Christopher R Taylor

Quote

I seem to recall a comic book page where Spider-Man (43 STR canonically) uproots a tree. But he probably begged a bonus for Clinging from the GM...

This is the problem with trying to emulate the comics; The Hulk held up the Himalayas in Secret Wars.  Now, he's very strong, but it doesn't matter how mad he gets, he's not going to be holding up billions of tons of rock.  Every so often writers get a bit crazy in what they have characters do and you have to hold those outliers as mistakes or exceptions rather than how to build a game or a power.  Spidey could easily uproot a small tree but I don't know how big a tree it was (don't recall that issue).

Quote

How much Strength would it take to knock a rooted tree over? I don't mean a young tree; just your average tree you see outside your window or in a forest.

I would probably approach this as the tree using STR to hold on to the ground, and the character trying to use STR to pull it up.  So you could just do a simple formula, like 5 STR per meter of height gripping strength with the roots, and its a simple STR vs STR contest.  That makes an apple tree of around 7 meters have 35 STR to hold on to the ground, and a sequoia of 92m have 460 STR.  Mind you the Hulk could probably rip up a redwood and beat you over the head with it in the comics, so there probably should be a cap of some sort to make it possible to emulate the comics.

Quote

 

Those genre tropes the heroes follow cause them challenges, but they also come back to the heroes' benefit, not their detriment.  If the GM won't follow that trope, why would the players follow their genre tropes?

Yeah I have been in one of those games.  One fault GMs can fall into is to try to win, or at least to feel disappointed that their villains are beaten too easily.  So they keep making the villains tougher and meaner and the PCs feel like they're in an arms race that requires them to be even more powerful and deadly.

The concept here is that as a game, its about fun, and failure, misery, and being defeated is not fun.  Its even tough to get some players to handle temporary defeat followed by amazing victory.  This is where, in my opinion, the Avengers movies failed: they made the misery and loss and failure too total and the victory too minor and filled with suffering, regret, and misery.  You didn't get that sense of triumph when Thanos was disintegrated, just a sense of relief.

The first Avengers movie did it perfectly: very tough fight, almost a loss, incredibly challenging, but total triumph and redemption in the end.  The second one... less so, because the stakes were so odd and felt so minor even though they were built up to be enormous.  They evacuated a floating city.  Yes, the claim was it would somehow blow up the earth yadda yadda, but it never felt like that was what would happen.  

Yeah, it worked in the movie for batman to not save Rachel, because it got her out of the picture and gave us Two Face.  But it was a bad Batman story, because Batman utterly failed and Joke won (over and over).  Its like Superman murdering Zod by twisting his neck slightly after a 10 minute battle where he couldn't harm Zod at all, next to people too stupid to get up and walk away from the death beam.  Heroes find a way.  Especially Batman.

Classic Batman story with Neal Adams art

Once again, the reason the Joker has to be taken out now is not because of anything innate in his character, but because of the way writers have been writing him. Each new writer thinks they have to top the previous one. Frank Miller tried to show Joker at his most unhinged, most horrible so that Batman had to take extreme measures to stop him -- and later authors took that as a base line and wanted to make THEIR Joker story even more awful.

In the end, they turned a sinister, somewhat deadly clown who did tricks like turn every fish in the harbor into Joker fish... into a mass murdering psychopath who slaughters by the dozens, or hundreds.  THAT Joker has to be taken out.  The Joker he started as, no.

Quote

The problem is that cutting a tree (tree trunk more than 20 cm) with a single sword stroke is not a heroic feat, is a super-heroic feat.

It kind of is, but that's the place a lot of fantasy martial arts stuff goes.  And I could see buying it as a special maneuver to cut through objects, but not than blanket "I just do enough damage" 

Quote

The way I would build it would be to give her an offensive strike and add 2 HTH DC to the marital art.  Also take weapon mastery and 6 or more skill levels.  The offensive strike and weapon mastery will add 9 DC to the sword and the skill levels bring that up to 12 DC.  That adds 4d6 Killing damage to the sword.  A Katana should be doing at least 1 1/2d6 damage base.  A character like this probably has a magic or extraordinary weapon so is probably doing 2d6 damage.  That puts the damage to 6d6 killing damage. 

I just want to go on record here as finding this horrific and shocking.  Anyone doing 18 damage classes in a heroic game has really lost the plot in my book.

You could as a GM rule that if you roll x or lower then there's no visible or audible trace of your passage.  For example: if you make your roll by 5, there's no sound.  If you make your roll by 8, there's no visible damage to the rice paper.  This is more old school Hero, but certainly within the concept of the skill.  It just represents someone with astoundingly great stealth or an amazing effort doing things beyond the believable.

Quote

As a result, many find Multiform overpowered. 

Well if you abuse the system anything can be overpowered, but as I have only run Multiform in previous editions, it may be less problematic than it definitely was in the past.  Thanks for the update on the way Multiform is built, I was running from memory of 5th (I think?  Might have been 4th) edition.

In any case, the character that I ran a game for was definitely underpowered.

Quote

I haven't gone through all the Q&A, but Steve never says anything like "the alternate form has X points to spend, minus the cost of Multiform itself."

Correct... but as I said, IF your alternate forms can change into any of the other alternate forms without going back to the primary form first, THEN they have to buy those forms.

But even if you aren't down any points in those forms, you still are in your main form, and a weaker character and trust me, that character feels it.

Quote

Is this just a matter of having a lot of damage dice, or is something else going on?

You could in theory do it with tunneling, dig a hole through the tree the width of the trunk and voila, it falls. 

The thing is, the rules aren't precise about dealing damage to objects like trees.  You have two choices in the rules: things that break and are ruined, and walls that are breached.  For the ruined things, reducing the Body to 0 results in a broken machine that doesn't work any more.  For the wall, reducing the body to 0 creates a 2m x 1m ("human sized") hole.  

I interpret this to mean that you deal with objects by 2m square areas; you haven't knocked down the entire Great Wall of China by blowing a "human sized" hole in it, just this one section.  You can break a crane by damaging this 2m area where the controls or engine or the base of the crane arm, etc.

So if you want to knock down a tree, you have to do enough body damage to the section (or sections) of tree you're at to break it all the way through the trunk.  This might take a few attacks to take down a Sequoia, for instance, but for most trees, one 2x2 meter area is sufficient.  The entire tree hasn't been turned into wood chips, just that section, which causes it to fall.

But a tree definitely has resistant PD; anyone who has chopped wood knows this for certain.  Quite a bit of it, actually, given how hard you have to swing an axe (dealing killing damage) to cut though a log, even with the grain.  In the rules, a tree is given 4-5 rPD and 3-4 rED (fire bad).  The Body total ranges from 5 to 11 to get through a 2m area.  That might be a bit low, in my estimation.

Quote

Why were the multiforms weaker?  As I read 5E, the multiforms get full points to spend...if the campaign's 500, then the base form pays the 100, but all the alternates have complete freedom to spend all 500.

You have to buy all the multiforms in the main form making that character weaker.  You have to buy every form your multiform can turn into, making each of them weaker.  5th made it less penalizing than 4th by giving you the doubler effect (5 points for each x2 forms) but still, say you make Ronin who can turn into 5 other forms, but those are still points that the main form gets no use from.

That's 250 points/5 for the first form, then +5 for 2 forms, +5 for 4 forms and +5 for up to 8 forms, in this case 5.  So your base "true" form is now 65 points down from every other character.  "But," you say, "everyone pays for powers!"  Indeed they do.  But these powers directly impact the characters ability, they can use all of those powers in their single form.  Multiform points are points in your character that this character never uses.  Its just points gone from their total.  So Ronin is a 195 point character in a world of 250 point characters.  Each form that the other forms can change into are also crippled in this way.

See, Duplication you're using all those forms at the same time, so you're using all of that power at once.  Multiform you only use one power set at a time.

The reason I see this as a problem is playing the campaign and seeing "dang Ronin is just flat out weaker than everyone else" in action.  It was frustrating for the player, and for me as the GM.  Being able to turn into a different set of powers is valuable, but not that valuable.

Quote

I realized that such people are approaching the story from the perspective of a gamer. I.e. "If I was playing this character, what would I do to win? What are the gaps in the plot, the tricks of the system that I can exploit so my Player Character comes out on top?" Which if carried through to the entertainment they're participating in, would result in a very brief, dull and uninteresting story. 

It could be.  But its hardly unreasonable to expect a character who could fly in Issue 17 to fly again in issue 18 when they encounter traps on the ground.  If this causes the story not to work, that's not because of unrealistic expectations of a reader, but poor writing on the part of the comic book.  Things have changed quite a bit, I agree.  Back in the Silver Age, readers were less interested in continuity than gee whiz fun.  Today, people have read, and played games, and talked about it and won't put up with what readers used to.

But I don't really call that a problem for anyone but lazy and unimaginative writers.

Quote

Not sure I ever finished it, as we're talking 5 or 6 character sheets. 

Yeah he had 6 character sheets: one for each element and one for his normal form which was sort of a ninja.  Unfortunately because of the way multiform worked in 5th edition (and as far as I know still today) basically he ended up with 6 different characters all of whom are weaker than every other character in the game for the dubious advantage of variety.  And since he had no control over which element he'd show up as, the advantage was even more questionable.

Quote

Frankly, Vlassic Traveller is our preferred system for westerns for pretty much this reason.

Mmm pickles.  Seroiusly though, some systems do lend themselves to more lethal combat than others, although if you use the optional rules for hero like hit locations, disabling, impairing, bleeding, etc its quite lethal as well.  Particularly given the lack of resistant defenses (unless you're Clint Eastwood in A Few Dollars More) and mortal level stats.

yeah the translation thing... they kind of did it to themselves, I don't blame companies for not wanting to trust them to handle their product.  AI is not going to be as good as a quality, talented translator but it can be at least as good as these guys changing the words for their own agenda.

The What If comics were driven by readers, mostly.  People who wrote letters or talked to writers.  They asked you "know, what if..." and then Marvel would make it happen.  Sometimes the fans were the writers, who came up with their What If scenarios.  Stuff like "what if Annihilus killed Sue Storm?  (hint: never make Reed that angry).  None of the What If TV shows really seem to be that kind of story.

yeah I had a player build a guy who couldn't die and had takes no stun.  He regenerated and was impossible to hurt.  But, that was so expensive that he didn't have a lot else going on, he was just unkillable.  He couldn't break out of entangles, he couldn't see if he was flashed, if he was knocked back too far, he took forever to get back into the fight.  It worked.  I mean he ended up in lava once and got hit by a truck because I never had to hold back on him, but that was just part of the schtick.

For me as a GM, those kind of characters are what makes me interested and try to build something great for them.  The multiform guy who turned into Chinese elements.  The mentalist who could grant other people mental defense.  It gives me a challenge to come up with interesting scenarios that give those players something to deal with.

From what I've seen, Orm look a lot more like Aquaman than Jason Mamoa.  Its too bad they didn't trust the character enough to go with the comic book version.

Quote

 

In the HERO System Advanced Players Guide 2 there exists a specific Extradimensional Space power.  If you already have the APG2 I'd recommend that power.

 

It does not say so but the description of Extradimensional Space implies that its for items, and the user cannot climb inside.  But again, the rules do not explicitly state that.  I think this never made it into the main rules because its a unitasker: its a power with only one real utility, like Instachange.  At least, I cannot think of any use for the power other than "allows you to store things without weight." 

The rules strongly suggest it be attached to a focus (like a sack or a folding framework, etc).  There are no rules for putting other people into the space, or using it on yourself, or how you can get out again.    The closest that comes is this section:

Quote

The GM defines the nature of extradimensional space for his campaign. This includes such issues as whether it has air, light, heat, or geographical features; whether characters can be trapped there, enter it voluntarily, or survive there

Which is kind of a throwback to old Hero where you didn't have 3 pages of details explaining every possible aspect of the power and its interactions with other elements in the game.

Base plus extradimensional adder on the base, plus extradimensional travel is probably the cleanest way to do this, but with GM permission you could probably use XD Space.

The only Resnick story I have read is one I cannot remember the title of, but its about the most evil man in the universe who is hired to deal with a problem only he can.  It was well written and very interesting when I read it in high school.

Call of Cthulhu is kind of a beast of its own; the simple system works really well for that setting because its less about mechanics (let's face it you're hopeless in combat anyway) than atmosphere and role play.

It was an offhand suggestion on how to make a surface impossible to cling to: because its not there!

Applying desolid to something else is ridiculously expensive and technically you cannot affect a thing that is not a power with modifiers.  If you really had to twist the GM's arm, you could apply it to the Body of the wall as if its a base but come on, really?  That's why I said it as a goof.

Quote

Technically you would need to affects real world.

What would you buy the advantage on?  The paint?