Toxxus

I find this is true too. Combat luck provides a solid amount of hardened defenses with none of the pain of encumbrance (-dex rolls, -dcv, - movement) and it is cheap as dirt. Part of the reason I max out defense stacking to a single point is to stop players from taking 2 ranks of Combat Luck and then putting on plate armor and being unkillable gods.

We lost so many characters in FH 4th edition. All it required was a crit to the eyes or vitals and someone would be down, dying or already dead. So far I've managed to not kill any of my D&D converts (the best place to harvest new players for FH), but it's only a matter of time before the dice gods require blood.

That's not anywhere in the source material that I can find, but I'm thinking I will allow it going forward.

The show Knight Fight - while comically garbage and sublimely awesome at the same time - displays the absolute absurdity of group fighting without resistant defenses. You might dodge, parry and block a dozen blows, but you're going to get hit and when you do it is going to be immediately lethal. Every week they'll have a guy in plate armor take a shot to the body or back that is so brutal that even with the plate armor on he's dropped to his knees hoping he'll regain feeling in his legs. When they have the guys fighting in chain mail (5-6 def) they will use spinal plate armor and limit the size of weapons allowed to prevent broken bones. You want to fight in pajamas? Want to know why that wasn't historically a thing? Because death.

That seems like a way to go bat !@#$ crazy almost immediately. Over 150,000 people die each day. Now add in all the people in non-lethal danger and that sense would be going off every single phase until the Hero lost his mind or it went numb.

In this case the boss monster in question had an EGO of 20+ and 10pts of Mental Defense to ward off other mental powers. All of which does nothing to stop it from being paralyzed and stabbed in the eye balls repeatedly before it gets a turn.

I might need to re-read the casual breakout timing. I was under the impression that even a casual breakout roll has to occur on the creatures turn. If they can try immediately or, as you suggested, defensively abort their next turn to break out then that's something that might work.

Let me set the stage a little bit. I've co-opted two tables of D&D players to play Fantasy Hero. They are loving the flexibility and the increased options of HERO combat and they are simply blown away by how you can build almost any character concept you can come up with. Character building has largely been them giving me the ideas they want and me building the initial character with them customizing skills and making tweaks as we progress. One player had a level 11 bard and is a long time D&D player. So what I did was build the character as close to what he had as I could get including a variation of the spell slot system. One of those spells.... Hold Person.... which I forgot to restrict to humanoids when I built it... so it is effectively Hold Monster. It is 2d6 mental paralysis and fits inside the 50pt active point cap we currently have. I am fine with how effective it is against most fights which involve 4-12 enemies where having one or two of them locked down isn't a major swing. But being able to paralyze the Lightning Dragon and trivialize and encounter that was otherwise deadly to them caught me off guard. The creature has tons of resistant defense, mental defense, power defense, etc. It's designed to be tough. But the mechanics of entangle are easily abused due to timing. I actually like the Legendary Resistance mechanic because it means you have to wear the creature down with "failed saving throws" before you disable it. This, imo, isn't terribly different from having to wear it down by doing body/stun damage. Stopping the creature with several good hits - fine. Stopping the creature with a single overpowering hit - not cinematic nor dramatic. The player's ability is good and I want it to contribute to the team's success. Not either guarantee a win nor be completely ineffective. My current thought is to model the Legendary Resistance as something along the lines of a 5d6 mental blast triggered by being mentally entangled and a slightly higher blast triggered by being physically entangled with 3 charges.

The issue really comes down to timing. Being able to break out of the entangle isn't the issue since it will be re-applied the next round - or at least is likely to be. The boss being DCV 0 while most of the characters take a phase to bash it senseless isn't alleviated by the boss breaking loose and then being paralyzed again for a 2nd phase of bashing. In heroic settings, even big bad boss types can be quickly subdued by a series of eyeball strikes while they are DCV 0. x5 stun multipliers really hurt. In D&D 5e they gave their big boss types Legendary Resistance typically usable 3x per day to automatically succeed on a saving throw so they wouldn't be instantly destroyed by a save-or-suck spell. I may have to do something similar along the lines of a triggered mental blast of 5d6 when paralyzed.

This kind of thing happens in real life as well. Sometimes you get very lucky or make a silly mistake. Ex: In ancient times when I was sparring with my TKD Instructor (an undefeated LHW kickboxer to boot) I landed the slowest, clumsiest blue-belt hook kick on him. It was a one-in-a-million shot. My kick was so slow that he lifted his hand up to block and then started the counter-attack before my kick actually hit his arm. We all had a good laugh after that. I don't think I landed another shot until I was creeping up on black belt.

I almost always have hit locations in play so 1x stun multiplier for location or 3 stun for generics (roughly mid point between killing x2 and normal x3.5).

Turns out Mental Defense offers no protection at all against Mental Paralysis attacks. "Mental Defense neither adds to the character’s EGO for purposes of breaking out of, nor offers any other protection against, Mental Paralysis." I feel I'm going to have to house rule this now or it will become the only move that gets used against any opponent that is even moderately threatening.

I don't find this tactic creative as it will consist of spam mental paralysis until we automatically win all single-target super-boss fights. One thing I've been pleasantly surprised with is that most of the D&D spells that I've converted that seem to be broken on their face (hypnotic pattern, banish, up-cast hold person on 5 people at once) are generally very expensive in HERO. The active point system does a pretty good job in most scenarios for evaluating relative effectiveness. Even standard entangle isn't bad since the first attack on you shatters it. But Entangles transparent to damage are just nasty when they drop an enemy to 0 DCV and allow for a barrage of crits and eye-ball shots. Time to review that mental defense bit. The boss in question had 10 points of it and I probably short-changed him the opportunity to casually snap free.

This rant has inspired me to alter Combat Luck to not work against the first point of BODY damage like a build option that was posted earlier. I like the idea that it is more rolling with the punch or "almost" dodging the attack better than outright immunity.

It's still stupidly overpowered unless you load up your bosses with massive EGOs or some other way to be immune to the effect. My Wednesday night group landed one on a lightning dragon and before he got his turn to even break out the 5 remaining heroes all landed massive shots (OCV 7-8 vs. DCV 0 = reliable eyeball shots and crits). I'll have to re-read it, but if Mental Defense doesn't currently block some of the entangle I'm going to houserule that it does. Otherwise this move will become THE move to deal with boss encounters.

Even City of Heroes realize this after a couple of years. I ran an Ice Tank which was based on lowering the accuracy of nearby attackers and raising it's own DEF. However, it had no resistant defenses and a bad hiccup in the RNG would result in an instantly dead "tank". Invulnerability tanks, on the other hand, were able to raises resistant defenses so high that getting hit by everything was meaningless. In the latter half of the game's life they adjusted both so that Ice Tanks got some moderate resistance to damage so they wouldn't be insta-killed by a couple bad rolls and Invulnerability tanks had their resistant defense lowered a little, but got a bonus to their ability to avoid attacks. Long-winded version of - "Couldn't agree more!".

Almost posted to this effect earlier. They cover it in the books as well. Without the distraction of Aragorn's army at the gates there would be no chance for the hobbits nor the giant eagles to get into play without being spotted and eliminated.

It's working for me now! The world is once again safe.... for now....

Since bone materials are handy then can create conventional-ish weapons with long bones/tusks to serve as handles and shafts with obsidian blades or teeth for inflicting damage. Possibly throw in some oversized arthropods to allow for chitinous armor/shields/bits to which you can attach obsidian.

I'm still seeing Unsupported file type: text/xml error after updating the app just now on my Android / Samsung Galaxy Note 8.

This is not the case. There can be many situations in which your normal senses are simply incapable of detecting the danger you're in. What if you're walking down the sidewalk and there is a bomb that was build into the pavement? You can't see it or feel it with conventional senses, but danger sense might save you. What if an enemy sniper is a mile away targeting your hero with the new 1.5 caliber Super Sniper 5000? You can't see the sniper with such massive range penalties, but your danger sense should tip you off at the last instant as the bullet races towards you. You're partially correct in that a lot of conventional dangers can be perceived with normal senses as well as Danger Sense. But there could be many dangers that are simply impossible to detect without some sort of super-sense.

Are the new 12 point levels applicable to all combat and all skills?

Making levels too restrictive will just send the players scrambling for higher base OCV/DCV. 10pt All Combat levels are fairly gross as you're paying double the cost of a permanent CV for the flexibility to move it around. Do you want a +1 OCV or +1 DCV or would you rather have a permanent +1 to both? The cost structure doesn't work unless your campaign has capped OCV/DCV.

We have 1 open slot at our Wednesday night game. Runs 7:00 PM to 10:30 PM CST at Chronicles Games & Comics in Lewisville in the DFW area.

I feel like the +2 PD/ED for double-the-weight charts give us a good rule of thumb for stacking defenses. Essentially the lesser defense has to be no more than 2 pts below the higher defense or it doesn't effectively add anything. I do allow players to stack things like a chain shirt (5 PD/ED) with a steel breastplate (6 PD/ED) and for the low-low cost of the weight of both armors enjoy a total of 7 PD/ED in the double-covered areas. By limiting the stacking to +1 pt it keeps things from getting out of control. Plate Armor + 2 levels combat luck = 14 rPD/14 rED? No thanks!