zebediah

Re: Recovery and Endurance logic So..to gather together some of the things people have said here: Endurance Reserves are typically only applicable to a single SFX, as opposed to Endurance, which can be used for anything. Certain things are necessarily taken out of Endurance, rather than an ER. Strength and running movement are the primary examples. You can spend your "Endurance" below zero by taking stun damage. Not so with an ER--when you're out, you're out. Recovery replenishes your Endurance, but you have to buy ER Recovery to replenish your ER...and ER recovery only acts once a turn. When suffocating, you lose your Endurance, then your Stun, and finally your Body. ER doesn't figure into this at all. However, if you get knocked out, your Endurance drops to zero. Your Endurance Reserve stays the same. These limitations are the reason that ER is 1/5 the cost of Endurance. On Recovery...I was asking about it because I was trying to figure out why Rec only costs 2 points, when it looks like it should cost more if you build it with Healing. But here's some numbers...assuming you have a very generous GM, and that he just waives the cap on the Healing. Stun Recovery for Taking a Recovery: Simplified Healing, Standard Effect (10 points per 3 pips), No End (+1/2), Self Only (-1/2), Takes a Full Phaze (-1/2), Restrainable: cannot be used if you cannot or are not breathing for any reason (-1/2), Handwave that it heals 1 END per pip instead of 1 Body per 3 pips. Total: 15/2.5 = 6 points for 3 pips = 2 points per pip. Stun Recovery for Post-Segment-12 Simplified Healing, Standard Effect (10 points per 3 pips), Persistant (+1/2), No END (+1/2), Self Only (-1/2), Takes a Full Turn (-1 1/4), Restrainable as above (-1/2), Handwave as above. Total: 20/2.25 = 7.3 points per 3 pips = 2.4 points per pip. Combined, that's nearly 4.5 points per pip...over twice what Rec costs. The only thing I can imagine they do is that everyone actually has an extra phaze, bought as +1 Speed, Only For Making Recoveries, which always goes in the bookkeeping of post-segment-12. That gives you a cost of about 2 for each Rec, and the cost of the extra recovery phaze is common to all characters, like knowing their native language idiomatically, and thus free.

Re: Recovery and Endurance logic Another oddness...I know you can buy up and down the rec rate on endurance reserves. I suppose one might be able to apply the same rules to normal Rec...though I have difficulty imagining any GM doing so.

Re: Recovery and Endurance logic I didn't think characteristics were inherent...I've seen some scary things done with Drain Endurance, Supress Body, and the like. For more common effects, "weakness" spells that drain or suppress Strength are pretty straightforward. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the rule that supressed primary characteristics don't result in supressed figured characteristics. And it doesn't invalidate the "sell back my endurance to buy an endurance reserve," but I think some things are necessarily hooked into your personal END. Your strength, for example...though I could think of a few instances where you could hook it to an END reserve (there was a character in a novel I looked at who was a paralyzed telekinetic, but was so deft at the telekinesis that he could move around like a normal person whenever he was in range of a gestalt engine.) I brought up healing/regeneration because it's another highly straightforward way of achieving a very similar effect to recovery--CP healing of END & Stun once a turn. Doing the same thing to anything else is much more expensive, and I'm curious as to why.

Endurance, as a characteristic, is 2 per point. Endurance, as a reserve, is 10 per point. This seems to be following some sort of "5 points of effect for 1 point" rule, like equipment, followers, multiform, and duplication. Recovery, for a reserve costs 1 point per. Recovery, as a characteristic, costs 2 points per but also replenishes Stun. Regeneration, for Body damage, which is nominally built on cp healing, costs about 8 points to heal one Body each turn, and you can't "take a recovery" to have it heal more often. The proportions seem all off between recovery and endurance, for reserves and characters, seems all wonky. Beyond that, Recovery seems to be a tremendous discounton trying to build the same thing as a power...and comes packaged in characteristics which already give you a hefty discount. I may simply be missing something, but...I don't see the logic of how these work together, how the points balance. Where do these numbers come from?

Re: Stretching Question One thing to note is that TK explicitly can't be used to move yourself around, or to "grab onto" a flying super and get dragged along. Thus it doesn't give the benefits of Swinging. Swinging, in fact, appears to be Flight with a few limitations boiling down to "can only be used where there are tall structures to swing from," some level of "your control isn't precise as someone with full flying," and "people may be able to screw you by messing with your swinglines." But the basic power it's most similar to is Flight. This is seen in the fact that the swinglines, whatever they're made of, are pretty much special effect. It's kind of like building throwing knives. There aren't mechanics for someone catching your knife in midair and using it as a handheld weapon, because, mechanically, there isn't anything there to grab.

Re: How to handle Posession as a power? Here's a little effort towards building all of those options in Hero. I'm not sure I, with my limited knowledge of the system and my copy of Sidekick and Mystic Masters will be able to pull it off, but here goes... I'm going to refer to "Possession" as a power. I am not refering to it as a Power, but rather as a bundle of Powers to be determined, but probably involving a lot of Mind Control. I also use 'horse' to refer to the subject being possessed. I like it better than 'possessee.' Let's start at the end, with #6, "Possessor dies if he leaves body without being able to return to his own body." This implies to me that this form of possession is built no-range over some sort of Astral Form power (built to taste), probably coming with the limitation "astral form has no connection to physical body" (-1) and a Dependence on "being inside a body," at a level reflecting exactly what you mean by "being inside a body." --does the character actually need to possess someone to 'be in the body,' or can they just skinride, or even just walk the astral form over so it occupies the same space as someone else? Using the Dependence also allows you to control the 'fade rate' of psychic ghosts. Now let's look at 1, 4, and 5. These all control whether you get to use your own skills & powers, the target's skills & powers, or both. I see a major split between 'mental' and 'physical' skills here. Some skills, one should obviously be able to use even if you're just looking through the horse's eyes and talking to him: mostly knowledge skills, and probably the ability to use your own skills to advise the target, like the expert systems on a computer do. For physical skills and powers, buy "Usable by others, usable by one other, not usable by self when used by other" as a naked advantage, linked to your Possession, and possibly with "No END Cost" and "Invisible." Alternately, you could not buy the END cost and invisible, and make it so that the horse's eyes glow or ghostly hands guide his when 'channeling' a skill. You could even require skill rolls on it, so only if you succeed in a very difficult "Power Skill: Possession" roll can you use all your powers through the horse. Alternately, if you're just looking to use BOECV powers, buy linked Clairsentience, Mental group. This build may not be entirely legal, but it does allow you to give the horse whatever you like...your physical stats, martial arts abilities, Powers, whatever. That covers the cases where you can use the horse's abilities, and either can or cannot use y our own. If you cannot use the horse's abilities, that might be a limitation on your Possession power. Alternately, the horse might not be there at all... Buy Shapeshift for all but the Mental group, limited range of forms, imitation only, must be imitating someone you're looking at, Meat Body (-1 limitation, you leave a vulnerable body behind). Also buy ExtraDimentionalMovement, Usable as Attack, so you can stick the horse into an empty pocket dimention where he gets to wrestle with endless darkness and solitude. Perhaps buy an extradimentional mindlink to them, if you can choose to chat. Put the EDM in a multipower pool with a triggered EDM UaA to teleport the person back when you "stop possessing the horse." Buy teleport (probably megascale), to a single floating point defined as "your body." If you want, have it be triggered by EDMing the horse back into reality. If you want to walk away after being killed, buy a little regeneration linked to the teleport or something. If you want, but all sorts of powers (or better yet a VPP), "Only to mimic powers of the horse," so you do really get to be them. Applying a skill roll "Power Skill: Possession" to everything gives you the effect of having to struggle with unfamiliar powers. This handles everything except the fact that the horse takes damage whenever you do. You might be able to talk the GM into making that a feature of the pocket dimention, especially since the dimention's "inside the body," but that might be an abuse of EDM. Or, I suppose, you could be making them desolid, not against damage, and taking clinging BOECV to hold them in place over you so everyone hits them instead of you. I think that's more expensive than the EDM, but might be a reasonable option, especially as it also protects you from damage. As for #2, being the "guiding will" of the target...normally, I'd expect this to be done with lots of Mind Control. I'd also use the construct I wrote about before on this thread, with one Mind Control to force them into a Mind Link so you can see everything they sense and don't have to target your "control the actions" Mind Control. If you're going with the shapeshift option, then you don't need to do this. And if you're mindlinked, you don't need to have equal speed...you command them to follow the orders of the voice in their head, and talking for command purposes (like presence) doesn't take any time...if your GM complains, you might be able to get a hefty discount on extra Speed, only usable with Possession, only to match horse's speed.

Re: How to handle Posession as a power? Mind Link, with that adder that allows you to sense what the other person senses. Lots of Mind Control, bought with Concentration at the -1 level, possibly Constant. First, you Mind Control your victim into accepting a Mind Link with you. Then, keeping that up, you mind control the horse's every move. You might want to buy a separate Mind Control for convincing them to keep the Mind Link, and link your "control your actions" Mind Control to the Mind Link. This has the interesting effect of making it such that the victim could temporarily override you, before you reassert your control of the body, or by targetting the Mind Control Only To Accept Mind Link you can actually be excorcised from the host body.

Re: Redefining Power Frameworks I think it would be great. But then again, I'm a theoretical mathematician, and I love hero for the way it breaks things down into itty bitty component parts that you then get to string together. I just don't think it goes quite far enough. :'] Of course, if it were doing that, worldbooks and GMs would effectively get to design the base powers for their world, and then pass it to the players--the players would need to see a bunch of half or fully built powers to figure out what they want. Though given that most Hero books are a signifigant fraction preconstructed powers for use in your games... I keep thinking that there used to be a system out there which was sold as a metasystem--you built the world's cultures, and they provided you with tools to make magic systems, rather than magic systems themselves. I can't remember what it was called, though--I seem to remember it died an ignonimous death from unreadability.

Re: Do characteristics break the Hero way of doing things?

Re: Do characteristics break the Hero way of doing things? Characteristics strike me as doing a few things for Hero characters and GMs: They're something everyone has some of, so you don't accidentlly forget to buy your character the ability to hurt people by punching them, the capacity to think, or the ability to run. They help define the human norm, and give a sense of proportion--because each characteristic is a bundle of Powers, it does for you some of the balancing to determin how much END you want to be able to not get winded in a fistfight, or how fast someone with superhuman coordiantion should be able to pull off attacks. They help the GM (and the player, during character design) have something that sums up the character concisely, in a quantitative way. A character with an Int of 5 shouldn't have a gadget pool, and a total klutz probably shouldn't have a lot of advantages that resemble fine control (like armor piercing, or selective AoE, or whatnot). Like an Elemental Control (or the old package deals), they make a great handle for visualizing the character, and as such I'd beleive they deserve to have something of a point discount. Finally, they're good for filling in the cracks, so to speak. When a situation comes up and you can't easily deduce from the rules how the character would be able to respond, you can pick an appropriate characteristic and ask for a roll. This is related to the point above, and possibly a rephrasing of it--when you need to know if a character has the willpower to go on, you can appeal to the character concept, and get a number to test against. It means less GM fiat, which is the major reason to have a gaming system in the first place. Personally, I've been experimenting with the idea of using alternate sets of characteristics, and with only allowing characteristics to be bought 5 levels at a time--so every characteristic ends in 0 or 5. It's not entirely unprecidented, as White Wolf uses stats of 1 to 5 to cover the range of human ability, and buying the 5th dot costs twice as much as buying the third. And it gets rid of a lot of (what is to my mind) annoying rounding a pointshaving.

Re: The Perfect Alibi You might consider combining Duplicates with deep cover...you send out the dupe (special effect--you stick your mind into the helpless horse) who is essentially identical to you while possessed. The Deep Cover is what gives the duplicates their own lives when not being used--a caught duplicate is either useless for a while (until the cloud of suspicion falls away and the Deep Cover is reestablished) or captured/incarcerated/dead, in which case you're out a duplicate. One oddity of this is that if you've got a fair number of horses, it might be cheaper for the 'duplicate' to die and be replaced with another than for you to rebuy the Deep Cover. Though that might be realistic, if it is easier to condition a new person than to remove the cloud of suspicion over the old one... You could take some limitation of Duplication if you only have limited access to your dupes. Alternately, you could take Deep Cover, Shapeshift with added difficulty to starting it to represent finding one of your horses and the Meat Body limitation (-1, from Cyber Hero, I think) to represent the fact that you're leaving your body behind, and then megascale teleportation, 1 movable location (you body) for getting out of jams. That doesn't leave the horse behind to take the fall, but if that's only a minor concern... Or, of course, just take bodyjacking with limitations to represent the limited range of people you can use this on. The latter two options are especially neat if you could "pass" yourself from one horse to another mid-heist.

Re: Redefining Power Frameworks This only resolves ECs, and has no interaction with multipowers and VPPs, but I still think it's an interesting concept/generalization you might want to think about... HKA and RKA differ in that the RKA is ranged (a +1/2 advantage) and HKA can be increased by Strength--5 active points per 5 levels of Strength, up to 'double' the effect of the power. I've been playing around with the idea of a "Attribute-Based" advantage, +1/2, which allows a Power to gain additional effect, one additional AP per level of the base attribute, up to double. So you could have Mind Control based on your Presence, or Armor based on your Constitution, or Luck based on your Intelligence (you have to notice things and know what tricks to exploit...) But the interesting effect of this is that you could then define 'blank' attributes to create and EC-like effect. Say an attribute, "Fire" which costs 1 point per point, and all your fire-themed powers are "Fire-Based." They need to be unified in special effect in order to be plausably based on the attribute, and by draining the attribute, you can reduce powers by up to half. The blank attribute may even have the built in flaw of being drainable by anything that drains something based on it. This immediately gives ride to the question of "How does a HKA in such an EC-like setup work?" I'd guess that such a power would have to be "Attribute Based" on both Strength and the elemental attribute, looking sort of like the following: Killing Attack (10 points per due of killing damage), Strength-Based (+1/2), Fire-Based (+1/2), total: 20 points per die of killing damage. Each level of Strength of Fire increases the effective active points of this attack by one, i.e. Str 20 would add one die of killing damage, and Fire 7 would add one pip of killing damage. I'd guess that you'd max out at 3 times the base level, so a 3d6 KA based on strength and fire couldn't exceed 9d6 (and would need combined strength and fire attributes of 120 to get it to that level). After all, being based on two things is a +1 advantage, and as such you could have bought twice as much power for it--it seems logical you could pull a little more oomph out of that if you wanted. An alternate tactic could be to have Succor, All (Fire) based powers, no END, standard effect, and buy down the max effect from it until it's simply a block of AP you can apply to any fire-based power. Heck, if you bought it for all fire-based powers, only one at a time, you could do something that vaguely resembled a multipower pool. Would that be totally abusive, illegal, not point-efficient, or otherwise poor? I haven't seen anyone mention using adjustment powers to simulate EC-like effects, despite the fact that they're one of the few powers with explicit special-effect driven advantages.