sentry0

I just posted the first version of the export format at: 

I think the issues with Word have been sorted out based on my conversation with Brian.  Everything should be working

6 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

It's not opening for me in Word. The warning message says "Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt."

Ah crap.... alright, I'll see what I can do.

On 4/14/2019 at 11:58 AM, Brian Stanfield said:

I don’t know how to do any of this, especially the xml. I used to do ok with html, but I’m looking for a good text output instead, and there aren’t many of them available. I’m curious to see, and it would be awesome if it saved me the trouble of having to learn xml. 

What word processing software do you use? 

I'm asking because I used LibreOffice for this export template...everything should "just work" in MS Word but I would prefer to test it before I post.

The file is attached to this post if you or anyone else feels like trying it out.

It gets you most of the way there to a back of book write up...certain sections like powers and disads require some after export messaging.

4 minutes ago, Brian Stanfield said:

Let me know when you get it done. I’d like to see it. 

I'm making an RTF version as I write this...better for formatting and cuts out an extra step.

It's almost done...having an issue with special characters that I'm trying to sort out.

I saw it last night with my wife and we both quite liked it.

It's a good humorous take on what it would be like to have superpowers if you were a kid.  I thoroughly enjoyed them abusing his amazing powers to buy beer and candy and all the messing around they did on youtube.

A friend of ours saw it with her kids and they all loved it too, I think it's a really solid family movie too.

4 hours ago, Steve said:

Average Skill Penalty looks like it should be -5 based on 47.4 Average Active Points, if the standard is -1/10 penalty.

 

So, on any given day, despite having access to such wondrous powers, over half of them don't use them at all? That's some impressive self-control given that you could have some individuals among them who have a favorite ability or two they use every chance they can.

 

Even given your assumptions, about six breaches a day just in NYC alone implies that the worldwide effect is a powder keg waiting to detonate. 

Not all of the spells are -1 per 10 AP, the more expensive spells are -1 per 20...still I was rounding the penalties wrong in my base spells, I was rounding in the players favor.  I revisited the rounding and it ends up equalling 4.81 so I bumped up the % fail column by 1...and FYI I'm throwing out the top 2 and lowest 2 spells in my calculations in both cases.  Now I have to go back through the doc and update the spells themselves.

I think it's reasonable to assume that if you could do something really cool on demand but it has the potential to do something really horrible you would be judicious about doing it.  That's my premise coming into the calculations which I think is reasonable.  However, the numbers are getting a little bit too high with that new bump in penalty...I may take you up on your suggestion of going for -1 per 20 across the board, it will get the numbers down to 2.3 using the same assumptions.  

2 hours ago, Brian Stanfield said:

Try this: 

 

 

See if it gets you what you want. It's like the stat blocks in the 5e books. Spence also uploaded one that's exactly like the character sheet in the back of the books as well.

That's a nice one but it's not quite what I'm looking for...there are a couple of minor things that don't quite match up to the FCB write ups for 6e.  I'm piecing this together based on the writers guidelines for 5th and the tweaked format for 6th.

I'm going to post my modded version...it's just a text export but you can copy/paste/modify it and it cleans up nice in a word processor.  I have the whole process down to about 5 minutes now

Just now, Brian Stanfield said:

 

Have you looked at the downloads section of herogames.com? There are a bunch of different templates there. I don't know exactly where I got mine, come to think of it, but I suspect this is where they came from.

I did, I based my temple off of one I found there.  It was already pretty close but it was not quite in the right format in many sections so I ended up modifying it for 6e.

I may post it if no one can point me at one.

Is there an export template for the Full Characteristics Block style of write up we find in books?

I'm using something I built yesterday but am wondering if there's something official and where would I find it?

I've been playing with numbers a bit and have some interesting results.  Essentially, I built a statistical model to calculate the number of Breaches based on the following:

• total Blooded population
• % of Blooded casting in a given day
• average spell power and skill penalties
• average number of spells cast per Blooded

It's interesting, I ended up calculating on average 5.8 Breaches a day for NYC based on the following inputs...

It's not perfect but it does account for a number of factors and I think it's a decent first attempt at trying to understand just how many Breaches the Blooded could cause on average.  I tried to be fair in my numbers...not too conservative or aggressive.  Obviously, things can be tuned up or down but overall it's pretty manageable in my estimation between the Blooded knights and Breach Hunters and misc. agencies and organizations that would want a piece of the action.

Guilt Complex ?

35 minutes ago, Steve said:

I'm thinking that elements of Monster Hunter International should be a part of this world, with the government offering PUFF bounties to professional monster hunter organizations. The Blooded can be explained as the reason why there are so many monsters infesting various, random parts of the world.

I actually don't know much of anything about MHI other than the fact it exists so I don't know what a PUFF bounty is but I can imagine.

 I like the idea of having the government involved in some way...that's partly why I wrote up Mars Industries, they're useful to the government because the government can deny they new anything inhumane was going on with the research and walk away from it cleanly.  The government doesn't have to deal with angry voters because they're spending money on good old 'Murican defense and not chasing fairy tales.  Given that the average person has that Psy Lim I would speculate that majority of their voters wouldn't approve of spending money on monster hunters because they would deny the existence of monsters even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

I totally think that Mars would have hunters on the payroll though, teams of them in fact, which are trained to retrieve mythic creatures from the wild.  They probably would even subcontract out work to private security firms, i.e. other groups of hunters, it's even better for deniability.

I couldn't sleep tonight and I was thinking about the conversations we had here over the weekend.  I wrote up the following to talk about the effects of Mythic Breaches and how normal humans perceive them and the creatures that come through.

I think I'm happy with this as an explanation as to how the Blooded world has evolved to incorporate the occasional encounter with mythic creatures.  Encountering a mythic creature is still a very uncommon event and not something the average normal human would do, perhaps ever.

----

Mythic Rationalization

The world of the Blooded is like our own world; there are subways that transport people beneath the city streets, people work day jobs, have children, and love one another. Where the world of the Blooded differs is that magic is real, not only is magic real but so are manticores, chimeras, and orcs. These Mythic creatures arrive via Mythic Breaches, tears in reality which gate in creatures from another time and place – these Breaches can occur when Blooded magic goes awry. The world is not overrun or inundated with these creatures as the Blooded themselves have laws and groups like knights and Breach Hunters to deal with Mythic Breaches and their results.

Also consider the following when dealing with the fallout of a Mythic Breach:

    – The Lost Legion actively attempts to recruit Mythic creatures who arrive via a Breach

    – The Continuum hunts down Breach creatures an attempts to erase them from the timestream

    – The Crimson Cabal hunts Breach creatures for material components

    – The Clockwork Union collects and studies Breach creatures

    – Mars Industries is capturing Breach creatures for genetic engineering

    – Witch Hunters will gladly hunt a Breach creature

Mythic Rationalization is something that almost all normal humans do when confronted with magic or a Breach creature, they rationalize the encounter away. It is the same mechanism that allows people to do seemingly irrational things like ignoring the evidence of the health effects of smoking or the impact global warming has on our planet. The human mind is a capable of rationalizing away a great deal of logical inputs and facts so that normally rational people can have quite irrational views.

A normal human being in the world of the Blooded will go to great lengths to explain away an encounter with something mythical. They will convince themselves that there was a movie shoot nearby, that some guys were running around in masks, or that they saw a lion on the streets of Manhattan and not a manticore. This rationalization extends to photographic and video evidence as well as recorded audio. So powerful is the need for the human mind to rationalize away the encounter that a regular person will go to great lengths to explain what they saw in terms that make sense to them.

In game terms almost all normal human NPCs have the following Psychological Limitation worth 15 Complication points:

    – Psychological Complication: Mythic Rationalization (Uncommon; Total)

Obviously, there are exceptions to the above rule, Witch Hunters would not have this limitation nor would members of the Clockwork Union, Continuum, and so on. The vast majority of humanity does however posses this psychological complication.

Just now, Simon said:

A Persistent Power cannot cost END. A Persistent Power with Costs END Only to Activate is no longer Persistent - it’s Constant.

I see, thanks for the clarification.

I hate to do this to you but I think there's still an issue with Time Limit and Costs Endurance (Only to Activate).

According to the Time limit writeup (6E1 346), Time Limit should be a limitation when it's applied to a persistent power when that power costs 0 END or only costs END to activate.  

If you take Knockback Resistance as an example:

1. Add Knockback Resistance to a character
2. Add "Time Limit" to the power, note that it's correctly identified as a limitation at this point
3. Add Costs Endurance (Only Costs END to Activate) and Time Limit flips to an advantage

I believe that this is incorrect behavior based on the Time Limit writeup.

4 minutes ago, Simon said:

Well that was a fun one to track down.

 

Just pushed an update that should fix the issue.

Hehe...thanks!

3 minutes ago, TranquiloUno said:

This is for Fantasy Hero.

I've got a mechanic for using Magesight to estimate APs in various ways already, but that's more for active use of magic, and not so much determining the power of summoned soul harvesters and more passive threat detection.

 

What I'm wanting to do is give them the stats ahead of time so they can plan an intricate (as intricate as they'd like) way of countering the threat. Which I think will work better if they have the actual stats to compare to their own.

 

It's pretty meta-gamey and breaks that there 4th wall. Interested to see how it turns out.

Given the typical gaming secrecy that surrounded NPCs and GM controlled folks I was curious to see what happens if that gets inverted.

Well you could always try it out and see what you think about it after.  If you end up not liking it you can stop, no harm no foul.

You can communicate threats effectively if the villain has a rating (Alpha, Beta, etc) by having the PCs make a KS: Superhumans roll or equivalent.  Telling a player that so-and-so looks tough is vastly different that saying "that's an Omega level villain".  Unless the villain is a complete unknown most villains will have the rating so you may as well use it.

You can always do a deep dive after session where you look at the NPCs to teach.

3 hours ago, Steve said:

I'm wondering if the Segments column should be inverted, with low-powered Breaches taking more time and high-powered ones less. I could see a low-powered Breach happening after a couple of minutes and releasing something like an imp or gremlin, but a high-powered Breach happens in just seconds and releases something big.

 

Who hates the Queen of New York? Why do they hate her? Is there anyone like a Sheriff (Shire Reeve) that helps her enforce her laws or maybe multiple Sheriffs, some more loyal than others?

Officially, she has a hunted with The Lost Legion as her big hunted.  I figure the Legion has been emboldened by their victory in Chicago and/or perhaps Queen Vulkers is sponsoring the resistance.  I also bought her a 5 point hunted for "Various" to represent a general collection of orgs all wanting a piece of her.  Politically, she is well liked but I could see Julia Seco making a power play.

There were Manorial courts in the middle ages...technically we're missing Barons but Dukes would do just fine as hosts.  Manorial courts were for the local peasantry and were generally for trivial crimes.  There used to be a thing called a "tithing" where groups of 10 people would watch one another for crimes.

Frankly, I've bastardized midieval hierarchies to the point that I'm wondering if local justice should fall under the knights job?  Knights would become police in effect in addition to their charge of defending the kingdom.  A knight could bring in a misbehaving peasant to the Manorial court or even the Kings court if the crime was serious enough.  It's not like there are hundreds of thousands of Blooded in one place, even in a city the size of NY there's only a few hundred Blooded.  You wouldn't need an army of knights to police that number.

I'll think some more about your suggestion about flipping the segments column.

1 hour ago, Durzan Malakim said:

Does all magic risk Breaches or just the magic of the Blooded? If some Breachers can cast magic, why wouldn't they use it to intentionally create more Breaches? I would suggest making Breaches a potential side-effect for all magic. The beings that come out of a Breach are hostile to the caster and the caster's realm. This explains why the Lost Legion doesn't intentionally go around creating Breaches and instead only focus on recruiting potential allies from other's Breaches.

 

Here is my suggested explanation for why mortals aren't more aware of Breaches. The government runs and supports the Crimson Cabal and actively suppresses Breach events. The government knows magic is real and is desperately trying to close the magic gap in this arms race. Their solution to Breach incursions is to capture or kill the mythic beings that enter our world. Some beings they study trying to learn more about magic. Some beings they kill and convert into spell components. Perhaps Crimson Cabal magic exploits a loophole in magic. Since spell components are the flesh of other magic users, any Breach side effect gets redirected to that flesh. Crimson Cabal mages are essentially casting spells by proxy. This actually gives the Crimson Cabal an incentive to find and exploit Nameless. They can Capture a Nameless, force them to create a Breach, clean up the mess, and then gather more spell components. The Blooded don't care what happens to the Nameless, and The Nameless have an even bigger incentive to stay hidden and not draw attention to themselves. You can use the Crimson Cabal as both Men In Black and boogey men used to scare Blooded children into behaving themselves. This also helps explains why there is a First Law. When mortals learn of mythic magic, they exploit it with literal flesh and blood. 

Only Blooded magic can cause a breach on a failure and only then is it a % chance to cause a breach.  It's a side effect for how their magic works, they're literally tapping into a mythic force via their blood to summon forth magical effects...when it goes bad, it can go real bad.  Here's the breakdown of how Mythic Breaches work for reference:

Mythic Breach Probability

*Spell roll failures of 5 or more are moved one row down the chart

I like your idea about the government being part of a conspiracy, in fact I have written up a defense contractor that I already implicated in something just like you suggest.  Maybe what I should do is write up the larger government conspiracy...honestly, I was just throwing down breadcrumbs for future me to use and to flesh things out a bit  

I keep coming back to Blooded magic being a choice...I don't see them casting Darksight when they go into the cold cellar for example.  I actually imagine that many Blooded would live lives that are quite banal that wouldn't require them to cast magic on a daily basis.  Peasants would be trained in Blood magic and know some simple incantations but wouldn't be living the life of a 21st century adventurer and not ripping holes in reality every other day. 

This is a strange one, but it is reproducible...I'm not sure if it's just me using HD incorrectly or a bug but I figured I would report it.  I also understand that Time Limit can be an Advantage or a Limitation depending on the power but this happens on the same power.  For the record, I'm using the 20190210 build.

1. Add the power "Knockback Resistance" to a character
   1. Add "Time Limit", note that it is a Limitation at this point
   2. Add the "Cost Endurance" Limitation (Only Costs END to Activate)
   3. Note the Active Points and Real Points of the power
   4. Save the power
2. Open the power you just added
3. The AP and Real Cost has changed because Time Limit has turned into an advantage
4. Hit "OK" to save the power with the new cost
5. Close the character in HD
6. Open the character
7. The cost of the power has changed again because Time Limit is now a limitation

This also happens when adding powers built with Time Limit and Costs Endurance from prefabs.  Time Limit will flip from a limitation to an advantage when adding the power to the character from the prefab causing point costs to skewed.

59 minutes ago, Steve said:

Actually, containing widespread knowledge of Breach incidents seems like it could be quite troublesome for the Blooded. With the sheer number of them existing in the world set at around 500k or so, combining the chances of skill failure with the chances of a Mythic Breach activation seems like it would mean somewhere around 0.05% to 0.1% of the Blooded population is causing a Mythic Breach on any given day. That equals hundreds of Breach events every day in the world.

 

Because of the number of potential events, that seems like it would be highly difficult to contain knowledge of _all_ of them, especially given that containing them and erasing knowledge of them would require the use of Blooded abilities, which could then cause additional Breach events. You could easily end up with a cascade failure, a mass event of Mythic Breaches all at once, like something out of a Ghostbusters movie.

 

It's a suspension of disbelief question for people who look at your numbers. How to mitigate that?

 

If the foes of the Blooded are also aiding in maintaining the masquerade, that eases the burden of containment a bit, but there could also be one or more groups that is actively trying to disseminate knowledge of Mythic Breaches.

I don't think 100% Breach containment is realistic either, that's how The Lost Legion maintains it numbers...at least partially. There's lots of groups who would love to get their hands on what comes through a Breach.  Lots more who would just as well destroy the Breach creatures and Blooded.

The question becomes what do mortals do with stories of mythic creatures stalking the streets?

Personally, the way I'm going to play it in my game is that those are tabloid stories and urban legends.  If one of the myriad of interested parties fail to handle the Breach then what happens?  The Breach creature may end up in the news.  The Blooded need to cover it up ASAP and the manticore of the lower East side becomes public enemy #1.  The Blooded have extensive NCI and would be able to manipulate the press, local police, even FBI and government wouldn't be beyond their reach.  They don't have to mind wipe everyone in a quarter mile radius of a Breach because of they can control what gets reported on and what gets investigated.

About cascading failures: it is a real possibility that the Blooded make things worse when covering up a Breach.  The types of magic being cast by Breach Hunters would be quite a bit more powerful than what the average Blooded peasant would be casting.  Overall, Blooded magic needs to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer...which I'm fine with.  They're not Superheroes.

Is it air tight?  Absolutely not and that's part of the fun for me ?. If Breach containment was 100% I would argue it would make things a lot more boring.  I like that Breaches add an element of risk to Blooded magic and makes casting a spell a choice and not a given outcome to a problem.  As it stands, it's a delivery mechanism for mythical creatures into the setting that impact the setting itself in very tangible ways.  That's exactly what I wanted them to be!

9 minutes ago, Lucius said:

 

Actually, set the question of why aside for a moment.

 

With dragons and manticores and djinn and the like more or less crawling out of the woodwork on a pretty regular basis, tell me HOW???

 

 

Lucius Alexander

 

With woodwork coming out of the palindromedaries

 

There's a couple of things at play here:

• Not all Blooded are PCs and casting spells frequently
• The Second law states that a Blooded are expected to deal with any breach they create
• Breach Hunters work to clean up the fallout of a breach, including dealing with cell phone videos, police, witnesses, etc

There's also the Lost Legion who are actively recruiting the creatures who come through the breach for their own war against the Blooded.  The Crimson Cabal would love to get their hands on the critters that come through.  The Continuum would probably rather not have mythic creatures from the past in the present...

Take your pick I guess.

If you're not digging the concept then maybe take a pass on it???

1 hour ago, Brian Stanfield said:

So I modified the 6e sheet to include the Base Value and Cost of each characteristic. Is this something I'm allowed to post, or upload or something for others to use? Does anybody know how to find out?

I think you're fine to upload it, just give credit to the original author (if known) I would say.

18 hours ago, Steve said:

 

This seems okay to me.

 

The KOT will need their own package deal like you have done for the Bloodlines, since they are effectively acting as an 8th Bloodline. I would suggest giving them a tracking sense for finding Blooded and maybe their Blooded list is composed of paladin-like abilities. In addition to finding newly awakened Blooded, this tracking ability would also let them hunt down violators of Blooded laws. Perhaps they could also have an ability to discern truth from lies, which would also aid them in acting as agents of Blooded justice. You might consider giving them a Psychological Complication of some kind that reflects their dedication to their role. KOT squires probably have to undergo many trials and examinations during their training to determine their worthiness to drink from the Well of Segais.

 

While you probably don't need something like an entire Order of Sith to oppose the KOT from the shadows, there might be one or two fallen knights out there that could have abilities like D&D Death Knights or just be Sith-like. Perhaps failing to live up to the high standards of the KOT causes their Blood to burn within them, a penalty imposed on them due to having drunk from the magic well. This burning usually kills the offender, but perhaps under very rare circumstances preserved one or two, and those beings are whispered about by the squires or used by Knights as object lessons on the dangers of failing in ones duty. Death by their Blood burning would be taught as being far preferable to this other possible fate.

I wrote up the Knights of Tuath spells last night...5 of them, all sensory in nature, I figure those types of spells would help them perform their tasks.  I also did their package deal...it's modest but offers lots of flexibility.

I added a couple of new Blood magic spells while I was on the spell kick...Sense Breach, Sense Mythic Creature, and Tenacity.

I'm going to focus on writing up NYC for a bit and then I should be done in terms of things I wanted to accomplish.