Markdoc

And that brings up back to the numbers. It's the GM's job to interpret the results in a fun and plausible way, but (at least in Hero system) it's not his job to just make up the numbers. The players should have a reasonable idea of what their characters can (and cannot) do, based on the numbers on their sheet. Cheers, Mark

It's not a bad starting point - larger, higher velocity bullets *do* do more damage. The only reliable way to incapacitate a target is to hit something vital, and a high velocity round will penetrate deeper or go right through the target (thus having a better chance of hitting something vital) while a larger round has a larger cross-section and thus also has a better chance of hitting something vital (plus it typically has more momentum, helping with penetration). The detailed data-gathering that has gone on in the last couple of US wars has taught us a lot about bullet trauma. In those two wars, bullets killed about 18% of the soldiers who were hit in combat with them, and (odd tidbit here) the average bullet trauma included 2.3 bullets. Obviously, that covers a wide range of situations and bullet types, but the commonest firearm was 7.62 calibre, suggesting that the vast majority (80 +%) of soldiers hit with 2 or 3 rounds in that calibre survived - and we are only talking about those wounded, so those cases where body armour stopped the round are not included. Modelling this is pretty iffy, because you have to make so many assumptions, but I have played around with it, and the most consistent number is around 3-4 BOD per hit, or about half what you'd expect from the current assumption, which puts such weapons at 2d6 RKA. This number might even be on the high side, because roughly 2/3 of the deaths were KIA (killed in action) and the rest were DOW (died of wounds: meaning they survived long enough to be evacuated to a casualty station). In other words, the number of soldiers killed outright by single rounds appears to be very low - way, way lower than you get using current values. Interestingly, if you assume a 7.62 round does 1d6 damage, then a hit to the unprotected head using hit locations)has about a 16% chance of causing an instantly fatal wound (ie: fall down, bleed to death in short order) to an ordinary fit adult ... which is actually not that far off, though a bit on the low side. 1d6+1 is probably closer to reality, and gives you a fatality rate (once distributed out over the hit location chart) not too different from real life figures. There's two catches to this approach. The first is that it squeezes weapons down into a smaller DC range, reducing your ability to differentiate various weapons. While this appears to be realistic, it is also apparently deeply offensive to weapon enthusiasts. The second is that in real life, damage is "spikey", meaning that 9 times out of 10, or even 19 times out of 20, a single hit might not kill you, but sometimes, it will. One solution to this is to replace the flat modifer for hit locations with a die roll for damage that penetrates. That works, and gives quite realistic results, but makes combat potentially more lethal: your hero can be felled by a point or two of damage that gets through his defences, but gets a really good modifier. The flip side is that it models real life defences quite well - damage that does not penetrate defences often does little or nothing. That's a really good question, and I think there's two aaspects to the answer. The first is that in a fantasy game, attacks and defences tend to be lower, so they are *already* more compressed than modern weapons. In the firearms section, man-portable weapons range from 15 to 420 active points, vs 17-48 in the muscle-powered weapons section. Modern vehicles can have 30 hardened DEF, while the best armour a fantasy PC can wear is 8 (magic excluded in both cases). That means while the GM can reasonably say “You can't damage the iron bound door without breaking your broadsword" or "You can't damage the nazi warwalker with your .45", in the latter case the players can respond with "What about my BAR?" or "What about my bazooka?" You rapidly hit a point where GM fiat becomes obvious fudging. In a game as crunchy as Hero, that suggests system failure to me. Cheers, Mark

Agreed. It'd probably be simpler to fix the problem at root. There's actually - as I see it - three problems here. 1. Ranged weapons in Hero system almost all do too much damage. This has been discussed at length, but the very short version was that weapon damage was based on the idea of "the instant kill" which is an artifact of TV shows. People shot in the head, or the heart don't "die instantly" (with the exception of weapons that cause massive trauma) - instead they fall down and bleed out over the space of a minute or two to a few hours. In the real world "lying down with heavy bleeding internally" is the same as "dead" unless you happen to actually be in an operating theatre - and I speak as someone with experience on both ends of that equation. I've written before of trying to save someone who was shot right outside our hospital. He wasn't dead after being shot - at all: he could still run and scream - but he passed out and died despite having a fully equipped surgery only a couple of hundred metres away and being rushed through the door of the hospital by a posse of doctors. So a handgun that can do 10-12 BOD with a head hit (ie: 5 or 6 before doubling) is doing a real life "instant kill". People also overestimate how lethal handguns are - in the US, about 13% of shootings where the target is hit end in a fatality, and that includes all shootings (important edit: excluding suicide attempts!) regardless of of how many bullets ended up in the target. (Edit: of course that's because most of them end up in hospital - the fatality rate would be significantly higher if medical attention was not available) Of course, most people are not very skilled - a skilled shooter can put bullets where they count more, but it makes the point that the base damage is not high enough to kill a human in the vast majority of cases. A head hit - even a hit that penetrates the skull - does not always kill the target, and I'm living, writing proof of that. If we accept that the low end of damage is unrealistically high, it naturally follows that the high end of weapons damage is also unrealistically high, because it simply builds up from the base. 2. The second problem - the high DEF of tanks - grows organically out from the first problem: when you have high damage for small arms, you need a ton of DEF to stop people just shooting up tanks with their pistols ... which then puts it out of sync with other attacks. 3. The third problem is a mechanistic one: in the real world, damage does not work the way we model it in most RPGs (including Hero). If all you want is an abstracted combat system, that doesn't really matter. But it becomes a problem when we try to scale damage of real world weapons, because we think we know how those work. I've been worrying away at this problem for a while, trying to think of a better way to model damage in Hero system and I've been reading a lot of inquest and battle reports (as the initial post above might indicate!) to put those thoughts into perspective. The short version is that in-game we work on the principle of attrition - you have a pool of damage points (whether for a person or a vehicle) and when that's used up - be it in small dribbles or one big hit, you stop functioning. Damage in real life, however, tends to be "spiky". Generally it requires penetration of the target, but that when that occurs, it can often be catastrophic - so even a small attack in the wrong place can kill you, if you are unlucky. In short, in reality, 3 small wounds are not the same as one larger wound, and attacks that are stopped by defences often do little or nothing at all. The last thing of course is that in real life an attack that doesn't incapacitate you at all, can still kill you later on, through bleeding. Few RPGs model sustained damage, and it's an open question as to whether we actually want to go there, anyway. So what do we do about this? I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts and I have to run right now, but I can post my ideas later. cheers, Mark

Tanks are filled with high explosives in the form of ammo, and fuel, and lots of burnable stuff in the form of electronics. If you look at the battle reports, one-hit kills of tanks by tank guns or by missiles are quite common. A "kill" doesn't always mean that it explodes in a giant fireball (though of course that can happen) but that, quite often it stops working properly, catches fire and after the crew bail out it just burns out. This even happens in state of the art tanks like the Abrams with built in halon-dump fire fighting equipment, but it was even more a problem with older designs. One of the problems with the current setup is that it's essentially impossible to one-shot a tank like the Abrams with weapons that routinely do one-shot it (ie: make it stop working so that the crew bail out) in the real world. You could solve that problem by making the weapons even more powerful, but that's "solving the problem" in the same way that you can put out a fire by pouring on gasoline until it uses up all the available oxygen: they are already capable of taking down almost any published hero with one, or at most two, hits and do building-leveling damage. cheers, Mark

I got an update note that another example of an Abrams disabled by 25mm autocannon fire, was at Najaf - this was apparently friendly fire (again!) from a Bradley against the rear of the engine compartment. Since a 25mm comes in at around 3 1/2d6 RKA, this is almost impossible under the current rules, again suggesting that the armour values are too high. I've got to admit, I would never have expected that you could take an Abrams out with a heavy machine gun or a light autocannon, but obviously that can and does happen, even if infrequently. Looping back to the original post, if light support weapons or cheapo shoulder carried RPG-7's can disable an Abrams (and we now have quite a lot of cases where they have proven that they can), I'm guessing the Mighty Thor should be able to mess one up pretty good. cheers, Mark

So are fingernails, which would make punching through a forcefield that excluded dead organic matter a painful affair - at least the first time you did it ... Of course if the forcefield did not exclude dead organic matter then a simple wooden club would do the trick. If only living matter passed through, a club freshly cut from a tree should work. cheers, Mark

Actually the preferred primary weapons in that period seem to have been spiky things (hammers, beaked maces and the like), two handed pole arms (glaives, guisarmes, glaive-guisarmes, glaive-guisarme-glaives, glaive-glaive-guisarme-glaives, etc ) ... and swords. The first two classes speak for themselves - weapons designed to pierce or crush armour with either a spike or two-handed leverage. The gripping by the blade thing may or may not have been common (I know we see it in illustrations in a few fechtbuch, but not in any contemporary illustrations, and a lot of blades featured a sharp edge all the way down to the hilt, making it a dangerous practice, even with a gauntlet), but it's clear from design that they were not used like quarterstaffs, since they featured rigid stabbing blades. The goal seems to have been not to try and slash through the armour (you basically can't) but to aim for gaps and holes with the point. Various contemporary accounts make it plain that a skilled swordsman could put the point into the eyeslot of an opponent's helmet, for example, and I imagine that would spoil anyone's day. Pretty much every warrior carried a dagger, and there are plenty of contemporary illustrations showing men-at-arms grappling with daggers, so I get where you are coming from, but I get the very strong impression that this was not the preferred approach, but something you did when you were forced to, for example in the press of the melee. In the situation the OP listed this wouldn't help, since the goal with a dagger is to stick it into a gap where there isn't heavy armour and a forcefield amulet wouldn't have any. I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but this might make swords obsolete too, since in the late medieval period this seems to have been their major route of attack as well, leaving you with the AP and +1 STUN weapons as you preferred option. cheers, Mark

Coming late to this thread, so apologies for getting back on topic The short answer is "No, tanks are really not that tough". The perfect example is the battle of Norfolk (which despite its English sounding name, actually happened in Iraq during the first gulf war). There, the 2nd armoured division engaged Iraqi forces - when some of the US forces penetrated the Iraqi lines and turned round to re-engage, they were mistaken for hostiles, leading to a short Abrams vs. Abrams confrontation in which 5 Abrams were rapidly destroyed. The results are instructive. First off, it showed that a US-crewed Abrams was far more dangerous to another Abrams than the Iraqi forces - almost all the US AFVs lost were lost to friendly fire. Crew training and discipline counts for almost as much as armour - a fact often overlooked, but brought into prominence by the many Abrams lost by Iraqi forces recently against ISIS. Anyway, with regard to what happened. The first tank, B-66, was hit by three rounds against the front of the tank. The first penetrated under the turret, killing the gunner and wounding the commander, the second set the tank on fire. I can't find an indication of where the third round hit, but the tank burned and then exploded. The claim that "the frontal armour of an Abrams has never been penetrated" is technically true - the first shell to hit did not penetrate the frontal armour plate, according to the US army report - but it still went through the tank's frontal defences. The second tank (B-22) was also hit frontally, by one shell. Again, the round did not technically penetrate, but it still caused internal damage, and the crew abandoned it when they were unable to extinguish the burning electronics. The tank was disabled but not destroyed (it was alter decommissioned because of radioactive contamination in the crew compartment: I'm not quite sure how to square that with the claim that no penetration occurred, unless it was from spalling of the depleted uranium armour. The third tank hit (A-14) does not specify the location, though it was probably also frontal since the only casualty was the driver. The tank was disabled by one hit and then caught fire and burned out. The 4th tank (A-31) took a hit in the left rear - this disabled it, but it was not destroyed, being repaired and returned to service. The last tank (A-33) was adjacent to A-14 and it was also struck in the side at the rear (this time by an anti-tank missile, thought to be from a Bradley). This disabled the tank, but as the crew was evacuating, it was also hit by a round from an Abrams on the side armour. This went right through the tank, hitting on the left and exiting via the right. Yeah, you read that right - the round went through two layers of side armour. Add that to the fact that ISIS has apparently been using the Kornet missile with reasonable success against the new generation of Abrams (according to Jane's there have been at least 6 cases where the missile has penetrated the armour, though they do not say where) and it's pretty clear that the armour on the Abrams can be penetrated by modern weapons. The US lost at least 2 Abrams to Kornets when the Iraqi insurgents were using them, and those tanks had reactive defences as well. So what does that mean in Hero system? Well, one round from the Abram's main gun can go through the frontal defences of another Abrams and disable it in one hit. The fact that this happened on more than one occasion suggests that it wasn't a freak accident. Under the current rules, that requires you to roll at least 31 BOD and then roll a 3 on the damage table and assume a disablinghit. It's not impossible, but we're talking a good roll and the GM deciding that the tank's largest power is "movement". Alternatively, since the tanks were using DU rounds, you could go for double AP, but you'd still need a good roll. The incident where a round went right through an Abrams would require a roll of 41+ BOD. You know, I'm just not seeing that on 8d6. Either the gun as depicted in the rules is underpowered (and really, I don't think we need to go above 24 freakin' damage classes, here) or the armour given is unrealistically high. Given that we have several incidents of Abrams being destroyed in one or two hits - and it has 25 BOD - we're actually talking about hits that are putting 8-12 BOD through that armour. If we look at the other attacks, wire-guided missiles are listed at 8d6 double AP (ouch!) That'd mess the Abrams up pretty good, frontal armour or no, doing an average of 28 bod vs 15/10 defence (after halving) The light antitank weapon would do nothing against frontal armour, but would have a chance of penetrating the side armour, which is not too out of line. They have no chance of destroying one in a single hit though, even though we know that they can do so in real life. As a last point, there are reports of Abrams being disabled by small arms fire in both the first and second gulf wars, not through penetrating the main armour, but by igniting external fuel tanks, and of disabling hits from RPG-7, and even one Abrams disabled by what was described as "medium-caliber automatic weapons system such as a 12.7 mm DShK heavy machine gun" and another knocked out by a 25 mm light anti-tank weapon firing into the rear armour. When I look at these rules, it is clear that there's an imbalance in the weapons damage listed and the armour of the Abrams. In real life, lighter weapons can disable an Abrams that have no chance to inflict damage in Hero system - even if it happens rarely (meaning a very high roll, essentially ) But part at least of the problem is down to the way that vehicle rules work: they are designed to let people "chip away" at a vehicle, destroying various components until the vehicle is completely destroyed. In real life, a vehicle can actually take a ton of damage, and still function - just as long as nothing vital is hit. At the same time, "1 hit = 1 kill" is not uncommon in real life. When a vital system is hit, basically the vehicle ceases to function. But when looking at how the rules work, the very high defences of the Abrams exacerbates this problem, because you require a ton of damage to penetrate it, and to destroy it you need to do that over and over. To actually destroy it in one hit - which we can see happens - you'd need to do 45-55 BOD, so we're talking 12d6+ killing attacks. My own feeling is that the vehicle rules make vehicles too durable. I understand that you don't want vehicles to be too fragile, but look at it this way. The main gun on an Abrams does 8d6: on average 28 BOD. An Apache helicopter has 10 DEF and 20 BOD. As the rules are set up now, most of the time, if you fired the main gun of an Abrams into an Apache, it would take a major amount of damage, but could still fly off and operate with some minor reduction in its efficiency. Is it just me, or does that just seem wrong? So I think we have two problems here. The Abrams itself is out of line with pretty much everything else in the system in terms of durability, and the higher-end weapons have been set up with the Abrams/MBT baseline in mind, meaning that they are pretty gross (compared to superheroes) in terms of damage output. That's one problem. The other problem is that even when an attack penetrate defences, it is actually pretty hard to put vehicles out of commission - they tend to lose minor functionality when their defences are penetrated, meaning you need multiple hits to stop anything with decent armour. At the other end of the scale, a couple of good hits from a .45 will destroy (as in blow to bits, not disable) a midsize car. The other thing that comes up again and again, in real life is that hits to vehicles often end up incapacitating or killing the crew (as noted in the examples above) even though the vehicle is not destroyed. That's not really covered in the basic rules. All up, looking at the vehicle rules, I'm inclined to say they're not fit for purpose. Fixing them is a bit harder, and I'd be interested to hear suggestions. What I've done in the past (I posted this to the forums a while back in the One person versus a starship? thread) is a bit more complex in terms of write up, but - in my opinion anyway - works better. That's to divide the vehicle up into sections. I even mentioned the Abrams in that thread, dividing it up into crew compartment, turret and engine (in retrospect I'd probably add tracks as an additional section). The purpose is two-fold. Since each section has the amount of body we attribute to the vehicle currently, it can take a lot of distributed hits, allowing you to decrease the DEF significantly. The second thing is that it allows you to work out pretty much instantly what the effect of destroying/damaging a section is. In some cases that will disable a vehicle, in others, the loss of a section will effectively destroy it - and in some cases, damage to a section might have little effect. I apply this rule to buildings too, making walls able to be smashed though, without the building being comically fragile. cheers, Mark

I'm on the side of "never needed a rule for this". It's relatively rare for a mook to be KO'ed without taking *any* BOD, so in general, if they go down, and get enough recovery to become mobile again (and that's not actually that common in my experience - at heroic levels, most fights are quite short) then they are "walking wounded". So depending on circumstances, they will surrender, stumble away or play dead. After all, they're mooks, not heroes. They're only fighting for the bad guys because they've been forced, or their family has always served the Lords of X, or to pay for their wife's heart operation, or whatever. Once the players learn that a full-clear is not necessary for victory, they'll spend less time going around and gakking the survivors, which, to be honest, just doesn't feel that heroic. I usually don't have mooks fight to the death either. Sentient beings usually break and run (or at least retreat), once it's plain that they are taking a beating. There are exceptions and that's fine. Members of the Relentless Cult of the Badass might fight to the death, and plaguebearers might need to be 100% killed off to ensure the plague is contained but that's part of their shtick. And really, having some mooks which are a bit scarier (because they are a threat unless definitively killed) but which are not terribly powerful (because after all, they're still mooks) is a useful GM tool. Cheers, Mark

In a way, if such amulets became common, it'd be the same as if heavy armour became common, which in late medieval Europe and Japan, it did. People just shifted to heavier weapons (option #1 above). In a fantasy world that would mean a mix of big hitty two-handed swords, axes and maces, and magical weapons. Historically, it also meant the decline of bows and longbows, which don't perform well against heavy armour, and the rise of weapons (guns) which could. In Fantasy Hero, missile weapons are unrealistically effective, so you won't necessarily see that. Cheers, Mark

For me, the fact that you have to make exceptions, generally indicates that the rule in question is probably not well-thought out. There were a lot of exceptions and gotchas around STR, most of which resulted from the pricing structure ( and that's been discussed to death in the past). I see this as simply one more (and not one of the worst, to be honest). cheers, Mark

In my game, magic armour is just DEF, so people can (and do) wear armour amulets (or more usually bracers, or something similar that cannot easily be grabbed: you don't want to be the middle of an armoured melee, protected only by a fashionable shirt). However, most magic armour is made to look like armour, because it serves an important visual function as well. It's just as effortless to wear as bracers (it's magical after all!) but provides space for heraldry, and gives an imposing "Now I am going to war" kind of vibe. Higher up the scale, it also includes useful functions (strength enhancement, flight, life support, etc) Cheers, Mark

If I recall correctly, the rationale was that "strength is different". Because of pricing issues in earlier editions, it was the one characteristic that routinely went to high levels in supers games. For a Brick, a strength of 50+ was all but mandatory, whereas in my experience it's been rare to see a DEX, INT or EGO over 50. That meant in many games, contests between someone with a very high STR and someone with a low STR could be routinely expected - and a single characteristic roll-off made it more likely that a very fit normal could - say- beat someone capable of lifting a tank at arm wrestling, etc. The "# of damage dice" roll makes that less likely. That's the rationale. I didn't say it was a good one . Personally, I too have long just used a characteristic rolloff - though to be fair, since I usually run low powered games, that's not a problem anyway. Cheers, Mark

Right - nerd and geek (or its English and Japanese analogues "anorak" and "otaku") were all undeniably negative when I was at university. "Anorak" seems to have dropped out of use, but the remaining words have lost most (not all, but most) of their negative sting. This changeover - in my part of the world - happened in the late 80's to 90's and (not surprisingly) was tied to the rise of computers - at least among people I knew. To be into computers in the early 90's you either had to be an engineer or a nerd (scientists fall into the latter group in the public mind, pretty much by definition). But by the mid-90's computers were going public - and so did computer nerds, a few of whom became mindbogglingly wealthy. And among the university grads I knew, being able to help with computer problems in the late 80's was an instant social in. It was absolutely not cool to hand in a thesis written in longhand and then typed, no matter your major or gender. And during this switchover period, I noticed a few people started to use the term geek or nerd interchangeably, and also occasionally self-referentially. And of course a few people tried to claim it, I guess the same way the gay community claimed "queer" as a way of destigmatising it and shaping an identity. I suppose the obsession with "fake nerds" comes from this last group. Maybe the idea that anyone can be a geek threatens their idea of community ... but the way they have responded online portrays exactly why they were stigmatised in the first place. Not for being geeks. But for being dropwads. cheers, Mark

Ain't that the truth. Cheers, Mark

Get off my fandom, you darn kids! I get the point you're making, but I absolutely don't buy it. Star wars fandom, Star trek fandom - they're each a teeny-tiny piece of a very big universe. Geekery is far bigger (and far older) than that. When I was a kid geek, I was into (as well as fantasy/SF) medieval music. It was incredibly hard to actually get hold of, since the internet didn't exist and accessible catalogues were tiny. What mailing lists existed were, you know, actual mailing lists that were made on paper and - well, they were mailed. We used to exchange cassette tapes, that we had made of material found wherever. Mailing someone a recording of a recording of a recording of a recording of a concert someone somebody knew had recorded at some castle in Wales ... that's pretty damn geeky right there. And it's a geekdom that had virtually no overlap with my other music geekdom at the time - which was African music - despite the fact that it operated in precisely the same way. Divisions in geekdom have a long and dishonourable history. On the comics/movie side of things, there were fandoms built around different comics (especially anime, but also eurocomics and British comics) complete with conventions and cosplay dating back decades. The earliest big comic cons started in the UK and the US in the '60's. Movies and books were the same, as were gaming cons. Fandoms have not become more isolated since the turn of the millennium - speaking as someone who has experienced it up close and personal, I can promise you that the exact reverse is true. As comics and movie geekery has been mainstreamed (and profitable!), the fandoms have become more accessible (and also much bigger) - and also broader in their range. It's a lot easier to be a geek in multiple fandoms when it's readily accessible online. I think you are right that the "real geek/fake geek" thing is a grognard attitude (not all grognards are old) - it's a desire to have a little area all of your own where the other kids can't play. That's not new. I met people like that in fandom 30 years ago, and I don't doubt that the attitude is much more ancient. But that attitude didn't define or determine fandom back then and it doesn't today either. Because of course, real fans - like real geeks - by which I mean people who are really interested in some kind of fandom - welcome people with an interest in their pet topic, even though not all of them are (or will become) hardcore. They always have, in my experience. cheers, Mark

White-ish woman , but yes. She was asked to pose for the picture and comment about her job by her company, who is doing a recruiting drive. Her image (but none of the others from the same campaign) attracted a lot of negative comments online because some dropwads apparently thought that engineers can't look like that. Just like the "fake geek" stupidity, they were claiming online that she was a "fake engineer". The whole hashtag thing came in response to the online trolling. This is - unfortunately - not an isolated incident. One of our gaming group is a very attractive female electronics engineer: she's bumped into exactly this attitude in the past - both in regard to geekery, and in regard to engineering. cheers, Mark

What the heck is an "actual sports fan"? Is there an exam? Some kind of certificate? Are you still allowed to attend sports events if you don't have the certificate? I've known plenty of sports fans who meet exactly the same criteria that you fulfill yourself. It doesn't seem to stop them - or other people - identifying them as sports fans. This makes the point that it's a ridiculous argument to start with. I know that there are people who actually feel that if you are not expert in their particular hobby, then you are not worth talking to - heck, I've met a few. But just as there is no such thing as an actual sports fan, there's no such thing as an actual geek. People have a gradient of interest (in sports, in games, in electronics, in whatever) - just like they have always had a gradient of interest, and frankly anyone who suggests that maybe you shouldn't take part because you know, you aren't an expert (as defined by a totally arbitrary personal scale) deserves a repeated slapping in the face with a well-aged fish. They're not fans and they're not geeks - they're just d***s. There is no fast line defining a fan, or a geek, and there never has been. In reality, there never will be, because of course every fan started out with a less than comprehensive knowledge of their area of interest. cheers, Mark

Agreed. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a "real geek" and a "fake geek" is so precious as to be laughable. There's a crapton of fandoms/hobbies out there, and people are immersed to a greater or lesser degree in some/many of them. There are also many geekdoms that have nothing to do with gaming or fantasy at all. There doesn't exist some platonic ideal ubergeek who masters every geekdom in depth. I like scifi and fantasy, medieval music, play RPGs and videogames. Have done since long, long before any of those things were cool. But I'm otherwise pretty straight-up: I also like most of the the things that white middle class males are supposed to like. Does that make me a "real" geek? Or not? I'm pretty sure some people would say yes, and some would say no, but the smart ones would say such a question is, at base so asinine as to not waste any time worrying about it. Personally, when I check my give-a-**** meter, it's not registering this question at all. cheers, Mark

My "rule of thumb" was that most reasonably experienced adult people had (on average) 10 points in assorted skills and physical attributes. In general, that would be things like area knowledge, a profession, etc. This would often simply be more points in things that fall into the everyman category - for example, most people will have a basic AK: for their home region, but some ordinary people might have more. I then increased the points by about a quarter for each halving in population, and just round to the nearest 25 points. So a village of a hundred people could expect to have a couple of 50-pointers, and about 30-40 25 pointers. A prosperous provincial town of a couple of thousand, would have one or two characters between 100-125 points, while in a city the size of Imperial Rome at it's peak, you'd expect literally thousands of people over 100 points and a few monsters in the 500-1000+ point level. These - naturally - are famous (or infamous) heroes or villains. I never let myself be shackled by this, of course, it was always a rule of thumb. But it let me decide on the spur of the moment what kind of resources were likely to be available. cheers, Mark

It's been about 20 years since I last went to Gencon, but even back then they had panels and sessions on fantasy/Sci Fi wrting, art and films. So it's pretty safe to say that if it hasn't been there from the start, it's at leats been a part of Gencon for a long, long time. cheers, Mark

"Something"? Got you covered right here https://mobile.twitter.com/jonathantimar/status/626269345908285441 Cheers, Mark

I've always used a very earth-like world* (despite a fondness for weird-world design) because a a weird fantasy world throws up several challenges. It makes it harder to get players deeply involved, it's (a lot) harder for the GM to maintain consistency and all too easily it can distract from the story rather than adding to it. When I do run weird-world stories, they thus tend to take place in other dimensions, on other planets, magical artifacts and the like. cheers, Mark *actually more than "earth-like" - the game world I use is actually a far-future parallel-dimension earth invaded by "fae" - creatures from another, much more divergent dimension - thus explaining all the cultural parallels that inevitably leak in. It thus also has a recognizable Moon, Mars and Venus, all colonised and (somewhat) terraformed long ago by daring wizards: that's often where I run my weird-world stories when I have the itch.

There's no problem with having a preference for shaved leg/pubes/face/whatever. The problem only comes into being if a person insists that others have to conform to their preference. I like redheads - always have. But I'm not insisting that women with hair another colour have some kind of problem. My morbid dislike of neckbeards is already documented upthread. I'm not advocating mandatory barbering though (although I can dream ....) So yeah, the assumption that women have some sort of requirement to shave, when men don't is sexist - even more, since it has nothing to do with function but is overtly sexual in nature. And to be fair, any assumption that men have a requirement to shave - even their loathsome back fur* - would be an imposition. Oddly enough, if both genders had a generally accepted requirement to shave unsightly hair, I guess it'd stop being sexist and merely become intrusive . Cheers, Mark *I never claimed to be without body prejudice - I'm just open that these are my own prejudices, not natural laws

World-building is just a part (not even an essential part) of GM'ing. I enjoy doing it, but the focus of a successful game is the game itself. The games I have most enjoyed have both an immersive world and a GM who is good at gaming (the ability to tell a story through the limits of the gaming medium). Those also tend to be the longest-lived. If world-building takes priority over the game itself, it ends up being (in my experience) a less-than satisfying experience: it feels like a tour instead of an adventure. Of course, none of that matters if you don't have players! cheers, Mark