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Vurbal

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Everything posted by Vurbal

  1. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Fade Away - Bad Company Fair, Fair Nashville - Heywood Banks Faeries Wear Boots - Black Sabbath Family Tree - Megadeth Famous Last Words - My Chemical Romance Fascist Pig - Suicidal Tendencies Faust Arp - Radiohead Fear of the Dark - Iron Maiden
  2. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? F**k California - Presidents of the United States of America F.V.K (Fearless Vampire Killers) - Bad Brains Fabulous Disaster - Exodus
  3. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? F*!#in Up - Neil Young and Crazy Horse At least that's what my iPod says it's called
  4. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Chimes - J Geils Band
  5. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers - Motörhead
  6. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Running Free - Iron Maiden
  7. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Under the God - Tin Machine
  8. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Thunder Express - The MC5
  9. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Suicide's An Alternative / You'll Be Sorry - Suicidal Tendencies
  10. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA - Devo
  11. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Tell-Tale Heart - The Alan Parsons Project
  12. Re: Energiser Bunny Effect Mushroom Mushroom
  13. Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Head Like a Hole - Devo followed by Revolution Rock - The Clash
  14. Re: EC's cannot have non-END powers!!!! As written in 5th Ed I don't think they're either. In 5th Ed I see them more like multiple aspects of a single "power." I don't mean Power in the game sense, but rather in conceptually. For example, the ability to create and manipulate fire would be a single power conceptually, but with multiple aspects that are written up as individual game Powers. It makes sense that all your fire manipulation powers would be affected simultaneously by adjustment powers since they're only separate in terms of game write up. I prefer this to previous editions where it had no mechanical purpose and was, as most people seem to agree, pretty much pure cheese. At the same time, based on that reasoning it doesn't make sense to disallow natively 0 END powers as long as all the game Powers make one conceptual power. If there are balance reasons for a particular Power to be disallowed by a GM that should be decided on a case by case basis. Another option would be cutting the EC bonus in half before being applying it to 0 END Powers, regardless of whether they start out that way or not.
  15. Re: Pimp My Automaton Sorry I didn't respond to this earlier but I've been working way too many hours. I don't see it as playing the hardware any more than I see using the focus mechanic for it would be. IMO the mechanics of an automaton work best for this manifestation of powers. If all I were planning to do with it was Clairsentience I'd be doing it the way you suggest. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
  16. Re: Pimp My Automaton Thanks for trying to help, but I'm aware of the implications of the build. It's not overbuilding if it does what I want - which it does, in the way that makes the most sense to me - which it does, without seeming more complicated than it needs to be to me - which it doesn't. To be more specific, during combat I anticipate my role to be primarily based around using one or more of these items to collect data that I can relay to the rest of the team. I also expect to use them for many other things outside of combat, such as shadowing, bugging, and intercepting various forms of electronic communications. As it's going to be my surrogate for a good portion of the time I'm gaming, I don't want its interaction with PCs, NPC's, and the environment in general to be handwaved any more than I would want my character's interaction with those things to be handled that way. Otherwise I wouldn't be playing Hero. Likewise I don't want to re-invent the wheel and come up with an entire set of advantages and limitations to make the powers manifested in these items work the way I want them to with regard to the rules when automatons are already close enough to what I'm looking for to do the job.
  17. Re: Pimp My Automaton I am using Clairsentience for transmitting video/audio/other normal sensory data. The Mind Link is specifically to create a secure connection (a VPN of sorts). Edit: If you mean why don't I use Clairsentience for the entire thing, it's mostly because I want a device that can be given instructions and operate independently. I also want it to be able to lose abilities per the automaton rules.
  18. I'm building an automaton for a Champions character. The basic concept is a small sphere that can fly to a remote location (like wherever the rest of the team is engaged in combat) and transmit video (normal sight) back to my character so he can communicate what's going on to his teammates. Eventually it will also be able to transmit audio, and possibly other sense based data, and also physically interact with computers and tap into data lines. He'll communicate with it through a computer worn on his person somewhere. I have the basic design mostly finalized in my head, but I'd like input on some of the different options I'm considering. 1. Communication From Automaton To Computer For basic communication I'm planning to use Mind Link: Machine Class of Minds; One Specific Mind (character's computer); No LOS Needed. I'm also giving the automaton and computer both High Range Radio Perception and defining the Mind Link as Only Through HRRP Signal. 2. Data Transmission Since you can't see or hear computer data (direct from data transmission media - including the pins of a chip) with normal senses, how would you write this up? Would you define a sense (possibly either in or based off of the radio group) to interface (listen and transmit) to data transmission media? Would you require Clairsentience to transmit this to a remote location (which is how I'm planning to transmit vision/hearing/other sense based information)? My initial thought is that this would basically be like "talking" through the Mind Link so no Clairsentience should be necessary. 3. Automaton Disads What Disadvantages would you consider appropriate for an automaton like this? My initial thoughts are to give it physical limitations for not having limbs for propulsion or carrying things and having a camera lens for vision (decreased arc of perception and limited depth perception). It will start out with no sense of hearing, smell, or touch, but since it won't (initially) be given instructions that require those senses the only way that's really limiting is that additional points would be required later when I want it to be able to transmit information gathered via those senses. Thoughts about anything here or anything else I haven't covered are welcome.
  19. Re: What Do Active Points Represent To You? So you would say that an Ego Blast with the No Range and Limitation has the same amount of effect as one that has the normal Line Of Sight/No Range Modifiers? They have the same Active Points but I'd say one has a quantifiable advantage (ie the cost of buying DEX or Combat Skill Levels) over the other.
  20. Re: What Do Active Points Represent To You? I'm in a similar situation as far as the games I play in, although my hypothesis is that if you use power frameworks it could make more of a difference at the heroic level. My primary interest in the subject came from an idea I'm playing around with for using the toolkit aspect of Hero to build a fantasy setting that would make it easier for players new to Hero - but not new to gaming - to learn. My thought was to build a lot of abilities as powers and provide both a standard Hero writeup and a "plain English" version of the mechanical effects, similar to what you get in more traditional systems. The idea would be to build a character using these pre-built abilities but still be able to customize them with little (or no) Hero experience under their belt, and then move on to learning the intricacies of the system. At any point in this process they could decide they're happy with how they're doing things and not have to progress any further. In order to make this second writeup easily customizable without reading through the more technical standard one I thought I'd have it just show the Base, Advantage, and Limitation values and some simple/common changes they could make. It was during the process of considering this approach that I started seriously questioning the consistency of what goes into the base cost of a power and what effect that has on Active and Real Points. Once I experiment with some different approaches I suppose I'll have an idea whether I can make the kind of changes I'm talking about without a) rewriting the majority of the existing power (and maybe characteristic) structure and making more work than it's worth. If I find that it doesn't work without completely overhauling the system I'll stop there. It would need to be close enough that I could hand someone who's been playing in this setting a copy of Sidekick, along with an explanation of my changes (no more than a few pages), and have them able to use it to customize my pre-built abilities relatively quickly and with little one on one help from me. I suspect I'll find it to be more useful as an intellectual exercise than anything else, but that's alright with me. And if I do get something of value to enhance my gaming experience it's an added bonus.
  21. Re: What Do Active Points Represent To You? I'm hoping to look at it this evening. Primarily what I'm going to be looking at is the effect on frameworks, although for the couple of superheroic level characters I have handy I'll make some comparisons on their powers as well. Hopefully using custom powers in HD will make this a relatively painless process.
  22. Re: What Do Active Points Represent To You? I disagree. If that's the case why does increasing the range increase the Active Point total? Being ranged is built into the base cost of the power, which means it's figured into the Active Points. As I said before, the reason the "problem" (and I'd generally call it a quirk rather than a problem) exists is because many (most?) powers have multiple effects built into the base. Balance is then achieved by comparing these base costs by using rules of thumb like 5 points per die of damage. Because of that you have oddities like the 5th Edition change to Hand Attack being 5 Active and 3 Real Points or the equal oddity of 3 AP for 1d6 damage in 4th Ed. Neither "feels" right to me but one or the other seems necessary to attempt internal consistency. Of course if you distill each power to the lowest common denominator (a single mechanical effect that will always occur) you have to make certain major changes to the system that would be too much to still consider it Hero in some people's eyes. IOW it doesn't really make sense unless you're redesigning it from the ground up.
  23. Re: Spending experience points It helps a lot if the players let the GM know ahead of time when they want to spend XP on buying something new. For example, in our fantasy game our characters organized a tournament and had an NPC responsible for some organized gambling. In order to keep him honest my character was with him at all times, and during the process made a point of getting some instruction. I mentioned to the GM that I intended to buy familiarity with gambling and he was fine with it. The same character is trying to set up a business catering to the wealthy, but while he has all the skills he needs to run the business, he doesn't have High Society and only has familiarity with Conversation. Since we have an NPC who has an appropriate background, my character approached him during last week's game session to get some pointers. Once again I let the GM know my intentions to buy a skill so he can work it into the game as appropriate.
  24. Re: What Do Active Points Represent To You? I agree that Limitations aren't supposed to be the opposite of Advantages, which was basically my point in the original post. If you put No Range on an EB it is changing the relative strength. It doesn't make the range less effective. It removes it completely. That changes the actual strength of the power and not just effectiveness.
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