Toxxus

The old classic methods of simulating snake venom were to attach an NND killing attack that did body damage over time but required the initial bite to do body damage. I never liked this approach very much as it got VERY crunchy and lead to some incredibly high active point costs. The way I've always modeled the poison on snakes is just +Xd6 HKA that is limited by delayed onset, doesn't work vs. life support - poison immunity/resistance, and requires the initial attack to do damage. Keeps it simpler and you don't need NND since the defenses were already breached by the initial bite or there wouldn't be poison to worry about in the first place.

5th edition is simplified quite a bit, but overall it's a considerable net positive. The number of casual players has absolutely exploded over the last couple years. Anyway, keep us posted. I'd love to see what you came up with.

Thanks, Duke! I've been winging it from what I can barely remember from that article 30 years ago. Is there a place where we can view what you've already completed?

Paying double past a certain threshold discourages (but does not eliminate) certain choices. I personally like it as having stats in the super-human range can often have pretty large in-game implications. In 5e and earlier a DEX of 23+ made you a combat god with near certainty that you would go first and have a higher base OCV/DCV than anyone you encountered. Similarly a STR of 25+ meant you were doing more damage than anyone else with your muscle-powered weapons while shredding most entangles with ease while your compatriots were stuck. I'm really enjoying the various viewpoints on this discussion. Several good ideas floating around.

The Google has lead me to the old Adventurer's Club article I was after. It is in the ancient tome known as Adventurer's Club #3 - Champions Plus: Character Rating System. Duke, is this one of the one's you've been able to scan?

I like 6e, but there are a few changes that I felt were not conducive to Fantasy Hero play. 1- Encumbrance being based on strength means you can run around in full plate with effectively zero penalty. Just watch an episode of Knight Fight to see what a full suit of armor does to DCV and END costs. They do 90s rounds and the knights are dripping sweat and gasping for air after the 1st round. 2- Fourth Edition had the right idea with weapon costs. STR min has to be based on weapon effectiveness or any sensible player will cherry pick the best item. 6e dropped the +1 to hit inherent in almost all swords and retained it only for great swords. Why would anyone use a STR min 12 sword instead of a str min 10 mace when they do exactly the same damage? 3- Barrier being a power you can abort to makes anyone with that spell/power nigh invulnerable. Compounding that with the created barriers being persistent for no extra cost means you can build your own castle in a couple hours. I've had to GM alter it to cost end to maintain and be limited to INT/5 instances with BODY max = to 1/2 highest of PD/ED to keep it halfway civilized. There are things I like a lot about 6e, but the rule books are MASSIVE. Normal players are not going to choke through those things to learn how to play.

I feel like abandoning traditional killing damage attacks is a bad idea. The variability on smaller dice pools is a big part of what makes killing attacks scary. The odds of larger dice pools substantially drifting up or down in BODY count is very low. 6d6 very consistently does between 4-8 body. 12d6 even more consistently is in the 10-14 range. A 2d6K or 4d6K can with much greater probability generate dangerously high or harmlessly low numbers. I know that the difference between normal and killing damage is a point of confusion for new players, but it's not a big one. If that one thing is what chases them off of HERO system and not the umpteen combat maneuvers and dozens of situational OCV/DCV modifiers or sectional armor or.... It goes on. The system offers incredible flexibility at the cost of crunch.

Sorry if I missed it, but is there a place where we can see / buy your completed list of converted spells? Will you be giving it a stab for D&D 5th Edition?

On a related note - Is there any way to get the ancient Adventurer's Club magazine that had the Combat Effectiveness Calculator in it? I want to see what the original looked like compared to the one I invented from decades old memory.

Adventurer's Club! Ah, I miss those. I added several items to the list beyond the RAW stats to get a more overall combat effectiveness. If you have hard CCs (Entangle, Mind Control, Mental Illusions) that raises your value a few points. If you have soft CCs (flash, darkness, invisibility) that raises your combat value a few points. There are several items on the list, but it allows the CC heavy characters to be good in combat - but not as good as the ones without those modifiers. It's a balancing act and so far it's resulted in several very unique play styles.

Thanks for the book reference - I'll go check that one out. Not sure I'd let someone execute a second attack without penalty just because they have two one-handed weapons drawn. That seems to contradict Two Weapon Fighting. I'll read it again to be sure I'm not missing something.

I've seen a similar level of output on a show that was like Deadliest Warrior where they were pitting cowboys vs. mafia. The cowboy rifleman fatally wounded 5 targets with partial cover in 4 seconds flat. On a per second basis he out damaged the hand grenade and finished the contest with a better kill rate from a safer distance. A skilled rifleman is a very, very scary thing. In HERO terms you have to consider that nobody is wearing armor and the military grade weapon is probably doing 2d6K (or more) per shot. That's 7 body (aka impaired or dying) with each hit. If God is using the realistic killing damage rules then it's 14 body (near instant death) per hit.

I'm currently running a Fantasy Hero campaign and I wanted the weapon choices to have an impact on fighting style for the characters. I thought Pillars of Eternity did a fantastic job with this and wanted something similarly cool for my HERO game. So far I have: 1- Two-Handed weapon wielders can Multiple Attack two enemies in reach in a big sweeping attack, but not the same opponent multiple times due to their size and weight. 2- Dual Wielders can Multiple Attack the same enemy twice, but not hit separate opponents. I'm not completely happy with the way this one feels. 3- One-Handed weapon wielders that leave one hand empty can do weapon damage after a one-handed Grab maneuver instead of squeezing or throwing. A dirty fighting favorite - the Grab and Stab. 4-- Weapon and Shield fighters can Multiple Attack alternating weapon and shield bash. Would appreciate any ideas to make these 4 modes feel more specialized.

I'd say you're looking at a few things. 1- Drawing both weapons as a zero phase action would require a Fast Draw skill check with a minus 1 on the roll (the -1 is for drawing 2 weapons instead of 1). 2- Attacking twice with each weapon is just taking the Multiple Attack action with 4 attacks. This puts each of the 4 attacks at a -6 OCV and a single miss ends the attack series. 3- You will most likely want to pick up the Two-Weapon Fighting skill to reduce the attack penalty a bit (1st additional attack does not impose an OCV penalty) so this would get you to -4 OCV on each attack. 4- Rapid Attack might be another good skill to pick up so that your gunslinger can move around a bit before the bullet storm.

That's a pretty good method, Hugh, and close to what I'm using in my current Fantasy Hero setup. I have a variation of NCM going where players can have all primary stats up to 15 and either two in the 16-20 range or one in the 21-23 range. I'll slightly move the maximums as they progress in power. The whole group (minus me) is from D&D 5e and they're used to having hard constraints everywhere. I didn't want to have a bunch of STR 40 fighters with 10 levels in swords so I had to put hard limits in place as well as using the NCM double-cost after 20. I also resurrected a Combat Effectiveness calculator that I vaguely remember from one of the small champions mags. Can't remember the exact name of the publication but it was 1/2 size and between a comic book and normal book in thickness. Basically it's a quick spreadsheet of everything that is particularly useful in combat (OCV, DCV, max damage class, max PD/ED, max resistant defense, SPD, Levels, etc.) and they are given a hard cap total at each stage of the story. So far it's working pretty well.

I'm so partial to rolling that I bought Hexman dice for the entire table so they could get used to counting body and stun on normal attacks with a little assistance. It helps my wife out a lot since her RL character put all her points into social skills and took susceptibility 3d6 (does Body!) to math.

Very interesting thread. Perhaps one way to avoid the NCM limitations and potentially wasted points in racial packages would be to purchase the higher stats as some sort of Aid. Ex: Dexterity of the Elves - Aid DEX 2d6 (fixed at 6pts - 3 DEX), 0 end, persistent, always on. Less sure how I'd write-up the negative modifiers, but possibly a persistent suppress/drain of a fixed amount that you received points back for having.

I was hoping there'd be something already done. The Tasha's 6e HTML is pretty good, but I didn't spot anything to track encumbrance and sectional armor defenses. Not even sure how sectional armor would be handled in HD6 without some sort of mod to add a new tab. I've been putting the covered locations in the equipment descriptions, but that's a long ways from what I was shooting for. My current table are all D&D 5e'ers and I've been trying to ease their transition into the Heroverse. Even got them all Hexman dice.

Ultimately, our group settled on a variation Analyze for this purpose. Analyze Motive (a bit of a pathfinder rip of sense motive). I'll allow players to use persuasion as well, but unskilled INT rolls would be at a -3 as I want points spent on skills to be of substantial value.

If you like that campaign style you will find the Pathfinder adventure path War for the Crown to be particularly interesting. It thoroughly mixes in royal balls, senatorial intrigue, exploration and a modest chunk of combat. It is a very nice change of pace from dungeon crawl heavy runs like Dungeon of the Mad Mage.

At first I thought it was a typo and he meant 60 STR, but then that didn't work out either. Nor did 30 DEX using NCM. The point is still reasonably made though. If a guy spends 50 points on X instead of 50 points on Y - Does it really break game balance? My general thought - Yes. Some stat ranges - depending on the campaign - can absolutely obliterate any sense of balance at the gaming table. Keeping a group of players happy with game balance requires that both the reality of the balance and the perception of the balance be in a good place. Each Hero must feel like their particular strengths and skills are just as important to the groups success as those of the other players. If StatMan does double the damage of his counter-parts while being nigh invulnerable and faster to boot then it will be difficult to keep SkillMonkey and MagicMarven happy unless the campaign throws obstacles that favor their abilities over the raw combat power of StatMan fairly often. In my Fantasy Hero campaign I set hard caps on primary stats at 15 and - at their current power levels - my players can have two stats in the 16-20 range or one stat in the 21-23 range. As the campaign progresses I'll raise the caps until it's just the standard NCM. So far so good. Everyone has found their niche. We have crowd control elemental martial arts guy, spirit shaman brick guy, melt-your-face-magic-lady (my wife) and a guy playing a recreation of the Witcher.

Fourth edition for me as I primarily played Fantasy Hero and 4th edition Fantasy Hero was SO good. In fact for my current 6e Fantasy Hero game I have retained the weapon, armor and encumbrance charts from 4e as I feel they did a much better job of balancing the effectiveness of gear.

How did you come up with your 'handle' (forum name)? Around 1995 I made a Shadow Knight in Everquest roughly themed after the god of disease (Bertoxxulus) so I shortened it to Toxxus. What was the first tabletop RPG you played? D&D when it still came in pastel colored cardboard boxes (Basic and Expert) What was the first tabletop RPG you GMed? D&D basic followed shortly by Boot Hill What are you currently playing/GMing? I'm playing Fantasy Hero using Pathfinder adventure paths for content. My Saturday group (mostly D&D 5e'ers) is enjoying the new system though I admit I'm enjoying it more as it comes with 30 years of nostalgia for me. When did you start to play Hero? Right around 1980 when I picked up a softcover edition that came in a cardboard box (they all did back then). Played Fantasy Hero extensively in high school and college.

I'll give the exact value thing a shot and let you know how it goes. Do you know of any Fantasy Hero-centric export formats that include encumbrance / total weight carried?

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I can't see a spot on the exported character sheet (default one) for total KG of carrier gear. This is pretty important for a FH campaign where encumbrance substantially effects DCV, Movement and END sue. Also, STR min limitation on weapons (HKAs) leads to pretty inconsistent output. Is that because they're defined as ranges or... ? I'll finish with - I love HD and it has made creating a host of characters, campaign rules and items very easy.