Toxxus

You are seven years older than Jesus. Deal with it!

This is only true if it fits the narrative. Christians in Nigeria are getting annihilated by Muslim extremists, but that's not something the mainstream news in America wants to cover. Both are horrifying atrocities, but only one of them is getting coverage.

I would categorize it as pandering to the audience as the movie was hyped in some venues as a big girl-power, feminist installment. I'll admit I was watching for it some based on Brie's pre-release statements along the lines of, "I don’t need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle in Time,” Larson said. “It wasn’t made for him!" So knowing in advance that she has racist, sexist, gerontophobic world views had me a bit apprehensive going in. That being said, apparently the Wrinkle in Time book was OK for 40-year-old white dudes because I liked it just fine.

Strange, her equally successful pilot buddy was acting circles around her with her ability to convey a range of powerful emotions. She shoots the man's face on the True Lies poster and leaves Jamie Curtis unscathed. The Kree scanning device intones, "Human Male. Threat level low to none.". A guy is rude to her so she steals his motorcycle. There were others, but I've already forgotten them. It was beyond stupid. He's been nothing but lovey dovey to the Flerkin up to this point and the space-cat clearly enjoys his attention; fights on his behalf; recognizes friends from foes; and then out of nowhere blinds him. Later, they're inexplicably on good terms again. Sorry, but after something takes your eye you don't continue to let it roam your office in case it wants to be petted and/or take your last eyeball. Dumb as !@#$. Easily the worst part of the movie.

I'm trying to work in a variation of Lesser Restoration for one of my converted D&D tables. The D&D version of the spell removes the poisoned, diseased, blinded and paralyzed conditions. I thought about doing a transform, but the active point cost of reliably landing a Major Transform on 15-20 BOD allies would be very high. Either that or they have to spam it a few times for it to work. Alternately, I considered using a variation of Life Support: Usable by Others vs. Poison & Disease that lasts for a few hours (normally long enough to outlast a poison and maybe a GM handwave on the disease). I'm hoping you have some suggestions.

Brie felt robotically stiff in most of her acting scenes. There's a bit early on where she's told to control her emotions and my first thought was, "What emotions?". They could have used a billboard of her with some lip animating software for some of the scenes. Just. Awful. That and a couple of lame man-bashing bits that seemed like they were thrown for a certain, tiny segment of the audience did nothing to enhance it. The way Fury lost his eye was beyond stupid. All that being said I thought it was moderately entertaining. Good, but not Marvel Movie good. My wife and daughter liked it more than I did. Though, at this point, even my daughter is picking up on the Mary Sue schtick in movies. "She's going to win because she's a girl. Girls are good and boys are bad. Girls beat boys at everything! <poke, poke, poke>".

This is a good point though I sometimes use the power of the GM screen to make a badly missed roll an "opposed" roll and exclaim that I have rolled even worse and then give the players just enough of a hint to continue. Alternately, I will move a clue to another location and use passive scores such as: Witcher-guy, you notice with your (PER 15-) enhanced senses that there is the smell of copper and jasmine very faintly emanating from behind the vanity... Just insert whichever high skill rank a relevant character has and give them a freebie while making their investment in the aforementioned skill part of what makes them critical to the team's success.

Discovering this thread was like time travel back through the 2016 election cycle. So much drama and despair and ridiculous statements from both sides of the aisle. I think one of the pinnacle moments was some guy wearing a "Punch a Nazi" t-shirt to my home D&D game. My wife, who is Mexican, voted for Trump (I didn't) and suddenly white-hipster-man came face to face with reality. You can't call everyone who disagrees with you (either direction) some variation of evil without considering their personal motivations for making their decisions. Hers was that her family immigrated legally and it was BS that millions of people were coming in illegally and ruining it for everyone who played by the rules. She also supports the wall - big time. Reminder - she's Mexican. I, like many, felt that I couldn't in good conscience vote for Hillary or Trump and gave my vote to the Libertarians. Both of them had major problems as candidates for me and I just couldn't do it. I might as well have voted for Giant Meteor. This was just the mental reset I needed before I start this next bit of code.

I feel like I owe them something more nuanced than that as I've been GM'ing Hero since the 80s. I'll have something for a group test-drive by Wednesday night. I'm thinking either MD adds to damage dice to break free combined with allowing a defensive abort to break out or some variation of a persistent damage shield power that attacks the paralysis as soon as contact is made. My main goal is to leave the ability in play - it's a staple of the genre and fine in most encounters - but moderate (not eliminate) it's usefulness in the epic finale fights. Even in the big fights if it is team vs. team then I can have a mage type working to free someone who is paralyzed. It is only the iconic team vs. dragon (or other epic monster) fights where it is currently a huge problem.

Great ideas! Thanks. I want to come up with a mechanic that works for the players as well as the monsters. It's important to have the mechanics work consistently and fairly for both groups.

If I could put negative OCV/DCV/Run Speed on equipment items HD would handle all of my current needs. I'm struggling to get items with Encumbrance or negative stats on my players character sheets.

The obvious power of the Centaur body type comes into play when an enemy grabs his arms and another grabs his front legs. On his next phase he kicks the crapola out of someone behind him. Beware his (almost never useful) power!

Would I be able to do this to add say.. DCV on Armor in the equipment section and put a custom modifier called "Encumbrance" on it to reflect the -DCV it causes?

Don't be a slave to the rules ever. This is great advice, given by Brian, and should be something to keep in mind no matter how many years you play any RPG.

It's part of the advice on 6E2 Page 283 called Only Count Certain Advantages and is specifically geared towards active point caps only applying to the advantages that are considered to increase the raw power of abilities and references 6E2 Page 98.

I've found the best way to get a Fantasy Hero table going (I have 2 weekly now) is to DM D&D 5th Edition (so popular right now) for an extended period and then offer your D&D players the chance to try out a new system. Both of my tables flipped on the 1st offer we're a couple months in now and the primary take aways are: 1- HERO is ultra-flexible and you can make any character you dream up. 2- HERO is more number crunchy and you'll need the DM's help more often. 3- HERO combat is more tactical and more fun than D&D combat If you develop a good rapport with your players they'll trust you enough to follow you into a new gaming system. All that being said we're using Pathfinder material because the players have explored almost all of the D&D material and the pathfinder modules are GOOD. I think the real challenge for getting back into the market in a meaningful way is the lack of adventure combat and the rules bloat. Condense the rule set back down to something that players can absorb and provided content they can play. A lot of us veteran GMs from the 80s/90s don't have the time for fully home brewed worlds and adventures.

We run at Chronicles at Music City Mall (formerly Vista Ridge Mall) in Lewisville. Game runs 7:00 pm to 10:30 pm. We're currently at 250 character points.

I saw one balancing tip where AP caps are only considered against base cost + advantages that increase damage output (Armor Piercing, Area of Effect, Autofire, etc.) and not to advantages that usually have a much lesser effect on combat (reduced END, Indirect, etc.). But my new HERO players are math tilted as it is so I keep it simple with a hard AP cap.

I haven't posted my variant, but it runs along the same lines. Offense, Defense, Mobility and Variability (number of different types of attacks) all add to an effective combat score which is capped. I move the cap a bit each time we cross a certain threshold of character points and let the players decide where they will advance. Once a character is at the campaign cap they have to either hoard points or expand in non-combat aspects. This has pleasantly lead to most characters taking on a role or two and expanding into areas they wouldn't if they were allowed to keep advancing their combat abilities.

I've found that it helps, but as some others have pointed out - when you set the caps that becomes the standard value for the envelope pushers. What really helped was building out a variant of the Combat Effectiveness Calculator from Adventurer's Club #3. With a total max value for offense, defense, crowd control and movement I was able to force the players to choose from aspects they wanted to excel in since the point cap wouldn't allow them to excel at everything.

I don't even allow 2pt. levels in my campaign and require a pyramid scheme of sorts to moderate the costs. I basically max players out at two levels at each tier (2x 3pt, 2x 5pt, 2x 8pt, etc.) so that they can't cheese out and take +8 OCV with their go-to attack for the same cost as +2 with all HTH combat. There are many things I prefer with HERO (hell, I converted all of my D&D tables to HERO tables), but for some players the rigid class structure prevented them from going too crazy. It oddly feels like the difference between not stealing the money because it's in a locked box vs. not stealing the money because it's the wrong thing to do.

This is a really important part of DM'ing and why the Rule of Cool often trumps RAW. I completely agree. The whole point of the rules is to facilitate an enjoyable RPG experience for everyone at the table (GM included). Nit-picking rules minutia doesn't add to the fun for anyone.

You can work around this - to a degree - by making sure there are scenarios where the battle mage needs the help of the party to function. This is also why classic computer RPGs had roles like tank, dps, healer, crowd control. Each person just has to be best at their schtick and everyone is happy. During the last Saturday game I ran my wife's character (classic nuke-happy fire sorceress and the party's healer - last air bender type with healing water magic) were both hit by a 3d6 Entangle and it took them out of 75% of the fight. Both had Gestures as limitations and low strength scores. They had to sit there doing nothing while the tank (who got KO'd) and the DPS witcher sword guy fought there way back to them and hacked them free from the vines. A later scenario involved fighting an archer on a desert drake and suddenly the melee guys who were so instrumental in the previous fight became painfully aware of their inability to attack at range while the air bender and fire sorceress rained armor-piercing death on the archer/drake duo at a range of 60m. Make sure the healer gets to heal, the nuker gets to nuke and the roguishly handsome bard type gets to charm and deceive.

This is why was trying so hard to hunt down a copy of Adenturer's Club #3. The combat rating system breaks down character power levels in 3 simple steps: An offensive rating that adds OCV, DCV, DC and Number of Attacks (to account for situational flexibility). A Defensive rating that adds PD, rPD, ED, rED, Misc defenses (flash, power, etc.), total STUN and points in Invisibility / Deflection A Mobility rating that adds maximum half-phase movement (how far you can move & still attack), Speed and oddly Acrobatics. It's a good starting place for rough estimates.

Couldn't agree more. Had a player back in the day that had Usable Against Others - Flight. Make an attack roll and then move enemy to where you want and they don't get a breakout roll like they would against telekinesis. We quickly decided that non-combat abilities with Usable Against Others (old version of Usable as Attack) just broke the game in ways that were not fun for anyone and banned them. I generally feel that way about game mechanics that do not have reasonable counter-play. Much like D&D 5th Ed Force Cage. You're in a magic-proof box that cannot be dispelled and lasts for an hour and allows for no saving throw to avoid.