Istaran

Re: Learning from the mistakes of others My experience with playing 4e for a few months now and 3.5 for a few years before that is that the roleplaying in 4e is pretty much the same as it was in 3.5. Except that the skill system doesn't actively tax me for my character concepts so much anymore. Yay. I'm sorry some of you have run into some serious munchkin players in your areas. Believe me, they can get far more annoying in Hero than they can in D&D (and for that matter much worse in 3.5 than in 4e, at least so far). At least in Hero it is expected that the GM will review character sheets and approve/disapprove every obnoxious attempt at cheesing obscene bonuses out of every last corner of the rulebook(s). D&D4e characters aren't balanced to do anything close to the same damage as each other. They're balanced to be equally important as a combat team which needs to work together as a team to succeed. That means some of them focus on massive damage to single targets, some focus on modest damage to many targets, others do only modest damage but aid and heal their teammates as well, and yet others are designed to keep threats away from their allies while being able to stand up to threats well themselves. Most characters straddle the line between two of those descriptions. And D&D4e does have a mostly combat-oriented ruleset, but it's designed to mostly stay out of your way for non-combat roleplaying. How about Hero? What's that, you're a librarian? Did you spend your 3 points in PS:Librarian? No? You know you ought to spend a good 50 pts in KS: skills as well.. okay, now that you've finished re-writing your character.. huh, why do you always get clobbered in combat? I've seen a Hero system character with so much non-combat points spent that she basically hid whenever combat came and felt useless. At other times she was the only one who could participate in certain non-combat scenes and the rest of us got to wait around for a few hours while she has her screen time. That's not the kind of 'balance' that actually works out well for the group in practice. Ideally everyone should be useful in and out of combat on a regular basis so that everyone can be involved in playing. I've also done some of the kinds of PVP type stuff some people have complained about here done in Hero system. In a certain sense it's more natural in Hero system; after all NPCs are built with the exact same rules set as PCs, aside from a few extra options like Automatons. That isn't anything about the system, and everything about the players involved and what they want to do with their time. (In our case it was playing around with the system after hours when we had two players and no GM around, and just wanted to practice making characters and seeing what works and how well. We learned a lot about the system from that, which helped us know what we were doing when making our real characters for the real game.) Anyways, the point I really want to get across is that if you have a bunch of people that want to roleplay with some solid tactical combat, 4e works great. 4e can also work well for pure dungeon crawls. Hero does well on the roleplay (if you put up with the rampant concept taxes) but I'm less sold on the tactical combat aspects.

Re: Learning from the mistakes of others I'm on the new side for RPGs. I did a lot of freeform stuff in junior high, but I only started D&D with 3.5 about 4 years ago (about the same time I first tried WoW, randomly enough) and I've played Hero for a much shorter time (and a small bit of GURPS). I love 4e, and absolutely agree with you that it's a beautifully done tactical wargame. I've been playing the new Living Forgotten Realms RPGA campaign, and see it as being more or less exactly Living Greyhawk's equal (for better and for worse) when it comes to roleplaying. (More than anything, this is evidence that rules get in the way of roleplaying more than they help it per se.) I find myself rankled by the 4e feels like an MMORPG position. Mainly because I'd be playing a lot more MMORPGs if they had anything remotely comparable to the fun tactical feel of 4e. For that matter, I haven't managed to get the tactical feel of 4e out of HERO. That's why I usually play both every weekend; 4e for the tactical fun, HERO because my GM is a talented world-builder who has created a deep and engaging roleplaying environment and plot. And I do like being able to build whatever I want, but when it comes time to play with what I've built.. the difference is quite noticeable. (I also love that after playing 4e for a couple months, 3.5 for 4 years, and HERO for over a year.. 4e is the one I need to spend the least time consulting rule books. Tell me that isn't an accomplishment on their part?)

Re: Ability Check Variant: Count the Body Count the pips has the further advantage of allowing the 1 pip step, so 3 out of 5 increments on the characteristic are meaningful, like how STR applies to punching.

Re: Dresden files anti-tech aura As for the disad, it seems like Physical Limitation might be right. You physically cannot make long term use of any technological item, since it will break down. The imparingness/frequency of course can probably be toned down a bit for you compared to if a normal had it, because you have magic to make up for what you lack in this way. Though amusingly as the Always On portion of the power goes up, so does the imparingness/frequency of the disad. For example, if you can't ride an elevator up a building because it pretty much WILL break before you can get to the top, that's more of a disad then if you had a lower level of power and it was generally possible for you to get off at the top floor before your aura does too much damage.

Re: Ability Check Variant: Count the Body On the Pro side of the equation for switching to CHAR/x d6 for ability/skill rolls: This would allow more granularity in the attributes feeding the rolls. For example, assuming we keep 1d6 per 5 pts, the odd 3 pts is worth a half die. That doubles the number of break points for characteristics for this purpose. Also, as someone else pointed out: a 15 INT person would almost always outthink a 10 INT person. Shouldn't that be the case? And shouldn't a 10 INT person have an advantage over the 8 INT person? I'm not convinced overall, but it has some interesting aspects to it. To a certain degree it's a question of how broad should the range of a characterstic like this be in practice? If 0-20 is our range, the current system leaves the least intelligent among us outthinking the most intelligent among us on a fairly regular basis all things concidered. But if we're looking at more of a 0-100 range in characteristics, a system that is less responsive to small changes in the characteristic may be preferable (should the 100 INT character be that much smarter than the 95 INT character? I don't know! Of course it seems to me that the count BODY system will give the 100 INT character a less total advantage over the 95 INT character than the 10 INT character has over the 5 INT character.. somehow this strikes me as right.)

Re: Would Like everyone to take a look at this power. I don't have my book handy but.. a) If I'm not mistaken, Cannot Recombine means once you use this power the duplicates permanently exist. So if you use the power to make all six duplicates, you can't duplicate any further until you buy more max duplicates. Is that what you were going for? If not you should probably remove Cannot Recombine, and maybe replace it with a lim for more difficult recombination, if appropriate. Again, I could be wrong but doesn't Linked mean the power can only be active while the Greater Power is active? Meaning that once the Healing is no longer active your duplication ends? Doesn't deactivating Duplication require you to immediately recombine? For this reason, Linking a Constant Power to an Instant Power seems inherently problematic. More so in this case, since there's no way you're using the power phase after phase. c) Also, Linked does not make it triggered: you don't automatically Duplicate just because you Healed. I think in this case you can only Duplicate at the same time that you Heal (because of Linked) and you cannot Duplicate at the same time you Heal (because one is Triggered and the other is a normal Half-Phase during your Phase) with a possible corner case exception of holding your Half-Phase to Duplicate when the Healing goes off. I think you should have Triggered on the Duplication instead of Linked. Doing the Link the other way (Healing Linked to Duplication) is more workable even if it's more expensive. You should still have Triggered on it: Linked does not give you Triggered for free. And you should probably get rid of Cannot Recombine. (If you're going to keep Cannot Recombine, the whole thing is a senselessly contrived construct: if you're only going to split once and stay that way from then on, you should just buy the power straight.)

Re: Dresden files anti-tech aura I think Killer Shrike is mostly right on. I would add 'Cumulative' to the dispel, so it will kill things over time that it won't kill instantly, and I think making part of the power Always On and part of it not Always On is the best way to make the variable levels of effect. As a further plus, that will mean the total value that can be achieved by this will be high relative to the damage done per phase by the Always On portion (becuase it's based on the overall power) unless I'm misreading something somewhere. (The plus of this is that it will kill some things over a longer period of time than other things.) As for being less effective on less 'advanced' tech.. well the point totals naturally tend toward the opposite effect (higher tech naturally gravitates toward higher AP, so harder to dispel), but you can always offset this with an agreement with your GM that lower tech devices take half or less effect from the aura. Also, hello. (First post on the forum. Wee)