Markdoc

Re: Your "2005" Pet Gaming Projects And so did I. Hmmm. Not sure how that happened, but the link has been truncated to: http://www.angelfire.com/ok3/markdo...troduction.html Here’s the full link. http://www.angelfire.com/ok3/markdoc/gothick_empires/ge_introduction.html Cheers, Mark

Re: What is your ideal sized hero group 4-5 for me is ideal - enough space for diversity, not so many that thhey step oneach ther's shticks. Not so many that I can't keep individuals backstories and sublots going for each character, but not so few that if we have a drop-out for an evening or two that the group is hampered. I find one on one a bit tedious for more than a session or two and even 2 players tends to lack the "group chemistry" which I find to be alot of teh fun. Bigger numbers are do-able though. For a while I was GM'ing (I kid you not) for 14 players. Not a one shot either, but a once-a-week game than ran for 6-8 months. At least it started as a once a week game - the players kept splitting off into smaller groups - anywhere from 6-7 down to one on one (which I would run seperate series of adventures for) - so it was more like 2-4 games a week as the group split up, coalesced again, split up again and re-coalesced. Eventually, we lost a few and it split (permanently) into two groups (one of 5 one of six) the Wednesday night and Sunday night crews. Over time, by not replacing natural attrition, I pared it down to 6 players (phew). I moved on, but chatting with one of the players by email found out recently that the core of the wednesday night crew is still gaming together, 23 years on! cheers, Mark

Re: Ay Yi Yi! GM advice needed! An alternate approach to trusting roleplaying is simply change the base rules: since you haven't sprung the "don't remember the evidence on them" yet, just change it to "can't act on the evidence". So when the players go "Alright! Let's take this guy down. We'll take the evidence to X and show him.", you simply adopt your pious GM face and say "you suddenly find yourself standing in central park. Judging by the sunlight, it is several hours after leaving the base. You are all holding partially eaten icecreams." When they get back to base the evidence is still there, where they left it If the players find that every time they try to do something with the evidence - tell someone, show it to someone, make copies, etc, they "blank out" for a while and lose a variable amount of time, that will a) explain why this has never surfaced before really, really motivate them to take that SOB down c) get them started on trying to find a way to break the spell - which could be pretty hard, given that it's presumably got god-level mojo behind it, so you got a good adventure or two out of this. and d) when they finally do break the spell, suddenly a whole bunch of people will pp out of the woodwork to support their allegations, so they won't look like some dingbats trying to take the president down with fake evidence. cheers,Mark

Re: I'm considering Hero... OK, that's a fair answer. It's explains why you have lethality problems - but it's a question of taste, rather than rules per se, because even in a heroic setting, with NCM in place, that's a perfectly legal construct. Not of course, that there's anything wrong with taste - it's what gives every game its "flavour". For me, "damage" is an abstract quantity. You can, in real life, kill a perfectly healthy adult male by ramming a hatpin in one eyesocket - yet that's only at most a 1/2 d6 HKA. A normal human can also survive multiple gunshot wounds (the most I know of is 32 x 5.56 rounds, suggesting either the victim had in excess of 30 BOD and every roll was a 1, or many of the hits were doing 0 damage). So I don't have a problem with a warrior doing 12 DC in HTH. That damage is moderated through the "blade" limitation, which means if he tries to cut his way through a castle wall or a stout door all he'll get is a "ping" sound and a broken sword - whereas a superhero with 60 STR with some effort could smash his way through. So a 12 DC swordsman as noted fits within my game (he's terribly competent in combat, but his lifting and leaping abilities, while prodigious are not out of the frame) - but a character with 60 STR would not fit. cheers, Mark

Re: I'm considering Hero... Yeah, I never understood the need for those optional rules and don't use 'em. The worst thing about Fantasy Hero is haxxies that have been introduced which don't fit into the system - if you use the Turakian system for magic for exaple, it's not surprising that you have uber-mages who are really, really hard to kill. But that reflects a deviation from the normal rules set, not the rules-set itself. But just using the standard rules, it's never been a problem (for me or my gaming groups). I wouldn't want to see fantasy characters dealing out truly superheroic heroic damage, but a "who would win: Batman or Conan?" type poll isn't too far off the radar. As noted, I have had PCs (only a few, but still) dishing out 4d6 HKA with a combination of two handed sword, martial arts and big muscles. That's plenty lethal - but then it's also a character who is optimised for one thing and one thing only: killing things with swords. That may be too much for your taste, I dunno: the character still fit snugly within a low fantasy game setting and didn't dominate the action. cheers, Mark

Re: I'm considering Hero...

Re: Is it a staff or a staff? Yep. Common martial arts weapons includes staff because staff is, well, a common martial arts weapon. However, if you're a 12th century English yeoman who has been forced to flee to into the forest by the evil sheriff, you get sword, shield and spear as your common melee weapons and have to pay an extra point for staff. Once that's done, both guys can use broomstick in a pinch. Works like a staff, just breaks easier and doesn't do quite so much damage. cheers, Mark

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow" Because once your OAF is taken away it's "bye-bye power" til you get it back somehow. For things that harder to remove, we use OIF (weapon of opportunity) since you can readily get a new one. So if you have a power that requires you have your special family heirloom sword, that's OAF, because it can be taken away. If on the other hand you have a power that requires any sword it's classed as OIF, simply since if it's taken away you can knock over a guard and use his, or run off to Bob's Used Swords and get a new one, or carry two swords, etc etc. cheers, Mark

Re: hit location For fantasy games, I always use hit locations. Not much more to say, really. cheers, Mark

Re: Three or more Eyes If it gives him some extra powers, it's a power, with the eye simply being the special effect. If it just means he has three eyes, then it's maybe a disadvantage (distinctive appearance). cheers, Mark

Re: I'm considering Hero... I've played and GM'ed D&D through multiple incarnations. It's fine if you want to play D&D, but really blows if you want to do any other sort of fantasy gaming. Since you've been playing GURPS, I figured you already made that connection I've played GURPS fantasy in the past, but for fantasy games Fantasy Hero has been my choice for lo, these many years. Anyhoo, compared to GURPS (never tried 4th, Ed. so only compared to earlier versions) Character creation is in some way easier than in GURPS, especially for spellcasters (no pesky Pre-req.s) but it is also less defined making it hard for some people to get started with a character. It helps with new players to use templates (standard basic barbarian, standard basic soldier, etc) and then let them customise those, at least until they are a bit experienced. However, once started, play (in my experience) is smoother than GURPS. The basic mechanisms are fairly simple and they are *consistent* - once you've learned them, they are good to go. The drawback, as already noted, is that you need to do some work to get up and running. There are bestiaries and grimoires available although not in the quantities you find for d20, but since the whole point of the system is customisation, you'll need to customise them to fit your setting. The good news is that once you know what you want, you can then plunder all those other system's supplements for stuff you can use. To take the example about making mage's eyes light up when they find ancient scrolls, you can do it multiple ways. Make spells have a hard skill roll if casting them from memory, but not if read off a scroll or out of a book (variable limitation). Make inscribing (creating) written spells difficult to do (require rare inks, special powders, etc as part of the focus limitation). Since adventuring books are likely to have a limited lifespan, building up a big library with spare copies would be a good thing. Only allow mages to learn (buy) new spells from detailed study of existing copies (this is just a special effect - part of the basic game rules you set as a GM). It's a common thing in the fantasy genre where the world has fallen from a golden age of magic. Make spell books and scrolls independant items (meaning players have to permanently sacrifice experience points if they want to make their own) requiring a skill roll to use. In this case, anyone can use a spellbook they find - if they can read it and if they have a magic skill. In this way their eyes will REALLY light up when they find a spellbook. Mages would not buy spells with their own points: they'd spend them on obscure ancient languages and magic skills so they coud use the books and scrolls they found. But you could have dabblers, like Cugel in the Jack Vance books who knows just enough magic to really get in trouble with a stolen spell book. You see the problem - there are many ways to get the effect you want. But you as the GM has to decide how you want to do it. cheers, Mark

Re: Let's Talk Lovecraft I've been a bit ambivalent about CoC. I like Lovecraft's work (I even did a "Lovecraft tour" of New England where we visited places mentioned in his stories - that was nice). But the fundamental problem is that much of the horror aspect in his stories comes from the characters realising that they are up against something that they really cannot handle. That's no basis for roleplaying game though, which is why CoC almost always turns into "hunt the cultist" which is more August Derleth than HP Lovecraft. As a general rule, therefore, I tend to avoid using a CoC background and run horror games in a different setting. But as McCoy points out, the essential element in any horror game is the feeling that things (probably bad things) are happening in the background - inside any mystery is an enigma, and inside that is a riddle, etc. cheers, Mark

Re: Keeping them distant Skjaldberg sounds like a mangling of a real Scandanavian (Danish/Norse) word. Skjöldborg means "Shield-castle" and is the old norse word for a shield wall. Unfortunately since Skald or Skjald (alternate spelling) means poet/singer and Berg or Bjerg means mountain, at first glance the word looks more like "poet-mountain" to someone who speaks those languages. Ritchie Blackmore style wargaming, anyone? cheers, Mark

Re: A new take on "Deadly Blow"

Re: Keeping them distant Yep. Bernard Cornwell makes the point in his arthurian series that in the days before real soldiers, getting your soldiers to charge was actually quite difficult. Hence all the posing about and shouting insults before the actual fighting started. General: "You chaps! Run over there and kill those angry-looking fellows with the big spears" Part-time soldier/farmer: "Good heavens! Is that the time? Must pop home and check if I left the cat on the fire." General: "OooooKay. How about you?" etc. On the other hand if you have a few berserks handy you can ask them and once they are moving (hopefully in the right direction) it's much easier to get everyone to simply follow them. It's just that most people don't want to be first. cheers, Mark

Re: Bigoted Archetypes My approach is to avoid using the negative stereotypes, but I do use language peculiarities as "flavour". Interestingly, this seems to have an effect on the player's reaction to NPC's who do this - the British secret service agent pretending to be an indian talked Peter Sellers Indian English: "Oh my goodness me! He appears to have met with a fatal accident!" and was treated with mild contempt by the players - until he displayed somewhat ruthless competence. Make of that what you will. I also have NPCs occasionally display attitudes which involve those stereotypes. Generally the fact that someone is an out and out racist is a decent clue that they are not person of quality . But in some cases, I have NPCs who are otherwise admirable display less virulent racism, simply to get across the point that the game is set in 1890, not 1990. cheers, Mark

OK, this is such an obvious question someone must have asked it, but dredging about on the boards hasn't turned it up.... Characteristics can be drained below 0, yes? So if Ego is drained below 0, to -10 say, does that mean you only need to roll 10 on a mental power to get a +20 effect? Or is there a baseline of 0 for the various "+X" effects? cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And another one I did just for fun. It does show how "flexible" the poser models can be - all the people in this picture are actually the same model, suitably altered. Cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art I got around to finishing Sven Snotgobblersen last night - here's the completed picture. Cheers, Mark

Re: Campaign Idea - Suggestions Gratefully Welcome Some of my favourite repeating villians. A character with mind control, mind link and a mass of skills bought "usable by others" (special effect is that's she's "inside the victim's head" so he/she can use the knowledge). This person's shtick is to find some dupe, seduce him, get him to agree to the mindlink and then whammo! He becomes an instant martial arts master. If he has any powers or such himself, so much the better. As a vanity thing, her dupes always wear variations on the same outfit, so it looks like the same person (at least until the costume's off), and they have the same distinctive skills so it fights like the same person, but put them away and another one pops up. I don't think the players ever figured this one out: they thought they were up against some big martial arts conspiracy group, when it was actualy only one person. The other one uses a simple mindcontrol and a transform - into a person that looks like him. Same deal, but sort of in reverse: it looks like the bad guy and it acts like the bad guy, but the powers/skills are different each time. The players did figure out the basic mechanism here and even how to rescue his victims, but they never did get the bad guy. Finally, there was a necromancer who destroyed the minds of his victims (so they had very low EGO, natch) and then kept the zombie-like things around. He could pop his spirit into any of these and take action - if one got trashed, he'd just hop to another. "You can kill this body, but I will simply take another, and another. Eventualy you must tire and then will be - the time of the reaper!" (bonus points if you can work out who this is a rip-off of) The mechanism was that he was permanently desolid (he was dead, after all!) and could go invisible when possessing someone, with a largish mind control (affects normal world) and a few limitations tagged on for flavour. Basically, a wandering Mind Control with a bad attitude. cheers, Mark

Re: Keeping them distant Sure, my point was that the only way to really "keep someone off" is by making them scared to attack. In real life, it's not like you are pushing them away with the pointy end. You menace them with "try to come close enough to hit me and I will stick you" - spiced up with advancing on them and giving the same message. If they actually DO decide to have a go at you, then either: a) you stick them or they're inside your weapon reach. It's not like they try to attack but somehow can't manage to get close. In the situation you describe, I'd adopt von D-Man's suggestion where the hero "covers" his opponent. The simplest solution would be to GM it, using the already existing rules - if an NPC is faced with an opponent who is clearly ready and has reach, then he may well be disinclined to run onto the end of the waiting pointy thing and instead dance about, waiting for an opening, trying to distract the opponent, calling for reinforcements, etc. In other words, play sensible NPCs like real people. That's not unreasonable in a swords and sorcery setting where a lightly-armoured attacker is unlikely to want to take the chance of taking a 1 1/2d6 HKA. It also suits the genre - instead of charging the waiting spear, you hook a bar stool up with one foot and throw it at them, hoping to score enough stun to let you close, while they recover. If, on the other hand the player wants a cinematic move specific to them, then I'd use a version of the "force back" fighting stunt from the Valdorian age source book - basically a triggered 1" running usable against others. You could simply adopt this as combat move that anyone can use, but that I suspect that could get tedious very fast. cheers, Mark

Re: Keeping them distant Like most combat-related things, I take a simple approach. Spearmen historically have been good a) in massed formation and when advancing cautiously or on the defensive. In contrast, when the formation was broken, they tended to lose to fighters armed with individual combat weapons. Wild screaming charges are mostly for sword/ axe or lance types. I therefore use no special rules. Polearm users - including spears/pikes have extra reach already built in. When standing on the defensive - ie: held action - they automatically get to strike first, since they can hit their opponent before he reaches them, when on the advance, spearmen go forward at half their normal move: ie: they go: half move, hold attack action. And, since as noted, longspearmen or pikemen in massed formation can stab over the ranks in front, that means the possibility of being stabbed by multiple opponents, not just from rear ranks, but also possibly from the sides, giving the possibility of multiple attacker bonuses. That simulates the scary effect of massed pointy objects, well enough for me. Mounted lancers can use the same rules against opponents without reach weapons to hit first, making them, in turn, scary to opponents with short weapons. My experience - both personal and observational - has been that in one on one conflicts weapon reach really doesn't make that much difference: the guy with the longer weapon often gets to hit first, but he can only keep his opponent at bay if the opponent is too intimidated to commit to an attack (with consequent risk of getting hit) - the rules for extra reach and the OCV penalty on longer weapons seems to simulate that adequately. cheers, Mark

Re: Campaign Idea - Suggestions Gratefully Welcome Ok, here's a couple of suggestions. First off, throwing players curveballs, so long as it is done without gonking their characters is always fun. Most players will slide with it - even like it - as long as they don't get gonked (1). So.... my advice would be to start it off as a Dark Champions game. Say nothing at all about mystic beasties and throw the characters a series of standard thugs and crim.s adventures. You can (a la early X-files) also throw them a bunch of apparently mystic things - with mundane "explanations" ie: it wasn't really a gator-man, it was a psychotic serial killer, who raves about the gator-man. Or was it - could be there really is a gator-man and the psychotic got that way from the shock of meeting him/them? That way, some time later when you introduce a genuine mystic beastie the players will soil their urban combat trousers ("Bullets don't stop it! What do we do now?") The players will probably be cool with that because their characters are still competent arse-kickers - they just suddenly need a little help on the magic front - and you already have an advisor lined up. If you go this route, it offers a solution for your problem of the whole thing being a little cyber-punky. The ruthless corporation aspect could be covert: either corporations that have little or no public profile, or arms of well-known corporations that operate in a totally different sphere (for example, using mystically-derived technology which is not - for obvious reasons - available on the open market). If the mystical aspect is totally covert - and powerful nameless groups have a strong interest in keeping it that way - then you can balance off having a "normal" world setting (keeps down the GM's work) with having advanced technologies/powers accessible to some groups of NPCs. If this route appeals, you should check out: The Feng Shui roleplaying game. I personally dislike the rules, which are very heavy on "GM's call" but there's a gold mine of stuff in the background, much of which is available free on the net. The concept of Arcanotech - magically-powered technology - in particular, might fit your needs. Tim Powers' books "Last Call", "Expiration Date" and "Earthquake Weather" all of which (apart from being damn fine reads) describe a covert magical war based Arthurian archetypes running under the surface of normal life in California. The comic series "Planetary" by Warren Ellis, which deals with a team of super-powered individuals trying to ferret out the world's "secret history" - alien visitations, ghosts, lost cities, etc - and the people who want to stop them. cheers, Mark 1. Where I come from from, a "gonk" is a useless cloth doll thingie, shaped kind of like an egg with limbs. A gonk character is one that is pretty much useless (a character can still be a gonk, even if it's well designed - a Wolverine clone in a golden-age, 4 colour settng for example). Gonking a character is messing with its backgrounds, powers, etc, or the game setting, so it's useless.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Oh, I'm well familiar with the mutant joint phenomenon. It's tempting in Poser (just because you can) to grab a limb and move it where you want. The rest of the body follows as best it can, giving the impression that your figure has just been hit with a sonic blast, hurling it sideways and liquifying most of its bones. You get (IMO) more realistic posing if you follow the way the way that limbs naturally move: move the torso to roughly where you want it (and the general position you want - hunched, twisted, etc), then the shoulders, then the forearms and last the hands. This tends - where it moves the upper limbs - not to have the distorting effect that starting with the hand or foot does. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art And one last one - the chief bad guys from my fantasy campaign: the slowly-dying-out reptilian old race. They are powerful enchanters and hide by pretending to be human: this is their real form. cheers, Mark