Markdoc

Re: Paladin Martial Art? That doesn't sound like a "puny zombie" - you're talking about a level of defence 50% higher than hardened steel: tough enough to bounce without harm - on average - a rock hurled by a catapult or a two-handed axe wielded by the mightiest of barbarians. A half dozen zombies with that level of toughness would tear through any kind of normal soldiery. cheers, Mark

Re: Paladin Martial Art? Given the traditional link between the Paladin and his mount in D&D, a riding martial art (levels in movethrough or moveby, combat riding, etc) might be in order. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them? As a GM, or a player that kind of fiat suggest to me that the GM hasn't thought his economy or magic systems through. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Economies: How closely should we examine them? I have no such rule, have always had devious players and haven't had a problem. The one time I had a mage try to buy his way with transformed gold, he was glad to only escape with a brief period of enforced servitude

Re: Without fusion power, why go back to the moon? Actually, that sounds kind of cool. Useless, expensive and dangerous, but cool. Imagine the effect of a super-radioactive pool of molten metal throwing great gobs of the stuff into the air, as it poisoned everything in sight (and then some), like the Old Faithful of Hell. That'd attract interstellar tourists, even if nothing else we did would. cheers, Mark

Re: My Campaign Is Starting to Flesh Out... I Need Help! If you want a published setting, I'd second the suggestion for Valdorian age and Elweir, even if you don't use the magic system/Sword and sorcery feel. That's simply because a really big city offers possibilities that a keep on the Borderlands won't. Another possibility - one that I used in my last game - is a non-Hero system setting. I pinched the idea of Pavis from Runequest - a city perched on the edge of the ruins of a much older and larger city. In my game, I started with a large, very wealthy port city, that was home to powerful wizards and lords. Living mostly by sea-trade and fishing fleets, and protected by huge walls, the area outside the city's crop-growing hinterlands was still pretty much wilderness, inhabited by barbarian tribes. Eventually, a huge earthquake dropped the cities seafront 8 metres, flooding the lower quarters of the town, and triggering a massive mudslide from the crater lake of the mountain towering above it - burying the upper half of the town. With a hole in the wall, the barbarians flooding in to loot, their fleets destroyed, half their city under a steaming pile of clay and their port lost, most of the survivors left or died. Fast forward a few centuries, and a small city (built mostly of remnants) has grown up on the edge of the vast ruins. The exposed ruins have been picked over pretty thoroughly, and are now a dangerous wasteland of tumbled walls, forlorn columns and hidden cellars, drowned in trees, bushes and vines, but buried in the giant mudslide (now honeycombed with tunnels), there are still untouched buildings, potentially full of treasure, which continues to draw a motley crew of adventurers. And who knows what's in the cellars of ruins sticking up above the waves?. The descendants of the original city dwellers are trying to rebuild the city's former glory and are holed up in fortified towns dotted about the ruins, while barbarians, outlaws and things escaped from the ancient labs of long-dead-wizards roam the ruinous landscape. The players ended up using one of these fortified bolt-holes as base, getting involved in equal parts political intrigue between the various factions and looting runs into the ruins. cheers, Mark

Re: How many of you use END outside of magic? and other questions... Some clarifications as to why I made the change I did, which might help decision making. It is one more thing to keep track of in combat: but then so is STUN So the first question I posed when this comes up, was "Does it add anything useful?" I can't do without STUN, but I decided that END added little, for these reasons: 1. Combats in fantasy hero tend to be brutal and short, compared to Champions, and people tend to make less use of powers. It was very rare that people ran out of END. I also found that I was designing my NPCs specifically so that they did not run out of END under normal use ... so I was ignoring it myself! (To be fair, I was often running up to 20 NPCs in a fight, so that added up to significant book-keeping otherwise). The one exception to this was magic users, who did use a lot of powers and who did often run into END problems. So my first decision was that if regular END use went, I wanted to retain something to simulate the effect on mages. I chose to require LTE use, to help reduce the amount of casting that was possible, but regular END use only for magic would also work. It'd just be less restricting. 2. I didn't want tireless characters: so I still needed a mechanism to simulate tiredness and exhaustion. Using the LTE rules worked well for that for me, but you could simulate it other ways. This meant, for example, that in prolonged fights, or battles, even non-magic-users got exhausted - as time went on, their LTE END ran down, when it was all gone, actions stated to cost them STUN which meant either operating at low efficiency, or at full efficiency for only short bursts before they collapsed. As an aside, the requirement for Magic use to use LTE had an effect I liked - in big battles, magic-users let off a barrage of spells and counter-spells like artillery , but once the spell barrage was over, the mages were generally spent, and if both sides were still functional, the issue was decided by clash of pike, with occasional eruptions of spell-fire. This mechanism worked well for things like long chases, having to shift heavy objects, wearing heavy armour in hot weather, etc. The last question was "How does it work?" When I decided on the house rule, we played with it as a trial for several sessions, and honestly, apart from less paperwork, it made no difference at all. That's when I decided to keep it as a house rule. cheers, Mark

Re: Has anybody experimented with removing Speed? We actually tried it in-game, but the withdrawal symptoms were still horrible. Basically after trying the game without SPD for two sessions, everyone - including the GM who had suggested it - agreed it was such a horrible idea that we would never mention it again. Basically the whole game was written with that mechanic as core and it comes across as only part of a game without it. cheers, Mark

Re: How many of you use END outside of magic? and other questions... Not at all: it merely means they need amending In my last FH campaign I dropped END for general use, due to player complaints about "too much book-keeping" ... and I could kind of see their point. This led to the following house rules: 1. Normal use of powers does not cost END. However, this is not equivalent to "Reduced END", which may still be purchased. 2. Players may build powers that cost end and take the limitation "Costs END" to reflect unusually tiring powers. 3. Pushing is still possible, but pushed powers use Long Term Endurance. 4. Although normal activity does not usually use END, prolonged activity will use Long Term Endurance as usual. Basically what this means is that in most cases, the GM and players can ignore END. However sustained activity will still tire characters out (When needed, I simply use the LTE rules from the book, pretty much as written). This is why, despite the changes, some players still bought "Reduced END" for a few powers: it gave them essentially the ability to use a power tirelessly. Reduced END was still also required for continuous powers, otherwise they would start to use burn LTE after a while. This approach meant that no further changes needed to be made to pricing structures for powers. This set up worked so well, that I think I will use it in all future heroic-level games. With regard to the OP's original post: In the same FH game, magic use burned LTE, which meant that most mages ran out of steam after one or two good fights or similar bursts of activity, and would need to rest up for a few hours to a day to become effective again. That worked pretty well. Tracking individual wounds? We tried it. Once. Never again. Way too much book keeping Can't comment on the Turakian age system, as I hated it on sight and have never used it. That was the reason that the Turakian age stuff is the only fantasy-related material from Hero games, I never bought. LTE isn't a problem, in most cases, because (with the exception of special cases like the magic rules or pushing house rules above) you don't normally bother. It's for things like forced marches, the PCs trying to carry away a giant statue, or blasting their way through thick stone walls with an energy blast, etc. It's really only for cases where PCs are going to be using powers over prolonged periods. cheers, Mark

Re: How to balance mages in high fnatasy. Given that Concentration doesn't make you more vulnerable to damage, I'm guessing that campaign had a pretty high body count if a single hit was doing 2xBOD+DEF in body damage! cheers, Mark

Re: 6E - Low Fantasy Hero - Game Balance Issues - Advice Requested A couple of points. 1. I'm not a big fan of points limits*. In my experience, setting hard caps to powers or attacks is like saying to the players "This is what you should aim for". If you do set caps, be prepared for every PC who doesn't start at the cap to reach it in a few sessions. I use 20 as a soft cap and charge double to go over it. The hard cap is actually 30 STR which is Conan-level badassery. In reality though very few players start at or surpass the soft cap until they have many, many sessions under their belt. 2. It's all about points. Frankly I'd be surprised in your PCs didn't start out at the Max. for their relevant characteristics, because you are giving them lots o' points. I typically start "low Fantasy" at 100 points (50 + 50 points of complications) specifically so that players can't go hog wild on characteristics - and occasionally less. As you have noted already, a 175 point character plus equipment totally outclasses a starting threat, and (as a very rough guide) is equivalent to a 5-7th level D20 3.5 character. 3. I find a terribly useful houserule is that free equipment and powers/talents don't stack. You can have combat luck ... but you can't add it to armour. Combat luck reflects not getting hit, or not getting hit significantly (which is why it doesn't help at all against getting whacked by surprise): it doesn't reflect Pecs and Abs of Steel. You get the better of combat luck or armour, not both. Same applies to spells. Your magic shield spell will add DEF to your arcane armour spell (because you paid points for both), but not to your mundane armour. Likewise, you can't buy naked advantages and add them to your free sword (and a wizard can't take a sword and use it as a free starting point for a permanent enchantment: if he wants to soup it up, he treats it as an external power and uses adjustment powers. He can't simply buy 1d6 HKA and add it to a 1d6 HKA shortsword to get a shortsword that does greatsword damage. If players balk at this point out that it's a game balance mechanism akin to the fact that you can't add two morale bonuses or two luck bonuses together in D20, and in Hero system, it's part of the "real equipment" limitation - which is why they get that equipment for free. 4. Come down hard on magic use. Define - in advance - what styles or school of magic are available and think about how you want them to play out in your game (in style first, not mechanics). Don't let players decide how they will cast magic: it's an important part of the flavour of any fantasy setting. Then build mechanics to taste. As an example, in my last game, magic required a skill roll, extra time, concentration, side effect (in some cases) and cost Long Term Endurance. That meant that a mage casting in close combat had a big target painted on his face, and also that mages could only cast a limited number of magic before running out of juice. The flip side, was that the limitations meant that spells were cheap - and therefore could be powerful. Mages really wanted to stay out of close combat, but at the same time, in a fight you really wanted to kill the mage first because they could boil you alive in your armour if they got a few seconds to cast ... 5. You are no longer in a rules set where characters have to have magic items to compete (or even just stay alive). I like to exploit that and am really, really stingy with magic items. The lack of the ability to just buy or find a magic item to cover mundane needs like eating, slepping, staying alive in the wilds or traveling, gives the characters reasons to spend points on something other than combat. That said, I'm a big fan of low fantasy. With these guidelines, we've had many successful, long-running low fantasy campaigns. cheers, Mark *That's a polite way of saying I regard them as training wheels for newbie GMs and players.

Re: How to balance mages in high fnatasy. I was the GM! In truth though, we have had similar characters in most of our games, regardless of GM. There's only been one who'd snuff characters like that out of hand. That doesnt mean that they got a free ride: simply that the PCs protected their squishies Cheers, Mark

Re: Should Abort be automatic? I'm still not seeing a problem here: either gamewise or logic-wise. Aborting simulates the real life "Imma outa'here" panic reaction and fills a real (and frequently needed) use in play. Those two needs are sufficient for me, though we could probbaly think of more. cheers, Mark

Re: Should Abort be automatic? A seperate issue here (though one which colours the discussion somewhat) is dive for cover. That's not an issue with the rules for aborting, per se, because aborting covers other things, but in one specific instance - using dive for cover against melee attacks - you can really abuse the aborting rules. When Dive for cover was first introduced (4E, 155) it was only for area effect attacks, where Dodge - which affected DCV - was irrelevant. This made sense. It was only later that DFC was extended to also cover melee attacks. I've commented on other threads that we pretty swiftly identified that as a case of poor game design and added a house rule. The house rule is: "You can try to get away from an attack by dodging. This maneuver adds +3 to your DCV. A dodge can also include a half-move, by "diving for cover". A Dive for Cover requires a DEX roll at -1 per 2 M covered and you fall prone at the end of the move. If the distance moved by a successful Dive for Cover takes you outside the area of an AoE attack, you are not affected by that attack. You not have to end your move behind cover to "dive for cover", but if your movement does end behind cover, you may add a further +2 DCV. If the DEX roll required for a Dive for Cover is failed, you instead fall prone at your starting point, and are at half DCV.". Very simple and avoids the problem with DFC. As for aborting, there still doesn't seem to be a problem with that mechanism at all. cheers, Mark

Re: How to balance mages in high fnatasy. Actually the mage who is hamstrung in tactical combat is a perfectly playable character - as long as he can do other things which are important for the game. Indeed, in my last game one PC played a mage with no defensive spells, and one offensive spell - a 1-hex 15 STR TK! That character was not only viable, but a valuable member of the party, who saved the group's lives many times, over a campaign that lasted 5+ years! Our experience (across multiple GMs, and multiple campaigns) is that if mages can reliably (or even semi-reliably) go toe to toe with other combat type PCs, then there's no reason to play anything else, and soon, every PC will be a mage. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing: I have fond memories of campaigns we played where every PC was a mage! It simply depends on what kind of game you want. Basically the combat-mage is only a genre-defining character if that genre is D&D and D&D-like games, and those games have their own (admittedly, relatively ineffective) control methods to provide balance (no armour, lower HP, restricted number of powers, 2 bad saves, etc). Hero system doesn't have any bias in that direction, which means of course, there are no in-built controls. It's up to the GM to provide them. cheers, Mark

Re: How to balance mages in high fnatasy.

Re: Should Abort be automatic? Heh. The new technique will save you some time, if nothing else. As for the idea, I think the primacy of abort is justified on several grounds: 1.We prioritise defence over attack, as a general principle 2. The cost of an abort - the full loss of the next phase - is a relatively heavy one. In a situation where there is a relevant disparity in ability between the parties (relevant in this case being OCV/DCV, DEX/SPD), the ability to abort is actually less useful. If you have a really high DCV compared to your attacker's OCV, you gain relatively little in exchange for losing an action since he probably would not have hit you anyway. If it's the reverse, you are giving up a phase, and may get up getting hit anyway. When the disparity in SPD is great, in favour of the defender, they can use their extra actions defensively and still attack on "off phases" (this is actually more flexible than aborting). When it's in favour of the attacker, aborting really sets you up as a punching bag: it's a desperation tactic. Abort is actually most useful when the two foes are evenly matched. In terms of simple pros and cons. Pro ..... I don't see any Pro's here. What is the actual in-play problem this change is trying to address? Cons .... 1. Given that aborting to defence can already carry a heavy penalty, I am not sure making it harder is a good idea. 2. It's an additional pair of dice rolls in a combat system that is already dice-roll heavy. 3. It places further combat advantages on the side of those characters who already have substantial combat advantages: I am quite certain we don't need that. cheers, Mark

Re: How to balance mages in high fnatasy. The trick is to give the non-magic types something to do. Usually, that something is combat, although rogue-types are possible. To make fighters useful in combat, magic can't be instant or easy: if a Mage can cast a spell as easily as a fighter swings a sword, the fighter will soon be useless. Typically, you can create this balance with limitations like extra time, incantations, gestures, etc. Another thing is to allows "powers as skills". If the fighter can buy an arrea of effect RKA defined as strikinging everyone adjacent with his sword, or an AP RKA, defined as mighty blow, he's going to be on a more level footing. Cheers, Mark

Re: Superheroic fantasy

Re: Facing and Passing Equally to the point, this is a gaming board, and we're in the "system discussion" section, so one should expect that discussion of RAW and rules minutæ are the order of the day. Saying "Ah, just wing it" might be appropriate in a thread where someone is asking advice for their own game, but there's not really much point to such a comment in a rules discussion! As for the original question, I stand by my original response: the effect of the drain depends on how the drain is defined when it is built. The only addition I'd make is that "Flight usable as swimming" does not IMO - turn it into swimming. It means simply that the flight mode can be used underwater. It's still flight. As an example, a regular plane flies. Sky Captain's amazing hot-rodded airplane flies - and can also fly underwater! It's doesn't wiggle its tail fins or flap its rigid aluminium wings: it just flies. Drains are to a large extent a metagamey effect (and to be fair, often mimic a meta effect from source material: how exactly does one turn off "a mutant power" anyway? Whatever, it happens all the time in the Marvel Universe) and needs to be looked at in that light. Thus (to reiterate) "drain swimming" does not drain "Flight usable as swimming", since the power in question is still Flight. If however, the drain was defined as thickening the water to retard any movement through it, that should be bought as "vs special effect" not "vs a single power" - in this case a pretty limited special effect, but still ... cheers, Mark

Re: VPPs used liberally to prevent character stagnation? Agreed - combat (especially for direct attacks) is not the problem. It's everything else. Cleverly used VPPS can be a problem in combat though. A 20 point VPP can't generate a lethal RKA, but it can generate an entangle which will take almost any human target out of the fight. Since FH (and most heroic games) tends to generate characters who can be one-shotted by a good hit, and use hit locations, a relatively small flash followed by a sword to the head, can wreak havoc. Even a relatively small running drain can be lethal. Etc. So I'd add that even in combat a VPP can be a huge force multiplier, if used craftily. It's not raw combat power, as such, that's the problem, it's the ability to generate effects that many (if not most) opponents can't easily prepare for, or counter. cheers, Mark

Re: VPPs used liberally to prevent character stagnation? But that cost is offset by flexibility. If you are not careful as a GM, lots and lots of flexibility. A GM unaware of how this can play out will reap a harvest of bitter, bitter tears. In a fantasy setting, even a few points sunk into some powers become hugely powerful - flash, flight, forcefield, detects, etc, because standard fantasy opponents offer lack any counter-methods and standard settings are often walk-overs for characters with powers (5" Flight, usable by others, for example, won't send you zipping across continents, but it renders castle and town walls irrelevant and turns many monsters that lack ranged attacks into so much chopped meat). We've been playing FH for near on 3 decades now, and for a long time, VPPs were banned by many of my fellow GMs because of their vast potential to be gamebreakers. Certainly many of my own most effective FH characters had VPPs. I allow VPPs, but I also ride very tight herd on them to stop them becoming way, way, too effective: mostly by requiring very tight definitions on what can go in them. A VPP for "Magic of the Temple of the Horned Man" for example is OK, because that defines pretty tightly what spells the character has access to. A VPP for "Magic" would not be. In the last game (which ran regularly for 5 years) we had characters who started with VPPs and other characters who acquired them as the game went on and they got XPs. That worked well, and certainly the players who had them did not express dissatisfaction. cheers, Mark

Re: Make Your Own Motivational Poster As noted, atheism is "without gods" not "against gods". There's a perfectly good word for the latter: "Antitheism". In all three cases, you could substitute "religion" for "God" and retain the accurate meaning. Many of the pre-christian thinkers who were atheists or agnostics were not necessarily antagonistic towards the idea of gods: some early atheists believed that gods might well exist, but that since they didn't seem to interact with humans much, if at all, what did it matter? You can believe that a god or gods exist and still be an atheist - that is, without gods of your own - if you simply don't care. Personally, I tend to use the word "areligious" - still meaning "without religion" or "without gods" - since "atheist" today has taken on the connotation of "antitheist": and that's not me. I have no idea whether a god or god exists, still less what they might be like or what they want (if anything) from me if they did exist. It doesn't offend me if others have a different viewpoint, or make it difficult for me to work or associate with them. To me, if someone tells me that they are religious, it's the same as if they told me they were gay, or liked Schopenhauer: in all cases, I think "That's nice, but it's not really my thing". I don't see that description as a negative, nor do we need (IMO) a "positive" descriptor: areligious is an accurate description. cheers, Mark

Re: Facing and Passing Someone changed their mind in the course of an internet discussion? I've already notified AP and Reuters!

Re: Facing and Passing You missed the word "typically". cheers, Mark