Goodman's Tips

[Christopher R Taylor]

I would probably allow someone to hold a phase to recover... but only if they did it at the beginning of the phase.  As in, at their normal DEX and everyone gets to act after that, not at the "end" of the phase.

[Doc Democracy]

3 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I would probably allow someone to hold a phase to recover... but only if they did it at the beginning of the phase.  As in, at their normal DEX and everyone gets to act after that, not at the "end" of the phase.

 

Is there any point holding a phase that you use at the beginning of your phase?

[BoloOfEarth]

4 hours ago, Doc Democracy said:

 

Is there any point holding a phase that you use at the beginning of your phase?

 

I'm thinking he meant at the beginning of a Segment.  (Though Christopher can correct me if I'm wrong.)  If you normally move on Segments 4, 8, and 12, and on 12 declare you're holding your action, then I think he's saying that he would be fine with you deciding you want to do a recovery at your DEX in 3, but not at the end.  

[Doc Democracy]

1 hour ago, BoloOfEarth said:

 

I'm thinking he meant at the beginning of a Segment.  (Though Christopher can correct me if I'm wrong.)  If you normally move on Segments 4, 8, and 12, and on 12 declare you're holding your action, then I think he's saying that he would be fine with you deciding you want to do a recovery at your DEX in 3, but not at the end.  

 

So easy to mix up terms.  I can understand saying that you cannot guarantee being the last to act on a segment within your phase, I can buy into that. 😁

[Christopher R Taylor]

I figured a held phase is still your phase, even if its off the usual speed chart location.  All of them fall on segments.

[Duke Bushido]

While I get all the outpouring of 'you can't do that because you don't know when the phase ends,' if I have the high DEX, I can decide to go last. 

 

If I have a held action and count heads, I can decide to go last-er.

 

 

[Sketchpad]

On 2/16/2023 at 11:51 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

 

Slightly OT (and probably answered previously), but what was Steve Goodman's character in The Guardians?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

what was Steve Goodman's character in The Guardians?

 

I want to know too

[Scott Ruggels]

His character was called Force. 
 

I am also amazed at how many of you losers don’t buy your powers to Zero END. 😁 power armor FTW! 

[assault]

23 minutes ago, Scott Ruggels said:

I am also amazed at how many of you losers don’t buy your powers to Zero END. 😁 power armor FTW! 

 

Now it's on!

 

Obviously you use the points you save on reducing your END to zero to buy a bigger attack! Or at least a bigger CV. Or SPD. Or whatever.

 

The idea is to put the zero END character down before you need to take a recovery.

 

Of course such calculations are really based on comparing your character against other PCs, but hey, what else are points for?

 

As for power armour... well even if you have to take the Limitation, there are plenty of other justifications for it. And if you are sufficiently Goodmanized, you can actually skip it if you have to. Because Limitations hurt.

[Old Man]

22 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

His character was called Force. 
 

I am also amazed at how many of you losers don’t buy your powers to Zero END. 😁 power armor FTW! 

 

I almost always did that just to not have to track END.

 

Also, Drain vs. END is devastating, try it sometime.

[dmjalund]

remember when people run out of END they can still burn STUN to power their abilities

[Sketchpad]

On 2/20/2023 at 10:56 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

 

I am also amazed at how many of you losers don’t buy your powers to Zero END. 😁 power armor FTW! 

 

I always used END Battery for power armor. 

[BoloOfEarth]

As GM, I typically create most villains' powers with Half END, figuring that brings the END cost down enough that I don't have to worry about it.  Because I don't track END for the villains unless one has gotten temporarily KO'd and wakes back up with END down below 10.  (And even then I rarely track it, because the PCs are very likely to put that guy back down into GM-Discretion-Land pretty quickly.)

 

The players in my game rarely create Drains, and haven't gone with END Drains at all.

[Old Man]

59 minutes ago, BoloOfEarth said:

The players in my game rarely create Drains, and haven't gone with END Drains at all.

 

END Transfer is even better.  It pays for itself!  Muahahahaaaaa!

[Duke Bushido]

On 2/20/2023 at 10:56 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

His character was called Force. 
 

 

 

 

For those who started with later editions, the only appearance of Force that I can recall were a couple of build examples in the 2e book (I _think_ they were carry-overs from the 1e book, but I am not certain enough to state it as a fact.) 

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Old Man said:

 

END Transfer is even better.  It pays for itself!  Muahahahaaaaa!

 

I always had a soft spot for Endurance Transfer, but my favorite Drain was always Recovery (kinda pricey as a Transfer under the old rules). 

 

Most folks learned END management pretty quickly, and built the bulk of their tactics around it.   Most of those tactics relied on knowing when you were going to recover (based on SPD which, in the old editions, cost a fortune to adjust) and REC. 

 

Start taking that away, and some folks would straight up balk; either they conserved too many actions (didn't want to risk the END cost of a miss at any kind of range), or they literally fled the field.  The best ones were the ones that spent an extra Phase or two recovering (aka "target posing" ) instead of acting in spite of their sudden handicap. 

 

Do you have any idea how easy it is to hit someone taking a Recovery with Drain: REC, Ranged?  Not only does it reduce their recovery further, but it totally denies them the one they wasted their phase on trying to take. 

 

Honestly, we needed those 4e STOP signs long before we had 4e.   

 

Don't get me wrong: outside of Paranoia (where, whatever you might _choose_ to believe, it was the freakin' _whole point of the game_), I was _never_ a "Killer GM.". However, I wasn't a stupid villain, either. 

 

(unless the villain in question actually was stupid, mind you.)

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I've mentioned this before but back in 3rd edition the "Destroy" mechanic (very long term drain) recovered based on your recovery score. If you had 6 recovery, you got 6 points of a stat back per time period.

 

So... if you destroyed Recovery below zero it never recovered.  You inevitably, certainly will die from burning stun to zero and starving.  I even came up with monsters who died this way, zombies who were drained to death.

[Steve]

32 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I've mentioned this before but back in 3rd edition the "Destroy" mechanic (very long term drain) recovered based on your recovery score. If you had 6 recovery, you got 6 points of a stat back per time period.

 

So... if you destroyed Recovery below zero it never recovered.  You inevitably, certainly will die from burning stun to zero and starving.  I even came up with monsters who died this way, zombies who were drained to death.

You can effectively do this in the current edition by delaying the recovery period. Set it to recover five points per week or per month.

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I've mentioned this before but back in 3rd edition the "Destroy" mechanic (very long term drain) recovered based on your recovery score. If you had 6 recovery, you got 6 points of a stat back per time period.

 

So... if you destroyed Recovery below zero it never recovered.  You inevitably, certainly will die from burning stun to zero and starving.  I even came up with monsters who died this way, zombies who were drained to death.

 

Oh, yes.  Power Destruction.  I didn't _exactly_ take it off the table for my Champions players, but I reminded them that villains have access to the same powers that the heroes do, and it's been a few decades, but no one has touched it for Champions. 

 

I have used a sort of variant of it for counter-spells and counter-curses for my fantasy games, where the counter-caster beats the AP of the spell that was used to place the curse and thereby lifts the curse /counters the spell. 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Steve said:

You can effectively do this in the current edition by delaying the recovery period. Set it to recover five points per week or per month.

 

 

You could do that in every edition, it just cost much more.  In the early editions, the power recovered one per Segment beginning on the first Segment after the Phase in which the Adjustment power was used. 

 

This return could be delayed by one Segment by paying 2 pts times the cost of the thing being drained.  To delay the return of STR, the attacker would pay 2x1 per Segment delayed.  To delay it 4 segments, he would pay 8 pts.  Similarly, to delay the return of a DEX drain, he would pay 2x3, or 6 pts per Segment delayed.  To delay the return by 4 segments, he would pay an additional 24 pts. 

 

Now the rules never had an exactly-worded specification of what recurring effect such a delay had with regard to slowing down the delay, but the overall verbiage suggests that after the delay has passed, the return rate resumes at 1pt per Segment. 

 

We had a few players who felt that, if the delay was in play, it should delay each Segment individually.  That is, if you paid for 4 segments of delay, it should delay each point. 

 

That is, a character hit with a drain on Phase 12 would suffer four segments of delay, recover 1 pip on Segment 5, endure another 4 segments of delay, regain a pip on Segment 10, etc. 

 

The problem was that, while the overall gist of the rules suggested (without stating) that this was not the case, the argument was sound and persuasive.  To resolve it, we house ruled a second sort of delay return that did work in this way, and priced it at 3 x the cost of the thing being drained.  It got bought regularly and deeply enough that we bumped it up to 4 pts x unit cost, and never really looked back.  

 

I still use that particular house rule, actually. 

 

At any rate, the point was that the ability to create 'Power Destruction" always existed, which, more than anything, was the reason I never adopted it (outside of a couple of isolated off-label uses in fantasy).  Like the shades of transform, shapes shift, multiform, and a few others over the years: it was already there.  All the official Power Destruction did was make it _so ridiculously cheap_ next to the extant methods. 

 

[/segue] 

 

 

[MrAgdesh]

I seem to remember that my 14 year old self thought that Goodman’s School of Cost Effectiveness was pretty cool at the time. 
 

My 55 year old self is just annoyed at how the min-maxing abuse advice negatively affected campaigns. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

That is the tough road to walk, to try to avoid them being cheap and rules-shaving, while still being useful to players.  I think just about every long-term player uses most of Goodman's tips without realizing it.

[MrAgdesh]

Yep. I mean it’s not rocket science to figure out that in a system rounding to the nearest 5, primary CHAs of 13 and 18 were very efficient. it’s just that until that was written down - in the actual book (Champions II?) - it didn’t really happen. The tips kind of emphasised that you were a chump not to take them. 
 

the suggestion above that you can burn STUN as END is far more a useful oft forgotten kind of tip without being all power-gamey. 

[Hugh Neilson]

4 hours ago, MrAgdesh said:

Yep. I mean it’s not rocket science to figure out that in a system rounding to the nearest 5, primary CHAs of 13 and 18 were very efficient. it’s just that until that was written down - in the actual book (Champions II?) - it didn’t really happen.

 

 

Your experience differs from  mine.  STR tended to go in even 5's to avoid half dice and STR rolls were not common.  DEX (often Ego) typically rounded up to the next CV.  CON nearly always ended in a 3 or an 8, as did INT and PRE.

[Old Man]

5 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

 

Your experience differs from  mine.  STR tended to go in even 5's to avoid half dice and STR rolls were not common. 

 

STR varies by genre.  In Champions, where you might actually hit someone with a fist, STR tended to be in multiples of 5.  In FH, where what matters is the STR Min of your weapon, STR ended in 3 or 8 because (from 4e onward) STR Mins tended to also end in 3 or 8 and that extra point of figured characteristics was actually worth something.