Old Man

I don't think you can get points for that... I think it's kind of just assumed. Kender are frickin irritating, though. Just like elves, only smaller, and harder to hit.

No, but I do believe I'll have a couple more of those fried elf ears. Crispy, just the way I like them.

A lot has to do with player experience as well. If you have a group of players new to the game, then start pretty low and slow so that they get a feel for how combat works (CV 3-5, SPD 2, 3-4 DC) Another thing to think about is if some of the party is weak and some of the party is tough. You have to keep the encounters challenging without having the group write new characters every week. I think it will come to you easier after time.

I think he meant that SPD or lower. Instead of making extra die rolls I fall back on INT. If Segment is same, DEX is same, then whoever has higher INT goes first.

no no no...it's either two Brians or two Sheilas. I'm not exactly sure how Duplication works - have yet to read up on it. but you might also consider the way they did Hydra heads in the 5th Ed Beastiary.

Maybe because somebody decided that that was the way they wanted to do it. That my friend is the glory of Hero. Just because somebody did something a certain way doesn't mean you have to do it the same way in your game

Mm, fermented magic mushroom piss. Yum.

The usual guidelines are to look at the average OCV, DCV, and damage classes in the group and create the opposition accordingly. So if the group as a whole averages out to OCV/DCV 7, wearing 3 DEF and inflicting 1.5d6K, then an equal number of bad guys ought to be around OCV/DCV 6, 3-4 DEF, doing 1d6+1 or 1.5d6K. Note that these values need to vary pretty sharply if there is a great disparity in numbers. If there's two baddies for every party member, the OCV/DCV should drop by at least one, and the damage by at least a DC. Conversely, if there's a single boss, he's going to get wolfpacked by the party, and OCV/DCV should go up by about two; DC should go up by one or two depending on whether you mind forcing the players to make new characters. You can usually alter the difficulty of combat in mid-fight by changing the intelligence of the bad guys. If the party is just mowing them down they can suddenly elect to use teamwork tactics (like one grabs while the other swings at the 1/2 DCV victim). If the party is on the verge of annihilation, some baddies may gloat too soon, or carelessly wind up for a haymaker. After all, that's how the bad guys lose in the movies.

As far as I cantell, the Dual Brain would only add a few points of INT/EGO and make it possible to have 1 or 2 more mental mutations. Then again, I haven't looked at a Gamma World book in ages.

Well, for balance purposes, you'd want the cost of HA to remain in parity with the cost of STR. Otherwise you'd see a lot of guys buying HA and neglecting STR. For heroic games, however, increasing the cost of HA might not be necessary, since it's unusual for players to be allowed to buy HA, except as a spell. I ran into another reason to increase the cost of STR the other day: feebs. I was toying with the idea of making a fairly stereotypical crotchety old wizard, and it would have been in character for him to have a STR of 5. But in practical terms there's no way a player would ever do that, because he'd be giving away scads of figured characteristics for very little point return. It's the old too-many-figured-characteristics problem in reverse. The end result is that you just never see physical stats in the 1-9 range, and that exacerbates the granularity problem you might have heard me complaining about elsewhere. As it is my withered old mage still has a STR of 10. If STR cost 2, then selling back 5 points of STR would net 10 CP, which still makes up for the loss of 1 PD, 1 REC, and 2.5 STUN, and people might actually do it. Next on my list of characteristics to 'fix' is DEX. My plan was to split it into two characteristics, Agility and Coordination. The former would count for DCV and acrobatics rolls, while the latter would count toward OCV and lockpicking. That way you can have a craftsman or archer who isn't also an acrobat. It's not perfectly clean, but it does increase the net cost of DEX, and it fixes some of the issues I have with that stat.

Well, I didn't like the way the old spell colleges were executed. I really do not think that every college should be entitled to a Force Field and an RKA. That 'requirement' resulted in some spell concepts that were really reaching. The "life bolt" out of the Body Mastery college was one. The example you list, the Flock Of Birds Force Field, was another. So was the Solid Flames Force Field. What does work is the limitation concept wherein the char gets an extra limitation on her spells whose value increases with the points spent on spells. That helps to level the field for Real Mages as compared to warrior wizards or one spell wonders. The thing is that you have to allow the value of the limitation to remain constant across all the spells bought by a given character, rather than fixing the limitation for a given spell. I think this is how the college spell lists were meant to be used--they just had to put in some value for the published spell listing, otherwise they couldn't show us the math.

The formal system presented in 4th ed. FH balanced just fine at practically any power level. The college system was clunky, but it worked. Of course many GMs like to tinker with the magic system in FH, so of course you'll get different balances depending on how you tweak it.

I wouldn't minds seeing an overall scale change wrt stats. One of the big problems with running a heroic level game right now is the extreme granularity. If 'normal' stats were set to around 20 average that would increase the resolution a lot. Of course there are a lot of ramifications to making that 'simple' change. The skill system also needs to be revamped such that each point of relevant stat matters. That way an INT of 14 matters more than an INT of 13 when making a deduction roll. And I still think STR needs to cost 2/pt, for heroic level games if not superheroic.

IIRC the version of berserker that was in the old Vikings campaign classics supplement attached a side effect to berserker rage which was a 60 pt. BODY/STUN/END drain. Apparently historical berserkers were useless for about a day after berserking. They also charged into combat naked.

Cool! Didn't know there was an asian beastiary planned. I would presume that there would be demons in it as there are demons in the first beastiary.

The nose bleeds don't actually affect the characters in any way. It's just a special effect or something equally minor. They don't even clean it up after a gallon of blood shoots out of their nostrils. If you're playing an anime based game then you might let the character have a Physical Limitation: nose bleeds when seeing female nudity (May not act on phase 12).

Assuming two players with equal rules skill, their characters will come out reasonably balanced. FH does favor the brick somewhat in the way that Champions does, but by and large you don't see the wild power variation between wizards and warriors the way you do in certain other systems.

I think that was part of the reason that the old enc penalties for armor were dissociated from STR. The stronger warrior may be able to lift more, but he's usually larger, so his armor has to weigh more. It was simpler to handwave it all and use a straight def-to-penalty relationship.

Basically, yeah. I don't know 3e so I can't help with the specifics, but I think "only when enraged" is worth about a -1/2, or -3/4 if you're a nice GM.

Good idea but like you said complex. I tried to figure it out in my head but it started to hurt. Best to keep it simple unless you really want the mental exercise. Start with 10 BODY 10 STR, 8 DEF, 40 kilos. Don't even think about sectional armor yet.

I think skill should count for more during character creation than luck.

I was actually only wondering about Move Throughs by huge creatures. The car ramming points were good, but how can you penalize somebody for using their own huge body?

You're kidding, right?

I'd be inclined to do something like this to just turn up the encumbrance penalties for armor. Heavy armor needs to impose a -3 DCV/DEX penalty on a STR 20 tank just to approach balance with light fighters. It really ought to be more, because a -3 penalty is easily made up with a large shield. (Aside: the inability to use two-handed weapons is not much of a penalty. Given the choice between an additional DC or +3 DCV, my tank would pick the +3 DCV every time.) I'm thinking there's two ways to get around this. One is to go back to the enc table from 4th ed FH, where encumbrance penalties were the same regardless of STR. The second is to have a STR-based enc table like 5th ed., but more strict, and increase the cost of STR to 2. A third which I am not really considering is to hook armor weight to BODY and STR of the wearer; this way a halfling cuirass weighs less than an ogre breastplate. This would be very complex to implement, however.

I think they wanted to represent that force fields will prevent all damage from lightsabers. If lightsabers could do anything to them, then the lightsaber duel in Episode 1 would have been different. Now that I think about it, that says something about Force powers as well. You forgot to mention that in addition to chopping off arms, lightsabers also chop off heads and cut bodies in half. I also think that keeping the damage low but with certain advantages prevents things like killing tanks and AT-ATs in one or two swings.