zslane

Social status plays a role in obtaining commissions during character creation. Beyond that, well, it probably helps when players need to call in political favors for all the mercantile shenanigans they'll be engaged in once the campaign begins.

I think Alex Ross is a superb choice. As a practical matter, however: 1. He would be extremely expensive. 2. His schedule is filled for, like, the next ten years at least. 3. His work is so tightly associated with DC that the book might get confused for a DCU product.

Oh I know. I was just trying to help you preserve your own sanity. ;-)

I'm just thinking of the poor GM--he has enough on his plate already just trying to come up with scenarios that fit the characters well based on character concepts and their abilities at a high level. Trying to adjust the campaign to match all the limitations found on eveyone's character sheets can get overwhelming, especially if there is some formalized system making GMs feel as though they need to do so at that level of granularity. Yes, limitations can, and should, occasionally inspire adventure hooks or plot complications aimed at particular characters. It is one of the benefits of a limitation/disadvantage system in the first place. But in the larger scheme of things, the easiest way to keep bonus values in line with the events of actual game play is to adjust the bonus values, not the game play. GMs will exhaust themselves trying to work it the other way around.

Sure, the mechanics are different, but only because they had to shoehorn the idea of hitting a hex into the opposed-action mechanics of combat (hexes don't offer opposition, but they must be treated as if they do to avoid adding another mechanic just for that purpose). Nevertheless, if you think about it from the character's point of view, the ability to identify a volume of space at a distance, within LOS, is the same whether you intend to teleport yourself there or direct an attack at it. The only reason the mechanics are different is because the outcome is a different kind of outcome, but the innate, in-game ability that makes them even possible would logically be the same. The point being that hexes can't conceptually be infinitesimally small points in space that are "nearly impossible" to locate with normal senses because Teleport wouldn't work at all, with its mechanics written as they are, if that were so. Given Teleportation's mechanics, I'm now convinced that I don't even need special OCV modifiers/rules to deal with this. The logical ramifications are that hexes have a DCV of 0 and attacks that target them are at normal OCV (I say normal instead of full because other factors can still reduce OCV, like range mods). Hexes, like any other completely static hex-sized target, could conceivably receive DCV bonuses for things like concealment, but the base DCV would always start at 0.

Aren't we mostly rehashing what was discussed at length in the "7th edition thoughts" thread?

I think the expectation (by the designers) was that the standard Limitation bonus values were based on what would reasonably occur naturally, on average, in any given campaign. You shouldn't have to work to incorporate those limitations into the events of sessions; situations should be arising organically that bring them into play. If a GM finds this is not the case because of the unusual particulars of his campaign, then he is expected to adjust the bonus values accordingly. Otherwise, trust in the overall validity of the values and just run the game normally, without contriving events to fit the limitations. Disadvantages on the other hand...

I'm trying to suss out how the classic career generation system of Traveller contributes to the feel of the resulting characters. Players choose a career path, but then the skills and stuff they get from it is random. In Hero, players choose a package deal and get whatever skills are built into it, plus whatever extra skills they buy on top of those. It is the usual random vs. selected dichotomy. So is the "authentic Traveller feel" tied to the random nature of the skills (and mustering out benefits) a character ends up with? Or is it tied to detailed backstories? Not all Traveller players will bother to construct elaborate backstories that explain the hodgepodge of skills and gear their characters end up with, so is the authentic feel of the game dependent on players who make that effort? If so, wouldn't the same players go to the same effort to explain any extra skills they buy in the Hero System? I would expect the feel of the characters to be determined more by the skills and gear available in the game than the particulars of the subsystem that distributes them. But I could certainly be wrong about that. As a game world, the Third Imperium is built upon an unusual mix of hard-ish sci-fi and nostalgia-driven anachronisms, and that's easy for me to see just by reading the game books. It is harder for me to peer into the character generation system and extract how its design results in a "feel" that all characters obtain by having been produced by it. It is a fascinating notion, especially from a game design point of view.

If empty mid-air hexes had infinite DCV that nobody could possibly target accurately, then Teleportation would never work as written. Ergo, the assertion is not valid.

My understanding is that Ant-Man will be a "heist picture," presumably with the shrinking being used to sneak into and out of high-security facilities. While he will no doubt fight a critter or two while shrunk, I doubt it will be a major focus of the character or the film.

I'm not sure that matters in this particular line of analysis. The claim was that hexes were intrinsically difficult to locate with ordinary (even Targeting) senses because they are intangible conceptual constructs (or simply empty, unidentifiable space). Locating a piece of space is locating a piece of space. Why you are locating it is immaterial.

Teleportation also establishes the fact that hexes (also colloquially referred to as "locations"), for all their "nothingness", can be targeted without making any kind of roll (PER, attack, or otherwise) with any regular Targeting Sense, like normal sight. That dispels the notion that hexes are pure abstractions that don't really exist as anything and are intrinsically difficult to "geo-locate" with ordinary senses. Therefore, that whole line of reasoning can't be used as the rationale for hexes having a positive DCV.

At the end of the day, I feel that the mathmatical involvedness of the Hero System is a fair, if not necessary, price for its vast expressiveness and versatility.

A hex is not merely a 0-dimensional point in space, a "set of coordinates" as you put it. A hex is a 3-dimensional volume of ~7 meters-cubed. It is not a coordinate in 3-space, it is centered on one. And when you hit a hex, the simplifying assumption is that you could have landed your attack anywhere within that volume and you're deemed to have hit its center point. A hex has real boundaries; it encloses real space which is not merely "an abstraction," but a vital tool for measuring distances and sizes in the Hero System.

Genre-wise Grimm fits into the Modern Fantasy category, which has been hot lately (Lost Girl, Witches of East End, Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Constantine, Bitten, etc.). It is basically the same territory covered by MHI, and so I suppose MHI might be a good source of advice for adapting Grimm into RPG form. And Fantasy Hero, along with its bestiary, could potentially help a GM who isn't comfortable translating the magic and monsters of Grimm into Hero System form on his own. But I don't think you can take anything as-is from any Hero genre/setting book, except maybe modern weapons and vehicles, since Grimm has its own unique mythology.

That's an intriguing notion. How would you describe the "authentic Traveller feel", in terms of a character, to someone who is not familiar with Traveller's mechanics?

In my experience, most audiences don't think about it deeply enough to notice lapses in logic, be they minor or major. They don't go on forums and blogsites and comment on it like we do either. So while you and I might be disappointed by major lapses in logic, most viewers won't even notice and so tv writers don't really worry about it much. Which is why tv shows and movies actually make for lousy RPG settings if you are looking for air-tight logic and long-form internal consistency.

My understanding of Limited Range is that it sets the range of the power to somewhere between zero (No Range) and half normal range. It isn't "conditional range". However, Conditional Range (-1/4) could be a custom Limited Power limitation.

Overshooting is handled with its own mechanic and the fact that you can miss and overshoot isn't the cause of DCV. It is the cause of the miss-and-roll-for-drift mechanic. Your point about concealment is a reasonable one, except that concealment lowers OCV, it doesn't increase the target's DCV. I can see the logic behind lowering an attacker's OCV if a target hex is obscured by real cover (you know, objects that are in the way). Empty intervening hexes do not constitute cover by any reasonable interpretation of the concept. Fair enough. But I think you overestimate the complexity of my approach. It takes less text to describe than the standard rules for hitting invisible targets (or attacking while blind), and in practice would involve nothing more than deciding if the attacker's OCV is normal, halved, or 0 (based on a trivial observational assessment that would take a fraction of a second to perform).

I'd use the Hero System, stealing whichever elements fit best from all the other books on my shelf. What is the value/point of pinning it down to one particular, ill-fitting generic genre book?

Read: the Borg behave in the manifest best interests of the writer tasked with getting that week's script out the door, and the manifest best needs of the plot. Whether or not it otherwise makes a whole lot of sense is usually besides the point.

No doubt. I was hoping maybe someone knew of an old interview or bbs/usenet/forum post they could dig up a quote from (or remembered anecdotally). I knew it was a long shot, but I figured it didn't hurt to ask.

Oh, I don't expect the official rules to change. As you've pointed out, that decision was established too long ago; it is effectively set in stone at this point. I am nevertheless interested in knowing the official rationale behind that decision (as opposed to speculation about it), but I don't think that will ever be forthcoming. As a refinement of Lucius' proposal, I was thinking of the following experimental (house) rule: SPoR (static points of reference): A hex is said to have SPoR if there are static objects (rocks, trees, cars, lamp posts, buildings, etc.) in it that serve as points of reference for targeting that hex. Hitting a Hex: Hexes have a DCV of 0. Attackers get their normal OCV against their own hex and any of the six adjacent hexes. Attackers get half their normal OCV against hexes further away that have SPoR, and and an OCV of 0 against those without SPoR. Range mods against OCV additionally apply, as usual. Characters with Spatial Awareness or other means of pinpointing a hex's position in 3-space suffer no OCV penalties just for targeting a hex.

That might actually be an interesting variant to try. I wouldn't discount it without trying it first (over the course of many sessions). In the same vein, one might reasonably argue that while hexes, as spacial referents, are invisible, their volume of space isn't if only because there are usually things in the environment (like the ground and objects on the ground in the hex) that serve to provide locus data for targeting. A hex with such referential queues could be said to be "visible", or at least have the equivalent to Invisibility's bright fringe effect. Hexes up in the air, in outer space, or deep underwater--basically any hex lacking any kind of locus referents--could easily justify OCV penalties (while the hex itself remains at DCV 0). This variant could also give added value to Spatial Awareness. I'd still love to see a quote from the game's designer(s) stating that giving a hex a DCV of 3 was their way of avoiding the above "complexity". Their insights from playtesting various alternatives could be illuminating.

Even if we treat a hex as an "invisible" target, the result would be an attacker dropped to 0 OCV. The DCV of the hex would not be affected. An invisible character who is Entangled has a 0 DCV, while attackers are reduced to 0 OCV when targeting him. And yet when targeting a hex, attackers get their full OCV, which means hexes are not deemed to be invisible at all. I've never heard anyone from Hero Games say that giving a hex a DCV of 3 was some sort of bass-ackwards way of accounting for its lack of "visibile-ness". I understand that the To-Hit formula links OCV and DCV in a way that makes them appear interchangeable, but they are not. They are separate mathematical entities for a reason: certain things modify one but not the other. Invisibility modifies the OCV of the attacker, not the DCV of the target. The velocity and size of a target modifies its DCV, not the OCV of an attacker. A quick study of the combat modifiers chart(s) might help here...