Sean Waters

I think you are right. The whole changing SPD thing seems complicated and needs a proper look at, but you can definitely change SPD freely on PS12.

IIRC you have to have a phase available on both your SPDs so if you went from SPD 3 to SPD 4 PS12 you could not take your first phase until segment 4. Something like that. You can always change SPD on segment 12 (unless you are SPD 1).

Anyone seen 'Glow'? Because y'oughta.

Another way to think about this is that if a 20 STR heavyweight boxer punches you REALLY slowly it may push you back but it isn't going to cause any direct damage, whereas your 50kg kid sister won't move you much with her full speed punch but will leave you with a black eye.

What doccowie said. So the damage you take from a moving object hitting you does not make a lot of sense for very low velocities, as it assumes a perfect transfer of energy. If the locomotive hits you, it does not transfer all of its energy to you, just enough to change your velocity to the same as its (OK, the new velocity will be a fraction less because of physics, but that is a rounding error). If it is moving at 1m/s all it has done is accelerate you to 1m/s. It has not transferred its momentum to you, or it would be stationary and you would be approaching mach 3. You'd calculate the damage using your mass and velocity change, not the mass of the train. It is as if you have fallen at 1m per second. When you fall you do not factor the mass of the earth in the calculation of damage, at least not directly. So, generally smaller faster objects are better at transferring their momentum/energy to you because of bullets. Of course if you can not move (your back is to an impenetrable wall, for example) and the same train runs in to you, it does stop, with you between it and the wall, and then you do get a lot of energy transfer. At that point you are doing a move through on an impenetrable wall with a low velocity and a LOT of mass. There are all kinds of other problems with calculating move based damage in Hero: for example, if two cars have the same velocity, it is better to be hit by the more manoeuverable one as it will do less damage because the SPD will be higher so the velocity per phase will be lower. The Lumberer (SPD 3, move 24m) moves at 13mph but does more velocity based damage from a move through than Slick (SPD 12, move 18) who moves at 40mph. That can't be right.

So I was looking at the System Quirks thread and Das Broot posted this: HERO's a great system but it definitely has some quirks that people find amusing, distracting, or annoying. One of mine is falling damage vs move-through damage. HERO assigns a max falling speed (terminal velocity) of 60 meters per segment for 30d6 damage. Oof. The thing is... a move through attack that impacted at 60 meters per segment (ie: a character using a movement power, a car, etc) inflicts strength + v/6. So a car with a 'str' of 20 inflicts 14d6 if it moves 60 before hitting you. That's half the damage of striking the ground after falling the same distance in the segment. Why? What makes falling so much more dangerous than being hit by a car travelling at the same distance in that segment? Or a hero strong enough to lift the Statue of Liberty (70) with the same action (14d6 + 10d6 = 24d6)? What's yours? (Open for discussion of anyone's specific quirk as well as adding your own.) First off, 30d6 has always felt way too high: if you work out the energy of a falling body and compare that to the energy of other attacks of similar energy a terminal velocity fall should do 12 or 13DCs, which seems better (that is 55 to 90 m/s). So, here is a thing though. A car moving at 60m per segment moves at 720m per turn. If the car is SPD 3 it does more move through damage than the same car at SPD 4, which makes no external sense. A 30 STR car does 6+30 DCs at SPD 4 and 6+40 at SPD 3. I think not. Velocity for the purposes of adding damage should be calculated for the per segment move (i.e. Move * Spd / 12). We should probably also be buying move differently too, but that is a discussion for elsewhere. Also velocity adds an an arithmetic scale, so you double velocity from 30 to 60, you add 5DCs, whereas if you double STR from 30, you wind up with 35 STR and that only adds 1DC. It is a mite more complicated because kinetic energy is 1/2 mass times velocity squared, and we can't be using move per phase, as a phase is not a set time and it makes no sense that someone with a higher SPD does less damage with a move through than someone with a lower SPD but the same velocity, so we have to calculate it to metres/second (or segment). Anyway, the table looks like this for a 100kg (10 STR object). Look up the highest velocity number that is equal to or less than your velocity and read over a column for damage. For heavier objects subtract 2DCs and add the STR/5 (or STR required to lift the mass/5). Velocity DCs 1 1 2 3 3 4 4 5 6 6 8 7 15 8 20 9 25 10 35 11 50 12 Low terminal velocity (54m/s) 65 13 Dive terminal velocity (90m/s) 95 14 130 15 185 16 260 17 Speed of sound (343m/s) 370 18 515 19 730 20 1025 21

Incidentally, this also means that a terminal velocity fall should do 12 to 13 DCs of damage for a 100kg person on Earth. Not 30d6. In fact one of the problems you will have with the Boom Table is reconciling velocity based manouvres as the DC add from velocity does not work on an exponential scale. Something moving twice as fast should do an extra DC of damage, hust like something twice as strong should do an extra DC of damage.

Or, right, change the cost of resistant defences to -1/2 rather than +1/2 but they do not double and only work on killing attacks, so for the 21 points we have been spending on defences in the above examples, you could have: 1. 21 normal defence 2. 19 normal/3 resistant 3. 17/6 4. 15/9 5. 13/12 6. 11/15 7. 9/18 8. 7/21 Normal attack damage 1. 14/0 2. 16/0 3. 18/0 4. 20/0 5. 22/0 6. 24/0 7. 26/1 8. 28/3 Killing attack damage: 1. 35/10 2. 32/7 3. 29/4 4. 26/1 5. 23/0 6. 20/0 7. 17/0 8. 14/0 Honestly, tweaking the way the damage is applied rather than the way it is calculated might have legs. One of the big issues that a lot of people did not like about old style Killing Attacks was the Stun Lottery. Even in New Hero it exists , although mitigated to an extent. Personally I like the use of Body and Stun being extracted from a single roll, the very Hero-like mechanic. Anyway, see what you think.

I suppose we should also try 15 normal/4 resistant (19/8). Same cost as before: That would be: Normal No Body 16 Stun Killing 2 Body 27 Stun You could also, right, buy Body Resistant defences which are the same price as normal defences but have no effect on Stun or Stun Resistant defences which are the same price as normal defences but have no effect on Body. These are both Resistant defences (so double against killing attacks). For tweakage. The reason this could work is that it uses the same damage mechanic as for normal damage, so you do not need two systems: the difference comes in how you apply the damage, and you work out the defences against the appropriate attack at character creation. Hmm.

Or, right, roll damage as for normal dice but if your attack is built as a killing attack it ignores normal defences and resistant defences count double. Killing attacks are not an advantage or limitation, they are just an attack that is defined as 'killing', and cost the same and work mechanically the same as 'normal' attacks except when they interact with defences. So, you have an 10DC attack, this averages 10/35 Against (these should all cost the same): 1. 21 points of normal defence (i.e. 21 against normal and nothing against killing): 21/0 2. 14 points of resistant defence (i.e. 14 defence against normal and 28 defence against killing): 14/28 3. 12 points of normal defence and 6 points of resistant defence (i.e. 18 defence against normal and 12 against killing): 18/12 4. 6 points normal defence and 10 points resistant (i.e. 16 defence against normal and 20 against killing): 16/20 Normal attack: 1. No Body 14 Stun 2. No Body 21 Stun 3. No Body 17 Stun 4. No Body and 19 Stun Killing attack: 1. 10 Body 35 Stun 2. No Body 7 Stun 3. No Body 23 Stun 4. No Body and 15 Stun So against non-resistant targets it is much more effective, but against heavily armoured opponents it is much less effective. Against moderately armoured opponents, results are similar. Now, in theory, this benefits taking killing attacks, but how many opponents have no resistant defences? It is the difference between theoretical and practical balance. In practice, people are going to build characters that Could work, you know.

That was it! Well remembered. Follow me everywhere from now on, in case I need you.

Well, you could rule that the PC's healing power does not work against injuries inflicted by Bob (as in "What do you call a man with no arms and no legs in a swimming pool?"). There will be a reason for this, perhaps based on the heroes SFX or history, or it could by psychological: it is another mystery to solve and, at the end of it all, once solved, the hero can put all the damage right. This could be a major plot point that helps to clarify how the character's powers work. Effectively you are adding a -0 limitation to the PC's power, without telling him or her If you were desperate to have a mechanical explanation, how about ongoing uncontrolled damage? Add a limitation that it does not cause additional Body but offsets healing, or that it is applied in part when healing is administered, meaning that when the hero tries to heal a victim they hurt them more. Of course ENOUGH healing will overcome the effect, but they don't know that, and having the poor victim scream in pain rather than sigh in relief when they are 'healed' could be an interesting dramatic moment. Alternatively dccowie has suggested Transform and that might be your best bet here, if the above does not tickle your fancy.

Have you thought of EDM to a reality where there are more of you and fewer of them? No? Probably for the best. If this is a NPC power, just let it happen, you control how and when it happens so you do not need to worry about the mechanics of the build, just apply whatever rules you feel are appropriate. I trust you, you are the GM. If it is for a player, no no, noity no, noity no no no no, I think not.

All desolid does it allow you to pass through stuff and stuff to pass through you and you can ignore damage and effects from powers that are not built with the appropriate power modifier unless they affect your flavour of desolid anyway. It does not mean you sink into the Earth (unless you do so deliberately), or that you can walk on air and it specifically (IIRC) does not prevent you falling. You have to separate the perception of the power, the 'logical consequences' of whatever your SFX might be from the actual mechanics of the power. In short if you were to (for example) buy Change Environment to reverse gravity locally, everything would then fall up, including desolid characters. OTOH if you were to buy increased gravity to crush your enemies, it would not damage a desolid character unless you buy the appropriate power modifier. The general effect of gravity is a meta-effect, the application of damage is a built effect.

You could just hand over your GM notes. I mean, that is what this player wants, a look at the script, and a bunch of clues they have not earned, all on the roll of a die, well, three dice. Cynical much? Nah, but the problem with this type of character is that it looks a lot better in Elementary or Sherlock than it does in an actual game. Being observant is the SFX of whatever skills or powers they have. I would be really careful about letting anyone have precognition or telepathy in (what I assume) is a non-super game. Mind you, true story, I played a game of Golden Heroes with my brother running it once and my character was a proper telepath and he sold me a right dummy: I read this dying guys mind and saw this nasty looking chap with claws running at him before he died. Turns out this was a vigilante superhero who was trying to save him from an unseen attacker. What a chump I felt, after I found him, beat him unconscious and read his mind too. Example: Anyway, if all the player wants is to identify a likely mark, how about Analyse: likely soft touch (bearing in mind, but not necessarily mentioning to the player, that a gullible idiot might be fine to cadge a few quid off, but is unlikely to know what actually happened. This allows them to find a soft point but not necessarily succeed. There is this book by David Gemmell where this city is under siege and the enemy are telepaths, so the leaders pick some twit and send him out on a vitally important secret mission with duff information that he wholeheartedly believes to be true, expecting he will be captured and the (false) information detected and believed by the enemy. Maybe Detect: social incongruity (No conscious control). I like 'NCC' as it leaves the power in the hands of the GM rather that the player/the dice. "You get a sense that something is not right...the Admiral is wearing the Medusa Medal, but he can not be more than 45 and the Battle of Medusa took place 40 years ago..." You see you are giving them a clue, but not telling them everything, you are doing it when it suits you and you are still leaving them with a puzzle to solve whilst nudging them in the right direction. Another amusing build for this sort of thing is (Side Effects), the side effect specifically being wrong information, a misread: it turns out you charmed him too well - he was lying about knowing who was behind it all to try and impress you...or whatever.

If their aging is accelerating faster than they are then it will get away from them and they won't be able to age any more. If I have completely misunderstood the question SOMEHOW, just add more points to Psychological Complication: Opinionated bigot. That way you get more points every time you run fast. Until you fall and break your hip, anyway.

This is true, although that may have just been him winding people up. High functioning sociopath. Got to keep yourself amused somehow. Anyway, I daresay if he'd ever needed to find his longitude he'd have remembered hearing something about it. I imagine the incessant violining played hob with everyone else's concentration: as Garfield says "If you want to look thinner, hang around people fatter than you". There is also probably a 'fiddling with himself' joke in there somewhere if you could be bothered to look for it...

KS: Feline Taxidermy

I like this progression much more than the (I believe) ridiculous totals you see for some nuclear weapons and such in Hero games. There might have been one 'planetbuster' that was 1000+ DCs IIRC. It may even have been 10000DCs. Why? This actually fits well with other calculations, like the Body of Earth if you treat it as a wall: it is around 80, so the Dinosaur killer would not have destroyed it but if you could focus the entire energy output of the sun on the planet you could burn a hole right through it. You could build a superhero that could survive some of these extreme phenomena: the energy of a couple of black holes colliding would be about 153DCs, and you could build a character on 350 points that could live through that, albeit probably not for long. That may sound ridiculous (and it is, a bit) but bear in mind that is just 'not die instantly'. Anyway, the scale seems to work pretty well and fit in with quite a few bits of Hero (although it also shows some anomalies). I've done an Excel spreadsheet: I don't think you attach them, can you? Apparently you can't...if anyone is interested, message me and I'll send you a copy but it is pretty basic so don't expect much. Of course it is all a bit rough and ready but it does give a framework for approximating DC that is not entirely arbitrary. Also a couple of places I took my reference values from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_energy

10 STR allows you to lift 50kg and throw it 4m, or 2m straight up. Shifting 50kg x 2m against gravity of 10m/s (rounding) is 1000J of energy at STR 10. You are not going to manage anything like that amount of energy in a basic punch though, so a quick Google search gives the energy of a punch at maybe 100J for someone who is not a trained fighter, maybe 1000J for a top boxer's punch. If we bump that up to 1600J it still means that the best 'normal' boxer should only be able to do 6DC of damage with a punch: Hero allows a 20 STR human with a haymaker or offensive strike to do 8DCs, which is probably too much. I have grabbed various figured for gun muzzle energy from Wikipedia or where ever I could find it. If we assume 100J is 2 DCs of damage ( a normal punch) then this fits pretty well with most of the small arms in Hero, but the damage for explosives and tank guns is way off. On this scale a stick of dynamite should do 15DCs of damage, as opposed to 5DC explosion. Even if you 2/3 the DC (as Explosion is a +1/2 advantage)it should still be 10DCs, but to be honest 15 sounds about right: I would expect someone holding a stick of dynamite that goes off to be blown in two or more pieces, not 'nastily bruised'. A tank round would be 18DC or 6d6 Killing/4.5killing AP. On this scale, WW2 atomic weapons would be 41DCs, or just under 14 dice killing, and the Tsar Bomb would be about 52 DCs, the dinosaur killer meteor about 73 and the Sun's thermal output per second would be 83 DCs. A supernova would be about 142DCs. DC STR Energy Joules Example 1 5 50 2 10 100 .22 LR (160) 3 15 200 4 20 400 9mm (519) 5 25 800 .357 Magnum (873) 6 30 1600 5.56 rifle (1798) 0.50 AE (2000) 7 35 3200 7.62x51 rifle (3799) 8 40 6400 9 45 12800 0.50 BMG (15037) 10 50 25600 11 55 51200 12 60 102400 13 65 204800 14 70 409600 15 75 819200 1 stick of TNT (1MJ) 16 80 1638400 17 85 3276800 18 90 6553600 AP tank round (7500000) 19 95 13107200 20 100 26214400

You could do this as a Hunted/Watched where the other person wants to cause embarrassment or humiliation rather than killing you. You would not even have to know the other person has a grudge necessarily (at least until they obviously act on it), but that would probably involve 'mystery complications' allocated by the GM. That is the effect it has on the IM character - bad stuff happens to them. It only becomes a rivalry if they put themselves out on a regular basis to do bad stuff back.

One of the reasons the bloody book is so long is that it keeps repeating the phrase 'except with GM permission', which is why I said 'if your GM is OK with it'. Mind you there are some pretty silly GMs out there so you have to watch that.

Doc Democracy already said this but my take is that if you get a cost break for it being 'obvious' then it is i.e. when you point it, people treat it as a real weapon, which it is, and assume that it has done something unpleasant, even if the end result is not immediately obvious. If something is obvious then an observer in game is going to believe that it is a deadly weapon and act accordingly. This, however, is where you have to stop applying real world logic to the game mechanics. This would not stop you, for example, taking it on stage at a theatre and shooting an audience member, any more than it would stop you doing the same thing with a real gun: the difference is that it would be obvious there and then that you had fatally wounded someone. Similarly you could hide the thing under a coat and shoot someone and it would not be obvious that you had done so, which would not be the case if it were a real gun. Let us take it out of the realm of the mystical. You remember the Russian spy killed with polonium delivered by umbrella? I kid you not. CLICKY Would the umbrella be an obvious accessible focus? It is certainly accessible, and it is certainly and obviously an umbrella; what is not obvious is that it houses a secret mechanism that makes it deadly. I would say it is not obvious that it is a weapon, whereas if the weapon were a poisoned sword that had to be pulled out and used to stab the victim, that would be obvious, even if the effect of the poison were delayed. If it is not obvious that it is a weapon then it will not be obvious that it is being used to deliver an attack (or, in game terms, that a power is being used through the umbrella). That would suggest it is inobvious. The fact that the Colt 24 looks like a weapon does not matter, it is still the umbrella. It is illegal in many places to carry an imitation firearm in public, simply because people might think it is the real thing and act accordingly, but that does not mean that if you shoot someone with it anyone is going to think that you have killed them (and, as mentioned above you could hide it under a jumper or something anyway). In fact it could easily be argued that powers with invisible and delayed effects should almost never get the 'Obvious' cost break. Of course you COULD buy the Cost 24 as an invisible power delayed attack attack and get the IAF limitation and also buy it as +5 PRE for making threatening PRE attacks and get the OAF cost break. This is all a lot simpler than it seems: is the power you want the cost break for obviously coming from the gun when it is used? No? Right, it is not obvious then, for that power. I'm glad to see we've already suggested Transform and EMD: Doc, Mr E; you are both hilarious.

Crusher Bob, it's a role playing game so role play it: have your character go round to everyone's house and kidnap their children and pets and tell them they are not getting them back unless they come to your party and dance like monkeys. Of course that is not going to work with everyone because, for example, if you kidnapped my children then you'd be the one promising favours if only I'd take them back. If you were stupid enough to kidnap my dog too, I'd own you. Damn dog. You just let me know when I start being helpful and I'll rein that right in.

We used to use quirks: I can not remember whether they were in an earlier edition of Hero or we stole the idea elsewhere, but you could have up to 5 points of quirks, for a point a quirk as a disadvantage (like I implied - it was a while ago). It could be silly stuff, meaningless stuff, stuff that did not have any anticipated game impact, but sometimes character defining stuff. It was good for two reasons: 1. you could add little foibles without having to sweat the build: you might not like a style of music, or you might be mildly allergic to tomatoes, you might prefer blondes or collect frog jewelry: just stuff to round out the character. 2. If the character costed out to 248 points you did not then have to stick 4 more points on COM 'just because I might as well' (no, really, it was a while ago). Anyway the Psychological Complication is probably the best way to go in this instance.