Markdoc

It lets you cast "some" spells, but even 6 points of extra mana would be swiftly consumed by a few utility spells. In contrast, Magery III lets you use your less expensive spells at-will. "At will" is very different from (say) "an extra 2-3 times a day". It's not that the design is bad: just that it doesn't really give the feel that Magery does in GURPS. My own opinion was that even though they jacked the cost of Magery in later editions, it was still a poor design, because it gave such a huge boost to utility, that Magery III was essentially a must-have" for any serious magic-user. Any power that *everyone* in that area has to have is usually a sign of broken game design. cheers, Mark

Couple of points. First off "long spears" - which includes macedonian pike in the ancient era, European pikes in the renaissance and early modern era, and long spears as used by - among others - Flemish and low country medieval infantry, italian and spanish town militia in the renaissance and medieval arab militia in the early medieval period, are a lot longer than man-height: they could be over 7 metres in length and at their shortest about 3 - say 10 to 27 feet for our US and Burmese readers. They're not designed to be used with one hand, obviously, (though you can, do so with the shorter ones) but you can still use a shield with them. They were designed to be used en masse, where troops could stand up to 24 ranks deep, so that the front of the unit was like a hedgehog. Each individual soldier had limited mobility and a limited space in which he could stab, but to anyone facing them, there was a wall of stabbing iron points, and the actual soft fleshy part was well back behind it, which is a pretty scary prospect. This was particularly the case with the shorter versions - 3 to 4 metres. While still unwieldy, and still mostly used with two hands, you could use a shield with them. People even used shields with the longer pikes. As far as we can tell, this was one one of three ways. First you could use a buckler. This strapped to your forearm, leaving both hands free, but you could fairly rapidly move it into place to gain some protection. Bucklers provide relatively little passive protection, and historically don't seem to have been that popular: they dropped out of use fairly quickly in every case where they first appeared and were just replaced by up-armouring the front rankers in the unit.The second way that shields were used - which was much more popular, or at least stayed in use much longer - was to use a very large shield, which provided good passive protection. I don't know of any cases off hand where this was combined with really long weapons such as pikes:I'm guessing the combination was simply too unwieldy. The last combination was a medium-sized shield, which was used both with pikes and with shorter longspears, but it does not seem to have been as popular with pikes, and also dropped out of use. It should be noted also that many European armies used longspearmen carrying pavises, which provide great missile protection, but are not so handy in melee, suggesting that the major role of the spearmen was defensive (and that seems to be true from historical accounts). Although we know what was used (based on contemporary illustrations and some surviving equipment) we don't know exactly how it it was used. Given that bucklers dropped out of use fairly swiftly every time they were introduced, I'm guessing they were not much use. Macedonian pikemen used them, but gave them up during the conquest period, as far as we can see. Spanish Tercio pikemen also started out with bucklers, as did English renaissance pike. In both cases, they were dropped fairly swiftly. English pikemen continued to be issued them for a while but almost no illustrations or writings from the era show them using them, suggesting that it was the troops who didn't want to bother. Large shields stayed in use for centuries, suggesting that they did offer some benefits, but they were also not used much with really long pikes or deep formations. So .... rules? I don't know about printed rules, but here's how I'd house rule it, if the question came up. When using a shield passively with a two handed weapon, it provides 1 less DCV, and also gives you a -1 OCV. You can always forgo an attack, and hold your weapon in one hand, to use your shield actively, in which case it functions normally. That rule means that bucklers are essentially useless. They offer no passive DCV and actively hinder you fighting. Their only advantage is that you can choose to use them actively, which means it would be handy to have when advancing under missile fire and when the frontline has broken down and you have to resort to your sword. Medium shields are a mixed bag - when fighting with your spear, they give you a +1 DCV at the cost of a -1 OCV. They do give better protection when not actively fighting in melee. You might want them, you might not. Large shields are a better bet. They still cost you -1 OCV, but they give you +2 DCV, and in addition, you get +3 DCV when not engaged in hand to hand: which is a big deal when facing archers or crossbowmen. This simple rule would support the kind of behaviour we saw historically, and is easy to implement. cheers, Mark

I agree with the general sentiments - to sell a fantasy game you need eyecatching art - not something that Hero has ever been very good at, though to be fair, it's an expensive luxury for small gaming companies. It also requires a setting which does one (or even better) two things: one, it catches people's imaginations right out of the gate, so that they actually want to play it *before* they have sat down and read it and two - and most crucially - makes it easy for them to do so. Hero games fantasy settings mostly fail at #1. There's some decent stuff there; I own a bunch of settings and have a particular fondness for Valorian age and Tuala Morn. But I was already a sucker for "savage Age of Conan" or "Red Branch" style stories, so I was an easy sell ... and I still bought them mostly to help support Hero. Jump-off-the-shelf-and-play-me, they weren't. Now I realise that the art and visual oomph is a hard issue - good art costs, and good design sense is not something everybody has. It's not impossible to pull off though: Green Ronin and Fantasy Flight Games have all proven that. You can also get by with less than stellar design if you have a simple concept hook. This is what Savage Worlds have done. As noted above, people don't generally buy Savage Worlds games because they are enamoured of the system. It's because they want to lead the Howling Commandos against Nazi war-walkers and zombie shocktroops, or fight prohibition era crime with a couple of chromed .45's. "A well thought-out and original fantasy world!" is not a hook - it's a description. But sadly, ALL hero system settings fail at #2 and they do so big time. These are settings books for people who already own the core rules. Many of them are well thought out and well-written, but they face the high barrier that their target audience is almost entirely people who already play Hero. And we already know that's a hard sell. So ... I've been thinking about this, and also about the Fantasy Hero Companion. I think that the best approach would be to try and deal with both problems. #1 is harder - you could try developing a killer setting and use that as your base. The trouble with killer settings is that they are like pornography - you know it when you see it, but it's hard to define in advance. So one alternative is to try to sell it as a game which lets you play ALL the killer settings. That's kind of a tough row to hoe, though - without a setting, it means that the game is not actually pick-up-and-play. #2 oddly enough, is easier. There's been argument over whether the mechanics should be in the front of the book or the back. My heretical suggestion is that the core rules should not be in the book AT ALL. Instead, use the core rules to design a simpler pick-up and play game, with a GM section in the back explaining (very loosely, with a few details) how these package were built and pointing the GM towards the core rules book if they want to customise. Hero purists might blanch, but I'm not suggesting actually simplifying or altering the rules. I'm talking about hiding the mechanics so that players (and to a large extent, the GM) simply don't have to deal with them. I discussed this approach in this thread (http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/88214-impromptu-hero-old-school-adventures-with-indie-style/) and can attest that it works. I got 6 players - including one who had never played anything but D&D - to make up perfectly functional rules-legal Hero system characters in less than half an hour, with no prep. on the player's part, except popping open a cold beer. And then we played. The thing is, that you could continue to play using the simplified system indefinately - or, as time went on, you could keep the simplified approach, but allow players to tweak the packages - or you could go full out Hero system. You can take existing Hero system characters and drop them directly into such a system. It's not precisely Hero, but it is precisely Hero compatible. And you could do this for any genre, tweaking the packages as you go. Because honestly, as things stand right now, I don't see much cross-over appeal in the Hero system as currently presented. I love it to bits, of course, but I'm not the target market for a book like Fantasy Hero Complete, or any entry-level book. cheers, Mark

Just a couple of points. First off if you want to play sword and sorcery, dashing-derring-do type games, then yes, the comments that the suggested points totals are too high ... way too high ... are spot on. I have no idea why people think a 175 point fantasy hero character is equivalent to a 1st level DnD character. A first level D&D mage (4E excepted) is a decent match for 3-4 shopkeepers armed with improvised weapons. A mighty barbarian is better off - he can probably take 5-6 shopkeepers ... if he's lucky. A first level D&D wizard can cast 3 spells a day (plus 3 cantrips, or very minor magics as often as he likes). These spells give him - at their most powerful - a better than even chance of taking down a shopkeeper. He might be able to turn invisible ... for 6 seconds a day. He's likely barely competent with 3 or 4 skills and incompetent at everything else. In contrast, a fantasy Hero mage starting at 175 points is sleeping on the job if he can't fly, turn invisible at will, erect forcefields to keep out any mundane weapon, or alter his shape ... and very likely several of these things ... in addition to having competence in multiple skills. The same is true of more martial types. Of course, Hero isn't D&D, and you don't need to start everyone off with 25 points (though we did that once, and it was hiilarious: people still talk about that game). The sweet spot seems to be about 75-100 points. That gives people enough to build decent physical stat.s, a decent (for starting heroes) number of skills and some proficiency in their preferred method of murder - be it sharp steel or altered physics. As for the game, to try to run small, think crime. Almost all RPGs thrive on conflict, and to have conflict, you have to have a foil for your heroes. There are plenty of potential hooks, but crime is easy. If your villian - even your behind the scenes villian - is Ba'ad el-Guuy master of a thousand afrits, then your plots are going to skew epic, no matter what you intend initially. If he's the minor son of a local noble family who wants to kills his brother and his Dad to gain the fortified mansion and ravish the daughter of the local miller, then the scope almost naturally will be smaller. I ran a very successful game (also fondly remembered) which started with an argument over ownership of a sheep meadow. But it could, just as easily be something like the discovery of a treasure map. There's a fantastic comic (not - inexplicably - available in English) called De Cape et des Crocs, which starts off like that. It's set in a fantasy Renaissance Europe, and despite the fact that it's swashbuckling fantasy with two (or three, or 4, if you count the rabbit) swordsman heroes and pirates and evil money-lenders, it also has sea monsters, wizardry and mad (Renaissance) science. It'd make an awesome campaign. cheers, Mark

The detect part of that build is fine but the aid doesn't really do it. The subtraction effect of magery meant that lower mana cost spells were essentially free to cast - so you could have some utility or even useful lower-powered combat magic at-will. This was particularly potent at magery III levels, since mana was often a limiting factor - so being able to cast some spells without dipping into your precious mana pool was a really big deal. A small naked advantage granting 1/2 END or 0 END would be closer to the effect. Because it's only small, it greatly decreases or abolishes END use - but only for lower-powered spells. Cheers, Mark

It's a long time since I played GURPS Fantasy, but unless it has changed significantly, one of the greatest benefits of magery was the reduction in mana cost, greatly expanding the number of spells you could cast - a naked reduced END advantage + a magical sense would seem to cover it, plus a limitation "requires magery X" in the spell system to allow casting of higher powered spells only to those with the requisite level of magery Cheers, Mark

You could even do it with a non-villian-based team, if the PCs didn't know at first who they really served. It could make of an interesting twist partway through the campaign when they worked out who was really pulling the strings: presumably, they would then have some motivation (and the contacts/insights) to fix any problems they had themselves caused and also to thwart Kal-Turak's ongoing plans. cheers, Mark

Ashton Carter did write the article in question - he warned that terrorist attacks against the US had been attempted in the past, and that eventually some of them were likely to succeed (well, duh!) He also indicated possible high risk targets: the two towers, the white house, etc. All of which is .... well, common sense actually, and no different from what me and my buddies (and tons of other people) were saying. He did not predict airline hijacks, he didn't predict the date, all he did is point to something that should have been obvious to anyone paying even moderate attention to foreign affairs. He also pointed out that reactionary elements in the US government would use such an attack to push their own security business agenda, which of course also happened ... and which other people had also pointed out was likely in advance. Heck, they're still doing it today, and back in the commie era they did it then. Predicting that outcome doesn't require prescience so much as basic awareness of US politics. As for the site that published the article, they're ... how do I put this delicately? They're raving, drooling bug**** crazy - for example, just sample this delicious article about how Liberals and Jews have nearly toppled the British Conservatives through mass ritual satanic sacrifice ... and then go on to the big reveal - satanic cults are actually the front for an extraterrestrial mind control operation! This is stupidity on such a scale that mere contact with it burns. So seriously, I don't think we need to look for corroborating evidence before dismissing this out of hand. cheers, Mark

I'm guessing you haven't looked at the case in any detail - nor read what I wrote, from this response. Brown was shot once while allegedly wrestling with the cop - I mentioned that and noted that if true (and it is supported by the autopsy evidence), that was easily justifiable. However, that isn't what killed him - he then fled the scene, apparently lightly injured. The cop pursued him some distance (about a block) and fired another 10 shots (none of them at close range, according to the autopsy), killing him. That - again, if true: it meshes with both physical site and autopsy evidence - does not seem to comply with either the local PD's rules, nor federal law on the use of lethal force, both of which require a suspect to be considered an immediate threat to the community or officer in question. A priori, then, there seems to be grounds for a trial. Now maybe there's more evidence that argued against that - but so far none has been been presented. Maybe he was charging - maybe not. Without a trial, we'll never know .... which is kind of the point, no? All the palaver about "show trials" is just you inventing things you thought I might have said, which you think might sound bad: I'm not in favour of show trials, and have never claimed to be. Nor am I "fixated" on the public order aspect of trials. But that is an important aspect of this case - as the riots so eloquently prove - and it's pure foolishness to ignore that aspect: as the riots also demonstrate. cheers, Mark

More accurately, I'd say poorly written, half-baked conspiracy looney reading. More of the "WTC bombing actually by US government" silliness. Photoshopping Ash Carter onto an Israeli flag decorated with bloody handprints is usually a good sign that this is not a serious news site As for predicting 9/11, back in the late 90's, Susano and I (and a couple of other friends) were discussing the possibility of suicide attacks by terrorists using hijacked airliners. We got the basic MO corect and even picked most of the 9/11 targets correctly (not hard to do when you think of likely targets, though we did not predict the WTC). The US government's response was (sadly) pretty much as predicted, too. It wasn't ESP or foreknowledge, just basic thought. Cheers, Mark

If it were the case that prosecutors only proceeded when they knew they could secure a conviction, then every trial that actually proceeded would end in conviction. That's not the case, so we can write that idea off. Trials and pretrials proceed by different rules, and they don't always end the same way. "Certain" convictions sometimes fall apart, and longshot prosecutions sometimes pull through against the odds. How the evidence is presented, what it is, how the witnesses handle cross-examination - all make a difference. There's a reason that testimony at a Grand Jury trip is treated legally as hearsay and is not normally admissible at an actual trial. We'll just have to disagree on whether a trial would have helped defuse the issue: since it didn't happen, we'll never know. It has happened in the past though. As for "that he was desperate to avoid a trial" comment, you'll note that I was referring to the prosecutor, not the cop, who of course would probably not have wanted to go on trial, even if he was truly innocent and assumed that h e was likely to be exonerated. Any trial is going to be stressful. To Badger, I should note that had the case gone to trial the officer would have been suspended on pay and the police department's insurer - not the cop in question - would have been paying legal costs. So stressful, yes, but financially he would probably be better off than he is now. This is more than just technical futzing about: if the citizenry lose faith in the justice system, the consequences are inevitably terrible for everyone. I've lived in places like that, but you can just look across the border at Mexico for an example. And loss of faith seems to always start with "minor" things like this, where broader concerns get lost in local noise. You place emphasis on the fact that Brown was a big guy, does seem to reacted aggressively towards the cop, and isn't a poster boy for unwarranted use of deadly force. Maybe true. But see it from the community end of things: why was Michael Brown stopped in the first place? What heinous crime was he committing? He was initially stopped for ... jaywalking. Even later, when he was recognised as a potential suspect in a nearby robbery - of 3 cigarillos - that's not enough to warrant the use of deadly force, which requires the suspect be an imminent risk to the community or the officer in question. So using a gun in self defence - which arguably was the case when the officer was in his car - is fine. Pursuing the suspect and firing a further 10 shots at him and killing him - that's pretty dubious and not immediately clear that it's in accordance with the law. Here's the autopsy report - http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/heres-dods-report-michael-browns-autopsy and http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/08/13/ferguson-qa/819e10796b809e6135932cdd63a2bb937c390f1f/autopsycrop.jpg. Seen from the community point of view, this is another case of a minor crime escalating into confrontation and death. Police in other countries are specifically instructed - first order of business - to try to avoid escalating things, which is maybe one reason that they kill citizens at 3-5% the rate that US officers do. It's almost certainly a major reason that Ferguson boiled over the way it did: less to do with the actual details of the incident - more to do with the nature of the incident. cheers, Mark Edit: oh, and I *have* tried skydiving: I got my B licence (unsupervised free fall) at university. It's awesome fun and can be highly recommended.

"Know won't go anywhere"? Are you implying a fixed trial? A grand jury is not a trial, and with more time, more evidence, and a different procedure, might yield different results. So, you don't need to be certain of a conviction to proceed. The only thing required is "probable cause" - is there a case to answer? I'll admit I don't know. But experience shows, that if there is any doubt, sending a case to court tends to defuse the situation more often than it exacerbates it - even though that's not always the case: there's no certainty in life. A badly-handled trial *might* be as bad as a badly-handled grand jury - but the lack of a trial emphasises the feeling in the community that justice is not being done. That's the real cause of the trouble in Ferguson. This particular shooting is just a trigger - as you note, maybe not even a very good case - for underlying problems. And yes, it would have been hard for the cop in question - but then, so was deciding not to go to trial. He's lost his job and his home, so it's not clear that a trial would have been worse for him. And given the riots after the grand jury decision, it is clear that didn't work too well - an outcome that should have come as a surprise to no-one. So yeah, I think it could have been handled better. Edit: No, actually, stronger than that. Given the pervasive and growing distrust of the police even among ordinary citizens, precisely *because* of the feeling that justice is not being served, I think it was handled really badly. The fact that the usual procedures for a grand jury were significantly altered in this case, indicates that the prosecutor knew what the issues were and fumbled it anyway. He gave the impression - even to me, who tends to give the cops the benefit of the doubt - that he was desperate to avoid a trial. Whether that is true or not, it's impressions and emotions that are fueling this. Cheers, Mark

Actually, sometimes you do. A core concept of the English justice system - on which the US system is built - is that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. The justice system does not exist in isolation from the citizenry, and the prosecutor had the discretion to send this case to trial, if only to ensure justice was seen to be done. He should have done so, I think. After all his job - and the job of the system - is to maintain public order, and it does not look like that is what happened. Our systems give prosecutors a lot of discretion, but the flip side is that we expect them to use it wisely. Regards, Mark

This makes no sense. If you can only compare things that are exactly the same, then you can't actually compare anything - because of course if they are exactly the same, there's nothing to compare, and if they are different, then you're saying they can't be compared. So you can't compare, say, Utah to Nevada? Or Utah in 2014 to Utah in 2013? Eeeh. I don't buy it. Europe and the US are different yes, but not so different that no meaningful comparisons can be made. It's not like we're comparing Utah and Anbar province. As for the point about statistics, I don't think that word means what you think it means: it's not a synonym for data or numbers. Saying "9 per year is a lot more than 1 per year" is not statistics. It's just good old-fashioned common sense. Statistical analyses, in contrast, look at variation - for example if the average is 10 per decade, is that 1 a year, or none for 9 years and 10 in one year? The average is the same, but statisically those two counts are different. But that's way off the discussion here. We could *do* a statistical comparison if you want - but really, there's no point. We can see without it, that these numbers are very, very different. US cops shoot and kill more citizens than the cops of any other developed country. Heck, at these levels, they are shooting and killing more citizens than criminals do in many other developed countries. So you have to ask why. Saying "Ah, it's just different" doesn't help. We already *know* it's different. But why? If you can't (or won't) answer that question, then you probably can't solve the problem. To me, at least, it looks like a problem that needs solving. Cheers, Mark

This not about statistics, though. In Utah, with a population of about half that of Denmark, the cops shoot and kill 9-10 civilians a year. In Denmark, twice as many people, the cops shoot and kill about 0-1 people per year. No matter how you slice it, those two things are fundamentally different. And Utah is not even one of the worst states. Now sure - different rules, different cultures. For a start, criminals here rarely have guns, which fundamentally changes the situation. But still, you are looking at a real difference, and one of huge magnitude. It cannot be explained as different methods of assessing data, or similar. Dead is dead. So it's a real difference. The question is, what can or should be done about it? And that depends on you guys. I can guarantee, that here, if we had 18-25 police killings a year (a level equivalent to US states), the police commissioners responsible and the minister of justice would all be looking for new jobs, if not facing charges - unless there were some truly extraordinary extenuating circumstances Cheers, Mark

But isn't that an argument for going to trial? In a trial, the evidence would have been given a thorough airing. You could argue that not only would it have given closure to the victims family, but would also have protected the officer in question. As it stands, he didn't go to trial - but he also had to quit his job amd apparently leave the area. Cheers, Mark

It doesn't sound good: "Utah police now responsible for more homicides than gangs or drug dealers" .... (http://rt.com/usa/208403-utah-police-gangs-homicide/). I understand that this is a complicated issue, but it certainly seems like something is out of whack when the US police are killing civilians at a rate nearly 20-50 times higher than police in other developed countries. For example, in Denmark the police have shot and killed about 1 person per year (on average) over the last decade. Adjusted for population, that's about 5% of the US rate: and it's actually the highest rate in our neighbourhood by a reasonable margin. And honestly, to me, it seems very odd that "Fear of the police" is considered in any way reasonable. The police are there to help provide public safety. They are not there to be feared - and if they become feared, then to me, that's a sure sign that they need to be reigned in. cheers, Mark

Of course: they were the jihadi's best recruiters, for a while. But now that the US is dropping secret torture prisons, incarceration without trial and kidnapping as official policy, the CIA doesn't have so much support to offer to the terrorists, so it's only natural that their affection for the CIA will cool. Cheers, Mark

So ... Supporting the criminals, eh?

Those numbers are not for "full careers" though: they're for tenure, which basically means top o' the tree. The days when every full professor eventually got tenure are far off in the past, especially in the US. cheers, Mark

No - since it was one of the medium-small parties that created the problem. Very short and simple version is that there's a relatively new rightwing party that has opposition to immigration as their major focus. It has about 13% of the vote, but since the parliament is split between an alliance of centre-right parties, and an alliance of centre-left parties (who have a small advantage in numbers, but not enough to have over 50%), that's just enough to enable them to block either side from passing any laws, unless the two sides agree to vote together. Basically, the spoiler party is going all tea party on both sides saying "give us what we want, or we'll paralyse the goverment". So ... new elections. Cheers, Mark

It's already had at least two long threads, and I know a bunch of other Hero GMs are using the system - because I still get the occasional questions about it, and it's posted on various websites. A search of the boards would probably bring up those threads. Edit: a search using "martial arts multipower markdoc" will bring up a whole bunch of threads where the system is introduced and discussed in detail. Those using Hero Designer can get the prefab.s made by my ol' buddy Fitz here: http://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/fantasy/highfantasyhero/index.html - under the martial arts subsection, of course. Still, if people are interested in something more current, we certainly could start a new thread. Cheers, Mark

In my experience, hit locations only slow the fight down marginally if at all – with one caveat. Since most fights involve killing attacks, you just need to roll/count BOD and location – for most players that’s no slower than calculating BOD and STUN. They can easily call out “7 BOD in the 14!” The caveat is that this relies on the GM being familiar with the hit locations, so that you can do the damage calculations on the fly. That really only comes with experience. In the mean time, you can use this handy chart drawn up by a friend of mine - http://www.mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/hitlocs.pdf to keep track. Also based on my experience, the big timewasters in Hero system combat are: Player indecision. This is not system specific: we have the same problem in our pathfinder games, but it is made worse when players have a lot of options to choose from. Hero can sometimes suffer from flexibility – some players with a ton of tactical options dither over which one to choose. This usually gets better as they become more comfortable with their characters – and some of my players have never really gotten to grips with combat maneuvers in Hero (move-by, move through, Haymaker, etc), but as long as I have, that does not matter. A GM can help players react faster by simply asking them to state their actions in plain language and then applying the rules as needed. END. Players already have to track BOD and STUN: END seems like a paperwork too far for me, in return for relatively little payoff, in a fantasy game. Originally I dropped END tracking for fantasy games as a starter house rule, to help new players get up to speed – but the loss of it had such a negligible effect, that I never bothered to replace it. This has some flow-on effects: the reduced END advantage is rarely used, for example. Also, I did not want PCs who were untiring robots (unless, you know they actually are untiring robots), so although I did not require tracking END in regular combat, I keep the END stat. and used END use and the Long Term Endurance Rule to calculate when PCs became exhausted, how far they could carry really heavy things, etc. The biggest change from this rule regards powers/magic. Without END, you need some other factor to balance spell use. The SPD chart. I like the idea of different speeds in Combat, but the SPD chart can sometimes cause things to drag – especially if there is debate over whether someone acted or not - and can also be exploited by clever players. Personally, I deal with this by using a simple house rule: I roll a dice to generate what phase it is (since it is rare that we have SPD above 6 in a fantasy game, I usually use a d6). Characters get to take an action if their SPD is equal to or higher than the dice roll. They can also jump in at any roll if they have a saved action or choose to abort. This ensures that everyone will get the same average number of actions that they should relative to all other characters, but jumbles them up in the short term, so that (for example) the SPD3 character can never be 100% certain in advance that he will get a phase where the SPD2 character cannot act – just at some point there will be an opening. It should be noted here that some GMs and players love the SPD chart to bits and would never countenance such a radical change, but it works really well for me. These things greatly increase the speed of combat. I can say that with some surety because I’ve tried them out on 5 groups of hero noobies now, and they have always helped. With regard to opponents, I mix it up. A fight with lots of mooks gives the PCs a chance to shine as they cut their way through a mass of foes, and you are less likely to get outright unexpected PC deaths. I tend to play most mooks as smart as they should be: they’ll fight to the best of their ability but few mooks will fight to the death (they are mooks, after all). If they are clearly getting the worst of things, they’ll start to fall apart and flee. Severely injured mooks stagger away bleeding: they don’t try to go toe to toe with a clearly superior foe while trying to hold their guts in with one hand. These two facts mean that mook fights don’t have to be really long affairs, even if the PCs are matched off against 20-30 opponents: many of those opponents will go down in one decent hit and even if they remain (or become again) conscious will flee, rather than carry on while severely wounded. A fight with a smaller number of matched opponents should not take too long – but it has the potential to go really badly for the PCs really quickly, because one good hit to the head or vitals can take even a tough PC right out of the fight: the GM should try to have a backup plan if it does. Paradoxically, a fight like this can take a long time if both sides are employing the terrain and tactical maneuvers to their fullest – on the plus side, that can lead to a really memorable fight. On the topic of martial arts, I agree with you. I really like the potential for martial arts, and like playing martial artists, but I take the phrase to mean more than “fights real good”. I strongly dislike the habit of some writers to sprinkle a bit of martial arts on everything – particularly given that the standard Hero system has the potential to give a very high bang for the buck if you choose 1 or two maneuvers to spam. I ignore the widespread dumping of martial arts and suggest you do too. J A few combat levels plus a little damage boost is both easier on the brain and generally works just as well, if more damage is required. That said, I also have developed a more flexible system for martial arts (and also one more suited for wuxia-style high powered martial arts if that’s your thing) using standard Hero system rules – I can always repost that if you’d like. cheers, Mark

Maybe I'm a minority of one, but I always hated the spirit rules. They added a lot of new mechanisms that didn't play well with the hero system for (IMO) minimal benefit. For ghosts and things that are "on a plane inaccessible to ordinary mortals", I have always found it easiest to take it literally: they *are* in fact on another plane and can only interact with the 'material plane' if they - or a person on the material plane, such as a medium - have the transdimensional advantage on their powers. How '"powerful" a spirit is is therefore often dependant on how much it can actually manifest in the material plane. A spirit that is a powerful ghost might not be (relatively) so powerful on the spirit plane. Specific foci - such as the teddy hear of a murdered toddler, or the hoard of a miser - are just that: foci. A spirit may require a foci to manifest. Cheers, Mark