dataweaver

Quick and to the point: which villains in the Champions Universe have taken a personal interest in Nighthawk, and where can I find information concerning them?

Re: Of Body and Mind Well, not necessarily "a lot"; that depends on how much of the action takes place in the Mind Zone. I'm planning on it being a place that the heroes visit, but not a place where they live. I think that some playtesting is called for to determine an appropriate cost, although my gut instinct is to stick with the same cost for mental characteristics as for physical ones until I see evidence that the prices need to change. Eh. Taking Characteristics out of the equation entirely is a bit extreme for me. But I did say that I'm also planning on using the "Skill Difficulties" rules from APGII, which opens up another possibility: fold OCV and DCV into DEX's SV. In earlier editions of Hero Games, Mental Combat Value and Mental Defense were based off of EGO (they were even called "ECV" and "Ego Defense"); and a case could be made that since Interaction Skills are based off of PRE, "Social Combat Value" should likewise be folded into PRE's SV. That said, it has always bugged me that EGO was the go-to trait for all things "psychic" while PRE was the go-to trait for all things "social", while physial conflicts had a much more diverse split. I suppose that I could fold all of the mental and social combat values into INT; but that feels wrong to me, for both practical and conceptual reasons. So how about this: add a new "Empathy" Characteristic, which represents how well the character grasps emotions (both his own and others), and fold all Mental and Social Combat Values into EMP's SV. So, as far as combat systems are concerned, you have the following sets of traits: Physical Combat: STR, DEX, CON, BODY, PD, ED, STUN. Mental/Social Combat: PRE, EMP, EGO, MIND, SD, MD, COM. Other: INT, SPD, REC. In a game where mental combat has less of an emotional context to it, you might fold the Mental CVs into INT's SV instead of EMP's SV.

Re: Of Body and Mind OTOH, most Characteristics already cost 1 point/level; lowering their costs would be problematic. That said, this was one of the reasons why I decided to fold the Social CVs into the Mental CVs: having to buy four CVs is bad enough; having to buy six? Ugh.

I wasn't sure which tag to use for this, because it's a combination of a campaign idea (rather, a setting idea) and a house rule that the setting is built around. I'm drawing extensively on APGII for this: I'm using a tweaked version of the Social Combat Maneuvers system; I'm using the Mind Zone variant of the Speed Zone rules (with the added complication that there might be a Speed Zone within the Mind Zone); and I'm using the Skill Difficulty system. The setting is a "science meets magic" setting, with the science being "cyberpunk" and the magic being "supernatural horrors lurking in the shadows". There are cyborgs, robots, and netrunners; there are also psychics, shamans, necromancers, and cults. Rules-wise, it's built on a "body/mind duality" paradigm: most characters have a body (defined by their STR, DEX, CON, BODY, OCV, DCV, PD, ED, SPD, REC, and STUN) and a mind (defined by their PRE, INT, EGO, MIND, OMCV, DMCV, SD, MD, MSpd, MRec, and COM). Only END is independent of the physical/mental divide. In this model, PRE is the mental analog of STR: it dictates how effective you are when attempting to influence someone else's mind. INT is the mental equivalent of DEX, and it is used in place of DEX when determining who goes first in mental combat during a given phase. EGO is the mental counterpart to CON: where things that lack CON are generally not alive, things that lack EGO are generally not self-aware. MIND is the mental counterpart to BODY, representing in essence your sanity: as your MIND degrades, so to do your mental faculties. OMCV isn't just about "psychic combat"; it's also your ability to use just the right phrase at just the right time, think of the most appropriate insult, state your case in the most logical or convincing way, and so forth. That is, it doubles as your Offensive Social Combat Value. Likewise with DMCV. In many ways, the distinction between "mental" and "social" is akin to the distinction between "energy" and "physical", which is why there is both an SD ("Social Defense") and an MD ("Mental Defense"). MSpd might only be applicable in the Mind Zone; I don't know yet. But when it is applicable, it operates exactly like SPD. Likewise with MRec and REC. COM (Composure) acts as the mental counterpart to STUN; in addition to its role in social combat, Mental Attacks inflict Mind and Composure damage rather than BODY and STUN. Every entity has mental characteristics (though not all of them have a full set); but not everyone has physical characteristics (there are things that have physical characteristics but not mental characteristics; but they're not entities). In addition to automatons that have a limited subset of the physical attributes, you also have four varieties of spirits, corresponding to the four Classes of Mind: nature spirits (which register as "animal"), software entities (which register as "machine"), ghosts (which register as "human"), and ultraterrestrials (which register as "alien"). Spirits reside in hosts in the "Body Zone", but are free-roaming in the Mind Zone. (The "Mind Zone" itself may have a similar subdivision going on, with a "Human Mind" Zone, a "Machine Mind" Zone called cyberspace, an "Animal Mind" Zone where the nature spirits commune, and at least one "Alien Mind" Zone inhabited by ultraterrestrials - still debating this.) I have a few more thoughts; but I'd like to get some feedback on the overall approach here before getting too far into the weeds. So: Comments? Criticism?

Inquiring minds (i.e., I) want to know: are there any plans for doing a 6E book on Mentalists? If so, what (if anything) do you plan on doing differently than you did with The Ultimate Mentalist (aside from the obvious "base it on the 6E rules")?

An idea that was inspired by White Wolf's Exalted and Green Ronin's Mecha and Manga: I'm looking into ways to treat aggressive social interactions as a form of combat. The core idea is that social interactions are a kind of mental combat that anyone can engage in, not just people with mental powers. First of all, the Characteristics: it's mostly possible to divvy up the existing characteristics into physical and mental characteristics, and to draw parallels between them. The mental analog to STR is PRE; the mental analog to DEX is INT; the mental analog to CON is EGO. These aren't perfect analogs; in particular, PRE is like DEX when it comes to interaction skills (as things stand right now); and before 6e, EGO would have been like DEX when it comes to mental combat values. Speaking of mental combat values, OCV matches up with OMCV; DCV matches up with DMCV. Also: in this system, your mental combat values represent social savvy as well as psychic finesse. SPD transcends the physical/mental divide, unless you really want to mess with the headache of tracking physical and mental actions on different phases; I don't. I tend to think the same of REC and END: they straddle the divide, being equally applicable to both the physical world and the mental world. BODY and STUN are both physical, and neither has a mental analog in the current rules. However, I could see giving both of them mental analogs, mostly useful in Horror Hero: the mental analog for BODY would be MIND, and would represent the integrity of your mind (i.e., your sanity). The mental analog for STUN would be COOL - where loss of MIND leads to insanity, loss of COOL leads to emotional outbursts. This means that there's an analog to Normal Damage and Killing Damage as well: normal mental damage is stuff that puts you on edge; mental killing damage is stuff that directly assaults your sanity. PD and ED normally don't have parallels; but in a game with MIND and COOL, you might pair them with Presence Defense and Mental Defense respectively. In effect, physical and energy attacks are roughly analogous to psychological and psychic attacks. Just like a normal human's natural combat capabilities are physical and not energy, his natural mental combat capabilities are psychological and not psychic. (Annoyingly, "physical" is used in two different senses in Hero System: "physical" as opposed to "mental", and "physical" as opposed to "energy". The latter is a subset of the former.) Another difference between psychic and psychological attacks: a psychic attack involves some sort of direct mind-to-mind contact; a psychological attack only requires a means of communicating with your target. OTOH, it can often be rendered ineffective by a language barrier; psychic attacks typically don't have that problem. Skills: many (most? all?) Interaction Skills would operate like Combat Skill Levels rather than like ordinary skills. This would remove the link between Interaction Skills and PRE, and would instead result in them enhancing your MCVs in appropriate circumstances. The net result would further enhance the body/mind parallel. Powers: If you're using the new mental characteristics, Mental Blast no longer affects BODY or STUN; instead, it affects MIND and/or COOL. By default, it's a psychic attack, and so must overcome the target's Mental Defense; but there are possibilities in defining it as a psychological attack instead. There are variations on Healing and Regeneration that deal with MIND and COOL rather than BODY and STUN. Interactions: social interactions are resolved as a form of mental combat, with Interaction Skill Levels affecting your OMCV and DMCV respectively. "Psychological maneuvers" would probably mirror the existing list of Interaction Skills. If your gambit is successful, roll dice based on your PRE, much as if you were attempting a Presence Attack. (In fact, the Presence Attack rules are subsumed into this system.) Most or all of the bonuses and penalties listed for a Presence Attack become modifiers to the Mental Combat Values instead. If you're using the new mental characteristics, the result usually counts as damage to MIND or COOL (after you've applied the appropriate Defense); if not, adapt the Presence Attack table to reflect the "social maneuver" that you were attempting. Related ideas: A side effect of the body/mind duality is that the Spirit rules from long ago (a 4e supplement, IIRC) could be more thoroughly integrated into 6e: a spirit is a character type that has no physical attributes, not even BODY or STUN; to hurt it directly, you must somehow attack its MIND and/or COOL. An automaton could be revised to be a creature that has no mental attributes, and thus is immune to mental combat. Automatons and spirits could each come in two forms: basic and advanced. Basic automata would lack CON; basic spirits would lack EGO. In effect, spirits would be a revision of 6e's computers. This could be used to represent ghosts and zombies in a Horror Hero game, or hardware (i.e., machine automatons) and software (i.e., machine spirits) in a Cyber Hero game. Also related is my proposal elsewhere for treating PRE as a Mental Power. This is an "alpha version", probably full of bugs. I'm looking for constructive criticism here: don't just point out problems; propose solutions. As well, I'm looking for ways to expand on this idea: how far can the analogy be usefully taken? Is there a social analog to Grappling? Is there a social analog to area attacks? etc. Final note: if done right, I'd like these rules to be the sort of thing that one might be willing to include in 6e's equivalent of The Ultimate Mentalist, to represent "mentalists" who have no psychic powers.

Re: Presence and Classes of Mind The assumption is that if you attempt to use an interaction skill on a class of mind other than your own, you'll either suffer a penalty (at best) or fail outright (at worst). If you take the Multiple Classes Adder for PRE, you won't suffer these problems against the additional class.

Re: Size Powers The Body Alteration Powers group mentions that three of those Powers - Growth, Shrinking, and Density Increase - alter the subject's mass. And these are also the three powers where the book explicitly says that if you're always in the altered state described by said power, you shouldn't take the power; just buy the traits describing that state directly. I suppose that you could shift the focus from size to mass; but that still seems to miss the point.

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated.... True enough. OTOH, the same argument could be made concerning Multipower.

Re: Size Powers Two points: first, I just admitted that I was mistaken in assuming that I had made myself sufficiently clear. I'm not going to be using those prefixes anymore, because apparently people don't see them. (I don't see why they're so easy to miss; but so be it.) As well, I was attempting to be concise for once, since I usually have a tendency to over-explain myself. Apparently, I have to over-explain myself here, or else someone's going to jump to conclusions about what I'm saying and then blame me for not being clear enough. Second, I did not make up a new group, as you imply. I am indeed referring to what the book calls "Size Powers"; and I was trying to get the point across that once you get past the obvious conceptual similarity (i.e., both have to do with size changing), there's a deeper, and at least IMHO more meaningful similarity that the description in the book of the Size Powers group outright states and that has nothing to do with size at all. Would you like me to quote the relevant text? And in fact, there's a third Power that behaves exactly like Growth and Shrinking in this regard. So Density Increase ought to be in this group. But once you've put Density Increase in the Size Powers group, the name "Size Powers" is now blatantly misleading; so I need a more suitable name for the group, to avoid the confusion caused by the existing name. So I asked for one.

Re: Interlingua That sounds like a 3- or maybe even 4-point similarity to Spanish (and presumably French, Italian, and Portuguese): you read the Interlingua site at a decent clip without any training in Interlingua at all, which either means that you got a point or two in it for free from your existing languages, or that you were making successfil Int checks to puzzle out the words' meanings. I can see English being a 2-point similarity, maybe three, largely due to its tendency to mug other languages for "loan words"; while German and Russian might be 1- or 2-pointers. After thinking about it some more, I suspect that the other difference between Interlingua and more traditional languages is that it's rare to find anyone with anything approaching "native" fluency in the former. Most speakers have only one or two points in it. The same would hold for trade pidgins: there may not be such a thing as native fluency.

Re: Interlingua I don't know about Esperanto; but Interlingua was constructed by using grammar and words from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English, German, and Russian, with a bias toward the Romance Languages. The effect is that people with a passing familiarity to the likes of Spanish, Italian, or French are generally able to puzzle out what a statement in Interlingua means.

Re: Size Powers The goal is to group similar mechanics. The catch with Desolid is that I don't think that you can duplicate its benefits without using Desolid. Thinking about it some more, I don't think that I will include it in the expanded Size Powers group; but I'll add a note under its Limitations saying that you don't have to remove the END cost or make the power Persistent before making it Always On: at least in the case of this one power, taking Always On automatically kills the END cost and renders the power Persistent.

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated.... That would resolve the problem of negative-cost slots, and would reduce the problem of zero-cost slots to the single case where one of the forms is the "worst of all worlds", with no redeeming qualities relative to any of the others. Of course, another thing being neglected here is that the other forms look different (usually). This is why I had indicated using a mixture of Multipower and Shape Shift: the former (or some variation thereof, such as what we've been discussing) would address the differences in capabilities; the latter would cover such things as the ability for, say, a wolfman to throw off his pursuers by ducking around a corner and transforming into an innocent little boy. But the Shape Shift cost structure doesn't mesh as well as I'd like with the Multiform-based capabilities cost structure. If it was a straight "x points per alternate appearance", it would fit nicely. OTOH, the ability to Shape Shift into large classes of abilities dovetails nicely with a VPP-based alternative to what we've been talking about - this would let you do Beast Boy from the Titans. (OTOH, coming up with a "worst of the lot" package for someone who can turn into any animal might be its own problem.) And Multiform has other features not reflected here, ranging from a tendency to lose your personality to the possibility that injuries won't carry over from one form to the other. These would have to be reintroduced into the new structure. Personal preference: I'd like to see the player be able to write up one form of his choice (i.e., the "base form"), and then spend additional points to be able to switch to other forms, with the cost determined primarily by how many points worth of abilities he can acquire by doing so. Something to the effect of: add up the positive point changes between the base form and the alternate form; add up the negative point changes separately. Find the ratio of negative to positive, and round it to the nearest 1/4; apply that as a Limitation to the "Base Cost" of the positive changes. Once you've got Active and Real Costs for every form, pay for them as if they were slots in a multipower. So a form that has as many bad things in it as good things (relative to the base form) will cost half as much (-1L) as it would have had it had only good things in it. You can then handle quirks such as personality loss and separate damage tracks as limitations and advantages that get applied directly to the slot (assuming that you don't want to charge more for the latter).

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated.... Actually, he suggested a "lowest common denominator" write-up rather than a "cheapest form" write-up - that is, the "base character" is written up as those traits - both positive and negative - which are shared by every form. You then write up each form in terms of what characteristics, talents, skills, powers, complications, etc. that form has that at least one other form doesn't have. If one of the forms doesn't differ from the "common traits" write-up at all, it will have a cost of zero: no positive traits to raise the cost, no negative traits to lower it. If one of the forms has a minor benefit and a mass of complications that are not shared by all of the other forms, it will have a negative point total. If you try going by the cheapest form, rather than the "common ground" traits, then you may end up having to write up some of the forms at least in part in terms of which traits they don't have, rather than which ones they do have. Consider the cripple who turns into a Norse deity: From the "common ground" approach, you'd buy characteristics at the lowest level of either form; you wouldn't buy any of the deity's powers (because the cripple doesn't have them), nor would you include the cripple's greater intelligence, skills, or Physical Complication (because the deity doesn't have them). You'd then write up two slots: one for the cripple, one for the deity. The cripple's slot would include some Intelligence, a few mental skills, and a Physical Complication; the deity's slot would include some vastly improved physical characteristics and some god-like powers. From the "cheapest form" approach, you'd buy you'd buy characteristics at the cripple's level; you wouldn't buy any of the deity's powers, but you would include the cripple's Intelligence, skills, and Physical Complication. You'd then buy two slots: the cripple's slot would be free, because he doesn't differ at all from the base write-up. The deity's slot would include everything that the deity has that the cripple lacks; but it would also include a set of missing or lowered traits: a reduction in Intelligence, the removal of several skills, and the removal of the Physical Complication. Oh, and consider the possibility of two forms with equal point totals, but vastly different abilities: by the "common ground" approach, both slots would have positive costs; by the "cheapest form" approach, both slots would be free (one, because it doesn't include any changes from the base; the other, because the benefits and drawbacks would cancel out).