DarkGreen

Re: Difficulty ratings for Bestiary/MMM/etc... Thank you Captain Obvious (his actual name)... but I would like to see a tool that lets the GM start out by going to some specific example creatures instead of undergoing the full exercise you describe for every possible monster on a regular basis. I'm trying to reduce my workload here.

Re: Difficulty ratings for Bestiary/MMM/etc... That does sound cool. Did they release hero designer files on the bestiary / MMM ?

Re: Magical Trap trigger blinder/activator 1) Agree 100% 2) Simulate it with a really high skill roll. An example of this is in the FH Grimoire spell for reading languages and breaking codes. The spell doesn't use "detect: original unencrypted text" but rather has a slot with Cryptography 25- to decrypt. A detect should not be a low-cost workaround to skills, IMHO. Why use knowledge skills otherwise, you could just have "Detect: information you need, analyze" to cover all KSs. (That last bit was obviously a bit of Reductio ad Absurdum to make a point, but you get the idea). 3) I would suggest using Dispel here since it would be permanent on a trigger but maybe that's what you meant. Dispel that sets off triggers instead of quietly neutralizing them would be advantageous some times, but usually more of a problem. Seems like just a special effect which works well if you catch the guy setting a trigger and poorly if you are trying to be sneaky, so it seems reasonable to me. Thoughts?

Re: Astrophysics question Oooooh, neat thought! My best answer is that I have no friggin idea . I'll mention that over lunch some time to some of the folks I work with who spend their time pondering just such things. I think you may be on the right track with the AM and M getting sent opposite directions though.

Re: Heroes and Nukes! Probably pretty close. As long as velocities are low gravity is pretty easy Standard physicist joke regarding figuring out the potential distribution of a herd of cows, Step 1: assume the herd of cows is a sphere.

Re: Heroes and Nukes! Both the sun and the torus fusion reactor work at very low pressures and densities. I didn't come up with the number, it's been around since the manhattan project when some of the scientists were tasked with figuring out whether they would blow up the planet. It was mentioned to me by Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb) at dinner once, and I think I recall seeing it in Richard Rhodes book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". I didn't do the calculations myself, but those seem like pretty good sources. What is the gravitational binding energy? Is that the energy required to lift all the matter in earth out of the gravity well and separate it? That's an interesting number I've never thought about. Darn it, now you've made me want to go look this stuff up... but I'm at work.

Re: Astrophysics question Lots of very good info in this thread. Lots of high IQs in hero land. Comic is right about handedness, that's how you tell them apart. There are particle physics interactions that have right handedness in matter and left handedness in antimatter. Until we can shoot a particle beam at distant galaxies and watch the results in high resolution though I don't think that there is a way to tell the difference at a distance. Grimblefig is also right about the creation issue. You get lots of positive and anti matter near black holes and tend to lose one type of particle in slightly higher amounts into the event horizon due to the handedness issue. Thus you get net matter generation in matter neighborhoods and presumably the reverse in antimatter neighborhoods. The handedness has also been shown to give galactic scale tendencies for matter and antimatter to cluster with like materials so that after the big bang an inhomogenous universe would develop to allow for matter galaxies and antimatter galaxies. I once ran a star hero campaign where the PCs travelled through an ancient Farcaster network (with rooms of pure force in the travelways, so there were places to go "between" destinations). The creators of the network had cleverly designed the world gates so that one part would light up if you had the same matter status as the destination and another if you were different. When the PCs ran into their first contact the others help up cards for the PCs to point at to indicate which lights they saw on a nearby gate, thus allowing the NPCs to figure out if they could interact with the PCs without exploding

Re: Heroes and Nukes! A random bit of physics from someone with a real-life nuclear materials certification... At about 3 TT (TeraTons) the blast would be energetic enough to start an atmospheric fusion reaction that would consume earth's atmosphere in a horrendous conflagration. So make sure your heroes don't drop any decimals when building that thing. Of course your badguy could tell the PCs at the last minute that he has a "strong force amplification field" that will increase the yield of their bomb enough to do the trick. So now the heroes have to race against time to stop their own bomb from going off! Yarr! Plot twists FTW

Re: Magical Trap trigger blinder/activator It seems like "flashing the trigger" is a bit of munchkin cheese to me. Sorta like the guy who wanted to use images to outline invisible people in the rules questions thread and Steve just said "use suppress, outlining is just the special effect". I think you should just use suppress. It turns off the power, check, and has a duration, check. Special effect could be blinding the trigger if you wanted ("This spell will blind the guardians to our presence"). If you want to set off a trigger that gets more tricky. Images seems like it works but I'm worried about letting people detect the trigger as it could be abused and is ridiculously cheap. It would be like "detect: password" in a modern campaign. As a GM I would say that if you can dispel a triggered effect you could activate it instead if that's how the power is built. You dispel the trigger by setting it off. Somebody paid for the effect and somebody paid for it not to be there anymore, having it go off seems fine.

Re: Difficulty ratings for Bestiary/MMM/etc... Very cool, I can see the formula (AND it's a nice lesson in active html...) Faces are over-rated.

Re: Difficulty ratings for Bestiary/MMM/etc... Wow Liaden, that's most excellent, nice linkage! Now I just need the score for all the monsters Also, lol at your title.

Re: Difficulty ratings for Bestiary/MMM/etc... That's an excellent point and place to start. I was thinking if I had the tables in the back of the books in an excel table I could compute columns for offensive and defensive effectiveness as a start. I know the point values don't do the trick (although it's better than earlier editions where giants and vermin had hundreds of points in size powers, those were the days ).

Hello all... I've finally convinced my D&D group to come to the side of truth and light (HERO obviously). One thing I did find useful in DnD was the ability to look up monsters by relative difficulty so if the PCs do something unexpected and I need a monster I can find one. Has anybody put together a rough list of the published monsters in a spreadsheet? I can come up with some offense and defense metrics, but don't want to re-enter all the data. -Dark Green

The title sort of says it all: if a character uses aid on themselves what type of action is it? And does it matter if the character has the "only on self" disad on the Aid? Several thoughts come up: 1) On page 71 the "Activating powers" section says that activating a power that isn't an attack takes a zero phase action, and Aid is "Adjustment" not "Adjustment/Attack" like Drain. -However- 2) Aid typically targets a characters DCV, and page 234, under "Attack actions" define any actions which require or involve any sort of attack roll as attack actions which therefore take up a half phase and end a characters phase. At this point I might be inclined to rule that aid was always a half phase attack action, which seems kind of odd in some cases. -And yet- 3) In the FAQ it defines using STR or an energy blast to get out of an Entangle as not an attack action because no attack roll is needed to hit the entangle (even though an attack power is in use). And I would not normally require an attack roll for a character to apply an aid to themselves. But the entangled people can point at pages 108 and 283 to show they needn't make an attack roll. So should people aiding themselves be considered to be making an attack roll (even if it isn't rolled) and therefore making an attack action? Does this still apply if the Aid can only effect themselves? Can someone miss themselves while trying to Aid? If Aiding self is an attack action, what about the ubiquitous example of transform as "quick change" to change clothes - Transform would seem to be clearly in the same boat as Aid here. Or is this a case for rule 6 on page 337 - but please give more guidance than that. -Darkgreen, the troublemaker

Heh... I now require that hunteds can only be on -8 (or -6 with even lower points). The reason? Once I had a group of heros, I think it was 5 of them. 3 had hunteds on -11 or more. So that meant typically at least one hunter showing up per session. Then two of the players reverted to OLDER characters who also had hunteds. Now, I couldn't tell them they couldn't go back to these guys because of the hunted disads since these characters actually predated the newer team.... so I wound up with a statistical expectation of something like 3 hunters per session. First session with this group, ALL the hunted rolls turned up positive. I was goggle-eyed behind the screen then figured: hey, why not! This adventure had the PCs showing up live on TV during a fight in a major metropolitan area at one point so I figured the hunters would happen to have teams handy and watching TV. Just as the fight (which was minor) began winding down, VIPER showed up... and so did DEMON. Then a couple Eurostar members jumped in the fight. Chaos reigned supreme (after all, these groups don't exactly get along)... the players started getting giddy. Then The Illuminati showed up and people finally realized these were their hunteds currently destroying the city while shooting at the PCs and each other. Just as the last player was remarking that at least his hunted hadn't shown up the sky began to bloom with parachutes: the Ugandan Army had arrived!!! (Yes, he was hunted by the Ugandan Army without limited geographic range). The battle raged for hours (and put any thoughts of a plot completely out of mind). Additionally at the time I was using rather strict damage rules and every missed shot had me rolling some dice to estimate buildings damaged. Some of the PCs hid for a while. The group got split up based on mobility. Various hunters began shooting at each other. Most of downtown was destroyed, and we could only gape considering the loss of life and property (those VIPER robots have some nasty missiles!) After that I declared -8 as the maximum on hunted disads and everyone completely agreed. I don't think the PCs every solved the crime they had first been investigating. They just looked out across the miles of destruction and said "I bet we got 'im." -DG