Markdoc

Re: Odd Swords -- Real or Fantasy? I think the real value of these things is as wall decorations (though I have to admit, I would never decorate my wall with something that so obviously wasn't actually a sword). There have been a bunch of weird and wacky sword designs used in real life, but even so, what's in the photos are clearly are "fantasy blades" - useless and imbalanced in combat. One thing all real swords share with each other (regardless of cultural origin) is an absence of the doodads, flanges, whatsits and animal/monster heads with which fantasy blades are so richly decorated - even if the blades, hilts or pommels of real swords were carefully and sometimes richly decorated. I agree with Mayapuppies: the big handle/blade ratio on these babies suggest that their real point of origin is the elven blades from LoTR. cheers, Mark

Re: Music during sessions? I started using music for my game after I noticed how effective it was when out Runequest GM did it: he had mix CDs with background music, ominous music, fight music, etc. These days I have my laptop at the table with my iTunes library and playlists for various atmospheres. I stream the music to the stereo. That way I can kick up whatever I need in a few seconds. One key point - it's background music and should almost always be played softly. If people have to talk louder to be heard over it, I think that's too intrusive. For example, the "background" is mixture of the LoTR soundtrack, some Celtic, Scandinavian and classical. "Ominous music" has a variety of Ennio Morricone tracks (there's nothing like kicking "The Thing" up when the players are exploring some scary old ruins!), plus stuff like Arvo Part. I also have "Triumphal music" (marches and stuff) which I play when the players win a big fight, or otherwise do good. It's interesting how that perks them up. "Fight music" is mostly the livelier parts of LoTR and some more peppy classical stuff - I'd be interested in recommendations, though, since that's the part I am least happy with. cheers, Mark

Re: Watchmen: A GM's tale...or why we set campaign limits Also flight - we see him flying outside the white house Duplication Telekinesis - we see him holding multiple objects up in the air without touching them when he's working on the synchrotron and he dresses himself without using his hands Clinging (he walks on walls as through they were flat) Either a funky sense or extreme microscopic/telescopic vision - he can see tachyons and gluons (I must admit it sounds more like "molecular sense" to me Growth (he's hellacious big when he crushes the wall of Ozymandias' base and also while working on the synchrotron or blowing up Vietnamese) Precognition - we see him telling Laurie what she's going to do or say before she actually does it Life support (usable on others) and possibly mucho regeneration (though maybe that's just a special effect of being desolid and the intrinsic field subtracter didn't in fact disintegrate him.) It's still doable, but I'd struggle to get it in under 350 points simply because of the magnitude of some of his demonstrated powers - I'm thinking of "Simultaneously teleport multiple people to their homes" - not to mention how he knew where their homes actually were.... Edit: I hadn't seen McCoy's post, but yeah - It was Laurie and Dr. M outside the White House, but yeah, it's a great scene. Pity they left it out of the movie - I think that just screams "Ultimate badass" cheers, Mark

Re: Watchmen: A GM's tale...or why we set campaign limits

Re: Magic: SFX or mechanically distinctive? Also decide what you want magic to do. In my current game, it's heavily limited, so mages make poor warrior replacements. However, they can do things that warriors can't (magic healing, divination, breathe underwater, fly, etc). cheers, Mark

Re: What books would you recommend? I don't do this, but I avoid giving weak monster too much resistant defence - that way a good blow will put them down. Once they go down, they may get back up again, but they don't usually charge back into combat - instead they crawl off sniveling "Oww. I think he broke a rib". That's actually faster than ignoring STUN, since they tend to go down faster than on BOD damage alone.

Re: Watchmen: A GM's tale...or why we set campaign limits Yeah, I can easily see watchman as gaming group fodder. The first campaign, featuring two-fisted pulp heroes ends as players move on or PCs die. The GM takes a few of the surviving PCs, makes them NPCs and starts a new game. This time the tone is grittier, the heroes have more points - but also more disad.s - and he's added a high points uber-NPC, who one of the PCs has a contact. He also adds some plot twists. Comedian - a former PC - gets killed right at the start of the game, as a hook to bring our hero team into the action. Night Owl I, another former PC is killed (as a red herring) as the game progresses. Later, one of the PCs (Silk Spectre II) discovers her predecessor (and now DNPC) has a dark secret that may have a bearing on the Comedian's death. As the game goes on, the PCs try to contact the one remaining NPC from the old group, to see if he can help, or if they can protect him - and discover that Ozymandias - former boy wonder - has become a villian. In the big showdown that ends the campaign, Rorschach plays out his psych. lim.s and gets stomped by the GM's Uber-NPC. With the right group, it'd be dynamite! And seriously, in the first long Champions campaign, our group played, the big baddie turned out to be a long-respected hero (the game's version of Captain America). He gave us a good run for our money even though we way outpowered him physically, because we implicitly trusted him (I mean, hey! Captain America!) - we even told him what our plans were ... When the big reveal happened: a) it was a crowning moment of awesome - everyone was stunned. we ended up smashing his organization - but he got away and we told no-one. In an echo of Watchmen - which hadn't even been published at that point - we figured that covering up his dirty little secret would be better for everyone than revealing it. So yeah, it could work. cheers, Mark

Re: Exosuit Prototype: Lockheed's HULC Sure, I understand that. The F-22 has been hit all the usual ways. First the original estimates by Lockheed as to how long and how much the project would take have proven hoplessly optimistic, so the project was actually nearing the total procurement cost before the first plane was delivered. That's partly their fault and partly the fault of the geniuses, who changed the spec.s part way through from air superiority to multi-role fighter (though to be fair that change was in part in response to budget over-runs: there was concern the airforce could end up blowing most of its new plane budget on an air superiority fighter at a time when most of its work was actually ground support). That led in the end to the current order, which is about a quarter of the original plan and less than half the original contract. So cutting the order without question raised the per-plane cost. At the same time, the original plan was for 750 planes entering service in 1994 at a total cost of 86 billion dollars. The original contract scaled that back to 442 for 61 billion dollars. In 1996 - before a single plane had been delivered - the program was already years behind schedule, tens of billions over budget, more money was required - and delivery date had been pushed back to 2000. It was apparent at that point, that the cost was going to be way, way beyond the original contract for 61 billion. In fact, the current buy of 187 was designed to reach the 61 billion originally appropriated. It's not that the budget has been cut, per se - it's just that 61 billion bought 187 planes, not 442. The unit cost would fall of course if more planes were built, but the total price would still more double if the originally contracted number were purchased. cheers, Mark

Re: Exosuit Prototype: Lockheed's HULC Yeah, but more of them are also surplus to requirements. The Air Force said "OK, we have enough of these" and Congress - looking out for the attached jobs - said "No, no, we insist, have some more". It's the same with the DDG-1000, which the navy has decided was a big, expensive mistake. They don't want it and will probably never deploy it (the Navy has already drastically downscaled its weapons program for the DDG-1000, so there's a distinct possibility that the taxpayer will cough up 9 billion dollars for three warships .... with no armament). But the ship's boosters have insisted the navy buy a third one anyway. With programs as expensive as this, I think the Fed.s need to make decisions on better grounds than "It looks really good on the Military Channel" I do dig the fact that the Lockheed system is pronounced "Hulk" though cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? 'Allo 'Allo was one of those series that was hysterically funny at first, but for me at least, lost funniness pretty rapidly because it's basically a one-joke series. They got some pretty amazing mileage out of that one joke, but still... cheers, Mark

Re: World of HEROCraft?

Re: What does 'Magic' mean to you? Coming late to the discussion: magic is a special effect. End of discussion, for me. Gawd forbid we should hard-code specific adders or advantages /disadvantages onto special effects: that goes right against the reasoning at the heart of Hero system. SFX are not unimportant. Players should choose their SFX with some forethought and should (IMO) be encouraged to make use of it where they can. If a player or a GM decides they want "magical fire" to be different from "regular fire" they can certainly build that into the game. But it is not (and IMO should not be) implicit in the rules. You want motorcycleburningheadman's hellfire EB to act differently to flyingonfireguy's flameblast .... then build them differently. Hero system provides you the mechanics to do so. It doesn't however provide any rationale for saying "this EB always interacts significantly differently with the game system to that EB, based on SFX". cheers, Mark

Re: World of HEROCraft? Also, "Fivetotenminutesride" is kind of an awkward name cheers, Mark

Re: I need help with a Magic System Concur with KS: Trigger. I've used a similar system, modelled closely on Vancian magic in my FH game with some success. Basically what you are describing is a spell with a long preparation time (the extra time limitation) and a trigger (an arcane gesture or word). If the character wants to use a spell immediately, he can run through the preparation and then just use the trigger immediately. In my game, the spells all required spellbooks, which were universal foci, so anyone who got heir hands on the book, could (in theory) use the spells, but if they lack skill, are likely to futz things up. The system looked like: Spells can be bought either singly or as slots in multipowers. All spells require the following build: Aid 1d6, Trigger (Activating the Trigger requires a Zero Phase Action, Trigger requires a Turn or more to reset; +1/4) 1 Charge (-2), Extra Time (1 Minute, -1 1/2), IIF Bulky, extremely expensive/difficult to replace (-3/4), Gestures (Requires both hands; -1/2), Costs Mana (-1/2), Requires A Skill Roll (Active Point penalty to Skill Roll is -1 per 20 Active Points; -1/4), Side Effects (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4) Total limitations -7 1/2 Essentially, a wizard reads up his spells, "fixes" them in his brain (this takes some time) and then can releases the stored magical energy with a word or gesture (zero phase action: trigger must be defined when power is bought). There are several points to note about a such a system. 1) Most of these limitations - not "one charge" but everything else can be applied to the reserves of a multipower, making magic extremely cheap, and therefore extremely powerful. This is countered by the fact, that a wizard is very inflexible: he needs to decide what spells he is carrying in advance - and if he wants more than one use of a specific spell, the "one use" limitation means that he needs to buy extra slots. That's not a big deal since ultra slots are dirt cheap: 1-2 points for up over 100 active points 2) Spellbooks are listed as IIF foci, because the wizard doesn't need it with him to cast spells (meaning he cannot readily lose it in combat). But he does need it to regain spells once cast. If he loses it, he's basically powerless until he a) gets it back or writes a new one - a process which would take months. Most wizards therefore keep their books at home, really, really well guarded. Since it's a universal focus, if someone does steal it, they can use it. This probably isn't exactly what you want, but you could build what you want out of it pretty readily. cheers, Mark

Re: Arcane Archer Type Character Count me in for another vote for Multipower: I actually designed a character exactly like this for a long-ago FH game and he was pretty lethal - especially when combined with my wife's character (an Earth elementalist). She'd immobilise 'em, I'd shoot 'em. Famous quote from that game: "It's windy, raining and he's 200 metres away. I'll shoot him in the head to make sure." cheers, Mark

Re: PA Hero:How long would plumbing work? I'm not a plumber either, but I'd tend to agree - most sewerage/drainage systems require electrical pumps at some points along their line - and sewerage systems at least also require frequent cleaning (I spent one summer working at a sewerage plant when I was at university). My guess is that many systems would fail within hours of the power going off due to lack of water pressure, a majority of systems would fail within days as the drains backed up/blocked up and a very few where it was gravity feeds throughout would last for many years, possibly decades. They are still using sewer lines laid in in Copenhagen in the early 1700's, for example - because those early lines were only laid places where gravity feed was possible, and they have been regularly flushed to clean them. cheers, Mark

Re: Norse Campaign Journal How nice! cheers, Mark

Re: Immunity to Electric Attacks

Re: N-Ray with Senses having the opposite effect? As a matter of interest, why not use mindscan? What you describe is essentially what it does. cheers, Mark

Re: Norse Campaign Journal Yep, and I'm not Scandinavian, but have had an interest in vikings since I was a kid. Now, more or less by coincidence I live in Copenhagen and work there and in Norway (for about 11 years now). One of the people in our old gaming group (don't see her much since she had kids) is a lecturer in early scandinavian history and used to work for the national museum, so we got to see/do some cool stuff. So we have a shared interest in vendel/viking times. cheers, Mark

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations Yeah, one of our old gaming group (Dylan Horrocks) wrote part of the series (Hunter: The Age of Magic, specifically). It's a nice background, I think. cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy Magic System I use multis pretty widely but in general require in-game roleplaying to acquire new slots: either finding new spells or a prolonged period of downtime and the necessary research skills. The current game uses primarily VPPs but the same rule is in force to prevent the VPP from morphing into the "solve anything" power. This is always explained up front and the players have always been cool with it. cheers, Mark

Re: Find Weakness, again Not really - as I highlighted, you would perhaps prefer it to be a simplified hit mechanic, but that's not really how it works: after all, you can use find weakness on a wall, which doesn't have any hit locations, and on Vehicles, or on Automatons: Saying "You can use it to reflect things other than hit locations, but that's not really right." ... well, you're welcome to your opinion, but that's not how FW is written. It can be applied to a variety of approaches. I think you are taking your own preferred SFX and trying to cram everyone else's approach into that - which is why you are meeting so much disagreement. cheers, Mark

Re: Norse Campaign Journal

Re: Norse Campaign Journal In old norse,"thing" is a group or meeting. Althing was the name given to the big meeting in Iceland which served as a combined law session/market and which eventually evolved into a parliament. As far as I am aware, though, that's a specific Icelandic usage, not a general norse/viking thing. The Danish equivalent was called "Storråd" or "Big council" for example, even though the word "ting" was and is used - today's parliament is called Folketinget "The people's assembly"). In Sweden, the closest to the Althing was Landsting or "Country assembly", but also as far as I know, in viking times there was no national assembly there. cheers, Mark