Captain Obvious

Re: PCs owning slaves: Do, or Don't? The D&D setting al-Qadim had mamluks as a...not a class...a kit?...an option for fighters. I don't remember if the description said they were slaves, and I'm almost certain it didn't say they were castrated (another part of being loyal to a ruler is not having kids to pass a dynasty on to), but one of the drawbacks to the class was that they were subject to orders at all times. Higher level guys had fewer possible people issuing those orders, but unless the character maxed out his level and took over the kingdom, there was always someone to tell them what to do on pain of death.

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction I ran the numbers with FF&S assuming the Alien Wars chemical rockets had the same performance characteristics as Traveller HEPLAR drives. The engines came out smaller for the smaller ships (smaller than the numbers I was using), and bigger for the Centauri. The fuel requirement jumped dramatically for all of them. I could fudge it for the Sting, and it filled up a good bit of the space in the Centauri, but it was more than the Antarctic could hold. Then the thought occurred to me that the bigger ships don't necessarily need enough fuel to run engines 24/7 for a month...the fighter might reasonably use 6 hours of fuel in a 6 hour mission, but the bigger ships are going to use a little delta-V and then coast for days. I'll have to think about how I'm going to work that...I could say the Antarctic doesn't need fuel for 24/7 thrust to go a month between refuelings, but then I have to figure out why the Centauri is carrying enough fuel for 24/7 thrust, even if it doesn't use it, and still needs to be refueled that often. I can see how Steve has been so adamant about not getting this nuts-and-bolts about starships. It's not easy making any kind of system fit in with pre-existing vehicles.

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction FF&S is mine. Now cruel fate mocks me, as it's time to leave for this 5K Run/Walk my wife signed us up for...

Re: Weird Animal Species for Your Games Looking around the net, it seems pistol shrimp are pretty popular aquarium pets, and there's a lot of skepticism about their ability to break glass. Mantis shrimp are also very popular, but even with them glass-breaking seems to be rare. So I'll revise my statement: I wonder if, on those rare occasions that a mantis shrimp breaks the glass of his aquarium, does he have an "oh crap" moment?

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction

Re: Weird Animal Species for Your Games I've heard that too. I wonder if they have an "oh crap" moment when that happens.

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction Heh heh...well, the Centauri-class battleship is significantly bigger than the Antarctic-class. I thought I had everything all figured out...what I have now scales well from the Sting fighter to the Antarctic-class, although life on the Antarctic-class is very spartan. But I'm nowhere near filling up the Centauri-class. I'm going to have to work out some new formulas for scaling propulsion systems and stuff, I guess. Here are the formulas I'm using right now: Chemical rockets - (Max Flight (in hexes) x SPD x Size^3)/5000 cubic meters Fuel - (Max Flight (in hexes) x SPD x Size^3 x hours of fuel)/150,000 cubic meters Class Beta Hyperdrive - Size x 100 Maintenance access to each of these systems takes up more space, and this works out well for the fighter and the Antarctic, but once you move up to that Size 20 battleship, it's not that significant. Does anyone have any suggestions? Because unless I alter these formulas in a way that doesn't change the smaller ships much, I'm going to have to put a couple of football fields in the battleship to take up room.

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction Actually, I do have Spacer's Toolkit (but not Terran Empire...go figure). It doesn't have Mark II or III lasers in it anywhere either. It's got up to Mark XX (or maybe a little higher) but there were other gaps in the series besides the II-III skip. I was wondering if maybe I shouldn't stat some up. Either way, I'll probably assign them a volume for now and worry about their game stats later. Just for completeness' sake.

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction Does Terran Empire have the stats for various kinds of starship lasers? Alien Wars has Mark I starship lasers on several ships, and Mark IVs on the Liberty-class. Are Mark II and III detailed anywhere? I probably ought to get Terran Empire...

Re: "Neat" Pictures It was pretty awesome...what little I saw of it. We just peeked in for a few hours last time we went, and decided that next time we were definitely going to work in closing the place down one night. Then Disney closed it. It's still got a pretty devoted following on the Internet...maybe fandom will one day move heaven and earth and Disney will bring it back.

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. Just now, my wife was reading aloud an article debunking this business about the supermoon causing the earthquake et al in Japan. I explained to my son how the theory was supposed to work...how the moon at perigee is supposed to cause earthquakes due to increased gravity. His reply: "At least it wasn't a runaway planet hurtling between the Earth and moon, unleashing cosmic destruction."

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Jake and the Batman

Re: Alien Wars spaceship construction

Re: "Neat" Pictures [ATTACH=CONFIG]38163[/ATTACH] From the Adventurer's Club, formerly at Disney World, I present the yakoose. The yakoose is part yak, part moose, part armchair, and was fully at home in the Adventurer's Club, which was made up of equal parts pulp adventure and raving insanity. It will be missed.

I've been playing around with the ships in Alien Wars trying to deduce some sort of constants that can be expanded into a more general ship construction system (I'm really only worrying about volume now...price isn't an issue for primarily military vehicles). I think I've worked up some values for the Sting fighter that I like, and am now working on the Antarctic class light cruiser. My current problem is that all of the larger ship writeups reference escape pods, which as far as I can tell are detailed in Terran Empire (which I don't have). Would anyone be so kind as to shoot me details on the size of the standard escape pod, so I can make some progress? If I ever make any real progress on this, I'll post it here.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Chickens can be tricked into laying year-round, but before electric lights, it wasn't easy to do.

Re: PCs owning slaves: Do, or Don't? It was very common for white (or heck, black too) "prisoners" of various American Indian tribes to be adopted into the tribe and be reluctant or even actively opposed to going back. And of course, they were seen as prisoners or even slaves by the European-descended American governments. The flip side of that coin is that often, Indian kids were taken in by whites and "civilized", which was seen as charitable by the whites and imprisonment/slavery by Indian leaders. At any rate, there's one style of slavery that dominates American thinking, but that's not the only form that ever existed. In some times and places, slavery was brutal and dehumanizing, in others it was fairly benign as such things go.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore If they made those around here, I'd hope they'd be exported too.

Re: Power activates on less than 8 or less You could just add multiple Activation Rolls. For instance, IIRC, 7- is about 5%, so putting together 8- (about 10%) and 10- (about 50%), you get about 5%, for a total value of -3 1/2. This is the way I finally ended up doing it when I worked up Activation Roll values equivalent to the poker mechanics used in the old Deadlands (does the new version still use that?).

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares It was Vatican assassin warlocks. http://www.cracked.com/article_19100_the-active-ingredients-in-charlie-sheen.html

Re: "real" Magic resources Are you sure? The last I heard, no one knew what the writing said, although it did seem to be actual writing, not some random gibberish.

Re: Calling all Doctors... Doc Sonic was one of the Protectors, in To Serve and Protect.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Whichever one you get at dusk as your first meal of the day.

Re: Poisonbrewing Brewing poison is essentially the same as brewing a potion. If you make alchemists pay points for their potion brewing, the assassin should pay points for poison brewing. And poison isn't quite the same as other equipment. No one's getting worked up because someone wants to carry three swords, or have eighty arrows handy at any given time, but if the guy wants to have thirty doses of blade venom at all times, his GM gets antsy about his NPCs and the other players worry about getting overshadowed in combat, especially if the guy's carrying around the "Horrid Monster" type venom. If he pays the points, he limits himself in the number of doses and the lethality of each dose. If you wouldn't let an alchemist carry around a five gallon bucket of healing potion, and say he needs to pay points to have that skill, then the poisoner should have to as well. (And yes, I'd build the poison power exactly like an alchemist potion power)

Re: Poisonbrewing Make her buy the poison as a Power. The point cost will keep it in check. Other than that, the only reason I can think of to keep poison out of the hands of genre-appropriate PCs is the D&D legacy. Poison was so effective in the early editions that it was basically an insta-kill. That's not an issue in Hero.