Markdoc

Re: Medieval Farming Villages I wouldn't get too hung up on this - statements like "a family is X persons" or "A family requires X acres" are only applicable to certain cultures in certain areas at certain times. For example, the acreage mostly quoted here is more or less based on medieval english history, using grains such as early (small-head) rye and wheat. Medieval germany - especially north Germany - used a crop rotation system with a much heavier emphasis on root vegetables that supported a higher population (one of the reasons the Germans were so much trouble to their neighbours - they continually outgrew their available space). Modern grains yield 2-3 times as much medieval ones and it's far from unreasonable that in a fantasy world where magic actually works, that some crop improvement has not occurred, even if you want to stick with grains as a major crop. Root vegertables - and especially potatoes - shift the balance even further. Quoting from Hobhouse's book "Seeds of Change" on potatoes "an acre and a half would provide a family of four to six with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent grain required an acreage four to six times as large..." - and it required less work, and fewer tools (no ploughing, no plough animals, etc). It's a high density food for primitive farming. At the other end of the scale, Montaillou (perhaps the world's best-studied medieval village) had 250 people (almost all living in single family dwellings) and farmed an area of over 2000 acres - about 9 acres per person. But then, it was an upland mountain village living by a mixture of herding and small-farming. Likewise, what constitutes a farming family varies wildly: in Northen Europe, especially Scandinavia with the Heregaard system, a farm with more than 20 residents and 6-8 adult workers was by no means unusual (large farms could house up to a dozen families in one building complex, with numbers reaching 40 or more). So you have a historical range of land needed per person from 0.25 to 9 acres in different areas/eras - a 36 fold difference, even though the technology was similar! We also have a historical household size ranging from one to nearly 50 (actually in some places, times, like Imperial Rome farms could be much, much bigger, but that's outside the scope of what you described). My advice is to decide what you want in terms of social arrangements, make sure that it is not too unrealistic (you have enough info for that in this thread) and then just go for it. Either way you have plenty of land for the population you described and plenty of wilderness left over. cheers, Mark

Re: Aging Campaigns

Re: Anyone combine Champs with Call of Cuthulu?

Re: Comics you loved...but apparently no one else did Pretty obscure, really but I really like the short-lived comic Zenith - a british superhero strip that mixed WW2-era heroes, modern day heroes and Lovecraft-inspired bad guys. Snappy dialogue, nice clean (but not great) B/W artwork and well-defined characters. I stole whole chunks of this for the occasional supers game I ran, mixing it with the immortals from my own fantasy game. Actually I wasn't the only one who loved Zenith. The character was apparently quite popular and there have at least a couple of attempts to spin it off into its own series but they never came to anything, which is kind of surprising since it was written by Grant Morrison who has done Animal Man, JLA and a bunch o' other stuff for DC. cheers, Mark

Re: Supernatural Special Forces

Re: Wunderwaffen!!! - Secret German Warmachines of WW 2 Oh, and one more link - all the imaginary German aircaft you can shake a stick at, plus some nice pictures of real experimental ones. http://www.luft46.com/luftart.html All of this makes me feel like running an alternate WW2 game now, but I'm off to kill some orcs instead. Have a nice weekend, y'all. cheers, Mark

Re: Medieval Farming Villages Actually I meant to correct this before, but that's backwards: the Household (old english: Husholdningen) was the whole schmoe. So "family" is wife, kids, granma and uncle Ulf - all the people living together and related by blood. "Household" is all of them plus the three serving girls, two swend and the boy who looks after the pig ie: everyone who lives in the house or holding (Holding comes from the old word meaning "to include" as it happens). In medieval times a wealthy household also included a priest (or more) and personal guards. Basically everybody who lived in the house and derived their living from the head of the household. So... to get back to the topic at hand, your area is about 150 square miles (Von D-Man's right - that's space for a pretty big fief). 2 square miles or so will be the village and surrounding fields (might be as little as 1 square mile, if 30% of the population are fishermen) and each of the independant households would be less than a tenth of a square mile in area (that's plenty for the size you are describing). That leaves more than 90% of your coastal strip essentially unsettled Given that the households are probably going to be no more than a half-day's walk from town that fits the medieval pattern: everybody crammed into one corner of the fief and then nothing for two-three days travel. No wonder the baron spends all his time in town - sounds like he lives in the boonies. If I was him, I'd be looking for right trusty adventurers to build holdings out in the woods, to bring more land under his control before someone else does it. cheers, Mark

Re: Is Hero too preditable?

Re: Some thoughts on River Tam (Firefly)

Re: ExrtraDimensional Bases & getting to them Do you want people to be able to say "Door" and pop through or is the door to this place an actual, you know, door? If the former, give the base an EDM teleport, 1" UBO (+1/4) (only to location X, -1), at Range (+1/2) megarange (+1 1/2) Transdimensional (+1/2) so it can reach out and zap someone over regardless of where they are. If you can exit from the base pretty much anywhere you'd need to beef up the teleport (maybe a multipower with some megaranged TP's?). The 1" Teleport is because I am assuming that you have a small pocket universe so that you only need to get there, not move about within it. You'd probably need to give the base a transdimensional sense too, so it would know when it was being called - mindlink for that one purpose wuld probably do the trick If it was just an actual door that opened into another space, then it's simply EDM teleport, 1" UBO (+1/4) (only to location X, -1), maybe with a focus limitation and with either trigger or continuous, depending on how you want it to work. cheers, Mark

Re: Is Hero too preditable?

Re: Is Hero too preditable? And that's kind of the point, I think. There are so many dramatically unbalanced prestige classes, that at this point, I think it has to be intentional. At first, I was inclined to think it was simply due to the lack of metasystem, but there are increasing numbers which do exactly what you said - allow you to advance in the original class AND add mad-kool l33t skillz. In a few cases, there is literally no attempt to balance them at all. I put that down to the idea of luring people to purchase the books. And as I say, if you start from the precept that an adventuring party is not a bunch of people in armour with weapons, but something that looks like it escaped from a wild anime series, then that's fine. I really look forward to our d20 games. Sure it's kinda dumb, but it's kinda dumb fun! cheers, Mark

Re: Is Hero too preditable? Actually, reminds me of another quotable quote from last week's game: My Wife: "But we could all die!" Me: "Well, all except me . Hmmm. If you *did* all die then I wouldn't have to split the experience with anyone...." And I can remember back in the day working out how much we were all worth in XP. It's funny, but my wife will never make a good D&D player (although she's a good roleplayer) because she simply can't grok the game's mindset. At one point she berated my character for walking into an (obvious) ambush - and my reaction (in character) was "Of course, it was an ambush. That's WHY I went there. So much more convenient than having to hunt them down one by one! Now - stop whining and heal me." cheers, Mark

Re: The "Nice Happy" Thread I just got a nice email from the people at Zit travel (I kiddest thou not). The missus and I are going to Santorini for a week in June and they have booked us into one of those glossy white hotels that perch on the crater rim, where every room has a view out over the sea. The nice, happy part? I'm going as as expert speaker at a meeting there, so all my costs are covered - I pay about 300 bucks for Kath's airfare and that's it. cheers, Mark

Re: Wunderwaffen!!! - Secret German Warmachines of WW 2 Back on target, here's some art from GearKrieg - an alternate WW2 game with walkin tanks and the like: http://www.dp9.com/Funhouse/GKART.htm cheers, Mark

Re: Some thoughts on River Tam (Firefly)

Re: Is Hero too preditable? I'm an old grognard who can remember the truly 'orrible "brown books" and still owns a copy ofChainmail - and even I like it. I would not, however, describe it as even remotely balanced. Hero system, while not perfectly balanced, does give you reasonable guidelines. d20, OTOH, seems to actively encourage munchkinism: a player who plays a standard fighter or a standard sorceror for example, is going to be totally overshadowed by any one of the variety of combo characters. I don't think this is entirely by accident - the cynic in me says the system is deliberately designed to be unbalanced, to encourage players to buy the splatbooks like Defenders of the Faith and so on. Why play a boring old cleric when you can have a Cleric/Hospitallar, who's stronger, faster, more hygenic? Of course to include one, you have to buy the add-on book. Good for sales, but not good for balance, especially when you combine add-ons from different books which can unexpected synergies. In last week's game, my wife (having seen the party saved, once again by my character creatively using power combos) gave me a withering look and said "You're such a munchkin" - and I was thinking "Just wait. Two more levels and I'll not only have the butt-kickingest stealth fighter with great saves - but I'll also take no damage from any attack that I can save against!" And to get this killer combo, I had to give up.... well almost nothing, really. It's a fun game, but D20 is really a "D&D simulation" game. Taken in that light, munchkinism is simply part of the deal, just like a group of peculiar folk going undeground to kill wierd creatures and get loot their bodies. cheers, Mark

Re: Military Size

Re: Streeeeeetch Having read the thread, it does appear that making stretching amovement power is ... well, stretching it a bit. Cheers, Mark

Re: Is this android "anatomically correct"? Disagree 110%. Sure, genitalia probably wouldn't be industry standard. But money and points have little or nothing to do with each other. A 1d6 HKA is a 1d6 HKA, regardless of whether the special effect is a saturday night special or a ladies' evening pistol carefully chromed with gold and sapphire insets. It costs 15 points active, 7 real, regardless of the fact that one costs 200 bucks and the other 2500. cheers, Mark

Re: Is this android "anatomically correct"? Yeah, but she was also shacked up with a guy from section 6 (IIRC) and there are other references to boyfriends. I think the real reason Motoko doesn't go for Batou is ... well, would YOU go out with Batou? cheers, Mark

Re: Military Size It really depends a lot on your setting/culture, but a total number of 5% for a full turn out is probably not too high, and 1-2% is probably closer to every day numbers. To put those numbers in perspective, in the 1300s Siena had a population of nearly 100,000 and could field an army of 6000, which was mostly town militia supplemente by local nobles, their retinue and mercenaries. Milan, which was about 50% bigger, could field an army of 15,000, but that included a lot of mercenaries. Since these were both very wealthy cities, which had control over a fair deal of surrounding countryside, with extensive trade and banking networks and had been at war with most of the neighbours for some time, this is probably pretty close to maximum. At the other extreme, early republican Rome, which was on a more or less permanent war footing, required every able-bodied male to serve when needed and they were able to draft up to 30% of their citizenry to fight in an emergency (which is why the Romans could keep losing thousands in battles and still keep fighting). Of course, they only got away with this, because about 20% of the population were slaves (not citizens), who could be used to keep things running, but even so, that approach nearly bankrupted the state due to losses in their labour force and the need to feed all the soldiery. cheers, Mark

Re: "Look, up in the sky! It's Super Saint!" Christian-themed heroes I still have a soft spot for my old character Father Azrael - a two-gun totin' catholic priest who worked for the Church's secret order of witch/demon hunters - but could also summon angels to help out This was in a game where demons did exist and (according to my character anyway) were behind all sorts of nefarious plots. cheers, Mark

Re: Is this android "anatomically correct"?

Re: Is this android "anatomically correct"?