Catseye

Sadly I am now in Florida or I could be interested

Something that has always bugged me about Hero as it developed is that its almost but not QUITE regular in some of the overlapping powers. 

Force Fields and Armor *aught* to be the same thing, one bought uses end and one not, for instance, but in practice the numbers don't quite work out that way.

I'd love to see someone take a step back from all the existing work and ask "how many of these powers are really other powers with advantages/limitations" and then re-calculate the numbers so it really all adds up.

Do the "complete" books really have all of the 2 core rule books in them?  Because what I want to do is build my own setting.

Since my primary thrust is Fantasy i think id go for FH complete instead, if its the same difference...

On closer look, even the damaged copies of vol 1 are marked as "unavailable".

All I could find on the online store were "damaged cover" copies.

Im thinking about catching up and updating my FRED but Id really like nice printed copies of the new rules.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far

I never had that big a problem with 5e Regen. A bit clunky but it worked in play. But then I'll admit I don't use it very much at all.

To be most playable, I would suggest that a game system SHOULD front load the hard things to build time as much as possible.

I'd go so far as to suggest as this might be one of the most important game-design failures of Hero in later revisions. The sheer mass of bookeeping required during play-time.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far

*raises hand*

 

I haven't used the hit location chart in normal games for years nor has anyone gm I've played under lately.

I've only ever used the hit location chart for 'called shots' in heroic level games.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

Glad you enjoyed it.

Jonnathan Coultion is very much a folk/pop net phenomenon and one of my favorite new talents. You can hear more of his stuff at his website... (or on real Rhapsody if you subscribe.)

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/store/downloads/

He's actually got a pretty big underground/folk rep already. He wrote an produced the "Code Monkey" song that was used as the theme for a TV show as well as the song at the end of Portal.

Edit: P.S. Here's one of my absolute favorites...

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/ReYourBrains.mp3

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

No

Re: Why are so many people upset that Cryptic is only using the Champions IP?

Ignoring for a moment the question of right to use rules...

(see Parker Bros. v. Anti Monpopoly. The upshot is that Copyright with regard to written works only covers text and artwork, not ideas, and rules systems are ideas. Trademark, often misunderstood, only cover your right not to have someone make your customers think they are you.)

I'm not upset that they arent using HERO rules. I've just lost any interest in the project. Its like a Champions cartoon to me, and I wouldn't watch that, either.

However I think they have made a big mistake in that the rules ARE of core interest to the Champions core audience.... and I'm not sure that they haven't just lost most of not all marketing value to the IP.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

Champions and Charnel Houses

 

Groups of people in spandex get together in bars and drink until someone hands them a map leading to a supervillain lair. Nobody bothers to ask whether the "supervillian" has committed any crimes, they just group together into a team to go off, kill him and his henchmen and loot the corpses.

SOunds exactly like what the Crytpic Champions game will be....

You just described the mindest of CoH players to a T. One of the reasons I burned out on the game...

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares

Hmm

Elrond the elf.

L Ron the Hubbard

Who's the third?

Re: Need a reasonably well known charcter idea

Oh and my write up of Jin is pretty basic. I had to turn it out quick and this is a 150 pt game. By the time I got done buying him Kinjitsu (sp?) with the Damage Shield option there wasn't a lot more to do beside a guess at stats, some Acrobatics, and PS:Cooking. (I have a vague memory that it came up in an episode that he is actually a fine cook...)

Side note while researching I found out something I always wondered about-- what the hell does "Champloo" mean. Turns out its a corrupted transliteration of the original Japanese word in the title. Actually translated the title would be "Samurai Mix-up" or "Samurai Remix" which explains the record album image in the opening credits.

Re: Need a reasonably well known charcter idea

Well, yes, I'm sure there are earlier examples...

But I personally found Adric to sort of be the absolute essence of the problem.

YMMV.

for your enjoyment... a plot treatment someone once told me at a con..

Wesley Must Die: The transporter goes berserk creating duplicates of Wesley Crusher leading to an all out "phasers on kill" Wesley hunt.

Re: The book I want more then any other....

I think the sheer size of the rule makes it slower, at least for me.

It used to be (back in the second edition days) there there were a pretty small handful of powers to know and then it was just "get creative with adv/lim." A lot more is cannonzied now, so that means there is a lot more cannon you need to reference.

This may improve as I get my HERO feet back under me, but I'm noticing an ongoing trend... please try not to react defensively to the second half of this. This is just my experiences. If people are having better experiences, I'd like some pointers or suggestions.

I have run two systems over the past 2 years, HERO and TORG.

I love character creation in HERO. I feel like I can really create original characters that are exactly what I'm trying to accomplish. I hate character creation in TORG. I have this dirty feeling that despite the outward trappings, all characters are really about the same.

I love running TORG. I find it easy and breezy. I have the tools to reduce any off thing the players through at me down to a difficulty check practically without thinking. The players have plenty of tools to create drama and save themselves from bad situations so little to nay of that falls on my shoulders.

I don't like running HERO these days. I always feel like I'm drowning in the rules, and missing things. If I don't get the balance exactly right then the dramatic pacing goes to hell. In the end, I find myself cheating so much to keep the game going and functional it almost doesn't matter what the characters are on paper.

In the end, it seems to me like HERO excels at what I would think of as "PvP" from my world of computer game development. When its just a small number of characters fighting (which to be fair is most of what a supers game is) it works great. When you try to take it to larger story issues though it gets unwieldly.

Help?

Re: The book I want more then any other....

For those with up to date experience yes.

I actually found it a challenge even using HD coming back to it after all these years. A LOT of time spent looking the details of things up in rules. Many thanks to Dan for putting page references in the descriptions. Without those I might still be at it...

Okay,

SO last night I ran something I've been itchign to try for awhile, my open-genre game.

The players enjoyed it.. they asked when we can run again... but as a GM I felt i had a number of problems that I'd like to try to address. Some may just be rustyness with the system and learning the changes from the last time I really did a lot with the system, which was around the second edition of Champions.

(1) Balance. This one is plauging me big-time. Maybe it because I played a PC for awhile before judging, but in an old 200 pt super game I didnt have ANY balsace problems really. I simply built approximately equal pt villains, threw them at the heros, and it mostly seemed to "just work."

I'm more interested in running Heroic games these days, around 150 pts I think, but Im having a heck of a time with balance. How much PD/ED should charcters running around in such a game have? What scale (number of dice) should attacks be? Since they generally arent paying for attacks out of their own charatcer points, it just seems harder to all balance out.

(2) Scale. In the super genre it tends to be small numbers of Heroes v. small numbwrs of villains. My HDTimer plugin handles the round and recovery tracking, but it still seems pretty hard to balance and keep track of these things over large numbers of characters. IS the "overwhelmed by numbers' scenario just not workable in hero?

(3) Combats dragging on. This relates to the balance thing. If defenses are too low, its too deadly. if they are too high, combat drags on forever unless I GM-cheat it.

Thoughts folks? Im all ears...

Re: Modeling Parkour/Free Running

Super Parkour probably *would* be a style of Wire-fu.

One could argue that a lot of the stuff in the matrix was super-parkour...

Re: Need a reasonably well known charcter idea

First of all, the character's name was spelled ADRIC,

You should be really ashamed you know that.

and he was during the Peter Davison era, not Tom Baker.

Actually it was both. He joined Baker originally in N-space but stayed a bit past the switch of Doctors.

Re: The book I want more then any other....

What I notice is the cool distance.

People are nice enough, but this place is called new England for a reason. People here would die rather then show you what they are really feeling.

Its a lot like the Midwest where I lived for highschool and college.

Cali is the opposite. Its sort of like the NYC openness Iw as born to but with a layer of smiles on top of it.

You know how you say "fuck you" in Califronia?

"Thank you for sharing."

You know how you say "fuck you" in NYC?

"Trust me,"

You know how you say "fuck you" in the midwest?

"well, isn't that nice."

I havent quite figured it out in New English yet...

Re: Need a reasonably well known charcter idea

Sylvia Stingray from the old and new version of the Bubblegum Chris is very much a focused, calculating person with an array of scientific skills and the desire to use them to persue her own agenda.

Great character. Someone I'D play.... but I doubt this guy can handle playing a girl.

Just about everyone from Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell can fit this bill depending on how scientific/technically versed they need to be.

Oooh, didnt think of GITS. yeah a few of them mgithve worked.

In the end I ended up with 3 stiock characters...

Jin from Samurai Champloo

Jim Hawking from Outlaw Star ( I filled in the one on the web but it was a great start)

Scooby Doo

Thats enough choice for him.

 

It's not what you want but I have a 150 Post Apoc gunslinger I built. Easy to play, easy to use. I'll email it to you if you want. The player I built it for never showed up.

Sure, ill ptu it in stocks. Its the right poitn cost.

Re: The book I want more then any other....

As Archermoo points out, I'm from the East, notably New England. Where insults are often greetings.

Really? Who the heck do you play with?

I'm in north Boston now and I'm literally seeding HERO play from scratch, not that I entirely mind as per above.

Not sure I understand that last statement, btw. In my part of NE people are very polite... distant.. but polite. (Except when they drive but thats a whole different thing.)

I nearly dropped my package my first week here when a 13 yr old bumped into me in the mall, turned around, and said "excuse me."

Re: Need a reasonably well known charcter idea

Thanks Carl... I need to decide if my absolute HATRED of "boy geniuses" will be a problem with that one...

There is nothing more annoying and generally hated then the little kid who always knows the right answer. Wesley Crusher being one of the more recent examples.

I have a name for this phenomenon-- I call it "The Adrik Syndrome" after the oldest example I know of, the Adrik character during a period of the Tom Baker Dr. whos.

The only good thing about Adrik was, when the BBC finally figured out that everyone hated him, they didn't pull a whimpy "send Wesley off to the academy" thing. They slammed the spaceship he was in into prehistoric earth.

Yes, Adrik's final act was the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Well, near extinction. We know now that some are still with us.)

Re: The book I want more then any other....

This probably qualifies as "fools rushing in where angels fear to tread", but here goes...

 

For me, disadvantages are a huge part of chargen. I think this is because I enjoy stories about people overcoming their limitations. It's not like I don't like other kinds of stories, but this kind of story appeals to me. And I think it appeals to alot of other people also.

Our abilities tell us what we can do,

Our limitations tell us who we are.