Lamrok

Re: Obscure Research Help One more link. This book has some information about the Budapest telephone system in the time from you're interestied in. It might also have other details you can use in your novel. Google books only offers a "preview" of it, but you might be able to find a copy in a library. The book quotes an except in which someone describes using a telephone. The caller picks up the phone and hears a woman's voice say "Jozsef" (the name of a telephone exchange), then the caller gives the operator the name of the person he wants to talk to. By 1913, I expect the caller would have needed to supply a number. While I didn't easily find a list of telephone exchanges, "Joszef" does seem to have been one of them.

Re: Obscure Research Help The problem here is that this sort of information tends to be too mundane to be written down and recorded. You need to go to contemporary sources. In the US, old movies are a treasure trove of this sort of info, since when a character uses a phone, they'll typically need to show the process of making the call. You might have some luck at the Internet archive looking for something along this line, but, frankly, I'm not sure such a movie even exists. On the other hand, Google Books is a much overlooked treasure trove of technological information from around the turn of the century. I didn't push in too deep, but a few minutes of trawling turned up this interesting interview of a Hungarian "Telephone Official" from 1914. You could make some inferences from that article that might give you what you're looking for. I imagine you could probably turn up some other relevant information just combing through "Telephone Review" magazine, since it looks like Google Books has full text images of this publication.

Re: June 2nd Getting bounced out of a beta you can't participate in isn't much of penalty.

Re: closed beta applications I'm in also - got my invite last week.

Re: When your superhero group became powerful enough to rule the world?

Re: Which is your least favorite archetype to play? For me, it would probably be any super-powered hero who depends on a melee weapon to be effective. I just don't find this intriguing or interesting. I won't support this with any good reason, because I don't really have any. Wishy washy reason include: - Having to worry about having it grabbed away - Feeling unheroic when dealing with some villains - Feeling like I should be playing in a Fantasy game - Trying to find some semblance of sanity in limitations and powers on the focus. I've built characters like this, but don't remember ever actually playing one (and if I did, not for very long.) Actually, I once did have a guy who would snatch his own arm off and use it as a weapon, then re-attach it when done. But this only added a few dice, and he had to make an ego roll to pull the arm off (because, you know, it really hurt.) Mostly he used other methods in combat, saving this one for presence attacks. Characters with guns don't bug me. Characters with bows don't bug me. Wimpy mentallists don't bug me. It doesn't bug me if anyone else plays a weapon-based melee character. Hmmm... Now that I think about it, I might have had a sword-ninja super in a game fifteen years ago. If I remember right, he really sucked - from his name to his combat effectiveness. Maybe that's why.

Re: Intro Solo scenario for new player My most successful introductory scenario was "You wake up in the hospital after a probably exposure to nuclear fallout." Players had to figure out their powers (built by myself), then take their first steps out into a world in need of super heroes. This completely hooked the group on Hero (they had been a GURPS group before that.) Once they had a feel for the way combat and skills worked, I gave them their character sheets, and allowed them to make modifications.

Re: Humanity Rating?

Re: Best magic system? Last time I ran Fantasy Hero (probably at least a decade ago), I rolled my own. The mechanics (completely hidden from players) worked like this: All "mages" had to buy a small VPP - 5-15 points, depending on how strongly magic was manifested in the character. You could put an Aid inside the vpp to "stretch" it to fit larger effects, but this took extra time, and added extra limitations (the aid required concentratiion, for example). Every power used had to be described by a "spell." Spells were INT-based skills, but there was a "wizard" skill enhancer you could use to cut the cost a bit. Spells were chosen from a list that hid all of these mechanics from the player - the only purpose of the mechanics was to determine how long it would take to cast (a function of the size of the vpp, and the amount of aid necessary to expand it), the possible powers you could use to produce effects (you couldn't cast a spell if the minimum points for the necessary effects couldn't fit in the vpp), and the penalty to apply to your spell skill in order to cast the spell. So, players saw descriptions like: Fireball - description, x damage, x range, area of effect x requires: magery II skill roll -x time to cast: 2 phases pre-reqs: must know Burning Hands at 11- (all spells were divided into spell schools with pre-req trees that added a bit of extra flavor - so mages tended to be "water mages," "fire mages," etc. and the various types of mages had various different reputations.) Spells didn't look like long catalogs of weird hero-speak, they looked like spells in other games. But, unlike those other games, spells in my game could all be quickly reverse-engineered if you needed to change a parameter. This was heavily based on GURPS magic, which I used to be quite fond of. But, it provided the flexibility to add any spell (I converted the entire D&D spell list plus the entire GURPS magic spell list), while providing a mechanism to balance them somewhat against each other. Casting big spells took an investment in pre-req skills, extra time, and an extra investment in skill points to offset the skill roll penalty. I thought it worked reasonably well - Mages had a lot of options in how they chose their spells. Unfortunately, all my notes and background material for this were lost in a disk crash some years back.

Re: TV: Kid Nation

Re: How many points does a person have? I tend to think I could build a pretty good version of myself for around negative one hundred points - maybe less - maybe a LOT less. That includes my mighty 13+ strength, and awesome 12- technical skills. It also includes loads limitations (I have a LOT of DNPCs, various physical limitations, and at least my share of psych lims.) If I had enough skills to balance my disads, I'd have been too busy to write this.

Re: Thank you -

Re: Hero system complexity

Re: Nanny, nanny, boo boo!

Re: Hero system complexity