tancred

Ramalatus, I use "Real Technology" for any non-weapon power I use in my current TravellerHero game. It's the same value and effect as "Real Weapon" for anything that isn't actually a weapon, e.g., communication equipment, medical gear, sensor gear, and so on. If you use Hero Designer to build your equipment, the simplest way to do "Real Technology" is as a Custom Modifier, worth -1/4 just like "Real Weapon." So the short answer is, yes, you can use (the equivalent of) Real Weapon for other equipment.

I just came across this thread after the newest necromancy. The last time I ran Champions, some 15 years ago, I had a secret master-villain who somewhat resembled a much darker Adonis. He had cloned his original female minion, and granted both the original and all her clones super-powers. The game didn't continue long enough for the players to twig to what was going on or encounter the master villain. If I ever pick that game up again, Adonis will probably replace my much-less-fun villain. Brilliant work, all. Thanks for the fun read.

My last 2 Heroic-level games (PA and now TravellerHero) I have used 100+50. This is 5e because that's what my players know. 100+50 lets them be quite good at their specialties but also have some other flavor things to use. TravellerHero in particular is VERY skills-heavy. Only one player is playing an alien with any powers at all (I have one Aslan warrior/scout). One thing to watch out for, though. If you start at 100+50, don't be too generous with how much XP you give out. I was rather over-generous at first, and now things that should be hard for some characters are pretty routine. I have to keep coming up with more and more reasons why some particular task is either extra-difficult or doesn't apply at all. On the other hand, at least they're learning that combat in Traveller is dangerous even when you use Hero rules...

Re: Combat Armor that requires having a skill. You're very welcome. If there's anything more you need just post here; I'll keep checking back. BTW, I also like the idea of Penalty Skill Levels; I'm going to use that for my (hopefully starting-next-week) Traveller Hero game. I did require the players to take PS: Vacc Suit if they want to have the Traveller Vacc Suit skill, but I'm also going to use the PSL idea for Combat Armor or Battle Dress, especially since none of them are Army or Marine characters.

Re: Combat Armor that requires having a skill. FWIW, when we converted the Traveller weapons for Traveller Hero, a TL 12 Laser Rifle came out as 3½d6, AP, AF3. All of the lasers are Armor-Piercing, and the Rifles have Autofire where the pistols and carbines do not. TL10 Combat Armor is 7 rPD/rED Hardened, while Battle Dress starts at 8 PD/ED at TL 10 and goes up to 16 PD/ED at TL 12. Those were just our numbers; YMMV.

Re: Fins and Ray-Guns Third approval for the Lensmen. But while you're talking about Doc Smith, don't forget the Skylark of Space and its sequels. They're hard to find now, but good reads. Although the power level goes WAY up in the later books, as well of the scale of the whole thing.

Re: The Atlantis city-ship from Stargate:Atlantis -> vehicle or base? Reminds me of Harry Turtledove's alternate history series with the South winning the Civil War and becoming a separate country. When Tanks are invented in World War I (most of which takes place in Kentucky) they aren't called tanks except by the British; everyone in America (North and South) calls them barrels.

Re: Source for Comstar Traveller Hero books? I'm going to want another set; one of our group's co-GMs is a huge Traveller fun and these would make a great Christmas gift. Let me know when you need me to paypal you. Edit: Make that 2 sets; my other co-GM wants a set too. Any chance you can sign them before you ship them?

Re: Why I prefer HERO System over Pathfinder/OGL/D&D for fantasy This is exactly the kind of project I would love to tackle. Except for the minor matter of having to work to support my gaming habit...

Re: d20 feats in .hdc format Here are two prefabs for 5th that I downloaded from somewhere. I've never used them so am not that familiar with them. Hopefully they'll give you a start.

Re: Post apocalyptic HERO I have a campaign that we have been playing off and on for several years. I actually started it well before Post-Apocalyptic Hero was published. I'll second all of what Christopher said, especially about the amount of prep time. Essentially what I did was get Glupii, the other Hero GM in our group, to help me brainstorm it, and then threw some twists into it so he would be surprised too. I picked a real-world place (Seeley Lake, Montana), looked up as much information as I could on it, and set the starting point there. The game was a Sleepers Awake scenario, and the first session involved the players finding out they were even in a PA game (I didn't tell anyone but Glupii). Our group had never run PA, but I was tired of all our games (d20 and Hero) being fantasy so decided to give it a try. After the first session, the players began to slowly explore their world. A lot of the early part of it could be described as Fantasy Hero with the players having guns (but VERY limited ammunition). My aim for the feel of the game was for mostly realistic, with a very few odd/paranormal touches thrown in just to keep the players guessing. Even yet, several real-world years (and about 3 years in the game world) later the players, even Glupii have no idea how the Apocalypse happened. It just isn't that relevant to day-to-day survival. The game is turning into something like a USA summer series; it goes in seasons. This last season, the game moved out of low fantasy/survival mode and acquired some steampunk/early 1800s touches. I have found that, because I don't want it to be TOO fantastic, I have to be careful about plots I use; I can't just throw in Fantasy Hero plots. I've had a couple of times I had to pause it to think up the next season/story arc, but I don't know if that's just me or just the style I picked. The hardest thing about running PA now is that I keep reading about ways an Apocalypse could happen. It gets harder and harder to stick to my original plan, because there's always one more cool thing to throw in. Anyway, long ramble. But the short version is that you do need a lot of prep time. You have to decide how long after the Apocalypse your game is set, and whether the player characters are from modern day or from the time period of your setting. You also have to decide whether to use a real-world setting or make up your own. Both work, they just entail different kinds of work to prepare. Hope some of that helps.

Re: Anyone have pre-made star ships??? Shadowcat is the grand master of Traveller starships. He did most of the conversions of them when we were working on Traveller Hero. If you have/can lay hands on a copy of that, there are over a dozen Traveller ships statted out in Hero terms, as well as starship components. Whether those are suitable for your game or not I couldn't say.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Unfortunately not. Only the second player and I are Laumer fans. Nobody else got it until I made the comment about 2 megatons/second firepower.

Re: Current Champions or will 4th Edition suffice? Corsair, the "character generator" you mention in your original post is the program known as Hero Designer. For $25, it makes it incredibly easy to create anything you can build with Hero. The very short version is that if you have the $25 in your gaming budget it's a terrific deal. HD is a terrific and easy-to-use program and makes my job as GM a LOT easier. You can get Hero Designer versions of an enormous number of characters, vehicles, monsters, enchanted items, you name it, for good prices. Especially with the 5th Edition stuff on sale. And the current version of HD fully supports both 5th and 6th Editions of the Hero rules. But I understand budget concerns; my gaming budget has dropped to practically nothing over the last couple of years too.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Our DC:TAS game from a couple of weeks ago. Several of our characters carry the mini-bolos found the in the 5th ed. Dark Champions Utility Belt. One player asks me, "So how many bolos do you have?" I replied, "Three." Another player responded, "If you have three Bolos, I think we can take anything." Knowing what he meant I said, "At 2 Megatons/second firepower per main battery per Bolo, yes I think we're good." The first player said, ""I don't think you did the points right if you have that kind of Bolo."

Re: Susano's Song-Based DC NPCs Virgil Cain, from The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Original lyrics (not Joan Baez's): http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/s/sophie_b_hawkins/the_night_they_drove_old_dixie_down.html Wikipedia talks about how Joan Baez mis-heard the lyrics before she recorded them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_They_Drove_Old_Dixie_Down I had no idea that song had been covered so many times. I'm not posting a version, because I took a totally Twilight Zone twist on him. He will show up as an NPC in one of my games one of these days.

Re: Fantasy HERO encounters & balancing them SOME Goblins are plenty smart... That aside, one thing about being able to Abort to a Defensive Maneuver. It's NOT as useful when your players and their opponents are the same speed. Glupii and I have managed to teach our players that Abort to a Dodge or Block is a good thing. But if the players and opponents are the same SPD but the players have higher DEXs (which is usually the case in our games), the players have to forgo any attack actions to have the opportunity to Abort to defense (since you can't Abort in the same Segment in which you just took an Attack Action). Or in shorter terms, SPD matters a lot. If the players are just 1 SPD faster than their opponents, they will have a LOT easier time even when outnumbered than if all are the same SPD. We found this out in the DC:TAS game we're playing the hard way. And one more thing. Using the "Minion Rule" helps the players a lot. That is, when the low-level opponents hit 0 STUN, take them off the board. But allow the players to still Recover once they hit zero. They're Heroes, after all. I'm playing a martial artist in the DC:TAS game, and I'm the most "fragile" hand-to-hand fighter we have. We have two bricks and an energy projector besides me. I've repeatedly been knocked unconscious, but been able to get up and continue fighting after taking a couple of recoveries. If the minions are able to do the same, things are a lot tougher for the players. This isn't appropriate for more powerful opponents, but lets you throw a lot of minions at your players at the beginning of a battle or session.

Re: How many of you use END outside of magic? and other questions... Actually you can, but it takes some work. You have to use the Custom Multiplier button and put in 0.33333 to get it to divide the Real Cost by 3 as Turakian Age says. I've written up a number of the colleges for Turakian Age; my one mage player used them the last time I ran Fantasy Hero.

Re: Fantasy HERO encounters & balancing them Here are a couple of things I have learned in 20+ years of running Hero. As mentioned above, the OCV/DCV and damage values are very important. But the defenses of both sides matter too. If numbers are about equal, your opponents should be about equal to your party's numbers for all these values. If you have more than about 1.5 opponents per party member, tone the opponents down compared to the party. One trick I've recently learned: give the bad guys a combat skill level or two (probably one fewer than most of your players have). BUT, be ready to add or remove skill levels on the fly, as you see how the battle works out. For Heroic level games, a +1 can make a large difference. Another thing to keep in mind is that STUN adds up. Even if your bad guys can't get any BODY through the party's defenses, they usually can do at least some STUN. Eventually that will take party members unconscious. Having the bad guys have Teamwork makes that even more important. We've been seeing this a lot in both my PA game and Glupii's DC-TAS game we're currently playing.

Re: Sanity points related to Ego Score - Call of Cthulu type scenarios I've seen a mechanic like that in the old Horror Hero, which was for 4th Edition IIRC. I've also seen writeups where your character gets hit with a Drain EGO but gets to make an EGO Roll to take no damage. I'd personally go with that last one, just because it's easy and doesn't require any rules modifications.

Re: Star Hero? If you want a setting for your game, I can also recommend Terran Empire. It's an excellent setting. And there are several accessory books for it, such as Spacer's Toolkit, Scourges of the Galaxy (rogues and villains), and so on. Unfortunately, all of those are also only 5th edition.

Re: History of Space Opera, aka Finally an io9 article that doesn't suck. I loved Ender's Game; still think it was one of the best SF books I've ever read. The rest of the series left me completely flat, though; didn't enjoy the next 3 books at all and gave up after that. But your quote of him is dead on; it's the mix of Character and Idea that makes the most appealing stories. For me, at least.

Re: STORMlords Update I so want to see this setting. I'm reading the Harry Dresden books for the first time now, and would love to see how an Urban Fantasy game could/should be run. I think this book would help me a lot in that direction. Unfortunately, my gaming budget at the moment is zero so I can't contribute toward the Kickstarter. But my good wishes are with you; I hope you are able to finish this and get it published, Steve.

Re: Source for Comstar Traveller Hero books? I don't have any copies of the books other than my comp copy, so can't help you there. If there's no licensing problems I'd be all in favor of the old pdf being posted/hosted somewhere. It's just a shame that the license got rescinded; I think a lot of people would still buy the books if they could.

Re: How long to learn or improve a skill, spells, etc? My inspiration for the use-based awards to XP came from the Wizardry 8 computer game. In that game, every time you use a skill (and it includes magic skills under that) there is a chance that the skill will increase. My progam works as Glupii has said, dividing the number of XP I award each session over the number of uses for each character. It rewards the players for using skills and helps aim their development along skill-based lines. I don't award lots of uses for combat; we learned the hard way that that does focus characters into strictly combat mode, AND tends to unbalance the game as one character gets too powerful. I use the Skill Categories in the rulebook (5ER, page 48), although I just decided to add back the General category that went away between 4th and 5th Edition. This allows me to handle non-INT-based Knowledge Skills, for example, and accumulate General experience points without awarding them separately. We definitely did find that listing each skill separately is NOT the way to go; it takes too long to get an increase in a skill unless the player uses it constantly or the GM awards a LOT of points. Neither worked well for us, so I switched to the categories. We've used this system the most in my PA game which is a heavily skills-based game to begin with. I should add, I threw in code at the last second in my experience program that also awards a few fractions of a point toward characteristic increases. The percentage is small so the points accumulate slowly.