Trebuchet

Re: 5th Ed: Flying Dodge We have two PCs with Flying Dodge in our Champions campaign and haven't had any trouble with it. I thought it just allowed a Full Move and a +4 DCV; which is obviously nice but hardly guarantees an automatic miss?

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Define "long." Is it number of Segments? Number of Phases? Number of Phases they take offensive actions? Is a Phase where they take a defensive action subtracted? Define "effective." Is it the number of hits they take to take down a normal? To take down a martial artist? To take down a brick? To punch their way out of a wet paper bag? Do Recoveries change these numbers? Are they considered effective if they solve the mystery but can't take down the bad guy? Are they effective if they only helped take down the bad guy? Define "survive"... My point is that these are entirely subjective concepts. Player A's idea of success may be totally different from Player B's. One player may be happiest running a supporting character who is not as effective in combat by design. Others may prefer to run a concept that is less effective in combat because they feel it enhances the role-playing experience to think their way through problems instead of powering through them.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Makes the game better, doesn't it? I suppose that depends on your definition of "asymmetric." I run a PC with an 11d6 attack, base 14 OCV/DCV, and 12 PD/12 ED in a campaign where average attacks are in the 12d6 - 13d6 range. Is that asymmetric? I'm sure you noticed that attack:defense ratios changed when you dropped caps. With caps, once you've hit what you consider your most important attribute (offense, defense, SPD, OCV, etc.) because of a hard cap, you have to go spend points on the next thing. IME that certainly led to very little real asymmetry. Now you can actually build an eggshell armed with a hammer or a tough character who can't hit the broad side of a barn.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Almost anything can be abused in the system if overdone. Preventing that abuse is the job of the GM, not the rules - official or otherwise. Too many GM's substitute house rules for a willingness to say "No. I know it's legal, but that won't work in my campaign" to an player's face.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Which is precisely the reason I dislike caps and that we discontinued their use completely with the introduction of 5E. Our team now has a DC spread from 11 to 16 and a corresponding SPD range of 9 to 4. There is, BTW, no reason that accuracy (or its opposite number, damage evasion/avoidance) needs to be included in such a formula. Lightly defended characters need to be harder to hit for the obvious reason that they can't take as many hits, so this evolution will take place naturally anyway.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Why? We've already agreed Thor and Captain America work fine on the same team. I'm pretty sure we'd agree that Thor's defenses and attacks are significantly higher than Cap's. I haven't noticed that Thor misses very much; in point of fact he's an extremely skilled warrior even by Cap's standards. My thought is that this player brought you a well-thought-out character concept and asked you to build it. He wanted a character that had to think and use skill rather than raw power to accomplish his goals; which I think is entirely admirable. It seems to me it's unlikely he didn't realize he might be lower in several categories but still wanted to play that character as conceived. Maybe you ought to stop trying to shoehorn him into your view of what is balanced when it's not even clear "balanced" is what the player wants.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong What I don't understand is why Ki-Rin implied this concept cost 40% more using RAW than it did with his rather minor Limitation on STR. Yes, the build seems to be a bit overdone, but it still doesn't seem like it should be so expensive unless there's a lot more to it than we've seen. A 40% overage on a 350 point Champions character comes out around 490 CP. Nothing in his posts suggested a 500 point-level MA. Quite the contrary; it sounded like the character was perhaps dangerously underpowered.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong I think you misunderstood me (and if you didn't them I apologize ): It's not that a brick has a multi-tool - which sounds like I meant a Brick Tricks Multipower or Power Tricks (STR) Skill; it's the STR itself that is the multi-tool. You can bend things with it, you can break things with it, you can lift things with it, you can hold things with it, you can catch things with it. It does pretty much anything we use cranes, bulldozers, beams and braces, fireman's nets, wrecking balls, battering rams, and other heavy equipment to accomplish IRL. A brick is a one-man rescue (or wrecking) crew. The old axiom in our campaign is "There is no substitute for Strength."

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Congratulations, you've created a variant of Martial Demi-Brick. I've seen many of these over the years, although most of those had STR in the 40-45 range. Me, I think I'd have just gone with a higher STR (but still NCM) build to represent the same thing as your 10 STR PC. It's not like a 20 STR would be out of line as an abstract representation (as all Characteristics are anyway) for someone trained and in good physical shape using leverage and techniques to perform extraordinary feats of "strength." (I've got nothing against 10 STR MA's, by the way; I play one in our Pulp Hero campaign and he's hands down the most dangerous HtH character in the game.)

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Since we haven't seen the actual writeup we don't know the details, but in considering this character Ki-Rin has been discussing in this thread I did have some concerns about the END usage of a high STR MA as opposed to one using DC's for damage.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Alright, I can see that. What I don't understand is why you think martial arts Damage Classes won't do what you need? After all, if you're harder to hit you're almost by default going to hit more often as well, so I don't see why an MA should be expected to hit as hard as a brick. Captain America (one of my absolute favorite heroes, BTW) fights on the same team as Thor, but nobody expects Cap to hit with the same power as the Thunder God. That sure as Hell doesn't mean he's some kind of wimp. If a brick in the campaign is doing 10d6+ damage with his 50+ STR, why in the world would an MA with a 20 - 25 STR, Offensive Strike (+4d6) and perhaps a couple of levels of Damage Class be considered inadequate? In our Champions campaign, our team brick does 16d6. My MA does 11d6 and has just a tad over a third of the brick's defenses (not even counting CON and STUN). Even with her much superior DEX and SPD there's almost no chance she could beat the brick in one-on-one combat given the vast differences in their potential damage and defenses, but I don't see my MA as suffering in any way by comparison. She's just as viable a character; she just has to approach combat differently. She accepts that she's going to get hit sometimes, and often be Stunned or knocked out if she does get hit, but she can still Recover and get back into the fight most of the time. That's just the way it works. I disagree with my original statement as written. What I should have said was that a brick can be an HtH specialist, but it's not an automatic correlation to having high STR. Circus strong-men and competitive weightlifters are obviously strong, but I don't think most people would consider them hand-to-hand combat specialists by default. You certainly don't have to be an "expert in combat" to beat someone up; my experience is that most fistfights are pretty clumsy - even banal. My contention is that the primary roles of a brick are two-fold: 1) Damage sponge; soaking up damage that would hurt their more lightly defended comrades (such as MA's); and 2) Heavy hitter; authoritatively delivering the coups de grâce once the team has worn down the bad guy(s) a bit. What about horse archers? I agree it is legit if it works in the context of your campaign, although I could point out that IRL martial artists are often known for performing feats that would often be attributed to strength but more often actually involve leverage and/or technique. Does the player of this MA you're working on feel his character needs to have a high STR (with Limitations, of course) in order to be competitive or to be fun to play? What kind of STR are we talking about here? 25? 40? 55? Surely the "little old man" master typical of martial arts films isn't using pure (if Limited) strength to perform his feats and bump up his defenses? I'm not certain you wouldn't be better off concept-wise buying some extra DC's, Leaping, and a bit of Damage Reduction or Combat Luck, but you know your own campaign best. Buying limited STR solely for the extra PD, REC, and STUN it provides rather than the "muscle" just smacks of metagaming to me (specifically, metarule #6). Even if it's technically legal it still feels to me like an attempt to end run the RAW; and I'm pretty sure I'd disallow it in my campaign if a player came forward with such a build. That's something I think we can agree on 100%. Do post the character when he's completed. It sounds like a cool concept even if I might not agree completely with your build. That's OK; you probably wouldn't agree with all of mine.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong You seem to see the difference, so why do you seem to think they need to be built in similar ways? One doesn't build a scalpel the same way one does a hammer. Both are excellent tools, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. MAs don't need the kind of CON, REC, or Stun bricks do because they're supposed to avoid getting hit in the first place - that's why they tend to have higher SPD and mobility: to evade getting hit. Higher SPD for MA's isn't to allow them to hit their opponent more often; it's to give them enough Phases to Dodge or DfC to keep from being hit and still get in some counterattacks. I've never seen a Hero MA that didn't spend a good third of his or her Phases Dodging, Blocking, or otherwise evading attacks or recovering from them; attacks that many bricks can simply shrug off. (As an aside, I personally disagree that bricks are HtH specialists. As you note, they are blunt instruments, who IMO tend to use HtH because that's where their high STR and defenses are most useful. The HtH aspect is incidental; a serendipitous benefit to being strong, tough, and getting your hands on the enemy.) Strength has plenty of other uses than just delivering damage; it's the super equivalent of a multitool. There are plenty of major bricks out there in the source material with serious ranged attacks.) Try this analogy: The intended targets of both AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks are enemy armored vehicles, but nobody would dream of suggesting that they use the same tactics or be built the same way. They have similar attack ranges and can dish out similar amounts of destructive firepower, but the tank is armored in ways the helicopter could never even dream of. That Apache is going to be in serious trouble if he just sits still a kilometer away and swaps shots with an Abrams. He needs to use his superior agility and speed to outflank the tank or he's going to get blown out of the sky in one hit.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong I don't intend to buy 6E and certainly don't get any commission for copies sold. But, seriously, I also don't think 5ER is as broken as you seem to. I simply don't get what you think the problem is.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Yes, there's an easy solution to address this "imbalance": Switch to 6E. No more Figured Characteristics; no more problems with Figured values one way or the other. Now the HtH characters will be balanced, and ranged combatants will hold the upper hand instead. Isn't that better? You are still, IMO, trying to fix a non-existent problem. No real problem, no satisfactory solution. I have to ask: Why did you even start this thread if you already had the answer and didn't want input?

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong You apparently have umpteen pages of house rules to correct (if I may be blunt) non-existent problems, but can't see any possible case where you'd grant GM permission for an NND Does BODY attack? Granted they should be as rare as hen's teeth, but exceedingly rare and requiring GM's permission certainly does not equal no way to build them. Why? Equal points does not equal equally effective. They are different character concepts. IME neither brick nor MA have a significant advantage over the other. The sheer number of "Bricks are too powerful" and "Martial artists are too cost effective" threads over the years on these boards suggest that the line is nowhere near as clearly defined as you paint it or these players wouldn't be complaining that they're finding one or the other too effective against the other archetype. I've played both over the years; and I've fought both with both types and won and lost. If I had to call it for one or the other, I'd say bricks have a slight edge, maybe 45/55. That might be important in a tactical wargame, but it has no bearing in an RPG. One can roleplay well with either.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong Wrong. They're designed to simulate attacks for which there is no normal defense - hence the name of the Advantage. It is entirely possible and legal to build NND attacks that do BODY. It seems to me that this is exactly why there are Combination Powers. A quick reading of the 5ER metarules shows no such prohibition against using two or more types of attacks. Could you provide a reference and/or quote the relevant sentence(s) in the rules?

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong No, he didn't, but my point was that there's no clear line of demarcation between bricks and martial artists, "classic" or otherwise, even in a Champions campaign. The line blurs even more between genres, where a 25 STR "brick" in a Fantasy Hero game can be weaker than a "martial artist" in a supers game.

Re: fair cost for strength that isn't strong