Markdoc

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Here's a picture of what out D20 group got up to last weekend. My PC is the jumping guy, the cleric casting spritual weapon is my wife's PC and we've got the big meat shield and the fire sorceress (Lars and Maj-Britt's characters). The fifth PC (the healer/sage type) is out of sight - because she was hiding cheers, Mark

Re: DC check Yeah, but my point was that for Mid-level characters in D&D a DC30 check isn't that hard - at least for their better skills. If it maps to a 20- roll either the PCs in a hero setting have very high rolls, or the GM is getting pretty generous with the situational modifiers (or they have some really cool gear). Because of the way Hero is built around a bell shaped curve, it maps OK to D&D in the middle range but you need to look at the rolls a bit more carefully at the extreme ends. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? This week we saw Up in 3D (good light-hearted comedy). No surprises, but very pretty. Then we saw Inglourious Basterds (Evil, black-hearted comedy). Full of surprises - which is why I like Tarantino films. Even Kath, who doesn't much care for gore, laughed and laughed (somewhat guiltily). cheers, Mark

Re: Russian SUV "Whale penis leather interior" Say no more. cheers, Mark

Re: CU: How does PRIMUS handle foreigners? Superman is a refugee? I never thought about that before .... cheers, Mark

Re: DC check Also, if you are converting D20 adventurers be aware that it's possible for D20 characters to get very high rolls, whereas with Hero, the bell-shaped curve makes very high rolls unusual. For example, while I agree that a DC15 check is about 11- in Hero terms, you can't just apply a direct +5 DC = +3 to a Hero skill roll. Our characters are about 8th level and for their better skills routinely roll 30DC checks (in fact my martial artist can't fail a DC check of 30 on something like Jump, which isn't even his best skill). That corresponds to a Hero roll of 20- (!) using that formula. The reason is that it's relatively easy to get big bonuses in D20 - a +10 is not unusual, while in Hero system, a +2 is often a big deal. In addition, it's assumed that players will have access to items that boost their skill rolls. That means that in mid - to high level adventures, DC checks of 30+ are not that unusual - but they are not intended to be absolute killer challenges, just difficult. Higher level DC challenges may need to be scaled back, to make them accessible to Hero characters. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? We saw it at the theatre about three years ago. The action scenes are good, but there's a lot of non-action scenes which are also skilfully done - sunlight over the beached ships, stuff like that. It's a blend of rendered CGI and soft-cell animation (I don't mind that, but some people hate it, so a warning). However, as my swedish colleague points out, the plot is reeeetarded. Seriously. Worth watching, because the plot is actually only an issue right at the end, but I'd say Netflix or bargain bin it. Bunneh-style I'd give it three ecologically-sound microlights out of 5. cheers, Mark

Re: Laser test To me, this is more of Boeing trying desperately to restart its failed DoD laser program gravy train. I watch the videos and think "Gee, they can now set paint on fire on a stationary target, after 15 seconds, under ideal conditions. Apparently, given several minutes, they can actually melt a hole in thin sheet metal" A minigun could do 100 times the damage at the same range in a tenth of the time ... for less than 1% of the cost. And it doesn't require ideal weather conditions, a Herc to haul it around ... it can even be reloaded! Boeing needs to admit the gravy train is over, go back to the lab and try to develop technology that could realistically be deployed, instead of trying to resurrect their old tech. This is after all, the same ATL that was cancelled after the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board said that "the Advanced Tactical Laser testbed has no operational utility." cheers, Mark

Re: "revised" hit location chart? Yep - that's why I chose "complications" as a name. It could be inflammation, organ failure, infection, imbalance of the 4 humors, blockage in your chi flow, whatever ... The origin of this concept was the old critical hits chart I made up for my AD&D game lo, these many years ago. Unlike most such charts, it didn't just dish out insta-kill or extra damage effects, but also included a lot of crippling hits, which could, if not treated, be fatal over the longer term. We had an interesting session in one game where a Dwarf PC took a crossbow bolt through the guts. The party's healer could cure the physical harm, but could not cure the infection - which resulted in a tense evening's play as they raced the clock to get him to a temple where he could be cured, with the PC getting weaker and less able to move as time went on ...

Re: "revised" hit location chart? Just a couple of comments - although there's nothing in the lower abdomen you can't "live without", significant damage to the liver or spleen (both highly vascularised) can cause internal bleeding, which can kill you within minutes. Penetrating wounds to the intestines almost always cause peritonitis. You won't die of it too quickly, but without medical care and antibiotics, it's almost always fatal. In truth, there are very few injuries which in real life will kill you within seconds: significant trauma to the brain, heart and spine - that's about it. Damage to the real vitals - lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys, or major blood vessels - will usually kill in minutes to days, without care. Pretty much any other significant injury might kill you (in days to weeks) or it might get better on its own. One possibility that I played with (but have never implemented) was to check for "Complications". In this approach, hit locations functioned as they do currently, but any attack that did BOD was checked for "Complications" by rolling a D6. If you roll under the BOD taken, you have a complication. In that case you simply roll another D6, and take the original damage again each turn, if you roll a 1 and move up the time chart from there: each minute if you roll a two, every five minutes if you roll a three, all the way up to each day if you roll a 6. This damage continues until you get appropriate medical treatment (ie: not normally a quick paramedic roll: meaning that you could potentially linger for weeks before expiring from an injury, or end with a minor injury that simply won't heal properly, or takes a long time to heal). A Paramedic roll, however, will stabilise the patient and allow you to reduce the speed at which you lose BOD, by 1 step up the time chart for every -2 it is made by. Each time you take "extra damage" check for disabling on the optional damage chart. Locations which increase BOD taken (like the head) thus increase the risk of taking further damage. Those that decrease the BOD taken (like the limbs) reduce that risk. Still, a good shot to the limbs can still cause you to bleed out inside a minute, if you are unlucky. This system does not impact combat too much, since most of the extra damage is deferred beyond the length of most heroic combats: it's a pretty rare fight that lasts more than a minute or two. However, it (intentionally) makes combat both much more volatile and much more lethal and makes wounds post combat, much more of a liability. It's also (intentionally) fairly simple/abstract: so it could realistically be used in games. I haven't tried it because I decided I needed neither more lethality or more volatility. I've played with the numbers and this actually gives relatively realistic outcomes with regard to real life numbers on surviving serious trauma (though it's a bit more stringent than realistic in terms of time), and by increasing volatility, you can end up with situations where someone can - albeit rarely - die from a punch to the face, or after falling off a horse. The second point - on location 13 - is that while I understand it's meant to be an abstract lethal location, in games where characters have segmented defences, you are more or less forced into assigning it a groin/lower abdomen location. Where characters might have DEF8 in one location and DEF0 in another, and that defines BOD and STUN multiples, it's difficult to just "let it float". cheers, Mark

Re: Skills in Science Fiction It's also worth running the numbers. A character with a skill at 13- will succeed at a moderately difficult task, with no preparation, no special tools and no backup, in the shortest reasonable time .... two-thirds of the time. He succeeds in routine tasks all the time (doesn't need a roll). Basically, he's a real expert. In this regard, many of the skills listed above could well be FAM.s Is the Starship repair genius really an expert guide to all the ins and outs of Cold Harbor Station? Not just the bars, and machine shops, but high class restaurants, local Fences, location of police stations and datahubs, members of the ruling council, etc? Is he a highly skilled thief, expert-level driver, special-ops level combatant, in addition to being a genius-level engineer? If yes, then there's a reason he has a gigantic skill list: he's an omni-competent all-round Hero. He can do almost anything, and do it at an expert level. If not, then start reducing some skills to FAM.s and start cutting away others. That should solve the problem. Of course, if you don't like that approach .... then you have chosen to have really long skill lists. It's an either/or proposition. cheers, Mark

Re: Post "gotchas" here The discussions prior to the addition of HA made it pretty plain that HA was derived from limited STR: it's why in its earliest form it was 3 pts per D6 (later retconned to 5 points with a mandatory -1/2 to reflect the invisible "no figured CHA"). HA has always been problematic, because HA even at 3 points cost more than "STR, no figured CHA, no lift" or "STR, sell back STUN and Leap". 6E has addressed that mostly, by removing the figured CHA. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? It seems to be a rule of scifi movies - the black guy always dies. Usually he goes first. The characters commented on this in Planetary cheers, Mark

Re: Well, we haven't talked about Killing Attacks in a while... The flaw is right here: since people almost always have more STUN than BOD, any such attack that can KO someone will almost always kill them first. Not what we are looking for. At least, not what I am looking for and I voted "more killy" cheers, Mark

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Finally got around to reading Daywatch and Nightwatch. Very different from the movies*, but an enjoyable and quick read. Now looking for Twillightwatch. cheers, Mark *It's like they took the characters from the books, set them in an entirely different plot and dotted it with vignettes from the books in a more or less random order. Actually, that is what they did! cheers, Mark

Re: Well, we haven't talked about Killing Attacks in a while...

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Yep, I ran through 6 versions before finding a lighting setup I liked. And yeah, I was originally playing around with sketches of 300-style spartans vs real spartans, and it kind of evolved into this. But I went with a kilt-thing in the end because what with the 300-style speedos ... no, I just can't go there. cheers, Mark

Re: Well, we haven't talked about Killing Attacks in a while...

Re: The Good, The Bad, and The Weird Yeah, as I said to Mike, I really liked this one - it's way better than it has any right to be. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Just a picture that popped into my head last night ... cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian: Indusharan and women - typo / errata? Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, of all places. You can get an excerpt containing a description here in user-friendly format or a detailed discussion of the overturning of gender-based sentencing (which references the pennsylvania law) by the courts in 1968 here. cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian: Indusharan and women - typo / errata?

Re: Turakian: Indusharan and women - typo / errata? Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, of all places. You can get an excerpt containing a description here in user-friendly format or a detailed discussion of the overturning of gender-based sentencing (which references the pennsylvania law) by the courts in 1968 here. cheers, Mark

Re: Turakian: Indusharan and women - typo / errata?