Tywyll

Has anyone made a nice sheet for this?

Are there any rules covering a flyer trying to recover from being thrown by a brick? As I understand it, throws are 'instant', so a brick could grab and throw a character their full range in one segment. But can a character with flight (or teleport) or some other movement power reduce or cancel any of the distance they are thrown before it gets bad?

As lunch mostly.

That isn't technically true, or else Trigger wouldn't work the way it did.

But that isn't what happened. They had cover, triggered it, then used a held action by virtue of combat starting thanks to a slower character initiating it.

Yeah, it's the failed roll and what that represents that is problematic. I mean maybe you see them blink, I guess? In this case, the player had a magic sword pointed at him with no way to know it could shot beams, hence me not announcing it until after the fight started.

@masseyI like your explination and it does help with certain genre conventions. Though it raises anohter question-do people know if they are successfully covered or not? Like in your example with the five guys, would the player know that mooks 1-3 made their cover 'attack' and would cover him while 4 and 5 failed their roll? Or would he just know that they took that action?

The hold was started before combat began. Then Phase 12 occurred. He blasted the guy. Now does he immediately also get an action in his Phase 12 after that? Also, when does the Cover damage take place? In this case the bad guy was faster than the player, but it was the player taking an action that began the combat (meaning I treated it as though combat more or less started on the pcs dex). So in effect the bad guy was holding his normal action, released the Cover on the Pcs dex, then...could he still get his held action? My players griped about it saying it made opening every potential encounter with a chat and pointed crossbows the optimal strategy and I have to agree they have a bit of a point.

Wow, never heard of that. I would love to see it though!

Exactly. I certainly don't agree with all of Steve's Rule Calls, and don't use them all (Only vs Fire I'm looking at YOU). But I decided to ask for the official answer after I started this thread because having reread the maneuver, I'm just so in the dark about how it's supposed to work, I wanted to get the RAW interpretation as well as other people's views on it.

Actually those were a repackaging of the Non-Weapon Proficiency rules from AD&D that appeared in Oriental Adventures (Gary Gygax, 1985) first and were refined in Dungeoneer's Survival Guide (and then Wilderness SG and then became part of 2E core). OA was published two years (and DSG 1 year) before AA's Grand Duchy of Karameikos introduced Skills into BECMI. That said, I think the implementation of Skills was smoother than NWP, especially the class based ones in 2nd Edition. And I completely agree that the system is better for building characters who are capable in non-combat tasks then the systems that came later.

So how does this work in regards to actions. The way it seems to read is that if someone establishes Cover before a combat starts, they could effectively attack twice once it does (since inflicting the damage 'takes no time'). We had a scerario where a character was covered last night (the cover being established before the characters were in actual combat), and when the pc took his action, the covering npc took the shot (in phase 12) and then when it rolled around to the npcs DEX, he was going to go again. Is that correct? Or should his phase have been spent already?

Me neither. To add a slight wrinkle, does Covering someone interact with holding an action or do you surrender your action to maintain the cover?

So how does this work in regards to actions. The way it seems to read is that if someone establishes Cover before a combat starts, they could effectively attack twice once it does (since inflicting the damage 'takes no time'). We had a scerario where a character was covered last night (the cover being established before the characters were in actual combat), and when the pc took his action, the covering npc took the shot (in phase 12) and then when it rolled around to the npcs phase, he was going to go again. Is that correct? Or should his phase have been spent already?

Ahhh...I see. No, I'd use a rolled up newspaper on a player who tried that. At best I'd let them activate it on their phase only. The benefit of the free reset is simply they wouldn't need to spend part of a phase to reuse it.

See I just feel that way about a game. I either buy a game and own it and use however I want, including deciding to buy DLC if I want, or I don't. I don't want to pay $50 for something and then pay $10-$20 a month to keep playing it. But when I play games I'm really more about narrative than grinding levels and resources, which most MMO's are based around, so that's another reason I'm not into them.

When I went to the OSR and started replaying B/X era D&D, I found this thought process (which I'd been guilty of) really funny. In the old days, early edition 1st level characters were actually quite tough, compared to the mundane world. A warrior could have twice (8) the hp of a commoner (4) before Con. A wizard could put down an entire village mob with a single spell. A cleric could restore a grieviously wounded individual to full health. A thief could...well, thieves still sucked. REgardless, 1st level characters weren't idiots. I think power creep and the constant influx of new, tougher monsters distorted the idea of what the characters represented. I suppose dungeons with instant kill death traps didn't help either. Later editions made it worse with every NPC having levels (wth is a 20th level commoner exactly?!?), but that became necessary because they tried to build NPCs the same way as PCs and for someone to be good at skills required high character levels. And such, 1st level characters became more and more bumbling morons. As much as I wasn't super fond of the Non Weapon Proficiencies in 1st and 2nd edition, the nice thing they accomplished was allowing a character to be skilled in a mundane task regardless of level. So a person could be an excellent blacksmith without having 10 levels, for example.

Oh, I know its in there (though the way suits of armor are build in expecting you to buy the parts seperately instead of simply buying Armor without an activation roll limitation is...odd and stupidly overpriced). I just wish that it was more possible to build a character who can be resiliant without relying on armor. Its such a weird restriction to the magic system in my opinion.

This is why I never got into MMOs...

Only downside is they are really glass cannons since only the highest level of magic provides any kind of defensive magic (barring defending versus their own element). Everyone has to run around in super plate mail or something or else die to the first blast spell they get hit with! At least that's how it reads to me.

If you ever get happy with it, I'd love a copy. It looks great!

What export are you using for those sheets?

Sorry to derail... My group has use the TTS for our hero campaign twice now and its worked pretty well. There have been some bugs (which I've told Brennall about) that have been frustrating, but that's mostly because we want to use ALL THE TOOLS!!! As a way of just playing as a vtt it works well. But the combat tracker and loading character sheets has been so cool and helpful. My players, who are all HERO newbies (though we've been playing for about 6 months) and mostly have shown little interest in picking up HERO are much more interested now that we are using TTS. I don't know why though.

Thanks for that! So when you use the stats of, say, an Orc from the Bestiary do you add levels and MA to their build? Otherwise they seem far from those levels on their own! I mean the default demon only has a CV of like 6 I think, with a single Combat level.

Sure, I get that. I just still don't understand how that build is game breaking. You trigger it, it inflicts 0-2 Body, done. Unless you have a way of triggering it multiple times (which the vast majority of characters shouldn't) I don't understand why its so bad? I'm just wondering if I missed something in the build.