Markdoc

Re: D & D Diatribe Well, except Hackmaster, which is more D&D than D&D itself. cheers, Mark

Re: New weapons/Armour list They did. However right up until the Sengoku Jiddai era, among samurai, a well-described tradition of one to one combat existed, in which armour clearly played a crucial role. In the roman gladitorial games, where one on one combat was major feature and where we also have good contemporary evidence, fighters with heavier armour were matched against fighters in lighter armour. The heavily armoured fighters were always handicapped so that they would not win too easily. We have near-contemporary writings from the icelandic sagas also describing individual combat in which the benefit of armour is plain. And in a thousand and one small conflicts - Irish versus viking, Irish versus norman, Highland feuds, the crusader era and so on and so on, where combat was often in very small groups or individuals versus other individuals. In such combats the best armoured individuals usually prevailed - which is why armour was always so highly prized and highly sought after, even in cultures where large-scale organized combat was rare. cheers, Mark

Re: "Fantasy" withoiut Magic Matter of opinion, I think. I have also read stories of imaginary cultures in which magic does not exist and I would very definately classify them as fantasy. Likewise, "no magic" does not by any stretch of the imagination equal boring. I've never run a no-magic game, but I have played in three. All were huge fun. One of those - a game set during the first crusade - evolved into a campaign that ranks among the best and most exciting I have ever played in. And given how fondly it is remembered by the other players, I doubt I'm alone in that assessment. cheers, Mark

Re: "Fantasy" withoiut Magic

Re: New weapons/Armour list I'll pass on the weapons, since that's very much a matter of taste: FWIW, none of them appear grossly out of whack. On the matter of armour, though I have a few questions. First, Double Chain? I didn't think people still believed in Double Chain (or tasselled mail, or reinforced mail or brevetted mail or....) Secondly, I'm not sure about the lowered ED values, paticularly for mail - sure the metal bit has holes, but underneath is usually heavy leather or cloth (or both), which should give very good protection against cold-based energy attacks, and decent against fire-based attacks. The mail itself would give good protection against electricity-based attacks. Plate should also give good protection against energy attacks for much the same reason - anything hot enough to heat up plate to the point where it is hot enough to do damage on its own is going to char flesh pretty effectively: anything NOT hot enough to heat the metal up, is going to do no damage at all... OK, I realise that we don't want to be excessively logical when dealing with energy blasts, but I'm not sure that I can see a logical reason for decreasing their defence. cheers, Mark

Re: New weapons/Armour list Of course! That would explain why lightly armed, unarmoured warriors were so effective historically.... oh, wait. Never mind. Cheers, Mark

Re: Unlicensed Adventures

Re: A high powered campaign I've run Fantasy games starting at 250+ points in my standard fantasy world, where 250 points makes you a butt-kicking badass - especially since the players were able to buy neato-kewl magical powers (since otherwise, what's the point of all those points?) The game ran really well, and was much beloved by the players, but there are just two things to keep in mind: One: you need some sort of a plot to get things ticking - unless you scale things up to the "stretching credibility" level, normal fantasy tropes (rescue the Baron's daughter from the bandits, yawn) are simply not going to fly. Two: get point #1 across to your players - hardened fantasy gamers may have some difficulty shucking the "kill them and loot the bodies" mentality, and unless you provide interesting alternatives for them, keeping control of a pack of high-powered looters can be pretty hard - especially if they have cool movement powers. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Hero Grimoire review discussion My problem is not with a roll of 25-. After all, in my fantasy game, I have NPC characters hundreds of years old who do have totally whacked skill rolls. But if you suggest that 18- is "pretty good", then that's the benchmark that your players will use. In the end that means that either you have to start giving out more XP.s, which can distort the other facets of the game (Hmm. I can be "pretty good" with stealth or I can buy +5 OCV with my sword) or your players will be frustrated that they can't measure up to "pretty good" characters. It also makes it hard to challenge the players unless you start stacking arbitrarily huge minuses onto skill rolls. The only place where skill rolls really become an issue in FH is with big spells - and as noted, I see that as a feature - not a bug. cheers,Mark

Re: What should be DROPPED from HERO?

Re: What should be DROPPED from HERO? Isn't this what I wrote? I am aware that two weapon fighting styles exist - as pointed out, I have myself trained in them. But the idea that having two single sticks, as in escrima, suddenly gives you twice as many attacks is ludicrous. I have two hands and two feet - so I suddenly get 4 times as many attacks if I fight unarmed? Feh. Of course not - an effective HTH attack has to be launched from the body (centre of mass) and you have only one body, and one brain to direct it. We both agree that having a weapon in either hand (assuming you know how to use them) raises your threat level because an effective attack can come from either hand, without having to shift your mass as much as an offside strike with one weapon would require. But does having a single stick in either hand give you more attacks than a guy with a bo? Answer - from experience - NO. The guy with the Bo can also strike to either side. Likewise with guns. Can you fire two pistols at the same time? Sure you can. Could you hit sometime with both? With practice, yes. Will you ever reach the same degree of accuracy with two as a skilled shooter with one? No, never - accuracy reqires concentration and you still only have one brain, and one pair of eyes. A skilled shooter with two pistols *might* be able to put the same number of slugs in the target in the same time as a skilled shooter with one, though I doubt it. No "real-world" justification for doubling his firepower exists. Now as noted, I have no problem with two handed fighting in Hero system - I don't feel the rules as presented are abusive and they certainly mirror the movies and comics just fine: indeed I have a tendency towards two wepaon fighters in both FH and modern genres - although I have never bought 5th Ed. TWF - I tend to use it as a justification for extra levels or talents. I was just pointing out the need to distinguish between "cinematic" and real. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Hero Grimoire review discussion Just to quibble - but 11- is about a 60% chance and that's off the top of your head, in one phase, on task of ordinary difficulty, with no help. That's actually pretty damn good - I only wish the people I worked with were so good. So the skill scale is fine with me: 14- means a correct response 80% of the time, without any additional resources, which is pretty damn professional. The problem with skill rolls and spells is the reduction with active points for big spells. In general as a GM I LIKE that - I don't want mages easily flinging 4d6 RKAs in combat. The minuses, as noted by others, more or less require big spells to take extra time, wizardly adjuncts and helpers, etc. The problem cited from in the review revolves around the fact that the spells in the Grimoire are generally too high powered for most FH games. I bought the first grimoire, but ignored the second for that reason. This problem is exacerbated by the Turakian magic system which distorts the points balance in Hero system. Put those two together, and it's not surprising the reviewer has a problem - hell, I have a problem with it and I love Hero system. Cheers, Mark

Re: New to Fantasy Hero Looks fine to me. I'm a long, long time GM and although as GM i prefer skill monsters to Stat monsters, the game can easily accomodate both. And it must be admitted, I tend to play Stat monsters..... cheers, Mark

Re: What should be DROPPED from HERO? MPAs have been around a lot longer than 5th Ed. - I remember debating them on the old AOL board. It's just that 5th Ed. was the first to give them official imprimateur. As such we've had MPA'ing character's around in our games many times. The most abusive of these have generally been characters with VPPs or two multis. A VPP offers flexibility, but at the cost real power: it's hard to get a VPP up to a point where you do mongo damage - that's always been their major "real world" limitation. Unless you MPA. It doesn't have to be some gonzo power combination - if you have a -1 in limits on a power (not that hard to do) then you can do two full strength attacks. A 60 point gadget pool can churn out 2 4d6 RKAs. Ugh. To me the argument "Yeah, but Batman can punch someone and throw his batarang at once" simply makes no impact. It could as easily be two actions, occuring close together as two simultaneous actions - after all would you allow an attack and an abort at the same time? You see that in single panels in cartoons too. MPAs reek of munchkinism. The only good suggestion I have seen is Zorn's with the ice blast/iceblast plus entangle, but I prefer to model that with two powers (for examples, slots in a MP), a linked power or a power stunt. cheers, Mark

Re: What should be DROPPED from HERO?

Re: Crazy idea for a magic "system". Here's an opposing suggestion. What if everyone/thing has an inborn magical talent that is unique (sorta like Xanth) and that "spells" are simply how you learn to manifest of this talent? That would give you the effect you want, in that that everyone would have a unique signature style of magic. It gives you an underlying rationale: certainly magic does not have to be based on any real-world style/idea as long as the ideas behind it are coherent. At that point, you need to decide how "learning" spells works. Is it natural process, that each person works out (in that case, Hogwarts is right out, there'll be no grimoires, etc) or is it a talent that can be nurtured and trained (in which case you can logically have apprentices, magic books, etc). You also need to decide how limited each talent is. For example "Fire magic" is pretty damn broad. "Ability to heat metal" is pretty limited. Ability to make things burn/vapourise is in the middle. You'll have to decide whether you want people to be able to choose their magical field (probably the best idea) or whether you want to limt their choices (players might not like that but it's more flavourful). You could do the latter by (just an example, right off the top of my head) making a huge list of magical areas (fire, water, air, darkness, light, animals, weather, etc etc) and then getting people to roll two off the list. Fire and animal powers for example. That lets you .... ummmm... summon giant firey animals. You could either do it as different summonings or as powers, or as a combination of the two - you got RKA right there (with a few fairly specific limitations and advantages that makes your magic unique). You could in theory, learn a spell that lets your giant firey animals talk (although as messengers, they're never going to be subtle). You might learn to ride them - giving you extra running or flight, etc etc. OK, maybe that wasn't the greatest example, but like I said: off the top of my head. Last of all, you want to think about mechanics. For what you describe, a multipower or VPP might be the way to go, the latter requiring a skill roll to generate powers and only known spells as limitations. That should not be unbalancing, since most spellcastes as you describe it will be limited to a fairly defined area of magic: no swiss-army mages with lots of inbuilt functions. cheers, Mark

Re: How good is "good"? Strictly speaking, no. You can't simply say "cannot be blocked" although the GM could OK it. I have built "hard to block attacks" by using the following combinations: An area affect, selective attack that only affects one person. By definition, area effect attacks cannot be blocked or dodged, although you can dive for cover. Attacks using invisible effects. These can be blocked, but the defender has to actually state he is blocking an attack. You can't block something after it has hit - which means that if the defender just stands around he's likely to get walloped before he realises what's going on. I treat blocking an invisble attack the same as attacking an invisible foe. "If done right, can no defend!" cheers, Mark

Re: Building the Necronomicon Depends on the kind of book. Some evil books allow you to read them and thus spend XP.s on useful topics such as KS: undead; creation, care and feeding of. They may skew your worldview a bit but I don't use any game mechanics; just allowing the players to create undead will inevitably tempt them to do things they shouldn't. Other evil books have genuinely mind-wrenching content and/or something that man was not meant to mess with actually accessible through the pages. These books are magical artifacts and have the following general characteristics. 1. By reading them you can gain access to instant neato-kewl powers. 2. These instant neato-kewl powers come with a side effect (sometimes triggered by a roll: what that is, depends on the kind of book). Sometimes there's no roll, just a side effect. Cthuloid-type books of evil lore tend to have a side effect made by failing an EGO roll - a transformation either into an insane person or by giving a physical lim - usually it makes you "visible" and susceptible to attacks from things that can't reach the average person. Since many of the powers include letting you see or interact with things that are there, but normally unreachable, this is fair enough. These rolls are usually cumulative and only a few dice, so that you can look at and read the thing for a bit before getting the effect. Thus if you inherit a copy of the necronomicon from your strangely-deceased uncle and just use it from time to time to check the spelling of "Shub-Niggurath", you will probably be OK. You'll heal the transformation damage. If, on the other hand, you routinely use the spells contained therein for summoning nameless horrors, or just spend a whole evening reading the thing cover to cover, you will inevitably get transformed and develop an amusing (to the GM) mental abberation. Much like the Harry Potter books, incidentally. This naturally generates the desired player behaviour - they know that such books are bad news - but they are also desirable..... Naturally, I don't tell the the player "you are now insane". I simply tell them that they can see or hear things that aren't actually there, or suggest appropriate conclusions when they are considering something. Since the players know that ancient instant neato-kewl powers can be obtained from such books - and that they can have varied side effects, it's not necessarily clear to the player if the malevolent things stalking him are actually figments of his imagination, or if he really IS being stalked by the Hounds of Tindalos and had better start stocking up on putty. Of course sometimes they really ARE being stalked by the Hounds of Tindalos - the side effect in this case being a summoning. This also naturally generates the desired player behaviour - even if they are not mad, they soon start behaving as though they were. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing Magic I also liked the idea for my game of having lots of soldiers with swords being an important part of teh game world, which meant magic use in combat had to be tightly restricted. But I didn't want it to be useless. Here are several magic systems - including one heavily-influenced by the European concept of magic - which are mostly aimed at making magic an adjunct to combat rather than a part of it. http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Grimoire/magic_systems.htm cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing Magic

Re: Fourth Age Hero

Re: The use of desolid I've played a chracters with this power (or fairly similar) in a martial arts game and have had NPCs with it in my own FH game. I haven't found it to be abusive for several reasons. 1. It's a fair ol' chunk of change in a heroic level game: if the player buys it it'll be a large part of his shtick. 2. Unless the player buys the +2 advantage on his attacks (and the STR to use them), then abort or no, he can't attack. That starts getting pretty expensive. Otherwise, it simply means the character can go into full-on defence mode where he is almost impossible to hit: but then he's not doing anything else. 3. Note, I said "almost impossible to hit". In a game world where this talent exists, spells and martial arts tactics to "hit the unhittable" also exist. Probably not common, given the rarity of the defence, but still there. 4. Finally, as noted above, the power is not invisible, so either the player sinks MORE points into it, or it's not something that he can use all the time - it'd be obvious he was doing funky evasion stuff, which is going to make it hard to buy a beer... Simply put: would you allow a mage in your game to buy a spell that allowed him to turn to mist (desolid, not through objects?) If that's OK, then why isn't this? cheers, Mark

Re: Fourth Age Hero Well that's kinda the point. Gandalf's buff, no doubt about it. But he's clearly not a mage in the DnD lotsa spells way. No second level mage is going to go toe to toe with a Balrog - well, not for more than one combat round anyway But all of these high level types - Gandalf, Sauron, the Witch king himself, Morgoth, all the various Noldor princes, uncle Tom Cobbly an' all - they've all got powers. They can all make or do clearly magical stuff. Gandalf has this "annoying old guy who knows a lot of the plot" power for example - he can tell when things are happening at a distance and make a good guess at the future. He can cast a few low power spells: light, hold portal, "set fire to pine cones", etc. Aragorn can heal. Luthien can cast a sleep spell by singing. But when it comes down to fighting enemies, their approach - one and all - is to hit them with a pointy piece of metal. I doubt very much that it's the metal "giving their magic something to work on" - Gandalf drops his sword (probably didn't want to spoil the finish) and does in the Balrog with his bare hands. Several other powerful characters resort to wrestling their foes too - that's how Morgoth was brought down. This is hard to model - Tolkein was probably thinking about spiritual combat, since I see no indication Gandalf has 80 STR and if he had 30 resistant PD he wouldn't be fussed by a bunch of orcs. Given that he was a) well known as a wizard and perfectly willing to cast magic and C) happy to kill evil creatures like orcs or balrogs when they got in his way, I can't see him having much compunction about zapping them - if he could. Morgoth was certainly under no compunction about not using magic or fighting fair - but he's also in the "hit it with a mace" camp when it comes to combat. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing Magic Also I'm not so sure about those "traditional" wizards with lots of spells - they seem pretty rare in fantasy literature and generally absent in folklore too. Do you mean "wizards in D and D"? My experience with Magic is that unless the game is "Superheroes and Castles" (a perfectly legitimate genre, I should add) then magic needs to be heavily restricted - otherwise, flight, tunnelling, X-ray vision, and megascale persistent killing attacks, etc, will completely change the dynamics of the game. A wizard who can do "any power" can find ways to get around almost anything, which stretches the GM's brain in interesting ways How you restrict it up to you - there are many ways. In my game there are no points caps and I allow multipowers, but there are compulsory limitations on spells. That means you can build really powerful spells and have a reasonable number, but their use in combat or stress situations is to be avoided. You can use points caps or require specific limitations. You can write up allowed spells in advance, or charge real cost for spells, or whatever. But do something.... cheers, Mark

Re: Fourth Age Hero