tesuji

Re: Thats one nimble little bull I am sorry but the head in the sand denial just doesn't cut it. YES absolutely there is NO RULE MANDATING anyone use the Cu stats. However, most every game i have seen is commonly in that ballpark. Do you think all those games with 23 dex and speed around 5 all just happened blindly by accident? NO. The sameple characters provide supposedly useful examples. And guess what - surprise surprise PEOPLE USE THEM. If for no other reason than if my campaign is close to theirs in scale, then i can use all those publish materials and characters with less conversion work. the samples and examples provided are used by lots of folks and have influence beyond their "you dont have to even see them" optionality. In that regard, the more askew to "good design using the system strengths" these examples are the more confusing rather than helpful they become. if the remainder of the 6e characters also are just straight ports of 5e, ignoring all the benefits actually using 6e to generate characters allows, the less useful they will be to those actually playing 6e. I didn't buy a new ruleset to have it produce the same characters with different totals and to ignore the differences..

Re: Thats one nimble little bull I tend to asses character viability and limits not by def and dc but by longevity - how many hits of type X does it take to KO you. I also gauge the con stun number. I have in the past told people to lower any or all to meet campaign specs, and this tends to avoid the DEF focused myopia i often see. then again i also repeat the process for rka and for eb and for mental blasts to get everyone onto a comparison, so really, as long as the pcs all wind up relatively similar in capability to last, I then adapt the villains to matchup well. this all assume relatively similar dcv. if the dcv is higher, i have to boil it down to "attacks" including misses evening out. gack!!! i have been doing this too long. One campaign i handed out six supervillains and said "you have to be able to last more than 12 and less than 36 segments against them.

Re: Thats one nimble little bull To me the inflated con was as much a product of over-simplified balancing tools. the most common expression of "limits" were a def limit. rarely were there stat limits for things like con or stun So for example in a 12dc game a character with 30 def was considered HIGH DEf and had to justify the concept and the defense. However while a 30 def, con 15, stun 20 character might have to justify why he has " a def above 20" a 20 def, con 25, stun 50 guy would likely be just fine and not need any special "why i am so exceptional". A typical 12d6 attack however will KO the former with two hits and need only 3 above average to stun with one shot while the second guy can take three hits before ko and be just as vulnerable to stunning. If the balance metric wasn't often expressed as "defense cap" but as some measure of toughness "X number of 12dc hits KOs you" and "this value minimum to stun you" or any sort of calculation which keeps a look at overall impacts, then i think we would not see as much of a con drive up effect. Net summary - even in 6e and the loss of figs, i think the usual expressions of def and balance metrics will keep con inflated into the mid to upper 20s. Even in 5e though i did enjoy building the atypical brick with very low def scores, often just the base values, and extremely high con & stun - like 40+ con and 70+ stun. .

Re: Post "gotchas" here

Re: Thats one nimble little bull and ignore happily the fact that the reasons for the scores have drastically changed. yes you can do this. depending on your gm threshold for justification of stats. i mean one can provide concept of "slow plodding behemoth" and one can give it speed9 dex 300... if one wants to and the gm can swallow that. one can...

Re: Thats one nimble little bull Also frankly if the way "HERo officla builds characters in 6e" is going to be "just like they were built under 5e" then IMo with all the significant differences in system, those characters will be less and less useful for 6e games. Additionally, on the over time thing, when i first started playing champs back in 2e the base speeds were 5 average for supers with 4-6 being the usual range for supers. Defenses were up there more or less where they are now. from 4e to 5e and now from 5e to 6e i haven't seen a significant increase in what characters have in the way of stats. the prices have gone up some but not the values.

Re: WOW! Stun drain in 6e another approach would be to have adjustment powers require an advantage to affect characteristics. say +1/2 for "affects a characteriostic not a power." thats sort of halfway between the way it works now. now as an aside that might make "characteristics bought as powers" or even "strength gained from growth" more drainable than "real strength" which doesn't seem all that off to me. draining the spidey super strength might be easier until he gets to peter parker normal level.

Re: Thats one nimble little bull i fully understand that any given campaign can and will have whatever limits and standards its users wish. But in this case, we are dealing with genre specific examples in a case where they do have defined standards for the various levels. 175 may seem low to you for Ninja hero and thats fine but the characters they presented matched points wise with the campaign standards they put forth. What seems askew in those examples to me is the sense of "the points mean something." A 23 dex isn't just a good rounding but a measure of "really high dex" based on the norms. Now sure, if they define the other characters in the cu so that your typical hulking brute is supposed to be more agile than an olympic gymnast thats fine, but so far nothing EXCEPT THE NUMBERS seems to indicate this as a design parameter. It looks to me like they just kept to old 5e design parameters where high dex was the norm since thats how you get cv. That status quo to me runs contrary to one of the better changes in 6e and is a missed opportunity to highlight the improvement. another generation of olympic gymnast bricks is fine of course, if thats what you are into, but for me i am glad to have the opportunity to see more diversity and more "the numbers mean something" concepts not punished by the point buy.

Re: Thats one nimble little bull Well and true except that - in this case - the sample characters are not actually in the generic brules but in the specific sections on genre by genre examples. It is common for non- or less frequent hero users, those most likely playing as opposed to gming, to make the mistake of thinking HERO IS A GAME as opposed to HERO IS A GAME BUILDING TOOLKIT, IMX. But regardless, i would expect sample characters in the genre specific sections to be good ones, exempletive of the system's handling of the genre. and i too hope they do wind up doing the followup characters from the ground up and if i were them i would simply erratta taurus and the others once the new "how we try and represent these in hero" work is actually done.

Re: Thats one nimble little bull yes in 5e the amount of dex was whatever you wanted within campaign limits. but imo in 5e the amount of dex chosen was most often chosen high because of the combat efficiency of buying dex as opposed to the other options. so in this case, the pointing system being skewed caused the "concepts" to be limited. people would not usually play an actual hulking brute but more a world class gymnast of a hulking brute. in 6e i see a definite improvement in the separation of those traits so that dex can be something you dont feel pressured by the budgetting system to ramp up. if you start wanting an agile or fast brick, great, but there is no longer the pressure to make every brick into an agile brick in order to stay competitive. the thing and te beast are both viable, neither favored mechanically. different but equally playable. thats imo an improvement. i just wish that difference could have been spotlighted in the sample characters in the core book. many people do follow those leads, particularly new guys if there are new guys. bybthe time an enemies books gets out many new 6e campaigns will already be underway working off the core book examples. its an opportunity missed imo. not uncorrectable but it really depends on how much effort goes into reimagining the enemies characters and the cu specs.

Re: WOW! Stun drain in 6e the first sounds a lot like avad as a limitation. so you can build that in the system now. as for faster recovery, looking at how complex even something like transfer now is, a triggered aid doesn't seem all that off to me. oh wait, triggered healing. but ok i get the picture.

Re: WOW! Stun drain in 6e

Re: WOW! Stun drain in 6e ah hah! thats it. thanks

hmmm... 6e stun drain looks to be exceptionally effective compared to other alternaties. 12dc 12d6 eb does 42 stun with defenses dropping that to say 15-20 thru AVAD power defense 6d6 does avg 21 stun vs power defense and this is likely all thru or maybe reduced by 5-10 to 15-20 as well so far so good stun drain 6d6 (it is ranged by default now) score 21 effect now as well but since stun cost 2 for 1 thats 42 stun loss if they have no defense and even if we assume 5-10 power defense thats still 22-32 stun drained. the 2-1 cost issue doubles the effectiveness when compared to other attacks vs stun. now sure they recover lost stun at 10 cp per turn but hey thats not going to be too far off the typical recovery rate for regular attacks is it? seems off by comparison. what am i missing? what am i missing that makes 6d6 vvad power defense and 6d6 drain vs stun both weigh in at 12dc 60 ap 6 end each and they be of equibalent effect?

Re: A tale of two tails/bases part 6 :-) is there a 7e thread yet?

Re: Thinking about combat numbers a good imo rule of thumb is this... take dcx4 so if the gaem is 12 dc have dcx4 of 48 make sure con and def equal that amount or more unless you are playing a dodgy eggshell. i have built a number of bricks based on say a 40 con, with very low defense and high stun totals. they may take 30 stun on an average hit but are well short of con stunning and can take 2-3 hits and stay up. this way you get the tough guy who isnt rock hard, he can be hit and hurt by even agents but can take a lot. this worked fine in 5e with all the figs that con gave but i have yet to run the numbers and see how well it works in 6e but i think with con and stun being cheaper it may be even more viable. its an atypical 5e build for sure but i loved those. con 40 costs 30 pd ed 10 each costs 16 stun 80 costs 30body 20 costs 10 add a little resistant def or regen hmmm...

Re: A tale of two tails/bases part 6 yes it is explicitly defined under extra limbs and the base one is the [artial coverage rule under bases. i brought this up under 5e and also explicitly added it to the 6e design threads but it remains as the official way to go in 6e. the answer in 5e was along the lines of "if you dont like it dont use it" still following thay recommendation personally.

Ok so things could be done in 6e differently than they have been but so far they aren't and I am wondering why. In the old days your typical supers all had dexs in the 20s and up. 23 or 26 depending on campaign standards was overly common even for supers not known for "agility" There were quite a few dex 23 bricks or at least dex 20 or 18. All of which are "really damn good" or "superhuman" depending on genre/edition/version. All because dex provided CV and speed, two things every hero needed. But now we have HERo6 and all dex is about is who goes first and skills, more or less. CV and speed are totally separate. This opens the possibility for heroes with more normal stats. There is no reason a gadgeteer would need a high dexterity. Certainly a brick wouldn't. There is nothing wrong with a brick say with a 10 dex or maybe he is above average and so has a 13 or so. But when i look at the sample characters provided I don't see any move away from the old way. Taurus a bull-minotaur based brick, who has in his write0upalmost no mention of being especially agile or a previous career as a gymnast, has a 23 dexterity. Why? How does that match his concept? This isn't about nit picking a given character write-up but looking at the sample supers i see a lot of "just like we did in hero 5" ishness on their characteristics. the first five characters i wrote up had widely varying characteristics and many had basically normal dex and such. So as you play with hero6 characters are you seeing a lot more "this matches concept" low to normal human characteristics where you used to see the usual superhuman stats? brick with 10 dex - got one yet?

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated.... I have decided to keep it simple Base form pays full book multiform cost Other forms pay 1/2 the multiform cost each. Assuming 400 pt forms, thats about the same points as yours BUT... I dont have any frets about "well if my form is only built on 360 do i have fewer complications. I also avoid the old recursive issue of "well the form is only 360 so the multiform cost is 1/5 of 360..." There is no difference in 400 pt character who paid 40 for multiform and 360 pt character who didn't, except i think the former is simpler. So whichever way works.

Re: Omcv 1?

Re: Idea about Dex In my curent homebrew, a very simple system, I also ditched after decades the notion of "attributes" or "characteristics" the lumped group of traits that apply to skills. If you want to be dextrous buy up the traits that should be high. So dumping characteristics as skill bases seems logical to me. Want to be good at running buy running, climbing buy climbing, etc.

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated....

Re: Is there a "penalty to skill roll" modifier for powers?

Re: Is there a "penalty to skill roll" modifier for powers? So the goal is to just make powers cheaper? Why be so complex. just reduce their cost? Same result but more forthright and upfront. We think these powers ought to cost less. BAM cost loweder ewsult - they cost less. beats the heck out of "we think these powers should be cheaper" BAM we add a not really limiting limitation and scale it so they reduce the cost but buy more skill and save points for nothing result - they cost less but its a much bisier character sheet. Putting a lim into place at a value so that they will get powers cheaper and thats after buying off the penalty - thats just lowering the cost, not using the system. house rule the prices down and be gone.. i mean heck, in FH i think some of the established options are things like "divide the cost of all spells by 3" do what works but do it simply.

Re: Size Powers Actually, isn't that the rule? Thats the "solution" its what you are doing. Thats not "why"? What is gained? What will be different in play? In chargen? as a result of this change? So, if i get this right, you are giving desolid always on an automatic persistent and 0 end for no cost? have such characters in your games so far seemed underpowered? I mean, sure, i might consider the value of "always on" in regards to desolid and of course it might go up, depends on character build and how serious this is. But i think i would still make them buy 0 end and persistent. I myself loathe having limitations that grant free benefits .I find it throws the active points comparisons, for what little they are worth, right out the window. ymmv