arcady

Re: Disadvantage based XP A -character- might not want it coming into play, but a -player- had better want it to, otherwise they should not have put it on the sheet.

Re: Disadvantage based XP I would look at doing something to avoid as a player ignoring the disad, or refusing a plot thread that involved it, or otherwise ensuring it does not enter game play. That's very different that working around it, or struggling against it - in game and in play. Essentially, it is not different than any other issue of bad roleplaying. As a GM, I expect players to create and drive the majority of the plots, I'm just the facilitator. Players who take an active hand, and who bring up and roleplay with their disads are the ones I want to reward. A player who tries to avoid the disad should never have been given points for it to begin with.

In 7th Sea you have an XP system that gives XP for bringing your weakness into play. If your weakness shows up during the session, you get one bonus point. In effect, players in that system are encouraged to work the game into a situation where their weakness comes up and hinders them. I want to bring that into Hero. I'm thinking of replacing the two parts about roleplay XP with notes on Disads. The idea would thus make sure disads became a part of the game, and characters could thus grow around them. Something like this: +1 for bringing a disad into play during the session. -1 for doing something to avoid letting the disad into play. It needs refinement, and general thoughts to see how to steer it and how best to use the concept. Ideas or opinions?

Re: Turakian Age Review posted to Enworld Fair shows up three times. Looking at them from the pov of dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=fair This one is valid: there's also a kingdom ruled by a fair and noble lich 6. 1. Having or exhibiting a disposition that is free of favoritism or bias; impartial: a fair mediator. 2. Just to all parties; equitable: a compromise that is fair to both factions. These two can go either way: After that we get the usual fair for the DnD-genre The cultures are a lot richer than the usual DnD fair fair: 8: of no exceptional quality or ability; "a novel of average merit"; "only a fair performance of the sonata"; "in fair health"; "the caliber of the students has gone from mediocre to above average"; "the performance was middling at best" [syn: average, mediocre, middling] fare: 4. Condition or state of things; fortune; hap; cheer. What fare? what news abroad ? --Shak. The intention with its use in the last two is 'character' or 'nature', and I'm not convinced on either spelling.

Re: Turakian Age Review posted to Enworld In what ways would you say it wasn't for you from the description? I'm wondering, cause I wonder if it's something about the product, or about how I described the product because my intent was not to turn people off of it.

Review of Turakian Age. I may poke fun at its similarity to DnD, but I liked it, and gave it high marks.

Re: Hero Needs Reviewers!! Review of Turakian Age. I may poke fun at its similarity to DnD, but I liked it, and gave it high marks.

Re: Is Ambidexterity a little expensive for what it does? Two weapon fighting is only one point more than ambidexterity - and for that one point you get everything players are going to want when they mistakeningly look at ambidexterity: the ability to make Drizzt clones... Given that, and how much more it does than Ambidexterity, it's probably too cheap. Sure, outside of combat you still have an off hand penalty, but if they're going for drizzt, do they really know there's a game outside of combat?

Re: FH Grimoire 2: Who has it? I don't have a take on Grimoire I yet, other than that if it comes up having the same problem once I get to looking at it in detail, I will see the same issue. I scanned it enough to be able to do the grimoire II review, but have yet to read it. During the half off sale I bought a lot of Hero books and have been going through them one by one. I'm doing reviews now, but focusing on the books that are newer or less covered. Posting to rpg.net: it does take time, typically posting a review the same day to both sites will cause it to show up one to two weeks later on rpg.net. I did NOT post my grimoire II review there yet, because I wanted a day to read it and see if any comments showed up on it that made me need to correct it. You can edit your reviews on enworld, but not at rpg.net. The only real reason to post reviews at enworld is to try and convince the DnD people to change game systems... rpg.net will frankly reach a more friendly audiance, but you have the delay issue.

Re: Is Ambidexterity a little expensive for what it does? Perhaps the counter to this is the question of whether or not two weapon fighting is too cheap.

Re: Non-humans in a mostly human world: social limitation or distinctive features? The social lim aspect would be a general one applying to all non humans in roughly the same manner - you're not human, you're a second class member of society. Doesn't matter if you're a cat, a dog, or a drake. The only few exceptions are the "races" humans fear - dragons and pure faerie. As a collective whole, the ten percent of society that isn't human is looked down upon, and most of the terms and names for them are derogatory in nature and origin. In 'the empire' for example, there simply isn't a word for the animal-bred races that isn't somewhat demeaning. They're called beastlings if they look more animal, or manling if they look more human (think classic anime cat girl), or just reffered to by the name of the animal they come from as if they were that animal (in my story 'Moving On', Chaire is simply reffered to as a cat).

Re: Why is there no Temperature level 0? Not only is zero not an advanced concept, but trying to do math -WITHOUT- it is just confusing... Looking at that FAQ, when they subtracted 2 from 2 to get -1, I just had to stop and reboot my brain for a second - cause I got stuck in a system crash over trying to get that to flow smoothly in my head...

Re: FH Grimoire 2: Who has it? My review is now up: Review of Fantasy Hero Grimoire II

Re: Hero Needs Reviewers!! Review of Fantasy Hero Grimoire II I wanted to rate this one higher, but I got tripped up on what for me became a key issue. I suspect my next review will get a higher score, given what I'm reading next. I've actually got three more books in the plan, and then we'll see what happens from there. Eosin: you can edit reviews at enworld, and one of the options it will give you is to delete them. Use that to get rid of the extra review.

Re: Possible solution for common GM problems You can always play with the temperature rules for environment when they wear armor. Leather will keep you warm in cold, but iron won't. Both will make hot weather worse. Possibly multiply the temperature rating by 1.5 when an individual is 'over dressed'. Consider it like a +1/2 advantage on the temperature rating, and give another +1/2 (for a multiple of 2) for humidity. Fahla, my setting, is often both hot and humid in the core areas of focus, so I'll probably use something like that, in addition to an increase in price due to needing to get many armors imported. There is a note in Fantasy Hero about environment, and also one about imposing penalties for sleeping in your gear.

Re: FH Grimoire 2: Who has it? I've had it since the day it shipped. Overall good, maybe a bit high powered, but on backing that I found Grimoire one also seemed a bit high powered. A lot of spells have active costs of 60, 70, 80, or a 100 or more, when I always assumed an active cost of 30 ought to be normal for Fantasy Hero. I've got a review coming, but it's been slow - it's hard to break down a powers book for a review.

As part of the armor debate in the Fantasy Hero rules I started looking at the environement rules, and caught the note on page 297 about temperature level 0. By the book, you're always losing REC and END no matter what the temperature, because there is no temperature level 0. So I figured that had to be fixed in the errata somewhere. It wasn't, but in the FAQ I found this: http://www.herogames.com/SupportFAQs/rules/THE%20ENVIRONMENT.htm This seems like a very funky change. Why not just say 'Oh, yeah, there is a temperature 0 after all, it's whatever is normal.'

Re: hero vs rolemaster Yeah but the same thing can be said about Hero - I rarely if ever ran a super hero combat that took less than three hours, and had one go up to twelve - ending only when I got sick of it and cheated. And those were all normal skirmishes, and not battles. Fantasy Hero on the other hand, lacks most of the issues that slow up Champions.

Re: Help me find flaws with my Magic System So perhaps I should make a list of say three things that each of the four elements has as exclusive to itself. Each of them presently has one such thing - the physical element. Only Fire mages can produce and manipulate fire, only Water mages can produce and manipulate water, and so on. Adding two meta physical categories to each might make them much more distinct. On the other hand, I could sharpen the skill penalty on casting in poor effects to perhaps -4 rather than just -2. Doing of both of these options is a third choice I could go for.

Re: Possible solution for common GM problems

Re: Possible solution for common GM problems At the end of the day, if players refuse to play their characters 'reasonably' as you see it, you can sit down and discuss it with them, and if you have to dock their future XP over it. Hopefully in the discussion you will be able to avoid the XP measure by reaching a common understanding - which means you need to start without attacking their assumptions over the game and presenting your cause in as friendly a way as possible. If you tell them how their PCs feel, your going to get trouble and resistance. If you can get Endurance costs, DCV mods, and other factors to line up against them though, you can do all that in fair play.

Another one for the Fantasy Hero Hero Designer prefabs. I went through armor and cleaned out extra data, made the shields shorter in descriptions, and multiplied all costs by 10 to match the Silver Pieces standard of FH and Turakian Age. This time I -DID NOT- add the Barding and Siege Weapons that show up in the FH book at the end of the armor section - figuring they really belong in their own categories I left what was in FHarmor.hdp as is without adding new stuff.

Re: FH Adventuring Gear.hdp - fixed costs, included missing third of equipment I could, but what's your source for them? If it's not one of the Fantasy Hero books all I'd be able to do is give my comments on the style of how you entered them. The biggest differences between my file here and the older one were: multiplied all costs by 10, to put it on the SP standard rather than GP standard. I did that at first not realizing you'd put all the costs in decimals when I set my campaign to SP and didn't set up any decimals place. After fixing my campaign settings and seeing your prices, I kept with the multiplier anyway to match the equipment files in the Turakian Age download and because FH assumes SP as the normal currency. switched everything to Custom Power - this was a very fast change actually, done in HomeSite with the seach and replace tool. After doing a quick search and replace when you load it into HeroDesigner it removes all the unused fields from the XML, and adds in new ones for how custom power works. I also did a search and replace to set all costs END and all show active points fields to 'No'. Then I used Homesite to set all Name fields to just "" - so that only 'Display' has the name of the object, and it thus gets listed only once on the sheet.

Re: hero vs rolemaster Rolemaster is so absurdely unreal it is just silly. The critical charts have no basis in anything remotely resembling serious gaming or a practical look at how things happen. Hero is a bit more abstracted, and this actually helps it to be more real - it isn't so typed into silly premade results and you can describe what goes on giving it a greater level of realism. Rolemaster is the most unreal and bizzarre RPG I've seen in print, to be frank about it.

Re: Possible solution for common GM problems I'd never tell a player how their character feels, unless some power was being used upon them, but I might tell them the conditions and let the player fill in the emotion. You're hot, sweaty, starting to itch, and low on energy. However, In Hero, those conditions are a factor of the Endurance stat. If they're at full Endurance, and I tell them they're low on energy they're going to tell me I'm wrong, and they will be right. If the game engine never simulates the wear and tear of armor, yet has a mechanic for simulating wear and tear which is expressely not triggered by armor, then if I claim wear and tear without triggering that mechanic I'm somewhat out of line. Perhaps I would be better off using a system of long term endurance which drains them down. Which means I need to find the right numbers if it is a concern. Roman soldiers may have marched all day in armor - but they probably slept hard and felt groggy the next day, and if attacked near days end of wearing that armor probably did not fight at their best. Having been there with modern armor I can attest to that feeling and my thanks at not facing combat after a day of it. As for study, here you need to face up to pre-TV generation people not all having ADD. Studying all day long is not actually all that unreasonable.