Retro I win: Powers and Perils

[DrPraetor]

Baali? The fucking NINETIES? You call that nostalgia? You peons can go ahead and miss the Clinton Administration - I'm going to start missing the Soviet Union.

Powers and Perils was an Avalon Hill RPG that came out in 1984; it was abandoned 1) because it was a total commercial flop and 2) because Avalon Hill entered into some kind of agreement to slowly kill RuneQuest instead. Powers & Perils, although a commercial disaster, was a favorite of the cognoscenti of the time, with an out-sized influence on such diverse future den-favorites as Dominions, Champions and Shadowrun. In a fit of coolness, the author had published the entire shebang here:
http://abroere.xs4all.nl/pnp/

Let's open this sucker up!

The Character Book
Unlike modern roleplaying games, which tend to contain many pages of setting, atmosphere, and other filler to lull you into a false sense of complacency, P&P gets straight to the point with a one-paragraph advisory to learn the rules of the game, before you play it.

Then, you have a "helpful" attempt to tell you in-which-order the rules should be consulted to generate a new character, along with another reminder to read them first. We're going to get back to this in a bit, but these dense lists of numbered references to other text sections are typical of the fun-to-read style that made P&P such a hit at the time.

Without explanation we jump into attributes. There's a brief expository paragraph about how these attributes determine your "phenotype". Notice: women have an Intelligence penalty, effectively. Compared to a Man, a Woman has -3 Strength, +1 Stamina, +1 Dexterity, +2 Agility, -2 Intelligence, +2 Will, +2 Empathy and +1 Constitution. Women aren't very smart, but they are stubborn and emotional. Also they run faster than men - don't ask. Modern readers may stop at this point (we're on page 5), but keep in mind that this material was written in 1884... okay, 1984. And it was revised by the author last year when it went into the public domain. Let's take a look at some of the early highlights:

Constitution: You roll (2D10)*(1D10)/2 to get your Constitution. This is going to be a big component of your hit points; the game is lethal, so you are going to roll 10-100 for your Constitution and get that out of the way early. This gives you an early taste of how capricious this is going to be.

Halfbreeds: Now, you have a 10% chance of being a halfbreed. There are no halfbreed Dwarves, but no rules for halfbreed Elves or Faerries. Halfbreeds are pretty superior to vanilla PCs in any case - this is your first chance to roll a die to see if get to be someone special or not. You'll have several more, don't worry. Anyway, if you luck out straight off the bat, you then get a bunch of stuff explaining about the MEL and EL of various magical abilities you might get depending on your parentage.

Maximum Ability: Roll 2D6 to determine how good you are. Remember when you rolled a crate of D10s to determine your innate ability scores? None of that mattered much, because you are now going to roll 2D6, to see how much you get to multiply all those numbers by. You get 2D6+14 "multiples" to assign to each of those 8 attributes; so if you get a 12 your attributes average ~36; if you get a 2 your attributes average ~22. This is becoming a pattern. In a lesser variant of the same thing, you will also roll % dice to determine your station (another 10% chance of being significantly better than the default), and 2D10 for extra points on the bizarro priorities table.

Special Events: Once again, you have a chance to not be a peon. Basically, you have 3 rolls on this table, each of which has a 7% chance of being "Special Attribute", which is going to give you some magic powers so you don't suck. If you luck out, you then have a 10% chance of getting something really awesome; more likely, you are Aquaman.

The balance of this chapter is just lists of numbers, tables and formulae. Fortunately, there are few decisions here, because there's little effort made to explain what any of this stuff is going to mean or why you're going to care. Dodging blows, because it uses the dexterity bonus, is described here, along with some tables that you'll need the Combat book to remotely understand.

In a previous version of P&P, you got to be an Alfar if you were an Elf and happened to be tall. This was a 10% chance of being awesome which has been removed from the game.

It's late and I had forgotten how skills worked. I'll resume later, for now, let's try making a character! How about a Female Elf.

Str 5
Sta 11
Dex 9
Agi 17
Int 10
Wil 11
Elo 14
Emp 20
Con 10 x 2.5 = 25
App 18 x 4 = 72
(these are 2D10 + the modifiers)

This is sorta okay - Emp determines how good you are at Sidh magic, so she'll be a decent magician if I set that up properly.

* For Age I roll 03 - so I'm only 17. Well, that sucks actually, but moving on. On the plus side I get an 82 for Station - so she's Station 3, which is respectable.

* Now, only two special events because she's under age 20. No whammies! I get a 08 (nothing) and a 38 - recently escaped from prison. So she's a hot 17 year old elf girl recently escaped from jail. I think I'm supposed to roll on the Felon table - 73 means I'm accused of Murder, 96 means I'm guilty. The victim was Station 2, so there is a reward of 11 SC for my capture in a neighboring land. That's a plot hook at least.

* For maximum ability to distribute, I roll a 4, meaning my ticks only total to 18. On top of my low age I roll a 6 for advances. This means I get only 34 + 3 + 6 = 43 points of advances. I'm going to put 5 pts into Wealth, 8 pts in combat experience, 10 points into expertise (only 200 pts!) and 20 into char points to get 75. She's a 17 year old girl, she isn't going to know much. I'll distribute these in the next section after a brief aside.

* Since I'm otherwise useless, I'm going to be a Sidh Mage. Looking into Book II, I see there is a break point for having a primary requisite of at least 66. So, I'll raise my Em to 66 (using up 46 of my 75 char points). It costs me 150 of my initial 200 expertise to pay for the apprenticeship, so I only have 50 points left to buy actual skills (ouch.)

I'll resume this at a later date.

[Starmaker]

Compared to a Man, a Woman has -3 Strength, +1 Stamina, +1 Dexterity, +2 Agility, -2 Intelligence, +2 Will, +2 Empathy and +1 Constitution. Women aren't very smart, but they are stubborn and emotional. Also they run faster than men - don't ask.

Looks like women are better! You can buy up stats with a crazy amount of char points, and women have a +4 bonus in total!

Looking into Book II, I see there is a break point for having a primary requisite of at least 66. So, I'll raise my Em to 66 (using up 46 of my 75 char points).

Where' the break point rule? I'm not going to try to parse that shit without alcohol ice-cream.

75 char points? Looks like you can be any single-stat class if advances permit. As unlucky as you are with the advance roll, you can be a shaman right now, and you could've been a wizard if you were luckier on that particular roll, no matter initial stats.

It costs me 150 of my initial 200 expertise to pay for the apprenticeship

175 points for Sidh apprenticeship unless I'm missing a discount somewhere. Double ouch.

I'm going to put 5 pts into Wealth

Right. Any MC Referee who runs Powers and Perils will immediately take away any excess wealth your character might have, you munchkin.

[John Magnum]

Wait a second. There's separate stats for Dexterity and Agility, AND for Stamina and Constitution? And then HP is separate from both?

[rasmuswagner]

Wait a second. There's separate stats for Dexterity and Agility, AND for Stamina and Constitution? And then HP is separate from both?

Yes. Having a fuckload of stats makes the game more realistic. People still write games from that retarded viewpoint today.

[DrPraetor]

The thing you notice about P&P is that it is absolutely chock-full of break points; and unlike Champions they are in all kinds of F'd up places. Important break points are found in the following parts of the text:
- "Starting Experience and Expertise", right at the begining of the magic book, has break points are primary requisites of 41, 51, 66, 81 and 101. That 66 is annoying since it breaks the /10 you'd want for your other stats. These are furthermore *huge* break points since they determine your starting pile of magic.
- "The Bonus Table", which has break point at 16, 31, 51, 76 and 106 instead. The whole system of "stat bonuses" is somewhat mysterious, especially when those stat bonuses are multiplied by TWENTY as they often are. My stamina is 77, so my stamina bonus is 4, so my stamina bonus TIMES TWENTY is 80, which is crucially different from 77.
- Other formula tend to have breakpoint at 11, 21, etc. But these are often sums of attributes, so for example (I+W+Em)/10(RU) comes up a lot, for example in Mana Level which is used all over the place. My Elf wants an Em of 66 (costs 46), and a W of 31 (costs 20), therefore since 66+31+14 = 111, she wants an I of 14 (costs 3 points), to hit the next break point.

In the book I just downloaded Sidh apprenticeship only costs 150 for an Elf.

Anyway, will try and resume the actual review tomorrow, with the skills and problem solving sections.

[Starmaker]

"Starting Experience and Expertise", right at the begining of the magic book, has break points are primary requisites of 41, 51, 66, 81 and 101.

So, apprenticeship also grants points upon "completion", the higher the stat, the more points. How amazingly realistic! I am ashamed to think I would have loved that idea when I was 12.

In the book I just downloaded Sidh apprenticeship only costs 150 for an Elf.

That must the the 2.0 rtf then.

Acceptance as an Apprentice
Characters must be accepted for training. The chance he is accepted by a master of the path desired is given below.
MAGIC PATH ACCEPTANCE CHANCE
Wizardry Maximum I + 20
Sidh Magic Maximum Em + 20
Shaman Maximum Will + (Native Em*2)
Kotothi Shaman Maximum Will + (Native E*2)
Shadow Magic ((Maximum W + Maximum Em)/2)+25
Priest See the appropriate section
If the roll is higher than the value determined, he failed to find a mentor. He may not start as that type of magic-user.

:awesome::awesome::awesome::awesome:

No fantasy game is complete without covering the history of supernatural powers extant in the mythos. This section provides the basics of that Cosmology.

That pretentious hot mess of a cosmology section (page 217 onwards) makes me want to hit whoever wrote it with something heavy (non-fatally).

[Seerow]

Constitution: You roll (2D10)*(1D10)/2 to get your Constitution. This is going to be a big component of your hit points; the game is lethal, so you are going to roll 10-100 for your Constitution and get that out of the way early. This gives you an early taste of how capricious this is going to be.

Isn't it actually 1-100? If you roll 2d10 and get a 2, and then a 1 on the 1d10, that's 2 hp, divided by 2 for one.

Or if the two d10 are supposed to be percentile (in which case 10 is the minimum), then your maximum would be 100*10/2 = 500.


Either way, the range is even worse than you made it out to be.

[DrPraetor]

Seerow - it's approximately as random but the average is lower. It's somewhat more like rolling 1D70, but you do get occasionally a very-high result.

Also, the actual formula for HP was I think (C+St+S)/4. You tend to get at least 10 hp one way or another; I think you're supposed to scrap the character and start over if you don't.

[catacomb librarian]

Hello everyone,

nice to see this brief P&P thread on this forum.

I recently wrote some material about this game, you can find it here:

http://mesmerizedbysirens.blogspot.it/2 ... of-ad.html

http://mesmerizedbysirens.blogspot.it/2 ... -main.html

http://mesmerizedbysirens.blogspot.it/2 ... ntasy.html


http://mesmerizedbysirens.blogspot.it/2 ... nt-to.html

there are others on that site, but now i forgot where.

bye

[Prudii Kyramud]

was that guy googling himself to find out if anybody was talking about him?