Doc Democracy

Re: Lower Water and Part Water

Re: Lower Water and Part Water

Re: Lower Water and Part Water Ooh! Life Support, Area Effect (Line), UBO. That allows anyone in the area effect to walk across the river lake etc without having to worry about breathing. I reckon we can do the dry thing and running, flying etc rather than swimming as part of the SFX. Doc

Re: Lower Water and Part Water I'd be careful about worrying too much about this stuff. When you starttrying to pull in real effects then you get tied up in knots - it is a special effect and if the player wants to use it creatively then explain the Power Skill to them. For example - Armitage provided a very good statistic for us on weight of water but if you part the waters of a river then on one side the water will run away and on the other it will begin to rise in height - you have just built a dam. On the upstream side of your parting it will get heavier by the minute until you are causing a flood when it breaches its banks. Too much detail for a heroic flavour - you can hand wave a lot to get the effect you are looking for. Doc

Re: Lower Water and Part Water

Re: Lower Water and Part Water Is it a matter of looking at what you are trying to achieve? In the parting of water you have the main thought of providing a path so that people can cross without the problem of having to breathe under water? One way might be to use tunnelling or teleport (with the gate advantage) that would allow people to walk from one side of the river to the other without drowning or getting wet. Special effects, the water being parted. Obviously there could be other applications - such as preventing the passage of boats, fish etc but you could either rule that SFX or add in some other stuff. Lower water is more difficult - I guess it comes down to what you are looking to achieve - and thus highlight the big difference in philosophy behind the rulesets. Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Remember what I said about Maximum Game Fun? Well, it has to be fun for the GM too. If you give the GM the impression that playing (notice the word, not competing but playing) is going to be so much work it will detract from his fun (and potentially the other players' fun) then that is exactly the course I would predict. There is line to be trod between ensuring you are clear on the rules and pestering...it sounds like you strayed over that line. When I am asking questions of a GM I usually ask one or two pertinent ones that allow me to see what kind of GM they will be. You can then tailor your play style to the GM or find another game. I play with a munchkin GM. He is a friend and all of our gaming group recognise his style and adapt to it when he runs a game. In his game our characters are all munchkinised to the nth degree and we push the rules to their limits. We have a great laugh and it is interesting to play in a different way. We do not insist that his game suits the style the rest of us play in and he does not insist that our games suit him. We get together as friends and play a game for the enjoyment of everyone. We respect the amount of work the GM puts into his game, listen to how he wants his game played and then we try to enjoy ourselves. It seems so simple! Doc

Re: Protection Power This is quite a powerful ability as it would allow an unarmoured mage to wander around a combat knowing that any attacks directed at him would, instead be diverted to the tank whose armour would apply. I think that you'd have to purchase something like Forcefield, usable as an attack, Side Effect: caster takes the damge that passes through the forcefield. That could be linked with a Healing power that is triggered on the person protected by the forcefield only when the forcefield is breached. Other limitations would be Can ONLY be used on others and forcefield only protects to the level of armour worn by the caster. You will have to decide on whether this can be cast at range and how close you and the person protected have to be for this to continue working - currently the situation would be limited by the range of Healing (I think). Doc

Re: "No Points" Character sheet?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement So much argument about minor points to shed light on the bigger points. From my reading Warp9 _needs_ a crunchy system like Hero. Treb and others _like_ a crunchy system like Hero. Warp9 asked about trusting GMs vs Trusting systems. He does not seem to want to accept a middle path where you trust the GM to choose and run a system to enhance the enjoyment of everyone. If I was not enjoying gaming in a certain group I would never game with them again - if they were friends I'd watch films, play football or board and video games, if they were not friends from elsewhere I might never see them again. Full stop. I would rather trust a GM than a system. Despite their flaws the GMs I play with are friends trying to ensure that we all have a good time. A book of rules will never have that ability for me, never be able to bring a story to life or provide the flexibility that I expect from my GM. So when it comes to it, I'd rather trust my GM without rules than trust my rules without a GM. I'm in this for the frindship and company. My perspective and I suppose all that I have left to say about this. Doc

Re: Language Games and Fantasy Languages To get the feel of not knowing a language we had, in one game, a set of sheets for limited language use. It was essentially a list of words that could be used to make sentences and the less talented at the language the fewer words you had at your disposal. In one game we had a major curse levelled at us which left us all with only the very basic word list (I think 40 words). It was fun but frustrating. Dark thing, pointy thing. Hurt thing. Go. You. Me. Hurt Dark thing. Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement You dont often see a trebuchet deployed defensively! I think in some places I'm definitely the enemy here!!! Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement See. i think this is what is frustrating people. You seem to be asking for more rules and yet also seem happy to promote an existing rule for the problem at hand. Why are you asking for more rules or whether the current system is flawed? The Hero system allows a GM to build the environment just the way he wants. If he wants to dictate special effects of environmental things down to the level of detail you appear to want then the tools are there to do that. If he would rather spend his time on putting scenarios together then he can do that too. The message you are getting here is that many of us appreciate what is possible but refuse to entertain trying to replicate to that level of detail. You are welcome to do so and appear to have a good enough grasp of the rules to do it as well. You cannot expect another GM to do that simply because you do not trust them to exercise their judgement in a fair manner. You cannot expect Hero to publish such detail because it would probably not sell enough to make it worth spending even the time necessary to put it together, never mind the typesetting and printing costs.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement All anecdotal but the best GMs that I have experienced have regularly abandoned the rules when it made sense for the game to do so. The worst GMs have often ruthlessly applied the rules whether or not it made the game worse. Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Exploding Dice I was talking about how the players relate to the mechanic rather than the practicalities of it. If it is something that is invoked and special to the player then it is more likely to invoke some special feel for the game as well. So if you are going to add to the administration side of the game you want to ensure it ties in with the feel of the game thus justifying the extra bit of admin and, hopefully, making the players look forward to invoking it rather than thinking that this just makes a long combat system that bit longer. Did I explain that clearly - just dashing out of the office.... Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement As a GM, I want a system that allows me to make a ruling when I need it. When I am telling a story I dont want the rules to be telling me that the drama needs to stop because the rules dont allow for it. One of my most successful games had, at its centre, me completely ignoring the rules about mental illusions - it was a haunted house scenario for superheroes and when the heroes had ignored or discounted all of the 'outs' I had provided them then things inside the house began to change at my whim. The players, by this time, knew it was illusion and that I was not going to be rolling dice or working out effects and that they were effectively now being funnelled to the final fight of the scenario and that loss of control actually added to the element of horror that the characters should have been feeling at that time. One conversation with the players went Player1 "OK, I've had enough. We're getting out of here." me "How" Player1 "Through the door, obviously" me "What door?" Player2 "Well the windows..." me "What windows?" Player3 "I dont suppose that I can blast through these plasterboard walls?" me "The only door you can see is the one to the kitchen where there is a dim red pulsing light coming from the cellar door. Your energy blasts simply flare against the walls, not even singeing the wallpaper. It begins to grow dark and the darkness herds you towards the kitchen. Do you want to wait until the darkness envelops you or will you go to the kitchen." AllPlayers "Oh *****!" To have stopped and rolled or even stopped and compared pre-rolls with stats etc detracts from the drama of that situation. The players knew where they had made mistakes, they knew they had missed the opportunity to avoid the fight that had been trailed for them earlier in the session and they were enjoying the story enough to ignore the rolls and start thinking about the fight to come. GM call to improve the game by completely abandoning the rules. You have to trust your GM to make things a better gaming experience and if you cant then you GM yourself or find a better GM. No amount of rules will make a bad GM a better one and the best GMs often go off piste to make the game more enjoyable. Doc

Re: Exploding Dice Hmmm. If it is simply a matter of implementation then you are looking for a way to make the God of Chance intervene. Lots of players dont like wild dice (as they were called in D6 Star Wars) possibly because they throw up lots of wild events, things that you cannot plan for and, like any other critical system, work against PCs in the long term if everyone has access to them. Now. If the system has no drawbacks (such as lots of ones cause bad things to happen) and only the heroes and named villains can explode their dice then I think the players are more likely to buy into it - no-one wants their Hero PC taken down by a rock thrown by an exceptionally lucky peasant.... I would be careful in the implementation that it doesn't happen too often that it becomes just another part of rolling damage - it should be special and deliberate (though the effects would be open to chance). What about having the PCs have a 'free' disad of 'Noticed by the Gods'. This disad would allow them to invoke the name of the God of Chance and allow him to influence the results of their contest. So the PC would normally roll 1D6K for his dagger. He invokes the God of Chance when he hits. In a competitive system then he would roll 1 black dice and one white dice - subtract the black from the white to get the number to add to the BODY damage. In a non-competive system roll a normal damage dice (1-2 BODY) if the BODY damage is a 6 and add the normal die's BODY as killing. For a 2D6 attack roll two dice rather than one as above, for 3D6 roll 3 etc etc The non-competitive system is obviously as likely to be bad for the invoker as it is good and while as the dice number increases the extremes get larger they also become less likely to occur. You may also want to use the competitive system as a way of using 'bennies'. If you disburse bennies for good playing then those bennies can be used to remove black dice from the competitive system... Doc

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Maybe I can bridge a gap, maybe not. The basic message is that if you want a rule system to cover every possibility then you are either going to limit the in-game possibilities or you are going to have an extremely large multi-FRED sized volume of rulebooks. The next basic message is that if you have a decent rule framework (like Hero) then you can add the detail where you want. The GM needs to take an interest either - for the liking of someone like Warp9- during character creation to ensure that all builds are valid for the game you intend to play in or - for other people - when things come up in play. Obviously the level of trust you have in the GM will dictate to what extent you veer toward the former or latter positions. I dont think anyone want an Encyclopedia Brittanica core ruleset.... Doc

Re: Urban Fantasy Recommendations

Re: Dreamwalker Yeah, you are making the common mistake when looking at this kind of thing of getting drawn into the colour. What can the dreamwalking achieve? If it is very much based on some activity that can be endless then you are looking at a VPP that is limited on some kind of RSR (which is used to simulate the effort while dreamwalking). The true element of this ability is that of altering the waking world. The dream walking aspect is SFX even if it could be roleplayed to good effect. Doc

Re: Fighting against more speed What Hugh said... However you have to accept that if one character has spent 19 points more on SPD and DEX that they expect to get the value from that. If they characters are evenly spent then the slower, less dextrous character should have 19 points spent elsewhere that may even it out - an area effect flash attack might aid them - special effects that provide one off OCV bonuses etc etc. If the character is a lower level then it might be expected that the best they can accomplish in this scenario is to establish a stalemate. Doc

Re: Gang members I'm surprised. The only thing that I'd give street toughs that I wouldn't give an everyman is either extra offensive PRE or the intimidation skill - and probably the former. I'd probably also limit it to when they are on their turf or with their gang. They are street toughs who have access to weapons - looking at the results of street battles they dont have any particular skill in using the weapons - casualties are almost random. I might also give them psychological disads to reflect their need to act in certain ways - distinctive looks, Psych: Needs to be respected, Psych: Commits casual violence, Psych: Territorial Something like that. Otherwise they are your 16-18 year old everyman statwise and skills wise. Doc