the Outpost 19 expedition is launched) is that there is a small but thriving asteroid mining community using in-system spaceships based at the asteroid and NOT run by the Pilot's Guild...

The problem, as others have rightly said, is that unless the rules are exceptionally well integrated in to the game system AND the setting, they tend to get ignored. My memories of playing SW d6 is that it is indeed one of the few that did a good job (but then, it had to - Space battles are avital part of the source material) - but my Traveller experience was far closer to the TV series Firefly or Star Trek:the Next Generation§: the ship was a home and means of reaching the next plot and exactly how it worked or interacted with other ships was not something the game needed to be centre stage...

Cheers,

Nick

§ Classic Trek was somewhat different and like Rod, my memory is that the FASA game did a rather good job of capturing the feel of Classic Trek ship combat...

[rust]

The problem, as others have rightly said, is that unless the rules are exceptionally well integrated in to the game system AND the setting, they tend to get ignored.

It could be done in the same way as in the Ringworld RPG: A good explanation

of space travel plus some examples of the types of spaceships that would be

useful for player characters, but without a detailed construction system and

a space combat system - if there would be many requests for such material,

it could be added later on.

[Jarulf]

For what its worth, GURPS has a series of PDFs detailing a, I believe, rather abstract ship construction system. It also includes s space combat system focused on the PCs at their different stations.

I've no idea how good either is, but I think the intent was to design simple, quick and fun systems to play.