Markdoc

No. Heat Vision, Rain of Arrows, lightning storm, plague spell, these things are special effects. AoE is a mechanic - it has a direct mechanical effect in-game, and that effect is more or less identical regardless of the special effect chosen. Likewise, being able to choose hit locations is a mechanic. So I pay close attention to how the mechanics work, but I'm actually pretty relaxed about special effects. Minimum 5 point levels to go into a power framework. That means in most cases, an accurate AoE attack is going to be more cost-efficient, but as noted, the trade off is that you don't get to choose hit locations. The fact that it doesn't always hit is no biggie - after all, ol' Bats has dodged the heatray as well, and he's just a highly trained human. I should point out that 'fluff' isn't meant to be dismissive - fluff is what gives games character and life. It was meant more as meaning that fluff tells you nothing about how a power should work. 'Eyebeams' tells you that the power comes out of the eyes, but it tell you nothing about the power constuct used - it could be an RKA, an EB, an entangle, or a mental blast, etc etc. Anyway, the reason that Big Blue's powers are hard to model is simply that in most comics he's written as though he's built on a huge amount of points. His powers themselves are actually pretty straightforward (strong, tough, flies, shoots heat beams out of his eyes) - though of course, his powers vary wildly from writer to writer* and even issue to issue. Instead of the heat vision writeup above for example, I would probably simply go with the base RKA, and let him deal with all the other aspects by simple power tricks, spreading the beam, etc. cheers, Mark *tell me you've read the issue where he has "rainbow powers"

Well, my response as a GM to the power below would be "that's fine" - it's a perfectly straightforward, build, and not as dangerous as the 4d6 killing he already has.. But if the player wanted to use it to target hit locations, my response would be "No way, José" - even though, as noted, "Accurate" attacks are not really the big problem. I like to keep AoE attacks as AoEs. If a player wants a precision attack, we can do that another way. The rest of the stuff about the power being kryptonian, etc is just fluff. So is the fact that "he can hit anything he looks at" because of course a ) he'll still miss occasionally (and in the source material, Supes misses people with his heat vision all the time) and b ) you can build such a power multiple ways. AoE accurate is one way - built in CSLs is another. cheers, Mark

Ah - if they can only change into the person that they are touching at the time, then that's definitely worth a -1: I didn't get that from the power, since I assumed they could adopt the form of somebody they had touched at some point in the past. cheers, Mark

Pretty much what Hugh said - *I* don't allow called shots with AoEs, which is why I liberally sprinkled my post with phrases like 'in my opinion' There is, as always, a mechanical analysis behind this: an AoE loses roughly half its damage capability (obviously this varies, depending how many advantages you stack, but you get the idea), in exchange for being able to hit multiple targets, at a low DCV. With hit locations in play for AoEs, though, you can buy a few PSLs vs hit locations, and for a few points get an attack that allows you to reliably hit the head – thus gaining back much of the damage you traded off for the AoE advantage and letting you headshot multiple opponents simultaneously and relatively cheaply– the ‘head-splodely’ attack. Accurate, oddly enough, is not so bad – all it does essentially, is drop the target’s OCV to 3 (which can simply be simulated by a regular attack with few CSLs) plus negating Dodge and Block. The combination of lowering DCV plus hitting multiple targets, is what makes targetting AoEs problematic, because you get to 'double dip' - it makes hitting specific locations easier by dropping CV and it lets you hit multiple targets, so the value in play is far more than just the CV difference. So I don't allow it, but of course that does not mean you can't - just be aware of the implications. cheers, Mark

I'd agree. In general, being able to mimic specific people still gives you a wide range of possibilities, and often, as a shapeshifter, you want to mimic specific people. -1/4 is plenty. cheers, Mark

An AoE accurate attack is still an AoE, and it still targets a hex's DCV, not the target's DCV ... It's just that it is small enough that it only affects one target. So - at least as far as I am concerned - it's treated the same as any other AoE, meaning no placed shots. Since the current costing includes the ability to aim some attacks, but not AoEs, and it seems to work well, I would not change the costing of AoE (it's already effective enough that people routinely buy AoE attacks). Cheers, Mark

Yeah, but for me, mechanics trump special effects. If you want a power that allows you to hit multiple targets AND aim at specific locations, then you don't want an AoE, which, by definition, attacks an area and which (crucially) targets the DCV of the area, not the people in it. You want an autofire attack, which has a to-hit roll. You can easily choose to shoot 3 bad guys in the hand if you have a crazy high DCV (or Overconfidence at a high level), by simply taking the hit location penalty for your first hit and then counting down by two for each additional hit.* In fact, long ago, in one of our Hero system-based Judge Dredd games (run by Ofeelya on these boards) I recall bringing down a pack of fleeing juves, by shouting "It's knee-popping time!" and then shooting all 4 of them in the legs, using exactly that mechanism. cheers, Mark *Edit: not really relevant for this discussion; but the easiest way to shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand is not by shooting his hand (which I think is -8 to hit) but by attacking his OAF (gun) at -2 to hit

We've played this, way back in the dark ages. It was a pretty cool, very atmospheric game, based on the call of cthulu ruleset, but awfully unbalanced with regard to magic. In true Elric style, magic was based on summoning, and it was not that hard to get something that could do whatever you needed. The major block was negotiating with the GM to persuade the summonings to do what you want. We used to joke about casting the spell "I win". Combat was also extremely lethal, and without access to ready healing, I recall lots of dead PCs littering our adventures. Still, compared to all the D&D clones around at the time, it was a breath of fresh air. Cheers, Mark

We played around with a combined to-hit and location roll. The mechanism was simple: you rolled to hit. If you hit exactly, you rolled hit location as normal: ie. a random hit. If you hit by more than you needed, you could use the excess to offset the penalties for another location and move your shot there. So if you exceeded your needed score by 1, you chould choose a body hit, if by 2 you could choose a torso hit, if by 3, a chest hit, etc. AoE attacks always just hit a random location - after all, you can't aim a grenade just at someone's hand! It was simple and fast, but we never moved it into regular games, for the reasons already alluded to in this thread: that it boosted average damage with no downside, and boosted the value of CSL, especially of 2 point levels. I decided that I did not want to rejigger the cost of CSL and damage/DEF for a fairly minimal mechanistic benefit, though I would still like to streamline the combat mechanism if I could. Cheers, Mark

Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light had a similar setup. There the "gods" owed their power to technology, but though extremely long-lived they could still die. When that happened, the other gods chose an appropriate mortal from among their closest followers. Cheers, Mark

There's also the mundane aspect that standard effect makes armour somewhat more effective, since there is no possibility of rolling over the defence. One thing I have played around with, if you want "realistic" damage is to reduce the overall damage of weapons, but replace the standard hit location modifiers with a higher and more volatile modifier. So for example, instead of the Head location being 2x BOD and 5x Stun, make it a d6 modifier on all damage that penetrates defences. This works best (IMO) with the system I mentioned on another recent thread of eliminating killing attacks as a seperate mechanism and just using AVAD (resistant defence) for killing attacks, since it reduces the volatility of the initial attack. This approach can be tuned to produce results that are realistic, in that they turn in lethality outcomes that model real life, but it's an open question if you really want that in your game. The reason I say that is that the overall lethality is not necessarily different from the existing model (in fact, as I modelled it off real life casualty numbers, it's actually a bit less). It also models the real life effect that if armour stops an attack, you typically suffer little or no damage. But the damage is much more "spiky" - in that a single hit from a .22 or a single knife stab, will rarely be lethal ... but sometimes it will. That makes for a high risk that you'll suddenly get a dead PC from what was considered a low threat attack. cheers, Mark

Yup, I read it, but increasing DC based off increased KE directly increases lethality in the game, hence my comment. It might be better to get what you want by using AP, penetrating or a custom limit such as DC "only to negate armour" which lets you finetune how much armour an attack can bypass. I'm not sure it's worth too much effort though - real life ballistics shows that .22-.25 weapons excluded, there doesn't seem to be very much variation in penetration of body armour among handguns. I'll allow though, that we have too little real life data with really heavy handguns (0;5 caliber) to know how they work. cheers, Mark

Yeah. Well, actually, no. You can - in real life - take two attacks with wildly different KE values and find that they have similar lethality, or two attacks with similar KE but different lethality. So yes, kinetic energy is a factor in damage, but there is no direct linkage in that more KE does not (in real life) necessarily mean more damage. I totally understand the desire to have a simple (or at least consistent) method for ranking weapons, but so far reality refuses to give us one, and KE ain't it. Now of course, this is a game, so I repeat my point that if it floats your boat, by all means go for it. cheers, Mark

After firing more bullets into more things than the most enthusiastic gun nut will see in an entire lifetime, and going in detail through the entire shootings databases and extracting real life shootings where the weapon and ammo could be identified, the FBI ballistics team found only two things that predicted lethality: depth of penetration and location of the hit (not surprisingly, head hits are far more likely to be lethal than foot hits, for example). They also noted that handguns that produced hits that reached or exceeded 16" (40 cm) depth in ballistic gel were likely to penetrate right through the body cavity and that beyond that, there was no significant difference in lethality. Most modern handguns reach or exceed that baseline, which would imply that they are all similarly lethal ... and that's what their analysis of the shooting database showed*. Long arms were significantly more likely to inflict lethal hits than any handgun, and again, there was little observable differences between different long arms. Other factors (muzzle energy, bullet weight, residual energy at 30 yards, etc etc) were analysed in detail - none of them showed any correlation with lethality. That's also the conclusion from the published studies I linked to the last time we had this discussion, and it's true of both homicide injuries in the US and conflict injuries among British soldiers. So in conclusion, if you and your players like using KE to model damage for firearms, sure, knock yourself out. As Massey notes, BOD is a fairly abstract quantity anyway, and using KE to estimate weapon damage is no more unrealistic than people who can fly or shoot energy beams out of their eyes. But it is a game construct - it absolutely does not model what we see in real life (at least as regards shooting people). That said, Tasha has a point. We're not really discussing Hero system mechanics here anymore so perhaps we should let his lapse here and take it up in the Dark Champions forum if there is any interest in discussing it further. cheers, Mark *Edit: the firearms analysis program is ongoing, but the head of the program noted a while back that they were looking for the tiniest differences, saying that even though the difference might matter 3 times in a thousand, that 3/1000 chance could still save law enforcement officers' lives. That gives you an indication of the scale of the difference they .are looking at - about 1/3 of a percent, which is way, way less than a DC.

Yup. Cheers, Mark

No. While it is true that it takes longer to train a good longbowman than a crossbowman, it also takes longer (much longer) to train good pikemen than spearmen or swordsmen, and Europe was producing pikemen like crazy at the same time as the longbow was fading into irrelevance. And at that point, guns were a new, expensive introduction, restricted to professional military, so were both rare and expensive. In England, the longbow was still used in huge numbers during the Wars of the Roses, but the longbow was soon shifted to a support role, because even longbowmen massed in their thousands could not stand up to the armoured men at arms, who would just charge on foot right through the storm of arrows. It wasn't that the longbowmen of the era were any worse - on the peripheral battlefields of the Wars of the Roses, like Ireland or Scotland, where armour was usually lighter, they were lethal. It's just that during the beginning and middle of the Hundred Years War against France, which was the longbow's heyday, the standard armour of heavy troops was chainmail, and even the best knightly armour of the time was a mixture of chainmail and some plates. The longbow had already lost a lot of its punch by the later period in the Hundred Years War as the French developed heavier armour and better tactics (don't charge the longbows on your unarmoured horse!) - take 'em on foot instead. The same thing happened in Italy where English longbowmen were in great demand as mercenaries (condotta) ... until heavier armour rendered them in efficient. It's not like the longbow suddenly disappeared. England and Wales kept training and producing longbowmen in their tens of thousands for a century after they had lost most of their effectiveness, and in smaller numbers after that. Longbowmen were still in use (albeit in small numbers) during the English Civil War in the 17th century! But by the mid 1400's they had stopped being a battle-winning element and had started to become a support element used to harrass the enemy. They were still effective against cavalry, and very effective against lightly armed infantry. So no, it wasn't training that was the problem - England was still had compulsory longbow training and produced bowmen aplenty for generations after they had lost their primary place on the battlefield. cheers, Mark

Well the video shows very clearly indeed that the projectiles survive impact entirely intact - even the one that was fired through the car door, so no, that's not the reason.You are right that different projectiles would almost certainly change the outcome of the tests ... which right there tells us that kinetic energy is in fact, not the determining factor, since different projectiles with the same KE will behave differently. As to the fact that 1d6 is not different to 2d6 .... actually that's a huge difference. In hero system terms the first will never penetrate normal ballistic armour while the second will do so routinely. That's a far, far larger difference than that observed in real life with handguns of any calibre - that's actually about the magnitude(or a bit larger) than the real-life difference observed between handguns and mid-large calibre rifles. regards, Mark

It's a fair question. The basis for it is that I've been playing Hero System for about 30 years, in multiple different campaigns, with multiple different GMs, and can't recall a single PC ever buying KBR, out of what must be 50-60 superheroic characters. As I noted, the only characters I recall with any form of KBR are those who had it in earlier editions as part of the package deal with growth and density increase. It's also pretty rare among the published characters. So I think it's fair to call it a rare defence: the game defines Flash defence and Power defence as rare, and I have seen them on characters a lot more than Knockback defence. That doesn't invalidate your experience, of course. There's a lot of table to table variation, and some groups like particular powers or strategies. The first group I played Champions with had virtually no killing attacks among PCs (they were considered "unheroic") and had plenty of heroes with little or no rDEF. The third group I played with, virtually every PC had a killing attack and 15+ rDEF was practically de rigeur. Cheers, Mark

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. But almost everyone I know uses the word cap to mean hard cap. Indeed, this entire thread was started because of that assumption! I understand that you don't use the word cap that way and that's cool. But you shouldn't get cranky when people assume you are using a word in the way that most people use it. Edit: I'm genuinely not trying to be argumentative here, because this looks to me like a semantics issue. But you comment a couple of posts up that you are mystified that you always get jumped on, when this topic comes up. Could it just possibly be that it isn't that *everybody else* is offbase on this issue? That when you say "cap" meaning a soft cap or guidenline, that people in general take cap to mean a hard limit? The only reason that this is worth any discusion at all is because of the issue that sparked this thread (and the many threads just like it on these boards) regarding powers that are not obviously abusive but which edge up over the cap (hard cap, if you prefer). The simplest solution is simply to ignore the cap, and it seems that as GMs we all do that (at least sometimes). But the fact that we keep getting this exact same question over and over suggests that there's a problem here. Cheers, Mark

I haven't quoted the rest of your post, because I basically agree 100% with what you have posted. But what I'm aiming for is not to simulate medieval combat with high accuracy. For a start we know very little about medieval combat anyway, so "high accuracy" is going to be pretty subjective. What I'd like is a simple system to differentiate weapons so that players have a choice that fits their particular desires, but at the same time does not produce results that flatly contradict what we *do* know about medieval combat. To just take a particularly egregious example, in the current rules, a longbow can do the same damage as a modern assault rifle, and a longbowman can very easily take down a man at arms in full plate harness. In real life, of course, the longbow proved ineffective against fully armoured men at arms and so faded from the battlefield. I think part of the reason this happened is because the original rules writers wanted to differentiate bows (which is fair enough), but the only real tool they had at their disposal (given the way weapons were built) was raw DC. So I guess what I am looking for is something that's reasonably simple to use, gives some flavour, and doesn't make a person with moderate knowledge of arms and armour go "WTF?" Our current system actually does the first 2 pretty well, but doesn't do the last very well, so in the spirit of Hero system tinkering, I'd like to see if I can do better. Cheers, Mark

A quick google search for 'amateur railgun' will turn up plenty of videos and websites, but most of these are small railguns that can safely be fired inside despite their very high muzzle energies. But if you want see a state of the art amateur rail gun, try these guys: http://hybridtechcar.com/railgun-27-kilojoules-the-most-powerful-amateur-railgun/. It fires a big-ass projectile, with a muzzle energy of 27,000 joules. For comparison, that's (very roughly) about twice the muzzle energy of a 0.5 HMG. The projectile can penetrate a single car door or about 20 cm into ballistic gel, so the lethality if you fired it at a person is probably a little greater than a .38 short (less penetration, but it would make an ugly wound with that projectile). It kind of makes the point eloquently that muzzle energy doesn't really tell you much about a weapon's lethality or ability to inflict damage. There's a reason that balistic wound specialists gave up on measuring KE as a predictor of weapon lethality a couple of decades ago: it doesn't map at all well to real life shooting data. I talk about this in more detail (with data links) on a recent thread in this forum called "are tanks really that tough" but the topline message is that while there are clear diferences in lethality between handguns and long arms, the differences between handguns or between long arms is so small that it's very difficult to measure, even averaged out over hundreds of shootings. In hero terms that means that similar weapons (for example, handguns) all fall into a DC, or if you stretch it to the limits of credibility, at most 2DC of each other. I'm a very data-driven guy, so the real life data for me, trumps the ability to differentiate weapons for gaming purposes, even though I know a lot of players (including me, it must be admitted) like that Cheers, Mark

I think we are going around in circles here. To me, saying "I use hard caps, except sometimes, and not for these things" is pretty much saying "Actually, I don't use caps". To me a cap is just that - a limit you can't go over - and of course, the post that started this thread, had a problem, precisely because of a power - not obviously abusive - that would go slightly above the cap. To me, the obvious answer is to pop the cap. Simply use guidelines instead, and this particular problem disappears. Guidelines are not a euphemism for cap, since as eloquently illustrated (by everyone on this thread) that we are prepared to accept powers that blow right through both AP and DC caps (30% over, in one case!) on the GM's assessment that the power isn't likely to be a problem, and I think we have all encountered powers that are below a certain AP or DC cap but still as abusive as heck. To me, guidelines - in contrast to caps - are not about active points, but about playability and feel. A power can be over a cap and OK, or under a cap and still unsuitable. Guidelines encompass not only how much of a given power a player can purchase, but whether a power or a build is suitable for a given game at all. As an example, Nightmare Master, a shadowy detective who tracks down evildoers and punishes them with nightmares until they repent or turn themselves in, might be a viable PC in a 4 colour game, if he's built around stealth, skills, martial arts and some minor telepathy-related powers .... but probably not if he's built around Mindscan and a continuous mental blast that does BOD (“If you die in the Nightmare you die for REAL! Bwahahahaha!"), even if that's under the AP and DC caps. Cheers, Mark

I have to agree with the others here. The EFFECT is pretty much the same - in both cases, characters don't need to worry about starving to death or procuring masses of supplies. The special effect is different .... but that's true of any special effect. You can't set fire to the curtains with your water blast, and you can't extinguish the burning curtains with your fire blast. They are different, but still both just EB. If you want to define Life Support:eating as "creates food" that seems like a viable special effect and the in-game effect is pretty much identical to a much more complex build that creates actual food (how many active points is "food" anyway?). In the same vein, if you want a "summon sword" spell, you want HKA, not transform or summon. The fact that it IS a sword doesn't matter for a power construct. What matters is what it DOES in game. Cheers, Mark

I think we are all pretty close to being on the same page here. As far as my preferences go, despite playing mostly Heroic level games, I don't want to break the linearity of the system by making heroic and superheroic incompatible. And as fas as changing things goes, I'm firmly in the "Don't change things for the sake of changing things" camp, but agree that normal attacks, killing attacks, HA and STR formed an ugly knot that should (and could) have been untied in the last revision. The fact that they weren't, is obvious in the rules kludges we have now. One option that I have discussed before and just note here is to eliminate killing attacks as a seperate power, and simply treat killing as AVAD. If I was going to do that, I'd also clean up AVAD by leaving the basic progression as it is, but taking out the requirement that AVAD attacks do no BOD and instead just requiring AVAD to be puchased for BOD and STUN seperately. That simplifies the damage system, and fixes some of incompatible maths we have now (for example, compare the current price of mental blast, does BOD, with an ordinary EB that works against mental defence and does BOD). It also clears up the whole "adding STR to HKA" debate, since killing now uses the same mechanic as STR and can simply be prorated. But importantly for this discussion, this change offers the ability to do a great deal of finetuning. Under this approach, killing is simply a +1/2 advantage that can be applied to HA so that BOD rolled only goes up against resistant DEF, while STUN goes against full DEF. I don't see this as unbalancing, since you can already create more lethal builds using the current rules - mental blasts that do BOD, penetrating KA, etc., and they don't seem to be problematic. But using this approach you can now tweak weaponry a deal more. For a start, just keeping things in the same range as before, we have 1-6 DC to work with though I think we could actually open that up a bit since damage will be less "spiky". But now you can make a weapon that does killing BOD damage, killing STUN damage or both. You can combine it with other advantages like AP and reduced penetration. And, of course, since killing is no longer its own mechanic, we can drop or tweak STR Min, which was a mechanism originally added to stop the damage of muscle-powered weapons escalating out of control compared to defences. In its current form, it has always led to debate. After all, STR 5 can lift 50 kg, while a greatsword weighs at most 4 kg. That - combined with the other changes - gives you a wider range of options than we have now, without greatly increasing lethality. The downside is that you would need to rework all of the weapons tables, but honestly, that's the work of a couple of evenings. You might also want to rework the armour tables, so that flexible armours like mail or leather provided a mix of rPD and PD, making them less effective against weapons that did killing STUN than inflexible armours. Just off the top of my head, (since I've done the math, but not contructed any weapons tables) you could for example, build slashing weapons using a DC or two more, but making them reduced penetration - ideal for killing unarmoured targets, but not heavily armoured knights, while piercing weapons gain AP and impact weapons do killing STUN. You can mix and match, so something like a Bec de corbin does AP killing BOD and STUN. That makes it an ideal knight-killing weapon, but not as good as a sword against lightly armoured opponents ... which reflects its use in real life. Etc, etc. Cheers, Mark

Not only is there minor - if any - gain, but in real life there does not seem to be any direct connection between kinetic energy and actual damage. Too many other factors are as least as important. A perfect example are the amateur rail guns you can see in action on youtube. ENORMOUS muzzle energies, and yet most of them can't shoot through a cardboard box, because the round they fire is so light that it has little momentum. So it's a lot of work to get an unrealistic result. The problem with bows illustrates that nicely, as does real life shooting data, where there's no discernible difference across a wide range of calibres and muzzle energies. Cheers, Mark