Diamond Spear

Will anyone be able to be on chat tonight?

I think we should leave politics out of it.

Feeling under the weather at the moment but still planning on playing coordinator. Was thinking about trying to get as many of the interested people together in the chat room either Thursday or Friday night after 7pm EST. Can people make it?

As long as people don't find it presumptuous I'll go ahead and start figuring out whose volunteered for what and get started on a basic flowchart/ task list. Should only take me a day or two. Any objections?

If you still need someone to coordinate I'd be happy to help. My day job is office administrator so I'm used to that kind of thing.

I should have also mentioned that the force field would be 0 END to activate/maintain when not taking damage.

How would I construct the following? I want a force field that runs off of a battery (END Reserve I know) and every time the force field is hit with BODY from a Killing Attack it has to use an amount of END equal to the BODY damage to stay powered up. Example 1) a 6 PD force field with an END Reserve of 18 is hit by a Killing Attack that does 4 points of BODY damage. The force field remains at 6 PD and the END Reserve is reduced to 14. Example 2) a 6 PD force field whose END Reserve has been reduced to 3 is hit by a Killing Attack that does 4 points of BODY damage. The force field is now reduced to 5 PD because only 3 points of END were available. Any additional BODY damage from Killing Attacks will further reduce the force field until it is reduced to zero or the END Reserve gets a Recovery. How exactly would you build this power? Help!

Thank you very much.

Thank you for saying what I wanted to say better than I said it.

Sorry guys, I think that I may have given the wrong impression. I was more making a post to see what people would think about a game run in such a setting not about me sitting down and writing up a full setting. I guess my "defense" of my first post did a poor job of making that clear. Sorry.

First of all, thank you for your response. I don't think, however, that “That ship has sailed” really describes the situation. I appreciate that you are working on a similar idea and will absolutely take a look at it with an eye towards seeing if I can make a meaningful contribution to it, however my idea differs in a few key ways. First I'm looking at much more of a “kitchen-sink” setting especially considering the inclusion of Vikings. Secondly I'm looking at a much less, I guess “structured” would be the word, setting. I'm going for more of a floating concept to be customized by how any individual game progresses rather than a completely mapped out and stated out setting. Secondly, and I'm basing this more on other posts I've read about your setting rather than a perusal of the actual Gazetteer, the games/setting that I'm envisioning is much more High Fantasy/Swashbuckler/Spies and Intrigue than what you're doing. Thirdly, the cultures, empires, etc. are based much more on our popular perception of those cultures rather than the reality of those cultures. For instance, historical pirates were really not nice people but our modern perception of them in fiction is much less objectionable. Another example would be the fact that most people, not being history majors, have only a vague idea of what the great native empires (Aztec, Inca, etc.) of the Americas were like and for my idea that works just fine as such cultures can be expanded on and described in each individual game. I think the major difference between our ideas is that what I'm talking about is a general type of game and what you're working on is an actual setting for a game. Neither idea is superior they're just different ways of approaching things. Does that make sense? EDIT: Skimming over your map and Gazetteer you seem to be developing a setting that is not the "real world" while what I'm proposing is setting adventures in a fictionalized version of our actual, real world. EDIT THE SECOND: Your work is strictly a different version of Africa while I'm talking about the Caribbean and the Americas so a completely different thing. Going back to your first sentence I'm thinking our ships are sailing in completely different directions.

Fantasy Hero seems to be the perfect springboard for a game set in the Age of Exploration. A little tweaking of history and instead of the Age of Exploration resulting in, well the events that actually transpired, perhaps you end up with the cultures of the Americas being able to meet the Europeans on equal or near equal military/technological terms. Or perhaps the inhabitants of the Americas have built their empires based on magic which the Europeans are completely unprepared for. Moving the time up by a century or so and the Age of Piracy becomes not an offshoot of, and side-show to, the wars in Europe and the European settlement/exploration of the Americas, but perhaps the Caribbean is the place where the dominate powers of Europe and the Americas meet to trade, negotiate, spy, raid and trade, all in the hopes of gaining some advantage over their cross-ocean rivals as well as the countries right next door. If you want to add even a little bit more to the mix perhaps the Viking cultures never accepted Christianity and were able to settle the northern part of North American, modern day Canada and the northern-most parts of the United States. Vikings allied with Northern native tribes could make for formidable foes. Plus the thought of a Viking longship armed with cannon and packed with musket wielding Vikings is both terrible and glorious. And if runic magic actually works.... So what do you guys think? Any additional suggestions? Directions such alternate history might take? Is this a nifty idea worthy of a game or just silly?

The most important thing to keep in mind about HERO is that all the work (or at least the vast majority of it) is front-loaded. The second most important thing to remember, or maybe even 1A is that "Just because you CAN stat something out in HERO doesn't mean you SHOULD". My favorite example of this is when I tried to stat out the sisters from Charmed; I was basing them on 150 points and having the devil's own time stating out Piper's Time Stop power. After an hour on the phone with a friend I hit on a brilliant solution: I wrote out a description of the power based on what it's shown doing in the show including its effects, its limits, who/what was immune to it and gave it a cost of 75 points. All this without creating a stat block for it because I realized two things: 1)Even in HERO it was impossible to exactly recreate and 2) There was no need to. Half the character's point budget was a reasonable cost for the game. Problem solved.

Yup that works well.

Thoughts on the second half of my post?

How exactly does one "base" a dead "house"? I'd love to see the write up on that. On a more serious note perhaps several of us could get together and work up some "cleaner" introductory material.

I do see your point and agree that a cleaner presentation is desirable.

Just had another thought. You could run the game in an "Age of Exploration" setting. Magellan, Drake, the Conquistadors that kind of thing. You can run very personal adventures that can still take place on a larger world stage and manage to scratch both your itches at the same time.

Read up on Renaissance Italy and you should be able to come up with a ton of ideas for a more "local" campaign. Even just some cursory research will give you some idea of the tensions between various merchant/political/family factions. Throw in a Church that is powerful but beginning to be challenged for primacy by more secular powers and away you go. Intrigue, power-grabs, exploration to find distant lands full of exotic goods (Marco Polo anyone) all make for good but non-world shaking adventures.

HERO Rapier: 1D6 Killing Attack, Armor Piercing (real weapon, OAF, STR Min 8) Hardly a paragraph.

If your character has a Code vs. Killing it makes no sense at all for him to have a Penetrating Killing Attack given that you WILL do BODY to almost anyone you hit with it.

The more I think about this power the more it concerns me since it comes off very much like the player is trying to never take damage. I'm not sure if that's what's happening here but I've played with people like that before and it seldom ends well. @Basic. How does this power tie in with the rest of the character concept? Why would it manifest? What is your intention in including it? How upset would you be if it were disallowed? Would you be willing to drop it for now and buy it with experience later once both you and Tom are more familiar with the rules? If not why not? I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I'm just trying to figure out how important the power is to the character as well as you as the player.

Our games have used pretty much the same house rules as the first response and they run just fine.

One other thing to consider is just not allowing the power, at least not to start. In my experience a lot of times when it takes this much discussion on a defensive power it turns out to be a problem power down the road. Heck, it doesn't even have to be a defensive power; I once let a player argue me into allowing a character with the following combination of powers: Flight, Invisibility with no fringe and a No Normal Defense Attack with invisible power effects. What I failed to realize was that the character could hover safely out of the way, no one could see them and no one could tell where thier attacks were coming from. It was EXTREMELY unbalanceing.

More or less. Again it's a genre convention that individuals with powers also have increased physical characteristics. Trying to make that make perfect sense with a particular background or trying to apply real world logic just gets in the way of the game. It kind of comes down to the fact that in a 400 point game characters NEED those increased characteristics to be playable. If you force Basic's character to have physical/combat scores consistent with his background than you're putting him in a situation where an average 250 point character could mop the floor with him without breaking much of a sweat. Can I ask if you've set the average and maximum values for your game other than total points yet?