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

Re: Hero system complexity

Re: Hero system complexity The complication has nothing to do with math. The problem is all the niggling little sub-rules "when a summoned being can act," "Defense and body of a focus," "Momentum of growth," etc, etc. Most powers, limitations and advantages are far from the generic building blocks they are billed as. They are filled with strange little gotchas that often require "outside of the box" thinking to achieve desired results. Fifth edition intruduced way too much of this kind of thing (though my second example is a long standing issue in the rules.) When many people talk about over-complexity, they are thinking of constructs like the shapeshift rules, or the viability of penetrating attacks when used vs foci. I seriously doubt that more than 10% of Hero groups actually know all rules that apply to the characters they are using. I play with a very experienced group, but every time we play, I see constant errors. On my drive home I nearly always realize that I've made at least one major rules goof. This is the problem with complexity. Just poke through the rules FAQ here. It is insane. Hero should be a purely effects driven rules-set, instead of the strange hybrid it actually is. Why are running, flying, gliding and swinging different powers? What is the real point of having killing attacks in the game? What is power defense, really? Why is desol so tightly influenced by various sfx? Lots of this stuff is entirely arbitrary, and only serves to put barriers in front of a player seeking to model a certain special effect.

Re: Musings on Random Musings If you have a Nintendo Wii, you can. I haven't tried it yet, though. Also, I think there's a program on the G4 cable channel that plays a lot of youtube clips.

Re: Any advice for a CSI-style campaign? I'd be pretty general on the initial description. Don't front-load too much information or people won't be able to properly process it. Give them just the basics and let them get the rest through questions - they're more likely to be able to grasp the import of new clues if they come individually as the answers to questions instead of as part of a long sequential list. One of the biggest challenges of a game like this is going to be getting the information to the players in a way that they can understand and use.

Re: Any advice for a CSI-style campaign? I'd generally avoid rolling dice, giving information mainly based on player ingenuity with some influence from the skills on the sheet. Keep it fast and loose. Award extra information if a player uses a new or creative method to examine evidence. Push players to solve the crimes instead of characters. Require players to build characters that are distinct from each other so they depend on each other (ballistics expert, DNA expert, etc.) You might also spend some time defining CSI skills, since they don't always correspond very well to real-life technology (I love CSI - but I consider it science-fiction and judge it accordingly.) On the show, it seems like if an idea is cool enough, it can trump scientfic reality ("Look, if you magnify the store surveillance tape enough, you can read the sign reflected in the eyes of the guy standing in the doorway!"). I think that this is an excellent thing to keep in the game - it allows players to think a bit more outside the box and exercise some cleverness without being restrained by what they themselves actually know (or don't know) about technology. It also helps pull away from a situation in which a tech-minded player serves as the gatekeeper for what other players can do.

Re: Anyone running a CSI-style campaign? I've run lots of "murder mystery" plots in the past. Here are some tips: - Watch Scooby Do. As a viewer, you'll think the soultions to the "mysteries" are ridiculously easy. As a player, sitting at a table and enduring countless red-herrings and dead ends, and having to winnow through all of these, it turns out (in my experience, anyway) that this difficulty level is just about right. It seems to set the bar just about right for players to solve in a lively fashion. - Help out with information usage. In my games, I use a whiteboard to list suspects, and to write down pertinent clues. If I don't write it down, it isn't worth following up on (obviously, I write down a lot of wrong stuff also, just to keep things interesting). When players get stuck, they just have to look at the board and find some other angle to pursue. - In my games, I plot out contingencies - places where I can slow things down if the players' progress is too rapid (bad guys attack!), and places I can speed things up if they're dragging - (a new witness comes forward.) - To design a scenario like this, think of the original villain, and decide what he wants. Then decide how he will go about getting it. Then work out ALL the details from every angle you can imagine of how it happened. Then work out all NPC histories and backgrounds. Think about clues that might be generated by various details of the caper. Then toss in a few other suspicious things going on at the same time. Do not conceptualize a "solution" or best way of solving the probem - just hang on to your framework of events and let the players attack it in their own style. Be sure to have NPCs pursuing their own agendas at the same time. If you have a solid grasp of the sequence of events being examined, you can use that to answer the skill rolls the players will be making. Keep in mind that these sorts of games take a lot more prep than regular games (you need very detailed information on every NPC worked out in a way that is consistent with your plot). I usually just toss them in every now and then when I feel the yen. In my experience, if you scale the difficulty level properly, most players love these.

Re: A problem with Annie Oakley How about "Annie Oakley vs. The Wild Bunch?" You could toss appearances by an aging Geronimo and a young Pancho Villa for some southwestern flair.

Re: Character: Socially Conscious Man! I played a character with a very similar outlook on life in one of Lemming's games. The character was lots of fun (he was completely naive in many ways and easily mislead by other characters). He didn't have powers to fix social problems (he was a brick with "concrete manipulation" powers), he just always felt responsible for everything that happened to anyone he felt was "disadvantaged." Of course, his zeal to help could be a bit over the top at times. That's what made him fun.

Re: To PLAY Or NOT To PLAY? That's the best way. GMs can learn a lot from other GMs. If you want more transparency, run a game and demonstrate how well it works. Teach the other players to expect it, and teach the other GM(s) that it enhances the game.

Re: What makes a great campaign great? The one thing that makes a game irrefutably great is when players are playing characters that they LOVE to play in a setting that inspires a GM to go the extra mile. I've run games where the players couldn't get enough, but in which I felt all the blood was sucked out of me in prep. I've run games in which I could write plot after plot, and the PCs just weren't synching. Brilliant success happens when the players and the GM both can't get enough, when the players show up an immediatly start the game without the GM, when the GM spends days in prep because there's nothing he'd rather do. When this comes together, you'll have a game that will produce stories that will get retold forever.