new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

[secretID]

[standing disclaimer: I’m brand new to the game, so please don’t take any of this as forceful criticism – I’m just playing with ideas.]

[second disclaimer: This post is crazy long, but it’s so good that you’ll come back to read it again and again!]

 

I thought a lot more about this, and came up with this rough proposal:

1) The first duplicate costs as much as its base points. All of the duplicate’s stats, powers, etc. are completely variable – the only thing that makes him a duplicate is his consciousness.

2) Summoned slaves are slightly less expensive than duplicates, and follower slaves are slightly less than that. Both become less expensive as they are less devoted, of course.

3) Each extra duplicate/summoned/follower costs marginally less than the prior one – 90-95% less. E.g., the second duplicate costs 90% of its base points.

4) The most expensive multiform costs 50% of its base points. All of the forms stats, powers, etc. are completely variable.

5) The next most expensive multiform costs 45% of its base points, the one after that 40%, etc., down to a minimum 5%.

6) Any disadvantages carried over to a duplicate or multiform (e.g. hunted) do not count towards building the duplicate/multiform.

 

The GM would have to closely control disadvantages, of course.

 

Here’s how this system compares to the rules in a few examples. All examples assume 200 base points/100 disadvantages.

 

1) Elementalman – Otherwise regular guy who can change into any of four elemental forms (fire, water, etc.).

 

This is a very coherent character that the rules can’t do well at all. The MF is the only power, so you spend all 300 on it. There’s 10 points in adders for the 4 forms, which leaves 290 for the power, so each form has 1450 CPs. However, each form has only 200 BPs, so you have to do a huge amount of disadvantages and a huge amount of powers, and you end up with something pretty messy. (You may be able to finesse it by making one of the elemental forms the main form – I didn’t try that – but that’s kind of a clumsy workaround.)

 

By the above system, each multiform gets 176 base points (you can do the annoying math or take my word for it). You can add some appropriate disadvantages to each form to come out with something 200-250 CPs. Each form is significantly less powerful than a 300 CP character, but in exchange you get the flexibility.

 

2) Hulkman – Similar to Elementalman, nearly regular guy Bruce changes into a brick.

 

Under the rules, if you make Bruce the main form, you have the same problem as with Elementalman. If you make the brick the main form, you have to make Bruce with a minimum 200 BP, far out of character.

 

With the system above, you have to make the brick the main form, with Bruce as a MF and appropriate disadvantages/limitations. It’s not pretty, but it works to get you the proper proportions of Bruce to brick.

 

3) Beastman – Regular guy transforms into different animals.

 

This is another classic character I don’t think the rules do well. As with Elementalman and Hulkman, you have a huge problem when you put a large portion of your CPs into the MF. It’s even worse here, though, b/c each form has the same BPs, so you have trouble making the different animals.

 

With this system, you pay for each form in proportion to its power. Though each successive form is relatively cheaper, you can’t make an enormous variety of forms, but how many different fish do you need?

 

4) Blackwhiteman – Hero with two distinct but equally powerful heroic personas. I can’t think of a comic book example, but I’m thinking of maybe two mystics sharing a body, but not simultaneously.

 

The rules do this pretty well. You make Black the main form, and spend 50 on the White MF, for 250 CPs each. White takes 50 points in disadvantages, so he’s actually slightly better than Black, but close enough. I think that’s probably a little to powerful.

 

The system above is very similar but a little less powerful. You start by taking 65 from Black, leaving him with 135 BPs and 235 CPs. White gets 130 BPs. White can’t make CPs from disadvantages shared with Black, but you can give him new ones and possible add some BPs to him to even out the two forms somewhere around 210-225 CPs each.

 

5) Multiman – Rounded character with beefed characteristics, plus growth, shrinking, density increase, desol., and duplication, for a fairly coherent character.

 

This is actually a character I was making. The idea was that he could only do one of these things at a time.

 

This should work better with the rules, because they seem to work better the fewer points you spend, but it still doesn’t. The problem is that you really can’t use the powers separately, because the duplicates have to have the other powers. You don’t HAVE to actually use the dups' CPs, of course, so the duplicates don’t have to have the other powers, but it seems strange that the way to make it work is to just throw away points. When I was building this character, I quickly realized that the duplication made him hugely powerful – instead of 65 more CPs, I had two more 235-CP fighters.

 

With the system above, you just give the “duplicate(s)†as many points as you like, so the duplication power can be a power on par with the others.

 

6) Mobman – Completely normal guy creates exactly identical clones.

 

Obviously, under the rules if you put all the CPs into duplicates it would be ridiculous. (I thought I crashed Excel for a second – in scientific notation, it’s 2.81475E+14 duplicates.)

 

Under this system, each duplicate costs only 1 point, so you can make 300. You can’t buy anything with the disadvantages because of rule #6. He’s a lousy character, but his power level seems about right to me.

 

 

So...whaddyathink? Be gentle with the newbie.

[paigeoliver]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

The reason multiform and all that are so cheap is this.

 

Characters don't scale perfectly pointwise.

 

A single 200 point character is much more capable than a pair of 100 point characters.

 

A 100 point character can take care of nearly a dozen 0 point characters,

A standard 350 point superheroic character can handle 20 or more 100 point characters. And that same 350 point character could likely hold off or defeat an ARMY of zero point characters.

 

I know the speedster character in my group could handle an army of thousands all by himself.

[Guest WhammeWhamme]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

To be more helpful...

 

The "old" Multiform and Duplication points structure was as follows:

 

Pay 2 points for each five point of the first duplicate. Pay 1 point for each five points of successive duplicates (first duplicate is most expensive). The most expensive character, _not counting this power_ pays this cost.

 

Pay 1 point for each five point of the first multiform. Pay 1 point for each tenpoints of successive forms (first form is most expensive). The most expensive form, _not counting this power_ pays this cost.

 

This is lower than your proposed system. And it was horrible. The math was clunky, and Duplication based characters were.... well, it was easy to make one that could take on Superman, or one that couldn't be a VIPER Agent.

 

Hero is designed with the implicit understanding that it is impossible to achieve game balance... but that it is MUCH easier to SEE the game imbalances and correct them. Points/point efficiency just tells you when something is possibly a problem.

[paigeoliver]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

Yeah, if you are custom building your multiforms, or duplicates from maximum munchkin effect then yes, they can really get out of hand.

 

Specifically in the case of multiforms when the character goes beyond the "Normal" and "beast" concept and starts in with all sorts of specialized forms for certain situations. Like a sneaky form, a social skills form, ranged combat form, a hand to hand combat form, an underwater form, and a living starship form. I think it is especially out of hand when the character makes more multiforms for assorted noncombat skills/powers just to save points.

 

As for duplicates. It depends on how it is set up. If the character has a single IDENTICAL duplicate then the pair of them will probably be less effective than a same concept single character (based on same points), but when you start pulling out the tricks like having 8 DIFFERENT duplicates, each with unique powers and skillsets, or doing stuff like making 256 duplicates with nothing in the way of stats, but each having a area effect NND attack with personal immunity.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

Without saying "yea" or Nay" to any of the proposed changes, please note that nothing REQUIRES each form to use its 200 base pooints. You can certainly build a character who has a 300 point Multiform, buy 16x the number of forms, and make one 300 points (an elephant or a dinosaur, perhaps), and another 1 point (a songbird, for example, or a crow). The 300 points is a maximum only.

 

Just like customizing 16 different forms to cover 16 different specialties is min/maxing, so is using every last CP for each of your animal forms, even when it's out of concept for that form.

[simplygnome]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

You certaintly have put a lot of thought into this. I'll give you that much...

 

There are several good points being made here, and a few more I think I'll add.

 

----------------

First off, Paige Oliver is correct in saying that points do no scale equally. If I spend 65 points of a 300pt character to create TWO duplicates (60 + 5 x2 dups.), I now have 3 Characters at 235pts.

 

On the other hand, my Brick friend uses his CPs to buy 75% resistant damage reduction to all physical attacks....

 

I know have 3xs the HP (divided between my clones) but I take 4 TIMES the amount of damage he does.

 

These two are fairly balance IMHO. One good AOE attack has the chance of defeating my "trumph card" while my friend has a rather large chance of surviving.

------------------

 

Second, in FH and Champions alike, Metamorph and Dup are not always the end-all-be-all of the character. In certain cases, like what you've demonstrated, it can be.

 

Going back to Tommy, my slightly delusional hero friend I talked about in the other thread. His one "trumph" power was his hero team of duplicates. This left me with around 150pts (as I spent 50 on innane skills and attrib) to play with. I built a multipower based on other "heroic" encounters from Team Fantastic. I had +12" of speed, with the special effect of having "Lightning Quick" zoom in from out of no where, pick up the you lad, and run off. I had several other situational powers that, while they couldnt be used with my duplicates out (because of my special effect), still came in handy.

 

Refering to your Multi-man, why not try making his Multi-persona separate from his other powers. Make one multi-power pool with the other powers (desolid, etc etc) and then make your Duplicates, so that EACH of them has asses to the other powers in the pool. It will be a bit more expensive, but an interesting idea.

 

Even if you want to go with the original idea, I dont see the current rules as being "clunky". In actualiy, if you're building all of your powers in multi-power so you can only use one at a time, then only the MAIN character is using a power (which is duplicate), and the other two have their power pools open to use any of the other powers (other than DUP) they want. Worse comes to worse, you can always use altered duplicates.

-----------------------

 

There does come a time when a large transformation, however, is wanted. Lets look at Ryoh-ohki, the lovely Cabbit (rabbit-cat *thing*) from Tenchi Muyo. It went from a ?? 25 ?? point CAT, to a roughly 1000 point startship.

 

Interesting character concept, not abused in the anime, and useful when its time came (no one flew a starship around in the atmosphere, so it was situational).

--------------------------

 

Worse comes to worse, you can always "dump" points if it doesnt fit your concept. Its an odd thing to do, but I'd rather do that 5% of the time, than have my other concepts considered rules illegal because I dont have the points to build them.

 

Anyhow, good luck in your points testing, regardless.

[secretID]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

The point about scaling is very interesting - shows the gaps from my inexperience. I don't know if that would mean that the exponential rule is better, or that my percentages should be adjusted.

 

The funny thing was that as I was creating characters, and then doing this exercise, I had less of a problem with the exponential rules and more of a problem with the 1/5 rules and the fact that the costs were based on CPs instead of BPs. Those are what really kill Elementalman and Hulkman, and what made gnome's character tricky. If you can't do either of those pretty standard characters without throwing away points, I think the system could be improved.

 

Re: Multiman, I guess I wasn't clear. I specifically wanted to avoid the duplicates having all the other powers. I could refuse to use the duplicates' points, but then I ran into another problem - I was working with a prohibition of duplicates in an MP (under Global Guardians house rules), so I had to pay this very high price for a pretty modest power. That aside, it still seems to me that the rules could use some tweaking if they're making you throw away points.

 

Short note: A few people seemed to be responding to me in these threads as if I am approaching Hero with the perspective of some other system. The only RPGs (other than computer) I've played are AD&D and V&V, and that was more than 20 years ago, so I'm not coming in with many prejudices. (Actually, I always thought the AD&D system was terrible.) Hero looks like a great system, but these few rules have been bugging me.

[zornwil]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

SecretID, I would stress that if you like this and it works in your games, do it! And feel free to keep people on the boards up on your ideas and even restate if it's appropriate, new people on the boards or people who missed this the first time might go, "Huh, that's cool!"

[secretID]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

Thanks for the supportive post.

 

This is mostly academic for me, since I haven't even played in a game yet, so I don't expect to be running one for a while if ever. Mostly I wanted to throw this out for consideration by GMs and the designers.

[simplygnome]

Re: new dup/MF/sum/follower system proposal (LONG)

 

Totally noted. Although you've said that you were sorry several times, I (and I think a majority of the hero community...just a guess) don't feel at all like you have done anything offensive in stating your opinion on the rules. GM specification is what HERO is all about.

 

In the least, you've posted a possible solution to something you see as a problem. If for any reason another GM comes onto this board that see a similar problem with MF and DUP, then he will at least have an OPTION now available to him...or at least something to think about...all because you posted your ideas.

 

The more ideas we throw around, the more options we have...and I for one think thats the GREATEST strength of the HERO system....

 

Take care!