London, this year, given all the Olympic securit.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/91883927/Air-Defense-Map#fullscreen

It's the perfect way for a villain to bring in a death laser. In fact, the best use for The O2 would be to hide a death laser.

Quick and Dirty.
Even if there are less options, and more prescribed ones, the group can get that part out of the way faster.
The thing is, they love shopping in RPG's, who doesn't? However the massive list of every variation of every type of gun giddies the group. The gadge system was great for customisation but they drew a blank when given a shed load of modifiers to add to things.
It was great, but the gear tables were like looking into the sun at times. My "fix" was to have lists of recommendations for types of missions.

I love that 50% of the game tends to be prep and planning, but the gear drags 75% of play into that state in my experience of 2.0.

The Origin system is fantastic for customising something as prescribed as classes.

I'm a little reticent about using Subsystem minigames these days, as it's all. Ore widgets, more groups of stats to use. If I have to, then I try to introduce one at a time to the group as they only hold so much logic, as do I in my old age.
If there's a good example of where widgets to a game can work, it's the New WoD, where the systems all revolve around successes and dots. The "currency" of the game is the same no matter what.
To this end, the use of "leads" in Spycraft dramatic conflicts was good, but the cards and the restrictions of those actions felt like they ultimately complicated things.

Aspects from FATE for encouraging people to use both them for positive and negative traits, rather than just turtling and being way too precious about their character.

The XP unlocks from Marvel, as a kind of "achievement unlocked" system.

Using relationships and abstract concepts such as love or justice as scores in Smallville.

Alternity's system of success levels, so organised into Ordinary/Good/Amazing successes instead of a specific hit or miss DR.

Sanity. Always Sanity. Dead of Night's Survival Point mechanism as health & sanity & drama points, along with the currency of the Tension Points work brilliantly.

Oh, and to stroke the ego of Crafty Games, the action dice for all their ways of affecting the story.

I'm sure there are more, and will mention them when I remember what they are.

Excellent, thanks.
Yes, it would be the first point of contact with the blast.

Good to get the official confirmation.

I don't recall the multiplied by dimension thing from Morg mentions possibly being in Spycraft 2.0 It does mention that if you dive on a grenade or anything like that you suffer the maximum possible damage and the blast of it has its damage lessened by their Con score.

If they Death Star Trench the killer factories then I'm cool with running with that.

Hey there.
In last night's game a player suggested that when a blast goes off it damages each square, and if it damages each square then it damages, say a Large (2x2) creature four times as it occupies four squares if it's blast 2 and hit dead on.

This seems like crazy person logic.

Looking at the rules, while there's nothing specifically saying that, it only implies that everything in the blast is only hit once, not once for every single square.

It would totally de-power massive creatures like a dragon, or in my next session's case a 100 foot tall killer factory.

I'm looking for confirmation of whether my 'crazy person logic' argument is correct. I'm pretty certain it is, but you never know.

Hackmaster 4th had a thing where each + of armour would have a certain amount of HP and each hit would reduce that by one. This way attacks would have effectively DR1, but the armour would need fixing.

As mach1.9pants says, when you're young and that's the kind of thing you want out of a game then fine. These days, less so. Things like acid are funny when dealing with players' equipment. I might have to have some NPC's attack the weapons and armour soon, too, just out of cruelty.

I've only got one player using a longsword and that's the proper fighter. Most are using things like a quarterstaff, a scholar's sword, a crossbow, even pistols now.

Personally I think the fact it's not got any qualities makes that d10 more palatable. From a group who didn't know what any qualities did in SC2, to depending heavily on them in FC. I'm proud of my guys. Next step, not dying through fire...

In second edition had an Archer Foundation base under an ASIO building. There were NPC's the group could have as contacts, get good and bad relationships with and then potentially call in or have help on a mission.
If they angered the science division, they'd get a bad cut of the gadgets. In the '24' style arc all around Canberra, the internal security guys were a help AND a hinderence, providing better than normal back up AND also checking up on the shady dealings of the group.

I've had pointmen player characters act as a handler, but some kind of NPC equivalent of Chloe Sullivan, Paul from Dollhouse or even (at the lowest level) Morgan Grimes, could be fun.

And subdual (and stress) are nasty damages. In all the games I've run, I've come closest to a party kill through subdual damage (I love Orcs) than through vitality/wounds. 4 failed saves and you're out, no matter how much vitality or wounds you have left.

I had this very thing just last weekend with the beefiest character in the group. His vitality and wounds were equal to two of the party put together, but I had him: stunned, bleeding, Fatigued III and Shaken II. With him stunned, I was about to Coup de Grace (I'm NOT an evil GM), hinted it to the group and they hadf to pull that guy's fato out of the fire.

Admittedly when I first did NPC creation I was worried that there was so much vitality, but yeah, Shaken and Fatigued are great ways out.

Yeah, it works, but I'll be modifying it. No breakthroughs/setbacks, though, as it's all survival against a barrage of enemies.

At the moment I'm using:

Each turn, d20x3 people will die. Possibly more, possibly less.
They can work out what to do, but here are some suggestions:
•   Survival – Resolve, Tactics, Sneak, Spellcasting could all allow more people to live through their round. DC20 will remove a multiplier from the d20 roll. A critical hit will stop anyone from dying. A botch will make the result x4.
•   Exhaustion – Intimidate and Resolve will help spur people on. If there is not a check against exhaustion each turn/every six hours, then the group will ALL suffer a -1 to their rolls unless there’s some anti-sleep ability. They will have 1 level of fatigued at the start of the next scene if the penalty remains at the end of this challenge.
•   Healing – A Medicine DC15 will add 1 to the population count, +1 per 4 above the DC. A crit will double the amount, to a maximum of that turn’s casualty roll.
•   Hiding – Blend, Disguise, Sneak or Survival allows the group to camouflage the caravans, with a DC10 to subtract 1d3+Dex from the casualty roll.
•   Choosing the Right Paths – Search, Investigate, Survival to search for a good place to go. Will add +2 to one person’s roll next turn. On a critical result, will skip one six-hour increment.
•   Repairs – Craft or Knowledge roll DC15. Equipment gets damaged. After suffering enough casualties, a repair roll will be mandatory for a PC or NPC. A failure means -1 to all gear checks until the gear is repaired. A critical means +1 to gear checks for the next check.

I'm really good at winging it so any unorthodox ideas which can't be covered by these, I'll find something for.

Also NPC contacts have been a big thing, especially given that in their group of survivors, losing a blacksmith means NO weapons repaired back to a good quality. Losing a priest means less healing. This means that while everyone's doing their thing, the PC's can call on them for a bonus, at the risk of putting them in my evil GM spotlight and therefore risking their survival.

Hopefully that'll work as something quick if I can't read through the narrative combat by then.

I'm impressed with the fear fire's created. It's brilliant in a kind of primal way.

In my demo game of this, a house got set light to by a Drake. It caught amazingly quickly and NPCs died. A lot of NPCs. Things got out of hand and the group fled. Nice and easy.

Since then we've had a couple of encounters with fire, such as the magic shield the Soldier has, which he can spend an action dice to ignite. People generally plead with him not to. Anyway, in my latest session the Priest PC was set light to and we all backed the hell away, fearful of everything catching on fire. He died, as none of us had a way of putting him out and were too scared to get close. It was sad and we probably could have done something, but the fear was great.

Sweet. I'd never really noticed Adamant until Icons, and here they are popping up again.

Just looking on DriveThru it's only 64 pence. I'll have to check it out. I've grown to really hate the slowdown combat becomes, so anything to speed things up would be great.

There is a core difference in running and prep which I've been noticing in the last few weeks. I'm normally a GM but a player's using FantasyCraft to run a Pathfinder game. It's interesting seeing what's what, but there's been a culture clash which I've not really noticed until now.

FantasyCraft, much like SpyCraft, is along the lines of Deus Ex. You get a problem and non-linear methods of completion. At least I feel it's encouraged heavily. With 3.5, 4E and Pathfinder, the "action time" happens at an encounter-by-encounter pace instead of a scenic one.

This might just be me, but I've felt the FantasyCraft system encourages not just combat as a method to complete a scenario, or at least unorthodox combat as a potential solution. With encounter-based systems it feels more like a jRPG where you go from room to room, killing things. Again, it's possible with scenes, just less of a thing.

My next session's the start of my campaign's big season finale. They've got a long, hideous road ahead of them and I was wonderin if there was any advice or input people could give to this.

The group are looking after about 400 people. They've ditched some civilians, lost a lot of people and gained a large amount of allied (kind of) knights. The group are on their way to a militarised town big enough to take in their population and likely to save them, but the priests have just had visions of EVERYTHING in the towns they've seen rising from the dead and charging towards them.

We're talking a "33" style bombardment of enemies. Every 20 minutes or so there will be a ton of foes charging down on them. Mainly human undead, but also Wild Elves, Dwarve and animals.

The problem here is that I can' run a combat for every 20 minutes which passes, and there are a ton of combatants (nearly 200 of the 400 populace by now). The key fights they can be in, but I need a fast and loose way.

My current idea is utilising one of the few things I loved about 4E. Skill Challenges.

Basically for a day and a half of travel, they'll need to make a roll each, using skills they determine to be relevant to the cause, allowing everyone to pitch in an potentially help. I'm not having them roll to fight as everyone will be fighting, but perhaps something like: Tactics keeps people alive, Impress and Resolve prevents the penalties people will start gaining from fatigue, Intimidate to drill them into moving faster, that kind of thing. Again, there's no need to measure their success against the enemy (who, conservatively, number over 15,000), just the ability for the group to survive.

I've already kept track of resources they have (gunpowder, etc) for the horrific finale, but I need some method of wearing them down in a quick, interesting way to show the constant pressure they're facing.

Any better ideas or suggestions for skills and results they can have on the group?