knasser2

Hi! Hopefully a simple one. I'm looking at the fire, acid, et al. rules (6E2,p147) and I can't find anything that explicitly states when you take damage from a harmful environment but the acid damage example seems to imply that a character takes damage on each of their phases. However, surely this must be wrong as it results in the following: Nimblus the Nimble, Elven Rogue, has Speed 4. Chunketta the Dwarven Warrior Maiden has Speed 2. Both are trapped in a burning room. Numblus the Nimble burns to death twice as quickly as Chunketta, (we'll assume the unlikely chance that rED and BODY are the same for both). As this doesn't make sense, I feel I must have gone wrong somewhere but I can't find anything saying "Environmental damage occurs at the end of the Turn" or similar anywhere. Thanks for any answers!

Ah, it's interesting to know about the banishment approach but no, they're not "Summoned" creatures in my setting. Not necessarily anyway. Fey just skip into this world when they feel like it or if they want to abduct adopt a human child. Devils are entirely capable of crawling their way up from Hell by themself if nobody is keeping an eye on the deep passages in the earth that lead down to it and demons... they might be summoned but more likely some wizard done goofed and unleashed a ravening ball of death in their tower by critically failing a magic roll. Ha! No, I am NOT throwing out my carefully atmospheric power descriptions just for that. However, I AM going to try and work it into the game when a temple bell drives off the devils.

Wonderful. Great reply - complete working example that captures what I want! Thank you so much!

Monks in a period European setting can certainly be odd.

The problem with this is that only certain PCs have the ability to make the holy sounds. So it would essentially be giving a free "turn undead" style effect to people that they didn't have to pay for. Devils and Fey are moderately common in my game so it needs to be a cost to the PC.

Nice. It never even occurred to me to give the creatures some escape route and force them into a horrible choice. I like this a lot. Now I can see some mighty devil (high Ego) roaring defiance whilst its crowd of imps all flap about in agony. How would you build a power that forced people to cover their ears on a failed characteristic roll? This is beyond my Hero skills, I'm afraid. For that matter, how would you do something that imposed a -4 to all actions on someone as well? I really like the choice aspect. Thanks for these ideas - really good stuff.

Hi, I want to make a power for priests in my game that lets them inflict a terrible ringing sound on unholy creatures. So for example, it specifically affects creatures of the Fey type, or Undead, or Devils (according to the priest in question). Much like how in some folklore faerie folk could not abide the sound of church bells ringing on a Sunday morning. I'm actually going to do two variants of this - one that happens when the priest chants their scriptures so that marching clerics can Dixit Dominus a pesky devil back down into Hell, etc. And another which will be attached to the temple bell and obviously have a much wider range - but that's not a PC power, that's a magic item. In both cases however, the effect is the same. I'm not sure what to build this effect with or how. My first thought was Mental Illusions since it's really a painful auditory hallucination. But that seems more about actual deception. I also looked at Flash which I know could target hearing, but that's about removing a sense alltogether. What I really want is to add a sort of "hard to concentrate" penalty to the victims. I'm open to suggestions as to what that should be - penalties to OCV, Stun damage. Currently, I'm leaning towards Stun damage which would probably answer my own question because I'd then just make it an area effect Blast centered on the priest or bell and some kind of hard-wired Selective limiter. I'm curious how others would handle a distracting environment or distraction due to pain in general though, to see what other options I have. Stun damage is okay but I think it might be fun to do something more immediately painful. I want to see those devils hopping around with their hands clapped to their heads! Thanks for any suggestions

Going to need the special tomatoes for that one!

RPG authors picking out words or names for special significance from foreign cultures is a goldmine of hillarity. I don't think anything quite tops White Wolf naming a Vampire clan the "Giovanni", though. I suppose they thought it sounded sinister and urbane. But for those of you not from Italy, imagine if you will a vampire clan titled the "The Smiths". Actually no, that one works! That band might actually be vampires. Okay, how about "The Joneses". Sound scary now? Mind you, this is White Wolf - the company that also had gypsies with magic stealing powers, so what do we expect? :D

Oh wow! I'd thought it was simply some mildly different way to resist damage - probably mainly for thematic reasons or a hold-over from previous editions. There are a lot of worms in that can! I think I will put it back on the shelf for now and look at it again another day! Thanks for both replies. That example of the Normal BODY versus Normal Stun is rather eye-opening, especially.

It did. But there are still some odd artifacts and it turns out there are some things that 4e did manage better (at a significant cost to role-playing and variation, sadly). One of those is solo monsters. I wont go as far as saying they don't work in 5e, but they're pretty bloody wonky. More on this below: Actually, no - I'm talking about adult dragons and what you list as the solution is what I see as the problem. Which I am happy to agree is a matter of flavour / taste, but I find it a constraint. If you want to battle a big dragon as your monster then you make it work by giving the dragon bunches of minions, special environmental effects. Basically things you add to prevent a PC party's nova abilities making it helpless whilst they wail on it until it's dead. As I covered in my post, 5e aims to achieve its balance by giving characters very powerful abilities but limiting how often they can use them. As we're discussing the monk class the best example would be its Ki points which it gets X number of per day. That works if you're following a set adventure path where you have to make it through four to five encounters per day. But I run a game with a lot of strategic freedom on the part of the players. Maybe they don't want to battle the baron's minions. Maybe they find a way to lure the baron out to the inn where they are staying and fight him there. But if you allow the players to control the number of encounters like this, the game suffers badly because the chief limiting factor has been removed. Additionally, even if you do deplete the resources it still doesn't really work well for solo monsters. There are simply too many ways to overwhelm a single opponent, necessitating the minions scenario you give above. As said, it's not a problem if you are happy with that scenario, but it is objectively a constraint in that true solo monsters don't work well. Yes - the above, essentially. Smaug the Magnificent, the Black Knight that guards the ford, the deadly (monk ) assassin. Solos are a popular archetype but they don't fare well in D&D 5e. Spence is right about Legendary Resistance. I had semi-forgotten about that as it's been a while since I've run 5e. So for example, an Ancient White Dragon gets Legendary Resistance 3/day. Meaning it can choose to pass any three saving throws. This helps. But there are still a lot of abilities out there that let you shut down a solo opponent quite easily. In 4e - critically flawed though it was if you were more of a role-player than a roll-player, it didn't need a lot of fudges to make solos work, imo.

Hi, What is the logic behind having both Damage Negation and Resistant Protection powers. I get the thematic difference between someone who is, say, made of slime and can ignore being stabbed and a knight in armour whom the same blow will simply slide off. But mechanically is there anyhing particular to separate the two? Are there scenarios in which reducing damage classes and reducing damage are meaningfully different when attacked? I'm creating a devil creature that has resistance to fire and it just got me wondering what I may have overlooked. Thanks, K.

Thanks. I hate to do this because I like to do things by the book. But I'm reaching the point now where I'm becoming willing to cheat. And if the Xd6 must exceed armour approach is still balanced and simpler to use, I'm inclined to just go with it. The linked physical attack could work, but the damage from it would be so low (given what it's meant to represent) that it would be something like 1 Body. Well now, that depends on the size of the wasp...

5e thing, actually. 5e quite heavily assumes a standard 4-5 encounters per day and presents resource management as one of the challenges of the game. Most classes can "nova" quite effectively, by which I mean they each have some very powerful effects. The balance to that power being their finite uses per day. This works somewhat when the encounters per day are those of the design assumptions. It makes it a little bit of a game of "we could win any combat we choose, but how can we get through this without using everything up / which combat should we choose to win". The approach works very badly for GMs who are open to players being very strategic and picking their battles because the players can go nova at their own pace and it becomes very difficult to challenge them. One might think you can just up the difficulty of your "end boss" but in practice that just makes the combat very swingy with a lot of uncertainty as to which way it will go because to withstand the nova'ing PCs, opposition must be substantially more powerful and in D&D power in defence increases in lock-step with power in offence. Which brings us back around to the monk as a great example of this. The monk has a Stun power. It costs one Ki point to use and lets you stun an opponent for a round if they fail a saving throw. Combine it with things like Extra Attacks to make chance of failing low and abilities like Step of the Wind and the ability to run along walls and ceilings and a monk's increased movement speed... the effect on solo monsters is devastating. The dragon will sit there looking dopey whilst everyone else takes it apart. Ki is a finite resource so the theory in 5e is that the player wont play this way because hey - they'll burn up all their special power. But it requires a very specific style of play to work. I don't recall specifics of brokeness in 1-3, I'm afraid. I just have vague recollections of unarmed people burying everything under a tonne of unstoppable attacks but I can't attack power names or numbers to it by this point, I'm afraid.

If it's as simple as that, then I'm happy. It's normal to wear armour in my game. You get the odd combatant without any but if someone is daft enough to fight naked then I'm fine with saying a successful hit automatically means the damage over time effect takes place. The only hiccup is that someone with sufficient armour such as full plate which gives Armour 7, would entirely immune unless I ramped up the damage. And if I did that then lesser armour would become ineffective against it. But what the hey - if a knight in full armour can ignore the little tail stinger, I can live with that. There's likely to be an upgraded version of the power that has AP effect anyway so it's all good. Thanks for a really easy solution!

Very elegant. I like the touch of half-elves and half-orcs proving it.

Hi, Hopefully a simple one (though is it ever! ). I want to do a poison attack which does Normal Damage over time. That part I think is easy enough. However, obviously wearing plate mail shouldn't help you fight off poision so I need to disallow armour / resistant defence. That I could do with AVAD, it seems. However, whilst it makes sense that Armour wont help you fight off poison that's been injected, it makes a lot of sense that it should stop the stinger (Attack is a poison tail stinger) from injecting it into you in the first place. It should be harder to inject a knight in armour than a peasant in a cloth tunic. And I don't want it to render armour inconsequential. So how would I do this? I'm guessing some sort of standard attack which does damage and which the armour can prevent normally to represent the stinger being stuck in and then a Linked or Triggered second power which is the damage over time one? And this only takes effect if the first attack manages to do damage. That sounds like what I want but not quite sure how to build it. Thanks for any replies. K.

I think the three things I like most of all in that novel are That the main character's girlfriend is named "Ptracy", iirc. The school of assassins where there's a rumour amongst students that if you successfully kill your teacher it gets you an automatic pass.

All your throwing stars to the back accomplish is help me achieve my dreams of being a stegosaurus! I guess I'm okay with oriental settings having them. It's just a bugbear of mine when they show up in Medieval European settings. It's so typical of D&D's "Kitchen Sink" approach. Generally I'm very careful about what I allow in my setting. For example, I've reigned in D&D's profusion of little people. Halflings and dwarves and gnomes and whatever else. I just have dwarves. (Well there are gnomes but they're only in the Fey realm) A good meal requires a caerful balance of well chosen ingredients. It is not made better by just adding everything. I also think "Chi" can be easily re-flavoured to have less Wushu flavour if desired. A warrior who has a pact with some deity or is possessed by a demon. The D&D monk just feels like one of those hodge-podge damn-all-sense things D&D is famous for.

It's popular because a lot of immature players think "ninjas are cool" and have no regard whatsoever for general atmosphere or whether their personal power trip makes my setting all loopy. Also, in most versions of D&D the monk class is easily exploited to create game-breaking combos like stun-locking a dragon round after round. Why yes, I am harsh and judgemental and wildly opionated. Why do you ask?

Thanks for all that. Very helpful, very complete. And no worries about the side-discussion on classes and levels. I didn't take it as a criticism and it is very different to the general Hero ethos. I'm just used to people saying it so I tend to be able to blast out a response pretty quickly. I actually am finding it tremendously positive to do classes and levels in Hero. I've worked out a rough path of where characters CV's should be at different levels (with adjustments for whether they are combat focused classes or not and whether they favour attack of defence). I've created four tiers of powers that you get at different levels (Minor, Lesser, Greater, Major) and create class related powers that are thematically appropriate. It actually lets me subtly add the flavour to my game that I want which is a sort of half-way house between Warhammer Fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons. By crafting the powers myself I can ensure my game feels more like A Wizard of Earthsea than a Tom Holt novel, etc. Plus I can do nice things with the tiers of power levels creating pre-requisite paths. So Greater Familiar follows on from Lesser Familiar and leads to characters (PC and NPC) whose abilities tie together nicely. I should post up a few pages from my rule book sometime. I think it would be worth any number of posts about "I'm doing this.".

In my game, he's a god of mountains and thunder. No worries - I've created them however I like in my campaign so possibly different to whatever the original version was.

One thing I've found works really well with this is if the gods themselves are bastards. There's nothing more terrifying to a player than a deity with a sense of humour. For example Kord (a thunder diety) tends to refer to petitioners as "little people" and find their problems and trials hillarious. Vecna is petty and demands offerings before he will hear PCs.

So does the basic HKA with OAF that I did not work? I appreciate the Damage Shield explanations and people seem to be suggesting that's the way to go, but I'm unclear if there's anything wrong with the simple HKA version I did above.

Well for Armour I am using a suggestion in Fantasy Hero that it only has half-effect against Energy Damage. This adds realism and tactical depth, imo. And the class / level is something very much wanted by me as GM. I find Hero very complex as is. Having players run loose through the rules system would create an unmanageable scenario for me. Additionally, the reduced choice adds depth to the game. Warlocks fight in one way, Fighters another... It doesn't all merge into one. Sure, it flies against the design intent of "do anything", but I find my way easier to play and more fun. I can invite a friend round to try something called a "role-playing game" and let them choose to be a level one Druid that can turn into a bear. I can't invite them round and say "hey, here are two 400 page rule books, make a character." I picked up Hero as a drop-in replacement for D&D because D&D 5e has numerous things I don't like and is balanced like a drunken hippo. The cost, of course, is the vastly greater complexity. By creating classes and levels, I get to have my cake and eat it. (For some considerable effort on the GM's part, anyway). Okay. I definitely do not want the power to function for anyone else. It represents the warlock channelling their power through the weapon the hold. I also want it to function for any weapon, not just metal ones. So yes, it burns everyone that is struck by it yet doesn't consume the quarterstaff that is on fire. I like "Pencil of Opportunity". John Wick would approve. However, I'm still uncertain about the weapon being "Inaccessible". If someone disarms the warlock (quite possible), then they've lost access. The PCs are not typically walking around loaded with many weapons. For example, this character normally carries a quarterstaff and a knife. They could draw their knife but they'd hate not being able to use the power with the quarterstaff which does more damage. I guarantee the first thing they'd be trying to do would be to pick up their quarterstaff again! So wouldn't all this make the focus Accessible? Thanks - it's good to know this stuff for learning purposes, but in this case Cantriped is correct - I actually don't want it to be useable by others. The only reason this is being done as a "Damage Shield" is because this is how people are suggesting I do it. The in-game fluff is that the character channels magical power out through the weapon they hold to burn those they strike.