Markdoc

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing It could be. That's one interaction. Again! Objection! Statement contrary to fact! I have in fact seen many fights which have ended with the first blow in Hero system - in fact at Heroic level, it's not even particularly unusual. No, it's not hypothetical. Merely wrong, as pointed out above.

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing Objection! This is yet another of these unsupported statements made blank face as though they were true. Yes, combat may involve more rolls in a short period, but social interaction may involve just as many rolls (if not more), albeit distributed over a longer period. We've had many, many game sessions the featured no combat, but plenty of skill rolls. This directly contradicts your assertion, so it is clearly false some of the time, if not a lot of the time. Indeed, it's not clear it is true at all, because "number of rolls" alone is a weak metric. Consequences also need to be weighed. "Getting your head bitten off" in the context of combat with a yeti is more likely to have long term consequences than the same event in the context of an argument with a guy on the train. As I said to Hugh, these are all very weak arguments: nothing said so far on this topic convinces me that any of us have actually encountered problems in-game. It's all unsupported assertions, most of which are directly contradicted by real life events. It reads more like hunting around to see if we can create a hypothetical problem. If there have been actual problems, what were they? If there haven't, why should we care? To take a much-discussed example, Ego Attack (sorry, mental blast ) is clearly underpriced ... but in game, it doesn't seem to matter, so I simply stopped worrying about it.

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing See, this has been my experience (especially since +3 is at the extreme end for bonuses: +1 is more usual, +2 reserved for more unusual actions. +3 is something reserved for those actions or statements that make everyone go "You did what, now?"). This whole discussion, from my point of view is sliding down the well greased chute it always does, into highly theoretical examples designed to show that under certain unusual circumstances, you might sometimes get a result that could from some perspectives, be considered to be unfair. Doc Democracy's point of view about playing the GM to avoid making rolls altogether, I think is a more valid one ... which of course isn't going to be addressed by any rules system, since it's an attempt to slide around the rules entirely. We've probably all seen examples of that, and I confess to being occasionally guilty myself That's nothing to do with social interaction, or skill use, of course, since it's also possible to do with combat! cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing It might be - but you will note that on the player boards the words "boring" and "frustrating" get a solid workout, plus there are a fair few comments from players saying they simply walk away from social interactions and accept the political fallout. I'm not sure it's a good idea to introduce a new system that (based on my own prior experience) some players would hate and most would dislike. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing Not just good, it's an ideal thing, as far as I am concerned! I give out both bonuses and penalties to combat and skill use, precisely because I want to promote good play, not quash it. But the important point is the the glib character - even without those bonuses is still better at social interaction (and usually much, much better): essentially he gets what he paid for. If that's what he's pointing out, then, fair enough, he's welcome to his opinion. I, for one, respectfully disagree.* cheers, Mark *Edit: perhaps that brief comment requires expansion. The way I see it, the skill rules may look one-dimensional because they take up less space. But that's a very - if you excuse me saying - a very one-dimensional take on things. The powers section (note: not combat - much of the powers section is for non-combat powers) is much larger, but it does not necessarily means that it's more "dimensional". When it comes to skills, the ability to use complimentary skills and to create new skills as broad or detailed as you like gives you a huge degree of flexibility. I can't actually think of a case in the last 20 years of skill-intensive/social interaction intensive gaming where we have needed something in the skill toolkit that we didn't have - with the possible exception of broader skill modifiers. And that's using RAW. In all the years I have been playing, I have added precisely 2 house rules (one of which is now an official rule in 6E: the "proficiency" rule) so I guess I have only one house rule now to skills. I've tinkered far more with powers. So yes, I reject the idea that the skill section is somehow "lesser". It gets at least as much use - if not more - in my games, and works very well, indeed. There's a lot more to rules than simply word count.

Re: These are small, those are far away... No, as I continue to repeat, that is NOT what I am saying. The "blowing things up" was simply one example - among many - to point out that area to be scanned - per se - is irrelevant. A larger picture has greater area: this cannot be denied. But also, a blow-up - as we also agree makes it easier, not harder. So area, by itself, is not a contributing factor. What matters is how easy it is to identify your target ... not the area you need to scan.

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing I'm not actually fond of simply arbitrarily splitting things up into multiple rolls for the sake of splitting things up into multiple rolls, however. That's simply inflicting more chances to fail onto the PCs. My point is more that social interaction normally - and naturally - involves more than a single contest, just as most fights involve more than a single punch, and most attempts to break into a heavily defended building and steal something from the safe involve more than one security systems roll. At the same time, that's not necessarily the case. If She-hulk punches Morten the mild-mannered accountant, that's likely to be a one-punch fight. If Powergirl suggests to Leisure suit Larry that they go back to his apartment, that's also likely to be a one-roll social encounter. So the number of rolls should be dictated by the circumstances at hand - the number of tasks. The rules actually make this pretty explicit, though I suppose they could make it even plainer. You can always break a task up into smaller tasks. But breaking tasks up into subtasks should be a decision (IMO) made by the players, not the GM. The 4E extended challenge mechanism (and the Robin Laws games where the mechanism first appeared, as far as I know), are only necessary because they have abstracted the game system enormously. That's not really the case in Hero system, where we have a wealth of skills available to choose from. It's a very crunchy system. The "extended challenge" that is presented in the adventure above could (and in my opinion should) simply be roleplayed through. The weakness in the 4E approach is amply illustrated in this first challenge where it makes very little difference if the players score one success, no successes or 6 successes: they get rattled along to the next stage of the adventure regardless, and the only difference is how sceptical the guards are and how many innocent villagers they choose to kill along the way Let's look at the adventure in "hero terms". In the first challenge (the village), the PCs turn up, find their contact has vanished and local people are acting strangely. What are they going to do? At this point, more or less organically, there are multiple opportunities to use skills: deduction, concealment, forensics, conversation, intimidation, persuasion - even tracking, for Pete's sake. These simply do not, naturally, fall into a single skill roll in my mind. I simply cannot conceive of a GM inept enough to set up a scenario like this and then say "OK, make a deduction roll. Made it? Good: you work out your contact has been abducted and taken to this location in the swamp. Right, when you get to the lair ...." The second challenge (the trap) isn't even an extended challenge strictly speaking: it's just a difficult trap and can be bypassed with a single good jump. In Hero system, you would simply set this up as an area effect power with the ability to be bypassed by a (single) difficult roll. The only reason multiple successes are needed in 4E is because that's one way to measure difficulty. In a hero game, the "extended" part is whether the players picked up on the earlier clue (gaining a bonus) or whether they can bring something else to the table in terms of complementary rolls. The third challenge is simply a way to get the PCs to roll some dice in an attempt to fairly arbitrarily score some successes to avoid taking damage. Pretty much any skill can be used, because what the players actually do is largely unimportant: praying, kicking things or simply reading what's written on the wall are all equally valid and equally useful, actions. Again success, is predetermined. Part of the problem is sloppy writing, but that itself stems in part from the lack of concrete mechanisms for solving non-combat problems: it's an issue with most abstracted rulesets. It's not a problem with Hero. Basically, it's simply untrue to say that we have no rules for extended tasks - we have hundreds of pages of them, and many situations will - by their very nature - be extended tasks. Combat is itself, the very definition of an extended task. So it's really not a problem. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Yeah, but Vitruvius wasn't what we would think of as an architect today. He seems to have known a lot about buildings, but seems also to have actually been employed to knock buildings down: he was apparently one of Cæsar's senior siege engineers. One of these talented guys who dabble in a vast array of subjects and who seem to know something about almost anything. His only surviving book is on architecture, but that doesn't make him an architect any more than Leonarda da Vinci was (da Vinci's second most famous illustration is something of a homage). I think collecting other people's work on architecture is not enough to actually make you an architect, and would agree that as a trade, architect does not seem to have existed in the ancient or medieval world. cheers, Mark

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Ha! There are actually two streets here with whole rows of antiquarian bookshops, but the truth is more prosaic. I did a quick search online to see where I could get it and saw that it was published by MUP, who are part of an academic system called the Online Library. It just so happens that my employer pays about 1800 quid a year for me to have unfettered access to OL, so I simply logged on and downloaded the .PDF These days, I actually have most of my own library on my PC. I only buy paper versions of things I can't get online, or big-format glossy picture books (like architectural volumes, for example). cheers, Mark

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Aha! I now have a copy of Knoop and Jones! Thanks for the tip, it looks like a good read. It also, on reading through appears to solve several questions. With regard to Lodge, Andy is right - from the earlier medieval sources there are multiple citations to "logia", "loge" and "luge" as a place "where the masons work". Logia (modern form loggia) means an open gallery or room. The same documents make plain that the logia quite distinct from the place where the masons lived. In other words, the logia (we can call it a lodge) was originally a covered place where they could work sheltered from the weather, but it's not a house and from the descriptions, could be either a temporary workplace or a more permanent building (which makes sense for large construction sites that might employ dozens of masons). The Fabric rolls of York Minster define it as "the shed or temporary residence put up for the masons and quarrymen" They quote letterbook C as saying "John le Wallere holds a small place without Alegate near the foss, in a certain small house called ' Loge ' 12 feet long and 7 feet broad..." We know from the rolls of Edward III that John le Wallere was merchant and had a house and shop in town, so presumably the loge was a place outside town where he stored ... I don't know. Stuff? A horse? Not stonecutting gear, anyway. It seems that "loge" in medieval times simply meant a shed. The sense that AmadanNaBriona and I used (lodge meaning a meeting place of masons) seems to have evolved later, since Knoop and Jones give citations from the renaissance where lodge is used as specifically distinct from workshop or house and they suggest that Lodge came to mean "group of guildsmen of one town" or by extension, the meeting hall of a guild. cheers, Mark

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called?

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing As far as custom character sheets, sure, knock yourself out. I usually draw pictures of my characters, and often of all the other characters in the party, too (as an amusing aside, in the campaign we are playing this afternoon, the other players bought miniatures that matched how they visualised their characters, and I drew pictures that matched (in pose and clothing) the miniatures). Immersion is good, IMO. But I'd never give XP for that: it's something outside the game entirely. The other points about amateur dramatics and so on, likewise: it's Out-of-Game. I don't give XP for OOG stuff, whether speeches or endless strings of monty python jokes - that's just part of the shared gaming experience (and is as often annoying/anti-immersion as amusing). Indeed, I rarely (very, very, rarely) give XP for amusing or dramatic acting inside the game: that kind of behaviour gets bonuses in-game. A dramatic speech or clever use of a critical bit of information may get you one-shot bonuses in social interaction exactly the way surprising a foe in combat or clever use of the environment gets you one-shot bonuses in combat. cheers, Mark

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing As a matter of interest, how long do your games last? I can see the appeal, whilst at the same time, I'm not sure I'd like to play exactly the same character for a hundred game sessions on end ... (and that's not hyperbole: I've been playing my current character for about 70 game sessions, and my last campaign ran about 150-200) Cheers, Mark

Re: These are small, those are far away... OK, I think this a better example. In this example, you'll need to move your eyes more, but that's a relatively minor thing (the whole sheet of paper will be within your scanning field). The difference is so small that (assuming you can distinguish the brown square when they are mashed together) that it should take almost no more time, again arguing that area, in and of itself is largely irrelevant. However, if you filled that large space up with more black squares, then it would take longer. Again, number, not area, is the defining feature here. It's interesting. The more examples you put up - and this was good one -the weaker your case appears to become. cheers, Mark

Re: These are small, those are far away... In real life, probably it will take longer - in game terms it's likely to be one phase either way - 6 seconds is a long time. But as you noted, you are cheating - that example is not about area, but arc of perception, which I noted in my first post on this thread, was an important factor. If the person in question had 360 degree vision, it'd take about the same time, thus again proving conclusively, that area per se is really irrelevant. cheers, Mark

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Also, as an addendum to that, consider that medievals often worked to longer time frames than we did. A big building like a cathedral or fortress could - literally - take generations to complete, so a worker could not necessarily wait until it was finished to collect his fee! The stone marking deal allowed a mason to work for a few years, while getting a steady (if small) stream of income as "his section" was being completed. It also protected him against loss of income if somebody else was not pulling their weight: he got paid for what he had done. In addition, certain stones or types of stone were worth more than others: the kind that required special attention or were critical to a specific point (heavy load-bearing stones, lintels, that sort of thing). In an era where paper contracts for workers were rare and the sort of tracking of business expenditures that we take for granted today didn't exist, it's actually a pretty clever system. As an aside, I've just gotten back from 10 days in and around Rhodes. We stayed in the old city, which is both a world heritage site and the biggest inhabited medieval city ion Europe. As we were walking around the defences (which are still in really good condition), my wife commented "How long did it take to build this? These guys must have spent most of their life cutting and stacking stones!" cheers, Mark

Re: Damage Limits I've never bothered with a damage limit for physical weapons (though I do enforce the "no more than 2x base damage - from all sources" rule for real weapons). I do limit damage from powers, though, because it is easy to get those well out of whack in a fantasy game. In general, magic powers and the like either don't do more damage than weapons, or only do so if heavily limited. My basic philosophy is if you want to make someone dead get a warrior or an assassin. If you want to talk to the dead, you need a mage. Since the biggest weapons tend to run around 6 damage classes that means that weapon damage tends to top out around 4d6 HKA or 12d6 normal, in most games. I think we took about 2 years (real time) in my last campaign before we hit that 4d6 ceiling, but then the game stayed there for the next 3 years, right up until the endgame part of the campaign when the players got their hands on a magical uber-spear that let them tackle some of the big bads*. That was your fairly standard fantasy setting, with lots of monsters crawling out of holes in the ground and the players ended up pretty much all tanked out in heavy armour. In the campaign before that, we peaked around the same level, but since everybody spent most of their time wearing clothes, that put a lot of emphasis on killing people fast, before they killed you. That was a Japanese fantasy Chambara-style game: pretty much everyone had martial arts, and fights tended to be verrrry short ... but exciting. The PCs could go through a lot of mooks in an evening! Unlike the Fantasy game, it was not unusual to have several set-piece fights in an evening, because they were over pretty fast. This approach has a couple of advantages: once the PCs max out their weapons, the whole arms race thing tends to peter out. Armour is still useful, but no longer a must-have (a good hit will put you down, armour or no), so players are more prepared to come out of their iron shells. Hardcore combat monsters will boost their CVs, but there's a natural limit to that, as well - once you have a +3 CV over your common foes, spending more on it is not very productive. So players start to spend points on other things - especially skills/powers - which leads to some interesting builds. However, it only works because I'm real stingy with magic items. In the Japanese game, I gave away one magic sword in nearly 5 years of play, and one quasi-magic sword (the PCs gave them both away ). In the Standard fantasy game I gave away 2 magic wands, some magic armour, 1 magic sword, one badass magic spear and a bunch of minor charms and trinkets over the course of more than 5 years play (plus some plot-item devices the players got some use out of before they were taken/given away). cheers, Mark *note, since magic weapons can have higher base damage than normal weapons, this makes them highly desirable to players!

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called?