Markdoc

I'm familiar with the drug. It's an old antibiotic, decades off patent and as far as I know, has never been on tiered pricing (that's the deal where rich countries pay more to subsidise access for the poorest countries). The manufacturing price is confidential, but based on the cost of similar drugs, I'd expect it to be a bit less than a dollar per pill. These days it's only used for special, difficult-to-treat cases, because it has a high frequency of side effects, but it still has medical value because it's effective in a few cases where other antibiotics fail. It was available a few years ago at a low price because the original manufacturer was only producing it since there was no other source. They weren't making any money off it, just keeping it on the market for the patients who needed it. There's a fair number of legacy drugs like that around. So, no, there's nothing to suggest the new price reflects anything other than a desire to gouge customers who don't have an alternative. That opinion is backed by the fact that this guy has form. He started a company called Retrophin, whose business was based around buying up a niche drug with only one supplier and jacking up the price - only 2000% in that case. It made him pretty rich, but he was fired from there amid claims of embezzlement and insider trading in the company stock. Prior to that, he ran a hedge fund, which made him a lot of money, but went bankrupt, amid .... you guessed it, claims of embezzlement and insider trading. Technically speaking, what he is doing is not illegal. But you can gauge his degree of compassion by his response to the claim that some people would die because the price rise would price the drug out of reach. He responded by tweeting "Ain't my problem". Cheers, Mark

I haven't made a big thing out of it, but players in my game have learned to be sceptical when somone offers to sell them a "magic item". We still chuckle (well, I chuckle, anyway) over the goblin who tricked the party out of almost all of their loot by selling them a pot of oil that would let the oiled blade "cut through anything" - demonstrated by casting an illusion on an old rotted tree trunk to make it look like a boulder, and then letting them hack hunks off the "boulder". Cheers, Mark

He seems to be the kind of guy for whom it's all good as long as he makes money. A real vulture capitalist. You'll look in vain for any sort of moral compass. It's possible, because vulture capitalists like this guy have worked out that many niche medical products are natural monopolies, with only one supplier. This deal has hit the headlines, because of the 5000% increase .... but it's actually worse than that; because the company he bought the drug from, jacked the price from 1 USD per pill to 13.50, before he jacked it to 750 USD. So that's actually a 75000% increase in 6 years. And this is not an isolated case: I know of at least 5 others of the same kind in the last few months and I have not even been keeping paticularly close count - I am sure there are more. It happens because the barrier to entry for drug production is high, and for niche products like this, there is often only one producer. You need high quality requirements because if something goes wrong, you can end up with a lot of poisoned people. But that means the need to demonstrate safety requires millions of dollars invested and potentially years before you get approval. For niche products like this one, that's enough to stop competitors moving in to compete and drop the price. So it becomes a question of "Pay what we ask or go without and die." Yup. He apparently used company funds to try and pay off investors he had fleeced when his hedge fund went under. A 65 million dollar lawsuit by his former employer is underway. cheers, Mark

I should have specified that the "holding the blade" thing I was thinking of was not guidong the point while thrusting, but the kind of swinging he shows in most of the video. And actually, the video kind of makes the point. Even with the gloves on, he's tapping the tyre enough to make a little dent. A solid blow, even from a wooden training sword, should compress the tyre significantly - much more than he did, meaning he wasn't hitting it very hard - and I trained with guys who could literally compress a tyre of that type with a blow so that the two sides actually touched. Honestly compels me to admit that those two guys had no wrists: their forearms just merged directly with their hands but the kind of blows he is delivering are just going to make an armoured man go "hey kid, knock that off!" I've also watched a professional re-enactor demonstrate this on a training dummy wearing mail, to prove that it was possible with a sharp weapon. He gave it two solid hits, and then I guess his grip slipped, because on the third strike, he sliced his palm right open through a heavy leather gauntlet, and had to be driven to hospital, with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked towel. So yeah, it's dangerous. Maybe people really did do it in serious fights - or maybe the depictions in fechtbuch reflect the fact that most of them were written by people who weren't professional combatants, mostly for a readership that wasn't expected to engage in warfare. They contain a lot of wacky stuff, plenty of which might have gotten you killed on the battlefield if you tried it. Cheers, Mark

I've taught a lot of people to play hero system, having started up no less than 5 groups over the years, plus converted a number of fellow GMs over to Hero. I've also successfully run Con games. The players in those have ranged from a few people with some Hero experience to people who had never played an RPG before, not even on the computer. The games I've run tend toward epic fantasy games (epic in the sense that they run for 4-5 years real time, not that they involved earth-shatteringly powerful characters), but I have also run shorter games: fantasy, pulp, WH40K, horror and the occasional supers game. I even ran a short, but popular fantasy supers campaign, based very, very loosely on Nine Princes in Amber, and most recently a game (detailed here http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/88214-impromptu-hero-old-school-adventures-with-indie-style/?do=findComment&comment=2335876) where a bunch of Hero noobies generated new characters from scratch and played a full game, all in the course of a single evening. I have found the following guidelines to be indispensible. 1) As GM, you have to be prepared to do the heavy lifting initially. That includes character generation and combat during play. The character generation pathway for new (or even experienced) players always starts with me explaining what kind of game I am going to run and then discussing what kind of character the player wants to play, so that we get something that fits. I also try to get the player to give me a reason their PC will become an adventurer. I use example characters a lot as illustrations - normally using cinematic or fantasy characters that the player knows as an example, rather than a character sheet. Only once we have a general archetype and rough background do I even begin to consider mechanics and with new players I build the character, with as much input as I can get. There is also an explicit agreement with the player that the design can be tweaked during the first few sessions, so it perfoms the way they want. 2) It is far easier, for everyone involved, to start with lower points totals and fairly simple constructs. I typically start fantasy games at 75 points (50 + 25 disad.s) and supers games at 250 points. 3) This should be self-evident, but if you want to hook your players you have to have a good game. If you are starting with players who have little or no RPG experience (especially adults), sending them into a hole in the ground to slaughter and loot random monsters simply may not cut it. I like to try and hook the players' interest in the story, rather than worrying about the game mechanics initially. I find that mysteries or specific tasks (deliver the Mcguffin to the NPC, find out what happened to a missing person, etc) work well for this. The last campaign I ran started with all the PCs coming to a small town to compete in a series of games at a festival, and then solve a murder mystery that occurred during the festival. That let me highlight the mechanics of play in an environment that was unlikely to kill anyone off, while planting the seeds for the subsequent story arc. The campaign before that started with an assignment to find a a missing person and a lot of strangely unhelpful villagers. The one before that started with a lethal jack-in-the box and a rain of fishes ... 4) Ideally, mechanics should be transparent or invisible to players, unless they actually want them. To that end, I like to keep character sheets as simple as possible (the example linked to above was kind of an extreme in this regard) . This also means more heavy lifting for the GM. You really need to be able to adjudicate combat and skill use on the fly. I can totally identify with the players who want fantasy combat to be fast furious and easy to play. With Hero system and a good GM, it both can be and (IMO) should be. I play regularly in a Pathfinder group and can guarantee you that fantasy hero combat in my game runs faster and more fluidly. Partly that's because there are fewer temporary modifiers to track in Hero system, but largely it's because I don't require players to deal with the minutae of combat - they can tell me what to do in plain language and I handle the mechanics, with some feedback like "You're really going to have to run as fast as you can to hit him over there - that's going to make it hard to land a hit". As time goes on, those who are interested get the mechanics, so they can do their calculations themselves, those who don't want it don't need it. They know what a haymaker or a moveby means in combat, so they can use it, even if they can't calculate it themselves. To make life easier on myself and the players I have simplified combat a bit, but nothing drastic. 5) Actually, I don't think there is a point 5. That's basically it. cheers, Mark

Oh, I know. American gun nuts love the .45 – other countries have their own holy weapons. A few years ago, I shared my dad’s opinion of the .45. He said “It’s a good gun, very heavy. By the time you’re close enough to kill someone with it, if the bullets don’t do it, you can throw the gun at them”. American gun fandom was outraged, and plenty of slurs were tossed at my dad and his opinions. Here’s the funny thing though: he was a highly decorated veteran, and an army marksman with 5 years of combat experience including a great deal of close quarters combat. He had used the .45 in combat and had killed people with it (in fact, the very last person he killed in the war was with his .45 – I think I’ve told that story on the boards before). The people who were outraged … had done none of these things. Kind of like the current discussion, they were outraged because his real life experience did not mesh with how they imagined things. It’s also interesting; given the points in this thread, that my dad’s experience was that you carried a handgun as an absolute last-resort backup: for close combat he far preferred a Thompson submachine gun and for anything else a rifle - the same as Ellifritz's conclusions 60 years later. As for the point about excess enegrgy, that's exactly right. Hydrostatic shock is apparently another advertising copywriter's myth to go in the dusty archives alongside knockdown power and "kinetic energy dump". Not only is there no actual evidence that it does any damage - it leaves no evidence in tissue, but these days we routinely use medical techniques to generate shockwaves in tissue 2-3x more intense than that you get from a high powered rifle bullet, without any harm to the patient. That leaves us with good old-fashioned tissue damage. and I think the reason that the handguns have similar lethality in real life data (regardless of calibre) is because in the situations measured - ordinary shootings in the US - typically occur at close range. The US federal police did a study of 6000 shootings back in the 1970's and reported the ranges as: Contact to 3 feet ... 34%, 3 feet to 6 feet ...... 47%, 6 feet to 15 feet ..... 9%. At those ranges, even a .22 is going to shatter bone (I can attest to that part personally!) and penetrate through most if not all of an adult male's chest cavity. So in those conditions, it's just about if you hit a vital organ or not. And it turns out that more powerful handguns have only a very, very minor advantage (too small to measure, even in hundreds of shootings, and therefore way less than 1 DC) in that situation. The guy who runs the FBI ballistics program essentially said the same thing, saying that when coomparing rounds and handguns, most of them performed at a very similar level, but that they were looking for the slightest advantage: differences that might occur 1 time in a 100 or less. To see that, you need to fire thousands of rounds - and it's too small a difference to model in any RPG I know of. cheers, Mark

To follow up on this, would it be any more satisfying if in a modern game, players had a choice of handgun or rifle for firearms? It sounds ludicrous to us, but read on. Nusoard suggested a simple model to calculate handgun damage (I know this is the fantasy board, but bear with me: unlike medieval warfare we have reams of data on the effect of modern weapons and it nicely illustrates the gulf between what we think, and what we actually know. Also, guns are easy to compare because a bullet is a bullet - different calibres are still closer to each other (I think) than a mace and a sword). Now I understand the appeal of a simple, easily scaleable model, believe me. And the approach outlined has the advantage that it "feels" right - there' an easily traceable logical thread. But there's a problem with the idea that you can map DC to muzzle energy - which is that it utterly fails to produce results that match real life. Professionals have spent decades trying to tweak this very approach and by now have pretty much all given up on it. My experience has been that when a model fails to match reality, it's not generally reality that's the problem. Now if you don't care that it's unrealistic (it is after all, as noted, consistent, easy to use with a variety of weapons, etc) and just want a method that works for your games, then cool. I can see that. But it's not what I'm looking for. There is additionally the problem that some of the powerful handguns can generate muzzle energies 8x that of a typical .38 round, so you're looking at a 3-4 DC spread just for handguns, and with rifles, you're going up from there. This exactly what leads to the problem we have now where squad-level weapons put out superhero-killing or building-levelling amounts of damage, and vaporize ordinary humans. In turn, you need skyhigh levels of DEF to resist mundane weapons which leads us back to air-deploying Hero system tanks without the need for parachutes. I've talked about real-life data. Here's what we have. Greg Ellifritz did an analysis of over 1800 US domestic shootings where the outcome and weapon used was documented. He looked at number of hits, hit location, etc. I'm just posting a couple of examples here. .22 (short and long) Hits that were fatal - 34%. One-shot-stop % - 31%. Actually incapacitated by one shot (torso or head hit) - 60% .45 ACP. Hits that were fatal - 29%. One-shot-stop % - 39%. Actually incapacitated by one shot (torso or head hit) - 51% Interesting, no? In real life, the .45 was no more lethal than the .22 (it might look like it's actually less lethal, but there's enough variation in the samples that statistically, these numbers are identical). The same level of lethality is found for .44 magnum, .38, 9mm, etc. If there was anything close to a 1 or 2 DC difference, it'd show up with sample sizes this large. But it doesn't. He also looked at rifles and shotguns, and these weapons were significantly more lethal than any of the handguns. His conclusion? " For me there really isn't a stopping power debate. All handguns suck! If you want to stop someone, use a rifle or shotgun!" We even have a sort-of controlled study. Between 1978-1979, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office used 0.38-caliber pistol ammunition of different designs. The police used 150-grain Winchester round-nose bullets and the sheriff's office used 110-grain Federal jacketed hard-point bullets, with the two rounds bullets having different muzzle energies. The differences are instructive - namely that there was no difference at all. There were a very similar number of shootings by officers of each service, and the number of rounds fired per incident was the same, the number of hits was the same, the number of fatalities was the same. If that wasn't enough, the British army did a detailed analysis (published by Owen-Smith in the journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1981, vol 127:31) of over 2200 casualties during the hostilities in Northern Ireland, broken down by location of the wound, outcome, and where known, weapon used. Their results are almost precisely the same as Ellifritz's with one important difference. The British soldiers wore light ballistic armour. In the analysis of weapon penetration, the .22 rarely penetrated the armour and perhaps for that reason, there were no fatalties caused by .22s, though there were wounds. But all the other handguns had essentially the same chances of penetrating the body armour and the same chance of causing fatal wounds, regardless of calibre: .38, .45, 9 mm - didn't matter. Rifles, on the other hand, were significantly better at both penetrating armour and causing lethal or serious wounds than handguns - but again, they were all pretty much the same as each other. Calibre and muzzle energy didn't seem to have any measureable effect. I should mention there was one exception - the venerable .303 - but I wouldn't put too much weight on that since there were only 7 shootings with .303s identified in total, and they were used exclusively as sniper weapons, unlike the other weapons - so most of the hits were headshots. So basically, all the data we have shows that there is a significant difference between side arms and long arms, but that within those categories, the differences are too small to measure, even with hundreds of examples; certainly there's no difference as big as 1 DC. Further strengthening the analsis is the fact that the British data on long arm lethality matches very well with US data from WW2 (the Bouganville study), from Korea, Vietnam and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and here we're talking about tens of thousands of casualties, so the data is very, very strong. Basically, we have a lot of data, and it's all remarkably consistent. To loop back to the sword/axe/hammer example, you could match the real life data on firearms far better by having just two categories of weapons - handguns and long arms - than you could with the current Hero system line up. You could get an almost perfect match by having just 3 categories - smallbore handguns (.22, .25) and medium/largebore handguns (basically everything else) and then long arms, with squad-level projectile weapons having even greater lethality. Now I'm not sure we actually want to go there, and I also have a pretty good hunch why the data looks the way it does, but if you told any gamers that there's little difference in the damage done between a .22 and a .45 and they'd throw a fit. But that is what actually we see in real life. It makes me treat my own instinct to say that medieval weapons "must be different" with some caution. cheers, Mark

Oh sure. I feel the same way. But is that because it's true or because we have been programmed by TV and films and games to feel that way? People can be trained to believe very strongly things that are not true simply by repeated exposure and assumption. In Grettir's saga (written in the late 1200s/early 1300s, when people still had plenty of experience of actually using medieval weapons) he is delighted when he gets a shortsword. It immediately becomes his primary weapon, replacing his battleaxe. That suggests that to the people of the time, a battle axe was not obviously a better choice. Now maybe Grettir's response was a status thing, but I have never seen an RPG where the shortsword would be a better choice, which suggests to me that our fixation on the idea of "bigger weapon = more dangerous" may not in fact, be true. cheers, Mark

Yeah, weapon complexity that isn't used is not only no good to anyone, but it's a relatively common feature of game design and has been for a long time. Hands up all those who remember AD&D's weapon modifiers? I don't recall anyone, even among the most rabid of fans, using those. We actually used a homebrew character sheet (courtesy of Fitz, on these boards) that had them written in and we still didn't use them. With regard to weapon damage, I agree that there should be some differentiating factors between weapons like a sword, an ax, a pick, and a hammer. But I'd be wary about anything that starts with "Obviously". Obviously how? Do you have personal experience in using these weapons on people? If not, obvious based on what data? We actually know very little about the effects of these weapons in real life. My feeling that they should be differentiated is based on an appreciation of the fact that as armour evolved, the weapons used changed, and they changed in a way that actually moved against social/cultural pressure. As an example of what I mean, in both Europe and Japan, swords were prized, not just as weapons, but as status symbols. For a long while while they were also the preferred close combat weapon (usually alongside a reach weapon like a spear or lance). But as armour improved, swords became less and less the preferred close combat weapon. They were still carried and still prized, but as armour became heavier, one handed swords assumed a secondary role - axes, picks, maces and hammers became much more popular than they had been. Then, as armour retreated in the face of firearms, suddenly swords came back into fashion again as a primary close combat weapon, while the impact weapons again became secondary choices. The fact that this happened across multiple cultures, in different timeframes tells me that there is almost certainly a physical difference at work, and that difference almost certainly affects battlefield lethality, since it is battlefield use that changed, not cultural preference. But is there a difference between in the lethality of an ax, a pick, and a hammer? As a gamer, I'd like to think so, but I can't think of any data that supports the idea. We need to be wary of the fact that as gamers we have been culturally conditioned to believe there are differences. I'm at work now (taking a quick cofee break), so don't have time for a detailed response, but I'll post some more data tonight that shows just how cautious we should be of things that "seem" obvious to gamers - but turn out to probably not to be real. cheers, Mark

This is true. There'a catch though - we now have a vast trove of data on injury and death from firearms that shows very clearly that in real life, muzzle energy has very little correlation with the ability of a weapon to kill or maim. And damage dice, inasmuch as they measure anything, measure the ability to kill or maim. It's pretty easy to see why - the same model of gun, firing the same ammo, can have dramatically difference muzzle energy outputs, depending on the length of the barrel, even though that has no effect on the lethality of the weapon. Depending on the ammo used a .45 can have a higher - or lower - muzzle energy output than a .357 magnum. The KE delivered by a slug varies hugely depending on the distance from the muzzle, etc etc. So it's a measure which is easy to quantify, just one which is largely irrelevant to calculating damage. The fact that all of these similar weapons - in real life - seem to have similar effects and that there are so many contributing factors which can't easily be modeled, to me says that we should ignore the unimportant details (and that seems to include the vast bulk of the minutae about weapons) and focus on the important ones. All that seems to be important in real life is penetration and placement. Slugs with more KE (as long as they don't fragment too easily) penetrate better, so there's no question that a weapon with more energetic projectile should do more damage (on average). But the difference seems to be pretty coarse. 5.56 or 7.62? Real life data says "same, same". .45, .44, .357, .5? Again, real life data says "no measurable difference, even averaged out over hundreds or thousands of hits". But there is a difference between a .22 and a .45. So there are differences, just not between basically comparable weapons - so the differences are pretty coarse. But I've already found out that gamers, who have grown up with the idea of finely differentiated weapons tables, apparently find this very hard to accept. cheers, Mark

That parallel hasn't escaped the media or the politicians over here either. Why do you think Germany has stepped up to the bat, to take by far the largest number? They're saying they'll accept 800,000 refugees. The US and the UK have grudgingly said they'll take 10,000 each, with many other countries even further down the list. But there's another interesting parallel to the 1930s - private citizens are forming refugee support groups, offering food, money legal help, even accomodation in their homes. By themselves, they won't be enough, but they are already having a wider effect by helping shame the politicians. cheers, Mark

Exactly - pumping up the damage for ranged weapons like guns to allow them to punch through arnour gives you the problem that they then become ridiculously lethal against unarmoured targets. What tends to happen in-game* is that everybody then up-armours as much as they can ... meaning that light weapons become completely ineffectual, so everybody carries the heaviest weapon they can ... It also causes a problem for the GM, in a fantasy game, because to make nonhuman monsters a credible combat threat, you have to pump defences and attacks ... which is how we ended up in the thread about the stat.s for the Abrams tank, which to make it proof against small arms fire got sufficient defences that it can be airdropped from a couple of Km altitude and still be battle ready after impact. It drives the gun nuts crazy, but the real-life answer to your question about the difference between a musket and an assault rifle, in terms of lethality appears to be ... not very much. Calibre, by itself, is a lousy measure of lethality. Looking at real-life figures, smaller calibre, high velocity rounds are consistently more lethal than larger calibre lower velocity rounds - and large calibre, high velocity rounds are the most effective. How to measure that, though, is not clear. People have looked at muzzle-exit energy (which turns out to be a crappy predictor of lethality), how much kinetic energy is deposited in the target (has absolutely nothing to do with lethality), etc. If we take lethality as a measure of raw damage (ie: how likely is a hit from this weapon/round to kill a target, on average) it has changed remarkably little in the last couple of hundred years. What has changed, as you note, is the rate of fire, and also the degree of accuracy. In the 1700's musket shot was reckoned at about 280 metres (ie: the range at which a musket ball could be expected to kill or maim on a hit, what today is called the lethal range). On the other hand, the range at which an ordinary soldier could be expected to hit a man-sized target was only about 60 metres. The M16 has a lethal range of around 900 metres (and I'd take that number with a grain of salt, given real-life results), or about 3x that of the old muskets, but an effective range of about 450 metres - about 9x that of the musket - plus of course a rate of fire about 100x as great. In addition, it's lighter, more reliable, more robust under field conditions, and less likely to reveal your position and obscure your vision with a cloud of smoke. It's a superior weapon in every way ... but not because it does a lot more damage with each hit. In fact, at the ranges where most combat actually happens, both weapons are well within their lethal zones. cheers, Mark *we've been through this exercise in our games (sigh).

As far as firearms go, the very earliest medieval firearms probably don’t warrant armour-piercing. They were low velocity, and some fired arrows instead of bullets, others fired stone bullets that disintegrated on hitting good armour, etc. But by the time you get to the late 1400’s they should definitely have AP: they were after all, specifically deployed to meet the threat of heavily armoured infantry that bows and longbows could no longer defeat. And we know from contemporary texts that they were capable of making lethal holes in even good quality armour out to medium range. Of course in the renaissance era, people started making shotproof armour, but that was a ) expensive and b ) thicker and heavier than regular armour. It’s one reason why as firearms became widespread, leg and arm armour disappeared: it was simply impractical to make those pieces heavy enough to be shotproof, and if they weren’t shotproof, they weren’t much use. Better to save the extra weight to compensate for the increasing weight of breastplate and helm. For a game where you have different tech levels in play, a simple house rule would be that weapons gain 1 level of AP against armour for each tech level, they are higher than the armour they attack, and armour gains one level of hardened for each tech level it is higher than the attacking weapon. I wouldn’ charge for this: it’s just part of the campaign ground rules. This might sound like it short-changes high tech weapons, but if we are just talking kinetic energy, a musket ball that passes through you will do pretty much the same damage as a modern round that passes through you and presumably the same damage as a Gauss needle that passes through you. It’s the hole that’s the lethal part – improvements in firearms haven’t changed the damage much over the last couple of centuries: what they have done is reduced the weight, increased accuracy, durability, rate of fire and ability to penetrate armour/cover. Cheers, Mark

Unfortunately in the EU, you have populists making the same arguments, with the added edge that the refugees are mostly muslims. It doesn’t help that much of the current immigration crisis is actually two problems. One is ordinary old illegal immigration – similar to the situation in the US you name: mostly people trying to sneak into Europe in search of a better life. This is a problem, but it’s a manageable problem – and the numbers of illegal immigrants in the EU is about the same order of magnitude as that in the US. We’re talking about maybe 12-18 million people in total, with a couple of hundred slipping through the borders every year. Illegal immigrants at least try to keep their heads down, find work, etc. There are a lot of social problems (crime, poverty, etc) but society can deal with these, because they are slow-fuse issues. You have some time to make adjustments. But what’s happening now is that illegal immigration is being overlaid with refugees. It’s actually hard to get your head around the scale of this problem. The US, for example also takes refugees – last year they took about 14,000 and there is a hard cap of 70,000 a year. In Europe right now, those kinds of numbers are arriving every week and there are an estimated 12 million refugees trying to reach Europe right now. That’s like every illegal immigrant to the US over the last 50 years all trying to arrive at once. And unlike ordinary illegal immigrants, refugees are entitled to claim asylum by international law, are entitled to have their case heard and to have support while that’s done. The system, quite literally, cannot handle that number of asylum seekers, and the cost is going to be astronomical. In addition, war refugees have always been a problem to integrate, because they often arrive with little to nothing, often have severe trauma, and often have links to the fighting back home that can lead to internal conflict. Plus, of course, many of them are less motivated to integrate – they didn’t come to Europe because they wanted to, but because they had to flee their homes. As an example of that, I learned Danish with a guy who had been a sociologist and professor in Iran. That’s not a popular profession in Iran under the Mullahs and he got out just ahead of a warrant for his arrest. He ended up in Denmark, and after hearings on his status, was granted asylum, though that took several years. Once granted asylum (and residence) but without Danish and without recognized professional qualifications, he had no chance of a professorship. He spent several years on welfare and when I met him, he was working as a postman. The depth of his bitterness was astounding. He hated almost everything about Denmark and he hated the Danes – even though they had taken him in, given him food, clothing, money and shelter. What he really wanted was his old life back, and he hated Denmark and Europe because it couldn’t give him that. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands or even millions of cases and you see the problem. Most refugees will adjust, but many won’t. Politicians here are freaking out and populists are having a field day, because everybody recognizes that there is no good answer to this at all. We’re likely to end up with border fences and camps with barbed wire to keep the refugees in, even though almost nobody wants that, simply because no one can come up with better answers. cheers, Mark

That and heat - it was an insulated freezer truck (there was no cooling switched on) and that many people packed into an insulated box would heat up very fast. cheers, Mark

I've played around with increasing the values of armour (in fact, I've posted the updated values here), but experience shows that simply shifts the problems elsewhere. I think it makes sense simply to address the problem at root. Cheers, Mark

Eh. Better to just tone down the damage. We've gone over this before (most recently, here: http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/91443-are-tanks-really-that-tough/page-23?do=findComment&comment=2451309) but the short version is that most ranged weapons in Hero do unrealistically high amounts of damage. Cheers, Mark

Amusingly, we've had my niece visiting from Australia recently. She's really, really pretty... and she's an engineer. We put her together with our pretty engineer friend from roleplaying and not only did they hit it off instantly, but within a couple of minutes they were (without any hints from us) exchanging "sexist moron" and "office harassment" stories. Not only is it common, it appears to be quite pervasive. It seems like the idea of having a pretty female engineer - still less a pretty female engineer boss - is simply too much for a lot of guys in the field. Medical science was still a bit like this when I started. It's not perfect, but it's cleaned up its act considerably. Listening to stories from the trenches in Engineering is like peering back 30 or 40 years into the past. cheers, Mark

STUN and END recover so quickly, that I have never really had any demand for healing for that: as Hugh points out, it's normally more effective to do something else in combat time, and out of combat it usually is irrelevant. That said, I'd have no problem with making it cumulative in this case, since the benefit is so small. Cheers, Mark

it depends on what you expect from your magic system. I like skill rolls (in fact, in general, I mandate them in my campaign) because I like the idea that controlling magic is a mixture of skill and occult might. However, like Vondy, I'm not fond of forcing sky-high skill rolls, for pretty much the reasons he lists. However, I also like the idea that magic is a ritual-rich, complicated sort of thing, rather than just a way to make a fantasy machinegun. The solution (for me) is to utilise all of the myth and lore we have built up around magic over the last centuries. So, for example, I'm perfectly happy with characters who build skill levels into foci such as wands, or Aid into a familiar. I give bonuses for appropriate settings and time (in fact the last campaign had a table on specific foci, times and seasons related to each school of magic, that a clever player could use to get a whopping bonus to his skill roll). Extra time is the easiest way to get a bonus to your skill roll. I allow complementary skill rolls to give a bonus, so accumulating ancient lore not only helps with in-game knowledge but can boost your magical power too (in appropriate circumstances). But all of this is a specific game style. If your idea of a mage is someone who hunts through ancient lore, and accumulates occult knowledge then the idea that it's easiest to cast "raise dead" in a cemetery at the dead of night under a new moon, while holding a silver scythe is perfectly OK. If you want a spellslinger who weaves through combat twin-wielding wands and flinging doombolts at his foes, it's not going to be your kind of thing. It works for me, because I go with the pulp fantasy idea that if you just want somebody dead, you get a barbarian with a terrible swift sword. On the other hand, if you need to find and enter the famed city of ghouls in the centre of the Stubbornly Unmapped Waste of Kool, then you'll probably want a wizard. So if skill rolls are a problem for your game ... drop them. If (like me) you see them as a feature, then take advantage of them. cheers, Mark

The general rule I use for my fantasy world is that magical healing just temporarily "fixes" the injury, and allows the person so healed to function until they can naturally heal the damage. Think of it like a cast which allows a person to use a broken arm - just better. The in-game rationale of this is that you can only take so much magical healing at any one time - a spell can patch up a cut or a broken limb, but the injury is still *actually* there: the spell simply holds everything in the body where it should be and strengthens the injured part. So a PC with (say) 2d6 healing could heal his comrades up to 6 BOD - but that's their lot. Until they have naturally healed some of that back, they can't get any more magical healing, unless they find a better healer, because his spell is already doing what it can to support their injuries. It also means that healing can be dispelled (evilgrin). This has the effect of making healers useful, without making them overwhelmingly powerful - for every BOD a character heals back naturally, the healer can give him another point of magical healing, essentially doubling people's healing rate. This makes even a low-level healer a boon - especially in situations where you have bed rest and good conditions - people can recover at a miraculous rate. It also means that when a party first goes into an adventure- when everyone is fresh and unwounded, the healer can relatively quickly patch up their wounds. However, that capacity degrades - as the PCs become wounded and then healed, the capacity to receive fresh healing is lost - meaning that they can't romp through encounter after encounter, getting hurt and then fully recovering. Essentially healers can cover for those unfortunate incidents where someone gets badly hurt, but you can't rely on them to allow your meatshield to get beaten up and then push him out to the front again over and over. I use this approach because it gives me simple book-keeping (as GM, I only need to track two totals per PC: current BOD and current magical healing) and it permits substantial but not unlimited healing: my experience has been that if PCs can rely on continual healing, they become pretty lackadasical about actual physical danger. If they know that healing is a limited resource, they try to plan to avoid injury instead of just bulling their way through. I like to encourage and reward planning . I also like to avoid the whole adventure suddenly stopping because one PC has suddenly taken an unfortunate wound that incapacitates him - but still want to be able to inflict meaningful harm on the PCs when appropriate to the story. A rarer (and more expensive in terms of points, which means it's generally limited to dedicated healer-types) form of healing is empathic healing where the healer takes someone else's injury and then heals it up later personally. Unlike the approach above, this is "real healing" - the injury is transferred away and the person healed is 100% healthy. For this I used the stop sign "regeneration usable by others" power, to provide "unlimited healing" - the limit in practice being how much damage the healer could take personally. Again, there's a mechanistic rationale for this: as the game became higher level, PCs faced more powerful foes and players had more and more invested in their characters, I wanted a way to save characters who might otherwise be one-shot killed by massive trauma - but I still didn't want danger to be a thing casually accepted. With this approach, the healer could give out a very large amount of healing, even to someone already carrying around magical healing - but at the cost of becoming injured him or herself. Again, that made it a precious resource, not something that was done after every fight. Last of all, I allowed healers to enter a healing trance, in which they regenerated - though this was limited to REC/hour, meaning it would normally take them a day or so to recover from major injuries (such as the use of empathic healing). Same rationale as before: allowing access to sufficient healing that the adventure didn't stop for a couple of weeks, while our heroes hobbled off to the hospice, while still not making physical danger trivial. cheers, Mark

For me, the definition of "destroyed" is not "atomised" but "can no longer be readily repaired". The US attempts to destroy disabled tanks that could not be recovered, was not to render them useless (they already were), but to destroy them so thoroughly that that hostile actors could not obtain any useful information from the parts left behind. In the context of the Abrams, some of the tanks disabled lost power (and thus became sitting ducks and were abandoned by their crew) but were able to be restored to active service after a few days. On the other hand, those which caught fire and burned out were "destroyed" - even though a substantial metal hulk was left behind. Those hulks were good for nothing and were simply abandoned by US forces. For "character" constructs, we have destroyed (dead) and disabled (KO'ed) concepts, but for vehicles, the disabling effects listed are rather weak. I think the basic concept is sound (when the vehicle takes damage, some functions are lost) but the implementation is weak. An alternative approach, which I alluded to above is to simply drop the DEF levels significantly, and assume that BOD damage represents relatively superficial damage up to that point where you reach a total of BOD (which is actually how we handle BOD for characters). In that case the 25 BOD allows the tank to soak a great deal of damage (even with a much lower DEF) before things start to break. Once you take 26 BOD however, it starts to leak smoke, the engine stops, the turret can no longer rotate ... and the crew bails out. The tank is disabled - but can be repaired. If it takes 50 BOD through defences though, it's a smouldering hulk which is of no use whatsoever. At this point, I'm not arguing that 25 is the "right number" - just using it as an example. Personally I think we should have hit locations and a damage multiple for vehicles just as we do for hit locations on people, allowing you to combine damage-soaking ability and the ability to inflict one-shot kills or KOs. cheers, Mark

Yeah, but as you note, your chances of rolling 46 BOD are infintesimal. In reality 23d6 will do 20-26 BOD, which means the tanks will be essentially unharmed ... which is not a real life result. As noted, if they both charged at each other, at noncombat speed you could get up to 35d6 ... which would still leave both tanks essentially unharmed (they might take some minor damage). This is definately not what happens in real life (I've read in the past of Abrams crashes, which resulted in crew deaths during training and the tanks being totalled). I think this shows that you can't describe the current Abrams defence stats. as realistic in any sense. cheers, Mark

Of course I did. With the current rules, 2.3 hits to a lower limb (the average in reality) will be fatal in about 30% of cases (as you note, 4 BOD per hit and 2.3 hits (on average) per wounded soldier. Just on average rolls you are looking at 10 BOD .... which is in fact, pretty life threatening. Add in just one roll which is a bit above average and you are into bleeding to death territory.. Add in the probability of thigh hits (also non armoured) and the fatality rates go up significantly. Even assuming effective body armour (which I was) the current rules give a fatality rate around double that experienced in real life. cheers, Mark

I love the mayor's measured response. "I do believe that this was a mistake," Mayor Bill de Blasio told 1010 WINS Friday afternoon. "It does not appear that was something that should have been done." Gee, you think?