Markdoc

Not really surprising - the whole supplements thing is pretty much a giant scam: the best you can hope for is that your supplements don't actually hasten your death, so maybe it's a good thing if they are just mostly harmless vegetable pulp. cheers, Mark

If we go system-nonspecific, the only things a warrior needs to be competitive are: The ability to hit things hard. Exactly what this means is very system and game specific. In a game where magic (and thus things like invisibility) are common, he may need a way to actually find his enemy, he's going to need a way to consistently land attacks (CSL, high stat.s whatever) and he's going to need a way to blow through the target's defences. That can be big damage, defence avoidance, or whatever. A warrior who can't dish out consistent high levels of hurt is basically just ablative armour for other PCs ... at best. The ability to mitigate incoming damage - high defences, a big pool of HP, high evasion skills, block. If you can't do this, you don't even make very good ablative armour: too much effort is spent by the other PCs on keeping you alive. That's actually it, pretty much. Everything else is gravy. Personally, if I'm playing a fighter type, I like to add in a noncombat specialty (sneak, face guy, information guy, etc) - exactly what, is not important, but I like to have something to do when "AM SMASH!" is not the preferred option. cheers, Mark

In most of the fantasy books I read, magic items are pretty much always a big deal. Same in my games - I rarely (very, very rarely)* give away magic items. I always hated the fact that in many fantasy games, the characters are defined by what items they own, not by the characters' abilities and personality. In my own games, PCs can make them themselves, if they want, but given that they have to pay character points and also take the "independant" limitation, it's rare for any PC to make more than magical trinkets. So when players do find a magical item, that makes it a red -letter day, and said item almost always has a history attached. As a GM, it's way easier to make a backstory if you only have to do it once or twice a year, then for every other session. It's also very easy to give them something that makes them very happy, when they are used to getting mundane items. Cheers, Mark *in the last campaign that ran for 4-5 years, the players got their first magic item after more than 2 years of play - a flying ship (which they promptly lost, after one use ). It took them another year or two before they started turning up magic items again, this time by a direct quest to start tracking certain things (weapons, armour) down, in preparation for the final confrontation with the big bad (which, in all honesty, they didn't need, but I let them because they wanted it so much). In the game before that, I think I gave away one significant magical item (a sword) in about 4-5 years play: the PCs gave it away. Games - even standard fantasy games - don't have to be all about the magic loot.

Well, in a way, we did: we had to fight off several attempts on our heavily laden "money convoys" Cheers, Mark

And yet, the minimum buy of flight with say, "gestures and incantations to cast" is equivalent to a combat level in terms of cost ... Hero system is slippery like that. cheers, Mark

Our GM thought he was being smart by giving us a huge treasure ... mostly in the form of copper pieces and other small assorted coinage. Tonnes of coins. He assumed we'd curse, take the small percentage in easily portable loot and move on. Oh, no. We weren't going to pass this up. What we did was dig in like ticks to defend the hoard, repurposing traps etc and turning the dungeon into a fortress, while one PC hightailed it to the city, rented some ships and pack animals, and then sailed back. we shipped the lot back home, tonne by tonne down to the last copper piece and half-bit and were ever after feeeelthy rich, with completely level-inappropriate magical gee-gaws. cheers, Mark

If you have flight, you don't need climbing cheers, Mark

In general, I don't like to worry too much about minutiae, but I do recall forcing disease checks for the injured after the players got in a fight in the sewers. In general, PCs show a disregard for anything that isn't instantly or obviously lethal, and really, in-use sewers are not pleasant places. Threatening disease checks is a good way to get players to say "Uh, I really don't want to crawl into that!" cheers, Mark

I don't worry about it in combat situations - as you have noticed, real armour makes you heat up and sweat, it tires you, etc. - but these are all longer-term effects, not something that's going to wear you out in the 12-48 seconds of intense adrenaline-fuelled combat that is a Hero system fight. In addition, wearing armour longer-term chafed (by definition it's heavy and relatively inflexible), leading to sores and infection. There are documented examples of the military orders (who were real hard-asses about almost everything) retiring knights from combat duties because of armour-sores, so it's nothing to laugh about. I handle the armour thing by simply noting LTE and by enforcing the armour penalties listed in the document. If the players are reasonable about it, I don't bother with more. If they insist on waltzing around in armour all the time, I start to track the LTE effects, which may mean that they start to lose LTE over time - meaning they start a fight with a lower END total (i.e.: they are tired). If they are totally abusive (hasn't happened in a long time) and want to sleep in their armour, wear it to dinner, etc then they start to develop armour sores which will give them a minor STUN drain in combat or vigorous exercise (riding, for example) and start checking for infection, etc. cheers, Mark

Here's a totally different approach. It sounds like you can - if you have the right mojo - tap into ley lines and nodes. If I read it correctly, ley lines make magic safe to use, but do little else, while nodes allow you to amplify your magical capacity in different ways. At the same time, if the ley line is too strong, it can be dangerous to use. Lucius has already indicated that the text is a little confusing here. I'd suggest simplifying and rationalising your description and it's not hard to do that in a way that meshes with old ley line lore. Namely that ley lines allow magic to be used safely, and that more power can be found in old, deep ley lines and at nodes. Tapping that extra power though, can be dangerous. This does not actually sound like a power you should build for PCs - instead it's part of the game world and the powers that PCs need are those to safely tap the power. I'd define all magic as having side effects (whether based on a skill roll, activation roll or always when used is up to you) when used outside a "ley affect area". Whether the limitation is -1/4, -1/2 or -1 is again up to you depending on how severe the side effects can be. Additionally, I would note that nodes and particularly deep ley lines can provide an Aid, with the Variable special effect advantage (at the +2 level?). The Aid is not a PC power: it's inherent in the node or ley line itself. This lets you tap some extra power, which you can use for a variety of purposes (up to +1 in advantages). It doesn't help you, though unless you are already some kind of spellcaster, since you need to have a power to Aid. The catch, of course is that this Aid comes with a side effect (I'd suggest that this one be based on a skill roll, with a penalty based on active points, maybe at the -1 per 5 active points level, so the more powerful the source you draw on, the greater the risk of magical meltdown).This gives mages a variety of ways to tap into this extra power safely. They can just blow the points on an increased skill roll. They can create rituals (extra time, incantations, foci, etc) to do so more cheaply. You could even, as Lucius suggests, build a base on a powerful node and use the base to harness it, by building a bonus to skill rolls into it. A mage could choose to make the extra power available to others via the variable advantage, or selfishly hoard it. This should give the feeling you want, while providing an easy-to-run solution. Instead of buying the Aid itself, mages would want to buy spells to detect, analyse and tame nodes and powerful ley lines. For those mages who want to build arcane architecture to generate their own ley lines, they can build a base containing a similar Aid power. cheers, Mark

Thanks for the comment! I like a good rule as much as anyone, but if it interferes with play, it's no good, IMO. Thus in many cases, I emphasise playability and simplicity over "realism". That said, here's the stuff: http://www.herogames.com/forums/files/file/214-markdocs-fantasy-hero-weapons-and-armour/ It might be a short while before it is OK'ed by the admin. and thus accessible. cheers, Mark

The Russian economy would be floundering even without sanctions. And honestly, not only are the sanctions put in place are a pretty mild response to what appears to be naked aggression by Russia, including the shooting down of a commercial airliner by their puppets, but the sanctions are a response to what appears to be absolutely senseless military adventurism. The US can (and should) take full blame for the cluster**** that is the Arabian peninsula right now. It's the direct result of their own mindless and equally unprofitable (in every sense of the word) military adventurism. But the US being totally in the wrong in 2003 is no reason for other countries to be totally in the wrong in 2013. And not responding to naked in-your-face aggression right on your own doorstep is not really an option. Frankly, I'd rather see the US and the EU try to punish Russian stupidity via sanctions first, than by starting with sending weapons and troops to Ukraine. I understand that Putin feels threatened by the EU rolling up to his door. But that has less to do with EU "expansionism" than with the former Warsaw Pact countries responding to decades of Russian occupation and oppression with an acute desire to put as much distance between themselves and Russia as possible. Russia's current ravaging of Ukraine is more of the same - Putin has done more to boost the desire of Ukrainians to join the EU than a generation of Eurocrats ever could have managed. Basically, Putin seems to have taken the collapse of the Soviet Union as a blueprint for Russia, not a warning. cheers, Mark

The US's credit rating is far better than Russia's (with good reason). Technically, BB+ is quite not junk - depending on which definition you use, it's the very lowest step of what's considered investment grade, or in other words, 1 notch above junk. What "Junk" means is just "speculative/high risk". That's certainly the case for Russian sovereign debt. Russia got into a similar pickle in 1998 and defaulted on its debts, and it may well happen again. The story is depressingly similar. in 1997, the Russian government was grappling with the cost of the military intervention in Chechnya, and chronic problems with corruption and crony capitalism which were draining their internal finances. When the oil price dropped due to the global economic slowdown after the popping of the internet stock bubble, the problems became too big to handle. The ruble fell by 2/3rds, despite hefty Russian government intervention to try and prop it up, and the country entered a long recession. The government's reaction - instead of recognising the real cause was their own incompetence, corruption, military adventurism and over-reliance on oil revenue - was increasingly hysterical outbursts that the Americans had engineered the whole thing. Heard this before? What's highly amusing or desperately sad (depending on which side of Walpole's fence you fall on) is that the Soviet Union imploded due to ... you guessed it - their leader's own incompetence and corruption, the high costs of military adventurism (this time Afghanistan) and over-reliance on oil revenue (which collapsed in the late 1980's for the same reason as now: overproduction driven by previous high prices). They blamed the US then, too, but the truth is, it was entirely their own fault. The good news is that the fallout from another severe Russian recession is likely to be far less today than it was in 1998 - back then Russia accounted for about 4% of Global GDP. Today it's only a bit over half that. cheers, Mark

I thought about that, but while damage negation gives you the effect that small hits do nothing, it would tend to make big hits less threatening too. It could work, with some tweaking, I think. I've played around with several ideas, but haven't put any radical changes into practice, because I am not sure exactly how much realism we actually need in the game. Here's some of the ideas. 1. Simply use BOD to determine if an attack penetrated defences. If it does, you wear the lot. Pro: simple to apply, maybe slightly more realistic than what we have now. Cons: probably a lot more lethal than real life - so, not actually really realistic. Armour can still reduce damage even if penetrated (in the Bane example above, the chain reduced penetration to a bit under 3 inches ... it was nearly 6" with no armour That's a downscale from lethal to maybe lethal). Also - major problem - probably far more lethal than we actually want: it makes 1 hit kills likely. 2. Add a bonus to damage that penetrates armor. I've played around with the hit location table and you probably want to make the bonus an adder rather than a multiplier, but one approach (I've tried several) is to decrease base weapon damage, but then apply multipliers based on the BOD that gets through. This does not disadvantage normal attacks as much as you might think, since they can fairly readily leak some STUN through defences without a multiplier, but a killing attack that has no multiplier does no STUN damage at all. This makes killing attacks "spiky" in terms of damage - either they do nothing (if they don't penetrate) or they do potentially nasty damage. This is not a bad compromise, but it has some wierd effects with regards to weapon choice, and it still doesn't address the problem of longbowmen mowing down knights in plate harness llike they were wielding battle rifles. 3. Use a modified version of the impairing rules. In this case, when you take BOD damage, simply make a BOD roll with a penalty equal to the damage you took. If you fail, you are impaired and the duration of impairment depends not on a random roll, but on the amount of BOD you are down. Fail 2 rolls and you become disabled. This has the charm that it's simple as heck, and also that it matches well with real-life combat reports from Iraq. I can't find it now, but there was nifty report I read from a military doctor who commented that the injuries in Iraq basically fell into three categories - minimal, incapacitating and fatal. With improved battlefield care, injuries that would have been fatal over time a few decades ago now are typically incapapcitating. But the type of injuries that were incapacitating on the battlefield or fatal on the battlefield had not changed very much since WW2. The major modifier here was body armour, which in his analysis decreased the percentage of fatal injuries (particularly strong effect) and incapacitating injuries, but had no apparent effect on minor injuries. What body armour didn't do was turn fatal injuries into incapacitating ones or incapacitating injuries into minimal ones. It just prevented some of them. The downside is that this is amajor change to how the game plays now, and could quickly lead to what's called teh "death spiral" where injured PCs lose the capacity to fight and then are quickly overwhelmed. Realistic, but not necessarily fun. 4.which leads me to the solution I have adopted. I didn't want to drop the damage on weapons too much because a heavy bow or a longsword should be pretty lethal to a guy in his undies. I did make some changes to reflect the capapbilities of the weapons, and in a few cases STR min dropped, but on the whole weapons are not too different from what's in the various Hero books. But I increased the protective value of the armours. So "soft" armours gained +1 DEF and rigid armors gained +2 (Cloth becomes 2, leather becomes 3, but boiled leather becomes 5, Brigandine becomes 6, both Chain and Scale become 7 and Plate goes all the way to 10. Plate + Chain ceases to be a seperate sort of armour, but simply becomes "plate in some locations, chain on others". The final tweak was that muscle-powered missile weapons recieved a -1 DC penalty for every -3 in range modifiers. So, no penalties out to 16 metres, then -1 DC out to 96 metres, -2 out to 96 metres, or -3 beyond that. That's probably too generous on my part (people who have never actually worked with primitive missile weapons are always surprised at how short their effective range actually is), but at least it helps simulate the well described fact that even powerful weapons like longbows or central asian composite bows had limited effect at longer ranges against armoured troops. cheers, Mark

Not discredited so much as still uncertain. Bodkin points were used on war arrows, we know that much: both from contemporary writings and from finding actual arrowheads. Their effectiveness against leather armours like cuir bouilli is undoubted, and Bane's work suggests they are marginally better against heavier armours than broadheads. But that's about it. As far as I know, no-one has found masses of hardened bodkin points, so it could just be that they were made to save money. In my games,I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to be AP (even though I am aware that's likely a stretch) but at the cost of doing 50% less damage. Cheers, Mark

Real knights ... in armour mostly made of chain mail. Knights on completely unarmoured horses. Foot who were either unarmoured, or lightly armoured. That was in the 1300's. By the 1400's, full plate harness for knights was becoming the norm. Munition plate was becoming common for infantry. Knights no longer relied on mounted charges but as often as not would dismount and advance on foot ... aaaand, not surprisingly, the English started losing battle after battle to the French as the longbow lost its effectiveness. And - mark you this - all a half century before handgunners had made any significant appearances on the battlefield. It wasn't just in France either. In Italy, mercenary companies composed of English veterans put out of work by the truces did great business in the 13th century. There too, English longbowmen gained a fearsome reputation ... until the Italians learned that heavily-armoured knights on foot could take them - and that easily. Once the foot advance became popular, the English companies withered away. But it's in Britain that the effect is most pronounced. English armies in the 1300's and 1400's were heavily biased towards longbowmen in terms of numbers. But tactics changed dramatically over the century around 1400. In the 1300's the Longbowmen were often highly dominant and many battle were won or lost during an exchange of missiles. Through the 1400's, although longbowmen were still present in very large numbers at every major battle, they more and more became a supporting arm to heavily-armoured men-at-arms who fought primarily on foot. By the early 1400's the bows were being relegated to scouting, skirmishing and garrison, while the heavy infantry became the decisive arm and the melee the crucial point of the battle. And again, this happened long before the spread of guns. It's not that longbowmen suddenly disappeared. It's not that they stopped training or being recruited in their thousands. It's not that they were less effective than they were before - English longbowmen did fearsome execution on the lightly armoured Scots and Welsh in both centuries. It's just that armies that relied on longbow fire to stop or weaken their enemies starting losing all the time. It's worth noting that even at Agincourt, Ursin notes that the Constable's guard (who had the best armour) were relatively unhurt by the sustained arrowfire - and that they advanced across the field under fire and engaged the English in melee - but that casualties were heavy among the ordinary knights. The decline of the longbow cannot be attributed to guns because it started 3 generations before guns had any effect on battlefield tactics or even appeared on the battlefield. The earliest version of the weapon that became decisive (the arquebus) first started appearing on battlefields in the mid 1400's - 3 generations after the shift towards heavily armoured men-at-arms as the key battlefield arm had started. Likewise, the fact that longbowmen took a long time to train is of no relevance at all. The decline of the longbow started - and continued - despite the fact that longbowmen were being trained in greater numbers than ever. When guns started to appear in numbers, it's not like they replaced longbowmen because it was easier to train and equip them. On the contrary, guns were expensive, specialist instruments and for more than a century they were restricted to specialist troops - highly expensive mercenaries, at that. In England, mercenary handgunners made an appearance at the end of the War of the Roses. The small company of mercenary handgunners at Bosworth is credited with determining the form of the battle, as the Lancastrians apparently decided that a direct attack into their fire would be disastrous ... a consideration that the thousands of longbowmen present did not occasion. That's because by then commanders knew that men at arms on foot could walk through the arrowfire with relatively light losses - but that armoured men advancing on foot would have to weather several volleys of gunfire, which could not be ignored. You mention that the gun replaced the longbow because it was better. Yes, that's true enough. But better how? It's not cheaper (quite the reverse). It's not easier to make (again, quite the reverse). You couldn't put more gunners into the field than you could put longbowmen (again, quite the reverse). Add to that it was cranky to use, required specialist supply trains, was even more sensitive to weather than bows were, and had a far lower rate of fire. So what was it good for? One thing - and one thing only. At mid to close range it could make big holes in contemporary armour. Longbows could not do that ... which meant that all the other advantages counted for nothing. Matthew Bane did exhaustive testing firing arrows from at close range. His results are instructive. Against "high quality riveted maille", the needle bodkin (an AP arrowhead) and curved broadhead (a regular hunting arrow, but also used in war) penetrated 2.8". That's not necessary a lethal wound - but it is could certainly be an incapacitating one. Against a coat of plates, the needle bodkin achieved 0.3" penetration. The curved broadhead did not penetrate but caused 0.3" of deformation of the metal. Results against plate armour of "minimum thickness" (1.2mm) were similar to the coat of plates, in that the needle bodkin penetrated to a shallow depth, the other arrows not at all. So against mail, the longbow is very effective. Against plate, really not effective at all. And not surprisingly, contemporary commentators actually wrote the same thing - and history shows that as plate became common, longbows faded away. And it's not just Bane. Every test so far has given the same kinds of results, whether using reconstructions of the actual bows used or hydraulic rams, which can inexhaustibly shoot more consistently than the finest trained archer. It's not a question of modern archers. Training lets you fire for longer and use a heavier bow. it improves your aim, it improves your speed. It does not, however, let you magically add kinetic energy to your arrows. a 130 lb draw is a 130 lb draw, regardless of century - and tests have also been done with these uncharacteristically heavy weapons ... with the same results So yeah. 2d6 for a longbow? That would suggest that a longbow would punch right through plate armour nearly 30% of the time when all testing and history says it could do so very rarely. That's insane. Just to add the yucks factor, I fell impelled to note that adding AP to that 2d6, makes a longbow an excellent weapon for taking out armoured vehicles in Hero system - on a good roll, you can penetrate the armour on an MBT! Imagine the surprise of the crew! Though to be fair, it's partly a problem with the way Hero system handles damage (and every other game system that I know of does not better and often worse). In real life, if a weapon is actually stopped by armour, it does little to no damage (there are a few exceptions - weapons with a great deal of momentum can harm you even if they are stopped, but that's not really the kind of thing that we are talking about here). Flexible armour of course can let damage "leak through" without penetration, but rigid armour doesn't. So a system that "substracts" damage is always going to have this problem, because damage doesn't scale nicely. A .45 fired into your chest at close range will almost certainly kill or incapacitate you. A .45 fired into your chest covered with rigid body armour at close range will make you flinch ... but that's about it. If you doubt me, watch the many idiots on youtube demonstrating the latter part. Upgrade the weapon or ammo to something that actually goes through the armour and you are straight back into death/incapacity territory. cheers, Mark

Actually, I'm with MHD here. 2d6 killing is insane damage for a longbow. Adding AP simply moves you into OMGWTF territory. Historically longbows were hugely effective against unarmoured troops, quite effective against moderately armoured troops and rather ineffective against heavily armoured troops. The English did not first downgrade and then abandon the longbow for random giggles. The spread of effective plate armour simply meant that longbowmen became less and less relevant and the focus shifted to the heavily-armoured man-at-arms. The arrival of effective guns made longbows obsolete as frontline weapons - though they hung on as low qualty scouts and support troops for a couple of generations. This interpretation is supported by modern recreation testing. Longbow arrows - even from bows with very heavy pulls - simply bounce off period style plate armour at anything outside point blank range - and do little damage even at point blank range. I've actually had the opportunity to test this personally, but you needn't take my word for it - there's tons of videos on youtube making the same point. Cheers, Mark

Actually, Viet Nam and Iraq are examples of concentration of force being not only rewarded, but prioritised. It's no coincidence that the chopper is the symbol of the US war effort in Viet Nam: it was the first war where airborne deployment went mainstream. "Concentration of force" is not a question of raw numbers. A smaller force that is more mobile than its opponent can still employ concentration of force, by moving your forces to the place where you want to fight in such numbers that that you have superiority of force locally. It's the "local" part that's crucial, which is why it's described as "concentration": you are concentrating part (or all) of your force in a limited space, at the cost of fewer resources being available elsewhere. Of course "concentration of force" is more than just a simple headcount - modern militaries concentrate force by applying force modifiers - artillery, armour and air power - but that does not change the basic principle, just the resources that are being deployed. Far from being a counter-example, WW1 is a perfect example of why you want to employ concentration of force - and what happens if you don't. Operations like Amiens that were successful relied on concentration of force (in that case, massing tanks on a narrow front to pierce the enemy defences) - operations that frittered away resources on broad advances tended to be fiascoes (and costly ones at that). The classic example from WW1 of course is Tannenberg (though it's far from the only one), where the numerically inferior Germany 8th Army, under Ludendorff, faced off against two invading Russian Armies (the 1st and 2nd).Ludendorff did not even have sufficient troops to cover the entire front. So, he employed superior mobility (in his case, a good railway network) to concentrate his troops, enabling him to hit the two Russian armies seperately, one after the other. He not only achieved numerical parity by pitting the 8th army against the 2nd and the 1st armies in turn, but was able to achieve superiority at the actual point of attack, overrunning the Russian 6th corps which was spread out over a much wider front than the attacking Germans, and which was defeated in detail, opening up the 2nd army's rear and flank. The 2nd army was swiftly encircled and completely destroyed. The Russians were sloppy and the Germans operated brilliantly, but concentration of force was the key. You never want to fight your enemy on an equal footing if you can avoid it. Concentration of force via superior deployment speed is one of the core concepts that the US military is built around today. It was also an essential element of the Wehrmacht's strategy in WW2, but the idea is much older. All the great commanders knew this - and still do. Nothing has changed in that regard. cheers, Mark

As I suggested, a simple naked advantage, using Reduced END (I'm working off the idea that END is functioning here as a Mana proxy, which is basically accurate in terms of how it functions in the game, it's just that Mana/End recovers more slowly than ordinary END). I've used this approach in my own game for years, which that Magic works off END - but that when you use END to power magic, it recovers as Long Term Endurance. The concept is that magic is inherently draining to cast - think of Gandalf trying to cast Hold Portal on the door the Balrog was trying to open: he was exhausted. Not only did he stop casting create light, to conserve his energies, but he had to be helped along for a while and was still tired (ie: low on END) some time later when he faced off with the Balrog at the bridge. So, if that's the case, you could build the power like this (an example only, you might want to adjust the active points) Magery 1. Reduced End (0 END, +1/2) on up to 10 active points, only to power spells (-1/2) (15 active, 10 real). This would trim 2 END (or Mana) off any spell you cast. Meaning minor utility spells (up to 10 active points would be free, and larger powers would use 2 less END (or Mana) per casting. You'd also need to include the detect, but your writeup is fine for that. Cheers, Mark

I think we are pretty close to agreement here. But as I see it - and checking the rules last night seems to confirm that, what Aid does is effectively increase (temporarily) the active points in your power - whatever that power is. For the sake of this discussion "power" is actually a characteristic. But it doesn't exempt the power from any existing rules/modifications. So adding 15 active points to an EB via Aid gives you an extra 3d6. Adding 15 active points to an AP EB via Aid gives you an extra 2d6 AP. not 3d6. You don't get AP for free. Likewise, adding 6 (or 12) BOD or MANA boosts the total active points you have, but it does not - as far as I can tell - give you access to a pool of infinitely renewing BOD or MANA which is exempt from the normal rules on recovery. In other words you don't get regeneration for free on your BOD or Mana. If Aid did work like this, it would be a huge boost for the cost effectiveness of Aid (and render regeneration redundant), but the optional rules on healing allowing it to be applied repeatedly to new injuries, suggests that this is not the default. It it was the default we wouldn't need an additional optional rule. So - to take your example above, I agree, if you used some or all of the extra Mana granted by Aid, and then Magery was somehow shut down, you would still have your normal Mana untouched. My point is that in this situation, if Magery was then restored (let's say it was shut down by a transient "anti-magery" drain, the Mana that you had used would still have been used. You would not suddenly gain a new dose of Mana - it's just that your maximum would go up to the maximum it was boosted to before. As I understand it, the Aid boosts your maximum Mana (so far, so good) and thus gives you some additional Mana that you can use. Once that Mana is used, it's used (just like regular Mana). If your maximum Mana is kept elevated by a continuous Aid, that does not somehow exempt you from the Mana recovery rules. It just means that you start off with a slightly larger pool - it's not that you can "use it once and never again". It's more that when you use it, it recovers exactly the same way regular Mana does. What the continuous gains you in this situation is essentially that your maximum mana is always elevated (as long as the Aid refreshes faster than the fade rate) - you don't need to spend a couple of valuable phases getting it up to speed when you want to call on it. Does that make more sense? cheers, Mark

I'm cool with concentration limitation. It doesn't just reflect aiming, but simulates the fact that bows are not melee weapons and that archers were historically extremely vulnerable to melee troops. At the same time, I have no problem with Legolas style super-archers in high fantasy games, either. In my games, they just tend to buy "Bow powers" and don't actually use the free "real weapon" bow with all its limitations. After all, movie Legolas not only uses his bow in combat without problems or when surfing down stairs on a shield, or hanging upside down from a giant bat, but carries it always strung, without a case, through rain, mud and snow. It never fails, never weakens, never seems to need replacing. He can climb a raging monster and somehow, when he's on top, his bow (which magically disappeared during the climb) is back in his hand again. He never seems to run out of arrows, either. That's not a bow. It's a 2d6RKA. cheers, Mark

Note: the suggested rule states that it is specifically for spears large enough that they were designed to be wielded in two hands. Spear + Shield was a standard combo for around 3 millennia, so we can assume it was pretty practical - but that was with a spear short enough to throw or wield in one hand. The question was about really long spears - which in many cases were used with shields (even though the rules would kind of imply that you can't use them with two handed weapons). So the rule is an attempt to simulate the usage that was actually common at the time. The forerunners to the the pike and shot troops of renaissance and early modern Europe were the communal troops of major cities in Spain, and especially Italy and the Low Countries. They were a major battlefield presence for about 200 years, and fought with very long spears (not quite pikes - about 3-4 metres or 10-12 feet) backed up by guys with heavy crushing weapons (clubs, hammers, axes) plus archers and (mostly) crossbowmen. The basic formation was petty straightforward - the guys with spears and big kite shields or rectangular shields formed the front ranks (heaviest armour to the front), while behind them the more lightly armoured crossbowmen formed up. Against cavalry, the spearmen were effective at preventing charges. Against massed infantry, the spearmen and guys with heavier short weapons served as shock troops. Against missile troops, the spearmen, with their big shields served as cover. In all cases, the crossbowmen served as missile support - analysis of corpses from battle graves indicated that in many cases, the victims of crossbows were short at point blank range, but from the front, indicating that the crossbowmen were right behind the guys with spears and axes, shooting directly into the enemy's front line. Probably not coincidentally, the use of shields became less and less common as armour got heavier and heavier - not just for infantry , but for cavalry as well. By the 1500's, the shield had pretty much gone out of use by spearmen (except for specialist cases), frontliners were increasingly wearing plate which was proof against arrows and bolts outside of very close range, the spears were getting longer and heavier (turning into pikes) - and the crossbow was being replaced by guns, which hit harder. As a side note (not referring to your post but another one) I don't think we actually need extra rules for fighting in formation, or extra ranks: all you need to do is apply the knowledge of how things worked historically. Formations served multiple major purposes (and still do, in am ore distributed way). First off, they have a simple function in keeping all your guys together in a space where you can give them orders and keep an eye of them. Secondly, they serve a protective function - they stop your guys getting surrounded and cut down with one guy against three, for example, and they keep someone from getting on your shieldless side (if everything works as it should). They allow you to put your best-armored guys up front to protect the missile troops, etc. They let lightly wounded guys fall back among their comrades so that they don't get swiftly killed. Finally they provide some offensive bonuses. They let - as with the communal spearmen - the missile troops do their stuff with less concern about being run down by cavalry. They let (and this is why spears got longer and heavier) several ranks of guys fight in a narrow frontage. Warfare has always rewarded concentration of force. In Hero games terms, this is all pretty easy stuff. The thing about keeping your guys together where you can issue orders speaks for itself: troops without orders tend to do nothing. The issue of protection is also pretty straightforward - if you are attacking the enemy, it's easier to kill the guys without armor - and you can't do that if they are behind the guys with armour - unless you have a missile weapon and are prepared to take "cover" penalties for shooting over/through the front liners. As for the offensive aspect, having your frontliners backed up by missile troops is straightforward: there will be continual incoming missile fire while you are advancing and fighting. Even though you could reasonably expect to have cover once in melee, more attacks means more chance of something getting through on a lucky dice roll. And with spearmen, multiple ranks with spear long enough to reach past the front rank, mean multiple attacks on each opponent, with consequently greater chance of a hit. cheers, Mark

Ah - I was assuming that the additional Mana would be lost and recover slowly like your own mana. In other words an Aid would boost your maximum Mana up to the maximum extra permitted (and since it was constant hold it there) but that it doesn't top you up repeatedly, with no upper limit. Think of it as analogous to BOD. If you have an Aid boosting BOD, built the same way, you have an elevated BOD score. If you take damage, it's going to have to heal - you don't suddenly get extra Aid beyond the points you paid for, to boost it back to and above the starting score. To put it more clearly, if you have 10 BOD, and you get 6 points from Aid (constant) you have 16. If you get hit by an axe for 8 BOD you now have 8 BOD (2 normal + 6 Aid). You don't get that 6 plus another 8 on top of it to repair damage - if you did, that would mean that the Aid was actually providing 14 points of Aid, not the 6 that is the theoretical maximum. At least that's how we have always played it: otherwise continuous BOD Aid would be a hugely efficient form of regeneration - even one point of it would return 4-6 BOD per turn, with no upper limit. I was assuming that Mana works the same way, simply because otherwise even a small Aid would allow you to do an end-run around the Mana rules. If it can top you up to full no matter how much you have used, then it would be just as good for powering large spells which drained much mana ... you'd just have to wait a few phases. And perhaps more to the point, it would mean that Aid had effectively no upper limit on how much it could provide - only how much it could provide per phase. I'm pretty sure Aid doesn't work like that. In most cases. of course, that's not an issue, because Aid is used to boost a static number (if you have 12d6 Energy blast then the Aid simply adds to your total). But just like BOD, if your energy blast is drained, I have never assumed that Aid would top it back up to to boosted total - merely that it would offset some of the loss. For example an Energy Blast boosted from 12d6 to 15d6 and then drained 6d6 is a 9d6 energy blast (at least until the drain wears off) - Aid doesn't pop it up to 12d6 and then 15d6 again after two phases. Maybe we have different interpretations? Cheers, Mark

And this, I think, is part of the problem. Like so much of Hero, the world books have tended to be toolkit oriented. Instead of saying "This is how you do it" they say "You could do it like this, or like this, or even like this, if you want." For an experienced GM, that's great. But that's not what we're talking about here. For a newbie GM, a proliferation of choices is almost as unhelpful as no choices. Even the most detailed of the Hero setting books, like Valdorian age give you a setting in which you can run a game, but they are not a game in and of themselves. That's doubly true of genre books like Fantasy Hero. You can't simply take the setting book and with a few tweaks start running a game. Now if you are into worldbuilding, as many GMs - and pretty much all Hero system GMs - are, then that's great. But it's not an effective gateway to sales, because it assumes that you have a Hero GM - or wannabe Hero GM - ready to run. In contrast, if I look at Savage World Products or Pathfinder adventure paths, I could pick one of those up and run a game with almost no difficulty, and very little prep. time beyond reading. Heck, with access to the core rulebooks for each system to help with translation, I could run it in Hero system with only a few hours prep. for each session. I don't want to be overly negative: I just want to stress that delivering a useful product to your fans requires a different approach from delivering a product that will make fans of unbelievers ... ahem, that is to say, the more casual gamers. cheers, Mark