David Johnston

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) Only one entry? How sad. I'll pick a winner in a couple of days, so I hope someone will offer me a choice.

Re: Darkness and Evil -- Examing the Metaphor Want your crops to grow? Better pray for sunlight. Where I live, crops grow much faster than in the United States during the summer months because the days are so much longer. If it were not for that, the deadly long months of cold and darkness would turn the area into a virtually uninhabitable wasteland. It is for that reason that the Norse admired Freyr and Baldur, the gods of light and summer. But...for an evil sun-god you need to look further south. The Aztecs did not love the sun. They feared him, and sacrificed to propitiate him, holding off the inevitable time when he would burn us all. While Ra was sometimes revered, he was eventually toppled from his position of dominance, stories being told about how he had gone mad or senile and been replaced by Osiris and Isis, the rulers of the Earth and the cool dark underworld. Central African mythologies diminish the sun to a relatively minor element much the way that Roman religion paid little attention to Jupiter's nocturnal counterpart (who was no more evil than his brother, but just didn't attract much attention)

Re: Deities in Detail -- Brainstorming Heaven It is extremely routine for a war god to have some other portfolio if it is to gather much in the way of worship. Astarte was goddess of love and war, Mars was god of young men, as much a patron of farming as he was of warfare, Tyr was primarily god of oaths and so forth. Ares was unusual in his exclusive focus on war, and he was not in fact particularly popular. Athena was a far more popular military deity outside of Sparta. However, this particular pantheon is pretty elementary. If you look at real ones, while they almost all have sun or sky gods, cthonian deities, sea gods and something representing fire, they also have harvest deities, patrons of love or marriage, trickster gods, gods of the hunt, virginity, archery, travel, music, mercantile honesty. Now, often elemental gods will pick up these more human interests as subsidiary portfolios, or vice versa. For example Artemis apparently started as a hunt goddess and as she became more important picked up the Moon as her subsidiary portfolio. But it is extremely rare for a polytheistic religion to only have elemental deities. Incidentally, in order to decide that magma is something endemic to the underworld, the population would probably have to live in a land with many volcanoes.

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) My apologies for the delay. I am on vacation. The next name goes farther afield: Vigil

Re: Alignment Issues What you say isn't true. Fantasy literature swarms with environments in which there are two opposing supernatural sides whether it's Seelie and Unseelie, Light and Shadow, Law and Chaos, Life and Death, God and the Devil, or even Fire and Ice. All of them are aligned universes and it isn't difficult at all to modify "Detect Evil" to "Detect Death". What's more, it also isn't difficult to drop all the alignment based spells if you want to do a universe in which there is no good. At least, it shouldn't be difficult for anyone prepared to create a Fantasy Hero magic system. However, D&D does end up with many games with great general similarities since after all, they are running with the same magic system, mostly the same spells, and usually the same array of nonhuman inhabitants of the universe. That's not an alignment issue. That's the natural outgrowth of a game with a great deal of preprepared material.

Re: Alignment Issues In fact, a Wizard could learn more than one alignment's spell list, although I think there were certain forbidden pairs - no taking both Law and Chaos spells, for instance. And that's a problem with D&D - there is no "unaligned" option. Nuetral is NOT the same as not having an alignment, although some people in this thread have been talking as if it is. If you look at the "alignment graphs" that Gygax drew, True Neutral is actually the smallest area - a Druid is as restrained in his way, striving to maintain a perfect balance, as the Paladin is in his, striving to embody ultimate Lawful Good. Or should I say, that WAS a problem with D&D. I haven't actually played in many many years, so I have no idea what the game is like these days. Druids no longer have to be True Neutral. They just need to have Neutral somewhere in their alignment. And while Neutral Something may be an alignment, there is no such thing as Detect Neutral, Protection from Neutral, or Smite Neutral. Nor are there swords of Neutrality the way there are weapons of Evil, Good, Law and Chaos. There might still be Neutral outer planes as destinations for the dead (or not, I'm not sure), but that about it as far as Neutrality being an alignment in its own right.

Re: Could Destroyer Win? "Irradiate" would probably be a more accurate descriptor. But it is true that the United States wouldn't deploy a weapon without testing. Zerstoiten would have to add some unobtanium to the mix when nobody was looking. But hey, anything to get mutant hordes.

Re: What do you consider “Modern Paranormal”? It's not an expression I use. I use: Horror: Stories about people helplessly meeting dire ends Urban Fantasy: Stories about creatures of myth and folklore in the modern day. Superhero: Stories about quasi-human people with superhuman powers beating down the bad guys. Magical Realism: Stories about sensawunda encounters with the supernatural that are nonviolent.

Re: Orcs as Druidic/Celtic analogs? It's not that strange. Tolkien wrote them as cockney. Tolkien was a pastoralist, and therefore his bad guys were fundamentally city boys who lived in hive-like caves or anachronistic industrial complexes.

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) In the 1920s, a small amount of metal from a dead civilisation was discovered by a German archaeologist named Dietrich Adler, a black alloy which had the peculiar property of entirely absorbing radio emissions. Adler was murdered by members of a criminal organisation looking for the stuff but his son, Gerhardt, grew up intent on studying the amazing alloy and avenging his father. He believed the English criminals were agents of their government and so naturally offered his services to the State to fight them as it became increasingly obvious that there would be war. The alloy was almost impossible to duplicate, but he managed to coat an entire experimental STOL airplane with it. Using his virtual invisibility at night, he could fly into British airspace on a regular basis, carrying messages back and forth and executing daring infiltration operations to steal British secrets as Nachtflugel (Nightwing). He engaged in several encounters with Bright Angel, the legendary British aviatrix who, unable to get a position as a fighter pilot due to her sex, took to the skies in her own custom designed plane to fight. The fights tended to be inconclusive because he could break off fairly easily as long as it was dark. On one occasion he shot her down, while on another she managed to guess his route back to Europe and found him as the sun rose. That time she shot him down over the sea, and although he made it back to land, it wasn't until after the war that he was given the opportunity to salvage his plane and the precious corrosion proof coating, as a result of a deal he made with the American authorities. Throughout the 50s, he flew covert missions for the CIA as Nightwing all over the world, but he never let go of his grudge against the English.

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) Once the thread goes off the front page, it's not likely the current challenge will get more entries.

Re: Making colonization attractive? The third category is the most important one. Transportation costs are pivotal in determining whether a resource even once found is worth going after. In Heinlein's the Man Who Sold The Moon, the ending made no sense since one of the many scams associated with the effort was the pretense that there were diamonds on the moon but when the guy finds out there really are diamonds on the moon, he tries to cover it for fear of collapsing the diamond market with a flood of lunar imports. Couldn't happen of course. No matter how plentiful they were, the transportation costs even in the story would protect the value of diamond for a long time into the future. Of course if we could find something really uniquely valuable up there, like Asimov's singing bells, something that couldn't be duplicated on Earth, then almost any transportation cost could be covered. But even with cheap transportation costs, in order to a colony to thrive, they would have to have exploitable resources. Room is not a resource. Livable land is. Gosh it would be nice if like in 2010 some alien were to come along and do all the terraforming work for us and expect so little in exchange. Sadly, we'd probably have to do it the hard way. Which of course means that once the project was launched there'd be plenty to do on Mars long before it was even remotely habitable and lots of reason for lots of people to be there. A Mars terraforming project seems like a good candidate to be the centerpiece for Solar System colonisation. Bases on the Moon, and asteroids might provide support for the effort less expensively than trying to give everything on site or worse, trying to ship it out of Earth's gravity well. However, such a project would require an incredibly forward looking government to launch a project with a good chance of outlasting a typical nation. Perhaps more importantly, the government in question would have to actually be able to claim to own Mars in the first place. Therefore it is more likely to start in a future where Earth (or rather the powerful bits of Earth) have been united by some means

Re: Star Hero versions of Fantasy Hero races? The reason why copper is used in science fiction is because it's a safe bet. The most common alternative to hemoglobin is cyanoglobin which, despite the name uses copper to substitute for iron and is used by molluscs and crustaceans. I've also heard that sea squirts used vanadium, but I'm not sure if that's true.

Re: Any ideas for a National Hero for India? Big brother? Why not growth? He can be superstrong at normal height but also has the ability to grow to sizes (and increased strength) primarily limited by his reluctance to devastate the country.

Re: Costing Problem: Senses You're right. You aren't getting value for your points. That's because you've been piling on modifiers like mad. First...lose those transmits. They aren't necessary. In fact they don't make sense. If you have "transmit" with the sight group that doesn't mean that you can pass on what you've seen. It means you can communicate complex concepts without speaking or using your radio, probably by a communications laser. How much more information do you expect to get from fast radar? Why are you getting "Sense Bacteria/fungi" when you have the magnification on your vision to _see_ the bacteria? Oh and drop "tracking" on your radio. I doubt your robot really has the power to sense old radio signals that were broadcast a few hours ago. "Targeting" lets you home in on a radio broadcast source with pinpoint accuracy.

Re: Give me your ice power ideas! What? You didn't get a Force Wall?

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero The thoughts which occur to me are these: Because of complimentary skill rolls, redundant skills are more cost effective than getting a higher level in the skill you already have. This is the only real non-fluff reason to get a KS when there is a relevant PS or Science. The trend to greater skill packages means that character generation is fraught with many more opportunities to mess up by failing to give a character a skill he obviously needs to be who you purport him to be. The trend also means that point values becomes far less important if you wish to estimate whether a given character is a match for another one. This means there is less reason to do the math on an NPC.

The Comic You just took on a villain who demonstrated an almost supernatural knowledge of you and what what you were going to do next. Just as he has you on the ropes and is about to finish you off, you manage to just barely escape at the last moment. Suddenly his confidence vanishes, and he hastily vanishes, leaving something behind. It's a comic book which details everything that just occured in omniscient detail right up until the last moment when the comic book ended with a cliffhanger that made your counterpart appear to be doomed. The book gives very little information about your adversary, nothing you didn't see for yourself, but reveals details of your personal life. Whaddayado?

Re: My Boyfriend is a Special Effect Exactly

I was watching one of the later Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne episodes and I noticed something. Earlier on, Sinbad was her professional rival/romantic interest. However after her sidekick's departure and resulting format change, he no longer tried to beat her to her target. Having lost the game, all he wanted to do was protect her so he'd show whenever she inevitably got in over her head, and cut her free of the trap or take the killing shot for her so she can then get the upper hand and seal the demon. Makes him the new sidekick right? Or does it? You see one of the things I notice is that whenever he's doing something, she doesn't do anything except whimper "Chiaki". Whenever she's doing something he doesn't do anything. So...is he really a sidekick or is he just a special effect?

Re: Ring of Bouyancy They bring up a point. Why is the ring so obvious? It doesn't seem like all that flashy an effect.

Re: [Campeign Creation Project] Pirates of the Naebbirac Astroid Belt It would keep missiles from hitting but wouldn't prevent proximity bursts. Thus nukes would be worth using, but would be strangely ineffective by our standards because they can never score a direct hit.

Re: Star Hero versions of Fantasy Hero races? Thank you for humouring me with a pretence of shock. Really, most of the fantasy folk packages could be used as is. The "Cat-people" template for example is a science fiction standard dating back to Andre Norton's Salariki in the 50s although her particular cat people has a sense of smell so acute that it was both a superpower and a serious weakness. Dwarves aren't at all unlike certain heavy gravity human variants I've seen.

Re: Game Mechanics of Visibility If you drop the sense groups then you won't be able to use super senses to detect invisible power uses.

Re: D&D to Hero Fantasy rules questions Trust me, once they beat you unconscious by reducing your stun to 0 and then string you up, you'll think they're a threat worth avoiding. As for the other question...is it necessarily a bad thing if the occasional villain gets away to reappear later? However you should remember that you can push your running and in a chase both characters generally are. The one that tires out first is the one that loses the guy he's chasing or gets a sword in the back.