Kdansky

Re: Flexible Active Point Limits: What Do You Think? Remjin's example shows well how the system currently works: We treat the points as guidelines and then we eyeball for balancing. By the way, I once played a short adventure where our characters had neither point limits nor the same overall maximum. It works rather well. What I would like to have: If you spend 150 points in an obviously meaningful way, then you are useful. If you powergame as much as possible, you are about as strong as the 150 cp character if he got 15 exp. Result: We powergamers would be allowed to do it because it had nearly no consequences (10% improvement is tiny) but we (at least I) enjoy building something with high synergy a lot. Sadly, this is probably an impossible problem, at least in P.

Re: End Of Year Blowout Sale! Ouch. It's cheaper then to order them without the sale, but at home

Re: Desolid and Strength It was more a general figure of speech, sorry

Re: Desolid and Strength I read through all the chars by now. I pretty much like all of them. Certainly, Turbofist is ridiculously powerful, but so is everyone else. So I suppose these chars worked very well, as they seem to be similar in strength (way above what most players would consider standard). I mean, having 350cp chars which are as strong as other 500 cp chars is no problem, if everyone does it.

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts With the 1/3rd guy I meant: You can coerce/bride/sweettalk nearly anyone, but you *will* fail with the BBEG. Same goes for MC, the BBEG will very definitely have countermeasures. But while there actually are countermeasures against MC (the magic amulet of mental damage shield/defenses, pretty simple), it is very hard to come up with a good anti-skill thing. 10 negative skill levels? Please, why would he have that? It's just that you cannot sweettalk anyone into anything. Period. It does not matter how much money you offer me and how great of a talker you are, I will not kill my family. Never. The skill system does not reflect that at all, it actually does the opposite! Assume you roll a lucky 3 on your sweet talk roll with your 23- epic skill. What am I going to do as a GM here? Destroy the plot due to one lucky roll? In this regard, a more finegrained system as proposed before would actually help, since then my NPC could have very good stats there. And yeah, I figured someone might quote my PRE example. But do you really think how you word your PRE attack has more influence than 1-2 dice tops? When you go with 20 PRE and blaze away, that's not *that* huge anymore. Buying a 18- skill for a lousy 10 points is. That's the next problem. I cannot rely on characters to A: have the skill, and B: make their roll. That means my clever clues might not be found, which results in a failed quest without anyone even noticing. True, that is a pessimistic view But in the end, conversation boils down to this: If you have the right argument, the NPC will give in, and your skills/rolls/player charisma does not matter much. If you have the wrong arguments, the NPC will not budge. It's really rather boolean. Sure, you can haggle a bit, but if he wants his daughter freed from the dragon first, he wants his daughter freed from the dragon first. "But we found this great prostitute on the street!" won't work. Never.

Re: The cost of killing damage As probably stated before, in our last campaign, we had an ugly rDEF inflation. The first character concepts had not a lot of rDEF, but most had Killing Attacks (not because of the mechanics, but because "Sword" and "Sharp Claws" are kinda obvious from an SFX point of view). Most NPCs also used KAs (Weapons) and we very, VERY quickly realized that we needed rDEF. And a lot of it. After about three sessions we redesigned most characters with combat luck (we were new to HS, so redesigning flawed characters was rather common, and even FRED states that one should not be afraid of doing retroactive changes to characters if they unbalance the game. And falling over in segment 12 in nearly every fight is *unbalancing* (that was a baaaad pun)). So I really cannot answer your question, we couldn't solve the problem at all.

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts You sum up my point nicely. Because these skills do more bad than good (spoil the plot, make the problems too easy, give out information which the GM hides on purpose) I really do not like them. If you use "tactics" in my game, I (as a GM) will never explain to you what you should be doing. Assume Space Warfare scenario: You can have exact numbers about your ships, you can ask me "if we pit this ship vs that ship, will ours win?" and get a decent answer (assuming I know it) or you can get circumstance boni on ocv/dcv and similar things. Also, it will help for not being surprised. We simulate combat with dice because we really cannot do well otherwise. But that is not true for mind games, which work nicely in our heads. Rolling dice is a crutch when nothing else works well, it's not how things "should" be!

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts Well, you can certainly play characters more knowledgeable, but smarter? How is your character going to come up with an ingenious plan to save the universe? "I roll an INT roll to see if I find a way out of the sticky situation"? Probably not. By the way: Every RPG system I know has an INT score (or something equivalent).

Re: Susano's Guide to Adapting Fictional Characters to HERO I may be very main-streamish, but .pdf is rather nice

Re: End Of Year Blowout Sale! Yeah... I'm thinking about the Ultimate Series Big Deal. How am I supposed to get that stuff home afterwards? (Student exchange in Japan, living in Europe usually) Postal fees is like 1 euro (use google) per 150 grams. How heavy are the ultimate books all together?

Re: Social versus Physical/Mental Conflicts I have to say that I did not read the whole thread, but I oppose you greatly! I dislike the idea of even having an INT stat totally (and social skills even more so!). My character will never be more intelligent than myself (since I think for him), even though he could be more stupid. So for me, being dumb would a physical limitation ("dumb, moderately impairing, very common"), and there is no INT stat. I don't oppose a DEX, STR, COM or PRE stat, since these are not related to my. My speed does not influence my character, but my intelligence does. So instead of putting social skills with rolls into the game, I would prefer things like GURPS uses: "Goodlooking, 5 cp, +1 on reaction". They have a Reaction roll table (3d6 +/- whatever your modifiers are) which tells the GM: "likes the character, hostile, love, ..." depending on the modified roll. Table + roll is not necessarily the way to go, but a generic +x for social interations is much better than "roll 17- to succeed". And then, the Roleplaying takes place, with the GM taking the modifiers into account. You got +25'000? Well, as a GM, I'm giving in to any stupid argument, even if it does not make sense. You got zero? You'd better have some pretty good story, or the NPC will not do your bidding. This also solves the GM story dilemma neatly. If you could talk my NPCs into not lying to you, we'd have a solved murder case after 5 minutes. I just cannot allow you to roll a 15- to solve the quest which I took two weeks to prepare for. In my system, you might have a +10 on reaction (in gurps, that's huge, since +1 costs 5cp and the average char only has 150 cp total, so you spent 1/3 of all your points on social stuff, so you could have bought telepathy + mind control too for that amount of points), but I'm not going to give in with my BBEG who's lying to you. He might like you so much that he does not send you into the trap in his garden which he prepared, but instead just lets you leave his mansion without any problems, but he's NOT going to confess the murder. Intellect and Wisdom are player stats, not character stats. I once tried to play a smart ass. I failed so much I had to rewrite my character concept after two sessions, because I'm just not fast enough to come up with smart comments all the time.

Re: The cost of killing damage I ask myself right now: What do I want from a Killing Mechanic? I mean: Having an attack to take out targets without any resistant defenses whatsoever is nearly useless, since all your enemies will have rDef, and that is covered by AVLD and NND very well. So we can go with two things: Either add another AVLD mechanic or do something completely different. I would like to see something like this: Normal Attacks: - Reliable, small fluctuation (at DC 12+ it could be a bit more than currently, really). KAs - unrealiable, bigger fluctuation (call it crits if you like), a bit less in average (since critting is an advantage due to stunning and how defenses work linearily) Normal Defenses - reliable against EBs and against KAs, but do not protect well vs outlier rolls (crits) Resistant defenses - also reliable, more expensive, and protect well versus outlier rolls or crit. Very crude example, I'm not entirely happy with the mechanics, it's really only to show what I mean: PD, ED, EB working like now KA: Like EB, but instead of 12 DC = 12d6, that would be 12d6-12, but for every four, five or six you roll, you get an extra die (full die, no minus 1). You cannot infinite crit (to prevent the current 100+ stun hits), meaning, a 4, 5 or 6 on a bonus die does not give another bonus die. Also makes rolling damage a neat two rolls at max, never more. In the end, your average will be 3.5 * DC * 1.5 (due to 50% chance to get another DC) - DC, equalling 4*DC against unarmored targets, an improvement vs EB, and a lucky rolls are favoured. rDEF: For each n (lets say 3) points of rDef you have, you can prevent one of these bonus rolls. So if you run around with 10 rDef + 10 PD and get hit by a 10 DC KA, you can prevent 3 bonus dice, and the KA will probably roll 12 dice, but subtract 10 points for stun, that's a tiny bit worse than EB ( 12 * 3.5 - 10 < 10* 3.5). But 10 rDef costs you 5 cp more, or 1 DC for the attacker to compensate. The numbers are not far off. Since rDef costs more points, being "very" safe is expensive, and being "rather" safe is cheap. Against turtle opponents with lots of rDEF, EB is better (or rather, a lot cheaper than the defense and a tiny bit better than KA), against pure PD monsters, KA *can* shine.

Re: Information on incoming attacks I assume a character who *has* a certain defense also knows about what it will usually work against. Also note the word "usually" in the former sentence.

Re: [Killershrike.com] Character List by Genre When I hover names, they get red and bold. And if they are longish, they become two lines which makes my mouse not hover them anymore, which in turn... well, you know, messed up html and stuff Opera browser, current 9.x something.

Re: Information on incoming attacks Sure you can Analyze such things with appropriate skills, if you have them... There is probably no catch-all skill. And as a GM, you should really tell the damage rolls *before* applied defenses and tell the players which defense is affected. Everyting else quickly becomes ridiculous, see your example.

Re: Oh baby Do you think he's ... compensating for something? Why am I the first to make this joke?

My next campaign (if it ever sees daylight) will start with low rather weak characters which also do not have to have superpowers (but can, if the player wishes) in a steampunk-world. Due to campaign plot, they will acquire certain "plot-powers", e.g. some items, which they can pass around and even configure (meaning, they get 50 cp worth of OIF Item, "has to be spent in a certain way that fits the item"). This will result in a very quick power growth, I suppose we start at 200 to 250 (or even lower) and in the end we should be at about 400. My question is this: What ruleset should I use? Actually, I want them to be able to buy weapons with money (at first), but the plot powers (ome of them are weapons) will replace most things anyway rather soon (a 2d6 HKA OIF trumps any buyable sword anyway). I think I will be going for STR costs END /10, mainly because it's less complicated if you use your str with your AP HKA But then, how do I go about armor, equipment, or even disadvatages? Also, I'm really unsure about AP/DC/Def limits.

Re: Another VPP Question That's the forums. You state a rather complicated problem and the first post is a three-liner, perfectly fitting your example, and a clean and nice build.

Re: The cost of killing damage If we want to keep the wild body damage, we can also go the other way: Roll Body like now (3DC = 1 die), apply only against resistant defenses, then add x for stun to make it "on par" with an EB. We could even state that also the stun is only applied versus resistant defenses (and in turn use a lower x than if we go for "all defenses work").

Re: End Of Year Blowout Sale! Is shipping included? How about sending to japan?

Re: Naked advantage for my own EC? Errr, right, but can I fire multiple powers from a MP when they all are delayed? Won't the powers disappear when I swap slots?

Re: Question about Nonpersistent Oi, that greatly reduces the amount of recoveries many characters can take. Force Fields and such are rarely persistent, but often 0-End. Dropping my DCV is one thing, but also losing 15/15 defenses is something completely different.

Re: Question about Nonpersistent Huh? I thought you can take a recovery even if you have a 0-END power active. Meaning, you can do it as long as you don't pay END in that phase.

Re: Actions versus Spotlight - revisiting the SPD Concept from a more fundamental lev I think SPD and a different amount of actions work very well. With one major exception. All characters should be relatively close in SPD values. We've had a group where the slowest character was at 2, and the fastest at 6. That just does not work at all. 5-9 sounds like a good range, the fastest one does not act more than twice as much as the slowest, while still being decently fine-grained. My next game will be between 3-4 to 6-7, depending a bit on the characters the players make. I would like to see something like: "Everyone can act once per second, and for each SPD you buy, you get an extra action every 10 seconds". There you would really have to buy lots and lots of SPD to get ahead, but every point would be very useful. If this was usable spontaniously, that might be fun. "The BBEG shooting his BlasterOfDoomTM at you." - "Whoa, I abort my bonus action and dive for cover. Then i use my second bonus action to shoot back!" Yeah, that was brainstormed

Assume I have an EC (Powers which are not meant to be named) - 30 cp Unnamed EB 30 cp Unnamed KA 30 cp Unnamed KA - AP 30 cp etc etc I want all attacks to be able to use the "Delayed" Advantage, more or less simulating that I can summon the powers in advance, place them on hold and release as wished. Should I: A: Put delayed onto the EC? B: Buy delayed for any slot (expensive!) C: Buy delayed as a naked advantage, usable with any power in the EC? Results: Can I then prepare all my attacks and use them as I see fit in a multipowerattack-kind-of-way? How many attack rolls do I make? And how do I put limitations on the delayed part (e.g. "can only be held active for x turns", "activating in delayed mode requires concentration/gestures/extra time/extra end") and so on? Would "prepared spell is visible for enemies" (floating burning skulls) be a valid limitation? How much is that worth? I think I'm a bit confused by the options I have And on a completely different topic, though I don't want to make a new Thread for this: How much would you value "Only while enraged" as a limitation. Surely depends on the enrage chance mostly, right? With an 8- common enrage I would have gone for -1.5. ok?