Markdoc

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Conan is armed with a sword of pure awesome. He's one of those iconic characters who earned their iconic status the hard way, by Crom! I re-read all the Conan stories again last year. I last read them about 30 years ago, when I was still at school and I was amazed at just how good they were and how well they stood up to my fond memories. cheers, Mark

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... It's hard work, but it does stay with you.... Greg Bear. Ick. Great ideas, clumsy execution See my comments above. Just finished re-reading The Dragon Waiting. Still a very evocative book, with some great ideas, but not as awesome as I remembered. A Also read the Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. It's the kind of book that people who like this kind of book will like, if you know what I mean. Distinctly Wolfe, and compulsive reading - I went through it in a couple of sessions, but at the end ... I felt ... I dunno ... kind of disappointed. No, I don't know why. Probably because like the Book of the Long Sun, you're left with the feeling that there's more to the story - but that it hasn't been written down. cheers, Mark

Re: Dark Champions Images and Art You want abandoned stuff, try here. cheers, Mark

Re: Pirates of not Freeport or the Caribbean If you can find a copy in English, try "Red Orm" (I think it was also published as "The Long Ships" in English) - it's a book about a bunch of vikings who go a-pirating along the coast of France and Spain, amnd run into some Barbary corsairs, for a slightly different take on things. Also - a must-read - is Tim Power's "On stranger tides". It's got pirates, magicians and voodoo! cheers, Mark

Re: Cool Guns for your Games Huh. My kéyboard doesn't have büilt-in aççeñts. It does have å, æ and ø, though .... Note: accents above delivered via the power of amazing alt key (Except for å, æ and ø, of course!) cheers, Mark

Re: New Metarule Yeah, I don't like this idea at all. It takes away a significant degree of granularity, for no good reason that I can see. I have my own metarule, which is that if a PC has a skill (even a FAM), they don't need to roll when success would be trivial and or expected. Rolls only matter when something's on the line - and in that case, if you want better than a 1 in 4 chance of succeeding, you should maybe spend some points. cheers, Mark

Re: Sixth Edition Showcase #2: New Combat Maneuvers; Objects As Weapons And I disagree I've always seen linked as a way of building composite powers, and am delighted that MPA has been included in the rules in a way that makes more sense to me. In general, I have not been much enchanted by the new character building rules, but all of the changes listed here get an enthusiastic thumbs up - some of them, like breaking DEF into its components, have been part of our houserules for decades now. cheers, Mark

Re: ... armor, limits of limitations,etc.

Re: ... armor, limits of limitations,etc. You are misunderstanding. The whole idea behind a points-based system is that it doesn't make anything "hard to get"; that's the GM's job. It tries to make it balanced, with similar points costs, if the GM decides to make it available. A 10 PD armour spell costs you the same as a 1d6 HKA, which may occasionally put BOD through, and will usually put STUN through that defence, or a 1d6 E-RKA, which will always put BOD and STUN through. Given the number of ways there are to put damage through 10 PD armour for the same cost, it seems pretty balanced. The cost ISN'T the best way to control access (in fact, it's the very worst) since that means the cost would be different in every game - in some games 10 PD armour would be a lot, in many, it's hardly any. cheers, Mark

Re: ... armor, limits of limitations,etc. Yep. One thing we did a lot when we were customising Hero system to our games was run lots of one-off or short games with disposable characters. The players were given a fair degree of freedom to design how they liked and we almost never bothered with artificial limits like points caps. We had a lot of fun, and learned what worked and what didn't. For FH games, my basic rules are: 1) keep an eye on magic users - the fact that they have access to a wide range of powers and other characters do not, makes them more powerful than they look at first glance. The mandatory restrictions you indicated would solve this potential problem. This has the side effect that it is often more cost-efficient to pick up a free weapon if you just want to hurt someone, meaning that non-magic-using characters are often the most efficient dealers of raw damage to single targets - but that's OK, IMO, because magic using characters are better at almost everything else. In addition, you need to keep some control on what sort of spells are available. mind control, X-ray vision and long distance teleport are often far more gamebreaking than a simple killing attack. Some game systems limit them to "high level characters" but in Hero you can get them relatively readily if the GM lets you. 2) Don't allow "equipment stacking". This means you can't use character points to augment free stuff - otherwise it's too easy to get free armour and add on some extra defence at low cost, or pick up a free sword and make it uber-cutty. Again, if you do this all your PCs will gravitate to warrior-mage types, because nothing else compares. If the mage has armour and the stoneskin spell then he gets the better of the two, not both. With those basic caveats, I've run a lot of FH games and never had any real problems. In the current FH game, we are three years in and we've had two dedicated magic users (we've got one left), one rogue type and four fighter-types, and two that started as fighter types and have expanded to acquire some magical powers. In addition, the fighter types mostly have differentiated roles - one archer, one face-man type, one strongman and one specialised damage dealer. In other words, in over three years of play, we still have a fairly broad range of abilities and they've remained relatively balanced - without a great deal of input from me on what powers they should and should not have. cheers, Mark

Re: ... armor, limits of limitations,etc.

Re: ... armor, limits of limitations,etc. Because those limits are ... well, limiting. You're looking at the effect of the spell when it's up and running, forgetting that much of the time people are going to be applying the damage directly to the soft squishy mage without any protection. Let's look at it: he's paying END for the stoneskin (quite a lot of END in the original version), which means he can't have it up all the time. It's not up when he's stunned. It interferes with his ability to cast and maintain other magics in combat. It requires gestures and incantations which means that in many situations it can't be used at all. The improved version has a base cost of 96 active points, which is a -10 on his magic roll ... hope your mage sunk a lot of points into that roll, or he's going to get the benefit of the spell hardly at all. In a real game, your mage is going to be able to use his stoneskin spell only some of the time. And even the base version is a 60 active point power! A 4d6 RKA, which has the same active points cost is going to slice through it like knife through butter. It'll KO the mage in one hit, kill him in two - even if he succeeds in getting the spell up in the first place. Even if you move to a more extreme example where the mage makes his spell 12 PD/0 ED and limit killing attacks to 2.5 d6, it's still no spell of invulnerability. Sure, the mage can shrug off the BOD damage from most sword blows if he gets the spell up, but the first energy-based spell is going to put a big ol' hole in him (and probably stun him, blowing his stoneskin spell, so the next sword blow will finish off what's left). A swordsman with Find Weakness will likely carve him up in sort order. In other words, there's lots of ways around his defence ... which is why it's cheap. A strongish warrior with a longsword can generally put out about 2d6 killing - not even at the top of your damage range. That's 7 BOD and - on average - 19 STUN. So even an average hit will put some STUN through the basic version of his spell - and some BOD. But you need to look at the range of damage, not just the average. 1/6 hits even with average BOD will do 24 STUN and 1/6 will do 35. Even with a PD of 6 and his Stoneskin spell maxed to 12 PD, he's still likely to be wearing significant stun from a few hits, from an opponent not even at the top of your starting damage range. He's far from invulnerable and if he wades into combat expecting his spell to protect his from all damage he's in for a nasty shock in about 3 phases. And in a crosstime game, he might be facing someone with a BAR. 2.5 d6 RKA? The stoneskin spell is going to be a great help, but even if it is maxed out, it's not going to give invulnerability, or even anything close. Remember, it doesn't help much if you bounce 5 hits and the 6th one lays you out unconscious without your protective spell .... Bottom line: by only looking at average damage vs defence and not looking at actual utility, I think you are getting a misleading impression how effective limited defences are, in play. As an experienced FH GM, I'd look at that spell as useful, but not even close to being a gamebreaker. cheers, Mark

Re: Wolfram|Alpha for Science Fiction Writers Interesting - I've been using Wolfram|Alpha since it went public and was generally unimpressed. However, it now occurs to me that the problem was not Wolfram|Alpha but me - I was using it wrongly! Rep! cheers, Mark

Re: How would this work - Citizenship Right - an equally constrained example can be found in earlier European history. In the later western Roman empire, certain jobs were considered "Strategic necessities" and were constrained by law. If you were born into that occupation, you could not leave it and ducking out on your job carried heavy penalties (up to, and including, being sold as a slave: it was treated similarly to desertion from the army). These included things like (I'm not kidding) baker. Bread was a strategic asset! Tokugawa Japan's another good example of the opposite to the European situation - there, popular movement was heavily constrained - in some cities, you actually needed a pass to go from one neighbourhood to another, let alone, leave the city! Trying to leave the country was punishable by death (as was trying to come back). Again, it comes back to what you want. I'd start with the "feel" of a state you want. Make evil states more restrictive with regard to property laws and movement - that's in line with traditional dictatorships . In Republican-like settings most adult males (perhaps all adults) are citizens, but with that privilege comes some responsibility (for example, a requirement to serve in the military in times of need). In feudal settings, de-emphasize citizenship and play up ties of loyalty. That, as a GM, lets you mess with your players head, when a player's duty (to his feudal lord) comes in conflict with what the modern-minded player sees as a duty to his country. Areas which are tribal or confederations have similar conflicts, but you get involved by being born into a tribe, not by taking oaths. Etc. I approve of the idea of trying to work out what government does - it's one of the first things I do when I set up a fantasy gaming area. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Star Wars. I'm sure it'd work fine. We've actually played games where martial arts and psionics were in play, along side traditional magic. Traditional magic required gestures, incantations, etc so it was flashier and less flexible than "the Force". However, if I were going to run a game like this, myself, I'd go for your "force is the only magic" approach. Side note: in the fantasy game above, a friend's character who was playing the party's "Jedi master" (a paladin-type) had put side effect (migraine) and "requires a Force skills roll" as a limit on his powers to bring the cost down. He had horrible luck with his "Force skills" roll, so my primary memory of that game (apart from the horrid combat efficiency of my own less force-gifted character, Flanghall of Ferlect ) is of him going "I sense a disturbance .... accck! Migraine!" all the time cheers, Mark

Re: "Heroes that Wreck the World" They did something like this in X-men. Phoenix2 decides the universe is so messed up because of the Beyonder and his utterly '80's dress sense that she decides to end it all. Then she mentally touches a bunch of folks and decides that maybe murdering every single person in the universe isn't such a great idea and backs off .... Girl had issues, I'm telling you. As for the series ... could be interesting. On one side you have a decent person who's about to make a terrible, terrible mistake and on the other side a bunch of total b*****s who want to stop her. The last anime series I really enjoyed (Darker than Black) had a cast line up of mostly casual killers, but it was till an interesting series. They even had a relatively sympathetic character who had murdered hundreds and maintained her power by drinking the blood of babies! cheers, Mark

Re: Bloodmäter

Re: How would this work - Citizenship Couple of points: "citizenship" is relatively modern idea, Rome not withstanding. The vast majority of people living and born in the Roman empire were not Roman citizens (in the full sense: they were not Cives Romani, but one of another civic class (there were six, if you count the fact that there were two legally distinct classes of roman Roman citizens). Heck, most people living in Rome, born of Roman parents, didn't have full citizenship (Cives Romani optimo jure). Basically "citizenship" in the Roman empire consisted of a graduated series of rights, like owning property, making legal contracts, voting, holding office, different tax rights, different legal rights, etc. It was quite possible to have some of these rights, but not the others. Also citizenship wasn't a lifelong thing - you could lose it simply by moving house. If a Roman citizen with full rights (Cives Romani optimo jure) moved to a city that didn't have legal status as a Roman colony (ie: not just a city in the Roman empire, but a city that didn't have the legal status as a little offshoot of Rome) - then you lost your citizenship. You could, quite literally, do that by moving less than 50 miles from Rome. Amusingly, you could get citizenship by signing up as a legionary (only citizens could be legionnaires) but once you actually signed up, you lost most of your legal rights - including the right of citizenship. As a result, any children you had while a legionary were not citizens, regardless of your status prior to joining up. You got your citizenship back once you had completed your term of service. (note: for history bugs: yes, I know it's more complex than that ) Anyway, the point that I'm making here is that citizenship - the idea that a person "belongs" to a certain country and that grants them inalienable rights - is a modern one, in most places. In medieval europe, tradesmen could and did wander from kingdom to kingdom - borders were porous and there was no such thing as a passport. The idea of nationality was a bit nebulous too. If you lived in Lorraine, were you German, French, Burgundian or Lorrainese? (the correct answer is "any and/or all of the above" depending on time and exact location.) The borders of "countries" waxed and waned depending on marriage, war and commercial deals and it wasn't unusual for a single province to belong to two or more "countries" at the same time. Essentially, countries were an ideal. There were usually fixed cores that defined the national ideal: Ile de France was definitively French, for example, and Southern England was definitively English. But around the edges things got fuzzy ... was The Pale English? Was Gascony? Was Gascony French? They didn't even speak French down there.... (or English). That's how the English king could stand in a cathedral and take an oath before his assembled nobles and God's representatives that he was, in fact French. And English, of course. And also a little bit Spanish. Basically rather than "citizenship" it was more a question of certain rights granted in exchange for personal (or group) privileges. So a "roman citizen" from the barbarian areas (Cives Foederati) gained certain privileges in return for his tribe supplying some military service. Other people living in his area, but not of his tribe might not (in which case they might be Cives peregratinii or cives provincales, if they were anything). Likewise feudal ties were upwards along lines of oathtaking, not across geographical areas, allowing a Baron in the North of England to be a "French noble" by virtue of his obligations to the French king in return for his lands in Normandy, while a count in Provence could be a "Free Englishman" by right of his feudal obligations in Kent. In the same vein, Hansa merchants were considered foreigners everywhere in England in the 14th century ... except in some ports on the Wash, where they had wangled a special status putting them on the same legal footing as local residents. Given that, I'd look at how you want "citizenship" to work. It will probably be different in different places. cheers, Mark

Re: Would you allow the white knight defense? I had a character with a build like that: a batman/wolverine mixture. Healing - even triggered Healing - is relatively inefficient, but if combined with Damage reduction, it becomes quite cost efficient. The character I had (Kestrel) had low defences (his supersuit was the equivalent of a flak jacket) but the combination of Regeneration, triggered Healing and Damage Reduction meant that though he usually took body in a fight (often a lot!) and was often Stunned, he was very, very hard to actually put down for very long. On the other hand, he'd sunk quite a lot of points into his "healing factor" and as a result was not an overwhelming combatant. In general, he'd have been far better off with higher defences, but there were some cases where - wolverine like - he could take huge attacks and survive, plus he could stagger through special attacks (NNDs, AVLD, etc) that would have dropped the team brick. As result, he was the guy who usually got worfed by the bad guy at the beginning to show how bad-ass the villain was. And he spent a lot of each fight lying down. But he was a heck of a lot of fun to play. Edit: here's the build - it's GM's permission, since it included Damage reduction in the EC 30 Elemental Control: Healing Factor, 60-point powers 20 1) Healing BODY (Regeneration) 3d6, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +½), Persistent (+½) (60 Active Points); Self Only (-½) 30 2) Energy and physical Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50%, (+1) (60 Active Points) 17 3) Succor 3d6+1, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +½), Persistent (+½), Trigger (Activating the Trigger requires a Zero Phase Action, Trigger resets automatically, immediately after it activates; +¾), Continuous (+1) (64 Active Points); Self Only (-½), Only Restores to Starting Values (-½) Basically the way we ran it (to simplify things) is that I used Standard effect - if he was injured, he recovered 1 BOD every other phase (he was SPD6) and 10 STUN each phase, until he was back to full health. Like I said, almost impossible to put down for long - but then, he's sunk almost 100 points into this! cheers, Mark

Re: Michael's Mook-Mashing Concept The simplest way to do it .... don't build mooks on 75+ points. I tend to build my mooks on 10-25 points and fights go rapidly (last session the PCs waded through 48 swarming beasties - basically mooks - in a single fight). Mooks don't have high defences, either, so they're easy to hurt. In addition, mooks are mooks because they're not heroes or major NPCs. They don't fight to the death, so a Mook who takes 3-5 BOD may not be dead, but if he's KO'ed, he's out of the fight. When he wakes up, he crawls away, moaning and nursing his injuries. If he's badly injured but not KO'ed he's probably going to stagger off, clutching his wounds, or try to hide. Either way, as far as the PCs are concerned, he's out of the fight. These rules require no additional rules, no artificial "mook" categorey and as a result play nice with all existing rules - including pushing, spreading attacks, bouncing, etc - and let the players power through dozens, or even hundreds of lower level opponents, depending on their power level. In addition you don't get an artificial bar that can trip players up, where you vastly increase the difficulty of opponents simply by lifting the "mook" title off them. cheers, Mark

Re: Michael's Mook-Mashing Concept The simplest way to do it .... don't build mooks on 75+ points. I tend to build my mooks on 10-25 points and fights go rapidly (last session the PCs waded through 48 swarming beasties - basically mooks - in a single fight). Mooks don't have high defences, either, so they're easy to hurt. In addition, mooks are mooks because they're not heroes or major NPCs. They don't fight to the death, so a Mook who takes 3-5 BOD may not be dead, but if he's KO'ed, he's out of the fight. When he wakes up, he crawls away, moaning and nursing his injuries. If he's badly injured but not KO'ed he's probably going to stagger off, clutching his wounds, or try to hide. Either way, as far as the PCs are concerned, he's out of the fight. These rules require no additional rules, no artificial "mook" categorey and as a result play nice with all existing rules - including pushing, spreading attacks, bouncing, etc - and let the players power through dozens, or even hundreds of lower level opponents, depending on their power level. In addition you don't get an artificial bar that can trip players up, where you vastly increase the difficulty of opponents simply by lifting the "mook" title off them. cheers, Mark

Re: Extra-planar Fantasy Shout out Also pretty exotic is the Shattered World duology: back in the distant past, the world is destroyed and wizards are able to save some of the population by essentially creating a giant belt of air around the sun and artificial gravity. The "world" is today made up of planetary fragments, which range in size from little uninhabitable rocks, through flying castles, to small countries. You could prop it up in the sky over Esoterica. cheers, Mark

Re: Iron Kingdoms: Boatman Awesome ... I can use this cheers, Mark

Re: Space Warfare III – 'Warships' in Space? Interestingly, this pretty much mirrors my own biases. And it also mirrors my all-conquering fleet from the days we played Trillion Credit Squadron - a carrier/repair facility that was basically just a big jumpdrive with a huge cargo capacity. That carried a bunch of ships (I called them cruisers) just big enough to take a spinal mounted weapon, and backed as much computer and in-system engine as I could cram into them. That was it, basically, (apart from a few steamlined refueling ships for skimming hydrogen off gas giants). You jump into a star system (preferably far from any expected enemy) and then unleash a horde of cruisers. The computing power available and their lighter weaponry rendered them essentially unkillable by smaller craft, the spinal mount was big enough to kill anything, even much bigger and more expensive ships, and they were fast and (relatively) cheap. The first campaign of trillion credit squadron we played they ate up everything in their path. The second campaign (natural selection, you know) featured only navies built up along precisely the same lines. It amuses me that an ancient rule set produced such eminently logical results, suggesting (if it wasn't blind chance) that some thought went into it. cheers, Mark

Re: How to encourage RP? Two other points - nothing fosters roleplay like attachment to your character. That takes some time to develop, normally, but once players start saying things like "I sneak up on the guard" instead of "MegaMan sneaks up on the guard" you'll know it's working. Give them some non-combat interaction. I started my current group off with a series of contests, which involved only occasional fights, as a way to learn the rules in a situation where death was unlikely. The contests themselves which involved things like brutal full contact sports, drinking contests, poetry contests, races, running gauntlets, etc opened their eyes to the things one could do apart from roll to hit. cheers, Mark