Christopher R Taylor

The answer is... it depends!

Right.  One of my pet peeves of those videos is that there is literally no one alive today to compare to those awesome Welsh longbowmen that Henry had in his army, so you cannot really do a proper test.  I like watching Shad do his demonstrations but he's no warrior, so you have to take his conclusions with a grain of salt.  Its like watching someone 700 years from now explain how its not possible to jump up and shove a ball through a hoop like the legends say because he can't and he's studied basketball for years.

I enjoy watching those videos but... these are amateurs trying to study an art developed over centuries and a lifetime of training.

One of my favorite portrayals of an alien in movies is Dark Star where the alien acts in completely incomprehensible ways, its motivations and intentions are inscrutable.

Iron had its advantages in a lot of areas even in its crudest form, just not for stuff like swords and armor.  Arrowheads, for example, could be harder and sharper, and thus better.  Armor was heavier and more brittle so not as good.  At least that is how I understand it.

One of the things that archaeologists are finding is that people were working better material earlier than previously understood.  Vikings were making damasked steel from lumps of rock found in swamps, for example.  Many of the assumptions of the "dark ages" etc from the 20th and earlier centuries are being undone.

Here's my house rule advantage for homing.  I only used it once, on bad guys.  I came up with this idea after watching the film Runaway with Tom Selleck:

Quote

 

Seeking Keeps trying to hit the target for x increments over y time period (similar cost structure to DOT).   Starts immediately, cannot be a limitation.  Must roll to hit normally each increment

 

MOD	INCREMENTS
+0	1
+¼	2-3
+½	4-5
+¾	6-7
+1	8-10
+1¼	11-15
+1½	16-20
x2	Need not maintain line of of sight
half	Cannot have more than one attack seeking at once
half	Attacker must channel attack (can take no other actions)

MOD	TIME BETWEEN ATTACKS
+1½	Segment
+1¼	Every other segment
+1	Every three segments
+¾	Every Four Segments
+½	Every Six Segments
+¼	Every Turn
+0	Every Minute
-¼	Every Five Minutes, etc

 

I don't like find weakness either, but... Karnak from the Inhumans was based entirely around this, as well as a few other characters, so it has its place, but not the way it was built in the old rules, in my opinion.

I always understood double armor piercing to simply be a way of negating a level of hardened, not that it quartered defenses.

At this point, given what has been done to the character, it actually makes more sense than having just one guy be like this for 90 years.  And it would give the character a very interesting, unusual feel, although it would make stories like Joker's Last Laugh not work any longer.

There is a "Christian RPG" called Testament that is set in that kind of time period too, has a lot of interesting source material.  I think there's some interest in a Bronze Age Hero book, but probably not a huge amount.

Quote

But, for my taste, was a setting a bit depressing. 

For some reason Europeans like really dark, doomed, miserable stuff, especially the Brits.

Yeah see that's the kind of thing I keep getting, the AI doesn't seem to know what a Warthog even looks like

Here's a combination of creatures I'd like to see a good version of: cross of a warthog and an elephant, with horns, and no trunk

It took me years but I finally managed to get all those books.  The Vikings one took the longest, people charge outrageous amounts for them for some reason.  Some of them are better than others (I think I like the Robin Hood book best).

Honestly I think a Roman Empire era fantasy game could be a lot of fun.  But my real dream is to create a bronze age fantasy setting -- very low magic, very low tech.  Conanesque.  Akkadian empire, etc.

At this point we're slouching into Idiocracy.  Mike Judge was only wrong in how long he predicted it would take to get here.

Yeah the new ones are bigger and blue, and have the dots as well.  I would love to get a set of the old green ones but :/

Quote

I personally dislike "different rules for PCs", but my equivalent is that the NPCs are generally far less committed (stubborn?) than PCs.

Sure, you can define it however you want, but in the source material, when mooks go down, they stay down.  Are they playing possum so Mr Terrific doesn't punch them in the teeth again?  Do they creep away into the night?  Whatever.  They aren't getting back up to keep fighting, and this simulates that effect.

Quote

City of Heroes has been back for 4 years. I've been playing on Rebirth since May of 2019.

Yeah I fooled around with that some again.  Rebirth has everything for free both COH and COV, and all expansions, options, etc

Yeah there are tricks to make fights with agents/goblins/mooks faster and easier.

The classic is to assign each one a number of hits they can sustain before they drop: 1-2 for the regulars, 3 for the sergeant types.  No matter how hard the hit is, they take two hits, they drop. 

And don't let bad guys recover unless they are important or have a role to play.  Once they go down, they stay down.

Treat stuns as knockouts for all but important enemies.

No power pool changes unless you have the powers written up in advance.

If someone can't figure out what to do in 30 seconds, they hold and go to the next on the hit list until they figure out what to do.

Really familiarity with the system is the biggest key: if everyone knows their character and what they are doing, it goes smoother and quicker.

I have never run any of the 6th edition villain builds in any campaign largely because they are wildly overpowered.  They won't just knock out a hero they hit, they'll probably vaporize them.  But I tended to run lower powered games than some do here at least, and as Liaden points out an old campaign with tons of xps probably can handle that sort of thing better.

Make a hit list and stick to it, list everyone in order of dex and speed.  I used to use the GSPC combat program and it worked like a charm, but I am guessing the newer programs are even better.

Knock you down, wrap you up, blind you with debris their wings stir up, stomp you with area effect feet, bite limbs off, knock you flying, stun you with a roar, terrify you, cause you to at least temporarily go insane, destroy your equipment, off the top of my head.

I think I have heard that rumor but I never saw the box set to know for sure.

City of Heroes is really feeling its age though, could do with a graphical, gameplay, and setting update.

Almost all legends have at least some slight basis in reality: there probably was a guy Robin Hood is based on (possibly more than one), for example.  There probably was an Aurthurian king (not called arthur) but the later Norman stories are probably based at most on noble ideals, types of knights known in the past, etc rather than anything real.  There was no Lancelot, but there probably were some knights people knew in the past that were that kind of ideal knight who failed because he took the chivalrous ideal of love too far with his noble lady.

The origin of holidays is religious (Holy Day) so that would be a major contributing factor; the faith and religious traditions of a community determines which days they set aside as holy.  Modern holidays tend to be noteworthy cultural events or the birth of someone we want to commemorate; in the past sometimes they were days for remembering some great military event or victory but that seems to have gone out of favor these days.  It could rise again, with noteworthy victories given their special day.

Tyrants in particular like to impose holidays to impose their ideas and cultural demands on a public: celebrate my birthday!  Celebrate the foundation of our new 1000 year reich!

I would love to have a lot of the old Hero covers as posters; Justice Inc, Danger International, Fantasy Hero (any of the editions), Lands of Mystery, Champions 4th edition as you say, there's been so many great ones.

I usually use late medieval, but without gunpowder.  So there are some advances like compass and even pocket watches, but no guns or cannons.

If I was going to use a historical setting it would probably be the 14th century because it was such a turbulent, eventful time period.  Always plenty to do.