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?

Yeah' date=' I hate giving the wrong signals and/or not reading the signals correctly. I accidentally did that to Lamrok in a game, improperly communicating the tone I was looking for and compounding that by somewhat misunderstanding his character. Although fortunately it wasn't intended as long-running but rather as a lmiited run thing to both test M&M and run a different sort of supers game than we had been running.[/quote']

 

I don't think that character derail was at all your fault. Sometimes new characters just get off to bad starts. When you're playing a character that's been around for a couple of years, and things get a bit dicey, a sense of perspective generally keeps things on track. When everyone is playing brand new characters, things can fly off the tracks easily.

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?

Personally' date=' I think it is a matter best left to role-playing. I think there is the distinct danger as mentioned earlier of people simply playing the mechanic. "Oops, I spent a few days in space dealing with cosmic threats, so I'd better spend some time rescuing cats out of trees to balance it out". Unless they're willing to let their humanity go because they think it will be interesting to play out. So, basically, it boils down to the humanity rating only affecting those that want to be affected by it, so you may as well just leave it to role-playing.[/quote']

 

This has been the central conflict of my character in Zornwil's long-running Supers game, something that has been riffed on many times without any mechanics involved. (His issue is that he has INT of over 200, so he doesn't see things quite the same way others do.) As a player, you know when your character is getting too close to the line, the fun is in how you handle it. I'd rather keep that sort of thing discretionary rather than build a bunch of rules around it.

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

My personal experience is that the capacity of children for mindless' date=' thoughtless cruelty is virtually infinite. I imagine it is part of the Darwinist impulse to be the fittest by dragging down your adversaries. But for a society to be sustainable there needs to be a limit.[/quote']

 

That completely depends on the kids involved, just the same as with adults. Some ring leaders are all-inclusive good guys. Some are sadistic bullies. I've seen both in the groups my kids run with. A lot of it just depends on the personality of the kid who winds up calling the shots. Kids aren't that different from adults as far as that goes, they're just a bit less refined in how they act.

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 -

I'm killing off my campaigns' date=' bwa ha ha! And you fools can do nothing about it - do you think that I would tell you if I hadn't already done it?![/quote']

 

None of that. The fates have decreed that just this once I will be allowed to show up for your Champs game ON TIME this Saturday. Nothing better get in my way.

Re: Hero system complexity

Beyond what Lamrok wrote' date=' the thing is we see constant discussions "is this balanced" and the like. Even in an experienced group, I see people who've played for years and are certainly not dumb struggle to achieve efficiency that other people have. This is directly related to complexity - and it's directly related to what Lamrok cited regarding the niggling aspects of how SFX play out against all these abiltiies and interact with mechanics.[/quote']

 

This complexity creates a two-tiered playing field. Those who revel in complexity, who love reading rules closely and putting together "pleasing combinations" with subtle potentially abusive effects, and those who just want to hash together a character and play. Personally, I'm in the first group. That wouldn't matter much if the rest of our playing group was like this, but, for whatever reason, most people don't like reading through the rulebook every couple of weeks, poking through online discussions of rules minutia, and running mathematical analysis models to guage baseline character efficiency. I don't do this stuff because I want to dominate a game - I do this because that's who I am. I care about "doing things right" to an obsessive degree. It dominates the way I do my job, the way I coach my kids, the way I grill steaks. Hero gives me the tools to massage characters to a ridiculous extreme that most players simply don't have the patience to match.

 

When my character dominates a combat, I feel bad - embarassed in fact. I want a good story, not a walkover. So I start adding extra conditions to character building, progressively tying my hands behind my back to give the other players more glory time (at least four times over the years, I've voluntarily rebuilt characters to be less efficient to make the game more fun for everyone else). But, this is an inexact science - how far do you have to hold back? I've asked to have a look-see at other players' character sheets to see if I could help them out. One player allowed this once, and I immediatly saw at least a dozen errors that needed to be fixed before we could start the tweaking. That was awkward. He's kept his character sheet to himself since then. And no one else has ever accepted my offers. My general take on the situation is that most players who share the table with me do not understand the rules well enough (despite at least ten years of experience) to build characters they feel confident to share.

 

I won't deny that this same pattern apparently exists in D&D also, but I will assert that it is something that makes the hobby less accessible to new blood. Even if people are perfectly attuned to the complexities of D&D after playing for ten or more years, that doesn't make them eager to dive in and learn another complex system from the ground up. And lots of them are going to look at Sidekick and say "Hey I don't want the n00b rules, I'm an experienced gamer and it's either the full thing or nothing." I've always sort of felt that the existence of Sidekick was sort of a condescending measure - a version of Hero for the ones not quite bright enough the grasp the industrial strength version. Most RPG players don't want to admit that that might apply to them, and seeing that there's a lite version of the rules (that still isn't exactly simple) just assures them that the full version of the rules is just as monstrous as it looks.

 

The light version of the rules should be the standard version of the rules. The complex stuff should be spun off into optional supplements (a model that appears to work quite well for Other Games.) That would make it easier to get up and running with the system without making some kind of value judgement on newbies. I'll echo Rjcurrie's comments about stripping out all the dependencies and "extra stuff" that comes with most characteristics and powers (maybe that was in another thread). I think Hero could be stripped down to something very lean without losing any flexibility at all (instead of buying E-Blast, you'd buy damage + range + spreadable + bounceable). Buy lifting, damage and stat boost separately for strength - or, better yet, put together packages that contain these things and include them in the "Champions Book" instead of the Basic Rules book.

 

Just some thoughts. (And not really directed at Zornwil, since he's heard me ramble about all this stuff before)

Re: Nanny, nanny, boo boo!

Oh! In that case...why are you such a Kansasian nazi incapable of intellectual discourse? Your parents were not married when you were born' date=' were they? [/quote']

 

I'll have you know that I have never actually lived in Kansas.

Re: Hero system complexity

While I agree Hero could be more generic' date=' I think you are arguing another thread.[/quote']

 

Many, many threads over the years, actually.

Re: Hero system complexity

In Hero' date=' the curtain has been pulled back. The complexity revealed. In The Game Which Shall Not Be Mentioned, the wizard stays hidden. You must take his word that things are balanced and buy more and more supplements for the actual class/feat/spell you wanted. Sure, you could just make stuff up on your own but you are going off map. Nothing really wrong with that. It's just that, Hero has already shown you how.[/quote']

 

There's still plenty more curtain to remove on Hero. For example, what mathematically consistent construct supports the logic behind costing for ECs, MPs, and VPPs? How do you reconcile the cost of strength to the cost of intelligence? Why have killing attacks at all? When you pull back the curtain on a power, you still have a collection of effects with a point value set by dead reckoning. Energy Blast may seem to be the simplest and most straightforward of powers - but it comes with the ability to spread (increase OCV or cover multiple hexes) and to bounce. To make it simple ranged damage, you have to put a limitation on it.

 

Hero Sixth edition could easily become the game that the more Hero-positive folks in this thread are describing. But you'd have to scale back things to a more generic, more basic level. I'd love to see that.

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

I love the quote - "Wouldn’t it be great if you could see YouTube on your TV?"

 

 

Um, no, no it wouldn't, actually.

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?

Have you considered running a game yourself? You seem to have the right attitude. Maybe you could teach by example.

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.