Markdoc

Re: A days journey Yeah, but you did it without a significant amount of gear - which usually cuts a person or horses' speed by almost half, and you didn't try to do it for several days in a row, which tends to degrade your speed over time as well. Move onto slightly poorer footing and you'll reduce your speed even further. We have a lot of evidence from real life that 25 kms a day is a pretty good pace for strong healthy men or horses carrying supplies, over decent terrain, when they are moving at a sustainable speed. cheers, Mark

Re: Malthesitic Fantasy Universes

Re: Behold Leviathan: the sperm whale that killed other whales

Re: Welcome to McGuffins. May I take your order? Or alternatively the mention of destiny reminds of that useful artifact from Nightwatch: "the chalk of destiny" - which allows you to rewrite someone's destiny and thus alter their powers, or even - in the movie version - rewrite history. cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Zeppelins

Re: Welcome to McGuffins. May I take your order? A technomagical ring that cancels superpowers in a substantial radius around it. Not so appealing to your average supervillian, perhaps, but an item beyond price to your non-super-powered crime boss: with this, his gun-toting, martial kick-slingin' bodyguards can protect him from powerful supervillians. He could even knock over his super-powered rivals' operations, who won't be expecting an attack by "normals". It'd force any heroes who wanted it to operate on a level they don't normally, and potentially think their way through rather than fight their way through. It'd also be desirable for Supervillians to get hold of, if only to get it out of circulation. While it's a really powerful device, it is unlikely to be terribly attractive to heroes since it also suppresses their powers. Edit: which means that it's not a campaign wrecker if your heroes get their hands on it! As far as build goes, two unified powers, with area affect (radius, megascale) Suppress "all Cha above 30 active points" + "Suppress all powers that do not have "real" as a limitation" Huge number of active points, but hey, it's a McGuffin. You'd need to decide yourself, who created such a thing! Cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Dragons Right. Fafnir was a dwarf (giant in some versions: in Norse mythology they overlap anyway) who turned into a dragon (or in some versions, was turned into a dragon by a curse). There's nothing to suggest that he was a wizard in the D&D sense though. Shapechanging is a common magical power in the old norse tales. I think the whole "Dragons are powerful wizards" thing is another D&D'ism that has come to be accepted as "traditional". In all of the old stories I can think of from the west, dragons are mostly monsters (of varying degrees of intelligence) or transformed magicians. That makes sense: in most of those stories dragons are monsters for the hero to kill, typically symbolizing pride and greed. St George's dragon, for example, once beaten in a fight "was led about on a leash, tame as a dog" to quote the old stories. It's a little known fact that George originally killed the dragon after it had been tamed In that regard, Smaug is a dragon in the western tradition - intelligent, tricky and highly dangerous - but dangerous because of his size and fiery breath, not because he can cast spells. He also explicitly typifies both the traditional vices of western dragons - pride and greed. Eastern dragons are a different kettle of fish - they are typically depicted as elemental powers, both magical and highly intelligent, but not actually physical. The D&D dragon is kind of a mash-up of those two concepts - magical and intelligent, but also a physical monster that you can kill. cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Hidden Blade I haven't played assassin's creed, but inspired by the samurai film Hidden Blade, I have written up a hidden blade technique for my game game. It was actually built with HKA, continuous uncontrollable 0 END, fully invisible effects and with the sleight of hand roll on the invisible part - just like the first post. In use, it was a 1DC killing attack which meant up to 1/2 HKA with STR (Strength doubling rule was in effect). That doesn't sound like much, but the weapon was described as a very, very sharp, thin punch blade: so sharp that even the target might not know at first what had hit him. That means in practice that it was not much use as a combat weapon. But that wasn't the point - it was designed to be used on an unsuspecting target, allowing the user to target the head or vitals, and specifically, to target an unarmoured bit. The wound itself was trivial, but the victim would bleed - and he might not even realize he was hit, until he saw blood and collapsed. By the time he keels over and starts dying, the assassin is probably a couple of blocks away and whistling. Indeed, since the amount of STUN done is so trivial the victim might literally bleed to death before he realized that something was wrong - and at 1-3 BOD per round, that will take about 10 phases for your average person - which is less than 30 seconds. Fast and nasty. Since continuous attacks need some way to be turned off, I ruled that a successful healing roll would do the job. cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it. Massively unlikely? Based on what? The truth is, we simply don't know. You're extrapolating from a sample of one, and one thing we can be sure of based on our experience is that such extrapolation is far more likely to be wrong that correct. The zoologists I know who have thought about this topic - and many who have written on the subject - disagree about what likely requirements for sapience are. But the two things they agree on are that 1) we can't make any meaningful predictions about the requirements for sapience and 2) the odds of them being like us are vanishingly small. To take our own planet as an example, groups which are at the top of the tree in terms of intelligence - for example, primates, octopi, cetaceans, corvids - are all closely related, compared to any alien life form - yet only one - us - meets most of your criteria. That's not very encouraging if you want to apply it to something far less closely related to us than an octopus ... cheers, Mark

Re: Who is sticking to 4th or 5th Ed HERO

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it. As an aside, most of the "explanations" I have read as to why Aliens must resemble us, strike me to have all the gravitas of those articles written back in the 19th century explaining how any successful society must inevitably come to resemble Victorian England cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it. Reminds me of a throwaway quote from a science fiction novel I read years ago: "Why are ships engineers always called "Scotty"?" "I dunno: it's an old space-faring tradition, like making the first officer wear those plastic ears" cheers, Mark

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it. Again, why specifically? Heck, we have plenty of species here on earth that don't require air to breath. Why would this requirement be foisted on a totally alien biology? The odds that aliens have an atmosphere enough like ours that we can breathe it strikes me as grossly improbable. There's nothing magic, biologically speaking, about the mix we require. Again, why? Octopuses have nothing resembling an upright stance but they are both relatively intelligent and very adept tool users. They can even travel a fair distance across land - but they don't do it in an upright fashion. If we have smart tool users who are very closely related to us genetically and who don't have an upright stance, I can see no justification for assuming it's a requirement This I think is likely: I suspect - but it's just a guess - that truly advanced intelligence requires extensive tool use, if only to expand your horizons ... but I'd be doubtful about assuming it's a requirement for sapience. Really? Based on what? Can one-eyed babies not grow up to be sapient? How did whales, which lack binocular vision, retain their intelligence? They are not sapient, as I understand it, but there's no biological reason that binocular vision is required for sapience - or depth perception, for that matter. It's a relatively efficient model used by animals of our genetic line, but that doesn't make it a requirement for any reason I can see. Ummm. Assuming they have heads. Or that they keep their brains in them.

Re: Aliens: everything you know is... well, "wrong" doesn't even begin to cover it. The author makes a decent point though: it is unlikely (by which I mean mindbogglingly improbable) that aliens will be anything like us. To say "Well it makes it more interesting if we can identify with them" is just a crutch for weak writing. A good writer can make you identify with things that are alien. The reason I read relatively little scifi these days (and watch none on TV) is because Xavier has it right, I think. The bulk of it is overwhelmingly lame: the most interesting scifi I have seen recently on the big screen is stuff like Moon, where there are no aliens or authors like Ian Banks where the aliens are .... well, alien. Heck, half the human cultures described there are pretty alien. Avatar, on the other hand was really pretty - but there wasn't actually a single alien in the movie: just humans in different bodies. cheers, Mark

Re: Who is sticking to 4th or 5th Ed HERO I have to admit I would just have built Blur!! with a high DEX to start with and then limited her because she's crap in a fight. I actually have a character like this in my current FH game - she's an archer and a scarily effective one (interestingly - in FH archers can be among the most effective fighters - in D&D, unless augmented with magic, they're rubbish ....). But she's no good at HTH combat, reflected by the fact the fact that she "freezes up" if enemies get too close (I handled that by a psychological limitation, but it could have easily have been a limitation on DEX). That said, I'm not too fussed by the lack of Figureds. I would have preferred to see the costs balanced off and retain them, but uncoupling was (to me) a clear winner over leaving things as they were. cheers, Mark

Re: Dragons

Re: Dragons

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated

Re: Dragons As Lucius has said, there are some where the dragon is even smaller and punier. I've always thought in those cases, the rescued maiden could have shown some spine - she could easily have kicked it far away, like it was a gnome's badger ... err .. minion. Like this, for example. Don't stab it, man! Get off your horse and give it a good kicking. That's all that's really required. This, on the other hand is more what dragons are like in my game (though they can get significantly bigger): Scary and bitey, but not city-levellers - and typically not hoarders of gold either. However, dragons in my game are monsters - meaning manufactured by wizards - not natural creatures, so their nature is highly variable. cheers, Mark