Vanguard

I did not know that was even possible.

Shockingly enough it is. I don't know how many I'm "allowed" to give but I keep getting  "You have reached my quota of positive votes for the day" message every time I try to like a post. I did go on a "like" spree early this morning so i'm not surprised . . . 

I just find it weird that we seem to have a limit.

Awesome!

Thanks for the confirmation.

Will have to think about it a little bit more but it helps not having to pay 90$ to get back into things.....

Yeah, I vaguely recall when they went to tokens.  I (and my wife) renewed our accounts for a month to see not only if we had enough for a token already but also to see about how much it was per token.  Even though Blizzard regulates the token prices (I think), at the time it was 25k (I think) and believe it or not, we didn't have that much on all of our characters. And since neither of us are very good at making scads of gold we just canceled the accounts and let it ride.

 

If it were up to me, there are parts of the Hero System I would completely gut and start over with. That is almost an entire project to explain and this is not the thread to do it in though.

I don't think you're the only one.

There are a few things that I'd change and/or rework from the ground up.

And yeah, for training purposes and official publications, it's good to know what the those official rulings are.

Would toss you both likes but I ran out of them.

As much as I may not agree with it, you don't get any more official than this: http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94056-end-when-waking-up/

 

When Steve Long says it, then that is the official interpretation. 

Just because it's the official interpretation doesn't mean you have to use it.

That's the beauty of Hero.

Edit: I thought we could delete posts . . .. 

Anyway, I see later that you basically said what I just did so, sorry for being repetitive.

You folks have peeked my interest in WoW again.

Thing is, the last expansion I have is Cataclysm.

Do any of you guys happen to know what would happen if I bought Legion? Would I get Mists and Warlords or would I need to purchase those separately?

Edit: Hmm, I looked at my account and, apparently, when Legion released I now have access to everything up to Warlords.  That is if I interpreted the thingy correctly.

Still, input/confirmation would be welcome.

Thanks! 

 

That is why I advised against making it too secure (like arctis plus Anti Air). It only becomes a headache to get the players inside the moment something does happen (when, not if).

This I don't understand.

How is it a headache to get the players inside when/if something happens?

I'd assume they'd have the clearance and/or passwords to pass through the checkpoints and whatever "superjet" they used to get around would have the proper IFF codes to allow them to pass through any automated defenses.

But it does refer to the version of Starship Troopers.  Or in other words, it implies a request for the OP to clarify his question so that it may be answered.  Which was what I was going to ask....

 

Ah. 

I see.

My apologies.

I'm assuming he doesn't as he stated "in the Hero System" and that website, while informative, has nothing to do with the Hero System.

The way i took the "DCV can only be halved once" is just that.  If you use two maneuvers that halve the DCV, it's only applied once.

As for the whole bow thing, I figured Concentration 1/2 DCV covers what Hyper-man was talking about.

I'm also on of those people who's never felt Hero doesn't do heroic level well. Maybe because I discovered Fantasy Hero first and played primarily heroic games for more than a decade before I really got into Champions per se. The impression I get - and I'm certainly not trying to put words in anyone's mouth here - is that some people who are used to playing Champions have a harder time scaling back down to heroic level because it means giving up some things they're used to thinking of as central to the system, while "bolting on" extraneous things like Hit Locations, etc. And it means deliberately limiting yourself (and your players) in some major ways compared to supers gaming. Whereas coming from the other direction, scaling up to superheroes you can just let yourself go nuts. [shrug] It just depends what you're used to I guess.

I went from Champions to Heroic level play.  And I much prefer Heroic over Champs.

My issue with it is the same as Tasha's.  The system lacks granularity in certain aspects of play when scaled down to Heroic level. 

They still have the shitty stun lotto it just averages way less stun. Broken because the granularity is so bad, also because it uses a much different mechanic. I also think Mental Powers are broken. They are built for dc 10+ games, which make them really worthless in Heroic games. Also, again they use a much different mechanic than the other powers.

Ah I forgot that.  It's been a while since i've played superheroic and we always use hit locations for our heroic games.  No stub lotto there... Unless you get your bell run or kicked in the jimmy.

My issues with mental powers are legion. 

Thing is that Killing attacks don't really even work correctly in Superheroic games. Which is why they were severely nurfed in 6e.

Depends on what you mean by working correctly.

If you mean that they don't actually kill anything then, yeah, but that's that's par for the genre.

How were they severely nerfed in 6e? To me they seem to be just about the same as they were in 5th sans the horrible, horrible stun lotto.

That's something I have heard from certain players for years. That Hero Combat and powers seem to feel like a supers game. It's a problem that I just never had with the system. I think that Stats lack real granularity, which is the exact issue I have with Killing attacks. Those are issues that I have when I am designing a campaign and designing characters. They don't really effect my perception of play.

Huh, I guess I never thought of it that way but you've pretty much said it.  I've got not problem with HERO combat nor powers.  Were my issues comes from is using the toolkit to create something that isn't Superheroic.

When I sit back and try and create something for a Heroic level game, the fact that the rules I'm using were initially designed for a superhero game keeps smacking me in the face.  Sure, it's something I can, and do, ignore but it's still a tender area.

PS: I'd've tossed you a like but I used all mine up for the day.

Well in 2e all four tentacles have to hit in order to partake of the grey matter milkshake so it's not an easy maneuver to pull off. The prospect of dying gave you a closer bond with your beloved character I always found. D&D was my first rpg when I started back in 197(cough)9.

I've found that I develop a closer bond to my character the more I play them.  Not by how quickly they can be killed.

Sure, the prospect of dying does add a bit of spice and tension to the actual combat but does nothing to boost the affection I feel for a character.

Oh, and I really hate that whole save or die mechanic of all of the D&D flavors. It leaves the my character's life up to a single die roll, which IMHO is BORING and Frustrating. There's a VERY VERY Good reason that I switched to Hero in the 80's and never really looked back. Why each other game I play make me want to play Hero more.

You and me both Tasha. (and apparently a few others here too. )

While I don't find the mechanic boring, I do find it frustrating.  The fact that the fate of one of my characters rests on a single roll (and sometimes not even that.  Finger of Death anyone?) isn't fun and I'm not really sure why they thought something like that should be included in a game.  Especially if they wanted the players to treat their characters as something more than just lead marks on a piece of paper (in the olden days).

[snip]

 

But when I build "small" to simulate lower level Fantasy or gritty games at the more normal "real world" ability ranges, I find that while I can build it.  Hero seems to lack and intangible feel that makes a game fun.  

This is the problem I'm running into more and more Spence.

When I try to make a Heroic level game, Hero just doesn't seem to feel right.  I keep seeing it's Superheroic roots peeking through and they seem to contaminate certain aspects of the game. (Mainly combat)

A case could be made that in some D&D editions with munchkinny players, the most feared and hated enemies were the rust monsters, who ate your stuff (and there aren't any Resurrect Stuff rituals). Put five mind flayers and two rust monsters on the map, and the party unloads all their alpha strikes immediately on the rust monsters.

Wouldn't a Mend spell fix the items?  Can't remember if rust monsters totally destroyed an item first hit or if it took a while. 

I do seem to recall that there were Item Saves added later on though . . . . 

Most Champions characters know to fear Mentalists in general and will focus fire on any Mentalist until they are in GM's option and perhaps further. 

::nods sagely:: Yup. Kill them . ..  Kill them with fire.  Then launch the remains into a Sun.

Though it would look alot like Day of the Dead vs a reality rewriting goddess.

True.

Which would be awesome.

She's decided that it doesn't matter. She doesn't see why "good" curses would penalize a caster so much. Also Rachael has come into so so much power that she makes Anita Blake seem like a wimp. Rachael has the full power of a "Demon" and she will use that power. She also has more imagination to use that power than her surviving people.

Exactly.

Although there was a point in one of the books, can't remember which one off hand, where she didn't do what I thought she was going to do.  Especially after she made that declaration.

I'm not 100% sure I'd say she makes Anita look like a wimp but I would say that a fight between those two would most likely look like the fight between Zod and Kal-el in Man of Steel.

I must have missed that.  I'd take either one of them, but I have to agree that Ivy is just plain dangerous.

Racheal could be just as dangers as Ivy if she wanted to. 

She just chooses to limit herself so not to acquire too much smut on her aura.

But, that's really no different from fantasy where, Folk in full plate armor are balanced against magicians who can fly. Who can rain fire down on the battle. But this works in fantasy and esp Fantasy Hero. Because we stick to the core philosophy of the system. That allows for no absolutes, nothing that is a 100% defense. That means that the Jedi Blaster Bolt Deflection isn't ever going to be perfect. The Lightsaber doesn't really HAVE to be the ultimate weapon just as long as it's deadly enough.

 

I would turn one of your comments back on you. "Compare them in Hero terms not "I love this story" terms"  Build stuff to be the Star Wars Flavor, not slavishly trying to exactly show what you saw on screen. I would rather have a fun game with the flavor of star Wars, than a game that followed some interpretation of the movies so close that it wasn't fun for everyone. When something switches medium sometimes compromises have to be made for the medium you are converting for (ie RPGs). 

 

Oh and nearly no one wants to play the side kick. They want to play the Hero(ine). This is HERO, you CAN make an awesome RotJ Luke and still have Leia, Lando, Han and Chewie be able to keep up with him. It's ok for everyone to be awesome. It won't take away from the Jedi's awesomeness.

I'm not sure how it is in your fantasy games but in all the ones I've played it starts out with the Fighters ruling the roost until the mages can start casting more than 1 spell a fight.  The more spells the casters are able to cast, the more they start outstripping the sword and shield folks.  Until it gets to the point where the fighters (and their players) might as well just stay home.

About the lightsabers.  Even the canon stories themselves seemed to realize how over the top it was to have a weapon that "could cut through anything". So much so that they started included things that were resistant to lightsabers.

The other thing making a Star Wars game at least attemptable is, again, the "no absolutes" rule that Hero has.  You pointed out the Deflection ability and that's a good example.  Sure, a character can buy lots and lots of additional CV to be able to deflect more shots/things but eventually they're just going to get overwhelmed.

It's nearly, nope that's not right. It's impossible to build something exactly as you see on screen.  You have no basis for doing so.  There's no baseline to work with.  Just using the lightsaber as an example points out the futility of the act.  Especially trying to recreate it in Hero. if I asked, I'm sure everyone in this thread could produce a write up for a lightsaber.  And I'm thinking that no two would be the same.  What I think the problem is that even building to the flavor causes issues because that's subjective.  In this case it's trying to decide where the compromises lie and how to make them work so that the flavor is preserve for everyone.

No one's saying that you can't make an awesome RoTJ Luke and have the rest be able to keep up with him.  I think what's being said is that Luke would wind up being more expensive that Han, Leia or Chewie.

Edit: And Jango really didn't "stand his own" against Obi-Wan.  Everything he did slowed Obi-Wan down just so he could run away.  If he was really able to stand his own against a Jedi, he would have lasted more than a second or two when facing off against Mace.

I should do the 14 hour patch and fire it up again.  I do enjoy SWTOR, but not in long periods.  Just short bursts

I think I mentioned this in a previous post but I agree wholeheartedly.

I wanted to love SWTOR but just couldn't get past the arbitrary restrictions they put on the characters and the way the game feels like it's on rails.

There's a dearth of sci-fi based MMOs in the market and I wanted so desperately to have that itch scratched by SWTOR that I can't really play it very long without logging off and unistalling it in fit of disappointment.

PS: Sorry for the lack of anything really meaningful in this post PG . . . 

Who was it that said fairness as a concept is vastly overrated and hugely misunderstood? There's little point in changing the rules if you don't actually apply the changes. I don't find many other games since 3e D&D which look for reverse compatibility between editions. Prior to 3e, a new edition of a game was typically a tweak to some rules, not essentially a brand-new game, but 3e changed that model.

 

Decoupling was substantially expanded in 6e, but just printing the same characters we had from 5e suggests there was no real point in doing so. I think that was ultimately a failing in the presentation of 6e.

I have no clue. But I do know that no one I've every played with would be happy playing a 100 point character while everyone else was playing a 300 point one.  I don't know if that was the point you were trying to make or if it sailed over my head (sometimes that happens:) )

You are correct though. If you're going to change the rules then you should take the time and effort to apply those changes.  Thing is, as far as I know, every book (with characters) that has been published for 6th Ed has had the characters just copied and pasted. All of them.

Oops, sorry. I see that were in agreement on this . . . 

At least I think we are . . . 

I never had that problem really, but I can see how people really trying to crunch numbers would.  If my character concept was someone less agile, then they were less agile.  If they were accurate, I bought levels.  If they were quick, I bought speed, if they were slow, I didn't.  But that probably wasn't the norm.

We've had that problem constantly.  No one wanted to buy levels because it wasn't an efficient use of points.  For maybe a little more expenditure, you could put the points you were placing in skill levels into Dex and now your CVs have gone up, your speed might have gone up AND all your Dex based skills have gone up.

I kind of wish all the players I encountered were like you. I think I would have had a much more entertaining time using the Hero system.  (Not saying it wasn't fun but it was a bit exhausting dealing with things like the above).

You bought lots of DEX, only for non-CV applications (-1/2 limitation).  There's nothing in the stats that couldn't be done in 5th edition that can in 6th, it just took a little effort.  Emphasis on little.

Except no one, at least no one I played with, was willing to make that effort. It was easier to just purchase skad loads of the stats what would give  you the most bang for your buck and trying to wiggle the character concept into that.

Practically speaking, I doubt many builds have changed despite decoupling the primary and secondary stats.  People still are buying their DEX up and getting CV around DEX/3.  OCV and DCV are still the same in most characters.  People are still buying 18 CON, not 17.  At least, that's what I'm seeing in published and in created characters on here.  Why?  Well rolls still are stat/5 etc.  Habit.  Point breakdowns are still there, just not as exaggerated.  I don't think its made that big a difference in how people are building most characters at least.

That could be because people haven't gotten used to the added flexibility or are updating premade characters, so why change the stats?  I dunno.  Personally I really liked the idea of figured stats, and if you look around you see many new games and editions of systems actually have them.

That's mainly due to the fact that most of the published (or republished) material is just copy/pasted into the new books.  Which is one of the reasons why I think most character building is still the same.  Why change the way you build characters if it doesn't appear that the published characters are being changed.  And it's not fair to ask the GMs to go through all the published stuff and change them to reflect the new rule sets.

As to why players do so, you've already pointed that out. It's habit to make your CVs DEX/3, regardless of the fact that that character concept might not require it.  Since it was done in the past, it's done now.

I, personally, didn't like figured characteristics because it caused issues like Tasha pointed out.  Characters would be created that were extremely dexterous and agile, yet had not spent a lick of time in combat yet, because of figured stats, they had higher CVs than long term combat vets.  Removing figured, fixed that or at least has the potential to fix it.

Could only mark one as solved but thanks a ton!!!

I'm probably (hopefully) going to be starting up a Star Hero in the next several months so I need a decent starship's deck plans.

No while the move Prometheus left a lot to be desired, I did find myself taking a liking to the ship itself.  Same with the Raza from Sci-Fi's Dark Matter. I liked the show for a bit, up until the last few episodes, but still like the ship.

My problem comes from, probably, my lack of Google-fu.  It is weak.

I can't seem to find decent plans for either ship. 

So, I'm turning to herodom at large for assistance.

It might be a little bit before I can make it back to the boards but then, it's going to be a bit before my game starts so there's plenty of time. (of course, I say that now and the next thing I know, the game is going to start tomorrow . . . ).

Anyway, any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

PS: i did use the search function to try and locate the above butit came up empty.  If there is something there, I chalk missing it up the lack of search-fu in general.

EDIT: I'm also going to go out on a limb and say "Champions" is what makes Hero System, Hero System. There have been some valiant attempts to downscale Hero from the Superheroic to the Heroic, but the game's superheroic legacy is always lurking there.

Which, when it comes right down to it, is my biggest complaint about the Hero System.

No matter what genre you try to play, the Superheroic roots of the game is always there, lurking in the shadows.

So it feels as if the system only seems to function properly if you're playing Superheroic.

Actually makes me wonder:

Was there ever a SciFy setting where humans were not special?

Where we had no special genetic/evolutionary advantage/disadvantage towards other species? Where there was no "indomitable spirit" or other trait that set us appart?

It's been a long, long time but if i remember correctly, Star Frontier.

In that game setting, humans were pretty much as unspecial as you could get.  No stat bonuses, no tech bonuses, nada.

   Just because its in the book and RAW still look at said power because it may not do what you think it does. And even if you build a power yourself, sometimes it may still not work they way you intend to. Sometimes only actual game play will shake some of the bugs out. Any ways enjoy!

Truer words Ninja . .. Truer words.

"On Paper" is sometimes totally different from real world implementation.  And you won't know what the practical consequences of a build are until it's actually used in a live environment. 

This can, and probably is, due to how the player interprets how the combination of limitations and advantages work as opposed to how the GM does.

PS: I hope you don't mind the paraphrasing of your comment in my reply . . . .