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Too Many Swords


JohnnyAppleseed098

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A more important question is "Why are all the swordsmen stepping on each other's stchick?"

 

I know that if I were a new player in the campaign and the game already had several swordsmen, then I'd get myself Deadly Blow with longbow and a few Penalty Skill Levels to offset Range and Hit Location with Longbow.

 

Or up my DEX & INT and max out my skills, with maybe two levels of Deadly Blow with daggers, bought as Only From Behind.

 

Or play a Cleric, because the role play opportunities in playing lecherous monk can be hilariously awesome.

 

I used up my likes for the day but I wanted to give this a +1 because it would be something I would do.

 

So +1

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I've played in games where the only solution to any problem was to stab it.  There were some monsters around, and the GM would rather be castrated than let you get out of fighting them.  "I got out these monster figures, and by god, you're gonna have to chop through the hit points of every last one of them."  One particular fight, the gamemaster had our 7th or 8th level D&D group encounter a thousand skeletons.  And we sat there and hacked apart every damn one of them.  And he counted the hit points and had them all numbered.  That fight took like three hours.  If I hadn't been 19 and stupid, I'd have probably got up and left.

 

In a game like that, players are going to respond to what works in the campaign.  In that guy's game, priests were the best.  In another guy's game, fighters were the best.  It just depends on what you emphasize.

 

Now I've played in other games where we were allowed to roleplay our way through obstacles.  Skill use and creative thinking was very important.  We went through one dungeon (a cave) where we knew there were a bunch of monsters waiting for us.  There were going to be pit traps and poison dart traps, and other things like that.  So we decided that cheating was better than dying.  Since we had some money, we asked the GM how much a cow costs.  "Umm, like a piece of silver?"  We had lots of silver.  So we bought a huge herd of cattle (like maybe a thousand), got them near the mouth of the cave, and then used a fear spell to make them stampede right through that dungeon.  They piled into those pit traps until they were full, and then they ran over the bodies.  Poison darts dropped a cow or two.  They busted right through wooden doors.  They trampled orcs and goblins, and smashed skeletons to pieces in their panic.  Warded hallways exploded with magical lightning, and the cows ran right through it.  We followed along at a safe distance, ready to take on anything that survived the stampede.  Not much had.  We cleaned up that day, and I don't remember rolling a single die.

 

When we suggested doing it again on another dungeon, the GM said "no".

 

I told that story because it's funny, but primarily to illustrate that if you let something work, players will want to do it.  Let the agile thief sneak into the castle, avoid the guards, steal the gold, and slip back out.  Then everybody will think that's awesome, and they'll want to be a thief.  Right now it sounds like you've got a game where being a fighter is a clear choice.

 

I've been on both sides of that scenario. I've been the player who came up with a clever strategy to obviate the GM's planned adventure (or most of it), and I've been the GM who saw my carefully planned adventure blown to pieces in the opening move by players doing things I never thought of. The best GMs I've played with have generally a) let the PCs accomplish their goal, even if derailed that adventure, B) smoothly changed gears and thrown a new adventure at them, and c) talked to the players _out of game_ about how to make sure everyone is having fun*, even if it's somewhat unrealistic/cinematic. The best players will also listen and moderate their behavior.

 

A group who love pulp-style adventures will have a very different idea of fun (and what constitutes a reasonable character action) than a group of power gamers or rules lawyers who think that a fair fight means you're doing it wrong (i.e., you're not planning adequately to present overwhelming force). As long as everyone is on the same page, both groups can have a lot of fun. I've been in both sorts of groups and had fun, but it requires learning and understanding (and playing by) the "genre" conventions involved.

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Aaron Allston's article on the different kinds of roleplayers is somewhat instructive here. There are many reasons why people participate in the hobby. Only a few of Allston's player archetypes are the sort who will make honoring and preserving the campaign's genre conventions a priority. Everyone else will just be a thorn in our sides. ;-)

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I haven't seen this approach used, but if your magic wielders are penalized/hampered for wearing armor, cut that out.  "But then I'll end up with full bore battle mages in full plate armor!"  I've been using this option for my mages and have never had this happen.  All of them wind up using lighter armors exclusively because they see the advantage in being able to move more freely.  As Mr. Miagi said, "Best way not get hit is not be there!"  Of course there's another part of it: make the fighters get -hurt-!  This is critical.  I have tended toward a melee character attrition rate of about one character per six to ten adventures, depending on how smart they play it.  Magic users?  Never lost a one.  Just sayin'.

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I've played in games where the only solution to any problem was to stab it.  There were some monsters around, and the GM would rather be castrated than let you get out of fighting them.  "I got out these monster figures, and by god, you're gonna have to chop through the hit points of every last one of them."

 

 

I like the opposite.  When players find interesting ways to avoid an encounter, fool them, use the environment against them etc I enjoy that more.  I try to build encounters specifically to allow and encourage it.  The best bits in action scenes are when someone is outmatched and has to figure a different way to beat their foe than diving in fists first.

 

"But then I'll end up with full bore battle mages in full plate armor!"

 

...and?  They still won't have the battle skills or body/hps/what have you.  Mages NEED better defenses, because they can't take a hit.

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...and?  They still won't have the battle skills or body/hps/what have you.  Mages NEED better defenses, because they can't take a hit.

 

This is a carryover from the old D&D tropes. There is no particular reason in Hero system that Mages should be less able to take a hit than fighters, simply because there is no such thing as 'a mage" or "a fighter" in terms of mechanics. This is particularly true in 6E, where figureds are disconnected from primary stat.s. We've had plenty of very buff fighter-mages in our games: in most of those games, by coupling physical ability with magical protection, the fighter mages could take the heat of combat in places where mundane fighters quailed. In general, in our games, the difference in BOD and STUN between magic-using and non-magic-using characters is pretty minimal, even before you took magic into account.

 

cheers, Mark

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...and?  They still won't have the battle skills or body/hps/what have you.  Mages NEED better defenses, because they can't take a hit.

I quite agree, and really wouldn't mind if they did take the BODY, CON, and STUN to stand right in there on the front line.  That said, most of my players have, as I've mentioned, simply kept with lighter armor to give them some protection, but at the same time they have a pretty good DCV to just not get hit in the first place.  I've even had a couple just use my rules to strap on a small shield or buckler, take their spells without gestures as a limitation, and add that DCV bonus.  It's proven to be a pretty darned effective combination.

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There is no particular reason in Hero system that Mages should be less able to take a hit than fighters, simply because there is no such thing as 'a mage" or "a fighter" in terms of mechanics.

 

Well I guess in a fantasy game you can kind of abandon all this but...

The average person has only so many hours in a day and energy to focus on training.  So a mage who studies their whole life to be great at magic is not going to have nearly the time they need to build up the endurance and physical durability to take a hit like a warrior who spends their day doing just that.  Its not a matter of rules, but rather concept and reason.  Its why your average academic is a milquetoast and your average MMA/bodbuilder type is not particularly well educated.

 

In hero terms: you only have so many points to spend, so you can't be great at both at the same time.

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There is no particular reason in Hero system that Mages should be less able to take a hit than fighters, simply because there is no such thing as 'a mage" or "a fighter" in terms of mechanics.

 

Well I guess in a fantasy game you can kind of abandon all this but...

The average person has only so many hours in a day and energy to focus on training.  So a mage who studies their whole life to be great at magic is not going to have nearly the time they need to build up the endurance and physical durability to take a hit like a warrior who spends their day doing just that.  Its not a matter of rules, but rather concept and reason.  Its why your average academic is a milquetoast and your average MMA/bodbuilder type is not particularly well educated.

 

And yet, I know academics who compete internationally in Ironmans, run marathons, etc. The idea that academics are less physically fit is actually a stereotype, not something founded in real life. In fact  ..... drumroll ... academics are more likely to be fit and strong than the general population (this is just a single review not behind a pay wall, but there's a ton of data supporting this. In fact, it is not just academics, but high-earning whitecollar workers in general). Partly, this is probably due to the mental benefits of being fit and active, but it is also, I suspect, cultural. Going to gym, running, working out, cycling are all embedded in  modern academic culture, and like academic success they also benefit from having a highly competitive nature. Who knows, perhaps junior mages in magic school are rousted out of bed early to run 2 leagues in frosty weather, to shouts of "Remember children, Mens sana in corpore sano!" .... just like I was. ;P

 

In hero terms: you only have so many points to spend, so you can't be great at both at the same time.

 

True, but most effective fighters in Hero system - just like in real life, actually - don't focus just on bulking up physically, but on building skills and experience in fighting. Acquiring the CSLs and martial arts necessary to make somebody who is really good at killing people with a sword, costs just as many points (sometimes more) as the spells needed to make you really good at killing people with a sword. My own gaming experience is that physically, there's often not much (if anything) to seperate the spellcasters and the non-casters physically, and the points not spent on combat-related skills or combat-related magic are spent on non combat skills and non-combat magic.

 

The problem is that often magic is a far more cost-effective way of building a swordsman than skills and martial arts, if you are just using the basic rules set. So you can be great at both - but only if you are a mage. The reason is simple: mages get access to all the powers, while (in a fantasy game) mundanes get a limited subset, making mages far more flexible in their builds. Getting the balance right, so that you can have effective party members on both sides of the magic/mundane divide is one of the hardest things to get right for a GM running a fantasy campaign. I've had a lot of practice,  and I still struggle with this sometimes.

 

cheers, Mark

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Who knows, perhaps junior mages in magic school are rousted out of bed early to run 2 leagues in frosty weather, to shouts of "Remember children, Mens sana in corpore sano!" .... just like I was. ;P

 

 

 

 

 

 

...where did you go to magic school, and is there an age limit?

 

 

Also, I suspect there's a strong correlation between higher income status (of which academics tend to be compared to the national average, exceptions abound) and fitness. From the combination of education increasing awareness of the value of fitness, knowledge of the importance of quality food, income to access said food and spending money to invest in fitness instead of just keeping the lights on, PLUS the professional benefits of fitness (people who are physically active are more likely to advance higher in a corporate hierarchy even if the job has nothing to do with physical activity)... it seems highly likely.

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We live in a time when anime has overtaken the pop culture fantasy stereotypes previously established by D&D. Being a highly skilled hero in fantasy anime invariably means being able to both harness superpowers spells and fight with weapons. Kids today would probably be baffled by the notion that a lethal swordsman would not also be capable of throwing devastating fireballs or lightning strikes, or put up a defensive shield enchantment.

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...where did you go to magic school, and is there an age limit?

 

 

Also, I suspect there's a strong correlation between higher income status (of which academics tend to be compared to the national average, exceptions abound) and fitness. From the combination of education increasing awareness of the value of fitness, knowledge of the importance of quality food, income to access said food and spending money to invest in fitness instead of just keeping the lights on, PLUS the professional benefits of fitness (people who are physically active are more likely to advance higher in a corporate hierarchy even if the job has nothing to do with physical activity)... it seems highly likely.

 

Alas, I never got past 'the magic of mathematics' or 'the magic of latin'. But you get the  general idea, I'm sure :)

 

As for the income/status and fitness thing, you are correct. There is a very strong correlation between employment income* and fitness. And you are absolutely right that it's not just academics (I actually noted that in my post). In fact, if anything, it is is even more extreme in the corporate world. When I look at our executive team, there is - literally - not one person who is not fit and toned looking. There are multiple ethnicities, decent gender diversity, a fairly wide age spread .... but there are no overweight people. So yes, I think it's a conjunction of factors. Status is one, Being overweight or unfit is not only seen as a sign of weak will/poor character, but these days, being overweight is increasingly regarded as 'low status". Financially secure people don't have to worry about the cost of eating healthily or the cost of gym memberships, so the only reason to be overweight, barring rare medical conditions is "you don't take care of yourself" - a cardinal sin for many high-fliers. Competition is another - senior academics and corporate people are by nature intensely competitive. They would not be where they are, otherwise. Fitness is another arena where that competition plays out. Lastly, higher income tracks very closely with education. Not perfectly, of course, but closely, so you are also talking about people who are aware of the health benefits and risks and who are both motivated and financially empowered to work on that aspect. Really, it is no surprise.

 

All, way, way off topic, but it always amuses me that we have this stereotype of buff physical workers and out of shape academics, but in the real world, it is increasingly the other way around. I think the stereotype persists, because it appeals to our inherent sense of fairness: the idea that smart people are weedy, simple people are strong, pretty women are dumb, rich people are unhappy or any of the many other 'balance" prejudices softens the recognition that life is fundamentally unfair.

 

To drag the thread roughly back on track, it has never bothered me as a GM or player that adventuring mages are a physically robust lot, since they are choosing a way of life that exposes them to physical danger, much exercise and rough living conditions. So it makes sense.  Any mage put off by the thought of walking 5 leagues in the rain with a heavy pack, climbing a cliff and then engaging in life or death combat at the end of it, is not likely to last long as an adventurer.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*not necessarily wealth - the correlation is far stronger among those who work for a living.

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Markdoc said it already--and in a wordier fashion :D--but, yeah, displaying your wealth and privilege by showing that you have the time and money to stay fit is a big factor. Back in the day when most labor was physical and outdoors, the wealthy preferred the pale, soft look to differentiate themselves from the poor saps who had to work hard out in the sun all day.

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Can we really apply realistic (or worse, modern) models of social hierarchies to describe literary/folklore archetypes?

 

Besides, most of our current expectations regarding FRPG archetypes come from D&D, which is its own genre with its own conventions. Gygax took classical myth and ancient folklore, filtered it through the lens of 20th century fantasy literature, and then distilled the results down into something gamable and expressable as a formal set of rules. We should not be surprised to find that none of D&D's character class tropes conform to a survey of real medieval life.

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I think it's safe to say that every heroic literary/comic character is subject to Writer's Fiat no matter the genre or culture of origin.

Sure, just the more powerful and outrageous you make them, the more blatant and annoying it becomes.

 

And there's a big difference between a fit academic (sort of easy to do, lots of down time in academia where you can exercise) and a brick academic.  Someone like The Rock does not have time to do any heavy reading or thinking.  Someone like Einstein doesn't have time to get ripped.  A really great mage has no time or energy to become also a really tough front line bruiser that can take the hits, unless he uses magic to buff himself up.

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I also hate enormously overpowered villains with the Achilles Heel (aka Single Point of Failure) disad. That's okay for a figure from mythology where the stories are meant to be simple cautionary tales or vehicles for teaching the salient details of your culture's social contract. But when it comes to modern storytelling, that's just lazy writing/character design in action.

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Can we really apply realistic (or worse, modern) models of social hierarchies to describe literary/folklore archetypes?

 

Besides, most of our current expectations regarding FRPG archetypes come from D&D, which is its own genre with its own conventions. Gygax took classical myth and ancient folklore, filtered it through the lens of 20th century fantasy literature, and then distilled the results down into something gamable and expressable as a formal set of rules. We should not be surprised to find that none of D&D's character class tropes conform to a survey of real medieval life.

 

Well, in many ways, fantasy worlds with ubiquitous magic share more features with the modern world than they do with medieval Europe. Not surprising, really. As you note, they are modern fantasies, cast onto a pastiche of vaguely medieval tropes.

 

The real point here is the idea that the stereotype that adventuring mages should be physically weedy, because they are training their big, powerful brains instead of working out. In real (admittedly modern) life, we can see that dichotomy does not exist. And if we look back a century or two, the golden age of exploration is full of academics who crisscrossed the globe under appalling conditions, sneaking through war zones, often fighting in the process ... all the while taking meticulous notes, making careful detailed observations, collecting specimens ... etc. A lot of those guys were seriously fit.

 

Basically the idea of the buff fighter and the scrawny mage is a D&D'ism, built off US college stereotypes, not fictional or historical archetypes. There's no mechanistic reason reason it has to exist in Fantasy Hero games, and there's really no realistic reason it has to, either. Like a lot of fantasy tropes that originated with D&D, its has become so ubiquitous that it's simply accepted as the standard, like Tolkein's elves, dwarves and hobbits.

 

cheers, Mark

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Sure, just the more powerful and outrageous you make them, the more blatant and annoying it becomes.

 

And there's a big difference between a fit academic (sort of easy to do, lots of down time in academia where you can exercise) and a brick academic.  Someone like The Rock does not have time to do any heavy reading or thinking.  Someone like Einstein doesn't have time to get ripped.  A really great mage has no time or energy to become also a really tough front line bruiser that can take the hits, unless he uses magic to buff himself up.

 

Not bodybuilders, but as noted, I know a couple of very successful academics who balanced their academic career with competing internationally in sporting events - one of them winning at the Olympics. I think "competes successfully at an international level" is a tad more than casually fit. They're a little unusual - but only a little. People like Veloce or Grainger, academics who compete at the Olympic level, can be found in most big universities. UCL in London, where I used to work on and off, was proud of the fact that they had more 40 Olympians among their professors (and that's just one university, albeit a big one). They were not concentrated in the sports medicine department either!

 

So like it or not, people do have the time to get ripped and also build a successful academic career (or for that matter, other kinds of careers as well) in real life. It's all about being organised, being focused and being driven. If it can be done in real life, I don't see why it should be excluded in fantasy.

 

It's not because they have a lot of time on their hands. To be honest, the idea that successful academics have a lot of down time just makes me laugh. To be successful in academia (well, science anyway, which is all I know) is really a full time job: 50-60 hour work weeks are not uncommon. There are other academics on the boards - you can verify with them. The really successful people in academia are always on - 16 to 17 hours a day.

 

Now, if you like the idea that you cannot combine high level study and exercise, then you can always build that into your game. But in Hero system games there really is no mechanistic or realistic reason it has to be that way.

 

cheers, Mark

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Dolph Lundgren has two Bachelors degrees and a Masters in Chemical Engineering. He got a scholarship to MIT which he ditched in favour of shacking up with Grace Jones and getting into acting. Which he succeeded in doing at least in part because he was buff as a coat. He's also a 3rd Dan in a recognised school of Karate. Near 2m tall and made of muscle, he doesn't fit the archetype of the weedy scholar.

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Dolph Lundgren has two Bachelors degrees and a Masters in Chemical Engineering. He got a scholarship to MIT which he ditched in favour of shacking up with Grace Jones and getting into acting. Which he succeeded in doing at least in part because he was buff as a coat. He's also a 3rd Dan in a recognised school of Karate. Near 2m tall and made of muscle, he doesn't fit the archetype of the weedy scholar.

 

And there are plenty of other examples*. I don't think we need to beat this to death - there's enough real-life examples to make it plain that when it comes to muscles and brains, it's not either/or. Sometimes it's neither, and sometimes it's both. :) And we have a game system that allows - nay, even encourages - that.

 

cheers, Mark

 

*Dr. Layne Norton, for example is both a biochemist and a professional bodybuilder. My favourite though, for this kind of discussion is the infamous Professor Snook. Not a bodybuilder, but a respected academic and Olympic gold medal winner in the "military pistol" shooting events ... infamous because he later shot and killed one of his students. :) Don't diss the Prof.!

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While real life does offer plenty of examples for buff academics, game characters are limited by their points. Every point allocated to physical abilities means one less for magic abilities and vice-versa. I could put lots of points into martial arts and physical stats, but that just means I have less points to put into other things.

 

Point scarcity promotes archetypes, I think.

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While real life does offer plenty of examples for buff academics, game characters are limited by their points. Every point allocated to physical abilities means one less for magic abilities and vice-versa. I could put lots of points into martial arts and physical stats, but that just means I have less points to put into other things.

 

Point scarcity promotes archetypes, I think.

 

It promotes specialisation (up to a point) but in Hero system, magic is not inherently more expensive than skills and martial arts (often the reverse). This brings us back to where this side discussion started, which is that magic users in-game (in my experience) are not usually very different from fighters in terms of physical stat.s. Both groups benefit from decent physical stat.s and tend to be in the same ballpark. Where fighter types spend points on martial arts and skills, mages tend to spend a similar amount on spells and other skills. (Edit: in part this is because characteristics are relatively cheap, in Hero system and the normal range in Hero is not very broad)

 

There are always exceptions of course: in one game I played a rough, tough, magic user (good ol' Sir Flanghall) who could have taken most of our party's fighters down in a straight fight (he was certainly the strongest member of the party), and in my long-running Japanese martial arts campaign we had one pure fighter (General Yabu) who had mad martial arts skillz, but who was easily the frailest member of the party (in his case, because of age and disease). On the other extreme, in one game we had a pure fighter (the mighty Khe'eel) who had precisely one tactic (hit thing with greatsword) but who was built to be as tanky as f***. Aside from cases where the game is specifically built to promote a different approach, basically whether a magic-user or a fighter in a fantsy hero game is buff or scrawny depends entirely on what the player in question wants: and that's good with me.

 

cheers, Mark

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