traeki

Re: Request for help envisioning/modeling a power Oh, that's a great idea! That way, the spell need not actually fail, because it's costed to always "succeed", but a quarter of the time...not exactly as intended. I love it!

Re: Request for help envisioning/modeling a power Excellent, this, or something similar, should do the trick nicely. Thanks! (And Shrike, I love that character concept. =D)

(I'm a n00b here, so if I should have done a search, or posted to a different forum, or whatever, feel free to indicate as much.) I want to create a power that has a wide variety of effects, and roughly 25-30% of the time it does something rather wildly different than intended. Ideally I'd like the "accident" effect to be varied enough to be amusing, and more towards confusing/awkward than outright harmful. The player I'm working with was suggesting that for example they might accidentally turn somebody into the Jolly Green Giant. I'd like to aim for something a bit less comical (I want this character to fit into a somewhat grittier environment than that would imply), but equivalently weird and unpredictable. My first thought was something like: Nd6 of Luck Multipower (side effects of blasts), with e.g. entangle, rka, flash, maybe one or two others. Energy Blast Nd6, linked to Multipower, variable special effects Then I would have something (I'm unclear on how to make this work correctly, much less legally) depend on a Luck roll level 1, and choose the number of luck dice to correspond to the target chance of failure (6 or 7 dice, I suppose). Then I need something like a side-effect that triggers on luck roll failure. So, that's kind of close, but it still feels wonky, and limits the character to energy blast type attacks. I'd like a more chaotic feel, and I'd also like a cleaner model. At the very least, I need help figuring out how to arrange the above components. Oh, and this is in the context of a standard power-level champions genre. Help? Thanks, -John

Re: Seeking advice on campaign design Thanks for all the comments, very helpful! I'll experiment a bit and post back when I need more feedback. =)

Re: Unofficial Welcome Mat (For New Members) Thanks! =)

Hi all. I'm new to the HERO system (which is bizarre given how long I've been a gamer) and instantly in love. I tried GURPS back in the day, but never really liked it much, but HERO really manages to coherently package _everything_ cleanly. Internal consistency makes me very happy. Anyway, I'd like to finally create the campaign I always wanted to build but never had a system with enough scope. Basically I'm looking for something that's kind of a union of Star Wars and Shadowrun. Space Opera, with technology sufficiently advanced that "magic" and "superpowers" and "high tech gadgetry" all sort of blur together. And I'd really like a minimum of focus on spaceship battles, so I'm thinking maybe the setting will involve travel more along the lines of Stargate, so that there are arbitrarily many worlds, but you don't spend any time fussing with deep space travel outside of near-orbit and that sort of thing. That's the setting. The thing I'm really struggling with, mainly because I don't have any experience with HERO, is what point value and Heroic vs. Superheroic settings to turn the dials to. As I read through the rules, it's becoming clear that Superheroic and Heroic campaigns actually have a significantly different feel. In particular I note the difference between buying your "weapons" (superheroic) and buying your "expertises" (heroic). And I'm just not sure what's more appropriate. Does it make sense to, say, go with a heroic campaign, have the "generally available" equipment fall into a modest range which requires weapon familiarities or whatever, and then allow characters to have unique or uncommon equipment that would not require those familiarities? I'm kind of flailing here. Any suggestions as to how I ought to be structuring this? To give an idea of what I'm after, I want the tenor of the game to be close to Star Wars (gritty, pulpy action) but a little darker and more "real" feeling (50 stormtroopers might actually hit you occasionally). At the same time, I want the PCs and their opponents to be able to make meaningful use of cool dynamic abilities that start to feel like magic/superheroic powers. I don't want to rule out entire categories of powers because they are "just too expensive". Thoughts? -John