TheEmerged Posted April 8, 2003 Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Heya gang. Lately a couple of my computer-gaming friends have been trying to get me over my "RTS-prejudice", especially related to StarCraft, so I'd join them for some games of SC. In particular, they countered my usual "it's just about who builds the most the quickest" with the argument that the units all have natural counters -- although, amusingly, sometimes they suggested the same unit to counter each other, but the RTS thing is a rant for another day. It got me thinking about to what extent this concept exists in HERO, however. Here's what I've worked up so far; I'd like to see what y'all think and what y'all can add. One rule -- certain counters are so excessively obvious as to not warrent a mention. Two good example of this would be Find Weakness/Lack of Weakness and Dispel/Difficult to Dispel. Several of the following will still be pretty darn obvious; they're included mostly for people new to the system. THE ULTIMATE COUNTER Faced With...Rule Flaw/Abuse Natural Counter...Good GM/Veto Power I think we can all agree this is the Counter Supreme While in the long-tmer/big-picture I will always insist that the veto power of the GM is no excuse for maintaining a flaw in the rules, in the short-term that veto power is necessary and important -- as is a good GM. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Faced With...Continuing/Fuel Charges Natural Counter...Dispel Imagine the ability to give a power the No END advantage, as a limitation! That's what Continuing/Fuel Charges looks like at first blush. The trick is that Dispel burns the entire charge when it hits one of these. What's more, the power remains off until at least the target's next phase; that can be anywhere from annoying (Flight) to troublesome (Force Field) to downright problematic (Force Field from a Focus) or even dangerous (Flight from a Focus, at high altitude). COROLLARY: Dispel is also a great counter for Uncontrolled powers for the same reason -- it takes away something the opponent thought they could "fire and forget". Faced With...Excessive DCV Natural Counter...Area Effect and Mental Powers 5th Edition Adds...Change Environment From the Department of the Hideously Obvious, I'll admit, but worth mentioning to newcomers to the system or people that haven't upgraded to 5th yet. I'm mentioning it mostly because a change to 5th adds a new tool to our list. 5th Edition has added a new and wonderful variant to this, however: Change Environment's upgrade. Specifically, I'm talking about the ability this power has to reduce the DCV of opponents. I've already seen a few variants of this run through my campaign (PC and NPC) and it's worth mentioning. Faced With...Mentalists Natural Counter...Sense-Affecting Powers Expecting Mental Defense, weren't you? Mental Powers can generally only be used against targets that can be seen, or targetted via a targeting Mental Sense (Mind Scan). Often, mentalists need to be more afraid of a Darkness to these groups than they do Mental Defense. Faced With...Sense-Affecting Powers Natural Counter...Alternate Targetting Sense Another one from the Department of the Hideously Obvious -- and yet, one of the first things I will always look for when judging a writeup and my second biggest pet peeve with a lot of official writeups. The penalties for not being able to sense your opponent are quite stiff -- not insurmountable, but certainly worth planning for. I've said before and will continue to say that the best 10-15 active points any character can spend are to make an existing sense targetting or to buy a targetting sense like sonar or radar. Faced With...Find Weakness Natural Counter...Invisibility/Darkness A moderately-common house rule before, 5th Edition makes official that Find Weakness can be blocked as a sense in the Unusual group. With Lack Of Weakness a little more expensive now (because it must be "categorized" similarly to Flash Defense), suddenly this option looks much more attractive. Faced With...Overly-aggressive players Natural Counter...Images and, to a lesser extent, Mental Illusion Well, it worked for me Nothing makes a player stop and think like realizing the world around them might not be what they think it is. You have to watch this one -- it can cause resentment. Faced With...Missile Deflection/Reflection Natural Counter...Invisible Power Effect While many of the same tactics as "Excessive DCV" can be used here, nothing beats an attack the user can't perceive Faced With...END Reserves Natural Counter...Dispel! Normally, Dispel can't affect characteristics. END Reserves however are powers and, according to Steve (asked on the Questions board before the Denial of Service attack), affected by Dispels. Granted, however, like adjustment powers the active value of the END Reserve should be figured as though the END and REC cost 1/2 and 2 points instead of 1/10 and 1, respectively. That means this method is best used against the mid-sized reserves that crop up with some regularity. However, if you find reserves getting out of hand you may want to rule as I do -- that the END and REC of the reserves can be targetted separately... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mutant for Hire Posted April 8, 2003 Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Re: Exercise in Theory: Natural Counters of the HERO System Originally posted by TheEmerged Faced With...Mentalists Natural Counter...Sense-Affecting Powers Expecting Mental Defense, weren't you? Mental Powers can generally only be used against targets that can be seen, or targetted via a targeting Mental Sense (Mind Scan). Often, mentalists need to be more afraid of a Darkness to these groups than they do Mental Defense. I'd modify the Natural Counter to "Sense-Affecting Powers versus Mental Sense Group" just to make it clearer what you're talking about. I worked this one out a while back. The big question is of course can Change Environment be used to lower ECV values for the purposes of defending against mental attacks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Victim Posted April 8, 2003 Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Isn't there something in the FAQ that says that END in a END reserve is affected by adjustment powers at the normal 2:1 rate, and not 10:1? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheEmerged Posted April 8, 2003 Author Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Yep, in fact I'm reasonably sure that item appeared after I asked Steve whether or not it should Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaratustra Posted April 8, 2003 Report Share Posted April 8, 2003 Faced with... Falling Natural Counter... Flight and associated Unnatural Counter... Entangle The good old method of using Entangle to cushion BODY damage that otherwise would go to your widdo head. Works with falling civilians, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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