Markdoc

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

Re: Armor Wars I've snipped out the rest, because that isn't the question being asked - the question the OP posed - but which is as old as Reed Richards himself - is "If super tech is available, why don't people do exactly what you describe and field militaries composed of battlesuits, mecha and gravtanks? Also, where is my flying car?" The real answer is "Because we want Superheroes in a recognizable modern setting, not a cyberpunk or science fiction one" It's why Marvel comics still have all the recognizable countries, and the same international debates and the same religions, even though pretty much everyone knows that aliens and other gods really do exist, interstellar travel is possible and that there really are other dimensions. It's why after Earth has provided asylum and protection to a galactic empress and then Earthlings helped her get her empire back, nobody ever says "Uh, you have tens of thousands of starships - how about lending us a couple of engineers and a couple of your really old ships, so we're not trapped on his mudball? You know, we have saved your whole empire three times now - plus you married one of us. How about a little help here?" The Earthlings who do have their own starships (and there's a surprising number of them) keep them tucked away in their garages for the occasional jaunt, along with their flying cars, low orbit-capable planes, powerful non-polluting power sources, highly advanced medical facilities, alien visitors, etc etc. None of this makes any sense. The best way to deal with this is the way the comic book writers do which is to simply politely never refer to it ever again. There simply isn't a good explanation. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars Lose the tracks and mount it on some of those repulsors, so that it can fly, and now you're talking! That makes perfect sense - but it also leads to the world of superscience flying tanks, etc, which is what comic writers are struggling to avoid. Who needs Iron Man when the military can field an armoured division with each tank being more powerful than his suit? Any villain the military can't take down is going to be more than a match for the heroes in a fight ... I cheated when I ran supers games - anyone who wanted to play a gadgeteer had to supply me with a reason why the tech couldn't simply be mass-manufactured. The one dissenter (who wanted to play a gadgeteer) folded when I pointed out that if it could be mass manufactured, it would be - and did he want to be faced by hordes of agents wielding the same powers he had? He still played a gadgeteer (and playboy billionaire) but we settled on the rationale that his own gadgets required more finesse and skill to use, and more rare and expensive elements to produce than the more mundane ones he made his fortune with, and so could not be mass-produced. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars

Re: Armor Wars Ah - OK. But the M3 wasn't a pre-war design: it was commissioned after the Battle of France made the current US weakness in armour clear, and it was intentionally designed as a "build-it-as-quick-as-you-can" stopgap to allow the US to field a medium tank while the Sherman was being designed. It was never intended to be produced in huge numbers. The first one wasn't produced until mid-1941 and production was wound down in 1942 as the Sherman became available. A better example of what you are looking for might be the T26 series - the tank series that eventually gave rise to the Pershing and latter the Patton. Their development was slowed by politics - especially by General McNair (head of Army ground forces), who still held to the idea that tanks were there to support infantry and that the US army didn't need a heavy tank with a high velocity gun: that the Sherman was good enough. The British, who had had much more experience facing german armour, were calling for better armed tanks (eventually they gave up on the US and produced the Firefly as a stopgap, before their own Comet tanks came into service - superior to the Sherman in pretty much every way). However that opposition suddenly collapsed as soon as US forces had to face German armour in strength during the Ardennes campaign. It's like I said: bureaucratic foot-dragging is only possible when the use or potential of a new military technology is theoretical. Once practical application is demonstrated, that's the end of it. cheers, Mark

Re: If I had 500 slaves...

Re: FANTASY HERO -- What Do *You* Want To See? Looking forward to this tome! cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans I think the reviewer (don't recall his name) who described Terry Brooks as "able, with just a few lines, to turn ageless archetypes into rotting, 2-dimensional hulks of cardboard" had it about right. I guess Shannara is an example of a publisher's greed triumphing over an editor's shrieks of horror. Only monsters. There were human wizards, but just as many - if not more: I haven't done a headcount - non-human wizards (typically undead). cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars It's also important to remember that the design cycle for a tank - from any nation in that era - was 2+ years. So the Sherman went into production in 1941, based on the lessons observed in the battles of Poland and France - when the German "Heavy tank" was the Pzkw III! Most of the German armoured forces in those campaigns were Pzkw I and II light tanks. The Sherman was more than a match for any of those. The Germans, however, had already started upgrading their forces, and their answer (the Pzkw IV) was a fair match for the Sherman. However, they met the T-34 in 1940 and by 1942, their answers (in the form of the Tiger and Panther series) were rolling off the line. The Pershing was designed in response to the Sherman's problems with these tanks - and it started rolling off the lines a couple of years later. Essentially, every generation of tanks was built to beat the opposing tanks of the generation before: it was merely the production lag that saw Shermans facing off against Tigers The problem wasn't that US troops could not have maintained and run a more complex tank: UK tankers routinely did so and US crews who used UK-designed weaponry had no problem maintaining it. US military personnel also had no problem managing much more sophisticated equipment. There was, I assure you, nothing in the design specs to suggest that the tank should be "dumbed down". The Sherman was built the way it was, because it was the best the US could produce - at the time. The Pershing was a far better (and more sophisticated) tank because a couple of years later that was the best that could be produced - at the time. Even the piddly little tanks that Tasha mentioned (not the Sheridan - that was a postwar medium tank armed with a weird hybrid gun, but I guess she meant the Stuart) were the best that could be produced at the time. Back then, US military strategy was based on the defence of the Western Hemisphere - which meant a strong navy and a relatively small and weak army, with what armoured capacity existed being strictly infantry support. It was assumed (correctly, at the time) that no enemy existed that could land armoured forces in the US. It wasn't that better weapons existed that weren't being put into production - it was that the US had no official plans to have armoured divisions at all. As a result, they had no significant armour production capacity (No lie: in 1940, when the Wehrmacht struck west the US army had only 28 modern tanks - 18 medium and 10 light. Belgium had 5 times as many, plus some heavies!) Of course, once the Germans demonstrated what armoured divisions could do ... everybody started building them, just as everybody would put battlesuits into production, once they had demonstrated what they could do .... if they possibly could. That was the point I was making: politics only plays a significant role for weapons systems when their potential is doubtful. Nothing changes minds like success. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars I think the real reason is "It's the comics, stupid!" Powersuits don't replace tanks for the same reason that grav vehicles don't replace helicopters, fusion engines don't replace fossil fuels and NASA still uses the shuttle, while our heroes have orbit or interstellar-capable vehicles in their garage ... in other words, because if you made those changes, you'd be setting your stories in a science fiction world, and most people seem to want superheroes in a more or less recognisable "current world". Given the huge tech advantage that powersuits typically display, none of the political reasons given are terribly plausible to me: despite the wailing of conservative generals or politicians, things that work are adopted pretty damn fast. The tank is a perfect example - most politicians were disinterested, or actively tried to block spending on the british tank program, the generals charged with deploying it openly did not want tanks .... but once they were actually tested in battle, all the major combatants fell all over themselves designing and building them. In real life, the programs that get slashed and die are ones like Reagan's Star Wars, that don't show any promise of working or which (like the DDG warships) don't offer promise to justify their cost. And in comic books battlesuits have been tested and have proven their worth. To me, that means either the cost must be prohibitive (which, given how the US military spends money, means serious megabucks) or serious problems with making and using such suits. There are multiple ways to do this - Iron Man 2's "Nuh uh. It's my suit and I ain't giving you the designs" works for me. The idea that to safely use a suit you have to have olympic level reflexes and massive INT works too - how many gadgeteers have you seen in game with a DEX/SPD less than 18/4? Or maybe the suit is an alien artifact, and thus impossible to duplicate, etc. It's an old problem, as noted above. Forget military application for a second - Iron Man's suit has enough power to fly halfway around the world - and back - at supersonic speeds, without stopping for a refill. Just the power source alone would change our world dramatically in a few years, if it could be mass produced. As would Tony's nifty computer system: it doesn't matter if it cost millions, companies would pay for such a powerful system. In the end, you simply need to suspend disbelief on this concept. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars

Re: 6th edition Min Str

Re: 6th edition Min Str It's not true. It is true that by the end of the Middle ages, improved armour was starting to make slashing weapons useless, but swords had been pointed since long before the roman empire arose (old roman sword training maxim: "The edge wounds, the point kills"). Most swords have always been both cut and thrust weapons, with the emphasis usually on one aspect or the other and a few, like the 11th century knight's broadsword a nearly perfect balance of the two. The problem was that as armour improved there were fewer and fewer places you could put a point to kill - and you just can't thrust a sword point through good armour. Just physics. It can't be done (at least not by a human). Thus, the battle weapon of the heavily armoured man at arms became not the sword, but the axe, mace, hammer or pick or - more and more - the pike and halbard. The sword became a side weapon and - probably more importantly - a symbol of gentility. It's why - paradoxically - as armour became better and better, the european knight's sword started getting lighter and apparently more useless on the battefield. The paradox is resolved when you realise that swords were becoming at least as important as a symbol than a weapon. It also explains why you see this change in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and England - but not in the celtic or slavic fringes where armour was typically lighter and heavy swords remained a practical battlefield tool for centuries. It's also why even as armour declined, western european swordplay remained built around thrusting-focused weapons: formalised training had arisen from the earlier era when thrusting was considered more important and once formalised, stayed that way. cheers, Mark

Re: Not D&D

Re: Medieval knight's face reconstructed That's langspids, not gede Cheers, Mark

Re: Medieval knight's face reconstructed Somebody else obviously did, too. cheers,Mark

Re: Not D&D Your first post sounds like a game I wouldn't volunteer to play in. This post, on the other hand, sounds not only inviting, but quite interesting! cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans I have run campaigns pretty much exactly like this for nearly 20 years (with the exception that there are still undead - they're not a race, but constructs, so they fill a role similar to traps in many cases). What's different? Not that much, actually. Sure, PCs don't go round killing sentients "because they're evil". The gods don't turn up in person, provide divine intervention or the like, but their temples still intrigue, scheme or wage holy war on each other. The players still have plenty of enemies, plenty of causes and plenty of reasons to fight. It's just that now their enemies are not colour-coded for their convenience. One of the first things you notice about other sentient races when you run a game without them is how utterly unnecessary they are and how little they actually add to the gaming experience. Essentially, "other races" in game are simply "other cultures". They're typically not even very different from human cultures: the Antarctica-based human culture Vondy was working up is far more alien than most of the cultures of other races I have seen. cheers, Mark

Re: FANTASY HERO -- What Do *You* Want To See? I'd go with the whole "wishes are plot devices". The current suggested mechanism is clumsy in the extreme, but that's because wishes by definition allow you to operate "outside the rules". Even D&D which originated wishes as player options, have placed more and more restrictions on them so you can't just use a wish to wish for what you want. cheers, Mark

Re: If I had 500 slaves...

Re: Not D&D

Re: Fantasy Art Thread [ATTACH]35963[/ATTACH] Outside the city where the PCs currently reside is a vast wasteland called the Harrowlands. It's just chock full of barbarians - so here's a picture I did to show the players what both the Harrowlands and its inhabitants sort of look like. cheers, Mark

Re: Not D&D Oh c'mon - look at the heroes: "Hero: Charles Spurgeon Alignment: Lawful Calvinist Stats: Doctrine +5, Faith +1, Relevance +2 Story: Charles is lawful but moderate, and will accept people if adhering to a base statement of faith. Comes pre-equipped with Cool Cigar of relevence +1." "Cool cigar of relevance +1"? Who can resist that? I'm guessing this is a parody. cheers, Mark

Re: Secret of Kells and Monks in Campaigns Well, if someone got killed, clearly god was indicating that his opponent had a good case However I shouldn't have given the impression the manuscript was entirely useless - far from it. It has some failings that suggest the person who wrote it was not an experienced combatant, but at the same time it's mostly full of good advice, and back then that was rare. If you had to fight a judicial duel and you weren't professional military, it's likely that you would know little to nothing about how to fight with a sword and shield. And it's not like you could pick up a book or find a sword teacher - there weren't any books, prior to this manuscript, and sword teachers were also rare or non-existent. As I have commented in the past, the idea that martial skills were something that could or should be systematically taught was actually kind of foreign to european thought of the time: it didn't really evolve until later when you started to get professional militaries composed of non-nobles. So in that context a basic primer on combat could be a life saver. That said, judicial duels were never "to the death" - the whole point was to settle a legal debate, not a defence of honour, and killing a defeated party would prove nothing apart from the fact that you were a bad winner. The records we have of judicial duels showed that the rules were pretty flexible: that's a polite way of saying "usually made up on the spot". Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, and Royal Constable wrote detailed rules for judicial duels during the reign of Richard II: but what records we have from that period indicate that people tended to simply ignore him. If the parties employed champions - which they often did - those might possess armour. But if they didn't, a judicial duel could easily be fatal, even if the parties weren't trying to kill each other. To avoid this, some judicial duels (such as the one between Engelardus and the monks of Saint-Serge of Angers) employed clubs instead of swords. As for ritualistic behaviour, here's Thomas' rules and a great deal of pointless ritual it all was. cheers, Mark