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Most Ridiculous Rules Interpretation Ever?


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Most of these were mine, back in the day.

 

One of the old Enemies had an RKA and EB linked... and I asked the GM about linking an RKA to an EB. The EB was a plasma wave and the RKA was a laser that lased within the beam. 15d6 EB, 5d6 RKA. RKA had beam. Linked attacks are the same to hit roll/CV. Ran into the major DCV based baddie, spread the EB for OCV and got +14 OCV with my RKA. Oh yeah they were two slots in the same EC.

 

Way back when we thought martial throw acted as a block, so we would wait for the attack, abort to throw, throw the opponent and do damage.

 

Designing a fantasy spell, as GM. I wanted something where the caster just touched a wall, and a few moments later it just started desintigrating. But I didn't want it killing people so it had Inanimate only as a lim. Built as 1d6 Body drain, recovers per geologic era, uncontrolled continous, sticky.

I looked at it the next day, my eyes widened at what I had built and I said nope- this spell does not exist.

 

Had a player that had an OAF bow and 50 STR TK only to get bow.

 

Built a supersuit doubledipping on OIF, Ohid, with the rationale that if it was just OIF, I could use the foci independently and not be in Hero ID.... Didn't really grock special effects there.

 

Had a GM who ruled that if you were stunned in 12, your post 12 was spent recovering from being stunned, as it was a recovery.

 

 

Was once a powergamer, but I'm much better now.

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A simple error this one, but it lead to a ridiculous situation.

 

A hero with a 2D6 RKA and FW 14- sets, braces, and rolls against Grond (4th edition, no LOW) 5 times ! Because he forgot the -2 per successive roll, poor Grond has about 1 rPD when the guy finally pulls the trigger. It took two shots to down him, and practically hospitalised him.

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Originally posted by Catacomb

WAAAYYYY too nasty for anyone to have.

 

I haven't seen that, I don't have it here to look it up, but I'm not sure how NND would matter for an Entangle. It's still an Entangle, and would still have DEF and BODY based on the roll. Entangles don't act against the target's PD or ED anyway, do they?

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After reading the thread, I have to say it...Wow, that's some creative cheesiness. Kraft would be proud.

 

Let's see...I can't think of any really cheesy moments in our Champs games. Some people might consider these cheese, but I was rather impressed by them.

 

1) 1d6 NND 1-hex AoE x5 Autofire on charges, in an OIF "Grenade Launcher on Power Armor."

 

2) A martial artist with light power armor to add defenses and STR and Flight.

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Originally posted by Lord Mhoram

Most of these were mine, back in the day.

 

One of the old Enemies had an RKA and EB linked... and I asked the GM about linking an RKA to an EB. The EB was a plasma wave and the RKA was a laser that lased within the beam. 15d6 EB, 5d6 RKA. RKA had beam. Linked attacks are the same to hit roll/CV. Ran into the major DCV based baddie, spread the EB for OCV and got +14 OCV with my RKA. Oh yeah they were two slots in the same EC.

 

I would have ruled that both, or neither, would have to have the Beam limit.

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Originally posted by The_Hero

Had to chime in on this one...

 

Remember the whole "talking takes zero time" rule?

 

Well, we had a group that believed it all the way.

 

If a threat would come up, we had a team meeting on what to do about it that took 3 hours REAL TIME, even when the threat was immediate! The rule was intended as for use with one-liners and sililoquies.

 

We ended up having one session of briefing, one session of action, and one session of debriefing!

 

Makes perfect sense... if your playing the Superfriends.

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Originally posted by D-Man

I knew a group that insisted package deal disads didn't count towards the characters total disads, and then only included the points paid for the package after disadvantages on the sheet.

Thats not all that unusual. Ive seen this before in other groups, and even used it for 1 conversion to make easy bite-sized chunks (the goal was primarily to ween players to HEROs from other systems, so some of the more hairsplitting aspects were smoothed over with an eye towards simplicity).
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How about this one: Darkness, bought OAF Grenades, with the Trigger advantage set for "whenever I need it".

 

Or how about a mind control laser bought Area Effect: One Hex and then boatloads of Megascale?

 

Oh wait, those are from FREd and Champions :eek:

 

I gave my players a specific prohibition that said, "Don't even think about sending something like this my way".

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I once played with a GM who allowed his pet NPC to use FTL only through electrical lines as an extremely inexpensive and infallible form of teleport. He was the GM that all those "How not to run a successful campaign" articles are based on. His story lines were rigid and his NPC's would always come and save the day because the challenges he presented were far beyond the PC's capabilities. The players were there only to witness the total awesome kewlness of the GM's NPC du jour. I think I lasted two sessions before I quit in disgust. What's sad is that this individual was well into adulthood.

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The GM was Gullible

 

There was this character who survived falling into a vat of chemicals, she became a classic brick BUT she was 100% blind

 

Well the player asked GM if he could replace it with something like; Susceptibility 2d6 Flash. (Blind only temporarily , like Hysterical Blindness)

It turned out that both were EXACTLY the same number of points ( 10 pts). So he lost no points in buying off the disad, and the character was 99% SIGHTED !

Anyone happen to know what happens when you roll a " 1" on a die for Flash results (HINT: NO EFFECT, NOTHING)

Even today I don't think that the GM knows what he allowed.

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Originally posted by talisman

My favorite:

150 presence. This guy scared pretty much everybody all the time. He was a hippy, and even losing dice for situations, could pretty much just give the "peace" symbol with his fingers and make Mechanon run away

 

Reminds me of my very first Dark-Champions style character: Trenchcoat. This was in 4th Edition, and I built a mostly-normal dude with an armored trenchcoat & fedora as his costume, a shotgun, lots of points into a vehicle, and 70 PRE. His M.O. was to come crashing into a place in his car, blow someone away with his shotgun, then made his PRE attack, which thanks to modifiers was a least 14 dice. Since Trenchcoat was a vigilante targeting street-scum, this would leave all of his victims helpless with fear while he finished blowing them away.

 

Once the GM saw just how gross this was, we ended the campaign.

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Originally posted by talisman

My favorite:

150 presence. This guy scared pretty much everybody all the time. He was a hippy, and even losing dice for situations, could pretty much just give the "peace" symbol with his fingers and make Mechanon run away

The poster child for the hippie generation. Should've run for President...
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Can't remember if anyone's mentioned these kinds of things yet, if so, my bad.

 

Near the end of our 3E Champions gaming with my old group, we'd degraded to completely and totally raping the computers/vehicle rules. I built a computer for my powered armor inside its elemental control with something like 24 SPD, Detect Incoming Attacks - Continuous, Analyse Incoming Attacks - Continuous, Counter Dangerous Incoming Attacks - Continuous, and a VPP for the purpose of, you guessed it, countering said incoming attack. Every phase it would have at least one full phase delay waiting to use it's VPP to negate the first attack an opponent launched at him. Whether that was encasing the armor in rubber to negate a lightning bolt or actually teleporting the character out of the way of a thrown bus, the computer was there to do it all. Character often had to take a half-phase to look around and see where he was after the computer acted, but that still left him half a phase to shoot someone.

 

Buddy build a vechicle with multiform so that once at the combat site it would convert into his armor, or was it his weapon - I forget. Either way, that 1 CP for 5 CP conversion made it an extremely cheap way to get nasty during the battle.

 

Only thing I can say is that the GM was just as bad.

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Originally posted by Kristopher

I would have ruled that both, or neither, would have to have the Beam limit.

 

Yep. The GM really is responsible for that construct. He looked at the character in the book (Lava in EI IIRC) and said "If you spread the EB, you can shoot the RKA with exta CV" and I said "Can I do that?" and he said "Sure".

So I pushed it.

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I had a friend who performed blatant acts of rules bending/breaking and hid them out of a desire to protect his CharGen secrets. He was a big fan of "Secret Wars" style mass combats, creating characters of a given point base and having them brawl FNAR, an there was no need for a GM (no story), so we made the characters and went on an honor system. Eventually I'd find out what he was doing and show him that it wasn't legal, but until I found out, things were pretty rough. Here's the three worst offenses...

 

First, he thought that density increase added to your figured characteristics. Thinking this, he realized that one level of DI (old rules) was worth negative total points and he went nuts with it, making a character with 20 levels of DI. Before I realized what he was doing, this character found himself KO'd from a round of NNDs from a pack of agents. With 20 levels of DI, we couldn't get enough strength between all of the characters there to pick him up to carry him away from the scene.

 

Next, and this was his most abused effort, he discovered negative figured characteristics. Only one figured characteristic can be negative, but he neglected to remember this and started making characters with CON scores in the thousands. Almost overnight, his roster of characters got WAY more powerful. Eventually, I got him to fess up as to how he did it, showed him the rule, and that was the end of the problem.

 

Finally, I watched him roll his dice one-by-one and toss each successive die at any result that came up a 1 or 2 in order to change the result. As you can guess, this didn't last long either. Though it isn't a rule, it's pretty bad to see someone try to justify this...

 

For all the headaches caused by the above, there were still some good times, so I don't regret it. I just remember them as some of the worst examples of rules interpretation that I'd ever seen. :)

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Originally posted by Super Squirrel

A person created a tiered system for their character. He had four 'gears' and each had a new and harder activation roll to turn on.

 

Actually, *is* there any way this could be done without being abusive? The idea of powers that could only activate in a cumalative fashion is not an inherently bad one.

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Hex

 

I got another one! I got another one! Magical power - unluck, ranged. This is another one from my early days. I came up with it, as a GM, 'cause the girl who was playing the character was cool and... well, you get the idea. Ended up with 13 dice of unluck, with which she regularly caused enemy groups to suffer hideous penalties.

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Originally posted by Brandi

Actually, *is* there any way this could be done without being abusive? The idea of powers that could only activate in a cumalative fashion is not an inherently bad one.

Ive done this before, buying partially limited effect on down scaling ACT roles, and then defined it as 'one roll', get the aggregate effect. However, since the probability of making 1 roll is generally better than that of making several rolls, we prorated the ACT lim accordingly. I cant recall off the top of my head what the values were; we based it on the statistical likelyhood of making several rolls as appropriate to each step down the line.
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We had a cahracter who had a "Power Stunt Pool" He had a VPP with the limitation "Must Learn Stunt" -1/2 basically the ability had an 8- activation roll until he made the roll, then it bumped up to 9-, then 10-, see where I'm going with this? Eventually the roll would no longer be required to use that "Stunt".

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