Duke Bushido

Thanks, N-B. And while it might not have been distributed through formal company channels, it is by Allston; I think I would treat it as being just as official as if it had been bound and printed with the HERO logo on it.

I see. Thank you, Sir. Is the five-point doubling part of the errata, or in the book?

Given how many "are you sure?" And "yyou understand that this could kill you if it goes wrong?" "You understand that you cannot control the dice and the dice don't love you?" And "there is no way you will survive this" and "get up, look at the map, maybe go grab a smoke, and take,another look" type warnings I give, I have never had a personal issue with letting a character get killed, and have never received a lot of flak (after the initial shock) from players who did it anyway and did not get lucky. While it wasn't exactly what you re asking, our campaign city still celebrates a day of rememeberence for a weekend session where we thinned the hero and villain files (there is a problem no one mentions when a game makes a sort of minigake out of character creation: An all-out war for the city where, across a three-day weekend, roughly twenty players grabbed characters (heroes and villains) and when it was over, we had killed off just short of 300 rarely-used or never used or haven't-used-in-a-couple-of-years characters. If the guy you were using fot killed, reach in the files and grab another one. I dont think _anyone_ was unhappy about that. Great stress reliever, and it made managing the city easier be removing a thousand or so loose ends and "we will get back to that" references. Again, not what you were easing, exactly, but periodically referencing the even in-game reminds even new players that death is alowed in this game. Outside of that, "dying a heroic death" is the hands-down favorite way for my suoers and sci-to players to retire a character when they feel they are really ready to play another one. This probably stems from the years before I was the GM: my first character qas a one-trick brick who, for whatever reason (presumably way I developed the character, but who knows?) That, even after I lesrned the game and was ready to make a thought-out and planned character, but let the rest od the group browbeat at me into playing that same character, over and over, even as they made new characters several times. Eventually he was not fun to play anymore just because he was so out-of-scale power-wise, and I was miserable as a player even while they were delighted in game to be interacting with a character who the GM eventually made "legendary." (Imagine playing Superman in a world full of Burt Ward's Robin). Eventually they stopped asking, but those feom the original group ever sinve have made certain to go out of their way to die heroically than take a chance on getting stuck like that.

I have had no reason to contribute to this thread as I still play 2e, but I did want to contribute this: Even I, essentially an absolute rule Luddite, who, while I don't hate anything Steve has from all the way back in 4e, I haven't particularly loved any of it, either-- Even _I_ appreciate the breaking of the DEX /SPD connection. I mean, heroic level _obviously_ doesn't support a lot of DEX in the 20+ range, and when you look at the comic book super heroes, there isn't tons of support for DEX much higher than that, either, or SPD. Granted, I know precious little about comics except what my players and Google teach me, but it seems the overwhelmong majority of supers get their general agility defined ad "highly-trained acrobat" or "Olympic-level gymnast," all of which I suspect falls near or not far over NCM, but they (and even agents) still have the combat know-how to score hits on genuine godlike beings. So yeah- I am glad of that one, at least.

If it cheers you up any, I read the thread title with a medical-field perspective and was absolutely horrified that nine people wanted to discuss that with you.... I hope fate is with you and your community, Sir. As a guy who spent thirty years living in hurricane country, you have my empathy on the misery of evacuation.

Thanks, N-B! Which edition and page? Thanks! .

According to the subject line, the betterness of either figured or or non-figured formerly-figured characteristics. However, we are humans, and there have been a few drifts.

Aw, Geez....! You said that out loud! Quickly, go stand in a circle of salt, rub your rosary, and chant over and over "it was a mistake; do not take my soul!" from noon until midnight, and for all that's Holy, do _not_ ooen your eyes, no matter what you hear!

This is a fair question; I will do my best to give it a fair answer. Do not percieve any brevity or ommision as any sort of disregard, though. Instead, forgive it as a sign that I am working from a phone, with just my thumbs, and am a bit "done" with typing this way, having just carried on an extensive but important conversation on a separate matter. Apologies in advance. The best summation I can offer is to refer back to an earlier point in this thread where- I believe it was our friend Doc Democracy- pointed out that one can roughly tailor things to produce the kinds of combats one desires, from six-turn slugfests to three-punch drops. And he is right. And it works. And once you do it, players very quickly adapt to their new constraints- that is, players optimize their builds for the arena in which they play. Your recourse is to either forbid this (which I have get to see go well in any game under any circumstances), or do the same in order to offer any actual challenge. Take into consideration the bell curve of the attack roll. Players will optimize their characters here, too, be it additional skill levels, tactical maneuvers, etc. But the best routine adjustment players can hope for is +3 or +4. More extremes are possible through cunning planning and careful teamwork, setting, bracing, adding skill levels and environmental bonuses, etc, but during a typical combat using loose campaign limits, the best typical adjustment is an additional three or four points on his CV. Your villain likely will have a few of his own tricks, and can likely get two or three points of adjustment of his own; more if you make,it point to not dumb your villains down now and again, and maneuvers and environment, etc are available for your villain as well. With everyone optimized- even just a little- for their table rules, in my own experience, it is really unusual to get a running (ie, non-surprise) combat where the antagonists have more than four points of CV different, with two or three being the most typical. Looking at the bell curve and the shifts for CV differences, the odds of scoring a hit are quite predictable, and upsets like wild dice rolls- as we know- are less common the more dice you roll. Our attack roll uses three dice, so upsets are more _possible_, but still not terribly likely. You can get a pretty solid feel for who gets in the first hit, and who gets in the most hits. A damage dice pool of what- twelve to twenty dice? Is even more consistent than the attack roll. And of course, you have a very good idea of how many blows it takes to drop each character _because you designed specifically for that_. In absolutes? No; it is not one hundred percent predictable. In practical terms, the nature of the bell curve for 3d6 and for pools of large numbers of dice make both "who hits who the most" consistently- not perfectly, but consistently- predictable, and the results of a typical damage pool are easily compared to the targets available. When things like campaign limits or recommendations come into play, players _will_ optimize for them; GMs optimize for them, and the end result is that, from the meta, it actually becomes _easier_ to predict, but the limits, ultimately, reduce the variables in play. When you design those guidelines toward the idea of "drop in X hits," it all becomes that much more consistently predictable. Again: not perfectly, but more consistently. In a way it is a help: I know just what villains to send against them to give them a challenge!" Or "to take the wind out of their sails" or "to give them a quick victory," but again, that is possible because the guidelines have made the outcomes more consistently predictable. Is this always the case? No; of course it isn't. In fact, I expec2r several post demonstrating how wild rolls are still possible and how a scenario once went totally opposite the plan because of three or four of them. I have a handful of these stories myself. However, they are called wild rolls for a reason, and when I compare my own handful of them against all the time I played under rule-of-X style limits, it just reinforces the increased predictability such guidelines bring. Even with an unusual amount of wild rolls in a session or two, the longer a given campaign goes on, the more dice get thrown, the more the resolutions averages out to the initial prediction. Is it bad? Inherently? No; not in any absolute way. The points made in this thread, such as "design your villain to drop in three hits" and such demonstrate that for the majority of users, it might even be _desirable_. For me-- Let me stress: _For me_, I found it _intolerable_. Because I like wild crazy things to happen? Well, _yes_, but in fairness, as a general rule, I bristle equally hard at conversations of predestination, so there is a thing you know about me now. ;). But _for me_, it was a big stab against what I thought Champions with it's unique build and combat and damge resolution systems were providing us. I felt like I had been somehow cheated (no; of course I hadn2t been cheated, but emotions and logic have different names for a reason. ). I had just assumed that campaign regulations were helping, when in fact they were providing me the opposite of what I wanted: a high degree of unpredictability. Truly crazy stories to tell, I saw two options: Institute the hit location rules (which I did not want to do) to provide radical damage swings and spice things up, or go play something else. So I did that. I missed HERO, and almost ten years later, I came back, but I havent used limits, caps, regulations, or rule of X -type things since then. For what it is worth, I have been much happier. Maybe it _is_ harder, and I don't think most people happy with what they have would want to even consider it, but it works for me and mine, and I am quite tickled to play again. Before anyone thinks I hate on guidelines or limits: I do not. They have their value. It is merely that _for me_, they restricted one of the more enjoyable elements of the game.

And before it was cool, too! :rofl: But yes; with the "any rules changes you want are okay" clause, technically, I can play Fantasy HERO by weaving between the dashed center lines on my morning commute (so long as everyone playing .... At your table....? In your car? Agrees with you that this is the way to do it. I havent written any house documents like that myself, but still find it fun for other reasons. Though-- and feel free to fact check me if I am in error- just a paragraph or two after the one you quoted, is there an inclusion to the effect of "it would be better if you don't change what I already changed"? To be fair, that can be ignored (and should be, if you want to change somethinf the author changed: change it back, or into something completely new that you and your friends and that one strange guy your friend found and insists really doesn't give off that vibe after you get to know him a bit better all prefer. And while the caae can be made that "just because it isnt specifically forbidden doesn't mean it's allowed" most certainly _can_ be made, an equally strong case that "this exactly _is_ what it means" can also be made, given that 1) there exists no real rule to establish that all things not forbidden by name also forbidden-- or, probably better said: "all things not listed as expressly permissible are forbidden," though I caution that this line of thinking leads to the oft-revisited discussion about whether or not it is possible to knock someone down without buying a martial maneuver that specifically includes "target falls." and 2) the existence of the "change any rule you want" rule makes such a rule easy enough to invalidate anyway. That may be why such a rule does not exist in the first place; I cannot say. Or it may be that the change any rule rule exists to allow the GM to tell the martial artist "he hit him with a 74 Oldsmobile. _Of course_ he falls down!" Again, I can't say. I am going to stick with my 80-page rule book and be happy. If we need another rule, we will make it go when we genuinely need It. It has worked so far.

Yep. Tried pirates twice over the years (I like the romanticized swashbuckling version of pirates; the whole group was into it each time), but both fell apart for pretty much the reasons you suggest. Interestingly, every attempt we made at FASA's old Star Trek RPG fell apart for the same reasons. Looking at it from this angle, perhaps it wasnt just setting and knowledge issues: our T2000 game might have just been destined to fail under the weight of even a pseudo-military structure. 😕

Cautionary Disclaimer: Hugh: don't read any further. I know this entire line of thought bugs you, and that isn't why I am here, Sir. Carrying on, but be warned that this is ground I have covered before: There are two killing attacks; they each have a specific ability. One has range; the other increases in power based on the user's STR (or at least how much he wishes to use with the attack). We know the advantage: Range is a +1/2 Advantage. If we remove the cost of this advantage from Ranged Killing Attack, we end up with a ten-point power that has no range and does not add additional STR-based damage. We have found the base power: Killing Damage, and we know it costs 10 points per die. (Sorry, Hugh, but I encouraged you to not read this.) If we pull H-t-H KA down to it's base 10-points of Killing Damage-- which, remember, has no STR bonus and no Range- we end up discovering a +1/2 Advantage we can call "Stength Adds." This is _remarkably_ inexpensive, considering we can buy an Energy Blast for 5 points per die. Put sixty points into it for 12d6. Add another thirty for a character with 60 STR to effectively double that into a 24d6 energy blast. Neat! Or he can spend 30 points on a 10d6 Hand Attack (from one of the new editions; I have no idea what Hand Attack sells for these days), add 15 points for Strength Adds and another 15 and potentially have a 20d6 energy blast for 60 points or so. Also neat! But for whatever reason, that has never been as fascinating to me as the idea that for ten points apiece, I can buy raw Killing Damage. That is just the most dun for me to contemplate. (Sorry, Hugh) I would like to offer an opinion-- be assured that this is not like offering my results, where it is quite popular to tell me that those were in fact _not_ my results--- Wait. I suppose there is nothing to stop someone from declaring that this is not my opinion, either. Anyway, my opinion, and worth every but you paid for it: "Strength adds to damage" is not an orohan mechanic. It is a holdover. It was never a mechanic. It was a compromise. We all know this game grew from notes and ideas in college, and the playtesters and GMs who would write the first rule book were just winging it. Once a basic idea was established (say, mivement is broken into types, or all ranged attacks share a mechanic because only damage matters, mechanically- whatever- then things worked out from there. Or maybe it went the other way: maybe there was a radiation blast power, electric blast power, hydro blast power, and heat ray power and all the playtesting kept refining things and refining things and what we saw in that first edition was what fell out, each edition and supplement tweaking and refining a bit further. (Anyone else remember Penetration Points?. Been a while since we saw those... Remember when Damage Resistance was an advantage you bought to apply to half of your existing Def?. Been a while for that, too) Anyway: "I want like a massive super-niva kind of attack that melts bank vaults and sublimates glaciers from ice to hydrogen bombs. But that's like.... A million points of energy blast!" Well, let's play with some ideas..... How about... Or maybe it was an entirely different root cause: "Okay, roll your 45d6 attack." Okay, just let me.... Wait a minute... All right, I need- crap! They wont all fit in my- hey, Tony, take about ten of these dice and roll them for me-- ah, man! Where'd they go?! Half of them are on the floor! Okay, tell you what-- how about you roll fifteen if them and we will multiply the result. Sound good? Well yeah, but what about Terry? He has to roll thirty dice for that "Stun Only" attack of his. Maybe you couod do somerhing dor him, too...?" Look, I dont know. I wasnt there. But like everyone else here, I have been involved in lots of brainstroming and lots of testing- at least enough to know that once you have a working model, you start to see why you really dont have a working model, and imorovments and streamlining begin immediately. So my guess has always been that one or the other of the Killing Attacks was hammered out and well-received and loved by the one or two players using them, then the guy playing the brick said "I would love to have one of those killing attack things! It would be great for busting down walls and ripping Volvos in half!" (No; I have nothing against America's favorite Grandad-mobile. In the era this game was created, Volvos were really easy to draw, what with their stack-of-boxes-on-wheels styling aesthetics) "So what does it cost if I take "no range" as a Limitation?" And the testing GM, somewhat on the fly, decided he didnt like giving away that kind of damage potential for only twice the cost of an Energy Blast, and said "fifteen points for a die." "But that's the same,price as he paid to have range!" Well yeah, but you can add some,oomph that he can't. You can add some,extra damage for your Strength, if you are willing to pay the extra END." Oh! Okay; cool! Let's do that! And it never got revisited. People were okay with it as-is until they began to grumble en masse about the STUN Multiplier and _then_ someone took a look at Killing Attack with an eye toward surgery, but only that bit of it. Happens a lot. Haymaker wasn't really a mechanic. It was a confession to bricka and martial artists- some little bit of "evening up" that non-ranged characters got to make sacrificing range a bit more palatable. At least, up until the ranged attack players "hey! Why cant we have that?!" Well, it's just a concession- something to make the lack of a ranged attack a bit more tolerable- "No; screw those guys! _I_ want a haymaker!" So punch someone. "No; my punch sucks; I want to haymaker my finger beams!" Look, it's really just a crappier version of Kick-- "I dont care! I paid 5 points for every die of damage in my ranged attack; I should be able to kick someone with it!" Well the brick paid 5 points to buy the Strength that is required to get each die- "Well, that's _his_ problem, isn't it? I wanna kick with Face Blast!" And we went and studied up on that and debated for a few years and boom- the game evolved a bit more. Then the brick guys were all "hey! That's our thing! They took our thing! Now we are right back to being hosed for a concept that doesnt have a ranged attack!" Well, let's look at what else you get when you buy STR- I don't actually -want- an 80 STR! I want a 40 STR, but _want_ a 16d6 punch! Oh. Okay. And we studied some more and complained about cost / benefit ratios and had easily 1/3 of the conversations on this board and all those before it and boom- hand attack is (or was, maybe? For a while at least) 3 points a die (unless, it has been folded back into a long hand formula of STR with various modifiers, etc. Now none of this is _bad_, mind you (though the hundred-and-eighty-six-thousandth rehash of "why STR costs too little and here's how to fix it!" does just slide right off of glazed-over eyes, I am afraid). This is how games- any concept, really, gets refined and sorted out and changed- sometimes even improved. I say "sometimes" because every once in a while you end up with with things like the current build for Instant Change. But sticking with "the Killing Mechanic"-- I maintain that it is not an "orphan" mechanic. Granted, 'additional STR damage' is dound only in this one power-- _for now_, but that doesn't mean that it can't be pulled out and put other places: Rubber Ralph uses his incredible stretching powers and pliable body to ensure his opponents with his stretch limbs -- Entangle: Strength adds. (Just a hasty example folks; don't get worked up about it). "Oh, I can get the truth out of him, Boss. Five me ten minutes alone with him, please." Mind Control: Strength adds. (Yeah; as above) Of course, even if we were to all one-percent agree to this idea-- yeah, I know; sometimes I crack myself up. but even if we all agreed to this, there will always be folks claiming it is an orphan mechanic because it hasn't been officially reworked and published into an Advantage or other published powers don't have a similar component-- I will always maintain that it is a holdover: something from the earliest days that hasn't had the scrutiny that other parts of the system have had, or because not enough energy projectors have complained that they can't add STR damage to their photon blasts or something- I don't have a clue. please remember: I opened this by stating it is an opinion piece and admitting that I have no factual information on how this power came to be, and have gone on to admit again, just above, that I have no idea where it came from or why it came to be and even took more time to write this sentence pointing out (and hopefully reinforcing) those admissions-- in short: I have wasted enough time for several people all at once. There is no need in wasting your own time telling me that I am wrong, or that I have no way of knowing how all this came to be-- etc. at any rate: this is a _unique_ mechanic that hasn't been meticulously analyzed by anyone in any position to make changes who has found it in need of change. Sometimes, change is good. But given what has happened to Instant Change, Transformation Attack, and Shape Shift (yes: it already existed. It was in Champions III back in the 80s), I simply want to point out that sometimes leaving it alone might be the simplest, cleanest solution. Okay. Now. Go ahead. The dogpile starts just below.

Nope

Nope

I have no dog in this fight, but have enjoyed the discussion immensely; my thanks to everyone who had something to say on the subject. I did want to visit that comment above for a moment. First, I would like to mention that before you can decide that, you must first decide if the hit location chart is going to be in play. If it is, remember that depending on how well you roll there, a normal can one-shot a normal, and a super can accidentally kill one. If you are using the hit location chart, you may want to put a little extra thought into what defenses and what levels of them are acceptable. I also wanted to comment that when that epiphany hit me-- "Rule of X means how many hits before they drop," I walked away from HERO for almost a decade. All that I had percieved as a precise, detailed system for resolving combat, etc, all boiled down to "how many times do I want them to roll to hit before it is over?" At that moment, I became a narrator telling exactly the story I wanted to tell and they had no idea that everything they did was futile: I could pre-determine the outcome of every battle by setting the villains such they could absorb one more hit than could the heroes, or that they could "Typically" drop an opponent with one less strike, or reverse those, and the heroes were nearly gauranteed victory. Not by their actions, so much, but because I could decide on Thursday who was going to fall or reign supreme on Saturday, and because everything was built within the required campaign limits, no one ever doubted that it was all on the turn of the now-almost-pointless dice. So I walked away. I went back to Traveller, some Space Opera, some Space Master, lots of Car Wars and a few other things, but it was almost ten years before I thought about going back to Champions / HERO. Eventually we slid a then-in-progress Traveller game onto the Champions wheels, and it worked out well enough, plus allowed for a lot of creative freedom. We used it for a couple of short fantasy games, and that was working great until I felt myself matching characters and their equipment do campaign limits and realized that I could again simply replace everything with odd-or-even and three hit points. Anyway, I obviously did come back, but in the examples set by Superman and Batman or Wonder Woman and some guy with a wingsuit and a club or pretty much _anyone_ and the Flash, I have pretty much ignored forcing any limits on characters or the game. If the writers can find something for Batman to do that really does contribute to what Superman is doing, then I can find a way to make a team up between Ultra-God and the Bohemian Bedazzler work out as reasonable, too. I wont pretend that it isnt hard or that everyone should try it, but it has brought back to me the fun I used to have with HERO before I realized it was "knock three times for victory!" when using campaign limits.

If I recall the newer editions correctly, one cannot add to one's focus STR damage beyond the point of doubling the damage dice.

What Hugh said. But mostly I just wanted to add a little music: Necromamce if you want to- You can bring dead threads to life.... Some threads stay dead when they are dead, but-- They're not my favorite kind....

That was pretty cool for an animation that I am pretty sure qas rendered with a Sega Genesis. as cool as it was, though, I suspect our long-standing history as land animals has a lot to do with underrepresentation. Even a space habit, we think "well, at least it be quick" when we consider catastrophic failure. swimming to exhaustion and drowning awake.... That's a lot harder to get behind, I am afraid....

Help! Help! I've been hit! I just took a shot to my youth and vitality!

To this very day, I pronounce "sanitized for your protection" as the most somber of blessings, and regularly schedule visits to the Holy Mouth Man.

I have only my own limted travels by which to judge, but "@$$holes" seems to be rather popular, globally-speaking.

"No; that's a hobo, and a rabbit...."

Agreed.

Thank you, Sir.