Markdoc

About the same as the difference between a samurai and a knight. Cheers, Mark

This is how I run it (and is also in accordance with the rules as written), but that's only relevant for in-combat healing. Out of combat, you have the time to max out those rolls, so post fight, I just let the players heal the max. I think it's important to have fluff as well as rules: the healing house rules that I use are explained by saying that healing magic does not physically heal back the damage - it simply patches the damage up like magical sutures and saline, so that you can continue to function. It might look partly healed, but there's a limit to what can be done with simple healing. Healing won't replace a lost eye, or let you stick a sliced limb back on again, for example. But it will protect a damaged limb or a cut stomach so that it is usable. It's still damaged though: somebody hits you with a dispel, and that magical healing that's holding you together is going to stop, for example. That's why magical healing has a limit - if the underlying tissue is too damaged, there's simply not enough to actually hold together with healing magic. As an aside, I allow regeneration under strict control, as a more powerful way of healing. In the last game the team's healer learnt a secret cult spell as a special thank you from one town's temple. It was a sympathetic healing spell which gave the healer Regeneration UBO, but with the side effect that he took the same damage. That gave him massive healing potential, but it was something he could really only do once a day. Later he learned a healing trance spell (regeneration again) that let him heal himself up to REC BOD/hour, but he was in a 0 DCV trance while he did it. That meant that given a couple of days, he could get the whole party healed up if he worked at it, by taking their wounds himself and then trance-healing them away, but it wasn't a stunt he could pull off in the middle of most scenarios. For me that hit a balance so that we did not lose the dramatic tension of wounds, but at the same time didn't have to stop the plot for a week after a big fight to let people heal up. Cheers, Mark

Yeah, this has always been a problem: in D&D healing was kept in check by three facts: 1)you only had so many spell slots 2 )you really wanted to use them for things other than healing and 3) as you started to get up over 100-150 hp, being able to do 1d8+10 didn't get you too far, so the lower level healing became largely irrelevant. Hero's ability to let you use healing repeatedly causes some problems: if you let it be used repeatedly, or stack, it's way too powerful. BOD damage become far less relevant, for PCs who can spam healing, since anyone who isn't dead goes straight back to full strength after any fight. If you don't, it's relatively ineffective, leading to paperwork exercises like tracking each wound (not fun with 6 or 7 PCs, I can promise you!). The fact that we need something like that (which I regard as an ugly kludge) shows how poorly the healing power works. My own approach (which I freely admit is also a kludge) is to allow characters to carry as much healing as the healer can deliver, but no more, until they naturally heal back some of the magical damage. In other words if the healer has 2d6 healing, he can eventually repair 6 points of BOD, but once a PC is carrying 6 BOD of magical healing, he can't get any more until he has naturally healed back at least 1 BOD - then he can get another BOD of healing. Essentially that lets a healer provide some emergency patching up (to his limit) and thereafter, essentially double the rate of natural healing (which, if he has a decent place to put the patient and they take full bed rest, can be quite swift). A second healer can only improve on that if he has more dice of healing. That still requires extra paperwork, but much less than tracking wounds - the GM just has to track one number: how much magical healing each PC has received in total. This system means that PCs who have been in a serious fight or two can't just stop for an hour's healfest and then carry on, but they can - if they have the leisure to stop for a few days - get everybody functional again. Still, this approach is a band-aid, so to speak. Anyone got suggestions on how to model healing so that it's not either "BOD damage is irrelevant" or "BOD damage almost always cripples the PCs for a session"? It doesn't have to be based on the current healing power. I have played around with the idea of Aid to REC, so that the target simply heals faster, but I have not playtested that. Cheers, Mark

Before combat luck existed as a listed power, we had been using a variety of versions: "Ha! you missed me" - +3 rPD armour, only vs attacks that can be dodged (-1/2). This won't help you if you can't dodge (ie: tied up, unaware, etc). It's a classic rogue or martial artist power "Is that all you've got?" +3 rPD armour, does not stop the first BOD of any attack (-1/2). This decreases damage (but does not prevent some leaking through). This is a classic tough guy power etc. But one simple house rule: anything with the "Real" limitation does not stack (real armour, real weapons, etc) with powers/spells. And the same powers don't stack. If you have two 8 PD forcefields, you have two 8 PD forcefields, not a 16 PD forcefield, etc. Two shortswords are two 1d6 HKAs, not a 2d6 HKA, etc. Combat luck does not stack with armour. Based on our own experience in multiple FH games, with multiple GMs letting powers and free gear stack is the fast track to a game that gets out of control: it becomes easy to get enough protection to render mundane weapons irrelevant - which means everybody wants magically enhanced weapons ... that in turn render mundane armour irrelevant. Stacking powers simply means that every PC has be magically enhanced for combat, and that means in turn that everyone who isn't decked out like a christmas tree with magical gee-gaws is essentially irrelevant. The way we dealt with people who wanted to enhance the mundane or magical gear they used was simple: you can use Aid (or similar). That's more expensive, which keeps it under control. So for example: "Wears armour like his own skin". 2d6 AID to armour - std effect 6 points (translates to +4 rPD, 0 END). This costs END to use and more character points than just buying combat luck, but it also makes you - briefly - able to dance in your armour so as to turn blows that might otherwise have penetrated it into glancing hits. With regard to big attacks, it's important to enforce STR mins on weapons, and I highly, highly recommend the now-optional, but previously standard rule about not more than doubling base damage: a character with a great sword can generate a 4d6 HKA (and I had a PC in one game who did just that) but her PC had a) an 18 STR, a decent number of CSLs with sword and c) martial arts. All up, that represents a significant investment in exactly one thing - hitting people with a greatsword. And yes, at that point the PC could mow down armored warriors like wheat before the scythe, but that was his thing, and the "no more than double" rule capped his damage at 4d6 (unless he went the Aid route, which means even more investment). Deadly blow - as it is now built - doesn't alter that. In our experience, the cost required to max out weapon attacks, though low enough to be feasible, is high enough that it's not a no-brainer decision. Which is really, I think, where we want to be. Cheers, Mark

No, not at all. We've routinely gone over 45 AP. Never been a problem, and we have not needed to adjust rDef. There is no "designed level" for hero system, and points caps are a late and entirely optional addition to the system (outside of con.s, I've never played in a game that uses them). What's appropriate is entirely up to the GM and players. Now a game with high AP attacks and low defences may be more lethal, but that's a perfectly valid design choice. I ran two popular campaigns (lasting 2 and 4 years of regular play) where some characters had 3-4d6 HKAs and the PCs spent most of their time in their clothes - no armour at all beyond 1 level of combat luck. In 6 years of playing time we had two PC deaths, so we are not talking an uncontrollable splatterfest. And I've played in games (our Strontium Dogs and Judge Dredd games spring to mind) where 2-3 d6 RKAs were the norm - and so was 2-4 rDef. PC deaths were still pretty uncommon. To answer the original post, the proposed levels of Def shown are for 4-colour supers games, where serious injury almost never happens, and PC deaths are extremely rare. In other words those are guidelines for a very low lethality environment, which is not appropriate for most fantasy games. If you could tell us where you want your own game to sit on a scale from "Masters of the universe" to "Game of thrones" and we can advise on how to set that up. Cheers, Mark

I'm guessing they had these guys in mind: cheers, Mark

I agree. Dump the VPP and buy either striking appearance or PRE and some social skills. That'd do a whole lot more. Or alternatively just buy limited mind control. Cheers, Mark

I've run plenty of games in low-magic (often, very low magic) settings, with no problems. Here's how. 1. Your players have to be on board with it. If you have players who refer to "under level 10" as "mud-D&D", prefer high level games and feel oppressed if they can't teleport directly to the action, then you're probably not going get them onboard. 2. That said, if you are clear with your expectations and they are good players, they can probably deal (maybe with enthusiasm). Like I said, if the plot/game is good, I've had no problems, even with players who grew up in the Pocket Army. Once you are over that hurdle? First off, forget about points caps. I've never used them, and to be perfectly honest, I view them as a crutch for poor GMing. They're also a crutch with a razorbade for a handle and spikes hidden in the pad at the top, as you have just discovered. Any halfway competent player can make fantasy-game wrecking powers even with a relatively low points cap, and powers with a high points total are not necessarily game-wreckers. If you rely on points caps for control of what players can do in the game, you are already doomed to fail. Instead, you need to control what magic can do, and how easy it is to do it. There are a variety of ways to control what magic can do, but the easiest is to generate spells yourself (just as in D&D). I let players create spells, but that has to be done in-game, at the cost of research and rare materials, etc, so it's an in-game process. That means it has to be something they really want to do. You can also create a magic system that doesn't encourage every mage to be a mini-superhero. How easy it is to do magic, is the most important part. As you have already discovered, in a low magic game, even low-magic is very powerful: it doesn't take much to challenge mundane characters: entangle, flash, drain, barrier, invisibility ... these are not high active point powers, but they are potentially game-changers. If they can be used "casually" then they will be game-changers. Again, you can control this, but you need to do it in the set-up phase of the game, so the players know what they are up against. As an example, I ran a game where to do magic required the caster to use life-force (ie: BOD instead of END to cast). Even minor, casual spells would injure the caster. Since the easiest way to get BOD was by sacrifice, magic-users had a pretty bad reputation. The flip side was that since magic was so dangerous, it was rare, and so magical countermeasures were also rare. A flight spell was a major deal to cast - but in a world where no-one is expecting flying invaders it is also potentially very powerful: it circumvents 90% of castle defences, for example. That approach is probably more extreme than you want to go, but it makes the point: to stop magic being the go-to solution in almost every case, you need to control how easy it is to use. In my last game, I used 4 aspects: all magic required a skill roll (and I enforced penalties for stressful situations), it used LTE instead of END (so it exhausted the caster), it required concentration (thus reduced DCV) and it took extra time. That made spellcasting a hazardous procedure in combat (which was exactly as I wanted) but it was still very powerful: the party's prime spellcaster saved their butts more times than I can count and made it possible for them to go places no mundane adventurers could have gone. Basically, no part of a fantasy hero game is more important than how you set up your magic system. Get that right and the rest is pretty easy. Get that wrong, and the rest doesn't really matter. cheers, Mark

A 250 point body would be - veritably - a superman. It'd be a steal at 50K: that's the price of a moderately expensive car. Even 250K is too good to pass up. If I could buy myself a body like a young, top flight Olympic level athlete for that price, I'd plunk down the coin tomorrow, I promise you. At that price, I think you could reasonably assume that almost every middle class and wealthier adult would be a homonculus in a couple of decades. Even at 250K, including the cost of the spell, it'd be a no-brainer. Think about it. You're 50 years old, and have a decent job, but you are not as sharp or as physically with it as you used to be. Put yourself in a tough, healthy teenage body, and suddenly, you have just bought yourself another 40-50 years of healthy life expectancy - at a cost of 5K per year. Discounting for inflation, that works out to about 2K per year. Maybe you don't have 250K lying around, but you could probably get a bank loan for it, because it would massively expand your earning potential, and the odds are good you'd be around to pay that loan off with interest ... especially since you would not want the bank repossessing that body, now, would you? If you had some assets you could pledge (a house, a pension payoff) you could definitely get a bank loan for it. If homunculi cost 2500 bucks for the basic version, it'd be cheaper (way cheaper) than a part time au pair. You can assume most middle class households would have one for basic house and yard work at that price. cheers, Mark

I ran an interesting and much loved fantasy game in which all of the PCs were immortals, with significant magic powers. Kill them, and they simply woke up the next dawn in a new body somwhere else, with all their memories intact. Although that game was set in my usual fantasy world, it played very differently from a standard fantasy game. Cheers, Mark

In addition, sintering aluminium at high temperatures via directional electric pulsing yields a crystalline structure that rivals high grade steel for strength but is significantly lighter: the US military is experimenting with it as a possibility for vehicle armour. Cheers, Mark

I'd get hold of the graphic novel Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface although you may also need the first series to make much sense of it. It's a cyberpunk series, in which the major character (intentional pun ) is a full body cyborg. She speculates as to whether, she's a actually a cyborg: is there really an organic brain inside her body? She can't tell. Maybe she's actually a fully digital personality. At the risk of spoilers, she actually does become a fully digital personality and then (subsequently) does inhabit multiple different bodies, very much like changing clothes. In fact, multiple characters do that (which can be a bit confusing at times). Given the amount that people spend on cosmetic surgery, if you gave them the ability to swap themselves into a nice, new, specifically-designed body, they would do it in their tens or hundreds of thousands - or millions, if it was cheap enough. You could (I'd say would) end up with a society where affluent people are always young and good-looking, while poorer people are not. First order of business: you need to work out how much a homunculus transfer costs. If the price is as low as - say - a quarter million bucks, you are going to have millions of them walking around. If it's a million bucks, then hundreds of thousands. Of course if they're a quarter million a piece and only last 5 years, that rules them out as cheap labour. If they are cheap enough to use as cheap labour then you have to figure that anyone who can afford a house and car will potentially want one: then their numbers will eventually be in the hundreds of millions - maybe outnumbering natural born humans. The limiting factor then is simply how fast they can be made. In the end, fae invasion or not, it's all about the benjamins. cheers, Mark

In a fantasy game, you probably don't want to "balance" armour so that people rarely take BOD. For one thing, it's not exactly true to the source material. For a second, it's going to make fights quite long. For a third, it means every fight will end with a lot of unconscious people, and few, if any fatalities, which raises problems about what to do with all those prisoners. As a rule of thumb, the largest weapons in most fantasy settings tend to be 2d6 killing (things like greatswords, arbalests, etc), while armour tops out at 8 or 9 rDEF. That means that heavy weapons can be expected do respectable amounts of BOD, but will rarely kill a fully-armoured target outright. PCs in this setting may often be injured - even seriously injured - but if defeated in combat will usually still be alive. It also means that fights will go relatively rapidly, based on the idea that few foes will fight to absolute death, and that an NPC seriously wounded and knocked unconscious will, when they recover their senses, crawl away to have their wounds tended, and won't be back for a long time. That means you don't have the prisoner problem. There's a list here that is basically the one I use, with a few modifications. It also means that a serious fight or several fights in a row will often leave the PCs pretty battered and in no condition for another fight: but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can control how resilient they are by controlling access to healing. If healing is easy to come by, then injuries are of no real consequence, and PCs can go on more or less ad libitum, as long as they get a pause to catch their breath. If it's hard to come by, serious fights (or the occasional unexpected injury) can have serious consequences. regards, Mark

I get a lot of use out of the martial arts book, but otherwise, I think you've got it covered. You could also do without the grimoire at a pinch - there's lots of fan generated spells on the net, and it's the book I use least out of that lot. cheers, Mark

Change environment would work (at least it does in my games) but it's kind of noticeable that you are going around in a shroud of darkness. As a GM, I wouldn't go for life support (after all, this is presumably a major complication we are talking about here), but at a pinch you could go for multiple layers of heavy robes and cloaks. That's also kind of noticeable, though not as much, but that's the point: "Burns in Sunlight" is a major complication and not something that should be able to be casually handwaved away. As Cassidy the Irish vampire puts it "Sure and what have we got to fear but the sun herself?" cheers, Mark

Huh. I didn't know that. I knew that coconut shell was rare (and therefore prized and expensive) in the renaissance, because it had to be traded from East Africa, but I hadn't read that it was magico-medicinal: I guess that's because I never looked. Now that I do, there's lots of evidence, which explains all those gold and silver-mounted coconut cups! Thanks for that! cheers, Mark Edit: for those interested, you can read a quick summary online in the article Mounted Bezoar Stones, Seychelles Nuts, and Rhinoceros Horns: Decorative Objects as Antidotes in Early Modern Europe

It might also be worthwhile to look at this thread - there we discussed how to simplify the game by making packages of various hero powers instead of getting players to allocate points point-by-point. I mention it, because the game I ran worked pretty much like you describe - the characters picked a starting package which had all the basic stuff for that archetype/class and then a variety of packages to customise it. If you wanted to, you could easily build out those packages to that you could pick a 10 point package at each "level" and that "prestige classes" (which normally have pre-requisites) simply opened packages that were not normally available. For example, you can't become a Templar (ie: take the Templar package) without already having the "Armoured warrior" and "Priest" or "Paladin" packages. If you really wanted to, you could give a small bonus, each time the character chose a package in their selected path (so, just to give an example: someone who chose the "fighter" profession package at the beginning gets +1 STUN each time he chooses a "martial combat package", etc. In a way, this works like the online game Path of Exile: any character class can use any weapon/armour and choose any selection of skills, as they level up - but the hulking muscular marauder generally gets more out of heavy armour and big axes than dagger fighting or casting spells. Still, if you want a muscular, tattooed spell caster with a big axe, you can do that. cheers, Mark

Yeah, we've already done that joke in my game. Also, it doesn't rust! Truly, the Aluminia of the elves is a magical substance. As an aside, Otto von Bismarck is said to have had a parade helmet made out of aluminium: the photos I saw indicated that it was polished to a high sheen so that it looked like steel, but I can guess that it would be a lot lighter to wear. Not a bad thing if you had to have it on for hours at a time. cheers, Mark

Yeah, that would be another way of doing it, I guess. cheers, Mark

That's OK as long as the desolid follows after the possession, but you can no longer use possession after you become desolid - which means your victim is going to break out reasonably quickly. cheers, Mark

Eh. I've never bothered with points caps: in fantasy hero or any other genre. They're an optional rule, so that's not really a consideration. But really, you wan this to be an expensive power: fantasy worlds are usually full of powerful, but none too bright creatures, and with this power they are all potential playings of the possessor. cheers, Mark

I've also used the desolid route, pretty much for the reason Old Man stated. The fact that the possessor doesn't move is irrelevant - the place he goes is "into the victim" so if the victim moves, so does the possessor. If the victim flies, so does the possessor: he doesn't need a power for it - just as he doesn't need flight to ride in a plane or on a pegasus. Of course, if the victim is tied up with chains and thrown off a ship in the middle of the ocean, the possessor goes with him, so it's a mixed benefit. On the other hand, he does need to buy "affects physical world" for the possession power which makes it expensive - but that's OK, because it's a very powerful ability. cheers, Mark

Admittedly, the pieces I've seen were from Scandinavia, which was pretty backward compared to the rest of Europe (both jewellery-wise and superstition-wise). As an aside, people in earlier times had a different ideas about jewellery than we do. The same collection (it's the Royal jewellery collection in the vault under Rosenborg castle) with the meteoric iron brooch has some later pieces (actually quite a few) with bits of coconut shell set in gold or silver. Yup, ordinary, brown-looking coconut shell. I've never heard that it was considered magic, just exotic, so it's possible that the meteoric iron was also prized for its rarity, not magic powers (though I like the magic powers idea, and it's not too far out). Also - on fantasy jewellery tropes - we visited the collection in the sultan's palace in Istanbul. You know those stories about "an emerald as big as your fist?" They actually exist. The collection has some huge gems, literally as big (or bigger) than a man's fist, including one huge emerald hollowed out and made into a drinking bottle. To modern eyes they actually look kind of ehh, because they are not faceted and polished like modern gems, so they look more like shiny rocks, but still ... cheers, Mark

And just to hammer the final nail into the topic, a mundane example. A merchant in Lacramar - a large, bustling trading city - buys a mundane shortsword from a blacksmith for 2 pieces of gold. it's a 1d6 HKA, OAF, real weapon, STR min 8 weapon). He then puts it in with the other goods in his caravan travels across the dusty plains of the serene republic, through the sere crags of the Kintamo mountains, across the burning plains of Kehesh and finally sells it to one of the barbarian chiefs for its weight in gold dust - worth about 40 gold pieces once he gets it home. So is a 1d6 HKA, OAF, real weapon, STR min 8 weapon worth 2 GP or 40? The answer is ... it depends. cheers, Mark

No - what I was suggesting is that cold iron is "natural iron" - Iron that hasn't been produced in a human forge. It's meteoric iron that has just been carved off a meteorite and hammered into shape. It's a pretty ineffective way to make weapons - all of the unforged weapons we know of are arrowheads or small spearheads or tiny knives: it'd be pretty difficult to make a sword that way. The evidence for the use of unforged iron is in (among other places) the University of Copenhagen's geologic museum (where one part of the Cape York Meteor is sitting in the courtyard) and the National Danish museum where they have a big collection of artifacts from the viking settlements in Greenland. Their websites are in Danish, but there's a page here discussing the weapons, and a better photo here showing another one. So we know that weapons were made of unforged iron. We also know that they were considered valuable items: they were traded back to Europe in small quantities, despite the fact that forged iron was readily available. It's easy to see why - they were made from metal that fell from the sky (or grew out of mountains) and they didn't rust. The part of the Cape York meteorite in rainy Copenhagen sits outside uncovered. In the decades it's been sitting there, the meteorite hasn't lost its lustrous, shiny appearance, despite being fully exposed to rain and air. In a few cases, chunks of meteorite iron were set in medieval jewellery - thought to be for good luck charms (it wasn't because iron was rare; by that stage, iron was being used to make pots, nails and cooking implements). Small amounts of meteoric iron were also forged into more conventional weapons made with ordinary iron, presumably because of its magical property. Of course, we don't know that that's what the phrase "cold iron" refers to: we don't know for sure what it means. But that's a widely accepted origin of the phrase among scandinavian folklorists. Old Norse uses many words to describe iron, among them ildjern and kuldjern (Fire-iron and cold-iron) generally thought to mean forged and unforged iron. The latter is thought to have "magical properties" and the idea that iron is anathema to trolls and færies is common in Scandinavia and the northern British Isles (though if true, it seems to have simply changed to any old iron in many stories). Like troll or fae, it's a folkloric term and thus by definition, exceedingly imprecise: it can mean whatever you want it to mean. cheers, Mark