Anyone out there play Bill Gant's Gunmaster?

[Targan]

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

What character sheet do you use? Harnmaster Gold?

Some of this is going to have to wait until I'm home from work! I can answer some of these questions though. If you're using Harnmaster Gold as your base system, the Harnmaster Gold character sheet should work fine. We had customised character sheets made using MS Excel. They maximised skill slots and allowed more room for some of the pseudo-skills we added as the conversion evolved.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

What did you use for vehicle combat?

Basically T2K 1st edition vehicle combat rules, but with all the numbers converted to Gunmaster. We used Guns, Guns, Guns (3G) to do all the weapons calculations, converted those numbers to Gunmaster stats (IIRC there are conversion notes in the back of the Gunmaster rules) and also converted all the vehicle armor numbers to Gunmaster as well.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

Could you explain your character creation process from Gunmaster 2000?

That's one of the questions that'll have to wait until I'm home and I can post here or send you the Lifepath rules.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

What are Skill Checks?

Skill improvement checks. One of the problems is that my group of players all started playing Harnmaster using the original 1st edition rules. Many of the terms from those original rules we kept using, despite perhaps slightly different terms being used in later editions. Skill checks are the way in which Harnmaster skills improve. Each skill has a Skill Base (a number based on the average of the 3 stats most applicable to the use of that skill plus Sunsign bonus if any) and a Mastery Level (ML). The ML is basically the skill level. In the version of Harnmaster we were mostly using (1st edition + Bill Gant's Harnmaster II house rules) a character's maximum possible ML in a skill was (5xSB)+25. If the GM decides that a character is due a skill improvement check, the chance of the skill improving is maximum possible ML minus current ML. If you roll under that number the ML improves by 1. This means that once a skill is near its theoretical maximum, skill improvement is hard to achieve.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

Do you get all of those occupational skills?

Yes. Harnmaster, Gunmaster and especially Gunmaster 2000 do have unusually large numbers of skills.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

How many optional skills do you get??

I'm going from memory here but I think you sacrifice 2 of your skill checks for that year for each optional skill you want to open.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

What is luck?

Luck rolls are really cool and can be easily used in pretty much any game system. They go like this: roll a D100, then try to roll under that number on a second D100 roll. If you roll above the first number you're unlucky. If you roll below the first number you're lucky. Any multiple of 5 or 10 is a critical result, otherwise it's a marginal result, so you can have a critical success (CS), a marginal success (MS), a marginal failure (MF) or a critical failure (CF). The CS/MS/MF/CF system is of course standard in all versions of Harnmaster. I believe the original idea for Luck rolls comes from the Pendragon system but Bill Gant adapted it for his Harnmaster II house rules.

[Michael Lewis]

Originally Posted by Targan

Some of this is going to have to wait until I'm home from work! I can answer some of these questions though. If you're using Harnmaster Gold as your base system, the Harnmaster Gold character sheet should work fine. We had customised character sheets made using MS Excel. They maximised skill slots and allowed more room for some of the pseudo-skills we added as the conversion evolved.

I started using Harnmaster III character sheet but noticed that it does not have the touch stat. That's why I asked

Originally Posted by Targan

Basically T2K 1st edition vehicle combat rules, but with all the numbers converted to Gunmaster. We used Guns, Guns, Guns (3G) to do all the weapons calculations, converted those numbers to Gunmaster stats (IIRC there are conversion notes in the back of the Gunmaster rules) and also converted all the vehicle armor numbers to Gunmaster as well

That seems like a lot of work. I was afraid of that.

Originally Posted by Targan

Skill improvement checks. One of the problems is that my group of players all started playing Harnmaster using the original 1st edition rules.

Harnmaster III is different in that regard

Originally Posted by Targan

Yes. Harnmaster, Gunmaster and especially Gunmaster 2000 do have unusually large numbers of skills.

What scares me is starting the PC's out with too much skill. Did this happen in your experiences?

Originally Posted by Targan

Luck rolls are really cool and can be easily used in pretty much any game system. They go like this: roll a D100, then try to roll under that number on a second D100 roll. If you roll above the first number you're unlucky. If you roll below the first number you're lucky. Any multiple of 5 or 10 is a critical result, otherwise it's a marginal result, so you can have a critical success (CS), a marginal success (MS), a marginal failure (MF) or a critical failure (CF). The CS/MS/MF/CF system is of course standard in all versions of Harnmaster. I believe the original idea for Luck rolls comes from the Pendragon system but Bill Gant adapted it for his Harnmaster II house rules.

This sounds interesting. I thought about using Piety as some sort of luck role.

Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[Michael Lewis]

It's funny. You are exactly 24 hours and 1 second ahead of me.

Actually no. That's wrong. I'm off by twelve hours and 1 second. It's morning there and night here.

[Targan]

If you're using Harnmaster III you should definitely take a look at Bill Gant's house rules for HM 3rd edition, and also his Harnmaster Advanced houserules, they're designed for Harnmaster III and even more detailed.

Originally Posted by Michael Lewis

What scares me is starting the PC's out with too much skill. Did this happen in your experiences?

That can happen but as skills get into the elite levels they become very hard to improve. Also, you could use this option: http://www.warflail.com/downloads/HMG_HR-Skills.pdf
More of Bill's house rules, this time for HM Gold, it truncates very high skills for starting characters to more reasonable levels. It might solve any discomfort you have in that area.

In addition, we were using Bill Gant's ML Decline rules from his Harnmaster II houserules (I'm not sure why but Bill no longer has his HM II houserules available on his website). Under the ML Decline rules, skills which are not used or practiced for some time can slowly decline. This means that a GM can choose to have a PC who has high skill levels in certain skills early in their lifepath generation but change careers and no longer use those skills much, suffer some decline in those skills prior to the campaign commencing. The ML Decline rules work exactly the same during campaigns, should the GM choose to apply them.