Rapier

Re: Would you play a game with pre-generated characters? For me, you are basically asking (and I'll make a stretch with my analogy this time) Emeril (or one of the Iron Chefs, perhaps) to eat some Stouffer's frozen meals. Rather high opinion of myself, neh? For a short term deal (like a convention) I would have no problems with pregens. But I tend to run into a couple of main sticking points for most pregens. 1) Build theory is very different for each person. How a GM designs a character may not be how you would like to play the character. 2) I'm a control freak. But that is not to say that it's impossible. My current character was pseudo-pregen. I built a basic character and the GM added my super powers. I was then allowed to tweak those powers so they fit my vision of the character and my playstyle. I also believe that I'm kind of an odd man out in this case. I believe most people would have no problems with pregens. I think that pregens are even a good idea in many cases. Just, as a rule, not for me!

Re: the meter and the hex (stretching) Or possibly two 5m Stretching Powers, unified.

Re: the meter and the hex (stretching) The character is going to need 10m of Stretching, at the minimum. If only one arm is stretchable, then the character would need 16m (6 forward, 6 back to starting position and then 4 behind). Assuming two arms are stretchable than one arm will stretch 6m forward and one arm will stretch 4m behind. 6m + 4m = 10m.

Howdy do! A character has the power: 40: Nuke: Blast 6d6, Area Of Effect (20m Radius; +1) (60 Active Points); No Range (-1/2) The character is tired of taking damage from his own power. So he wants to purchase a Hole in the Middle Single Power Naked Advantage for his Nuke. However, he's just learning so it's difficult. I want to add x2 END, Requires Roll to it. But I'm having a problem figuring out how much the Base Cost of the NA will be. In my mind, Hole in the Middle requires AoE (otherwise there is no need for the Hole) which means the NA would be based off the 60 Active Cost. But I could see it possible that the Base Cost could still be the Active Cost of the Blast (40 Active Cost). Could you provide some direction? Thanks!

Re: Bad character design or broken rules ?

Re: Naked Power Advantages I was not sure about 2. So when all else failed I loaded HD and there didn't appear to be any Martial Arts listed in the Powers tab. Since Martial Arts aren't listed in the Powers tab (although Skills, Perks, Talents and Characteristics are) I am assuming that they would be illegal, since HD is built around the rules as intended. 3 is what is called a Naked Advantage. 6E1, p314. Oh, and UMA is the old 5E book, Hero System Martial Arts which if not already will be coming out shortly, is the 6E equivalent.

Re: What do you really think of Champions Online?

Re: What do you really think of Champions Online?

Re: Naked Power Advantages 1) You cannot simply apply a Naked Advantage to your STR and have it apply to your maneuver (UMA, p104). 2) I believe purchasing a Martial Maneuver in a Framework is patently illegal. 3) Almost, see below. 4) Nah, if you want Martial Arts buy Martial Arts. [For reference, UMA p 104 and 105] You calculate the cost of the NA just like you would any other power. The Base Cost of the maneuver (in this case) is 40 (for Strike maneuvers, the base cost is the same as if the DCs of STR were purchased outright, so in this case 8d6 = 40pts) plus modifiers based upon elements (according to the table on p105), in this case +2 DCV = 10 points. So the total Base Cost for a Martial Strike of 8d6 is (40 + 10) 50 points. You have to purchase the NA for each maneuver (so a Single Power Naked Advantage): (Base Cost * (1 + Advantages) - Base Cost) Base Cost + (Base Cost * Advantages) - Base Cost Base Cost * Advantages 50 * .25 12.5 ~ 12 pts. The cost of adding AoE 2m (+.25) to an 8d6 Martial Strike is 12 pts.

Re: Naked Power Advantages Take a look at this (http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/78158-Single-Power-Naked-Advantages?p=1975673#post1975673). I've broken down the math into basic algebra with variable names. See if this doesn't clear things up.

Re: "Neat" Pictures Eh. I missed RPN entirely. I ran into it a time or two and was like 'meh.' It may have been a few keystrokes less (especially on longer equations), but it wasn't worth the bother of trying to get used to it, especially since it had already by that point started to become a little rare. Besides that, we were required to have a graphing calculator and those used pretty normal notation, much like you would write it out longhand. Shrug.

Re: Boomerang Indirect, naturally. x2 KB (trip). Explode-erangs (more appropriately named BOOM!erangs) Gas-erang NNDs Slow-erangs (SPD Drain) KO Gas-erangs (Mental Blast) Acid-erang (Drain/Suppress DEF) Flash-erang (both sight and sound, Flash-Bang-erang) Bee-erang (Summon Swarm of Bees) Smoke-erang (Darkness) I'm running dry now.

Re: Impact of Figured Characteristics Gymnast girl that's never thrown a punch! Extra near-sighted kung fu master! A pirate! (high dex for running around a heaving ship and no depth perception because of the EYE PATCH! HA!) A pacifist! (i could hit you, but I just can't bring myself to land a punch...i mean, i KEEP MISSING!) HA! I like this game!

Re: Impact of Figured Characteristics Some super sciencey poindexter who is very clumsy but has a nice targetting computer. A character who will frequently trip over things and can't seem to avoid walking into walls, but has fantastic hand-eye coordination. A normal person who has spent the past 20 years practicing with various weapons, and has recently suffered a tragic accident that has rendered him lame. A retired superhero while, despite his ailing health (eg MS or some other gross muscular/nerve degenerative disease) is still able to attack with accuracy...for now. The spirit of a dead martial artist inhabiting the body of a woman who died last week. His skills are undiminished but he's still getting used to this body. Off the top of my head!

Re: Impact of Figured Characteristics But I want to lower my END. I don't need it. Now what? Maybe I want to sell off all my ED so that I can replace it with Resistant Protection. Can I do that? It is very easy to quickly get bogged down in campaign requirements that you end up with half a novel. I'm finding that we are better off to just let them loose and see what turns up. I was, at first, shocked, dismayed and appalled to lose my precious Figured Characteristics. You might as well suggest that Geddy Lee switch to the ukulele as his instrument of choic! But then I began to play with it and look at it and OMG. The versatility!! If I want to have a character with high CON and high END I just give him both. But I don't have to. I can give him a tiny END, little STUN, minor ED, no PD and be perfectly happy (well, at least until this poor excuse for a hero gets into his first combat! 8P). It's extremely liberating and leads to some truly fantastic builds that are highly effective and very fun to play. I guess a ukulele isn't that bad after all! At the very most, a simple statement of 'characters with DEXs of 13 - 17, routinely have OCVs/DCVs of 5' is more than sufficient. It should be nothing more than the chart that lists 'Superhuman Intelligence' ranges from 20 - 25.

Re: Bad character design or broken rules ? Ok, some of this we can fix real quick. Hero has a lot of granularity. Which, you've noticed. For example, let's take Survival. When you look at Survival there are a LOT of options under there. If you select ALL those options Survival costs 16 pts!! So what do you do? Well, (and I'm not sure where this suggestion came from if it was in the book, in the APG, in the forums or what - can someone find me a reference or have a clue where I discovered this?) what you do is kind of use a 'skill tree' method. The base theory is that someone that has Wilderness Survival will have some clue about how to survive in the Arctic. They will have a better chance of surviving than someone without Survival at all. So you allow someone with Wilderness Survival to make Arctic Survival rolls at a small penalty. Hmmm. Well, what if the character doesn't necessarily have specific survival knowledge. Perhaps a general survival skill, not particular to any environment? You allow them to purchase Survival without any concentration. If the character wants to make a Wilderness Survival roll they use their Survival skill (at a small penalty). So instead of having to pay 16 pts for SURVIVAL the character can pay only 3 pts for Survival (and probably increase the score a couple of points to offset the penalties that will occur). You can do this with a number of skills (eg Gambling, Forgery). That should save you some points right off the bat. Secondly, it is not necessary to buy every skill up to fantastic levels. You can simply purchase the character some Skill Levels that apply to all skills. These are a bit expensive, but if the character has a lot of skills, the cost become very economical very quickly. The Universal Translator Talent would allow him to speak all languages (thus removing the need to purchase scads of language skills). Spending points on his 'action hero powers' may be expensive or it may not be. It depends quite a bit on how you've built him. Post a copy of him and we'll see if there isn't some tweaks we can make to bring his costs down some. Hero builds can be a bit difficult until you get into the swing of things. Lastly, it can be difficult to take a group of characters from another game and convert them directly to Hero and have the point totals match up. Different game systems apply powers or skills in different manners and it may just not be possible to have 'that exact same character.' It may, in the end, be impossible. But I imagine we can get pretty close!

Re: Impact of Figured Characteristics

Re: "Rolling a Critical" I use both critical hits and misses. I've got a progressive chart I use. If you crit, roll for severity/location and then bonus damage. I think max is +4 DCs.

Re: What do you really think of Champions Online?

Re: Placed shots effective?

Re: What do you really think of Champions Online?

Re: What do you really think of Champions Online? I was seriously considering purchasing a lifetime subscription. I had even saved and scrimped to get the cash to do so. Then I played the open-beta and not only did not purchase the lifetime, I cancelled my pre-order. - I wasn't fond of the animation. - The gameplay seemed difficult at time. I can't tell you how often I would have to make multiple attempts to lift a hunk of concrete off a bystander. - I frequently found myself unclear on mission objectives (which, I will admit was partly my fault, when i first started the game I was clicking things to see what did what and minimized the 'mission objectives' window, but also no where was the interface described well enough for me to know better) - The biggest problem for me was mission objective camping/griefing. I need to rescue this one guy for the mission so I'm standing there waiting for him to spawn. He spawns, and some jerk runs in and grabs him while I'm reading his text. This would happen multiple times so I would either need to ignore the story to rescue him or wait for an exteremly long frustrating time to complete the misison. Similarly this would happen with the loot found on the ground. - I found the crafting system confusing and unclear as to the expected purpose/result. - Having multiple instances of a map made it impossible to team. Even if you were on a particular instance, went into a door mission, when you exited we always ended up in a different instance. - As many options as the character creator had, there was almost too many options. I wanted to create a powered armour character and never could seem to find the right pieces. And most of the faces had a rather simian appearance, which I found very unpleasing. It's nice and fun to have 4000000000 different possible combinations, but at the same time I didn't necessarily want to spend 20 hours creating a costume. - The split between soloable and team necessary content was very spotty. Most of the mission I ran across were totally and completely soloable. Then all of the sudden WHAM here's a mission you simply cannot complete on your own. So you put up a team to complete that mission and the next missions are all soloable. The soloable missions were ludicrously boring for teams and did not scale up for the increased team size. - I found the populace to be filled with griefing, kill-stealing, pre-pubescent, power-mad, power-gaming, teabagging assholes that I had absolutely no desire to spend time with.

Re: Placed shots effective? About the only thing I can think of is that maybe trying to block or perhaps it's normal to have your arms and hands near your face when someone is aiming a gun at your head?

Re: Placed shots effective? Emphasis, mine. You cannot compare the Called Shots chart with anything and begin by discounting the main purposes in using Called Shots. Called shots are, by their very nature, intended to exploit a vulnerability in another character. The character has no leg armour, so you are targetting his legs. According to the chart, that may be a "suckers shot" but it bypasses his armour entirely and is, thus, EXTREMELY effective. It also has the benefit of possibly decreasing his movement and DEX making him easier to hit and less likely to escape. This is why Called Shots are not recommended for SuperHeroic games, where DEF is considered to be covering the entire body. Partial armour, like you would fine in a common heroic level game, is ripe for Called Shots. It should also be mentioned that allowing someone to buy enough levels to offset the penalties for Called Shots can be crazy effective. Edit: Oh, and to answer your Post Title, yes Placed Shots are very effective when used as they are intended.

Re: so is this broken? Hardly. You are reasoning backwards, towards effect. You could fill an MP with MultiForm into a giant spider, an Flash Grenade and a Summon Motorcycle with the understanding that you can't use them at the same time, but that doesn't make it a good build. The fact that you are dropping unrelated items in a power framework with the sole reasoning that 'it saves points' is highly suspect under the best of cases. FrameWorks are also gauged by their ability to be drained/supressed/aided/dispelled as a group. So casting a Dispel Only vs Wooden Objects would destory the club in the MP, but how does it effect the Sword? Similarly, how does a Rust spell effect a wooden club? 'Because they're weapons' is not a common SFX.