Killer Shrike

Que será, será

Sorry, I took a new job at the beginning of April, and the hours are intense, and almost immediately required me to travel abroad. I also started running a new Here There Be Monsters campaign which sucked up my available-for-gaming-stuff-free-time. I do have a finish for this story in my mind, and I intend to finish it, but I don't want to half-ass it either. So, it's on my mind to wrap it up but it is currently on pause while I take care of other things.

I recommend you look at the output of a lot of sheets, figure out which have bits you like, then look at the underlying export templates to figure out which elements provide the content you want to include in your sheets.

Killroy saved the day vs a huge tentacular monstrosity known as a Q'gthik hiding in a still lake to waylay unwary passerby's (a blatant Watcher in the Water rip off). The other three Hunters had been rendered unconscious and had been pulled under the waters to either drown or be devoured...take your pick. Having smartly set himself up as a sniper should, Killroy shot out one of the thing's eyes (and rolled one off max damage in the process), and finally finished it off with a head shot. Murgatroyd really earned his keep as well, between timely use of his Hermetic Circle, ring of blasting, and general arcane knowledge. His Supernatural Resistance also paid for itself protecting him from suffering the tainted consequences of learning dark secrets of a Cthonic nature, forbidden knowledge that let him give smart counsel to his teammates.

The first two sessions were detailed in this thread in the Dark Champions forum: The Tears of Tierrasola. The third session was played last Saturday, face to face at a local game store. We buddy'd up with a couple of players from another group of players...@Steve and @Durzan Malakim who played Killroy and Murgatroyd respectively. After the modern equivalent of "the king has a quest for you" to move past the usual awkwardness of getting a new group of PC's together, the Hunters agreed to take on the contract and were teleported to a suburban house in Las Vegas where the rift to the other dimension was being contained. As soon as the arcanists keeping the rift sealed let it open, the Hunters were immediately plunged into the $#!^ as three monstrous tentacles plunged through the tear in reality. Adapting to the danger with admirable aplomb, the four ad hoc allies managed to destroy the Cthonic tendrils, and then bravely crossed over. Finding themselves in a dismal otherworld, the Hunters proceeded to push onward in an attempt to find the Heartstone, steal or ruin it, and then GTFO back to base to collect their fat stacks of cash. Fun was had, tentacle faced monsters were killed, and TPK was narrowly avoided. A good night of gaming. Hopefully part 2 will be as engaging.

The Hunters: The Story: We're three sessions in to what I hope will prove to be a recurring episodic campaign (a collection of one to three session adventures, in between other campaigns in different settings run by revolving GM's). In sessions 1 and 2, the salty ex-SWAT Lt. turned Monster Hunter Drew Altman and the wet-behind-the-ears teenager Joey Manegarm who's adolescent inexperience is belied by his supernatural nature as a descendant of the Get of Fenrir (which also makes him Loki-spawn, but whose counting?), unexpectedly met and had to rise to the challenge when a swarm of Revenants overran the coffee shop in idyllic Tierrasola where they both happened to be partaking of caffeinated beverages. Combining forces to discover and defeat a powerful Black Wizard, the unlikely duo proved to be an effective team. In session 3, Drew and Joey were invited by Section M along with lone gunman and surly vengeance seeker James Killroy, as well as the aloof ritualist Wizard known as Murgatroyd, to be sent through a tear in the dimensional fabric separating their own reality from a darker one corrupted by Cthonic forces, apparently caused by the misadventures of the infamous Mysterian and Arcanist Miles Hendricks. Something on the other side is trying to come through, prevented only by the actions of a beleaguered and tiring team of specialist arcanists, and Section M wants the Hunters to go thru the rift to put a stop to it. An artifact described by Miles from his time on the other side, the Heartstone, is believed to be the key to the endeavor, and the Hunters' mission is simple...capture or destroy it and then if possible survive long enough to be extracted. The danger is immense. But so is the bounty...$1,000,000 for each surviving Hunter upon success...a nearly unheard of amount for a single contract.

This club is for those who contribute to the Here There Be Monsters (HtbM) setting, play in a HtbM campaign, or are just interested in the material. Unfortunately, the very lengthy old thread from the Dark Champions forum where the modern 6e iteration of the setting was built collaboratively on these boards did not survive the most recent archival purge. Similarly, a G+ group for the setting recently died as well along with the rest of G+. Luckily, most of the usable game content is preserved on killershrike.com at http://www.killershrike.com/HereThereBeMonsters/Concept.aspx, but the real world creative collaboration and design process captured in the forums and on G+ are gone. New characters, story ideas, resources, campaign related information, and so forth will appear here as time goes by. Hopefully this venue will outlast the previous two.

Ya, for HtbM I went with photographs to jive with the tone of gritty modernism.

Thanks! I had fun making her. The tricky part, as is often the case with more outlandish characters for HtbM, was finding some appropriate artwork.

A new Here There Be Monsters character...dubbed "old lady Cthulhu face" by a certain player, a creepy possible addition to a party of Monster Hunters. Melissa is descended from one of the various Elder Thing tainted bloodlines. She physically appears normal from the outside (most of the time), but an autopsy would reveal that her physiology is inhuman and disturbing. Those with supernatural senses also recognize her as being of Elder Thing origins. From a practical perspective she is incredibly durable, not invulnerable but very difficult to injure, and her mind and body are resistant to external manipulation. When her true nature is revelead, one or more high-tensile strength tentacles can emerge from her body, primarily from her mouth. This effect is disturbing, and causes psychological damage to many who observe it. http://www.killershrike.com/HereThereBeMonsters/Characters/GMsVault/Killer Shrike/Melissa McBrien.HTML

This is a thing I once wrote up as a tool for running play by post or online games with the GM using the HS as a backing engine for resolutions but presenting it as something much simpler to the players. However, it may actually help you as a character modeling tool to first abstract and then apply. It might be a useful exercise for you to reduce your player's concepts into the trait model I describe as one step, and then as a second step build characters to broadly satisfy the "contract" of what the players indicated is important to them. http://www.killershrike.com/GeneralHero/Concepts/TraitDrivenHERO.aspx

Direct link: That's not accurate. I mean, as the GM you could run it that way, but I wouldn't. It's not that you "know who to _get in touch with_", it's that you have a relationship with that person and they are more likely to help you or to help you above and beyond what they would do for a stranger. In the abstract if you the GM know there is someone in the area that a) could be helpful and b) might be helpful in the right circumstances, any character could in theory navigate themselves through the soup of the game's narrative to find that person or you the GM could simply present them. Either way, the existence of that person and access to them and what they are willing to do for the PC(s) is gated by you the GM. However the character with Contacts can assert the existence of the contact and their character's access to them and also boundaries on the GM's adjudication as to what the contact can potentially do and what the contact actually will do in a given context onto the plot. This is a form of narrative control; it asserts facts and outcome guidelines onto the GM, but still leaves interpretation to the GM. This is not just "knowing a guy"; it's "I assert that there IS a guy, and he MIGHT be available, and he MIGHT help me". So, that's a very gamist point of view. From a simulationist and a narrativist perspective, extrinsic vs intrinsic matters quite a lot. Extrinsic abilities attempt to model or simulate discrete items or things separate from a character in an attempt to mimic how similar things exist in the real world. Extrinsic abilities can be permanently taken away, intrinsic abilities can not (at least without damaging the character's identity). Extrinsic abilities embellish a character, intrinsic abilities define a character. Extrinsic abilities might come and go over a long enough plot line, intrinsic abilities only change in extreme circumstances (if at all)..."life changing events" An imbalance can potentially occur whenever any "balancing mechanic" is used for some comparisons and not for others. If points are being used as the balancing mechanic for a game, but some abilities are not tracked via that balancing mechanic then the opportunity for an imbalance exists. Small things within a margin of error don't create much of a problem depending on the precision of the balancing mechanism, but at a certain tipping point the impact of unaccounted for things destabilizes the balancing mechanic. Economic and game theory both go into these ideas in great detail. Resource Pools kill many birds with one stone. They basically help prop the system up in the awkward point range between gritty reality (low points, high realism) and high fantasy / supers / space opera / unrealistic fiction. The "cinematic realism" space, which the Hero System engine itself is really good at resolving, but which the Hero System pay-for-what-you-get character build economy struggles with. Several things contribute to that awkwardness; in the real world people living in first world countries are very capable and empowered in terms of the sheer amount of commodities they have or can easily acquire and the influence of their social network. However, in heightened circumstances (such as combat, or a whirlwind misadventure) part of the tension of the story often hinges on a character in those situations not having immediate in-the-moment access to that extended capability set. Resource Pools also do other things, but I've got to get to work and don't have time to get into it. My tl;dr there is you may be approaching Resource Pools in an overly reductive way and thus are not fully appreciating the nuances of its "smoothing effect" on gaps in the Hero System for cinematic play. They can be if you want them to be. I commonly allow very broad skill definition in some campaigns. In other's I dial in the granularity and subgroupings for EXTRA granularity. This is a tool you as the GM wield to dial in the feel for a campaign. As long as you are consistent within a given setting for a given skill. I could post links to a bunch of things I've done over the years in this area, but I don't have time to hunt them down currently. What I will recommend is that you check out Ultimate Skill. The takeaway is just like most else in the HS, there are dials and levers and knobs available to twiddle with to achieve a given feel. I feel like what you are missing here is this: The players are communicating to you WHAT KIND OF GAME THEY WANT YOU TO RUN. By taking a linguist and sinking points into it (or whatever) the player is telling you as part of the player-GM contract, they expect you to run the ensuing game in such a way as to make that important. They may not verbalize it. They may not even realize it consciously. But in their mind they have some idea of how cool it is going to be to play that character and be awesome because they speak Swahili or whatever and it will matter and the other players will go "cool, you are useful, glad you're with us". When you think to yourself "those points are going to be wasted", what you are saying is "I already have an idea of how I'm going to run this campaign based upon what I want to achieve and speaking a lot of languages just isn't relevant so it is not going to matter that this character is awesome at that". I suggest you invert your thinking a bit and either adjust how you run the campaign to accommodate the PC's within it and give them opportunities to apply what the players have said is important to them OR tell the player upfront "that's cool but I don't think it will ever come up in the context of the campaign". This is that "Relevance and Reliability" thing I talk about at times. The character with lots of language ability is RELIABLE at dealing with linguistic stuff, but if you the GM run the game in such a way that it is rarely if ever RELEVANT then that character is going to suck in that campaign. A different GM running a campaign in the same setting might run it in such away to give the character an opportunity to apply their abilities and in that campaign, same setting, the same character would be useful and successful. Having said that, if you really want to do a language pool, or whatever...go for it. Set it up, and run a campaign using it. Nothing is stopping you from doing so. Afterwards, if you feel like it worked well, keep doing it for future campaigns where it seems useful. If it didn't work so well no big deal. Experiment. Just be clear with your players upfront that the custom thing you are doing is not the game as written...this is a thing I'm introducing as a house rule. Otherwise if you bungle something in your home brewed formulation, and a player who didn't know any better then goes on in later years to tell other players "yeah, I tried that Hero System thing, and it sucked...language pools and what not", then you did a disservice to the game and its community One thing you might adjust your mind to, you're just talking about bags of points. A character is essentially a "resource pool" of character points. They might be a resource pool of resource pools (the Composite pattern..."is a, has many" in OOP speak), but from an external perspective they are a state bag of allocated resources. Some allocations are immutable (don't change, at least not in the context of a game session) and some might be mutable (might change during a game session). If you are internally compartmentalizing some of the resources of the character into "misc pool" and "equip pool" and so forth, presumably you are doing so to encapsulate a subset of the characters state to restrict or to apply variant behavior or to mark those abilities as being special in some way, whether for definition or behavioral reasons..."behavioral structural creational". If you have a reason to do it and it accomplishes something and it doesn't create further imbalances, then go for it. Personally, I follow the rule of thumb that I need three reasons to do anything...and at least two of the reasons must be good ones. It's part of your learning process. There is much to be said for static analysis. However, even with thorough static analysis runtime errors can be greatly reduced but can still occur. There is no substitute to actually running games in the realm of learning things. I recommend you iterate rapidly. Make mini campaigns set up with various options, run 1-5 sessions each, recur.

I'm not sure what you mean. Clarify? You could do that if you chose. The main thing w/ resource pools as they are written however is that they represent things _external_ to a character such as gear, vehicles, base, and other people. I also use them for _other things_ to lock in role protection, but I do that at a 1:1 point ratio...for instance Here There Be Monsters, all mystical powers must be bought in a Mystic Resource Pool. Every 1 point in a Mystic Resource Pool costs 1 character point, so there is no point savings. Instead, it prevents people who lack a Mystic Resource Pool from taking mystical abilities. There are other pools for other types of protected role abilities. I think it could be interesting if it serves a purpose. However, I would recommend you consider Universal Translator as the foil to languages. Similarly, a character could take Area Knowledge: "Places I Reveal I've Been To Before When It Is Relevant To The Plot" 27- and succeed on a 17- even at a -10 penalty. And so on. The point being there is a sort of ballpark # of points for how much it should cost to be categorically covered for the various "soft skills" such as AK, KS, SS, and languages. Similarly, their utility in a given campaign depends entirely upon the GM...the more the GM makes knowing foreign languages and places and applying specific sciences and knowing specific stuff important to the game, the more useful knowing languages and things about places and science and stuff is to a character. Contacts on the other hand is basically buying an NPC with limitations on how useful they are in general and how frequently they can be useful. In an ideal scenario, they offer a modicum of the narrative control usually monopolized by the GM to a player. Some GM's, the adversarial sort mostly, balk at this and can't or won't allow contacts to be very useful. Many narrative GM's typically love it when a player takes a more active interest in interacting with _any_ NPC, and thus tend to like contacts and make them perhaps too useful at times. Simulationist GM's will tend to prefer whatever outcome they think "makes sense" per their sensibilities about what is "realistic" to the setting and will often bend / interpret / filter contacts resolution accordingly. Gamist GM's will tend to just follow the game mechanic for when Contacts trigger, and apply whatever guidelines the game sets forth as to how helpful a contact can be. Knowing which sort of GM you are will help you decide which approach is a natural fit for you. Knowing which sort of GM you are will help your players decide if the taking of contacts at any level is likely to be worth it in your campaign. Can you post a link to it for me? After the first thousand posts it gets harder to keep track.

I use resource pools, and I give players a fair amount of utility, appropriate to their investment. Benefits gained via contacts should serve the story IMO, not derail it, so I act accordingly.

Any decent text editor. I have several IDE's (Visual Studio, VS Code, Clion, IntelliJ) that I could use, but html templates are so trivial that it's not worth the bother for me. I like Notepad++ as well; I've been using that on my windows boxes for years.

Not at all. Your Sparkle Motion-itude is top notch.

Sure, and I basically agree with you. BUT if arguing thru the details helps some people frame their positions on 6e (no figured) and pre-6e (figureds), then what's the harm? I don't think they've damaged the thread and discussion continues, and out of that back and forth...spin off conversations have born fruit. It all seems like fair game to me so far {shrug}

"dickering" has a certain petty, time wasting connotation to it...https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/dickering https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dicker dicker VERB North American 1 Engage in petty argument or bargaining. ‘Sam advised him not to dicker over the extra fee’

Do you mean why would a character have OCV and DCV not equal to one another? Plenty of reasons. For instance, a character that is hard to hit might have a DCV higher than OCV, and a character who wades in and soaks damage might have a lower DCV than OCV. Ability to hit things and ability to avoid getting hit are separate abilities and while they can of course be kept equal to each other if desired, it is nice to have the freedom to set them at different values when that is desired. I think the math indicates that one should buy OCV / DCV as characteristics until NCM (if any) rather than relying on CSL's.

This is a great post, and I can say that you and I are actually philosophically very close. My main reason for starting the thread was coming back to the forums after a multi-year absence and noticing here and there snide comments, edition bashing, anti-Steve digs, and polls that cast 6e in a poor light. When I left the forums, 6e was generally well regarded, so the shift in my years away took me by surprise. As I regard every edition of the game I've personally played fondly, and 6e in particular, I was curious to find out what was going on among the community. Personally, I find value in comparing and contrasting things; it's how I recognize things that are good and should be retained and also things that could be improved. I have an analytical mind and analysis of pros and cons is how I process the world. For my own part, while I think 6e is right for me, I respect people playing earlier editions of the game. You'd be hard pressed to find anything I've written crapping on any edition of the game. I can point out things that I think one version did better than the other, but that's not an attack on either version or the people who prefer that version. We may be in different tents, but we're all in the same circus here.

I personally agree (and have stated this upstream as well) that I found 4e to be more fun as well. I think that was partially due to the lighter weight rules, but also partially as a byproduct of being younger and more prone to having fun in general. I used 5e / 5er for many years and it was a very utilitarian edition of the game. Less fun, but more robust. However there were some math issues, particularly at the heroic level of play which is what I primarily used the game system for. 6e rules addressed many of my fundamental issues w/ 5e and IMO is a cleaner game engine. The 6e rulebooks are comprehensive and very well organized. "6e lite" versions of the rules such as Basic, Champions Complete, etc, are able to be cleanly derived from this model and co-exist as subsets within the 6e model, such that GM's can easily use the full 6e rules to expand campaigns using a lite version of the rules when they like without disruption, and players coming from a lite version of the game can easily transition to a full version or a different lite version (for instance a player who started on CC could reasonably switch over to Fantasy Complete without disruption). This is what a universal system is supposed to do; and while pre-4e, 4e, and 5e all offered similar crossover the edges were rougher and the abstractions leaked more. So, my personal perception is that 6e as a game system succeeded in fulfilling the design goals of being a unified universal point based game system applicable to any level of play in any genre better than previous versions and thus represents the pinnacle of the game's evolution as a system. Having said that, I do agree that it fractured the player base more than most new editions do. I don't think that is entirely at the feet of the system itself however, it is also partially due to the fading out of the game company producing it and downturns in the pen and paper RPG that were happening industry-wide in the timeframe after 6e was published. There were also some publishing choices that in retrospect could have been different that may have helped transition more players (what if say a product like Champions Complete had been printed much earlier or even concurrently with 6e, for instance?) As to fun, while it is true that the core rulebooks are written in reference manual style, more "fun" treatments of the rules could be presented in lite versions of the game. Tone is independent of the game system, its a function of authorial voice. If you have a lawyer writing your books it perhaps isn't surprising that the books thus authored may take on a "lawyerly" voice. Personally I think in the reference tome model of the 5e / 6e core books that's a PRO not a CON. But in the genre, splat, player friendly, low entry bar books a looser / less formal voice is warranted. So, that's a long winded way of saying that I basically agree with your post, though perhaps for different reasons than your own.

If people want to argue about build semantics and appropriate characteristics levels and other concretions, while you and I may not find much value in that sort of discussion, and you and I may smile bemusedly at the edge cases and extreme positions taken and think "Hero System GMing 101 techniques wallpaper over this sort of thing", and you and I may prefer to focus on abstractions and higher order considerations...who are you and I to tell the rest of our peers that they are wasting their time on circular arguments of little consequence? It is their time to spend and their privilege to self-determine what to spend it on and to decide what is and is not consequential for themselves.

I do not agree that the lack of figureds makes chargen more difficult; quite the opposite...I think it makes it simpler and easier. Figureds require knowledge of the relationships between the characteristics, and application of sub calculations, which cascade each time a primary with figureds is tweaked. None of that happens in 6e with a la carte figureds. You personally may be more familiar w/ pre-6e and thus find that style easier due to familiarity, but having sat thru the process of players making pre-6e and 6e characters, my perception has been that the 6e approach is easier for players in general. And having made very many characters myself, I find making 6e characters to be much less fiddly than 5e particularly in the area of primary-secondary twiddling.

Dissenting views are very definitely welcome. All views, dissenting and agreeing, are however subject to scrutiny, dissection, and discussion. This is after all a public discussion forum. Wherein we discuss things. As a forum of peers. It's kind of in the name.

Hrm. Well, I ran with a tough crowd in a hostile environment (the Everglades) as a child, was suspended for fighting many times from grade school thru highschool, played highschool lacrosse (led the league in face offs and maybe also roughing penalties), was scouted for ivy league scholarships before I broke my wrist in the last game of my senior year and lost my ride, and served in the US Marine Corps where I had perfect PFT's (physical fitness tests). I ran 3 miles cross country in 15 minutes like clockwork. I did obstacle course speed competitions against other Marines. And so on and so forth. I was exceptionally fit and fast and scrappy. At my best, most physically fit (late teens, early 20's) I don't think I was DEX 18 SPD 4-5. That's 10 points of DEX over normal person average of 8 DEX and acting twice as often or more than normal people. Seems extreme to me.