What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

[Netzilla]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

What sort of fantasy campaigns do you enjoy the most (and why)?

 

High powered, almost superheroic? Low powered, gritty and deadly? Epic stories? Stories of a band of people just making it in a big city? Almost Earth-like settings? Weird settings? Long, world-spanning quests? Political court intrigue?

 

Obviously we can all love many different types of campaigns, but what are your favorites? What have you enjoyed? What would you love to play (or run) but have never had the opportunity?

 

As might be surmised from my inadvertent thread-derailment (sorry about that), I tend to prefer a lower-powered campaign where magic is mysterious, rare, difficult, slow and inherently dangerous (kind of like the sorcery in the Conan stories). The PCs are definitely better than the average town guard but they're far from the top of the food chain.

 

As for scope, my group is all over the map. We've done local regional-level heroes up to world-saving and everything in between. My personal preference is probably to start at the regional level, with the group slowly working its way up in influence & prestige.

 

On the action side, we generally prefer the cinematic side of things rather than gritty any-hit-could-kill-you. Typically for this kind of campaign, we'll use Hit Locations and might bring in Disabling & Impairing, but we also use a slightly modified version of the Heroic Action Points rules from Pulp Hero, which allows characters to survive things most mortals can't.

[Netzilla]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

I don't normally allow the wealth perk. It's a level of abstraction that is out of genre for most fantasy hero games' date=' unless you wanted a pulpy high adventure feel with little attention to detail. But in most genres of Fantasy Hero - you care about what you eat, how much money you have, how you travel, what the weather is like and so onl.[/quote']

 

I've toyed around with the idea of using it to define your starting cash and that's it; no income. The levels of cash would have to be properly re-worked. I'd figure the starting character should be able to afford a sword, dagger, shield, ringmail, and some basic gear. At the highest level of wealth available, you might be able to afford a horse, sword, plate, lance, shield & gear but that should be fairly pricey.

 

Overall, though, I prefer to use the Equipment Pool from Dark Champs to simulate wealth. Much less abstract and subjective than the default Wealth rules and a little easier to control. After all, gear that's expensive money-wise is not always the most effective.

[Netzilla]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

A warrior won't have any use at all for the magic-use tools (the energy gems' date=' the scrolls and so on). And then there are low-key magics anyone can use equally (healing potions, for example, or a pot of magic super-glue). But the price-list, in this case, was already designed from the ground up to do exactly what we're talking about ... insure that any ten randomly-chosen PCs of any type (wizard, warrior, or other), suddenly showered with ridiculous wealth, would benefit from that wealth more-or-less equally, in adventure-mojo terms. I'm a very careful fellow with my price-lists [/quote']

 

Interesting. So mages would be buying things like the energy gems (I'm guessing non-regarable magic batteries basically) to supplement casting spells. Perhaps wands or other trinkets that are to a firebolt what a club is to punching power (a force-multiplier) and the like. Obviously you're going for a more magic-rich environment than I typically work with. So, I could see that working. In that instance, though, you probably will have to watch out for wizards stealing the show, depending on how powerful and broad in scope the magic itself is.

 

I'm a good GM, but never let the industry cred fool you Sadly, a huge number of well-credentialed RPG writers don't (and don't even care to) game regularly anymore

 

Hey, you're polite and not too proud to ask for advice on things; that's a good sign in and of itself. I've conversed with a couple industry pros on other boards that thought a little too highly of themselves (not unlike you might find in any profession). Doesn't hurt that you had a hand in a couple GURPS books that I really love to steal ideas from (I've so got to finish my Black Ops Hero conversion one of these days).

 

... Hero gamers are fortunate to have a certain Steven S. Long, who is a for-real gamer in addition to being a sinister robot writing machine from Planet Wordcount.

 

SSL rules. Got the chance to play in a Fantasy Hero game he GMed at DieCon a couple years ago and had a blast. Reports on the Dark Champs & Pulp Hero (prior to its release) games were quite good as well. I think ScubaHero (one of the members of my gaming group and semi-regular on the boards) got in on one or both of those.

 

That's definitely the way I'll be proceeding once I'm behind the screen ... but the end-goal is an article for Blue Lamp Road, so I want to make sure it's mechanicaly sound as well, at least by the time I'm finished with it. There are lots of stages before that, though: first, I'll be a player in a local FH campaign, to get a feel for it from that side. Only once I'm comfy with the system as a player will I step up to the plate to GM, and then so on from there.

 

Hard part's character creation just because of the huge array of options. The key (as with probably most any universal system as I'm sure you're aware) is to nail the concept before thinking about mechanics. Once you're past that, the system itself is pretty straight forward, especially if you hold off on using optional rules until you're familiar with the core.

 

This is a small project in terms of the scope/audience for the article, but it's a big project for me, personally, since I'm way, way overdue for logging some flight-hours as a Hero System GM.

 

Well, I hope you enjoy it. I don't know how long you've been perusing the boards here, but we've got a pretty friendly & helpful community who are more than willing to offer advice; even if some of use have a bad habit of dragging threads off on tangents. (Sorry again, Jhaierr. )

[S. John Ross]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

Interesting. So mages would be buying things like the energy gems (I'm guessing non-regarable magic batteries basically) to supplement casting spells.

 

They recharge naturally, but they can also be pushed and burned out. They can both supplement and enhance, though what that means in any given game system varies according to what the system has to offer (I've GM'ed this world in 8 other game systems so far, with some of my testers GMing it in several others, and I never hesitate to massage it a bit this way or that to bring out the best in the game I'm marrying it to that day).

 

In that instance, though, you probably will have to watch out for wizards stealing the show, depending on how powerful and broad in scope the magic itself is.

Or the other way 'round Since the world is (to say the least) friendly to very cinematic approaches to any sort of character, it really reaches a point where the distinction between a "wizard" and anyone else is more aesthetic and social than practical (with the social distinction being pretty important in some places). A purely non-magical warrior could become - functionally - a wizard with sufficiently flamboyant Stupid Archery Tricks, for example. Even speaking in sober cosmological terms, it's a world where the distinction between high skill and "magic" is sometimes an artificial one, and any skill (cooking, poetry, calligraphy, underwater basket-weaving) can concievably be twisted into something potent in adventuring terms, if the player is sufficiently perverse and/or whimsical about it.

 

It isn't a high powered setting (in raw D&D terms [the Interlingua of fantasy gaming!], I like to float it around the equivalent of 2nd-6th Level for most campaigns), but on the grittiness scale it's made of a kind of ultimate alien anti-grit. If a fragment of grit ever touched down on the surface of the world, it would be launched back into space at relativistic speeds. There would also be a farting noise, and perhaps some sort of potluck dinner where everyone wore rude t-shirts.

 

So, power-levels are frequently modest, but within those limits the nature of a character's potency is pretty much unfettered. So, for that I need a very flexible system, which is (in part) why I've included Hero on my world tour, as it were.

 

Aside: In case anyone's wondering (because someone usually does ask by now) this approach doesn't - at least in my own anecdotal experience - dilute the specialness of magic. Instead it (A) throws other character distinctions, like the social stuff, into sharper relief and ( sometimes has the interesting side-effect of making actual PC wizards rarer ... because some gamers who habitually play wizards do so because they enjoy outre/unpredictable/fantastical character abilities rather than mundane ones, and some gamers who habitually play wizards do so because they honestly and genuinely love wizards. The net result here is that the wizard-lovers keep on playing wizards, but the outre-ability lovers tend to go hog wild exploring other avenues of outre (because they know if next week I run one of my more sober fantasy worlds, they'll be back to playing wizards).

 

Hey, you're polite and not too proud to ask for advice on things; that's a good sign in and of itself.

Nobody gets anywhere denying their limitations, and Hero swims in the vast and stormy sea of my own ignorance, as I like to say.

 

Doesn't hurt that you had a hand in a couple GURPS books that I really love to steal ideas from (I've so got to finish my Black Ops Hero conversion one of these days).

Ooh, I'd like to see some of the scarier critters from Black Ops adapted; it could be a like a Rosetta Stone of overwrought monster-power!

 

Hard part's character creation just because of the huge array of options. The key (as with probably most any universal system as I'm sure you're aware) is to nail the concept before thinking about mechanics. Once you're past that, the system itself is pretty straight forward, especially if you hold off on using optional rules until you're familiar with the core.

And while we're at it: God Bless Hero Designer, yea verily.

 

Well, I hope you enjoy it. I don't know how long you've been perusing the boards here, but we've got a pretty friendly & helpful community who are more than willing to offer advice; even if some of use have a bad habit of dragging threads off on tangents. (Sorry again, Jhaierr. )

Ditto on the ... and I've poked in now and again, mainly following the release of Pulp Hero searching around for crumbs of ego-biscuit But this is the first time I've visited on any kind of regular basis, since now I'm officially engaging as a user of Steve Long's 592-page drug ...

[Markdoc]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

No rules prevented magic-users from using weapons & armor. However' date=' most folks' image of a wizard doesn't involve him running around in chailmail while swinging a sword and shield. Yes, Gandalf did use a sword, but I don't recall him much relying on armor, nor was he much of a sword swinger during the Hobbit. Likewise, I don't recall much swordplay out of Merlin, Morgan Le Fay, most of the sorcerers from the Conan stories or a host of other archetypal spell casters. Regardless of that, however, the wizard just plain doesn't get as much mileage out of a sword as a warrior does.[/quote']

 

Sure, but in the Amber books, or Salvatore's books or Talsorian's books, in the Thieves' World series, etc, etc there are plenty of wizards who get substantial mileage out of swords - and of magic (in fact all the deadliest combatants are usually also mages). And in the Conan stories there are wizards a-plenty he can't defeat in combat - he needs to use a special knife or some cunning plan. And for that matter, even Gandalf's no slouch with a sword .... It's most certainly not the case that being a magic user means you can't be good with a sword.

 

To give you some numbers as an example' date=' I'll go off the example warrior I gave earlier who had roughly 25 points worth of combat gear for free (sword, bow, chainmail & shield) as I don't have any old character sheets in front of me. In order to stay roughly on-par combat-wise, the wizard sinks about 25 points into combat spells (burning hand, fire bolt, mage armor & blink).[/quote']

 

Ummm..... why doesn't he just use the same free sword, bow, chainmail & shield?

 

Worst-case' date=' the warrior could invest those 25 points into combat-enhancing abilities: +6 DEX (12 pts), +1 SPD (4 pts after DEX), +5 STR (5 pts) & +2 CON [4 pts']. The warrior is now +2 DCV, +2 OCV, +1 action per turn, +1 Damage Class, +1 PD, possibly +1 ED (depending on the break point), +1 or 2 Recovery, +4 Endurance and +4 Stun. The warrior acts more often, hits harder & a greater percentage of the time, is harder to hurt and doesn't get hit as often. That's a pretty major set of combat advantages. The wizard is throughly out-classed in a fight.

 

Unless he's smart, in which case invisibility will make it harder for the warrior to hit him and easier for him to sink his free sword between the warrior's shoulderblades. Or a 1-hex entangle, which reduces the warrior to impotence in one phase. Or Flash, which can shift the odds decisively in his favour. Or images or mind control, or...

 

This is a fair point, but again, there's no need for a wizard to be a physical weakling. A warrior type should normally have an edge in physical stat.s, because the wizard needs to spend some points on magic: but the array of powers available and the ability to limit them and thus reduce the cost, usally more than makes up for this.

 

The only way a warrior can outclass a wizard is if the wizard is dim enough to spend his points re-buying stuff everyone gets for free. That's why I asked if you had a house rule preventing wizards from using free gear.

 

That could be one of the "balance" factors I referred to. Maybe the reason I've never seen warriors overpower wizards is because I've never played in a game where magic-users are forbidden to use weapons and armour.

 

That doesn't even get into the wizard having to invest in more Endurance as the warrior is far more END-efficient than the wizard due to swords and armor not costing endurance while spells do.

 

Well, spells might - many spell systems don't require endurance. But it's a moot point if your Mage wields a sword and wwears armour anyway.

 

Now' date=' yes the wizard should be relying on range to defend himself while the warrior's in the thick of it. However if the enemy's brought any ranged weapons (spears & daggers, never mind having an archer or two in the group), that shield wall doesn't do the wizard much good.[/quote']

 

Unless he has a missile reflection spell up. Or he's invisible. Or he's displaced, using images. Or he's in the midst of combat, protected not only by his armour but by a blur spell and an aura of horror, using his spell-enhanced STR to slice armoured warriors like gherkins with his two handed sword ...

 

There is a wide range of possibilities.

 

The warrior can also take advantage of range by using his bow and will be better at it due to the +2 OCV. Plus' date=' who do you think becomes target #1 after the first spell is cast? [/quote']

 

See the comment above: archery is often useless against a sensibly-prepared wizard - and the archers often look a bit sad after the first Flash spell lands and the wizard's sword-wielding companions are among them ... and they're all blind.

 

I've cut out the rest, because it's basically more of the same - the idea that mages are weaker because they don't have access to free gear. But that assumption is not something I've seen in most games, where wizards DO have access to the same free gear as warriors.

 

In high powered games or in comics the trope that magic-users don't use weapons is even weaker than in fantasy (where power-armoured technological geniuses like Dr Doom also use magic) - and it doesn't hold at all in anime. A typical character might be my Demon-hunter Takahashi Jones from Mike Surbrook's AMP game. He's a traditional Japanese shinto sorceror (anime style ) who augments his magic with martial arts and free gear (swords, chain weapons, night-vison goggles, bugging gear, heavy automatic weapons, land mines....).

 

Now there's nothing to say your group can't or shouldn't play that way - in fact, it seems like it'd make for a reasonable balance if you wanted to do it. But in my experience, players often want to get away from that approach - it seems very D&D style: and unless the GM makes it so, there isn't anything to stop a mage getting exactly as much benefit from weapons and armour as a warrior.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

Finally' date=' why do you suppose it is that all the FH products I've seen (FH Grimois, Valdorian Age, Turakian Age, Tuala Morn, FH itself) all suggest ways of making magic [b']cheaper[/b] if it's so much more effective all the time?

 

Actually, Valdoran age works hard to make magic more expensive and more limited - but then it's a sword and sorcery game. You are right about the others,: they do make magic cheaper and Steve has been explicit about why - these are high magic settings, where mages are supposed to shine.

 

I prefer a setting where magic - while not rare - does not dominate the game: it's why I'm fussy about crimping magic so the warriors get their chance to shine too.

 

It is an an issue; so far I've played in two online FH games, which have both used the Turakian magic system - both folded pretty quickly, in large part because it was apparent that the non-magic-using characters were essentially sidekicks to the mages. I'm partly to blame for that: after playing a warrior in game #1, my character in game number two was a shapeshifting mage using spells from the FH Grimoire #1 and he was simply insanely powerful

 

cheers, Mark

[Netzilla]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

Sure' date=' but in the Amber books, or Salvatore's books or Talsorian's books, in the Thieves' World series, etc, etc there are plenty of wizards who get substantial mileage out of swords - and of magic (in fact all the deadliest combatants are usually also mages). And in the Conan stories there are wizards a-plenty he can't defeat in combat - he needs to use a special knife or some cunning plan. And for that matter, even Gandalf's no slouch with a sword .... It's most certainly not the case that being a magic user means you can't be good with a sword.[/quote']

 

We can go back and forth on listing examples of mages who use swords and those who don't (after all, I did mention Galdalf's use of a sword in LotR). My point was that there is a variety and I'd rather not penalize the player who chooses to base his wizard around the Arthurian-Merlin rather than Amber-Merlin. I just don't feel that a wizard should have to be fully kitted out in sword & armor in order to compete.

 

As an aside, paying points for everying in no way precludes the sword-mage concept either. It just makes a character who, while highly flexible, isn't as good a swordsman as the warrior (though better than the wizard) and not as good a spellcaster as the wizard (though better than the warrior).

 

That could be one of the "balance" factors I referred to. Maybe the reason I've never seen warriors overpower wizards is because I've never played in a game where magic-users are forbidden to use weapons and armour.

 

Neither have I. As I mentioned previously, there were no rules forbidding it, it was a character concept initiated by the player. As you can find plenty of examples of non-sword wielding wizards in the source literature, I feel that it's an archetype that should be viable.

 

I'm going to do a bit of snipping here as I feel the following points best illustrate where you and I aren't connecting:

 

Well, spells might - many spell systems don't require endurance...

 

Unless he has a missile reflection spell up. Or he's invisible. Or he's displaced, using images. Or he's in the midst of combat, protected not only by his armour but by a blur spell and an aura of horror, using his spell-enhanced STR to slice armoured warriors like gherkins with his two handed sword ...

 

There is a wide range of possibilities.

 

In high powered games or in comics the trope that magic-users don't use weapons is even weaker than in fantasy (where power-armoured technological geniuses like Dr Doom also use magic) - and it doesn't hold at all in anime.

 

You seem keep working from the assumption of a high powered and/or relatively open-ended magic system. I've repeatedly said that if you change either of those factors, the abilities of the wizard to run hog wild are greatly reduced. The impact of gear is much smaller in higher point-value games (where 25 free points is only maybe 10% of your character points rather than 25%) or in systems where wizards are able to toss around high active point spells at a whim (6d6 Flash, AE - Radius, 0 END). Both are not my group's preference for FH, thus our use of a solution you "recommend strongly against".

 

I have never once said that wizards are always weaker in all campaigns. I've repeatedly said that different solutions are required for different groups and campaigns. There are too many variables in player dynamics and campaign flavor to make statements like

 

The problem in any FH game is nor "warriors over-powering wizards due to free "combat powers" (which I've never seen happen) but warriors getting totally owned by wizards with cool "magic powers" (which I have seen happen all too often).

 

(emphasis mine)

 

What works to balance a high-powered, cheap-and-easy-magic style of game (like a 200-250 point Turakian Age game), doesn't work to balance a low-powered highly limited magic style of game. That's why my group came to a different solution than yours did. Neither solution is wrong. Both were right for their given circumstance.

 

Anyway, this thread has been derailed enough and I'm sure any bystanders who really cared have already made up their own minds. So, if you really want to continue this discussion, I'd suggest either the creation of a new thread or taking it to PM. Though unless some new arguments are raised, I really don't see it making any headway since we're not even arguing from the same base assumptions on campaign power level.

[casualplayer]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

The type of campaign that I love to run or participate in is one where the characters warrant the attention. Either through noble mission or mesmerizing personality or passion that just might change the world, if any aspect of the game can be described as generic that diminishes it in my eyes and erodes at my interest. High, low, Middle Earth, whatever, as long as the world is evocative.

 

To address the entertaining derail, Mages (ranged combatants of all types) thrive on the low Half-move and low point (150>) characters usually have low Half-moves. If the sword swinger can't reach the mage and still take a swipe, it's like showing up to a gunfight with a knife. The FH lesson for creating warriors is budget points for Running!

 

One of the most ridiculously effective FH characters I've ever made was a mage with a hawk familiar. He had surprisingly low spell capacity but he had Range Penalty Levels bought through the familiar. He was never cut by a hostile blade and the only one to come close got that close through an extraordinary Stealth ability. Basic artillery-spotter combo that works like a dream in many a genre.

[Bismark]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

The idea of magicians being superfluous in combat is just so bizarre I had to read that post twice…

 

I have never played in any group where the characters had to buy any 'mundane' (i.e. non-magical) equipment with points - points were only ever paid for magic items that the player wanted his character to have at the beginning of the campaign (and where there was an agreement with the GM that if the item got lost or destroyed the player could replace it with an equivalent cost item or simply find a duplicate of the original)

 

Back in the days of 1st ed FH (2 years after I first started playing CHAMPIONS/HERO), magic was rather steep cost-wise, to the point where our gaming group (a group of 'min-maxers', I might add ) dumped the whole concept of the 'traditional' magician on the grounds that a lot of common attack spell concepts were simply not cost-effective.

 

We went for magic-enhanced fighters instead; these proved to be more than a match for any of the 'pure' fighters, even the ones that our pet 'munchkin' dreamed up. It also led to the use of Flash Attacks, Drains, EGO attacks, and NNDs (very few 'pure' fighters in low-ish level campaigns have any Power Defence or Flash Defence, for example).

 

Because magic was expensive back then (we had not considered spells in Multipowers etc. - it took us a while to get the concept of HERO system fully 'meshed' with fantasy, and we were using the examples in the rulebook where each spell was bought as an individual Power) we did not impose an Active Point cap, which led to an interesting example of a warrior mage that was virtually un-hurtable by anything short of a giant (or a siege engine) owing to his stacking a hefty Force Field with the plate armour he regularly wandered around in (we were quite happy to let magical defence stack with armour) - and yes, he was quite competent with weapons and usually dealt with his opponents by slicing and dicing them while their attacks bounced ineffectually off his defences.

 

In these days of 5th ed, the balance seems to depend very much on the points base of the campaign, whether magical defences stack with armour and whether the fighters get 'Super-skills' and wuxia-type feats (or, in really epic-style games, Damage Reduction, Power Defence and Regeneration, etc.)

 

I would not even bother doing a magician with an Active Point cap of 25 points - but then again, I don't run campaigns at less than the 175 character point level (unless it's Sword and Sorcery, when I use 150 pts as the base), and I dislike low-level campaigns as a rule (I like slaughtering mooks, not running away from common woodland animals). [Can't tell I started roleplaying with OD&D, can you? :D:D]

 

I'm sure that my habit of running magicians with DEX 18 (and STR 20 - it's under-costed, so load up on that extra carrying capacity, ability to use big honking weapons, PD and STUN) will also raise a few eyebrows (if I want to play 'pointy-hat-with-robes-and-dagger' mages I will play OD&D, AD&D or C&S; if the game system allows mages to use serious weapons then I will use serious weapons).

 

In high point-level campaigns I invariably end up playing an armoured, beweaponed seriously badass magic-enhanced combat monster - it's like crack, I just can't give it up

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

What sort of fantasy campaigns do you enjoy the most (and why)?

 

High powered, almost superheroic? Low powered, gritty and deadly? Epic stories? Stories of a band of people just making it in a big city? Almost Earth-like settings? Weird settings? Long, world-spanning quests? Political court intrigue?

 

Obviously we can all love many different types of campaigns, but what are your favorites? What have you enjoyed? What would you love to play (or run) but have never had the opportunity?

 

I would most prefer a somewhat slow burn, with low powered people early in their careers gradually encountering low-level unconnected threats and making friends and reputations. As their power and influence grow, so does their reach and the scope of their adventures. I don't especially like having THE BIG CAMPAIGN start right at the beginning, with the starting characters involved in the epic quest against the Big Bad. I'd much rather have their involvement grow a bit more organically.

 

I like at least a step or two above gritty, but not all puppies and unicorns.

 

Mostly I like campaigns where I can be interested in the world as a whole, the NPCs and the other PCs as well as my own character. Exactly what stories flow out of that can vary, but as long as I like the dramatis personae involved it makes for an interesting show.

[Markdoc]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

We can go back and forth on listing examples of mages who use swords and those who don't (after all' date=' I did mention Galdalf's use of a sword in LotR). My point was that there [b']is[/b] a variety and I'd rather not penalize the player who chooses to base his wizard around the Arthurian-Merlin rather than Amber-Merlin. I just don't feel that a wizard should have to be fully kitted out in sword & armor in order to compete.

 

Oh, I agree 100%. In fact, the latest player to join my FH game is a traditional weather mage with little combat ability: his role in combat will be limited to blowing arrows aside with gusts of wind and summoning mists to cover the players' movements, methinks. However, out of combat, he will broaden the party's capabilities significantly.

 

As a GM, I like that. Combat is what the warriors are for: it's their speciality and chance to shine. Mages can do so many other things, it seems unfair to let them particpate equally (or more than equally) in combat as well.

 

As an aside' date=' paying points for everying in no way precludes the sword-mage concept either. It just makes a character who, while highly flexible, isn't as good a swordsman as the warrior (though better than the wizard) and not as good a spellcaster as the wizard (though better than the warrior).[/quote']

 

Actually, my point was that paying points for everything makes the sword-mage the deadliest character there is, because he gets the same bennies as the warrior, but access to a far broader range of powers.

 

Think about it: in most games, a specialist warrior will have better physical stat.s than a mage, because the mage has to actually buy his spells. Remove that factor (ie: make 'em both pay for any powers) and there's no reason for the wizard not be just as buff as the warrior.

 

Now the only differentiation is what they use their equipment pool on. The warrior only normally gets mundane buys - DEF and RKA/HKA and those are largely predefined (weapons and armour).

 

The wizard not only gets access to those, he gets access to much more and potentially, at least the ability to customise them. A 1d6 EB doesn't sound too deadly - until you make it NND, AoE, 0 End Continuous, sticky (swarm of stinging insects). Now it costs the same as a longbow, but will, in quite a short period of time, wipe out a whole party of heavily armoured foes, as long as they aren't protected by forcefields. It's easily within the price range of a mage in even a lower-powered game, can be used without the DCV penalties of a longbow, it hits at longer ranges (for a relatively small cost you can also remove any range mod.s) and if combined with incantations and a wand, actually takes less out of the mage's equipment pool. And it doesn't run out of arrows! Make it a 1 pt HKA NND, does body (swarm of wasps) and it now costs the same as a heavy longbow, but is quite lethal: it'll kill most humanoid foes in a couple of turns (or much more rapidly with repeated castings), during which all the mage needs to do is stay out the way. Or alternatively he puts on a 1 pt Forcefield over the top of his comrade's armour (to keep the creatures off) and they can charge into combat with their foes, who now can no longer choose to take recoveries and who are losing STUN or BOD/STUN each phase.

 

It's easy to build similar 20-30 active cost spells that are very hard for a pure warrior to counter.

 

Now - I repeat - if the GM chooses to go this route, that's fine: but it usually leads to a different style of game. It'd be quite suitable for example, for a sort of Runequesty game, where it's assumed that everyone can have access to magic. At that point, it's no longer imbalancing: and we've played several such games - one in particular in the Tekumel setting, which was a heck of a lot of fun.

 

Neither have I. As I mentioned previously' date=' there were no rules forbidding it, it was a character concept initiated by the player. As you can find plenty of examples of non-sword wielding wizards in the source literature, I feel that it's an archetype that should be viable.[/quote']

 

Agreed - personally, I actually build my magic systems to favour that archetype, because it is so prevalent in fantasy novels: I was merely pointing out that if you build the magic system so that advantages acrue heavily to magic users, most of your characters will end up being magic users - of one sort or another. And that based on fantasy literature, there's no sort of "one true rule" for how to play mages.

 

Now players won't always build for points-efficiency: and that's good. But in my experience, most players will. That's not unreasonable: players in general want their PCs to good at what they do.

 

I'm going to do a bit of snipping here as I feel the following points best illustrate where you and I aren't connecting:

 

You seem keep working from the assumption of a high powered and/or relatively open-ended magic system. I've repeatedly said that if you change either of those factors, the abilities of the wizard to run hog wild are greatly reduced. The impact of gear is much smaller in higher point-value games (where 25 free points is only maybe 10% of your character points rather than 25%) or in systems where wizards are able to toss around high active point spells at a whim (6d6 Flash, AE - Radius, 0 END). Both are not my group's preference for FH, thus our use of a solution you "recommend strongly against".

 

Sure, and maybe I came off more strongly than I intended: if so I apologise. One of the strengths of Hero is that you can make all sorts of different balances and I certainly didn't mean to imply there was anything wrong with the way you play/GM. And as noted, we have used this system ourselves for several FH games (in fact when we started with FH, we used variation of it for all of our games), so I'm not talking on purely theoretical grounds.

 

But we have had multiple threads on the board from GMs saying "Help! My wizards are trashing everthing else in the campaign!" and the idea that "wizards are weaker than warriors because warriors get free stuff" is almost inevitably one of the assumptions that led to the problem.

 

It's not an insoluble problem: but it is something the GM needs to take on board when designing the game: hence my warning. But note the example above: you don't need a lot of points to build effective spells. In one of our earlier games, my Paladin type got a great deal of mileage out of a small Flash spell: just a phase or two of making your enemy blind was often enough for a quick kill. I think that was the last game we played where PCs paid points for their stuff. We had a maximum of 30 active points for magic in that game (the same active cost as the largest weapons like 2H-swords) - and by far the weakest HTH combatant was the only pure warrior in the group. Everyone else ended playing a "paladin", or a "cleric" or something of that ilk.

 

And again - it wasn't a bad campaign: I had a lot of fun and still have a great fondness for Sir Flanghall - my bad-tempered, dirty-fighting, lay brother from a holy order - from that game. But the choice of paying points for everything certainly shaped the character design and had implications for the development of the game down the line.

 

I have never once said that wizards are always weaker in all campaigns. I've repeatedly said that different solutions are required for different groups and campaigns. There are too many variables in player dynamics and campaign flavor ...

 

Agreed. You can (in fact, I do) build magic systems which allow pure fighter types and pure magic-usig types to exist alongside each other as well as alongside PCs who mix both. My reaction was purely against the idea that mages are somehow weaker than warriors - as attested to by the other posts on this thread, the reverse is generally true. Not always true - but generally true.

 

What works to balance a high-powered' date=' cheap-and-easy-magic style of game (like a 200-250 point Turakian Age game), doesn't work to balance a low-powered highly limited magic style of game. That's why my group came to a different solution than yours did. Neither solution is wrong. Both were right for their given circumstance.[/quote']

 

Oh - no question about that: and again, if I gave the impression that I thought was you were doing was wrong, in some way, then I apologise. But what works for you and your group, does not, in my experience work for most groups (even in low-powered games, which is the kind I generally run - 100 points is my usual starting level): hence my suggestion to a newbie GM to think carefully before implementing it.

 

Anyway' date=' this thread has been derailed enough and I'm sure any bystanders who really cared have already made up their own minds. So, if you really want to continue this discussion, I'd suggest either the creation of a new thread or taking it to PM. Though unless some new arguments are raised, I really don't see it making any headway since we're not even arguing from the same base assumptions on campaign power level.[/quote']

 

Agreed. I think we've laid out the arguments as well as we can and neither will convince the other - indeed, I don't really think it was about convincing each other

 

cheers, Mark

[SCUBA Hero]

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love?

 

SSL rules. Got the chance to play in a Fantasy Hero game he GMed at DieCon a couple years ago and had a blast. Reports on the Dark Champs & Pulp Hero (prior to its release) games were quite good as well. I think ScubaHero (one of the members of my gaming group and semi-regular on the boards) got in on one or both of those.

Yah, I was in the Fantasy Hero game with you... good times!

 

I gave up my seat in the other game to Blast Furnace... thought he deserved it more, as he *really* wanted to run in one of Steve Long's games, and I had already been in one...