Ximenez

I don't think this is a rules question. What (if anything) does the power Drain Longevity do? I say "if anything" because "no, you can't buy that" seems like a reasonable response. But if you follow the logic, it's a really cheap way to eliminate (or perhaps incapacitate) that 600-point vampire lord.

Looking for opinions: a player wants the ability to create an illusory duplicate of himself. How much of a disadvantage to Images is "Only to create a duplicate of yourself?" The two duplicates can do different things--the image could appear to attack while the real one runs off, or vice-versa.

Player wants to build a character who can take three sizes: 1) The default form, a key-chain sized, tiny dinosaur who's carried around by a 10-year-old boy. 2) The second form, roughly human sized. 3) Third form, full-size T-Rex. So 0 END Growth to Huge is 135 AP, which is way over the campaign max but I'm willing to allow to facilitate a truly unique character concept. Or we could do Multiform, which would be considerably cheaper, although the character doesn't go through any mental changes and keeps the same skill set. My main concern is with campaign balance--creativity counts for something but I don't want to give the player too much of an advantage. Thoughts?

Late to the party but... My rule for HERO is that if something is so advantageous that every character would do it, regardless of character concept, you shouldn't allow it...or if you think it's fair, just give every character a few extra points. So if MOCV is useless in your campaign and that every character should buy it down to 0, just add 9 to the number of points your characters are based on.

In the medieval world, "wealth" was defined primarily as regular income--mostly generated from agriculturally productive land, but sometimes from other things. For a heroic fantasy campaign I assigned a specific income level for every point of wealth, and set a ceiling on the max points the PCs could spend. Every so often I'd increase the ceiling. Adventuring was a high risk/high reward activity that had boom and bust cycles...sometimes they had tons of money; a couple times they lost almost everything. Wealth gave them a steady base. Also, wealth took time to manage. Characters had to explain how they were getting the wealth, and then deal with issues related to the source--spending some time managing the store, visiting the farm, or whatever they did to get the money.

How do you determine the amount of damage needed to damage a stretched "limb" that is neither a limb nor a focus? Here's the special effect: a character (super) is surrounded by rope-like energy fields that function as a damage shield. She can extend a "rope" to grab other characters at range, doing damage to them as well. Unless I'm mistaken, this is Stretching, probably with extra STR usable only with Stretching. She shoots out a "rope," grabs someone with it, zaps them. It's Stretching in part because other characters can attack the rope. But's not a focus, so what are the rules for determining how much damage is needed to break the rope? This same question would arise if Stretching was bought with an unbreakable focus--you can't attack the focus and destroy it, but how would you determine the damage needed to cut through the stretched item?

If you want to be realistic about expertise in the modern world, it's better to give someone several overlapping skills that can be used as complementary skills in one area. An expert is going to have a lot of general knowledge about specific areas, and then be able to put it all together. So you might have: PS: Pianist (13-) KS: Classical music (13-) KS: Romantic era (13-) This person can sit down and play jazz or Elton John very. But if they sit down and play classical music that complementary skill pushes them to another level. And when they're play music from the Romantic period, their real specialty, it's going to be the best ever. This also reflects that any expert has to get a lot of background knowledge...someone who interprets music from a specific period is going to know a lot about the era they study that has nothing to do with music.

I missed that EGO can be used like STR to break out of a Mental Entangle. I couldn't resist doing the math...a person with 10 EGO, pushing to 20, has a 15.8% chance of escaping a 3d6 Mental Entangle on the first roll. It might be cheating to let someone push repeatedly, but it will get you there. And a 15 EGO pushing to 25 has a 37.8% chance. That doesn't seem quite so unreasonable.

So Mental Entangle costs 22.5pts per 1d6, and if you hit someone with it, they're trapped permanently unless they have a mental attack power of some kind. That makes it impossible for most characters to escape, and thus very unbalancing...but I haven't used it in a campaign. Am I missing something?

PS--I'd argue that "Transform" creates some weird effects: for example, the required power of the transform is based on the BODY of the target rather than the strength of the poison. It doesn't make a lot of sense that the mighty barbarian would be harder to unpoison than the fragile sage, so that suggests Transform isn't the right direction to go in.

Thanks for the ideas! I'd argue against Life Support being able to negate the effects of an attack. Poison is usually (I thought) written as an NND with Life Support as the special defense. Once the attack takes effect, Life Support can't undo the damage. Furthermore, in any campaign where someone has a VPP, poisons can quickly be eliminated by Life Support: Usable By Others, which is extremely cheap (especially if you can buy it as a 1-point LS for the specific poison you're targeting). This makes poison almost a non-issue. I think it's more fun to make poison and disease something that can easily be prevented in advance, but which requires a lot of points to cure after the fact--it requires the magician (or other VPP user) to make some tactical decisions. In response to my original question, I get the feeling that Drain is more appropriate than Suppress for an attack that reduces the effectiveness of a poison after the fact. Would y'all agree?

OK, this is not something I ever thought would happen. I've been asked to run a 1-shot adventure as a team-building exercise at work. 8 players, only one with any RPG experienced at all. Requests were for "Jane Austen" and "gritty fight for survival." So the scenario is that a British ship is wrecked off a Caribbean island circa 1810, and the party has to make it to safety. If you could make your boss play an RPG, what would you want in it?

So I created an antivenom potion for a fantasy campaign by buying Dispel HKA, only against poison (-1/2). Easy enough! Then it occured to me that it might be better to have a Suppress HKA for an effect that reduces the damage of a poison without completely eliminating it. But Suppress seems designed to be an attack on a character. It crossed my mind to construct it as healing, only vs. damage caused by poison, but it would take a LOT of healing to undo the damage caused by a strong poison. Any thoughts?

Yes, you could get exactly the same result by calculating SPD as 5+DEX/5, cutting the cost in half, and making the Normal Human Maximum 8, and that saves you the trouble of writing up a new table. It works fine, by the way, and doesn't create too much trouble. The only quirk is that people can get a recovery on a phase when they don't act, but that hasn't had a major impact on the way people fight. I don't have any philosophical reason for picking one over the other.

The catch with a "language map" is that national languages only became possible when printing, schools, and national governments imposed a standard form of a language on a whole region. In the Middle Ages, language functioned more as "dialect continuums" where speech patterns changed gradually. For example, modern German is based substantially on the language spoken around Berlin, while modern Dutch is based substantially on the dialect spoken around Amsterdam. Each "language" has been imposed as a national standard, with a clear boundary between the two. Historically, the way people spoke changed gradually over distance. A person in what is today northwest Germany, near the Dutch border, would have had an easier time understanding "Dutch" from Amsterdam than "German" from Berlin. However, languages changed more rapidly (because people moved less) and so a person might have been hearing a "foreign" language if they moved just 50 or 60 miles away from home. The best way to simulate this with a HERO language map would be to have a whole lot of closely related languages. In my campaign, I balanced out the large number of languages by making all languages cost two points. With the Linguist bonus, characters can speak large numbers of languages without spending a ridiculous amount of points.