Jed Clayton

Re: Absorption Power - What's the deal with the Increased Maximum multiples? Ah, that would make sense then. Thanks a lot! I wasn't thinking about the Phases there. Since the character usually gets several Phases in which to "soak energy" (he will be SPD 4), the higher base number for BODY still retains its meaning. Really, thanks, I appreciate it. Replies on the Hero Games board are very fast.

Hello everyone. I admit I am still new to many things in the Hero System (especially in 6E), like some of the more advanced options for powers and the ones with the stop sign printed next to them. So, questions are bound to come up. Last Friday night I was building a new player-character for Champions with a new player. That player had specifically asked me to explain Hero 6E to him, so I wanted to get this right. One of the character's special gimmicks is an electricity-siphoning ability that we wanted to define as Absorption (6E1, ppg. 165-167). I noticed that Absorption has changed noticeably from 5th Edition to 6th Edition, such as not being rolled on d6 anymore, but written as a fixed number in BODY. What I'm not quite getting is the Advantage Increased Maximum for +1/4 per each "doubling" of the maximum possible value of BODY absorbed. Increased Maximum +1/4: increases your maximum to x2 Increased Maximum +1/2: increases your maximum to x4 Increased Maximum +3/4: increases your maximum to x8 Increased Maximum +1: increases your maximum to x16 Increased Maximum +1 1/4: increases your maximum to x32 Increased Maximum +1 1/2: increases your maximum to x64 etc. However, the normal maximum which can be absorebed is already double the amount of BODY bought for the base Power, for example 10 BODY if you have bought Absorption 5 BODY. If I can actually get double the maximum that easily, and then double that doubled number, and double that again, etc., wouldn't it be much more cost-effective to simply purchase a low number as the base for the Absorption and add several levels of Increased Maximum? For example: Just a normal Absorption of 40 BODY could absorb a maximum of 80 BODY to the benefit of the character. The first doubling is free and already included in the Power as written. That Power would cost exactly 40 points. However, to get the same maximum, I could also buy Absorption 10 BODY with Increased Maximum (+1/2), getting two additional doublings. I'd get 8 times 10 that way, 80 BODY. But now it would only cost me 10 points x 1 1/2 = 15 points. A pretty crass difference, paying only 15 points instead of 40 points! What benefit would I get from going with the first version? My player pointed out the same thing. The higher the base amount amount of BODY bought in the Power, the larger this discrepancy gets, of course. The END cost is also much lower if you can keep the Active Points low this way.

Re: Lucha Libre? Thank you. It'll be tough to catch up on 50+ years' worth of comicbook issues from Mexico. I can do some research to find out whether or not the Santo book is still being continued, and maybe get some of the more recent issues from eBay sometime soon. If they are anything like the Santo films, I can't go wrong with them. I was a little disappointed by Rob Zombie's El Superbeasto, I have to admit, so I'd much rather stick to the Mexican originals.

Re: Lucha Libre? Great, isn't it? I have seen this before on Facebook. I love the cover, and of course I totally love the idea. I would also buy a DC Heroes lucha book, any lucha book whatsoever, if it existed. I'd even learn Spanish really fast to understand actual lucha comics. But anyway, this cover blows me away. Look at that mask on Wonder Woman. *LOVE*

Re: Lucha Libre?

Re: Lucha Libre? Oh yes, buddy! Please do that when you have the recordings. *Orangutank* is a great pun, I love it when someone pulls that off. Thanks for the story.

Re: Lucha Libre?

Re: Lucha Libre? Here's one more thing that I've been thinking about regarding Lucha Libre Hero. One of the fun things that almost all player-characters have is Damage Classes for lucha libre, which literally means that they simply pack more punch with their various wrestling maneuvers. Since a single DC costs only 4 points, do you use any sort of cap on buying DCs? A player of a typical 250-point Luchador character could go crazy and just put 40 points into Damage Classes. I feel that this getting too much. If you could add 10d6 and more to every wrestling maneuver, fights wouldn't last long. The character could just waltz through any opponent. I'm not sure whether the book defines a limit to DCs one might have with a martial art, including lucha. Personally, I have used a maximum of +4 DCs. That seemed about right.

Re: Lucha Libre?

Re: Lucha Libre? Thanks for the nice reply, Darren. Very good to hear from the writers themselves, as always. The convention game was fun indeed, especially since none of us had expected attendance to be particularly high, and someone on the internet who claimed to be familiar with the con in that town had previously told me, "No one plays unknown stuff like that over there." He was wrong, I was right. End of story. As for the lucha libre weapons: If a character has bought Damage Classes with all lucha libre combat, do those extra DC apply to unarmed lucha only, or can I also add them to lucha libre weapons like chairs, baseball bats, steel poles, brass knuckles? One player was very clever with rules commentary and one-liners. He said, for example, "Now that I know that referees count as impromptu weapons, I say next time our referee travels with us to the mad scientist's lair."

Re: Lucha Libre? Here is my info about the LLH game session I ran last Saturday. I didn't quite get around to posting feedback immediately. In a way, I am still a bit tired from the past weekend where I was up for approximately 33 or 34 hours. Anyway, I was getting ready to run LLH at that con at an old wooden house on the third floor, just as it was getting warmer and warmer on Saturday afternoon, and eventually it was hotter inside than outside, what no one had quite expected that weekend in late April. In addition, I had my Mexican wrestling mask on and I'd forgotten how hot it was getting with that on. The promotional effect of being the only masked guy in the building can't be overestimated, though. I'm really happy I have that mask. Whenever I am in a new town for a convention and no one there knows me or Hero Games or LLH, it's safe to say that they will notice the "guy with the wrestling mask". That is also how I got a 10- or 11-year old boy to join my game session. His parents were running the catering and bar area for the convention, and he got very excited about talking to the guy in the wrestling mask and when I told him I had a roleplaying game with wrestling, of course he wanted to be a part of it. There were 2 married couples who joined me as players, and a friend of one of the couples, so I had six Lucha players altogether, all new to the system. That number of players also caused a bit of a problem, since I had only prepared three player characters for LLH, never expecting so many people to want to play something that obscure. But luckily I had all my notes with me, the LLH book, and six blank Hero 6th character sheets. Yes, I'm running LLH with the 6th Edition rules now, which makes almost no difference in-game. The only main difference is that you pay more points to buy up OCV and DCV as separate stats, and less for DEX and some other stats. Eventually, one player played a slightly rewritten version of Craneo Llameante, one played the Wrestling Detective (based on Caveman Cortez), there was another wrestler based on Craneo, two Amazonias -- one called Dolores (great idea, since "dolor" is pain in Spanish) and one called Tequila the Killer -- and the 11-year old player played The Undertaker from WWE. I always notice that young kids who watch wrestling on TV still like The Undertaker best. What I loved about all that was that the young boy not only understood the entire Hero 6th character sheet and all the rules used in-game (skills, holds, action stunts, etc.), but played the Undertaker character with great panache. Sometimes kids that young don't have the patience to sit through a 6-hour session, but he did, never complained. That made me so happy. I'd played another game with friends from Friday at 7:00 PM till about 5:30 in the morning, so I didn't get any sleep before traveling to the con, and when I arrived there I was physically in no shape to do a detailed 6-hour game, but the players' interest and enthusiasm kept me going. A magical day for the Hero System and for Lucha, I believe. It got really funny when at one point, the Undertaker pulled out a medieval two-handed sword, but that was in a scene where the luchadores were in the jungle and confronting a giant mutated anaconda, so it made sense that they had a lethal weapon against that danger. And besides that, knowing the Undertaker character a little, it is not too far-fetched to believe that he dabbled in medieval weaponry and historical combat guilds in his off time. A few problems we encountered: - Next time I have to make sure that all characters prepared for the session either use the full Lucha Libre Maneuvers rules or Variation Dos or Tres, since the previous versions were mixed. I think next time I'll give everybody Variation Dos (my favorite, since it makes a good middle ground between the detailed combat rules and the super-simplified Variation Tres "Beyond the Bone"). Technically, it is possible to mix characters with Variation Dos/Tres with full system characters in the same group, but it looks confusing to a new player. I just want a coherent and consistent system for wrestling holds, strikes and escapes. - We were quite surprised when we realized in the middle of the game that Amazonia, the jungle girl on the team, did not have a Stealth or Tracking skill. Editorial oversight?--Well, when the characters wanted to sneak around in the jungle, we agreed to just use a DEX Roll every time. - In the same scene with the characters traveling through the jungle, they wanted to use teamwork on the giant anaconda. Their plan was to build two slings from the ropes they had brought with them, suspend the slings from branches and pull them tight when the anaconda moved through them, with three luchadores pulling toward one side and three others pulling toward the other side. The question was just how to do that properly in the rules. Pulling the ropes to make the sling tie around the snake and then holding in place (before the Undertaker hit it with his two-handed sword) ...well, to me that is basically a STR Roll versus the STR of the snake. But how do you do STR feats when several characters are all co-operating? Do you add all their respective STR scores? Is the actual STR relevant, or only the STR Roll target number? Since I didn't have time to read the full rulebook for that, I determined that the character with the highest STR on the team could use their STR Roll, improved by +3 for preparation and clever teamwork. - There was slight confusion over Weapon Shots and Lucha Libre Weapons. Most characters had the WF: Lucha Libre Weapons among their skills, but only a few had Weapon Shot as a power. I explained which items (and even referees and audience members!) constituted "lucha libre weapons" in the game, but the game wasn't so clear about the weapon damage dice. Should I use the individual weapon's # of dice from the Lucha Libre Weapons table, or should I just add +8d6 for Weapon Shot? This just reminds that a character like Supergran with his 6d6 Hand-to-Hand Attack damage, adding the +8d6 for Weapon Shot, would do 14d6 with a folded chair or trash can. Wow, that is 42 points of STUN damage on average. With that, a single Weapon Shot would ordinarily take an opponent out. That's great for occasional mooks, guards, and zombie-style monsters, but maybe not so good once you want to play wrestling matches. Apart from those small problems, I think we had a great game session and it made me really confident about running the Hero System, well, at least Lucha Libre Hero!

Re: Lucha Libre? Hello Pól, Sounds like great fun right there. Hope you'll get to play more games like that. Best of luck!

Re: Lucha Libre? My Lucha Libre Hero game is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, 12 AM. Once that game has been played, I'm perfectly ready to post to you guys on this forum how it went and what we did. I'm very likely going with one of the short plot seeds in the book. No space aliens this time, since a friend of mine at the same convention is already doing a lot of science-fiction. But a mad scientist and a mythological creature will make an appearance. Since Craneo Llameante is intended as one of the PCs, I think there should be a supernatural monster for him to use his bonus on.

Re: [Lucha Libre Hero] Missing stats - Where's the Supercar? Thank you, teh bunneh. That's perfect then. It was just very easily overlooked when I was in a hurry ... it says "flying car" there instead of "supercar", so my search in the PDF didn't point me to that paragraph. D'uh.

Re: Lucha Libre? Very nice, teh bunneh. LLH probably lends itself very well to convention gaming because it can be played "out of the box" with just one book, independently of any other Hero book. It's also fun to play your own self-contained lucha movie in 4-5 hours game time. The book even has its own random plot generator, which works better than some of the other random plot generators I've seen. By the way, it was pretty easy to convert those sample characters to 6th Edition. Really, the major changes are basically refiguring the characteristics (DEX being cheaper now, for example), converting ECV to OMCV and DMCV, and making minimal adjustments to STUN and END. All the lucha maneuvers and Skills cost the same, as far as I can see. I think even if the maneuvers cost a different number of points, I wouldn't feel like "messing" with them now. Better to leave them as is.