JMcL63

Re: Have you ever taken a fall? Well, I have had a superheroine decide that she had had enough emotionally, and suffer the equivalent of a maxium-level successful PRE-attack (and this just as combat was opening), simply because it seemed appropriate at the time. Does this qualify?

Re: GM's "rights" Well, signing up for one of my games is giving me a button-pushing licence for sure, and I expect no less of my own GM's, so there's a player who's good to have in a group. But, does he really never hanker to develop a character concept for himself? I simply cannot imagine never ever creating my own characters, especially for superheroing. Plus, do you never hanker to tell him to go off and do his own number-crunching once in a while?

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming Magic-using characters will always have to have some kind of knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the magic system and of the forces it manipulates. This is not the same thing as what the general public might know about magic, its existence perhaps as well as much as how it works. This is pretty basic, because magic-use in HERO is typically delivered through skill use, which brings in KS and SCI as complementary skills. But of course, that knowledge doesn't necessarily have to be correct...!

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming Well I reckon you can't dramatise every moment in rpg combat. It would be too time-consuming, and would lend too much airtime to higher SPD characters, something that is open to abuse by egoistic players. So the raw numbers are sometimes all that is needed to keep the game moving on. You could think of the more detailed descriptions as 'establishing shots' so that when you just use the numbers, that represents the combatants settling down to get on with it. This has the added bonus that special moves or extreme results actually are dramatic when they happen, because their dramatisation breaks up the routine of combat.

Re: Things I'd like to see more of in fantasy gaming

Re: Prophetic Insight How about trying this as Analyse built as a sense with temporal orientation? The idea being that the character is analysing the future timeline(s) of the objects into which he has insight. Also, how about making it continuous, to generate a cascade effect to give you the unerring aspect? I don't know if this would work because I'm not consulting the rules, but these are just some suggestions. Hope they help.

Re: GM's "rights" Rpg's are supposed to be cooperative, and this should apply to the relationship between the players and the GM in terms of character-creation, and it should be a 2-way street. A GM can define the basic parameters of their campaign, and can reasonably expect players to stick closely to those. Beyond that, the GM should no more railroad players into something than vice versa. Let my try to highlight this with an example from my own superhero campaign. A player, who is also the other GM in the campaign, was making up a character with a minor precog power. I was happy with the concept, but didn't like the execution. So I devised a version of the power that I felt gave a better version of what the player was telling me he wanted. At first the player was very unhappy with this, believing that I was denying him what he wanted. But I patiently explained what I was trying to do, and eventually the player realised that he was actually getting a more interesting version of the power, that was closer to his own conception, than his own first draft. In the end- strong arguments, harsh words and all- this turned out to be a very positive experience, because my player gained respect for my method of working with players, and realised that, if I offered input as a GM, it was always to make things more interesting, and that he could trust me with this.

Re: Reccomended Reading: Fantasy Novels Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a classic fantasy series with an atmosphere as unique and compelling now as it was 20 years ago when it was first published. More recent books that I would recommend are Trollslayer and its sequels by Bill King, featuring his epic heroes Gotrek and Felix. These are essentially monster-hunting romps featuring strong characterisation, including a great backing cast, some epic fight scenes, and some great moments of comedy. Fine entertainment.

Re: Are there ever too many points? Well, if every player in a group could be omnipowerful (ie. each have access to literally all the powers in the book) then that would make for dull gaming indeed. So there can be too many points. I suspect also that the points total at which this game-destroying power level is accessible would turn out to be surprisingly low, although it is ultimately determined by genre and power level; eg. this omnilevel would be reached at a much lower points total in a heroic game than in a superhero game. At what sorts of points totals we're talking about in a superhero game I cannot guess, familiar as I am only with pre-5th edition 250pt standard superheroes.

Re: What graphic novels should I get? Another essential compilation available in TPB is the Miller/Mazzuchelli Daredevil run Born Again. This shows that The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One weren't accidents.

Re: What graphic novels should I get? I heartily second all of these suggestions.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' powe Indeed. Otherwise they are just an excuse for points and you might as well just do away with them and hand out the points for free.

Re: Invalid Disads: should disads not be worth more than if bought it as a 'neg' power? This is a correct example of the kind of abuses you seem to want to address. Hiding your secret ID is included in the notion of secret ID. These are the flies in your ointment. Avoiding your hunter is not logically necessary in the notion of being hunted in HERO. I would still have qualms about this as a GM, but it is not the outright abuse that is your secret ID example. The orc example is similar, although hating orcs does more or less seem to be included in the notion of being enraged by their presence. In both of these cases, subtle changes to the psych lim could make the combos more palatable- eg. fears Mechanon. I like your thoughts about CvK in a classic 4-colour game.

Re: Protection from own movement damage. I think JMHammer has it about right. The other thing that strikes me is that if the extra PD renders the character essentially immune to the damage from the move by/through attacks, then its value is so much the greater. Based on what you've told us so far, I'd still be of the opinion that -1 is about right. So I'd suggest applying other limitations to it if you still wanted to make it cheaper. An activation roll or costs END strike me as 2 options off of the top of my head.

Re: Light or Dark Future? Well, my bughunter setting is definitely a dark future, with a crypto-totalitarian world government and that sort of stuff, but that was really to do with the situation of the clone troopers. I'd also be happy to do an upbeat, more space-operatic setting.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... The Game Players of Titan, by my literary hero Philip K Dick. This was the last of a bunch of Dick books I picked up in a lucky find at a local 2nd hand bookshop recently, and it is just great. The more I reread Dick's work- which I first became a fan of in my late teens, the more I get out of it, as I discover a psychological depth rare in genre fiction of any kind, and which puts Dick's work on the plane of great literature.

Re: Atserix the Gaul The Asterix books are just great. I've read loads of them, but no longer have the few I've ever owned. I think that Asterix would make a great comedy fantasy campaign, but using HERO? Nah, I think the system'd just be too much for a game like that. I'd use Toon instead, which I think has the right sort of rules.

Re: The Big Arguments A friend of mine has started charging 2pts for STR in a superhero campaign, which makes sense to me. I'd still cost it at 1pt to characters with NCM though I reckon.

Re: Is a politician a good secret ID? Politician is a great secret ID for a superhero- a great public ID even, as in the new Ex Machina. I was in a campaign once where one PC was a politician who had superpowers thanks to a government project during his military service. A villainess soon turned up who was another subject of this project, gone rogue. It was great fun!

Re: VPP Limitation: Magic Only? I think it depends on the campaign. I mean, can 'magic only' really limit a VPP in a fantasy setting if being a magic-user is the only way you can have a VPP in the first place? I don't think so. In a superhero campaign OTOH, there are essentially as many SFX as players can conceive of, so 'magic only' would be a real limitation, especially if the GM enforces it properly by requiring/applying appropriate power modifiers to represent spell casting, and by making sure to create NPC's whose own SFX negate the magical SFX, thus limiting the use of the magical powers.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Abstemious: sparing, or marked by abstention; eg. Alfred (Bruce Wayne's butler) is an abstemious person, wouldn't you say?

Re: Musings on Random Musings I also like facetious and abstemious, because they are the 2 words in the English language featuring all five vowels, once and only once, and in the right order.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Heh, Enforcer84 just gave me rep for posting a thread with the word 'penultimate' in it! Cheers!

Re: Favorite Pulp Character Indiana Jones, although I enjoyed Howard Chaykin's take on the Shadow, back in the 80's.

Re: Polishing The HERO System I don't think it is a good idea to introduce the divisor 15 into skill roll calculations! Skill rolls are quite fine using the rule of 5, surely? The basic 1+2pt structure of skills costs is just fine IMO. One of the big advances of 4th ed. remember was unifying all those odd skills costs into a simple 1+2+2, well, most of them at least. And this was developed further in HERO5. So I'd suggest that the 1+2pts are just fine. The bog standard 8- Familiarity enables you to use skills to do things no simple characteristic roll could ever do, except perhaps for superheroes, and you can't use skill levels with them, so making Familiarities CHA-based seems both illogical to me, and simply too much of a giveaway to super-powered characters. The divisor 10, and a second base number from which to calculate skill rolls too. And the divisor 5. No, that's just too complicated I have to say Hugh Neilson. This would seriously undermine the value of even the 1pt Familiarity, not to mention adding a 3rd base value and 4th divisor for calculating skill rolls. No, I can't say I think that's a good idea at all Hugh Neilson. We have consensus! I like the idea of NCM. It's the sort of thing that could be used to add colour to campaigns.