Cloppy Clip

I like your note about using cumulative in this situation, but the business with breakout rolls is something I'd overlooked, and that I have just been brushing up on. For this particular power, it might work out better to drop the voice range area of effect and make it a normal single-target power. Then, with the Clever Repartee power from APG2 (effectively a Drain PRE), you could get back to the usual Talent Social Combat system, where the user would want to reduce their opponent's PRE over time and then hit them with the Mental Illusions when they're vulnerable. That would probably make for more engaging gameplay, too, as there's the question of how much PRE to drain before going for the big finisher. That said, if breakout rolls are normal EGO rolls, only modified by how much you beat the effect roll, is it just me or is it going to be quite difficult to build low-AP mental powers? For a low-powered campaign focused around them like this one, that's something that needs keeping an eye on.

I'm not sure if I can reproduce the text exactly, but effectively it's an adder equal to the amount required to get the modifier. So an EGO + 10 effect would be a 10 point adder. For what it's worth, it does have a warning sign (not a stop sign) by it. APG p69 if anyone has it and wants to look up the reference themselves. EDIT: To clarify, with the adder any successful roll always achieves that modifier, as I understand it. So for this power you pay 10 points for the adder, but any amount over the defender's PRE would get you the +10 effect.

While playing around with ideas for social/mental powers, I came across these two and wanted to check them by the more experienced members of the forum. The specific modifiers discussed above can be changed if need be, but my main focus is on the power builds as a whole. Psionic Surgery Major Transform 6d6, Attack Versus Alternate Defense (Mental Defense; +0), Alternate Combat Value (uses OMCV against DMCV; +1/4) (75 Active Points); Only Works Against Targets In Social Combat (-2), No Range (-1/2), Based on INT (-1/4) The first idea I had was for a secret society to use to provide a "reincarnation" service for the wealthy and elite. You provide them with examples of your memories and personality traits that you feel describe you and, however long it takes, the society will find someone of a similar description to you and use this power to reshape their mind until they truly believe themselves to be you. Then, in the event that you die, this doppelganger can be placed in control of your estate, ensuring that you retain control over it from beyond the grave. Now, I've picked Major Transform because the Psionic Surgery example from APG1 only gave examples up to and including Major, so I figure by that logic successive uses of a Major Transform should be able to, over time, replace enough of someone's mind to constitute an entire personality-switch. But do you think Severe would be justified, since the end-result is complete replacement of the mind, or would that only be needed for doing the whole process with one use? Also, the APG writeup included a Limited Target modifier (mental "objects" in the minds of sentient beings), but I wasn't sure if this was justified in this case, since I couldn't think of anything else you'd change with a Mental Transform. Any thoughts on this? A Superior Kind of Chicanery Mental Illusions 4d6, Guaranteed Modifier, Constant (+1/2), Area Of Effect (32m Radius; +1) (75 Active Points); Only Works Against Targets In Social Combat (-2), No Range (-1/2), Based on PRE (-1/4), Incantations (-1/4) This power uses the Major ability of Mental Illusions to make friends look and act like enemies, and works in reverse by making the user come across as innocent of any crime to anyone who can hear them speak. The Guaranteed Modifier is from APG and guarantees a PRE + 10 effect if the roll succeeds, which is what I've judged this level of change at, and the other modifiers are designed to create a Voice Range/Damage Shield effect. What I'm not sure about is that both of these modifiers require Area Of Effect: Voice Range at the +1 level and Damage Shield as a personal surface. I decided to pay for the more expensive version, but should I technically pay for both? I'm not the best at keeping track of modifiers, and these can be some messy interactions, so I might be setting myself up to fail here, but does anybody think there's enough worth working with here? As always, any thoughts are greatly appreciated!

That makes sense, and is probably a much better way than tinkering endlessly with conversions, no matter how tempting that may be lol. Are your players all familiar with HERO, or do they need some help with the mechanics. And if the latter, how easy are they finding the combat? I have a sneaking idea that HERO combat gets much simpler for new players if you have someone experienced who can break down each option at any given point into "roll these dice, try to get 12 or under" and other similar examples, but unfortunately I'm the closest thing to an experienced player my table has, so that doesn't work out so well in practice for me!

That's another good point. I'd started by simply porting over the modifiers from the Talent Social Combat system, but I wonder if things like being mutually intelligible and requiring enough time to convey ideas were supposed to be represented by that hefty Only Works Against Targets In Social Combat. If we had modifiers for Incantations and Extra Time then we'd probably need to take that out, or at least reduce the limitation severely, and at that point is there anything else missing that could do with being made explicit?

Not sure the best place to post this, but I’ve seen other people post their magic systems and was hoping I could get some feedback for mine? The setting is the United Kingdom in the 30s, modelled after the Golden Age of Detective fiction written then. In play, I see it working as a sort of political thriller, but because of my love of mysteries, a lot of the action will revolve around somebody turning up dead and the players having to figure out who’s done it, and how to protect their interests in the fallout. To go along with this less violent approach to HERO, and because I love superpowers as much as the next person, I wanted a system of social-based magic loosely modelled on the Talent Social Combat system from APG2. But this will be expanded to the most overtly-supernatural, where psychic powers are widely known about and studied, but only seem to present themselves through debate and rhetoric. With this, virtually any mental power can be expressed as Rhetoric (playing on emotions to sway a target) or Logic (appealing to rationality to convince someone) by adding the following modifiers: No Range (−½), Only Works Against Targets In Social Combat (−2), Based on PRE (−¼) (for Rhetoric), and No Range (−½), Only Works Against Targets In Social Combat (−2), Based on INT (−¼) (for Logic). Under this system, Presence Attacks can be targeted against PRE or INT at the attackers discretion, based on how they want to structure their argument, so either approach can be spun off into its own sub-system, while still using virtually the exact same powers. Questions I was wondering, though, why the talents in APG2 had that No Range modifier. It’s consistent throughout the section, so I’ve kept it here just to be safe, but unless I’m misunderstanding something you don’t have to be right next to somebody to talk to them. Also, are there any interesting mental powers people can think of to convert to this system? I’ve got ideas for a few that I may post later, and I know you can get some mileage by converting non-mental powers like Entangle to being mental, but I’m sure the board’s wealth of knowledge can turn up something I’ve missed. Thank you very much!

That looks like a great solution to the battlemap question, and much more artistic than I could manage. If you don't mind my asking, how many points are your players working with? And how are you handling the conversion of D&D monsters to HERO - are you using some sort of system, or do you just substitute whatever seems reasonable? Hope your second session goes well!

It sometimes gets to the point where I figure that, if the rules worked one way in that edition and another in this one, and presumably people were happy enough playing both versions, then the game won't fall apart completely if I tweak a few things. I think the game's precision can sometimes be misleading, where people assume that the specific points costs for abilities mean that the ability must be worth that much, and not one point more or less. Actually, I think the game is much more flexible than it can sometimes appear to new players, and these slight changes through its lifetime are my proof of that.

Don't have much to add, but this is a fascinating project so I'd love to hear more! It's been years since I've read TOEE, but I think I remember the gist of it. Still, it sounds like you're expanding on it and adding new elements based on your players, so my memory might not be as much help as I'd hope here. I was thinking about the zhi marking one of your characters has. The wikipedia article says it's used in Daoism, which puts me in mind of those cultivation stories that have popped up recently. I've not had much luck with them, but the idea of developing increased power by consuming alchemical herbs and potions might be a good outline for what these zealots who are popping up believe in and practice. Whatever you decide, I'm definitely looking forward to finding out what comes of this.

I suppose that's just the risk you run when switching between editions, where the exact point costs can shift about. At least it's not something like D&D, where it almost looks like you're playing a different game depending on the edition!

I get the impression that the current rounding rules are in place to minimise 'feel bad' situations by always rounding in the player's favour, but there's no reason if you were starting from the beginning that it'd have to be that way. And something like always dropping fractions would probably eliminate situations where somebody learning the rules has to figure out to buy 3 INT instead of 5, which can be a bit confusing for newbies. Things might go a bit askew if you drop fractions at each step, though, so I might make it a rule that you keep all fractions until the very end and then drop them. I don't know how they do it in D&D 5e, but in HERO there are enough stages to some calculations that it could make a difference.

Oh, I certainly went off the rails a bit there, and I agree you don't need to take things as far as that! That was mostly me spitballing ideas because I wanted to see how they turned out, and if anything would turn out useful to anyone that'd be an extra bonus. Your changes do sound interesting, though, so if you get anything pulled together I'd love to read them.

So there was indeed a good game-balance reason I'd missed! Yes, I hadn't thought about draining REC, but that would definitely do it. So, in that case, would this Destruction effect be completely replaced by a Delayed Return Rate Drain, for the purposes of a 6E game?

Gamers were clearly made of sterner stuff back in the day, because the examples in the 6E rulebooks were instrumental for getting these rules into my thick head. If you do ever get around to adding examples, I will say that one of my pet peeves is designers who always pick the nice simple examples and end up missing out key information. The number of games I've seen where there's no rounding rule specified, and where every example that could demonstrate one conveniently picks values that end in whole numbers, is truly perplexing something...

I see I jumped the gun a bit, unclevlad, and missed what you were going for with the killing advantage. The normal/killing attack distinction can feel a bit arbitrary to me sometimes, so I agree that if we're changing things around this much we don't need to try and port it over as-is. And I think I might be missing something again, because Hugh's idea about allowing any characteristic to add onto any attack... doesn't really bother me? I can see why it's not done that way in HERO as it is right now, or at least I think I do, but if we're tinkering with things to this level I don't see a mechanical reason why you can't add, say, DEX to a Mental Illusions power. There are lots of problems with what sort of fictional power that's supposed to represent, but I'm not sure it's HERO's place to judge the stories we work around the mechanics: if the players and GM are happy working something out together for their game, and there's nothing wrong with the mechanics behind it, why shouldn't we allow such things? There is the consideration of whether buying the characteristic along with a +1/2 advantage is cheaper or more expensive than buying more of the power with an appropriate limitation, but I think there's enough examples of different ways to do the same concept that come down to points accounting in HERO that we could allow one more. Right?

This Destruction power sounds interesting, even if by the sounds of it you can replicate it near enough with Delayed Return Rate. Out of curiosity, if Drain and Destruction (or Drain with Delayed Return Rate) used to return the points at REC/turn and REC/month, instead of the 5/turn and 5/month we have now, would it be possible to have a +0 modifier that replaces the 5 points per turn with REC? It's a thought I've sometimes had while thinking up powers that, in the fictional world of the game, would heal back like physical injuries and therefore be affected by the victim's REC. Or was this something changed for a good game-balance reason that I don't know about?

I'm not going to be any help on older mechanics, but it is interesting reading about how the game's evolved over the years, so thank you for the reading material! On a more productive note, the excerpts you've written look solid to me. I'm not an expert on technical writing, but they seem laid out well enough to teach a new player the rules as they come up, without wasting too much word count. One suggestion I might make, if you have the space, is to provide examples of some of the procedures, particularly for things like BODY damage where, even with totally unambiguous text and all the will in the world, I feel people can still get tripped up by the different ways of calculating it in different scenarios. But examples can be a pain to write, and you don't want to get bogged down in minutiae to the point you lose steam, so it'd make sense if it's not a priority for you. But what you have now is a good introduction to the rules, and I think it could definitely meet the standards of a professional rulebook.

There'll probably be enough unforeseen knock-on effects with those changes alone, unclevlad, but if we're feeling cheeky could we go even further and add killing attacks to this single damage power? If we're pricing it as 5 points for 1d6 and using modifiers to give the damage properties like 'no range' or 'adds STR', then couldn't 'killing attack' work as a +0 modifier (would that be an advantage or a limitation?) that converts 1d6 normal damage to 1 DC of killing attack damage? That way you could take all the modifiers and pricing structures you've worked out for normal damage and replicate them for killing attacks to sort out RKA and HKA into one consolidated power. It might be pushing things too far, and I'm not sure if it would be an improvement in play or if it'd just make things worse, but it does feel somewhat cleaner from an aesthetics viewpoint...

If it's all right to go a little off-topic, I'm interested by that mention of eliminating characteristic rolls, greypaladin_01, assuming you didn't just mean in the context of contests. If you want to strive for consistency in resolution mechanics, which I think is definitely a laudable goal (if not one HERO is necessarily concerned with as-written), then using the 'roll and count BODY' method for uncontested rolls would make sense. I haven't gone through this thoroughly, so I'm just playing around here, but a target number-based system seems obvious. Roll as if the characteristic were STR, add up the BODY, and compare to a number based on the difficulty of the task. You could match the difficulty to the number of dice rolled by someone of the equivalent skill, so average difficulty would be 2+, as someone with an average characteristic of 10 would roll 2d6. This would let you benchmark higher or lower difficulties fairly quickly in-game, as you'd just have to imagine the rough level of character you'd see taking on each task. You could even keep modifiers to the roll in for circumstances that affect performance by adding or subtracting dice. Although, thinking about it, it might be more elegant to work everything off the difficulty number, so you only have one axis to keep track of. It's a personal preference thing, like so much of this, I guess. The main thing to watch out for would be RSR and Power rolls. The HERO skill system is fairly loose so you can tinker with it without too much trouble, but there's a lot more going on with the powers side of things, so you might need to keep an eye out for how changes to skill rolls affect powers that depend on them. Like I said, I haven't had a proper look at this, but crunching some quick numbers for 60 AP powers (so a -6 with the baseline rules) seems to indicate that a difficulty of 2 + 1 per 10 Active Points should get you similar results. But don't hold me to that! Sorry if this isn't what you had in mind for your post, but it was an interesting idea to me (even if I don't use it in my own games), so thank you for giving me the chance to play around in this space.

Other people have said as much, but I think it bears repeating that points in HERO don't represent a character's power. This is something that tripped me up when I started with the game. Instead, the ability guidelines you set (examples in 6th edition are on page 35) decide how effective characters will be, and as long as everybody sticks to those then you could have characters with completely different points totals that still played together just fine. The points aren't here to balance characters, but to get you thinking about what matters for your character concept, and to let people customise their characters freely from the same starting point. So for villains, it's more reasonable to compare their abilities like CV, DC, etc, to the players', and work out how dangerous you want them to be. A villain built on fewer points than the players could be a truly threatening foe if all of their points are put into combat abilities, while one with heavy investment in skills might be a pushover despite having twice as many or more points. If you still want to use points as a measure of how experienced an NPC is, I still wouldn't assign a fixed number per year spent active. After all, experience can vary in quality depending on what you're doing. A character who spent six months fighting wave after wave of supervillains would come out the other end with more experience points than one who spent ten years rearing cattle in Nebraska (at least in most cases). When designing NPCs with a lot of experience, then, I'd think about what those experiences were in their career. If they've had a lot of useful encounters to learn from then that would justify picking up a lot of skills and variations for their powers, which would bump up the point total. As long as you can justify each purchase based on their backstory, the sky's the limit since you're building a character to reflect a concept instead of to within a points budget. Sorry, that's a bit long-winded, but hopefully something in there can be of use!

If using the Social Combat Maneuvers rules from APG 2, page 85, is an official value given anywhere for the frequency of Social Defense if used as an Alternate Defense for an AVAD power? Or is it up to a given table to decide for themselves?

That's true, and -kage names are, at least in my mind, sufficiently ninjaesque that you could shorten it to Robokage to match with the other four names. But having a full name with a title feels very suitable too, and there's always potential in having one name stand out from the others. I like this a lot, and now I'm cursing myself for not thinking of it. 😂

Might be a bit of a stretch, but how about Koppomatic? Combining automatic with koppojutsu (lit. 'bone technique'), a style focused on breaking bones and joint locks that was ostensibly used by historical ninja, and is a part of modern reconstructionist syllabi. If you're happy with the -matic part then Ninjamatic would work as well, but I personally prefer the sound of koppo. There's no accounting for taste, I'm afraid!

Volume 1 pages 34 and 35 have guidelines for the different levels of power you can find in HERO, but I'm having some problems extending the table and would appreciate some input from the forum, if that's all right. Firstly, the ability guidelines seem quite loose to me, and I'd be interested in tightening them up. My first thought is to tie the rough power level to the expected DC of a standard attack. From there you could derive expected defences, and increased or decreased CV would adjust the damage dealt out or taken accordingly and factored in, along with SPD and everything else. With that said, how many points would you want, thereabouts, for a given DC? I think I've seen it said that 12 DC is standard for a 400-point game, but if you were given a different DC to aim for then how many points would you want to hit that target while also having some wiggle room for your other powers and skills and such? Then, once we've got a point total in mind, how many Matching Complications would seem right for that total? The table on page 34 has complications scaling more slowly than total points, which makes sense, but what's the level that feels right to you? And the same applies to how many points can go into any given complication, although that seems to generally hold at around half the total Matching Complication points. So, in short, what would be a good rough formula to go from DC to Starting Points to Matching Complications?

I think you've got the core ideas down right. It's been a while since I've gone through Part 4, but those would cover most of the uses of his power that I remember. A Multipower with the different uses probably wouldn't be too expensive either, although you might want some sort of Power skill (maybe flavoured as the finesse needed to word his commands?) to access the weirder uses of his Stand that wouldn't be covered by the normal powers. Since making somebody launch themselves backwards at high speeds was one trick he used, and then never spoke of again for the rest of the series, that would seem like a good time to use a Power skill.