Jhaierr

Re: The Ol' Cross-Genre Bait-and-Switch What if you were to tell them that the game will take a sudden shift in the first episode, but not tell them what the shift would be? That might take out the unpleasant part of the surprise and let them enjoy it, and they won't be able to create the characters with any sort of foreknowledge. Just a thought.

Re: Gundam 00 Hero (As an aside, how very strange that you post this tonight, as I was just now going to the boards to browse for combining mecha stuff.) Do you have the Ultimate Vehicle? It covers creating mecha quite well!

Re: Super Heroic Fantasy Games The main fantasy campaign that I run (and/or plan to run) is definitely superheroic. It's influenced by a lot of high-powered media. I love the genre as well.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Heart Never Lies - McFly

Re: Mega Fantasy City Map - My latest project

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? Ah! That wasn't a conscious decision, but that's a good point. Most of the genre examples in Hero seem to group low power and deadlier rules together, so I tend to think of the two as very often coupled together. That reminds me of several discussions I've had with a friend: Would Buffy be a superheroic or heroic campaign? It's the tendency to group lower-powered with grim lethality automatically that makes that decision difficult. (If I were running a Buffy campaign, I would use superheroic rules but not superheroic-level starting character points. It all comes down to: Do I want my players to have to deal with disabling or impairing injuries, hit locations, and whatnot -- or is combat a bit more punchy/fighty and simple?) To address your concerns, I would say that to get what you want (a non-grit, lower-powered campaign), I would use the superheroic rules (e.g., no hit locations, disabling/impairing, encumbrance, bleeding, maybe even paying points for equipment if it makes sense for your campaign) with heroic points (150 or so). That should reduce the lethality, and the grit would just be how you interpret failed rolls, describe things, and run the campaign in general.

Re: What kind of fantasy campaigns do you love? I love a world where you feel like the magic and races are something more than a "drop in." Original races and original magic systems. I like low or high-powered as long as there is a good story/plot, but I probably lean more toward high-powered because I like cool action. It all depends on the campaign, though. It all has to fit together. I like magic to feel more like a living, breathing part of the world instead of a list of delineated, game-balanced-via-times-per-day-fiat spells one can cast. (D&D drives me insane with that, but I digress.)

What sort of fantasy campaigns do you enjoy the most (and why)? High powered, almost superheroic? Low powered, gritty and deadly? Epic stories? Stories of a band of people just making it in a big city? Almost Earth-like settings? Weird settings? Long, world-spanning quests? Political court intrigue? Obviously we can all love many different types of campaigns, but what are your favorites? What have you enjoyed? What would you love to play (or run) but have never had the opportunity?

Re: Why do you like to play Super Hero Games? It's the sheer variety or stories and characters that are available, but the genre still having a certain consistent "feel" to it nonetheless.

I was looking through the Mental Maneuvers Chart, and I had a question about the Ego Overwhelm maneuver on page 252. In the book, it's this: Cost: 4 1/2 Phase -2 OECV -2 DECV Ego Attack +4d6 I'm tempted to think that this is a typo and it should be "Ego Attack +2d6", since 4d6 would be 8 damage classes. Is that the case? (If this is the case, page 256 uses +4d6 as well under Mental Combat Styles: Commando Psionics.)

Re: Combining mecha campaign? Hehehe. Well, there is that campaign, definitely, but I do have inklings of another fantasy world in my head. Would be pretty different. As for the other campaign, yeah, I'm still working on that and may be about to run it within the next year for our current group of players.

Re: Combining mecha campaign? I have several floating around in my noggin that I'd love to do. Let's see, off the top of my head: 1) An Aeon Flux-like campaign (influenced by the movie), where the players are super-ultra-cool operative types. 2) A "relic hunters" campaign set in the '20s or '30s. 3) A campaign in a fantasy world that I have about 1% finished in my head. 4) A "mystic masters" superhero campaign where all the players are supermages. Essentially every movie or show I watch makes me want to run a campaign like it. I saw Chronicles of Riddick and I was like, "I wanna run a fantasy-like futuristic campaign now!! Aaaah!" The same with every Hero book I read.

Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero That's a good point. What I want from a game now is quite different from what I wanted when I was 19-20 when I started on Hero. Comics have changed as well, and I suppose in some ways the granularity is a reflection of that.

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero What got me thinking about the point inflation (or more specifically, the "need to have more points to express the character") was that 5E, 5ER, and the Ultimate books are all much more detailed than 4E. So the feel of 5th edition makes one think "I should write up every possible power application and every perk and skill to make sure the character is very well defined." It's not so much a change in the core rules; it's the shift in focus of the books. But I've learned to deal with it by just saying "okay, you get 450 points total" or a total that will allow the players to create the characters they want to create. I usually go through and make one or two characters, especially the more powerful ones (say, someone who has a dragon multiform), and see what I need to make it fit.

Here's something I've been mulling over for a few months. I've been with Hero ever since 4th edition Big Blue Book. Since 5E and 5ER and all the (fantastic) new books since, I've begun to notice a slow trend with Hero: it's what I refer to as "point inflation". A few years ago, when I first read how superheroes (by default) will now get 350 points total to work with instead of the old 250, I thought: Fantastic! This will allow me to make supes that have the appropriate level of power, even a standard beginning superhero. And so it did! I reworked and remade lots of characters and refit them, expanding their abilities, making them super-keen. But since the beginning of 5th edition, I've begun to notice that many of the "core" books of Hero, mainly the 5ER book and the Ultimate series, seem to be subtly upping the amount of points you need to create the character you want to create. For instance: power pools of "[archetype] tricks" that might've been assumed or worked out on the fly before, and lots of new adders and advantages that (to me) seem to express things that the GM might've assumed already (e.g., flight working underwater assuming the SFX was appropriate). Not to say that those are bad. Actually, they are quite cool. But it does mean more points that need to be spent to buy them. Has anyone else noticed this? If so, do you guys feel this is a good direction? I do like the new additions and ideas, but I also value simplicity in a game system as well.

Re: THE ULTIMATE MENTALIST -- What Do *You* Want To See? I have to second "Possession as its own Power" as well as the "Mental Astral Plane" like we saw so many times with Professor X, Jean, Psylocke, etc. That's always been a challenge for me to emulate easily.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Cheesy random jazz at Panera.

Re: Order of the Stick Weird. I just ran across the strip a couple of weeks ago. Over a dozen of them have made me laugh out loud! Really love it.

Re: Combining mecha campaign? Very cool ideas. Now I want to run a campaign like this. Maybe one day I'll get around to that.

Re: Combining mecha campaign? So many potential campaigns floating in my head. Was just thinking about what to do when the vehicles combined. Essentially, you'd have just one character (UltraVon or whatever) that would fight the big baddie. Typically one player would control it and the others would just sit around. After thinking about this, I'd run it like there was a "vote" on what to do next. Either a straight up vote, or perhaps a contest of EGO rolls. There would be no actual leader when it came to controlling UltraVon, so to give everyone a voice. Of course, this would all be "instant" in the gaming world. Another alternative would be to have everyone control the different parts of the giant robot, but that seems a bit boring to some of the players: "Okay, you are the left leg. Roll to walk. The right leg will roll a complementary skill roll..."

Re: Your personal comic book origins I had read random comics here and there, but nothing serious, until my (new) best friend in high school loaned me all of his X-men, X-Factor, New Mutants, Avengers, West Coast Avengers, etc. etc. to read. I started with Classic X-Men #1 and read from that point on. Wow. I read so many comics that summer. When I was finished, the X-men were in the midst of the Inferno storyline! Wow, that was a blast. I lost touch with comics around the Phalanx Covenant storyline. I've read some here and there since, but they haven't captured my interest since then.

Re: Combining mecha campaign? Hehe... If someone missed, maybe the GM should say, "Well, looks like you can't combine to form UltraVon! You'll have to fight the bad guy in all your separate vehicles..."

Anyone ever ran a combining mecha campaign (e.g., Voltron)? I remember reading about that in the Ultimate Vehicle book and thinking "Hey! That would be kinda fun." I'd need some "combination sequence music" though... and the ability to make that "light glare on shiny metal" sound effect.... WRRRRRNG! or however you'd write it.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) IT HERO Manager HERO Boyband HERO

Re: Question about the mystic planes of the Champions Universe Interesting. Thanks for the responses so far.