Durzan Malakim

In the books and Netflix series a cortical stack effectively grants you Life Support immortality by way of an obvious inaccessible focus. The books describe rich people having banks of blank clones for them to download into. One punishment in this world is to forcibly remove someone’s digital self from “their” body and adding the now empty body to the public bank of available bodies. The first book has the main character walking around in someone else’s body and having to deal with their nicotine addiction and attraction to another character. This might be a transform attack in Hero terms. Transform from human body to cortical stack digital human freight and vice versa. 

I'm used to players surprising me when I GM. I'm not used to surprising myself as a player in @Steve's game. This week I surprised everyone when a standard lightsaber duel instead became my "Han shot first" or "Captain Mal kicks a man into an engine" moment. My character, retired Imperial Marine Brigadier turned space Pirate Captain Nemos was supposed to duel his hunted Judas Cain, a former Imperial Navy Captain and possible Zhodani infiltrator. Before the fighting started, Judas began villain monologuing about how the outcome of the duel didn't matter because he had several clone backups to carry on his search for vengeance. Not only would he keep sending clones after me until he killed me, but he'd also hunt down my crew to avenge the death of one of his other clones that we had killed with a nuke. I don't begrudge the man for having clone backups because I also have a clone backup, but we have very different views on the nature of clones and whether the sins of the father (the original) fall on the child (the clone).

My character thinks of his clone as more of a twin brother with his own identity, wishes, and desires. Given their shared history, their goals are mostly aligned, but had my character died in the duel, he'd not expect his clone to carry on the grudge or avenge him. In fact, he'd explicitly not want him to carry on the grudge because Captain Nemos has a greater mission he wants to complete. I even recorded a message along the lines of "if you're hearing this then I'm dead" to tell my clone to carry on the greater mission. However, when I learned that the duel wouldn't end the grudge, I realized that there was no point in being honorable and fighting fair. So I asked my fellow PC @L0rd_Magg0t to "take the shot" from his sniper overwatch position. I used the distraction to decapitate one clone, and then next phase I disarmed (literally) another clone that was acting as his second. I was surprised by how much outrage I felt about the duel not mattering. It felt like Judas was bragging about being able to cheat until he won, so I decided to cheat first. I learned in that moment that this character has a weird code of honor. This code of honor includes the idea that clones are not disposable copies of the original that are enslaved to carry out the original's will. It also includes not suffering the insult of breaking your word. For Captain Nemos the outcome of the duel was supposed to settle the matter, but Judas Cain broke his word by not being willing to abide by the outcome of the duel.

It was a great role-playing moment for me, and I look forward to seeing what consequences come from this choice. I think this is the most morally gray character I've played. No one thinks of themselves as the villain of their story, but Captain Nemos is just one "ends justify the means" choice away from being a bad guy. He has principles, but if you're on the wrong end of them he looks pretty villainous.

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.

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.

I look forward to the Basic Version and the follow up Kickstarter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

6 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

Jeez, it's like you had to run a campaign before you could run your campaign. 

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.

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.

I hope that Foundry approves this as a system. Hero System is long overdue on Foundry.

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.

I'm looking into online gaming alternatives for my D&D game. I've used Fantasy Grounds for D&D, but I don't know how well it will support Hero or Cortex Plus. It may be easier to do the game mechanics portion through talking like we do in a face-to-face game. We certainly all have dice and can roll them and declare our results. We can save video for maps and our lovely faces. This assumes of course everyone has access to the necessary hardware: computer with camera and software. We can always go on hiatus if need be.

Thanks for the information @King Red. Hopefully we can still meet at someone's house if people are healthy and willing.

I hope your daughter gets better soon. Let us know if our next game can be at one of our houses. I live in Mira Mesa so could host a game on the march 21st if needed. Let me now what location preferences you have.

My house is available if need be, but I hear that @Killer Shrike has a killer game table to use.

I printed out a copy of Beretta in preparation of Jaeger piloting her. I can always bring a copy if it's needed.

I'm available tomorrow, and I'm willing to Jaeger pilot Beretta as well.

I like this campaign story line and want to see it where it goes. While I'm fully engaged and committed to its progression, I do admit that my long-term memory failed me for some of the story details. Perhaps I've grown spoiled by your story recaps, but this is a case where a summary might help reorient us. Also you can utter the words RTFM, which are always fun to say. 

I have a partial conflict for our 25th game. The wife and I have been invited to a Chinese New Years celebration from 3 pm to whenever. I could come late, but since @L0rd_Magg0t already cannot attend do we want to bump our next game to February?