UltraRob

Re: The great armour race...

Re: The great armour race... I tried the DCV penalties, but they only proved to be a minor inconvienience....I didn't think of giving the powers an activation roll if there is encumberance....although that would only affect "qi gong" type techniques where they need to be able to move quickly...doing a "sword focus" type maneuver (to make your blade AP or somesuch) wouldn't really be affected much by wearing armour. In the end, the only rationales for dealing with armour I could come up with were just having it outlawed (not Uncommon in Ancient China), or having public reaction to armoured characters be...bad....(as many kind people have already suggested in this thread...) I really do like the DCV penalties idea, but I've never been able to make it work well in game...although I did think of things as severe as -1DCV per 1 DEF of total armour coverage....Never tried it out though. Rob

Hey guys, Sorry if this has been covered here before (and I'm sure it has), but recently when I started my WuXia Fantasy Hero campaign I ran into an interesting problem with Armour and Defenses. Basically what happened was (in a genre where the characters are generally armour-less!) my party basically maxed out their defenses (PD:20, rPD10 was average) through stacking armour, combat luck, and any other trick they could pull off. Quickly rendering themselves pretty much impervious to any normal weapons, which started to really get to me after a few sessions (I had them jumping small armies because they decided they didn't have to worry about being hurt...) so I asked them to tone it down to max 8PD, 4rPD... Well, you can guess what followed. I had a party in which every person had...8PD, 4rPD in some combination. At which point I sighed and continued on with that, it being enough to make them cautious about combat without being vulnerable to everyone who came along. (Meanwhile, I still looked at my source material, where even a powerful character will be wary of a dagger, and sighed some more...) My point is, as you might guess...Is there a way to get PCs to not be piles of Armour in FH? I tried applying Dex Penalties, but they just pretty much ignored them. This was a 250 (150+100) point heroic level game, and of course everyone had maxed out their NCM DEX at 20 too, which also made the game kinda boring in a way. It was a HERO learning experience (my first use of FH) and I have learned from my mistakes, but the ways to keep them from being Max defenses, and Max DEX still eludes me...I want a party, not a bunch of cookie cutter combat machines. Rob

Re: Should FH wizards use VPPs?

Re: New Limitation: Does not Stack. Gm's please look Well, a few thoughts to toss into the pot... Personally, I don't like the idea that the armour my mage wears is useless just because I have a force field up, that just doesn't fit logically. I think stacking is natural within the game, and the GM should use other methods to keep it from getting out of hand... Off the top of my head, I see two fairly easily solutions to this recurring problem... 1) END costs, make all DEF spells cost END, and in fact, make them cost LOTS of END (X5 END minimum sounds nice...) that way the wizard can do it, but they require a lot of focus and effort to pull off. If they wanna blow their END on a Force Field that leaves them Mr. Invulnerble, let them. If the combat runs like HERO combat often does, they'll be gasping for END in no time flat unless they use their defenses very carefully and only when necessary. 2) I once heard somewhere a neat concept where using magic generates a ton of heat around the users's body, and therein unless they wear loose clothes they will quickly start to suffer from heat exhaustion. About 1D6 STUN Drain per 1 DEF of armour worn on each phase a mage is manipulating magic sounds nice (Or END, or whatever suits your campaign best.)...and of course those Forcefields are requiring him to manipulate magic EVERY phase he's active.... Of course they can solve this by wearing very light, loose fitting or revealing clothes....(Which suddenly explains all those half-naked female mages running around in chainmail bikini's) Anyways. Just some ideas. Rob

Re: PA World Questions I ran a Post-Apocalyptic Campaign based (very) loosely on an anime called "Scryed" a year or so ago...it was my attempt at a PA:Superhero campaign where the players were inhabitants of a place called "The Zone"...following a "natural" disaster (earthquake) that did huge amounts of damage over a massive area, people in a 200km radius around the city of London, Ontario began to manifest superpowers. However, these powers only function within that radius, and only about 1:1000 of the people will manifest them....And of course of those, only 1:1000 will have any high level of power, and so on....These people became known as Power Users and were the other half of the reason many people fled "the zone" to live in the rest of the world, which is still quite normal. The North American gov't established a fortress city at the former city of London site, and a special military organization to rule it called TOWER. The mandate of the city and TOWER was to bring order to the Zone, which is otherwise a lawless urban and rural wasteland and they have proceeded to attempt do so in a rather heavy-handed fashion, and with limited success so far. So, we have a vast wasteland filled with all manner of people, mostly trying to just survive, while superpowered people roam the land as well, working for many sides. My PCs ended up being troubleshooters working for a do-gooder merchant who sent them on all manner of assignments. Fighting TOWER's supers teams who tried to bully people as part of TOWER's reclamation project was a regular adventure, as was fighting gangs and cults. It was quite a wild ride, and one of my more memorable Superpowered games. Oddly enough, in the end the PCs actually ended up joining one of the villian groups, one of the PCs with power-amplication powers decided some "freedom fighting" villains were in the right....so she blithely used her powers to turn the leader's super charisma up to the point where everyone else thought he was right too! An odd end for an odd, but very cool campaign. Rob

Re: PA World Questions Err...by "PA", you mean "Post Apocalypse", right? Rob

Re: GEM Fighters

Re: GEM Fighters It was heading in that direction, what was actually going on in my version was that the GEMs were pieces of a massive mana-stone which had been shattered before an evil sorcerer could use it to do nasty stuff with it. Left without a way to repower all his shards, he hit upon a new way of collecting the energy he needed: let other people do it for you! He was basically counting on the "highlander effect" of a small group of people becoming uber-powered who he would then capture, reform the gems and voila! One mega mana-stone recharged and ready to go! He did have agents as well, and in the campaign the players just got to the point where they'd had an encounter with a pack of demon-dogs who were hunting a football player who used his powers during a game in front of everyone....Then the game ended and we switched to something else because I, as a GM was getting really frusterated with my PCs inability to RP High School students with anything resembling initiative. One or two members of the group were generating all the storylines while everyone else just watched...The campaign was just too narrow for this group, who are used to something a little more broad, to handle. Actually, this was this group's first major experience with HERO, and HERO combat, and exactly as you said, it started simple but things got more and more complex. Also, since they had no experience with HERO powers, they kept things simple at first (+10 to STR for the duration of the fight, +5" running, +5D6 HA, etc...) but eventually things evolved into more complex power stunts as they got more comfortable with the system. You pretty much hit the nail on the head, it was a great HERO starter compaign, but it just proved to be too narrow for me to handle with this group as an "unlimited duration" campaign. I had originally planned for it to be a 3 month long campaign ending at the tournament, but they were crawling through the story and power levels at a snail's pace and by the 2 month mark hadn't even gotten out of the minor leagues of their own school! If I were to do it again, I'd either plot the hell out of it, or maybe start them at a higher power level so they could jump through the story quicker... On the plus side, I followed this up with a WuXia Fantasy HERO campaign which is running to this day and the players love to death. And they could handle that because I hit them with this first! Rob

I don't remember if I posted this before, sorry if I did...But I thought it might of interest to some here... I just finished a HERO Campaign not to long ago based loosely on an Anime called Ikitousen, where all the characters were teenagers who had become what I called "GEM Fighters" in that they had bonded themselves to these small quarter-sized magical gems which functioned as followed: The gems themselves each started out as 10pt Variable Power Pools which the players did not pay for, instead they were given to the players who were 100pt (50+50) teenage martial artists. The GEMs were supposed to be pools of "ki energy" which the characters could draw upon to perform "ki tricks" such as the usually martial arts stuff, and boosting their stats for combat, etc. All powers which came from them had to have a reasonable "martial arts" theme to them. These GEMs had no Active Point limit on them, with a "Gem Use Skill" roll (at -1 per 5pts of active cost) the players could change the points configuration as a 1-phase action to any combination that fit within the real cost of the power. (ie 6D6 Energy Blast at a -2 total limitation would fit in nicely, as would +10" Running at a -1 limitation, etc...I primarily encouraged "Extra END" to be the limitation of choice and gave them a list of options to choose from when picking limitations.) When a GEM Fighter defeated another GEM Fighter, the winner's GEM rating (VPP) increased by 1pt. and the loser's went down by 1pt. This was the only way to improve the Gem's rating. Of course, these GEMs had their downsides... Every time a character defeated another character in combat, they would not only get a point of power, but a massive high that went with that power. Thus fighting became incredibly addictive to a GEM-Fighter. (15pt disad, GEM Addiction.) They had to make EGO rolls for each day not to start a fight with someone, and even more limiting was that they could only defeat a single opponent and have it "count" (the GEMs were semi-intelligent) one a month. Fighting them again would not result in energy transfer. If a GEMs rating went down to 0, it would shatter, and the character's stats would all drop to 1/2 normal and recover over a period of months. (They are out of the game...) The same would happen if a character chose to break the gem, ending the addiction, but causing no small amount of pain. SO, in the setting (my province of Canada), these GEMs had spread like wildfire among althetes and wannabe because of their booster properties and the addictive effects. The end result was that tonnes of secret societies had been formed in high schools (for some reason, they only bonded to teenagers...) and there was a huge underground fighting circuit going on, with it usually being team vs team instead of one on one. There was even rumours of a tournament in a few months at a hidden location...(which the campaign ended before it reached...) My players ended up being members of the school Anime Club, and fought many duels against such opponents as the Poster Club, the Soccer Team, the Baseball Team, and others...all the while looking forward to facing the ominous Student Council....And having to keep these fights and the GEMs secret from the authorities since this was the "real world". The idea, of course, was that they'd work their way up through the school ranks, then the city schools ranks, and then hit the provincial tournament...And of course there was the mystery of what the GEMs were and why they did what they did....(theories included Alien Eggs, Evil Soul Gems, and Demonic Spirits...) And those who tried to use the GEMs publically tended to disappear.... The campaign itself burnt out after a few months due to a) the repetitive nature of the game (everything leading to fights), and the unforseen event of some PCs losing more points than they gained, while others poached opponents during fights and became powerful really fast! Which made the team unevenly powered. But, it was an interesting experiement, and one of the things I did learn from it is that using Variable Power Pools with no Active Point limit, but really low numbers of points in the pool makes for really creative use of those few points. Anyways, just something to add to the pool. Rob

Re: DEX vs. CSLs Tell me about it...I had a player in 250pt game who decided his character was a "barbarian" and put almost all his points into STR, DEX and PD. End result was a STR:70, Dex:32 monster who literally ruled the battlefield over the more balanced other PCs..and kept putting any XP's he got into DEX! I had to skew the power levels of the villians and even eventually force him to tone down the character because it was ruining the game... :-/ Rob

Re: What's the best method of introducing HERO System to newbies Agreed, at the end of character creation for any new system (or modified existing system they know), I always run a combat first. Unless I plan something special, this will be a "dream" combat that one of the PCs is having...(which PC? the winner of course! ^_-) This lets them get a feel for the combat side of the system, including it's lethality, and let's them know what to expect accordingly. Usually I just let them face of against each other (board/mapped combat), but occasionally I will throw in other foes to face. (Facing off against each other is not a bad idea, since they will now know what they can expect from their equivalent NPCs...The only problem could occur if you have vindictive players who might try to get revenge in-game later...In which case have them fight generic NPCs.) After combat, if they wish to "tweak" their characters, I allow changes before the game starts, as long as they're not just making themselves even more combat machines...8 Levels into Handgun! :-P Oh, and as far as introducing them to the system goes...since it's just Battletech this will be easy, since there are no powers inolved. Just go through it step by step with them...attributes...talents....perks....skills....equipment....GO! Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Hahaha! Points taken! I will remember to do that next time. Actually, I have a real temptation to try running a 25+25pt campaign someday, just to see how it comes out. Doing what you're doing might be the only way to make sure they get the skills they need to surivive. Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Sounds good! I will keep that in mind the next time I run something a little more focussed...Although I don't quite understand how this would affect the min-maxers, they'd still min-max, just be doing it having been forced to take more appropriate extra skills for the setting. You're basically just letting them get around having to spend their precious combat points on roleplaying stuff by giving them cheap extra setting-specific skills. They end up being setting-specific combat machines instead of general combat machines.... Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Actually, that's why I had a category called "special" or whatever, which literally was there as a slush fund for further character customization. After all, the idea is to nudge them into a more even distribution of points, not to handicap them from making the dude they want to make. Which is also the reason the players set their own priorities on the categories, I didn't plan on saying "Ranger= Attributes>Combat Skills>Noncom Skills>Special>Social." But instead letting them do whatever they wanted, within the idea that they had to allocate which blocks of points went where. The idea is to prevent complete neglect of the overall character in favor of min-maxing. Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System I have a rule, it's a simple one, and all my players know it. The PCs, unless they do something bizzare (like join the villians, which has happened...) will generally win anything I run, but they will go through hell to do it. After all, this is a game where the PCs are the heros, and the most important people in the story. If they build a bunch of nerdy archeologist, I will make a way for them to win. If they build a bunch of mega-heros, I will make a way for them to win. And the opposition will be suited to each task, and the bad guys will act quite logically according to the genre and setting. If they outthink my bad guys, which has happened, then they will win without throwing a punch. I should note, I tend to run non-superhero games, as my group is oddly enough not a fan of traditional superhero stuff. Usually my villians are dead...my players don't believe in leaving things to chance....I have to plan carefully if I don't want dead villians...But again, I'm not running traditional superhero stuff, more fantasy, SF, and assorted original weirdness... Done all of that, the group didn't make a peep. They just soldiered on. They know I always leave options, and they trust me as a GM enough to know they're not truely helpless. So long as they don't do anything stupid, that is...If I tell them they have no powers, and they go up against Dr. Destroyer anyways...Well, they can debate the folly of their ways while they wait in his torture chamber to be disected and used in experiments...Even then, a beautiful lab assistant will fall for one of the PCs and help them find a way to the hidden cave where the mysterious minerals can restore their powers...If only they can reach the sun and activate the minerals... Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Well, in the last 9 or so hours of my current campaign...there was about 1/2 hour of combat, to give you an idea of how combat oriented I am as a GM. I have more roleplaying subplots going on than the group can handle, and most of them will never lead to combat of anything but the emotional kind. Yeppers, I am big on balance. As I said to one of my friends the other day, I hate "mooks", I have a real thing against faceless villians. Every one of those people they fight is a person, or at least a facimilie thereof. The PCs can bargain with them, bet with them, party with them, or do just about anything they want. Sure I have big baddies who are built on a lot more points than my PCs, but the world isn't fair....Not that ever stopped a PC from charging right up against even the worst of them instead of just staying calm or retreating....What is it about gamers that makes them incapable of understanding the concept of..."We'll get her later!"? Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Reasonable. I do realize what I am saying probably looks like an Imperialist preaching King and Country to a bunch of Rebellous Freedom Fighters. But, what I am trying to do is not straightjacket them, simply ask them to produce a more rounded character. I am not saying where those points go, exactly, just limiting how much can go where in the name of character balance. I see a big difference between this and Character Classes, because they can choose where their points are going to go, and aren't limited in what they do with them. Really, I see this as a halfway compromise between a character class system and an open point-based system. I ask nobody to use it who wouldn't want to, but don't think it's without merit to consider in some gaming situations. Best! Rob

Re: Priority Character Creation Meta-System Again, I see it as quite the opposite. Especially when you have newbies coming off D&D, they have no clue as to where to put their points, and in my experience tend to pile them onto the combat stats. Perfect example was the last HERO fantasy game I ran...two players used to D&D walk in...they stare wide-eyed at FRED as I try to get concepts out of them and then in the end go for extremely narrow concepts (1 of them put 80% of his points into SPD to make super-fast goblin, the other put all his points in DEX and STR to make a barbarian-type.) which I let them play because getting more out of them was like getting blood from a stone. In the end the goblin died fast (no pun, or surprise there because he had no defenses..) but the Barbarian ended up lording over the higher-skilled and balanced PCs by virtue of being a purely DEX based and ignoring skills almost altogether. (To the point where we had to tone his character down...so much for points being balancing...) While the Goblin's next character was more balanced (he could handle the system now, at least a little better...) I think that giving them more of a framework of where to put those points and pick from would have resulted in more rounded characters from the get-go. Yes, I can achieve similar results by spending many hours coaxing them through things....while the other 4 experienced members of the group sit around bored because they finished their PCs in an hour....But to get them as quickly into play as possible, sometimes you just gotta fudge things. My 2 cents, anyways... Rob

So, I have been playing with an idea I got from Shadowrun as a way of nudging my PCs in the right direction in games I run. I call this a "priority system" of character development, and basically it runs as follows: Would a "priority" system work for HERO or GURPS? And would it enhance or limit the gameplay and character creation? ie for a WuXia Martial Arts Game in HERO Characters must choose between 5 categories and allocate points accordingly, the base characters are 150pts with 100pts of disadvantages, for a total of 250pts. The categories are: Attributes Martial Arts Techniques/Maneuvers/Powers Skills (general skills, non-combat) Social (Perks, Contacts, Money, non-skills) Special Points are allocated thus: Priority One: 100pts (40%) Priority Two: 75pts (30%) Priority Three: 50pts (20%) Priority Four: 20pts (8%) Priority Five: 5pts (2%) The PC would choose these priorities as one of the first steps of character creation, and should not be allowed to pick them after. The idea is to encourage character conceptualization and make the player think about where the character is really focussed. After all, how many people just start putting piles of points together semi-randomly in HERO? It might work sometimes, but especially when it comes to newbies, I think having something like this to give them more "structure" when they make their character would be beneficial. The character cannot use more than those points in building that aspect of their character, and thus must focus and specialize in order to achieve the result they want. It also has the advantage of forcing them to spend points in areas they might otherwise ignore in power gaming activities. (ie Social Stuff like PERKS and Money in HERO.) Special can be anything which makes the character semi-unique. For example, special equipment, magic in some settings, unique skills out of the ordinary or talents. It should also be 100% under GM discretion and control unless otherwise defined ahead of time. (ie a list of options.) In a 150pt HERO game, they would look like this: Priority One: 60pts Priority Two: 45pts Priority Three: 30pts Priority Four: 12pts Priority Five: 3pts (of course, 245pt, and 145pt GURPS characters will use the same progression.) For a Fantasy Game, I guess the categories would be: Attributes Race Skills Social Special Although Race might come under "special", since it is something that separates the character from the others, and could be replaced by Combat Skills. (Especially if you were putting Martial Arts maneuvers into your game.) The idea is that you can change the priorities to fit whatever you run, and whatever will work best to get the genre feel you are trying to accomplish. I wouldn't use this for Superhero games unless I wanted the PCs to be more "well rounded" characters in say something more like "X-men" which is supposed to have more down to earth characters. When you get to "Justice League" level, doing this will get in the way because they are bundles of powers and hyper-skills set up to kick butt. Oh, and I also see this as a way to deal with the "attribute maxing" and "skill level race" that I often see happen in Fantasy HERO level games where everyone often dumps everything into a few places. Because they have less points to work with, you won't end up so much with everyone looking the exact same, and they will be more rounded characters. Anyways, I hope this helps. Comments and questions are of course appreciated. Rob

Actually, I am just a big Ultraman fan. Rob

One version I always loved was the Japanese comic "Five Star Stories" where the ruling elite were the descendants of the Super Soldiers of a previous ruling Star Empire. Ruling resource-strapped worlds which had been mined-out, these very much superhuman rulers had one of the flaws of their origins, which was that the smartest of them actually only had what we would call "average intelligence". One of the side effects of this was they liked to keep society simple, because it was easier for them to control that way. And they kept war simple too, since fighting between them was actually more efficient with beam-swords (light sabres) than if they used guns. (They were too fast to hit with most guns at the higher levels.) It created a real "knights in conflict" atmosphere, with these guys being massively more powerful than even troops of guys in terms of speed, stamina, and sheer combat power. (And a few even had psionics...) I always thought this would be a cool setting to run in, I just never got around to it....yet. Links: http://www.heika.net/html/fss.htm http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Garden/5494/index.html Rob

Actually, I generally don't recommend GURPS:China too much...it's way too dry and doesn't cover the material from a gaming aspect very well...Just kinda gives a very limited overview of Chinese history and a little culture....you'd be better off reading real books about the subject and using GURPS:China as extra reference at best....but the books everyone should own are: GURPS: Japan Imperial Rome Aztecs Celtic Myth (basically any real-world book but China) Supporting Cast Martial Arts Space and Ultra-Tech (which I get a huge amount of use out of) Rob

There's an old Kung Fu movie called "Crippled Avengers" that comes to mind...the heros get seriously maimed at the start of the movie and then the rest of the story is how they train in weird kung-fu to use what working limbs they have left to get revenge.... God knows no PC party would ever be willing to do that after the bad guys won....but as a GM I can dream. Rob