Quote from: Spinachcat;1011956D10 progression is my norm. It does allow for PCs to ramp up quickly which in Stormbringer fits fine with the sorcery soaked setting. PC death is very common, and unless you're wearing demon armor, almost any hit by a demon weapon = death.  

I guess Stormbringer's system and its high kill rate worked for my group because we were all CoC players. One bad roll = death was a boon, not  a bane, in our minds.

Yeah when I ran Stormbringer in the 80s and 90s, the players were pretty happy with it being a given your character at some stage would probably die a horrible death and knowing there were no Resurrections or much of healing either. It helped we were all Michael Moorcock fans and read most of his books.
Fun times and yeah they tended to be CoC players as well.

Regarding CoC.  I never really cared either way about the system, I just loved the RPG and setting.  Basically if you got into a combat in CoC, it's likely you'd be in a bad way and if you got to a combat, it's likely you did something wrong.
TBH, I never did a lot of dice rolling or had a need to understand the CoC game mechanics that much.  It was 90% RP really with the system vaguely in the background, which for that type of RPG is great.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1011900For my player group the possibility of having a character go insane is one of the biggest draws of CoC!!

Yeah, anybody who bitches about the sanity mechanic in CoC has never read Lovecraft.

Quote from: sureshot;1011930Agreed and seconded. As much as some of the fans of both insist otherwise imo. Savage Worlds, Fate and other more rules light generic rpgs have eaten heavily into both market share. Hero is pretty much on light support. Gurps survives because of Munchkin if they did not have that they would have been in a similar situation imo. It's worse with Gurps because of some strange decisions on what to produce as source books. Fans have been begging for years for 4E Gurps vehicles. Instead apparently their is a huge market for Discworld and Mars Attacks. The first I can see since the novels to me at least seem popular but Mars Attacks? Is there some hidden cult rpg following of it I don't know about. Things won't get better for either rpg either imo. As the fanbase for both Hero System and Gurps is very very resistant to change. They want nothing to change. Yet their will be a turn around in both companies fortunes any day now..any day now.

HERO is another that has been impacted by questionable business decisions. First there was the near death of the game in the late 1990s (and the poorly received Fuzion system). Then a fairly successful revival in 2002 which was pretty remarkable considering that the game had been dormant around 5 years.
The timing and roll out of 6th edition was poorly handled across the board. They fractured the small but fanatical fan base and then failed to follow up with new product to support the new edition (most 6th ed products were just recycled 5th ed products). To top it off the new edition did little to draw in new blood as it looked even more intimidating than the prior edition. Last their timing was impeccable, they introduced an expensive RPG product just as the economy crashed.

Strangely GURPS did almost the same thing at about the same time although I think the 3rd / 4th split in the fan base was less damaging as GURPS hadn't gone through two prior splits and most agreed the game needed some revision (at least a good soild edit to round up all the optional rules).

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1011820Static hitpoints are an enigma to me. I understand why people prefer the idea. However, the entire system has to be done really really well, or else they create just as many problems as they eliminate. Whitewolf/World of Darkness is a good example of a failstate: everyone has 7 health levels (I think, it's been 20-ish years now since I played), and then the pacing mechanism between full health and death is mediated through the dodge and health+armor damage resistance (soaking) mechanism. But then there's "aggravated damage" which ignores the damage resistance, so the game becomes a rocket-tag/race to see who can get a 7pt. aggravated damage shot off. You can play the game, but how it's better than D&D-style hp is not clear to me. WEG Star Wars was the opposite direction where you could game the dodge and resistance mechanics (that you kind of need if you don't vary the hp) to make nearly invincible characters. So, while I like the theory of static hitpoints, saying, 'come play ____, it has static hit points' isn't really a selling point in and of itself.

This is a great analysis, and I wanted to expound on it with some thoughts of my own. Most RPG combat mechanics can be sorted into three types: (1) games where defense is static regardless of character experiences, (2) games where character experience improves defense improves by making you harder to hit, and (3) games where character experience improves defense improves by making you harder to kill once you're hit. Type 1 games include Cyberpunk 2020, Recon, and Traveller. Type 2 games include Mekton, Savage Worlds, and D6 Star Wars. Type 3 games include most variants of D&D. Some games are hybrids. For instance, in both Cyberpunk 2020 and Traveller, ranged combat is Type 1 (defense is static) while melee combat is Type 2 (defense increases with character skill). In 4E D&D, it's a Type 2 / 3 hybrid, as AC and hit points both increase with level. But the general theory holds.

I have found that "firefight simulationists" prefer Type 1 combat, and everyone else basically prefers Type 3. The answer to why is math. Consider the following:

Type 1 System) I have a 20% chance to hit you. When I hit you, I will kill you. It will take me 5 rounds to kill you, on average.
Type 3 System) I have a 50% chance to hit you. Each time I hit you, I will do 1d3 damage. You have 5 hit points. It will take me 5 rounds to kill you, on average.
Both systems yield a fight that lasts an average of 5 rounds.

But in actual play, the Type 1 system is very swingy, and four out of five combat rounds, I have accomplished nothing. Conversely, the Type 3 system is much more predictable. At last half the time, I'm actually doing something useful, attritting my opponent. The same applies when viewed from the defender's perspective. In a Type 1 system, I can do everything right, be winning, and then just get splattered. In a Type 3 system, I have a sense of control and time to think.

When you consider that RPGs are played in groups, each player both values his moment in the spotlight, and also wants to contribute to the team effort. It is much more satisfying on a consistent basis to feel that you have contributed by attritting the target, then to feel that you simply have wasted your turn with yet-another-miss.

A Type 2 system, in practice, plays like a Type 1 system on steroids - that is, if defender skill makes you harder to hit, then the odds of hitting are actually *lower* than they are with a realistic simulation of combat; they have to be, or the heroes can't survive heroically.

In the most popular Type 2 systems, the game designers have implicitly fallen back on a Type 3 combat by introducing an attritable, hp-like mechanism to help heroes land blows (against unrealistic odds of doing so) or survive (if they can get hit too easily). For instance, Mekton had Maneuver Points and Luck Points, Star Wars had Character Points and Force Points, and Savage Worlds had Bennies. In all those games, given relatively even combatants, combat is really about attriting the other side's "fudge points"; whoever runs out of Maneuver Points/Luck Points/Character Points/Force Points/Bennies first loses the battle.

BRP and its ilk have tended to be either pure Type 1 games or pure Type 2 games and hence players who enjoy Type 3 combat (which is most of them) simply don't find it to their taste.

The theoretical solution to the Type 2 problem is to create a system where damage scales in proportion to the extent to which offensive skill exceeds defensive skill, so that fights between equal combatants are attritional and drawn out while fights between unequal opponents end quickly. Feng Shui did this very well. BRP tries, and I admire the elegance of their solution, but its implementation (20%/5% attack crits versus 20%/5% defender parries) tends to be too mathematical for most players.

Quote from: Bren;1011912I guess once again it's that booger eating moron problem to which you are so fond of referring.

More like "tautological statement is tautological."  If more people liked BRP, it would be more popular.

Quote from: Bren;1011915I think there is another reason why D&D is more popular.

If we look at fighters in combat and ignore the MUs, I think that the problem BRP/RQ have with respect to the inflating hit points and erosion of hit points that is D&D combat is similar to the problem I have with watching Soccer vs American football. Soccer is like RQ. It's a bit difficult to tell (at least it is for me) who is winning and who is losing until the end when someone often wins by a score of 1-0. In American football, you have the incremental gains in yards won and lost during a drive and there are often considerably more than just 0-3 successful scoring opportunities on each side before the end of the game. So it is easier to tell who is winning and who is losing. And I think people like that. And tactically, for an RPG, it has the advantage of making it easier to tell if you are likely to lose before the final score so that you can run away, change tactics, or some magic wielder can drop a magic bomb on the other side.

That's an awesome analogy and I'm going to steal it for later use.
Type 2 combat = soccer
Type 3 combat = gridiron football

Has anyone played BRP in a science fiction RPG?

What was the player response?

Quote from: danskmacabre;1011966Regarding CoC.  I never really cared either way about the system, I just loved the RPG and setting.

I suspect most CoC fans would agree with you.

My RQ and Stormbringer crew were all CoC fans, but many of my CoC players would not play BRP fantasy. For them, fantasy was D&D.

BRP had a huge impact in the swedish rpg hobby in the 80's, 90' and 00's.

DRAKAR OCH DEMONER (dragons and demons). First version released in 1982 as a translation of BRP Magic World from Worlds of Wonder. This was our "D&D" for a very long time.To keep it to titles released for the international market, It spawned:

MUTANT (after Mutant:Year Zero it does not use BRP anymore but the earlier versions did)

MUTANT CHRONICLES 1ed & 2ed (the rules were based of Drakar och Demoner and Mutant.)

SYMBAROUM  (started out as "trying to do BRP right" but became its own thing).

KULT (  kind of a derivative of another BRP derivative. Kind of shows how the rpg designers in  the hobby tried to move away from the DoD legacy, but still beholden to it's influence.) Kult tried very hard to actually live up to the D&D-panic in the 80's ( and did spawn its own panic in the 90's.) . Very much a  pure distillation of the 1990's grimdark thrope.

TRUDVANG CHRONICLES ( derived quite a bit from its origin. Officially known as Drakar och Demoner Trudvang in swedish)

GEMINI (largely forgotten, but a real dark fantasy gem. The rules were were heavily derived by Drakar och Demoner and I guess Ars Magica.)

Stormbringer 1e, Type 2 on 'roid rage turned to eleven!  Seriously, get a sorcerer who can create demon armour and weapons especially with combatants who have high skills, and the only thing that will hit will be criticals, which will ignore armour, do massive damage and essentially turn the poor fool hit to jelly. If both sides have demonic equipment the fight will deadlock until one rolls a critical attack against which the other fails to roll a critical defense. The likelyhood of this happening gets smaller as the skill numbers get bigger.  Unless someone pulls a sneaky trick.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1011985Has anyone played BRP in a science fiction RPG?

What was the player response?

I did a one shot mining colony on Io near-future space-investigators vs mi-go thingy once. It was inspired by the movie, Outland, with Sean Connery.  It was cool. People died horrifically or went mad, and great fun was had by all.  I never tried it for a more long-term sci-fi campaign though.

Quote from: Bren;1011915....watching Soccer vs American football...

If I have this analogy straight, then Americans should really like D&D and everyone else should absolutely love RQ, correct?

QuoteThere is an interesting presentation by Greg Costikyan called, Randomness: Blight or Bane? that talks about this and other things related to randomness in gaming. He makes a couple of salient and relevant points. The second point helps explain why one might prefer the way D&D does hit points over the way games like BRP do hit points.

That's all fine, but really I was only discussing the complaints about RQ somehow being slower in combat than any modern form of D&D, which is frankly nonsense (having a fair amount of experience with both).

Personal preference is perfectly fine.  Actually, I quite like OD&D combat, a lot in fact.  It and RQ are both pretty tactical by design, but with fairly different takes on it.  (Modern D&D is also pretty tactical but in a totally different way.)

QuoteBy design. Because of this the effect of strategy may be entirely outweighed by a single, die roll that has disproportionate effect. Which makes strategy a bit less likely to solely determine the outcome.

This is only true if you see strategy as something that happens after you start rolling the dice.  The strategic parts of both RQ and OD&D are almost entirely based on actions that proceed any actual die rolls.  At the time you start rolling the dice, both are down to mostly luck.  They function differently and have a different feel, so naturally different people will appreciate each.  I'd also note that both are equally distant in how they function and feel from modern D&D, which is what I was comparing against initially.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1011937Chaosium got it perfect with Pendragon, which completely defeats the problem of pointless rolls at high and low skill levels. Unfortunately, they didn't generalize that system to their various other games...

Pendragon is one of the few Chaosium games I've never read or played.  Does it do skill vs. skill, winner gets a hit?  We actually implemented that in RQ for a while in the 90s and it worked pretty well.  It's pretty easy to map combat to the Resistance Table.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1011946...but I agree that RQ6/Mythras' combat does not suit the way I like to pace combat.  I always thought it might if my players and I really mastered all of the options, but the pace and detail of BRP/Stormbringer/CoC is about right for me.

Same here.  That modernization of RQ combat is a good idea for people want more combat actions, but it's heavier than I like to deal with.  Personally, I'm perfectly happy with old RQ2/BRP.  It works fine and moves about as fast as anything that isn't OD&D.  This the same reason I'd veto any idea of playing any D&D outside of OD&D.....well, I can be talked into 5e, but it moves slower than Mythras in actual play experience as it has more options.  (As always with D&D this does largely depend on the levels of the characters, I realize.)

Quote from: Spinachcat;1011985Has anyone played BRP in a science fiction RPG?

What was the player response?

We played Ringworld a little bit back in the day.  It has some weird, unique rules to BRP, so those can skew some things.  For example, it expands the simple SR system into an AP system without rounds, which was simply tedious in actual execution - I'd opt for DEX order initiative if I revisited it.  

Anyhow, it worked pretty well for SF.  One of the fun things about it is that it used the hit location system from RQ.  Most weapons instantly vaporize anything they hit.  With hit locations, this is generally a limb.  Toss the PC in an autodoc and they regrow the limb by the next adventure.  Only head hits (maybe other torso - been a while!) actually resulted in death.  A lower tech approach would probably present issues since weapons are vary damaging and healing wouldn't be quite so magical.

Quote from: RMS;1012009Pendragon is one of the few Chaosium games I've never read or played.  Does it do skill vs. skill, winner gets a hit?  We actually implemented that in RQ for a while in the 90s and it worked pretty well.  It's pretty easy to map combat to the Resistance Table.

 magical.

Yes, that is more or less how it works but there are some nuanced details that are also important. The person who rolls highest on 1d20 while also rolling under their skill level wins. A roll equal to your skill level is a critical success. If your skill level is less than 20, a natural 20 is a fumble. If your skill level is greater than 20, you add the difference to your roll, and all roll totals greater than 20 count as 20 and are critical successes. If both combatants get a critical success, they cancel. It is a system that works super well for people having skill levels between ~5 and 25. When skill level approaches 40 (automatic critical on every roll) it starts to get janky. But that is really a white-room sort of problem - PC's don't develop skills that high.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1012015Yes, that is more or less how it works but there are some nuanced details that are also important. The person who rolls highest on 1d20 while also rolling under their skill level wins. A roll equal to your skill level is a critical success. If your skill level is less than 20, a natural 20 is a fumble. If your skill level is greater than 20, you add the difference to your roll, and all roll totals greater than 20 count as 20 and are critical successes. If both combatants get a critical success, they cancel. It is a system that works super well for people having skill levels between ~5 and 25. When skill level approaches 40 (automatic critical on every roll) it starts to get janky. But that is really a white-room sort of problem - PC's don't develop skills that high.

Does damage and armor work similarly to other BRP games?

It sounds like the HeroQuest mastery system would fix the high skill problem if you wanted higher powers.  In fact, it sounds like the HQ resolution system is a direct evolution of this.

Pendragon is my favourite of the BRP derived systems but it is close to my number one game period.