Old Man

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Wow, that's a lot of sirens.

Re: Need list of skaldic kennings Conlangs are hard, fantasy ones even moreso. I wouldn't fault any author for not achieving a Real Life level of depth with conlangs designed mainly to support a fictional narrative. Tolkien is an outlier, a frickin' professor of Olde English who spent decades developing the conlangs that went into his books. Me, I have a hard enough time grappling with my native tongue; developing multiple fictional tongues is beyond my ken. You used to read the entire trilogy in one sitting?

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Steambirds I played that for a while. It's pretty good but certain levels are really annoying.

Re: Fantasy Hero 6E - initial impressions The best.

Re: Fantasy Hero 6E - initial impressions What, your character can't handle a triple radius autofire PRE Drain? Or maybe I make it a 1 pip RKA so that I can "fail" a spell and kill all the vermin within 32 meters. But if it really really bothers you I could define the AE as a line... straight up.

Re: Musings on Random Musings But was the car okay?

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? Not really. Denying frameworks hurts all spellcasters (who have access to all powers) far more than it hurts mundanes (who might be able to get half a dozen different powers, if that). No spellcaster is going to be unaffected by raising the average cost of spells to 4-5 instead of 1. Least affected will be the ritualist with a zillion limitations on his spells, but even he will still have to have more limitations than he would if he were using a multipower, and will probably have to reduce the number of spells in his inventory, which is what we were trying to accomplish by getting rid of the frameworks in the first place.

Re: Fantasy Hero 6E - initial impressions No, no, no. To minimax Side Effect you don't take crazy suicidal stuff like RKAs, you take Aids or Density Increase or (more likely) COM Drains and Flash vs. Taste. Area effect Side Effects are another good way to reduce the penalty to the caster and possibly have a useful effect (or at least annoy the other party members). Especially after you buy it triple radius autofire.

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? ...this, and the magic schools limitations from 4th ed, and I guess the related powers limitations or whatever from 6th. Which are all still framework-free, come to think of it. But they reduce costs for spellcasters so they are less useless, especially in combat.

Re: Musings on Random Musings qfmft.

Re: Fantasy Hero 6E - initial impressions So I've had a chance to read quite a bit of the PDF, though of course I haven't read it cover to cover. I'm pretty happy with it. As others have stated, the graphics and layout are huge improvements over 5th, which was... hard to read.* Contentwise FH6 is more of an incremental improvement, but there wasn't as much room for improvement in this area to begin with. I can even live with the melee weapon table. I really have to reach to think of things that could be improved. Still, it does seem to me that the campaign-customization fluff kind of gets in the way. The magic system section is fifty pages (!) of maybe-you-could-do-it-this-way discussion, which is great, but it makes it hard to find the one paragraph in there that details the default magic system. Were I a new player trying to figure out how to build my wizard character, it might help if the campaign customization stuff were at the back of the magic section, with a note up front explaining that hey, FH supports a lot of magic systems, check with your GM. Were I a new GM, I'd probably be less interested in advanced customization issues and more interested in the example magic systems; that section could benefit from a table up front that briefly summarizes the magic systems, their flavors, and their power levels. The other suggestion I might make is that FH is getting really, really big. It's all good stuff, but it seems like things like the Fantasy Civilizations, Enchanted Items, and Magic Systems sections could be scaled back at least, and other sections could be condensed somehow. I worry that potential players might be intimidated by a phone book-sized rulebook. * Some of you may recall me ranting in here about how FH5 was laid out worse, and harder to read, than many of the technical documents I deal with for work.

Re: Considering: Sliding the KA scale for Weapons

Re: Help me refine NoNameYet I'll repeat Markdoc's suggestion that you lose the martial arts. As he said, they're expensive, and since you have a multipower you can put maneuver-like slots in there to accomplish almost the same thing, much more cheaply. Also, is that Second Wind power supposed to be able to boost his END and STUN above starting levels, or does it work more like a healing? If the latter, you should be able to get some additional limitations on there; that is a very expensive power. Hell, put some charges or something on there, too. 10 PRE seems low for the concept.

Re: Bit confused by Requires a Skill Roll and I finally decided to ask [munchkin] What you do is buy up the skill roll real high so as to mostly negate the limitation. This works best if you then put RSR on lots of spells/powers. [/munchkin]

Re: The cranky thread

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? No, Hero is perfectly capable of balancing "realistically possible" with "magically possible". Along a broad range of development points. You just have to be careful about how you go about it. Certain characters should, conceptually, have access to a broader range of powers than others. Usually, the way to balance that is to make the "restricted access" powers expensive enough to make up for that versatility; either that or you have to give the specialists some kind of cost break or other compensation for giving up access to them. Giving everybody multipowers may seem fair, but if a warrior can only put HKAs and badly-built Drains in his multipower, he's still at a disadvantage to the character that, conceptually, can slot every power in the book. Especially as the game progresses. So now if I want my mundane character to be competive, I have to give him a pact or blessing or supernatural skill or charm or relic or divine ancestor, whereupon he is no longer mundane. Thus, mundane PCs are discouraged, at best.

Re: Considering: Sliding the KA scale for Weapons For newer players, yeah, I wouldn't bother changing it. For ancient hacks like me, after a few years the granularity in FH gets annoying, and there's a significant jump between the .5d6 DC and the next, full dice, DC up.

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? Yeah, I played FH about weekly for a decade with a bunch of munchkins, so I know what you mean about getting to know the system. It's certainly interesting that our respective groups came to handle certain things in different ways.

Re: The cranky thread Yeah, but is it worth lawyering up over?

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? I know, right? This kind of touches on my pet peeve that Hero is costed for supers and not for fantasy. But at the same time, it's fun to be practically invincible with 5" of flight, a 1 hex area flash, and an ego blast.

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? More like common sense than convention. You are really reaching to find ways to get even ineffective drains and summons into the swordsman's arsenal, and there are lots of other powers that they really just can't have. Giving mundanes and spellcasters access to the same (broken) power framework not only doesn't even things out, it tilts things further in the spellcaster's favor, because he can use powers the mundanes can't, and because he can do the things the mundanes can do just as cheaply (if not cheaper). You mean a mage with Multiform, who can literally be every other character in the party, less 20 points or so. But seriously, as I said above, the range of powers available for "combat tricks" is just not as good as the range available for "it's magic". No, this is totally wrong. It's common, if not typical, for most characters in a fantasy setting to have no magic abilities whatsoever, with a small minority of people able to use magic effectively. You seem to think that all PCs have to be magicians of one sort or another for there to be balance in the game. That's just not true; Hero is better than that. If I were playing in a campaign where I had to play a magical character to compete with the other PCs, I'd be really irritated.

Re: Martial Art: Lunch Money

Re: The cranky thread Well, I tried.

Re: FANTASY HERO Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! Yeah, Moses did take awfully good care of his beard, even on that long hike.