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Things not covered/addressed in Hero


specks

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2 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

I have heard the reverse comment of "what's the point of a game with no risk of character loss".  There's a balance to be found.  Some players really invest themselves in their characters, and they don't want them to be disposable.  Others find the thrill of success enhanced when the risk of failure is greater. 

 

Well put.

 

It's not about when our characters die, but how. I think most of us want to feel like our characters' actions matter and that our characters have had an impact (ideally a legendary one) on the game world, so that if/when they do die, whenever that may be, they will not have died in vain.

 

I don't like Care Bear campaigns because I'm firmly in the "what's the point of a game with no risk of character loss" camp. I once played a paladin-like character in a GURPS Fantasy campaign and I got so sick of the GM fudging outcomes to keep my character from nasty consequences that in frustration I deliberately tried to sacrifice the character in the most glorious and epicly heroic way possible, and even then the GM would not let my character die. He assumed that just because the other players were Care Bears that I was too. Ugh! I stopped playing shortly after that.

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9 hours ago, zslane said:

I don't like Care Bear campaigns because I'm firmly in the "what's the point of a game with no risk of character loss" camp. I once played a paladin-like character in a GURPS Fantasy campaign and I got so sick of the GM fudging outcomes to keep my character from nasty consequences that in frustration I deliberately tried to sacrifice the character in the most glorious and epicly heroic way possible, and even then the GM would not let my character die. He assumed that just because the other players were Care Bears that I was too. Ugh! I stopped playing shortly after that.

 

There's a gulf of difference between characters that last a few sessions and ones that have some kind of story arc.  That doesn't mean care-bear; if you do something grossly stupid or sacrificial, so be it.  But when was the last time you saw any Champions game end up in TPK with any competent GM?

 

Not to mention, how often do comic book heroes die irrevocably?

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For most genres, a campaign becomes a Care Bear campaign when the GM, out of fear/concern of upsetting his or her players, routinely overrides the mechanics/outcomes in order to guarantee that no story arc ever actually puts the PCs' lives in jeopardy, no matter how implausible that becomes (given the genre and the characters' actions). Since I began playing in 1983, I think I've seen only one Champions PC die. Pretty much everyone I ever played Champions with understood that the characters were not typically at risk in the superhero genre, only their DNPCs and their reputations (and their xp earning potential, I suppose). To turn a Champions campaign into a Care Bear campaign, you don't fudge things to make sure nobody ever dies, you fudge things to make sure nobody is ever defeated. On the other hand, if you're going to play a game like CoC or Kult, then it must be understood that your character's life or sanity are at risk at all times. Similarly, given my literary influences in the fantasy genre, I expect PCs' lives to be at risk in every significant encounter, and I find myself like a fish out of water when the rest of the group is not similarly inclined.

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In most fantasy literature, I question whether it is reasonable to say the characters' lives are at risk in every encounter - most of the Fellowship of the Ring made it through a pretty lengthy campaign, although it often seemed like they were in significant jeopardy and risk of death.  Campaign lethality is a matter of group consensus, in my view, and as zslane notes, if there is a significant difference in the group's expectations, not everyone is likely to be happy.

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20 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said:

I think the hardest game to GM is a game where you want the illusion of it being deadly but not be. 

 

I think that comes into the GM style.  It almost has to be shown early on that if the players screw up (not usually the dice unless they are only being rolled due to bad decisions) then someone is likely to die.

 

When my players decide that they are going to embark on a headlong assault on a hard point that I have demonstrated by wasting countless NPC lives to be deadly, then they accept they are now in life or death dice rolling.  If one of them dies in this, I am pretty unsympathetic.

 

If they had sought another way round the hard-point, trying to think but it all goes wrong due to issues they had no way of knowing about, I am more likely to seek to transform death into capture or severe disadvantage (loss of equipment, disabling wounds etc).

 

It is almost impossible for the game to be both deadly and forgiving.  Gamers will game.  If the system has built in mechanisms to escape death, gamers will not keep them for special situations, they will consider them as part of the tactical landscape.  (I am not using gamers pejoratively here, just saying we are playing a game and players will often look to play optimally, even when making bad strategic decisions).

 

Doc

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The is neither here nor there, but I was playing in a D&D Encounters group for a while that met on Wednesdays at my FLGS. It was an informal core group of 5 or 6 guys, and whoever wandered in to learn the game. A "care bear" setting if ever there was one, and characters with short story arcs for sure (just by how WoC organizes it). It was a blend of personalities and goals, so there was always some dissatisfaction on some front, but the GM did a great job of balancing interests, especially with new people. 

 

But I happened to miss one week when a guy showed up randomly and built a chaotic evil character, and role played him appropriately. It ended out leading to a Majority Party Self-Kill (MPK?) where they all turned on each other in the middle of an adventure over a role-played misunderstanding. I came back the following week to find half the players and most of the characters gone! It led to hurt feelings, players quitting, but also an epic story for the guys who stayed. 

 

The GM had the opportunity to scale back that particular encounter in order to smooth things over, but as the conflict unfolded he let them play it out. Once they turned on each other there was no turning back. So in the end, it was a mix of good GMing and good role playing that led to a bad outcome, but I think nearly everyone appreciated their own agency in how the story unfolded. 

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There's substantial difference between a GM who seeks to make death (or ignominious defeat) a possible consequence of poor decision making on the part of the PCs, and a GM who seeks to ruthlessly kill the party every chance he gets. I'd say the former is simply normative roleplaying, whereas the latter is borderline sociopathic. At the other end of the spectrum, a care bear GM seeks to soften the blow of every poor PC decision so that there are virtually no negative consequences (character death in particular). That may be a reasonable approach for a one-off demonstration game intended to attract newcomers, but it is not the kind of long-term campaign I'd recommend for most players, especially those involving children. Such campaigns denude the game's tremendous potential for teaching valuable lessons about actions and consequences, all folded into the fabric of fun adventure and engagement through creative problem solving.

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I'd like to see a rewrite of the Teleportation power to have two options.  The standard default, and one similar to a Warp  which creates a gateway from A to B.  Doing it with mass rules can be clunky if you want something that affects volume instead of mass.

 

IT would also be nice to have an index of where to find things that have vanished form previous editions.  Instant Change?  See Transform.  Find Weakness, See (I forget). Etc.

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  • 1 month later...

GURPS has a cosmic modifier to bypass defenses. I don't see anything similar in HERO regarding this.

The only things that come close is ACV,  AVAD or Penetrating. What kind of modifier would something like that be worth?

What would the cost of a defense be against a cosmic attack?

 

IIRC GURPS cost of a cosmic modifier is 300% so would +2 be acceptable?

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I looked it up, and 300% is for the "irresistable" aspect of the Cosmic modifier. You could probably build your own "Cosmic" modifier by throwing other advantages together:

Affects desolidified +1/2 because irresistable Cosmic attacks affect anything. NND attack (vs Cosmic defenses) +1 because irresistable Cosmic attacks are only affected by Cosmic defenses. Does BODY +1 because irresistable Cosmic attacks hurt, no matter what. Difficult to dispel +1/4 because irresistable Cosmic powers are hard to affect. The total advantage becomes  +2.75 (almost the 300% you mentioned).

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I'd like to see something like what Mutants and Masterminds calls a Feature.  It's more or less the equivalent to a Fringe Benefit, but as a Power.  It would be 1-10 points and would give the character some minor ability as worked out between the player and GM.  The old Instant Change Power could be an example of this.

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On 4/20/2018 at 6:09 PM, Sidume said:

I'd like to see a rewrite of the Teleportation power to have two options.  The standard default, and one similar to a Warp  which creates a gateway from A to B.  Doing it with mass rules can be clunky if you want something that affects volume instead of mass.

 

IT would also be nice to have an index of where to find things that have vanished form previous editions.  Instant Change?  See Transform.  Find Weakness, See (I forget). Etc.

 

You can build "portal" type teleportation, but it would be EXPENSIVE.  

 

And Find Weakness would just be Naked Advantage: Armor Piercing, Requires a Roll, etc.

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14 hours ago, specks said:

GURPS has a cosmic modifier to bypass defenses. I don't see anything similar in HERO regarding this.

The only things that come close is ACV,  AVAD or Penetrating. What kind of modifier would something like that be worth?

What would the cost of a defense be against a cosmic attack?

 

IIRC GURPS cost of a cosmic modifier is 300% so would +2 be acceptable?

 

One easy way to do this is to have a campaign-wide default Limitation on all power builds: +0 "Not vs. Cosmic". Then provide a new Advantage +2 "Cosmic". With this scheme, non-Cosmic attacks will do nothing against Cosmic defenses, and non-Cosmic defenses will provide no protection against Cosmic attacks.

 

This is how I do things like Primal in fantasy campaigns. Primal (as from WotC's very first RPG product back in the day, The Primal Order) is the power that gods wield. Anything built with Primal bypasses (or defeats) anything not built with it. Same concept as the GURPS "Cosmic", I guess.

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41 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

I'd like to see something like what Mutants and Masterminds calls a Feature.  It's more or less the equivalent to a Fringe Benefit, but as a Power.  It would be 1-10 points and would give the character some minor ability as worked out between the player and GM.  The old Instant Change Power could be an example of this.

 

Well, then we'd build the power and give it to them.  Add appropriate modifiers to simulate any rules of M&M "Features" you are needing.

 

And we have perks and talents that do similar; you buy the talent but it is really a Power.  Combat Luck is Resistant DEF with "Only vs. Attacks you can Perceive" or whatever.  Resource Points are basically a VPP where the source of the power is money and/or connections.  :D

 

I haven't found much I could not do with HERO; but plenty I could not do "well" or just never settled on a final build. 

 

1 minute ago, zslane said:

 

One easy way to do this is to have a campaign-wide default Limitation on all power builds: +0 "Not vs. Cosmic". Then provide a new Advantage +2 "Cosmic". With this scheme, non-Cosmic attacks will do nothing against Cosmic defenses, and non-Cosmic defenses will provide no protection against Cosmic attacks.

 

This is how I do things like Primal in fantasy campaigns. Primal (as from WotC's very first RPG product back in the day, The Primal Order) is the power that gods wield. Anything built with Primal bypasses (or defeats) anything not built with it. Same concept as the GURPS "Cosmic", I guess.

 

I used to do a similar thing with Star HERO ship-to-ship weapons vs. small arms.  "+2 STS Weapon" = x10 damage or whatever it was, I kept changing the number, and it made it a 10m AOE Explosion when not fired at a ship, etc.  But the math never worked out; so I scrapped it and just made ship-to-ship weapons (and ship defenses) ridiculously big.  6d6k to 10d6k, all with AP and/or Penetrating, starship armor all having at least 1 level of hardened and impenetrable, etc.  Have not gotten to playtest the new ship builds much, though.  

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I find it a little unwieldy to try and build irresistible attacks and impenetrable defenses by making them "big enough", since something always comes along that surpasses the established benchmark. A campaign-wide "Not vs. <blank>" scheme is simple and foolproof/future-proof.

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On 4/8/2018 at 9:03 AM, Grailknight said:

Fixing Growth and to a lesser extent the other Size powers. Currently,  Growth is just  a kludge of templates. It works in theory but no one takes it as a power IME.

I use stretching ,knockback resistance and manual dcv adjustments for growth

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That's part of my modifiers but its still a work in progress.

 

Here's a rough draft. Take note that all these powers are being valued with 2x /Costs End because you pay End for Growth and then in some cases for the added power.

 

Growth: Each level costs 15 points and gains the character the following

 

+10 Str

+1 OCV (HTH only)

+1 PD and +1 ED Damage Negation

+1" Knockback Resistance

+1" Stretching

+2 Meters Running (not sure here)

+3 Pre ( also open to debate)

 

-2 DCV

2x Size

8x Mass

-2 Stealth 

 

Feedback is welcomed.

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11 hours ago, zslane said:

 

One easy way to do this is to have a campaign-wide default Limitation on all power builds: +0 "Not vs. Cosmic". Then provide a new Advantage +2 "Cosmic". With this scheme, non-Cosmic attacks will do nothing against Cosmic defenses, and non-Cosmic defenses will provide no protection against Cosmic attacks.

 

This is how I do things like Primal in fantasy campaigns. Primal (as from WotC's very first RPG product back in the day, The Primal Order) is the power that gods wield. Anything built with Primal bypasses (or defeats) anything not built with it. Same concept as the GURPS "Cosmic", I guess.

 

Another example is Rifts/Palladium SDC vs. MDC.

And I think it's good to mention, because the cost aspect is going to be highly dependent on availablity and who has control of it.  If this is something the PCs can do, and it's somewhat common, that might be when it should be MOST expensive.  OTOH if it's something predominately controlled by the GM, and is kept fairly unusual, then maybe it can be a little cheaper.  

I do definitely think the broad campaign-rule approach makes sense because of this.  And, *all* Cosmic powers should require DM review.  I would also probably limit these to normal attacks only...never killing attacks.  One bad roll with a killing attack and...POOF.  I remember a game where this happened...the character had quite high DCV but no resistant defense.  (Dangerous but often fitting.)  IIRC, the char got surprised, got hit with 2d killing.  11 body rolled.  OOPS.  

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