Duke Bushido

I know it isnt what you came here for, but this is most easily adressed by going to any pre-Steve edition and importing "Transfer" from any of the first 4 editions. It is 15 it's per die, one die roll, no long list of modifiers and no subjective powers, etc: roll the dice. Target loses that many points and you gain them. The most complicated thing you might want to do is "Ranged" or maybe "Reduced END." (Personally, I pay really close attention to any Transfer with that mix of modifiers on it).

Why dont we start at the bottom. We want fast, simple, and shios that aren't too delicate. So, for my,next space battle, I am going to try 1e Car Wars rules. Will report back!

I dont know, Dude. I have heard all over the internet since I first got here on the old dial up way back when: "Ambient sounds! Mood music! Sound effects!" "All the best Game Masters do this!" "Mood lighting drives home the scene!" "Partial coatumes or themeatic clothing brings a character to life!" And an impressive list of other such "increase the immersion" type suggestions. And I took it to heart for a while, and have tried several of these things, particulalry the music and the sounds. Without fail, the first time, everyone is impressed for two or three minutes, then it devolves into "what? Turn that off I can't hear you" or "this isnt really selling it for me-" "Me neither! _i_ would have gone with Y-" "Oh! You know what would _reallly_ be cool? Have you heard A?" "No, but seriously, B has this eerie bass vibrato undertone-" "Duke, just turn it off so they can shut up aand we can get to the game, please!" Similar resukts with mood lighting: "I cant read my damned sheet! No; that lamp makes it worse- it just shoots straight into my face when I turn it on..." Etc, etc. I know there is a small industry now for RPG sound effects, but overall, I have found this stuff to be far, _far_ more disruptive than helpful.

Thanks! For,what it's worth, Bad Mister Frosty was my go-to butt-kicker in Clay Fighter and Clay Fighter 63-1/2, so I am,quite delighted by your choice of images for Snow Goon.

Ultimate migraine, I think..... Though I am,glad Davien ledt my table almoat thirty years ago. This is the kind od nonsense he would _love_ for "cheating in the open." Ans just auppose that your energy blast is 14d6. It wouls aound like you were playing pool!

I enjoyed Starfire, too. To the point that I still own a copy of it- not the original, but a xerox I did when the original began to seriously suffer from bottom-of-the-saddlebags syndrome. They were pretty similar at first, with a few differences, but SFB caught on and just kept growing. I haven't played it years now. Lars' and Jim's groups were the last groups that played. I havent played it since Jim moved out west thirty or so years ago, bit even then, they were very diffetent games at that point.

I sont suppose there is any chance you were just really,bad at learning SFB? Seriously,though- were you playing the original "little baggies" or the over-stuffed and under-explained books that came afterwards?

It is not that SFB is great, game-system wise; it is that you can teach it in five minutes, and it goes remarkably quickly even if you have forty ships in a free-for-all. The original Traveller system (pre range bands and simplified movement) is really sweet for "the way it would acrually work, kind of," but it can get a bit boggy in any situation with more than three ships.

This is the game I mentioned being a Player in on the quote thread. I have played four times now, and it is surprisingly enjoyable.... No murder-hobo-ing yet, though.

Not gonna lie; the wife and I were talking about them two weeks ago. We were both under the impression that they went extinct at some point in the eighties.... 😕

You had to wait for the lawyers to pocket the award, put it in the bank, let it grow interest, then give everyone involved one-tent of one percent of that interest. Class action suits do not exist to punish unethical businesses; they ezist to enrichen lawyers- the only actual "winners" in a class-action suit.

That is actually kind of a surprise. Everyone here kno2s I am no fan of D&D, but Superhero 2044 was _so much worse_.... My first Champions GM was a superhero nut; I think I have played every superhero game he could get his hands on, including a- I think British?- one called "Golden Heroes," which had a serious lo2-budget production values (and so many games did, back then. Remember the original Starships and Spacemen?) , but turned out to actually be pretty good. I fully understand my superhero bias (anti-bias? They don't do much for me, on the whole), but even taking extra pains to be objective, superhero 2044 was awful. It wasnt until we tried some variant suggestions published in Dragon that it was it was even close to an RPG.

To adress Doc' initial question, here is something I have toyed with in the past when Speed creep found yet another way around the guidelines: You can only take X recoveries per Turn, where X is usually the lowest SPD in play, and defaults to 2 in most cases. This is especially useful if you aren't allowing Reduced END: 0 END, ans you will end with players still pushing the limit, but they tend to decide for themselves that the limit is now much lower than 12. Even if they do push into the high end, they will often opt to forego an action or two if another Player is in a better posirion to act.

Ah. Thank you, Sir. Remind me,when I dont actually need to know "who" to appreciate the joke, please.

Whoever said that is absolutely correct. However, he failed to continue with "and they can't turn it off...." Because they look like that is _all_ they see, all the time. At least, they do in that particular picture. Who are they, anyway? Singers or something?

Finally! News I can use!

Precisely. And I do not wish to hijack the thread-- I have in good faith answered the original question by pointing out that HERO does not mandate that Decapitation is an Insta-kill. Steriaca further confirmed this by stating that you cannot decapitate someone until they are already dead-- I assume that this response is to the fact that killing someone in the game and _then_ decapitating them (or perhaps beating them until they are 1 Body from dead and _then_ swinging the headsman's axe) doesn't highlight the fact that HERO doesn't care how many flesh and bone pieces you lose because those pieces are not math. I assume this was the backdrop of his response, because if he meant it literally, I think we can easily prepare a lengthy list of French aristocrats who vehemently disagree with the idea that only the dead may be decapitated. I would also point out that this only reinforces the idea that decapitation is a special effect, and one that he believes (and not at all incorrectly; let's be fair here) for final dead-is-dead death. Decapitation _is_ just a special effecr in this game, and they are so because heads are not math; they are not even numbers, even if you have a number of heads. Because they are niether math nor numbers, they cannot be or be affected by affected by mechanics, which relegates them squarely into the category of special effect. Now, all that being said, I have absolutely no issue with decapitation being fatal, _but you need to create a mechanic for that_, because currently, HERO has managed to go through six editions without ever actually doing it. my own suggestion is to determine how a neck is to be targetted, and what the BODY multiplier should be. (Frankly, I think it should be _huge_!), and it should somehow _force_ bleeding to occur, just because cutting halfway through a neck without any arterial bleeding is highly unlikely outside of a surgical suite. Now, karate chopping someone's neck in twain is unlikely (though Johnny Cage manages to somehow remove a skull from a spine, right at the foramon, and all those muscles and tendons holding the skull in place (and without removing the mandible, which isnt actually attached to the skill at all... Man's got skill; that's all I gotta say about that), so I _guess_ you can decapitate with crush damage...? at this point, it seems like decapitation (the mechanic we are trying to build here) should be a maneuver specific to edged (and large) weapons, and for Johhny Cage, a martial maneuver. so what is the cost of the martial element to radically increase the BODY multiplier?

I have never done this, but I have seen it sone at other tables: Tell your players they have X number of actions, where x is their SPD score. Let them use them when and where they will. If necessary, add a shot clock. When time euns out, actions unused are forfeit for the next round. It creates a glorious but highly-focused chaos in which the SPD 7 guy suddenly finds himself without further actions when the SPD 2 mook has the drop on him. I have never done it because I _love_ the SPD chart; I just do. It's a unique, heart-of-the-system sort od thing like the targetting overlay on... Was it Aces and Eights? It is just neat, unique, and everything else kind of hangs from it. Still, I am,well-aware of its limitations, and the unique problems created specifically because it exists- things like held actions screwing up plans, characters just refusing to take action until everyone else has bevause thwir DEX says they can, players who play a purely reactive game, wanting to pick off an opponent precisely between his half,move (he's coming closer! My range penalty foes way down!) yet before he attacks (because you cant make them,understand that you are simulating a running attack and it is handled like it is to make it easier to track what is going on, etc)- it goes on and on. Taking that away really throws them off their habits. Also consider disallowing held actions or aborts (or both) and maybe even requiring the players to declare before anyone acts in a phase if they wish to go first, second, etc, and make them stick to it.

I wont say you learn to like it, and you get used to it sounds too jaded, but I have buried all four grandparents, one father in law, one foster father, three uncles, a first wife, a dozen friends, two brothers and two children. It will never not be awful, but there is a point at which you just accept that the misery is normal.

I swear, if I am groggy enough, I have _extra_ STUN when I first wake up. Walk into a door? So what! Keep going.... Etc, etc...

I am out of rep, but thanks, Hugh! (I will hit the button after I have reloaded). To Vlad et al: I am not disagreeing with you that we think of a decapitation as a fatal blow. I am saying that game system does not mandate that it is a fatal blow. Steriaca: yes; it is a neck wound. I was pointing out that the hit location chart doesnt offer up "neck" as a target, meaning that by RAW, decapitation is both non-fatal and simultaneously impossible. I went a bit further to add the suggestion of allowing "called shot to the neck" using the head-shot modifiers. If you want to make decapitation fatal, up the CV modifiers a bit (as we all know it is fatal, we tend to guard the neck quite closely) and increase the BODY multiplier for a "neck shot". Don't be surpriswd to see your player characters buying heavy steel collars.

GOD DAMN IT!!! Billions of us to choose from and this is the man you strike down?! There is too much wrong in the world already. Please stop making it worse.

Right; I get that. In '77, the abaolute only thing that I knew about a computer was that they were massive things that required highly-trained operators and near-sterile rooms and one had to take great pains to avoid any sort of static discharge around it. Now bear in mind that this is what I _"knew_". Even today, with regard to the state of computing in 1977 (when I started playing Traveller), I have no idea _at all_ of just how accurate this was, amd given that it was exactly 45 years ago, the accuracy of those assumptions is now only an irrelevant point of curiosity at best. But I "knew" a couple of other things about computers, too. I knew my Pong machine was a computer, and I knew that Lars's _much cooler_ Atari machine was one. I had heard comments from people more familiar with computers say that Lars's Atari had the same "computing power" as the machines that got us to the moon. Again: No idea if that was right or wrong, and at this point it doesn't matter beyond my personal curiosity. I qas a did-hard fan of Star Trek, which featured gigantic-- but not room-filling-- computers, slave terminals, and dozens of computer-controlled and computer-monitored processes all over the ship, and alien room-filling xomouters that ran entire planetary societies-- from a single room! All of this- and who lnows how many more sci fi books and movies-- and our tiny little home "computerized entertainment machines" led me (and Lars, who was my first Traveller ref) to just assume (again: we weren't actively trying to justify something; we just made an honest and, to us, obvious assumption about why the comouters of the future would be so gigantic in terms of weight. Clearly they were going to get smaller and more powerful: we had seen it happen to calculators, radios, telephones, and car engines, and there were already computers (of a sort) creeping into cars to control various oarts of the ignition and pollution reduction systems, and none of them were more than little black plastic boxws filled with goo and a single circuit board. The only thing that made sense to us with regard to the xomputers of the future was that "computer tonnage" included not just the processors and memory- which we assumed to be significantly huge, of course, as they would have to make who-knows-what kind of calculations and references and maintain how many floating points and track God-himself-might-have-to-double-check moving stars and obstacles just to calculate a songle jump, and do it quickly enough to make space travel an efficient meqns of exploration, warfare, and trade. So yes: we knew there would be massive amounts of whatever was needed to do all that, and there were similar data and processing needs for firing solutions and maneuvering in and out of harm's way during a space battle, but we still just assumed that the rest of the "bulk"-- the _majority_ of the bulk-- was going to be the hardworking and the various slave terminals and thousands of solid-state components that allowed everything else on the ship to be monitored or even controlled by the ship. Given the dangers of space and the inability to just pull into a full-service Texaco whenever we had a hitch in our giddyup, we also assumed multiple redundancies in every instance. Ultimately, the only difference here is that we had, without even pausing to reflect on it, made an assumption based on what we were actually seeing in the world around us instead of looking for a justification to force the rules to make sense. Ultimately, it doesnt matter: No matter what we assumed about the how and why of it, we all gor to a point where a four ton comouter made perfect sense, right? The only "advantage" to our interpretation of the rules is that it slides nicely into the change Mongoose made with regards to computer bulk. 🤣 so we got lucky enough that, should we switch to Mongoose, we dont have to backport or upport or house rule anything there to make a direct swap. Yep. And the way the optional rules came out-- you literally,biught a packet of tiles, and it came with optional,rules! You bought a larger packet to add a new race and their ships, and _it_ came with optional rules! It lead to a house rule that optional rules could only be implemented if everyone playing already owned and was both familiar and comfortable with them (probably because after the first guy wins with the Klingon Butthook Maneuver, _everyone_ starts looking for really obscure optional Butthook Maneuvers of their own... The English lqnguage is the largest, most complex, most vocabulary-laden langaue in the history of mankind. It totally failed to produce words extreme enough to express my hatred of the touchscreen interface, and worda vile enough enough tobdescribe what I woyld like to do to the body, mind, and soul of the guy who decided flip-out and slide-out physical keypads were no longer the way forward for portable internet devices.... 🤬

There were items adressing points raises by both of you. Unfortunately, the limitations of a phone screen being what they are, it is more than a little difficult to track multiple quotes, etc. I have no doubt that I goofed up more than once. I ask your grace in those instances.

Thank you, Sir. Very kind of you to say that.