Markdoc

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?

Re: Not Quite Free Equipment You will. We've been down that road multiple times in the past, with different game settings and different GMs and that's always where we ended up. Note: I'm not sayin' that's a bad thing - we had plenty of fun on the way and we played like that for about 3 years. cheers, Mark

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies? I think it's fair to say that they consider themselves to be christian - but that doesn't mean we have to. They also consider themselves part of the "master race" and I guarantee, take the hoods off and you'll be surprised at the number of drooling chinless wonders with no foreheads, that you'll see. Under Hitler, the nazis set up their own christian organizations - but I think we can agree they didn't represent mainstream Christianity anymore than al-Qaeda represents mainstream islam. Looked at in that light, the KKK are no more christian than (say) Glenn Beck. In both cases, they self-identify, but use their purported religion as a tool to sow hatred and for self-aggrandizement. The smart thing to do in all of these cases is for their erstwhile coreligionists to say "Buddy, you got no business defaming my religion like that". cheers, Mark

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?

Re: Not Quite Free Equipment If you search on the fantasy board for free+equipment you'll pull up dozens of threads discussing this. Every GM's experience is different, of course, but a large number of threads deal with "Help! How can I stop mages overwhelming my game?" and a lot of the answers involve restricting mages so that they don't become the magical equivalent of Green Lantern while everyone else is playing Aquaman. In contrast, I can't think of any thread, where GMs have had the opposite problem. It is possible (especially at lower points levels) for the mage to feel useless in combat if he tries to duplicate the fighter's attacks. But the mage has access to a far wider range of tools. I like VPPs for mages, since they prevent exceedingly high active point powers. But a 30 point VPP - not unreasonable for 100 point mage - gives access to (potentially) far better protection than a fighter can have, invisibility, flight, Flash and - the bane of fighters - entangle, plus a bunch of other stuff. Sure, the fighter has better Combat stats, but being able to walk up to him invisible - so that he's half DCV and OCV negates much or all of that advantage and giving him a 2d6+STR EHKA in the face, will probably do more than a few stun ... Of course, if your mage in the game didn't have useful powers, it's a different story - and that's the point: you need to control mages (and one way is to control access to powers/spells) to stop them overwhelming the game. Doing that for a one-shot is not too hard: unless set up that way in advance, it becomes increasingly difficult as a longer-term game progresses - which is where the imbalances begin to appear. I'll admit my bias up front: I don't often run or play in one-shot games, so my concerns and my experience is heavily weighted toward longer-lasting campaigns. And I've run and played in a lot of those over the last quarter century: fantasy hero has always been our mainstay. Think about it. For the price you suggest, a fighter who buys a wide but fairly standard range of familiarities (common melee and missile weapons - up to greatsword and heavy longbow) pays 21 points plus another 14 for Plate Armour, plus another 9 to use any shield. Your heavy fighter is thus in for 44 points, before he spends anything on characteristics or skills. The mage spends 37 points to get a 30 point VPP, with Gestures (one handed) incantations and RSR, plus another 7 for Power skill magic +2. He's spent the same amount of points, and has the disadvantage that he has to actually cast to get his powers. Again that's a pretty vanilla build. But in addition to potentially being able to generate a more powerful HTH attack than the fighter gets (because he doesn't have STR min), he can also have far better protection (up to 20 PD armour) - and flight, zero end invisibility to sight. He can see in the dark. He can breathe underwater. He can use TK to pick the fighter up and send him 50 metres into the air and all of these powers cost him 0 XP to add. And as set up, he can have at least two of these powers active at any one time: if he uses spells based on continuing charges, he could easily have more. Moreover, the two have the same amount to spend on characteristics, so there is no guarantee that the fighter will be any faster, tougher or stronger .... You can see where this is going - the fighter pays a big ol' chunk of point but gets access to a very limited range of powers. The Mage pays about the same but gets access to potentially any power. There is an additional side effect to this system, which is worth considering: the best fighters probably wouldn't use weapons, or armour as this is set up - they'd buy martial arts, combat luck and spend the rest on improved SPD, CV or CSLs. 44 points invested like that would let him beat the living daylights out of the poor shmuck who had saddled himself with 44 points of gear. If you want game where "heavy fighter" isn't a viable archetype, then this would be the way to go. Likewise, 24 points on martial arts plus 12 points on a 10 active point spell pool of "ki powers" plus (for example) an extra point of SPD would be an effective build. So your suggested system would be good for - for example - a wild asian martial arts system where people by and large don't use weapons or armour, but rely on martial arts, ki powers and magic. cheers, Mark Edit: this shows the strength of Hero - as noted above, it's not that what you suggest is a "bad idea" - it'd be perfect for some settings - just that it will almost certainly not generate a fairly standard fantasy feel.

Re: Weapons We actually started our career in Fantasy hero - before there was a Fantasy Hero, but only Champions - doing more or less exactly this. It was, I am afraid to admit, teh suck. The problem in Fantasy Hero, is that mages are typically much more flexible, and usually more powerful than fighter types, so saddling fighter types with extra costs makes them even weaker - and in our games, simply meant that after a short trial period, everyone retired their fighters to play mages. cheers, Mark

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies? They sure do. From Egypt, in a book called The Eloquent Peasant which is dated to the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1650 BCE): "You are commanded: Do to the doer in response to that he does." Good ol' Confucius in his Analects has "Here certainly is the golden maxim: Do not do to others that which we do not want them to do to us." (From around 500 BC: he's the person credited with coining the "golden rule" name) The greeks have multiple versions of this preserved, but probably the earliest is "Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him." by Psitticus from around 600 BC. The Christians' predecessors had it down too: the statement "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn." dates from slightly before the christian era And of course the Hindu's had it to: the Maharabata states "One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires." - that's from about 400 BC. I don't think anyone can identify the origin of the thought, and whether it arose independently in different places or has always been a part of human thought. We can guarantee however that it didn't originate with christianity. cheers, Mark

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies? Actually the US has been secular from its very founding, and intentionally so: I point out the law debated by both houses and signed into law in 1796, starts ""As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion .." That law was drafted by the administration of one founding father (George Washington), signed by another (John Adams) and voted on - and passed - by the house and senate, which contained many others of the founders. The wording raised not the slightest controversy. There are plenty of other examples of course - for example, Jefferson explaining the the laws of the US were not based on christian writ in his letter to Thomas Cooper writing ". . . if any one chooses to build a doctrine on any law of that period, supposed to have been lost, it is incumbent on him to prove it to have existed, and what were its contents. These were so far alterations of the common law, and became themselves a part of it. But none of these adopt Christianity as a part of the common law. If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." There, as noted, are plenty of other examples. Anyone who thinks the US started as a specifically Christian state is deluding themselves and is certainly not familiar with the writings of the founding fathers. It's probably more accurate to say that it is only in the last 40 years has the secular nature of the United States government (as opposed to the US people) come under direct attack. cheers, Mark

Re: The Theory of Intersteller Trade by Paul Krugman

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right?

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right?

Re: Political/Religious Space Colonies?

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right? When I am starting someone completely new to the system, I often stat out the sheet very simply - so they get a regular DCV and a "flatfooted" (ie: half) DCV listed. If they have martial maneuvers, they get a fixed OCV/DCV value listed alongside each manuever and if they have levels I just assign them in a chunk, listed as "all out offence" and "all out defence" on the sheet, meaning they have at most 2 numbers to track in combat. It does mean that I need to do more math in my head to deal with half DCV, etc, but I can do that almost without effort. I think one of the keys to this discussion is that I have almost always had to start up Hero groups from scratch, each time I move. If I get players with roleplaying experience, it is almost always from D&D, so I use D&D terminology to explain - in that context OCV = BAB + dice roll to hit, is a no-brainer. Often though, I think as gamers we underestimate how hard these concepts are to grasp for non-gamers, who literally have to have the concept "roleplaying game" explained. "Teaching Hero to someone you meet at a con" is not at all analogous to "Teaching Hero to someone who has never even thought about roleplaying" because the con attendees already have internalised many of the basic concepts. Here's an example from last week end. We played Arkham Horror - a board game. It uses a simple dice pool mechanism. A standard success is a 5 or a 6 and you need a certain number of successes to succeed at a task. For me it's a no-brainer that to have an even chance at any task , you need 3x as many dice in your pool as you need successes. Yet for my non-gaming friends, that basic concept took literally hours to start to emerge, even though I explained it under way - twice. It's not that the math is hard (3x the number of blood drops on the card, duh!) but the concept of dice pools and numbers of successes was alien to them - and alien concepts are hard to retain. cheers, Mark

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right? Ummm .... no. That wasn't what I was suggesting at all, nor is it how we play. I guess I should have spelled it out down to the last point, but it seemed so obvious to me, that I didn't realise I needed to: what I described is only applicable if the character doesn't have maneuvers or CSLs - in other words, the very simplest way of presenting the numbers to a new player. I guess this makes obvious what we have been discussing: what might seem obvious to one person isn't necessarily so to another! I should have realized, in hindsight, the way I wrote it could easily be misinterpreted. cheers, Mark

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right? Actually, the rounding issue is exactly the same whether you roll high or roll low ... so I am not sure exactly what the point of this is. cheers, Mark

Re: Standard Military Gear circa WWII Right. I thought about the Brandenburgers, but they were combat engineers/ assault pioneers, of the sort used - albeit not always so spectacularly, nor successfully - by multiple armies both today (all modern armies still have combat engineers, as well as special forces, and they are still quite different areas of expertise) and also prior to WW2. But as noted already, they weren't anything like what we consider special forces to be: they were trained for direct combat operations, often supported by artillery and armour, in close support of standard operations, and used at the battalion or regimental scale, and fought as normal infantry much of the time. They weren't expected to operate covertly, in small groups or separated from their supporting troops. They did not receive any special training in close quarters combat, operations behind enemy lines, or operations outside the sphere of normal mass assaults nor were they specially trained for skills other than demolition. Brave and effective troops, yes, but an even worse example of special forces. Stoßtruppen were drawn directly from regular infantry divisions, given almost no extra training (in many cases, none at all) and no independant role. As you noted they were assault pioneers, deployed at a divisional level and moving into combat accompanied by massive rolling artillery barrages. Their role was to outflank strongpoints and cause havoc in the enemy lines ahead of a mass attack by regular infantry (their role was much broader than setting up machine gun nests in the rear - they were assigned to attack railway depots, headquarters and silence the enemy artillery, etc). Again, they were never trained for nor expected to perform small-unit tactics: they were simply the vanguard of an attack by hundreds of thousands of infantry and were deployed by the tens of thousands. The "stormtrooper" doctrine had little to do with special training, or independant units: it was a combined arms doctrine intended to combine infiltration by conventional infantry with artillery, armour and massed infantry assault. These tactics were also used by the ANZACs, Canadian and French, before being used in a big way by the Germans in their spring offensive (in fact it was the French, who first formalised them). If the definition of special forces are that they infiltrate the enemy line, then all infantry are special forces, as are some light armour units. The descendants of the Stoßtruppen were not the special forces, with whom they have nothing really in common, but the german panzergrenadiers and commonwealth divisional cavalry, who played much the same role - breakthrough and disruption of the enemy line ahead of assault by conventional infantry, not by attacking the enemy's strongpoints head on, but by bypassing them and isolating them. Sure - all armies had forces with special capabilities - airborne, marines, artillery, armour and subspecialties within those broad arms (artillery for example being broken up into regimental, infantry and divisional, in most cases). But that doesn't make them special forces in the way we use the word now. Your points about how Supers would be deployed are good ones, and kind of what I was getting at with my comment that if Supers were deployed n any numbers the whole idea of special forces might never have gotten off the ground, with Supers being deployed to augment conventional forces instead: bricks with the armour, fliers with the airborne or airforce, energy projectors with the assault guns. In the British comic series Zenith, this is how the Brit.s used their big superhero Maximan in WW2 - up front with the infantry as a morale-raiser and support element. Amusingly, in that series, the British did form their supers into a special forces unit post WW2 - which they later had to disband, when it refused to go fight in Vietnam cheers, Mark

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right? Actually if you are going for maximum simple, you don't have to. People are either at full DCV, half DCV or no DCV: giving them three numbers: active, reduced and no defence. Of those two, they generally only need to remember 2 - full DCV and half DCV. Both can be put on the sheet at chargen, and just updated as CV changes, like any other value. cheers, Mark

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right?

Re: Standard Military Gear circa WWII That's true today, but it wasn't true in WW2, when (at least initially) no nations had special forces. Indeed the initial suggestion that such forces be formed met with a lot of resistance from the brass. It wasn't until the LRDG and Commandos demonstrated success, that the idea took off with the British, and not until the Brit.s demonstrated broader success, that other countries started to copy the idea. Given that we're talking about a world with supers, I wouldn't hew too closely to real life history, but if the game world is reasonably close to real life history, a "special unit" of supers would be breaking new ground in the military system. It's quite possible they'd be the prototype and that conventional special forces would never evolve at all! cheers, Mark

Re: Obfuscation and Unbreakable Vows... I'd go with invisibility and fully IPE, as Treb suggested. The reasoning being the range of mind control limits its usefulness, as does the fact that by RAW, mind control is going to have no effect at all on recording devices, which don't have minds to control. Invisibility IPE, means that not only is the base invisible, but people don't realise that it's invisible (ie: that there should be something there). cheers, Mark

Re: OCV/DCV Am I doing the math right?

Re: World without horses

Re: The Theory of Intersteller Trade by Paul Krugman Of course - government/religious actions are often economic at base. However, they often become so detached from their original purpose that they they serve no economic goal, or indeed, sometimes work against economic goals. A few obvious points in case: The French maintaining colonies in the horn of Africa long after their utility had passed: colonies that had never made any economic sense anyway, since the trade they were intended to protect had never eventuated. Likewise, the Brit.s maintaining colonies in northern British East Africa, which were never anything but a drain on the imperial purse. There are plenty of other examples: military colonies were often founded and maintained as flag-flying exercises that served no useful purpose, either military or commercial. They were expressions of pride or combativeness. A lot of the proxy warfare conducted during the cold war was the same - it garnered neither side economic or military benefit. It was simply done to make a political statement. cheers, Mark