bcaplan

Re: Is anything in the system correctly priced? A lot of the pricing problems in Hero stem from the use of linear pricing. It's easy to make EB cost 5/d6, but since you have to get over the threshhold of ED to do any damage, the last d6 is worth a lot more than the first. Unfortunately, I don't think that quadratic or other non-linear price formulae are likely to catch on - people already complain enough about the math in Hero as it is. Nevertheless, there are quite a few pricing problems that the system designers seem to accept, but handle with ad hoc restrictions instead of a simple linear price change. Two examples: 1. Making martial maneuvers like Offensive Strike too cheap, and compensating by requiring martial artists to have at least 10 points of maneuvers. 2. Forbidding the sell-back of more than one Figured Characteristic, instead of changing the formulae that make this so profitable. (Look at the value of the Figured Characteristics caused by a 5-point rise in S. They're worth more than 5 points!) Bottom line: Prices won't be perfect because there's a trade-off between convenience and accuracy. But when you can improve both, why not go for it?

Re: What's the best hero suppliment! Dark Champions: The Animated Series. I didn't expect to like it, but it made me realize that the cheesy Batman show of my youth was actually a low-quality instance of a high-quality genre.

Re: Lack of Resistant Defenses Yes, but what if it's genre appropriate to kill normals and mooks, but not heroes? That's what R-rated action movies - and TV shows like 24 - are all about.

Re: CSLs overpriced? Speaking as both a gamer and an economist, you're right. The nice thing about the Hero System isn't that all the prices are right, but that it's fairly straightforward to show which of the prices are wrong.

Re: Lack of Resistant Defenses Sure, but Body Armor is out-of-genre for most modern games. Body Armor works in military or special forces genres, but that's about it. Arnold almost never wears it; neither do James Bond or Jack Bauer. I don't know the Pulps very well, but I suspect the same holds there.

Re: Lack of Resistant Defenses

Re: Limited Characteristics My standard off switch is "if the character gets Stunned." You've got four good fights in your, but if you get Stunned, you've lost one of them.

In non-Champions Hero products, a high percentage of characters are built with 0 resistant defense. The main rationale, as far as I can tell, is that it's "out of genre" for non-superheroes to have bullets bouncing off of them. But of course the special effect of resistant defense doesn't have to be that bullets literally bounce off. It could also just be Combat Luck, skill in avoiding damage to vital body parts, etc. And if you really think about it, if you're trying to simulate e.g. action movies, something like Combat Luck as a virtually universal PC ability makes a lot of sense. How else can you explain the fact that Arnold gets shot at for two hours and still walks away at the end?

Re: Limited Characteristics The Continuing Charges limitation probably has more bite in my game because I don't let people get their charges back until the end of a story arc (2-4 games), rather than just the end of a session. At the same time, the limitation isn't as hard to live with as Sean suggests, because everyone doesn't have it. But whatever you think about my example, my larger point still holds: How come very few official builds use Limited Characteristics? You can say "A limitation that doesn't limit isn't a limitation," but why would limitations on Characteristics be so much less limiting than limitations on Powers?

Characters in Hero Games products almost never impose any limitations on their characteristics. There are two or three that buy extra STR, DEX, CON, etc. through an OIF. People occasionally buy PRE with the limitations Only for Presence Attacks or Only to Defend Against Presence Attacks. But other than that, virtually everyone pays full price for all characteristics. In terms of game mechanics, this strikes me as very odd. As the saying goes, "You could pay full price, but why?" Perhaps GMs disallow this because they don't think that limited characteristics are very limited? If so, I beg to differ. In my campaigns, for example, characters (PCs and NPCs alike) often buy combat-related characteristics with Continuing Charges. Instead of having a Speed of 6, you have a Speed of 2, and, say, 4 1-minute charges for +4 Speed. Special effect? Perhaps "Only has four good fights in him." This turns out to be a limitation with bite. PCs always have to weigh whether a fight is worth one of their Speed charges. When they underestimate, it hurts. And when they overestimate, they don't have their extra Speed when they really need it. This is just one example. But the broader point, again, is that official Hero characters burn up a ton of points on Characteristics, and its not clear why.

Re: Funny game voices This thread piqued my interest because I've been miserably failing to do a decent Middle Eastern accent for super-being Plutonium Jihad. (I'm doing a Champions story arc involving conflict between Dutch Nationalists and Muslims). A google search revealed an amazing resource: The Speech Accent Archive, http://accent.gmu.edu. (Shared university affiliation totally coincidental). Check it out, it's very well done.

Re: New Advantage: Disorienting This seems like a reasonable trade-off, actually. Your Disorienting 2d6 KA with +1 Stun mod averages only 7 Body and 28 Stun. At least in super-heroic genres, that means you'll never do any Body, and probably not much Stun either. The only thing the attack has going for it is a very good chance of stunning even a super-heroic target. (A heroic target, in contrast, would be Stunned even without the Disorienting advantage!) A regular 4d6 KA, in contrast, averages 7 more points of Body and 14 extra points of Stun - and it still has a half-decent chance of stunning a super-heroic target. In short, in exchange for 7 points of Body and 14 points of Stun, your chance to stun rises from low-moderate to high. The doesn't seem excessive to me.

When designing a radiation-based super-being (hero? villain? That would be telling...) for a future Champions game, I came up with the following new Advantage: Disorienting (+.75): The victim is stunned if 2x rolled Stun minus defenses exceeds Con. Intuitively, it's like a Double Knockback advantage, but for stunning. Example: If you roll 20 Stun on a victim with 15 ED and 20 Con, you normally do nothing at all. If the attack were a Disorienting EB, however, the victim would be stunned (40-15=25>20). The victim would not in fact sustain any damage, but he would lose a Phase and have to reactivate non-Persistent powers. Game balance? Compare a regular 12d6 EB (60 AP) to a 7d6 Disorienting EB (61 AP). The regular EB would average 42 Stun, and typically stun any character with ED+Con<42. The Disorienting EB would average 24.5 Stun, but would typically stun any character with ED+Con<49. Seems like a reasonable trade-off. I could even see cutting the price to +.5 - but at least in my game the greater chance to turn off Continuing Charges probably justifies a +.75. Any thoughts?