assault

3 hours ago, GDShore said:

The only way that this happens, is if the "Dragon" had for seen his/her own death and prepared for same. Setting up a replacement government to handle things until they should return. As Doc and Assault suggest, anarchy will reign and fracturing will occur. The bigger the kingdom/empire is the more fractures as every two-bit bureaucrat makes a grab for power. You would likely see decades of anarchy as one after another warlord made a power grab only to be replaced by some one even more ruthless than they were. Maybe a hundred years or more.

I was thinking that the Establishment would retain power through new forms. In fact that was kind of the joke.

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

In Hero's Turakian Age game world, the city-state of Tatha Gorel has been ruled for centuries by a dragon, Scauromdrax the Magnificent. However, Scauromdrax has proven to be such a wise and just king, rulers from other lands have been known to seek him out for advice on matters of statecraft. This presents the opposite problem for PCs if they're misled into treating the king as just another "Big Nasty Monster." Slaying, or trying to slay, a realm's lawful ruler, respected both domestically and internationally, is likely to cause a stigma that will follow them a long way for a long time.

My idea was that the Dragon Monarchy, having existed for centuries, would be seen as the traditional way of doing things, complete with a conservative elite that was doing very well out of it. It wasn't their children who were being eaten, after all.

1 hour ago, Old Man said:

 

Sheep, hens, cows, a handful of horses (including one stubborn and gullible cart horse), a goat, and a raven, and a donkey.

And dogs?

Could go full Animal Farm, I suppose.

Ooh. And a Lion with religious pretensions. "Hi Aslan..."

Of course he is still a predator.

Exactly.

I could labour the metaphor even more by including wererats and werepigs among the potential oligarchs.

This is partly a "here's my cool idea I might never get to use" post, but I think there is a more general point.

So... the situation is:

For centuries, the Dragon-King has ruled the Kingdom. By ruling, of course, I mean appointing human puppet rulers, sitting on ever increasing piles of treasure, and eating regular sacrifices, including the obligatory virgins. You know, politics.

What happens when some idiots (guess who!) kill the Dragon?

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So far, so good. I'd read the book/watch the movie. Why not?

From a game perspective, there's a bit of a problem though. Dragons are Big Nasty Monsters. They don't generally get killed off early in a campaign. This is more obvious in zero-to-hero games (like D&D), but even in Hero, killing off the biggest, most powerful monster near the start seems a bit off. If nothing else, it means that the PCs can do this, even if they need help, and that suggests they can handle nearly all subsequent threats too.
 

In combat, anyway - and that reservation makes all the difference.

(I kind of want to run it in D&D though, to melt the faces of the "Lawful Good is Lawful Stupid" crowd.)

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For what it's worth, I'd see the Dragon monarchy being replaced by an oligarchic republic, headed by some of the Dragon's former proxies. (It's been centuries since there was last a human king - nobody cares about the old dynasty, except for those who do.)

 This might not go down well with some of the PCs, unless they just want to ride off into the sunset. I'd probably build in some hooks to encourage them to stick around.

Any thoughts? Feedback?

Definitely not a Tolkien thing.

I'm a little unimpressed with all Dwarves being Lawful Good, given that Elves are usually given a probability of being Neutral. I'd extend that to Dwarves as well.

I treat Gnomes as a subrace of Dwarves.

I call them "Burrowing Dwarves".

No real place for them in my current game though.

I appreciate all the input. For what it's worth, this is the same world that has ornithopters being launched from Stone Age technology (Melanesian/Polynesian etc) sailing canoes. And there are Halfling sized people living on an island which is totally not Flores.

Mechanically, I will, in the end, make my own decisions, of course. But I appreciate the suggestions - I wouldn't have asked for them if I didn't.

And yes, besides my "here's my cool idea! What do you think?" motive, I am concerned with any sensitivities involved: we live in the era of culture wars, where disrespect and edgelordism is rewarded, and where respect needs to be asserted against them. (And that can lead to a measure of hypersensitivity.) In this context, I chose to err on the side of respect. (How woke of me! Clearly I am some kind of communist bed-wetter...)

So it looks like I've mostly got it OK.

Thank you.

And yes, the Flores Hobbits are coming. Think North Sentinel Island with very small elephants, not the Shire... Don't get me started on Komodo Dragons, yet, anyway.

So, I'm toying with adding a new area to my game: the Pearl Islands.

This is a small group of islands noted both for the high quality pearls grown there (hence the name) and the population of Sirens that make them dangerous.

There is a small human population - the Pearl Islanders I am talking about.

I'm thinking that this group experience hereditary deafness, giving them immunity to the Sirens' calls. They communicate with sign language, which is also understood by some of the merchants who trade for the pearls, and by some of the Sirens.

Marriage outside their community can give rise to hearing children, who are at risk from the Sirens. They can also intermarry with the more friendly Sirens (merfolk), giving rise to aquatic half-breeds who, if they can hear, are resistant to the Sirens' calls, and well equipped to harvest the pearls.

So, how to build them?

Within their own community, their deafness is no big deal. However, they still have trouble communicating in poor light (at night!) and may not be able to detect and respond to certain dangers. They also have obvious difficulties in communicating with outsiders.

Clearly some kind of Disadvantage is appropriate. Not as bad as if they were Deaf within a hearing society, but there are things they can't do.

On the plus side, they are immune to the Sirens' effects.

That's the first necessary build.

The half-breeds aren't really necessary, and can be based on any aquatic humanoids. Again, they have the immunity to the Sirens' effects, being part Siren themselves, but are otherwise stock demi-humans, with both some extra abilities and limitations. Straightforward enough.

The hearing children would be standard humans. I'm not sure how they would survive on the Islands, which suggests they are rare, or living off the Islands, perhaps with their Deaf parents. This suggests my next point.

I suspect that the Islanders (the ones living on the Islands) would be somewhat genetically isolated, or more bluntly, inbred. The interbreeding with the Sirens would assist with this, but I doubt it would occur frequently enough to eliminate it entirely. Maybe over time it would have an impact on the small population, gradually shifting the population away from a pure human one to one of demi-humans.

Any thoughts, ideas or condemnations? I am, after all, walking through the "disability" minefield, and representing a Deaf culture from outside.

Urgh. A cool fantasy idea, but I may not be the right person to write it... I may need to bowdlerise it somewhat.

If you want to be fancy, try Action Comics #1. That gives you Superman, Zatara and Slam Bradley, who is Batman without a mask.

Add Captain America, the Human Torch and Namor if you want to extend your range.

On 5/15/2023 at 4:14 AM, batguy said:

Thanks,which six attributes should i use?

Why six attributes?

You need the attributes that matter. That doesn't necessarily involve "characteristics".

What distinguishes one character from another? That's what matters.

From your past posts, I gather you are a big DC fan. What distinguishes Batman from Superman, Aquaman, Robin, Catwoman, the Penguin, Lex Luthor or the Joker?

What could possibly go wrong?

If you were using In The Labyrinth, once you had allocated stats, you had to pick Talents and spells based on Int.

It was kind of a double points system. Buy Int with points, buy talents/spells with Int.

4 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Because even Villains & Vigilantes, and Superhero 2044, had random tables for powers. From what I remember champions started as homebrew rules to make Superhero 2044 playable. George McDonald did quite a lot of work.

Superhero 2044 didn't use random tables, at least in the core rulebook.

George acknowledged the influence of Wayne Shaw in allocating powers.

7 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

The game didn't lean into the toy commercial aspect, but it kept leaning into the bad slapstick of the cartoon instead of the drama of the movies. 

I'm not sure how you would write a game based on the antics of Peter Venkman, arch-sleaze.

There's a reason why defining your goals is step one.

Write them down, and organize them.

Defining your goals means deciding exactly what you are trying to do, what kind of superheroes you are talking about, and so on.

It's the point at which you go from Vague Idea In Your Head, to something practical written on paper.

16 minutes ago, greypaladin_01 said:

Unless I am misunderstanding something and the 15 points extra is adding 2 levels not one?   So the multipliers should then be x2.5 and x3?

 

That's the issue. An extra "level" is half the initial cost. So 30 points gets you two levels.

I'm just sitting around having a beer, so check the rulebook, but I'm pretty sure I'm right.

7 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

- opening up the 'free-form" concept of characters not having to be beholded to class archtypes.   - Although how does this jive with the Package Deals.  I assume they are there more just for reference and to help people with general concepts?

The key word in Package Deal is Deal.

Early on, there were Package Bonuses, which offset some of the cost of the package, and even some of the Characteristics you needed to buy. In return, the Package would include stuff that such a character should have, but wouldn't be all that useful in most games (and thus wouldn't be bought if you were strictly minmaxing). Such bonuses were eliminated later on.

The remaining benefit of using Packages is speed of character building. You don't have to plough through huge lists of stuff deciding what you need. Instead, you just pick a Package, buy appropriate Characteristics, and add a bit of stuff to make your character an individual. Much faster. If I was at home I would build a character in real time to show you how it works.

6 hours ago, greypaladin_01 said:

Recently started reading through Champions 3rd edition out of historic curiosity, having never looked at the rules from before The BBB era.   Looking over Martial Arts, they are very different, but simpler in a good way, from what I am used to and I need some help with making sense of the mechanic.

 

Specifically the way it is described in the "Adding Damage" section on pg 75 (using Green Dragon for the example) does not match the actual Green Dragon character sheet.  I am trying to figure out if I am missing something or if this is one of the classic "math errors" from the older editions.

 

For reference to those that don't have the book my question follows this:   I know there are rules against putting too much off a book text in the forum so I am trying to just generalize for the sake of the math. 

 

- Character has 15 STR and Martial Arts with 1 level of damage increase according to both the Example and Character Sheet. 

 

- The example shows that this gives the character 6d6 punch and 7.5d6 kick

- the character sheet shows that the character has 7d6 punch and 9d6 kick

 

Based off how the rules are saying to calculate everything the example version seems to be the correct one, but the main book and campaign book for 3rd edition have Green Dragon character sheets showing the larger damage dice.  Does anyone have insight into the discrepancy?

 

Check how many points he spent on Martial Arts.

If it's 22, 6/7.5 is correct.

If it's 30, 7.5/9 is correct.

Related to the combat system, just like Hero's standard humans are 2 metres.

I still like the 4.35 mile wide coins and tiny humans. Was the problem with the units in the PDF, or a Duke's phone issue?

9 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

We did that for our DI and Robot Warriors games as well.  It just seemed like it was tough to build a functional skill-based character on 75-100 total points.  You could easily spend 50-75 on Characteristics if you weren't careful, or even if you were. 

I'm planning on building some Fantasy Hero characters to test this soon.

My gut feeling is that "a Package, required Characteristics and a bit of stuff to individualise the character" would probably work, but there are obvious questions with spellcasters, not to mention characters that want to buy a bunch of Packages and the Characteristics to match. Requiring them to suck up the Disadvantages needed to balance the points is fine, but once every character is built like this it makes more sense to bump up the point total.

Everyone wants to play an edgelord...

33 minutes ago, dmjalund said:

how would you do magic?

Pre-generated "pick from a list", with the original system behind it in "another book". (Not necessarily a literal book. More probably a file.)

A loss in universality, but a gain in playability.

There would need to be enough explanation to be able to use the spells. That would pad up the page count.

New variant options like repriced Disadvantages could go into Espionage II without causing too much angst. Just mark the whole thing Optional and you're good.

Of course my hidden agenda is to leech off all this work to build a shorter "my version" of Fantasy Hero.

I'm not a fan of introducing another set of Disadvantage values. Two is quite enough, if not too many.

6 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

 But then you see in the old movies that all the heroes were about the same body type, and nearly interchangeable, except the protagonist had that one talent, or bucket of PRE that made him the leader.

True for most superheroes too, especially during the Golden Age.

Ignoring guns for the moment: Package Deals are a big thing. If you have a tight focus - CIA agents, in the case of Espionage, it's easy to fix. But if you have a broader focus, things get weird. You get duplication and potentially double dipping.

Suppose you have a package with characteristic requirements. Suppose your packages include duplicated skills (Weapons Familarity is likely). Suppose your package includes Disadvantages of the same category of those in other ones.

Characters will need to be recalculated because of those.

It's a pain, but can be handled. You just need to handle them.

For military use, scythe blades were typically set on their handles polearm style, not sticking out to the side as in their civilian use.

Still a rather dodgy improvised weapon but not entirely useless.