Chudwine

Re: Looking for NEW words of transformation: (SHAZAM, Thunder! Thunder!...) You might think about where the character gets his powers from if he is using a phrase to invoke them. The only character I ever ran who used triggering words was "Lancelot Steele - The Indestructable Man" who got his powers from the vaguely described "Gods Of Goodness". His "Power-Up Phrase" was: Powers Of Might and Hope and Weal, Turn me into Lancelot Steele!! Corny, I admit but it fit the character and I have always been a sucker for rhyming couplets.

Re: What is the average attack and defense in your super’s campaign? For most of the true "Superhero Level" games I have run or played in, we end up with a soft cap of around 12 damage classes. (12d6 EB, 6d6 Ego Attack, 4d6 RKA etc). If a character is especially flexible or has a significantly higher speed than other characters, he might lower his damage classes a bit. Some characters might have "signature maneuvers" the exceed the limit but they can either only be used very rarely or at great cost to the character. As for defenses it depends on how the character is defined as defending himself. A character with generic defenses (like a standard energy blaster) will usually be set up so he can take take an average attack without being stunned and can normally take 3 blows without going down. (Default for this would be something like a Con of 23 and PD & ED in the 25 range and Stun ranging from 40-50.) It is rare for a 12d6 normal attack to exceed 48 points of damage, so the character is normally not stunned but 15-20 damage leak through on average per attack. Characters who are designed to avoid being hit will have lower defenses and and normally designed so that one average 12d6 attack will stun the character and a second will knock him unconscious. (18 Con, 15-20 PD & ED and 30-35 Stun). And the standard damage sink character (which is normally a brick but does not have to be) will normally be trivially easy to hit but capable of taking 6-7 blows before going down (28 Con, 30-35 PD & ED, 55-65 Stun). These are just guidelines and only cover physical and energy defenses. Damage Reduction alters the guidelines quite a lot as well. Players are encouraged to be flexible in designing the character's defenses to avoid "cookie-cutter" characters. One thing that we insist on is that every character must have some sort of weakness (no one is allowed to take all of the exotic defenses at high level).

Re: Your Gaming Group's Jargon Among the groups I have played with there has been quite a bit of jargon but the three that I find most memorable are: "I see the king of the potato people." - Standard statement by a player who has just completely blown his perception roll. "Tuesdayed" - Our groups term for being knocked way unconscious. It began with "He'll be out until next Tuesday." and gradually morphed to "He's been Tuesdayed." "Stuka" - named after the German WWII dive bomber. Source is a wargame (World in Flames I think) where every turn the German player got to attack Russian sites with his Stuka bombers and the Russians could do nothing in response. Now any character who is designed to allow him to attack with no reasonable chance of the enemy striking back (Blaster with Telescopic Vision and No Range Penalty on his attacks, Tunnelling Mentalist with N-Ray Vision, Invisible Teleporting Martial Artist etc.) is called a Stuka and treated with justifiable disdain.

This is an interesting topic as is it both an opportunity to vent and also to see how widespread certain behaviors are (at least among the people posting here). My primary pet peeves are as follows: 1. Like many others I get annoyed at players who are not "on table" when a combat is going on. Nothing slows combat more. A secondary issue is that the character who is not paying attention is likely to have the least effective combatant which can also lead to hard feelings. 2. The player who tries to research the adventure into submission. This is especially true when the player keeps trying to get additional skill rolls by framing the same question in slightly different manners in the hope that the GM will finally relent and give away the story. I'm going to draw a distinction here between research and investigation. Research as I am defining it has to do with interacting with inanimate objects (books, computers etc) and is dead boring for the other players. An investigation, at least has the character interacting with NPCs and can be good for some entertainment value. 3. The player who takes any problem or anything that makes his character look bad personally. I have found this to happen more often when the character is an idealized self-image of the player. For that reason I am very leery of allowing any such characters into any campaign I run - it is just asking for trouble. 4. Sort of the reverse of JmOz's Backpeddling problem. I have a serious issue (granted this is more of a GM problem thing) with GM's who are unwilling to allow character skills, competencies and abilities to supercede the statements (or lack thereof) of the player. I have met a few too many GM's who's rule is - "If you didn't say it, the character didn't do it." I think I understand where this is coming from. It is a hard and fast rule and should serve to prevent bitching and whining. Still it makes certain types of characters (those designed to be knowledgeable and competent) almost impossible to play. I am ashamed to admit that in one such campaign I made a list of "things to always do" and kept adding to it and then rereading it every time my character was going to attempt something (this being the only way I could think of to be certain I didn't forget anything important). Ultimately I grew tired of this seriously passive-aggressive style of play and (when discussing matters with the GM made no difference) left the campaign. 5. The player who give his character no social or psychological hooks or weaknesses (this is out standard loner survivalist without a past - Wolverine has a lot to answer for). A danger sign for this is when the character has no one and nothing he cares about except (possibly) the other PCs. Again, I recognize that at least some of these players are scarred survivors of campaigns where friends, family and other NPCs existed only to be taken hostage or killed in horrific fashions. But I'm not like that so give me something to work with here. 6. Finally, and this comes down to my borderline obsession with play balance. My view is that character balance really only exists between the PCs, so I hate what I call the Doc Savage syndrome. This is when a player creates a generalist character who, because of how effectively he was designed, it better than all the specialists in their areas of expertise.

I personally always had a problem with what I call the "dozen army rangers syndrome". If your heroes storm the master villians base, take out his minions and stop his doomsday plot therefore "saving the world", it doesn't feel as important when you know that a dozen highly trained, heavily armed army rangers could have easily achieved the same result. I admit that this is only important for groups or players who feel that the rules define the world. But for those of us who do, it's hard to feel like one of earth's greatest heroes when an antitank rocket (or M50 machine, stinger missle or whatever) is three times as powerful as your biggest attack. It's hard to play in a scenario where you are earth's last hope when you know that it is trivially easy for any major world government to send out a real world strike force that dwarfs the PCs in power. There are several solutions to this (for people who see this as a problem - clearly not everyone does). 1. Don't use the hero system to run an "Earth's Mightiest Heroes campaign". Stick with "Heroes of Metro City" or whatever. 2. Increase the character's points to the point where the truly are more powerful than any real world force. That solution has it's own balance issues as certain powers and constructs (Cosmic Pools, Desolidification, etc) which would normally define a 350 point character are just part of the package for high point characters and as a result all the PCs begin (mechanically at least) to look the same. Granted a good group of players and a GM who is on the ball can keep this from happening. 3. Introduce house rules that allow for more powerful PCs. The last campaign I ran was of the "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" variety and I introduced a notion called "Scale Factor." This was before 5E and Megascale was introduced so to avoid needless confusion I changed the term to "Force Multiplier" or FM. In essence, I said that everything in the universe had a Force Multiplier. Force Multipliers were simply assigned - they did not cost points. The real world's FM was 1. FMs went up by factors of 2 (FM 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 etc). The basic idea what that everyone and everything multiplied their attacks and defenses by their FM. The rules required some other tweaking as well of course (tweaks for damage reduction, velocity based damage etc). but in essence the players created standard level characters at a Force Multiplier of 4. Since they were (essentially) the only FM 4 heroes in the world, there were plenty of circumstances where they and they alone could stop the bad guy or prevent the natural disaster or whatever. The Force Multiplier rules added some additional complications, of course, but they did allow us to play a "Cosmic Heroes" game with fairly standard champions writeups, which was an acceptable tradeoff.

This is an interesting subject. My own thoughts on it are as follows: First of all, although Rapid Fire and Autofire do somewhat similar things, comparing them to one another is sort of missing the point. Rapid Fire is a maneuver and as such is always available and can be used anytime it makes sense to do so. It makes more sense to compare it to similar maneuvers like Sweep and Multiple Move Through. It was an open question in 4th edition whether Sweep could be used to do multiple attacks against a single target. The wording seemed to disallow it and we never allowed it in our group. Now, in 5th edition it is expliticly allowed by the rules. Multiple Move-By could always be used to target an opponent more than once if the attacker has sufficient movement. Clearly the changes favor high OCV characters. There are very few characters in a game with Damage Class caps who would not trade 3 blows for 1 no matter what the respective defenses of the characters might be. As a maneuver, Rapid Fire is not counted against Damage Class caps (either hard or soft) for campaigns that use such things. There are plenty of situations (The Fast Brick optimized for doing Move-Throughs comes to mind) where a combination of an attack and a maneuver which shatters the campaign limits is used frequently. At that point the either player has to agree not to use the abusive combination very often if at all or the GM and Player have to tweak the character to remove the potential for abuse. It seems to me that the primary issue is not hitting multiple targets but rather hitting a single target multiple times and creating quick knockouts. In that situation Rapid Fire is really no more offensive with NNDs or Ego Attacks than with regular attacks since they are full power attacks. (In a 12 damage class campaign with defenses in the 20-25 range, a 12d6 EB, a 6d6 Ego Attack and a 6d6 NND attack are all fairly well balanced against one another in the amount of damage they do and that balance remains no matter how many times a target is struck.) If number of dice were lowered and the defenses remained the same (As with Autofire counting against the Damage Class Cap), then NNDs become much more useful. (An 8d6 EB will do little against a character with 25 defenses but a 4d6 NND will still put a fair amount of stun through). Rapid Fire seems very open to abuse in superhero games. That doesn't mean it should be disallowed but it does mean that the GM will have to be careful in what sorts of characters he allows in the game. For example, if Photonic want to add "Photon Cloud" (4d6 Energy Blast, NND, 1 Hex Area Effect, 0 End Cost) to his 60 point attack multipower, I might well see this as an attack designed for Rapid Fire and disallow it (or force the character to take the limitation "cannot be rapid fired). Clever teamwork can also create situations where a Rapid Fired Attack is a battle ender. Legsweep followed by Rapid Fire Attack is one option. Having one character set up the target with a transparent to damage entangle followed up by a Rapid Fire attack is another. While I like to see clever tactics and teamwork rewarded, this looks like too high a reward. If I was running a Mentalist with a decent ECV, the temptation to Rapid Fire 2 Ego Attacks per phase would be tremendous and it is not too difficult in many firefights (by holding until the right moment or falling back under cover) to be put the character into a position where the DCV penalty does not come into play. Ultimately, while I felt the new rules for Sweep and Rapid Fire added something to heroic level games, I had to tweak them for Superhero games. I ended up going back to the 4th edition rules for sweep (only usable vs. multiple targets) and houseruled that superpowered attacks could not be rapid-fired unless they were purchased with the +1/4 advantage "Usable with Rapid Fire".

Just a couple of notes from someone who did switch over to allowing attack-then-move in a game but finally chose to switch back. I had no real problem with allowing a character to move after an attack was made. A intelligent player with a fast character could finesse the rule to gain combat advantages in some situations but that was never a major issue. The rule applied to all characters and if one character was creating a situation where he could get free attacks by attacking then moving, it was up to the other character to change the tactical situation (move into a confined area, hold an action, retreat and regroup or whatever). What ultimately made me go back first was the issue of holding. Could a character hold an action after making an attack? If not, why not? There seemed to be no good reason to disallow it. If he could , were there specific things he could not do with this held action that he could do with any other. Note that the held action could theoretically last for a couple of segments. Next came the issue of the other manevuers that end a character's action. Dodge, block and dive for cover were the ones that came up most often. If an attack didn't end a turn, should they. I eventually decided that yes, these abortable defensive maneuvers would end a character's turn. A character could move after an attack so he could use certain powers. Could he also use other maneuvers? Dodge was the prime issue here. I eventually decided no. Then I starting getting into a gray area. How about Dive For Cover, Roll With Punch or other things that were sort of actions and sort of combat maneuvers. Note that this was important because our group wanted detailed, objective and transparent rules. Ultimately, it was too much trouble than it was worth to keep up with all the potential options. (Now, my character can hold after attacking but he can't use that held action to dodge even on the next segment, he has to abort his next action to do so?) The rule gave us a different set of tactical options but they weren't necessarily a better set of options and didn't make up for the problems they caused. Bottom line, in my opinion. The creators of the Hero System drew the line at a certain point (Attacking ends a character's action). Some players have drawn the line at a different point (you can move before or after attacking), others might choose to draw it even farther down the line (all half-actions are equal and attack followed by attack is the logical outcome). It's all rather arbitrary and it seems odd that someone would argue that their preferred mode of play is more "modern" or more "realistic". I don't think it is. All it really does is create a different set of tactical assumptions. And I did not find the tactical options better or richer which would have been the necessary trade-off for the higher level of complexity. So for the core rules for a game that a lot of people will be playing (bringing their own views of how tactically oriented or rules intensive they want the game to be) I think the rules as they presently stand are better. Finally, let me point out that the group I tried this with broke up long ago and the group I am with now plays a lot more fast and loose with the rules. I would have no problem playing "attack-then-move" as a house rule with many groups but I would not want to play it with a tactically inclined group and I do not think it should be the default assumption for the game.