Markdoc

Re: Pathfinder Hero

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? Nah, they trace their ancestry back to Gorm the old, died about 950 AD. For a long time, people assumed ol' Gorm was legendary, but - surprise, surprise - it turns out that a) he was real and they found his bones (or what was left of them) and his wife's under the floor of Jelling Church when it was being rebuilt, along with a runestone from their son, Harald Bluetooth (also King). Cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion You're kinda hurting your own point here. Even giving Energy Man an EC to try and compensate for he STR advantage, she's going to whale on him. At SPD 4, he's going to put a puny 20 stun a turn through her defences, even if he hits every time. No chance of stunning her, and that leaves a whole 4 STUN a turn after a post-12 REC. Odds are he can't hurt her at all - she's likely to REC everything he throws at her. And the same might - at first glance - apply to Power Woman. But in the vast majority of situations, it doesn't. Here's why. She's as fast, as he is and has the same CV and move, so he can't shoot and stay out of range. At some point, she's going to grab him. At that point, it's game over, win to Power Woman. He has no chance whatsoever of escaping, and all she has to do is squeeze - since he's paying END for his force field as well as any attacks and she pays nothing for her PD/ED, she's going to be hurting him more than he can hurt her. And he can't take extra recoveries without dropping that forcefield at which point he pops like a grape. Once he's grabbed, there are any number of clever plays by Power Woman (pinning him under a tank, dropping a wall on him, holding his head underwater in a fountain, etc) that can end the fight. And he can't do very much about it. In a fight if either character somehow gets stunned, Energy Man is highly vulnerable, while Power Woman is momentarily inconvenienced. If Powerwoman attacks Energy Man by complete surprise, he's going to the morgue. If he attacks her by surprise, she's likely to be stunned and lose a phase. Looking at those two characters, there are multiple ways in which Power Woman can maim or even kill Energy Man - whereas the reverse is not true. In short, to make the two characters closer to comparable you need to make the FF 0 END and persistent (at which point Power Woman is cheaper but still more effective). As already pointed out, to make them fully comparable, you need IPE as well. With more efficient builds, that gap widens. So yeah, based on lots of experience, bricks in games with 2:1 STR are perfectly viable and as you have demonstrated at 1:1, they rock. Ph3AR the brick with a framework! The heroic level example is closer and as designed, the two are a decent match. That's because a small investment in martial arts is highly efficient. But parity only lasts until you introduce weapons and armour. At that point, Har Nald trashes Karadeen: he can wear heavier armour without impairment, and use larger and more damaging weapons. At a STR of 10 Karadeen is going to struggle in anything more than light armour and the best weapons he can use efficiently are light swords. Even if he spends an extra point to include weapons elements in his martial art, it's going to make little difference (the max he gets to add is one DC). Har Nald in contrast can wear medium weight armour and a shield with no penalty and use a large one handed weapon. Combat at heroic level is always more uncertain, so there's no certainty as to who will win, but with better Def, better DCV and higher damage output, the smart money's most certainly on Har Nald - he can even crank his damage output 2 DC with is levels, if he wants. And that's with a relatively inefficient purchase of 4 x 5 point levels, nearly a 1/4 of his total points. If he was smart and used those 20 points a bit more sensibly (some 3 point levels in sword and another point of SPD for example) his advantage widens even further. The same applies in heroic settings where guns are used: while Karadeen's going to struggle to hit anything using a large calibre handgun, Har Nald's blasting away with no penalties on his assault rifle. Guns equalise things a bit, but the advantage still clearly lies with Har Nald. You can see now why STR at 1:1 is such an exceptionally good buy. cheers, Mark

Re: What gives the "rightful" king the right? OK. Historical hat: The "divine right of kings" is of relatively recent origin. It's not medieval, but rather post-renaissance and a huge chunk of European history was bloodied by kings saying "I am king by right of conquest/descent" and the pope saying "No, you are king by divine choice, and therefore as the divine regent on earth you owe fealty to me." Now the pope carried a lot of weight back then, so him anointing someone else, or threatening to do so, had a dramatic effect (Henry's penance in the snow, for example). However, that only happened because Henry was king (emperor, technically) over a bunch of fractious nobles. Popular, powerful kings could flip the pope the bird, and often did. In the end - once the pope lost most of his temporal power and was no longer trying to be an earthly prince as well as a religious one, he came to an agreement with the various crowned heads and legitimized their lines as chosen by god. Which brings us to bloodlines. Verra, verra important. Reason? Well, threefold. First, training. King (or any high noble) is actually a fairly specialized job: it's like playing diplomacy, only 24 hours a day with hundreds of players instead of 6. High nobles were trained for this pretty from much once they stopped soiling their clothes. They also had families (read: staff) ready-made. When you move into the big house, everyone knows what to do. It turns out that "commoner kings" in general didn't last that long - assuming they clawed to the top of the heap at all. Second: monopoly. If you make bloodlines - and especially high bloodlines - "special" then it stops any old guy with a big cleaver from getting to be king. It cuts down the competition. Think of the various noble families like baseball commissioners. You think they want people to be able to recruit who they want, or even start their own teams? Hell, no. Convince the rubes that you are the only game in town, and your chances of making a good living - even if you don't get the big prize this year - are greatly improved. Look at medieval laws: there were a vast number that deal with things like what you could wear, who you could marry, who inherited and in what order, what names you could have, when children were actually in line and which weren't and so on. And many of them carried severe penalties. For changing your surname to a reserved one? Death. Wearing clothes of a certain colour? Face branded with red-hot irons, and so on. All devoted to one thing: defining who had special ("gentle") blood and who didn't and stopping them mixing. As an important part of this, it's also a way for rich people to ensure their accumulated wealth goes to their children - always a popular theme. People were not unaware of this in medieval times, nor of the fact that nobility was an invented trope: there's a song sung by rebellious english peasants in the 14th century "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" - meaning that originally there were no noble families. Third: practicality. If you convince everyone - even yourself - that certain sorts of blood are special and that some are more special than others, it cuts both ways. It means you can't just kill the old king and take his throne and smokin' hot daughter under most circumstances. After all, he's special! This actually - even though it restrains your own (doubtless rightful) ambitions has a benefit: a kingdom at constant war is no good to anyone except bandits. Sometimes, it makes sense to choke it down and support the consensus candidate (ie: the "rightful" king) - even if he's still wetting on his nurse - rather than launch a ruinous war. And it has the plus that if everyone agrees on a consensus candidate family, even if it's not yours, at least it isn't those 3€&%&!!! from the next fief over. Medievals were quite aware of this aspect too - contemporary writings show awareness of the importance of continuity and tradition in keeping order, even if the king himself was a waste of human skin. People like William Marshall, who could almost certainly have become King had he so chosen, chose instead to support a variety of "royal candidates" - because that's what his sense of honour demanded - said code of honour also being carefully built up overtime to support and strengthen this bloodline progression. So there was more to the whole rightful king deal than being the baddest mutha in the land - even if most royal bloodlines started that way. And it's laughable how many people who did slaughter their way into power, suddenly discovered that actually, they were descended from Barbarossa, or King Arthur, or John the Baptist, etc etc. OK, so much for the history hat. On with the GM hat. In this case, it's whatever makes sense. In my current FH game, all the "kingdoms" are actually "principalities" - the last heir to the line of kings (who were not only originally appointed by the gods, but intermarried with them) suffered a surfeit of pointy bits of metal and the families of the people he left in charge of various regions have been in charge ever since. There's nothing mystical, they just have the most professional soldiers. In an adjacent kingdom, the Queen is queen because she's a vampire sorceress, older than sin, and can suck your soul out through your eyes. Are you going to argue? Besides, OK, she drains a few citizens dry every year, but in return she keeps the streets orderly, the taxes light, the kingdom monster- and adventurer- free and the borders secure. Most citizens will happily offer that she has less blood on her hands than any of the neighboring princes. Across the sea, on the other hand, the leader of Tyrannc is most definitely "the rightful king" - or warlord, to be more accurate. All the priests say so, and not only does that imply a divine right, but most priests of Tyrannc go around in blood-spattered robes because they haven't changed clothes today. Probably not smart to debate the question. Also he can do miracles, and has not been consumed by the divine maw of the Living God, which is a pretty clear show of divine favour, right? And so on. In this case, "rightful" can mean anything that seems useful cheers, Mark

Re: NO everyman skills

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion

Re: The value of your health Yep, for any genre except supers, Regen is (to me anyway) a big fat-ass stop-sign power. In supers it's fine, but you don't need much regen to build a wolvie-type: it's not really meant as a protective power, as far as I can tell. I used triggered, self-only aid/healing instead to build my Wolvie clone, which has the advantage that it brings back STUN - combine it with damage reduction (STUN) and you have a winner. That particular character (Kestrel) was referred to as "weeble" - you can knock him over but he doesn't stay down. He was, in fact, damn near indestructible and as you have commented, how much BOD he took was very rarely relevant: he healed some during the fight and the rest in a minute or two afterwards. cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion Not really: I've never been much of a superhero GM - I realized the potential for what was then the thin blue book (Champions) as a set of fantasy rules after about my third game. I can even remember the epiphany - sitting at home suddenly thinking "You know, using these rules you could define a dagger as a 1/2d6 HKA and a misericorde as 1/2d6 AP HKA!" At which point I started scribbling.... It actually took me a while to get everything sorted, but in 1984/85, I switched my fantasy game (which had been AD&D) over to Hero system. And several of my co-GMs soon did the same thing, so that within a couple of years we were playing my "D&D" FH game, Karl's "D&D" FH game, Brian's Judge Dredd hero system game, Mike's Strontium Dogs Hero system game, Steven's Tekumel hero system game - plus Chris' original Champions game and a few other one-shots. This was long before FH came out, so we had to build *everything* ourselves and we tinkered with the idea of equipment pools (before equipment pools existed), "paying points for stuff" (which is how I started) as opposed to "free stuff", etc etc. And one thing that came through in ALL of the games (with the possible exception of Champions) was that STR was the shiznitz, the hands-down best buy there was (although SPD and DEX come pretty close ) So it's fair to say that the STR cost debate predates FH by a long period, but it might also be true that it only really became an issue once people started using Champions rules for non-superheroes. You can see the same problem in Champions, but it doesn't stand out as much: when OneEyeman can shoot force beams out of his eye, it doesn't seem so weird that the team's human detective/martial artist can lift one and a half tons. We found that your "average" supers martial artist usually has a STR in in the 20-30 range. In a supers game that's not a big deal: in a traditional fantasy game, it is. cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion And for you that would be right. I'm a free market kind of guy - you set up your market to produce the results you want and then let collective wisdom provide the optimal decision. That applies to gaming, too, which is why I like Hero. cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion

Re: Char: Blackcat (with art) 2000th Post

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion Nope, not in my game. I have clear, succinct guidelines, and it's obvious the players understand them. However, I also respect players' choices. A GM who is cranking on a player because they put 3 points into STR and "that's not appropriate for a magic-user" is probably too controling to ever be a good GM, IMO. Players make teh choice to buy more STR, simply because the penalty for a low STR - as you note - is severe in a heroic game, and in exchange for that penalty, they get very few points back. It's one thing to play to concept: it's a bit much to expect players to wilfuly hobble their PCs purely on the basis for concept. It's also against teh Heron canon that you get what you pay for. Far better IMO to design the rules to encourage players to design what I feel is appropriate, than simply say "No - design it my way". And for what it's worth, with STR at 1:1, I don't think I have ever seen a PC sell STR back even for a "frail" character. At 2:1, I have seen that happen. In short, changing the cost of STR encourages exactly the behaviour I (and apparently many others) want to see. That's a solid clue that 2:1 is the correct price. As to the downside of the change, there is the problem that it's a change to the core rules: not something I do lightly. But in terms of downside, that's pretty much it. cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion

Re: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Oh, but that's the thing about Germanies. They're pretty much all the same, from world to world. It's pretty odd, now I think about it - especially when you consider how much - say - Chinas, or Englands - vary from world to world cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Cosmologies

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion And in answer to the original post, yeah, STR is underpriced. I've been in the 2:1 camp for nearly 20 years now (as both a player - occasionally - and as a GM - almost always) and my response is: it's sweet. I matched this change by making HA 5 points per d6, with the rationale that the limitation "only with attack" is a -1 limit on STR (it works out the same more or less, as No Figured Cha, no extra leaping and a little extra for "no lifting, grabbing or breakout"). In that setup HA exists as a simple power (because it's convenient, and for AP calculations) but it functions the same (and costs more or less the same) as modified STR. The already implicit +1/2 for "can add STR" or "Usable at range" now falls neatly into line, with STR, HA, HKA, RKA, EB and TK all co-existing in equal point harmony with each other. For heroic games, even at 2:1, most characters buy at least a few points of STR, because the utility is simply so great. In even in games where Guns are the prime means of dealing damage, STR is still vastly useful because a) most guns have STR Min and at some point you're going to want to whack someone with a katana anyway. Trust me on that . For Fantasy, it's a no-brainer. In my current FH game starting with 100 points PCs and NCM, we have one character with a 23 STR (his shtick is "the strongman") - he started with 20. So it's clearly not overpriced, if we have players buying it up over NCM. And I've got 20 years of FH experience that says with STR at 2:1, you'll still get plenty of PCs with 18 or 20 STR, so it ain't too expensive. The only difference is that not everyone will have 18 or 20 STR. In short, that suggests that the price is about right.... Even for Supers, it has not been a dealbreaker: characters who rely entirely on Raw STR become less common (but by no means rare) and it simply become commoner to get Bricks with limited STR - no Figured Char, still get gets you leaping, lifting, grabbing and breakout on top of basic HTH damage. HA becomes pretty common (and no longer kludgy) and STR power frameworks (to accommodate extra lift, HA, brick tricks etc) now exactly parallel the energy blaster's power frameworks. Cheers, Mark

Re: The Cost of STR & Other Characteristics: An open discussion

Re: Best Graphic Novels to Inspire a Campaign? What? No-one recommended Astro City, yet? Silver-age heroes with a more modern - but not gruesome - sensibility. Consistently top-notch writing, IMO and none of the " Dog supreme anal rape scene" nonsense* cheers, Mark * Supreme in-Joke!

Re: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Germany, by the sound of it cheers, Mark

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Agree 100%. Declare inspired me to run a game (which sadly, never got past the first adventure, sniffle) and remains one of my favorite books. On Stranger Tides is fantastic - so is the Stress of her Regard, which I recently re-read and enjoyed almost as much as I did the first time. The King of the West trilogy is also great "secret history" (and particularly enjoyable because I've been many of the places described in those books). In fact, the only things by Powers which are not top notch (IMO) are Forsake the sky and Dinner at Deviant's Palace which are both early books that got published after he became famous. Hell, I even have his autographed cookbook (it was a present form my wife ) cheers, Mark

Re: "I shoot the escape pod!!!" Dude, we don't have any cayenne. I just used that old bottle for the dog's flea powder. Cheers, Mark

Re: Would you allow Put me in for believing that EDM is the best way to handle this, with some limits. It can be to "a universe where life never evolved" (or something similar) which should take care of the "stuff doesn't happen - it's just a way to travel" problem. It also addresses the mechanics problem: the character moves to a parallel universe, makes however many hops he needs to to get to his destination and then pops out again. It avoids the problem of getting essentially unlimited distance travel for the same cost as a 10" teleport. cheers, Mark

Re: Stegosaur at Angkor Wat?

Re: How do you approach spirit binding? I use a very simple system: you can use the XP in a creature to power a magical item, by "binding its spirit". This is (mechanically) simply a major transform, with the proviso that you can move the points around. How many points you move, of course depends on how long you spend transforming. You don't want your magical item healing back, so it's generally built without healing, and instead must have a (relatively simple) method which will destroy the enchantment as a way of canceling it. The advantage of making magic items by binding spirits into them is that you can make magic items without spending your own precious XP. The disadvantages are that: a) it's generally considered an evil act to turn a sentient being into an item. Hence most items with bound spirits tend to be the sort of thing that evil people like. Swords with demons in them, black armour with spiky bitz, huge purple and gold codpieces that radiate an air of foreboding and stifled terror - that sort of thing. You actually have to capture the creature you want to bind and then generally keep it restrained during the "binding process", which means you end up spending points on other things, so you don't die trying to make magic items. c) the bound item is a transformed character, not an item. That means unless the target was also subject to a spiritual transform, it will have a personality, which may or may not be helpful*. It also means that if someone can work out the unbinding ritual (or just zap it with a dispel), your magic item goes buh-bye. Worse, it turns back. If (for example) chanting the true name of a demon frees it from its enchantment, you might end up holding an angry demon by the ankle in the middle of a fight..... In theory, that makes it possible for characters to churn out powerful items. In practice, the disadvantages (and the points investment required) mean that it has never been a problem, in part because I generally disallow transforms that actually *add* points - just those that move 'em around. That way to create powerful items you need to capture powerful monsters (or heroes: as it says in Slainé "Blades for heroes, need the blood of Heroes"). Works for me. cheers, Mark *Long ago, one of my PCs (Fonographix the Bard ) ended up with an intelligent flaming sword - very good for killing trolls. It was a cool sword until the day when I tried to sneak past a big warband of trolls: at which point the sword, outraged, started to scream in its tiny voice "Hey you! Yeah you, green and Ugly! I'm talking to you! I had yo momma, You wanna know how I had yo' momma? You come over here, etc etc" We had to fight them all and nearly died. After that the damn sword wouldn't shut up about our "cowardice" and in the end I gave the damn thing back to Hengeist and bought a nice normal magic sword.

Re: Does anyone have any idea why this is legal?