Gauntlet

I would have to say that if you do feel that Penetrating should be 1/4 Advantage for Normal Attacks and 1/2 Advantage for Killing Attacks, then you probably will want to do the same for Armor Piercing as well.

Hmm.  10 DCs (so 8d6 with AP).  Let's go with 20 Con and 25 defense.
 
Normal attack averages 35, target takes 10.  From target's perspective, stunned about 3% of the time.  
AP averages 28, versus 13 defense, so target takes 15.  Needs 34 STUN rolled to stun the target...that's 18%.
 
Hmm.  12 DCs...which means 9 AP, I suspect, for most.  I hate half dice for normal damage.  23 CON, 30 defense.
Normal attack averages 12 past defenses, and stunned also around 3%.
AP averages 31 vs. 15, so...16 past defenses.  Need 40 to stun...about 6%.  And this is with a slightly lower DC rating overall.
 
So he's got a point.  Even if you go with higher defenses, halving that defense is huge.  The better you are...the more effective the AP is.  
 
If you're concerned about this, then you want to look at *some* of your defense being hardened.  Particularly at higher levels.
 
Note that I'm considering only AP normal.  AP killing...I have a principle.  Killing attacks are just that...deadly.  AP killing attacks are *lethal.*  Someone using something that looks like an AP killing attack becomes a High Priority Threat, if a villain, and more severe counters are acceptable.  A hero should almost never use an AP killing attack, IMO...not against even typical supervillains.  Yeah, I strongly prefer that heroes try hard not to kill, if there's any choice.  
 
EDIT:  another aspect.  If a normal-damage attack with AP is gonna do BODY, generally, it won't be much.  That's good...make the PCs sweat.  But an AP Killing attack risks potentially doing a LOT of BODY...the variance is just that high.  That might be more than sweating....

I am always for more Champions and Hero content, whatever it may be.

Glad to be of service. 🫠

Very true.

non-lethal AoE powers, be it entangles, mental attacks or others, may be of limited use till you need to safely remove the mind controlled crowd from the battle, the villain hiding in the crowd that is running away... 

Yea, but Continuous's teeth grew back in a matter of seconds. 😁

And you are not wrong, Sir.
 
But as long as there is more than one mechanic- particularly if one is a random number generator and the other are not, balance will not be attainable.
 
Unless there is a movement to remove both the random number generator and the tendency for situational fluctuations making one ability more or less useful at any given moment,  any attempt at making everything equal is doomed to fail.

That is the slight wierdness of what I am doing.  I want to aim for the tropes of Greyhawk without seeking to replicate D&D, so magic schools and levels of ability/spells etc but not necessarily vancian magic.

Please discontinue from answering so directly and informatively. How else are we gonna get this into the 10,000 posts range if we are being direct??? 

It is the Bushido Paradigm, as a thread progresses beyond three pages, the likelihood of it shedding any further light on the original question diminishes geometrically.

Problem I have is that not allowing STR to increase HKA makes STR pretty much useless in Heroic games. A halfling with a 5 STR does as much damage with a knife as does a Troll with a 35 STR. Just doesn't make any sense. I think it might be a better idea to allow other characteristics add things so that STR isn't the only characteristic doing so. Perhaps allowing EGO to increase your mental attack, and perhaps even allowing DEX to increase your Ranged Attack.
 
Now if you go with the argument that the 35 STR Troll shouldn't be doing 2-1/2d6 Damage with a little knife, I agree with you, that is why I think the doubling rule is a good thing. But stating that someone with 129 times the lifting capacity will do the same damage, just doesn't make sense. 
 
But as I have said before: I love that this game keeps older version usable. So in the case that the new version is something myself and my players truly hate, we can stay with an earlier version without repercussions. I like that this game thinks of all its players, not just the new ones.

I think we need to go the other way. I agree that perhaps Ego attacks should have a bonus based on your EGO. I think what we maybe should be increasing what other things do rather than just reducing them.
 
As for OCV and DCV along with OMCV and DMCV as well. But I think that the option to purchase them up as a characteristic is a good idea as well. This way characters have the option of going either way. 
 
 

So you are saying that Penetrating needs to be a higher value advantage because they gave it its own defense type in 6e. I can understand that but also feel that Hardened should go back to being a defense against both Armor Piercing and Penetrating. 

It definitely is a case of what you want to do. If you are going for unconscious, go for normal damage, if you want them dead, go for killing damage.
 
So what you are saying is that the person who is small and has trouble picking up a plastic stool will do as much damage with a sword as that giant that can throw cars at you?

Oh no, you don't!
 
That"s how 2/3 of this threas happened!..:lol:
 
 

Saying that people would not use HKA with no maximum in 6th edition overpoweringly is crazy. I have seen a ton of people who buy a 5 point HKA (1 Point Body Damage) and then use their 50 STR to make it a 3-1/2d6 HKA which is a devastating attack. Much more devastating than an 11d6 normal attack via STR, and they both cost exactly the same. Doubling means you don't get these point hogs that do things like that, and I have seen a huge number of them, both in house and online. Every 6th edition game I have GMed or played in has had a player do things like that. Every online game, every in-house game, every game at a convention, period end of subject.

Nothing to his STR. Each HKA would take the limitation No STR Bonus which is a -1/2 limitation.
 
But then I realized you were speaking about a character picking up a HKA that he/she did not purchase with points. I guess then it would be a -1/2 limitation to his STR but I definitely am not sure.

So what you are saying is that hand attack is the same thing. There should be no hand attack, you should just buy more STR. I mean if I am a normal with 10 STR and have a 3d6 HA I am doing 5d6 damage, I am getting 2d6 for free.
 
But on a different note, there is a some talking about hero changing so it can sell copies. Which is correct but at the same time, and definitely different than most other games, you can pretty much use any writeup on and version in any other version, as long as you are not worried about cost. This makes it much easier to utilize that old villain you loved for your new game on a newer version. I think that is one of the great things about this game.

Have you found the system broken with how HKA works?  Seems like Hero has cruised along fine with hand to hand killing attacks allowing increased damage from STR since, I dunno, 1st edition?  

I wouldn't go that far. Penetrating can do a little BODY Damage, average of 1 and maximum of 2, while NND Does BODY means the target takes whatever is rolled. Now if you want to say that Penetrating is like the unregistered infant of NND, then that would be more like it. 😁

One thing, Penetrating does not replace the Does BODY advantage. If your have an NND Killing Attack it still requires Does BODY to do BODY, the Penetrating advantage does not change that.
 
The other problem is with Penetrating doing only STUN is that you have to put 7.5 points on each die to get one stun, or you can pay 2.5 points on a normal attack and get one stun per die. 

Sometimes I will dig deep and come up with some strange ways that to defeat the threat that the characters can discover through investigation. This is where skills like Journalism, Research, Antiquities, and such can really start coming in handy. Like the characters finding out the key to stopping Dorian Gray from terrorizing one of their DNPCs is to find his portrait and destroy it. That sort of thing can be a lot of fun for the right group of players.

I definitely don't disagree with you. Many times in those type of situations the players need to think their way through, not just attack and assume they are powerful enough to win. I have found that many times players will say something is impossible because they do assume that a direct conflict is the only way to go. Part of the GMs job in this case is give them a good chance to understand that there are other ways to win then just direct combat.

"Prevailing" in a horror game is often very different from fantasy or supers. The threat usually isn't something the protagonists can defeat with brute force. They need to just survive until they can devise or discover a method for them to win, if they can. In Lovecraftian horror, for example, stopping the unspeakable alien monstrosity is most often a matter of preventing whatever ritual/ceremony will bring it to this world, rather than fighting it directly. With Stephen King's writing the protagonists usually need to uncover the threat's hidden weakness or vulnerability.