Terminal

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Next team: The Byters, a four-member team specialising in data theft from big corporations, through both subtle and violent means.

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! I hear in the popular press that 'aliens' are a plague. They are an evil tide of mucosal menace, sloshing noisomely about in the cauldron of species that already inhabit our world. And if we don't deal with them, if we don't drive them out, the panic-mongers cry, then we are doomed. DOOMED! Poppycock. Marvellous creatures, all of them. Though perhaps not for the reasons you think. Some seek to understand them. Others see them as fellow travellers, beings with the same rights, the same aspirations as our own. There are many who believe that they bring something unique to our lives, and should be protected. I am in the latter group. And the thing I believe they bring to our lives? Ingredients. Keep your beefsteak. Enjoy your barbecue ribs, savour your coq au vin if you will. For myself? I like nothing more than flank of ransai, slowly chargrilled then slathered in a sauce made from its own barrier mucus. Flesh, bones, organs, every part of every alien menace is a new and unique culinary opportunity. And I, The Gustator, shall savour them all. Mastery of my enemies' endocrine systems, I can turn their bodily processes against them, paralysing with a touch, turning their nervous system into a jangling conductor of pain, causing their own digestive juices to consume them from within. It is not pretty, but it is effective. And it makes their flesh so very, VERY tender...

I ran a short (and heavily combat-centric) game in which each player had a different armoured 'battle-suit', carrying a variety of rockets, lasers, mobility powers and HTH weapons. All they did was fight their way into an unmanned production facility, defeating automated defences and autonomous sentry robots, while reloading and up-arming their suits from the debris and equipment they found. None of the players realised (or they didn't say if they did), but it was tightly based on a popular platform video game of the period (late '80s I think). It collapsed in an unwieldy heap because I was trying to use the old ICE Tech Law combat system, scaled down (and sideways) for the setting. Anyone else ever based RPGs on video games? Successfully or otherwise?

Re: What's a good way to learn the game? Best way to learn combat (and ain't that the hardest part) is to grab a couple of Normals and have 'em fight barehanded. When that gets boring (won't take long), give one of them a knife. Then give one a gun and the other some body armour. THEN try making a character with just a handful of points, twenty or so, who could survive such a duel. Once you've got the basics, leave the book open at the manoeuvres page and try out a few. And if I were running a new system that neither I nor any of my players were familiar with, I'd knock out a few simple characters and play out a one-night adventure with them ("You're off-duty cops on a road trip into the Rockies. After a few beers, you decide to haze the rookie of the group by leaving him tied to a tree outside. You let him freeze for an hour, then come out to discover he's gone, there are strange footprints in the snow and the ropes have been burned through. What do you do?") There's nothing quite like a bunch of curious players to really steepen that learning curve.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Death Tribble's avatar is far better than mine. THis is thanks to the years he spent apprenticed to Van Gogh, cleaning his brushes and hiding his kitchen knives.

Re: Alternate terms for "superhumans"? They were always 'freaks' or 'superweirdos' in my game. But I think that was more a reflection on the characters' personalities than the fact they had powers.

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? Low fantasy campaign: I used 'schools' of magic (basically mirroring the Rolemaster magic schools) and had required limitations on them (must be zero End and have verbal components for priestly, must cost End and require expendable foci for personal magic, must be ego-based for mind magic). Then slather on the extra limitations (mostly extra time and rituals) and you end up with reasonable spell power for under 5 points, but it takes half an hour and a crateload of eye of newt to make it work. Then the casters increase their power by slowly buying off the limitations. Meanwhile, the fighters are buying CSLs by the bucketload, keeping things nice and balanced. It's working well, largely thanks to the players staying very much in the spirit of things.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... So many: "You see the tyre tracks of a blue van." On meeting a Small Chinese Magician: "What's your problem, scuzzball?" SCM: "You DARE insult me? What is this 'scuzzball'?" "It's a small Chinese man who can perform great feats of magic." SCM "Yes. I am Scuzzball!" And from a character trying to physically block the effects of a magical crystal: "I get between myself and the crystal ball."

Re: Two-weapon fighting Leaning towards the headslap solution right now... Thanks all; confirms my thoughts. May I indulge your patience with a follow-up question? TWF simply makes for more favourable modifiers to a Sweep manoeuvre, the implication being that the attacker uses two weapons. But what if the attacker wields, say, a broadsword and a knife. He wants to make three strikes (or four, or five). What determines WHICH of the weapons he uses for each strike? Can he make one strike with the little dagger, then declare that the other two (three, four) are with the honkin' big broadsword? For that matter, there is no stipulation that ANY of his attacks must be made with the off hand; it is simply implicit (and will be enforced by me!) What restrictions, besides common sense and dramatic effect, apply to which weapon is used for which strike? Thanks

I'm struggling to convince one of my players that the mechanics of sweep-with-TWF are identical to those of sweep. While he agrees that sweep gets -2 per attack after the first, he believes that the first two rolls of a sweep manoeuvre by a character with TWF should receive NO penalty, regardless of the total number of attacks, i.e. 4 attacks = OCV modifiers of 0, 0, -2, -4. I cannot convince him that all four attacks are at -4. He is led to this belief by the following from 5th ed. revised, page 74: "-it allows the character to ignore the first -2 OCV modifier when making his first two attacks. (In other words, the character's first two Attack Rolls are at no OCV penalty; any Attack Rolls thereafter in the same Phase are at a cumulative -2 OCV per Attack Roll)." The mechanics of the Cumulative modifier are clearly stated under sweep. Unfortunately, he is fairly fixed on that phrase "...first two Attack rolls are at no OCV penalty", and will not accept that this is only if making exactly two rolls and no more. Is he right?