bcaplan

Re: WOW! Stun drain in 6e

Re: Doesn't anyone like low-powered campaigns? Both the games I just ran at GenCon were low-powered. The first, Juche, was a high school horror game. The PCs (a cheerleader, a drug dealer, a math teacher, and the principal) had 75 CPs, and were built to mimic the main characters in horror movies - normal folks who somehow managed to survive through most of the story. The other, Punctuated Equilibrium, was a Post-Apoc story about ordinary DC residents trying to survive the end of the world. The PCs (a dentist, a street punk, a Secret Service agent, and a Senator's daughter) had 150 CPs, but a lot of the points were spent on powers and skills the players didn't realize they had until they had a chance to use them. I've run both stories several times, and they're a lot of fun. When I have a little time, I'll probably write some more...

When I was running some Hero sessions at GenCon, I found it hard to explain the system for ability checks. (What part of less or equal to 9+Score/5 on 3d6 don't you understand?) On the other hand, the grapple rules seemed pretty intuitive - roll d6 per 5 points of Strength, count the Body, and compare. Which got me thinking: Why not replace the standard 3d6 ability check with a (d6/5 pts + count the Body) rule? Not only is this mechanic manageable (it's a lot easier to count Body than Stun), but it also makes Ability vs. Ability contests a snap. If you've played Hollow Earth Expedition, you might notice that my proposed mechanic is similar to HEX's "count the successes" method. But the count the Body method seems especially good for a generic system like Hero, where some characters really should be able to perform ability feats that are virtually impossible for lesser men. Any thoughts?

I've long thought that Transport and Weapon Familiarities are overpriced. In particular, it seems like it's usually a waste of CPs to have more than a few common Familiarities, because you'll rarely use them and you don't get a price break. Here's an alternative system I'm using that seems to work: For 2 CPs, you get Int/10 Transport or Weapon Familiarities. For every additional 2 points you spend, you double the number of Familiarities. E.g., if your Int is 20, you get 2 Familiarities for 2 points, 4 for 4 points, 8 for 6 points, etc. Adding Languages: I drop the complex Language rules, and just have PCs buy "Language Familiarities." 2 points makes you fluent in one Language/10 points of Int, 4 points gives you twice as many, and so on. Pulpy Bonus: For the price of 5 Familiarities, you can buy a "mystery" Familiarity. In essence, you get blank slot that you can fill in whenever you like. This allows a PC to suddenly announce that he actually knows how to speak the language of the Maoris, throw bolos, or drive a tank. Of course, once the PC reveals the mystery slot, it's no longer flexible. Any thoughts?

Re: Low-Action Hero?

If you were playing a time travel RPG, what are your top 3 space-times to visit? Please limit yourself to Earth, pre-2008 AD. And just to make the challenge more fun, let's rule out Nazi Germany and the U.S. Civil War.

Re: Best Graphic Novels to Inspire a Campaign? I suppose its more Urban Fantasy than Champions, but Fables is not to be missed. And Y: The Last Man is a great take on post-Apocalyptic Hero. There are lots of great Dark Champions-type works: Sin City of course, but also check out 100 Bullets, Human Target, and Scapled. Personally, I'd love to play a one-shot game based on Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World, but I fear I'm the only one!

What is the least action-packed Hero (or other RPG) game you have ever GMd or played-in? Has anyone ever done a violence-free (or almost violence-free) RPG inspired by, say, The Office, Seinfeld, Desperate Housewives, or Arrested Development? My sense of pacing keeps telling me that violence-free RPGs just can't work. You need to have at least one violent confrontation every 3 hours - and a bloody climax - to make the story work. The only exception I've experienced is Pandemonium, where "getting the story" satisfyingly replaces combat. At the same time, Hero's generic system keeps inspiring me to question my preconceptions about what kind of an RPG can work. For example, a recent one-shot Horror Hero game that I ran convinced me that an RPG with mundane PCs can be a great success. Anyone care to share his experiences?

Has anyone ever run a Horror Hero game without any supernatural element? I ran a one-shot naturalistic horror scenario, and it worked very well. One player even said it was the most truly horrifying horror game he'd ever played. But perhaps there's the rub. Naturalistic horror is just too scary. Supernatural stories play to our sense of "of course this could never really happen." Thoughts?

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think?

In most of the Hero games I've heard of, you can't use the Persuasion skill on a PC. (Furthermore, you rarely get to use Persuasion against a main villain). This bothers my sense of symmetry, but it's easy to see why people play this way: Players want to decide what their own characters do, not be at the mercy of persuasive third parties. What is to be done? Here's an idea I've been toying with: Explicitly state that some characters (PCs and main villains) are immune to Persuasion, but let them take Susceptibility to Persuasion as a Disadvantage. You could tailor the Disadvantage to e.g. "Susceptibility to Persuasion by Beautiful Women" for extra flavor. Since this would be a chosen trait, the player who took it would probably have fun with it, and so would the rest of the group. At the same time, it allows the GM to design an occasional main villain who can be reasoned with, seduced, made to feel remorse, etc. What do you think?

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think? My thinking is that if players want higher AP limits, they can pay for them with their XP. But of course if you wanted to raise them for everyone, you could just give a CP refund to everyone who already paid for it.

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think? True enough, but one of the main benefits of having a point system is to cut down on the amount of eye-balling the GM has to do. There's no formula complicated enough to capture all the synergies, but I think adding an explicit cost for AP limits gives a better summary of a character's power without raising the computational complexity very much. (In contrast, we could switch from linear pricing of attack powers to quadratic pricing, or something along those lines, but the extra computional complexity just wouldn't be worth it. See http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51289&page=3).

One of the main trouble spots in the Hero system, as I see it, is that there is a strong incentive to pour a lot of points into one really big attack power. Since you need to exceed someone's defense to do any damage at all, weak attacks are virtually useless. This, presumably, is the main reason why a lot of campaigns impose Active Point limits. The trouble with AP limits, though, is that they lead to a high level of uniformity. If you have a 60 AP limit, then every well-designed character is going to have a 60 AP attack. It might be a 12d6 Energy Blast, or an 8d6 Armor Piercing Energy Blast, or a 2d6 Autofire RKA with 1/2 End, but it's going to have 60 APs. This is where my proposed solution comes in: Give PCs a "standard" AP limit, and let them pay points if they want to increase it (or give them points back if they reduce it). For example, suppose you run a Superheroic game with a standard 60 AP limit. This you get for free. If you want a higher AP limit, however, it will cost you, say, 3 CPs per +1 AP. If you want an 80 AP limit, you pay 60 CPs purely for the option to buy powers with up to 80 APs. Similarly, if you are willing to reduce your AP limit down to 50 APs, you would get 30 CPs back to spend any way you like - as long as none of your powers exceed 50 APs. What do you think? Does the 3 CPs per +1 AP price seem reasonable? P.S. You could easily adapt this system to other systems with similar problems, like Mutants and Masterminds.

I'm turning Amore Infernale, one of my favorite story arcs from my Champions campaign, into a graphic novel. Here's a teaser poster: You can read the first two issues at: http://www.bcaplan.com/amore.htm

The story arc that I'm writing begins with the death of all five members of the French League, the defenders of France. Stripped of its main supers, the PCs will have to step into the gap to protect the people of France. But I was so pleased with my casting of the French League that I thought I'd post it. Maybe in someone else's campaign they'll have a chance to be more than just a team that died in the line of duty. Here's team leader, The Legionnaire (1960-). I see him as a very-high-level Dark Champions-type figure, with a big arsenal of weapons, lots of resistant defenses, and a de Gaulle-sized ego. Here's Roland (1974-), #2 in command. He's a retro battlesuit. Saint Jeanne (1985-), the youngest team member, combines deadly fighting skills with healing/medic powers. Then we have Babeuf (1945-), bomb-throwing Communist gadgeteer, who desperately wishes he hadn't missed the French Resistance. Finally, rounding out the French League, there is the mentalist Fraternité (1965-) If anyone winds up using this team, I'd like to hear about it.

Re: Hey Rube! Circuses in Pulp Hero. A while back a friend of my told me he was organizing a Pulp game (system undisclosed!), and I asked to play a defector from the Moscow Circus. Here's what I sent him: P.S. Unfortunately, my friend has shown an unhealthy obsession with work after he inspired this character concept, so he remains unplayed.

Re: Mental Illusions and Memory I'd agree if someone wanted to use Images to achieve this effect - these are externally visible rather than just in the head. But for Mental Illusions, this strikes me as too restrictive. For example, if an illusionist wants to create an illusion of a target's mother, why can't the imagination of the target fill in the gaps if the illusionist doesn't know what she looks like? Needless to say, turnabout's fair play - villains might play similar tricks on the PCs.

Doesn't it seem odd that in heroic-level games with NCM, ability checks for average and maxed-out characteristics are so close? If an average Int is 8, and the max is 20, the former has an ability check of 11-, and the latter has an ability check of 13-. Not much difference, really. Think about how often Joe six-pack would beat a valedictorian in an Int vs. Int contest. This is particularly striking because the difference between average and maxed-out is twice as large for CV. There, an 8 has a CV of 3, and a 20 has a CV of 7. In a brawl, a Dex 20 hero would have a very easy time a Dex 8 normal - he'd hit on a 15-, but only be hit on a 7-. The simplest solution, it seems to me, is to make ability checks work like CV. Make the required roll 8+Ability/3, instead of 9+Ability/5. Alternative: Make the NCM break point 30 instead of 20. Any thoughts?

Re: Mental Illusions and Memory Psylint wrote: I disagree, it seems like a clever but natural use of illusion. If you want to find out a villain's plan, for example, you create the illusion that his henchman has returned for instructions, and eavesdrop. Seems fair to me. Why can't you start with the illusion of being in prison, and observe how the target responds to the situation? It's basically a super-powered version of the trick the IM team pulled over and over again on the Mission Impossible t.v. series...

I've now got a PC in my game with Mental Illusions. It didn't take long before the following issue came up: The PC wanted to transmit illusions that would be obviously recognized as such if the victim kept his memory intact. For example, the illusionist wanted to make another character think he was suddenly back in prison, so he would re-enact the scene of his escape. The problem, as I saw it, was that if you suddenly found yourself re-living events from six months ago, you would have good reason to think that you were experiencing an illusion. And if you had a good reason to think you were experiencing an illusion, your behavior would probably be very different than if you thought the events were real. In the end, I decided that by adding 10 to the difficulty roll, illusionists could make victims would ignore memory inconsistencies/discontinuities generated by Mental Illusions. In effect, an illusionist could mimic the experience we've often had while dreaming - make the victim buy the current situation as real, even though it doesn't fit with his preceding experiences. Has this issue come up in other games? What do you think of my solution?

Re: CHARACTER: Rocky Balboa Maybe Rocky should have Regeneration, or at least a really high Recovery?

Re: Horror Hero: What would you have liked to have seen? I was hoping to be wowed by an author who had read every horror book and watched every horror movie and t.v. show. Like Pulp Hero, but for horror. From what I've heard, Allen Thomas fit the bill. What's it going to take to get him back on the project?

Re: Frameworks Simplified

I've always thought that Multipowers and VPPs were abusive. Elemental Control bothers me less, but it seems needlessly complex. Why not just give a "package deal discount" of -1/4 (for stuff loosely linked to a character concept) or -1/2 (for stuff tightly linked to a character concept), and leave it at that? If this seems too cheap, notice that a well-designed Elemental Control can almost half the cost of included powers. Notice that this would also solve the problem, noted in another thread, that 5th Edition "package deals" don't save any points - my version of package deals could encompass any purchases the GM was willing to OK.