Alcamtar

Re: inflict berserk power Another way to do it, if the GM allows it: use Drain, and define the "negative points" as a complication... in this case berserk rage. This works well for a complication that is temporarily inflicted and fades, becoming progressively less severe until it is gone.

Re: how much BODY damage is typically accrued? This kind of practical advice is invaluable. I wish this sort of advice were included in the rulebook.

Re: Name That Keep! Castle Yllek Orcbane Keep Fort Doom Edit: forgot Castle Greyskull

Re: "Raise Dead" / "Resurrection": for those of you that DO, how do you handle...

Re: how much BODY damage is typically accrued? In the games I've played in, characters typically have 4-8 DEF worth of armor and assorted defenses, maybe up to 12 DEF with magic. Attacks range from 1d6+1 to 2d6, but when combined with STR, skill levels used for damage, talents, and martial arts manevers, the average attack seems to be in the range of 2d6 to 4d6. It's actually quite easy to hit 4d6 or 5d6 with a good combination of abilities, so the GM needs to keep a careful eye on things. On top of that, hit locations can double the BODY damage of an attack. Hit locations allow a 1d6+1 sword to actually damage a plate-armored foe, and change a 3d6 attack from "hurts" to "incapacitates a in a single blow" (plate armor notwithstanding). On the other hand, hit locations can also nullify good damage rolls. They're very swingy. Use hit locations for a bloody game where you want characters to take significant damage from time to time. For a less lethal game, use a 0-5 (1d6-1) STUN multiplier instead of hit locations. This will eliminate the chance of a lucky blow dealing 20-30 BODY, and increase the chance of a 40-50 STUN knockout blow. I don't think HERO does "whittling down" (over multiple fights) very well: it's the cure for the 15 minute adventuring day! On the low side, you can't do enough BODY to get past defenses, and on the high side, you can take someone to zero BODY in a single shot. There is some space between but not a lot, and with only 10-15 BODY it doesn't take many wounds to take you out completely. STUN doesn't work for whittling either because it is recovered very quickly between fights. Healing doesn't change this much. A small amount of healing isn't enough to make a significant difference. A large amount of healing just means that characters recover fully after every fight, eliminating the whittling effect. HERO really seems built around how long you can last in a single combat, with little carryover from one fight to the next.

Re: Setting a real point limit, instead of AP limit Interesting, I've been thinking about that same approach for purposes of VPP limits, but hadn't considered applying it to RP in general. Really when you think about it, Real Points are Active Points -- adjusted for utility. The problem is that some limitations are the equivalent of a "dump stat" (for balance purposes). And as Ice9 points out, specifics will vary with the power and/or SFX. Similar reasoning applies to advantages (and possibly adders). I think sometimes power advantages result in AP inflation that is not really a balance problem. Maybe replacing AP with some sort of "rule of X"? For example compute a power two different ways, once to determine the RP cost, and once to determine the rule-of-X cost, where the rule-of-X uses only a defined subset of power modifiers.

Re: A days journey We used to do about 25 km a day, backpacking in heavily forested mountains following good trails. I would guess that you could do maybe 40 km a day on level terrain but I have no experience to back that up. From what I've read, loaded horses (whether ridden or packing) can go about the same distance as a man on foot. Horses are faster over short distances, but humans actually have better endurance over distance. A day on foot would be a couple hours to break camp and eat breakfast, maybe eight hours or so of hiking, and a few hours making camp and eating. Horses need more time in the morning and evening to eat, they need time after eating before exercise, and time after exercise before eating, and they get tired faster. So you only get maybe four hours of travel time with a horse, the rest of the day is used for feed and resting, but in those four hours the horse covers the same ground a man covers in eight hours of steady hiking. As a point of reference Pony express stations were located at intervals of 8 to 32 km, averaging 15 km. Wells Fargo stagecoaches traveled 5 mph and changed horses every 20 km.

Re: Kill the Dude with the Thing I tried to kill the dude, but he abides!

Re: Not D&D Anyone who wants to discuss issues relating to Christianity and gaming might want to check out the Christian Gamers Guild. http://www.christian-gamers-guild.org/ There are some great articles in the FAQ and Chaplain's Corner, but most of the activity is centered around the mailing list: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Christian_Gamers_Guild/

Re: Postapocalytpic Antarctica (Problems/Questions)? This thread is just begging for someone to post this: Bal Sagoth - In Search of the Lost Cities of Antarctica (Even if you don't care for the music, the images are cool.)

Re: Postapocalytpic Antarctica (Problems/Questions)? According to this article, 250 million years ago Antarctica had significant forests. And despite continental drift, at that time the continent was located approximately where it is now. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041101/leaves.html

Re: What Do You Do with a Dog in a Dungeon? Trained dogs are standard equipment in our D&D games. Watchdogs when you need to rest, guard dogs to keep the goblins away from the wizards, and of course they serve well as auxiliary fighters -- especially if you outfit them with spiked leather armor and name them "grip" and "fang". ;-) If you get a St Bernard, put a healing potion in that little barrel under his collar. Because, you know, they always have one of those. Dogs are useful for dealing with pesky minor critters that you don't want to bother with - giant rats, kobolds, etc. A dog adds to your PRE attacks when trying to persuade people do leave you alone. You can reward your dogs with dead rats and stirges... and as we all learned from NetHack, if you feed your little dog someday it will become a BIG dog. :-D Getting a dog is also handy if your wizard's cat familiar is always taking naps and shedding on your blanket. 'course then a dog is shedding on your blanket, but at least you annoyed the wizard. What you don't want is a talking dog. If you don't know why, you haven't seen the movie "Up". rofl. (but now I want to play a talking dog...)

Re: 10 pt CSL Ah thanks, I tought it must have come up before.

I'm a little unclear on the distinction between 3pt and 5pt CSLs Would "all swords" be 3pts or 5pts? There's a lot of sword types, but the group itself is pretty small compared to all possible melee attacks. Is a 3pt CSL meant to approximately mean "three attacks"? - all daggers = 3pts - all one-handed swords = 3 pts - all two-handed swords = 3 pts - all blades = 5 pts or maybe... - all swords & daggers = 3 pts - all axes = 3 pts - all swords & axes = 5 pts - all melee weapons = 8 pts what do you think?

10 pts can buy a CSL that gives +1 OCV or +1 DCV or +1 damage class, one at a time ...or... 10 pts can buy you any two of the above, always on simultaneously. Is there anything I'm missing here? It seems like the skill level is overpriced a 5 AP multipower with 3 ultra slots costs only 8 pts a 5 AP semi-cosmic VPP costs 10 pts, but you can use it for much more than just OCV/DCV/STR

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh thanks!

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh My overwhelming thought is... I love that map!! Where'd it come from? Is it online somewhere, or from a published product?

Re: A couple of brain cells connected... That assumes that enchantments are like science, just a force you apply however you wish. It seems to me that magic generally obeys the laws of poetry and tradition, not reason or law. Magic is also apparently semi-sentient and it does what it wants to do. You can't force it to do whatever you want, any more than you can force water to flow uphill. Magic is like an invisible cat with the powers of a genie. You have to coax it, and it generally works best when you command it to do what it was already inclined to do anyway, because it's aloof and it just doesn't give a damn.

Re: A couple of brain cells connected... As an art, not a science. The same way surfing or art or music or cooking or language is taught. "Everyone does it a bit differently... here's how I do it... there are no hard and fast rules, most people consider X to be bad form, but some of the great masters do it that way... I can't give you the skill, just watch me and try it for yourself, and practice practice practice. You'll figure it out if you have the knack for it." Like music or cooking, some people can manage by precisely following someone else's instructions, but the true masters work intuitively.

Re: Alas, no more Independent! I loved the 1E Create power, and was considering using it in my 6e campaign. I'd forgotten how it worked.

Re: Alas, no more Independent! I think the disconnect is that we have a system for it. It's like with D&D 3E, when everyone complained it took to long to prepare for a game because you had to construct monsters like characters, assign all their skills and feats and stuff, derive a correct challenge rating, and also make sure the treasure was within guidelines. The usual answer to this was: just make it up, nobody will know the difference. But making it up pretty much defeated the whole point of playing 3E in the first place. Might as well go back to playing 1E. And how did 4E fix this? Largely by dropping the complex build system and reverting to "make it up". Even so, it might not be an issue, except that Hero has a long tradition of statting up everything. Weapons, armor, vehicles, bases, gadgets, even Talents are build as powers and a point cost can be determined. If Hero had a tradition of handwaving some things it would be a lot easier to ignore the system, but it feels weird as a GM to handwave stuff when you're the only one doing it. Also I suspect that most of us who play Hero aren't big on handwaving stuff, or we'd have chosen to a different game. My "other" favorite games are D&D and Fudge. Both of those are handwavy games. Both are a lot easier to play, and Fudge at least can do anything Hero can do, you just have to make it up instead of having a metasystem to do it. The ONLY reason to use Hero is because I want to use the metasystem to build stuff, instead of just making it up. (Well, and because I also want to roll huge handfulls of damage dice!!) One last issue, at least for me, is: how do you keep your balance in a game that lets you do anything? Hero's answer is that everything costs points, and you have a finite supply. If you say "points don't matter anymore" then there is no reason to limit yourself. A wizard can create a magic staff that can shoot three fireballs a day, or he can create a magic staff that contains every spell ever known, grants +12 SPD to the wielder, and uses zero END. If points don't matter, then the only thing stopping him is GM veto. This requires the GM to exercise a lot more judgment and authority, to review everything carefully, and personally I find it exhausting. Ultimately it's not the player building the power anymore, its the GM building everything to the player's specification. And again, if I want to run things that way it's a lot simpler and less work to do it in Fudge. Working through the points system in Hero is fun. It stimulates creativity to try to stay within a budget, to try to squeeze one more real point off the cost, to evaluate various tradeoffs when you can't afford them all. As many have said, it's a game in itself. So there are a lot of reasons. I'm not saying it's badwrong to make stuff up, or that it doesn't work in Hero. Just thinking out loud about why people don't want to.

OK got a question. A player in my Fantasy Hero game is creating a Priest who requires a Faith Skill Roll for his powers. I said Faith should be based on EGO, but he argued that Faith should be based on PRE. He said faith is based on courage and humble obedience, not willpower. His theological argument is good, but I question whether that is really modeled by PRE. This is complicated by the fact that the definintions of EGO/PRE seem to have changed in 6e. In 5e, Presence attacks could be resisted by either EGO or PRE whichever was higher; EGO represented fortitude and self-control, while PRE represented attitude and self-esteem ("I'm just as bad as you are!") At least that's how I understood it. But in 6e, Presence attacks are resisted only by PRE as a default rule, which suggests that PRE also represents fortitude. EGO is still an optional rule, but the emphasis is subtly different, and I think he is reading a lot into that, and also into the conventional association of "ego" with "arrogant pride". (The fact that PRE adds to his "Turn Undead" ability, and he used EGO as a dump stat was probably also a motivating factor ) Now his key argument is that his character is humble. He resists fear because he is so humble and obedient that he has no self esteem and takes no thought for his own danger, he is "empty of himself". Since (he argues) PRE is courage and EGO is arrogant self-will, high PRE is the very soul of selfless humility. Now, it seems to me that PRE is the very essence of "arrogant pride" and "being full of yourself." It also seems to me that EGO is the perfect stat to represent selfless, obedient self control. So I think he has these exactly backwards. I'm the GM. It's okay if he wants to build his char that way, and I can certainly exploit his lack of EGO. But for running the game, and for the other characters, I want to have a correct understanding and usage of these abilities. What do you all think?

Re: Combat Luck when you cannot be surprised Thanks everyone for your comments, that is very helpful.

Re: Enough to Destroy A Planet? Dr. Destruction (175 pts) 168 pts: 59d6 RKA [885 AP], one charge (-2), OAF gizmo (-1), only vs planets (-1), gesture "give the planet the finger" (-1/4) 7 pts: +50 END (allowing for normal characteristic maxima) -25 pts: Suicidal (all the time, slight) -25 pts: Berserk whenever anyone questions him (very common, 11-, 11-) Makes for a very short game!

Combat Luck has the limitation luck-based, which basically means it doesn't apply when you are unaware of an attack, or unable to do anything to defend yourself. That's fine, but what happens when the character also has something like Defense Manuever IV, spatial awareness, lightsleep (or no sleep), and/or danger sense? Of course you have to look at the overall combination to determine the actual effectiveness, but if a character essentially is never caught by surprise, doesn't that really make the luck-based limitation not limiting? The limitation is worth -1 which is pretty significant, and is the same value as a (9-) activation roll. In theory it should make the talent useless about half the time, though in actual play being surprised is infrequent. Still, if a character is almost impossible to catch unaware, I'm thinking that Combat Luck could be changed to a 9- activation roll in order to preserve the effect of the limitation. Otherwise the character should pay full price for hardened resistant defense. Interestingly, using an activation roll would make it truly luck-based. For characters who are only partially "surprise-proof" but still enough to be significant, you could go with a higher activation, somewhere between 11- and 14-. Thoughts?