Markdoc

Likewise, even when we were running the game in Champions! days, it was assumed you could function at negative body. We've had plenty of cases of "dying, but still on his feet" over the years. Cheers, Mark

if you go to my ancient site, there's still a usable list of equipment with weights and prices. cheers, Mark

I've never actually played Rolemaster, but it was used as a basis for a homebrew system by one of our core GMs (he was a good GM, but also the guy who showed me that effective game design is harder than it looks). We did however plunder a number of tables from Arms Law and Spell Law, back in the day and used them either as-is or further modified. Possibly relevant to the healing question - using my old Arms-law inspired critical hit table, one of the PCs in my game got stabbed in the guts, while solo adventuring. It did not kill him, but it did give him an infected wound that would kill him in 3-8 days. He could heal the physical harm, but not the infection. There followed an epic race back to cvivilisation, in search of healing, with the character growing weaker and more feverish day by day He finally tottered over the threshold of the healing temple holding aloft a bag of coins, near death and whimpering "Cleric! Quickly!" So you can get atmospheric results from the system ... I just don't think it's worth the general grief. cheers, Mark

I simply cannot watch those shows. Long, long ago, before I moved to the US, I used to work in a pathology department, and one of my teachers was a leading forensic pathologist (a brilliant guy, but like all pathologists, I've met, a wee bit strange: he's the guy who played the "jelly brain" trick I'v' mentioned here before). There is pretty close to zero overlap between fantasy TV forensic pathology and actual real life forensic pathology. cheers, Mark

Sure. In general, I only give PRE bonuses if there is clear difference in gear and or percieved skill - so a heavily-armoured guy is going to look pretty threatening to a bunch of bandits in rags or leather armour ... But not to an experienced duellist, even though he has no armour. Likewise someone who's a known badass will get the reputation bonus. As for things like clashing weapons to shield, that sounds like it qualifies as a threatening action. Generally, I am fairly liberal with what qualifies for a bonus to encourage players to be creative - I just don't let them stack too many bonus dice. Cheers, Mark

There are optional bleeding rules (6E2, page 113) but I only apply them when players decide their PC needs to be active, whilst at negative body (hobbling along slowly and whining, does not count as "active"). In this case with a "soul damage" special effect, I might actually be inclined to let it slide, however, for exactly the reason you describe. cheers, Mark

As a general rule, I don't think that GMs and players use PRE attacks and social skills nearly as much as they could. Put the two together and you actually have a very flexible and effective social interaction system. Too many GMs in my opinion treat their NPCs like robots: they all fight to the last man, are needlessly aggressive to PCs, are careless of their own safety, etc. So I like to use PRE attacks to determine outcomes for NPCs - they can even affect the decisions of NPCs with a specific plot role, but are especially useful for things like "random old guy NPC #163". cheers, Mark

It'd definately have some sort of an OCV penalty - not only would guiding the spear be exceedingly difficult, but you cannot thrust or stab with it: unless it was attached to your hip somehow, swinging your hip is not going to impart any significant momentum to anything hanging off your shoulder. So it wouldn't be much use. At the risk of being a wet blanket, I very much doubt the item described was ever used to hold the pike during fighting. We have three detailed contemporary tactical manuals covering the macedonian and successor armies, including the phalanx (the tactica of Aelian, Arrian and Asklepiodotos). None of them mention such a practice - in fact they note that the pike was used in two hands. Plutarch describing the later phalanx of Cleomenes also notes also that their shield was supported by a strap, while the spear was held with both hands. There are also contemporary carvings and paintings of the phalanx. None of them show such a practice either (though it must be admitted that most of them are pretty stylized). Our best guess about how the shield was used with the pike looks like this: This approach, with the shield used mostly for passive defence against missiles (you can still lift and move it to some degree while holding the pike) is probably why the shield used by the phalangites was significantly smaller and lighter than that used by other heavy infantry). This also matches the few surviving images we have. The leather cup on a sling did exist: it was found in a macedonian grave in Iran. But historians disagree on what it actually was - not something to use in melee combat, but possibly something to carry the pike upright when maneuvering, which otherwise is fatiguing. Alternatively it may be something else entirely - in a contemporary source there is reference to a sling for casting javelins, rather like an atl-atl, which sounds a bit like this thing. So there you have it. cheers, Mark

Agreed. In real life armies tended to break up and run once things started looking a bit dodgy, long before most people in the army are casualties. In my own games I use PRE to determine how units and individual NPCs act: This also gives PCs with good PRE a chance to influence big fights, not just by killing, but by being inspiring or intimidating and leading troops. I can give a couple of examples: I'll stick with pikes since that is what we gave been talking about. A unit of Swiss mercenaries charge a unit of Italian communal infantry armed with spears and crossbows. The Swiss are professionals and veterans (PRE 15) have a fearsome reputation (14-, best soldiers in Europe, never take prisoners, etc) for another +3d6, have superior technology (ie: better weapons, training and armour, +1d6) and they are performing a violent action - ie: charging with pikes leveled for another +1d6. The communal infantry are part-time soldiers - all PRE 10. The Swiss are going to get an 8d6 PRE attack on them, for an average roll of 28. On an average roll, the communal infantry are going to be in the +10 range, meaning they are hesitant, and the Swiss get a big advantage in the first round of combat... but if the Swiss roll 2 up on the dice they reach +20 PRE for their PRE attack and the Italian unit's morale crumbles - they lose an action, are at half DCV. At this point they would probably just run away. If they do stand to receive the charge, the Swiss are going to slaughter the front ranks, and the unit is probably going to rout at that point. If things look to be going badly for the Italian army (ie: the unit can see other units retreating, etc) then you can give the Swiss another couple of d6, in which case they are almost certain to get +20 on the charge, and the Italians will probably run before the charge even contacts. On the other hand, if a PC is with the communal infantry and makes an inspiring speech he may be able to boost their morale by +5 or +10 - in which case, the Swiss are in for a fight. The Italian infantry could also try a PRE attack on the Swiss, of course, but they really have no chance of cowing them, so personally I would not bother. Now run that same combat, with the Swiss charging, say, German Landsknechts. The Germans are professional soldiers (PRE 12) with the same sort of gear and training, so the Swiss technology advantage goes away and they have a pretty good reputation themselves (8-), reducing the Swiss reputational advantage to +2d6, so the Swiss end up rolling a 6d6 PRE attack (average 21). On an average roll, the Landskneckts will be unaffected ... but if the Swiss roll 1 up on the dice they will hesitate, letting the Swiss get an advantage in the first round of combat. It sounds more complicated than it actually is - in a game where we are playing out a battle, as GM, I just look at the units in question, and can easily sum up the factors and say how many d6 the PRE atack should be and whether we need one at all. It works surprisingly well. cheers, Mark

I think it depends on the version - as I said it's years since I played, but I seem to recall that you needed to make various morale tests due to combat results, or special effects like fear, but not due to circumstances. So if a warlord charges into a unit of greatswords and tears them to shreds, the village levy will still march cheerfully to certain doom if you want to "hold him up for a turn" cheers, Mark

Well I haven't played Warhammer in many a long year, but as far as I know, it doesn't have morale rules as such. Warhammer first ed. had a stat called cool, which was used for a variety of things, including morale checks induced by fear-causing monsters, getting beat up in melee and similar specific cases and another called willpower which was used to recover if you failed a cool test. It also had a stat called Leadership which was used for characters to help lead units and for performing maneuvers. It's been even longer since I played the roleplaying game (though I still have the rules and the first campaign they put out) but if I recall correctly, it had the same stat.s. Cheers, Mark

Morale is a seperate issue in and of itself. I handle it by giving veteran soldiers extra PRE and using PRE tests. In general I don't think you need to make a morale check to get archers to move back as the pikes advance - that's covered by common sense since if they stand their ground they'll all die. So they will do it naturally if they can. But morale is useful to know if they are going to say, retreat a bit and then regroup to keep firing rather than just running away once the pikemen get close. In the example you give the pikemen are going to force a PRE check, with bonuses because at point of impact they almost certainly outnumber their enemy, and are almost certain to win any fight (if they are a known unit like Swiss, they'll get a reputation bonus as well). Any attacks that cause people to hesitate or be awed are likely to cause them to retreat or flee if they can - massed soldiery aren't generally heroes. cheers, Mark

Derailing is the nature of the beast And I have to plead to being as frequently guilty as anyone else! As far as the whole pike debate goes, I'm not sure I have anything to add: my response was triggered by the suggestion that it wasn't really a melee weapon. As shown, for about a century, it was the melee weapon par excellence - no other melee troops of the time could stand against well-trained pikemen. Pikes declined (slowly) as firearms gained prominence, but there's an interesting question relevant to this thread and to a couple of other comments on it - why did pikemen rise to dominate the late medieval battlefield in the first place? It's not like it was a new weapon: pikes also dominated battlefields of the classical world for nearly a century before disappearing. The reason seems to be economics. According to contemporary authors, it took years to train a good pikeman (most of that training seems to have been on the job: so you get recruited as a grunt rear-ranker or infantryman and rise to be a front-ranker or close melee specialist if you are good enough and survive long enough. But for that to happen, you needed a military unit that was continuously in service (ie: professionals). So if you want to have pikemen in your games, “realistically” they should only exist where you have fulltime military or mercenary companies. In a fantasy game with effective large-scale magic, you’ll also need to consider magical defences, otherwise they look more like a big fat target. But in-game you can also use them to give PCs a nasty surprise. The reason they were so effective in real life seems to have been the combination of professionalism and the fact that pikes allowed the “front ranks” to actually extend over the first 4 ranks of soldiers, allowing numerical superiority at the point of contact. What that means is that if PCs end up in a battle against pikes then instead of facing 1 or 2 foes to their front, they might face 4 or 8. That’s a big deal, since when PCs face ordinary soldiers, they typically have a significant edge in terms of CV – more attacks mean a better chance of landing a hit. Likewise the fact that pikemen are typically professional soldiers means it’s easy to justify giving them a CSL or 2. While PCs might not take place in pitched battles very often; they don’t have to face off against 500 pikemen – contrary to stereotypes, pikes often fought in congested settings. The battle of Torrington I mentioned was a prolonged melee that raged through the streets of a small town, where the pike blocks apparently broke down into small groups of soldiers each contesting a single street. At the battle of St. Jakob an der Bir, the pikes ended up defending a walled churchyard and entrance to the church itself: forcing a doorway defended by say, 8-12 pikemen could offer an interesting tactical problem to the players. In the end, that’s what it’s about: offering the GM and the players interesting and believable options. I agree that you can get carried away with detail, but disagree that it’s not worth knowing a deal about these things. I’ve played in games with GMs both knowledgeable and not knowledgeable about historical societies. Maybe it’s just coincidence but the more knowledgeable GMs ran far better games – they were more able to answer player questions or players going off-track, on the fly, and they ran games that were more than just a series of fights in improbable locations (or worse, a series of fights in boringly similar locations). The fact that the gameworld made an attempt to be coherent made it far easier for players to immerse themselves in the game and made it far easier to play games that had a focus other than combat. Now that’s not for everyone – some players just like a good dungeon romp (so do I from time to time) – but it is the preferred style for a lot of players. Cheers, Mark

I have seen, up close and personal a person with mortal gunshot injuries (who literally died right in front of me) and he did not appear in any way physically impaired - well, apart from the whole bleeding-to-death part. Other people with personal experience make similar claims (I'd specifically recommend "Shooting to Live With the One Hand Gun" - a short, very informative read by two guys with a great deal of experience in shooting and being shot at in close combat). These anecdotal stories are backed up by a huge amount of data from combat injury studies. Basically, even with a mortal wound, if a bullet does not hit something structurally important (bones or major muscle complexes) or critical (spine, brain) the target is likely to be up and fully functional until they die - running on adrenaline, basically. Capt. Fairbairns comments on a physical fight (admittedly a short one) with a man who had been shot through the heart with a bullet from a heavy handgun, and the guy I saw had been shot through one lung with a 7.62, and another 7.62 that grazed both his heart and his spine. He was still capable of sprinting about 200 metres and was both lucid and physically active right up until the point he passed out. So, I don't impose any penalties on people at negative body - I assume the kind of hits which take down the target in real life are reflected in-game by those which also cause sufficient STUN to render the target hors de combat. It also allows the occasional cinematic last stand where a character dies on their feet. cheers, Mark

Sure: the limitation suggested plays nice with extended and continuous powers, and both frequently and infrequently-used powers. In this case, since the Extra Time limitation table is more granular than the base time chart (which is why I chose to use it, instead of a custom limitation just using the base time chart) "once per season" nets you a whopping -5 limitation ... but given the diminishing returns from stacking limitations, it actually doesn't save you any points: it still costs 2 real points. cheers, Mark

Umm. No? I'm not even sure precisely what point you are trying to make, to be honest. Yes, it's obvious that not every enemy was as ferocious as the Swiss. And .... so what? Before the Swiss rose to glory, French knights enjoyed the same reputation, while among infantry Swabian swordsmen and Flemish infantry did. Nobody really liked fighting any of these guys, and inferior troops would sometimes flee if they found themselves about to be on the receiving end. How does that contradict anything I have written? Yes. But we know from accounts of people like Florange that they were typically stationed in the 4th to 6th rank. So they get to earn their pay in the melee that results, if the enemy actually stands to recieve the pikes or countercharges .... in which case, presumably, most of the initial front-rankers will be wounded or dead. Which is, in fact, exactly the situation Florange describes, the time he almost got killed himself. At the very least, there will be gaps in the line to allow them to move up. It's worth noting that the Spanish used sword and buckler men in this role before abandoning the pike block for the Spanish "abomination" - the Tercio. and they have even less reach than halbardiers. So not a contradiction - just an understanding of the tactics apparently used. For completeness' sake, I should note that halbardiers were often also detached to cover the flanks of the pike block, and depending on the era and the army could constitute anywhere from 10% to 25% of the "pikes". Cheers, Mark Note: for those not into renaissance warfare, the Tercio was Spain's (successful) answer to the pike-charge style of the Swiss and Germans, mixing pikes, swordsmen and guns in equal numbers. The pikes were in front and flanks, and were used for assault or defence, the swordsmen got stuck in once melee was joined, and the arquebusiers provided support. It was the first real combined-arms unit, and the technique replaced the pike block as the dominant unit for about a century in Europe.

I believe you suggested using clips of 1 charge with an increased reloading time in the past. Personally, I just use a variation on the Extra Time limitation called "cooldown" which is worth -1/2 less than the standard Extra Time limitation. So a power which you can only use every other phase gets a -1/4 limitation. This sounds like it might be a bit undervalued, but the value chosen meshes with the Time advantage and alternate uses of Extra Time, so that you can't get a freebie bonus by combining them. Cheers, Mark

Actually, you're not wrong .... but it's complicated. We have a pretty good idea of what the battles were like in the late medieval or early renaissance period, because we have contemporary accounts. But we know very little about individual fighting, because nothing was written about that. Florange gives detailed accounts about the politics of his war, the people involved and the battles. He also says it took 5-6 years training or experience to make a good pikeman .... and that's it. He tells us nothing about what that training was, or how the soldiers actually fought. And neither does anybody else, as far as I know. But we can make some educated guesses from what *was* written. Some commanders complained about poorly trained pikemen who "fenced" with their pikes, and did not close with the enemy. From this we can guess that the best pikemen did get in close. There are also complaints about pikemen who dropped their weapons in melee, from which we can guess that they were not supposed to. They could still fight one handed with a light weapon, but there's another option ... A pike block was (ideally) a highly-trained unit. If you - as a frontliner - trusted your comrades behind you to kill the guys facing you, then you could use your pike to kill the guys in more distant ranks, breaking up the cohesion of the enemy's front ranks. Finally of course, both Swiss and landskneckts included sword and halberd men in small numbers, whose place was just behind the front ranks. We know that their job was to "cut into" the enemy formation, so that the pikes could continue to push into them ... presumably in that press of melee. As for the willingness to take horrendous casualties, that's one of the things that made the swiss so feared. They were apparently always willing to do that, and their enemies often crumbled, or even ran at the Swiss charge, because they weren't. Here's a Swiss classic. At the battle of St. Jakob an der Bir, a swiss force of around 1500 pikemen was sent scout out and harass the advancing French. Encountering the French army - an estimated 30,000 troops - the Swiss decided to ignore their own orders .... and immediately attacked. Even for these guys, at odds of 20-1, the outcome was inevitable. Although they actually broke the French centre in hard fighting, the heavily outnumbered Swiss were eventually surrounded and completely wiped out (some writers say 16 escaped: whatever) after an epic fight that lasted 10 hours. We also have a detailed account of that battle from an eyewitness - a mercenary commander called Picolomini ... who later became pope. What was that bit about avoiding horrendous casualties if other options were available? Cheers, Mark

I thought I'd add an extra post here on a topic that is kind of related. It's about projecting our own biases onto how people thought and acted in the past. Sometimes when you see artifacts from the past - graffitti, writings, domestic articles, I am struck by how much they were like us. Other times, reading what they wrote and accounts of what they did, I am struck by how much they weren't like us. And one of the striking ways in which they were different was the very low value placed on life. So there's a tendency to see things in the past through modern eyes without thinking that people in medieval societies saw things differently. Narf's comment on the carnage associated with push of pike being unacceptable to any soldiers is really just saying that it was unacceptable to the amateur reenactors trying it out. I mentioned the pikemen of the Black Legion in the post above deliberately, because they are a unit we know a bit about. Through the Italian wars, they were frequently in combat, repeatedly suffering losses that could be 25 or 30% of their total strength ... and filling the ranks with new recruits and going back into combat. What might be unacceptable to a reenactor seeing things through modern eyes clearly was acceptable to the soldiers back then. To put it in perspective, this single unit - in one successful action - lost as many men killed in a day as all the US forces in Iraq put together lost in the course of 7 years. And yet, far from being broken, they were in action again a few months later. Edit: I don't know if it is available in English, but if you really want to know what fighting in a push of pike was like, and can read French, "Mémoires du maréchal de Florange, dit le Jeune Adventureaux" is available online for free (it's been out of copyright for more than 400 years ). These are memoirs of the Italian wars written by a commander of pike who was really there. At Novarre, he led his landskneckts against the Swiss in yet another protracted melee, being severely wounded in the fight (which he describes laconically as "very long"). He also notes that of the 400 men in the front ranks of his pike block, only 6 (including himself) survived and comments that the Swiss losses were even greater. And really, I'll take the word of someone who was actually there, writing for contemporaries, some of whom were also there, over the assumptions of some enthusiastic modern amateurs. Don't get me wrong - reenactment is a valuable tool, but it's fatal to assume that because something is difficult or dangerous that it wasn't done. Here's two examples. A few years ago I was in Rhodes, looking at the English section of the fortifications. It's an impregnable series of walls, with two defensive walls and a huge wall/counterscarp ranked sequentially, plus a very deep dry moat cut into the rock. My reaction on considering an assault was "You have got to be ****ing kidding me". And yet, the Turks did assault this position, and nearly took it, scaling the first wall, according to contemporaries, on a mound of their own dead. Even if that's an exaggeration, chroniclers on both sides agree that the slaughter was terrible. Unacceptable losses? Thousands of men died in an area the size of a largish city street, in the space of one night and one day. 10 metre high mound of dead or not, the final assaults must have taken place over a deep layer of bodies. What does it take to charge into combat on top of the bodies of your friends? It seems entirely unreasonable (actually to be honest, it appears to be screaming bat**** insane) ... but it happened. Another, less martial example involves a friend of mine, who worked for the national history museum in Copenhagen. They were testing viking clothes, based on burial finds and she had a costume that included a decorative swath of cloth that they thought was attached by two brooches at shoulder height. After a week, this woman was convinced that they must have it wrong: It simply could not have been worn that way: the cloth was just a giant pain the ***. She said that it was just impossible (and dangerous) to try and cook food on a fire, carry a baby, all kinds of tasks, with this cloth hanging down and getting in the way. The catch is that that traditional women's dress of some groups in Eastern Anatolia and Armenia - still worn into the 20th century - has an almost identical hanging cloth and women did do all their daily tasks wearing it. So it is possible. It's easy to underestimate what a decade of all-day, daily practice will allow you to do. So when thinking about what things might be like in a medieval or pseudomedieval society, one of the most important things to know is not so much the weight of a sword (though I admit the D&D encumbrance lists always make me roll my eyes) but the fact that people in that environment were not entirely like us. Among other things, they accepted discomfort, risk and danger with a stoicism that's very rare today. cheers, Mark

Well personally, I'd call fending off cavalry "melee combat" since it's not like they were throwing them But be that as it may, the rest of this is just wrong. Pikes were very much melee weapons, and prolonged combats certainly occurred. The only other interpretation is that the modern reenactors are correct and that every single contemporary witness is a liar. Not just the writers, either. Hans Holbein, who went to some lengths to ensure accuracy in his depictions, has a famous sketch showing pikemen getting stuck into each other, and other contemporaries, even those used to war, commented on the slaughter attendant on pikemen fighting each other. Contemporary battle reports bear them out. At the battle of Torrington, during the English civil war, the pikemen of the two forces battled it out for 2 hours, according to witnesses, with the Cornish pikes being slowly driven back before eventually breaking. But we have a rich feast of battles with contemporary accounts of pike vs. pike from the earlier Italian wars. One of the larger battles (Marignano) pitted more than 30,000 pikemen against each other in a series of actions that in total lasted a day and a half. Some of those actions were prolonged. The initial Swiss attack against the landskneckts of the Black Legion started near sundown and continued into full darkness and after moonrise, according to those who left us reports - long enough for the French cavalry to drive off the flanking scouts and then encircle the Swiss and launch multiple attacks from their flanks. Long enough for the artillery that had been attacked to be harnessed to their horses, driven to a new location get positioned and start firing again. We're not talking a few minutes here, or even a half hour, but probably 2 or more hours of bitter combat. On the subsequent day the fighting between the landskneckts and the Swiss pikes started at daybreak and lasted until midmorning, and the casualties in total are said to have been 15-20,000. At Pavia, a decade later, the pikes again clashed in grand style, with tens of thousands of Swiss and landknecht pikes (there were landskneckts on both sides) going at each other from 7 am until nearly 9 am - again, a bloody, close struggle resulting in thousands of dead. The Black Legion stood their ground and were wiped out almost to the last man - ironically, not by the swiss, their traditional foes, but by other landskneckts. There are plenty of other examples, but you get the idea. Push of pike definitely developed into bloody melee combat on many occasions. What this means in practice, again, based on contemporary accounts, is that the pikes met in a bloody clash, but after that additional clash, the front lines degenerated into close combat, while the rear ranks stabbed past them at whatever target they could reach. The front lines might pull apart when the casualties became too much, only to dress their line and press forward again, but in other cases, combat seemed to have been a slow meatgrinder of continual pressure. As a general rule I'd treat what is written by ARMA, Skallagrim and similar websites with a solid deal of skepticism. My own experience with them is that they blend a little bit of solid scholarship, with masses of enthusiastic amateur speculation, and a bit of wierd fanboism. When in doubt, look to original source material, and never take any one single person's point of view (including mine ) as gospel: everybody has their biases. cheers, Mark

You'd be right

I mentioned Tim Powers and his "iron is antithical to magic" schtick in some of his novels in another thread on this forum. The idea was that with increasing industrialisation, iron became ubiquitous - in Europe, flakes and specks of iron impregnate the air and the water, so magic in those areas is too diffused to be useful. That means magic only survives in a few "primitive" areas, at sea (well away from the coasts) and in hidden areas (deep caves, the centres of huge forests or mountain chains, etc). You could easily use the same idea with other anti-magic artifacts or materials. cheers, Mark

Actually, I was not over-estimating (since I have no idea what spell-lists you will be using), so much as warning very, very strongly to be highly restrictive in what you permit from the beginning. It's always easier to start off narrow and relax the restrictions if you feel comfortable with how things are working, than to discover something is not working and try to stuff that particular genie back into the bottle. Experience tells us that you don't need a whole spellbook of nasty spells to be disruptive - just one or two hard-to-answer spells will do the trick. As for the restriction on metal armour and weapons that's a possible and interesting approach if you want to further differentiate mages and warriors. If you want to go that route and haven't read them already, it's worth checking out the Tim Powers books The Anubis Gates and/or On Stranger Tides: they both use the "iron is inimical to magic" trope and they're both rollicking good reads, as well. Edit: the way iron works in those books is analogous to a drain or suppress effect, making magic weaker where there is much iron. In the books, that effects both the spellcaster and the target, making it hard for spellcasters to directly effect someone protected by sufficient iron. That might be an interesting alternate approach, though it heavily tilts the board against spellcasters in combat. Otherwise, the only thing I can see that might be a problem is spell research. If your players are anything like mine, the first thing they will want to do is spell research in any down time they have - if you have much downtime, they will be able to generate some nasty stuff fairly quickly (at which point the whole "restricted access" thing becomes moot). A month, for example would be enough to generate 2-3 really useful spells or one that fills their starting VPP, and in most games a month's downtime between adventures is not likely to be super uncommon. As long as you are on the ball, you should be able to catch anything you really don't want, but unless you actually want spell research to be a thing the PCs spend a lot of time on, I'd review whether you actually need it in your game. Personally, I don't like setting up rules constructs that will probably force me to say no to players on a regular basis. In my own game, spell research is analogous to scientific research in our time - not something you knock out in a few quiet evenings in a rented room, but a painstaking process that normally takes years or even decades - preferably in a well-equipped lab - to generate usable results. That essentially places it out of reach of PC spellcasters, while still explaining the question of where new spells come from. That's an explanation that players will likely easily accept, so it causes no in-game problems. It also offers you as GM the ability to provide "breakthroughs" for players to develop their own unique spells in the form of someone else's nearly-complete research notes, if you want. cheers, Mark

Agreed. I allow all character archetypes to use power frameworks in my games, but that's not what the original poster is suggesting - as it stands, I get the impression that only mages are allowed to use frameworks, and the framework itself looks to be fairly open to powergaming. I'm not saying that's a terrible idea, merely pointing out to the OP that if he ends up with problematic characters, that's likely where they will come from. Cheers, Mark

The problem is, once you start using power frameworks, that difference is purely semantic. You can have a flying, invisible mage who can drop disabling spells on his foes ... or fire up a flaming sword and go to town on his foes in hand to hand combat, if and when that's called for. Unlike class-based systems, there is nothing in the rules per se that make those two roles distinct. Players can choose to play one or the other, but there's nothing to make, or even encourage them to do so (actually the reverse: they'll be most effective if they choose to do both). That's what I've been saying from the beginning: if the GM wants those roles to be distinct, he's going to have to design his sytem to make it so: there is no inherent design bias for D&D-style mages built into hero. And if the GM designs the system so that magic is a viable option in combat, then soon, if not at the beginning, all his PCs will be mages. Nobody plays a mighty warrior to have the mages keep kicking sand in his face. Now I should stress that neither of these outcomes is undesirable: we've played some great Hero system campaigns set in Glorantha and Tekumel, where everyone in the party was a mage of one flavour or another. I'm just trying to make the point that the GM should be aware of this outcome, when doing magic system design. Cheers, Mark