Christougher

Re: Not Quite another Killing Attack Thread

Prestidigitator - Reasonable idea, but I'm looking for something that applies while they're conscious too. See Sean Waters' idea.

Greywind - It applies equally well to large energy blasts too.

Pinecone and Ghost-Angel - All that does is increase the body taken - along with a corresponding increase in stun. I'm happy with the current defense vs stun ratio; it's the defense to body ratio I dislike. And I want to allow bulletproof, if they pay for it.

Sean Waters - Reasonable, but that has the same effect on bricks as it does on lighter defended characters. Plus it's additional math, which my idea does too. :/

Hugh Neilson - I expect a bit of increase, but not much, I think Healing and Regen will increase some too. As for Killing Attacks, I don't believe they've been reduced in value, I believe they've been properly (re?)defined as a Killing Attack, not an Occassional Knockout Attack.

I don't necessarily want supers to take BODY all the time, but I want them to feel the risk of that possibility. Given the average DC to defense ratio, someone with 'average' defenses almost never has to worry about it.

Re: Champions Jargon

FORD - An NPC designed to perform an action (such as gasping out important information) and then immediately expire. Found on Road, Dead.

Toon - A character that exhibited cartoonlike tendencies, either in construction or behavior.

Eggshell with a Hammer - variant of the glass cannon. Remember, if you want to swing the hammer, you have to protect the eggshell.

Hardboiled Egg - only heard it once, but the opposite of the preceding - a brick whose defense far outstripped his attack.

The reference to a player's stable of characters often earned its own name, not often complimentary. My own was Foster Farms, the dozen eggshells...

One thing I've noticed in superhero games is the difficulty in doing BODY damage. A high strength prick punching a lightly defended character (say 60 STR vs 15 PD) routinely knocks them unconscious without harm. Some people will argue that's a feature of the system and/or the genre. Fine, but take that argument elsewhere, I want a "grittier" feel game where serious harm is a possibility. These are my ideas on how to accomplish that goal, I'm looking for comments and suggestions.

First, all defenses are halved vs the BODY of an attack. The previous 15 PD stops 8 BODY and 15 stun, resulting in similar unconsciousness but taking 4 BODY. Inanimate objects, Entangles and Force Walls do not suffer this halved BODY defense.

Defenses with the Hardened(+1/4) advantage offer full body protection. I expect this will lead to an increase in the purchase of Hardened defenses, especially for lower-defense characters. Armor Piercing is not significantly affected by small amounts of Hardened defense, so it stays a +1/2 Advantage. Penetrating attacks can be blocked completely by the same Hardened defense, so it is lowered to a +1/4 advantage.

Killing attacks are fixed at x2 Stun multiple. High DC Killing attacks become just that - KILLING. This means that 24 Resistant PD is effectively bulletproof, while 12 Resistant Hardened lets some stun through, but no body.

Re: What's in a Name?

Leann Hunter thought she had it all, a good life and a loving husband, or so she thought. Garth was a dark sorcerer, and some of his rituals involved acts that counted as cheating on his wife. When Leann discovered him in the midst of one of these rituals, her mind snapped. She grabbed the green dagger at the center of the ritual and stabbed her husband repeatedly with it, capturing his soul within the blade. His "assistants" soon joined him there.

The jade dagger is now a symbol of her psychosis. Without the blade, she is believes her husband is still alive, lost somewhere and she misses him terribly. With the blade, this Jaded Soul seeks to collect enough souls within the blade to be able to resurrect Garth.

Next entry: Flux

Re: Odd Elemental Controls

Second one is right: EC Pool cost can not exceed half the cost of the smallest power' date=' so you have to round halves down on 'EC pool' cost.[/quote']

 

Thanks. That's the way I've always been doing it, for some reason it just occurred to me to question it.

I posted this on the 5E Questions thread:

Don't have Revised, so apologies if this is covered explicitly there.

And the answer was:

See 5ER 313.

Since it seems he didn't read that first sentence, can someone with 5ER answer this question?

Both elemental control examples in 5th used 50 AP or higher powers. What happens when it's an odd costing power, resulting in a half point somewhere?

Is it:

23 EC: Flame On!

22 a) Force Field 16 PD/20 ED @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

22 Flight 18" @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

22 c) Ranged Killing Attack 3d6

or:

22 EC: Flame On!

23 a) Force Field 16 PD/20 ED @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

23 Flight 18" @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

23 c) Ranged Killing Attack 3d6

or something else? Yes, the point difference is minimal, but which is the most correct?

Don't have Revised, so apologies if this is covered explicitly there.

Both elemental control examples in 5th used 50 AP or higher powers. What happens when it's an odd costing power, resulting in a half point somewhere?

Is it:

23 EC: Flame On!

22 a) Force Field 16 PD/20 ED @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

22 Flight 18" @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

22 c) Ranged Killing Attack 3d6

or:

22 EC: Flame On!

23 a) Force Field 16 PD/20 ED @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

23 Flight 18" @ 1/2 END(+1/4)

23 c) Ranged Killing Attack 3d6

or something else? Yes, the point difference is minimal, but which is the most correct?

Re: Original Supervillain Groups -- Get Creative!

Arachnaphobia - Still a work in progress.

Dr. Spider - Magician who possesses a Spider Amulet that provides telekinetic arms to hold components and foci for his spells. Nominal team leader.

Black Widow - Rich debutante mutant telepath, enjoys using her powers to make opponents stab each other in the back. Only four limbs, but wears a black costume with a red hourglass on her stomach.

Tarantula - The brick. Human sized spider thing who's either one of the Dr's experiments or from another dimension. Thinks pinkskins are tasty, and often has to be forcefully controlled by Black Widow.

Fang - Teleporting martial artist, his signature is a katar - or rather several of them tuned to his opponents weaknesses when possible (VSFX HKA).

Arachnos - Wears a harness of eight extendable tentacles ending in blades. Might be combined with Fang into a single character depending on points.

Spinner - Newest recruit to the team, highschool cheerleader who emits a sticky substance from her fingers. Can store this up and expel it as powerful entangles.

Re: Martial Arts and /Style/

I think I see where your comming from...But....some forms of Aikido Do have stikes' date=' some forms of Kung-fu Do have grabs...etc......for me "style" is about ...say you've got two knife fighters...No 1 uses shifty deceptive arm and hand moves and shifts the knife from hand to hand...No 2 reverses his grip and uses the knife as an extension of his usual fightingmethod...Very differant "styles" maybe identical mechanics...[/quote']

 

Those writeups were just my perceptions - I'm not going to argue that they're perfect or even half right. Show me your styles. Take away everything from your martial arts style and show me what the core is, how and why the style is what it is.

 

Certainly roleplaying can make some difference, but when the Wrestler fought the Bandarian Kickboxer, one Grab and the fight was essentially over. That's what I want. Fighting styles that look and ACT different in combat. A speedster will be more wary of an Aikido master than a Kung Fu master if he recognizes the difference. The brick who'll spar with a Wrestler but know it's table time against the Mongoose. Real differences in styles, not just different names for the same maneuvers.

 

 

Trebuchet, it's mostly thinking out loud, but it's making me re-examine all my MA characters. Why do they have the styles they do? What goal did they have in mind when they learned it? When I recognize a style, why do I recognize it? Can I deduce elements of an unknown style and formulate countering tactics?

Is the Style Disadvantage for martial arts really a disadvantage when

all your superpowered martial artists look and feel the same? One uses

capoeria, one aikido and two ninjitsu, but all have two strikes, Block

and Dodge, and one other maneuver. When I started having those

feelings, I started looking for ways to make different martial arts

styles /feel/ different. I reread descriptions of building Mongoose

Style and Bandarian Kickboxing, and found those two depicted how I

wanted martial arts to feel. Both styles had few maneuvers, but based

on the selection(or design), one was about speed and slipperyness, the

other brute strength and power.

The idea was sparked, to boil down different styles to focus on what

they did that others did not. A style would have exactly three

manuevers, plus one type it would never use*, and rules for increasing

by Damage Classes or levels, and where those levels were allocated.

*Why one type of maneuver it would never use if a style had only three?

Because the characters were given a total of 40 points to spend - they

could add another maneuver but not violate the style of the art. The

style definitions meant everyone knew the three maneuvers, and it

produced a series of distinctively different fights.

A few selected style before opening this up to the masses for comments.

Aikido: Throw, Dodge, Block; No Strikes, +DCV

Kung Fu: Killing Strike, Off.Strike, Block; No Grabs, +DCs

Wrestling: Grab, Escape, Reversal; No Strikes, +DCs

Capoeira: Def. Strike, Dodge, Martial Strike; No Blocks, +DCV

Bandarian Kickboxing: Killing Strike, Off. Strike, Nerve Strike; No

Dodges, +DCs

Hawk Style: Grab, Dodge, Fast Strike; No Blocks, +OCV

Mongoose Style: Grab, Crush, Dodge; No Blocks, +DCV

Overwhelm: Sacrifice Strike, Legsweep, Fast Strike; No Dodges, +OCV

Re: Which of Your House Rules should be System Rules?

Elemental Controls: An EC is supposed to be a reward for a tight concept/powerset. What's the downside? In my games, it's that you take disads equal to the EC base cost which are directly/obviously related to the EC. (EG: Werewolf EC = vulnerability to silver.) Currently, this is above and beyond the regular disads for a character.

Re: Which of Your House Rules should be System Rules?

Only seen one or two comments about the jump in skill rolls. For a 50 pt game, I set skill rolls as follows, and it's working out well:

0 points: 7- everyman

1 point: 9- familiarity

2 points: 11- skill

3 points: 9 +CHA/5 min 12

This applied to pretty much ALL skills, so 11- lockpicking wasn't an issue.

Re: Looking for Spidery names ... sort of.

Most of the names of my spider themed team have been taken. The only one I'd have left to add would be Fang, the dagger/katar wielding martial artist.

Re: Entangle, Desolidification, and the Quest for Truth

Nowadays if I play any deck-building games it's Steve Jackson's Illuminati: New World Order' date=' and I've been thinking of trying out [i']Munchkin[/i] and it's spinoffs.

Munchkin's pretty good. Ask Blackjack, he'll say the same.

Re: Str Minimum For Armor

You could also do as Old Man suggested and use the Encumbrance Table but using Casual STR instead....

Damn, beat me to the suggestion. The time(s) I considered this, basing armor STR mins on casual STR seemed the best effect. They had to pay END once per turn for the STR used (pretty much the same as the REC penalty). Higher encumbrance meant paying the END per phase. Imposed additional DEX penalties when less than STR min. I also tinkered with a modified hit location chart so that hit locations covered exactly equaled armor weights and defenses. Might have to go find those ideas...

Re: Starship Design

Actually, as it says in the writeup, the hull of my fictional ship is 20 cm thick, or nearly 8 inches. That's considerably thicker than the hull on modern warships and even deep sea submersibles even were I not using a rubber science hull material. My starship also includes Armor and a fairly substantial Force Field. And of course my ship is deliberately not intended as a warship but as a light research vehicle. It's not even lightly armed.

 

I'm not trying to sound defensive about my ship here (my starship was designed for a Silver Age superhero mileau and is not necessarily realistic enough for a Star Hero game); I'm just pointing out that in real life the hull of a starship does not necessarily need to be thick unless it's a warship. Depending on the tech level, armor can be a quarter of the ship's total mass (Honor Harrington) or a small fraction (Star Trek).

 

Chris, you're quite welcome to borrow my TUV. Just remind me and I'll give it to Jeff.

As a MoO game, yeah, they're all pretty much warships, even the unarmed ones. As for hull widths, I didn't know they were that thin... Preconceived notions and all. No need to feel defensive, not trying to be offensive.

Very generous of you to offer the book, I'll have to take advantage of it at some point. Speaking of seeing Jeff, what's the latest word on the Le Magister game?

Re: Starship Design

The basic rule form 5Er is that interior size is half of the total size of the ship. So about 50% of the ship goes toward engines' date=' weapons, walls, and other equipment.[/quote']

 

Yeah, but I kinda wanna play around with that some - have the option for overgrown engines at the expense of weapons, etcetera. Thanks go out to you, Aroooo (did I get the right number of o's?) and everyone else.

Re: Starship Design

Heh, I was gonna start a thread like this myself...

Confusion about dimensions aside, seeing Trebuchet's ship (cool) raises one nitpick / question about size and space. Specifically, the outer hull is paper-thin. Superhero level materials aside, how does / should outside dimensions translate to the inner dimensions? When you get up to the 200 AP size starships, is that size for a single deck, meaning I need to divide it up for multiple decks? If not, how many decks are free? Is there a guide to crew numbers per size class? What about AP-to-hexsize ratio for weapons / equipment? Santa wasn't nice enough to give me TUV or Star Hero, so if the answers are in there I'll have to find a copy.

I'm planning a Master of Orion game, limiting 'size' by AP total, but that makes handling miniaturization a bit tricky; it should be an advantage to take less space, but that means fewer devices, not more. And following strict advantage / limitations, an immobile, OCV 0 keel mount costs fewer AP than a 360 degree point defense turret.

I know that several people have made versions of their favorite Champs PCs in the online game City of Heroes. Has anyone tried converting a COH character back to Champions?

Re: Non-combat Magic items with plot hooks

Perhaps not completely noncombat, but the magic item I'm most proud of for 'plot hooks':

Heart: This is a short, double edged dagger. The crossguard is in the shape of a heart, red interior and outlined in gold. A similar heart caps the pommel.

Powers: +8 EGO; Mind Link: One specific person: The wielder's 'one true love'.

Re: Balance Rating

My (SPD + DC) <= 20 formula is based on the same basic concept' date=' and has proven to be a fairly decent predictor of combat effectiveness in our campaign. Plus it has the merit of simplicity. [/quote']

 

It fills those goals, I won't argue that. I just can't bypass the thought that CV ought to be included. Setting aside the "but good players won't..." argument, since it theoretically overrides the need for any kind of rating, there's a world of difference between two PCs with the same value, if one has a max OCV of 6, and the other 14.

 

The one session I sat in on, there was discussion about Sidestep needing another OCV or two. A really, really detailed benchmark might have showed that, but one that detailed is probably too cumbersome to use. The only real use for these types of ratings is to show when a character is too far out of line with the rest, either high or low.

Re: Balance Rating

The trouble with all of these ratings (and I'm not picking on Christougher... most of these ratings make the same mistake, including ones I used to tinker with) is that they measure unequal things as though they were equal.

 

< snippage >

 

I'm not saying that formulas can never provide interesting or useful info. I'm just saying that they should be taken with a grain of salt, and comparisons that seem clear and logical on the surface may not hold up under closer scrutiny.

Agreed, it's not perfect (no rating ever is), but it was intended to cover the major points of variance, and be fast and simple to compute. In the group where the formula was written, SPD really was equal /if CV and DCs are lowered to compensate/: A speed 10 speedster doing 6d6 with a 10 OCV was roughly equal to the spd 4 blaster who throws 14 DCs with an 8 OCV.

Re: Balance Rating

Let's see if I can remember or recreate the one I came up with..

OCV + DCs + SPD = Offense

DCV + DEF/2 + Stun/5 = Defense

I think I had something for movement/flexibility, but that covers the basics. DEF is average of PD and ED, while Damage Reduction multiplied the Stun number. Gives a HERO normal(all 10s) a rating of 15, and for our games, every 50 XP usually amounted to +5 to the rating.

Re: An EB by any other name...

Of course' date=' none of the proposed names for Entangle reflect he ability to make barriers with it.[/quote']

 

Combining the barrier aspect of Entangle with Force Wall is a very common suggestion for change/argument. Call it Barrier, give it adders or advantages for increased shape control, it becomes the power to create physical objects.

 

I like the suggestion of Immobilize; removing the barrier aspect leads to interesting thoughts. I think the DEF+Body mechanic should probably change(not sure to what), but that takes away the chance for someone else to free the target.

Re: An EB by any other name...

Repeating myself from the 'what would you drop' thread. Succor needs to die, Boost is a much better name.