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.

Greywind, I'm implementing this in a game where the characters are built on 40+40 points. Nobody can afford higher than SPD 3 to start.

Yes, I'm using 5th ed.

A person with SPD 2.5 goes on segment 12 like everybody else (in the rules I have learned, anyway). In the next phase, they go on segments 5 and 10, and get recovery after 12 like everyone else. The phase after that, they go on segments 3, 8, and 12. Repeat as necessary.

I'm running a fantasy campaign where the characters start with 40+40 points. At that level, the difference between 2 SPD and 3 SPD is so huge that I introduced SPD of 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 so that characters with above-average DEX can get some benefit without having to spend a relatively large number of points on SPD. I was wondering if anyone else has tried this, and how it worked, or if I'm just crazy (although you might think I'm crazy for running a campaign with normals in the first place!)

One variety of spellcaster in my current campaign has a (relatively) small VPP that can be used to simulate any power within a class of special effects. This class is designed for people who can think of creative ways to use "little" spells.

A player of mine has realized that low AP=low END use and has been wanting to use her magic to achieve gradual effects. With her powers based around "trees and wood," she has worked to rot the wood of a ship, leech tannins from wine barrels into an enemy's wine to ruin it, and drive out an infestation of carpenter ants from a peasant's cottage. This is exactly the kind of creative use of the power that I want to encourage, but I have no idea how to formulate this in game terms. So far I've basically said, "yeah, you can do that" with very little attention to the numbers. That has been working OK, but her character is gaining XP and becoming more powerful, and I want to have some way to determine what she can actually accomplish. So what's the best way to simulate this kind of attack?

...Use sparingly. If the players get the idea that no matter how much ass they kick, you're going to just "cheat" and throw something heavier at them, the conclusion they're likely to draw is "Wow, this guy is a dick!" and find a new GM.

Short answer: I don't think we have any real disagreement. This particular GM sounds like he's getting pushed around, and so I recommended some pretty strong measures to create better collaboration between the GM and the players. I don't beat up PCs just because I can.

The 5th edition rules are very explicit that 2m is the distance from corner to corner, so that the area of a hex should be 2.6m, even though it shouldn't. The key point, though, is that there isn't any particular reason it was done that way, so I can do what I want without unbalancing anything.

I'm new, and this could have been done before:

The Twins

Two inhabitants of the hotel look exactly alike. They don't dress the same, but they share something in common--a piece of jewelry in common, or they both carry the same teal purse. Nobody else seems to notice. If you point it out to them--say, by pulling one's long hair in a bun, or giving one a fake mustache so they match--they'll look in the mirror at two identical images and say, "sorry, don't see it."  

I am talking about calculating the area. The thing is, neither way produces a convenient number.

You are not mean enough. Like when you say, "I had difficulty building encounters that would prove in any way challenging for them, and when I did, they immediately spent their experience points to eliminate their weaknesses."  YOU RULE THE UNIVERSE. 

If they defeat 10 thugs, let one escape and bring back 20 friends.

If they beat your big bad villain, tell the players that his big brother has shown up--take the same character sheet, add 20 to all the numbers on it, and have at it. 

Assume the villains ALSO learn from their defeats. Make sure that whatever the heroes did last time won't work again. 

Make one player's stupid skill the one they need to turn off the 50 PD/50 ED force fields the villains have acquired. 

And you talk about how they spend their XP...why are you giving them XP to spend? If they aren't achieving the goals you give them--to role-play, work on background, and so on--they shouldn't be earning experience. For example, you could make a tally mark every time a player gets it right, and give out XP based on the number of tally marks each player racks up. Someone will be greedy enough to become creative in order to get ahead.

Ultimately, not everybody likes the same thing. If your idea of fun and theirs are just that different, maybe you need to find other people who won't fight you every step of the way. But in my experience, players eventually do find out that roleplaying is fun, even if they end up roleplaying "the guy who gets in trouble for shooting first." Try being mean before you give up.

I love the boom town because it gets into dirty local politics. If hero teams were based in cities, they would be like sports teams: an expensive luxury showing that a city was "legit." You'd have a group of people who really want the heroes there, and those who think they're more trouble than they're worth (not to mention the civil liberties issues). And what happens if the supers realize that the city officials and leading citizens who brought them to town are the real criminals? It would be fun to have superheroes who are fighting white-collar crime for a change. If super teams are only for really big cities, the heroes could be in the Bay Area, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston...if they're for smaller boomtowns, you could have Charlotte, Columbus, Austin. I like Charlotte because it's built on biotech and the financial industry, so lots of opportunity for fun criminals and an explanation of where the villains could come from.

Ooh! Freddy vs. Batman!