blackbird77

Re: Potential issues with a Matrix like campaign premise I would recommend you check out the movie "The Thirteenth Floor", which is very Matrix-like and often forgotten. The premise there was that the VR world was created as a game/sim for entertainment purposes - sort of like a ramped-up version of Second Life or The Sims. From a campaign standpoint, it is different from the Matrix because people are not trapped within the VR world - most of them don't even exist outside of it - they are just computer-controlled NPCs. But there are a relatively small number of "players" who can enter the game and pretend to be normal citizens there. I would need to think through the ramifications of it all, but it sounds like you could base a campaign on that: The real world is much like our modern-day real world, just near-future with more advanced tech. A company creates this Second Life game, where you can enter the game and everything works just like the real world, except with super-heroes. And the world is 99% populated with computer-controlled NPC's, but those NPC's don't know that they are not "real." Somehow, the game takes on life-and-death stakes in the real world. There are a lot of ways that could be made to happen. You could pick one way and expand it into an entire campaign, like a conspiracy that figures out how to use the game to re-write people's personalities in the real-world, or a super-villain in the game world has figured out that he is not real, and he is trying to find ways to enter the real world. Or the PC's get trapped in the simulation by a glitch and have to find their way out before another glitch turns them into permanent NPC's. Or you could create an episodic campaign so that every adventure was about another way that this simulated world was a threat to the real one.

Re: working on encounter prediction software (for gauging balance) Yes, target selection came up very quickly as one of the "how deep do you want to go on this?" sections. Right now, I have it doing the following: If the character has an attack than can hit desolid, then he looks first for any active opponent (STUN > 0 and BODY > 0) to target. If no such target exists, he picks targets normally. Normal target selection means that a character picks one active opponent at random, but then sticks with that target until one of them is down, even if he keeps missing or failing to penetrate defenses. Overall, this works pretty well so far as a general solution, mostly because I can just have it run 1000 simulations, so any inefficiencies in targeting are getting lost in the noise, but I have a lot to do on that one to bring it up to where it could be. My "to do" list on that one function right now includes: //focus on lowest DCV first //focus on lowest PD first //focus on lowest STUN first //focus on lowest BODY first //focus on lowest rPD first (considering type of attack - killing) //focus on lowest ED & rED first (considering type of attack - energy) //focus on targets possessing specific characteristics, or even flag specific characters pre-combat as the primary target but even for those, I have to decide if the characters should act as though they know in advance what their opponents stats are, or if i want to get into tracking what stats can be inferred based on history in a single combat. (In other words, you know you failed to penetrate his defenses when you rolled average damage - do you still want to go after him or do you assume even your good rolls will not penetrate either?) but i realize even with all these variations, that not every combatant, regardless of PC or NPC, will always follow numeric logic in picking their target. In a combat spread across a large battlefield, the characters will tend to just attack whichever opponent they are closest to, and the numbers-only approach would not simulate that without some randomness thrown in as well.

So I posted a previous question about determining what an appropriate encounter would be for a party, based on point values. The best answer I got was that you can't judge whether a combat will be balanced by just looking at the points - instead you have to look at the overall picture, considering OCV, DCV, DC, DEF, SPD, etc. I agree on that, but looking at multiple numbers like that can be misleading, at least to me, so I wrote an app to help me with it. I am still fiddling with it so that it can handle more parameters, but for now it has already helped me tweak a particular combat so that I didn't accidentally kill off the PC's in an unwinnable combat against lower-point opponents. Anyhow, just to describe what it is: it allows me to enter the basic combat stats for the heroes and villains in a particular combat (OCV, DCV, DC, DEF, SPD) plus some flags relevant to my particular set of PC's (are they desolid, can they hit desolid, etc.). Then the software runs the combat, running through the different phases and letting each character pick one of the enemies as a target and attack them, (taking into consideration whether they are desolid) and tracking STUN and BODY to see if they get taken out. I have used this now with a combat i planned for the game i ran last night. I have two PC's each built on 250 points, and i set up a combat where they would fight a 200-pt villain and his two 150-point henchmen. Based on the numbers, i felt it would be a good fight, but that the heroes would pretty easily prevail. Instead, when i set up the simulator to run 100 combats, the heroes only won 1% of the time. So i lowered a couple of the key stats of the villains (reducing their defenses, for instance) and i saw the win percentage start to creep up. I kept nerfing the bad guys until the heroes had a win percentage of about 70%, and then i knew that i had a "hard" encounter but one that was basically winnable. Anyhow, up next i plan to add in the differences between killing attacks and normal attacks, the differences between energy and physical attacks, and then start to bring in area effects and mental attacks too. If anyone has suggestions or interest in following my progress on this, just let me know. PS - i am doing this as a .NET web app with a SQL server backend right now, so it is not immediately easily portable for other people to use, but if there is interest, i can see about modifying it into a windows forms app that runs on access or XML so it could be downloadable by others.

I'm new to the HERO system, but I've GM'ed d20 systems for years. One of the "crutches" that I had in the d20 system came up with encounter design. In that system, I knew that, if I had a party of 4 3rd-level PC's, that I could put them up against a single CR4 enemy for a balanced encounter that would use up an average of 1/4 of their daily resources, and that I could put them up against a CR6 if I wanted to really challenge them and use up over over half of their daily resources, and a CR8 if I wanted to have a "boss fight" where they had a decent chance of dying but should be able to barely scrape by with a victory as long as they played well. In HERO, I don't know how to plan balanced combats yet. I have two players, and each one has built a character based on 250 points (125 base + 125 dis.) and they are solid balanced characters - effective, but not really super-combat-monsters. So I was not sure what would kind of point totals the enemies should have, to provide an "easy" encounter, a "hard" encounter, and a "boss fight" encounter. I started out with them in a combat against one 125 point leader (100+25) and two 95 point henchmen (75+20) and the combat was extremely one-sided. The PC's stomped the enemy on segment 9 of the first turn while taking only a handful of STUN. In the next combat, I pitted them against a single 160 (125+35) point leader and four 90 point (75+15) henchmen. Again, the PC's stomped the competition so quickly that I don't think this would have qualified as a "standard" encounter, but more like a "too easy" encounter. My new thinking is something like this: standard encounter = one 200 point NPC hard encounter = one 250 point NPC or two 200 pointer boss encounter = one 300 point NPC or two 250 pointers or four 200 pointers Does this look right? Any other rules of thumb or recommendations to offer?