Ximenez

OK, I'm asking Steve Long.

I have read that calculating area is done by treating a hex as 2m from corner to corner (which gives a hex an area of roughly 2.6m2). However, characters move from center to center, which means 2m is actually the distance from the center of one side to the center of the opposite side. Given that, the corner-to-corner distance should be roughly 2.3m, and the area of a hex would actually be about 3.46m2. Am I missing something here? I want to get this worked out BEFORE I start mapping my city!

I do have something like this as a way of balancing the power of character classes I liked. My strategy was to create a variety of networks. A squire gets lots of cool equipment, but answers to a knight. Another class of fighter can learn wuxia, but they have to swear loyalty to a band. Mages don't have to join the guild, but that's the best way to learn spells. Members of the Order of Mentalists get awesome powers, but are also carefully monitored. Courtiers know all the right people, but have to keep someone happy.

In many societies, you couldn't get anywhere without a patron, so the idea of having powerful NPCs in the background is totally appropriate. And if the players show some initiative, the NPC can just agree to give that character a wider leash.

I agree that active point limits don't help much. In a campaign with castles, for example, Tunneling is a <STOP> power. Yes, there are workarounds, but it made more sense for my campaign to just ban tunneling. The power to go under a castle wall is immense, and the power to go through a castle wall even more so. If you want to knock a hole in a wall, you'll need to buy the KA to make it happen.

So I noticed a statement (in 5th ed., I will note) that for purposes of area, a hex is measured as 2m from point to point, and started using that as the basis for my buildings and such. But...characters move 2m from center to center, which means that 2m would most logically be measured from side to side. Because of this discrepancy, hexes are exactly 25% smaller in area than it seems like they should be. Is there a reason for this? Is it an oversight?

And if this seems like a picky question--hey, it's HERO. Wouldn't you expect someone to do the math?

I tried for the best of both worlds by using an alternate reality. My superheroes are the product of genetic mutation that started to show up in the 1960s. So my superhero campaigns were set in Detroit, but a Detroit that was slightly different from the real one. The "real" part of the city was the scenery--the PCs and their adversaries were entirely fictional.

I'm running a campaign with characters based on 80 points. Suck it up.

I didn't read all 6800 posts, apologies if these have been done already.

The Watchmentalist

Pulp Fiction HERO 

Avengin' 2: Electric Boogaloo

Kiss of the Amazing Spiderman

Save the Last Samurai

Voyager!

(Pushing the rules a bit...) You Are Being Served

I'm running a heroic campaign and using money for the first time. It's fantasy, but there are lessons that might help you:

1) I linked the cost of weapons and equipment to their points on an exponential scale. For me, that meant that every 3 Real Points of cost in a piece of equipment basically doubled its cost. I had to do a lot of adjusting from that base, but it gave me a good starting point.

2) I made weapons, armor, and such expensive enough that they represented a significant capital investment. A sword or bow costs the equivalent of a few thousand dollars. Plate armor costs a few hundred thousand. These are not easy to get or replace.

3) I didn't worry about cost of living. The characters are well off and can buy basic supplies without having to worry about money. The characters have to pay for their weapons and armor, their books and tools (which are important in this game), but when they buy things like a prybar or a spot on the floor at an inn, I don't keep track of it.

Too soon to tell how this will work, but it's promising, and the players like it. They have motivation for adventuring, but don't have to do a lot of annoying bookkeeping.

If you're shooting at the cops, you're not the heroes.

That's an interesting perspective. I don't use critical hits and misses because I don't like to have the balance of power (and the story arc that goes with it) upset by a die roll.

Funny that I didn't think about D&D, where that's the natural progression of the game. OK, problem solved. And Prometheus, they're powerful enough to be cool. In the first adventure, they defeated a gang of 20 skilled normals (took out 7 and got the rest to run). As for your DM, he kind of missed the point that HERO characters are supposed to be hard to kill. To use the (2nd ed) D&D analogy, the mob boss is like a high-level rogue--he's not going to stand up to a high-level fighter in a swordfight, but he's got more than enough skills to deal with low-level characters. He's a match for about a 250-point fighter, but he's no Avatar of Death. And he is one of the most powerful people in the city--enough to give the ruling Count pause. 

So 20 years ago, I created a very detailed fantasy campaign setting as my senior honors project in college. I got away with that because I did a lot of research into medieval agriculture and demographics and then worked out the impact of magic on those numbers, so that I know how many people are in the world, how long people would live, how many cities the world could reasonably support, and so on. 

With all this done, there's no way of getting around the fact that some people in this world will eventually accumulate whole lot of character points. About 1 in 250 people will eventually be able to accumulate 250 CP. Sure, a lot of them have spent a lot of points on Followers and Bases, but there are still a considerable number of VERY high-powered people around. For example, the home city of the campaign (population 40,000) has half a dozen people with 500+ points. At that level, opponents are overwhelming no matter how you approach them--for example, my 600-point mob boss is not primarily combat-oriented, but he could still wipe the floor with my entire party even if they caught him without any of his bodyguards or henchmen around. I'm curious if anyone else has run a game where the world is filled with potential opponents that are way beyond the capacity of the party to deal with, and what that looked like.

So I'm late to the party but here's my answer:

In my fantasy world, deities are generated by belief, although people don't realize that. The gods did sign an arms limitation treaty (about 1500 years before the game's present) but they were very active in combat. Eventually a religious leader arose who preached that all the gods in different kingdoms were actually one and the same. As his ideas caught on, the new "integrated" gods became more powerful and eventually were able to become the foundation for a political super-state that unified the continent. The humans on the continent don't realize that the gods have basically cut a deal with the many other, less powerful gods in other parts of the world to keep it in isolation...they only know that nobody ever arrives from other places, and anyone who sails away never comes back.