austenandrews

Re: Hero System for Horror gaming You just know Daphne would pick Shaggy, if no one was watching. I've had plenty of success running horror in Hero. The Orrorsh mechanic David mentions is great, but for the most part I prefer simulation to immersion (to use the computer game terms) when it comes to lengthy roleplaying. For that reason I never used any Hero versions of CoC SAN or similar genre-enforcing constructs. Minor modifications to basic Hero works just fine. Of course for any horror game, the GM has to be committed to creating the proper mood and the players have to be comfortably on board.

Re: From the mouths of babes When my kids make up adventure stories, they come out sounding like video games. Which is funny, because we don't play video games at our house (except an occasional Flash game at a web site like Nick Jr.). My four-year-old made a book (stapled and everything) the other day about a kid who takes a dangerous journey through mountain tunnels. At the end he meets an evil robot and beats it by draining its gasoline tanks. My older son used to make up stories about Everything-Proof Man and his enemy Half Man (half human, half robot). Usually EPM's spinosaurus mount wound up defeating Half Man's T-rex mount.

Re: Space Pirates? For that matter a pirate might be able to hide the mass change and other evidence of intrusion, if he was careful and knew exactly how the system works. Or use a drone to spoof a clean monitoring signal and make off with the whole ship (you could build another scenario around just obtaining the algorithm for a clean signal). Or robot barges could come in convoys and one of them could be infiltrated. Or you could stage a meteor accident. Or there could be a cryo-frozen crew and the pirates have to be finished before they wake. Or fierce security robots could intervene. Definitely no shortage of possibilities.

Re: Space Pirates? Realistically speaking, boarding a spaceship in transit (that doesn't want to be boarded) is potentially harder/more dangerous than boarding an airplane in flight. You could get around it by making space laws requiring rescue actions as a route to Trojan horse boarding. The real thievery would come in or near ports. It wouldn't be unlike how the mob regularly snags cargo shipments from the airport tarmac. Unmanned cargo barges might be a good weak point, as far as secrecy goes. Bear in mind, though, that technologically it's fairly trivial (a) for ports to remotely monitor a robot ship on a continuous basis and ( for a robot ship to continuously or periodically monitor its own mass and sound an alarm if it changes. So it may not be as simple as just clamping onto the hull and carving a cargo door. In fact it may be easier to sneak aboard a crewed ship, which must make allowances for random human activity, as opposed to "big dumb object" robot ships that should be almost entirely static.

Re: Help request with new power Or come to think of it, Suppress might be more appropriate.

Re: Daya Clayton, Wonder Woman in the Pulp era No invisible biplane?

Re: Help request with new power Flight Drain, Leaves Enough To Hover?

Re: HP Lovecraft movies

Re: How hard is your science ficiton? To be honest, I don't care for a lot of "diamond hard" SF as it tends to adhere to current knowledge rather more slavishly than I think is realistic. It can make for a thought-provoking read, but I'm not sure I'd want to spend a lot of game time worrying about details analogous to limiting the speed of a 21st century naval vessel based on the max feasible sail area given 18th century textile science.

Re: "Neat" Pictures I like it. Very minimalist.

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help Come on, now. They had them beat in style nine ways to Sunday.

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help Remember too that far-reaching commerce was not unknown. Just because a culture can't make bronze weapons doesn't mean it doesn't have access to bronze weapons.

Re: Real Life Egyptian Tomb Adventure! Bummer, I'm curious to hear if it's any good.

Re: The use of accents/voices in your game Long ago we had a dwarf who sounded like Sean Connery. I guess that counts.

Re: "Neat" Pictures The mind boggles! Remind me never to show you any of my drawings.

Re: Micronauts Art I had to look closer to see his head.

Re: The use of accents/voices in your game I don't generally have "races" in my fantasy games, but I do give different nations a distinctive accent. Last campaign I used American (midwest), British (various), Scottish (non-highland), Irish and Italian accents. They definitely lend flavor to each nation and allow the players to immediately recognize an NPC's origin, which would generally be the case in real life as well.

Re: Planets not orbiting stars I wonder what it would take to snag one of those puppies and put it into orbit around one's home star.

Re: Planets not orbiting stars You know they're remaking it, right?

Re: Hyperspace Help If you're looking for a reason to prohibit it, I'd say it just doesn't work. If you posit some sort of massive damage or something to discourage it, five gets you ten the players will use it as a weapon at every opportunity.

Re: Real Life Egyptian Tomb Adventure! That looks way cool.

Re: Help with a new campaign. If the Disads are things like "Can't Stand Sunlight" or "Must Obey the Computer" or "Shines Like a Beacon On Alien Scanners," the choice might make a little more sense. Besides, I don't see any indication that the non-suped characters aren't LTL.

Re: Help with a new campaign. Depends on what the Disads are.

Re: How effective do you feel weapons should be Of course if one looks at RL technology, offense is pretty much always going to be stronger than defense. We're close to the capability of pinpoint-vaporizing almost any known material. That's why armor of all types (for vehicles, personnel, buildings, etc.) is and will probably always be a secondary defense. At present force field-like technology is entirely in the realm of rubber science; and there's no reason to think that if we do develop FF tech, it will behave any differently than armor in that respect. At the same time, when we speculate about advanced space travel, we almost have to assume some pretty serious defensive capabilities. The energies one has to handle at near-c and/or in extreme stellar conditions are way beyond anything we're even close to. In which case, maybe it's not so outrageous to think that a warship could repel a ground-zero nuclear blast. Just thinking out loud.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Hey, give those back!