Markdoc

Until he uses Flash to blind them. Or magic to boost his STR to 33. Or mental paralysis to make them stand still - just for a phase - so that he can headshot them. Or invisibility to give him a huge edge in combat or a Ghostblade spell to make his weapon pass through armour, or ... there's an almost endless number of ways that a mage can make very, very, very effective use of mundane weapons and armour. Decades of GM'ing fantasy hero has taught me - and my fellow GMs - that there is no more effective melee combatant than a combat mage. It's even worse if you allow them to augment mundane equipment. In fact, the rules for magic (and for power frameworks) we use in our games is heavily influenced by the desire to have parties of PCs that weren't 100% composed of armoured mages. And it's not just our groups - this issue has come up again and again on the fantasy boards here, so it's a very common problem. cheers, Mark

Without limits, it's not heal everyone within 10 minutes - it's heal everyone within 1 minute. So I share your concern. As far as the delay goes, what I have done in my fantasy game is require magic to use long-term endurance (LTE) instead of END (a -1/2 limitation). Zero or reduced END for spells is only available in rare circumstances, with GM's permission, so spell-casting will drain LTE. No more wizards with 24/7 force fields! LTE recovers at REC/5 hours, but has an interesting in-game effect, which is that it reduces your available END as it is used up - so a wizard who goes all-in for spellcasting over a short period of time, will end up exhausted, and will only be able to walk slowly, can't carry heavy things very far, etc. On the flip side, ordinary physical exhaustion will interfere with their ability to master the titantic energies required for spellcasting. This lets wizards "nova" with a series of devastating spells, but at the cost of being burned out for a few hours. It also gives wizards a reason not to wear heavy armour all the time, as the weight and heat can prove fatiguing. There's the additional advantage that it doesn't require any new mechanisms - the END cost and recovery is exactly the same - it just uses LTE instead of regular END. As it happens, I've actually dropped regular END use for my FH games - it turns iout that adds little to the games I run except book-keeping, and only use END to calculate LTE both for spellcasting and also for working out fatigue/exhaustion for mundane activities. PCs (and NPCs) still have END and can buy increased END use or reduced END on powers to reflect activities that are more or less fatiguing, but we don't track it phase by phase. One PC in the last game, for example bought reduced END on his normal movement so that he could run all day without tiring. cheers, Mark

And a spellcaster would not buy the same kind of equipment .... because, why, exactly? If I was going into a fight, I'd still want mundane backup even if I could fly and blind my enemies by looking at them. cheers, Mark

Right. As far as I know, Hero has never had "facing" rules as such. Although movement or actions are segmented by phase, it's assumed that you are still moving and reacting inbetween your own actions; So you can't simply stroll around your opponent and whack him from behind in your phase and then wait while he strolls behind you and whacks you from behind in his phase, etc. To any kind of positioning bonus you either need to gain surprise, or be able to apply multiple attacker bonuses. Cheers, Mark

I understand where you are coming from, but we've had countless threads on these boards, with GMs complaining that their shiny new fantasy game is being trashed by their wizards. The "only spells that you have learned" is fine ... right up until the point where the wizard gets his hands on some decent spells. And that will happen (it's the nature of the game, really) unless you as GM are completely hardass about what spells they can access. After all, what happen if two starting PC mages agree to exchange spells? Now they each have 6 to choose from, and that was just the first adventure .... So I am not saying don't use VPPs - I did so in my last campaign, without any problems. I am just warning you to lock down access to spells as tight as you can, rather than just letting them choose "magic". In my last game, I did so by requiring players to choose a specific (and quite limited) school of magic and also restricting them to spells that they could find and/or trade for. That allowed each magic user to do some unique and cool things, but not to dominate the game, since they could not do everything. In addition, they had to use Mana (Long Term Endurance), which recharged very slowly, so that a mage who really went to town with spell use, could find himself taking a couple of days to recover and being so exhausted he could barely move, for a few hours. Getting magic right is the single most important thing you can do for your fantasy game. cheers, Mark

Actually, with the limitations suggested (requires a skill roll -1/2, side effects (ego blast on failure) -1/2, incantations -1/4, full phase to cast -1/2) you've got -1 3/4 in limitations: that means a 40 active point power draw 14 points out of your pool. A full 40 point attack, plus a full 40 point defence, still leaves 12 real points - enough for 33 active points of powers- say, invisibility to normal sight and 6" of flight. You can do this with the suggested starting VPP and it's going to be more than enough to slaughter anything a 100 point mundane character can bring to bear. Trust me, we've been there, multiple times. And the suggested caps actually don't matter too much to a mage since a) his 40 point VPP is under the cap and b ) he can tailor his attacks to work against low defences. You can, for example without any chicanery at all cast a simple 3d6/5PD+3ED Entangle for 35 active points .... that's going to lock up 90% of starting mundane PCs pretty much forever, and even a 20 STR character for a long, long time .... easily enough to fly them a couple of hundred metres into the air and drop them, for example. cheers, Mark

Here's my take as someone who's run a lot of low-mid level fantasy Looks fine Bit metagamey for my taste (the party can only have one really strong guy, for example), but I can't see it causing problems This eliminates a lot of concepts from the get-go, and I'm not sure what you gain by it. A player who wants a high-SPD PC, or a power as skill, but who is not allowed to start with one would simply pour all his points into it over the first few sessions. Unless the game is only meant to run for a few sessions, all you gain is them not being able to play the concept they wanted from the beginning. Forget typical ranges. If you set the max at 12, every martial character will use that as their starting benchmark. I find that PCs actually start off with lower CVs when I don't set a maximum, because it doesn't give them a "you must be this tall to take this ride" vibe.Really high CVs are rarely if ever a problem anyway, since a PC with an OCV of 10 will hit his target 92% of the time, while someone with an OCV of 14 will hit it 94% of the time Really high damage, OTOH can be a problem. I'd forget about max DCs, and instead put the "you cannot do more than double the base damage of an HKA by addinfg STR or martial arts damage" optional rule in place No problem here The problem with combat luck is not stacking with itself, it's stacking with free gear such as armour. Don't permit it. In general, a good rule of thumb is not to permit stacking of powers and free gear at all (see my comments on magic below for more on this) This, OTOH, I can see being a giant problem from the very beginning. A 40 point VPP like this would enable a starting wizard to fly, throw up a reduced end 20 PD forcefield that will stop pretty much every mundane weapon, plus an entangle that will be nigh-unbreakable by any character. Or he can fly and turn invisible ... and just get himself a longbow. Heck, he can get himself a two handed sword, pump his STR a bit, throw on his forcefield and just mow down any hapless warriors who get in his way, with his 12 DC killing attack. He can teleport intercontinental distances. The worst and easiest abuses are when you let a mage pick up a free mundane weaponand then use his VPP to enhance it, since that automatically makes his pool "larger". You can easily generate a 70 point attack out of a mundane weapon + a 40 point VPP - and you can even do it without violating the 12 DC rule. In terms of raw damage output, 40 points does not sound like much - until someone throws that first sonic scream spell (1/2d6 RKA, AVAD (vs Flash defence, hearing), does BOD) and starts melting down all his enemies at range, or casts an "arrow storm" spell and turns his 2d6 heavy longbow into a giant area-effect death machine. If you are going to allow a 40 point VPP, I would strongly recommend restricting what spells are available, and thinking carefully about restricting VPPs to certain types of magic, so that you don't get mages who can do everything - unless you want a game where everyone is a mage. cheers, Mark

This is kind of cool. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3291134/Ancient-warrior-s-tomb-laid-untouched-3-500-years-discovered-Greece-alongside-huge-hoard-treasure-including-gold-jewellery-signet-rings.html cheers, Mark

Regeneration is a bit of a gamechanger, once you allow it past the week/day level. In the last FH game I played in, as opposed to GMing, I played a character with some trollish blood in his background (not so weird if you are thinking of norse trolde, instead of D&D trolls). It was not enough for him to go all Wolverine in combat, but it did mean that with a few hours rest he was fine, even if severely wounded. It gave the character far more staying power than any of the other martial types. Like Combat luck, if you allow (or even suggest) it, it rapidly becomes something that most martial characters will see as a must-have, because wounds which regenerating characters shrug off may cripple their character for prolonged periods. That means that either everybody else stops while their PC heals, or their PC hangs around in the background while everybody else is active, and essentially nobody wants that. That in turn means that the nature of the game will change, because it makes it much harder for a GM to "threaten" PCs with physical harm - by which I mean that combat becomes much less consequential, and often therefore less exciting for the players. If wounds heal very rapidly, you don't really care if your PC is wounded. It becomes much like taking STUN damage. If you have good players and a game plot where combat is incidental, that might not matter much. But if physical combat plays a major role, it will change the whole gamestyle, as noted above. I think it works fine for any high fantasy game, and it does avoid the "someone has to play the healer" thing which often afflicts fantasy games. You can also work with regeneration by limiting it, as you suggest. In the last campaign I ran (not the one in which Jiro died!), I allowed regeneration and also the big stop-sign power regeneration usable on others. And it worked fine, because the powers were heavily limited. Regeneration usable on others was only available as "empathic healing" - where as a side effect, the healer took the same damage that he healed (in effect, transferring the wound to himself). The healer also had access to regeneration via a "healing trance" which allowed him to regen 1 BOD/hour: but he was definitively out of action while doing it. That worked in the context of the game, since it set a natural limit (empathic healing could heal no more BOD than the healer could sustain at any one time - and obviously while they were in the middle of an adventure, there's a limit to how much the healer wanted to gakk himself) but allowed him to heal the entire group in a day or two when they had downtime - or, as described below - perform the occasional feat of heroic healing. That gave us some good gaming stories. In one adventure, a PC got infected by a demon that implanted larvae (horrible writhing things covered in barbs and hooks) in its victims with a long "stinger". These would grow with unnatural rapidity, killing the victim in an agonizing fashion and hatching another demon out of their corpse. When this happened, the healer took control, getting the victim swiftly out of his armour, and getting two of the burliest PCs to hold him down. The healer then sliced him open - with a sword - none of yer namby-pamby scalpel work here, and tore the larvae out of the victim's chest (inflicting more damage in the process). Everybody involved was sprayed in blood, the PC in question went from nearly full health to -7 BOD and near to death in two phases - and then the healer healed him empathically. Talk about heroic healing! Neither of them were in great shape (both ended up on 1 BOD, IIRC), but they both survived. As for disabling and regeneration, technically speaking it only works on things that work off BOD, like injuries and transform, so it should have no effect on impairing/disabling. But it's hard to see why a character should remain disabled if they can rapidly heal all damage, except in cases where there is actual loss of a body part and the PC lacks the "can heal limb" adder. I guess you could argue that the disabling reflects a wound "that doesn't heal right" or some such. Either way it's a GM call. cheers, Mark

Good to hear. It was a fun game to GM - the entire campaign ran every other week for 4-5 years. Cheers, Mark

The pursuing foes were coming anyway. The players wrote quite a lot of fiction during that game: you can read about the demise of Jiro in this piece on my ancient and long-gone website from last century, preserved like a fly in amber on some aggregator site cheers, Mark

Actually, in this particular case, it went OK, which is testimony to the quality of the players. The players knew (and the PCs knew) that the character was bleeding to death, and the dying PC went on to make a one-man stand against the pursuing foes so that the rest of the PCs could escape, eventually expiring of his wounds on top of a pile of enemy corpses. Instead of being a bummer, it turned into a legendary death in the campaign, much admired by the other PCs. But it's worth noting that this happened even though as GM, I was really careful to try not to kill the PCs. If I had been a bit more brutal, the death toll would have soared. cheers, Mark

Just as a side point, having read and studied Ayurveda quite a lot over the last 20 years, and worked for 6 years in indian hospitals, it's safe to say that Ayurvedic medicine was not even remotely comparable to western medicine in the WW2 era. It wasn't even comparable to western medicine in the Franco-Prussian war era! I think it's fair to say that it was comparable to traditional Persian or Chinese medicine (though older than either) and clearly better than medieval european practice, but that's about it. Traditional ayurvedic practiioners "purified" their instruments and their locality by Agnihotra, and Dhoopan, but that was not the same as sterilising them and even today, infections via - for example - contaminated things as apparently safe as guasha instruments are a real problem in India (not really in western ayurveda, where, ironically, western sterlising techniques are widely used). I actually had a colleague in Bangalore who tested Dhoopana Dravyas for sterilising surgical tools and published the results in an Indian medical journal - to his disappointment, they were more heavily contaminated after the procedure than before. The idea that ayurvedic practicioners knew about anesthesia is kind of true. They knew about (and used) pain-killing medicines (alcohol, cannibis, henbane and opium-derived, etc, etc) but then, so did the Romans, Arabs, medieval Europeans and ancient Chinese. These are analgesics and sedatives rather than true anesthetics, though - and in all cases rather dangerous to use. cheers, Mark

Sure - healers from some cultures in my own fantasy world know all about microbes, and mundane surgery (though it's kind of a niche interest, since magical healing is better and faster). However, in the game in question, several players had the healing (paramedic) skill, but when you have a PC at -5 BOD, that's a -5 on your paramedics roll. In this case, even the most skilled of the PCs just didn't make his roll. Equally importantly; in a game with no magical healing, a PC who takes one good wound may be prevented from dying, or may even be "fine" just on low BOD - but that puts them one single good hit away from death. So you bet the game played differently. It's not a question of in-game knowledge: it's a mechanics-driven change to style of game. cheers, Mark

One of the things I have considered while playing around with this was the idea of dropping BOD completely, or making it a fixed stat. not a "consumable" one. The basic idea was that when you take more STUN damage than your CON, you are stunned - I had thought of taking the same basic idea and applying it to BOD damage - the idea being that when you take BOD damage you may acquire an impairing or disabling wound. I've toyed with and modelled two approaches. The way that BOD works, you are unlikely to take all your BOD in one hit, since attacks do far less BOD than STUN. So we need an way of modelling damage when you take just some BOD, instead of "more than" the way that CON and stunning works. The first way I thought about is based straight off the current rules for impairing and disabling. If you take 1/4 your BOD, you take an impairing wound, if you take 1/2, you take a disabling wound; These fractions could be changed if you use hit locations and damage multiples. That's simple, but a bit rigid for my taste - it also makes very high BOD scores highly desirable, since they make you essentially immune to small hits. So the second approach was to make a BOD roll: just a normal 9 + [CHA/5] roll any time you took BOD damage, with a -1 on the roll per point of BOD damage suffered (alternatively, you could just dump BOD altogether and just use CON). A failed roll would gain you an impairing wound, a roll failed by 5 or more would gain you a disabling wound, 8 or more and you are fatally wounded and bleeding to death. At that point, you have a number of segments equal to your BOD before you die - you can stop the bleeding with a healing (paramedic) roll, with a penalty equal to the BOD damage, similar to the case today, or with a healing spell. You could tweak these numbers: they were set up with heroic level games in mind, where BOD would typically run from 8-20, and to give a slightly cinematic feel, where heroes could fight on, despite multiple major wounds. That means that for a normal healthy adult (BOD roll 11-), even 1 BOD that actually penetrated defences would give a 50% chance for an impairing wound, and a 9% chance for a disabling wound - you would have to roll a 3 to be down and bleeding to death. Bear in mind that neither impairing or disabling wounds usually takes you out of the fight! On the other hand, a mighty barbarian with 23 BOD - a paragon of human strength, at the outer limits of what's normally possible, with a BOD roll of 14- would only have a 17% chance of being impaired by 1 BOD and would have to roll an 18 to be disabled. He's just not gonna die from a puny 1 BOD damage, ever. If on the other hand, you took a heavy hit - let's say 7 BOD through defences - the normal's chances are: 98% chance of being impaired, 63% chance of being disabled, 9% chance of being killed outright, while the physical paragon has an 84% chance of impairment, a 26% chance of a disabling wound and only a 2% chance of being killed outright. If I was going to go this route, I would almost certainly beef up the impairing and disabling tables a bit, and use a 2d6 roll to give some more diverse outcomes - and also to make the more severe outcomes less likely. There are a couple of nice (but hidden) features of this approach. First, it provides a border zone between unconscious (no STUN) and dead, where PCs are wounded, which has appreciable effects in-game. Right now BOD damage is kind of abstract. I've done just a little playtesting with this idea, and players with wounded PCs play differently to players with PCs who have lost some BOD: they are more cautious and more prone to retreat. Secondly, it makes PCs a bit more durable, without making them invulnerable - the odds of being killed outright are (deliberately) relatively low, but the odds of being seriously wounded are quite high. This approach also means that armour is important, but not so crucial as it is now, since a player might survive (they are unlikely to be in great shape, but they might survive) multiple wounds doing 20+ BOD in total, that would 100% wipe them out under the current system. Thirdly, it requires no more book-keeping than the current system: instead of tracking body taken, you track wounds taken, and you won' take wounds from every hit. And fourthly, the damage is nicely "spiky" like damage in real life. A dagger thrust is highly unlikely to kill your beefy barbarian in one hit ... but it could. 5 bullets at point blank rage from a .45 into your unarmoured character are highly likely to kill them ... but just like in real life, there's a small chance that you'll survive. There are disadvantages too. First, more dice-rolling (though fights with this system tend to be relatively short, if the GM rules that severely-wounded NPCs drop out of combat, which is reasonable enough). Second, it's relatively hard to ensure one-shot kills (I don't mind this, as it reflects real life, but some players hate it). Third, there's a risk of PCs entering a "death spiral" where they lose combat effectiveness, as they go through an adventure and then keep getting hit more and more and taking more and more wounds - with the current system, you remain at full combat effectiveness, even if you have 1 BOD left, making heroic defiance more effective. I took this into account when juggling the numbers for this system, balancing the fact that PCs are harder to kill against the fact that they are easier to degrade. The idea for this approach actually came from my reading (summarised in a relatively recent post on Tanks, over in Hero system discussion) about combat injuries in real life. The US doctors who were involved in classifying injuries during WW2 (the so-called Bouganville project) noted that injuries basically fell into 3 classes. The same has been been described in Vietnam and Iraq. Basically they noted that some wounds were rapidly or instantly fatal. Some were disabling, taking the soldier out of combat. And some were minor. Minor wounds might require treatment, even hospital treatment, after combat, but they did not prevent the soldier from continuing to fight. When they looked at different weapons, they all induced these kinds of wounds, but at different frequencies, and where you were shot also altered the chance that you would end up in one of the three categories. So oddly enough, in some ways, this proposed system is more realistic than what we have now, in terms of outcome. Anyway, to loop back to healing, in a system like this, healing (and regeneration for that matter) ceases to be about boosting BOD and instead is about removing wounds. Basically they could be two variants of the same power - one you can use on others, the other only on yourself. For natural healing, you could simply give the PC a BOD roll - perhaps at a penalty - once per "time interval" to decrease the status of a wound - a wound that had you down and bleeding to death, becomes disabling (assuming a healer or medic stopped you actually bleeding to death), disabling becomes impairing, impairing goes away. Time interval could be discussed, but I had thought once per week would be sufficient - that means that severe wounds could lay you up for several weeks (not that different from the current BOD/REC rules). The regeneration power would simply let you move that interval down the timescale (1 day, 6 hours, 1 hour, etc). Healing, in this case simply becomes Regeneration usable on others. I had played around with making the cost 10 points per step down the table, with no lower limit, taking into account the fact that PCs are more likely in this system to be wounded rather than dead, so it's not as crucial to have high level in-combat healing: a decent paramedic roll would be enough to stop someone dying and you could easily build that into a talent ("healing hands" or some such) or spell if you wanted, and that 30 points of healing would be enough to have everybody healed up in a few hours. Interestingly, this approach also makes it possible to build Wolverine-style characters whose healing factor brings them back from almost anything - which is really really expensive to try and do in the current system. It's expensive, but 70 points and a decent BOD score means that the character could take multiple lethal wounds, and get back up on his feet in a few seconds and be back to normal in under a minute (assuming he was still conscious, of course) cheers, Mark

Trust me, it makes a huge difference - I've run games for groups without a healer or with very little magic healing, and one good hit on a PC can take them out of action for days or even weeks, potentially crippling the party as a result. I dealt with that by providing plenty of down time between adventures for people to heal up and making most adventures with significant combat short, sharp affairs, so that a downed PC's player had to sit out one evening's play at most. You can do it, and in my opinion it gives games a gritty, desperate feel that I really like, but I literally had to design the entire game around the fact that magic healing was not readily available. Even so we had PCs who were wounded and literally died of wounds in front of their comrades (just ask Susano on these boards about Jiro) because without a magical healer they could not stop the bleeding. This is what I mean when I said that rule design affects gameplay - that one change, made more difference to the game than practically everything else - it affected the kinds of adventures I could run, the pacing of adventures, the danger value of NPCs, how the players played, how they developed their characters ... everything. Cheers, Mark

I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, except the first sentence. Really, the rules do suggest playstyle - more, they define playstyle. Even players who know little about the rules as a whole, don't minmax (or even know how to minmax) their PCs, will gradually (or in some cases, swiftly) adapt their playstyle to that rewarded by the rules, even when they are not aware that they are doing it. I've taught a lot of people to play Hero, and an even greater number to play RPGs in general, and I've watched this happen over and over again, regardless of player background and RPG experience. It's not just me as GM, because the same thing happens in all the groups I have played in as well (and actually you make this point yourself in your own post, when talking about unlimited healing being appropriate for some genres. You're right, but that's a playstyle thing). The rules are the agreed deinition of the PCs universe, and so, inevitably, the PCs come to conform to it. In games where we have altered the baseline rules (and in the old days, the group of GMs I was part of, tinkered with the rules a lot), inevitably those changes were reflected in character design and gameplay. If you make healing cumulative and moderately priced, it will become a must-have and players will start to treat physical damage casually (because after all, it's only temporary). This is exactly what happened in some of our earliest FH games where we had to homebrew some version of healing, and initially made it too easy. Now of course, if that's what you and your players want, that's cool, and it's very easy to tweak the rules to make it so. It's apparently not what most fantasy or heroic level GM's want though: it's a very different playstyle from most fantasy/Spy/street level games. I do understand your problem with the inconsistency - I suffer from that too. I'd much prefer a better method of dealing with healing, but I've been thinking about it for a long time, and haven't yet found an answer I like. The reason is simple: BOD was designed to be a limited resource; that's why recovery was set at REC/month. Cumulative healing can do an endrun around that, even at the very lowest level of effect. The closest I have come to what might be "better" approaches actually involve quite radical departures from the way we do things now. Cheers, Mark

That is in fact, precisely what happens in my game. There's even an "open wounds" spell which is a limited dispel aimed at creating that effect: though it's typically a bad-guy spell. As Manic Typist noted, the in-game rationale for why healing works this way is that it is magically substituting for the injured tissues and bones, so that the real ones can heal. You can only substitute so much, though, before there's no real tissue to support. Cheers, Mark

I understand why they didn't though: whatever goes into the rulesbook becomes the de facto "standard way to do something", the "change whatever you don't like" credo notwithstanding. And fully cumulative healing as the standard way to handle BOD damage means a major, major change in game design and playstyle, because it says very explicitly that BOD damage doesn't actually matter that much. With fully cumulative healing, PCs are pretty much either completely unharmed, or dead. Most Hero system games don't run that way, as far as I can work out, so it means making the "standard" - by the rules - something that isn't standard in games. Essentially it's like saying "Here's the rule: we suggest you don't use it." So it would be simpler in conception but actually make most GMs' role harder, which is almost always a sign of poor design. I think that we can agree that the current healing power is a kludge, though. The fact that so much discussion has been/and is expended on it, is also an indicator of design problems. It's not an easy problem to solve, however. The core of the problem is, IMO, the fact that Hero is not a resource management game, like so many other heroic level games. Powers do not, by default, come with an X-uses-per-day or per-encounter limit. But if we follow that logic with healing, it means that after every encounter, even 1d6 of cumulative healing is essentially unlimited healing. A SPD3 character could deliver 10 BOD per turn, which means that a minute after a fight, even a wounded-nigh-unto-death party of 5 could expect to be at full health again. The lack of resource management is a problem specifically with healing because it is essentially the only combat-related activity which usually takes place mostly outside of combat. Even if you added Extra time: 1 turn to the power, making it 4 pts for a d6, you still get essentially unlimited healing: adding a few minutes outside combat is essentially irrelevant in 90% of situations. That's a pretty good deal for 4 points ... an untenably good deal in my opinion. There's another catch, too. For other combat relevant activities, if you want a more effective power, you need to buy more dice, or for those powers which do use cumulative, like, say Mind control, you need to use more phases in combat to get a greater effect. In-combat healing follows this same logic, but in most cases, in reality, in-combat healing is restricted to a quick patch to prevent death - otherwise, normally PCs have better things to do in combat with their precious phases than healing wounds. So if we allowed healing to be cumulative by default, we create a power where in practice, 1d6 healing has nearly identical utility to 5d6 healing. So, when you think about it, it's pretty easy to see why Healing is not cumulative by default - that's because from a game mechanics point of view, it would be a really terrible idea. So how do we do it better? Healing is (as currently defined in the rules) a kind-of, sort-of adjustment power. The major differences are that a) it doesn't bring you up above starting values and b ) it does not fade. If we built Healing with Aid, a) is covered by "only restores to starting values" (-1/2) and b ) is covered by pushing the fade rate down to 5 per year (+3 1/4) for a total cost of 13 points per d6. After all, if you have any REC at all, you are going to have long since recovered the BOD healed by then. The difference between "fades after a year" and "never fades" is so small it can safely be ignored in this case. This is simply cumulative, but Aid still has a maximum (ie: the maximum you can roll on the dice). This was essentially how I ran Healing in my last campaign, under 5E rules, with the caveat that since the Aid only restored lost points, once you had recovered any points by natural healing, that cancelled the Aid for those points. This is simple, intuitive, and only requires the player (or GM) to track how much healing the character actually has (in total) at any one time. It also plays well with all the other rules about adjustment powers. It's not a perfect solution though, since it still requires tracking how much Aid the character is carrying instead of just their current BOD, and it also makes very powerful healing quite expensive (though I suppose you can argue that it should be). It also does not handle recovering from blinding, loss of limbs, etc., though those are all optional rules. And it's not as simple as the suggested Healing rules for 6E, which is just "you can only use this one particular power once per day per recipient". What we typically want out of healing is that it is a limited resource, but one that is easy to apply. I'd be interested to hear if anybody else has ideas about how to tackle this - either adapting existing rules or completely new ones, because I don't have a great answer. cheers, Mark

Studies suggest that sleep deprivation has many of the short term effects of drunkenness, so using the rules for intoxication are probably a pretty good match. In general people, can go two-three days without sleeping before they start to really weird out, but it's safe to say that your performance is seriously impaired after two nights without sleep (I've tried this personally on a couple of occasions!) cheers, Mark

We're all time travellers, in that direction As for 1000 IQ people, bring 'em on! Our planet does not noticeably seem to suffer from too much smarts. cheers, Mark

Oddly enough, I stumbled over this case earlier this evening while reading Science - so, relevant to this discussion, but I came across it quite out of context. He has posted a letter on his website admitting inappropriate behaviour (I know nothing whatsoever about the context of the accusations, so can't comment on the letter) so in this case, it appears that the accusations phase was actually over a few months ago, and that he has settled with the university. cheers, Mark

I think we can safely agree it was a stupid thing to do. I'd want to see much better evidence before I assume any linkage with subseqent deaths, though. cheers, Mark

This is just introverted gibberish. Change a few pronouns and a few activities and the article could have been written by a woman. In fact, I've read very many, very similar articles that were written by women, except they were about societal pressures to be feminine. Which makes the point, that it isn't about masculinity - or femininity, or even gender roles, for that matter: I've also read similar screeds on being Catholic (or not, in a catholic environment). It's about how we react to social pressure to conform to a specific role (or roles, because we are all expected to assume multiple roles). It's a pity. The author starts out promisingly, writing "Speaking for myself—the only person I can reasonably speak for—being a Man never seemed like an attainable goal, let alone a desirable one. This has something to do with me and who I am, certainly ..." and then goes on to ignore his own starting premise and write as though his own experience is universal. I understand his experience, because it's very similar to my own. But his conclusions and his reactions - even though entirely understandable to me, based on shared experience - are diametrically opposed to my own. So his own experience is not universal. Nor is mine – nor are the experiences of my many geek friends that run the spectrum. They are all equally valid … and only a tiny subset deal with anxiety issues. And it is a pity, because there are a few insightful comments mixed in with the gibberish. So masculinity isn’t an anxiety disorder. He has an anxiety disorder about his masculinity. That’s an issue he’s going to have to solve or learn to accommodate himself. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic, but locating the real root of a problem is the first step in resolving it. Trying to externalize it, the way he does here is actually only going to deepen his issues, because the world is not going to change to accommodate his personal problem. Cheers, Mark

It's called temporal association. This thing happened, and then that that thing happened, therefore this thing caused that. Humans are great at pattern recognition, not so good at analysis, and the vast bulk of people operate as much (or more) on gut instinct and superstition as logic. I'd weep, if I wasn't so busy laughing. Sigh. It's a serial problem in my own speciality field of vaccination - we call it the "What else could it be?" problem. cheers, Mark