Steve

Re: When you hear Urban Fantasy...

Re: When you hear Urban Fantasy... If you like humorous Urban Fantasy, I recommend the author Tom Holt. Some of the titles he's done: Earth, Air, Fire and Custard Expecting Someone Taller Paint Your Dragon Snow White and the Seven Samurai You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps

Re: How To: Suspended Animation This sort of effect is normally done (that I've seen) as a combination of Feign Death and Life Support vs. Aging as a pair of Linked effects. The cryosleep modules in the Alien Wars sourcebook are done this way.

Re: When you hear Urban Fantasy... I suppose a sub-genre case could be made for "Suburban Fantasy" then, but that reminds me more of the old TV shows like "I Dream of Jeanie" and "Bewitched."

Yes, I speak of the classic TV series of Samantha Stevens and her wacky relatives. How would you build the abilities of a witch like Samantha as done in Bewitched? Some would be inherent, like Life Support (I'm guessing 4 points worth rather than full immortality) and maybe Invisibility. Some magic didn't require much effort (usually some form of TK, Summon or Transformation), but others required elaborate rituals and incantations. Would you define a witch/warlock as staying within NCM? This is my 800th post!

Re: Worth his weight in Diamond A similar question can be found here. It's just a matter of relative density.

What does it mean to you? Do you picture an urban metropolis like Hudson City, only with sidhe hiding out in its dark corners to prey on the unwary, maybe with gritty notions like vampire prostitutes and streetsmart wizards like Harry Dresden wandering about? An otherwise normal city with a neighborhood bar run by a down on his luck godling, where Norse valkyries and Greek heroes drink and chat among normal humans? Vibora Bay in the Champions universe? A near-future setting like Shadowrun? The World of Darkness from White Wolf? Something else?

Re: Valdorian Age world map (dear Mr Curtis...) Maybe they are going to put it up when the whole site gets redone? Say it ain't so!

Re: Granularity In my rush to explore granularity from a characteristic-basis approach, I neglected to consider skill levels. Depending on the cost multiple for a primary characteristic, skill levels can get blown out or still remain cost-effective. Comparing it to a 5-point skill level (for all skills of a given characteristic-basis) gives some interesting math results. Consider the three main multiples: x1 (ex INT), x2 (ex EGO) and x3 (ex DEX). Using a STAT/2 model: x1: Every two points spent gives a +1 to all skills based off that characteristic. Skill levels are less efficient. x2: Every four points spent gives a +1 to all skills based off that characteristic. Skill levels are marginally less efficient. x3: Every six points spent gives a +1. Skill levels are marginally more efficient. Using a STAT/3 model: x1: Every three points spent gives a +1 to all skills based off that characteristic. Skill levels are less efficient. x2: Every six points spent gives a +1 to all skills based off that characteristic. Skill levels are marginally more efficient. x3: Every nine points spent gives a +1. Skill levels are more efficient. Skill levels can only be used in a single skill at a time, so there is a cost-benefit analysis that must be considered. Make skills too cheap by lowering the characteristic divisor, and skill levels become worthless. Adding normal characteristic maxima makes the cost different even worse in favor of just buying high stats (at least until NCM comes into play). It's a puzzler, all right.

In setting up the ground rules for my Traveller Hero campaign, one of the things I am looking at is improving granularity for Heroic-level characters, using a 5-20 range for primary characteristics. In Ultimate Skill, there is discussion about changing the characteristic roll involved to add granularity at the lower range involved for Heroic-level sorts. Currently, I am leaning towards using a skill roll calculation of 7+STAT/3 or 6+STAT/2. The 7+STAT/3 calculation is useful because it follows the pattern used for calculating base CVs which makes it a little easier to follow for new players. In the range of 5-20, the skill/CV breakpoints are: 5, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 20. This isn't bad, since the figured characteristics will still follow the same calculation pattern, so 3s and 8s will still have value and smooth out the breaks a bit. In the 6+STAT/2 calculation, the range of 5-20 gives skill breakpoints at: 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19. CV breakpoints are still 5, 8, 11, 14, 17 and 20. This gives a few "sweet spots" at 5, 11 and 17 where skills and CVs break at the same time. Has anyone played with altered skill calculations like this to add granularity? How did it work out? Did it discourage buying higher characteristics because not as much was needed? Or did the opposite occur because characteristics added more "bang for the buck" now?

Now that I've been dusting off my old Traveller stuff for my Hero campaign, I see that the most common handguns are still slugthrowers with the occasional laser weapon, with TL9 ones requiring a backpack power source. I personally like blasters due to visual appeal, but I'm wondering if Traveller works best to stick to slugthrowers to maintain a sort of Old West feel. Thoughts?

Re: Order of the Stick And some of us are more pedantic than others. I'm looking forward to the next strip in the series. It looks like Miko's going to roll over a certain halfling. I wonder if she ends up joining Nale's crew?

The adventures of the .

Re: Traveller: Jump Drive I think it makes more sense to me to build a ship as having enough fuel for at least 2-3 jumps before needing to refuel, especially after reading the article Nyarth referenced. Being able to make only one jump on a full tank seems way too limiting to me. Gas giant refueling doesn't bother me that much, although it does pose a fair element of risk in getting that close to such a heavy gravity well. Perhaps some heavily-travelled systems have orbiting fuel depots that skim gas giants for supplies of refined fuel. One thing I thought was interesting when I read it was that the amount of hydrogen used is not just to provide power through the engines for a jump. Some of it is used to fill the jump bubble created during jump, gradually bleeding off and lengthening the time before the bubble collapses and drops the ship back into normal space. I think I read that in T4, but I know I read it somewhere.

Re: Traveller: Jump Drive I was reading in one of the BITS supplements (101 Religions) that there is a cult that worships jumpspace as being the naked face of God or somesuch. So they'll get drugged up and stare out open portals at naked jump space for hours on end. They also have their own ships, described as having a disturbingly large number of portals for viewing. I'd forgotten that the jump drive has only one charge before needing to refuel. That sure makes scouting a new system a really risky enterprise. No gas giant or water world in the system, and you're stuck there. Since the ships have fusion power plants, I'm wondering if an END reserve that gets mostly drained by a jump (leaving a little to run electrical power out to other systems) might better represent fuel reserves. I was thinking of having one main END reserve that represents overall fuel for the ship, and a second one for electrical power that is linked to the first. That second one would generate power for the ship's other systems, but costing END off the main END reserve in order to run.

Re: Order of the Stick Site is working now, and #407 is up. A good follow-up to the last one.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Traveller: Free Trading Well, I do like a given structure for figuring out how much a cargo will make in profit. I was just having troubles figuring out the numbers for the advanced trade rules. I may just stick with basic trading.

Re: Traveller: Jump Drive Part of the reason I went to 1"/parsec is because there are 3.26 light years in a parsec, and it was easier to work with the given Traveller jump drive ratings in Hero measurements that way. When I was running the numbers using inches as light years, the numbers I was getting were Jump-1 as 3", Jump-2 as 7" (6.52 lightyears rounding up to 7"), Jump-3 as 10" (9.78 light years rounding up to 10"), etc. I just finally said, screw it, an inch is a parsec, and the math worked fine. It was also cheaper points-wise to do it that way, an added bonus. So setting up for a jump takes an hour? No Millenium Falcon style escapes then. I thought it was a faster process, but my memory is from games long ago. The choice of one recoverable charge taking a week to recover is an interesting design. I didn't consider that one, but it kind of makes sense. My understanding of misjump is that it is a random thing not tied to skill rolling in Traveller, since in Traveller it occurs on a 2 on 2d6, modified by using unrefined fuel and other things. Maybe give the drive a 5- chance of misjump as a Limitation instead of tying it to a skill roll? A failed skill roll would then act as a modifier to the misjump chance. Should the drives be able to scale down? I thought I read somewhere that you could jump much shorter distances that would still take a week to do, but the 1 parsec per drive rating number was the maximum.

This is my attempt at putting together a write-up for a Traveller Jump Drive. It actually works pretty well to model in Hero with the intersteallar hex mapping. I'm Megascaling it up to 1"=1 parsec instead of 10 LY/inch, which works quite nicely with Traveller scaling. Jump Drive-2: Teleportation 2", MegaScale (1" = 1 parsec; +3 3/4) (19 Active Points); Extra Time (1 Week, -4 1/2), Increased Endurance Cost (x6 END; -2 1/2) Am I missing anything? I'm also wondering if it would be book legal to take a separate Extra Time Limitation and use that to show the time needed to get the drive ready to enter Jump Space.

Re: Traveller: Free Trading Actually, that's pretty close to what I was thinking. Firefly might be a better example. Enemy agents, native cults and femme fatales. Pulp Traveller anyone? My group might get a little restless if they gamed out the wheeling and dealing of a Free Trader. In order to GM it, I need to get a grasp on the economic model used too.

Re: Traveller: Free Trading My experience with Traveller is that playing it as written you have to really focus on being a merchant in order to keep the ship running, not an adventurer who just trades on the side as part of playing. The upside of this is that you tend to make more money trading than you do adventuring. Realistic? I guess. Fun? Well, maybe if you have Ferengi blood in you. Actually, the Ferengi might work pretty well in the Traveller universe.

Re: Traveller: Free Trading The trade map looks great! Thanks!

I broke this out as a separate thread because I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around the advanced trading rules from GURPS Traveller. Is there a spreadsheet around to help in calculating trade routes and determining profitability of different planets?

Re: Traveller Hero Update Faster! Faster! Will you be making a new section in the website store for all the Hero items when they become available for purchase? My group is getting excited about trying Traveller now.