Markdoc

Re: How to have long combats Huh. Maybe I'm doing something wrong as a GM, but we often have fights that last 3 or more turns: in both Fantasy and Supers. In the current FH game, we had recently one that went more than 4 turns, with just two opponents, using killing attacks where one opponent had no resistant defence at all We've also had much longer combats without such extreme results, involving lots of opponents. Reasons? Characters with relatively high CVs, which let them fight defensively, full use of terrain and plenty of use of blocking and dodging. Even so, going 6 or 7 turns is still only a couple of minutes game time. I actually like "short and brutal" for fantasy fights. I also recall a fight long ago between my character (Kestrel - wolverine/gadgeteer type) and damn.. the big brick from Dr Muerte's group... yeah, him... which went on interminably. I hit lots and sneaked a little damage through each time - which he recovered. He hit rarely, but hard enough to knock me down - but never enough to put me out, because I healed it up between hits. After more than an hour's playing time and I-don't-know-how-many turns, we ended up glaring at each other in the ruins of the house where we had been fighting, going "OK, I'll let you go this time, but next time...." Now that's a fight that could plausibly have gone for hours, but frankly, who'd want to play that? cheers, Mark

Re: Wunderwaffen!!! - Secret German Warmachines of WW 2 The simple and real reason is that gas weapons are not very effective - even in WW1, where no effective countermeasures were available for the first 12 months, it took roughly a half-ton of gas to generate one casualty (and that includes casualties caused to the user's troops as well). It was a hell of a lot cheaper, safer and effective to just use high explosive instead. And that was in trench warfare, where your targets were tightly packed. In normal field conditions, gas is of very little use, part from generating panic. The big problem is concentration: the 11 liters of Sarin used in the japanese subway attacks was (in theory) enough to kill 22,000 people. In fact, it killed 12, and that in a situation (a packed subway) which was ideal for getting high local concentrations. The gas attacks in Iraq under Saddam show how variable this is. A concentrated attack on Halabja using mustard gas and at least two nerve agents caused about 7000 casualties. A similar attack on Birjinni caused 4. So I am not sure that the use of sarin on D-Day would have been at all significant. We know it was as windy as hell, and you are talking about trying to cover many miles of coastline. The odds are very good that all the expense of producing shipping and stockpiling hundreds of thousands of tons of gas would have been for naught. And the High Command knew that. Sensibly, they decided to use their resources elsewhere. cheers, Mark

Re: Help designing a nasty Zombie

Re: Wunderwaffen!!! - Secret German Warmachines of WW 2

Re: Metric Measurments The metric system works on base 10, so there are 100 metric buttloads in a metric boatload (or one centibuttload). Since one metric buttload is roughly equivalent to 9.9 of the old imperial buttloads, a metric boatload is 970.2 of the old imperial buttloads (if the math seems strange, remember that buttloads are a measure of volume). Clear? From that, the answer to the second question should be obvious. cheers, Mark

Re: Weight a minute Of course it is - avoid the custom limitation and simply sell back 6 " of leaping - totally. legal, easy to justify if you weigh 6200 kg - and worth more points. As it stands now, the only reason to buy DI is so you can framework it and limit it (OHID, for example) without too much trouble. Otherwise, the straight ability buy is probably a better deal. cheers, Mark

Re: Help designing a nasty Zombie Sort of. If the zombie gets too far away, the limb would go inert (if you play strictly by the rules). But it does mean the limb can function if the Zombie is not in direct line of sight - so for example if the arm crawled into a nearby room to have a go at the baby in the cot while the Heroes were duking it out with the rest of the zombie next door. It also means you could (for example) use the limb to attack from behind and get a bonus: thatsort of thing. cheers, Mark

Re: Help designing a nasty Zombie You seem to have gotten most of this down pat. With regard to a couple of things. I don't think you need both detect life and detect live brains - just brains seems to be good I don't think you need stealth (doesn't seem to fit) - you can still catch people by surprise if they are paying attention to something else, they faol a PER roll, or there's some background noise, etc. As for the damage-soaking ability, I'd give 'em 5 resistant PD and 50% physical rDamage reduction. A strong guy with a big sword could still chop one into bits, but it'd take some work. With a dagger or a bow you'd be at it all night. Don't underestimate automatons - 5 PD might not sound like much, but they can be freakishly tough and you can always buff one or two by putting them in normal armour, which goes on top of their PD. With regard to the bite, 1/2 d6 goes to 1d6HKA with their STR. That might be a bit extreme, but you could make it reduced penetration so they could chew up unarmoured figures real good but wouldn't chew through armour. Then, I'd drop the entangle - with 20 STR, it's going to be hard for a human to break out of a grab unless they have real big muscles or magic augments. And once you are grabbed, you are half DCV, so it'd be zombie pile-on time: once 4 or 5 of these guys get you, even a really big muscly guy will go down like tuna at a kitty party. You might like to give them 5 STR TK "only to animate body parts, -1" so that if they get an arm chopped off they can still grab with it and severed body parts can crawl away and have to be hunted down for disposal. Last of all I'd give 'em +1 OCV for grab, defined as "lunges in without taking any evasive action (unlike a human foe)" just to give them a better chance of actually getting hold of someone. Make it +2 if your players are really buff in the DCV department That should make your players wet themsleves. cheers, Mark

Re: Medieval Farming Villages Yeah but the key phrase is"One village craft was so widely practiced that it hardly belonged to craftsmen. Every village not only had its brewers, but had them all up and down the street. Many if not most of them were women. Ale was as necessary to life in an English medieval village as bread, but where flour-grinding and bread-baking were strictly guarded seigneurial monopolies, brewing was everywhere freely permitted and freely practiced" So there's no question that medieval taverns and inns existed - I've visited some whose founding dates back to Angevin times in the UK. But all the old ones are in cities or on pilgrim routes. The old traditional village pub dates back in most cases only 150-200 years: long after the medieval alewife had ceased to exist. But in medival times when alewives were common, few if any of them owned a real sit-down tavern: those were strictly regulated by licence and usually belonged to wealthy merchants who imported strong beer from the continent - and not unnaturally that kind of person wasn't found in your average village (they might be found in wealthy villages like the Cotswold wool towns during the 1500's though). cheers, Mark

Re: Hit from behind Like most of the GM's here the 1/2 DCV reflects an attack by partial surprise: it's simply easier to avoid detection from behind and harder to respond to something you can't see. Running around them doesn't help since it's not like they are stuck in aspic - they can simply rotate to face you. That doesn't count as an action or a move - UNLESS the target only has movement with a turn mode: then it makes sense that a faster attacker can "get on his tail". You can get the multiple attacker bonus by flanking or otherwise surrounding your enemy - you can get the 1/DCV bonus by actually getting behind him, if he chooses or has to face away - there are several attackers in front, for example and he can't turn to present a flank to both. 360 degree vision or combat sense prevents this, of course, but it would not negate multiple attacker bonus - for that, use defence maneuver. This rewards clever use of terrain in combat and encourages a single attacker to "put his back to something" if facing multiple foes. cheers, Mark

Re: Medieval Farming Villages That's not really true - for a start, blacksmiths and armourers were seperate job categories, but even big centres of armour specialisation like Mainz and Graz did not often make things on spec. - records make it plain that they only worked to order, and they were often back-ordered months or even a couple of years in advance. What they would do is make blanks - prepared metal suitable in size and quality that could be made into things since that often took as long or longer than bashing out munition weapons and armour. Same point - you wouldn't make a dozen different sizes - you might make a few extra shoes of the same size and then fit them as required, but most smiths simply kept the metal rods handy. It's not actually as big a deal as it sounds - I've watched the Carlsberg smith make a new horsehoe and fit it from scratch in about half an hour. The whole idea of "making things in different sizes in advance" doesn't seem to have caught on until the 19th century. cheers, Mark

Re: Some thoughts on River Tam (Firefly)

Re: Medieval Farming Villages Also remember that largish farms would often have someone who could do minor metalwork, using a crude temporary furnace and the side of a hammer as an anvil. This is how travelling tinkers did their work. You need quite a lot of people to make a living out of full-time smithing. Based on my own experience, since some of the places where I work are esentially agrarian/medieval even today, no, it doesn't surprise me that the tavern beloved of fantasy writers was rare to non-existent. Historically, it's basically a city institution. In rural west africa, hotel-type taverns are rare off the main roads - a village of even a few thousand is by no means guaranteed to have one. And even purpose-built bars are pretty uncommon - it's much more common for someone to put an old pot or a cup upside down on a stick stuck in the ground by the side of the road. That means a house where you can get a meal or a drink for a small payment - but you can't order: you get what the family is eating. A similar practice was common in Ireland and England (and I presume elsewhere) right up until the 19th century. cheers, Mark

Re: Some thoughts on River Tam (Firefly)

Re: A question of genetics... Actually, that's been done, sort of. In Nature, about 8 years ago they reported on group that used computer modelling to see what a heavily blended human would look like, by taking thousands of faces from different ethnic groups and point-mapping and texture-mapping the faces over one another. One interesting aspect was that they asked people from different ethnicities to rate the different faces for attractiveness. People tended to rate their own ethnicity slightly higher than other, unaltered ethnicities, but all groups rated the highly blended faces as very attractive: in fcat the more blended, generally the more attractive. At least part of the reason is simply due to blending - it tends to make the faces more symmetrical as individual varaitions are averaged out, and humans of most ethnicities (perhaps all - tend to rate symmetrical faces as more attractive). The outcome was, as you say, dark-haired, light brown skin and a fairly fine-boned face. But as I noted, it really wouldn't work like that: what you'd really get would be a range of skin colours, with no clear seperations between groups, tending towards that middle. As to dominant genes, there are none with regard to race (race is not really a meaningful concept in genetics for this reason: you can't inherit a "race"). As noted, physical appearance is very much a blending. Two people from central Africa are unlikely to have a blond blue-eyed baby (can happen, though) - but when you get crossing between someone from central Africa and someone from (say) Scandinavia, possible outcomes range from children who could easily pass as being from just one their parent's ethnicities to a blending anywhere in between. To take one example, there are currently thought to be somewhere between 5-8 genes that control skin pigmentation. What you get is an outcome of that mixing. However, genes *don't* mix (although they can influence each other's expression). It's mostly on/off or present/absent. So (to make a crude analogy) a black/white mating does not automatically produce brown children - it can produce a mix which varies anywhere along the scale, from very light to very dark. It is possible, depending on the precise combination, to end up with children either lighter or darker than their parents. But since the genes don't mix, a second generation carries that *same* possibility for blending - two children of mixed heritage could produce children in turn who resembled their grandparent more than their parents. Thus, there is tendency towards the middle, but there will also be people who fall at either extreme even after a prolonged period of interbreeding. Note for geneticists - OK, I admit I am simplifying - if you want to discuss relative allele balance, codominance and penetrance be my guest - I'm trying to outline the basic concepts here. Likewise I've used gene instead of allele and I haven't discussed polymorphisms at all, for the same reason. The rest of you, move along, nothing to see in this paragraph This is why you have African-americans who could pass as locals in many parts of Africa despite a heavy degree of cross-breeding with Caucasians, stretching back over 4-5 generations. People assume it's because their ancestors continued to marry within the African-american community, but as soon as you start tracing family trees, it becomes apparent that's not the case. Despite what people like to think, physical appearance is not a terribly reliable guide to ancestry. Appearance is also more plastic than people think - you know me: I'm dark brown-haired and green-eyed. But there's plenty of photographic evidence that for the first two years of my life I was blond (not light-haired, but like white-blond, aryan wet-dream blond) and blue-eyed. For some reason, the pigmentation genes that are now active were not initially active (not uncommon, incidentally). My brother's kids (both he and his wife are dark-haired, as were all of our parents and grandparents) are all either blond or red-haired and stayed that way into adulthood. In other words, the blond/red-head gene combination was present in all of us, even though through for at least three generations there was nothing but dark-haired adults in all four family lines. It wasn't until generation 3 that those genes showed up briefly (in me and my younger brother) and in generation 4 that the combination giving rise to those hair colours emerged as adult colouring. The same applies to skin colour and facial shape. cheers, Mark

Re: A question of genetics... 2-4000 years? Yep, that's easily long enough for racial characteristics to essentially have blended out. In real life, I am not sure that they *would*, unless the shelters were quite small (ie: limited populations in the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands). Remember, "race" is a pretty meaningless term when it comes to genetics. It's not like there's "chinese genes" and "european" genes or "latino" genes: all "racial" characteristics are actually due a blending of genes and there's no hard and fast combination that makes you a particular race, so it takes relatively little to change that balance. cheers, Mark

Re: Summon as Duplication OK, a bit more OT, duplicates no longer have be exactly the same as the base character so if you want dupes you can reuse (thus giving the word dupe it's full meaning) then simply buy them regen with the resurrection adder - or (better and cheaper) buy healing with the same adder for the base character with an "only on duplicates" limit - that should be good for at least a -1, given how useful the power otherwise is. cheers, Mark

Re: Summon as Duplication I see you've been reading the storyline for the new Millar Superman story arc.... Cheers, Mark

Re: Summon as Duplication Not to be picky - OK, I lied - picky picky picky: if you swapped out a whole chromosome it wouldn't be a clone Cheers, Mark

Re: Daily Art Findings The same way he can lift his arms above shoulder height without popping his head like a pimple between those shouldermum pads - Mad l33t armor skillz cheers, Mark

Re: Daily Art Findings Maybe his feet were on fire and he put them out in the swamp but they're still smoking? Or - my personal guess - is that this is a speed concept painting and after doing the bit he wanted - the armour - he just jazzed everything else with some quick brush strokes Taken on those terms I can live with it - it has a nice overall atmosphere cheers, Mark

Re: Exotic ammo in DC? Smart consumer - I've found that sites like this make amazing claims based on precisely zero evidence, and even some of the more sensible ones hype their ammo past the point of reality - after all, they want to sell bullets and the price can range dramatically - some of the so-called exotic rounds cost only a little more than regular ammo to make - but can sell for up to 20-30x the price. You do the math cheers, Mark

Re: Exotic ammo in DC? Most of the exotic rounds are not legally available to civilians - but then neither are a lot of the firearms used in DC! As a rough guide: Tracer* or Incendiary rounds are legal except in NY City, California, and Florida. Note - contrary to gamer legend, incendiary rounds don't burst into flame unless you fire at a hard target and hit it at relatively high velocity - fired at a squishy target like a human, it'd just be an ordinary bullet. It might ignite on a trauma plate, though. "sort of" armour piercing ammo is legal (hard points, solid core, etc) but milspec AP rounds are not (as of 1986, when Congress amended the Gun Control Act of 1968. This was tightened up with The Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994). So, depeted uranium rounds or APDS are out, sorry. Fragmentation, deforming or tumbling rounds are legal in almost all states but again some of the more extreme versions are specifically outlawed - this varies from state to state. Not that it matters much. Again, to the disappointment of gaming geeks everwhere, the actual difference between frag rounds and normal semi-cap rounds is minimal to non-existant (see for example Dr. M. L. Fackler, "Wounding Patterns for Military Rifle Bullets," International Defense Review, January 1989, pp. 56-64 or "Clinical and legal significance of fragmentation of bullets in relation to size of wounds: retrospective analysis". BMJ. 1999 August 14; 319(7207): 403–406) - basically, most trauma surgeons think the 1899 prohibition against "dum dum" rounds is meaningless with regard to modern ammo. Flechettes* or darts are illegal in many states but they are (I think) legal in some (not certain: that used to be the case, but may not still be true) Explosive ammo is illegal anywhere * means this doesn't always apply to shotguns cheers, Mark

Re: 2nd Thoughts About the Hit Location Chart Which means of course you are more likely to take someone out of the fight - without killing them - by shooting them in the arm or leg rather than the head. Which makes pretty good sense. cheers, Mark

Re: more stuff for the gunbunnies! Target shooting and the joy of owning a really big gun: there's no practical use (practical meaning "not for fun") for it outside military and a few specialised police applications. Barrett, the guy who made the original .50 cal rifle says this: "It's like, what does a 55-year-old man do with a Corvette? You drive it around and enjoy it," said Barrett, 51, whose customers include doctors, lawyers, movie makers and actors. "I know all the current actors who are Barrett rifle shooters, some Academy Award-winning people. But they don't publicize it. They love to play with them and have fun. Shooting is very fun." The way I figure it the same sort of person buys a Barrett as buys a Hummer: it's big and loud and expensive and mostly kind of useless, but it shows that you can. cheers, Mark