Fitz

It's working fine for me now; it must have just been one of those mysterious internet gnomes screwing me around. I hate those little bastards.

When I hit the "submit" button, I persistently get a "document contains no data" alert. I'm using Mozilla 1.5 in win2k

My neighbours live too close for a trebuchet to be useful. I'd need something more like a ballista, and even then I'd have to mount it on the roof so it could shoot down over the fence. Actually, since I get on pretty well with all my neighbours (except the old lady down the back who doesn't approve of the way I don't garden, but she's old so she'll die soon, so what the heck) mounting a siege engine of any sort on my roof would be far too much trouble.

Are you using the Language Similarity system? Because it may be simpler just to decree that it has no similarity to any other language, so that it takes an extra point to learn. To be able to get reliable information they're thus going to have to spend at least 3pts for Fluent Converstaion, and more likely 4pts for Completely Fluent. Plus, if it's a written language only you coulfd also sting them for Literacy -- another point. If 5 character points isn't enough, then you can just restrict the learning opportunities through roleplaying. I guess what I'm saying is that a language is a language is a language; even a wildly different language will use the same learning skills and brain function as a normal one. Adding additional character point requirements seems to me to be unreasonable in terms of the Language aquisition rules as they stand.

Ha I remember having the exact same sorts of discussions back in Ye Olde Tymes when Excalibur came out.

I had a thought for a movement limitation which, as far as I can recall, doesn't already exist as a standalone -- "No Combat Movement" -- the rationale being that the movement, whatever it is, requires sufficient attention and/or resources that it reduces the user's DCV in exactly the same way as non-combat movement does, regardless of the speed at which the character is moving. Of course, this effect is already covered by the "Concentration - throughout" limitation, so it's not strictly necessary, or even desirable. However, there are other instances in which a power-specific limitation could be duplicated by generic limitations, so what the hell.

I've started migrating my old Gaean Reach space opera campaign to a Terran Empire setting -- it's still largely a barren wasteland, but for what it's worth you can get to the sections for both campaigns from http://fitz.jsr.com/roleplay/herosystem.html A lot of my old sci-fi stuff is redundant or irrelevant in the new setting (which makes me sad after all that hard work) but there's still some useful stuff there.

I was thinking about building force fields for my Star Hero campaign which flicker on and off according to a set frequency to allow the ship's synchronized weapons to fire through unimpeded, but which hopefully catch some or all of an incoming attack. How to represent this variable defence under the rules though? An activation roll is the obvious contender, but in this instance I don't want a binary on/off, but a sliding scale of effectiveness depending on how well the roll goes. It can be done with some GM hand-waving, by buying multiple iterations of the appropriate defence with steadily increasing activation rolls, and assuming that a single roll result includes all the iterations below its level. I'm pretty sure that's not actually rules-legal though. A genuinely rules-legal method would be to buy multiple iterations of the defence, all with a set activation roll, and have the player roll for every one, stacking the total defence. That would mean a hell of a lot of dice rolling though, and it feels clunky. Any other ideas?

I've found the most excellent way of keeping a running tally of END and STUN during the game -- an abacus. I found this little toy abacus for a couple of bucks at a local educational toy store; it's about the size of a pocket notebook (A6) and has six rows of beads, enough to keep track of up to 999 END and 999 STUN (or 999,999 of either). It saves me a lot of erasing; I just have to make sure that my current totals are noted on my character sheet at the end of the session. Yay for ancient technology

Modular generic maps -- that's what I'd like to see (assuming we're not talking about specific location maps here). Having maps of complete office buildings or taverns or fire stations is all very well, but they get familiar awfully fast. I'd like to see the equivalent of those architectural prefab planning modules, which can be rearranged and mixed and matched to make new and exciting locations for the PCs to smash to pieces. That means including add-on pieces like elevator shafts, stairwells, horse troughs, gibbets, death star force field control pylons, etc.etc. as well as the standard 5-sizes-of-rectangular-room bits.

Gurps Lite (free download) will suffice for most translations, since all that's really needed in most cases is an idea of relative power. I've generally found trying to do a point-to-point translation more trouble than its worth -- far easier to take the concept and rebuild it in Hero terms.

I have no fundamental quibble with the idea of super-duper-ultra-mega-SPD except for this: it makes the game kind of boring for everyone else. I played in a scenario with a guy who built an absolutely awful character called Nexus (hi Mark ) whose only powers were, as far as I can recall, Duplication (12 duplicates) and SPD 12. We spent a lot of time sitting around twiddling our thumbs while he took care of his 144 actions per Turn. Even in our mid-level Fantasy Hero game the difference between the SPD 5 characters and the SPD 2 characters was extreme, in terms of camera time.

Re: Re: game mechanics I agree completely -- I thought TE was great, and if I wasn't so attached to the Space Opera stuff I've already done, I'd be using it myself. In fact, I may do so anyway; none of the characters in my imminent SF campaign carry over from the old one, so it's probably a good time for a milieu change. I'll be very interested to see how Alien Wars pans out too. I have high hopes for it.

OK, now that my evil master villain knows that if he accelerates a one tonne rock towards the Earth at 6G it will take an hour to get there and be travelling at about 210,000m/sec when it arrives. So how big is the explosion? If I recall correctly, in the HSR it says that an object can do no more than its DEF plus BODY damage when it impacts on something else -- i.e. if it's thrown. This equation seems to fall down a bit when you start dealing with Intergalactic Space Bugs who are tossing asteroids at Buenos Aires. Or does it? What am I missing?

That's great, thanks very much

I'm a complete ignoramus when it comes to mathematics. This has its down-side, unfortunately, when one is planning running a space opera campaign. What I want is some utility into which I can plug an acceleration value (e.g. 3.2G) and a time value (e.g. 76 hours), and have it tell me how far I've travelled in that time, and what my velocity is. Also, I'd like to be able to plug in a distance and an acceleration value and have a trip time returned. This seems to me to be the sort of thing that someone with an ounce of mathematical ability and programming skill could whip up in ten minutes, but unfortunately all my programming pals have moved to other cities. Has anyone out there in HeroLand done anything like this that they'd like to share?

I would rationalise and condense the Powers list for attacks, making use of Modifiers to differentiate them. I don't see the point of having separate powers for HA, EB, HKA and RKA when the only difference between them comes down to the way they're implemented. A single "Attack" power, with modifications: * Usable at range * Can't add STR * Does killing damage along with all the other Modifiers currently available would do the trick. Similarly, Flight and Gliding could be conflated. I have no doubt there are other points as well, though they don't come to mind off the cuff. My reasoning for this is to make the Powers as generic as possible -- there is still something of a bias towards Hero's Champions beginnings when it comes to power names and organisation.

Head hits aren't all that common, but for some reason about one hit in three in my FH campaign hits one of the characters in the groin. Sorry, "vitals". I can't explain it, I've tried changing dice but no matter what I do I keep slamming them right in the swimsuit area. It's got to the stage now where one of them has gone out and bought himself an armoured codpiece -- his only armoured location, I might add.

Ah, all is now clear -- pardon my obtuseness

Hmmm, perhaps I wasn't clear about the problem. Just defining a jump drive isn't a big issue, whether it's a single unit or a multi-part module dingus thingummy. What I'm having trouble with is this: I want to be able to give it a decreasing activation roll which doesn't kick in until after some arbitrary number of uses. Doing it as I am now, by basing it on Ablative (even though it's not a Defence Power) and starting at an un-failable roll level will work for what I want, but Ablative is worth -1 and clearly this limitation isn't as bad as that, since there's a clear period of predictable reliability. Using Charges doesn't quite do it, since it can be used (probably) after all the charges have been expended..... unless I go to the lengths of giving it a bunch of regular charges, plus one charge at 17-, one charge at 16-, one charge at 15-, and so on. Clunky, to say the least. In point of fact, an exact limitation value isn't really vital for my campaign since the point value of a ship's systems don't matter at all to the PCs. However, this is a limitation type which isn't precisely covered by any of the current rules, which interested me since I don't often find something I can't build straight, without hand-waving.

Regaining reliability is as simple as swapping out the drive and replacing it with a new one. They're not hard to come by, or terrifically expensive, but if the ship is stuck in the back of beyond without ready access to a spare parts store, there could be trouble. If you're interested, my campaign stuff is at http://fitz.jsr.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/sci-fi.html There's a reasonable amount of stuff there, though most of it is still written up for 4th Ed.

I'm in the process of renovating my old space opera campaign, and I want to define a quality for Jump Drives so that they will operate reliably for a while, and then aquire an activation roll. At present, I've decreed that the basic unit starts with an Activation (Burnout) Roll of 36- and which drops by one with each successive use of the drive, effectively giving the user 19 reliable jumps before something might break. It works similarly to Ablative in its effect, but the deterioration doesn't kick in for a while. My problem is, how do I cost this?

I would concur -- I've bought two "damaged" books now, Star Hero and Fantasy Hero, and both arrived looking as though they'd been flipped through once or twice and dropped once (both have a *slightly* bent corner). The opportunity to buy these high-quality seconds at a discount is a real boon for me, because my money supply is pretty tight these days (having gone back to school after a 20-year break). In short: I'd recommend them. Even if you buy perfect, pristine copies, they'll look like this after you've had them for a couple of days anyway.

Check out Mark Doherty's site -- he ran a Sengoku-era campaign for a long time, and has a bunch of stuff there. I don't know the exact page(s) you'd want, but the home page is http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/9529/index.html Note: this isn't "Sengoku TM ", the game, but Sengoku Jidai, the period of Japanese history.

That Bogart movie was "Sahara", and the tank was a M3A1 Lee -- I just got it on video from the Super Duper Cheap Bargain Bin. An excellent fifty cents worth.