Pattern Ghost

Re: The Question write up?

Re: Is Find Weakness mispriced? Here's what I'm wondering: Why is Find Weakness even in the game, aside from modelling Karnak from the Inhumans? We've got AP and Penetrating. Do we really need Find Weakness with a whole different mechanic?

Re: On the Use and Abuse of Character Weaknesses.... I think the frequency rolls should be dropped. Those rules come from an older mindset where the dice sometimes were expected to dictate a bit too much. I mean, if you rolled for a group of the Champions above, you're pretty much gauranteed to have a minimum of one hunted a session creep in. The whole "The GM secretly makes this roll at the beginning of the adventure..." thing really needs to go.

Re: I finished reading 5th Edition, Revised Yeah, I missed that long post #101 before I posted this. The last line there about Killing attacks still makes me think that Robyn doesn't understand reasoning from effect. ALL attacks can cause death. The situations cited can be handled with an additional modifier of "Only to prevent unheroic death" at whatever value is appropriate based on frequency. Probably not worth much, IMO. A simple custom limitation does the trick though, but I think the game mechanics dictate the special defense be on both resistant and non-resistant levels to get the desired result.

Re: I finished reading 5th Edition, Revised Re: Plaything of the Gods and defending against Killing attacks but not against Normal attacks. This is a case of not reasoning from effect, and the build for the situation is simple. What is described in the first post is someone that's simply hard to kill. You can stun them, beat them senseless, whatever, but they survive. So, hard to kill = what? It means you don't lose body easily. Easy way to handle it: Armor (or whatever resistant defense), Only Vs Body Damage (-1). Just buy enough Armor to handle whatever level of abuse you think your character is capable of.

Re: Acronym Refresher I call shenanigans! Everyone knows PD is Police Department!

Re: Brainstorming: Defense Manuver SFX I just made a character with precognition that has full defense maneuver.

Re: Had an idea about NND It's an interesting concept, but it can be done cheaper and more effectively with a multipower construct, I'd think. New method: 6d6 NND (+1), Does Base Damage (+1/2) Cost: 75 vs. MP: Blastingness 60 pt reserve 6u 6d6 NND (+1) 6u 12d6 EB Now, it may be useful in terms of not wasting an attack completely if the target has the NND defense. However, most NND attack dice have relatively low values, so you're not gaining much except against weaker targets. Given how situational it is, it seems like it wouldn't present any balance problems.

Re: On the Use and Abuse of Character Weaknesses.... The Disadvantage system is inherently flawed at higher power levels if you use the suggested numbers. What GM really wants to keep track of an enforce 150 pts of Disadvantages for an entire group? This tends to dilute the higher point value disadvantages considerably. It's more reasonable to cut back on allowed disadvantages (and by allowed, I mean required, because the game is usually balanced around everyone having the same total character cost and players will take the max points availble nine times out of ten), and have them be more meaningful. I've got my Champions 5th book sitting here. Let's look at the sample team, the, er, Champions: DNPCS: 4 total, one at 11-, the rest at 8- Hunteds: Whole team has Viper 8-, then there are 7 more 8- hunteds that are NPCs. Psych Lims:195 pts total, with everyone having 2-3 lims. Then there are some throwaway Disads, like the team mage having a Vulnerability to Cold. Tell me they weren't just looking to fill out a full 150 disads with that one. Flipping to the villains, you'll find that the villains don't even have a full 150 Disads, even on the 350 pt characters. IMO, if the disads are used according to their mechanics, 50-100 pts should be plenty enough for a superheroic level game, and 25-50 should be plenty for anything lower powered. At least you'll be able to enforce the disadvantages. Giving out points for disadvantages you won't be enforcing is the same thing as giving out base character points anyway.

Re: HWYW*: Marvel Civil War? I don't know if I could bring myself to do such a massively stupid storyline. A few things I'd do differently, though: 1. I'd do a much longer build up to the Registration Act, across multiple titles, before starting the thing. There should be tension building up in both the public and the superhero community regarding the issue. Then the trigger event would simply be the straw that broke the camel's back. This story arc, in my mind, is an attempt to reconcile the mutant hysteria with the lack of hysteria over every other super powered being in the MU, which is a good idea. Having ONE trigger event is a bad idea. 2. Along the same lines, I'd have a bit less violent and sudden rift develop down the pro/anti lines. Let the arguments be a continuation of rational pro/con arguments. Reference past incidents that should have bearing here, too. Maybe a news report mentioning some past events, or heroes arguing about the time that X villain trashed Y city. 3. In no F-ing way, shape, or form, would Spider-Man unmask. That's far, far too much of a stretch for the character. He has a rogue's gallery that's nearly as psychotic as Batman's and just as willing to take out his loved ones. I don't know that I'd see him as the leader for the anti movement, but an impassioned spokesperson, yes. 4. I'd definately do some research into each major player's core identity, philosophy and history before assigning any sides. 5. A bit more build up to the registration agenda's more extreme tactics would be in order. I'd include a couple of incidents of stronger than called-for resistance from the antis which may call for a presidential order to suspsend habeus corpus. In this way, you may have a case of Captain America intially supporting the pro side, and even have some good hero fights with more rational heroes on the pro side hunting down some anti side hot heads. THEN you can have the government go after some folks who aren't doing anything but minding their own business, and you can have questions arise about where the detainees are kept. Eventually you can build up to the Thor Clone, and the New Thunderbolts. Some of the pro side would start to split off as the craziness escalates. 6. Speaking of the Thor Clone. Sure, let's have a Thor clone smite some poor schmuck to death. It'd have to be someone a lot more prominant than Goliath. Let's make it count, dammit. Now, for the second part. Marvel did Ragnarok, correct? I didn't read it, but the upshot is a bunch of dead Norse gods, I take it, and Thor missing in deep space? Hammer left on the ground, retrieved by mysterious shadowy figure with "DB" initials on his bag? OK, let's have that guy show up. One of the few survivors of Ragnarok... Magni, son of Thor, god of Strength: from the Wikipedia entry on Magni: Hmm, half giant, half Thor, and can lift stuff at three days old that, depending on how you read it, either all the Aesir combined, or no one Aesir, including Thor, can lift. Let's have him toss Mjolnor straight through Clone Thor. Anyway, just some random thoughts. =D

Re: Reading FRED for the First Time Here's a sample of character building that I put up a while back. You may find it useful: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=62124#post62124 Edit: One thing you'll note on the characteristics portion of the sample is that I take a bit of advantage of rounding rules to get the numbers to come out to nice round numbers. For example, 15 STR and 13 CON contribute 8 (7.5 rounded up) and 7 (6.5 rounded up) to the STUN total. Then I take 15 BODY so I come out with a nice even 30 STUN and enough BODY to survive taking some killing damage. I also used rounding with Running taken at 7". This gives a 4" half move (3.5" rounded up), which can come in handy. This isn't anything abusive per se, and most long time players use rounded numbers pretty much instinctively. It's just a quirk of the way that rounding works that tends to devalue some of the off values.

Re: nbc heroes tv series Hiro Nakamura I think the grounding was actually pretty well guided. He just forgot to post gaurds outside his house to prevent the window escape.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I think her arm is fine, though she has a slight case of man-hand on the left hand. The area between the thumb and her leg seems a bit bulky, but it doesn't jump out at you.

Re: WWYCD: Red Garden My character doesn't know the girls are from an anime, and likes dogs. He'd attack the girls.

Re: Stupid Animal Questions The value of goats is most likely much higher in a low Fantasy campaign. Remember, the value of goats today is based on herd sizes that are entirely unheard of in the type of setting you're talking about. That brings the values of goats down considerably. I'd put things into perspective of a "herd" of goats (1 pt), a "large herd" of goats (2 pts), a person in charge of or of influence in a goat co-op, managing the interests of large numbers of goat herders in the area, perhaps the key player in moving the goats to market (3 pts), and at 4 pts or above, you didn't get there on goats, you must have some other sources of wealth. Now, if you wanted to get technical, you may be able to dig up some references to the average herd size way back when. But the key point is you must scale it over time, as the large commercial herds of today didn't exist way back when. For example, an "average" breeding alpaca (a wool animal) today goes for around 20-30k, with prime specimens up into insane prices. However, Angora goats (also raised for wool) goes for around 250-500 dollars, with some primo subjects commanding more. Sheep go for around fifty bucks. The price differences are all in how the animals are raised and managed. Alpacas are not currently actually being raised for wool, they're being raised to breed more alpacas with better quality wool, in the hope of establishing a future wool industry. Thus they are very low in numbers and somewhat speculative. Angora goats are a lot less common than sheep and prime breeding stock is in demand, whereas sheep are inexpensive because they're into very large scale production. For a medieval guy with a 1 pt perk, I'd give him fifty goats and call it a day. If you want, you can add for flavor that his goats have a good reputation for any of the following: good meat goats, heavy slaughter weight; good wool goats, fine quality wool in large bulk; females that produce large quantities of milk; females that tend to throw twins. All of those add value to the herd due to the potential breeder value.

Re: Resolving a Combat in One Roll? Let me add: The above assumes that the Mook fight does have some consequence. In my mind, thinking of all the great Mook fights of comics and the screen, the Mook fight exists to serve two purposes: 1. To showcase how badass the protagonist(s) is(are). 2. To establish that no matter how poorly-trained, the villain is bad ass enough to have a squad of Mooks. IOW, Mooks boost the Bad-Ass-O-Meter of everyone else in the story.

Re: Resolving a Combat in One Roll? It seems I'm jumping in a little late here, but for handling large groups of Mooks, here's what I'd do. I'd tend to go for just using Mook stats for the mooks and running the combat normally. Each Mook gets his CV/Damage recorded. Each time a PC hits a Mook, the margin of success determines how close to taking out the Mook the attack comes.* Suspend any optional damage rules in place in the game for the duration, for both sides. (Things like bleeding, hit locations, etc.) For dramatic effect, allow players to make called shots if they want, but assume they succeed if the attack roll succeeds. These are Mooks, after all, it's OK to show a little flair. If the damage roll is below average, the Mook is still standing but the next hit will take it out. Have some of the Mooks flee, or attempt to if they get hit like this, and that thins them out a bit. If the damage roll is average or better, the mook is one shotted, and out of the fight. You don't need to track anything except damage to the PCs this way. You'd want to assign values to the Mook's stats that ensure that the PCs won't take too much damage, but I think it's appropriate for the genres in question for the heroes to emerge with a few dings and dents after the fight. *For some assumed numbers. Let's assume the average PC has a CV of around 8 or so, counting base CV and maneuvers/skill levels available. You'd want to give the Mooks a less than even chance to land a hit on the PCs. So, let's give the Mooks a CV of 5. The Mooks need 14- to hit a PC and the PCs need an 8- to hit the Mooks. Give the Mooks some appropriate weaponry, and you're ready to roll.

I just had an idea for a particularly nasty vigilante archer trick. What if an archer were to lace a broadhead with an extremely potent anticoagulant to ensure their victim bled out, to hinder medical treatment/first aid attempts? How would you build it in Hero terms?

Re: Harbinger got neutered! You could always get him some neuticles . . .

Re: Nonarchetypal Heroes I think that quote sums it up quite well. The dungeon crawl can certainly be fun. The new edition seems to really encourage the tactical/wargame approach to using the minis a bit overmuch (though I think you could ignore some of that altogether and still be left with a playable system) for my tastes as well. But the bottom line is the game is designed for powering up to be able to take on the next biggest dungeon, not for what has become roleplaying in the intervening years since its release. One thing that always annoys me on other boards when Hero is mentioned is that so many people think it's a rules lawyery game. The first time I saw the Disadvantages side of a Champions character sheet, my only thought was "WOW! These guys have built a game mechanic to help you roleplay!" Ars Magica was the next game out that did something similar, then Amber DRPG (that I picked up, that is.) BUT, Hero was there first (IME), with rules built to encourage players to get into character. Now all the rules-light gamers out there, whose games are very much inspired by this aspect of Hero/Champions, denegrate the game on the grounds of it being rules-intensive, when a huge chunk of the rules are a roleplaying aid. Not to mention that 4th Edition Champions had one of the best sections on roleplaying I've read in any game book. (Sorry, Steve, but I'm going to have to admit to having glossed over the similar material in Fifth. =)

Re: Unarchetypal Heroes Actually, that might be amusing. =) Of course, with DnD, you'll get standard classes as choices most of the time, and anything non-standard has a fair shot at being munchkiny. Of course, with Fantasy Hero, players are encouraged to build something more or less from scratch, so you get happy accidents like your example group. Sorry about that comment. I thought it sounded very bad when I read it later, but I didn't edit it out b/c I had to run to work.

Re: "Common Sense" descrepancy Champions has a "Normal Guy" (not sure if that's the exact phrase used) Disadvantage package. It has stuff like vulnerability to falling damage to make the character more fragile, or less cinematic, as it were. I can see a Physical Disadvantage that limits the character's ability to damage tougher materials working in a similar fashion. The up side is that you wouldn't have to limit his attacks, just say that the character can't damage things a normal human can't reasonably be expected to damage, and/or takes feedback damage when he doesn't do BODY damage or KB* with an attack vs. hardened targets (can define "hardened" how you want, such as having resistant defenses, or defenses over a certain amount, or made of certain materials, etc.) edit: *stole that KB part from the above post, as it also makes sense.

Re: Range of Light OK, a hex is two meters diameter. That's one honking big laser pointer! In fact, that's big for a flashlight. Not sure I understand your reasoning on this one.

Re: Unarchetypal Heroes The default setting for those areas of the books that need to make an assumption on the setting is indeed Greyhawk. Now, tell me everything you know about the Greyhawk setting based on a read-through of the core books. That's a bit harder, since we only have some monsters, the names of some dieties and some spells named after Greyhawk mages. You cannot construct a Greyhawk specific scenario out of the core books, because you have no history, no geography, and no people to populate it. Therefore, you have no setting that amounts to anything other than some flavor text. Granted, the rules are structured as such that the game is expected (espcially at the higher levels) to be played in a Greyhawk type world full of powerful magic, strong monsters, and all the rest that goes along with the DnD flavor of fantasy. And it's hard to seperate the rules from the style of play. But, for lower-key play, with lower level encounters, it's not impossible, just not ideal.

Re: Nonarchetypal Heroes I think you put your finger on the biggest problem with DnD: The game seems to be designed so that access to magic at higher levels is a necessity. And the skills system, while better than previous editions, lacks a lot of depth. 3rd Edition added a bit of flexibility, but it's still far from a generic system. Hero just does a lot of stuff better.