Chris Goodwin

The hilarity ensues from my long post of theory wank crossposted with this.

I've got a guess, and I'm coming at this from a different direction than my usual "unofficial Hero System historian" one. I once wrote a retro-clone of Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip. I was doing very little design, mostly trying to re-express the original game in my own terms, with enough rules changes that it wouldn't trigger any copyright issues. (I know, you can't copyright rules, only the text.) I was doing a good bit of reorganizing, and a lot of seeing everything that was in TFT. I discovered something pretty neat in the process. Not just superficially, but at the DNA level, TFT is a direct ancestor to Champions and the Hero System. I mean, superficially, sure, but not just that. The other parent was, of course, Superhero 2044 and Wayne Shaw's house rules for designing powers in there. (Thanks, Wayne.) Looking at those two games together, I can almost mentally hear how the conversations went. "We're playing on hexes, so of course we're going to use hexes." "I think TFT has not quite enough stats; S2044 has a number of... weird ones. Let's organize this, see what we've got, and what we need." "Hey, superhero comics mostly do a lot of punching and blasting, but not a lot of slicing and dicing" (and here someone is looking over their glasses at Wolverine). "Yeah, but I still can't figure out Superhero 2044, so let's start with TFT." TFT's stat scale is more or less on a par with that of GURPS, probably closer to Hero's Characteristic Rolls than the stat values themselves. The very basic six stats pulled from D&D, of course. Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, Charisma, back in the day, but since we're organizing the system, let's organize them so the groupings make sense. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. Hit points? Yeah, let's look at those. We'll scale our hit points to the same level as the other stats. Playtesting shows that if we use hit points at this scale, and weapons or other attacks that do 1-3d6 of damage, we're seeing results all over the place. All right then. How about some form of nonlethal damage? Let's tweak numbers. If we scale our nonlethal damage at something like Strength + Constitution, and use Hit Points for lethal damage, how does that look? Easy. The Hulk and The Thing will be almost impossible to put down. So let's tweak those. Half Strength + Half Constitution? Too low. Basic Hit Points should probably figure into that somehow... So now our nonlethal damage works pretty well... we roll dice, subtract that from nonlethal damage capacity, and maybe roll this different set of dice to subtract from hit points... (Cue a lot of discussion, a lot of late night pizza and beer, a lot of waking up at night in a cold sweat... I mean, we only got a small dose of this in SETAC. They were staring into the unfiltered abyss of balancing Normal and Killing Attacks...) Okay, but shouldn't nonlethal attacks do some hit points? How about one per die? Okay, but hey look, I just rolled a bunch of 6's on this damage roll. Shouldn't those hit harder? Yeah, okay, but then 1's ought to not hit as hard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above imagined conversation happened in my head at first over about ten seconds, then over about the two months or so I was writing the retro-clone. I mean, the first thing I wanted to do was add nonlethal damage, and there are only so many ways to do that. Later, on the Facebook group (when I was still on Facebook), Bruce Harlick more or less confirmed to me that yes, they were playing a lot of TFT in those days. I don't imagine there were direct lifts, but I mean, when you're playing a lot of one game, and designing another, it's pretty natural that there's going to be some filtration.

Would a deck of cards (or two) work?

Here it is... With the Usable On Others with Differing Modifiers rules, it's possible for characters to have Powers that no one has paid points for! Usable On Others with Differing Modifiers is a GM option to start with, but it works really well for certain builds. Someone pays for the ability to grant the Power, but that's not the same as the Power itself. The Power would have its own writeup as it is used, which would have its own -- implied -- point cost, but no one actually pays that cost -- and if they did, they wouldn't have the ability to grant the Power, only the ability to use it! (I once asked a rules question of Steve Long whether the recipient of a granted Power could pay the points for it and keep the power; his response was, essentially, "That's up to the GM.") The Differing Modifiers rules as a modification to Usable On Others came about in the 4th edition supplement, HERO System Almanac. But their origin? First edition Fantasy Hero, in the form of the Create effect. Admittedly, the Create effect specified that the created effect had to be a magic item with the Independent Limitation. But no such requirement exists as part of the Differing Modifiers rules. In fact, Independent is gone from 6th edition entirely as a Limitation. Differing Modifiers is also given as an option in FH 6e (maybe 5e as well) for creating magic items, explicitly to be specified for magic items by the GM for no Limitation value. (For disclosure's sake I should point out that FH 6e doesn't state that the Usable On Others rules are used when creating magic items, only that they are "similar to" the Differing Modifiers rules on 6e1 p. 359. Which was a slight misconception on my part in earlier threads, but that doesn't invalidate my point.) There's no specific requirement for a Differing Modifiers granted effect to be built with a Focus. If it is built in this way, and if the granting process meets a certain set of GM-specified parameters, then it's a magic item. The wording of Independent has been pretty sloppy over the editions, but the thing it uniquely does is makes the points spent on it a permanent investment. (In FH 1e, and 4th and 5th editions, it also specifies that an Independent effect need not be bought through a Focus or magic item, that it can be tied to person or a place.) In most of its appearances it specifies that using it disconnects the effect from its creator, and that the effect can continue working while the creator is unconscious or dead. But! We already have a Modifier that allows an effect to continue while the originator is unconscious… that being Persistent. (We have a Limitation that has been worth -1 to -2, depending on the edition, and it automatically grants Persistent?) By the way, there's nothing in Independent that prevents Dispel from working on the Independent Powers, nor Drain nor Suppress... I'm going to digress slightly. Consider the lowly firearm. Whichever make, model, caliber, and so on, that you want, but at its simplest let's say 2d6 RKA, OAF, 10 shots. In most Champions campaigns, in any edition, you can find a generic "thug" writeup that has that on its list of Powers; in most modern, non-superheroic campaigns, you can find it on the list of mundane equipment for which PCs don't pay points. (Substitute a mundane 1d6 HKA, OAF sword, in fantasy campaigns.) Either way… who created that OAF Firearm? The factory, yeah, but it would be ridiculous to claim that the "creator" or originator of the firearm had to invest points in it (unless that was specified in Limitations), or that its RKA is somehow tied to the points in it. It can certainly be used after its last wielder's, or creator's death, regardless of whether they paid points for it or not. (I haven't ever seen a writeup of any firearm that used the Independent Limitation.) Getting back on target (no pun intended), I'm going to throw out a statement that may very well be heretical. The "connection" between a caster and their spell, or an enchanter and their created magic items, is no more inherent than that of the thug's OAF firearm, to… anyone. It's certainly a reasonable conclusion to come to, and it was certainly implicit and in some cases explicit in the way FH 1st edition presented it, but that's also where Persistent first appeared. The FH 1e supplements Magic Items and The Spell Book both suggested a GM-permission Advantage called Permanency (which would be Inherent, in current editions), for items that are truly permanent, as in things like the One Ring, Mjolnir, and the like -- anything handed down by the gods or whoever. In conclusion: It's possible for someone to have a Power for which no one has paid points (through UOO with Differing Modifiers). There's nothing inherent about any Focus (regardless of genre) that causes it to stop working when its creator dies. There's nothing inherent to a Focus (regardless of genre) that ties it to its creator except by implication and GM decision. The GM should specify, in any Fantasy Hero campaign, whether and how a spell is connected to its caster, whether and how a magic item is connected to its creator, and whether or not characters pay points for their magic items (and, if so, whether they pay permanently or not). Don't worry, Duke, I'll have more to say about Independent in another post.

Fantasy Hero Complete in fact includes, electronically at least, 18 sample PCs (in PDF, RTF, and HDC formats!), a starter adventure (the Val of Stalla), 24 monsters, the Kingdom of Grishun setting, and five maps (kingdom, city, town, countryside, and dungeon). So we pretty much have the Fantasy Hero starter set! The only thing it doesn't include is the dice. $20 for book + PDF, $10 for PDF only; both of those include the adventure, setting, PCs, monsters, etc. We pretty much have the Fantasy Hero starter set!

Oh, it's perfectly clear. I have a good bit to say, and between this thread, the points for magic items thread in Fantasy Hero, and the Western Hero equipment thread in main system discussion, not to mention a number of threads over the years I really want to compile up a post where I lay out my complete thinking on it. For my part, I've generally thought of Foci, magic item or not, superheroic or not, pretty similarly. A lot of it goes back to first-gen, where in Champions, the reasons Batman doesn't pick up a tommy gun and become Captain Thompson, rapid fire blaster of bad guys, are two-fold: because that's not how it's done in the comics, and because he didn't pay points for the tommy gun. I'm on my phone right at the moment, and the seasonal change is hitting me maybe a bit harder than usual (and maybe some other things are too), but I'll owe you a post. The general you, not just you, Duke. By this weekend I should have something.

Whoa. I just recently had this idea. I mean, dragons love gold. And the only thing they love more than gold is, more gold. And the way to more gold is investments. Right? That hoard doesn't do any work sitting in a cave where adventures can come and loot it. Better to have it circulating via interest-bearing loans. If you can get fractional reserve in play, so much the better!

For the most part, in Hero, we don't really care whether our target dies, as much as we care whether our target is "out". Whether that's dead, unconscious in GM-discretionland, unconscious by 1 and staying down, whatever. For genres where the primary attack type is Killing, we can pretty much get all of that from Hit Locations plus sectional defenses. It's not laid out for you right in front, and it's not a Champions-style or even D&D-style slugfest. You have to take advantage of cover, you have to Brace & Set when you can, you have to use CSLs, and most importantly you have to have a team. I'm aware of how... vociferously... IRL gun enthusiasts discuss the... vast differences between, let's say, a 10mm round and a .40 S&W... and, I mean, is there really?

This was one of the suggestions I made during SETAC... and while I didn't particularly care for the idea that much myself, it was roundly, and unanimously, slapped down by everyone else in the group.

They likely didn't pay points for it as a giant club. In fact, it probably doesn't appear anywhere, except as an implied thing that was sitting there in a construction site.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but I'll give it a shot. (No pun intended...) Why aren't the guns in Western Hero built with Powers? In Western Hero, and most "heroic" level campaigns (Fantasy Hero, Pulp Hero, etc.), "mundane" equipment for the setting doesn't cost points. It's treated more or less like equipment in any other game. There's no edition change; really, it's more of a power level toggle. All the way back to the first non-superheroic Hero System game (Espionage!) in fact. If it was something special within the setting -- for instance, a magic item in a fantasy game -- it's very probable that it would cost points and would be built with Powers. We've got at least two threads going on in other parts of the forums talking about almost this very issue, and some participants (meaning me) can't seem to make up their minds about it. Except not really, it just gets into deep theoretical system discussion. The general rule, though, is that in non-superheroic genres, mundane equipment doesn't cost points and often isn't statted up with Powers.

But... see... I tried to find a meme from The Matrix to fit... Anyway, for any iteration of UOO, the only character who has to pay points is the grantor. And they don't pay points for the granted Power; just the ability to grant it. No one pays points for the granted Power! What if... hear me out... Someone creates a Focus... and no one pays points for it? It would last for a scene or two, maybe to the end of the session...? Okay, let's say a brick picks up an I-beam, and smacks a villain with it. GM thinks a sec, and says it's +2d6 and an Area Effect Line, and then the villain gets smacked, and then everyone forgets about it... Who paid the points for that? I mean, I know I'm saying pretty much the exact opposite of what I was saying on that Fantasy Hero thread, but... do you see what I'm saying?

Why does fantasy have to have those particular tropes? Magic I'll give you, but elves'n'dwarves? Why do they have to be there?

In V&V I usually rolled something like Animal Powers (crustacean) with Flame Blast and Psionic Power. I know for sure I rolled crustacean powers more than once.

The wizard can also load up on mundane weapons and armor for no point cost, only coin. I usually consider mundane weapons to be well enough limited by Normal Characteristic Maxima, STR minimums, and the like, that anything anyone pays points for should have the opportunity to go a little bit higher. sentry0, to answer your original post, I would go ahead and charge full cost for them, possibly with the idea that they may modify their build into a Multipower or VPP eventually.

Yeah, Independent originated in Fantasy Hero 1e, was really only ever meant for Fantasy Hero, and ... people already know my thoughts on Independent.

My own personal preference is for worlds that seem "lived in". Which I guess explains my preference for non-High Fantasy, non-Epic Fantasy. (I don't want to say Low Fantasy because, like "bemused", it seems that the phrase has been misused enough that I'm not sure anyone is really using it to mean the same thing.)

It Depends. For the most part, yes. Although (a) if he intends to keep it, and (b) not necessarily limited to Focus; in fact, there could be a character whose concept is that they can grant powers to others (UBO, without a Focus), and sometimes those powers are permanent, though no one can really figure out why (at the meta level, it's because they spend points to keep them). As I'm rereading the description (FH 6e p. 320) it doesn't actually use the UBO With Differing Modifiers rules; it specifies that the item creation spell is Instant, so presumably it's like every other Instant Power with a lingering effect (Entangle, Drain, etc.). So, it could be recast, yes, assuming the other conditions of creating the item are met (Extra Time, expensive Expendable Foci, etc.) If you were using UBO, you'd have to follow all of the UBO rules, so, no, it couldn't be re-created. Although as with my example above, what happens if the receiving character spends XP to "keep" the Power? (My answer: they gain their own "copy" of the Power, that's not tied to the original grantor, and the grantor's UBO instance ends.)

Usually, a Focus is an item, while a UBO is... I'll give an example. You might have a Spell of the Flight of Birds, in which during the casting you can touch up to eight people, including yourself, and anyone you touched can fly for up to an hour. You'd stat that out as a UBO with the appropriate sets of modifiers dialed in. I think the difference is really, who decides? If you fall unconscious and someone can grab it and use it, then it's a Focus. If you have to take some kind of action in order for someone to use it, it's (probably) UOO in some way. Here's an interesting bit of trivia, though. Usable On Others with Differing Modifiers is almost entirely the original Create effect from Fantasy Hero 1e, that was used to create magic items. And FH 5e and 6e have both suggested using that as one way to create magic items. For me, conceptually, UBO/UOO with Differing Modifers can be sort of... the Power to create the Power, I guess. I know that doesn't clarify it much. (Create a power with the Focus Limitation, then create a UOO With Differing Modifiers Power that takes a "blank" of the Focus, Extra Time, RSR: Enchantment (or similar), whatever additional Limitations are required... then you activate the UOO, and suddenly you have a magic item.)

You've kind of hit one of my pet peeves, that being the notion that fantasy has to equal medieval (which I disagree with). I went back through my copy of GURPS Fantasy, and the world there is in fact pretty medieval, with Catholic canon law, Islamic law, and Jewish law, among others. Which kind of bothered me some, as the Banestorm was around 990 to the 1200's, with occasional aftershocks, and the "now" of Yrth is... I guess whatever now is IRL, so probably 2019? They've had over a thousand years of development, but they're still working with a medieval system? I'm interested in things that are not just default "generic medieval"; I know also that we don't get a lot of that in fantasy. Note that IRL, the Code of Hammurabi dates back to 1754 BC. Athenian law dates to 621 BC; Roman law was in effect from 449 BC to 529 CE, and Rome had its own judiciary. English Common Law got its start with approximately the court of William the Conqueror (1066). The English Parliament's House of Lords got its start in 1215 with the Magna Carta, and the House of Commons was first elected in 1265. None of these are exactly modern. (Also, why are all fantasy worlds not only generically medieval and feudal, but always with a generic "council"? Never a parliament and never any political parties?)

I have to admit, I'm not sure where you're going with this. Care to elaborate? Do you know what world the GM was running in?

Have you ever done anything with law in your Fantasy Hero games? We've all had the PCs thrown in a cell before, haven't we? Have you ever had them ask for a lawyer once they were in there? What did you do? Have you ever had them ask for a lawyer when they weren't being thrown in a cell? Have you ever had any PC lawyers, or at least PCs with PS: Law, or KS: Law, or similar? If so, how did it go? Because I think most of the time we just assume that every polity is some autocracy where whoever's in charge can just have anyone clapped in irons if they want. How about bodies of law, like how IRL we have English common law, Roman civil law, Napoleonic code, etc.? Have any polities in your world inherited a body of law, or maybe more than one and had to reconcile them? I Am Not A Lawyer, but I am curious.

I don't like them because to me it seems to turn characters into superheroes with swords. That's not the power level I like running or playing at. If you're fighting opponents that are slightly too hard for you to affect, the answer isn't supposed to be Moar DC!!! Figure something else out. Research its weaknesses. Use the environment. Lead it into a pit or off a cliff. Tie it up with ropes. Or run away and live to fight another day! Come back with a dozen mercenaries. It's not like you get XP per kill... And if you have ordinary Combat Skill Levels, you can put two of them into +1 DC anyway. I don't believe that Combat Luck is overpowered, because even three levels is more or less within the range of heavy armor or a wizard's defensive spell, but it just doesn't seem to fit into the power level I like to play or run at. I also feel similarly about Penalty Skill Levels or any Skill Levels bought with "only for (X)" Limitations. If your special effect is "I'm so good with a sword that I can do more damage with it," buy more CSLs. You can also use those CSLs to make it easier to perform a called shot, either to a Hit Location with higher damage multiples or one that has less armor. Edit to add: Take a look at my Low Heroic Protocols document, which might give you some ideas.

That was the SF author Charles Stross. I'm reasonably certain that at the time, Games Workshop was a TSR licensee, and that White Dwarf was at least in part considered the house organ for TSR in the UK. I think the githyanki submission was to a column in the magazine called Fiend Folio, from which TSR compiled the monster book of the same name. It was for sure Stross, and it was for sure from GRR Martin's work; Martin was apparently unaware of this use of his material, but apparently the Stross version bears no more than a passing resemblance to Martin's creature. The Wikipedia article on Githyanki has a bit more information.

I put together a Google spreadsheet that was meant to be a 3rd edition Champions character generator. It's not quite there, but I do have it able to build rules-compliant 3rd edition Champions powers. It's not too far from that to a FH 1e spell builder...