How is Chaosium Basic Role Playing compared to Hero System?

[Hugh Neilson]

I recall the Traveller system being pretty lethal, but we never got into Traveller (or any Sci Fi games, really).

[Duke Bushido]

36 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

I recall the Traveller system being pretty lethal, but we never got into Traveller (or any Sci Fi games, really).

 

 

It is indeed!  Realistically, you can expect to be killed by a gun, and rather quickly!   Frankly, Vlassic Traveller is our preferred system for westerns for pretty much this reason.

 

Not because we want to spend  hours making Character after character, but because when a PC is staring into the bore of a Peacemaker, we want the player to understand that the character is in mortal danger.  No 'well, a called shot might allow' or 'the damage multiiplier for a shot to this or that location' or any other "this might not be so bad unless"  stuff, but "if that thing goes off, I am going to die."

 

The only way to get that kind of tension in Champions is to triple the damage dice of every weapon.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Frankly, Vlassic Traveller is our preferred system for westerns for pretty much this reason.

 

Mmm pickles.  Seroiusly though, some systems do lend themselves to more lethal combat than others, although if you use the optional rules for hero like hit locations, disabling, impairing, bleeding, etc its quite lethal as well.  Particularly given the lack of resistant defenses (unless you're Clint Eastwood in A Few Dollars More) and mortal level stats.

[Duke Bushido]

15 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

An exception:  LBB Traveller had a fairly involved character generation process (including what was arguably the first "life path" system in the industry) but was not only quite deadly during play, it could even shortcut things by occasionally killing you during creation. 

 

While I apreciate the humor of death suring character generation-  it even got a mention in Murphy's Rules, back in the day (I really miss Murphy's rules.  I could have an absolute ball posting absolutely broken modern End builds, but I guess that's what Tick Tock is for these days.     )

 

But it always bugged me how Fugate and company- and by extension, pretty much the bulk of the fandom back then- missed that the whole reason was so that the universe wasn't filled with nonogenarian adventurers with tons of the skills that Miller felt should be rare- like the "lifetime,specialties" of a character as opposed to a list of everything that character had ever learned how to do.  😕

 

the idea was that the risk if having to start all over might discourage players from trying for forty-year (or more) careers.

 

even Wiseman seemed to miss that, but in his defense: he was writinf his adaptation for a points-build system; such systems make the lifepath /career choice thing more a narrative thing than a necessary part of character building.

 

though- for anyone who has not read GURPS: Traveller- he did make a nod to it (though I can't remember if it was in the introduction or the character generation sections):

 

long time players may remember the survival roll from the classic Traveller rules of long ago.  GURPS Traveller does not by default require such a roll.  Those wishing to include such a mechanic should, upon completion of their character, roll a D6.  On a 6, they should wad up their character sheet and start over.

 

(Or words to this effect)

 

 

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Mmm pickles. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

if you use the optional rules for hero like hit locations, disabling, impairing, bleeding, etc its quite lethal as well. 

 

Yes....,,sort of

 

You can add an extra roll to the mix- hit location-  and hope you get one of....  Eh; I can't remember!  (I don't generally use it, mostly because of the extra roll)  was it... Two?  Three locations that give a significant damage multiplier?

 

And adding bleeding (something else I don't generally use because it adds more tracking).  Wven then- you've got to deal twenty BODY to Joe Average to kill him, meaning that, given STUN multipliers, etc, you're got one party member (PC ir NPC party; either one) dedicated to "double-tapping all the unconscious foes lying about, because KA is pretty good for CON Stunning and KO'ing opponents in a hurry.

 

Short version is yes; you can throw more and more steps into the mix to make Champions sort of as lethal as something else, with the sacrifice of experience, but if you want lethality without added complication, well there is always--

 

Well, pretty much everything else, really.  Though honestly, even with CoC on the table, I think Boot Hill was probably the most lethal RPG ever written.  I would have played it more, I think, if everything else hadnt been such a mess with it.

 

I am not knocking Champions by any means, mind you: it is one of the four games I always come back to (I guess technically 3, since one of them is pocket box Car Wars).  But because of it's superhero roots, it was designed from the get-go to minimize lethality, and making it more so by adding extra steps is still adding extra steps to one of the more sluggish combat systems out there.  Traveller:  you hit!  Roll damage, and toss in that green die iver there so we can see what Characteristic it applies to....

 

Endurance for eleven points!

 

Jeff; what's your END?

 

Nine.

 

Okay, Raymond Duqenesque lies dead, sprawled across his desk; the electric scent of laser fire and unsettling smell of burned flesh begun to fill the office....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rich McGee]

5 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

the idea was that the risk if having to start all over might discourage players from trying for forty-year (or more) careers.

If so, it completely failed to do that.  People were using the software to generate PCs by the hundreds even in the LBB days, and that despite the Stone Age junk that passed for computers back then.  One of the most misguided design choices ever, rivalled by gems like Richard Garfield saying "well, if we make the card rare no one will ever have enough in a deck to notice it's a little too strong" before Magic first released.

 

From a 2023 vantage point, Miller also had some absurd ideas about far-future high-tech medicine's effect on life expectancy and aging in general.  If you have the money for it (which few people do, of course) we can do at least as well as his fictional anagathics right now, and what we'll be capable of by the time the 3rd Imperium forms can't even be predicted.  I suspect younger him would be pretty amazed by the average working ages today, for that matter.  In 1977 65 was still a pretty firm mandatory retirement age and dipping out early at 60 wasn't uncommon.

5 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I guess technically 3, since one of them is pocket box Car Wars

Hooey on disqualifying Car Wars.    That game is as much a roleplaying game as you want it to be, and that's without GURPS Autoduel (or Autoduel Champions) even in the picture.  We ran multiple campaigns back in my high school days, and were still meeting on breaks in my freshman and sophomore college years.  If the main GM hadn't gotten married we might have gone on further.  Even those solo adventures they published were light RPGs in disguise - better than any of the Tunnels & Trolls ones I ever played, too. 

[Duke Bushido]

2 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

 

Hooey on disqualifying Car Wars.    That game is as much a roleplaying game as you want it to be, 

 

 

It is.

 

And since i don't want it to be, I have disqualified it.  That and checkers are my last bits of tactical gaming joy, and I am not going to sully the tactical,beauty with a three-hit-points RPG. 

 

 

 

[Rich McGee]

Just now, Duke Bushido said:

That and checkers are my last bits of tactical gaming joy, and I am not going to sully the tactical,beauty with a three-hit-points RPG.

Hey, it could be as much as nine HP if you spring for the fancy improved body armor.    Or just plain "a lot" if you're using Autoduel Champions supers, some of those have more HP than starting OSR characters even before damage resistance.  Some of my favorite CW fictions were those magazine articles with the troubleshooter group full of secret supers, even if they don't fit the overall setting all that smoothly.

 

What happened to your other period wargames?  Star Fleet Battles (or Starfire if you wanted fleet actions), Battletech, all the AvHill and SPI and GDW stuff still floating around?  Not to mention the other microgame format stuff like Ogre/GEV/Battlesuit or War In the Ice?  So many options back when CW was young.  For all the variety of board games these days they just don't have the same appeal to me.  

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

Hey, it could be as much as nine HP if you spring for the fancy improved body armor. 

 

Just the Pocket Boxes, Sir:

 

Car Wars, Truck Stop; Sunday Drivers.

 

All others are apocryphal cash grabs.  

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

 you're using Autoduel Champions

 

Never!

 

I own it.

 

I understand its historical significance.

 

I love most of Allston's stuff for any game and from any magazine.

 

And it is my belief that Autoduel Champions was one of the worst things to ever come from the hobby.

 

(Yeah; I understand what opinion means and fully expect that no one should heed the unsolicited opinion of another, and likely two-thirds of the solicicted opiniona, either.  I also believe it was a solid execution of an absolutely _horrible_ idea.)

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

What happened to your other period wargames?  Star Fleet Battles

 

As players aged and moved on, and younger and younger people replaced them. I found less and less people who played SFB.  Hell, my local game store stopped carrying it completely about the time Champions entered the ICE Age.  When I asked Fred (the owner) about it, he said he hadn't sold a copy in three or four years, so he cut a deal on his remaining inventory to some guy who was still buying things (mostly minis), and never looked back.

 

Over the years, four moves, and one house fire since then, I dont even have my meager collection of SFB stuff, either.  (Though I always preferred replaceable-via-Xerox pasteboard counters to actual minis)

 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

(or Starfire if you wanted fleet actions)

 

I only ever played Starfire solo, and mostly because I enjoyed the "mapping a universe" expansion stuff for it.

 

It did not survive the immediately post-wedding move; haven't seen it in almost thirty years.

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

Battletech,

 

Until I met our friend Chris Goodwin, I was the only person I knew into mechs.  (Do remember I live in rural Georgia).  Thus, while I enjoyed reading articles related to it on the various gaming magazines, I never owned or even played it.  If I had the slightest ability to paint beyond spray cans, I might have collected the minis, but with no such talent, I couldn't even justify the cost of just that. 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

all the AvHill

 

No.  Just no.

 

I am not into historical recreation nor do I enjoy that level of meticulous planning.  SFB was great (and Car Wars still is) because these are more-or-less "you are in the captain's chair, making snap seat-of-the-pants decisions based on a very small handful of options" and usually play out in an hour or so.  That has always been my sweet spot for tactical games.

 

Besides, from what I recall of wargamming conventions. I don't own enough horizontal surfaces to get get into anything from Avalon Hill-- I might not even own enough floor!

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

and SPI

 

The fact that I cannot think of a single tactical game from SPI tells me pretty much what I need to know:  if it didn't catch my interest in the shops (when there still shops), I doubt I would be more interested now.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

and GDW stuff still floating around? 

 

I own Imperium and ... Was it Belt Strike?  Strikers?  Both?  Anyway, I own three GDW Traveller-esque games that saw so much use they exist now as manilla folders of Xeroxes of the original pages; some pages as Xeroxes of earlier Xeroxes.  That is how much use those games saw- we litterally _wore the booklets out_ (and the maps, and the counters, and even the dice look kind of sketchy).

 

And I haven't found another soul in the last twenty years who was interested in taking a stab at them.  For what it's worth, they just don't have an enjoyable solataire aspect the was Starfire did. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Rich McGee said:

Not to mention the other microgame format stuff like Ogre/GEV/Battlesuit or War In the Ice?

 

Played them all.  Didn't really enjoy them save for one particular group that made Ogre more fun than it was with other groups, but even then, they eventually scattered to the winds.  Still, though, they weren't really "my thing."

 

The thing is people who don't enjoy tactical games in general tend to think all tactical games are kind of the same.  The reality is that this is like saying all superhero RPGs or sci-fi RPGs are equally interchangeable when they really aren't.  Anyone who has played both Universe and Space Opera or Star Frontiers and Traveller can vouch for that.

 

I have a very limited enjoyment of tactical games myself, but I do have a sweet spot:  simple rules, quick decisions, limited options, playtime of not more (and preferably less) than two hours, and little to no "historical recreation."

 

There just isnt much of that out there anymore, and no reasonably local people who play.

 

 

[Rich McGee]

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Was it Belt Strike?  Strikers?  Both? 

There was Belter, which was principally an economic development game where you were playing as a small mining business expanding into Sol's asteroid belt.  Good multiplayer, marginal solo play.  I knew several Monopoly fans who loved it despite hating every other thing GDW made.  Tended to be quite long to finish though.

 

Striker was the miniatures rules set, aimed at 15mm but adaptable to other scales.  Served as an engine for bigger fights for Traveller mercenary campaigns, mostly.

 

Beltstrike was a Traveller RPG adventure module.

 

Maybe Snapshot rather than Striker?  That was basically a streamlined Traveller RPG personal combat system adapted to board game scenarios centered on shipboard combat.

 

Imperium and Dark Nebula shared a system but covered different campaigns and time periods, but I enjoyed both.  Been through three copies of Imperium from two different publishers over teh years, although I found the Avalanche press version inferior to GDW.  Prettier, but inferior.

 

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

I have a very limited enjoyment of tactical games myself, but I do have a sweet spot:  simple rules, quick decisions, limited options, playtime of not more (and preferably less) than two hours, and little to no "historical recreation."

Asteroid might have been my favorite GDW board game, and had decent solo rules published somewhere.  It fulfills those requirements nicely and has a lot of replay value.

 

Did you ever try the Dwarfstar small-format games from Heritage?  Six of the eight of them fulfill your stated criteria pretty well (the others are surprisingly sandbox-y choose-your-paragraph adventures), with Star Viking ranking up there with Imperium in my all-time favorites list.  Seven of the eight are still available for free download, with Dragon Rage (one of the best of the lot IMO) sadly being lost to licensing to a company that did one new fancy edition print run and never reprinted when it sold out.  Outpost Gamma is probably the lightest and quickest of the lot.

[Duke Bushido]

3 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

 

Did you ever try the Dwarfstar small-format games from Heritage?  

 

 

Let me put this in perspective:

 

Five hours, forty-seven minutes.

 

It was effectively six hours one-way from my house to what was back in the day the only "permanent" game store in the state.   They popped up all the time, here and there, and sometimes I could make it before they folded, but none of them lasted more than a few months except the one in Atlanta that lasted eight or nine years before it, too, folded.

 

I didn't try a lot.  Most of what I owned was bought from adds in the back of gaming magazines (which also dried up eventually), but even that I didn't do a lot of, because the cost became cost-plus-postage (and there was never a sale price via mail order) plus post insurance, and I was loathe to risk it on stuff I knew nothing about, so....

 

 

The only thing I tried related to the Star Vikings era was....  Oh, crap...  Well, yeah, it _was_ crap, but I can't remember the name of it.  It was during the Fugate Era of Traveller, and it was....  I can't remember what they were called, but it was also the name of the game.  "Battle Sleds" or some such thing.  Anyway, one side had Battle Sleds- massive ships that had traded Drives and fuel allowances for additional weapons, while the other side had small nimble ships with one or two weapons.  _Allegedly_, it was extensively

 

Battle Riders!  That was it!  Man, what a completely-untested bit of,absolute crap _that_ was!

 

It was sort of like playing chess, except the guy playing the traditional fighter craft got to use his pieces _and_ a framing hammer.  Every other turn, he was allowed to randomly pick one of your chess pieces and smash it with a hammer.  Continue playing.

 

At any rate, it proved to me that it wasn't even safe to spend money on a company known for excellent games.

 

 

 

 

[Rich McGee]

We had no game stores at all until the mid-80s.  I bought my gaming stuff through a mix of indie book, comic and especially toy stores, and when I went away to college from the actual game store right across the street from my dorm.  The variety of gaming stuff carried by all those small unfocused businesses was better than any game store I've ever seen, although I never did get a chance to see the Complete Strategist in its glory days. 

32 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

Battle Riders!

That was a dog, agreed.  Its contemporary Brilliant Lances wasn't much better if any, and the whole Traveller franchise was headed in to an all-time low with the "New Era" stuff, which also included the fairly awful Striker 2 miniatures rules.  Between an entire edition of Traveller games being duds and the legal problems that Gygax caused them with Dangerous Journeys (which was awful anyway, and sold poorly during its brief lifespan) GDW went into a death spiral and was out of business by 1996.  23 years of putting out more than one new product a month and dead because of a few too many flops at once in a period where the whole gaming industry was being stressed by the CCG boom Magic started.

 

The back half of the 90s was a very grim period for a lot of older publishers, as Hasbro/WotC's ownership of D&D displays.    

[Duke Bushido]

Never even heard of dangerous journeys.

What was that?

 

 

[assault]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

Never even heard of dangerous journeys.

What was that?

 

 

The fantasy RPG Gary Gygax tried to produce after being kicked out of TSR.

Edited January 2 by assault

[Old Man]

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Never even heard of dangerous journeys.

What was that?

 

 

 

After his ejection from TSR, Gygax developed a new game and took it to GDW.  It was originally called Dangerous Dimensions, but was changed to DJ after TSR threatened to sue.  Then TSR sued anyway claiming DJ was a derivative work of D&D.  The lawsuit was utterly baseless but GDW didn't have the resources to fight TSR (They Sue Regularly) and was forced to hand over all printed DJ material, which I assume was then sent to a landfill.

 

(It never ceases to amaze me how much our hobby is dominated by copyright law, lawyers, and corporate suits who hold their customers in open contempt.)

 

Oddly enough, DJ shared little with D&D other than being a TTRPG.  As I understand it, DJ was an attempt at a universal system that used only d6s and d10s and had point buy character creation.

[Duke Bushido]

4 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

(It never ceases to amaze me how much our hobby is dominated by copyright law, lawyers, and corporate suits who hold their customers in open contempt.)

 

 

 

Our _country_, Sir.  Our entire country.

 

[Rich McGee]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

Our _country_, Sir.  Our entire country.

 

Too true, too true.

 

FWIW, the game line was technically Dangerous Journeys, but the few published books were all for Mythus, which was intended to be the core fantasy setting for the game engine.  In pre-release there were promises of similar scifi and horror settings using the DJ engine, although I'm not sure they got farther than conceptual work.  Gygax also wrote a trilogy of novels for Mythus that aren't bad for fantasy-detective stories set in a weird alt-Egypt.  Sorry, Aegypt.    Not quite up there with the best of his Gord the Rogue books, but enjoyable enough. 

 

6 hours ago, Old Man said:

Then TSR sued anyway claiming DJ was a derivative work of D&D. 

That's interesting.  When the legal action was being talked about back in the day I recall the buzz centering on Gygagx having signed a non-compete contract that kept him from developing RPGs for X period of years, and DD/DJ/Mythus were released so soon after it expired that TSR could plausibly claim development had taken place during the period.  Which might well still be spurious, but it would be a very different thing than it being a supposedly derivative work.  

 

6 hours ago, Old Man said:

As I understand it, DJ was an attempt at a universal system that used only d6s and d10s and had point buy character creation.

It was definitely intended to be a multi-genre game engine, hence the advertising teasers for horror and sci setting to accompany Mythus fantasy.  I forget the exact die mechanics - one of my housemates was in love with the system and tried running it for us a few times and I vaguely recall hating the game mechanics although the specifics are lost to time and old age.  The Mythus setting itself (which was pretty much pseudo-historical with strong fantasy elements) was pretty interesting though.

 

Wrenching this thread back on topic, there's a brief review of the new BRP over here that might be helpful.  Comparing it the "yellow book" version it sounds a little more adjustable, but it's hard to say how much so.

[Duke Bushido]

11 hours ago, Old Man said:

who hold their customers in open contempt.)

 

Though I confess, that part can apply to me as well, particularly when I am working at the builsing supply house.  After all, it is no coincidence that you can rearrange "customers" into "store scum."

 

 

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Old Man said:

 As I understand it, DJ was an attempt at a universal system that used only d6s and d10s and had point buy character creation.

 

 

I hope it was better than those editions of Traveller that used d6 and d10.  Those were _awful_.

 

 

Edited January 2 by Duke Bushido

[Old Man]

39 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

I hope it was better than those editions of Traveller that used d6 and d10.  Those were _awful_.

 

I managed to miss those, but it's not like the system in LBB Traveller was stellar.  Ship combat was okay, but personal combat was extraordinarily lethal.  The strength of Traveller is the setting, in all its humanocentric dieselpunk glory.

[Duke Bushido]

For what it is worth,I liked the lethality.  It encouraged role play over gun play when things started going south.

 

 

[Rich McGee]

4 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

For what it is worth,I liked the lethality.  It encouraged role play over gun play when things started going south.

 

 

Agreed, although the other side effect was to plan to have every advantage possible when violence was the most (or only) viable option.  Really taught people how to plan ambushes and distractions and use dirty tricks and sabotage...and plot out your withdrawal if things still go wrong.  Never fight unprepared, and don't fight at all if you can talk your way out of having to.

[Duke Bushido]

Bingo.

[Ninja-Bear]

9 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

Agreed, although the other side effect was to plan to have every advantage possible when violence was the most (or only) viable option.  Really taught people how to plan ambushes and distractions and use dirty tricks and sabotage...and plot out your withdrawal if things still go wrong.  Never fight unprepared, and don't fight at all if you can talk your way out of having to.

Oh so it’s D&D then! 😁 I’ll dodge now!

[Rich McGee]

3 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Oh so it’s D&D then! 😁 I’ll dodge now!

OSR grogs frequently boast of how much "smarter" and more "tactical" they have to be when playing because of OD&D's deadliness, particularly compared to WotC editions.  IME they're trash players compared to the old-school Traveller mob.  No magical healing in Traveller (barring a GM who lets psionics in) so that crutch is absent, your "hit points" never increase to let you shrug off damage, and the baddies are carrying the same weapons and armor your are - ie, the best ones they can afford and get away with carrying at the local law level.  

[Ninja-Bear]

@Rich McGee and @Duke Bushido and anyone else, did you guys design you own Battlemechs? Or at least customize them? I find that building your own that fits into 3025 era (starting) has a certain feel and is similar to building a good character.

[Rich McGee]

Sometimes.  Depended on the group I was playing with.  Many people these days have a fixed attitude that playing DIY mechs is cheating, and some will even balk at any customization outside of RPGs, but that was much rarer back in the early days of the game.  It's trivially easy to break the design system and wind up with some stuff that never gets used, particularly back before all the tech proliferation.  Even today it's too easy to build something that makes the all the published designs look like they were designed by idiots, but the jankiness and flaws of the official designs is supposedly part of the charm.  I don't see it myself, but at least a design system exists for those who want it, unlike (say) Star Fleet Battles.

 

There are reasons I always preferred Starfire to SFB, and Mekton to BT.