Eisenford

Re: Cutting the Drama Out of Character Creation Additionally, I like the whole "they come back next story arc with some disads", that might be a suitable compromise.

Re: Cutting the Drama Out of Character Creation First off, sorry for taking so long to reply; I've been slammed at work all afternoon. In any case, the genre is a paranormal game with supernatural/science fiction elements working together. Players are typically around 150 base, generally set up with one power/a small suite of powers and the rest is skills/attributes as the player likes. I orignally ran the group as part of a paranormal investigations team working for the Chicago PD, so the players had to buy a small suite of skills pertaining to being police officers. As far as lethality, it's not so much that I want the game to be a "killer" game or anything, I just want to feel like I can kill characters off and it not be as big of a deal. Thanks for the advice so far, I'll look into the Hero software, that seems like a good idea.

Ok so here's where I'm at: I love the Hero System and its versatility. Typically speaking, with new players I take an approach of "tell me what sort of chracter you want to run and I'll help you build it", which works fine for introducing people to the rules and such. The problem that arises is that even with my help, the players (and myself) do spend a good amount of time (2-4 hours with a good, somewhat experienced RPG player) creating these PCs, which translates into a good amount of grief when a PC dies. This in turn makes me want to run a game that errs on the side of not letting my players die, which makes for ultimately a less rewarding game, when the threat of an actual player death doesn't seem real. What I'm getting to is this: I'd like some advise on how to simplify or otherwise make the character creation process more streamlined so that we can make these characters more quickly, and hopefully therefore less of a drama bomb when something happens to them. I want the players to feel like they're special in game (otherwise what's the point of a system where you can do ANYTHING?); there has to be a happy medium in here somewhere.

Re: Summon Singular Creatures Ok I think I've got it: The character is a "magical girl" who has a stable of magic creatures from another world that she wants to summon. She only wants one out at a time. If I'm reading this correctly, the 5 point adder is the modifier that regulates how many summons you have out on the field at any one time. The advantage Expanded Class changes the amount of creatures that CAN BE summoned through each application of the power. So we'll build say a 150 point summon, then expand the class to "magical creatures" for +1/4, then combine that with slavishly loyal +1(or probably can get away with just +1/2 loyal) and Specific Being +1. Thanks for your input, thanks Steve Long for putting me in the right direction.

I have a player who wants to build a summoner that has (basically) one helper pet out at a time. I look at summon and it seems perfect except that, in the rules for summon you can have as many summoned creatures out as you want at any given time, and there's not really an explicit way in the book to handle this. Any suggestions on a fair way to arbitrate this power?

I have a player who wants to be able to summon a few different premade creatures to fight with her, with the limitation being that she can only use them one at a time. Summon almost takes care of this, but in the rules there are stipulations for having multiple summoned creatures at once. What's an appropriate way to approach this power?