What's with all the points

[Guest TheUnknown]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Actually he is. Every 5points is twice as effective. 10 is twice as much a 5, 15 is twice as much as 10 and 20 is twice as much a 15, etc.

 

In everyone's attempt to discredit my post, you've forgotten what the original topic is about: Why is it 350 instead 250. The simple reason (and most of you have actually proven it) is stat inflation.

 

Eosin,

The reason you think Cap needs a 7 SPD to simulate the comics is because of the level you've put everone else. You've given Marvel Girl a 4 SPD, in my world, you've just made Marvel Girl as fast as Bruce Lee. I can give Cap a 4 SPD and simulate what he does in the comics just as well as you. I don't see any reason for you to get defensive, we all live in our own campaign world if it works for you great. I'm explaining why there was an increase is points from 250 to 350. My system, 350 points isn't needed, you disagree great, I won't and am not trying to convince anyone my way is better, or your way is wrong. I have NEVER said it was, and is in fact the way the majority of people play. I'm just trying to answer the question in the original post.

 

That.s not true sir the only stat that says double for every 5 pts is str and that's it. Now you can take the arrogant stand of everyone has proven your point but that makes you a legend in your own mind not in application of rule to balance effective builds from source conversions. But I respect your opinion none the less because we are all allowed to have them.

[Guest TheUnknown]

Re: What's with all the points

 

In addtion to why more points because

By the by the whole def AND damage thing is broken anyway and its up to the GM to moderate it into balance. Example normal tanks having 16-19 Def making it impossible under normal conditions for the old 100 ton (60 STR 12d6 by system) hulk to trash them at all unless he roles extremely well. so unless you bring the real world damage and def down to heroic level the characters from comic books will never be able to dish out or effectivelt take what they are suppose to.

[Psylint]

Re: What's with all the points

 

I don't know if a 16pd is really going to completely shrug off a 12d6 attack, but I know where you're going. I have been toying with the idea of setting lower absolute caps, like 10 to 12 rpd, and then requiring Damage Reduction. Under such a system, Bob the Brick can mostly, all but not entirely ignore small arms, but machine guns, artillery and explosives are at least somewhat dangerous. At 50% damage reduction he can still take quite a few 12d6 punches, but it'll eventually where him down. At 75% it takes an awfully long time.

 

Personally, I really don't like the idea of even Super hard Supers ignoring artillery shells.

[Guest TheUnknown]

Re: What's with all the points

 

I don't know if a 16pd is really going to completely shrug off a 12d6 attack, but I know where you're going. I have been toying with the idea of setting lower absolute caps, like 10 to 12 rpd, and then requiring Damage Reduction. Under such a system, Bob the Brick can mostly, all but not entirely ignore small arms, but machine guns, artillery and explosives are at least somewhat dangerous. At 50% damage reduction he can still take quite a few 12d6 punches, but it'll eventually where him down. At 75% it takes an awfully long time.

 

Personally, I really don't like the idea of even Super hard Supers ignoring artillery shells.

 

12d6 average is 12 body good is 16 body you rolled 4 6's and no 1's to get that a tank is impenetrable to hulk's 60 str 12d6!

[Guest TheUnknown]

Re: What's with all the points

 

So depending on what level brick you're trying to do you need points just to break things you should be able to by physics and worse yet be immune to things that really shouldnt fade you.

 

The original blue eyed Thing 50 ton 55 would and should be immune to any martial artist/wrestler/boxer ect who's damage is well within extremely exception humans but by game mechanics most batman types could do him some damage and though it may take a lot of attack to put him down they could with time and if you had a gang of martial artist than ooh boy!

 

I dnt mind martial artist thats suppose to be doing super damage because that's their concept affect the Thing or any brick for that matter like DC's Karate KId or even other sfx and chi mastery of martial skills but a human perfect or not martial artist putting down bricks well again its up to the GM to create balance.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: What's with all the points

 

 

In everyone's attempt to discredit my post, you've forgotten what the original topic is about: Why is it 350 instead 250. The simple reason (and most of you have actually proven it) is stat inflation.

 

As for the concept of stat inlfation, it could also be campaign tone and style. I my champions games I don't want a basic trained character (go with your 8 dex, WF and maybe a 2 pt level) to have, on average a better than an 8- chance to hit the average superhero in my game. I don't want normals to be a credible threat - the tone I am running is that superheroes are beyond that. So his CV is 3/4; that would me the average DCV I'm looking at (and this is ever for bricks) is 6 to 7. 18 to 20 Dex. Fits right in with published characters.

 

And that isn't stat inflation, it is a concious design choice. Many people see supers are super in everything including stats, even if the SFX don't call for it. That is just style and tone. One you don't agree with.

[Guest TheUnknown]

Re: What's with all the points

 

As for the concept of stat inlfation, it could also be campaign tone and style. I my champions games I don't want a basic trained character (go with your 8 dex, WF and maybe a 2 pt level) to have, on average a better than an 8- chance to hit the average superhero in my game. I don't want normals to be a credible threat - the tone I am running is that superheroes are beyond that. So his CV is 3/4; that would me the average DCV I'm looking at (and this is ever for bricks) is 6 to 7. 18 to 20 Dex. Fits right in with published characters.

 

And that isn't stat inflation, it is a concious design choice. Many people see supers are super in everything including stats, even if the SFX don't call for it. That is just style and tone. One you don't agree with.

 

Well put rep to you!

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Couldn't have anything to do with the effort of trying to sift through over 10' date='000[/b'] posts, could it?

Ha, well, surely, that doesn't help. But I think also my original anti- posts were before the last reboot of these boards (and therefore part of my pre-10K legacy!).

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

The seal is not 2x more dexterous than joe 8 gives 3 CV and 11 Gives 4 CV to close for confort in a fight but hey the great part about hero system is perspective so have at it what works in your world may not work for mine and vice versa!

Exactly. Speaking of which, here are my thoughts on the specifics, and I do NOT mean anyone should accept them, but to illustrate how very differently I saw it from that post -

 

A guy who works out 20 minutes a day is NOT average (and this, btw, I think I can say as an outright fact IF we mean not that we average workout time across all people but average whether people work out or not). Remember, something like 60% of Americans are overweight. That is your 8 DEX/8 STR person - a slob (like me, though I'm no longer overweight or at least not more than a few pounds now, now HWP). I work at a place that makes athleticwear and there the average of course is much higher here, but the average person, anyway, I'd say is somewhat overweight and not toned. So that's the 8 guy.

 

The guy who works out everyday for 20 minutes but isn't otherwise doing anything rigorous, let's say works either in an office or a factory, and let's add his workout routine pumps up his DEX (just to bring parity for DEX and STR), that's the 10 STR/10 DEX guy.

 

The Navy Seal, whom I personally take as someone nearing the top of human physical abilities, is about 2-4 times as dextrous as the average person, IMHO, and similarly stronger. So that's going to put him at 15-20 in the stats (if we use the +5 = double - which I think is not really true, but it's a good general guideline).

 

An athlete specializing might be around double the Seal in STR OR (but probably not "and") DEX, in an EXTREME case let's say 4x, such as the world's greatest weight-lifter, perhaps he's 4x as strong, which is 16x as strong as the average guy, and while way out there, if we're talking about something like 10 people in the world that seems okay to me. So at most we're talking 30 for a stat.

 

Oddly, that seems to hook up not too badly with the HERO book guidelines even though I'm using my own personal logic.

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Well, I'm a little embarrassed. While I DO have 3rd edition rules, it's apparent that we used my copy of 4th edition rules to play the majority of my characters. I hadn't dug down deep enough into that dusty box of RPG games that has survived three moves and my wife's rolling eyes.

 

Also, I'm noticing that most of my characters are 50 active points in most of their powers, and yes, about 10-15 pts in skills if you don't count combat levels.

 

I do know we played with a lot of "tweakers" (to be polite) so I'm thinking 350 points would have been too much trouble for most of us to contnrol when we GM'd. I do like the idea of requireing an amount of points to be spent on skills to round out the characters to avoid 350 pts from being abused.

 

Anyways, I think I'll still stick to 250 pts for a while, lower-powered supers tend to make for more fun games, for me anyways.

 

Happy Villian stomping in 2007!

Your comment about tweakers and not wanting to go over 250, which is entirely fair, raises a question to me - are you not giving any or much XP or not gaming enough that XP bumps mean much? Because otherwise I'd assume you'd hit the 350 point issue on your own across somewhere between 50 (at 2 XP per session) and 20 (at 5 XP per session) sessions

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Actually he is. Every 5points is twice as effective. 10 is twice as much a 5, 15 is twice as much as 10 and 20 is twice as much a 15, etc.

 

In everyone's attempt to discredit my post, you've forgotten what the original topic is about: Why is it 350 instead 250. The simple reason (and most of you have actually proven it) is stat inflation.

 

Eosin,

The reason you think Cap needs a 7 SPD to simulate the comics is because of the level you've put everone else. You've given Marvel Girl a 4 SPD, in my world, you've just made Marvel Girl as fast as Bruce Lee. I can give Cap a 4 SPD and simulate what he does in the comics just as well as you. I don't see any reason for you to get defensive, we all live in our own campaign world if it works for you great. I'm explaining why there was an increase is points from 250 to 350. My system, 350 points isn't needed, you disagree great, I won't and am not trying to convince anyone my way is better, or your way is wrong. I have NEVER said it was, and is in fact the way the majority of people play. I'm just trying to answer the question in the original post.

 

I think people can agree to disagree. Obviously, you don't believe that increased granularity in build plus the desire of players to play characters more advanced than early on in Champions were the heavy contributors. Some do. Shrug. (PS - of course, someone is right, but Steve wishes not to explain the reasoning for these decisions, so we'll never know (which, while I don't really agree with the approach because I think to use a game BEST you need to understand the philosophy underlying it, but I also understand why he does this, fans are so argumentative it can drive designers crazy).

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

That.s not true sir the only stat that says double for every 5 pts is str and that's it. Now you can take the arrogant stand of everyone has proven your point but that makes you a legend in your own mind not in application of rule to balance effective builds from source conversions. But I respect your opinion none the less because we are all allowed to have them.

I would say that there is a semi-accepted convention that +5 is double "power" (note the small "p") in general. This is somewhat reinforced by, throughout the book, we see that +5 doubles things in many instances (though of course +1/4 Advantages do the same sometimes!). I do NOT know the genesis of this but I BELIEVE it was due to some comments from the designers early on in published materials, but not the core book. But, anyway, many believe this is an underlying system mechanical basis, and I tend to buy this as well based on the popular usage by the most experienced and connected (I mean to the original designers) users.

 

Does anyone know the genesis of +5 = double?

 

But we should never confuse 2x power with 2x EFFECT! The actual effect of Active Points is a very different thing, and rather complicated. Even +5 STR and doubling lift and so on is not really 2x the actual effect on other characters and the world - it depends on defensive values and so on.

[Spence]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Well everything said and done. For four color supers games I play/run we still play at the 270 point starting level. But then we tend to use broad skills and be much less gritty. For instance rather than buy surveillance, forensics, law, deduction ad infinity.... We will just buy Detective skill as an overall umbrella covering all of them. Since we don't use skills to replace the players ability to think but rather as a way to get hard data. A successful detective roll may tell the PC that the man was killed 6 hours ago, strangled by someone taller than him, but what the players does with the info is up to the player. This is mostly because skills in a supers game support the superpower aspect of the game, rather than drive the game.

 

If we are playing a different genre we do get more detailed. Heroic games are more driven buy a PC's skills, so they are much more important. Plus PC occupations tend to be much more specialized.

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

As for the concept of stat inlfation, it could also be campaign tone and style. I my champions games I don't want a basic trained character (go with your 8 dex, WF and maybe a 2 pt level) to have, on average a better than an 8- chance to hit the average superhero in my game. I don't want normals to be a credible threat - the tone I am running is that superheroes are beyond that. So his CV is 3/4; that would me the average DCV I'm looking at (and this is ever for bricks) is 6 to 7. 18 to 20 Dex. Fits right in with published characters.

 

And that isn't stat inflation, it is a concious design choice. Many people see supers are super in everything including stats, even if the SFX don't call for it. That is just style and tone. One you don't agree with.

I would add another point - we keep discussing stat inflation, but I wonder how many gamers have really kept expanding their points for starting campaigns where those campaigns are basically the same over the years? I certainly have not - in fact, I went the other way with my current supers campaign (although the goal was also for very fast growth, so we started at 155+60, and now those same PCs are around 600+ XP).

 

Ooh, I'm going to start a thread/poll...

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

I thought it might be interesting to hearken back to 2e (I don't have 1e) and its advice on values for stats - it says:

 

If you start your campaign at a beginning power level of 225 pts. per character, some general guidelines on characters are possible. Most of the characteristics can be at their base value, but some should have larger than minimum values. The following are good beginning ranges of charateristics, with approximate costs. Obviously, you can't be at the maximum for all of the characteristics. You should decide what area to concentrate on, in accordance with your character conception.

 

DEX: Range 18-30. Centering on 20-23, cost 40 pts.

 

CON: Range 18-33. Centering on 18-23, cost 20 pts.

 

PD: Range 8-28. Centering on 12-18, cost 10 pts.

 

ED: Range 8-28. Centering on 12-18, cost 10 pts.

 

SPD: Range 4-6. Centering on 5, cost 20 pts.

 

A character's capabilities should also fall into certain ranges. The beginning character will probably have a smaller range of different powers than more experienced characters, but should have some ability in each of the following areas:

 

Attacks: 40-60 pts.

(STR, Damage Powers, Find WEakness, Entangle, etc.)

 

Defenses: 20-40 pts.

(extra PD and ED, Skill Levels, extra DEX, Force Fields, etc.)

 

Movement: 10-40 pts.

(Running, Flight, Swimming, extra SPD, etc.)

 

Spending points as above will give a character a basic set of Powers and/or SKills for about 200 pts. Any extra capabilities that the player wants the character to have could be purchased with the remaining 25 pts. Most skills need not start better than their basic level for beginning heroes. Thus a character could have three skills and still buy a higher INT, or PRE.

 

Bear in mind that this was before most Perks existed in any form, and back when the COMPLETE skill list (with the basic investment cost below) was:

 

Acrobatics, 10 points

Climbing, 5 points

Computer Programming, 5 points

Detective Work, 5 points

Disguise, 5 points

Find Weakness, 10 points

Luck, 5 points per d6

Martial Arts, the old style cost in STR

Security Systems, 5 points

Skill Levels, 3/5/8/10 points

Stealth, 5 points

Swinging, 5 points

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: What's with all the points

 

I thought it might be interesting to hearken back to 2e (I don't have 1e) and its advice on values for stats - it says:

 

A quick run through of 1st I didn't see anything like that, but the example "normal human trained to fight - no superpowers" character Crusader has a 25 Dex and a 6 speed.

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

A quick run through of 1st I didn't see anything like that' date=' but the example "normal human trained to fight with supers - no superpowers" character Crusader has a 25 Dex and a 6 speed. [/quote']

I don't have a copy of 1st. Where do you live? Do you lock your doors?

 

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

PS - didn't want to edit my last post as I saw you (LM) were in the thread and figured you might miss it if I did - in 2nd, this listing was in the back in the "Notes on Playing" section, page 71 in that edition.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: What's with all the points

 

PS - didn't want to edit my last post as I saw you (LM) were in the thread and figured you might miss it if I did - in 2nd' date=' this listing was in the back in the "Notes on Playing" section, page 71 in that edition.[/quote']

 

Cool.

The notes on playing in 1st is only about a page long. Nothing on building characters or stat ranges.

[Robyn]

Re: What's with all the points

 

I don't have a copy of 1st. Where do you live? Do you lock your doors?

 

 

According to the Location entry, Mhoram is in Ogden Utah

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

Ha, well, he has feared the Zornwil beast and we have struck a deal in order to spare his abode the dreaded attack of the giant radioactive lizard...

 

(something about villain mode requires one to speak of oneself in the third person)

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: What's with all the points

 

dreaded attack of the giant radioactive lizard...

 

 

heh.

My avatar can beat up your avatar.

[Robyn]

Re: What's with all the points

 

heh.

My avatar can beat up your avatar.

 

Not yet, she needs to settle her identity crisis first

[zornwil]

Re: What's with all the points

 

heh.

My avatar can beat up your avatar.

If this were NGD I would so drag this out...

[Checkmate]

Re: What's with all the points

 

*snip*And that isn't stat inflation, it is a concious design choice. *snip*

Reguardless of your reasoning, it IS stat inflation. You seem to think I've attached some sort of negative connotiation to the phrase "stat inflation", and believe me I haven't. You have inflated the stats to make your supers more super, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing nor have I accused you of any crime. Like you've said it is the accepted method, which is why I beileve stat inflation was the major contributing factor to going from 250 to 350.

 

TheUnknown,

I don't know why you think I'm acting arogant, but you may want to watch the condensention in your own post if you're going to accuse someone else of it. In LM's post she said she prefered more super, supers so used higher stats to get the feel she wants, I called (and still call) that design philosophy Stat Inflation. Eosin said he gives Cap a 7 SPD, which goes a LONG way to proving my point about stat inflation, hence my comment, "A lot of you are proving my point". If you took some offense to that, please explain why, and I'll see if I can clear up any misunderstandings.

 

Zornwil,

"...the desire of players to play characters more advanced than early on in Champions..." I think there is a direct relation to this and stat inflation (which I will expand to cover power inflation also. No longer is 12d6 good enough), so yes I do believe this was a contributing factor.

 

As far as more granularity (which I assume you mean more background skills) I believe it was probably a reason the designers did it, but I don't believe it's why it was so universally accepted by the players. I look at a lot of the player made characters, and will never be convinced this is THE reason the majority of the players like the increase.