Pattern Ghost

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Thanks for the reply, Tribal! Thanks for the article link, especially.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Hey fellow Heroes! I was thinking about reactivating my account in COH, but I had a question or two for those who are currently active. When I left, which was around Issue 3, there were a few reasons, so how have these changed, if at all, since then: 1. I left after the level cap was raised to 50. Leveling at that point was a massive experience grind, and the only missions I had available were AV missions requiring a huge group. The fights and zones were simply uninspired and boring. How's the path from the low-mid 40s to level cap looking now? Is the cap still at 50? 2. It seems like we now have something besides enhancements to spend our Influence on. Do any of these add anything to the game play? Just plain looking cool counts, here, as that's one of the nice things about CoH. 3. At the time I left, Blasters had just taken a huge cut in damage output, specifically AR/Dev blasters. What's the current state of (esp. AR/DEV) blasters? Are we able to solo higher level outdoor content again? 4. At the time I left, my tank (mid-20s or 30s, I forget; Invuln/Energy) would take about a week and a half to kill anything. Have non-fire tanks gotten any better solo ability? And that leads to... 5. Has the player base learned how to use a tank/healer/dps setup? I remember the basic atmosphere being of a bunch of soloers running around, and tanks not really being appreciated for their group role, save by a small group of people with experience in other games. While it's nice that you didn't actually have to have a tank in a lot of groups, it did make it a bit annoying to be play one in most groups. 6. One of the things that I liked was that the GMs were pretty responsive when there was a serious issue. Is the in game support still good? 7. I recall an announcement about characters on inactive accounts losing their names. Later on, but not too soon after, there was another announcement retracting the first. Did anyone lose their names? Were they high levels or were they just targeting lower level alts being used to reserve names? What's my risk of having to rename Sureshot to Player5841863? 8. Speaking of lower level alts, I do have a few I was working on. Have any lower or middle level zones been added? 9. Is there anything else you can tell me that'll make me want to rush on over to COH right this instant and sign back up?

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Just finished the first Dresden Files novel, Storm Front the other day. Good stuff. Cool thing is the TV series and the novel's universe seem to be disparate enough that I can enjoy both on their own merits, but close enough in the essentials that I can get a good sense of double-dipping into the Dresden-verse. Here's hoping they renew the show! In the meantime, I think I'll be picking up more of the novels.

Re: SPD and DEX for superheroic martial artists? You could have lost that post too. You know, the problem I have is that you simply nitpick too much. I post a quick, rough outline in the middle of the night, in a hurry, and you come back with this extravagant, overbearing response. I don't care enough to go nitpicking over some crap I typed out in the middle of the night, so I'll try to restate what I was thinking. Maybe that'll work better. I suggest that most people (that includes NPCs that will be in combat with PCs as well as PCs) in the campaign world should have a 3-5 speed. Exceptional fighters, like superheroic martial artists should be able to hit 6. 7 or above is the realm of speedsters. I don't expect players to run agents, so nobody is going to be taking SPD 3, the value is there because it's a common number that will be seen in game. PCs will usually be from 4-6, with most players opting for 5-6, regardless of their concepts. If you make them justify higher scores, then they will. Most games run with 4-6 SPD, and have for years, with 5 and 6 being average. That doesn't mean the characters are average, it means that people like playing on the higher end of the scale. That's typical for published material, and if you set a well trained agent at 3, elite military normals at around 4, then you're not seeing PCs that are totally untouchable in terms of SPD. As long as most PCs fall within 3-4 pts of SPD from each other, you don't have problems with people getting bored waiting on their turn to act. That range kind of splits the difference between Marvel's pretty low stats type of campaign to DCs very inflated stats type of campaign. As far as DEX, who cares? Seriously. You should be monitoring CV, skill rolls, and any other result that DEX contributes to, not DEX itself. If someone wants to make Captain America with a 20 DEX and a ton of CSLs, Lightning Reflexes, etc, and someone else wants to cut to the chase and just give him a 30 DEX, does it really matter? Are aesthetics of the character sheet as important as reasoning from effect and simply buying the end result? Not in my opinion. Anyway, I'm done beating the dead horse. Hugh, you keep on fighting the good fight man, I'm out of here.

Re: Harry Dresden I'm surprised nobody chimed in for Bob written up as an AI level computer yet.

Re: Are all the good names really taken? Just thought of one: Long Arm. (as in ... of the law)

Re: SPD and DEX for superheroic martial artists? I think that generally, comics characters fall into a 2-5 speed range, with a few 6s hanging out there. So, Bob here would fall into the 2 range and have to work his way up to 3. Nothing wrong with that, but you just described a character concept more fitting for a joke character or sidekick than what Champions has always aimed for, which is more mid-lister, could have his own title type of character. Eh, it was late when I typed that description, but yeah, he'd have to be a combat veteran to get there. Most superheroes fall into SPD 4 just by virtue of having survived through many issues of their own or others' comics. I'm pretty sure every RPG I've read has had a statement assuming the DEFAULT power level is designed to allow for some experience. Again, if you want to buck that trend, and save some points, that's fine. You've now got Bob with fire powers and no combat skills. But you can also afford to buy things like AOEs that still have decent base DCs in them, or special attacks like maybe a heat attack in an area that impedes everyone without the appropriate life support. You don't need to be SPD 4 to keep up with all of the average supers who are sitting at SPD 4, but you'll probably get up to SPD 4 with experience. Also, that was reflexes OR alertness. I'm not looking back at my OP now to see what I typed, but if I didn't make that clear, my bad. My intention was to point out that you generally don't have to be a physical powerhouse to achieve SPD 4 in my way of thinking. A high level of situational awareness allows one to anticipate future actions, giving more effective actions. Let's face it, I can certainly attack someone more than twelve times in twelve seconds, but the intent of rolling attacks based on SPD is to show the number of effective attacks someone can toss out in that timeframe. Your brain has as much to do with your effectiveness as your body does. That's why I was pointing to experience and alertness bridging the gap from SPD 3 to SPD 4. SPD 4 should not be given out like candy. It points to someone who is in some way special. If you want to make a physically unremarkable hero with a speed less than 4, that's OK. You need to sit down and think about what SPD really means before making that decision though. Then give Bob SPD 3. It just gives you more points to budget for other things. You're using an example of a guy with NO combat training and NO combat experience, and you want to use him in a genre which has a heavy focus on combat? Ok, if you want to define it that way, you can play it that way. I think most experienced heroes will fall out around SPD 4 if you benchmarked them. Taking a less experienced hero and starting him around SPD 3 makes sense. I think the problem you're having here is that the average SPD of official write ups falls around SPD 5 rather than SPD 4. I've never said a campaign average should be SPD 5. You just tossed that in. Maybe that hypothetical GM didn't think things through? I'd say Johnny Storm is probably a SPD 4 character. In general, I think Marvel comics are a lower-DEX/SPD campaign than, say DC, where you have a ton of enhanced physical capabilities guys. So, I don't get what your point is here? That you agree with me? Or that Johnny Storm should be SPD 5 or needs to be SPD 5 to compete in a Champions environment. If it's the latter, then you'll notice I said the major balancing point is CV, not SPD. With all of hero's combat options and power customization, you can be hideously effective at lower SPD values. Just because a Viper Agent and a Hero both have SPD 3 doesn't mean the Viper agent actually has a chance to beat the Hero. Yeah, basically. Do you want games with a huge SPD spread? That can be pretty unbalancing. Remember, the default human level gives you three values: 2, 3, and 4. Since you want your heroes to be a bit more effective than standard baseline humans, you nudge your chart to 3-5. You allow for shticks, such as "best of the best" type Martial Artists to go for a 6. In general, most speedsters are fine at speed 6. You could also just go with a range of 2-4 and use Hero to model combat effectiveness differently. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS THAT YOU ARE WORKING WITHIN A RANGE OF NUMBERS THAT DOESN'T UNBALANCE THE GAME. You can't do that effectively if you open up all values on the SPD chart to players.* Usually when people start a sentence with "Oh, but..." on a message board, they're either being sarcastic or talking down to someone. I'd advise you that neither is conducive to productive discourse. Of I could call you a jackass. You pick. I'll help you out here, since you are having trouble wrapping your mind around the concept of "major villain." A major villain is capable of challenging an entire super team. In order to have enough actions to challenge a team, they'll need a higher SPD. You don't seem capable of defining SPD as a measure of anything other than PHYSICAL prowess. That's not my problem, it's yours. He most likely doesn't move as fast, but he probably has more chances to take EFFECTIVE actions within 12 seconds. Speedsters on the Flash's level don't work well in games, period. The concept is horribly overpowered. If you look at a more balanced approach to the problem, such as how the Flash is portrayed in the DC Animated Universe, then I'd say THAT Flash probably has a lower SPD score than THAT Darkseid. So, what's your argument exactly? That the martial artists get hit less often than the non martial artists? Pull your head out of your behind for a second and think about the question at hand. What is the OCV of a well trained agent? More than a couch potato, more than the local police, probably on par with elite military units. What's an elite military unit capable of in a cinematic setting such as a comic book? The answer: A hell of a lot more than a real person with the same job. That's a BASE CV from DEX of about 5. Add in a few CSLs with their weapons, and it goes up. I'm assuming that most agents have training, maybe not in your campaign. Also, let's look at who gets hit and who doesn't get hit. You say Iron Man gets hit a lot? No kidding. Who'd have imagined a guy wearing the most sophisticated suit of ARMOR on the planet, a guy whose moniker includes "Invincible," doesn't bother to fight defensively against mooks! Same for your other examples. HOWEVER, if Iron Man DOESN'T want to be hit, he's pretty damned good at NOT being hit, even by superhuman opponents. The suit does enhance his reflexes and speed. It's pretty easy to say so and so gets hit by agents or mooks all the time, but you don't bother to think that maybe they get hit because they simply don't care? You didn't think when you made that example that the martial artists don't get hit as much simply because they can't take the hit? What is the point of your argument? I say keep your SPD range to about a normal spread of three with some outliers to account for character shticks and to closely monitor your CVs, and you come back with anger that you can't play Bob the Flaming Couch Potato concept? Is that concept even in genre? What an utterly useless contribution to the endless debate. Try again, with less vitriol and sarcasm. *Edit: I'm going to go ahead and note that people do, in fact, make the wider SPD range approach work. It's certainly not easy, nor in my example (which my whole original post was based on being a statement of my view of things) really necessary to model a comic style supers universe.

Re: Are all the good names really taken? I'd look more away from size related names, as those are going to be taken usually. Two part names incorporating more abstract concepts are probably more productive to brainstorm with. What are his goals, both immediate and long term? Obviously, hiding from Viper is one. If he's going to hide in plain sight and continue to adventure as a costumed vigilante, then what's his reason? Is he seeking redemption, or to uphold some principle? If he's looking to be a Bastion of Justice... well there's a name right there. (Marvel has just plain Bastion.) If he's just looking to hide in plain sight with no higher goal, then maybe Elephant (as in, "...in the room." What are his interests? What did he do on his downtime between thuggery back in the day? What are his current interests? What about his occupation in his secret ID? What kind of neighborhood does he come from? What ethnic background? (And remember, generic white folks have ethnicities too.) How did he get involved in crime in the first place? Religious leanings? More generic adjectives and nouns may be worth exploring, though many of the catchy ones are taken already.

Re: SPD and DEX for superheroic martial artists? Hmm, the Topic That Lived. I'm pretty sure I said this before. If not in this iteration of the board, then one of the prior ones. Here's how I see it: Heroes are defined by how far they are from the norm in comics, largely. You can go from godling level to gritty pulp hero level and still be loosely in the superheroic genre. Of course, publishers love to mix and match the two, so that doesn't help us draw a baseline. Heck, the publishers do all kinds of crazy stuff, like have a guy with a medium acrobat's build flip a limo over. (A panel from Daredevil, don't know who was sleeping at the wheel on that one, so to speak.) You can look in the comics and pick a lot of things to use as a baseline to model your stats. When it comes to fighting ability, I like to look at relative performance. To me, the raw numbers don't mean as much as the spread of numbers you have to work with. Whether you aim for close to humanity, or a more lofty power level, SPD generally ends up in a narrow range anyway. It's CV that needs to be monitored more closely. DEX isn't relevant, other than using it as a baseline for CV. If you want to go first, you can buy limited DEX with Lightning Reflexes anyway, and going first doesn't help much if the other guy has obscene CV. Since most superheroic RPGs focus on the middle of the road power level hero, with an eye on the lower end of middle for starting characters, that's where I'd go baseline. For SPD, I'd say that this spread hits that ballpark: 2: Joe Blow. You can achieve the illustrious speed of 2 simply by walking around. 3: Jocks, Soldiers, Generic Agents, leet FPS players (but only in game). You get a 3 SPD through not only good coordination, and being in good shape, but also through maintaining a high level of alertness. This represents the ability to quickly size up a situation and act decisively, two things most people can't do. 4: Elite Athletes and Military. Take great reflexes, extreme alertness and then add on a huge heap of experience under fire. You won't find any non-combatants here, though you may see someone like a jockey or Indie car driver at 3 SPD. You don't train for 4 SPD, you earn it. 5: Veteran combatants, superhuman physiques/reactions. Robin Hood or a cinematic martial artist would probably fall here. So would super humans who have slightly boosted physical or mental capabilities. 6: Veteran combatants with extensive training, or superhuman with a heightened reflexes shtick. Basically, the majority of comic book martial artists fall in here. Cap, Bats, Iron Fist, you name it. You also get combat experienced and/or trained supers with physical enhancements, like Beast, Nightcrawler, and probably Spider-Man. 7+: Your SPD is a defining aspect of your character. In most games, this would be reserved for speedster types or major villains. So, most PCs are going to be 4-6 SPD. Slide the scale down to 3-5, and they are more vulnerable to mass agent attacks. As far as CV.... well, I've been up all night so I don't have the math handy. But a wide CV spread will do more damage to a game than a wide DEX spread. When I have a problem with an official write up, it's usually the obscene number of CSLs on the character sheet that bugs me rather than the DEX. What if you set out some benchmarks and someone makes a character to concept? Let's say I make The Marvelous Mop, Janitor by Day, Crime Fighter by Night. A strange accident involving cleaning fluids and a green monkey gave the Mop the power to absorb water and launch sudsy attacks at his enemies. As a Janitor, he's had no special physcial training. He's never taken an interest in sports. He's been a hero for a while, though, so has some combat experience under his belt. So, I give him SPD 2 and DEX 15, with two levels in his suds MP. So, CV 7 (depending on how he splits the levels) and SPD 2. Well.... You'll find that most comic book janitors turned crime fighters don't suck quite that bad. The character is seriously out of line with what the publishers have shown us to be the capabilities of a mid-list hero. Even with a SPD 3, he'd only qualify as an agency thug. Most superheroes either have innate abilities that overcompensate for their lack of training and experience (Spider-Man, for example), or have decent training, whether formal or learned on the job. PC heroes are assumed to be somewhat seasoned at the default point level, I think. There's nothing wrong with modeling an even lower CV and SPD range, but it's not that mid-list standard Champions has had all these years. The more you close the gap between the heroes and the SPD 2 / DEX 10 couch potatoes, the further you move away from the mainstream four color genre. I think at the de facto default levels, masses of agent level characters can't simply be shrugged off by most characters, especially if the agents have halfway decent gear and a sense of tactics.

Re: Are all the good names really taken? One thing's for certain, you'll be at a huge disadvantage if you are starting with a name and just a power concept. If you have some idea of backgrounds for these characters or any other character concept tidbits, that'd help. For example (probably not a good ones), if the growing hero was a blue collar type, particularly in construction, he may go by Crane. If he was into photography, he may go by Macro. If he was into going to live sporting events or concerts, he may go by Nosebleed. Eh, not quite great examples there, but I'm pretty sure none are taken yet.

Re: New to Champions and I have a question Oh, no arguments there, just keeping stuff straight for the new folks. =D

Re: Giant Airplanes I wonder how many of those would fit on that giant boat?

Re: New to Champions and I have a question Note that while this is a worthy list, you'll still need either the main Hero system book or Sidekick to run a game.

Re: Storn Art From Idea to Full Picture Year 4 Here are a few. Some may be too bleh, but here they are anyway: Nightingale: Superpowered nurse, ninteenth century blended with modern motif. She uses an air pressurized injector similar to the one used to give vaccinations to deliver a wide variety of interesting substances, both harmful and helpful. She should be better-looking than the original =). The Chiropractor: Where do bricks go when they throw their backs out after falling off a skyscraper or stopping an asteroid's collision course with the earth? There's only one guy strong enough to get the job done... The Chiropractor. Unfortunately, he has a sort of Jeckyl and Hyde personality, so sometimes, the spines just come right out.... Dark Matter: This guy knows where all of that unaccounted for mass in the universe has gone. With the ability to channel and internalize "dark matter," our hero can create force fields, platonic solids, and even become super dense himself. With his force field up, he's totally black, though he tends to "leak" bits of matter (think Kirby dots, though, uh not Kirby dots b/c they're just representing positive space.) Star: A robust, cosmically-powered energy projector. Her uniform is a sleeveless unitard with a large silver/white star in the center of the chest. With her powers activated, the black takes on the appearance of a starfield and the chest embelm pulses with silvery energy. A Gadgeteer/MA on a budget. Using parts either easily fabricated in a small machine shop (his garage) or modified off the shelf. His helmet is a cast off fighter pilot's helmet, rewired and integrated with a parabolic mic and infrared sight system. His armor is a combination of kevelar and titanium plates sewn in to reinforce key areas (torso, joints, high collar to protect spine/neck, toes, knuckles, and back of hands). His swingline system is based on the mittens tied together with a string through your coat sleaves principle. His back has a housing for a flywheel system, and each forearm mounts a pneumatic grapple-line launcher. When he releases with one hand, the next shot of line is reeled in and fed to his second hand. Unfortunately, the system can get tangled sometimes, and needs to be reeled in by hand. His vest has a number of canister type grenades of various types, all home-made using differnt types of tin (aluminum nowdays) cans, such as Campbell's soup, etc. His belt holds a largish pouch of tools on one side, including a balpeen hammer visible on the outside of the pouch. His weapon of choice (aside from armored fists and feet) is a bolo gun. The bolo gun consists of four tubes about the same size as tennis balls, around a central post which feeds the line between the bolos. After two bolos are fired, two more are advanced, and so on. A jar in a brain. Bulky brickish-looking guy with an exposed brain, in which is embedded a jar. Although he's drooling, it's obvious that he has both vast physical and psychic power. Pick any of the psychadelic visions of angels or beasts from Revelations and do a literal interpretation of it.

Re: Flight with Passengers - What's the Best Way? I'm pretty sure the book says it's OK for GMs to change the rules. It seems to me that a good time to make such changes is when an affect isn't achievable without six pages of debate, and when it's a common effect in the genre and not one with a great deal of impact on the campaign. I'd say taxiing people around with a movement power falls into that category. Usable On Others does not have an option for giving the power to a willing target and having them not be in control of the power. Usable As Attack does that, and willing targets could be considered DCV 0, but you could still miss the attack roll. "Ok, GL, roll to pick up your teammates with your power ring...ah, too bad, you rolled an 18, try again." The roll on willing targets could be handwaved, but then again, we're talking about handwaving. Why not just make a Limited Power limit on the UOO advantage to handle the lack of control for the passengers? Let's look at some common cases: Storm picks up her teammates and hauls them along with her on the wind. TK probably handles that one just fine. Green Lantern picks up his teammates in a force field bubble and flies with them, providing transport, defense, and sometimes life support. I'd say Force Wall is appropriate, house rule that you can drag people along if you have any TK STR, so you can also transport prisoners trapped in the bubble, and buy LS linked to the FW. So, you broke a rule to get a genre effect, no big deal. Ice slides, and other matter surfing powers. Frankly, most applications of slides I see have the character carrying the person or the passenger passively sitting on the ice slide. Other people may jump on the slide, or disrupt it by damaging the slide. Physical Manifestation as a limitation works here. The small advantage gained that someone can ride (but with severe penalties to act in any meaningful way is outweighed by the slide being attackable, because after all, the hero could simply sling a willing passenger over the shoulder. Flying Carpet. Flight with a physical manifestation or focus works for me. As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and slap on AE: Hex to it for carrying another person. The vehicles rules also work, and some purists may prefer that rule, in favor of using what's available first. Either way works, neither one breaks the game, so who cares? The issue is rarely going to be game breaking. Just make sure that the player pays appropriately for anything that gives a combat advantage on a regular basis, and go for it.

Re: I'm mad at Killer Shrike I'm mad too! Shrike owes me hundreds of hours of my life back that I've spent on his site.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Johnny Cash "A Boy Named Sue," "Rusty Cage," "Folsom Prison Blues"

Re: Flight with Passengers - What's the Best Way? I'm not suggesting anything, merely observing.

Re: Help with player knowledge vs. character knowledge I'd turn my head so I didn't have to witness him taking a leak. Of course, if there wasn't a fire hydrant nearby, I might just try to sack him with a tackle, and attempt to catch him off balance. If Vector is a speedster, it makes even more sense. I think either conclusion would be within the bounds of character knowledge.

Re: Flight with Passengers - What's the Best Way? This was the original post in the thread. It's a pretty straight forward question with a very easy answer that has deteriorated into a slugfest of unwarranted proportion. I think some folks are having their Enraged When Reading Boards and Stubborn Disadvantages triggered here. And the next time anyone goes to another board and defends the system against complaints of being overcomplicated, they'd do well to remember this thread, and that it's only as complicated as we need to make it. This isn't directed at anyone, it's just a general observation. If you do take offense, that's probably b/c you're guilty.

Re: Granularity Hero has the same granularity as any other popular game at the Heroic level, ie, the same number of significant stats, so why worry about it? Edit: Actually, the number of characteristics means it's more granular than most.

Re: How to model GL dragging along an englobing Force Wall? How about an adder: Common sense force wall +0. Then link a FW with some AE TK. Just let the stupid FW move as long as you have enough TK STR to lift the contents. That works fine for willing targets. For the unwilling, TK + Entangle. Done.

Re: Hero System and Rpg.net Yeah, the actual comment cited wasn't that bad. RPG.net's still mostly a turd-fest though.

Re: Hero System and Rpg.net RPG.net has a community full of idiots who like to get into geek oneupmanship contests. Best to ignore those types if you go there.

Re: New to Champions and I have a question I think starting with Sidekick is a good idea, too. You can get the meat of the system, and if you like it you have a second book handy at the table for passing around. If you don't, then you're out a lot less money.