Mark Taylor

Re: HERO 5th Revised So on that basis a service which is provided completely free of charge, which many other similar companies don't provide and which DOJ have no obligation to provide is somehow twisted around to become a reason for complaint? Geez, the world is even more screwed up than I thought. Quite apart from the fact that 90% of the questions addressed to Steve could be just as readily and easily answered by other board members in the HERO System Discussion board, many of whom I'm sure would be more than happy to give you a 5E page reference should you ask for it.

Re: HERO 5th Revised

Re: HERO 5th Revised But the price increase is only 25%, and the book is over 50% bigger! See I don't understand this POV because could easily just keep using 5E, which is no way reduced in value by the release of 5ER. It seems a bit like complaining that the company who make your washing machine or DVD player released a new and better (and slightly more expensive) model and didn't give you one for free. (Which is something that consumer electronics companes do regularly every six months to one year and nobody seems to complain).

Re: Dealing with Magnetism How about: Entangle 6d6, 12 DEF, Takes No Damage From Attacks All Attacks (+1/2) (135 Active Points); Entangle Has 1 BODY (-1/2), Limited Power (Target must be close to a metal surface; -1/2), Cannot Form Barriers (-1/4). Total cost: 71 Points.

Re: HERO 5th Revised

Re: The cranky thread

Re: Heat Vision

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Every time I rep somebody they post something even more deserving of rep an hour later, and I wish I'd saved the rep for that post! Ah well.

Re: HERO 5th Revised Makes sense. It's fairly close to midwinter, shortest day and all that. Less trouble with pesky sunlight turning them to stone.

Re: HERO 5th Revised

Re: HERO 5th Revised

Re: HERO 5th Revised I'd suggest you actually read 5ER (as I'm currently in the process of doing) and compare its content with that of 5E before making that kind of assertion. At the moment I think you're making a bit of a fool of yourself by making false assertions based on groundless assumptions. But as you said, time will tell.

Re: HERO 5th Revised Yes, almost three. It's easier to type than two years and X months (I think X = 9, but I'm not sure and can't be bothered checking). I'd apologise for my lazy attitude in typing and fact checking, except that I still don't see anything wrong with it. It's also an amount of time after which the FAQ had grown to an extent where little new was being added to it and a lot of people on these boards and probably elsewhere were suggesting it should really be incorporated into the main text. In other words, there was DEMAND for the revised edition. DOJ did something that many of the customers asked for. The fiends! My point was it is and must be irrelevant to DOJ's decision to publish the revised edition. No matter how many years after the original edition they decided to publish the revised edition, whether it be 2 or 20, there would still have been people who only bought it yesterday. Does it mean they should never publish the revised edition? That's kinda silly. How recently you happened to buy the book is beyond their control, unless they do what certain other companies have done and let the main rule book go out of print for months or years before reprinting... which would generate far more complaints than 5ER has done and probably place the company in serious financial difficulties.

Re: 5ER Picture caption contest. Page 459: "...an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

Re: 5ER Picture caption contest. Page 213: "Screw this. I'm going for a swim." Page 230: "Heheh! This is way more fun than tipping 'em over!" Page 261: "Aagh! Just wait until I catch up with that guy who told me smearing honey on my armor would keep it from rusting!" Page 330: (thoughts) "I'd bored. Who'd have thought being King would be so damn boring?" Page 378: (thoughts) "Smoking with no hands is pretty cool, but damn the smoke sure does get in my eyes!" Page 408: "Check out these biceps, kid!" Page 443: "I knew that gigantic stick of bubblegum would come in handy."

Re: An EB by any other name... I see your point here. I think Takes No Damage From Attacks should include an option where another character cannot damge the Entangle at all, not even by targeting it at a penalty to OCV. Personally this is how I generally interpret the situation anyway in such cases, based on special effects. I still think there are plenty of valid uses for Entangles that can't form barriers though. And in many cases in which they can, they could only reasonably do so in doorways, passages or other situations where they have something convenient vertical surfaces to cling to, and the rules do not reflect that either. I only just remembered it now, but a particular villain (actually a demon) that appeared in my Ninja HERO game had a cinematic "piledriver" attack (the campaign is not exactly 100% serious in tone). The character jumps high in the air and lands with his feet on the victim's shoulders. This is just a sort of "jumping move-through" and as such could do quite a lot of damage, but on anything other than hard ground it could also drive a victim into the ground, trapping him. That part was built as an Entangle, Cannot Form Barriers (among other limitations). Just wondering if you would have built it a different way.

Re: An EB by any other name...

Re: An EB by any other name...

Re: HERO 5th Revised I can't see how it's in any way unreasonable to charge 25% more for a book that's well over 50% larger, or to publish a revision of a book that's been available almost three years. However long ago you personally happened to buy it is completely irrelevant, isn't it? You'll probably find that the rulebook page references in future supplements are to 5ER, but assuming you can work around that you should not have any problem at all. The rules haven't changed.

Re: An EB by any other name... A rope accross a doorway doesn't form any kind of barrier anybody can't get past in half a second unless it's strung back and forth several times and pretty well secured in place. An action that's going to take a lot of Extra Time, so it's hardly a valid use for, or a natural part of the powers of a lasso, for example. As for mystic bonds, for example, again that's highly SFX dependent. It depends hugely on the nature of the spell and how it's visualised. I'm not sure how a 'glue gun' could reliably form any kind of barrier which couldn't easily be passed, without an awful lot of time and effort or exactly the right circumstances.

Re: An EB by any other name... I think we just differ in the genres we play. I am guessing you mostly play Champions. In the heroic (as opposed to superheroic) genres Entangles which do not form barriers are IME actually more common than ones which do. Any kind of paralysis effect from a Martial Artists' paralysing nerve strike ability, to a paralysing poison, to a Wizard's spell of mystic bonds, to a Sci-Fi Tangler weapon is generally built using an Entangle which Cannot Form Barriers. OTOH if a player wants to build an ability which is purely intended to form barriers, he's more likely to employ a Force Wall than an Entangle, since in most cases he gets more value for his Character Points that way.

Re: An EB by any other name... No, it stops characters from being able to move or act. Physical barriers are just a special effect. Out of the three characters in the two campaigns I'm currently running who have Entangle based abilities, all three are built with the Cannot Form Barriers Limitation, and from what I have seen of characters posted online, Entangles built that way are just as common as Entangles with a physical barrier type special effect.

Re: An EB by any other name... In GURPS (which has the equivalent of Power Modifiers, though they're not as core a part of the system as in HERO) they are called Enhancements and Limitations. Whereas Disadvantages are still Disadavantages and Talents and Perks are both classed as different types of Advantages. To my mind, the naming of these and indeed many other elements in GURPS is rather more logical and consistent than in HERO, But HERO is still a far better system overall IMO.

Re: An EB by any other name... It only just occured to me, Restrain fits quite well.

Re: An EB by any other name... Ensnare is pretty good actually. It's better than the thoughts I had, which were along the lines of Impede, Hinder, and similar, none of which sound right. Probably the most technically correct term in the English language would be Arrest, but unfortunately that just really doesn't sound right, probably because of the police-related connotations.