29 October 2013

Conversion Notes from BRP Mecha to Pendragon

The first two sessions of my Pendragon and BRP Mecha mashup were conversions from Pendragon to BRP, with percentile skills, a damage bonus, and a fuckton of differently stated out weapons, for both human scale and mecha scale.

I felt that this was annoying, for me, I don't really think my players cared as two of them are essential still noobies to table-top rpgs and the other is my wife who like Pathfinder more than I do. But in the interests of making things simpler, I decided to go back to the way Pendragon determines damage with melee and thrown weapons, strength plus size all divided by 6 to give a number of d6s to roll for damage, with some weapons adding or subtracting one or two dices. Very simple as now the only distinguishing thing between one weapon or the other is its name and the skill of the wielder. The problem is that I did not want have the way mecha determined damage be too radically different from the PKs, as the formula is damage of weapon plus damage bonus, and the armor values differ between Pendragon and BRP.

Anyways, too much rambling?

As I know that BRP and Pendragon have different armor values for the same type of armor, I assumed that I would have to change the way that mecha calculate armor if I change the way that melee damage is determined, and that I would have to convert the damage for ranged weapons as well. As an aside, who the hell wants to roll a d2 for damage?

I decided that since mecha scale is explicitly stated to be 10 times human scale, that I would determine damage similar to Pendragon for PKs.
Strength plus Size divided by 60, because I would rather not be rolling 10 to 30 d6s for damage per attack every combat round.
Then I through the magic of picking a baseline of how much I want a ranged weapon to deal at the size of mecha I'm doing created this handy dandy chart for the ranged weapons.



Basic Roleplaying Mecha
King Arthur Pendragon
1d2
2d6
1d4
3d6
1d6
4d6
1d8
5d6
1d10
6d6
2d6
7d6
2d8
8d6
3d6
9d6
4d6
10d6
5d6
11d6
 
Next I puzzled out how I want to convert armor, once again I just picked a starting point.
There are 5 grades of mecha armor and 9 grades of knight armor. Then I decided that since the mecha I have stated out for this campaign did relatively less damage than a knight would be expected to do, I matched up the armor that would be most commonly worn by a knight, mail with an armor value of 10 with 5d6 of damage from an average knight, with the level of armor I wanted the rundown ancient mecha in the campaign taking into account that these mecha would be expected to do 2d6 of damage. However I  had to take into account that in BRP Mecha armor is also determined by the size class of the mecha, or kaiju. Additionally, a chivalrous knight applies their armor of chivalry bonus to their mecha.



Type of armor and expected uses for it
Armor per SIZ Class
Scales and Fur, only for kaiju and other large living things
1
“Steel,” the default of knightly mecha
2
A well to do knight’s mecha
3
The armor of a perfectly maintained mecha found abandoned in the wastes
5
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
6
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
7
Probably magical, gift from a faerie noble, or worse
8
Definitely magical
9