Paragon

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! The problem is it seems, if anything, the inverse of the genre; people who in the comics ignore conventional weapons but will care about agent blasters and the attacks of others supers often do the inverse. That was always the big pain of the killing attack; you'd see people take it, not because it was a good way to kill people (which at least would be consistent with its apparent purpose) but because it was a good way to get a gusting massive stun result on otherwise next to impossible to stun targets. When you're taking the Killing Attack to do Stun--well, something's backwards conceptually, and probably in process, too.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps Well, to be fair, its more Body, Stun, Con and Recovery, since the divided stun effectively comes back faster and is less likely to Stun someone too.

Re: Real point caps? At least in combat (and remember, itsnot 15%, its 25%) the problem is that likely it does the job as well or better than it having worked a hundred percent of the time would; at least in Champions, a single 30D6 blast is more dangerous to a target than four 10D6 blasts in the vast majority of cases because of a combination of the Defenses involved and the likelyhood at least one recovery will have rolled around in the time frame when four blasts landed (about eight phases worth of attack). That's a quirk specific to damage, but other, similar problems apply to other sorts of abilities with Limitations; if you're getting more total power out of the effect, often the fact that applying the power is more troublesome doesn't really balance them. The reason Active Point limits work is you don't end up, in parctice, getting more raw power; you get points to divert to something else, but its often, if not usually less useful than more of the same would be. There's certainly a point that this gets more complicated away from the superhero genre, but I think its still fundamentally true about combat applications even away from that.

Re: Real point caps? In addition, it can make for a highly disruptive result. The classic example would be a GM who caps a campaign's real point limit on offensive powers at 50. Now someone takes a Blast at 50 real points with Activation 8-. He spends a lot of time watching it fizzle, but the one time in four it actually works, it blows out 30 dice of damage, enough to demolish most opponents outright. That tends to turn combats into incredibly dicey procedures, where its more an issue of when the dice turn up than any decisions on anyone's part. Similar problems can arrise with a lot of Limitations. In others, the cost to benefit swings too high; its often not trivial to make an OAF quite the problem it should be anyway, but its weighted high because it can be a big problem; on the other hand if the OAF user is doing twice the damage anyone else is, even with those problems its probably overwhelmingly attractive.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps I'm not a big fan of indiscriminate use of Damage Reduction on every master villain, and Recovery doesn't actually help necessarily, since you can have a villain taken out before his post-12 rolls around, and taking a recovery mid-fight when you're outnumbered is usually a non-starter.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps It can be a fine line though, especially if you have a group of heroes up against a single villain without backup. Over the course of a full turn, it isn't at all uncommon for a group of four heroes to be able to launch 20-24 attacks off, and depending on the CVs involved and so forth, a few stun here and there can sometimes add up pretty quickly.

Re: An observation on two systems M&M has its own issues, but its actually become the superhero game of choice locally for a lot of people, including a lot of long time Hero players.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps Well, that's easy to do; if you don't pump up defenses and Stun totals and the like, almost any reasonable super tends to flatten normals pretty reliably in Hero. In most cases that's true even of agents. Classically, they've been heavy enough offense to offer concern, but go down easy. Just be aware that because of the way Recovery works, this can make for _very_ drawn out fights; if an opponent has 32 PD and ED and his attackers are using 10 dice, he's only accumulating 3 stun per successful attack, for example, and he likely bleeds off somewhere in the 6-10 range at the end of every round.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps An issue to consider with defenses is how you want typical fights to play out. Killing attacks tend to confuse this because the standard rule gives them so bloody much variance, but the closer the defenses are to the expected damage with normal dice, the longer the fights will go, and the less often you'll see stun results; at the other end, if you have too much damage relative to defense, you get too much opportunity for whoever gets the first shot off to be too decisive.

Re: An observation on two systems Hero was originally designed in a far more gamist/simulationist way than any more modern superhero game, back in the day when that was kind of the ethic that was growing for all new games. That means it has a lot of tools for making distinction in places you want to make distinction (the whole martial arts system for example). What it isn't, is quick and smooth flowing. Even though it was reasonably crunchy by modern standard, TORG and its descendants Masterbook and Shatterzone were attempts to turn a game-play experience to dramatist ends, and while it didn't work for everyone (the card play could positively interfere with people who wanted to primarily get into their characters heads because it was both elaborate and pretty much disconnected from any in-character process) it did a pretty fair job of producing the flow of certain sorts of stories. So in practice, the systems are trying to do pretty different things.

Re: package deal question "All" and "most" weren't in my statement, but on a more limited case you're response is exactly correct. People will tend to not go above human unless they feel like they have an overriding reason to do so with NCM. Strength might be a bad example as its often too attractive in heroic scale games, but I've certainly seen the effect with Dexterity. So yes, in my experience it does what its supposed to; makes trans-normal-human-range attributes rarer in the PC population than it otherwise would be.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) In a campaign where doing damage isn't important? Why? Cost is nothing if not assessing value relative to available resources. Then I think we're done.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) They already do that the moment they put a point cost on things; that's just as much a campaign dependent issue, and just as much something I think should have a default state. And there we are. And I think they were ones fundamentally less safe on balance grounds. Again, don't see any way we can resolve that. Do you?

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) Just wanted it to be mentioned for any readers who weren't aware that active point limits and their kin weren't in the original design. I don't really agree, but I'll agree its one of the stickier areas to fix systematically (since I did it once, and it was a pain in the ass). And that's where we fundamentally disagree. I think the system should default to them being present, but allow the GM to override them if he judges appropriate. I can't see how we're going to resolve that. I just think that Stopsigning is necessary, but not sufficient; its not an excuse not to make some basic balance design decisions in how the power is set up and presented.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) Well, that requires a digression, so bear with me. Power in games tends to turn on two things, which I'll call (from lack of a better set of terms) breadth and depth. Early on (specifically as of at least 2nd Edition) Hero figured out the hard way from field experience that it was doing a halfway decent job of addressing bredth (though the Limitation system could sometimes confuse this, as did the presence or lack of frameworks), but did nothing about depth. That's pretty much why things like active point limits, defense caps and skill roll limits appeared in the system; because it had shown that just points didn't tell the story, as often narrower, but heavily focused characters were way too problematic to deal with (and as far as I can tell, neither the designers nor most of their market thought entirely ad-hoc decisions as where these should be capped on a character to character basis were good ideas). That said, though, the inverse was also true; one of the limits of AP caps and the like is that it doesn't address synergies. If you have two otherwise identical characters, one of which has a wide sensory Invisibility and the other doesn't, then that latter character is, usually, far more powerful than the former. Its possible to put together a regulatory framework to deal with the latter, but its a lot of work, and always provides disagreement space, as the exact value of those synergies is not easily reduced to simple mathmatical analysis, as some of the benefits are situational. So for most people the usual limiting factor is the points involved; unless the setup has a huge amount of slack, its hard to cover all the basic ground well and still pull too many synergies out (as most of the dramatic ones aren't cheap). The problem with both Multiform and Summoning (in slightly different way) is they pretty much end run this control. In Summoning, the lack of a point cap means that its entirely possible (and not necessarily even deliberate) to sidestep the limitations points normally put on your synergies simply because you can pull a controllable NPC out a larger point than any character in the campaign. In Multiform its less an issue of overall points than the fact you can, essentially, convert any character traits you don't need for specific purposes into ones you do, again, allowing you to afford breadth-related functions you otherwise couldn't. So, honestly, even if AP limits do apply to Summon (and I don't think its entirely clear they do, but I suspect most sane GMs would treat them as they do), it doesn't entirely address the problem, because of the ability to build a summoned entity that is higher point than any PC would allowed to be.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc)

Re: package deal question But they don't necessarily understand why one human can, but you don't want all of them doing so, or even most. Since attributes are the only areas where there's an absolute limit in the first place, its moot. Most other areas, I don't claim that a limit is based on species traits, either; its simply naked campaign support. As such, I don't consider the two cases parallel except in the vaguest possible way.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) You've missed it completely. My point is that as soon as GM involvement is assumed to solve balance problems, you can't talk about balance, because GM involvement can _always_ solve things that way. However, it often doesn't, and if the GM has to be involved to make something balanced in the routine cases, what's the point in the cost purchase rules? Just have people write down what they want and move on; after all, the GM is going to have to decide its okay anyway.

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc)

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) I made one. You simply don't agree with it. There's not much I can do about that. Other than that, I think you're conflating my position with others in the thread. I think it did a reasonable job of reducing dubious builds in 4th for just that reason, so I'm afraid I can't agree with you here, and I don't find the builds that need to exceed that cap all that legitimate and common. And I think bringing it in essentially makes the discussion pointless, as its the all purpose get out jail card, as its been used that way in every balance discussion I've ever seen. (This does not mean I think you've personally used it that way, but I think others in this thread have). In the case where all you need to do to make a power broken is to dial it up, I don't think it takes much demonstration. Most powers are not broken just by buying a lot of them, per se (and to the degree they are, the game already has a mechanism to limit that in Active Point limits or defense caps that don't require any _necessary_ GM examination).

Re: package deal question It probably seemed so on design. This assumes you consider soft caps, which are fundamentally arbitrary, a good thing. Sometimes they're necessary in some areas, but as far as I'm concerned, the less I have to debate with players about why player X gets to do something they don't, the better; attributes are universal enough its the last place I want to see it. You don't. But you have a different kind of problem I don't see as any better, as I note above.

Re: package deal question I think it lands in the "better than nothing" area; an absolute limit might not always serve most campaigns here, so there's a comprimise. Personally, I use a bit of both; in heroic scale games I have the the doubling point, and then an absolute cap about one and a half times that (so in a typical heroic scale game I run you can't have a human with more than a 30 Dex or a 6 Speed tops, for example). Now this does run into the issue that you need to set different racial maximums, which can create some balance questions, but that's wrapped in a problem Hero's always had in that area.

Re: Repeated Attempts I'm just noting that a simple following of the rules here isn't necessarily benign. That probably is reasonable with surface thoughts, but it really doesn't make much sense with hidden thoughts, and certainly not once you've gotten down to memories.

Re: Repeated Attempts

Re: 1 for 5 powers (summon, duplicate, mult-form, follower etc) I don't disagree at all. However, that means its legitimate to argue whether the point was reached here. Well, its to be noted that any rules system that goes on long enough to some extent "just grows". I have no evidence that Hero is any different here (and in places I can trace things that did just that; the distinction between the combat system and the skill system is largely an artifact of what the original design of the system was based on for example). And as I said, from what I know of the earlier design, at that point there was no attempt to factor the input of the ref directly into character design, except in the areas of things like disad and limitation frequency (if anything, this wasn't done as much as it should have been in some areas). That said, as I noted early on but got lost a bit in the back and forth on whether this was always a virtue, Steve Long clearly does have a slightly different design ethic here; there are powers (like Summon) that are set up because he did not want to exclude some usage that was dubious at the price of excluding some that wasn't but would have been precluded by rules to prevent the former. On the whole, this is a net break even I think; it means the advice does not discourage actually customizing the system to your own needs, even if it requires changing core rules (something prior editions were quite reluctant about). But I think it also errs on the side of making it open to the point that it requires more GM input in more places that it did before, likely to the defiicit of more users than it needed to. For example, Summon could have easily have a top listed cap, with a note that the GM should consider allowing it to be exceeded in some cases. That wouldn't have perfectly balanced it, but it would have eliminated the simplest way to abuse it for most people without really harming its utility for those who had legitimate uses for it at all. So I think its quite legiitimate to argue whether these constructs are broken, and I think that, honestly, arguing about GM involvement in the rules is begging the question. I _do_ think its legitimate to argue that some sorts of rules constructs are intrinsically dodgy and hard to balance directly mechanically without crippling them, but that doesn't say that the current constructs couldn't be done better, and just fending off that argument here is essentially saying "we like it so there's no problem" and once you start that, there's no possible grounds to argue about mechanical balance at all, and I'm not prone to accepting that tenet without a fight.