Chris-M

Re: What's the Simplest Way To Do This? I actually think the restricted VPP approach is your simplest and best bet. If my thinking matches yours, you basically have three 250 point (or whatever) packages of powers and she can cycle through them one at a time as desired. Like you said, it's sort of a set of uber Multipower ultra slots, but I think this way it's just simpler and easier to handle than either an actual linked-up Multipower build or a multiform-based build.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine And still some more Old School for y'all (there's no school like it!). Here's my modern interpretations of...The Circle: Aureole, Kor Hunter, Megan Pierce, Ebonfire, and Moonsilver (the Master refused to leave his garden and was therefore unavailable to pose ).

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race?

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Excellent work, especially...LEROY!!! Frak, I have to spread rep around before I can hit you again.

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race? Your whole post was great, AC, but that line about taboos reminds me of a few questions I try to answer when developing a culture for a fantasy world, be it a human culture or a non-human one: What is a behavior that these people consider "bad" that the default "normal" culture of the world think is fine? Why? What are the circumstances under which these people would find this "bad" behavior acceptable? What is a behavior that these people consider "good" that the default "normal" culture of the world think is wrong? Why? What are the circumstances under which these people would find this "good" behavior unacceptable? What is a personal quality that a person or thing can possess that these people find particularly admirable or desirable to a degree that is different from the default "normal" culture for the world? Why? What are the circumstances under which these people would find that quality bad or undesirable? What is a personal quality that a person or thing can possess that these people find particularly bad or undesirable to a degree that is different from the default "normal" culture for the world? Why? What are the circumstances under which these people would find that quality good or acceptable? I think these are useful thought exercises in themselves, but what I'm also trying to do is drill down into their mindset and worldview (and hopefully the practical reasons they possess their mindset and worldview). But I think when working these things out, if you want to create a really rich and engaging, and more naturalistic, culture, you want to not only figure out the surface qualities, but the exceptions as well. The seeming contradictions and inconsistencies are what make a race or culture really interesting and engaging to me, especially if you feel like you can scratch the surface a little bit as to why those contradictions and inconsistencies exist.

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race? Good answers, guys. I've used the approach of designing non-human races patterned after historic Earth cultures (although I always try to emphasize more than just one or two obvious facets of the base culture). I've also created non-human races by picking some important difference between the new race and humans and then building outward from that, similar to the Weapon and Shadowsoul's comments. I've never built up a stable of races working from a cosmological origin sequence as Enforcer discusses or as Tolkien did, but that's an interesting possibility. I think the closest I came to something like that was designing a world that was based on five different "primal energies," and each race had evolved to take advantage of a different energy (and there were no humans in this setting, which, surprisingly, my players didn't have a problem with -- I was really expecting more hassle on that point). I dig where Shrike is coming from, although I also feel it's sometimes good practice not to make everything too rational or too logical -- you can end up with settings that feel too designed and not naturalistic enough. That said, I think it's good to have a compelling reason for adding in something, be it a non-human race or whatever (as long as it fits the setting), but that reason could simply be "because my gut tells me it's a good idea to have put that element in." Only time and results will tell whether listening to your gut is a good idea or not. I don't mean to sound too cavalier about this issue of adding in new non-human races. I certainly don't advocate throwing in a ton of new races willy-nilly just to do it. But they can add a lot to a fantasy context, and I think they're fun to do, if you can do a good job, and veteran fantasy gamers will, in my experience, be happy to take a break from the usual array of races. That reminds me. Something else I try to do is to think about the relative population ratios of different races if I have more than one (that is, more than just humans). I typically don't do settings where there's some relatively equal populations of several races. Typically humans are the largest and the most geographically dominant, and I give a lot of thought to who's the next largest and so forth (and how much smaller than next largest race's population base is). It can be a fun twist, if you do it right, to have humans as the second-largest racial group -- or even a relatively rare and isolated group. If handled well it can give you a really different and really interesting feel to the campaign. Sorry about dropping into Ramble Mode there, but anyway, a few new thoughts.

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race? John, what kind of campaign needs did your SH non-human races fill? What kind of experimentation opportunities are you trying to create for your players with your FH races? Sounds pretty cool!

Re: What Makes a Good Non-Human Fantasy Race? Presented like that, authorial insert characters are definitely a bad thing, but handled more deftly I've found them to be very interesting and engaging on occasion. I think, though, it's important not to make them too common. I think they work better as rare or unusual NPCs.

We're going to cover some of the same ground we already discussed in the "We Loves Us Some Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs" thread, but I wanted to try to have a conversation about designing non-human fantasy races from a game design perspective. Why have non-human races in a setting? I think the traditional reasons are: They can have powers and abilities beyond those of normal humans. They can be limited or disadvantaged in ways normal humans are not. They are an opportunity for the gamer (or reader, in fiction) to experience unusual or alien thought processes or cultures. As a clarification of that last point, they give gamers a more focused personality framework for roleplaying a character. The first two bullets raise questions about game balance. Also, I suspect that the powers or abilities are the main reason most gamers pick a non-human race -- as a min-maxing tool (although I feel somewhat guilty about being cynical for saying that -- but bear in mind I'm playing in a 4e campaign right now ). The second two I think point to what in fact should be the coolest thing about having non-human races, although there are a couple pitfalls there as well. The first is the One-Note Race problem (e.g. "We are Klingons! We are a warrior race!"), and related to that is the second: Stereotypical Fantasy Race Syndrome (which we discussed at length in the other thread), common for elves, dwarves, orcs, and such. So what thoughts about designing and building non-human fantasy races do you have (beyond Steve's from the FH book)? Any particular thoughts about building a stable of races to populate a non-D&D fantasy world? Do you think in terms of populating certain "slots" or certain "campaign needs?" What would those be?

Re: Fingernails that shine like justice! I can't tell if her fingernails shine like justice, but excellent anyway. Rep to you!

Re: World of HEROCraft? I can't argue with either of those points. The wiki Shadowsoul pointed you at will be a great resource for you, then.

Re: World of HEROCraft? I'll be Mr. Obvious here and suggest checking out the WoW d20 3.5 books. The core book would be a very good resource for you as far as crafting races and classes go, and I'd definitely recommend it if you're really going to run something with WoW or WoW-style races or classes. The book is short on some of the cosmology details of the setting, but either you can fake that yourself or pick up the Shadow and Light book.

Re: Help with the name of a package deal Oh man, Gene Wolfe uses a bunch of terms in the New Sun books that would probably be perfect for what you want. The only one I can remember off-hand (naturally -- my memory sucks) is "exultant," which you could use for a warrior or a bard. I think it works well for either. I'd go "skald" before "gleeman," which just sounds a little too nerdy-'50's for my taste, but if you want to avoid culture-reminiscent terms, I'd use either "exultant" as mentioned, or maybe "troubadour" or "wanderer." I liked Caps' "weaponeer." Another one, which Wolfe's work reminds me of, could be "excruciator."

Re: We Loves Us Some Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Sorry, Scott -- didn't mean to dis you personally. You know, you could have just reworked the Geodesics and I wouldn't have minded.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine

Re: We Loves Us Some Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs That's a very cool way to go if you have the right group and the right GM. I like that idea very much.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine After updating the User Guide, I figured I'd finally take a crack at doing something nifty with the ol' Hero Criar. For my first attempt, I thought you guys might appreciate something old school, so I decided to take a stab at my favorite villain group from the old Enemies days. Hopefully the results aren't too bad.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? All the expected geek summer movie fare (except Dark Knight -- just haven't had a chance yet). On TV: the Avatar series-ending run of episodes, which were great, and the new Burn Notice episodes on USA, which are also great.

Re: Norse Hero PC builds- feedback welcome Finally checked these out this morning, MT. Alas, Shadowsoul beat me to most of my comments (and of course, spotted a few things I didn't). I had the same thought about extra STR only with longbows. As for the rune-crafting thing to make magic weapons/items, if it's a temporary effect it can be built as some kind of magic (i.e. spellcasting) variant. If it's to be permanent, I knew a guy once who had an enchanter character in a Fantasy Hero game he was running, and he let that guy spend his permanent XP to make weapons, trading 1 XP for 3 or 5 (I forget what it was) CP to build magic items with, but there was a set of blanket Limitations they had to be built with as well. I never played in any of those sessions, but he said it went well in part because it was a fairly cinematic campaign and he was fairly liberal with the XP anyway.

Re: Fantasy Grounds and Hero System: Good Fit? Yeah, I saw that thread (and I suppose I should have just performed some bubbamancy on it -- my bad). So it's not an issue of "support" in the usual sense -- it's more a question of whether anyone has created an XML file so that FG will support Hero rules specifically. If they have, the software *should* work just fine. I was curious if anyone had, and if it worked as well as purported.

Is anyone here currently using Fantasy Grounds to play any kind of Hero System game live on the computer (or have you recently)? Is it a good digital tabletop option for online gaming a Hero System game? I did look at earlier threads, and it seemed like none of the information was recent, so I thought it would be cool to ask again. BTW, the reason I'm asking about Fantasy Grounds specifically is that a friend of mine is trying to talk me into buying the player client to play in online D&D games with him, which I would be cool with doing, but only if I might be able to use it to play Hero online as well.

Re: Old races, new tricks. Thanks for doing it! Cool stuff. Back in the day in high school, I started an AD&D campaign which was a very thinly disguised version of Mongo from the late-70's animated Flash Gordon series. Everything was the same except I changed the names and took out the technology or replaced it with very simple magical implements. So Ming was called something else and was a powerful magic user, and his robot minions were instead low-level iron golems. And Auboreans, or whatever they were called (Prince Baron's people), became elves, the lion people were lion people with some made-up race name, and the hawk people were hawk people with some other made-up race name. My players thought it was all wonderfully creative and different, and being insecure and thirsty for any sort of praise, I couldn't bring myself to admit where this wonderfully original campaign actually came from.

Re: Potential New Player Needs Advice I'd start now. As others have said, 6e won't be out for another year, and Steve Long has said that he's not doing any kind of radical redesign, so learning and using 5e now will serve you well if you want to switch to 6e at some point after it comes out. You don't need the Champions genre book to run a superhero game with Hero -- everything you need is in the big, black book. That said, the Champions book is very well written and contains lots of good and useful material. I've been playing Champions forever, and I picked it up really just for the sake of completeness -- I didn't actually expect it to be that useful in a practical, mechanical sense. But I was pleased to find that every other page was an idea or a piece of advice or an example of a character or power that made me think, "Hey, that's really nifty! I never thought of that before" (and really, Aaron Allston's such a good writer that I should have known better than to be surprised by this). So if your cash flow is good and you can afford it, I'd definitely recommend it. If money's tight, you can hold off because it's by no means necessary. So here's the paradox of Hero: While it seems very complex because you have a zillion options (and if you employ all zillion options, it certainly can be very complex), the truth is that by electing to utilize a narrow set of options you can run Hero as a very simple and straightforward system. The problem (and the paradox) is that it can be hard to figure out how to do that until after you know the system reasonably well. To answer your question, I would say that, in all honesty, I don't think learning to run Hero is any more difficult than learning to run 3e D&D (and it's even simpler in some ways). The big black book itself has some good advice on how to self-simplify the system, and here are a few personal tips on how to make your life as a GM a whole lot easier early on so that you can get something up and running right away while still learning the system (some of these won't make much sense now but will if you decide to delve into Hero): Don't allow any Power Frameworks initially. If necessary, raise allowed the base character point total to compensate, but in my personal experience, Power Frameworks often confuse new Champions players and also tend to give the player more options than he can meaningful really understand and use effectively early on. If you can afford to, buy at least the first UNTIL Super Powers Database book right away and only use powers out of that. Otherwise, only build (for players or villains) powers that have one Advantage and, at most, two Limitations. You can of course move away from this as quickly as your group's growing understanding of how to build powers allows. Once you're comfortable that you'll be using Hero for a long haul, the Hero Designer software is extremely, extremely useful and a very wise investment. Don't be super-concerned about all the combat modifiers and optional rules early on. I mean, if it helps you and your group learn to run combat more easily, and to have faster-paced combats early on, don't worry about Endurance until you're ready to handle it. Don't worry about very specific range modifiers until you're ready to add that in (in necessary, just have "close range" and "long range," where "long range" has a -2 or -3 penalty for something far away but still realistically hitable), and so forth. That last point is very important, because a lot of people, players and GMs alike, coming from other systems like D&D have this tendency to want to experience "the rules as written." Hero actively wants you, the GM, to change, customize, or ignore whatever you feel like if it will enable you to run a fun session that you can handle. (Never let your players back you into a "but the rules say we can do this!" argument. ) Don't worry about it! We're here to help, and it's always great to hear from someone who's looking into using the Hero System. If you have any other questions or concerns, don't be self-conscious or worry that they might be too simple or too nit-picky -- just fire away and we'll do our best to help.

Re: Fantasy Hero 101 Sounds cool -- and thanks for the update. You could always try to work in a little roleplaying/social skill-oriented stuff into the modules. My memory of the Keep is misty at best, but maybe in an orc area the players could rescue/interrogate a hobgoblin prisoner and get a little side quest that way that was more RP-oriented. Or if you want to keep the "slay evil races on sight" vibe going, have the players run into some clueless townie boy who's out there trying to find his older sister whom he thinks has been captured by the hobgoblins. That encountered could be roleplayed and then when the players find the sister it can turn out that there's some reason why she doesn't want to go home and that encounter can be RPed. Just some different ideas you may or may not find useful at your discretion.