Fitz

Re: Ultimate Grimoire Letter M I have .hdp files for all of the Ultimate Grimoire on my site at http://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/fantasy/magic/spellfinder.html. Some of them are Shadowcat's stuff, some are mine, and some come from others. There's a zipfile there with the whole shebang too.

Re: Complex and unnecessary I vaguely toyed for a while with the idea of scaling DEF, BODY and damage along the same sort of lines as the MegaScale advantage to cater to the enormous range of power levels that people play this game at. I let the idea lie and didn't develop it any further when I stopped running a Space Opera game, but I think it could work well enough within the current game parameters if the costings were properly worked out.

Re: Decoupling Movement from Speed or Segement moviement I have tried decoupling movement from SPD, and I held out hopes that it could be done elegantly, but the knock-on effects throughout the system eventually sent me back to the Old Ways. I do still think it would be better -- I don't much like the idea that being more nimble makes you run faster -- but it just required too much work for a lazy GM like me to sustain.

Re: D&D 4th My two cents, for what it's worth: I've had a week or so to absorb the new edition of D&D. Underwhelmed. very, very underwhelmed. I'd go into details as to why, but frankly there's no point. When 3e came out, I found it quite an exciting progression in the development of D&D and I ended up spending hundreds of dollars on rulebooks, splatbooks, monster books, and even an adventure or two. I won't be spending a cent on this edition. It's not 100% made of fail, but it's boring - and that's unforgiveable.

Re: D&D 4th Assuming it's balance you're aiming at, stand-off weapons like bows should be doing less damage than melee weapons to offset the fact that you don't have to put yourself directly in harm's way to use them. And if you're aiming at simulationism (completely off-topic for a D&D discussion, I know) they should definitely be doing less damage to reflect the low shock value an arrow has compared with, say, an axe. Mind you, if you're simulationizing (?!!) you'd then have to look at ongoing effects from internal bleeding, but you get my drift.

Re: Do you have players justify experience points expenditure? I'm fairly lenient when it comes to buying new skills and powers; as long as the player has made some sort of effort to justify it in terms of the campaign milieu, and it's not too outrageously munchkin or unbalancing, I'll generally let them have whatever they want. That has occasionally come around to bite me on the bum, but not too often. I'll even let them spend points on some skills in the middle of a game, such as buying up an Everyman skill they've been using previously. I wouldn't allow them to do that with a completely new skill though.

Re: Keeping track of END, STUN and BOD. I've toyed with using chips in this fashion, and it works OK as long as the players are on board with the idea. The only real problem we ran into was because one player kept forgetting which colours represented tens, fives and ones We run our game without any free post-12 recoveries (i.e. the character has to spend an action to take a recovery), and everyone just tossed their chips into a central pile as they used END etc. and fished them out as they took recoveries. It worked just fine.

Re: Create Water spell If you use the rules for assigning BODY to things (for the purpose of breaking them) according to mass and complexity, air turns out to have about 1 BODY per cubic metre I think. Assuming that my memory is reliable, which is far from certain. Once you've got that info, then the amount of water created is simply a matter of how much BODY you roll.

Re: How do I reduce my DCV? Why not just use a 15pt Custom Disad "-3 DCV due to size"?

Re: I had a descussion with Steve about buying some Hero's books... There's a lot more to Hero than there used to be; the rules include a lot more examples and explanations than they used to. The book is a real monster, and though $50 seems a lot, it's not unreasonable for that much paper and printing these days. Since your budget is limited, I'd suggest you get the rules first and spend some time absorbing the changes and expansions -- you can always get the Champions sourcebook later if you decide you still need it (and you may not). As an alternative, you could look at getting a copy of Sidekick, which is much, much cheaper. It doesn't contain the complete ruleset (I think it's missing stuff on Power Frameworks and that sort of thing) but it's got everything you really need to get up and running with Hero gaming. 6th edition is still a little way off. I guess you could wait until it comes out if you want to; personally I'm not that good at delaying gratification

Re: Hero On E-Book: What would you like to see? I've never used it, I still do all my coding the old-fashioned way (I use Homesite 4.5). I've toyed with Dreamweaver, but I found I wasn't getting any more productive using a wysiwyg design app than I was just coding it straight so I went back to Homesite. You said you hadn't done much with html before, so there may be a few things you might want to take into account. First, you can't rely on your audience having specific fonts installed, so there's very little point in specifying them except in generic terms - i.e. serif or sans-serif. Unlike pdf, there's no reliable way to pack font files with html documents, so if you want to use fancy fonts for headings and what-not, you'll have to present them as image files rather than text, with a corresponding increase in file size. Second, images should be resized to pixel dimensions; resolution is irrelevant. For example, you'd size an image to 300x200px, not 3"x2". As far as possible, use generic html tags, and rely on an associated css style sheet for formatting. It's more graceful, as well as cutting down on file size because you don't have to put formatting code in every single tag. There's a bunch of other stuff as well, but It seems to me that for the job you're doing you shouldn't need to worry too much about the more abstruse aspects of html and css. Good luck with it; if you need advice I'm happy to help.

Re: Hero On E-Book: What would you like to see? A physical book and an on-screen document have fundamentally different layout requirements; all too often, an e-book reproduction of a physical book is just a layout dump to pdf (or whatever) without any thought taken for the needs of the viewing medium. I'm not familiar with the Kindle (or any of the other readers, for that matter), but I am intimately familiar with html and css and layout for on-screen viewing (help files, website design, pdf document production etc.) and I guess I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about this. Depending on the destination, you're probably going to have to reorganise the page breaks. As far as possible, arrange your layout so that each page view contains all (and only) text relevant to that specific subject -- remember, you don't have to worry about paying for paper, so there's no point in cramming everything together. Multi-column text probably isn't appropriate. Illustrations are easy enough to incorporate, but you need to ask if they actually add anything to the information you're trying to display. If you can use hyperlinking in the end document, you can use it to good effect to take the viewer to example callouts, tables etc. which means you may not need to display them directly within the section - a linked thumbnail may be sufficient. Way back in the distant past, I recreated the 4th Edition rules as html documents for my own convenience, and the thing that made the exercise worth while was the massive amount of interlinking I could indulge in to make navigating to the precise information I needed as easy as possible. In short, DON'T just try to reproduce the physical book. You're working in a different medium, with different strengths and weaknesses. Work with them, and don't try to shoehorn it into an ill fit.

Re: To Have a Campaign Map or not? I always have a campaign map, because I just love drawing maps. The players will have, at best, a very crude approximation of the actual geography. They do have to be constantly reminded that their medievaloid map is a rough guide, and can't be relied on for exactitude like a modern touring map, or else they'll blithely assume that it's actually to scale or that things like rivers and mountain ranges will actually appear. That can be funny, but the expressions of outrage and death-threats against innocent map-sellers starts to get old after a while.

Re: Skill Trees (A New Framework?) Since the Feat Tree in D&D is one of the things I find most frustrating and annoying about it, I would resist its introduction to the Hero System, to the DEATH if need be! But y'know, if it floats your boat, go ahead.

This is a Spirit Mask that will be inserted into my campaign at some stage. It's supposed to be creepy-looking enough to ring some warning bells with the players, mainly because I so love it when their natural paranoia conflicts with their overwhelming avarice

Re: NO everyman skills I have the exact opposite attitude -- I use them precisely so that we don't have to hand-wave what people know or don't know. The Everyman list I use for my campaign gives everyone a clearly defined basis to work from, and more importantly, it means that I know that someone will have the skill the entire campaign hinges on

Re: How do you approach spirit binding? Major Transform - Demon/Spirit into Item with (x) powers, and take it from there. In an Elric-style setting I'd give the spell all sorts of limitations -- lots of extra time, must know demon's true name, various rare, expensive amd/or disgusting foci (blood of innocents etc.). Plus, if you want to actually be able to use its powers once in the item, the demon (or whatever) would have to be cooperative or be coerced: that might require a pretty hefty mind control, or a powerful lingering amicable summon. That's the approach I'd take, off the cuff.

Re: Combining Perks/Talents and Disadvantages I think the Disad to use would be DNPC -- as far as I can tell, that disad's main function is to get the PC into trouble one way or another.

Re: Oh baby You tempt me curiously, dark stranger

Re: Stop Bleeding Herb? I'd vote for the "Bonus to Paramedic Roll" version. In the hands of an ignorant klutz, even the best medical tools are going to be of limited usefulness, and I'd assume that such a herb would require some basic knowledge to have any useful effect. The only reason I'd go for the "1d6 Healing" method would be if it were actually some kind of magical uber-aspirin. As a side note, I've actually been a little surprised at the number of characters in my game who've elected not to "waste" any points on improving the Paramedic skill over the Everyman level. Clearly I've let them get their hands on too much magical healing.

Re: Actions versus Spotlight - revisiting the SPD Concept from a more fundamental lev The problem of spotlight-time imbalance was brought home to me in a game I played in many years ago, when a certain person who shall remain nameless (OK, it was MarkDoc ) built Nexus, the most annoying character ever made, with just two powers: SPD 12 and Duplication - 12 duplicates. That meant that effectively he got 144 actions per Turn, while the rest of us on our puny SPDs of 5-8 got a lot of sitting around time. Since then I've tried many methods of adjusting the speed system to allow for both high- and low-speed characters to co-exist enjoyably, and to remove the mechanical predictability of the SPD Chart. None have really been wholly satisfactory, and the search continues.

Re: Daily Art Findings I do like Berni Wrightson's stuff, ever since I first saw it in Heavy Metal in the early '80s, though some of it is a bit too "EC Comics" for my taste. His pencils are consistently good though; in general I like them much better than his inked stuff. I hadn't seen much of his painting before, and a lot of it reminded me of Frank Frazetta in terms of pose, point of view etc. Good stuff.

Re: Daily Art Findings This is another doodle. I have no particular purpose in mind for this little guy, just as I had no particular plan for what he'd end up looking like when I started drawing him. One of these days I might colour him, but for the moment I like him well enough in black and white.

I don't know when, or how, but this has got to appear in one of my campaigns - but with a lot more weapons attached to it Note: apparently that engine is out of a tank. I don't know what sort of tank. Just a TANK! I can picture the guys lounging around with a few beers... "So, Hans, what are you going to do with that tank engine?" "Dunno, I thought maybe..... motorbike?" "NOW you're talking!"

Re: FRPG Ideas from Hero that ain't necessarily so Low-SPD mooks spend most of their time frozen like statues while the PCs act.