GreyGuardian

Re: Sin City Kevin Smith interviewed Miller and Rodriguez on NPR - the whole interview is about an hour long. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4569989 I read the orginal comics as they came out. I have to admit it actually made more sense as a film because all 3 stories happen at once. The lag between the first issue and the last of those 3 left lots of room for forgetting what the heck was going on and who was who. I really liked the film.

Re: Alien Wars hit location and aimed shots takes care of the stun multiplier randomness. You want average damage? take a chest shot. you need to put the thing down in 1 shot because it won't matter what you do if you don't? take the head shot and hope for the best.

Re: The Stormtrooper Effect This is when you fudge the die rolls as needed. If a mook gets a solid shot decide if it is dramatically appropriate enough to actually occur, if not look upset and declare a miss. The Screen is your friend - although I prefer the half height ones as they are easier to see over.

Re: What are you working on? Episode 3 of my Star Hero game using Terran Empires and some extrapolations from champions setting books material. Pondering future sessions and which space opera schtick is going to get tossed into which episode while making the players nervous about lethality and their hunteds. (running about once every 4 weeks) Planning the next run of my Champions game currently set in millenium city. (runs once every 3 weeks) Pondering recruiting one or two new players. Wanting to take some time and revise my champions convention scenario, Human Factors. Things to do include handouts with very brief info on the player characters and their interactions with each other. Short News clippings from the week prior to the start of the scenario. Figuring out how to pace it a bit differently. And the hard bit - trying to re-work the set up so that the ethical issues to struggle with about the best course of action are more apparent - because it has to be more than just the detective work and the energy blasting. Developing a clear encounter outline for the sequel to my living-greyhawk (dnd 3.5 sigh) module, Shades of Gray (now retired from active play alas). And making sure that the thing is short enough to play in 4 hours and ties up the major loose end from the first adventure while still being entertaining for people that hadn't played the first adventure.

Re: Whoot! Pulp Maps! Grats on the cool find. I'm looking forward to pulp Hero.

Re: The Ultimate Mystic: Good, Bad, or what? I liked UMY. It contains a very good summary of real world mythology, mythological monsters and gods etc in different cultures and that sort of thing.

Re: New Star Hero stuff? http://www.herogames.com/Products/sched2005.jsp Worlds Of Empire: The Terran Empire contains thousands of intriguing, exotic, and dangerous worlds. From Earth itself, the seat of the Empire, to the distant worlds of the Frontier, to the strange planets located near the Galactic Rim, its worlds contain thousands of opportunities for adventure and profit — and this is your guide to them. Author: Allen Thomas Tentative Release Date: Late 2005 Tentative Size: 160 pages

Re: Hero System vs. d20 Two of the harder concepts in hero are reasoning from effects to choose powers and their modifiers and how to hit rolls work. For example, you want to run a fantasy game. So you start creating spells that are available for the players to buy. In hero you decide what you want your spell to do and then buy the appropriate powers to produce that effect. You can use the exact same rules construction, but because the special effects are different the game effects are different. You want a spell that creates a stream of water that shoots out from your hand and hurts your target with the force of the water. So you buy energy blast - but the damage it does is physical rather than energy because the special effect is that it is a stream of water causing impact damage. And since it is water it probably leaves the target battered, bruised, and wet. The being wet may or may not have a minor game effect. You also want a bolt of fire, ok well its energy blast again and this time it does energy damage, and it's fire so it might not be a good idea to use that in the fireworks shop and the target is probably singed if not burnt badly. Combat resolution - for some reason this seems to confuse people converting from d20 - the attacker has a Combat value and the defender has a combat value. The attacker's combat value is an Offensive combat value (OCV), and the defenders is a defensive combat value (DCV). So the attack rolls 3 dice A hit is scored when your die roll is equal or less than OCV - DCV + 11. But another way of explaining that: DCV hit = OCV + 11 - die roll is easier to use for a lot of people. There isn't anything in the system more complicated than simple algebra. The rules are internally consistent unlike d20. All the rules you actually need are in the Hero System book. One reason it is so thick is because of all the examples.

Re: Flying through an asteroid belt. I hate to go here but - like in Lost in Space, there has been some sabotage aboard the ship. So you have the pilot, sensors, weapons stuff going on, and the engineer and anyone else available are trying to find the sabotage and repair it to get "manuever" systems back on line to make the pilots job easier / possible. Or add a saboteur (or squad) that they become aware of just outside the asteroid field that is on the shop and needs to be apprehended. Or fighters harrassing them a la star wars And / or the villain saboteur taunting them over their comms as they race towards distruction because of various system malfunctions. Just a few ideas.

Re: HERO system observations and beefs I was just referring to the champions supplements. Decent ideas, but not well executed (they weren't terrible but the 5th edition versions are uniformly much better). I agree danger int and justice inc were both quite good.

Re: 'Optimal' Travel Time Yes this sort of detail is useful for consistancy in a star hero game. For space opera I am already fudging lots and lots of science. It's nice to have a little physics to add a touch of reality.

Re: mental illenes (disadvantage) it would be a physical limitation. second http://www.nami.org and learn about the illness as it appears you have several misconceptions.

Re: HERO system observations and beefs believe what you want to, but I find that 5th edition revised was worth buying for the improved layout and clarity and expanded examples. There are rules I thought I understood, but it took 5 or 6 readings in 5th, in 5th revised the text elaborates enough or provides examples that make the meaning quite clear and confirmed or corrected my interpretations from the previous editions. Genra books. I generally had an expectation that I would be familiar enough with world building that the genra books were not going to be terribly useful for me. I was wrong. They aren't cover to cover essentials but they do save a lot of time where they cover something it would have taken me time to research. The how to construct x ability in terms of hero has been surprisingly enlightening. Setting books - I generally like terran empires. it gives a core political / historical perspective a decent amount of tech gadgets etc and leaves lots of room for customization and expansion. The things it is missing include a more detailed and clear discussion of ships being atmospheric vs not atmospheric capable vs fast shuttles vs reactionless drive vs the time it takes to get from outside the gravity well to a place of interest. And it lacks a good discussion on ship floor plans, component size (though that can sometimes be extracted from the text) and general ship design philosophy. I'm using champions universe, VIPER, UNTIL, and the city books to flesh out my champions game. Demon will be there too after I get a chance to read the whole book (possibly the best of the lot for the type of game I tend to run). The big advantage of published settings aside from the lack of needing to write all that my self is the accessibility to my players so they can become familiar with the setting during non-game time. I've been playing HERO since 1984. Pre 4th edition the supplements were uniformly mediocre to bad. Generally all of the 5th edition books have had something in them that was useful. The enemies / bestiary books have had bad guys etc that are actually worth using without major modification and have useful plot hook suggestions. The modules are generally good. Shade of black is my favorite of them so far. As a comparison, the dnd 3.5 expansion books (complete this and that, frost whatever) are prettier I suppose but no where near as useful as most hero products. Generally they have to expand the rules to allow character customization... and hero - well all the rules are in the big black book - and I like that a lot.

Re: Psychic Wars Fiction recommendations: The Demolished Man by ALFRED BESTER http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679767819/qid=1109108063/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-4677822-7845669?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 and probably Bester's short stories and other novels. The following might have some relevance - I read them many years ago - all by Ron Goulart Barnum System : Ben Jolsen (as I recall it was about a shape shifting detective but if that fits in with psychic powers (projecting images that you are someone else, stealing identities) then these might be relevant.) The Sword Swallower (1968) Flux (1974) Starpirate's Brain (1987) These I think might have been about a psychic detective - Odd Jobs, Inc. Hail Hibbler (1980) Big Bang (1982) Brainz, Inc. (1985) I probably read most of these stories in old pulp magazines like fantasy and science fiction. So I have a really distinct memory that Goulart wrote about psychic type stuff I am not exactly sure which books and amazon and the web have been a bit less than helpful in reviving old memory.

I am confused by the hyperdrive write up in TE. It takes extra time but the implication is that the extra time is a maximum time for the ship to stay in hyperspace. There are also stats in the description of x light years per hour etc. But the actually speed seems to be linked to the duration you can be in hyperspace and the velocity you can go there, which is determined by the normal space engines. The text also implies it takes some amount of preparation to make the jump to hyperspace... but the duration or nature of the preparation is not discussed. Can anyone explain this? I'm probably missing something obvious. Thanks.

Re: How Long to Learn Hero System? weapons and armor and such do tend to have a long list of limitations and advantages - but generally they are a common list. During play what you usually need to know is that a pistol has x number of shots, does x damage, has (or doesn't have) modifiers to combat value, and if the stun multiplier is modified. Everything else is there for special situations and to describe how a gun works in game terms. For example Obvious accessible focus means that you can see that the gun causes damage and you can disarm someone or take the gun away, or grab them and prevent it's use. All things you would normally assume but relevant for overall game balance. I'd rather have it all spelled out somewhere convenient than cast a spell and have to dig through a book and read a page of rules to figure out if I could cast the spell, what it actually does vs what I thought it did, etc. Often with cross references that might but usually don't matter. Hero is actually simpler than d20 for most things. Then again I always prefered word perfect to ms word because I could see everything that was going on.

Re: How Long to Learn Hero System? Grab the two page combat summary from the free stuff section on this board. read it. That's the core of the system. Then, selectively read the sections on characteristics and skills (you don't need to know what happens when someone has a -30 str at this point just kind of skim past that sort of detail and know it's there when you're ready). Then the same for the combat section. Understand the intiative system IS the speed chart. how to move. how to hit things. how to take and recover from damage. And that's it. A LOT of 5th edition revised is example and optional rules. The beautiful thing is that very different powers work in similar ways. Once you understand the basics the powers etc are just variations on the theme. For character creation the most important thing you need to understand is you decide what you want your character to be able to do without necessarily looking at the rules. Once you have an idea of what you want then you take the constructions that most reasonably do those things. Everything flows from the special effects. For example just because you want a character that is very easy to hurt but regenerates the damage almost instantly doesn't mean you don't take lots of Armor. You can in fact take lots of armor and define it as, he takes the damage but it heals instantly. In general to learn the character creation system write up a bunch of different characters. You'll be more motivated to read through how entangles work if you are writing up Jelly Man and are looking to get the powers to work the way you envision them. After you generally understand powers look at advantages and limitations. Those are how you fine tune the powers to really work the way you want them to for a specific effect. Somewhere in there take a look at how disadvantages work and realise how easy they can make writing up the notes for your next game when you are running short on time - oh look a player is hunted by these guys and this player's dnpc is looking for a job and heck those guys hunting player 1... well they're recruiting. then ponder power frameworks which are generally how you can do more with fewer points. It doesn't take long to learn the basics - usually the biggest problem people have is unlearning the rules or responses based on other games.

Re: Grimjack Tech levels Is the first new GJ issue out?

Re: Pulp Hero better to start low with 50 / 50 and build up or infuse points if needed than to start too high. It's always easier to give things to the players than take them away.

Re: Terran Empires - FF + Body armor? Thanks for the idea John. One of the starting themes in my game is the characters are poor. their equipment is old (ie lower ATRI generally) So if I need to I have a great justification for things starting to "break" ie turning ablative.

Re: Terran Empires - FF + Body armor? Thanks for the replies. I like the idea of defense DC equivalents but for the moment I'll let them stack if the players think to try it. The high tech weapons look pretty lethal. If stacking is too powerful I can always do a retroactive correction. Speaking of the weapons, when I first got a look at the gun types and explanations I thought about posting how very wrong some of the underlying physics is... then I realized that I say "I am nuking something" when I put it in a microwave oven to heat it up. i.e. the names stuck and that's what people call them, even if the name doesn't fit what they actually are.

Re: FH Adventuring Gear.hdp - fixed costs, included missing third of equipment Very cool. Thank you.

Aside from setting limits on cash / resource points is there any reason that a personal forcefield would not work when worn with body armor? Wouldn't they just add their defenses together?

Re: hit location Champions no hit locations except for the called shots. Heroic level games I always use hit locations.

Re: Hero Designer in a Star Hero Campaign?