Markdoc

Food for thought .... http://www.statista.com/chart/3411/police-shootings-in-perspective/. They didn't adjust for population size (which is bad, sloppy or both) but the US is about 5 times the size of the UK and 4 times the size of Germany, population-wise, so you can make the comparison easily enough. cheers, Mark

Actually, it was more like: First phase, roll to intensify Second phase, roll to intensify again Third phase roll, to intensify again ... and then roll to cast, then again to hit. At that point, your target rolls to resist, but if he fails (and if he's not a spellcaster he usually will) then he is normally ****ed. In truth, it normally didn't pay for a magician to cast attack spells like the practical conflagration, unless they were very powerful, because an ordinary archer could do more damage, faster. I just used it as a simple example. Instead they would use spells which their targets could not effectively resist, like a big area affect Flash attack, or an entangle, or petrify, so they only had to cast once to end any combat. But in general, C&S isn't your game if you want to play a combat mage. Not only is there a lot of rolling, as you note, but in most combat situations, any competent knight would slice your gubbins off long before you could get a spell powerful enough to stop him up and running. After all, Merlin was the greatest enchanter in the British Isles, and he spent his time lurking around in the background, offering advice, and helping the king sleep with other men's wives, not accompanying him into battle to cast lightning bolts. cheers, Mark

To some extent, yeah. Like any VPP you need a player who is at least capable with the rules, since they will be modifying things on the fly. On the other hand, C&S also had discrete spells, so you did not need to make everything from scratch. So for example, the magician might have learnt "Zorch's practical conflagration" from a an ancient scroll: it's a fairly basic spell: create fire+amplify. He writes the spell in his spellbook. In Hero terms it is simply "RKA, AoE, explosion, 7.5 active points per DC" If he has a 20point VPP, he can cast a 1/2 d6 practical conflagration. If he intensifies the spell, and can squeeze another 2.5 active points out of his pool, he can cast a 1d6 practical conflagration... etc. Most spells are listed with either a simple cost, or a cost per DC so the question becomes "is my pool big enough to cast this spell (or these spells)?" If yes, cast away. If not, intensify until it is. If it's a cost per DC or dice of effect, the question is simply "How many dice of effect can I squeeze out of my pool?" Since you could only cast spells that you know, the player would have the basic cost written down already, so it's not that hard to work out what the cost of the final spell was. If the magician wished to research an improved version of the practical conflagration - then he could do so ... and then write that down. So for example "Zorch's expanded practical conflagration" "RKA, AoE, Radius, 10 active points per DC". In general, magical research was something you did in your laboratory, not something you did on the battlefield. Edit: with all of this dice roling, it usually took a magician a while to get a spell cast, but if they could do so, it was often a fight-deciding factor. cheers, Mark

Well, it was all a long, long time ago, but I know exactly where to find it. It's in a big fat binder on my roleplaying bookshelf in the apartment in Copenhagen. I, however, am in another apartment Brussels (sorry, Mario, the GM is in another apartment!), and will be for some time Fortunately, however, I reworked the system for another game, and those rules are online. Taking that, and what I remember, here's the basic structure. In C&S, magicians cast basic magic by creating an element (fire, water, earth, air) and then modifying with various aspects: Accelerate, Amplify, Concentrate, Intensify, etc. to make a wall of stone, fireball or whatever. In C&S, mundane things are resistant to magic, so to affect anything with magic, you need to make a Magick roll, which is opposed by the thing you are trying to enchant. For sentient targets, this is a simple 8- roll, unless they are skilled in magick, in which case it is a skill vs skill roll. So non-magick-users are almost always affected by magick, but a powerful magician can just shrug off magickal effects. For inanimate objects, there was a penalty to the roll, based off the Basic Magick Resistance of the target. It's so long ago I cannot recall the penalties, but the tables are in the book. To simulate all that, I required magicians to use a VPP, with the limitation: Requires multiple skill rolls (-¾). The Magick skill is a a normal skill based on INT and is decreased by the difficulty of the spell (-1 per 10 active points) and it can be increased by spending experience on it. The VPP can only contain spells that the magician has learned (whether because they were taught them by their master or because they have learned them by research amongst ancient scrolls, from Devils, etc). This is a -½ limitation. There were other limitations as well, depending on what sort of magician you were (Wizard, Kabbalist, Alchemist, etc). VPPs are very flexible, but they are also expensive: it's hard to get enough oomph out of them to make effective combat spells in a typical fantasy game - particularly since a magician would need to invest quite a lot in skills. For a start, all those aspects mentioned above require skills. Not every magician will know all of these, but anyone who isn't a hedge wizard will know at least Intensify. Intensify is the Aid power. This is bought outside the VPP and defined as Aid to magical powers, any power, two at a time (+½), requires multiple skill rolls (-¾). It is possible to buy up the maximum on the Aid. Note that to Aid spells in a pool above the number of active points in the pool, the pool itself must also be Aided. Since the Aid can affect two related powers simultaneously, normally it will aid the pool and a single power. The Magician can use this Aid power to increase the power of his spells. But to change any aspect of the power (ie to add advantages), the Magician must make the appropriate skill roll: thus to add area effect to a spell, the Magician must make an Amplify skill roll. To increase the effect (ie: active points) of a spell, the sorceror must make an Intensity roll. If he wishes to do both, he must make BOTH skill rolls (that's why it's -¾). And so on and so forth. Basically a magician can generate pretty much any spell he can think of, as long as he knows the basic power, but to build up sufficient magical oomph to do major magick, he normally has to spend several phases pumping up his VPP and the spell, and making an Intensify roll. Then he has to cast the spell by making a Magick roll against the target's magick resistance. In practice, this makes it easy for Magicians to do things like turn invisible, or Fly, but hard to directly attack people in a physical way. You are better off zapping them with a cumulative, invisible effects spell so that you can build up the effect, before they are aware that they are actually under attack (ie; a curse). Which of course, is exactly how medieval magicians are supposed to carry on. There was a fair bit of other stuff that I cannot recall, but that's the gist of it. cheers, Mark

C&S is a horribly-designed rules-set set in the world of Merrie Olde Englande (and France) of King Arthure and his Rounde Table with vikings and tolkein-like races added in. It was horribly-produced as well - a dreadful gemische of different fonts in different sizes, and a spine that was apparently held together with baby-spit and hope. My copy fell apart after a couple of months and it lasted longer than most of my friends' copies because I handled it carefully. I had to rebind it with glue and heavy duct-tape. That said, I just loved our C&S campaigns to bits and I still have the original duct-tape bound version 1.0 of the rules (and the companion that came out later) because it's very atmospheric, full of wonderful ideas and gaming advice and includes tables for any manner of things a GM might want. It was kind of a cult game when it came out, given the rather bland generic-fantasy nature of most of the competition at the time. It included sections on tournaments, courtly love, etc, plus a very atmospheric and grotesquely unbalanced magic system. It was obviously a labour of love for the producers, and shows that often atmosphere trumps mechanics. It's hard to think of a game system better suited to conversion, honestly ... but I haven't done it myself. I have however, poached lots of ideas from it, including a magic system I used in my own Hero system games. cheers, Mark

The problem, though, is that software companies gotta sell new stuff, and software designers gotta design new stuff, otherwise they both go bust. There's a valuable lesson in the saga of Cricket Software. Back in the 90's, they sold a graphing program that crushed the products offered by bigger competitors. It was clean, swift, intuitive and did a great job. Everybody I knew in biomedicine used it - across multiple institutes, across multiple continents. It was basically the defacto standard. But of course there was a catch. Once everyone had bought a copy, the market was saturated. Cricket Graph 1 apparently sold like gangbusters. The company bulked up, hired some new developers, and produced version 2, which buried the clean, fast interface under layers of added features that nobody actually wanted. Version 2 sold poorly. The company laid a lot of developers off. Then, since adding lots of features worked so well last time, in version 3 they added even more unwanted features, and made it buggy and unstable as well. Cricket Graph 3 basically sold no copies and the company folded. Their problem was that they got it right the first time and no obvious flaws existed to be easily fixed for an upgrade. Cheers, Mark

First in their pool, but not clear favourites to win. The question for the All Blacks is always "Can they hold it together long enough to win or do they come second again." Cheers, Mark

Well, he's doing what he can on the 'president for life' bit. He's already on his second go-round. Cheers, Mark

Well, that makes sense. In this context, angry seems like the logical response. Cheers, Mark

You go, boy! Cheers, Mark

Too true. In addition, the next season, one of my buddies foolishly used heavy leather gauntlets during a medieval longsword demonstration, rather than plate ones, because he was in a hurry getting armed. A glancing blow, with a bated blade crushed one of his fingers, and he had to be driven to hospital to have it set too. Leather is way better than nothing, but as armour, it leaves a lot to be desired. Cheers, Mark

You are of course, welcome to your opinion. You are wrong, but I guess that's not a crime. As to what I've seen, I've repeated it accurately. It is true that the guys I was talking about were not hitting a tyre hanging on a chain, but one fixed in a frame - I guess your venom might originate from thinking I meant they crushed a hanging tyre: which I agree would be impossible. But the point remains - he's delivering light blows. You can actually test this yourself. To avoid cutting himself he's pinching the blade between his fingers and his palm. If you have access to a bated blade or something similarly blunt (I don't want you to cut yourself) try holding it like that and hitting with the hilt. Then wrap your hand around it firmly in a normal grip and try again. You'll deliver a far heavier blow. Try that with a sharp blade though, and you'll cut yourself. Then try it gripping the hilt normally. Again, you can deliver a heavier strike, than you can pinching the blade with you fingers. Cheers, Mark

Oh, and on a more positive note, you're all going to be replaced by machines. Have a nice weekend, meatbags. Well, OK, maybe not, but we are making progress into digitizing memories. For those suffering from traumatic brain injury, this is big news, but the implications go far beyond that, particularly because another recent study indicated that memories considered to be "lost" are often actually still stored in the brain, just inaccessible. In theory, they can be retrieved and made accessible again - they have already demonstrtaed this in mice. cheers, Mark

Why are you even surprised? This is what, the 6th school shooting this year? The - heck, I can't even count them - 250th or 300th mass shooting this year? The state of the union includes frequent mass shootings and frequent school shootings, and honestly, the way things are, there's no political will to make any changes, so that's not going to stop any time soon. cheers, Mark

I've SEEN the Russian naval base in question, not so many years ago. I know it features prominently in discussions between armchair strategists online, but I don't think that it has the slightest interest to Putin or the Russian military at all, except as a propaganda piece. It's a tiny harbour with a few rusting corrugated iron sheds, with two cranes, one of which has rusted out, and fallen over into the harbour. When I saw it, the floating piers were derelict and there was a rusted sunken ship at one wharf. It was, in a word, desolate. The Russians are entirely smart enough to know that a small, useless harbour in an area where they cannot reliably project airpower is not a military asset on the global stage, but a liability, which is exactly why they've left it to decay. Promises to rebuild it so that it could host aircraft carriers or cruisers have so far produced bupkiss, and the current Russian buildup isn't even in the area of the port. Edit: and the Russians are actually using their access to the much better port at Limmasol in Cyprus rather more than their Syrian option anyway. I don't know what the status is now, but prior to the war, their "naval base" had a staff of 4. No, Putin's interest and his whole foreign policy - which has been pretty consistent for the last decade and a half - is built around one thing: maintaining Russia's ability to intervene in global energy markets. That's it, period, finito. Every action he has taken in the past has been consistent with that goal in mind, including his intervention in Ukraine and now his intervention in Syria. Putin is irrevocably marked by the collapse of the USSR and the USSR collapsed because - like today's Russia - it was critically dependant on energy revenues for foreign exchange. When OPEC pulled the plug on oil prices in the '80s, that was all she wrote for the USSR. Putin - in his own ham-handed way - is trying to ensure there is no rerun, and for that, he wants a seat at the table in the Middle East. Syria - and the Assad regime - is the last proxy the Russians have left in the area, although they are attempting to cuddle up to Egypt again. The last thing he wants is a new government that is supported by the US or Saudi Arabia becoming dominant in Syria. And that's why the Russians are not hitting ISIS right now, instead hitting the more moderate rebels pressing the regime forces. It suits Putin just fine to have unrest in the Middle East, and ISIS is, quite frankly, useful to him at the moment. As long as they are not strong enough to tople Assad, the worst he is likely to send their way is harsh words. It's also why the Russians moved into Syria at right this moment, as soon as Turkey and other NATO members started taking a more active role. cheers, Mark

I think it's more useful than that - in the immortals game I mentioned, one PC (The Hanged Man) had precisely this ability. When s/he "died" she simply entered a vegetative state for 24 hours and then emerged, fully healed, with a new set of powers and skills. This was built as invisible extra body only to prevent death, some limited regen, plus a big ol' VPP with a fairly stringent requirement for changing powers (ie: 24 hour delay, 0 DCV concentration, the character had to take 20+ BOD) and the powers were limited to those possessed by people s/he had contacted in the previous 24 hours. Even with those limits, it was an extremely strong ability, since with a little prep. time, the player could acquire a skillset suited to any job at hand. Once she got the hang of it, the player was regularly "killing off" her PC and reconfiguring it. I don't recall the exact cost, but it was somewhere north of 200 points for the whole package. Expensive yes, but the character was not overshadowed, even though she was playing alongside Death and the Devil. cheers, Mark

I often use figures and a hex map, mostly because it keeps my players happy, but it's perfectly possible to run fights (even complex fights) without them. I do it all the time. All that is required is for the GM to have a good idea of what is going on in his head: you need to be able to visualise where all the various people and things are. What I typically do is just sketch out the battlefield on a scrap of paper and then just note where everybody is, make notes as the fight progresses, stuff gets broken, etc. One advantage of this approach, if the GM is comfortable with it, is that it's much faster than a hex map and figures. Players spend less time agonizing over where they are going to move and counting hexes, and more time thinking about what they are actualloy going to do. cheers, Mark

I agree that they would not get along, and since Raistlin both stood toe to toe with a goddess and destroyed the world in the process, I'd have to go with him over Xykon ... even though Xykon's actually more of a fun guy. cheers, Mark

Just a couple of short comments, since most of this has been covered already. First off, I'd agree that it's pretty much a special effect. If a dead character "reappears" as a fetus and has to go through birth and growing up before they become a viable adventurer, its relevance to PCs is preeeetty close to zero, although it could be a fascinating exercise in society-building for the GM. At most it's a reason why your starting character has a really broad range of skills and some odd psych. lim.s. As for skills, on the idea that the brain can only hold so much and that a character who remembered multiple lives would inevitably go mad, I have to call poppycock. For a start, when we are talking about a person who shifts memories intact to a whole new body, it's pretty clear that wherever their memories are being stored, it's not in the meatball inside their skull. I hesitate to make definitive statements about what the memory capacity of a disembodied spirit that can move from body to body is. As for multiple lives driving you mad, I know some relatively with-it people in their 90's and have seen no evidence that having lots of memories has had the slightest effect on their sanity, even though they have the equivalent of 2-3x the life experience of most preindustrial humans. If a century isn't the limit, what is? Two centuries? Four? Fifteen? Who knows? As to how you handle it in-game, I've had immortal characters in my games before (in fact one campaign featured exclusively immortals as characters: like the elves discussed in this thread, if they died, they simply woke up the next day in a new body, though in this case, an adult body resembling their former one). I handled the knowledge problem by several mechanisms. First simply allowing very broad categories of knowledge (for example KS: Personal History) with the explicit rider that things that could plausibly be within a character's personal knowledge would get a bonus and other things would take a penalty. I also found that giving a character cramming (again with the "personal history" proviso) would allow them to have a broad range of knowledge and would allow for things like "Oh, yes, I know this place well - of course it's changed a bit in the last two hundred years" (AK: some place 8-). Finally, skill enhancers allow characters to pick up lots of skills cheaply. cheers, Mark

Part of me goes "Eh". As speaker he was neither effective nor effectual - he basically got nothing done during his tenure. The other part of me suspects that his sucessor will make him look pretty good. cheers, Mark

I think the point of the OP is that this is a way to take an adventure that might last years and have it happen in the course of an hour, or even a minute. As far as I see, the suggested build should work. Of course you could still do this with transdimensional movement, so either way works. The mental illusions approach is actually more elegant IMO, becuause unlike physically transfering people, it is, in fact "all a dream". So 30 years could pass in the dream, but the characters involved would not have aged when they wake. They could die or be injured, and would be fine on awaking, etc, etc. regards, Mark

Speaking as a Professor of Medicine and specialist in infectious disease, there is no biological or medical basis for this claim. Diseases can be bloodborne, highly infectious and able to survive in the environment (hepatitis B is a good example) ..... or not. The same is true for airborne diseases. The mode of infection tells you precisely nothing about how virulent and potentially infectious a disease is. Likewise, immunity to one pathogen does not seem to imply any immunity to other, unrelated pathogens. What mode of infection does tell you is how likely you are to be exposed, and on that basis, immunity to STDs in-game is likely to be overpriced at 3 points. Immunity to a disease you are unlikely to ever encounter, for example, should be worth nothing. After all, how many points is a susceptibility to radio waves worth, in your standard fantasy campaign? Cheers, Mark

They qre certainly more obnoxious

Great news. But the article is right, this is a big problem in the US: it's not just one sleazebag financier. This is a growing problem, and it's got little to do with the pharma industry per se: these specialist drugs have been around for decades without companies trying to pull this kind of ****. The reason is that for a real pharma company that makes and sells multiple products, the damage to their brand is not worth the relatively small, quick profit off one niche drug like this. But over the last 15 years, we've seen an influx of guys like the one in this case, who are actually financiers. Thier business model is to find a single product that has a monopoly, borrow a bunch of money and buy it, jack the price up as high as they possibly can and skim off as much profit as possible. Typically, what will happen is that when the price goes skyhigh, another generics company will get in on the action, but, as noted, that takes a few years. The new generic competitor can make a decent profit by undercutting the skyhigh price, but of course that price is usually way above the initial starting price. When that happens the financier usually jumps ship at his own company. Burdened with the debt he took on to buy the product, but without the skyhigh prices needed to sustain that debt, it crashes and burns, the financier walks off with a huge profit, and goes looking for another drug to repeat the process. The sytem is like a rachet, inevitably forcing up the prices of all kinds of products. It's not just medicines: this happens throught the US healthcare system. We recently went through a similar process with the special cleaning fluid used to clean and disinfect a lot of machinery like dialysis machines and blood pumps. I should note though, that this is a US problem, not a global one. It doesn't happen in other developed countries. Fixing the problem requires two things the US healthcare industry will fight to the death: pricing transparency and open markets. Cheers, Mark

In theory, yes. But in practice, the two posts under yours nailed it. To make and sell it in the US, you'd need to set up a production line and get it FDA certified. You'd then need to set up distribution deals with your most important purchasers (mostly the big drug distribution chains) and make a series of deals to get your product covered by insurance. Realistically, you're looking at 3-5 years, and about 10-20 million dollars if you already have a production facility where you can switch over a production line, 10 years and 200 million if you don't. For a market with about 12-15000 patients a year in the US (that's an educated guess: I don' think anybody knows exactly how large it is), it's just not worth it. There's a reason there's only one producer left! In this case, however, the guy has bought the existing process, which is already FDA-approved and the existing distributors list, so he's good to go. He'll need to renegotiate the contracts with the distributors, but if there's no other supplier, they're stuck. 15000 patients a year is not much; but without access to this drug, as many as 30% of them will die. Those numbers mean the distributors basically have to carry the drug. cheers, Mark