doccowie

I sometimes think that designing characters in HERO is a bit like painting miniatures. Some people hate it, some people do it as a means to end - to use them in games - and some of us mostly do it because a well designed character is a joy to see in itself.

Goodness, that's impressively complex :- ) I adore the rabbithole of Hero as much as the next person (actually, on this board? maybe not), but first question - is this designed to be an NPC, or a PC? If it's an NPC, then awesome work. You've come up with a way of modelling a complex character using expert knowledge of Hero, whereas someone else with less knowledge may have required a lot more points to get similar effects. I like that that you feel that you need to justify an NPC's powers using the point system rather than just handwaving. If it's a PC - then see above, but there are some assumptions that are really up to the referee to comment on. The sheer complexity might make him difficult to play/referee - but if everyone in your group is happy with this, then obviously fantastic. If it's more for art's sake - creating something beautiful using the HERO rules (see Hyperman/Tasha) then I really like it too.

When I first saw this thread I thought it was just going to be another of those "My group prefers doing things differently to RAW" threads, where someone tries to persuade everyone to change what they do. Inherently this seems pretty pointless - RAW is imperfect but it's pretty darn good, if you and your group prefer something different then go for it, you don't need my permission! There's no such thing as having fun the wrong way* (If it matters, I'm happy to use DEX, both from a simulation aspect, and because I just think DEX is a little expensive at 2 points** - Teamwork is a great skill and it throws DEX a bone) Actually, though, it's been very interesting as an overview of how people see skills, so, thanks very much all for the insight. *OK, obviously there is, but not in the context of house rules to HERO. ** I am super aware that it would be too cheap at one point. Ultimately, as always, is RAW perfect? No. Is it awesome? Yes. Do I care enough to argue? Not so much. Can I remember the name of that annoying politician who always asked himself questions and then answered them? No.

Good luck to all my American friends, You have had a stressful few months (it's been tough enough with the Atlantic between us). The bile and misery in the news seems so alien to how I always find people in person, both those supporting Clinton or Trump. So, go vote for whoever you think best, and I am confident that the people I know and love over there will still be there no matter what the result. Keep/Make America Great!

I had a go at this on HD last night. First off is the "Do you make them automatons or not?" question - if you do then along with moderate defenses it all gets very expensive very quickly. If not, then your mech gets stunned - but actually I don't think that's awful in superheroic genres. Are we all happy that "protects carried items" on resistant defenses protects passengers in the same way that vehicles currently do, with passengers unharmed by machine gun fire unless there is a BODY breach to the vehicle? "Usable by others" on HD was confusing. Could someone break down what the modifier should be for a weapon that can be fired either by the mech, or by a gunner? "Grantor pays END" - yes, "Must stay close to grantor"? All in all, it's more expensive than building a vehicle, but the difference is less than I thought (unless you go full automaton), and I like the result. Next, building an AI controlled base using character rules :- )

Making vehicles using normal character rules - this certainly makes sense for KITT, or science fiction ships run by AIs. I'd be fascinated to see what the character sheet would look like if anyone has done this - what assumptions have people made about passengers etc?

"Inelegant" - I use it when two powers that seem to me to have similar game effects have markedly different costs. The great elegance of the effect based system of HERO is the fact that you just have to say "what do you want to DO?", and then (in the perfect world) similar effects can be crossed over to similar costs. I realise there is so much opinion tied up in "similar effects", and also hugely dependent on the game - a clearly objective effect like "75% damage reduction vs melee weapons" has a very different effect in a fantasy game vs a cosmic space game. So, I would never say "wrong" when there is a mismatch between my expectations, I just say it's inelegant, which makes it very clear that opinion is a big part of it. PS So to clarify: Major Transform 10d6 =100pt (100 active and real points) +Naked Advantage - AE 1 hex (+1/4), extra time full phase (-1/2) (25 active points, 17 real points) Easy! Now - 3 different powers - C is there just as a mid step A Major Transform 10d6, AE 1 hex (+1/4), extra time full phase (-1/2) (125 active points, 87 real points) B MT 10d6 AE 1 hex (+1/4), Megascale (+2), ET (-1/2), conc (-1/2) (325 active points, 162 real points) [ C MT 10d6 AE 1hex (+1/4), Megascale (+2), ET (-1/2) (325 active points, 234 real points) ] Let's say I want to be able to do either A or B by adding +Naked advantage Megascale +2, concentration (-1/2) to A Is the cost based on the active cost difference (325-125) then add concentration (-1/2) = 167 real points? Or the active cost difference (325-125) then add concentration (-1/2) and extra time (-1/2) = 100 real points? Or the real point cost difference between C and A (234-87) then add concentration (1/2) = 98 real points) Honestly, I don't mind if everyone else has lost interest in this :- ) Thanks again.

Thanks all. The 5 min limitation on the base power was left off deliberately - I was trying to simulate someone with a quick but limited power, or a more powerful option that took longer. Then I just massively increased the active points to highlight the issue :- ) You may well argue - why do it this way? Which is fair enough. It was really because Multipowers are great for options with identical active points, but there isn't a great equivalent for powers with similar real points. Using HD it seemed that often it was cheaper to buy these thematically strongly linked powers completely separately, which seemed... inelegant. Fine for NPCs, obviously, but you like to think that heroes and NPCs can have similar sorts of powers, with the holy grail of effectiveness well correlated with points (I know...) Active/real points in Multipowers is a subject which has been discussed before, and there are undoubtedly risks about allowing people Mega options limited by, say, charges. Why wouldn't you put a 1/day 30d6 blast in your multipower in case DD turns up, or a bunch of attacks "only vs robots -1", "only vs humans -1", or whatever? But still, sometimes it is a reasonable character construct, and like all good forumites I try to do it by RAW before going to Rule 0 :- )

Right. This is from HD: Here's a slightly extreme example - the Transmogrifying Man! MEGAElemental Reassembly: Major Transform 10d6, Area Of Effect (1m Radius; +1/4), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), MegaScale (1m = 1 km; +1), Anything to Anything Else With Identical Elemental Masses (+1) (375 Active Points); Extra Time (5 Minutes, -2), No Range (-1/2), Concentration (0 DCV; -1/2) 83 Points Now, let's say he wants to be able to transform a smaller amount or a larger amount: Elemental Reassembly: Major Transform 10d6 (Anything to Anything Else With Identical Elemental Masses), Area Of Effect (1m Radius; +1/4), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Improved Results Group (+1) (275 Active Points); No Range (-1/2), Concentration (0 DCV; -1/2) 137 Points Mega- Elemental Reassembly: MegaScale (1m = 1 km; +1) for up to 275 Active Points of Elemental Reassembly (275 Active Points); Extra Time (5 Minutes, -2) 92 Points OK, so what have I done wrong? The Naked Advantage for Elemental Reassembly to make it Mega costs more than the original MegaPower, with the combination costing 229 points!!!!

Oooh, thanks - if that's how you do it it would help. I PROMISE I will try on HD tonight...

Thanks, I have it at home. I've just been disappointed by the results of using naked advantages where the initial power has advantages/disadvantages, and the naked power also has extra advantages/disadvantages. The cost always seems really high, just because the power advantage is based on the active cost of the initial power, and the disadvantages only cover part of the cost. It's clunky, but as always, RAW is a darn good start, but it can't cover everything perfectly the way everyone thinks it should.

OK, I'm sure I'm an idiot, can I check this is right: Example Power: Blast 4d6, 0END +1/2, Extra Time (Full Phase) -1/2 (30 active points, 20 real points) Blast Enhancement: Area Effect +1, Penetrating +1/2, Armour Piercing +1/4, Personal Immunity +1/4 for up to 30 active points of Blast, Conc (0DCV) -1/2, No Range -1/2 (90 active points, 45 real points) That would give you the chance to either do a small blast or an explosion for a total of 65 real points? If you could only do the explosion it would be 70 active points, 28 real points? But it would still be 0END and take a Full Phase? It just seems that these naked advantages can give a weird pricing structure where having a weaker option adds a lot of real points to the cost. Possibly I'm doing it wrong, possibly it's just inefficient, and it's stupid to try and build the effect you want that way :- )

I'd agree. It's the HERO way - start with the effect you want to have, then work out the game numbers - not the other way around :- ) If your player wants the effect to be "I have complete control over liquids", then that's a VPP, and not a cheap one given the possibilities (as Christopher says above). I mean, it would be easy to argue that he could kill any living creature easily (and messily) by turning all bodily liquid into gas, and almost any nonliving object could be destroyed by creative use of pressure effects. Perhaps a Multipower with a Transform/Object Creation/Change Environment slot, and several other slots actually reflecting the things he wants to do in the game (Blast/Entangle/RKA/movement/NND/Barrier etc, etc, etc? A Power skill could be used to create a one time slot for fancy effects?

As always, what suits one campaign is not always necessary for all campaigns. I love the idea of a parkour based hero, but like Hugh I do wonder if it could be achieved without needing extra bolt-on rules. At its simplest you can use Climbing and add extra Running, Leaping & DCV with Requires Skill Roll (Acrobatics). Even Flight (w/ Must Contact Surface and RSR?) to allow bounding up buildings at high speed, and falling great distances without injury? But ultimately, it depends how big a part of your campaign it is going to be. Are lots of people going to use this skill? Then if you and your players enjoy it and both get the benefits - that's great. If only one person is really going to use it, or it isn't going to be a frequent issue, then maybe simpler is better?

I'm not an FH aficianado, so feel free to take this with a pinch of, well, salt, if you make your Geology skill : -) From a Hero point of view, we could start with you and the player deciding what effect and limitations you are happy with, and pricing that up? It sounds like the Lab limitation won't work (though if he sometimes gets to the lab you could add a separate heavily limited VPP?) . Does he want Requires Skill Roll as a limitation? (or again, he could have a bonus VPP with RSR?) In fact, by its very nature alchemy usually involves planning - does he really want the extreme flexibility of a VPP to be able to make things up on the fly? Would this be better as a Multipower with maybe six slots (and charges/delayed phase etc, etc - whatever he wants) and then allow a rewrite if this is not letting him do what he wants? Perhaps a Power roll to tweak the abilities a little? I like Surreal's idea about tying it to the potency of the reagents he has found, with an agreed random element to aspects of the creations. Or you could even have a Naked Power Advantage of Up To +1/2 Advantages for up to (say 30AP) of powers with RSR Alchemy/OAF/maybe other things as it is quite expensive... But in the end, the players says what he wants his character to do, the GM gives a ruling on cost, they both negotiate, everyone is happy!

Apologies, I didn't mean to add fuel to the fire. You are exactly correct, one campaign's munchkin is another campaign's skilled builder. I was hoping to imply my agreement with the basic tenet "The GM is always correct", or perhaps "The campaign norms (led by the GM and agreed by all the players) are always correct", but then ruined it by adding my own opinion. So, if all the non mentalists in your campaign sell their OMCV to 0/1, then effectively everyone just has an extra 6/9 points. That's super cool. It would be ridiculous to suggest that every character built on 406 points was munchkin based. Sorry if anyone felt I was being judgey :- )

It's interesting we are all discussing social contract/GMing solutions to this issue - I think that means that we all agree that in a normal game that gaining 9 pts by reducing OMCV to 0 is much less punishing (to a non mentalist) than the 9 pts saved by, say, reducing STR by 9, or DEX by 4, or by removing 3 skills, or almost 2 dice of Blast. The perfect HERO rules set would make every point spent equally useful in every campaign. That's an impossible dream, and what is an irrelevant sellback in one campaign can be crippling in another. The further from the "average" campaign you have to go to make the points equally effective, the greater the accusation of "munchkin" to the player and the more difficult for the GM - if you don't target it the player gets free points, if you do it is so obviously targeting the player's weakness that people can feel picked on. I would say to the player "You think you should be getting 6/9 points for this. A reduced ability in a situation that I've never seen appear in any published adventure since 1st edition doesn't justify it". (I may be wrong - I know lots of villains/heroes use devices that rely on OMCV or equivalent, but how many adventures expect a non mentalist to take it off them and use it? Even if your campaign has focus borrowing as a thing, there will probably be a mentalist who can use it better.) Honestly, I think the Complication approach is best here. I would say that the 6/9 points from sellback would be too difficult to justify in normal campaign gaming, but if you wanted to take a 5 pt complication explaining why you were particularly useless mentally in a way that could be targeted (ideally entertainingly) every few sessions like everyone else's 5pt complications then that's awesome, obviously. If it doesn't affect play, it's not worth points.

Oh, my goodness, Chris, that is awesome. I bow to your epic technical geekery. No-one on D&D forums adjusts their replies on the basis of the speed of sound in variable air density:-)

Touché!

The dogfighting rules in APG 1 are very good for positioning and a cinematic effect, though they don't seem to solve the problem of vehicular OCVs. Useful suggestions in the Ultimate Vehicle, suggesting -2 penalties for gunners using their own weapons from a vehicle. But this seems to make things worse! My OCV with the F15 autocannon is always 0, but if I wind the window down and shoot a pistol I'm just at -2! I suspect this comes down to the problems associated with OCV/DCV multiples. Everyone is happy with adds and subtraction, some people are less happy about halving and reducing to zero - it just seems too extreme. If I can make a Breakfall roll at -10 to survive terminal velocity (meaning that if I use enough points to buy up the skill I can eventually have a reasonable chance to do it), why does it not matter how many points I put into my skills - I can't get a decent shot at a tank from a plane? I think my favoured options would be penalties rather than absolutes, and I will scurry away and come up with something that makes me happy. Alternatively, the only fix by RAW seems to be ... my old copy of Autoduel Champions!

Greywind, of course you are right. This isn't a big thing. "Newsflash - Hero NOT perfect for EVERY game in EVERY way" But - given that we love the system - can we tweak it to do what we want?* I wanted to swoop down on tanks like a bird of prey, rather than buzzing them like an ineffectual wasp. Now I have some good ideas on how to do it, so I'm happy and will once again lurk in the background .... PS Loved Business Unfinished. Would have been polite to mention it before now... *NB We all want different things, obviously :- )

Without being lame and defensive, I don't think it's reality vs game rules, it's genre and coolness vs game rules. If there is one reason to play HERO it's because it is so good at simulating so many genres. Obviously, that's why we're all here. Lots of movies especially involve vehicular combat, this just seems like a bit of a gap for SOME campaigns. Many campaigns it really doesn't matter. Hero is so good at so much other stuff. RAW Hero doesn't simulate jets strafing ground targets terribly well, just like it doesn't simulate bricks destroying tanks (I really enjoyed that thread, which perhaps reveals my simulationist bias). If your 120 STR hero punches a tank, and literally nothing happens, you feel a bit let down. There were so many cool ideas about how to work round this In the last thread, I wondered if similar approaches existed for vehicles - because if your hero in a tricked out T16 can't hit a womp rat you don't get that feeling of how heroic your character is. Again, to defend bringing in reality - two superheroes battling in a comic is difficult to quantify, if you don't know how hard they punch, how do you know how tough their defences are? You get a baseline power level by comparing them with real world objects. "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound" Thanks for the tip on UV and APG, Chris, I will totally look at this.

Thanks, Tasha, I do get this for "normal" vehicles, but planes simply cannot move at their so called "combat" speeds, they will stall and crash. And for spacecraft the number of points required to get a vaguely useful combat speed would be (literally) astronomical. So, by RAW, including the stats given for the F15 in book 2, it simply doesn't matter what the plane or the pilot's OCV is, they will end up with an OCV of 0. We seem to have a choice. Demand that planes buy at least 200m flight and 6 speed (to get to a still pretty slow 360kph), or look at tweaking the rules if vehicular combat is relevant in the campaign. Which it usually isn't in super heroic campaigns, obviously. In fact, just to be controversial, is it easier for a gunner to aim a gun out of a car when the driver has his foot down travelling 120mph in a straight line (NCM), or when they are being whipped back and forth in sharp turns to get the full DCV? NCM works well for characters moving under their own power, but just doesn't work when trying to recreate Top Gun, Star Wars or even any car chase scene in the movies...

Thanks, Chris. What you say certainly makes sense. I particularly like the velocity DCV as a penalty rule. However, in RAW the F15 (and pretty much all other planes) will always be travelling using NCM (I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure 114 kph is below its stall speed). Why bother giving it an OCV of 8? Would that only be useful when it was stationary on the ground? It's even worse in Star Hero. How can you have dogfights when all craft will at the very least be travelling at NCM, probably megascale, and possibly even FTL? If by RAW there will be no difference between Luke and Jar Jar Binks at the controls of an XWing (I know, they can use Combat Piloting to evade, but, you know, shooting). Now, I love the Hero system for its flexibility, and the last thing I want to be is That Guy moaning about something i could just rewrite. But given the comprehensiveness and duration of the system - has this never cropped up before? I will go and check out my old Adventurer's Club mags :- )

Dear All, Plea for advice from a long time lurker. Dead Eye Dick is in his trusty modified F15 (OCV 8). He has fitted it with a 20mm cannon, and added a patent targeting system (+4 OCV with cannon), and rangefinder (+2PSLs vs range penalties) Dick himself has OCV 6 (he's more technical than combat orientated), but he's not called Dead Eye for nothing (+2 levels in ranged combat, +3PSLs vs Range). So, he's trying to strafe a tank below (DVC 3, +4 OCV to hit, -10 range penalty). What the heck roll does he need to hit? Do you compare each of their chances to hit and take the lowest (Dick final OCV 5)? (Plane OCV 8, + 4 targeting, +2 rangefinder, -10 range, +4 tank size - total OCV 8 vs DCV 3) (Dick OCV 6, +2 ranged combat, +3 PSLs, -10 range, +4 tank size - total OCV 5 vs DCV 3) [in which case, what is the point of the rangefinder (unless you are very skilled it does nothing)? In fact, what is the point when creating a custom vehicle of installing anything that puts it higher than your chosen pilot's OCV?] Or do you just take the lower of the two initial OCVs (6), and then EVERYTHING else stacks OCV 6, +4 targeting, +2 rangefinder, +2 ranged combat, +3 PSLs, -10 range. +4 tank - OCV 11? Or some arcane combination of the two? Now, once we have that sorted, what the heck happens at Non-Combat Movement? I mean, it must be Non Combat movement, right, otherwise the F15 is only moving at 114 kph (76m x5 SPD)? Is OCV just 0? Do some of the bonuses and penalties apply? If so, which? Does it make any difference if Dick makes a Combat Pilot roll as a half phase? What if Dick is just a gunner (not the pilot) in a slightly different plane (though every other number is identical)? Thank you in advance...