Paragon

Re: Lower Water and Part Water I looked at Force Wall, but it wouldn't really work since someone could still penetrate the water if they wanted to (I suppose I could have Limited it, but at that point it really starts to look like I'm using the wrong tool for the job when its got almost none of the properties of the original power).

Re: Lower Water and Part Water I did the telekinesis approach, and assumed you didn't need much Strength because I'm buying it area anyway (I know this is always a muddy topic when applying area to TK; you clearly don't need the full strength any more than you need enough damage with an EB to harm every part of the area, but exactly how much is questionable, and I was probably overly generous in my assumption; I probably should have used a man-size mass of water as the Strength value (not a full hex though, or there's no difference between a 1-hex TK and a targeted one in its effect, and that doesn't seem right). I was trying to avoid the handwave aspect with CE, because it looked like it'd set a precedent I didn't want to do.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement As you say, you can certainly argue that the concept has drifted since then (though I'll note that any system that has a rifle doing only half again the damage of a medium pistol is clearly using non-linear damage progression) but I'm really surprised there's any debate about this being the original premise; it wasn't exactly a big secret during the early period of the system, and there's enough oldtimers on here I'd have thought that'd be pretty well known.

Re: Lower Water and Part Water Its not clear what you'd base the cost on, even if usable; it doesn't provide any of the standard modifications, as such.

In my ongoing conversion of the RuneQuest color magic spells I have (some of which are derived from old D&D spells) I'm going through Grey (water) Magic, and I've hit a couple more troublesome cases. I came up with solutions for both, but I don't really like either of them, and one was particularly dodgy. The two effects are: 1. Lower Water: This essentially lowers the water level in a body of water over a reasonably large area (about 160m radius) for a while. I did something with Transform, but I'm not in love with how it came out. 2. Part Water: This simply slides the water to the side (the Red Sea effect) for a while, leaving a 2-4 meter wide, 160 meter long and up to 160 meter deep trench. I did something with Limited Telekinesis in area with the Affects Porous adder, and its a bit better than the above, but I'm still not entirely thrilled with it. Thoughs and suggestions?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I believe Warp9 gave a quote from the 1e rulesbook on the subject upthread. Past that, just what proof would you like? Since short of getting George McDonald to post in this thread, it doesn't sound like you'd find anything proof, you'll excuse me if I find I don't care much about your disbelief.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I've never run into the problem personally in my life, as I'm very fussy with whom I play. On the other hand, I've seen enough of GMs complaining about what struck me as perfectly legitimate attempts by players to get a little more control of their gaming experience that I have no reason to believe this is a meme that's serving people well on the whole. Its just what they're used to. And that's the common view, but as I said, not one I share, and not one I think most people would have if this hobby hadn't started with a basically top-down paradigm.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I was, however, using the generic "you" in that sentence. Again, I apologize if it appeared more specific and personal than it was intended. I certainly endevor not to without far more information than I have at hand. At most you could say (and I think if that sort of thing bothers you you have some justice in your view) that since I think most such people haven't really thought it through thoroughly, or have been so influenced that it colors their view excessively, and you're in the included class, that this means I think most likely that's the case. But I still see a difference between that and bringing it to personalities. If you don't, well, that's as it is. I don't recall my carefully posting a general post to the thread using someone by name and disparaging them. Do I need to quote the post where someone else did? You'll note that's the only one I've objected to here, as it was a baldfaced slam at me that did not seem to even have anything to do with the actual discussion at hand. If someone wants to attack my opinion, and even ascribe possible causes to it, that seems a different beast than going out of their way to attack me. Again, if the distinction isn't meaningful to you, it isn't.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement As Warp9 quotes, it certainly was in intent, and the weapons and DEF values were derived with that assumption. As you correctly note, real damage, especially to living things, is far too complicated for that to tell the whole story or even most of it, but that doesn't change that intent and how it works in regard to inanimate objects (where energy applied gets much closer to the only meaningful metric, though even there structural issues of the target are a factor).

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Well, they aren't always on the same wavelength; that's rather the point. What everyone wants out of the game varies somewhat. What I don't see is why the guy sitting with the GM screen should be the total authority on how that's resolved, or even necessarily the major authority. In the end he doesn't have to run anything he doesn't want to, but that doesn't tell me he needs nearly the degree of power the hobby assumes to get an acceptable result, and I think in the end that assumption does a fair bit of harm. Respect and power aren't the same thing (and honestly, I've seen campaigns where I'm not sure I'd say the GM was even doing that much more work than the players; certainly not more than the extra enjoyment he's getting).

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement As I said, if we didn't have a set of built in benchmarks in terms of weapon damage values and DEF values, it'd be less of an issue, but we do; as long as that's the case that progressive damage is built into the functional game and to ignore them in the context of this sort of discussion is simply nonsensical.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Yes, but to not acknowledge that intent ignores the real problems that decision caused, especially in the context of the benchmarkes that were used to derive things like weapons damage. There were reasons to do it; a non-progressive damage system is almost certainly a non-starter for a superhero game, which is, after all, Hero System's root design. But there's a price for it, too, and it creates a lot of ripple effects too, and often those don't serve the system when its being used for something less stylized.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement As I said, its as close to the metric as you're going to get; it fails less than any other single metric. Actually, the original designers _did_ use the 2x Energy=+1 DC assumption, if you're going to bring that up, because they said so on several occasions. The size of the hole per se, is not an indication of the damage it does. That's just making my point, actually. No, but it was the original basis for the rough assumptions, and since those numbers haven't changed, whether Steve considers that the primary basis, its still all over the system, since those benchmarks haven't changed appreciably with 5th Editions.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement The damage system has been based on that form day one, and while not explict, is pretty obvious all over the weapons damage tables; otherwise the relationship between handguns and rifles make no sense. Its as close to a single metric as you're going to get, and if the metric fails, its on the opposite side; two half energy attacks are _less_ likely to do damage to something in reality (all other things being equal) than one of twice the energy (this doesn't mean that twice the energy does twice the damage in all cases, but threshold issues are even more pronounced in reality in some ways than they are in the game). In either case, treating two half energy attacks as doing _more_ damage (barring hit locational effects) is almost always senseless; the cases where it makes sense only occur in special circumstances.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Well, on its simplest grounds, damage to creatures/objects/barriers and so on is always a pretty high order abstraction, because in reality it turns on a lot of things involving what "damage" means, and the structure and material of the objects. Damaging a living thing is not the same as damaging a machine is not the same thing as damaging a non-functional object, and what translates into damage turns on issues such as the hardness, sharpness, power behind and other issues on the offensive end, and the hardness, brittleness, structural consistency and other issue of the target. In the end, that means that the damage system for the most part tries to deal with the biggest, coarsest parts of the process, and hope that some of the rest of it gets paved over in the randomness inherent in damage dice. If the system is properly designed, this will work with most of the common cases, as it does in Hero. But there are _always_ going to be corner cases, and I don't think in practice that a human-administered system can eliminate all the corner cases (except my making the process so abstract as to make resolution almost meaningless or so general to be really unsatisfying for many people). Hero has to deal with another issue, which is that geometric progressive damage really never works right with an accumulated damage model. It just can't, because its mixing an additive with a progressive function; a 3 DC attack twice does more damage than a 4 DC attack (defense threshold issues confuse this, but don't really eliminate the problem) even though the 4 DC attack is theoretically twice as powerful. The first part of this problem, as I say, can't be handled at all, and fixing the latter would require a radical reworking of the system to deal with it (and isn't unique to Hero; the problem was even more start with the old DC Heroes/Blood of Heroes system).

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement How those characters interact with the world is at least as much an issue for them as the characters themselves, and that's exactly the sort of thing that is classically GM-only in terms of his dominance over rules issues. Obviously this isn't tidy; rules say something about the world general too, so there's cases that are going to be problematic. But to act like this is an issue where only the GM has a stake, and somehow his is intrinsically greater, doesn't describe the situation to me at all, and that that's assumed is an artifact of the way GMs were treated early on in the hobby. Only in degree, I suspect. Let me give you a couple of examples. In the upcoming FH campaign I'm running, when I was deciding on the campaign, I went though a rather complicated selection process based heavily on player input. In the end, I didn't end up with the campaign I'd have most liked to run, because it wasn't the campaign they'd most like to play. That doesn't mean its one I won't find interesting to run (things that flat out weren't interesting to me, because I didn't put things I just wasn't flat out willing to run up on the table. But in the end, the players had at least as much input as I did on it. This included pretty extensive discussions of tone, character power, and so on. Now, I'm not going to say most groups need to go into the detail and complexity of the selection process I used; that's an artifact of specific traits of my gaming group (though I think there are a lot of potentially conflicted assumptions that go on in a lot of gaming groups that would be better served by more discussion, but that's not a direct issue of GM power but communication; the issues are somewhat orthogonal to each other). Another example is that I did an initial set of houserules for the campaign. I also told people that once they looked them over, if four of the six of them didn't like a rule and told me to change it, I'd change it. They understand what the campaign is about and its intended tone. They understand what I like as much or more than the inverse. They understand that a game I don't like likely won't go well or last long. So if something really is enough of an issue that 2/3rds the group wants it changed enough to vote for it, why should I be the immovable post in the process just because I run the game? Is where I'm coming from here any clearer?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I don't see most of you as being uncivil at all. I reacted to one specific post that was directly dismissive of me in specific rather than of one of my attitudes. If that distinction doesn't seem important to you, it doesn't, but its the classic definition of the difference between taking things to personalities to me. If the terminology annoys you, I genuinely apologize for that. Most of the time I attempt to avoid semantically loaded terms when I see another one that describes what's going on accurately, but what would that be here? "Bypassing the rules?" "Disregarding the rules?" Would either of those suit you better? I haven't insisted that. I'm willing to bet some people who make this argument haven't, and I strongly suspect that's the majority of people, but I'd never think to say so about any individual poster who makes such a statement, because the simple fact is that I don't know anyone here well enough to know.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement On the fly, not many. Usually that two sets of subrules don't seem to be working together in the manner not intended. _Changing_ rules is a different story. A permanent change in rules can be done for all kinds of reasons serving different purposes, and as long as everyone knows its been done and is at least moderately onboard, that's fine. Ignoring a rule is one-off event though, and the justifications for doing it are very limited as far as I'm concerned. If I actually thought most cases of ignoring rules really did that for the majority of participants, I'd probably agree that's a good principal.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement To be dead honest, I'd argue that part of that is probably a simple case of your expectations from having developed in the hobby as it is. I don't mean offense, but I think a lot of this is expectations and inertia rather than what people really want.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I don't think there's a thing wrong with presenting either as the case, if that's one's opinion. I do think its inappropriate to get offended when there's disagreement though, and take one as a given while writing off the other. The truth is that different approaches here serve different people better, and as long as you don't demonize people with the opposite view, its all good. Unfortunately I think demonizing people who are serious about rules is all too common in this hobby, and as such, I'm going to continue defending that view whenever it comes up.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement