massey

Our group doesn't really play Fantasy Hero, but I think my comments apply generally to Hero. The game works best when the players and GM have an agreement on the expected power scale, and everyone sticks to it. You can build a character that is too powerful for the game, and throw everything off. You can also build a character who is too weak for the game, and that's just as harmful (it's basically the exact same problem, in reverse). If you expect the PCs to be running around at about OCV/DCV 8 and Spd 5, then the guy with a 15 OCV and 8 Speed is really unbalancing. Of course, so is the guy with a 3/3 and Spd 2. "I'm just playing my character", he says, ignoring the fact that the GM is having to go out of his way to not kill the character, or make him feel useless. For a while I tried experimenting with unusual character builds. Desolidification, Invisibility, Darkness, Missile Deflection, Images, Shrinking, etc. The characters had little traditional offense or defense, but instead had one cool power that they relied on all the time. The problem with these characters was that every single battle, I was putting the GM in an all-or-nothing position. Either there was an opponent who could see through my invisibility/hit my desolidification/penetrate my illusions/hit my DCV, or there wasn't. If a bad guy could see me/hit me, I went down. If he couldn't, then I was effectively invincible. Typical combat in Hero has a sort of "whittling down" effect, but this didn't. It wasn't fair to the GM, who had to decide when he was designing the scenario whether I was going to get dropped in the first few phases or if I'd stay up to the end. It wasn't fair to the other players, because they were playing in a more traditional way and they ended up taking more damage because most villains couldn't touch me (so they'd focus on the people they could see/affect). And it wasn't fair to me, because ultimately it wasn't all that fun to play. This all goes towards building characters who fit the themes and standards of the campaign. Anything that is too out of whack is going to lessen the fun. +8 OCV with sword thrust is awesome, until it pushes the GM to start raising DCVs. Then the other players get forced into an arms race, and that isn't necessarily what they want. That's why the players and the GM should discuss campaign standards. How high does my OCV need to be, to be an average swordsman? How much to be a great swordsman? How much to be the best in the world? How good are we supposed to be in this campaign? The game itself has very few real world benchmarks, so it's hard to know how good something is without discussing it with others first.

Let's suppose that the Killing Curse is going to be a major plot element in your game. We want the players to be afraid of it, but we don't want it so lethal that the game ends. If it gets used on them, we want the PCs to survive, but just barely. We definitely want the players to sweat it. So let's say that the average player character in the Kid Wizard Academy game has 13 Body and 10 resistant ED. So let's make our Killing Curse start out as a 10D6 RKA, all or nothing. On average, this won't affect one of the PCs. The average roll is 35 Body, which will be just short of the 36 necessary to instant kill them. Of course, it's easy to roll slightly higher than average. This will still kill about half the characters you target with it. So let's tweak it a bit. Let's apply some of the options in my post above. Main character defense + weakened all powerful attack. Let's slap a limitation on it that mystic shields apply. "Target applies both rED and Power Defense (-1/2)." And we'll say that important characters can buy Power Defense. Most people don't have it, even most wizards. And we'll say that the average PC will have like 8 points of Power Defense. So now the attack needs to roll 44 Body to kill them. A roll that high won't be that uncommon, so they're still in danger, but they should be relatively safe. It's not a great combat option against them (it will usually fail). But now we try it out, and pretty quickly the PCs realize that it won't affect them most of the time. We don't want them feeling like they're immune. So let's add in some NPC vulnerability, The stars are right, and Lucky PC aspects to the mix. We're going to make it so the PC's aren't automatically immune, so they'll feel some real danger and tension. We'll also add some extra limitations to bring the costs down. Killing Curse -- 8D6 RKA, all or nothing (-2), target applies both rED and Power Defense (-1/2), can be used 1 time per opponent per combat (-1), gestures and incantations (-1/2) plus 6D6 RKA, with same limitations as above (-4), and requires opposed KS: Magic skill check, gets 1 D6 per point of success (-1) 210 Active Points, 39 Real Cost Non-plot essential NPCs have a x2 Vulnerability to the Killing Curse. Even important characters may have this Vulnerability after they've fulfilled their role in the story (they're no longer protected by the fates and so are subject to its full power). The opposed KS: Magic roll means that the caster will roll off with the target. The evil Lord Vrakdemarr has KS: Magic at 20-. Wizard Kid has KS: Magic at 17-. Lord Vrakdemarr rolls a 12, making his roll by 8. Wizard Kid rolls an 11, making his roll by 6. Lord Vrakdemarr won the roll off by 2 points, so he gets 2 additional D6 of RKA for this use of the power. It's now a 10D6 RKA. Had Vrakdemarr rolled better, it could go all the way up to a 14D6 RKA, which would probably have instant-killed young Wizard Kid. What you've got here is a power that is potentially extremely lethal. But through a variety of little tweaks to the power, we've kept PCs from being subjected to the full blast. They'll probably survive, but if somebody really craps out on their KS: Magic roll, or the bad guy rolls awesome on damage, they could still get killed really fast. We've added on an additional layer of complexity with the KS: Magic roll off, to throw players off and make it feel like they're in more danger than they actually are. We're connecting it to something that isn't normally a combat stat (I'm presuming this game doesn't require a skill roll when you cast spells), so it's something they haven't pumped up as much as they could -- it's not a traditional defense. There's also a great deal of variability in the potential dice damage, which means that an unlucky PC can eat it real fast. So the PC's don't just have pure plot immunity. Even at the 8D6 level, most NPCs will get slaughtered. It's effectively instant death unless the GM rules otherwise. If you are a PC or other important character, the spell user is going to have to beat you in a magic roll to see how many extra D6 he gets. The GM can allow the Luck power (or other factors) to boost the target's roll. This means it's theoretically ultra-lethal except when the GM needs the player to survive.

Exactly. I'm not that familiar with Harry Potter. I only ever saw the first movie, and that was a long time ago and I didn't really care for it. I am much more familiar with DC comics. The Killing Curse sounds a lot like Darkseid's Omega Beams. It's an overwhelming attack that destroys anything it hits, and it never misses -- until it targets a big name character. Then they somehow miraculously survive. It turns out that Batman can dodge them, and Superman can grit his teeth and tough it out. So how do you represent this in the game? Well there are lots of ways to do it, some of them more elegant than others. Option 1 -- Main character defense. All main characters buy an extra power to represent resistance to something like this. Batman takes "Desperate Dodge", +15 DCV, only vs attacks that will instant kill (-2), requires dodge action (-1), 1 charge recoverable (-1 1/2). If it's something that will definitely kill him (as in you rolled the damage and it dropped him to negative full Body), then as long as he dodged, suddenly he gets an extra +15 DCV retroactively added. His DCV goes from (say) 15 up to 30. Did you hit at his now higher DCV? No? Then he just barely dodged out of the way. Superman buys +30 Body, only vs instant kill attacks (-2 or higher). Main character defense is relatively cheap, as it only works versus a tiny handful of powers. It will usually not come up, and it exists only to separate the hero from NPCs. Option 2 -- A weakened "all-powerful" attack. The power itself is supposed to be able to destroy anything. But realistically, we don't want it killing the main people. So we scale it down, and instances in the background of somebody dying to it are really just the result of a good roll. The attack isn't powerful enough to blow everyone to negative full Body immediately. It can still be powerful, but on average it won't live up to its reputation. 6D6 RKA, and the GM rules that since the average damage will kill an average person, it's "instant death" for anybody who is a background character. No need to roll damage when targeting mooks, goons, or bystanders. When targeting characters who have actual defenses, Option 3 -- Lucky PCs. You just play the game straight, with an all-powerful attack that really will kill the heroes whenever it's used. When they survive, it's because they got extremely lucky rolls. Just remember, most of the time, they won't. Option 4 -- NPC vulnerability. NPCs have disadvantages that players don't. For one, they're vulnerable to NPC killing attacks. x2 Body from Killing Curses, Omega Beams, and other things that wipe out characters. This basically ensures that people who aren't that important to the story can get killed off by suitably dangerous powers without the game having a super high PC kill count. Option 5 -- GM discretion, i..e., fate, i.e., the stars are right. +3D6 RKA, No Conscious Control (or other suitable limitation). The power can potentially be much mightier than it normally is, but only when the fates are in agreement or something. The power is at low ebb when the GM doesn't want it to work. Other times it's quite powerful. You can give control to the GM, or make it random. Perhaps you make an activation roll, and how low you roll determines how many extra D6 the attack gets. Do whatever you want to do with your game. But you can't be surprised when other people choose a different option than you. I'd probably go with some combination of all of them, myself. I want PCs to sweat the big mega attack -- it could potentially be extremely lethal. But I don't want them rolling up new characters every day.

Years ago, there was a game called Feng Shui. I never got to play it, but did flip through the rulebook one day. What I remember of the rules was that the game separated opponents into different groups. You had powerful villains (don't remember what they were called) and mooks. The thing about mooks was that you only had to hit them once or twice to drop them, and it didn't matter how you did it. You could describe it however you wanted. Shoot them, punch them, throw them out a window, it didn't matter. The game was supposed to mimic wild action movies, and so it didn't matter if you just backhanded the mook or hit him with an axe, as long as you hit with a large enough margin of success (I don't remember exactly how it worked) they'd go down with one shot. Mooks are there to go down fast. Whether they're dead, or just knocked unconscious, it doesn't matter -- they're no longer in the game. If you think about combat in that sense, a "killing curse" really doesn't have to be any more powerful than a normal attack. It can be powerful enough to drop a mook, but for some reason it never affects main characters.

Another thing to keep in mind -- if your game is all about combat, that's what players will spend their points on. If you include other things in the game, players will feel like they're getting the most bang for their buck by diversifying. For instance, let's take Aragorn from LOTR (movies, since I haven't read the books in about 30 years). He starts off and he's a combat character, and he has a handful of wilderness survival skills as well. Then when he's off doing some ranger stuff, the hobbits' players all blow their Int rolls. They start a fire and are cooking food, until Frodo's player comes back from the bathroom. When he finds out what they're doing, he says that he wouldn't let them do that, but the GM is all "no, you were asleep, you wake up and they're cooking bacon". Then the Nazgul attack. Aragorn comes in to save the day, driving off the ring wraiths, but Frodo gets dropped to negative Body in the process. The GM starts rethinking how many combat levels he let Aragorn buy. The Nazgul were supposed to be really tough opponents, and he just solo'd them. Maybe Aragorn needs some other stuff to spend points on. So Aragorn carries Frodo and they try to head for Rivendell, with Frodo's player bitching and moaning the whole time that it's not fair that he got stabbed when it was these other guys' fault. Aragorn asks if he happens to know any sort of ranger healing techniques, maybe with his wilderness skills he knows of a healing plant or something. The GM asks if he has either Paramedics or KS: Herbalism. Aragorn says no. The GM lets him make a roll anyway, but tells him that his next XP points have to go into that skill. Aragon is like "I got this", then he rolls a 17 and totally fails to help Frodo. Frodo's player starts complaining again, the GM sighs, and then he introduces Aragorn's elf girlfriend. "After you buy Paramedic, you'll need to buy Contact: Elf Girlfriend" the GM says. She's cool and has neat powers, so Aragon says okay. As the story progresses, the GM drops the hint that maybe he's got some royal lineage or something. Wouldn't it be cool to be a king? That's something to spend points on later. Oh and here's a magic sword that belongs to the king. It's broken right now, so you will have to have it reforged before you can use it. Be sure to save your points for that. Aragorn thinks that sounds cool, and he's on board with it. The GM decides that to be king of Gondor, Aragorn is going to have to buy a lot of stuff. He can't just spend 10 points for Perk: Head of State. He will have to buy that, but he'll need other stuff too. Along the way, he's going to have to buy Contact: Elrond. He's also going to have to buy up his Tracking roll when he goes and chases after those orcs who kidnap the hobbits. He will encounter Eomer and Theoden, and he'll have to buy KS: Rohan (with the excuse "yeah, I've always known this stuff"), as well as Persuasion and High Society. Of course his Presence will have to go up as well. Then he'll have to lead an army at Helm's Deep, and so he has to buy Tactics. The whole time, Aragorn keeps talking about how he wants to increase his damage, and get some more combat skill levels. He didn't like having to run from that Balrog, and when he almost lost to that one badass orc that killed Boromir he got pissed off. But the GM always puts him in a position where there are new skills and abilities that he needs as the game goes on. Aragorn complains because the hobbits have started spending points on combat abilities, and he's not super head and shoulders above them anymore. "Hey, you're working on being a king, remember?" the GM says. Aragorn reluctantly accepts that he needs to spend points on other things. But then Legolas will do something awesome and Aragorn gets mad again. The GM finally says that Aragorn gets to command a ghost army for a while, and then he's happy. Ultimately, he's spending 10 points on Head of State, then he's got to spend 15 on Wealth (all the riches of Gondor), several D6 of Reputation, he's got to buy up his Ego to use the Palantir, he has to pick up a bunch of skills, and then he's got the magic sword (and the GM doesn't really mention that it only has Affects Desolid and a couple D6 of Rep, without doing much more damage than a normal sword). Being king ends up costing Aragorn at least 70-80 points, once all is said and done, but combat-wise he's not really any more effective than he was when he started.

I'm also fine with people buying abilities with the excuse of "he's always been able to do it, it just hasn't come up yet".

Today I learned a horrifying bit of information. When Wil Wheaton has his birthday this year, he'll be the same age Patrick Stewart was when he started playing Captain Picard. Just think about that.

This makes me so happy.

We got Bruce Willis. We're good.

This guy moves his hands way too much. It makes me want to punch him in the face.

I'll probably see it before I see Infinity War Part 2, if only so I'll know what to expect out of her when she makes her appearance. I'm not really interested in the character, and nothing in the trailer has really grabbed me. I don't particularly care about any controversy that Brie Larson has created. I just don't like the character that much, and I'm not thrilled with the film coming out so close to IW#2. The only thing I'm actually worried about is that Marvel might have her come in and pull a Superman on Thanos. I don't want them to introduce this brand new hero, who we don't really know or care about, and then she's suddenly the star of the show. We've spent 10 years getting to know the original Avengers cast, and I want to see them stop the bad guy. It's not that she's a woman. I'd feel the same way if they had a Sentry movie. I'd be like "oh this is gonna suck". Now I have a lot of faith in Marvel, but what (very little) I saw of Brie Larson's comments about the film, she was describing it as exactly what I don't want to see. "I am woman, see me ruin franchise." But I think one of the people who were in GOTG said similar things ("the Guardians could kick the Hulk's ass" somebody said), and that didn't turn out to be true. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I do think Marvel is trying to cash in on the success of Wonder Woman, and also trying to promote someone whose name is the same as the company. That's not really a bad thing, companies exist to make money. But I'm just not excited about it. At all.

Good chart with the 3D6 distribution. I need to save that. My point with regards to mathematical consistency is not that the bell curve gives it. I know it doesn't. It's that you only get the illusion of consistency by going to a set minus. You can make the 11-, 12-, 13- look consistent, but the actual percentage odds of success will still vary wildly. You can make one set of numbers look nice and even, but the others aren't going to match it. Professor Executioner has a 12 OCV. He targets Captain Amazo (normally DCV 8). He needs a 15- to hit, meaning he should expect to succeed (looks at chart) 95.4% of the time. But Captain Amazo is Stunned from the last time Professor Executioner shot him, so his DCV is halved and is only a 4. The Professor need only avoid rolling an 18 to hit him. His chance of success rises to a mighty 99.5%, but only a 4.1% increase. What if we make it a set -3 DCV while Stunned, instead of 1/2? Same exact odds, still a 99.5% chance of success. Compare this to Viper Agent #3, who opens fire on Captain Amazo. #3 has an OCV of 6, and he's shooting at a DCV of 8. He needs a 9-, for a 37.5% chance of success. If Captain Amazo's DCV is halved, then he needs a 13-. His odds go up to 83.8%, an enormous 46.3% swing. That's over 10 times the benefit that Professor Executioner got. If we make it a flat -3 penalty, it's still a 12-, or 74.1% chance of success. Still a 36.6% improvement. The point is, the average odds of success are going to vary wildly. The odds of hitting aren't consistent, even when we're talking about one character with a set DCV.

^^^Exactly. You've also lose the option to whittle people down with it. A 4D6 RKA is generally going to be a lot more effective (against most targets) than a 10D6 RKA all or nothing. Let's say you roll an average of 14 Body and 28 Stun. That will nearly kill any normal that it hits (dropping a 10 Body bystander to -4 Body and -8 Stun). It will drop most agents as well (that Viper agent will be right around 0 Body and 0 Stun, more or less). Against a low grade superhero, it may put a few Body on them and a nice chunk of Stun. You can also use it to wreck vehicles and foci. Against higher tiered characters, it may not do a whole lot, depending on what their defenses are. Now let's look at the 10D6 RKA all or nothing. Against bystanders, they're dead, killed outright unless you have a really crappy roll. Against agents, they're probably dead as well. Instant killed. Against a low grade superhero, it's a very dangerous power. Unless they bought up their Body a little bit, or purchased more than 15 points of resistant Def, it has an okay chance of killing them in one shot. But it's really situational. If it comes 1 Body short of instant death, it does nothing at all. As characters go up in power level, it becomes totally useless. I guess potentially you could roll 60 Body on the attack and instant kill most things, but the likelihood is so rare that it'll probably never happen. So, both attacks are lethal (or close to lethal) against really low powered guys. But you don't actually gain much from ensuring that mook is really really really dead. You end up losing the ability to nickel and dime your opponent to death, which is how most combat in Hero is fought.

It's not mathematically consistent at all, because Hero uses a bell curve. Applying a flat penalty (-1, -2, -5, or whatever) will affect characters far differently, based upon the number needed to hit them in the first place. Characters who have extremely high or extremely low DCVs will be affected less than characters with average DCVs. So does 1/2 DCV of course, but I don't think you're gaining any kind of mathematical purity by changing to a flat penalty.

If I were going to run a fantasy hero game, I'd try and establish some clear character benchmarks for the world, and then make sure I didn't exceed them. Characters buy up combat skill levels because it makes them more effective. They don't buy +20 OCV just for the hell of it -- there's no benefit once they're hitting most targets on a 14 or less. If random orcs are showing up with 8 levels in all combat, the players will respond by buying more. But let's say that enemies are going to top out at around a 7 OCV/DCV. Players probably won't go to much more than a 10 total, regardless of any hard limits imposed. And if you do impose a hard limit, they probably won't feel restricted since they're still able to hit effectively. Aragorn is at the top end of the OCV/DCV paradigm in LOTR. It doesn't matter what that exact level is, just that Aragorn is there. Nobody is going to show up and best him in hand to hand skill. Likewise you won't have players dumping points into tons of damage if you don't have ogres or trolls with 30 Body that you have to slowly hack your way through all the time. Once they're satisfied with their level of combat ability, and they aren't facing the constant "monsters get tougher and hit harder" progression, then they'll be free to expand their characters in other directions. I toyed around with the idea of having wizards who only know like one spell. What about a necromancer who is a powerful fighter, has an array of henchmen and a gloomy castle, has a magic scepter that lets him bind spirits (mind control vs ghosts), and knows the ancient ritual "Summon Undead Army" (summons 10,000 skeletons at 75 points each, but can only be cast under a full moon with rare components). In some ways he's more powerful than any D&D wizard, but he's also far more limited. It's something you wouldn't see in other fantasy games. If you take off the D&D shackles, Hero offers a whole lot of possibilities.

I think you've got to keep in mind that by the time your characters have that many combat levels, they're the D&D equivalent of probably 20th level. They should be able to tear through all the monsters in the book. There are a few ways to control their character progression, depending on who you ask. --Cap the amount of combat skill levels (or other abilities) that the characters can have. Make them spend their points on something else. If the best swordsman in the world has +10 levels with his sword, then no, the player can't have +12. Best he can ever get is +10, and maybe he needs GM permission to go past +6. Like he can't spend his first 30 XP to go to +10, he's got to bulk out his other stats, and buy KS: Swordsmanship School or something (possibly roleplay out some exceptional training) before he can do that. --Encourage people to branch out beyond their D&D character classes. Why be a simple fighter when you can be a sword-mage? Maybe the fighter has an intelligent animal companion (like a talking horse or something). Or perhaps he's a prince, but he didn't know it before. All these are great point sinks for characters. You can steer them towards things that cost a lot of points, and are cool for the character, but don't throw the OCV/DCV system out of whack. --Give some XP as predefined bonuses. They complete an adventure where they help the Elf King, instead of getting +15 XP for that story arc, maybe they get 3 XP, plus Contact: Elf King on an 11-, plus they learn an elven protection spell, and they get a magic charm. A lot of XP in fantasy games could take the form of magic items they find. This steers the character advancement in a way that you choose.

Also recall that a hex at range has DCV 3. Hence part of the reason why the base DCV for a normal person is not a 0.

Holy crap. Let's hope they bring him back in another season later on. He can be like "no, I faked my death because of XYZ reason. Now I'm back." They did that with his father in 90210.

6th edition problems...

I'll agree, and disagree. To be able to play the game, we have to accept standardized limitation costs. If you wanted to get limitation values perfect, you'd have to vary them by campaign. You may even have to determine value as specifically as by character, and maybe even by story arc. "Okay Iron Man, the next couple months I don't really intend to have your Secret ID come up much, so you'll basically always be in the suit. That OIF limitation isn't going to come into play, so you'll need to refigure your cost and find some powers you aren't going to use during this time." Obviously that's crazy, and no one is suggesting we do that. But we accept a certain amount of inaccuracy with our limitation values -- we don't really have any choice. When you're talking about non-standard "custom" limitations you've got to be careful. And you should always be particularly careful when you're talking about a -2. I agree that "all or nothing" may really only be worth -1/2 on a particular character, in a particular campaign. But I'll object to the notion that it has to be effective only 1/3 the time to be worth the -2. A 4D6 RKA with all or nothing is almost worthless for combat. Even against guys with straight 8s, it usually won't work. And how often are you going to be fighting those? As you go up in D6, it becomes more effective, but your opposition increases in power as well. A 10D6 RKA sounds really nasty, but remember that somebody with 15 rDef will have about a 50/50 shot of surviving. It would be a great mook killer, but it'll fail quite a bit against anybody tough. It's still not going to work against master villains.

And as I said, after the first campaign, people will no longer play Daredevil. Everyone’s concept will be as flexible as they can make it.

Do you ever play more than one campaign with the same players? Restrictions like that will only work the first time. After that, players will learn.

What you'll actually get with this mentality are very open-ended concepts. You don't get Batman. You get Professor Iron-Bat X.

Then GMs shouldn’t push characters to stray outside their concept to be effective in the game.

I don't know anything about Harry Potter. Somebody made me see the first movie and that's all I ever saw. But... just because a power is described as working a certain way, that doesn't mean the game mechanics have to match that description. If a power mostly kills bystanders and offscreen NPCs, but it never hits a major character, you could represent it as a much lower powered attack.