Panpiper

Re: Allowable Martial arts Let's see, I started with a Karate style when I was 5 years old, but classes were on Saturday mornings which interfered with Saturday morning cartoons, so I only stayed with it for a few months, just enough perhaps to whet my appetite for later. Around 12 I got into boxing and found that my body had a natural understanding of torque, even my left jabs hit hard. At thirteen I got back into Karate in a serious way and then within a year found myself involved in the Shango Dance Circus. The Shango was a loose affiliation of dancers, clown, mimists and martial artists who all mixed and matched their talents and training to create a non stop circus performance famous for it's flamboyant fight scenes. There I learned everything and anything that looked good on stage, and to this day I have no idea what 'style' half of it came from. I studied with them till they broke up just shy of my 18th birthday. I took a break for a couple of years then got back in formal classes studying White Crane. I stuck with that for a few years, then dabbled in Hung Ga for a bit of contrast. Finally my interest in martial arts matured and I moved into Tai-Chi in a fairly serious way for a good many more years. I taught a variation of Yang, but all the while secretly wishing I could find a teacher of Chen, and then only in the last few years, I finally did. I am now fifty years old and have a long familiarity with many martial arts. (And I spent seven years training twice a week in the S.C.A. in single sword and polearms. Twice a week was unusual in the S.C.A. but I was the marshal and I organized practices for twice a week.) It would be quite impossible for me to accurately depict my personal martial arts style by picking maneuvers off of the lists from the 6th Ed. rule books. It would also be quite incorrect for me to pick up multiple package deals from some future martial arts source book, as my style is not several other styles all heaped atop of one another. The only way I could possibly depict my personal style would be to scratch build it using a maneuver construction system. Nothing I do is standard to any traditional style martial art, but it is clearly a martial art. (Exception, I have an extremely powerful leg sweep which remains unchanged from the day I learned it back when I was 14. But I learned in in the Shango and have no idea what 'style' it comes from or even if it came from a traditional style at all. The Shango were an inventive bunch.) I have studied and practiced dozens of martial arts 'techniques' as they would be defined by Hero. That does not mean however that my character sheet would list those dozens of techniques. In terms of what I would actually 'use', I have three different strikes, I have a block/grab, I have a block/strike, I have a joint lock 'hold', and a takedown. I do not have a particularly evolved way of getting out of jointlocks nor am I of much good in 'ground fighting', as virtually everything I've ever studied is striking. But this is not seven specific 'techniques' so much as seven different metaphors that describe approaches I might take to a situation. But I am a simple case of 'creating' a specialized style set. My case is rather easy. How does one deal with someone like Richard Dimitri (a local example of a really good 'Reality Based Self Defense' teacher)? I would define him as having six levels in hand to hand and no techniques, except for a special inteligence drain attack for his 'shredder'. I would personally describe the style of Hsing-I as being a single 'defensive strike' attack bought with a couple of extra damage classes in martial arts. It is a very simple style that can be mastered in two years by a dedicated student with a good teacher. Many practitioners of other styles of Kung Fu learn Hsing-I in order to put internal power into the strikes of their other style. As a stand alone, buying a single maneuver with two damage classes would be a flagrant violation of the rules, but it is an accurate description of Hsing-I in my opinion. So in short, I agree with the OP that a lot of leeway can be taken in the description of martial arts and what counts as a martial art. If a player has a well fleshed out character conception, far more than simply a list of stats and powers, then a GM aught well to allow that character a great deal of freedom in how they describe their character's abilities. For the sake of point balance, require them to stay within the rules of the maneuver construction system and reuire them to spend at least 20 points on maneuvers, but otherwise let them have at it.

Re: OCV stat vs Combat Skill Levels I fear that bought this way, your 'Tommy Gunner from Hell' is also a 'Bazooka Wielder from Hell' and a 'Howitzer Firer from Hell', and an 'Absolutely Any Ranged Weapon on Earth from Hell' character. If you wanted to be a "Tommy Gunner from Hell" I would suggest buying a couple of 2pt OCV levels with Tommyguns and a couple more 3pt levels with Small Arms Machine Guns. And with the extra 22 points, you could buy all sorts of knowledges and skills appropriate for a 'Tommy Gunner from Hell'.

Re: Not quite normal campaign guidelines This is a much simpler system to grasp for a player than most "Rule of X" systems I have ever seen. I applaud your effort.

Re: Package Deals? The way packages are handled now in the game and seemingly by most GMs, where there is no bonus for taking one, is in my opinion an utter waste of points. If package deals are optional, then I will never take one. They are a lists of some things I 'do' want, and inevitably several things I do not want, things I believe are a waste of points, at least for my conceptions they are. Why would I pay points for things I do not want if there is no benefit to me in doing so? If package deals are 'required' (because if they are not required why on earth would anyone ever take one other than pure laziness in building a character), then they simply turn Hero games, that epitome of total freedom and flexibility, into just another class system, where the only flexibility is flexibility for the GM in defining their classes. In the game I started recently I never so much as mentioned package deals to my players. And they never asked about them either. Why would they? "Please GM, would you give us a class structure so as to limit our freedom in character design?" I don't think so. "Please GM, would you give us lists of stuff we don't want for our characters, so we can pay points for that stuff, just because it is on your lists?" I don't think so. The only way I would ever hand my players a list of package deals would be if the 'complications' reduced the cost of the package, so that stuff you 'didn't' want to pay for, is compensated for by the package. Then, and only then, do package deals make sense for any purpose other than creating a class structure or a convenience for lazy players. Sorry if I sound harsh, but package deals right now have been nerfed to in-utility.

Re: Fantasy Hero with 6E Lankhmar! Yes! Please! :-)

Re: Working Notes for my Campaign Conversion to 6E This is totally off topic for you post, but this is the first time I've seen someone mention a GM-NPC. What do you mean by that? I take it this is different than simply an NPC. It sounds like you somehow have more vested in this character than you would in other NPCs. I ask because for most of my gaming, my groups rotated GM 'duties' and whoever was GMing kept their character with the group, so a transition from one GM to another would be seamless. But I've never seen a reference to anyone else ever playing that way.

Re: Fantasy Hero with 6E A typical 6th Edition Fantasy character will be built with 175 points instead of the 150 points that was normal in earlier editions. This is largely to compensate for the change in characteristic costs. That said, if you give an extra 25 points to a published character from fifth edition and with that try to convert them into the identical character in sixth edition, you will find that you still come up short. This will especially be true for any character that had a high dex in fifth edition. The easiest way to handle the transition, instead of having to recalculate all the points for the sake of balance is to use the fifth edition characters 'as they are', except you drop their OCV/DCV combat values each one or two points. Characters that had a lot of other characteristics that were bought up, drop their OCV/DCV by one. If the character was 'mostly' dex, drop their combat value by two, as they likely wouldn't have the points to get their combat values up to more than that. If the character is really important in your game, you might redo the character in it's entirety, as in some instances you will want to deliberately buy down their dex now in order to shave points. It costs 20 points still for a dex of 20 and all that gets a character is initiative and nice stealth rolls. While in fifth edition is was quite normal to encounter high dex characters because they 'needed' the high dex for OCV/DCV, in sixth I have virtually never built a character with more than a 13 dex. For initiative I might buy a few levels of Lightning Reflexes.

Re: Online Fantasy HERO: Campaign genre Your 'standard normal' would appear to have a speed of four. I really only have three questions that need answering; Is the GM having fun? I've actually known people who GMed mostly because it gave them a sense of power, unfortunately not always a non-sadistic sense of power. But if the GM is doing the job because they are having fun, and also does it primarily so that the players also have fun, then that first question is answered in the affirmative. Are the players there to have fun? There are players who play primarily to 'win', to prove their superiority. These folks are fortunately as rare as GMs who don't play for fun. I prefer to avoid such 'bullies'. It's hard to know online if people are such though. That said, I don't think the online world would be of much attraction to such people. Finally, are the players good guy, team players? I have no interest personally in playing evil characters or playing in a group where everyone is in it only for themselves, and the thoughts and desires of the others be damned. That too is hard to judge before a game starts if you don't already know the players. Though a good GM can help there by stipulating that that is the sort of play they expect from players. The above is not to be construed to mean that people who do 'not' fit the above criteria are playing 'wrong' or are 'bad' people. I just don't care to play in their games is all.

Re: Firearms in fantasy? OT: Man, it would be nice to know 'before' you create your character that you are going to be sucked into that world for real. I dare say that would affect my character conception. ;-)

Re: New to Hero I would have to say that Hero is not an 'easy' system. There are plenty of systems out there that are definitely easier to learn. That said, Hero is easier to learn than you might think upon first glance at that 600 page book. The reason for it is that it soon becomes apparent that there is an underlying 'meta' system that the game is built upon. and once that becomes clear, suddenly it all starts to get very intuitive. I came back to Hero after fifteen years of not playing it and GMed a game first time out. Not once during the game did I open the rulebook. That is not because I am God's gift to gaming. It's because the system makes sense, enough sense that once you understand the sense of it, you get it. The advantage of the system is that once you know this system, you can play absolutely any game with absolutely any character conceptions that you could imagine, and you can do that using the same set of rules and it all works, flawlessly. You could not for instance take a Star Wars system and play vampires and werewolves but doing that with Hero would be trivially easy, not because there are rules for vampires and werewolves in the Hero System, but rather because the system literally can create and deal with absolutely anything.

Re: Heroes TV show regeneration I've got a character build I built a bit before this thread actually, who has a troll like regeneration and resistance to damage. The (5th Ed.) powers were built thusly: 7 Healing 1 BODY, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Persistent (+1/2) (20 Active Points); Extra Time (Regeneration-Only) 1 Turn (Post-Segment 12) (-1 1/4), Self Only (-1/2) 2 "Tough Skin": Armor (1 PD/1 ED); Limited Power loses about a third of its effectiveness (Does not stack with armor; -1/2) 12 "Heroic Toughness": Armor (8 PD/8 ED) (24 Active Points); Limited Power loses about a third of its effectiveness (Only stops half the body of an attack, up to 8 body.; -1/2), Limited Power loses about a third of its effectiveness (Does not stack with armor; -1/2) 20 Physical Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50%; Limited Power loses about a third of its effectiveness (Does not stack with armor; -1/2) Now for a full 'Heroes' level regeneration, that should be three or four levels of 'healing', or enough for one per actual phase on the part of the character, plus 'heals limbs' and 'resurrection' (which would bump the healing to 40 real points for a 3 speed). And the limitation on the "Heroic Toughness" of 'Does not stack with armor' is frankly gratuitous for point reduction (also however to keep this character from ever donning armor, which would make him way over powered). His DCV is in fact quite low, the lowest I've ever built for a PC class character. A zero point normal could actually hit him reasonably often without needing extra skill levels. This in fact had nothing to do with wanting him to get hit more often for 'Heroes' dramatic flavor, but rather it was simply right for the character conception. And as a GM, I would not allow this level of 'regeneration/defense' on a starting (fantasy) character that could fight at the same level of competence of my more normal PC builds. The effect of this grouping of powers is that every fourth body damage from a killing attack will inflict a body. This can be a problem if the character gets surrounded by a horde of normals wielding farm implements who go to town on him. If he gets hit two or three times a phase, even with 1D6 weapons, (actually if he gets surrounded, due to multiple attackers and rear attacks, he is likely to get hit six times per phase) he runs a serious risk of going down. A more regular PC build would be wearing chainmail or plate (or have equivalent defense), would be 'much' harder for a mob of peasants to hit, and might even have defense maneuver, such that this mob would pose little threat, in fact their weapons would bounce off the plate defense doing no damage. The upside for this character is that no 'regular' PC could take the upper level of damage this character could. This character could literally get hit by a tank gun, and get back up.

Re: Heroes TV show regeneration

Re: "Vorpal Longsword" Unfortunately there is only a 2.78% chance of rolling an exact 5 on 3 six sided dice. In fact there is only a 4.63% chance of rolling a 5 'or less' for normal head shots. Giving a 2.78% chance of doing an extra 2D6 of damage with a limitation of -2 is like charging ~60 character points for a single damage class. In other words, for 5 points I can buy a 100% chance of getting an extra damage class if I hit. With your -2 limitation, I can reduce that 100% chance of a damage class to a 2.78% chance, whereas it should reduce it more properly to a 25-33% chance. Either that, or the limitation for the extra damage on your sword should not be -2, rather it should be -30. Of course if this is a found weapon, it matters not at all how you do the calculation and the effect is a nice little bit of chrome. However if you want players to 'pay' for items, or a player wants to build a that effect into sword, I would suggest re-examining the -2 for such a limitation on extra damage.

Re: "Vorpal Longsword" Well, that's not actually a vorpal sword in the traditional sense. That's a head hunting sword. A vorpal sword hits like a normal sword, but has a 'chance' to take a head off when it does hit. With your sword Susano, your sword either gets a head shot, or it misses entirely. With my sword, if the sword hits with a normal, non targeted shot, there is a much greater chance that the head will get hit, but if the head is 'not' hit, it will still deliver a body blow.

Re: "Vorpal Longsword" Doh. Yes, sorry, didn't quite catch the drift there. Yes, that is indeed the stun and body multiple. The sword basically has a 25% chance of doing 200% of the body damage. Close to the same number of points spent on straight damage would have given a 100% chance of 150% damage. As it is, this is a less effective method of spending the points than simply buying a 3D6 sword attack. It is more fun for the player however as they are now carrying one of the legendary 'vorpal' swords.

Re: A New Dawn. 'Post-Apocalyptic' Fantasy HUSH! You with your magics! Lest you wake that which slumbers... Come, come this way, where the taint is less strong, that I may tell you of that which you must know. What you must heed if you are to have but a chance of survival... Danger abounds here and it is often unseen. Your best defense is to remain unnoticed. Keep your fires covered and small. Hone your senses and walk softly. Sleep in daylight and sleep lightly. Avoid ruins! What happened here you ask? Magic happened, great and terrible magics unleashed in a cataclysm of fury! And the powers they loosed upon the world are not gone, they are merely dormant, and the gods themselves will not help us if they wake. So heed my words and keep your magics silent! Once this land was rich and fertile and great cities gleamed. But the people allowed their pride to turn to arrogance, they thought themselves gods. They built magics of immense power. And now you see the consequence of power, the evidence is everywhere. Their once great cities are now blasted wastelands! Dark forces cover them with their malignance and creatures of pure evil lurk in their shadows. Great and terrible creatures that do not belong in this world now haunt the land. And we, those few that survived, we live in the scraps that malevolence ignores.' A little something I wrote to at least start off the write up for the post-apocalyptic High Fantasy Realm on Killershrike.com http://www.killershrike.info/GenericaRealmApolypticaDescription.ashx Any chance you might be interested in helping there to fill that out properly? What creative time and energy I have to spare (which is not as much as I would like) has been spent on the Tolkeinica part of that site. And I must say though, I do very much like what you have done with this campaign setting. I love finding other people's campaign parameters and creating sample characters that fit (at least in theory as I tend to create grossly overpowered characters), and your setting was no exception, I whipped up a few different characters, just for the fun of building them.

Re: "Vorpal Longsword" Page 71 Volume 1 of 6th Edition: COMBAT SKILL LEVELS WITH LIMITATIONS With the GM’s permission, characters can put Limitations on CSLs (for example, to build equipment, like a laser sight for a gun). The GM may restrict which types of CSLs a character can Limit; for example he might rule that only 3-point or more expensive CSLs can have Limitations. Unless the GM rules otherwise, CSLs with Limitations can only increase the user’s OCV, not DCV or damage. Yes. Page 111 of Volume 2. Edit: Doh! Nevenall is too quick for me.

Re: Drow Blade Dancer Something odd about your character there, as you have clearly used Hero Designer to build it, but it seems to have not included the cost of the extra two inches of running and leaping (6 points). There is obviously a lot of thought given here to being faithful to a character conception, and that is a good thing. Indeed for many game masters, they would delight in characters created with such a devotion to their conception without focusing on their combat potential. That said... I must say, for a 317 point character (323 if running and jumping get paid for), this 'war dancer' is not a very good fighter. Yes, she has a Dex of 20 and a Speed of 4, which are the essential 'starting' stats for such a character. But then, other than 3 combat skill levels,, really minimal resistant defenses and a Deadly Blow that puts the damage into what I would expect coming from a 100 point character, there is very little here to make her exceptional. Again, for some GMs running a very low powered game, this might be perfectly fine. But I don't know any GMs running such a low powered games that would have characters built with over 300 points. Were I creating such a character, I would very strongly consider some martial arts maneuvers, as it is quite hard for me to imagine a war dancer without such enhanced maneuvers. Also, most dancers I've known are extraordinarily strong, while this dancer is so weak, she couldn't add a damage class with her Strength to even a short sword. Consider buying some hand to hand combat levels with a -1 limitation on them 'Only for DCV' and call it 'Melee Awareness', which will help compensate for the relatively low resistant defense on the 300+ point character. Finally, while the Drow magical abilities might make some sense from a character conception point of view, they seem to me to be a huge amount of points spent on a couple non lethal grenades; a flash grenade and a smoke grenade. I'm not quite sure what you were trying to achieve there. I look at the points spent there and see a lot of martial maneuvers, strength, combat levels, etc., that were 'not' bought.

Re: Help how do I balance PCs against NPCs The important thing is for your players to experience a sense of adventure. If you are not sure how much is a challenge, you can be doubly sure your players don't either. The end result is that it is not necessary for your first few challenges to 'actually' be a challenge for your players. You can afford to understate their power and loose none of the sense of danger, as your players are learning just as are you. So basically, build an equal number of opponents as you have players. But spend less points on them. If you know most of your players are doing 2D6+1 of damage with an OCV/DCV of 8 (after levels, etc.) and they are wearing Def 7 plate armor, have the same number of opponents go at them armed with weapons that do 2D6 damage, OCV/DCV of 7 (after levels) and wearing Def 6 chainmail. If your players don't win that fight, well, 'luck' was not on their side. After a few fights like that, you will have a much better idea of the player's grasp of tactics, and what they can handle.

Re: History: My first HERO character I discovered Champions within the first couple of months of the first edition coming out. I utterly devoured the rules, as many of my gaming compatriots also got into the system. The first game was filled with unabashed powergamers. I was no exception. We 'wargamed' Champions. Back then a standard superhero was built on 225 points, and that was quite restraining. My first character was played for several years as the game stopped and restarted. She was the great, great, great, great... grand daughter of the goddess Ishtar, appropriately named; Ishtar. Her claim to roleplaying chrome was that she 'wasted' 5 points on buying her Comeliness up to 20. All the rest of the points were spent without any limitations to reduce the cost, unlike most of my fellow players who heaped on loads of them to squeeze more power. Our GMs however (we rotated the job amongst us) took great glee in exploiting all those limitations (appropriately) and my character was frequently the only one not hampered by the villain's plans, due to having no such limitations. I did however exploit the rules to the level of rape. The sixth edition has finally corrected the huge oversight in the original cost of dexterity. Oddly, none of the other power gamers saw the utility of it if pushed. So my character walked around for the longest time with a Dex of 38 and for years remained extremely hard to hit, and she virtually never missed. I explored a number of different options during her initial build, starting with a discus thrower, moving on to a martial artist, and then it dawned on me that the ideal meld for her martial arts level dexterity was to not spend points on martial arts to double the potential for her strength damage (the way it was done back then) but rather to simply sink those points straight into strength, which would net me lots of figureds, especially stun. So I built a super high Dex, light brick. She was hard to hit, and if she 'did' get hit, well, she was a brick, she could take being hit. I remember her starting stats exactly: 55 Str 45 36 Dex 78 23 Con 26 10 Body 10 Int 8 Ego -4 14 Pre 4 20 Com 5 21 Pd 10 21 Ed 16 6 Spd 24 16 Rec 46 End 50 Stun 15 Half Damage Resistance 6 +3" Running Total: 225 The first experience points boosted her Dex to 38, her Strength to 60, her Con to 28, her PD/ED to 25, and her Presence to 20. I don't remember what happened with her Ego, but we rarely encountered mentalists. I do remember diversifying her defenses with Power Defense and the like, so I must have boosted Ego. Neither she nor any of the other characters ever spent much on non combat. Oddly, there was none the less a fair amount of roleplaying. It just never figured into our character sheets back then. Ishtar had a public ID and often appeared on 'low ratings' talk shows. She thought it was because she was cool and popular. She never clued in to how she was more of a circus freak in the way she was treated. At least, that's how I played it. She 'did' get on the Johnny Carson show once.

Re: Firearms in fantasy? Here are some firearms I paid for on a dwarven pirate gunsmith I built a short while ago. Note that these do not reflect 'standard' pistols, but his own invention, paid for with character points. He went a little bit overboard on the sheer power of them, and it takes pretty much a giant's strength to handle them. "Brace of Three Big Bore Flintlock Pistols": (Total: 75 Active Cost, 10 Real Cost) Killing Attack - Ranged 3d6+1, Armor Piercing (+1/4), +1 Increased STUN Multiplier (+1/4); Real Weapon (-1/4) OAF (-1) 4 clips of 3 Charges which Recover every 1 Week, expensive. (Increased Reloading Time: 1 Minute; -2) Beam (-1/4) Restrainable (-1/2) Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (Big Bang, Big Flash, Big Smoke; -1/2) Limited Range (-1/4) Extra Time (Delayed Phase, -1/4) STR Minimum 19 and higher (STR Min. Cannot Add/Subtract Damage; -1 1/2) Required Hands One-And-A-Half-Handed (-1/4)

Re: "Vorpal Longsword" What Curufea said.

27 Real Points "Vorpal Longsword": (Total: 77 Active Cost, 27 Real Cost) Killing Attack - Hand-To-Hand 2d6, Armor Piercing (+1/4), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (52 Active Points); OAF (-1), STR Minimum 9-13 (Strength 10; -1/2), Real Weapon (-1/4) (Real Cost: 19) plus +3 with a small group of attacks (9 Active Points); OAF (-1), STR Minimum 9-13 (-1/2), Real Weapon (-1/4) (Real Cost: 3) plus Penalty Skill Levels: +8 vs. Placed Shots to the Neck (16 Active Points); OAF (-1), Real Weapon (-1/4), Requires A Roll (9- roll*; (Real Cost: 5) *Roll 2D6+3 for hit location. Any calculated roll of 8 or less automatically strikes the neck (head shot).; -1)

Re: Parkour Sell back all 12 meters of running. Then buy: 19 Flight 14m, No Turn Mode (+1/4), Invisible Power Effects +1/4, Reduced Endurance (1/2 END; +1/4) (24 Active Points); Only In Contact With A Surface (Must move along some at least exceedingly, remotely plausible surface; -1/4)

Re: My First Hero System Character: Bluebird