LordQulex

In Star Hero 6e p.190 (and 6e Equipment Guide p.194), a plasma rifle is defined as 12d6 NX. The key describes X as "Area Of Effect (Radius Explosion, assumed to be of a size to give the Advantage a final value of +½)." The Area of Effect table (6e1 319) says 17-32m radius is +1, and explosion is -½, so a "final value of +½" is anywhere between a 17 and 32m radius. That can't be right... Explosions lose one DC every 2m after the target point +2m, so a 12d6 N blast will do damage out to a 25m radius. Granted only 1d6 N, but a 25m radius none the less. To put things into perspective, that 25m radius is roughly 10x larger than the floorplan of an average single family home (so says Google), or 1/3 the area of an American football field. That's BIG for a standard issue infantryman weapon (in my opinion). I just want to make sure my interpretation is correct. I understand that this is a hard sci-fi setting and I can change the rules how I see fit (I'm going to make my plasma rifle 2m radius), but again I want to make sure my understanding of how this all interacts is correct so I can correctly interpret other equipment in the tables. Thanks!

I checked the appendix where the writers show their work constructing talents and size templates, but can't find senses. I've built normal vision as Detect A Large Class Of Things 9- (Unusual Group), Discriminatory, Range, Sense, Targeting, but that only works out to 32 points. I'm betting the extra three points come from a "skill" attached to INT but I'd still like to confirm my suspicion. Is there an official write-up of the senses I'm missing somewhere to help me understand what's going on behind the curtain here? Thanks!

6E2 183 says computers don't come with standard senses for free, "they have to be hooked into sensory systems (like the security cameras at a base, or the sensors on a starship) to give them the ability to perceive, or the builder has to buy the Computer specific Senses (see 6E1 209 for costs)." I cannot find "standard senses" in the enhanced senses powers directory in Hero Designer. Are we forced to use customer powers for this, or is there a way to add/remove standard senses that I'm not finding? Thanks!

I'm reading the Star HERO 6e Warship example (p. 250) and I'm a bit confused about the warp drive multipower. I see that the Costs Endurance limitation was put on the multipower reserve, and then applied to each power slot. But wait, flight already costs endurance as per the power. So this appears to me to be one of those "limitations that doesn't limit the character" situations. Wouldn't the Costs Endurance limitation be prohibited on the multipower reserve because not every power slot costs no endurance, and be applied only to the FTL travel power? This would mean the reserve costs the full 28 points, standard flight cost 2f, and FTL flight cost 1f. Thanks!

Is there any mention or recommendation in the rules for everyman powers? Let's say we're playing in a world where magic is fueled by life force, and sacrificial slaughter has measurable and repeatable results. I'm sure given enough time I can cobble together the power (aid endurance reserve requiring the killing of a creature and dice based on creature size somehow), but I'm also not entirely confident that effort would be well spent - knowing how you want it to work is more important that the active/real points if a) it costs no END and b) everyone can do it (i.e. costs no CP). Do any of you have any anecdotes or experience using "everyman powers" that may be useful?

"This is a good way to simulate magic scrolls whose writing disappears after the spell on it is cast one time..." Ok, I'll bite: Scroll of Fly: Flight 30m (30 Active Points); 1 Continuing Fuel Charge lasting 5 Minutes which Never Recovers (-2 1/2). Real Cost: 8 cp. Depending on speed, that's 1.5 - 3 km which can be useful in a magical medieval society sure, but... what happens to those 8 cp after you use the scroll? Maybe I'm running a superheroic campaign and the player had to buy it with CP, or maybe a heroic campaign using resource points from the Advanced Players Guide, but either way, 8 character points got spent on a non-recoverable charge. Do you get those back, or are non-recoverable charges the new independent? Also, what if (for cost-savings) a non-recoverable charge is put in a variable power pool? "Oh, that charge is used up. I'll just drop that power next time I can swap powers." The idea of a non-recoverable charge just seems so foolish - even at -2 the only reason I'd ever have a non-recoverable charge would be a contingent, upon-my-death AOE KA.

I've tried to do it for High Fantasy, and Sci-Fi settings. The truth is, you don't want a kitchen sink game. In case you don't want to read the rest of my explanation, you'll want to look up the rules for "Hordes of the Things." It's a tabletop war game that separates units into archetypes and those archetypes have costs. They're big claim is that you can play HOTT with any models and it works. I have a friend that works in design and she said to me when designing a game, start from the bottom and build up. If you include every rule under the sun that you love and the game is unplayable, it becomes difficult to decide which rule to exclude. But if you start with a basic idea, and it's playable, you can add rules you enjoy until the game is too cumbersome. Then simply remove the last rule you added and you have a playable game with some mechanics you enjoy. HERO System works as an RPG because I only have to keep track of one character's BODY, STUN, END, ammunition... Even as a GM I tend to fudge these things with minion NPCs because it's simply a ton of bookkeeping. If you're interested in a more complex Mordheim, Kill Team, X-Wing, Infinity, Malifaux, etc., go ahead. You'll be keeping a binder of 8-12 character sheets with tactical level statistics and skills. You can even develop an economics system to recruit new members and give existing ones experience points. I'm simply going to tell you in my experience trying to do this, you will be pitching a lot of the bloat rules in favor of what it is you are trying to do - put minis on the table, and kill them.

6E1 382 - Limited Power: Power loses almost all of its overall effectiveness. (-2) I'm using 6th edition, I just figured that using EGO for the sole purpose of intimidation was extremely limiting. Though when Steve Long tells you that it's Only For Fear/Intimidation-Based Presence Attacks (-1), you listen. ?

So as far as my group can tell, intimidation is a presence attack. One of my PCs wants to improve their intimidation, which normally isn't too rough but in this case, I can't find much in the book aside from the obvious solution of increasing your presence. In a heroic level with normal human characteristic maxima, that's kind of expensive. So I as a stop gap I'm having her buy PRE as a power, with a -2 Limited Power (only works for intimidation) but can only buy as much presence as her character has. This gives her a 5d6 presence attack, which is reasonable in a heroic campaign. Have any of you had a PC that wants to intimidate better? How did you handle it? Thanks!

There are two challenges I would like to overcome before running a StarHero campaign. The first is the constant wrestling match between the SciFi genre and Sir Isaac Newton. I like the realistic movement endurance rule and the realistic space acceleration rule, but I don't believe they combine logically enough for my taste. Sure, accelerating a big ship costs more endurance, but it still costs 15 points to buy 15m of flight. Combined with the maximum velocities per turn that the book suggests, there is no reason why a battleship wouldn't buy the same acceleration as a fighter. This makes interceptors unable to, well, intercept... I'm toying around with a few ideas to fix this, but maybe the community already has one? Right now my leading idea is to enforce an adder on the flight power somehow based on the vehicles size - that way flight costs more on bigger ships, and more endurance. This should artificially cause larger ships to accelerate slower than smaller ones. The reason I believe this works is due to the second rule I am toying around with: Upper limit of vehicle cost based on size. I was talking to a USAF friend of mine about how modern military vehicles are designed. I summation, the #1 restraint of a modern military vehicle is size. Sure, you can make a battleship go 50 knots, but half of its space and displacement will be utilized by engines. If you want a fast ship with limited projection capabilities, great! But most modern militaries would choose a larger radius of efficacy over raw speed, so smaller engines and more space for guns and planes. I was crunching some numbers on the example vehicles, and saw that they all spent between 8 and 19 times more points on capabilities than size. So I set ship class sizes (DD 13, CR 16 etc...) and simply said a ship can only spend 15x more on powers than on size. I think this will adequately represent space limitations on ships. And the starter ship for my PCs it's only 5x or 10x to represent being a run down, old POS ship. Does this approach make any sense? What other tools and mechanics have been used to balance and normalize ships? Thanks!

I'm trying to build your classic chain lightning spell. I've built a blast with autofire, but it just doesn't feel right. I'm looking for something that will allow me to take AoE: Line, and "bounce" my blast from target to target. I can't find any Area of Affect options that allows this, or anything that allows a bouncing attack special affect. Any suggestions? Thanks!

A cleric prays to his deity and his sword is engulfed in holy flames. A mage casts a spell and a sling bullet becomes enchanted. A witch blesses her father's service revolver to be able to damage demons. These are all examples of things I can not figure out how to do in the HERO system. They all have one generic thread in common - how to enhance a mundane item with adders. In heroic campaigns, where above average people purchase average gear with in-character money, how does a hero magically enhance their equipment? . If the cleric is to harm ghosts, it needs affects desolidified. If the mage wants to enchant sling bullets to hit better and explode, it needs range advantages and area-of-effect. If the witch needs the bullets to pierce the hide of a demon, it needs armor piercing. Can the noble and benevolent community share how you have enchanted equipment in your games? I'm looking for powers that give adders to common equipment. Thanks!

I have found this map of stars within 50ly: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/50lys.html I would like to generate a star system around each of these stars, but the rules are quite lengthy and this will take a lot of time. I am a professional software engineer, so I started writing a program to do it, but the tables are a pain in the butt. Are there any good solar system generators out there that are of the same detail as our beloved HERO System?

There is an old game out there called Escape Velocity - originally only on Mac. Then later there came Escape Velocity Nova, which brough us the vell-os. A sub-race of humans who have psychic powers. One in particular I'm trying to design in the HERO system, and am having troubles. Basically, they can wrap themselves in a force-field and create a 'psychic hull' of a ship that they can fly around and move cargo/passengers. They can also psychically tear a hole in space to enter sub-space for FTL travel (that is the easy power to define). I can't quite figure out how to do the ship though. I looked into barrier, non-anchored and moveable, but the book says barriers can't move other things like characters. On top of that, life support (low pressure, extreme cold, self-contained breathing) usable on others is a nightmare. So then I thought, "**** this, I'll build a vehicle and ignore all these weird rules!" But that has its own problems: how do I represent the fact that it is a psychic ship and I can summon it and dismiss it at my whim? Summon doesn't quite work that way, and I don't want to use desolidify/shrink to represent it... Any ideas friends?? Thanks in advance!

Re: I love me some xenomorphs! 4) This is the only substance they produce that I believe can do this, though I want to avoid the power of using this to bind arms and legs and stuff (I dont remember the power name at the moment...). 5) Yes, excuse me, it isn't exactly blood. 8) It was confirmed in the video and computer games that they use echo-location - as you walk around you hear this chittering sort of clicking sound. This was also confirmed as wayland spoke to you I believe. 10) Confirmed in the video games, specifically AVP on the PS3 recently released (the game that prompted this post ).

I just eat up anything that has the creatures from the Alien saga in it. I've built and rebuilt the species in the HERO system every time a new edition came out. But, I am still unsatisfied! I have not see my extra terrestrial comrades on these boards, anywhere! So a tribute has been called! Everyone, make a xenomorph. For those of you unfamilliar, here is an abridged list of their features: Tail with a spearhead-like bit on the end - it is prehensile. His claws (and tail) can penetrate metal armor, hull plates, etc... He is not a member of a hive mind, can think for himself, but the will of the queen almost always overpowers his own. He sucreets/drools a viscous goop that can be used to improve lairs, or cacoon victims. This has been mainly used as an out of combat task. His blood is a highly corrosive acid which is under pressure between two layers of skin - when he dies, he explodes in a shower of acid. It also melts many close combat weapons that pierce his flesh (the Predator species is the only known faction that has acid-resilient weapons). They are personally immune. Strong enough to lift a marine in his full combat load. Can climb along walls and ceilings like insects. Has an elongated skull (in this author's opinion to house a bio-antenna used to transmit and receive information to/from the queen). Has an inner jaw capable of providing the force necessary to pierce a combat helmet, and human skull, and out the back. Ability to cacoon themselves and metamorph into a Queen Alien when no queen is present. What are you waiting for, start writing! Cheers!

Re: Dozens of deckplans These are fabulous mate, thanks for the link! My friends and I use a free app MapTool by RPTools to role-play over the internet. I just have to slap one of these deck plans into the program, tell it to make image bigger or smaller, put a hex map over it and BAM, instand ship! You're awesome, keep 'em coming!

Re: Developing Life I noticed that too - so look what I figured out. Earth's atmosphere is, for the sake of argument, 20% oxygen, 79% Nitrogen, 1% argon (actually 21/78/1). If I happen to generate an atmosphere for a rock-iron planet in the green zone of 30% CO2, 40% N2, 20% Methane, 1% argon, 4% ammonia, and 5% sulfer dioxide, and life happens to be on it, pre-my linear scaling I can have a planet's atmosphere with 20% O2, 40% N2, and 1% argon. With my scaling, I would generate 20% O2, 78% N2, and 2% argon - pretty close. I also just thought of an alternative method. I call it, "dump the excess percentage into nitrogen" process. With 20% O2, 40% N2, and 1% Ar, you just "dump the excess percentage into nitrogen" and o'uilla, 20% O2, 79% N2, 1% Ar - Earth's Atmosphere! I think I like this method...

Re: Developing Life Oxygen rich is very true. But it's the 14% argon that makes it horribly horribly toxic. For comparison, our atmosphere has little under 1% argon. We have an argon threshold of about 1600 millibar partial pressure of argon. So your right, technically with 14% argon the atmosphere of this theoretical planet needs to be over 11x the atmospheric pressure of Earth for that to be toxic. Oops.

Re: Developing Life That didn't really answer my Question. Bump.

I am a bit confused about what happens to a primordial atmosphere after life gets formed on it. The book says that the atmosphere loses everything but nitrogen and argon, and gains 1d6 x 10% oxygen, then becomes half as dense. With the random atmosphere generation rules, I could have an atmo with 30% oxygen, 20% nitrogen, and 5% argon. That's only 55%... I was toying with linear growth of the non-oxygen parts as follows: I generated 30% oxygen, which leaves 70% of the atmo left. So: 70% = 20%X + 5%X .7 = .2X + .05X .7 = .25X X = 2.8 End result: 30% oxygen, 56% nitrogen, 14% argon. Horribly horribly toxic. Is this what you guys think that paragraph means? What do you guys think that paragraph means?

Re: Where can we live?? Nyrath- Thanks a lot mate! I downloaded that PDF and it helped me develop an algorithm for what type of atmospheres we can breather! The key is we need between a partial pressure of O2 between 60 and 400 torr, or 80 to 533 millibar. Since 1 atmosphere ~= 1 bar, the table that gives atmospheric pressure as a product of atmospheric density and a planet's gravity can be used to calculate the partial pressure of oxygen. Take the table results, multiply it by the percentage of oxygen, and you have the partial pressure of oxygen. Along with the rest of my research I've got a good idea of how to determine whether an atmosphere is breathable or not! I think that we could survive anywhere from .5-10 bar comfortably.

Re: Where can we live?? I'm not sure that is the case. I know a lot of solar radiation has to do with how much the atmosphere filters or fails to filter out. We could live on a closer planet with a denser atmo, or a further one with a thinner atmo. Now plants on the other hand, I'm not sure what affect a blue or red sun would have on plants we eat and our food eats. Maybe I'll rig up some red or blue lights for my hydroponic farm and see how they do. I don't think orbital distance is as critical as atmospheric conditions. I generated one planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. Based on the dice rolls it was able to support life to create a livable place for us, despite being .15 AU away from the sun, and having no daily rotation (the temperature was very comfortable despite). I actually did the, what I call "complicated math" to figure out the atmosphere's composition of various gasses at various altitudes. This "complicated math" is what I want to circumvent. It's probably not all that complicated, but I'm no chemist/astrophysicist. I found a few internet sources that say we need a partial pressure of oxygen between 100 and 400 billibars to be able to breathe that atmo. This can be determined without leaving earth because of our low-points and high points. I.E., people climbing Mt. Everest need O2 tanks cause the PP of O2 is less that 100 millibars, and deep-ocean divers need a special gas mix with less O2 to breathe that deep under water because the pressure compresses the gas up to the ~200 millibar level. Also a caveat - I was doing some research about the human condition in high and low pressure areas. It seems that through nothing more than complete accidents, people have suck their hands into vacuums and been so deep under water to drill for oil to provide data that the human body can indeed exist in a near vacuum and over 33 atmosphere's worth of pressure with no permanent injury! So I really think that this partial pressure really is what determines whether an atmosphere is breatheable, cause our bodies will adapt to nearly any planetary surface pressure.

I'm currently trying to build a near-future human timeline game in the hero system, trying to keep rubber science to a minimum. I'm in the process of creating solar systems for the 50 closest stars to Sol (a huge undertaking, if any of you are interested I wrote a planet generation program to speed up the process). The problem I'm running into is determining whether a human can survive unassisted on the planets surface. I was scouring Star Hero book and saw the -20 to 50 degree range developes life, but I didn't see anywhere about more conditions. The only factors I can think of are atmosphere, gravity, and temperature. If those aren't right we can't live there. The range of the temperature is in the book, and it suggests people can't live on planets with more than 1.5x their home planet's gravity. But with all these rules about trace, thin, standard, and dense atmospheres, complex atmosphere composition formulae, and the hardest rotten table to program the atmospheric density table, I really can't figure out whether a person can realisticly breathe a planet's atmosphere. Between web pages saying we need a certain percentage oxygen in the air, at a certain partial pressure, blah blah blah chemistry physics here... Can someone give me a rule of thumb like, "if the atmosphere is between W% and X% oxygen with no toxic elements, and the pressure is between .Y and 1.Z, people can survive there"? If that isn't possible, can you give me some tips on how you determined whether people could breathe the atmo or not? Thanks in advance!