Scott Ruggels2

22 minutes ago, PhilFleischmann said:

If the GM says the moon is made of green cheese, then the moon is made of green cheese.  The real moon that orbits our real world has nothing to do with the fictitious moon (or moons) that may orbit the fictitious fantasy world that we base our games in, or write novels about, or watch movies about.

 

The players also know that there's no such thing as magic, or dragons, or superheroes, or FTL travel.

Oh, I know that, but, where your Suspension of disbelief breaks down around the concept of Gods being sustained by worshipers END or other such energies, Mine breaks down around Geocentric cosmology, surrounding a flat Earth resting on the back of Turtles going all the way down.

Mighty = Mongoose.  cleverness, fearless

Impala  = Speed

Gorilla = Strength

Humming Bird =  precision

Tiger = directed ferocity

Ibis = Patience, observance

Eagle = Leadership

Thoughts?

On 9/10/2018 at 3:06 PM, Simon said:

I believe the code is still owned by the original author (as I've seen nothing donating it to open source), with the IP owned by DOJ.

  Thanks, I will go Bug Micky, and see if she still has it, then. Thanks.

I'd love to have a version of the original DOS Hero Creator, just for my portfolio. It's one of the few pieces of software that I don't have a copy of with my (admittedly, kind of retrained) art.

On 9/27/2018 at 6:00 AM, Drhoz said:

Pathfinder : The Mummy's Mask : Tomb-robbing For Fun And Profit
 

 

It's a quite entertaining read. I am towards the end of The Mummy's Mask, with 3 other players (there was a fourth, but he dropped out and one of the players took over his character). It's interesting to read how different some of your decisions were. (For instance we turned over  Veldriana Hypaxes, bound and trussed up to the Temple, where upon they executed her. But all the traps and tricks in the necropolis, as well as the wash of Necromantic energy were all familiar.   Trust me, this Module" goes on for a lot longer, and gets much wilder. I expect another 6-9 months of entertaining write ups from you guys. (We started at 1st level with brand new characters, and now we are around 12th, or so? Lots of stuff.)

Scott

I sat in on a game of Prowlers and Paragons early in the year, and Ray played Dove. I played a Powered Armor suit. Watching Ray play was rather awe inspiring, in how he played the system and outwitted the bad guys (and the GM) using basically defensive skills. You could see how he was often a "Back up leader" in the old Guardians campaigns. He was a very "reluctant" Hero, as in reluctant to get closely involved, but he has  a DNPC to rescue, so he wasn't the happiest of creatures on the battle mat.  Prowlers & Paragons, has a similar flavor to Champions, but it is a simpler, and much l3ess crunchy system than Hero, and for me it was too much, "Theater of the mind", and not enough maps and miniatures for me, personally. However, with the calibers of players we had at the time, I would play Candyland with those folks.

The way we did it, was that any attack (that was not the result of a damage shield) ended a character's turn. In the above example the VIPER Agent ended his turn with the martial Punch, even if he had a saved half action. But the additions to his DCV with the martial punch would stick, until his next action. If "Our Hero" saved his half or full action, he would be able to drop an attack on any following segment, until his next phase. This was often used to simulate complex martial arts move in our games, allowing consecutive segment/phase actions. But on a busy battle mat, with dozens of opponents engaged in combat, held actions became a rather rare commodity.

 

!

 

Actually this is pretty funny. A potion that only has the effect of getting you addicted...  I don't think I would treat this humorously at all. I would leave it low key, just put it on the menu and wait for a hapless PC to try it by mistake, or have a drink bought for them by an NPC. Let it spread silently and wreak its economic and political havoc.

 

A likely plot would be hiking the price on this beer, driving the other brewers out of business while enriching oneself on the monopoly. The guilds would be in an uproar, but as soon as they taste the new brew they would cheerfully "admit" it is truly better, drop their lawsuit, and change professions in shame. This sort of thing could spread nefariously and require subtle and speedy investigation to get under control. If the king gets a taste, he might even order the investigation halted. The distributor could run it like organized crime, they could break kneecaps and threaten to cut off the supply to any middleman that reveals the source. Eventually once everyone is hooked they could come into the open, though still protecting their "trade secret" in a fortified factory guarded by armed thugs. The R&D arm could be hard at work developing new "variants" like hallucinogenic beer, beer in pill or powder form, etc.

 

But rather than being slapstick, or an emergency, I could see it forming a subtle backdrop to a campaign. Something nobody notices or pays attention to, or maybe they mention it in passing. Like everyone addicted to their cell phone or their morning coffee or their latest netflix binge. It's just known and accepted, and so enjoyable that people LIKE being addicted. Why change a good thing? Only if the pesky PCs take notice and do some digging do they discover the seedy secrets behind it all, and get themselves into trouble trying to fix a problem nobody thinks needs fixed.

 

Just had a thought: maybe failing your brewer roll creates a tainted batch of beer that tastes... bad. Real bad. So bad that where before, you would not drink any other beer, now you would drink ANY beer but this. Sort of like how if a food makes you sick you can't stand it anymore. That could be another way to reverse the curse. A villainous brewer would of course need to test each batch on an unsuspecting victim to ensure any tainted kegs are destroyed and not distributed.

Breathtaking. I bow to your superior villainy and math skills. This is truly an elegant  "spell".

That pretty much describes my process. I am NOT a visual artist though.

Ot does help though. Like for instance, before -play I will generate a few pages of sketches of character faces, and then turn them into NPC's based on what the face tells me about them. A lot of my notes are just pages of faces with names written below them and maybe another note about their associations, or a single page will be on "People associated with the Grand Church in the Capital", various priests, guards,  Sisters, and laypeople.  Sometimes for player's benefits I wll sketch out losely a street scene or a vista. Then comes the research and the back filling.(and the stats and building XD)

The GM Bubble being a rectangle in yellow, like old Marvel Comics XD. IC Charactger  speech bubbles would be  fun(provided you had a little (x) at the corner to dismiss them if they get in the way of something on the map.

It making a game that doesn't have the power construction section at all. It has all of the Superskills, Spells, special abilities totally prebuilt. All Monsters, vehicles, equipment, etc prebuilt and ready to go. A game fully built and not requiring that the GM do anything more than Generate NPCs, Plotlines and encounters. It would include a fully fleshed out campaign. At least in the general sense of the word. You could still have future supplements that add stuff to the campaign and add detail to the world. The rules would only include those that are used for that game (ie FHC does this to some extent). A set of Pregenned Characters would also be nice.

 

You have a point, though, it would also I think  be somewhat dependent upon an attractive license to bring people to it.  The sorts of books that may generate Cable TV shows, but before they make it big. (The Expanse, Game of Thrones), or some "fan" popular property that could be aquired with little heavy outlay. Maybe even a popular web comic might do.

No one has the marketing chops, or the money to sell an unknown property to the masses here at this time.

I still might like an appendix section that mentions Hero, though.

Most vehicles swim like a rock...

And the assumption that "everyman skills" include swimming is an assumption also based on modern Western education. Plenty of folks could not swim. Reading a book about The Great Siege of Malta, the Knights were very impressed by the swimming skill of the native Maltese in defending their island, during the fighting.

That would work, though in  voice, people tend to ignore the chat bar unless it has a die roll.  Is there a way to play a sound or tone to tell people to check the chat window, like a Skype  message?

Though wouldn't the lack of coordination then simulate fights in martial arts movies where the attacks come one at a time, even if the protagonist is surrounded by a sea of mooks?

While my fondest Hero memories come with Fifth Edition: Revised, I salute this idea. Hero Fourth was a really good iteration of the game.

Well my fondest is probably around Champions 2 and Champions 3 as a player. As a GM it was a couple of FH Campaigns in  4e that were my fondest as a GM.

I think the Fantasy Hero Primer project is a perfect intro to the system as a  game, 

I may stick to 4th Ed. simply because it's what I own and have to hand  I am going to try and introduce it to a few folks via Fantasy Hero ( and the Fantasy Hero Primer), to a group that is toptally infamioliar with it soon and see how that goes.

okay that makes more sense. put all the system calls in the appendices, with calls to pages in the big rule book. I can see that, though , again as I said on another Fantasy Hero thread, you will have the build out EVERYTHING! It will take a fair amount of work, but it will look like a full game, but as it is, then the MHI approach is the way to go.  So, are there any licenses worth pursuing at this time?

if you want to keep it serious, DO NOT LET THE PLAYERS PERSUE THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK, Put a spell on it or something to keep it "locked".   Also, start statting up the major players and major player NPCs, so you know what the factions are and what their reasos and operational methods are. prepare to be "reactive to the players action, but reactive "in characcter" (see:previous point on factions) that will keep things flexible, and keep you from having a brain anyeurism by plotting too much, and then the players going somewhere else.

 

I started a game like this, with a solo ~400 pt character running through a moderately high level D&D module (X4). Since it was a solo PC we targeted around 10th level equivalent elf, expert at both combat and magic. It is easy to sink that many points into a FH character, and he looks really good on paper, and fits my idea of what a high level character should be capable of. He is a good match for the larger monsters. He was able to take on a wizard mounted on a wyvern and three trolls simultaneously, and basically one-shotted a dragon. But the vast majority of fantasy monsters in the bestiary are far outclassed, not to mention entire armies. In practice that means either I rewrite them to be tougher (thus negating the "high level" effect), or fights with lesser foes become dull. Dull in the sense of the PC being virtually invulnerable, so it becomes an exercise in dice rolling with a predictable outcome (or being hand-waved).

 

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I guess the gotcha in my experience is that the Fantasy Hero resources are not applicable, and (at least in my case) the Champions resources are not applicable.

 

It looks to me that it's not as much that it doesn't work, so much as the assumptions between the two systems are so far apart (stun & body vs hitpoint mechanics). yes a fight between a high level Hero built character versus an army of normals may end up like the old Traveller warning about flying power armor versus cave men, but even in a champions game, agents with the right tools and tactics can take down a super if they are prepared.   on another note, a good FH campaign really does need to be built entirely from scratch.

That's where I'm going with my Fantasy Hero setting.  The player and GM books will pretend its a brand new game so everything has to be explained, but the player book will have basics and the Gm book the details.  My dream would be to bundle the GM book with a tutorial intro adventure and the Player book with a character packet, but that takes moola I don't have.

 That's what Kickstarter and a good artist are for XD.  However how hard do you want to hide the origins of the system?Is it economically worth it to pursue a new player base at the expense of the old one? However this is me being curious, not a criticism.

 what about going super Low tech, and just putting a graphjic of a speed chart line and an extra set of tokens on it? i know the real estate is kind of limited, but some sort of a floater might work, or something in the side bar?

For world building, It may be, because i am a visual artist, but I always start with a scene. Imagine a place, a city square, or a slice of countryside, and then imagine what is populating it, and what they are doing. I then imagine what they are wearing and what is around them and think about why.  and then think about the level of magic or not. Sometimes it's all humans, sometimes it's humans and others.  So I just sit back and daydream a bit, then I start picking out things that I can recognize from history and do a bit of research. Little mental movies of what the scenes look like.

As one of the original members of "Doug's Thugs" in the fantasy Hero playtest, it was eye opening to me how flexible the system could be for running fantasy. L. Douglas Garret ran the game  from around 1985, until he left for Japan in 1997 or so, every Sunday at what ever place he was living at the time.  on average, every two or three years he would cycle the campaign, and come up with a new background, and he really gave the system a workout, often a background emulating some aspect from a series of fantasy novels that the group liked. He made what seemed to be the downside of a toolbox system an advantage, as he (as I do) grooved on worldbuilding.  The amount of maps generated, and write up was amazing. I also would generate about a file drawer's worth of material per campaign. It may be that the limiting factor for Hero is that it requires a world builder, or at least a fairly detailed genre book to run. Simple adventures aren't enough, unless there is a supporting world book. probably.

AS to Doc's illustration above about "Powered by Hero", for a supposed Glorantha game, how is Monster Hunter international doing?

Of course it can be done, but you need to come up with equivalents in your settings to what you find in superhero worlds that constrain their activities.  In general, fantasy games run on a less enlightened plane of morality than modern superheroes, so either the campaign needs a higher level of moral elevation (Like Greece or some of Rome or early China.), or there needs to be power structures and limitations to keep the characters from turning the campaign world into their own back yard. this either needs to be rival powers, the oppositions or even limitations on their powers (ENDpowered by the worship by followers, that will tank if they do things the population doesn't like). It could be a fun campaign. good luck with it.