Ghostkat

Re: Negative CSLs (or other NegSLs, I guess) as Adjustment Power Well this may be coming out of left field, but I know of one power which specifically grants negative CSLs and other penalties. So reasoning from the effect (give the opponent penalties), I figure the Change Environment power can do what you're after! Don't have my Fred here at work, so I can't do a quick write up. But I believe it can be made to work the way you want it to.

Re: Adding Damage Well I'm definately not an expert on the system, yet I shall attempt to give some insight on the subject. The first thing you need to do is figure out the AP cost per DC with the advantages figured in. So in other words 1 DC of HA is normally 5 AP (before lims). Strenth is 1 AP per pt, so every 5 pts of strength adds 1 DC to the HA. Simple enough so far. Now if you make the HA armor piercing then it becomes 7.5 AP per DC. So now you need 7.5 points of strength to add just one DC. So for your examples a 2d6 HA w/ Armor Piercing and 20 str would have (20/7.5) 2d6 added, becoming a 4d6 HA w/ Armor Piercing. That's the equivalent of 30 AP (4 DC * 7.5). The 2d6 HA w/ Armor Piercing and 45 strength is 8d6 then, with an effective 60 AP. Did that make any sense? Short term is figure the Active Points of each Damage Class, then go from there.

Re: Alignments Coming into this late, but I recently found a cool document that's all about game design and stuff. It takes a big hollistic view, and while meant for the online style rpg, brings up quite a few perfectly valid points for PnP games.. I'm just posting this in hopes a lot of folks find it useful. --------- Beyond Good and Evil Stuff One of the classic misconceptions about games, role-playing games in particular, is the definition of Good and Evil. Evil tends to be misused horrifically, applied to everything from a brainless NPC monster to a guy who lives to kill players for no reason. The scope of a true definition of "evil" is beyond the scope of this document, but suffice to say that real evil does not exist in a commercial game. If it did, the game would be too disturbing to support a viable subscriber base, and would probably violate a lot of laws. In game terms, as well as in real life, one can define "good" as being in accord with your own interests, and "evil" as being opposed to them. This is a inaccurate use of good and evil, but it's the way these terms were used to exhort children to march across the desert to take back the holy land (before they were sold into slavery), so it works just as well as any other. So disregarding good vs. evil as a possible source of conflict, you have some realistic and perfectly viable choices for player (and NPC) motivation: * Nationalism * Religion * Economic Interests * Social Power * Fame * Personal Achievement Why should you, as a designer, care about the distinctions between realistic motives and the hackneyed good vs. evil concept? Because it lends credibility to your world. Monsters don't attack humans because they're "evil," they attack because they want more lands and recources (Economic Interests), they want to impress their own leaders (Fame/Social Power), they are mad because the humans did something bad to them (Nationalism), etc. A player can theoretically find out why the monsters are doing what they do, which is a quest in itself. This helps to flesh out your world, makes it more immersive, and helps it to stand out from the pack of other games where monsters just stand around and attack players because their algorithms tell them to. From the player standpoint, it also helps to define players' roles in society. A paladin who goes out to drive back the hordes of monsters that threaten the local farms is doing it for reasons better than "being good"; he is doing it to defend his homeland (Nationalism), to insure that his people get enough to eat (Economic Interests), and because the church has decreed that he must (Religion). A player who aspires to a noble title with lands and holdings does so to become rich (Economic Interests), status (Social Power/Fame), and just to say that he's the Earl or whatever (Personal Achievement/Fame). Understanding the motives of your players and their characters (hoping against hope that the characters are being roleplayed to the degree that they have motives of their own) is key when designing content, goals, and quests that you hope they will be undertaking, and making goals appropriate to each of these motivations attractive and fun enough for players to want to pursue them.

Neato! Surbrook writes some very cool stuff!

Oh yeah, another piece of advice from a novice HERO gm... don't be too suprised if the first few fights your group is either too strong, or seems to weak against opponents. I've found this to be one of the trickier bits. Personally I see it as another form of black magic all it's own, tied into character creation etc all. Edit: Of course I didn't have Bestiary.. that'd help, and so would the 3M book of baddies as well. Benchmarks.. yeah that's the ticket!

If I'm grokking what you're getting at, you're asking something like 'Can the same spell belong to more than one school?' To that I'd say Heck Yeah! Lots of things defy a singular classification, the more complex the more things you can classify something as. (Hmm, that was an obtuse statement, oh well). To use another evil game, often referred to M&M I believe , lots of spells in that crazy system belonged to 3 or more different schools of magic. A Fireball fell into something like Elemental, Evocation, and of course good old Combat Magic. As far as I'm concerned a School of Magic is nothing more than the way someone learned to cast spells. The spells themselves don't really care that much (usually). Edit: Oh yeah, and in the case of HERO SFX rules all. ie, a Clairsentience Divination that shows the past in a ring of fire could easily count as an elemental spell as well. It just depends on how you define it.

I looked this over earlier while I was at work, and it looked pretty neat. I especially like your method of handling 'divine magic'. What I think JakSpade meant about the skill cost is that you didn't make it clear about the skills needed for each style of magic. Other than the quick mention of PS: School of Magic I didn't see any mention of it. And I'm thinking the other question was whether you would require PS: School of Magic to DO the spells, and a KS: School of Magic for overal knowledge of what the school is capable of, what a particular spell might be like (it blows holes in things...), that sort of stuff. Considering I have yet to come up with anything satisfactory in a magic system I have to give kudos for this being off the top of your head!

Another suggestion is the Hero Bestiary for all your animal and creature needs. It's something I dearly wish had been out when I tried running a FH game with just the core book. Of course there are plenty of good genre books out for Hero, and each one just gets better!

I would say yes to the clinging being an auto-grab if the attack hits. But I don't have FREd with me to check if it works that way. SFX-wise I'm reminded of Spiderman using his clinging to hold chunks of wall and such. Off the top of my head the 'Shoots claws out then reels the victim in with them' type effect almost sounds like a continuous damage too.. personally I like the Stretching linked to RKA myself, it would be more like a normal grab (I think). -Gk

Re: using Presence attacks for persuasion and convincing Ok, I took a quick look through the presence stuff and it's interesting. A few good ideas it looks like, but I'm a bit baffled by this bit here. Why do you think INT is a better stat to base Interaction skills on instead of presence? You mention not wanting the skill to stack with a PRE effect (I think that's what you meant), but that still doesn't explain how being smarter makes you better at relating to people. That would make most geeks better socialites by default than most valley girls.. It's just one nit I'm picking, but I couldn't help it. I don't see much of a problem with using PRE based skill rolls as complimentary to PRE attacks, since the mechanic is a bit different for each. And it also looks like anyone making a PRE attack would want all the help they could get. -Gk