Agemegos

Re: It comes back to haunt you

Re: It comes back to haunt you

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates All kinds. The whole point of commmando operations was to attack weakly-defended vulnerable points, which of necessity depended on understanding where the enemy's strength was and what it depended on. Commando training was (and is) also full of survival training, which is all about what the ecological environment is like and how to exploit it. Even Zorro robbed the alcalde when he was taking his graft out in secret to hand over to his banker. He didn't storm the alcalde's fort to get it. That's a thing you don't even think of unless the alcalde is set within a fairly well-understood system of objectives and opportunities. Then there is T.E. Lawrence and his like (not, admittedly, a commando), who was into assimilating to Arab culture the better to manipulate the Arabs. And that bloke whose name I have forgotten who set up a commando outfit from Jewish settlers (and jailbirds) in Palestine. They weren't just into social engineering, they were also into how to survive and prosper in the desert. "Conventional soldiers think of the jungle as a mysterious place full of lurking enemies. In my system, we do the lurking." I do blame it when I run across things that can't possibly be made to work. When I was trying to set up my pre-movie game I had the gretest difficulty in in devising a Jedi Order that was small enough and wimpy enough for two Sith to wipe out in twenty years (to the point of Han Solo's ignorance and skepticism in Star Wars), and yet large enough and effective enough to guard law and justice in a galaxy for a thousand generations. Its a basic problem with archetypal writing: it is incompatible with the basic SF notion that things might change in a fundamental way. I couldn't agree more. However, my take is that the SW canon is riddled with really big contradictions, and therefore that the GM or the game designer is facing a particularly difficult problem in this case

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates

Re: Monofilament Blade

Re: Monofilament Blade The tensile strength of buckytube is on the order of 100Gpa. The tensile strength of steel is up to 340 MPa. So you see that although monomolecular fibres are very strong, they are by no means unbreakable. 'Only' 300 times as strong as steel. And a monomolecule is mightily thin. The diameter of a single buckytube is about 0.27 nm. So I estimate its strength as that of a steel wire 10 nanometres thick. A breath would break that. All in all, I estimate the breaking strain of a single buckytube as 5 trillionths of a newton. That's about a trillionth of a pound force. It isn't going to cut through flesh and armour like a wire through cheese. It is going to be incredibly fragile. A monofilament blade is not an SF object, it is half-baked techno-babble.

G'day It just occurred to me that setting up tech for an SF RPG campaign is more like doing the same for a successful sci-fi TV franchise than for a more limited thing like a SF novel. The example in point is the 'variable sword' in Larry Niven's 'Known Space' books: a monomolecular filament stiffened by a stasis field, and which will cut through anything except GP hull material, which is monomolecular. You can thow away a thing like that in a novel (especially as an item of small significance), and people won't realise the implications until they have finished. But you have your royalty by then, so who cares. Let that sort of nonsense get past the continuity editor in a TV series, though, and you end up in the hell Star Trek made for itself when it suggested that dying crew members could be restored from backup in the transporter buffers, or witht he ridiculous things it established the holodeck as being able to do. (I would have had holographic marines in a flash. What would you have done with holodeck technology?) The thing is that any feature of teh world and its technology that you establish for a successful TV series is with you for a long time, and you may have to deal with it. In an SF RPG campaign you have that problem, except worse, because you have an ongoing dialogue with a bunch of imaginative people for whom the features you establish represent problems and resources, and who are looking for opportunities. They will not conveniently act dumb as characters in scripts will do. If I put a variable-sword in my SF campaign, and let it chew its way through armour and what have you, it would not be long before my PCs took out the patent on monomolecular (eg. synthetic diamond) plates for armour inserts, and monofilament-cored fibre for weave armours. And everyone would have to wonder why those things had not existed originally.

Re: Monofilament Blade So how long before we have armour vests woven of monomolecular thread, and with force-field plate inserts? You have to think your technology through in pre-build, not just let players drag in half-baked ideas from every bit of SF they've ever read or seen. Otherwise you end up with PCs owning some very valuable patents.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates You are correct. Something like two-thirds of photosynthesis is performed by unicellular algae in the top few millimetres of the oceans. That is what I was thinking of, but I was quite wrong to confuse unicellular algae (which are eukaryotes) with blue-green bacteria (which are bacteria). My apologies.

Re: Monofilament Blade Frankly, I don't think they would work. The edge would hit a crystal or a tough macromolecule and snap. Besides which, like the fine glass pipettes used in getting organelles out of cells, its very likely that such a fine thing could pass right through cell membranes and that they would just reassemble when it had passed. But that's just me.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates Indeed, most of the oxygen going in to Earth's atmosphere is produced by bacterial photosynthesis, is it not? But I think that they would need water.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates I doubt it. If nothing else, there ought to be a gradient of some sort from the equator to the poles, and also with altitude. A small planet with deep oceans to provide efficient poleward transport of heat might get you a narrow range of climates, but even so…. Star Wars's peculiar notions of planets (and of galaxies, for that matter) are one of the things that makes me find it hard to manage that universe.

Re: Missing SW-Brand Mono-Climates Atoll world. Marsh world (as opposed to swamp world). Bog world. Wheatfield world. Grassland world. Dry woodland world. Mulga scrub world. Rocky mountainous world. Hawkesbury Formation sandstone gorge-country world. Bristol quarry wolrd. Suburb world.

Re: Pulp Film Recommendations Mr Canton & Madam Rose, I think.

Re: Stat Inflation

Re: All you GMs sux0rs

Re: All you GMs sux0rs

Re: All you GMs sux0rs Then in my opinion you have erred in giving them 150 point to build characters. 150 point characters are supposed to be heroes. They are supposed to overwhelm guards. If you want characters to treat normal guards and soldiers with circumspection, you give teh players 50+50 or even 25+50. It seems to me that you want the characters to be heroes on paper, but not heroes in the game world, and are getting tangled in the contradiction. To get what you want, give out 50+50 instead of 75+75. You'll get characters with lower stats who won't overwhelm guards. And whose strength is not always jammed up against the normal characteristic maximum. (Though I have to say this: in a context where PD, REC, and Stun are all valuable, where damage class is valuable, where HERO's ridiculous strength minima are in force, and where characters have no access to powers and power frameworks, no need to buy multiple defences etc. etc., STR is a very good buy at one character point per point. You might still end up with a lot of STR at 20)

Re: Stat Inflation And your players want to play heroes, so they want to wield common weapons well. So naturally they buy strength. Fantasy HERO has a bit of a problem jammed down in the lower end of a representation scale meant for Spiderman, the Hulk, and Superman. There are only five values for strength in the 'normal' range that are functionally different from one another. For heroic characters, HERO is a very low resolution character representation system. Stength is cheap, and very important (especially with HERO's ridiculously high strength minima in force). You can't expect people not to buy it at the price. If you won't raise the price, and won't bring in rationing, I am afraid that you are snookered. The only out I can suggest is to raise the maximum normal strength to 25 or even 30. Otherwise you are going to have to tell you players to adapt tothe truth: STR is nothing very much in HERO System, it is cheap and effective and every combat character has it. If they want to characterise themelves as big strong guys, they will have to shell out for three or five points at double cost.

Re: Character sheet for heroic characters I have finicky tastes in charcter sheets. If they re two-sided, I like all the information that is used in combat to be on one side of the sheet. I have been known (not in HERO) to print two-sided charcter sheets side-by-side on A4, and fold them down the middle for storage, to get away from having to flip character sheets back and forth in combat.

Re: PULP HERO -- What Do *You* Want To See? Indeed. That is exactly why I asked for a character sheet designed specially for characters that do not use spells or powers. The space saved ought to be used to a section for weapon and vehicle stats.

Re: Cockaigne, the Empire. Feedback please I've updated this page, adding the promised short description of Cockaigne, and also adding a list of the PCs in the con game, linked to PDF character descriptions. So if you are at all interested, it is worth looking at again.

Re: Character sheet for heroic characters Not bad, but I'd prefer something on one page and with a few lines formatted for weapons stats.