CorpCommander

Re: Mottos for use in games

"When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow"

--common saying from Viet Nam

Re: Ninja Hero - Samurai vs. Ninja blood bath

Had a funny accident today while painting the ninja figures. I use some expensive paints that come in small, soft plastic squirt bottles. The flesh tone I use for asians apparently had become a bit stopped up. I shook it fiercly (this paint needs both the carrier and medium shaken excessively) and it wouldn't squirt onto my pallet. So I worked the nozzle off, used a thin wire and prodded it to clean out the dried up paint, reassembled it and tried it again...

To put this into context I was at my local hobby shop chatting with people while I paint. A guy named Ray was there. You probably know gamers who also ride motorcycles. Ray is a die hard biker who also games. Ray is one scary dude if you don't know him...

So there I am squeezing the bottle when all of a sudden it goes POP! The nozzle has exploded off and a cone of asian flesh tone catches me, the table, some figures... and Ray! I don't notice this last bit for a second as I am startled, say "Geez!" and start to look for a towel. It is then that I look 3 feet away and realize I got Ray from ass to neck line. Everyone in the room pauses until Ray breakes into a huge laugh! I don't think anyone else would have taken it so easily. What a mess it was. We all got as cleaned up as one can get. Ray said it perfectly - it will be a memory and a laugh.

The ninjas are coming along nicely. I should have them painted by tomorrow. The game will NOT be next weekend as they have some sort of Warhammer 40K thing going on but the weekend after. Gives me more time to prepare.

--Pete

Re: Ninja Hero - Samurai vs. Ninja blood bath

May I .sig this?

Absolutely. Glad you liked it!

Re: Ninja Hero - Samurai vs. Ninja blood bath

I am hoping it will be. I am doing some intersting things lately with a GM-less encounter system. Older players might remember a great solo game that came out years ago called "Ambush!" by Victory Games. It was a psuedo RPG/Tactical game in which you squad had missions and you did paragraph lookups as you traversed the map. It simulated enemy alertness (which often started off pretty low) along with changing battlefield conditions. After reverse engineering it (with the help of some old articles from "The General" magazine) I've come up with a new system more applicable to skirmish miniatures or RPGs. It is in the development stage. My goal is to have it more fleshed out by this summer but I have enough of it ready to play something next weekend.

Recently I've been trying to revive interest in Hero. 6th edition is steaming along and is the only RPG product of 2009 I am interested in. So I am thinking of doing a one off game to get people interested in it. Mainly my friends are war gamers as opposed to role players so getting them interested requires a bit of subtlety. Which to me has NINJA written all over it. Ninjas are the "b" in subtle!

OK so here is the game from a logistical point of view. I was just at Nashcon here in Nashville TN and Wargames LLC had a sale on Dixon miniatures. I discovered they had a TON of ninja figures! Good ones. So I picked up 8 of them for a buck each. I'll have those painted up by this weekend. I already have about 250 painted Samurai figures. I also have painted up several Japanese buildings.

Here is the game from an historical point of view. It is the nambuko-cho period, the early Muromachi era when, for a brief time, Japan had not one but two Emperors. There was the Southern Court and the Northern Court. Samurai and their vassals were split on who to support. One represented a dominant Emperor with Samurai clans in support, the other represented a dominant military family with the Emperor as figurehead. The first (the Southern Court) is the weaker but more sympathetic to the people in general. The Northern Court is more interested in regaining power and control. In a recent raid a strong Samurai with many vassals has moved against lands friendly to the Southern Court. In order to deny the Southern Court logistical support they have set up road blocks, burned crops and taken farmers from their lands. Little did they know that in their rampage they destroyed a small ryu of Ninja who were part of the Iga clan.

Here is the game from the player's point of view: It is time for some payback. The local daimyo is a real hot head. His hatomoto of body guards are all killing machines. A frontal assault would be suicide given that one on one the Samurai are better warriors and also that the hatomoto out numbers the Ninja by 8:1. However, they are Ninja. Ninja don't do frontal assaults. They don't call out challenges and face the enemy in one-on-one duels. They don't care a whit about honor (which really is just bragging rights, bling and respect gained through brutality.)

Using stealth, special fighting abilities, special and exotic weapons and gadgets, the Ninja team is to infiltrate the camp, find the Daimyo, kill him in a way no one will ever forget and get away. No one is innocent so if anyone is in the way between you and success then they must be overcome by any means at hand.

I am hoping to have my writeups, figures, and all things needed to run this done by next weekend. I am giving myself a tight deadling in order to help me get this thing done and not leave it as yet another half done project. If it goes well I will run it at Historicon.

Source material: Ninja Hero / Fifth Edition Hero System, revised

Sengoku, 2nd edition (Gold Rush Games)

Shinobi (Gold Rush Games)

If you don't have any of these I highly recommend them.

Re: Urban/Modern Fantasy Questions

Been running one for a while, based mostly on the Dresdenverse.

 

http://www.the-wild-hunt.org/dresdenverse/index.html

Really, Really well done! I am very much impressed!

Re: 6th Ed Champions Universe

I swear' date=' where people come up with some of this stuff boggles me.[/quote']

 

I'm voicing a concern - seriously, what bad manners. This is an open forum. Too bad you don't like what I have to say. So take your boggled mind and march off.

 

I would bet many of those changes discussed will become reality. The fact is, even with all the discussion mayhem, most of them make sense.

 

2nd - Steve's been at this for a year now. 6th edition is not years away - the man is a writing machine. Every time he's had one of these discussions it was not long after that a new book was out.

 

My concern is with the new edition is coming a new direction and I don't want to invest in something that isn't going to support it. That is not unreasonable. I found your comment rude and unjustified.

Re: 6th Ed Champions Universe

...And keep in mind that just because 6th edition comes out that doesn't mean that all of the 5th edition books are suddenly obsolete...

That was true for Champions to 5th edition, but, 5th to 6th edition is a remarkable departure with several fundamental changes. No "build" will survive. Basic concepts are changing or even going away. Some I could care less about (like COM) - others are much more disruptive.

Book of the Machine sounds like it will have a lot of character and equipment builds in it. I would assume they would target designs for 6th and give stats in an appendix for 5th. For the first color book I would expect that especially if it is a harbinger of what is to come. I would want it to be 6th edition centric because I think the changes proposed are fantastic and I want the company to show equal enthusiasm. Even though 6th edition is not out yet it will be. Let's face it: Steve Long is a Remorseless Writing Robot.

From what I can tell, of the changes as discussed, all of the books of vehicles, characters, powers and equipment are all essentially in need of reworking by me, the consumer, to use them in the new edition. To me that means obsolete. Maybe you have a different definition - which is fine. If I have to do work to get them to be useful I have no other word than obsolete to describe them.

I can make anything in those older books just from a description (ah the power of the Hero System.) I have them because they save time. Since I intend on going to 6th edition I am not going to buy new books that won't help me save time. For me their value is pretty simple and very profound: I have very limited time which means my free time is very valuable. If I have to invest 3+ hours of time to convert the data to 6th edition then that is a big loss to me.

Re: 6th Ed Champions Universe

Will the new books be 6th edition compatible? How is that being handled? I'm sure there are people like me who don't want to invest in something that will be obsolete in 12 months time.

Re: Clever Future Weapons

Nah, I've seen enough trauma up close to be able to make a good guess. But it would be pretty academic - you get a hole in even a secondary artery where you can't pinch it off and you're dead unless you're alreday in an operating theatre

Wait! Apply a tourniquet to the neck! and... oh... uh wait a minute.

Anyway. I am sure you snicker everytime someone says they want to give you a piece of their mind.

How many hexes away was your brother? Since it wasn't a properly aimed shot he didn't suffer the -8 OCV but got lucky on the location table. What kind of gun was it? One of those small rifles? So RKA 1D6+1? What do you estimate your rPD was at the time? :-)

Re: Clever Future Weapons

Still' date=' I wouldn't be around if the bullet had continued in - instead the slug ricocheted off the shattered bone and kind of skidded along the inside of the skull, eventually coming to rest up against the superficial temopral artery (back by my ear). A fraction of an inch more and I would have hæmorraghed to death in a couple of minutes.[/quote']

 

Probably seconds actually. See, it is all about shot placement. I was talking to a colonel that in Viet Nam got a ride from a guy that needed to be lifted by the crew into the pilots seat of his Slick. Upon inquiry he found out the guy was a hell of a chopper pilot and that he got hit by a .50 cal. in the gut. The shot took away most of his abdominal muscle but he managed to *fly the bird home*!

 

I have also heard of an SAS guy that got a 40mm round (big Air Defense round) and tossed about 10 meters. It hit his rucksack! No idea if the story is true - there is some controversy in the truth of the tale.

 

Anyway, I am very glad your brother had such lousy shot placement and that you've lived to tell your tale. Any follow on problems from the injury later in life?

Re: Clever Future Weapons

So a soldier armed with a laser rifle' date=' with dozens of settings for range, focus, pulse rate, frequency, and whatnot will be at a severe disadvantage to a soldier armed with an M-16 that just has a safety and a trigger.[/quote']

 

My M-4 has a safety - I point it at other people and I am safe. It also has a selector switch that sets the trigger from 0 to many bullets per pull.

 

I think the laser guy has the advantage though. By the time we get to having lasers all of that "manual crap" will be done automatically as registered by the signal return from the laser itself. There is zero time of flight, flat tragectory and little effect from trigger flinch. Honestly, I would not be happy knowing I was up against lasers with scopes. It takes a math genius to fire a sniper rifle at > 400 yards* - but a laser is point and shoot.

 

Just remember to shoot the guys in back first if you are elevated because all that mist and smoke from the burning and steaming will just blunt the force of the laser. Search and traverse boyos.

 

CC

 

*You have bullet drop, differing hights changing the hypotnuse of the bullet path, scopes marked in minutes of angle that you have to convert to inches at the estimated range, etc. Don't let video games tell you differently. You cannot "no-scope" in real life! :-)

Re: Mass Effect Campaign Setting

Equipment is a big deal in the game' date=' but for the tabletop I'd just work out the basics and make minor adjustments.[/quote']

 

Pretty much equipment differs by very small variations in attributes. There are various "Marks" of guns, forinstance that are only slight variations of each other.

 

To be really faithful each character should be able to carry a complete gunshop, with ammo, on their back with no endurance cost. I'd complete missions with something on the order of 30 guns to sell!

 

The nano-tech in the game is really interesting as a way to explain a lot of effects.

Re: Clever Future Weapons

If you want to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy to mess with your weapons' date=' you have to go back to throwing rocks at each other. [/quote']

 

Ok kill him as soon as possible.

 

I've been rather interested lately in the TDI Kriss Super V which takes the biggest problem automatic weapons have (muzzle climb) and turns the forces around in the weapon to keep it steady. While subguns are losing favor excepts for special forces I don't see why this can't be applied to a great range of weapons.

Re: If I were to write 6th edition Terran Empire I'd...

You would want some sort of simplified "mass" for equipment, not weight. Mass is affected by inertia. Magically reducing gravity or inertia would have the effect of making direct travel from here to there possilbe. Otherwise you have to rely on either hyperspace or warping space. I just read "The Hunt for Zero Point" by Nick Cook so the concepts are still fresh in my mind.

CC

P.S. the book is a great page turner and has lots of ideas for pulp but the science is mostly rubbish.

Re: Clever Future Weapons

Now that is frightening. How does a weapon like that distinguish friend from foe from innocent person trying to go about his business?

Avoid combat in built up areas that have not been evacuated yet. Unless you belong to an organization that doesn't care about collateral damage. In fact if you are an Afghan Warlord who doesn't like the current democratic based government in Kabul you might consider placing babies strategically around your meeting site in full view of the drone with the guns and missiles. I've personally seen that and you can easily find videos of such on the net.

How do you tell it to stop shooting in such a way that a savvy enemy can't fake the order? How do you stop eemy hackers from using it against your own troops?

Encryption and complex data streams. How many Predator drones have been co-opted by the enemy? None. Could the Chinese or Russians do it? They sure would like to try. The control setup is quite complex with bi-directional information streams with lots of interesting information. You'd need to steal both a drone and the control setup to figure out a way of decoding it. You could probably make some guesses as to what needs to be sent but without knowing the CRC methods you'd be unable to send the right commands.

What if unscupulous regimes use it to break up protests?

You can end that sentence at "unscrupulous regimes". As soon as you say that it doesn't matter what else is there. Unscrupulous regimes can make their own robots now. Heck the Chinese will have unmanned drones in Quiqdao for the Olympics' security. The Chinese have already tested unmanned ground based security robots in real crowds in the capital of Jinan this past July 4th. The future is now.

Check out the Foster-Miller TALON series of robots:

Re: Clever Future Weapons

MetalStorm and iRobot have teamed up. Now all they need to do is team up with a neural-linguistic vendor and pretty much the ultimate Cyberdyne model T-1s will be rolling off the assembly line.

I've seen the area defense MSgun in action and it is frightening. It tracks motion and smokes anything in it's field of view. I am sure they will have multiple barrels with various types of ammo to choose from; anti-personnel, anti-tank, anti-aircraft/missile... if protected well they would be better than mine fields at re-directing traffic!

Also, imagine the robot version and how that could be use for ambush...

Ambush along phase line alpha, fall back after contact to ridgeline beta, smoke the enemy as they crest the ridge in counter attack, move to phase line delta and repeat.

See this article for an example iRobot with a 40mm version of the MetalStorm gun: Metal Storm reaches Navy test range

Re: Happy 31rst Anniversary Traveller

That is cool. '77 huh? I got my copy in 1981. I gave it away earlier this year. I had a lot of fun in the 80's with it. You soooo needed Mercenaries and High Guard and Scouts in order to get the correct feel for the game but still, was lots of fun!

Re: Clever Future Weapons

Ok its been a while since my favorite thread has been active. Lets see what new life we can add.

So I recently came across some interesting reading on retro-sci-fi weapons that the German's are alleged to have developed. The so called Foo Fighters apparently were radio controled, radar invisible, HiRF weapons meant to bring down fighters by shutting down their engines. It is unclear that any of them actually worked. No example model craft has ever been displayed as an example Foo Fighter. The Feuerball as it was called by the Germans and of course we know of no known weapon system to be later derived from this.

Still though it made for interesting reading and neatly ties up pretty much all of the UFO history that's been made since the early 40's through today if one imagines that that branch of technology has been kept secret all this time.

Here is an example web site on the technology. Did it really exist? I think at best we have both speculation and one post-war written account. Judge for yourself.

http://discaircraft.greyfalcon.us/WNF%20Feuerball.htm

Re: If I were to write 6th edition Terran Empire I'd...

Ok so I've been spending more time delving into Terran Empire. I want to be fair and honest and since Steve has mentioned it on the front page I think it deserves that.

On Starships - the section there is quite modular and I have to give it credit for that. The issue I had and still have is there is an assumption that starships are like nuclear warships today - stock 'em up with fule for years of service at a time. The problem is, the scale of star travel is just crazy big. A close examination of the energy required to push even 1 ton of mass that far at those speeds is pretty daunting. So I see refueling and sticking close to travel lanes to be imperative. Having tenders would not be out of the ordinary or unexpected. In the post Civil War era the US had sea going iron clads that would be followed by coal supply ships!

Second, remove the size modifier. It's megascale so there isn't a point. The size of the ship at the scale distances we are talking about are millionths of minute of arc. Even something like the Death Star would be relatively small at long distance.

The modular system isn't bad - it is only limited by cost and point value perhaps.

The ATRI writeup isn't bad. In fact I like bit but I would like to see more specifics. They mention higher technology but don't really describe it. So I guess it is up the GM but it would be nice to see a little more specific detail here.

The package deals and the game element treatment are fantastic and I highly recommend the book for those sections as well.

The history section in the front is dry and I think that puts people off from the get go. There are plot seeds in the book near the back (GM's Vault of course) but I'd cut the history down to 2 pages from the 10 (illustrated) it currently occupies. Keep it simple. Start the book off with a 3 page short story instead to give the flavor.

Others have mentioned a few other points they would like to see updated and I agree with them. More NPCs. A few other tweeks. etc.

TE is a fun galaxy to play in. I recommend it. It will be exciting to see this mature package grow even more with 6th Edition Hero System.

The Deep Impact ship is still active and taking movies. Recently NASA released a short clip of the Moon passing in front of the Earth that is actually quite fascinating to watch. It is a sped up version of what I'd expect the forward view screen to show!

http://www.nasa.gov/mov/260503main_red_green_blue2.mov

Enjoy!

Re: If I were to write 6th edition Terran Empire I'd...

Point taken on the history being out of the box. I would rewrite it so it allowed for a bit more freedom and discretion of the GM. If it was pared back there isn't a reason in the world a GM couldn't stick with the older, more detailed history. It definitely needs to be less dry.

The point on NPCs is also a great one.

Since you wrote the book on vehicles. Literally. What would you do with the starship designs?

Finally I want to thank the original authors for the work they put into both Star Hero and Terran Empire. This discussion is about what can be built upon the shoulders of the work they have done.

Re: If I were to write 6th edition Terran Empire I'd...

One thing I would like to see happen with 6E core rules is that vehicles feel more like vehicles from design through use. There are great ideas in The Ultimate Vehicle and I'd like to see those rules become core. I'd also like to see more in the way of weight and space become an issue in design. Future tech levels that shrink/lighten components would then be more tied in. Maybe that is too far off kilter for the "big huge changes" coming for 6E but, hey, if we are getting rid of figured stats I would think anything could potentially be on the table!

Another change would be an addition to automatons. Right now the limit is 1 command per point of intelligence. So it could have 20 commands for 20 INT. But 20 INT for a player would be 4 times as smart as the average person. 20 simple commands just doesn't sound right. So I propose that a 0 INT automaton is a remote controled robot like a RQ-1+ Predator or bomb defusing robot. A 5 INT automaton relies on reacting to stimulus depending on what sensor are built into it and what purpose it is supposed to serve. So if it has camera eyes and it builds cars then it will weld what needs to be welded and bolt what needs to be bolted as it comes into its reach. Kiva Systems "drive units" are basically robots at this level of intelligence. INT 7 allows for robots that can free roam and have limited decision making capabilities (not enough for an armed robot but certainly good enough for trash collection, general maintenance, etc.) At 10 INT automatons can make decisions, discern things and make abstract leaps concerning its purpose. 15 INT the automaton is self-aware. 20 INT the automaton is seeking to take over the Universe...

1) design Starships that had fuel limitations. All of the TE ships have endurance reserves with full recovery every turn. I suppose this is nice for when the reserve is destroyed because you are using the advanced hit locations on vehicles table but it just never felt right to me.

2) I'd leave the description of the history as simplified as it is for the other races. What killed TE for me was trying to read the many pages of Terran history. I didn't find it compelling at all.

2b) I'd make it a lot less traveler like. Empress? No. Think ahead to some other weird futuristic government type such as some sort of machine run government super democracy and all the trouble that would ensue from that. Or anything really than what has already happened in history. Things move on, eventually. Let's be creative. Better yet lets leave it fairly ambiguous and let the GM figure out what works best.

3) More details on intergalactic dealings. Don't make the races clear cut allies/enemies.

4) Much more detail on what is and isn't in an ATRI class. I have a character from Zur that has "advanced technology" at ATRI 12. What, exactly, does that mean?

5) I already said less history - but I do want more plot hooks! Just brain storm a bunch of plot starters! Some other game did this years ago and I was forever grateful. I want to say Warhammer Fantasy Role Play but I am not sure. Anyway it would be nice.

I like TE and I am using it for my next campaign but these issues I've come up with are ones I am dealing with. Just my opinion, mind you. Now what would you change? I know that Star Hero and TE were not big sellers so maybe now with some expereince and a need to redo it for 6th Edition what would you change?

Re: Banned Supplement For Sale

Do they ever plan a follow up scenario where you have to keep the inmates from escaping a concentration camp in order to save them from some battle raging around the place?