HAP: How to use them

[psyber624]

Re: HAP: How to use them

 

I agree, effort gets rewarded as well. If someone sucks, if they are at least trying they will get a reward. Maybe not as many as someone who does a good job at it (although I really don't know about this point, would vary from game to game) but I would definitely want to encourage someone who is trying. Of course gaming the system gets no reward, and there is a difference between bad roleplaying and only putting forth a minimal effort to try and gain a reward. That is sometimes hard to determine. I hope as a GM I would be capable of putting our bad roleplayer in situations that would give him an opportunity to roleplay (as i consider roleplaying as more than describing what your character is doing.)

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: HAP: How to use them

 

Okay' date=' Fair warning, likely to be a really long post, so I am going to spoiler my direct responses to Hugh for those that don't care to keep up with the debate, and just leave my general comments here. [/quote']

 

OK. I'm going to clip items that aren't germane to my response, for the same length reasons.

 

 

1. Random Number of HAPs: Flat number is always an option. As is a system like (d6+6) so that everyone gets at least a certain number but can get more with luck. My main intention is to prevent someone from getting so few that they can never get ANY benefit. What can I say' date=' I like the potential for a really lucky roll (it can start things off on a positive note) while trying to ensure that none of my players feel "dice screwed" by something like this (which can set a negative tone for that player) especially as this will last for most of an adventure. However you are right that it doesn't really gel with the general balanced creation system of HERO so the flat may be more appropriate for something like this with long reaching effects. [/quote']

 

What I don't grasp here is how the die roll can be meaningful enough to allow someone rolling high to feel they got lucky, but not meaningful enough for the guy who rolled low not to feel they were unlucky. 101 - 106 makes the die roll pretty meaningless, and I expect the 1 and 6 to feel neither penalized nor euphoric about that jackpot. 7 - 12 seems much more meaningful, but 12 seems a lot better than 7, so if 12 is a jackpot, 7 feels like a dead loss. The only game we've used these, we've used 2d6 start of session. The world hasn't ended. It goes around and comes around, and characters can be meaningful without huge HAP, or roll a 17 on a critical roll which their 9 HAP are not quite enough to convert to success (that one actually happened).

 

2. Gaming the system: I believe you misunderstand. First of all your "negatives" will come up solely based upon your point values spent in them (for the most part). And like I stated this would probably be an award I would give for "start of next session" to prevent exactly what you described (roleplaying only one instance of a negative for the points.) I believe that the negatives we apply to our characters are JUST AS IMPORTANT in defining our characters as the positives but due to the "game" nature of the system there is a definite tendency to try and downplay the negative aspects. (Not universal by any means). This reward is more about using the drawbacks you select for your character in a convincing fashion to portray and reflect a more complete picture of who your character is. And honestly if it felt like you were trying to "game" the system I would be less likely to reward them (I would definitely classify myself as a Narativist GM in this situation.)

 

Here again, it's you assessing whether I'm "gaming the system" or playing to my vision of the character. I draw a lot of examples from existing characters in games that had no HAP. Frankly, if players need a treat to motivate them to role play, I don't see them as role players. The best way to game the system is to design a character with flaws you will clearly perceive as coming up and being appropriately role played. As long as I play MY CHARACTER to YOUR SPECIFICATIONS and expectations, I will get rewarded with HAP's. I'm pretty sure we've debated that intensely on a different thread, so 'nuff said here.

 

3. Heroic Success Reward: Your right about the Heroic success one. I agree with your points. However' date=' there is something about the feeling of a truly heroic action that leads to success and saves the day that just feels like it deserves a reward to me. Jumping out from behind cover under a hail of bullets to pull your stunned friend out of the line of fire. Grabbing the bomb and flying off into space with it ticking down, racing against time to get it out of range before it detonates. These are hallmarks of the genre in general and make for really great scenes.[/quote']

 

OK. Now let's add "cowardly" to the character sheet. Are you going to be equally generous in rewarding heroic behaviour that runs counter to the character's established personality? That guy who just rolls dice tries to build a real personality into his character, making a character who is hesitant in dangerous situations, fears for his life and has a measure of cowardice (rather than a playing pawn with stats who takes whatever action seems tactically best at the time). He's doing what you claim you want - role playing. The actions you describe would be out of character and, as you will potentially reward them heavily, are themselves gaming the system.

 

Coming back to my comment above, for your games, clearly my character should have flaws like Overconfident, Protective of Teammates and similar elements which will make it more in character to take the actions you feel merit rewards independent of role playing the character. Building and playing the character you clearly want to see is a means of gaming your system.

 

As far as failure goes' date=' well, truly heroic acts that result in failure would usually result in at best a posthumous reward anyway so..... [/quote']

 

Success need not equal death. In fact, didn't you say he just needs to spend all his remaining hero points to survive? And what's success? Does getting his friend out of the gunfire while the bad guys escape, and saving his life, constitute success (I saved my friend) or failure (the Bad Guys got away with the Maguffin)? One of the best role played successes I've seen was an overconfident character who got beaten down badly by challenging Firewing to single combat. Why? Because:

 

(a) It was so perfectly in character for this Overconfident fellow, established by character sheet but more importantly by prior role playing, to challenge Firewing to single combat "if you've got the guts to face me";

 

( Icing the cake was making a voluntary penalized EGO roll to assess whether his character would Dodge on Ph 12 to get to that desperately needed recovery, which would require admitting to himself that he wasn't winning this fight;

 

© Firewing was, in the grand scheme, a distraction. Since this one character tied up all his attention from the outset, the rest of the team was able to accomplish thjeir actual goals of the scenario without the drawbacks a delay would have caused.

 

(d) Far too late to award HAP, the players and GM remember this 20+ years later.

 

But he clearly failed - Firewing cleaned his clock, and it was obvious from the outset he was not going to win. I'd call it a success, but of course the character was KO'd for the rest of the scenario, so any reward would simply be reset to zero at the start of the next game. So this would be a bad move in your system - either no reward, or the reward disappears with no chance of being used. Similarly, don't all Iron Man's HAP for your "Grab the bomb" example disappear during Fury's discussion with the Counsel (I thought I saw them fall off during Stan Lee's cameo)? How is that a reward? That's more relevant to an issue below.

 

4. Penalty HAPs: I understand the argument where "a bonus to one is a penalty to everyone else" with one caveat' date=' everyone can earn these bonuses. [/quote']

 

If everyone takes a -2 penalty but Charlie's great tactics reduce it to -1, that's a +1 bonus to Charlie. If everyone gets a +1 bonus, and everyone but Charlie gets a GM blessing to add another +1, that's a -1 penalty to Charlie. It's all relative. I don't like taking HAP (or xp) away either, so that's all I have to say on this issue.

 

Actually, real life - I've seen plenty of people motivated to seek alternate employment because they did not get a bonus and others did. Everyone could theoretically earn a bonus, and there was no commitment to who would or would not earn a bonus - in fact, "earn" is a misnomer in many cases as the bonuses were, in many cases, gratuitous on the part of the employer. Yet those who did not get a bonus felt penalized.

 

5. Wiping HAPs: Plain and simple not wiping HAPs leads to hoarding.

 

That's the risk. Wiping them, as noted above, means those heroic actions which counted the most - achieving victory in the climax of the adventure - do not get rewarded. Or, if we award HAP only after the scenario, your heroic actions early on do not contribute to success in this scenario. As we know that all HAP get wiped after the final battle, may as well use them to achieve success with less effort, and trivialize the final battle to the fullest extent possible. "I hit the Big Bad Sorceror - hit location 8. Well, I have 5 HAP left, and they're all gone after this battle - use 3 to change that location to '5' and get a head shot".

 

If you have an issue with HAPs being wiped then that means you are wanting to carry them over from session to session and build up a big pool of them.

 

Or I have an issue with the result that HAP earned early in the scenario, in crappy mook battles, are more likely to generate a reward than those earned late in the game through heroic (and possibly self-sacrificing) actions. Getting an HAP award for a heroic action which saves my teammates and sets them up to win the battle, at the cost of my own ability to participate meaningfully, means I get a HAP award that vanishes before I can use it.

 

BTW, why is it easy to spot and deal with gaming the system through character design and/or character play, but impossible to spot and deal with abuses caused by hoarding?

 

Spending HAPs early should be done with caution (they aren't meant to be used willy nilly). But on the final Boss you know they are about to expire anyway so pour them on.

 

Unless, of course, you take a heroic action which effectively removes you from the boss fight. Then that max roll and reward for your heroic actions just drains away. That feels a lot like a bonus morphing into a penalty.

 

 

If I wanted an RPG that simulated a video game, I'm thinking 4e is a pretty good choice. I'd be more likely to just play a video game. As such, I'm not in a position to comment on that emulation. I want my players to role play every step along the way, and I don't want every game structured as a linear series of steadily more difficult encounters until we have a boss fight (typically a load-bearing boss so the HQ collapses when he goes down and we have a dramatic escape). I like mixing scenarios so the starting stages of the next one might occur just before the climax of the current one, with a one shot inserted in between an intermediate stage of Arc 2 and the foreshadowing encounter for Arc 3. And if that one shot inspires Arc 7 down the road, so much the better.

 

6. Spending Points: Your right' date=' it is cheaper. That's sort of intentional. 3 points is the cap on adjusting rolls, so 3 points also allows you a reroll if that's not enough to give you the success. I had thought about an "auto success" option but that leads to all kinds of problems with players doing things that could NEVER realistically succeed and knowing they would work (and as it is, with the 3=automatic success rule they can still try ANYTHING really and succeed on 6-) And while I don't use hit locations personally I don't really see a problem with it (in fact some abilities allow you do to that already.) If it proved to be too powerful I might not allow HAPs to be used for that (or would adjust the cost appropriately.) The problem with the "spend before rolling option" is that the two REALLY don't work well together. It is almost NEVER a good idea to spend fewer points in case a roll fails than it is to wait and only spend them if you actually fail. Especially since my goals would be that most players would see 10-15 HAPs per adventure. So I have to pick one option over the other. If you have tons of points to spend, and its easy to get more the spend before system becomes more tenable.[/quote']

 

Given the only HAP game I've played had 7 - 12 HAP, I think 10 - 15 is tons. But ours reset each session, not each arc, so that's also a difference. Having them front loaded also changes the dynamics, though. We could expect an average of 21 over a 3 session arc, but never more than 12 at a time and seldom out of single digits. To me, Spend Before simulates the common "I'm only going to get one chance at this - I've got to give it my best" trope in fiction. But, if the only really important actions always happen at the end (which strikes me as very predictable and monotonous) clearly saving the points to use at the end, in a HAP frenzy, is the best approach. To me, though, all that would seem to mean is that the final encounter is more challenging to soak up the HAP's, for a net sum zero. I know they'll use their signature moves that do 10 points more damage, so the Big Bad gets 10 extra defenses. Smoke and mirrors.

 

7. Defense Spending: Umm' date=' well if that's your point it is generally true all the time. HAP rules really don't change that. The Brick can use points to turn something that barely stuns him into a non-stun. The MA can do exactly the same. In both cases a few points one way or the other is all they can spend. It may be more useful to one than the other, depending on caps and such (In some campaigns the Brick will NEVER get stunned, even by a lucky shot because he is built to be practically unstunnable, so this is worthless to him, where the MA will get stunned from time to time, meaning that a portion of the times a few points might prevent the stun. In other campaigns MA's will basically get stunned if they get hit PERIOD, and no amount of points will protect them, whereas the Brick only gets stunned on occasion, and a few points will be useful to save him.) The problem with using it with DCV is that it allows you to COMPLETELY NEGATE an attack, frequently by only using a couple of points, which I feel is too powerful.[/quote']

 

The guy with high defenses can also negate all the real implications of that lucky attack. I would not price a DCV boost the same as +1 PD, but then I note it costs 1 point to make an attack that barely missed just hit instead, so why should the cost of avoiding an attack that barely hit be any higher? As I said, I would be more inclined to price "not stunned" rather than say "you can buy the damage down". Maybe that's 1 point per 5 points you were stunned by, or 1 point to modify the opponent's attack roll by 1, with both capping at 3 points spent for consistency with your other elements. And for 3 points, you can make him roll again (so much for that 3 to hit me, or that 4.5 average damage roll to Stun me!)

 

8. Signature Attacks: See point 5. Generally speaking a signature attack would be just that' date=' an attack. Although I also liked the idea presented about creating abilities that required HAPs to work and your +10/+15 point defense would definitely be an option for something like that. However, I would leave the point cost up to the players (as it would determine the limitation value. I am thinking something like (-1/2) per HAP required, but this would definitely need testing.)[/quote']

 

I repeat, is Telekinesis or Barrier an attack? Some abilities are more versatile than others. But my lack of videogame concerns probably make this an area where I'm not well equipped to contribute.

 

9. Power Skill: Actually' date=' supercharging the air around a Desolid Foe wouldn't require HAPs as that is, in my opinion, within the normal realm of a "power trick". Spending HAPs doesn't replace power tricks, it expands on them (allowing you to do things I wouldn't allow a normal power trick use to do.) The not attacks thing generally applies to not trying to use a non-attack power to create some oddball type of attack. This is generally due to balance considerations and not logical considerations. In my games, pretty much any use of an attack power to simulate different advantages on that attack power would fall under general power skill uses (in your example you added "affects desolid" to your attack, perfectly legal.) Any cases of this which I feel are not appropriate are going to be based upon balance considerations honestly and I doubt that spending HAPs would make me change my mind about them. (Honestly can't think of specific examples right now but I am just one person. I am sure that things could occur.)[/quote']

 

Here again we come back to differing judgement. I don't see adding Affects Desolid to target that villain who was otherwise able to laugh off any attack you directed as markedly different from using your attack to protect innocent bystanders with a Barrier type effect. Or using your Force Barrier to swat the Desolid opponents. Conversion between power types doesn't make the Power Skill any more problematic in my eyes. What I do see is that the penalties to Power Skill get really big, really fast. Using HAP to overcome that carries a great potential to allow for "power stunts", which I think merits consideration. In fact, for a Supers game, I could see Power Stunts as the ONLY use of HAP making for some interesting dynamics.

 

10. All Points: there are many options available to help prevent PC death. I would probably allow a PC to spend all points to prevent any specific negative occurance they wished' date=' however all points would generally mean all BASE points, and is the only thing that could "borrow" points from the next adventure. So if using a flat amount or a dice based amount, i would generally require them to spend the average and if they already spent too many they could "borrow" some from next time. Yes, this does pose a problem if this is a one shot encounter or the like, so might need some modification.[/quote']

 

To me, death comes up so infrequently in a Champions game that it's not a major issue. KO is much more common. Losing all HAP to prevent death is much more punitive at the start of the arc (more so in your multi-session arc model) than losing them to prevent death in the Boss Fight. Besides, if you want a video game, shouldn't they get three more lives for another play anyway?

 

 

I agree' date=' effort gets rewarded as well. If someone sucks, if they are at least trying they will get a reward. Maybe not as many as someone who does a good job at it (although I really don't know about this point, would vary from game to game) but I would definitely want to encourage someone who is trying. Of course gaming the system gets no reward, and there is a difference between bad roleplaying and only putting forth a minimal effort to try and gain a reward. That is sometimes hard to determine. I hope as a GM I would be capable of putting our bad roleplayer in situations that would give him an opportunity to roleplay (as i consider roleplaying as more than describing what your character is doing.)[/quote']

[psyber624]

Re: HAP: How to use them

 

Lots of great points man. Several of which are making me rethink some of my positions. (others I disagree with, but I don't see a reason to continue this debate as its really about playstyle and such.) I will say this, I see your point about "HAPs earned in the final moments of the fight" and would probably award them next session. And you make a really good point about the "Heroic success" reward. Definitely points to ponder. Thanks for the discussion