Killer Shrike

I've allowed a "Focus of Opportunity" modifier for half Lim value for many years. A normally -1 Focus is worth -1/2 with "...of Opportunity" applied, a normally -1/2 Focus is worth -1/4, and a normally -1/4 Focus is worth -0, etc. Works fine.

I have no interest in doing that. As I've said in the past, if someone else wants to extract the content into a format that they prefer, they are free to do so. I do appreciate credit when people replicate or borrow from the site. However, there's no copyright, trademark, protected IP, or anything else so fac ut conscientia dictat. It's all just some random dude on the internet's miscellaneous thoughts and screeds about various games. tl;dr I have no objection if you or someone else scrapes the site and host it in part or whole on a CMS or whatever platform they prefer. It would be disappointing if having done so they claimed or implied authorship, but I'm not going to send Pinkertons or lose any sleep over it.

"Navigation was very intuitive on a desktop or laptop computer." Yeah, the fantasy hero material (and other older parts of the site) mostly predates the prevalence of smart phones, and the nav is not mobile friendly. I use laptops / desktops myself and have a hate-hate relationship with smart phones, and am just a dinosaur in that regard. So it doesn't effect me and thus I tend to not think about it. My son yells at me periodically, and in the newer subsites I made some effort to be more mobile navigable.

I have the Dark Sun boxed set in storage somewhere and played it back in the day, but have not looked at it in a very long time. What I mostly remember is that I liked Dark Sun as an idea but didn't like the implementation of it as a D&D setting. At the time, I thought it would have been better draped around a bespoke system rather than trying to stretch AD&D 2e to power it. It always struck me as more of a "mood" setting...the essense of Dark Sun is in its feels rather than its mechanics IMO. If I were going to run a Dark Sun or similar campaign I don't think I would use a well-defined mechanical model like the Hero System or even some version of D&D...the rules of such heavier games will inevitably conflict with elements of a more feels based setting. I would tend to reach for a more narrative system like Fate or Cortex for something like that because the "fiction" comes first and mechanically significant things like "you sterilize the planet in a square mile to cast this spell" are handled by the expedient of dropping a single Aspect or Complication on a scene. However, for the sake of using the Hero System to do it...off the top of my head the quirky thing that would differentiated it significantly from vanilla dnd is the magic system. The rest of it is either avialable (psionics) absent (dieties) or easily adapted from similar things (feral halflings, thrikreen, half giants, etc). I wrote up a sketch of an ambient magic system by request on these boards twenty-ish years ago but cannot find it w/ a search...it my have gotten culled. I never bothered to put up anything more than an allusion to such systems on my site because, frankly, I don't like that sort of magic due to the amount of effort it puts on the DM / GM to consider how much "mana" or whatever is available in every square inch of real estate or scene or whatever scale you prefer to work at. However, a straightforward way to do defiler-like magic is to make all spells cost END, require them to be paid from an END Reserve with no REC, and make all practitioners buy a Transfer (5e) or linked Drain+Aid (6e) targetting vegetation / life that deposits into the END Reserve. Dial in the particular behavior you like ranging from "exactly the same as Dark Sun" to "similar enough". The ability to drain life on a glacial fade back in a radius is quite powerful unto itself, so modelling it exactly would be costly. If you wanted to defray the cost, you could subsidize it similar to the core Fantasy Hero divide spell costs by 3 notion or encumber it with various limitations. Another similar option would be to instead have the draining of environmental vitality be a mandatory Side Effect on such spells. Similar outcome, different feel. The first is definitely deliberate and premediated...you drain life to fuel a magical battery. The second feels more like a lamentable but unavoidable consequence. [shrug] If I were going to pursue such a project, I would model it both ways, and if I thought of other ways as I went I'd do them too. Then I'd make a character and do a variant for each potential system, and potentially at different point levels to assess viability over apprentice / journeyman / master. Then I'd pick the one I liked best given the pros and cons, and I'd go from there.

The tip jar is still active ( https://www.killershrike.com/Donate.aspx ) and contributions are appreciated. However, as I see it there are three scenarios where the site would go down: 1) Money -- currently not an issue. 2) Tech -- the infrastructure of the site is quite old at this point, and is a legacy / organic frankenstein of 3 decades of web tech. It's definitely not mainstream, and hosting options have dwindled accordingly. There's a variety of ways this could become an issue. 3) Bus factor of 1 -- I'm the sole maintainer, and while I'm healthy I am also in my fifth decade of life. I also have a busy professional life. So, I could get sick or die on the one hand, but also if a significant amount of work needed to be done to overcome Tech issues I might be too busy to actually commit the time to it. I'm also not particularly keen on going thru the effort of trying to hand it all off to someone else either. Its been a vanity project from start to finish, feels weird to hand the reins over to someone else. Also, the time and frustration of such an undertaking is not appealing either. So...tl;dr: I'm glad people still get value out of it, I appreciate kind words and also contributions to the fees, but don't fret about kicking in on costs. The service outage wasn't due to an unpaid bill or anything on my end, the hosting company was just having a bad day or rotating servers or experiencing overbooked virtualization or experiencing multi phasic solar flare ups due to mercury being in retrograde, or something like that. 👍

Hey all, thanks for the concern. The host was having issues for a chunk of time yesterday but they seem to have gotten it worked out. I have no immediate plans to take the site offline, and keep paying the upkeep year by year. So, it will be there for the forseeable future, unless I keel over dead or it becomes untennable for some reason. Cheers!

For me, the best part about Hero and other "universal tookits" is that they are toolkits. When inspiration strikes for a one off or campaign I can slap together enough to get going and then spiral out from there. I don't want to be tied to a specific genre or setting, I want tools to whip up materials for whatever wacky idea I come up with. Thus I prefer a solid framework and maybe some scaffolding, and I'll figure it out from there. I'll cobble together what I want, bend to purpose this or that if necessary, homeroll to fill gaps, and discard the rest...until next time. Conversely, I don't like games or materials that have too many assumptions or opinions baked into them, because they get in my way or provide unwanted friction. I also don't like things that are too specific or niche. Reasoning from that position, I thought the Ulitmate books got way too specific to be marketable or necessary. The Ultimate Skill book was significant and useful, but that's a very cross-cutting consideration for the game system. The Ultimate Martial Arts book is also a very useful favorite and tellingly also cross-cutting. However, while some of the archetype AT books (the Ultimate Brick and so on) had a useful tidbit or crumb here and there, they were overall unecessary IMO and had little to offer. They were also predominantly Champions / supers oriented. A single Ultimate Archetype book with a chapter per significant comic book AT branded as a Champions supplement would have been better IMO, if it was even necessary. I seem to recall the Champions book itself having a section on AT's which could have been expanded if desired. Thus, I don't have any interest in an entire book on sth like Ultimate Power Armor or whatever. As to settings, I prefer gazeteer / skeletal setting books. Give me the big picture, set up the main themes, and set the hook of the setting -- what differentiates it. If I'm interested I'll take it from there and detail it only as necessary, and allow my players actions and impulses to collapse the waveforms on the rest of it. The more the official material or I describe, the more resistance the setting has to emergent play and player agency. I like just enough to run the game and inform my decision making, not enough to get in my way or slow play while I scramble to look up what the name of the 3rd barber of the second tier city of this particular city is named in canon. I also avoid licensed settings for the same reason. I don't want content, I want ideas, hooks, and tools. Less is more. Thus, I'd rather see a single book with a compendium of mini-settings or samplers for genre settings. As a for instance, the D&D 5e product Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is not actually about Ravenloft (the adventure Curse of Strahd is a much more pactical supplement to run a game set in Barovia / actual Ravenloft as its commonly thought of). It's actually a sort of Horror genre book with a bunch of mini horror settings in the form of various Domains of Dread. In a similar vein, Fate has a collection of "World of..." books which collate clutches of mini settings with a loose theme per book. I like that sort of thing a lot of better. I recognize that's a less common preference, but I'm unlikely to shell out money for multiple Star Hero setting books while I would consider buying a single book with a collection of less densely described settings. I do have a fondness for Cyberpunk / Dystopian near-future stories. I played and ran a lot of Shadowrun 1e, some Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020, and many cyberpunkish themed homerolled settings / games. The linked to MetaCyber material being one of them. I'm a busy person and not as plugged in to the day to day of the hobby as I used to be, so I often find out about these things too late, but I would definitely plunk down a chunk of money for a Cyberpunk 6e kickstarter if I became aware of it in time to back it.

No, its just a handful of fantasy PC's from various campaigns, run with different systems. I wrote each up in the various systems as a compare & contrast exercise. I recently did D&D 5e 2024 versions as a further point of comparison. They are "feel" conversions, trying to match the core idea of each character with 3rd level equivalent options across the board, reinterpreting as necessary to fit the idiom / mechanics of the relevant game system.

I did a similar thing at some point...you might find this useful or at least interesting: https://www.killershrike.com/rochemotul/

...so...you want to know how to map 5e skill proficiencies to Hero skills?

Actually, D&D 5e (2014 or 2024) -> Hero 4/5/6e is much simpler than D&D 3.x -> Hero 4+. The characteristic score ranges are the same as D&D 3.x D&D 5e's bounded accuracy maps MUCH more easily over Hero's 3d6 bell curve. Attacks of Opportunity are nearly gone, and what remains is far less entangled with character abilities. Abilities are generally simplified and standardized, which maps much more easily to Hero's SFX vs Effects model. ...and so on... The main difference remains in action economy. D&D 5x every character gets one turn per round, in a semi-random initiative order. On their turn, each character can Move and take an Action in any particular order (including move - act - move), and may take a Bonus Action if an ability or item allows them to do so, and may take one non action such as draw or drop a weapon and potentially more if they have an item or ability allows it. Each character can take up to one out of sequence triggered Reaction if they have one available. In the Hero system of course, characters don't get the same number of phases across 12 segment turns, in a fixed initiative order. On their phase, each character can take a Full Phase or 2 Half Phase actions but an attack ends the character's phase. There is no "Bonus Action" notion but there are ways to combine more than one action in a phase, and there are some non actions including "casual strength" usage. There are some defensive triggered reactions that character's can reactively "abort" to, and characters can have custom abilities built with Trigger or other mechanisms. But this is just "runtime" behavior and in the end doesn't matter that much, really. In practice, its pretty straightforward in my opinion. I would definitely say that D&D 5e and Hero 4+ are much closer together than D&D 3.x and Hero 4+, and D&D 5e is much more consistent that 3.5, thus conversion between D&D 5e and Hero 4+ is much easier. I'm willing to attempt to provide suggestions on particulars if you have any specific details you would like to discuss.

All seems fine to me, the main thing I would point out is that when I laid out the original styles for the magic system, for each I really focused on the implications of the modifiers along the following lines. how magic of that style would "feel" and appear to those with supernatural senses what sort of magics it would lend itself to (some modifiers rule out certain things entirely, make other things more or less practical) given that it takes a lot of study and commitment to learn these styles, what sort of personalities would be drawn to which style if learned scholars or opininated wannabes were to have a conversation about various styles, what would their talking points on the subject be? I was really linkening it to how in the real world different styles of doing the same basic things are complex combinations of purpose, approach, congruence, influence, quirks, preferences, the personalities it draws to it, the sub-culture of "inness" and "outness" that forms around it, etc. You see it in say cooking styles, art styles, musical styles, role playing styles, pretty much all human endeavors where there is more than one way of doing more or less the same thing, styles of going about it form. Martial arts styles provide a clear touchpoint for Metier (a word meaning basically "what are you good at" and chosen non-accidentally to name the magic system ). Imagine the difference between say Karate and Boxing or Wrestling and Tai Chi. That of course breaks down further into substyles...what kind of Karate compared to what kind of Boxing (etc). In the same way, you might consider that at least some of the variants you are defining are derived from, sects of, or influenced by an older style. Maybe an angry student sets up a rival style to spite their teacher. Maybe a practitioner develops a variant because their old master died before finishing their training and they had to figure it out themselves...but came to a different outcome. Maybe an old style fell into disuse or disappeared entirely, but a prodigy rediscovered it and tried to bring it back...but got parts of it "wrong" resulting in a new strain. Maybe a once in a generation talent comes along and says their style is the style of no style (Variable Advantage + Variable Limitation) and leaves a counter legacy of syncretionism. Really, theres no end to it. That's one of my favorite things about defining magical / martial / practical traditions in game settings...at a certain point it crosses over into world building. Starting from, mechanically I want a character to be differentiated by doing a certain kind of thing in a certain way...and this isn't a personal quirk its a thing other characters can also do...and how did the knowledge of how to do this become a thing and how is it perpetuated from past generations to future generations...and we're world building. Anyway, I'm glad to see you are still getting enjoyment out of the material. I've had a fondness for Metier since I wrote it as I think its a neat system, and it makes me happy that at least one other person agrees.

Very sad to hear this; he will be missed. Thoughts and wishes to his friends and family.