Gauntlet

4 hours ago, pawsplay said:

 

I'm not saying it's advantageous. Rather that it's ability to absolutely overcome defenses is appealing to some people when trying to model certain highly powerful attacks, and the fact it is not always advantageous causes the resulting construction to look and  play weird. It's like, hi, I'm wearing a spacesuit, so I'm less vulnerable to adamantium claws.

Okay, so it looks like we are all on the same page. My big thing is that I don't believe that Penetrating should be a higher advantage than Armor Piercing. I think that both should be 1/2. I am not sure why they would put Armor Piercing at 1/4 while Penetrating is still 1/2. 

2 hours ago, LoneWolf said:

Why do we need to eliminate either of them?  There is nothing wrong with having more options, both advantages have their place.  The whole point of the Hero System is that you can build any power you want.  Some attacks are better built as AP others may work better as PEN. 

 

 

As to the cost difference AP attacks are more useful on higher dice attacks, where PEN works well on low dice attacks. Putting AP on a low dice attack gives you less bang for the buck then PEN as the target with decent DEF can still often bounce the attack.  PEN on the other hand becomes less effective at higher dice.   

You definitely have this one right on.

WAY WAY WAY to COLORY!!!

12 hours ago, pawsplay said:

I'd rather get rid of Penetrating and keep AP. AP allows attacks to rationalize enemy's defenses without creating huge kill numbers. It's indispensable for characters like Wolverine, who can harm very hard targets but isn't going to cut a tank in half with claws that short. Whereas I could live without Penetrating:

 

Bees! 1d6 RKA NND, defense is environmentally sealed armor or immune to bees

 

Penetrating is in many examples used as, okay, this really CAN cut through anything, and I think it's the wrong Advantage for that. Penetrating should really only be for attacks that can seep through incompletely sealed defenses; it does full damage against lesser defended foes but still always does something without Impenetrable defenses. It's a very specific behavior, which in most cases could be adequately modeled by combining an attack with a Linked NND attack for the splatter/leakage/swarming damage.

Not quite sure that Penetrating is so much better than Armor Piercing. I have seen it a lot of times where Armor Piercing fully takes the target out as it allows a ton of damage to go through, while Penetrating, even with high dice attacks really doesn't do much. Being hit with a 5d6 RKA that is Armor Piercing many times can take you directly out of the combat while Penetrating only means that you will take a minimum of 5 BODY, while is not good, it does mean you are still in the fight.

Well Transform will not work as to make enough water to fill a 4 hex radius area for 5th edition you would need to transform 753 BODY of air to make the water which would take a 251d6 Transform which would cost 3765 points. So to make an area of water that is a 4 hex radius you cannot utilize transform as I don't think even someone at the power level of Dr. Destroyer could do that. In 5th edition I believe that Change Environment would be the best way to do it, but I cannot figure out how to get it to do the same thing as actual water.

Now you might say that the spell could be less dice and they would just have to do it more than once, but considering it is an attack spell if you have to do it for multiple phases it kinda makes it worthless.

It has BODY as pretty much everything does. Even if you were desolid and can walk through walls, have bullets go through you, and everything else desolification gives you, you still have a BODY characteristic. Plus, transform requires a BODY characteristic for changing. So to create a spell that makes a 16 meter radius of water via Transform, you have to have a BODY Characteristic.

How much BODY would a 16-meter-wide globe of water have?

It looks like Change Environment would be the best way to make an area just of water, but I am not sure how it would be done. Other ways really don't work for making a room or hallway fill with water without the water spilling immediately to other areas. Doing it as transform into water just makes water that splashes away. A barrier is just a wall, not an area of water and other than stopping someone it would not give any effects that water would give, such as drowning, and once it is broken it goes away.

What would be the best way to make an area magically filled with water so that a radius of water appears and stays there so anyone going into it will have to swim and have the same problems as being under water?

3 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Fafhrd and Gray Mouser as well as Elric, Nine Princes in Amber, and Conan all rejected the medieval serf-lord structure for their stories.  Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and other classic fantasy stories had no such culture.  I agree its very common and typical, but isn't the necessary benchplate.

Of course Elric was with the Lords of Choas, so not having a culture with lords and such may not be that strange.

One thing also to remember is that you are going to play games you have some understanding of, and that many times will depend on where you come from. I will bet that a gamer in India or China or Japan would have incredibly different world bases than someone in the United States or Europe. And there is nothing wrong with that. The whole point is to have fun using your imagination. But then again if you want to run something different than the norm in your area, then take some time to learn different cultures, history, and imaginative lore.

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

Having popular and famous people play the game in streaming helped a lot, too.  So do shows like Stranger Things that feature it.

A lot of that is part of their advertising. They pay producers to put themselves in their shows and tell actors to tell people that they play their game. I am not saying that they only play because they are paid to, but one of the big reason they let people know that they are playing it is because they are paid to do so.

8 minutes ago, Old Man said:

 

D&D has a critical mass of people to teach other people how to play.  That's the main reason; I don't know anyone who learned how to RPG just from a book.  D&D also has celebrities playing D&D on youtube, entry-level boardgames that ease boardgamers into D&D, kids playing D&D on Netflix, and oodles of name recognition. 

They in some respects have gotten themselves to be the "Cool Thing To Do".

33 minutes ago, steriaca said:

While not a superhero entry, it is Gruntar, Mind Flayer Barbarian. Who says monsters can't have levels in classes?

I have seen them with classes before but normally it has been spell casting ones.

6 hours ago, Sketchpad said:

 

Except that D&D5e is getting new players consistently. So if it is more complex than Hero, something else is helping to bring people in. I've always seem D&D/Pathfinder around the same complexity as Hero, just in different manners. For example, having conditions actually can make a game flow better... BUT players need to know and understand what those conditions are. In the same respect, having to mold an ability to emulate conditions can be a bit of a head scratcher from time to time. 

D&D gets the players because they have the money for lots of adds, not because of the value of the game.

There is nothing wrong with using folded paper figures. They are easy to get and to make and work very well.

I am pretty sure the argument about if Champions is just variations on superheroes is kinda pointless. All heroes in movies, roleplaying games, or even computer games are Superheroes. The fact that they may not wear a cape or have lazers out of their eyes is irrelevant. For example, look at any of the Die Hard movies, in real life he would probably be at least hospitalized, or even dead, at the first encounter of the movie. Hell, Conan the Barbarian was even considered a superhero in Marvel.

1 hour ago, Scott Ruggels said:

 Irs ! Exactly. A good hunk of my gaming revolves around tactical puzzles, which were a centerpiece of the team based fights in Champions. I need that map and counters/Miniatures. THeater of the mind for me is just not compelling for combat. It can be for dialogue, but not when it gets to combat.  I had problems with some war game rules and as a result I got into WW2 Re-enactments.  It made a lot of the tactical choices a lot clearer.

Plus, with miniatures and such you got something to paint and show.

On 11/28/2023 at 1:13 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:

I have played a bunch of other modern systems and while each has their nice features or ideas, none of them are superior to Hero overall for me, at least.  I see no reason why on earth I would ever change to any other game except to just try it out or for a specific play session.

I definitely have to agree with you. Problem is most young players really just want to play a video game, not an actual role-playing game. They want it short and simple. I have played the new D&D and the reason they need to have 50,000 different character types is that each character is pretty much the same. And to actually look at it, in many ways D&D is more confusing than Hero, with each character type being completely different and nearly impossible to tell which would be more powerful as there are plenty of character types that are almost completely useless. But I have found a good note. That players as they get older do find the repressiveness of some of those simple game to no longer be fun and go to more interesting games, such as Hero, where you can actually make the character you want, not just something listed in a book the same as every other one.

Depends, in a Fantasy World, definitely, but in the real world, due to poor food intake and disease, the average might be higher than today's average due to a much greater amount of physical labor, but the maximum was much lower. I would say that the average today would be 7 or 8 while then it would be 11 to 12. But now we do have individuals with STR of 20 but then that would be overwhelmingly rare and 15 would be the top.

Normally in FH games I have magic-based characters have different characteristics for END and END Recovery when a spell caster. I have it as the following:

For Wizards (or spell casters who are obtaining magic from themselves):

MANA: 2 x INT

MANA REC: INT/5 + EGO/5

For Clerics (or spell casters who are obtaining magic from a higher source):

FAITH: 2 x PRE

FAITH REC: PRE/5 + EGO/5

Wendy and Marvin is who I was thinking of, I just gave them the wrong name.

No, it was a dog in the Superfriends. The Blue Space Monkey was a different cartoon.

What was the pets name the wonder twins had on the Superfriends cartoon?

11 minutes ago, Chris Goodwin said:

 

To use it though, the squishy wizard has to get within melee range of the sharp, pointy warrior. 

 

Just sayin'.

Not when his spells are ranged, which in many cases they are. Even if the power isn't standardly ranged, the ranged advantage can still be added.