Duke Bushido

I see; thanks! So, if I am interpreting this (I would have to drag out the book to get context; I am assuming I won't need it, but feel free to correct me) properly: No; it does not impose Dex roll penalties to things that already require Dex rolls. Yes; it forces a Dex roll, but only on those things that "require effort." I would have to agree with you: that seems suitably open for GM judgement and 'common sense,' or what Steve refers to as "dramatic sense," because unlike most of us, he had enough "common sense" to know just how much being told that it's okay to use common sense inflames this crowd. From what you have posted (and again: I have access to the full text if I need it; I just don't relish dragging it down and pouring through it. Ugh), I don't like it: it doesn't increase existing Dex penalties, but does force a Dex check. However, it does leave it open to GM moderation, which I appreciate. Problematically, that doesn't fly in this crowd: never, _ever_ leave open to interpretation what can be replaced with an absolute mechanic! Never! I kid, of course. Sort of. (I mean, have you seen the latest roll under / roll over thread? Dude: Sudoku. Get your math fix that way; it's supposed to be relaxing or something. ) Thanks, schir!

Turn on them! Draw your weapon and sample random mushrooms! Let the blade sort it all out....

I am all out of rep, and at work, so I cannit adress this properly, but I would like to thank and simultaneously rage at you for pushing for normal maneuvers. The ever-increasing push for mechanics for eveything has proven to lead toward a minset that results in "okay, your kickback is more than enough to blast him completely off the roof!" "Cool! How much damage does he take after his nine-story drop?!" "Did You buy the 'target falls' element on your martial kick?" "Well, no....." "Then he just kind of hovers there, stunned and very confused.." I will try to reply properly later this evening. As always, Sir: thank you playing.

I would have to do it. I would just _have_ to know what happens next....

Sunday morning a friend stopped by the house- obe of my,players from the Brunswick group that is looking at Year 3 of corona hiatus. he was on his way to join a group doing Warhammer 40k RPG and stopped to see if I was interested. my kids arw only familar with 3 games: they know what D and D is; they play Champions in the youth group, and I have run a coyple of games of classic Traveller at the house. they were quite curious about RPG talk (the youth group hasn't played regularly since Corona) and pushed closer and closer. Finally, seeing that I wasnt interested and that the conversation was nearly over, my daughter just butt in with "what is Warhammer 40k?" Without skipping a beat, without looking up from her book, my wife replied "Catholic Traveller," and I don't think I have ever been more profoundly struck with epiphany in my life.

>ahem<

If it was a typo, don't tell me! I would much prefer to think it was done on purpose. It introduced a mechanic for drowning. It remained unchanged in 4e, and I seem to recall it was pretty much unchanged in 5e. I can't remember if it was changed-- or even included-- in 6e, but I suspect it was. At any rate, it was "no recoveries while holding your breath" and "suffer END loss" and a couple of other things. In theory, one could use it to represent no-breathable gasses, assuming there was no directly-poisonous elements involved. At least, I've used it that way my ersatz Traveller game. It seems to work reasonably well and nothing better has presented itself. I don't think I understand what you are asking here. For Clarification: Are you asking for something to force a Dex roll? Or are you asking for something to make a person fall? If it's that second one, forgive me, my friend, but I'm not getting wrapped up in that "you couldn't knock people down until Aaron Allston created the Target Falls element!" style of conversation again. Chris beat me to it with the "reverts as normal" option, but even then, a really nice power Limitation would be "recover per Turn" or something similar, I think. Power becomes less expensive; AP stays the same, of course. Time Chart-based Advantages and Limitations are-- or at least, were-- fairly common build techniques and making a 30 AP Power significantly less effective shouldn't be a problem for too many GMs. The savings might offset a cumulative Advantage as well.

Thanks, Hugh. I missed that _completely_! (the title bit, I mean) Missed that, too (I only read 6e once), but I will immediately add it to the list of 6e rules that I am going to ignore the hell out of. Yes, but interestingly enough, we have an established mechanic for that, thanks to the Scourge from the Deep module back in 3e. I may be the odd man out on interpretation, or I may have just completely misread it to mean "-3 to all DEX rolls," period. That is, in a situation that required a DEX roll, you would suffer a minus 3 penalty because of the "environment." I did not interpret it to read "take a penalty, and it forces a roll." Again, I may be the odd man out, but if the rules now state "forces a roll," well, that's on the "ignore the hell out that nonsense" list, too. Thanks for the feedback on that (I admit I was curious), but I've pretty much moved into the "agree to disagree" camp. The automated recovery mechanic for negative STUN tells me not to do it this way. Yes: I bend many rules, _especially_ newer rules. But when there isn't really a need to do that-- ie, Mind Control: you are getting sleepy.... or Transform: alert to asleep is going to be my preferred choice. Though here's a waffle on the Mind Control option: buying it versus CON, the target character would then make CON rolls to break out; I will pre-assume that we agree on that. Here's the waffle: how does he decide to do that if he is asleep? Certainly we can rule that it becomes an autonomic response of some sort-- the subconscious "just knows" something is fishy, but even that leads to some unreliable results _or_ some really, really permanent results at a high enough STR versus a frail enough target. So I tended toward T-form. Now you know. Now you _all_ know! Bwa-hahahahahaaa! gloob....gloob

Thanks, Hugh. I just reread the whole thread looking to see who said "poisson".... taking your suggestion seriously for a moment: we are familiar with environments that can be treacherous: ice, hillsides, trembling tundra- situations like like earthquake, gusts of typhoons winds, etc. what sort of environment onduces instant sleep? All I can come go with is "room full of sleeping gas", but I think that moves more toward the attack mechanic of the gas as opposed to the environment. so now I am just curious.

Tangential question: Now that CV is essentially a Primary Characteristic, can we just Drain that?

Funny you should say that. I have never run for _any_ public office, ever, _specifically_ because of how often that particular thing does not sound the least bit unappealing. That's a thing that I know about myself. Now it's a thing all you folks know about me. I have known this about myself even when I was in grade school, and I totally understand that I am not the person best suited to make sympathetic decisions for large numbers of people. I made a conscious decision to never seek any sort of political or governmental authority based on that. You are welcome; all of you.

Nope. Met him when he was directing a movie in Savannah. Sorry. Met Jim Henson completely by accident while taking a sponsored tour (won a contest) of Congress, on which I met Daniel Inouye. Met Neil Armstrong on that same trip-- after the sponsored tour, I _really_ wanted to see at least a tiny part of the Smithsonian. Guess who happened to be there for some event? Rupaul. I have never met Rupaul.

For your sake, I really hope the lie is not Kathleen Turner. I'm going to guess Tyler Hoechlin, simply because I know who the other people are.

Ha! I don't know why, but that reminded me of a meme going around some years ago with the tagline "But what if Elmo is just signing his favorite song? Can Elmo say it then?" No; if you don't know the meme, I will not be taking questions (or posting it). Sorry.

This might be amusing. Pick 5? 1) Jim Henson 2) Daniel Inouye 3) Neil Armstong 4) Clint Eastwood 5)Ru Paul

It's quite possible; I _did_ play a good bit of BGC back in the day. I don't know precisely the inspiration for it, but it was put in place to stop things like "Okay, a three always wins. I am going to make my EGO (or CON or whatever) roll to push myself up to a 200 STR so I can catch this comet / building / deadly GM glare. So I'll be unconscious for six weeks. Big whoop." Look back at the 1 and 2e rules (which I still use): there weren't really any limiting factors on Pushing except for your END, and of course, you could burn STUN as END.... At -31 Stun, you enter "option land." It's worth noting that characters who are at or below 0 stun will take recoveries on their action-- So Draining STUN to create sleep means kicking the target into a series of recoveries as he struggles to regain a state of attentiveness. That's not sleep. I am not presuming a special effect here: I am reading the mechanic, period, and noting that what the mechanic describes is not only not a part of sleep (as a sleepy person has taken no damage-- er, STUN reduction, if we are all going to pretend that being KTFO and staying up into the wee hours to finish a book have the exact same effect on the body). Actually, let me go back just a bit to my problem with this idea: STUN is not defined as a measurement of the threshold point between being asleep and being awake. It is defined specifically as a damage-resisting characteristic. This is done by stating flatly that STUN is lost via damage, and when a character has taken more damage than he is able to shrug off, he will be knocked out. While conversationally we make the words interchangeable, there is an arc of difference biologically between being unconscious and being asleep-- so much difference that we use "unconscious" as a hyperbolic metaphor (HA! I accidentally type "methaphor" Talk about not being sleep! ) for unusually deep sleep. Anyway, backing up. At -31 STUN, the character enters the land of option, where the GM decides how often he make make recoveries. All I did was to House Rule that negative Original Stun Value, you burned BODY in place of STUN. Again, I can't squarely tell you that it was appropriate from one source or another, but I can tell you that it was because for the edition I use-- for the first five editions of the game-- STUN was a function of the BODY characteristic. There is some validity to the idea that with a more robust and durable physique, you can soak a bit more abuse, after all. It also follows-- to me, anyway-- that at the point where you can't take anymore, the durable physique from which are drawing will begin to suffer. It certainly makes far more sense than does "you can actually whack on them forever with a broomhandle-- seriously! _Forever_!-- and not really hurt them at all. So long as you avoid major organs and don't break bones, there is no actual limit to the amount of pain they can absorb! It's neat!" Even if you don't want to accept that "yeah, at some point the tissue itself is going to break down (and it will, and it does), but long before that, there are going to be some psychoses coming to the surface (and again: it will, and it does). Of course, HERO doesn't have stats for Psychosis, at least not until 4e's Horror HERO appropriated Sanity from C'Thuluh, and then never ever again. So I worked with what I had: a reasonable understanding of biology and pointers from the rules that STUN and BODY were tied together in some not-completely-defined way. I'd like to think that is mostly where the house rule came from, but it's quite possible that having used a similar Fuzion mechanic in BGC made me more receptive to the idea; I can't say for certain either way. Anyway, getting back to STUN being defined as "not damage." This is not me choosing an SFX. This is the raw mechanic: a measure of a the ability to withstand a certain kind of damage. if my target has 30 STUN and I can reliably deliver 6 STUN per blow, I have to hit him _eleven times_ to take him into option land. If his STUN has been drained away to -20 to induce "sleep," then I have to hit him three times to put him into option land. Again: there is not a special effect involved: the _only_ thing I am doing is using the STUN mechanic precisely as it is laid out in the rules: reducing it to the point that he may not wake up until he's had a couple of birthdays. The fact that it was reduced because we wanted to pretend that being knocked out was the same as sleeping doesn't change the fact that he no longer has his normal STUN available for _any other purpose_ other than being not asleep: there is only one STUN characteristic. Wanting to pretend it works an entirely different way in this one special instance does not prevent it from causing serious problems for all other instances of how STUN might be delivered. As far as the sleep thing goes: I don't think any of us would ever get any rest at all if we started recovering as soon as we dropped out and woke back up upon reaching-- well, since we took no damage, we'd never actually get to sleep, but let's pretend that we took "tiredness damage" that took us to 0 STUN, or even -2 STUN. We spend our next (and every) Phase taking a recovery, and if you've got a REC:3, you're popping back awake your next Phase. If you've got a REC:1 and voluntarily reduce your speed to 1 (and I'm not certain that's viable outside of GM fiat, given the rules stating that you _will_ do nothing but take recoveries, which-- at least to me-- suggests that you're not going to pass up the chance to take an extra one, but let's assume GM fiat says you can reduce your SPD to 1 when knocked out), then the very best that you can hope for-- SPD:1, REC:1, STUN:-2, is thirty-six seconds of sleep before you are once again bright-eyed and bushy tailed. This is _not_ an SFX issue. This is _nothing_ but straight-up how the mechanics are defined in the rules and how they work mathematically. This math is so simple that I didn't even need to invoke Hugh for fact and figure checking. It is for the above listed reasons-- and I am keeping all the personal ones out of this-- but for those purely game-mechanical reasons that I personally find the best two valid options for forcing someone to sleep are either the creation of an entirely new characteristic for tracking "be awake" energy and "need sleep" energy-- which is just adding more complexity, more cost-- loads more humor potential; I can't deny that , and probably a bit of confusion about how that would work-- or use T-form-- or even Mind Control! I am _perfectly fine_ with Mind Control for this. Given my general dislike of T-form unless there is absolutely no other way to do a thing (4e really burned me out on T-form), I would probably prefer Mind Control, but _still_, I find T-form: awake person to asleep person to be far more appropriate to simulate any sort of "put them to sleep" ability. It even has its own recovery mechanic built-in, so we don't have to worry about those pesky Recoveries every Phase. Best of all: I am still going to wear myself out trying to beat them into a coma, because they still have all their STUN available. Sure; it's just me. I can accept that. I may be the only guy unwilling to pretend that nothing in the way STUN works per the mechanics precludes it being used to put someone into a gentle and restorative sleep and does not impede their ability to withstand damage in any way, but I have to level with you folks: I really have given this some thought (because my realization that there isn't really an obvious way to do this in HERO), as everything above may suggest-- I have given this a _lot_ of thought, far more thought than I am generally willing to sink into answering a question for someone who's final decision has zero affect on my game--- and targeting STUN to simulate sleep just has way too many problems, and requires bending way more rules and mechanics that does either T-form: awake to asleep of Mind Control: Go to sleep!. I am going to _remain_ the person who disagrees-- respectfully, of course, because I like you guys so much that I keep coming back, and ultimately, because it doesn't affect me or my games in the slightest... No; this time it kind of did: I now know how I would build a Sleep potion, if it ever comes up in my games, so thank all of you for that. , but I am going to remain the dissenting opinion regarding Drain:STUN as being any sort of acceptable for the desired result. Thanks to all for the inspiration.

I would have thought so, but then again, the person reading the Champions write-ups is more likely to have his eyes out for Champions products at the game store. The guy playing V&V, though... You might be able to sell him on a new system....

Looks like someone has been reading Different Worlds Magazine, issue 30.

That's exactly what I _did_. I made them free. That makes them way more meaningful for the points invested. The points, by the rules, is what-- it was 1 for five, originally. I own the modern Ultimate Base book, but given that I don't bother charging for bases, I have zero intention of reading it. Is it still 1 for 5, or is it 1 for ten now? At any rate, the points invested are one-fifth divided by the number of contributors to one. Let's say you've got seven heroes buying a base. You are, as one contributing individual, spending 1 point to get thirty five points worth base. What actually _is_ a better value than that? For five actual points from each of seven characters, you get access to what? 245 points worth of base? If that minimal investment is too much- or rather, you are not getting anything significant enough to make a one-for-thirty-five exchange rate worthwhile, I respectfully suggest that you are making my point for me.

I can appreciate that. So long as _no one_ tries to defend Galactus's hat.

Which takes me to my two biggest reason that bases are free in my games: If you didn't pay points for it, you don't mind when stuff happens to it for the sake of an adventure-- you are more free to enjoy the game. And the biggest reason of all: If you pay for the base, you are going to want to be there a lot, to use it a lot, and to incorporate it a lot. I built a whole world for you and your friends. I don't _want_ to spend every third week in your dungeon.