Christopher R Taylor

Well they can still hit you, you're still stretching they just can't hit any of the bits connecting your fist with your body as I understand it.  In other words, you have a disembodied or portaled or solid fist on a desolid arm, etc.  So they can hit your hand as you punch them.  But I might be misunderstanding how the advantage works.

Still, I don't see any difference between that and, say, blasting someone anywhere on the battlefield.  You aren't in HTH range of them either.

When I put out a book of treasures eventually its going to include the concept of treasure disadvantages.  That magic item is likely going to have distinctive looks, it might even be hunted by someone.  It might have a personality of its own, giving it psych lims.  That can help reduce the "ulp" feeling a GM tends to feel in Fantasy Hero at giving a character a 50 active point item.

The tough part at first for a GM is learning what sort of thing is shiny to the players.  Each group is different and until you get a feel for that it can be difficult to control or take advantage of.  That might be another reason the sandbox is popular, it lets you fit in any real group of players because its just a setting and you can let the go nuts until you get a handle on them.

I gave the serial killer slasher flick monster I did teleportation but only when nobody was looking.  Its how he can somehow always be behind people, or in that dark room, or able to get away when obscured by flames or collapsing objects

Yeah I think that this may be why "sandbox" adventures are doing well in the poll.   Then its just a setting with different potential encounters and storylines and the players can run amok their own way.

When I write an adventure I try to come up with windows of opportunity and options for a variety of character types and backgrounds.  Sort of like the way first person shooters started adding in stealth options in the last decade.  Its one thing to have a setting, but another to make it work for an inventive player, to reward their creativity.

The best way to start this kind of thinking is to have the way you introduce the characters into the adventure be more flexible.  Sometimes its okay to use the "you wake up in a slave ship chained to an oar" intro but having a wide array of possible options seems ideal most of the time.

I get what you mean by the misuse of the term railroad - its certainly misused for any nudging or direction by the GM toward a plot or storyline.  But there certainly are times that a GM can become ridiculously controlling and disallow or block anything except a certain envisioned storyline in their head.  In my experience the longer, more complex, and more specific an adventure line becomes, the harder it is to corral players.

See, it doesn't just have to be about slaughtering things or staying on plot; Role Players can be side tracked very easily as well.  A personal vendetta from some slight, a love interest, a curiosity the character wants to follow up, a thousand things can send players off on some other tangent with their character that can have nothing at all to do with the epic story line.  The longer it goes or the more complicated the plotline, the more likely this can take place.  What the GM meant as some minor single-session side bit to establish a later event can become a whole separate storyline out of control.

Epic long sweeping storylines is making a late push, that's interesting.  Those are hard to write in modules because the longer the story gets, the harder it is to avoid railroading players to keep them on plot (see Dragonlance module line).

I don't know, building a barrier tough enough to sustain significant damage costs a lot more than an entangle.  Entangle still has quite a bit of utility, its just a different sort of construct.

I would suggest that perhaps Barrier not be usable to duplicate entangle, however.

Humor is one of the hardest things to force or create, its mostly just surprise and irony when well done and that's very tough to pull off.  That said, there is much hilarity every game session from just the clever, intelligent, and talented players I have, unrelated to the game as it might often be.

I do think there is a market for unusual settings, as long as you don't go overboard.  People appreciate something different than the "over the mountains and through the forest" fantasy template, I believe.

I actually liked Timothy Dalton as Bond, he was very true to the books.  He got a pretty awful script to work with in License To Kill, unfortunately.  Someone had been watching too much Miami Vice.

If I had the Hollywood clout and billions of dollars I'd reboot the Bond franchise, filming each book in the time as period pieces accurate to the era and books.  They would probably not be as big a box office smash but they'd be damn fine films.

My example of the overly creative but too alien setting is Skyrealms of Jorune.  Amazingly detailed and creative, but incomprehensible.  There was literally not one single hook that a player could grab and find familiar to build from.  You can go too far that way, and an adventure or setting that is like that just can't get any traction.

Right, and the more distant in history you get the more opportunities for this kind of thing.  Napoleon was a horrible warmongering despot, but after over two centuries you can admire the guy for some things and imagine playing a French soldier.

But that is one aspect that would be good to emphasize: you don't know the big picture.  You don't even know the small picture.  You know who your friends are and where the bullets are coming from and want to get home.

With all of the optional rules applied, Hero can be very deadly, but that works well for this kind of setting.  Although you could have a super elite force of Rambo types that never seem to get hurt much, the default would probably be high lethality.  That means you could have a high turnover in characters, unusual for Hero but it can be interesting for players; reinforcements showing up, guys being sent home from serious injury, etc.

I'd call the parachute OIF, because it wasn't a one-phase operation to remove.  OAF means something easy to remove, a simple act (if you hit) such as taking away a club or a hat.  Something with straps and clips that takes longer than a phase to remove I lean toward OIF, and if it takes a turn, then definitely.

If the entire line was renamed "x champions" then the confusion would be significantly reduced.  And as rjcurrie notes, the confusion with Dark Champions is mostly the fact that it WAS originally for gritty champions adventures.  Its like naming a shoe company Nike then expanding it to include wedding dresses and car parts.  People are going to associate it with shoes.

Plus, there's nothing innately "dark" about spy or modern adventures, but the name is in there.  So its more the "dark" part that's the confusing bit than the "champions" part, I suspect.

OAF presumes that the focus can be easily restrained and removed from the character, even used against them.  Like a pistol, not a backpack.

Its reasonable to presume that the weight and restriction to movement that armor causes would tend to negate the benefits of combat luck.  Almost all of the spells that add resistant protection in my Fantasy Codex specifically have limitations that note they do not stack with any other sort.

By the way I really like the concept that Bhelliom Rhal brought up of having templates for characteristics sets, skills, complications etc to help build characters.  A form of that is going into my Fantasy Hero player's handbook.  It would really help people who seem to just get overwhelmed by the flexibility and openness of the Hero system.  

It seems to genuinely frighten or paralyze some players: do I roll dice to force me into a predetermined roll somehow?  Please?

I like unified power for tight concept groups and related powers, like "fire elemental powers" so if its drained, the whole thing gets weakened, not just the single power.  It works well for a lot of concepts such as powers that are essentially one power used in different ways (but not in a multipower), or combined powers that should all be weakened proportionally at the same time.

Given I started doing this in the late 80s, I am not sure where the connection to D&D would be.

I'm actually happy with EC being gone as well.

 

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The only thing is that it always seemed to me that you were simply getting a bonus for doing what you should have already been doing; 

Yeah I agree, Elemental Control was basically a bonus for building a character well, which is kind of a bonus in and of its self.

I have a chart of items and things like property, favors and such that players roll on when they make characters, as heirlooms.  I don't concern myself with the cost, since everyone gets one, its just a part of the campaign.  Often I'll give some other freebies as well such as a number of points in background non-combat skills equal to the character's INT score.

Unfortunately I'm seeing it happen.  I have a friend who's been playing Hero since the early 80s and now he's looking for a simpler system (he's trying out Savage Worlds right now).  I think the desire to have a rule for everything that GMs used to guess or hand wave in the past starts to snowball and get out of hand in any game system.

The thing is you don't HAVE to use all that stuff in Hero, and building a character is no more complicated now than it ever was.  There are more options, but when I started playing Champions in 1983 there wasn't a handy Hero Designer program, either.

I think it would be a terrific product, but the way the gaming industry is now, publishing something without a ready audience is just a waste of money