UltraRob

Re: The First Hurdle: Creating a *gulp* Magic System I completely agree with this for anyone breaking in their group to HERO, I did it with one of my groups too. They had no HERO experience, so before I hit them with a big bad WuXia Fantasy Game I ran a simple quick superhero type campaign first. Worked like a charm, when the time came for the Fantasy Hero game the hardcore types who'd play the wizards had already half-memorized HERO, and the casual types who wanted to play warriors knew the combat system pretty well. I should mention I did a dirty trick, however, when I ran my superhero game I made a point of giving them all low-level variable power pools they could use to do extra tricks. This encouraged them to play with the system and not just accept what was on their sheet. Rob

Re: The First Hurdle: Creating a *gulp* Magic System Perhaps saying the spells "have" to have a random element might be overstating the case, but especially in the case of channeled magic I strongly believe it should. Gods have bad days too, and putting the random roll in there for clerical magic represents a whole lot of outside factors that might be involved. (Same reason we roll for skills rather than always assuming success.) If you want the spells to always work in your world, go right ahead, but I like watching my players choose when to use their spells carefully, hesitating on whether to use that precious spell at the right moment because it might fail them; I like them going out of their way to pray to their gods and be creative to try to get spell roll bonuses to offset the randomness; and I like watching them try to work off accrued "sin" penalties and turn it into self-motivated adventures and roleplay. But if you want to go "okay,it works, he's healed", that's good too. Rob

Re: The First Hurdle: Creating a *gulp* Magic System I think Thia is interested in the whole "working with what you got" aspect of pre-assigning spells, which is why charges don't work exactly like how Thia wants them to. Charges can be put on a Multipower as a whole, for example, but they would still amount to the character being able to cast whatever-whenever as long as they have Charges. (Unless delayed effect is also put into the mix, requiring the charges to be pre-assigned each day amongst the pool.) I agree with Faith based casting requiring an activation roll as opposed to a skill roll, the gods are unpredictable at best and there needs to be some random factor in there. However, the GM might allow for bonuses to that roll based on some other factors such as situation, quality of prayer, acts of pennance performed by the PC, etc. Activation Rolls also allow for such fun things as the character getting a minus to their activation roll as they do things their god might not agree with. (Acruing "sin penalties".) Then they have to perform tasks or missions to purify themselves and restore the balance. Rob

Re: The First Hurdle: Creating a *gulp* Magic System My advice is save yourself and your players a whole lotta trouble and just use an END reserve that recharges at like 1/hour for Wizards and let them cast whatever they want if they have the END. They still end up being limited in their casting abilities (one or two big battles and they'll be out of END right quick!), but don't have the headaches of pre-assigning all their spells. If you want casting from books to be different than casting from memory just have the skills rolls be hard (-1 per 5 active points) and let the books give a bonus to counterbalance this. As for Sorcerors vs Wizards, use the above END reserve for both, but as Steve said just don't require the RSR limitation for Sorcerors. Rob

Re: Campaign idea! Something I had a lot of fun doing in more random games (like V&V and MSH) back in the day was give characters powers and equipment, but have the players not know what they were. Watching PCs spend hours trying to figure out what they can do, or discovering what they can do is loads of fun. I don't suppose it would work well with HERO though, unless you made them set aside some points during character creation for "surprises" which would be planned by you, the GM. Rob

Re: Campaign idea! Since this is a fantasy game, they're probably people who were part of some prophecy but the bad guys couldn't kill because that was also forbidden. So they had their memories magically wiped and were dumped out to fend for themselves. Rob

Re: Whats wrong with Cliches ? There's some good advice. My advice to you is to ignore them. I remember back when I started to GM many moons ago I had a player who used to do stuff like that all the time to me. "Oh why don't you call them X-Wings and get over with it?" "Ninjas? Gimmie a minute while i go fight some cliches!" (Actually, they weren't real Ninjas, as he discovered later...) This bothered me a lot at the time, but later I came to realize it was actually him trying to look cool in front of the other players by dissing anything he deemed a "cliche". It was all about ego, and he was looking for opportunities to heckle the GM, it had nothing to do with my chosen ideas. Although it did inspire me to try harder to be original and put different spins on things, which I suppose I owed him for in the long run. Rob

Re: kind of fantasy Well, the problem is it's hard to talk about it without spoiling the ending of the original series. Suffice it to say that it's running Japan right now as we speak, although I heard it's a little lighter in tone and done by another artist, not the original. (Although I believe the original writer/artist is still writing it.) No word on whether Dark Horse will translate it, but I'd consider it a safe bet that it will be translated sooner or later if it's any good. Rob

Re: Zen Team Reborn! - A Ninja Hero/Teen Champions Campaign Well done! As a tokusatsu fan myself, I have considered similar campaigns but never quite got around to running one. This is an excellent template for using to run a sentai campaign fo whatever flavor the GM wishes. Good work! Rob

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Although it isn't quite Fantasy... The Count of Monte Christo I finally got around to reading this, and all I can say is "oh my god!" this is one of the most amazing books I have read in my life. Now I know why people have been reading it for nearly 200 years. I sooo want to run a post-Naploleonic-era campaign after reading this, I can't believe people don't mine this period to death for games. The level of detail for Europe of the period in this book is astounding. (Although this isn't surprising when you consider when it was written it was set in "current day".) Rob

Re: kind of fantasy Except that's when the vast majority of Japanese samurai TV series are set...(although many of them, like Abarenbo Shogun or Mito Komon use the cheat of the main character being super-high nobility so they can ignore most of the things you were mentioning.) I think we have a pretty rigid idea of the Edo period, when in reality I doubt it was all that rigid. It was a period like any time in human history: the government and society were harsh, but people are people and without some flexibility society collapses. I never had a problem with Ogami wandering the landscape because he knew the system, and how to get by. Also there were quite a few times when he had to get past checkpoints and border guards. An even more detailed series by the same author has come out called Samurai Executioner, which still puts the story first, but is one nasty piece of edo era drama. And rumor has it that he's also working on a sequel to Lone Wolf and Cub right now... Rob

Re: kind of fantasy Mark, not to say it's 100% accurate (by it's nature, it can't be), but that comic is probably one of the most meticulously researched and presented images of the Edo era ever done. "Usagi Yojimbo" bears a "loose" relationship to historical Japan because of it's more fantastical nature (although it is also extremely well researched later on in it's run), Lone Wolf and Cub's setting is hardly "loose" in any sense of the word. Rob

Re: Star Wars - Balancing Jedi with everyone else and heroic vs. superheroic A better way to handle it, given that Star Wars is supposed to be a sort of infinite fantasy setting is rather than worry about racial packages let the PCs make their own "races". The simplest way to do it is this: Allow each PC to have: 1 "exceptional" stat that caps at 30. ( for main stats, should they wish to buy it that high) 1 "impressive" stat that caps at 25 (ditto) 1 "dude!" stat that caps at 20 (same same) and everything else caps at 15. (except figureds, of course) They can't buy anything over those numbers, except maybe with experience, and at X2 cost. Then let them go wild, within your sense of reason anyway. You could even say that they can trade one of those "high" stat maxes in for a "power", like Flight, or regeneration, or body armour that they couldn't normally have. That "spot" then becomes Max 15. Now you can have an alien assassin whose 30 DEX lets them walk next to the Jedi, or a Chewbacca that can lift a cargo container. They just have to explain their exceptional stats, and now they can do whatever they want in terms of character creation. (yes, it's possible they'll all drop the 30 into DEX, but that's the chance you take, and they do blow a huge amount of points on it.) Rob

Re: Alternate Star Wars Chronology.... Hmmm, the idea of wiping them out and starting again does appeal to me too. Actually, as a WuXia fan I really dislike the whole "there is just Jedi/Sith who use the force in conjuction with their funky martial arts" thing. You mean in that vast galaxy nobody else figured out how to use the force over hundreds of thousands of years? Also, were the Jedi themselves originally one school? Or are they the results of many different schools of force using warriors almagmating together? (Perhaps to combat the Sith.) Another note of my research into "semi official alternate versions that could have been" found a page that said the very original version of the "Sith" were an army of force-trained space pirates that Vader himsel trained and used as his personal army. So, even Lucas didn't originally concieve of there just being a handful of Force-Users out there, there just weren't many Jedi left! Anyways, my point is, I like the idea of lots of rival schools of Jedi/Force Users running around the galaxy because it means lots of conflict and rivalries. More fun for PCs! Rob

Re: Alternate Star Wars Chronology.... Ahh, yes. I'm wrong, it was ROTJ where that ending was supposed to happen. Still, an interesting alternate version, might have been better than the one we got, especially since it opened things up more for sequels of different kinds. Rob

So, I was reading not too long ago that there was an alternate version of Empire Strikes Back once planned where Han died, Vader wasn't Luke's father, and Luke and Leia went separate ways (Leia with the rebellion, Luke off to study the Force and Jedi stuff). Eventually this would have turned into movies about Luke and his son (shades of Lone Wolf and Cub!) having movie adventures as they travelled the galaxy together fighting against the empire. This chronology keeps rattling around in my head because it completely opens up the setting to a multitude of adventures. The Empire isn't destroyed, the rebels are still out there somewhere, Luke wanders the galaxy finding Jedi and helping others, and Vader is still alive! (To say nothing of the Emperor, and if you wanna kick out the Prequels, you can even have more than 2 Sith at a time!) A leaner, meaner and darker Star Wars universe, and ripe for gaming. Rob

Re: "This is Aleph, and you're on the Global Frequency..." Not necessarily... The TV pilot had a (very) small team of adventurers who then worked with specialists to help get the job done. This could work for a RPG campaign a number of ways: 1) The simplest way is run it as a normal modern adventurer campaign with the same PCs each session and use the GF angle to explain how and why the PCs are involved, it's a super hook to get the action started from the get-go. The other GF agents then become "helpers" for the PC and resources, but of course in RPG tradition are of limited use. 2) A more complex way would be to have the players make up a number of PCs, maybe 3 or more, which they can then "plug in" to the adventure each week based on the nature of the adventure. For example, each Player makes up a fighting guy, a scholar/expert of some kind, and something weird. Then at the start of the session GM tells them what kind of adventure this will be (in broadest terms) and they can pick which one they will use for that adventure. (This also allows the players to select according to their mood for that week.) 3) And at the other extreme, just run it as 1-shots with the whole GF thing being the hook to bring disparate PCs together. The GM would tell the players what type of game this will be, they make PCs, and things go! Actually, I think GF is one of the coolest RPG ideas I've ever seen for running modern adventure games. If I currently had a group, I would have run a campaign or two of it already. Rob

Pics from the Staten Island Boat Graveyard, good for any dark future game.... http://www.opacity.us/gallery87.htm

Re: The Old Races One interesting take I saw on "The Old Race" was the anime series Vandread, in it the Old Race was Earth humanity, but for various reasons it had seeded countless numbers of other worlds with more baseline humans. Highlight for spoiler info: The various "earth colonies" in Vandread were actually pools of "spare parts", each of the different planets having slightly different genetic quirks that they were harvested by the Earth-progenitors for. Damn that was a creepy series when they introduced that idea. Rob

Re: Robert E Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien? I think those are the Lyrics to a MANOWAR song....Now there's a band that owes REH royalties! Rob

Re: Does anyone here play Cyberpunk HERO? I have a scenario for "low" Cyberpunk I always wanted to use but didn't get the chance yet... The GM needs a city map (preferably the Night City Sourcebook or some other resource), or they can fudge it, but they do need to know the city and setting fairly well. So, the scenario is this: The players start off with no equipment but dirty clothes (and maybe other small non-combat items of marginal usefullness), just enough money for two days food and a single unloaded gun. They're in a rat-infested appartment which is only paid up for a few more days and have no jobs, all their leads seeming to have run dry. GO! The point is to see what the players do, and can do, to survive. How far they get, and how much they accomplish. I call this one "4 men and an unloaded gun". Rob

Re: Vanor: races

Re: Vanor: races

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... I'll second that vote! I'm currently alternating between Hornblower Books and Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'brian. Both are amazing, and you wanna know something weird, if you alternate them like I am, you find they're actually running almost in sync! Each book is covering the same rough point of time as it's counterpart is in the other book series! Both series are absolutely amazing, but I describe them like this: Hornblower is the Silver Age DC version of Napoleonic Sea War. Epic, heroic and larger than life. Hornblower is a minor god in training. The Aubrey/Maturin saga is the Silver age Marvel version. The stories of two realistic people having amazing luck and adventures on the high seas, with just enough grit and detail to make it come alive as a real place. Rob

Re: Vanor: races Interesting, but two comments: 1) Currently that's a completely controllable mind-link, and thus Orcs can quickly become a nearly unbeatable foe as an Orc army has instant intelligence at a level of fighting where intelligence can almost rule the day. That's pretty scarey, actually. 2) The trolls/orges make me think of the ones from the comic Gold Digger, they were actually descendants of a super-advanced race now reduced to barbarism. Inherently they were the smartest guys around, and their language (which everyone else thought was gibbering) was actually so advanced that nobody could understand it but them. Rob