PhilFleischmann

Yes! What Gary said! This issue came up a long time ago on the old, old boards. I go with a general guideline of half the value of what the limitation would be on the power itself, if it's only on changing slots. And it's very important that this limitation be placed only on the slot costs themselves. Here's a more extreme example: Player A: 12d6 EB gun - 60 pts. Player B: 60 pt MP gun "Stun" 12d6 EB - 6 pts. "Kill" 4d6 RKA - 6 pts. Suppose the switching slot limitation is so severe that it's a -1 lim. Do you really want to give player B his gun for only 36 points? There's nothing that says the gun can't be left on a particular setting. It could be just a switch. If it's left in one setting, it stays in that setting until you change it. (otherwise, yes, it would be worth a limitation if you can't use it at all for the first X amount of time of a combat.) BTW, there are other limitations besides extra time that could be applied to switching slots.

Don't know for sure, just speculating on what has been said so far: If you're underwater, IR or Thermal vision (which I thought were kind of similar if not the same) would not let you see fish, because they're the same temperature (or very nearly so) as the surrounding water. But it would let you see dolphins and other marine mammals, because they're warm-blooded. Is this right? I also have always found the "+4 Nightvision allows you to see in total darkness" to be suspect. A dark night with very little light I might buy, but total darkness seems like far more than a -4 penalty.

This is what I'm saying. Giving a character 50 more real points worth of power (spells, abilities, whatever) for only 25 real cost raises a big red flag, IMHO. You can do it, but you have to make sure that non-mages get some equitable consideration. Unless you want all the players to be mages, which is another possible way to go. It seems to me that if real points are no longer real points, then why do all this math?

IMHO, the restriction that an arrow requires a bow to fire it is part of the "Real Weapon" limitation. I think the potions were written that way so that GMs could decide for themselves how rare/expensive/difficult to obtain the ingredients are. Just add on the appropriate lims.

Let me see if I understand this correctly: My wizard spends 58 real points on his spell pool and gets 135 real points worth of spells? That I can change with study time? Sign me up! Some players are naturally born munchkins, but some GM's provide a breeding ground for them.

I realize as I read these posts that you can't really talk about VPPs as if they were one thing. A "cosmic" VPP is totally different in terms of the way it works, balance, and impact on the game, than one that can only be changed after hours of spellbook study/meditation/prayer/work in the alchemy lab. Likewise a mimic pool is a totally different animal than a single "flexible spell" whose many (or few) applications are best simulated by a VPP. These should almost be treated like different framworks when deciding whether they should be allowed in any particular game or genre. There is also the danger of mistaking problems with the content of a power framework (the actual powers which may be unbalanced or abusive) as opposed to the framwork itself.

A slight change of subject: I have a character with flight. The SFX was telekinetically pushing off of a surface. I wanted a limitation "Only within 3" of a Surface." What would the value of this limitation be? If only on a surface is -1/4, then this one should be less, because it is less limiting. But it is more significantly limiting than a -0. I someone or something 4" off the ground or more is out of my reach. I can't intercept airplanes, fly up to the cloud city, or fly from the roof of one building to the roof of another if their more than 6" apart (three problems that I've encountered in actual play). If "only on a surface" a bigger advantage, like -1/2, it starts to cost less than running, while being significantly more useful. Sometimes I think the cost structure of movement powers needs adjustment, the way some have claimed the cost of STR needs adjustment. *Please! I don't want to start the whole cost of STR argument here!* On solution I thought of is to allow finer-grained limitation (and advantage) values. "Only within 3" of a Surface" could be a -1/10 limitation, for example.

Seven gods suggests to me the seven planets of historical astrology. Here are the seven planet-related cards from Everway, a rather wierd RPG, which I own but have never played (WOTC was selling it for $5 at the time! It's definitely worth that just as a source of different ideas.): Priestess: Moon, Understanding Mysteries Hermit: Mercury, Wisdom, Isolation Peasant: Venus, Simple Strength Fool: Sun, Freedom Smith: Mars, Productivity King: Jupiter, Authority Soldier: Saturn, Duty I find the same old earth-air-fire-water gods to be somewhat trite and overdone. Of course there can always be exceptions, new interpretations, etc.

I played in a FH campaign with no humans. The GM designed ten races of "animal-men" - erect-walking people with various animal-like characteristics. Let's see if I can remember them Baboon-men and Vulture-men - "cleric" types (I was a baboon-man) Elephant-men - wizards Zebra-men - Illusionists Hyena-men - theives Lion-men and Rhino-men - the fighter types Ostrich-men - aristocratic Scorpion-men - the bad guys Ant-men - minions of the scorpions There were rivalries and wars between the various races. The ostriches had formerly enslaved the rhinos. The zebras, being vegitarians, hate the lions. The elephants pretty much considered themselves superior to everyone. The hyenas were annoying. The baboons and vultures had diametrically opposed religious beliefs. Our ultimate goal was to reunite everyone in peace. It was a very cool campaign.

In that case, you go ahead and make up those details - because you're actually using them! That's what I'm saying create details as they become important. Don't bother creating a town and this skills that its guardsmen have if you aren't going to create that character. Yes, eventually you may start to get a seemingly haphazard collection of details with no overall "theme," but 1) what's wrong with that? After all, that's the way the real world is. Medieval Europe did not design itself to be consistant and compatible with Feudal Japan. The Portugeuse did not consult the Poles when establishing their society. 2) at that point, if you want you can start to add details that do bring the world together. Figure out how the different cities/nations/peoples get along with each other, etc. And yes, I have created some unnecessary detail in my campaign world, because I enjoyed it, and to help me as the GM, get a feel of "the big picture" of the world (#2 above). My world has two overall ideas that govern it: 1) Each village or city has its own native style of magic that it teaches to its inhabitants. The village of Pepperrose uses herbalism. The city of Phaneinopolis uses magic that deals with light. The city of Kesseltra was originally three separate villages, all with similar styles of magic dealing with transformations. Magicians on the north side learn to assume the forms of various animals, those on the west side transmute materials, and the ones on the south side transform whole objects or people into other objects. 2) Things get weirder and more exotic the farther you go from the central area of the campaign. Things are fairly normal in Virbenland and Neron, the two main "good guy" kingdoms of the world, and in Wizard's Wound, the desert that separates them. Once you enter Grominia, the land of the gnomes to the south, or cross the Snake Peaks, the home of dwarves to the east, or sail west to the Ylanian Ocean, or explore the Northern Colonies, you'll find strange monsters, unusual cultures and magic that seems most alien. The main issue I have with designing a magic system is its effect on the quasi-historical elements of society. I want there to be mighty stone castles, which wouldn't exist in a world where people commonly have magical powers which let them fly, become desolid, or teleport. So how do you add magic without changing the medieval feel? Whew! I didn't mean for this to be so long. I guess I just got on a roll!

A richly detailed world is irrelevent if the individual adventures aren't enjoyable to play. As I said before, start with the adventures - the stuff the players are actually going to see and do. Once you've got a good start on your world, after some number of adventures, certain overall, world-governing principles may occur to you. A theme may start to develop. You may notice things that are missing from your world - so add them! You may think of things to add: new monsters, an exotic country with a different type of government, any unique fantasy or fantastic element that occurs to you. IMHO, if you let the world develop "organically" like this, it will seem much more natural, believable, and consistant, than if you preset everything. When the whole world is set up in advance (before actual adventuring) you have no way of knowing if certain elements don't work. It's like making a product without customer feedback: how do you know the players will like it? And speaking of players, let the players help create the world. By this I mean add to the world the places where the PCs come from, and where their backstories took place. One player might say, "I'm a barbarian from the mountainous kingdom of Wuttevr, to the east. I crossed the vast desert to come to this land and meet the rest of my current travelling companions (the PC Party)." Be grateful to such a player! He's done much of your work for you! Now you know that to the east there is a desert and beyond that a mountain range that is the home of a barbarian tribe. This also establishes a bond between the players and the world.

IMHO, the above quote is the key. Start with the adventures, not the world. My friends and I played deendee for years without ever thinking about the politics of the campaign world, or what the continent we were on looked like. We had lots of fun. That was back before most of the campaign suppliments were published, and the ones there were, we didn't buy anyway. Start with the adventures, make sure your players enjoy them. Fill in details as you go along, and as necessary. If your first adventure takes place in a great walled city, then you know that there's a great walled city in your world. This could be the capital of the kingdom, or not. You can make whatever decision you feel you want for the way you want the world to be. Ask yourself: Are there other cities this big in the world? Is this the biggest or one of the top ten? How far away is the nearest city of comparable size? Is the other city friendly or hostile to this one? Are there smaller cities and villages nearby? Other questions will probably occur to you. Your players might even ask you some questions. If your next adventure takes place in some ancient ruins on the edge of a deep, dark forest, then you've just added some ruins and a forest to your campaign. Where are the ruins in relation to the walled city? They're probably not too far away, since the PCs just came from there. Exactly how ancient are these ruins? Does anyone or anything important or dangerous live in the forest? What keeps the danger from threatening the walled city and nearby villages? Is there a relatively safe road or path through the forest? Are the trees deciduous or coniferous? (do the leaves turn colors and fall off in the autumn, or are they evergreen?) How fertile is the soil here? Where are the nearest people to the ruins? Why are the ruins no longer inhabited? Your players next adventure might be in an underground cave complex. Are the caves natural or were they carved out by someone (or something)? What could the caves be used for? Where are the caves in relation to the walled city, ruins, and forest? Do the people of the city know about the caves? Could it be that whatever caused the ruins to fall into ruin was something that emerged from the caves? When you answer these questions, and ask others that occur to you or your players, guess what you're doing? You're world-building!

More praise for good indices I appreciate how difficult and boring it is to make a good index to a book. I also understand that the index often goes unnoticed and unappreciated. Allow me to add my voice to those who sing the praises of 5th Ed. indices. That was my biggest complaint about the 4th ed. BBB; bigger than the typos, bigger than any rules loopholes, bigger than the repeated illustrations. ALL books of ALL RPGs of ALL genres should have an index! Read that line again several times until you've got it. Speak of it in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up.

But that's even worse! With a 20 point base pool, you could add +15 to get a total of 160 Real Points of spells! I understand that none can be more than 20 Active, but that's still 160 RP for only 35! Plus you have the advantage of being able to switch them around. Why would anyone pay 160 points for 8 20-point spells, when they could get them for only 35 points, with the ability to swap them for other spells? You should always pay the full Real Cost of whatever Real Points you have. That's why they're called "real points." Anything less is abusive.

Altering the AP limit for VPPs I don't remember who suggested this solution, so forgive me if it was you. It was a long time ago on the old boards. I thought it was an absolutely brilliant, and very well balanced house rule: For a VPP, you pay 1) the Pool cost, as normal. The full amount = the maximum amount of Real Points of power that can be in the pool. (So far, this is exactly according to FREd.) 2) The Control cost = 1/2 the maximum Active Points of any one power in the pool. If the maximum AP = the total RP, you have a standard, per-FREd, VPP: Examples: a) Standard FREd-like VPP: 50 Pool Cost = 50 Real Points of power in the pool. 25 Control Cost = 50 maximum Active Points of any one power. 75 CP total Low AP VPP: 50 Pool Cost = 50 RP total 10 Control Cost = 20 max AP of any one power. This would be for a pool of fairly small powers only. Smaller powers, less flexibility = costs less: 60 CP as opposed to 75. c) High AP VPP: 50 Pool Cost = 50 RP total in the pool 50 Control Cost = 100 max AP of any one power. This allows huge powers to be put in the pool, provided they have enough limitations to fit into the Real Points limit, e.g., a 100 AP power would need at least -1 in limitations to fit into this pool, and even at -1, it would use up the entire pool. Bigger powers, more flexibility = costs more: 100 CP instead of 75. For the record. I find VPPs to be quite useful for mages. In my campaign I usually don't allow them to be changed on the fly. Mages must spend an hour or several hours studying to change their pools around. But I do allow them great flexibility as to what spells they can have. Pretty much anything goes that doesn't spoil the plot, and as long as it satisfies any other restrictions on the character.

I meant that the d20 rules are full of "You CAN'T do this" and "You MUST do it that way" and "You're NOT ALLOWED to have so-and-so until you have the other thing" ... That's why I like to call it B&D.

YES! Mine as well. This is something I've been saying for years: The word "can't" should not appear anywhere within the HERO System rulebooks. IMO, one of the essential ideas of HERO is that anything can be done, for the right price in character points. OK, so maybe you think Cumulative Healing is too abusive for 15 points per die. Is it still too abusive at 100 points per die? Now it's way too expensive (now the players, rather than the system, are being abused). Somewhere between a +1/2 and a +99 advantage, there must be a price that is "just right." What if each level of Cumulative for Healing was +1 instead of +1/2? How's that? Maybe Steve was suffering from some d20isease when he put that restriction on healing.

Perhaps the problem isn't the Tunneling, it's the Force Wall. I usually interpret a FW as being not a physical thing (it has no BODY). A physical barrier sich as a rampart of earth should be built as an Entangle (perhaps with "Only to form Barriers"), which CAN be tunneled through. Does Earthmover's rampart instantly go away if he stops spending END? If he builds it 10" long and Moleman breaks a 1" hole through it, does the whole thing collapse? If the answers to these questions are no then it should probably be built as an Entangle barrier. If he continually spends END on it, that could mean that he is continually renewing and supporting it, which could explain why it can't be tunnelled through. Every hole you poke in it instantly fills back up with dirt. That would be a Force Wall.

This is a problem I've had with the +5 for twice as many rule. Why would you ever pay for something smaller when you could get an additional full-size one for 5 points? According to the rules, a hundred full-strength, big, honking, Star Destroyers costs 10035 points; but one Star destroyer plus 99 smaller, less powerful ships costs more. The same problem kicks in with any other pice of equipment: Ship A: 100 point main cannon 50 smaller cannon 15 seven more smaller cannons 165 Total points spent on cannons Ship B: 100 point main cannon 20 fifteen more main cannons 120 Total points spent on cannons Ship B has much more firepower but costs less! I noticed many examples of this problem in TUV. There was one about the Life Support system for a ship (say 50 points, I don't remember exactly), and then a backup system that wasn't as good and only covered part of the ship (say 25 points). Why not just pay 5 points and get a backup system every bit as good as the first one? I don't care what is printed in the books - More Points should get you More Power, Fewer Points should get you Less Power. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. To me this is an inviolable rule of the HERO System, which overrides all examples to the contrary. I have a partial solution to this problem, but I don't have time to tell you all about it right now. Do any of you have solutions? I'd like to hear them.

No Money? Blasphemy! I never bothered working out a detailed coinage system for my FH world - which is somewhat surprising considering all the other details I did work out (calendar, zodiac, heavenly bodies, dieties, etc.). I don't keep strict track of money in my campaign. This must come across as heresy to some, but I've always found it too boring to spend time on. I want my players to be adventurers, not accountants. This was one of the things I always hated when I was living in the primordial slime of deendee that we all crawled out of. Money just isn't interesting enough to keep track of every fictitious coin. If I wanted to play Monopoly, I'd play Monopoly. You may say: But how do you regulate what equipment players can buy? Simple: If they don't have the Money Perk, they only have access to standard "middle-class" equipment (assuming it's available at all in the town where they happen to be). In my campaign, there are no "magic item stores" where you can buy fireball wands and invisibility cloaks and talking swords off the rack. I keep the world's economics fairly simple and vague: commoners do most of their trading via the barter system. In urban areas, coins are used. Unskilled laborers (swineherds, woodcutters, farmhands) are paid in copper. Skilled laborers (smiths, bakers, carpenters, craftsmen) are paid in silver. Gold is almost exclusively for the rich. In a medieval-style society almost no one (except the PCs) are "upwardly mobile." If you're born a peasant, you'll stay a peasant. If you're born a noble, you might squander it all away and end up penniless, through gambling, drinking, wenching, etc., but apart from that, you'll tend to remain rich. The two main nations in the central area of the campaign - Virbenland, and Neron - use similar coins which are usually considered interchangable. A Neronian silver piece is the same size as a Virbenlandic silver piece. Only the design engraved thereon is different. In more distant lands, such as Temna, on the far side of the Snake Peaks, other types of currency are used such as electrum. And in some, such as the primitive Boo-Wa-Doki, far to the south, they have no coins at all (and almost no metal to speak of), and sometimes use ceramic beads as a means of exchange. That's about it. No price lists. No inventories of how many GPs, SPs, and CPs each player has. I say to the players, "You're strangers here. Rugged adventurers, not noblemen on a diplomatic mission. You won't be sleeping in the palace. You'll be sleeping at the inn where other common travellers stay. However, unlike most common travellers, you can afford to each stay in your own room (subject to availability) because of the treasure you've accumulated."

There's a few classics that have been missed: The Wizard of Oz Gulliver's Travels (there was a theatrical movie from the early 80's, and a more recent, more complete, made-for-tv version) Ulysses (aka, The Oddessy. I believe this was a British production, never released in the U.S. I saw the video in a high school English class. It's probably available somewhere.) True classics of fantasy literature. And other made for tv fantasy movies like: The 10th Kingdom Dinotopia I do not make any special claim for the quality of any of the above movies but they all have good fantasy visuals (which was the original idea for this thread).

I do understand why it bothers you. It bothers me, too. But I want to play with other people, and their ideas do not always conform to my pre-conceived notions. One wierd halfling does not bring my whole campaign world crashing down. And I don't see how it ruins the fun of the game for you or other players. And you're calling me narrow-minded?! ---changing subject--- And I do agree that STR mins on weapons are generally too high and unrealistic. I feel sure there's a balanced way to adjust them. How 'bout: lower them all by 5 - but only for the purpose of avoiding OCV penalties, not for adding additional damage. So a weapon with 15 STR min could be wielded by someone with 10 STR at no penalty, but even with 15 STR, you still don't get to add any extra damage. At 20 STR, you could add 1 DC. Hmmm... I'm not sure that will work, I'll have to think about it some more.

The "tireless" problem is easy to fix. As Old Man said, get rid of post-12 recoveries. If that's too harsh, just give them half their REC, or do it every other turn only, or allow only recovery of STUN in post-12, not END, or divide the REC between STUN and END (perhaps allowing the characters to choose how much of each to recover). The possibilities are unlimitless...

So how does a 30 STR halfling ruin your game? It wouldn't ruin mine. I'd rather have a player have more fun by playing the character he wants to play than impair his fun by not letting him play it, or kick him out of the game completely. Granted, there is a limit. A 70 STR halfling would impare my game, but that has nothing to do with race or character conception. It would be the same with a 70 human or giant. I plan an adventure to have a certain level of difficulty and require certain actions/skills/abilities/etc. If I was writing a fantasy novel by myself, I probably wouldn't include a 30 STR halfling. But this is a game with other people involved, not a novel. And again, NCM (I'm talking about using it as a default in fantasy or other non-super genres), does not define a race, human or otherwise. It defines a power level.

I firmly agree with Monolith. The only problem I have (sometimes) is with the "chunkyness" of SPD at low power levels (heroic). With supers, a range of 5-7 is not a big deal, with especially slow ones at 4, and especially fast ones at 8. But with heroic level guys, as SPD range of 2-4 makes a much bigger difference. One way to get around this that I have been toying with is to allow fractional SPD values. So you could have a 3.5 SPD, which essentially means get 3 phases in one turn, and 4 in the next. I expanded on this idea to create larger scale phase charts, so the phases would be evenly distributed. For example, I might use a 24-second speed chart where everyone gets recoveries after segments 12 and 24 and a character with a 3.5 SPD gets 7 equally spread out phases during the "extended turn," which is actually two normal turns. This has the added side benefit of making the speed chart less predictable, JmOz.