Nope. Not ready yet. But it is close.

However, as long as I have your attention, I need to get a lot more eyeballs on this site and participating in the playtest. Lots more viewpoints, especially from outside the EABA-centric core we currently have. Several hundred new people would be a good start. Several thousand would be preferable.

I can bump up the announcements made on other sites like RPG.net, but that is only going to get a handful of people.

Suggestions? Volunteers?

Edit: July 29 2011
This is more or less the final version of the advanced combat chapter. There is room for change, addition or improvement if I missed anything vital. Additions and changes since the original version include the "design your own melee skill" section and an addition for "Aiiiy! I'm on fire" sorts of combat effects.

Meh...

Well, I can't give you more eyeballs. I could hint this website in a forum I usually visit, but this would only mean 1 person at best (so +2 eyeballs).

Oh, and my brother checks the pdfs, so that is +2...

admin wrote:


I mentioned it on the Google+ beta. Most of my online gaming group is there (as well as Facebook), but I don't know if any of them will bite.

I'll try to get my regular group interested (+10-12 or more eyeballs) ... they're computer literate and hang out at all sorts of interesting RPG places, just not the ones that would lead them to BTRC. They think of me as the BTRC/EABA guy, and let me do all the heavy lifting there (they've been at me to start it up again, when the current Fading Suns arc I am running is finished), but they all have their own favourite systems ... and that's where they hang out/comment.

But I'll try

Phil

Hey, send them over. Tell them there might be stuff in the system they might want to import into (insert favorite game here). All useful comments appreciated.

What might be really useful is if you can get them to take a look at it and mention on their favorite site that they are looking at it (with links). Most forums, including mine, are system-centric, without a lot of room for someone like me to go in and troll with "hey, leave your current system and try mine!" messages.

But, if an established member happens to mention EABA, I'm not going to turn down anyone who shows up here and joins just out of curiousity.

Okay, it's not perfect by a long shot, but here's the advanced combat chapter. This will (or should) let you do just about anything in terms of conventional combat effects. I'm particularly interested to see if advanced combat forms such as a particular martial arts or weapon style can be done up as combinations of maneuvers and specializations. As a query, should melee and unarmed combat skills be listed in the advanced combat chapter as something like "choose X maneuvers from the following list"? I think Hero has something like that. But don't get fixated on that subject. Just look at the chapter as a whole and tell me how I screwed up...or not.

Edit: July 29 2011
File removed and latest version moved to first message in this thread.

Of course, I read the lobby scene first. Quite splendid.

Now to the rest of the chapter...

Just finished my first read-through.

Overall impressions are good. It's a lot of fairly fiddly material, but that's more or less the point of the chapter, so that's all good.

The Matrix example is quite intriguing, though it does miss a good chance to see armor work. You did have some fairly extensive armor examples earlier in the chapter, so that helps some. It still might have been nice to see armor use integrated into the big overall example.

My only other initial quibble is in how autoburst works. Admittedly, my only experience with an autoburst weapon is with an M16a2, back in the day. Still, within 50-100 meters, at least within my experience, if your first shot in a burst struck the target at all, especially center of mass, it was almost certain the other two would group fairly tightly with it.

Not really sure how I'd model the difference between that and true autofire, which was a very different experience, at least comparing the SAWs or M60s we used with the M16A2s. The only idea that immediately comes to mind is to just add dice of damage for autoburst, rather then separate shots based on how well you hit.

Eh, maybe the mechanics for difficulty based on range fudges it well enough, since the closer you are, the more likely you are to tag with multiple shots.

This was really yummy stuff. Almost everything that crops up in usual combat situations (that I can think of) seems to be addressed in one way or another.

In EABA 1 I did autobursts so that every point you beat the roll by you got one hit, just to model the relatively tight groups, it felt better that way (given that I have no experience with firearms whatsoever). The rule applied to regular autofire as well for the first three shots, if the gun was of a type that I thought had low enough recoil (M16's, MP5's and so on).

I thought about it, but from a "real" realism standpoint Neo's pistol-caliber weapons would have had little effect against serious body armor, yet the guys in the movie went down like dominoes. Even the ones shot with their own weapons (like the shotgun to the back) were killed or outright incapacitated, even when clearly struck in the "armor". Even if I used the blunt trauma rules for flexible armor, they would not have taken enough effect to be universally incapacitated.

So, for all practical purposes, they had no armor. Not the way I would have done the scene, but I had to narrate it as it was filmed.