CorpCommander

Re: Paying Points for Equipment...

Re: Recreational Drugs What time period are you talking about? Recreation drugs have varied over the years with trends going for 5-15 years or cycles. From my memory (which i have because I never took the damn things) here is what I remember: Reds, speed, pcp, LSD, H, low THC content weed are the 60's nd 70's. Coke, Hashish (isn't this just weed though?) are late 70's early 80's drugs. Designer coke seems to have dominated the news in the 80's until finally it became so expensive that suddenly people rediscovered Weed which was then manipulated into high THC content. Also becoming popular were Thai Stick and Crack. LSD makes various come backs. Early 90's druggies rediscover Heroin. Why? All the old Heroin junkies are dead. Excepts Keith Richards. The 90's also saw E (aka Ecstasy, et al.) Did I miss any major ones? Probably. I am sure someone here will help add to the list. I don't know much about opium, amphetemines, absinth or mushrooms. Of those I only saw mushrooms used once in college. The others are pretty old drugs, no? Today drug abusers seem to like Oxi Cotin (Hillbilly Heroin) and lots and lots of anti-depresants. Apparently and anti-siezure med I was on, Neurontin, has serious street value. I have no idea why. While it was great at stopping siezures it was also very good at nulling out emotions (you don't get too sad or too happy while on it.) Some drugs don't have a physical effect but can encourage violence, wild mood swings, disreality, phantom voices and so forth. When I had bad insomnia once I was given Ambien. You've probably seen the commercial for it on TV. Nice stuff. Sure gets you to sleep. Next day you wake up and YOU DON'T GIVE A DARN about anything. This isn't a side effect for everyone but in my case it was a real motivation killer. 4 hours after waking it would lift that mood. I gave up all those medications for more natural methods like exercise, eating right and stuff like that. (In my case I was in a bad accident and had a head injury which caused me to need all of those things. I'm 100% reovered now, 6 years later.) Lots of anti-depresants have a side effect of depression. No, really, look it up. Go to webmd, they have tons of great writeups! For the anti-depressants also note that some stay in your system for months or years. Celexa and Welbutrin are two I remember still occationally feeling the effects of 6 months after I'd stopped taking them. Oh and lets not forget just about every drug suppresses sexual function and desire. Sort of Dr. Darwin's way of saying, stop taking drugs! So, hopefully there is some fodder in here for you to work with. I take it you are trying to do a comedy adventure? Just kidding!

DU rounds Lets be specific. DU rounds are those utilizing U-238 (aka Uranium Hexafloride, aka UF6.) Several watchdog groups have been complaining about the environmental impact of DU. I was surprised to see that there is a 7.62 DU round! They also come in 20, 25, 30, 105 and 120mm sizes. I would not be surprised if these small calibur rounds have an 'X' designation in front of them. The flechete round for the M-79 was widely deployed in Vietnam and retained the 'X' designation for several years. The difference between it being "offically" deployed or not was really a matter of paperwork. According to DoD at the time it was in field tests. Some field test when you are shipping tons of munitions over to a combat zone! Anyway that said, I actually can't find *any* ammo designation even for the experimental version of the ammo in question. My conclusion is it isn't as wide spread as I had believed before I looked into it. I couldn't even find anything official on the Barrett having a DU round. The 'watchdog' groups mentioned above lost me with thier screaming rhetoric so now I am begining to doubt them as well. I will go back to my source and see what he has to say on the subject matter.

Re: What kind of Star Hero 'teams' are you gaming? I've been working on and off again on a sort of post apocalyptic game. Its not as depressing as the Mad Max world or as desperate as the world of LA in 2029 in Terminator. Its more along the lines of wierd like the Logan's Run TV show from when I was a kid (and many of you weren't yet a gleam in Mommy's eye!) I've got a technically backward population that covers most of the world with a few vault dwellers whose job it is to go out and tame the wasteland and bring order back. Its The Morrow Project meets Parinoia meets any of dozens of Post Apocalyptic Utopia stories. --Pete

grenades

DU .50 cal rounds I spoke last year with a Marine who was using this ammunition and said its a godsend. Extreme penetration capabilities. Does a number on APC's and hard cover. As far as he was concerened hard cover like bricks and earth stop every small calibur bullet out there but the DU .50's could penerate. He was in for over 10 years and had decent experience with a wide variety of weapons. Also, if the Marine Corp is getting it then every armed forces group has it - the Marines are tough but they get the worst junk when it comes to weapons usually. Unless its dangerous/untested - then the Marines get it first. or so I am told. :-) I personally haven't seen it in action but I respect his opinion and he felt was exceptionally effective. YMMV. Oh and on another subject, someone earlier mentioned a M203 GL being used at a range of 7 feet. This has to have been a mistype. The leathal radius for the standard dual purpose round is greater than that and also the round has a mechanism that uses its rotation to figure out how far it has traveled. It won't unsafe until its gone at around 10 meters. There was a famous case of an M203 going off indoors during the 1st Gulf War. It hit a wall and went dud because of this mechanism. Perhaps the subject in question was 27-37 feet away.

Re: Paying Points for Equipment... Resource points, hmmm. Haven't been following DC's development. I'll give it a look when it comes out (and have been thinking of buying it anyway.) As for the VPP it lacks the major limitation VPPs have - active points limitation. I saw a Star Trek phaser that was written up as a 180 active points. Some of the equipment I want to give to my party will also have high active cost offset by appropriate limitations. I'll have to run this past my group and see what they think. --Pete

Re: Paying Points for Equipment... mudpyr8, thats a fantastic idea! Let me develop it a little further. What you seem to be talking about is a new kind of framework. One whose benefits are similar to multi-powers and vpp. No cost break is assumed and its not an infinitely variable vpp either. Lets call it the Equipment Framework for now. EF for short. Critique this. Lets develop this idea. I think its a good one and it definitely solves a problem I have in another setting I am developing. Another, semi-related idea is having players with index card boxes. The box represents the EF and the index cards are the equipment. To equip a player pulls the cards they need out of the box. They can't reequip without returning to their equipment store. There might be cost breaks for differentiating your EF as a back pack versus a fixed bank vault. I am sure that there are lots of offsets to any storage situation. A backpack can't hold as much as a bank vault but its right there - you just have to drop it and go through it. Its also unsecure so you can be robbed. It might be too restrictive visualizing the EF as a physical storage space because people tend to have lots of places to store stuff (trunk of car, pockets, base arms locker, etc.) Anyway, worth brainstorming on!

Re: Divine Powers Zeropoint, those are both cool. I like the luck thing because for really weak Gods that would be a perfect way of doing their abilities. "After the Druid clears the vine from the Oak a Dryad appears and sprinkles pixie dust, roll 3d6 of Luck." Sure, nothing may happen but its a freaking tree Goddess. The VPP is neat but requires a conflict of interest with the GM. The GM is all knowing and seeing of course and is hard pressed on their duty to offer a challenge to the players. Though I suppose the player could offer up a prayer and thus give hints to the God what they want. "Dear God, it would be really nice if that bugbear were smited with a 12d6 NND bolt from the blue. Amen." :-)

Re: Name My Character... Having lived in the City of Boston here are some things the Boston Herald would come up for names: Instead of Boston Brontosaurus you'd have the Beacon Hill Brontosaurus if they wanted to portray him against the working man. The Southie 'Saurus if he was against the posh yuppies. The Green Monster II if he used a light pole as a bat! (it wouldn't matter if he was green either.) Especially if he swung and missed everytime but still sat on his laurals from 1918 when he once hit something... but I digress on a bitter pill. Dunkin' Dinosaur! If he destroyed a donut establishment. The Fenway Flamer. This requires a certain knowlege of Boston. Assuming the dragon has a breath weapon there is the obvious connection. The thing to know is that the Fenway is an area of the Charles River with high reeds, gardens and benches and is frequented by vagrants, muggers and (the important bit) men seeking other men for "anonymous contact" (ahem! and that is as subtle as I can put it.) So the other possible meaning should now be obvious. Lechemere Lizard (Lechemere is a stop on the Boston 'T' subway system, specifically the Greenline (!) near Science Park in Cambridge (leading to a possible origin story.) Its also near the Charles and Mystic Rivers (see the movie Mystic River) and is near enough to a high crime area that you'd be in business right away! Wow, what a roll!

Re: Divine Powers Your Gods did not grant you the power to percieve it correctly. Anyway, you reinforce my point that there are various ways of depicting divine magic - specifically powers that come from worshiping a powerful entity. Further questions become: is that entity part of the creative force of the universe or is it just some really powerful mage. In the "Iron Kingdoms" setting the clerics of Cryx get their power from a very powerful dragon who is a self proclaimed God. Is this dragon just redirecting his own immense arcane abilities or are the powers he grant actually God like? Clearly this is up to the GM. One could find a lot of different ways of making divine magic different from arcane. How about forcing all divine spells that work at range to be indirect and not eminating from the caster? That little special effect makes it obvious it isn't the caster's power but the caster calling on the God's power and enhances the knowlege that the God is seperate from the caster. That is just one system. Certainly there are examples in history, description of miracles if you will, where so and so God worked through their vessel on Earth. Lets look at a case of someone being granted divine powers: Joan of Arc. What powers was she given? Protection, Healing and an immense presence attack (think of the view of women at the time and realize this 5'4" girl shows up at the age of 19 and commands men and generals to follow her the very first day she showed up in camp.) Mainly she had a few powers that were somewhat constant (though the presence attack wore off by the time she got to the walls of Paris.) And a few big miracles that she had no control over that were oneshot deals. She's actually easily modeled in Hero. And she doesn't have a list of spells that cost 1/3rd real. ;-) --Pete

Re: Dark Champions Campaigns I'd love to run or be in a campaign based on Steakly's novel Vampire$. For those not in the know, Vampire$ is about a secret organization of normals with cool gear that hunt supernatural threats. They are in part directed and financed by the Catholic Church and at one point find out there is a werewolf devision... Life span is rather short for these guys. The vampires are smart, fast, strong and viscious so the characters have to come up with equipment ideas on dealing with them. Also, town folk tend to turn against them since no one wants knowlege of these things getting out. Picture the mayor in Jaws with a really bad mean streak and you get the picture somewhat. A really awful movie by John Carpenter was made sort of based on the book. Ignore it. James Woods was OK as Crow but overall the story got hollywoodified. The book is suspensful, funny and well thought out.

Re: Name My Character... Barney Fluffy Snoot Cuddles the Dwagon hey, it aint easy being green. At least with names like those he'll be constantly underestimated which you can use to your advantage.

Re: Paying Points for Equipment... This is how I do it. I think having points gives a nice limitation on character creation, but once a fantasy or scifi game gets going where you can buy equipment it becomes important to not worry about points but limiting what players can get easily. For example the local city square with the big market area: do you allow them to just sell +1 swords? I don't. you can hardly find anything useful in the market beyond normal usefulness in my game. Food, rope, polls, prosaic weapons, etc. Magic items/weapons in my world all have history and often times curses of one form or another. How about a powerful sword that warns you of ambushes, but everywhere you go you end up IN ambushes (with some warning!)? Party leader to sword holder - "Lose that thing!" hehe! I typically have wierd magic weapons - not ones that are just extra accurate or sharp. You'd want to keep dear old dad's sword because its more balanced in utility. The magic stuff you'd only find A) in a crypt in the hands of someone who likely won't want to part with it. Also, since the magic weapons are very rare and unique they identify the holder to some degree. "You see a woman in chain upon a mighty charger. she is bearing a The Flaming Sword - you thus recognize her as the Red Handed Kin Slayer Kristin, "widowed" wife of King Cormeer and daughter to the highland chieftan of Suchandsuch kingdom." Want a magic sword? You can trade for it. Trade blows that is! Have at you. So basically I make magic special. Its powerful and hard to come by. Once you've come by (and that ain't easy) it you can either deal with the curse laid upon it and/or deal with the reputation of the item. One thing that is fun to do is come up with 20 unique magical items for your world. Develop a short history for each. Place them either in very hard to get to places, in dark and dangerous crypts or in the hands of very powerful and protective heroes/anti-heroes in your world and then let the players find out about the magic items via rumors and what not. The adventures practically write themselves. Note who in the world would want such an item, who has it or how it is otherwise hard to get and then draw conclusions from there. The thieves guild, if there is one in your world, is going to be a major problem for the party if they run around with anything obviously powerful and live in tents in the woods or stay at the cheap 1 copper inn outside the town walls! As for crafting of magic items, make that a life time study that precludes adventuring so party members can't make their own stuff easily. The will have to find some extra ordinary materials and go to an enchanter. Anyway those are some ideas.

This is a crosspost from a tangent in a discussion on the Company Questions board... -------- Is there going to be a book for FH covering Divine magice? Monks, priests, paladin and druid types? I'd love to see that. I thought I read somewhere something like that was in planning.

Re: Turakian Age: Drakine Population Dynamics Well sign me up for that! How can Male Draks go to war? They must be exhausted!

Re: Japan-based Fantasy HERO If you want a head start, get Senjoku from Gold Rush Games. It can be pretty easily ported to Hero. It is a FANTASTIC reference material as well. Samurai is my favorite period. I have hundreds of Samurai figures and I wrote the miniatures game "Japanese Art of War." Its a wonderful and long time period with incredible history. The mythology is rich and can be and should be combined with chinese and Indian mythology. Though we view Japan as Isolationist, one cannot fully understand Japanese history without understanding Chinese and Korean history as well. In the last D20 game I was in, I had a character from Oriental Adventures. That was fun to play.

Re: Using Attack Roll as Burnout Roll

Re: German Super Baby Proves Champions is Right I was shocked when late in the day no one else mentioned this story. It truely is remarkable how double edged this information will be in the coming years and, frankly, is great fodder for any Champions background. The same treatment that cures MD can also be used to create Super Strong humans for good or evil purposes. --Pete

Ok, bizare topic title but here is the even more bizare news story. http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/06/24/muscle.gene.ap/index.html Seems there IS a way to make very strong people with a genetic mutation. At first I thought this news story was a joke... but truth is sometimes stranger than fiction!

Re: Sci-Fi Game or Porno Flick? Leave it to an elitist yankee from Ohio to come up with something offensive like that. Maybe at Origins me an all the other boys from Tennessee can tell you what we think of your sense of humor.

Re: Hero Designer v2 - Helpful or Hurtful For newbies I would say that HD is very useful. If anything its a good proof reader for legality of your design. The drawbacks are heavily outweighted by the benefits. The biggest problem is controlling powergamers. However that is more the juristiction of the GM and not the software. Compared to doing it by hand on paper, there is no doubt using HD is much more fun. It reduces the complexity of character design and gives people the ability to ask "what if?"

Re: Repulsion

Re: Repulsion TK only for pushing... now that sounds like a plan! Thanks! I love this board.

I'd like to recreate the spell "Repulsion" from ("sheilds up Mr. Checkov") D&D. I've thought of force fields, strength draining and a couple of other schemes. I am currently thinking it is best to set it up as Teleportation, usable on others, only for the purpose of repelling enemies from approaching. I don't know. Kinda ran out of ideas on this one. I am going to guess that someone has already done this. Thanks,