Markdoc

Oh I agree with that 100%. In my own games, I don't have rules for that, per se, I simply adjudicate it as part of "combat conditions". So in a clinch, I'd just tell sword guy he's at -3 OCV. In a narrow corridor, axe guy gets a -2, when fighting on a pitching ship, everyone without the appropriate skill takes a -1, etc. What I object to (and where the thread started) is the idea of giving weapons a DEX penalty based on weight/type, under the idea that "it's lighter, so it gets to go first". The reason for that is simple. If you do so, a knife becomes a superior duelling weapon - other factors being equal or near equal, it would let you strike first against a swordsman, and that's a really big advantage. But in real life, a knife is a distinctly *inferior* duelling weapon, and gets to go last. So to me, giving a knife a "first strike" advantage is just wrong. The same goes for rapier vs longsword. In this case, despite the weight difference, they're more or less matched for speed. Ninja-bear commented that you'll tire faster with the heavier weapon, and that's definitely true (I've already stated exactly that up-thread) but it's very rare for a fantasy hero swordfight to go much more than a minute, so it's not that relevant - for longer fights, we already have END if we want to track fatigue, and you use more STR (and thus END) to meet the STR min with larger weapons. The advantages of a knife are not that it's faster (it isn't) but that it's handier, easily concealable, etc. Cheers, Mark

I'd agree completely that reach/range is very important - see my earlier posts. But I simply can't agree with you about knives vs swords, having seen the lunging knife guy get hit 3 times before he lands a blow. Yes, reach is that important and yes, you can still slash someone well inside arm's reach. Blocking with your arms is fine ... Well actually, against a blade, it's not. Lose the use of your arms and you've lost the fight, and unless you are an orangoutang, you can't guard your legs. Lunging with a short weapon is a very dangerous (probably fatal in a real fight) tactic. Like Procyon says, everybody I know who has tried this agrees. Now in a clinch, you want a knife, no question about it. But in a face-off you want a sword: nobody voluntarily brings a knife to a swordfight, and if it gave you an edge on speed (even a small one) people would. Cheers, Mark

I"m giving it exactly as much credit as real life allows. Understand, I used to believe the whole "lighter weapons are faster" thing too: it'd been a standard part of my roleplaying. Then I tried it in real life, and real life wouldn't cooperate. Turned out in real life that speed was all in the arm and the head, and that reach, reflexes and skill was so much more important than trivial differences in weight, that we couldn't even measure an effect of weight. I do believe that if you take it to extremes (knife vs greatclub, for example) then, yeah, you'd see a difference, though notvas much as you might think. Cheers, Mark

All true - but all irrelevant. My point is exactly what you are saying, which is that having a open hand doesn't make you faster than the same hand with a knife. The reverse is true, in fact - you need to put more effort - meaning more upper body movement) into an effective strike with a fist than you do with a knife - just as you point out with a the eye jab. Likewise, being armed with a knife doesn't give you a speed advantage over being armed with a sword. In all these cases, the limiting factor is how fast you can move your limbs and body, to exert the amount of force you need to do damage. The trivial difference made by a dagger vs a sword means nothing compared to the factors involved in the actual strike. cheers, Mark

I've been using multipowers for magic for decades, and it hasn't been a problem. That said, it can be a problem if the GM doesn't pay careful attention. Here's my general guideline with regards to magic multipowers. Don't let players design their own spells. With a multipower, it's very easy to generate some abusive combos and also to very rapidly get enough points to be able to do pretty much anything: for many powers you end up paying only 1 or 2 points for a slot. So the mage can get (for example) Flight, Mind control and Invisibility for the same cost that the fighter pays for +1 to hit with swords. If the spellcasters can do pretty much anything, they tend to overshadow the rest of the group. I handle this by differentiating schools of magic. One of the things I disliked about western shores was the fact that every college of magic has essentially the exact same spells, just with different special effects. If you restrict the powers available to the colleges, you get both more variety and also deal with the wizard-who-can-do-everything problem. So fire mages can blow stuff up real good, shadow mages are good for stealth and deceit, air mages can fly and control weather - and so on. Specialisation leaves space for everyone to contribute. I let non-casters also use multipowers, so that they can compete. So the fighter can get an awesome sword skills multipower, the monk can get a martial arts multipower, the rogue can get a stealth multipower, etc. This has always worked pretty well for us. cheers, Mark

Well yes - estocs: defined as a one handed, two-handed or hand and a half sword, with either a cutting blade or not ... I'm teasing you of course - I think the point's been made and we basically agree. Given what I've seen (and played!) a few people do want that sort if thing. But not me. As for your first comment, if you look at the weapons and armour list I posted in downloads, you'll note that I gave a few weapons classed as being particularly light/fast or hard to defend against a +1 OCV to reflect that fact. cheers, Mark

Yeah, but no. My point was that saying "Daggers are faster than swords because they are lighter" is objectively wrong, because of course some daggers are not lighter than some swords. If you think weight is a critical factor, you're going to logically have to segregate your weapons by weight and then add your DEX penalties, not by weapon type, but by weight. And honestly? I don't think anyone wants to go there. In addition to that, of course is the basic (flawed) argument that dagger is somehow faster and an empty hand faster still. There are two problems with this argument. The first is the suggestion that negligible differences in weight have significant effects on speed. You can demonstrate the falsity of this pretty easily yourself: drop an object and stab at it with either your finger or a knife. Note how far it falls before you hit it. You can easily demonstrate that there is no appreciable difference (in reality, the knife hits first by a marginal amount, but that's just because most most people don't have fingers as long as a knife). But - and I've done this with friends when we have had this discussion before - the hand is not faster than the knife (or vice versa: the limiting factor is how fast you can strike). So the idea is pretty easily proven false. If you don't feel like setting a phone up to film a falling ball, you can also demonstrate much the same thing simply by timing striking with the knife - it's no slower than a fist. The limiting factor here is not the paltry weight of the weapon - it's the speed of your arm and upper body. Obviously, that becomes less and less true as you move to weapons that are of significant weight like axes and great swords, but when you are comparing daggers and swords, typically you are talking about differences of a kilo, kilo and a half - and that's just not significant in the context of body movement. So yes, in theory, a lighter weapon would be faster - but in reality the difference is so small as to be insignificant. The second flaw in the argument is the idea that "speed" (i.e: ability to strike first) is determined by hand/arm speed. This you can also test - try attacking with a knife against someone with a blade (foil, epee, whatever: you can use a short stick and a long one, for that matter). Notice how the sword guy always gets the first hit in? "Speed" in this context is governed not by the negligible weight difference of the weapons, but by reach and ... what for want of a better word ... we call "Angle". When defending against an attacker (of attacking a defender) with the shorter weapon the person with the longer weapon can strike at multiple points on his opponent by leveraging the extra reach - for example, a feint thrust towards the torso can easily be actually targeted at the torso - by continuing the thrust - or the lower legs, simply by revolving the arm and exploiting the fact that a small difference in the angle of the attacking line turns into a much greater difference in the point of contact. To defend against both potential attacks with a knife you need to be able to drop your arm to below knee height (i.e..actually move your whole upper body) in the time that arm twist takes, assuming you are using a standard guard. And that's nearly impossible, because the angle achievable with a longer weapon means that the point can move faster than the arm behind it. This is pretty basic fencing stuff. There's a reason that the standard duelling weapons - even among commoners - were longer weapons. In real life, nobody wants to bring a knife to a sword fight. Still, I know from past experience with this debate that the idea that knives are somehow "faster" dies very hard among gamers, so perhaps we can simply agree to disagree. Cheers, Mark

This - exactly this. For those who could afford it, every weapon was custom made, so (in a sufficiently technologically advanced society) you can have your axe with or without backspike, a "longsword" with a long, heavy blade or a slightly shorter, lighter one ... etc. In real life terms, similar weapons appear to have functioned more or less identically, and so it comes down to æsthetics (or preference, if you prefer). Certainly some of the additions I have seen on medieval weapons do not seem to have been added for combat effectiveness and may have even slightly impaired it (the frilly pompoms on the lathe of a crossbow in Gravsteen, for example). I'd be inclined to differentiate between Slicy/Stabby and Crushy/Spiky, given what we know about how weapons were actually used, but anything more than that seems like needless (and probably inaccurate) extrapolation. cheers, Mark

Which is precisely the sort of thing we often hear from gamers. Trouble is, I can attest from personal experience that it. is. not. true. Absolutely false, to put it another way. And of course that's even ignoring the fact that heavy daggers such as some of the bigger Espada are actually heavier than some of the lighter rapiers .... I've handled and sparred with both, and I can assure you that this trope is based on gaming lore, nothing else. I've even been lucky enough to hold and test (not in an actual fight of course) genuine battle swords, so it's not just repro stuff we are talking about here. Every other person I know with real weapons experience agrees. A knife does not give you a speed advantage, and an epee is not necessarily faster than a knight's sword (they're all about the same, with the knife perhaps the "slowest" of the three, inasmuch as that makes any sense). In reality speed is about reaction time and experience, not about weapon size at all. So this oft-repeated trope that "daggers are faster" is a gamist myth, not based on real life. The largest effect of weight for single-handled weapons is endurance. 5 minutes of sparring with an epee will make you breathe hard - with a knight's sword, it'll make your wrist and forearm ache. The speed of a weapon depends on many factors and overall size is actually far from the most important of these. Yes, larger two handed weapons are generally heavier and a bit more cumbersome than single-hand weapons - but the extra leverage means that you can get the blade moving faster than you can manage with a single-arm swing, and an experienced pole arm fighter can turn his weapon into a blur of motion that is very hard to penetrate - far faster than a person can swing a knife. In truth, (as has already been pointed out) the difference in the weight of a dagger and the weight of a rapier is negligible - in terms of speed (meaning "who gets to attack first"), reach, leverage and shape/weight distribution is far more important than trivial weight differences and it's how fast you can react or move your arm that counts. Which is why in a fight between a knife wielder and a person armed with a rapier, the person with the sword is not only almost always going to attack first, but is probably going to get more hits in to boot - unless the fight moves to a grapple, in which case the situation reverses. cheers, Mark

If you look at real life estocs, though you'll note that their blades range in size from nearly 1.6 metres down to just a bit over a meter (in other words, from great sword size down to longsword size if we wanted to cram them into RPG boxes.) Some had ricassos, some had extended grips above the hilt, other don't. Some have extended hilts, others - even with the same blade length - don't. Some have bated blades all the way up - others have a cutting edge near the top. Blades could be triangular, square or rhomboid. So is an estoc a great sword, a bastard sword or a longsword? Really, it's none of the above, but for an RPG argument, you could point to real life examples that kinda fall into each category, making the point just exactly how arbitrary each category is. In addition, some estocs were very heavily ornamented or altered - I've even seen one that incorporated a pistol. So yes, æsthetics (meaning more precisely "personal design preferences" rather than just "prettifying") obviously played huge role. It's not like anyone ever designed the optimal estoc from which other weapons were based - in reality they were made to order (often a pretty loose order) and what that order was depended very much on what the customer felt like, right down to "squiggly hilt or plain?" And that obviously affected how the weapon was used, how effective it might have been and so on. Role-players often have great difficulty coping with this degree of uncertainty, which is any we get these neato long lists of weapons ... that don't really reflect reality. Given that, obsessing about precise stat.s seems bit pointless to me. A general guideline is every bit as accurate (perhaps more accurate) than any attempt to add fiddly bits in the vain hope that it is "simulating history". cheers, Mark

With regard to LTE, it’s rarely a problem for someone who just wants to wear heavy armour and fight. It’s only really occurred in situations where someone wants to do a field march across rough terrain in full plate, carrying several weapons and backpack full of rope, lanterns, tools and assorted geegaws. Remember that ordinary movement uses END as well …That’s a problem that can be solved at the cost of some transport animals or serfs and a slower pace, but it has been an issue from time to time. The more common case has been post-adventure, when the PCs are trying to toil back to town laden with loot, or they want to spend some time hacking a hole in the side of some tomb. Players are all too fond of saying “My fighter can spend 12 hours pickaxing his way through the stone wall, no problem …” In general, treating encumbrance sensibly and just using the LTE guidelines with a light hand has been enough to stop any egregious abuse. As for the weapons thing, I agree that (within limits) size is a red herring. As noted, a dagger or a fist is no faster than an epee or a shortsword (actually, they’re a tad slower due to the question of reach, leverage and – as you note – thrust versus swing). In truth, the difference is so small as to be below the level of granularity of Hero. I’d also agree that stabby vs. cutty vs. crushy (ie thrust vs. swing, or piercing vs. slashing vs. or however you want to define it) is far more relevant in terms of effect. The problem is A. how to define that in a useful way for gaming and B. how to define it in a “real world” terms. For example, is a sword a thrusting or a slashing weapon? In almost all cases, the answer is “Both”. The same is true for most halberds, broad bladed spears, daggers, axes with spikes, etc One can easily question whether “cutting and thrusting” actually means anything useful at all given it is such a broad category. It’s almost like saying “weapon”. You have the same problem with impact weapons – both axes and maces are typically thought of as impact weapons … but one has a cutting blade, while the other doesn’t. And what about a mace with a spiked head? That’s pretty clearly a piercing weapon, since it’s designed to punch holes. What about a hammer with a backspike (a common design) or a hammer with an axeblade on the backside (also a common design)? Is one Impact/piercing and the other impact/slashing? That way lies the madness of the runequest table already posted, and it ignores one giant, staring fact … that in real life these two weapons were used exactly the same way by the same typoes of soldiers against the same type of opponent and had as far as we can tell exactly the same effect. My rue of thumb for this kind of thing is that a difference that makes no difference is no difference. So all this stuff about crushing/slashing vs crushing/piercing is just RPG geek obsessing. Certainly the people who used these things as actual weapons of war did not seem to care very much. Just look at the countless variations that existed in real life – people seemed to be at least (if not more) concerned about how it looked over specific forms. That said, we can trace some specific trends. There does seem to be a correlation between improving armour and an increase in two-handed weapons and axe/mace type weapons (not just in Europe, but also in Asia), suggesting that heavier weapons and/or impact weapons were better against plate armour. To my mind, the current rules giving axe/pick like weapons AP and heavier “impact weapons” +1 Stun Mod. seem to work OK. You could howver, if you really wanted to work out a similar list from first principles, assigning active points by weapon size, then adding AP or +1 Stun Mod for piercing or impact, stretching for longer weapons and finally adding +1 OCV for weapons that are hard to counter (like a flail). That way you could make your own weapons, such as an unusually heavy lochaber axe (AP and +1 stun Mod and stretching!) I suspect that that would probably lead to a frenzy of player fiddling until they designed the optimal weapon, which everybody would then use, which is why I have never been tempted to do this. Last of all, I’d agree with your comment about martial arts. I’m not a fan of the use of martial arts to mean “fights real good”. IMO that’s what CSLs are for. But most fighty-types in my experience like martial arts and this differentiates them in combat far more than whether they use a spetum or a partisan. I’m also no longer a fan of the standard martial arts rules and instead simply use multipowers: that system been heavily discussed on the boards in the past, so no need to go into it here. Cheers, Mark

Oh, no question. Players recognise that armour is good. But in general, players favour a balance between protection and mobility most of the time (a breastplate and helmet or a chain byrnie or similar) when they venture into risky territory, and pile on as much armour as they can, when expecting a fight. But a combination of social factors ("You can't come in here dressed like that!") environmental factors (fights on rooftops, in waist-deep water, inside a working watermill, in a desert, in a palace) and practical rules (long term END (LTE) - unless he is very strong, a player in heavy armour will tire faster than his more lightly armoured colleagues) militate against the D&D fantasy trope of "all of the the armour, all of the time". This gets players to think about when, and how much armour they want to wear, so that they don't routinely don full plate before going down to breakfast. For our games, there are relatively few house rules. We did drop routine END use and free post-12 recoveries. Initially I did that because I was introducing a group of newbies to Hero, and wanted to keep it as simple as possible. But after playing for some months and seeing how little difference it made, that became a fixed rule. However, PCs still have an END stat. I use the long term END (LTE) rules, so having END is still useful: it allows me to calculate how long PCs can go before they become exhausted, and I also use LTE as "mana" for spellcasting. This allows players to buy reduced END powers if they want, so that they have "effortless" powers that they can use as long as they want without any problems - one player for example in the last game bought 0 END on his running so that he could run all day without tiring. cheers, Mark

Oh it's clear - this is what I understood. What's not clear to me is the rationale. Why would you want to make a dagger "faster" (or "less slow" if you prefer) than say, a rapier or a longsword when in reality the reverse is true? I'm guess what I am not getting is what benefit accrues in exchange for the extra complexity and reduced "reality" (we're talking about a fantasy game, so this is flexible concept ) the rules would add? cheers, Mark

Perhaps I'm obtuse, but I can't really see why you'd want to give weapons DEX bonuses in the first place (in Hero system). It produces results exactly the opposite of what you can observe in real life, and adds complexity, for no apparent benefit that I can see. Saying "Yeah, it can give weird results but it doesn't happen that often" just work for me. As for not standing still in combat, I agree that people don't usually just stand still and wail on one another, but I have not generally found this to be a problem: combat in my games tends to be mobile as people manoeuvre for advantage: I haven't found any need to give extra move - PCs generally have plenty of move already, if they want to move. But as for allowing people to move after an attack, it can very easily be used to abusive effect if there is not some counterbalancing penalty. We tried this in the past, but it became common to see move-attack-move-to-where-you-can't-reach-me: that can get particularly hideous when flight or teleport is in play and it also makes for a very frustrating fight if you have a fast, ranged attacker: they can move-shoot-move-into cover. There are already plenty of ways to combine movement and attack - move-by, move-through, strafe, triggered attacks, etc, but all of them have counterbalancing negatives. I'd need to see a pretty compelling argument to consider letting movement after attacks back into into any game I run. cheers, Mark

I've actually taken a different approach: I try to make armour just as awesome as it really was (see other recent threads for that) and then say "No, you can't have it" to the players The reason that "You can't have that" is the same solid historical reasons that make armour awesome: it's heavy, hard, stiff, it wears away your skin, makes you sweat and chafe. Taking off armour after a couple of hours gives you exactly the same feeling as taking off skiboots after a few hours on the slopes: even the best fitting versions make you sigh in delicious relief. Basically armour was something that (historically) you did not wear if you didn't have to, and many places you couldn't wear it even if you wanted. The flip side of that is that the heavy fighter gets to be awesome when he does get to wear all his coverings, but he can also be assured that he will get to spend plenty of time without it. In contrast the light fighter is a lot squishier in a battle that permits the heavy fighter to shine - but he shines when combat starts in the middle of the grand ball, or in a rowboat, or after a cave crawl that involves high slippery slopes, crawls and deep water. I don't need any new rules for any of that. Just common sense and the encumbrance rules. As for weapons, I have a detailed weapons list, because players like detailed weapons lists, but I don't bother with any kind of speed or initiative modifier, or indeed, any new rules at all. I find that letting players say "I delay and hit him as soon as he gets into range" covers all my "reach" needs. What I do have instead, is the hero system rules and a fairly free approach to "powers as skills/talents". If a player decides to buy some powers and call them "magic" I see no problem with another player buying some powers and calling them "amazing prowess with a blade". In this case players have far more freedom to define (and with what) they fight than by trying to choose the precise weapon that gives them the most favourable modifiers and it shifts the emphasis back to where (IMO) it should be: on the PC's skill at arms, not on what specific weapon he chooses. So I don't need to add any modifiers to daggers or unarmed combat - player can do that themselves. In our last game, despite plate armour, greatswords and small swords, there were plenty of punches and kicks exchanged. One PC preferred a great axe, another daggers and a shortsword and one PC spent several sessions fighting with ... an oar. It made a nice heavy club and for him, that was "good enough". It all worked pretty well. cheers, Mark

Yeah, I get the problem that RQ has with this - I was a long-time player of RQ2E. But the problem with the whole dex- or initiative-modifier thing (which pops up in multiple contexts) - is that a dagger-man or a barehanded combatant can charge a line of pikemen and get in the first blow, all other things being equal. That's just .... odd. Now of course, you can get around it by rules allowing held actions, etc, but in general I hold the view that if your basic rule needs special cases, extra situations, addenda, then you should look at it. And it's not just pikemen and daggers.The fact that such dex- or initiative-modifier approaches means that the dagger-wielder has a speed advantage in straight combat against a swordsman - which is the exact opposite of real life - makes me more than a bit suspicious of the underlying concept. I agree that we are aiming for a fun game, and that a complex simulation of medieval combat is neither desirable (nor, probably possible, in playable format) but I'm not keen on extra rules that detract from reality. My rule of thumb is that if a rule makes me screw my face up and go "Wait, what?" then it's probably not something that I want to add to my game. One thing gamers are terribly bad at (as a whole) is the whole combat/weapons thing. There's a desire to slice categories ever-finer and then try to define them in ways that make some kind of sense. But in reality, all the different forms of medieval handweapons, and all the different forms of handgun or ammo, etc differ in relatively few aspects from each other. Longsword, broadsword, shortsword, smallsword, scimitar .... they all shade into each other. When you look at real weapons that really were used on the battlefield, you become struck by how useless the RPG categories are. You find yourself trying to differentiate short longswords from long shortswords, and long longswords from short greatswords, or unusually curved longswords from unusually straight scimitars* ... the truth is, they are all medium-sized blades. The dividing lines are purely arbitrary and make every bit as much sense as RPG arguments about what "real elves" should be like. The skill and experience of the wielder makes far more difference than the relatively trivial difference in shape. Roleplayers in general (in my experience) hate to hear this. They insist - with no evidence whatsoever - that it does too make a real difference! But really, medieval weapons can be divided up into pointy things, crushy things and slashy things, in small, medium and large sizes. The exact shape of said things seems to have more to do with cultural preferences and individual resources than actual measurable utility. cheers, Mark *my wife and I like to play this game when we travel - in fact last week, in Bruges we were playing it with polearms, which are the best for this game. Is that a Glaive, a Glaive-guisarme, or a Bill-bec-de-bardiche-glaive-guisarme?

And now it's just perfect!

It should be noted that when he writes "Medieval historian and arms expert" he actually mean "enthusiastic role-player". He writes well enough, and his enthusiasm is undoubted, but real life is not like roleplaying. Reach is important, of course, but has nothing really to do with speed. It just means that you can stick the other guy when he can't as easily stick you, and in any fight, that's normally a floating variable (i.e., it changes from second to second as people move). In a battle, where you are part of a line and can't as easily move back and forth, it's not quite so easy, but the basic idea is the same. How to simulate it in a game? The two most important things I can think of, off-hand is that: 1) reach gives you an advantage. Two guys with similar swords? The taller guy, with longer reach, has an advantage as long as both parties can move. He will have that advantage throughout the fight because he can move back a bit and retain that advantage - and if he knows how to fight, he will. And he can move forward with his sword forcing his opponent to defend - which, again, he will, if he knows how to fight. In the open, a spearman against a swordsman has similar advantage - though that is reversed, in enclosed quarters like inside a building or in a forest. Miyamoto Musashi, who knew a thing or two about swords, makes these points. The idea that you can somehow "get inside" the reach of a weapon and gain the advantage is not very realistic, except for a few, edge examples (like a long pike) because your opponent can simply move and suddenly you're where you started. If he's even decently skilled, he'll move as you advance so you are always in his advantage zone. 2) If you are waiting for an opponent, having reach gives you the first opportunity for attack. That said, looking at world class fencers, although they tend (on average) to be taller, there are plenty of short champions. The oft-quoted rule of thumb from fencing is that a 10% advantage in reach can be countered by a 5% advantage in technique: in other words, it's an advantage, but not a huge one. So, game mechanics? If you want to worry about it, I'd give the party with reach a +1 CSL in open spaces. Note that doesn't mean "Halberds get +1 CSL" - because two halberdiers would be evenly matched with regard to reach. In enclosed spaces, the opposite is true: the shorter weapon gets a +1 CSL. So if you are grappling, you want a knife, not a sword. If you are fighting in a corridor, a sword, not a two handed axe. If you are fighting on open ground, a spear is preferable to a sword ... at least to the extent that you get a +1. Personally, I think even a +1 CSL is probably too much, and the only thing I do is allow people with reach weapons to reserve an action for "I stick him when he gets close enough" allowing the person with reach to get in the first blow regardless of SPD or DEX ... as long as they are not surprised. cheers, Mark

I'm not sure I'd call it excellent, because it skates over the whole reason that this law has been controversial, where the federal law mentioned (and the 19 other state religious freedom laws) were not. And that is because the federal law (and the other state laws, as I understand it) specifically deal with restricting how the *government* may restrict issues of religious freedom claimed by citizens. The Indiana law, in contrast, adds a section specifically dealing with how *businesses* may claim religious protection for their actions and also because it's vague about exactly when this actually applies (see, for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2015/03/31/is-the-controversial-indiana-law-the-same-as-a-law-backed-by-obama/). As pointed out by multiple writers, this means the federal law would not protect (for example) a business operated by a klansman if they felt that serving black customers infringed their sincere religious belief that blacks are tainted by the curse of Ham - but that the Indiana law potentially, at least, would. The same issues would apply to gays. So yeah, I can see where the fuss is coming from. Cheers, Mark

Actually I should also note that the Chinese ended up attempting to solve their problems the way the Romans did when faced with a similar problem: they imported breeding stock from countries that did have an indigenous horse-breeding and riding culture and they employed mercenaries from those cultures as well. Under the Song and Tang, there was an imperial office specifically concerned with breeding horses for the army, but the program as a whole was never a huge success. In the Tang era the official breeding herds were recorded at about 350,000 horses (so it's not like they were not breeding horses), but even those large numbers were simply not enough. In part this is because the breeding was never heavily funded, but mostly because the competition for arable land meant that the horse-breeding program was continually being moved out to the margins. Again it's pretty simple economics: horses require grazing and plenty of space. As a rough rule of thumb, you need around 3/4's of a hectare per horse allowing space for resting the grazing. That's about 1 1/2 acres. But that land under chinese farming techniques will produce 1 to 1-1/2 tonnes of rice a year (it should be noted that that's about 20-25% of typical modern yields). It was no contest: tax-paying, food-producing and soldier-producing peasants were far more attractive for chinese land-owners and administrators than horses. As a result, the horse-breeding programs were squeezed out onto the most marginal land that could support them .... aaaaand not surprisingly, were never highly productive. In addition, they were often on the borders of the regions, so exposed to attacks by nomads and rival kingdoms, who were more than happy to steal horses. The Kok Turks of western China trashed the Tang horse-breeding program in the west exactly like this. cheers, Mark

Unfortunately, there is no truth in this at all. China has a wide, wide variety of soil types, and selenium levels vary wildly across the country, from quite low to extremely high - China actually has some of the highest selenium levels in soil on the planet. Indeed, Enshi in China is often called the “World Capital of Selenium”. Not only is it extensively mined there, but seleneosis (a disease you get from too much selenium in your diet) is common - in fact the Chinese government is looking at ways to decrease the amount of selenium consumed in these regions. In contrast, Mongolia has long been know to have low levels of selenium in soil, and this can be directly measured in the vegetation grown there and in animal meat (though it is rich in other areas of central Asia - Kazahkstan and Russia, for example). So yeah. I don't know where this idea comes from, but it's absolutely not true. I should note by the way that selenium is also essential for humans: areas where selenium levels are low enough to prevent horse-raising are also unsuitable for people. The Chinese have long had indigenous cavalry - cavalry are depicted in many contemporary art and accounts going back a couple of thousand years, and the Tang in particular were famous for the amount of cavalry they used, and their emphasis on horse-breeding. But even Tang armies were still mostly infantry. It is true that Chinese cavalry was considered inferior to its nomad counterparts and the Chinese armies were always dominated by infantry. But that's got absolutely zero to do with selenium. and everything to do with culture and economics (see the epic thread drift on the spear and shield thread for a similar discussion). Horses require grazing to thrive, and good cavalry requires a culture where riding is an integral part of everyday life. The nomads grew up in a culture with the horse in the centre. They started learning to ride not long after learning to walk, and horses were valued almost above any other possession. Meanwhile in China, historically,there has never been a chinese (ie: Han) horse-centred culture and history shows a progressive loss of grazing land (and horses!) to intensive cultivation (and people!). That's still going on. I spent last summer in Western China and the process of converting the rich grasslands on the northern slopes of the Tibetan plateau is proceeding apace, as are huge schemes to pipe water to marginal lands in Xinjiang to convert grazing lands there to cropland. The signs and work are literally everywhere you look. As result, the nomads raised the best horses and made superb mounted warriors, no question about it. The Chinese raised horses by the hundreds of thousands - but they did not focus on them the same way, so they raised competent mounted warriors ... but that's about it. In the end, the Chinese struggled to raise effective cavalry forces not because of a lack of horses, but because their burgeoning population and their urban, centralised culture pushed them to focus on intensive agriculture. Lots of people and no mounted warrior caste = infantry armies. cheers, Mark

Back in the 90's I converted my AD&D game to Hero without too many problems. The hero system has expanded its options, but the basic chassis is still pretty much the same, so it's not going to be a huge deal. I found that after a few months that I was able to do much of the conversion on the fly (by which I mean take the basic stat block of a D&D monster and just run it in Hero system without converting in advance). Of course this was AD&D, so no feats or similar, which made it easier. My suggestion if you are going to do it is not to sweat the details too much, but aim for look and feel. I found that spells were the most challenging part simply because of the wide range of possible effects. When I converted my game over, I did a fairly faithful conversion without worrying too much about making all the PCs the same points level. Although they all started out the same level, their Hero system points totals were wildly divergent. Over time, I fed the lower-point PCs slightly more Xp per session, so that after a few months they all more or less balanced. If you are not converting an existing game, that's not an issue. So It'd say there's two important things to think about in advance: 1) how you want magic to work. For that game I went with a simple system that modeled how AD&D-based casting works (all casters have to prepare spells in advance and you get so many per day), but you don't have to do that. If you don't it changes the game look and feel significantly, but that may not be a bad thing. 2) work out what your power level is going to be. Things like Stat.s translate across fairly easily. Normal humans in Hero have Stat. ranges from about 5-20, while D&D is 3-18, with heroic types going above that range. On the other hand you need to convert defences and hit points to Hero equivalents. Across normal armour ranges, it's pretty straightforward AC to DEF conversion (again, there's a fairly close correlation) but at the higher ends, you need to think about it, because it's easy to make a creature the PCs simply can't hurt. Hit points are a harder translation, because the way Hero damage works means you need to consider physical damage (BOD), plus stunning effects (meaning you need a balance of BOD, STUN and CON). As GM, you can choose how you make this translation and it will affect your game - higher values means that heroes will wade through "lower level" characters like plasma through Jello, while lower levels will make a more gradual transition. As a final suggestion, you might want to look at a recent thread on these boards (http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/88214-impromptu-hero-old-school-adventures-with-indie-style/). If I was doing Hero system conversion of D&D, today this is how I'd do it: a simple reskinning so that I could use all the accumulated D&D materials as-is, without having to convert everything in advance. cheers, Mark

Like all things. how much detail you want, depends on the GM and the group. I admit I've created coinage for most of the major regions in my game world (I've even made sketches, and noted dimensions/weights) so if players ask I can tell them exactly what sort of coins they have just found. I didn't do it precisely out of numismatic geekery, but because I use the coins to both help build immersion in the game and because coins make great clues/plot hooks: they come from specific regions and are usually minted with identifying marks indicating where and when they were made. I can (and often do) use those things as clues or local flavour. In the last campaign the fact that one NPC had a pocket of newly minted coins from a neighbouring kingdom warned the PCsthat he was taking bribes from a visiting nobleman, while in an earlier game, the appearance of a gold plaque-coin alerted the players to the fact that someone might have found a clue to the legendary lost treasure of Shassamanse. And so on. In addition, trading and commerce can play a big role in some adventures: I ran a series of adventures over the course of a couple of years regular play, where the PCs were a group of trouble shooters for a major merchant house, protecting caravans, dealing with criminal gangs, protecting merchants against assassination attempts and ultimately dealing with a nest of pirates. Having some information on trade routes, trade goods and coinage helps me deal with unexpected questions. Of course you can still do this without the need to create detail in advance - I just find it easier to do so. cheers, Mark

I know "Medieval England" is a pretty broad period, but even taking a fairly narrow time frame in the middle of that (1300's-1400's) you have three kinds of gold coin (nobles, gold pennies and florins, all of different sizes and values) and 5 kinds of silver coin (Groat, half groats, silver pennies, half pennies and farthings) - all of different sizes and values). To add to the confusion, accounts were done in marks, pounds and shillings ... even though there were no mark, pounds or shilling coins at the time. In addition, you have foreign coins circulating in daily use. I don't suggest we necessarily use similar arrangements in our games, just pointing out the idea that medieval England had a single simple coinage is not actually correct. cheers, Mark

Hexcrafter is a magus archetype: Magus is Pathfinder's Gish-in-a-can class, combining some spellcasting ability with some martial ability and a few unique options, such as the ability to cast+attack, magically enhance their weapon, etc.It's actually a pretty good class, with opinion evenly divided as to whether it's way over-powered or just too weak. Hexcrafter is a magus who trades out some flexibility with spells in exchange for access to a limited number of witch hexes. cheers, Mark