Zane_Marlowe

If an indirect attack traces a path behind its target, does the target count as "attacked from behind" and hence, only has 1/2 DCV? I'm imagining the "boomerang" type attack, you know the ones in the comics, "Ha! You missed!" and then *THUNK*

Re: Hero System Power Cards If you keep this up, there will be pun-itive measures.

Re: Hero System Power Cards The cardstock thing is possible if you go to places like Kinkos or even some local print shops, but that just seems more expensive than a deck of playing cards from the corner drugstore. Heck, I'm actually using some surplus TCG cards from a long defunct game (you know, back when everyone thought TCGs were a license to print money).

Re: Hero System Power Cards Hey, a quick postscript on this for you who are approaching convention season with Power Cards in mind. I've discovered that if you're putting these in the card sleeves, you can stiffen the cards by inserting a normal playing card (or a standard-sized TCG card) in behind the power card. Gives it a much nicer tactile quality as a "card" rather than as a plastic-protected slip of paper, and it adds a little weight that makes it feel a little more solid and durable as well.

Re: Hero System Power Cards Hm, I think I've been too hasty with claims about having an RTF export ready. Will have to consult RP Miller perhaps. Also, have a real hurdle with the fact that you can't get Advantages and Limitations to write separately on the export. Not sure what there is to be done about that. Anybody know otherwise? I'd love to be wrong about that.

Re: Hero System Power Cards I did an RTF export, but the embedded graphics for the watermarked shield and lightning bolt didn't work. You think it would be preferable to try without those?

Re: Hero System Power Cards Well, there's not a good way of doing Word output with HD so far as I know. I looked into this briefly, and it's far more complex than I'd guessed. Without doing it in Word, it'd need some serious HTML wizardry to come out right, and that's a BIG project. I'm happy to help if others have expertise here, but the closest I've got at present is a text file export that has the relevant returns, tabs, etc. for pasting into the Word template in my previous post. Thing is, it still requires editing because I haven't found a way of getting the advantages and limitations printed out separately.

Re: Hero System Power Cards Well, here's the Word document template for those interested in doing their own power cards. I briefly experimented with some variations on export formats, but I'm not seeing anything that I can cleanly cut and paste into Word, formatting intact. Hope you guys have a great time with it, I'm already creating Star Hero cards, and will post examples here when I get them done. Feel free to post your card examples, modifications, etc.

Re: Hero System Power Cards Well, again, that's why I went the card sleeves route. If you want to save money on the sleeves, I'd suggest the gray fluff text background and the black header background could be recolored and printed on a color printer at the local copy shop. (Could even laminate it too.)

Re: Hero System Power Cards Yeah that was essentially my reasoning. However, the color idea is a good one, which is why I used different colored sleeves. In the test game for these, I used black for basic character info, red for weapons, green for heroic talents, blue for arcane spells, and white for divine spells (see pic above for example). I'll probably simplify the scheme somewhat, but part of the challenge is working with the quantities one has of any particular color. Yesterday I picked up some purple and silver sleeves to add to my collection of black, red, blue, white, gold, and green sleeves. (This is going to be really cool when I get to Champions!)

Re: Hero System Power Cards Not cardstock, cardsleeves. Look upthread for the link or just look for the trading card games at your FLGS. They're printed on regular paper and super easy to make. Once I get this perfected, I'll post the template for others who are interested.

Re: Thrown weapons that return Oh, hey that's interesting! I didn't buy the naked modifiers up to the level of the other advantages, which has the neat effect of making it impossible to use more than one at the same time. So now it's almost a kind of de facto MP framework with a bunch of fixed slots. By the way you guys, thanks for the insights! I think my own thinking about the options and judgment calls has improved significantly by this thread!

Re: Hero System Power Cards The cards measure about 2.5" x 3.5" in case you're wondering about scale.

Re: Hero System Power Cards I made them into actual cards. See pix. [ATTACH=CONFIG]38600[/ATTACH]

Re: Thrown weapons that return I thought the necessity for a weapon was covered by the application of the modifier to blessed weapons. Those will as a matter of fact all have to have foci, but the ranged power doesn't save points from that limitation, which is where the cost of the automatic return shows up. Does that sound right?

Re: Hero System Power Cards Tried these on a group tonight and they worked like a dream! Everyone was a hero newb, and combat FLEW by! I highly recommend this for intro games and for people who are just getting their feet wet in the system. Heck, I just like the aesthetics and I've been playing a little while--I'd use them myself. Anyway, there's one thing I've overlooked that was immediately present. I need to make sure the phase length of one's actions is listed somehow on the cards. So, I'm thinking of just using the following notation somewhere on the cards. Full Phase Actions, "1" Half Phase Actions, "1/2" Zero-phase actions, "0" Actions which take no time, "-" The question is, where do I put it? Here's the latest version with a couple options filled in next to the type, roll, or endurance stats. I'm leaving the other areas free for UI/Busy-ness reasons, and of the options depicted, the first and third look most promising to me. What do you think? [ATTACH=CONFIG]38573[/ATTACH]

Re: Thrown weapons that return Wow, you guys went are way helpful! I've been quite busy today, but let me speak to some of the points raised upthread. The basic SFX/Effect concept is that the Paladin has a blessed sword. He endows it with auras that have constant so that the effect granted by the aura can be maintained phase to phase without having to reroll the activation roll (Divine Authority, my version of the "faith" roll in most people's clerical magic). That's why constant isn't applied to the sword, but to the naked advantage itself. (The advantages and limitations of the naked advantage apply to the advantage, not the thing the advantage modifies, so far as I know.) The sword is just an ordinary longsword with a "difficult to replace" modification to the OAF focus. Because this is for a convention rather than a home game, I'm not using frameworks. The multipower route would work fine if that were otherwise, but the solution as proposed seems to do the job elegantly if I'm right about how it's all supposed to work. That said, I kind of like the "recoverable charge" route because it suggests a way of stipulating a roll or condition the character might have to make to return the weapon to his hand. Thanks for this input everyone!

Thought I'd ask people's opinions about this. I'm building a paladin who's abilities include power auras that he can use to give his blessed longsword various effects. These effects are naked advantages (e.g., armor piercing, alternate CV, etc.), and I thought it'd be relatively easy to create a Thor-style aura that lets him throw the weapon and have it return to him automatically. Here's what I came up with. Blessed Recall Naked Advantage: Range Based On STR, for up to 32 Active Points of Blessed Weapons. Constant (+1/2) (12 Active Points); Requires A Roll (Divine Authority; -1/2), (Real Cost: 8). The other auras get limitation points for a focus, but I removed that from this aura so that the ranged effect wouldn't be "take away-able." The key thing I want to avoid is a "dagger turns into throwing knife" situation where an HKA gains ranged, but you still have to hike to go get it once it's gone.

Re: Striking Appearance at 2-point level Remember that it can be unrelated to physical beauty. It can be about a certain kind of presence as well. E.g., Batman in costume has an advantage that Bruce Wayne on his own doesn't.

Re: Hero System Power Cards Hey that's really cool! I'll be interested in using that anyway for regular campaigning I think. I'll see what I can do with the export format; you may have saved me a significant amount of time!

Re: Hero System Power Cards

Re: Hero System Power Cards It's not an export format yet. That'd be a useful next step, but it actually doesn't take that long to do these once you have the character figured out. For now I'm still in furious convention-season-development for my Origins/GenCon events (first year I'm GMing at the cons), so I may not get to that until later. One thing about that is that I'm not putting in all the powers or all the characteristics, etc. It's just the stuff players would need to have on hand and it's going to have simplified descriptions for quick use by new players.

Re: Hero System Power Cards Good call!

Re: Hero System Power Cards Oh, quick PS: they're going to have PDF character sheets as well, so skills/perks/talents will be present elsewhere. This is for simplifying combat scenes mainly.

One of the things I liked about Our Esteemed Competition is that in the 4th edition, they introduced power cards that made it very simple to communicate what your character could do. Sometimes (even with the excellent PDF export), I've thought it can be dizzying to read an extended power build if you're new to Hero. So I built a template with nice design and simplified layout for my convention players this Summer. These cards will go into cardsleeves of one sort or another, probably color coded by type (heroic talents, spells, character data, etc.). Here's a sample, be interested to hear your feedback. [ATTACH=CONFIG]38514[/ATTACH]