tancred

Re: help with ship clasifications One thing that I've found interesting is the fighters/no fighters choice. Different genres/games handle it different ways. Modern day (since 1942, anyway) has shown that real-world aircraft are extremely dangerous to ships. Thus, the carrier is the modern queen of battle, the ship that must be protected as the center of a fleet. Star Fleet Battles, on the other hand, has "fighters" that can barely damage a cruiser, let alone a dreadnought or carrier. In that game, a carrier's firepower (a full squadron) is an adequate substitute for a cruiser, but not much more than that. That difference in power level of the fighter defines how your fleet will use and view fighters.

Re: Star Hero:?

Re: New NBC Show: Chuck Chuck was really good; my wife liked it as much as I did. And she's MUCH pickier than I am, so that's a good recommendation. Whether they can keep it up or not, I don't know, but I'll keep watching. Journeyman was good. And the ending ROCKED. I liked the show up to that point; that last line convinced me I will be watching it again.

Re: [How To] Prevent Corpse Decay Surprisingly, this is the way the Fantasy Hero Grimoire does it. The Perfect Embalming spell (page 163) is Change Environment, Reduced Endurance, Uncontrolled. (It's not UAA, though.)

Steve, I'm trying to work up the spells from the Fantasy Hero Grimoire and I've found one I can't figure out. FHG page 165, the Soul Feeding spell (Necromancy). The spell is listed as Aid END and STUN 2d6, Uncontrolled, at 80 Active Points. 1. There's no Variable Effect Advantage listed, to allow it to add to both END and STUN. Should it be there? (If you do, I can't make the 80 Active Points come out right.) 2. You can't put Uncontrolled on an Instant power; at least, Hero Designer says that's the reason you can't select Uncontrolled for this spell. So how should this spell read? Thank you!

Re: New to Fantasy Hero Shop carefully, though. The Bestiary is quite the bargain; only $6.99. (It was one of the very first character packs released, and somewhat under-priced, IMO.) Many of the later packs run $30.00, because they contain essentially everything in their respective book EXCEPT the actual descriptions. At that price, I have to choose between buying the pack and ordering a new book. So far, the book wins every time. For that very reason, I'm keying in the spells from the Fantasy Hero Grimoire myself. The good side to that is, I'm sure learning about all the spells that will be used in my Turakian Age game. It has also let me figure out ground rules for players creating new spells for my campaign. Generally speaking, the genre book character packs are the better bargains (Star Hero, Fantasy Hero, etc.). And the UMA-Ninja Hero, Bestiary, and Turakian Age packs are WELL worth the price, IMO. I don't have the packs for the other Ultimate books, but I'm considering them.

Re: New to Fantasy Hero Welcome aboard, White Lion. And have some rep. One thing I can't believe Thia didn't mention: Hero Designer. (He's the only one here who's a bigger booster for it than I am.) Hero Designer is your indispensable tool for everything Hero. You will find yourself designing characters faster than you ever thought you could. It does the math for you, AND it enforces the rules, helping you make sure anything you write is legal. It's a steal for only $25.00. You can purchase character packs from the various books. The Bestiary character pack is a particularly good bargain, at $6.99. ALL the creatures (monsters, animals, EVERYTHING) from the Bestiary book already done in HD, ready to be customized to suit you at a second's notice. This pack includes all the various templates for customizing creatures that are listed in the book, as well. These make it even easier to customize a monster on the spur of the moment. Need an Infernal wolf? Load up the wolf character sheet, load the Infernal prefab, and add the abilities to the wolf. Voila! done. Buy it NOW. You'll be glad you did.

Re: Weapon Damage in Traveller Hero That must be why the EB rather than RKA choice, seeing them done that way for Star Hero and Terran Empire. (It's been a LONG time since we did those write-ups; I really don't remember now.) FGMPs SHOULD do an insane amount of damage. IIRC, in CT even rolling minimum damage (all 1's) is an all-but guaranteed kill on a character, and average damage will take out most vehicles, even armored ones. As to Challenge magazine, I was one who was very disappointed by it. I did NOT want to pay more for so many pages of non-Traveller stuff, and let my subscription lapse after something like 2 issues. I do miss the Journal; great magazine.

Re: Weapon Damage in Traveller Hero Most of the weapon write-ups that I did were conversions from CT. These were in fact mostly straight ports over from Dark Champions, using the "Antique Equivalents" sections from the LBBs to tell me which DC weapon to grab. Some of the weapons are from later editions, which I don't have. In those cases, other authors did the conversions and I just worked them up in Hero Designer. I don't remember now why the Plasma/Fusion Guns were done as EBs rather than RKAs. I'm pretty sure that every time I've seen them written up they were done that way.

Re: Starting over AND Hero Designer! :thumbup:

Re: TE Starship Design Theory Nolgroth, for the ship construction system you may want to take a look at Traveller Hero. The simple construction system there is converted from Traveller's, which meets most of your criteria. It includes (in Hero terms) all the various components that go into a starship. We didn't do anything about changing vehicle combat, but the construction system may help you.

Re: Starting over Penn, welcome to the board! You have a lot of work ahead of you, but there are a couple of things that can help. First, RIGHT NOW, buy Hero Designer, if you haven't already. It's a STEAL for only $25, and it will make your life MUCH easier. It is so very easy to use, and makes creating whatever is in your head go very quickly indeed. You can also pick up the character pack for the Bestiary for a song, to give you monsters ready to use. Second, for your Fantasy Hero game, let me echo what keyes_bill said. The beautiful thing about Hero is that you aren't limited by the system. Consider getting away from the D&D magic system, and letting your imagination run wild. I'm starting a Turakian Age game, using that book and the 2 Fantasy Hero Grimoires, and it is going to be a blast. I happen to really like the magic system Turakian Age uses, and I think my (so-far-only-one) magic-using player is going to, too. Give it a look, if your budget will stretch that far (I know that problem; it's why I don't have Post-Apocalyptic Hero yet).

Re: Spell Storage Items Another possibility might be to use Delayed Effect (rather than Trigger) as the Naked Advantage. Seems like that would give you the same result: cast the spell into the item and it holds it for you. Now I have to go make one of these for my Turakian Age players to find....

Re: What books are good for ships Comstar also has some more Traveller Hero books, the Golden Age Starships series. Check them out at http://www.comstar-games.Com

Re: Minor correction in Traveller Hero Book 1 Me either, really. I think I used them for one passing encounter. Ironically, I didn't notice until after I'd worked them up that the writeup in JTAS specifically says they're NOT suited for player characters ("Jgd player characters are out of the question"). They're simply too alien.

Re: Minor correction in Traveller Hero Book 1 I think that crept in when I first started working that race up. In the document that I scanned from the Contact! articles, the race name shows as "THE JGD-LL-JAGD " in the title of that section. More than likely, it scanned that way and I never caught it.

Re: HTH combat questions Maybe I missed it earlier in the thread, but I think there's one point overlooked: If both characters are the same SPD, and the defender (successfully) Blocks, he AUTOMATICALLY goes before the attacker on their next Phase (5ER, page 383). Thus, using a Block at least creates the possibility of breaking the stalemate.

Re: Suleiman-class Type-S Scout/Courier Deckplans LOVE these deck plans, Alathan. My vote would go to the Far Trader; that's a ship I used a lot in various Traveller games over the years.

Re: First Impressions of Traveller Hero If you roll up a character by Traveller rules then use the Traveller Hero conversion rules to turn him into a Hero character, an older character may have more points than a younger one, due to more skills. Of course, his Characteristics are likely to be lower due to aging. Was that what you meant?

Re: Alien Stereotypes Take a look at Terran Empire, if you don't already have it. It has a lot of other races to use. Not much in the way of stereotypes that haven't already been mentioned, but some interesting races there.

Re: Genie A slightly radical thought, but you might not have to use either Follower or Summon. Reasoning from effect, the Genie is just the special effect for what he can do for you. You could just buy the powers you want, and put the Genie as the Focus Limitation on them. The Focus might even be Inaccessible, if it can teleport back to you. Probably also with Gestures (since you have to open the bottle) and perhaps Incantations, since you have to give the Genie his orders. Just a couple of things to think about...

Re: help with building powers Might want to give a similar bonus to Concealment Skill. I'd give it an additional Limitation "Only To Conceal Self, -½" since it's for hiding yourself, not concealing other objects.

Re: Spell Active/ Real Cost in Average Games I have to agree with everyone else, it isn't just the point costs that matter. I'm starting a Turakian Age game, using the published Grimoires as my magic system. There is a wide range of Active Point costs just in the books. For the game I'm going to run, several spells are far too powerful and I will be toning them down. Others, even with high Active Point costs, just aren't that powerful. I suspect they will either get ignored entirely or that I'll be asked to re-write them to make them more useful. Because of the Requires A Skill Roll Limitation, and the default for it being -1 per 10 Active Points, I prefer to see spells in the 10-60 Active Point cost range, but you still have to judge each spell individually for effectiveness.

Re: [Review] Fantasy Hero Grimoire I I'm starting up a new Turakian Age game soon, and we're going to ues both Grimoires as is. I've run Fantasy Hero before, but not the Turakian Age. In particular, I've never run FH with Cost Multipliers, and I'm curious to see how that works out. I only have one player who wants to be a mage anyway, so I think it will work well enough. He doesn't have to work up his own spells, and I don't have to work through deciding whether to approve them. We probably will be adding spells to the various schools, if we decide that there are spells that are appropriate but missing.

Re: Monk One of the characters in the Turakian Age game I am starting is a monk (a Drakine monk, at that). He wanted to have several of the Ch'i powers from Ultimate Martial Artist, which fit very well with his character concept. I decided to allow him the same Cost Multiplier (1/3) for these powers that the mages get for their spells in the standard Turakian Age system. He didn't go crazy buying the powers, and it looks like they will not be unbalancing. He has plenty of other things to spend experience on anyway, so I don't expect the powers will get so high-powered that I have to rein him in. If you have UMA, take a look at the various abilities there; I think those might fit well for you.