Yamo

Edit: Just as an aside, I've had some problems using skill rolls as a primary limiting factor. If the task doesn't take long, the player can just keep rolling until he makes it (usually within 3 or 4 levels up the Time Chart, btw, no matter how low their roll is). If the task takes a long time, players inevitably come up with ways to improve their roll. I'm not saying don't use it, but don't rely on it as your primary means of preventing a flood of potions into your world.

I wouldn't say it's the primary factor. The primary limiting factors would probably be:

a) GM veto. It might just not be possible to make a game-unbalanced type of potion in the first place. "Elixer of Omnipotence? Nice try, pal."

Ingredient availability. The sort of rare and esoteric ingredients that potions require sell for princely sums where they can be found on the open market at all. More often, the alchemist or his agents must gather them themselves, often in remote locales and under dangerous circumstances. Even then, you'll virtually never locate a huge stockpile of these rare components in one place. Finally, even failed attempts at potion brewing will consume a batch of precious ingredients.

c) Time and equipment access. A PC who wants to brew a ton of potions on a regular basis is going to have to spend a whole lot of time in a lab, which really cramps the adventuring lifestyle. Also, alchemy is slow work. The dragon might decide to attack the city NOW, not in another week or so when this month's batch of healing potions are done.

So there are a lot of obstacles to PC alchemists, but a high character/experience point cost is not one of them. This leaves the door open for "adventurer" character s to dabble in alchemy without weakening their core character concepts or threatening the NPC alchemist's role in the long run or unbalancing the game. I really do like it.

I don't really like any of the ways Fantasy HERO listed for handling potions and such.

So it just occiured to me: Why not just have the alchemist buy KS/PS Alchemy Skills and use them?

If a player wants to make a particular potion, the GM just decides:

a) Whether it's possible.

How long it takes.

c) What components are necessary and how difficult they are to obtain (which would likely require a KS: Alchemy Roll).

d) What bonuses or penalties (if any) are applied to the final PS: Alchemy Roll.

So the player doesn't actually have to buy any of the Powers the potions represent, but the GM can easily balance this by making trickier potions more difficult to brew (forcing the player to invest a ton of points into Alchemy Skills) or by making them take longer or require more rare and expensive components.

Also: I think this skill would be perfect for poison-making if the skills were changed to Toxicology.

Thoughts?

Hey, that's good work! Many thanks!

I'd make it a Multipower with:

1) A 0 END Uncontrolled STUN Only No Range Energy Blast that fades as noted. Use it by itself or as part of a Multipower Attack with a weapon of your choice, unarmed Strike, Grab, etc.

2) A 0 END Uncontrolled STUN Only Energy Blast that fades as noted and that can only be used in conjunction with a ranged weapon attack (probably a -0 or -1/4 Limitation at most in this case).

3) A Minor Transform (water to ice).

Thanks, guys. It's my review, but I didn't expect it to be up until Wednesday! I just found out they posted it from this thread.

I'm shamed by my numerous typos and dropped words, however.

Trigger and/or Usable On Others. If the tattoos are permanent, just give the character making them PS: Magic Tattooing as a Background Skill to explain how whoever he tattoos can spend their experience on them.

On a related note, Tolkien didn't have any mortal wizards did he? I thought all of them were Angels or fallen Angels with the terminology switched around.

Depends who you ask. Somewhere, Gandalf mentions either knowing or formerly knowing all the spells in the tongues of men, orcs, etc. That would seem to imply that such can cast spells, at least to a limited degree. I also believe that the Mouth of Sauron is mentioned as having learned dark sorcery from his master.

That's at least some precedent, but others disagree.

"Regardless of the method used to limit the number of Powers the character can have in use at one time, he can double that number for every additional +1/4 Advantage. This additional Advantage must be taken for every Power for which the character purchased Delayed Effect."

So I'm confused here. What if I use Delayed Effect to represent multiple, very different types of Powers in the campaign.

For example, say spells, potions and scrolls all use Delayed Effect. The rules as written would seem to indicate that my character could only have INT/5 (or whatever other method is used to limit Delayed Effect Powers) totals spells, potions or scrolls in existance at a time. But what if I would prefer these effects to be seperate for purposes of the blanket Limit? Say, INT/5 spells, INT/1 potions and INT/2 scrolls. Is there a legal way to do that, or do I have to resort to house ruling things (bleh)?

Looking through FH now. Noticed a few things that I think might be either mistakes or bad ideas. Wondering how you guys see it:

a) The potions are all built as Powers with Delayed Effect, OAF Fragile, and Charges. So far, so good, but not of them include any sort of Limitation representing the sort of rare ingredients that normally go into potions. The assumption seems to be that the potion-maker has a constant supply of ingredients that he never has to pay for. That's contrary to how I've usually seen this handled in games. I

my not sure I want my players making potions for free. Why weren't ingredient-related Limitations like the ones for Expendable Foci used, as well?

The section on scrolls seems, well, kind of idiotic. As Independent items, they're a horrendous waste of Character Points. I can't imagine any PC in any campaign I ran paying 15 points for one use each of four spells he already knows (as per the "Scroll of Many Spells" in FH). That's just loco. 15 CP is a collosal amount in a Heroic campaign. A costly Independent item just to cast a spell you already know once? Why? Scrolls are virtually unusable as per the "official" FH writeup.

c) None of the magic arrows have any kind of a Limitation in thier game information indicating that a bow is necesary to employ them. They're just RKAs. A player using a item written-up like that would have the full weight of the rules on his side if he insisted he could manually throw the things for full range and damage! Silly. Was this a mistake, or what?

In the campaign I'm planning, all spells require Gestures and Incantations. However, some skilled wizards can "simulcast" two spells at once by weaving the Gestures and Incantations from each together just right. It can be any two spells, provided they both take the same amount of time to cast, but all the individual spells still require Gestures and Incantations and characters can't legally activate multiple Powers with Gestures and Incantations at the same time. Ideas? I would prefer "by-the-book" game-legal methods, of course.

Thanks.

Drow would be thought a myth in many lands, because nobody would see one above -300 feet in elevation, and every other PC wouldnt be a puerile dual weilding Drizzle fan boy (as an aside I once wanted to play a character named Fritz Foe-warden. He was a white skinned human that wanted to be drow; he would have tried to dual wield, but he wasnt actually a Ranger and lacked proficiency. He would have died his hair white and used soot to blacken his face. He would have worn armer painted black, and weilded scimitars for no reason, not actually being from a desert culture. What Vanilla Ice was to rap, Fritz would have been to the drow. This was all an across the table "subtle" FU to another player working on his 5th consecutive lame Dritz clone. I dont think the dim wit even understood why everone else was laughing their arses off -- we got into such a fit of mocking D&D in general we ended up playing WHFRPG instead. What did the drow wannabe ask to play? Dark Elves of course )

Now that's entertainment!

I'll just second everyone elses' emotions here. Cut down on the magic, especially the magic items and the magic bent to mundane uses. Ditch the uber-NPCs. Discourage the worst cliches (Drizzt clones, etc). Do all that and you have a fine setting on your hands.

It seems like you have a pretty clear grasp of what you dislike about the setting already, so just follow your instincts about that and you can't go wrong.

It is always populism. If the majority do not see it as broken, then to please the majority you should not change it. If you change it they become the minority. Making your majority your minority is never a wise thing. Just ask the Fusion guys that.

But even if that were so, you've yet to prove the existance of a majority that would care strongly either way, which leaves us both on equal footing in that regard as of this moment in time.

Touche.

It seems to me that something should be considered a "system flaw" when the majority of players find it to be in error, not when the minority do.

It's not populism, it's mathematics. You spend X points and you get Y benefit where Y = > X.

Since the HERO ideal is getting what you pay for, that's clearly a flaw. Just because some flaws are inevitable is no excuse not to correct the known ones.

Then the best thing to do is what Lord Liaden has done and change it for your own game. There is a very big difference between "I do not like it, it should be changed for all" and "I do not like it, so I will change it for myself."

There's also a very big difference between "I do not like it" and "It is a system flaw."

DEX costing 1/1 would be a system flaw. COM costing 9/1 would be a system flaw. STR costing 1/1 is a system flaw.

Why?

It's objectively provable that you get numeric benefit in excess of numeric cost. A drastic amount in excess, in this case.

That's demonstrably true. How can it not be a flaw?

Fix it, then encourage people to change it if they want. Don't leave it broken and then encourage them to fix it. That's not good game design. It's completely bass-ackwards.

As I stated in the other thread, the HERO System does not guarantee equality just because two characters are built on the same point totals.

No, but it usually at least embraces balance as an ideal and attempts to encourage it, even if nothing is perfect. STR needs a change for that reason alone, I'd say.

Would you approve of RKA costing 60 points/DC and Energy Blast costing 5 simply because "Oh well. There's no real guarantee of balance anyway, so what does it matter?"

The whole point of the HERO System is to be able to play the types of characters you want to play, not limit yourself to a simple class system of play.

Yes, but if the character you want to play is essentially a superhero or a demigod, I fail to see why you should feel you have a right to be able to build him with 150 points or less, even it it means making his primary ability (STR) radically undercosted and every other character in the campign with a different concept drastically less effective.

You can do whatever you want in HERO, but you should still get what you pay for, no less and certainly no more.

Maybe in the games that you play, but in the games I play players build their characters based on character concept, not power-crunching.

Unfair.

The players just want to be treated fairly by the system; for their X points to "spend" just like the next guy's and buy them a corresponding level of effectiveness at whatever their specialty is.

It's not fair to accuse a player of twinking or cast aspersions on his roleplaying ability just because he wants equal ability under the system when compared to a character with the same number of points and an arbitrarily undercosted schtick.

That is not unreasonable. It's basic fairness.

Ever here of characters like Samson? Heracles? Theseus? Sir Gwaine?

Well, obviously if your GM is having you make up Greek demigods and other characters from myth and legend as PCs, he's going to be allowing you Champions-level point totals. So, as has been shown multiple times in these debates, the brick concept is still perfectly viable (and STRONG) with those kinds of point totals, even at 2/1 cost. Nice try, though.

Again, the problem is Heroic games. Cheap STR is only a problem when you're dealing with relatively low (say 150 or less) point total characters. If you're building Superman, Heracles and Doc Savage wannabes, you'll have more than enough points to make them properly buff, even at a 2/1 STR cost.

A 1 point investment in STR nets you... +1 STUN. That is really all you get out of it. It gives you no extra damage, no extra defense, no extra recovery. Just +1 STUN. Oh yeah, you get to pick up 20 more kilos too.

A wiseguy, eh? Why I oughta...

Is STR too expensive?

Well, it's hard to look at a complete breakdown of what a one-point investment in STR nets you and not conclude that you're getting a lot more than one point's worth of effectiveness.

Personally, I think one-point STR is the Champions legacy holding HERO as a whole back as a universal system. STR costs 1/1 because STR always cost 1/1. But really, the supers genre is the really the only one where players are going to need to generate Superman and Incredible Hulk clones on a regular basis with limited point totals. Better to just make them pay a lot of points for a lot of effectiveness than to nerf all the other genres by making STR cheaper than dirt.

My hope is that Hero Games will do the right thing for 6th Edition and realize that a slight loss of backwards compatability and inconvienience to Champions brick fans (who, incidentally, would still have a VERY viable and powerful character concept on their hands) is more than worth it to sand this most annoying of warts off the system and make the game the best it can be in the here and now. Legacy concepts can be a good thing, but they can also mire you in the mistakes of the past if you don't have the courage to hold them to strict standards of contemporary usefulness at all times.

I don't think 1/1 STR is an asset to the system as a whole.

15" flight, +1 advantage, so 60 points (or 30" flight +1/4 advantage; 75 points)

Nope. Cheapest way = 2" Flight, 32" NCM with three noncombat doublings. 17 points. 34 with the necessary +1 Advantage. With a -2 "Only to Stop And Hover For No More Than Two Seconds No More Than Once Every Thirty Seconds" Limitation, you could do it for 11.

Two words: Rust monsters.

They're a little goofy, but it could work.

Now the Heat Metal spell. That was always a nasty anti-tank trick from the D&D canon.

I'm sorry if your players don't want "history lessons" in their game, but putting 17th century weapons or characters in a high fantasy game (where plate mail is common) makes almost as little sense as using heat seeking missiles.

Nevertheless, it's common in many fantasy game settings, which don't consider the situation in those terms at all. How to represent that in HERO without favoring any character concepts over any others is the issue.

P.S. Dragons don't make sense, either. Flying with those wings? Aerodynamically impossible poppycock!

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of pre-ordering mine with Champions Battlegorunds, so neither will ship until both are ready.

10-point Skill Level with -1 Limitation should do it.

If the armor is such a problem for you and you don't want to change to D&D perhaps you should charge points for everything so the heavily armored fighter costs the same as the swashbuckler.

HERO was not written to be D&D, with a lot of work that is possible but why?

D&D isn't the only form of extremely romantic high-fantasy where weapons and armor don't always interact "realistically."

Most fantasy anime would be another example.

a lightning bolt is a lightning bolt, the physics works

How so? Last time I checked, most fantasy lightning spells didn't fry the wizard slinging them and tended to go where they were told rather than grounding out immediately at the nearest appropriate conductive surface.