Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

[HewhoisMatt]

My two questions bothering me (they are small so I doubled them up) are on space and time, or rather hexs and Segments. Lets begin.........

 

Space/Hexs I have found that there are alot of premade maps out there of buildings, towns, landscape etc etc etc. The problem is they are mostly all done with squares instead of hexs and I was wondering if anyone tried running their game on square maps and how they liked it.

 

Time/Segment I just can not get behind the idea of a Segment being one second with all the things the game allows us to do in a single Segment "example- Load and fire a crossbow" , it's just that even with normal human limits the things we can do in one round seems insane. I think 1 Segment should = at least 5 seconds. Has anyone tried different time rules in their games and if so how did it work out.

 

 

Well those are my two questions to ponder. What do you think?

[ghost-angel]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Space: we've used squares ... little issue has arisen from it. Hexes are just easier to deal with when trying to figure out exact facing. We've also used a whiteboard set on the table with no grid at all equally well - probably the best option we've found - using a ruler.

 

Time: Never really bothered us to be honest ... sometimes we fudge the whole time aspect .. if a battle took nine phases and we feel 38 seconds should have passed, then 38 seconds have passed. Mostly we just got to 1 phase = 1 second and suspension of disbelief is still there. Of course, we run combat-light games so it's rarely much of an issue for us.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

...snip...

Time/Phases I just can not get behind the idea of a phase being one second with all the things the game allows us to do in a single phase "example- Load and fire a crossbow" , it's just that even with normal human limits the things we can do in one round seems insane. I think 1 phase should = at least 5 seconds. Has anyone tried different time rules in their games and if so how did it work out. ...snip...

• 1 segment=1 second.
  
• A phase represents X# of actions/12 seconds a character gets where X=the character's SPD.
  
• 1 phase=1 second ONLY if the character has a 12 SPD.
  

HM

[HewhoisMatt]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

• 1 segment=1 second.
  
• A phase represents X# of actions/12 seconds a character gets where X=the character's SPD.
  
• 1 phase=1 second ONLY if the character has a 12 SPD.
  

HM

 

Okay that did not really help but thanks for pointing out my mis-post. I will correct it.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Time: Never really bothered us to be honest ... sometimes we fudge the whole time aspect .. if a battle took nine phases and we feel 38 seconds should have passed' date=' then 38 seconds have passed. Mostly we just got to 1 phase = 1 second and suspension of disbelief is still there. Of course, we run combat-light games so it's rarely much of an issue for us.[/quote']

 

Depending on the SPD of the character's involved this is perfectly fine.

 

A normal with a 2 SPD has phases that represent 6 segments or seconds. The rules for Aborting to defensive actions before your normal phase just mean that a SPD 2 character has an opportunity to Dodge on phase 1 vs. a SPD 12 character and keep the benefits to DCV for that Dodge until his DEX on phase 12. The only exception is if the SPD 2 character decides to Abort his phase 12 action early (phases 7-11+phase 12 before his DEX acts) to something different like Dive For Cover (usable vs. an AOE attack).

 

HM

[Guest Champsguy]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Segments are 1 second long. You don't use segments to act, you use phases.

Phases are a representation of a period of time. If I'm Spd 4, then my phases are about 3 seconds long.

Segments are the times that your phases are considered to "happen".

 

Thus, if I'm a Spd 4 character, and I shoot my crossbow on segment 3, and intend to fire it again on segment 6, then I'm basically considered to be loading it and preparing to fire in the meantime. But it doesn't take effect until segment 6. Segment 6 is considered to be when I load and fire it for purposes of the "timing" of the fight. It's an abstraction. Make sense?

[HewhoisMatt]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Okay guys it is not that I don't understand, it is that it is to fast.

 

Would it help if I said I think 1 round should equal 1 minute.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Okay guys it is not that I don't understand, it is that it is to fast.

 

Would it help if I said I think 1 round should equal 1 minute.

 

Are you speaking of the 1 minute round that Gygax was talking about on page 61 of the 1st edition AD&D DMG?

 

Combat is divided into 1 minute period melee rounds, or simply rounds, in order to have reasonably manageable combat. "Manageable" applies both to the actions of the combatants and to the actual refereein of such melees. It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds length. It is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however, to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte. The location of a hit or wound, the sort of damage done, sprains, breaks, and dislocations are not the stuff of heroic fantasy. The reasons for this are manifold.

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. ...see book for more.

 

Sounds like you just want HERO to be more like D&D20.

 

HM

[prestidigitator]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Okay guys it is not that I don't understand, it is that it is to fast.

 

Would it help if I said I think 1 round should equal 1 minute.

Dude! Do you have any idea how long one minute is in a combat? D&D 2nd. used a minute for a combat Round, with shaky explanations about an attack really being the final good opening you get after a bunch of fainting and dodging and such. Everyone I know House Ruled the Round to far less than that; usually 6-10 seconds. Even that is a little slow. When the adrenaline gets pumping, a whole lot can happen in a very short time.

 

Action movies probably go a little fast on average, due to the choreography, cuts, and post-shoot speeding up they do, but they aren't too far off. Watch a scene. Or, better yet, watch some real Martial Arts sparring. Count out twelve full seconds, and watch how much happens during that period when things get intense.

 

The World of Darkness systems actually used (as little as) three seconds per Turn. A character could do multiple actions in a Turn (although they would each be less effective). I actually really liked this timing. If anything, I think Hero is a tiny bit on the slow side, but I'm pretty comfortable with it all the same.

[Hyper-Man]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Dude! Do you have any idea how long one minute is in a combat? D&D 2nd. used a minute for a combat Round, with shaky explanations about an attack really being the final good opening you get after a bunch of fainting and dodging and such. Everyone I know House Ruled the Round to far less than that; usually 6-10 seconds. Even that is a little slow. When the adrenaline gets pumping, a whole lot can happen in a very short time.

 

Action movies probably go a little fast on average, due to the choreography, cuts, and post-shoot speeding up they do, but they aren't too far off. Watch a scene. Or, better yet, watch some real Martial Arts sparring. Count out twelve full seconds, and watch how much happens during that period when things get intense.

 

The World of Darkness systems actually used (as little as) three seconds per Turn. A character could do multiple actions in a Turn (although they would each be less effective). I actually really liked this timing. If anything, I think Hero is a tiny bit on the slow side, but I'm pretty comfortable with it all the same.

 

Actually, I have seen behind the scene stuff from Bruce Lee's old movies and he consistently had to SLOW down many of his moves for the camera!

 

HM

[prestidigitator]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Segments

 

Space/Hexs I have found that there are alot of premade maps out there of buildings' date=' towns, landscape etc etc etc. The problem is they are mostly all done with squares instead of hexs and I was wondering if anyone tried running their game on square maps and how they liked it.[/quote']

I haven't used squares for Hero, but I have used hexes for D&D, which uses squares as its basic mechanics (they have specific rules for hexes, but I never had the need to read them). There really doesn't tend to be a big problem converting between the two. Straight lines at odd angles are a pain in both, circles are a bit more of a pain with squares, etc.

 

Actually, if the premade maps are the only problem you are having, drawing out a premade map measuring in squares is not all that bad on a hex map. Measure one "square" worth of distance in one direction as the distance between opposite parallel sides of a hex, and in the other direction measure it as alternating between a hex edge and a hex diagonal (that is, the line between opposite points on a hex; this all makes sense if you are actually looking at a hex grid). This isn't an exactly square arrangement, and the aspect ratio of your map will be distorted somewhat, but it isn't that big of a deal.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Actually' date=' I have seen behind the scene stuff from Bruce Lee's old movies and he consistently had to SLOW down many of his moves for the camera![/quote']

True, though Bruce Lee was a bit exceptional. I have become a little disgusted with the way they have mucked with film speed in the last few years. It is so obvious most of the time, and really tends to detract from the viewing quality IMHO.

 

EDIT: Sorry. That was a bit of a run-on post. The two statements weren't necessarily meant to correlate.

[sinanju]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Dude! Do you have any idea how long one minute is in a combat? ... [snippety-snip-snip]...

 

Action movies probably go a little fast on average, due to the choreography, cuts, and post-shoot speeding up they do, but they aren't too far off. Watch a scene. Or, better yet, watch some real Martial Arts sparring. Count out twelve full seconds, and watch how much happens during that period when things get intense.

 

A friend of mine is a) a martial artist, a sheriff's deputy in the county prison system, c) an instructor for the SWAT team there. He's got plenty of experience in fights and plenty more eyewitness experience. It's amazing--and a little appalling--to learn just how FAST violence can happen. The Hero system, like virtually every other combat system in a game, is way too neat and orderly to accurately represent the reality.

 

Real combat--where people are seriously trying to hurt one another--is shockingly swift, brutal and brief. A trained or experienced attacker can punch you faster than once a second, and--especially in prison fights--usually the loser doesn't know he's in a fight until afterward, and by then he's lost.

 

Personally, I'm happy with a more abstract and orderly combat system--but I don't think the problem with the Hero system is that the characters are moving too slowly.

[Warp9]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Segments

 

Time/Segment I just can not get behind the idea of a Segment being one second with all the things the game allows us to do in a single Segment "example- Load and fire a crossbow" , it's just that even with normal human limits the things we can do in one round seems insane. I think 1 Segment should = at least 5 seconds.

How long do you think it should take to throw a punch or pull the trigger on a gun?

 

If you follow the idea that "1 segment = 5 seconds" it would be 30 seconds. Many human runners can run 1/8 of a mile in that time (that would be the same pace of a 4 minute mile).

 

I actually think that 6 seconds (which is how long HERO make a normal person take to fire a modern pistol) is too long. IMO an average person could pull a trigger, or throw a punch in about 1 second (or less).

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

As far as hex p[roblems go, you could also copy a hex grid onto a series of overhead transparencies, and overlay these over your "squares" map.

[MitchellS]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Okay guys it is not that I don't understand, it is that it is to fast.

 

Would it help if I said I think 1 round should equal 1 minute.

As with what everyone else has said, a phase really consists of several seconds for a character. And believe me a person can do a lot in 3 seconds. A professional boxer can jab and punch you 8-10 times in that period of time. A 40 yard dash time is usually less than 5 seconds for someone in shape. A great many things can be done in only a few seconds.

 

Now if you want the game to take more time then just have a turn equal a min rather than 12 seconds. Nothing really changes for the character. I played that way for a couple of years. It was no big deal. What we stress now in our games to players is that a "round" is really 12 seconds long and that your phase is the number of attacks you get per round. That seems to make things easier for people to understand.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Now if you want the game to take more time then just have a turn equal a min rather than 12 seconds. Nothing really changes for the character. I played that way for a couple of years. It was no big deal. What we stress now in our games to players is that a "round" is really 12 seconds long and that your phase is the number of attacks you get per round. That seems to make things easier for people to understand.

 

Nothing really changes except that you need to reqork the time chart (1/turn now equals 1/minute, which takes one increment out). This also influences perception of how fast END batteries recharge (it's now 1/5 as fast), how long characters need to be out of combat before we can just say "You've recovered your STUN and END" (as recoveries only happen 1/5 as often), and how fast my Wolverine cone goes from near-death to full BOD (since he regenerates 1/5 as many BOD per minute).

 

In other words, I believe the change accomplishes nothing of real benefit, while requiring rejigging some rules and perceptions, so it wouldn't be worth it even if I thought 12 second combat rounds were too short.

 

Interesting, by the way, that after years of criticism of its ponderous 1 minute rounds, D&D 3.0 goes to 10 second rounds.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Hexes, squares, octagons, parallelograms, no lines...whatever. As long as things are reasonably in scale, just use a ruler/tape measure for distances.

 

As far as the idea of expaning out a 12-segment turn to being 1 minute instead of 12 seconds, some issues that would need to be addressed:

 

*Movement - without tons of movement, everyone is now moving *very* slow in relation to the 2-meter 1" hexes. Someone's non-combat speed of 200mph is now 40mph, since they are covering the same distance in 5-times the amount of time. One possible way to handle this is to simply say "all movement out of combat is x5" or "out of combat each inch of movement covers 5" ".

 

*Advantage/disadvantages related to time - may need to re-value them based on the new, minute-long turn.

[Mentor]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Lots of very good explanations on this subject. Let me just add my 2 cents.

 

Much of the difficulty lies with the genre in which the game is being played. fantasy is very different from Superhero games or Sci Fi. In the D& D heyday of the late 1970s, one of my old gaming friends, when asked if he could draw a weapon, cross the twenty feet of our host, Eltripon's family room, and strike the questioner in ten seconds, or a melee round, joked that he could crawl the distance and perform the tasks in question. IIRC, he managed the feat in just under three seconds. Ultimately, we determined then, that D&D rounds not only included feinting and dodging, but coffee breaks, as well.

Our Hampions campaign has determined that, given the genre in which Champions is set, a phase is more correctly viewed as the frame of a comic book.

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

You can take all the pepperoni off of a slice of pizza in 3.3 seconds.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Space: I don't think squares work well: there are either substantial advantages to moving diagonally, or you need dodgy fixes. Certainly with superhero combat, given the movement of most of the characters, we just use the floor, with piles of books or CDs as buildings and scenery, and measure distances with a tape measure, area effects with a template.

 

Nothing wrong with using the map with squares printed on it, but I'd ignore the squares...

 

The other advantage is you can never quite be sure what the range is....keep 'em guessing!

 

Time: a normal human has SPD 2, which means that each action takes 6 seconds. I would have thought that loading a crossbow would be an action and firing it another one, so a normal human would take 12 seconds to load and fire a crossbow: quite realistic IMO.

 

Superhero battles are ludicrously quick, but then again, they are battles involving superheroes, so no biggie. If you find that you are playing Fantasy Hero and everyone has a SPD of 4 or more then maybe you ought to have a word with the players about character creation. If the highest speed is 3, the combats may well seem more reasonably paced...

 

If you still have a problem with it, can I suggest that you define each segment as 3 more than 1 second? This may mean that you have to twiddle with some limitations and advantages (extra time and fade rate for adjustment powers) but it shouldn't be too difficult. If you want to say 1 segment is 2 seconds, then BMG. A turn now takes 24 seconds, and Joe Normal gets a go every 12 seconds.

 

If you say 1 segment=5 seconds, then the turn takes a minute: remove the '1 minute' part of the speed chart and bump everything down one. Ready....go....

 

Mind you you then have the rather daft situation that it takes Joe Normal 30 seconds to throw a punch....

[Silbeg]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

You can take all the pepperoni off of a slice of pizza in 3.3 seconds.

 

 

Now, that is important information to have.

 

Sounds like "experiments" we used to do with a buddy's dog. She (a samoyed) could eat a slice of Pizza Hut deep dish (from a large) in less than 7 seconds. We timed her... many times. She never slowed down!

[Sean Waters]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Now, that is important information to have.

 

Sounds like "experiments" we used to do with a buddy's dog. She (a samoyed) could eat a slice of Pizza Hut deep dish (from a large) in less than 7 seconds. We timed her... many times. She never slowed down!

 

Slice?

 

Pah!

 

...BURP...

 

[Dust Raven]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Phases

 

Ultimately' date=' we determined then, that D&D rounds not only included feinting and dodging, but coffee breaks, as well.[/quote']

 

When I read that passage (as Hyper-Man so kindly quoted for us) in the D&D books I laughed. I suppose it's based on the old fencing, swashbuckling and Camalot films style of fighting. Where the combatants just hack away and everyonce in a while one of them will get this look on their face (a-ha, now I have you!) and make some spectacular attack that is either spectacularly parried or gores the opponent.

 

Now, I've watched pro fencing on ESPN, seen exibitions of swordplay at the Renessaince Fair, and have even fought shinai and light and heavy rapier in the SCA. Most fights don't take more than a total of 20 seconds. If they do, it's because some nut stuck his nose in the middle and called a halt (damn those refs). A minute is far too long to represent a single meaningful attack. I minute is usually too long to represent a single meaningful fight.

[Dust Raven]

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Segments

 

Space/Hexs I have found that there are alot of premade maps out there of buildings' date=' towns, landscape etc etc etc. The problem is they are mostly all done with squares instead of hexs and I was wondering if anyone tried running their game on square maps and how they liked it.[/quote']

I've never tried running game on a squared map, but I don't imagine it would be that much different. The only problem I'd have is the scale. typically a squared map is measured to 5ft per square, but a hex is 6.5ft. Again, not that big of a difference unless you are talking about longer distances (like across the entire map). So long as everyone is using the same measurements (calling a hex a square) it should all be good though. If you don't like it or find that the diagonals screw thing up, just ignore the lines and use a ruler or some string and a yardstick and measure things that way.

 

Time/Segment I just can not get behind the idea of a Segment being one second with all the things the game allows us to do in a single Segment "example- Load and fire a crossbow" , it's just that even with normal human limits the things we can do in one round seems insane. I think 1 Segment should = at least 5 seconds. Has anyone tried different time rules in their games and if so how did it work out.

 

While it's been covered, A Segment is just a portion of a character's Action. Most characters' actions take up several Segments (2-4 on average). Still, 4 seconds does sound a bit quick for loading and firing a crossbow, but I think it can be done. 2 seconds is pushing it, but then again, a character whose actions only take 2 seconds is moving half again faster than the human maximum. Then again, in those same 2-4 seconds, you are only allowed a single punch, kick or similar attack, though in reality anyone is capable of dishing out many, many more.

 

The thing to keep in mind about the timing is that 1) it's abstract. The amounts of time represented by Segments and Phases are for game purposes. If it makes sense that an action takes longer, it takes longer, but the character's action still takes place on his Phase, using however many Segments his Phase covers. 2) it's fair. If one character can load and fire a cross bow, but another character can cross 12 feet and throw half a dozen punches things aren't balanced. Time is measured the way it is so that everyone get's equal time (per single actions) regardless of the tactic they choose, be it throwing a punch, pulling a trigger, throwing rocks and firing crossbows.