Markdoc

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

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting? Nope: I'm trying to discourage them, not punish them. A character who sinks a majority of his points into items (I don't really care about minor items - I've often had PCs start with minor magical gee-gaws. I'm talking a major amount of points) is often annoying for both the other players and the GM. With the items, he is significantly more powerful, without them, he is often useless. This is true whether you have independant items or not. In other genres, it's not such an issue - you can deprive a player of his foci from time to time, without derailing the game as a whole, since games tend to be location based. But in Fantasy, the PCs are often on adventures involving extended travel. If you deprive a player of the magic whoosis of whatsit, and his opportunities to get new gear are limited, then the player is going to be stuck with a depowered character for what might be months of play. I have allowed players to make characters who start a game with magic items: but to me, any player who sinks a lot of points into items is waving a red flag: it's rare to get a decent explanation as to why the player has a magic item. Can you suggest any fantasy archetypes who are item dependant? Now this only applies to chargen: magic items acquired are a) just gear - they don't cost the characters XP and thus don't cripple the character if lost and given in the GM's purview.

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting? You're welcome to your own game style - but we've used Independant (and yes, players spend points on independant items) for years, through multiple games and it's never broken anything. The idea you suggest simply rewards the player who spends lots of points to start with items - something I actually strongly dislike and discourage as a GM. I feel the character should be the character, not a life support system for his magic items. Fortunately, independant is still with us: it's just become a custom limitation, as many GM's have have already indicated. That's good: it's a very useful tool to seperate what a character can do and what he can own. cheers, Mark

Re: Which is easier to swing, an axe or a sword?

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting? You could certainly do this, but it sets up an explicit in-game contract with the GM that "magic gear will be readily available". That would certainly be suitable for a high-fantasy D&D style game, but probably not many others. I'm not sure that it offers much, if any advantage, over going full scale D&D and letteing ye playeres goe too ye olde magice shoppe too buye ye olde magicke itymes (on sale this week! Byrnies!) cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games I'm guessing it's based on the experiences of WW1, where troops and their weapons often spent a lot of time in the mud - and you got to admit, it's a pretty stringent test. cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Oh, it'll jam - just at about 1/3 the rate of a regular M4. All guns jam - it's the nature of the beast. It's just a question of how often and then how easy it is to clear. M16/M4s have a reputation of being hard to clear, and a well-documented history of being relatively easy to jam. As an amusing aside, on another thread we were talking about the old Garand M1. In WW2, the Brit.s considered purchasing M1s for their army, but it failed reliability testing, so they stuck with the old Lee-Enfield. Reliability testing back then involved - I am not kidding - burying the weapon in thick mud, leaving it there for 48 hours and then firing a thousand rounds through it. I doubt many modern weapons would hold up under those conditions! cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Yup. Guessed as much cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Yup - they want you to keep your hand on the grip, so it's ready to use. But when you are under fire, the nearest cover is 20 metres away and you have a case full of ammo for the squad MG in your other hand ... a handle's actually useful. I think it might be more accurate to say that it's always changing its mind SOCOM did order a bunch of SCARs for assessment - but then cancelled the order. They are apparently buying cheaper H&K M416's instead. It seems the Chiefs think the cost of replacing all the M16's/M4 in service is too expensive, for anything less than a major improvement in technology. Part of the reason for that might be frantic (and expensive) lobbying by Colt, whose weapons finished last in all three competitions held by the army, with 3x as many malfunctions as the next competitor (and about 6x as many as the XM8), but who want to hold onto their lucrative no-bid contracts. Cheers, Mark

Re: How Magic Changes Architecture The way I treat this is affected by culture and style of magic - so that's another level you have to layer on top of things. But summed up very shortly, I make two basic assumptions. 1. I assume that people desire comfort and security in my fantasy game as much as they do in our world, and will pay handsomely to get it. 2. I assume that magic cannot be mass produced, or even produced for free. Doing magic requires a mage and making magic items requires Xp. This has several consequences. In cultures where magic is widespread, many people will have access to small magics they can do themselves. This means that society will - as a whole - specialize slightly more, this takes some of the rough edges off society. It means that societies of this type will be able to (for example) deal with disease better, feed more people for less effort, make better buildings, etc. As a very, very rough rule of thumb, think of Victoria-era western Europe, outside of the cities. In the countries where my current game is running, which has this "common small magic" approach, it makes a "merrie old England/fairytale" setting possible. Since most warriors will have some battle magic, but few will have really powerful magic, stone medieval-style castles make sense - and so does a warrior caste specialized in magic-enhanced mayhem. The temples, where most mages are trained, serve their communities as combined hospital, library, post-office and community centre. In more magic-intensive (where the magic tends to be be more complex to learn/get ahold of*) cultures, the rich will have access to magic (indeed, most competent magic-users will get rich!). The poor, however won't be any better off than their neighbours in a low-magic-setting. You'll get magical heating, sewerage and lighting if you can pay for it: but without the ability to mass produce, there'll always be more demand than supply - so with limited access to magic, most people won't get it. What that means depends on cultural context: in some settings, you have teeming slums of the worst sort, overlooked by palaces, whose inhabitants never grow old or get sick, and who dine on imported delicacies ... protected by magically summoned dragons and ogres to keep the teeming masses in line. In others, you have what might look a bit like a medieval version of gilded age America: for most people, life isn't too bad - but wealthy families move in a totally different orbit, spending the baking days of summer in their palace up in the mountains, winter on a barge off the Southern coast, chatting with their friends and doing business all over the empire by mindlink, moving from place to place by portal, etc. The very richest can spend time in their orbital castles, or hobnobbing with the tall, elegant Lunar nobility. In those settings, the military tends to look more like the modern western ones - a smaller, professional forces armed to the teeth with the best equipment money can buy. There's no point at all in sending ordinary spearmen or archers against even a single Warguildsman in his flying 20 PD/ED armour, that gives him life support, and doubles his STR - and who wields a lightning lance that lets him fry a dozen men in an eyeblink. Castles in that setting look like a blend of star fort and sci-fi bunker - prepared for assault from ground or air, provided with magical screens and divided into defendable sections with alarms internally to deal with subterranean or teleport attacks. Or for that matter, flying castles with wings of dragon-riders - the equivalent of aircraft carriers. *There are some cultures where powerful magic is not acquired by learning, but by sacrifice/summoning - these tend to be low-tech, anarchic places, since a powerful mage can come from anywhere, which means that power is obtained by taking it and power structures tend not to be very stable. The Hero system lends itself to this approach, because in general, the simplest way to get more raw power is to take limitations, which means doing magic becomes more "complex" and/or more "risky". You can tap a lot of raw power by summoning a demon, but then, y'know .... you've got a demon. How societies deal with magic and the possibility of power pretty much defines how your game will look and feel: it affects a lot more than castles! As a very rough guide, I think of my game world like the modern world ... with access to 21st century technology restricted to those who have magic. cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games

Re: Caelum Imperium: A Space Opera Science Fantasy Setting (Cross Posted from Star He I'd rep you if I could, but I can't, so I won't. But I will say, this is pretty cool stuff. cheers, Mark

Re: The Future of Food Technology Look at submarines. A sub galley is the same size as closet, and meals are made there for a substantial number: including frying, baking, etc. It's surprising what you can do in a little space with some training and imagination. Also, a little off topic - the sub thing reminded me - if you are intersted in cooking and history, there's an amusing movie called ... Cooking History (with the tag line "6 WARS. 11 RECIPES. 60,361,024 DEAD."). It's a documentary about military cooks and is both serous and pretty funny at the same time: though it comes with a warning for the sensitive for "graphic food preparation scenes". I commented to my wife afterwards "Not that many animals were harmed in the making of this movie". It has a scene with a cook pretending to make a meal in a tiny sub galley, which is literally just barely big enough for him to stand in. cheers, Mark

Re: Standard Military Gear circa WWII

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting? As for the original question, items are either: 1) made the old fashioned way by sweat and skill rolls, if mundane or: 2) made the old fashioned way by sweat and skill rolls, and then enchanted by the use of life force (Xp) and more skill rolls, if magic. Items don't have to be independent (in fact many of them are not: a wizard's wand for example, might just be a carved stick to anyone else, but to him it's +5 on his magic skill rolls. If it gets broken, he just carves another.). But non-independent items or spells cease to function on the death or similar removal of their caster. They are, after all, not independent of the character who made them. cheers, Mark

Re: How are magic items (equipment) created in your setting? Yeah, Narf has already said it, but Independent was the second thing house-ruled straight back into 6E for me. It's simply too useful to do without. cheers, Mark

Re: Order of the Stick Or possibly cheers, Mark

Re: The Theory of Intersteller Trade by Paul Krugman I'd cover that under "want to send a message to washington" - the message being "Crowd angry! Crowd smash!" but you're right. Note: I did say it was stupid - but the main reason for differentiating "stupid" and "irrational" is that you can - with some effort - cure stupid, and you can predict how it will act, if you know the rationalizations involved. You can't actually do very much with irrational, in either case. cheers, Mark

Re: Handling social stuff in HERO I've never had a problem with conversation - as a GM, I can control (via the rolls) how much information the NPC can obtain - or for that matter give out. Even on a wildly successful roll, I'm not going to assume the PC just blurts out out the address of their secret base, but the NPC may well be able to obtain - for example - the apparently harmless information that the PC is very familiar with the tunnel toll and rush hours despite living and working in Manhattan and flinches when the name "Hackensack" comes up in conversation. The same goes the other way, too. The guiding principle is always what is "reasonable" and that's going to be context and history dependant for any PC/NPC - if the PC thinks he is talking to Awesome Man, he might well give him the address of the base (though I'd pitch that as "Awesome man asks you what time you want to meet at your base" not simply assume the information is given out. Of course the PC (or NPC) can clam up and refuse to be drawn on any subject ... at the price of appearing anti-social or a wierdo. Normally, they'd need some reason for that, though. As for the other suggestions, I'm reluctant to use perception as a social skill: all it would tell you in a conversation contest is that the person you were talking to was really interesting. I do like (and currently allow) players to buy "social powers" however. In the current game, for example the noble knight Lamoniak has a "detect emotion" power bought as the "acute ability to read body language". He can't necessarily tell if people are lying, but he can often tell if the person is excited, nervous, angry, scared, etc - which often lets him draw useful conclusions about how far to trust what they say. I encourage that sort of thing as adding more depth to the information exchange process. cheers, Mark

Re: The Theory of Intersteller Trade by Paul Krugman

Re: Not Quite Free Equipment

Re: The Theory of Intersteller Trade by Paul Krugman Actually, I tend to take the opposite view: people almost always act in a rational fashion. It's just that their priorities are very rarely only economic. In the last election, many middle-class and lower-class americans voted for republican candidates, which based on the last half century's record, is against their own economic interests. I think they are being stupid, but but not irrational. What they did is rational because they chose to act on other grounds (the president is sekrit muslin, I want to send a message to washington, the democrats are attacking our moral fibre, they're going to take our guns ... whatever) I think it's stupid, because to me, none of those issues are as important as the economic ones ... but I freely admit that's my personal preference. Some people might think I'm stupid for valuing a strong economy over the prevention of butseks at all costs. . cheers, Mark

Re: How does a Megacorp make money? I don't think I have ever seen a game where there is only one megacorp, so there'll be cross-corporation sales. In addition, in most cases, you have a giant - if oppressed - working class. They might be poorer (relatively) than they are today, but there'll be another 150 million of them in the US by mid century and another 3 billion of them worldwide. They're going to need clothes and food, water and electricity and a place to live - and they'll probably pay a lot more for those last few than they do today. And they might not need - but they will want - shiny gadgets, entertainment, personal upgrades, etc. Think about how things are today with increasingly pervasive personal advertising and increasing disparity of wealth. The poor ol' joe schmoe might not have as much money relatively as he does today, but companies will be increasingly adept at prying it out of them. I've always envisaged the "dystopian cyberpunk future" like this. Take those trends I noted above and lay it over modern metropolises like Bangalore, Bangkok or Lagos. You end up with things like this: Ambani's billion dollar house, where he and his family (and 600 servants) can kick back in luxury and enjoy the view out over Mumbai's slums. The people in those slums might not have much money personally, but they - and people like them - have enough collectively to make corporations like Ambai's very rich indeed. cheers, Mark

Re: Need help coming up with motive for Zeus in modern times. As various people commented Zeus is all about teh wimmin. However, he also used to keep an eye on some of his progeny: you could have his motivation centre around a descendant - either aiding him, or if he's a hero, opposing him. cheers, Mark

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?