bigdamnhero

Oh, one more from last week. The 5 PCs and their 10 retainers, seeking shelter from a sudden storm, are spending the night at a farmhouse and barn. The two characters with Survival have gone out braving the storm to hunt; both make their Rolls by a lot, enough to feed everyone and pay the farmer for his trouble... Priest: "Eh, I pay the farmer for one of his sheep, give him a little more than it's worth. We cook and eat that." [outraged laughter and "Oh no you DIDN'T!" from the hunters] GM: "So you return to the barn carrying a freshly-killed stag between you, only to find everyone gathered around the fire chowing down on roast mutton." Ranger: "Freaking rich people! Got a problem? Throw freaking money at it! Just typical!" Priest: [holds out a mutton leg] "Want some?" Ranger: [takes it] "Well of course, thank you, but that's not the point!"

I just remembered another funny moment from two weeks ago. Low-fantasy game set in "real" Medieval Europe circa 1000 AD. The PCs are in Constantinople, and 2 PCs have wandered off on their own: a Welshman and an Irishman. I figure this is the perfect opportunity to introduce a key NPC, so as they're passing through the forum I describe a crowd that has gathered to hear some guy preaching, and describe his appearance and how he's mesmerized the crowd, and I take a breath to start in on my prepared monologue... Player 1: "Wait, what language is he speaking?" GM: "Um, well he's preaching to the masses so it has to be in Greek...Crap, neither of you speak Greek do you?" Player 1 & 2: "Nope." Player 3: "I speak Greek." Player 4: "Me too. Shame we're on the other side of town..." GM: [sigh] "Well whatever the hell he's saying, it sounds important. Sure has the crowd worked up. No idea what it's about tho." Player 2: "Dodged THAT plot hook!" And that, children, is why most Fantasy RPG settings have some sort of common tongue!

Exactly. If I want to cheat there's not much they can do to stop me. Except to vote with their feet of course. I think it depends whether your group sees the GM as competing against the Players Gygax-style, or as working with the Players to create the most fun experience for everyone. I'm fortunate that my group is on board with the latter approach. (Adversarial-style GMing never made sense to me anyway - it's not like killing PCs is a real challenge when you have infinite character points at your disposal...)

This. It's not cheating if everyone enjoys themselves. I maintain a list of ~10 pre-rolls for each player that I can use either for bluebooking between sessions or when I don't want to tip them off that a roll is needed (PER Rolls typically). Since the players made the rolls themselves and trust me to use them fairly, it's never been an issue. I have occasionally pre-rolled a few of "my" rolls, but more just to speed things along than anything else. Bottom line: either your players trust you or they don't - if they don't, then a few pre-rolls is the least of your concerns. The only piece I might question, if I understand you correctly, is that your had 2 hours pass "inside" the illusion while only a Phase passed in reality? How many Breakout Rolls did the characters get during this time? If they made 2 subjective hours' worth of actions & talking but only got 1 Phase's worth of Breakout Rolls, I might have an issue with that. (Did you pre-roll their Breakout Rolls as well, or have them make them at the table?)

From last night's FH game. Our Heroes are hiking overland, accompanied by their 10 retainers - Egyptian sailors/pirates the PCs beat up and converted a few weeks ago. GM: Your Egyptian sailors are unused to long distance walking, and several of them have bad blisters by day’s end. [everyone looks at the miracle worker] Priest: I’m not wasting a miracle on blisters. Warrior: Fine. [makes Medic and PS: Herbalist rolls to get them back on their feet] [1 minute later, following some mediocre Survival Rolls...] GM: Unfortunately today’s hunting is less successful, and you don’t really have enough for everyone to eat their fill... Priest: Oh I’ll totally spend a miracle on dinner!

I think you have a point that part of the problem with Hollywood today is the mentality that every movie has to be a Blockbuster. They don't really make mid-range movies anymore; they go from small budget rom-coms and Oscar bait straight to huge, bloated extravaganzas that need to make $1B just to break even. A lot of these big Epic Failures still get seen by tens of millions of people.

I don't even mind permanent changes to characters, as long as they're organic and make sense from within the character & story. That's called "growth." Not letting characters grow and change is just about the worst thing you can do to any fictional series. ...Almost as bad as saying "We're going to remake Superman as an emo douche because it's edgy!" Amen. Kurt Busiek understands Superman better than most people writing Superman. (PS - You know there's more than one Samaritan story, right? It's been interesting watching how he's allowed that character to evolve while staying true to his core.) Exactly. There are people like that in real life. The ones who can't handle it don't last long as heroes.

Yes, I use mook rules too. Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to articulate - thanks!

Exactly. The player and I talked about the option of upgrading this to Clairsentience later down the road, so I want to leave some room for the effect to improve as well. I haven't read Wheel Of Time, but I think this fits. Humans on foot vs humans on horseback, yes. Humans from City X vs City Y, no. Tho from what I've read birds have really good color vision, so he might be able to get what colors they're all wearing, if the mooks are thoughtful enough to color-code by nationality. I could use the character's Animal Handler Roll to measure his ability to keep the falcon focused on what the character cares about rather than what the bird wants to chase. Hmm...now I'm wondering if I should've thrown RSR on the build? That's a good way of putting it. That's a great point - "They have bows!" is something I think the bird would recognize, know to avoid, and therefore be able to communicate. But swords vs spears? Not so much. As far as quantity, I'm thinking it's basically: one, few, many, hordes?

FH has a custom Talent called Follow-Through Attack (FH6 p139, FHC p47), which models the D&D Feat that when you kill an opponent in melee, you can exploit that opening to get a free attack against the guy behind him. It's built as a Naked Trigger for HKA, Triggered "when character kills an opponent in battle with an HKA weapon." Costs 20 points at its default level. My question is: given that outright killing other characters is somewhat less common in Hero than in most fantasy systems (certainly compared to D&D) and characters often go unconscious before they get chopped down to -X BODY, would you let this Trigger work when the character KOs or otherwise takes someone out of the fight even if they're "not dead yet?" And would this change the value of the Talent?

We had a similar discussion a few months ago; you might find some good ideas there.

I assume it just meant "distributed to the players." - Not The OP

Bluebooking: varies from game to game, and player to player. The campaign we just finished had a TON of behind-the-scenes scheming and playing against each other, so there was a ton of bluebooking, some player-driven and some initiated by me as the GM. It was a blast, but it got a little hard to keep up with. This campaign everyone is much more above board and everyone tends to know what everyone's doing, so very little bluebooking so far. Summaries: as GM I write a summary after each session. Honestly it's as much to keep everything straight in my mind as it is for the player's benefit, but I think it helps them too. And occasionally the players will catch something I missed. I also keep a list of significant NPCs - basically just a cut-&-paste from my notes - to help them keep track who's who; this doc gets referenced in game more than it does between sessions. And in our last campaign as the plot got more complicated I also maintained an Intel document that summarized what they've learned about this and that, as well as a short list of outstanding plot hooks waiting to be resolved. (That campaign was a LOT of damn work, but it was worth it!) Length of campaign: We're only 4 sessions into a new campaign, but my last several campaigns ran 2 years, 54 sessions, ongoing 3 years, 50 sessions, ended because we completed the story 2 years, 36 sessions, ended because we completed the story 5 years, ~100 sessions, ended due to players dropping out, new players joining 6 years, ~100 sessions, ended due to GM moving away

Given the relative dollar values involved, I suspect it mostly goes the other direction, ie - the New 52 comics made Superman a dick at least partly because that's the direction they were planning to go with the movies. (New 52 came our before MoS did, but the latter would've already been in development.) In general, I think Warner has made it pretty clear they don't really care how these characters are portrayed in the comics and see no need to stay faithful to anyone else's vision, so I don't see that being much of a factor.

This is a "how would you handle this in your game" question, not a rules question. A ranger PC in my current low fantasy game is a falconer who bought Mind Link with his trained bird. (I suggested calling the power "Bird Brain Connection" but the player demurred.) Note that the falcon is a perfectly normal tho well-trained bird. (The PC does have Animal Handler.) It's not magically uplifted or anything unique, and if it gets killed, he buys a new one at Pets R Us and trains it up. We debated buying the bird as a Follower, but decided if I wasn't going to make the other PCs pay points for their horses and so forth, it didn't make sense for him to pay points for a common falcon. My question is what sort of information would you let the player get through this link? And how detailed? Given the low fantasy nature and tone of this campaign, we don't want to go full on Dr. Doolittle, so they're not going to be having full conversations. Presumably the bird can recognize things like "There's a river off to our left" or "A group of horsemen approaching from our right." But would it be able to recognize "It's the same guys you fought yesterday" let alone "They're all wearing chainmail and carrying broadswoards" and such? Falcons have terrific vision, so spotting these details isn't the issue - it's their ability to communicate those details to the Ranger that I'm wondering about. Thanks,

Having actually watched the show, this is mostly incorrect. Kara arrives on Earth - as a child - to find Clark is grown up and protecting Earth. Clark thinks it's important that Kara have a normal Earth childhood like he did. He also knows that as a child, she's vulnerable and his enemies would use her against him.* So he encourages her to just be a normal child as much as possible. Once she grows up and decides to become Supergirl, Clark makes it clear he's proud of her and had hoped she would choose this, but that it had to be her choice and it had to be an informed adult choice. That's all explained in literally the first episode. Frankly, much of your argument on this thread comes across just like this - you're arguing very passionately about things you haven't read/watched. Which hey, we're all geeks here, nothing wrong with arguing passionately. But at some point you need to entertain the possibility that people who've actually read Superman comics might know the character better than you do? I do agree with your point that early on Marvel's heroes were more relatably human than DC heroes; that's been well discussed. But you're vastly oversimplifying everything that's happened since then. * This part is implied but not stated outright in the show.

I'm from New Mexico. It's like that. (Or at least parts of it are.) I really enjoyed the first Thor, mainly because I was so skeptical they'd be able to pull it off without making Thor seem goofy or cheesy. Getting Branaugh to direct was an inspired choice, as Brannaugh's superpower has always been the ability to make Shakespearean dialogue sounds like normal conversation. And based on the director's commentary, he really understood the character and what to do with it. Having JMS do the initial story draft didn't hurt either. I liked Dark World too, but it wasn't as much of a surprise to me.

Exactly. Or in Darkness, or if the caster has been Flashed or blindfolded... I think you're right that CE to trigger a Stealth Roll is the simplest way to go. It's really an environmental effect, and no different than if there was a bunch of naturally-occurring dry leaves on the ground. 4ed CE has Area Effect by default, so you just buy up the Radius, define what penalty you want to put on the Roll (4e leaves this subjective, so the GM just assigns whatever seems fair) and you're off.

That works too. And Detect was much cheaper in 4e: 3 AP +2 to make it a Sense. Oh, and it should probably have some sort of Immobile Limitation to reflect the fact that the crystals can't be moved - the Power would have to be reactivated in another location. Well that at least is easy to address - you just define the Detect as Hearing Group. But I think you're right that if anyone nearby can hear the crystals breaking, then Usable By (Multiple) Others at range is going to get expensive fast.

Yes, except it requires "input" from the other character which means in practice it can take longer to adjudicate than a simple Skill Roll. (And you're correct about Defensive Mental Combat Value is the new black Defensive Ego Combat Value.) Oh wow, yeah! Under RAW, any Action that requires an Attack Roll is by definition an Attack Action and ends your Phase. Which gets really complicated when it happens on your attacker's Phase - does it force you to Abort to your next Phase? I'd be inclined to handwave that if I really thought an Attack Roll is the way to go here, but we keep coming up with more and more reasons to avoid that route.

Good point. Tho I don't see that mentioned in 4ed. (Change Environment was incredibly broad/vague before 5ed.) You could call it a penalty on the sneaker's Stealth Roll and accomplish the same thing. I thought we were talking about Invisible to Hearing, in which case the Fringe gives the sneak-ee a Hearing PER Roll. (Which could be modified by CE.) If you're assuming the Fringe is on Invisible to Sight, then yeah that wouldn't be relevant here.

I'm curious why? I enjoyed it myself, but I wouldn't rank it in the top half, and a lot of folks seem to rank as one of their least favorites. So I'm just curious to hear what you loved about it so much?

I would go with Change Environment to give a bonus to Hearing PER Rolls. If the invisible character bought normal Invisibility, you get a PER Roll anyway based on their Fringe*, so this could either be a bonus to that roll or extend the range/area at which the Fringe is detectable. If the character bought their Invisibility with No Fringe, then the CE has no effect and they get to walk across the crystals silently. * I had to double-check to make sure 4e had Fringe as the standard, but it does.

With supers games, because you often have the whole dual identity thing, there's also variation between what I think of as the DC-vs-Marvel approach. I.e. some players are better than others at envisioning their characters as people who have powers, whereas other players see their characters as a set of powers first and any SID or personal life tends to get tacked on as an afterthought.

Back on the original topic: I'm realizing some of my feelings on mutant as an origin story may be colored by a bad experience I had some years back. I had just moved to a new town and was starting up a new Champions campaign with three players I had met at local gaming conventions. I talked with them about what they wanted to play, thought about what I was interested in running, and suggested a campaign where all the world's superhumans had been killed in a Massive Epic Crossover Event 10 years ago, leaving a world without superpowers. The PCs were to be the first of the "new generation" of supers. And I thought it would be fun to start out with the PCs as normal humans for a session or two and then play out the radiation accident that gives them powers (and incidentally reintroduces superpowers to the world). Everyone agreed that sounded fun. So I only asked the players for 3 things: No mutants (because the point of the campaign was that everyone *gets* powers by some mechanism. No teleporters (because teleportation was a significant plot point in the metaplot I was putting together), and No mentalists (because my previous campaign had been all about mentalists and I was burned out on them. Two of the players were fine. The 3rd gave me a draft of a character whose background was Generic X-Men Origin Story #1, complete with power manifesting during puberty, being estranged from his family, hunted by Genocide, the works. Oh, and the character's power set was built around teleportation. I carefully (re)explained that while I could maybe work with the teleportation angle if that was really important to him, there were no mutants in this campaign world and did you actually read the campaign notes I sent you? You would've thought I had cancelled Christmas. We spent over an hour on the phone with him whining about how I was unfairly inhibiting his creativity and "arbitrarily" shooting down all his ideas and basically killing his fun. I eventually talked him down out of his tree, he said he understood what I was trying to do and said he'd get me something else. A week later I got a character draft with a completely different power set, but with essentially the same mutant origin story - the biggest change he made was changing the name of Genocide to IHA, because I had mentioned they had made that change in 5ed and he apparently decided that was my big objection. Oh and the character's powerset was - you guessed it! - a mentalist. For some reason (mainly because I was new in town) I decided to try and work through it and we eventually got to a character who was a completely generic flying brick with no personality and no background story at all. We played one session and the guy never came back. We found a couple additional players and campaign ran for 3 or 4 without him. (Tho I did manage to work his PC in as an occasional recurring character.) So yeah, none of that reflects on the merits/shortfalls of "mutant origin" per se, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.