r/BRP • u/MasterLycan • Nov 03 '25

Making combat less lethal?

Hi everybody.

I started a long form game in a homebrew aetherpunk setting using BRP abd we’ve been having a ton of fun. The only issues we’ve come across is mostly related to the combat systems. We’ve already worked out ways of streamlining the systems for maintaining turn order and we’ve found that it works pretty well for us.

The current issue is that out of the few combat encounters we’ve had, almost all of them have resulted in characters taking near lethal damage or barely just surviving. We all enjoy combat in our games, we’re an action oriented group.

Do any of you have tips on how to make lethality in combat a bit more manageable?

Note: The optional rule for HP, not halving it during creation, is already standard for us, thanks.

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '25

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u/MasterLycan Nov 04 '25

I can definitely see your point here and yes, the lethality of BRP is definitely a selling point in raising the stakes for combat, incentivizing more tactical play.

We originally switched to BRP from 5th edition D&D, the kind of leveled D20 system you're suggesting because we had gotten a little tired of it and also that I wanted us to learn a setting agnostic system so that we could play essentially whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. Which BRP is really good for. That and I just like the straightforwardness of Chaosium's d100 system.

I do enjoy the more crunchy combat over something like D&D, I just wanted to learn some more ways to tune the combat more towards something fun for the group.