Old Man

Rapid Attack just lets you make a Sweep as a 1/2 phase action instead of a full phase action. It doesn't do anything for the DCV penalty. I'd have to say that was a darn good question. The levels would get sort of halved - they round up. I think you should just go with 3 pt skill levels for a close group of attacks. Then allocate those as you need them for OCV or offset the DCV penalty.

For things like mega magic, have the player construct the spell outside of the normal MP or VPP. They just have to take 1 Charge (-2), Charges Never Recover(-2) in addition to any other limitations you might want. That brings the real cost down and since the points are gone forever, players will be reluctant to do it very often.

I've been having a...discussion with someone on the B5W mailing list. This is the latest message he sent out. It just boggled my mind. ---- I've observed the same thing in Champions games. Everybody buys regen, speed 5+, and Dex 23+. Just because a system is skill point based is no guarantee that the sameness is or can be avoided. Quite frankly we agree to disagree. >> I find this to be quite funny but since you don't >> take the Hero System seriously, then you wouldn't understand why. Heh, where did you get this? Hero has a fantastic framework, you just can't let the players buy anything other than perks, skills, and stats with normal maxes. Or you do what I'm considering and have people randomly generate their characteristics and allot them some skill points jettisoning the abusable parts for the valuable mechanics.

oops

Bravo. I too would pay extra for a hard cover with great art. Examples of equivelent armor types. Like Furs and Cloth Armor are Def 1; Leather Armor and Ratan are Def 2, etc.

Use Hero whichever Hero system Hero you Hero want. heheh Seriously, as long as you don't go the d20 route, you and your players will be happy. d20 is easier to learn but leaves that not-all-the-way-satisfied feeling in your gut. Especially when there is not a real difference at all between a stat at 8 and the same stat at 12.

Perhaps a given material should be defined as a ratio of DEF/BODY instead of just DEF. So we could define wood to be DEF 2/BODY 3 per inch of thickness, while granite would be DEF 5/BODY 2 per inch. Then a 4" thick door would be 8DEF/12 BODY if wood, and if granite, would be 20 DEF / 8 BODY. That simulates the relationship between hardness and brittleness a little better. The numbers are pretty high, but could be tweaked. Besides, for heroic level campaigns I think higher values are necessary. The numbers above aren't that far off, given that a normal human can do about 1.5d6K to a wooden door with an axe, and wouldn't have a chance of getting through the granite in anything like combat time, even with a pick doing 1d6+1K AP.

Having thought about this for a bit I think there's three main problems: the range of damage, as you say; the type of damage, i.e. piercing vs. cutting vs. blunt; and lastly, that the DEF/BODY scheme is flawed. There's more to object damage than simple DEF/BODY can account for. Swing your baseball bat at a DEF 1 BODY 1 plate glass window and the window shatters--pretty easy, right? Now suppose that glass window is two feet thick. In real life you could swing all day at that thing and if you're really lucky you'll scratch it, even though it's made of the same stuff and therefore has the same DEF. But in Hero you'll get through it in about a minute given haymaker swings and recoveries. DEF really ought to scale in some way as BODY increases--this would help fix a third of the problem, at least.

Re: Slayers 5E Writeups I don't see why not. If the whole thing cannot be used 7 days out of 28, then sure, give it a -1/4

It went wherever the old message boards went, i.e. into the ether, forever. Too bad really.

Something about Bill Gates and his world empire...or something

spoo!

Depends on what you want to happen IF something gets through. 160 pt RKA will totally ash the wearer with the Dispelling Armor. The Suppression Armor will make the target of a 160 pt RKA go "ouch"

The "Real Weapon" limitation is a useless piece of handwaving that says nothing more than "it is up to the GM to determine how this should work," which is how things were in 4th ed., or for that matter, Basic D&D. It does nothing to help the GM with an argumentative player who has a different idea of just how many hacks it takes to get through an oaken door in "real life".

No, I'm not real fond of trying to make various parts of Linux work with each other, and keeping my libraries up to date, while debugging the hot window manager of the day. That's actually the complaint I had/have with the many versions of Windows, back when I used to adminster a 2000/NT/98/95 network. They're just too prone to bit rot and registry/DLL corruption, and there's nothing you can do but reinstall (which is, literally, what MS tech support used to tell me after three hours of tweaks and reboots. At $150/hr.) And then of course you had to install the correct service pack (remember, only the odd numbered ones work), hoping that the software you need to run will work with said pack. Maybe ME/XP is better, but I'm not willing to risk my blood pressure to find out. I prefer Mac for the desktop and Solaris in the data center. Each of them have their issues, but they very rarely crash. In fact we have a problem with customer Solaris boxes that stay up so long people forget they exist. "Hi, I'm here to fix your mail server?" "Yeah, um, you know, we're not sure exactly where it is..." o_O

Actually that's the relativistic mass, not the actual (invariant) mass. Which is a consequence of being able to increase momentum without being able to increase relative velocity. Otherwise it would be possible to create a black hole simply by accelerating an object sufficiently. Anyway... yeah, we don't need this level of detail in the game.

The cleanest true-vector-based space movement I've seen came from, I think, Triplanetary? Anyway, your ship had two counters, one that represented the ship and another that represented where the ship would be a turn from now. When it came time to move, you put your ship within (thrust) hexes of the "future" counter, then moved the "future" counter such that it was at the hex that was opposite from the hex where the ship used to be. Fortunately, I don't think facing mattered in that game. However, for purposes of practically all popular SF this movement scheme is lame, because in all he movies and TV shows, ships fly through space as though they were aircraft (Star Furies being the one exception that springs to mind). At some point the whole thing has to be abstracted, and Hero is just not as far down the "gritty and realistic" scale as, frex, GURPS. Which is a good thing.

We used to deduce specific head locations from the armor chart in 1st ed. FH. That chart had location 3-eyes/face, location 4-neck, location 5-top/back/side of the head. For the most part it's all just x2 BODY x5 STUN, but we used to play with extra bleeding for location 4 and potential blindness for location 3. As for called shots, I think we defined the maximum called shot penalty to be -8 or -10... the practical limit is around there, otherwise the minmaxers just take high shots which give them 50% odds of hitting 3-5 at, what, -4 OCV? Something like that.

What's funny is that the usual body/def figures don't work too well in fantasy. It's trivially easy to do 2d6K with a sword in FH, which gets you through a standard oak door in one or two swings. It's one of those places where the superhero origins of the game show through. And I can't think of an easy solution that doesn't involve radically increasing the BODY of certain everyday objects.

I was all set to buy it until I read that last line. I avoid windows for a reason. Oh well, that's $5 they won't get from me.

You could apply the Standard Effect Rule to either of the armors to avoid the chance of bad rolls. p 72 FREd. The Dispelling Armor would dispel any magical power of 36 points or less. The Supression Armor would reduce any magical power by 30 points.

The biggest problem I've encountered in detailed worldbuilding is a chicken-and-egg issue. How do you determine the place names of a place without developing a history for it? How do you develop a history without having named anything? How do you work the history backwards from where you want the story to take place? The most success I've had so far was to start with a really vague 3-way map: cultures, races, and climate, determining in a general way where I wanted them to be in relation to each other. Then, with some idea of what languages I was going to have, I went ahead and just started writing down names for all kinds of common stuff in the various languages. (This is the hardest part for me, because I'm just not good at pulling good fantasy-sounding names off the top of my head.) Armed with the general map and a partial lexicon in each language I am then able to flesh out the histories and cultures. After that it's just a matter of keyboard time. Once you reach a certain critical mass it gets pretty easy to put down more stuff.

Isn't that GURPS? It's a good idea, but I don't see an elegant way to retrofit that onto the existing system. HERO is just a bit more abstracted than that.

We need to give maces some distinction too. I thought about giving them reduced pen, but that would make them useless. So is the +1 stun mult that usually goes to the hammers. Maybe some kind of permanent plate armor/shield damage? That's my understanding of how they were used. Say each hit with a mace takes off X DEF from the armor, where X is equal to the amount of 'normal BODY' rolled on the dice? So if I'm swinging for 2d6K on average I'd take 2 DEF off your platemail when I hit, in addition to any damage I happen to do to you. The biggest problem I see is that this drops sharply in effectiveness if hit locations are in use.

You might could do it with entangle, since it now allows you to create things. I'd just handwave the table and chairs and stuff. The only potential problem is that for 75 points it'd be hard to make one that's as resilient as the original sounds.