Veldruk

Re: Diviation From Called Shots (House Rule) I wouldn't say that there would be a 50% chance of a miss being converted into a hit. Remember, the "miss" can travel up to 6 hexes from the aimed position, and there is plenty of negative space for the bullet to travel as well. Look at it this way. First the player will of had to hit the target's DCV without the penalty for aiming. Then for every location there are 36 different hexes that the projectile could potentially hit. So lets take the chest. From the chest, the only possible locations to hit would be 7 (2x Shoulders, 2x Hands, Head, Stomach, Vitals). 7 outta 36 possibilities. So that right there is closer to a 20% chance of a miss being turned into a hit, and the chest has this highest probable chance to hit another part of the body. I think it's tied with the head and the other "center mass" targets have 6. And the rest of the locations have even fewer outta the 36 to actually hit anything. I'm not saying that this should be written into the 6th Ed, just wanted to share what I had come up with... which apparently is very close to what other gaming companies have mustered. I don't think I'll be making silhouettes for animals and the like tho, and the "are they behind cover" thing will come into play assuming that the player wants to do an aimed shot instead of using the Hero rules for shooting at someone behind cover.

Re: Diviation From Called Shots (House Rule) Whoops. I forgot to turn the "vector" hex 30 degrees clockwise for it to match the orientation of the rest of the hexes. So on the 1-6 hex, just turn that clockwise to match the rest. I'll post an updated picture soon.

Re: Western Hero (Price of goods and hit location) Thanks for the reply but that wasn't as realistic as I wanted, so I came up with my own: Thread: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1859452#post1859452 Pic:

Hey guys! I was just thinking last night why all the law enforcement and military train to shoot center mass and how that could transcribe into Hero System. In the real world you aim center mass to increase your chances to hit something. With this set of house rules I've created, now hero system will be able to do just that! I've made a handy reference sheet to basically sum up all the rules and how to's, check it out: With this system it wouldn't always benifit the player to do called shots. If the player just wants to hit the target, then the good old OCV non-called-shot roll would be the best. But with this "called shot deviance" set of rules, if the player's OCV roll would have hit the character without the called shot, after the deviance rolls are made, there is still a chance that they will miss. For instance: Target's DCV = 4 Players OCV = 6 Player makes a called shot for the Chest (-3 OCV) Player rolls 11 Traditional rules would say that he missed ( 6+11-3-11= 3 ) But with this optional rule if the character rolls a 3 and then another 3, the bullet would go between the target's legs. This is just a little optional rule that I came up with last night when trying to figure out how to make my Western Hero game more life like. I may only whip this out on the important fights instead of the boring old bandits. Some final notes: This probably wouldn't work with melee to well unless the character was doing nothing but stabbing. But I suppose even with a slashing attack this optional rule might work. Slash at the chest coming in from the target's left and end up hitting the target's right hand? The target pivoted back and threw his hand up for balance... poor guy. Also I have not tried this in practice yet. My next game is coming up within a week or so and I'll ask the players if they wanna try it out or not. Even if the players opt to bring it in but decide not to make every shot a called shot and still make classic OCV, Location, Damage rolls that is fine too. Tell me what you think! -V

Re: Zombie Horror Survivor (Left4Dead)? Well, for fast zombies your players are gonna shit themselves. It'll be great =D As far as stats go tho, give the zombies a normal movement speed and have them move at non-combat speed when attacking. This will be somewhat forgiving for the players because non-combat speed will half the zombies DCV so it shouldn't be to bad throwing more then a handful of zombies at a time. Then if you really wanna make em run, throw 100 or so and watch the gears turn. I'd still go with a higher str. Maybe not a 20, but at least a 15. Because everyone knows that zombies gain unnatural str after turning. =P But remember, since these are fast zombies, you might not wanna go for the bite right off, maybe some clawing, or a move thru or so before the "grab" phase. But I think that keeping the "Grab then Bite" attitude is still a good mechanism for survival and the "fun factor". Cause who wants to play a game where the first zombie charges you, you fail one roll and the zombie bites you Ah hah! Speaking of bites. If a player does get bitten, how will you turn them? If their BODY falls to 0 it could be one of tho's instant change type things where everyone is gathered around their friend's corpses wondering what they should do now... (Or if your friends have been preparing they'd of already discussed what everyone needs to do incase one of them gets bit.) and then BAM zombie-friend! Buuuut, if the bite/struggle with the zombie doesn't reduce their BODY to 0 (Or perhaps go -10 Body or whatever their max body will be) then the "zombie venom" would take a set amount of time to run it's corse. Depending on how long you want this campaign to run you have a couple of options. 1- Make up an arbitrary time for no other reason then "I say so" 2- 7 hours. Thats when rigor mortis starts to set in so they'd need to be a zombie before that, so perhaps right as rigor is setting in, bam, they'd turn zombie 3- 72 hours (for the long term campaigns) they would basically be suffering from muscle stiffness durring that time and maybe for the last hour of their life they "aren't as feeling as stiff. In fact, you feel downright good, like your body has worked all the pains out from itself and everything is OK" then BAM! Their vision starts to tunnel out, they pass out and are maybe down for 12 phases (Might even think about going to phase 12 after the party has seen this happen before. It would be a nice way of letting the group have some sort of upper hand over their former friend turned zombie as the turning process is going and also be a humorus turn of events for the guy holding the axes to miss the zombies head while it's down. Or hell, have them make an ego roll to be able to do harm to their friend! It's funny. Talking about a zombie game has started making me wanna run another one. I do have a new group of players (they've played hero system once, got them converted from DnD =D ) and they are really enjoying the freedom of being able to run any campaign with the rule set. Now I'll make them piss their pants and be afraid of the dark for a while =D or at least I would if these friends didn't keep their home defense systems up to date with shotguns, various assault rifles and more pistols then you could shake a stick at. Which I suppose is great for them because every other survivor is going to be braving the isles of Zombie Wal-Mart for the last of the shotguns and ammo =D Everyday low pric.... BRAINS! Post here and tell us about the game or any other brainstorming ideas you have. I'll be running my new and improved zombie game here within a week or so. If you have any thing that you think will step the game up a notch, feel free to tell me. -V

I'm about to run a campaign and the western hero book is currently being held by a friend of mine. I don't know if I'll be able to get it before the game and I'm left in the dark as far as "cost of living" goes in the 1880's. I know that an average 6 shooter went for around 12 bucks and that the average weeks salary for skilled workers usually was about 16 bucks, but thats all the info that I can pull from memory. I've tried google to get a rough listing of goods and prices of that time, but couldn't seem to find a decent one. Would anyone have any information or pointers as to where I could search to find said list? Also, I'm wanting to throw in a hit location deviation into the game. Basically, when you shoot at any object in real life and you miss, it's not always by much. For instance: When you shoot at a person, anyone in law enforcement or military will tell you aim for center mass. Well, in hero system, that would be something to the effect of always aiming for the chest at a -3 to your ocv. But people get shot in the arms and legs all the time on center mass shots. What I'm trying to figure out is some set of house rules that would allow for an arm or thigh to be hit instead of the chest if the roll misses for the chest. A couple of I ideas I had was to set up an image of the human body on a hex map where each one of the locations would have it's own numeric value per hex. IE The head would take up 3 hex'es (3-5 on hit location) and the chest would take up 2 (10-11) The body would look a bit odd, but it would serve my purpose. My purpose being if the shot misses but would have hit the character without the penalty for aiming, roll a D6 to get the vector of deviance and then another D6 for "velocity" of diviance (how many hexes from called shot hex the shot would travel. I have a pic drawn up, but I'm to tired to remember my password to the image hosting site. But this is just one though. Another simpler (but less realistic) would be to say if the hero missed his target, but would have hit him without the penelty, to just roll random location. But then everyone would be aiming for the head without any reason not to. Any suggestions as to how to handle hit deviation? -V

Re: Zombie Horror Survivor (Left4Dead)? I ran a zombie game once. I thought about going the 50 base 50 disad route for a bit, but we had just done several campaigns in a row like that and it was getting old, soooo..... Picked up the action as if the players themselves were the character. Let them make their own character sheets. Ruled that 10 stats across the board with 3 pts to put in anything they'd like (Str for the guy that lifted weights, Int for the mensa wanna be) and then gave them 45 (if memory serves) to put into skills. I was dealing with a mature bunch of players that put 1 or 2 pts into OCV levels and the rest were KS's and other practical skills, like electronics for the guy going to school for it and breakfall for the guy that would jump off the roof from time to time. If I were to give you one word of advice, it would be this: Don't go for the slow "Dead Rising" zombies. The shufflers and moaners. That had detracted from the horror factor so much that the game turned into a turkey shoot for zombies rather then a "you gotta survive" I ended up having to throw massive amounts of zombies at the characters and when I did that, they just went to open ground. I had a time table set up for the zombie infection rate which dealt with % of the population being zombies over a 3 day period. At first, the goal was just survive. After they did that well enough I ran into the "what now". Looking back I could have handled the "what now" part a little better. I set it up to where there were "safe" locations across the US and roughly planned out geographical and population obstacles to overcome along the way, but all the gas stations and grocery stores weren't densely populated, or rather, should have been more populated then they were. As far as zombie combat goes. Give the zombies a higher str then normal, but slower movement speed. And if we are going classic slow zombies, have them grab first, then bite. Adds to the "Oh #!@$" factor. It also added for some great teamwork and very close calls concerning a shotgun, a zombie head and an ally head" It was a hell've alotta fun. And there are different entertainment values to each class of zombies. 1: Slow Zombies- Low stress for players, more on the light side of zombie apocalypse, but a pain in the bum for the GM to keep up with all the individual stats of each zombie. I used the "zombie is still alive until you sever the head or do substaintial damage to the head itself. Otherwise, the zombie will just fall and use it's next phase to get back up. 2: Fast Zombies- Don't need as many to put the fear in your players. This tends to be a higher stress game and I'd make the zombies not want to go for the bite first. Throw some claws into the mix to give the players a chance to act. I didn't go this route because, to me, zombies are dead people. Rigor mortis has set in and it's a miracle that these dead things are moving at all, unless 72 hours have passed, then rigor is gone. I suppose you could have a mix of the two. Call the initial infection the "fast zombie" stage where rigor hasn't set in yet, this will last at most 7 hours. So if you need some fast movers to get the players pulse going, you could do that. Then slow the zombies down after 7 hours to the normal shuffling sort. As far as the orgin of the zombies, hell, pick any zombie movie and copy/paste. Medical treatment gone wrong, military "super soldier" gone wrong, bio chemical attack gone right, or straight up voodoo of sorts. But having a set goal in sight is a good thing. Perhaps saving a mutual friend for the short term and finding safe haven for the long. Sorry for the length, I get carried away. -V

Re: Zombies: Real World Campaign Well, the game is tomorrow, Friday, July 6th. I hadn't considered making the zombie an AoE, but thats a good idea. It would save alot of downtime in the game setting up all the individual zombies. There is one problem with giving my player group an npc that can't climb. I'm almost positive that one of my players will just leave them or shoot them. Of course me (as a gmnpcpc) will object, but he might be crazy enough to shoot me. Regardless there is almost no way that this will be a bad game. I'll post here with the highlights and the overall story sometime this weekend. Thanks again for all the input.

Re: Fighting Game Universe Timeline v0.9 Wow! Awesome work so far. This falls into the catagory of "Things that I would have never thought of but think that are awesome!" Well done.

Re: Zombies: Real World Campaign Thanks a ton you guys. Yeah, about a year after I got into the Hero System we had talked about running a zombie game. I believe that 1 of our players stopped showing up because he found religion and another had moved away. And with an average group of about 4 showing up at any given game, roleplaying a zombie survival game with just me and another guy would be kinda lame. I'll be stretching the rules just a little bit for my PC's. Even tho they will be keeping the base 10 dex, I'm gonna give them 2 8-point levels into combat so they can throw them into OCV or DCV if they want. This way they can still swing a baseball bat at a zombie but do it "cautiously" as opposed to just dodging and wasting a phase doing so. Because with a 2 speed (I might make it 3) wasting 1 of your phase-6 moves on just dodging would get kinda boring. But if they want to dump everything into DCV AND dodge, thats perfectly alright too. The hardest part about this campaign is going to be figuring out what would keep the players from doing the very rational and logical thing- climbing ontop of a house where zombies can't get them and wait it out. ... Then again, I had originaly only planned on making this whole episode 3 days long. But I'll just throw that right out the window and leave the ending wide opened. They'll have to run outta food sooner or later =D I may set a time span where a crack team of doctors have found a cure for zombie'ism but since our gaming group lives in a rural town and about an hour drive from any major city, (and it's not even that major of a city), then they can't just hop on down to the hospital to get immunized, they'll probably have to drive from NC to... (NYC/Atlanta/Chigago/ect) depending on how the dice fall. Thanks again for the help everyone.

Re: [Character] Hayate the Combat Butler You forgot the TF with two wheeled muscled powered vehicles and the respective combat driving with it

Greetings everyone, I have been a long time player of the Hero System and have run several successful adventures in the past. While being bored one day I decided to optimize my house against a zombie invasion and then was struck with a genius idea: "Have our gaming group roll up themselves as a character and throw zombies at them!" Granted, I'm sure that this idea has been had by many in the past but there is one thing that is standing in my way. :ugly:Zombie Character Sheet. I'm opting for the slower traditional zombies and not the athletes that we've seen coming up in Hollywood as of late. My zombies will shamble and moan and only spring out at dramatically appropriate times. I'm thinking of maybe a 20 str at the cost of <5 other characteristics. Keep in mind that our hero's are going to be limited to 10's on their characteristics to avoid conflicts such as "Oh wtf dude, I know I can bench press more then you, so that justifies me having a 15 str." I may allow 3 char points to be put into any characteristic to allow some variation, but for the most part, str/dex/con/body/ect are all gonna be 10's. I'm not sure how many points I will allow for skills. As a rough number I'm thinking of 50 for skills and 100 disads. But aside from what I should allow, point wise, for the players, I need a good shambling zombie. :help:So now I leave the floor to you, the Hero Games community. I am open to all suggestions on how to make the best "real life" zombie that will go against "real life" characters.