The Hyborian

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Basil:

 

A 'straw man' argument is one meant to direct attention away from the real issue. An ad hominem att ack takes the form of "Mr. X's argument is false because he is an alcoholic (or insert whatever name-calling you want)"--it is basically saying that, despite reasoning and the truth or falsity of the position on its merits, one should not give the idea any credit because the owner of the arument is a _____, and in the blank, insert whatever name you want.

 

I agree that either is not fair argument. But I also deny using either.

 

I did use the Hunger Boy and Balance Boy example, and I apologize if you feel that my post attacked you.

 

I stand by what I wrote. By refusing to define the game effect 'block balance' has, you'll never be able to legally fit it in the hero system.

 

Personally, it is my impression that the characteristic of DEX simulates sense of balance, and no 'sense' of balance should be appropriately added to HERO system rules, since any balance effecting power can be easily simulated with the rules which exist.

Don't worry Atlascott, I took Basil's comments about the "Straw Man" etc. to be a rather high handed way to not answer the meat of your argument. Its a strategy less formally known as the "try to look smart and keep talking" method. Its typically what a college professor/politician does when someone asks them a question they can't answer.

If Basil wanted to discredit your arguments he should have attacked its merits, not made an arcane reference that only some of the posters he would catch and then move on as if that settled the matter. It would have been better so say nothing, quote only the part he chose to respond to, and make his point there. I find the whole approach very telling.

T.H.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

I want any "block", etc. to the Sense of Balance to be that which occurs with a "block", etc. to any other Sense. As it ways on page 114 of the 5th Edition:

See pages 226-227' date=' 245, 283 for details.[/quote']

 

That means almost nothing.

 

All it says is that it allows you to "blind and opponents sense", and that "A flashed character who cannot perceive his opponents with a targeting sense suffers penalties to his DCV and OCV."

 

Unless the target's only active targeting sense was a special sense with a balance Fx, there are no combat effects.

 

For the duration of the power, the target feels woozy and cant tell which way is down with his eyes closed.

 

If you want it to do anything other than that,which is more or less nothing, you need to buy another power with the same special effect to inflict those effects on the target.

 

That assumes the GM lets you buy the "balance flash" in the first place, but as it looks like it would not actually do anything, I would probably let you waste the points.

Re: Feedback on "Tank"

Don't make the PCs pay for it. That's retarded.

 

Calling someone else's idea "retarded", without even bothering to state a reason why or a counter arguement is more than a little rude. I think the retarded thing here is your social skills. If you thinks is a lousy idea, thats fine, but explain why. Posting this way sounds like name calling.

T.H.

Re: Nomenclature

The main issue I have with power defence is that I have a hard time coming up with a Fx for it. I usually like to have some on my super characters. Adjustment powers are to potentially crippling to leave that kind of hole in your defences. But I have trouble imagining exactly what the Power Def represents. Afterall, it resists against everything from magic spells to tasers to gas guns to mutant viruses to nanites to . . .well, you get the picture. Other than saying "well, my charcter is really tough, he could resists these attacks through toughness and willpower", im not sure how to describe my own power. It always makes me feel like a bit of a powergamer, which I dont like. On the other hand, I usually feel like its too important to go without.

T.H.

Re: Need Help: Attacking through Images

Not true. There's always Sweep and Rapid Fire to take care of that situation.

Well, sort of. But with duplicates one duplicate could chuck a thowing star, one could attack with a sword, another could use a net-based entange attack, etc. Using images the attacks all have to originate from the character, not the image, and the character would one attack opportunity per phase. Yes, there are ways (sweep, autofire, etc) to make a multiple attack, but you still have only one opportunity to attack. With duplicates each duplicate would be throwing that autofire/sweep at the enemy.

Having said that, however, I do think Images is a better power to simulate the Fx in this case. But the "image" ninja can not attack without the main charcter having a half phase to active that indirect attack power.

Re: Looking for Spidery names ... sort of.

I'm sorta designing one at the moment with the working title of ArachniKid.

You took my answer.

Actually, I knew someone years ago who ran a spiderman ripoff called "The Arachnid Kid".

Re: To agree or disagree with Steve's answer

I would go with Steve's answer- mostly. I would let a single attacker throwing a singpe power "lump" their drain damage. If Captain Taser zaps the villian multiple times with his taser touch to drain stun, I would add the total drains together and have them recover at whatever rate the power allowed recovery. If Captain Taser then pulled out another gadget that disrupted the villian's balance (best bought as a drain against Dex) that drain would recover seperatly. If Captain Taser's sidekick Tear Gas Boy also hit the same villian with a stun drain, that would have to be tracked seperatly, and would recover seperatly as well.

I dont buy the argument that we should lump adjustment power damage because other forms of damage do so. The reason is that adjustment powers have special rules for how you recover from them. By overt definition they work differently.

T.H.

Re: Need Help: Attacking through Images

A couple of thoughts:

Images vs. Duplication. If you are using images then you still only get one attack per phase. With duplication all the duplicates could attack at the same time. Of course, your duplicates could "die", images cant get killed. (unless you are being super-realistic with them, so that your enemy does not realize they are images).

You metioned sense, I would look at Clairsentience. That way you could be in another room and still control the image and make attacks.

Re: Feelin' philosophical...

I think part of it is that the gaming community has gotten older on average. Many of the peole who started playing in the early days of the hobby (late 70s early 80s) as kids are still playing. And honestly, Im not sure how well the industry is doing at recruiting younger players. Back in gradeschool when I got my first edition AD&D hardbacks I lived in a town that had 5 TV channels, no internet, and video game technology that peaked at the Atari 2600. RPG's were the natural extension of my geek interests.

Clearly, there is a big interest in genre material out there right now, but I think only a fairly small percentage of that fanbase is attracted to pen and pager rpgs. How many hundreds of thousands of subscribers is World of Warcraft up to now? And even for a niche genre like supers, City of Heros had 180,000 subscribers at one point (dont know if they lost any ground since WOW took over the world.) A lot of people clearly enjoy the RPG experience, but I think a great many of them are getting it from the Internet these days.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Incorrect. It also prevents you from reading, distinguishing colors, etc., IOW, all the things that sight specifically allows you to do. Let's see you cut the red wire and not the blue wire with just your passive sonar before the bomb goes off. I think you're missing a subtle point here (though I didn't think it was all that subtle myself, and I certainly didn't mean it to be): There are other impacts of the loss of a sense besides combat targeting. There are several published characters that have Flash vs. Hearing or other senses that are not normally targeting.

 

I don't know if you've been actually reading my posts, so I'll say this again: I am not looking for a power that drains characteristics (Drain) or causes unblockable STUN damage (NND); I'm talking ablout a power that blocks a sense, in this case, the sense of balance.

Quite correct. What I should have said is that it does not have an effect on your Combat Values.

As for loosing your sense of balance, Im not sure what effect it could have other than penalites to movement and targeting. Balance keeps you oriented in space, and messing with it should have some negative penalites. But, flash is the wrong tool to simulate this. If you flash my blance, I cant target with it, which I probably was not doing in the first place (except for Basil of course). To impose combat penalites beyond that exceeds the mandate of what the flash power does. And if the power has no effect beyond removing balance as a targeting sense, then you have paid points for an attack that makes your target a little woozy, but has no real game effect.

You ask "what would this do?" The real question is "what would you want it do?" The heart and soul of Hero is that the powers are FX independant. Think of what you want your attack to do, and then choose the power(s) that best represent it. Its totally up to you what disruption of balance would do to someone. Thats because disruption of balance is a Fx, not a power or game mechanic. Don't think in terms of "what would happen if I flashed balance?" Thats a game mechanic effect. Decide what your special effect would do, then look at some other powers to simulate it.

Re: Linking a characteristic decrease to a power

Beat me to it. Yep, side effect.

Re: I don't understand Hallucination Spray

2. I probably wouldn't have built it with no conscious control, or if I did i would probably only have allowed it at -1/2 limitation, like having a set command, so i quite agree with you there.

 

My initial reaction was much the same, but after reading the NCC rule there is an option for powers that a character can activate at will but not control the effects. The listed value for that is (-1).

However, for the -1 limitation I think that the results would be more random. The target might see something terrifying, but they might also see their highschool sweethart, the king of Siam, or a 12 foot tall pink and purple bunny doing the Lindy. If the power was always scarry, then it should probably be (-1/2), like a set effect, as TheRealLemming suggested.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

HUMM, major formating boo-boo in above post. Sorry if its hard to read. Im a rules lawyer, not a computer geek.

The Hyborian

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

[So is saying you can't pay for Targeting for Balance, etc. There is nothing in the rules, *nor in an unfettered imagination* that forces non-Targetability on Balance. If you don't want Targeting Balance, fine. But please stop assuming your preferences have to limit my imagination.

Well, you could buy some kind of detect, define it being related to balance, put it in the unusual sense group, and then buy targeting for it. I still do not see how my ability to walk on a balance beam would tell me where anyone else in the room is. I would suggest that you cant just pay the points for targeting on balance without buying it as a detect first.

 

God, can people please stop saying this? It's utterly WRONG. In fact, it doesn't give me any information about what's inside my body, ONLY what's outside it.

 

Explain to me how your sense of balance lets you tell where your enemy in combat is and I will stop saying it. I do not see how balance gives you any information other than about your body and its orientation in space. If you put on a blindfold and use your blance you get ZERO information about MY body's orientation in space, or which side your about to be attacked from.

 

 

 

OK, if your are being attacked by a planet sized object, I would allow you to use your balance as a targeting sense. Still doesn't do squat about that ninja sneaking up on you.

 

 

If my foe is microscopic, Normal Sight won't tell me where he is; that doesn't mean Normal Sight isn't a sense. On the flip side, a Sense of Balance with Discriminatory, or even a sufficient number of plusses to PER could tell you where your foe is. Indeed, this is the only reasonable explanation for Spatial Awareness I've ever encountered (from a semi-realistic/preserve verisimilatude point-of-view)---well, that or a highly sensitive Magnetic Sense.

Perhaps it would be clearer to you if you considered humans to have, innately, major-league minuses on Balance PER Rolls. Thus, we get only the crudest information, and are capable of sensing only largish masses. More sensitive creatures, and machines, can sense more clearly; some can even use it to locate (potential) foes.

 

Ok, I see where you are going with this, but what you are talking about here is a superpower, a detect defined as the ability to sense objects by registering the minor changes in gravity the generate. Well and good,thats a perfectly fine special effect for a detect. BUT, its not something most people could do. And if my character does not have that power, I think its its unfair for you to get a combat advantage by flashing my balance. As I have said in a couple of other posts, the combat effect from flash comes from using flash to take away a targeting sense. If I have another targeting sense, I might have a slight disadvantage related to the sense loss, like not being able to tell colors if my sight has been flashed, but my CVs stay the same. There is not MECHANICAL effect from the flash as long as I have a targeting sense up and running.

 

Now, by imposing penalties from a balance flash you have turned flash into a drain of sort, one that will almost never encounter a target with a defense against it. Who has ever built a character with a flash defense for their balance? People have talked about things like 1/2DCV and no concentation powers for the effect to this. That hugely unbalancing to give that effect to a flash power, one that one one will have defences to, and in one that will take effect even if the target has another targeting sense. As I have said before, I dont object to the concept of a balance affecting power, I object to the mechanical way it is being imposed. This is either a drain or a major transform.

 

 

That is an unwarrented assumption.

 

Well, if you want a flash that doesn't impose combat penalties, then I guess you can have as much as you would like. I would suggest 11d6. My assumption was that you would like the flash to do something to the target.

 

 

Actually, its the only way to do it, at least that I can think of. If you want a power that can give you information over range about things a typical person can not sesne, thats pretty much a ranged detect. What other rule would you purchase it under? You can call it whatever you want in terms of Fx, But I can not think of another standard rule that would let you sense spacial orientation over range.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Not being able to see has an impact, right?

Not having a sense of balance also has an impact, right?

 

A subtle point is being missed here. Actually, not being able to see has NO GAME MECHANIC IMPACT on combat, unless sight is your only targeting sense. If my character has passive sonar as a targeting sense, and you flash my sight, I am still at full combat value. You have to flash both sight and passive sonar, THUS REMOVING ALL MY TARGETING SENSES, to give me CV penalties. Flashing "balance" would not give me a penalty in combat, because I was not using "balance" to target you in the first place. All flash does IN MECHANICAL TERMS is temporarily prevent a character from using a sense to target.

I think buying this kind of attack as a flash is a way to get a drain or transform around a target's power defense. Who is going to by flash defense for their "balance" when they build a character? No one. Basically Its a NND that costs no points, and that is unfair and unbalanced. That doesn't mean that you cant have balancing affecting powers, but I would see it as a drain, or perhaps a transform.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Just because the term 'sense' is often applied to balance doesn't mean there ought to be an option to flash this 'sense'.

 

Otherwise, I could just as easily flash your sense of wonder, your sense of security, your sense of timing, your sense of fair play or your sense of humor...

lol

I flash your sense of comedic timing, no wisecracks for the rest of the fight. . .

Re: Help with balancing fighters with magic users

A couple of things to consider:

Is there an active point max on the magical powers? That would go a long way to keeping magical damage in line with martial dammage.

Some more details on your magic system would be helpfull. I can tell you from hard experience that if you leave the magic system too "open" for heroic fantasy that you can get some nasty powers pretty cheap.

Second, there are a lot of ways to increase damage with heroic melee weapons. Martail arts with weapon elements, extra marial art DCs, skill levels spent on damage instead of CV, strength beyond the weapon str minimum. I dont know what point level you are playing at, but its very possible for an experienced charcter to turn that 1 1/2d6 sword into a 3d6+1 attack. And thats the same as a 50 active point attack, which is a pretty hefty spell in many campaigns.

Re: [iron] Why do you dislike the Four Color/Silver age (No Flames please)

The words "status quo" came up in this thread. I think silver age comics often were guilty of supporting the status quo in many ways, but were at their best when they defied it. Stan Lee, theat egomanical carnival barker of the comic world, love him or hate him, wrote some genre reversing stories in his day. Spiderman, the super with problems and doubts, driven as much by grief and shame as anything else. The Fantasic Four, supers with disfunctional family issues and self esteem problems.

And to jump the other side of the fence into the DC world, How about Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Take a chin up chest out old timer like the Lantern, and put him in a book with Green Arrow, who up to that point had been a silly batman ripoff with a cave under a mansion, a youthfull ward, and a yellow submarine, and turn them into a socially conscious exploration of American cultural divisions and race (ok, with supervillians).

My point being that each age of comics has innovators and status quo writers who write what is popular without depth. There is great storytelling in the Silver Age, although much of it was crap. Same with every other age of comics.

Re: Valdorian Age

Stereotypes are hard for some to get away from.

Quite true, but stereotypes sometimes exist for a reason. The big three for fantasy character designs are "Im focused on physical combat", "Im focused on using magic", and "Im focused on noncombat/technical skills." Fighter, wizard, thief. You can come up with combinations, and flavor, but a truely "original" character that can still participate in "traditional" fantasy storylines is hard to come up with.

Re: Flash: Inner ear/ Sense of Gravity/ Sense of Balence

Well, since Targeting Taste is not possible, and Smell can never be accurately Targeting, are they not senses? Or are you willing to "hand wave" the science? In that case, why not Targeting Balance?

 

After all, perhaps my alien-from-another-dimension character can tell what direction is down "way over yonder". Very helpful sense in an Escherverse.

Why cant smell be a targeting sense? You just have to pay the points to make it targeting. If I am playing Captain Grizzly, avenger of the wilderness, I think he might have smell so sensitive that I can target with it. Its just a matter of playing the points.

As for Taste, the problem is that taste is no range in its default state. You have to touch something with your tounge to taste it. Pay the points for range and you can taste from across the room. Weird FX probably, but you can do it. Pay some more points and your ranged taste is so sensitive you can target with it.

Now, with balance, the issue is that it doesn't give you any information OUTSIDE of your own body. It just affects you, it does not sense other objects, even if you are touching them. As I said in my post, its an awareness, but not a sense. It doesn't tell you where a foe is.

Further, i think significant penalties from a Flash attack are out of game balance. Now, before someone freaks and writes a flame post about what happens when you get flashed, think about this. Flash does not impose penalties, but rather you have combat penalties when you no longer have a working targeting sense. You can flash my sight all day long, but if I have another targeting sense I can use then my CVs stay the same. By flashing balance you want to impose signigicant combat penalties without any recorse for the target character. Who buys a "backup" for balance? What is really being talked about here is a cheap drain, and I would thus disallow it if it was my campaign. I dont have problems with a power that disrupts the targets balance, but it needs to be purchased another way, probably through and adjustment power.

As for your alien with the ability to sense which way is "down" at a distance, thats a detect with range, defined as "detect spacial alignment". It would be nearly useless on a standard earth, but in a dimension jumping campagin perhaps it would be necessary.

Re: Hand To Hand Attacks

No, no... okay... let me try to explain.

 

I'm building a character with a normal strength - 10. But I want something to represent that while he isn't really strong, he knows how to fight, having grown up in back alleys. I want this to be represented by a 1d6 H2H attack, figuring that I can add my full strength to that (is this correct?) to get 3d6 total.

 

Now, if the character's brawl fighting, and picks up a wrench or something to work as a club for a 4d6N attack, do I use 4d6(Weapon)+1d6(H2H)+2d6(STR) or am I limited to 4d6+2d6?

 

This isn't a "your campaign" thing - I'd like to know what the actual rules say here.

I would skip the HTH attack power alltogether and just use skills. If the Fx is that he is a skilled streetfigher then buy a martial arts style called "Back Ally Street Fighting". If you still dont have enough dammage with your martial strike then buy some additional dammage classes with your martial arts. You can then buy weapon elements for the marial arts to use them with clubs, knives, etc, as well as just your fist.

As others have said, you have to specifiy heroic or superheroic rules for weapons and adding dammage. From the power levels you are talking about it sounds heroic to me, however. In a heroic campaign weapons have a base damage and a strength minimum. Strength over the strength minimum may be added to dammage. Damage classes from marital arts may as well, provided you have the weapon element on your martial arts. Killing attack weapons get 1 DC from every 2 DC in your marial arts, normal attacks its one for one. You can also use two skill levels with the attack to increase a weapon attack 1 DC. The cardinal rule is that you can never more than double the original weapon dammage.

If you want to use HA anyway, the standard rule is that its 5pts per 1d6 (same as strength) with a manditory (-1/2) limitation on it. It just adds to your strength dammage. BUT. . . it has to be a campaign where you are allowed to buy powers, as HA is a power. In strict Heroic campaigns your GM my insist that you go the skills route.

Re: Sunspot clone - OIHID - Instant Change

It really comes down to how you want to work it.

 

-If the character can always turn on his powers if he needs them & is rarely caught without them it's a special effect with a -0 limit.

 

-If he can be trapped in his nonpowered form in some way and this actually comes up every few games, its OIHID and is worth -1/4

 

I would say that in either case he doesn't need instant change. Instant change is more for Spider-Symbiotes, Early Power Pack, and others who can appear to be wearing whatever clothing they feel like.

Quite correct. Sunspot's "transformation" was just the Fx of turning his powers on. It was more or less instant (0 phase action). It only turned off if he ran out of juice.

According to 5th edition you can only take OIHID is it takes some time to change ID, or you might be prevented from changing somehow. Most hero ID's are only special effects.

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING"

 

Then again, if you are simulating an ability that defies the laws of physics or simulates magic, anything is possible.

Thats quite true. I guess in a genre where a player might want to play a characer who turns into a big green monsters when they get angry I should not get too hung up on "realism".

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING"

I believe this was in reference to a SFX to justify increasing the DCV of a hex.

 

 

How about: I'm warping space and making the hex you are aiming at appear much further away (actually an OCV penalty, but the same results), or I'm making the hex appear much smaller (definately a DCV mod using the size of target rules).

 

If the attacks will actually interact with the hex and surrounding hexes as if they were smaller, the end effect will be that the hex really does have a higher DCV.

I still think that I would go with a change environemnt for that effect. Im not sure how you make the hex appear further away by itself. Is there an empty spot and the hex shows up over thataway? How do you make the hex look smaller by itself? Everything in it little and there is a empty gap around the outside? I woud, however, certainly allow a power that affected the perception of the attacker. One possible one would be Change Environemnt, warped spacial perception, with CV penalties. You focus it on the attacker (not the hex that you are in) and everything looks like funhouse mirrors to him, making it a bugger to aim. But doing something to the hex itself IMHO, would result in a very funny looking hex, surrounded by normal looking hexes, and would thus be no harder to hit with a hand grenade or garden hose.

Re: Equipment Pools?

I'm not sure those point values are out of line' date=' if you are looking at something like the equivalent of a really high level DnD characters. [/quote']

Quite possible true, but that just points out that high level DnD characters are basically superheros, especially the spell casting classes. I once was invovled in a DnD episode where a 10th level wizard killed about 100 soldiers. It involved an narrow pass, a cloudkill spell, a couple of fireballs, a summoned elemental, and several pre-cast defensive spells. Admitedly, the wizard was more or less done for the day after that, but he flew in, droped all kinds of hot death on the enemy formation, and flew away mostly unharmed. And thats only 10th level. High level DnD characters are basically Demigods. As I said before, cosmic level supers.

 

Once again, I will reapeat my "But if it works for you, its ok by me" mantra.

 

Back to the topic of the thread, Resource Pools, they are an good idea for some genres. Sort of like James Bond popping down to Q branch early in the first act and seeing what gadgets they have for him this time out. But I still think that I would make these kind of charcters pay points for items, even if some sort of house rules had to be devised to support it. The casters are paying for their magic with points, the fighers should have to do the same for their magic items.

 

 

BTW, what level did you start at point wise Darkhope, and how long has it taken the characters to get to where they are?