Markdoc

Re: Weapon Creation The problem with HA as written is simply that it's not continuous - you need to roll to hit after you have grabbed. And AFTER you have grabbed, your target is no longer surprised, so you no longer get the big bonuses to hit the head, nor the damage bonus against an out of combat foe. The most likely outcome of the grab-followed-by-HA is that you grab the guard and then fail to hit with a -8 for the head (even granting the DCV reduction he has, since he is grabbed). Even if you hit in this situation, there's a fair chance you won't con-stun your opponent, since with the advantages on the HA, even 20 STR will only add 1d6 extra damage - meaning a 40% chance the guard can just shout for help If you want to use HA, I would suggest making it triggered so that it goes off as soon as you grab - otherwise I use the same construct not for garrotes, but for saps, so you can come up behind someone and hit them on the head - putting them out, but not necessarily killing them. cheers, Mark

Re: Firearms granularity

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds But I'll answer it anyway, bwahahaha I can't speak about the Turakian age because i skipped that one - but I bought Valdorian age because I like to run Sword and sorcery style games. What you get is essentially a world book rather than a campaign setting - so you get a description of the world, a history and one detailed setting - a large city which intended as the main point for campaigns. You also get a half-dozen NPCs and a nifty magic system (which for me was the high point of the entire book). What you don't get is any sort of bestiary (OK, since it's aimed at a city setting, that's fair enough). You get almost no supporting cast - only a few NPCs. You get no adventures - only a few plot hooks mostly attached to those NPCs. There's nothing wrong with the way it is presented but what you get is a setting in which - I guess in tune with Hero system philosophy - you "build your own game". Not a campaign that you can pick up and with relatively little effort pick up and run. You get general descriptions, but the GM works out what (in Hero system terms) a standard city guardsman looks like, what a standard thief gang looks like, etc. And you get no adventures. There's plenty of things to do in the game world, and there's plenty of scope for a full-fledged campaign. But if you are going to run one, you are going to have to start it yourself. Now I claim no insight into running a gaming company, so maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem to me that a GM who buys a premade game setting does so because he wants to avoid the work and time involved with starting from scratch. In truth, apart from the magic system (which is why that was the prize for me) you could get almost as much from buying *any* fantasy setting. The history and location descriptions are "non-crunchy" - non-Hero specific. I'm firing up my FH game again at the moment - I'm using my old game world, but setting it in a isolated archipelago, that I doodled in years ago and have never used for anything, so I'm essentially starting with a blank setting. So far I have done the religions, the basic history and climatology, detailed the large scale maps and set up the basic social structure. To get the basics fully in place, I need a few city maps - especially the locations used for the begining of the story arc - and generic locations (castle, temple, etc, in the local styles). I need the magic systems. Finally, I'll put the politics in place and name (but not detail) the major players and their goals. Essentially I am recreating (in much less detail, admittedly) what you get in the Valdorian Age sourcebook - I've used 4 evenings on it so far and it will probbaly take me at least as long again to get all that nailed down. But I also need a metric buttload of NPCs. I need a few unique critters for flavour. And most of all, I need adventures. Compared to the work in putting together the setting (maybe two weeks worth of work) putting that lot together is going to take literally months: fortunately I don't have to have it all before I start - an overarching story arc and a few notes is going to get me started. But while I kinda like doing this, I know from my own experience that faced with the pressure of getting - and keeping - a campaign running, many GMs fold. And that's why I think the stuff about "generic settings" or "lack of flavour" miss the mark. The GMs I know (including our current *** GM) who might like to run Hero system but fold when faced with the amount of work needed, usually end up choosing an *equally* generic campaign setting - but one that comes with pre-generated adventures and lots of already generated NPCs. I think there's a space - an important space - between pure settings books and pure modules and that's Campiagn settings: a mixture of the two that a GM can pick up and run with relatively easily. Not the large amount of detail that is presented in a settings book - not a slim book focused on one adventure, but a setting in which the GM can run adventures with the possibility of continuing the game after the premade adventures are finished. And of course the possibility of providing more adventures in that setting through (say) Digital Hero. cheers, Mark

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

Re: Runequest Spirit Magic to Hero System Well the UBO, 1 5 minute charge is cheap and nasty, so it is rightfully a stop-sign power, but it is also rules-legal and does exactly what you want. In a regular FH game, I would be careful about allowing it since it would be easy to build the Uber-Combat-Mage o'Doom, but in a RQ style game where everyone and their Duck is using the same construct, that reduces the prospects for abuse. Not only would I allow it, I DID allow it and part from the fact that the PCs acted like RQ characters (throwing magic spells on all and sundry) we didn't identify any problems. cheers, Mark

Re: Weapon Creation My approach was: Garrote: 1" Darkness vs hearing (only to cancel voice of victim, -2) +10 STR (only for for hold/squeeze, -1), NND (+1, defence is rigid armour in location 5 or no need to breathe), targets throat without bonus or penalty, must follow grab (-1/2), OIF (garrote,weapon of opportunity, -1/2) total cost: 10 points. This was written up as a skill/talent rather than an item, ie: the ability to strangle somebody, rather than the cord itself, but you could use it as an item. Doing it this way rather than targetting the neck specifically means you forgo the juicy x2 multiplier, but also means a normal can do 3d6 NND, which is enough to put anyone but heroic types out in a couple of phases - during which they cannot scream - and all you need to do is succeed with a grab at -2 OCV. Not too hard against a surprised foe, in which case you get the double damage. Effective enough too, since even if you don't knock 'em unconscious, you have a good chance of CON-stunning 'em. In the hands of a competent rogue type, this was usually good night sweet price for unsuspecting sentries - with a couple of 3 pt levels he was almost guaranteed a hit and the next phase, he simply switched the levels into damage, to speed the process to DM's option. Note that this is a knockout garrote, not a killing garrote - you'd need to strangle someone for a while to actually kill them, and if they had a high PD you couldn't kill them at all. You could, if you wished either add "does body" to the NND (making the real cost 15 points and this into a rather lethal attack). If I did that I'd be inclined to make the fous OAF - good quality wire in medieval or renaissance times was hard to come by and could not be readily replaced if lost. cheers, Mark

Re: Firearms granularity Entirely true. Combat vets have said what they care about is: Reliability. Utility. Accuracy. Weight. Calibre and all those details some gamers like to obsess over are pretty meaningless to people who actually use weapons in combat. Whocares about residual damage when most firefights take place at 50 metres? When the NZ army introduced Steyrs, the details the troopers loved were things like the clear plastic mag, so you could see how much ammo you had left, and the light recoil, so you could get close and accurate grouping. Calibre grains and kinetic energy did not feature high among priorities. As one acquaintance put it (in response to "rabbit gun" comments by FN devotees) was "a 5.56 in the face does a lot more damage than a 7.62 in a nearby tree" Still, in response to the original post, players do love having multiple coices, so I'd echo the earlier posters - get Dark Champions and that will give you a good list of guns and also sundry other useful equipment. I basically bought it myself mostly for the gear list. cheers, Mark

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds Boy, you give thread a little manure and leave it alone for a while... OK, now that the thread has maturedenough to drive away the noobs, let's throw a new idea in. What if the settings produced are not selling, not because they are generic or not "flashily presented" (personally I think both of those things are true, but still...) but for another reason? Certainly lack of flash works against impulse purchases - and that effects the core rules too - so it's unlikely that Joe Q. Gamer will walk into a store and think "Oh, gotta have that!". The bulk of rules probably means less in that situation than the simple visual appeal (or lack thereof). I know plenty of games geeks who have bought rulesets they never play - and I bet you do, too. OK, but what about people who know what they want? In short, there's plenty of Hero system GMs, and a fairish number are interested in Fantasy or Sci Fi (or even Superheroes, fer Grond's sake!) Why don't they buy settings books? And there's two possible answers to that questions I can see. The first is that Hero system GM's are ornery critters and they don't WANT someone else's setting. They want to do it themselves, consarnit! Well, judging by this thread, those people are out there. But..... there are also plenty of people on these boards who openly lament that they would run a game but they're short of time, and... etc. If they are on this board they are already heroistas. Those people would buy a setting book if it offered what they want and need. So why don't they? OK, here's the new idea, i mentioned. The settings books so far published - at least the ones I've bought or read - DON'T meet that need. What you get is a very bare-bones setting, with one or two locales described in detail. Very few NPCs, few to no "setting-specific" critters. No adventures (a few adventure seeds, if you are lucky). A GM - even an experienced Hero system GM - can't sit down with these settings books and throw a game together. He/she has to generate a mass of NPCs, a mass of setting-specific monsters and then start putting them together into adventures. In other words, you need to do 90% of the work that you would like to avoid when you buy a setting. I don't think I'm too far off the mark here. Someone has already mentioned my "Sengoku" setting. Thanks, mate . Do a google search and it usually turns up in the first page: that's been true for about a decade now. Things have cooled down now, but the site that hosts it used to cut me off every month for exceeding my bandwidth (sometimes with the first week or two!) and it attracted literally thousands of unique hits every month. The adventures have been downloaded hundreds of times, even though I ask people to email me for a download site. Why? I doubt very much that it's the overwhelming attraction of my writing But what I have done - and GM's write back to say how much they like it - is design a setting the a GM can pick up and use in a day or two. Some background, a glossary of cool words/phrases, some maps. Probably not more than 20-30 pages of "stuff". The remaining 600 odd pages are hundreds of NPCs and a critters and enough detailed adventures for a couple of years solid play. The necessary backgrounds, locations and descriptions are included in the adventures, where the GM needs them. Most people who want a premade setting don't WANT a detailed base on which they can build their own unique game. They want something they can pick up and use. They don't need or want to know how many swordmakers there are in "campaign city" - they want something they can run tonight at 6:30 when the players turn up. And the current settings don't offer that - but WW and Forgotten Realms do. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Spell Failure How you set up the rules depends on what you want the effect to be: If you use the regular encumbrance rules to define spell failure, expect mages to be big, muscly buff guys who wear armour. If you set a flat penalty for armour on skill rolls, mages will probably be scrawnier, ('cos they will use extra points to beef up their magic rolls so they can wear armour without penalty). They'll mostly still wear armour, but not all will. If you decrease the effect of magic in armour (by decreasing its power or giving it a chance of failure), then you can expect mages to generally not wear armour. It seems like it is the latter you want, so I would suggest a genre-specific house rule: All magic must take one of the two following -1/2 limitations - a) Sorcery: must take a -0 limit: Side effect - spell failure: triggered by casting in armour. or Divine Magic: must take a -0 limit: Side effect - spell failure: triggered by casting a spell that does not match deity's alignment/purposes. Since all magic takes these limits - and since the side effect is minimal (no lockout, no harm, the spell simply doesn't work) and since the side effect can be easily avoided, I'd class it as a -0 limit, so it does not affect spell cost. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And another: a spider-mage from Pesh (a land that lies under a heavy magical shadow, so this is pretty much what it looks like by day...) cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Ooh, thread necromancy! Rustles about on the computer... Here's a picture of a Vanaquisl: one of the "Civilisation makes men weak!" barbarian types from my game. cheers, Mark

Re: to map combat or not to map combat. I map most combats, but often have two (or more) maps - a detailed one for "the combat area" and a simpler one sketched on grid paper, so I can keep track of things happening in the general area. That way - to take the big docks area example - the area map will have various cool bits marked in (the cranes, the ships, the warehouses, etc) but I'll do smaller detail maps of just one crane, a ship, a section of warehouse, etc. That way someone can hide on a rooftop and shoot at someone on the crane, even though it's 100" away: I can keep track of the range modifier, and I know how long it'll take to cross that distance, but there's no need to lay it all out - I just mark people's locations on the area map. For many conflicts - even quite complex ones - the area map is all I prepare in advance. I just sketch out the detail maps on a battlemat as I need it and as the players run from place to place. It helps a lot because many of my fights are 3-D, involving walls, roofs, underground tunnels as well as the surface - all at once. They also often involve (literally) hundreds of participants (I'm mostly an FH GM). Trying to deal with that without maps - or trying to map it all on a flat surface - involves simply too much awfulness to contemplate. cheers, Mark

Re: Thinking Differently About SPD We actually tried this for one campaign: my character was a two-fisted gunfighter who compensated for a lack of speed by buying area affect selective attacks and the like. After 4 or 5 sessions, the game folded. Without SPD, combat became very repetitive and rather dull ("D&D-like", in one player's words). It's a pity, because the GM was excellent: we should have just added SPD back in The problem with SPD creep, IMO is simply part of the general problem of points creep. If you give players more points to spend, you should naturally expect higher SPD. And if you think you have SPD problems, pity my first Champs GM. After making a first character without understanding SPD and END (a slow lumbering BRICK, who had a rec of 30 to cover his END requirements and spent a lot of his time going "Hey guys, wait for me!") I made a time-manipulating martial artist. Originally SPD 6, he could crank up to SPD 12 for short periods of time - and duplicate himself. So on phase 1 it was Nexus, Nexus, Nexus and Nexus. On phase 2, it was Nexus, Nexus, Nexus and Nexus - and Shadowspawn. On phase 3 it was Nexus, Nexus, Nexus and Nexus - and everyone else. After two game sessions, I (ahem) toned him down but it was pretty damn amusing (for me) while it lasted. cheers, Mark

Re: Villains of the Cult Yep. 5 rDEF sould be good. That'll let him shrug off small attacks, take some damage from medium sized attacks and be threatened by large attacks (but not so much that he can be one-shotted). So he's not invulnerable, but he can dish out the damage. That makes him a scary foe (which is what I guess you want) but not an unbeatable one. Sound good? cheers, Mark

Re: Repulsive Odor Nah. You're falling into the common trap of confusing SFX and powers. How the power *works* is defined by the power write up. The SFX is simply an brief description of "how the power appears" - in this case : Repulsive Odor. Shucks, even in the real world, the SFX described can have different effects: when out with my younger brother and a friend we came across a bunch of cows that had gotten bloat, fallen down a steep bank and died. They smelled pretty nasty, being as how they were several days dead and swollen up like giant hide balloons. Of course I couldn't resist shooting one to see what would happen. What happened is that it sort of blew up, sending liquified guts and cow shit spraying, but oh my god, the smell! To borrow a quote, I pray whatever gods there be never to set such a stench athwart my nose again. The effect was: I stood, gaping in awe at the stench, my friend Lance expressed certain choice comments about my choice of target and fled, retching and my younger brother just threw up. Is that three different effects, or three different levels of presensce attack? Shrug. It's really up to the GM. As a GM I would have no problem with two horrible stenches which had two different effects. cheers, Mark

Re: Advice for Drawing Maps Well it's high fantasy, so a city that size could be possible: if we go with the population density from large medieval/renaissance cities that gives you a population of about 30-50 million. Holy medieval megacities, Batman! To put it in perspective, pre- Henri IV Paris was about 400,000 people and 3 kilometres by 4. Constantinople at its height was about a million and about 7 km by 3 km (although that included a fair amount of opens space and farming land inside the walls. So anyway, I don't have a problem with that - though I'd think a little bit about trade and how to feed that many people: I figure magic would have to figure pretty prominently, so you will probably have to have plenty of powerful mages - think about how that may affect the power balance between the different families. If food is grown normally and transported magically, then you might have flying castles, magical gates or both: plenty of adventure hooks there. Finally the earlier posters are right - in a city that size - esecially one without a magical planning department - most people would get lost once they were outside their own district. A whole neighbourhood could burn down and be replaced with most of the city being none the wiser. Cheers, Mark

Re: Efficacy: Heroic relocation Talent I don't see it as unbalancing at all, although it doesn't sit too well inside the current hero rules, so it's kind of hard to what the "proper" cost should be. But as a player I'd never buy it. You'd be better off sinking the points into combat luck or plain ol' DCV. So, if anything, it may be too expensive. cheers, Mark

Re: Villains of the Cult Holy mother of god! I'd look very, very carefully at his defences. As built, this guy could walk through a small army: I wouldn't be surprised if he turned your PCs into mulch without breaking a sweat, which is probably not a good way to introduce them to Hero system. He has some really nasty attacks: the NND does body will hospitalise or kill outright most 150 point characters, and his autofire and area effect attacks are likely to hurt heroic level characters as well. The kicker is the combination of a significant amount of armour with "takes no stun". Automatons triple the cost of Def to reflect the fact that no stun goes through. So first off, you should triple the points cost of his armour - and consider that you have just given this guy over 100 points of defence In practical terms he's immune to any sort of mundane missile fire - heavy longbows and arbalests will just pitter patter on his armour like gentle rain. A strong guy with a two handed sword will have only a tiny chance of doing him any harm: he'll bounce 3d6 killing attacks without any harm about 90% of the time. Anything less than that, forget it. Even a strong master martial artist with a two handed sword, cranking a 4d6 (pretty much the maximum you can expect without magical aid) has only about a 30% chance of inflicting any damage on him at all This thing's a monster. At the very least start the players off on a few skeletonly minions with much lower defences and "takes no stun". I think you'll be surprised at how hard they are to put down. Cheers, Mark

Re: Repulsive Odor

Re: Best way to do this.... The simplest way to do this would be to use a partially-limited power, I'm thinking. So example, buy the base power (xd6), then buy another xd6 with "Only if cool, dim or wet, (-1/4)", then another xd6 with "Only if two of cool, dim or wet, (-1/2)" and finally another xd6 with "Only if cool, dim and wet, (-1)" If you want to be able to overcome the limitation with extra END then change each of those conditions to variable limit, so that you can choose to carry the extra points with increasingly high endurance costs, instead. cheers, Mark

Re: New Campaign Hey! I *remember* those maps! That's the game where Caille the Paladin got snowed in by a blizzard after fooishly chasing someone or other into the wilderness and had to kill and eat her faithful warhorse cheers, Mark

Re: I'm going to have a WHAT? Hey, as an American, you have the constitutional right to be offended any time you damn well feel like it. cheers, Mark

Re: More Automatons . . . I just use the base roll of 9- like some others, but when - after time or enough tasks - the automaton escapes control, it doesn't fall apart: it becomes autonomous. So a zombie mght shuffle off, muttering "fresh brains..." while a Golem might simply become unresponsive or hostile depending on its levels of "loyalty". Think Frankenstein's monster.... The reason for this is that it a) allows my NPCs to buld up huge zombie armies (which would be hard to do if they kept falling apart) and acts as a control on abuse of the power: do you really want to summon/create lots of things if you have to worry about keeping them under control? cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing Money Factor The simplest answer is that your problem comes from the fact that you can use Points to buy the perk: wealth and then use wealth to buy cyber (which is points). Just break that cycle. Disallow the wealth perk. I routinely disallow it in in heroic levels games where I want cash to play a major role. The players can start off with a defined reserve of cash that they can use on cyber or guns 'n stuff (depending on background, that can be savings, if they have a decent job, an inheritance or a big suitcase of pure cocaine they took off a corpse). Everyone starts with the same cash (which is fair), and how much cash the players later have access to in-game you can control as a GM: it makes the pursuit of cash a major goal for the PCs which is pretty normal for cyberpunk games/literature. My last suggestion is to make cyber MUCH more expensive - base the costs off modern surgery costs. Sure, we can give people new hearts and internal organs today, but the price of a new liver or heart is anywhere between 100 - 400 thousand US dollars: basically the cost of a house. A high quality slicon-joint prosthetic arm today costs 10-15,000 US dollars - and that's without any cyber! I'd jump those costs by a factor of ten, at least - maybe by a factor of 50. That way, the players will have to score big time to buy much in the way of fancy gear (giving you more control as a GM) and you have an incentive for blackmarket chop shops dealing in stolen ask-no-question cyberware: which opens up lots of interesting plot options and also fits the grim and gritty feel of most cyberpunk. It also means that not every street punk is going to be cybered to the gills, so the players will feel happier and more "special" when they can graft some cool toys onto their body. cheers, Mark

Re: New Perk Since normal PCs are legally independant, I'd suggest 0 points: just make up a special effect ie: note the reason she is considered legally independant. Normally you don't pay for a Perk which is essentially "treated like everyone else". If OTOH she is getting points from a disadvantage for being a young girl, look at how much she is getting. Appearing to be underage is likely to have some drawbacks, even if they come without legal strings attached. cheers, Mark