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Hero is broken


TaxiMan

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The underlying basic concept of Hero is broken. That concept is the exponential scale of damage and defenses. They are wrong. Here's why:

 

A man ("George") attacks an enormous elephant. He has 4d6 attack, and the elephant ("Jumbo") has 16PD. On average, "G" does 14 STUN, which is reduced to 0 STUN after "J"'s defenses.

 

OK, so even though J has 40 STUN, he'll never go down, the attack is ineffective. J is pretty passive, and just stands there.

 

This will never work, so G picks up a club that quadruples his damage! He now does 6d6 (4d6 + 2 doublings), and will dish out 5 STUN a phase after J's defenses (21 STUN average - 16 PD). It will take eight phases before J (who holds his breath so he gets no Recoveries) is KOed.

 

G has learned his lesson! Next time he meets the forgetful J, there is no club available. Fortunately, he has three friends, so they can deal out quadruple damage! At first they are uncoordinated, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING happens to J. The elephant thinks he's getting a massage. Ho hum.

 

G's team learns to coordinate their attacks, and so the group of four get to add their damage. Now it's 4d6 * 4, or 16d6 / phase. That's an average of 56 STUN. Working together, G's team takes out J with one blow!

 

To recap, G's attack can't hurt J.

 

G quadruples his damage, and takes 8 phases to defeat J.

 

G has three uncoordinated friends, and can never defeat J.

 

G's friends learn to coordinate and defeat J instantly.

 

That's where the exponential flaw is easily seen. Let the flames begin! Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

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OK, the thread title was worthy of a "plonk!". I love Hero, and have loads of fun so how could it be "broken"? Still, this seems out of whack somewhat. If nothing else, it should illustrate to players that they should coordinate their attacks - and fear the same from the bad guys. Even a few normal humans trained to fight can take a superhero down!

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Well first off, I don't think a man can hurt an elephant just buy punching him, so that part of the rule makes sense. Now if a man picks up a club then it seems reasonable that he would cause some damage to the elephant. Of course the elephant would attack somewhere between the 1st and 2nd hit and kill the character, so I guess that point is moot.

 

Now as far as your coordinated attack goes, you do not get to add damages together to do more overall damage. What CA does is allow you to add the STUN which gets past the DEF for each attack so that the combined STUN damage can Stun the elephant. In this case since none of the attacks can do any STUN to the elephant no damage is done by any of them.

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Brilliant deduction. Of course, its based on your incorrect interpretation of the rules, but yes if the rules did work like that you would be right.

 

I love it when people say "THIS IS BROKEN!!!" only for it to turn out that they are just confused and/or the issue they are so concerned about is only imagined.

 

 

Coordinating attacks is only really useful for trying to CON-STUN somebody. The damage does not add together before defenses to be inflicted upon the target as one big attack.

 

You could have the population of some nation throw 5 million pebbles at a tank all at once, and all of them would bounce (except for the once that happened to fall through vision slits and apertures of course ;) ).

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Originally posted by Killer Shrike

You could have the population of some nation throw 5 million pebbles at a tank all at once, and all of them would bounce (except for the once that happened to fall through vision slits and apertures of course ;) ).

Perhaps the weight of all those pebbles will crush the tank? Let's see... assuming a pebble weighs 1 oz, that is 5,000,000 ounces, which makes it 156 tons. I think 156 tons might do some serious crushing damage to the tank. :)

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Re: Hero is broken

 

I think this example is badly formed. Critical hits being used? Figure the OCV and DCV and the respective critical hit probabilities, then calculate.

 

Second, you are using averages only and not accounting for variations in dice rolls.

 

Third, well, when was the last time you saw a human being, of large size or not, with martial arts or not, take out an elephant with a fist? LOL Never! That's what elephant guns are for.

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Originally posted by Monolith

Perhaps the weight of all those pebbles will crush the tank? Let's see... assuming a pebble weighs 1 oz, that is 5,000,000 ounces, which makes it 156 tons. I think 156 tons might do some serious crushing damage to the tank. :)

Its all about dispersion and surface tension. I think the majority of the pebbles would fail to find purchase on the tank and would fall harmlessly to the ground or bounce. Only a very small percentage would actually remain on the tank.

 

Im sure somebody could program one of those hyper-intelligent new-fangled calculators to model it :D

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Re: Re: Hero is broken

 

Originally posted by Galadorn

Third, well, when was the last time you saw a human being, of large size or not, with martial arts or not, take out an elephant with a fist? LOL Never! That's what elephant guns are for.

 

You haven't watched too many chop sockey martial arts movies, have you?

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Originally posted by Super Squirrel

Oh yeah, well D&D 3rd is broken because Monks can jump themselves into orbit at like 12th level.

You mean, with the leap of the clouds power?

 

If so: Wizards can do the same at 1st level, assuming they have access to the jump spell. ;)

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The original thread starter's interpretation of Coordinated Attacks is incorrect. Others have already pointed that out.

 

However, the geometric damage scale of Hero DOES cause some odd effects, but you have to extend the analysis a bit.

 

Our Hero has 14 BODY. Assume Killing Damage and no resistant defenses. You shoot OH with a 1d KA. It takes four shots to put him at 0 BODY, and four more (a total of eight) to kill him.

 

"That's too many shots!" we cry. Let's use a weapon that does eight times as much damage! However, 8x as much damage from the characters' POV is only 2d or twice as much in points of damage due to the exponential nature of the system.

 

Our Hero is put to zero BODY by two shots, and killed outright by four shots (he's having a rough day). Eight times as much KE, but it takes only half as many shots.

 

You can do a similar analysis of points of BODY, making certain assumptions (IIRC, +2 BODY = x2 mass) and show that also gives counter-intuitive results.

 

Is Hero broken this way? Yes. Is there any game system that doesn't have similar problems? Not that I've ever found.

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Originally posted by Arthur

However, the geometric damage scale of Hero DOES cause some odd effects, but you have to extend the analysis a bit.

Where in HERO does it say that damage is geometric, i.e.; 2d6 is twice as much damage as 1d6 and half as much as 3d6? I've never been able to find this anywhere. The only doubling I've been able to find is for Lifting per 5 points of Strength. But the listed damage in the Strength Chart on page 21 of 5th edition (and it says nothing about double damage) for STR doesn't apply in the chart chart on the next page to Throwing or Leaping. If you can't jump or throw twice as far for each +5 STR, why should we assume each d6 of damage is twice as much damage? That it is more damage is inarguable, but it does not follow that it is twice as much. That's as irrational as asserting that each 3.5 points of DEF (enough to counter an average d6) is twice as tough, and therefore a character with 17 PD is four times as tough as one with 10 PD. Neither logic nor game experience support that theory.
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BTW, fr those who think you shouldn't be able to hurt and elephant with a punch from our example, i would like to point out he will.

 

its bad math to simply apply the average result against the blocking value.

 

If i attack you with a 1d6 attack and you have a 3 pd, the average hit point per attack is not .5 (3.5 average - 3 per) but rather 1 per attack (6 rolls of 1-6 -3 per each WITH A MINIMUM OF 0 per attack.)

 

.5 would have been correct if low damage rolls gave hit points back to the elephant, which they don't.

 

17 is not too far from the average of 4d6 as to be rare. Since i have a 3d6 chart i will reduce this to 3d6 vs 12 defense and point out that this is a 25.9% chance of doing damage. My bet is that needing a 17 on 4d6 is probably in the range of 20% likely.

 

So the real issue is not the strength vs PD but rather the rate of attack vs the rate of recovery. So a crowd of sufficient size of guys all punching the elephant for 4d6 each will bring him down.

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Originally posted by Trebuchet

Where in HERO does it say that damage is geometric, i.e.; 2d6 is twice as much damage as 1d6 and half as much as 3d6? I've never been able to find this anywhere. The only doubling

 

Firstly, it is implicit in the way that every other damage scale follows the STR model. EB is obviously modelled directly on STR damage with 1d N per 5 points.

 

Secondly, an analysis of firearm KE vs. DC, which I did when I had a lot of free time, matched that almost exactly. 50 Joules of muzzle energy was DC 1. 100 J = DC 2; 200 J = DC 3; etc. The correlation fit to a surprisingly high degree of precision, given that a game system has a lot of leeway.

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Originally posted by Arthur

Secondly, an analysis of firearm KE vs. DC, which I did when I had a lot of free time, matched that almost exactly. 50 Joules of muzzle energy was DC 1. 100 J = DC 2; 200 J = DC 3; etc. The correlation fit to a surprisingly high degree of precision, given that a game system has a lot of leeway.

I can just envision George McDonald sitting at his kitchen table for 2-3 weeks trying to come up with a game system which would allow him to correctly assign 1 DC as 50 Joules, 2 DC as 100 Joules, 3 DC as 200 Joules, etc. Who would have thought that humble game designer was so smart? :)

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Originally posted by Arthur

Firstly, it is implicit in the way that every other damage scale follows the STR model. EB is obviously modelled directly on STR damage with 1d N per 5 points.

You've apparently missed my entire point, which is there is no absolute or explicit scale in the game system for what a d6 is. It doesn't matter whether or not EB or Killing Attacks or Transformations are based on the STR damage chart, because nowhere does HERO say that 11d6 is twice as much damage as 10d6. 11d6 is not twice as much damage than 10d6, it is simply 1d6 more damage. What 1d6 actually is is irrelevant. It's simply a way to keep track of relative amounts of damage and defenses.

 

You are extrapolating from a lifting chart which doubles lifting capability per 5 points, but does not double either throwing or leaping distances. Based on the other aspects of the STR charts, arbitrarily assuming each DC is twice as much damage is not supported.

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Re: Re: Re: Hero is broken

 

Originally posted by D-Man

You haven't watched too many chop sockey martial arts movies, have you?

 

LOL. Actually, the criticism was about lack of consistency and reality, so that was the context of my statement. But veeeeeery funny. LOL.

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