Chessack

Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero What you seem to be saying here is, "The player can tell the GM by paying points for things that he wants them to be important." I suppose I could see that. However, to me a good GM caters to his players whether they pay points for things or just write up a damn good background paragraph. As a GM, if I see that the player has taken the time to write a whole paragraph about his character's "girlfriend", then even if she is not a specced out "DNPC", I will know he cares about this character, and I will bring her into the story. In fact, something rather like this happened, though not from a background. One of our heroes developed a bit of a relationship with an UNTIL agent and she ended up being around a lot, because he liked RPing that, and I could tell he did... so I kept adding her in, even though originally she was just a one-shot "throwaway" character. In fact she showed up so much (and he rescued her so often, with the player enjoying every minute of it), that he at one point said, jokingly of course, "I should get points for her!" I suppose if you want, as a GM, you could say to your players, "Pay for the stuff you want to RP about, with the most points going to the things that are most important to you." Personally, I'd rather just ask the player, "Hey, do you like RPing about this?" than do it in a roundabout way like using points, though. In my case, people were running out of points they needed to build important Powers that they really wanted, and they were running out because they thought that, to play a character in the military, as a background element, they had to buy contacts, military rank, etc. I don't require them to pay points for such things, and their reaction was, "Oh, that makes it easier." It's the same character, with the same background, and the same military rank, and it WILL come into play. They just get it for free because they wrote a good background, so they can spend their points on other stuff. C

Re: Character sheet -- comments requested I like it a lot. You know why I like it? Because the first page is laid out fundamentally like the old 2nd edition sheets (which I like the best of all the versions of Champions Character Sheets). Cha upper left, Disads lower left, Powers on the right with lots of room. C

Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero That really is my point. The rules before allowed but did not encourage these tendencies. Now they seem to encourage them. And I wish they didn't. I realize I am probably not just in the minority, but in the vast minority. Doesn't change how I feel about it though. C

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero So did my group. We used to rotate GMs so everyone got Enemies right when it came out. We all read all the villains and knew most of them. Everyone turned up their nose at Fox. No GM wanted to use him. In those days once someone used a villain from Enemies in his adventure, he had "called" the villain, and it became "his" (no one else could use it without permission, just as if I had created it myself). After the first session with Fox, the other guys in the group were VERY bummed that I had, in effect, "called" one of the best villains in the book. (I apparently had an eye for this sort of thing though I didn't think about it at the time. With Enemies II I also was the first person to use Foxbat, and thus "called" him as well.... Which ultimately led to the Fox + Foxbat teamup scenario. MUH-hahahah.) Yup. I openly admit it. It took the other guys about a full year to convince me to move my campaign from 2nd edition to 4th (nobody liked 3rd so that was never an issue). I'm an old fuddy-duddy. Guilty as charged. I don't mind people preferring 5E and using it. I just wish I could (easily) get a nice newly minted copy of 2E and use that, too, if I want. It's a shame that for all games, not just Hero (D&D does this too), once they put out a new edition, all the old stuff is gone forever. Barring your E-bay suggestion of course. That's a decent idea but I'm wary of E-bay. C

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero First of all, those options have been there from the beginning. NND, AP, Explosion, AOE, Charges, OAF, etc, have all been around since day one. But the original philosophy of the 2E (and probably 1E though I never owned it) design was to assume that even a single advantage changes a Power substantially, and that you therefore don't need 18 of them to make a power different. By combining advantages with special effects every power can easily be made unique. After all my 7D6 AP - Fire is clearly different from your 5D6 NND - Sonic. Second of all, nobody would have said "You have to only have EB" or even "you have to only have simple powers." But I think the precedent set in 5ER from the very outset is, "most powers are super complex" and I think that's a bad message. Our group Rules Lawyer made up some amazingly complex stuff. But he was the exception, not the rule. It's the conversion of the Rules Lawyer style of writing up characters from allowable to default, to which I object. Right. I used the wrong word. I should've said "Rules Lawyer." That's a matter of opinion. I happen to think a guy with powers like "10D6 EB" and "+20 PD/+20 ED Force Field" and 2 pages of background is far more fleshed out than a guy with "5D6 EB - Explosion - NND - Hole in the Middle - Charges - Cost END to Use - No Range - Does not work on Sundays - OAF" who has a 2 sentence background that is just like every other hero background in the group. In our group, I would've said if you were doing that, you were not "playing right." "I blast it" was not considered a valid Phase action even if you only had a single blast and it was all you could do that Phase. You had to describe it... and you had to roleplay, including Soliloquy if appropriate. I used to dock experience for people who just said, "I half move and blast him". That's not roleplaying. In our group, roleplaying was punctuated by game moves... not the other way round. If that's so, then "10D6 EB" is plenty sufficient, because what matters is how you RP that EB, not how many points it costs or what D6 of damage it does. For us the variety came from the RP, not the points on the sheet. The points and dice represented a way to resolve a conflict whose outcome was indeterminate, not as a way to dictate play. So, for example, if character A wants to shoot character B, the only (fair) way to determine whether he hits, and how much damage he does, is to use points and dice (since those are objective). But for everything else, we just RPed it. As for simple characters being boring, one of the best villains we ever had was the old Enemies villain Fox. In the book, all he had was a good DEX and teleportation Power (he was one of the weaker villains) and a few other things (I don't remember his other stats but my recollection is they were unremarkable). As written I'm not sure what you were supposed to do with him, but it said in his background that he was humorous and he liked to throw pies at people and hit them in the face. Now, he didn't have pies on his character sheet. But I ruled that the pies would act as a 1-phase Flash and that your Flash Defense did not protect you, because realistically you were spending time clearing Pie out of your face, (which is why your DCV went down). It only acted vs. one person (in those days Flash was default AOE and the concept of "single target flash", which came out in Champions III I think, did not yet exist). Fox had some floating locations so I would find a spot on the map for him to store his pies, and he would "bamf" in and out of the battle field and hit the heroes with pies while his allies (the "real" villains) were fighting. Fox caused no end of trouble, and became a group favorite, both for me and the players. For the first few encounters he drove them completely nuts, but then someone happened upon his "pie stash" after a fight and realized what was going on, and after that when he showed up, they'd task one person (usually the Mentalist) with "Find his pies" so he would stop bothering them. All done without points... all done based on a single sentence in the background. Nobody but our rules lawyer argued "it's not on his sheet." And when he argued that, everyone just told him to be quiet, since they liked Fox as an enemy. Now you could say, "Well that's just what your group did," but I don't think that's accurate. Our group was doing what the 2E books encouraged us to do... which was to NOT be slaves to the character sheets, but rather, do what was fun and what made sense, and allow players to use Powers in creative ways. In the old days because a lot of things were NOT pre-defined in terms of costs and effects, GMs (at least in our group) would let players make things up, like the time my fire/ice hero put out a fire by putting his fire and ice hands together and making water. Since nowadays everything IS defined already, including how fire extinquishers work, there's less incentive for the GM to just allow it, and far more for him to point at the line in the book and say, "You didn't buy this so you can't do it." Again experienced "old school" GMs will still allow it, but I don't think newer ones are as likely to. And I consider that to be a shame. C

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero Agreed of course. You're right. I should have said "Rules Lawyer" not "Powergamer." It appeals more to the sort of player we used to call the "Rules Lawyer." As a GM, I really disliked having to deal with our resident Rules Lawyer. He turned every session into a tedious search through the books to prove whether he was right. Luckily, he only showed up occasionally, and the rest of the time I just used his character as an NPC and we all were able to play without even looking at the book. But 5E reads like it was written for someone like him, so I have a natural tendancy to find it distasteful. I agree, but it's a huge amount of work. It has taken me several weeks of hard reading, hard thinking, wracking my brain, and comparing paragraphs in 4E and 5E just to set up my house rules. I used to be able to set up house rules in an evening. Yeah but I can still buy back-issues, and fairly easily. I wish they would make 2E available, or heck even 4E, as a cheap PDF download. I'd buy it, I'll tell ya that. And I'd switch my whole campaign over to it in a heartbeat. C

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero I think you've hit part of the problem exactly. "What elements, if dropped ,will break the game?" As someone who played 2nd edition Champions, which was a total of 80 pages, and had half the Powers, 1/4 of the skills (if that), no Talents or Perks, and probably 1/4 of the Advantages and Limitations, I can look at all the new stuff -- all of it -- and say, "It can all be dropped without breaking the game." I can say this with 100% confidence because I played the hero system without all of it back during 2nd edition and the game was not broken. Imperfect, yes. A few balance problems, yes. Broken, no. The #1 weakness was that certain "odd" powers could not be codified/characterized (things such as what we now do with Multiform, Duplication, Summon, Damage Reduction). There were more limits on what you could precisely build... in 2nd edition, pre-Champions II/III, you could build about 85% of the heroes in comics, or that you could imagine, either precisely or nearly so, but the other 15% were just not even doable with a very big wink and a nod (e.g., Duo Damsel or the Transformers). So, having had that experience, I could easily toss every Perk and Talent in the book, most of the skills, and half the rest of it, and know that I will have a working game. Beyond that, I know what to toss. I know from experience that dropping most of the Perks and letting people just put them in their backgrounds will not break the game -- because we played with rich and poor characters, military ranked characters, ex-cops, etc, for years and years, without anyone paying one dime for any of those "perks", and there was no problem. But a new player isn't going to know that. And so, while Long et al. can say every paragraph, "The GM, at his option...(blah blah)", how is the GM to know which options to exercise and which not? There is no way to know, without some serious trial, error, and probably bad game sessions until you get your "sea legs." The examples in the margins of the book are also an issue, in my opinion. It's fine to show some complex examples, but those seem to be all they show. I suppose they figure "Well anyone can figure out the simple stuff" and in a sense that's probably true, but what they are doing is inundating the player with complicated example Power after complicated example Power. The player begins to think that this is "how you're supposed to play Hero system games," when in fact, that's just not so. You certainly CAN play Champions et al. with super complicated Powers on every line of your sheet if you want -- Powers laden with 11 advantages and 35 Limitations. But you don't have to and, what's more, starting players probably shouldn't. A starting player should really be "getting his feet wet", so to speak, playing characters that have just straight powers with maybe 1 advantage or so to make them a little more interesting, or a Limitation or two. I'm not saying that building such characters is always right, but for a starting player? You bet it is... because the system is complicated enough without building a "5D6 EB, NND, AOE, No Range, Hole in the Middle, OIF, Act 14 or less, 12 Charges, Continuing, Costs End To Use, Variable Special Effect" (or whatever). Sure, sometimes doing that perfectly captures what you wanted, and that's fine for an experienced player, but a newbie shouldn't be encouraged to build Powers like that because it makes everything too hard. After all, even in Champions 2nd edition, even without II and III, we got seriously complex after a while. Our first characters were simple, like the Crusader and Starburst examples. But our later characters became more and more complex. They became this way naturally as we got better with the system, understood it better, and became better able to have it accomplish what we wanted. But we didn't try to start that way... and the system really didn't encourage you to start that way. They started out with very simple examples and then once in a while threw in something complicated to show what is possible. It just feels like the whole perspective has changed... the goal has gone from being able to capture the essence of superheroes without getting too bogged down in the details, to capturing the details without regard to how well the essence is being represented any longer. Some of that is the consquence of making Hero Games GURPS out of it instead of keeping it focused on Superheroes. But a lot of it is just a gradual change in perspective that has been creeping into the system since 4th or possibly 3rd edition (I bought 3rd but it was such a mess our group never used it as anything but a surface to write on, so I don't remember much about it). In 2nd edition and the Adventurer's Club around that time, Hero Games writers often said things like, "Well you can do this with points, but you probably shouldn't -- just RP it" (not those words but that idea). Now the philosophy seems to be "do everything with points." You can see this again in the example of Healing with adders like... Resurrection?? Death and resurrection were considered story elements in Champions 2nd edition. I don't think it ever would've occurred to anyone back then to figure out how much "resurrection" should cost... because it would've been assumed to be left up to the GM. It's that kind of thing that makes me just sigh and hit the ol' House Rules file to disallow things... But I wish I didn't have to keep writing over and over, "We will not be using X. Just RP it." I shouldn't have to keep doing that. I never used to. C

Re: "Perk inflation" in Hero I agree with you, but I think the problem I have with 5E (and 4E to a lesser extent, which really started this trend of "codify everything" that 5E is kind of taking to the logical conclusion) is that it encourages this kind of super-nitpicky thinking on the part of especially newer players and GMs. Those of us who have been around since the early days would not ever think that way, but why would a GM who just bought the books last week and does not read these forums or know anything other than what's in the book, NOT think exactly in this super-detailed, "pay for everything" manner? As a great example, I'm starting up a new campaign with some new players, some of whom are Champions vets, and some of who have never played it before. When the new players who had played only the online game City of Heroes before (which has no such things as perks, talents, etc) started working on character sheets with nothing more than 5ER and Hero Designer, I got initial submissions from them with 30-40 points in Perks... all sorts of silly things like "military rank" and "passport" and such like. I gently said, "Guys you do not have to pay for this" and eventually made a house rule prohibiting the purchase of more than 2 perks. This was mostly for the new players to help them understand that they don't have to pay points for everything. "Just put it in your background guys!" And luckily for them they have a GM who is old school and doesn't charge them points for what amount to RP devices. But this is my point: without someone experienced in the older version of the system, it is very easy to become overwhelmed by all those details and end up building characters with powers 8 lines long when a simple "Energy Blast" would easily do just fine, and 10 perks worth 40 points when a simple sentence "My character was a police officer before the fateful accident" would suffice. The problem is that 5E provides no real guidelines to help new people figure out what really needs to be paid for, and what really belongs in the province of "roleplay it." Without those guidelines, the default for most people is "everything has to be paid for." C

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero I just bought 5E myself after years of hiatus from Champions, and one comment I made to an old friend of mine (both of us have been playing since 2nd edition in oh about 1982 or so) was, "5th edition reads like it was written by and for powergamers." Honestly, for a while I just sat and stared almost with tears in my eyes, apalled at what has been done to the game that was once my favorite of all time. If you take a look at the old example of Crusader, who was supposed to be a typical "starting superhero" the guy was 200 points -- 200! (This was in 2nd edition). And Starburst was about the same. These were the two sample characters in the books. The other thing you noticed about them (relative to the sample characters of today) was their relative simplicity. They had things like EB, Force Field, Flight, Martial Arts, and some skills. In the old days you just didn't see single powers that took up 5 lines of text like you do today. Part of that is the new "writers' guidelines" format (which I've complained about relative to Hero Designer and been told "that's how it's done now", sigh), which has apparently foregone the obvious abbreviations (EB, RKA, etc) in favor of writing things out longhand... But a lot of it has to do with the fact that everything is spelled out as an advantage or an adder now. But you're right... Ever since 4th edition (this was done a bit in 4th edition but way more now in 5th), Champions/Hero has gone from a game where you paid points for the basics and used your imagination to fill in the details, to a game where you pay for all the damn details and if you don't pay for them you can't do it. The great 4th edition example of this bloating is Perks. Other than Vehicles and Bases, which have existed since Champions II in 1983 or so, every other Perk is something that, in prior editions of Champions, was just part of your background and RPed. Being rich or poor was not based on points -- it was just an RP device. Having some highly placed contact, again, as a roleplay device. And so forth. I suppose the designers decided that these things were so good you should have to pay for them, but frankly I have always thought that the effort to codify every niggling detail of the verisimilitude into points was a mistake. This has been taken to an extreme in 5th edition. Also, they seem to have deicded to "generalize" things. So, for example, Regeneration is now a very complicated option fo Healing, rather than being a simple power. In part because of this generalization, which forces it, and in part because the philosophy has "gone powergamey" on us (on me, at least), what used to be the exception in Champions, occuring once in a few character sheets -- long spammy powers with multiple stacked advantages and limitations -- has now become the norm, and is "standard character design." I think this is a mistake from a number of angles, not the least of which is the stifling of player creativity. In 5th edition every little thing is codified on your sheet, and if the sheet doesn't say it then (barring a GM like me saying "*bleep* that, we're playing old school") you can't do it. In 2nd, 3rd, and to a lesser degree 4th edition, you just bought the BASIC stuff, and then all those details we now pay for, back then, were just "in the imagination." I for one prefer it the other way. And the only reason I don't still play freakin' second edition Champions, is because the books are long since gone. If I had them, I swear I'd scan 'em into PDFs and e-mail the PDFs to all my Champions play-by-email group and that's what we'd use. And a lot less "on the fly" creativity by the players just coming up with cool ways to use their powers. Now, of course, the GM can still allow it. And an old school GM like me does. That's why the campaign I'm about to start has no less than 22 House Rules already, some of them with sections "a" through as far as "t", most of them either disallowing the options I think are just catering to powergamers in the first place, or replacing the 5th edition stuff with more old school interpretations. (For example, I keep telling people, "Don't buy perks like Contacts or Fringe Benefits. Just put it into your background.") Of couse you can always point out that the book says about twice a page, "at the GM's discretion" or something like that, and it tells him to ignore the points in favor of RP in the GM section. However, expecting players who have been given 5 pages of detail on how to do something to just wave their hands and ignore it is expecting the unrealistic. Once you show players "this is the right way to buy all this stuff with points," the natural tendency of anyone who only knows that way of playing, is going to be to use all the details. Only someone like me, who has seen the other way of playing -- the "in the imagination" way -- is likely to wave his hand and say, "Screw the points, use your imagination." The rules SAY you can do that but at every turn they promote just the opposite way of thinking. In short, I think the way 5th edition is built is teaching people the wrong thing about how to play Champions: it's teaching them that the points are gods, and that every little detail in the universe can be codified into game terms. Now, it's always been true that every detail in the universe could be codified, but it generally wasn't ACTUALLY codified in the past... and it is, now. Yes, I've noticed it, and no, I don't think it's a good direction. I find it rather sad, actually. I used to say Champions was the greatest RPG in the world. I still think that. It was. No question. Hero 5th is merely a good game. It doesn't suck, mind... But I think in the effort to make Hero's version of GURPS (it even says in the back of 5ER that they were purposely making a generic game, rather than a superhero one), we have lost what was so special, so unique, about Champions. I remember being able to play 2nd ed Champions -- even with the optional Champions II and III rules -- without having to look at the book. I could GM whole game sessions without opening the book to consult a chart, table, or paragraph of text. That's because the rules were streamlined, and this encouraged players and GMs alike to build simple characters and then roleplay everything else. It made the game easy and flexible at the same time. Now it has neither of those traits. As I look over the characters in my PBEM campaign that players are working on, I have to hit the blasted rulebook to look up things that used to be simple, like freaking Public Identity for crying out loud (which is now a Social Limitation for some reason I will never understand). It never used to be this hard. It was never this spelled out. I'm sure some people like that it's all super-spelled out, but I don't. I preferred it back before it was "Hero System: The Generically Complex Roleplaying Game..." back when it was "Champions: the Superhero Roleplaying Game." And I miss it. C

Re: You cannot defeat me! Heheh. Yeah, it was cool. The player thought of it. I had expected them to just escape, since Mechie was so powerful, and figured they'd fight him again another day. But they ended up wiping his memory core (and, of course, ultimately paving the way for Mechanon VIII, who showed up months later, when the heroes were far more powerful, heheh). Mechanon was one of the more popular villains we had. Several GMs used him. When he showed up, often someone in the group would shout, "Oh yay! Mechanon!" Mechie also had a rep for being kind of "smart but stupid." His plans usually were great but had some obvious achilles heel -- obvious to a human but not to a computer. C

Re: You cannot defeat me!

Re: Mental illusion Remember to apply modifiers for the appropriateness of the context. Someone who is swimming underwater and hit with the mental illusion that he is on fire is much less likely to believe it than someone who is standing in a forest during a drought with lots of dry leaves and tinder around him. C

Re: Having players help w/ the logistics (esp. SPD chart)