DangerousDan

Re: Heat of the Moment I strongly agree with most of this. I tend to think of my characters as 'me' in a different skin (and usually with different skills, abilities and often, motivations) and in a different place. The character is mine, just as the world is the GM's. The character is my interface to the GM's world. The GM of course has the right to limit what is possible within his or her world, but beyond that, the character is mine. If the GM starts telling me what my character would or would not do, he has chosen to interfere with my side of the interface. When the GM decides that the world is insufficient and that he must play the characters as well, .... If he wanted to play solitaire, he should have stayed at home. I know that my feeling of control over my choice is an illusion. Too many times I've done things I decided not to do and often failed to even start to do something that I decided to do. I've seen this in others as well.

Re: Heat of the Moment And, as far as I'm concerned, a player cannot be a good player until he or she is able to refrain from acting on knowledge that the player has but the PC doesn't. Almost everybody I play with will, for example, be willing to walk a character into a trap that the character has no way of knowing exists, even if the player knows about the trap. Let us say for a moment, that Nemisis has killed, maimed, tortured or otherwise harmed innocent after innocent, and in other ways damaged Never-Kills Heroman's state of mind. Does it make more sense, dramatic or otherwise, to allow Never-Kills Heroman the possibility of breaking his code this one time for this one villain, or for the GM to insist, "Nope, you've got a total Psych limitation against killing--you won't make that attack. Do something else." Should the decision affected by the GM's knowledge of what the player is likely to do with a character that has violated a "Total" psych lim? As a GM, I am far more likely to be flexible in this case to the PC who's player has consistently played within the character's disadvantages than to a player who takes them less seriously. If I think that the player is likely to try to play the character afterwards as if nothing unusual had happened, I am less inclined to be flexible. In short, I agree that it is wrong for a Never-Kills PC to just off someone with little pretense. In short, I feel that there must be some pretense, and some tension post-action. As a player, I am likely to find this a somewhat difficult decision, and am likely to make a modified EGO roll before even proposing to attack the Nemesis with something that I expect is likely to kill him. But since my characters typically have moderate or strong psych lims, and nemesii are rarely this deserving, this rarely occurs.

Re: Making things too complicated Relatively recently, I built a character with a 1d6 major physical transform anything to anything with the cumulative advantage. I later realized that transform, by nature accumulates effect and replaced the "cumulative" with some other advantage(s) that I had wanted the power to have.

Re: How can I do THIS? Well this is one of the things that Hero doesn't model very well either. The system does seem to be designed to prevent you from changing your set of skills without adding experience. The only two mechanisms which I'm aware of that can easily be twisted to this purpose are Cramming and Variable Power Pool. Transfer allows you to take one thing from a victim and add a similar or equal amount to something you already have, and Transform does not allow you to transform yourself. Cramming costs 5 cp and gets you no better than an 8- ever with one single skill at a time. In my mind this costs too much for so little. If you are the GM, you can, for example allow players to apply one or more overall levels to improve this 8- to something useful or even change the cost of Cramming. Since Skills as powers are "Special," GM's permission is required to create a skills VPP pool, but it does not explicitly break any rule to have a VPP with 3 points in the pool and 1 in the control cost that allows you to have at any one time up to 3 points of any skills. This costs you one point less than a single cramming slot and gives you more than 3 times as much effect--too little for so much. The limitation that the skills (including knowledge) in the pool can only be changed by taking those skills and/or knowledges from creatures he eats is a whole -1/2 limitation. With that, an 11 point pool would have a 4 point control cost, with a total of 15 real points. Thus for the price of 3 cramming slots that only get you three 8- skills, you get the ability to have more than 5 two point temporary skills or 3 three point skills with two points left over. I cannot see any GM allowing a marine to acquire more skill than the victim possessed. Transfer could be twisted to allow a marine to transfer skills that he didn't have from a target to himself, without alteration or with slight loss. Built with a delayed return rate and possibly other advantanges, this would get you what you want, but would require significant limitations to get the cost down to something appropriate. The Kroot's situation is far easier: the juvenile or adult kroot has a mimic VPP, and the GM simply allows a kroot's offspring to be different. In Hero, as in most RPGs, reproduction and fertility are implied and not explicit. The only thing that prevents people in a game from giving birth to dragons, or vice versa is the GM.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) Threes Company HERO Your normal life HERO HEROs playing HERO HERO (also known as Reentrant HERO) Dreaming HERO Canceled after one episode HERO Nihilist HERO EBay shopping HERO Psych Ward HERO Fate HERO (everything that happens to your character has already been predetermined by the GM)

Re: Supernatural Special Forces Other faery are harmed by "cold iron". And some vampires are harmed, strangely enough, by Roses. The shotgun allows you to fire a mixed load: iron, silver, salt and other things, all at the same time. Have them blessed before you go out just in case.

Re: Your Favorite Fantasy Weapon? Among my favorites: Death's sword in Terry Pratchet's Diskworld series. In a previous game, I allowed PCs to have at one time or another, one Oblivion grenade (when it goes off: a 300 foot diameter hemisphere disappears), and a knife forged by a weaponsmith god, which could cut through anything, but still did an ordinary amount of damage to NPCs. btw: there is a scene in the "Sword and the Sorcerer" in which a galvanized steel highway guardrail is visible behind Talon's horse.

Re: Favorite Sci-Fi Weapon I'm fond, for one reason or another, of Reason (previously mentioned), the smart-bullet gun from "Runaway", the two alien weapons from a movie released in the US as "I come in Peace", and several others, but the one that most clings in my mind is the tnuctip multifunction gun from Larry Niven's short story, "The Soft Weapon." More versatile than anything else I've seen yet in this thread. A guaranteed campaign killer. To say any more would spoil the story.

Re: Need Clarification: Extra-Dimensional Movement

Re: Need Clarification: Extra-Dimensional Movement That seems to be a sufficiently advantageous special effect that as a GM, I'd be inclined to require that be built as Images linked to Teleportation. But I'd also fell compelled to have at least one NPC fall for it.

Re: Spell build help needed: Transform + AOE Yes AOE Transform can be used that way, and I've seen at least one such example in a Hero Systems sourcebook. If your friend telling you that that is how it works happens to be the GM, then it definitely works that way. Not too long ago I built and played a Dwarvish Earth-mage with an AOE transform earth (stone, minerals and metals). It was around 50 active points, and a few real points. While playing, I used it to build walls, gates, bridges, trenches and traps. After all, the rules for Entangle say that it cannot be used to create bridges, braces or stairs; to do that use Transform. The rules for Change Environment say that it creates subtle effects over a large area, and the changes are rarely long-lasting or permanent, while Transform creates a drastic change over a limited area, and its effects typically last a long time.

Re: Irreducible Damage

Re: Irreducible Damage -2? only if almost nobody has damage reduction. Look at the chart for Limited Power guidelines: -2 applies to Power loses almost all of its effectiveness. A -2 1/2 limitation is Power loses more than all of its effectiveness. Okay, it doesn't say that, but it should. If half of your opponents have 50% DR and half have no damage reduction, or all of them have 25% DR, the power loses more than half, but significantly less than most of its effectiveness, which leads us to -1 1/2. If the average amount of DR is closer to 75% than 50%, not only is the limitation down to -1/2, but your character is living in a very tough neigborhood.

Re: Irreducible Damage A Villain with two levels of Hardened sneers at PC with two levels of Armor Piercing (or Penetrating, or 1 of each). A PC with Find Weakness (and good luck with die rolls) hacks Villain in half. Of course, with some GMs, that means that every succeeding villain has at least 5 levels of Lack of Weakness. Hit them with a few different kinds of Flash, Ego Blast, Drain, and in a few weeks time, you are facing an army of DefenseMan clones.

Re: Tactics Skill I've always considered "No Conscious Control" to be along the lines of "Only to Advance the Plot (or to Amuse the GM)", so NCC + CP:OTATP is for me, a redundancy. NCC + CP: Only to Amuse the GM could be worth significantly more than -2, because the owner of the power couldn't expect the power to actually often be useful even when it does activate:drink: .

Re: Taming Absolutes I just had a nasty thought. Invulnerability as the combination of two Automaton powers: Takes no STUN (60 AP) and Takes no BODY (??? AP). Of course, one of these powers does not exist, but if it did, it would make a constructing an "invulnerable" character quite simple.

Re: Mental Attacks: Visibility Thereof

Re: Affects Solid World Totally off topic-- if that happens again, try this: Drag the cursor over your longer reply, thus marking it. Use your browser's Edit->Copy to put it on the clipboard. Get back to the message you were going to reply to. Start a new reply. Paste the long reply to the new message.

Re: Affects Solid World

Re: Two-Weapon Fighting 20 STR, Greatsword has STR Min = 17, one handed use adds +3. He can do it, but just barely.

Re: Works Well in the Source Material, not so Well in the Game

Re: Mental Attacks: Visibility Thereof If you're hit by a mental power, by the rules, it is not invisible to you, even if you do not have Mental Awareness. If however, the guy next to you doesn't have Mental Awareness, he's clueless. You can always perceive an attack against you unless it is bought with IPE.

Re: Seemingly Silly Things to Model This is strangely similar to a character I have actually built and played. He is a time traveller from an alternate future. Where he comes from, many of the things from SciFi films and books from the 40's, 50's and 60's came true: Flying cars, Benevolent World Government, Space travel, Alien Invasions, Time Travel, Cloning, etc. Curiously enough, the Superhero team he ended up joining in this game has a flying car. It is the only vehicle he has seen since arriving that he has the appropriate Transport Familiarity for.

Re: A New Use For Hardened I don't like the idea, won't use it, won't allow it in my game. Don't let me stop you, though.

Re: PC Necessities My last supervillain had high SPD, high CV, but low DEF. The heroes continued pounding him after he was down and still. He was less than a turn from bleeding to death before a few thoughtful Heros did Paramedics and Healing. He is still in a coma. If I recall correctly, not a single killing attack was used in that entire fight.