Markdoc

Re: "Realistic" gun damage

Re: Building times

Re: Empathic Healing plus Damage Link Just a couple of comments here: In the last campaign, I allowed "Regeneration usable on others" for healing, with the side effect that the healer themselves took the same amount of BOD damage. It is by far the simplest way to build empathic healing and as you note, the side effect keeps it from getting out of hand. I also allowed "healing trance" where the healer could go into a deep trance (DCV0) and accelerate their own healing (regeneration, again, but with a 5 hour interval) allowing them to regenerate all their BOD in a half day or so. Yeah, it's not recommended in the rules. Whatever. You're the GM, it's your call. FWIW, in 5 years of regular play, this combo was not a problem - and it gave us exactly what I wanted from healing. In Amazon speak "Would order again" But then, I wanted the party to be fully able to heal up in 3-4 days after an intense encounter, without allowing healing to be freely on tap during combat. I didn't want long down time because of injury, but I wanted fast, brutal possibly lethal combat. The empathic healing route, plus self-healing for the healer, does that, because in combat, the healer can only soak up so much damage and then they are out of it for at least some hours. If that's not what you want, then regeneration is not a good option. As for the side effect, the "takes damage inflicted during the healing period" is unlikely to occur frequently, but could be serious when it does: I'd just go with a single side effect, but increase the limitation one step to reflect that the empathic healer will always take some damage and could - potentially - take a lethal hit. cheers, Mark

Re: Flight based on self telekenesis I on the other hand, love it and use it frequently! It seems to me to model very nicely a lot of powers that are exerted through the environment or loose objects. I think that's a matter of GM taste. As to the limitation, I'd agree with the others: given the ease of finding suitable metal, I'm guessing -1/4 sounds about right. cheers, Mark

Re: "Realistic" gun damage To answer mhd's question, the damage spread on Hero looks small compared to GURPS, But that's a little misleading, because what you are really interested in is the ratio of damage to defences: and in a modern game, the spread of defences in Hero is also low compared to GURPS. That means a 2d6+1 round is actually more threatening than it looks: even with normal ballistic protection, there's a decent chance you will take BOD and you will almost always take STUN. Without ballistic armour, 1 or 2 hits will likely take out most human targets. This is not far from the effect we probbaly want, so spread is not such an issue, IMO. With regard to modern weapons vs black powder, the differences are not as great as one might think when it comes to raw killing power - at close range, a .58 minie ball will kill you just as dead as a .5 hi-power. The latter will go right through you ... and so will the former. The difference is that modern weapons are far more rapid to fire and reload, more accurate and tend to have much higher velocity bullets (meaning that the .5 hi-power will still go through you at 200 metres, whereas the minie ball won't). At close range modern ballistic armour will stop the minie ball dead, whereas modern ammo has a chance of penetration. Rather than increasing the damage of modern weapons, then (which is going to significantly increase PC mortality at the heroic level), I'd simply make two changes: older firearms already have significant loading times, which put them at a major disadvantage. To that, I'd reflect their slower, high momentum slugs by doubling all range modifiers and giving them "reduced penetration". Against unarmoured targets they will thus still be deadly, but against modern body armour, they'll be largely useless. And they'll be handily outranged by modern weapons, which should also be the case. cheers, Mark

Re: Damage Limits I was. Magic swords are only relatively common in traditional myth and fantasy, if by "traditional" you mean "like D&D". In written fantasy, I'd regard Conan as pretty trad. sword and sorcery, and he goes through his whole career without owning a magic sword, as do Fafrhd and the Grey Mouser. There's plenty of magic and even a few magic weapons, but they're all plot device stuff, destroyed or lost once used. Lord of the Rings falls into Trad. fantasy, too, albeit more at the epic end, I would have thought. It does have magic swords: but they're few and far between: Aragon, scion of an ancient line and an experienced adventurer, doesn't have one (until Narsil was reforged). Boromir, chief warlord of the most powerful kingdom of men, doesn't have one, nor indeed, does anyone else in the entire kingdom, that we know of. In stories like the Nibelungenlied, which is traditional myth, two magic swords pop up ... in the course of decades of strife between kingdoms and major noble houses . In Arthurian legend there is one - maybe two - magic swords, neither of which appear to be very powerful. Yet I'd call Arthurian myth pretty traditional. And so it goes. One can certainly run games based traditional fantasy and myth without loads of magic gear. Indeed, that's pretty much the default setting, if one wants traditional, I would have thought. Certainly, my last three campaigns have all been pretty traditional fantasy, with lords and castles, monsters and evil wizards, and wide-ranging adventures by land, sea and air ... but not a lot of magic swords. It's certainly not a given in that sort of setting that any competent adventurer will have magic loot: in fact, in my game, magic loot is rare and valuable. Right: this is why I made the comment in the first place. If magic armour and weapons are commonplace enough that most PCs can reasonably expect to get them in a while, it will change more than just flavour - it will change the dynamics of the game, and that significantly. Raising the base damage by even a couple a DC, raises total damage output by 4DC, which basically renders mundane armour - to take one example - pretty close to useless. Unless you want a high body count, this means that players must have magical protection to remain viable in combat. If all the PCs have magical attacks and defences, then among humanoid foes, only who also have magical attacks and defences remain a credible threat. Note, I should stress that I am not saying you shouldn't play like this: I've played plenty of games exactly like this. But it is a design decision which will echo through every adventure you run thereafter and shape the type of adventures you can run: you'll need extra-mundane opposition pretty much for every adventure.

Re: Damage Limits

Re: 400 pounds per square inch = ??? Absolutely: that's what I first suggested to Mike: work out what you want your snake to be able to crush: that's where you set your strength cheers, Mark

Re: Building times

Re: Building times Slavery is a brutal business: there's no way around it. And it didn't actually change all that much between Greek times and pre-civil war US. As for incentives, at base, the incentive was "Do what we say or we will kill you, possibly in inventive and exceedingly painful ways". Less permanent penalties - maiming, branding, blinding, were also employed. Getting a whipping was actually relatively mild on the list on on bad things that could happen to you. But positive incentives were also used. The Romans left a detailed code, but we know the Ottomans, or for that matter, American slavers did the same. If you behave badly: whippings, rape, loss of children or partner, torture and death. If you behave well - permission to take a lover and raise a family, better food, better clothing, some spending money, maybe a little house of your own - and if you save hard, maybe the right to buy your freedom (when you are old and thus less valuable ) That situation was pernicious. Although the vast majority of slaves had lives like Newt Gingrich: dull, brutal and short, a few could actually rise to wealth and power, and some to a decent standard of living ... but never security. A slave's position was always subject to his or her master's whims. Despite this relatively few people ran away: the laws and society were ready to detect and hand over runaway slaves. Where could you go? How would you live? Most people would rather live in misery than die in unknown, but probably painful circumstances. And recall, even at the time, some Romans from the late republic complained that household slaves lived better than free peasants. Would you throw over a small amount of comfort, if the odds were 100-1 that you'd just end up getting tortured or killed? As Lawnmower Boy has already pointed out skilled slaves certainly existed - and in relatively large numbers: the Romans had a whole, empire-spanning bureaucracy based around the use of slaves, responsible for upkeep of the roads, aqueducts, public buildings and ... running the state treasury (Aeraerium) which had the responsibility for military expenditure. Yes, slave accountants, and slave administrators. Not just slave accountants, but slave accountants helping to run the military. We also know of slave sailors, slave soldiers (and slave generals!) slave librarians, bakers, builders, messengers, supervisors, etc. In a culture where many people were illiterate, anumerate or poorly trained, why would you waste a newly captured literate slave, with useful skills, by getting them to pull a wagon? Plenty of other people to do that. As far as oarsmen go, there's a Venetian (Cristoforo da Canal) who left us discussions on naval warfare (he was among other things, a galley captain before becoming a politician) in the late 1400's and early 1500's. He (and apparently his fellows) were of the opinion that free rowers were generally better trained, better motivated and tactically more effective. In the Venice of his day, they were also a relatively small minority, because they were more expensive than slaves, being professional sailors, not citizen volunteers as was the case back in Hellenic Greece. So yes, slaves were used on military projects, including in some cases fighting and defending slave-built fortifications. Slaves' work was supervised, of course. A free worker knew that he might be flogged and discharged without pay if he did his work poorly. A slave knew that he might be bound to an iron grill and slowly roasted alive, alongside his children, if he did his work poorly (yes, actual historical example). Given the options, the vast majority of slaves did what they were told. However, even in the face of certain brutal reprisal, slave revolts were a feature of slave-owning societies, meaning that if there was even a small chance at freedom, there were plenty of people ready to grasp it. As for freeing slaves who fought, that was unusual, but certainly not unknown, and not restricted to Syracuse, or Greece for that matter. The Turkish Admiral at Lepanto promised freedom to his slave oarsmen after the the battle was won (though he was probably lying, given the numbers involved), Scipio promised his slave oarsmen freedom after the war was won (and he at least seems to have kept his word). In Greece, slaves who fought for Athens at Marathon were freed - though only some time after and as a result of a legal challenge ... no, really! In the US, there was a proposal in the south to offer freedom to slaves who were willing to fight for the Confederates, when the war was going badly, though the fear of armed slaves meant that went nowhere. And so on. There's plenty of examples, but the people who left us notes about those examples make a point of noting them because they were unusual. The Romans, for example used roughly 9000 slaves to help build the siege works at Masada: the remains of the guarded camps can still be visited, and there the slaves were being used to military architecture which was to be used to attack their co-religionists! We don't know what happened to those slaves, but despite taking an active part in the siege, there's no record that they were freed, indeed, we know from Josephus that some of them at least were later paraded (still slaves) in Rome. cheers, Mark

Re: Building times Would it kill you to do a little historical research? In the examples I gave, the expedition to Sicily contained about 130 ships (including transports). Scipio's invasion of New Carthage around 150 ships (also including Carthage). At Actium, probably the biggest fleet action of the ancient world (in Europe, anyway) involved about 5-600 ships (again, including transports). The Delian League of the Greek cities against Persia were able to scrape together between 200-300 galleys to face the Persian invasion: that's all of their fleets added together. So fleets of 2-300 were very rarely assembled and as a result, you're grossly underestimating the importance of 25 warships. We don't - as far as I know - have accurate figures for the Carthaginian defence fleet, though estimates suggest 130-150 warships, so in this case 25 galleys would represent about a 5th to a 6th of their total strength. I have already noted that most rowers were not slaves - but it very clear from contemporary writers that slave oarsmen were used, and used in their thousands and tens of thousands - and that in case of need, could make up a significant proportion of some fleets. And that's in the ancient world, by the medieval period, galley slaves were used even more frequently (it's estimated that almost all the Turkish oarsmen at Lepanto: more than 35,000, were slaves. Christian records indicate more than Turkish 12,000 slaves were freed in the aftermath of the battle). There were also regular markets held to ransom galley slaves - I visited one such medieval "ransom centre" earlier this month on Rhodos. Right - but masons are also a small part of your building workforce. They are not the only skilled workforce, either. There were other skilled workers involved in medieval building, too. None of that obviates the need for a large - not especially trained - workforce for hauling and lifting stones and digging. Claiming that "slaves weren't used" flies in the face of massive literary and archeological evidence. In many places, they were: we know this. Hell, even here in Denmark. Pretty Nyhavn, with all its bars and restaurants was dug by enslaved swedish prisoners of war, many of whom died in the process. They were used for otehr military building projects as well. cheers, Mark

Re: Damage Limits

Re: Damage Limits

Re: Damage Limits Really? You have some actual magic items we can compare? No? Well, in that case, we can fall back on the rues. 1d6 HKA is 15 points. 1d6 RKA is also 15 points. So yes, a zappy wand is no more expensive to create than a magic sword. And "coming out of nowhere"? Seriously, in a world where we have magic spells, complaining that magic is ... well, magical, seems a bit odd. Each of these swords were wielded by the realm's mightiest heroes. What were their powers? Excalibur? None, apparently. It was the scabbard which was magical. Durendal? No powers that we know of: it was just really hard to break. Balmung? Might have had magical powers: the legends don't say. Kusanagi, is the real deal: it had the power to control winds ... but it was the sword of the gods, and part of the imperial regalia: not exactly something your average wandering adventurer is likely to get his hands on. You're kind of making my point for me: in old myths, magic swords tend to be rare beasties. Not non-existent: just rare. That's how they are in my games: I've given away 3 or 4 magic swords over the last ten years of gaming, I think. cheers, Mark

Re: Building times

Re: Building times It depends greatly on your labour force: the more people you put on, the more time you can save. As Mike noted, sometimes, building a castle or a cathedral could take decades (occasionally, even many, many decades), However the Co-Cathedral of St John on Malta, which is pretty damn big, went up in 4 years. Even more impressive, the defences of Valletta, which dwarf any castle I have ever seen, went up in just 5 years. Also at Valetta, the maximum building time allowed for a palazzo (multistory stone house built around a courtyard, and hooked up to the drains) was just over two years and most of them went up in the space of months - including internal plastering, carving and painting. The whole city was built in remarkably few years. If you want to go earlier, Dover castle was also completed in a bit over 4 years. So - real rough figures - if you have resources enough, houses can be built in a couple of weeks (for small ones) to several months (for large ornate mini-palaces). Stone castles can go up in a year or so (for small ones) to several years for large ones - and cathedrals and major town fortifications can go up in 4-5 years. Of course, that assumes plenty of resources. You might be able to shorten the times by pouring even more into it, but probably not by much. If you have fewer resources, or take pauses, it takes correspondingly longer. The Hospitallers tinkered with the defences of Krak de Chevaliers for nearly 30 years before they were satisfied, and then launched a second wave of rebuilding a generation later that took them a further 20 years to finish. As for boats and stuff a very large viking longship would take a typical team of 10 men about 6 months including the time to cut down the trees, cure the wood and build and equip the ship, based on the work done at the Roskilde museum. That matches the sagas where people typically built a ship in one summer for use the next summer. cheers, Mark

Re: In consideration of partial effect dispel You seem to have already gotten there, but in my game, a simple 1-hex continuous suppress does the job (possibly with personal immunity). It's expensive enough that it will stop relatively few spells, but it will take the edge off them and that may be all you need. Alternatively, you can use dispel, but set it up on a trigger - magical attack vs target, so that it "counterspells". cheers, Mark

Re: Damage Limits

Re: 400 pounds per square inch = ???

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing I have no problems with powers as unbelievable skills, but that's not really the issue here: certainly high level skills let you succeed under adverse conditions. So under most circumstances then you can disappear with your 18- stealth roll: situations where no normal person could hope to succeed. But there are times when the GM can - legitimately, I think - say "Nope, ain't happening". In such a situation, you can skip the roll. That's not limited to skills: there are times where the same applies to powers. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing Agreed. I don't think I have ever given a penalty for "bad roleplaying" (however that's defined). If you simply state what you are doing, that's the base case. Bonuses are for doing something more. The overall tenor about adding bonuses however, when looked at in toto is pretty damn conclusive. Taking one comment out of context, it may not seem conclusive, but it's hard to read the rules and get any impression other than that roleplaying and tactical bonuses should range from +1 to +3 with the higher end being for unusual actions. Exactly. Also breaking the task up allows for the possibility of partial failures: the captain may refuse to let you in with weapons, but that's still yards better than not being allowed in at all. Of course: this is the strategic/tactical aspect of social interaction. A skilled player will set up the ground: make contacts, build a reputation, etc, so they can take advantage of it when they really need it. Sometimes you don't have time to set up the ground, but even then a couple of hours might allow a well-connected character to (say) find out who's going to be in charge at a specific time and choose to maybe wait a couple of hours so that they avoid trying to persuade Captain Highbrow, who's known to be stickler for protocol and instead talk to Captain Lowbrow, who's known to be a cheerful sort of chap. These in-game differences are the "terrain" on which social interaction takes place: as I noted last time we had this discussion the backstory makes generalisation about interaction entirely impossible: the whole "persuade the captain" thing takes on a whole different light if the PCs last interaction with him was cutting his hand off as they escaped his attempt to arrest them! Excellent! Now, you are starting to think like a skills-oriented GM! I do enforce the rule you mention, and I encourage thinking tactically (also in social interactions). However, tactical considerations need to also look at the possibility of failure: if you have a good chance to succeed at first, it actually does make sense to hold some bonuses back. If you are not sure of success, it may be better to throw them in up front, because the consequence of failure may be that you don't get a second chance, or that you begin to stack up negative modifiers. That's a decision for the players to make. As far as I can read, the rules are pretty clear. As you note, the use of modifiers (note the plural) is encouraged (at multiple sites in the rules) but the over-use of roleplaying or surprise modifiers should not be overdone: they should be reserved for actions that are noteworthy, especially with regard to the higher bonuses. At the same time, GMs should not go completely overboard: you don't need to make a PER rolls to find your keys on your night-table (as Sean suggested he should, in another thread). You don't need a climbing roll to climb a ladder in your backyard, or make a concealment roll when you are looking exactly where something is hidden. This comes back to the routine tasks and "things players should know" discussion we just had above. Making the rolls is an important part of the system, but you don't want to go overboard, and require rolls for every little thing. My general rule of thumb (and this applies to combat as well) is to make rolls when it seems appropriate. That's most of the time, but if failure has no discernible consequences, I don't bother. If the Stealth 18-, OCV8 assassin wants to sneak up on an unaware, 10 point guardsman, in a part of the castle where there is no-one nearby, I'm more like to say "You take him out without problem" as require a stealth roll and a phase of combat. Why slow the game down with rolls that - even if failed - will simply be rolled again until success is obtained? Likewise, there will be times when no roll is allowed: even if the assassin has 18- Stealth, I'm not going to give him a roll to hide himself in a well-lit, open space, with nothing to hide behind, while people are watching him. Climbing 18- isn't going to get you up a perfectly smooth, glass-like wall without some help, and conversation 18- isn't going to get Tarkofanes to renounce his evil ways, lay his undead minions to rest and take up making multiracial dolls for handicapped children. So the chunk of rules you quote - far from contradicting what we have been saying - is all of a piece with them. You need to read things in context, not treat each sentence or sentence fragment as something to be analysed by itself. Where a particular GM draws the "no roll allowed/required" line seems to me to be common sense, but obviously, every GM will have slightly different place to draw that line and - for that matter - the same GM might draw it two different places in two different games. I'd treat "Deduction 15- differently if I was GM'ing a grim-n-gritty police procedural or an anime-inspired space opera game. I'm not sure that rules on "How to GM your game" would add anything positive at all. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing Both approaches can work. This is where tactics on the part of the players comes in. As I said, I am not fond of breaking tasks up just to break tasks up. However, faced with a tough task, it's often easier to take it a chunk at a time. Here's two examples. The players bustle up to the Guard captain and demand to see the King. He doesn't know them, and they look (to him) like a heavily-armed, potentially dangerous bunch. If they insist they want to retain their weapons, that's even more suspicious. Like you, I'm thinking -5 at least, probably more. However, if the players have a face man with appropriate social skills, I feed some information back to them (no roll needed for this: I figure that anyone who has a skill should be able to make some general estimate of how to use the skill, and how tough a given task should be. I thus warn players when their character is about to do something they would know to be difficult). They may decide, in that case, to break the task up. In that case the players - not the GM - may decide a different approach. For example: 1. Let's persuade him to read the evidence first before we start making any demands 2. Once he's read it, we should get a bonus 3. Then we persuade him we need to see the king, not just have the documents delivered 4. Then, once he's agreed to take us to the king, persuade him we need our weapons because we fear assassins (and evidence of assassins would help here: if the players are smart, they can try and work up evidence in advance to give them more bonuses). They could also try to enlist a person trusted by the captain to get a bonus, run up some blackmail on him, try to impress him with rank, if one of them is a noble ... there's more than one way to tackle problems like this. So the players have a choice: run into possibly difficult-to-overcome odds, or try to even the odds a bit and tackle it a bit at a time. In that regard, I don't really play it very differently from combat: if the players want to storm into the castle with weapons out, they'll get a warning that it's likely to be the last thing they ever do, but still, it's their choice. Of course, if there are things they could not or should not know (like: the guard captain is in on the plot!) they don't get warnings about things they don't know. As for the comments about the consequences of rolls, that's so context-dependant, it is completely impossible to generalise. A refusal is going to mean different things depending on who the PCs are, how they behave .... too many variables to say anything useful. cheers, Mark

Re: 400 pounds per square inch = ???

Re: 400 pounds per square inch = ???

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? We saw that recently: it made me want to go to Tokyo just to eat there for my birthday, and I am still vaguely considering the idea, even if it seems kind of extravagant. Cheers, Mark