greypaladin_01

Have to say that what I really see here is arguments for better scrutinizing limitations.  A -1/4 limitation is expected to have an impact in play. If it does not, then it should not be a limitation. If the limited range is still so much range that the limitation has no impact, it is worth no points. Ditto a skill roll that has no impact, an OIAID if the character will always be free to adopt that AID or a Focus that will never be damaged or unavailable.
 
If we're going to allow -1/4 or -1/2 limitations for issues that never, or almost never, come up in the game, why not just give everyone a -1/4 or -1/2 AutoLimitation, rather than allow players prepared to game the system to gain advantages over players using the system for a game?

Half-dice and "+1" were present even back in 1st edition, although they were not explained very clearly there (they could be extrapolated to Powers from usage in the STR table and the "Weapons" section).  2E really made it clearer, however, offering specific explanations of half-dice in the "Determining Damage" section.

Ah, I didn't know that. I thought it was more of a static setting (just recently updated) with a really impressive Wold Newton-ish timeline. I really enjoyed the idea of the ubertimeline from dawn of time to far future, with different ages of heroes. I really wish it had found more purchase in the 5th edition.

I also wish that the streamlined version of Champions (Fuzion) had been a bit more polished and accepted.

 
Will share some other items of interest as I get further in my campaign.

01 - https://armchairgamer.blogspot.com/2023/03/champions-one-earth.html [ FIRST POST ]
02 - https://armchairgamer.blogspot.com/2023/05/champions-one-earth-broad-strokes.html [ BROAD STROKES of the CAMPAIGN ]
03 - https://armchairgamer.blogspot.com/2023/05/champions-one-earth-bayport-megacity.html [ SETTING: BAYPORT MEGACITY ]
04 - https://armchairgamer.blogspot.com/2023/05/champions-one-earth-player-characters.html [ CHARACTERS: Part 1 ]
05 - https://armchairgamer.blogspot.com/2023/05/champions-one-earth-player-characters_14.html [ CHARACTERS: Part 2 ]

Other people have said as much, but I think it bears repeating that points in HERO don't represent a character's power. This is something that tripped me up when I started with the game.
 
Instead, the ability guidelines you set (examples in 6th edition are on page 35) decide how effective characters will be, and as long as everybody sticks to those then you could have characters with completely different points totals that still played together just fine. The points aren't here to balance characters, but to get you thinking about what matters for your character concept, and to let people customise their characters freely from the same starting point.
 
So for villains, it's more reasonable to compare their abilities like CV, DC, etc, to the players', and work out how dangerous you want them to be. A villain built on fewer points than the players could be a truly threatening foe if all of their points are put into combat abilities, while one with heavy investment in skills might be a pushover despite having twice as many or more points.
 
If you still want to use points as a measure of how experienced an NPC is, I still wouldn't assign a fixed number per year spent active. After all, experience can vary in quality depending on what you're doing. A character who spent six months fighting wave after wave of supervillains would come out the other end with more experience points than one who spent ten years rearing cattle in Nebraska (at least in most cases).
 
When designing NPCs with a lot of experience, then, I'd think about what those experiences were in their career. If they've had a lot of useful encounters to learn from then that would justify picking up a lot of skills and variations for their powers, which would bump up the point total. As long as you can justify each purchase based on their backstory, the sky's the limit since you're building a character to reflect a concept instead of to within a points budget.
 
Sorry, that's a bit long-winded, but hopefully something in there can be of use!

First off.  If any of my players are reading this thread.  STOP.
 
I am afraid that I have done very little conversion work.  Our D&D 5E group became disillusioned with all the shenanigans going on with the publishers and community.  We then reverted back to AD&D 2E with an all new campaign, but that only lasted a few sessions before some of the younger members in our group made it know that they really didn't like the system that much.  So now we transitioned over to Hero System.  At first people attempted to replicate their 1st level D&D characters in Hero which is possible but you end up with some really wonky builds.  After that first attempt I encouraged the players to just keep their background and history and rebuild the characters using the published Hero System sources.  This has worked much better.  The elves used the elf template from Fantasy Hero, the Gnome and Halfling did the same (6-players, 2 elves, 1 gnome, 1 halfling, 2 humans).
 
Since it is new to most of the group, I started them off in the Village of Hommlet.  In AD&D they made one foray to the moathouse (where one got eaten by a big lizard) and then retreated to regroup.  We transitioned the campaign to Hero system.  Four of the characters kept the same character idea that they had.  One player changed.  And the deceased character was a new build as well.  I have pretty much just gotten the equivlent critters from the Hero System Bestiary where possible and just made a quick build for the few I did not have (Bugbear and Gnoll).  I have even used the Hero System Ghouls even though they lack the paralytic power of the AD&D versions.
 
So basically I convert as little as I can get away with.  And since most of the group was not familiar with Greyhawk, they do not necessiarly come across as typical Greyhawk characters.  One guy is running a character based on Bell from a certain popular anime.  And then the Complications that players have put on their characters have given me all sorts of material I can use as, well Complications.  I am trying to bring those complications to life using Greyhawk background where possible.  And at least one character is familar with the background and so is essentially running a former Scarlet Brotherhood monk who is being hunted by them as a traitor.  

Same here.

And you get to round down to the Hero’s favor there as well!

You have my admiration, KK. I have more than enough trouble trying to untangle the confused jumble that either company has made of their own universe. The thought of trying to weave them together into a coherent whole makes me twitch uncontrollably. 

I believe you modify the STR first THEN divide by 5 to get DC. And don’t forget to round in Hero’s favor! 

Well, I'm inspired by having a sort of "generations" approach to these things (the two mini-series by John Byrne covering the Superman & Batman families across generations).

There are generations of these heroes as the older ones retire, get lost in the Phantom Zone, are killed, time travel, and so on. I chalk up the costumes as a legacy that gets passed on, but I am trying to side-step some of the questions until the issue becomes critical to the story. In fact, I've just introduced a Golden Age Superman fighting some monsters that invaded from the Phantom Zone...

There is a Superman, Thor, Batman, Captain America in this current setting, but the costumes are different and they may or may not be the same until the players interact with them. Until that time, they're free to speculate with their own preferences based on their knowledge (or lack thereof) of the comics.
My early attempts at a timeline certainly gave me a headache...

REPOSTING a portion of my Campaign Guidelines:
 
Campaign Hook: Knight Watch Red
The PCs start off as plainclothes super-heroes tasked to investigate incidents (involving locations, individuals, and artifacts) of a potentially multiversal nature. If there's potential danger, they are to secure the location, individuals, and artifacts involved, contain multiversal incidents, and protect sentients and the dominant reality.
 
Borrowing from SlyFlourish's Six Truths approach to fantasy rpg campaigns, and applying it to my own (just enough for my players to jump onboard without having to read pages and pages of background), I came up with the following for my super-heroic campaign:
The world of Knight Watch Red has a single timeline from WWII to the present involving different ages of super-heroes (from Marvel & DC). Super-heroes and super-villains tend to age normally from their first appearances, and have seen multi-generational legacies across heroic ages. Nations, corporations, and organizations recognize the threats of metahumanity based on battles of super-heroes and super-villains across history. Nations, corporations, and organizations also recognize the value of metahumanity in conflicts against attempts to conquer or destroy the Earth. Organizations like the Justice Society and Checkmate evolved from fighting crime to monitoring, regulating, and cultivating the super-human societies of Earth. Recent anomalous incidents suggest that multiversal incursions are weakening the fabric of reality, and must be contained to safeguard the timeline. The combination of these Six Truths helped me establish a familiar combined universe, yet one that was also different from the ones in the current comics -- where some heroic and villainous mantles are already on their second or third generations, while others are eternally frozen in time and still hold on to their places despite their aging compatriots. It also allowed me to briefly expound on new elements of a status quo that place Earth in a universe with aliens, but have somehow placed it in a semi-static status quo that does not have an incredibly fertile mutant population with Omega-level threats around each corner, that does not have yet another alien race invading this week / month / year, that does not have hyper-advanced technology in the hands of common folk. But more on this in another post.
 
Of course, I added a Seventh Truth to this set, which was related to the creation of the characters themselves:
 
7. Each PC must be a legacy character. Whether they are related by blood to another hero or villain in the DC or Marvel universe, or they are inspired by one of them, or they have inherited artifacts, knowledge, abilities through various means, they must be tied to an existing character in these universes.
 
The reasons for this last one were: (a) to provide me with a handle on the types of adventures that these created characters would like to engage in; and (b) to allow me to quickly and easily grasp the backstories of these characters -- including whatever time-/science-/space-bending implications their histories and powers might have. It reduced the need for long (and potentially contentious) discussions about histories, NPCs, powers, abilities, enemies and allies through broadstrokes mentions of key figures in the DC/Marvel setting (filtered through the rough timeline and current status quo in my head). Oddly enough, it also curtailed a tendency for my Champions players to come up with the wildest character concepts executed in the most-game breaking way possible -- by giving them a chance to go through favorite character concepts and legacies and an opportunity to put their own stamp on this legacy character.

I don't give XP to NPCs or villains, and I have very few NPC heroes.  As a campaign goes on, I check to see if the villain has become less effective, simply because the heroes are getting more experienced and powerful. If it's needed, then I may revise the villain a little to make him a little more in line with the concept effectiveness, i.e, more powerful, but that's about it.

This is the way. You have to examine every build on a case by case basis. Experience is irreplaceable for eyeballing balance. 

I can honestly,say that it has been,over thirty years sonce I have seen a Multipower with a drawback, period.
 
A Multipower has the _potential_ to have a drawback, but it doesnt have to.  It gets a bonus anyway.  Ultrasound on your movement and it becomes quite the bonus, with no drawbacks.  Only want one or two selectable advantages on a power?  Ultra slots give quite a discount there, too, and without drawbacks.
 
Multipowers give free points, period.  Same,as Elemental Control.  I dont care because it didn't take just a handful of characters to figure out that points do not, will not, and cannot provide balance, period.
 
Honest opinion?  Someone had a hard time figuring out how to do a proper EC, bad mouthed until he got repeated, and here we are, finding faults in EC that are by no means exclusive to it.
 
 
 
 
I am not saying it won't ever happen, but I have get to personally encounter a situation that was made worse because I couldn't Teleport and Swim at the same time.
 
And these are the multipowers that players build; these are the Multipower that GM build for their villains (though most of us do tend to ensure that our villains might be inconvenienced in one or two possible ways).
 
My Desolidifcation goes in _one_ Multipower; my Energy Blast Affects Solid goes in a different one.  My Forcefield goes in one; my running goes in a different one, etc.   We use multipowers to optimize our points expenditures, period.  Even when there is a genuine "complication"  (I cant use my flight and my Force field at the same time or some auch), the idea that we are soaking a disadvantage is entirely a fabrication:  this charavyer is exactly as we conceived him to be.  With that being the case, has he actually been deprived of somethinf he should have had when we concieved him without it?
 
All of the "you get what you pay for" is an absolute mantra at one moment, and just like "build exactly what you want," is conveniently forgotten when it comes time to make the case for Disadvantages and Limitations anf Frameworks, in spite of the fact that you are getting _exactly what you wanted_.
 
Elemental Controls are bad bevause there is no "real limitation."   Multipowers are _good_ because _it is possible_ to have a "real limitation_."  Possible?  Yes.  Mandated?  Not once; not ever.  Build your multipowers so that you tuen off powers you would never want to use in conjunction anyway.  What have you suffered or bartered away?  Nothing.  Well, your overall cost; you bartered some of that away.
 
 
 
Buy 12d6 of every power, straight out, no advantages or Limitations.
 
Buy enough Power Pool to create 12d6 of any power.  Do you have them all?  Not at the same time, but without anywhere near the investment.
 
To keep it fair, build 12d6 of every power with the same limitation your power pool has:  only one power at a time.
 
Then consider that your power pool can provide additional chracterisitics boons and powers that are not broken down into sice of effect.  The price gets better and better!  12d6 of everything man has not only paid too much for his abilities, he cant opt to trade them for a quick 30 inches of flight, either.
 
 
If after this exoeriment the cost are similar, I will not only eat your hat, I will give you thirty minutes to draw a crowd.
 
 
 
The argument against EC was flawed from day, propped up for decades by carefully ignoring the same problems in all other frameworks, and having gone away officially (for most of you), we can all feel justified for parroting the same flawed arguments because "Well, we must have been right."
 
  
 
 
 
 

VPPs offer flexibility, so you don't have to pay for it with advantages like Variable Special Effects or Allocatable, available on some defense powers, lets you shift points between the different defense types.  
 
And this can easily be viewed as dubious, but...for a combat VPP, you generally don't buy No Skill Roll.  It's too expensive in most cases.  Well, OK...you're gonna buy your Power skill up to something fairly good anyway, right?  If we're talking 18 INT, and a 60 point control cost, to get to a 14- requires 7 levels.  That's 17 points.  Well, taking it to a 17- is only 6 more.  And here's the dubious part:  slap the common modifier Requires a Skill Roll on.  Your Power skill's already the natural choice, and you've already paid for it.  Yeah, you have to make the roll, but that's why you buy the roll up.
 
What this means is, everything in your VPP is now getting a -1/2 limitation.  In a 6E VPP, pool size and control cost are completely separate.  Pool size is character points.  So you can have pool size 41, control 62...say, for a VPP where you have 10 dice at 1/2 END, or 12 dice at full, for a swath of basic attack powers, and you can tweak for AoEs or whatnot.  You can also define the pool size as much larger, so you throw your Flight in there, with both combat and non-combat modes.  With the -1/2 limitation applying. 
 
An extreme form of this is a control cost of 30, with a pool size of around 100...yeah, 5 separate 30 point powers, if you keep the skill roll.  What you MAY do is buy 0 Phase to switch powers.  What can you buy?  Defense in layers.  10/10 Resistant and 50% DR...physical and energy are separate.  That's 3 slots.  HTH attacks.  Movement.  Characteristics...30 points means as much as +3 SPD, or +3 OCV and DCV, or +20 STR, 0 END...combined with 4d6 AP HA at 1/2 END for a Harvey Wallbanger configuration.  For No Skill Roll?  A smaller pool size, enough for probably 1 power, where that power can take other limitations.  Or when the entire pool is gonna be bought with OIAID.  ESPECIALLY when you can take a fairly large Limited Powers in the VPP.  Quite often this works out better in an MP, tho...basically, the double cost savings of keeping the skill roll on the VPP, and slapping RSR as a common modifier, is huge.
 
Basically, the Hero rules are open-ended, and there's almost no inherent balance checking.  That's left up to the GM and players.  Character creation is an exercise in massaging the rules to get the most we can get, while keeping the drawbacks to what we can accept.  That assessment is highly personal.  The rules allow point shaving in MANY ways...OIAID, focus, the double-use skill roll VPP, ECs, multiform abuse.  For combat powers, Limited Range is your friend because the range mods kill your attack effectiveness anyway, long before you hit the limit for Limited Range.  
 
I agree that the notion of "you get what you pay for, and no more" is a goal, but it tends to be a lot easier to enforce at the micro level, not the macro level. 

That's in classic organizations, I've made some changes.

Virtual reality is the trend I'm thinking of. You now have people playing "sports" using lifelike images of real athletes, in their chair with a controller. You have people taking virtual "tours" of places they'll never see in real life. Whose whole method of communicating with others is via electronic media, even when it's possible to be physically present with them. And whose idea of "gaming" is following a limited number of computer-generated paths and options spelled out by someone else they'll never even meet. Increasingly, people are able to take their media with them and consume them anywhere, for instant gratification. The latest VR tech even shuts them off almost completely from the rest of the world. And we're getting closer to the time when the people we watch and listen to perform are artificially generated, to the point where most of us won't be able to tell the difference between them and real people.
 
How long before everything we experience is divorced from reality, and we no longer even recognize what the real experience is like? We just let some caste of specialists craft fantasies for us to live in.

The main ones offered in 6th are Multipower, Power Pools and the Unified Power Limitation.   There are some variants in the APG but I don't remember much about them off hand.

From at least 4/5 are going to be basically the same with the only difference being Elemental Controls, which Unified Power replaced.   But they essentially do the same thing, I think there are other posts going into more details on UP vs EC.

That really is it for the most part.  There are some variance on how the various Frameworks function by edition and the older (pre-4th) you go, the more different some things will look.
 
 
That being said, you mentioned Champions at first but then also Fantasy and Pathfinder.  Exactly what type of game are you trying to do with HERO?    Because completely separate from Frameworks are suggested rules and systems based on type of game.

I'm still on the fence with Unified Power, yes it allows more... but ultimately that is because more and more rules kept getting piled onto ECs.   Even with some of those, it feels more like rules that were created to stop that ONE player instead of putting more of a focus on Genre or GM campaign limits.  

As @Duke Bushido mentioned, all Frameworks are a 'cheat' to milk more points into a character build, and EC are no better or worse than the others.  Ultimately some of this should come down on the GM saying "ok, maybe by the RAW you could do this, but I am going to say no.  You need to make X changes and then we are fine."    

Personally I like Elemental Controls more for various reasons, even if one of the biggest is just how it nicely gathers all the associated powers into one place.  I would ignore many of the limits placed over the various editions for the sake of proper concepts...but I am also not afraid to say 'no' or "we tried this but it needs reworking"
 

Might as well add this, though it may or may not be tangential:
 
It is no secret that I like to make fun of the bow and arrow superhero.  It is generally good-natured (generally.  It isn't a concept I care for, but I am not going to disallow them; I know they are popular).
 
Let me tell you who started me on this path or archer hatred:
 
My own brother J.
 
He built an archer, complete with a trick arrow MP filled with Ultras.  I reviewed and okayed the character.  Now before anyone selected or built their characters, I gave them a general layout of the plot, where the campaign was (hopefully) going to go, who they might face, etc, etc.
 
This included a guy with the power to drain tecnology-based powers (could reduce equipment to dust).
 
At one point, the villain grabbed J's bow and did his thing, starting to destroy the bow.
 
J responds with "I hit him with two electro STUN arrows."
 
How do you expect to do that?
 
"One in each hand, stab him in the neck from each side."
 
Okay, I tell you what- _technically_, losing the bow is draining your MP pool, but given your SFX, I see why this should work.  Make a DEX roll to see if you can grab both--
 
"Yeah; I dont have to.  They are regular powers; the arrows are SFX."
 
"Right, but without the bow-"
 
He spun his character sheet around to me,  "the bow is unnecessary."
 
I _thought_ I had read the character before I approved it.   I had not read it closely enough.....
 
Evrything in his MP was bought as normal attacks-  that is, HTH attacks, or without range.
 
The bow was listed separately.  It was the cost of adding Ranged to non-ranged attacks, bought through a focus.  The MP was _not_ bought through a focus (though it did have lumited shots on everything.
 
I had missed that.
 
And that is how, in the mid-eighties, we stumbled across the idea of what is now called a Naked Advantage.
 
(Oh, and the villain went down: he had a weakness against electrical SFX).  Granted, J was throwing his arrows or leaping in and stabbing villains with them, until they swung back by HQ.
 
And that was when my ire with archers started.   it is really J slipping one past me that I am grumbling about.
 
 
 
 

THANK YOU!
 
I was starting to think I was the only one!
 
Okay, if I drain one of your spider powers in your EC, you lose clinging, bonus STR, Bonus DEX, Spider sense.....
 
And your completely mechanical web shooters.....
 
If I drain your gun MP, you only lose the specific attack I drained, and evey other attack in the gun works fine....
 
If your turbine boots give you swimming and flight, and I drain them, I only drain one power, in spite of both powers coming from the same pair of turbines.....
 
Ugh.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Yep.  It is _one_ power: Power Pool.
 
Drain that.
 

I also should add that it doesn't bother me because I apply the "Drain one, Drain all" mechanic to Multipowers and VPP's also. Powers drawing from a common pool seems to me to be powers with the same source.

To this day, we play it a bit different.
 
Some things just "felt" better using EGO instead of INT.  Ego for mind control; Int for illusions-  that sort of thing.   We have been playing it that way for decades.  To be honest, though, it wasn't about any mechanical problems, as much as it was about what felt right for the powers and how we perceived them to work.
 
 

not if you sharpen it

HAHA  oops....   I meant  "knife throwing"  which sounds extra dull now by comparison!