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I think you can simplify this a bit by starting with Clairsentience as your base power with a limitation that it only works through cameras/sensors. I personally would give it 1/4 or maybe 1/2 limitation value if anything given the relative ubiquitous nature of sensors in our world today, let alone the near future. Strictly speaking, Clairsentience doesn't provide you with telescopic or microscopic vision. Perhaps a small VPP would make sense in this scenario. One that only works with your Clairsentience and only to mimic the sensor you're looking through.

Like many systems, designing an encounter is part art and part science. I've had my players tear through an encounter I thought was hard because of some lucky die rolls and other that were nailbiters when they really shouldn't have been. Campaign baselines are critical to make this work. You need to know what is considered average in order to make any of this work IMO. Generally speaking your average mook encounter should have lower CV and lower damage than the player average while an even super encounter would have about equal. Sometimes that means dialing up CVs and attacks , sometimes that means dialing them down. It's something that comes with time and experience and is most hard at the start of a campaign when you don't know all the PCs as well as you will in a few sessions. Some players may have a nasty power that slipped by you in character creation that trivializes content, someone may be underpowered... It's challenging but my advice is: Make sure you understand what your characters can do Go slow, setup a few mook encounters and get a feel for what your players can do Don't be afraid about dialing up or down NPCs powers and stats to fit into your world Design a variety of encounter types, not every encounter needs to be against equally powered foes Use your campaign baselines as a guideline to figure out if someone is less or more powerful than the players Hope that helps... I know it's not as black and white as in some systems but it can be done.

Looks amazing, great work

I just wanted to give a quick update about the last week of development... good news and bad news I guess. The good news is that I have enough of a working application to start an alpha test. A special thank you to all the people who signed up! I'll have something available for Android and iOS within the next day or so. The "bad" news is that World of Warcraft Classic has stolen my free time! Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I'm working on balancing my free time between WoW and developing the app (and being a husband somewhere in there too )... I'm not going to lie, WoW killed my forward velocity on this project. I am still committed to making this thing work though and will find the time to get it done. More info to come once I get alpha test launched.

Yes, in fact I now have experience writing code that will scale properly based on device size from another app I wrote. It's unlikely that I will be doing much more than scaling it, to start. In the future, I may write screen size specific screens but that would be sometime off in the future, if ever.

OK, I just read the barrier cost rules and it looks like all defenses are totalled when calculating the cost of the defense of the barrier. I'm pretty sure I was doing the calculations on a per defense basis which would be wrong in this case I'll have to revisit my calculations for Barrier on Resistant Protection and make sure I'm totalling first.

FYI - Resistant Protection has similar math issues with the Flash Defense adder.

I found what I think is a little math bug in Barrier. It has to do with a Barrier with Flash Defense built in. 6 Points of Flash Defense costs 15 points according to the UI... the math adds up at that point: Going to 7 points of Flash Defense cost +3 points according to the UI which brings the total cost of the adder to 18 points. The Total cost of the power only goes up by 2 points though: Minor inconsistency, but I thought I would bring it to your attention.

The effect you're describing sounds more like a Transform which would not be a cheap way to off a 600 point Vampire Lord.

It's been awhile since I gave an update on the app so I figured I would stop by and give one. I've been working diligently on reading in the HeroDesigner files and have made good progress so far. Reading in the file is easy, what I'm finding is time consuming is writing code to calculate and display powers. On an export template you simply get tags to do these things for you but when reading a template directly you have to perform the calculations yourself and handle the display of odd powers. It's time consuming but I have a solid design pattern which I'm using to make my life easier (I'm using the decorator pattern for you nerds). At any rate, I've knocked out Characteristics, Skills, Perks, Talents, Martial Arts, and Complications completely. Powers have proven to be the most time consuming because unlike the other areas they tend to be unique and require the most custom coding. I'm currently finished with the "F" powers and am working my way down the list. I've baked in some goodies that I thought I would share...here's one: Strength now shows you how much damage you can do, how much you can lift, and gives you an example of what you could lift. Strength between 0-999 will tell you exactly how much you can lift and show you the closest example of what you could lift. The example kind of falls apart the farther you get from 100 STR as that's the last entry in the table. The other fun thing I worked in was your total km/h for movement abilities... have a look at the screenshot below: The "Max Combat" and "Max Non-Combat" speeds are calculated based on your characters SPEED attribute and is an accurate number AFAIK. If anyone wants to check my math it would be appreciated. The formula I'm using is: meters per phase * SPD * 5 * 60 / 1000 There is still a metric tonne of crap left to do but my plan is to try and knock out the powers and then get a test build up for all you folks who have signed up for testing. I'm still looking for testers, if you're on the fence or maybe thought you missed the window... it's still open. Let me know if you want in.

Nice, I need to read up on that one

I've actually wondered about this myself, I wanted to model an ability in HERO that worked similarly to how you described. My scenario was a Blast that normally did a baseline 10 dice damage but did an extra 2 dice vs undead. This damage would always be present vs undead regardless of any vulnerabilities the target undead may or may not have. There seems to be no direct way to do this for ranged attacks short of comparatively heavy handed techniques like Aid. Maybe model the extra dice after Extra Ranged Damage Classes from martial arts? 4 points per DC... Alternatively, you could make a MP for each ability, one slot for the baseline attack, 1 for the powered up attack. It would be stupidly expensive and not elegant at all but it's one approach I guess. Perhaps in each scenario it should be approached in the opposite direction. Instead of boosting an ability, buy the power level you want outright and put a limitation on it so that AP is restricted unless certain conditions are present. The powers are essentially always nerfed except under certain circumstances.

It could be a follower with Resurrection Regen to simulate being temporarily disabled.

This is well said. I actually will gloss over the use of END for a couple of games unless things get really out of hand (powers with Increased END basically). You may want to consider a soft entry into the system and add more crunch as you go until you've hit the "realism" level you want.

They say that hitting water with enough velocity is about the same as hitting concrete. Assuming that's not just an urban legend you would probably be done either way. Maybe if you're feeling generous a die or 2 may get knocked off.

I did some research today and it looks like I have much more sophisticated tools available to me via the Play and App stores for testing. Both stores offer mechanisms to invite users to participate in the testing process which means the test app will be distributed via the regular channels. So I won't be distributing an APK from my Google Drive account after all 😂 Same rules apply: DM me on these boards or at phil.guinchard@gmail.com to get into the tests.

I'm looking for people interested in helping me test out that app. I can provide periodic builds via Google Drive for Android users and instructions on how to install the app. It should be pretty straightforward for Android users. I'm not sure how to do this for iOS but will look into it. If you're interested in helping out please DM me through this site or shoot me a message at phil.guinchard@gmail.com and we'll work something out.

Cheap out and buy extra PRE with a limitation "Only to incite rage towards self".

I will be releasing the app with support for both types of characters. Just reading in a HD character still leaves a lot of work on my plate to do things like calculate costs, totaling modifiers, calculating STR damage, etc. The end result is that there are a lot of things that I have to code for. Which means more bugs. What I'll end up doing is provide people with messages to inform them that they're either using a deprecated character format (the XML export) or the experimental HD format when they load a character. This will keep people informed about upcoming changes to the app in regards to loading characters and provide a fallback if you come across a bad bug in the new format. Not that it means much to people but I will be bumping the version number to 1.3.0 when I release this feature. This will include a deprecation message for users of the export template. At some point in the future (once the bugs are worked out) I will remove support for the export format entirely and do a 2.0.0 release.

Here's the skill screen...I assigned a skill some miscellaneous Advantages/Limitations just for testing. The Martial Arts, Perks, Talents, and Powers screens will likely be quite similar... a lot of the work at this point is foundational as I build out classes and components to process and display the character. Points to whoever spots the easter egg Simon put in Note that the math doesn't work right now so ignore the Cost.

Thanks, that reminds me that I need to convert that to feet/lbs. I should probably add a setting to let people use metric measurements too.

It's been my experience that there's plenty of salt available on these boards. 😜

Hmmm, looking at the UI what I could do to save some space is hide the Base and Cost fields until the plus button is pressed. I don't think people generally need to know that info at a glance so there's really no need to clutter the main display with it.

I'll see what I can do. The challenge there is that devices have different dimensions. I primarily test on a Pixel 3XL which has more real estate than the regular Pixel 3, for example. I also try to support all the way down to an iPhone 5 which is quite small and is unlikely to support the big six being displayed without it becoming difficult to read.