Grail Quest

Re: Null Characteristics replaced by negative CHAR rules? Maybe. Which supplement was it that had ghosts? I thought that was the one that has null STR and null CON.

Re: Null Characteristics replaced by negative CHAR rules? The AI portion can, but what about the crystal ball "body"? Computers in HERO are tied to something else, like a base or vehicle, or possibly someone's focus. I suppose I could declare a vehicle with no movement powers, but: (a) It still has a STR score, which it shouldn't have at all. How much am I allowed to buy it down? Is a null STR worth only a 25-point Physical Limitation? (Very Common, All the Time) ( It sets a dangerous precedent. Suppose everyone declared they were vehicles with AIs, and they happen to be suspiciously fleshy and human-like. So much so that they are -- surprise! -- identical to humans! Personally, I don't like the idea of vehicles being separate anyway. Why are horses defined with one set of rules, but motorcycles with another? I rather prefer pasting on Automaton Powers.

I vaguely remember that, way back, the HERO Almanac 1 had rules for null stats. I don't have access to that anymore, so I can't look up those rules. Were those wholly and adequately replaced by the existing rules for very low or negative Characteristics, as discussed in the HERO System Rulebook? Say, for example, you are an intelligence bound to a crystal ball. You have no physical movement except when carried, but you can still act. You cannot manipulate anything since you have no limbs per se, so you really have a null STR. And as a crystal ball, you may have a BODY value, but being inorganic and what not, you really have no CON per se. How would you stat this?

Re: How to do very small creatures?

Re: How to do very small creatures? Er... Sorry... You lost me from the get go. Is this for large creatures ignoring small attacks?

Does anyone have a good system for handling things when creatures are very small? Sometimes we can handwave things, but what happens when two small creatures fight (say, two witchs' familiars)? How can stats be written up when they really have fractional values compared to even 1 PD, for example.

I'm toying with the idea of a "Size Damage Reduction", where very large creatures completely ignore very small attacks. That is, if you have a scrawny 1d6K nerve gas NND, you will still do effectively nothing against a moon-sized Space Manatee, although that creature has no appropriate defense. In this way, you cannot quickly kill huge creatures with toothpick-sized attacks because of the non-linearness of HERO. I'm using a personalized NND Suppress power to simulate this. I didn't want to try buying a little bit of every defense, because it won't cover situations like NNDs, among other things. For it to work well, I want the personalized Suppress power to decrease a power at the Base-Point level instead of the Active Point level. A small power, stacked with a load of Advantages, will therefore still be treated as a small power. That is, 1d6 Energy Blast with +5 worth of Advantages would be completely negated by a mere 5 points of Suppress. This is because those Advantages may have nothing to do with the "size" of the attack. I'm thinking of putting an Advantage on the Suppress that says that it works by reducing Base Points instead of Active Points. So, with this advantage, 15 points of Suppress would reduce 20 STR, Reduced END to 5 STR, Reduced END. What might be a fair value for such an Advantage, or is there a cleaner way to do this Size Damage Reduction?

Re: New defence power: Damage Conversion

Re: Modelling Artillery Payloads Hmm... Couldn't help noticing everything starts at 8d6K. How was this value estimated?

Hello! Has anyone done extensive work on modelling the various payloads for contemporary artillery?

Re: Culture Shock: Slightly less 'cuddly' STAR HERO equipment I'm working on recalculating firearms myself, and am interested in how you converted muzzle energy to DCs of damage. I'm using a combination of projectile weight and muzzle velocity to estimate damage, and all damage is AP, No Knockback. Muzzle velocity is converted into DCs using the Velocity Damage chart. Projectile weight starts at 1 DC for 1/64th of 100 kg, and can have a negative DC. When the DCs are summed together, I get the final rating BEFORE applying Armor Piercing and No Knockback, which all projectiles have. Armor Piercing is on the BODY damage only. The numbers turn out like this: Pistols: 5-7 DC Rifles: 8-11 DC Heavy Rifles (.40 to .50 caliber) 10-13 DC 152mm cannon, 27kg shell only (excludes warhead damage/effects): 21 DC

I'm redoing, for my own house rules, modern projectiles. So far, I have a looks-reasonable damage estimation guide where the amount of physical damage is estimated based on projectile weight and projectile muzzle velocity, as AP damage. However, there is then the question of shells that contain an explosive charge, and I was wondering how to simulate that. (a) For contemporary warheads, is this damage PD regardless of the SFX? E.g., If a shaped charge warhead uses a blast of molten liquid to punch through armor, is this still damage against PD? And if so, would tank armor, for example, have lower ED than PD? ( What is the real world useful blast radius? © What is a reasonable guideline for the explosives damage for a shell? The existing guidelines for "Explosives" on p487 don't account for bigger and smaller shells.

Re: Good source of firearms survey data? thanks!

Hello all! I'm working on establishing some guidelines for firearms damage, and so far have had no luck locating any websites where a survey of firearms can be found. In particular, I am looking for the range of: * projectile (not cartridge) weight, and * muzzle velocity for small arms all the way up to artillery. The type of data I would be looking for would give me a general idea of, say, 150mm howitzers having a projectile weight in the range of 25 kg and muzzle velocity in the range of 650 m/s. Anyone know of any good sites? Thanks.

Re: Casual STR = Negligible Effort? I don't know if this post is trolling or not, but since it's in a thread I started, I suppose I ought to respond. Your POV suggests you don't need the HERO rules at all. Just use Cowboys and Indians (which has its own advantages): ClintE: "Bang bang! I shot you. You're dead." JohnW: "Am not!" ClintE: "Are too! Now, for dramatic effect, just shut up and play dead." The whole point of a rule system is to try to model a certain "reality"--even an unrealistic one. No finite rule system will accurately model one, but we can try to come close and have it internally consistent. Without this assumption on why we are proceeding, we need not discuss any rules at all. And we "need" to do this because in a game, there are different opinions going on and different ways players want to move the story, and when these interplayer stresses come into conflict, "fair" means an impartial, agreed-upon-beforehand rules arbitration. Rules are not there to help the story--great stories need no rulesets. Rules are for people-management (or, if you like, ego-management) in a collaborative environment. For a multi-genre ruleset, I admit that it may be a moving target sometimes--it depends on how detailed you want to be. But if your internal consistency is that there is no internal consistency, and you're willing to handwave everything to "dramatic effect", you have wasted your money on the HERO rule book. Also, I think you have assumed everyone wants to play a superhuman with the HERO System, or that everyone in the game is superhuman. I'm not sure which, or both.

Casual STR = Negligible Effort? How about: * Casual STR is a measure of Negligible Effort on the part of the character. If a result is achieved by Negligible Effort, it is meant that, without significant exertion, that result is achieved. Commonly, this also means that the result was an incidental one, often unknowingly accomplished. For example, a sprinter in the lead breaks the ribbon erected across the finish line. That he has broken the ribbon is incidental to his running forward. As the ribbon is broken as if it were not there, it is considered to have been broken with Negligible Effort. Beyond a certain threshold, an action will require active use of Strength and a character must normally take the time to perform an action. This amount of effort is the maximum possible amount of Strength that can be considered to be exerted with Negligible Effort. This is Casual STR. Casual STR is arbitrarily set to be (STR - 30), or approximately 1.6% of a character's maximum STR without Pushing. * I have deliberately set Casual STR to be very low. I do acknowledge Trebuchet's point, but I also feel that Casual STR should also imply near-zero long-term effort as well. 14 lbs on "average strength" is not much to lift, but will still tire your arm after a while. If you've ever been to an Interval Training class and done 30+ bicep curls on even just 6-8 pounds, especially when you're already sweating bullets from the aerobics portion, you'll know this to be true. And at that stage, even a 2-pound difference in a handweight can make a crazy amount of difference. Feedback?

Re: What is Casual STR meant to be?

Re: What is Casual STR meant to be?

Re: Bigger Animals - To use realistic STR or not Something I was thinking of doing next, once I get the size issue figured out, was to give big creatures a scaled amount of everything-defense to shrug off relatively tiny attacks. The way it is with most game systems, things usually go one of two ways: (a) size tiers, like Palladium, where big enough = MegaDamage health rating ( no size tiers, like D&D, where toothpicks can kill Godzillas if your hit roll is good enough I can see a certain amount of Damage Resistance coming into play instead of Armor, but the numbers still need to be crunched. Anyone done anything like this yet? It was super-easy to do in D&D ( it's part of the house rule set I cooked up, downloadable here: http://www.freewebs.com/d20elements/ ).

Re: What is Casual STR meant to be? Actually, the official FAQ indicates that for negative STR, Casual STR is (STR - 5), although they arrive at this in a roundabout way. I had considered making Casual STR equal to (STR - 40), since at -30 STR, a character is supposedly not able to move themselves. Assuming a base STR of 10, this means an adjustment of 40 points, or approximately 0.39% lift. However, that is based on a possibly arbitrary benchmark. We can all come up with "obvious" cases of Casual STR, such as brushing aside a buzzing fly or what not, so those don't give us an idea of what the benchmark should be.

The mechanical definition of Casual STR, while it works out, in numbers anyway, for many situations, is clearly incorrect. A character with 100 STR has a Casual STR rated at ~0.1% of his full STR, while a character with 10 STR has a Casual STR which is 50% of his full STR. If you look at how much can be lifted/moved, as STR approaches 0, Casual STR becomes approximately the same as full STR. What, then, is Casual Strength? What are real-world examples of actions that approach the limit of what Casual STR can do?

Contrary to the guidelines for Growth, realistic size changes increase STR differently: "As creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to cross section of muscle for any particular limb, and goes up in proportion to the square of the increase in dimension." (full article here: http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/biganims.html) After the math, this means that when you increase by 1 level of size (e.g., from 2m tall to 4m tall), STR actually increases by +10 instead of +15. Conversely when size decreases, STR decreases by -10 instead of -15. Big creatures are comparatively weaker than they look, where small creatures are stronger than they seem. A dog, for instance, can drag a human, but a horse can't carry another horse. This also corresponds then to the real cap on land animal size. Big whales, for instance, would collapse under their own weight on land, without having water to support their mass. However, unless we do some hand-waving, we can't have titans, since they wouldn't be able to carry the same amount of gear that a scaled-down version (e.g., a human) could. Inviting general thoughts on switching to using realistic STR for Mass changes: Where will this system meet with disaster?

Variant Rules for Armor Try this thread for variant and expanded armor rules! http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=765230#post765230

Revision Update: The Limited Arc of Coverage and Planar limitations for Shields has been revised to be consistent with the parallel Limitations on Vehicles. The article has been changed to my full suite of House Rules. Navigate down to Chapter 4 (Equipment) for the specific article mentioned in this thread. Here's the link again: http://www.freewebs.com/d20elements/herosystem.htm Thanks to all who've given their feedback!

Dumb Answer Time Okay, this is very wierd (I'm always experimenting with wierd things) but how about reversing the whole thing: (1) The base form is Form _3_. Form 3 has one Multiform (Form 2), which can be activated by an Accidental Change (when very injured). (2) Form 2 also has a Multiform (Form 1), which is also activated by a similar Accidental Change. So, when Form 3 is very injured, you could potentially get a cascade reaction shifting all the way back to Form 1. Simply set the injury condition to be more severe in Form 2 before it triggers a switch to Form 1. (3) Players start in Form 1. Since Form 2 is more powerful than Form 1, Form 1 can take a Psych Limitation or some such to switch to Form 2 with an EGO Roll. Form 2 can have a similar Disadvantage governing a reversion to the true form, Form 3.