Western Hero 6th edition

[HeroGM]

[HeroGM]

1981 -- Boot Hill

[Joe Walsh]

All five of the original modules for Boot Hill were pretty good. The final, BH5 Range War!, has an excellent setup for a land use battle between ranchers and sheep herders. Really good stuff, useful for any western campaign.

[SCUBA Hero]

Gotta love that Bill Willingham art! 👍

[HeroGM]

4 hours ago, SCUBA Hero said:

Gotta love that Bill Willingham art! 👍

 

Willinghan and Dee. Maybe it's age, I miss the cartoon style. Reynolds and all of the current artist are good, no doubt. Does it have to be THAT realistic though?

5 hours ago, GM Joe said:

All five of the original modules for Boot Hill were pretty good. The final, BH5 Range War!, has an excellent setup for a land use battle between ranchers and sheep herders. Really good stuff, useful for any western campaign.

 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

22 hours ago, HeroGM said:

 

Willinghan and Dee. Maybe it's age, I miss the cartoon style. Reynolds and all of the current

 

 

 

I just miss good clean line art.  Portraying the most with the least.  Line art is poetry amongst the prose of flashy colors, cell shading, washes, and filters.

 

 

 

[steriaca]

I just got this book.

 

I was pondering what would be an Iron Stomach talent (Life Support: Immunity To Food Poisoning) cost. It only is supposed to protect the user from bad cooking, not if someone actually does poison food. Such a talent isn't in the book itself (the closest is the Can Handle His Drink talent which protects from alcohol poisoning, let alone getting "drunk").

[steriaca]

On 12/31/2021 at 3:23 PM, Tjack said:

All this is true but this is the thread for Western Hero, not western reality.  I don’t recall seeing in the Fantasy Hero section discussions about the alternatives for toilet paper, or that everybody’s breath stunk.

  This should be the place for debating how much of an advantage “Never runs out of bullets” should be.

I would think a naked advantage on 2d6 RKA which buys off 6 Charges would cost. I'm guessing this should be instead of a talent a GM setting thing which everyone can and will do.

[Duke Bushido]

Don't take the Charges Limitation.

 

Done.

 

Never run out of bullets.

 

The difference in the build with and without that limitation is how much it's worth.  We can over think it and drive the cost out to lunar orbit if we want, but remove Charges to get what you want and call it a day.

[steriaca]

13 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

Don't take the Charges Limitation.

 

Done.

 

Never run out of bullets.

 

The difference in the build with and without that limitation is how much it's worth.  We can over think it and drive the cost out to lunar orbit if we want, but remove Charges to get what you want and call it a day.

I call it "Cinematic Ammunition". Remember this is not a superhero campaign. The hero doesn't pay points for his gun, only money. So how can you do this in a setting where everyone gets a gun if they can afford one (and, well, probably gets one for free anyways). This calls for a Talent.

[Duke Bushido]

"Knows When to Load 'Em:"

 

Character has an uncanny knack of buying and carrying enough ammo for whatever lies ahead, and habitually has more than enough on his person at all times.  He has casual-- almost  nervous--l habit of loading his weapon, even when going to bed.  Any time he thinks his gun might come in handy, he will, by unconscious habituation, load the gun.  Is one hand shooting?  The other is fishing for bullets.

 

Price to taste.

 

[steriaca]

6 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

"Knows When to Load 'Em:"

 

Character has an uncanny knack and a casual habit of loading his weapon, even when going to bed.  Any time he thinks his gun might come in handy, he will, by unconscious habitation, load the gun.  Is one hand shooting?  The other is fishing for bullets.

 

Price To taste.

 

I think this should be 10 points.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I was pondering what would be an Iron Stomach talent (Life Support: Immunity To Food Poisoning) cost. It only is supposed to protect the user from bad cooking, not if someone actually does poison food. Such a talent isn't in the book itself (the closest is the Can Handle His Drink talent which protects from alcohol poisoning, let alone getting "drunk").

 

It looks to me like just a low end Life Support vs poisons (minor food poisoning) as you say, maybe 1-2 points.  Not enough to save your life from strychnine, but able to survive eating that half-chewed coyote you ran across in the plains after starving a week.

 

Quote

This should be the place for debating how much of an advantage “Never runs out of bullets” should be.

 

Well to me that's more of a setting rule than an individual thing.  Either characters run out of bullets in this campaign, or they don't; everyone.  Because no matter what you price it at (more on that in a moment), every player but the big boxer character who uses his fists or the slick knife fighter is going to buy it; if its available why they hell would you not??  Six shots is a pretty severe limitation on firepower in a gun battle, its why cops bailed on their wheel guns in the 80s no matter how reliable and trusty they were.

 

This is the biggest gun anyone is likely to wield in the game:

Enfield Pattern 1853   3d6+1 RKA (50 active points) 6 charges, recoverable: -¼ limitation (10 points) "it shoots through schools"

 

The Maxim is even worse, but it has so many rounds that it doesn't even get a limitation from charges, so it wouldn't cost anything.  Plus, good luck running into one.

 

The M1857 12-pounder is a cannon, not even a crew served gun so it doesn't count.  Unless you're that giant from the Harold Lloyd film carrying a gun around on your back, I guess.

 

So if you really wanted it, 10 points is probably a decent price.

 

So decent, like I said, everyone would just buy it.

[steriaca]

Sounds like we have a few small things to help build a Western Hero Companion book. A section on Cinimatic Ammunition here. A few new Talents. Enough justification to put an primitive Rastling (Wrestling, Professional) and Knifefighting on the Martial Arts list. Prehaps a few new templates (I do believe Prospector falls under Mountian Man, but where does Railroad Worker falls under? Especially the guys who blast through mountains with dynamite? How's about Rancher [the one who owns the ranch or farm]? Riverboat Sailor? Traveling Entertainer? Saloon Girl/Soiled Dove?).

[Duke Bushido]

Agreed: everyone would buy it, making it a campaign norm anyway.

 

Costing any talent is way deep into GM fiat country.  If you were to build it as a Power, you would have to start with some form of precognition or insane amounts of luck (I wouldn't ise the Luck, though, unless you were going to do Standard Effects, given that you need a lot of sixes, specifically.  

 

All that together:  sure.  10 points se.ms,reasonable enough, depending on the grim or the realism factor you are shooting for.

 

[Spence]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

Costing any talent is way deep into GM fiat country.

 

I thought there was a write up/reference somewhere that detailed how they made the talents. 

Or am I misremembering?

[Duke Bushido]

4 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

I thought there was a write up/reference somewhere that detailed how they made the talents. 

Or am I misremembering?

 

 

No; you are not misremembering.   The problem comes with "what powers and modifiers do I use to do this?"

 

Like I alluded to above: 

 

is this Precognition?  Or is it Luck?  IE, is he lucky enough to have just happened to have bought enough ammo?

 

Then there's the problem of simulating this in a money-for-powers game: how do you know he bought enough ammo?  Do you just deduct a percentage of all his income and state "this is what you used for ammo?"  What do you do when that really wasn't enough after all?  Do you (as I would suggest) make him pay for ammo retroactively, on the assumption that he actually did just happen to have bought at least that amount every time?  And what do you do when when he's out of money?  Un-buy a few things, or do an "abort income to cash on hand" kind of thing?

 

And how do you represent that in the build?  _Do_ you represent that, or do you declare a fiat?

 

Using Luck, you come up with one cost; using Precog, you get another.  Which is "best?"  Or, less judgmentally, which is most accurate?  When do you stop applying modifiers, for that matter?

 

Sure: when you get it "exactly right" is the ideal answer, but I think most of us are going to have a "this is close enough" point, and that's going to vary, too.

 

 

I apologize; I didn't say any of that to be disagreeable; it was just something that I thought we should keep in mind with regard to pricing a Talent.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

is this Precognition?  Or is it Luck?  IE, is he lucky enough to have just happened to have bought enough ammo?

 

I just bought off the charges limitation, because that effectively negates ever worrying about running out.  Lucy Lucia loads her guns, but its just a special effect; she doesn't actually need the bullets

[steriaca]

I say the GM build an average 6-shooter generic handgun as the base. Then build it again without the Charges limitation but with the Reduced Endurance (0 END) advantage. The difference is what everybody pays for not tracking bullets for up to 2d6 RKA. Any firepower above 2d6 and you need to track them bullets.

 

Note: this can also be used for Endless Arrows and Endless Throwing Knives. Except of course, both cost endurance as well as charges.

[Duke Bushido]

11 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Don't take the Charges Limitation.

 

Done.

 

Never run out of bullets.

 

The difference in the build with and without that limitation is how much it's worth.  We can over think it and drive the cost out to lunar orbit if we want, but remove Charges to get what you want and call it a day.

 

3 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

I just bought off the charges limitation, because that effectively negates ever worrying about running out.  Lucy Lucia loads her guns, but its just a special effect; she doesn't actually need the bullets

 

 

We think alike more often than we don't.

 

 

[HeroGM]

"Reload? We dont need no stinking reload..."

[Duke Bushido]

On 3/4/2022 at 1:50 PM, steriaca said:

I think this should be 10 points.

 

 

I haven't bothered building the guns, but I'd keep something in mind:

 

No matter what the build is, it is _worth_ exactly the difference between "gun with Charges limitation" and "gun without Charges limitation."

 

 

[HeroGM]

26 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

I haven't bothered building the guns, but I'd keep something in mind:

 

No matter what the build is, it is _worth_ exactly the difference between "gun with Charges limitation" and "gun without Charges limitation."

 

 

 

If I was writing this as a talent I'd take the most expensive weapon and do the difference from that. That way the Removed Limitation (or the "killed" one in this case) cover the full cost of all possibilities same as a Naked Advantage.

[Duke Bushido]

Pretty much what both I and Christopher suggested up-thread.  As Steriaca was looking for a Talent, though, I would use this cost difference to determine the actual "cost" of the Talent, regardless of what mechanic was used to justify the underpinning.

 

 

CAUTION:  Do not take any of the following as an attempt to restart that conversation; it is offered as an opinion, and as such has no value outside of that.

 

This is one of the many, _many_ things I point to when maintaining my position that the quest for some sort of mathematically balance and equitable "this many points of X is balanced against this many points of Y" is utter crap.

 

 

[steriaca]

"Cinimatic Ammunition" IS better off as a campaign thing. Either everyone has unlimited bullets or nobody has them. Or, more accurately all the Player Characters and major NPCs have unlimited ammunition. Grunt owlhoots aren't going to be alive long enough to fire 6 shots, let alone more than once.