mhd

Thanks, and it's actually plainly stated like that on 6E2 22, which apparently I've been reading rather selectively.

My group started playing HERO a few months ago (switching from a GURPS campaign), and it's been going pretty well. But while discussing the intricacies of aborting actions, a few questions came up. I, as the GM, apparently ruled right, but while reviewing the relevant rules, something came up that's either a bit odd or just shows my misunderstanding of one of the rules terms involved. Let's say Alice (DEX 15, SPD 3), Bob (DEX 13, SPD 2) and Charlie (DEX 10, SPD 2) are fighting, with Alice and Charlie ganging up on Bob. In Segment 8, Alice attacks Bob, who aborts to dodge. Now in Segment 12, Alice attacks again, but the DCV Bonus is still at work and saves his life again. But now it would be his phase, which ends his DCV bonus. Which might be all what Charlie needs, when he attacks as the last in the segment. And Bob can't abort his segment 6 phase to dodge that, as per 6E2 22. So, when dodging, it would seem beneficial when you're the one with the lowest DEX? If Alice and Bob were fighting Charlie, he would also get two attacks in segment 12, but his DCV bonus would apply to both.

Re: Swords and Sorcery Setting Not sure by what definition they seem to be going, as I certainly wouldn't rate movies like Krull, Excalibur or the Black Cauldron amongst S&S. Never mind Orson Welles' Macbeth…

Re: Swords and Sorcery Setting I can also recommend the "El Mercenario" comics by Vicente Segrelles. Every panel being an actual oil painting, they're quite stunning. Most Sword & Sandal movies are good inspirations, especially if they contain some Harryhausen magic, but most fantasy versions released in the wake of the first Conan movie are a bit disappointing(and that includes the Conan sequel itself). I kinda liked Beastmaster, that movie with the two "barbarian" wrestlers and the one with the magic bow and the snake people. Also, well, .

Re: Swords and Sorcery Setting Sure, that definitely pushes it over the edge, I was merely contesting that divine interaction would seem possible for sword & sorcery, probably with the gods not being that special (either via the science-fantasy/Lovecraftian influence or because they're closer to the Greek/Norse gods than immutable universal forces incarnate). Although I have to admit to never liking the term "Epic Fantasy". At its core "epic" can just mean "long", which seems a bit of an arbitrary distinction. A Conan "fat trilogy" would certainly seem possible, if REH would've lived in a time with a different publication model for pulp fantasy. You could integrate a lot of the stories in one, erm, epic quest until he sits on the throne in the end. Not too dissimilar to e.g. Homeric epics, I think. Would this not count as Sword & Sorcery anymore? The "visual style" wouldn't deviate too much from the short stories. In a way, one could view S&S as "pre-/post-Christian Epic Fantasy".

Re: Swords and Sorcery Setting

Re: Converting Skyrim to Fantasy Hero ... any thoughts? There's also the option of skipping the guardian stones and doing it the way the older TES games did it (i.e. star signs). After all, Skyrim mostly did it so that you didn't have to do anything at character creation besides picking your race and appearance. And you're probably not doing that in HERO. (Possible, but I guess this is more "HERO: Nirn" than "HERO: Bethesda Video Game")

Re: Alternative Necromancy Didn't old AD&D classify clerical healing spells as necromancy, too? Basically everything that's connected with life force, although the name itself is a bit badly chosen for that (what's the oppositive, "vitomancy"?) I think apart from general creepyness, the big moralistic divide about actual shambling death would have to be the concept of the afterlife and how necromancers affect this. If you're e.g. a priest of some zombie-lovin' god and it's in his power to demand a few tasks before truly letting go of your mortal connections, then I guess most people would have to be okay with this. As opposed to someone ripping the very souls of people away from heaven to power his undead army… If the soul isn't involved and it's "just" animating unliving matter, then there's still the matter of propriety. People generally don't like others abusing the remnants of their relatives, even if there's no spiritual reason not to (even atheists don't tend to condone the other popular word starting with "necro"). And you'd have to have a good excuse why you're not just animating statues or huge piles of lint.

Re: Retreat & stagger: Abort action options Didn't assume that and I don't really have any problem with the visuals. Sorry if I didn't present that the right way: The movement part of retreating and advancing isn't a big issue, I'm not that concerned with grids so that's easy enough to handwave. It's doing the retreat in the first place, i.e. there's not a big reason to abort to a defensive action in a lot of cases. Let's assume Jean-Pierre is meeting his arch-rival for the hand of the duchess, the black-hearted Comte de Petit-Pain in an empty ballroom. They draw their rapiers. Both have SPD 3. Jean-Pierre is a bit more dextrous than the aging Comte, so gets to attack first. They both want to kill their enemies with their own weapons, no reason to wait for help or onlookers, so why drag it out? There's simply no reason to defend a few times before making your own counter-attack. Maybe one block, if you've got a Block/Riposte technique. There might be no good solution for this, I don't mean to force this. But I thought I'd throw it out and see if someone with more swashbuckling experience has a good idea. Mixing CSL with RSR(Evaluate Technique) would be an option, although a less generic one.

Normally, I have to decide to abort to a Dodge or Block before the actual attack occurs, so in a evenly matched one-to-one duel, there's actually little motivation to do that if I intend to attack later anyway - why risk getting hit 5 times before I have to "take it" anyway so that I finally get to make my counter-attack? ("evenly matched" here includes same SPD) I'd like to provide some kind of motivation to make this happen, as I'm quite enamored with this in swashbuckling movies and the like. And preferably not as a special power of one of the combatants (e.g. extra circumstantial SPD or a free PRE attack for the one driving his opponent before him). Maybe someone has a good idea how to add an incentive for doing that. There are a few reasons that come to mind while one would back up, with the intention to attack later. One is just being intimidated, at least for a moment, but while this is my usual excuse to do it for NPCs, you'd need something like presence attack for PCs, and I'd like to avoid too much additional dice rolling. Another reason would be the defender trying to recover enough to start the counter-offensive, but even in a Heroic campaign, fighters should have enough REC and END to make this rather rare, unless this happens at the end of a run, swim or too much chandelier-swinging. Same goes for waiting until the attack is exhausted. On the other hand, looking for the enemy to expose himself or make a similar mistake might work. A Block/Riposte is already something similar, maybe some kind of weaker block/dodge, where the defensive benefit isn't as great, but you get the possibility of a bonus if the attacked failed enough? Or instead of an additional maneuver, just allowing for the aborted action to not be wasted in a certain circumstance. Maybe using a "fumble" rule for the opponent or a "critical success" on a block?

Re: Mega-damage, bit by bit Standard Heroic rules from 6E1 34, with 175 total points and 50 points matching complications. There are some bigger monsters in the future and I wanted to leave enough space for costly non-human races and magical abilities. My planned HârnMaster campaign will definitely start with a lower spread and maxima. I have a pretty big dislike of specific "minion" rules (and their inverse).

Re: Savage Worlds magic to Hero? The test drive should be sufficient (magic rules are on pg. 14 under "Powers").

Re: Savage Worlds magic to Hero? Have you tried statting out an existing or sample character to see how the points would turn out? Given suitable limits, I found that you can get a decent mileage out of individually buying spells. And it's not like SW mages have that many spells either, it's not like you'd be trying to emulate the full grimoire a D&D or Ars Magica wizard has. For some related spells, a multi-power is a good choice. "Fires of Destruction" with different elemental attacks, some with areas, some without... As a personal matter of taste, I'd go without a perk if you're buying the spells individually, it's mostly useful if you're doing something cheaper (spells as skills etc.), so that you can offset part of that.

Re: Savage Worlds magic to Hero? I don't have my SW book handy, but as far as I remember the basic Savage Worlds power system is pretty simple, you've got your magical ability (Science, Faith, Magic etc.), and then depending on your specific background X powers and Y points to fuel them. Which should translate pretty easily into lots of spells with the Requires A Skill Roll limitation and an Endurance Reserve to power them. Or am I missing some side effects ("trappings")?

While re-working my campaign's house rules (mostly for magic), I'm thinking about character creation constraints and limits again. As this is my first heroic campaign (and my first HERO adventure since ages), I just concerned myself with powers and basic attributes. But I see that a lot of the damage output comes from combining lots of smaller bonuses, arriving at quite a lot of instakills with their usual problems. One of the more obvious examples would be ranged combat: OCV isn't too high. A few CSLs, which most of the time you can fully dedicate to hitting things, as your def is crappy anyways. Then a few points in PSLs to reduce range and hit location penalties, maybe even Weapon Mastery. With the rather benevolent bow damage, you're getting a very high chance of a 3d6 arrow to the face. (And I'm not even allowing ranged haymakers) Now it's harder to justify the same for defense, as I don't want to have too much magic and don't want to have every bandit running around with gapless full plate. How did/would you do such a limit on all the various combinations? Fixed limit of OCV+CSL+PSL? Separate ones for the constituent parts (e.g. PSL-hit locations max 4)? Just admitting that with a 175 point base I'm in the higher echelons of fantasy anyway and should have more powerful (or just more) enemies?

Re: Detailed (mundane) armor We do use sectional armor and hit locations. Targeting skill levels plus CSLs make for some deadly ranged combatants... My incentive for some added rPD mostly came from the two extremes of armor usage, i.e. both well-padded ultra-heavy plate and light cloth/leather. Both might do fine with some additional protection against bumps, probably most of what the "armor" is worth for the heavy-cloth types. As I'm playing a "Iron Kingdoms" game, those types are well represented by either elite troops with insulated uber-plate and the ubiquitous dusters & greatcoats.

As I see it right now, quasi-medieval mundane armor has one characteristic to rule it all, i.e. the same value for PD/rPD/ED and rED. Has anyone ever thought about doing a Hârn-like differentiation between damage types by doing that a bit finer grained? As we don't differentiate between slash and thrust damage, there's no big need to vary the protection, but I could easily picture some armor types having more rPD than straight PD, e.g. making a bigger difference between heavy chain and plate. While we're at it, we could think about the two ED types, but I'm not all that concerned about that. Any ideas/experiences? Or other ways you made armor more detailed?

Re: Camouflage? Am I the only one who's got the Stan Ridgway song stuck in his head now?

Re: Camouflage? Once precedence is 6E2 178, Lion: camouflage coloration: +1 to Stealth; Only In Home Environment (-1)

Re: Hero Designer 3 die roller ported to Android? Erm, no, you would go to http://imgur.com, then drag something on that web page. You got it worked out here, but it might be interesting to remember whenever the forum software itself doesn't support image uploads (or via IM etc.). The dice roller looks quite neat. Let's see how long it takes for one of the resident hackers to work out a replacement

Re: Hero GUI I always thought the cover of the APG would make for a nice character sheet design. Or maybe one that slightly less Vitruvian, with a sword and a shield in each hand to better indicate offense/defense.

Re: Hero Designer 3 die roller ported to Android? I can always recommend imgur, just drag something onto the web page, start upload and then copy/paste the BBCode part.

Re: Hero Designer 3 die roller ported to Android? Generally, maybe, but for a dice roller and given the usual random number APIs, "1d16+2" would be a) a somewhat weird way to approach things, given that you need code for Xd6 anyway and not even easier to program. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if someone would radically over-engineer this and include a proper Gaussian distribution for arbitrary ranges instead of just calling "randInt(6)+1" a few times. By now, I'd be interested in seeing a few HD3 screenshots if possible. A dice roller without a required fancy visual representation would be pretty easy to do in a web app, and then both the people with iPhones and with Androids could use it at the table (and PC users for virtual tabletops/IRC games etc.).

Re: Hero GUI Paring things down is probably the wrong approach. To actually reduce complexity, you'd need to eliminate a whole category of elements (otherwise you'd just be limiting variety, which is quite different). And you'd be hard-pressed to find a genre where you could totally ignore one of HERO's constituent parts. Sooner or later you'll have to get down to the bare metal for some element. Sure, one obvious solution is simplicty for the players and refering to the GM once the abstraction gets leaky. Not a big fan of that in the long run (i.e. for anything beyond a one-shot or convention game). Initial complexity is a different deal, here we're mostly concerned about teaching, not building levels of abstraction for perpetuity. But there are lots of traps involved in this part, as often you're paying for the initial shallow learning curve with a big bump afterwards, as people have to forget their training wheels and sometimes even have to start from scratch to learn the "proper" rules. A good learning abstraction makes transitioning easier, not harder. Let's use the UI analogy once more: Your application allows you to cut and paste. You don't know how. But hey, there's a big button with scissors in the "tool bar". Great, works, done. But I would argue that the menu is the better interface. The disadvantage is that you have to click around to find that there's a "Cut" option in the "Edit" menu, but the big benefit is that you might find out about other functions ("Select All"/"Find") and that you might learn the keyboard shortcut for cut & paste, arguably the fastest way to do things. And while we're at it, let's stay in the IT world so that I can explain my "programmer POV" comment above: Now you actually want to make a GUI. You don't know the technology involved, as up 'til now you've worked with other systems or just created straight-forward printouts. Now the actual windows on screen can be hugely complex, ranging from the "Ok/Cancel" error message to something like Microsoft Excel. You might have a menu, tool bar icons, one of those status bars at the bottom, your window might be resizable or not etc. Lots of options, very high complexity. How that programming system is designed is obviously the biggest issue, but let's assume that's set in stone already (as is its in our case, we're not talking about Hero 7E after all). So how do quickly get a new programmer to produce some applications? The dangerous option is a simplified layer on top of it all, so you don't need to know about the complex system. Instead of calling your "Window" function with a metric ton of options, you just call a "SimpleWindow" function that has everything set up already: You've got a menu, you've got a tool bar, etc., you basically just tell it how big the window should be and its size. Works out alright, you've got a whole bunch of other functions that operate on SimpleWindows, making the whole experience a lot easier. Until you need to create a program that looks really different (maybe a game or a drawing application like Photoshop). Then your knowledge of SimpleWindows doesn't help you at all, you're back to scratch. There are other approaches, too, and we might learn from then: One popular one is to have a very generic "skeleton" program, where you just "fill out the blanks", but you could still delete or modify parts of the generic version -- or simply learn from it, look at how its done. Or make the documentation better. Programmers moved from shelves of pages a while ago and were quite eager to embrace the web. Hyper-linked documentation is a boon for exploring a complicated system, better than any index. Never mind that almost any modern documentation today starts with a tutorial, giving a general overview. Nowadays that's often in the form of a screencast, where you actually see someone typing in and executing all that stuff (not in real time, more like a "I already prepared that" cooking show). And then there's the importance of a high level structure. Keeping things in different files is one thing, but you also might have a graphical diagram showing you the constituent parts of your whole program, click on one of them and you're in the code. Whew, I earned my nerd points today. But all of that can have RPG analogies, and often already does. The "skeleton" should sound familiar, as we already do that with templates. Or even sample characters, were 90% of your points are spent, but you've got a few left over for your own designs or to pick from a small set of additional abilities. Improving the "documentation", i.e. the HERO books is a bit difficult, mostly for legal reasons. I really loved the D20 SRD site when I was still caught in GM'ing D&D. So you've got your Pixie NPC, and when you need to find out what those spells mean, you're there with one click. Haven't seen anything like that for PCs yet, but given the proliferation of tablets, maybe some day… And while we do have sample characters in almost every RPG out there, as well as sample sessions, I still believe we could do a better presentation for newbie players, especially if it's in an external document and thus won't cause problems with costing too many pages (for non-newbies, it's about as important as the "What's a RPG?" section). Some games actually did this with a "choose your own adventure" solo mini-game, where at almost every step a new ability/attribute/mechanism was explained. This would translate nicely into a more graphics-heavy or electronic format. As for a high-level structure, that's basically better character sheet design. Your Power Cards being one example. The important part (in my opnion) is not hiding away the abstracted parts too much. Make the first page of your sheet stack simple and include everything you need, but give the complete power construction details on subsequent sheets, preferably with the usual "6E1 42" indexing. Again, this would really benefit from an electronic presentation and easy rules reference, but, well… Whew, quite a long post. I don't know if I can provide a good TL;DR version. Maybe "beware of abstractions". They tend to outlive their usefulness and often leak (i.e. you still need to know what's at a lower level).

Re: Hero Designer 3 die roller ported to Android? You've got a pretty bad opinion about programmers