zornwil

Re: Fumbled Seduction Roll I dunno, the other day I said to a player, "You're positive you succeeded," and they looked at me and said, "Oh,no, you must have rolled an 18!" I didn't, but they were still guessing!

Re: Fumbled Seduction Roll I think that made sense, sure, that's a good way to do it. I tend not to do that only because I think "regular" success and failure should be apparent to players, but that's just me. Borderline cases I'm borderline about! PS - I meant mechanically apparent, as well as RP-apparent. I realize you intend using RPing as the conveyance/feedback method.

I'm using "Ch'i Energy Gems" in my Cyber Ninja Pirates game and a player mentioned Qi was the appropriate spelling - or was that Ki? Anyway, that's the question, and I know some of you know the language and know the transliteration well, so figured I'd throw this out and hope for a reasonably authoritative consensus...

Re: Fumbled Seduction Roll I would certainly go by NOT letting the player know they failed. They should think they succeeded brilliantly. Either the target is turning the tables and fooling them utterly or more likely it will just end badly much as described in the post above, although if it's befriendship sort of Seduction as opposed to sexual then I'd have the conversation or whatever it is continue a bit and have the offended party do something like call in some friends to beat the crap out of this person who so offended them or otherwise have them do something that completely takes the PC by surprise.

Re: An Open Call to Action Thankfully, such decisions are outside of the scope! As a side note, however joking SS' note was, I really don't want to even discuss DOJ politics or the good or bad of whoever is driving the products. I want this to be very much an independent think tank, if you will, and I don't want to be part of taking any official (or otherwise) stance on whether DOJ is doing something right, wrong, or indifferent, except where we may have reasonable and honorable disagreements on rules directions.

Re: A Treatise On "Only vs. (X) SFX" Limitations Very well said, sir!

Re: Where else do you roll down? Just checking! Sometimes people hate something without really being forced to hate it, if you know what I mean. I still like mac and cheese, always love potatoes. I can eat ramen's, but that's about it, I wouldn't choose to do so.

Re: I need help with this Character Concept. Suggestions and Opinions. I see Dive for Cover in this character's future!

Re: I need help with this Character Concept. Suggestions and Opinions. If I understand the rules, I think it's simply dropping the "Surface Thoughts" and keeping "Empathic" although if you really want "Fear Only" (I didn't take that literally) then I'd certainly replace Empathic with a greater Lim. As to the EC, like I said, I personally wouldn't change it, that just depends on your GM (if you were asking about that part, too). PS - whoops, if you don't want drain-one-drain-all and your GM will enforce that, I don't think there's too many great alternatives, though you can multipower the attacks and anything that can't be done the same time as an attack, and leave the other stuff outside not in a framework.

Re: An Open Call to Action I like 3d6 - though I'd say it's more of a core mechanic than axiom per se. Hugh, would you please drop me your email either via the board e-mail or PM?

Re: An Open Call to Action Ah, it's all about priorities! But, yes, I think the axiomatic and core mechanics is a necessary first understanding. I'm sure our first arguments (as a group, not necessarily you and I) will be related to action versus study!

Re: An Open Call to Action I bet a lot of people could say the same (well, not that they play RDU Hero, you know what I mean! ). In fact, rather a tangent but still, I think that's one of the big reasons for occasional acrimony over refused customizations to HD - the (understandable) purpose of HD is to implement HERO, period, whereas HERO ironically encourages people to build their own little versions of HERO, so a conflict arises. (BTW, PLEASE do not take this as any form of attack at all on HD, I'm simply stating the conditions, and I think it's understandable as to HD's limits and I'm good with that, and even if I weren't good with it, this isn't the place for that discussion)

Re: An Open Call to Action Well, I'm pretty encouraged by the responses! Thanks. There's a few more folks I hope are interested, but I don't want to push anybody, though I might send a few PMs.

Re: An Open Call to Action Oh, now, come on (edit - said light-heartedly), if there was a fan base around for 5th, there'll assuredly be one for 6th. I, for one, was pretty despairing and turned off to HERO, as a company not as a system, before 5th became a reality. Heck, I saw the draft before DOJ took over (don't worry, it was closely guarded and I was not allowed nor did I ask of course to copy or otherwise get anything more than "a look") and said, "well, that's nice, but I'm not interested, I don't even think I like a lot of it." Oh, yeah, not interested...

Re: HERO System Vehicles Whoops, okay, I thought you meant you were moving some from an actual Marvel game. As Emily what's-her-name (Latella? sp), Gilda Rader's SNL character, would say, "Oh, that's very different! Never mind." BTW, you should publish characters anyway if you like. I think a LOT of people's here don't match CU or HERO's general approach. I surely don't.

Re: A Treatise On "Only vs. (X) SFX" Limitations Well said, thanks! I'm out of rep but it's on the backlog...you are severely owed rep, anyhow, sorry...

Re: HERO System Vehicles That would really be great, at least for me as someone who's interest is much more casual.

Re: HERO System Vehicles Hmmm, I think you hit the nail on the head in that I think it takes a more genre-motivated audience. So, Fox1, maybe in one of the other fora you'd have better luck - such as Dark Champions. Also just making a suggestion to help. BTW, I was thinking later, I don't want to come across as knee-jerk defending of the core vehicle rules. Like I said, I just think it's a difficult proposition to start - accomodating vehicles in this game gets very genre-specific, and in my opinion a large majority of heroic fiction just uses vehicles as window dressing and so HERO has to accomodate that as well as provide the springboard for more serious design. To put it this way, in playing supers, western, and in the old days fantasy I never saw vehicles come much into play in any detail, and, beileve me, it wasn't because people were afraid the rules weren't supportive enough. Whereas with sci-fi, absolutely, it comes into play big-time. Pulp is more sketchy; it didn't come into play in the relative few games I've done of it, but I am sure there are groups with serious demands for detailed vehicle rules in pulp, there just "has to be"! Anyway, from dealing with sci-fi even superficially, I assure you I understand there's an issue here. But I also just tend to think that the framework is reasonable and adequate as is for the so-called universal toolkit, and the bolt-ons you and Christopher reference are probably necessarily more genre-oriented. Maybe I'm dead wrong. I'd love to see a reasonably elegant vehicle design system that bridges the gap, allowing for less detail for many (most?) people and more detail for where it's needed.

Re: HERO System Vehicles

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Yuck, I went through this at home some months ago. NONE of the anti-spyware tools could get rid of it. I finally had to sleuth around and check dates/times from about when it started, and narrowed it down to a file which then had to be deleted by mounting the drive elsewhere (being ME, it was virtually impossible to boot into command mode).

Re: An Open Call to Action Heh, yeah, true. I realize time is a huge barrier, which is why I hope we can, in the end, give DOJ good info to assist, helping in the development cycle. IF (big if, I admit) we can get such a thing off the ground and become effective, I could also see us being a good group to playtest anything you guys felt was safe enough to send our way, if it's a specific rules idea or such. But like I said earlier in this thread, we'd really have to build some credibility to get to that point.

Re: An Open Call to Action I suspect you're right. But I want there to be a barrier to change. And I entirely welcome people who don't want change - I just don't want people who turn off conversation without making a case as to why. PS - personally, actually, I'm fairly resistant to core changes. I like to talk a lot and for house rules that's fine, but real system change requires serious validation and serious justification.

Re: An Open Call to Action Good ideas, all accounts, though I do like "Society" more than "Skunkworks"...but that's just me. Skunkworks is really a better name. Let me tell you (all) a story, by the way, one which "skunkworks" reminds me of. I own a piece of Digital Audio gear for recording that didn't "live" very long. It was made by Ensoniq, who were then bought by E-mu, who were then bought by (gasp) Creative Labs. Through that process, the hardware/software combo was basically killed off, and is now technically obsolete. This was great gear, and in fact has been used in a few award-winning recordings in the C&W, jazz, and gospel fields. There was a lot of despair, particularly as the software provider turned "idle" (they had other commitments, this is a very long story so I won't go there), and stopped issuing updates. And there was an issue of that company not being responsible for the hardware drivers, which were owned by E-mu/Creative Labs, and which didn't support Win2K or XP. But guess what happened? A dedicated group formed and started working on a new driver and on plug-ins. They managed to convince E-Mu to release the driver and let them work on it! The hardware/software remains alive through that groups effort. Their name includes "skunkworks", naturally enough, so this reminded me of that. The point is, cool stuff can happen...and in that situation things were grim. Here we have tremendous opportunity.

Re: An Open Call to Action I don't see it that way. I see this group as taking a very "long haul" perspective and not wedded to attempting some big batch of changes. I see various postings/releases of ideas, as I indicated above, some suitable simply as possible house rules, some situational, and I suspect only a minority would we, as a group, really endorse as "the rules should change!" I would enjoy the last part the most, because that's my nature, but realistically the bar for change to core rules should be very high. And in reaction to whatever the current edition is, even if the change is fundamental, i.e., I would think that we'd be working at a mechanics level or a rules level and either way such changes would really be in sub-systems, not entire system-wide rewrites. But who can predict? I can say that I would want in place some sort of process by which a governing body would only approve an actual rules change recommendation after lengthy, certified testing, and by some large majority such as 2/3 or even perhaps 3/4. The idea is a rules change should be really highly justified. I expect most of the time we probably wouldn't agree to large rules changes - that's okay!