Shoug

This is the best answer. Cannot feel emotion like a Vulcan? Psychological Complication. Has strange value structure that causes it to take offence to weird things and become violent? Enragement complication. They speak martian and are therefore capable of omnipotently controlling matter at will? Matter Control.

This all happens to be very related to a spell I've been wracking my brain on how to build for a few days now. I've been trying to build a Circle of Teleportation spell with an accompanying medallion. There is a magical circle that the wizard knows that he can use to teleport up to four people at a time safely to any other Circle of Teleportation within 100km. He and everybody he's teleporting needs to be physically inside the circle, maybe 2 meters in diameter (I'm probably not going to buy that AOE, they just need to be with the wizard and the circle). The wizard wears a medallion at all times with a Circle of Teleportation engraved on it. He can use this as a "site", he can teleport from it and to it (if he leaves it somewhere), but he can only take himself when he's using it as the "entrance" Circle. It takes a long time to draw a Circle, but to use it is instantaneous thereafter. So the medallion not only lets him teleport in a pinch, but it also let's him basically instantaneously "study" a new Floating Fixed Location by taking off the medallion and leaving/throwing it somewhere. The only caveat is that after taking off the medallion, he no longer has access to any Circle, so if he wants to use that new FFL, he's gotta draw a new Circle or find an old one. I want to see how other people would approach building this before i share what I come up, just to avoid biasing anybody.

I want to use this effect to simulate a Flashlight with an Image power.

I love to see Hero Effortlessly miming TFT. The power of this system is astounding.

I honestly think this is the best way to do this, assuming the GM is keeping it more or less strictly balanced (everybody remains within 10 points). In fact, I think I'll take it a step further. Not only can you essentially find CP on the ground by finding a magical item, any magical item may be upgraded with XP at your leisure. You can choose for the magic item to become part of your character, like Excalibur or Mjolnir, and thereby earn the right to discover new abilities (much like a new use for one's powers in comic books) or just improve its current abilities.

"Sometimes there will be magic items given as loot. You can consider them to be XP 'windfalls' if you want. I'll try to be fair to everyone, but if we get to a certain point in the campaign and you feel like you've been shortchanged, we can make that up with additional XP or an extra item for you." This is the best way IMO. I would treat the point cost of all the items players receive as guidelines for the GM to us in deciding what to give out to whom and when. If your players can't deal with a little power disparity here and there from time to time /shrug.

This honestly sounds like it would negate our biggest hurdle. We understand play fairly well, checks and effect rolls are very simple, most things are self explanatory. We just had trouble with a few pieces of gameplay rules (the range ones mainly) and the details of all the powers. I'm gonna try this out.

Sorry, I didn't realize there were so many books. I decided to go with 6e first because, despite it being criticized for being a slog, I wanted the ground zero of my experience to be the most comprehensive version with the least ambiguity (I play a lot of MTG where the rules are basically computer code). I've got the PDFs for the two core 6e books (vol1/2). Searching the terms I find in the game rarely makes it much easier to find what I'm looking for. Usually what I find are the keywords being used within examples of other concepts or I find situations where an exception to the keyword had to be explained (like in the case of Autofire, which has a few special meanings in the cases of Powers like Environment Control and the like). I'm considering picking up the hardcopies because I figure it would help me by 1) Providing yet another page that can be open simultaneously with other pages, 2) Making it possible for me to memorize the physical locations of specific sections and chapters. The price tag is just a little out there for me, considering that I've already bounced off of the system a few times. Thanks for the suggestion, 100 pages is 100% accessible. I'll check it out.

This is an incredibly gracious offer. I would much appreciate it. In terms of what genres we're interested in, we're pretty diverse. Sword and Sorcery is on the menu, sci-fi settings ranging from Barsoom to Black Mesa to Arrakis are on the menu, modern mil-sim or zombies are on the menu. This is an example of the sort of problems we're running into. We can find explanations at this level of detail, which isn't quite enough. For example, what's a range increment? Is it a hex? 4 hexes? What is a damage class? So we end up in these massive spirals of madness down into the rulebook that can take hours before we emerge any wiser.

I’ve been admiring Hero System from a distance for some time now. Over the course of a few years, I’ve started and stopped reading the rulebooks, occasionally intending on “Buckling down to RTFM cover-to-cover this time, then I’ll know it!.” Each time I stopped because I couldn’t maintain interest, gleaning only the most elementary understanding of the rules of the game. I recently tried kickstarting a game with my friends by reading both a 2 and 3 page version of the rules and then just finding premade characters on the internet to do a mock-combat with. The idea was this: after being forced to look up things we were seeing on the character sheets enough times, we’d have a high enough resolution gestalt of the game to start digging around and making our own characters (and playing quickly and smoothly). We were using these premade character sheets: http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/combine_overwatch.html http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/antlion_soldier.html http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptationsvideogame/hl2/weapons.html We acknowledge the possibility that these character sheets are the overwrought brainchildren of a theory-wanking grognard, and might feature extravagantly avant garde applications of the rules that are satisfying only to the “clever” guy who thought of them. It’s a scenario we hadn’t much opportunity to avoid, so we opted to treat them as fine examples of character sheets. Nonetheless, there are certain concepts that are used on these character sheets that we can’t find anything about by CTRL-Fing through each of the core rulebooks. The shotgun’s damage is “reduced by range”, which is a string that we just literally couldn’t find in the rulebooks, and the pulse rifle utilizes “autofire” which we couldn’t find a core definition for (everything we found was an explanation of how “autofire” works for specific Powers and how it affects the strength requirements of melee weapons, it wasn’t listed at all underneath “Firearms”). Most of the terms we searched could be found in either books' glossary, but those definitions were often too abbreviated and none of them directed us to a page that would give us the full scoop. In addition to this, when we tried to use our best judgement about how these rules should be applied, we couldn't find a way to produce a result that seemed sensible. What I mean is, we couldn't figure out how these Antlions were supposed to penetrate the seemingly very strong body armor of the Combine Overwatch. This is just an example of the problems we have been facing. So what we want to know is: What are we doing wrong? Is this whole “trial by fire” technique just a bad technique? Is there a video or series of videos that we could watch that would connect the dots for us? Should we actually just read the books cover to cover before attempting to play? We can’t seem to find many straight answers to the questions we have just by digging through the rulebook, and so we’re kind of stuck.

That all you know about a character's ability to lift is like 98% of his max deadlift. And form factor isn't taken into consideration at all. As far as the game is concerned, the same 10 strength that lets you pick up a 100kg barbell and stammer two paces lets you pick up a 100kg sleeping man and stammer two paces.

I don't care what settings they were meant for, I want to know if there's a book which simply contains all the skills, characteristics, powers, advantages, and disadvantages, talents, magic, whatever that have ever appeared in any books. All the raw materials that I could ever need to build any of my own settings. I don't like the feeling of these things being tucked away in different genre books, I just want all the character building tools extant within the system. I feel like the splatbooks should exclusively contain package deals that, no matter the setting or genre, only reference a single book worth of raw building materials. Does such a book exist? Am I an idiot, and that's already what the 6e core book is?