Greg

Re: Star Wars - Balancing Jedi with everyone else and heroic vs. superheroic Yeah, I didn't want to diss Chewie, but he didn't even get a medal at the end of A New Hope which kind of seems to prove my theory.

Re: Star Wars - Balancing Jedi with everyone else and heroic vs. superheroic It's basically going to be a VPP with the limitation 'learned powers.' I was going with the idea of a multipower for awhile, but the my co-GM really wants the flexibility of a VPP. I can go either way, but see advantages of either way.

Re: Star Wars - Balancing Jedi with everyone else and heroic vs. superheroic Great, it's good to see I'm not completely coming out of left field. To ease in players I'm going to write-up templates for: bounty hunter - combat/gadgeteer VPP smuggler - lots of rogue type skills/jack of all trades droid - a couple different models, but mainly tech skills and some gadgets jedi - the obvious, but will probably be the most work since I want to spell out their powers so as not to abuse their VPP: Force any other good archetypes I'm missing? Maybe mercenary, soldier or ambassador.

After playing KOTOR2 my group and I are itching to play some Star Wars and since I've already taught them Hero we're not going to change systems. I've got some ideas that I think work well, but I haven't seen anything quite like this mentioned in the plethora of lightsaber and Jedi writeups. I'm going to propose that characters use most of the super-heroic guidlines for character creation. Any Jedi from the movies is going to be expensive and the only way to make a lightsaber remotely balance is to make the player pay for it with points. Further, our lightsaber build is somewhere around 60 real points, plus the force VPP is around 100 so we're talking pretty high-powered characters. So for now let's just say 350 point characters. However, Jedi force powers aside nobody, including Jedi, are super characters in terms of stats. So my second part of the proposal is observing NCM and "requesting" that some percentage of points be put into equipment. For the Jedi that'll be their lightsaber, for a smuggler it's going to be a ship and their wookie. I think that leads to Jedi who are relatively naked beyond their powers and swords and at the same time lets others balance themselves with ships, bases and followers. For some reason the above seems sort of un-hero by laying out point guidlines, but the end result seems to be pretty much perfect. Does anyone have a campaign where they did something similar and are there problems with having non-super supers?

Re: Robert E Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien? Do you mean her book Dragonsbane? I haven't read anything by her lately, but I went through a phase where I read everything she wrote. If you're forced to read more D&D books Elaine Cunningham is an interesting read. Ignore what the cover says the setting is because she doesn't play D&D and doesn't care to.

Re: Shapeshifting and experience On an aside, computer use can cause eye fatigue, but doesn't cause any permanent effects. Back on topic, I'm letting the comparable type character in my campaign increase his powers just like a fighter could increase his natural strength. If your main concern is that it's unbalancing to give him additional powers though then that should be reason enough to disallow it. You could attach a side effect to his changing outside of a humanoid form. Maybe he takes damage from turning into such odd forms or maybe it costs endurance because of the strain.

Re: orichalcum You use Dakuelufu? I'm trying to wrap my head around using the Japanese approximation of an English phrase in English. I don't get the problems with Baatezu and Tanari though since demon/devil are kind of generic terms for 'bad stuff' demons and devils need something to call themselves. It's been stated so many times that Drow rhymes with cow I really don't know where people find anything to argue about. Gary posts all the the time on ENWorld and has stated and restated it. I was looking up orichalcum a little bit. When we played Exalted I remembered it as being basically pure gold+magic and looking around online it apparently has some grounding in actual myth. As far as pronunciation the official is Ori-kal-kum. I have a feeling things sound "better" because that's the way you thought they were originally.

Re: 25-7-11 24-7-14-14-3 5-3-26-8 20-11-23-14-11-1-8 I've bragged enough in another thread that I reverse engineered the super secret code. I was starting to doubt though because I just made a javascript (nerdly-ness...over..whelming...) program to decode messages and Steve's were a bit garbled. I've noticed there are a bunch of places where he consistently swaps the letter l and w and z and q I think. Having said that I'm pretty tempted to pick up a damaged copy of Pulp Hero from the online store.

Re: Glitter Boy for 34 points- is that sick? From that page there is this link: http://www.palladiumbooks.com/conversions.html That basically says "bottom line don't do it". If you say Juicer: though I honestly don't know what they'd be suing you for since you can't copyright a gaming system (only the concepts therein). Though IANALnimw (neither is my wife)

Re: Monsters, Minions, and Marauders: Opinions? I think Steve is just trying to be true to the source material. http://webhome.idirect.com/~donlong/monsters/Html/Ahuizotl.htm and http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/aztec-mythology.php?deity=AHUIZOTL both comfirm the hand on the tail thing. That'd be like an Indian complaining about how they like unicorns except for the the single horn (yes they literally only have one).

Re: Your "Character Sheet Resources" Alright here's my slightly revised version of my Fantasy Hero sheet that now features the Hero font. It's also significantly smaller. *update* Changed sheet to be editable. Uses some Wayne Peacock code, but also figures half dice and lift amounts.

Re: Your "Character Sheet Resources" Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm missing just yet. I made my sheet in Photoshop and if I save it so that it retains the text it's like 15MB even if I discard the layers. If I print to a PDF then it shrinks somewhat, but I lose the searchable text. I've got Inkscape for Vector Graphics so I may try to get it to work from that.

Re: Your "Character Sheet Resources" Ignore this one and try the one I posted below...

Re: Modern day fantasy ala Changeling or Gaiman I have a sick amount of unread books already...must.. resist.. urge to buy more. Well, I'll have to buy Anansi Boys when it hits the stands, but that's it.

A while back I picked up WW's Changeling game and more recently I've finished reading American Gods and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame. I'm hankering to either do a one shot or a con game that puts characters in a similar world. For those that don't know both of these settings are sort of like Alice in Wonderland, Xanth, Thomas Covenant, Woman on the Edge of Time or Oz where a character in the normal world gets sucked into a fantasy world somehow connected to the real one. The characters never quite know if the world is real or not, but ultimately they don't care because they have a better time there. They're usually thought to be insane by the general populace and may be homeless while they are in our world. I'm looking for anyone else who has thought about this and come up with plot hooks or character ideas. The most interesting aspect for me is their interaction with both worlds and not just the fantasy one. Also, the fact that they all may just be insane and the world is just made up is pretty thought provoking. I really like Gaiman's Neverwhere where they are physically in the real world, but somehow the normals can't really perceive the fantasy realm.

Re: Secret decoder Thanks, I've reviewed my super-secret notes of reverse engineered insanity covered in rubbings from lost Mayan temples cross-referenced to passages in FReD, but thanks to you and ChaosDrgn, I've made a small revision. I don't spell nearly as well in code. I even referenced the original super secret message from Lil' Orphan Annie to get it just right.

Re: Brass knuckles and high strength characters Wow, well it's good that I'm not the only person to run up against this. To answer some questions: Because I thought this exact same thing on a 2 hour car ride home yesterday and I love the idea for this character. (I'm using the former, but would allow him to block/parry with them.)

Re: Secret decoder 14-1-11-8 8-17-7-11-24-5

Re: Secret decoder I didn't pickup Pulp Hero at Gencon due to me probably never being able to play, but in about 5-10 minutes I've managed to figure out the code because of apostrophes and Curufea's web address. You're not going to keep it a secret at this rate! 18-9 20-7-7-23!

Re: Brass knuckles and high strength characters Bloodstone- Yeah, there's any number of ways to add more damage by spending points. I was just trying to rationalize a way for a strong guy to benefit from picking up something harder than a (near) human hand in-game. Rapier- DC is just where I stole the stats for brass knuckles. It doesn't really matter what the weapon is just that any normal damage weapon usually doesn't scale well with strong characters. You're on to something though because anything above 18 or so STR is beyond real life human ability so maybe a 30 STR guy is just a lot denser than brass knuckles or a lead pipe. I'm just going to do what I alluded to above and give my over-the-top player an over-the-top weapon that should scale into the upper strata of strength. Ultimately, I'll just create a "great club" with slightly different SFX.

Re: Brass knuckles and high strength characters Prior to now I've just been giving my player a generic +1d6 so he'd have some benefit to wearing something over his hands. I'm probably going to give him the option to change it to killing damage to simulate spiked gauntlets. Since I know he likes rolling piles of dice and I encourage players to do stuff for fun/in-character versus just for in-game benefit I'll make his brass knuckles 5d6 str min 20 to simulate giant metal plates that wrap around his entire forearms and hands that only the strongest of creatures could wear. That way when he goes into one of his infamous berserk furies then he'll still be able to get a benefit of wearing them. At the same time he could strap some sort of barbed spear into the wrist a la Conan when he fights in the gladiator pits in the first movie. Obviously this is pretty high-fantasy so unrealistic weapons are par for course.

I looked around for similar questions, but couldn't find anything. In my Fantasy HERO campaign I have a STR 30 brawler. He's generally just been swinging his giant mitts, but was looking for a way that he could punch for a little more damage. Dark Champions list brass knuckles as 2D6N STR Min 8(or so) so by normal doubling rules that only brings them up to 4D6N max. For Joe Average that's fine, but at STR 20 and up you've broken even despite the fact you're strapping metal to your hands. I'm not necessarily looking to house rule just for this one thing, but am I missing something with the way normal damage adds to STR? I've only played standard heroic games, but it looks like in a super game you'd just add +2D6 to your STR damage, but that's because you're paying points for the weapon. Or to go another direction, is there a balanced way to build a giant pair of brass knuckles/gauntlets that just do more damage due to a higher str minimum? I suppose this line of questions applies to any fairly small weapon that loses it's effectiveness in comparison to a strong fighter's bare hands.

Re: Gen Con and HERO @ the ENies PM'd you, thanks!

Re: Gen Con and HERO @ the ENies Herolover, I'm trying to remember...did you take pictures during Voodoo Treasure? I always like to have a picture of my self once I've been strung out on RPing for 20 hours. I was sitting right next to you and forgot to mention I was a board poster.

Re: An idea on making the system a bit more dangerous I've been finding in our FH games that it's not overly difficult to stun someone when their CON is somewhere in the teens and characters are rolling 2d6 for damage. We generally just use a flat x3 stun modifier so on average a character is doing 13 or so stun after defenses per hit which will essentially take a guy out in 2-3 hits or effectively one if you manage to stun him. For cannon-fodder characters knocking out or stunning them should effectively disable them. Besides, a guy with 20 strength will average 8 body with a haymaker which knocks a normal's BODY to 0. Make it a shot to the head or use bleeding rules if you want to be really brutal. I think the system is primarily designed to keep PCs alive, but realistically if your opponent is swooning around after getting smacked just say he gets finished off. Save the recovery rules and what not for major villains.