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Doc Democracy

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Posts posted by Doc Democracy

  1. 5 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

    We sont count them; we don't figure END from them

     

    Do you not use END, or use something else?  I have a number-friendly mind (moreso than my friends) and I find the distinction between active and real very useful.

  2. 7 hours ago, migo2154 said:

    Another question, could be possible to have a separated speed chart for my shadows?, something like: A SPD 5 Speed chart for zed, and a SPD 3 Chart to make the shadows actions when they are summoned?. I'm not sure if this could be possible... Maybe i could talk it with my GM about it.

     

    You could agree anything with the GM that suits you both. As a GM, I would be content with two separate SPD tracks,  one for ZED hitting the usual SPD 5 segments and one for the shadows on a SPD 3 track. With you paying for 5 SPD at full price and an additional 3 with some kind of limitation.

     

    The big question are how does it work when the SPD changes because a shadow is created or a shadow is destroyed.  What happens, in your system, when shadows and ZED are supposed to move at the same time? There is a big advantage in being able to act twice in one segment, that might be a 0 limitation taken on the 3 SPD, cannot act in same segment as ZED.

     

    Doc

  3. 10 hours ago, migo2154 said:

    Umm, yeah, maybe... But in that case, what kind of actions can i make with the shadows if they're not builded as summons?. For example, a shadow could walk by they own, attack, climb structures, spy... All of these by Zed's orders, because they cannot think by they own.

     

    Me, Duke and LoneWolf are probably saying that the shadows are essentially SFX of other powers, they exist in the world and the advantages they provide can be removed by opponents by destroying the shadow, which must then be recreated by Zed.

     

    Because they are SFX, they are extensions of Zed and can do anything you pay for Zed to do.

     

    Essentially, the shadows are created and move away from Zed at whatever pace Zed can move.  They then become floating points from Zed to attack from, perceive from, instantly change places with, etc.

     

    All you need to do is pay for those abilities.  So, attacking and carrying out tasks, those come using indirect, or stretching (does not pass through intervening space).  Swapping places is teleport, only to specific floating locations (the shadows). Spying would be clairsentience, only from those same locations.

     

    I suggested that, on his own, Zed has SPD 5, and that increases when he creates shadows, representing an ability to do more when shadows are active.  If you stuck with RAW rules about SPD changes, that could get tedious, I would get a little loose with it.  If you were moving from SPD 5 to SPD 8, your phases go from 3,5,8,10,12 to 2,3,5,6,8,9,11,12.  I would suggest that you allocate phases 2, 6 and 11 to the existence of shadows and act on 3,5,8,9,12 in their absence.  If it takes an action to create a shadow, Zed might spend segment 12 in combat creating a shadow, segment 2 creating another, segment three creating another, so he would be delayed until at least segment 5 in acting, if he wanted to be fully up to speed.  If he chose to work with fewer shadows and different SPDs then you could work with the GM on what segments your phases would be, I dislike the RAW for this.

     

    Duke and LoneWolf gave steered clear of this and suggested the shadows extend his ability to act in a round but not how often he acts (truly, more sensible but leaves out (for me) the feeling that he can do MORE per round).

     

    It is a halfway house to using summons and duplication.

     

    Doc

  4. This looks like an obvious application for duplication.  I have real problems with duplication characters.  Why?  Because it allows one player to dominate a game.  If there are four players with a character each, they all get 5 or 6 actions per round.  If one If those players can duplicate into four, that player gets 20 to 24 actions per round, more than the rest of the group put together.

     

    As such, if I was given such a character, I would be looking at a character with perhaps 5 SPD and +3 SPD (physical manifestation) and a naked advantage to apply indirect to physical skills (from any of the shadows created when the SPD is activated).  The swapping is, to me, effectively a limited teleport, only to the locations of the Shadows.

     

    The big thing for me would be what happens when a shadow us destroyed, does it mean that a new shadow can peel off and can only move at the movement rate of the core character?

     

    This means the player can move character and shadows but he gets only 8 attacks a round, stopping him dominating stuff.  Attacks can come from player or any shadow, the player can instantly move to where a shadow is. Then you can ignore all the issues with slavery etc.

     

    Doc

  5. There is limited value in referencing real life history as we are playing in a reality where the gods are verifiable real, where there are many different sentient species with varying modalities and some so alien that their morality may be incomprehensible.

     

    The idea that there is true evil, not people doing evil acts, is difficult in our relativist normality, where we might even choose to watch a movie humanising the Joker.

     

    The existence of absolute good, or absolute evil is difficult to comprehend. We tend to do poor approximations because we are stuck in our heads.

    Though the telling of historical stories is interesting and a reason I keep reading!  🙂

  6. 33 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

    Further:  consider that the attacker pays for the AP once.  The defender has to pay for it twice...PD and ED...or leave a big hole.

     

    Personally I think this is a positive.  It is a failure of point-buy systems that they encourage players to seek copper-bottomed defences when there should be differences and holes.  That is what creates drama, tension and drives tactical play.

  7. I am wondering if we have been thinking about it all wrong and we should be retaining penetrating and getting rid of AP.

     

    I have watched the arguments ebb and flow and, as often, come to a radically different place. I am looking at AP being more similar to penetrating but the defences working in a very different way.

     

    What if armour piercing provided 1 BODY through defences and 1 STUN per dice in the attack.  Additional levels of AP increase the BODY through defences by 1 and STUN by 2.

     

    First level of hardened removes the BODY and halves the STUN.  Each level of hardened after that removes 1 more BODY, if necessary, and halves the STUN again. 

     

    I think this then delivers the small but guaranteed damage, possibly including BODY, without mangling anything else and it means the defender pays increasing costs to deal with ever smaller amounts of damage.

     

    Doc

  8. 32 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

     

    Seriously? Not even Dracula ever tried to pull that off.

     

    Humans have the numbers. They have the day. Once they realize what they're dealing with and mobilize, the vamp is toast.

     

    Never really had a game player playing a vampire.  A clever vampire could wipe out a city, probably easier than a village as cities do have infrastructure underground.  But would it?  Vampires are predators, intelligent predators.  They know they need a human population to prey upon.  They know they have vulnerabilities and they know rogue predators stimulate extreme, organised responses.

     

    It is in a vampire's best interest to be in a position of power, preferably behind the scenes due to longevity.  It is in a vampire's best interest that the city regularly finds and deals with "the most recent vampire plaguing the city".  It is in a vampire's best interest to have as few competitors present in the city.

     

    So, a vampire, in control, can expect a city to continue running.  A vampire out of control can be expected to be hunted down and dispatched. A vampire in control who is killed might result in a territory war, probably good for the city, OR an out of control vampire organisation which might spiral out of control as masses of new vampires rampage.  Which could result in a ruined city, people fleeing during the day and burning things in the night.

     

    Now a haunted city, full of hungry vampires, holds a valuable artifact with which a brave adventurer, ready to combat these bloodsuckers, might enrich himself...

  9. 11 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

    I would also start with the basic rule that, if you can do it, the bad guys can do it with similar frequency. Are you OK with the typical villain team having one or two members who can reliably hit every PC with NNDs?

     

    Something my group always has in their minds.  When we were teenagers and they wanted poison on all their weapons all the time.  I said that if that was good, then all their opponents would do so.

     

    If they didn't, only the most evil ones would and they could assume that anyone who did was an enemy.

     

    That truce has lasted almost four decades.

  10. 4 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

    except for that jackass Duke, who assigned it a -1 to -1.5 depending on how long it took for the character to regenerate, and _insisted_ that if you did nit declare that you were spending that amount of time to regerate, then you, in fact, were not Regenerating.  He Also had the infuriating habit of pointing out that the character had to spend this time doing nothing, as the official write-up tied the power to taking Recovery, which had specific rules. 

    What a douche!  You should have avoided his games....

  11. I quite like the reasonably empty land scenario.  The mundane death rares are quite low but the adult death rates soar.  There are dangerous lands where the risk/reward is so high that young men and women are willing to risk their lives chasing big rewards because the alternative is often reasonably rigid social class structures.  🙂

     

    It IS fantasy after all, and those monsters NEED big hunting grounds and LOTS of less than competent adventurers adding cash and kit to their lair hoards...

  12. 4 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

    I dunno... IME when you find yourself agonizing over details, you're probably overthinking stuff that most of your players won't even notice. ;) Are you sure that what you'll get from the effort is really worth that much B, S, and T?

     

    It is a project, something to occupy me when I have time on my hands and want to get my HERO books out, or get my Greyhawk books out.

     

    I reckon the details I am agonising over will ensure I can answer all the questions my group might have so that is good.  But I am under no illusions that most of this work is for me. 😄

  13. You guys are AMATEURS!!  Don't you realise that the chemtrails are depositing self organising nano-particles onto our skin that make perfect reception and signal boosting for the virus activation?

     

    It is almost like you haven't been reading the literature....

  14. I found, in this situation it was indeed all about presentation.  I fixed on the idea of rolling 10 or higher, when no modifiers were active, to be a success. 10 is the normal difficulty.

     

    Everything on the character sheet was presented as +something.  So Stealth +2 meant that when rolling stealth you rolled 3D6 and added 2.  I had hero character sheets, Stealth +2 equates to a 13 or less roll, Stealth +4 would equate to 15 or less.

     

    A difficult (+3) task meant the difficulty number rose to 13.

     

    I also worked on campaign average for combat.  The average was CV 5 for a heroic fantasy.  So melee attack +3 was OCV 8 and parry +4 was DCV 9.

     

    Combat worked the same as skills with defensive numbers adding to the difficulty of a combat task. In the above example attacking at +3 meant rolling 3D6 and adding three to beat a combat difficulty of 10+4.

     

    Sheets looked VERY similar to D20 stuff but it was pure 6th Edition HERO they were playing.

  15. 2 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

    Usually doesn't take me very long. Most of the time I already have them created as when bored at working and waiting for a project to get through, other than answering the occasional phone call I don't have much to do so I make NPCs.

     

    Before our spam filtering software got significantly better, I used to glance through the public mailbox, dodging the extreme porn, to look at the names that were randomly generated.  I seem to remember getting a few brilliant NPC names from there....

     

    Doc

  16. I am with @Grailknight, it is entirely about what you are likely to need.  NPCs in my games usually begin as a name and a couple of sentences on an index card.  If players are interested, then those notes grow, and when they exceed the space get a page in the campaign folder.  If they are actively helping or opposing the players then they will eventually get a character sheet in the campaign folder.

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