Arthur

I duplicated my last post as a new thread under "Hero System Discussion". I think this is a system-level issue, not just an FH issue.

This came up on the FH board: I am considering adopting it system-wide as a House Rule. The cost as is doesn't seem too much of a problem in Superheroic games, as others have pointed out. Still, even there, Bricks can be built somewhat more cheaply than other archetypes. I would still make the change system-wide, for consistency. At 2 pts per pt of STR, you have to change a few other aspects of the game to keep in line: 1. HTH attack: Doubles to 10 AP plus the Lim. Seems to clear up a lot of balance issues with that Power right there. 2. Extra DC for Martial Arts should also double to 8 pts per +1 DC. This is probably the biggest bugaboo. Do we then let extra DC bump up NND and KAs at 1/1 instead of 2/1? 3. CSLs used for damage become more effective. Perhaps they should increase damage at 1/3 instead of 1/2. Has anyone else made this change? How did they deal with these issues? Were there any other ramifications? This enquiring mind wants to know!

I've been pondering this very notion - not just for Fantasy Hero, but for the Hero System in general. The cost as is doesn't seem too much of a problem in Superheroic games, as others have pointed out. Still, even there, Bricks can be built somewhat more cheaply than other archetypes. I would still make the change system-wide, for consistency. At 2 pts per pt of STR, you have to change a few other aspects of the game to keep in line: 1. HTH attack: Doubles to 10 AP plus the Lim. Seems to clear up a lot of balance issues with that Power right there. 2. Extra DC for Martial Arts should also double to 8 pts per +1 DC. This is probably the biggest bugaboo. Do we then let extra DC bump up NND and KAs at 1/1 instead of 2/1? 3. CSLs used for damage become more effective. Perhaps they should increase damage at 1/3 instead of 1/2.

The first six are great - they dropped off rapidly after that. I read them all, but some were almost a chore. Book 9 or 10 (Dealer's Choice) was a standout - it almost (but not quite) had the quality of the early books. Card Sharks (the three books in the second cycle) was quite intriguing as well. Same comment as for Dealer's Choice.

So it has part of its damage defined as "only on an especially accurate hit"? Intriguing. First off, how did you come up with 30 AP for 4 DC? 30 AP would be 6 DC (2d K) - about right for a good magic sword. Also, you can have define it even more dynamically, if you wish: 3 DC (1d K) - Limitations listed. +6 DC (+2d K) - Lims listed PLUS "does +1 DC per point the attack roll is made by, up to +6". I'd rate that at about a -2. That's pretty limiting - assuming that a foe's DCV is usually going to be roughly equal to your OCV.

APW is an Advantage which has to be bought on OTHER Powers (or STR), not on Desolid itself.

I like the way that expressing a distance as "inches" automatically means it is an in-scale measurement, while "meters" means it is in-game. So, when I express a distance as "14 inches", that means "on the map"; if I say "28 meters", that means "to the characters'" Don't even get me started on the idiots who always have to ask "how far is that?" "I just told you how far! 28 meters!" For them, I should convert to Furlongs per Fortnight.

Saw a book series called _Rising Stars_ with this theme. Have not picked it up yet, but it's on my "oneathesedays" list.

Boy am I late getting into this one: HERO 6 (1) Change the cost of STR to x2. This is probably the most glaring flaw in the system. I've seen too many Champions games where every single character had STR 25+. And the problem is twice as bad in Heroic games! If you don't go with a STR of at least 18, you are voluntarily hobbling your character. Some dedicated roleplayers will do that, but why should they have to? (2) Do something to address the END/REC problem in low-point games. In a low-point game, SPD tends to be lower. At a low SPD, the END and REC system breaks down: it's not unusual at all for characters to be tireless. Two possible fixes: A. In Heroic games (or all games), go back to the original paradigm of 1 END per 5 AP. This works out nicely in that 1d N = 1 END. B. Increase base SPD by 2 in Heroic level games. Change the scale such that 1" = 1 meter. C. Increase base SPD by 1 in Heroic games. You wouldn't need to mess with the scale. It would make characters a little faster than what is realistic, but not so much as to be absurd. (3) Define the system that relates KE to damage and stick to it. In 4E, an analysis of firearms showed that you could equate 50 J at 1 DC, with a each doubling of KE being a +1 DC. Put a stop this new notion of picking values out of the air. A lot of us like to game-stat out real-world weapons - arbitrary values make that difficult and inconsistent. (4) Reinstate the +1 OCV for swords. (5) Eliminate "absolute" Powers Invisibility and Desolidification. Replace them with graduated effects: Obscure and Density Decrease (or whatever). Each level of Obscure would be a penalty to detections; each level of Density Decrease would allow you to ignore 1 BODY worth of attacks and 1 DEF worth of objects. Or something to that effect. (6) Make Regen consistent with Healing. Set a default value of "once per day" and charge a +1/4 Advantage for each step up on the Time Chart. For instance, Regen at once per Turn would have to be built with a "Reset Time" of 1 Turn for a +1.5 Advantage. Makes Regen expensive, but it's worth it. That also makes the slower Regen times more appealing: many character concepts call for healing on the order of 1 BODY per hour. (7) Use Skill Defaults a la GURPS. (8) Reduce the costs of Immunity to Poison and Disease to 5 points each - tops. How often are characters exposed to disease? I could see 3 for all diseases and 5 for all poisons. (9) Here's an easy one: Damage Shield! The old way at +1/2 was fine. (10) Keep Haymaker just the way it is in FRED! That was a House Rule of mine for years before that, anyway. Puts it in line with every other martial maneuver. (11) Write up a list of 0-point maneuvers using UMA and make them optional maneuvers anyone can use. For instance, anyone can make an "all-out attack" at +2 OCV and -2 DCV.

The STR cost debate goes back to the days of Red October. I concur that STR is too cheap, especially in Heroic games, but have balked at doubling the cost. I fear it will go too far the other way. Have you considered/Did you ever try a cost of x1.5? Do you also modify the cost in Superheroic games? If so, do you find that Bricks go from common to nonexistent? The main point that I recall is that STR at 1 point was not balanced well against other Powers, but it was balanced against Power Frameworks. Old-style FH did not allow Frameworks, which exacerbated the STR problem. I personally designed many wizard-concept FH characters with low STR. However, I almost always went with STR 13 - even I balked at giving up that much.

This seems to be a perfect case to argue the merits of being "realistic". Too much realism can ruin a game, but in this case, insufficient reality is more damaging. The fact is, with all else being equal, heavy armor is by far the most important factor in a low-tech fight. For an excellent example of this, with discussion, read the second book in the _Cross-Time Engineer_ paperback series (_The High-Tech Knight_). Conrad Stargard, a 20th century engineer stuck in the 1230's, finds himself slated for a fight against a champion who outclasses him in every skill-based factor. So he builds a set of Maximilian plate two hundred years ahead of schedule ("in combat, high-tech means 'higher than your opponent'"). His opponent was in chainmail, was a much better fighter, and lost. Historically, why did anybody NOT wear heavy armor? Enforce the following: 1. It is EXPENSIVE. A knight would often have the vast majority of his wealth tied up in his horse, armor, and sword. The horse and the armor would take up the most of it. Wealth Perks. 2. It was limited to a certain class. Only nobility could legally wear it in many places. Status Perks. 3. It is HEAVY. It wears you out quickly (high END cost) and slows your movement considerably (much less Running). It didn't, however, significantly impair DEX. A penalty of a few points is reasonable, though. DCV would also be strongly impacted. 4. It is VERY hot and DOES NOT BREATHE. There is a very good reason that plate armor appeared in Europe. Europe is as far north as Canada. Many quite well settled lands were not too far from the Arctic Circle. When it's -10 degrees Celsius, that plate armor would actually be welcome. Try that in sub-Saharan Africa and you will be Mr. Heatstroke REAL quick. Increased END cost (drastically) based on weather. The way for a lightly-armored fighter to beat a tank is the same way a small guy beats a big guy in a fight: wear him down.

Whoa! Someone else who remembers Shock Bones from Arduin! Talk about Old School.... I remember I was running an FRPG about 20 years ago. One player was playing a medium-level cleric. They were attacked by what appeared to be skeletons. The player said "Oh man, I just know these are shock bones. But my character wouldn't know that. He's going to try to turn them. Here goes a wasted roll." He rolled his Turn Undead attempt, and they exploded into dust. They were regular skeletons. Moral of the story: In role-playing, always go by what your character knows, not what you think is going on.

Looked OK, until I got to the part about armor. I take you mean "bypasses armor". Not good. That means someone in MI Powered Armor (say, DEF 25, Hardened) can be hurt by a 1d K attack? Now, if you want to introduce a extra damage variable BEFORE defenses, I'd bite. Or put in something about how the extra damage can't be more than the base damage. So if Trooper takes 2 points of BODY and you roll a 6 for that extra half-die, that extra half-die is capped at 2.

GURPS is (or was) an awesome system. It is currently buried under so much cruft it is almost unrecognizable, but its basic structure is very sound - in the human to "just above human" range. It was originally designed mostly for low-tech fantasy-style combat. After that, the linear nature of the damage system gets out of hand. It was really obvious in SF gaming: you either had enough armor to ignore the weapon, or you were toast. Probably realistic, but I could have written GURPS Ogre in two sentences: "You see a bright light. Make a new character." Hero is my favorite, since I like to have at least some super-powers in my gaming, but its logarithmic damage scale is a little TOO coarse. If I were redesigning the game from the ground up, I'd probably make every +2 DC a doubling of energy rather than +1 DC. Every 10 points of STR would double lifting capacity. STR damage would still be STR/5 d. It works fine now for Normal damage. However, the way that Killing Damage is compressed by a factor of 3 causes some issues. In its original (Silver Age) incarnation, Killing Attacks were rare. Normal Attacks were called that for a reason - they were usually what you rolled. It never quite adapted to Iron Age style comics perfectly. Oh, well, hindsight is always 20/20. I can just see the little guy on my shoulder telling me "Oh yeah? Let's see YOU design a better game from scratch!"

That'd make a great Alternate Earth (Champions in 3D is my all-time favorite supplement pre-FRED). Sort of a cross between the future world of The Terminator and Day of The Dead. That could compete with Horror World for sheer, well... horror.

Puts that whole Origins Award crapola in perspective, don't it? Man, I'd send my award back via Parcel Post in exchange for big sales numbers any day.

The only reason I can detect for Damage Resistance being a separate Power from Armor is for those cases where you want your rPD to be greater than your (Full PD - Figured PD). For instance, if you have STR 50 and PD 20 and want 15 of it to be Resistant, then buying it with Armor would be kind of clunky (you'd have to buy off part of your figured PD). Same for ED. If it weren't for those cases, Armor would cover it. Remember, "Armor" (the Power) is not the same as "armor" (a special effect).

Neil, I see exactly where you are coming from on your analysis. In some ways, it is even better than my approach. The whole idea is to simulate what a typical firearm does in real life or in heroic fiction, depending on your taste. However, IRL, the effect of a bullet wound varies drastically. Sometimes a single .22 round to the body will drop someone on the spot and kill him instantly (well, IRL, "instantly" means "within a few minutes" - the negative BODY rule simulates that quite well). Other cases have been reported where someone took a half dozen high-caliber rounds and kept coming. ISTR one case where a man showed up at the ER complaining of a headache. He had been shot in the side of the head with a medium-caliber pistol round. The bullet had lodged under his scalp after being deflected off his skull. He didn't even realize what it was. In heroic fiction, it varies just as much: if the story needs for the hero to shrug off that rifle wound to the shoulder and go on, then he does. If the story needs for the thug to be dropped instantly by the lady's derringer, he is. Probably the overall best way would be to analyze each and every type of round for its average effect. However, this would entail a vast amount of empirical research for every weapon, either of RL data or how they are portrayed in fiction. Seems to me that basing damage on KE is relatively simple, realistic, and in keeping with heroic fiction (the heroes' Big Guns do a lot more than the scrubs' little handguns). The biggest advantage to this approach, though, is that it makes it easy to come up with a GURPS Vehicles or 3G3 type system to design custom weapons. BTW, Neil, you have raised some really interesting points in this discussion. You may not be the physics weenie I am, but it's clear you are a sharp cookie putting a lot of thought into what we are trying to accomplish here. I've really enjoyed this thread. Too bad you don't live in Colorado - I suspect we'd make a great gaming team. P.S. The reference to "pondering" is from "Pinky and the Brain".

I did the same thing, but I started at DC 1 as 50 J. I arrived at that after looking up KE values for every gun listed in Hero (all the ones I could find, anyway). At the time, I was working night shift at General Dynamics, and had access to a large library of Jane's books. I wish I still had all my notes on that project. I still have most of them: I didn't keep my list of KE ratings. I did convert every single weapon in the then-current edition of GURPS High-Tech (A fantastic resource for weapons c.1400-1990).

Now THAT is a VERY intriguing question that I never even thought of addressing. In Real Life , there are probably less differences than you think: in general, Normal Damage differs from Killing Damage only in the amount of area affected. At least, that's the only real way to model the difference. Any physical attack is just a transfer of kinetic energy. Bullets and swords and such transfer that energy over a small area - that's why a sharp blade is better - less area. Likewise a pointed bullet. Normal attacks like fists and clubs spread the energy over a larger impact area. That's about it for the difference, in terms of physics. Let's make a real rough seat of the pants calculation here (using a couple of WAGs to get a ballpark estimate): Let's say our STR 10 hero is able to put 30% of his 100 kg body mass into a punch, and the punch travels at 10 meters/sec. That comes out to 1500 Joules, which would be DC 6. This works out if you assume it's a Martial Offensive Strike. That still seems pretty high damage, since I suspect a trained fighter can do a lot better than that. Hmmmm. This will take some analysis. If anything, modern gun damage is overrated! Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Back in the day (around the time of Red October and the Illuminati BBS some 10-12 years ago), I did a lot of analysis of both GURPS and Hero damage ratings and how they matched up with KE (kinetic energy = 1/2MV^2). I don't have all my notes, but it turned out that GURPS damage was proportional to the square root of KE (which means it was directly proportional to momentum). I contacted Mike Hurst (author of first edition GURPS High-Tech) and asked if that was the analysis he had used. He answered with "nah, I just winged it - nice to see my guesses matched up with some physics". More on topic, it also turned out (in 4Ed Hero) that DC 1 was just about 50 Joules of energy. Each DC was a doubling of DC thereafter. DC 1: 50 J DC 2: 100 J DC 3 (1d K): 200 J Etc. Now, with FRED, that seems to still be in place up to about DC 10 or so. After that, it appears to use the "make something up" approach. I understand the idea of "It's a game, not a physics problem" - HOWEVER - this makes it difficult to convert other RW weapons. I have a list of every weapon from an earlier edition of GURPS High-Tech and Ultra-Tech converted over to Hero. Using the math, I was able to make a consistent conversion. I'm sticking to my guns on this one (pun intended).

Noticed that too. I would watch phaser firefights in DS9 and wonder why those barrels didn't disappear. Just part of the way ST slowly turned into a Star Wars clone after Roddenberry died. Here is my take on why it happened (real world, not fictional world): original Trek took its cultural cues from the Cold War. In 1966, war meant nukes, which meant instant annihilation (at least that was the perception). Therefore, combat in 1966 Trek was like that. Trek in the 1990's reflected the conventional war mentality. Phasers essentially became handheld versions of the current perception of war. However, they lost a lot of credibility with me, and contributed to the demise of Trek. I liked Star Wars a lot (the first three), but I didn't want Trek to acquire the same paradigm. However, it did and now it is apparently dead or dying. Just as well, it has changed beyond recognition. It's no longer the Star Trek I knew and loved.

I have a copy of Champions in 3D carefully saved, complete with book cover. IMO, it is the single most underrated supplement ever put out for Hero. Horror World is arguably the highlight of the book, but the whole thing is just chock-full of crunchy goodness.

You bet your sweet ass I voted. What is the deadline, anyway? I know I can round up at least one other person to submit a vote.

I think this belongs under the "Insanity" thread.