dkellis

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. Here.

I was told to post these rough notes here. Very rough notes, since I didn't expect to have to clean them up for other people to read. Has anime-centric slang, and whatever language I was thinking in at the time (Indonesian and Chinese, mostly; English is not my first language, even if I've gotten comfortable with it). I've tried to translate it to English, but I may have missed some. The background is that I was planning to sockpuppet a game all by myself, using these characters and this story. When I asked for advice on miscellaneous rules questions, I was told that I needed a context to put all of it in. This is that context. Valkyrie Rings The source of the powers for the characters are Belmarin Valkyrie Rings, which allow the characters to henshin. In non-mahou-shoujo form, has minor powers the girls can use. Free action to henshin and back. Given by the Belmarin Council (Arius Belmarin), who instructs the girls to use them to fight crime. Tracie and Emily do it willingly, Ashley is ordered. In heroic form, Ring-specific powers disappear. Power level roughly around Negi's group of Negima manga, specifically Asuna, Setsuna. Tracie Aldair/Bright Blade As Tracie, shy among strangers to the point of incapacitation. Nodoka from Negima. Very pretty, often the center of attention in a crowd, which works against her shyness. Meganekko. Smart and physically competent, keen analytical mind. Curious and inquisitive. No confidence. Comes from a very rich family, and has the Graceful Ojou-sama personality type. Also has High Society social obligations, which she can theoretically do easily, but shy so not able to hobnob well. Owns and can drive a car, international licence. Has a crush on Timothy Stanton, who's a Nice Guy Jock. Timothy has seen her around (see Center of Attention), but doesn't really notice her as anything more than a schoolmate. Cautiously optimistic, always polite. Doormat. As Bright Blade, is more confident and outgoing, says whatever is on her mind. Lots of snarky remarks. Powerful enough to leave small craters in concrete, fast reactions enough to block incoming attacks with sword. Sword is called Grand Blade, very big, can do Normal, Killing, and a ranged blast. Usually busts through walls rather than go around. Grand Blade can be disarmed, but will reform in Bright Blade's hands on next action. When disarm happens, possibility of random change back into Tracie Aldair. Fast Healing. Can set Grand Blade to cause fire, ice, lightning, or magic damage, but not all at once. Will protect innocents at all costs. Bright Blade has feathery wings, can fly. Cannot retract wings. Wears armour, magical, looks like Saber's. Theme: Tracie is able to vent all the nasty things she wants to say as Bright Blade, but cannot as Tracie. Importance of being yourself. Emily Stanton/Emerald Fire As Emily, loud and brash and da bu fen shi chang flail around. No patience. Chloe from Touch Detective. Tsundere with plenty of tsuntsun and not much dere. Adopted sister of Timothy Stanton, loves her brother very much. Doesn't like Tracie, jealous of possible relationship between Tracie and Timothy, wants to take Tracie's Ring away for her own use, but honourable anyway. Harisen for regular tsukkomi role. Jumps to conclusions easily. Has good brain, but seldom uses it. Twintails. Stubborn. Happiest when Timothy approves of her; Timothy is clueless about all this. Actually very honest and blunt. As Emerald Fire, less confident, more cautious. Snarky. Glows brightly. Still doesn't like Tracie. Prefers to hang back and check out the situation before committing. Pessimistic/cynical. Stubborn. Uses height and range in combat. Wears big power gloves called Emerald Gloves, not actually green. Powers are standard Normal Damage blast, Killing blast, sniper with zoom, and rigid capture field thing to grab and toss enemies. Like Tracie, will protect innocents at all costs. Knows how damaging powers are, reluctant to use unless necessary. Some magical protection from blows, but may change back into Emily when hit hard enough. Hitting Emerald Gloves hard enough can cause them to short out temporarily, flight and protection not affected, but attack powers cannot be used for a short while. Theme: Emily has to learn to accept her powers, as well as Tracie's love for her brother. Dropping the facade of confidence. Ashley Welles/Shield Maiden As Ashley, doesn't care about anything. Yuki Nagato but more so, darker. Loner, weird. Heterochromia. Lives alone. Used to be bullied. Financial support from Belmarin Council, ordering her to join up with Tracie and Emily. Has considerable innate magical talent, but never bothered to develop until obtained Ring. Nobody can get close to her, ignores most attempts at conversation or socialization. Speaks only when necessary. Reads a lot, all genres. Takes a lot to make her care. Creepy laugh, morbid. Psychologically messed up, withdrawn, depressive, silent. Seldom noticed. Can use Ring for telepathy. Magical senses can detect dark aura, even without Ring. Always tells truth, doesn't bother to clear up misunderstandings. As Shield Maiden, specializes in debuffing enemy and buffing allies. Little to no direct damage. Healer, able to give extra protection to teammates. Serious ToHit debuff. Shield Maiden boosting Bright Blade is scary powerful. Dark aura still there. Dresses like gothloli version of typical bright magical girl. Lots of bright sparklies. Still doesn't care about much, but will go out of her way to help teammates. Will not kill, but doesn't care as much about protection of innocents. Uses a cheerful-looking wand with star on top for debuffs and buffs, cannot use without it. Can change back to Ashley due to shock if any of the other two changes back. Can hover in place, but moves via teleportation. Able to teleport teammates with her, must touch them. Cannot teleport unwilling. Theme: Ashley opens her heart to others. Friendship. Closing wounds. Uberplot Five Belmarin Valkyrie Rings, each "finding" its owner, giving them instant power without much sacrifice. Rings can be stolen and used by another, tapi provided they already have a Ring of their own; stolen Ring boosts power. Tracie finds one, Emily finds one, Ashley is personally given one. Two more are also found by others, who defect to The White Tower. The White Tower is much less powerful than the Belmarin Council, and is mostly a sort of freedom fighter/rebel group. The two Dark Magical Girls are given orders to capture the three Belmarin Valkyries. Truth is that Arius Belmarin is actually one person/demigod with different masks, who wants to come to this dimension to solve the world's problems his/her/its way. Arius Belmarin is sealed off, so must use key: key gains power whenever Valkyrie Ring is used in the cause of good, what the user believes is good. Complicated ritual (risky, dangerous) can cut off power flow, so White Tower wants to capture Valkyries to neutralize Rings. Theme: power without sacrifice, responsibility. Trust. Hubris.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. The issue was that I've already had to water down the original character concept to build it by the rules. And I wouldn't have minded it so much if it didn't take so much time. Combining a 10-point and 15-point overlapping Disadvantage into a 25-point one takes maybe ten minutes of thinking, but that leaves me 10 more points to fill in with other stuff, which I have to pore over the current Disadvantages and try to find something which doesn't overlap. This takes me a full day of pondering and trying to wrestle the original character concept to fit in the new Disadvantage. I use the Master List because it gives me a rough idea of what is considered a Disadvantage rather than a roleplaying hook; that's why I'm relying on it so much. Obviously, from the progress of this thread, I still haven't gotten it. It's the only way I see where a Disadvantage which applies to the heroic form doesn't apply to the civilian form, and vice versa. It's one of the themes: the character gains a mask, and starts acting differently with that mask on, even though she's still the same person. Since the heroic form has a completely different set of abilities from the civilian form as well, Multiform seemed to be the best way to go. Unless one can modify Disadvantages with Only In Heroic ID and Only In Civilian ID. The transformation is Instant Zero Time in the same way that monologues are Zero Time; dramatically it's impressively long, but mechanically it takes no time to execute. I know that my characters exist essentially in a vacuum. That's because, as I've stated before, I don't have a game. I have no GM. I have no players. I am sock-puppeting an entire campaign by myself. I was also told that not having a game would not be a problem when asking for advice on this board. What would you have me do?

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. Fine. Conceded on the Ranma issue. I'm still not convinced that huge amounts of Psych Limitations will make a character crippled or boring, but I concede that Ranma is a bad example for me. My Livejournal. I admit that it's not a "board". I also cannot ascertain the actual experience of the player who commented. But like I said, I asked, I got no response, I posted a first draft, got a "okay, looks fine", and that was it.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. If there's a rumour of a secret training technique that could conceivably make him stronger but will more probably kill him, he'll do it anyway. He's thrown himself against obviously superior opponents just to figure out how their martial arts work. This happens about once every new character or new technique introduction, and is a major offender in the power escalation of the manga, since it's essentially a comedy, and Ranma Saotome Can't Lose. Ranma has plenty of problems with female opponents. The entire Ranma example was to show that having more than 100 Psychological Limitations does not seem to cripple a character. Ranma Saotome is an established fictional character (from Ranma 1/2 by Rumiko Takahashi), which often translates poorly into HERO. As I mentioned before in this thread, the characters which prompted this thread in the first place are done. They have their Disadvantages all finished and listed. Maybe I could improve those Disadvantages, but I already listed the Hunted and the Social Limitations in there. I am not looking for a solution for these few characters, I am looking for a general solution for all future characters. I've solved the problem this time, but I may not be able to solve it next time. That is the purpose of this thread. And I already received my answer earlier, that it's all GM Discretion. I'm the opposite. I asked some experienced HERO players on other forums about the best way to create a magical girl transformation. Getting no response, I picked Multiform, and I have gotten no complaints as of yet. Since all three (technically five, but I haven't written up numbers four and five) of the characters are magical girls, all three have Multiform. I'm open to alternate suggestions.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. I could go on and on about my planned story. Technically it could be set in the Champions-verse, but the CU metaplot is vague enough that I could leave it until I need to cross that bridge. (I really, really like the Champions metaplot. This could be because I like Foxbat, who has the best Psychological Limitation ever.) In any case, the reason I asked the original question wasn't so much for these particular characters; I've already given them their 150 points of Disadvantages, with the max point limit of 50 per Category. I was asking more for general cases; it's like wanting a general code-breaking algorithm rather than a specific password.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. In this case, the characters just picked up their powers about a month or two ago, story-time. The obtaining of powers without any sacrifice will, in fact, be a theme in the uberplot. I know that it sounds like I'm creating a whole gameworld. Technically I am; it's just that I have no players for it, and so I sock-puppet everything.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. Right now all I have for description are notes, in the "like so-and-so from this anime, but also with aspects of such-and-such from the other anime, with a bit of this-and-that from yet another anime" vein. I'll need to clean it up first. Also, since I'm working on three characters, each with their own Multiforms (and distinct personality changes), it's essentially six characters' worth of Disadvantages I have to come up with. For no actual campaign, too. I'm doing this because I want to try the HERO System, without any actual game going on, or likely to accept the characters.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. Okay, since the consensus appears to be that it makes for more interesting characters, but it's not actually crippling if I abolished that point limit, I'll just accept it as GM Discretion. Thanks for all the help, everyone.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. I'll give you Cannot Look Weak being an aspect of Overconfident, but Driven To Be The Best is something that Genma and Nodoka have been hammering into him throughout his life. He's conditioned to want to be the best, regardless of his actual confidence level. It's listed in the Master List. If it's not a Disadvantage, then I concede that it's not. (People have taken advantage of it in the series before, if I remember correctly. Mostly unscrupulous characters like Shampoo, and I think Nabiki at least once.) Fair enough. Conversely, if someone has a lot of Reputation points, one could turn Brash And Impulsive into a Psychological Limitation, couldn't they? What I wanted to see with that exercise was if it was definitely true that having over 100 points of Psychological Limitations (the original claim was 70 to 80, I believe) would result in an un-fun and unbalanced character. In my view, just because Ranma may not actually get actual points for the Psych Limitations doesn't mean that he doesn't have them.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. Random: I was curious about high Psychological Disadvantage points being unbalancing to the character, so I decided to pick a random fictional character to test: Ranma Saotome, from Ranma 1/2. I'll put aside all his Hunteds and Rivalries and Accidental Changes for now. All point values are from the Master List of Limitations. Overconfident: Very Common, Strong (20) Driven to be the Best: Common, Strong (15) Ailurophobia: Common, Total (20) Code vs Killing: Common, Total (20) Cannot Resist Taunting His Opponents In Combat: Common, Moderate (10) Cannot Strike A Woman: Uncommon, Total (15) Cannot Look Weak: Common, Strong (15) Brash and Impulsive: Frequently, Greatly (15) That's 130 Psychological Limitation points without even trying. Nevertheless, Ranma is still considered to be a popular character, at least among anime fans in the 90s. Possibly this is because his other problems (Hunted by just about everyone wanting to kill him, marry him, or both) dwarf the Psych Limitations.

Re: Disadvantage Point Limits. For full disclosure, to head off any more speculation on my motives: my actual characters, if they could break that 50-point Category limit, would have at most 80 points in Psychological Limitations. (I have three of them; one will have 80, one will have 60, the third 65.) The reason I asked if I could have all 150 points in one Category is because I wanted some indication of how much breathing room I can have. One solution would be PhilFleischmann's, which divides the Psychological Limitations into different subcategories of Fears, Beliefs, and Quirks. That would very easily solve my problem with the point limit. And a lot of the "gimmes" of DNPC or Reputation just don't fit. A reclusive loner (the 80-point Psych Limitation character) probably won't have a DNPC, and for this character, I really cannot see her as she is with a DNPC of any sort. And being relatively new heroes in a small town, they don't have a Reputation that's worth any points. All of them already have Secret Identities and Vulnerabilities, so that's taken. I'm not sure how disadvantageous a Distinctive Feature has to be before it can be considered a Disadvantage, so I played it safe. (What sort of reaction would count as Major? Surprise, or outright panic?) To reiterate, all this is to have a basis of understanding of the system, so that sometime in the far future, if I ever get to run a game (since that's probably the only way I'm going to get a local group together), I can look at a player's character sheet and decide whether to stick to that point limit, as well as what sort of point limit I want to stick to.