Markdoc

OK, let's look at the requirements. 1. You want a trigger (spell goes off) and 2. you need a way to deliver it wherever the victim is. The first part's easy - just add Trigger: I think you have that covered The second part ... well you want to be able to hit them indoors, or in a bunker, or on the street ... anywhere. That means indirect, for sure, and at the +1/2 level. You also want to be able to hit them even at extreme range (like on the other side of the globe). Even with megarange you still have to be able to see or hit them, somehow. So I'd cheat. Instead of going for very long range ....I'd go for very big area effect. Since I'm not the kind of man who just wants to watch the world burn, I'd add accurate. That gives you Area affect radius (+1) accurate (+1/4) Megascale (+2 planetary). That way, you cast the spell, and everybody on the planet is in your area of effect. If the target triggers the spell - POW! - no matter where he or she is. cheers, Mark

Actually, in the Russian NIghtwatch series, our hero uses a mass of spell energy to do precisely this, allowing him to subsequently choose the correct course of action, unhindered by preconceptions. cheers, Mark

Do your fighters start with a Greatsword of Ogre Decapitation? O is it something they find in the course of adventuring? If the latter, see how your players who want to play mages react when told that they start with no spells, but have to adventure and hope they find something useful ... cheers, Mark

Our party has left the Eastern lands where we've done most of our adventuring and returned to the lands of my character's youth, on the trail of a pilfered demon-slaying sword. This is the Hall of Loyalty, the Monastery where he grew up. cheers, Mark

Thanks!

In my last campaign, year 2 was a pirate-oriented series of adventures. In that, the PC's ship served as their floating base and all the adventures revolved around it, or involved it to a greater or lesser extent. There have been other similar circumstances in other campaigns. In a much earlier campaign set in the same gameworld, the PCs were all part of a travelling circus, which basically existed as a cover for their spying activities, so they trundled about the landscape in a big wagon train. That game unfortunately, though it started well didn't last, due to two disruptive players. Last of all, in the same game world, some of the Dymerian warguilds (think of them as either Medieval orders like the Templars or Space Marine Chapters from 40K) have flying castles that serve as their base of operations: those have never played more than a peripheral role in the game, though. cheers, Mark

Thread drift on the hero boards? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you. cheers, Mark

Well rural areas in the developing world can be pretty crummy - lord knows, I've worked in some pretty awful places. But I think the definition of a slum is concentrated awfulness. It's not necessarily worse as a place to live than awful rural places - after all, the worst big city slums are usually kept well-topped up with recent imports from the country. But concentrated poverty has a frenetic desperation all of its own - if only because you take all of the desperation, violence and deprivation from two dozen villages and compress them into a quarter of a city block. Per person, it might not be worse - but misery per square meter is definitely higher. As for the purported population densities of ancient cities, as a student living back in New Zealand, I thought they simply had to be inflated. Having worked in urban slums that are positively medieval in squalor, I can easily accept that they are not. I have no problem accepting Roman population densities having seen thousands of people in a modern city slum dependant on one faucet for water. People would stand in line for hours to fill some buckets of water. cheers, Mark

I dunno. I'd pay to see that cheers, Mark

Yeah, I know: that's why I stuck to examples like Rome or Babylon, where there's been a lot more work done and the numbers are pretty consistent, for ancient cities, or to modern European capitals for the medieval stuff, where there has been a lot more research and where there's more documentation. Even there, precise numbers are impossible to get, but the estimates tend to vary by less than 20%. Move outside well-known sites and variations become much more extreme. cheers, Mark

Actually it's a very apt description. Cheers, Mark

Yeah, but the point is that using active points (or points at all) is never going to give you a "realistic" result. The two things are not connected. If you want realism, look to real life. But for fantasy gaming, we probably don't want to much real life in the mix. So active points makes a simple compromise. Now I agree that the current rules are kind of arbitrary: but this is Hero! You can easily roll your own. I have for my game, for years. Here's my quick and dirty conversion. STR Min is calculated using Active Pts/2. OCV Mods, whether positive or negative, do NOT figure in. Stretching DOES figure in. Two-handed melee weapons get an automatic -5 STR Min; 1.5H weapons have two STR Mins listed (one for one-handed fighting, the other for two-handed). The STR Min for a normal weapon used two-handed is -3 STR Min. Weapons that are +1 Stun or increased KNB use their active points for calculating STR Min; ones that are -1 Stun have their STR Min calculated as if they were -1 DC from their listed damage. STR Min for Autofire throwing of weapons is based upon their active point cost, same as with +1 Stun weapons. However, these weapons have two STR Min listed: one for single shot, and one for autofire use. Other modifiers do not affect the calculation. That gives lower strength min.s than the standard rules, but note that it has two consequences. 1. It means that ordinary people can wield almost all weapons without penalty. I see that as a feature, not a bug, but not everyone does. 2. The damage inflicted will increase, on average by 1-2 DC. This also is something I see as a feature, not a bug, but it does make combat a teeny bit more dangerous. cheers, Mark

Yeah, I got that, but it doesn't square with the math. People moving to the cities was certainly a major factor (it still is today!), but in many cases (not all), the growth appears to be too much and too prolonged for immigration to account for it all. In some cases (Rome is an example) local born citizens had different rights and obligations to immigrants - even if those immigrants were citizens - so we know from the records that there was significant growth even among those who lived there. In the case of Copenhagen, by the 17th century it dominated the surrounding countryside in terms of population, so there literally were not enough people around it to supply enough new babies to drive its growth: it had to be internal as well. I think the real difference is that in pre-modern cities, the mortality rate and financial constraints were high enough that they significantly blunted growth - but were not enough to stop it entirely (in most cases). If you look at most existing European cities (I don't really know enough about non-european cities to say) they exhibit a pattern of slow growth where they tripled in size every 100-150 years (as a really rough rule of thumb). But in the 19th century they exploded. It took London about 2000 years to grow to a million people, around 1800. It then added another million in 40 years, then another in 20 years and another in 10 years ... a lot of that was migration, but it was also driven (increasingly) by internal growth. Those big numbers caught people's eye, but if you look at it, that growth started in the 14th century, at which point the population shifted from very slow increase to exponential growth (numbers here, graph here). cheers, Mark

Sanitation? I imagine it was handled the same way as in large above-ground cities: either dump it in a pot and carry it away, or pour it down a hole to where a stream could carry it away. In practical terms, I don't see a huge difference between living 3 stories down in a hole to living three stories up in a tenement. It's the same number of flights of stairs either way and if you lived in the middle of a tenement, ventilation would not have been a great deal better ... Levity aside, I'm thinking that lighting and air quality would probably have been a problem - it'd get pretty funky with lots of candles or oil lamps going, not to mention plenty of people. On the other hand, the relatively constant underground temperature would have reduced your need to burn fuel just to stay warm. And disease ... well disease was always a problem, any time you had plenty of people gathered together. I haven't seen any numbers on that, but I kind of doubt it. Babylon more than trebled in size (near as we can tell) over the space of a couple of hundred years and Rome (for which the figures are much better) went from around 100-200,000 to about a million in 2 centuries or so. A lot of that was immigration, but given the rise in the number of roman-born citizens over the same period, there was clearly a lot of population growth as well. In fact, the Romans had a continual problem in the early imperial period with overgrowth of their cities, trying (and failing) to keep the population below fixed limits to prevent overcrowding. Berlin stayed tiny for about 400 years but then it started to grow, and just kept growing for the next 400 years - same with Copenhagen. Ancient and Medieval cities could go up and down dramatically in population: Siena went from 60-70,000 in 1340, to around 12,000 in 1370, through a combination of the plague and Florence Rome went from over a million to about 50,000, albeit more slowly. Looking at the numbers, it seems around the end of the Renaissance (1500-1600) that cities started to grow consistently in Europe and that tracks with a growth in the total European population over the same period. cheers, Mark

It may not be balanced, but it's probably realistic. Active points are an abstraction. A misericorde does not require more strength than a dagger just because it's armour-piercing. cheers, Mark

And yet, people did exactly that. If you google "Underground cities turkey" you'll get many images of what such a city could look like. The largest of these cities (there are at least 200 known, across the middle east and caspian region) could have housed well in excess of 12,000 people, and has 13 levels, each with defensive works. And actually ancient people - by and large - were not big on obsessive planning. The structure seems to have grown organically, like many cities, with extra parts being added on as required. Need more space? Dig sideways or dig down. Hit an existing street in the process? Build an arch, add a door and switch direction. If you visit some of these places, the bizarre switchbacking, variations in size, and ups and downs that passages and rooms follow make it very plain that they were not working to a plan. cheers, Mark

Indeed. I think morality plays out differently when you really can see things as black and white. There's no debate about whether something is evil, if you can actually reliably look at it and say "That's evil" or look at things and reliably rank them on a "scale of evilness". As a result, I play this character (who's called Myrial) as a cheerful happy-go-lucky chap, with a bit of a fixation with swords, who also firmly believes that there are some things/people which just deserve to be hacked into quivering, smouldering pieces. I did this picture to make the point. It's inspired by one of his quotes: "I said, "Paladin", not "Pacifist"". cheers, Mark

Funnily enough, that sort of line belongs to the guy in the front ... although he's also the kind of guy who says "Ooh, that'll leave a mark" as he cleaves his greatsword through somebody's shoulder You know, the type - a smile, a quip, a helping hand, and a trail of blood-drenched corpses. cheers, Mark

And another with the same character (a later adventure: there's something nasty in the cellar ...) cheers, Mark

And since the thread has lurched zombie-like, back to life: here's a couple of pictures from our recent gaming. This one's called "sneak" - as in: we sneak in, we rescue the prisoner, we get out and nobody's any the wiser .... Yeah, right. cheers, Mark

Verra nice, Storn!

Just to back up what earlier posters have said, the earlier threads linked to have a pretty exhaustive discussion of this. The very short version is that Hero does not have a mechanism granting extra attacks when someone enters your "zone of control" so that if you want to defend an area you really need to focus on defence (ie: held actions), not attack. A held action should almost always let you get an attack on someone moving in or through your zone of control. One option - a house rule, but worth considering - is that in our game, an attacker can get the "attacking from behind bonus" if their target is for some reason unable to respond. The classic examples are attacking by surprise, or where a target is surrounded by multiple foes. We also allow this to apply if someone moves past an attacker to do something else. So just moving past means little: if they have a held action they can attack you, but you can still defend. Onthe other hand, if you run up to the bomb and try disarming it, or move past the knight to attack the princess, you can reasonably expect to get shot/stabbed in the back as you pass by Otherwise, I'd caution against adding a freebie mechanism to the game allowing extra attacks: that would almost certainly lead to abuse. Even in 3.5/pathfinder, where multiple attacks are built into the system, abuse of AoO means that it is often primarily used as an offensive mechanism, rather than a defensive one: a way of getting free attacks. That said, you can easily build this as a specific power - and we have done so, in past game. As people noted, a triggered attack essentially gives you a freebie attack, but only one per "reset". This is similar to the D&D AoO. You can buy a trigger that resets more frequently, giving you multiple attacks in one phase. Alternatively, you can actually just build up your guarding capacity by buying a few CSLs only for "attacks of oppourtunity" - that makes you a dangerous guy to try and slip by, if you have a held action. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways you could build similar mechanisms. regards, Mark

Woot! The "go to new post button" now functions! cheers, Mark

Right. Shield - even bucklers - are not actually designed for hitting people. You could do a fair amount of damage by hitting them with the edge of a medium-sized shield - especially if it has a metal edge. But still, you are swinging it with your arm, and almost always with an awkwardly-placed grip, which mandates a sideways swing or a push. Both rob you of the leverage you get with a club, sword or axe, and prevent you using much of your strength. In addition, most weapons concentrate your attack's momentum in a small space. Even a buckler (excepting those with spikes) has a far broader point of impact than a sword or axe. Basically, a shield is like a clumsy knuckleduster. The advantage of a shield bash is not that it's a good weapon: it's more that it gives you another hard thing to hit your opponent with and distract them, put them off balance or open them up to your primary weapon. All of that boiled down means that I think +1d6 HA is reasonable. Bucklers are smaller, yes, but also far easier to hit fast with, or to "punch" with, which IMO counters the greater mass of a bigger shield.. All in all, it works out about the same. That can be converted to +1pip killing (so a half d6 total, in most cases) for spiked shields. That sounds about right: a shield is a far less useful weapon than a knife. You could, I guess, go to 2DC, but I really would not do more. If you really want to differentiate, you could give bucklers 2DC, medium shields 1DC and large shields 0DC, to reflect the fact that it's easier (in my pretty limited experience) to actually hit someone hard with a buckler than a larger shield. cheers, Mark

Says it all, really: The other answer, is "about what you can realistically fit in a pack, or over your shoulders". That's quite a lot - the Marian era legionaries carried about 60 pounds of stuff, and they did it over long distances and had to be ready to fight along the way. They were tough SOBs, and not too far off our hypothetical adventuring types when it comes to strength and stamina, I think. Roman military training in those days consisted mostly of "running", "carrying heavy things" and "Running while carrying heavy things". They have not just weapons and armour, but also tools, blankets, tents etc. They didn't carry food, beyond the day's snacks and water: the rest was rolled along on wagons or carried on mules. Of course if they had to actually fight (or scramble away from an opening pit, etc) they'd have to drop all that stuff, in which case they'd end up with weapons, armour and precious little else. cheers, Mark