Trebuchet

Yes, it would, but the vehicle template lists neither that data, defenses, nor equipment. So the printout is incomplete anyway.

To a certain extent I agree with you, but not only has George MacDonald not made such an explicit statement but to a large extent the rules defy their own internal logic on this topic. (Nor is George MacDonald the final authority anymore, he has been superceded by a new prophet.) Nowhere in the rules does it state categorically that each +1 DC represents twice as much damage; some people are extrapolating that from other data. Steve Long has repeatedly asserted that one must use common and dramatic sense when playing this game, so why not in this particular and ambiguous case? What would be harmed within the game by Steve Long categorically stating that damage is linear rather than exponential? Absolutely nothing. It would simply give results more compatible with both real-world and comic book physics. I know this is a game of rubber science, but that doesn't mean we can't strive for internal consistency. If it is left as is we are faced with the absurdity of a vanilla 60 STR brick being able to destroy the Earth in under one minute within the game system. Since that defies both observable real-world physics and the comic-book physics that this game system was originally designed to simulate, I put it to you that this needs correction. We are not dealing with holy writ here; as you correctly pointed out it is a game system, edited and revised by a man who is perfectly willing (and has!) to admit he makes mistakes. If the system were already perfect there would have been no reason for 5th Edition.

That's an excellent suggestion, and I have made it so. With a couple of Limitations it didn't even increase the cost of the vehicle.

I think you're probably wrong there, Monolith. The only truly new person posting in this thread is Shadow ****. While I may not agree with Warp9's position, I believe he is a legitimate poster who honestly disagrees with me. Shadow **** is too arrogant and obnoxious to disguise himself for long. He's just a more-obvious-than-usual troll. I just do the smart thing and block his posts whenever he appears instead of waiting for Ben to shut him down again.

And the official Hero approved version of the Hulk published in July's Game Trade Magazine would require a 170d6 attack to kill in one shot. (35 PD, 25 BODY, 50% Damage Reduction) Doesn't that illustrate my exact point rather succinctly?

Doug, where do you see me bringing up rules to support my position? I stated the obvious intent of a section of the rules; to wit the section on destroying objects. It is you and your allies who have decided to extrapolate those rules beyond all reason. You are quite correct, there are numerous examples of exponential progression in HERO just as there are examples of linear progression. What I am saying is that Hero System's entire use of exponential progression is wrong, both in game effects and in observable real world examples. I gave examples of several absurd results from using exponential damage and BODY which you chose to ignore, I can only presume because you have no effective rebuttal. Kindly produce a counterargument as to why a 75 STR brick can't destroy Earth in less than 2 minutes using the HERO rules. Without resorting to GM fiat, you can't. Any game system needs to be internally consistent in how it works. I don't have any problem within my campaign using the rules as written, because IMHO nuclear weapons and planet-shattering attacks are plot devices and don't need that level of detail. I'm simply not so pedantic that I see a need to quantify how many dice the Death Star'sâ„¢ blast was. As far as I'm concerned it was awholelottad6. This is not an argument of taste, I am merely stating the somewhat obvious fact that in this particular regard the rules are broken. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to grab my sledgehammer and destroy our planet to illustrate my point. I'll be back in 10 minutes.

Ah yes, the classic "appeal to authority" of those with a flawed argument. Yes, I can accept the fact that the rules say that without agreeing with that rule. It's patently absurd. By your line of reasoning, if Earth has only 86 BODY as claimed by Star Hero, then less than a dozen 20d6 attacks would also destroy it. (Average 20 BODY per attack, 20 - 7 PD = 13 BODY to Earth per attack, or only 7 20d6 attacks to destroy Earth.) Let's take that a step further into the absurd. A standard speed 4 brick with a 12d6 attack can break Earth into pieces in only 18 Phases, or less than one minute. Can you see now why this 2X mass per BODY formula is inherently flawed? And of course the equally flawed opposite side of this coin is that each 1d6 is twice as much damage. It just doesn't work that way. Let's take another example of where HERO doesn't jive with observed facts. A person in HERO falling and impacting at terminal velocity takes 30d6 of damage; and conversely ought to do 30d6 of damage to whatever they hit. In Hero this ought to leave an enormous crater in the earth, since dirt has a DEF of 0 and only 10 BODY. Thus a person hitting the ground at terminal velocity should theoretically leave a crater of 500,000 cubic hexes in size since he did 20 more BODY than the dirt had and each +1 BODY doubles the size of the hole. But in the real world do skydivers who fall to their deaths destroy entire cities when they hit? No. The Breaking Things rules were designed to deal with discreet objects like buildings, doors, walls, bridges, boulders and the like that humans can plausibly interact with, and they just don't scale up well. It cannot be rationally applied to objects millions or billions of times larger. Earth and other planetary sized objects should have millions if not billions of BODY. I agree that a 200d6 blast would do serious damage and would probably make an enormous crater, but destroy the Earth? Hardly. I 'm sorry, Warp9, but this is one instance where the original game designer had a major brain fart. George MacDonald blew this one rather badly, and I'm only sorry Steve Long didn't see fit to fix this for 5th edition. Just because something is written down in a rule book doesn't make it gospel. I'm not going to stop using my brain just because "The Bible tells me so." If Steve Long et al want to kick me out of the Church of HERO as a heretic, so be it. In the meantime I'll keep nailing my list of grievances to the cathedral door.

There is nothing wrong with wanting such a thing. I attempt to do the much same thing in my own game. My point is that the Warp9 (and others) are arguing that Hero's damage system is exponential without any evidence to back up that assertion. An exponential damage system is not supported by game-world results. By stating that each DC is twice as much damage as the preceeding DC, we are led to such ridiculous conclusions as that a 20d6 attack is 524288 times as powerful as a 1d6 attack and 30d6 attack is well over 53 million times as powerful as a 1d6 attack. That is obviously not the case if you look at how the game works. A 20d6 attack will level a building or flatten a hero, but it is patently not 524288 times as powerful as a 1d6 attack. Think Spider-Man could survive a 15d6 punch from Rhino? Of course he can, and has. Think Spider-Man could take a thug's bullet for 1d6RKA (3DCs)? Natch. How about 5461 bullets as Warp9 proposes is the correct damage for 5d6 RKA (15 DCs)? I don't think so, Tim. You can create reasonably accurate representations of real world weapons in HERO without resorting to exponential damage. In fact, they would alow you to be more accurate since you have a near infinite number of grades (1d6, 1d6+1, 1½d6, 2d6, 2d6+1, etc.) rather than each d6 being twice as powerful.

Mentor recently ran a fun game in which his master-villain Master of the World and his superpowered henchmen were based in a giant airship. After a running fight through a Turkish palace (Don't ask.), the villains blew a hole through the ceiling of the palace and escaped to their tethered giant airship with MidGuard hot on their heels. Our two martial artists, Eagle Eye and Zl'f, leapt to catch the tether ropes and began climbing up to the airship in a scene wonderfully reminiscent of 30's pulp fiction. Only one of our available team, Silhouette, could fly and the team's teleporter, Lt. Kilroy (As in "Kilroy was Here") TP'd up through the bottom hatch of the gondola. Once we got inside the huge vehicle it was like something out of a Pink Panther movie, with heroes and villains ducking in and out of doors and hatches to hide and strike at each other. Outside, Silhouette couldn't punch through the metallized exterior, so she finally Desolidified through the hull and then went to full Density Increase (All 400Ktonnes) and did a high speed Move Through which succeeded in seriously damaging the airship. Then we heard a downward countdown begin: 30 seconds...29...28...27... We assumed it was a self destruct device, so after a frantic but unsuccessful scramble to find the bomb we finally abandoned ship at the count of 3. Much to our irritation, the countdown turned out to be not a self-destruct countdown but rather for the launching of the villains' rocket powered escape vehicle located in the tail of the airship, and hanging on to Silhouette hundreds of feet in the air we watched helplessly as they literally rocketed to safety, sans one member whom Zl'f had defeated and we had taken prisoner in the palace now miles away. That was our second encounter with the Master of the World's goons (We've since had a third), and like the other encounters we've basically managed tactical victories but strategic draws each time we fight. (The developing rivalry between our brick Silhouette and their brick Fezzik is fast approaching legendary status.) We've managed to run them off and capture one each time, but the Master seems to have a steady supply of supervillains to fill vacancies in his ranks. They are a pretty tough team, and we haven't even seen him yet.

And don't forget "PC develops symptoms..." Great idea; especially since we have two physicians on our team. Consider it stolen. BTW, how did the Quincy episode work out in the end? What was the cause? I ran a scenario recently that featured little combat where I took the team (along with half of the University of Montana at Butte) back to the Cretaceous. The heroes not only had to figure out a way to reverse the process (which kept our brick occupied since she was our Nobel-prize winning physicist), but the doctor on the team had to treat minor and major injuries from the transference (and later, from the local fauna). Better yet, the heroes had to keep their superpowers under wraps or they would have given away their secret identities. None of the University staff or students ever realized MidGuard was present. I did allow for a little dinosaur stomping. The first night our martial artist engaged what he thought was an ordinary crocodile in the lake filling the east edge of the campus and and was somewhat taken aback when the critter turned out to be 45' long with 5 foot jaws. And when our physician flew around the campus to get some air the next night and saw a pack of velociraptors chasing three coeds he blasted the 'raptors with his Area Effect attack. He was amazed at how easily they went down, one shot took them all out. But as I told him "They're not monsters, they're animals. Think of them as bipedal tigers with big rear claws." The T-Rex would have been tougher, but anyone on the team would still have beaten him handily. A great time was had by all. (Well, except the dinosaurs.)

And here is the picture of it I came up with. If you're thinking it looks a lot like a fat F-22 Raptor with truncated wings, you'd be right. Dang! Forgot the gimballed beverage holders...

I'll put this in simple words since you seem to have identified the problem. 1) Kristopher is discussing in-game mechanics. 2) I am discussing in-game mechanics. 3) You are discussing "real world" mechanics. 4) Game mechanics are not the real world. I don't particularly care if you think 2d6 is a highway flare or a hydrogen bomb in the real world, in the game it does 2d6. Period. End of discussion.

No, because there are no physics in a game. That's what we are telling you. Damage and defenses in Hero are relative only to each other. While engineers may well be able to calculate fairly close approximations of structural strength, they cannot look at a blueprint and say "That thing has 17 DEF and 21 BODY, so we need a 38d6 attack to break it." I watched a show earlier this week on the busting of the Rhine dams by the RAF during WW2. Even under carefully controlled conditions and using actual German engineering drawings of those structures, engineers took dozens of attempts to figure out how big an explosive to use and how to place it. It's just not as cut and dried in the real world as you seem to think. It's simple in Champions because this is a game.

My guess is that George MacDonald, the original creator of Champions, used firearms tables to correlate damage within his system when he was designing it. He had to use some scale, and charts for kinetic energy are easily found in any reloading book. The system works pretty well at the low levels of energy involved with firearms, but breaks down completely when dealing with the power levels of nuclear weapons and city-leveling energy blasts fired by megavillains. If kinetic energy translated directly into damage on an exponential scale then the military would have developed 5mm antitank rounds travelling 1000000 fps rather than wasting their time with clunky 120mm shells in tanks. (And yes, I know the penetrator in an Abrams round is considerably smaller than 120mm, it's closer to 25mm.) First of all, you seem to be the one assuming damage in Hero is complex. It's not complex at all, it's a simplified model of a fictional system of physics. All models are simplistic by definition; that's the entire point of working with models be they physical or mathematical: They are simple enough our feeble brains can analyse them. Why do you insist on making this harder than it needs to be? Damage in Hero is quite simple: 1d6 is half as much damage as 2d6; 10d6 is 10 times as much damage as 1d6. What's so hard to grasp here?

I was specifically addressing both living and unliving ("Without such a real world scale to measure life and/or physical toughness...'). However, we have no real world way to know exactly how much damage a non-living structure will take to destroy either. That level of knowledge requires either having been the one who created that structure or destroying it in order to analyse it in such detail.

Thought I'd post the flying sub used by our team, MidGuard. This vehicle was donated to MidGuard by the Japanese government for preventing the assassination of the Crown Prince and preventing a military coup in 2000. Comments? Suggestions? MidGuard Flying Submarine Val Char Cost 40 STR -15 20 DEX 30 20 BODY 1 5 SPD 20 6" RUN020" SWIM-20" LEAP0Characteristics Cost: 91 Cost Power END 69 Multipurpose Engines: Multipower, 69-point reserve, all slots: 1 Continuing Fuel Charges lasting 1 Day each (+0) 7u 1) Standard Flight Mode: Flight 25", Improved Noncombat Movement (x4), Combat Acceleration/Deceleration (+1/4) (69 Active Points) 1u 2) Supersonic Flight Mode: Flight 1", Megascale (1" = 100 km; +3/4), Can Be Scaled Down: 1" = 1km (+1/4) (4 Active Points) 1u 3) Underwater Thrusters: Swimming +20" (20" total) (20 Active Points); Limited Maneuverability (-1/4), Turn Mode (-1/4) 13 Active Sensor Suite: Multipower, 32-point reserve, all slots: (32 Active Points); OAF Bulky (-1 1/2) 1u 1) Radar Array: Radar (Discriminatory, Increased Arc of Perception: 240-Degree, Telescopic (+10)) (32 Active Points) 1u 2) Active Sonar: Active Sonar (Increased Arc of Perception: 240-Degree, Sense, Telescopic (+10)) (29 Active Points) 15 Rugged Construction: Armor (5 PD/5 ED) Vehicle Equipment, all slots: OIF Bulky (-1) 13 1) Stealth Systems: Invisibility to Radar & Sonar to Sight Group, Hearing Group, Infrared Perception (30 Active Points); Bright Fringe (-1/4) 3 4 2) Ejection Seats: Teleportation 5", Usable By Other (x8 Number of Targets +1) (20 Active Points); 1 Charges (-2), Can Only Teleport To 5" Outside Vehicle (Only in Flight) Fixed Locations (-1), Must Pass Through Intervening Space (-1/4), No Noncombat Movement (-1/4) 8 3) Electronic Countermeasures: Missile Deflection (Any Ranged Attack) (20 Active Points); Only Works Against IR or Radar Guided Missiles Limited Type of Attack (-1/2) 8 4) Sealed Environment: Life Support , Safe in High Pressure, Safe in Intense Cold, Safe in Intense Heat, Safe in Low Pressure/Vacuum, Self-Contained Breathing (17 Active Points) 6 5) Communications System: High Range Radio Perception (12 Active Points) 2 6) Polarized Cockpit: Flash Defense (5 points) (Sight Group) (5 Active Points) 10 7) Passive Sonar: Ultrasonic Perception (Discriminatory, Increased Arc of Perception: 360-Degree, Sense, Telescopic (+5)) (20 Active Points) 12 8) Thermal Imaging: Infrared Perception (Discriminatory, Sense, Targeting Sense, Telescopic (+3)) (25 Active Points) 6 9) Low Light Cameras: Nightvision (Sense, Telescopic (+5)) (12 Active Points) 10 10) GPS System: Detect Exact Position 17-, Analyze, Discriminatory, Sense, Sense Affected As Radio (+0) (23 Active Points); Not Underwater (-1/4) 1 11) Underwater Arms: Extra Limbs (5 Active Points); Only in front of Vehicle (-1), 20 STR Only (-1), Limited Manipulation (-1/4) 6 12) Spotlight: Sight Group Images, +/-4 to PER Roll (22 Active Points); Only To Create Light (-1), Limited Arc of Fire 60 Degrees (-1/2) 2 15 13) Winch: Stretching 10" (50 Active Points); Cannot Do Damage (-1/2), Always Direct (-1/4), No Noncombat Stretching (-1/4), No Velocity Damage (-1/4) 5 Powers Cost: 209 Total Character Cost: 300

Megascale is a "Stop Sign" Advantage for a reason. It can easily be abused, bur when used conceptually can be very useful. One of the characters in our game is the avatar of a storm diety, and he uses a Megascale Change Environment to represent a summoned thunderstorm. It would be ridiculously expensive to try to build a mile and a half across thunderstorm using Area Effect Radius.

Quite right. And I'd say 3d6K reasonably represents the effects of a .50 BMG on a human being. Against most people it will produce a mortal wound (10.5 BODY) which will prove fatal in mere seconds, with a head shot it will result in instant death for normals (21 BODY) and even some supers. Numbers like "xd6" and "y BODY" are meant only to represent game mechanics for what are ultimately abstractions at best anyway. While engineers may speak of joules and megajoules of energy to represent kinetic energy, there is no corresponding number for physicians to rate "life energy." ("Quick, Nurse Johnson! Call the Crash Team! He's down to only 21% of his BODY!") Heck, we can't even really define life, much less quantify it. (Are viruses alive?) Without such a real world scale to measure life and/or physical toughness, trying to determine the real world equivalents of damage is utterly pointless. And that brings us back to HERO. In HERO, 3d6 is 3X as much as 1d6 just as 3d6 is 1/3 of 9d6 within the game system. These numbers are relative within that system, not logarithmic. Saying it is anything else is ultimately pointless. It's a nice academic exercise, but nothing more. We have to use self-reference within the game because that's the only scale we have to work with that supplies numbers for damage, resistance to damage, and surviving that damage.

I agree with Zoot. If they take over the US, they deserve what goes with it. Letting them win would be the most evil thing you could possibly do to them, and I'd handle it like this: "Excuse me, Mighty Man, but here are those figures on farm subsidies and pork barrel projects you needed." "Sir? The Boy Scout troop from Kalamazoo is here. The photographer should be here in 5 minutes. One of the scouts says he's a big fan of yours." "Lady Justice, the senators from Wyoming insist on an immediate meeting to discuss Federal highway spending. That shouldn't take more than an hour." What your players don't seem to realize is that by siezing control of the country, their characters have just transformed from superheroes into politicians. Don't forget the Law of Unintended Consequences, either. End farm subsidies? Sure, and bankrupt 50,000 small family farms. Be they socialistic utopians or reactionary tyrants, how long do you think it will be before the heroes are fighting amongst themselves about policy? Three game sessions of this kind of stuff and they'll either abdictate or commit suicide.

1) Why not? A vaccuum is certainly lighter than any gas, so at least theoretically it should work. (The practical problems of a vaccuum chamber 500 feet long might be another issue entirely.) 2) You're worried about real life in a discussion of flying bases inhabited by a Nazi nobleman in a world with superheroes? With a vaccuum-ship even if the hull gets breached they need only patch the holes and pump out the air. With hydrogen or helium airships the villains would need to find a sufficient supply of the gases, which might be difficult. Oh well, at least with a helium-filled ship you can make the heroes talk funny.

True, but he would still have had to hit her with his attack. He did in fact have a rather substantial EB, I believe it was 14d6. Even spreading his EB for a +5 to hit would not have guaranteed a hit on Zl'f, her DCV with a Martial Dodge and levels is 20. The bad guy (His actual name was one of those mile long and totally unpronouncable Aztec god names.) would have needed a 7 or less to hit; that's only a 16.2% chance of hitting. Even if he hit her she would have quite possibly Recovered before he got off his second shot anyway, since he had a 6 SPD compared to her 9. He was focusing his attacks on the characters that were actually hurting him; she was "merely an annoyance." He was also fighting a team of five; if she had gone down one of her teammates would have covered her until she recovered, just as she has done many a time for them.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulp novel Tarzan at the Earth's Core featured a rigid airship whose lift was provided by vaccuum. It featured an airtight skin made of a supertough "experimental" metal. (The ship was even German-made IIRC) When the shell was emptied by vaccuum pumps the ship became lighter than air and floated. This would really work, and would certainly seem super-advanced to WWII era characters. And of course, since it doesn't need hydrogen (potentially explosive) or helium (extremely expensive and rare in the 1940's), it could go anywhere.

Now let's turn this back to the original topic; Damage Shields. In the incident I just related above, if the villain had bought even a small (5 or 6d6) Damage Shield my character would not have been able to engage him with impunity. Three average 5d6 attack rolls from a DS would have rendered my character unconscious, with serious consequences for our entire team. In fact, if he'd had a DS I seriously doubt our team would have prevailed. Our second MA had been hit for 70 points of Stun, so he was out cold till the cows came home (We carried him out as the temple, in classic form, collapsed.). Without my character constantly halving his DCV by Leg Sweeping him and knocking him prone, he would have only been hit half as often (or less, IIRC he had an 11 DCV) by the remaining characters. Damage Shield would have been tremendously useful for this particular megavillain, but without it MidGuard ground him up and spit out the bones. Had he but purchased the "overpriced" DS, the villain would probably have beaten Earth's premier superhero team, MidGuard, and been well on his way to godhood. To paraphrase William Shakespeare in Richard III: "A Damage Shield! a Damage Shield! my kingdom for a Damage Shield!"

I'll take that as a compliment. One thing I should have made clear: The wide range of DEF, attacks, etc., in our campaign did not come about by accident. It was a deliberate attempt by the two (now 3) GMs to steer the game in that direction. We explained to our players that we wanted some lightly defended characters, and if they played them they would not be penalized in play for those low defenses. This required a certain level of trust by both sides; from the players that the GMs would not attempt to screw them over, and from the GMs that the players would not try to build cheesy character designs. Batman can work with Superman if your campaign is properly tailored. (While my martial artist is tremendously fast (43 DEX, 9 SPD) and would be an absolute terror if her fighting style included blades, I have so far resisted the impulse to make her The Amazing Buzzsaw.) So far it has worked beautifully, and has given us characters with tremendous variations in skills, defenses and attacks. Nobody feels useless, and as long as everyone plays to concept it just keeps getting better. I don't rate combat effectiveness as being solely based on DCs and hit probabilities, but on the ability of the character to change the course of the battle. As an example, in a recent fight we had to fight against an incipient demi-god whom my character was essentially unable to harm with her max 10d6 attack due to his high defenses (30 PD, 50% Damage Reduction, 150 Stun). Since he had no minions to fight, she didn't have anything to do, right? Wrong! He was very quick and had a high CV, but my character was faster still and spent virtually the entire fight Leg Sweeping or Shoving him across the room to keep him off balance. He spent almost the entire fight at half DCV due to being prone, which allowed our lower OCV/higher DC characters to pound on him. We brought him down with teamwork.

I like randomness, it adds a, well, random element to the games which I find adds a dash of interest. YMMV. In my campaign my martial artist Zl'f would be Con-Stunned by an average 9d6 attack that wouldn't even leak Stun through her chum Silhouette's defenses. (Zl'f: 12 PD, 18 CON; Silhouette: 33 PD, 33 CON) Do I feel my character suffers in combat compared to her comrade? Nope. Zl'f acts more than twice as often per turn (9 SPD vs 4 SPD), is more mobile (30" Running), and in many ways is the "heart" of our team just as Captain America is the core of the Avengers. (She's the only character who has been continually played since our campaign started in 1992.) Zl'f may spend more time unconscious than Silhouette (There's an understatement!), but she's still tremendous fun to play, and I think to play with as well. Both characters are very effective, just in different ways. We base our effectiveness on our abilities as a team. Who would win in a fight between the two? Who knows? We don't do "arena" battles.