zornwil

Thanks Lemming! I think your campaign has a pretty good structure, I always enjoy campaigns that wing it more than not, it's more interesting - like how we befriended Plastique. This isn't just a mutual admiration post but rather would like to point out to anyone reading it that when GMs roll with the flow it makes the game much more interesting than being forced into situations that don't quite make sense.

Sure, in fact among gritty heroes I'd expect that to be common. They won't kill because they believe vigilanteism has a limit, that they are not "entitled" to carry out a sentence - but society via the courts is fully entitled. And they easily often feel the same way about their peers and therefore attempt to stop them from carrying out any revenge or "preventative" killings. Most vigilantes (in the super-context) often operate on the belief that the law tolerates them specifically because they don't cross a line, and their way of life and public service is important enough to them fanatically avoid killing.

Re: Local Heroes The superhero team in my game meets other heroes from the same city (Detroit, no not at all Millennium City) somewhat regularly but virtually never "in the line of duty". Most run-ins are flavor and contact-building with occassional info sharnig. They were given a little info on the heroes around the Detroit area when starting. They are actually in one of the more super-populated areas of the country. Detroit per capita has way more heroes, it's a sort of enclave for mutants (specifically vigilantes) compared to other cities due to the mayor's attitude as well as rampant pollutant and technology-driven mutation. There are 3 major heros/teams of major magnitude, Metal Men, Wilting Rose, and Flaming Carrot, and there's a developing Buffy with her gang.

I usually have several subplots and a small number of major plots running at any given time. Just depends on what cans of worms the PCs open. As far as how I go about it, no real magic, I just make time for the plots that seem to have something going on, either by PC prodding or the actions of determined NPCs. I try to give everyone some time though the characters contribute so much "color" it's hard sometimes to appropriately give out the according amount of time. Before a game I normally have a list of the ongoing activities of NPCs and what things the PCs are abosrbed in. A few are "must do" items as indicated above (someone is forcing the issue), others are elective according to how much time we have in the session. Also a few go on in the background without the PCs knowing for a long time, as NPCs do their thing which eventually intertwines with the PCs.

I think "reasoning behind" would make good Dig. Hero article(s) on occassion if Steve is so inclined. I would like to see more of that in the designer's notes in the HERO books, not to say it's problematic now, the designer's notes have been adequate as needed, but it could be expanded. But I think as a separate forum it's a tad much and would require a lot of Steve's time.

I don't think this is abnormal, characters do change. Re the PC to NPC change, I suspect it happens a lot given other comments here. One player in my current group abandoned his Superman-like character, The Captain, out of a lack of interest and adopted another character (actually a couple since then, though the interim one was short-lived, the "rebound PC"). The Captain became extremely powerful overnight due to exposure to some special material, and as he always had some ego/security issues, those grew out of proportion as well. He became condescending to his old team as he struck out on his own and forged an alliance closely with the White House as "Mr. Good Guy" but behind the scenes an arrogant jerk. His path has continued to where he recently nearly killed the team's "pet dog" (well, an NPC whose brain they put in a dog) after it peed on his leg. The Captain however is also powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Magneto, nearly defeating him once but getting defeated by Magneto with a team of mutants on Magneto's side and high-level agents on The Captain's.

As someone mentioned, a key ingredient in whether super-protagonists kill is the effectiveness of the penal system and how likely they are to come back anyway. ** WARNING TO X-CHAMPIONS PLAYERS (not sure if Lemming is the only one here?) - A COUPLE SPOILERS THOUGH NOT SERIOUS ONES BELOW, NOTHING PLOT-SHATTERING ** Speaking for my current game, the penal system is not particularly effective for the higher-level villains: Kingpin beats the system because he partially owns it (well he did, more on that in a moment); Bogeyman is nearly if not immortal so he can kill himself and come back; Bud Girl has powers the penal system couldn't quite counter even though it is highly developed against mutants; and others may have very powerful friends (like Magneto) who can orchestrate a jailbreak from outside. But most of my villains do stay in the pen and some reform. Bud Girl couldn't really be held but it was in part because she did work towards reform and is reformed, though it was unnaturally fast. Pterodactyl is reformed although she's still in prison. On the other hand Octal Fist gotten broken out (although now he's back in although at some point someone who is "interested" will get him out, probably for the last time) and has become prison-hardened and a mutant cause terrorist. Several got broken out during an orchestrated strike once. As far as I can remember, only one of the heroes, Troll, deliberately killed a villain out of combat, and in that case it was a regular mortal guy who killed the character's mother just as they were reaching reapproachment after estrangement that essentially prevailed from birth. (The player wanted some tragedy so...). This same character however did plan to kill Kingpin (who had orchestrated the killing of his mother and had been imprisoned by the character's team but had wormed his way out of it) once he was forced (via a foolhardy teammate getting imprisoned) to deal with Kingpin again. Troll was spared the killing only because another, more veangeful (but with a much more compelling reason even) NPC killed Kingpin. However, the team has been responsible for 2 in-combat deaths, one a mistake (combo of too much force and on top of that a high die roll) against a very fragile villain and the other a similar strike by the aforementioned character against a somewhat (but not that) fragile villain. One character is distrustful of Troll as she's very upset about the killings (in character only of course). The other characters range are uncertain except for the calculating one who is essentially supporting Troll but with his "plausible deniability". The death of Kingpin is recent and there's been no fallout, in large part since the team was not directly responsible. But one of the aforementioned villains died and another in a battle a while before. And nothing serious has come up - yet. There will be some repercussions (and I won't give that away) but the other issue, which the PCs don't know really although they might have figured out, is that the government LIKES when "heroic" mutants kill the "bad" mutants. It allows at least an influential segment of the public enough fear to keep the government in control, and it keeps some chips in the government's hand if they decide they need to trump something up and "control" the hero mutants. It also spares the legal and penal system some work. So an accidental death in combat (at least if that combat is for an obvious good cause) is pretty much ignored. But careless or calculated killings by the heroes would definitely be out of bounds. It would cause the government to outlaw and hunt - and any mutant deemed a threat can be put away for life without a trial. Hope this wasn't too long-winded.

Excellent. Now I will rule the world. Seriously this is great, thanks.

The Men In Black agents in my campaign all look disturbingly alike. Let's see, I'm just checking now my top agents, they're 453, and the bottom agents (but still agents as opposed to thugs) are 51. But the top agents are fairly inefficient points because they're NPCs; they could probably be built on a lot less.

The two prior posters said it all re the points question, I just want to add that "Package Deal" I think has caused a lot of confusion because of the word "Deal". It is NOT a deal. They should just be called "Standard Packages".

Lawyers always win. I say Harv.

Well, what about Follower? Anyway not a bad idea. But I think that all of these powers/perk (Follower, Summon, Duplication, Multiform) now conforming to a 5 points/construct method indicates an underlying power of sorts. Folding Duplication into Summon is sort of like folding HKA, RKA, Energy Blast, et al into Attack in terms of the path it goes down. I'm not against it - in fact I find it intrigueing. But it boils down to how "toolbooky" to make HERO versus how accessible for immediate constructs.

Steve's comments are at http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3465 The issue is not math nor do I think I portrayed that in my post, though perhaps the confusion is where I said "mathematical rounding dilemma" but I intended to be clearer with the parenthetical comment about when to do it. Sorry if it was not clear.

We had a duplicator a long time ago, only one I've had as a PC. The way it was done at the time was it cost 1/3 of the total character cost minus the cost of duplication itself, but the way I did it that did not count points from disadvantages. The duplicate was NOT owed that portion of points that constituted the duplication power, nor would I agree with doing that even today as the cost of duplication in theory is really paid by each duplicate in a theoretical way to me.

PS - additionally, "Invisible to touch" should NEVER grant invulnerability for one desol vs another, that makes no sense. Otherwise you're saying that invisible to touch = desolid, and that defeats a core tenant of the rules of not buying something when a power for it already exists.

Well, as has been stated elsewhere, one desolid character versus another should be SFX-based and IMHO not dealt with "Invisible to touch". If you really want to say "my desolid beats your desolid" in rules term I'd say Hardened would make more sense.

I'm not sure I understand why you need "invisible to sight" to be invulnerable. As far as "invisible to touch" I'm not sure why you need that either unless you're using it to circumvent defining something specific that the desolid state is still vulnerable to, and even in that case I wouldn't think it makes sense.

The only thing I would add that was implied but maybe not stated (though I only hastily looked through the other responses) is to not spend time reading through each skill and power. Anything that looks like it's pivotal (for example, many people are really into martial arts) are worth a look but otherwise aren't worth spending time until/unless they come up or someone wants them ("Computer Programming" or "Security Systems" in any fantasy setting). This is especially true of powers. Also, you might get a lot of bang for the buck out of just buying Hero Designer (depending on your finances) and designing characters via the software, looking up in the book as you see things that don't make sense/wonder what they are.

FWIW, what I've seen is that people don't object to even fairly large-scale rules changes so long as they're explained. So maybe it's worth trying it out even as you move around (maybe moreso because you may find one group it works great in while another group discovers some fundamental flaw and exploits it). YMMV of course.

When Steve Long says figured characteristics are getting to be more trouble than they are worth, that's an interesting statement.. I am starting to see eliminating figured/derived characteristics and values (even things like Leap) might be a nice way to resolve both the mathematical rounding dilemma (when to do it) and get towards a system where you buy the real effects and don't lump anything together, even if logically related. In fact, the "even if logically related" can easily be resolved with the existing EC framework or Linked modifiers if handled properly (such as buying up STR, PD, Leap, and STUN, when each are otherwise bought seperately, would be fine under an EC if not too aggressively done). Of course I say this without doing the math. But given the right constructs and some ready-made packages, this could be much more elegant. The problem is it's more to think about in character creation (though most die-hard HERO fans won't care) and might be more easily unbalanced than the "lump" way of doing things now. It also might demote so many heroic genre conventions it isn't worth doing, though I'm unsure. Overall I really am starting to think it wouldn't bother me at all if HERO did recost the basic characteristics and recreate the figured characteristics as additional base characteristics.

Why are derived characteristics treated differently than it was decided the final calc for Leap should be treated, i.e., as I recall, it was decided that the sum of leaps was not rounded at every step but rather the straight sum of every STR component and then divided? (Note - I'm not asking for or stating an opinion on right or wrong, just wondering what the rules reasoning is)

Cool, nice to see this go public after all the hard work, Christopher, thanks so much!

For what it's worth, I agree with building some automoton followers with VPPs. This seems less kludgy than messing with Summon, where you have to deal with the fact the robots are hanging around and can be used throughout the adventure, they really aren't "summoned" in the game sense (even with "Arrives Under Own Power" because they are generally going to be logically available). There's definitely room to allow the follower to be rebuilt afterwards if damaged into disuse during the adventure. I'd probably go instead though with a single follower with duplication and ask the player to build along those lines (or if you are the player I suggest it anyway), reason being that it will be a tighter concept and less prone to abuse. Finally, along these lines, if in fact the player really wants to use the robots most often and generally with more points much of the time, then make the scientist the follower, even if he is the decision maker.

Re: My Millenium City feedback... This actually sounds like a plus to me. I don't normally get sourcebooks and one major reason is that they tend to be rather generic, as others have already said, too much "all things to all people". This makes me think it's a little more worthwhile. For me a sourcebook should have stuff I'm less likely or less inclined to think of.

I've created a few powers, some pretty consistent with the guidelines, a couple fairly inconsistent. As far as "recommendations", I'd say stick with things that really don't feel right ("too clunky or difficult to use" as it states in 5th ed.) as being derived from other powers, much as it mentions in the rulebook. But that "feel right" is very much to taste.