Oh, how I love these games.

  Yes, the systems are a little complex...

  I freaking LOVE the Living Steel setting.  Rhand, Swords, Vissers, Spectrals...  I always wished this got a remake or a re-release with rules a bit more streamlined...

  Anybody have contact information for BN these days?

Last thing anyone knows he went to work for NASA or something.

BN works for JPL and to my knowledge has no plans to revise or for that matter reissue any of the leading edge games.

J.J.

Quote from: jjwolf120115;599231BN works for JPL

Hey, its Jack Parsons' old hangout!

RPGPundit

I dimly recall that I played in a Friday night RPG group at Caltech with a JPL guy who was colleagues with the Leading Edge guys.  He ran us through a Rhand campaign, which amounted to finishing one tactical melee over two sessions

Of the LE guys, he said they (and he) were JPL geeks in Pasadena who bashed orc heads on weekends, and had access to computer number-crunching back when mainframes were leet.  (This was way before Amazon, Twitter, mobile phones, laptops -- try to envision that.)

SP:G is what you get when five off-duty engineers lock themselves in a room and they want some realism.  It models able-bodied, right-handed humanoids (he said it scaled down to dwarves really well, 4'2" guys with 40" vertical leaps in armor) down to 1/10 second impulses, with linear and rotational acceleration rates, and every single swing.  For damage, they modeled weapon tip shapes, body target areas, and the volumetric intersections thereof, and assigned hit point density values based on things like muscles/nerves/brains.  Rhand branched out into quadripeds, with 6-second rounds (note: no hit tables for rocs, centaurs, snakes, gelatinous shapes).

Hence all the tables, which basically cross-index the "impact" you generate (force, to an engineer), weapon cross-section, hit location, armor thereat, to damage done.  (Internally, they must have run scripts to compute the volume of puncture, and integrated the hit point density over dv.)

• Drawback: Hit chart proliferation.  Need a hit chart for every shape of creature in a battle.  That's unbounded (which is why most RPGs elide the issue entirely).
• Drawback: ibid, for weapon shapes.
  
• Drawback: ibid, for armor types.  That's a whole lotta tables.
  
• Benefit: You don't need to model critical hits separately; they're automatically included as heart (1%) or head (5%?) hits.
• Drawback: Hit locations were entirely random, disregarding skilled aim.  Can't Brisingr a Shade.  ("But hey", quoth Durza, "look at it from my side: any random turnip farmer off the field has 1% to throw a pitchfork right there, regardless of my studly defenses!!"  Palpatine nods: "We have felt your pain -- TWICE -- moisture, he farmed")
  

N.B. damage with a penetrating tip (e.g. spear) to the head is non-linear in ghastly ways, e.g. for integer impact values of 1+ vs. chain mail, damage was something like 1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 100, 5k, 10k, 20k, 100k -- a Fibonacci on boosterspice.  I joked about this to our DM: "you can see where it enters the brain".  He replied, completely seriously: "no, 5k is where it penetrates through and the tip is emerging out the back of the skull".  Oh sure, you're laughing now, but --

The system is hit-point-less, but this emerged as a glaring flaw (incompleteness).  These geeks weren't biomedics, so they (I still think) glossed over what it meant to take a "5k" hit.  

• In Rhand, you compute a "hit threshold" from body size, health, CON-like attribute, level, and other willpower factors.  Damage is then probabilistic in the chance to knock you "out", from a minimum 1% for 1-pt dings, to X% when you've taken your HT total.  Since they were engineers, X could have been some geek value like 100/sqrt(2), or a (negative) power of e.
• Note that it's < 100%.  You can exceed your HT, just with an ever-increasing % of the next hit knocking you out.  With a HT of 30, you could even absorb one of those 100k hits from a 30mm depleted uranium ballista bolt through your heart (and out the other side; it doesn't stop) and still have a tiny chance to stay heroically conscious.
• Flaw: Doesn't model central nervous system (broken spine), load-bearing bone structure (broken legs), or fluid mechanics (blood loss).  Abstracting these away into "100k" hits can lead to nonsensical (heroic) results.
• Conversely, you could stub your toe and be "out of the fight".  The second time this actually happened , we grilled our friendly DM on the meaning of being "out" -- am I unconscious?  Can I crawl?  Can I point a flashlight?  How long am I out for?  How quickly do blunt impact HT hits decay (habituate)?  Their overly simplistic model explained none of these things; hence, Rhand breaks down about halfway into your first big furball.
• SP:G was, IIRC, similar but even worse.

Now, actually playing SP:G wasn't too bad, if you're part of the original group of 5 geeks who invented it.  Every swing is basically a database join of 5 tables; hence, each of 5 persons opens his own copy of The Book to his section of tables, and you quickly cross-index them all, requiring only about 10 brief spoken mini-messages.  Don't try this alone.

• Drawback (SP:G): Rotational acceleration rates really suck for most people who just want to play a game.  Some tactical air combat boardgames model it, and failed (commercially).  In video games, you get Asteroids-like controls, e.g. Gravitar, which was a successful niche, but with very little cross-over appeal.  In practice, your orcs will run into walls, obstacles, fences, etc. because humans just can't handle the math 80 ticks (of 1/10 seconds each, remember) in advance.

The emergent principle of h2h combat was: impact rules.  In Rhand:

• You have a small number of "swings" per round, e.g. 2-3.  With these, you can pay for actions per round:
• Any number of "parries".  Your opponents' total # of attacks, vs. your # of parries, cross-index into a table with lower hit %.
• Corollary: Zero parries is suicidal; your opponents' hit rates are like 90%+.
• Corollary: All-parries isn't impervious; at best, you lower them to 30-40%.  You'll still die that way.
• As many attacks as you can afford.  You can freely choose between short stroke (1/2 swing, 1/2 impact), normal, or long stroke (2 swings, 2x impact).
• Hence, the vanilla recipe is: 1 parry, 1 short + 1 normal, and you hope you get into the 2 attacks vs 1 parry table.
• Drawback: At low levels, characters have a terrible time landing a blow with enough impact to get above the exponential knees of the damage curves.  My newbie guy (equivalent of 1st level) spent ~4 hours over 2 Fridays doing the minimum 1 damage per hit.  I was 1-v-1 with basically a goblin for 90 minutes, and we stalemated, and both walked away.  That's ... very not AD&D-like.
• Gambit: 1 parry, 1 long stroke.  Then you're in the 1-v-2 table, so your hit chance sucketh like 12%, but your hit will actually do 10-50 damage.  So you're actually outracing the 1-per-swing guy.  But then your opponent does the same, and it's a coin flip.

Rhand melee gets very fun at high levels, when you get the "elemental" fighting skills.

• Fire: Impact x2 (if moving forward --? I may have this confused with the "Targa" specialization).  Sounds bland, until you've labored through the low side of the damage curves for some fights ... like, once.
  
• Water: Every short stroke also counts as a parry.
  
• Earth, Air: I forgot them by now, so they must have sucked in comparison.
  

Nowadays, the concept of a Rhand/SPG-like combat system, done with modern computer support, is tantalizing (or maybe it's already being done?)  Basically, you could revisit the premise of hit locations x value density functions, but compute everything volumetrically, in real-time.  You'd probably need a (more) complete biomedical model to handle the effects of damage and healing.  And, of course, scale up to plasma guns, wormholes, magic, psionics, and mundane stuff like fatigue, food, lefthandedness :jaw-dropping:, poison/venom, ...

SP:G/Leading Edge amounted to a grand experiment, and it probably explored that niche of the RPG idea space as deeply as the inventors cared to -- hence their lack of interest in doing it again.

I never did get to actually teleport a Special Action Team into a Rhand melee.  Sigh.  But we could write that ourselves!!  Who's with me?

Thank you, that was delightful.

Quote from: Arminius;725985Thank you, that was delightful.

Agreed, 100% pure awesome.

Wow...
A labor of love for them I guess.

Rhand, in its various incarnations, still strikes me as a pretty neat setting.

And yet I never really hear anything about it beyond that it's good. I saw a module once, KVISR Rocks! (?) and couldn't understand how it could be connected to Morningstar Missions or any of the other hyperdetailed combat systems. Did people have time to roleplay? And once they got started at roleplaying, did they really switch gears and bring out Living Steel or Phoenix Command for a back-alley fight?

Sounds like what you get if you mix Rolemaster and Riddle of Steel and then add acid...:jaw-dropping:

Quote from: Arminius;726014And yet I never really hear anything about it beyond that it's good. I saw a module once, KVISR Rocks! (?) and couldn't understand how it could be connected to Morningstar Missions or any of the other hyperdetailed combat systems. Did people have time to roleplay? And once they got started at roleplaying, did they really switch gears and bring out Living Steel or Phoenix Command for a back-alley fight?

I've played in a couple games, and people had time to role-play.  To be honest, with the right GM, I never saw it as much different than Rolemaster, honestly.  At least from my perspective as player.

I actually have a copy of Sword's Path Glory, I think, as part of a bulk box of my buddy's Living Steel stuff I bought.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;488387In the advanced rules, the ultimate in realism was the goal and few concessions were made. The result of years of play, Advanced Book 1 is for those who refuse to compromise in their gaming. It contains over 300 pages of material including:
*194 pages of Damage Tables
*19 Armor Classes
*30 Armor Locations with rules for mixed or layered armour and heavy plate
*Shield Damage and Penetration
*Knockdown and Balance Rules
*Terrain, Visibility and Position corrections
*Hit Locations for attack from the front, rear, left or right
*Target Size adjustments to damage
*Expanded Parry Rules

Autism.txt