Tom Carman

Re: Transform Anothers OIF

So I can target your head with a ranged attack' date=' but not the helmet you're wearing? Not trying to be sarcastic, just trying to understand the logic.[/quote']

 

"106 HERO System Rulesbook

Any Focus that provides defenses to the character is

automatically hit by any attack that hits the character. Of

course, the Focus gets its DEF or the defense it provides to

the character (whichever is higher) against the attack. If the

character has multiple foci, all Foci are “outside” of any

defenses they don’t provide — so if Armadillo had OAF

goggles that gave him Telescopic Vision, the defenses

provided by his powered armor wouldn’t protect the goggles

from damage. (Of course he could have just made them OIF

and part of the suit, but this would have cost more points.)"

 

Technically, any Breakable OIF Armor is subject to being damaged and broken by the attacks that it intercepts, but in practice this rule seems to be roundly ignored in every version of the rules, at least in Superheroic games. It's also been my experience over the years that GMs allow OIF power armor to be specifically targetted for damage (because that can knock out the various powers bought through the armor). While not book-legal in older rules, I would be OK with targetting your OIF helmet at a -10 penalty (-8 for the Head location, -2 for targetting the focus).

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

Moscow: "You say 'year around ice free ports' like it's a bad thing."

Here's an interesting site.

THE EXPERIMENT OF DUBIA

Dubia's premise is simple enough in theory. But like most collisions between politics and nature, it gets very messy in practice. Suppose we avoid war, plague, and famine, and the world goes democratic and capitalist? That appears to be the dream of President George W. Bush, or, as he's sometimes known, Dubya.

But part of Dubya's dream is that oil goes on ruling the world for another generation. Despite all conservation attempts, carbon dioxide levels go on soaring. Too many people burning too much fuel! Poor countries industrializing will offset any efficiency-savings in rich countries.

So our grandchildren live in a world with C02 levels double ours, 600-700 ppm. Double ya!

That world heats up. Climate zones move north until the poles thaw. Greenland and Antarctica melt. Coastal nations are drowned. In the end, the sea rises some 110 meters. Global hothouse! It's happened before, of course, on this scale, but not in the last 50 million years or so.

But once the catastrophe's happened and the survivors replant, and adjust to redwoods at the poles, and farms in Siberia, and jungles on the prairies, and coral seas where great cities once stood... what if they don't change it back? After all, they may argue, why put the Earth through birth-pains TWICE? Double jeopardy! It's climate change, not climate, that's disrupts communities--both biological and political.

So... they leave the new world alone, to stabilize. We think of global warming in the short range--the shock of change. But what's on the far side? What would that world be like?

I couldn't resist--even though I admit that any climatological projection this long-term and radical is inherently dubious...

Dubia.

Re: Transform Anothers OIF

No' date=' they can still be targeted for purposes of damaging but at -2 OCV(6E1 page 377)[/quote']

 

Yet another 6-ism with which I disagree. In previous versions, the above rule applied to accessible foci.

"HERO System Rulesbook 105

An Inaccessible Focus can’t be hit with a Grab or a ranged

attack while the character is in combat. However, an

Inaccessible Focus can be taken away by someone taking

one Turn out of combat."

Re: Transform Anothers OIF

Foci have BODY so theoretically could be transformed with the approriate Transformation attack

True, and easy enough for attacking an accessible focus, but the OP did specify OIF. Technically you'd have to take it away from the user first... Although I might allow it with both an area attack encompassing the owner and focus, plus a targetted attack against the actual focus.

Re: Quantum Flux Tube model railroad with superconductors!

So... where is my flying car? I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE FLYING CARS!

There are. They're just very expensive and still crude.

Re: Paper

Apple is one thing' date=' but there are also formats from defunct companies that may or may not have been lost. I still have, somewhere, boxes of 5.25" floppies formatted in AtariDOS 2.5 with documents written in some word processor whose name I can't even remember. Try googling "Atari word processor".[/quote']

 

Bank Street Writer, maybe? I remember its "encrypted" mode: it amounted to scrambling the 3-digit extender. If you looked at it in DOS instead of the Writer program, it was plain text.

Re: Force Dome

4th/5th Ed: Forcewall, length 18 hex-sides, height 2 hexes; surrounds 7 2-meter hexes

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

Hm...hard to pull off on a rotating space station.

No, they just need good timing... and avoid long-winded prayers.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

Only when religion means "interpretation of the holy text's at any given time by any large neough group".

The currently common interpreatations of the bible is basically "be nice to each other". But it is the very same religion who spawned the Inquisition, was the force/legitimation behind the crusades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades) and the persecution of every group not close enough to the mainstream religion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#History).

Let's not start howling too much about the evils of the crusades (of which there was plenty) as the Muslims do. The latter are quite loath to acknowledge that the crusades were at least partly in response to 5 or 6 centuries of consistent Islamic aggression, overrunning once-largely Christian lands in the Middle East and North Africa, and making significant inroads into Europe before they were finally stopped and kicked back.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN)

Scientists don't make things up or at the very least slant the data to fit in their own view of the universe? Got two words for you; "Climate Gate".

In which there was a bit of the latter and none of the former.

From FactCheck.org:

Summary

In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:

* The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.

* Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.

* E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

We know what we know & nothing else (neither more, nor less).

 

It is impossible to otherwise know what we know (as God is supposed to do).

 

If God knows more (or less) than us, then God doesn't know what we know. God knows something different.

 

If God doesn't know what we know, then God isn't God.

I suspect that this also is a logical fallacy, or just playing games with word definitions.

Re: Extra Limbs and Centaurs

Extra limbs are really for manipulation, I think. A centaur's legs provide a good bit of additional Running, and maybe a strong HTH attack (to the rear only), but that's about it.

Re: More space news!

Well it would just invalidate the Special Relativity Theory, the basis of our entire physical knowledge since 1905. But then again, it would not be the first fundamental 100-Year old theory that is in danger in the 22th century.

 

But we certainly first have to see if nobody miscalculated/misconfigured something important.

You don't toss a perfectly good theory with hitherto excellent predictive properties just because of a tiny glitch. It could turn out that the neutrinos never exceeded light-speed-in-vacuum at any point, they just took a little dimensional shortcut. Which would be a whopper of a discovery in its own right.

Re: Dissecting Powers

God' date=' that's still awful. "This power blinds people for a couple seconds, leaving a 16 m radius cloud of smoke that lingers for one turn, enabling the user to sneak or leap away without being detected--it can be set to go off on a particular trigger, and may be used twice a day--it uses small, inobvious containers which do not resemble grenades"--a little better. Throw in a few more explanations, i think it could still be about half as long.[/quote']

 

"... leaving a 2m radius smoke cloud that lingers a few more seconds, enabling the user ... and may be used twice-- it uses small, in-obvious ... Ingredients to make replacements can be obtained in a week."

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments

Costs might vary not only for raw power, but also utility. For instance, the cheap products would be the flashy obvious Magic Sword! with +1DC and +1OCV. The really pricy one is the dagger that hits like a battleaxe, with Invisible Power Effects to prevent it being recognized as enchanted without close examination on a high PER roll.

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments

For permanent magical items, yes, this is a good way to go. For a lasting-but-not-permanent enchantment-augmented mundane weapon, I think it's a bit much. I don't think I'd use Aid or Transform (in fact I'd ignore the stats of the original weapon altogether). The spell would wholly define the characteristics (damage, OCV, DCV, special attacks and Complications) which would replace those of the mundane weapon for the duration of the spell. Aside from the magical energy cost to cast the spell, the monetary cost for spell components might be anything from half to twice the price of a mundane weapon with equivalent stats (depending on how common or long-lasting you want such enchantments to be).

Re: How to Build: Lasting Weapon Enchantments

You can make this as complicated as you like... What it really comes down to is a Heroic game where you buy equipment with money instead of character points. In this case, you are using the purchased spell components to convert a standard purchased weapon into a slightly better/different weapon, possibly with added Complications like "Glows" or "Magical Aura". It's just SFX.

Re: Star Wars: Fading Light at Hero Central

And I can't even think how inflexible designing with figured characterstics must be. As far as I heard I have to buy most of the values indirectly' date=' like buying CV by buying DEX and ECV with EGO. Not to mention things like having Barrier and Entangle in the same power....[/quote']

 

I wouldn't call it inflexible; of course I've been used to playing it since 4E. Several characteristics cost more than 1:1 because of the secondaries they provided, DEX being a whopping 3:1 for the CV. If the figured secondaries are not high enough for you, then you can buy some more at straight cost. ...And we won't go into the endless wars waged by numbermancers over whether STR was underpriced or CON overpriced.

 

Anyway, my basic point was reverse-engineering a 6E character back to 5E point costs would not be difficult or particularly time-consuming.

Re: Star Wars: Fading Light at Hero Central

5E to 6E conversion was repeteadly noted for the bigest amoutn of changes so far. Since I don't have to old rulebooks' date=' I better pass.[/quote']

 

Given that I don't have 6E and can't speak with direct knowledge, my impression has been that the major change from 5E to 6E was dropping figured stats and giving players more points to buy the final stats directly.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction?

Chapter 6

"The Babel fish" said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Re: Changing the roll low to hit and skill check to a roll high to hit and skill chec

I've had exactly the problem you described, with new players.

A simple halfway solution is:

Leave skill rolls as they are: explain them to players as "This is your target number - you need to roll under it." That seems to go over pretty well, because there's no math on the player side - it's a static number.

Change the combat roll to roll high and explain it as "Your OCV is a modifier on your to hit roll, just like BAB. Your target's DCV+10 functions just like AC. " That's the kind of math they are already programmed to do and it will solve your problem: I've been through this with multiple groups.

 

cheers, Mark

I mostly play with skill and to-hit rolls as written in the manuals. But if the game is still going in the wee hours and I'm losing focus, then I often switch over to the additive roll-high approach, exactly as the OP described.

Re: Blasters: why?

I like the versatility arguments' date=' both ethical and practical, although I suppose that depends on the nature of the blaster. A laser pistol is probably not going to be set to stun, but an electron beam might, although either could be used for welding or some such.[/quote']

 

Not necessarily: check out the Pulsed Energy Projectile section.

Re: A galaxy of humans

I suddenly got this image of a colony planet whose colonists consist entirely of re-enactors. The Ren Folk & ECW get one continent' date=' the SCA another and the Age of Sail/Revolutionary War/Buckskinner folks get a third.[/quote']

 

Check out Christopher Stasheff's Warlock series, starting with "The Warlock in Spite of Himself". Planet Gramarye was settled by Ren Fair medievalists (with a bit of voluntary memory wipe at the start). Only... there were a number of latent psychics in the group, and the planet had this interesting psychoactive fungus that responded to strong mental images by morphing into, oh whatever. A few centuries down the road there were flying warlocks (levitation) and witches on brooms (telekinetic).

Re: Steam punk genre

The Wild, Wild West TV show was certainly Steampunk, at a heroic level. The later TV movies were pushing that a bit (Loveless Jr.'s "$600 people" played by Shields and Yarnell). And of course the Will Smith movie went totally over the top with robo-spider and flight.

Re: A galaxy of humans

The Miles books are alien-free; but that has humanity spread over maybe 20-30 systems at most. Hardly a "Galaxy of Humans."

I don't know where you get that number. As a late-starting minor-but-belligerent military power, Barrayar controls 3 systems. I would put the Cetagandan Empire at upwards of a half-dozen, probably a dozen. At least a dozen polities are mentioned in the books; most may be single-system, but others are less clear. I don't recall a mention of Beta Colony having colonies of its own, but Cordelia Naismith was captain on the Betan Interstellar Survey Corp when she explored the world that became Sergeyar (Barrayar's third system). And I got the impression that we were only seeing one end of the Wormhole Nexus.