Kdansky

in this http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=573587#post573587 thread, we were talking about mental powers. I will sum up the questions: All examples use the following: - Mindthief, a character with Telepathy, Mind Scan (about 193874 AP), EGO attack and Mind Control, he hates Dude. - Dude, a character without any importance, very gullible, thinks he's a friend of Mindthief. - OtherGuy: an ally of mindthief. - Egoguard: Dude's friend, he has Mental Awareness. 1. If Mindthief wants to talk to Otherguy, he can first mind scan for him (entire planet, etc etc), then use Telepathy. 1a: Does Otherguy know who is using Telepathy against him and can he lower his ECV accordingly? Or do they need to arrange a certain time ("I'll contact you at 06:10.00, do not block me, please") 1b: will his ECV be lowered against all powers Mindthief uses? 1c: will his ECV be lowered against all mental powers from anyone? 1d: How long will he need to lower his ECV? Just 1 phase? 1e: can Otherguy choose to NOT roll the breakout so Mindthief can stay in contact for as long as he likes without paying end? 2. Mindthief is contacting Dude, who lowered his ECV. 2a: Can Mindthief change the telepathy level and dig up something without Dude knowing/wanting to do that? 2b: Can Mindthief use Mindcontrol / EGO Attack on Dude's 0 (?) ECV? ac: Can Mindthief have an open connection to Dude AND Otherguy at the same time (we think yes ) 3. If Mindthief is Mindscanning for Dude, finds him and opens a telepathy channel, can he drop Mindscanning? If he's using a deep telepathy, he'll have a targeting sense established anyway. 4. Mindthief is in telepathic contact to Dude. 4a: Mindthief is paying end. Can Egoguard sense him? Is that targeting (even if mindthief is 2913847 km away) 4b: Mindthief is not paying end (but Dude rolls bad on breakouts). Can Egoguard sense him? Is that targeting (even if mindthief is 2913847 km away) 5. (This is a blatant copy of TRL's post) Some questions might be redundant (or depending on each other), but I'd like to be perfectly and completely sure This should go into Errata/FaQ I think

Re: Mental Power Rules questions I've checked the BBB (which I have laying around, FRED is @ friends): TELEPATHY A character with this Mental Power can read or send thoughts. Each 1d6 of Telepathy costs 5 points. Well, seems that is wrong.

Re: Mental Power Rules questions Actually, I'll need both then But thanks for clearing things up.

Re: Mental Power Rules questions I think that's not correct, you don't need to reroll the ECV attack roll. And paying 4 end once for every target is not expensive at all... (Most characters could contact about 10 people without any recovery whatsoever, and if you take your 5 minutes to do it, there's 25 recoveries in between...)

Re: Mental Power Rules questions Trouble is: Mind link is limited on the number of people you can contact, telepathy isn't. And you don't need to pay end at all, so communicating with many people is fairly easy (given time), you just open up a lot of "channels" and send thoughts as needed. As the character has telepathy to steal information too, we thought we would not need to bother to buy mindlink, because telepathy includes that anyway.

Well, I got some rather lenghty questions: A character in my group is using a (costly) Telepathy, Mindscan, Mindcontrol in an EC. Now he (usually) uses the Mindscan to find his friends (whereever they may be), then contact them through Telepathy and then he will just communicate to them with it. - Can his friends willingly not break out if they don't want to? - As he does not pay end all the time, does the telepathy break when he's going to sleep/stunned/KOd? - Can he have multiple telepathies open and talk to each one like in an IM conversation? - Do his friends know who's trying to contact them so they can "let him in" (by lowering their EGO/ECV)? Actually, these are all rules questions, but I suppose steve will take a far longer time answering them (and use difficult words )

Re: [Optional]Luck Pool System I like it a lot, it allows you to do something. HS has END, which you usually burn through beacuse it's extremly expendeable. Even 10 seconds stopping will power most characters back to full END (and stun), so there is no real "man, that fight was exhausing, let's rest a bit", except if you're badly wounded (and even a low-armor character can take 3d6 KA without too much trouble (except getting KOed)). Also, it gives you a bit more freedom to do something different except that "seg3: hit, seg4: get hit, seg6: hit, seg8: get hit" combat...

Re: EC balance fix EC is probably the easiest power framework to abuse. If there aren't any transforms/drains present, you just get 50% off of every power except the first in the framework. I did not think about taking Power Defense up to now, but this is really cheap. 4 powers at 100 AP, EC at 50, brings us to 250 total, add 50 power defense and you're really safe. 25% discount and even got an advantage out of it (50 points Power Def will make you undrainable for up to 14 dice). Impressive. I rarealy allow ECs anyway: Firewoman vs any magician, she just get's discount on flight, dmg shield, EB, EF and he does not with his flight: wings (per spell "grow wings"), dmg shield "burning body", EB "lightning blast", EF "magical barrier". Variable Special effect + EC would be cheaper, as special effects are just that. What defines a power: Active Points. What fleshes it out: Special Effect. Now why do we get discount on Special Effect? On the other hand, there are situations where an EC is a good solution: I've got a mute psionic in my game and he has to use telepathy to tell someone he mind controlled what to do, this is clearly a disadvantage. (Could also buy linked, but then he can't write the commands onto a sheet of paper

Re: Damage Evaluation How about: "As much as fits the plot"?

Re: Variable SPD: how do you model it? Actually I ran into this problem too when we switched from BBB to FRED (aid got twice as expensive, my speed boost aid got useless). If I have speed 5 and go to speed 7 with 20 points of speed (costs end +1/2), do I pay 7 times 2 end (=14 in a turn) or twice 1 end (the extra phases cost 1 end each)? The first one is the way the rules would do it, but I really don't like it You pay the end exponentially...

I'd go for drain, as you state "The end effect is that the character can make someone weaker, or unable to use their Powers." with special effect: They only think so.

We do feel though that some of our characters have too few background skills because they simply can't pay for them (as I said, we only have 150 cp). It concludes to this: The more broken a character is (Multiform/Multipower/VPP) the more background skills he usually has, because he has a lot of points spare compared to the rest.

I'd like to see something on the lines of: If you block successfully, you automatically do a free counterattack (say 50% dmg and at -2 OCV or something like that). It would make blocking really interesting and different from dodging. and for the record: The +3 Dodge bonus will carry over even if 178 thugs attack you, but if you block, you'll be at a cumulative -2 everytime. That's mean Nah, seriously, I can code such things much faster than I'd write an excel sheet that does it. Might have to do something with studying computer sience

As you say, you could dodge and go to DCV 14 or Block with OCV 11. That's the purpose I made that small calculator. It clearly shows that DCV 14 is superior to Block with ODC 11 and have DCV 7. Even if you have the choice to power up your OCV to block it's not worth it. That's exactly what disappoints me. You don't get what you pay for. The protecting of innocents may be important for a typical supers group but if you're not the "Hero" but rather someone with his own (and perhaps not THAT nice) targets you rarely need it. We're playing Hero for 3 years or so now (with different GMs, different players and different characters), but we did not have 1 case of trying to intercept an attack I'd remember

When exactly do you have a high OCV but a low DCV? Switch your combat levels and dodge, it's just better. Buying dozens of 2cp levels and blocking is real munchkinizing (because 2 cp levels are too cheap per se).

We made our own world, so we absolutely do not need background information. What else except background information + limitations is in FH? And yes, a minor thug with a knife will get massacred by our characters. Thug: "Hey you, gimme your money or I'll kill you!!" PC1: (Zombie): "I'm already dead, try me." PC2: (Demon) *shapes into black demon with leather wings and 10" claws* "Any last words?" Which implies that the "usual" NPC is of higher power level than random thugs.

Yes, but I'm calculating that too and blocking still sucks. As you really rarely roll a very low number (eg 6-) on 3d6, this rarely matters. That's the reason blocking is slightly more efficient on 1d20, because once in a while you just roll a 1 or 2 while blocking and your opponent would have needed a 1 or 2 too to hit then. Blocking is better if both parties have exactly the same OCV AND the defender has the same DCV. That's a really rare case and the player usually doesn't know the values of the NPCs. Agreed, this is the only advantage I see (although that too is a rare case in non-super campaigns.) I'd use "Martial Dodge: Special effect: PC blocks the attack". I hate the "I'm better/worse because my SFX says so". I found a little (though not really great) solution though: What if one could NOT reallocate his CLs while aborting? That way if you do an all out attack (all CLs to OCV) you should rather block next because you're still on high OCV. True, it does not make block better and it's a "the player who knows the statistics better wins" but at least blocking would have some use against dodge.

We are using a "everyone can take everything" magic system. This holds also true for non-magic powers, so we've got a demon with multiform, invisibility, wings and shapeshift, a caster with multipower and one with VPP (although we're not sure if it is broken yet). We're using quite a bunch of house rules because we discovered that HERO isn't really superior to GURPS or DSA if you're playing FH. We didin't even bother buying FH, because why would we need a book that just limits the character creation somehow? If there is interest, I can compile our rule changes to english and post them on the web.

That's rarely woth getting hit for and it only matters IF your next phase is the same your enemy acts too AND your dex is lower AND hth only. Else you'd rather dodge...

We're playing 150 base + any number of disadvantages, though we only count 1/5th (aka 20%) of any disadvantage point so no player is forced to take 75. (and it really matters if you have 150 or 125 points, thats nearly 20% difference). We are using Super rules and playing FH with it

I made a small tool to calculate some statistics on the question: "Should I rather block or dodge?" Download Tool Retaliation: This is just the chance that the defender would hit the attacker, so you're not missing something As far as it looks dodging is (still) much better than blocking, especially if your foe has low OCV and/or you have high DCV. I did a 1d20 Attack Roll too (as we are using that to counter the "everyone has 7 ocv/dcv and hits everyone on 11-" because having less is catastrophic and having more is not permitted). There might be a delphi runtime needed, tell me if you're missing some files... Simple first conclusion: Blocking sincerely sucks. Usually dodging is better and in some rare cases it does not matter which you do (assuming there is only 1 attacker, if there are many, blocking is even worse).

In a low-powered campaign (which we do) high speed seriously messed everything up. If speed scores go from 2 (brick type) to 5, the brick is simply useless against someone who acts twice as much for a meagre 30 (40 with NCM) points, even on 150 cp Level. We adjusted speed a bit differently, we started it at 4 instead of 2 and let the NCM drop. The difference between 4 and 7 isn't so harsh as 2 to 5. (+75% compared to +150%). We also dropped all figured characteristics to solve STR/CON issue and a few other changes I'm going to post sometimes perhaps

Sure it's not hard to do a bad character But I don't even think "unified theme" is a good expression. Is "Fire" a theme? I'd accept Spiderman, but how should someone fly using fire (fantastic four)? Why is it cheaper to buy EB (ice) + Force Wall (ice-wall) + flying (ice-trail) than EB (shooting rays from eyes) + Force Wall (telekinetic wall) + flight (wings) ? These are the same powers and they have no real disadvantage compared to the rest, yet they are about 30%-50% cheaper. Seems to me like every second villain/thug should have a drain/transfer/suppress then.

ECs may work fine in 4-colour campaigns, but if you use HERO with it's unrivaled "we-can-do-everyting" power, EC (and Frameworks in general) are just not fair. Character concept "Indiana Jones". He's got a load of skills, a whip (done as stretching + some HKA/HA), and a pistol. He'll absolutely never use the pistol and the whip at the same time, yet he pays the full price for both. They don't even are that different, it's a RKA and a KA with 6" range, woot! Double the cost for nearly no effect. Then there's the "firewoman" player, he get's a cheap Damage Shield, Forcefield, EB, Flight, and about anything else just because he's using a stereotype character design? Why should a player be rewarded for a stereotype design? I'd rather reward them for the opposite, something clearly unusual and new (truly, Indiana Jones isn't non-stereotypical, but that's not the point . We've got another player with a Dragon multiform, he was new to roleplaying and came up with the character concept of an evil, ancient dragon who was prisoned for thousands of years and now the spell broke (due campaign storyline). He's got a human form which is still cursed as he cannot tell a lie, hates humans and is obliged to help them at the same time, he's got a dragon multiform which he can't use if someone sees it (except in life-threatening emergency). He does get zero points for great character concept, no Framework at all. True, he got a multiform, but mages can get a multiform inside their framework!

Frankly, I watched Naruto lately and got really excited about it, it's a great anime, one of the best releases in the last 6 months or so. To make a long story short: The main Character has got a "Shadow Replication" Technique (Kage Bunshin no Jutsu for those who speak japanese) which creates clones of himself out of thin air. If they get hit once, they just dissappear in a puff of smoke, else they can fight with a bit lower power than himself, think independant and have got a good team work (about the level a group of players have with the notorious "PC-Mindlink" called "players discussing the fight while eating cookies"). Things I know how to do: Duplication, Gestures, Incantation, Concentration, Extra Time. Perhaps add a Mindlink and a small psychological Limitation "Sometimes start to argue between themselves". Things I have no Idea how to do: How do I make them "die" at the first damaging hit (let's say: the first hit doing body) and how do I overcome the duplication's Limit that dead copies are dead forever? The character can just re-cast his spell and the shadowclones reappear. Or would you rather go with Images?