Mike W

Re: What if: Japan won World War 2? Japan couldn't win, per se. But if it hadn't been for the atomic bomb, taking Japan would have been so incredibly expensive for the US(especially in terms of lives lost) that Japan might have been able to force a draw based on our unwillingness to lose the massive number of men it would have taken to conquor the main islands of Japan. Now, if we had taken Japan without the A-bomb: women's rights get sped up and we see a lot more women in the workforce, even in traditional "male" jobs much earlier because there would have been a lot less men coming home to reclaim jobs they had left. The US probably has much less of a Marshall plan and has to take a lot longer to rebuild Japan because of the drain on our economy. We also would have been much more likely to press for war crimes trials against some members of the Japanese military for the POW camps they were running. The US economy, while still the largest in the world, takes a lot longer time to accelerate. We also probably stay out of Korea and/or Vietnam which gives the Russians a better showing in the Cold War. Whether Reagan is able to win the Cold War in the same way is debatable. Probably the strategy will work, but Reagan may not be able to "finish the job". It may fall to a later president to get it done. Assuming of course, that we still have the same run of presidents. If Japan gets a "draw": There is a radical change in the run of presidents. Truman loses in '48 because he didn't win the war against Japan. And Eisenhower never gets elected because people don't want reminders of the war they couldn't win, even though Ike was the European commander. We probably win Korea much more handily and maybe Vietnam because we're trying to "make up for not beating Japan" and get far more aggressive in our military strategy(either that or our psyche is damaged enough that we stay out entirely, it would depend on who the president was at the time). Furthermore, since Japan isn't conquored, they might get to keep some of the territory that they had taken. Can you picture the world if Japan controlled eastern China? In either case, staying out of Vietnam would radically alter the 1960s and the baby boom generation(which might be small enough that you wouldn't even call them the baby boomers). The long term effects of staying out of Vietnam are staggering - including the possiblity of Clinton never getting elected.

Re: skill roll affected by spell level? How? There is(or at least used to be in 4th) a range of modifiers for skill checks that no one ever remembered. In particular, you got bonuses for doing things that were really easy for the character(up to +5) because they were considered "routine" abilities for anyone with the skill. Sure it's POSSIBLE, your electrician can't put in that light socket but it's so routine that the roll gets a major plus because no electrician should miss that roll 1 in 4 times(which a character with a 12- skill roll will). As a GM you would be perfectly justified in adding beneficial modifiers to the roll to represent the ease with which the character should be able to do something. With that in mind, you are within your rights to simply assign each skill a "difficulty level" and make the team wizards pay points for mastery, like a secret agent pays for clearance. Or simply port across a chart. Difficulty 1 requires an 11- roll. Difficulty 2 requires a 12- base roll. And so on. One thing to remember is that HERO allows you to do pretty much anything that you and the players can agree on. It's flexibility is both its greatest benefit and its most frustrating part. You CAN do just about anything. More often the question is SHOULD you. If it's something you and all the players want to do,then you probably should.

Re: Looking for recommendations for Power Armor information Mechanics aside, for ideas and inspiration as well as a fun look inside what being in power armor would probably be like, go track down an old Iron Man one shot called The Iron Manual. Marvel put it out in the late 80s or early 90s and it was essentially "the Iron Man technical manual for dummies" as a one shot comic book.

Re: What rule don't people know?

Re: What rule don't people know? They generally don't have HERO designer. It's more just that I still get asked about it during the game sessions when it should either be on the sheet or you should know it by now. They're good guys, and I don't get on them or anything, but inside I'm annoyed as hell at having to answer the same question every week because someone has forgotten.

Re: What is your favourite Masks (Luhadore Masks) Jushin Thunder Liger's mask has always been my favorite. Hands down. http://www.obsessedwithwrestling.com/profiles/j/jushin-liger.php

Re: What rule don't people know? I've been playing HERO for almost 15 years. We've never played that way. We've always played that you lose your next action, but if you're holding then your held action counts as your next one.

Re: What rule don't people know? I think the thing that drives me nuts the most is how many people I play with still have trouble calculating END costs. They're newer to the system than I am, but most of them have still got at least 30 sessions under their belt. And the big one that I've seen more people forget over the years than anything else: Characters who are reduced to negative STUN and recover enough to return to the fight have END equal to their STUN.

Re: Power Build "Bamf" Last time I built Nightcrawler, I built it as an HA Autofire linked to his Teleport.

Re: Favorite Anti-Brick tricks? Favorite Anti-brick tricks include: Martial Arts moves with a Fall element like Legsweep and Takedown. Flash Attacks(can't hit what you can't see) Environmental vicotries: Drop a building on him. Push him off a cliff, etc. I once "beat" Juggernaut in a friend's Marvel campaign(run on HERO) by grabbing him with TK, flying out over Lake Michigan and dropping him in. Sure, it didn't hurt him, but by the time Juggy walked back, the fight was over. (My guy had LOTS of move). AVLD/NND attacks. Make him mad, then dodge behind his friends. A guy I played with in college did this to Grond once. He taunted him then started ducking behind other bad guys(mostly agents). Grond ended up doing a LOT of our work for us before we got took him down(with a sneak attack haymaker from the power armored guy). You can also get extra damage on the brick by staying just out of range and making him try to move through you to hit. Of course, given the relative CVs the brick has a much better chance of hitting the big nasty wall behind you and damaging himself. But really, trying to take out a brick one one one with a Martial Artist is almost impossible unless you have an NND attack like Nerve Strike and a LOT of time.

Re: Bag of Holding...How Would You Do It? I would think either Extra Dimensional Movement, Usable as an Attack or possibly Shrinking with the same advantage. Extra Dimensional Movement would probably be more appropriate though as a certain game by WOTC, which shall remain nameless here, specifically talks about a Bag of Holding being an extra dimensional space and the bad consequences of taking it into another extra dimensional space.

Re: Would Marvel/DC Sue? Generally speaking, concepts are trademarked, not names. As long as you make the character distinct from anything Marvel or DC has going, you'll probably be OK. That said, I would stay away from borrowing any distinctive names. That's part of the reason why Marvel Comics ended up with the trademark on Hulk Hogan's name. WWF was billing him as "The Incredible Hulk Hogan" and Marvel said that was just a wee bit too close to their character. Also, Capt. Marvel was originally a character for Timely Comics, but DC won a lawsuit that said the character was too much like Superman. It wasn't just that he was strong, fast and flew. If you look at the characters, they look a LOT alike. Now, characters from older literature(e.g. - Thor, Hercules) are part of the public domain. You can use just so long as you don't "adapt them to the new world" the same way.

Re: Combat Skill Levels vs Martial Arts I think whether you use Martial Arts or whether you use Combat Skill Levels depends on the character. For me, the general guideline is that if I can't name the Martial Art the character is using, then they get CSLs.

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? Speaking entirely hypothetically, I would expect one or more of the folowing to apply: 1. The bigger your empire gets, the harder it is to govern and the more revolutions you have to worry about. For example, one concern the English kings had for much of the middle ages was that any time they wanted to put a major force in Europe they had to be concerned about the Scots seizing an opportunity to rebel. Maybe she's worried about having to commit so many elite troops to conqueroring Earth that revolutions might spring up on already conquored worlds. 2. Earth's dimensional defenses might be better. She can't commit as many troops as she would like because the Earth's mystic defenses are much higher than a normal planet's. 3. It's not just the number of supers but super mystics around Earth that is the problem. And don't forget that certain evil mystics might not like some interdimensional interloper to come by and try and conquor the Earth. Do you really want to tick of Takofanes? 4. She's worried about her own safety. Sure, she has endless numbers of troops who could certainly take over the Earth easily, BUT Earth has a lot of super powered types who might be able to figure out where the threat is coming from and try to go directly to the source and attack her directly(and maybe win). Conquoring the Earth does her no good if the Champions(let's say) capture her while the battle is going on.

Re: Multiple constants That seems like a strange rule, but it's probably about power balance. I'm not sure I would agree with that, at least for my games. I'd have to think about it.

Re: Multiple constants You can only have as many instances as you have paid for. In other words, if you want to have multiple Force Walls up, then you need to buy Autofire. You can have as many different Constant powers going at once as you want, provided you have the END to run them all and they aren't contradictory somehow(multiple slots of the same multipower for instance or trying to put Suppress and Aid on the same thing or in the same area).

Re: Prison facilities for super-human criminals in your Campaigns? I call it Stronghold, but it's run more like The Vault in Marvel Comics. Guards have low grade power armor. Cells each have special tech to compensate for the powers of the villains. Like Marvel, it's also in the Rocky Mountains - in an out of the way section - where escapees have a long way back to "civilization".

Re: What would some good limits be for an experienced hero?

Re: What would some good limits be for an experienced hero? For a disadvantage: Hunted: Rogues Gallery, 8- You've been around a long time. You've made some enemies. You probably have one or two "archnemesis" that get their own Hunted line on your sheet. But for the rest, take them as a group Hunted and list a half dozen people that want to kick your butt.

Re: VPPs and Game World Logic Honestly, I think you're overthinking some of these examples. 1. Any "expense account", in game terms would produce one-shot items until you paid points for them. As a game balance, you can't just buy new powers with your character's wealth via equipment and write them on the character sheet. So the amount of points each one is worth is really irrelevant. And in the real world, most "expense accounts" say for a businessman who flies alot, wouldn't need to be defined in great detail anyway. It's just a "the company pays for it" 1 or 2 point perk. 2. ANY gadget pool is limited by the technological levels of the game. So is real life. There are lots of things that happen in comic books and science fiction novels that don't happen in real life. For example, we don't travel to other galaxy or build flying power armored suits in real life. There is no way around such a limitation for a gadget pool. In order to have a gadget you must have the materials and the know-how to build it. Sure some things will be more expensive than others, but most typical real world technology, at least that is usable by an individual person, doesn't have such radically different point costs as to create a problem here. You can have a typical hand gun, a grenade, and a personal radar system all for about the same price. A real life notebook computer would fit into that as well. 3. As for the psychokinetic example. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of some of the things you're attempting. OK, so you want to create a microthin blade to cut someone's head off by sheer concentration? A blade needs an edge to cut well and the thinner the blade the sharper the edge it needs(and the harder it is to maintain that edge). Does your character know anything about how to actually "construct" a blade? And you still have to create something in midair and then repel all the forces around it to keep it afloat. And probably exercise a great deal more control over it to be effective. And if you want the blade to be more than a "one and done" construct then you need to be able to maintain your concentration and the integrity of your blade and you slam it into something that is much bigger. A blade as thin as you're proposing and made out of almost any common real world knife material would be dulled the first time it hit anything remotely solid - bone, brick, wood, whatever. Honestly, I don't think any of your examples hold up very well.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills But I don't think it's always a player issue. Sometimes you get a cool idea for a character because you want to build it around a particular power or origin and then when you start crunching numbers you have a hard time rounding the character out. And anymore, between the 350 starting point and the fact that characters tend to start out, both in games and in comics, tougher and more well rounded than they used to, I think requiring a few non-combat abilities out of a starting character isn't off base or unreasonable. Granted, when most characters make their first few appearances, you tend to see lots of flash(powers and combat stuff) and not much non-combat stuff like skills and perks, but that has more to do with "catching the reader's eye" than anything else, I think. Characters that hang around you usually see a lot of the other stuff before too long.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills I generally don't like to do that either, unless it's unbalancing. But I find that if I don't at least strongly encourage people to spend a fair amount of points on non-combat stuff(and there is no set point total but I like to see a handful of things on the sheet that don't have to do with combat) then they spend half the game bored, or worse, disruptive, because their character has nothing to do while the rest of the team is figuring out what's going on. I think you're underspending a few people too. For example, Wasp still had a lot of money and some contacts, and some interpersonal skills like Conversation and High Society. I could get 20-30 non-combat points easy, especially by the time the mid to late 1980s rolled around.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills Well, I try to construct a variety of stories and try to make sure that the story is complex enough that one character can't figure it all out by themselves. You might need the techie to figure out what's behind all the tech thefts, another guy with KS: Supers to figure out who might do it and someone with Deduction in order to put it all together. And players are made aware from the get go that if they choose to make a character who is useless outside of combat that they are probably going to be bored for a significant part of the night. Since I don't want players not paying attention for half the night, I tend to discourage a Starfire type build. I don't like player characters who have no reason to associate with the other players and know nothing about anyone or anything in the world. Such characters are more workable in a comic book than a role playing game. And being a comic fan who grew up on 1980s Marvel, I don't really remember many such characters in team books. Hercules, Thor, and She Hulk fit somewhat but even She Hulk had a couple contacts, a law degree, and a basic KS for bad guys.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills Well, I don't absolutely REQUIRE they have at least 40 point in skills and perks but I make it clear they'll regret it if they don't. The stories require you to use skills and perks(like contacts) to figure out what is going on. And taking down the villain without figuring out what's going on always comes back to haunt you. And that's assuming you can find the villain in the first place.

Re: GMs: making abilities useful As a GM, I try to make sure everything comes into play eventually, though not everything will necessarily be rolled. In some cases, you use them just to explain how the character got their powers, especially for equipment based heroes. Or I try to figure out how a particular suite of skills will come into play. The one that gets rolled will depend in part on how the player approaches the problem. As a player, I try to buy a full set and stretch them as much as possible to get the most out of them.