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PhilFleischmann

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Everything posted by PhilFleischmann

  1. That sounds good to me. The object is a Fixed "Location" and the power is bought UAA, so yes. Of course, it only works for the fixed "locations" that you specify for buying, or you can pay more for a Floating Fixed "Location". You would certainly be able to teleport *to* these objects as Fixed Locations, without UAA, so I see no reason why, for the price of UAA, you can't teleport them to yourself. "Accio!"
  2. I think his point was that he wants more granularity - not complete coverage. If you want a character that's especially difficult to stun with physical attacks, but not with energy attacks, et al. The limitation on CON for "Only to Avoid Being Stunned", I would put at -1/4 at most (and more likely -0, but that's just me). But the limitation on PD for "Only to Avoid Being Stunned", should be quite a bit higher. -1 at the very least, and probably more like -2.
  3. And if you like, you can even increase the granularity a little. Say +1 for three shots, +3 for eight shots. I love granularity!
  4. No, I'm not. I'm using "gods" and "magic" in terms of a fictitious fantasy RPG setting. This has nothing to do with the real world. Though it would be nice if it had some verisimilitude, and made sense, and was internally consistent - within that fictitious setting. I fully acknowledge the distinction. In this case, both apply: I don't like it. And it makes no sense. Part of the reason I don't like it, is because it makes no sense. These gods are created by mortals, and not the other way around - then why the heck should anyone worship them? Thanks for that. It's still stupid. And I think it's a vestigial remnant of that other FRPG system - which it didn't even originally include. Back when I used to play B&D,I has subscribed to Dragon Magazine, and I remember an article in there that AFAIK, was the first time anyone put forth the idea that gods need worship for fuel, or to exist, or to have power. I thought it was a dumb idea then, and I still think it's a dumb idea. Then again, that game system was chock-full of dumb ideas, which is why I no longer play it.
  5. In most fantasy worlds, it's not propaganda. The gods actually did create the world - just like in all historical mythologies - on which all fantasy RPG gods are based. Assuming we want to emulate that style of world, then the gods actually are gods, and they actually have god-like power, and they actually created the world. Where does magic come from - particularly "divine" magic? Is the fantasy world based on a circular "perpetual magic machine"? People give the power to gods by worshipping, and then the gods grant magic power to the worshippers. So none of it is real, but somehow real magic effects happen. And how exactly can gods gain power from mortals'worship? Because the mortals believe that's how they get their power? And the gods have to conform to the beliefs of mortals? It seems to me, the farther you follow this idea, the more in unravels into ridiculousness. I don't actually see anything in the Turakian Age that says that the gods get their power from the worship or faith of mortals, but perhaps I missed it.
  6. Agreed. I've always hated the idea that a god's power comes from worshipers. There's an inherent contradiction: If the gods created the world and the people in it, but they only get their power from the people who worship them, then how did they have the power to create the world and the people in the first place? And if the majority of people worship the good gods, then the good gods will be vastly more powerful than the evil gods. There would be no evil gods eventually, because they'd lose power whenever people stopped worshipping them. Mere mortals could effectively remove all evil influences in the world by simply not worshipping evil gods. But there's absolutely no reason why any given fantasy world's gods have to work that way. And I'm sure there are plenty of examples in fantasy literature and historical mythology where this isn't the case. Where the gods have power because they are gods, regardless of whether they are worshipped, or how many people worship them.
  7. And the thing is - well *a* thing is - that there is already a power to find someone at a distance - Mind Scan. It's just that in this case, we want a power that's not based on EGO and Mental contact, but on Visual contact through Clairsentience. If you're looking for Joe with this Clairsentience-based power, you might find someone who is disguised as Joe instead. Or you might see Joe, but not realize it's him because he's disguised as Frank. Of course, the the appropriate adders, you can penetrate those disguises. The difficulty, without using Mind Scan, is how do you focus in on the one person you're looking for? Clairsentience doesn't really allow you to do this, and neither does Detect People. Detect Joe works for Joe, but it doesn't work for Frank.
  8. On the general topic of realism, I would also note that there's a lot more to it than damage. In fact, I would say that damage is one of the easiest things to adjust when you need to. Damage is just numbers, and numbers can be adjusted easily. And we've got lots of extra damage-related rules to make damage more or less lethal, and more or less realistic. Normal Attacks vs Killing Attacks Hit Locations Called Shots Disabling Impairing Combat Luck Deadly Blow The Doubling rule Extra DCs for Martial Arts All sorts of damage-affecting options: Penetrating, Reduced Penetration, Armor Piercing, Hardened, NND, AVLD, Does BODY, etc. Susceptibilities Vulnerabilities Damage/Defense caps etc. And you can always adjust it further with GM fiat.
  9. Yes. You're the third person to mention them, I think. Some complain that they are unrealistic, but that really doesn't matter. There are lots of unrealistic things in HERO, like Teleportation and Telekinesis. If you can imagine it, you should be able to build it in HERO. It doesn't matter how realistic it is, what matters is how useful it is, and that it should have a cost commensurate with its utility.
  10. All of the above. With regard to realism, all I want is verisimilitude and consistency. I am happy to play in any style of game, at nearly any level of realism. There is at least one more level of realism you could add to that list, beyond what you call "fantasy". You might call it "Cartoon" - I can swallow a lit stick of dynamite and all it does is cover me with soot temporarily. If I get run over by a steamroller, I become a living paper cutout of myself - again, temporarily.
  11. OK, so how much do you think "Detect Any One Specific Person, Chosen Each Time the Power is Used" is worth - before adding all the other modifiers like Range, N-Ray, Mega-Range, etc. Just ike "Detect Gold" allows you to detect the presence of gold, but it doesn't locate the specific gold coin that you gave to the travelling merchant that you met a week ago on the road to Phaneinopolis. "Detect People" (Large Class, Very Common = 10 points) will not find one specific person you're looking for. It will find all people. You can add "Discriminatory" so you can check each person you detect, one at a time, to determine if that's the one you were looking for, but that could take a while. "Detect Fred Farnsworth" (Single Thing = 3 points) will find the one specific person named Fred Farnsworth, but it won't detect anyone else. +5 points for each additional class of thing detected. It seems to me that it's only fair that if the additional "class" is only a single thing, then it shouldn't cost more than +3 points. So to detect any one specific person from a list of 50 people would cost 150 points - before adding in Range and N-Ray, and everything else. If you want to detect any one specific person in the entire human race, that would cost approximately 3 x 7.6 billion points. But I'm willing to be generous and only charge 1 point for each additional single thing detected, so it'll only cost you a flat 7.6 billion points. If you're detecting all the people within a 15-mile radius, you could add Discriminatory and a few levels of Rapid Sense to check each person to see if they're the one you want in a reasonable amount of time. How many people will be within a 15 mile radius? Well, it depends on the setting, obviously. In the modern word, there could easily be over a million. So six levels of 10x Rapid Sensing would cost 18 points, to check a million people in the time it would have taken to check one. If you happen to be in a big city with more than a million people in a 15 mile radius, it'll take longer, but probably still a reasonable amount of time. And a mere 12 more points of Rapid would allow you to check everyone in the world in that time, to find the one person your looking for. So, the bottom line is: Detect People - 10 points Range - +5 360 degrees - +5 Discriminatory - +5 Targeting - +10 N-Ray - +10 (Defined as "not through anything that isn't a mirror") Rapid x6 (1000000x normal speed) - +18 = 63 points, then adding at least one level of Megascale Range for +1/4 = 79 points. And that gives you a base PER roll, subject to (Mega) rMod, and other circumstantial modifiers, so you might want to add Telescopic or some Enhanced Perception, in case your target is near the edge of your range, or is hidden or concealed in some way.
  12. You buy the Clairsentience "Only from the point of view of a mirror", and then you count the number of people you see. This doesn't work, because it doesn't let you see anything other than the "Target". If there's a street sign reflected in the mirror behind the person, this power will not see the sign. I don't think I would allow "Target" as a thing to Detect in the first place, unless it was specifically defined when the power is bought. "Detect Fred Farnsworth". If it's just "Detect People" then it will detect all people, and won't let you pick one just one to detect. If you want to *see* whatever is reflected in the mirror, then Detect is not the power you want, but rather Sight - in this case, Clairsentience for Sight. Another consideration is the definition of a mirror. Is it just actual mirrors, built and intended to be mirrors, or will any reflective surface that could be used as a mirror count? How about a hand-held mirror, or a compact mirror in a woman's purse? If that compact mirror is the closest mirror to the person, all you'll see is the darkness of the closed compact inside a closed purse. Does it have to be a silvered glass mirror, or could it be a polished metal mirror? How about a car's rear view mirror? If that's the closest mirror to the target (and the target isn't in the car), your view might be moving too fast for you to catch a glimpse of the person you're looking for.
  13. It could definitely apply to EDM, Maybe even Swinging - if there's a swing rope permanently fixed somewhere that you know about. Or even to implement parkour-type moves - when you know in advance where there are things you can jump/climb over/bounce off of/etc. And thus it might apply to Climbing as well, somehow. I'm not sure Shapeshift would apply here, since that's not the way you buy Shapeshift - you just go ahead and buy the shape or category of shapes you want to shift into. Mind Link also sorta-kinda works this way. Based on the way the OP described the power, I think it would be Mind Scan with the limitation "Locks on to the nearest mirror, rather than the target's mind" combined with "Cannot use Mental Powers on the target". And then a Linked Clairsentience from the point of view of that mirror. (Depending on the specific details of how the power is supposed to work.)
  14. My first thought is some sort of Mind Scan combined with Clairsentience. But then another thought occurred to me, and I don't know how much this should cost: Something like Fixed Locations for Teleporting, you could have Fixed Locations for Clairsentience. And they could be either regular Fixed Locations, like your best buddy, or Floating Fixed Locations, that you have to spend some time "studying" to change. Seems like a rather obvious adder for Clairsentience that should have been available already, now that I think of it.
  15. I thought it was appropriately costed in 5th (mostly), but the incompleteness of it bothered me. There are two separate options that are being conflated somewhat: the flexibility of the effect, and the number of effects. For the base effect of an Adjustment Power, you can buy say 60 points to affect one specific power or characteristic. Say 6d6 STR Drain (assuming the cost hasn't changed in 6th). If we want to put advantages on this power to make it affect other things, we need to ask a few questions: a) How much of an advantage is it to affect any One of STR, CON, DEX, BODY? b) How much of an advantage is it to affect STR and CON simultaneously? c) How much of an advantage is it to affect any Two of STR, CON, DEX, BODY? d) How much of an advantage is it to affect STR, CON, and DEX simultaneously? e) How much of an advantage is it to affect any Three of STR, CON, DEX, BODY? f) How much of an advantage is it to affect STR, CON, DEX, and BODY simultaneously? IMO, (a) is worth about +1/4, and if this has gone up to +1/2 in 6th for a good reason, then I'm OK with that. (b) should be worth at least +1/2. And if (a) is already +1/2, then it could be that (b) should be more. (c) should obviously cost more than either (a) or (b). And (d) should cost even more, and (e) more still, and (f) even more than that. (g) How much of an advantage is it to affect any One of STR, CON, DEX, BODY, SPD, PD, ED, REC, END, STUN? Clearly, this should cost more than (a). (h) How much of an advantage is it to affect any One of the Characteristics? Clearly, this is worth even more than (g). (i) How much of an advantage is it to affect any Two of STR, CON, DEX, BODY, SPD, PD, ED, REC, END, STUN? Clearly, this should cost more than (c) and more than (g). etc. I kept it to characteristics to keep it simple (!), but when you start adding such advantages to Adjustment powers vs power, it gets even more complicated. "Any One power of a particular SFX" Fine. How about "Any One power of either of two SFX"? How about "Any One power of ANY SFX"? And then there's the issue of a STR Drain - purchased "normally" with no SFX-based advantages - having an equal effect on BigStrongMan's muscles and SteelMan's power armor.
  16. I believe there already are rules that reduce the effectiveness of repeated PRE attacks. You can't just keep smashing things and expect the target to be equally stunned each time. And presence attacks need to be available even without "violent action" - it's sometimes a function of the character's leadership and inherent impressiveness. Like if Captain Patriot is trying to calm down a rioting mob of civilians.
  17. An interesting idea, but I wouldn't use fire elementals - just ordinary fire. Seems safer and less expensive.
  18. Slightly off-topic: I've always felt that there should be an equal bonus for receiving a violent action (assuming you can shrug it off). If the enemy lobs a grenade at you, and you swallow it and burp, that's imPREssive. If the enemy mooks unload a hundred rounds of machine gun fire at you, and you're reduced to an unidentifiable bloody mess on the floor, and then the next phase you regenerate, and your parts fuse back together and you stand up and smile - that's imPREssive. These should also be worth bonuses to a PRE Attack.
  19. Are you talking about realism? The system isn't based on realism. It's based on a balanced cost for utility. Skipover Sprayfire makes at least as much sense as Teleportation or Telekinesis or Clairsentience.
  20. And somewhere (4th ed? And probably also in 5th ed. And I would assume it's been included in 6th as well somewhere), there were "Autofire Skills" that could be purchased, such as "Concentrated Sprayfire" that let you hit multiple targets more than once each (up to the total number of shots fired, of course), so if three targets are in a close group, you can try to hit one of them three times, and the other two once each; or two of them twice each, and the other one once. And there was also "Skipover Sprayfire" which allowed you to shoot at multiple targets that were spread out, without having to waste shots on empty hexes - though your to-hit penalty was still based on the total number of hexes you had to track across. And there might have been another one called "Accurate Sprayfire" which reduced the OCV penalty to a flat -2 IIRC, regardless of how many hexes you tracked across. And there may have been other Autfire Skills, as well. IDHMBIFOM, and I don't remember what they cost. I'm going to go see if I can find those rules.
  21. No, the villain would never do that. The person is at 0 DCV because they're incapacitated. So the villain would put the person into a complicated death trap that will take at least an hour to kill the victim, and then leave.
  22. I was going to say that if you've got a 10 OCV, and your target has a 0 DCV, then you need a 21- to hit, so on a 3, you could hit with all 10 shots. But what kind of sadistic bastard are you, shooting a machine gun at a guy with 0 DCV?
  23. Remember that Range Modifiers worked differently back then. A Range Modifier being halved was a BAD thing. RMod was a specific distance in hexes, and every multiple of that distance the target was away, was a -1 to the to-hit. So if a weapon had a Range Modifier of 5", a target 6-10 hexes away was -1. A target 11-15 hexes away was -2. A target 16-20 hexes away was -3. etc. It's pretty much impossible to hit a target 10 times anyway. Even if you hit on 18-, and you roll a 3, that's only 8 hits: 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4.
  24. That seems a little too much. +2 for a "sacrificed" shot means that two hits is as likely as one hit without sacrificing the shot.
  25. And anywhere where there's a city on one side of the river, even if there are no bridges, someone will have a boat that can take you across. And if it's daytime, and you're on the opposite side of the river, you can probably yell loud enough to get someone's attention to give you a ride. There will probably be people making use of the river all day long that can see and hear you.
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