arcady

Re: The Future of Small Arms Why are we shooting BB's from orbit again? I see that pop up on page 5 of the thread but can't find where it started. Anti-matter BBs would involve a huge energy output to make - probably not a cost effective weapon. At that point, you might as well get a super tanker and ship thousands of gallons of high rated Greenhouse gasses from Venus to take out the whole planet... it's probably a cheaper venture. A modern day oil tanker sized container full of Sulfur hexafluoride has enough GWP to probably take out the Earth overnight... Anti-matter is just way too over doing it, and it takes near nuclear amounts of energy to generate even a few molecules of the stuff.

Re: Pg number for cost of PER roll bonus? I used this: Human-Anthros got: 5pts - Enhanced Sense: Tracking Smell 8pts - +2 PER for all senses, +1 more for touch (+3) Bioroids got: 7pts - Enhanced Senses: +1 PER for all senses, +2 Touch (+3 total) Somewhat giving up on the idea of being too detailed, but enhanced touch is a particular trait both of the altered-human types are known for in the setting. Original version, in tri-stat terminology, was this: Human-Anthro: Heightened Senses: Tracking Smell, Hearing, and Touch Bioroid: Heightened Senses: Touch and either Hearing or Sight I may start a thread somewhere soon when I get more into the conversion of my setting to Hero, to second check my ideas with people.

Re: The Future of Small Arms I have also been thinking of smart micro-missiles. The onboard flight computer of the missile knows where the walls are, and stops itself... Shot at an organic, upon penetrating it might dose the victim with something to either kill or induce a seizure, or cut off muscle control - depending on your desired goal... Not sure how plausible this is, it just popped into my head. It takes a lot of energy to stop a fast moving projectile... so it might not be so practical over other devices. Something that shatters on impact but the fragments are all connected by micro-wires... that might be neat... either a slice-n-dice idea, or for delivering an electric shock through a net, similar to a stun gun, but with less need to carefully aim for clothing it can penetrate...

Re: Pg number for cost of PER roll bonus? I must have scanned that page so many times and not seen that... Thanks. I knew it was 'in the book somewhere', but I wanted to figure out what to do for building a bonus to just smell, taste, and touch, so wanted to see the details. Now if I read this right, it leads to some oddball results. 3 for all senses. But for smell/taste is 2, and touch another 2 - so it ends up costing more, at 4 per +1.

I know it is 3 points per +1 to PER rolls, but where in the book is this?

Re: Would You Assassinate the King?

Re: Would You Assassinate the King?

Re: Reading FRED for the First Time You have a good set of starting books. However I would have recommended one of the FH Grimoires, and one of the two FH settings before the equipment and combat guides - given your interest in fantasy. The Grimoire will show you how to use the massive power design engine to build spells. FH covers that, but the Grimoire gives examples. The two settings, and especially Turakian Age, will show you how to put the whole package together. Turakian Age feels like 'everything good in DnD', minus everything bad... so it makes a great launching pad for a DnD gamer into Hero. As for rules... don't try to memorize the powers, skills, and so on. Just learn the basic structure of how it comes together. You can pick up the individual skills and powers over time in play. For now you just need to know how to make a skill roll, how to roll to-hit and calculate damage, managing the speed chart, Hero style rounding off, and the was Hero sets its 'break points' on divisions of 5. The first things I always teach new players are using OCV / DCV (11+OCV-3d6=DCV you hit), and rolling X or less on 3d6 to succeed at a task. Once they have that, they can play, and everything else sort of fills in over time. For -reading- the book, I'd read the basics of play, and the basics of using a skill, using a power, and for combat - skipping all the options and complexities for now. Read the powers by name as you start to build magic spells, and then the details of the ones that seem right as you do the actual building. Most of the skills have names that imply what they do, so you can leave reading the details to the first time they come up in play. The exception is Seduction and Persuasion, each of which does what the name of the other one implies (shrug). The combat manuevers are the same - name sort of implies function. With new players what I like to do is start out not using them in my tactics, but with each combat I have my NPCs try one new manuever, and when it comes up I assign a player to read the rules for it out loud, so everyone learns at the same time. I use the same trick for powers, but of course I start using them right away - so the first combat is usually 75% reading of rules...

Re: Fantasy Reproduction In the last fantasy setting I did with Elves and Orcs (both of which I no longer use), the name I had for a half-elf/half-orc was 'human'.

Re: Does anyone here play Cyberpunk HERO? Thread necromancy... These projects have since moved to: http://home.comcast.net/~brianfwong/SciFi/ and: http://www.geocities.com/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html And conversion to Hero of the setting is now underway, for which I am open to suggestions. The lifepath generator is now downloadable and can be highly customized. In addition, it contains presets for a number of different styles of Cyberpunk.

Re: The Future of Small Arms One thing about new discoveries and inventions is they always seem, after they were brought about, as if it was utterly obvious that inevitably that idea would come about. But if you look at gunpowder, it was only ever invented once in human history and there is nothing before it to imply it. It was not at all inevitable that we would ever have it. By that same token, whatever replaces it, if anything, could very well be something we are simply not able to imagine today, but after it comes about will seem obvious and intuitive. So, shrug, could be anything. That said, my own Science Fiction setting takes places roughly 250 years from now... and gunpowder based arms are largely not in use, although better technology is not really there. For my setting, which exists entirely on space stations, the concern is the danger of hull puncture. So electrical weapons, stun guns, and even drugged dartguns and yes, bows, knives and swords (vibro-blade, electro-blade, cyanide laced blade, and so on), are the weapons of the day. Switch to space however, and warfare is largely done with nukes, mass drivers (why build fancy explosives when a yugo-sized rock moving at .9C will do), and saboteur-engineers who try to get enemy populations to lose orbit and fall into the atmospheres around Earth, Mars, Jupiter, etc... And then of course, there is data and memetic warfare... Which also translates back to personal combat. Hack the enemy cyber-brain and shut off his vision, or make his cyberarm strangle himself. Or simply crash their programs leaving them confused, or tag them as trash and let the city cleaning bots come along and drag them off... Or, on a slower scale interpersonal conflict, undermine their memes and send them down delusional misperceptions of reality. But that isn't direct combat. On a planetary scale, the beauty of 'bullets' is they are just a lump of mass shoved along. Lower energy needs that the fancy rayguns. Like my note above about throwing rocks at enemy spaceships - throwing rocks at your fellow man takes less energy than throwing small pieces of the sun at him (plasma weapons). If you can throw it fast enough, it becomes deadly enough. You only start to get into energy weapons when you are seeking non-lethal weaponry, and you only need that when your goal is policing rather than killing, or you are in an environment (such as shipboard) where you have to limit the force used.

Re: Would You Assassinate the King? Not at all. History is full of people staring loaded guns down and denying they even exist, because the gun doesn't fit the frame of how they see the world. The three names I mentioned are all figures holding loaded guns to the people of their day, and with two, to the present. Truth has no value without backing by unfounded belief. Humanity puts more stock in faith than fact. It's gotten us 'shot in the head' several times throughout history, and it will continue to do so. So, no matter how much proof this character has that the 'divine' of his world is just a hasbeen writer in another world, and that his Sovereign therefore deserves no 'Divine Right of Kings' deference, no one will believe him until he can change from using facts to using superstition...

Re: Discourse on Fantasy Hero

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? I've been glancing at this. It is a -very- different form of cyberpunk than I am working with. It looks more classic-genre, 80s style - mixed with super powers. My setting is 'postCyberpunk' - a variation that began in the 90s with a rejection of such themes as 'technology will alienate' and 'megacorps will take over'. And I of course, have no presence of any form of powers in 'Mosquito', in fact I've done my best to be as 'hard science' as possible. That said, you reminded me that I need to open up my copy of Dark Champions again to look at things like resource points.

Re: Discourse on Fantasy Hero

Re: Would You Assassinate the King? Kings, Queens, and Emperors are generally seen as ruling by divine right. So most people won't act against them even when they know that the ruler is utterly insane. Thus why it often took so long even after such excess for Roman emperors to be dethroned. Though they were dethroned more often than is normal... If a civilation can tolerate Calligula and Nero, even one that only a few generations before had believed for centuries that no man should hold such power, then in a civilization with a long tradition of royalty, committing regecide won't come easy. Now, the character here in question is in a unique position. He is insane and he knows it... He knows the world only exists as the imaginings of a 'has-been writer' in some other world who merely wants to write 'entertaining stories. This is an utterly insane belief... even if true... he is likely to wonder at his sanity for believing it... and he will have a hard time convincing anyone else of it. even with proof. Galileo had proof, and it didn't help him. Darwin had proof, and it still hasn't helped him. Gore has proof, and it isn't getting him all that far... Being able to prove you are correct isn't much, because the truth doesn't set anybody free. Framing does, belief does. Belief outweighs truth everytime. So, your character might be convinced of his truth, he might even be able to prove it, but he is not going to be able to convince anyone. And therefore he's going to run smack up against the divine right of kings. Even if he manages to kill off the king, he will likely end up with his head on the end of a pole. And it may very well be his own friends who put him there. All the characters are -probably- born and raised in a society that believes in the divine right of kings. Shaking that kind of belief doesn't come easy, and something as small as friendship loyalty isn't usually going to do it. The British still can't shake it, and they've got the cast of a Jerry Springer episode on their throne...

Re: Is anything in the system correctly priced? The most abusive power in the game is on page [inset random page number here]. Which is often about as truthful as you can get. In the hand of the right player, anything is abusive. This also plays into cost balance games - in the hands of the right player, anything is too cheap or too expensive for what you can get out of it. But in the hands of a typical player trying to play 'right' - it then becomes a game of defining what is playing right. Are we playing for 'good player plays to genre' or are we playing for 'good player plays for game balance'. Those will lead to very different conclusions. In the hands of a player who keeps an eye on balance, everything is balanced perfectly. But in that player's hands, the same is true of 1E AD&D... In the hands of a player with an eye to genre, which genre matters, but most of them would have balance issues in a number of varying areas. Is it all costed out to the 'best compromise or reasonable to expect assumptions'? Generally so, or it would not have survived this long, but there are still popular sticking points.

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? By all means, and I am enjoying the discussion. It is not that I agree or disagree with anything, but for me this is somewhat uncharted territory. I know the 'feel' I want, I know how to do it in a few other systems, but I want to do it in Hero because well, its Hero and I wouldn't be in this forum if I didn't see some advantage in that. All the different ideas are helping me formulate notions in my head. Well at this point the 'players' are theoretical. I have a setting I have used in Ex Machina that I am fond of and I want to retool it to Hero due to problems in Ex Machina as a whole and the publisher being out of business, and well, a feeling that in most areas of my needs for this genre, Hero is ideal. The players will come after, when I manage to convince a few people from the DnD / MnM group to give this a try someday... Feel wise, I want this brains hackable by a trained operative with the right gear, or an expert with a stable connection. The 'cyber-brain' itself is almost ubiquitous - nearly everyone has one, though most people have very limited ones that allow them to interface with the wireless 'net' that is all around them, and enables them to experience SIN (Sensory Interface Network) recording. Here's a slightly out of date description of the net, cut from various pieces of my setting, which as I realize reading it now almost a year and a half after writing it, pre-supposes a lot of Ex Machina terminology as understood...: The above is out of date in that it places my 'Com link' in an optical implant, and the note about neural jacks not being used to access the net might not be consistent... but the theme of it seems intact. I put the last three bits in to give a little flavor of what can be done with the mind. Given my first paragraph of this post, it seems a hybrid is what I want A trained op can get a 'rig' that has the mental powers and use her skills to use those powers. A genius like laughing man has the mental powers on his own, bought as skill-talents if I remember my Hero system terminology right - mental powers that a re specifically tailored to 'hacking'. The brains themselves then have a lim or disad of being able to be hacked, rather than having focus. And the degre of this lim or disad sets how 'hackable' that given brain is. This also would not get in the way of how I perceive most 'netrunning' - which is just pure skill use of running around on that 'everpresent wave'.

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? Well when I run it in Mutants and Masterminds, 'Google' is just the means by which the knowledge skill is used. Relevancy here... I think its why I have trouble seeing mental powers with some of this. Communications is just the language skills. HD-space is just eidetic memory. Going on the net is just making a knowledge check. Making someone see something however, gets different. I could see mental illusions there. Reading their organic mind might be mind scan, but reading the cyber-brain is an open door once you have the password, and a shut door without it. Mind scan perhaps, but with some unusual exceptions. Likewise Mind Control to 'take over the computer in the cyber-brain.' I will probably put these powers into some 'hacking devices' that are acquired through cash or 'falling off the back of a shuttle craft'... and put the points burden in the skills. Although the play out still feels wrong. A skill roll merely 'turns on the power', and it is the power that determines degree of success... So that puts my thinking back to square one.

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? I think the reason mental powers really un-nerve me is that I want a person to be able to do this by training and by luck, but not easily so - by skill and not power. But perhaps also to be able to get assistance from rigs that add processing power for 'remote command' of 'cyberdolls' being adapted or also built to command of cyber-brains. Mind Control makes it a permanent and big point investment, unless I start tacking VPPs onto all skills. Perhaps I could place the power into that rig, and make it skill roll activation based...

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? I might eventually download that. First, I want to see how far I can get converting my Ex Machina setting into Hero without relying on other's tools that might alter my setting. After that, I will likely download his book so as to ensure my rule choices look 'familiar' to people. While I used Ghost in the Shell as a reference above, my flavor is very non anime. My PDF book is here: http://home.comcast.net/~brianfwong/SciFi/ I'm troubled because I like the skills idea, but worry that it might be too easy, thus too abusable in play. That said, I am leaning on a skills idea, and a limitation applied to cybernetics / cyberbrains that they can be hacked - perhaps five lims for varying 'preset' difficulties. Wide open... the max lim - you have no security and if I can make a basic check to use a computer, I can use your cyberbrain and everything it controls. Nobody has this, but I'd stat it out as a 'baseline'. This would be the -2 lim version. If your dog has wireless he could take you for a walk with this... Unsecure - you've got all the security of the WinXP of the future. Normal - future-Unix level security Secure - norm for people concerned about privacy. 'Mil/CorpSpec secure' - you've got a license to be this hack-proof. I will then put the 'wireless' into a separate disad, or lim on the brain. It is both a power, and opens up hacking you to people not wired to you...

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? I'm not favoring EDM as the 'net' I'm putting up is not an elsewhere - it is an everpresent thing. You're online constantly as you walk around and get data back from things you encounter - and you can go to 'websites', 'chatrooms', and the like fairly much as you do today. There's no 'cyberspace'. Normal use of the 'net' is simply day to day use of various knowledge skills, computer use, etc. hacking the net would simply be computer programming checks to overcome passwords. No 'cyberspace' ICE, digital monsters, etc... It just gets complex when the 'net' meets the brain... Conceptually, the Cyberbrain is a hard-drive in your head, connected to a wireless card, and a basic computer (like a PDA). If you have any cybernetics, it is also a processor for driving these and interfacing them with your organic brain. A hacker could get into it if they got past your firewall and password. If you have cyberlimbs, they could 'drive' them as the processor for that would be connected, if you have cybersenses or a SIN-recording implant, they could 'sense / feel' through you, or override your inputs and make you sense / feel something other than what is real. And of course, if you had cybereyes, they could even force you to look in certain directions or over-ride the input and make you see things.

Re: Hackable cyber-brains? That's my initial impression, but it seems problematic in a couple of areas: If all it takes is being skilled or even just the other party lacking a firewall / password... needing to buy a mental power is no longer fitting. If you do it with a rig, but the actual 'process' is essentially the same as hacking into a building security system - its more physical than mental. Mental defenses would come into play at times, but not at others... This concern is less severe than the first one, as most cyber-brains will be wired up to a live brain and thus mental powers could be justified on the basis of that live brain resisting. Finally, mental powers implies an ability to continue resisting. But what if the cyber-brain, after bing hacked, simply has it's I/O channels to the organic side shut off. If you shut off the access on the organic side, mental resistance makes sense, but if you shut it off on the computer side, it seems overcoming it would be a Programming skill issue... The above said... Ideas on ways to structure mental powers to address these concerns? Especially the first one.

Hackable cyberbrain question: Imagine a situation as in Ghost in the Shell (similar, but not identical); - Most people with cyber-assited brains can be 'hacked'. - This includes any cyber-assistance that can control motor functions. - They cannot hack into the 'organic' side of the brain save where - the cyber portion is able to control the organic portion. - a sufficiently skilled hacker can do this, but such skill is rare. - - It might require a rig of some kind to pull it off, and perhaps a password guess or codebreaking device... - Difficulty is based on a combination of the type of cyber-brain and the mental fortitude of the victim. How to build this game engine wise? - Disad for all peope with cyber-brain assistance? - special skill for hacker? Power they must buy? Also: Any thoughts otherwise on 'cyber-brains'? I am thinking the general 'cyber-brain' will involve: eidetic memory with a limitation of 'limited storage'. and a 'sense' package to allow people to 'sense' the 'net'. - which in this setting is dual layered, a web like the modern day real world, plus 'iconification' layering over reality, so that if you look at a person the 'net' will give you data on them, and two people could look at a wall and see different signs painted on it, while a third who is offline would see only the blank wall with a little 'beacon' for ID'ing the data point present there. A limited cyberbrain at a minimum would be required to control any cybernetic implants, which are rare in the setting, but cayber-brains for data are near universal.

Re: WWYD: The Perfect Partner (potentially controversial) Well first off I think the marketing campaign would fail on the coasts, in Europe, parts of Latin America, Japan, and Korea - where men don't have these "problems". But given that sex-toys for women are already popular and largely socially acceptable, I don't think this one would make any major waves. It's just a talking vibrator with legs and arms. The exact same robot, as a female, might very well face legal challenges, or at least extreme scorn (consider that there is a male version of a vibrator, and after you stop snickering over the idea... think of why you find it so 'pathetic and silly' and yet don't do that with what women buy - and no, I am not an advocate of either kind of product, I just note the double standard). Now... consider that the major business today in organized crime is sex slavery. Women and children are being shipped across global lines at an unprecedented scale - the pure numbers probably rival the old African slave trade, although the percentages are much lower. The major source of the problem is that many countries refuse to legalize easily economical access to sex. While you can find slave brothels in the alleys of every American city, you will be harder pressed to find them in Germany - where the sex workers are liscensed, unionized, and given regular health checks. Why do I seem to side track like that? Because it's really on point. A toy like this goes to that same demand. If you think women don't like sex as much as men, consider that DNA keeps showing in almost every culture on Earth that 33% of children do not have the father the mother claims is the father... Further, go read the book 'Chicken' - an autobiography of a male -HETROSEXUAL- prostitute... The demand is there. A robot toy would lesson that demand. It might help prevent a lot of men from being 'cuckolded'. In fact, a female version should be made to help meet the demand of the male or lesbian consumer. It is however, not a relationship. No matter how well it seems to parrot emotion - it is not a living being and not a true care taker. Much of infidelity is driven by a need for additional companionship, and it will do nothing to stem that. The only thing that could drive that down would be a re-examination of artificial concepts like marriage and monogamy. In my own science fiction setting these multiple demands where met by the bioware industry. In effect the genetically engineered 'sub-human' slaves. Bioroids and Anthropomorphs that could be rapid grown, worked to death, and recycled (use the biomass of the old as food for the next generation). Such creatures were placed in a number of less ethical nations as well as in extra-territorial regions such as 'off shore platform' and space stations. The setting in fact revolves around the struggle of these creatures to throw off their masters in a successful revolution in the outer solar system, and then to struggle against the 'slave mind' programming that was used to attempt to make them compliant. A bioroid has an advantage over a robot in that it will have an organic brain. It is therefore capable of intuition, original ideas, and emotion. It is not simulating or parroting communication, but actually communicating. It is not limited to only what it has been taught to do. It can learn to love and truly understand the needs of its owner. And when you're done with it, you can have it birth and then raise it's replacement, and then feed it to the upgrade... But back to the robot hypo. I don't see it as making any waves of any notice. It would be just a 'shrug' and move on sort of thing. NPR the other day announced some research that managed to clone sperm cells from other cells in, I think, mice or rats. The idea is to move the tech to humans to allow infertile men to have children. But the announcer noted that it would also allow lesbian couples to have a child with both women as biological parents. Scientificially, we are probably only a decade from no longer needing males. Of course even if culture ever shifted to not desire them, they would still be a good thing to have around in case of a technology failure. But if you coupled that science with this robot - you could mimic some of the concepts. But it's never going to give you much more than you already get with a vibrator.