bluesguy

The biggest thing I do with critical fumbles is drops weapon, broken bow string, device is broken for the combat, etc. No one accidentally kills someone else (self or others)

In my heroic games, we use Hit Locations and Placed/Called shot. Please remember the X Body is applied after appropriate defenses are taken into account (6E2 108). If combined with Critical Hit Damage (6E2 118), which requires rolling less than 1/2 of what is needed to hit the target. So if a character decides to take the extra time and shot their opponent in the head and needs a 12- to hit the head (PSL to offset hit location and PSL to offset range mod) and then rolls a 5- with a weapon that does 3d6 RKA. The target took 18 Body and 90 Stun and if the target was wearing a really tough helmet that had 8 resistant PD and they have 8 PD, then the target would take 20 Body [(Body - rPD) * 2] and 74 Stun [Stun - rPD + PD]. Unless they are fighting a dragon it is very likely that the target is dead or so unconscious they will only wake up if they receive medical attention. I had a game where this happened a couple of times (more often to NPCs than to PCs). The players very quickly learned to plan ambushes and be on the look out for ambushes.

I use random tables a lot but not for these kinds of things. Rather I use them to help generate potential encounters, locations, NPCs (and personalities) and adventure ideas. I will generally generate a hundred or more and then pick out a few to refine to the point where they can be used or strung together into a narrative. I use Inspiration Pad Pro to generate the results. The tables themselves are based on material I have found on the net and then my creating the random tables for Inspiration Pad Pro to use to generate the information.

This application does not replace what you can do with Hero Designer. In any case here is the link about Hero System Mobile

Yes neon blues is a color that people only see in the night sky (the campaign is called Nyonia - The Celestial Jewels) and for all practical purposes a small celestial jewel fell from the sky (see background for the campaign website). Some things I have decided: It will take time and effort to figure out the full potential of the stones Simple uses include grinding up the stones and mixing the powder with water to make a blue neon dye which will dye just about anything It is possible to use the stones (after a lot of time, effort, and expense) to magic items. A finely crafted item is made with either the blue stone powder mixed in with the base material. Then a mage takes the time to cast the appropriate spell on the item. One spell per stone. After a week of casting the spell (pretty much all day long), the spell is bound to the item. Probably make the caster roll spell research every day and for every -2 they make their roll by the item gets an additional charge. In my world items recharge very slowly (1 charge per day). So if someone wants an item with multiple spells they would probably want to have multiple stones attached/embedded into the item and each stone could have a different spells cast. The meteorite is not a living entity. The side effect of using such items case a slow change in skin tone until you look like the Beast from the X-Men

Oh I wasn't going to have it turn them blue. Although some spores from a plant growing in the soil where the rocks were found turned one PCs arm blue. So yes a side effect of using an item made from the stones should turn the user (or a part of them that comes in contact with the item during use) starts to turn blue..

@death tribble and @Duke Bushido I love your suggestions. The players are very role playing and story oriented. They like complicated plots. The campaign has an overall campaign arc, this event was just a random event. Based on some of your suggestions I can see how I can weave this into the main plot line. I should have been more clear about the random events. What I do is before a session I will generate a bunch of random events and then pick out some of which are interesting and see what happens. I use random event sessions for travel between places. My world is huge and travel time is measured in weeks (and months). Something needs to happen along the way. I tend to create an overall campaign plot with plot points/places/events/people and I let the players find their way through the campaign. It is never a straight line. No Smurfs (Die Smurfs Die!)... Some of players were part of the group that generated these quotes. Look at bullets 9 & 10 in the list.

Looking for some advice, I need to provide some context first: Sometimes I like to run a single session that is purely a series of 'random' events/encounters. I wrote 'random' because I do use a tool to generate the random events/encounters and then I collect up the best ones and put them in a list. Based on what the characters do will drive what happens. That is what happened on Sunday. The party is traveling up a river towards the frontier. Along the way they encountered a huge thunderstorm and a F5 tornado (Random). The captain of the boat (PC) has luck so no one hurt and boat survived intact. The next day they encountered a fog and they noticed animals where fleeing the fog (Random). That night they encountered another boat and that crew had captured a bird which had a few feathers that were neon blue in color (Random). Sitting around the campfire a couple of the players realize there was a falling star that hit in the area 50 or 75 years ago. Two characters are very curious so they use skills to take a guess where the falling star probably hit. They headed off in that direction. Along they way they noticed more and more animals, plants and the very ground turned to the color of neon blue. The lucky character and good skill rolls got them close enough to see an unusual land formation in the form of a mesa (Random). They climbed up and found a weird biosphere and a bunch of blue stones. All the plants were blue in color. One of the players accidentally bumped his arm against a plant and spores from the plant sprayed his arm and his arm turned blue. At this point the mage determined the blue stones have alteration magic associated with it. Ok so here where I need advice: The party took about 30 lbs of stones with them. The stones are in fact magic. I really haven't decided what can be done with the stones Here are a few things I have thought about: Stones (prepared/ground up) and put into a liquid can be used to color anything neon blue. Permanently or temporary... Stones combined with other magic can be used to alter an item to contain the magic that was cast on the item. In my campaign world there is only one group of mages who can create magic items by working with other mages. The blue stones bypass the need for the mage who creates magic items. Stones add some kind of power when added to a an item Stones do nothing Thank you

We are currently using Luck in combination with Hero Action Points. I have everyone roll 4d6 and add the body for HAP. The character who has luck gets to add +1 to the final outcome. This seems to be working pretty well.

Chris: Take this with the sense of humor it is intended to be

Yes this is overwhelming, especially if you have never GM before. Hero game system is like someone handing you all the tools and materials to build any kind of dwelling you want. As they say "The sky is the limit!" That is the power of the system. This is very different from d20 games where you are handed a house and all you have to do is move in and adjust the furniture to your liking (i.e. Curse of Strahd). Here are some things that I think will help you along. You need some character builds of existing characters from the background material You need to build some example characters at the point and power level that the players will be playing at You need to decide on some campaign flavor Existing Characters from Background Material Give us a brief example of two or three existing fictional characters from the anime you want to use as the basis for your game. Here is what I would want to know: Name Basic description of the character's abilities. Is this character someone who projects energy, can fly, is super strong/tough, a martial artist, a tinker, etc Basic description of the character's personality Could the character using their best attack - break a oak board, brick, concrete brick, cut thru a steel I-Beam, etc? This will help judge how much damage they can do with their best attack If the character was hit by the above attack would they be dead, bleeding/broken and going to the hospital, unconscious and going to the hospital, unconscious but will shake it off in a moment, stunned (think a boxer who got hit in the head but is still standing and in a daze), or does the Luke Skywalker brush off the shoulder move ? Maybe one of the many folks here who love to create characters could create said characters for you with and without Power Frameworks so you can see what the options are. Since the characters in question are modeled after existing characters, I would not worry about point totals. Example Player Characters Then you can look at those characters and make some decisions about what you want the beginning characters in your campaign to be like. How tough are the player characters compared to the Existing Characters from the Background Material. For example, everyone who has played in any of my Champions (superhero) games has been familiar with comic book superheros. My wife said to me "I want my character to have powers like Wonder Woman." That is great except a complete Wonder Woman character is probably a 400 point base character with 300 to 500 points of experience. So I helped her build a character at 400 points and the character has worked out very well. Now if the players went up against say the Avengers, the Avengers would clean their clocks. Do you want the same to happen with the PCs if they encounter a named character from the anime? Campaign Flavor How serious is the campaign? Are you running something like the Dark Knight series or is it more campy like the old Batman TV show or someplace in between How 'real' is the campaign? Do the characters have to deal with real world situations (missing the bus, car accident, getting sick, job, etc)? Or is that all just hand waved over? Society and the law concerning 'powered individuals' Killing vs. not killing Goals Enforcement of the genre/flavor of the campaign. When I run a Superhero game I tell the players it is a Silver Age game and Superheros don't kill. Even most villains won't kill. One player almost killed a villain, even after he had her down. His character was charged with attempted murder and sent to super-prison. Hope this helps

Here are some question I have for you: Have you been a GM with any other game system? Do you have a group of people who are ready to game with you and are willing to try out Hero? What Hero products do you own? Are you going to run this as Heroic or Superhero level campaign? I am providing some generalizations about how each of these approaches could 'flavor' a campaign. Heroic campaign - characters don't have to use character points to get things like guns or cars or any other normal item that someone with $s could buy. Also characters tend to be very fit human beings but they don't have any super powers. Adventures tend to build more around skills, role-playing, narrative, and plot and less on violent encounters. In a fantasy game someone like Conan (see books or the 1st Arnold Schwarzenegger movie) would be an example of a character in a Heroic campaign that has essentially 'peaked' physically. A character like Batman could exist in a Heroic campaign. After all Batman doesn't have any super powers, he is just rich and smart and determined. Superhero level campaign - characters have to use character points to get everything - cellphones, cars, guns, etc. Characters tend to have powers (see superhero movies) and tend to be able to do things normal people can't do at all. Adventures tend to involve using powers and combat does take a bigger stage in these kinds of games. If you spend 50% of your points in powers you want to use them and most of those powers tend to be combat oriented. And Batman can clearly exist in a Superhero campaign as well. Most likely he would have a monster sized gadget pool and really large #of points put into Perks (especially wealth, contacts and favors). Some specifics: Build some characters from the My Hero Academia the anime and then post them here for us to look at and don't worry about the point totals just try and make the character match the show. So for instance if one of the characters is really strong and is shown lifting up a bus and throwing it a city block, you can calculate the strength needed to lift up a bus (see the Hero books there are tables for that) and then figure out how much extra strength the character would need to throw the bus that far. Also how easy is it for the character to be hurt will help decide on things like physical and Try building characters from the source material at say 200 (5e) or 300 (6e) points, since these are suppose to be children and are growing into their powers

Every superhero group I have ever run are centered around a major city where we (the group) actually lives. It makes it easier to say "You are at the MN State fair with your family, what are you doing?" And everyone is very specific about what they are doing and where because we have all been to the MN State Fair. Same goes for other famous locations. The adventures can range outside of the main city and go into the rural parts of the state. Over 20+ years of running I have never run out of locations and things for the players to encounter and deal with. I have had two dimension/time hopping adventures. One everyone hated and the other one worked out ok.

When I got back into tabletop RPG (I started in the late 70's and played Champions when it first came out) we would spend hours making sure our characters were correct. This was all done with pencil and Xerox copies of the character sheets from the book. No spreadsheet, just a calculator. Lord that was a pain the butt. I got back into gaming about 7 years ago, I didn't have any of my old material so I had to buy everything from scratch. I just went 6e. When I saw what HD could do when it came to creating rules compliant characters and it handled all the math for creating the characters, I was sold. Also my players at that time didn't know anything about Hero character creation. They came to me with concepts and I built the characters w/ HD and we would tweak them to get them just right. Then I got to a point where I wanted something to help me manage combat, back to your original question. I found the export I pointed you to, did a couple of quick modes and wrote a VBA macro in Excel to help manage the combat. Let me say the VBA macro was discarded within 3 months and I then taught myself Java (I was a software engineer more than a decade ago) and started writing Hero Combat Manager. So there is my answer.

Barbara Do you own a copy of Hero Designer? If you do you can load the characters you created in Hero Designer and then use the Combat Record Export feature in HD to export combat information - names, speed, dex, etc to a file. There is a 'template/export' format file that Tasha created here, which might meet your needs. If you don't have Hero Designer then there isn't an option for you, as far as I know. Shameless Plug: If you want to get really fancy you can use Hero Designer (Simon's product) to create your characters and combine that with my product Hero Combat Manager, which lets you manage combat from an application. HCM deals with all the bookkeeping for running Hero Combat. ?

I am working on a new release. I have completed the following bug and feature updates: Stunned characters are recovering actual stun which is incorrect (Bug) [#41] Any attack that is d6 "-1" can not be read in (Bug) [#76] GM Attack - AoE selection does not allow multi selection of targets (Bug) [#109] One Hit Wonder was miscalculating (Bug) [#108] Presence Attack (Feature) [#22] I am working on this feature right now: Combat Notes (Feature) [#37] - I am implementing this as something simple where you can access this from the main window and attack dialog. The combat notes will not be saved from combat to combat. I am looking into these bugs and try to get them fixed: HKA is not calculated correctly with STR (Bug) [#48] Character who aborted got 'stuck' (Bug) [#100] I am looking at doing a few of these for the next release. GM Attack - A list of potential attackers to pick from with their stats (Feature) [#25] - Not sure on what the workflow for this would be and so it might be pushed to a later release while I think thru the workflow. Fumbles (Feature) [#27] & Critical Hits (Feature) [#26] - These go together. This is mostly for the NPCs and it would be a preference that the GM can set before or during a combat session. This will probably show up as a message within the attack dialog after the NPC attack dice roll. With Critical hits the damage will be calculated and applied like any other attack. The fumbles will need to be handled by the GM (good place for a combat note ?) Opinions/concerns about what is on this list. I am not looking for feedback on additional features within this thread. Post those in a different thread. Thank you.

Chris, I have to say you are awesome for doing this. Very very helpful. You are a good man for doing this!

First of all thank you for doing that. I am always on the look out for material I can easily add to my sandbox game. I try to find generic material when I can and I think I have used a few of your products and at least one of these modules. I modify everything I get, it is just easier if I don't have to convert X game system into Hero for the villains. Again thank you!

No we haven't. Honestly their site confused me as to the pricing model and such. I will give it a try.

We have been using Epic Table which has meet our needs. I paid for a one time license and we are good to go. Our biggest problem has been with VOIP for all of the participants. One person in particular has an extremely difficult time w/ Discord. We also tried Hangouts but I couldn't get it to work w/ my headphones. And Skype (which we use when we have too) is a resource hog. Other options for VOIP would be appreciated.

First of all thank you for purchasing HCM. I deeply appreciate it. Secondly let me address you feature requests: Haymakers - great idea and I will add it to the feature list. My guess is that I will look at it at the same time as when I implement Constant attacks. Held Actions - there is a really annoying bug associated with Held actions. I am looking into that one at this time Knockback - I will add this to the backlog. I would probably make it an additional preference option so that if you select Knockback as a preference it will also ask if you want the damage to be calculated. I will think about the workflow around this one.

Hi First thing you need are some Export Formats, which you can find in the downloads part of the site. Under the Current Character menu is Export. You want to select Set Export Format. The select the appropriate export format type you want (i.e. one of the ones you downloaded). Then you can either Preview or Export to File. Personally I like to do Preview. All done

Yes to the best of my knowledge. Many of the items identified don't have a direct impact on running combat. Please realize that HCM does not implement everything that can be done during a Hero combat session. Rather it helps with '80% of the bookkeeping around' running Hero combat.

Very sad to hear.

Hi Jeffrywith1e, Thank you for joining us. You live in the Twin Cities... Cool so do I. We should get together sometime.