AwesomusPrime

Re: Pyrokinesis

I tried to work out a costing based on the ratio of matter to energy in the universe (on the assumption that a power normally effecting matter would be more advantageous if it effected energy by the same ratio as that of matter to energy) using e=mc2 and google calculator...

Evidently it would be an 8.98755179*10Exponent16 value advantage, and the best I can figure is a -4 limitation to make it fire only, being as how there are 4 main types of energy (force) in the known universe.

Clearly my approach is asinine. Carry on.

Re: Pyrokinesis

Would the weight of the burning material factor into play, in this case the weight of the oxygen?

It seems to me that my own suggestion is largely inadequate but I thought i'd toss it out there.

Perhaps a large cost advantage "Effects energy" and a large value limitation "Does not effect matter" and then some kind of E=MC2 conversion... most of that last suggestion was deliberately ridiculous.

I'm interested to see what productive people (Like Ghost) come up with I guess is my real point.

Re: New Mechanic: Scaling Invulnerability

Define intrinsically (in terms of your context) please.

So that I can better get a feeling of what you have in mind.

Perhaps an example?

Re: Better Block

Had a thought:

The effectiveness of your bloc is based on your CV yes? So in essence a point of block can be said to cost 9 points with some kind of limitation. Since Dex does so much, and block is only one aspect let's call it a 2 point lim for arguments sake. That means a point of block costs 3 points.

There we go a power.

HtH Block: Increase your OCV by 1 point for the purpose of preforming the 'Block' maneuver. 3 points per 1 point OCV.

You could probably reduce the cost further, likely to 1 point perhaps? I think 3 works as a starting point for discussion however.

Re: Better Block

I can't see as how an additional block on your phase is needed enough to warrant a seperate power but an automatic blocking power that would allow you to not loose your next phase while blocking.

In fact from an effects PoV, I think we could be talking about automated defense maneuvers in general.

Either way when I started this post I was sure I could come up with something, but now I can't so I'll come back.

I know lately there's been hot debate, from soffocation to can I do this and so on, but I think these "How could we do X that's in the rules but not this way" threads are quite interesting when the debate comes off right.

Re: Building Hero with Hero

2) Recovery can be barred by circumstance/FX. You can't recover while holding your breath. You can't recover in vacuum. You can't recover while in a choke hold. Why would you be able to recover when you being impacted by a power that won't let you breathe?

Aren't we giving character's a big time free ability here? Say we're fighting a baddie with massive stun/body, my endurance is better spent wailing on him with, or maybe the brick is wailing and I'm holding him.

I can save endurance, and metagame (my character doesn't know about the post 12 rec, he just knows ever 10-15 seconds he gets a 'second wind') to make sure that if this guy is goign to recover, he's gotta do it on his own time.

Very situational, I'm sure, but I think it's enough to warrant us to try and come up with a suffocation that does not rely on NND.

Re: Building Hero with Hero

No, it prevents you taking recoveries and damages END as well as Stun and (eventually) Body. You can build it but it is a big, sprawling thing not completely out of proportion to the actual 'power' of the effect. 'Not taking recoveries' is not an effect that you can buy in Hero as such, you have to adjust the REC of the target of find some other way around that, and that involves a lot of complexity and some arbitrary decision making.

 

I'd like to see a more coherent approach actually presented as a build using Hero mechanics for the environmental effect 'suffocate' rather than just a set of rules.

I had a thought Sean. We keep talking in other threads about reasoning from effect and not mechanic or "power, perhaps this is one of those instances.

When lungs are filled with a non-breathable substance suffocation occurs. Why not a transform that targets the oxygen in a targets lungs and turns it to any non-breathable substance. Apply continuous and any other necessary advantages/limitations so that as soon as it's coughed up into the mouth it turns back into oxygen but as soon as oxygen is brought into the lungs it turns to this substance.

There are a number of limitations you can apply, like only usable on air in a target's lungs, so that you can A) save points and ensure your player doesn't go around turning a whole room's air supply into jello with the SFX of force choke.

Basically my thinking is as long as the transform is contained internally, you could apply any SFX and simply deny what's happening inside the lungs. You could even transform the oxygen into vacuum, although as a GM I don't know if I would want to start allowing people to transform something into nothing.

Although transforming a baddie into a two by four...

Anyway, when I drink a glass of water, it would be dubious to say I transformed it into an empty glass, but if I drank it from a distance without a trail of water going to my mouth, you could say I transformed it. I see a similar situation here, suffocation doesn't transform full lungs to empty ones per se but doing it at range w/out physical interaction could be discribed as such.

The biggest con here is that it's a primary effect that does not mean suffocation but has the (almost ) guaranteed side effect of suffocation. This whole thing falls apart if your target has no lungs or needn't have air to breath or just needn't breath, that kind of thing.

On the other hand though, if you bought all the effects of suffocation seperately, called it force choke, and force choked someone w/out lungs like a robot, it would still drown them... which doesn't make alot of sense (over come of course with a "only on organisms who breath" limitaiton).

Re: First meeting of game group to consider HERO System

Sindyr,

I think, respectfully, you should not under any circumstances use the HERO system for your game. You have demonstrated that you dislike it and that the manner in which the rules are laid out does not correspond with your preferred method of interpretation.

In that I mean that the effects you wish to see are possible in HERO, but are both too expensive and constructed in a way in which you are not comfortable.

Presuming that your gaming group thinks the same way you do, I forsee nothing but frustration and discord.

IN short I do not believe that you will enjoy HERO. Every product is not suited for every person. I recommend the old Marvel system by TSR. If you haven't played it, it provides a different approach, much more absolutes and the power stunt system (if cost adjusted by house rules, we used /10 to all costs but you could simply give out X10 xp at the end of a session) allows you to literally "do whatever reason would allow based on the source and description of your power".

I would not say that the things you claim of HERO hold true, but I would not say they hold untrue. There are part truths to your opinions that many of us see as benefits, which you see as detriments. This is fair.

I'm fairly certain that the Marvel TSR system is unowned at this time, and thus can be downloaded freely. At least I was led to believe this when I downloaded it.

Re: Can this be done x 2

Also what is the problem with VPPs? They solve every single one of your problems so far and aren't hard to make.

Re: Can this be done x 2

What if instead of Captain Napalm, you have The Teleporter, a character that can do the following in game things:

 

1) Teleport anything he can see to anyplace he can see. (To keep this simpler, lets not even consider using TP against another character)

2) Teleport anything he knows where it is (say, stuff he has left in a room in his house for use as he adventures) to some where he can see. Range, unlimited, but he has a better chance to teleport the item if it's in a more familiar place or if it's closer. This means that stuff in his home he can TP no problem, as well as that glass he saw on the table in the other room (If it's still there.)

3) Teleport anything he can normally teleport above to a place he can't see, but can imagine, that is in range (1000 feet, say), perhaps having to roll for precision, such as placing the lit match in the gas tank.

 

Now, without making a VPP, how can I create the above character on 300 CP or so, in such a way that any use of the power that comes up in game will not fail due to not havnig purchased the right mechanics? For example, if I don't buy an Entangle, but later on I think to put a quantity of barbed wire in a room in my house, to be able to TP near/infront of/around baddies.

 

How can I design this hero so that theres no chance that later on I will think of something to put in my home that I can TP later, which winds up being disallowed on the grounds that I don't have the mechanics to cover it? Without using VPPs?

 

Edit: And without having to spend more CP, which I may not have?

By your TP as a gateway with lots of indirect and usable on/by others etc. and couple that with TK only usable through the gateway.

Open a gateway into your home, tk the object into your hand, open a gateway into a gastank, drop match, open a gateway with one end near something you can see and another end near something you can see and teleport object near gateway from one end to the other.

Would be an expensive power, the gateway would have to be able to compnesate for any object in existance and the TK would have to be of infinite strength, plus you'll want to make them both invisable to support your non-gateway involving SFX. I'm thinking infinity-1 points or so?

Seriously if you'd allow your tp guy to have a few weight restrictions on what he can lift/tp you could likely do this on a 300 point character.

Re: Can this be done x 2

If you are in the middle of a session, and the player has no CP left to spend, but his character ostensibly was supposed to be able to something anything commonly present somewhere on the earth, it doesn't matter how to build it, he has no points left. At which point, you would blame the player or GM.

 

But you can't blame the player or GM for not thinking of every possible way that summoning stuff could be used. It's just not possible to guarantee that the player won't have an Aha moment later, when his character points are gone.

 

And since he has no character points, the GM has to tell him even though it makes no sense for his character to NOT be able to do this one small thing when he has done stuff just like it all along, he can't because he has no points. - Or not enough.

 

That's the issue.

Is this what you're asking:

Character A finds dynamite and match on ground: can character a cause damage to persons/objects with said dynamite dispite lack of character points in relevant attack?

Obviously yes.

If you're the GM and you want this stuff to happen all the time, go for it. The majority of the community here wouldn't want to play the kind of game you are proposing.

If everyone can find dynamite on the ground, why would anyone spend character points in a gun?

Re: Can this be done x 2

I think something Synd keeps missing is the "reasoning from special effects" aspect of Hero.

If I give my character a power to summon napalm over an area, I could just as easily have him pour acid, or mail order in an airlift of man eating termites.

Special effects have no point cost or mechanic. If you wanted that power, you would buy a 15d6 aoe rka, and say you summoned napalm. Buying it as a summon, or a change environment would theoretically give you the ability to strike a match and cause the damage, but it is against the rules because your direct intent is not changing the environment, it's causing damage.

If a player had a power to summon water, and found herself in a universe where water was explosive then yes she could cause damage without having spent points. If a player could transform objects into random substances then if it randomly became an explosive she'd cause damage, perhaps to her own detriment.

The only reason to buy a power like that with the intent to cause damage is to cheat points.

Re: stuff

A glorious necropost.

Re: Attacking an object

When I run my games, if it's a stationary object, or a part of the ground, or an unconscious body, and 17 or less roll succeeds.

Re: What do you think

He had more than 100 END and more than 300 STUN.

The reason for the 140 AP Drain though was because the player wanted the task done, and he said I have 77 points, how much Drain can I afford with that 1 pt limitation. I said max 140, leaving you 7 points. He said Let's do it then.

Good times were had by all. Also concerning the moral ambiguity, the future version of this guy begged them to kill him. Also time travel ended up being very *****, if you changed the future scars would remain, so they retconned an alien invasion, but like 10% of the damage from the invasion happens anyway without cause and the populous remembers two histories.

Running this game taught me to never allow time travel to be a focus at all.

First off, in my supers campaign I allow my characters to 'level up' (spend character points to improve their character) at any point in time, including in combat. They rarely do this for obvious reasons. I also impose no point cap on them.

So last night, in the climactic final battle, one of my heroes comes up with something I think is pretty unique.

He is made completely of water, and has an EC of various powers to reflect that. So he grapples the boss and floads into his lungs (using a modified desolidification) and asks how drowning works. I'm impressed and tell him, but also tell him that it could take a while. So he says to me, I want to spend my character points to gain a new ability.

Shoot I say to him, what will it be and I'll see if it will be allowed. Since I'm made out of water he says, and have a small amount of environmental control over water, I want an ability that wiill allow me to suck oxygen out of peoples body into myself, but only while I'm in their lungs.

I laughed my butt off, there goes my boss. I gave him a 140 AP END Drain with the 1 pt limitation "Only when in target's lungs".

It took him three drains to get his max end drained from the boss, which made the boss burn Stun for end, and when the boss finally lost consciousness my player just stayed there until his heart stopped. (This particular boss, they had seen the future, was responsible for the complete discttruction of the omniverse).

Anyway, struck me as amusing, now that I type it, it doesn't read as good a story, but there you have it.

Re: A person and an AI

It would likely be easier to simply give the character powerful psychic abilities with some severe limitations like gestures and foci, along with disadvantages that limit when and how the specific power can be used.

Re: Brooklyn Rage!

For my money, there are a lot (read: not that many, but more than one) of powers that actually do little to help a character, and may actually take character points away. In my view this does a good job of limiting a character, while making him situationally effective, adding realism to some scenes and tension.

The problem as I see it is this system is designed to simulate dramatic realism, where the hero is always strong jawed and successful.

At any rate, I tried Absorb on an NPC last week and I agree, it's flawed to crap (read: useless for what I intended it to do). Modifying some of the advantages that affect it could be an answer.

Re: Martial Maneuvers

Took me a long time to find that on my own, imo it's one of the most confusing parts of Sidekick. It was easy to understand in the core book, which I read second.

Re: Your opinions please?

I can't win lol.

Re: Your opinions please?

At home I don't have to, but it seems here at work I do. What's funny though is when I try to do anything to my OP the edits don't show up.

Truthfully I gave up trying.

I change Plenty to an Change Environment 1" radius, with TK STR to pull objects toward the center only, and a 2 point Body NND: defense being No Mass, with Explosion that only applies to the STR and fades at a much higher rate than normal so it extends out only 4" or so. I called it Black Hole, after the limitations it only cost 54 character points, but it costs the NPC 27 END to use so it's a one shot deal lol

Re: Fistcannon?

Well since just as an update, and an answer to you Tech, we've played three sessions and things have gone well. I generally tend to toss one or two brutish characters in with every group and even before this character was brought to the table I had some heavy hitting NPCs (not entirely a villain but one reoccurring NPC, who the PCs are not always on good terms with, has a 20d6 NND, and 10d6 of luck). So there are threats that warrent a PC of such force.

two of my four have varied powers and abilities, one is this guy and one other has a varied character sheet, but massive amounts of TK.

Anyway, this guy has taken on the role of keeping heavy hitters busy, and because of his Psych limitation even when fighting a guy he knew could take the whole chunk of dice, he couldn't justify to himself using more than 12d6. I think this player is playing it well, in fact his power itself has become more of a disadvantage, in that a chunk of his character points are tied to an ability he is terrified to use.

Despite the fact that I probably wouldn't let it happen again, I couldn't be happier with this player's choice of point spending.

Re: Your opinions please?

Ironically, three of my four players fit the bill and the fourth is well read... but I still agree.

Re: Your opinions please?

Just tried to edit again, and I still can't space the first post. I think it would be polite of me to request this thread be removed, I feel bad having such poor forum ettiquette displayed by me here and in light of incrdbil making a good point, I think my question has been answered.

Re: Your opinions please?

They've never played it, so the world is new to them at every turn. Kinda why I chose it, let's me cheat as a GM, a wealth of interesting stories that my players have no prior experience with.

You do make a good point though, I never intended the 1984 reference to be anything more than an easter egg, perhaps I'm thinking too deeply into it.