arcady

Re: Hero Needs Reviewers!! Just posted a review of Arcane Adversaries.

Re: GM's "rights"

Re: held action I personally would stick with the Dex roll off, the harsh ruling of the official rules, because it makes more logical sense. Even when we try to get the drop on someone we don't always suceed - I've been on the losing as well as winning end of that enough times to know such. The other option is perhaps more hero favoring, but I tend to prefer a hard outlook where neither success nor failure is ever a given.

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming You just have to know how to set up and run or play the format.

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming Magic has several factors to it in Fahla that lead it to being something no one ever fully understands: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/fahla/Gaming/magic_Hero.html As for world knowledge, the game I'm running takes place in the Lomyrian Empire - which is like Portugal in its heyday. There is a printing press, and sailing rivals the 17th century. The roads in the empire proper are well maintained, and extend as such throughout the southern Papal states. Go off continent to Lengoli and then even have railways. These issues vary by setting. That said, the knowledge level of the PCs should fit the setting, and it often doesn't in many gaming setups. That's something of a failing carried over from DnD - which has a large list of logical failures in its assumptions.

Cast: Staeglio Verrenchi - Antiquities merchant hoping to cash in with his new role as a relic hunter for the Royal university. Highly superstitious after a mage's miscast spell artifically aged him twenty years. Simona Benedetta - Water Mage tasked by the University to work with this team of relic hunters, despite her personal aversion to 'action.' Sesto - Undead hunter, after failing seminary school he has been driven by his faith to ensure the Gatekeeper's will that none escape the cycle of rebirth. His particular knowledge of the heresy of immortality makes him a valuable asset in digging through the ruins of the ancients. Baronet Marko - archeologist and university scholar, he forms the team expert and has been tasked with helping the team understand its findings. Benito Verrenchi - son of Staeglio's sister in law, and apprenticed to the older man. "unamed PC" - the player named this character "Spaghettios" and I am waiting on a real name. Air Mage tasked by the University to the team in the hope that he will uncover a way to overcome the mystical accident that left him mute. The Premise: The PCs work for the University at Coinic in the Lomyrian Empire as a group charged with securing artifacts and lore of value. They have recently come off a expedition into the northern swamps, where they confirmed that a series of cairns did not in fact date to the pre cataclysm era but were merely markings left behind by tribal drakes during the wars of the Reformation. Life is going about as usual for off time when they are summoned to meet with their patron, Mistress Carmelina Primali and her page Agius at the Red Rose Pub and Inn in Red Rock Circle, a district on the east end of the city. There they are informed that during construction after a bakery fire in a nearby building a door with markings in the ancient tongue was uncovered behind the plaster walls of the basement. The guard has been dispatched to keep the area secure and the University, under the Duchess Gianya Dalyan of Coinic's command, has tasked the team with investigating and learning the nature of this find and whether or not it poses a danger to the city. The Adventure: We've had session one, and here follows a summary of the events. Escorted by Agius the PCs approached the building and were led by members of the guard to the doorway. There Baronet Marko determined that the writing marked the building as having some connection to a royal geographer from the pre cataclysm era some three thousand years past. Curiously, the door seemed to be mounted upside down, and portions of the foundation of a building could be seen where the plaster had been chipped away above it. Staeglio had Benito pick the lock on the door, and the team, minus Agius and the guard, entered into a small five by five foot foyer that was clearly upside down. Cloth tapestries had folden down and over, and when lifted revealed a portrait of a man and his dog - the man in a uniform of some kind and of an ethnicity more rounded and paler than that of a modern Lomyrian. None of the PCs at this time questioned why the tapestries had not rotted away in three thousand years. Beyond a door on the opposite end of the foyer they found an upside down staircase leading down to what was once an upper floor. Spackling in the ceiling enabled them to descend without too much trouble and they left that stairwell into a large room with a strange wind that seemed to blow from the edges of the walls into perhaps the center of the room - they avoided that area however and so were not able to determine this exactly. They did discover that the wind instantly died from full strength to nothing at the exact boundary of the room. Etched along the ground - the ceiling, was a six pointed and centrally dotted magical circle. "Unamed PC" was able to determine that the effect was as if an ancient mage had called the element of Air for working magic and then left it there - for three millenia. Normally the elements would have been grounded by now, especially in the absense of the working mage. Furthermore, leaving the elements at the ready is known to be very dangerous - it invites the attention of otherworldly beings, acting as something of an open gateway for them to enter the mortal realm. The symbol on the ground was the sort that should have been on the floor - which was up now, but when they tried to look up and confirm what was there now they found themselves unable to focus on that spot, and only aware of this fact through concentration. Something was always averting their gaze, keeping it out of vision. With Staeglio doing much avoidance of the wind room and the mages, the PCs investigated the floor further - finding broken furniture, an office with some letters, a slave pen, and a map of the continent that was missing the great Bay of Lomyr - showing the Eastern Mountain range continuing on down over its place. Everything was upside down, even the lighting sconts in the walls - which seemed to be internally fed oil lamps of some kind. Baronet Marko has begun to get a sense that the buildiing is angled as if it pointed slightly north east - such that it might point in the general direction of the Great Desert. A trapdoor in the ground of one chamber led down to the next level up. In this new level upon entering they found a room with two rugs and four chairs, all neatly arranged, and lacking dust. They found the reason for this in the second chamber - a skeleton in a short kilt was busy sweeping the floor as a skeletal dog ran about at its feet, much as it might have in life. Sesto immediately lept to the attack - the creatures being a heresy against the gods. After discovering that skeletons in Fantasy Hero are much harder to hurt than they are in DnD the PCs eventually managed to dispatch both creatures - largely as a result of Simona working with the elemental fluids in Sesto to give him an adrenal boost (Aid to strength). At that point we broke up session one. About half the time had been spent in adjustments for finalizing character design, particularly with Benito who's player is completely new to the Hero system. Session two will pick up in two weeks, as the PCs start to get to the actually wierd parts of this upside down dungeon crawl.

Re: DEX is used too much

Re: GM's "rights" I am very strict about forcing things to fit within my guidelines for the genre and setting, and my rulings about the rules (such as my strict stance on what is a valid disadvantage). Beyond that a player has control of their character. As a player I would find an alteration of a specific detail, or of the character's backstory to be intolerable, so I don't do it as a GM. I really don't care to get that involved in the PCs anyway - my focus is elsewhere. The last thing I want to do is become too attached to any one PC, given that I will likely be rolling the die that kills it. Examples of things I am working to revise in the current PCs: Reminding a player that it is a spear and axe culture - his sword will make his rogue blend in about as well as if he wore a clown suit. Telling a player they cannot have both DF: Guant and DF: Tall Telling a player they lack the skill to cast spells in a combat situation, that that requires the Skirmish or War magic skills and so without revision they'll have to use the 'forcing spells' rules of the setting. Telling a player that "Spagettios" is not a valid name in the local language... Noting that Social:religious is really psych, as is DF:religious. The name one is the closest I have come to demanding a 'backstory change', it being driven by a desire to not have silly names among the PCs. My role as GM is to present the setting and the stage for the story. The players provide the characters and the actual story. A GM who fiddles too much with character backstory or character personality is meddling where they don't belong.

Re: Romantic Fantasy Which is, in my opinion, an unfortunate confusion of a term away from its common meaning. If a word can mean anything, it soon means nothing. Likewise for digging into archaic meanings for a word simply to deride or disparage the themes inherrant in the modern common meaning. But aside from that, there's a seperate more important issue I'm seeing here. There seems to be a lot of derision towards the theme of Romance around here - which is regretable, as some of the best literature is found in such stories. Consider Romeo and Juliet for example. Equating love story with Fabio and Bodice Ripper is somewhat unjust much as equating fantasy with the DnD movie would be.

Re: Romantic Fantasy Would you find an RPG with no combat system viable? You might have sessions without action - everybody does that - but try whole multiple year long campaigns. If you find that comfortable, I would wager you are not even close to typical for a gamer. I wouldn't call Tolkien a romance at all - there simply wasn't one in there. The LotR movie had a thin one - but Peter Jackson's script writers are responsible for that. Tolkien's work was also quite thin in any form of characterization. Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Barbara Hambley and some similar authors have romantic fantasies.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe I agree with GURPS on this one. You should not 'get points for being a PC' and doing what everybody does in the genre or what every character does in an RPG. You should get points for the things that limit your character, and to the degree that they limit. Disadvantages need to hold weight. To do that they have to be things that will enter play, will hinder options when they do so, are exclusive to themselves are not a rephrase of other disads on the sheet, and have meaningful effects on game balance - not something better simulated by buying down a stat or getting a limitation on a power.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe And yet you are proposing an actual third option: 350+0. Disads as you have advocated them are all fakes, if they have not earned their value with play balance, they are freebies, tantamount to saying 350+0.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe Which I cannot possibly see as in any way a valid thing to do. It has the same level of legitimacy as getting, as an example, an Aid power an arbitarily saying you only have to pay 1/4th the cost of it. Everything should be given what it is worth. When there is a cap on total points this becomes even more important, you have put that limit there to mean something - and thus everything within it should earn its place. Handwaving has no legitimate spot at the table - it is tantamount to cheating. How to judge what is enough for something to be legitimate and by what means it reaches that has subjectivity, but saying that it needs to be worth what it is worth is only logical. Why have disads at all if they do not function to earn their value? There's no logical answer for that - if they do not earn their value, better to simply give arbitrary boosts to point totals and do away with them - leaving them to out of game terms descriptions.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe So you're saying that if I put a cap on the total amount of disads you can have, you should be allowed to have disads that have no effect on game play, or an an effect less porportionate than the amount of points they give? If not that, I'm not sure what you're getting at and how it relates to the topic. Either way, cap on total disads or not, a disadvantage should not, from my perspective, be worth more than it earns in play.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe Yes. How about in general though? Should a philosophy hold that no disad can be worth more than buying the same thing as if it were a power? In other words, no disad should give more than it's opposite would cost? I've been outlying a philosophy on disadvantages: I consider myself strict on disads - it needs to be something that -WILL- come up, will -HINDER- play options, is -EXCLUSIVE-, and is -BALANCED- in the points it rewards. Will: The disad cannot be structured in some manner that given our play style it will never be an issue or never come up. 'hates the moon' would not be valid in a game that took place entirely inside or underground. Hinder: The disad must actually limit the options available in play, or directly hinder a character. Thus it must somehow diverge from the 'default' options in the genre. You cannot "get points for being a PC." Code v. Killing would not be acceptable in a four color supers game, and 'like to adventure' would not be acceptable in a dungeon crawl fantasy game. Exclusive: The disad must not duplicate too much of the concept of any other disad you have. Each disad should be unique. You cannot have psych:hides true nature and social:secret identity, nor even psych:hates orcs and enraged:at orcs Balanced: No disad can be worth more than buying the same thing as if it were a power or 'negative power' (if such were rules-legal). In other words, no disad should give more than it's opposite would cost. I've articulated that here: http://home.pacbell.net/arcady0/fahla/Gaming/index.html#disadvantages And plan to use discussion in this thread to update and refine my ideas.

Consider this: Now consider this: +5 Con, only for stat rolls (-2 lim - based on idea that Con affects 3 things: die rolls, stunning/combat conditions, and figured stats) Real Cost: 3 points. Now, even if I make that lim less severe, even if I take it down to a '-1/4' lim, buying a +1 to con roll will always be less than 10 points. Especially if I did it not by buying a limited stat, but by buying skill levels. So should this disad not be worth as much as it is? Also, conceptually, should you be allowed to get multiple disads covering the same thing - in this case isn't this disad something that should be taken -instead of- age rather than with? Consider for example a character who has social:secret id and psych:hides identity. or Hunted:mechanon and psych:avoids mechanon. or psych:hates orcs and enraged:at orcs. Examples of this sort of issue are common in Hero system writeups - to me it seems though that not only should a disad need to be a disad to get points (thus I outlaw code v killing in four color games - because it is not a disad there, rather code of killing like wolverine is), but it should also not cover ground already covered in your other disads... Thoughts? I consider myself strict on disads - it needs to be something that -WILL- come up, will -HINDER- play options, and is -EXCLUSIVE-.

Re: The hobbit of a lifetime Heard this one on NPR the other day. npr.org is supposed to have additional info but I never bothered to check. What it does show is that indeed multiple intelligent species is the norm for Earth, and the present condition of there seemingly being only one is abnormal - perhaps as much a mistake of history as gunpowder and the rock that hit at the of the dinosaur era.

Re: No Humans? It's the whole 'Furry porn' hobbists that make it difficult. How do you build a Furry RPG that has mainstream appeal when so many people associate it not with storytelling but with wierd internet MUSH and MUD groups... Albedo and Iron Claw both presented very good 'Furry' settings WITHOUT any sex-kink, and that's what I'd want - just a setting of 'animals as people.' Everytime I've pondered the idea of furry game to actual people though, the whole 'porn' side of internet Furry groups comes up. And frankly, I've not even bothered to look at or pay attention to the Furry genre in years because those people have become so pervasive... I was drawn to it by the comic Albedo - a hard-science socio-political drama, so that's how it equates in my mind.

Re: No Humans? There's IronClaw - a 'furry fantasy' RPG. I'd love to see 'Furry Hero,' but suspect I'm in the extreme minority.

Re: Evolution of the races?

Re: Romantic Fantasy Meaning that you agree with the perception that the genre is overstuffed with action and not enough character or that you think the opposite that the fiction is too full of romance and not enough dead orcs? Personally, I find gaming too action focused, and find the claims of literature writers that fantasy and science fiction writers don't know character to be absurd - something of a sign of elitism from people who are not reading the right authors in the 'genre-fiction they attack.

Re: M&M to HERO San Angelo has now been published in both systems. However conversions are best done by translating the themes rather than the details. Attempts at numerical conversions leave you with PL10 MnM character that translate to anywhere from 200 to 800 points, and 350 point Champions characters that convert anywhere from PL5 to 25. The paradigms are different - so you should step back. Convert the character to comic book language, and then stat up the comic book character in your chosen system.

Re: Possession And Mind Control and Energy Blast don't? Entangle removes you in one shot, and is fairly cheap. Likewise Darkness, Flash, Mind Control, Telekinesis (to throw you a few miles away), and so on. You may then be able to do something in your future actions to overcome these, or you may not - but the same can be said of possession. I would model it with Mind Control for the possesion, and then figure out something to do with your own original body. There's a variation on Mind Control (or was in past editions) that only gives control of the body, and not of the mind. That is the version I would use in a possession power. It could be a Mind Control that leaves your body lying there (a major limitation), lets them possess your body (a side effect limitation - effectively they get [bodily] Mind Control on you equal to what you got on them), causes your body to merge into theirs and no longer exist ( a linked extra dimensional movement power ), or the merging of two physical forms into one (something complex that I've never seen modeled well in Hero). When the Mind Control fails or is eventually resisted - you're effectively pushed out of the possession. Assorted add ons could be used to delay this - an ego drain, supression, or whatever fit your given special effect. Normally, possesion should be cheaper than Mind Control - you're effectively limited (under the typical special effects for it) to one victim at a time, and you lose access to your own body while doing it.

Re: Possession And Mind Control and Energy Blast don't? Entangle removes you in one shot, and is fairly cheap. Likewise Darkness, Mind Control, Telekinesis (to throw you a few miles away), and so on. I would model it with Mind Control for the possesion, and then figure out something to do with your own original body. There's a variation on Mind Control (or was in past editions) that only gives control of the body, and not of the mind. That is the version I would use in a possession power. It could be a Mind Control that leaves your body lying there (a major limitation), lets them possess your body (a side effect limitation - effectively they get [bodily] Mind Control on you equal to what you got on them), causes your body to merge into theirs and no longer exist ( a linked extra dimensional movement power ), or the merging of two physical forms into one (something complex that I've never seen modeled well in Hero). When the Mind Control fails or is eventually resisted - you're effectively pushed out of the possession. Assorted add ons could be used to delay this - an ego drain, supression, or whatever fit your given special effect. Normally, possesion should be cheaper than Mind Control - you're effectively limited (under the typical special effects for it) to one victim at a time, and you lose access to your own body while doing it.