[Jason Durall]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Jason- Thank you for you kind consideration in addressing this forum. You are a brave, brave man. l

No problem. This pales in comparison to the morning diaper routine with my 9-month old daughter, so it's a welcome change. And my experience working for MMOs have hardened me to the roughest of message boards.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

What market is BRP aimed at?

Any gamers, really, but especially those who like a system-light experience, and want to be able to slot mechanics and and out of their games with ease.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Do you expect to compete head-to-head with GURPS and HERO?

I think those games have their audiences, and BRP has its audience. If anything, they're competing against one another and we're sort of on our own.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

BRP seems to have always been weak on gearhead stuff like rules for making things, vehicles, new weapons, as well as breaking , burning, and breaching obstacles. Has this been addressed in the core book? If not are there plans to do so?

There are rules for doing a wide variety of things to environments (remember that BRP is a misnomer... we're actually talking about games as diverse as Superworld, Ringworld, and so on.

There are rules for making stuff using powers, but they're admittedly light. Again, it's generally not a big part of the BRP game, and we were very strongly opposed to trying to make it just another generic rules kit like HERO, GURPS, etc.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

BRP seemed content to operate within a strictly game sense i.e. an abstracted SIZ instead of mass and volume in English or metric measures. Has the system been tied into the real world any better?

SIZ is still abstracted.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Was it planned for the powers to balance against one another so that one does not dominate?

It wasn't planned, and they don't really balance against one another. The expectation is that a GM will only be using one of them in a given campaign. Mutations don't balance against magic, and psychic powers are woefully underpowered compared to sorcery. Super powers are probably the most flexible and powerful of all of the five.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Will the optional rules bring BRP up to the level of other multi-genre games in terms of tactical options and finesse?

Perhaps. But again, BRP has never been about tactical options - it's a core game framework that can be made as complex or as simple as desired. In the past that's been by the designers at Chaosium, but now is in the hands of each GM.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

What parts of it are you not content with as a designer?

Hmm...

I'd have liked to have made Sanity work in the same fashion as HP, power points (formerly magic points), fatigue, etc. But that's too big a change to do in non-CoC rulebook.

I think that given the choice now, I'd have pulled critical successes out of the book entirely and just kept special successes as the default.

I've never been a fan of even using fatigue or encumbrance rules. I tend towards making those things "GM discretion".

I'd have scaled the whole thing back somewhat and gotten it done much earlier. Overlapping three moves, two job searches, a marriage, and the birth of a baby during the course of one manuscript wasn't really ideal.