arcady

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds Do we know they are 'not selling'? Are Hero's sales of its settings any worse than the industry norm for non-*** product in porportion to their rules? If GURPS sells X:Y ratio of rules to settings, is the rate for Hero known to be X:(Y/Z)? I've always gathered that Hero's settings did rather well with fans of Hero. If there's a problem, its that there aren't enough Hero fans. Let's face it, Munchkin Realms is -not- bought by probably over 90% of DnD players. Why bother, if the GM already has a copy or you're playing is Goth-Lands, Bland-hawk, Munchkeron, or one of a thousand and one other ***/DnD settings... In the DnD groups I've been with usually only the most -hardcore- of us buy anything beyond a PHB. I've got a pool of about 30 DnD gamers on hand, and I only know of 4 purchases of settings in there, and one of those sold his back to the store. Two of them are ultra DnD geeks - if it has a WotC label on it they own it. The last is me and that's as I was one of 5 GMs... Certainly lack of flash works against impulse purchases - and that effects the core rules too The core rulebook -IS- too big. In my group, only one other player has been willing to buy it, and he plans to sell it back. Everyone else just feels it is too big and too pricey and they're not willing to settle for a 'half the rules' book like Sidekick. About half of these people are long time Hero fans. Oddly, the one who bought it was new to Hero - but he's also an impulse buyer who sells about half his entire life possessions off on eBay every month... Last Wednesday I did get two people in my Ex Machina game to possibly be interested in getting Sidekick, but only after I pointed out that Hero has local offices and they might be able to cash in on a damaged copy next time it shows up on the website... The main book is still just too big. It is visually imposing. It is not the only RPG in it's price range, in fact GURPS 4e is more, but it 'looks worse' because of the physical presense of that masive volume. It's almost as big as my unabridged new Black's Law Dictionary... (and it has the same basic color...). Perhaps the people who would buy settings are buying these settings...? Do we know one way or the other? Personally, I've even bought Hero settings for genres I refuse to use Hero for, as I like the settings Hero puts out... Like I said for my review of Turakian Age (A genre I do use Hero for), it did DnD better than DnD does. It captured that subgenre of fantasy in a more playable and enjoyable manner. I found Turakian age exciting, full of detail, and yet highly consistant both internally and to the 'action gamer fantasy' genre that I tend to call 'DnD genre'. A lot of past settings that worked at its level of detail lost the 'DnD feel', but this one had more DnD than DnD did... and yet also let me make rich characters that I didn't have to 'slot out' my internal logic processor to be able to use. I didn't get that impression at all from either of the fantasy settings, nor the default supers setting. V-age is thin, but focused, and that works just fine for its genre. There are large expanses out there that are undetailed, but that is common in setting books - even the top settings in the gaming hobby are like that. I've got all the setting I need for several campaigns in VA, TA, and Champions (if I was willing to use Hero for supers). I don't like the -feel- of Champions, and I don't like the meta-verse that ties the Hero settings together, nor the over-presence of caucasians in T-Age, but if I didn't have those concerns they would be ideal choices. All the things I need for ready gaming are there. I'd need the same work for a Munchkin Realms campaign, unless I started at around level 16-20+. And if I used the Champions setting I'd have a wealth of NPCs that is unmatched even by using Marvel or DC... If I want to 'sit down and run' I don't buy a setting, I buy a module. I didn't like the aliens module in Fantasy Adventures, but otherwise that was a pack of modules any GM could sit down and run - setting regardless if subgenre of fantasy matches. I think this is what people buy Modules for, not Settings. People -DO- buy settings to get all of that swordmakers detail. Otherwise you can go just fine with modules and home adventures without ever noting the setting. Settings are not intended for 'instant use' they are intended as toolsets to give players character backdrop and ideas, and to tell GMs how to lay in their adventures and what else they can do within the chosen framework. They also stand as answers to all the wierd questions that pop up in a game, such as 'how easily can I find a guy who makes swords in this town?' Or from my game last week 'Hey, can we search this guy's neural buffer without a warrant?' and 'what's the law for unionizing here?' A setting is there to keep you from going 'uh...' when something odd like that pops up as suddenly relevant to the game. Settings are the tools for building adventures and characters that fit a theme. Not the actual adventure or character. That is true even with WotC and WW's material. Otherwise, if you want ready to run, you go for modules.

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds With Tina Turner singing the theme song no less!

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds My reviews of both Ex Machina, Turakian Age, and a number of on-topic Hero items are all on rpg.net. Go here: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/search-review.phtml and enter 'arcady' under the 'reviewer name' field. For a while I was officially reviewing books for Hero, but then I fell behind and haven't caught back up yet.

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

Re: Does anyone here play Cyberpunk HERO?

Re: Does anyone here play Cyberpunk HERO? I'm running a postCyberpunk game right now using the Ex Machina system. I've got a setting here: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/ And a lifepath generator here: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html I'd adopt the above to Hero in a flash given the right tools to do so. Back when CyberHero came out I heard nothing but complaints about it - especially with regards to the netrunning rules and their use of extra dimensional movement and needing points to buy programs. I prefer a realistic net over a Gibsonian net; one that takes the way info actually flows and is controlled online and just moves it through a speed up, greater globalization, and a neural interface. I personally can't stand the 'overly idealistic nature' of so many other games / genres as used by gamers. Cyberpunk lets me portray realisticly motivated and acting people - some gamers end up thinking I'm being dark, but I'm not. I just grew up a little closer to the streets than the typical gamer profile suggests... postCyberpunk is much like Cyberpunki, but without the obsession over Japan, lifetime employing corps, cyberware, and the idea of total collapse. It is still oppressively dark, but more int he sense that you have to deal with 'perfect societies' that are anything but, outsourcing, human trafficking, personalizaed information that is a bit too personal and omnipresent, and so on. Wikipedia has some great information on the subtle differences. At present post/Cyber/Tranhumanism is my preffered genre, if only because I've managed to get a wealth of ideas for it in the development of my setting and it fits so well with my studies from my recently finished degree in Political Science / Criminal Justice.

Re: Lack of Fully Developed Worlds

Re: Background Well for the right genres, you can use a generator. I've got a Cyberpunk one ready here: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html You could use it as a launching pads for ideas. Given time, I would adopt a fantasy version as well.

Re: Anthropomorphic/Furry HERO Resources My postCyberpunk setting features two kinds of 'almost furries': Human Anthros - humans with animal DNA to spice them up. think 'anime catgirl' as one visual for lack of a better example. Built as 'toys' for humanity, the majority of them were a violation of a Japanese patent held by 'Genki Neko' (happy cat) and within 'UN controlled space' their existance is now illegal as a result of a WTO ruling - so they've floaded the outer system's independant nations and brought with them the psych issues of races of people engineered to be 'passive toys' who want to be free of their own enslaving minds. Animal Anthros - animals uplifted for use in infantry and special forces. Think furries on PcP thrown into a kill zone. Or post war, think of a bunch of semi-psychotic vets with all kinds of health issues tossed out and told to 'fend for themselves' - put bands of them in space plaguing the 'solar highways' as 'posthuman era bandits'. Possibly in the employ of various governments out to make trade more difficult for their competitors, or various terrorist groups out to change the balance of society. http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/ I've only got one visual for them at present: http://www.deviantart.com/view/16348485/ - the figure at left. http://www.deviantart.com/view/14429296/ - used as the cover for the PDF of my setting.

Re: Anthropomorphic races It's intelligence that shifts the argument. With brains, they will know the advantages of coordinating and helping out their fellows. Intelligence is highly linked to socialization - with some theories even linkng it back to standing upright and the problems that gives with childbirth. The notion there being that this forces us to give birth to 'premature adults'. Where in most species an animal once born can fend for itself in a fairly short while - our children are born years before they really ought to leave the womb - as anything more developed will crush the pelvis of the mother on the way out. Jared Diamond advances this notion in his book 'Why is sex fun?' (or a title very much like that). The relevancy here is that intelligence and socialization link together - they are developed as tools to deal with unfit offspring. You have to suddenly nurture that offspring, and that leads to the development of more and more sophisticated means of teaching, communicating, and learning. Which creates society as parts of the supportive backdrop to enable those factors as well as protect the unfit offspring and those members deligated to their advancement. Socialization thus revolves around the notion of protecting your fellows. It is in your own interest to do so - they carry with them your own genetic potential and your own survivability. On those grounds, even many anti-social animals can learn the value of protecting each other. The idea of intelligent prey that tolerates a vastly smaller population eating its members goes in the same category as giant mecha and the Force - it may be fun fiction, but it has no basis in realism.

Re: Your "2005" Pet Gaming Projects Ex Machina review here: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10835.phtml

Re: Anthropomorphic races No, but it does mean you can think of new ways to survive - that's a core aspect of intelligence. Actually, one of the key things intelligence gives humanity is that while many species murder for pure fun (watch cats or wolves sometime - they kill just for kicks, or to hurt the feelings of surviving victims, and so on - very evil minded animals) we are the only species that while doing that, can then turn around and choose not to do it. You cannot teach a wolf or a cat to stop murdering. They will not only hunt to survive, they will hunt for thrill kicks or to harm, and it cannot be 'unlearned'. But you can teach a human to find alternatives for agression, thrills, and anger. It's an issue of free will which is something of what defines sentience. An intelligent animal will be able to look at a situation and re-examine its options. You're prey; Given: these other guys keep trying to kill me and my people. Given: In our pre-sentient past, the animals we evolved out of only had the choice of running and watching as those they loved were killed. Given: I can think now. Given: How can I keep from getting killed. Solution: remove the killer. Method 1: Kill them first. Method 2: isolate them away. So you either wipe out the predators or you ship them somewhere and confine them. You may be a herd animal, but you're a herd animal with brains, and you want to live. Herd animals -do- protect their fellows. Almost every land animal does that to some degree, as do many underwater animals. If you had the choice of running and losing loved ones or removing the threat, and you could easily remove the threat because your numbers were so vastly superior... you would, if you had any brains, remove the threat. And in this argument, we're giving them brains. Heck, even other predators would remove each other... Wolves kill coyotes and cats everyday. Give the cats and coyotes a pack of grenades, a sniper rifle, or even some suicide bombers and the wolves will have a problem. So the wolves will try to get armed first... And when those two have near wiped each other out, the winner goes for the bison, who just machine gun him down with their several hundred thousand people who have access to the same brain power and same tech (heck, even unarmed, several hundred thousand bison will take out a few hundred wolves with modern military gear just by running in a coordinated direction by communicating).

Re: Anthropomorphic races

Re: Your "2005" Pet Gaming Projects I've got two in the works: A '[Post/Transhuman]Cyberpunk' setting: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/ 'Dystopian Hard-Science drama onboard a giant space station in orbit around Jupiter' Inspired by the tail last few minutes of a dream I had the night before I started writing, it's managed to bust out over 80 pages now. By writing it in book form - and posting it in a PDF - I've managed to stay focused and keep my vision intact. That's something I was unable to do with my fantasy setting which I've always approached as a website of random thoughts, resulting in a randomly scattered setting that I feel, but haven't managed to express. The PostCyberpunk setting however has come together wonderfully. It's game system tailored to Ex Machina, because there is no Cyber Hero anymore and because Ex Machina is does the net right in one of its two cyberspace systems... As a result of project one, you get project two: A new Lifepath generator for the 'cyber' genres, in beta version: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/SciFi/lifepath.html Over the next few days I'll be customizing it for multiple different 'subgenres' of Cyberpunk, with a present plan to do '80s Gamer Cybperunk', 'Classic Literary Cybperunk', 'PostCyberpunk, and 'Transhuman'. That said, feedback and ideas for data I could add are appreciated. The present version tailors to hard science Post/Transhuman (meaning no true-AIs but other Transhuman themes present), the basis of my own setting. That said, the present project for me is adding toggles for the subgenres of: 80's gamer Cyberpunk Post Cyberpunk Transhuman Fantasypunk Lit-punk Mosquito Where Mosquito is my own setting (Cyberpunk on a giant space station in orbit around Jupiter - see my sig for the 80+ page PDF download...), and Lit-punk will be based off of what kinds of people show up in the non-gaming literature. Fantasypunk will be a straight copy of the Shadowrun norms... This toggle will probably take a few days to get perfect.

Re: Adult themes in gaming, a rant of sorts 80% or thereabouts of gamers are people who I find utterly distasteful. Sadly, that probably includes a lot of people in this thread and this forum. I get about the exact opposite ratio from the general population. Gamer geeks are just sad pathetic anti-social deviant-sex obsessed often drug abusing people... So, yeah, I probably don't like most of you, and that's just the way it is... Frankly, I've been burned by negative experiences so many times that I'm willing to say that opinion now, even here. There's a thread around here somewhere about bad gamer experiences, I've got a long list in there, and a lot of it deals with the obsession some gamers have with raping female characters... Here: http://herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=479273#post479273 All of this, by the way, happening in the Bay Area. If I wasn't addicted to gaming, I'd give it up. Dealing with gamers usually just isn't worth it.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Kind of like photography, but with a bit of drawing and sculpture mixed in if you make original textures and models. Anyone can go down to the local corner store and buy a $5 disposable camera and snap off some naked pictures of their girl/boy-friend. And that's about where 80% of the Poser community comes in... Likewise they can use that same camera and photograph the local woods, street corner, or whatever and get the results of about 50% of the Bryce / Vue / Terragen community. However only an idiot would deny that there are true artists among photographers. Some of them work for Playboy, and some of them wander out into the woods and become the next Ansel Adams. As in, it's not the medium that makes the difference. You can scan through renderosity.com and find some very highly respected users of Poser who, however, are little more than the guy with the $5 camera. Likewise you can find complete unknowns who are cross-comparatively better than Ansel Adams. Popularity in the Poser communities is usually driven primarily by two factors, the same two factors that drive popularity on most of the internet: 1. Putting up pictures of naked women 2. Claiming to be a woman who looks hot naked. Generally though, if you look at the facial expressions of an artists work you can tell a lot. Also, how 'canned' is what they do. Do they work in prepackaged poses, expressions, textures, lightings, camera angles, render settings, and so on, or do they actually do something that has its own particular emotion? Given some of the above, I don't look at it in terms of how is it different from drawing, I instead compare it to photography. You have more control than you do in photography, but then, you also have more control than you do in photography.

Re: Good D&D style setting to use to bootstrap? Well, I've called Hero's own Turakian Age "DnD fantasy done better than DnD" for a reason. Here's my review of Turiakian Age: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10598.phtml It will look and feel like DnD, it just won't have the problem of not making any sense. I'd recommend that. If you must use a WotC published setting, then your choices are all bad, but of them Greyhawk is better in the same way that getting shot in the leg is not as bad as getting shot in the head...

Re: Turakian Populations Well, you don't really need to do all the research. The short end of what I'm getting at is that 'western fantasy' doesn't map to what it claims to be based on. It is not medieval. The genre conventions aren't possible in the medieval feudal model. You can toss the genre and go feudal, or keep the genre and not try to fit medieval statistics to it. If you choose the second option, you then only need to do research if you care about the statistics. Most people get by with 'its a big crowded city'. But if you care more than that, you need to find a way to figure out how big. Since most of the rest of the world -does- work as an example for the western fantasy genre you can just pull easy to find numbers from anywhere else. If you care for the statistics, know that the actual regions of the western world make a poor map over for western fantasy after the fall of the Roman empire. Look at a place with tech and political structures similar to 'western fantasy' and you find some things are 'the same' and others are different from Europe. Communities are still highly clustered - a village every mile sort of thing, with wilderness in lands not ideal to farming. Cities are just bigger, because trade allows that even in the face of constant war. Even with things like the Mongols killing 100% of the population of Beijing (or was it Shanghai?), you still get cities in the hundreds of thousands up to a million or so. Almost anywhere in the world makes for a decent example, save for Europe. Europe just had a very odd political and health situation from about the fall of Rome up until the rise of nations that caused its cities to be smaller than they should have been and made the whole idea of freely wandering adventure very difficult (for example, the California gold rush was a gold rush not because of the gold, but because it was almost the first time in western history that the wealth was not owned by the state or even mined with forced labor). Medieval Europe had small cities, but, in many of them it also had a lot of ruins from when those cities were once larger... You can, for an easy mark to western fantasy, and as such Turakian as well, take a Europe like layout and just up the populations in any place with good trade and low disease. Then toss out the word feudal - that's not the political structure of DnD/western fantasy. Look instead to Monarchy Or Impterial - the systems of Europe after and before Feudal.

Re: Turakian Populations Meso America, India, Asia, and Africa were locked in more warfare and strife than Europe during the period, but still had cities with vastly larger populations. Europe chose a fractured decentralized system of government based on making 90%+ of the population serfs - a form of slavery in that it prevented freedom of movement and freedom of economic activity. It's closest modern equivalent are the collectives of Mao's cultural revolution and what happened in Cambodia - both of which caused massive deaths and population drains on their civilizations (but for reasons somewhat different than those of Feudal Europe). In most of the world during that period you could freely travel and adventure, and make your way in life - and this worked to boost populations as it encouraged great trading empires like the Persians, and the situation in India, or empires of conquest like the Aztecs and Inca. Or other great empires like Ethiopia, Benin and Songhai. Despite western fantasy having cultures that seem European, Europe is actually a very -bad- model for getting your details. There are some very key and very critical problems with using Europe as an example, some of them are: Feudalism prevents free travel, land ownership, and the right of claiming booty - which conflicts with the fantasy idea of family owned farms and people who wander as they will for hire as sellswords or simply to pillage minority disenfranchised populations like orcs. Europe's plagues are not typical for fantasy. They disrupt the pattern for populations. Europe was already too deforested. It lacked the same number of 'monsters' as most of the world. Monotheism created an over riding cultural pressure of conformity. Fantasy tends to have a diversity to it's belief systems and a level of social egalitarianism not possible under the monotheisticly controlled society. Lack of strong central governments. This at first might seem to match fantasy - which often claims the same nobility structure as Europe. But fantasy's nobility tends to work more like Monarchy or Imperial systems - Brittain, Ancient Rome, China, Aztecs and so on. Fantasy's nobility tends to be stronger and weaker at the same time - stronger in holding the 'kingdom' as a whole, but weaker in not having the complete dominance of people's lives one sees in Feudalism (were everyone is a vassal, or slave, of someone else). DnD Fantasy, which is what Turakian Age uses, has as the easiest example to draw from Earth the Roman Empire, but with the technology of Europe's middle ages. Moving out of Europe however, you can often find many societies with social and economic structures very similar to fantasy. Many of them even have wildlands full of monsters (lions, tigers, bears, oh my!).

Re: Turakian Populations Around 1000 through 1400 AD the world was full of large cities, they just weren't in Europe.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art She's actually based on a miniature, or I wouldn't gave gone -that far- with the design. Here's the mini: https://www.fantization.com/Painting%20Contests/Celtos%20Contest%20June%202002/Ron_Spencer4.JPG -NOT- painted by me. I got into 3D art in 1999. Originally thinking it would be an 'easy way' to do illustrations, rather than the drawings I'd been doing. Turned out 3D work is harder, and not at all like I expected it to be. But it's a lot of fun so I keep at it. There are things you can do in 3D that you just can't pull off in other mediums. Eventuallly I'll figure out how to do some of them...

Re: Turakian Populations Most fantasy underestimates city populations. There were unusual exceptions in Europe that made its cities smaller than those in other parts of the world at that time or in earlier periods on similar technology.

Re: Herophile Fantasy art An Orc.