Markdoc

Re: "Sense Motive" In Hero

Re: Rail gun damage?

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads Pretty typical, I'm afraid. cheers, Mark

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads

Re: Greater difficulty for intricate spells

Re: Tac-nukes vs. Nuclear Warheads Ian Banks has addressed this in his culture books, where, in fact, all the space combat *is* between computers. Basically the human angle is delivered through the humans/aliens who sweat through the buildup to any fight. Basically his space battles go like this. Launch your ships. Spend a couple of weeks speeding at FTL travel to your target. Either: battle is joined and over in a few seconds or one fleet is obviously much stronger, at which point the computers on the losing side run the odds and go "D00d!!! Pwnzred!??!!" and surrender - informing their human passengers a millisecond later, that the battle is over and they lost. It makes good sense, but if you want to read about epic space battles, probably not what you want. cheers, Mark

Re: Rail gun damage?

Re: Greater difficulty for intricate spells

Re: Laser Gunship Revealed More to the point, can they actually make it work? Remember this is the same team who promised us the first airborne laser test back in 1997. The one, that, uuhhh, didn't happen. It didn't happen again in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2006, which was when they got their budget cut by congress. This particular system - the ATL - was supposed to fly in 2005, then 2006, then in 2007. Now it's just around the corner, one more time http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/atl.htm Quotes like this make me instantly suspicious - "ATL will do for air-to-ground combat what ABL will do for missile defense: revolutionize the battlefield," said Pat Shanahan, Boeing Missile Defense Systems vice president. Since the original airborne laser program (ABL) has been flirting with cancellation for years now and has yet to even work once, I wouldn't be at all surprised if ATL was every bit as successful. To me, this smells like the ABL team trying to introduce a new weapons system, with greatly reduced specs in an attempt to keep the tax dollars flowing. Just like the cancelled Israel/US ABM laser, which the maker is now repackaging and trying to sell as a really expensive way of getting rid of IEDs. That's enhanced by the milnet statement which simply says "The Airborne Tactical Laser program is a pure concept project at this time". No timelines, no weapons. When you dig into the background a little more, you find that the "laser gunship" will be mounting a low-power solid state laser of the kind already used for target spotting. The actual high powered laser required to damage things, uhhhh ... apparently hasn't been built yet. http://www.kirtland.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-070404-027.pdf Dig a little further and you find what's actually in the DoD contract is "The primary task of the effort is to maintain the hardware in a condition capable of providing the required fluence of laser energy on a ground-based aimpoint from the airborne platform" http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AAC/Reference-Number-08-AAC-XR-SSN-001/SynopsisR.html In other words, simply demonstrate that you an actually hold a laser - any laser - on target from a flying aircraft. cheers, Mark

Re: Rail gun damage?

Re: Greater difficulty for intricate spells

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. What, the chicken leg doesn't register? cheers, Mark

Re: Oh baby You are correct. I read the website. It still doesn't answer the question of why he thought this was good idea. Oh, and bye-the-bye - this thing is actually a three wheeler - there's a side car - so it won't fall over and and smear your leg to paste, Still there's something about Germans and bikes. Last year me and a friend (John Way, for Fitz's reference) were on a drinking tour through northern Germany (near where this bike comes from, actually) and we were cruising down down the autobahn at about 140 Km/hr (about 85 mph). We heard this whining noise and some guy (sans helmet or any kind of protective gear) went whipping past us ON A QUAD BIKE! Now I don't know what he had done to it, but normal quad bikes do not do 90+ MPH! Now I think about it - Fitz - why don't you come and visit? I'll rent a car and we can go and find this guy..... don't you want to ride that bike? And they have cool castles we can visit - plus I know a great bar nearby... Cheers, Mark

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think?

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts No, you're wrong! Oh - and can I have a dollar? Wait, make that 10,000 dollars! Do I get a bonus for a surprise attack? cheers, Mark

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think? In order, yes, no, and generally not. Yes, you do need points (or something equivalent) simply because you need some way to bring the players and the GM all onto the same page. A purely soft text description "I have a powerful energy blast" likely means two different things to two different people, which doesn't make for smooth gaming. No, you don't need active point caps. I've always found them to be the source of significant problems and the benefits are largely theoretical, as far as my experience goes. As already noted by others, it's quite possible to build lethal attacks under most AP caps and attacks over the caps that are not out of line. They tend to promote "samey" characters and bias the game in unpredictable ways, depending on what's capped and what isn't. All powers need to be viewed in context and that context is going to vary from PC to PC and game to game. As to equal points, I have played in and GM'ed games with quite divergent point totals. That can certainly work, but your players need to be up for it. In the end, I don't think it works well for long-term campaigns - even the most reticent player will likely get tired of being the group's henchman after a year or two. Unless there's a compelling reason to do it, I'd avoid starting with imbalanced PCs and although some imbalances arise in gameplay, I try and keep them from getting too out of whack. cheers, Mark

Re: Hero Mod: Iron Age Hero

Re: Hero Mod: Iron Age Hero Actually, I'm not at all convinced we need any changes to simulate this - I've referred to a dark Champions (no, not Dark Champions) game we played before where the players ended up trying to establish their own nation as a safe haven for supers: sort of Iron Age before the term Iron Age had been coined. Killing attacks abounded and without any rules changes, we had a few deaths among the PCs and far more among the NPCs. It was not al *all* unusual for a battle to end with most PCs having taken body (even my character, and I was the party Brick) - occasionally "heroes" had to be rushed off to hospital at the end of or even during superbattles. And the casualty rates among normals and agents ..... well. Frankly, that was grim enough for me - we had PCs (mine for example) who could throw an 8d6 HKA (though at the cost of dropping his defences significantly). Haymaker that and even with 30 points of rDEF, there's going to be blood. And there were NPCs who had worse attacks than me And we didn't set out to be Iron Age Heroes - my brick started out with a 20 point code against killing, fer pete's sake! and Gecko, the team's martial artist and first fatality didn't have *any* rDef. It's just that in an unrelentingly grim setting, the characters naturally evolved into killing machines. cheers, Mark

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts I GM games that lean heavily to social situations (with a healthy leavening of violence!) and have never had any problem with "social aspects". The requirements are that the GM has a good idea of the motivations of the NPCs involved and that the players have a suite of social interaction skills. Because I run games like this, I tend to have players who buy those social interaction skills: in turn, having bought them, the players want to use them. The "trick" - if trick it be - is not to view social interactions as a single "all or nothing" interaction to be solved with a single PRE attack or persuasion skill. I wouldn't do this for combat "OK, you've rolled a hit: all the pirates are dead or incapacitated" Instead, social interactions tend to be a series of steps, generally requiring a suite of skills. Players have picked up on this too - in the current game one player has bought a talent "Detect emotion" which allows him to try and discern his target's mental state after some observation: he then uses this information to try and target his social skills - interrogation against a target who is afraid or hostile, conversation against a target who is relaxed, etc. To take one example, in the current FH game we have had three sessions where the players are trying to find some evil cultists: that's all social interaction. They have a prime suspect, but they don't actually know if he's involved. To try and find out involved interrogating various NPCs. This can (and has) ranged from "Tell us what you know or my overly-muscled friend there will grind your bones to make his meal" (fairly simple: persuasion by one player with interrogation as a complementary roll by the other player - and a PRE attack to try and get a bonus: otherwise known as "Good cop, Bad Cop") to trying to get information out of a senior priest at the temple. This involved a series of conversation and persuasion rolls going up the tree. First convince a junior to let them see the priest in a timely fashion (Persuasion, High Society ("I am a noble, you pleb!") and Bribery: an outright bribe would have been refused and had negative consequences for further interactions - a little something for the temple and a coin for your trouble, however...). Then the priest himself. This involves a series of challenges. First convince him you are worth taking significant time over (Conversation, High Society, Persuasion, Bribery, Reputation are all relevant). Second, convince him you are not raving paranoids (Basically the same skills, minus Bribery). Third, convince him he should stick his neck out to help a bunch of foreigners. Generally, social skill rolls are skill vs skill, or versus EGO or INT (though usually raw rolls are at penalty) In all cases, I give situational bonuses/minuses and roleplay bonuses/minuses to the skill rolls: but if you want to play a suave rogue, you really need to have those skills. Thus, player who roleplays well can get bonuses, but a player who wants to play a suave rogue - but isn't mentally nimble enough to gain a lot of bonuses can still do so by buying up his skills. Note: I tend not to give extra XP for roleplaying, though I might for particularly brilliant play, since it skews the game over time. I do, however frequently give in-game bonuses for it. Situational bonuses arise in-game. To take the example above, the players got a big bonus (+3) in the first interaction with the senior priest (worth taking time over) and a lesser bonus in the second interaction because they had a writ allowing them to trade in his town (obtained - with unusual foresight - months ago) with the seal of the Lord's brother. That establishes that they are solid citizens who know the local nobility, not some band of rag-tag adventurers. They got (unknown to the players) a small minus to the third interaction roll because the questions they were asking made the priest suspect that they are members of the Church Militant, which is not very welcome in his town. Had they thought about it, they could have allayed that suspicion - and had the priest known about their previous associates who were members of the Church Militant, that small minus (-1) would have become a big minus (-3). Had they failed any of the rolls that would not necessarily meant getting tossed out on their ear, but it would have inflicted minuses on subsequent interactions (how large, depending on the degree of faux pas). I use a scale of comparative success/failure of +5 to -5. A success of +1 or +2 means an NPC will be motivated to do something they would be inclined to do anyway. +3 to +4 means they will do something they are not strongly opposed to. A score of +5 or better is required to get them to do something they would be opposed to. You can't use social interaction skills to get people to do things they are violently opposed to: that's the realm of mind control. -1 to -2 generally just means the target is unconvinced: but that minus goes onto further attempts to persuade/coerce. A -3 or -4 means a refusal - and also a similar minus on later attempts. A -5 means a solid refusal and possibly other negative actions (in the case above, tossing the player out and refusing to see them again - possibly warning the captain of the city guard that there were potential murderers at loose in the town: the Church Militant has a reputation for summary execution of those they deem heretics - hence the negative reaction to them. I likewise have no problem with players who have characters who are smarter (or stupider) than they are: I view INT in the Hero system as including a fair amount of perception/ability to "connect the dots". Thus, I tend to give players more or less information about given situations based on their INT, working from the idea that players with more (or better) information will make better choices - as necessary, I use (GM-rolled) PER rolls when there is relevant extra information in play. That way, in general, smarter PCs will understand a situation better, but it's not guaranteed - occasionally even the incredible Bulk will see through things his smarter colleagues miss. cheers, Mark

Re: D&D vs. FantasyHERO vs. Palladium

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so Yes, but with spells you can get to be king for free! cheers, Mark

Re: D&D twists on Fantasy Hero Ok??? As for the original question, I used a battle mat for years that only had squares and it made no appreciable difference. For that matter we went years without a battlemat and that worked fine too. So yeah, there's nothing in Hero that actually requires the use of a hex mat. Occasionally, if we are fighting in an internal environment where most of the walls are at right angles, I still occasionally use the "squares mat" because it makes drawing easier and ease is the only reason I use one - that it cuts down on GM explanation on who's where and what they can see. cheers, Mark

Re: How much XP per 'level' The rules do specify it - you can only go to 0. However, the rules on drain also make it plain that you can "destroy", though only temporarily, a power or ability by draining it to 0, so yeah, anyone with running drained to 0" in my game stays where they are, unless they have other means of movement. Now of course, just as with clinging UAA "unable to move away" does not mean frozen in place: so reduced DCV, inability to dodge, etc don't apply - if the attacker wants that, he needs to either buy his drain vs multiple characteristics/powers or use entangle or TK. And as I have said repeatedly, it's not mostly the tactical scale that concerns me: the question often comes up on how far/how long/how heavy. Now you can just handwave it, as you suggest above. Many GM's do, which is why I referred to handwavium in my first post. I prefer not to. Here's a real-life example. One character in my game had a Conan homage. She did the "tireless thews of bronze" thing and bought down END use on his STR and Running, so he could cover the ground at an endless lope, never got tired in combat, etc. Now what happens when the fight is over and he tosses a comely maiden over one shoulder and a sack of coins over the other and runs off into the sunset? Saying "You can't move an appreciable distance" is one approach I guess, but doesn't really cut it. Since he has two casual STR items, he can in fact pick each one up "effortlessly" so there's no question he can get them over his shoulders. However, if you fix the apparent contradiction between "stagger a few steps" and "can't move at all" (I did it by simply changing the move penalty in Encumbrance - the same fix you suggested), he can stagger off at a slow walk, and reduced DCV. He'll get (far) further than a lesser man will, but even his tireless thews can't evade the LTE penalty and eventually, he's gonna either collapse or make the maiden walk (or steal a horse). And as an aside, it doesn't seem reasonable that his capacity to shift heavy weights for a period of time is equivalent to that of the equally strong, but fat and out of condition eunuch he got the maiden from, who'd be burning END every phase just to pick her up. Now, most GM's handwave it or ignore the problem entirely. Personally I'd rather FIX the contradiction - and at that point, pretty much everything falls neatly into place. I know how much PCs can lift, how far they can move it, how tired they get, how long it takes and how long it takes them to recover from such sustained effort. Not in the slightest. As I construe it, 100 kg is the most he can get off the floor AT ALL. Depending on how it's constructed, he may or may not be able to balance or carry it: to me, that logically determines whether he needs to put it down. But if he can't lift it at all, then he obviously can't get it onto his shoulder - and if he somehow did, his legs or back would give out: you were the one who suggested that a person could carry more than their STR lift if they could get it onto their back, not I. As for lifting obviously to be able to lift a weight it needs to be in a form you can lift. However, from my point of view, some things are pretty clear. 100 kg means 100 kg. A minus 8" penalty on your movement is exactly that. A "brief period" however is entirely dependant on context. It could be a phase or it could be 4 phases. That has quite different implications even on a tactical timescale.

Re: Lets talk about: Martial Arts Me, I'd go the MP route. In fact, I've even written it up for you http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/martialarts.html These are only the base maneuvers, of course, but assuming GM's permission, there'd be no problem bulking them up to superheroic levels cheers, Mark

Re: How much XP per 'level' OK, then we'll have to disagree. For me, having your movement reduced by 8" when you only have 6", means pretty explicitly that you can't move, just as having your move Drained to 0" does. I guess neither of us is going to convince the other on this point - and since it doesn't affect the way we run our games, suggest we leave it at that. cheers, Mark