AmadanNaBriona

Re: Cool Guns for your Games I wouldn't sweat it. Caseless rounds require the propellant charge to double as the housing, thus presumably have noticeably different forensic chemical characteristics from normal gunpowder, and might possibly include inert packing materials like wads, sabots, or powdered composites. I expect that if caseless technology ever takes off, the evidence to prove a caseless weapon was fired will be found, especially in a higher tech setting where higher tech forensic science is also likely.

Re: Proper Whip Build in 6e I don't normally quote wikipedia, but the section on whips as practical combat weapons is pretty concise, so here.... "As practical weapons Because of popularity of whips in film and television, people often want to learn to use the whip as a weapon, though in reality only certain types and usages are practical. Whips when applied against a human adversary work primarily through inflicting pain and fear rather than actual force. Short, stiff whips, including crops, are capable of inflicting welts or painful stings, but typically no disabling injuries. The more martially-designed sjambok can inflict serious wounds and sometimes even cut through clothing. Single-tailed whips hold a fearsome reputation from popular depictions; the fear of being painfully struck and the loud crack produced by long whips can scare less resolute opponents into fleeing. Striking a person or animal with a single-tail whip can inflict cuts, but with a whip made from common materials, these wounds are simple high-speed abrasions that do not penetrate more than the depth of the skin. If the whip has sharp barbs or the tip includes material, such as Kevlar, that is fine enough and strong enough to cut, there can be more serious wounds, but even with these, a disabling injury is unlikely. Whips with these features require an expert whip handler to avoid inadvertently cutting themselves, the whip, or other people or objects the whip may contact. A single-tail whip can wrap around limbs or body or the neck. This is fairly easy to do, but not practical in most physical combat environments where it is difficult to maintain the necessary spacing between the target and the person throwing the whip. Some shorter whips are designed with a heavy lead or steel ball woven into the pommel or a shot bag filled with lead shot braided into the body. Other whips have flexible metallic cable or rigid metal rods in the handle. These materials provide mass, making the whip easier to crack during normal use. These weights and rigid pieces also enable the whip to be reversed and used as a bludgeon. The Chinese Jiujiebian ("nine section whip"), is a segmented metal chain whip designed for use in martial arts. In the hands of someone trained in its uses, it is considerably more effective as a weapon than other whips."

Re: Heavenly HEROic Host: Playing Angels Pagan brother o' mine, sometimes it scares me how alike we think. This is real bloody close to the character I made for a 1st. ed. Mage game, at least origin wise.

Re: What is the strangest super power you have allowed from a SFX? Back in the 80's my group all put together comedy Champions characters for a tongue in cheek Con game by buddy was running. Turns out the villain of the piece was Doctor Nasty, a power armor mastermind parody, who was ralling the cavity creeps to do... something... I honestly can't remember. What I do recall was the villainous Doctor's chief henchman, Zodo the frog. Zodo was a small-dog-sized frog with Cartman's personality and a nasty acid vomit attack. Zodo had a... unique physical disad. He was so bouncy that he took knockback from knockback damage, and a Vunerability that he took double knockback from physical attacks. Combine this with moderate defenses, 3/4 damage reduction, massive body, and regeneration. So this foul mouthed frog would heap abuse on players and heave on them until someone finally creams him, whereupon he would fly like a rag doll at increasing velocity around the battlefield wiping things out until something arrested him or he went soaring off to the horizon, almost inevitably well into massive negative Stun.

Re: Horror Hero I didn't take it that way, just riffing on the original idea to make it more motivational for that sort of player.. I've had 'em at my table before, too.

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Guildhouse, more or less. A place where the mysteries of a craft are held

Re: Horror Hero The nice thing about doing the Teaser scene is that you can use it to motivate the players. If you make it clear that anyone surviving the prologue will represent the available pool of reinforcements, and possible replacement characters (possibly with a promised XP Bonus, say +25, for the sudden PC upgrade) in the event of casualties among the primary characters (Edit: This also plants the idea that PC lives aren't, in fact, sacrosanct). Gives 'em solid motive to keep their mooks alive, thus increasing investment.

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing this was the consensus among my old HERO group as well. Start with the character you want, and only spend XP when it feels character appropriate. Lots of minor radiation accident style power ups in between campaigns (Viking warrior spends his accumulated XP to learn Rune Magic, f'rex), along with the occasional "Training Montage" was the usual result.

Re: Ranged weapon reload times A steam driven flywheel system with an autoloader would make a credible version of the full auto dart throwers from Heavy Metal

Re: Ranged weapon reload times My FH setting is roughly 16th C in tech level, so guns are a fairly common item. I handled them as such... Start with size categories rather than strict by-caliber lists. Light (4DC base), Medium (5DC) and Heavy (6DC) works best for me. base forms are pistol, long pistol, arquebus (carbine, in modern terms, or horse gun), shoulder arms (Caliver, most rifles, later style muskets) and brace guns (Early forked rest muskets, wall guns, jezzails). These all modify OCV and Range Mod, and longer guns add to base DC as well. Use the boostable charges rules to reflect the ability to overcharge the chamber Guns are not AP, but the real weapon/armor limits are used to for a tech scale system, of sorts. basic fantasy armor is assumed to have 1/2 effect versus firearms unless built to proof. "Proof" armor is another form of Fine armor from the FH system for improved quality gear. I give all early firearms +1 stun, as they tend to use big slow moving lead slugs. Early firearms lost power fast, and all period texts on gunnery note the various ranges at which you can expect varying levels of effectiveness. So I give all black power guns a DC boost with the limited by range limit, so they do greater damage at closer range. Pistols get +2DC, so their point blank is only 8m, arquebus through shoulder arms get +4DC(16 m), and the big guns get +6DC, giving them extra damage out to 32m. I give fire arms "Requires a Skill roll" instead of a flat activation roll, because they are really very subject to skill and situational modifiers. The skill roll is made during loading, because that is usually when things go wrong, but you find out what side effects you've won when you pull the trigger. I've only had one bad black powder accident myself, Sparky has blown hisself up twice... but like riding a motorcycle, if you use BP in any sort of abundance, you expect that every once in a while it'll try and bite you. If you blow the roll by more than 3 points, the side effects happen while loading (Should'a blown all the embers outta your pan), 3 or less and you get some variation of Jammed, Hangfire, or Boom (full point blank DC of the weapon including any overcharge bonuses, Reduced Penetration as your weapon turns into shrapnel) Superior grade powder adds +1DC and gives a +1 to the skill roll. Bad powder subtracts -1DC and -1 to the skill roll (or more if it's in really bad shape)

Re: Ranged weapon reload times sounds about right, from my archery and reenactment experiences. My top speed using horn, flask and cap was about 2 shots a minute, firing from a set position with my gear laid out. Sparky, my chief gunner, was able to top speed drill at around 4 shots a minute with his matchlock caliver, but only until he ran through his bandoleer of pre-measured charges (apostles, in period slang), then dropped to around 2 as well. Most of our less experienced gunmen loaded considerably slower.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Yeah, I just got done watching the full Jon Stewart segment online. He's pretty awesome.

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? Makes sense.

Re: What is the building in which a mason works called? I was doing some reading related to this the other day, specifically in regards to masons marks. Each Lodge has it's own base lodge mark, which is the root mark for all masons trained at that lodge, and as the basis for any new lodges branched off from the main lodge. This allowed for the Master Masons on a particular project to recognize the providence of training for any journeymen hired for a particular job site by a glance at his mark.

Re: Horror Hero There are some Stupid GM Tricks one can pull to increase player attachment to NPCs Having your players write them up is one. Another I've posted before (which can tie in with the first) is the "teaser" scene, where you have the players play a squad of lower powered characters right at the beginning so you can give a nice preview of the opposition and hit them with the gloves off. Any survivors of the scene can be brought in later as NPC's

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units Been thinking about this problem for quite a while myself as well. I don't recall quite what I came up with, rules-wise, but yeah, I did it as an AOE attack/attacking a hex. I used an autofire style "multiple hits for better rolls" resolution system, IIRC, but it's been a few years since I toyed with the ideas.

Re: Why the change in destroying planets between SH 5E and SH 6E? Most of the time when discussing this sort of thing I'm looking at it from the perspective that taking the "Real weapon" limit means they have to follow the laws of physics... that and the whole "subject to common and dramatic sense". not to say I don't want it both ways... if my planet buster is a weapon that creates a singularity, I want to be able to build it with an AOE that is equally effective through kilometers of solid rock. And you really don't want to get me started on the lack of secondary effects... attacks of this sort should actually do more damage from the side effects than from the damage. A 30d6 Megascale AOE line punching a 100 km wide hole through the center of our planet would cause all manner of problems even if you were on the rest of the globe outside the immediate AOE

Re: Why the change in destroying planets between SH 5E and SH 6E? The Boom table is one of my go-to places as well (hell, Nyrath's whole site is, but I digress). Excellent breakdown, and I concur with your results. A better example of Reasoning by Effect, broken down into simple steps, has seldom been seen by reliable witnesses

Re: Why the change in destroying planets between SH 5E and SH 6E? I haven't stepped up to 6th yet, so this is all 5th ed perspective, but the planet busting rules have never sat right with me. While I'm good with the Megascale attacks for WMD's thing, I think setting the damage at 10d6 is silly low for a substantial WMD, much less a planet killer. Nukes in 5th pretty well standardized out at 20d6K, which seems to fit what an attack of this sort "should" do. Part of my reasoning is based on the "Blowthrough" rules from UMA, to whit: If an attack does Body equal to double a barriers Body+Defense, the attack continues undiminished. An extension of the Casual Strength rules. This gives us a reasonable benchmark for "vaporized" rather than just destroyed. At 70 average Body, a 20d6K Megascale explosion Nuke vaporizes most of the things it should, and functionally kills the rest, whereas it'd be possible for a tank crewman to ride out a 10d6 planet killer hit with little or no personal damage.

Re: Hunger Games and Survivor Rumors have it that the reason season 3 suddenly didn't air back in '09 (and the show hasn't been back despite rather noisy demand) is that the non-lethal combat turned out to be not so non-lethal. It's one of the only reality shows I'll watch, and it's really an amusing show. Only other show that scratches a similar itch I can think of was Scrapheap Challenge/ Junkyard Wars, but that didn't have the awesome fictional framing device or psychological trickery. I personally think they should mostly back off from HtH and start using guns equipped with MILES gear. Heck, with a Hollywood budget it'd be easy to hook squibs to specific sensors for visually apparent "Kill" shots

Re: Killiing a lot of zombies from a safe position. The sequel has more stuff in it, if you haven't played... http://www.kongregate.com/games/sarahnorthway/rebuild-2?acomplete=rebuild2

Re: Evil PCs I've been in or run quite a few through the years. The majority of them have been in shades of grey S&S settings, in fact most of our evil PC games have been very setting dependent. let me think... Lahnkmar FH game. Dragerean FH game. Stormbringer Agents of Chaos game, our Rolemaster crimelord game. WHFRP campaign inspired by The Black Company. Every WoD game and many Amber games could be considered all Evil PC's almost by default..

Re: More space news! WoooHoooo. Magnetic containment, like I expected. Wonder if they're using Dr. Bussard's new arrangement for the containment bottle?

Re: Things That Go Bump in the Night Sounds like my kinda book, and will add this to my list. So, this thread reminded me that I was curious about the whole Slenderman thing, which led me off into creepypasta and Fear Mythos territory, which I'm now considering adding into my setting and now I really kinda do want to see your write up for Slendy, if not the rest of the Fears. I feel like there's some sort of causality loop going on here p.s. OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING makes for interesting bedtime reading

Re: Unofficial Advanced Player's Guide 3 Survey. I like these. In general, I'd like a bit more systemic support for optional rules and more ability to manipulate said optional rules. You indirectly raised a good idea... "Does Knockback" could be easily tweaked to act as a broader advantage: Uses Optional Rule X, where X isn't normally active in a given campaign.