Chaosium Interviews: Building and breaking Basic Role Playing with Jason Durall

[MOB]

Line editor for RuneQuest and all things Basic Roleplaying Jason Durall talks about BRP, and his favorite, and most agonised-over sections of the "Big Gold Book". Jason is talking with Chaosium's James Coquillat.

 

[Jakob]

Opposed rolls ... yeah, I see the point.

OpenQuest - in its current third edition - just modifies the active skill according to how strong it is compared to the resisting skill (half, double ...), but that leads to some very wonky edge cases ...

I'd say make it player-facing and simple: Just let the player make a skill roll and assign a difficulty based on the skill value of the opposition, along a scale somewhat like this:

00-20%: +20 to player's skill

21-50%: normal skill roll

51-80: -20 to player's skill

81-100: -40 to players skill

above 100 ... well, not sure there.

It also leads to some wonky edge cases, but in many cases, you'll end up with something along the lines of 50/50 success chance where both skills are about equal (or lower, if the pc has a very low skill value to start with, which seems okay as well).

I think I should try something like this for BRP games, it seems to be the easiest solution.

[albesias]

One of my favourite part of brp is that numbers are really descriptive and mechanics are not intrusive. 

[Mugen]

On 4/5/2021 at 5:29 PM, Jakob said:

Opposed rolls ... yeah, I see the point.

OpenQuest - in its current third edition - just modifies the active skill according to how strong it is compared to the resisting skill (half, double ...), but that leads to some very wonky edge cases ...

I thought that was changed, as the rules in the Quickstart for OQ3 use a variant of the "roll under blackjack" mechanism, where the highest roll wins (or lowest if they both failed).

https://d101games.com/2021/04/07/openquest-3-quick-start-the-lost-outpost/

IMHO, it's the best solution (except I'd let the highest roll win also in a fail/fail scenario), my second favourite being based on the Resistance table : 50+(skill difference).

Edited April 8, 2021 by Mugen

[Jakob]

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

I thought that was changed, as the rules in the Quickstart for OQ3 use a variant of the "roll under blackjack" mechanism, where the highest roll wins (or lowest if they both failed).

https://d101games.com/2021/04/07/openquest-3-quick-start-the-lost-outpost/

 

Your absolutely right - it has obviously been changed for the finished OQ3 (and I'm quite happy with that).

[Chaot]

I love this! This is great. Quick technical note, a dissolve implies passage of time. When you cut the interview together the shot reverse shot should be just straight cuts. No dissolves.