Markdoc

Ooh - good point about Drain vs. Transform. I had forgotten the 'can't kill' aspect of Transform. Drain for filling your END reserve across the board seems to be the route to go, then. As for special effects, that's up to the GM, but the visual images I had in mind were that for Spirit, you see the victim shrivelling until the corpse simply collapses into fine dust and blows away. For earth, a similar effect, with the soil turning to grey, soft power like talc. In both cases the 'dust' that is left is not fine dirt - the essential mana has been leached out of it, leaving a very, very fine choking powder in which nothing will grow. You have the source of your blasted wastelands and your choking, blinding duststorms right there. Water and air are less impressive visually, but ultimately could have terrible effects - a mage draining the mana from water would simply generate a 'plughole' effect where the water was apparently draining off into nothingness. But do that enough and you could dry out lakes and rivers. And that water is gone. It doesn't get recycled in rain or snow to flow again. If a hex of water has 6 BOD, then to power a simple 12d6 Energy blast, you are using up the equivalent of two tonnes of water. A powerful mage could empty out a lake in a few months of magical tinkering, if it was not replenished by a decent flow of water. That's the next step towards your blasted wastelands. And air - even less of a visual effect. A hundred hexes of air might sound like a lot, but it's a cube about 4.6 meters a side, and air flows easily - I'm thinking the visual effect is simply a strong wind or whirlwind around the caster. Visually impressive, and enough to move small or light objects, break nearby windows, etc, but not enough to do serious damage. If you've seen the 'powerup' of various anime psychics, you probably have the visuals you need. It might appear the least destructive magic - after all, it's just wind right? That might even leak over into an assumed moral superiority of aircasters. But think about it. The effects might be slower and less obvious, but aircasters are using up our air .... gasp, choke. A society with thousands of aircasters that lasted for centuries might end up have significant effects on the whole planet's atmosphere. That completes your blasted wastelands origin story. Frankly, selling the 'Aircasting is the only morally acceptable form of magic, it doesn't blight the Earth or drain the waters or require the deaths of innocents" trope to the players, to try and get them to use that form of magic and then having the BBG or an evil lieutenant later do a reveal that "You people are the reason it hardly ever rains anymore" would be very hard for me to resist as a GM. Particularly since the evil lieutenant could then point out that the only form of magic that doesn't desecrate the earth is spirit magic. Yeah, that's right. Killing people is the only ethical way to power your spells. Nothing makes players hate the bad guys like having them try to capture the moral high ground, and it would reinforce the ambiguous nature of a grimdark campaign. Though that might be recycling, I guess, since I did something similar last campaign. cheers, Mark

I gotta admit, as a GM, I lean towards cinematic badass swordplay. Not quite anime or wuxia levels, but definitely not terribly realistic. cheers, Mark

Not bodybuilders, but as noted, I know a couple of very successful academics who balanced their academic career with competing internationally in sporting events - one of them winning at the Olympics. I think "competes successfully at an international level" is a tad more than casually fit. They're a little unusual - but only a little. People like Veloce or Grainger, academics who compete at the Olympic level, can be found in most big universities. UCL in London, where I used to work on and off, was proud of the fact that they had more 40 Olympians among their professors (and that's just one university, albeit a big one). They were not concentrated in the sports medicine department either! So like it or not, people do have the time to get ripped and also build a successful academic career (or for that matter, other kinds of careers as well) in real life. It's all about being organised, being focused and being driven. If it can be done in real life, I don't see why it should be excluded in fantasy. It's not because they have a lot of time on their hands. To be honest, the idea that successful academics have a lot of down time just makes me laugh. To be successful in academia (well, science anyway, which is all I know) is really a full time job: 50-60 hour work weeks are not uncommon. There are other academics on the boards - you can verify with them. The really successful people in academia are always on - 16 to 17 hours a day. Now, if you like the idea that you cannot combine high level study and exercise, then you can always build that into your game. But in Hero system games there really is no mechanistic or realistic reason it has to be that way. cheers, Mark

Well, in many ways, fantasy worlds with ubiquitous magic share more features with the modern world than they do with medieval Europe. Not surprising, really. As you note, they are modern fantasies, cast onto a pastiche of vaguely medieval tropes. The real point here is the idea that the stereotype that adventuring mages should be physically weedy, because they are training their big, powerful brains instead of working out. In real (admittedly modern) life, we can see that dichotomy does not exist. And if we look back a century or two, the golden age of exploration is full of academics who crisscrossed the globe under appalling conditions, sneaking through war zones, often fighting in the process ... all the while taking meticulous notes, making careful detailed observations, collecting specimens ... etc. A lot of those guys were seriously fit. Basically the idea of the buff fighter and the scrawny mage is a D&D'ism, built off US college stereotypes, not fictional or historical archetypes. There's no mechanistic reason reason it has to exist in Fantasy Hero games, and there's really no realistic reason it has to, either. Like a lot of fantasy tropes that originated with D&D, its has become so ubiquitous that it's simply accepted as the standard, like Tolkein's elves, dwarves and hobbits. cheers, Mark

Essentially, with Spirit, you are using BOD for END. So why not use a similar mechanism for the other elements? For physical materials such as Earth or water, objects have BOD. So a hex of dirt has 0 DEF and 10 BOD and Stone has 5 DEF, 19 BOD (IIRC) In this case, you could power your magic by simply turning the ground to a fine ash that blows away. It makes you incredibly powerful while standing on the ground, since you are rarely, if ever going to run out of END. But you can't cast magic while flying or swimming ... and it might pose some awkward questions about gravity and structural integrity, if you tried casting it inside a stone building ... Water has a suggested 6 BOD per hex. Like Earth, that would make a water mage incredibly powerful when in large bodies of water .... and not so much anywhere else. There is water in the air, so you could perhaps sustain a trickle of power in humid environments. Air is a bit trickier. Technically speaking it also has mass, and therefore also has BOD, but you would need (really rough extrapolation here) about 100 hexes of air to gain 1 BOD. That would let air mages gain END almost anywhere, but at a really slow rate. Fire is the trickiest, since technically it has no BOD, but in this case, I would sub in active points. So one way of doing this would be to link that mechanism to REC. If we assume that magic users can absorb END from their key element, then it is not direct END use that is key it is REC. In other words, all mages have a reservoir of power that they can fill, drawing on their key element. Mechanically, I'd do that by putting a limitation on REC (only recovers by absorbing key element, -2 1/2) and then requiring a mechanism for destroying/absorbing your key element. Transform would be an obvious mechanism: essentially you are transforming your target into Mana. The exception would be fire mages who use Drain, to extinguish fire and draw mana from that. Mundane fires would have 5 active points per DC, for this purpose. The reason this approach appeals is not only is it simple to work out, but it leads to some very different dynamics for the different magic types, while still maintaining playability for all of the different elements. The playability aspect is easy: given time to refill their Mana (or END) any mage could have a full reserve, which means in turn they can do magical stuff. You don't risk having some mages being totally useless out of their preferred area, and supreme while in it. But all mages will run out of Mana, which means they will also have to make choices about resource management - hard choices if they are away from their preferred source. The difference between magic styles come from the fact that each source has different characteristics. Spirit is reasonably easy to transport and is a concentrated energy source ... but using it involves killing (or at least maiming), which brings up the whole evil thing. It also has the effect that your magic-powering mechanism is a potential weapon, which goes great with the whole evil sorceror vibe - or, if you are into self mutilation, the sacred martyr, powering his spells with his own blood! Earth is almost everywhere, but relatively hard to transport, unless you have guys carrying bags of rocks around for you. On the other hand, an earth mage would be death to a conventional fortification - given time, he could just disintegrate it. Water is limited in distribution, and also hard to transport. Water mages get to be king of the Sea though. In a fantasy game, it'd kind of be like being Aquaman in the JLA - at sea, you can give even powerful bad guys a run for their money. On land .... not so much. On the other hand, people are largely made of water .... There's some slippery slope stuff right there. Air mages can do their stuff almost everywhere, but the need to transform lots of hexes of air one after the other, or have a really big area effect on their transform, means that they have the slowest recovery mechanism. Either they need to devote lots of Xp to recovery, or husband their resources carefully to avoid running out of power ... or both. Fire mages ... would be interesting. They could regain power by setting lots of fires, which is kind of noticeable (or hanging out around volcanoes) but their power-up mechanism also gives them a potential defense mechanism against fire powers. As an aside, they would make great firemen cheers, Mark

Actually, the problem does seem to have been that it was a rush job: the job took 5 years and was done by a respected German engineering firm (hey, they built der Fuhrer's personal bunker in Berlin, so they must be good right?) The problem is just that this is a really crappy place to build a dam. So I guess we can blame Saddam for ordering a dam there in the first place. cheers, Mark

In this case, not Saddam's fault, but ISIS' for trashing the maintenance that kept the dam stable. These guys are like a bunch of monkeys let loose in a house. They build nothing, they maintain nothing. They are essentially squatting in the wreckage of what other people built, looting what they can to keep the party going. cheers, Mark

Alas, I never got past 'the magic of mathematics' or 'the magic of latin'. But you get the general idea, I'm sure As for the income/status and fitness thing, you are correct. There is a very strong correlation between employment income* and fitness. And you are absolutely right that it's not just academics (I actually noted that in my post). In fact, if anything, it is is even more extreme in the corporate world. When I look at our executive team, there is - literally - not one person who is not fit and toned looking. There are multiple ethnicities, decent gender diversity, a fairly wide age spread .... but there are no overweight people. So yes, I think it's a conjunction of factors. Status is one, Being overweight or unfit is not only seen as a sign of weak will/poor character, but these days, being overweight is increasingly regarded as 'low status". Financially secure people don't have to worry about the cost of eating healthily or the cost of gym memberships, so the only reason to be overweight, barring rare medical conditions is "you don't take care of yourself" - a cardinal sin for many high-fliers. Competition is another - senior academics and corporate people are by nature intensely competitive. They would not be where they are, otherwise. Fitness is another arena where that competition plays out. Lastly, higher income tracks very closely with education. Not perfectly, of course, but closely, so you are also talking about people who are aware of the health benefits and risks and who are both motivated and financially empowered to work on that aspect. Really, it is no surprise. All, way, way off topic, but it always amuses me that we have this stereotype of buff physical workers and out of shape academics, but in the real world, it is increasingly the other way around. I think the stereotype persists, because it appeals to our inherent sense of fairness: the idea that smart people are weedy, simple people are strong, pretty women are dumb, rich people are unhappy or any of the many other 'balance" prejudices softens the recognition that life is fundamentally unfair. To drag the thread roughly back on track, it has never bothered me as a GM or player that adventuring mages are a physically robust lot, since they are choosing a way of life that exposes them to physical danger, much exercise and rough living conditions. So it makes sense. Any mage put off by the thought of walking 5 leagues in the rain with a heavy pack, climbing a cliff and then engaging in life or death combat at the end of it, is not likely to last long as an adventurer. cheers, Mark *not necessarily wealth - the correlation is far stronger among those who work for a living.

Oh true enough - obviously the vast majority of swords made it through a fight or two, otherwise nobody would have used them. But we have more than a few references to swords breaking. We have very many of them. Sword breakage features in almost every contemporary account where combat is described (I could find you dozens, if not hundreds from the sagas alone), and the description of carrying backup weapons is not uncommon, so it clearly was not a rare event. We also have very, very few non-broken swords from the era, especially when you were considered that they were manufactured in the hundreds of thousands, or low millions over the centuries. And we have even fewer that show signs of having been used in combat. Of course, we have very few non-broken artifacts of many kinds from that era: that's inevitable due to the effect of age and use. Lots of unbroken swords got melted down into other things, once they had lost their use, for example. I guess the take home message is that swords were pretty lethal, but also specialised tools that could be (and were) routinely destroyed in use. Modern fantasy/historical movies and books have desensitised us to this: you routinely see people clashing blades together, hacking at solid armour, chopping through chains and bonds, prying open chests .... all things that would probably destroy a period sword in short order. cheers, Mark

And yet, I know academics who compete internationally in Ironmans, run marathons, etc. The idea that academics are less physically fit is actually a stereotype, not something founded in real life. In fact ..... drumroll ... academics are more likely to be fit and strong than the general population (this is just a single review not behind a pay wall, but there's a ton of data supporting this. In fact, it is not just academics, but high-earning whitecollar workers in general). Partly, this is probably due to the mental benefits of being fit and active, but it is also, I suspect, cultural. Going to gym, running, working out, cycling are all embedded in modern academic culture, and like academic success they also benefit from having a highly competitive nature. Who knows, perhaps junior mages in magic school are rousted out of bed early to run 2 leagues in frosty weather, to shouts of "Remember children, Mens sana in corpore sano!" .... just like I was. ;P True, but most effective fighters in Hero system - just like in real life, actually - don't focus just on bulking up physically, but on building skills and experience in fighting. Acquiring the CSLs and martial arts necessary to make somebody who is really good at killing people with a sword, costs just as many points (sometimes more) as the spells needed to make you really good at killing people with a sword. My own gaming experience is that physically, there's often not much (if anything) to seperate the spellcasters and the non-casters physically, and the points not spent on combat-related skills or combat-related magic are spent on non combat skills and non-combat magic. The problem is that often magic is a far more cost-effective way of building a swordsman than skills and martial arts, if you are just using the basic rules set. So you can be great at both - but only if you are a mage. The reason is simple: mages get access to all the powers, while (in a fantasy game) mundanes get a limited subset, making mages far more flexible in their builds. Getting the balance right, so that you can have effective party members on both sides of the magic/mundane divide is one of the hardest things to get right for a GM running a fantasy campaign. I've had a lot of practice, and I still struggle with this sometimes. cheers, Mark

According to contemporary accounts, even a well-used sword of high quality will break: many of the instances in real-life accounts were swords in the hands of extremely skilled combatants. It's not a question of whether a sword will break - it's just a question of how long it will last. I hesitate to speculate how long that is, though, given the spotty evidence that we have - people mention swords breaking, but they don't tell us how long they lasted, on average! We do know that swords with destroyed blades were often preserved after battles as evidence of martial valour - the 14th century Spanish knight, Don Pero Niño, for example went through three expensive swords in three battles. Of the first of these it was written "The sword he used was like a saw, toothed in great notches, the hilt twisted by dint of striking mighty blows, and all dyed in blood ". The reason for this, it is stated, was the damage sustained from striking shields and armour. The sword was useless after that and he sent it as a gift to his lady . In Heimskringla saga from the 13th century, King Olaf Tryggveson (Gentleman Adventurer!) carries a chest of swords in his ship to replace weapons with blades ruined in combat and passes them out to his followers during combat as their own swords lose effectiveness. All of this suggests that destroying a sword in combat wasn't a rare event. It's worth noting too, that in medieval times, steel - even steel from master smiths - often contained tiny impurities that could weaken a blade, no matter how carefully forged. Even today, international level fencers break blades in use, though the quality of steel is far better (and more consistent) than that of medieval blades. It's not frequent, but it certainly happens. The commonest way for a blade to break in modern fencing (and in medieval accounts in real fights, apparently) is not in a parry (though I have seen that happen, once) but in a strike. A slash designed to cut open someone's head, as in the example in my post above, strikes a helmet. A cunning thrust aimed at the heart strikes through to the spine and the point sticks. A slash aimed at a opponent is caught on his sword hilt (you can see someone breaking off the blade of a broadsword like that here). It's actually not that difficult to bend a sword blade with a thrust, when the point and the line of attack are not aligned (novice fencers break epees like that all the time, which is why fencing schools often bulk-buy them). Sword blades are not designed to flex too much - if that happens, they can break, or be so badly damaged that even if straightened, they won't last long. As to how to model this in a game? I have no idea, to be honest. If we aimed for historical accuracy, my best guess (and it is just a guess, even if based on much reading and study) would be that after a few serious fights, the blade would be too damaged to be reliable. You have to recall that a month's adventuring often contains more combat than most professional medieval soldiers saw in a decade. But I suspect that players would revolt if you made them replace their sword every adventure or so. Tracking potential damage to blades point by point seems like needlessly finicky paperwork. Personally, I ignore the issue in-game and just tell the players every now and then that their blade (and/or armour) needs replacing or repairing, after a combat-heavy session. If you really want to have an in-game mechanism, then I would ask the player to roll a d6 any time they roll maximum damage, and the sword sustains damage on a 1, losing d3 DC. Since max damage will happen less frequently with larger, heavier weapons, and they can take a 'hack" or two this will reflect their slightly more sturdy construction, while still allowing lighter swords to be broken in one good hit. This also reflects the dulling/damage of the blade which is frequently described in contemporary manuscripts. I really have no idea how accurate that is, but at least it does not seem grossly out of line with historical accounts regards, Mark

This is a carryover from the old D&D tropes. There is no particular reason in Hero system that Mages should be less able to take a hit than fighters, simply because there is no such thing as 'a mage" or "a fighter" in terms of mechanics. This is particularly true in 6E, where figureds are disconnected from primary stat.s. We've had plenty of very buff fighter-mages in our games: in most of those games, by coupling physical ability with magical protection, the fighter mages could take the heat of combat in places where mundane fighters quailed. In general, in our games, the difference in BOD and STUN between magic-using and non-magic-using characters is pretty minimal, even before you took magic into account. cheers, Mark

With all due respect, I think you guys are missing the point. If I understand correctly, what the OP is asking for is not "Can you make existing mechanisms a bit easier to deal with on the fly?" but "Do players need to interact with the actual mechanisms at all?" And the answer is no, they don't. You can run a fully hero-compatible game without making compromises like dropping SPD, without making any changes at all to the game mechanics, and still get through character generation and play a scenario in one evening, easy-peasy. I know whereof I speak, having done it myself. And others have done it too. The software analogy is pretty apt: users of (say) MS word, don't need to know anything at all about the code running the actual program, or indeed, 99% of the functions available through the GUI. They just need to know how to open the program and start typing. As they grow more experienced, they can learn where the various functions are to be found in the GUI, but a lot of people learn only a little of that ... and that's all they need. I am planning my next fantasy game at the moment (in a fairly desultory fashion, it must be admitted, due to an overdose of computer gaming) and the plan is to use some of the readily available pathfinder material, to reduce my own workload. The goal is NOT to use Hero to simulate pathfinder, but to draft a "pathfinder -like" front end, so that I can pick up a pathfinder module, if I want, and use it with very minimal modification. So I am not interested in simulating mechanistic stuff like saving throws, but instead simply drafting a series of "sliders" if you like, that I can use to translate material on the fly. The front end that the PCs will see will look enough like Pathfinder that they can easily jump right in, based on their prior experience with that system, even if mechanistically they will play somewhat differently. But the major difference - which is where the GUI aspect comes in - will be that I am neither requesting nor expecting players to provide me with full builds. There will be no "Longsword; 1+1d6 HKA, 0 END (+1/2), Focus OAF, (-1) real weapon (-1/4), active points 30, real points 13" stuff. It'll just say "Longsword +4d6K" on the character sheet. The players can tell me what they want in terms of character archetypes, they can pick from a (wide) variety of packages and if they want a custom "feat" or ability, I'll put it together for them. cheers, Mark

Actually, swords are made of hard steel, and like anything made of steel will break if you press them enough. Modern fencing weapons are made of very high quality steel, by historical standards, are relatively light and yet they still break in use. We have contemporary Japanese accounts of sword breaking in combat, and the user being forced to use a back up weapon. Sir Kenelem Digby wrote a detailed account of a swordfight in renaissance Madrid, where not one, but two of his companions broke their swords. Of the first, he wrote: but he, ... struck the foremost of them such a blow upon the head, that if it had not been armed with a good cap of steel, certainly he should have received no more cumber from that man; yet the weight of it was such that it made the Egyptian run reeling backwards two or three steps, and the blade, not able to sustain such a force, broke in many pieces, so that nothing but the hilts remained in Leodivius’s hand. There are many other such accounts, and it is notable that the writers express no special surprise: having your sword break in your hand was certainly a disaster, but not one that was unprecedented, rather a known and accepted (if unfortunate) consequence. So bending and yes, breaking are both realistic outcomes. One of the reasons we have so few real medieval or renaissance blades left, despite the fact that they were churned out in the hundreds of thousands is that they eventually broke if they saw much use, and were either abandoned or, if collected, melted down for reuse. cheers, Mark

Right. As I noted “knight'" was a designation of a function (baically a professional warrior, in a society where only the rich could afford the gear needed for that role) rather than a social rank as such. By calling himself a knight, Charlemagne was making a point about his role as a warleader, and about his own physical prowess, in a day when war leaders were expected to accompany the troops, and if necessary, fight. Centuries later, Henry VIII also liked to refer to himself as a knight and fought in tournaments for the same sorts of reasons. So, for example, you could be a prince, or a prince and a knight. You got to be a prince, by being born. You could be a prince at 1 year of age, or at at one day, for that matter. You got to be a knight by being knighted, and that generally required both a period of training and a deal of ritual. In other words, nobody was ever born a knight. Unlike social class, it was something you became, not something you were. Where people get confused, is that knights were generally drawn from the ranks of the nobility and the gentry, and under feudalism, the traditional way that the lower end of the gentry could make a living was by military service. So social class and knighthood went together, but they are not the same thing. Cheers, Mark

No, you are totally right. It was the exception, and in general, became rarer as time went on, and feudal traditions became more involved and rigid. As a rule of thumb, it only really happened in areas around the fringes of “normal society" in places like Scotland or Ireland, where the normal rules of society were under stress anyway, and in times of war, where the normal rules of society were thrown out the window. Still those circumstances were common enough that you can find hundreds of examples. That's hundreds, of course against the tens of thousands who got to be knights the traditional way - by being born to it. So it's rare, but not so rare as to be completely unknown in those societies. An analogy might be being a US senator. We don't regard senators as being so rare as to be exotic, but at any one time, there are only 100 of them out of 300 million people and most people will never meet one. Cheers, Mark

They are related - but only veeeerrrry veeeerry tangentially. The use of the word 'squire" to refer to a country landowner is not actually reflective of rank, except in a very general term (as in 'a member of the gentry'). It's also not medieval usage. No landholder in the feudal/medieval era would have called himself a squire or been referred to as one unless he actually was a squire. Squire in the usage of a country landholder is actually a relatively modern term derived from the worn-down version of Esquire, rather than the medieval usage in much the same way as the usage 'guv'nor' to refer to a business' boss does not actually mean that he holds the rank of Governor. So it's not a rank, and has no direct connection to landholding, or medieval practice ... even though it looks like the same word. The connection to medieval squires is simply that in the post-feudal period, men who considered themselves of gentle birth (ie: of 'decent family" but who did not actually hold a formal rank) started to sign themselves as 'John Brown, esquire' or similar to indicate that. They used the word precisely because it was not any kind of formal rank. If they had tried to style themselves as 'Sir John Brown' or something similar they would have got it in the neck socially speaking ... and possibly legally speaking as well. People used to take this sort of stuff fairly seriously. The practice of signing yourself as 'esquire' started to die out in the cities, but it hung on in the country for longer, giving us later folks the impression that it was a country usage. cheers, Mark

Knights and Lords are not interchangeable in any of the European historical societies that I know of. Knighthood is an earned or awarded status, while Lordship is hereditary, pretty much by definition. So a Lord could be a knight (and almost always was) but a knight did not have to be a lord. Indeed a knight doesn't even have to be of gentle birth: European medieval history is full of commoners who became knights, and even rose to positions of political power. The German states went further - they had a class of knights (Ministerales) who were unfree: basically they were serfs who could (quite literally) be sold or traded away with the land they were bound to. Some of these unfree knights also became cultured, rich and powerful, but nobody at the time would ever confuse them with people of gentle birth, and certainly not consider them nobles. The same is true of Squiredom. Being a squire describes your role. It says nothing about your social class, except that it implies you are probably of gentle birth (since you serve a knight). A prince could be a squire, and so could the son of a landless knight, even though they are near the opposite ends of the social scale. cheers, Mark

For tattoo, foci, I have never ruled as a GM that you had to carve the whole thing away - just a cut is enough to disable it. You can heal back the damage and regain the focus. If somebody takes the time to scar you up, it is unusable until you get magical healing to remove the scar, or have it retattoo'ed over the scar. This mimics the effect of a physical focus, which can be taken from you, but can be reconstructed at a later timepoint, as long as you are at leisure to do so, and also, in the second case, means that (just like with a regular focus) if you are tossed in jail, and your focus removed, that you can't just regenerate it while still in jail. cheers, Mark

People tend to think that killing attacks are good at killing things, because that's what the name implies, but they are also really good at stunning things (in most games with moderate or higher defences, they are significantly better at stunning victims than normal attacks, due to the volatility of the base mechanism, even with the reduction n the STUN multiplier that was introduced in 6E). I know that every experienced Hero GM already knows this, I'm just posting it to make my point clear. That point is that killing attacks, when there are moderate defences around are far more likely to drop a victim by KO'ing them than killing them. But if the targets take no STUN, that's not going to happen. It makes ordinary weapons far less effective than you might estimate. Lets say that one of your zombies has defences equivalent to an ordinary ol' bulletproof vest (6 rDEF). That's going to make him extremely resistant to small arms fire. Not immune, no, but for all practical purposes, he can ignore anything smaller than a .45, and a guy with an M16 is going - on average - to have to empty 2-3 mags at burst fire to actually finally stop such a zombie (assuming shooter and target have similar CV's). Fewer bullets if he gets lucky - more if he gets unlucky. A zombie sporting a 6PD barrier with 3 BOD should easily be able to take down most shooters. If you boost the rDEF to say 10, you are looking at a whole squad with support weapon to stand any chance of stopping that zombie. If that's the level of survivability you want, cool. After all, as I understand it, these are PC zombies and as such, you might not want mundanes to pose a high level threat. But that's what the numbers suggest. cheers, Mark

Actually it's not hard - the way the SPD chart is set up, at the lower end of the SPD range, it's relatively trivial to get two actions in a row when your opponent can't act as long as you have at least 1 point more SPD and 1 point more DEX, just by delaying your action. It's not even that hard to get 3 actions to your opponent's one. For example, a SPD4 guy with a 1 DEX point advantage vs a SPD 3 guy can delay his phase 6 action to 8 (without significant risk) and then go on 8, 9, and 12. If SPD 3 guy uses his action to react on 8, SPD4 guy gets phase 9 free and then goes first on 12. If SPD3 guy aborts on 9, then SPD4 guy gets 12 and 3 free instead. Delay/act/act shenanigans used to set up a target by stunning, flashing or otherwise hindering them and then opening up the cano' whupass when they were at a disadvantage, while tactically savvy, got old pretty rapidly, because it was so predictable. There are ways that you can counter this, but I found the whole meta-approach to combat ("I'm going to delay this phase because I know there's a SPD hole approaching in the initiative") wearying fairly quickly - and of course, it just slowed combat even more. ;p I don't mind at all a faster opponent being able to exploit his superior speed to get multiple attacks on an opponent who can't respond - that's not only realistic, but cinematic as well. But I do mind the fact that the system is so predictable that he can tell you at what point in the fight it will happen, a week before he actually meets his opponent. cheers, Mark

To be honest, I find the idea of the authorities tolerating what are essentially militias not under their control, even less plausible than privatized police forces. After all the US already has an armed private police force with inter-state arrest and detention powers (they grew out of the Pinkerton agency, already mentioned). The UK government at least is open to the idea of privatising the police and so are some towns in the US. I have also worked in places (Brazil, South Africa) where private policing is routine. The suburb where my best friends in Sao Paulo lived was patrolled by heavily-armed quasi-private police (technically, I think they worked for the city government, but the work had been contracted out and they were at least partially supported by the local homeowners association: exactly how official that was, I don't know). That was not a gated community for the ultra-wealthy: just an upper middleclass community. And it might not have been gated, but the rentacops stopped, questioned and checked the ID of everybody who was not a known resident who entered - even when you were driving together with someone who was a known resident. I can totally see citizen militias springing up in areas where the (largely private) police forces simply are not active, but I cannot see them gaining official sanction. More likely they would be tolerated - something we have seen already in some other countries, simply because they fill a hole in those societies and they don't cause the authorities any grief. As far as privatizing the police goes, I can't see it as at all unlikely. In the US, more and more police or civil justice functions (prisons, jails, 911 call centres, forensic labs, routine office work, etc) are already being or have been outsourced and some communities are looking to add patrol officers to that list. Instead of a sweeping decision to just close down the police, which I agree is implausible, you could get death by a thousand budget cuts. In that scenario (which is basically the situation in Snow Crash) you still have civil police (at least in theory), but they are so underfunded that they are basically irrelevant. At that point, policing is the function of private firms, who don't serve a community policing role, but act to protect their own clients - be that a community or a firm. The fiction that there is still a functioning civil justice system allows those private security firms to operate under the "old rules". That is basically the situation in the countries I described: the private cops might "arrest" somebody - although officially they are not actually cops, and don't actually have police powers - and hand them over to the justice system. It's not a big leap to see the functions of the justice system also privatised - as I noted, in the US, a lot of them already are. If searched and arrested by people who are not "really" cops, you could try to sue, but ... good luck with that. The system is as it is, because it doesn't function transparently. You could try protesting or fighting the actual arrest ... but a lot of people who try that end up in the morgue. cheers, Mark

That's it. You're fired. cheers, Mark

The problem as far as I can see, is just the inconsistent application of the reduced defences to automatons. The sentence "Characters with Combat Luck got screwed compared to those wearing armor built as Equipment" suggests that the defences of equipment-provided defences were not reduced - but 'equipment" is just a special effect. The problem might just be in HD, because it's not applying th template to equipment, in which case the GM needs to adjust the defences manually. But having played in a session where the GM did not reduce defences on automatons (by oversight, not intention: he did not notice that he should have) I'd strongly recommend doing it. Automatons essentially have infinite defences vs STUN, so even moderate defences can make them exceedingly hard to take down. cheers, Mark

You need to practice for years, not hours, but the rest of this is just fluff: as shown in multiple videos, people can deflect arrows without needing 15 takes - indeed they can do it multiple times in a row. That part really is not up for debate. As noted already in this thread, the mythbusters episode showed a guy catching an arrow - and he did it in one take (though he cheated a little, since the arrow was relatively slow). To be honest, catching or deflecting arrows seems to be something that multiple people have demonstrated that they can do. It's obviously hard and requires good reflexes and plenty of training, but I can't actually see anything that suggests the idea is controversial. Simply saying it can't happen is not terribly convincing, when you have videos and real life demonstrations showing it happening (and showing harder feats being performed). Indeed, international level cricketers routinely catch balls moving at 130-150 fps - the same speed as a arrow, so it's not like that speed can defeat human reflexes. And they don't get to plot the direction or height of the ball - they have to react to an unpredictable course in a split second I do agree though that it should require more than a simple block roll. In all cases where we see people catching/deflecting objects at that speed, they are inevitably athletes who have trained really, really hard. Allowing missile deflection (for arrows and hand-hurled missiles, not bullets) seems to fit the bill reasonably well. cheers, Mark