Markdoc

Re: NND vs Barrier

Re: Cool Guns for your Games

Re: Quick question about oxygen! 100% oxygen in fact - at 5psi (normal air is 14.7). That's how I know about the long term effects of breathing pure oxygen There were two reason for that. First off, it reduced weight if you only carried oxygen: that was the main reason. The second reason for that is that nitrogen is easily dissolved in blood (oxygen isn't) - if you suffer a pressure drop, you ran a good risk of getting the bends, and in space that could easily be fatal. Also since space suits are not pressurized to the same level as the cabin (for a long time they also used low pressure oxygen) if you did a spacewalk, you'd need to decompress for 2-5 hours before you could come back inside - meaning your spacecraft also needed a decompression lock, adding more weight. But yeah, the tradeoff was fire risk. It wasn't quite as extreme as you suggest, otherwise they would never had made it off the ground, but in the end, it was still enough to total one Apollo Mission and end the reliance of low pressure oxygen. cheers, Mark

Re: d20 feats in .hdc format I'll take a) anything. Fighting tricks (aka combat feats) are most useful but basically anything that could be described as a talent or a feat would be of interest 5th or 6th. Our current game is 5th, but I'll be converting to 6th when it ends - which will probably be in a few months. That's one reason I want to avoid - if I can - hand entering a lot of stuff for 5th and then turning around converting it to 6th for the next game If I can get enough feedback on this, I'll compile it the same way I did the Grimoire and then publish it back here to make it accessible to other GMs. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy locations that should be real Reminds me of a favourite quote from a comic, on encountering what our heroes at first take to be the flying Dutchman: "See? There's nothing supernatural about it at all! It's a perfectly ordinary wrecked ship on top of a perfectly ordinary sea-monster!" cheers, Mark

Re: Quick question about oxygen! Depends how long it is. In the short term, the effects are dizziness, fatigue, fluid in the lungs, difficulty in focusing your eyes. If air pressure is less than normal, you can actually tolerate these effects better - and still get the oxygen you need to survive. Longer term, you will suffer neural damage and start to get physical damage to your lungs, due to subsurface bleeding, and muscle spasms, from fluid leakage and abnormal neuronal firing. So at about 1/3 of normal air pressure, you can breathe 100% oxygen for several weeks without apparent harm - longer than that, in animal studies, led to changes in brain chemistry and seizures. At 100% normal pressure you get oxygen toxicity in about an hour - so the severe effects listed above. You can recover from that, but more than a couple of hours (guessing here, because we have no data) would probably lead to severe permanent brain damage - and you'd almost certainly be blind and nonfunctional by then. cheers, Mark

I have a player (our D20 GM) who wants to expand her character's flexibility: she's a heavy-armour warrior sort. The easiest way to present these to her is as "feats" - it's what I have done in the past. So I am hoping to put together a prefab of useful feats, fighting tricks, etc. for her to choose from/work towards. I'm also hoping to save some time by building off feats others have already built in Hero designer rather than typing them in myself! I know we've had threads on this before, but with the board's weak search functions, I've only been able to dredge a few such items up. So don't be shy: if you have any, feel free to post them here! I'm sure other GM's could use them too. cheers, Mark

Re: Stealth in Space

Re: Cool Guns for your Games

Re: Stealth in Space Actually, it's pretty straightforward. Stealth does equal invisibility, or pretty close to. It lets you (for example) sneak into a system to spy on events, to drop off a package or let you launch an attack before your enemy knows he's being attacked - and therefore isn't taking countermeasures. ECM is when they know you are there, but you are trying to confuse their aim, by hiding precisely where "there" is. It doesn't allow any of the scenarios listed above: by definition it's a fightin' situation and your enemy - even if he doesn't know exactly where you are, knows that you are somewhere, so isn't going to be caught with his countermeasures around his ankles. Camoflage is something else again, where they know you are there but not necessarily what you are - a warship trying to look like a freighter, for example.

Re: Fantasy locations that should be real Montmartre? Cheers, Mark

Re: Stealth in Space I think that austenandrews' point was that you could "fake" mass, size and thrust by sending fake data at the signals so that your decoys didn't have to be as massive and complicated as your actual ship, since if they were, there'd be no point in having decoys. I agree with you that it doesn't seem at all likely to work, since, as noted you'd have to know not only where every sensor platform was, but what it was monitoring at any given time. All you'd need to do to defeat that sort of decoy system would be to squirt one probe (or even a reflector, to give you an altered angle of attack on your signal) out on a random vector as soon as you received a potential signal - and then he's screwed. Having a direct intel feed wouldn't help there (and the whole intel aspect relies on you having access to some sort of FTL communications system anyway - otherwise you'd always be behind your enemy's reactions, even if you had perfect penetration of their systems). The sensors would be sending information home and then your penetration would need to send the information to you: the time lag would be substantial - by the time you got the information, the enemy would have reacted several minutes (best case) to weeks (worst case) ago and your intel would be out of date. If we have FTL communications, we're off in rubber science territory again* - not to mention that if you have information bearing FTL transmissions you'd be able to watch your enemy's reaction to your actions prior to actually making them and then make your battle plans based on that, which makes my brain hurt to just think about it. I don't think his suggestion was intended to make you stealthy, though, since by definition you are doing the opposite, when you deploy decoys. It was just a way to make you harder to shoot. cheers, Mark *of course if we have FTL spaceships, then we're in the rubber science zone anyway, so really, I have no problems with "cloaking systems" or massless decoys - you could produce decoys by making multiple planned entries to the system and then hiding among the echoes generated by your Schrodinger field

Re: Would a MP or VPP be appropriate for a purely martial character and, if so, how? Part or all. If it's a purely weapons-based art like modern fencing, or kenjutsu you might as well give the whole MP the limitation. If the martial art can be used with weapons or barehanded, I just buy +5 STR (only for maneuver X, -1/2) instead of +1d6 HA to add a DC to a specific maneuver: tat allows you to add a DC whether you are using a weapon or a fist. cheers, Mark

Re: Would a MP or VPP be appropriate for a purely martial character and, if so, how? Agreed. As a GM, I let players use both the standard martial arts rules and the multipower version (a VPP would work as well, but I discourage those in my current game simply because none of my players are good at generating powers on the fly: it takes them ages. So the only VPPs currently in use are those with powers defined in advance). Given that choice, no-one uses the standard martial arts rules any more. And as a player I find them frustratingly limited, even for heroic games, both in concept and practice. And that's with a strict cap on CSLs in the framework - no more than you could get with standard martial arts, so no +6 OCV maneuvers, for example. cheers, Mark

Re: Would a MP or VPP be appropriate for a purely martial character and, if so, how? Iffy why? I'm not seeing a difference between having a slot active and using a specific martial maneuver - and we've been using multipowers to model martial arts for decades now, in both heroic and superheroic games. cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games

Re: Tintin Adventures that never were Cool stuff. I was a big Tintin fan as a kid. cheers, Mark

Re: Stealth in Space But it would only work if you knew where every sensor was, ahead of time - meaning that you already have acheived total superiority in terms of targetting. How you manage to locate all the sensing platforms without active scanning - which means turning yourself into giant beacon and shouting "Here I am!" - and how you manage it without lighting yourself up for the other sensors (since you'll need to hit every sensor simultaneously, otherwise you'll look anomalous to the system) .... I'm thinking it would be much more feasible to simply build a decoy the same as your actual ship. And of course that still wouldn't give you stealth - it'd just make it harder to target your ship. But if you can already target every single sensor they have simultaneously .... what do you need decoys for, again? Just knock 'em out. You're going to be announcing your presence anyway. cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Actually the Lee Enfields had a very long history as service as a sniper rifle, being modified for the purpose by the thousands and were so popular with users that that some NATO and Canadian forces retooled them for 7.62. They stayed in active service until the 1980s (with those forces - Taliban snipers ares till using them, as are many other armies). As for "generally considered superior" people have been arguing the superiority/accuracy of the SMLE and K98 for most of a century now, with no clear conclusion in sight. Having owned and shot with both, I can see why: in practical terms, there's little to no real difference. It comes down to whether your preference is for a heavier action or not. I liked the solid feeling of the LE action, but hated the weight of the MKIII for hunting - I sold it and bought a Vz23 BRNO: the czech knockoff of the K98, which is significantly lighter.

Re: Stealth in Space

Re: Fantasy Art Thread [ATTACH=CONFIG]37521[/ATTACH] Here's one from my game - Khatz is rescuing the party's priest, Dalarna, from a den of overly large spiders (those are just the babies he is cutting his way through). cheers, Mark

Re: Harpy questions In Matt Wagner's second Mage series the Harpies are exactly like this: humanoid birds - ugly as sin, but able to enchant their male slaves into an, ahem ... "close and caring relationship" if you know what I mean. cheers, Mark

Re: Creatures disappearing after death of creator - how to make? In my games at least, if the boss didn't buy his summoned or otherwise created monsters with "independant", then as a default they disappear/become unmotivated/ become confused - in any case, useless - when he dies. The same incidentally, happens for all magics/magical constructs, which explains why in many cases, killing the boss leads to the rapid collapse of his base - a time-tested trope! cheers, Mark

Re: Kobold Kommandos

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting?