Markdoc

One possiblity, used by a GM in a game I played in, was to generate 2 versions of each character - one "before" the prologue and one "after". Th idea was that the characters would develop over the first few sessions toward the finished character, with far more experience points being added after each session the would normally be the case. Thus my character went from 150 to 250 points in about 5 sessions, while other people's went from 25 or 30 poinst to 250 over the same period. That actually worked pretty well. cheers, Mark

I can't see a problem with this. In a game where a character can buy "casual ninja coolness" powers, I can't see why a hotshot with a gun can't buy "Heat-seeking ammo, +5 OCV only vs targets with normal body temperature" (-1/4). :-) In a previous wild martial ars game I had an NPC buy +5 DCV with "requires an acrobatics roll" to simulate continous dodging and leaping and a PC with +5 DCV with "must make at least a half move" to simulate a running dodge (I figured Martial dodge gives you +5 DCV, so that's not out of whack). I didn't give eiher character martial dodge though - that would have been a bit gross... And of course it won't help against the old master who knows "Fist of the Universe" (HA, area effect, 1 hex, double KNB) to deal with young punks who have really high DCVs :-) cheers, Mark

For a prologue, it may be OK, but two of the golden rules of happy GM'ing are: #6 Don't put the character(s) into a no-win situation. They'll hate you for it. and #5 Don't mess with the character concept or the character's physical/mental makeup without an in-game rationale and a damn good reason. You may think the character would be cooler with another psych lim. or different powers, but it's not YOUR character. Disobeying this rule usually leads to the death of the game. cheers, Mark

I give "only to do damage" a -1 limitation, taking into account that only 5 Pt CSLs can be limited. I also require 5 pt CSLs be a bit more specific - you can have a 5 pt CSL in HTH combat or ranged combat, but not both. To add 1 DC to all your attacks would require an 8 pt level That means two CSLs work out at the same cost as 1 DC - which is how it should be, no? Also, since I charge 2 points per point of STR, extra STR with the same limit also works out at 5 points per DC. So it all seems to balance nicely. Apart from those damn 4 pt DCs for martial arts, which I am thinking should perhaps be 5 pts each. Unless HA can apply to all your HTH attacks, in which case the maths goes: STR: 10 pts per DC (plus buttloads of good stuff) HA: 5 pts per DC to all HTH attacks Martials arts: 4 pts per DC on all HTH attacks (limited to martial arts maneuvers, -1/4) Two CSL: 5 pts per DC (limit: only to do damage -1) - can apply to either HTH or to ranged combat. Hmmm. Having written that down, I think I can see how I am going to run it from now on...... cheers, Mark

There is no hard and fast rule, because what's lethal to a 75 point thief in a shirt and tight pants may not be lethal to a 75 point warrior in platemail. Likewise a relatively weak monster can be a challenge to 5 guys in chainmail, but meat on the table for a magic-user. That's why there's no useful "rule of x" and no substitute for experience. Still having said that, a few rules of thumb: Start feeble. You can always add in more baddies to an encounter. It's harder to pull them out once they have shown up. A common Newbie GM problem in any system is to use the neato-keen Big Monster and then after it has kicked the party around without raising a sweat, have to dispose of it in some cheesy fashion (it trips over a rock and breaks it's neck, suddenly falls over from a blow too weak to hurt an ailing granny, etc). Start with monsters that do normal damage (bad guys with clubs, etc) or Reduced Penetration attacks (claws). That way, if things go horribly wrong most of the party is knocked unconscious, rather then torn into small gobbets of flesh. If necessary, one of them can just be *gone* when the others recover. But at least not everyone dies. As a side note, a ruthless but effective method of getting the players to take the game seriously is to kill one of them early on. You don't need to do it gratuitiously, but if it happens early before player gets too attached to the character, it is less traumatic than if it happens after a year's play. And they remember..... cheers, Mark

My approach to high quality weapons was to give a +1 OCV to hit, based on the idea that they were better balanced, stronger, etc but no damage bonus. I also gave them 50% more DEF to prevent them being broken as easily as normal weapons. Poor quality weapons suffered the opposite effect - a -1 OCV and 50% DEF. Seemed to work OK. PCs were certainly willing to fork over big heaps of cash for a "masterwork weapon". cheers, Mark

I switched to 2 points per point of STR and 5 points per d6 of HA long ago and I would never change back. The cost change to HA brings it in line with HKA, RKA and EB. It also makes it equivalent to buying 5 STR, (no figured characteristics, -1/2, no bonus to jumping, lifting things or other strength feats, -1/2). My experience has been (I mostly run Heroic levels games) that: 1. It has not hurt game balance: if anything, it has improved it, so that high STR charcters do not dominate combat quite so much. 2. Only characters who really want to be strong and hit things with big bits of metal buy 18 or 20 STR. So STR starts to mean more. One player, who had a giant wrestler type commented that 20 STR "felt stronger" than his 25 STR character in another fantasy game - because 18 to 20 STR was not the norm. Also, as pointed out, selling STR back is not such a stupid idea, so you start to get weak characters. Overall characters start to vary more on STR. And those points went to other things, encouraging more variation still. 3. It solves the problem of really cheap HA. That's mostly a problem with spell casters, but an HA limited by OIF or similar was also a problem in heroic level tech games, where it gave a lot of oomph for the points in a gadget pool or cybernetic device. Overall, it made it easier for me to balance things up, since a damage class was 5 points, regardless of how you got it (Martial arts DC aside, but see comment below) Frankly, the only downside I can see is that it's a house rule, and I tend to avoid house rules if possible, to keep things easy for me and my players. The only question I have not resolved is: How can you use an HA? In the past, I have ruled that an HA is a specific attack (in other words a boxer might buy HA and could use it for strikes, but he could not use his HA to escape if he was grabbed by a wrestler. A wrestler could buy HA and use it on grab/hold/escape - but not strike. In other words, you need to define a special effect of your HA. If it's a club, its use is pretty straight-forward, but if it is just your hands, that's less obvious. That fits the way it is normally used and also matches EB - a fireblast is a fireblast is a fireblast. But I am leaning now towards allowing HA to work on all STR-based attacks, because Martial arts DC are essentially HA (only on martial attacks, -1/4) and because STR (no figured CHA) costs almost the same as HA, but adds to all attacks - and gives other bonuses as well. I truthfully cannot see why any Fantasy Gm would want to retain the standard pricing system. Cheers, Mark

If the players want to MAKE them, then I charge points for them. If they find or steal them, then they are free like equipment - since *someone else* has paid the points to make them. I do not generally allow players to start off with magic items: if they do they have to pay the points for them. Unless bought as focus magic items are just like any othersort of equipment - they can be broken, stolen, lost, etc. Takes the point about finding treasure away if you have to pay for it.... cheers, Mark

>>>I try to remember that the people with stats above 15 are very rare indeed, not every fighter type should have 20 str IMHO.<<< I agree with you, but at 1 point per point of STR, you can expect virtually everyone to have STR18-20, fighter or no. Only players who are so dedicated to concept as to voluntarily disadvantage their character will do it. Chris makes a good point though, which I had not thought of - I switched to 2 points per point of STR long ago and maybe that is why I have never had much problem with Tankers, despite years of running FH games. cheers, Mark

You already have the key in your hand :-) You have already specified one of the limits for divine magic - the deity's favour. Why not specify some limits on arcane magic? If casters of Divine magic can pray for any spell their deity offers, that gives them a potentially much wider range of spells (at first) than an arcane mage who has to find or derive his own. But it sounds like a VPP and you may not want to go that route. But a very simple way to get the flavour you want is REQUIRING all arcane spells to to take the concentration limitation at at least the half DCV level. That means that divine spellcasters can don armour, pick up a mace or whatever weapon their deity favours and wade into combat to play combat medic or holy warrior. Arcane mages may choose to go the armour and weapons route, but since casting magic in combat will lower their DCV and make them more vulnerable, many will choose to put points into magic and let the fighters handle the wet stuff. You can justify it by saying all the Divine caster is really doing is calling on his deity to handle the magic stuff, while Arcane spellcasters need to concentrate to focus their will, summon mana from another place or whatever it is they actually do. The beauty of it is that it encourages your players to adopt the sterotypical roles you want them to play, but allows them the freedom to choose whether they want to play it that way. cheers, Mark

Yamo, I think you were missing the point a bit - the balance comment was referring to mages versus other characters in DnD. At the start, the mage flings his one puny spell and then hides behind the fighters, while some levels later, when comparing notes after a fight, the fighters find they have killed 12 gnolls each and the mage about 400. That's not a slam on DnD - most of us have played it, and I at least, still do from time to time. But the imbalance is real and it is built into the rules. A lot of "in game knowledge" is also built into the rules. Even in 3e, saying "8th level ranger" gives you a decent snapshot of the character, whereas saying "150 point character" does not. But that's got precious little to do with game balance. TFT was even more succinct, but that didn't make it more balanced. To reply to your earlier post, it seems like the magic system you propose should work fine, although it gives mages a hell of a lot of firepower. That's probably OK, since your comments about limitations and Cosmic power pools suggest you want powerful mages. I allow mages to use multis in my game - it balances fine because non-mages can also use multis for "cool tricks" or martial arts and because I control the limitations allowed. Cheers, Mark

I vote with the negatives here. I agree that this is not "realistic" - but I see you your point that you want the loincloth and bronze thews crowd in with the fluted steel plate crowd. Realism ain't everything. Trouble is, I can't see it working. The guys who want to tanks will just build low dex, high levels characters and STILL beat the pants off the guy in the leopard skin loincloth. When you are wielding 6-8 DC attacks 8 DEF and a good PD is going to count, regardless. But it seems to me that by trying to enforce one genre convention, you are warping things too far. All "knightly" characters will end up low DEX. High DEX characters will shun armour even when it is appropriate (Conan didn't stick to a loincloth when he led Aquilonia into battle...) I do put some DEX penalties on chracters wearing armour, but I simply think this is too harsh. The answer to tanks is to make sure the armour comes *off* a fair amount of the time - and that's mostly campaign/scenario driven. cheers, Mark

Well, I can't break it down by calibre/slug type, but in large hospitals which see a lot of trauma cases, firearms wounds run about 16% fatality (or roughly a 1 in 6 chance). The vast majority of these are from handguns (at least in the Chicago area (I assume the same would be true in other major metropolitan areas, but it might not be in MiddleofNowhere, Montana). Since many of these are multiple firearms wounds and in most cases, the victim has had to wait more than a few minutes for help, we could assume that this means taking someone into negative BOD. It's a reall ballpark figure, but if you assume a 1 in 12 chance of a single shot causing a fatality, then the current weighting for middle of the road handguns (.32, 9mm) seems about right. US military fatalities from firearm wounds are far lower than this number - even before the wide adoption of effective body armour - but that's because they usually have trained medics within screaming distance (like most PCs). So, you could well argue that firearm damage is over-rated. I can't see any real reason to up the DC. "Instakills" are actually pretty rare. What Hero (or any other game system for that matter) does not do is simulate bleeding very well - most firearms deaths occur in the 60-120 minutes *after* the injury occurs. And frankly, I am not sure that I need that much realism. I don't want to tell my players "Your character has suffered severe trauma to the pectoralis minor. He has heavy bleeding and an accumulation of fluid in the interstital space" cheers, Mark

For years, I have been letting players buy 5 point levels in DCV (only to offset armour penalties, -1) It doesn't seem unbalancing - the 8 points spent on offsetting the effect of heavy armour could easily be spent on a nastier combination of level, or just more DEX! I would allow PSL to be bought to offset some of the other limitations of armour, but would require those be bought seperately (so PSL vs minus on stealth roll, PSL vs minus on PER roll, etc) since learning to fight and move effectively in armour does not make you quieter or vice versa. No player has ever asked about this though :-)

I have been using this approach for many years, and I think it works well - you can find the whole "how to do skills" on my house rules page. http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/9529/Gaming_stuff/hero_houserules.htm I suggested this to Steve for inclusion in the 5th Ed. rules but I guess it didn't make the cut. You can expand it further, by giving the allowed skill enhancers with a list of everyman skills tailored to each culture - so a studly barbarian culture doesn't give rise to the "courtier" or "thief" skill enhancers (not that they don't have thieves, just no guilds to pass on skills in an oirganised fashion). cheers, Mark

Sounds like you simply want an RKA, unranged NND, 1 hex area effect, does body (not vs people displaying dried chicken legs) at (gasp!) 45 points per d6. You might also want to add personal immunity, so he can use it in his own hex, without doing himself a nasty injury. A 1 +1 d6 attack would cost 60 points, and drop your average peon in 3 attacks (basically , just a few seconds). It might take as long as 30 seconds to wipe out a really tough guy, but high dexterity would be of no use - you would have to dive away from the vampire to avoid the attack. I would be inclined to let people hold their breath and block their nostrils (but use the drowning rules while they are doing this) to avoid this attack, since it's a) true to the asian source material and I'm not sure that dried chicken legs count as a "common defence" :-) If you did that, the chicken legs could be dropped as defence and instead allow them to simply repulse him (physical or psychological limit) - that way he could not get close enough to use his attack if you were wearing them. cheers, Mark

How you build 'em depends on what you want. VPP - ultimate flexibility, but reduced power - gotta buy the pool cost at full points. Since most spells have limitations on them you can usually cram several into a VPP at once, so the mage can have his forcefield and his "turn the enemy into frogs" spell - just not a very big forcefield, and not very small frogs. This system is good for the kinds of fantasy sorcerors who can do all kinds of "magical stuff", with a few mystical gestures and a few chants like the mages in the Earthsea series. MP - like a VPP, but with more power (you can limit the reserve, so you get more bang for your gold piece, but you pay for each spell and don't have the possibility of making up spells on the fly). Again, you can usually have one or two spells active at the same time. This system is good for sorcerors who have a list of spells with names like Kujon's spell of the Whirling Hound (much beloved by postmen) and spend time hunting out new - good for simulating Vancian mages, or classical Dand D style fantasy game mages. A word of warning: it would be a good idea for both these systems to make up a list of spells and let players acquire them, rather than let them make up their own, since you run the risk of 30PD forcefields and similar obscenities. Next, you have the "buy a power straight" approach. Spells can be limited down to make them cheaper, but it is a gven that mages will have fewer spells than in the first two systems and some of them could be quite powerful (one powerful attack spell is normally better than two weak ones). This system is good for simulating Conan style mages, by Crom! where the mage often seems to have two spells - some kind of magical vision and Summon Unholy Thing. If Conan kills the Unholy Thing, the mage doesn't fly away or cast a lightning bolt him (although this may be because he knows he can't hit with an OCV of 4) - he normally makes a feeble attempt to run away. He doesn't even cast forcefield! Finally there is the "spells as skills" approach that goes like this. A fighter can have any weapon up to 2d6 KA (30 active points) for free - but he has to buy the WF to use it. Therefore mages should be able to buy Spell Familiarities (SFs) to use their spells - which they get for free - and these should also be limited to about 30 active points. I don't like this system - it's easily unbalanced, since fighters effectively get to choose from HA/KA and Armour, while a mage gets a wider range. Also to keep it even remotely balanced the spells need to be kept below 30 active points, which is restrictive. The key is not what system you use - any of these would do - but how you set the limitations up. For example: I am currently designing a magic system where I want magic to be common, but weak, and heavily restricted in how it can be used. I wil use a VPP, but then stack on limitations - which ALL magic users will have to use - that means each casting of a spell will render the caster magically weaker. Decide what you want in terms of flavour and then enforce that with limitations: once you have decided what flavour you want, what framwork is best is relatively obvious. You can have multiple different magic systems - the only thing I do nOT recommend is letting players just make up their own system. Then you end up with a flavourless hodge-podge. cheers, mark

If the world is going to be relatively high magitech, then you don't actually need anything other than a "magical inventor" skill. The fact that players have to pay character points to make indpependant items will slow the flow somewhat. If you rule that the points that go into a magic item are used up whether the inventor roll was successful or not (perhaps creating a flawed or cursed item) then the extra time and extra materials will take care of itself too, as the players will naturally want a well equipped magical lab and plenty of extra time to make sure they do not lose their points by messing up the roll. For non-independant items, if Wodgett to Obese gets his magical powers through the construction and eating of potent but extremely fattening Cookies of Power, then you shouldn't necessarily penalise him in comparison to Necros the Skinny who gets his powers by more traditional vigorous gestures and shouting. cheers, Mark

I ran exactly such a game once a week for the last 2 and a half years - although I allowed talents. I also ran a similar no-magic game once a week for a year, a few years. Both went fine. PCs in fact COULD use magic, but I had hedged it about with limitations so that magic use was difficult and dangerous in combat or combat-related situations. Very few NPCs had magical powers either (4, I think, out of hundreds). There are several points: without easy access to magic, the players have to think more. It makes the GM's job much easier as there are fewer strange contingencies you have to plan for. Finally, you need to plan scenarios so that rest time is possible to make allowances for the fact that when the players get badly hurt, they need a while to recover. I have also played in games where none of the players had magical power, and all of those games were also great (among the best, I have played in, truthfully). The key seems to be to balance it off. If the players have no magic, it's not fun to face them off against foes with lots of magic unless "get the magic-user" is the point - in which case there needs to be a compensating weakness. cheers, Mark

I have always taken that to mean "where they can grow" rather than where they are growing - and I don't count slime moulds or lichens! That means on the ground floor of most buildings - OK. On the 12th floor of the wizard's stone tower, not OK. In a street -even a cobbled one - in the town, OK. In a deep cavern, OK, but if it has a solid stone floor, not OK. In short, there has to be something for the plant to grow out of. Generally, spells with this limitation involve some sort of miraculous growth. I don't require light, and regular water and all the rest - if that were the case. it should be -1/2 or -3/4. Look at it as the limitation for OIF vs IIF. If the limitation was -1/2, then it's the same as a suit of armour. It should be pretty easy to remove the power, out of combat. In a medieval society, that's not too easy to do with "only where plants can grow" - it essentially means putting the guy either in a specially constructed prison, or high up in the air. Sounds like -1/4 to me. cheers, Mark

No, changing the appearance of a mind may make the use of mindscan harder, but that's a limitation built into Mindscan, not a power. A cosmetic transform (Man into Woman) adds no powers, but gives you immunity to any number of spells/powers like the harpy's song, the lamia's seducton, which I have seen written as "Mind control, only vs Males". One interesting point - now that Shapeshift has become a kind of illusion power - and fiendishly expensive with it - how about cosmetic transforms that change appearance? Do you have to pay the extra points to get cellular level Shapeshift for any transform that changes appearance? (The answer is obviously no - I'm just being a devil's advocate here) Cheers, Mark

Yeps. I think I still have the copy of Dragon Magazine with that Fineous cartoon in it somewhere (it had a handy table of weights for different materials - useful for calculating how big a one ton boulder actually is, or how heavy a chest of gold coins is, and so on. Although I might have given it away. I don't think I have looked in the box of old DnD stuff since I left New Zealand (about 14 years ago). But I have dragged it with me all over the world, anyway :-) cheers, Mark

My approach is to design the magic system for each game to promote the feel you want. It's easy to say "anything goes" but in truth, it does get out of balance easily. This is what we did in our early FH games and we got some pretty strange characters. That's OK if you *want* wierd fantasy, but not good if you want to play Arthurian Britain, or Middle Earth or Lankhmar. I gotta admit I hate points caps - either real points or active points. They distort the game in weird ways and usually lead to more problems than they solve. Plus they lead to same-y chracters with everybody piled up against the limit. Bleh :-P My take is normally to require limitations on all magic that limit its usefulness in combat (concentration is a goody - a 10 PD force field is much less use if you have to be DCV 0 to cast your fireball - inviting an arrow in your forehead). That gives the fighters a chance to shine in combat and encourages the mage to focus on other areas. cheers, Mark

>>>I designed a magic ring with a crosshair sight on it that gave OCV bonusses.<<< I'm Bored-Flak Boltlobber the wizard, and I very rarely miss at this range! :-)

There are several timesavers. The first is simply experience - as you make more characters and get used to the system, you find you need the rulebook less and less. If you have to check the costs of things, you spend a lotof time flipping through the rulesbook. The second is as you build up more and more NPCs/PCs, it becomes possible to "bolt characters together" out of bits. I do this all the time, and none of my players have ever complained that my characters are same-y. The third timesaver is to use all the rich treasures that lie all around you. You can steal - er, borrow concepts from - characters published on the web. There are plenty of sites with Hero system characters around - you can use mine: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo as a starting point, but there are plenty of others. I have a random Fantasy Hero Character generator on my site that lets you pick and choose, or roll your way through a character creation process. Even easier, there is the fantastic random character generator at: http://www.trimira.com/hero_stuff/fantasy_hero_random.html that does it all for you. Finally, you can loot other game systems: once you have concept clear in your head, it's usually not that hard to conert it to Hero system: the trick is to be clear on what you want. Here's an example of how I work. For a recent game, I wanted a big martial arts tournament. For that I needed about 60 participants - plus the players. Oy! Make up 60 unique martial artists? Well, first off, I rapidly decided that 30 were going to be fodder. If the fodder got matched up against a named character, then they would get beaten. So I didn't make sheets for them but just wrote a two paragraph description of physical appearance and fighting style. That still left 30. For them, I started with generic descriptions - this guy is going to be like the Ubermonk from "the Blade". This guy is a thief, not a martial artist. This guy is an old wizened master. And so on. To take one example in detail - the old wizened guy. Most martial arts campiagns have a few, so the basic template is straightforward enough - the trick is making him "different". I usually start with either a signature schtick or a distinctive personality - or both. This old wizened guy got both. For personality I made him talkative, self important, but morally upright - a teacher of the classics. He liked to lecture players on their responsibilities and correct behaviour, but if they were good, he would help them out. Secondly, his signature schtick - I decided to make him hard to hit and hard to evade, but weak. So I took another aged master's chracter sheet, decreased the STR, increased the DEX, gave him some KS:'s related to chinese classics and politics as well as the standard martial arts stuff and then added in a fairly standard parcel of "soft" martial arts maneuvers. Then the signature schtick: I gave him a high find weakness skill, so his puny blows could still do damage and also Invisibility to sight, sound and combat sense, with the limitation "only to obscure exact position" and the advantage "totally invisible". What that did was inflict the standard penalties for invisibility on his opponents in combat. Unless you had some mystical combat sense, he was never *exactly* where you thought he would be when you attacked. The result - a distinctive NPC, that I got 4 good evenings use out of, for about 20 minutes work. This is what I mean by bolting a character together out of parts. cheers, Mark