mhd

Sometimes HERO really has a penchant for a needless amount of rolls. Never mind that the armor part of that never mad sense to me. (I actually do something similar already with my critical hit house rule, though.) As for the others, modifying every armor out there seems like it's definitely way over the simplicity threshold. Never mind that if doing so, one could simple average out the PD stats instead of buying extra limited levels.

They did most of the common monstrosities and races in C&T, so they had to come up with new oddities for C&T II. And game designers who don't steal but try to actually invent something new is something that usually doesn't end well.

Some of the GURPS guys are doing something similar, to reduce swinginess. Although it does seem much more fun to throw more dice and then subtract from that than do the subtraction beforehand and end up with a 1/2 d6 damage roll. And that still wouldn't do damage types, unless we're talking about different DN for each type. (Or armor having rPD in general and DN/cutting) A lot of the games that have different damage types also have different armor protection vs. each type, although that would be further changes that would factor in the "is it worth it" calculation. With cutting having standard effect, the "armor piercing" property of cutting/bashing would be simulated by the possibility of rolling high enough to bypass. Of course, standard effect is slightly below the average, which might be a factor for some players. Yeah, but in this case there'd be no separate damage types or anything, and if one trusts in common sense at least a bit, there's not even a need to write down what damage types a weapon has (and thus no change at all to the tables). And there'd still be the question of bashing damage and its advantages. I could do N damage rolls, with only rPD counting vis-a-vis BODY. I might need to crunch some numbers. That might appeal to different players: You want to roll plenty of dice: Pick up a bludgeon. You don't want to roll low: Cut. You're up for some chance to achieve the highest damage possible at times: Stab.

That simulates specific (and often nonsensical) vulnerabilities, I'm thinking more about a basic damage type distinction in a fantasy/medieval context. Can't cut through armor, but it works very nicely on flesh. And further distinguishing weapons doesn't really hurt.

Some games distinguish between damage types, and I was wondering whether that's worth it for more realistic (heroic) HERO campaigns. In a simply and non-intrusive way. Right now we've just go normal and lethal damage, with a hazy distinction (clubs vs. maces vs. hammers). One idea: Make cutting damage use standard effect whereas piercing uses dice. That makes some armor impervious (no swingy high damage results), which ain't too unrealistic.

I'm not sure whether it makes sense to simulate this (in HERO) on the "squad"/party level. It's quite likely that the stats and support are good enough that it won't matter that much, just like accounting for every coin carried. It might be more applicable for the logistics part of a mass combat systems, where you simply have some tables about miles covered per day and that deteriorates slowly. Then you could have a minor Change Environment effect as a spell that turns the progression linear. Now, maybe if you're doing a sandbox grimdark Dark Sun game and decide to do that with HERO, you might apply more fine-tuned endurance rules, but I'd still go with LTE and REC reduction there (cf. cold/hot environments). Contributing factors would be climate, load, distance travel and probably CON, maybe even a skill (PS: Teamster, PS: Soldier, PS: Running While Conan Soundtrack Is Playing). I've got no good idea how one would actually turn that into a formula and/or tables, but I guess one can always peruse army manuals and historical records.

One common problem is that "miles/day" doesn't really cover it, as that makes it look like this is a totally linear thing. Yet even without forced marches, people tend to feel the strain after a few days. And if I've been told correctly, horses even quicker than people (i.e. over the stretch of a fortnight, there'd be little difference between the ground covered by infantry or cavalry). Mules and esp. camels fare a bit better, not so sure about pack gorillas. On the other hand, as with any really minor stuff that only hurts when things start to accumulate, this tends to be ridiculously easy to remove with magic. "Protection vs. blisters & sore muscles, 15' radius" would be the second spell any military magician/priest learns, right after "Dispel 'the runs'".

C&T also had the vorpal bunny, IIRC.

This would apply to CSLs, too. It's quite unlikely that your training involed countering all the other fighting styles and weapon sets available, in extreme situations you probably only ever fought against someone with the exact same weaponry. And if students of the Dagnabitian School of High Fencing didn't train against flails and the Orcish Kr'Hnkk, they certainly didn't train against countering minotaur charges and the spikey tentacles of the Demon Priestess of Outer Erthrul. But they're still better off than their rival fencing schol, which uses minimalistic interposition of their blades, which isn't adaptable at all against very different fighting styles, while their fancy footwork provides good defense against almost anything. Now, whether it's worth to simulate that is another matter entirely. While I could see campaigns where this is part of the implicit setting assumptions (in "my Kung Fu is better than yours" way), for most cases I wouldn't want to waste too much effort on it. So for very special cases like nerve strikes, anatomy skill rolls or training might be required (a one-time deal), whereas for others I'd just go with a variation of the GURPS familiarity penalty (-1 to -3 on rolls) for the first few times. And, well, grappling rules...

Plumbers?

I really liked the spell lists of RoleMaster back then, as they're very "non-exception". Almost everything was described in a single line. At first that looks like a disadvantage, a lack of flavor when compared to D&D's Vancian effusiveness. But in practice, it saves you a lot of rules to look at in the heat of battle. This is something I really have to be aware in HERO, too. I'm often tempted to pile on quite a lot of limitations to make a spell more "unique", but that might have more flaws than merits. It's probably better to have more uniqueness on the core spellcasting ability if you want to differentiate casters. They also tend to start out at a lower power level, which is fine for me (D&D-ish level 1/2 spells are my sweet spot for magic). One thing that I remember less fondly was rolling to learn a spell list. Two characters with the same amount of points spent of "spell development" or whatever it was called could have a wildly different amount of learned lists.

Yeah, it's certainly not tied to the setting (a common source of complaint from Tolkienites, not that anything can ever please them). A few years ago, they released "Rolemaster Express" as a lite version, and it had plenty in common with MERP. Someone also made a d20-RoleMaster mashup a few years ago, called "Blood, Guts & Glory".

Interesting, even among people that like RoleMaster, the healing subsystem isn't usually regarded as all that great. Sure, there's a certain flavor to it, but it's often very frustrating to players. In most other games with magical healing, the healer PC can heal most wounds the PCs suffer from the start. If they're heavily wounded, it might take a longer time for him to cast that many spells, but it's certainly doable. Sickness/blindness often being exceptions to this. Whereas in RoleMaster with its detailed criticial system, you might suffer hits where the cleric/animist/lay healer would need to be of a higher level to treat them. Which means either heading to NPCs or letting natural healing take its course (or running around impaired). Never mind that you had to learn a lot of spell lists just to cause "normal" battle wounds. For a game that otherwise stuck to the high fantasy D&D tropes, that's quite a change. And I've rarely seen something emulated in a game that wasn't hellbent on providing realism. And even then it's rare (i.e. if GURPS doesn't do it...). You've got a very mild version of this in HERO with its distinction between STUN and BODY damage. You do have long term injuries with impairments, but those don't require specific healing by default. Generally HERO seems to avoid things contributing to "death spirals", so I'm not sure whether it'd be that great to shoe-horn that in. Other than that, I find RoleMaster to be difficult when it comes to exporting bits and pieces of it. It's a pretty integrated system. I know that Arms Law was intended to work with other early RPGs, but I haven't ever seen someone doing that.

As a former cubicle drone, I can confirm that.

Stop being so ethnocentric. Apart from the OotS thing, I once read a novel where a hidden "tribe" survived the nuclear apocalypse due to being isolated in the lead-lined cathedral attic. And after a couple of hundred years, these living conditions caused them to be about a foot tall. The incest probably didn't help, either. To get back on topic: Would cathedral/church/temple masonry work as anti-magic material? By now, most of it is pretty old, and a lot of church organizations wouldn't have problems as being described as symbolically old, either. So that might be a long-term plan to cultivate anti-magic. One more reason why they dislike paleontologists.

They also used guiges, so enterprising PCs will have hoplites who use a shield and a two-handed spear and still have a hand free to throw javelins.

But there are rumors of a hidden people who were so afraid of wizards that it became a cultural tradition for them to carry lead sheets around all the time. Sadly, lead poisoning over the course of centuries resulted in their growth being quite stunted.

Hmm, for me it would be more intuitive to associate creation with magic, not opposed to it. So something new would be very magical. The aforementioned ancient iron deposits would've been "created" a very long time ago, long enough for magic to have drained out of it. So you need something symbolically or actually old to counter magic. Of course this is the reason why Russia went back to their old hymn. They switched in the early 90s, but after hearing some dangerous reports from their magic storage facilities in Siberia... It's also the reason why the Habsburg dynasty was becoming increasingly resistant to healing magic, resulting in birth defects that couldn't be countered. The destruction of ancient sites in the middle east is something to be worried about, as is changing the voting laws in Great Britain! The yearly druid assemblies at stonehenge? They actually try to counter the magic draining effect it has by now. An insidious plan, as that would mean that the Stone of Scone might soon be more powerful in its antimagics, leading to a new rise of Scotland that can't be prevented by the True Order of English Magicians.

I didn't meant getting rid of STUN damage, just saying that one could let CON handle both getting stunned and getting knocked out, i.e. not keeping a damage tally. Not that it would make sense in a game where you still track BODY and END. But actually I wish we had more uses for CON, e.g. resistance rolls.

Or we could keep CON and get rid of STUN.

How did you come up with your 'handle' (forum name)? Using ones initials is pretty common as a Unix system login. What was the first tabletop RPG you played? That would be Germany's "Dark Eye" RPG, back in the late 80s. I got it from my local church's library. So I guess the Pope made me do it. What was the first tabletop RPG you GMed? The very same game. Nobody knew about RPGs at all and someone had to run it, while we were passing time at your mom's single parent support group. What are you currently playing/GMing? It's back to the roots, as I'm using a Fuzionized HERO to run an old "Dark Eye" adventure series. Also, maybe I'm doing something more light D&D-ish pretty soon. And a sci-fi PbP is just getting started, let's see if that survives the first month.

How do you feel about graph paper for maths and lined paper for writing?

Now that I think of it, I always wanted my resident non-magic healer to have a bigger impact. As is, compared to magic First Aid and its ilk is doing diddly squat. Even with the optional rule where you restore 1 BODY scrapes. Clearly distinguishing between impairments and BODY/STUN losses would give more room for actual medical care and surgery. Constant care could alleviate the penalties. Just pumping magical energy into literally isn't a cure-all, some lingering effects remain. It probably should take off the worst impairment penalties, as you're not running around with a broken leg after all the BODY is magically healed. But there's some remnant aches and pains that will take a while. Expert magical help (i.e. a magical healer who also knows the mundane stuff) could do miracles, but that would be an advanced perk or spell, whereas just buying your "Cure Wounds" spell is just spackling and duck tape. I think I remember a healer in some fantasy novel who made similar remarks, where healing just was done on the physical level without concerning itself with the mental trauma and spiritual side-effects of wounds. One of the Malazan books?

Which would work nicely with quicker BODY recovery, treating it like LTE in that regard.

You say that as if making high quality pictures or arranging props is easier than just jotting down some lines on a grid. And you've got the option of gradually revealing something, which isn't as easy with a e.g. a printed out dungeon. Never mind that, yes, I think that estimating distances with a grid (esp on the lower level, 5-10 increments) is easier than flitting around with a ruler or string. I always felt like a manic tailor when doing that.