Paragon

Re: character balance in supers games Yeah, but that maximum damage was rarely relevant for the others in the first place, so I don't see it as mattering much for the balance issue; and since I didn't weigh in the extra two DC from his Offensive Strike there, his average damage-to-target was as good or better. In practice, it didn't seem like the martial artists were suffering.

Re: Fighting against more speed I think there's a bit of a difference between defining a time scale in general and varying them just on the size of the engangement, though; it doesn't do much to answer the question of why the PCs can act quickly one time but not the other. That's what makes it arbitrary.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Since I consider this a universal problem (its just a question of degree) I don't find that much of an answer, honestly. As I said, I trust the intentions of a GM or I don't play. But I don't trust the judgment of any GM absolutely, and nothing I've ever seen in the hobby tells me I should.

Re: Fighting against more speed That's pretty much fundamentally arbitrary, though (though its a common solution, and I think the one the Fantasy Hero mass battles rules use). Its sufficiently pronounced there it can even be noticeable in firefights; its very hard for a GURPS gun combat to take longer than 4-12 seconds, even in personal level exchanges.

Re: character balance in supers games Movement might well have been a flaw in the one I used (sometimes I thought so, sometimes not) but I actually did think it did a competent job with martial arts damage and the like (and I personally thought Haymakers managed themselves since everyone could use them and had the same problems--if anything 5e's flat damage add Haymakers are better there).

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I agree completely. One of the functions a rules set does is to provide the players an interface into a game world; and the truth is, that interface is never going to match their real world experiences perfectly, even in cases where the real world is something they know about. (Just to be clear, I mean in areas where they have experience; a lot of people's knowledge of specific areas of life is lacking or formed by things they see in media.) In addition, there may well be genre or style based things that don't match reality at all. Yet people need to be able to run characters who have some understanding of their world, in some cases a far better understanding than the player does. The only way to be able to even halfway consistently do this is when there's a set of rules in play that are visible to the players, so that even if they don't match the player's concept of reality, he can run his characters effectively. The more sketchy the rules are, the harder this is, since few players are able to read the mind of the GM. (There _is_ a downside to this; when a given character is doing something they aren't familiar with, the player may know too _much_ about how things will likely resolve, but on the whole, I think its a far lesser sin to have characters who are overcompetent in judging areas outside their expertise than characters who are undercompetent in judging areas within it).

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement I used to buy that too, but I don't any more. GMs for the most part do the work they do because they like to GM. And its entirely possible if they don't want to do some of it to offload it on some of the players. And while _individual_ players may cause more problems than GMs (because they're less prone to seeing the big picture), I think GMs cause more problems than the group _as a whole_ does, so I think giving them a collective tool to restrain his excesses is, on the whole, good. Its a nice theory that the GM and players are a team, but the flat out reality is that in the majority of cases there are conflicts of interest on some levels involved, and some method other than "the GM wins" needs to be used for that. I've seen far worse problems when there weren't solid rules as the basis of discussion than when they were. Otherwise, it all comes down to what everyone's personal perceptions of the situation are, and that's not a jot better than arguing rules--far worse, in fact.

Re: Fighting against more speed If there's any problem with the timing in Hero (and this is much pronounced in GURPS, so its not something Hero is alone in) its that its pace of resolution is, in some circumstances, too fast. You particularly see this in battle situations, where there's no real reason to take the relatively long pauses that happen in real battles while people reassess, gather their nerves, and so on. A minute long battle is forever in Hero, but you certainly see their equivalent or longer in the real world. Pretty much all Hero fights translate into really short duration rapid firefights, which is dramatically interesting but creates some problems when you start to get to the interface between normal combats and military actions.

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Sometimes the player group as a set. While typically better than an individual player (though not always), GMs are individual and as such prone to tunnel vision like everyone else. Its my personal opinion that virtually from its start, the RPG hobby has vested too much assumption of quasi-infallibility in GM judgement, when in fact, GMs are just about as often the source of problems as players are.

Re: Fighting against more speed I'd say many of the timing games Hero produces because of the Speed chart feel far _more_ realistic than what occurs in most initiative systems; I certainly know that back when I was fencing and doing martial arts they definitely had the equivelents.

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition? Whereas I'm quite comfortable extrapolating from the similar in regard to evaluating my tastes, and will not hesitate to do so. I think we're all clear on our positions now.

Re: character balance in supers games While there's certainly an argument that eyeballing can be better than any systemic approach, I personally prefer the latter as it tends to cause less social strife. The last time I ran an actual Champions campaign, I'd constructed a pretty elaborate Rule of X that seemed to handle 95% of the cases without needing my intervention, and that's more than sufficient to be useful from my POV.

Re: Earthquake and Move Earth It seemed a bit overkill for the job, and has the problem its based on mass and strength. If DEX suppress would actually cause them to fall, that'd almost work, but its way too expensive. I actually did think of something like that, but I wasn't sure how to buy it, and I couldn't remember off the top of my head if there was a resistance roll of some kind (which there should be). Well, I figured damage from walls falling on people could be handled just by the walls themselves at need (though KA seems excessive, honestly).

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition?

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition?

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Ah, but I think they _can_ limit the impact of bad gamesmasters. That's because when it comes down to it, whatever dim thing a GM does with a sophisticated rules set, the players have some sense of the range of results (and in fact, some sense of how dim he can be while still staying within the rules). This doesn't prevent abuse of process of course, but since my view is that GMs who are simply being stubborn and not too smart are a far larger group than the actively malign, I think that's still pretty valuable. I think, however, as I've mentioned here, that there's a big difference between distrust of people's motives and of their judgment. Playing with someone who's motives you don't trust is simply masochistic for the most part. Playing with someone who's judgment you don't trust is, to me, a fact of life, because almost all GMs have bad judgment from time to time. I think playing in such a fashion that you reserve the right to limit the impact of the latter is neither unreasonable nor antisocial; its simply saying that errors are going to happen, and you can't assume the GM will always be the best person to fix them.

Re: Earthquake and Move Earth And rock and more "permanent" features are really what this is all about. My understanding always was that the Body increased per each doubling of volume, so it'd be considerably more than that. Of course with cumulative transforms, all that really effects is how long it takes, which is fine.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement Fair enough. Well, it sort of did because your example was partly based on them assuming the GM would not use the rules in a straightforward (and simpleminded and dim) fashion; I was simply noting that with a detailed rules set, the simple solution there is to do just that as a default assumption, and then be pleased when he doesn't. At least at the point when the GM is simpleminded about it, you have the body of the rules to use as an argument point if you need one to get what you want done.

Re: Trusting Systems vs trusting GM Judgement

Re: Earthquake and Move Earth The Earthquake involved is of a really short duration; "Earthshake" might be a more appropriate name. I wouldn't think you could, for example, relocate a small hill with Change Environment. I thought about Transform, but wasn't sure what to base the necessary success number on.

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition?

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition? As noted, I don't expect my input on this matter to have any impact. It doesn't change my feelings about it, but there's no connection between the two; my ability to express why I have a problem with it, and my having a problem with it have no relationship. That's why in the latter parts of the Characteristics thread I've limited my comments to appropriate costs of characterstics with or without decoupling, rather than about the decoupling itself; I think feelings about the latter are such a vast gulf that there's literally no point in arguing about them.

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition? Though not to the same extent, M&M's disconnect of Dexterity from combat capability comes to immediate mind. The problem is that it doesn't work for me on a sufficiently basic grounds that I don't think its possible to explain why; certainly playing it won't change that, because as I said, its a fundamental conceptual level. It simply disconnects things I think should be connected. Let me give a broad analogy: you could have a system where your primary unarmed damage bonus was based on Appearance. In the end, it wouldn't matter how much or little this really mattered in play, the basic idea would put me off. The same is true here. I don't actually expect Steve to change his position on this, so that's pretty much a nonstarter. I don't actually expect anyone who doesn't have a problem with this from the outset to have their mind changed, because I think this is a fundamental enough issue that it either bothers you or it doesn't.

Re: Do you have any "deal breakers" when it comes 6th edition?