Ockham's Spoon

Re: Ambidexterty- too expensive? So taking you at your word here on your ambidexterity, I have a question I have always wondered about. Since practice makes perfect, would you find that although you are capable of writing with either hand that it is easier with your right hand because that is the one you typically use? Or brushing your teeth, or putting in contact lenses or whatever? Just wondering. ______________________________________________________________ "Some people spread joy wherever they go. Others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

Re: Trigger Clarification I haven't looked at the rulebook on this, but I thought a Trigger, even an autoreseting Trigger, could only reset once per PHA anyway. If so, there is no problem with the Teleport idea (although Dust Raven's point about movement totals was an excellent argument too). Or am I wrong about this? In any event, this kind of Trigger power I would not allow unless there was a reasonably common means to prevent it. I would have the character buy extra levels in DCV to represent the fact they were really hard to hit if that is what they were going for. (Or maybe I would have them battle on ledges and narrow bridges and stuff a lot...) Otherwise it smacks of munchkinism to me. _____________________________________________________________ "Why follow me to higher ground, lost as you swear I am?" - Ed Roland

Re: Ambidexterty- too expensive? One of the stated advantages of Ambidexterity is that if your primary hand is injured you can still function normally. How often does that happen in your games? Rarely in games I have played, so Ambidexterity loses some of its value. Ambidexterity also allows you to do things other than just attack, like Lockpicking, Sleight of Hand, etc, which could make it more useful. Some of those things would be easier with the "other" hand just due to the orientation of the task (if you have ever worked on a car and tried to change the oil filter with your off hand because you couldn't reach it easily with your good hand you know what I mean). But this kind of penalty (in my experience) is rarely if ever applied, which again robs Ambidexterity of some of its usefulness. I think that realistically that Ambidexterity is probably priced correctly, but it does not come into play as often as it probably should. It kind of falls into the catagory of skills that are appropriate for your character to have, but that don't actually have a great deal of impact on the game. And given that, I would probably allow a 5 or 6 point cost for Ambidexterity to reflect it realtive usefulness. ____________________________________________________________ "Some people spread joy wherever they go. Others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

Re: Amnesia I have a player that loves the idea of amnesia and a mystery past, and makes such characters frequently. I have, at times, allowed a 5 point Disad for it as a Psych Lim (Compelled to discover past), with the understanding that it will have to be bought off as the past is revealed. 5 points isn't much of a Psych Lim, and it is played at the 15 point level, but having to devote the first 15 XP to buying off a Disad is too onerous for most, so we let it sit at 5. Typically, from a character building standpoint, amnesia serves two purposes in my games. First, it means the character almost inevitably has a Mystery Hunted, which makes it easy for the player initially, but they have to deal with whatever I come up with for a Hunted. Second, it allows the player to have a background that they can't actually pay for, on account of the fact they have "forgotten" some of their skills.

Re: Recharging Things? I have modelled this power before by figuring what the normal END cost is for the item (in this case 6 END for a 4d6 RKA) and have it recharge at that rate with a Healing power with a custom advantage, like so 3d6 Healing vs. END, Can heal Charges of appropriate SFX (+¼), END per Charge = (Active Cost of Power being recharged/10), Act 14-, Side Effect: 2d6 RKA Explosion, centered on equipment being recharged. Active: 37, Real: 18 I did this in a heroic level campaign, where equipment being recharged was already "free" so there was no problem with someone saving points where they should not have. Besides which, when it failed to work (hey, it is tricky recharging a hydrogen fuel cell without proper connectors) the equipment was effectively destroyed and it stung a bit (or a lot), so it was only a last resort sort of thing anyway. LazerBlast might not be too eager to get a recharge if he knows his gun might be melted and his eyebrows burned off if it didn't go quite right. _______________________________________________________________ "Some people spread joy wherever they go. Others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

Re: Undetectable Firearms Invisible Power Effects would have been my first thought too, but bigdamnhero does make a valid point that it really affects the use of the weapon not the focus of the gun itself. So you could build it with Images or Invisibility only vs the gun, but I think bigdamnhero is right (again) about the negative PER levels. You might also buy it as a bonus to a Concealment roll, only vs weapon detectors, but that is essentially the same thing. Well, no not quite I guess... Enough babbling. Just read bigdamnhero's post and forget I signed on. __________________________________________________________ "Some people spread joy whervever they go. Others whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

Re: Practical Costuming (not quite a WWYCD) Now this is something I have always wondered about: how is a burka a practical garment? I realize you do not want the sun beating directly down upon you, but being enveloped in all that black cloth has got to be stifling. What am I missing here?

Re: Practical Costuming (not quite a WWYCD) Nice pics freakboy; I especially like the viceral artistry of the second.

Re: Looking for help - stealth suit powers? Just because you have the points doesn't mean they have to go into the suit. In fact, the character might be more balanced if you spent them elsewhere. How about some Martial Arts (he takes Tae Kwon Do as a hobby or something) or an Overall level or two? If you do put them in the suit, some other considerations are: Screening Circuitry: Mental Def (I guess this is a stretch if he doesn't have a helmet) Stim-Booster: Aid to STN, with charges Pain Inhibitor: Extra PD/ED, only vs. STN, with continuing charges Chameleon Field: Images only to blend into surroundings, probably vs Sight, Hearing, & Radar

Re: Practical Costuming (not quite a WWYCD) Costumes have always been kind of a sticking point for me, and when I GM I let my players handwave the outfit because it fits the genre, but when I make my own characters, I go out of my way to make the suit at least remotely practical. Consequently my characters almost always have one or more of the following: LS: Immune to Temperature - so they don't roast wearing their costume under street clothes or freeze in the winter when wearing that skimpy outfit Instant Change: usually to "fire form" or something similar, but sometimes in the broader use to be able to make the costume suitable to the environment. SFX or Transform that allows easy repair of costume. Shapeshifting powers (extensive or limited) or Multiform so no costume is needed. Illusions or holograms programmed to "create" a costume or at least obscure the character's identity. Public or Only in Hero ID No costume (or just a mask or something that could be carried in a pocket), and by this I mean street clothes or an alien body-type that does not really need clothes, not someone with the Psych Lim: Exhibitionist ____________________________________________________ "Joel, why is the heroine wearing a hubcab?" - Crow from "Cave Dwellers"

Re: How should a Super-Power Suppression Field affect characteristics? Well, heck, if this is just a plot device, do whatever you want. Put everyone at all base 10 CHA. Or 20 CHA. Or 5 CHA. Or not. Now the question is, what is it you want your players to accomplish once they are enfeebled? What abilities do they need to retain to escape their predicament? Are they going to need a modicum of combat prowess to beat off some low-level thugs, or will this be entirely a mental exercise? Instead of calling it a super-power draining ray, call it a cosmic crippling ray and strip them of whatever powers you want/need to get rid of and leave them with the rest of their abilities so they don't feel completely emasculated. _______________________________________________________ The only two infinite things are the universe and stupidity. And I am not altogether certain about the universe. - Albert Einstien

Re: How to block the "unblockable" punch? An excellent discussion, again demonstrating how many ways there are to do things in HERO. And perhaps how careful you have to be defining things My kneejerk response to this was that due to the SFX the attack is blockable; if the player did not take a -¼ limitation for it, they should have. But I also think that it should not be as easy to block as a normal attack; there is a +½ Advantage on it after all. For the sake of computing the effective OCV for purposes of blocking, figure out how many active points were spent adding the advantage, and convert them to 5 point HTH attack levels (5 point levels instead of 3 point because powers with built in levels are not allow to have them cheaper than 5 pointers, IIRC). So, for an 8d6 AoE 1 Hex attack, that is 60 active points total, 20 of which go to the cost of the advantage, which gives you +4 OCV for the purposes of an OCV vs. OCV block roll. Fair enough? ________________________________________________________ "The fiction in her family was that she was never nice. I'd say she was very, I just did not see the price." - S. Vega

Re: How should a Super-Power Suppression Field affect characteristics? Regardless of what constitutes superhuman or normal, the real issue here as I see it is how was the Drain/Suppression defined? If a player came to me with a "superpower" draining ray, I would make him tell me how it was supposed to work, because that is way too vague. If the Drain is a time constriction field that slows the reflexes, then both SuperSpeedGuy and DarkKnightGadgetGuy are affected. If the Drain siphons off molecular vibration energy, then SuperSpeedGuy is going to get slammed hard, but DarkKnightGadgetGuy is unaffected. As for how badly SuperSpeedGuy will be affected (that is, will he drop to 20 DEX or 10 DEX), that depends on how the character of SuperSpeedGuy is defined. Was he a highly trained athlete who was given super powers by a dying alien or was he a bookworm geek who was subjected to a radiation accident? The background will give you a reasonable idea of how much DEX he is going to lose. ____________________________________________________________ "Trumpy, you can do magic things!" "Its called evil kid." - MST does "Pod People"

Re: Yet Another Alternate SPD Rules Thread Some examples of repeated actions are running, or laying down suppression fire. These are relatively simple tasks that anyone can keep doing. Once a repeated action is started, it can be stopped any time, but the character then has to wait for their phase to come up before they can do anything besides stop. In Hero, you should allow a repeated action to be replaced by an Abort, where the Abort is any normal defensive maneuver. This sounds like a logical take on how actions are really performed. The one problem that immediately comes to mind is attacks with a continuous nature, like a Choke Hold. Do I get to do damage on every Segment because it is a repeated action? Then again, this is a glitch in the current HERO system because a character with a SPD 6 can choke someone to death twice as fast as a character with a SPD 3 (assuming the damage dice are the same) which makes no sense. I do not want to hijack the thread about this scenario in particular, but if you are going to tinker with the SPD rules it is something to take into account. __________________________________________________________ One day I will learn how to quote other posts in my own - OS

Re: Holding 'em Back How about just throwing a modifier on your Suppress STR power "only vs. exerted STR (±0)". Is the extra END the victim will use for STR really so great as to require something beyond a SFX call? If it is, make it a +¼ Advantage. At the +¼ level it would be cheaper than buying a Suppress vs. STR and END (at +½), but the END wouldn't be affected as much either, so the Advantage level would be about right. ___________________________________________________________ "Why follow me to higher ground, lost as you swear I am?" - Ed Roland

Re: Yet Another Alternate SPD Rules Thread I feel your pain about the second-by-second granularity of combat. Before I comment on your alternate SPD rules, let me offer a couple of ideas to ameliorate your problems with the SPD chart concept. First, if you ever watch people in a sparring match, they do not attack constantly. You throw a few punches and then pull back, evaluate your opponent, catch your breath, etc. The "choppy" way the SPD chart works kind of reflects that. Second, if you do not like the way time passes in combat, ignore it. Don't make each Segment=1 second. Just use the chart as a guideline for how fast people get to go relative to each other. If you need exact times, then just use GM fiat to make things happen at the most dramatic moment. This is my personal tactic, if for no other reason that most HERO combats last less than half a minute strictly by the rules, which does not lend itself well to dramatic storytelling. As for your proposal, first let me address REC. I would give everybody a total recovery, TOTREC=(REC+1)xSPD, where the +1 reflects post-12 recovery. You can take up to your REC score each phase you want to, but not exceeding your TOTREC score per turn. I don't think that the END is going to police this system well enough to keep people from going every segment. It will just encourage them to buy lots of END (which is pretty cheap), or use large END Reserves or lots of Charges. Throw a few penalty levels on top of that and you can make a low SPD thug really dangerous. I think this system will also change the dynamic of combat, for better or worse. People will tend to pack their actions into the front of the turn and then use their last action to Dodge so their DCV is high until the end of the turn. This will hurt high SPD characters the most obviously, and maybe that is a good thing for balance, but they did spend a lot of points to be fast so they shouldn't be penalized too much. Finally, I like the idea of divorcing movement from SPD Maybe your acceleration should be based on SPD for the sake of convenience, but otherwise doing it by the turn gives movement a much smoother aspect. Build movement analogous to the falling rules, which go by Segment already. Nice ideas though. ________________________________________________________ "Why follow me to higher ground, lost as you swear I am?" - Ed Roland

Re: Help me name a team Okay I will throw out a few, but they are not as good as either Darwin's Children or HELIX Mankynd (as distinguished from Mankind) Nucleors (both as a reference to the cell's nucleous and nuclear radiation) Chromosapiens (with chromosomes beyond regular homo sapiens) ___________________________________________________________ "Trumpy, you can do magic things!" "Its called evil kid." - From MST cover of "Pod People"

Re: New Player freaks the heck out of me. As a recovered power junkie myself, let me say from experience that you cannot let this character be played. If nothing else, he will either outshine the other players entirely, or if you enforce the limitations, he will be worthless. In either case he will not be on equal footing with the other characters and this will seriously degrade the enjoyment of the game. You need to tell the player that limitations should not be used for the sake of saving points, tempting though that is. The real purpose of limitations should be to help define the power (e.g. a Telekinesis with a magnetic special effect would only work vs. ferrous metal - you take the limitation because you need it to make the power work as you have envisioned it). The only exception you should generally allow for is powers that are brand new which might be bought with Extra END or Activation or something to reflect that the character is not competent with them yet. This allows the player to get a power and develop it later so they do not have to save up a huge chunk of experience. If the player tells you he needs the limitations to be able to purchase everything his character is supposed to be able to do, then you need to tell him to redefine his concept so that he can build it on the points you have allowed for. If he cannot make this concept work on that many points, he may have to come up with a new character. Sure that would be a bummer initially, but in the end everyone will be happier for it. ___________________________________________________________ "Some people spread joy wherever they go. Others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

Re: The Godfather and sticky wood Okay, I definitely need to get the UMA. I have its predecessor, Ninja Hero, which I always thought was a pretty good compilation on the genre, but I see there is more. So much more. Thanks for the input. ____________________________________________________________ "Uh, Joel, what is Ator sitting on?" - Crow from "Cave Dwellers"

Re: Entangle that costs end to maintain?

Re: Snap Shot Teleport Yeah, only 1" T-port for a Snap Shot. T-port is potentially abusive enough as is. If you want for a character to be able to do this at a longer range (with GM permission of course) you should buy an T-port Triggered to go off one Segment after you fire an attack. __________________________________________________________ "Trumpy, you can do magic things!" "Its called evil kid." - from MST's cover of "Pod People"

Re: The Godfather and sticky wood

Remember the scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone's loyal muscle Luca Brasi gets killed? One rival mafia thug pins his hand to the bar with a knife while a second comes up from behind and strangles him. So I am thinking, how would you build an attack in HERO where the goal was pinning someone like that with a knife or stake or something? (For a villain obviously; I think there was also a version of this in the movie Johnny Mnemomic) It seems to me that the critical factor is getting the knife to stick into the wood (or other substance). Which brings me to another common cinema occurance: the hero dodges the villain's sword blow and the sword ends up stuck in a wooden railing or something just long enough for the hero to regain his own weapon or balance or at least make a snappy remark. So I put it to you, how would you (or have you) modelled a weapon getting embedded in something, whether intentional or not? How hard is it to get back out? And how much would it hurt if you did? ___________________________________________________________ "Uh, Joel, what is Ator sitting on?" - Crow from "Cave Dwellers"

Re: Entangle that costs end to maintain? I have to go with Kenn on this one, what you really want is AoE Telekinesis. You could try a Suppress vs. STR and Movement, but really the TK is more elegant. _____________________________________________________________ "Ow! Looks like she missed the pool folks. That will affect her score." - Tom Servo

Re: Choke holds & silence attacks (build help) Thia, I think you are looking at this backwards. The spell caster took the limitation Incantations, so any reasonable way to make him stop talking should work. It is part of the limitation. You don't need a special attack because the burden should be on the caster not the one trying to stop him. If you want to put a mechanic to it, say the speech is impaired for a number of PHA equal to the BDY done to the neck/throat (this would mirror a Flash attack point-wise). If you have a martial art attack that targets the throat specifically, all the better. Just my two cents.