S. John Ross

Re: Whats your view of PC expiry? What's your in-game mortality rate? Varies a lot by genre and subgenre for me, but in most of my standard fantasy runs, there's probably a PC death every 5-15 sessions. I can't nail it down to a tighter range than that, since so much depends on how the players approach things. In fantasy campaigns, I see a TPK maybe once every 1-6 years on average. I see more TPKs than that in other genres, but I run a lot of games (like Fly From Evil, for example) where there's no such thing as a healing spell and there _is_ such thing as a Tommy Gun, so there's that. That's as a GM. As a player, it all rolls down into "I want my choices to have meaning in the context that they're made, and if that means I get killed, then that's what it should mean." The most cheated I've ever felt as a player was when my character risked everything in a very foolhardy move, and ... as far as I'm concerned anyway ... earned himself a fairly fiery and inglorious (though not ineffective) death. And the GM "let" him live. The character never felt legit to me after that, and I got the GM's permission to have him wander offscreen and be replaced with a different PC, a few sessions later. As both a player and a GM, I enjoy games best when there is no conflation between the success of the players and the success of the characters. A kick-ass session can be one where the quest is failed or gets set back, or even gets lost entirely. Similarly, a very drab session can be one where everything goes "perfectly." I think I became liberated as a gamer some years ago, when certain RPGs and campaigns taught me the value (the power, even) of keeping myself in character, but still cleanly separating the character's successes as an adventurer from my own successes as a roleplayer, tactician, puzzle-solver or shameless ham.

Re: [Review] Pulp Hero Well, see, that's another thing I'd be able to run for them I've been itching to get an FFE campaign started here in Denver ...

Re: [Review] Pulp Hero

Re: Medieval Doctor Package Depending on how detailed you want it, a specific skill to represent dental-work would be appropriate, since the skills of the "adubedent" were prized and marketed on their own (but frequently combined in the same man who cuts your hair and your leg). ... and there are other possibilities that would be more dependent on the character and less universal. For a fun (I hope) read on one such quasimedieval fantasy doctor, here's a piece I did for CityBook 7 back in the day. I didn't limit my medical-history references to the medieval, however, a few of the details are nods to later centuries (anything slightly creepy or ridiculous was fair game), but it's all based on something someone at one point took seriously: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/geoff.htm

Re: [Review] Pulp Hero Oooh, another one here in Denver. If you ever need an extra player ...

Re: Mounted Combat, and a Question of Historical Accuracy

Re: Question about "Pulp"

Re: Question about "Pulp" Holy leaping cats When I stopped freelancing (right around the turn of the century - I love saying that) I was holding a steady average near 6.5 cents/word, with a 7.5 negotiating baseline and occasionally (with that one WotC project, for example, and a few high-speed emergency jobs) getting 10 or more at the top end. Now, I know I was above average, but I also knew folks who were pulling a lot more per-word on a regular basis ... And standard "grunt rates" of the time were 5-6 depending on publisher, with a few publishers (like a certain pale canine) lowballing the newbies pretty cruelly, but overall newbies were getting 3-5 (which is where I was started out, as well), and if you were getting 2 cents a word it was for a startup or a magazine. I ditched freelancing (with occasional exceptions to keep the muscles flexible) and moved to PDF because it allows me freedom to write better and blindtest more ... I had no idea I was also moving into the more lucrative end of the pool I've been avoiding hiring writers because I didn't want to insult anyone with lower rates ... I could blow those rates out of the water. (for the pulp comparison, I was using 1935 Writer's Digest listed rates, comparing those to my own rose-glasses version of the RPG industry, and speaking more in writing-rate-relative terms than dollar-strength-relative terms, but I had no idea that RPG-rates had dropped near the "campus typist" level)

Re: Mounted Combat, and a Question of Historical Accuracy Ditto on that. When I first saw this thread, my response was "My god, someone's found the American history version of the dreaded what-can-a-katana-really-do question!"

Re: Mounted Combat, and a Question of Historical Accuracy

Re: Question about "Pulp" Sure, some were (and some weren't, and some notorious ones pretended to be, and some were sincere but desperately needed Google); I wasn't commenting on the pulpsters' own habits, just on their needs and resources. A 5,000-word short-story needs only a finite amount of detail (well-researched or otherwise), and the author gets to decide what those needs are ... While an RPG GM, by contrast, doesn't get to make those decisions except in a very preliminary form, until the PCs show up and change the story's needs on the fly with inventive roleplaying. And even some of the hardcore sticklers were hamstrung by poor information, especially on overseas matters or matters outside their focus (Erle Stanley Gardner knew the law firsthand and could run circles around other writers attempting legal drama, but he wrote some very embarassing things about firearms and foreign countries, for one example) Reading pulpster biographies is always a bit eerie because the pulpsters were a lot like RPG writers in many respects (up to and including gaming together -- a lot of the pulp writers in New York City did naval miniatures) ... the same kinds of cliquishness, the same crappy pay, the same (unfortunate) tendency for many of them to hold their own work in contempt because they'd rather be writing for the slicks, etc ...

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? They recharge naturally, but they can also be pushed and burned out. They can both supplement and enhance, though what that means in any given game system varies according to what the system has to offer (I've GM'ed this world in 8 other game systems so far, with some of my testers GMing it in several others, and I never hesitate to massage it a bit this way or that to bring out the best in the game I'm marrying it to that day). Or the other way 'round Since the world is (to say the least) friendly to very cinematic approaches to any sort of character, it really reaches a point where the distinction between a "wizard" and anyone else is more aesthetic and social than practical (with the social distinction being pretty important in some places). A purely non-magical warrior could become - functionally - a wizard with sufficiently flamboyant Stupid Archery Tricks, for example. Even speaking in sober cosmological terms, it's a world where the distinction between high skill and "magic" is sometimes an artificial one, and any skill (cooking, poetry, calligraphy, underwater basket-weaving) can concievably be twisted into something potent in adventuring terms, if the player is sufficiently perverse and/or whimsical about it. It isn't a high powered setting (in raw D&D terms [the Interlingua of fantasy gaming!], I like to float it around the equivalent of 2nd-6th Level for most campaigns), but on the grittiness scale it's made of a kind of ultimate alien anti-grit. If a fragment of grit ever touched down on the surface of the world, it would be launched back into space at relativistic speeds. There would also be a farting noise, and perhaps some sort of potluck dinner where everyone wore rude t-shirts. So, power-levels are frequently modest, but within those limits the nature of a character's potency is pretty much unfettered. So, for that I need a very flexible system, which is (in part) why I've included Hero on my world tour, as it were. Aside: In case anyone's wondering (because someone usually does ask by now) this approach doesn't - at least in my own anecdotal experience - dilute the specialness of magic. Instead it (A) throws other character distinctions, like the social stuff, into sharper relief and ( sometimes has the interesting side-effect of making actual PC wizards rarer ... because some gamers who habitually play wizards do so because they enjoy outre/unpredictable/fantastical character abilities rather than mundane ones, and some gamers who habitually play wizards do so because they honestly and genuinely love wizards. The net result here is that the wizard-lovers keep on playing wizards, but the outre-ability lovers tend to go hog wild exploring other avenues of outre (because they know if next week I run one of my more sober fantasy worlds, they'll be back to playing wizards). Nobody gets anywhere denying their limitations, and Hero swims in the vast and stormy sea of my own ignorance, as I like to say. Ooh, I'd like to see some of the scarier critters from Black Ops adapted; it could be a like a Rosetta Stone of overwrought monster-power! And while we're at it: God Bless Hero Designer, yea verily. Ditto on the ... and I've poked in now and again, mainly following the release of Pulp Hero searching around for crumbs of ego-biscuit But this is the first time I've visited on any kind of regular basis, since now I'm officially engaging as a user of Steve Long's 592-page drug ...

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? A warrior won't have any use at all for the magic-use tools (the energy gems, the scrolls and so on). And then there are low-key magics anyone can use equally (healing potions, for example, or a pot of magic super-glue). But the price-list, in this case, was already designed from the ground up to do exactly what we're talking about ... insure that any ten randomly-chosen PCs of any type (wizard, warrior, or other), suddenly showered with ridiculous wealth, would benefit from that wealth more-or-less equally, in adventure-mojo terms. I'm a very careful fellow with my price-lists I'm a good GM, but never let the industry cred fool you Sadly, a huge number of well-credentialed RPG writers don't (and don't even care to) game regularly anymore ... Hero gamers are fortunate to have a certain Steven S. Long, who is a for-real gamer in addition to being a sinister robot writing machine from Planet Wordcount. That's definitely the way I'll be proceeding once I'm behind the screen ... but the end-goal is an article for Blue Lamp Road, so I want to make sure it's mechanicaly sound as well, at least by the time I'm finished with it. There are lots of stages before that, though: first, I'll be a player in a local FH campaign, to get a feel for it from that side. Only once I'm comfy with the system as a player will I step up to the plate to GM, and then so on from there. This is a small project in terms of the scope/audience for the article, but it's a big project for me, personally, since I'm way, way overdue for logging some flight-hours as a Hero System GM.

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? Scared newbie here Questions: (A) When you say "free?" do you mean "free-free" (as in, any schmoe fighter could own a top-notch sword, barded warhorse and a heavy suit of armor right from session one and still have spending money left over) or "no points" free? ( What kind of groovy free things (either kind of free) were available to the mages? The campaign world I'm adapting isn't a "magic is a special snowflake," kind of world, it's a "really awesome magic is a special snowflake" kind of world, with "ordinary workaday magic is available off the rack," which may help to balance things a bit ... Mages won't be able to purchase the Dread Staff of Badassitude on the blue-ticket rack at the thrift shop (or anything like it), but they'll be able to purchase energy-boosting gems and other non-fancy but useful tools that - on balance - will be as enhancing to them as good armor and steel is to a warrior (and approximately as expensive) ... the rule would be that normal stuff can be bought with cash, and that "normal stuff" includes some fundamental magical tools, not just mundane metal and leather. I'll be adapting the world right off the page, and the price-list is already well-stocked with low-key minor magics. Indeed, and I appreciate the differing viewpoints presented here ... It does little to quell my fears in the short term, but it gives me more to work with in the long

Re: Question about "Pulp"