Markdoc

Re: Dive for Cover He's got two choices: dodge and then flee when he gets a move (there's no "attack of opportunity" in Hero) or dive for cover. Using my house rule, a "dive for cover" is just a dodge that incorporates movement, so he still gets his dodge bonus - all the DEX roll does is determine how far he goes. If he's smart enough to use the terrain, he can benefit from dodging behind that too, to get a cover bonus. If the cover in in his hex, he doesn't even need to roll - that's a classic "movie bit" where one antagonist is dodging around an object, while his opponent tries to whack him - like Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones fighting around the capstan in the last POTC movie. The house rule is simple. A dodge is a dodge and always treated the same (+3 DCV, +5 if it's martial). That's a substantial advantage right there. If you want to move (to get away from an AoE, for example, or to get some cover, or just to get away from an attacker) you make a DEX roll, modified by distance. That doesn't affect your DCV - you are still dodging, after all - the DEX roll just effects your movement and how far you can go. You fall down at the end of your move or end up similarly inconvenienced, so you are at 1/2 DCV. If you have bought flying dodge, you can move without the DEX roll - but it still doesn't affect your DCV: it's a dodge, after all. This plays very simply and works well - it even encourages the players to make more use of terrain. It makes DFC a useful technique, but not a killer advantage: and the players haven't complained, because it means that low point, low DCV characters can't delay and then DFC to gain immunity to HTH by succeeding on a DEX roll while their comrades pound on the attacking PC - which is what used to happen. cheers, Mark

Re: Dive for Cover I see it as a glitch, because the character doing the DFC is standing right next to his attacker. If the character dodges (ie: makes a desperate attempt to get out of the way of an attack) he has a reduced chance of getting hit - but the attacker still has a chance to connect. If the character DFCs (ie: makes a desperate attempt to get out of the way of an attack) the attacker has no chance to hit unless the target actually fail the attempt. It's not such a big deal for heroic level games where the chances of failing are significant, but in some of our superheroic games we had characters who could make a 1 hex DFC on a DEX roll of 18-. It meant if they wanted to burn an action, they could essentially dodge almost any HTH attack, regardless of the attacker's OCV (Hugh's already mentioned this). And someone with a DEX in the high 30's usually has phases to burn. It doesn't even make that much sense rationally - if you can move, so can your opponent: it's not like you magically end up 2 metres away while he is frozen in time. To me it makes more sense to treat DFC and dodge as two variants of the same action - a desperate attempt to get out of the way of an attack - and treat them the same way. cheers, Mark

Re: "Well, last time I saw that, we did...."

Re: [Review] Tuala Morn

Re: Mega Fantasy City Map - My latest project

Re: "Well, last time I saw that, we did...." What I did for a similar character was: 1. several slots of cramming. That only gives you an 8- roll but if you were (for example) trying to navigate San Francisco today when the last time you were there was in 1902, then an 8- roll is pretty damn generous. That lets the character have skills in almost everything, but at a low level. You could, with GM's permission, use a VPP for the same thing 2. A bunch of levels with extra time: the character can usually dredge up more information if he has time to sit and think about it. You could apply these to your VPP. cheers, Mark

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Dive for Cover Yeah: I don't like this rule, which was added in 5th, I think. I houserule that a dodge and a dive for cover are the same thing. In both cases you are trying to get out of the way. The house rule is that you can dodge either in your hex or try to dodge away form an attack. If you dodge in your hex, it's treated as a regular dodge currently is. If you dive for cover (ie: try to dodge and move) you still get the dodge bonus, but also have to make the modified DEX roll to cover the ground - if you fail the DEX roll - you fall short one hex for every point you miss the roll by. Either way, if you move, you end up prone. This plays pretty simply - a player simply declares a dodge - either in place or something like "I dodge behind the pillar". Non-AoE attacks go against the regular DCV + dodge bonus + cover bonus (if any), AoE attacks take account of cover. There's no fudging about "if it's a regular attack, if it's an Aoe attack I DFC" and it removes the irritating glitch that a 1 hex DFC can completely obviate a HTH attack.

Re: help with ship clasifications And if your battle riders are just big enough to take a spinal mount, then the advantage swings massively in their favour. Much cheaper than a jump-capable battleship but equally likely to kill it. When we were playing Billion Credit Squadron, every fleet started to look like this, because .... um.... the ones that didn't, weren't around any more. In a way it's merely upsizing the carrier concept: your fighters are now 10 kTon+ (maybe I got the size wrong .... it's been 20+ years since I last played:doi:) ships with a fairly large crew. Their only purpose is to carry the largest weapon and shield they can: analogous to WW2 fighter-bombers. Your carrier is the mother ship. We still deployed "fighters" - these were the smallest ships capable of mounting a weapon bay and were the only ones we ever bothered to streamline any of, so they could operate as planetary support. That gives you a hierarchy with jump-capable carriers at the top, cruiser-like battle riders, which in turn mounted the smallest warships which had a crew IIRC of about a half dozen or less. But those are specialised battlefleets, with a crew roster in the thousands (tens of thousands if you count all the marines stored as corpsicles). There's still a role for jump-capable warships, but that role is scouting, patrol and anti-piracy: frigates, if you like. These need to be tough, fast and long-ranged but not very large or heavily armed: they have no chance against even the smallest elements of a battle fleet, regardless. 100-1200 ktons seemed to be the sweet spot, IIRC. That's a reasonably sensible set-up, which just happily seems to fit well with roleplaying: your PCs can be the whole crew of a fighter in a battlefleet, or of a frigate doing patrol/scout duties. cheers, Mark

Re: Photosynthesis vs. Solar Cells?

Re: Mental Yep, you nailed it here. Basically, this is a special effect thing: which is why it doesn't figure in the hero rules. It's why I gave a mechanistic answer. Mind control uses the same attack rules (including targeting) as EB, because all attacks use the same basic attack rules. If you wanted to change it - and I can see why you might - then sure, houserule or (my preference) limit the mental attack powers.

Re: Watchers of the Dragon vs. Ninja Hero Yeah, Watchers of the Dragon is pretty clearly an adventure/setting book with some extra characters. I've gotten a deal of use out my copy as source of ideas, even though I primarily run heroic level games. However, here's a related question - I also have ultimate martial artist and that also gets a fair amount of use. It's equally clearly a character-building book for martial arts. What's the difference between that and 5th Ed. Ninja Hero? cheers, Mark

Re: BBC Airship Article It's a common problem (I have it ALL the time) - but not one you could solve by airships. Try sending stuff in over the border without permission and be prepared for military/police intervention: they're not going to give up their sovereignty, their security or their lucrative "import taxes" without a fight. In practice, we could avoid this problem right now by sending stuff in by helicopter. But in reality we can't - we'd have our licence to operate pulled in an eyeblink if we just started shipping stuff in without going through customs and security. cheers, Mark

Re: Mental Not really, no. Firelass can fry someone she can see. If she's attacking someone with invisibility to normal sight, she can shoot at - if at a minus - them if she can divine their location by hearing, or by touching. If she had IR "heatvision", she could shoot him cleanly as well - the benefit of having a second targetting sense. Being invisible doesn't mean you can't be shot at. I'm not sure why Mentalmidget should have the ability to zap someone with his Ego attack unless he buys an extra sense. The extra sense usually means that you can attack someone you couldn't normally see. Right now invisibility to mental senses blocks the ability to find someone using ... well, mental senses. That means mindscan primarily. It's a targetting sense as well as providing other utility, but I guess telepathy could also be affected in some circumstances (for example, "attacking" a region you couldn't see to try and catch stray thoughts - I'd use the invisibility rules for that). It would also affect other powers/sense defined as belonging to the mental group such as detects or (for example) clairsentience bought as a mental power (looking through another's eyes by "telepathy") for example. So this sort of exception really doesn't bother me. Certainly it's less irritating than DEX-based SPD for for mental actions (and yes, I know, but I don't use the optional rules - they're a pain) cheers, Mark

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so No. Now I have images of Cugel finding the head of Vecna! cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Saw it last night at the theatre. Two thumbs up. Also it got a good round of applause from the audience when it ended. cheers, Mark

Re: Currency . . . of the Future! That's true - any currency was only valuable within an area where people agreed it was valuable. And what's valuable is going to vary wildly from area to area. That applies to barter too. Here in Copenhagen, if you paid book value for a box of macrolide antibiotics, it'd cost you about 50 bucks. But if you had such a box, you couldn't exchange it for *anything* - not even an icecream - even though it has a defined cost and is perceived to be "valuable". Take it to a market in Africa and you could easily swap it for something in a similar price range to the cost here. Likewise, a cow that you could easily barter in the same market in Africa would fetch you precisely nothing in southern India - though the drugs would still be good. US dollars, however, which have no intrinsic value at all, you could probably barter in any of those three places - though they'd have less value than in the US. That was the whole point of my prior post - there really is no such thing as "intrinsically valuable" - only agreed value. And if you have a whole lot of people who can agree to a value for something - voila! You have a currency. The only real requirement is that it is something that cannot be easily falsified or collected. Edit: it occurred to me that it might not be obvious why I chose antibiotics as my barter item - it's because in postwar Europe, when antibiotics were new and rare, they served as an unofficial black market currency, with table pricing and even exchange rates between the different occupied zones in Germany/Austria. cheers, Mark

Re: BBC Airship Article

Re: BBC Airship Article

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so

Re: BBC Airship Article And the price of gas Seriously though, what killed airships was not the Hindenburg, anymore than the Titanic killed shipping. It was speed. Planes are faster and even in the 20's it was obvious they would soon have the range to cover international routes. Had there not been an alternative, airship development would probably have continued. I went to Capetown for a meeting a couple of weeks ago. Went to the airport in the afternoon, got into the plane, got out next morning, went to my meeting. It would have taken me 4-5 days by airship, if such a service existed. Now that would have been cool: sipping a cold one and watching the sahara slip by beneath us - but for most human travel, airships are too slooow. And for freight, ships are as fast and much, much, more economical. So much as I'd love to see them back, I can't see them making a big comeback in the foreseeable future. cheers, Mark

Re: Magic systems, Magic costs to much?

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so

Re: FRPG Ideas from D&D that ain't necessarily so

Re: Currency . . . of the Future!