Paragon

Re: Noob question - Defensive Strike and Martial Strike?

Generally speaking, a small, carefully chosen martial arts set is an incredibly efficient buy for a melee attacker; for example, an art that included Martial Strike, Martial Block and Martial Dodge is almost certainly a better deal by far than you'd get going any other way, and its unlikely someone with that orientation will ever regret the points. Just how efficient that buy is depends too much on setting to say; in a campaign where almost all combat is unarmed, or at least is melee and no special rules about blocking unarmed are applied, its pretty much golden, for example (you can use the Martial Strike constantly, with the appropriate bonus to DCV, and the Block and Dodge allow you some flexibility).

Actually two, only marginally related questions, but I figure why clutter the forum with multiple posts.

1. This may just be confusion on our part, but does it require anything special to use a weapon off hand in terms of Familiarity (I know the DCV bonus "Off-hand WF" but that's obviously something different). In other words, If you use, say, a war fan in each hand, does the one in your off hand take any additional penalties beyond the usual for those without ambidexterity.

2. I've searched for this looking under "shield" in the forum, but I'm not finding anything.

If I understand correctly, one of the things that being stunned does is lose you the benefit of DCV levels (as compared to being suprised in combat, which appears to just halve everything in DCV but still allows you to use them). Since shields are basically DCV levels on a focus, do you lose the benefit of that when stunned, too?

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

I can see that logic. I'm wondering though how we decide what needs to be flat? STR v STR I can sort of see: if +5 STR is 2x lift, then a little more STR should be a lot more advantage BUT the chances of 5 v 10 STR have very different with a count the Body thing than the chances for 45 v 50 STR, and, with the argument for Body counting therre should be no real difference there.

 

I think that's the issue; you need to assess the cases where a small difference in attribute should actually have a big difference in likelyhood of success against another force, you just really don't want to be using 3d6+mod, unless you're going to use variable mods (and if you don't watch it when doing that, you can have a situation where you make the situation just impossible).

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

Oh, sure. If you'd done it as CHA/3 originally we might be looking at 1d6 per 3 STR, for instance, and we'd be talking about the "default scale" being 1d6 per 3 Active Points.

 

Just out of curiosity; were you (or the OHGs) playing The Fantasy Trip around that time as well?

If you look at the original publication date of TFT, it only barely predates Champions; by the time the original authors got ahold of my houserules, it wasn't out yet, so it had no influence on me. Now whether George and/or Steve had played TFT by the time they were approaching getting Champions together, I couldn't say, but I kind of doubt it.

There's really no need; other than converting a lot of flat values to dice, most of Hero's core traits are pretty clearly derivable from S44 and the houserules; most of the innovations could easily have been in the actual development rather than with any real second inspiration source. Certainly the 3d6 roll (which was present for melee and mental combat in S44) and the general scale and point build approach were already present in S44, and my houserules expanded on that, so any similarities to TFT are pretty much parallel development.

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

I'm strongly in favour of changing all task resolution to 11+MOD-MOD, combat, skills, even characteristic rolls and opposed strength checks (Although I can see some logic in maintaining the Body Count method for opposed strength checks, if we did that we probably ought to use the same methody for all characteristic checks.)

 

We could use CHA/3 or CHA/5, but we should use the same throughout IMO. I think that CHA/5 is possibly the best bet, although I could be persuaded to CHA/3.

I think there's some reasons to keep two types of resolution 3d6+mod resolution for things that are somewhat linear (only somewhat because of the 3d6, but I think you understand what I mean) and dice-count-body for things where you want the result to get flatter and flatter as the value increases. I think they serve different kinds of purposes better.

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

The reason I wish I'd done it as Char/3 is that it would have increased the number of points of meaningful distinction for some characteristics that get a bit of short shrift here like Int. Admittedly, you'd lose the place where Char/5 cuts in, but most of those are on characteristics that have some interim value anyway (Dex for initiative, Strength for lift, damage and Figured Characteristic contribution, Ego for resistance value).

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

If there's anything I ever curse myself about, its that when I did the house rules for Superhero 2044 that Champions in part is based on, that I based the skill rules on attribute/5 instead of the smaller scale. If I had based it on attribute/3 I suspect you wouldn't even be having to think about this, Chris.

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

Maybe. Just pointing it out. As The Main Man notes' date=' how does this interact with Complementary Skills? But yeah, it is very much an edge case.[/quote']

 

Complimentary skills are the exception I referred to (I tend to think of them as supporting skills for some reason); but often ones supporting Intellect skills are Knowledges anyway, which don't default to Intellect in the first place.

Re: Consolidating Skill and Combat

The difference is' date=' the 5 point Skill Level adds to INT-based Skills, one at a time, while 5 points of INT adds to all INT-based actions, all the time.[/quote']

 

 

Other than use of supporting skills, when does that matter? I don't recall every seeing someone actually called on to use multiple Intellect skills that had to be used at exactly the same time...

Re: Philosophical: Definition Of A Mechanic

Sorry for the bit of necro here, but Chris had asked me to give this question a look, and I've been very busy the last few weeks, enough I wasn't looking at this board at all (and I think at this point I'll bail out of the 6e discussion since I've sat out enough of it).

My own feeling is that no component of a power mechanic is sacred. Choosing the base effect you're looking for from available options based on what seems closest to it, and mutate the rest at need.

Otherwise you're forced into mechanics that don't seem appropriate to you just because of what a power is called.

Two classic examples:

1. You want a power that does nothing but knock people away from you. There are two obvious ways to do it: a Limited TK and a limited EB. A purist approach would argue for the TK because TK is about moving things, whereas knockback is a side effect of an EB. But TK is largely all or nothing; if your concept is that the effect that knocks things away is variable in its reliability or has other properties where the blast seems more appropriate, I say go with the Blast.

2. You want a concealment power that affects the target's perception roll, but doesn't make you automatically unseen. Two obvious ways are to Limit either Invisibility or Images. The purist will say Invisibility, because its property is to conceal you; but if you want to be able to manipulate the degree to which you're hard to see, there's no obvious metric with Invisiblity, while Images has one built in, so it might be the better choice.

That said, Hero has never been entirely non-conflicted on what is appropriate for base effects anyway; some powers have always carried a lot more baggage than others (partly because there are two kinds of powers in Hero; real base core powers, and a handful of "powers of convenience" that represent effects seen often enough in comics that it was seen as tedious to have to construct them every time (and prone to getting into potentially undesireable inconsistencies)). That's one reason some purists would like the "Four Basic Elements" approach.

Re: Area Effect TK

I'm not necessarily disagreeing....so maybe the way to pick up a lot of objects over a large area and exceed the base STR of the TK is with an AoE Autofire TK?

If I saw any reason to not just do it with a regular area and not do this silly power spreading which is done nowhere else in the system, I might agree, but as it is its kludging a fix for a problem I don't see any reason to exist in the first place. As I said, I honestly think this is a psychological issue, not a balance one. Any logical problem with the TK effecting individual objects at full power and not contrinbuting more against multihex objects applies just as much to damage; any balance issues applies just as much to any area NND.

Re: Area Effect TK

Paragon I do understand your PoV, honest. If it were to be just a matter of how much TK could lift I would nt particularly have any problem with applying STR/target, even if that meant lifting an awful lot, but it is not as simple as that - as with the agent example, you can lift a lot of objects and use a game convention (damage due to falling) to cause damage, and a lot of it.

 

I still reckon you cannot justify your position with an in-hgame example: what sfx are you going to be applying to an AoE TK that justifies you being able to pick up several tons in weight of small objects, but only a few hundred KG of large objects?

 

Honestly, I really don't see it as any more problematic than the example of the large blast area that doesn't do any more damage to the building that the single target version. Both are dodgy, but they're equally dodgy and you see area effect done all the time.

And I do understand the agent issue; but that's just as much of a problem with single target versions and a flying hero, and at least the time taken is an issue (given how moving objects works with TK unless that's changed in 5e its based on throwing). Until you get to a certain threshold, its entirely possible for the targets to struggle free before they get to any great height, and by the time you've gotten them there--well, how many times could you have shot them with a regular area? A dozen?

 

Also can I just ask again aboutt eh autofire thing, and what people think on that?

Well, you can probably predict my answer from how I see the area thing; of course I'd treat each TK unit in the autofire attack as full power.

Re: Area Effect TK

Easy fix for that Paragon' date=' use cost multipliers in other genres. The group I'm in does that for magic and such where if you take certain amount of lims, you can put on a .33 mult for the ability.[/quote']

 

Sure. I'm just noting that there's some intrinsic problems in a multi-genre system talking about what cost is "right"; that tends to be most noticeable in Hero when you're talking to people who use it primarily for superheroic scale games as compared to those who use it for heroic scale. The design is for the most part biased toward the former (but there are some exceptions, such as some of the Immunities in Life Support which really only make sense in cost when used in heroic scale, and aren't really consistent in value with some other Life Support components per cost).

 

So its entirely possible to say "yeah that cost is right" or "way off" and have someone look at you like a lunatic, because their field experience gives them a very different sense of it because of their prefered genre.

Re: Area Effect TK

I'm not saying you are wrong or anything, but I am curious as to what value would you assign to Lift?

 

Telekinesis Component Breakdown:

1) Damage

2) Manipulation (Grab/Shove/Pull)

3) Lift (Carrying Capacity)

 

What values would assign to each of these components that make up Telekinesis?

 

- Christopher Mullins

The problem is (and this is a general problem in Hero; even though I've used it for years, I don't think a one-cost-fits-all system really works right in a multigenre game), I have to ask the question "In what genre/setting?" I'd give you a much different answer in Champions than in Fantasy Hero, and yet a third answer in a modern low-paranormal game.

I tend to consider the damage component of TK pretty trivial in a game where multipowers exist (since in the majority of cases that's what people are going to do to do damage anyway at a distance), so only the ability to manipulate and lift are really relevant; the manipulation ability is essentially a fixed cost benefit at the bottom and is hard to assess. The lift ability is a variable benefit, but I don't think is at all overbalanced in Champions as its currently priced; if anything, in practice, its too expensive.

There are some issues in using TK at its current cost in other sorts of genres, but in practice, I don't think the area question impacts those, since for the most part the more problematic uses require more buy in than you're going to see with an area effect in those genres. A single target version of greater strength is much more problematic.

Re: Area Effect TK

I'd considered weight as a 'defence' but it still does not end up directly analagous because (thinking of it that way) you would not be limited in the number of objects that you could lift where TK STR was greater than weight, the result of which is likely to be a net effect greater than the base effect.

 

Damaging attacks do work that way - the 'defence' works differentlyin practice because it is not all or nothing.

 

There's a clear exception to that; any area Body Doing NND; yet there's no special case applied there.

Re: Area Effect TK

There is a very real difference, in Hero: damage aplies to defences every time it is used, whereas there is no 'defence' to strength.

 

Sure there is. Mass. If you have a giant area TK but its only 20 STR, you're still not going to pick up anything that requires more than that, just because its area; you'll just be picking up more things that can be picked up with that. That doesn't seem meaningfully different to me than damaging a bunch of things that have low defenses in the same area.

Think of it this way:

A 1d6 AoE KA would apply 1d6 KA to each of (say) 8 barrels, each of which has a def of 4 and a Body of 3. About 1/3 of them are damage, none destroyed. That is very different from applying 8d6KA -certainly all of them would be destroyed. The point is the maximum damage is still 1d6, however you slice it.

 

And if the area was filled with a lot of glass bottles you wanted to break, it'd destroy them fine. Again, the situations seem quite parallel (barring Christopher Mullin's evaluation of the benefit of lift, which I disagree with the premise of, and thus the conclusion).

TR works differently. It has no defence as such, so if each of the barrels weighed 200kg and fitted in the AoE, and you could lift them all, you would actually be applying 30 STR to lift 1600kg i.e. you would be exceeding the maximum of the unadvantaged power. The problem is even more obvious if there is a single object that fills the AoE: what STR do you apply to that?

And if the area had a large number of low defense and Body objects, the damage would break them all. As to your question, the answer is "20 Strength", same as you'd only apply 1d6; if size of object doesn't change the damage it takes when it fills more than one hex, then there's no reason it should change the lift that gets applied.

The interaction of damage and defences means that an AoE attack can apply the maximum effect to each object and not exceed the 'power' of the unadvantaged KA, whereas, because STR does not have a defence as such, applying the maximum lift to each object substantially exceeds the maximum.

And I simply disagree because to me the weight _is_ the defense; its what prevents you from lifting it up, and that's the primary function of TK.

In addition there is the question of logic: how would you explain TK working to be able to lift 8x200kg but not being able to lift 1600kg?

The same way I do on the damage in the same area which I consider no more or less of a problem; if the logic bothers you with TK, I think it should do just the same with damage (at least on all exposed faces of a multi-hex object).

Finally the STR/hex thing is entirely artificial - nowhere does it say an AoE applies effects per hex - it is per object - and that means you can lift a lot more dense objects than light objects, if you apply STR/object - which is just plain silly.

 

I don't find it a bit more than the fact you'll do the same damage to a house with a single hex area effect than one that effects all its faces at once.

In short the rule is not an exception, it is an application of the principles of the game.

 

IMO.

And I completely disagree. Its a case of this bothering people in this area where it doesn't bother them anywhere else, but that doesn't make it more consistent; its just a case that one bothers people and the other doesn't.

Re: Area Effect TK

Well it is called game balance. In the same way that you would not get to apply damage to every grain of sand, you'd treat the sand as a single unit, for damage purposes, you don't get to lift every grain of sand individually, because otherwise the result is silly and unbalanced.

 

Sure. That's my point; any problem that applies to TK applies equally to damage, and if you're not going to allow people to sidestep it with damage, there's no reason to do it with TK; but there's no reason to treat TK more _harshly_ than damage, just because it'll allow you to pick up a large number of one hex objects cheaply, same as area damage allows you to damage a large number of one hex objects cheaply. I think the only reason the issue exists is people have cognitive issues with the distinction with TK that for some reason they don't with damage; the same people who'd never expect an area damage effect to damage a three hex area object three times will somehow get wierd that the area TK doesn't treat all three hexes as seperate lift.

Good question, but the same principle applies - game balance. So, why is it that the game balance dictates that there is a difference between damage and lifting strength?

 

Perhaps there is not. The damage applies to everything equally, but the total damage that is done - the maximum effect - is not exceeded. If you apply strength to everything in the AoE for lifting purposes then the maximum effect can be exceeded, and possibly by quite a lot.

 

Not at all. If you apply 1d6 killing to three objects, you'd done 3d6 killing; it isn't as efficient as 3d6, but neither is lifting 3 100 kg. objects as efficient as lifting 300 kg. As long as you can't lift one 300 kg. object with it _no matter the object's size_ the situations are exactly parallel.

Re: Area Effect TK

Well....TECHNICALLY the 'STR per hex' thing is not a rule anywhere, and AoEs affect every object in an area, so the rule, if this would be an exception, would be that AoE TK should be able to affect every object in an AoE.

 

That could well cause some problems: a volume of sand is arguably lots of very small objects, and a cubic metre of fine sand weights 1200kg or thereabouts (http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm).

 

Therefore a 2" AoE is about a 3m radius and, if filled with fine sand, would weigh about 135 tons.

 

If we apply 'principles' then you could lift a grain of sand with 0 STR TK, but let us say we take 10 STR TK, so that we get our 2" radius. So, principle says that this 30 point, 10 STR AoE TK should be able to hoist 135 tons?

 

Cool.

And again, if you have a lot of tiny objects in an area, you get to damage them with an area damage effect numerous times. I'm still not seeing why one is okay and the other isn't.

Re: Area Effect TK

I've never seen the problem the official ruling is designed to address here that isn't just as much a problem with any other area issue; yes, you can have some bizarre artifacts when you have more than a one-hex object (because in practice you're getting no benefit from the extra hexes of lift) but that's just as true with damage; you're only getting one damage increment there even though the damage could hurt each target in the seperate hexes for the same value. The fact that you get to do seven seperate STR 20 TK effects in a 3" area doesn't seem any more prone to abuse or problematic than the fact you get to do seven seperate 1d6+1 killing attacks in those hexes.

In other words, its a rules exception that seems to serve no useful purpose that I can see, and makes it harder to produce some effects than seems justified on any balance grounds.

Re: EC's cannot have non-END powers!!!!

As far as I'm concerned, an EC is a single power that just happens to have more than one possible effect. Which is why the cost savings and neat packaging are probably offset by the "one for all and all for one" nature of drains affecting the entire EC rather than just a single slot in said EC.

 

This only works if you run into a lot of Drains targeted at powers; otherwise its an occasional extra problem (that may not even come up in those cases depending on how the Drain is built) offset by a constant benefit.

Re: Character Effectiveness

Though I favor a systemized approach, all of Sean's suggestions above are good; in fact, my Rule of X was based on weighting most all of the same things.

Re: Character Effectiveness

The real problem I see with coming with (yet another!) combat effectiveness rating is that not only are these dependent on the specific group of characters' date=' but they're probably dynamic in most groups. IOW, not only will the rating change and evolve over time with both player experience and character Experience Points, but I strongly suspect [/quote']

 

 

I didn't find it was group dependent when I did the one I did. It did change with time, but that just meant that it was the controlling factor for what you could spend experience on.

 

(You're correct it can't account for player experience, but I didn't expect it to; to some extent I expect the players to do some of their own heavy lifting there).

Re: Character Effectiveness

The other problem I see here is that any such system will tend to take into account the effectvieness of the character in combat against another single opponent: fighting as part of a team or against multiple weaker opponents can yield very different results for combat effectiveness. For example, someone whose main attack is an AoE is probably going to be relatively useless against bricks who are easy to hit anyway but have high defences, whereas they will be devastating against martial artyists and speedsters who are hard to hit and tend toward low defences.

 

I like the idea of being able to figure effectiveness, but I don't think it is something you can really do in isolation.

Actually, when I set up my version, I assumed a team environment, because its actually _very_ hard to make assumptions about values against any single given specific opponent for the kinds of reasons you state; so I set it up assuming utility against a variety of opponents with at least some support. And I think it passed the simple test of well, working, when I used it extensively throughout a campaign; the few problems with it I ran into were ones I expected (overinflating the value of specialized defenses if used overly literally for example).

I was using the Wight from Monsters, Minions and Marauders this weekend and wasn't sure if its Paralysis of Fear power wasn't missing some information; as listed, it has the Advantage for Takes No Damage and a Limitation for breaking people out with a PRE attack, but wasn't bought AECV or the one for broken with Ego, so as far as I can tell the Wight still had to hit to make it work (which seemed to somewhat defeat the purpose described for it in the text) and would be broken out with Strength (which just seems odd for what it was). Is there some errata on this writeup I've missed?

Re: Character Effectiveness

I've been toying with the idea of largely ignoring points as a measure of effectiveness and not replacing it with anything. Although it is not particularly helpful here, The Eyeball is often the most effective way of measuring a character.

 

If you want to rate combat effectiveness you need to take into consideration CV, DCs of damage, SPD and DEF (and probably loads of other stuff), but of course a character can be very effective without ever getting into combat

Well, when I'm talking about this I'm primarily talking about combat effectiveness, as that's a big enough element of most games that it tends to be more of an issue. There's also more moving parts there; if you want to know how effective someone is as a security intrusion specialist, looking at one or two powers and certain skills tells most of the story. But then, often he's the only one seriously involved in that area, so that turns into an exercise in how important that operating procedure is in general (i.e. how much spotlight that specialization gives him) rather than specifically how good he is at it (you can run into issues in a more specialized campaign--a spy game, say--but even there unless there's a large group you'll likely not get too much overlap).

Combat, on the other hand, takes up a bit too much screen time in most campaigns to be blaise about it, and eyeballing suffers from two problems because of its subjectivity:

1. If there's absolutely any group stress at all, it can make things look like favoritism is going on. I know some people don't care about this but I think some people are also blaise about how not adding to the potential for this is a virtue.

2. It gives the players no metric for good or ill; they don't have any concept of what's too good (or too bad) so they're designing by guess, and then finding out if its okay. It also avoids one of the benign values of a system: it doesn't give people a metric to aim for if they _want_ to be combat effective. When I did it, it served as much on the latter as the former; it not only restrained the excesses of the more power-gamey players, but told others what to do if they were finding they didn't seem to contribute in combat as much as they wanted (and I encouraged it, as it meant I could put together opposition to a fairly common standard without worrying if they ended up against the wrong characters they'd clobber them).