bigdamnhero

I also liked Jessie's "Luke Starkiller" reference.

Citation needed? My Army marksmanship training is a few years out of date, but 50m is point-blank range for a modern rifle. I agree with 300m for a typical max range, but 100m or less is a gimme, especially if you're braced. Even against a moving target, I'd take that shot; not saying I'd hit 100% of the time against a moving target, but I'm certainly not going to wait until they're inside of 35m! The environment makes a big difference too. In urban & jungle settings, ranges are going to be shorter but that's more a factor of reduced LOS rather than a question of accuracy per se. Similarly, the incredibly short range of most law enforcement gunfights is partly due to the nature of law enforcement encounters rather than accuracy issues per se.

Average would be 7 BODY, not 6, so that's 3 BODY getting through after defenses. But yes you're correct it's not going to be a one-shot-one-kill thing. If you use the standard x3 STUN, that's 21 STUN or 28 with a +1 STUN Modifier, so with AP that has a decent chance of Stunning him. So certainly more powerful than a longbow, which would bounce, but not completely unbalancing. 2d6K may be too low: that's not even going to kill most unarmed individuals, so it just depends how powerful you want them to be. That's a great point: a lot of early firearms' advantages are in stuff that doesn't necessarily get modeled in RPGs.

Dear Wally: I'm sorry, but any woman who turns off Casablanca, especially in the middle of that speech, has just got to go. You know I'm right. Sincerely, BDH. Apart from that an enjoyable episode, as long as you don't think about the plot holes too much. (Which is generally how I feel about the Arrowverse overall.) I was a touch disappointed that Barry didn't take the bullets out of Joe's gun before he got it raised, but oh well. And I agree that a couple hundred gorillas with melee weapons aren't going to give the National Guard much of a workout, but we all know Conventional Forces Are Useless in most superhero worlds.

Well, except for the fact that gunpowder and metallurgy gave consistent, reproduceable results. I get your point, but gunpowder is pretty easy to make once you know how its made. Even if the gunpowder priests try to keep it a closely-guarded secret, it's only a matter of time until someone manages to get ahold of some and figure out what's in it. Maybe a few years, maybe a decade or more, but not generations. The flip side of the equation is if your world has the ability to manufacture ACW-level rifles, then their technology is going to be far more advanced than your typical medieval/fantasy society in other areas too. These advances don't happen in a vacuum. (Unless the guns literally fell through a portal from another world, which is what happened in the game I mentioned above.) All of which begs the question: how long have guns been around in this world? If they're pretty new (less than a generation) then the rest of society might not yet have had time to change & adapt. But if they've been around long enough for gun tech to advance to 19th Century levels, then they would likely have had a bigger impact on society.

For me it's just color. But color is nice to have.

Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden and his leaking the extent of the NSA's domestic spying programs. Much of it is actual footage of Snowden's first 3 days of meetings with Laura Poitras, Glen Greenwald, et. al. It's a very sparse film, without a lot of Werner Herzog-esque narration or "framing" and what coms across is a fascinating inside look at both the events and Snowden himself. Without kicking off a debate on government spying here, ima just say it's well worth watching regardless of where you fall on the privacy-vs-security spectrum.

True Time Stop is one of those "You Win" absolute powers that Hero doesn't model well, and which should be insanely expensive if you try to. Slowing time is another matter. Drain SPD AOE, Personal Immunity gets pricey. But if the mechanical effect is that the user gets to act more than those around him, then a big Aid SPD (Self Only) is close enough for most gaming purposes.

Magic can ultimately be used to justify just about anything you want. It's just a matter of how high the Contortionist (Mental) Roll gets.

Feels like going with 19th Century firearms would be a couple centuries too far. There's a reason why people stopped wearing armor long before then, and why melee combat was mostly on the way out. The only way fantasy weapons & armor are still going to be able to compete with guns is if they're still short-range, slow to reload, and unreliable. The damage seems about right, tho personally I'd still go with Armor Piercing.

Yeah, definitely worth a situational PRE Attack bonus for superior power/tech, violent action, etc.

That's a pretty fair point. Early firearms were meant to be fired in the general direction of that formation of soldiers, not actually at individuals. So increasing their range penalty beyond a certain distance might work. But I'm not sure how much difference it would make for most RPG combats. The other advantage gun had over bows historically was they were easier to learn: it takes years to become a decent archer, whereas most anyone can be taught to shoot passably in a few hours. It's harder to model that in Hero without totally reinventing the Weapon Familiarity rules, but you could just handle it narratively.

OK, I see what you're saying. But I'm thinking most crowbar-related tasks would be STR-based anyway - ie "I'm going to try and open this crate" "OK, roll your STR damage." "I have a crowbar!" "OK, add +3d6." So a STR/damage adder would still work. Seems like maybe we're over-thinking it.

You could, but I'm not clear why you'd want to? Seems easier to just treat it like every other weapon.

Actual bumper sticker I just saw: "Jarvis is my co-pilot"

Would an EGO boost work? (Either as Aid or just bought as a characteristic.) That would seem to apply against both mental powers and any kind of possession. And if the intent is to protect the dreams of one sleeper I wouldn't bother with AOE, just say must remain within Xm of the rune.

I've only mixed guns in with fantasy twice, both for one-shots. One was for a Seventh Sea-esque pirate game: I used single-shot wheel lock pistols that took 1 Turn to reload, so they were basically fire-and-drop, then go for your sword. The other was for a post-apoc fantasy game where the PCs managed to get their hands on some 19th Century Winchester rifles and Colt Peacemakers. Totally unbalancing, and was intended to be that way to give the PCs a big advantage. In either case, AP is definitely the way to go.

5-6 is about perfect for me too. 3-4 is fine, but the inter-party dynamics really open up when you add that 5th player. I'll run one-shots for 7 players, and have even done 8, but anything more than that is too much for me. OTOH some of the most fun games I've ever played & run were one-on-one games with just my best friend & me back in the day. Both my current games are 5 players and 1 GM cuz that's how much space there is around the table.

I'd call the crowbar a lead pipe. Or if you want to be lethal, same stats but change the 3d6N to 1d6K. Fire axes are pretty small, meant to wielded by "normals" so I'd call it a small axe.

For most games, I would just allow Detect EMF (large group). Anything unusual/implausible might give a penalty to detect the first time it's encountered, but would still be covered.

It depends how you want to use it. If you just want the character to have a homonculus, that's probably best handled as a Follower; the fact that it was created (instead of recruited or whatever) just becomes the sfx of where it came from. But if you actually want to have a spell to create them, then you're probably looking at a Summon with Amicable and the character has to re-cast the Summon every so often to "refresh" the number of tasks. If you have a really lenient GM you might get away with using Transform to create a Follower, but that's well into Flashing Red Stop Sign territory.

Heh, fair point Hugh. Looking to Silver Age comics for consistency in anything is an exercise in futility.

I read some of the UA books a long time ago; I remember thinking they had some interesting ideas and I borrowed some bits for an urban fantasy/monster hunter game I ran years ago, but only cosmetically. IIRC the original UA was very rules-lite "story games" focused? The flexibility of Hero seems like it would make adapting UA to Hero an interesting exercise. I think the key might be to keep a lot of the "here's how magick works" stuff as campaign settings rather than trying to stat everything out in detail. The big challenge as you point out is that UA tends to be much more focused on avoiding combat compared to most typical Hero games, so you'd need to have a long talk with your players about expectations. The one Horror game I tried to run (20 years ago) quickly morphed into the aforementioned urban fantasy/monster hunter game which was much better suited to both the players and my GMing style. It is certainly possible to run a combat-free game in Hero, but it does kindof beg the question of whether or not you need such a mechanics-heavy system if you're not going to use it much of the time. So just depends on what kind of game you want to play.

It was definitely a genius acid trip. FWIW, Hero alum Sean Fannon just re-wrote Rifts for Savage Worlds, and it's actually balanced and makes sense. I got to play in his demo game a few weeks ago and had a blast. If you liked the idea of Rifts it's definitely worth checking out. (Plus easily convertible to Hero!)

In the past I've tried building this as AOE Mental Illusions, but the cost gets astronomical and it's tedious to implement. Limited Invisibility like Netzilla suggests is much cleaner in practice. I've even thrown on an additional Lim that a target's MD adds to their INT for purposes of calculating their PER Roll to spot the character's fringe, thus giving mentalists a better shot at seeing through it.