The Suave

Re: Unique Bow Talents That Ricochet Strike can already be done using the optional rules for Bouncing An Attack provided in FRED pg 377 (sorry, don't have my 6E books yet.) Don't know if you want to make him pay for it (besides the CSLs) or not though. Ranged Martial Arts maneuvers might be good, as H-M mentioned, I believe it also contains a ranged disarm which could be fun. I feel like your player is looking for more ideas along the lines of the Entangle that you mentioned in your first post. As more of a support power, I always liked when archers or other ranged fighters used their projectiles to provide a climbable surface for themselves and allies (a la The Blue Raja.) I'm not sure the best way to build this, but Transform (Non-climbable to climbable surface) would probably be most appropriate, that way the climbing character would have to rely on his own Climbing roll for speed of ascent. Another option might be Clinging, Usable On Others. You could buy a Naked Autofire (I suggest Autofire 3, but 5 would work too) to simulate shooting multiple arrows at once.

Re: Some newbie rules questions HERO System gaming: It's SCIENCE!

Re: Some newbie rules questions I pretty much only skimmed this thread, but for the purposes of the square-grid discussion: Setting dice/miniatures/whatever out on the table works out great in HERO, because you can just measure, as was mentioned. Or you can go old school: hex grid attached.

Re: Required hit loaction Unless you're just trying to shave points, it sounds like you're making it hard on yourself. Can't you build the DEX drain and have the SFX be that he stabs the cat in the foot? If you are already building a super accurate rogue-type (by giving him pluses vs hit location mods, tons of other CSLs, etc), then I can see going ahead and attaching the Limitation, but if you're only giving him +8 vs Hit Location Modifiers for the purpose of stabbing him in the foot, then just build the Drain as-is methinks.

Re: Injured PCs and healing time I'm running a pretty basic 5e Paranormal Dark Champions game. I just really didn't want to hit the reset button after every episode (as it were), but I also didn't want to shaft my players going into a new episode either. Thanks for the tips, any additional tendencies or standard operating procedures are welcome.

How do you guys handle having a crew of injured PCs? Do you let them say "we lay low for a while" and skip ahead a few weeks? That seems an awful lot like letting them zip back to full health in between each fight scene (a la video games). I also don't want my two PCs (at 4 and 0 body) to die at the drop of a hat. One of the PCs has some good medicinal skills so that helps. I've handled this situation carefully but slowly, but for future reference: How do you deal with injured PCs? How much do you speed up healing for things like first aid, medical care, ER visits, etc?

Re: Should I? Are you playing Champions and Order? Awesome.

Re: Newbie and GM shouldn't go together. Another thing that's nice about your situation: You and your players are coming from D&D, and they are playing pretty standard character archetypes, which makes it easier for YOU as a new GM. You know how tanks, healers, casters, and rogues tend to act, and you know how they tend to act in unison with one another. You are used to those character archetypes and you know your players (quite well it seems), so that should make it easier for you to tailor your game to fit your players needs and desires. Then as you all get more familiar with the system, your players (and you!) will start to branch out, exactly as JmOz stated.

Re: Newbie and GM shouldn't go together. I'm really glad you're encouraged, Lavek. This thread title makes me sad every time I see it. If newbie and GM never went together we'd rarely have new gaming groups pop up. Keep your head on a swivel and your campaign will run just fine.

Re: Newbie and GM shouldn't go together. When I came back to GMing after a bit of a hiatus, I found that pitting my two PCs against reasonable enemies then scaling it up for future combats seemed to work fine. This has the additional advantage of "easy combats" being a kind of "tutorial stage" to the HERO system. If for some reason your players are getting slapped around too bad, you can always have your team of baddies suddenly complete a mystery objective and exfiltrate. It's a little sloppy but it works if you don't want to kill them just because you accidentally overbuffed the enemy. You can also drop their DCs and CVs on the fly if they're hitting too often or too hard. As a side note: I've found, that for a newer GM scaling enemies to PCs, a team of enemies (maybe slightly greater than or equal to the number of PCs) is much easier to manage than one powerhouse enemy. There seems to be a very fine line of "boss fight" baddie. They tend to either die surprisingly quickly, or they accidentally stomp the PCs. At least for me, I find it pretty hard to balance. With a small team it seems to be easier to implement strong Teamwork skills when you need to buff them, as well as having one or two members of the team get preoccupied with other tasks (paramedics, getting to better cover, finding a good sniping position, read: any timesink) when you need to give the PCs a leg up.

Re: Secret Wars Campaign Log Capturing a PC is a surprisingly difficult endeavor.

Re: Secret Wars Campaign Log He actually used that? He said he was gonna. You guys have the best GM ever.

Re: Shackles as weapons If you build it as +HA instead of KA then it would make it easier to model the damage from swinging it while simultaneously modeling the damage from a "brass knuckle" effect. I understand the "solid iron" part, and, while heavy, I don't know if I would consider it killing damage. Brass knuckles and steel collapsible batons are considered normal damage, and making it +HA does make it a tad easier to make the damage applicable to different types of attacks. One of the benefits of making it a KA though, is it gives your players less of a disadvantage when they're fighting armed and armored prison guards, so that might also be a consideration. The ability to grab/choke/disarm/bind/indirectly attack might make up for it though.

Re: Shackles as weapons I assume you just mean the shackle "bracelets" themselves along with the chain that might connect the two? First, why is it bought as a killing attack? Also is the "indirect" supposed to represent the chain? I rarely use indirect so I'm not really sure the benefits to it, but I would probably have just bought it as Stretching. Like I said though, I'm not very familiar with Indirect. I really like the -2 DEX side effect. Do you have similar effects for all of your weapons? Second, if the chain is still connecting the two, I might consider building it as a multipower so that you can use the chain as a choke, NND, or have extra strength for grabs/squeezes. Kind of like the book's Whip build, but with different powers. I suggest not telling the players that the shackles can be used as weapons, don't show them the build, just let them play and see what happens. Maybe it's just me but I like to see what happens when I let players improvise. Starting them in a prison breakout sequence is a great idea! Rep for ingenuity. PS Damn! Escafarc beat me to the choke/grab point. ESCAFAAAAAAAAAARC!

Re: Urban Fantasy Setting: Here There Be Monsters So once, for a Paranormal DC game that I never actually played in, I was getting around to building a character that would be incredibly appropriate for this game genre. He was a renowned professor who stumbled upon an ancient magic while investigating some ruins in South America. I was going to model this as "rune magic" because I really liked the idea of him carving glowing runes into thin air, and then cool things happening. I kept calling this "fear magic" because I wanted all of the spells to be based on creating, dispelling, or otherwise manipulating fear in humans (or monsters). I may give Dr. Edwards another shot, he might make a great villain (or PC!). I may need some assistance in writing him up with some of these newfangled abilities and rules that you've created (all of which are awesome). The GM for that game had us build "100 point normals" for the game, and give us the concept of what we wanted them eventually to develop into (aka runic fear mage), so here is the character sheet for Dr. David Edwards, pre-magic. I'll get to work on some spells and such and get back to you guys.

Re: Best ways to put together a Dark Champions team? While there's nothing wrong with the old standards: "Figure out how you guys would have already known each other," or "You've been a team before/for a while, let's play," I am lucky enough to have two very good players in my current DC game. They were independent PCs which I managed to bring together and now they are a pretty tight-knit duo. It would have been pretty hard to say "you're already a group" in my case though, because one of my PCs is a genius computer hacker, and the other one is a hobo. The start of a roleplaying campaign is often the hardest yet most rewarding part.

Re: Pseudo-elf race as monsters Ask Manic Typist about his elf sub-race that was modeled on a genocidal elf PC in his Semona game. He'll know what I'm talking about, just mention the "Widow's Tears."

Re: Supernatural Martial Artists I currently only have 5e books, including the UMA, but unfortunately not HSMA. Thanks for the tip though!

I am running a Paranormal Dark Champions game (eerily similar to Manic Typist's Secret Wars campaign) and I need a little assistance. My players just recently killed a few hard hitting baddies (Rasputin among them) in the last session, so I think it's time to move onto the next plotline. One of the PCs has a pretty strong Hunted: Chinese Tong (I forget which one) so I've been leading them up to a confrontation for a while now. I have decided that the Tong's hierarchy will include a "team" of martial artists, all with their own theme. I'm probably going to theme each one with one of the traditional Chinese elements. I briefly considered the Zodiac, but I didn't really want the team to be as large as 12, this is still an option though (especially if I aggregated some of the signs). As another option, they are also being Hunted by the Yakuza, so a similar team of Japanese elemental-themed martial artists would do as well, if that is your inclination. Basically what I need is some inspiration and assistance in building these martial artists. How do I make them unique yet unified? I don't have very much experience with martial arts as a construct, but I am familiar with the rules and how they work. So if anyone wants to build a martial artist based on one of the Chinese (or Japanese if you like that idea better, it could work just as well), that would be great, if not, maybe some ideas for powers. As for point-level, my players (2) are both built on about 225 points. One of them is a hacker with a medium-powered electricity-sfx multipower for combat, and my other player is basically an environment fighter (very effective in combat, but maybe not against MA-level DCVs). Thanks in advance for any ideas and/or constructs!

Re: if you don't want your xp, I'll take it. I quite like that approach, and will definitely be using it in the future.

Re: Blindness and CSLs My important take-away from this thread is that the halving (or setting to 0) of CVs occurs after the allocation of CSLs. That makes sense, and completely solves my problem. Thanks amigos!

Re: Hit Location and armor conundrum Just move the hit to another vital-yet-covered hit location. Or use whatever damage got through for the purposes of your narrative. Shot in the vitals, after defenses take 5B 12S, say that the bullet nicked the guys Femoral Artery and he's starting to bleed heavily. Or say that he got shot in the neck and must've grazed something important because the blood is everywhere. You can still narrate and move the shot around, just use the fact that the armor covers the location for the purposes of determining damage.

Re: Senseless Thread If she said it using that language, I suggest picking her up as a DNPC.

When a character is blind he is at 0 OCV and 1/2 DCV (or something). If a character who is blind (without any extra targeting senses or powers etc) makes an attack, can he apply his CSLs to the attack? My inclination is no, but I didn't see any specifics in the rules. I only have Diet Hero for the purposes of this question, because the Dark Champions books don't really touch on the issue (as far as I've seen).

Re: if you don't want your xp, I'll take it.