Markdoc

One of the major factors to consider is contrary winds were not just something that slowed you down, but something that stopped you completely (assuming reasonably historical ancient/medieval-type ships). Most of these ships could not sail within 3-4 points of the wind (meaning that they were literally unable to gain any ground against a headwind). There are literally hundreds of references in the sagas, for example to crews sitting around on land waiting for a favourable wind (sometimes for weeks), and we have letters from the ancient world that make the same point. So your speed in bad winds is 0 if you can reach land, or even negative, if you are at sea. Which makes the point, by the bye, that a retrograde speed is entirely possible: we see it in real life sailing as well. Anyway, this is one of the reasons why sea voyages could take what seems like an unreasonably long time - you might spend days or even weeks in port waiting for a wind. When the reconstructed viking longship Havhingsten sailed from Denmark to Ireland it only took a day and a half to cross the North Sea even with light winds at first. But the crew had to sit around and wait 10 days for a suitable wind (you can read an account of the voyage written by a friend of mine here). cheers, Mark

And this is why I am reluctant to call munchkin without a lot more context. First, because I have had players like this when I GM (and I have always been glad to have them) - secondly, because I am a player like this when I play. It's not all about Ultimate Powah! or even being better than the other PCs. It's not at all antisocial. I almost always play party-friendly PCs and make a point of asking the GM what they would like to see as a PC before I start designing. In our current pathfinder campaign, I chose a class (Mystic Theurge) which the CharOps boards are adamant cannot be optimised. For sure, it's not the most powerful option, but I am having a blast. For me, part of the fun in this case, is the challenge of turning class that almost everyone says is unplayable or at best highly suboptimal, into a viable character. In other words, character design is a crucial part of the fun, for me. cheers, Mark

I actually ran this as a Con game in California, years ago (the actual game was called Captain Blood and the Sky Pirates of Zandar! Everybody seemed to have a blast: I know I did. Back then, I simply used full Hero system, just with prebuilt characters, but today, I'd simply skin the game so that it was simpler and more accessible - I think that would deliver more fun per hour (FPH) than the standard method. and that's important with a Con game where your time is limited. cheers, Mark

Exactly. For the Hero-for-noobs game I ran a couple of years ago, there were no example characters, no prebuilt archetypes. There weren't even any characteristics apart from BOD and STUN (Heresy!). Instead there was a couple of pages of handscribbled notes of 10 point blocks. You want to build a tough fighter? Buy "Tough" + "Strong" + "Experienced Combatant". If you want to make a really tough fighter buy two lots of "Tough", 1 lot of "Strong" and 2 lots of "Experienced Combatant". Congrats. You've spent half your 100 point allotment - what do you want to do with the rest? Some background skills? How about "Mysterious drifter"? Or "Hardbitten ex-soldier"? Or "Skypirate"? It really was Hero broken down into very easily digestible chunks. And it let people with no Hero experience at all put together entirely rules-legal Hero characters in about 30 minutes, over a beer. cheers, Mark

Nah. Fuzion got flack (rightly) because it was half a game, with bad math. I'm not suggesting changing the game at all. I'm just suggesting hiding the mechanics away from those players who don't want to deal with it, and at the same time offering GMs a way to customise their game to emphasise genre and feeling without actually having make up new rules. Think of it like this. 6E1 and 6E2 remain the core rules. The GM's manual, if you like, both bullet-proof volumes of it. It's recommended to any hardcore Hero Fan. But if you just want to play "Amazing Planetary Romances: Sky-Pirates of Zandar!" (Powered by Hero system ) all you need is the 128 page softbound version. cheers, Mark

More and more I am of the opinion that - for entry-level games - that "talents" are the way to go. By that I mean, taking the same approach - self-contained microbuilds with a simple purpose, with a simple description. It's important to stress that I am not suggesting changing the rules at all. Just hiding them, at the front end. As an example, allowing a player to choose: Ninja spy (15 pts). You are skilled at stealth and infiltration. or: Climbing (CHA-), 3 points Concealment (CHA-), 3 points Security systems (CHA-), 3 points Stealth (CHA-), 3 points Ninja lore and codes (CHA-), 3 points is functionally equivalent, both in gameplay and system build, but it takes up a great deal less space. More importantly, it's a great deal less intimidating to a new player. But the important flip side of that is that as long as the builds are clear to the GM, they can be modified, expanded or improved as desired cheers, Mark

Or because have something they really want to buy and are just a few points short, but can't find anywhere else to scrounge them up. In one game I played in another player wanted "supersonic flight" (playing a flying speedster obviously) and spent a ton of points on it. That was in no way a really cost-effective or gamebreaking use of points, but I recall him scrounging points everywhere he could ... ending up with a character who could fly really fast and dodge pretty much anything while airborne, but who actually wasn't much use for anything. It's why I am reluctant to cry munchkin without a little more (actually, a lot more) context. cheers, Mark

No problems. But if you are going to crosspost it, it might be worth noting that this difference in accessibility is not inherent in Hero system. You can make 'pick up and play" hero games, simply by skinning the system, so that character generation proceeds via "pick from this list of options" rather than "build each power and skillset exactly as you would like it". I know it works, because I have done it. But to some extent, that makes the point about lack of support, I had to do that. I could do it relatively easily, because I'm a very experienced Hero system GM. A novice GM, however - even a really good one - probably could not. I'm always a bit loathe to suggest "what Hero Games should do" because it's usually a thousand times easier to suggest something than to actually do it, but just imagine if (for example) "Fantasy Hero" instead of being packed full of full hero system examples and general advice had instead had a simplified template+modules approach to allow people to build relatively generic characters in an hour or so in the front section of the book, GM's advice in the middle section of the book with advice (referring back to the full hero rules) on what kinds of modules and how many points are suitable for different fantasy world archetypes, with guidance on how the modules and packages were made and how they can be customised or expanded to full Hero system. and finally several short, generic linked adventures to get the group started. That approach requires that the GM own the core rules, but that given, you have everything else you need to get started and run a game. Now apply that approach to (for example) the spy/vigilante genre, or anything else you want - for that matter, you can do it for specific settings within a genre. Valdorian Age, for example, went some way in that direction, changing some basic assumptions, but the Hero system was still heavily on display in all its opulent mechanistic glory ... and more and more, I don't think it actually needs to be. cheers, Mark

Heh. My wife complains (frequently) that Pathfinder is both more complicated than Hero system and less logical to boot. She's right: but the difference between Pathfinder and Hero is not in the level of complexity, per se, but the level of accessibility and the level of support (which is part of the accessibility package, to be honest). To make an effective Pathfinder character, you need access to multiple books, and you need to plot your way though multiple levels so that all your prerequisites line up. I can easily spend an entire evening on a relatively straightforward Pathfinder build and complex builds might take several evenings. The catch is, though that you don't need to do that. You can pick your stat.s a class and a few feats, buy some gear and you are ready to go in an hour or less. The price you might pay for that approach is frustration down the line when you discover that your PC can't do what you had intended, but that price only becomes apparent months in, when you are already invested in the character and in the game and you have already learned the basics of the system. You'll do better next time ... With Hero that complexity is right up in your face, with your very first character. If you can get over that hump, it's actually easier thereafter, but there is no denying that the hump (more like a wall, to be honest) is there. There have been attempts to reduce the size of the hump, like Sidekick, but nothing that has really simplified things down to the "pick up and play" level. Secondarily, sidekick simplified character gen, but there is no equivalent support for the novice GM who just wants to run a game for his friends. I am not trying to trivialize the amount of work (or the resources) required to provide support, but recruiting novice players is only half the struggle. Half is better than nothing, but still .... cheers, Mark

This is exactly my attitude. I don't stress at all, at all, over whether PC X has squeezed out 6 points or 9 points more than PC Y. I care about "Is it a fun, interesting character?", "Does it add something to the group?" "Is it - both character and player - going to fit into the game?" It is entirely possible to play games where the PCs are widely divergent in point totals, that work well. I did a whole campaign like this, where some PCs started on 250 points and others on 200, based on their concepts. It was as popular as heck with the players. I'm also comfortable with the idea that 'munchkinism' is a pretty loose description and what is "munchkin behaviour" at one table is "effective character design" at another. I've played with enough people to know that the desire to squeeze the maximum points out of your character is actually not a good indicator of how someone will play. I've seen people who do it just to try and build game-breaking "god" characters and I have seen people who do it because they love Hero system, who are just really engaged in their character design - but who are kick-ass, helpful players at the table. cheers, Mark

I agree absolutely with this. One of the things that a lot of people confuse is the "do anything you want" hype around the game system, and the idea that you can "do anything you want" in a specific or a game setting. The best games I have played in have all had a defined and distinct game setting, and that almost inevitably means that some archetypes, ideas and tropes are just not going to be suitable. The key of course is getting this sorted out in advance, so that players don't waste time on a character that makes the GM go "Just .... uh ... no." cheers, Mark

Yeah, as I noted, you can make brick fighters if you go a bit outside the norms for most fantasy games. The one time I did it for my own PC, I was playing a half-troll character. Like your dwarf, he stacked a higher-than-human PD, with a very high CON and Damage reduction (plus regeneration). Given higher than human STR, and a greataxe, he had the same kind of damage output, too. He was tanky as all get out, but he was also not what I'd regard as a 'normal fantasy character': as you note with your own character, to get a functional brick without magic, you need to push outside what are typically considered human norms (and it costs a lot of points to get there, if you are not employing magic). Interestingly, the one effective tank I referred to in my own games was also a berserker. As GM, I let him buy automaton powers to represent his berserk state (it was a ritual possession, rather than a "normal rage") but with the caveat that since (in the rules at that time) automaton powers were not for PCs, when he fell into a rage, he would be handled as an NPC. The PC got used to waking up after a rage, covered in blood, with no idea of what had just happened and what he had just done. Amusingly, it got to the point that if a fight looked like it was looming, the other PCs would taunt and bully him to trigger a rage, and then just flee and let him carry the fight. Eventually, of course it got him killed, but he was a highly feared fighter while it lasted. The party was also shunned because of their violent, dangerous and highly unpredictable berserker! cheers, Mark

There's a problem with that definition though: in standard Hero system games it's very, very, difficult to build a mundane brick, because defences tend to be lower relative to attacks, than in Superheroes, and most games have some sort of cap on characteristics. I've had multiple players try to build mundane brick fighters and they all end up serving mostly as difficult terrain. We had one in the last campaign, and he ended up being retired as a frontline fighter: the other PCs (including the mages) were simply better in hand to hand combat. Ironically, the best way to build a "brick fighter" is with a mage, where you are not limited by conventional armour. It can be done (indeed, in our campaigns it was done once, long ago: that brings us back to the mighty Ke'eel., and I have done it once myself) but you have to move your game quite a long way from the conventional fantasy space to make it possible. As for the sliding definitions, most mages in games I have seen are not "top of their field genius" but simply smart. Most fighters are not huge hulking brutes (for the reasons I listed above) but instead are fit and strong. In actual games, I have run and played in, we end up back where we started: that physically mages and mundane fighters tend to fall into the 13-18 range for STR, CON and BOD ... ie: they're much the same, physically In terms of INT, wizardly characters often fall into the 15-18 range ... but so do quite a lot of mundane fighters. Published characters tend to be much the same. This is why I responded to the initial comments that fighters can better take a hit - theorycrafting aside, in real life games, that absolutely hasn't been my experience. If you guys have different experiences in your game, by all means share it. I'd be interested to hear. But GMs who plan on the assumption that mages will be physically less capable than most warriors, are in for some nasty surprises. I still recall with amusement the GM's stunned reaction to my fightin' mage who was supposed to be challenged by a tough warrior: instead of casting, I simply grabbed him, lifted him over my head, and threw him off the staircase where we were fighting. It was a long, long way down, and he couldn't fly ... cheers, Mark

I wouldn't make that assumption. At our gaming tables iOS devices slightly outnumber android ones and in the US, at least, iOS games still significantly outsell Android ones. That's one reason most games release on iOS first (I couldn't find global figures, but I would assume that Android is bigger globally). For the foreseeable future Apple will dominate the gaming market in the US (see Anton Kuchera as to why) I have no idea whether that difference in mobile gaming translates to RPG gaming though: the design problems with Android are going to be far less for a character design program than for a video game, and there are plenty of character design programs on both platforms. It might be a good idea to set up a pol here and see what Hero gamers here use, as a starting point. cheers, Mark

The catch with this, is that in real life you don't get a certain number of points to distribute, and in Hero system, although you do, the amount of points you have typically significantly exceeds the amount you spend on characteristics. So in a heroic level game, it's not normally a limiting factor on your stat.s. Which is why, as I noted, in practice, I haven't seen a great deal of difference in physical stat.s between combat magic users and mundane fighters in our games. cheers, Mark

This is the key, and the point I keep trying to make. There are only a small number of people who have the physical capacity to be your standard fightin' adventurer. But the distribution of mental capacity in that group is likely to be pretty much the same as in the general population. So among your really strong types, some will be smart, some will be dumb, and most will be inbetween. And the flipside is true as well. In a fantasy world, assuming brains are necessary for spell use, the same sort of distribution of muscle to smarts will apply. In other words, among those smart enough to be magic users, some will be really strong, some will be feeble and some will be inbetween. So yeah, people who are both really smart and physically really strong are going to be a minority ... just like in real life. But there is nothing to suggest that the smart people (or wizards, if you like) are going to inherently be any less likely to be strong ... again, just like in real life. Put another way, not every wizard has to be buff ... but not every buff guy has to be dumb, either. To use the NFL example, you can find guys like Michael Lewis, who graduated High School and worked as truck driver before going pro, and you can find guys like Myron Rolle, who did pre-med. got a Rhodes Scholarship and a graduate degree from Oxford before going pro. Both of them are extremes - but in the NFL, the high school guy is not more common than the academic whiz. cheers, Mark

If it was one or two, it would be an anomaly. When it reaches 50% or more of the study population it ceases to be an anomaly, and is, in fact, the norm. In the two schools noted, around half the star athletes were also star academics. So the point, which has been made over and over is that it's not an anomaly. So you could point out how many of your football stars could not complete an elementary education .... but you'd prove my point if you tried. Because around half of them are college graduates (and almost every single one of them attended college). Nearly 10 percent of NFL players have postgraduate degrees - a higher percentage than the number who didn't graduate high school. So .... more postgraduates than non-high school graduates? Yer kind of making my argument for me, tiger. Still if you really want to do the math, here it is: for a recent representative season, out of 1,947 NFL players ..... drumroll please! ... precisely 1 (one) or 0.05% did not attend college. So who's the anomaly here? The one guy who did not attend college, of the 1,946 who did? If you want to search the whole league (you can do it here http://www.pro-football-reference.com/schools/) I can find 2 active players who did not attend college, which means the chance of an elementary school dropout making it into the NFL is about the same as their chance of winning the lottery. Now to be perfectly fair, the NFL is a terrible pick to argue this point anyway, since they recruit primarily from their own farm system and that system runs through the colleges. You can find more guys in the NHL and NBA who didn't attend college, but even there, the players are overwhelmingly college attendees, and those with degrees still far outnumber the high school dropouts. So, yeah. I think this particular horse has been beaten to death. cheers, Mark

But it makes the point beautifully! Because of course that's not an actual person, but an actor playing the stereotype that launched this discussion. We look at it and laugh precisely because we know it's a stereotype. As an actual example, it's right up there with "all Poles are dumb", "all Jews are miserly", "all Africans got rythym" ... etc. There are plenty of people who will insist that those stereotypes are real as well. cheers, Mark

I think Christopher has the right of it here: the combination of no armour, no weapon proficiencies, low THACO, and low hit points meant that you could not effectively build a fighting mage (except in 1st ed. AD&D, with its wildly unbalanced multiclassing rules) regardless of what your physical stat.s were. I fact, as far as I can tell, that's what actually started the whole "weedy wizard" meme. Other fantasy games current at the time (EPT, Runequest, C&S, etc) allowed you (or in some cases, actively encouraged you) to build armoured, fighting spellcasters. But of course, D&D became the standard, and I think that's where the dominant meme emerged from. Amusingly, given the discussion above, I suspect that meme emerged from the US high school nerd/jock divide - US popular culture being written into the game's underpinnings. cheers, Mark

Exactly. We didn't have girls at our school, but otherwise, the picture is the same. It was a school dedicated to academic excellence. We dominated the scholarship lists every year for our region. And we also crushed all our rivals every year at rugby, which was the only sport that really counted. This was before D&D so there was no roleplaying, but at high school we certainly had our nerd group, who were into music, literature (both fantasy and "serious") and drunken rambling philosophical discussions - but half of the group were also successful athletes (one went on to play hockey at international level while he was at university). cheers, Mark

Same planet ... but a different culture. You look at the culture you grew up in, where the nerd/jock dichotomy is enshrined in pop culture and think that's the way the world is. I grew up in the english public school culture where it wasn't considered at all odd that the captain of the rugby team and the captain of the cricket team were also top scholars. Not only was it not odd, it was kind of expected. In that culture, physical prowess and academic excellence were expected to go together. Or at least, that was the goal: this is real life, so of course, they didn't for a lot of us. Academically inclined kids were also expected to push themselves physically as well - to become top at sports and - yes, to become war heroes. It's why the war dead enshrined at my school, also had their academic bests listed. Thus Lloyd Trigg, DFC, VC, Latin (1st). Or Lawrence of Arabia - nerdy school literature fag ...and tough as nails war hero, rolled into one. That was the ideal. So there really wasn't a nerd jock dichotomy. Being good at sports was no reason to shirk your studies and vice versa. You can also see it in the heroes popular in the same culture - invented heroes like Richard Hannay - amateur spy, soldier, fantastic fighter ... and educated gentleman, fluent in several languages. Or real life heroes like Hannay's inspiration Baron Edward Ironside - fluent in seven languages, functional in 10 more, student of history, amateur architect .... and star rugby player, spy, and highly decorated war hero, etc etc. But forget about examples: there's a simple, definitive answer to this discussion: if the nerd/jock dichotomy was actually real, you could measure it. Bigger body mass would correlate with lower academic performance and lower IQ. And guess what? It has been measured (a lot). That's the kind of thing people tend to measure and argue about. And it's not real. There is no negative correlation between body mass and intellectual performance - at least in any way that we can measure. If anything, there is a slight trend in the opposite direction: bigger body mass and better athletic performance tends to correlate with a higher IQ and better academic performance (the trend is weak though, and not significant in many studies). So there you have it. cheers, Mark

Yeah, that's right. I messed up, by thinking in metres instead of hexes. It makes the point even more dramatically, no? Cheers, Mark

But if you have been following the discussion, you'll know that the nerd/jock dichotomy isn't real. That's the point of the discussion. Yes, there are weedy smart guys ... and there are buff smart guys, in roughly similar numbers. There are big dumb guys .... and there are scrawny dumb guys, too, again in roughly equal numbers. In the real world, there is no dichotomy ... and the numbers on that are solid. So yeah, you can (and do) have nerd jocks - guys like vin Diesel. Cheers, Mark

It promotes specialisation (up to a point) but in Hero system, magic is not inherently more expensive than skills and martial arts (often the reverse). This brings us back to where this side discussion started, which is that magic users in-game (in my experience) are not usually very different from fighters in terms of physical stat.s. Both groups benefit from decent physical stat.s and tend to be in the same ballpark. Where fighter types spend points on martial arts and skills, mages tend to spend a similar amount on spells and other skills. (Edit: in part this is because characteristics are relatively cheap, in Hero system and the normal range in Hero is not very broad) There are always exceptions of course: in one game I played a rough, tough, magic user (good ol' Sir Flanghall) who could have taken most of our party's fighters down in a straight fight (he was certainly the strongest member of the party), and in my long-running Japanese martial arts campaign we had one pure fighter (General Yabu) who had mad martial arts skillz, but who was easily the frailest member of the party (in his case, because of age and disease). On the other extreme, in one game we had a pure fighter (the mighty Khe'eel) who had precisely one tactic (hit thing with greatsword) but who was built to be as tanky as f***. Aside from cases where the game is specifically built to promote a different approach, basically whether a magic-user or a fighter in a fantsy hero game is buff or scrawny depends entirely on what the player in question wants: and that's good with me. cheers, Mark

And there are plenty of other examples*. I don't think we need to beat this to death - there's enough real-life examples to make it plain that when it comes to muscles and brains, it's not either/or. Sometimes it's neither, and sometimes it's both. And we have a game system that allows - nay, even encourages - that. cheers, Mark *Dr. Layne Norton, for example is both a biochemist and a professional bodybuilder. My favourite though, for this kind of discussion is the infamous Professor Snook. Not a bodybuilder, but a respected academic and Olympic gold medal winner in the "military pistol" shooting events ... infamous because he later shot and killed one of his students. Don't diss the Prof.!