Fitz

Re: Spell cost multipliers? Use them or not I don't allow any Power Frameworks in my campaign, except for individual spells with variable effects. I use the 0.33 cost multiplier proposed in TA (for spells only - innate magical abilities are at full cost) and have found it to work fine in practice. I limit magic use by decreeing that it always costs Long Term END, and must cost END (no zero-END spells in my campaign, thanks very much!). The cost multiplier makes individual spells cheap enough to be reasonably affordable (especially if heavily Limited), but not so cheap that anyone will start with a repertoire of hundreds of spells. I've tried a whole lot of different magic systems, and none of them has been perfect. This one has the advantage of simplicity, which is a big plus in my book.

Re: Potion and items I just have them buy the appropriate power with one or more charges, an expendable focus (the potion) , a lengthy start-up time (mixing the potion), usable by others, gestures (drinking the potion), trigger (drinking the potion)..... you could go on and on. The best limit on use is to make the required ingredients rare and/or expensive.

Re: Daily Art Findings Remember, in D&D anything can mate with anything and produce a whole new genetically viable sub-race

Re: Daily Art Findings Huh? I'm pretty sure there's nothing even vaguely sexually explicit up there. Possibly a drawing including a boob or two, but that's it. I suspect an over-enthusiastic filter.

Re: Daily Art Findings This is just a doodle I did in Photoshop last night - it's mainly an exercise in lighting and reflection, and not terribly successful at that. What the heck. It is what it is. I suspect this thing might be finding its way into my campaign sometime soon, hopefully to the dismay of my players

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate? So far, in my present campaign arc, about five or six characters (out of a party of five) have died permanently. Most of them are the same player though, so I don't know how that skews the stats. I keep being surprised by the resilience of PCs; time and again I've been sure I was heading towards a TPK and had nobody die at all. I have to resist the urge to keep ramping up the danger level out of sheer pique

Re: Is the term "bastard", gender specific? Elizabeth the First was referred to on several occasions by the Spanish and others as a "bastard heretic", and her right to inherit the throne was questioned because of her bastardy (under Catholic law, her mother being Henry VIII's second wife after divorcing Catherine of Aragon) rather than her sex. The word is gender-neutral in English. I don't know about others, being pretty linguistically ignorant myself.

Re: Fantasy Hero Resources page Hmmm..... well, I have no clue what's going on. I've tried downloading it with Firefox, IE 7, and even wget. It always comes down the same -- 184 KB and corrupt. I can only assume that somehow I'm getting a false EOF, but how to fix it I don't know.

Re: Fantasy Hero Resources page 'Fraid not. I've cleared my cache, reloaded the page, re-downloaded the file and it's still corrupted. What should the file size be? It comes down as 184 KB.

Re: Fantasy Hero Resources page I got the same result, so probably not just transfer corruption.

Re: Daily Art Findings This is something I did a while ago, after seeing some stuff in National Geographic about the excavations at Ankhor Thom The scan is a bit light really; it could do with being re-done (or at least tweaked a bit in Photoshop)

Re: Magic systems, Magic costs to much? There are several ways you can go about it. One is to use Power Frameworks like Multipowers for magic, which reduces the cost for individual spells (though you still have to alot points for the Pool Cost). Another is to treat spells as Skills, so the cost of the power thet makes up the spell is irrelevant; the player just pays the 2 or 3 points required to learn the skill to cast it. The system I use, which seems to work pretty well, is that proposed in the Turakian Age campaign book, in which magic spells are bought individually (no Power Frameworks) but get a 1/3 cost break. All such spells have a common SFX - "Magic" - which makes it easy for the GM to determine when and how they work, or not. This seems to work pretty well to make most magic affordable, without making it too easy to get uber-powerful spells. You can get a pretty good repertoire with a 200 or 250 point character. I require magic use to need a Skill Roll (at -1 per 10 Active Points in the spell). I also decree that all magic spells have to cost END, and the END used is Long Term END. This means that magicians can't just blast away at everything that moves all day and night, which is something that tends to really tick off the more muscular members of the party who otherwise don't get to play with their pointy sticks

Re: 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World

Re: 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World Good find

Re: It sneaks up on you? It would need to have "Invisible Effects" so that the victim doesn't notice, and a good cooperative player to play the effects (once they were revealed) without the GM having to steamroller all over the place. As far as I remember, the victim still gets their breakout attempts to shrug off the effect automatically, even if they don't know what's going on, so it wouldn't be hideously overpowered compared to a normal mind control.

Re: resist being stunned by EGO attack with EGO not CON? I think not. Pain is pain and shock is shock, regardless of whether it's being delivered through a fiendish mental attack or by stubbing your toe. If you want to avoid being stunned by mental attacks, you need to be investing in Mental DEF.

Re: Adventuring company name Playthings Of The Gods

Re: Hero vs D20 Future Compared with the various d20 incarnations, Hero's perceived complexity is largely illusionary. I'm presently involved in a game of D&D3e, using some old characters that have been around since the days of AD&D1e, and building them (in PCGen) using 3e's labyrinthine feat chains and skill point system has been a nightmare. Not to mention trying to cater to the various non-standard items and abilities they've picked up over the years. We played D&D3e for a couple of years when it first came out, and gradually got to know it pretty well. However, when we returned to the Hero fold, all that knowledge disappeared, and going back to it now gives me some insight into how a brand new player would feel, confronted with the teem mass of contradictions, special cases and rules hidden away in a paragraph in some completely unrelated section. I'm seriously considering just putting my foot down and boycotting the D&D game, and hopefully my infantile tantrum will encourage the others to re-convert it to Hero again

Re: PRE Attacks for scary creatures OK, so how would you handle it when some practical joker decides to Suppress or Dispel the Necklace of Naboo's power? Handwave that too? This is at the very core of my objection to handwavium. It inevitably creates situations where the GM (and, to a lesser extent the players) has to start running the game by arbitrary fiat, because there are no objective measurements to work by. I'm not saying it should never be done; it's often a good way to keep the game moving. But any object or situation which is going to have a recurring role in the game needs to be properly defined so that everyone knows where they are with it. It's not neccessary to do it in the middle of play (which would be a royal pain) but it should be taken care of as soon as possible.

Re: Hi, Gene! Magic, Sanitation and Cleanliness Personal hygiene is for the WEAK!

Re: PRE Attacks for scary creatures The problem with just hand-waving the effect like that is that you start to run into problems with building countermeasures. Say you want to create a necklace that will bolster one's courage enough to face skeletons or zombies unimpaired, but isn't powerful enough to deal with the fear aura of a wight or a demon? Sure, you could just hand-wave that too, but then you start down the road to D&D-ization, and the whole value of using a point-based construction system is lost.

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world? A fantasy world is also an ideal place to indulge yourself in Lysenkoism

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world? Regarding the "easier to destroy than to create" thing: You could consider entropy as a sort of current in which everything sort of drifts along. Magic could be used to alter the rate of flow, or even reverse it. Magically speeding the rate of entropy would be relatively easy, just like poling a barge down a river. Slowing the rate of entropy would require a great deal more effort, and actually reversing it would require even more. You might also consider the idea that while magic could adjust the rate and/or probability of things happening, it can't just make something out of nothing. A spell may massively improve the yield from a crop, but in doing so it might drain the soil of nutrients to such an extent that it would take several years to recover. One might heal a wound by magically speeding up the body's natural recovery rate, but in doing so you might actually starve your patient to death if you can't get enough nutrients into him while he's healing. The idea that magic works within the laws of physics rather than breaking them willy-nilly can go a long way to making a home-brew magic system consistent and predictable for both the players and the GM, and it also makes it easy to decide whether or not a given spell definition fits within the overall framework.

Re: PRE Attacks for scary creatures I think the point about the modifiers an undead critter should get to its PRE attack just by nature of being a Hideous Abomination From Beyond The Grave is well made. I had a similar issue when I went to build some demons (based roughly on those in Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East). They were supposed to be frightening just to be near, so I gave them an AoE Suppress PRE (always on) and the ability to Drain PRE as well, if they put their minds to being extra awe-ful. It makes them pretty nasty opponents if they survive the first few Phases; once your Mighty Warrior starts having to make heavily-penalized PRE rolls to do anything offensive, he becomes a lot less Mighty. Of course, that means that anybody with pretensions to Mightiness is going to take the Fearless talent, but there you go. If they're willing to spend their character points on not being scared by things that would reduce normal people to jelly, fair enough.

Re: "Bag of Holding" You could easily build any of the D&D trans-dimensional storage receptacles with an appropriately limited/advantaged Summon It would have OAF of course, and for items like the Bag of Holding (which doesn't order the contents) it could have an Activation Roll to represent the time you have to spend fossicking around in it to find the thing you want. It would need the "Expanded Class" advantage - the level would be dependent on the GM, but I'd go for about +1/2, because although you could "Summon" just about anything, the thing does already have to been put in the bag one way or another. Where this method falls down would be in having to determine a maximum points value for items stored and retrieved this way. A kindly GM could just hand-wave it, while a cruel GM could use it as a means of getting rid of the Sceptre of Campaign Destruction he stupidly let the player get gis hands on -- he could put it into the bag, but never get it out again because it's too powerful to Summon