Grailknight

45 minutes ago, Steve said:

How would you model an attack that causes pain, but it doesn’t actually do any damage?

 

An NND? A Drain vs STUN? Something else?

It can be any of those things.

I've used Mental Blast, Mental Illusion, AVLD/NND, Drain and STUN-only Blast in this manner. They all work, just a matter of SFX. Whatever suits the character concept best is what you should go with.

Even simpler, an Entangle as a Damage Shield that only works when used as an attack. You can add Cumulative to it to reflect the idea that it seems to be harder to escape after the initial entanglement.

This has to be a collaboration between the PC's and the GM.

The PC's have to understand that they will not be able to fully retire the cape and the GM has to be capable of letting the PC's have a lasting line of success in an area of interest. This can be heroic or villainous. The PC's can be activists who clean up corrupt government or an organized crime gang that brings all the illegal action under their control. There will still be challenges that require their super personas but also plots and incidents that need diplomatic or intellectual solutions.

It can work as long as both sides keep their goals reasonable or the areas of activity small. A single city or a small island nation would be best for these projects.

Unless you just truly hate all things anime, I highly recommend you go to see SpyXFamily, Code:White. If you're at all into anime, this is almost required viewing.

It's the best movie I've seen this year. It has everything you'd expect in a theatrical release. High quality animation and score, a catchy score, good writing and excellent acting. Two of the mains are fairly dense emotionally, but that's part of the charm of the series. And you don't need to be a series follower to get into it. Everything you need is set forth in the beginning of the movie so you can become wrapped up in the unfolding story. 

10 out of 10. I haven't laughed this hard in a movie in a long time and the entire audience was laughing throughout.

" I wouldn't believe him if his tongue were notarized"

I am so stealing that for my next game.

Hero IS a skirmish miniature combat game.  That's superhero combat in a nutshell. It just happens to also have a unique character creation detailing system and a good, if dry, skill system.

This might be a good movie trope, but it doesn't translate well to HERO.

You are essentially penalizing some SFX but how do you make consistent rulings? What exact length of hair triggers the penalty? Why wouldn't capes be like tear-away football jerseys? What about horns, tails or body spikes?

If you use this on a PC, do they now get a Physical Limitation? You're imposing one as GM that the player did not present to you in character creation. How many of your NPC's will have that Limitation? Are you going to be constantly opposing anime girls or the Dora Milaje?

If you really feel this should be in your game, then purchase some Limited Skill Levels with Grab that only apply vs targets with the given handholds. Then describe the results cinematically.

I'm sure they command pretty big salaries for their market. But they rarely make movies aimed at foreign markets, so they have their pay based on domestic gross. 

If you're trying to figure out how long a combat will be, then you need to factor in at least 2 other parameters. You need the SPD's of the participants and also relative OCV and DCV. with the other numbers you just gave 4-5 average SPD will be a 3-4 turn slog at if you hit on 11 or less and 2- 3 turns at 6-7 SPD. Even at 8 SPD or higher, you're going in 2 turns. Turning up OCV slightly will shorten the combats slightly but shifting just to 10 or less will make these combats take forever. Some will be decided by who runs out of END.

You need to set all your variables and test them out. Only with a good baseline can you tweak.

Glad to see you back!

For movement at interplanetary distances, you going to want to look at the Megascale Advantage rules for movement. They change 1m. increments into kilometers and additional levels increase this by factors of 10 per step. It can still get rather pricey, but it is doable.

For interstellar travel, you'd use the FTL Movement rules.

I say just beginning because we don't have a true set of rules just yet. The transfer portal has changed each of the last 2 off seasons and NIL is still in the early Wild West days.

Right now, those valuations are just estimates by marketing research and don't have access to all the income from all sources because there is no uniform reporting structure. Until the rules are firmed up, there's no way to know how much many of these side deals are worth. But just getting a free car puts most of these deals above $50K and there's hundreds of those type of deals if not thousands.

Deleted.

5 hours ago, Steve said:

It looks like I made a misstatement on my comment earlier. If a character has any resistant defenses, then the added PD/ED versus STUN only doesn’t need to be made resistant. It would apply as-is if there were other resistant defenses. So 6 active points of STUN only PD/ED would be four points, plus two points for 6 active points of Power Defense versus STUN Drains only (if I did my math right). A total of six points.

 

Or I could buy a die of Damage Negation, limited to STUN only for three points.

 

Using Damage Negation is a simpler, cleaner build, and it has added benefits beyond just resisting regular or killing attacks. It would take a little math at the table to apply it to advantaged attacks, but that isn’t a deal killer.

I fail to see how a power with a Custom Limitation constitutes a simpler build than PD or ED. Also, the fact that it precisely duplicates an existing Power for less points sems to violate a metarule.

Shouldn't that be 9d6-14 and 12d6-24?  I don't doubt your graphs, but the starting parameters seem off.

But you equated it 10 points of either PD or ED and it is much better than that. Those 10 points allow STUN damage on 50% of rolls of 3d6 if spent on PD/ED but are 100% effective if spent on STUN only DN. And there is no situation where the PD/ED would apply where the DN does not.

One of these is clearly not getting what you pay for.

It's much easier to fight to the top in basketball than in football especially with NIL in play. It's pure numbers and even the smaller schools can play in this arena. It's just easier to raise the money for 15 basketball players as compared to 85 football players. Especially when it only takes 3-4 stars out of those 15.

I'd be shocked if Kentucky wasn't competitive in NIL deals for basketball. And Kentucky is down somewhat right now, but 90% of the schools out there would gladly take their "down'.

NIL and the transfer portal are just beginning to change college sports and even Saban got out because he could sense that staying elite was just going to be much, much harder and the power dynamic was going to shift. You effectively have to recruit an incoming class and re-recruit your current roster every year and then ride herd on a large group of 18–23-year olds with 50k-1mil plus incomes, no experience with said money and no parental supervision for maybe the first time in their lives. I applaud getting money to the players but that doesn't mean I can see how much harder coaching has become also.

I wouldn't allow "STUN only" to be applied to Damage Negation for an entirely different reason. 

Such a limitation would completely change the mechanic of the power. For such a Limitation to have meaning, you'd have to somehow know the BODY pips of the number of DC's negated. But there's no way to know that because those dice are never rolled. 

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

If you value this, tho...recognize that STUN only negation does NOT help against the BODY from AVAD, Does BODY, or the damage from Drain STUN or Drain BODY.  So there's a real loss of functionality for you.

This is already covered under the Non-Resistant Limitation for DN that is already in RAW. There's no need to duplicate that and even if you made STUN only a thing, the Drain STUN should still have effect. Plus, that 3 real points of limited DN is still equivalent to 6 PD or ED. It doesn't stop an average of the DC's, it stops them completely even if you would have rolled maximum damage every time.

Very nice!

I might suggest changing the Drain from CON to PRE but that might be too effective.

I'd go with this.

Ghostly Forms:  Multipower, 60-point reserve

 6f-Incorporeal Form:  Desolidification , Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (60 Active Points)

 2f-Semi-solid Form:  Physical Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% (30 Active Points), Costs END only to Activate

 2f-Semi-Solid form:  Energy Damage Reduction, Resistant, 50% (30 Active Points), Costs END only to Activate

Flight 15m, x4 Noncombat, Costs Endurance Only To Activate (+1/4) (25 Active Points); Limited Power Power loses about a fourth of its effectiveness (Only when in Incorporeal form; -1/4)

This way the character can interact with the regular world but is Desolid as a default. The Semi-Solid forms should be considered a Combined Power (Sorry, I had already closed HD).

29 minutes ago, Steve said:

While I appreciate the suggestion of using killing attacks, that’s not quite what I was looking for. That seems more like the comic book The Authority. That’s much darker than I was intending.

 

Consider two Kryptonians fighting. They can do some BODY damage to each other, but a fight takes quite a while as they don’t seem to be stunning each other.

That would be best simulated using the Fusion rules I suggested. Long combats where you take a great deal of STUN but recover drain the hp and eventually result in BODY damage.

Another option would be a Penetrating KA that only works with Activation that only works on targets at 33% of their STUN.

Damage Reduction lost some of its shine when the STUN Lotto went away. Damage Negation is generally better for a given value of defense until the DC's of incoming attack reach a threshold.

1/4 DR = 3d6 DN so DR is better when x-3 DC's of attack gets more than 10 STUN past defenses, 1/2 DR = 6d6 DN so becomes better at 21 STUN past x-6 DC's of attack and 3/4 DR goes against 12d6 DN so you need x-12 DC's of attack achieving 42 STUN past defenses. In most cases straight PD/ED is more effective but if we want to get some STUN past defenses DR will do that at all 3 levels whereas DN may stop some lower attacks completely.

I see Lone Wolf has given a spreadsheet while I was slowly typing away.

10 hours ago, Steve said:

Thanks for the chart, LoneWolf. The numbers are interesting.

 

What I started this thread for was to see if there was a way to defend against STUN and BODY that would allow occasional points of BODY to be taken but also be able to soak a lot of STUN yet not be immune to stunning effects. Jutst buying additional points of PD and ED versus STUN only seemed inefficient.

 

Damage Negation was my initial idea for soaking STUN damage, since six dice (STUN only; 20 Real Points, plus also defends against Drains versus STUN) seemed a good level versus 50% Damage Reduction (Resistant but STUN only: 20 Real Points). The ability to be resistant and also resist STUN drains was a nice bonus for Damage Negation. This is also an ability that could scale. If everyone is throwing around 12d6 then six levels of DN would work. If it’s 16d6 then that could be bumped up to 8 levels of DN.

 

I’m trying to find a build guideline to replicate a certain flavor of combat, where BODY damage can happen a little more easily but STUN is held down to allow for combats to go longer.

 

it might be that I will need to combine regular defenses like PD and ED, but also include both DN and DR.

 

 

Adopt the Fusion rules. Add the additional Characteristic of Hit Points which are equal to Stun. Then for every 5 or 10 Stun taken, the character takes 1 HP. When HP reach 0, the character takes 1 Body instead. HP heal at the rate in REC/day. Not immediately life threatening, but a long day of intense battles will wear down anyone and you'll be a few days healing up to full health.

We had a simple rule: How long does it take to beat your evil twin?

1 turn, you may be too damage heavy or defense light.

2 turns, just about right.

3 or more turns, you may be too defense heavy or attack light.

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