Hirudo

["Michael Kilgore" <kilgore@iquest.net>]

I took a look at the modified write up submitted by Steve.  I think this is
an improvement.  The black beam of death has been tamed and the
incapcitation spells have been made much more reasonable.  I still,
however, have a couple of problems with players having hirudo characters.

Most importantly, the hirudo in this description still can drain another
hirudo for experience points.  From what few adventurers that have been
hirudo, I have noticed two actual cases where this rule was employed and
caused a disruption in the balance of the game.  The first case is when I
ran an adventure in Centralia.  In this adventure, I had a group of hirudo.
 All members of this group were killed except one.  The one that survived
was immobilized and drained with teresium.  This particular hirudo was
roughly rank 50.  The members of the party took this hirudo to one of the
player character hirudo.  Well this PC hirudo drained the actor and gain
50,000 experience points.  I would like to add that this PC hirudo was not
in the adventure in question.  Ever since then I have either not used
hirudo or made sure the hirudo had a "get out of jail free" card so that
this would not happen again.

I can see two improvements that I would make to this modified description. 
First, get rid of the draining hirudo for experience points.  Personally,
as long as this is in the description, I don't believe hirudo should be
allowed for player characters.  Second, add the limitation that a hirdo can
have only one usage of each of the Decay spells affect a hirudo at any
time.  Under some interpretations, a hirudo can use drain strenght on five
or six people and get an effective five or six levels of exceptional
strength.  Although one of Dan's metarules could apply to this situation, I
think some people need to have things explicitly written down for reference
(take OSHA's recent clarification of the use of restrooms as an example).

As for allowing hirudo player character, I like the idea if the definition
of the hirudo is fixed.  However, I believe senior game masters should
place heavy restrictions on who can or cannot have a hirudo for two
reasons.  I don't believe that some players would be able to handle a
hirudo that is not overly disruptive of the game.  Secondly, the number of
hirudo should be quite low (just by the nature of the religion).  This way
adventures where half of the party are hirudo would not happen.

Thanks,
Mike