Agemegos

Re: Disad Advice I don't think it is even that. I can't think of a single circumstance in which he character is worse off than a default character. If an ordinary person is okay, he will be okay. By the time his 'disad' starts to bite, any other charcter will be dead of asphyxiation, unless they have Life Support. He loses his strength, speed etc. under circumstances where everyone else will die. That isn't a disad at all. It is a power. Not as good as 'Life Support: self-contained breathing'. But still it ought to cost points, not bring in points. Name the circumstances where this disad will bite. How common are they going to be? What exactly happens? What would happen to an default character under those circumstances? The whole thing is totally bogus.

Re: Disad Advice Okay, so he still drowns underwater and asphyxiates if you put a tourniquet around his neck, but it is because he needs the nitrogen? This alleged disad will only have any effect if the characer goes into an atmosphere with nitrogen but no oxygen. 1) That would kill all the other characters. Losing a bit of strength etc. under circumstances where others die is a power, not a disad. 2) Since the campaign is obviously not going anyplace where all the other characters would die, the circumstance that triggers these losses of characteristics are obviously never going to come up, and the 'limitation' is not worth points. What this character actually has is not a dependence, and not a limitation on his characteristics. It is a limitation on his Life Support. He loses characteristics in circumstances where a normal character would die, and where a character with self-contained breathing would be unaffected.

Re: Disad Advice

Re: Disad Advice The first one depends a bit on the campaign setting. Is your setting such that people in general treat a superhero with red skin a great deal worse than other superheros? If not, knock out the 'causes major reaction'. The dependences are just silly. Needing oxygen just as everyone else does is not worth points. The player is asking to be given fifty points for not having bought 'Life Support: self-contained breathing'. This is like taking a Phys Lim "Can't walk through walls" and a Phys Lim "Can't wlk through closed doors" with the special effect 'The character doesn't have Desolidification'. Point out to this idiot that with three minutes without oxygen his character will be dead of asphyxiation, so the dependencies will never have any effect. And then tell him about the first rule of disadvantages.

Re: 'Empire': a cliché?

Re: Why play Fantasy Hero over other fantasy games? Hero System is cheap, especially if you take into account that with D&D you are gong to be suckered into buying shelf-metres of supplements. The equivalent of new races, spells, feats, and classes are implicit in the rules, and you do not need to buy supplements to get them. And that's not all: for the price of FrEd you get a free superhero game, a free SF game, a free Pulp game, a free action-thriller game, all thrown in free gratis. Not to mention steak-knives. Hero System is free from funny-looking genre artifacts D&D bundles some funny things together into the classes, such as two-weapon fighting with the woodsman, magical horses with the holy-warrior-with-healing-touch, backstabbing with the skill-based interpersonal character, plate armour with the priest.. Not so the Hero System. Hero System is vastly more adaptable to different settings. My usual fantasy setting has mages who design their spells to specific purposes like engineers, avatars who gain miraculous powers from their ruling passions, favourites for whom godlings do what favours are within their powers, practitioners of mystic disciplines giving them powers like those attributed to Ch'i in martial-arts myth, and races quite unlike D&D races. It's all easy in Hero System, it's all hard in D&D. Hero System is free from the overwhelming changes in a character's power and toughness of a typical D&D character as he or she gains levels. Hero System run using the 'Heroic' options is much more realistic than D&D, resulting in characters who are more human and fathomable, who are subject to threats that are more familiar and immediate, and who therefore take part in adventures that are more familiar and engaging. Every D&D character who survives a year of play and gets to be experienced enough to use the cool abilities of his of her class becomes so tough that even six good flush hits with a sword cannot stop him: if he or she is a fighter, barbarian, paladin, or ranger a platoon of soldiers with crossbows aimed and ready is not a lethal threat. A 10th-level D&D character faced with a dangerous encounter might sensibly consider jumping off the hundred-foot-high battlements of Babylon onto a rocky bottom, then standing up and running away. Heroe System doesn't scale so drastically, so characters do not become such bizarre unfthomable non-human things. Unless you want them too, in which case they can.

Re: 'Empire': a cliché? It is a nice suggestion, except for two things. 1) How would it develop? Is it plausible that a group of 28th-century diplomats would revive ancient Greek? 2) It just so happens that I use ancient Greek terms very extensively in my fantasy setting, and I think my players would baulk at it invading Flat Black as well.

Re: A view from outside I find that an environment of varied threats and defences provides sufficient incentive to diversify. People won't sink more point into a defence that is already reasonably effective if enemies are slipping freight trains past the open flank, and they won't sink more points into an attack that is already reasonably effective if there are enemies they can't touch with it. Of course, that means that character tend to be[come] versatile rather than overpowering, which you might see as another problem. If it is, restrict the character points. The countervailing disadvantage is that they tend to kill people. Try reducing the incidence of resistant defences in your campaigns and let PCs face the prospect of trials for murder or manslaughter, etc. I have seen this problem too (I run only heroic campaigns), and find that a STR of 18 or 20 is too good and cheap for many players to resist. I have run and played in SF campaigns in which equipment (weapons and armour) were so good that hand-to-hand combat was a waste of effort: gunslinging characters often trun out with STRs of 8 or 10 if you adjust the STR mins of firearms to be realistic rather than 'balanced'. But of course you don't always want to play such campaigns. I would be tempted to raise the cost of STR to 2 CP per pip in heroic campaigns. I feel that problem too. I am toying with the idea of changing a stat roll from 9+CHA/5 to 7+CHA/3 as an experiment in making more distinct values of charcteristics meaningful. I'm not sure about this, because I don't run any or play many superheroic games, but had you thought that power frameworks are what allow power-based characters to compete on equal terms with STR-based builds? That STR and powers in frameworks are both underpriced to the same extent, and therefore that their relative costs are about right? Do bricks or martial artists or power-based characters dominate? If they turn out all to be viable builds because cheap STR, cheap powers in frameworks, and cheap DCs & CV in martial arts manoeuvres are all underpriced, then perhaps these things are all in fact priced right.

Re: 'Empire': a cliché?

Re: A Modern League of Extroardinary Gentlemen Dr. Bell. A lecturer at the University of Edinburgh medical school when Doylewas an undergrad.

G'day I have an SF setting that I have been running games in (using Hero System and ForeSight as the ruleset on various occasions) since 1987, but which I am now putting through a major revision (its second). The premise is that Earth estalished several hundred colonies using marginal, expensive, inconvenient means of interstellar travel that were very limited and effectively one-way. Then Earth was destroyed by what is believed to have been an unexpectedly powerful weapon, but what might have been an accident in a lab researching FTL travel. (In the first veersiion these 'primary colonies' were established by an instantaneous technolgy that required preparation of the destination. In the second it was STL lightsail tech. In the new version it will be JAFAL technology in which a stator propels a ship in a modified Alcubierre warp bubble.) After a couple of centuries of independent and divergent development on the part of the colonies, a bloke called Eichberger invented a convenient means of FTL in which ships are self-propelling. This allows return travel, and makes interstellar commerce possible. Eichberger became very, very rich: but unscrupulous and negligent people did great evils using his invention. After about 75 years, Eichberger vested the greater part of his fortune in a trust or foundation, with its purpose to mitigate and compensate the downside of FTL travel. This trust built a fleet, and used it to pursue pirates &c. But #1 and #2 on its 'most wanted' list succumbed so decisively that #3 (Jorge Luis Bertillon) attempted pre-emptive defence. He destroyed Eichberger's homeworld (and killed Eichberger and most of the trustees) using a Catalytic Thermonuclear (CT) device. The Trust's fleet, shipyards, merchant ships &c were, however, pretty much untouched. One of the Trust's (or Foundation's) commodores (Thyomas Kobayashi) pursued Bertillon to a world that acted as a fortified base for pirates. The world (Orinoco) refused to give Bertillon up, and began to prepare a war-fleet. So Kobayashi blasted it to a cinder with an improvised CT weapon, then shot himself. The surviving employees of the Foundation (or Trust) then swore to dedicate their lives and their posterity to protecting everyone they could from the danger of mass killings and other evils Eichberger had identified. There followed about fifty years of 'Formation Wars' in which the Trust (or Foundation) attempted to establish its power to do these things in the face of opposition by planetary government trying to maintain their untrammelled sovereignty and the absolute freedom of the spaceways. This ended in a stalemate and was settled by negotiation and ended in the Treaty of Luna, which acts as a constitution. The broad outline of the Treaty of Luna is that the colonies retain sovereignty within their atmospheres, and the power to supervise (through court which they appoint) all activity of the Foundtion (or Trust) within it. Meanwhile the Trust (or Foundation) is sovereign in vacuum and on unihabited worlds and has a limited authority to pursue its mission (eg. jurisdiction over WMD, terrorism, inter-colonial trvel, extradition, quarantine, etc.) subject to a bicameral legislature representing the colonies and with absolute control over taxation. The legislature has the power to authorise the Empire to intervene in a colony on which government fails. The power of this legislature has turned out to be far less than the framers of the Treaty of Luna expected, because the revenues of interstellar commerce and planet development make the Trust (or Foundation) independent of tax revenues. I have hitherto called the institution that the Treaty of Luna created out of the Eichberger Foundation 'The Empire', its supreme executive body 'the Imperial Council', its chief executive officer 'the Emperor', its navy 'the Imperial Navy', its marines 'the Imperial Marines', etc. But some of my players protest: 1. That there are far too many space empires around anyway. 2. That the word 'empire' seems like an unlikely term for the negotiators at Luna to revive. 3. That the word 'empire' suggests an hereditary monarchy, not a meritocratic oligarchy self-perpetuating by co-option. 4. And therefore that I would be better-advised to use 'Foundation', 'Trust', 'Company', 'Directorate, or 'Zaibatsu', and 'Board of Directors' or 'Board of Trustees', along with 'President', 'Chairman', 'Managing Director', 'Chief Trustee', 'Secretary-General', 'Director-General': or something like that. 5. In addition to which, they think that the word 'Foundation' is too suggestive of Asimov, ant that I ought to use 'Trust' or "Eichberger Family Trust'. Any comments? Am I okay using 'empire' to describe a government with supreme authority over an extensive group of states that have limited sovereignty, even though it is not a monarchy? Is it quie implausible that a bunch of diplomats would choose that term when (they thought) they were setting up such an interstellar institution? Does this term give the wrong 'feel'? has it been over-used? Is it misleding to new players? Regards, Brett Evill

Re: Sailing from Venice to Cairo Yes, it is southern France. Although nominally part of the Kingdom of France since Carolingian times, it spoke a distinct dialect and had a lot of cultural differences from the North (or Langue d'oiel). The actual authoity of the kings of France was weak in many places, and insignificant in the Languedoc until the Albigensian Crusade (AD 1208-1228), when the County of Toulouse and other domains in the Languedoc were in effect conquered by the Langue d'oiel-speaking retainers of the King.

Re: Sailing from Venice to Cairo Trieste to Alexandria is 1193 nautical miles. I would guess that a galley of the period might cruise at 4 knots. So figure 298 hours: a little over twelve days. But I am a bit perplexed by the notion of a merchant galley. A galley is a warship type.

Re: Interstellar communications

Re: My House Rules. Comments Welcome

Re: Interstellar communications

Re: My House Rules. Comments Welcome That's a contradiction. 'Round to two decimal places' means round to the nearest hundredth, not round to the nearest whole number.

Re: Massive engineering projects? It's okay, I found them. The orbits are called 'cyclers'. They depend on using Earth's gravity (and sometimes rockets) to put the shuttle into a different orbit for each repetition: which is pretty gung-ho stuff. How do people find those solutions?

Re: Massive engineering projects?

Re: Interstellar communications Why not leave the communications drone out beyond the gravity limit when you come in? Then send a radio signal to it containing the message and navigation instructions. It then goes directly into hyperspace where it is, and on arrival it uses a maser to general a signal that will travel at lightspeed to the destination? That's the way they do things in my SF setting. In my setting the point at which you activate your jump drive determines the point at which you arrive, and any uncertainty in your origin with is multiplied by a large ratio to produce uncertainty in your destination. With typically only a 500mm objective in their navigating telescopes, signal drones cannot navigate accurately enough to count on arriving in the departure zone for a return trip (indeed, under some geometries a one-jump return is not possible). They are built with motors and computers to get them back on station, but there can be delays of hundreds of hours. SOP is to leave one at your departure point, and then when you arrive at the edge of the gravity well, launch another programmed to take itself to a return point and await instructions. That way you get one rapid report to HQ, and one rapid reply. And then you might have to wait a week before you can send another signal home. That keeps HQ off your back.

Re: Supervillain: What Would You Do? Under those circumstances I'd knock over a pharmacy and lay in a large supply of powerful anti-psychotics.

Re: Massive engineering projects?

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... This week I have re-read Homer's Iliad, which, to be quite frank, I didn't enjoy this time. It was a slog to get through it, the meddling of the gods detracts seriously from the human drama, the grisly deaths all blur into one another, nearly all the major characters are utterly repellent, and the parenthetic digressions on the families and homelands of hordes of minor characters (most of whom do nothing but get killed) are nothing but an irritation. Perhaps it's great. But it isn't good. 4/10 And I read Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume, which is pretty good, which some striking Robbins turn of phrase, but which tries too take a large theme, and errs in including both a half-baked telelogical version of evolution and a few figures from Greek myth. 8/10

Weapon and carry sizes I've said this before, and I don't want to nag, but in case my suggestion has been forgotten I'll repeat it here where it will readily be found. I liked the rules that were in Justice, Inc for the sizes of weapons and the hiding-places about a person, and for how well-hidden a given object in a given carry was. I think they would have some usefulness in almost any type of heroic campaign. I'd like to see them re-appear in core Hero System.

Re: How many points? Ah! My mistake. I have always [mis]understood "radiation accident" to refer to one of those incidents in which a character re-allocated points that are already spent, swaps out disads, etc