What is STUN?

[archermoo]

Re: What is STUN?

 

Here's one take: the current Stun value is there to allow the GM and players to describe the apparent state of beatenupness of the player when compared to the normal total. The Body value serves a similar purpose.

 

Both are there to heighten tension and excitement in the game and have a profound effect when used appropriately as indicators for appropriate role playing. Whilst there is no real mechanical effect other than marking whether someone is conscious/unconscious or alive/dead, there may well be a substantial mechanical component created by, for instance, redistribution of skill levels, given that this could well be your last chance.

 

You should definitely be saying, in character, "I can't take another shot like that one...it is now or never!".

 

Yup. And for that matter, I've played in a campaign or two where it was the BODY damage that had me saying "I can't take another shot like that", rather than the STUN. Heroic level, with lots of small but dangerous firefights with time to take a breather (i.e. recover STUN and END, but not BODY) in between them. Heck, I've gone into a new fight with a character at -15 BODY in one campaign before. He had a normal BODY of 23.

[zornwil]

Re: What is STUN?

 

Good thread.

 

The notion of STUN, I would argue, is to drive play experience - to drive player behavior in enacting the character.

 

Because HERO emulates heroic action (or is generally intended to, let's say), it allows you to be just as effective at 1 STUN as 150 STUN not solely for simplicity but also to reflect that in much such fiction until someone is down they are pretty darn effective (at least the protagonist(s) and major antagonist(s)).

 

This was stated more or less earlier, but I think it begs this sort of specific argument. Game mechanics are to drive behavior, generally, and while simulation may or may not be a goal, it's a relationship to this behavior, as, after all, in enacting one's character one is supposed to "act like" that character might reasonably in that situation.

 

There are observable differences in behavior as STUN approaches low values (depending of course a bit on character and team construction). One may get riskier, believing it's an all-or-nothing action. One may get cautious, Recovering. One may even withdraw to fight another day (or even hour). These behaviors pretty well more or less approximate heroic fiction behavior both for heroes and villains as tempered by how they are written (the clever and not-so-proud villain sees the writing on the wall and beats a hasty retreat; the desperate hero gives it his all, even perhaps pushing himself to unconsciousness in a final last gasp of hopeful action - these are modelled quite well in HERO). This is where we should not look at STUN as binary in effect even if its specific mechanical impact is binary - the play experience varies in grays as STUN changes.

 

And as such we don't require a real world analogue nor should we want one. However, I would say that of course HERO has its notion of a set of mechanics upon which SFX are layered, those mechanics being essentially uninfluenced by SFX. As such, whether shock or tiredness or sputtering circuitry is the desired narration is/should be driven entirely by character and circumstance. As long as the narration "feels right" (even "his blasted ray is draining my will!") it's really irrelevant - if it does feel right, then it's functioning perfectly (even if it overlaps into the "territory" of other mechanics - so long as the mechanical manifestation is appropriate - that's why we can refer to "getting too tired to fight" despite its overlap to END).

[GAZZA]

Re: What is STUN?

 

Good thread.

 

The notion of STUN, I would argue, is to drive play experience - to drive player behavior in enacting the character.

 

Because HERO emulates heroic action (or is generally intended to, let's say), it allows you to be just as effective at 1 STUN as 150 STUN not solely for simplicity but also to reflect that in much such fiction until someone is down they are pretty darn effective (at least the protagonist(s) and major antagonist(s)).

I concur. In addition, there are already well defined levels of STUN that have incapacitating effects (-10, -20, et al). One can argue that it seems funny that you can lose 100 STUN and not be impaired, but lose 1 more and you're knocked out - but you would have to draw that line somewhere. Saying that you lose some effectiveness once you've taken 10 STUN damage is just as arbitrary as saying you're KOed at -10 STUN - and because it's arbitrary you're never going to get universal agreement on where the line should be drawn. "Go for broke until you hit negatives" is at least easy to remember.

 

It's hardly unique to Hero anyway - virtually any game with hit points of one sort of another has a threshold above which you are not impaired. Ultra-realism isn't something that Hero has ever been traditionally good at, because it wasn't really part of the design criteria - up until 5th edition, Champions was the system with all other genres using a subset of the superhero rules (I'm oversimplifying here, obviously), and the superheroic genre is rarely concerned with realism (possible exceptions: Watchmen and Wild Cards to some degree - the powers themselves are not necessarily realistic, but the world has a high degree of internal consistency, which is what most people really mean when they talk about realism, in my experience).

[Dust Raven]

Re: What is STUN?

 

Good thread.

 

Hey look! zornwil has brought another thread out of GM's Option!

 

 

 

 

Okay, bad STUN joke, but were else was I gonna use it?