Markdoc

>>> Yes, but do you LIMIT the skill level? Assuming a player had the points to blow on it, would you allow him to buy a 120 point VPP and a 30- magic skill, so that his biggest skill has 18- chance of success?<<< Sure. The player would have to decide to invest a huge chunk of points to reach that level, meaning that the character would be focussing on magic to the excusion of virtually anything else - and would have to be prepared to work at it for a long time (just to accumulate that much Xp, let alone all the gaming to acquire the knowledge to be able to USE that much power). In other words, the character wants to one of the world's great Adepts. What a great gaming hook! Other players would likewise be free to spend their points: they could also generate monstrously powerful characters with the 160-180 points we are talking about here - before you consider any other skills, languages or characteristics. cheers, Mark

>>> I was thinking about strong creatures with relatively minor HKAs that can do a bunch of damage by virtue of high strength. <<< To me, that simply sounds like a big HKA, perhaps flavoured with reduced penetration to desired levels. cheers, Mark

Here's what I used for "disabling" attacks for martial artists. Nerve strike, 1d6 Drain vs STR, DEX, STUN, REC, END or Running/Superleap, one at a time (+1/4), Return rate 1 point per Turn (+1/4) This is only 15 points, so you could double it for the AP limit you've got, which means you could inflict "significant malfunctions" on people without power defence. Flash lives in a seperate slot in the multipower. As for "hitting the wind" a simple EB in another slot should do the trick - or you can make it an HA usable at range if you wish an extra layer of cheese Should work. cheers, Mark

I enforce the RSR penalties, but also give bonuses for good conditions, good resources and extra time - as well as minuses for bad conditions. It encourages mages to focus on smaller, reliable magics for combat. and cast the big nasty spells out of combat. In other words, treat it like any other skill. Mould you rather perform a skill requiring careful thought in a well-equipped lab, with plenty of apparatus and a few reliable assistants, where you could take your time over it and have the instructions written out in front of you, or while you were plummetting to your death through a thunderstorm? cheers, Mark

I have nothing against VPPs in FH (indeed, I use them in my own game). Having said that, I absolutely would not, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, use the RC method. Just so we're clear about this You have the reason in your own post "with 20 points I can have a 480 REAL point pool" ugh, shudder. From my experience, mages with VPPs even when limited to "learned spells only" can be very powerul, although that power is gained through flexibility rather than raw power. This approach just gives them even more - for free. I simply can't see the need, or the point. If you want more powerful PCs, give them more points. At least, that way they remain balanced against each other. cheers, Mark

>>>But what about the movies where the unarmed hero starts beating up people with swords (like Bruce Lee in The Chinese Connection)? Some heroes even start kicking their enemies even when they have swords!<<< Just depends where you spent your points. I have had characters who deal just as much damage with their fists as they do with a sword, so why bother to carry a sword? I wouldn't add in extra penalties to blocking against a weapon: it's against the spirit of the genre (most people will use swords anyway, if equipment is free, because hey! Its a free HKA). But unless you restrict guns in some way you WILL get guns playing a major role, simply because of the attraction of firepower: I speak from experience here. cheers, Mark

Why don't people use guns in Kill Bill? For the same reasons they don't make much use of them in the Matrix: A cool guy with a sword or his fists can beat the crap out of anyone with a gun #1. In gaming terms, give people plenty of points to build characters, and don't go to heavily into realism. If a player want to carry his plane onto a sword let him make his 18- concealment roll against the pleb guard's roll (probably 8-, with a +3 for excellent equipment). #2 Rule that no character (PC or NPC) can spend more than 10 points on gun-related skills/powers. This means that guns would be fine for plebs, and if you are in a hurry, players could pile on the weaponry to gun down the mooks (it's probably quicker to spray the hall down with an M60, than fight your way through 30 mooks with a sword). But when it comes to the chief bad guys, you're never going to be able to hit them, so it's time to haul out the Katana. That should do the trick. cheers, Mark

>>> And the X=Slave spells weren't meant to be exact translations... I was more interested in catching the spirit of the spell, not the exact effect.<<< In which case, it should be 20d6 killing with the limitation "downgraded to 4d6 EB, when that would be funnier".... cheers, Mark

I prefer low fantasy for three reasons: 1. I like (both as a player and a GM) long running campaigns where events and NPCs/PCs can develop over time. While it is not impossible to do this with high fantasy, it is harder, simply because of the challenge to the GM to come up with interesting, different storylines week after week, year after year. 2. Kicking off from the above, as a GM, running low fantasy is easier, since your players' options are generally more limited. Many storylines can go chaotically haywire, if your players can routinely speak with the dead, cross continents in a few hours, teleport through walls and destroy small armies. Again: it's not impossible - I have played a very satisfying "demigods" game where players could do all of the above. But it required a great deal more planning and off-the-cuff GM'ing than standard FH games. It also required a deal more creativity from the players, as the larger range of options sometimes overwhelmed them. What to do, where to go? 3. In low fantasy, players interact with the world more, making it far easier to get into character as a player and giving more gratification to the GM (well, to me, anyway, since the joy of making things up and sharing them is a large part of the joy I get out of GM'ing). What I mean is that in low fantasy, many more NPCs matter. The geography matters. In a high fantasy game, the captain of the city guard is likely irrelevant: it's the prince's reaction that matters. In the low fantasy game, both matter - even if the players never meet the prince. Likewise the tribes of the howling wilderness between Ruthin and Carmack count for precisely nothing if the players can easily fly the distance, but can be all-important if the players have to cross the distance on foot. This means the GM can use smaller areas to tell a story, leaving other parts of the game world for later (thus contributing to #1 above...) Cheers, Mark

We're all trying to pretend Fuzion never happened. Fear not - the Sengoku site is full of crunchy Hero system goodness - it's NOT a Fuzion site (although it has Fuzion conversions, since so many Sengoku GMs wrote to me and asked for them). It's just that I had already started the Sengoku game (in Hero system, dammit!) and put up the website before GRG started working on their Fuzion-based Sengoku game, and I declined to change the name. cheers, Mark

I've been GM'ing FH for nigh on 20 years now and NEVER had a campaign implode on me because I gave away unbalanced magical items. As I said - don't give away items you don't want your players to have. And I ran the same game nearly every week for 6 years at college, so I think I have roughish idea of how to handle these things over the longer term. That doesn't mean that players shouldn't get pants-wettingly powerful items from time to time (they like that sort of thing). But I never give away such an item without having a good idea what is going to happen to it. When the inevitable happens and the sword-that-cuts-through-anything goes the way of all Xp occasionally the players have pissed and moaned, but they cheer up soon enough: after all, it's not like they invested their own precious Xp in the things. And that's my point. Loud would be the wailing indeed if the Gm not only takes away the sword-that-cuts-through-anything, but also 30 Xp! As for the idea that NPCs are built using different rules from PCs, that's goes straight against my "rules for GMs". NPCs are built on different points totals, of course. It has honestly never occurred to me that Mung the pot boy at the Inn, and Bludspurt Axfrenzy the Terrible, Scourge of cContinents, should be built on 150 points, but in every game I apply the same rules to both. Still, if you WANT to charge for magic items, it's your game. Likewise, the idea of using an "equipment pool" is viable: I have played in games where we use those (although it encourages a deal of sitting around scheming how much stuff you can cram into your pool, rather than just grabbing a weapon off the wall)

As to the idea that magic items are welded to fantasy characters, that happens in some books, with some characters: but in others, the exact opposite is true. In Jack Vance's stories, magic items are bought, sold, stolen or involuted and hidden under doorstops. Even in Tolkein, sure Gandalf gets to keep Glamdring, but Sting passes from hand to hand (Bilbo gives it to Frodo, Frodo is poisoned and Sam loots his body). That sounds like a Fantasy game to me Even the one ring passes from hand to hand - Gollum was upset when he lost it - imagine how pissed off he would have been if he had had to pay points for it! The whole Silmarillion is driven by the stealing, losing, looting and loosing again of several powerful magic items. You could argue that these items are plot devices, but that rather misses the point - in fantasy games, magic items are also plot devices. The first GM's rule for magic items - one rule to bind them all, if you like - is that you should never give the players a magic item you don't want them to have. That's it. Once you have mastered this simple rule, all the rest about balancing points and so on becomes unneccessary. To quote from a certain famous fantasy campaign: "There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil._ Bilbo was meant to find the ring, in which case you also were meant to have it." And who meant him to have it? The gamesmaster, of course. I have, in my time, given players hideously powerful magic items: I have also on occasion had those items stolen away and watched the players run hither and yon like headless chickens in an attempt to retrieve them. That would not have happened if they players had had to pay for those items with their own points, in which case I would have denied myself and my players 3 months of enjoyable gaming. So - no charging for magical items that are found. I don't charge the players points for the food they acquire in inns, either (life support, no need to eat, Focus (food), gestures (must eat food), 1 recoverable charge (recovers by finding new food), 1 real point). Note: yes, there was certain amount of sarcasm in the last paragraph As a last note, none of this point stuff negates the need to roleplay: a player who tried to convince me that had spent 15 XP and made a magic sword in his room over night would soon be introduced to the pointy pencil of pain. Chasing down magical ingredients, learning the necessary rituals and finally performing the ritual are all good gaming fodder. cheers, Mark. And may none of your players ever find an invisible, dancing, 2-handed vorpal sword!

Just to add to Fitz's post (Hi Fitz ) the GM's pages include translations of most of the NPCs ad characters into both Fuzion and Usagi Yojimbo stat.s, so translating back and forth should be trivial. cheers, Mark

Host a one nighter? But of course! I'm always up for that - and it helps that my wife is gamer too. See ya next summer cheers, Mark

This calls to mind a Games Workshop rip-off called (I think) Leviathan, where the Elves were twisted demon-worshipping racial supremacists, the Orcs were basically dinosaur-riding mongols (also racial supremacists), the Dwarves were previously slaves but now are magic/steam-technology wierdos and the humans are buff conan/celtic barbarians. The backstory was amusing enough, bu my eyes tend to glaze over on any description that starts "all the elves (or dwarves, or orcs) are...." cheers, Mark

I'm with the crowd on this one. If a player wants to *make* an independant magic item, then they pay XPs. That's reasonable and fits with my game's theory of magic. I explain to the player that they must not whine if/when the item goes walkabout. On the other hand, if a player FINDS a magic item it makes no sense at all, that it magically disappears in "next week's episode". Just imagine: Gandalf bursts into Frodo's hobbit hole on a really bad hair day. G: "Is it secret? Is it safe?" F: "Oh, I decided to improve my elvish instead. It's just, you know, gone" In my game, the ring hangs around because long, long ago Sauron made it an independant magic item and paid the Xp for it. THAT's where the Xp in the item come from, so the maths all balances :-) cheers, Mark

We tried several variants on this long ago, with the one I played in having the players being abducted by aliens. The idea was that we would gain control of a spacecraft and zoom off to adventures in outer space. I must admit I wouldn't do it again, but as far as I know no-one was psychologically scarred (or at least it was hard to tell...) We did have the "I have 18 PRE" sequence, though. The rest of the group went BWAHAHAHA and then settled on 8. The player was offended, but got over it in ... oh, a couple of months. For some reason, though such campaigns, just don't seem to have long life expectancy. Our games tended to run for months at least, normally years. These ones all died after only a few weeks. As a side note, I got some morbid pleasure out of watching the response of one player after "he" had died, when his erstwhile buddies casually rolled his corpse into a ditch and then started arguing over who got what off the body.... cheers, Mark

To be really helpful, we nee dto know how magic works in your game world. It is pretty easy to work out the mechanics once we know what you actually want. As a starter, here are three magic systems I have used/played with in the past. http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Grimoire/magic_systems.htm You might want to look at the "medieval" magic system as an example of the most detailed odds and sods magic system. You might not want to use it as described, but there should be plenty of insopiration for tinkering with magic in there. cheers, Mark

In theory, I guess it's OK. (Kinda strange, but OK) His math is wrong, though. 1d6 healing can "heal" a maximum of 12 active points of duplication. To fix his dead duplicate (50 active points), he needs to buy 4 1/2d6, for a total of 90 active or 45 real points. He'd be better off buying regeneration Seriously though, if it really worries him, suggest he buys regeneration from the dead for his duplicate (instead of for the power), as long as it fits the special effect. cheers, Mark

So to summarise all the discussion, it would appear that KA is better at hurting people, while EB is better at putting them down (once one takes that all-important CON stun into account. But otherwise, they come in pretty close. Sounds good to me. cheers, Mark

Simple fix. HEAT is AP with perhaps 1 hex area effect or explosive. It's designed for any sort of toughened target, but does make a bit of bang. HESH is simply explosive (perhaps with decreased falloff) APDS is double AP, since it is designed for use against modern tanks which often have hardened armour. cheers, Mark

For my FH game, I required all spellcasting to use up "Life force" - in essence to use up BOD per 10 active points, but only gave this a -1/2 (the BOD loss is to cast a spell, not to maintain it). The rationale for the limitation value was: a) it generated damage roughly equivalent to a side effect (against which you get no defences, remember) at the -1/2 level and it could be negated by the use of Healing, Aid or Transfer type spells. As far as game mechanics go simply treat it as a side effect. I may have to go back and re-evaluate it now that side effects have been changed in 5th Ed., though. Thus the evil mage would generally have a bunch of sacrifices on hand that he could drain BOD to power his magic, the good mage could have bunch of apprentices to aid him (and each other) and player character mages could either use meditative techniques, draw power from handy victims or accept that every now and then they would have to trash themselves to generate a big spell. The game rational was that I wanted magic to be powerful, nasty, stuff, but I did not want too much of it around. In particular I wanted to give fighter types a clear edge. It does this: if each spell cast costs the caster BOD, people are going to think deeply before casting spells - except cantrip type effects of 5 active points or under, which round down to 0 BOD loss. Likewise, mages, while powerful, are at their best in this system if given some time to prepare - in combat situations, they usually need someone good with bits of pointed steel to back them up. Secondly I liked the idea: it was inspired by the mage in the Harryhausen movie the 7th voyage of Sinbad, who gets older and more feeble as he casts each spell. However, this is definately not the way to go if you want lots of magic, or DnD-style artillerimages. cheers, Mark

Yeps. I'm in Copenhagen. cheers, Mark

On raw power.. >>>How will it be abused? Don't you use "campaign limits" on spells or require GM approval?<<<< Spells in my game certainly require approval, so you could limit it that way: OTOH, that level of control immediately runs a truck over the Ars Magica feel, where spells are spontaneous constructs. I don't use campaign limits. In general I feel campiagn limits encourage "samey" characters as everyone starts to push the limits. Finally, it just seems to me that campaign limits that apply to PCs but not NPCs are mostly a crutch for weak GM'ing. OTOH, I have relatively few house rules, so the system tends to be fairly balanced - maybe that is why I never felt the need for campaign limits. >>>>Sure he may have a 100 point VPP, but he still needs the GM's permission to actually use that much power.<<<< As a GM, I tend to avoid adding rules to the game which explicitly force me to choose a player's development. Although it is sometimes unavoidable, falling back on "You can't, because I say so" is usually a sign of poor planning on the GM's part (not trying to be insulting: it happens to me too . In this case, even if you limit the overall active points in one power, that makes the character only marginally less obnoxious: he has 4 60 point powers active at once instead of 2 100 pointers. You could avoid the whole scenario by setting the active point cost much lower, but in that case the whole thing becomes pretty pointless- you could just have ued a normal VPP. If you didn't want the player to have 100 points active to play with, why bend the rules to give them a cheap 100 point VPP? Puzzledly, Mark

Here in Denmark every home is required by law to have a copy of Saxo. Just kidding, but it sure seems like that Anyhoo, if you liked that stuff, I would recommend further reading of the icelandic sagas. You can get the three classics (Egil's saga, Njal's saga and Grettir's saga) for free here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/index.htm#scandinavia A number of others can be acquired through Penguin classics, in old fashioned book format (but better translations for the modern reader). I discovered the sagas as an undergraduate and was so inspired I treated my players to a year or so of viking-flavoured dramas of murder and revenge (the famous Snøtgøbblersons saga). I consider these essential reading for any GM who wants to run low fantasy games. cheers, Mark