BNakagawa

Re: Shields and RSR? The upper limit on defense is context sensitive. Look at the other people in your 350 point game. How many DC are they throwing? Scale it to that. You can do a simple test and throw an average-ish attack at the defense in question. How many hits does it take to knock the character out? If you're feeling a bit more ambitious, then compare their DCV to the expected average OCV. Calculate the odds of them getting hit and divide the number of hits-to-KO by that. (if it takes 3 average attacks to KO the character and they get hit 50% of the time, then 3 divided by .5 = 6 average attacks to KO the character) This simple test takes into account the mechanical elements of defense, ranging from the probability of an average attack hitting the character, the average amount of damage that will leak through defenses, and the number of such attacks it takes to deplete their STUN pips. It does not take into account elements that cannot be measured mathematically such as player style, aggressiveness or system savvy. A conservative player with a character who has a number of active defense options (missile deflection, desolidification, martial dodge) and a mindset to stay out of the thick of battle will survive more battles than the raw numbers would predict...

Re: House Rules for Hit Location Assuming your character has NO levels whatsoever, you'll drill Ogre in the head at least 75% of the time and stun him most of the time you hit. Were such a system to be implemented, it would require the rewrite of pretty much all of the NPCs and villains ever created to make them survivable. Even at the heroic level, it would completely upset the balance of power in most games. My 8 STR duellist would completely tool the 33 STR ogre. Under the standard rules, there were enemies against which she was useless (high def tanks) and enemies against which he was useless (high dcv swashbucklers). With generous hit location rules like those, the duellist would just own everything under the sun. Head shot, head shot, head shot, head shot, Post 12 recovery, head shot, head shot, head shot, lather, rise, repeat.

Re: House Rules for Hit Location

Re: House Rules for Hit Location Ugh. Being behind in the CV race is difficult enough. Your house rule makes it a death sentence. There is a balance between high cv, low damage and low cv, high damage in the HERO system. This house rule makes the latter character style obsolete. $0.02

Re: KA: The power at the core of RKA and HKA Given the relative ease of closing with your enemies in the HERO system, such a structure will simply cause people to close to HtH range to get the 50% bump in damage. (or buy stretching) What this does is render the EB obsolete. A 10Ap KA will at the 60Ap level, do twice as much stun and twice as much knockback to a 28 def target as a 12d6 eb. Assuming a CON of around 20, it will also stun the target most of the time, while the EB will only rarely stun such a target. All you need to do is close with your target. Movement is cheap. 6d6 KA multipower slot :6 points. 30" leaping: twentysomething points, depending on what your STR is. One-shotting OGRE (thank you, Stun lottery): Priceless.

Re: KA: The power at the core of RKA and HKA A decent idea with a serious drawback. Making the base d6 of killing 10 AP results in making the KA even MORE prone to advantage stacking than it already is. 2d6 RKA with AP and +2 stun mod is currently 60AP. 2d6 KA with ranged, AP and +2 stun mod would be 50AP, freeing up room for another +1/2 advantage like 0end, invisible power fx or affects desolid or whatever else floats your boat.

Re: How do you get players to role play in genre? Nah, anyone can learn to RP. They just need to unlearn years of bad habits. D&D, and all of its derivatives are very pavlovian. You beat up monsters, you get exp and money and magic items. What does this teach you? Build characters that are proficient at beating up monsters and derive benefits from standard magic items, which are mostly useful for helping you to beat up monsters. So, what's the result? A generation of gamers that have every expectation that combat is the primary means of advancement and swag. A generation that has every expectation that combat is the whole point of the game. So what's the fix? You need to find or engineer a game that explicitly rewards something other than gratuitous combat. Hopefully with rewards other than increased combat efficiency. Gamers are gamers. Once they learn the new rules, most will either adjust or play something else. But in order for this to happen, they have to be fully aware of the new rules and the consequences of breaking them. $0.02

Re: How do you get players to role play in genre? Don't award XP. (for gratuitous combat) People who come from a D&D background seek combat because they're used to being rewarded for it. So take away the incentive. Award XP for roleplaying and protecting the innocent and anything else that reinforces the genre. To make it blatant, start the XP sequence with: The base XP for the game is 3 (or whatever), but _charactername_ did _outofcharacterthing_ and _countergenrething_ and _playerbadhabitthing_ so I'm docking a point each for those, so you get NADA. See how long the pain lasts. Either they shape up and change their habits to get more XP or they leave. Either would be fine with me, but it's your game, so YMMV. $0.02

Re: How do you get players to role play the genre? find roleplayers first.

Re: Your Character's Greatest Fear? Mittens is afraid of filth and disease. She grew up in Japan and also fears things with tentacles. Arcana fears that her magic might get out of control and cause some sort of catastrophe. She is stronger in the presence of powerful daemonic creatures. This bothers her. Sniper fears for the wellbeing of his family. None of them (including himself) are bulletproof and he has many enemies. He also fears that he is hearing things and seeing things, but it's probably just stress...

Re: 3 1/2d6 vs. 4d6-1 Buy it multiple times, so for 60 AP you could have 6d6-6. Not legal unless it is 6 x 1d6-1 which would be entirely stopped by a 5 Def force wall.

Re: DEX vs. CSLs

Re: What superhero character concepts are you tired of seeing? FWIW, millions of Americans fought in WWII because they were drafted. Millions more fought because they were outraged at being (collectively) the victims of an unprovoked (for the most part) attack. A relatively tiny number fought prior to Pearl Harbour. There are a couple of key concepts in motivation to be found here. One is obligation. Relatively few characters in RPGs, let alone Champions are motivated by obligation. I like playing characters who owe something to something/one. It gives them context and a concrete authority to answer to. You might find this a little more in games like FH where structures like guilds, churches or royal courts might exercise arbitrary authority over one's life or death. Superheroes, being in the main power fantasies, are usually beholden to noone, as it would cut the drug that is nearly unlimited power. The other is reaction/pro-action. Why does M.A.D.D. exist? Because it's a good idea? Because drunk drivers are a blight on society? No, because someone's child got run over by a drunk driver. Tragedies and transgressions are great ways to motivate people to extreme action (witness the US entry into WWII and activity post 9/11). Was defeating the axis a good idea? Well, I think history pretty much pegs that as a YES. Was America the only uncommitted power strong enough to swing the balance of power against the axis? Pretty much. So why did it take a sneak attack to bring the US into the war? Because we're predominantly reactive. Batman, Spiderman, Punisher and countless others are motivated because somebody did something to me/my family. Many of them (spiderman, punisher) had their powers either before or independently of the event that gives them motivation. Batman went and acquired power in reaction to the event. Without the triggering events, these characters would be dramatically different. We're more self-indulgent than we'd like to think sometimes. If one assumes that powers can be distributed randomly, as in mutation or aliens falling from the sky and giving powerful artifacts to whoever is closest to the crash site, then it can be assumed that motivation will closely represent the psychological profile of the population at large. If this is the case, then one can expect that pro-active self-motivated superheroes of this type will be somewhat rare. This does not apply to self-made characters like martial artists, who typically need some sort of motivation to keep working at their craft until they achieve superhero level powers. $0.02

Re: DEX vs. CSLs Two martial artists face eachother. A has a dex 23 and no levels. B has a dex of 10 and 8 levels in his martial art and one 2 pointer with martial block. They both have the same speed. First phase, A has the initiative and strikes. B aborts to (martial)block and does so with an adjusted OCV of 14. That's a 17- chance, less whatever bonus A's maneuver gives him (if any) Second phase, B has the initiative thanks to the block and rolls over into offense. B has an OCV of 11+ whatever the maneuver gives him. A has a DCV of 8+ whatever the maneuver gives him. A has basically no say in the outcome of this battle. All of the cards are held by B. If B wants the fight to go long, he can play defensively and cancel out anything A throws at him. If B wants to go offensive, then A will have to abort to defensive maneuvers or they will trade blows. Assuming you aren't buying 8 point levels (and 5 pointers to a lesser extent) then levels are plenty cost effective provided you know what to do with them. It should be noted that in the above example, the DEX based character was placed at a sweet spot and the level based character left at a sour spot for CVs. Bump the level based character one point of dex and cut the 2 point level and the discrepancy is even greater. $0.02

Re: Cross-gender roleplaying Oddly enough, I just noticed that my current female PC is the only female in the group. Of course, this isn't quite as significant as she is often the only human in the group, which includes a robot with a human brain in a jar, an alien, a cross dimensional whatsit, a cross dimensional wizard and other stuff even harder to define. It sometimes becomes a challenge, being such a cosmopolitan bunch. Like the time we were confronted by a gang of superpatriot paranormals and she looks around her side in a panic and says "Isn't anyone here an American Citizen!?" (she isn't, either)

Re: Mental Entangles and the Weak-Willed I've never been very fond of the mental entangle/mental paralysis. It's inherently unbalanced. The standard entangle of N active points has roughly a 50-50 chance of getting blown away with one use of any common attack power of N active points. (energy or physical, normal or killing) Probably 90% of all published enemies or character have that. Maybe some of the martial artists might get hosed a bit, but they typically have high DCVs to avoid getting entangled in the first place. The standard mental entangle of N active points will survive at least one breakout attempt by 90% of the published enemies. I don't have any firm numbers, but I suspect for common values (60AP for example) some number ranging from a large minority to a close majority will not be able to break out of such an entangle without outside assistance, pushing or haymakers. Mental entangles are also no range mod, affect desolid characters more often than not with no extra point costs and probably can't be missile deflected. Martial artists are the most common suckers for mental paralysis, since they typically rely on their DCV for defense. You could paralyze a brick, but chances are, their mentallist will break him out later. You could land a few hits on the frozen brick, but you still have to fight through their defenses. You paralyze a martial artist and you have a good opportunity to lay them out for good. Their mentallist could break them out, but it won't do much good if the poor martial artist is GMO. Even a mediocre tactician can turn a mental entangle into a death sentence. I really dislike these things. $0.02

Blocking is really handy if you're standing next to a soft target and the GM lets you block attacks aimed at them. Dodging, not so much. (in this scenario)

Ultimate tookit? Please. Either you're just arguing semantics or your advertising hype detector is defective. The meta rules that have served hero well predate the "ultimate toolkit" hype by about twenty years. There is no auto-hit in HERO. Even if you do use an area effect 1 hex, you can still miss. I can buy a change environment and put an arbitrary number of penalties to your OCV and you can still miss my hex. But not if there is an automatically hits advantage. And as has been previously listed, the presence of an automatically hits advantage (or adder or power) sort of begs the issue of the never gets hit power, adder or advantage. Then you're left with another can of worms to open. $0.02

The fundamental problem with absolutes is that it violates some pretty core meta-rules. The basic issue is that most things come down to the interaction of the points you spent and the points I spent. If I spent a buttload of points on DCV, then I expect that you won't be hitting me without spending a buttload of points on OCV. Anything that allows an attack to hit automatically screws with this balance since now a fixed amount of points can render an unlimited number of points irrelevant. Same problem with invulnerability. If you spend N points on being invulnerable to something and I spend 100xN points on an attack using that something as the sfx, I'm going to feel awfully cheated. $0.02

That's because people don't typically get punched by beings capable of ripping bank vault doors off their hinges. $0.02

Point values do not dictate power levels. You can powergame at any point value. You can roleplay at any power level. But some regions of the point/power scale lend themselves more readily to one style than the other. I rather like low powered campaigns in that I prefer characters to be functionally limited. I think that what a character is incapable of is just as interesting a way of defining a character as what they are good at. $0.02

Obviously, this is only limiting yourself to superhero comics. Otherwise, I'd have to toss in stuff like Savage Henry or those annoying Post Bros. Then again, Ron was a superhero once...well, he had superpowers, anyway. (Mightiest Ron) Back to superhero comics, there's my two favorites, Destroy!!! and Everybody Hates Fight Man! "Big Strong Man! Bigger Stronger Man!! Biggest Strongest Man!!!" The pain...the pain...

Submarine hulls are designed to resist the force of pressure over their entire surface from crushing inwards, not the force of pointy tools from inside trying to poke outwards. And it's hard to find bank vaults of 3/4" steel. Steel isn't ablative like chalk or sandstone. Just because you find that you are able to punch through 3/4" in a couple of days doesn't necessarily mean that the same technique will get you through a foot in a couple of weeks. Otherwise you'd be able to punch a hole in an Abrams tank with a bbgun and enough patience. Which, I suppose is possible if you had geologic amounts of time, but I doubt that's entirely relevant. $0.02

What he said. I'm rather more used to 150ish point level FH. Around 300 you start looking more like Champions characters. Actually, most 300 point FH characters could demolish most champions characters if you're using hit locations. boottothehead yeah yeah yeah $0.02

I think it's more entertaining if a character who has powers that only work if they're following some sort of code either doesn't have the code as a disad or has some contrary disads. I mean, what sort of limitation is it if you have a character who has superpowers that only function to fight evil and he's also sworn to fight evil? Sure, you might find yourself fighting something that is combative but not evil, but if you have the freedom to define what 'evil' is you can make your powers act pretty much anytime you find yourself fighting... I think it's a lot more entertaining if you had a character with powers that only functioned when they were acting out of charity, but the character had greed as a disad. That way, you'd have an internal conflict between fulfilling their desires and having the maximal set of powers. But that's just me. $0.02