Markdoc

Re: Daily Art Findings Relatively simple - as RPmiller noted, it's just a matter of changing a few settings. To put it in perspective, the first picture took a couple of hours, mostly to assemble and pose the model and then export it to Bryce (I like that for rendering because of better control of light/atmosphere). In Bryce, I coloured the model it and rendered several different lighting setups to find one I liked. The second picture took about 7 minutes. I hadn't bothered to keep the original render file, but I did still have the model. So I had to start with Bryce again, import the model, recolour and re-render. For a relatively simple model like this, no biggie. As for the model itself, it's a mixture of commercial armour parts, free armour parts and a few simple doodads I did myself to make it look more "power-armour-y" (it started as near-future SWAT-style armour) and a wee bit of photoshop touch-up. This is kind of off-topic for the FH forum, but it applies equally to fantasy images. I think of poser a bit like plastic modelling: over the years I've built up a big "bits box" of items that might be useful and I can usually whack them together to make whatever I want. Carrara is where I make custom add-ons for the bits box, with photoshop filling the role of modelling putty to cover any unsightly gaps cheers, Mark

Re: Adventures Stories The campaign's still running but I am too busy/lazy to write it up for the web. There are however detailed pages of in-game notes, so it will get updated again at some point. Cheers, Mark

Re: Super Heroic Fantasy Games It's quite possible to run superpowered fantasy games. I ran a game I've described here before, where players started with 250-point characters, but using heroic rules, so all the equipment and cool toys they could find were free. Each character had unique powers so that some of them (Strength, for example) really could wrassle a dragon. In addition, each character was immortal (Power was bought as duplicates, but with lots of limitations including the fact that only one duplicate could be active at any one time). Thus, kill the character and he'd just pop up in a new body somewhere else. It did raise the interesting question of what to do with all your inert duplicates, since the only way to truly kill an immortal was to kill all 256 of his bodies: so you couldn't just leave them lying around. cheers, Mark

Re: [Review] Chasing A Golden Buck Don't all GMs do this? It's the only way that makes any sense to me... cheers, Mark

Re: Stun/knock outs, overwhelming the combats As noted, I use hit locations and keep a tight reign on the use of armour ("no, you can't come in to see the duke in armour: go home and get dressed in something suitable", etc) That means the problem is more often keeping PCs alive than worrying about STUN. As for Mooks, the same applies. Players tend to drop most of them with severe or lethal wounds as often or more often than they just knock them unconscious. Mooks in general rarely have the best armour available, making aimed shots practical and lethal. I've never needed a "mook rule" for the simple reason that I GM my NPCs intelligently. A thug or a man at arms who recovers consciousness after having been beaten insensible and likely leaking blood from one or several wounds is unlikely to spring up and go "Huzzah! Now that we are injured, let us hurl ourselves into the fray against opponents who wiped the floor with us when we were more numerous and all hale and hearty!" No, like any injured warrior with hardly any STUN or END, they tend to moan and try to crawl away inconspicuously, or lie there and play dead until their enemies go away. And if they meet the PCs again, their morale is hardly going to be high.... That makes the coup de grace thing relatively rare (actually, all but unknown) in my games and in addition has the benefit that when the players face fanatics - who do spring up when allowed to recover - they tend to think the fanatics are a lot tougher than they actually are (because they won't stay down). It also makes the players go "Wow! Those guys were fanatics! We had to kill them all!" In too many games, all NPCs are fanatics - which is why there's this coup de grace problem. There are a few exceptions - occasionally an unconscious warrior will stand up and re-enter the fray - but it is most definitely the exception rather than the rule. cheers, Mark

Re: Clinging, UAA I've actually used Clinging UAA in a game - in fact two of the PCs of posters here (Fitz and Sir O'Feelya) were on the receiving end. It is a potentially powerful effect, but not unbalancing. Although cheaper than TK or englobing FW when it comes to trapping someone, it is also far weaker - TK lets you do damage, throw stuff around, etc. FW totally seals the victim away. This power lets you stop them moving, or attach them to stuff, but that's all. You can, if inventive, do some fun stuff with it (for example, target a focus with the power so they stick to IT, when they grab it and it sticks to other things, stick two PCs together when they try to combine STR to pull free, etc). But given the cost, (you need to add UAA and ranged to make it truly effective) I don't think the power is unbalancing. cheers, Mark

Re: Daily Art Findings The advantage of digital art is that once you've done your modelling, you can rerender to your heart's content: after posting the first image, I wondered what the armour would look like in traditional Iron Man colours and you know, I think it's not bad. What'd ye reckon? Cheers, Mark

Re: Daily Art Findings

Re: warhammer 40k Star hero

Re: Daily Art Findings

Re: What are you playing now? No Hero system for me currently (as a player: I'm GM'ing a FH campaign). I'm playing D&D 3.5 - and this is Myrial, an orphan raised in a temple of Torm (if you know the Forgotten Realms backstory you probably know why - otherwise let's just say the temples raised a lot of orphans in the last generation) who has a touch of divine blood. He's another attempt to make a "light fighter": Monk/Cleric. He's the party's scout, with good stealth skills, Darkvision (he's an aasimaar) and decent combat skills: I especially like to be able to creatively combine unarmed and armed combat with a decent weapon. As he starts to gain levels of Paladin (next level) he should start to kick a fair amount of bottom. In a few more levels, when he finally hits the top of the feat tree I have been building, he'll become a death-dealing machine of the Gods. But even without that, he's fun to play.

Re: Daily Art Findings Here's something I did this evening. No particular character: I started with the intention of making a chap with pointy, nasty teeth (that's him on the bottom ) and it just went from there. cheers, Mark

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? Oh, I agree 100%. In fact, the latest player to join my FH game is a traditional weather mage with little combat ability: his role in combat will be limited to blowing arrows aside with gusts of wind and summoning mists to cover the players' movements, methinks. However, out of combat, he will broaden the party's capabilities significantly. As a GM, I like that. Combat is what the warriors are for: it's their speciality and chance to shine. Mages can do so many other things, it seems unfair to let them particpate equally (or more than equally) in combat as well. Sure, and maybe I came off more strongly than I intended: if so I apologise. One of the strengths of Hero is that you can make all sorts of different balances and I certainly didn't mean to imply there was anything wrong with the way you play/GM. And as noted, we have used this system ourselves for several FH games (in fact when we started with FH, we used variation of it for all of our games), so I'm not talking on purely theoretical grounds. But we have had multiple threads on the board from GMs saying "Help! My wizards are trashing everthing else in the campaign!" and the idea that "wizards are weaker than warriors because warriors get free stuff" is almost inevitably one of the assumptions that led to the problem. It's not an insoluble problem: but it is something the GM needs to take on board when designing the game: hence my warning. But note the example above: you don't need a lot of points to build effective spells. In one of our earlier games, my Paladin type got a great deal of mileage out of a small Flash spell: just a phase or two of making your enemy blind was often enough for a quick kill. I think that was the last game we played where PCs paid points for their stuff. We had a maximum of 30 active points for magic in that game (the same active cost as the largest weapons like 2H-swords) - and by far the weakest HTH combatant was the only pure warrior in the group. Everyone else ended playing a "paladin", or a "cleric" or something of that ilk. And again - it wasn't a bad campaign: I had a lot of fun and still have a great fondness for Sir Flanghall - my bad-tempered, dirty-fighting, lay brother from a holy order - from that game. But the choice of paying points for everything certainly shaped the character design and had implications for the development of the game down the line. Agreed. You can (in fact, I do) build magic systems which allow pure fighter types and pure magic-usig types to exist alongside each other as well as alongside PCs who mix both. My reaction was purely against the idea that mages are somehow weaker than warriors - as attested to by the other posts on this thread, the reverse is generally true. Not always true - but generally true.

Re: Stun/knock outs, overwhelming the combats I'd add to the chorus suggesting the use of hit locations - and note that if you have armour (or other resistant DEF) you get to add your PD to the DEF of the armour against STUN damage. That makes combat a wee bit more complex (at least until you memorise the location chart), but be warned that it ups the lethality of the game significantly. Especially if you have skile dplayers (or foes) who can deliberately target the unarmoured bits. I don't see that as a bad thing: fights in my game tend to be short and brutal, and that's how I prefer it, but I'm just saying... cheers, Mark

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? Actually, Valdoran age works hard to make magic more expensive and more limited - but then it's a sword and sorcery game. You are right about the others,: they do make magic cheaper and Steve has been explicit about why - these are high magic settings, where mages are supposed to shine. I prefer a setting where magic - while not rare - does not dominate the game: it's why I'm fussy about crimping magic so the warriors get their chance to shine too. It is an an issue; so far I've played in two online FH games, which have both used the Turakian magic system - both folded pretty quickly, in large part because it was apparent that the non-magic-using characters were essentially sidekicks to the mages. I'm partly to blame for that: after playing a warrior in game #1, my character in game number two was a shapeshifting mage using spells from the FH Grimoire #1 and he was simply insanely powerful cheers, Mark

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? Unless he's smart, in which case invisibility will make it harder for the warrior to hit him and easier for him to sink his free sword between the warrior's shoulderblades. Or a 1-hex entangle, which reduces the warrior to impotence in one phase. Or Flash, which can shift the odds decisively in his favour. Or images or mind control, or... This is a fair point, but again, there's no need for a wizard to be a physical weakling. A warrior type should normally have an edge in physical stat.s, because the wizard needs to spend some points on magic: but the array of powers available and the ability to limit them and thus reduce the cost, usally more than makes up for this. The only way a warrior can outclass a wizard is if the wizard is dim enough to spend his points re-buying stuff everyone gets for free. That's why I asked if you had a house rule preventing wizards from using free gear. That could be one of the "balance" factors I referred to. Maybe the reason I've never seen warriors overpower wizards is because I've never played in a game where magic-users are forbidden to use weapons and armour. Well, spells might - many spell systems don't require endurance. But it's a moot point if your Mage wields a sword and wwears armour anyway.

Re: Any Advantages to mounted combat in FH vs DND 3.5 Here's my house rules for mounted combat. They are years old, so to some extent overlap with suggestions in 5th Ed. and in other cases are different. They are certainly less complicated. It also covers Kristopher's question about funky moves in the saddle. Horses are independant characters - they are capable of making attacks, movement and so on, without input from the rider. Of course they can only take actions on phases in which they get to act, meaning that a fast rider will have some "free" phases in which he can't move (but can still do other things). He *can* make a riding roll to try to give his horse a new instruction. However, to *get* the horse to do what you want requires a riding roll, and to get it to *stop* doing something requires another riding roll. Essentially, every time you want to make the horse do something in a stressful situation, that's a Riding roll. Any riding roll is a half-phase action, so you can goad your trusty steed into action and still swing your sword. In other words, to charge the enemy is a single riding roll. To goad your steed to trample somone is a riding roll. To get your steed moving in a more or less straight line is a Riding roll, and so on. Once any of these actions is started, it will continue until either the horse gets an idea to do something itself (a trained warhorse, for example is perfectly capable of getting he idea to trample or bite a foe on it's own) or the rider successfully makes a Riding roll to get it to do something else. If you should be unlucky enough to end up in combat on a horse which is not combat trained, it will most likely decide to leave every time it gets a phase, so you had better have an action handy to rein it in. Some rolls - goading a horse into a furious melee, jumping a high fence, etc may cause a -1 to -3 penalty. Persons without Riding skill can make base 8- rolls to stay on the horse, but will have to roll at a penalty to make it do what they want or more if they want to do something complex. Staying on a horse - especially a rapidly moving horse - makes a person a less mobile target than if they were on their own two feet. Riders use either half their DCV or the mount's DCV, whichever is greater. This might seem a bit harsh, but historically, a rider surrounded by hostile foot was very vulnerable to being unhorsed. Keep moving! Mounted combat is not intended to be static. A rider who can and wants to, can make an acrobatics roll (or a riding roll at -3 or more) - if successful they can get their full DCV that phase, as they roll about in the saddle, drop to one side and so on. If they fail, they fall off. Like most skill actions, this is a half-phase action, so unless you are in combat already, will often preclude an attack. Horse riders get a free high shot (2d6+1) for location against opponents on foot, unless using a long weapon, while attackers on foot will get a low shot (2d6+7) on mounted opponents - again unless using a long weapon. Riders retain their regular OCV if they have riding skill, otherwise suffer a -3 penalty. A mounted charge can be either a move-by (normally with a weapon) or a move through (attempt to trample with the horse/dragon/war-elephant/whatever). In either case, if you use the mount's move and - if you are securely mounted - the mount's STR (this simulates the effect of mass and differentiates a charge by shock cavalry from the "ride up and hack" of skirmishing cavalry) to calculate damage. If the move-through or move-by is with a weapon, then the partial damage meted out to the attacker affects the weapon. It's pretty easy to shiver a lance like this! If it is with the mount, then of course it takes the damage and if it is stopped suddenly, the rider has to make a riding roll or go flying off. When attempting to cow opponents from horseback, use the horse's PRE instead of your own if it is higher. A mounted warrior could be a fearsome sight. It also means a man mounted on a dragon is scarier than a man mounted on an ostrich. cheers, Mark

Re: Players wish to emulate dnd's sense motive. I have a chracter in the current FH game (Lamoniak du Moncu) who has exactly this power, bought as: Detect Motivation, PER- (Unusual Group) (3 points), Discriminatory (5 points: only basic information, -1) for a total cost of 5 points As noted, anyone can pick up on a bad liar, or can make a guess at someone's motivation. Skills like conversation can make it easier to pick this up. However, not everyone can detect a skilled liar, and picking up other cues is harder. Even though he has a really high conversation roll, Lamoniak's player wanted something a little more concrete. I didn't make it a sense: he needs to actually observe or talk with the person for at least a half phase. Discriminatory is limited because he picks up only very basic cues like "this person is hiding it well, but he's really nervous" or "you get the impression that he doesn't like you much, even though he's being polite" not "You think he's leading you into a trap". As written the power is essentially described "reading body language" so it complementary to conversation: it is not a substitute for Danger sense, Telepathy or spells like "detect enemy". cheers, Mark

Re: Mounted Combat, and a Question of Historical Accuracy

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

Re: House AD :: Usable Only on Others I rate that at -1/2. cheers, Mark

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

Re: [Review] Tuala Morn Heck, nobody wants that! As I noted, it's not a big deal - the critters are perfectly usable as is: it simply adds to the feeling that the book was slapped together in a hurry and pushed out the door before it was properly done - a pity, because there's lots o' good stuff in there. cheers, Mark

Re: [Review] Tuala Morn