PaycheckHero

mhd: Skills were something of an afterthought in very early versions, I want to say through v2 or v3 (I wish I had a v1 to compare with). IIRC the non-supers games for v3 of necessity really expanded it because most non-supers games tend to be rather skill-based, and 4e unified and merged those expanded skill lists and systems back into the core. I wouldn 't say they're an afterthought now, though I think the rules contain artifacts from the fact that they were greatly elaborated after the basic system was in place, as well as artifacts reflecting the conventions of the era in which they were developed. Combat, as you have noticed, feels(*) like a separate subsystem from the skill system rather than an application of it even though recent versions tend to take another baby step or two in the direction of unifying the presentation of combat and skills with each release. Another relic is that hero skills are presented as rolls based on a specific characteristic rather than as bonuses to a characteristic roll that may be chosen on the fly. It is trivial to change it to the latter, as more modern games do, but in my experience no one bothers. (It's a bit of a shock sometimes to realize just how old Hero is and how innovative it was at the time, because nowadays we compare to systems that were explicitly built with lessons in mind that had been first learned in seminal games like Hero and Traveller.) What makes you ask the question is perhaps a misunderstanding of the effects of cost structure on character building. Whether characters tend to have skills bought above their starting values or not isn't a good measure of whether skills are an afterthought. The underlying cost structure discourages it unless you only have one or two key skills. Beyond that, it becomes much more cost effective to buy up multiple skill rolls at a time by buying up characteristics and buying skill levels with whole categories of skills (GURPS later modified the basic cost structure in a way that magnified this effect to a staggering degree, to the point where buying up characteristics and keeping most skills at a fractional point cost is practically a defining aspect of the system). This incentive is increased in every version before 6e in that primary characteristics are not only skill bases but also add to figured characteristics, and this so extremely cost-effective that you already want to buy them up just for secondaries even before you start wanting to save money on your skills. As an extreme example, one of my favorite characters was a 4e 225-point batman-like character, and to be true to the character I had to use every trick in the book (and talked the GM into a couple that weren't) to afford what amounted to most of the skill list and still be a useful team member in combat. I bought characteristics as I high as I could, but chose to keep them at 20 or below to stay true to the concept (in a particular rules interpretation which champions itself doesn't share) and then had to make up for "only" human maxima with very careful building. I *never* purchased anything above default. All skill improvements were 10-pt overall levels with both skills and combat--he started with two, and I think he got up to four before the campaign was effectively retired (and possibly should have had more by then, but I also had damage classes and utility belt gadgets to buy). Your argument would suggest skills must be an afterthought for that character because nothing was bought above starting level, and yet the character was almost entirely skill-based (except for DEX, can't ever have enough of that pre-6e) to the point where I had to create a custom character sheet to list all of his skills. What matters is how many and what kind of skills a character has, what the rolls are, and so on, not the little system-based efficiency tricks that players tend to use to obtain them. A character with a couple of signature skills may well buy them far above starting values, but one with many won't because the system rewards a different purchasing strategy. Since you mention GURPS you must be familiar with this effect, as GURPS exhibits it more than any game I've ever seen. I wrote up a couple of skill masters in, hmm, maybe 3e, and quickly learned that if you wanted a lot of skills and you paid more than a quarter-point for more than a very few of them you were a chump (though maybe a better role-player, if you're doing it to be true to your concept). Use of the skill system depends on the GM's style (the more you let your players do with skills, they more they'll buy) and the genre, but that's a separate issue. Suffice it to say that many games revolve around skills, and even in supers a skill-master character such as I described above is viable. PaycheckHero * Though it isn't at all obvious from reading the rules, the difference is something of an illusion created by the traditional presentation of the rules rather than a mathematical reality. You can actually re-write hero combat as an application of the skill system without changing the probabilities in any way, but it takes work and annoys experienced players because they don't want you to change the conventions they are used to. In fact, you can actually present hero as a mostly pure one-mechanic system with a set of elaborations. I'd like to write the system up from beginning to end this way, but there wouldn't be much point unless Hero Games wanted to publish it--which they would not. Worse, presenting combat as a pure application of the skill system is actually slightly cleaner mathematically if you switch to a (statistically identical) roll-high presentation of the skill mechanic, and even suggesting such a thing can lead to threats of violence. The fact that in one particular sense Hero is a roll-high system in (heavy) disguise (I found only one rule that is not equally natural either way, and it has a simple fix that preserves the statistics) doesn't placate the grognards at all. :-) (Plus, the truth is that it just doesn't matter much, so there is little incentive to annoy existing players in order to please players of other games who don't play hero.)

Now that I actually have MHI, I would modify the above slightly. The book doesn't have DR and uses DN heavily, so a better idea than 25% DR would be something like a campaign-wide default (which can be lifted for as many monsters as the GM likes, the books only said "many" not "most" or "all") of one DC of damage negation with the limitation "not against silver," with whatever exceptions the GM likes (not everything needs it, just "many" as stated in the books). It's also faster to use at the table (having a dozen NPCs taking 25% off damage would suck when the action gets heavy). That avoids making normal ammo useless, but still gives an edge to silver and a reason for MHI to use silver all the time. I still suspect that the PUFF amounts listed might not be enough to pay for that much silver ammo, but it's easier to suspend disbelief on that small economic matter than to believe in the fundamental premise of Urban Fantasy in the first place (that such secrets can be covered up by any amount of government intervention and subconscious wishes by the population not to know, when the evidence is that enormous numbers of people are determined to believe wacky things in the absence of any evidence whatsoever). The only reason to fix it at all is the explicit statement in the book, and perhaps the basic fictional rule that you shouldn't waste your readers' willingness to suspend disbelief on stuff that can easily be "fixed" (i.e. made more believable) but rather save it for the unbelievable stuff that is mandatory for your story. Anyway, that's my houserule proposal to give teeth to the "many things are better shot with silver" statement in the books with minimal impact to the MHI rules as written.

I picked up Star Hero this morning for some idle reading and found another elementary physics error (besides the incorrect centrifugal correction to effective surface gravity already discussed): p128 says that a Dyson sphere is stable. In fact, it is unstable in precisely the same way and for precisely the same reason a ringworld is. Possibly worth noting if you're running a hard-SF game. SH needed better science editing. :-(

It would be difficult to suspend disbelief if MHI went to the expense of silver ammo and it only affected werewolves to a degree that would show up in game terms--the number of such projectiles expended in the books would add up to a staggeringly expensive mountain of silver. That said, I don't remember getting the impression that Vulnerability would be the right effect to model silver projectiles in the book. With the caveat that I've only read the first MHI book and that only once (I bought it recently just because MHI was on the way), and I don't have MHI:RPG (yet), my impression from the books was not that many monsters have a specific Vulnerability to silver, but rather that quite a few are hard to hurt with normal weapons. Unless a re-read or subsequent books changed my mind, I'd model that by giving such monsters extra limited defenses; maybe 25% resistant physical DR with a "not against silver" limitation unless there was a special reason to give more or none at all to a specific monster. I might even just make it a campaign rule worth no points on the monster character sheet for bookkeeping convenience and only note exceptions, depending on just how extensive the list of monsters affected ended up. I'd have to read the rest of the books to see if the books offer much help in making the list.

I don't understand the exception. My numbers are precisely the same as the link I gave, though reported differently. I don't have any idea where SH got its numbers.

An answer to http://www.herogames.com/forums/forum/hero-games/hero-system-6th-edition-rules-questions/3589660-centrifugal-gravity-effect, since only Steve can answer there: Star Hero is wrong. The difference is around 0.34% at the equator. Just divide the centripedal acceleration by the acceleration due to gravity to get the percentage difference. OK, here is a page that shows how to do the calculation similar to the method I used, if you care: http://faculty.wwu.edu/vawter/PhysicsNet/Topics/Gravity/AccOfGravity.html He doesn't report it as a percentage difference, but you can divide the computed centripidal acceleration by g on the Earth's surface (~10m/s^2) to get 0.34%.

That kind of thinking seems to have made Hero into a game with few new players sometime after my primary playing days during the 4e era. Sometime in the 5e era the game became infeasible to pick up from the published material. It may well be good for experienced players. How is it good for the long-term survival and heath of the system? That argument is absurd. Here is a system with more options available than Hero: you tell me what you try to do, and I tell you what happens. Sometimes, maybe, I have you roll dice. Or maybe not, it might not be that kind of game. The point is, the very idea of rules-as-a-toolkit implies taking options off the table. It is one thing to argue about what those things should be, but "the more options available, the better a toolkit the system becomes" is self-defeating. I'm also always amazed by how many people argue as though the GM can say "no" to otherwise legal constructs, but not "yes" to otherwise illegal constructs. If the system is to survive, the rules shouldn't aim only to help experienced players who don't need it. They should help the inexperienced who haven't yet decided if they're going to continue playing it. Now that I'm thinking about it again, I have actually thought about writing up a set of fastplay rules for precisely that purpose. There are, however, obstacles to that, not the least of which is that Hero games would doubtless not approve. I'm not convinced either of you actually understood my post, but in any event I'm comfortable with that and your uncertainty.

I don't think I said "leave veteran players behind"--in any event, the intent was quite the opposite. The percentage of the gaming population willing to attempt to learn the game from the book gets smaller each edition. 6e might be an improvement on the system--I haven't decided yet, maybe won't until I can actually play it. Maybe it will serve the grognards better than any previous edition. But I am certain it will not "bring new players on board"--it may be the worst possible way to "get new players on board" in the history of gaming. Champions Complete may help in terms of presentation, I hope so, but presentation isn't the only reason the system has gotten less accessible with each edition. I have actually thought of writing up what I think *would* be an improvement in that regard, but I'm not strongly motivated because it isn't likely to be publishable in any form. Possibly, though the general trend in the Steve Long era has been to subtly alter the meaning of balanced and what the system aspires to achieve from what it was in the McDonald/Peterson era so I'm not that optimistic that I'll find the system as a whole to be more balanced than it's predecessors. I suspect the system reached maturity (which isn't the same thing as stability) with 4e. Post 4e editions seem to me to break about as much as they fix, often because a more abusable mechanic was in some way more theoretically elegant (which doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of generalizations that are definitely improvements). It occurs to me that 5e came out near the time my players moved away, and I really used it as a supplement to what was probably better termed a 4e game. I missed a lot of things I think are rather broken. Not that there aren't also improvements, certainly--only that to some degree improvement from edition to edition has become much more of a zero-sum game. Now that I maybe get to game again, I don't like finding stuff I'm going to have to houserule away that was better in 4e (though the fixes are of course pleasant). Which is really a way to lead back to the original point. It's a bit of an annoyance to find, for example, that 5e Damage Shield is unusably expensive and I just hadn't noticed the change, but it takes about three seconds to fix it. It won't affect whether I play the game. But if you're a newcomer, you can't do that yet. So the important point is that the subtle shift in emphasis post-4e really just another way in which the game has been evolving into a grognards-only game. I guess I can get by with any of several editions on my shelf, but that doesn't mean I don't care whether Hero Games stays in business. To some degree, it seems to me that Hero Games has a bit of the same business problem SPI did (if anyone remembers SPI): satisfying the existing players may involve reducing the number of new ones.

While I'm quite rusty, you certainly do not need GR for variable acceleration. You need it when space is curved, which either means extremely compact objects (neutron stars, black holes) or relativistic velocities of masses with enough quadrupole moment to emit gravity waves. You can get qualitative pictures of constant acceleration by drawing world-lines that asymptotically approach 45 degrees, but quantitatively I think you'd have to do some integration. it might not be a nice integral either.

I hadn't heard that, but it makes perfect sense. Piper was his friend, so he knew all about Piper's universe favors offense. A few ships can raid well-defended systems, and do so repeatedly in Space Viking. The story purpose of that is that it fits his historical models--the title of SV makes the model for that story clear, and so the Sword-Worlds discover they can raid the old Federation worlds precisely like Vikings discovering that the English keep valuables in indefensible abbeys on tiny little islands in the North Sea. I can see why Pournelle would want to make his model a bit different. Also, as I said Pournelle knows more science and cares more about using it. OTOH, Piper's universe is more cinematic. If I were doing a story in one of them, I'd probably do Piper. For one thing, role-players like to be free agents answering to no one, and that's much more like Piper's universe during the period of SV.

Yeah, anyone who can go to the stars can automate things, and the old stories have aged really poorly on that point. I believe the specific author I was thinking of was Hal Clement, who of course would go to extremes to introduce as few impossible plot-devices as he could. Naturally he had to have an FTL travel method (which, significantly, always stays well off-screen), but he surely wasn't going to also introduce FTL radio. I don't quote him as a source otherwise, though, because none of his stories are about space travel per se (they are about the places you could get to if you had FTL travel, and ultimately about science and how the universe works).

Having had time to think more about this for a while, a couple of more subtle points occur to me. The first is that the way figureds were eliminated (if not the elimination itself) is another step in the general DOJ-era trend for Hero to aim solely for the experienced Hero gamer without any consideration for bringing in new gamers. The reason for that is partly because you *have* to deal with more variables directly during character construction: the beginner probably has a crude idea of the likely game effect of a stat named "strength," but none about a stat named "recovery." The figureds offered some help in not creating captain fragile (though in fact it wasn't terribly good help, especially in the case of spd where it was basically a necessity to buy it up beyond what dex itself gave you). But there is a second, more subtle reason: that the names of the stats-formerly-called-primary now are to some extent actively misleading. The beginner buying a high dex probably expected it to give him what OCV and DCV actually do, and in 5e- you could get a reasonable CV without buying beyond what dex gave you--indeed, the cost of dex was low enough for what it gave you that it was common to set your dex by the CV you wanted. You can't do that any more--in fact, it is all but certain that a beginner trying to build a character based on guessing what the names mean is now nearly guaranteed to be dissatisfied. That is a problem. My guess is that not too many people on this board will agree, but that isn't how hero is going to survive long-term as an active system and as a company. I don't know that those problems are inherent in eliminating figured characteristics--they are more a sign of just how little the current incarnation of Hero Games cares to attract new players. I can think of some ways that might work. The simplest (for the case of dex, you'd treat other things similarly) is to rename dex to something like Initiative--of course, that would call into question why it is the base attribute for skills, so maybe better would be to rename it to something that reflects its current role as a simple package deal for skills (it's cheaper to buy up your dex roll than to buy up each dex sill individually) and then say something like "your initiative defaults to your skill base." Yes, that makes it a mini-figured, but the other choice is to split dex even more atomically, into Initiative and Dex Learning/Dex Skill stats (you see I'm trying to figure out what the non-technical short description would be for that concept) that have no mechanical connection to each other. In any case, that would then leave the term "dexterity" open to once again mean something like what every role-player is conditioned to think it means. At that point, it would make sense to make it an explicit package deal, as some clearly are doing. Side benefits to that are that you could do better than the old stat at hinting the beginner--nobody bought a 30 dex but kept the default 4 speed anyway, so you might as well cost it so that you get, say, a point of speed for every five dex or so. I don't really want to get into the argument about package deals, though--my real point is about how beginner-hostile the *terminology* has become. Mechanically, things can be named anything--DCV could be called "strength", running could be called "charisma," or whatever you like. The only reason for terminology is to make things easier by choosing it well. Unfortunately, the 6e terms are set for the convenience of experienced players (who at least know why Initiative + Skill Bonus has retained a name that is no longer descriptive) at the expense of new players trying to learn from the book rather than an experienced group (which apparently we have now given up on entirely, an odd business decision). I have some further thoughts on how in a sense 6e chose to go "too far, and yet not far enough," but I'll leave that aside for now so as not to distract from the one point I wanted to make, which is evolution into a game that can't outlast the gaming lifespan of the current generation of players. If that's not true, it at least makes for an interesting (I hope) thesis to discuss.

That kind of thinking seems to have made Hero into a game with few new players sometime after my primary playing days during the 4e era. Sometime in the 5e era the game became infeasible to pick up from the published material. It may well be good for experienced players. How is it good for the long-term survival and heath of the system? That argument is absurd. Here is a system with more options available than Hero: you tell me what you try to do, and I tell you what happens. Sometimes, maybe, I have you roll dice. Or maybe not, it might not be that kind of game. The point is, the very idea of rules-as-a-toolkit implies taking options off the table. It is one thing to argue about what those things should be, but "the more options available, the better a toolkit the system becomes" is self-defeating. I'm also always amazed by how many people argue as though the GM can say "no" to otherwise legal constructs, but not "yes" to otherwise illegal constructs. If the system is to survive, the rules shouldn't aim only to help experienced players who don't need it. They should help the inexperienced who haven't yet decided if they're going to continue playing it. Now that I'm thinking about it again, I have actually thought about writing up a set of fastplay rules for precisely that purpose. There are, however, obstacles to that, not the least of which is that Hero games would doubtless not approve.

Actually, almost the first thing I noticed about Champions was that the probability to hit is purely a function of (OCV - DCV), which leads to the scaling property you mention. I noticed it because I'd been playing with GURPS 1e, and the hit probabilities there were (in hero terms) functions of OCV and DCV separately. At least at that time GURPS did *not* scale with dex; even with the feint rule, as dex increased hits would become less and less probable. I thought about this a lot, because it seemed to me to encapsulate a lot of the difference in thinking behind the systems. Real fighting isn't precisely the same between novices and experts, and you can see that in any sparring sport (which I'll take as sufficiently close to fighting for this purpose, even though it definitely isn't fighting). (More to the point, it isn't the same in movies and stories, and of course games generally try to be true to the source material and not "real life".) In that sense, at the beginning, gurps was more true to the sources; if you chose the dexes correctly, you could get something like the battle between Inigo and Wesley, where a lot of fancy time-consuming swordplay happens before anyone gets the upper hand. But I think you'd have had to pick the dexes correctly, because the scaling was built-in, and if they were too low you didn't get the epic battle, while if they were too high eventually the sun burnt out while the battle was still raging. In otherwords, at at very dexes, it seemed to just plain break down. Hero, by making the hit rolls the same at high and low CV, clearly intended to scale up much better. It was a very good "big picture" moment for me. It made sense that a game that started at superhero power levels and branched out would scale more robustly than a game that started at human power levels and branched out (though I thought at those human levels gurps combat was often more satisfying if the genre wasn't too epic). That said--not everything in hero scales the way CVs do (unopposed skill rolls don't, for example, but that's kind of trivially necessary), and I actually tripped myself up by unthinkingly assuming they did. The first time I designed my own campaign, I lowered the normal dex range from what the official writeups showed on the logic that I wanted normals to be slightly more relevant to combat, particularly if they could get ahold of a big gun. At least they'd get off a shot or two so the heroes couldn't totally ignore them. I didn't change any other parameters. It took me a while to realize that I'd inadvertently made combat take longer, because I'd effectively increased the frequency of post-12 recoveries. It also made the lowest spd less attractive because there are two scaling laws involved with spd, neither of which are the simple CV scaling law (which in fancy terms amounts to translational symmetry). In terms of character to character comparisons, spd scales not as a pure function of the speed difference, but rather the ratio of the speeds; what matters is how many phases I get compared to how many you get, and 5/3 is a bigger difference than 6/4. That's why in heroic games the spd range isn't really 2-4, since (at least in the games I've played in) nobody wants to be half as fast as the speedsters (I sure don't). So effectively heroic games in my experience are spd 3-4 games, and this makes sense; observationally, it seems that it isn't as fun for the players if the speed ratio between the fastest and slowest characters is more than about 1.5. (That obviously doesn't apply to NPCs; they can be slower because nobody is waiting while others are playing, though I personally don't like them faster than the fastest PCs unless they're a big master villain fighting the entire team, because I don't want the whole group waiting too much while the NPCs take turns). The other scaling law involved comes from the fact that seg-12 recoveries don't change no matter what the PCs' speeds are, which means that end consumption scales linearly with spd (in a typical hard-fought battle where you can't afford to take a phase to recover if you don't have to). I think the idea is that higher point characters will have higher end totals, but I don't think it actually scales linearly in practice (keep in mind, this is mainly about 4e, where I have the most experience) for a few reasons, such as the effects of figured characteristics and the fact that damage scales closer to how CV scales (on average, it does, but the standard deviation increases as, hmm, the square root of the damage and that matters for how much PD/ED you want to have). The bottom line is that I screwed up by tweaking one parameter by being too naive about how champions scales and made combat longer than necessary. Oh, well. I'm older and have less time now, and my boy is young enough that he has an early bedtime. For the campaign I'm designing for him I'm trying to do the opposite and engineer in slightly faster (for champions) combat just as a matter of practicality. I won't know if I like the result until I try it though. I've thought of doing that, but didn't ever really need it. Size also doesn't scale if you use the growth/shrinking powers as your guidelines; at least in 4e, two really small characters would never hit each other. I think it was tolerable mainly because the intended use case was a shrinker fighting normal-sized characters, not another shrinker. I suppose anyone who wanted to play an Ant Hero campaign probably just re-scaled everything to the campaign normal size. I didn't look to see if this was fixed, but it's at least somewhat better because now you're not supposed to use the growth powers for permanent size changes as we did (rightly or wrongly) in 4e. "Just buy the effect if it is permanent" probably makes the above problem rare in actual games. Or so I'd guess. Hero's scaling choices (and why they're different than gurps) is purposely "unrealistic for both playability and source material fidelity--comics don't scale anything like the real world. For size changes, jjust the fact that enormous characters have human proportions proves that, as does the fact that really tiny characters don't encounter increased viscosity, and so on. That's why it's playable over such a wide range of power levels. Moreso in 6e, because of the elimination of figureds. That's obviously true for CV, but before 6e dex bought you spd, which means it doesn't scale purely that way. I think that was never a problem mainly because people always bought up their spd further anyway, so that the dex/10 bonus was in practice a package deal point break rather than something that set the typical speeds in a campaign. Champion's scaling properties are well worth a thread of their own, especially since it has a lot of effect on setting campaign parameters, and I'm glad you made me think about this again because it's going to be useful for figuring out how to use 6e's characteristics. There may be a rule about relative sizes--I'm not sure anymore, nor for that matter which edition I would remember. As for scaling, it may be that we use the words differently, but as I use it it is simply not true that *everything* scales to the environment. The most obvious one is SPD; if you increase a character's SPD with everthing else held constant, he will fly faster but run out of end quicker. Even if you argue that velocity can't be measured without something else in the world to specify another inertial frame to compare to (which is technically true in empty space, but not in a space with any kind of "cartesian plane" since I can measure velocity perpendicular to the plane), the increased end consumption is quite clearly a function of the character's attributes only and can be measured (in anything like a Newtonian universe, anyway). (The acceleration can also be measured locally by the character in terms of real-world physics, but I don't think the game itself treats it in a way that is clearly measurable.)

Yeah, one of the hazards of reading the forum late at night is I might be too sleepy to check the dates and avoid necro-posting. :-) My motivation is similar--the idea that aimed shots are a double-or-nothing gambit is basically crazy and doesn't even feel right. Back when we played lots of FH I'd have loved to fix this, but I was the only one bothered by the idea that that aiming makes you less likely to hit. Theoretically, I'd use hit locations for fantasy; however, now that I'm more daddy than anything else I'd run something my kids like, and for fantasy I'd probably use a certain cartoon they like. That would basically mean using superhero rules without hit locations or criticals, or even killing attacks. Neither the effects nor the extra rolls are appropriate. KB would be appropriate though. cartoons seem to involve nerf weapons but lots of cinematic flying about. I guess it's like getting smacked with a weather balloon. :-) In fact, it would almost be appropriate to treat weapons simply as a special effect of a personal power, since that cartoon portrays people fighting about as well without weapons as with them, a broken sword with 4" of blade is a perfectly sane weapon to use against polearms, and so on. I think you buy however much hand attack models your character's intrinsic fighting strength, and then just define the special effect "uses father's broken sword" or whatever. I suppose I could allow weapons to give you an extra die or something just to encourage their use (as in the cartoon) without there being that much disadvantage to having a silly weapon or none at all.

Thanks, both of those workarounds work for me.

This thread was up to about three pages a while ago, and now it is down to one and most of the posts I was following were among those that disappeared. What happened? It didn't look like the thread needed moderation or anything....

At least. Don't forget that Multipowers are also more generous with limitations than VPPs, so depending on what limitations you're willing to take it could be more than that. You can put a limitation on a single slot in a Multi, but a limitation that only applies to a single power doesn't make a VPP any cheaper (it just make the power take up fewer real points in the pool. And if you find one that applies to all of them, you can appliy that to the VPP control cost but not the pool, whereas you can apply it to every slot *and* the reserve with a Multipower. So if you have some unifying limitations, it could take a lot more than 15 slots to break even. Reading the framework rules carefully for whichever edition you're using would be a good idea, but IIRC the above will apply to 4th, 5th, and 6th. If I recall incorrectly someone will be along to flame me shortly. :-) Also, I think at least the 4e VPP may not have had any way to buy up the active point max, which meant that in many, perhaps most cases it was *horribly* inefficient if you could only have one power at a time (you had to have enough pool points to match the maximum active points, and so if the powers had limitations and were one at a time you got nothing for the one-at-a-time limitation). 6e doesn't have that problem, and I don't recall what 5e does. So you have to read the edition you're playing and make sure the GM doesn't houserule anything you're depending on (we had a houserule way to up the active point limit on a 4e VPP, though it was kinda under close GM scrutiny because it could easily be used for evil).

That is, of course, very age-of-sail, as they did precisely that--send dispatches on a fast sloop (in that context, sloop refers to a small vessel, not a particular rig). However, any technology that will let you go between the stars would let you automate things, and old-school SF usually fails to address that. I do I seem to recall reading a story where the author mentions sending "message torpedos," which I think is precisely what would happen. The other thing is that if you don't have some kind of normal-space reactionless drive (and if you do that, you've given up another step of near-future realism, so you have to think about it), having people on board is crippling for a lot of purposes, so it would be a good idea to automate shipping if possible so you can boost to the jump point (or whatever) at 50g's instead of 5. (This doesn't apply if you've decided that in-system economy shipping is done with lightsails and the ITN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network), so that accelerations are extremely low for routine shipping). So I think the GM has to make a dramatic choice: 1. Ignore it. You want everything manned, make everything manned. 2. Automate everything that has a big advantage automated. Nothing says you have to make it just like age-of-sail, in fact it may be more convincing to show that your future is internally consistent rather than simply a slave to a model. 3. Do what Pournelle did and make your FTL method do horrible things to electronics, so that you really do need a crew, at least to bring all the systems down before the jump and bring them up cleanly afterward. This becomes a critical plot point in Mote in God's Eye, which I highly recommend as a different take on an age-of-sail like model (I'll say more about this below). It's not totally convincing, as it seems unlikely that someone wouldn't figure out a way around anything that the human nervous system can survive (in fact, purely mechanical computers are possible and may even be efficient if done at the nano-scale, so you could probably make something with enough capability to shut down and bring back up the main electronic systems). That said, you're allowed a certain amount of Authorial Fiat, so if it's important to you just do what you want. Realism on most things is there to give you a fig leaf for doing unrealistic things with the most dramatic elements. :-) I don't know that book, sounds interesting. What you describe is more or less Pournelle's system so again I recommend mining it for ideas and comparing to something like Space Viking and the other Piper books. It gives you a very different version than Space Viking (which I mentioned earlier); in SV most travel time is spent in hyperspace and the ships have extremely effective normal space drives, which is more what we think of for classic space opera SF. In Pournelle's version, the actual jump takes no time at all, but depending on the location of the jump points you could spend months in-system on either end going from planet to jump point in the departure system and then jump point to planet (or another jump point) on the other end. (Pournelle knows a lot more science than Piper knew, or cared more, and so he acknowledges how long in-system travel could be whereas Piper's ships are so capable in normal space it's more like Star Wars travel times (except, of course, in SW you don't spend thousands of hours in hyperspace as you do in Piper's future). Pournelle's system is also less like age of sail (and I suppose more like age of steam after the Hams figured out you could skip HF off the ionosphere) in that of course during the trip to the jump point you are in radio contact with the departure system and after the jump you're in radio contact with the destination system, so you explicitly do *not* have the isolation I mentioned unless you're travelling through uninhabited systems (and realistically, there would be at the very minimum robot communications stations to leave messages with on even low-traffic routes, as the benefits would be incredibly cheap). The issue of whether the jump points are natural is a great one. One very different system would be to not have an alternative FTL system at all, but rather require that the other end of a gate be sent via normal space. This would have profound effects on both how quickly a civilization can spread (at a fraction of the speed of light) even if travel afterwards is much quicker, and really create bottlenecks as you won't have near as many jump routes and so those that do exist will be that much more valuable. It will also have radical effects on inter-species politics, if you have spacefaring aliens; interstellar war would be nigh-impossible if you aren't willing to wait centuries for your troops to get there (and if you are, I can't imagine a logistical system that would allow you to win against the resources of a system that has had decades to centuries to prepare and develop better technology than you had when you left--it would make a modern amphibious landing look like a cakewalk by comparison). The only wars would I suppose be possible between species that had previously agreed to set up a gate for trade and then had a falling out--and even then, I'd guess that it would be trivial to just destroy the gate, completely eliminating the attacker's logistical tail. If you have a lot of jump points, I agree that the map is effectively a graph and the distances just don't matter (something Pournelle points out for his system). You could always just get a copy of the old Imperium game and use the game board for your map. :-)

Halving doesn't work, however the method you describe is correct and actually neater than the original. I imagine they failed to catch that because everyone involved has played Champions for ages with the canonical roll being 3d6 <= 11 + OCV - DCV to hit. It's hard to catch a mistake like that because your brain "knows" it is correct. As for extra information, to use it as stated the GM would have to determine whether a crit was scored. Feasible, but pointless extra burden since it is unnecessary as you show. Ah, experimental mathematics. :-) It's easy to prove that it's always correct, however, so you don't need to do spreadsheet experiments. It is also a (slightly) better computation than the original, because for most people subtraction is easier than division. Unfortunately, that critical rule is the only rule in the hero system that comes to mind (there may be others) that requires the roll low mechanic. Roll high arguably has some nicer(*) properties than roll low (the magic number is 10 instead of 11, which the decimal system makes particularly fast and easy, and you can describe skill rolls the same way as hit rolls), but maybe the most important thing is that it's one less barrier to bringing new players to Hero. However, the crit rule becomes computationally very cumbersome for roll-high; I derived several alternatives and none of them were any good. That's too bad, as I'd idly thought about writing up a set of "Hero for d20 players" guidelines, and roll high would fit that better. It still will as long as you don't use crits, but it's annoying to have that restriction. * I say that as someone who has used roll low systems for almost all my gaming. Nevertheless the algebra says roll higher can be made nicer for Hero, though--it's almost like Hero is a roll high system in disguise. (Dons flame-retardant suit.) Except for critical hits, unless get out the paper again and find a nicer system.

Actually, almost the first thing I noticed about Champions was that the probability to hit is purely a function of (OCV - DCV), which leads to the scaling property you mention. I noticed it because I'd been playing with GURPS 1e, and the hit probabilities there were (in hero terms) functions of OCV and DCV separately. At least at that time GURPS did *not* scale with dex; even with the feint rule, as dex increased hits would become less and less probable. I thought about this a lot, because it seemed to me to encapsulate a lot of the difference in thinking behind the systems. Real fighting isn't precisely the same between novices and experts, and you can see that in any sparring sport (which I'll take as sufficiently close to fighting for this purpose, even though it definitely isn't fighting). (More to the point, it isn't the same in movies and stories, and of course games generally try to be true to the source material and not "real life".) In that sense, at the beginning, gurps was more true to the sources; if you chose the dexes correctly, you could get something like the battle between Inigo and Wesley, where a lot of fancy time-consuming swordplay happens before anyone gets the upper hand. But I think you'd have had to pick the dexes correctly, because the scaling was built-in, and if they were too low you didn't get the epic battle, while if they were too high eventually the sun burnt out while the battle was still raging. In otherwords, at at very dexes, it seemed to just plain break down. Hero, by making the hit rolls the same at high and low CV, clearly intended to scale up much better. It was a very good "big picture" moment for me. It made sense that a game that started at superhero power levels and branched out would scale more robustly than a game that started at human power levels and branched out (though I thought at those human levels gurps combat was often more satisfying if the genre wasn't too epic). That said--not everything in hero scales the way CVs do (unopposed skill rolls don't, for example, but that's kind of trivially necessary), and I actually tripped myself up by unthinkingly assuming they did. The first time I designed my own campaign, I lowered the normal dex range from what the official writeups showed on the logic that I wanted normals to be slightly more relevant to combat, particularly if they could get ahold of a big gun. At least they'd get off a shot or two so the heroes couldn't totally ignore them. I didn't change any other parameters. It took me a while to realize that I'd inadvertently made combat take longer, because I'd effectively increased the frequency of post-12 recoveries. It also made the lowest spd less attractive because there are two scaling laws involved with spd, neither of which are the simple CV scaling law (which in fancy terms amounts to translational symmetry). In terms of character to character comparisons, spd scales not as a pure function of the speed difference, but rather the ratio of the speeds; what matters is how many phases I get compared to how many you get, and 5/3 is a bigger difference than 6/4. That's why in heroic games the spd range isn't really 2-4, since (at least in the games I've played in) nobody wants to be half as fast as the speedsters (I sure don't). So effectively heroic games in my experience are spd 3-4 games, and this makes sense; observationally, it seems that it isn't as fun for the players if the speed ratio between the fastest and slowest characters is more than about 1.5. (That obviously doesn't apply to NPCs; they can be slower because nobody is waiting while others are playing, though I personally don't like them faster than the fastest PCs unless they're a big master villain fighting the entire team, because I don't want the whole group waiting too much while the NPCs take turns). The other scaling law involved comes from the fact that seg-12 recoveries don't change no matter what the PCs' speeds are, which means that end consumption scales linearly with spd (in a typical hard-fought battle where you can't afford to take a phase to recover if you don't have to). I think the idea is that higher point characters will have higher end totals, but I don't think it actually scales linearly in practice (keep in mind, this is mainly about 4e, where I have the most experience) for a few reasons, such as the effects of figured characteristics and the fact that damage scales closer to how CV scales (on average, it does, but the standard deviation increases as, hmm, the square root of the damage and that matters for how much PD/ED you want to have). The bottom line is that I screwed up by tweaking one parameter by being too naive about how champions scales and made combat longer than necessary. Oh, well. I'm older and have less time now, and my boy is young enough that he has an early bedtime. For the campaign I'm designing for him I'm trying to do the opposite and engineer in slightly faster (for champions) combat just as a matter of practicality. I won't know if I like the result until I try it though. I've thought of doing that, but didn't ever really need it. Size also doesn't scale if you use the growth/shrinking powers as your guidelines; at least in 4e, two really small characters would never hit each other. I think it was tolerable mainly because the intended use case was a shrinker fighting normal-sized characters, not another shrinker. I suppose anyone who wanted to play an Ant Hero campaign probably just re-scaled everything to the campaign normal size. I didn't look to see if this was fixed, but it's at least somewhat better because now you're not supposed to use the growth powers for permanent size changes as we did (rightly or wrongly) in 4e. "Just buy the effect if it is permanent" probably makes the above problem rare in actual games. Or so I'd guess. Hero's scaling choices (and why they're different than gurps) is purposely "unrealistic for both playability and source material fidelity--comics don't scale anything like the real world. For size changes, jjust the fact that enormous characters have human proportions proves that, as does the fact that really tiny characters don't encounter increased viscosity, and so on. That's why it's playable over such a wide range of power levels. Moreso in 6e, because of the elimination of figureds. That's obviously true for CV, but before 6e dex bought you spd, which means it doesn't scale purely that way. I think that was never a problem mainly because people always bought up their spd further anyway, so that the dex/10 bonus was in practice a package deal point break rather than something that set the typical speeds in a campaign. Champion's scaling properties are well worth a thread of their own, especially since it has a lot of effect on setting campaign parameters, and I'm glad you made me think about this again because it's going to be useful for figuring out how to use 6e's characteristics.