bigdamnhero

Short answer: Yes, changing something's appearance with Cosmetic Transform is not limited to the Sight Group. Slightly longer answer: ...but there are limits. Your rock might feel like a steak, until someone tries to take a bite out of it. Certainly you could make bird song sound like a different bird, but a roaring lion might be different enough to count as a Minor - especially if the player is trying to use it as some kind of PRE Attack, which in effect changes the function of the sound. I guess as a GM, I would look carefully at the intent behind the Transform to make sure the player wasn't trying to get around a more significant change by claiming "I'm just changing its appearance to the Touch Sense Group." Not accusing you of munchkinism, but the potential for munchkinism is there.

Hmm...Seems like building it as Autofire leads to other complications. As built currently, it's more of a Multiple Attack with it's own separate attack roll, you don't have to worry about skipover rules and all that. Not saying Autofire would be wrongbad, but it would be a very different effect. Personally I'm happy with the current build (Naked Trigger for HKA). It's certainly not overpowered at 20 points.

Striking Appearance only applies in certain circumstances, so it should cost less than 5 pts of PRE that applies in every circumstance. In our games, the standard refrain when making Interaction Skill Rolls is along teh lines of "Made it by X, or by Y if my Striking Appearance counts." Implicit in that statement is the fact that it doesn't always count.

I see your point about the cost structure. But I would be very wary of going too far down that path; that way lies munchkinism & madness. Striking Appearance is an exception. And even then, Striking Appearance generally only works in specific circumstances. (IE - being strikingly beautiful won't necessarily help me intimidate someone, and being strikingly ugly won't usually help me charm someone, and neither is likely to help with Animal Handling.

I was under the impression Lingua Franca was mostly pidgin Italian with a bunch of words added from other languages? Either way, my point was they didn't develop a completely new language like Esperanto or something.

I once played in a shortlived M&M campaign that had corporate sponsorship as a big component, mostly played for laughs. My brick started out as Captain Smash, but after he lost his sponsorship it turned out the cereal company owned that name, not him. So for awhile he was just TUG: The Unsponsored Guy, fighting crime in sweats and a ski mask.

Same here. Just like the notion that all elves practice the exact same religion in the exact same way, while humans created three new religions yesterday before lunch. But...elves are supposed to be different, so maybe that's one of the ways they're different. So while I find it improbable, I can usually accept it as a genre thing. Yes, but it's worth noting that usually it's the language of the dominant trading power that gets adopted by others for trading purposes (ie - Latin during the Roman Empire, English during the British Empire). It's rarely (if ever?) a separate language created for that purpose. Similarly, AFAIK most examples of thieves cants, et. al. are really sub-dialects of existing languages - or simply a few unique slang words - rather than separate languages. You don't need that sort of isolation to create new languages even among humans. As CT points out, just look at Britain, let alone Europe, which has always had a huge variety of different languages, often within a days ride of one another.

Haven't used it in a game in decades. (Tho to be fair, I don't run a lot of fantasy.) I can handle the idea that thieves of a given guild might have certain code phrases, or even that the lower classes might speak a different dialect from the upper classes. But the idea that thieves in one country share a common language with thieves all over the world strains credibility. Actually my current campaign doesn't even have a common tongue at all. It's set in 11th century Europe, at a time when Latin had declined in common usage, but hadn't yet become widely used among scholars. Arabic is the lingua franka in the Muslim world of course, but Europe is badly Balkanized linguistically. It's actually been a significant pain, and has really made me appreciate that particular trope!

Curse you, Kesedrith! Those words kept playing in my head and whispering "Well y'know, maybe it would be kindof a fun mental exercise! So while I'm on the record as agreeing this isn't really necessary, here's a quick survey of what's on my phone and how you might build it if you really felt like doing so: Make phone calls: Radio Perception w. Transmit, voice-only Emails: Radio Perception w. Transmit, text only Text messages/Messenger/etc: Radio Perception w. Transmit, text only (the differences between text & email probably trivial from a game perspective?) Skype/Facetime/Video calls: Radio Perception w. Transmit, Sight & Hearing Internet Browser: As discussed, probably a Computer Link Perk or maybe a variation of Cramming? Camera/Video: Eidetic Memory Voice Memos: Eidetic Memory, Hearing only Clock/Timer: Absolute Time Sense Calculator: Lightning Calculator Flashlight: Images, Light Only GPS/Maps/Compass: Bump of Direction plus some kind of Area Knowledge? Waze app: Analyze traffic congestion Various Weather Apps: Detect Weather? Soundhound: Analyze Song? Pandora/various music apps/podcasts: Images, sound only? Or else treat like some sort of library Computer Link? Yelp: Detect Good Restaurants? Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/etc: probably another Computer Link Kindle/comics/various library apps: Access probably Wallet/various banking apps: again, probably some sort of Computer Link Calendar: maybe +X to INT, only to remember where I'm supposed to be? Contacts: KS: contact info for people I know Various games: EDM, only to move forward in time (ie: time-wasting!). Or possibly -X to PER Rolls? A lot of duplication & overlap, obviously. Feel free to add your own. Y'know, just as a fun mental exercise...

Nothing wrong with tinkering for the sake of tinkering. But the changes you're proposing are going to have significant "ripple effects" throughout the game because it changes a lot of fundamental assumptions about how damage works in Hero. From a gamist standpoint, the major impact is going to be to make attacks very all-or-nothing - characters ether shrug off minor attacks or are quickly incapacitated by one decent die roll. That doesn't give the GM a lot of leeway to challenge the players without taking them out of the game, so Use With Caution. In fact, the comparison with Mental Powers is apt: Mental Powers have often been criticized because they tend to be all-or-nothing attacks, which doesn't make for fun gaming. So, if the goal is just to make combat feel grittier and less superhero-ey: Use more Killing Attacks and keep Resistant Defenses low Try using Wounding, Impairing/Disabling, Bleeding, etc. Restrict Healing powers. If you want to go further, you can try adding thresholds within the existing BODY/STUN framework, with penalties when a character is at 50%, 25% or whatever, as has been suggested. That will make things feel much grittier without undercutting core game mechanics.

Yeah, that part does sound more like Striking Appearance or some form of Positive Rep. Not to say it can't also be a Disad/Comp of course, but you'd need to put some more thought into how it hinders her or complicates her life, specific to your game. It's certainly going to make it hard for her infiltrate the Evil Overlord's Personal Guard and the like. That sounds like Social Comp: Naive or Easy Mark or something.

In shibbydibby9's defense, he's hardly the first person on these boards to suggest toolkitting RAW to get a different type of game. And we don't normally stone those who suggest doing so and call them heretics. The ability to change Hero is part of what makes Hero great IMO. So it's not about whether or not something is broken - it's about changing a specific part of the rules to get a different type of game experience. I think the problem is we're all still a little hazy on what type of different experience the OP is dialing for.

The line between "I don't see the point of that" and "that's a stupid idea" can be thin and sometimes subjective, particularly online. A lot of comments here have intended the former, but I agree a few may perhaps have shaded into the latter without meaning to. Apologies if mine was one of them. That said, I'm afraid I still really don't see the point of what you're doing. That is, I get what you're trying to do but not why? What is the outcome you're trying to achieve that is different than what you're getting with the current rules? Without understanding the reasoning behind it, it's hard to offer constructive advice.

Ah, touche! Bad choice of example on my part. (My Old School "roots" are showing again...)

I don't see what's new or different there? 6e1 p91 says Teamwork "reflects a character’s ability to fight well with others in combat." Seems like saying the same thing, just with different words. As for requiring a separate KS? Depends on your game I guess. To me it's like requiring a character with Electronics to also buy SS: Electrical Engineering - I understand the concept of distinguishing between practical vs intellectual knowledge, but I don't get the point of doing so as a game element. I used to break things like that down a lot more, but nowadays I feel like all it does is add another die roll. YMMV of course.

I specifically addressed this several posts back: Once your team has trained together and established what kind of signals you're going to use, then the ability to actually notice that your teammate is counting to three or giving a certain hand gesture is hardly a significant mental challenge. Yes obviously you have to be able to perceive it, but doing so is completely trivial under normal circumstances. It's certainly no harder than noticing "Hey, someone is taking a swing at me, maybe I should block it." The ability to perceive what's going on around you is an implicit part of every combat skill (and most skills period at some level) - and yet, CV is DEX-based, not INT+DEX based. Do you really think noticing your teammate giving the "hit him now" sign is somehow more intellectually challenging than spotting that your opponent's overhand cut is just a feint and you need to be ready to parry in Octave? Again, if there's smoke or someone's blind or something that specifically makes perceiving your teammate a challenge, then that's what PER Rolls are for. You still have to perceive what's going on, it's just Touch-based rather than Sight-based. Are you seriously arguing that dogfighting at Mach3 requires less perception that being aware of what the guy standing next to me is doing? It feels like you're creating a separate standard for "noticing what my allies are doing" that is completely different from "knowing what my enemies are doing" or "noticing what my environment is doing."

An interesting point; I confess I hadn't really thought about it that much. There's definitely a strategy/tactics side of coordinating with teammates, but it seems like Tactics can address that. Exactly. Only one character needs Tactics to think up what to do; everyone needs Teamwork to coordinate it. [nod] Which makes sense conceptually - you can't have teamwork unless you've trained together as a team - but you're not wrong about that being pretty unique among Skills. Hmmm...considering how effective Coordinated Attacks can be when they work - I can't count how many boss fights have been won that way - I don't feel like Teamwork is overpriced. Yeah, per RAW its use is pretty narrow. (Tho again, really effective when used right.) We use it much more broadly, for pretty much anytime two characters are trying to work together in a meaningful way, like with Fastball Specials and the like. I get your reasoning, but I think what you're describing is more hand-eye coordination, which falls under DEX. Sure, you need to be able to see your teammate in order to coordinate with them, but I feel like that's normally pretty trivial compared to the DEX-side of coordinating. And if there *is* a question of one character's ability to perceive their teammate well enough to coordinate, then a PER Roll might be required first.

We played with something along these lines once. (Details lost to the mists of time.) It certainly added a fair amount of grittiness to combat, which could be appropriate for certain games/genres, but IIRC we didn't feel the benefits were worth the added complexity, so we dropped it. It sounds like you're trying to get away from D&D-style "death from a thousand cuts" where the effects of minor wounds are cumulative and pile up until the target is eventually overcome (ie runs out of HP) and dies from the last paper cut. Personally, I sympathize - that's always been one of my least-favorite parts of the D&D combat system, and others derived from it. And Hero already goes a long way towards getting away from that by lowering average BODY totals compared to average weapon damages. (Tho what's "average" varies by game & genre, natch.) So I think I get what you're trying to do, but I think your proposal goes too far in the opposite direction. Essentially you've turned Minor wounds into something that sounds a lot like Stunning? By splitting BODY & STUN, Hero already has a mechanism for shrugging off non-lethal injuries that don't add up to fatal damage - no need to duplicate that within the BODY damage rules. There's a huge step increase from Minor to Serious Injuries. Minor I can basically shrug off, whereas Serious can take me completely out of the fight with one bad CON Roll? So a character with 3 Serious wounds (or 30?) is no worse off than a character with one Serious wound? At some level, that sort of damage is cumulative. Even minor wounds can add up. From a game balance standpoint, if I know my players are going to be able to ignore a lot of Minor Wounds, then the only way I can effectively challenge them is to up the bad guys' attacks until they are likely to cause Serious or better wounds. That's going to seriously increase the lethality of the game - your PCs will either be able to completely ignore armies of mooks, or go down quickly from One Lucky Roll. So make sue that's the game you want to play. One of your tags says "Make Hero Faster" - I can't see how any of this is going to speed up play. Quite the opposite in fact.

Yeah, while kinda depressing, that's not an unreasonable conclusion either based on the data we have so far. If you want a game/story where humans are the only people in space, it's far more likely that there have been other advanced civilizations before, but they're all long gone. So we're not the first, but maybe we're the first recently.

Re the Drake Equation and Fermi Paradox and all that: I've always felt the most likely answer is "we missed a variable that will be staggeringly obvious in hindsight once we figure it out in another XX years." Maybe there's something about dark matter/dark energy/whatever that interferes with radio transmissions over interstelller distances that are relatively low power (ie - emitted by something smaller than a star). Or maybe there's something way cooler/better than radio waves to communicate with, and everyone figures that out after only a few centuries of using radio, so the window of opportunity to spot them is really small. Or maybe we just don't really understand _____ as well as we think we do. [shrug] Pure speculation obviously, but any of those options seem more probable to me than "We're first!"

I could list my favorite Buffy episodes all day long. (Season 3 was the best IMO.) Angel wasn't awesome overall, but it had it's moments. My favorite Firefly episode is All Of Them. Even Dollhouse had a few really good episodes. (Epitaph 1 & 2 anyone?) And that's just TV: let's talk Avengers. Dr. Horrible. Cabin in the Woods. Freakin' Toy Story ferchrissake. Dude's won or been nominated for just about every writing award on the planet, to include Emmys, an Oscar (nominated), and a long list of Hugos. His writing style isn't to everyone's taste, and if it's not to yours that's fine. But I don't think we can pin AoS's problems on him. Especially since Joss has strongly implied that when he pitched the show he didn't know Marvel was committed to blowing up SHIELD in the movies, derailing the show's premise before it even premiered. And since they weren't allowed to do anything that might spoil Winter Soldier, the whole first season was stuck being unable to talk about the Elephant In The Room. It doesn't help that Feige & Co's determination to keep AoS quarantined from the film universe means nothing that happens in the show matters to the larger MCU; even the rumored Inhumans movie is basically going to ignore everything AoS has been building for the last several years. The Netflix shows have avoided this problem by focusing on small, local stories; but forcing SHIELD to tell small, local stories defeats the whole point of SHIELD. Basically, Marvel treated AoS like a bastard stepchild, and then wonders why no one loves it. I believe you're correct. Joss is listed as Creator and Exec Producer, and he wrote & directed the pilot. But Jed, Maurissa Tancharoen and Jeffrey Bell are the show runners and it sounds like Joss' day-to-day involvement has been all-but nonexistent. He has talked publicly about wanting to get "back to TV," which implies he's been very much away from it. Well, I think you're exaggerating the direct parallels between those individual characters. But I think you have a fair complaint that the team overall felt much more like something out of a Buffyverse show, especially at first, than a SHIELD comic. Not a great call IMO. But I think they could've overcome that if the writing had been less boring. (Also: Joss had nothing to do with Tru Calling. /nitpick)

Yeah, any Champions character/player who relies on the police to save his girlfriend needs to find a new hobby. Poor cell coverage is the least of his problems.

I know. I feel bad that I'm not measuring up. But I just can't. And I really can't get worked up over changes they might make to a costume I haven't even seen yet. Reminds me of a friend who worked himself into a frothing-at-the-mouth fury, the kind that does bad things to your blood pressure, over one of the first publicity stills for Fellowship Of The Ring because it kinda looked like maybe Gandalf's hat might be grey instead of blue.

Yeah, "I pick up a burner phone" isn't quite the magic get out of plot free card some people want it to be. And while not every character has the requisite tech skills to get past it, as long as you have a techie on the team you're probably okay, at least in a superhero game that isn't worried about realism.

If it's a well-done story with good characters that have some resemblance to the originals, how they dress will be the least of my concerns. Sorry.