Markdoc

Re: Build Me a Fighter, Advanced Class. As a GM, I'd be a bit dubious about the helicopter and turbo shovel maneuvers (though they wouldn't be out of place in a high powered Wuxia campaign) but the rest of it is pretty cool. I'd also allow "requires two hands ( -1/4)" on the reserves/slots, since that's a significant disadvantage. cheers, Mark

Re: Build Me a Fighter, Advanced Class. That's a damn cool figure - did you paint that? Cheers, Mark

Re: Ranged killing attack + No rage modifer broke? Afterwards. "Sure, it was a good plan. But we didn't expect the first hit to be a 9d6 RKA! I didn't even bother to teleport the remains away - we just got out of there." cheers, Mark

Re: Things I learned playing a Thief What? You're saying we've been playing it wrong all these years? No wonder we never made it to one of these "dungeons" they talk about Cheers,Mark

Re: UV vision Think what it did to the cat: he got 8-16 times what you did cheers, Mark

Re: How many points for the . . . (guards, minions, whatever)? I realise this runs counter to the spirit of the thread, but why not just give the grunts only a few points? That way they can hit each other (or oposing grunts) easily but have problems hitting "named" characters. Also, it's easier to write up their sheets.... cheers, Mark

Re: Build Me a Fighter, Advanced Class.

Re: Build Me a Fighter, Advanced Class. Thia, as I a GM, I wouldn't go for "flash speech" since speech is not a sense. However, I would allow (and have used) Darkness vs sound, only to negate voice of target (-1) for a throat grab, that's cheaper and allows you to add in a few d6 of NND HA to simulate strangling. cheers, Mark

Re: Mechanical Elephant in London Yep, it was put together by a French theatre troupe, who specialise in "events". An earlier parade in France where they showed this elephant machine thing was posted a while back, including some keen videos. Some UK events organisers saw it iand thought it was cool, so they brought it to London I'm a bit annoyed the show was this weekend - I'll be in London next weekend and would have liked to have seen it. Cheers, Mark

Re: Things I learned playing a Thief The one from Lanhkmar, of course! Which other Gray Mouser were you thinking of? Mark

Re: Amaze the Natives Kit Amaze the natives kit II: (AKA Carbine) Weight: 3.1kg Price: 210 cr OK, it's 10 cr more expensive than the first kit, but it's only Tech Level-5, it's a third the weight and it *also* works on natives who are not easily impressed. cheers, Mark

Re: Military Size He's the question man, not the answer man! cheers,Mark

Re: Whirlwind Attack! Indeed - we've got a character with a whirlwind attack like this in my current game, but he bought it as a full power (which I allow - encourage even). Naked power advantages have their uses, but adding them to free equipment is not, in my opinion one of them. cheers, Mark

Re: So the King is a Vampire In my game, any blood will do, but the vampire tends to take on aspects of it's prey over time, so needs the blood of sentients to stay smart. A vampire reduced to preying only on animals would become an animalistic, ravening thing. That's because the blood isn't actually food (I mean a vampire's dead! He doesn't get the munchies) but a way of setting up a sympathetic link so the vampire can drain life-force to keep himself animated. cheers, Mark

Re: So the King is a Vampire Not really, when you consider how it turned out cheers, Mark

Re: Genre conventions There are a few people who can do it interestingly - Robert Holdstock in Lavondyss, for example. There he also has the landscape and peoples created by expectations/dreams and both the hero and the villian recognise that they are fated to play out their archetypal roles, try to avoid it - and do it anyway. But for every good prophesy story, there's 20 bad ones cheers

Re: Genre conventions Sure - Gaiman did it years ago in "Dream of a thousand cats" IIRC. It's an interesting idea, but not one I'd want to use in my games. There are very few books which handle prophecies or fated heroes in anything like an interesting way (they're usually an excuse for lazy plotting, excess cheesiness or both): in a role playing campaign it sounds like a recipe for cheezy-whip disaster soufflé cheers, Mark

Re: Steve's Chat Tonight (Thursday, April 27) hah! We don' need no steenkin' badgers! Cheers, Mark

Re: So the King is a Vampire In my game (and in the current story arc, too, although she has been around for a long time in the game setting) I have a vampire queen. The general citizenry don't like her (I mean, random people disappear when the supply of condemned criminals or resolute paladin types runs dry for a few nights...) on the other hand, she's a very powerful magus, rules with a relatively light hand and has mostly rid her kingdom of nasty people-eating monsters, bandits and player-character types, so her kingdom is quietly prosperous and a safe place to live. If pressed, most people would point out that the vast majority of rulers kill far more of their subjects than the Dark Queen ever does and the kingdom doesn't suffer from the frequent wars of succession or rebellion their neighbours do. She's not evil per se - just hungry and sees the right to occasionally chow down on a citizen as a fair and reasonable payment for all she's done for them. cheers, Mark

Re: Power idea - flashing sword We have been using this power construction for many years. I agree the RSR is essentially unnecessary: the situation limitation and attack roll take care of it: as a GM I would not normally allow it Other possibilities using similar ideas are a flash simply defined as an eyegouge, or flicking dust, sand or water at your opponent's eyes with your blade, using a cloth such as a cape to cover your opponent's face, or (my particular favourite) cutting your opponent's forhead to make blood run into his eyes. That one was defined as a 1d6 flash with a short time delay, so you cut and then waited for your moment when your opponent was blind... cheers, Mark

Re: Geas, Oath, Contract...... You guys seem to be making this much more complicated than it needs to be (ooh! Surprise! ) What you want is .... trigger. That's it, nothing else. UB/AO is not required (unless you want to use a movement power as an attack or something similar). When you drop the geas on someone, all that happens is that you use a power (then and there) which will take effect if triggered by a later event. So to geas someone, mindcontrol or transform is probably NOT what you want: a geas does not normally *compel* someone to act in a certain way. It provides them with a very strong 'reason' to act in a certain way. If they don't act that way, the geas kicks in: they suffer some sort of penalty or lose some sort of benefit. In the latter case - I use geases a lot in my current game - a geas can be beneficial. If you accept a geas, you get a gift: a magical power. If you break the geas, you lose the power (the gift gets the independant limitation, so there needs to be a way to lose it: thus the loss is part of the special effect of independant and needs neither trigger nor a limitation). cheers, Mark

Re: Group Perception I do a single roll for the party with bonuses depending on what the group as a whole do and base the result off the highest PER roll in the group. Any other approach, IMO makes no sense. After all, when the party is hiding, do you give the bunch of 50 mooks they are about to ambush, 50 PER rolls? As noted, allowing the group to make multiple PER rolls inevitably leads to the "fishing for a 3" syndrome. One roll is faster, as well. As for the "hidden trapdoor that *must* be found" if I'm foolish enough to put such a thing in, in the first place, I roll myself and voila! it's found after an appropriate amount of searching. cheers, Mark

Re: So you want to be...a sexy vigilante.. Amazon recmmendations can be a little bit whacked sometimes - it recently recommended a book of pornographic photos to me and I couldn't work out where that had come from - until I recalled that I had searched for Hokusai (an 18th century landscape engraver) - who had also done portraits of Japanese Geisha. Since the photographer was also Japanese, I guess that was enough... cheers, Mark

Re: 2 for 1 pt STR - Question

Re: 2 for 1 pt STR - Question I've been doing it in all my heroic games, since ... oh, forever. In terms of how long the games lasted, between 6 months to 4 years, for different campaigns (mostly 2-4 years). In heroic games, I also routinely use NCM, so going over 20 gets to be expensive. As to how it worked? Great, just great. It hasn't prevented characters - even starting characters - from having 20 STR or even more (one human character had STR 23 before he got any magical buffs). Non-human characters obviously got much higher than that. On the other hand, we moved away from the situation where *every* character had STR 15 or 18. In fantasy games (most of the campaigns I run) STR does tend towards the upper end, especially for warrior types. If they don't start there, they tend to gravitate there over time. But still, in the the last game, which ran 2 1/2 years real time, we had a spread of STR from 13-20 by the end. In the game before, it was 8-20. Compare that to the last game I ran with STR at 1 per point where we had a range of 18-20 after 3 sessions. The current fantasy game, which has been running about 4 months now has a range from 10-21. In Sci-fi Games, there's less tendency to gravitate to the upper end, and in modern/espionage even less, though if you routinely gave out weapons with big STR min. My last conspiracy/modern game ended with some characters in the 10-13 range after 6 months play. Two campaigns ago, one player wanted to play a giant wrestler type. Originally he had planned for STR 23 starting out. When I pointed out we were using 2 point per, he dropped to STR20. Several sessions later he commented that the character actually "felt stronger" at 20 using this approach than at 23 using 1 point per - because the difference between him and the other PCs was actually more significant. Frankly, I cannot think of a single reason why I'd ever want to move back to 1 pt for STR. The disadvantages are manifold and the advantages .. well, there aren't any. cheers, Mark