massey

I agree that this is something that happens, but I didn't detect too much of it in Captain Marvel. And I was reluctant to see this movie, because of the lead actress' comments. Her quote was pretty much targeted right at me, saying "hey massey, don't see this film, it's not for you". My response on things like that is generally "okay, I won't". But I wanted to be prepared for Endgame. --Carol Danvers was one of my least favorite characters in the comics. I had no interest in seeing a movie about her. --I'd never heard of Brie Larson before, so she had no star power appeal for me. Her comments made me want to see it even less. --The previews that I saw didn't strike me as interesting either. Just looked like a generic comic book movie. --I didn't talk to anybody who had seen it who just loved it. --I was worried that we'd get a lot of man-hating girl power stuff. --I was afraid they'd take this character I didn't really like and have her ruin Endgame. For those reasons, my interest level was at an all-time low. But... Endgame. So I went to see it anyway. And fortunately, I think most of my worries were unfounded. The movie was not too bad, on par with some of the mid-tier Marvel films. It was roughly the level of a Thor. It was a Marvel origin film that had too much CGI in the ending. I saw the twist coming from a million miles away. Some of the comedy seemed kind of forced. I'll agree with people who say it felt a lot like a 90s action movie. I thought there were flashes of Independence Day and Men in Black. Now, I like 90s action movies, so that's not really a bad thing, but it did feel kinda dated. Overall, I liked it okay. I didn't feel offended by anything, I wasn't upset by it. It was just something to watch for two hours, and I hope her role in Endgame is pretty limited.

I don't like the idea that criticizing 40 year olds is gerontophobic. I strongly reject this idea. Please, please God let it not be true. You know some people say that 40 is the new 20.

Reading that, my first thought is that the DNPC reporter is clearly in on it. She finds the clues no one else finds, she walks away with someone else dead in her place, now she's getting the cool car and the big paychecks? Yeah, she's the murderer. I have no idea if that's your story or not. But I put it out there because even if it's not your story, I think it's still a reasonable conclusion that a player could draw from the clues you have given. I've had the luxury of seeing it written down and reading it several times. I've been able to read it when I'm up and awake and my brain is working right (as opposed to sometimes in the game, when we've stayed up late and it's past my bedtime). I don't think that's what you intended with your mystery. Point is, it can be really hard to solve when you're just going from the description somebody else gives. It would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle if you were blind, and somebody is describing what each piece looks like.

Racka frackin' is one of my go-to curse words when kids are around.

Yeah in the theater I was like "Missile Command!"

That was exactly my worry. Some of Brie Larson's statements about the movie (not going to go back and dig for them now) kind of gave me that impression. It was just a general feeling of "uh oh". I really didn't want the new character to come in and steal the spotlight from these heroes we've grown to love over the last decade. I don't think they're going to do that, but she managed to put that sliver of worry into my mind. At the end of the day, I think there's enough handwavium explanation for how she could have destroyed the Kree ship to not worry about it. As far as I'm concerned, she was mainlining pure Tesseract juice when she did that.

Aha, very true. You are perfectly free to play the game however you want, and even to alter the limitations as you wish. I'm not coming over to your house to tell you that you're doing it wrong. Your group shouldn't worry about what I think (likewise, I don't pay a bit of attention to what many people here say ). As I said using way too many words up above, refiguring the cost of published limitations is probably going overboard. There are exceptions of course. "Only under a full moon" would probably be something like a -2. However, if you are playing The Adventures of Captain Werewolf, and every game session is set at night during the full moon, then it may just be a -0. It's not that the character can transform whenever he wants, it's just that the "camera" is never on him except during those times. The player will never be affected by the limitation, because you skip over all the boring human parts.

Skimmed through the thread. I wasn't really impressed by Brie Larson's acting. The character is just kind of generic. I get that she's not really sure what her own backstory is, but I never really got a lot of real emotion from the character, one way or the other. She was just sort of boring. There's a change in tone part way through the film. When the Skrulls are revealed to be the good guys, it becomes a lot more comedic. What had been a pretty standard action movie turns into Thor Ragnarok-Lite. The cat thing was funny, the Skrulls became funny. I enjoyed it, but the humor did make it hard to take a lot of it seriously. As the chuckles came, it removed any real tension. You know the Skrull family isn't going to get killed because the tone had become too light hearted. Certainly not a bad movie. I had a good time. There were a couple of plot problems, things that happened earlier in the movie that no longer made sense once new info was revealed. Why were the Skrulls trying to kill her when she first got to Earth? Why were the Kree letting her run around with some random squad? Still liked the movie though. Edit: I just realized what it reminded me of. Men in Black. Once it became a comedy in the last reel, it felt a lot like Men in Black. Samuel L Jackson might as well have been Agent J.

Just got back from seeing it. Haven't read the thread yet. I thought it was a nice, mid-tier Marvel movie. Nothing controversial about it at all. The ending had a little too much CGI -- her full power mode pulled me out of the film a little bit because everything was so glowy. Still, I enjoyed the movie. I'd put it in the same tier as Dr Strange, Black Panther, and the Ant Man movies. Pretty good, an enjoyable way to kill 2 hours, but not something I'll rewatch a lot. The tribute to Stan Lee during the Marvel opening caught me completely off guard though. Brought a tear to my eye. The Tesseract and the cat made me want to rewatch First Avenger, because I thought they got it out of the ocean at the end.

--Group superhero stories in the comics virtually never involve mysteries. --Mysteries can be really hard for a group to play. --Mysteries are hard for a GM to run without becoming a plot on rails. --Some players just don't like solving mysteries. It isn't fun at all for them. --Some players may like solving mysteries, but that doesn't mean their character has any skill or interest in it. The Incredible Hulk is not known as a great detective. I usually have a hard time playing mysteries because in my experience, GMs want to hand out little details slowly and awkwardly. In fact I tend to get mad when I ask a few questions, try to make a few skill rolls, and the GM says something like "you don't find any clues." Then they want me to keep jumping through hoops until I randomly stumble across their plot. It's infuriating. After reading the recap, my thought is "why didn't the DNPC just tell him what the hell is going on?" You have to realize that the player can't actually see anything that is happening. He is 100% dependent on you giving him information. There is no burned down catering building for him to investigate -- it exists purely in the GM's mind. If he goes to investigate it and you say "you don't find anything", then he doesn't know what to do next. The player doesn't know if he's supposed to continue investigating there ("I dig through the ashes, hunting for a secret basement or something"), or if he's just supposed to move on and wait for something else to happen. Maybe the GM isn't ready to reveal the plan yet. Again, I wonder why the DNPC didn't tell him more on the phone. I'm sure the player does too. I think the "I go and get drunk tonight" was a direct message to the GM that the player is not having fun with this story, and is ready for you to get to the point. In my experience, behavior like that is supposed to tell the GM "I don't understand what you're going for, this isn't working".

Yeah and even with a computer program, you'd have to figure out how to apply it to things like the Darkness power. How does that scale? No idea at all. Are you taking into account a radius of 4" or more, which pushes people into the next range bracket? I don't even know if you should consider that. And if you did, how would that affect the pricing of range combat levels? Should you increase their price? I just don't know. And here's a great example of simple Energy Blast break points. Suppose you have a 10D6 attack, and your campaign's villains average 20 Def, 25 Con, and 40 Stun. On average, you'll do 35 Stun to them, meaning they take 15. They aren't Con Stunned, and it will take 3 attacks on average to KO them (dropping them to 25 Stun, then 10 Stun, then -5 Stun -- we'll leave out Speed and Recoveries for the moment). Now go up to an 11D6 attack. You'll average 18-19 Stun per hit, meaning they still won't be Con Stunned and it will still take 3 hits to KO them (though they'll be more susceptible to a two hit KO on a slightly above average roll, and they'll be more unconscious after 3 hits). Go up to a 12D6 attack and you still aren't Con Stunning them (on average), but now you'll KO them after only 2 hits. That's a much bigger improvement than the 11D6 was. Going to 13D6 and now you'll Con Stun them more than half the time on an average roll (45.5). What you're left with is that a single D6 improvement varies quite a bit in effect depending on what break point it pushes you past. And while an improvement of 2D6 is a lot when going from 10 to 12, it's insane when you go from 11 to 13. You're dropping somebody one hit faster, and they likely aren't even getting a response after that first blow. So, knowing all that... how should this affect the pricing of Defenses or Constitution? Should we change the pricing of Energy Blast when you hit those key break points, or should the price Def and Con be raised when you are no longer being Stunned by the average attack? Should going from 20 Con to 25 cost significantly more??? These are the crazy problems you start encountering when you look at repricing everything.

Yeah, my thought was to have some break points on every stat, every power. So defenses, movement, skills, everything would have a point at which it became more expensive to buy it up higher. The problem is it just becomes too complex too quickly. Then there's the fact that certain powers (desolid, invisibility) just don't scale that way. Even with attack powers, not every D6 is created equal. There are a few natural break points in the game, but it's going to vary based on each campaign. If the GM goes and screws with the cost mechanic, there's zero guarantee that he'll take these into account (I sure hadn't when I started messing with it). The complexity overwhelms you very quickly. Low level attacks often struggle to overcome defenses. A 4D6 normal attack is pathetically weak in most superhero games, you'll even have trouble dropping agents with it. NND and other defense-bypassing Advantages are very useful at this tier. High level attacks, on the other hand, basically get NND for free. Once you've overcome their defenses, every additional D6 just goes straight to Stun. At high levels, NND is a waste because you've already got past their PD/ED. How powerful an attack will be in a game is based around several criteria. Off the top of my head... --Can it put Stun on an agent/weak super/average super/master villain? --How many hits does it take to knock out an agent/weak super/average super/master villain? --Will the average hit do enough Stun to pass the Con score of an agent/weak super/average super/master villain? --Will an average hit do enough Stun to KO an agent/weak super/average super/master villain? --Can it do Body to an opponent? --Does it do enough damage that Knockback becomes an additional source of real damage? --Is the attack highly random (like an RKA), so that it can roll really high or really low somewhat regularly? Let's go back to our 17D6 example. How much better is it than a 16D6 attack? How much better is it really? Well a 17D6 attack will do ~58 Stun and 17 Body. A 16D6 blast will do ~54 Stun and 16 Body. So let's go through the list. We'll assume published 5th ed Champions universe. --Each attack can put Stun on pretty much anybody it hits. --Each attack will KO an agent or weak super in one shot, an average super in two, while most master villains will take four or more. --Both powers will do enough to Con Stun agents, weak supers, and average supers. Master villains will generally not be Con Stunned. --Both powers have about the same chance of getting a one-shot KO on each tier of opponent. --Neither attack will normally put Body on an opponent stronger than an agent. --On average, each attack will do about 9-10" of knockback, which is enough to put a few more points of Stun on an average super. --Neither attack is particularly streaky. They have very similar damage curves. Looking at that analysis, the 17D6 attack doesn't (normally) get you to the next big break point against most expected opponents. It doesn't give you that extra little bit that you need to knock an opponent unconscious a round early, or to Con Stun an enemy. Yeah, it might happen, but it won't happen often. The extra D6 isn't that much at that tier. On the other hand, going from a 12D6 attack to a 13D6 attack just might push you into that next bracket. At some point the extra D6 is going to be enough that you start dropping opponents in two hits instead of three, or it'll be enough that you start Con Stunning your enemies much more frequently. Once you can KO an agent with one shot, an extra D6 will let you spread and hit his buddy standing next to him. Hero makes no effort to try and increase the cost of a power based on these effects, and for good reason. It's just too damn complicated.

You'd have to refigure the costs of the entire game. It wouldn't work anything like current Hero. I have kicked around the idea of establishing a sort of "Heroic Characteristic Maximum", beyond which everything costs double. And then maybe a few break points beyond that as well. So let's say the GM set the campaign limit at 10 DCs. You can exceed that, but it costs double for the first two DCs, and the costs keep going up by 5 pts per D6 per 2 DCs. So a guy who wants a 17D6 Energy Blast can have it, but he's paying 50 (10D6) + 20 (+2D6) + 30 (+2D6) + 40 (+2D6) + 25 (+1D6) = 165 pts. In the end I decided it was way way more work than it was worth. I had been looking for a way to allow players to exceed campaign settings by paying a premium, thinking it would allow people to specialize in something they really wanted to do. But in the end it was a giant mess, totally not worth it.

I can see a perfectly rational argument for geometric price increases for stats. But Hero doesn't use it.

Just spitballing here, but what about a custom Advantage? I'm thinking +3/4 off the top of my head. The logic is that if you gain 2D6 at each range increment, you could spread that to cancel out the OCV penalty. That's functionally the same as No Range Penalty (+1/2). Except you don't have to spread to hit, you could keep the extra damage, so it's worth more. However it's not worth a whole lot more, because to get that bonus you've got to eat a big OCV minus.

5th edition has a black cover with a green guy in the jumping jack pose. 6th edition is a two book set with a blue cover with a yellow guy doing the jumping jack pose. Most of the rules are the same, but some of the costs are different.

In the Hero system, everything is built with Powers. Even regular equipment is defined by the Powers rules. So a normal gun is a Ranged Killing Attack. Then if it has something special, like Autofire or Armor Piercing, those terms are defined by the Advantages and Limitations also in the book. They modify the Powers to be either better or worse.

As far as reduced by range, it should be in the "Limitations" section of the book. The attack does full damage within the first 4 hexes (8 meters). For every extra range increment, it loses 2 damage classes. Autofire is under the "Advantages" section of the book. You can shoot up to the number of times listed beside the word Autofire (x5, x10). When you roll to hit, see how much your margin of success was. For instance, if you needed a 13 or less, and you rolled an 8, then you hit by 5. With Autofire, you hit the target one extra time for every 2 points of margin of success. So needing a 13-, if you roll a 12 or 13 you'd hit once. If you roll a 10 or 11, you hit twice. If you roll an 8 or a 9, you hit three times, and so on. You declare how many times you are going to shoot before you roll to hit. You expend charges or endurance for the full volley, regardless of how many times you hit.

If you are starting with the 6th edition double-rule book set, you'll find it's very slow reading. It's more of a reference material than an easy to read game book. On the positive side, virtually everything is in there somewhere. On the negative side, it's written like the tax code. I think you're doing just fine as far as starting out. And you can ask your questions here and we are usually pretty helpful. There's a large community of people with varying levels of experience. Surbrook's Stuff is a great website, but you're correct that many of the character sheets there were made by a guy with 20+ years experience in the game, for arcane reasons known only to him (and his fellow old fogeys). A lot of very experienced Hero players will get that way, debating over tiny details and engaging in long discussions of theory. It can be interesting, but it's not really useful when people are trying to learn the system. I'd suggest finding some more streamlined character sheets that are easier to understand at a glance.

Tunable shields sounds like a great way to always have the wrong defense at the right time.

Are they the PCs or not?

Yeah but we aren't characters in the universe. We aren't writing Harry Potter fanfics. We're people playing a game, and discussing how something within the universe can be represented in game rules. I can't say anything about the source material, except I think it's probably like a lot of other stories. The completely and utterly undefeatable XYZ, that promptly gets defeated by the hero is a pretty common storytelling element. I'd even suggest that the entire purpose of having something be unbeatable is so you can have somebody beat it. At least in heroic fiction anyway. Harry Potter is a hero. He exists in a genre where the hero is going to win in the end. The bad guy has a magic spell that kills anyone it hits. And it never misses, presumably. In a story, Harry can defeat the bad guy when the never-misses auto-kill spell somehow suffers a never-gonna-happen-again, once-in-a-lifetime mishap. Can you count on that happening in a game? Probably not. And if you do, it's gonna be pretty apparent that you just cheated to let the hero survive. So we come up with some sort of game mechanic to keep the feeling of dread alive. Because otherwise as soon as the players realize you're not gonna kill their characters with it, the Killing Curse becomes an empty threat.

That's why there's an "all or nothing" limitation listed in there. But thanks. We can distinguish between PCs and NPCs because we know the different roles they have. PCs can do some things that NPCs can't do. NPCs can do some things that PCs can't do. Some magic isn't really appropriate for PCs. Old Wizard Greybeard sits in his tower, casting divining magic. He chants his spells for days on end, before finally receiving a flash of insight into the Great Prophecy. His magic is something you wouldn't want the PCs to use, because you don't want them using every minute of their downtime to try and screw up all your plans. Old Wizard Greybeard has awesome noncombat magic, but giving PCs the ability to see into the future (or travel through time, or whatever) could break the game. On the other hand, PCs may need to be more combat effective than Old Wizard Greybeard. Regardless, they need to be balanced for the adventure, because they're the ones who are going to be taking part in it. The GM controls Old Wizard Greybeard, and if the GM feels like it he can just wander off anytime. As far as different points of view, I thought that's exactly what this thread is about. Of course we're approaching it from different points of view. You asked for our help. How would we build it? That's going to bring in all sorts of people with different points of view. As far as killing the main characters, the GM has a decision to make. There are only a few choices. 1) Make the Killing Curse so it slaughters absolutely anything you shoot it at. If that happens to be a PC, then screw him. Roll up a new character, Steve! 2) Make the Killing Curse more likely to fail against PCs, for whatever reason. Give them a chance to survive. 3) Don't use the Killing Curse at all. Pick whichever one you want.

Well, I thnk the Hero Point explanation is really a justification for giving villains a boost in their first appearance. Let's say you've got Captain Blastarr. He's a fairly generic energy projector in early 90s Image armor. And he first appears on the cover of Champions #287. He's not an amazing character, but he's got to look cool in his first issue. So he's standing there like a cheapo Dr Destroyer, with the entire team on the ground unconscious. He's got his hand pointed at Defender's body, with a glowing aura surrounding him. The cover says "AT THE MERCY... OF CAPTAIN BLASTARR!!!" He looks pretty tough there, and if you read the issue you see that he slaps around the team pretty easily. He's chucking huge energy blasts that drop two or three members per shot. Their attacks harmlessly bounce off his force field. It looks like nothing they can do can hurt him. By the end, the Champions will pull out a win by the skin of their teeth, and Captain Blastarr is defeated. But one day he will return... Of course, when he does eventually return six months later, the Champions don't have near the problem with him that they did the first time. They're ready for his moves, and they pound him into the dirt. Five years later he's making an appearance in some second string comic, and the Kindergarten Kommandoes are pounding on him. Eventually he only shows up in big group battles, where some giant team of 50 villains attacks the heroes all at once. He's just a face in a big group shot, and then you see him unconscious in some two-page splash panel. So... how tough is this guy anyway? Is he the guy who kicked the crap out of the Champions? Or is he the guy who got trounced by Wonder Tot's dog? It's too hard to judge villains by their first appearance. Presumably some villains roll really well the first time they show up.

Sounds like he's burning through his Hero Points to me. To explain: the old Mayfair DC Heroes game had something called "Hero Points". In Champions terms, Hero Points allowed you to boost your attack power, OCV, DCV, or Defenses up to double their normal amount. You could do a few other things with them as well, such as reducing damage, but boosting your stats was what people normally did with them. Once you spent Hero Points, they were gone. Instead of gaining XP, you gained Hero Points. Get enough of them and you could permanently increase your powers. Hero Points generally represent how important a character is, and how likely the whims of fate are to tilt in his direction (if anyone can survive that "one in a million" fall out of an airplane, it's Batman). Certain characters are consistently lucky, almost like they had loaded dice. So the general thinking among DC Heroes players is that when a villain makes an impressive first appearance, and then later they start sucking, is that they probably blew through all of their Hero Points in that first go, and then never got enough back to be a credible threat again. So imagine if somebody like Pulsar could blow through his reserve in his first appearance, chucking 24D6 Energy Blasts at an 18 OCV, and could shrug off damage like it was nothing. Of course, he can only do that once, because ultimately the heroes defeat him anyway, and then he never gets enough XP to offset everything he just spent. It's a simulationist explanation for a common trope, that the villain is badass awesome at the beginning and then becomes less powerful as time goes on. It's also a really long way of saying that you can't judge the villain on his first appearance. Presumably we aren't spending every waking moment with our characters. There are probably times when a new villain shows up to challenge the Flash and Flash beats him in a tenth of a second. Those battles aren't worth paying attention to. So we really only see the fights where the villain presents a credible threat, because they're either very powerful, or they got the drop on the hero, or they just got lucky. And a "first appearance" power bonus could simulate that fairly well.