Skill Tricks

[Citizen Keen]

Just bought DC. Love it for the most part (although the index is a little over spaced for a HERO book - it looks like you could have crammed in another page of text. Any response from the layout team?)

 

Two thoughts on Skill Tricks so far.

 

1.) Does "I've Got You Covered" seem over priced? I like the idea of using Invisible Power effects as a special effect for a cover/fastdraw idea. But 30 points to do this? That ability seems powered more at 5 or 10 points. Now, I know the GM rule "Do it however you want", but how would I create this ability with HERO and have it be more fair in terms of cost? Or am I missing some factor that makes this worth about hte same as +4 to overall combat?

 

2.) For "Got a Lungful of Air", rather than Uncontrolled at +0, doesn't a continuing charge lasting 1 minute seem more in line with the special effect? Especially since the special effect of the character not always getting it being the Activation Roll? What's the thought process behind this?

 

But overall, Steve, good job, and glad you could come back to your beginnings now that you're the head honcho.

[Steve Long]

Re: Skill Tricks

 

We space the indices to fit however many pages we have left at the end of the book, making them as legible as we can in the space we have. Layout isn't magic -- we can't predict in advance how long a book will be, and we generally can't go back and add pages in the middle of a book once layout is done. Even if I'd wanted to add a page (which I didn't), I wouldn't have done so, because it would have imposed days of work on Andy for no appreciable gain.

[Funksaw]

Re: Skill Tricks

 

"I've Got You Covered" isn't only paying for the invisibility of the power, as far as I can tell - it's paying for the Dex. Specifically, a 20 Dex "I've got you covered." is really a +20 dex I've got you covered. (thus the 60 AP)

 

Here's how I would do it though. Instead of making the *whole* DEX invisible, I'd just make the Dex that makes the fast-draw possible invisible- i.e., if a character has 15 dex, I'd treat "I've got you covered as a +5 dex power and have the PC roll/move as if he had 20 dex when getting off the shot. That 5 dex is 15 points, after limitations it's 7 points.

 

The rationale is that it's not the first 15 points that makes the draw so fast that it might as well be "invisible."

 

Alternatively - and this may not work, the power could be bought as +1 SPD at 10 points, for the *previous* phase only. I.E., if you didn't get a move on, say, phase 7, it turns out that you *did* get a move on Phase 7 after all - right at the end of Phase 7, right before Phase 8...

 

1 SPD is 10 points, -1/2 lim is 5 points.