Fitz

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Heh.... steal away I don't post anything on the internet that I don't want people to use. As long as you're not making money from my work without giving me a cut, I'm fine with it.

Re: Fantasy Art Thread This is a WIP illustration of a place in my campaign called Morrach, the base of operations of a Very Bad Man who is giving the party a lot of grief at the moment. I doubt that it will ever be finished now, so I've posted it just as it is.

Re: GMing Luck I use Luck Dice in this way: At the beginning of the session, the Lucky/Unlucky character rolls their dice and counts it just like normal damage. The Stun can be used to adjust die rolls -- that is, any die roll that directly affects the character -- up or down; The Killing pips are used similarly to Fate Points (discussed more fully elsewhere). In both cases the pips are a diminishing pool -- e.g. if a character with 3d6 Luck rolls 9, and in the first five minutes of the session has to use 4 points to adjust an enemy's blow down so that he doesn't get smashed in the head with a hammer, then he only has another 5 points left for the remainder of the session. The only difference between Lucky and Unlucky characters is that I, the GM, get to decide when and how to use Unluck. Players hate having Unluck; I don't think I can remember a single player who has taken it on purpose as a Disad.

Re: Paper Models for Fantasy Hero As some may already know, I have a bunch of paper models and stuff on my website that may be of some use in this respect. I haven't added anything to it for quite a while though.

Re: target locations on very large opponents Part I: that's about right. Part II: sure, why not? I can't recall off-hand whether AoE attacks don't use hit-locs by default, but in a situation like this where the whole AoE covers only a small part of the target I'd allow it. Both: fighting something this big there's almost certainly going to be modifiers for range too.

Re: Stalin versus Hitler Yeah! Go Stalin! Because he's not.... as bad.... as Hitler? Um. I have a boiling, seething, red-hot hatred for Stalin because in my opinion he is almost single-handedly responsible for the utter perversion of the communist ideal. He was, in spirit, a fascist, and has tarred communism with his execrable paranoid totalitarianism ever since. I'm not one of those starry-eyed idealists who think the sun shone out of Lenin and Trotsky; they were both pragmatic opportunists, to put it generously. But I am sure that things would have been very, very different if Stalin had never come to power. I'm also not that happy with Mao or Castro, both of whom seem to have seen communism as an excuse for dictatorship -- though ironically, I strongly suspect Castro wouldn't have stayed in power as long as he did if not for the US embargo, which he could use as a potent internal propaganda tool. I thought Ho Chi Minh was pretty cool though. It's a pity that he was followed by lesser men, but to me Viet Nam stands as the most successful of the communist regimes by being idealogically flexible enough to fit the local circumstances, and eschewing the dogmatical nature of Chinese or Soviet communism. Anyway, rant over.

Re: Problem Player (?) This sort of thing needs to be nipped in the bud or it can poison a game, and potentially a friendship. I know here of what I speak. I ran a "disposable characters" short scenario in which one character, mainly through bad luck but also due to some bad decisions, lost an arm. At the next session he announced that he was just going to ignore the results of the last session.... I assumed at the time that he was talking in-character, i.e. that his character wouldn't accept the loss of a limb, because I couldn't believe that anyone would be so rude as a player as to disregard the consequences of a playing session. When I realized that he was actually talking as a player, not as his character, I was more offended than I can say, and pretty much just shut down the game since I couldn't face running it with him in it with that attitude. My big mistake was that I let it fester instead of calling him on it straight away, and it came close to damaging our friendship badly. He honestly had no idea how seriously I took it; if I'd let him know immediately that his attitude offended me I doubt that he would have persisted, since he'd basically a very nice and considerate guy. Another of my errors was that I obviously didn't make it as clear to him as I'd thought the sort of scenario I was running; he's the kind of guy who invests a lot in his characters, and I don't think he really started with the "disposable character" in mind. It's just a game. Everyone has to have fun, or it's not fun. But everyone has to be on the same page, or the potential for not having fun is increased unacceptably.

Re: Stealth and Perception Unless they're actively on watch, I'd use the average of the group's PER, with +1 per doubling of numbers (i.e. +1 for 2 in the party, +2 for 4 etc.). If some are actually on watch, then I'd use the best PER roll of those watching, adjusted for numbers as above. (That assumes you're wanting to gloss over details of relative position, aproach routes etc.) If the party states that they're all watching in order to maximize their chance of spotting anything, then that means that nobody is actually doing anything else, so campfires don't get made, food doesn't get prepared, and so forth. Also, nobody gets to sleep. If the GM keeps track of that sort of thing and then lets the party enjoy the consequences of night after night of vigilence, it won't take long before some more rational system gets put in place

Re: Extra Time or Gradual Effect for Growth? Gradual Effect if you want to be growing the whole time, Extra Time if you want to suddenly grow at the end of the Turn. Naturally, with Gradual Effect you will need to keep track of your Growth state at any given Segment to take into account damage/knockback etc. taken while you're growing.

Re: Money in Fantasy Setting The down-side to no longer having 1, 2 or 5c coins around here in NZ is that there's no really cheap source of figure bases any more. Washers are OK, but they have that hole in the middle, and they all cost more than 1 or 2 cents each. On a RPG-related note: in one of the oldest campaigns I play in (infrequently these days, alas) the GM at one point gave us access to a hoard large enough that money (or rather, the lack of money) became irrelevant in the campaign thereafter. The only issue around money was how to protect the vast piles of coin and jewels from the drepredations of thieves, but a bunch of PCs with access to magic and effectively unlimited financial resources can make thievery a very, very difficult proposition. Players are sneaky. Anyway, the point here is that money is no longer a character motivator in that campaign, which does tend to make things a little more difficult for the GM, but only a little -- after all, everyone is playing the game to have fun, not to retire in obscene luxury.

Re: Really quite crazy campaign idea.... If you can lay your hands on it, read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. In general terms, it revolves around a generation-ship crew who have used tech to enhance latent psychic abilities and set themselves up as a pantheon of gods based on the Hindu gods -- Vishnu, Kali, Yama and so forth -- over their colonists. The conflict is between those who want to carry on with the status quo, and those who want to wean the populace off their religious subjugation and nudge them back towards technological civilization.

Re: THE BOOK OF DRAGONS -- What Do *You* Want To See? I'd like to see a section on dragonslayer archetypes along with the dragons themselves. It could be tricky to do in any depth, considering the breadth of the source material, but a few examples built to suit various milieus (e.g. Dragonslayer, Reign of Fire, Beowulf etc.) with appropriate skill sets and equipment could be helpful.

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy I'm not buying anything from the USA for the moment; the exchange rate between NZ and US dollars is pretty awful right now from this end. It's on my list though, assuming everything doesn't melt down any further. Of course if it does, then Post-Apocalyptic Hero might become an even more useful resource

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Try it in title-case rather than just upper-case; I think that will make a big difference, and you'll still get to use ye olde tyme scrypte

Re: Ditching PS12 I did away with PS12 a long time ago, and haven't missed it at all. Good riddance, I say.

Re: 6th Edition WAGs Characteristics will be pared down considerably to FI and TH (Fightin' and Thinkin') The Speed Chart will be considerably enhanced, retaining the 12-second Turn but splitting it into 120 1/10-second Segments to increase combat granularity. Actions, movement etc. will be determined Segment-by-Segment to make sure that combatty goodness lasts as long as possible so that all that embarrassing social-interaction roleplaying crap gets crammed into whatever time is left. Skills will be simplified and rationalised down to the basics: Fightin' Things (incorporating Breakin' Things), Fixin' Things (incorporating Makin' Things), Findin' Things and Fakin' Things Powers will be reduced to three fundamentals: Attackin' Things, Avoidin' Things and Being Cool. That, in a nutshell, is my vision for the future. Excelsior!

Re: Fantasy Gambling Ideas There was a game played in Ye Olde Tymes called "Beating the Blindfold Hog" in which a bunch of sturdy rustics were all blindfolded, given cudgels and let loose in a muddy pen along with a hog. The aim was to club the hog to death and avoid being clubbed by your blindfolded colleagues; the winner in the pen got to keep the hog carcass, and spectators bet on who'd win, who'd be laid out and when, and every other permutation of gambling you can think of. That's called "making your own entertainment" I guess

Re: Adventure conversions for Valdorian Age Handy -- I always like it when somebody else does all the work

Re: How many arrows can an arrow maker make? Assuming you have arrowheads available, appropriate feathers for flights, a source of canes for shafts, and resources for straightening the shafts and boiling glue etc. you can pump out arrows pretty quickly. Using a production-line system in a properly-appointed workshop with glueing jigs and so forth I can pump out a few dozen a day without going hard-out. If, on the other hand, you're out in the piney woods without access to the workshop, a day's hard work might get you half a dozen shafts flighted if you're lucky, and the chances are pretty good that they're not going to fly straight because the shafts are wonky and the flights have been attached off-kilter. Having a skill as a fletcher doesn't magically give you the equipment you need for mass-production in the wilderness. It's true that you don't need a lot of equipment just to make arrows, but without it the job gets a lot harder.

Re: The Atlantian Age Y'know, when I see a thread titled "Review: The Atlantian Age" I kind of expect to see a review of The Atlantean Age.

Re: What costing for noncombat movement without penalty?

Re: Random Spaceship Generator I'd vote "Hell yeah", though I'll be interested how you modify the randomness so that you don't end up with engine bays and latrines scattered piece-meal all over the map

Re: Would you ever allow a Large character as a PC? It would be kind of a pain to play since any sort of indoor adventuring would be fraught with difficulty. Any normal passageway would be extremely cramped (and would thus tend to cancel out your reach advantage) and at 1500 pounds you'd be spending a lot of time in cellars picking bits of floorboard out of your clothing.

Re: No Horses For You You know why people don't use carnivores as riding animals? Because they make terrible riding animals, that's why. You can get away with dogs as pack animals because they're... er, well, pack animals -- they'll accept a human being as pack leader, and are trainable. Get one big enough, you could probably ride it - if you could stay on. Horses and camels are herd animals, and can be dominated in a similar way. I seriously doubt you'd get the same sort of cooperation from a velociraptor; the only way you could expect to ride something like that without having to be constantly on guard would be if you could exert absolute mental and/or physical control over it. Another thing to think about when replacing horses is the anatomy of the creature you're proposing. Even assuming you could control a Saberhagenesque riding tiger-beast enough that it wouldn't chow down on you at the first opportunity, the spine of all cats flexes enormously when it runs; good luck staying on if you're not actually tied to it. Horses may be passé, but their backs stay relatively horizontal when they're moving at speed, which is one reason why they've been our most successful mount. Almost all of the mount replacements in games and literature have been chosen because they're cool, not because they'd actually be practical riding beasts.

Re: Chtulhu The ambience is easy enough to replicate if you have a decent group who are willing to take on the job. Use PRE Drains to model courage-sapping effects, PRE Attacks to do the Sudden Horror schtick, and you might want to add a SANity stat as well. The fact that Investigators are generally pretty run-of-the-mill in terms of abilities can be modelled by lowering initial stats to 8, taking NCM down to 15, and probably not going much higher than 50/50 starting points and disads (maybe even as low as 25/25). All in all, the mechanics are simple to build. As with any of the other CoC builds though, the key to success is in having a good GM who can build the suspense, and a good group who will play along with the genre.