Rapier

Re: Plans for a 6E version of Ultimate Mentalist?

I know that a lot of the genre and Ultimate books are behind some of the other stuff. In the interim, the Ultimate Mentalist for 5E would do you in good stead. Looking through it, I don't think there is an awful lot that would change rules-wise.

Re: Killing Damage in 6e

Our current brick has a 30 STR and a 1d6 HKA (for 3d6 Total). I'm ok with it. Yes, he is getting a slightly better bang for the buck, but I don't think it's overpowering. If a player comes to me with a 60 STR and a 1pip HKA and wants 4d6+1k, you can bet he's going to get a boot to the head. In this case his 1d6k Claws are the pointy end and his STR is the oomph behind them.

I might not be as forgiving of a weapon with a focus.

I think it comes down to a judgment call, "is what the player is asking for overpowering?"

Re: Killing Damage in 6e

Hit Locations have an interesting effect in the game.

Last week some of the guards rolled pretty well (in one case even 12 BODY on a 2d6k) but the Location they hit dropped the damage back down pretty far (iirc, it was an arm shot and was 1/2 BODY). For the most part things were pretty even until I rolled 3 hits (with the 2d6k AF5), one of which was a 10 or 11 BODY shot to the head. After the three hits the brick was down to -12 STUN. That's not too bad when you consider there was a total of about 75 STUN done to him that phase.

I've always kind of liked Hit Locations. They give a much more realistic bend to the game.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game

My Hero group plays on Champion on Tuesday nights. We've lost a couple of people over the years so we are down to about 4. We've probably got room if someone wants to tag along one night. We start at about 8p CST and play for about 2 hours. PM me if you're interested.

Otherwise, the majority of my playtime is on Virtue, where I have a tendency to be red.

I've gotten superbusy lately and don't have as much time as I used to so don't play as often (and I played a lot when I first hurt my back, so I got a little burned out).

Re: Inventor skill clarification...

I can't add a whole lot to what everyone is saying. Mechanics and Electronics are about building/fixing the current level of readily available technology. Inventor is just that...inventing. It's creating new stuff.

My normal MO is to use the Mechanics/Electronics/etc roll as a modifier for the Inventor roll (since the inventing is the main action).

For example:

Roll Electronics.

The roll modifies the Inventor roll (so if you succeed by 2 your Inventor gets a +2, if you fail by 2 it gets a -2).

Roll Inventor.

I've got a couple of mages in my current Urban Fantasy/Monster Hunter game. One of them has PS: Mage and a Magic Power Skill (used for the RSR on his MP). These two powers could be used to develop new spells, but at a penalty until he picks up Inventor (renamed Spell Crafter in this instance).

Re: Damage Class, weapons and abilities

One thing to also keep in mind is that just because there is a Ranged Martial Maneuver that does +4 DCs doesn't mean that any of the characters have to take it or even that you have to allow it. What HM said about the SFX of Ranged Martial Arts is generally accepted.

There is nothing wrong with coming out front and saying "You can't take Offensive Shot." There are a couple of Maneuvers that are only +2DCs.

Re: Damage Class, weapons and abilities

It depends a lot on the campaign. In this case, you could regularly and normally be dishing out 10d6 of damage which could very easily eclipse everyone else.

I'd discuss it with your GM. He may lessen the bonus for the maneuver or disallow it entirely.

As a rule, I wouldn't allow a player to go over the cap that regularly without some kind of drawback.

Re: Vehicle Damage And Body

To add clarity, these are two ships from Silent Death.

The one is a very small single person fighter craft. It only has the one damage track (eg BODY score).

The other (I just did a quick scan for explanation so about an inch near the binding is cut off) is a large multi-man craft that has a different damage track for each facing.

The little symbols in the boxes mean different things (eg loss of movement rate, loss of armour, loss of weapons, critical hits).

I know that a lot of this is represented in Hero by the Partial Coverage limitations for armour, but I think that the current layout for the character sheets aren't as intuitive and easily understood. They take a lot more envisioning that might be desirable.

Re: HERO System Bestiary

I've been looking through mine and I'm VERY happy. I was nice to see some of the material in books I don't own. It definitely whetted my appetite for more!

I also have to say that the uniformity in cover design is kind of nifty. Yes, I said "nifty." Get over it. While cover art is fine and dandy, the uniformity looks powerful on the shelf.

Re: Vehicle Damage And Body

Firstly, you have to look at what the numbers mean on a normal basis.

My Hero's name is Larry. He has 10 BODY. If Larry takes 20 BODY in damage he is dead and no longer functions, but his corpse still exists. You can still lug it around or kick it if you wanted to.

Part of the design for robots, automatons and machines is the concept around where them taking BODY can damage them in such a way that some of their abilities no longer function. This isn't too far from how people take damage. You get shot and maybe your liver doesn't work anymore. The difference being that the human body is capable of continuing to operate (for a time) even if some of it's systems are grievously injured.

Vehicles aren't any different. If you shoot at a car, maybe you hit the stereo and it can no longer receive radio. If you hit the engine, maybe it can no longer move under it's own power.

Regardless, simply taking something to 0 BODY or even -BODY does not make it disappear. The wreckage (be it vehicular or corpses) still remain. I think (and it's been a while since I looked them up) that the rule is that at 0 BODY the vehicle can't continue to operate until repaired and at -BODY it can no longer operate nor can it be repaired.

Now to get to kind of the 'between the lines' bits: vehicles (and even robots and/or automatons) should use Hit Locations. Without some kind of Hit Location the vehicular combat concept breaks down pretty quickly. You can shoot a car in the passenger compartment a couple of times and the engine dies? I don't think it stretches (too far) the bounds of the system to even say that certain areas of the car take no BODY (the BODY score of the vehicle) or perhaps that vehicle has multiple BODY scores. Maybe it would be better if some areas of the vehicle were built as Ablative Focused Resistant Protection instead. BODY is a mechanic we use to model something's ability to continue to operate as it was intended. If you shoot out the windows of the car, should it actually take BODY? This is where dramatic license and SFX come into play.

If you characters are going to constantly be engaging in vehicular combat, you should spend the time to draw up Hit Location charts and possibly distribute BODY to certain areas of the vehicle. If this is going to only occassionally be something that occurs, use your dramatic sense and tell the players that they need to tell you what they are aiming at and adjust the damage from there.

As much as it pains me to admit, Hero isn't good at everything. Mass Combat is better handled with a system designed just for it. Vehicular combat is better handled with a system designed for that. Personally, I prefer the way the space-miniatures game Silent Death handles vehicle damage. Each vehicle facing has a certain amount of damage it can take and loses functions located in that facing depending on how much damage is done. I don't think it would take too much effort to fit such a concept into Hero. It would take a bit of work, and probably wouldn't be easy, but the Hero Toolkit building blocks are very powerful and I think they might be able to be adapted to such a use.

Re: The ThunderCats Project

In fact, I think Cheetarah might even have Flight, Only Against a Surface or Turn Mode on her Running. She wasn't very agile but she could run REALLY fast. I think she would be a good candidate for lots of NCM multiples and a Velocity-Based-DCV.

Re: Some newbie rules questions

Time to dust off the Pythagorean Theorem: a^2 + b^2 = c^2

 

"a" is the horizontal distance between characters.

"b" is the vertical distance between characters.

"c" is the actual distance between characters.

While accurate, I've run into a few people over the years that would have their math skills seriously taxed by old Pythagoras. Some people just are NOT good at math.

I've seen people count the legs 3" horizontal and 2" vertical = 5" range.

I've also seen people ignore the height.

I've seen lots of fudging (1/2 the height, +1" for every 3" of height, etc).

As a backstop, you can always hop into Excel and pony something up.

Re: How does transfer work...

Adjustment Powers usually fade in that Post-Segment 12 bit. Which is, incidentally, when you get a REC. If 5 STUN fades and you REC 5 STUN the net result is no change in your STUN.

Re: Rapid Clotting

I suggested that in my OP' date=' but it didn't seem to be the popular solution.[/quote']

 

I liked it, and that's all that matters!

Re: Question about keeping equipment balanced in heroic campaigns?

My current campaign falls right into the bailiwick.

We've got one character that is able to control fire. She's got a unified power list (ala EC) and an MP. She dropped CONSIDERABLY more points on Powers than everyone else. Off the top, I would guess she spent half her points on Power and everyone else spent (at most) a quarter. Her Characteristics are noticeably lower and her skill list is markedly smaller than the other characters. If you take away her Powers, ask her to act outside of the bounds of her Powers or it is somehow inadvisable for her to use her powers (eg in a gas station) she is in trouble. She has no real ability to inflict any damage (other than the 1.5d6 slap from her raw strength) or to hit and is liable to be knocked out in short order.

The characters who are equipment based (and we've got 2) have higher Characteristics and more skills. They are more rounded and versatile.

Now, we do run into some strange occurrences (eg Tasers). And I had to build all the powers while keeping an eye towards the equipment...so that they are roughly of the same power level. Since the weapons were coming in between 6 and 8 DCs, the characters with Powers have all their attacks falling into that range also.

I've found that the character design has done quite a bit to balance the equipment vs power issue.

EDIT: Oh, and while we are using Equipment Pools I do allow a certain amount of '0pt Equipment.' I'm not going to stat up a ration bar and it would make sense that characters would have gun cleaning supplies and bottles of water etc.

Re: Have you ever built the same character more than once?

I've done that. I've used them both. Sometimes you get one concept that is tweaked slightly differently and sometimes you just get two people with similar powers.

Re: Question about keeping equipment balanced in heroic campaigns?

50 or 60 pts in the Equipment Pool seems to be about right. That's where I've start my guys at and some hardly use any and others need more. A lot of it depends on design. But even the non-equipment characters have purchased equipment that has come in right handy a time or two.

Re: The ThunderCats Project

That's part of why I don't like OLD sci-fi. It's crap! It's full of ridiculous silliness. It's just how things were back then. I mean, at some point, people thought godzilla and the giant spiders were pretty authentic and now we just laugh at them and think how stupid does that look.

Re: Why no Penalty Skill Levels in a Multipower?

Agreed. Compound powers which incl. skill levels are appropriate for multipower slots.

That's how I've built the assault rifles with an integral grenade launcher.

Assault Rifle MP

Slot 1 - Gun: Compound Power with RKA and Levels

Slot 2 - Grenade Launcher: RKA AoE

Re: DC Guidelines versus DEF Guidelines

My current campaign is Heroic so the average attack is coming in around 7 DCs. The players have about 15 DEF so they won't be Stunned on an average roll.

Take a look at p48. That was what I used to determine my targets.

I think you are correct that those values are rather low.

Re: Discriminatory IR vision?

Discriminatory means that you can tell one person from another. IR vision especially with people is not very distinctive. Depending on what you've been doing your IR look can change pretty dramatically. IR does not, by default (iirc), include discriminatory. I'd have to look it up for sure, and I'm a little short on time right now.

Re: The ThunderCats Project

Actually' date=' under 6e, Megascale reduces to Personal scale unless you choose to add an appropriate limitation.[/quote']

 

Yes, but the sense would either then use the MegaScale scale (eg 'I can sense an animal within a 1 mile radius) or the character can use personal scale, which would come with it's own inherent Range Penalties as built. Good luck sensing something past 32m (with that -8 Range Penalty).

 

Keep in mind that MegaScale still has Range Penalties, but they are much less cumbersome since at the lowest level there are no Range Penalties out to 8 km.

Re: Is there a running thread for minor corrections on old books?

You could be VERY busy. As a rule the pre-5th Edition stuff was rather rife with errors and a bit shoddily edited.

Re: Running up stairs.

I could go all physics-geek on you, and talk about the angle of effect of gravity on a slope, but I won't. Mostly because we are talking about differences that are so small as to not make a great deal of difference (and isn't really interesting to most people...unfortunately).

The stairwells in my building here at home at about 10' deep and we can guesstimate at about 10' per floor. Each stair level will cover 20' horizontally and 10' vertically.

The total distance travelled horizontally is 20' x 12 Floors (you don't count the first floor since you start out at ground level, so it's 12 European floors or 13 American ones) or 240' (or 80m).

The total distance traveled vertically is 10' x 12 Floors (same reasoning as above) or 120' (or 40m) and Hero tells us that moving vertically is twice as hard so we have to double that to 240' (or 80m).

So our triangle has two legs of 80m and 80m. Pythagoras tells us that the hypotenuse is a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Those with a fondness for trig will immediately recognise this as one of those extra special 45-45-90 triangles and multiply by the square root of two (or 1.4).

a^2 + b^2 = c^2

(80m * 80m) + (80m * 80m) = c^2

(6400 m^2) + (6400 m^2) = c^2

12800 m^2 = c^2

c = 113m or 56"

So 4 combat moves or 2 noncombat.

It's about the same value the others are coming up with, but I thought I would put on the lecture hat (that and I had to see how accurately they were 8P)!

Re: Post-Apocalyptic craziness: Grace Unterbrandt, Zombie Hunter

Ohhh. Nice. I could definitely use her (after dropping 100 points or so). I've been building monster hunters for the past week or so (at 200pts). Did you upload her to the vault?

EDIT: Oh, I can probably drop her to 200 points just by moving all her weapons to Equipment!