Markdoc

Re: Dealing with Stun, End etc in Fantasty My argument for "doesn't stack" is pretty simple. If you're wearing plate armour you have defences equivalent to hardened steel. If you have an 8 DEF FF, you have defences equivalent to hardened steel. Add the two together and you have defences equivalent to..... hardened steel. A FF has no significant thickness - a person with one on is not encumbered and doesn't have problems with being unable to grasp thiongs and so on. So essentially you are adding the equivalent of a teensy fraction of a millimeter of steel to several milimetres of steel. Same applies to any mystical armour. If it's thick enough and "real enough" to add significantly to armour underneath, it's also thick enough and real enough to encumber so much it can't be worn with armour. Of course it doesn't have an additional effect. Likewise, wearing your 8 DEF FF over leather is not going to help. An attack that blows through the equivalent of hardened steel is not going to be significantly slowed by a bit of padded leather. Oh sure, occasionally it might help a teensy bit, in either case, but the damage rules are not granular enough to worry about that. You simply get the best of what you have. Same with combat luck. It protects you (mostly) from blows that might have hit hard enough to harm. If you have more DEF from armour than combat luck, any blow that struck hard enough to penetrate your armour by definition was not turned aside by your combat luck. Again,you get the best of combat luck or armour, not both. same applies to armour defined as mystically warding away attacks cheers, Mark

Re: Divide by Three Yeah, KS has basically covered it for me, too. Divide by three is such a truly terrible kludge, I can't imagine why any GM would ever want to use it. Here's a simple exercise - take the Fantasy Grimoire, look at some of the nastier spells in there and then divide the real costs by 3. Far from being a -2 limitation, it often adds up to a -6 or -10 and basically renders any character *other* than mages totally redundant. Want a realy stealthy rogue? Build a mage with shadow magic. Want a kickass warrior? Build a warrior-mage or a shapeshifter. And so on. cheers, Mark

Re: Dealing with Stun, End etc in Fantasty I do let personal PD stack with armor - or with anything, actually. But I don't let armor stack with combat luck or with magic. It doesn't sound like much, but decent armour + combat luck can actually make a character all but immune to BOD from most normal weapons - and that's without any munchkinism. Add even a low powered FF and they can easily become totally immune. cheers, Mark

Re: "Neat" Pictures actually, people are getting much more realistic pictures out of poser these days. I've got a couple of examples here they're in spoilers because they're ... ahem ... not work safe These - the latter one especially - are getting so close to real, it's getting hard to tell they're wholly digital. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Heh, no I don't play Sengoku, though I did interact with Mark and the gang. There's always been some confusion since I had a Hero system game set in the Sengoku era. I called it "Sengoku" - since there wasn't a game of that name out at the time. Now I'm stuck with it As to the models, no, it's a home made conglomeration made to the plan I used for the player's base in the old campaign - I didn't realise Daz actually had a japanese castle. Now I'll have to go look! cheers, Mark

Re: Magic items - pay for base item? I simply don't allow items to be enchanted for "free". You're opening yourself up for a world of regret otherwise. Sure, the guy can have a +5 STR amulet over (or even under, if it's IIF) his armour, but it's a seperate item and can be stolen, loaned or targetted with having any effect on the armour. In that regard, it's mechanistically different (and more vulnerable) than an armour that gives +5 STR. It's mechanistically different from an amulet that gives +5 STR and 8DEF armour as well, so it *should* have an different cost. Most importantly, however, the player who makes a fighter will grit his teeth in anger when he routinely gets beaten senseless, while the mage who enhanced his suit of plate with another +8 DEF armour (thus getting double effect from his spell for free) is a combat monster, essentially unkillable by normal weapons - and paid a whole 3 points for that ability, using your guideline. You can always disallow adding extra DEF to armour and HKA to ordinary weapons, but then your players will likely add extra STR to the armour (to let them max out their weapons) and extra DEF to user when wielding the sword. The effect ends up being the same. A simple and very, very valuable rule for FH GM's is "Free stuff is mundane. Magical stuff is not mundane, and therefore not free". cheers, Mark

Re: Dealing with Stun, End etc in Fantasty

Re: Dealing with Stun, End etc in Fantasty Yep. I don't ride caps on my players. If someone wants to be a bitchin' swordsman he can have a big sword, martial arts, CSLs and big bulgy muscles - and do 4d6 HKA. Of course, unless you give your players masses of XP, that's going to be his whole shtick. If he comes up against someone whose whole shtick is "light fighter, so fast they never hit me" he'll struggle, but he'll gut common foes, armoured or otherwise. The same applies to mage's spells. Mr Ubersword is going to have to think about dodging or dying when he faces an Ildarian fire sorceror. Second, don't be too free and easy with armour. I've played in games where people wander city streets in armour and go out drinking in full plate with a two handed sword on their back. IMO, that's ..... wierd. If players spend some time out of their shells (and to be fair, so do their foes) you'll find the lethality rate goes, way, way up. Use hit locations. Not all armour covers every location - in fact most doesn't. Even a dagger in the unarmoured face can do some nasty, nasty damage. Third, don't give away freebies. In my game one of the limitations of "real" as in real weapon, real armour etc is that it does not stack with powers. So if you have combat luck, you can't drop plate armour on top for nigh-invulnerability. The wizard can't add his forcefield to that to get total invulverability. Likewise, he can't enchant a normal longsword by adding 1d6 HKA to an ordinary sword to get an uberkiller 2d6 +1 longsword. In this same categorey, I'd add don't be too easy on magic. Defences are cheap and it's easy to build tankmages. I cannot express my loathing for the "divide real coast by 3 or 5 or whatever" kludge since it makes it almost trivial to build mages who are invulnerable to any normal weapons. Powerful magic is fine - as log as it's not easy to do it all the time. Easy magic is fine as long as it's not too powerful. Blend the two and disaster awaits. I prefer to use END, but for the current group, most of whom were Hero n00bs, I did not initially use END - after explaining the concept and explaining that when they were more experienced we would add it - which I plan to do at the conclusion of this series of adventures. One way to avoid much book-keeping is to require or encourage energy efficient characters who normally replenish the END they use - and then only track unusual expenditure - spells, pushing, combat feats, etc. Last of all I deal with the "unconscious foe" problem by adding a dash of realism. A foe who has been knocked unconscious and wakes with low STUN, low END and a bleeding gash in some part of his body is probably not going to roll to his feet and charge back into the attack - he's going to play dead or crawl off somewhere to bind his wound. I've never had players going around giving the coup de grace - unless they were fighting fanatics who literally would not stop until they were dead. In that case, it was not only appropriate, but added a feeling of grimness that I wanted. To me that whole problem is simply a symptom of GM'ing like you were playing DnD - things are either dead or not dead: there's no such thing as "wounded". cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art This is no particular character - but it is a particular place: White Feather Castle from my Sengoku game. Took me two whole evenings to get the *%#*ing castle done, but it's a pretty accurate rendering of the original map and sketch. The castle's not perfect, and this is a small, low-res version of the image, but on the whole, I'm not too unhappy with how it came out. cheers, Mark

Re: Martial Artist Depends how far you want to go. To me "throwing my cells to the other side of the room" sounds pretty bizarre. "I'm so quick I can't be effectively blocked" on the other hand seems relatively commonplace (I had a character with this power - Teleport with the -1/2 limitation "must cross intervening space" so he couldn't go through tiny windows, barred gates and the like and he'd still be burned going through a wall of fire. Other possibilities for "total body control" include - simulate death - Life support - reduced aging, immunity to environmental effects and disease - Damage reduction and/or damage resistance - Aid to characteristics - increased HTH damage - Enhanced senses - etc. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Gotta bitta kulcha last weekend. We (well, my wife really) had a Jane Austen Day. We had a dinner with 18th century food and nice wine, watched Sense and Sensibility, then had supper, with a suitable sweet wine then watched Mansfield Park. cheers, Mark

Re: Running jokes in your campaign The GM for this one is on the boards, so he might like to comment ... We had this guy in the group who always liked to play something distinctive (no, not me - another guy ) so in one vauguely celtic-themed fantasy game he played a black guy from some far-off exotic country. And whenever he met a group of new people, someone would inevitably say "Whoa, somebody really messed up their tatooing, didn't they?" After a while the character perished (from annoyance, probably) but the phrase crawled over into my FH game where the players used it for anybody with distinctive features. Inevitably, then, they would run into people who, well, somebody had really messed up their tatooing cheers, Mark

Re: Alignment Issues In DnD, though, it was very much more than that. Pick up the Unholy Thinggummybob of Whosis and if you're Lawful Good, it may blow your arm off - even if you had no idea what it was. In that setting, alignment has a significant physical component - it governs how certain articles affect you - in some places, it even affects how the world itself affects you. It affects the way you can do magic, the powers available to you, etc. I'd never thought of it specifically, but I suppose you could model it as a *physical lim.* Probably worth 0 points in a DnD type setting though, like NCM in a heroic game, unless it's something you actively choose, since all people will have an alignment. cheers, Mark

Re: How To: Arcane Channeling

Re: Godwin's Law, or is that Godwin's Chaos? Irrelevant in that people seem to be confusing "law" - meaning a system of judicial rules, with "law" as it is used in the Moorcock stories (which is where Gygax lifted the concept from) which refers to the state of the universe. The two are only peripherally related and in their extreme forms either is inimical to humans - the two big "Law vs Chaos" story arcs ended with the Champion of Law (Corum) betraying the cause of law to opt for balance and the champion of Chaos (Elric) betraying Chaos - opting for Law, and ending up with balance anyway. The more metaphysical meaning of law in that setting only has meaning in the sense of alignment in that the "Gods of Law" promote an unchanging universe with rigid, absolute natural laws. Societies and people are "lawful" only inasmuch as they try to resist the tendency of the universe towards entropy (in other words they work towards maintaining a stable society). In that regard, *most* societies are to some extent lawful. That, at least, is always how I understood and ran it. Han Solo is Chaotic Neutral (later changing alignment to Chaotic good) - he's perfectly happy making a living by illegal means and could care a big fat zero about the shape of society. Luke Skywalker is Lawful Good - he's a rebel, but not by choice - he wishes to restore the old society, because he thinks it's "gooder" - but he doesn't wish to tear society down and build a new even more just (even more "good") society. Same with Robin Hood. He's not chaotic because he breaks the law. In fact, he's perfectly Lawful - he opposes the Sheriff of Nottingham because the Sheriff's stealing tax money, supporting the usurping John, and is generally evil, plus the Sheriff wants to boink the Lady Marian, not because he's chaotic. As soon as the rightful king turns up, Robin Hood immediately bends the knee, turns over his loot and cheerfully consigns half the merry men to death in battle in support of the returned king. In the Hollywood version, you can bet he moves back into Locksley hall and takes an official position, afterwards, too. (In the original version, he dies and the Sheriff's side wins, but that's another story) Admittedly, I don't use alignment for players any more - I prefer a few good juicy psych lim.s. I do however still use it for the multiverse. It has two axes - past/future and Law/Chaos. As you move law-wards through the multiverse, physical laws change and become more consistent - at the extreme you reach a steady-state universe, where matter is evenly distributed across infinate space - meaning there's a universe mostly empty apart from the very, very occasional mote of dust. Probbality doesn't exist because nothing ever changes. At the other end, you have a universe, where the most unlikley events can occur. Probablity is meaningless - a baby universe could burst into being in your living room - if there were beings there who could have living rooms - changing the current one and its physical laws at any point. Indeed, that's essentially happening continuously. Along that axis, the physical univers becomes ever more mutable, so that magic becomes both possible and then ever more powerful. Technology operates in the opposite direction. Along the time axis, time proceeds - although at what speed and how flexible causuality is depends on how far along the law/chaos axis you are. The time axis actually loops back on itself and since in both the universe of total law and that of total chaos, there is essentially not-time, you can view the resulting time/order graph as two opposed asymptotic graphs touching at their infinately distant and infinately small ends. That infinately small period of time is the life span of your hypothetical universe from big bang to collapse back into a big crunch - which moving down the time axis is the same process in reverse. I sound likethe TimeCube guy without the CAPITALIZATIONS don't I? I do however find it useful for visualising my game universe to deal with dimension/time travel. cheers, Mark

Re: Speed Chart dynamism A variant on this which I have used to great success is to randomise the speed chart using a dice. People act when the number rolled is equal to or less than their SPD - or can act at a higher number, if they have a held action. Everyone goes on a 1 and gets a "post-12" (or post-1 ) afterwards. It's a good time-saver, but doesn't address the Doc's original problem of people acting as soon as they have an action and not holding to try something different: it's a whole 'nother thread. cheers, Mark

Re: Putting my finger on it

Re: Putting my finger on it

Re: Putting my finger on it

Re: Fantasy Hero Problems and advantages

Re: How to do Priests use magic???

Re: Speed Chart dynamism So how does this work with SPD? Is it simply to encourage people to think about their actions (that's what I am assuming), or is it a replacement for SPD? If it's the former, my answer to getting players to think about SPD, was to use NPC's SPD properly. For example, when a higher SPD PC is attacked by three (relatively smart) mook types, they circle him and one or two delay while another attacks. Depending on the PC's actions the NPCs can react - it makes it far harder for the PC to use maneuvers such as Sweep to dispose of all of them in one go and it lets them use haymakers and similar attacks when the PC cannot so easily respond. Alternatively, whichever mook is attacked goes as defensive as he can. That means if the PC fights defensively - mindful of the mooks to either side - he has far less chance of inflicting damage, but if he goes all out for a sure hit, he risks getting tagged. That kind of tactical combat, where low-point characters compensate for their low SPD encourages tactical play by smart players - which in turn means using their SPD advantage. It's monkey see, monkey do. If the players keep getting beat up by 25 point street punks who use their SPD wisely, they'll retaliate in kind - which is what you want, no? cheers, Mark

Re: Sliding bars measuring each spell's "energy" The simplest way to do this - I like simple - is to buy the maximum amount of power you want to use and then limit it. So for example, you buy a 10d6 EB and a seperate (cheap) END reserve that holds 10 END, which either has an all or nothing recovery (once per day, say) or a slow recharge. You then give the spell a limit to reflect the fact that each spell can only draw off its own END reserve, based on the size of the reserve. For example an END reserve that only held 10 END would be worth maybe -1 1/2 since it's only a little more flexible than saying you have 1 use per day (which would give -2). I'd suggest using the charge limitation as a guide, with the END reserve limit giving a +1/2 more than a similar number of charges at full power because it's a bit more flexible. That way, with a 10 END reserve, you can zap off a single 10d6 EB, 2 x 5 d6 EB's or 10 x 1d6 EB's per day. If you want a little more oomph, you can buy up the END reserve so you get 2 x 10d6 EB, etc. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art No, there was this magic item, see, but it had a kind of curse on it.... I should have seen it coming actually - even before the sudden magical sex-change, the character had (in reverse order) lost a hand, been subjected to forced religious conversion, been subject to magical compulsion to kill, lost his memory, suffered a nervous breakdown and been robbed of what few possessions he started with.... It's a good things she's a warrior - she has a lot of suppressed agression to work off cheers, Mark

Re: How many Dragon's teeth adorn YOUR shield? My/our characters have killed a few dragons over the years, but it was never a cakewalk - I think we talked/bargained with as many as we fought. But one memorable session, my character (on his own) ran into a huge dragon. Being conveniently colour-coded like all dragons, I could tell it was evil, so naturally we set to. After a barrage of spells and counter barrage of breath weapon attacks, followed by sword versus fang, I was down to my last few HPs - but the dragon was also severely wounded and I knew it couldn't take much more damage. So we stood there for a minute huffing and panting and then said, more or less simultaneously "OK - let's call it a draw" and cautiously went our seperate ways. I actually recall that fight more vividly than the ones that ended with dead dragons. cheers, Mark