Robyn

Re: How to build a factory in Hero?

Wealth?

If he runs the mint, metallurgy (perhaps smithing or a more refined metalcrafting skill).

Re: Alignment Issues

There's no hint of any actual laws' date=' although they do have some rather intricate manners.[/quote']

 

The elves in Orkworld have no actual laws.

 

Elven society has no laws. None.

 

Instead, a balance of power exists through Chaos (silly, I know, but read on), where it's not necessarily that you've attacked someone else's ally, but that they are no longer able to pretend that you can be trusted.

 

But there are no laws against murder, so if you can get away with it, go ahead.

Re: Speed Chart dynamism

If everyone is waiting' date=' I immediately skip to Segment 1 (do not pass Post Segment 12, do no collect a Recovery) and stay there, with everyone having a held phase until someone does something.[/quote']

 

What if both sides want to rest?

Re: Suppress Nastiness....

Well technically the power would suppress any other power' date=' including itself [assuming you didn't take personal immunity or Selective'] so it is it's own destruction.

This did occur to me. I was thinking that Inherent might handle it, since (with so much in Advantages already) the cost isn't really much more.

Speaking of cost: to determine the exact strength of this power (Xd6), we have to look at Power Defense - specifically, what it has not been able to overcome.

Now, who do we know that has survived the death of a universe?

Galactus.

It needs to be unable to overcome his Power Defense.

I've also thought of just a couple more tweaks this would need to be realistic; the first is Extra Time (or perhaps Gradual Effect), because if the power drained even one pip (1 point) every Turn, we would all be feeling it, a lot more than we are. The other would, unfortunately, have to be a custom Advantage; how much Power Defense does a planet or star have? If a normal person (well, okay, an immortal) were Drained of an amount necessary to minutely affect a planet/star, wouldn't they feel it much more? The change I'm thinking of is: effect is multiplied by area covered, or rather, effect takes place upon each hex and this is cumulative for whatever is larger than a hex. This way, immortals are Drained for maybe an XP point or two every great once in a while (most people die before they directly experience entropy), and it blends right in with the normal variance in what XP they get; but planets and stars, over the same length of time, lose energy over their entire surface area (which can be different than the volume hexes, but at least it's astronomically consistent).

I think my brain just started hurting.

Overthinking. Take a break, do something else for a while, come back to it later

Re: How to build a factory in Hero?

I'm trying to nail down some reasonable rules for determining economic output and factory production by writing up a world as a Base.

From the answers here, I would say that you need to buy the appropriate skill for the base as a lab, and put an AI (also with the skill) in charge of it. Hopefully, the recent Ultimate Skill book will have guidelines on how long it takes to actually manufacture something once the skill roll is made.

Re: Alignment Issues

Darth Vader would kill someone for being rude to or disappointing him. You don't get much more selfish than that.

He would punish someone for insubordination or failing him. You don't get much more professional than that

Re: If Hero was linear

STR is the only characteristic that would be noticeably affected by changing to a linear scale' date=' and might need some sort of scaled pricing to cater to both Heroic and Superheroic characters -- for example, you might pay 1pt per pt up to a STR of 50, then 1/2pt per pt to a STR of 100, then 1/4pt to 250, and so on.[/quote']

 

What concerns me about fractional costs is that, unless we have fractional points too, we may as well just spend the last of our fractional points, reducing granularity.

 

We could start out STR at higher initial costs, though; this would satisfy people who think that STR should be 2 for 1, and if they wanted it to be 1 for 2 (or 1:1 to let fighters in a fantasy campaign easily buy it), campaign caps could still be established.

 

The Megascale advantage could be expanded to accommodate damage and defences as well as area and speed. It would need a little bit of tweaking' date=' but I think it would be an easy way to accommodate such a vast range of values.[/quote']

 

Can you explain this idea a bit further? Were you thinking a major tweak ("MegaStrength"), or just a minor tweak where Mega is still for scale?

So, for instance: buying your STR with one level of MegaSTR would mean that you automatically defeated anyone of lesser or equal numerical STR, but a lesser level of MegaSTR, and if you were two levels of MegaSTR beyond them, you would automatically defeat them (in any contest of Strength) no matter what their numerical value was?

Re: Suppress Nastiness....

But then if you loose Line of Sight with the universe' date=' or something in the universe that you chose not to Suppress decides to bop you and Stuns you, the universe comes back. That's the thing about Suppress - it has to be maintained to be effective, and there are simple ways to interrupt it. Even Death by Suppress isn't permanent; if you Suppress a target's Body to the point of death he "dies" for all practical purposes, but if you shut off Suppress he springs back to "life."[/quote']

 

I think I've just statted out Entropy, then

 

Think about it - the reversion condition is "cannot Suppress things anymore", and when everything is finally reduced to zero, it all springs back at once; the energy released in this moment is another Big Bang.

Re: If Hero was linear

Thoughts?

Linear allows for greater granularity; with exponential, if you want a character who is 5x as strong, you pay for 8x as strong, and so you might as well take the 8x. To maintain some level of equivalency with costs, perhaps the price for formerly exponential values would go down for higher levels?

Re: SPD inflation obesrvation & solution

There are a few perfectly normal people who have a very high SPD stat. If you ever watch some one who does quality control on an assembly line or some such they are acting once per second or so to check every item that passes them. I recently saw a documentary on cranberries and there were people who picked out bad berries at a rate faster than one per second.

Could be a level of Rapid on their normal sight, plus an AOE with Selective.

Re: Suppress Nastiness....

It will even suppress Power Def' date=' though it will have to overcome it first. But if some gets through, the next hit will affect more and should take more through... Assuming you've got the END to make it worthwhile of course.[/quote']

 

Give it 0 END and Continuous, plus lots and lots of Megascale, you can eventually take down everything in the universe

Oh, and Selective, of course Weaken only your enemies.

Re: How does a world die?

...or how the heroes would stop it from happening?

Natural disasters?

Even if the entire global nuclear arsenal were detonated' date=' the effect on global climate would be marginal at best.[/quote']

 

Not that any of us would care, at that point

Re: The Genesis of +5 = 2x power?

Now rather than arguing whether +5=x2, perhaps I could pose this question: would that be a desireable state of affairs?

 

It would mean the system goes truly exponential and, frankly, I don't think the rest of the mechanics are up to it. Mind you the system is not up to going truly linear either, not without major changes. Currently we have a weird and ill-defined hybrid that somehow still works.

Hybrid?

As in F . . . ?

Re: Alignment Issues

A sane' date=' functional, Chaotic society [i']could[/i] have leaders aside from war leaders. They would probably have clan elders of some sort and almost certainly some kind of religious leaders. These two roles might well overlap.

 

Of course, such a society would actually have "laws" of a sort, dealing with kinship and property, if nothing else. "You are married to someone from this village, therefore you are entitled to live here and help farm our fields" kind of stuff, or "you can't marry him, because he's a member of the Turtle totem lodge and thus is considered your brother".

Another contradiction: if someone has power, isn't it Chaotic to use it? At least, in a consistent manner? The truly Chaotic warlord would alternate between seizing power and giving it all away to charity. Only a Lawful warlord would use force to dictate how other people should behave

Re: Alignment Issues

I may be misunderstanding you here' date=' but it seems to me the only narrowness of the definition is to exclude the unrealistic and implausible.[/quote']

 

By the standards of Law, which is in no position to enforce its preconceptions upon Chaos.

 

In other words, the Law/Chaos debate soon devolves to:

Law: "Chaos is bad!"

Chaos: "Why?"

Law: "Because, by nature, Chaotic individuals must do . . . "

Chaos: "Who says?"

 

The rest of your post leads me to beleive we're using very different definitions of these terms, so I will wait for you to clarify the difinitions you are using (as I requested above).

 

I'll offer a more detailed definition later, after I get some sleep

 

For now, I'll just make a few brief responses to the more notable replies in this thread:

 

You can certainly enjoy freedom if your stronger, lawless neighbor hasn't gotten around to conquering you yet!

 

This presupposes a definition of Chaotic where "lawless" inevitably means "evil"; or perhaps I misunderstood your definition?

 

Chaotic (society) = one in which there is no formal legal system; where problems, conflicts, and disputes among the people are decided in a more-or-less arbitrary fashion by whomever has the power to do so. Those who have authority/power can do pretty much anything they want, and need not take into consideration the needs/wishes or the rest of the people. Those without power/authority have only those rights/recourses granted by the whim or grace of those in power.

 

Physical force is one type of power, but economic power can also factor into how "strong" someone is. If you produce something valuable (like food: everyone needs to eat!), especially something that noone else can, you (may) have the power to withhold it from others, and that is a power all your own! It may not be the power to harm or kill other people, but even without such ability (directly or by proxy of "authority"), one can be "in power".

 

How's that?

 

First there's Lawful: he follows a personal code (if he deviates from it, well, the Dark Side isn't known for mercy), strives to maintain order (by crushing the rebels who would dare seed dissent in the name of revolution!), and wants to spread it further. Then there's Good: not greedy or selfish at all, his first loyalty is to the Empire but that's not his only loyalty; he also loves his son and doesn't seem entirely happy with bringing Luke before the Emperor.

 

If we're truly talking about Law/Chaos as a separate axis from Good/Evil' date=' there is nothing inherent in Law that says a person can't change his place in society.[/quote']

 

Some time ago, in India, a village made up a story about how their ancestor was royalty. They couldn't change their caste, but they did change the rank of their caste. Not by much, and such shifts are certainly rare, but since a caste system seems like a very Lawful society, I thought it deserved mention.

 

They could, but it wouldn't be a function of their chaoticness. They might just as easily not have any such respect for those people.

 

But then, is this not a function of Chaotic alignment? To have the freedom to respect, or not, as they (individually) choose?

 

A lawful society on the other hand, establishes what respect is due to whom.

 

On the other hand, a Lawful society doesn't force people to have respect. Come to think of it, in a Lawful society, people might still respect someone, even when such respect hasn't been formally established as due.

 

Sure, I can. I can imagine lots of things. Doesn't make his purposes any less evil. The Nuremburg defense, "I was only following orders," doesn't change the morality of your actions.

 

So if you were playing a paladin, you'd essentially be a pacifist? (Can't slaughter those orcs, even if they are evil, even if your church ordered you to do it; that would be murder, just like Darth Vader did to those rebels.)

 

They can't hate it that much if they do it on a regular basis.

 

Isn't that what "supporting the Lawful society" means, though? They grit their teeth and do it anyway, because that's the law?

 

All he's doing is stealing. A Chaotic Evil Robin Hood would probably be murdering the men and raping the women.

 

Careful - but for that "probably", you're falling into the habit of doing exactly what Phil did, stereotyping alignments without regard to their personal interest.

 

A thought - if Robin Hood were Lawful Evil, he would probably have listened to society while growing up, heard that people like him (evil) were murderers and rapists, respected that, and become a murderer and rapist! But if he were Chaotic Evil, he would have heard what society said, and then another factor would have entered the equation: his own, personal, desires (if he wasn't interested in those, he wouldn't have felt compelled to engage in them anyway).

Re: The Genesis of +5 = 2x power?

Sorry' date=' but no. My formula *is* correct[/quote']

 

I did acknowledge that you had the correct formula, but only for calculating the number of units.

 

For that "final measure of power" as per the observation I made, your numbers below are still incomplete - remember the phrasing, each extra die of damage, which I emphasized in my last post.

 

If a single d6 is equivalent in power to every other d6, then 1d6 would be 1 unit, 2d6 would be 2 units, 3d6 would be 3 units - not, as I originally stated, 1d6 being 1 unit, 2d6 2, and 3d6 4.

 

(Interestingly, if we compare this statement to the formulae offered, we can see that I had the right idea from the start, and must have merely misstated it since actually following my formula as worded would not have yielded those results.)

 

The interesting thing about that wording you quoted from 1st Edition (and, perhaps, one of the reasons it was changed!) is that, if there are "extra" dice, the dice from before must have been included. So, to calculate the "final measure of power" (as in, not just the die with the highest damage!), they must all be added together.

 

If we take just 1d6, it is worth 1 unit (we have to use "unit" because d6's are already part of the lexicon), and we are done. If we take 2d6, the first is worth 1 unit and the second, as per your quote ("twice as powerful as the die before it"), is worth 2 units, therefore the total is worth 3 units. If we take 3d6, the third d6 is worth 4 units (because the one before it was worth 2), and we have a total of 7.

 

The pattern here follows my restated formula:

1 unit, doubled, is 2, minus 1 is 1, in d6's is 1d6.

2 units, doubled, are 4, minus 1 is 3, in d6's is 3d6.

4 units, doubled, are 8, minus 1 is 7, in d6's is 7d6.

Re: Character: Sam Vimes

Wizards tend to pile more limitations on their spells than Witches' date=' particularly Delayed Effect, Charges and Side Effect: Summon Things from the Dungeon Dimensions. Note that this becomes much less common in the later books, though you still get Ridcully asking "Does anyone have a _______" and such.[/quote']

 

I would call this a Psychological Disadvantage: thinks Expendable Foci are required, which allows them an EGO roll to overcome it and they can sensibly buy off the Disadvantage later on (whereas an actual Focus, if required, could not so easily just be "bought off").

Re: How does a world die?

There have been some settings in sci-fi and fantasy that highlights a dying world. John Carter has a dying version of Mars were life is worth little and cannibalism is common. Dark Sun is another dying desert world. But my question is how did these situations come about in the first place?

The passage of time finally brought the sun close to going out in The Dying Earth.

The carbon and water cycles would keep life going in some form. So unless some external force takes away a massive amount of material from a planet' date=' how do you kill a world?[/quote']

 

If you really want to know the answer to that one, consult an expert.

Re: The Genesis of +5 = 2x power?

No' date=' the final power = 2 to the power of (number of dice rolled-1)[/quote']

 

As it turns out, neither of us is right: the correct formulation, and how I failed to say it in the first place, would be:

 

"The final measure of power is equal to the number of units you are using, doubled, minus 1."

 

So, you do have the correct formula to use for calculating the number of units, but to make that extra die meaningful, you have to include it with all the other dice.

TUM: The Ultimate Munchkin

Re: Putting my finger on it

Zornwil - thanks

Example:

Don't restrict Healing from being applied to an END Reserve by default. If anything, mention that the GM may want to restrict the application of Healing to just any power as this could lead to balance and/or genre violations.

Adding to this: I'd like to see a "game balance" handbook listing the various restrictions that have been recommended, and at least one example of a "broken" build, and an explanation of how that would constitute "abuse".

Perhaps, after everything else has been published, they can take examples of abuses from those. It could be called "The Ultimate Munchkin" or something

__________________

Now gathering petitions for The Ultimate Munchkin

Re: The Genesis of +5 = 2x power?

"The standard rule is that each extra die of damage or 5 pts. of STR is twice as powerful as the die before it. This geometric scale should be considered when attempting to add damage or STR together."

Interesting . . . so, if the first d6 is 1 unit (of whatever), the second d6 is 2 units, and the third is 4 . . . do you see where I'm going with this?

The final measure of power is equal to the number of dice you are using, doubled, minus 1.

Re: Putting my finger on it

Setting = a complete game' date=' maybe some better way of organizing which core book stuff is in use and which is altered, maybe it's already there as I barely use these, but generally anyway try to make these more clearly complete games, even if "Requires core book" is stamped - to me the tricky part is that I'm not sure how you either don't get to "Requires core book and genre book" or "Requires core book and duplicates some material from genre book" - but the latter could work well, if all you do is duplicate the options/rules from the genre book and say "if you are interested in whys and wherefores to the rules mods from the core, see the genre book"[/quote']

 

Could you please restate the part above, from "the tricky part is" to "but the latter could work well"? I'm having trouble parsing the "either don't get" section.

 

I don't disagree' date=' but the ongoing problem I see is that HERO (like pretty much every system) produces optional rules in each Ultimate and Genre book, so we're always out of sync. I don't have a good solution (until we get to virtual books that are auto-updated....)[/quote']

 

Isn't that what Curufea's HERO-Wiki is for?

Re: The Genesis of +5 = 2x power?

PPS. Oh' date=' and I'm well aware that if it is +5 = 2x, than The All-American, with 20 stats, is actually 5.27x better than a normal with 8 stats.[/quote']

 

Or perhaps every 4 points above that norm is effectively another multiplier?

 

8 = norm

12 = twice norm

16 = thrice norm

etcetera?

 

I am beginning to think of the 'underlying mechanics' as a bit of a religious belief - an article of faith.

 

A theory, which some of us are still coming up with support for (but as we are still in the process of reverse-engineering, these pieces do not prove anything; they will only be useful if we can fit them together with enough other pieces).

Re: System cap on creativity

Given that he doesn't seem to get much thinner when he stretches' date=' I wonder what he weighs when fully stretched out [/quote']

 

The same mass, but he redistributes from the inside, so he is actually fully hollow then?