AmadanNaBriona

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Reading some of the older posts on this thread reminded me of another quote concerning the same PC duck. The player was a bit distracted, looking up a spell effect or somesuch, and so when my character, sensing an ambush, yelled "Duck!", he looked up and said "And proud of it!" And was promptly cut down by a hail of arrows.

Re: Fun with luck points - Refine my powers That mechanic is quite similar to the one I use for my FH and Champs campaigns, which are a little less cinematic than my pulp games. We play with fairly strong starting chracters, which when combined with an "instant" XP luck system can encourage XP hoarding. Which I like. I tend to prefer "radiation accident/ retraining" types of XP expenditures, where players save up a chunk of XP then use them to alter part of the focus of the character... The Viking warrior is laid up for 6 months with a major slow healing injury, so starts studying with a Galdor-Vitki and learns runecraft spells. the rogue gets caught on the front lines of a war, narrowly manages to survive, and decides to go to the local blademaster to learn how to defend herself. The power armor hero decides he needs to be able to add some modular attachments to his armor to deal with special situations, so he buys a VPP for said attachments. But I'm going off topic...

Re: Need feedback on house rules for my new campaign So how do you deal with real life examples that totally defy your house rules? One of the folk I taught swordfighting to (european 2 handed sword mainly) was an ex-football player who was in the police academy. He was 6' 5", 245 lbs of muscle, could lift me by the neck with one hand darth vader style (we used it in a choreographed fight one time) and was and still is one of the fastest and most agile men I've ever known. And he learned quick. I could usually take him with a trick, based on my greater experience. If I tried the same trick a second time tho, I usually would up nursing a painful injury. Even using blunted blades, getting hit with a 6 foot claymore HURTS. When I met him, you might say it was obvious how many points I had put into knowlege skills Although, within a year, he had become scholar enough so that I finally had someone I could discuss celtic history and legend with, as well as military tactics and period culture. When I stopped doing Ren Fiares, I left him in charge as my obvious sucessor. Unfortunately, he still needs to work on his more peaceful PRE based skills.

Re: Fun with luck points - Refine my powers I confess to not having read this thread, but have always liked the whole basic idea of "fate points" or whatever you want to call them. I've used several different variations of the idea, but the one I finally settled on for my Justice Inc. game was in the realm of an optional rule... Pushing your Luck Heros are favored by fate, and often have luck on their side. But Lady Luck is a fickle mistress and her price is high. Any player can alter game events in ways very similar to luck, but at a cost. They tell the GM that they wish to avoid or alter a situation for dramatic purposes. If the GM agrees, then he or she will determine how many levels of luck are needed to acheive the effect. A simple reroll would usually take 1 level of luck. Changing sucess to failure, or vice versa, could be one level or more, depending on the situation. Generally, the earlier in a sequence of events a character pushes his luck, the less levels of effect will be needed. Thus, its easier to "happen" to grab a stray bush after failing a climbing roll than it is to "happen" to find a soft landing spot while falling from a sheer cliff. After the GM has determined the appropriate effect level, for the duration of the session, or chapter, or other dramatic time interval that seems appropriate, the character looses any luck that was used while pushing. There is no requirement, however, that the character have luck in the first place. if the effect of the push goes negative, the character gains temporary unluck dice till his balance is restored. As an example.... Our Stong Jawed Hero, in classic "Harrison Ford-type character" is built with say, 3D6 Luck and 2D6 unluck. He's running away from several hundred enraged natives. He goes sprinting across a rickety bridge over a chasm. The GM decides this is a good time to check luck. His luck comes up naught, but both unluck dice hit. The bridge breaks. The players tries to leap for the far portion of the broken bridge and grab ahold so he can swing across and then climb to saftey. He leaps, grabs the bridge, swings across and is stunned by the impact with the wall. He fails a roll to hang on while stunned, and finds himself falling 500 feet to the bottom of the chasm and probably his doom. At this point, the GM checks his luck again, as he's REALLY in trouble, but has been keeping in the spirit of the genre. No dice. So the player pushes his luck. The GM decides that it'd take 2 levels of luck to take half damage on impact (say, falling trough tree branches) or 3 to manage to hit a deep pool in the winding river below. The character hits the pool. Having pushed his luck 3 levels, he now has to deal with the next scene with NO functiong dice of luck, and 2 dice of unluck. If he winds up having to do something similar, to ofset his bad luck, he'll find the rest of the scene being played out with his new temporary 5D6 of unluck. Eventually, a players luck will run out. I usually cap this at a max of 5 dice unluck. This mechanic also works well for characters bought with Luck as a main portion of the charater, as it allows them the option of spending some of their short term potential luck to pull of the Longshot type effects that, say 10D6, luck should allow for without always having to make their luck rolls.

Re: Bardic spell - "We are Heroes" And incendentally..... I'm sure I can't be the only person who models bards off their celtic origin rather than the "adventuring minstrel" model D&D has inflicted on the gaming community. For excellent examples of more "traditional" bards, check out GURPS Celtic Myths, "Hunter of the Light" by Risa Aratyr, most of Morgan Llwyellyn's books, and the classic Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander.

Re: Limits on Killing attacks? No problem.... I probably come across as a know-it-all johnny come lately. Just for reference tho, I've been gaming for a LONG time, and Hero came into my life pretty early. I've done a LOT of thinking about it, including a LOT of thinking on weapons and effects. In the days before Star hero, we had a campaign that was, due to an utter lack of agreement, know only as our "Space Game". I did most of the hardware work for it, producing some 500 odd distinct bits of gear from out of my own imagination and from converting ideas stolen from every possible Sci Fi source. In the process, because I was doing illustrations for the hardware as well, I had to learn a TON about weapons and future weapon devlopment theory, as I wanted the designs to appear feasable and explainable. (as an amusing aside... the earliest version of said campaign featured a badguy mega corp called Arasaka Industries.... that found publication in R.Taslorian's Cyberpunk when some of our older gamers graduated, went to college in Santa Cruz and started interning at R Tas.) you are right about the greater variation in the BODY damage of killing attacks. In most genres, however, that is entirely appropriate. There is a world of difference between taking a bullet clean through a muscle and having one hit the same location but then striking bone. In the past I was more inclined to tinker with the system. BUt one of the things I like about Hero is that I don't HAVE to fix the base rules. Adapt them to fit genre, yes. Fix, no. One past idea I tinkered with involved decreasing base damage, then adding a DC bonus based on how successful the attack roll was. The thought was to tie it to real world effect... the more solidly you hit someone, the more damage they take. This has the effect of making the more skilled characters and villans extremely deadly, tho, and makes low skilled attackers somewhat inneffectual. Thus I dropped it. As a metagame rules set, Hero works. Pretty much as written. If you are adapting it to a particular genre, then you have to take in consideration the conventions of that genre. In my experiences in the real world, "killing attacks" are a LOT more chaotic and unpredictable in effect than "normal" attacks. Its all about concentration of energy... when you concentrate a lot of energy in a small area, you create a larger potential for harm, but also a greater chance of said enegry expending itself on a portion of the target that can take the damege without much loss of function to the target. I can give some of my RT experiences if anyone cares. Its good to be back on the boards. I tend to go in spurts with my various webboards, but its VERY nice to finally be back on here as a poster. Yea for new computers!

Re: Limits on Killing attacks? Yes, I saw that way back in the beginning... and I mentioned it in my first posting too... I just figured that folk were having to much fun crunching numbers and arguing philosophy to have noticed either mention, so it deserved at least as good an explaination as the basic dice theory posts got

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... have had a number of good ones over the years, but right off the top of my head, I'd have to say my all time favorites came from an old Runequest campaign. First quote was from an Elven character (elves are plants in Glorantha) after being soundly torched by a dream dragon. "Mind if I smoke?" The other occured after our resident Storm-god following semi berserker barbarian duck found himself, yet again, lying on the ground missing a limb "Looks like Steve's not playing with a full duck again"

Re: Limits on Killing attacks? Bravo!!!! Great post.

Re: Limits on Killing attacks? I was gonna leave this alone after my previous post, but I just can't do it.... If it really bugs you, use hit locations. If you wanna be Superheroic, don't use any of the other rules, just the Stun Mod. Puts the Stun Mod into a bell curve like everyone seems to prefer. If you're worried about the fact that a KA can do a one shot takedown and a normal attack can't, then use the NStun Mod as well. then a head shot will be as likely to oneshot someone regardless of the nature of the attack. And they'll only show up on a 3-5, which is a pretty low %. Of course, the temptation for called shots then arises.... But if a hero makes a -8 called shot on top of Dr D's DCV, then I'd say he deserves at least a good chance of stunning him. And you know what....it doesn't involve trying to dream up some half kludged system to replace a game function thats survived HOW many years of playtesting? And on the character defences idea... Everyone bearing tons of resistant defences isn't all that genre appropriate. But GM's tend to swallow their tounges when you trot out a 0 Def, 17 base DCV spiderman clone.

Re: Adult themes in gaming, a rant of sorts At the risk of sounding like the classic old dude (damn, I'm only 35) White Wolf and LARP really radically increased the number of female gamers, or at least brought them further out into the open and forced more of the rest of the gaming community to have to deal with real life. I remember going to cons in the 80's where as little as 1% of the con population was female. And they usually reveled in the attention (I know my GF did) And there was always the one girl with the smoking body in the chain mail bikini whos sole purpose in life was to leave chaos and madness in her wake.

Re: Stuff to Make Up about the Gods I'll second the rep idea... this really is VERY good

Re: Limits on Killing attacks? without tackling any more math, 'cause y'all have beaten that one to the ground, I will say that I've never had a problem with the normal attack vs killing dispute. I've seen as many bad guys KO'd by a lucky 2 rolled on knockback from a bricks normal punch as I have seen folks go down from a lucky roll of 6 on the stun die. That being said...it was really a non issue in our games. We used hit location rules. Maybe not quite as 4 color, but then again, neither were our games. Most of our games had a genre range that went from your standard DC vigalante campaign (lots of KA's and martial arts) to X-men (lots of KA's and equivilant Normal attacks) to Wildcards (lots of KA's. low defenses). I still feel that the absolute best power for simulating comics reality is Damage Reduction, tho seldom did we use it at greater than 50% level unless the character in question was supposed to be well, nigh invunerable. We're talking Cthulhu invunerable here. Godzilla invunerable. Maybe even Tick invunerable, tho with the more mortal sorts, usually the last 25% at least had some limitations to keep some weak point. And incidentally... In FH games, DR makes Giant sized critters properly horrifying. At one point a 75% DR dragon all but wiped out 5 250 pt FH characters, most of whom could lash out 10-12 dc's with effort. In conclusion, and back on topic... Its never really been a problem over here. I tend to encourage my players to use KA's for attacks that seem like they should be KA's, and HA/EB for th ones that don't. And I don't dig players with silly write ups just to satisfy the genre. If your character swings around a sword, you'd better have a REAL good reason for trying to write it up as a normal attack.

Re: Stuff to Make Up about the Gods Nice outline. I'm probably gonna steal it for cleaning up my widely scattered notes and the thoughts that haven't made it to paper yet. *obviously, I'm in mega gaming mode right now... spending all free time on here*

Seems like an odd combonation, eh? Bear with me. It starts with a little rant. I was listening to an online "radio" show called FreakNBitches and have gotten up to episode 6. Now, this is a geek interest show, and fetures segments about Porn, Fantasy books, various rants, and gaming. D&D in particular. Kind of jaw dropping to realize that they are just like a major segment of the gaming populace. Stuck in about the 7th grade. Talking about the problems associated with gaming with a GIRL, because her character inevitably, in every game, sooner or later gets raped, has to deal with STD's and pregnancy, and generally gets crap dumped on her that, were it done to one of her fellow players characters would cause them to forsake gaming forever and take up a life of chess and sociopathy. So... after having her half sprite druidess get raped and impregnated by someone big enough for the child to be fatal, she decides that her next character is going to be a she-hulk half orc barbarian, who uses her wounded foes for her pleasure. Thus showing, that tho revenge is sweet, woman gamers are alas not immune to doing the exact same stupid shit that male gamers do. Hearing this got me thinking. First, my brain detoured for a moment, thought *hmmm... half sprite... in distress...Redneck Treeman takes revenge* (see http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05042002.shtml for explanation) then got on track with thinking about my gaming past. All in all, I have probably been pretty lucky. I got most of my juvenile gaming tendencies out back when I was, oh, 10 or 11, and by 12 I had joined a gaming based Explorer troop... which also contained girls. So I and my gaming buddies all got used to having female players around right from early on. It let us get past the "Uh, UH, UH!!!... There are, like, uh, real BREASTS in the room. CAN'T ... MAKE ... BRAIN ... WORK" stage pretty quickly and painlessly. It also introduced us to older gamers in the area, up to college age and a few beyond, and to almost every known system. I played my first Champions game in 1982, and still have my playtesters edition of FH around here somewhere (I'm also lucky that the original HG office was 11 miles from my house, so there were a lot of hero fans in the area). It also led to my first retail job, in the local gamestore, natch... the assistant manager was my Runequest GM. So there were women in our gaming group from a very early age, and we had guidance from our more experienced peers. One nice side effect was that it killed most of the guys unnatural but common gaming urges to play scantily clad nymphomaniac female characters. Something about having real girls looking at you like you are a dead guppy for making such a shallow sterotyped depiction of their sex. And then not being able to play it well. If the girls want to play that way...at least they have the right gender mindset. My GF all through HS and early college was a regular part of our group, just as much of a genre fiend as the rest of us, and specialized in playing very useful damsels in distress. Adult themes, thus were never really a problem in our games... if it fit the genre, we used them. If it didn't, we didn't. That got me thinking about various fictional books, and how they handle such themes, and if they do it well. Raven, Swordsmistress of Chaos (can't recall the author), John Normans Gor, and a few other books, as well as Heavy Metal magazine convinced me that there is a Juvenille Sex Fantasy genre. The Sword of Truth series, by Terry Goodkind and The Kushiel trilogy by Jaqueline Carey show just as plainly that adult topics can have their place. Most fantasies fall between, with a lot of the more adult action happening off scene, or handled tactfully. It so happens that my friends, generally belonging to the RenFaire/Goth/Theater/LARP/Vampire/kinky/poly/pagan crowd tend to enjoy adult themes, and so, consequently, I began working on a setting with a very dark, very grim, and very adult overtone. Then I moved to the mountains, and had no friends within 3 hours who gamed. And so seriously went to work on my campaign setting, lest I go mad. And I toiled for a couple of years, finally had a group of player assembled (I had found an old roomate in the area, and there was a group he played with). Joined their 3rd Ed D&D game, to get to know the players and learn a bit about the new rules (which do not suck as bad as I expected), started to fire up my campaign and... Suddenly moved again. To Fresno. Ugh. Got a new girlfriend, moved in with a friend. He was a gamer. She was not. The first non gamer I'd ever dated. I spent a long time talking to her, and she eventually became interested in trying it. And guess what. Right back to the beginning of this rant. Diehard Paladium system fanatics. Utterly stuck at 7th grade gamer mode. Characters having sex with each other to escape the tedium of the game, and of course dealing with the ubiquitous Pregnacy check, STD check, and Quality of Sex Check (I'm, alas, not joking). We rather quickly decided that having real sex was less aggrevating, and stopped playing. Eventually moved, back to the Bay Area, and found, eventually, new friends we WANT to game with. And my lass is willing to try again. So here we go. This has turned into a rant, so i'm going to change my intended title. Then I'll post a villan race with its place in my dark adult themed game, its uses (as a plot device and antagonist) and explanations my thinking, probably in a seperate thread with a mention of this rant. So, after all that... What are other peoples thoughts on the matter?

Re: Advice on map detail Yeah, my campaign world is solidly 16th century tech by now as well, with local variations in magic and the supernatural accounting for a bit of retarded development. I wen't 16 century for fairly obvious reasons... I know the millitary tech of the period inside and out from 15 years of research for Faire. That and I like having cannon on ships, and the occasional firearm, petards and the like. I use conventions within the setting similar to those used in L. Modesitt Jr.'s Recluse series or the Black Sun trilogy by C.S. Friedman. Both authors address the existance of gunpowder and technology within a fantasy setting and how to limit them. Great books... my ideas for my magic system were initally prompted by these. Besides... I dig the 16th century. Neat Martial Arts, groovy armor and fairly advanced tactics. My campaign gets a bit odd tho, because its very much a "what kind of society would evolve from a mix of early celts and early norsemen in a high magic environment with elves around" brought all the way to 16th century tech. No steampunk tho. Not for me. Not yet anyway. I'd need to read some good fiction on the subject before my mind could really embrace the idea.

Re: Bardic spell - "We are Heroes" I read this, and with a little thought, decided I really like this. For my 2 groats, I'd say to leave it as a semi magical skill, with no END cost. I confess to having experienced this effect in RL, during one of our choreographed battles at a Ren Faire. seriously, warpipes and battle drums make you fight better. Probably 'cause the fill all the empty parts of your brain that'd normally let you become frightened or distracted with "GO Smash the Enemy" vibes. This calls to mind a number of other similar bardic skills... reduced end on running, UBO, still encurs LTE losses (done this one too...did a half mile march in full armor at a log because we had the Wicked Tinkers piping for our march.... funny, when 70 guys in chainmail hauberks and 2 handed weapons come jogging down the road, people get out of the way ) A Pre boost similar to the Inspire Talent is a must Another cool idea would be to give a similar treatment to the Berserk Fury Talent. AS log as you don't mind all your allies going bugnuts crazy For some reason, I just got the image of what that ability would've done in one campaign I ran whith one character who was a deposed Dwarven King with a core group of Followers who were the remains of his personal guard.

Re: Advice on map detail SWEET!!!!! The Lankhmar geomorphs were always one of my favorite game aids, and a wonderful way to fill in a city. Now I don't have to go on a weekend long raid of my storage unit 3 hours away to go fetch mine. BTW, I have the same problems with drawing "orphan" buildings on an otherwise blank map. usually I'll just pencil in numbers on one copy while the master waits for artistic inspiration and subsequent embellishment. Of course... zI'm weird when it comes to maps...I like digging out the vellum and calligraphy set for making the players copy, often with cryptic notes in the matgins... sometimes in magical codes or runic notation... for fellow clue droppers who like making hard to decipher maps.... find a runeset you like (there are some GREAT fonts to do this in a word processor), write your clue, run it through babelfish to translate it to something similar to the orgin of the runes (Icelandic, for instance works fine for norse runes ), then copy the translation and convert it to the rune font. Makes it look great, and if someone is ambitious enough to translate it, it'll still be gibberish to most players... if the Character can read it tho, then hand over the translation. Sometimes its fun to let the players figure it out if they can... most hard core gaming groups will have at least one player who can puzzle out basic futhark runes, and there are just enough similarities to english that the translation can give some tantalizing hints.. "Wait...that last word kinda sounded like dragon when you read it!". If you think thats too easy, then go for it with Ogham and Gaelic, and be VERY impressed if a player manages to translate it (Its probably even character appropriate... the only folk I've EVER known who might be able to pull this off tend to play rather druidic/bardic/ranger/sidhe types anyway)

Re: A high powered campaign 250 points does not, by definition, need to be a high powered game. A lot of it depends on how your players are inclined to build their characters. My former group of players (and incedentally, the new ones I'll be introducing to the wonders of Hero) followed my lead and went to 250 max starting points (100 base +disads) for all of our old heroic level games. It works VERY well as a power level if you want to go for the cinematic/literary feel. One important note tho is that we didn't stick to one campaign or set of characters very long, and were a bit stingy with experience, so a character with 40 exp was a bit of a veteran. This power level has worked for us in almost literaly EVERY genre, except supers. We became so used to the luxury of having well fleshed out characters with 30-40 points woth of "flavor" skills that a 250 point super seemed, well, one dimensional. Also worth noting...we were all horrible genre fiends. It was not uncommon for a mini campaign to be spurred by a player making a new character that just begged for a starring role. One reccomendation is to pay closer attention to campaign limits, and keep vigilant watch for munchkinism. Rather than my prattling off a list,I'd say take the power level and try stating out some of your favorite fictional characters. We've messed around with playing in verious authors worlds, and I've seen 250 work fine for making characters in settings and power levels as diverse as Lankhmar, The Belgariad, Jhereg, and the Tain Bo Culainge, among others. It all comes down to character design and campaign power levels. My character in our Epic Celt campaign spent, oh, around 25 points on professional skills, just so he could reasonably hold the descriptive "An Ildanach" (The many talented) after his name

Re: Crazy idea for a magic "system". I can see a couple of ways that a "unique to caster" magic system could work, without going the superpower route. One way would be to use a talent based magic system, with different talents represeting different aspects of magic power, with a caveat that no "gifted" person can have the exact same set of talents. Another way would be a form of granted magic similar to the beliefs in old european ceremonial magic, or some forms of shamanism. I'm thinking about Elric and his ring here. Specific spell effects are granted by specific spirits, and only one mage may be allied or linked to a particular spirit at a time. Thus, while two characters may have similar fire spells, there will be at least cosmetic differences, and probably gameplay ones. This leads as well to roleplaying possibilities...seeking new sprit allies., binding them, seeking true names, etc... as well as ideas like a Master giving control of a lesser spirit to his appretice as a graduation present. The idea of lesser and greater magic, with greater being unique... that can work as well. A friend of mine wrote a novel where there were a limited number of "Great Spells" which kinda bounced around the world when they didn't have a host. They were essentially high level Words of Power, which were the echos of the Voice of Creation. from time to time, one would find a mind that was compatible with it, and they would join for the life of the caster. Thus, while there may have been various famous Necromancers down through history, at any given time there was a maximum of ONE person who could speak the Word of the Dead. Any other magic is relegated to the studies of wizards, who try and decipher some of the lesser Words, which are part of creation and thus available to all. A mage with many years of research may have a broad scope of available powers, but anyone weilding a True Word would be able to overwhem them in sheer power. Just a few ideas.

I can't beleive i forgot.. Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon books for the Eternal Champoin cycle... Chaosium has done good setting work for this one too... A great example of a Tech- Magic fantasy society. I've always loved this world. I enjoyed the Hawkmoon books even more than Elric's ones, and thats saying something.

Some other examples The tradition of Fantasy settings being descended from High tech origins has a long tradition. Examples from literature include The Sword of Shannara series by Terry Brooks (post apocalyptic fantasy...all races except Elves are decended from mutated humans), The Cycle of Fire by Janny Wurts (The whole inhabitiable portion of the planet was terraformed after a star probe crashed. Humans are decended from the crew... Demons from the psionic alien captives onboard... The Faerie Folk are actually the Navigation Computer) The Black Sun trilogy, by C.S. Friedman (Humans colonize a planet only to discover a strange power..."magic"...that manifests their desires and fears...including those of the subconcious), and the Recluse books by L.E. Modesitt Jr. ( human socitey is founded by refuges from a great war between two factions with opposing religious beliefs...loosely Angels and Demons. The pot is stirred when another ship from the oposing side crash lands generations later, forming a culture that reprises the conflict on a lower tech scale) An obvious Gaming setting already published, and with its own thread, is Kulthea the Shadow World, published by ICE for Rolemaster and FH. look hard enough in the ruins of the ancients, and you may well stumble across a holographic projector, or a blaster pistol for that matter. And while it has no real tech remaining that I've seen, the Warhammer Old World has its origins in a high tech civilization as well....

Dr Device re-read enders game and you'll find that the MD Device works similar to the weapon Kzintibane suggested. The energybeam is focused on a solid mass, which goes critical and explodes. the greater the mass of the target, the further the secondary effect carries, but IIRC, it decreases as it expands...unless it conects with another mass...in which case the new mass goes critical and create yet another blastwave. Sounds like an explosion to me. Definitly mega scale tho...even fighters in tight formation would be dispersed fairly widely, I suspect, at the speeds involved for space combat

LOL Yeah... all you'd need is a Major transform that does a zillion body Unless there's another way to do it that I can't currently think of...

remembered another planetbuster and how about Dr Device from Enders Game? That should be fun to write up, but if I do it now my girlfriend will disown me Basically a uncontrolled continous sticky explosion... probably need an adjustment power (Body Transfer to Explosion?) in there somewhere to represent the replicating waveform. *shudders* not something I'd want in a game I was running.... I suspect given a bit of rules lawering, it could be the cheapest planet killer of all, in point terms.