alms66

Re: How Fast an Horse can Go? Yeah, he's got it right there. In addition, modern man is wearing modern shoes which change the natural running gait of a human being considerably and actually weaken a human's natural ability at running - they cause tons of injuries in runners because of this. I don't know who the hell David Brin is either, and I don't have any internet links to point to, but what I do have is a stack of scientific magazines and books on my shelves that all point to the fact that without the past 6000-8000 years of animal husbandry (breeding for the traits we wanted out of horses - better strength, size and endurance), plus without the addition of horse shoes (which allow horses to traverse terrain they normally wouldn't be able to), horses were easily hunted down using the persistence hunting methods still in use in Africa today. Humans are the most efficient natural long distance runners due to their superior ability to shed heat, as stated above - no other animal has that. NONE. Humans can and do outrun everything - eventually.

Re: How Fast an Horse can Go? It depends a whole lot on what u consider a "horse"? Is it shoed? Much advantaged. Is it bred over thousands of years for strength and endurance? Much advanced. Basically, if you take a stone age horse and a stone age man, the horse is worthless in long distance running, change those assumptions and you change the answer.

Re: World without horses Generally speaking, a human and a horse over a long distance race... The human will win every time. Here's why: 1. Humans are natural long distance runners. We're capable of sweating and cooling our bodies better than any other animal on the planet. We also have an extremely efficient running gait. 2. Horses need long periods of rest, not only because of #1, but they also eat a lot more than humans do. This is because horses only eat grass/hay/grain, which is not as calorie-loaded as meat/cheese/bread that humans will eat on a long distance travel, plus we're simply less massive. 3. Humans can travel over any terrain, horses can't, they have to constantly go around obstacles, whereas humans simply go through them, assuming you're not on a road of course. So, therefore, the most effective long distance travel is not by horse, but by foot. Horses are great because they are faster than humans in short sprints, thus making them great for hit-and-run tactics of ancient cavalry or charging into a line of men, simply due to the horses mass, it will break the line. Also, horses are certainly more comfortable than traveling by foot in that you're not going through the brush, climbing over rocks, walking through streams and just generally getting filthy and sweaty.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Well, it's basically the method everyone's been telling me to use, even you a few posts up, it just took me a while to realize it was right... Noob...

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Ok, I think I've finally got a handle on this... 1. END Reserve is the caster's threshold and recovery rate. If the caster does not buy one, he's effectively causing a calamity roll with every casting. Recovery must be purchased with a -6 Slow Recovery (once per day) limitation. 2. END cost for spells is a minimum of 1. This makes END the way to track a spell's power, not Active/Real points. 3. END Reserve can be exceeded. As per Umana, for each full 5 points it is exceeded, you get a +1 to the calamity roll. Whether you start your reserve at say 40 and subtract END or start at 0 and tally up to the reserve's limit of 40 - doesn't really matter, though I prefer the latter to avoid dealing with negative values since that tends to put some players of for some reason. It's incredibly simple just as I wanted, and I have to thank you guys for beating the END and END Reserve into me enough for me to finally "get it" while I was re-reading the END Reserve rules tonight. This gets Umana fully working with HERO and has no real impact on how a character buys his spells, meaning you can tack it on to just about any other magic system and have it still work just fine - which is exactly how I wanted it because I plan on doing just that.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Active vs Real Points But, if you only use Active and a limitation is used against the player, say breaking his staff so he can no longer cast spells, wouldn't that player feel very cheated by the fact that you don't take that limitation into account? Or is it enough that it lowered the cost to buy the spell in the first place (assuming you're buying spells individually as powers)? Purchasing spells I really don't see how the method of purchasing the spells will affect anything other than some methods are cheaper than others, but using a cost divisor can bring down the cost of buying spells individually anyway, so you can easily remedy that. Is there something else I"m missing? Tally vs Reserve My main argument against the reserve is that HERO has no rules for exceeding it, thus the Umana tally method is better. It really doesn't require anything specific from HERO either, it's usable with any game system, so that's nice too. As for the calamities causing permanent scars on a campaign world, there's also that "heal calamity" spell at the bottom of the Umana article - I think I'll do something like that to keep from having too many overly devastating events in the world's history.

Re: New Campaign Idea: "Blood" I like the idea, though personally I'd have several different packages for 'mixed blood' with varying degrees of power. Anyway, some "Blood" Names: The Gifted The Great Ones Having "blood" in there actually kind of sounds cool The Great Blooded/The Lesser Blooded The Noble Blooded/The Knight Blooded As for the "normals" I really can't think of anything other than peasants or commoners. Why would they need a special name anyway? They are the "common" ones after all, they're just plain old humans.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO END Reserve vs Tally Umana has no upper limit to what can be cast, and well, the END reserve is a set amount of points you can spend and a tally is just an infinite tally of what you've spent. To me that's a world of difference so I don't see using an END Reserve as the best way to do this. Besides, there's no apparent way to use energy beyond this reserve. Power vs Fagiue Umana is basing everything on fatigue costs, the standard GURPS method, which is a reflection of the power of the spell - more powerful spells cost more fatigue to cast. However, I'm not interesting in modeling GURPS magic's mechanics, just Umana's mechanics. Again, to clearly separate the two for everyone, Umana is just this: A wizard has no limitations on what he can cast other than his own desire not to destroy himself. Or, mechanically Tally/Threshold/Recovery Rate. Ok, so let's do a quick recap of what I need to do to make HERO and Umana play together nicely... 1. There can be no artificial restrictions on a caster's ability to cast spells. He can cast any spell at any time, regardless of how powerful that spell is. He knows his own threshold, recovery rate and tally, so he can monitor the chances of calamity and do what he needs to do to avoid them. 2. There can be no artificial restrictions on creating a spell, no required limitations or advantages (technically this isn't needed, but in the spirit of Umana). (Since it's already been shown that a spell can be created which doesn't cost END, it seems the only way to track a spell's power and thus tally it, is via the points it would cost to build the spell as a power - Real Points being a more accurate representation given they reflect limitations the spell was created with) 3. Spells will be bought by wizard characters as a skill, spell by spell, individual skills. Wizards will also be required to buy a Magical Talent for the ability to cast spells. There will be talents available to change an individual wizard's threshold and recovery rate as per the Umana rules. (I may not have stated this before, but this is how I intend to handle these things using HERO rules - NOT by modeling the GURPS magic system - I just needed to find the simplest method of tacking Umana rules into the system, and it still seems to me I did that best in my first post). So why would a wizard not simply build all of his spells as gigantic 16d damage mega-death spells? He can create them, he can buy them as skills and he can cast them - at least he'll be able to cast it once, but it'll kill him. I mean, if you build a spell with 750 Real Points, and we do the 'divide by 10' thing and add that number to your tally, assuming I keep the threshold at 30 and this wizard didn't buy extra threshold, that's 45 points past your threshold and a +45 to your calamity roll - instant death. There would be no reason to have such a spell since you could never use it, without killing yourself. That is, unless you wanted a spell to use if you knew you were going to die anyway and just wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.

Re: THE HERO SYSTEM EQUIPMENT GUIDE -- What Would *You* Like To See? Well, if we're going to throw around ideas about wealth... 3 things make it up: Wealth on hand (cash or goods) Income Debt Each level you buy of them doubles the base value, set by the GM. You can add modifiers, positive or negative, for things such as "Wealth on hand" - Cash Only, Income - No Job (meaning something other than a job earns you money), Debt - loanshark, etc. Nice and clean and then you can just treat money as money, if it buys you equipment, it's ok, because you paid points for the money to buy the equipment.

Re: THE HERO SYSTEM EQUIPMENT GUIDE -- What Would *You* Like To See? One of the best equipment books I've ever seen is Rolemaster's "And a 10' pole". They list every piece of equipment by era, with price fluctuations through time and all kinds of improvements to various items through time. Granted, they just had to produce row after row of charts, not show how to build the equipment.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Well, last night, while reading through Fantasy Hero 6E, I figured out how to rebuild the entire GURPS magic system, prerequisites and all. The exact END costs might not be 100% accurate, but you'd have the whole book of GURPS Magic spells, nearly 100% identical to actual GURPS. I don't recall all the ways to do it, but I could figure it out again if someone was really interested in doing that. I'm not. I don't want the GURPS magic system verbatum dropped into HERO. I want spells to be built individually and bought individually, like any other power is normally done. I might put a spell divisor (say divide by 2 or 3) in there to make sure spells are cheap enough to buy and they get enough spells with enough variety and power, but basically standard HERO powers will be spells - no required limitations, or close to it. Then I want to layer the flavor of Umana on top of that (basically casters have no artificial limits in what they can do, they could destroy an entire army with a single spell in theory - only the threat of calamity keeps them from pumping out giant spell after giant spell constantly). I still think my initial idea is the simplest method of doing that. Take the real points in the spell, divide by 10 and round off (just to make the math smaller - instead of adding 54 to your tally each time, it'll be 5). Otherwise, basically use Umana as written. I might even keep the 30 threshold and 8 recovery, though I can't be sure, that would require some playtesting to get right, I'm afraid. I would still like to get Steve Long's opinion on it, even if just privately, just in case the master can see something I'm missing, but I can't see a better way to handle it at this point even with all the ideas thrown out thus far. They've been some good ideas, just not quite hitting the target on exactly what I want. Would it be considered inappropriate to PM Mr. Long and ask him to chime in this thread when he's got a second? I still welcome more input, it'll be some time before I put this into practice, so feel free to continue discussion, I'm not 100% set in stone yet and I'll be watching this thread.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Yeah, I love that too, no artificial restrictions, and I'm trying to keep that ideal in the conversion to HERO as well. That pretty much includes the way you build your power as well, and the original reason I wanted to leave END out of this... Ah, but minor spells don't have to be free and Umana still works fine. You may want to bump up your recovery rate or threshold, or both to allow for a few minor spells here and there, but the system will work just fine without using GURPS or HERO's 'free minor spells' thing, as I've also used Umana in other game systems which don't do that - D&D even, where each spell raised the tally in it's level worth of points.

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Well, standard GURPS magic basically costs END to cast a spell and you need to know the skill to cast it. A cost of 1, 2 or 3 is generally "standard" cost, area spells being a bit different but safely ignored for this discussion I think, and a cost of 10-15 END are like the most powerful spells in the game. There are devices called 'powerstones' which essentially act as END reserves to boost basic magical power, to be used and introduced into the campaign world at the GM's deciding. Umana removes the END cost and instead has you start with a tally of 0 and add your spell costs to that number until you hit a threshold, then roll for calamity. Your tally recovers daily (or monthly, weekly, whatever the GM desires really) at 8 points for each recovery, and your threshold is 30 (or whatever the GM desires and can even be 0). #1, Spells don't make you tired in Umana rules, so why the END reserve, why make spells cost END? #2, You've already calculated the active and real costs of the spell (power), which is a better gauge of the "power" of the spell unless I'm mistaken, which is what the cost to cast the spell represents in GURPS. Thus the reason I favor using the Real Points in some way - it's a better measure of a spells power, no? #3, the "infinite" push is actually an optional rule that says the level of magery (advantage that lets you cast spells) you have (can be infinite but recommended to cap at 3-10 depending on power level you want) can be used to power "pushable" spells, but not all spells are such spells, usually just the damaging ones like Fireball (cost=1 you do 1d6 damage, cost=2 you do 2d6 damage, cost=3 you do 3d6 damage, etc.). I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I'm genuinely trying to understand as I'm still a bit of a noob with HERO. In Umana, the spirit of the rules say that magic is to be extremely powerful, a mage does not simply not cast spells because he is tired or doesn't have the power to pay the cost of casting it, but because if too much magic is used - bad things happen - Ooooooo.... To me it adds a real sense of "magic" to magic when it works this way. You don't have any limits on your power other than you don't want something bad to happen to you and/or those around you. Like, for example, you don't want to blow yourself and a 100 mile radius around you to dust, so you decide not to go ahead and cast a fireball the width of a whole city. But, if you were desperate, you could... As a side note, in the setting I'm thinking of using this for, this system will be "standard" Wizardry magic. If you make a 'dark pact' for your power, oh yeah, you don't have to worry about calamities at all (but the demon doesn't tell you that he's slowly stealing your soul either, the more magic you use, the quicker he's gotcha - check the fine print). Mwahahahahaha! There will be other magic systems too, like Elven Magic (specific to the Elves, minor nature magic stuff), but nothing that compares in power to Wizardry and Witchcraft (dark pact Wizardy).

Re: Using Unlimited Mana with HERO Old thread, I know. I was searching the internet on this very topic though because Unlimited Mana was the only way I'd play GURPS magic and I'd like to bring that feel over to HERO. This thread was all I could find on the subject, so here we go. I think the original 'spells must be variable in power' isn't necessary. The system fundamentally does two things: 1. Allows infinitely powerful spells (maybe handled as no campaign-required spell limitations?) 2. The price you pay for using too much power is a calamity roll. Other than that, I think everyone is maybe over-complicating things a bit. Umana is simply a feature of the setting, no need to get the character creation involved at all really. What you do is figure out how much magic power you want to be cast-able on a daily basis. Umana states this as a default of 30, so let's just assume that, though you could change it to anything. So, if the threshold is 30, then once a wizard casts a spell, he keeps a tally of how may Real Points he's used, since that's the measure of the power of a spell, including limitations. Once he goes over 30, just as default Umana rules, roll on the calamity table, adding any excess to the roll. At sunrise or sunset, whatever time you want, the caster gets to roll a recovery roll to erase some of those tallied points. Anyway, that's the way I'm thinking of handling it, what do you guys think?