Vanguard

@Lord Liaden
 
Thanks!!
 
Gave Highlander Hero a quick look over and it looks like we did some of the same things.  One of the few things we changed, off hand, was that Immortals in our game regenerated lost limbs and body parts.  Mainly because during the series, we only saw 1 Immortal that was missing a hand while none of the others were even missing fingers.  And we found it a bit hard to believe that after hundreds of years of fighting with edged weapons, no-one lost a finger.

I absolutely love the concepts Chaos and Order, and I absolutely hate DnD alignments. I have never used them, and will never use them. But I don't eliminate ethics from my games. I don't need DnD alignments to have Orcs that are only evil. Evil orcs aren't about cosmic alignment, it's about nature, and empirical observations. All orcs are evil not because they're forced by the cosmos to be that way, but because they *just are.* In the same way that all mountains are tall, and all oceans are deep, all orcs are evil. It's just part of the nature of reality (in a setting with evil orcs that are done well). I'm not even saying orcs *should* be evil. All I'm saying is that there's nothing to be ashamed of in using evil orcs for slaughter in your games. If your orcs are evil and only for slaughter, that's cool to me. If you orcs are the misunderstood savage trope, that's fine by me as well. It's a worldbuilding choice that I appreciate, I don't think it's vapid or shallow or for low-brow pulp fantasy reading plebeians who don't have sophisticated tastes or whatever. I don't think it's for *racists* either. I think it's just for people who have enough imagination to appreciate something as simple as imminent material danger. I also don't think it's any more of an "illogical" worldbuilding choice than any of the other thousands of ultimately arbitrary changes that we make to our worlds so that they differ from Reality Prime. 

In fact, the less I know about why orcs are evil, the eviler and scarier they become for me. Because that would actually make them eviler and scarier to the denizens of the world. I hope I never have to play with somebody who's gonna roll their eyes when they hear a village has been completely razed and nobody knows why.

So.... 
 
Diet zombies? 

This one's for you, Duke.
 

Oh you mean people who look for things that aren’t there? Tolkien’s Orcs are corrupted Elves. Elves and Orcs are by Tolkien’s own words represent angels and demons to a lesser extent. The PC police are too much! They ruin a game quicker than anything else!

The hero is in a running battle with the guards at an evil villain's base.  He's shot several of them, knocked out a few more, and now he's sprinting down a hallway with a large group of men following him.  He turns a corner and there's just a big glass window in front of him.  There's gunfire down the hall behind him, and he knows this is his only chance.  He rushes forward and jumps through the window, shattering it, and falls 30 feet down into the unknown.  He bounces off of a railing halfway down, and then does a shoulder roll as he slams into the ground.  He shakes his head for a second and looks up -- only to see 5 men with machine guns standing directly over him with their guns pointed right at his face.
 
Our hero has just had the Cover maneuver used against him.
 
The bad guys have already used an action.  They've already rolled to hit.  All they need to do is declare that they want to do damage, and it's automatic.  The hero has to surrender and let himself be taken captive, because otherwise he's screwed.  He can't dodge, he can't try to quick draw a weapon, he's completely vulnerable.  The Cover maneuver is a roleplaying aid, it really helps to set the tone in certain genres, and it should be encouraged.  The hero has to wait until something distracts the people pointing guns at him, in which case he now has a chance to dodge or run without getting killed.
 
In my opinion, you should be allowed to take a shot with the Cover maneuver and then use your phase (as long as it hasn't already gone by), even if it results in two attacks in the same phase.  After all, there's a strategic advantage in holding your action.  There's almost never a strategic advantage to Cover.  You could have just shot the guy in your previous phase.  It's something that reinforces the genre, so we shouldn't penalize it.

I dunno.  It is always good to get an official answer alongside some crowd-funded ones.  I can then decide what I want to use in my game...

Personally, I think I might allow certain things that do no interfere with the cover, other things would allow the person to break cover due to distraction with other things and there will be actions that are simply incompatible with maintaining cover. 
 
GM decisions all over the place....

You know, I never thought about it this way previously but it makes rules sense and it is an additional disincentive for someone to ignore someone covering them - they WILL take damage and may take it twice...
 
Doc

I think the message here is that you really need to look closely at all triggers to see how they would work in your game.  There is no blanket recommendation.
 
I think a cleave effect is decent for particular kinds of game.  If you are a HERO in combat with waves of very weak, mook type characters then you want a way to clear the combat area pretty quickly - so a good attack can move through and attack another enemy in range.  Obviously this would be useful for enemies in adjacent hexes - several good rolls could clear a space all round the HERO.  VERY appropriate for some games, not for others.  I might require that the attack takes out an opponent (takes it below 0 BODY) AND does at least half the original BODY of that enemy to trigger an additional attack of another enemy within reach.
 
I do not think that anything can be entirely ruled out, or ruled in.  Completely GM discretion.  I would also tell any player that I give the nod to that I would want to re-evaluate after three or four sessions to see if it is too effective and needs another look.
 
Doc

As GM, you control the game pace.  In this case, it's not about Kryptonite or specialty attack, but just a common attack type.
 
1) If a player has a high level block and trigger attack linked to it, why wouldn't some of the villains?  What will happen is that in one phase, you will get a person blocking and riposting which in turn gets blocked and riposted until one of them fails.  Remember, anything you allow the players to buy, you should be able to buy for the NPCs.
2) Ranged beats HTH in real life which is why the army is equipped with guns and not two handed swords.  Even in fantasy, a quick drawn thrown dagger spoils a fencers actions time and time again in movies.  If your city guards only have swords, then your city guard is poorly armed.  I would equip them with crossbows and have swords as back up weapons.
 

Without reading how the specific Trigger was defined, it's impossible to say. But unless the trigger is responding to another trigger, I cannot see how a loop would be set up. And if you are worried about loops, you can simply declare that the trigger doesn't respond to a response which seems fairly common sense. Resetting the trigger as a 0 phase action doesn't allow it to respond to the same stimuli twice, at least I wouldn't allow it to.
 
I mean, I wouldn't think it needs to be said, but "The GM can allow characters to set other Triggers multiple times, if desired, or forbid multiple setting if appropriate."  6e1 p.351

Squeeze. Don't pull.

Ummm, it's meep-meep.  Everyone knows that. 

Gee, I wonder what's going to happen if people continually flout the law and endanger the lives of others.
 
"WHY IS THERE MARTIAL LAW?!!!!"

Yeah, nanotechnology will be far more lethal than any random string of RNA.
 

Good for him.  As a 40+ male with severe respiratory issues, he's very much in the high-risk category.

In my view, the good news is that we're still producing food, water, power, and all the other essentials, so the basics of civilization don't look set to go away anytime soon.
 
And if government supports people and businesses during the downturn, everyone with diminished income will get to pay their bills and keep their heads above water. So that keeps factories, shops, and homes in the same hands they were in before the crisis.
 
And if that government support for businesses is predicated on people remaining on the payrolls through the crisis, those businesses also won't have to lose their trained workforce.
 
After the crisis passes, we'll have a lot of pent up demand for all those non-essentials that we couldn't get during the crisis. People will go back to work providing those things and will therefore have money to buy them as well.
 
So it seems as though this could just be a rough period after which we're likely to see a nice rebound and a return to growth -- if we handle the crisis well.
 
If we handle it poorly, of course, it could get pretty darned bad. Congress can easily throw vast sums of money out the window if they listen to the corporatists in both parties instead of taking care of the middle and working classes. And if people keep going out despite stay-at-home orders, more people will get the virus, and more of them will die because the hospital beds are all full.
 
I hope we handle this crisis better than we've been handling things in general.