Markdoc

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help Actually, that's not the case. Even the bronze skin of a hoplon is amazingly heavy and we have shields (admittedly, not as large) in the national museum here which are solid bronze. I have seen the actual items up clse and hefted exact reproductions. They are astoundingly heavy, but apparently used in battle. A heavy club would still work but any stone-tipped missile weapon would be totaly useless against them - and against the hoplon, even bronze-tipped arrows were not very effective, as witness the many accounts of missile troops being run down by hoplites or being unable to shift them.

Re: Rarity of Magic?

Re: Elves

Re: Elves

Re: What combination would it take to score 40 on the pop-up M16 range? Also, based on RL hunting experience and ranges from combat reports, I assume that shooting on the range gives you the "ideal situation" and "tools" bonus. My own experience is that guys who could routinely tag a man-sized target at 100M on the range could routinely miss a much larger target at a half of that range when they were shooting at a live, moving target. Move that to a combat situation where the target is or may be shoting back and I could easily believe that you can drop the range rate to a third in RL combat. That not only matches what my Dad (a very-experienced combat vet who later did range training for the NZ equivalent of the National Guard) told me but also the real life combat statistics for Iraq, suggesting things haven't changed that much in 50 years - it's the person shooting who makes the biggest difference. If you make that assumption then your hypothetical average infantryman with a SPD of 3 and DEX of 11 needs 4-5 levels to consistently shoot 40 and with 3 will manage it a reasonable amount of the time. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic?

Re: And off we go! Yes indeedy. cheers, Mark

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical?

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? Truth to tell, he never did get the hang of being a GM. He ran interesting "hard" scenarios, where if you triumphed at all (and success was always less likely than failure), you got a *real* sense of achievement. And he had the rules down pat, which meant that combat moved smoothly and fast. But he never understood that it's not supposed to be "GM vs Players". I stuck with his games for a few years because a) he was a nice, interesting guy, and part of our social group and since we always had at least one other game going at the time, his games allowed me to rip loose and indulge in a bit of wargamey-style tactical roleplaying. But none of his games ever ran more than a short story arc, and in the end, everyone was "too busy" to join the next one. As a player he was fine, albeit intensely competitive. We still chat occasionally by email or in person when I'm in NZ, though we haven't seen each other for 10 years IRL cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic?

Re: Norse Beastiary - a little help Nah, just going off Beowulf and Grettir's saga cheers, Mark

Re: Economics 101: Character Building in a Point-Based System

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? Oh sure, but wasn't that the point of the thread? If running champions, while I like a bit of realism, I assume that secret identiies are usually safe unless you make no effort to maintain them, that wearing your underwear outside your clothes does not provoke derision, that bad guys are usually caught doing obvious crimes and that known heroes are always given the benefit of the doubt. Genre conventions, man. We actually had a GM who ran a (short-lived) campaign who played "realistic" with the genre and we ended up with situations like the one where my character (code against killing, don't ask me why, I should have known better, but I wanted to play a hero, dammit) haymakers a robot. It goes through a wall, into a family's living room, doing 16-18 d6 to the kiddies inside (add in some more KB and we have kiddie jam). OK, perfectly "realistic", but... do you really need that? As an aside it turns out the "robot" was an armoured suit and I'd killed the guy inside, too. Even though the police dispatcher had said "rampaging robots". The GM said I should have checked. That game (realistically enough) turned into a bad version of the Authority (long before that was written) with the public fleeing screaming at the sight of the "heroes" (because it usually meant major propert damage was about to ensue) and the "heroes" talking about acceptable losses "OK, I killed some kids and put their parents in the hospital, but if I hadn't, dozens might have died, etc etc". Strangely enough we ended up taking over a small african country and trying to make a decent state out of it, but it was mostly so we would have a place to live, rather than altruism. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic?

Re: Norse Beastiary - a little help

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? Of course evil also triumphs when good men do bad things - often for what they thought at the time were good reasons. So although society has decided that these things are not illegal, you'd take it on yourself to take them down? See the comment above - you've just become a supervillian. A pretty low rent supervillian, admittedly - no massacres of innocents or nothing... I guess you could probably make a living on kickback from sleazy developers who wanted to make a killing in redevelopment once property values fell far enough And when - lacking any real investigative backup, you kill the hero cop working undercover, or kill the wrong guy ("Oops! I guess he wasn't the rapist after all - sorry about that. Still, everybody makes mistakes") you graduate from criminal boss to full-fledged supervillian. Heros start turning up and you spend all your time working out ways to fight them. I've cut the rest of the examples, but you get the idea. It's a great origin story for a reluctant villian Seriously though, this illustrates the problem - if you go the vigilante route, you *will* end up hurting innocents - even with the investigative resources at their command, the police do so. One guy - no matter how bulletproof or smart - is certainly going to do so, and unlike the police, he has no mandate from the public at large. If you run around setting fire to people's businesses, I can't see you getting one. We've been talking this around at home and can't actually come up with a single way in which being a vigilante could be a good thing, except in the specific (superhero) case of tackling super-powered crime that can't be tackled any other way. cheers, Mark

Re: Economics 101: Character Building in a Point-Based System

Re: Economics 101: Character Building in a Point-Based System

Re: Rarity of Magic? "Cleric, we're getting over-run by zombies! Do something!" "I'm trying, but I keep getting a 404!" More to the point, this is why I decided there would not be any "raise dead" or "speak with deity" spells in my world. Most people in my game world are convinced that there is life after death and there are certainly big powerful entities moving in mysterious ways out there, but you can't go to heaven and then come back and tell your buddies what it's like. Cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic? Is it like the old west or not? That was an armed, but extremely *impolite* society - as was, for example, pre-christian Iceland. I tend to think a society where most people had access to magical lethal force would look more like Somalia, tribal Afghanistan or today's Iraq, where most people have access to lethal - albeit, non-magical - force. cheers, Mark

Re: Rarity of Magic?

Re: Norse Beastiary - a little help

Re: What to do with your stuff... In our current game, one of the *players* has taken on this role, making things even easier. Her character even sleeps in the stables to keep an eye on the mounts and extraneous gear. cheers, Mark

Re: What to do with your stuff...

Re: Treating CV like levels