DangerousDan

Re: Focus = Too Great a Price Break? Killing attack combined with Standard effect rule? I know on only one GM who might allow it--if only for NPC monstrosities. Rant deleted. To my mind, any GM that permits a Standard Effect Killing Attack deserves a severe mocking, at the very least. But that being said, I have no problem with the Killing attack's ability to cut through normal defenses. If this game mechanic is broken, it is simply because it reflects the same <broken?> mechanic in real life: if someone shoots you with a .38 special, it doesn't much matter whether you are naked or wearing a suit made of 5eR rulebooks. Similarly, padding that will protect you from a punch or a strike with a wooden stick isn’t going to protect you much from the slash of a broadsword. (Although a suit of 5eR rulebooks probably would, given that they'd stop a bayonet charge) The "Stun Lottery" effect of killing attacks is a separate subject in my mind. If you are a GM, you are free to rule that there are no Killing Attacks, but my prediction is, that if the Hero System makes it to a sixth edition, Killing Attacks will remain (nearly) unchanged.

Re: Focus = Too Great a Price Break?

Re: Focus = Too Great a Price Break? Then there was that recent adventure, in Paris, where Cyberknight's Armor got turned off by the Villains' megascaled anti-technology spell, and he didn't even make it to the fight scene, ... Of course, that same adventure had several of the PCs depriving unconscious henchmen of all of their foci (thus preventing them from rejoining the fight when they woke up) before proceeding to assist the rest of the team to deprive the Big Bad of his OIF Independant foci, which not only continue to be unavailable, but were deliberately broken in order to turn them off before the supers admitted victory.

Re: Idle Scalability Notion In one of the gaming groups I play in, there is a quote in a similar vein: "Can anyone explain why does Leopard-Girl have wings?" Since everyone is aware of the weird buy problem, it rarely happens. Almost all of the weird buying occurs when a character is first created. It may be simply that I've been lucky, but In the groups I play in, acquisition of language skills, background skills, professional skills and the like is quite common, for characters in 150 cp fantasy, 150 cp science-fiction, 250 cp superhero and even 350 cp superhero campaigns. And in any of these groups, if the GM said, "I'll make your characters for you..." Well, we've got plenty of other GMs, so that just isn't going to happen. Assigned experience is fine and well, and no one objects to it, but if it were the sole method of character development, I and most of the other players I know would consider it insulting. They might complain, and if the GM disregarded their complaints, he could very easily find himself watching someone else GMing a game when he was scheduled to. A GM has the power to control what happens in the game, but the players have the power to control whether the GM gets to run a game at all. It is a nicely self-balancing system if everyone understands this.

Re: Why can't Teleport do the Move attacks?

Re: Space & Time or Hexs & Segments

Re: Languages I thank god I wasn't drinking anything when I read this...

Re: Fiddling With 6th - Skills (first of ??) With some of the groups I game with, we use a house rule that allows you to use Overall levels (but nothing less) with Cramming. This was strictly illegal at least as far back as 4th ed and remains illegal in reFRED, but hey, its not like the rules police are going to come to your game and arrest you, is it? It really bothers me that a game system that seems to work so hard to permit almost any character concept works so hard to make it illegal under any circumstances whatsoever to build a character that is merely competent at every known skill. The third character I ever created is a 3500 year old werewolf who's been there, done that. On the first draft, skills alone cost over 600 cp, and that was with skill enhancers shaving a few hundred points off the cost. If you added up all of the experience ever awarded and applied it only to buying skills at 3cp each, I'm sure that at least one of the players you took those points from could say, "He doesn't know how to ____" But under the 5th ed rules, I can build (and have built) a character for far fewer points that can not only kill almost everyone in a moderately large cluster of galaxies, but leave an empty hole in the sky where the galaxies used to be. Of course, the character would only use this power if is was absolutely necessary. I know that I'm , but a game system in which one can build an character that has the power to eliminate a large portion of the observable universe really ought to have a mechanism to permit cramming to at least a 9-. Of course, any mechanism to exceed the 8- limit on cramming is subject to abuse. But really, how much worse can it be than killling you and obliterating your entire galaxy?

Re: Do Lower Powered Player Characters Lead To More Roleplaying? I prefer to make them work for it: flex their brains as well as their muscles. Some months ago, in an adventure set in Paris, the team of superheros faced an array of villains bent on turning off technology for the entire world. The team had to separate in order to foil the henchmen and deprive them of their foci before taking on the mastermind. Due to the prophecies written by someone far less cryptic than that hack Nostradamas, the PCs had some idea what they were up against. I let the players decide who would would face what villain and looked forward to seeing what happened. Some match-ups would be much harder on PCs than others. More than once, I heard a player say "there's no way we can handle this." But they did find ways, and they did prevent a dark age from being forced upon the world. When the last villain had escaped, every single technology draining crystal remained in the heros' control. When they'd done enough damage to turn off the powers, and the lights slowly started coming back on in Paris, they knew that they had earned every bit of the experience I awarded them. Everyone is looking forward to the next thing that I throw at them.

Re: Idle Scalability Notion Not all GMs do. But its part of their Job. If they don't do it, the players just might. Some of the GMs I game with had their earliest experiences as players with GMs who were quite fond of killing off characters. Those GMs didn't give a whole lot of experience. What would be the point? Why bother allowing the player to improve a character who's only purpose is to die in an interesting manner? The GMs I know who learned gaming under such twisted GMs are usually quite good about making the game interesting, and fortunately not so obsessed with killing off PCs, but they tend to forget to think about XP, although they are typically willing to think about (and give out) XP if the players nudge them. I and some of the other GMs in the groups that I play in came from origins where the GM's focus was on having a fun, interactive fantasy, and having the characters develop over time was a fundamental part of that process. A rare, but not unknown phenomena is for a character to become less fun to play after experience. I've only been playing with the Hero System for a few years now, and all of the experience accumulated by all of my characters combined would barely serve to fill the gap between the 250 cp starting point and the points needed to implement the starting concept of my third Hero character. Why the third and not the first or second? #1 didn't survive to his DEX rank in phase 12, which was something of a shock to everyone. Strangely enough, I never did play in that campaign again, but I do play in a (different) campaign with that GM. We both learned from the experience. #2 survived and developed, but the campaign was a casualty of real-world events. #3 started as a backup character in case the GM did a #1 on #2