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Cloppy Clip

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Everything posted by Cloppy Clip

  1. I don't think anyone could accuse Steve Long of being lazy, but I think his strongest villains are held back a bit by the need to cover absolutely every angle. When he does the midlisters you can see some really creative build ideas and tradeoffs being made, which is why I tend to prefer those characters in the villain books. Thanks for the Classic Enemies recommendation; I'll have to give it a look!
  2. To be honest, I prefer making my own NPCs too, but I like understanding why things are the way they are in the books, if that makes sense. So while I'm not going to drop Dr Destroyer as-written on my players, it's helpful for me to hear why he's written the way he is, so I'm hopefully better informed when making my own setting. @Tech I think I agree with you on the Multipowers. I'm more than okay with frameworks if the SFX justify it, but it does sometimes feel like too many villains have every possible variation on their power jammed into a Multipower, which makes them feel a bit samey. I have the same problem with the giant Cosmic VPP a lot of villains at the higher levels have.
  3. Thank you very much, everyone! Your point, Lord Liaden, about long-running campaigns reminds me of the Harbinger of Justice from Dark Champions. I'm not 100% sure on this, but if that statblock was what Steve Long had gotten him to after however many years of playing then it would make sense you'd want villains like Dr Destroyer to challenge Champions characters who'd been playing that long. Not that it helps my newbie players, of course, but there's always the options for powering down villains, or using some smaller fry to get them warmed up. Would it be worth picking up some 4e or earlier books, if the villains got a noticeable power-up in 5e?
  4. With emphasis on the Super. Something I've been wondering about is how certain conventions were decided on. 12 DC attacks feels about right for your baseline hero: bricks can lift a solid 100 tons with 60 STR, mentalists can steamroll bystander's minds while a bit of MD still counts for something, etc. But one thing that I don't quite understand is the top-end villains in the Champions universe: your Dr Destroyer types. They seem to have a baseline 30 DC power, whether that's Dr Destroyer's Destroyer-Beam, Menton's Mental/Telekinetic Powers or Takofanes's Darkest Sorcery. But isn't that a bit much? I only have the 5e book downloaded at the moment, but even a maxed-out Very High Powered superhero is going to fold very quickly against a 30d6 EB. So, given you could clobber most parties with a significantly weaker villain, why did 30 DC get settled on as the baseline for these guys? Does anybody know some old trivia that explains this?
  5. I'm not sure if this would count as a full house rule, but one thing that's helped us is putting the rules aside if we don't care too much about the result. HERO has a lot of rules to resolve almost any situation you can imagine, but if everybody's happy to agree on an answer we can just go with that instead of rolling it out. So if somebody takes a big hit we might say they get knocked back "this far" rather than rolling for knockback properly. If somebody disagrees we can always use the rules to decide what it should really be, but a lot of the time nobody cares enough about whether it should be 14m or 16m or what have you. This means we tend to spend more time on the parts of a fight the players are invested in, which keeps the game flowing and people's enthusiasm up. That said, that's more ignoring the rules than a house rule per se. I'd be interested to hear what tweaks people have made to the game.
  6. Blacksmith seems like the character that works really well as an NPC ally, but the fact that he doesn't have any attacks that always work regardless of the situation could make him a bit stressful to play as. But then that makes him a good supporting role for the PCs, as he can shine in the right circumstances, while not overshadowing anybody. And I'll have to go digging for the Omlevex bunch, thank you!
  7. It does seem odd to me that the rules make a big deal of laying out which powers are allowed in a framework, and reinforcing that frameworks should not be stacked inside other frameworks, only to let you put Multiform, transforming exclusively into copies of yourself with these forbidden powers, in frameworks. It feels caught halfway between two viewpoints (people can do whatever they want in a framework vs adding Multiform to the list of forbidden powers), and it doesn't feel like the most natural position to take.
  8. There's still a fair bit of overlap to account for, but Champions does something of this with the set-up of the different Worlds: Superhuman, Mystic, Martial, etc. Each one could effectively be treated as its own setting, and I wonder if there might not be some advantages to treating the Champions Universe as more of a multiverse of loosely-connected settings focused on different aspects, than trying to fit everything in all at once.
  9. Indeed I will! I thought I'd be lazy and just start with the most recent patch of posts, haha, but that backfired a little. You've been good about giving overviews of the characters, so it'll be worth doing a deep dive from page one at some point, to see all the ideas worked out in full. That said, you're on page 19 of this thread and you've done a fair few characters. Are there any particular ones you remember fondly? Either for the backstory, or some feature in their mechanics?
  10. Are you open to making any tweaks to the standard Greyhawk setting, Doc? GDShore's mention of city guard got me thinking about how, even though it's a standard fantasy trope by this point, it might get across the danger of the setting more if there weren't options for the villagers to turn to when something's afoot. From what I remember, medieval settlements relied on someone raising the hue and cry, after which everyone who heard it was expecting to chase after and capture the accused criminal. Failure to do so meant a fine for the settlement, but otherwise there was no official police force. And if Greyhawk HERO works this way, then whenever a dragon comes and starts stealing sheep the villagers would have no police to turn to, leaving the job up to whichever brave adventurers happen to be passing by...
  11. Absolutely agreed on that point, and especially that adding more stages for Advantages means creating more debates about exactly which stage something belongs at. I think, even if I were rebuilding the system from scratch, there's still a lot to be said for the current set-up, but if accurately pricing Armour-Piercing is winding somebody up enough that they'll put their game on hold and rewrite all of the rules then I wouldn't want to get in their way.
  12. I don't remember who it was I saw this from, but somewhere on this forum I came across the idea of making Regeneration an Advantage for REC, where +1/2 would move you one step up the Time Chart. That way, 1 BODY per turn cost 10 points, the same as Regeneration in 4e. Obviously HERO went a different direction in 5e and then 6e, but I quite liked the elegance of that approach.
  13. I think the game runs much more smoothly in general when players build characters with an eye toward what the world looks like. If the rules say it's perfectly find to use your Megascaled mental powers to mind control the universe while never leaving your house that's one thing, but are we playing in a game where mentalists regularly do so? If people are mature enough to admit that no, and it sounds like a bit of a silly game, then we can move on while keeping the stop sign options like Megascale open for when a character concept does justify them.
  14. I think the problem with AP stems from HERO measuring advantages in stages of +1/4. As unclevlad points out, AP is a bit stronger than an unmodified attack at +1/4, but as prior editions bore out it's a bit weaker at +1/2. We don't have anything in between these two stages, though, so you just have to pick whichever option feels more right to you. As for Penetrating, I could get behind pricing it differently for KAs, on the grounds that 1 BODY and 1 STUN aren't worth the same in terms of dice, but I'm not sure if that overcomplicates thing a bit. Of course, once you're at the point of 6th Edition's core books, trying to keep things from being overcomplicated might be wishful thinking.
  15. Good stuff here! I appreciate the notes about tweaking power level for the characters, since that's one of the things I always like about official Champions builds. I don't have Super Temps myself, but are there any established villains for these heroes to fight?
  16. For some reason, Fifth Edition dropped Regeneration and replaced it with a specific Healing build. That made Regenerating characteristics other than BODY fairly easy to work out, so I'd probably go with Hugh's suggestion of treating Regeneration as an Adjustment power that heals 2 points. On the topic of whether Regeneration per phase is too much, I'd say it's definitely a very different feel than limiting Regeneration to once per turn, but whether that's a bad thing or not depends on what sort of game you're playing. In previous editions (at least 4th and 5th, which are the ones I have), Delayed Return Rate started at +1/4, which makes long-lasting Drains much more of a thing to watch out for. In that case, having more reliable Regeneration of different characteristics would probably be justified, but if you're not expecting to deal with a lot of effectively-permanent Drains (like in most 6th Edition games, I'd guess), then it's probably going to take over the game a bit. @Duke Bushido I didn't know that about 2nd Edition Transfer, but that's a good reminder to me that the HERO tradition of character builds that make your GM pull their hair out with stress goes back a long way!
  17. @LoneWolf I think, in theory, making up any power on the spot could be all right as long as everybody's happy to go along with it. Even a messy NND doesn't have to be a problem if everybody's okay with it at the time. Conversely, if somebody wants to challenge a power that seems like it should be clear-cut (like Reduced END and nothing else on Blast), it's probably best to skip over it to keep the game moving. @Gauntlet Yes, Variable Advantages can shortcut a lot of uses for Frameworks. I remember one time I was trying to work out a Multipower of Naked Advantages, and it took me far too long to realise the obvious! @Chris Goodwin Sorry I'm a little slow on the uptake here. What would Delayed Effect do differently to Trigger in this specific case? (It doesn't help that I can struggle to tell them apart at the best of times) @Hugh Neilson I keep forgetting that you don't have to buy the full Pool amount in 6E any more, so the points don't actually work out to be that much more expensive even with the Cosmic Advantage. And, by the time you add on Limitations like Incantations and Gestures, it's back down to a much more reasonable level. @unclevlad That's a good point about the Multipower, and useful to keep in mind when you don't need that many spells on one character. And thank you to everyone else who's replied; I've got a much better picture in mind of what I want to do now, so it's all very much appreciated!
  18. Best of luck with your next session! If you make any tweaks based on feedback, please post them here as I'd love to know how it goes and what, if anything, you'd change.
  19. In practice what I tend to do with VPPs is have a list of example powers written up before the game (ideally the player can do this, but if not there's always good old me), and then while the player can theoretically improvise any power in combat, if they start to slow down working out specifics it just defaults to one of the example powers. The option to make literally anything is there for players who are more confident with the rules, but we have a backup in case something goes wrong.
  20. Sorry, I'd missed this thread when it was recent, but I think this idea could work well, especially if your players are more used to games like D&D that use a roll over scheme. I would caution that requiring 5 and 10 over for exceptional and critical successes is quite strict on a 3d6. If you wanted the equivalent to needing a 15 or a 20 on a d20 then +2 and +5 might be better targets to with for now. Thinking about characteristic rolls, you might want to adopt the D&D system of having scores and modifiers where 10 is +0, and every 5 points up or down (rounded so you get the same breakpoints at 3s and 8s) add or subtract a point of modifier. That way you could have skills become a case of paying 3 points to get your modifier to rolls, and 2 points to add +1 to the skill roll. You could then convert the Champions Complete table by subtracting 1 from the Skill Rolls to get your TN, since an 11- in the old system would be a +0 here, balanced against a TN of 10. That's all I can think of for now, but good luck with developing this and I'd love to hear more.
  21. Thank you LoneWolf, and I'm reassured you agree that this way of rolling is more limiting, if anything, than the usual way to use a VPP. While we're throwing ideas around, would forcing Trigger to be bought on every power work as a slightly-cheaper alternative to buying the VPP as a zero-phase action? I'm trying to get a sense of the different options, and want to make sense of what generally works (Zero-phase Advantage) and what doesn't (Linked Limitation).
  22. I think this extends to special effects in general in HERO. Certain special effects suggest certain mechanics, but unless you actually have them down on your character sheet they won't come up in play. This can be good for those comic book powers that would have catastrophic side-effects, like a normal human running at supersonic speeds, since players can decide how realistic they want their special effects to be based on what they pay for. But it can also work for other genre conventions. Normally a sword would be a HKA because of its lethality, but if you're playing in a game based on cartoon violence where nobody dies then you could buy it as a HA. Or, if you remember Final Fantasy 7, where Sephiroth can destroy the entire solar system with an attack that doesn't manage to kill the human party, you could give a super-powerful special effect to Blast 20d6, allowing you to have big "cutscene" moments while keeping your normal gameplay somewhat manageable.
  23. I'm playing around with some ideas for an improvised magic system, but I'm having a hard time expressing what I want to do in the rules. I want a mage to be able to make a Magic roll and cast a spell on the spot, which seems like a VPP. The problem is that a VPP has you make a skill roll and then gives you the power permanently until you want to change it again. It also doesn't cast the spell with the same action, which I would like my mages to be able to do. I can resolve the first problem with a Limitation saying the VPP can only be changed at the moment the spell is cast, but what would be the best way to combine the two actions? Can you Link a power created by a VPP to the VPP itself, even if that power doesn't technically exist at the start of the action? Adding +1 to the Control cost to make changing the VPP a zero-phase action seems a bit overkill to me, since you're giving up the ability to repeatedly use the power, but that might be the best way to handle this. Does anybody have any ideas on what Advantages or Limitations to use here? Or, if you can think of a way to do this without a VPP, that would be appreciated too.
  24. This might be better suited for the questions forum, but would all those mass doublings be needed, unclevlad? I'd always assumed that the AOE advantage would mitigate that to an extent: in the house example, each hex the house covers would hold a weight of about 4,000 kg, so as long as the AOE covers the entire house I'd assumed that you'd only need to be able to lift 4,000 kg (6 doublings) instead of 150,000 kg (11 doublings). But, having typed that out, I realise I can't remember where I read this rule. Have I gone and made the whole thing up, or can you skimp out on points this way?
  25. The way I see it, Fantasy Hero characters might be able to stock up on free equipment, but they'd still be constrained by being Heroic instead of Superheroic, which means you're limited to whatever the setting's idea of a normal person looks like. Just like a Superheroic character doesn't have to worry about NCM, being free to buy up their characteristics as high as they want, I think the Champions should be allowed to buy better equivalents of whatever the Fantasy Hero gang are limited to. So if the strongest magic sword is a 4d6 KA, the Champion should be free to buy a 16d6 Energy Blast or what have you, since they're Superheroic and are free to go beyond mortal limitations. So Legolas could have a magic bow and arrow, but Superman would be free to buy up his defences against Magic to the point that those arrows plink off him harmlessly. There is the matter of points limits, so Superman might have to skip out on some Superheroic defences leaving him vulnerable to a particular mode of attack, but I feel pretty confident that the Champion should outmatch the Fantasy Hero at their chosen specialty, if nothing else.
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