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Durzan Malakim

HERO Member
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About Durzan Malakim

  • Birthday 12/29/1969

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Temecula, CA
  • Interests
    Champions & Fantasy Hero
  • Occupation
    Technically, I'm a writer

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Durzan Malakim's Achievements

  1. It turns out that the original Harrison Vanderbilt IV was the evil clone all along. Unless we alter the clone's memories or personality, I suspect that we'd end up with two runaway grooms galavanting about the galaxy. How many clones variants will it take until we end up with our own version of Kang the Conqueror? May I suggest Harrison the Holocaust? Or I suppose we could go the Star Trek mirror universe route and create a clone for each of us.
  2. I love PC decision-making. It's easier to turn your foppish dandy of a cousin into a cyborg-zombie than to just tell him and the rest of the family of freeloaders that they get nothing but a place to stay. I look forward to Gaston's future hijinks even if the most likely scenario is returning to find him resting peacefully in the local cemetery. Without some outside help, I don't see the Vanderbilts getting the better of EDI. I almost got our crew out of the low berth prison business, but Krrsh pushed our disloyalty buttons. We can't be leaving tasty breadcrumbs behind for Judas Cain to sweep up. As it is we're leading him to a potential stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. I'm sure that won't get us and the entire sector into any trouble.
  3. I look forward to the Basic Version and the follow up Kickstarter.
  4. I'm eagerly looking forward to these two releases. Having a web-based hero designer is an accomplishment by itself. Support for VTT play is also wonderful.
  5. Without superpowers, a reach melee weapon, modern firearms, or terrain features to exploit, one person doesn't hold a breach. You can always say that the brave hero makes a PRE attack and forces opponents to freeze or engage. Perhaps getting the result of strongly consider what you say is enough to make your opponents challenge you one-on-one.
  6. Welcome to Mechanon Debate Club. The first rule of Mechanon Debate Club is: you do not talk about Mechanon Debate Club. The second rule of Mechanon Debate Club is: you DO NOT talk about Mechanon Debate Club! Third rule of Mechanon Debate Club: if someone asks why they got a downvote and you don't reply, the debate is over. Fourth rule: only two posters to a debate. Fifth rule: one debate at a time. Sixth rule: debates are civil. No doxing, no profanity, and no ad hominem attacks. Seventh rule: debates go on as long as they have to. And the eight and final rule: if this your first time at Mechanon Debate Club, you have to debate. Posting about Mechanon's latest efforts at world domination via AI-chatbots is not a violation of rules one or two. The unexplained downvote likely means that the debate is over though.
  7. I was responsible for some PC dithering as we encountered obstacle after obstacle between us and a vault full of treasure. Obstacle 1: Missile launchers shooting at our starship. We did manage to take out two missile launchers, but are there more? Obstacle 2: Imperial Navy and Marines guarding the vault. There are three factions aboard to contend with. Obstacle 3: A dead man's switch on a nuclear device that prevents us from just killing everyone from afar with starship weapons. Obstacle 4: Two groups of imperial marines in battle dress (basically Ironman armor). Obstacle 5: A Zhodoni psionic agent somewhere in mix scanning us from afar. Obstacle 6: My PC's psychological complication against killing Imperial military forces who he still has a sense of duty to. It's an interesting situation we find ourselves in.
  8. Player decisions are the bane of every GM everywhere. Having just given us a mission in Aslan space, we wiley PCs decided to forego adventures in Aslan territory and instead further plunder the Trojan Reach for crew, equipment, and targets of opportunity. Granted, as we understood it our Aslan mission is a fetch quest where we bring the stuff to the place. If the place already had the stuff within easy reach, they wouldn't need expendable outside contractors such as ourselves. We were hoping to plunder more from our favorite megacorp PRQ (Pretty Rotten Quality?), when one of the PCs spotted the name Techworld on the system map. His eyes lit up like a kid at a candy store, and it didn't take much to convince the rest of the crew that we needed a world's worth of tech. Kudos to @Steve for improvising our visit to left field so that Popeye could continue his quest to acquire more robotic or replicant minions followers and ship's crew. Fortunately he'd read ahead and knew the basics of the Hilfer system. We also gave him some extra time by having a side discussion about our ship's mixed stances on slavery and slavers. We are one robot revolution away from "ALL FLESH MUST DIE!" and yet Captain Nemos is vehemently anti-slavery. I'm sure this is fine, and nothing bad will happen. This session had a lot of story told by the dice. For example: A GM roll produced an enemy ace fighter pilot. GM combat rolls for Hroal Irontooth were consistently deadly (both deadly hit locations and high damage rolls) PC luck roles where we earned 5 counts of luck on 6 dice. PC critical success on a constitution roll. We also managed to use our entire supply of HAP. It turns out that deadly combat is deadly. All in all a great session with lots of complications and avenues for further development. I'm sure inheriting a pirate crew of Aslan will be fine. I'm sure the obstacles between us and the Treasure ship are few and manageable.
  9. As a player, I like HAP when the dice don't agree with a narrative element I've almost achieved. I resist the temptation to negate all my failed rolls. Good stories are not made by an endless succession of successes. Some of the best stories are in fact stories of overcoming setback or failure. In my opinion, HAP work well as a finishing move to complete a trend. That is you're most of the way there, but the dice generate a random number at odds with the trend. For example, you've almost convinced an NPC to accept your harebrained scheme or the fight is almost over. Ideally I would only use my HAP to complete a scene. Sometimes the trend is going against me, and I just can't roll a success. While I'm tempted to use HAP to buy myself out of trouble, I do my best not to negate failure. Partly this is a metagame decision to trust my GM with the consequences of my failure. Most genres allow you to come back from failures. Even dying can sometimes be nothing but a setback. In this game, I trust that most non-combat failures will not be lethal. Not everyone at our table shares my opinion. Just last session one of our players used almost all of his HAP to overcome a string of failures during a social interaction with an NPC. Personally, I thought failure would have been the more interesting result, but he had the HAP to spend and used them to resist an entanglement. One game mechanic I like is giving everyone a stack of HAP at the beginning of the game. We can in theory earn more during play, but we rarely do because we rarely run out of HAP. This is a good mechanic for tables where not everyone has real life social skills or likes power gaming by earning HAP. Those who prefer roll-play to roleplay don't have to worry about gaining HAP through their amateur acting abilities. How many HAP is a good amount will vary from table to table. I would fine tune it to your PCs playstyle.
  10. I'm curious to see how Blackfur develops. He has a new military commission to add to his list of accolades. He also knocked out another PC for being mouthy. President Meson certainly has quite the odd cabinet of cut throats around him.
  11. I prefer in-person games to VTT games and VTT-games over no-games at all. I like telling stories with dice where I can see the effects of our choices in real time, and where I can interact with multiple people simultaneously. Can you have that experience in play-by-mail? Maybe, probably, I just long ago gave up on that method of game play for other more immediate modes that better feed my addiction.
  12. It's a pre-campaign character-creation-minigame where much of the effort is on us PCs. We're the ones who concocted the stories that connect our characters. Mostly @Steve just had to look up tables and the results of our rolls. Although he also gave us our official campaign introduction to Drinax and our beat-up pirate ship in need of repair and a crew. The premise reminds me a bit of Our Flag Means Death with our group playing a mixture of the Black Beard and Stede Bonnet roles. Our ocular-challenged gunslinger might be Black Beard (Black Eyes?) and the two brigadiers have delusions of being gentleman pirates. We'll see if our campaign of piracy is more Captain Nemo or the Three Stooges. Daddy warbucks might not be happy to learn that his famous brigadier son has gone rogue. Much depends upon how well we follow Dexter's code: Can we prey exclusively on other pirates? Can we cover up our crimes and keep our secrets? Can our veneer of civility inspire the the remnants of the Kingdom of Drinax enough to transform a pirate fleet into an actual navy? Too bad literally none of us actually had a career in the navy. We've got an abundance of swashbuckling and a dearth of deck swabbing.
  13. I picked up the Traveller core rulebook update 2022 and discovered that we made some rolls incorrectly for some of our life events that involved skills. Evidently you're not supposed to add a characteristic modifier to these rolls, but since we're simply using them as inspiration for Star Hero characters I don't think we need to be sticklers. Rules as written, there should be many low-stat and in-debt Traveller characters who live short brutish lives. I suppose Champions and 5th edition D&D have spoiled me for starting heroic characters. I look forward to a life of piracy in and around Drinax.
  14. I hope that Foundry approves this as a system. Hero System is long overdue on Foundry.
  15. I was pleased to see Drew Altman as the sample character listed for your export format. One day the monsters will be here, and we shall fight them again.
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