JMcL63

Re: Code VS Killing Poll Your argument has stood up when you haven't even answered a single point of mine? If you want I guess.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll How you would choose to play your character in a world like this isn't really an argument against the gaming potential of such a world surely. And, in fact, your putative characterisation might prove interesting in such a game. It might provide an interesting contrast to the other characters (who would presumabley largely be more focussed on the realpol), and could even generate some interesting intra-party tensions too. A character like the one you suggest might prove to be an asset in such a game in other words assault. Fair dos, but your reference to "cops and robbers" hits the nail right on the head assault. That's exactly what classic 4-colour comics are about. But superhero comics have long sinced developed in other directions. I mean, even the glossy 4-colour game I want to GM at some point won't be classic caped cops and robbers, but it will be an upbeat 4-colour world, with all the appropriate elements, and not my other campaign, where the heroes are involved in what is basically a war against ultimate evil (which I suppose you could call a high-powered DC-style campaign with supernatural instead of street-level enemies). In the end, I would say that the superhero genre is now much broader than it was in the days of Spidey et al, and you play the style of game that takes your fancy.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll I thought geeky pointlessness was one of the raisons d'etre of the HERO forums as much as any others? PS. Do you need to exhibit pointed geekyness to contribute to geeky pointlessness? (I'm outta here...)

Re: Seduction an Everyman Skill Having checked out the defintion of Seduction in my own book, I had thought that my previous message was way off beam, what with its account of the seamier side of the narrow definition of the skill. So I'm glad you appreciated my thoughts KA. Nice amplification there. Cheers.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll Not germane- I never said as much. Which seems to be a roundabout way of agreeing with my point: that ordinary people can kill and be heroic. Your or anyone else's patriotism or record is not the issue here. Nor, as I said, is the war as such. I wanted to establish a point that you don't absolutely equate heroism with not killing in the real world, all the better to highlight the lacunae of your arguments absolutely equating heroism with not killing in the fictional world of comics. To amplify my point: this is an... unusual perspective. And it is not enough simply to state that warfare "is an entirely different thing from comic book superheroics". First: this is a tautology, since the conclusion (about warfare) is contained within your premise (about 4-colour comics). Second: this statement is demonstrably false, to wit, Captain America in WW2 to name a classic example; and The Authority, to name a popular contemporary one. The former is an example of when nascent costumed heroes of the modern kind were supersoldiers recruited as part of the 'hearts and minds' campaign of a real war effort, let alone the war appearing in the stories themselves. And that's only one example from WW2 as you well know Worldmaker, not to mention comics in the Cold War too. And The Authority, however much you may dislike it, is a comic about war too in its own way. Your puny sarcasm will avail you nought, though worlds may tremble at your rhetoric. Again, not germane because it is not what I said. For your benefit, here is what I said: "It's a bit rich therefore people to define 'superhero' as if only classic 4-colour characters existed as templates for our games. Stop it." (Emphasis added.) I've left out the slightly more than mere scintilla of argument about the history of the costumed hero that was my first demonstration that your preference for 4-colour superheroics has neither historical nor contemporary validity as an objective definition of the genre. I was pointing out that your definition of the superhero absolutely in 4-colour terms is about as valid some 20 years after Watchmen as would be defining the novel by the standards of Cervantes some 20 years after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Or perhaps about as meaningful as defining costumed heroes by the standards of the Shadow and the early Batman after the arrival of the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and so on...? Yes we know that's your opinion Worldmaker, but on your current showing- tautological, demonstrably false, and fatuous- do you have an argument that can stand up to the slightest scrutiny?

Re: Surgical Sterility Field Flippancy aside, that's a good point, as I know from experience of designing starships myself. I must admit that I am someone who likes to dot all the i's and cross all the t's with designs. Apart from being an obsessive (that's as rude as I'm going to get about myself), I like doing this because often you end up having to add in limitations that make things much more interesting. All the same, one thing I learnt from my experience of ship design is that you literally can't design everything, because you can't think of everything in advance. Sooner or later the players are going to ask for something that logically should be available, and if you stick too fast to the 'design all' route, you might end up being silly and not giving it to them. PS. I still don't really like the LF option, but there you go.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll What's been most irritating about the CvK discussion so far is not that there are two opinions, but that (some) representatives of one viewpoint refuse to accept that the other viewpoint has any validity whatsoever. This cannot be said of those who think that superheroes can kill, that it just depends on the characters and the game they're being played in. I want to address a question to those who have been outspoken in favour of classic 4-colour do-gooding morality: do you think that US servicemen engaged in combat in Iraq are heroes? If so, is their heroism diminished in your eyes because they killed people? Or are they even more heroic for precisely that reason? I raise this point not to open up a discussion about Iraq, but rather to use a real example to put this difference into some kind of context. Iraq is reality. We are talking about a game. If you are prepared to accept the heroism of killers in reality, then why on earth would you have such a hard time with it in a game? This is not a matter of telling you to change your own games. Rather it's just to ask you to stop being so bloody-minded about other people's. Furthermore, as has already been said, costumed heroes were originally killers, Batman included. They were little more than ruthless vigilantes to begin with weren't they? Then they changed- first to become defenders of truth and justice during WW2 (I'm no expert on this, so pardon any foreshortening of developments), then to become the 4-colour do-gooders we know today thereafter. But the superhero genre can no more stand still than any other cultural form. And the change towards the more morally ambiguous kind of hero is not new- it dates back to Moore's Watchmen, making it nearly 20 years old, and it has become ubiquitous since then. It's a bit rich therefore people to define 'superhero' as if only classic 4-colour characters existed as templates for our games. Stop it. You don't have to like post-4-colour comics; you can even ignore them if you choose; but you can no more pretend that they don't exist and haven't changed the genre than the classical cultural elite of the early 20th could ignore the impact of modernism.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll You seem to be close to my earlier remarks about there being aspects of the superhero genre which do not have the same moral content as classic 4-colour costumed do-gooding, ie. the 'war' campaign. So that superheroes who kill in the latter context are no less heroic, they're just involved in a different kind of game in a different setting. I've got that right then, yep?

Re: Surgical Sterility Field Interesting point about SFX versus power constructs there Treb, one that I myself feel is all too often forgotten. But following on from your logic, wouldn't the SFX of a surgical sterility field be to augment the effects of medical skills, be they of a character or an autodoc of some sort? In this case couldn't the CE penalties effectively act as bonuses to these skill rolls and/or CON rolls. I mean, if you don't let diseases be built as powers (for the good reasons you put forward), why then should anti-disease counter-measures be KA attack powers? You seem to be contradicting yourself here, unless you've somehow returned to the idea of CE and I didn't notice. What do you think?

Re: Turns, Segments, Phases and simulation Interesting idea. Wouldn't it, though, be easier just to rate bog standard normals as having base stats of 8 (as is-or was?). I mean, your Disad essentially strips normals of Everyman skills, and on this I can only ask you why? (It's your game, I know, I just think you might be making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself is all.) This gives them CV= 3 and SPD= 1. Just my tuppenceworth.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll Hear, hear!

Re: Surgical Sterility Field I've often seen CE recommended for constructs for which I feel it is inappropriate. Subsequent remarks about life support and drains notwithstanding, this is a case where my instinct is that CE is the right way to go.

Re: Using d20 instead of 3d6 (DON'T KILL ME!) Lots of interesting points in this post, but I just wanted to amplify this last remark. Dice are the essence of drama in roleplaying (adventure gaming in general in fact) IMO. First off, without dice, adventure games would inevitably resolve into unmediated ego-conflict, which would be no fun for anyone (except, perhaps, the GM's current 'pet' player?). Moreover, I have found that some of the best moments I've had in roleplaying have been when things have gone wrong, when the dice have thrown up something totally unexpected to which I or other players were forced to react in a way we would never have considered without being 'driven there' by the dice. Criticals and fumbles just ramp this up by rendering possible even more extravagant results. Long live the dice, regardless of the shape of their curve!

Re: Using d20 instead of 3d6 (DON'T KILL ME!) I like bell curves, a lot, an awful lot. IMO reality itself (ie. the work and power curves of real happening things and ongoing processes) are rarely linear, so bell curves are a good simulation of this. But I have recently become interested in the idea of d20's for some things in rpgs. It's not for the reason stated by vivsavage- namely the unequal value of drm's (this follows logically from the premise of a bell curve in any case- it's the plateau effect, which means that it's easy to get a big change from the mean with a small improvement, but much harder to get the same change from far above the mean, so that small improvement isn't worth so much). Rather it's the 'clustering' I've come to realise is not necessarily for the best, and then largely in combat. I mean, with the linearity of a d20, every point on the scale is as likely as any other. This means that puny goons are (it would seem to me) less likely to be completely overpowered in combat. It also means that high and low end results are more common, which makes combat more unpredictable, dangerous, and therefore tense. What I am trying to get at here is the idea that I am beginning to think that linear dice curves are better for combat engines, while bell curves are better for other tasks. None of which is to suggest that I'm particularly in favour of switching HERO to d20 rolls. All the same, one thing that has long intrigued me about d20 versus 3d6 is that they both operate across pretty much the same numerical range meaning that- leaving aside vivsavage's points about drm's having different values- drm's for a d20 are commensurate with those for 3d6. I hope this makes sense.

Re: Seduction an Everyman Skill That very much depends. Seduction is a skill that enables you to gain sexual favours without force even from people who are not very inclined to grant them. So you could successfully seduce someone and leave them feeling used and hence antipathetic. If you just used Conversation and Persuasion to gain sexual favours from someone I suggest you'd be more likely to retain the partner's trust' date=' because those skills would tend to have to work in tune with prevailing moods for characters to have their way. Seduction enables you to use a variety of tricks to get round that lack of trust. Hence you could argue that the premise of seduction [i']qua[/i] seduction is an underlying lack of trust rendering gentler methods futile.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll For me it depends completely on the campaign and character being played. One of my superheroes is 'in the line' in the war against ultimate evil. This campaign is not about fighting crime in a 4-colour universe, so killing is just something that can happen, even if my character doesn't go out of his way to kill people (he doesn't use his HKA indiscriminately, even if he never pulls his crippling punches). I have another character who is in a glossy 4-colour section of the campaign, so she has a strong CvK, though I can't remember how strong it is at the moment, because she needs to be rewritten due to me losing my original character sheets. So I can't really agree with the sentiment that superheroes never kill. 4-colour superheroes rarely do for sure, but there's more to superheroics than 4-coloured crime-fighting antics IMO.

Re: 40k Space Marines Suspended Animation It's not a matter of cheapness, it's a matter of how sus-an works. It puts you in deep sleep (ie. a controlled coma). This is an effect on STUN, not BOD it seems to me. The appearance of death could be modelled if you want, or you could just make it a special effect. Well there you go then. I think that the STUN-based sus-an is more logical, and simpler. That's about it really.

Re: Turns, Segments, Phases and simulation Erm, no. All rules are optional, official or otherwise, even if they are at the core of the system. See BBB, p. 252 for 'Nine Ways to Speed Up Combat'.

Re: 40k Space Marines Suspended Animation Bearing that in mind along with Lord Liaden's remark about suppressed attributes recovering immediately the suppress is switched off, then wouldn't suppress STUN be better? That way the character is just unconscious until the sus-an is switched off. Add in some level of life support- reduced aging, and I think that's a better approach. Hope this helps.

Re: 40k Space Marines Suspended Animation If BOD is suppressed, doesn't that make someone easier to kill?

Re: Using 1-second turns instead of SPD chart So much for my attempt at irony then...

Re: Using 1-second turns instead of SPD chart Yes, well that's just a consequence of the requirements of convenience in the rules. Strictly speaking, I guess that actions should be resolved at the end of the segments they encompass, but that would be too much altogether don't you think? And then again, following up on that notion, you could even start to suggest that some actions would take effect immediately, while others would wait until the end of the phase (ie. some segments later). And so on. Oh, the horror! Actually I tend to agree that the effects on movement rates is one of the most confusing aspects of SPD. That is: translating movement per action into, eg. kph is not intuitive (although it is simple enough arithmetically really) because of SPD. But then, you would have a similar problem with any combat engine that allowed multiple actions per turn. You would either have to rate movement per turn, then divide it for each action; or rate movement per action so that you have more or less the same issue as you get in HERO with SPD. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if I was to design an rpg, I wouldn't use anything like the SPD table. I'd probably go with a turn length that fits conveniently into a minute (eg. 6 seconds, so that you get 10 turns a minute); a basic number of actions per turn (eg. 2-4); and rules for extra actions based on special abilities. But then, I don't play HERO for the SPD table, I play it for its design flexibility. -EDIT- 200 posts! Whoo-hoo! Look on my works ye mighty and despair!

Re: Using 1-second turns instead of SPD chart Yes, you are indeed missing something Turin. The idea of the SPD table is that the segment in which you execute your action (your phase) is a convenient way of representing the fact that slower people take longer to do things. The action(s) are assumed to be spread out throughout all the segments until your next due phase, but they are executed when the phase comes up for the sake of convenience. Thus a SPD 3 character taking their first action on segment 4 is actually carrying out their action in segments 4,5,6 and 7. This is reflected in the way that OCV/DCV remain set until your next phase.

Re: Using 1-second turns instead of SPD chart I'm gratified bushido11 that you took my remarks in the spirit that they were intended. I don't know how GURPS players handle the 1-second turns because I've only played the game a couple of times myself. I'm sure there are some members of these here boards with more experience of GURPS who might be able to offer their thoughts. On your basic subject, another approach you could take is based on the power level of the game you are playing. If you are playing heroic games, with normal humans, then you could try stripping the SPD table down to 4 segments instead of 12, something I have seen GM's do in the past, because most characters at this level have SPD 3. This might require some house rules to fix things like holding actions and so on, but it is certainly workable. If you are playing superhero games I guess a 6-segment SPD table might just work although this is not something I have either seen or given any serious thought to. Another alternative could be to simply ditch the SPD table altogether, and to have all the characters play out their actions segment by segment without any gaps between each character's phases. Again, I have no experience of this, so cannot therefore comment on its practicality. Beyond that, at this power level, the only answer I can suggest is to be a well-organised GM. Hope this helps.

Re: Using 1-second turns instead of SPD chart Blasphemy to some bushido11, but not to me. I'm sorry I can't offer any positive contributions to your idea, but there you go. The thing is, with a turn longer than 1 second, you end up adding extra actions (of whatever kind) within the turn structure to differentiate different agility/reflex levels, and actions lasting longer than a turn become the exception rather than the rule (and I do think that the Time table in HERO does this quite well). By contrast, with a 1 second turn, actions lasting longer than a turn become the rule, rather than the exception, because most actions that most people could do take more than 1 second. Even a simple strike in combat has to become a 'multiple' action (ie. strike and recover) by and large. In other words: a 1 second turn just strikes me as being too short. Granted, you might be trying to get away from the SPD table (and why not?). It's just that I don't think that this can be done very neatly by stripping out the turn structure to leave the naked segments, because I do believe that it is easier to handle the necessary distinctions within the framework of a turn rather than across several 'microturns'. In the end, it seems to me that what I imagine you to be after would require a brand new turn structure, which would essentially require a radical redesign of the entire system (since the SPD table is intergral to power design as well as the combat engine). This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it wouldn't be HERO in the end, would it?