Doc Democracy

Re: Need Limitation Estimates I'm with the Life Support crowd - it isn't really a regneration thing as it only seems to regenerate the damage from environmental type damage. I would say it is a limited form of Life Support - one that prevents death but does not allow free action... I'd say a -1 limitation on Life Support.... If you are committed to the regeneration idea then I'd definitely pin it around the -2 level of limitation. Doc

Re: Dodge Giant Blows Gary made a good point about the absolute effect the area effect would have - you may want to consider that. However, to answer your point, if it is not going to be racially bound then the limitiation needs to be more closely drawn and, as such, may be worth no points to the giant. You could limit the area effect to those that have not studied gnomish giant fighting. This would be a perk (3 points seems good) that gnomes can purchase and that other races can seek a master to teach them - a perk costing more points perhaps (maybe 8 points). That way, anyone who expects their career to potentially involve fighting giants may get this training as it means that the giants would no longer automatically hit them unless they spend their time dodging behind rocks... Doc

Re: Dodge Giant Blows Like many issues in Hero it is usually best to design this thing into the attack. I would limit the area of effect advantage on the giant's attack so that it does not work against gnomes (dwarves, etc). Doc

Re: Seeking a couple of Middle Eastern monsters. I realise that this is purely non-authentic but in Fatal Revenant, Stephen Donaldson uses a creature called a Sand Gorgon that I think would be fantastic to use in a game. Obviously they need a bit of thinking about but they are essentially like a froce of nature tunnelling through sand at a fantastic speed and are able to reduce stone and physical buildings very quickly. They are purely physical and almost a stone and fire representation of hunger. If you kill a sand gorgon then other gorgons will gather to eat it and spawn new gorgons (no reveal yet as to how to stop that process - perhaps never will be as it is not relevant to the story so far). They are very resistant to physical damage and almost impervious to fire and heat damage. Their flesh is hot and can cause damage but the giant protagonists in the story kill them by reaching deep into their flesh and removing a vital organ (I'm calling that their brain). They are like wind worn stone with simple arms and blunt 'faces'. They have no fine manipulation skills and, barring one or two ancient examples, without sentience. These are a huge threat to any party but one, with proper guidance from NPCs etc, might prove a worthy challenge - the spawning of new ones from the one they only just defeated would be a good prologue to the adventure. Something the heroes will have to deal with in the future. Doc

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Second that recommendation. I've just finished the latest Stephen Donaldson book, Fatal Revenant, and I thoroughly enjoyed it despite having toiled through the last three. I enjoyed the original trilogy and the Wounded Land but the next three were pretty average I thought. I whizzed through this one and sat up late to finish it.... Doc

Re: System Gurus...help? You can always find situations where one character will have an advantage over another one. One option for the martial artist may be to leap close to the fire wielder so that both get hit by the one hex attack. It may be that in an open plain that the energy blaster has that advantage and that the martial artist has no winning options. A brick, once he has grabbed a martial artist is in a similar winning situation. In most circumstances, the martial artist will be in a location where he may force the energy blaster to waste a phase moving and look for some way to get a hit in. One of my messages to players when coming to the game is that the straight up fight is rarely the way to solve a problem - in this case the martial artist is going to have to look for ways to get round the built in advantage of this particular situation. As GM I would expect the martial artist to have breakfall and allow him to continually dive for cover, if that is all that it is going to take, allow him to try and wear the energy blaster out, or manouevre to somewhere that the energy blasters advantage is no longer as overwhelming, where some of the martial artists other skills might come into play...or even to call for help from some friends. Doc

Re: Ramming Speed Well, my take on it would be the kind of story you want to tell. It is easy to be right when neither side has any kind of real-life examples that they can use. If you want to replicate high seas adventures, cept they are happening in space then of course the technology is available that will allow ramming to take place. If you want a more tech based SF tale then you go the Star Trek way and use tractor beams, acurate phasers to engines and transporters to immobilise, disable and board opposition ships. To me, the right answer would come down to the kind of tale and feel that the GM is looking for. Doc

Re: Long-Term Endurance Infliction Alibear is right. One of the common Hero errors is to come to the forum, or to your friends, speaking game mechanics rather than the effect you want to achieve. We realise that you want to do something and that the first mechanic idea that came to you was causing someone to suffer LTE. It is almost always better to come explaining the game effect you want and while we may agree with you and see what we can come up with, we will almost always have alternatives to offer that may work better. Doc

Re: House rules for held actions - gap between start of segment and character's DEX Hmmm. Shows you how you play the game often differs from the rules as written doesn't it. For as long as I can remember I have played the game such that if my character was SPD 4 and held his action in segment three he could use that phase at any time up to segment 8 without penalty - he'd act on segment 7, segment 8 and would have two actions remaining in the turn. If he held into segment 8 then he'd lose the second phase for that turn as he'd still be holding the action for the first phase. Doc

Re: X-plain the Rule of X? The best thing about Rule of X is that it is more flexible than fixed AP caps and yet still provides some way of limiting the power level of the characters relative to each other. The problem with rule of X is what to include. Too many things and it gets really complicated, too few and you have to impose other forms of capping as well. If you have a stable group then a Rule of X normally comes to the fore naturally that doesn't have to be written down explicitly. Doc

Re: Statting Out Minor Enemies Yeah. I tend to list people as one, two or three hit people. Alibear's point is a useful one - though they are 'out' as far as any combat is concerned you have to decide whether you want them to be unconcious, dead, departing the scene or simply lying feeling sorry for themselves... These have consequences in information gathering post combat. Doc

Re: 4th ed vet-- how different is 5eR? As above. You will find 5th very easy to pick up if you know 4th. It was very much a tidy up and a few changes to try and make things more consistent within a pretty tight restraint. You might want to look at the sixth edition discussions - there may be much more distinction and difference to the rules in 6th edition than were made from 4th to 5th. Doc

Re: UK Student National RPG Championship Valdorian Age - request for ideas I found that Student national games work best if you think hard about the characters and (as everyone else has said) dont worry too much about the complicated story. After all, this is role-playing, give them a role to play. I tended to ensure that each character had a breakdown of the other characters, what he thought about them and why he wanted to be in the party (even if one or two others were a bit of a pain to be with). Complications can come through those backgrounds. In one adventure I had the party too large and the first encounter resulted in the death of half the party - they were removed (rules about non-players around the game) but the dead players were removed by another GM who then ran the dead character through a parallel scenario that joined for a final encounter with all the players, two GMs and lots of blood and gore. All the bad guys died as did 3/4 of the player characters - including the eventual winner who sacrificed himself to achieve his secret goal and that of two allies in the game. Doc

Re: How would you: emulate Ars Magica And given its your game then that's entirely up to you. Let us know if you play it and how it works... Doc

Re: How would you: emulate Ars Magica So you have a 15- roll and you want to cast a spell you already know. If that is 40 Active Points then the roll is 11-, so an 8D6 attack (for example, that would be Creo Ignem??) would work 62.5% of the time? Looks reasonable. If you had not learned that spell then rolled 11- then your active points in the attack would be (4+1)*5 = 25 active points or 5D6. Again a reasonable diminishment for similar effort. However what you then have is the known spell be more tiring than twisting the magic how you want it. It might be worth making spontaneous magic more END using by charging 1 END/5 active points? Perhaps you could control the effective power of the mages by having them all buy END reserves from which they power their magic and only very powerful mages will be able to cast powerful spells and have the reserves to power them.... This does get away from the feel of Ars Magica though and much more towards Hero. I think that it is good enough to allow the power to simply come because the mage is skilled enough in the Arts. Another question comes to mind about spontaneous casting - obviously the effects are less but there seems no down side to it. If the caster was looking for a fire attack of 8D6 and only gets enough success for 5D6 what does that mean for the caster. Are there potential side effects of getting the spell wrong. What if the known spell rolls 12? For spontaneous casting that still has an effect, for known spell does it get any effect? I was also wondering about the adding procedure. With my sketchy memory of Ars Magica, more complex spells requiring more elements were more difficult to accomplish, no?? In your system something requiring the creation and control of a fiery golem would simply add the various elements and get a higher roll. Possibly that would be offset by something requiring all of those elements to be high active points but that is not necessarily so and you might get complex spells created simply to access the added elements, especially if it was to be a spontaneous casting... I'm not giving you any concrete alternative proposals - I do like your system but those are the questions in my head about it. Doc

Re: Tracer Bullet I think Von D-Man essentially gave you the answer. If you want something to simulate the shooting then require a skill roll - in this case an attack roll - that ensures the delivery of the bug properly. Doc

Re: UK Student National RPG Championship Valdorian Age - request for ideas I've run a couple of games for the student nationals in the past. Have you put much thought into what the character sheets will look like? Are you doing this under a Supers category or under a Hero (Champions) category? Doc

Re: Hero Adaptations, Conversions, & Resources Any mod able to make this sticky? It is a useful resource in theis particular forum....

Re: Level of success

Re: Balance outside of a Super setting

Re: The Ultimate Disadvantage - Elemental Control Disadvantage

Re: The book I want more then any other.... Yeah, call them complications or something that gives more of a feel for what they are about. Disads are a boon to the roleplaying side of the game but get relegated to an arithmetical burden of an exercise - often at the end of character creation. I have become so blase about insisting on a full complement of disads. My friend is designing his own system for superheroes and we have been playtesting and developiing it with him. We had interesting thoughts on how to develop a 'spotlight' mechanic where one or two of the heroes in the group find themselves in the spotlight and, in that position, are significantly better at certain things but also find themselves the focus for unwelcome attention - no more rolling a dice to see who the bad guys hit - obviously they aim at the guy in the spotlight.... I think that there must be a role for disads in this kind of thing as well.... Doc

Re: END, Stun and REC I think this makes sense and is the least bureaucracy generating ruling. If you are pushing yourself beyond normal END limits then you do not get a free post segment 12 recovery. Nice. Doc

Re: END, Stun and REC So at 9 END per turn he is probably is covered for END and STUN burning and does get to a potential equilibrium if, as is normal in superhero games, LTE rules are not used. Of course, when the character gets to where they are going they are going to be at 0 END, not where I'd want to be if starting a fight.... Doc

Re: Repeated Attempts This is an issue I have with many systems. Due to the fact that it is statistically possible to succeed it is possible to simply keep trying until you succeed or until you fail. I prefer to play the system in that when the player tries (and has plenty of time to keep trying) then the initial roll indicates whether he has a success, will never succeed or how long he will have to keep trying until he succeeds. I like the suggestion of using the time chart - I would rule that a failure will require extra time to succeed if the character continues with his efforts. "Your telepathy slides across the surface of his mind and his fear obscures your sense. It is possible that you will find what you are looking for but you can tell it will be at least an hour before you do". This allows the character to make decisions and avoids the game becoming an exercise in dice rolling, hoping for a lucky break... Doc