GeekySpaz

Re: Muscle Mimic I mentioned this above and I remember reading it in the rules but I can't seem to find it. Where is the rule that skills cannot be bought in power frameworks?

A player in a game I am running would like to play a character who is a muscle mimic, able to mimic any physical skill, such as acrobatics, martial arts, etc. How would this best be represented in Hero game mechanics. My first thought was a VPP through which the character purchases skills but I thought somewhere it says that skills should not be purchased through a VPP.

Typically heroic campaigns use knockdown rather than knockback but some attacks I would think should still do knockback such as a fire hose or getting smacked with something really big. How would you purchase an attack that does knockback in a heroic campaign that is using knockdown rules by default?

Re: Damage and Defenses Very informative Remjin. Thank you. I take it from some of the things you've said that you are a police officer or something similar? Anyway much of what you said confirms what I am trying to say in this thread. In lethal situations cops have to use lethal force because less lethal force doesn't cut it. To relate this to the campaign I am starting the PCs will be essentially low powered superhuman cops fighting super powered criminals. My intent was to make the PCs have to deal with the same sort of issues that cops have to deal with. Not that I'm trying to make light of those issues. I would not want to deal with those issues in real life and have a great deal of respect for those who are able to do so. But similar to what cops have to deal with in real life I want to force that sort of decision upon my players. In a lethal situation my PCs should be more likely to choose a lethal attack rather than a less-lethal attack because it gives them a greater capability to stop those who are trying to hurt someone though it has the unfortunate consequence of killing the badguys. The problem being in the Hero mechanics I find that due to the stun damage less lethal normal attacks have a tendency to stop people more quickly than the equivalent killing attack. In other words I don't think the mechanics reflect what you have described above and I am searching for a simple fix to the mechanics to change that. Correct me if I'm mis-interpreting any of what you had said.

Re: Damage and Defenses Actually I don't think you are tangenting off the topic at all. I would like to hear more about this. If what you are saying is true then I may be sorely underestimating the effectiveness of tazers and other less-lethal attacks. It does cause me to wonder why then police still carry and use firearms as much as they do. Is it because they have not yet developed a tool that is less-lethal while being just as effective as a gun, and that does not have a negative image in the public eye?

Re: Damage and Defenses The problem becomes the numbers generated for the following reason. With the amount of stun damage done by normal attacks it can take noticeably fewer hits to drop someone with a normal damage attack than it does to drop them with a killing attack. Therefore the players have no reason to use killing attacks and no reason to hold back if the goal is not to kill someone since their most powerful attacks have a relatively small chance to kill someone.

Re: Killing damage and armor I think I mentioned this above but I wanted to see what people think of the best solution idea I've thought of yet. What if I were to treat all resistant damage as double against stun? I think that this does not change core mechanics much and it reduces stun damage to manageable levels while not raising character's resistance to body damage and thus it does not reduce the lethality of combat.

Re: Damage and Defenses I think I need to elaborate a bit on the theme of my campaign. The PCs will be low level supers functioning in a sort of law enforcement capacity. I'm not a police officer but my limited understanding of the role of police is that it is not their job to kill people. It is however often necessary for them to stop someone from doing something and when the situation is dire enough, or when the officer or someone else is in danger from the intended action then the police officer must use the most efficient means at his disposal to stop the assailant. In many cases the most efficient means that officer has is his sidearm. If police had a non-lethal alternative to their sidearm that was as efficient as the sidearm they would use that instead of the sidearm. I want to force the same sort of priority based decisions on the PCs. I want it to be the case that for the most part the most efficient at their disposal is one that stands a good chance of resulting in a fatality. In order to stop someone without killing them they will have show restraint by using attacks which are less efficient. That is what I'm trying to get at with the whole restraint aspect. If you have an attack that will put your assailant down (asleep or unconscious) in 2 hits and an attack that will kill your assailant in several hits but will not drop him until he is dead, why would you use the killing attack? Your creating an unnecessary risk to yourself or anyone else the assailant wants to harm and your needlessly killing the assailant. In response to Psylints example of the 2d6 killing attack vs the 6d6 normal attack: You have a good point but I should mention that I'm using hit location. Therefore a hit which results in a stun multiplier of 5 for the killing attack would have to be to a location where the normal stun multiplier is 2 so the maximum stun damage for the normal attack would be 72 Stun which is greater than the maximum 60 Stun for the killing attack.

Re: Damage and Defenses I agree that normal damage should be the arm of restraint. However it doesn't represent any restraint from the players when the normal damage attacks do more overall STUN than the equivalent killing attack and are thus the most efficient way to bring down the badguy. Unless I'm grossly misunderstanding something in the rules that is what happens.

I am having a great deal of difficulty trying to decide on something with regards to armor and killing attacks. A friend of mine is suggesting that I use the following house rule in my upcoming DC game: apply the body damage of the killing attack normally but when calculating stun take only the body that has penetrated the resistant defense and multiply it by the stun multiplier and then apply the non-resistant defense against the stun. The main problem I have with this is that it makes killing attacks do very little stun. His philosophy makes sense for some types of killing damage. Knives, and other cutting attacks have relatively little force behind them and so it makes sense that if the cutting edge does not penetrate the targets armor that no damage would get through. But for attacks that have a great deal of kinetic energy, such as blunt killing attacks (war hammer, mace [which are considered killing attacks in the weapons tables in the core rulebook]) it makes less sense since even if the armor stops the attack from penetrating the targets armor a substantial portion of the force of the attack will still be felt by the target. Additionally, using my friends rule, when comparing a blunt killing attack to a blunt normal attack the normal attack does much more stun to the target than the killing attack. This last one is what really does not make sense to me. A general problem I am having in DC games (and have discussed on another post) is that attacks against people in armor are doing too much STUN relative to the amount of body they are doing. One of the best solutions I have thought of was to double resistant armor for purposes of applying STUN damage. In this campaign I've put a limit on how high characters may buy their defenses. I don't want to increase the amount of defense available against BODY damage but I don't think defenses are quite high enough against STUN. Any thoughts?

I apologize in advance. this is a bit lengthy. I imagine this issue has been discussed on this forum before but I can't find it in past posts so I will raise the question again. I am starting a new DC campaign in a couple of weeks and before the game begins I need to address is the proper balance between damage and defenses. I want to make sure that combat has a certain degree of lethality to it. If the players launch themselves into combat with no regard for the amount of damage they are throwing around then they will kill most of the opponents they face. In other words if they want to leave opponents alive they have to exercise some restraint. This will be important as there will be in-character consequences for needlessly killing bad guys and constantly using excessive force. The way I see it killing attacks are more effective for putting down a bad guy quickly (put down = no longer a threat in this encounter, i.e. KO'd or killed) but run a great risk of killing them. Normal damage attacks run much less risk of killing someone but it will be more difficult to put them down. The problem is this. I have found that both killing attacks and normal attacks cause a bunch of STUN and relatively modest amounts of BODY damage. Additionally normal attacks do more STUN on average than killing attacks for the same number of damage classes. What this means is that if a character is wearing any armor, and therefore gets to apply all his defense to the stun from an attack, then normal damage attacks are the quickest route by which to bring down a bad guy. Since normal damage attacks almost never do enough body damage to get through the targets defenses the bad guys will almost always be knocked out and not killed and thus the players have no need to restrain themselves. I've looked over the suggestions made in the DC book. The one idea I liked best from that book was to treat minor NPC's as dead when they drop below -10 STUN. I have a couple of issues with this. Since normal damage attacks do more STUN they remain more effective than killing attacks. Also this rule shouldn't be applied to major NPC's in which case there is again no need to exercise any restraint when fighting a major villain. Has anyone else had the issues I am having? If so how have folks dealt with it? Ideally I don't want to make an already complicated system any more complex and I would like to avoid altering the core mechanics of the system much. Any ideas on what I can do?