Markdoc

Re: Experts? In my games, I have been using a similar idea for many years and it hasn't become abusive. First off, as already noted, I *like* players to take lots of skills. I have had problems with characters who want to bulk up on skills. Secondly, in the variation I have used, the GM gets to define what is, or is not, a background skill, so it doesn't simply become an excuse for buying cheap combat-useful skills The basic guidelines I use are here: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/hero_houserules.htm#SkillEnhancers One thing I am curious about - how general is this "Expert" skill modifier? cheers, Mark

Re: New Character Render - Heroine or...? Well if you like the magician, here's my current character from the same game - a berserker type with priestly powers. A typical exchange in this game. Miranda (my wife's character) "Why did you go in there? I said there might be an ambush!" Grim (My character) "Yeah. That's WHY I went in." It's sad to note that although he behaves exactly like a barbarian berserker, he's actually the good guy in the party. Cheers, Mark

Re: Of course we're criminals. We have to be. Smilies, man, smilies, dammit! Oh - OK. The 36K figure threw me - her real tax bracket (including social security, etc) would be 42%, which means her take-home would be about 78K, when you figure in basic exemptions. On the other hand this is way more detailed than I ever bother to get wth any of my characters.... cheers, Mark

Re: Of course we're criminals. We have to be. Well speaking as someone who lives in scandinavia and earns a little less than that... in the real world, 120K would be a comfortable salary but not really wealthy (it puts you at the top end of the regular management scale for a small firm or in the middle for a big corporation). Figure she could have a nice car - but probably not a Ferrari. A nice 4 bedroom house with a yard in the suburbs, or a fairly flash apartment downtown - but not a 6 bedroom show apartment. Enough disposable income for multiple overseas holidays a year, plus all the toys needed. By the time you figure in health insurance, 120K in Norway is probably about the same as 90-100 K in the US (assuming you live in a major metro area). If she has to pay for her own supergadgets, she might have problems, but a single person on 120K a year in Norway would be living pretty well, even if she lived in Oslo. I agree that it's probably not a huge salary for doing super-deeds, but it's a long way from sqeaking by cheers, Mark

Re: Sci-Fantasy at the Super level.. I ran a game where each of the players was an immortal (you could kill them, but they just popped up again in a new body) with 200 -250 points to play with on top of the immortality power I deliberately left the power level where it was for my normal 50/50 point start games and the players pretty quickly got the idea that dungeon-bashing and dealing with bandits was waste of time - it was a game about politics and magic. And everyone had a blast cheers, Mark

Re: Fourth Age Hero My take - and it's purely mine, I don't know of direct descriptions - is that Gondoran archictecture is Renaissance level. They bridge a large river between a mile and half a mile wide, build underground fortresses of some sophistication, build very large fortified cities, which apparently don't stink (meaning they have sewers and organised garbage collection, plus road workers) and they have plenty of descriptions of "high towers". So the sort of visons I have are of late medieval/early renaissance French castles like Chinon or Blandy les Tours, which match the "white" and "tall" descriptions but are still fortresses. And yes, I know that doesn't match the tech level in other ways (ubiquitous use of mail armour, for example). I don't think Tolkien was looking at tech particularly. cheers, Mark

Re: New Character Render - Heroine or...? One of the big things about poser 5 and 6 is the ability to do cloth! OK, might not sound like such a big deal, but when you have characters who have cloaks (Shut up, Em!), it makes a big difference being able to wrap the cloak around them instead of sticking it on the back like a piece of cardboard. Here's a render from last night (my back up character - a martial artist/mage type for our current game) to show what I mean. It's a straight render - no photoshop or nuffink Cheers, Mark

Re: New Character Render - Heroine or...? One of the big things about poser 5 and 6 is the ability to do cloth! OK, might not sound like such a big deal, but when you have characters who have cloaks (Shut up, Em!), it makes a big difference being able to wrap the cloak around them instead of sticking it on the back like a piece of cardboard. Here's a render from last night (my back up character - a martial artist/mage type for our current game) to show what I mean... Cheers, Mark

Re: STR minimum question

Re: columbia! Yeah, but she's a brick, right? Most Victoria's Secret models probably don't have breasts you could smash a car on. cheers, Mark

Re: Fourth Age Hero My take is that Emyn Arnen is a hilly, craggy sort of place which is why it remained forested even though it was right on the doorstep of Osgiliath. Reasoning? #1 Emyn means "hills" or "range" #2 the description in LOTR use words like craggy and Faramir's hideout is in what sounds like a very large hill/small mountain. My mental picture (and it could be wrong) is that where the Anduin runs between the mountains it has carved a path along the edge of the hills. The flat lands which serve up most of Gondor's fields are on the Minas tirith side of the river, running north towards Rohan and south along the coast. cheers, Mark

Re: New Character Render - Heroine or...? I use both - I've been on the DAZ|Studio beta tester program for ... oh from the time before you could use it at all and have used Poser from V.3. Personally, I find DAZ|Studio to be a little harder to use and less stable, although it has some features that Poser 4.0 did not have - multiple viewpoints, for example. It is also generally good at exporting figures and has a nicer rendering engine than Poser 4.0. It's still worse at control of textures though and makes it even worse by storing everything in propriatary formats - I HATE that. On the other hand, you can't beat the price! My take is: DAZ|Studio is about as good as Poser 4.0. It has a different style, which leads to a steeper learning curve. Poser 5.0 was bug-riddled mess: too many new features, too unstable. Poser 6.0 is significantly more powerful than DAZ|Studio. It's added better texturing, multiple library support, cloth simulation (which I love) - but also costs about 250 USD! (although the upgrade costs only about 150 USD, if you have poser 4.0) cheers, Mark

Re: Super humans populations in cities Simple. Dr Mutahtron threatens to let off his mutation device in downtown Manhattan if the goverment doesn't pay him 100 million dollars. The Sidekick threatens to go on a rampage through Flyspeck, MT if they don't retract his library fines. Who are your players really interested in fighting? cheers, Mark

Re: STR minimum question

Re: A New Look at Martial Arts Not very: you would need to increase the reserve a little to incorporate it, but that has little effect on slot cost, since most of the slots are at minimum cost. cheers, Mark

Re: How To Model: Magic adversely affected by cold iron Have look here: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Grimoire/magic_systems.htm#On%20Stranger%20Tides It's not precisely what you asked for, but you could easily enough steal from it what you do need. Cheers, Mark

Re: A New Look at Martial Arts This was exactly my point when I started using Multipowers for Martial arts - there are no new rules, I'm simply using the existing rules. Multipowers for martial arts only become a problem because more or less by definition, they include levels. To me that's no biggie because using levels in any kind of framework is strictly "GM's permission only" as noted in FREd. So BlackRose has a point: if you have funky martial arts maneuvers that take up 45 points in one slot and have a 45 point reserve, you don't want to see "offensive Strike, +6 d6 HA, +7 OCV" or worse "Martial dodge, +9 DCV" in another slot. Too many levels can get gross. But then, if a character with a neato-cool gun can have a 45 multipower allowing him 2d6 HKA autofire - I'd be equally leery of letting him have another slot "Homing bullet: 2d6 HKA, +7 OCV" Treat a martial arts multipower the same way you'd treat any other multipower, and you are good to go. If the homing bullet doesn't gross you out, then the Offensive Strike shouldn't either. cheers, Mark

Re: What??!! The Roman Empire fell to pieces while Jesus was still alive??!! Correct - but as far as we can determine their origins come not from the original churches founded in Persia (of which no trace remains apart from a few stones, potsherds and traces of scripture) but from the Armenians who moved into the area during the 3rd to 5th centuries. They still retain traces of their ancient culture and are apparently not indigenous to the region. That's why I was careful to write "from Paul's Asia Minor founding", not the Roman church. The Armenian churches which sprang from Paul's first preachings are also (at least as far as we can tell) also the origin of what went on to be come the Greek Orthodox church: their claim to be coeval with the Roman Church is the argument that they also arose from Paul's original preachings and the Persian churches were traditionally under their umbrella until the Byzantine defeats in 636/7. cheers, Mark

Re: A New Look at Martial Arts

Re: What??!! The Roman Empire fell to pieces while Jesus was still alive??!! Christianity became a Europe-spanning (and eventually global) faith via the Roman empire: first via its trade networks (where it was only marginally effective) and then after its adoption by the Empire, by active evangelism. If Rome had collapsed (really collapsed) around the time Jesus is supposed to have lived, its enemies would have moved into the gaps and the dissemination of the faith would either have never happened or happened much, much more slowly (to take an example, the area which is now French was "christianised" by official policy in only a few generations: north of the empire, however, the process still wasn't complete 800 years later) There would have *been* no Byzantine empire - at that point, Byzantium was a sleepy, no-account minor port and the Roman empire had no split officialy into Eastern and Western. The relatively peaceful Roman Asia Minor where Paul went to preach and build up his folowing would almost have certainly been plunged into war as the Persians swallowed it up and the local Armenian and Hellenised lords tried to prevent that. Not fertile ground for sowing the gospel of the prince of peace... Egypt would almost have certainly regained the freedom it had only recently lost, while the Germanic tribes would have moved south a few generations earlier. Europe had been pagan for 3000 years - it's likely that it would have stayed that way for a while longer. Forget about whether there would be a papacy or not - a very likely outcome is that Christianity would either have not survived or become one of many minor mystery cults. After all, the early church fathers travelled to Egypt, to Persia and even to India to spread their faith as well as staying in Judea, but those churches all perished. Only Paul's church got a lasting foothold, and that was in Roman territories and especially in Rome. The Egyptian coptic church is an offshoot of Paul's original founding in Asia Minor, not a survivor of the original founding, while James' foundings in Persia and India have vanished from history. The Ethiopian church is also an offshoot from Paul's founding, via a hellenistic convertee. And if Christianity had not become a continent-spanning religion, there's a good chance that Islam would not have arisen. If Mohammed was born at all, he may have copied Ahrimanism instead, or whatever was most successful at the time. It's really hard to imagine what the world would have looked like - the only safe bet is that it would not look much like what we have now. Cheers, Mark

Re: Fourth Age Hero Unless a great deal of the city is still in ruins (think of medieval rome with some new districts and others - the poorer quarters - with lots of people living in basically patched up ruins and even large areas of grass, used for grazing where buildings had collapsed or burnt down) then the population is likely to be large - on the order of 50 - 150,000, depending on density. By medieval standards, this is a *really* big city. By comparison, late medieval Siena was about 1/2 the area of this city and had nearly 100,000 inhabitants, while late medieval London (early Tudor period) was slightly larger and had a population of about 75,000. To my mind Gondorian building styles (lots of stone, courtyards, big buildings etc) have more in common with the Italians than the 1 or 2 story brick and wood style of the English at the time. Of course, having half the city be in ruins would be pretty cool too... cheers, Mark

Re: I need a question settled. I'd vote for a perk equivalent to lower nobility or something similar for the simple reason that Orc Society is generally depicted as being less organised than human. If the chief orc and the high priest have an argument and the chief kills and partially eats the high priest, it's not likely to be taken as a mortal insult to the cult. It just means the high priest wasn't tough enough - his second in command takes over and kills a few of the chief's friends (if he can) just to show he can't be pushed around. In contrast if a human king kills (or has killed) the Archbishop, his action is likely to be greatly disapproved of - even without the eating part - and is likely to have severe repercussions, even if he is strong enough to get away without direct challenge. So "rank" in a more structured society should be worth more: it gives you a little more protection/privilege. cheers, Mark

Re: How can an Napoleonic Era frigate fire a broadside every 12 seconds? Right. The simplest way to avoid any sort of difficulty is to give the weapons the appropriate loading times - 1-2 minutes for cannon, slightly less for rakers and swivel guns, less again for muskets. That means that at long range, the cannons fire, when you get closer, marksmen join in and when you get really close it's down to axe, sword and boarding pike, because firearms are too slow. Just like in real life, eh? The idea that combat in the tops has to stop because the cannon only fires once every couple of minutes is so startlingly dim, that I must admit I never even considered it. cheers, Mark

Re: Why does the USS Iowa only have a 10 Defense?

Re: Victorian Women's Art of Self Defense