PaycheckHero

Yeah, it's pretty accurate for sailing vessel travel times on Earth, at least toward the end of the age (the time to the frontier obviously varies by how far the "frontier" is away. It could be even longer when you put together the time to do your trading and business and get back home. Sailing times have little to do with the straight-line distance and everything to do with the winds--when I did my one blue-water passage on a wooden vessel I think it was 18 days from Honolulu to San Francisco, and that was only because we'd motored for almost a week to cut across the Pacific High. If we'd sailed, the sailing route from Hawaii to the West Coast is to sail far North until you get into the Westerlies, and you end up making landfall in the vicinity of Puget Sound. Then you sail South along the coast on the shore breeze--that's the fastest way even if you're going to, say, San Diego. So I imagine even a comparatively short trip like Honolulu to San Francisco would have been well over a month for us under sail alone. As a more authentic example, the record time for the New York to San Francisco run around the horn was a bit over 89 days, but that was set by a clipper ship so fast it took a century to beat that record with a purpose-built racer without cargo. Richard Henry Dana, making the same voyage and then back in an ordinary merchant vessel was gone from home for two years. I also have a book by a man who went to sea as a boy; by the time he got back home he was two years older and had circumnavigated the globe. So I'd say if you want the feel of world-wide trade under sail, think of ordinary trading voyages, perhaps involving several legs, taking as much as two or three years. That would be appropriate for a trip from a core world to the frontier and back, perhaps hitting several frontier and half-civilized worlds. If you want more the feel of the Atlantic packets, the fastest and most regular service ever done under sail, figure on the order of three weeks one-way. That would be for a trip between two important civilized worlds in the core of your Known Space. Another thing to keep in mind is that except for the Atlantic Packets when they started competing with steam, ships never kept schedules; they departed when they got enough cargo to fill the hold, and they arrived when wind and weather permitted. You can use that, though most people assume space travel is more predictable than that. If you make it more predictable, you can use the early steamers as a model as well. Their range was short, so they had to hop from coaling station to coaling station. Commercial sail actually lasted until after WW II, and the reason it was economic for a century after steam was not only because there were no fuel costs but also because the range was unlimited and they could use routes the steamers could not. Running grain to and from Austraila (or tea from China) under sail meant that you could get down in the Roaring Forties and basically let gale-force winds drive you all the way (you didn't return against the prevailing weather, you just kept going all the way around). Steam ships weren't practical for that run until the Suez canal was built, and even then they were slower. So if you restrict the range of your ships and have the right star map some trips will be much longer because there isnt a direct route with fuel. There will also be systems of enormous strategic value simply because of their location, if you like politics in your game. On the other hand, if you don't want to mess with that, don't--make travel work however seems most dramatic for your campaign.

If you want age-of-sail feel, don't allow FTL radio. The fact that sailing ships were about as out of contact with the rest of the world as a pocket universe had an enormous effect. The works of H. Beam Piper (esp. Space Viking) are probably good source material for you as his FTL travel works exactly as you say (and I think age of sail travel was his model, he liked historical models). Ships in hyperspace all move at the same rate and are totally out of contact with anything outside the ship. In a voyage his crewmen likely have a lot of time without much to do, so they tended to pursue some pretty serious hobbies aboard ship. Your speed can be literally anything that gives you the travel times you want, since once you're above lightspeed realism isn't any consideration at all. The only constraint is that if you want to be realistic, you'll have to have an idea of the mean stellar separation in your explored space. It does vary--IIRC the solar neighborhood is sparser than average, some areas can be denser. Knowing how far the average trip needs to go, you make the speed such that the trip takes however long you want.

I'm OK with math. For fun, I once proposed that we create a system that used the eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator to determine the probabilities of the various outcomes of any given action, represented as eigenvectors in some appropriate vector space. It wasn't as popular an idea as you'd think. :-) This I disagree on--you just can't do it by actually matching the total points of everyone else in the party. You can still have a combat monster form and a skillmaster form, which can be efficient enough to make up for the lost points and therefore unfair to the players that didn't take MF unless it's an all were- party or something (hey, World of Darkness Hero). I thought that went without saying. :-) I thought of that, mainly because there is 6e precedent with duplication and also because it's functionally what 4e does (it just says subtract off the MF points--if you do that, you might as well just pay the cost in each character, it will rarely make a difference and arguably makes more sense (the forms can change back, so they're exerciseing the MF power, so either they have it as well or they're using a power possessed by another character who doesn't, at the moment, exist, which is conceptually stranger--and an opponent should be able to use a MF drain on any of the forms if I can justify MF drain at all). I hadn't even given much thought to abuses of the doubling rule (except that it obviously magnifies any weakness in the base power), but 4e's version is linear not exponential and greatly resembles that (except the effective advantage is more like 0.1). I don't have to worry about it unless I decide to keep the base power in some form anyway.

I'm actually aware that 4e MF was extremely easy to abuse, I just figured if I said that I'd start two separate arguments and not have much chance of figuring out "what were they thinking" in 5e. My old gaming group actually banned MF outright in 4e (and maybe earlier if it existed before 4e, I joined about the time 4e came out but they'd been playing since probably 2e or 3e), in any form, after a little incident with a werewolf detective who was apparently the most effective character in the party both in and out of combat (Jaguar in the BBB looked suspiciously similar, but I never actually ran Jaguar to see if he was indeed unbalanced), and that's probably a sane thing to do. It's also why I hadn't noticed what happened in 5e until now--I just didn't have a reason to read the 5e version that closely. However, doing it with other constructs tends to be rough on beginners who didn't even know enough to think of abusing it and ended up with a character with a big multipower or VPP with funky restrictions to simulate MF. My wife's first supers character was a metamorph, and we ended up building her a VPP with some restrictions so she had to write up each form she could change to--basically, MF built with the VPP rules. It worked for that particular character, but of course it was clunky for her to build a new form. So now that that group is long gone, my main motivation was to work out the consequences of re-introducing the power just to make characters with multiple forms mechanically easier to play, and decide if I was willing to accept those consequences. Hmm. That's the first sane explanation of what what might have happened in 5e--thanks. That's one thing I was looking for. Well--it would be sane if it were a stop sign power with a paragraph or so explaining why, as you mentioned below. As it is, it's designed mostly to make new GMs suffer. I know if I were trying hero for the first time and had someone bring in an insane MF character I'd simply lose all confidence in the system (in fact, that happened the first couple of times I ran GURPS and I decided it wasn't worth it, fair to the system or not). That's why I don't like removing all restrictions and throwing a newcomer to the wolves in a way most powers don't. A stop sign would at least be a warning. Sure. I think what makes MF worse than other flexibility constructs, though, is probably the fact that it's price is independent of the similarity between the forms. If you use a framework, the premium on the construct is proportional to the number of re-allocatable points. That's not true with MF. Duplication seems to have the same problem, but at least it suggests some kind of penalty if the dupes aren't all the same. Duplication also at least does something that no other construct does, while you can simulate MF if you have to. One thing I'd thought of was to re-write the power so you split the character into a sheet of things common to all forms and a pool that can vary between forms, and paid based on the size of the variable pool (perhaps 1/5 rather than 1/10). That's not a lot better than just admitting that you're just re-inventing a multipower or VPP with particular limitations, however, and I'm not sure it would be easier to use (the only real reason to have it at that point). None of that, and I agree probably no mechanical rule, would be able to identify characters that are unusually effective because of the breadth of the forms--in fact, that's campaign dependent, since nothing is effective unless the GM gives you situations where you can use it. Ease of use is the only reason I wanted to re-visit the MF issue. For Teresa's metamorph we basically wrote a VPP with a set of modifiers (that I don't recall at the moment) that didn't let her mix & match between forms, so that she actually did have a separate sheet for each form. The VPP was really just providing the cost structure. That said, it isn't clear if it would have worked without heavy-handed refereeing for a munchkin. (The nice thing about playing with girls is that I don't encounter many of them that are serious munchkins.) I guess the issue is that Hero's implicit design is generally to provide balance where possible, so that the GM is mainly backstopping things that are too difficult to eliminate mechanically rather than making a call on every single feature of a character (which gets very tiring with a group of clueless munchkins). The 4e MF tried, successfully or not, to eliminate the obvious problem of having many forms all as powerful as other characters' single forms, though not the more subjective "always in the spotlight" problem of detectives with were-forms and mentalists who can hulk out ("My character concept is what if Bruce Banner were a mentalist! I'm just trying to play my concept!"). Currently MF doesn't obey that implicit rule. To some degree you can use any rule with sufficient refereeing, it's a question of effort. I guess to me, it isn't clear whether MF is worth the extra effort. That's the other thing I was interested in, thanks. You did a good job of listing the main ways to abuse Multiform, which is handy to have in one place. Yeah, a lot of nasty ideas fall under that heading. I do like your approach of thinking more directly in terms of turf protection for the players, that is a constant theme in a lot of MF abuses and I like the idea that it is better to say so explicitly. Thanks for taking the time to write up so many details. Since most of my gaming was in 4th ed days with a group that didn't use MF, I don't have as much practice tossing out bad MF ideas. Yes. I found it unfathomable as soon as I tried to use 5e+ MF. It should have been a stop sign power in 4e, let alone 5e+. Thanks! I never pushed my geekly little hobbies on my kids, but my oldest is very eager to game so I think I may have raised up players for myself. :-) I ran across your hero website a while back and found it pretty useful, BTW. We never liked the standard magic system in FH 4e and always rolled our own, so I'm going to have to look over your long list and see how others have done it.

For (almost) any PC X without MF, a PC using MF exists costing the same number of points which has a form identical(*) to X, plus other forms. How are those other forms not free? If you have a superteam with a brick, a martial artist, and an energy blaster, how is it not free points if I can write up a character with forms as powerful as each of them, plus some others that do things none of them can do (mystic, mentalist, skill-master detective, whatever you like)? In other hero constructs, you have to pay for flexibility with power--notably (because 4e multiform seems to be based on the cost of a multipower with ultra (fixed) slots) in the slot cost for a multipower or the control cost for a pool. 5e eliminated the control-cost analog for multiform. (*) Technically, the disads/complications may need to be re-written. This doesn't affect the argument since Hero doesn't let you go above the campaign's total point limit just because you took extra disads. Hero uses total points as the base limitation on starting PCs, not base points, and the point being made is that I can buy the same powers with the same total points. There is a better argument involving special power limitations for certain characters, thus the technical "(almost)". Sigh. If that answer were the cure-all that some people try to pretend it is, we wouldn't need points at all--after all, the GM has to approve every character, so just write down the powers you want and let him sort it out. Of course, the entire point of hero's character generation system is to avoid doing that when possible, and then let the GM backstop the cases where it wasn't possible. As for munchkiny shenanigans, the case where I noticed this was writing up an NPC, and discovered that MF invites abuse. If I can find the "abuse me" sign, so can others, and I like to find them first. As it is, I will probably simulate multiform for that character with other constructs and insist PCs do the same, but I don't really like that because MF is easier for beginners to use. I'd rather have a less problematic multiform, if I can find it. No, because by your logic all things are already allowed anyway. If the rules don't accept it, you simply ask the GM to approve it anyway, which he can always do. You can't have it both ways--if the rules shouldn't help the GM make those calls by red-flagging likely abusive characters, making them cost overthe campaign limit, then you can't turn around and insist that now the GM needs permission to accept characters that don't point-balance, and he couldn't do that until MF was re-written. No, it surely isn't. First, I said nothing about the doubling rule. The base mechanic seems to be broken, so I didn't want to get distracted. Second, followers, bases, and vehicles are not PCs, whereas MF forms most certainly are. And it is out of line with other constructs that let you spend your points more flexibly. If I have 60pts to spend on an attack, I can get 12d6 of straight EB, or a multipower with an 50pt reserve and two 10d6 ultra slots (perhaps one is against PD and one against ED). The point is that the price of the flexibility was that I couldn't buy as much raw power. The same logic is behind variable advantage, the control cost on a VPP, and so on. Also, consider 6e duplication, where the precise problem I'm discussing is ruled out: "...unless the GM permits otherwise, for ease of use all Duplicates must “pay for” the cost of the base character’s Duplication ability. Otherwise, the Duplicates would end up with more points to spend on other abilities than the base character himself has." (v1p198) Multiform's equivalent limitation was removed in 5e, which is what is mystifying. I'm likely to apply that logic to MF before I throw it out entirely and see if that fixes it acceptably. Part of the reason for posting is that I assume it has worked for other people, and I'm trying to figure out why. As it stands now, there is no way I'd allow 5e+ multiform in any campaign of mine. I'm fishing to see if there is a good answer to the above objections I'm missing, or to determine what the logic was behind the re-write.

I've been known to split Int into two stats since 4e, with Wits the base for perception and for any Int-based skill that requires quick thinking, leaving Int to be book-smart and the base of skills involving knowledge and so on (and I very often rebased 11- skills on an attribute instead). Joining them is--well, in the interests of diplomacy I'll say "confused" or "silly" and not what I really think of it. I suspect it would be most realistic to anti-correlate the two, to be honest, but I never enforced that. Aside from realism, it's interesting to see how few characters pay for both--usually characters that would buy up their Int really only wanted either perception or book smarts, not both, which I take as an indication that they are better split (and if anyone wants both enough to pay for both, more power to them). If anyone actually cares about realism, the only real-world data on this I know about is that the army apparently did a study on how to identify soldiers in advance that were likely to be better than average at detecting ambushes and IEDs (high Per in Hero terms). Supposedly there were two demographics that did better than the rest: kids that grew up hunting and kids that grew up in the inner city. I actually think when people quit thinking in game terms they already know this: I doubt anyone has ever been in a tight spot and said "if only Einstein were here, we'd get out of here without being ambushed." :-)

Why yes' date=' yes I am. It did after all suit my argument and word play to do so. I'm arguing game mechanics for a game based on statistical models (bell curve, effect) and numbers (point costs)...so...yeah, I am. And I fully respect that. If you like 5e or it doesn't make financial system to move to 6e' date=' then the sensible thing is to stay on 5e. I did a tremendous amount of content for and ran a lot of games in 5e; its a great system, flaws included. Same for 4e. I'm not an upgrade or get out snob. Bottom line, I'd far rather you and your group play some version of the HERO System than some other game entirely. I'm just really, really tired of the same old figured characteristic remonstrances.[/quote'] I've studied under developers/implementers and all of them had the same horror stories. "I don't have time to learn this. I have to get back to working." Even though what they were being taught was how the job was going to go. As for gamers being lazy, why do you think so many of them play D&D and nothing else? I've played Hero since '83. And several other systems. This in the one I prefer for supers. For Fantasy I prefer SPI's old DragonQuest. Right now I'm lucky if I get a game in at all, which is why I'm writing. And if you're tired of the discussion, why participate in it? I have the softcover SPI 2nd edition and the first two adventures (Palace of Ontocle and Blade of Allectus). The modules are labeled a dollar each, I probably picked them up at a store that was trying to clear them off the shelf. I hadn't thought about the game since, well, before everything was on the net, so I went googling and sure enough Arcane Wisdom is easily downloaded--I wonder who owns the copyright and if they care. Maybe not, since it doesn't generate revenue for anyone. I always suspected that DQ left way too much up to the GM without guidance. Rituals have material components sorts of limits, but I wasn't clear on how hard they should be to obtain. There may have been a similar problem with Namers obtaining True Names, though I kind of have a vague memory of some kind of mechanism that might be clearer than I remember. And rumor was that the biggest flaw was that there was no reason to not be a member of a college no matter how little your interest in magic, because it was essentially free. But I never played, so maybe those things would have become clearer with practice. It did seem like it was ahead of its time in a lot of its mechanics, however.

Why yes' date=' yes I am. It did after all suit my argument and word play to do so. I'm arguing game mechanics for a game based on statistical models (bell curve, effect) and numbers (point costs)...so...yeah, I am. And I fully respect that. If you like 5e or it doesn't make financial system to move to 6e' date=' then the sensible thing is to stay on 5e. I did a tremendous amount of content for and ran a lot of games in 5e; its a great system, flaws included. Same for 4e. I'm not an upgrade or get out snob. Bottom line, I'd far rather you and your group play some version of the HERO System than some other game entirely. I'm just really, really tired of the same old figured characteristic remonstrances.[/quote'] I've studied under developers/implementers and all of them had the same horror stories. "I don't have time to learn this. I have to get back to working." Even though what they were being taught was how the job was going to go. As for gamers being lazy, why do you think so many of them play D&D and nothing else? I've played Hero since '83. And several other systems. This in the one I prefer for supers. For Fantasy I prefer SPI's old DragonQuest. Right now I'm lucky if I get a game in at all, which is why I'm writing. And if you're tired of the discussion, why participate in it? Wow--someone who knows what DragonQuest was, let alone plays it? I have the book, but never got a chance to actually play it. Admittedly, it looked like it would be a lot more playable with the supplement which I gather only exists as a bootleg draft.

I imagine this topic has been beaten to death repeatedly since before the publication of 6e, but I just started looking a 6e so this is very much a topic of interest to me. If nothing else, I'll have to eventually decide if I'm going to adopt 6e, and really one reason I finally created a forum account is to find out what has been happening with both Hero Games and the Hero System recently. There seem to be two separate discussions going on: what the effects of eliminating figured characteristics is, and whether those effects are on the whole good or bad. It would probably be a lot more useful to discuss them separately. In particular, it would probably help people like me who are late to the discussion and are still trying to work out what what it means for their games. Keeping in mind that I haven't actually used 6e yet, the most obvious consequence seems to be that characteristics are more expensive. That in turn seems to have several further consequences. The standard point levels have been bumped up to compensate, but one thing I haven't seen yet is anyone discussing how the balance between powers and characteristics has been altered. Given that powers remain largely the same costs and effects, I would think that the most effective thing for many characters to do would be to put some of the consolation points in powers rather than buy characteristics all the way back to what they would have been in 5e. I would also expect it to be more efficient to be more selective about what characteristics you buy; for example, I'd think that with the new cost structure, bricks would be advised to buy their OCV back to 5th ed levels, but not buy dex and DCV all the way back but rather put some of those points elsewhere. And the consequence of that seems like it would be a greater variety of character abilities, but also perhaps less well-rounded characters (since the free figured points tended to be spent in one particular way that encouraged dex to correlate with spd, stun to correlate with con and thus the ability to resist being stunned, and so on). I'd be interested to know if those guesses match the experiences of those who have actually run 6e. I can think of other consequences, but that'll do for now.

This is definitely from the "a day late and a dollar short" file, since it involves a change from 4e to 5e that looks problematic to me (and the 6e version looks to have the same problems). There doesn't seem to be a forum search function, but google site-specific search works and I can't find any discussion or answers for the problem (or at least what I claim is a problem) discussed below (pointers to anything I missed gratefully accepted). It looks like I'm getting back into gaming after a long absence (I seem to have successfully raised up budding players of my own now). Most of my hero gaming was 4e; I used 5e (not revised, it wasn't out) for reference toward the end of my gaming career, but didn't really go through all the differences (which weren't great anyway). I've now bought the 6e rules, and while reading them discovered that multiform is radically different than in 4e. Checking my other books, it appears that the crucial change happened in 5e and I just didn't notice. In 4e IIRC multiform worked something like this: your primary form is the one with the greatest total cost. Your other forms can't exceed the total cost of the primary *minus the cost of multiform*. The first additional form is bought 1/5, each additional is bought 1/10. This makes sense to me--I suspect the cost structure was modeled on a multipower with ultra (fixed) slots, in that you can think of the total cost minus multiform as the size of the reserve, and the multiform cost as the cost of one fixed slot per character (so that the first additional form really costs 1/10 for that form and 1/10 for another slot for the primary form). It's abusable, but at least the computation is in-line with a multipower. It also ensures that, like all other constructs that let you change what a point is being used for, you give up raw power for the flexibility. None of the forms have as many points to spend on powers as would a character without multiform. 5e seems to have radically changed this cost structure. The crucial change is that the forms are built on the same base points as the primary *including the multiform cost*. It isn't specified how many disads they can take, and the only obvious number is "the same as the primary form." If that's the case, then the problem is that multiform just became essentially free. Say I build a 350 character (character #1) without multiform. Now I can write up another 350 character (Character #0) who puts 70 points into multiform (change to character #1) and is defined as the base character. Character #0 is completely free. He's not as powerful as #1, thanks to the cost of the multiform, but a 280 pt form with different abilities than the other is an amazingly useful thing to get for free. But it gets worse--I can double the forms with a +5 adder, so if #0 pays 75 points, I get two forms with a full 350 points to spend, and so on. This seems to break the fundamental hero assumption that you don't get stuff for free, as well as the assumption that you have to give up some power for flexibility. No powergamer would ever write up a non-multiform character. So that suggests that the assumption that the forms can all have the same number of disad points as the base form is incorrect, but if so there is no guidance on how to balance it and no other obvious number besides the base form's disad total. So I thought this must have gotten fixed in 6e (or 5er, which I don't have), but it appears to clearly state that what I claim is the problematic interpretation is the correct construction. "A character’s forms are built on the same Total Points (including Matching Complications) as the true form (or fewer points, if the player so desires)." That seems to make it very clear that I can create nearly unlimited numbers of forms that are as powerful as a non-multiform character under the campaign rules, as long as there is one that isn't (because it pays the multiform cost). So either I'm missing something, or this power is simply broken in 5e+. It's hard to imagine the latter, but I can't see anything I'm missing. I'd appreciate a pointer to something I missed, or an explanation of why this isn't a problem in practice, or a discussion of what people actually do in their campaigns if they have houseruled multiform, or anything else that sheds light on this. As it stands now, I couldn't allow 5e+ multiform at all. I'd either have to use the 4e rule, or simply disallow multiform and build the equivalent by hand with other constructs (which is not very friendly to beginners). Thoughts?

Is there any rhyme or reason to which products get bundled and which do not? I was thinking of picking up some of the 5e Ultimate books, and some have bundles but Energy Projector, at least, does not. That doesn't make much sense, since the reproduction cost for the pdf is just about zero. I can't think of any reason for some things to be bundled and others not.