Stun Damage and Armor

[rentauri]

Hello I am new to the game and ran my first Hero game last weekend (a Superhero Champions based game) and I have to apologize if this question has been dealt with somewhere else.

While running the adventure I became concerned with the amount of Stun that was getting thrown at my players with there armor. The players have around 10-15 Resistant Armor (add another 5-10 non resistant) and the majority of them, and the super villains of equal level, have 60 point mulitpowers and dealing between 9-12d6 of Normal Damage and 3-4d6 of Killing Damage and between 40-60 Stun. This seemed to be okay since the example characters of Firebrand, Maelstrom and Hardpoint all have that (and have resistant armor between 10-20) and around that Stun as well (even the brick example in is less then 70 Stun I believe). It would seem that 3 solid hits or 4-5 pretty good hits would take the players dangerously close to be knocked out, if not knocked out, and that seems like its a little bit fast. I was wondering if there was someway around this without telling them to just buy armor or reducing the amount of damage dealt because it is perfectly where I want it for taking body, that being the small chance of the characters taking Body damage (and normally no more then 5 Body, generally 0-2 at most).

My fear is that I cant run a semi-long dramatic fight because my heroes just don't have the staying power to take the damage that the super villain group would put them through. The grunts, oh they are easily taken out (well if the swordsman could hit the broadside of a barn while leaning on it maybe) but when they fight an equal amount of villains, or when they are forced to put themselves in harm's way (defending the people) it becomes a problem, in my opinion.

[Tasha]

In a game with 60 active point attacks players should have a range of 20-30 defenses (24 being average). If they (or the Villains) have less than this they will be knocked out pretty quickly. I got this number by multiplying the Damage class by 2 and by 2.5 (Also by over a decade of play):P

Also being KOed in 4-5 shots is about right. You can also fool around with DCV of the PCs. It may be that your PC's aren't moving skill levels into DCV or aborting to Dodge large attacks or Using their OCV levels to Block. It's all about using the maneuvers and your Skill levels intelligently. Heck for an average character adding 1 or 2 to their DCV can make a huge difference in whether or not they are hit by an opponent.

Hope this helps :D

Tasha

[rentauri]

It does. My major concern with telling them to raise the armor was that it would get to the point where they wouldn't take any body damage unless the roll was near prefect.

With no-one in my group ever playing Hero before (well I have but that was 15 years ago) we where going off the examples of Hardpoint, Maelstrom, Taurus and Eagle Eye. The first big fight was indeed an eye opener I will tell you.

Thanks

[Kristopher]

It does. My major concern with telling them to raise the armor was that it would get to the point where they wouldn't take any body damage unless the roll was near prefect.

With no-one in my group ever playing Hero before (well I have but that was 15 years ago) we where going off the examples of Hardpoint, Maelstrom, Taurus and Eagle Eye. The first big fight was indeed an eye opener I will tell you.

Thanks

For the typical superheroic setting, you won't see so much BODY damage get through defenses, that's fairly a typical result.

[Sean Waters]

Here's what I do:

Resistant defences should be about equal to the campaign DC, total defences equal to about DCx2. That means that Damage Through Defences should be about 1.5xDC per hit.

Assuming we are working with 12 DC, an average git against average defences should deliver about 18 stun, so 3-4 hits should put someone down, unless the hits are widely enough spaced to allow Recoveries that make a difference.

Bear in mind that average OCV v average DCV will mean only 62.5% of hits actually land: assuming that the target has 50 stun, that means about (50/(18x0.625)) = 4.4444, so 5 attempts to hit, on average, will take down an opponent.

(Bear in mind as well that, in practice those numbers may well be meaningless :))

I was reading a Justice League graphic novel the other day (The Injustice League) and one of the things I particularly noticed was that most attacks took down the opponent with one hit, so it does depend on what you want out, but the trick here is to build the character to do what you think they should - the 'standard' characters in the book will go down with 2 to 3 average hits. The reason they are designed that way, is so that combats do not take too long.

If you want combats to last longer then you need to either up the ratio of DCV to OCV, so people get hit less, or you need to up defences so that hits that land do less damage through defences.

That can be a bit cold sometimes, so, couple of thoughts.

1. Try encouraging people to buy skill levels rather than just OCV/DCV so that you can adjust OCV/DCV on the fly. People like to feel in charge.

2. Try encouraging more tactical play - if people hold actions to allow for more defensive maneouvres (including Roll With Punch - which you might like to extend to allow 'Roll with any attack')

3. Consider some interesting, or conditional defences: for instance stuff like 'Deflection' is a useful sort of power for a team player - you can use it to defend yourself but you can also use it to defend team mates - very often heroes are built to be far too self contained with not too much thought as to how they might function within a team context. You can create some extra defence that only works once a turn, or somesuch - allowing you to mitigate the big hits that occaisonally come your way - or last until that PS12 recovery.

4. Make sure the players never read the bit about 'Coordinating attacks'.

[Beast]

Sean is right on where resistant def should be(in a 12dc/60 active game
any higher and Killing attacks are worthless

some character go for the lighter def but have a higher than average dcv

being able to take 3-5 hits that do average damage is about right
so if a hero sees that they are getting low on stun they may want to do something to avoid getting hit
or going for that open shot with a haymakerand or push to maybe daze a foe to get some breathing room or if need be run away for a while
lead the villian on a merry chase to burn up their end/charges,set them up to be sniped at of even martial thrown by an ally

[Utech]

You'll want to tinker with the numbers to get just the game you want. Fortunately, HERO is all about that.

To solve your problem, you could offer people defenses that only work against STUN damage, increase total STUN, fiddle with the numbers to make it more (or less) likely for people to hit . . . lots and lots of things.

[Sean Waters]

Even things like reducing overall SPD will make combats last more phases because people will get relatively more recoveries.

[rentauri]

excellent, thanks for all the advice I'm going to talk it over with my players and see where they want to take it.