Powers Issues -- L-R

[Opal]

Q: Should Mental Powers provide Mental Awareness for free?
Steve’s Thoughts: In the spirit of removing the concept of Figured Characteristics, it would be consistent to remove this “freebie” from Mental Powers. I won’t say I’m totally sold on it, but it’s definitely worth considering.

I think that's a spirit that should go back in the bottle. Point savings on 'packages' of abilities that /should/ be closely related are a good idea and should be retained. If they were a bad idea, no one would be playing the game today, it'd've died by 1984 - because such things have always been part of the system.

Things like ECs, limitations, disadvantages, and, yes, figured characteristics and little things like getting Mental Awareness when you have a Mental Power - all make the game better by giving players an impetus to come up with characters that make some sense. Removing such things is going to result in more characters who are just a collection of powers and numbers.

Q: Should Mental Defense provide EGO/5 in defense for free?

Yes. Once a high-EGO person has developed any mental defense, it should be stronger than that of a low-EGO person.

Q: Should Missile Deflection and Reflection be changed?

Missle Deflection is basically the ability to block ranged attacks. There's nothing wrong with some characters having such an ability, but it can probably be handled much like block. Yes, it would make a little more sense to pay cost based on the mechanics of the attack than on the F/X. Specifically, on the attack roll.

That is, missle deflection should let you to block a ranged OCV vs DCV attack. An adder might let you add attacks that target a hex. A bigger adder, might let you deflect any part of an AE effect entering your hex.

It should otherwise be mechanically identical to block.


Reflection certainly needs to stay, but could be a sepparate power not directly related to missle deflection - it could be based on the power of the attack, for instance. You buy X amount of reflection, it lets you reflect that much BOD worth of attack. If it's exceeded, you still reflect, but only the amount of your reflection - the rest of the attack gets through (much like a FW). Unlike actual defensive powers, you should not be able to abort to Reflection - you'd have to use a saved phase to activate it or have it running as a constant power.

[Blue]

I'm not a big fan of making a post without having some kind of suggestion for fixing it, so I'll make this brief.

I've always had trouble ajudicating Mental powers; primarily Mind Control. Seems to me most of the time I'm splitting hairs at to how inclined somene is and my opinion almost always differs from the players.

What's more, Mind Controls rarely work. I mean, an uber-mentalist can take over people and play them like puppets (if one can play puppets), but there are so many rolls to resist that I basically had to remove some, otherwise a mentalist who successfully attacked and rolled enough dice to get the target to act always had his control broken before the target managed to actually perform the action.

But I really seem to be the exception on these things. And as I say, I don't have a lot of input on how to fix it.

[MicroMike]

Luck: Make this a talent, and remove all the 5th Ed options from it. Those options turned several games into 'crit the big bad in the head and win' cakewalks.

Replace with Hero Points. You could spend a HP to make a reroll, add a temp. +10 to STUN, or something.

Life Support: Just state 'Immune to all Poisons' for 10 pts. or 'Immune to all Diseases' for 10 pts. If a player wants less, make it a Limited Power from -2 to -1/4 and make the player define thier funky exceptions to the power. Listing zootoxins and Rabies, and Alcohol and Common Cold/Flu is contrary to the entire HERO philosophy.

[ajackson]

Q: Should Mental Powers provide Mental Awareness for free?

No, it's not really needed.

Q: Should Mental Defense provide EGO/5 in defense for free?

Well, I'm tempted to make Mental Blast consistent with other mental powers by saying it's 5 points per die and you subtract Ego from the effect.

Q: Should Missile Deflection and Reflection be changed?

While the existing mechanics aren't terrible, the main way to use deflection in practice is that you put it into your multipower as a deflection slot; deflection is almost never worth using normally because it consumes an attack action, and without a bunch of bonus levels it's no better than a dodge. As for reflection, you have the oddity of being able to reflect unlimited amounts of force with a successful roll; reflection seems like it should be a power related to PD/ED rather than a power resembling Block.

Deflection for yourself should probably be a free everyman maneuver; it's generally comparable to dodging, but occasionally lets you do useful things that can't be done with dodging, such as stepping in front of someone else. The ability to deflect attacks which aren't coming towards you is an advantage. If it should be possible to 'blow through' deflection, give it a slight bonus to the roll, and have it provide some extra defense based on skill or blocking power or something.

[Adventus]

I wish I could take credit for this idea. However, I first saw it posted on Red October by Opal. Welcome back Opal. So you rep should go to her not me.

[ghost-angel]

I'll echo The Main Man in stating that the Missile Deflection/Reflection from UEP should be the new Default Mechanic.

I also, like the others, don't believe that having a Mental Power should get you the Mental Sense for free.

[James Gillen]

Here's something on Mental Powers that I posted in the discussion on TUM that didn't get into the book even though I got tons of positive remarks for it (as well as +4 Rep, the second most I've ever gotten from a single post). I would have posted it earlier but I'm not quite sure which thread it should go into; I chose this one because most of the Mental Powers are listed in this part of the book, and it would be most often applied to Mental Illusions and Mind Control.

The idea is simple: to represent a continuing-effect Mental Power that always has a particular quality, buy that quality directly with points.

For example, suppose MindStorm has Mind Control, and his targets always remember their actions and think they're normal (+20 on the Mind Control Effects Table). The current way to do that would be to buy an additional 6d6 with Standard Effect, and a Limitation that it only applies to that effect plus whatever other Power Modifiers the base Power has. The way I suggest would give a nice, simple 20-point Adder that slips neatly right into the character sheet. It only has +20 Active Points instead of +30, and accordingly costs 4 END more rather than 6 END (along with other lessened effects on things like RSR), and this can be either a Good Thing or a Bad Thing depending on your POV.

This would, of course, also apply to things like doing STUN and/or BODY with Mental Illusions, making Mind Scan or Telepathy undetectable to the target, and probably even achieving specific levels of effect.

Repped.

jg

[Enforcer84]

I wish I could take credit for this idea. However, I first saw it posted on Red October by Opal. Welcome back Opal. So you rep should go to her not me.

The Rec/Regeneration Rule? Consider Opal Repped!

[megaplayboy]

On mental powers, if you're going to keep the existing table, I think one thing should at bare minimum be listed as an optional rule:
Breakout rolls shouldn't be straight EGO rolls, they should be contested rolls, with the target rolling their ego roll against the mentalist's. Note that this doesn't affect the target thresholds the mentalist has to hit to establish whatever level of control/effect, but it is likely going to be more difficult for a non-mentalist target to break out of control/effect. Characters could buy Resistance in order to get breakout roll bonuses, and mentalists could use combat skill levels to add to their rolls to maintain control as well.

Keeping the existing difficulty tables while adding a contested breakout roll would mean that the average mentalist isn't devastatingly more effective, but they are more effective on average with telepathy, mind scan, mental illusions and mind control.

[Vondy]

I would like to chime in on Regeneration. There exists 2 mechanics to recovering BODY: Regeneration and Recovery. You already get Body back in recovery every month. So, base Regeneration off of Recovery instead of Healing or Aid. Then it becomes either an advantage or a Limitation based on how fast or slow you make it.

I started doing this for slow regen characters about a year ago so I wouldn't have to fiddle with the time chart, and because I think the current expression for regeneration is overly complex (and breezy in terms of space on the character sheet). I haven't looked back.

[Opal]

There are no new ideas: When I first posted my Regen variant on RO, someone immediately chimed in, "oh, yeah, I've been doing something like that - it works great!" I think Fuzion may have used a similar aproach, too - either that or yet another person came up with a similar Fuzion variant independently, as well....


Oh, and I posted the full text of it on the boards, so Hero Games owns it!

No reason not to use it...

[Ockham's Spoon]

On Regneration:
I am fine with this as a subset of Healing, but only if it doesn't violate the general Healing rules. But it might be nice, for ease of character building, if there were a sidebar or something that basically said "Once all the advantages and disadvantages are applied, a regeneration power works out to 10 points for 1 BDY/turn" or whatever. I have other gripes with Healing, but I guess I'll post that under the "H" thread.

On Missile Deflection:
Missile deflection should be a combat manuever that anyone can perform, like a Block. Reflection is the power people should have to buy. That said, my complaint with Missile Deflection is that its cost is predicated on the SFX of the attack. Sure it makes sense that it is harder to block bullets than baseballs, but that should be reflected in the cost of the attack, not in the cost of Missile Deflection. Ranged attacks should have an adder cost for projectile, supersonic projectile, and lightspeed "projectile". Those adder costs are essentially penalty skill levels against anyone trying to Missile Deflect. So if you want to be able to deflect laser beams, you better have enough levels with the Missile Deflection manuever to overcome the penalty skill levels it imposes.

[dstarfire]

I agree life support is too expensive for most effects. Reducing the cost of "full life support" should be pursued.

Another vote for re-working life support, specifically the immunities and "safe in ...". First of all, it's an absolute defense, (everybody knows absolutes don't belong in the hero system *L*).

I'd suggest moving it to the talent section as a limited form of defense. This would have the added benefit of basing the cost on the frequency of occurence, which varies quite a bit between genres and even individual campaigns.

[SSgt Baloo]

Q: Should Mental Powers provide Mental Awareness for free?

It's power with (mostly) "invisible SFX" that can still be be "seen" by it's victims. Delete that "temporary" mental Awareness from the targets and I have no problem with mentalists needing to buy a sense just to use their powers.

Q: Should Mental Defense provide EGO/5 in defense for free?

See below. Lord Liaden suggested an ideal answer

Q: Should Missile Deflection and Reflection be changed?

Steve’s Thoughts: I think so. I wrote a whole HEROglyphs column in DH #38 describing some of the problems I see with this Power, including: you’re paying points for something that Dodge essentially lets you do for free; its effectiveness is based on special effects (deflect thrown, deflect arrows, etc.) rather than a game effect; the basing of Reflection on Deflection causes some problems.

I think others have come up with a number of helpful suggestions. I'd like to see Missile Deflection become an expansion on the "block" maneuver, with missile reflection either becoming its own power (and including a melee-only version), or lumped on top of Missile deflection (I have no problem with either concept.)

FWIW in my games I made Figured Mental Defense one of the "toggles" that distinguish Heroic from Superheroic campaigns. IOW for Heroic games, where the Active Points of Powers tend to be lower, I toggle off Figured MD, so that mentalists in those games will be more effective. OTOH I generally toggle it on for Superheroic games since Mental Powers tend to have much higher AP - in fact, in most cases all characters in such games receive EGO/5 MD for free regardless of whether they purchased separate MD.

Excellent suggestion.

As posted by someone else years ago:

Life Support: the cost breakdowns are both too high and needlessly complex for poisons & diseases, and the cost problem is compounded in low-point Heroic games. I'd suggest:

1 point: immune to single disease or poison.
3 points: immune to related group of diseases or poisons (i.e. zootoxins, viral infections).
5 points: immune to all poisons.
5 points: immune to all disease.

I would like to add my endorsement to simplifying Life Support. I think Xlotl's suggestion has merit. I would also like to see Regeneration restored to its former glory as an independent power. It's just klugy the way regen works in 5E.

[Markdoc]

Life Support: Just state 'Immune to all Poisons' for 10 pts. or 'Immune to all Diseases' for 10 pts. If a player wants less, make it a Limited Power from -2 to -1/4 and make the player define thier funky exceptions to the power. Listing zootoxins and Rabies, and Alcohol and Common Cold/Flu is contrary to the entire HERO philosophy.

Good point - that always struck me as kind of dumb - and it makes no kind of biological sense. I understand Steve wanting to break Life support down into various options (and that was a worthwhile exercise) but the way it's written now is clunky.

cheers, Mark