Non human playable races and encounter balancing

[shadythedevil]

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

No. You are assuming that the way D&D and D&D games do things is somehow superior and that other games should follow suit. We're saying no, that's wrong, BRP doesn't have to do things like D&D does.

The "barrier" that hold BRP from being more widely accepted is that it isn't a D&D clone. This goes back to the 70s when D&D players didn't like RuneQuest because fighters could cast spells, and Glorantha wasn't a blend of the Middle Ages and Middle Earth.

 

Basically the CR thing isn't going to work because a  Trollkin (think Goblin) in BRP can one hit kill a "high Level" PC in a way they just can't in D&D. Fifty 1 hit die goblins with missile weapons wouldn't be a CR 10 encounter in D&D, but could take down a Rune Lord and his retinue in RQ, depending on circumstances and die rolls.  

 

As for "s. walking a very fine line between challenging and the threat of death and restarting" you can't do that consistently in BRP no matter what the stat lines are. That's the dead horse we keep trying to beat. A GM just can't control the encounters to the same degree as they can in D&D. Not unless they are fudging, and then the players will eventually pick up on it and defeat the purpose.

 

A good example of the difference is with BRP's stepchild, Pendragon. In Pendragon the adventures are written with little to no regard for the capabilities of the player characters. Things are on an absolute scale not a relative one. So if a particular band of Player Knights can't take down a Redcap or Dragon on whatever, well, it sucks to be the, better luck with their next characters. Now you can get some very exciting  "very fine line between challenging and the threat of death and restarting" adventures (I've had a group actually win a battle that was scripted to be a loss) but "waking the fine line" is more akin to passing a roadside sobriety test while having a blood alcohol content of 0.099 and having drunk the last of the booze when you got pulled over so you wouldn't have an open container in the car.

 

It's a fun, exhilarating wild ride, but that's just it, it is a wild ride, not a controlled one. Now if you think you can plot encounters in BRP to walk that fine line, then more power to you. But you'll be the first. At least the first to do it without fudging. 

 

I know I can't run things that fine, as I'm generally pretty good at knowing what my players can handle. But dice can do stupid things and players can be random, and vice versa, and stuff happens. I had a group completely take apart an evil sorcerer and his minions only to be overwheleved on the way back to town by a half dozen baboons. The PCs only lived because they took the dog that the sorcerer was going to sacrfice for a demon of protection with them, and I got on a phenomenal hot streak that allowed the dog to save the adventurers. Thus began the legend of "Rex the Wonder Dog."  And there is no way to reliably plan for that without rigging the game. It just...happened.

 

 

 

BTW, you might be interested in Classic Fantasy. It is/was an attempt to emulate D&D in BRP (and later Mythras). I don't have CF, as isn't the style thatI want to play, but It probably has something like CR in it. Or at least as close to it as you can get in a BRP game.  I sure someone who has it can chime in.

 

Oh, and RQ2 & RQ3 had "treasure factors", to determine the wealth of the monsters, based roughly on how tough they were, and was similar to something we used to use to balance encounters in AD&D. It's not quite the same as CR since you can have tough monsters that don't carry much treasure, but if something has a huge hoard, it probably is capable of holding onto it. 

I can dig up the table for you.  It might help to get you in the right ballpark, but it won't ensure an exciting game.

 

read it all now. (sorry lots of moving parts in my life currently).

i appreciate your stance here, but it feels like you are telling me the basics of a ttrpg. i understand all of these things. and i understand the difference between static hp and hp that goes up with each level relative to the amount of damage being done per round. that being said, when im designing encounters in d&d, i almost always include a monster with one shot (one round, rather) capabilities. so really, the proportion is still the same.

but when im planning for d&d, im spending a whole lot less time doing so for the simple fact of the CR stat inclusion. when planning for brp, its taking way longer than it should because the developers/ community have some strange feelings about the system they want to run. i understand its supposed to be more deadly, but i was already running very deadly encounters in d&d (the proportion of hp vs dmg that can one shot a toon in a single round, is very similar)... except it took me about 2 minutes to draw an encounter up in d&d rather than 20 minutes in brp.

i feel a bit condescended to be honest. dont be offended, but its like your explaning ttrpg experiences that ive had dozens of times. ive been playing ttrpgs since ad&d. ive played rogue trader, pathfinder and starfinder and vampire the masquerade. im a huge nerd with a ton of experience at the LGS, in general and overall. i have many stories similar to your rex the wonderdog story. its great when those situations happen. i have a black dragon in my forgotten realms campaign that has been harassing player groups for years now because the guy just doesnt miss when it comes to saves. i love those situations and the stories they create.

when playing the game, the dice tell the story no matter what. if i have carefully prepared an encounter and my monsters all crit and the players all fumble and die, thats what happened. that doesnt take away from the fact that i want to carefully prepare and do so efficiently, without wasting a ton of time, as one would do with line by line stat block comparisons. i love these types of games and the wild outcomes they can produce, but im definitely not going to just say "fuck it, its a deadly system, here are the monsters you fight, no consideration was made towards balance or fun to be had on the players part." thats... not cool, and not the type of GM i am. I want to have fun and i want my players to have fun. i feel like the most fun that can be had is when the outcome of an encounter is really unknown, as it has been designed to walk a fine line between very challenging and near player death/ tpk.

[Videopete]

I think you are getting hung up on balance, when we keep telling you that BRP games ain't balanced at all, they are unpredictable but still very fun.  Let me give you a solid example, I was running a Balazar campaign using Griffon Mountain, the player were on a hunting trip and brought thier dogs and a two cousins.  So like 4 players, each had at least 1 to 2 hunting dogs and 2 NPCs with a dog each.  They fought/hunted a single brown bear and barely won.  Yet in another session, they were able to take down a mammoth, because they didn't charge in, the prepped a drop pit, and drove the beast to the pit, and took it out with spears, (using beast speech, and other techniques to lure the animal to its death).  On paper, the mammoth should be more dangerous than the bear, but even with less people they were more successful, as they used better tactics.  Even in Call of Cthulhu this is an issue, a couple Deep Ones, can go down in a hail of gunfire, but a handful of Cultists with some Shot guns and pitch forks can spell TPK.

 

Instead of creating encounters as solely as combat, or for purposes of Balance, write each encounter as mini scenario which there are no right answers, and sometimes your players might make a  new friend.

[Susimetsa]

12 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

d&d is a better system for planning for a gm for the simple fact the CR stat is included. the inclusion of a CR stat respects my time. there is a major disclaimer that the CR stat can be far from expected outcomes due to many factors, but as a baseline, if the players fought the monster in a vacuum, this is what you can expect.

You are shutting out a plethora of RPGs with a criterion like that. Rolemaster - with its critical tables - is famous for allowing lvl1 peasant to kill a lvl20 character with a lucky critical roll. Chaosium's D100 systems forgo the level stuff (for their benefit) and even the playing field out even more successfully. You are never safe, you need to find solutions other than combat whenever possible.

Playing this kind of system requires a different philosophy than more combat and tactics-oriented D&D systems. With D&D, your characters are "building" a deck of feats and abilities as their characters level up, clearly increasing in power in comparison to the world that they live in. (To me, it feels more like a card game than a RPG.)

[Ian Absentia]

As others have alluded, in BRP or related d100 games, how do you assign a CR that takes into account a list of non-combat related skills that can affect a confrontation, like Hide or Fast Talk?  Or Passions like Love that can buff (or diminish) a roll, or Honor that can open the opponent to parley?

I believe the problem posed in this thread is that there is a square peg here and a round hole there.  Love the peg for what it provides.  Don't resent it for not fitting the hole.

!i!

Edited June 19 by Ian Absentia

[Atgxtg]

On 6/18/2024 at 9:34 AM, Saki said:

It effectively did - you had Hit Dice and Number Appearing. 

There was a general trend for X HD monsters to be on level X of a dungeon, but it wasn't codfied into law the way it has since CR was introduced. 

On 6/18/2024 at 9:34 AM, Saki said:

The average number appearing for a monster of hit dice X would be an appropriate encounter for a party finding them on level X of a dungeon.  The Referee was given guidance to increase or decrease this number for other dungeon depths than X, and to adjust within the range of number appearing for the size of their own party.

Yup, and you also had lots of exceptions.  that holds true for most RPGs, and isn't exactly the same as CR.  A party that dipped down to a lower level ran into tougher creatures, too.

The thing with CR and "game balance" is that it's gone from being suggested guidelines, to be adjusted by each DM for their own group, to a cult of conformity, where players expect (and sometime demand) that everything is "balanced" for them. 

And "balanced" by CR meant an opponent at roughly 25% of the strength of the party. No real threat to the group. It's the third or fourth encounter where things started to get tricky. It was all about making things seem dangerous, mostly by attrition. 

CR is really just a cheat to help fledgling DMs write encounters. By setting a fixed CR, fixed magic allowed a standardized characters the DM doesn't have to do any work. It's all predetermined. In the old days it was possible for alow level group to find a high level item, but not with CR's and game balance. I believe magic swords get one plus per 3 levels of the PC?

On 6/18/2024 at 9:34 AM, Saki said:

Similarly, there is guidelines on how many enemies to place into wilderness encounters and monster lairs.

And there were also random wilderness encounter tables, which were anything but balanced. We used to joke that the lumberjacks and hunters in AD&D must have all been very high level just to survive the wander monsters in the wilderness.

Anybody want to claim that Inferno was balaced.

On 6/18/2024 at 9:34 AM, Saki said:

The Rules Cyclopedia even includes a very detailed balancing encounter formula so that Referees could either design a balanced challenge or estimate the deadliness of a published encounter vs their own party.

The Rules Cylopedia came out in 1991, eighteen years after D&D first came out.

[Atgxtg]

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

read it all now. (sorry lots of moving parts in my life currently).

i appreciate your stance here, but it feels like you are telling me the basics of a ttrpg.

Yes because not all ttrpgs are the same. BRP won't play like D&D.

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i understand all of these things. and i understand the difference between static hp and hp that goes up with each level relative to the amount of damage being done per round. that being said, when im designing encounters in d&d, i almost always include a monster with one shot (one round, rather) capabilities. so really, the proportion is still the same.

No the proprotion is differnt. Let me go into a few of the ways.

• First off  "dead" to a PC in D&D is a mostly temporary state. In most forms of BRP it is either permanent, or, in RuneQuest, can be done but is much harder to acquire and can't be used as frequently. 
• Secondly, injuries that don't drop a PC in D&D don't usually impact the character's ability to fight. Yeah, a 20th level fighter down to 1 hit point can be dropped with any attack, but they still fight like a 20th level fighter until them. In BRP a character at 1 hit point in unconscious. Hits that PCs shrug off in D&D will tend to take them out of the fight in BRP making thing much tougher for the rest of the PCs.
• THe effects of a PC dropping are much less severe in D&D. For one thing balanced encounters mean that the PCs went from having four times the strength of their opponents down to three times the strength of their opponents. So the real incovience is someone has to drag out the dead PC until they can raise them. In BRP, superior numbers make a bigger difference and a PC dropping can leading to the bad guys ganing up on, and taking down, more PCs. A tenth level fighter can take on four first level fighters easily in D&D. A fighter with 100% skill would be hard pressed by four beginingg opponents in BRP. 

 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

but when im planning for d&d, im spending a whole lot less time doing so for the simple fact of the CR stat inclusion.

 

Which ensures that the PCs win. So much for your "walking a very fine line between challenging and the threat of death and restarting" statement.

When the party has four times the combat ability of the opponents (what CR is designed to do), there isn't any challenge. That's the whole point of CR- to prevent the PCs from actually having a challenging encounter. I don't understand why you don't see that, since it was clearly stated in 3E. The whole point of CR is to ensure that the PCs will always outmatch the opposition if fresh. THe PCs are in no real danger. Yeah, dice can act up, players can push on when they should stop and rest, and yeah somebody can always do something stupid, but the whole point of CR is that the group is never in any real danger. It's why TPKs aren't much of a thing anymore.

Now BRP isn't balanced that way, and never really could be. The oppoents are much more dangerous, even in lopsided contests, and the PCs can't just go on for another encounter since they are only down by 25% of thier hit points and magic. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

hen planning for brp, its taking way longer than it should because the developers/ community have some strange feelings about the system they want to run.

Wait a minute. You come here from D&D and then blame both the developers and the community who already like the game for  for not making it work they way that you want it to.

I'll try to say this nicely (which admittedly can be a tough task for me) but maybe the problem is that you are coming into the situation with unreasonable expectations and demands. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

i understand its supposed to be more deadly, but i was already running very deadly encounters in d&d (the proportion of hp vs dmg that can one shot a toon in a single round, is very similar)...

D&D is not as deadly as BRP, I don't care how tough a DM you think you are. THe fact that you are so tied to CR just proves it. D&D has been nerfed. Running with CR is like playing with training wheels and issuing safety gear. It's not the same. 

How often ave PCs died in your D&D games? How long do they tend to stay dead? How often have the entire group gotten wiped out?

In BRP a PC is a greater risk of cutting their own head off with a fumbled roll than a D&D party is in a balanced encounter. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

except it took me about 2 minutes to draw an encounter up in d&d rather than 20 minutes in brp.

And how long have you ben running D&D compared to BRP?

It's like chargen. I used to have D&D players swaer to me that chargen was easier and faster in AD&D compared to RQ2. What they failed to consider was that they had all played AD&D for years, all had read the books, all owned their own set, and all knew what were the best weapons(for fighers longsword or military pick, depending on if you used weapon versus armor class adjustments), spells, classes, races, and proficences  to do certain things. They knew what worked..

Conversely, most of them were not familiar with RQ2, never read the rules, and certainly didn't own them, so everybody needed a turn with one copy of the rules at the table. The lack of classes and the pre-set path for advancement that comes with that. They had a hard time figuring what the "best" weapon, armor, race, cult, spell, skills to focus on, etc. were. The real problem was that most of what they were looking for didn't really exist. There was no "best" of anything in RQ2. Just preferences and some nice combinations.  So chargen took them a lot longer.

I knew a guy who used to put together entire RQ2 adventures in 20 minutes, and that was spending ten minutes getting to the photocopier. He used to use an RQ2 supplment called Foes which was pages and pages of pre-statted opponents. He's write a one page synopsis, draw a map, and two or three pages of stats from Foes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i feel a bit condescended to be honest. dont be offended, but its like your explaning ttrpg experiences that ive had dozens of times. ive been playing ttrpgs since ad&d. ive played rogue trader, pathfinder and starfinder and vampire the masquerade. im a huge nerd with a ton of experience at the LGS, in general and overall. i have many stories similar to your rex the wonderdog story. its great when those situations happen.

But what your missing is that the experiences you having only happen becuase you're used to playing a certina game in a certain style and that won't port over well to BRP.. Pathfinder and Starfinder are essentially D&D. Vampire isn't (and doesn't use Challenge Ratings). 

You won't see the wonder dog story in a D&D game because level trumps everything else. The dog was a 1 hit die animal that wouldn't have lasted long against one babbon, let alone four. 

 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i have a black dragon in my forgotten realms campaign that has been harassing player groups for years now because the guy just doesnt miss when it comes to saves. i love those situations and the stories they create.

Uh, that highlights the differences. In D&D a GM can screw around with PCs like that. The game lends itself to doing things that inconvenience the PCs. IN BRP one side of the other would have been dead long ago. What constitues harassment in D&D is probably a TPK situation in BRP.

Compare dragon stats in D&D to BRP (and btw, dragons are weaker in BRP that they used to be). 9d6 claw damage is more than respectable in D&D, but in BRP it's practically an autokill. It's not that the dragon could one hit kill a PC, it's that a one hit kill is the expected outcome against most PCs. It's not quite as bad with the current parry rules as it used to be either. It used tgo go something like "The dragon does 30 points of damage. You parried so your shield stops 12, you armor stops another 8, leaving 10 left over for you abdomen, and well, you're dead."

 

I'll give you another example. I was running RQ's Apple Lane, and one of the PCs got angry at another one for accidentally hitting him with an arrow for 2 points of damage. Damage while the other PC immediately rushed over and healed after the battle. Nowt he aforementioned archer only  hit the other PC once, and had taken down about 40% of the baddies while doing so.  But the first player was angry so "to teach the other player a lesson" he took a swipe at him with his sword, and chopped off the other PCs arm. In D&D a 8 point sword hit is no big deal. In RQ2, with no armor, it's going to do more than leave a mark. So you can mess around with characters in D&D.

 

 

 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

when playing the game, the dice tell the story no matter what. if i have carefully prepared an encounter and my monsters all crit and the players all fumble and die, thats what happened.

Yeah, okay so you don't fudge the dice rolls, but you still seem to want to go out of your way to ensure that your players aren't really challenged. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

that doesnt take away from the fact that i want to carefully prepare and do so efficiently, without wasting a ton of time, as one would do with line by line stat block comparisons.

If you want to carefully prepare and do so efficiently then you have to spend time. And that is time well spent, not wasted. If you can throw an accouter together in 2 minutes then you're not being all that careful are you? Two minutes it about how long I spend to prepare ramen, and that's not being all that careful. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i love these types of games and the wild outcomes they can produce, but im definitely not going to just say "fuck it, its a deadly system, here are the monsters you fight,

THen you are playing the wrong game. That's not how it was made to be. Take a look at the sample NPCs for a minute. A typical pirate has cutlass at 55% and a soldier has assault rifle at 65%. Now those "typical" values hold true for an entire campaign.

In D&D as the players level up so do the foes. That's not quite the case in BRP. If players in a BRP get good, raise their sword skill to 150%, and get attacked by pirates, the typical pirate should still be at 55%. They don't all magically bump up to 110% because the PCs are better.

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

no consideration was made towards balance or fun to be had on the players part.

Whatever consider for balance, if any are to be made by the GM and the players. The GM is not designing things specially to wipe out the PCs, and the players by picking their battles. 

Player fun is not an excuse to nerf things. If a player decides to jump off a cliff, then you shouldn't "balance" the damage from the fall so they will have fun. 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

" thats... not cool, and not the type of GM i am. I want to have fun and i want my players to have fun.

Well, what different groups consider to be fun is different. You're reminding me a lot of those D&D players who got consistently wiped out doing frontal attacks because they wanted to have fun.

You seem to think that it has to play like D&D, and have balanced encounter in order for you and your players to have fun. If so then stick with games like D&D. The whole point of playing something else is for things to play out differently. Even if you go to extreme length to balance all your BRP encounters, you're still going to have a lot more factors you won''t be able to control mess up your fun.

 

19 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i feel like the most fun that can be had is when the outcome of an encounter is really unknown, as it has been designed to walk a fine line between very challenging and near player death/ tpk.

This is at odds with your previous statement. The whole point of CR is that the outcome of an encounter is really known. The PCswin. Easily. That's the point. After a few encounters the PCs will have depleted some of their resources (hit points spell slots, potions), and stop to rest up. It's predictable.

 

The whole point of "balanced" encounters is that they are predicable. That's why you want so hard to balance them, because you won't just say "f**k it, its a deadly system".

As for " here are the monsters you fight," I take it most of your encounters are pre-ordanined. That is the PCs will run into said monsters when they get to a certain location and have a fight.  

One of the other big differences between game system is in pre-set encounters. In D&D they are going to happen and that is that. In BRP maybe not so much. I mentioned Pendragon earlier, but I add that most of the fights against big nasties in Pendragon are a matter of player choice. Usually they decide to take the risks, and those risks are genuine. The group that got mauled going after a redcap chose to do so, it wasn't forced on them. Likewise the same group that opted to pay the bridge toll to a giant (standard rate of 1 penny per man or mount) chose to pay rather than fight. 

Most D&D group's I've game with have the DM doing lots of ambushes. In D&D, with balanced encounters where the bad guys were never a real threat, you can get away with that. IN BRP practically every successful ambush I saw dropped at least half the group. Because ambushes are lethal. They are even more lethal in GURPS (had a PC kill three bad guys before the foruth one made an IQ roll and managed to get a parry!).

[Atgxtg]

21 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

Just to bring it up again, the closest things to giving you want would be to use either the Treasure Factor system from RQ2 or the Danger Classes from RQ3. Both were designed more to controllr the treasure gained (RuneQuest worried a lot more about balancing the economics than the encounters) than to balance encounters. Because a begging PC with 25000 pennies in coin who finds a 50 point POW storage crystal and a matrix with Protection 8 and Bladesharp 10 is a whole new animal.

I could send you the table with the Danger Classes for various monsters. It's about a close to a CR as BRP has ever got, and probably as close as it ever will get. Soit's a close as you will probably ever get to having a CR.

Maybe you might want to look for Classic Fantasy, an attempt to make BRP and/or Mtthras run more like old school D&D. It might be more like what you are expecting.

 

[Atgxtg]

On 6/18/2024 at 1:45 PM, shadythedevil said:

just responding to the first statement.

cr serves the purpose i need it for. a quick glance at the stat tells me, as a baseline without a ton of other factors, how tough/ bad ass the monster is. i use the CR when planning for the next session. it allows me to keep things exciting, on the edge between "that was very challenging" and "we nearly died!" and i think thats the sweet spot.

But CXR doesn't do that. A encountr set at the group's CR wont be a  "that was very challenging" and "we nearly died!" encounter. It will be a cakewalk. 

One 1 HD orc is not a very challenging encounter for a party of four first level characters. THe orc might get lucky and kill a PC or two, a most.  

 

So an encounter at the proper CR is rarely a "that was very challenging" and "we nearly died!" encounter. More like a "ho-hum" encounter. Unless the PCs do something stupid (like hump down 30 feet from the battlements to get at the orc), or the dice rolls go crazy and stay that way for awhile.

 

On 6/18/2024 at 1:45 PM, shadythedevil said:

i never used CR as a balance stat. the reason i want a cr-like stat for brp rules has to do with time and effort put into planning. i want to plan to be right on that edge i described above. its really hard to plan encounters in such a way without a cr type stat.

It's not really possible to do that in BRP even with a CR stat.

First off you'd have to figure out what "level" your PCs are at. Unlike D&D, PCs aren't balanced against each other, and  everyone isn't at the same level. Some players will succeed at making more improvement rolls than others, buy more training, and go in in different skills (sometimes not the ones they planned on; Had a character who always made his shield parry rolls in combat but never made the improvement roll to go up), so skill scores will diverge over time.Also not every BRP group have the same amount of magic the way D&D groups will (since treasure is aware by CR). Nor will the differences between characters be as well defined as in D&D. A sixth level fighter hin D&D has another +1 to Basic Attack Bonus, another hit die (and CON bonus), another feat or two, a saving throw or two might improve a point, and maybe another +1 to their AC attack and/or damage over a 5th level fighter. In BRP a fighter at 75% is basically the same as one at 70% with the only difference in combat ability being that 5%. A sixth level wizard will have an extra point of BAB, anoter hit die, better saves, and one more third level spell than a fifth level wizard. You can count of that.  In a BRP game what skills improve, and what spells a caster knows depend on what happens in play. 

 

Most everything in D&D improved with level, and level doesn't exist in BRP. You just have overall competency in given fields. So you don't have a party level to start with. Even if you did, you could not reliably set up an encounter in BRP to be in the "that was very challenging" and "we nearly died!" sweet spot that you are striving for.  You don't have that sort of safety margin in BRP. Anything that you deliberately design to be a "we nearly died" encounter will probably kill off at least one PC half the time. Most BRP encounter should have the PCs walking away relatively unscathed. 

 

So you will never be able to just say, I've got four fifth level PCs so I need a CR 5 encounter. 

 

One thing about CRs is that it assumes that the CR set by the designers of D&D is somehow correct for a given level party. That more would be too much and less not enough. But that's not true. What I might consider to be a proper challenge might not seem such to you or to the folk who wrote the CR tables.

Speaking of which, can you give us an example of what you consider to be a balanced encounter in BRP? THat will help us get an idea of what you are throwing at your players along with your expectations.

 

 

[shadythedevil]

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Yes because not all ttrpgs are the same. BRP won't play like D&D.

No the proprotion is differnt. Let me go into a few of the ways.

• First off  "dead" to a PC in D&D is a mostly temporary state. In most forms of BRP it is either permanent, or, in RuneQuest, can be done but is much harder to acquire and can't be used as frequently. 
• Secondly, injuries that don't drop a PC in D&D don't usually impact the character's ability to fight. Yeah, a 20th level fighter down to 1 hit point can be dropped with any attack, but they still fight like a 20th level fighter until them. In BRP a character at 1 hit point in unconscious. Hits that PCs shrug off in D&D will tend to take them out of the fight in BRP making thing much tougher for the rest of the PCs.
• THe effects of a PC dropping are much less severe in D&D. For one thing balanced encounters mean that the PCs went from having four times the strength of their opponents down to three times the strength of their opponents. So the real incovience is someone has to drag out the dead PC until they can raise them. In BRP, superior numbers make a bigger difference and a PC dropping can leading to the bad guys ganing up on, and taking down, more PCs. A tenth level fighter can take on four first level fighters easily in D&D. A fighter with 100% skill would be hard pressed by four beginingg opponents in BRP. 

 

 

Which ensures that the PCs win. So much for your "walking a very fine line between challenging and the threat of death and restarting" statement.

When the party has four times the combat ability of the opponents (what CR is designed to do), there isn't any challenge. That's the whole point of CR- to prevent the PCs from actually having a challenging encounter. I don't understand why you don't see that, since it was clearly stated in 3E. The whole point of CR is to ensure that the PCs will always outmatch the opposition if fresh. THe PCs are in no real danger. Yeah, dice can act up, players can push on when they should stop and rest, and yeah somebody can always do something stupid, but the whole point of CR is that the group is never in any real danger. It's why TPKs aren't much of a thing anymore.

Now BRP isn't balanced that way, and never really could be. The oppoents are much more dangerous, even in lopsided contests, and the PCs can't just go on for another encounter since they are only down by 25% of thier hit points and magic. 

Wait a minute. You come here from D&D and then blame both the developers and the community who already like the game for  for not making it work they way that you want it to.

I'll try to say this nicely (which admittedly can be a tough task for me) but maybe the problem is that you are coming into the situation with unreasonable expectations and demands. 

D&D is not as deadly as BRP, I don't care how tough a DM you think you are. THe fact that you are so tied to CR just proves it. D&D has been nerfed. Running with CR is like playing with training wheels and issuing safety gear. It's not the same. 

How often ave PCs died in your D&D games? How long do they tend to stay dead? How often have the entire group gotten wiped out?

In BRP a PC is a greater risk of cutting their own head off with a fumbled roll than a D&D party is in a balanced encounter. 

And how long have you ben running D&D compared to BRP?

It's like chargen. I used to have D&D players swaer to me that chargen was easier and faster in AD&D compared to RQ2. What they failed to consider was that they had all played AD&D for years, all had read the books, all owned their own set, and all knew what were the best weapons(for fighers longsword or military pick, depending on if you used weapon versus armor class adjustments), spells, classes, races, and proficences  to do certain things. They knew what worked..

Conversely, most of them were not familiar with RQ2, never read the rules, and certainly didn't own them, so everybody needed a turn with one copy of the rules at the table. The lack of classes and the pre-set path for advancement that comes with that. They had a hard time figuring what the "best" weapon, armor, race, cult, spell, skills to focus on, etc. were. The real problem was that most of what they were looking for didn't really exist. There was no "best" of anything in RQ2. Just preferences and some nice combinations.  So chargen took them a lot longer.

I knew a guy who used to put together entire RQ2 adventures in 20 minutes, and that was spending ten minutes getting to the photocopier. He used to use an RQ2 supplment called Foes which was pages and pages of pre-statted opponents. He's write a one page synopsis, draw a map, and two or three pages of stats from Foes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what your missing is that the experiences you having only happen becuase you're used to playing a certina game in a certain style and that won't port over well to BRP.. Pathfinder and Starfinder are essentially D&D. Vampire isn't (and doesn't use Challenge Ratings). 

You won't see the wonder dog story in a D&D game because level trumps everything else. The dog was a 1 hit die animal that wouldn't have lasted long against one babbon, let alone four. 

 

Uh, that highlights the differences. In D&D a GM can screw around with PCs like that. The game lends itself to doing things that inconvenience the PCs. IN BRP one side of the other would have been dead long ago. What constitues harassment in D&D is probably a TPK situation in BRP.

Compare dragon stats in D&D to BRP (and btw, dragons are weaker in BRP that they used to be). 9d6 claw damage is more than respectable in D&D, but in BRP it's practically an autokill. It's not that the dragon could one hit kill a PC, it's that a one hit kill is the expected outcome against most PCs. It's not quite as bad with the current parry rules as it used to be either. It used tgo go something like "The dragon does 30 points of damage. You parried so your shield stops 12, you armor stops another 8, leaving 10 left over for you abdomen, and well, you're dead."

 

I'll give you another example. I was running RQ's Apple Lane, and one of the PCs got angry at another one for accidentally hitting him with an arrow for 2 points of damage. Damage while the other PC immediately rushed over and healed after the battle. Nowt he aforementioned archer only  hit the other PC once, and had taken down about 40% of the baddies while doing so.  But the first player was angry so "to teach the other player a lesson" he took a swipe at him with his sword, and chopped off the other PCs arm. In D&D a 8 point sword hit is no big deal. In RQ2, with no armor, it's going to do more than leave a mark. So you can mess around with characters in D&D.

 

 

 

Yeah, okay so you don't fudge the dice rolls, but you still seem to want to go out of your way to ensure that your players aren't really challenged. 

If you want to carefully prepare and do so efficiently then you have to spend time. And that is time well spent, not wasted. If you can throw an accouter together in 2 minutes then you're not being all that careful are you? Two minutes it about how long I spend to prepare ramen, and that's not being all that careful. 

THen you are playing the wrong game. That's not how it was made to be. Take a look at the sample NPCs for a minute. A typical pirate has cutlass at 55% and a soldier has assault rifle at 65%. Now those "typical" values hold true for an entire campaign.

In D&D as the players level up so do the foes. That's not quite the case in BRP. If players in a BRP get good, raise their sword skill to 150%, and get attacked by pirates, the typical pirate should still be at 55%. They don't all magically bump up to 110% because the PCs are better.

Whatever consider for balance, if any are to be made by the GM and the players. The GM is not designing things specially to wipe out the PCs, and the players by picking their battles. 

Player fun is not an excuse to nerf things. If a player decides to jump off a cliff, then you shouldn't "balance" the damage from the fall so they will have fun. 

Well, what different groups consider to be fun is different. You're reminding me a lot of those D&D players who got consistently wiped out doing frontal attacks because they wanted to have fun.

You seem to think that it has to play like D&D, and have balanced encounter in order for you and your players to have fun. If so then stick with games like D&D. The whole point of playing something else is for things to play out differently. Even if you go to extreme length to balance all your BRP encounters, you're still going to have a lot more factors you won''t be able to control mess up your fun.

 

This is at odds with your previous statement. The whole point of CR is that the outcome of an encounter is really known. The PCswin. Easily. That's the point. After a few encounters the PCs will have depleted some of their resources (hit points spell slots, potions), and stop to rest up. It's predictable.

 

The whole point of "balanced" encounters is that they are predicable. That's why you want so hard to balance them, because you won't just say "f**k it, its a deadly system".

As for " here are the monsters you fight," I take it most of your encounters are pre-ordanined. That is the PCs will run into said monsters when they get to a certain location and have a fight.  

One of the other big differences between game system is in pre-set encounters. In D&D they are going to happen and that is that. In BRP maybe not so much. I mentioned Pendragon earlier, but I add that most of the fights against big nasties in Pendragon are a matter of player choice. Usually they decide to take the risks, and those risks are genuine. The group that got mauled going after a redcap chose to do so, it wasn't forced on them. Likewise the same group that opted to pay the bridge toll to a giant (standard rate of 1 penny per man or mount) chose to pay rather than fight. 

Most D&D group's I've game with have the DM doing lots of ambushes. In D&D, with balanced encounters where the bad guys were never a real threat, you can get away with that. IN BRP practically every successful ambush I saw dropped at least half the group. Because ambushes are lethal. They are even more lethal in GURPS (had a PC kill three bad guys before the foruth one made an IQ roll and managed to get a parry!).

there is a lot to unpack here, but ultimately, you do represent the aspect of the community that i find myself cringing the most at. i think the thing that really bothers me is that you exhibit rigidity in thinking, while also trying to educate me, as if i am not already educated on all of these things. to be frank, chaosium should really be careful about letting fan boys of the system being the flag holding representatives of the system, because... sheesh, its like you are intentionally trying to hold this product away from mass consumption.

 

overall and in general, the rigidity in thinking regarding the differences between d&d and brp is tedious to read through and essentially says that you believe the system is less flexible than it actually is. from my perspective, its actually the total opposite. d&d is the more rigid system and brp is the more flexible system.

 

starting from that premise, of considering brp as overall more flexible than d&d, one should try to understand my perspective of wanting ease in prepping by including one stat, that on the contrary to how you have claimed that it is not something that makes prepping easier, it does exactly that. i feel a bit like i am beating a dead horse here and i dont know how else to say it. the cr stat allows me to understand a lot by reading a total of between 3 or 4 total letters and numbers and it takes me about 1 second to look at two different cr stats. without the cr stat, i am comparing monster stat blocks line by line. it probably takes me around 30 seconds (maybe even a minute or two) to have a feeling of the difference in stats that i am looking at, and how that might play out in an encounter with players. 1 second vs 30 seconds or 60 seconds or 120 seconds IS HUGE. i just dont want to waste my time while prepping, without having to do a ton of play testing and tpk's just so i have gained enough experience with the rules to have a 'feel' for the system. imo, the exclusion of a time saving stat similar to the CR in the brp system creates a barrier for entry, reduces ease of access, both of which have pretty large implications for people looking at the bottom line.

 

ok so that was my emotional post after skimming through your super long post and i do feel it is necessary to say these things because its a great system with a fan base that has some quirks that might not be the best for exposure for the system. i will now be going back through your post to argue each point by point. it might take a while and please excuse me if it takes more than a day lol, you really said a lot there.

 

 

[shadythedevil]

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Yes because not all ttrpgs are the same. BRP won't play like D&D.

this is a real face palm kinda comment. i dont expect it to and i dont want it to, either. why say this? i feel your ttrpg tribal condescension in comments like those. its not a cool comment to make.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

No the proprotion is differnt. Let me go into a few of the ways.

• First off  "dead" to a PC in D&D is a mostly temporary state. In most forms of BRP it is either permanent, or, in RuneQuest, can be done but is much harder to acquire and can't be used as frequently. 
• Secondly, injuries that don't drop a PC in D&D don't usually impact the character's ability to fight. Yeah, a 20th level fighter down to 1 hit point can be dropped with any attack, but they still fight like a 20th level fighter until them. In BRP a character at 1 hit point in unconscious. Hits that PCs shrug off in D&D will tend to take them out of the fight in BRP making thing much tougher for the rest of the PCs.
• THe effects of a PC dropping are much less severe in D&D. For one thing balanced encounters mean that the PCs went from having four times the strength of their opponents down to three times the strength of their opponents. So the real incovience is someone has to drag out the dead PC until they can raise them. In BRP, superior numbers make a bigger difference and a PC dropping can leading to the bad guys ganing up on, and taking down, more PCs. A tenth level fighter can take on four first level fighters easily in D&D. A fighter with 100% skill would be hard pressed by four beginingg opponents in BRP. 

this is all blah blah blah. i run deadly d&d. no death saves. every encounter has a monster than can one shot a pc. thats the edge i like to plan on and play through. effectively, the proportion is exactly the same.

also, i was talking about balance for non human, alien races. the idea here is fairness for the players. nothing to do with designing encounters.

in regards to the lack of a cr stat, the complaint is that without such a stat, i am wasting a lot of time. nothing to do with balance in an encounter. i want the ease of designing things to be right on the edge without spending a ton of time going through stat blocks line by line for comparison.

this is all under the assumption that i am running d&d how you run it. i dont run it like that. its probably as deadly as it can be without there being a TPK every session. the players have to be very very careful, because i intentionally include one shot monsters, no death saves, as well as all the bells and whistles of complicating factors of the specific ttrpg situation.

youve made a lot of incorrect assumptions here.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Which ensures that the PCs win. So much for your "walking a very fine line between challenging and the threat of death and restarting" statement.

When the party has four times the combat ability of the opponents (what CR is designed to do), there isn't any challenge. That's the whole point of CR- to prevent the PCs from actually having a challenging encounter. I don't understand why you don't see that, since it was clearly stated in 3E. The whole point of CR is to ensure that the PCs will always outmatch the opposition if fresh. THe PCs are in no real danger. Yeah, dice can act up, players can push on when they should stop and rest, and yeah somebody can always do something stupid, but the whole point of CR is that the group is never in any real danger. It's why TPKs aren't much of a thing anymore.

Now BRP isn't balanced that way, and never really could be. The oppoents are much more dangerous, even in lopsided contests, and the PCs can't just go on for another encounter since they are only down by 25% of thier hit points and magic. 

again, an incorrect assumption.

on the scale of cr and designing encounters around that particular stat, my encounters are always deadly. my players know what they are doing. anything less than deadly is too easy.

again, a strange quirk of the brp community. a cr-like stat is absolutely possible and its weird that many people insist that it cant. im looking at a wonky version of one right now as we speak. also, as youve mentioned, various other d100 systems have had a cr-like stat. its possible and stop saying it isnt lol.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Wait a minute. You come here from D&D and then blame both the developers and the community who already like the game for  for not making it work they way that you want it to.

I'll try to say this nicely (which admittedly can be a tough task for me) but maybe the problem is that you are coming into the situation with unreasonable expectations and demands. 

did you miss the part where i said ive played a ton of ttrpgs. a major flaw of this community is this en garde attitude about players playing other systems. not only have i played d&d probably more than many people posting here, but i have probably played more nerd games from the LGS than your average nerd. my wallet and an entire room of nerd shit can attest to that.

and i frankly dont really care about how the community loves it how it is. im here now and i am going to be using the product how i want, whether i have heavy breathing nerds breathing down my neck or not lol.

its unreasonable to want to use the product how i want to use it? its demanding that i asked how a CR system might be made? lol.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

D&D is not as deadly as BRP, I don't care how tough a DM you think you are. THe fact that you are so tied to CR just proves it. D&D has been nerfed. Running with CR is like playing with training wheels and issuing safety gear. It's not the same. 

How often ave PCs died in your D&D games? How long do they tend to stay dead? How often have the entire group gotten wiped out?

In BRP a PC is a greater risk of cutting their own head off with a fumbled roll than a D&D party is in a balanced encounter. 

youve gotta stop doing this thing to new players of the brp system. this is so cringe and facepalm. im pretty sure i answered these questions in a previous response.

i get it. youre tribal. you picked a side. youre all in for your side. i really dont subscribe to this ttrpg tribal nonsense.

again, these statements come from an assumption that you know how i run d&d and that i havent been doing it for close to 3 decades.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

And how long have you ben running D&D compared to BRP?

about 50% d&d, 50% other rpg systems, mostly d100 systems but a few other funky ones as well. im tired of explaining this. i have a ton of experience. literal decades.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

But what your missing is that the experiences you having only happen becuase you're used to playing a certina game in a certain style and that won't port over well to BRP.. Pathfinder and Starfinder are essentially D&D. Vampire isn't (and doesn't use Challenge Ratings). 

You won't see the wonder dog story in a D&D game because level trumps everything else. The dog was a 1 hit die animal that wouldn't have lasted long against one babbon, let alone four. 

this is hogwash. a cr-like system respects my time and IS possible in the brp rule set, full stop. done arguing that point.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Uh, that highlights the differences. In D&D a GM can screw around with PCs like that. The game lends itself to doing things that inconvenience the PCs. IN BRP one side of the other would have been dead long ago. What constitues harassment in D&D is probably a TPK situation in BRP.

Compare dragon stats in D&D to BRP (and btw, dragons are weaker in BRP that they used to be). 9d6 claw damage is more than respectable in D&D, but in BRP it's practically an autokill. It's not that the dragon could one hit kill a PC, it's that a one hit kill is the expected outcome against most PCs. It's not quite as bad with the current parry rules as it used to be either. It used tgo go something like "The dragon does 30 points of damage. You parried so your shield stops 12, you armor stops another 8, leaving 10 left over for you abdomen, and well, you're dead."

 

I'll give you another example. I was running RQ's Apple Lane, and one of the PCs got angry at another one for accidentally hitting him with an arrow for 2 points of damage. Damage while the other PC immediately rushed over and healed after the battle. Nowt he aforementioned archer only  hit the other PC once, and had taken down about 40% of the baddies while doing so.  But the first player was angry so "to teach the other player a lesson" he took a swipe at him with his sword, and chopped off the other PCs arm. In D&D a 8 point sword hit is no big deal. In RQ2, with no armor, it's going to do more than leave a mark. So you can mess around with characters in D&D.

this is all nonsense my dude. my blackdragon in my d&d game is a character talked about outside of the game frequently, just like your wonder dog. one is not better than the other. they are equivalent. and im really tired of the lame ass, tribal elitism. its just not cool.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Yeah, okay so you don't fudge the dice rolls, but you still seem to want to go out of your way to ensure that your players aren't really challenged. 

tf dude? i feel like you havent read my posts. i am aiming for the area between very challenging and nearly tpk'd. on the cr scale, it would be considered very deadly. my players are that good. it is part of the reason why im switching to a more brittle, static hp system. it ups the challenge. i dont want to spend ages prepping the sweet spot because monster stat blocks dont have a cr-like stat block because it wastes my time. i also dont want to spend time TPKing the group, just because i need to learn a feel for a system that does not include a cr stat. thats bullshit.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

If you want to carefully prepare and do so efficiently then you have to spend time. And that is time well spent, not wasted. If you can throw an accouter together in 2 minutes then you're not being all that careful are you? Two minutes it about how long I spend to prepare ramen, and that's not being all that careful.

this is again rigid, stuck in my ways thinking. in one instance, i am spending a few seconds, in the other, i am spending minutes. obviously, one is much more efficient than the other.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

THen you are playing the wrong game. That's not how it was made to be. Take a look at the sample NPCs for a minute. A typical pirate has cutlass at 55% and a soldier has assault rifle at 65%. Now those "typical" values hold true for an entire campaign.

In D&D as the players level up so do the foes. That's not quite the case in BRP. If players in a BRP get good, raise their sword skill to 150%, and get attacked by pirates, the typical pirate should still be at 55%. They don't all magically bump up to 110% because the PCs are better.

if i ran my own LGS, people who uttered these words would be banned on the spot. tf is wrong with you? im a fellow nerd ffs. that tribal bullshit hurts the bottom line for people that make a buck off of the game. its incredibly rude and condescending. i really cant help but here the comic book guy from the simpsons and the sneer and the i am above thou chuckle that he does, when i read these words.

no my dude. im playing the exact game i want to play, thats why i bought the book. i will be playing it, exactly how i want, thank you very much.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Whatever consider for balance, if any are to be made by the GM and the players. The GM is not designing things specially to wipe out the PCs, and the players by picking their battles. 

Player fun is not an excuse to nerf things. If a player decides to jump off a cliff, then you shouldn't "balance" the damage from the fall so they will have fun.

lol. im literally not trying to nerf anything. im trying to not waste time. ive explained the ways that this system without a cr-like stat, wastes time on many fronts when it doesnt need to and im not repeating myself yet again here.

 

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

Well, what different groups consider to be fun is different. You're reminding me a lot of those D&D players who got consistently wiped out doing frontal attacks because they wanted to have fun.

You seem to think that it has to play like D&D, and have balanced encounter in order for you and your players to have fun. If so then stick with games like D&D. The whole point of playing something else is for things to play out differently. Even if you go to extreme length to balance all your BRP encounters, you're still going to have a lot more factors you won''t be able to control mess up your fun.

that d&d condescion has gotta stop.

ive played a ton of systems. its mostly the same group of 10 to 15 players that ive had for the past dozen years or so.

On 6/19/2024 at 10:31 AM, Atgxtg said:

This is at odds with your previous statement. The whole point of CR is that the outcome of an encounter is really known. The PCswin. Easily. That's the point. After a few encounters the PCs will have depleted some of their resources (hit points spell slots, potions), and stop to rest up. It's predictable.

 

The whole point of "balanced" encounters is that they are predicable. That's why you want so hard to balance them, because you won't just say "f**k it, its a deadly system".

As for " here are the monsters you fight," I take it most of your encounters are pre-ordanined. That is the PCs will run into said monsters when they get to a certain location and have a fight.  

One of the other big differences between game system is in pre-set encounters. In D&D they are going to happen and that is that. In BRP maybe not so much. I mentioned Pendragon earlier, but I add that most of the fights against big nasties in Pendragon are a matter of player choice. Usually they decide to take the risks, and those risks are genuine. The group that got mauled going after a redcap chose to do so, it wasn't forced on them. Likewise the same group that opted to pay the bridge toll to a giant (standard rate of 1 penny per man or mount) chose to pay rather than fight. 

Most D&D group's I've game with have the DM doing lots of ambushes. In D&D, with balanced encounters where the bad guys were never a real threat, you can get away with that. IN BRP practically every successful ambush I saw dropped at least half the group. Because ambushes are lethal. They are even more lethal in GURPS (had a PC kill three bad guys before the foruth one made an IQ roll and managed to get a parry!).

wrong again. the cr stat can be used in many ways.

the way i use it is to quickly understand the difficulty of monsters and line encounters up to be between deadly and tpk. my players are skilled enough to almost always survive enounters that were designed as deadly.

all im trying to do is not waste a ton of time and its really frustrating going up against the monolith of set in their ways, rigidly thinking, tribal nerds.

[Susimetsa]

I don't see the BRP fandom as tribalists. After all, the whole idea of BRP is to make it "your own". That same philosophy applies to Runequest as well: "Your Glorantha will vary".

I am very interested in how your tentative CR system works and how it accounts for very different character types in the party vs. various sorts of "monsters" and other opponent types.

[radmonger]

1 hour ago, shadythedevil said:

i run deadly d&d. no death saves. every encounter has a monster than can one shot a pc. thats the edge i like to plan on and play through. effectively, the proportion is exactly the same.

I'd agree some people have been a bit hostile, but I suspect that comes from a place of not understanding your point. Which likely comes from the difference between the language you are using, and the examples you give.

Specifically, you say you use D&D CR to balance encounters, but also say the above. Which is a very long way from how CR in D&D 5e works. So presumably you have something that does work for you, and you call that CR? 

The thing is, it is in principle easy to take the mathematical system of a BRP-based game and rank monsters from low to high. But it is hard to see how that gets you anything useful, in the abstract. And the reasons in which that wouldn't be useful vary between different BRP systems. 

To give the obvious example, in Cthulhu, you might well objectively rate different monsters on how large a unit of the modern US military it would take the kill them. Some take a squad, some a platoon, some a division. Pretty much anything with BRP statistics will eventually die to heavy artillery; at most it will just not stay dead...

But that is not what you are normally doing in game. Most of the time, the combat system is the thing you use to avoid being killed while you either run away, or apply a non-combat solution.

2 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

my players are skilled enough to almost always survive enounters that were designed as deadly.

This brings to mind the definition of a romance novel as a love story with an emotionally satisfying ending. Which is perfectly valid. Sometimes a combat is supposed to be a tactically challenging encounter which the players win.

BRP, by default, doesn't work that way. Mathematically, it is too high variance to provide a predictable outcome. And as the link says:

Quote

If you tell someone a book is romance and it doesn't have a happy ending? Romance readers will revolt. Don't mess with the happy ending!

So if that is what you are using the idea of CR to avoid, I don't see how you can do so adding something describing the odds. You would need to change them.

 

[Atgxtg]

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

Okay, let me try another approach here.

 

Let's say you are running a game with four player characters, each of whom has a skill in the 50-60% range with thier best weapon, 40-50% with thier other weapons, no armor to speak of, and no magic.

Now what would consider to be an appropriate challenge for that group?

 

[Atgxtg]

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

there is a lot to unpack here, but ultimately, you do represent the aspect of the community that i find myself cringing the most at. i think the thing that really bothers me is that you exhibit rigidity in thinking, while also trying to educate me, as if i am not already educated on all of these things. to be frank, chaosium should really be careful about letting fan boys of the system being the flag holding representatives of the system, because... sheesh, its like you are intentionally trying to hold this product away from mass consumption.

Well you come here, claim to educated on all these things, and then say the game needs CRs. 

To someone who has experienced with the game it's a contradictory statement. If you understand BRP then you shouldn't need CRs and should understand why they wouldn't work in BRP, because BRP doesn't have pre-set competency levels.

What you come off as is a D&D player who assumes what works for D&D will port over elsewhere, and must port over. We see that quite often.

Have you ever stopped to consider why we don't need or use CR, or why only D&D based games use CR? If CR was as helpful as you believe it would be, it would have been implemented already.

 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

overall and in general, the rigidity in thinking regarding the differences between d&d and brp is tedious to read through and essentially says that you believe the system is less flexible than it actually is. from my perspective, its actually the total opposite. d&d is the more rigid system and brp is the more flexible system.

The rigidity here is that you are trying to run two different games the same way. It's not a matter of how flexible the game system is but that it isn't going to run like D&D. Things that are a minor inconvenience in D&D will kill characters in BRP. 

Even within BRP not every GM sets the opposition at the same relative level to the PCs. You mostly don't get the increasing spiral of competency that you get in D&D.

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

starting from that premise, of considering brp as overall more flexible than d&d, one should try to understand my perspective of wanting ease in prepping by including one stat, that on the contrary to how you have claimed that it is not something that makes prepping easier, it does exactly that.

I understand why you want that, but you don't understand why it won't work. 

The more open and less controlled a game is the harder it is apply any sort of generic quantifiers. Because the character won't be standardized.

 

In D&D one fifth level party of four should be just as component as another. The game is designed that way. IT ensures that's the case with the various restrictions on how the characters improve. The designers know what possible range of classes, BABs, saving throws, hit points,magical items, skill bonuses, possible spells know,and attributes will be for a given level of characters. So it's fairly easy to figure out that you want an opponent at around 20-25% of that. A DM knows a first level party won't have access to fireball, or anyone with a skill bonus of +26.

In BRP you don't have a standard party at quite that extent. Now you can implement some house rules that can do something similar, such as setting the bad guys weapons skills relative to the PCs (say half or 20-25% lower or whatever te GM wants) but it isn't set in stone and applied to everybody.

Not only that, but it won't give you the slow attrition of party resources that D&D is designed around. BRP groups don't fight three of four encounters and then stop for a rest.

If the designers incorporated the "20% lower rule" into the game then the game would become more rigid, and less flexible. Even if they did, it wouldn't give you the sort of control you'd get in D&D because combat damage is much more deadly in BRP, and conditions vary quite a bit between BRP games.

 

For instance a starting PC in Stormbringer can summon up a demon sword that does an extra 3D6 damage. That's a game changer. In Elric! players are encountered to start the game with a weapon skill over 100%, something that takes work to acquire in most other BRP games. And what you get at 100% in Elric! (multiple parries and riposte) isn't the same as what you get in RQ (the ability to split attacks).

 

 

 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i feel a bit like i am beating a dead horse here and i dont know how else to say it. the cr stat allows me to understand a lot by reading a total of between 3 or 4 total letters and numbers and it takes me about 1 second to look at two different cr stats. without the cr stat, i am comparing monster stat blocks line by line.

I know the feeling.

I'll say again the CR stat doesn't actually tell you much of anything. It's a crutch, and not a very good one at that. It mostly gives DMs the impression that they are setting up good encounters, even when they are not. I've slapped around a party with a low CR opponent thanks to circumstances and or tactics (or lack thereof).

The vast majority of TPKs I''ve run were the PCs getting wiped out by a very inferior set of opponents. Usually due to one or more PCs doing something stupid. Things like: Charging multiple opponents, doing a frontal attack on opponents who are in a fortified position,  shooting (poisoned) arrows into melee. Stopping in mid charge to cast battle magic, attacking a creature they knew was immune to their weapon, using area effect stuff in places without the area. 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

it probably takes me around 30 seconds (maybe even a minute or two) to have a feeling of the difference in stats that i am looking at, and how that might play out in an encounter with players. 1 second vs 30 seconds or 60 seconds or 120 seconds IS HUGE.

And it takes most BRP GMs about as long to asses a threat in BRP. That experience and the learning curve. 

 

Cr doesn't tell you that either. CR tells you that three of four or these encounter will wear a party down to the point where it needs to rest and recover. It doesn't work that way in BRP. Without magical healing it will take weeks for agroup to recover from injuries. Months for serious injuries, if they do recover.

Add in magic and most groups are probably tapped out of magic points after one or two encounters. 

And all of that varies quite a bit depending on which BRP game you are running and what rules are being used. 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

 

 

i just dont want to waste my time while prepping,

How is looking over the oppositions stats a waste of time? To me it sounds like you don't really want to do the prep work.

Just a heads up but I think most BRP GMs would probably use standardized opponents most of the time. For instance , if the PCs ran into Pirates then most of the pirates would use the standard Pirate stat block, regardless of how experienced the PCs are. Generally that and maybe some beefed up stat for a Pirate leader or lieutenant and you're good. 

That's why BRP Games tend to have a leader & follower sheet.

 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

without having to do a ton of play testing and tpk's just so i have gained enough experience with the rules to have a 'feel' for the system.

Sorry you got to pay your dues. It'a a learning curve.

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

imo, the exclusion of a time saving stat similar to the CR in the brp system creates a barrier for entry, reduces ease of access, both of which have pretty large implications for people looking at the bottom line.

Which is why CR is universally used in every other RPG. Oh wait no it isn't, because it doesn't really work. Most RPgs give you some guidelines for setting the opposition but don't try to set up some sort of rigidly enforced scale of competency.

If you are as experienced with things as you say you are, then why do you rely so much on CR, and expect other games to implement a similar stat?

CR is designed to give you attrition combat. 

 

 

 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

ok so that was my emotional post after skimming through your super long post and i do feel it is necessary to say these things because its a great system with a fan base that has some quirks that might not be the best for exposure for the system.

Why are you so sure that the BRP fanbase has it wrong and that D&D has it right? Andif that is what you believe why are you looking at BRP in the first place?

If you want to do things like you do in D&D then you will want a game system more like D&D. There are plenty of them.

If you want to run BRP then don't port over D&D thinking, and try to run  it like D&D, becuase it won't work.

 

This isn't the fanbase being quirky, but experienced GMs who have run the game and have seen people try to do what you claim you want to do, and what it fail. We know how the game mechanics play out.  So we know that what you are saying you are trying to do just won't work. 

 

10 hours ago, shadythedevil said:

i will now be going back through your post to argue each point by point. it might take a while and please excuse me if it takes more than a day lol, you really said a lot there.

Well, I'm trying to convince you of something and I can't do that without trying to explain my position.

One of the things that doen't seem to be reaching you is that BRP not having a CR stat isn't about making the game easier/arder to write adventures for, but that the concept of CR doesn't work in BRP.

 

Again if you want a rule of thumb for statting the bad guys, try 25% lower skills, and half the armor and magic. Ten tweak from there to tailor it to your players. In my experience, I've had to tailor things for each group of players, sicne they all acted differently. I had one group that ,ostly couldn't figure out Battle Magic, and so I couldn't run them in a typical RQ campaign becuase they'd get massacred by NPCs who did figure it out. Another group had the hang of battle magic and could (and did) play through published RQ campaign packs. 

 

 

 

[shadythedevil]

9 hours ago, Susimetsa said:

I don't see the BRP fandom as tribalists. After all, the whole idea of BRP is to make it "your own". That same philosophy applies to Runequest as well: "Your Glorantha will vary".

I am very interested in how your tentative CR system works and how it accounts for very different character types in the party vs. various sorts of "monsters" and other opponent types.

i dont think ive done anything remarkable.

basically, its a flexible table with armor and hp being weighed heaviest, and dmg per round being second heaviest, and all other stats factoring in but to a lesser degree. if the player and the monster are even on the big 3 stats, its considered to be "average" or "human" encounter. Each other ranking is a 25% increase or decrease from being evenly matched across the big three stats. if a monster is about 25% better in the big 3 skills, the encounter would be considered challenging. 50% better, very challenging. 51- 100%, deadly and very deadly. Going the opposite way, if the players are about 25% better stated than the monster, the fight is considered easy, the next step up ( 26 - 50%) is very easy and the last category is "too easy," essentially meaning, dont give players this fight, its boring.

[shadythedevil]

7 hours ago, radmonger said:

I'd agree some people have been a bit hostile, but I suspect that comes from a place of not understanding your point. Which likely comes from the difference between the language you are using, and the examples you give.

Specifically, you say you use D&D CR to balance encounters, but also say the above. Which is a very long way from how CR in D&D 5e works. So presumably you have something that does work for you, and you call that CR? 

The thing is, it is in principle easy to take the mathematical system of a BRP-based game and rank monsters from low to high. But it is hard to see how that gets you anything useful, in the abstract. And the reasons in which that wouldn't be useful vary between different BRP systems. 

To give the obvious example, in Cthulhu, you might well objectively rate different monsters on how large a unit of the modern US military it would take the kill them. Some take a squad, some a platoon, some a division. Pretty much anything with BRP statistics will eventually die to heavy artillery; at most it will just not stay dead...

But that is not what you are normally doing in game. Most of the time, the combat system is the thing you use to avoid being killed while you either run away, or apply a non-combat solution.

This brings to mind the definition of a romance novel as a love story with an emotionally satisfying ending. Which is perfectly valid. Sometimes a combat is supposed to be a tactically challenging encounter which the players win.

BRP, by default, doesn't work that way. Mathematically, it is too high variance to provide a predictable outcome. And as the link says:

So if that is what you are using the idea of CR to avoid, I don't see how you can do so adding something describing the odds. You would need to change them.

 

ok my dude and thank you.

i think there is a bit of confusion going on with all of the terms i have used. some clarification is in order and i do believe i have explained this a few times previously, but i understand that terms can be flexible and i may have even misspoken here or there, using terms where i shouldnt have.

the reason i want a cr-like stat is for timeliness. it allows me to quickly plan encounters that will challenge my players and stay right on the edge of "that was very difficult," and "we almost all nearly died!," which i think is the most fun for me and my players.

the discussion i have about balance is about the fact that brp only has humans as an official race. i am running a hexcrawl, inspired by numenera and the manifest destiny graphic novel and playable alien races is definitely going to be a thing. the issue here is, i have some very min/ max minded players who will instantly be able to tell if one race is better than the other, in terms of raw stats and ability to stay alive/ kill other things. thats what i want balance for. its not for encounter building. i want balance for non human races so that 1) its fair and 2) my min/ max minded folk all dont pick the same race.

also, i understand that a cr-like stat has a lot of implications for balance and how many encounters in a day before players need a rest and all of that jazz. maybe cr-like stat was an improper term from the very beginning.

as i have mentioned, my players are pretty damn skilled. its actually tough to kill them. and i try to kill them, all the time. sometimes, i do actually kill them. most of the time, they are smart enough to win. when i prep for my group, for example, if they are all level 7, i immediately skip all monsters with a CR rating between 1 and 10. its just to easy. and thats where i am saving time with a cr-like stat, and wasting time when there isnt one.

about your last point, again, this is not about designing a balanced encounter that my players definitely win, but feels challenging. my players are way past that level of gaming experience and the difficulty really needs to be set between very challenging and nearly tpk'd, for us as a group to be having fun. i dont want to waste time while prepping doing line by line stat block comparisons to find the sweet spot monster, and i dont want to waste time through play testing and tpk's, just to have a 'feel' for the system.

[shadythedevil]

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Okay, let me try another approach here.

 

Let's say you are running a game with four player characters, each of whom has a skill in the 50-60% range with thier best weapon, 40-50% with thier other weapons, no armor to speak of, and no magic.

Now what would consider to be an appropriate challenge for that group?

 

lol what my guy?

im a bit confused... there are a lot of stats to consider. in my own wonky, flexible table of a cr-like system, armor and hp are weighted heaviest. so let me expand.

i think the discussion about other weapons they can use is a bit of a moot point. if the players can only attack once per round, they will be choosing the weapon that has the highest chance to hit. lets just say its 50%.

if one player has 10 hp, and 50% to hit, and does 1d10 dmg per round fights a monster with 10hp, 50% to hit and 1d10 dmg per round, on my scale, it would be considered average or human, the middle ranking of all possible rankings. although it appears that the monster could one shot the player in one round, the chances of that happening, considering all other factors that go into an encounter and with 3 other players, are unlikely to very slim. thats too easy, a waste of time, boring and not fun.

in my estimation, my group of 4 players with 10hp, 50% to hit and 1d10 dmg per round, would probably need a monster with stats like; 21+hp, 75%+ chance to hit, 2d10 dmg per round, to really be on that edge that i am looking for.

but thats the whole thing. thats what im trying to figure out, without doing a bunch of play testing and rerolling caused by tpk's. although its fun to start a new toon, my players almost certainly feel its more fun to have a toon with lots of stories and memories. in terms of fun imo, surviving near death > rerolling.

[Atgxtg]

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

lol what my guy?

im a bit confused... there are a lot of stats to consider. in my own wonky, flexible table of a cr-like system, armor and hp are weighted heaviest. so let me expand.

But if you were running those characters you would have to figure out what sort of encounter would be right for them? So what does your method say.

 

BTW, in BRP skill, damage  and magic are usually more important than armor and hit points. An unarmored guy with 8 hit points with Sword at 90% will ususally take apart a guy with Sword 40% with 8 point armor and 18 hit points. 

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

i think the discussion about other weapons they can use is a bit of a moot point. if the players can only attack once per round, they will be choosing the weapon that has the highest chance to hit. lets just say its 50%.

 

It's not a moot point because:

1. If they are at range or in melee then they will have to use ranged or melee weapons, which might not be their best weapons. They also might want to shoot arrows at a big dumb monster at a distance that get in close where it can attack them back.
2.  If they get disarmed or injured they might not be able to wield the weapon they want to. In BRP if you injure one of you opponent's arms they can't wield a two handed weapon anymore and will have to switch to a backup.
3. If they get disarmed or their weapon breaks they might have go to their backup.

 

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

if one player has 10 hp, and 50% to hit, and does 1d10 dmg per round fights a monster with 10hp, 50% to hit and 1d10 dmg per round, on my scale, it would be considered average or human, the middle ranking of all possible rankings.

And mathematically either has an even chance of winning the fight.

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

although it appears that the monster could one shot the player in one round, the chances of that happening, considering all other factors that go into an encounter and with 3 other players, are unlikely to very slim. thats too easy, a waste of time, boring and not fun.

And here is where we disagree. In D&D the chances of the monster one-shooting the PC are remote. The monster would either have to roll max damage (a 10%) chance or get a critical (a 5% chance) and roll 5 or better for damage (a 60% chance). So you got a 12.5% chance of the one-shot drop happening.

To one shot kill a PC in D&D the monster would have to reduce the PC to -10 hit points, which would require the monster to roll max critical damage, a 0.5% chance. At that rate you can pretty much ignore it. 

 

Now in BRP it's very different. , and varies a bit depending on which rules you are running.

• To start with that PC with 10 hit points is dead at 0 hit points not -10. So all those one shot drops above become one shot kills in BRP.  
• A character at 1-2 hit points is unconscious.
• In BRP Most  weapons and attacks can get a special effect. At 50% skill this works out to a 10% chance of a special. An impale does double damage (like a D&D crtical) but is twice as likely to happen in BRP than in D&D. A slash does 1 point of bleeding per round, until successful resisted/treated (which takes a roll) so high damage (7+) attacks can one shot kill a PC.

 BRP does have armor take off damage and parries which will reduce the deadliness. At 50% skill this will cut the fatalities in half. But BRP also has  major wounds, or hit locations, one of which is used in every published BRP game.

Major Wounds: A character who takes half or more of their total hit points in a single hit is out of the fight, and they might suffer stat loss that can cause a fatality. At 10 hit points and 1D10 damage, there is a 60% chance of that happening, and one shot dropping the character, each round.  Assuming the PC can parry half the attacks (50% skill) then that drops to 30%, which is 60 times the chances of a one shot drop in D&D. Thats without specials or verticals. 

Hit Locations: At 10 hit points the character has 3-5 hit points in each location. That means that the PC can be one shot dropped and killed much easier. If you use hit locations then the chances of disabling a location. If it's a chest of head hit the PC will die without getting the proper medical attention in time or making a stamina roll. Note that this means another player rolling a successful first aid skill attempt (or magical healing). Head and abdomen hits that take twice the locations hit points in damage disable the character and having them bleeding out at one hit point per round. Again a successful first aid or stamina roll is required to survive.

BRP also doesn't use intitive rolls and uses either DEX or Strike Rank to determine when a character can act, which means a fast monster can probably attack and do damage before the players can do anything about it. 

 

Now as far as the other characters go, in the case of a one shot kill, they probably won't matter much if at all. If the monster gets an attack and rolls a kill there isn't much the other players can do about it. The exception is if the PC suffers a bleeding wound,, in which case first aid can save them, if it is applied successful in time. 

 

So the chances of one shot killing the PC in BRP are greater than the chances of one-shot dropping the PC in D&D. The chances of one shot dropping the PC are also much higher. 

 

Now consider the after effects of the fight. In BRP if the PC got dropped, even if they didn't get killed, they probably have taken a major wound, or have a disabled hit location, are low on hit points, and will take several weeks to heal up. In D&D they are just a long rest from being back at full.

In BRP they might have permanently lost the use of a limb or suffered permanent stat loss. In D&D they are just a long rest from being back at full.

Yes, magic provide bounce backi n both systems but magic is much more plentiful in D&D and comes back faster. In D&D, as long as the PC didn't die, then two or three cure light wounds will bring them back up to full hit points. In BRP magical healing in on a point per point basis, and healing someone back to full won't offset stat loss or restore mained or severed limbs. Furthermore even if they can heal the PC back to full, the caster will be low on magic points for several hours.

So it's not the same.It's not proportional. It two very different games. 

 

 

 

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

in my estimation, my group of 4 players with 10hp, 50% to hit and 1d10 dmg per round, would probably need a monster with stats like; 21+hp, 75%+ chance to hit, 2d10 dmg per round, to really be on that edge that i am looking for.

 A monster with 75% skill that did 2d10 damage would probably kill one of the PCs before the fight is over.

Now what sort of monster it is, how smart it is, and who attack first all play a big factor here. Let's say it is a predator that jumps the PCs. Well with 75% skill and 2d10 damage it has about a one in three chance of killing a PC outright in the first round. As in dead.  And an over 70% chance of dropping the PC with a major wound or disabled location. 

If the PCs get a chance to go first, say they are some distance away, and got bows or something, then with four of them, they will probably be able to drop it before it gets to them. 

That's why how you set up the situation is far more important in BRP than in D&D. 

 

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

but thats the whole thing. thats what im trying to figure out,

And that's what you can't do mathematically in BRP. That sweet spot you are looking for doesn't exist. 

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, or that I don't want you to do it, or some such. I'm saying that it's not mathematically possible to reliably set up encounters to consistently work out that way. You don't have the same safety net when it comes to damage as you have in BRP. Wounds that inconvenience characters in D&D will disable, main or kill them in BRP. And the specieals and other stuff come up too frequently. Try to do it on a consistenly basis and you will slaughter PCs. . 

Any encounter that is designed to be dangerous enough to fit your "we almost died" criteria in BRP is one in which the actual odds of a PC dying as so high that a few such encounters will kill a PC. An encounter with a 25% chance of killing a PC will probably kill a PC in four or five encounter. It's playing Russian roulette with your PCs. 

Even that 10 hp 1d10 monster you used to start with, is probably deadlier than what you are expecting.

Tere is no "we got banged up good" spot in BRP that you can get to consistently. 

D&D uses combat by attrition. Threat slowly wear down the PCs abilities. BRP uses sudden trauma. You rarely see a PC get nickled and dimed to death. PCs usually get taken out by one good hit. One shot drops and one shot kills are not outliers, their the norm.

The big defense thing in BRP is defensive skills like parry and dodge, and they can't be relied upon work reliably. That 50% PC will only block about half the attacks. So that 75% 2d10 monster you want to use has about a 35% chance of dropping a PC in one round, and about a 15% chance of killing them outright. And that is much higher than in D&D.

 

6 minutes ago, shadythedevil said:

without doing a bunch of play testing and rerolling caused by tpk's. although its fun to start a new toon, my players almost certainly feel its more fun to have a toon with lots of stories and memories. in terms of fun imo, surviving near death > rerolling.

A "near death" experience in BRP is actually a "near death" experience for the PCs. With even a slight bit of bad luck it can become an actual death experience. 

 

So you see what I mean about the math?

 

[Kloster]

Let me talk about the game system I've played the most: It's not BRP (any iteration), but Hero System. With hero, all characters are built with points (150 for V1 to V4, 250 for V5 and 6 for supers, less points for hero or 'normal' characters). This applies to both PC and NPC.

Let's say you have a standard Champions (=4 color super comics) campaign wit 6 250 points characters (total 1500 points). If you build the opposition with 1 1500 5Dr Destroyer for Champions fans) points opponent, your team has absolutely not a single chance to survive the encounter. If you build the opposition on a 10 NPC of 150 points, the NPC ave very few chances to win, except if the are working as a team (and have according tactics) and PCs are not. If you build the opposition with a team of 15 100 points opponents, the PC will feel they fear nothing and the players will feel cheated and bored.

Thus, you will (as a GM) never be able to build opposition by counting the total of points used by PCs.. You have also to take in account their type of attacks (not how much damage they do, but if they are fire cold kinetic or psychic or other), their defenses, their skills and a lot of other factors. This is what @Atgxtg called the learning curve.

The problem is the same with BRP: you can not have a standardized way of comparing opposition to characters because all games are different, all players are different, all characters are different.

That's all folks.

Edited June 24 by Kloster
add example

[Atgxtg]

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

Let's say you have a standard Champions (=4 color super comics) campaign wit 6 250 points characters (total 1500 points). If you build the opposition with 1 1500 5Dr Destroyer for Champions fans) points opponent, your team has absolutely not a single chance to survive the encounter. If you build the opposition on a 10 NPC of 150 points, the NPC ave very few chances to win, except if the are working as a team (and have according tactics) and PCs are not. If you build the opposition with a team of 15 100 points opponents, the PC will feel they fear nothing and the players will feel cheated and bored.

A million Jimmy Olsens can't't take down Superman can they?

 

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

Thus, you will (as a GM) never be able to build opposition by counting the total of points used by PCs.. You have also to take in account their type of attacks (not how much damage they do, but if they are fire cold kinetic or psychic or other), their defenses, their skills and a lot of other factors. This is what @Atgxtg called the learning curve.

Not to mention attrition combat. In D&D character who get hurt lose hit points. It's no big deal until you run out. In BRP character who get hurt tend to lose body parts, pass out and bleed to death. It's like the difference between scoring in the last five minutes of a basketball game vs. scoring in the last minute of a football game. In one it's expect in the other it's a bigger deal.

The last time I ran RQ for a D&D group one of the PCs lost an arm, and from the way the players reacted you'd think I'd had chopped the player's arm off. It was culture shock. Permanent maiming and disfigurement was not something in their play book. It took weeks for the players to realize that was just how combat in RQ was.

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

The problem is the same with BRP: you can not have a standardized way of comparing opposition to characters because all games are different, all players are different, all characters are different.

Exactly, plus I'd add that with lower hit points and special effects combat is much more randomized.

[radmonger]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

And that's what you can't do mathematically in BRP. That sweet spot you are looking for doesn't exist. 

 

 

It doesn't exist naturally, but you can create it.

The trick is to tone down the lethality of the system, so that noone actually dies instantly from a fatal wound.  Instead (as is arguably realistic, as per the link below), an untreated fatal wound leads to death minutes, hours or even days after the end of combat.

With a few other changes, you can turn a TPK into a TPKO; an event within the story, not the end of it.

You just need to ensure that, a majority of the time, death is not on the line. Again, as is historically realistic, most enemies likely want to capture and then ransom, interrogate, try or sacrifice the PCs. What's not historically realistic, but easy enough to set up in fantasy, is post-combat healing magic that is effective and cheap. So the enemies who defeated you can be expected to heal you (and likely add any expenses incurred to your ransom).

Once you have used combats like that to gain familiarity with the system and the capabilities of your PCs, you can set up an actually deadly fight, with clear signalling that on this one climactic fight, you are ok with the possibility of all PCs ending up dead. After all, plenty of good stories end that way.

This is basically the approach taken by the most successful tactical-combat variants of BRP, RuneQuest and Mythras.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706344/

 

 

[shadythedevil]

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Well you come here, claim to educated on all these things, and then say the game needs CRs. 

To someone who has experienced with the game it's a contradictory statement. If you understand BRP then you shouldn't need CRs and should understand why they wouldn't work in BRP, because BRP doesn't have pre-set competency levels.

What you come off as is a D&D player who assumes what works for D&D will port over elsewhere, and must port over. We see that quite often.

Have you ever stopped to consider why we don't need or use CR, or why only D&D based games use CR? If CR was as helpful as you believe it would be, it would have been implemented already.

i shouldnt have started off comparing the two systems, but its inevitable.

i really like the BRP rules a lot, i think it will be significantly more challenging for my players based on the static hp fact alone. i also really like how advancement plays out. i liked it all so much, i decided to make an entire campaign using the rule set. now, ive made my maps, i know the history and lore of my world, i know the loot they can get, and ive plopped a hex down onto my map.

im now in the stages of keying that map. as ive started this process, i have recognized the ease in prepping time that a single stat from another system uses vs. the time i am spending while prepping for a system that does not have that stat. i really do feel that d&d is a better system in this regard, because it respects my time.

perhaps, if brp were to have a cr-like stat (in a previous post, i was wondering if i made an error using the term 'cr-like' in the first place, as it has a lot of implications about balance

) it would come with a bigger caveat than the cr stat has from its original system. i dont want the stat for balance. i want the stat so i can flip through monster stat blocks and understand them more quickly than doing the line by line, stat block comparison that i have been doing.

4 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

The rigidity here is that you are trying to run two different games the same way. It's not a matter of how flexible the game system is but that it isn't going to run like D&D. Things that are a minor inconvenience in D&D will kill characters in BRP. 

Even within BRP not every GM sets the opposition at the same relative level to the PCs. You mostly don't get the increasing spiral of competency that you get in D&D.

this is a rude assumption. im trying to run a game using brp rules. im also trying to not waste a ton of time while prepping.

is it just me, or has not a single person acknowledged this fact and instead, everybody is trying to talk to me about balance, when my idea about balance was actually about player races and the fairness of the starting stats of those player races.

can you just acknowledge this simple fact. reading a cr stat involves looking at between 3 and 4 letters and numbers. it takes about 1 second to look at two different cr stats. doing a line by line, stat block comparison, at the very least takes 30 seconds. please just acknowledge this lol.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I understand why you want that, but you don't understand why it won't work. 

The more open and less controlled a game is the harder it is apply any sort of generic quantifiers. Because the character won't be standardized.

this is just not correct. it might be to a certain extent if you are really focusing on balance, but im not. i want deadly, with minimal tpk's, as i learn the system. the problem, as i have repeatedly stated, is that it wastes my time lol.

stat comparisons will ALWAYS happen. its inevitable. whether you are going to do that line by line or not, it doesnt matter it happens. when that happens, i would like for it to take a second or two, rather than half a minute. thats my problem with excluding a cr stat. my time is being wasted if there is not a cr-like stat that amalgamates or averages or does whatever to the numbers, to come up with one number than can be compared to another number, using the same system for generating that amalgamation or average or whatever.

it can absolutely be done. it might not be as well defined as it is in other systems, but there really needs to be an easy way to compare stats other than line by line. without, and repeating myself yet again, time is wasted.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I know the feeling.

I'll say again the CR stat doesn't actually tell you much of anything. It's a crutch, and not a very good one at that. It mostly gives DMs the impression that they are setting up good encounters, even when they are not. I've slapped around a party with a low CR opponent thanks to circumstances and or tactics (or lack thereof).

The vast majority of TPKs I''ve run were the PCs getting wiped out by a very inferior set of opponents. Usually due to one or more PCs doing something stupid. Things like: Charging multiple opponents, doing a frontal attack on opponents who are in a fortified position,  shooting (poisoned) arrows into melee. Stopping in mid charge to cast battle magic, attacking a creature they knew was immune to their weapon, using area effect stuff in places

yeah this is nonsense. as i have explained countless times, i can easily flip to all of the monsters cr 11 or higher for my group of lvl 7 players. i cant do this in brp. and because i cant, im wasting time.

its like i said the word balance once and thats all you can think about. can you please acknowledge the fact that it takes considerably more time to compare stats if you are doing it line by line, than if there is one summary stat, like the cr is.

the cr stat tells me the most crucial thing. avoid these monsters, they are too easy. pick these monsters, it will be fun. how do you not get that? its not about balance. its about managing my time while planning.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

And it takes most BRP GMs about as long to asses a threat in BRP. That experience and the learning curve. 

 

Cr doesn't tell you that either. CR tells you that three of four or these encounter will wear a party down to the point where it needs to rest and recover. It doesn't work that way in BRP. Without magical healing it will take weeks for agroup to recover from injuries. Months for serious injuries, if they do recover.

Add in magic and most groups are probably tapped out of magic points after one or two encounters. 

And all of that varies quite a bit depending on which BRP game you are running and what rules are being used.

again, youre getting stuck in the granularities of that specific system. i dont care about adventuring days. i dont care about resting. i dont care about all of that. i just want to quickly pick monsters that are on the edge of deadly and tpk. i feel like i stepped in a trap by saying cr, but its the best comparison. forget i ever said cr. i know it has a lot of implications for you. for me, the stat means that if my group of players is level 7, avoid anything with a cr of 10 or lower because its too easy, and that saves me A TON of time.

 

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

How is looking over the oppositions stats a waste of time? To me it sounds like you don't really want to do the prep work.

Just a heads up but I think most BRP GMs would probably use standardized opponents most of the time. For instance , if the PCs ran into Pirates then most of the pirates would use the standard Pirate stat block, regardless of how experienced the PCs are. Generally that and maybe some beefed up stat for a Pirate leader or lieutenant and you're good. 

That's why BRP Games tend to have a leader & follower sheet

its a waste of time because on system allows me to compare quickly and the other doesnt? you can literally count the amount of characters. one comparison is done between literally 6 to 8 numbers and letters (and two of those letters are always the same). this is not possible in brp, and in comparison between the two systems, i feel like i am wasting time while prepping because there is not a cr-like stat.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Sorry you got to pay your dues. It'a a learning curve.

this attitude keeps the system down and has implications for the people trying to make a buck off the game. yes, it has a learning curve. no, i dont think it should be there one and no i dont think i should have to waste time learning a 90% great system, just because fans and developers of the system hate the cr stat, for strange reasons.

 

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Which is why CR is universally used in every other RPG. Oh wait no it isn't, because it doesn't really work. Most RPgs give you some guidelines for setting the opposition but don't try to set up some sort of rigidly enforced scale of competency.

If you are as experienced with things as you say you are, then why do you rely so much on CR, and expect other games to implement a similar stat?

CR is designed to give you attrition combat. 

this is just not true. most other systems have a singular stat that can be used as the comparison stat between monsters and characters, whether it be called cr, power level, level, treasure level, or whatever.

i think you are really getting stuck on the granularities of the specific cr system, when i use it very loosely and maybe not how others do. my players are skilled, and i need to pick deadly monsters for it to be fun. i cant quickly do that in brp.

7 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Why are you so sure that the BRP fanbase has it wrong and that D&D has it right? Andif that is what you believe why are you looking at BRP in the first place?

If you want to do things like you do in D&D then you will want a game system more like D&D. There are plenty of them.

If you want to run BRP then don't port over D&D thinking, and try to run  it like D&D, becuase it won't work.

 

This isn't the fanbase being quirky, but experienced GMs who have run the game and have seen people try to do what you claim you want to do, and what it fail. We know how the game mechanics play out.  So we know that what you are saying you are trying to do just won't work. 

i dont really frame it this way in my head.

one system respects my time, the other does not. i really wish the other one would respect my time, because they are both great systems with the major flaw of the other system being this imposed learning curve, play test so you know, we dont do cr-like stats, thing that most of this community has ascribed to. i do not.

both systems are great. one is a little bit better thought out in terms of how much time im using to prep, as a player that is also the GM. i cant help but feel that someone smart at d&d recognized this and said "hey, we know this stat is wonky, easily messed up, malleable, not true in a lot of instances, but it saves the most critical player at the tables (the gm) time" and they were right.

it is a strange quirk that this community insists that a cr-like system should not be attempted, has many justifications about balance in the game, but not a single one about my time management as the only guy running the adventure? thats a quirk i guess. maybe there is a better word.

8 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Well, I'm trying to convince you of something and I can't do that without trying to explain my position.

One of the things that doen't seem to be reaching you is that BRP not having a CR stat isn't about making the game easier/arder to write adventures for, but that the concept of CR doesn't work in BRP.

 

Again if you want a rule of thumb for statting the bad guys, try 25% lower skills, and half the armor and magic. Ten tweak from there to tailor it to your players. In my experience, I've had to tailor things for each group of players, sicne they all acted differently. I had one group that ,ostly couldn't figure out Battle Magic, and so I couldn't run them in a typical RQ campaign becuase they'd get massacred by NPCs who did figure it out. Another group had the hang of battle magic and could (and did) play through published RQ campaign packs.

let me reframe my question.

 

how can i not waste so much time if i dont want to do line by line stat comparisons as other systems have spoiled me and made me lazy. it feels frustrating spending that much time looking at stats and i just dont want to, but im playing the game, no matter what. ive already written 47 pages for keyed hexes and whatnot, have everything else fleshed out. its all in place. how can i save some time if i dont want to bore my players with easy encounters? how can i save some time if i dont want to do an entire table reroll, as this is generally unfun, people like to keep their characters alive if they can and i generally agree with this notion, with the major caveat being that one shot death needs to be on the table for excitement purposes?

[shadythedevil]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But if you were running those characters you would have to figure out what sort of encounter would be right for them? So what does your method say.

 

BTW, in BRP skill, damage  and magic are usually more important than armor and hit points. An unarmored guy with 8 hit points with Sword at 90% will ususally take apart a guy with Sword 40% with 8 point armor and 18 hit points. 

 

It's not a moot point because:

1. If they are at range or in melee then they will have to use ranged or melee weapons, which might not be their best weapons. They also might want to shoot arrows at a big dumb monster at a distance that get in close where it can attack them back.
2.  If they get disarmed or injured they might not be able to wield the weapon they want to. In BRP if you injure one of you opponent's arms they can't wield a two handed weapon anymore and will have to switch to a backup.
3. If they get disarmed or their weapon breaks they might have go to their backup.

 

And mathematically either has an even chance of winning the fight.

And here is where we disagree. In D&D the chances of the monster one-shooting the PC are remote. The monster would either have to roll max damage (a 10%) chance or get a critical (a 5% chance) and roll 5 or better for damage (a 60% chance). So you got a 12.5% chance of the one-shot drop happening.

To one shot kill a PC in D&D the monster would have to reduce the PC to -10 hit points, which would require the monster to roll max critical damage, a 0.5% chance. At that rate you can pretty much ignore it. 

 

Now in BRP it's very different. , and varies a bit depending on which rules you are running.

• To start with that PC with 10 hit points is dead at 0 hit points not -10. So all those one shot drops above become one shot kills in BRP.  
• A character at 1-2 hit points is unconscious.
• In BRP Most  weapons and attacks can get a special effect. At 50% skill this works out to a 10% chance of a special. An impale does double damage (like a D&D crtical) but is twice as likely to happen in BRP than in D&D. A slash does 1 point of bleeding per round, until successful resisted/treated (which takes a roll) so high damage (7+) attacks can one shot kill a PC.

 BRP does have armor take off damage and parries which will reduce the deadliness. At 50% skill this will cut the fatalities in half. But BRP also has  major wounds, or hit locations, one of which is used in every published BRP game.

Major Wounds: A character who takes half or more of their total hit points in a single hit is out of the fight, and they might suffer stat loss that can cause a fatality. At 10 hit points and 1D10 damage, there is a 60% chance of that happening, and one shot dropping the character, each round.  Assuming the PC can parry half the attacks (50% skill) then that drops to 30%, which is 60 times the chances of a one shot drop in D&D. Thats without specials or verticals. 

Hit Locations: At 10 hit points the character has 3-5 hit points in each location. That means that the PC can be one shot dropped and killed much easier. If you use hit locations then the chances of disabling a location. If it's a chest of head hit the PC will die without getting the proper medical attention in time or making a stamina roll. Note that this means another player rolling a successful first aid skill attempt (or magical healing). Head and abdomen hits that take twice the locations hit points in damage disable the character and having them bleeding out at one hit point per round. Again a successful first aid or stamina roll is required to survive.

BRP also doesn't use intitive rolls and uses either DEX or Strike Rank to determine when a character can act, which means a fast monster can probably attack and do damage before the players can do anything about it. 

 

Now as far as the other characters go, in the case of a one shot kill, they probably won't matter much if at all. If the monster gets an attack and rolls a kill there isn't much the other players can do about it. The exception is if the PC suffers a bleeding wound,, in which case first aid can save them, if it is applied successful in time. 

 

So the chances of one shot killing the PC in BRP are greater than the chances of one-shot dropping the PC in D&D. The chances of one shot dropping the PC are also much higher. 

 

Now consider the after effects of the fight. In BRP if the PC got dropped, even if they didn't get killed, they probably have taken a major wound, or have a disabled hit location, are low on hit points, and will take several weeks to heal up. In D&D they are just a long rest from being back at full.

In BRP they might have permanently lost the use of a limb or suffered permanent stat loss. In D&D they are just a long rest from being back at full.

Yes, magic provide bounce backi n both systems but magic is much more plentiful in D&D and comes back faster. In D&D, as long as the PC didn't die, then two or three cure light wounds will bring them back up to full hit points. In BRP magical healing in on a point per point basis, and healing someone back to full won't offset stat loss or restore mained or severed limbs. Furthermore even if they can heal the PC back to full, the caster will be low on magic points for several hours.

So it's not the same.It's not proportional. It two very different games. 

 

 

 

 A monster with 75% skill that did 2d10 damage would probably kill one of the PCs before the fight is over.

Now what sort of monster it is, how smart it is, and who attack first all play a big factor here. Let's say it is a predator that jumps the PCs. Well with 75% skill and 2d10 damage it has about a one in three chance of killing a PC outright in the first round. As in dead.  And an over 70% chance of dropping the PC with a major wound or disabled location. 

If the PCs get a chance to go first, say they are some distance away, and got bows or something, then with four of them, they will probably be able to drop it before it gets to them. 

That's why how you set up the situation is far more important in BRP than in D&D. 

 

And that's what you can't do mathematically in BRP. That sweet spot you are looking for doesn't exist. 

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, or that I don't want you to do it, or some such. I'm saying that it's not mathematically possible to reliably set up encounters to consistently work out that way. You don't have the same safety net when it comes to damage as you have in BRP. Wounds that inconvenience characters in D&D will disable, main or kill them in BRP. And the specieals and other stuff come up too frequently. Try to do it on a consistenly basis and you will slaughter PCs. . 

Any encounter that is designed to be dangerous enough to fit your "we almost died" criteria in BRP is one in which the actual odds of a PC dying as so high that a few such encounters will kill a PC. An encounter with a 25% chance of killing a PC will probably kill a PC in four or five encounter. It's playing Russian roulette with your PCs. 

Even that 10 hp 1d10 monster you used to start with, is probably deadlier than what you are expecting.

Tere is no "we got banged up good" spot in BRP that you can get to consistently. 

D&D uses combat by attrition. Threat slowly wear down the PCs abilities. BRP uses sudden trauma. You rarely see a PC get nickled and dimed to death. PCs usually get taken out by one good hit. One shot drops and one shot kills are not outliers, their the norm.

The big defense thing in BRP is defensive skills like parry and dodge, and they can't be relied upon work reliably. That 50% PC will only block about half the attacks. So that 75% 2d10 monster you want to use has about a 35% chance of dropping a PC in one round, and about a 15% chance of killing them outright. And that is much higher than in D&D.

 

A "near death" experience in BRP is actually a "near death" experience for the PCs. With even a slight bit of bad luck it can become an actual death experience. 

 

So you see what I mean about the math?

 

holy shit my dude are you a fucking novelist?

i just finished responding to your other lengthy post and i scroll up and theres ANOTHER LONG ASS POST LMFAO.

i havent read it, real life demands my attention.

i do want to go out of my way to say that i appreciate you being able to understand that my rhetoric, while directed towards you, is not personal and i do value this on going conversation.

i understand i am a little rough around the edges and can speak in a way that might rile folks up and while part of that is my intention, i want everybody to know that i consider you my brethren in the nerdosphere and i would always play any fuckin games you guys might wanna play. im just that kinda nerd thats down for all the nerd shit.

i will have to respond later tonight and thank you again for not taking me as some raging troll. i really do have a stake in the fight. i want the system to work how i want it to work and i think thats ok, especially as a customer who bought the damn book lol.

[Nozbat]

While I agree with most that has been said here, you're all very focused on combat solutions and fighting opponents. There's much more to RPGs than combat.

I've just played a 3 hour session where no one had brought their melee weapons or thought of drawing their daggers (used for cutting their meat at table) but focused on plans to infiltrate, get information and look at ways of abducting a suspect who had murdered their Meister. The suspect is possibly the most dangerous opponent they have faced yet, and his bodyguard of whip-wielding thugs are worse than him (possibly). It was sneaking around, using communication skills, wheedling information out of Plum Brandy addled Customs Agents or card-playing, angry Bakers apprentices. They know they can't win a straight fight or even a crooked one. 

They have decided to try  'cherchez le jeune homme' as the best tactic... find his love interest and use that against him... that is of course assuming that the cruel, evil, sadistic opponent has the ability to feel love. He may not, given his penchant for savagery and upsetting the Bakers Guild by publicly flogging the Master Bakers because the price of bread was too high. 

As Bilbo Baggins's father once said "Every worm has its weak spot", though as Bilbo pointed out it was probably not from direct experience. 

 

[shadythedevil]

32 minutes ago, radmonger said:

 

It doesn't exist naturally, but you can create it.

The trick is to tone down the lethality of the system, so that noone actually dies instantly from a fatal wound.  Instead (as is arguably realistic, as per the link below), an untreated fatal wound leads to death minutes, hours or even days after the end of combat.

With a few other changes, you can turn a TPK into a TPKO; an event within the story, not the end of it.

You just need to ensure that, a majority of the time, death is not on the line. Again, as is historically realistic, most enemies likely want to capture and then ransom, interrogate, try or sacrifice the PCs. What's not historically realistic, but easy enough to set up in fantasy, is post-combat healing magic that is effective and cheap. So the enemies who defeated you can be expected to heal you (and likely add any expenses incurred to your ransom).

Once you have used combats like that to gain familiarity with the system and the capabilities of your PCs, you can set up an actually deadly fight, with clear signalling that on this one climactic fight, you are ok with the possibility of all PCs ending up dead. After all, plenty of good stories end that way.

This is basically the approach taken by the most successful tactical-combat variants of BRP, RuneQuest and Mythras.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706344/

 

 

i finally feel like i have somebody on my side.

i am not wanting to adjust other stats as you are describing, so that a cr-like system works with less variability, but i do understand what you are saying.

this idea of a tpko is very interesting. in d&d, im generally not the type to allow players to come back from the dead. players staying dead dead when they die, adds to the excitement factor imo. i let one player come back from the dead, but it was literally an entire campaign that the rest of the group went on for like 9 months. coming back from the dead feels too mother may i. in general, i dont like it.

also, im really on the fence about damage allocation (is that what its officially called? its slipping my mind). I think its really cool and realistic, to say 'oh you were hit for 10 dmg, and it all went to your arm, and your arm is gone now, its over there' but, it can also increase the deadliness of the system.

and thats really what im trying to figure out without tpking my players a bunch of times. i want the threat of death to be on the table and i want to be able to kill the players if thats what the dice say because that adds to the excitment, but overall i think its also unfun to reroll and more fun to survive nearly being killed. i just want that sweet spot, because my players will definitely figure this system out in one go.

and you just gave me flash backs to my pmhnp program with that link. my players are not doofuses. the least educated people at my table are RN's. one is a psychiatrist, three others pmhnp, another a librarian and another a masters electrician. these are some smart fuckin cookies. as soon as session 0 is done and ive shared the books, the min maxers will do their min maxing thing, no doubt. i dont want to bore them. i dont want to do a bunch of tpk's as we all learn the system.