System Wars

[Trifletraxor]

Originally Posted by soltakss

Funnily enough, when people talk about the BRP community, I'm never sure what they mean.

The current BRP community (according to my own definition) consists of those who play old school RuneQuest, Chaosium Elric!/Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu, or any of the other d100 Chaosium games or homebrew d100 games based upon Chaosium's d100 systems.

The new system will be called "Basic Roleplaying" (not d100 as far as I know), and anyone playing that game will definitely be part of the community.

Sverre.

[Atgxtg]

Yuk, I think the new name is a misnomer. A sixteen page booklet could be Basic Role-playing. But the new game is more like "Advanced Role Playing".

Even the "Chaosium Role Playing System" would sound better.

Runebringer?

Call of Percentiles?

[badcat]

Soltakiss, ANYBODY who has played RQ as much as you is most assuredly a BRP fan-atic. As for 'rubbish magic system', watch your tongue, sirrah!

[soltakss]

Originally Posted by badcat

Soltakiss, ANYBODY who has played RQ as much as you is most assuredly a BRP fan-atic. As for 'rubbish magic system', watch your tongue, sirrah!

RQ had battle/Spirit Magic, Rune/Divine Magic, Sorcery and Ritual Magic as well as various kinds of other magic. What did CoC have? A list of meaningless spells with no links between them. Ringworld and Superworld had no magic at all. Elric had demon summoning but no real magic. No comparison, really.

All in my opinion, of course.

[badcat]

Of course. Have you ever read the Bronze Grimoire?

And Magic World+Arcanum makes the best magic system I have ever played, much more flavorful than RQ3 and with more possibilities. I agree about CoC, by the way, but I think it is largely because the authors didn't expect the players to be full fledged mages. At least as long as they were still sane and human and under the players' control. So I am not sure that is a fair comparison. One reason I would like to have seen Magic World (especially) expanded into a full magic system is that I have never been satisfied with any of the Chaosium setting ones. Or Mongooses' now. My own expansion of the Magic World system beefed up with the old Bard Games stuff has been my primary magic system for many years. Although I did use the SB5 summoning plus the Bronze Grimoire for a while too. It had some brilliant material detailing Runes and Necromancy, if you have not seen it, even though I have a feeling you know all about it already.

[Sorloc]

Originally Posted by Trifletraxor

... and MRQ might work as a stepping board from D&D to BRP...

Nope, sorry, probably won't. I would wish for the same thing, but I sincerely doubt it, and my reasoning is twofold:

1) ICE thought the same thing when they released HARP, that it was kind of 'between' dnd and RoleMaster, and might entice dnd purchasers / players over to HARP, and then possibly to RM. It seems that it has done less of that than it has caused a schism between RoleMaster players; some prefer RM, some prefer HARP, but it does not seem (to me, an outsider, but someone who has spent a LOT of time in the ICE forums) to have brought many curious dnd-ers.

why?

2) They don't want to change.
Let's face it; if dnd players were at all interested in playing a better system, they wouldn't be playing dnd any more. It's one of the worst systems I've ever played - and with 3.5, make it THE worst (but that's probably because my friends warned me away from Castle Perilous).
Every time the subject of dnd's inferiority comes up, on any forum, the defenders all say how simple it is - which is blatantly false, it's simplistic, not simple; complicated yet not complex. It's All F'ed Up.
Many dnd players will concede various points about the system, even admitting that they've 'House Ruled' the game into near-unrecognizability, but they always say, "yes, but..."

With dnd about to become a pen&paper video game , the potential may exist to market to newbies, heading off dnd, but I wouldn't count on it, as video games start before books now.

[Sorloc]

Is Moon Design Publications still in business? They did a pretty good job on RQ material in the past, while it was lying bleeding and abandoned in a ditch.

[badcat]

What Sorloc said about D&D. I cannot disagree.

I do see quite a few gamers drifting away from D&D, though. Lately I have been searching for forums frequented by folks I feel comfortable with, and found a couple of sites with a fair number of individuals talking about how they are looking for something different. Troll Lords and White Silver Publishing are two good examples. These games are pretty different from BRP, yes, but what is important is that people on these sites and others (I hope) are talking about certain things in common: the longing for simpler more logical system, system/game that does not restrict what the PC can do, games that don't cost an arm and a leg to get into and keep playing, a game that gives control back to the gm, a game that can be easily modified without breaking, and so forth. In other words, a whole lot of gamers are looking for games that have an amazing similarity to BRP even with different rules. C&C is class and level, but it also has a great deal of flexibility and is playable without a lot of constant rules lawyering; even though it shares the same resolution system with 3.5 it apparently plays with a very similar 'feel' as many simpler games. I see that Sorloc says he spent a lot of time at the ICE forums, and HARP is yet another game that has a lot of the factors listed above. Hey, they are cropping up all over the place. So there may be more unity among gamers than first appears...we may have different tastes as far as minutiae, but a very large percentage of us have a preference for a certain feel, a certain playability without a lot of hassle. I feel a cameraderie with the guys over at Troll Lords because we share the same attitude even though we prefer different games and systems. So it might be best to not look at it as us against them; I think there might be a broad swell of discontent against a certain attitude; a discontent held in common by many of the people that share this great hobby of ours. Maybe there is hope, and anyway it ain't over till the fat lady sings, and she hasn't sung yet as far as I can tell.

[Simlasa]

It's funny to me that D&D is moving to be more like World Of Warcraft... since to me World Of Warcraft seemed a lot like D&D.
A lot of the things that annoy me about D&D (levels, classes, reliance on 'magic' items) seems to really serve video games concerns... levels give the designers an excuse to control the rate at which you move through the limited game content ("You can't go there yet, you're too low level") and classes force players to develop characters along predictable lines by creating 'niches ("We need a meatshield, go find a warrior"). All the concentration on magic items makes appeals to consumptive/collector mindset ("If I can just finish this quest I'll get that great shield") and keeps players clamoring to renew their subscriptions.
Those things seem to serve the limitations of video games so well... that I wonder over how they originated with a pen & paper game that shouldn't need any such restrictions.

[Enpeze]

Originally Posted by Simlasa

It's funny to me that D&D is moving to be more like World Of Warcraft... since to me World Of Warcraft seemed a lot like D&D.
A lot of the things that annoy me about D&D (levels, classes, reliance on 'magic' items) seems to really serve video games concerns... levels give the designers an excuse to control the rate at which you move through the limited game content ("You can't go there yet, you're too low level") and classes force players to develop characters along predictable lines by creating 'niches ("We need a meatshield, go find a warrior"). All the concentration on magic items makes appeals to consumptive/collector mindset ("If I can just finish this quest I'll get that great shield") and keeps players clamoring to renew their subscriptions.
Those things seem to serve the limitations of video games so well... that I wonder over how they originated with a pen & paper game that shouldn't need any such restrictions.

I guess this is the way the average gamer likes his roleplaying game. See all these juvenile hypes about superninjaherowhatever mangas, invincible, armored, walking mechwarriors and so on. I am playing a little bit WoW since 2 years and I got in contact with other players. Most of them (not all and mostly juveniles) like to show around THEIR T4 equipment, THEIR mighty hammers, THEIR epic superfast mounts. They run around like peachicks. Its like in real life, if one buys a porsche sports car, instead of a practical car. (only much cheaper for a fee of 13 bucks/month)

So I am quite sure in the future we will see that pen and paper rpgs and MMORPGs are melting together even more than 4.0 and WoW does it now. This I meant with my post (in another thread) that BRP will not have much chance against the primordial power of a system like D&D. But I hope it will at least have its fair shair of the rest of the market.