Chris-M

Re: Social resolution mechanics for Hero Like Doc, I would be very interested in seeing a system for group social dynamics (groups in the sense of institutions large and small, not in the sense of an adventuring party). As for individual interaction, my thinking tends to be along the same line as Mark's. If a roleplaying goal, such as trying to get Lord Fancypants to reveal where he's getting his information on the Tightwad Merchants, is an extremely important campaign point, then as a GM I'm going to set up something big and dramatic, like a ball or a jousting tournament or whatever is appropriate, that lends itself to a layered, slow-building sequence that will require several skill checks at the very least. Like others, I find Hero perfectly satisfactory in this regard, but I don't pay too much attention to the time requirements or whatever. I assign modifiers based on what makes sense to me. I will say that, like nexus, I have certainly had problems with players balking at themselves being the targets of social interaction skills. While Mark's suggestions are awesome, and I definitely want to try using some of them soon, I have had players in specific situations with whom even those ideas would not work. One thing I try to do now when starting a campaign is that after characters are made but before we actually start playing, I like to sit down with all of the players and talk about what my intentions are with the campaign, the style I'm going to employ in running it, what I expect from the players, and so forth. Sometimes are first session is nothing but this "orientation." One of the things that I like to cover is this issue of things like NPCs using social interaction skills or charm magic or mind control on the player characters, and how I expect the players to handle it. Needless to say, this doesn't eliminate all problems that crop up later in the heat of gaming, but it does seem to preempt most of them, and I can always have a one-on-one with a frustrated player later and remind him or her of what we talked about when the campaign began. Also, since I'm not a jam-the-players-up kind of GM, I always remind and promise them that player characters will always have the opportunity to turn the tables or have their revenge if a particular NPC's actions really bother them, and I stick by that since it makes for good heroic fiction (all I'm promising is the opportunity -- it's up to them to act on it successfully). Getting back to nexus' original questions, I think part of the problem is that this issue hits directly on the whole roleplaying-versus-mechanics problem -- if you're trying to promote play-acting style roleplaying, or that's your group's normal MO, do you go with the roleplaying or what the mechanics dictate? My solution to this dilemma has been to adopt a "Bonus Not Penalties" approach -- I encourage players to roleplay out an encounter using a social skill and if they do a good job or do/say something particularly clever, I'll give a bonus to their skill check when they make their roll, but if their roleplaying is bad or comically inept, I might, at most, point out that the character would no better than to actually do that and then let the player roll without a penalty for roleplaying (this of course doesn't apply to overt acts like hitting someone upside the head with a bottle). Of course, this just further demonstrates how subjective this aspect of gaming is. I don't know how you get around that beyond making it a completely crunchy and mechanic-driven part of the experience, but I can't imagine that would be very satisfying for most gamers.

Re: Gettin' Crafty! Okay, that's pretty darned nifty.

The simplest approach would seem to be to build the character with a lot of Luck and a lot of Unluck, the former with the Limitation "Only works immediately after doing something particularly good or selfless," and the latter with the Limitation "Only affects the character immediately after doing something particularly bad or selfish." The two obvious problems that jump out at me are having to rule on what is "particularly good/selfless" or "particularly bad/selfish," and the fact that this shtick could really get out of hand and dominate attention at the game table too much. To address the latter point, I'd probably also slap an Activation roll on both. As to the first point...I suppose you could go with an 8 or less Activation roll and if an action by the character seems close to qualifying just roll the Activation roll and let karma decide. Thoughts?

Re: The Ol' Cross-Genre Bait-and-Switch Great point about reading the characters' disads to anticipate what the players envision for their characters. I also agree with everyone who said that the players need to be tipped off in some fashion to the fact that some major twist is going to happen. I think if you have a group that is very major-twist-adverse normally, you'd probably want to not only tip them off, but let them know that it's going to be a genre twist. If I were doing it and I felt reasonably confident my players would be able to roll with it, I'd just want to let them know that there was going to be some sort of major twist in the first session so that they're not blind-sided, but not let them know in advance what sort of twist it will be. If I had one or more players putting a lot of points in things like Money, Contact, and such, or world-specific disads, I'd probably want to wave them off at character creation, saying, "Don't put points in those areas. Just trust me." You guys have given me some confidence that, if properly handled, this sort of thing could be pulled off. I definitely wouldn't do it at a con unless that was the advertised point of the session. "A team of special forces operatives crash land their chopper during a strange storm and find themselves in a world of elves and dwaves -- with a Dark Lord's army of orcs bearing down on them!" or something like that. (Really, who wouldn't want to mow down orcs with automatic weapon fire?)

Something I've always wanted to do as a GM is to start a new campaign for a specific genre -- Star Hero space knights, Western Hero gunslingers, maybe Dark Champions special forces operatives, or whatever -- have the players make up characters, get halfway into the first session, and then have some sort of cosmical event hurl the party to another time/dimension where the real campaign is going to be set. So we'd end up with a group of Space Knights in Hudson City, Old West gunslingers in a planetary romance, or special forces soldiers in fantasy world. I've never done it, though, because in my experience players hate being faked out in this fashion, not that I blame them. When I put together a new campaign, I want the players to put a lot of thought into building their characters -- not just their backstories but how the player wants the character to grow and evolve as well. In experience, with a system like Hero, most players are already thinking along these lines anyway. So the problem is that when you pull the ol' cross-genre bait-and-switch, you screw up the vision in the players' heads of how they saw their characters growing in the future. I’m sure some players would be excited and up for the challenge, but for others the shift in setting would “break” their characters and they’d lose a lot of enthusiasm for the campaign (which, again, I can understand). The reason I'd want to do it as a surprise and not let the players in on what I'm going to do from the beginning is that I think the surprise adds to the fun, and also, gamers being gamers, you'd get players who were built to be effective in the setting the action is going to shift to, no matter how shaky the rationalization. Of course, if you do try the bait-and-switch I think you have to try to win over your players as quickly as possible by focusing on what’s cool and fun about the situation, which I think means giving them an opportunity to do cool and heroic things with their out-of-genre skills and abilities (in support of all the usual stuff that makes campaigns fun – good story, good characters, good situations that can go several different ways, etc.). I’ve also thought about doing this as a con session, although the concern still remains. On the one hand, since you’re talking about a one-off session, hopefully players would be more inclined to roll with the twist. On the other hand, you might have players who chose your session over another precisely because they wanted to play in an Old West gunslinger adventure and now you’re dumping them in some swords-and-Martians planetary romance thing. So maybe a con isn’t the right place to try to pull this off. Thoughts?

Re: User Guide for that Bruce Timm/DC Animated-Style Hero-Maker Thing Here's a new tip I'm adding to the guide that you guys may find useful. I'm a little disappointed with the limited selection of chest symbol elements available in the Heromatic, and the first thought I had was drawing my own or using some royalty-free clip art pieces and dropping them in after copying a character screen capture into Photoshop (or your image-editing software of choice). Of course, the problem is that the figures are standing in 3/4 view and any clip art or other emblem I might want to use would be a flat, front-facing view. After applying a little experimentation and good old fashioned perspective drawing technique, I've determined that you can get the right angle on a new element you want to add to the figure pretty easily. Select the element you want to use. In Adobe Illustrator, use the "Shear" option under the Object-->Transform menu option. Set it to Horizontal Axis and set the angle to -15 degrees. In Adobe Photoshop, select the element, use CTRL+T to transform the selection. Then under Edit-->Transform select the Skew option and set the Horizontal angle to 15 degrees. This will give you the skew you need to slap a new emblem onto your character's chest or forehead and have it look right.

Re: User Guide for that Bruce Timm/DC Animated-Style Hero-Maker Thing Okay, I made Pariah's correction to the guide, fixed a few other typos and such, and the HTML zip file now includes the extra graphics files (just a couple things -- the guide isn't graphics-heavy). I've replaced the original zip files with the updated versions, so you can grab them from the first post in this thread. Thanks again for reading through the guide, Pariah, and spotting that error! As always, any other comments, corrections, and suggestions are welcome here.

Re: ninja heroes from each state Well, obviously Texas' Ninja Hero would be Bubba Ninja, and-- say, waitaminute...

Re: User Guide for that Bruce Timm/DC Animated-Style Hero-Maker Thing

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

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Just FYI, in case you haven't already seen it, I wrote a user guide to the Heromatic app and posted it in this thread. Check it out if you have the time.

Re: We Loves Us Some Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs Please do! I did want to mention that while I like games with nonhuman races, I think human-only campaigns can be a lot of fun too (sadly, I've never gotten to play in one). I do think human-only, from what I've seen, tends to push GMs in the direction of thinking things through a little more about making things fun, different, and interesting for the players since they don't have the ol' multi-race mix to fall back on.

Re: Post A Crime With Game Potential No link, but a few years ago there were all sorts of stories about various weapons (small arms to WMDs) disappearing from the former Soviet Union. My understanding was that in most cases this was believed to be the result of current and former military officers selling off these assets for their own profit, but you could easily imagine one or more supervillains being behind at least some of this, or committing crimes to get the cash to buy the goods themselves or through their intermediaries.

I have written a user guide for that, well, you've read the title to the thread, so you know what I'm talking about. Hopefully this will help and encourage some new folks to create some characters with this awesomely fun and addictive tool. (The Heromatic in question is located here for those who don't already know: http://fabricadeherois.blogspot.com/ -- scroll down and click on "Criar!") Please post any questions, comments, corrections, and admonishments here in this thread. Also feel free to share any tricks or techniques you think users will find useful here as well. BTW, to see a whole bunch of great costumes/characters already created with the Heromatic, check out this thread. Speaking of which, please do not (DO NOT!!) post any characters you create to this thread. I'd like to keep this thread for tips, tricks, advice, questions, and corrections related to actually using the Heromatic. I definitely would love to see whatever super-cool characters you come up with, but please post them to the previously linked-to thread or start a new one. Thanks!! I'm attaching the guide in Word Doc and HTML versions to this post. The Word Doc version is more readable, I think. So please take a look at the guide, especially those of you who are already black belts with the Heromatic, and let me know what you think of the guide. Like I said, hopefully it will encourage and help some new folks to enter the character-creation fray! To paraphrase our own Steve Long: Make a Hero!

Re: We Loves Us Some Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs I actually liked Skyrealms of Jorune a great deal, although I think it's more of a science fantasy/planetary romance (which I am predisposed to like because it's hard to find well-conceived, original, and well-designed instances of those genres). That said, I completely understand what teh bunneh and ghost-angel have said about the GMs busting out their completely original/unusual non-human races. I've actually wanted to build a fantasy setting with completely original non-human races, but it's a daunting challenge. On the one hand, if you don't make them fully-conceived and thought-out peoples, you run the risk of them coming off as shallow and one-dimensional ("they're all hot-headed, honor-obsessed warriors!") or, if they're not clearly defined at all, they might come off as fuzzy and vague and incomprehensible. On the other hand, if the GM does too much detailed, nuanced racial design, and tries to force too much of it down the players' throats, you get the "study in alien physiology" effect. So if the GM wants to bust out a stable of original/unusual non-human races, and doesn't want them to be one-quality cliches (although the traditional fantasy non-human races are often one-quality cliches), he has to design them to be nuanced yet easily-understood conceptually without overwhelming the players with "The Ecology of..." style info. Which is not easy to do (as proven by the parade of easily-forgettable alien races one finds in many sci-fi RPGs, although I think players in sci-fi games are a little more patient with or accepting of weird/unusual/original non-human races than fantasy gamers in general). I think that's one reason why I generally favor either using the standard battery of fantasy races (either as-is or with tweaks), or a lineup of completely original races, but not a mix of the two. I've found that the contrast between the two usually reflects badly on one or the other -- if the original races are great, it seems to emphasize the tired, hackneyed nature of the standard races, while if the original races aren't great or are confusing or too complex, they seem annoying in contrast to the comfortable, familiar standard races. At least that's been my experience to date.

Re: Possible House Rule: Group Cover Combat Maneuver (long) Those are all great suggestions. I'm torn between biting the bullet and doing it as some sort of crew-served AE attack or some combination of Sean and g-a's suggestions (with a dash of my idea). I'll probably try a couple different things in gameplay and see what "feels" best for my style of game. Thanks again for the feedback.

Let's say a buddy (who's a decent GM) says he's going to start up a new Fantasy Hero campaign. How important is it to you that his fantasy world has the standard elves-dwarves-orcs assortment of fantasy races? Or to flip it around, how disappointed are you if you hear it's not going to have the standard elves-dwarves-orcs lineup? How do you feel about game worlds that feature more or less the standard assortment of races but give them different names and/or change them in generally not terribly significant ways? How do you feel if the world has a mix of standard and more-like-Star-Wars-aliens races? Is it weird having the cliche next to the extremely different/unusual? How do you feel about fantasy game worlds that have a slate of non-human races that are all very unusual and non-standard? I know that the politically gamer correct answer is that what's important is how good the campaign is, building interesting characters, how good a job the GM does of making the world come to life, etc., etc. And of course, that's all true. But all of that aside, it's okay to say how you really feel. Let it out! If you have to have halflings, admit it. If it kind of bothers you when the GM gets too creative with his fantasy races, that's okay. If you hate the cliches and will hurl if you see one more half-orc, we want you to share!

Re: Possible House Rule: Group Cover Combat Maneuver (long) Thanks for the feedback, Sean. Your point about brevity is well taken. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at explaining things succinctly, but I'll work on that. You're right, the group OCV should be based on the lowest OCV of the group. Along the same lines, the biggest range penalty for any covered hex should be applied to the group OCV and used in all attack rolls. I don't think Setting and Bracing should be allowed -- I'm trying to balance the penalties and the gain the Group Covering characters get, but what do you think? You're also right that they're getting off too many shots. Maybe just do it as two attack rolls on each character who moves into the covered area, but keep the part where they can shoot at a number of target characters equal to half the number of covering characters?

Re: Covering a Hex with a Beam Attack I decided, perhaps foolishly, to whip together my own Hero-ish maneuver-based solution to the problem, which I have posted here. Hopefully I don't get mauled too badly for it being too long or too complex.

The special effect I want to model is the classic scene from an old Frank Miller Daredevil or Wolverine comic book where a dozen or so ninja archers are hidden, perched atop roofs and walls overlooking a street or alley, and as the unsuspecting characters enter the trap a hail of arrows rains down upon them. In comics and movies this kind of thing tends to fill non-hero normals full of arrows, but the heroes get hit once or twice (if that) and keep rolling. This would be easy to build as a power, or you could conceivably just use the standard Cover combat maneuver. But for personal taste reasons I don’t want to build this as some kind of group power, and I don’t want to have to figure out, keep track of, and apply Cover for a whole bunch of archers individually. So what I’ve decided to do is create a house rule Group Cover combat maneuver, and it goes like this here. A couple of quick caveats: Obviously this is built to my personal tastes, which may be a bit more “gamey” and comic book-ish than others prefer. And this may seem complex as I explain it, but I think that in practice, once you grok what I’m going for, it’s actually pretty simple, unless my reasoning is out of sync with yours. As always, YMMV. Also, I intend to use some version of this maneuver with NPC minions I am creating specifically for a campaign I’m building, and while I don’t intend for it to be available to the PCs, I’ve included what my rules would be for PCs using this maneuver in case it sounds like something you might allow your own PCs to use in your campaign. A group of three or more characters must declare to use the Group Cover maneuver (or adjust the minimum characters required to your liking). Each participating character must have the Teamwork skill and the Rapid Fire skill. As a GM option, you could require that each participating character have at least one CSL with the Group Cover maneuver (I’m going to). The characters providing Group Cover move at the SPEED of the slowest member of their group, and move on the lowest DEX of the group. They must all have the same type of ranged attack. The damage rolled if a hit is scored is equal to the least powerful attack in the group. No levels can be used to increase damage. The bonus to OCV from levels is equal to the smallest bonus any of the covering characters has. If one of the archers or gunmen only has one level he can apply towards his OCV, then the group as a whole only gets +1 to its covering attacks, even if every other covering character has 6 applicable levels. As a GM option, he or she can rule that only CSLs in the Group Cover maneuver can be applied (or the Group Cover or standard Cover maneuvers). Characters participating in the Group Cover maneuver are automatically at 1/2 DCV, even if they have other combat maneuvers or abilities that would normally mitigate this. Characters providing Group Cover can perform no other actions. If a character participating in the maneuver does take some other action after combat starts, that character is dropped out of the maneuver and cannot rejoin it later. The other characters performing the maneuver can maintain their Group Cover as long as they meet the characters required minimum mentioned above. Also, they cannot change the hexes they are committed to covering. Once the characters who want to perform Group Cover are in place, they declare the hexes that they are covering. If the number of covering characters is equal to or greater than the number of hexes being covered, the cover modifier to OCV is -3. If the number of hexes being covered is greater than the number of characters providing cover, for every point by which the number of hexes being covered is greater than the number of covering characters, the cover modifier increases by -2. So if six archers are covering eight hexes, they are at a -7 OCV before they apply any applicable levels. Once the Group Cover is set up, what happens if a target character wanders into one of the covered hexes? Any character that moves into a covered area gets attacked with one shot at the OCV calculated above for each covered hex he or she moves into up to half the number of covering characters. So if six archers are covering an area and a hero runs through four hexes in that area, three attack rolls are made on the hero because three is half of six. If there were eight archers providing Group Cover, then four attack rolls would be made. Characters performing the Group Cover maneuver can continue to make these attacks on characters who enter the hexes they are covering up to half the number of covering characters. So if six archers are covering an area and three heroes run through four covered hexes, each will be attacked three times. If a fourth hero runs through the covered area, no attacks are rolled on him at all. To keep things simple, the covering characters don’t get to pick and choose which enemy characters they fire on. They don’t have to shoot allies, but they automatically must attack an enemy entering the covered area if they are able. The reasoning here is that the reason the maneuver works at all is that the covering characters are concentrating and reacting with hair-trigger reflexes, so they don’t have time to analyze or pick and choose (other than to not shoot their own allies). At the GM’s discretion, player characters performing the maneuver can tell the GM, when they declare the area they’re covering, which enemy targets they won’t fire upon, but they are not allowed to change their minds once combat begins. Additionally, if the characters set up Group Cover after a combat encounter has begun, the GM can rule that they can’t use this option at all if circumstances are too chaotic for them to properly coordinate (or maybe he allows it if they can communicate with each other and make a Teamwork roll). The Group Cover maneuver continues in subsequent segments until the number of characters attacked is greater than half the number of covering characters, at which point no further covering attacks can be rolled until the covering characters’ next phase. Example: Six archers with an effective 3 SPEED are using the Group Cover maneuver. On segment four no one moves into a covered hex, so they hold their collective action. On segment five, two heroes each move through three covered hexes. Each has three attack rolls made against them by the archers. In segment six a third hero runs through four covered hexes, and three attack rolls are made against him (because there are six archers and three is half of six, the character can move through the fourth hex without provoking an additional attack roll). Later in segment six a fourth hero runs through covered hexes. No attacks are rolled against him by the covering archers because they’ve already rolled attacks against three targets, and the maximum number of target characters Group Cover can fire upon is half the number of characters participating in the maneuver. On segment eight, before the archers’ DEX comes up, one of the heroes runs through the covered area again. The archers cannot make any attack rolls on him because their covering attacks are still used up. After their DEX comes up, another hero runs into the covered area. The archers can once again make attack rolls on that character... And there you have it. Now, I haven’t playtested this yet, so I have no idea if it will work well in practice or not, but like I said, I need something like this for a specific set of minions I’m building for a campaign so that I can set up some specific encounters I have in mind that will, I think, be very exciting to play. Anyway, let me know what you think.

This is another one of those "I could've swore I read how to handle this in one of the books somewhere, but now I can't find it no matter how hard I look" things. I'm creating a team of bandits. About half are melee weapon guys and the other have are archers. The way they work is that they set up ambushes where the melee guys jump out and attack and the archers prevent the targets from retreating. Effect-wise what I'm going for is that these archer guys are covering the escape route and if a character tries to run away (or run in to help), they have to run through a hail of low-OCV arrows. Are there already specific rules for using the Cover maneuver with a beam attack on a hex or a set of hexes? For a set of characters using the Cover maneuver with a beam attack on a set of hexes?

Re: The Spirit of Superheroing Trebuchet, one thing I always try to do is establish early on that the campaign is the PC's show, and even if they aren't the biggest and most beloved heroes initially, it is their destiny to become so if they can rise to the challenge. I find if that if you can get the group to buy into the idea that becoming more famous and respected than the Avengers (or whomever) is a cool thing to strive for, they're a lot more inclined to go with your flow. I'll make sure to play the NPC praise card early on to try to win over my hack-and-slashers. Vulcan, I'd never thought of just reconceptualizing the idea of loot like that before. Great idea, and I'll definitely have to try that.

Re: Can Characters get to powerful for some Genres/Settings? Sounds like there are two issues going on in that campaign: One is the issue of raw power and the other is Killer Shrike's concept of Relevance -- check out this post and Shrike's article that he links to in it. By "too powerful" I'm guessing the GM means that their powers are built better or they have more active points in them. The first case can be solved by the GM and the players who aren't as effective rebuilding some of their powers to be more effective (and this can be handwaved by some sort of cosmic event where the Beyonder or Fargoner or whatever transforms a few of the characters or what have you). The second case can be fixed by using the previous method and then the GM applying a house rule that limits the upper reach of any one power in terms of active points. In other words, figure out how many active points each character has in his biggest power and rule that the highest active points in a power cannot be more than 30% greater than the active points in the least expensive of that group of powers -- so if Character A wants to dump more points into his Mega Blast, he'll have to browbeat Cornwheat Boy into dumping more points into his most powerful power first, if that makes sense. The other issue is Shrike's Relevance, where a character has one or more powers that, given the setting/circumstances/GM's style, get used more often than other characters. The GM should either make an effort to give opportunities for other characters' major powers/shticks to be just as important, or he needs to allow some major rebuilding of these other characters' powers if necessary to make them fit the campaign better. Along the same lines, the GM should make an effort to make all the characters important to the setting of the campaign. Now, if he gives all characters an opportunity and they don't take advantage of it, I don't think there's anything more he can do except maybe make some out-of-session suggestions to those players for ways they might get their characters more involved in the background story of the setting. Hopefully this addresses at least some of what you're talking about.

Re: The Spirit of Superheroing Indeed. And it's not that these guys in particular are bad guys or bad gamers or anything like that. I've played with very few such players who don't get it eventually. I'm just looking for ways to try to shorten the time it takes them to get it and get in the proper spirit of things. Great suggestions, Scifi_Toughguy. BNakagawa, I think those suggestions could actually work if applied with some humor and handled carefully -- I don't want to make it a competitive situation where the players feel like I'm having the NPCs show them up just to say "you guys, suck!" Your suggestion also makes me ponder whether there's some way to give them immediate goals that seem to play to what they want to do (hack, slash, and loot) but that in fact put them in situations where the real glory and satisfaction is in true superheroing. My gut tells me that this might work, although I'm not sure I'm clever (or devious) enough to pull it off. I'll have to give it some more thought.

Re: "Glass Jaws" for Tough Minions? Wow, guys, thanks for the all the great ideas! Outstanding work. I considered things like Damage Reduction or extra PD with an activation roll (both great ideas -- especially Sean's where it's tied to what the attacker rolls), but I didn't want to go that route because it's an extra die roll and plus I wanted to make it more about the grunts being vulnerable to an attacking hero scoring a good/lucky hit (that is, I wanted the excitement of the moment to be about the player making a good roll rather than the GM making a bad one). archermoo, what I want to do is build a special type of minion that is actually tougher than normal (more PD than your standard grunt) and can take a few more hits -- unless an attacker lands a particularly good hit, in which case they go down pretty easily. I guess the idea I'm going for is that these guys are, for grunts, pretty savvy fighters, and the way I'm going to describe fighting them (that is, the special effect of their unusually high PD) is that they're shifty characters who seem to naturally roll with the punches and never enable an opponent to hit them squarely (and I don't want to use the actual Roll-with-the-Punch mechanic because I'm trying to keep things simple -- they are grunts, after all). I suppose, then, that I do want to do what Sean and sbarron suggested and tie it to hitting by less-than-half, because that way it is skill-based and it will encourage the player to put their levels in OCV and use OCV-boosting maneuvers, which will expose them to some additional risk because these minions have (again, for minions) high-damage attacks that, being minions, they won't hit with all that often. I like risk-reward dynamics, and this seems like it might be a fun way to make what will probably several different fights with "mere minions" more interesting and dramatic. So probably what I'll do is combine Sean's idea about some (significant) portion of their PD being tied to the attacker's die roll in combination with a house critical hit rule that will work on all minions in the campaign. Together, they should achieve the effect I'm going for, I think. sbarron, I absolutely love your idea about the tiered critical hit system, and I am seriously considering swiping it wholesale regardless of what I do with these special minions. Thanks again for the help, guys!