mhd

The worst thing about maps in my experience is that they change the setup of locales. The hex/square becomes the universal unit of measurement. Corridors get pretty wide, everything tends to be quite square and uniformly shaped. And often, encounters occur at more fixed places. Because, well, you've got that one room prepared as a hex map, whereas transfering any random location from your maze of twisty passages will lead into some dead time while you get your ruler out. Mileages do vary, of course. My drawing ability pretty much defines the lower end of the scale here. I recently had to quickly sketch an octagonal room with corridors on every edge. The result was almost non-Euclidean.

One thing that was quite neat about RoleMaster is that you could have long-term wound effects, but they were separate from your "can I fight at all" buffer zone, i.e.e your hit points. So there was a difference between impairment and ability to withstand new punishment. Of course, mathematically you could be worse off, as a penalty to your offense and especially defense will make those hit points vanish more quickly. I'd also say that it seems more realistic if an impairing injury takes longer to recover from than points that mostly remain abstract (system overload? blood loss?). Even worse if the latter came from a plethora of minor wounds that barely penetrated armor. Going all Frodo because you got hit really well one time feels different than taking the same time to get back from a thousand papercuts... I think one of HERO's bastard cousins thus treated wounds by degree (multiple of some core stat/bonus), so you had to document your wounds and each of them had a different healing time (and degree of difficulty for medical treatment). One of the more narrative systems I've read recently gave this option in player hands, where you could either take the hits or take a penalizing wound.

For large battles I tend to get out my old Chessex battlemat, otherwise it's really all in our minds, plus the occasional sketch to denote position. At least in a melee-based fantasy campaign like my current HERO adventures. When area weapons are common, plenty of "mooks" abound and/or melee positioning actually matters (D&D, GURPS), maps are used most of the time. I do sometimes use tokens just to count how many opponents are still engaged, without any maps.

It seems that since time immmemorial, martial arts manuals have a solid foot in the self-help section. There might be some solid advice in "How To Kill Foes And Decapitate People", Holy Roman Empire gym bro edition, but taking everything at face value... Never mind that you always leave stuff out so that people actually come to you and don't just buy the books. Those seminars bring in the real money. (also cf. trap streets & stone lice...) But to get back on topic: Wouldn't it be interesting if those amulets really work awesomely well, with few easy exploits and are plenty cheap, taking all the fun out of war? That would be a hotbed for scammers trying to teach you fake ways to circumvent the force field. ("One surprising trick to slit someone's throat!") Sounds almost Pratchettesque.

This looks quite interesting. I actually toyed with the third "leg" of this, i.e. "short term" BODY. Wounds that can kill you, but that you'll recover more easily from (blood loss, shock etc.).

For our tents and porpoises, at least it'll mean that the game will operate on a similar scale and thus porting select mechanics should be easy enough, although you might end up with different tiers for the costs, of course.

It hasn't been that long ago, when "obviously" was often followed by references to Asian martial arts, and these days it seems we get a new influx of Thalhoffer-jutsu dudes and dudettes claiming the same universal absolute knowledge. And the proper science side of things isn't really all that better, as experimental archeology is still pretty new and the amount and rigor of tests is, well, maybe on the level of the social sciences... But at a certain point, I'll just have to say "screw you realism, I like my pawns and rooks". Arms, armor and their use is highly complex, turn-based combat is inherently flawed and when you're outside of a duel and in a pitched battle, nobody knows what's going on anyways. And after that you add your trolls, dragons and spells. So it's actually not unlikely that a mixture of OD&D's "every weapon does the same damage" and Tunnels & Trolls "every group rolls their weapon dice, we add them up and compare them" is closer to realism than a hyper-complex combination of initiative, maneuvering, armor, weapons with distinct penetration and tissue damage for weaponry. Yet to some (me included) those bits and pieces are fun and nice to reason about in a "gamistic" way. You get a "+X bonus to stage Y of the combat flowchart". That might be called "initiative" or "parry" in games that aim for at least a bit of verisimilitude. In a Kung Fu or D&D 4E game, it might be something more exotic. And they're probably vastly unrealistic or at least dubious oversimplifications. And I'd say that that's perfectly okay. In a game, there's nothing obviously wrong. Or right... There's a whole spectrum of "wrongness". Just like when you look at "real" fighting, where actual mortal combat is on one side, chess is on the other, and martial arts, football, movie and stage fights are somewhere inbetween. I for one, like watching people duke it out more than people moving wooden pieces around, but also like Jackie Chan jumping around more than sweaty hairy dudes choking each other. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Which seems to be the as-is case right now in HERO. I'm just saying, if you put more value into AP, the DCs need to go down accordingly. Yeah, weapons need to be "lethal enough", and once that's reached you tend to go for other criteria instead of going for the overkill (although that would probably be not as true in a GW campaign -- or the US hobbyist market). But I'm not just talking about realism here, but about different game models. GW might be closer to superheroics, where you might not really want to go into detail about the OCV/RMod/reliability parts of the design but instead provide a more or less linear TL -> DC curve, with added AP/Penetration/whatevs once that plateaus out (higher DCs then are reserved for e.g. energy weapons). Depends on whether you want the players to immediately go for the most advanced weapons available (the equivalent of the +3 sword) or cherry-pick according to various statistics ("well, the fish-headed gibbon mutants are mostly unarmored and tend to swarm attack, so I'll use my blunderbuss instead of my sniper mazer").

Although you don't really need to be AP to PA. Lump damage alone will serve you well, and firearms were no slouch in that department. HERO tends to exaggerate here already (great base damage, very easy to add to that), so I'm always a bit wary here. Of course this also depends on how the weapons are modeled. What's the difference between a musket and an assault rifle, besides RoF, especially given HERO's narrow DC range here. (I think I've seen tables (equipment guide?) where it's all about caliber, which really favors the muskets a bit too much. On the other hand, "Guns, Guns, Guns" might be a bit overkill for a beers & pretzels GW game.)

In a Gamma World setting, I'd be careful to not overrate scrounged metal armor. There's an incredibly huge difference between custom (post-)medieval plate vs. bent signs. On the other hand, you're going to find a few people who'll do the Clint Eastwood/Marty Mc Fly thing and just strap solid hunks of metal to their various body parts. If you're doing hit locations and decent encumbrance rules, that should be no problem, though. There's nothing inherently magical about firearms. They co-existed with armor for long periods of time. Now, granted, mail vs. bullets is just a pretty creative way of self-inflicted shrapnel. But it doesn't really matter whether you're hit with a warhammer, a quarrel or a blackpowder bullet if you're wearing plate. They had "proofed" plate where marks of the bullet tests were actually signs of quality. If I remember correctly, the hussars wore incredibly thick breastplates, and there have been records of them surviving cannonballs. Now in HERO terms, I guess that at some threshold you'll call certain bullets "armor piercing" and certain armor "hardened". There are probably arguments for making any firearm AP and shot-proof plate hardened, or you could wait 'til FMJ rounds to call them AP and make modern armor hardened. Even more superior weaponry would be even better at penetrating armor, but sadly HERO as written only has a fixed divisor. Although for Gamma World and it's wide variety of weapons, I'd try to simplify and disregard actual tech/science/physics and just go with "tech level" as the sole determining factor of both PD and DC.

Y'see, I just googled that quickly to post a confirmation here and didn't actually read it all the way through. Strangely enough, the paragraph continues with "the same ruleset that made Cyberpunk 2020 gain worldwide player acclaim". Which ain't exactly true. (Maybe even the opposite, although I blame CP 3's lack of success more on the abysmal production values) So it seems it'll carry the brand, although it will be interesting to see what's underneath, i.e. whether we'll get some major revisions compared to the last public version. (It would also be a good time to finally give the core a more open license, but I'm not really counting on that.)

http://thewitcher.com/news/view/1086 I don't think Talsorian will come up with a totally new system, although I wouldn't exactly bet money that it'll carry the "F" brand… Especially given that the press release mentions CP 2020 but not its ill-fated successor.

And/or increase the value of armor. A bigger gap between proper armor and dungeon protective gear doesn't really hurt. Unless, of course, you really want bows to be that deadly, then just roll with your 2d6+ weapons and give out special arrows that really are Armor Piercing. Perfectly valid and fun -- as long as one doesn't sell it as a close enough simulation of the English longbow and its broadheads vs. contemporary armor.

Well, there's supposed to be an official RPG coming out using HERO's Cousin We Dare Not Speak About.

Isn't that a wee bit complicated? I mean, even the GURPS guys got rid of their "PD" and that was comparatively simple. Never mind that solid mail was pretty much impervious to arrows, too, and bodkins weren't armor piercers. HERO's bows are just too damn good. As with other weaponry problems, this is partially based on the fact that certain weapons apparently have to be better than others at damaging people and there's only so many DCs we've got in the muscle-powered range.

The opposite is true, too. I don't think this fight will be won by might. I guess we'll get some epic back and forth, than some burst of clerical might that smites Roy, then some non-violent solution, probably involving the real Durkin in a "Nooooooooo" moment. Or Belkar will stab some undead kidneys.

It isn't? I can't count the fixes anymore: Wound/Vitality, second winds, convert any spell into healing spell, 5E "hit dice", complete recovery every rest, reserve points... But speaking of STUN/END, that's also a good source for limitations: Convert restored BODY to STUN (e.g. each point to 1d6 NND), then combat healing might become a risky preposition. You might want to recover a bit before the cleric comes a-laying. Outside of combat that's obviously not that harming, although LTE might be a good option of something that actually heals, but does drain.

Let's talk about limiting healing. You don't want to make it too easy, so that's a pretty common concept in campaigns. The default is 'once per person per 24h period'. In my current campaign I do it by having a Side Effect (always active) where END cost equals BODY restored, and the END reserve has Slow Recovery (1 day). I ditch the once/24h limit. The last campaign was in the Iron Kingdoms, where the gods are a bit stingy with their boons. I had a total BODY limit there, with unbelievers counting more (50% more the more beneficial god, double or triple for the more rat-bastardly). Plus empathic healing, where the healer takes on the damage and then regenerates it. And I think one of the HERO campaigns had "healing" that just was a STUN + REC Aid. Any other cool ideas or own builds? Right now there's little to no divine healing magic, so it's mostly done by wizards, but the next more D&D-ish campaign will surely come, so I'm interested in all kinds of suggestions.

"Initiating divorce" means the legal proceedings, right? I'm not sure whether I'd call that the actual point where the relationship failed. If more men cheat and then the women go to the lawyer, that would still qualify.

My "solution" to this general problem was extending all skills to the increased range that Power skills usually get. I mean, I got no problems with that in a superheroic setting, where it really hardly matters, but for skill-centric Heroic games, it's nice to have several degrees of capability (esp. if they're not based on just having superior stats or skill category adders). That worked well enough for our 'one skill per spell' setting, although you could easily do it the way FH suggest in it's 'Spells of Sarillion' example, where there's no active point penalty on the skills and ease of access is done via other ways. One could theoretically have different costs for different spells (from 1+1 to 3+2 or worse). Although that would almost assume that you've got a limit on generic modifiers. And of course, collecting modifiers. Have your +2 focus-based spell adder, assume that most spells are that hard because that's the abbreviated combat version and just "ritualize" them otherwise (great for Summon spells or battle magic), where you get a +X from ritual components, maybe some extra participants and generally a modifier based on the different time scale.

I just noticed that I seriously messed up my initial post. To clarify: I was talking about the formula where you derive a single defense rating from your sectional armor, for "generic" damage or when you don't use hit locations at all (I'm in the latter camp currently). There were two ways presented to derive this: Just consider torso and head armor, divide equally. Consider all the armor, divide equally. My concern is with the weight as in importance each section of armor receives in this formula, not its mass (so maths, not physics). I consider the weight in kilograms a solved issue, as we do have scales. Formula 2 gives has an "importance factor" of 1 for each section, formula 2 either 1 or 0. So my question is about whether we can do better than that and whether it's worth it. The complexity of the formula doesn't really matter that much, as this isn't really done once per combat round. You enter your sectional armor in a spreadsheet, no matter whether it's "sum(all sections)/16" or something worthy of a scientific paper. I proposed another idea and Cosmoemeritus came up with another possibility: 3. Go by armor coverage. As the armor weight/kg tables seem to provide that, just use those measurements. 4. Go by the likelihood of getting a hit on an armor location, i.e. look at the 3d6 distribution. And just by the seat of my pants, I could think of several other line of thoughts, starting from just giving torso and head a fixed multiplier (1.2? 1.5?) before dividing all sections. Or using the distribution from a 'high shot' to convey importance (a variant of #4). Or, heck, use formula #2, and just consider that chest and head pieces actually were more protective. A cuirass had thicker steel than sabatons, never mind there's a bigger likelihood of layered armor.

I was mostly talking about the attempts of an universal mechanism, which is something that Fuzion certainly did, and where you'd come pretty close with some of the APG rules. Balancing stats and skills is a difficult topic, and I would say that HERO itself has a bit of a glass-house problem (with a skill system that's awfully close to binary). Lately my heresy goes beyond just mentioning Fuzion, with impure thoughts about non-linear costs for stats/skills and degree-of-success mechanics

Knockback itself, sure, but I'd say that most justifications for resisting knockback also would apply to resisting trips, i.e. increased mass, limbs, density. If it's just this extreme corner case, sure. But generally you'll find lots of size and weight differences, especially in fantasy heroic campaigns (more so than super-heroics, I'd argue). So some mitigating factor besides combat defense or Breakfall aptness would be nice to have. And I think there is a reference to using some size-based limit for both Throws and Trips somewhere in the books, although I think that's a hard cap, not some gradual impediment. So, in other words, Fuzion? I'm currently using a 1:3 characteristic bonus plus expanded skill ranges (1-10), with a universal roll-high mechanic. Works pretty well. We expanded the use of familiarities for some regular skills (e.g. Survival), but combat still is the only section of the rules where you distribute skill levels. Which is fine, I like this better than the separate attack/parry skill system suggested in one of the APGs or Fuzions default attack/defense roll using the same skill for both.

I wonder whether it's the author or whether Cracked's infantile format is forcing this, but that headline is bad. If it's a chronicle of one woman's experience in four sections, you can't really claim that it's "4 sides" nor "women".