Titan59

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming I think under the circumstances described its perfectly permissable for the Emperor to have the players done for Lesse Majeste. Most players I know would probably pay due respect to the Emperor if the potentially lethal consequences of dissing him were explained to them before, during or after them doing it. Normally as GM when this sort of thing arises I explain to the player the fallout that might occur from their actions and ask them if they are sure they want to do that or say that or whatever. If they say yes, hell, let the dice fall where they will.

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming Intellectually I am with Archer on this one. Any sort of magic would really impact on society. I have long thought the most likely outcome of magic really existing would be a feudal system with mages instead of the traditional warrior nobility at the top. Robin Hobb's assassin trilogy is a really good depiction of how a very few, not very powerful (in High Fantasy terms at least) mages could dominate a whole society. That said, emotionally I prefer worlds like Robert E Howard's Conan stories with big armies, lots of pseudo-medieval empires and a few nasty mages lurking in the corners.

Re: Schmucks? At last, the voice of reason! I'd certainly consider buying it. Anybody else willing to nudge the good people at DoJ in the right direction?

Re: No Humans? Anybody else remember Monsters! Monsters!? It was an old 70's RPG from Flying Buffalo (I think). You played monsters who came up from the Dungeon and plundered the human villages and taverns. It was quite funny in a silly way.

Re: Schmucks? On having really high-powered NPC superheroes in a campaign: I say, why not! As long as they are kept off stage/in a different city/ nowhere near the PCs except for those special crossover issues. Somebody has to be able to keep the Dr Destroyers of this world from taking it over and if your PCs are all 250-350 point starting characters its NOT going to be them at least not on a regular basis unless there's something very strange going on with your house rules. Of course there will be the issue where Destroyer has captured his arch-foes, and put them in the death trap and your poor underpowered players are going to have to sneak into Chez Destroyer and save the day. That will be a day when your players are very, very scared. Which is no bad thing. I've been involved in a multi-GM Champs game thats been on the go for over 20 years now and there's never been a problem with having big NPC super-teams existing-these were sometimes even teams of retired gross PC's. I think its who your players face on the day that counts. You can always find reasons for not having them bailed out by the local equivalent of the JLA/Avengers/whatever but it does at least make sense to have such a team be there. (Unless, of course, you're players are that local equivalent!)

Re: Adapting D&D Worlds You mean Andorra? Actually I like Eberron. Have been doing some work on converting it to Hero recently. Some of the new races become a little unbalanced when you convert. Warforged ended up with 36 points of life support.

Re: Carpenter's Tools and the Hero System Toolkit I think the great strength of Hero is the way you can get into the guts of the thing and tinker. If my players struggle with the system I will happily build characters from their concepts that are streamlined and basic- all powers on zero end for example. For most new players its the book-keeping that tends to be intimidating so I find it best to keep that to a minimum. Once players have a feel for the system they can do their own work and add the rules sub-systems they want to suit themselves. This modularity is a good thing. As an aside, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any other system that could have survived a multi-year long layoff by the company that produced it and then come back the way Hero has. (OK- D&D sort of did it but then its D&D and it had all the marketing muscle of Wizards/Hasbro behind it) I think it was the fact that Hero demands involvement in the design process by players and GM's that allowed it. The fact that Hero gamers are used to doing homebrew stuff must surely have been a contributing factor to the systems surviving. Not to take anything away from DOJ- they have supported 5th Ed the way I always wanted to see it supported. Long may they run.

Re: Fate systems For many years I used a system of Hero points. Basically players started with 3 and got as many of them after each scenario as they got xp. A Hero point could be used one time only to set any die to any result you wanted after the die had been rolled. Mostly they were used to reduce the body dice of nasty incoming killing attacks to 1 or to reduce the stun lottery on killing attacks. Real power players could use them for other things but my players tended to keep them to improve survivability. Once in a blue moon somebody used one to land a really satisfying blow on a hated enemy but that was rare. They also used them to make those rolls they just absolutely had to make. This system worked pretty well with the players I had but is obviously open to abuse. It can also deflate the tension from game critical rolls like that demolitions roll to defuse the bomb that will level the city if you don't make it. The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fate point system is great. I can recommend it heartily.

Re: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Read an interview with Jude Law in one of the UK papers at the weekend. He was talking about making a sequel. Apparently, and I am quoting from memory here so the numbers are not exact, the film cost about 40 million dollars to make and has pretty much made that back already so the producers are keen.

Re: Converting the Arduin Grimoire to Fantasy Hero Cheers, mate!

Re: Converting the Arduin Grimoire to Fantasy Hero Same. I would really like to see these. I have always loved Arduin. Really enjoyed the article Hargrave did for Different Worlds. Tis a pity the man is dead.

Re: "You're not a REAL Hero!" I think that the reason certain types of characters are not percieved heroic is that they are often played by certain types of players. Invisible Desolid Sniper Man, in my experience, is usually played by the sort of wargamer/powergamer who is interested in WINNING as he percieves it, and not roleplaying heroes or anything else as such. Winning in this case is usually either staying alive at all costs or playing "my character can take out your character and your character cant do anything about it" mind games. I realise that this is a gross generalisation and I hasten to add I have seen a fair number of heroic mentalist/desolid/invisible types in my twenty odd years of playing Hero, but there is just something about these character types that does seem to appeal to a certain sort of rabid powergamer. Its one reason I think they get a bad name.

Re: What Da Hook Gonna Be? I am actually running an Eberron campaign right now, and its scary how bad the pre-written scenario openings are. I am currently just about to start running Whispers of the Vampires Blade and the opening is as follows: The local equivalent of James Bond has just been turned into a vampire. He had raided Q's labs and made off with a scarily powerful magical sword. What does the local equivalent of M do? He pulls a bunch of PCs off the street and tests them by making them fight a giant ape in his garden. If they pass he dispatches them to hunt down the rogue agent. Actually he does it if they fail the test too. By doing this he is effectively giving a bunch of complete strangers with no reason to be loyal access to all manner of state secrets and a government expense account. Why would anybody do this? John le Carre it is not. I am rewriting the opening because the rest of the adventure is pretty good. One of the best things about Hero is that you usually have more than enough hooks lieing around in the characters background and disadvantages to justify your scenarios. I really need to convince my players to make the switch.

Re: Why would Dwarves Trade with Humans Another good reason to have trade in your campaign is smuggling, always an excellent source of adventure, particularly in an island based campaign. In Britain for many centuries customs duties were the largest form of tax collection until the introduction of the dreaded universal income tax and people will always try and minimise their tax bills. Give the players a small boat, a cargo of pipeweed (or whatever), and send them out to sea. Add pirates, rival smugglers and the tax collectors of whatever kingdom you want and you have an adventure. Also smuggling is a good reason to develop all those shady contacts PCs always have. You can also always have Jabba the Hutt or his local equivalent hunting them for dumping their cargo. To return to the original point about why trade, a lot of governments have historically encouraged trade because its an excellent source of revenue. It lets them extract relatively large amounts of money from a relatively small and sometimes not particularly popular or influential part of the population (merchants). It even lets them tax foreigners bringing goods into the country. Its easy to establish choke points where taxes can be assessed-customs houses, bonded warehouses etc. (Raiding these might be another adventure idea.) And as people have pointed there are always things people will want and be prepared to pay high sums of money for. Again, historically, most pre-modern trade was in small, light, high value high portability objects. Dwarves might produce their own ale but can they produce rare narcotic wine? What about alchemical supplies, magical items etc. There's the whole theory of comparative advantage to consider as well but at that point we enter an area of stupendous dullness. Not for nothing is economics called the dismal science.

Re: DC: Queen & Country Anybody ever seen Callan? It was a UK series from the late 60's/early 70's about an ex-convict who works as an assassin for British Intelligence. It was a brilliant if very dark and grungy series. Callan's hobby (very symbolic) was war-gaming. Apparently the series was hugely influential on the revival and growth of the historical miniatures hobby in the UK. Very cool series if you can catch it. There was a movie too (not so good).

Re: Playing 3.5 after Fantasy Hero Have to say that my experience is that 1st level D&D characters seem about as powerful as 25+25 FH characters. I have even run a couple of 25+25 campaigns for that very reason. (I like low level D&D.) In one case the players had just come off a 3 year twice a week Champions campaign with all the XP that implies. It was a shock to the system, I can tell you.

Re: DC: Queen & Country If you're looking for some very down at heel British spy stories, a little dated but still brilliant, you can't do better than Len Deighton's early work, particularly The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain. The movies are fine but the books are great. If Raymond Chandler had written spy stories about British secret agents they would read like these books. I've been to many of the places described in these books and Deighton was superb in his depictions of them. Colonel Stok is a villain well worth ripping off as well.

Re: Playing 3.5 after Fantasy Hero What do I like about 3.5? Its fast. In one recent session we played out 12 combat encounters in the space of an evening. I could not do that with Fantasy Hero-well not without a lot of fudging anyway. If you want a fast playing system that lets you get on with playing out your story efficiently there are far worse systems than D&D. I dont particularly like the magic system, and all the rules exceptions make planning an adventure a real dog, but all my players know the rules and it is easy to teach newcomers. OTOH- with Hero you get excellent cinematic combats. They may take longer but the players feel like they are in a movie or a comic book. They have lots of combat options, all the options make sense, and they give you a real sense of having some control over your characters destiny. You are not just rolling dice. And, I can improvise encounters on the fly, simply because I know x points worth of power in a spell is balanced against this particular group of players. I find that all the rules exceptions make this difficult to do in D&D. I suppose if I memorise all the rules this would not be a problem but who has time? At the moment, I am playing Eberron, and I confess I am enjoying it. I would enjoy it more if we were using the Hero rules but the players may take some persuading to shift.

Re: Normal Characteristic Maxima I have usually found the "will you be happy when your opponents start using this on you/doing this to you?- remember that many of them have more points to spend than you do" argument works well with most minmaxers. It also works well for those players who insist on inappropriate behaviour (such as killing unconscious opponents and looting their focii in superhero games). I have never had a player push this to the point where I actually had to implement the policy. Most minmaxers are smart enough to understand when a thing cuts both ways.

Re: Help with campaing fleshing! I think the size (or at least the mass) of the world does affect things like gravity. Most of the Big Planet type worlds posit a lack of heavy metals or stuff like that to balance this out- which has definite cultural implications. No gold for currencies etc. OTOH somebody could have built the world this way- a la Ringworld, the World of Tiers etc. It could be a mini-Dyson sphere with an artificial sun on the inside, for example. It could have been built by the Elder Gods for a specific purpose. The questions would be who built it and why? And more importantly are they still around?

Re: Lovecraft Horror Hero Let me just add my "yay to that" here. That section of Champions 3D went down a treat when I ran it many moons ago.