Markdoc

Re: Most PCs...

Re: Discussion: 'Dive for Cover' and Non-Area Attacks Yeah, it's already been noted but DFC is not usually the best option against a foe with a similar CV/Speed, and it's usually not the best option against a whole swarm of foes. It's highly effective, if you have a high DEX and SPD compared to your single opponent. It can be abused, though, so one of the few houserules we run with is to dump dive for cover as a seperate maneuver, and retool Dodge to allow movement under the same conditions as DFC. The difference is that attacks (melee or ranged) aimed specifically at the dodging character, treat him as dodging, while AoE attacks use "in or out of area" to determine if they hit. In both cases, if the character ends his dodge move behind appropriate cover, he can get protection and/or a DCV bonus. So under these rules, in melee combat, or if he is being shot at, a character can choose to try and get out of the way of the attack: in both cases, he is treated as dodging (+3 or +5 to DCV) whether he moves away from his current location or not. If he is attacked by an AoE at the same time, he can still try to get out of the way of an attack (with a DEX roll modified by distance) ... and is still treated as dodging for the purposes of the other attacks. This prevents a DEX 28 character knowing that he can neutralise 97% of melee attacks by DFC, regardless of his opponent's skill, but doesn't hose high DEX characters: they can still dodge, and still try to get away from AoE attacks. They can also make use of terrain to try and better the odds. It's pretty simple and it works for us. It also avoids the problem of someone with very high DEX or levels in DFC being able to neutralize almost any melee attack. cheers, Mark

Re: How to deal with OSLs as a power I GM'ed for a character with 8 overall skill levels: that was her main power. It worked fine. You had a character who most of the time could perform pretty much any skill competently or even heroically, but at the same time, that was her main power: she didn't have the fancy stuff some of the other characters did. cheers, Mark

Re: Most PCs...

Re: aggrovated over flash/Blindness Bigbywolfe got exactly the two quotes I was thinking of, so nothing extra from me. But those two quotes make it explicit that you should not be able to play leapfrog and expect to get a bonus. As a general rule, if what's being suggested sounds really stupid, it's probably a misunderstanding of the rules: they've been given a pretty solid fine-tuning by many, many, many players through the years. cheers, Mark

Re: How to Build: Read Ancient Ruins / Writings Yeah, I'd avoid over-thinking this. Cryptography sounds like exactly what you need. After all, all you are doing is figuring out cryptic marks Cheers, Mark

Re: aggrovated over flash/Blindness

Re: Humanoids not in charge? Hmmm. I hadn't thought of undead (kind of lumping them in with humanoids) but I have a few places in my game world where they are in charge. One of them is a medium-sized city-state, ruled by an exceedingly ancient and powerful vampire queen: a sorceror with thousands of years pf experience (and Xp). She's relatively restrained when it comes to her own city: a few people wake up feeling a bit anemic, from time to time, but there's relatively few deaths/disappeances among the law-abiding folk. She takes human lovers, who also become de facto head of state/mouthpiece. The very, very luckiest get turned into vampires and become part of her inner circle, while most end up as dinner (but hey, they get a pretty good run up until that point ....). Criminals, monsters and invading armies on the other had are basically an all-you can eat buffet for the queen and her coterie. The citizenry are not wild about having a vampire queen, but are quick to point out that on the other hand, her little kingdom has enjoyed an unusually long reign free from wars and rampaging monsters. There's another culture - on the other side of the globe that also reveres their undead as "living-well-sort-of-living-ancestors"). There the vampires don't rule the roost alone: the sorcerer-priests handle day to day business, but the vampires are seen as honoured predecessors, are consulted on important matters, get festivals in their honour, are leading warriors in the inter-tribal conflicts and get unimportant visitors as "guests" (nom, nom, nom) in their warrens below the tribe's holdfast. So they are part of the political process, sort of like a management board. Important sorcerer-priests and similar worthies occasionally get to join the "management board" once they start to get concerns about mortality. Another city state is ruled by a giant vessel/temple that holds the spirits of the departed, important dead. They are incorporeal, but can talk with their priesthood by magic. They have centuries of experience with which to guide their city and occasionally possess one of their priesthood, when there is need for their particular expertise outside the city's boundaries (or just occasionally when they are yearning to re-experience the joys of the flesh: it's nice to be able to just hop put of the host body before the monumental hang-over sets in ). I also stole the "dragons ruling a city" thing though that was only used for one world where the PCs were plane-hopping, not my homebrew standard game world. cheers, Mark

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

Re: Resource Points in Fantasy Hero My experience is that it doesn't help balance magic users against other PC archetypes at all, because the balance issue in fantasy games is not about equipment, but access to powers. As I've noted in the past on this topic, I think it's one of the reasons why our groups have never had a problem with them in modern/Sci-Fi/cyberpunk games but hate them them so much in fantasy games (there's two other important reasons, of course: travel time and the range of powers accessible via equipment). cheers, Mark

Re: Resource Points in Fantasy Hero As a GM, I've never had a problem with that. I simply downplay the importance of loot. I ran a 5 year, twice-a-month game, where the players had set objectives, which didn't include trying to collect magic gee-gaws (there were hardly any) or looting (they had more important things to do). This wasn't a fluke, since I did it twice in a row, with completely different groups, including both newbies and hardcore D&D'ers*. My experience has been that if you give players a game where the goal is to kill the monsters and take their stuff, then that's what they'll do. If you give them a game where the goal is something else, then that something else is what they do. My last campaign, which also ran about 5 years of regular play had plenty of magic items and monsters, but the players actually spent relatively little time looting ... because they had other things to do. The only time they went on a concentrated looting expedition was when they were seeking specific items to face a big bad and since I wanted them to have the items they needed to face the big bad, resource pools would have just been a waste of time for 4 1/2 years and then a PITA for everyone concerned for 6 months. cheers, Mark *I admit these people were a bit shocked that 1) there were no magic items for sale - at all, at all and 2) that there were no magic items to be found after a big fight. Often, there wasn't even significant coinage or jewellery. They learned to deal, and since they are still playing happily as part of the group 10 years on, I guess they are OK with it.

Re: Resource Points in Fantasy Hero We've used them in modern and cyberpunk games where they generally worked well, with some issues that we could cope with. In fantasy games though we always ended up in one of two dead ends: either make them so large as to be meaningless or have them be endlessly irritating and stupid. My suggestion instead: use the encumbrance rules and common sense. Cheers, Mark

Re: VPs, charges, triggers & multiforms Well, there are two options. 1) They don't know, in which case I wouldn't spring it on them unexpectedly. 2) They do know, but being inexperienced with the rules don't really understand the implications. 3) They do know, but are just an idiot. The only pertinent comment is that yes, under virtually any circumstance I can imagine, this can be abusive, and you deserve credit for not abusing it! A while back an acquaintance tried running a very short-lived Turakian age game on-line. I warned him against the divide by 3 magic, and I also warned him - several times - about multiform. He ignored both warnings. So I played a thaumaturge (a scruffy hippy type, actually; it was an amusing character, and might have been a lot of fun, if it hadn't been so grossly overpowered). The campaign lasted only one session, once the GM realised what happened when one of the 150-point characters had access to a 5 point spell, letting him turn into any one of 16 300 point monsters ... To make it easy, I restricted myself to creatures from the Bestiary, but that includes things like the cockatrice with a 6d6 NND does body killing attack, and the Treeman who has a 12d6 HTH attack, 45 STR (fear the Treeman with a greataxe!) and who's pretty damn hard to hurt with weapons. I had other spells, but to be honest, I don't recall what they were: all I needed was shapeshift to be a better fighter than the fighter, a better rogue than the rogue, to have enhanced mobility, great scouting abilities, etc. Hugh's right about flexibility - but only in theory. In practice, there's no way I'd let a multiform like that anywhere near one of my games. Summoning is a bit more balanced in that the creature is an NPC, and the rules actually indicate that normally the creature should be built to the same rules as PCs, which means not on more points. As a GM anything with very loyal summonings is subject to intensive scrutiny, but otherwise the possibility that the summoned creature is only nominally under the control of the PC means that I sometimes allow summoning of more powerful creatures than the PC/NPC (demons being the classic example, as they are always antagonistic). I'd suggest pointing this out to your GM, and suggesting to him the same house rule I have - and which you seem to hit on yourself: no multiform into creatures of higher points than the base creature. For summoning, discuss what the options are. Generally, no creatures over your own points is the default. But if you can only summon natural animals, for example, going over your own points is not such a big deal: a rhinoceros is built on more points than a cockatrice, but though it's a doughty fighter, it's far less dangerous in most circumstances. By rules as written, no. Essentially when you set the triggered spell, it is cast at that point in time. You can then shift points in your framework without affecting the triggered spell. Trigger is intended to be a way of setting up "fire and forget" powers, so this is also in line with the spirit of the rules. However, I'd discus this with your GM, as it can very easily be abusive, especially in games where extra time was specifically put in place so that spell casting does not dominate combat. Not unless the alternate form also has summon. The rules state "In general, all forms should pay for other things they have in common, such as certain Skills for some characters." This point is reinforced by other comments in the text. So if you shift forms, you either need to spend the point or you lose your summoned creatures (however, see comment below: maybe you just lose control of them) This is a difficult one: if your summoning power is removed from your framework, technically speaking the creature is still there. The power is instant, after all. However, there's an oddity in the rules: you can't spam summonings. If you can summon with your spell "One wolf" you can only ever have one wolf. You can't cast it twice to get two wolves. That indicates that if the points are used again for summoning a new creature, the old summoned creature disappears - which in turn suggests if you shift the points into a another spell, the summoned creature should also disappear, or you simply lose control of it. The latter's how I run it myself, but nowhere is it directly stated or even implied in the rules. cheers, Mark

Re: Charges and persistent Powers Yup, you are interpreting it correctly. The key phrase from the rule is: "All powers bought with Continuing Charges must include a reasonably common way to turn the power off. If a power with Continuing Charges is turned off for any reason, the Charge is used up; the character must use another Charge to reactivate the power. " All you are doing here is providing a reasonably common way to turn the power off: essentially "powers last for one scene". Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Continuing charges are not meant to be a cheap way of getting powers that are always active on the cheap. cheers, Mark

Re: Summoned Creatures walking the earth: Capturing and Summoning them

Re: Summoned Creatures walking the earth: Capturing and Summoning them Add to that a transform to add - over time - "usable by one other" + "Transdimensional" to some of the monster's powers and then the owner can tap them as well. cheers, Mark

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: Actually what was suggested earlier is that few people would associate crap or crapper with the Victorian English company Thomas Crapper & Co, manufacturers of fine toilet systems. cheers, Mark

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills:

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: You can easily learn it with instruction, without any theory at all. As I noted, I have trained people to do simple surgery (and do it swiftly and safely) without giving them more than about 15 minutes theory, and that was only because I thought I should. It's all "Cut here, glue there, staple here".

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: I'd agree with this, by and large: you need some knowledge to make use of reference material, and all the internet is, is a very large repository of reference material (some of it of pretty dubious quality). That said, though, it does allow people to easily find out things that a few years ago would have been impossible without a dedicated research team. The same is true of smartphones. Everybody with a modern phone has a default FAM for AK: almost any city. A GM can say that's not paid for with points, and that they can't have it, but the players would be fully within their rights to ridicule such a GM, because in reality they should have that. My own experience is that a decent GPS+net connection is a far more reliable and useful a guide to a large city than an ordinary person who has lived there all their life (and in terms of knowledge, far more capacious). At the same time, there are things you won't find on the net: it may know more restaurants and bars than the most ardent gourmand, but it won't necessarily know about the owners' private after-hours parties, or be able to tell you about specific customers. Likewise unless he has public ID, or similar, you're not going to able to look up a villain's susceptibility. But if he's been in public fights, you probably could look up his basic powers, costumes, known associates, maybe even a good photo or two. If he does have a public ID, you can maybe work out his susceptibility from his ex-girlfriend's comment on E! that he always checked with the waiter if there was kryptonite in the dishes he ordered at restaurants In that regard, the net gives you either a FAM for generally available knowledge, or it can act as a bonus on skill rolls. Of course, you won't always have access to it, or time to access it - in that case, what you carry in your head is going to have to serve. But it's silly to ignore it.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... I read it one episode, one month at a time and had no problem following it: but it probably didn't hurt that it got re-read during that month. Man, it was a long, long time between issues (these days a month pretty much vanishes just after I've noticed it started). But it's a testament to the story that even 25 years on, it's still worth reading. When it came out, it blew us away: not only did we not know where the story was going, but there had - quite literally - been nothing like it before. We were also getting the English translations of Akira around the same time, also volume by volume. I haven't been so hyped about comics pretty much ever since. cheers, Mark

Re: He's not Bigfoot! He's just a really tall, hairy guy!

Re: Mega-damage, bit by bit Man said 175 point base: simply taking him at his word. Fantasy can be played at all sorts of levels - I've literally run games starting at 25 point base all the way up to 200 point base, set in the same game world. In general though, I find 150 -175 points too high for starting characters, for my taste. I can't see the point in giving characters plenty of points to start with and then limiting what can be bought with those points so that the characters are less powerful than the points would normally allow. I just give 'em less to start with and then let them build their characters pretty much as they see fit (with GM veto on clearly abusive combos, of course!) cheers, Mark