Sam On Maui

I’m a hobby painter, and while I’ve got one main game (Warmachine(, I like to paint other minis from different games. it occurred to me I don’t know if any kitchen sink style skirmish games, and I was thinking that’d be a lot of fun! Especially if I could create my own units. There are some out there that allow for that, but they’re generally attached to a specific genre. So I’m looking for more, but one idea that came up was using HERO, GURPS, Savage Worlds, etc., to do try this. Has anyone done that before? I know HERO is a toolkit, so ditching stuff that’s not necessary ought work, but... hrm... there’s a lot to consider in regards to implamentation.

If you're in close you've got more tools at your disposal ranging from throws, sweeps, etc, giving you more options to press your advantage. If you dash back out then you'd be open to be charged at yourself if you didn't stun them. At least that's the theory. And, if I use Gnome's suggestion, you'd be at full OCV after, unlike the Dash Attack.

Wow... what a post! O_O I'll have to copy all this down for later and look it over. I'd happily try this for a small group, but I think ours is too big to really do this, and only a few of us would really want a full-on emulation like this. But it sounds awesome! O_O

One other thing: its one of those arcane engine details from late 90's/early 2000's - some games feature damage scaling so the more hits there are in a combo, the less damage each hit does. Its supposedly an anti-infinite/100% health combo/balance measure. Sorry, completely forgot that detail. I'm sorry I didn't spell it out explicitly. "Playing defensively" can take a number of methods, including staying away and pegging people from a distance. It'd be referred to as "zoning" (if projectiles are key to it) or poking/footsies in fighting parlance. Anyhow, while I do appreciate your input, I'm really not sure we're on the same wavelength here? Which is fine/normal, but I'm not looking to get a 100% translation/emulation to HERO. Just "good enough" for my purposes. My group is too big (8-12 people every Saturday) to use Fight!, which is a game made to emulate the fighting game genre, and I can't focus much on 1-on-1 fights as a result. So, inspired by, not equal to.

Its to discourage purely safe play. I will say that Garou: Mark of the Wolves and some other games encourage aggressive play, which is something I want to emulate. Garou/Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves would even cause counter hits to put hit enemies into juggle-states, something a projectile couldn't take advantage of. Killer Instinct (the new one) explicitly rewards higher risk choices with increased damage potential. Guilty Gear X onward actively penalized defensive play by reducing super meter over time.

That's enough guys! No worries, okay? Samurai Shodown (and most fighting games) do not have projectiles that decelerate or suddenly change speeds, although exceptions are out there I'm sure. Generally speaking they're a consistent speed selected by the player at the time of input, and either stop when they impact or go off-screen. Gnome Body had a nice solution I'll be looking into, and I'll be checking the velocity rules later.

You're speaking my language We've got 8-13 players each night, so we've had to scale back how many rules we implement so we rarely ever DEX-off. For the -N OCV gives +X DC, that's a nice idea. I'll have to think about that. Certainly easier than doing the math for Velocity calculations.

Well, I think the ranged attacks like Hadokens/fireballs would be fine as normal, but that is an interesting idea. I was thinking stuff like Terry Bogard's Burn Knuckle, E Honda's sumo-torpedo thing, Blanka's rolling ball, etc. And certainly, one trick with projectiles if you do them too close it can open you up to retaliation if it doesn't stun/knock down, so that arguably reflects that.

I'm wanting to make the change to help emulate video game fighting game mechanics, like Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, Samurai Shodown, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, etc. The increased damage isn't in most of them per se, but rather is a simpler way (I think) to reflect the chances you interrupted/counter-hit someone. In fighting games that often results in juggle/combo states, increased damage, etc. I need to keep it simpler rather than messing with OCV/DCV value because my group is large, hence looking to modify damage. Very much an attempt at emulation, not simulation

So, anyone who has played a fighting game before knows that some special attacks are right in front of a player, and some travel a distance across the screen. I'm planning a Samurai Shodown inspired game, and would like to incorporate that into building powers/attacks thematically, but am not sure how to do it. In a fighting game the farther a player is away from the target, the easier it is for the target to block, dodge, whatever. I was thinking the Range modifiers would work here. To help with an element of risk/reward, I'd like it to do more damage if the target is farther away, or less damage if they're close up. I was thinking maybe having it have a Velocity-based modifier like Move Through/Move By. Trick is, I'm not sure how I'd implement that simply. Looking over my 6e Champions Powers book, I know I over think things in terms of how it COULD be... thoughts?

I searched and got that, so... *shrugs* Still a great quote. I think I heard it in reference to Doctor Who originally

(Also posted at RPG.net) Last year I ran a Christmas "special" for our supers group involving Krumpus. This year I'm doing a Halloween / Dia De Muertos special. The basic premise is that a representative of each have come together to promote both events. Why? Because the year has been so crappy, people are stressed with all the horrors of real life, they're so busy they're not remembering friends and family, etc. Kind of a Hallmark movie type of thing. The world is doom and gloom and paranoia, and people need reminding that the metaphorical monsters in their lives are beatable! “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” ~G.K. Chesterton Additionally - and this is stealing from "The Book of Life" animated movie plus "Grim Fandango" (classic adventure game) with a touch of "Lanterns" (a wonderful board game) - there are people who need remembering to help them on their path to the afterlife. The solution the two came up with? Giant monsters will "attack" on Halloween night, and will explode into candy when defeated. Some of the candy is the standard stuff, but some of it will also be nostalgic, reminding kids and parents of happy times with passed on loved ones and more, and hopefully getting them to spend time as a family reminiscing about it. That's where the heroes come in. The heroes beat the "monsters," candy goes everywhere, and by dedicating each defeat to some of the souls in limbo? They get extra help on their journey out of there. And therein lies the "how should I do this?" part. I was initially thinking of players sacrificing dice to make the dedication, but that favors folks with large dice attacks. I'm now leaning towards them making Presence attacks with modifiers to wow the crowd as it were, with the results basically building up into a pool to see how many souls they help out. Thoughts? Anything else to consider? Side note: one of the PCs just *nuked* an army of something (I wasn't there for it), so when the main story comes up he's going to be sanctioned/under investigation/etc. I was debating his actions either counting against their total (foreshadowed with "Oh hell no, I ain't taking no dedications from THAT guy!") or maybe helping people go to hell I was also thinking of adding a twist where all the negativity made the candy monsters go crazy, but am unsure about it so far.

Usually when folks talk about HERO, it seems there's an assumption you're running a full-fat, RAW game with extra optionals turned on. But I was wondering - what's the leanest, most bare-bones you've run it? Recognizing its a tool box, you can do quite a lot with it! Did you get rid of the speed chart? Stop tracking END? Ignore STUN? Toss hit locations away? For instance, I just ran a game based on Doom and really, REALLY pared things down. And after that? I trimmed a little more off to boot. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3dkBHyXsZaReTF0aG9MNGlkRVk/view?usp=sharing I was inspired by some board games as well as games like Fate, Marvel Heroic, etc. Also, I was trying to emulate the game in question, which was very fast paced, had no STUN, etc. Pulled from games like Team Fortress and Halo for role inspiration. It worked well, and the players had a great time. How about you?

Okay, upon asking for recommendations on Atomic Robo, and mentioning Fate never made sense to me? Someone gave me this... http://www.uptofourplayers.com/fate-core-rules/ So, I'd want a bare minimum of rules PLUS a comic "how to"/playthrough. Seriously. Because walls of text can be an obstacle.

A true HERO Lite, IMO, would have no powers creation. It might have powers, but they'll be pre-fabs and the like. It might have some base pre-gens/archetypes, but then have customization options for them. Honestly, the base mechanics are pretty easily, but the overall presentation is what freaks people out. I'd happily kickstart alternative character creation method books if the option came up. A simplified method book would compliment the main books nicely, since sometimes you want a nice and easy front end (like a smartphone) instead of REAL ULTIMATE POWAH (Unix command line).

I'll have to look those over, thank you!

Not really fluff. It'd be the basis of the game.

I'll have to look. IIRC, Lucha Libre was going a different route, like the old movies and such, and the assumption was "this stuff is real!"

Its "real enough," meaning that everyone except the newest/youngest of fans knows its theater where the actors do their own stunts, are there for the show, etc., but the players/wrestlers themselves? Yeah, its "fake" but it still puts you through the wringer. As Diamond Dallas Page puts it, "you can't fake gravity." So trying to balance putting on an exciting show versus "I actually need to live through this" would be part of it.

So, the players are in the squared circle, locking in, and trying to put on a hell of a show for a small time promotion. They need to make everything look good, sell each hit, make every slam believable, yet be able to walk out of the venue in one piece at the end of the night. How would you run this without making it into a morass of skill checks? When I first thought of it, it went down the line of STR check, acting check and crowd reaction, etc., then trying to figure out how much a move actually hurt versus "man that looked brutal!", with failures resulting in actual damage or worse. But the more I thought about it, I began to wonder, "is there a better way?" Something more streamlined, to the point, but without getting too bogged down in actual simulation? Thoughts, anyone?

HERO is a very internally consistent tool-box system that lets you do the same sort of things more narrative RPGs do (ie, define everything), but gives you more structure to do so. Likewise, because everything can be well defined? It gives a greater sense of "world" like more traditional RPGs, but lets you see "under the hood" at how it works and gauge things for yourself rather than "just trust us" or leaving you wondering how powerful something really is. Additionally, once you learn it? The rulebook isn't needed often at all. Compare that to games like Pathfinder, D&D, etc., which are very reference heavy. I've tried running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying before, and while we had fun? The fact was it was too unstructured for some of the players. Likewise, I abandoned Pathfinder because we were constantly having to stop the game to look stuff up.

So far as I can recall we've NEVER done respecs. That said, everyone else in the group either has 30+ years of HERO experience or lets one of the long-timers make their character for them.

We've been doing "group experience" like this for Iron Kingdoms RPG (2012) and yeah, it makes life SO much easier. Sure, sometimes folks have to play catchup because they missed a week or two (real life/family first - not going to penalize for that), and yeah, its wonderful. We allow a respec there too, but I think its once players hit Epic level.

Given that HERO has a learning curve, characters develop organically, and everything is point-buy versus being random? Do you allow players to "respec"? A chance to revise their build, possible retcon bits of history? Especially in supers games? If so, under what conditions? Does it require a goal of sorts? Do you require they buy it with XP (arguably because they'll be spending more efficiently the second time 'round)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus I'm doing a one-shot game for the holidays in our Champions game. The basic idea is the world has been SO bad, SO naughty that Krampus is going to hit the big shiny reset button on planet Earth. How? Well, there's an old missile silo out in the middle of Nowhere, USA, and he's going to fire the stupid thing off, expecting the Russians, North Koreans, etc., to go nuts themselves (or have automated systems they haven't updated in decades). So, I'm looking for advice on statting him up, plus maybe some disgruntled elves who defected from Santa's side because, well, "kids today" (or something). The challenge will be making this a reasonable challenge for a group of ~10 experienced players at 250-300 points each done up in HERO 5th. I generally make my NPCs in 6th because I think its easier to make them in a reasonable fashion without bloating up stats and such to get to desired points. Because they're such an army of players, I'm thinking of having some of the elves fixing the old equipment so over time they have to take them out to stall the launch. Of course, now I wonder if he's really something to be defeated so much as an obstacle... *arggggghhh* Help?