Blackberry

Re: Can you explain Aid to me? For the armored suit, I would just buy the Characteristics Power, with DEX and SPD, No Figured Chars on the DEX, and put Costs END on the whole thing.

Re: Looking for a name for my "fate points" Thanks for all the suggestions. I think I'll go with "Catalyst" though, since this is not about controlling chance but about focusing the "mana" behind all superpowers, and part of the metaplot involves discovering the source of powers.

Here is my version of editorial control that I'll be using in my upcoming superhero campaign. I'm looking for a better name than "Morph" that doesn't have to do with luck or probability. Any ideas? Any suggestions on improvement? I want the editorial control to come with tension and temptation. - - - - - Ever since superhuman abilities have become known and to some degree understood, the cause and source of such abilities is still unknown. Why is it that one person who falls into a vat of acid develops superpowers, while another person who falls into a vat of acid just dies? Why is it that some born with generic mutations exhibit amazing powers, while others just have to live with wheelchairs? There are theories, but no one knows. This is not yet known in the game world, but there is a formless substance in the world which I'm calling "Morph". Through a means as yet unknown, certain individuals can direct and transmute Morph into the world of matter and energy. During play, you can gather your energies and concentrate your powers to the limits of your normal capacity. Whenever you roll one or more d6, you may take a Morph Die and roll it, then substitute it in place of any other die in your roll. You may only affect your own rolls. There is no limit to the number of Morph Dice you can take. When you take a Morph Die, I will note it down in my secret notebook. Occasionally, as a reward for good play or heroic action, I will secretly erase a Morph Point. Between sessions, I will roll 3d6 against the total number of Morph Points you have taken so far, as if it were a Hunted or DNPC. If I roll the total or less, the balance will shift against you, and the universe will claim back some of the energy you stole. Something will not go right for you for that session. Perhaps you'll miss an obvious clue, perhaps your Activation Rolls will be off just slightly, perhaps an enemy will somehow gain the upper hand. Take more, and things may start to go a bit haywire with your powers -- you may develop abilities you didn't know you had, or you may put some unintended extra oomph behind it at the wrong time.

Re: Change Environment It depends on the nature of the effect. If it's one effect that blankets the whole area and has multiple game system effects, then I would buy it as one power. If it's a number of different effects that all cover a similar area and each one has its own game system effects, I would buy them as a compound power. But it would cost a whole lot more.

Re: Super Action rules interpretation I'd let him do it once with a successful Power skill roll. I also allow Pushing to add an Advantage, so he could Push his STR to add Indirect. After that, there would have to be some points spent.

Re: Questions from a New Hero Yes, you must specify the senses affected by Flash. Why is a thunderclap Nonselective? Keep in mind that Nonselective is not the opposite of Selective; Nonselective means a separate attack roll is made against every target in the area.

Re: Double Ended Weapons I'm using Battlegrounds, and v1.3e has built in support for HERO's segment-phase-turn sequencing.

Re: Breaking large volumes Forgive me if I have flashbacks to Hybrid. There are no upper limits in HERO. Nothing is infinite. It's just that rolling 1000d6 may get tedious. You may want to use Standard Effect after about 20 dice. What results do you want the system to give you if I, a flabby computer programmer, go up against Odin in a fist fight? In HERO, if you give me an 8 STR and a 3 PD, and you give Odin a 300 STR and a 100 PD, HERO can support all those numbers just fine, but will it give you the results you want to get? Similarly, what results do you want the system to give you if I go up against Odin in a riddle contest? Should I have a chance of beating him?

I've played HERO for about 25 years, but it's been a long time (I think back to the Champions II days) since I've run it at all. I'm starting a new superhero campaign and designing some villains, and I'm looking for some guidelines for rough point scales. I have a group of five heroes at 375 points a piece (200 base, 25 XP, 150 Disads). I'm not using any caps, but they're all aimed at the 9-12 DC, 60-90 Active Point range. A rough point level for five supervillains to pit against them is obvious, but what about: - Two supervillains and a number of agents? - Two supervillains by themselves? - One super mastermind?

Re: Breaking large volumes In the game you are trying to create, does a normal stand a chance of "winning" against a god? Defeating in physical combat, a game of riddles, etc.? If not, there us no need for a system that scales to both ends. Just do what Nobilis, Truth & Justice, and Rifts do (am I the first to lump those games together?), and make a normal level and a god level. If a god has a punch that does 15d6 damage, that's on the god scale. Against a normal, it simply kills them outright. Against another god, roll and apply as usual. Likewise, even a normal's killing damage would be barely felt by a being that can summon miracles with but a thought. If the game is to focus on the normals, aren't the gods just plot points, and vice versa?

Re: Breaking large volumes I did not forget it; I'm saying that, once you get beyond about STR 60, comparing the linear increase in damage dice (which is there to make the game playable) with the geometric increase in lifting capacity (which is there to make The Hulk a playable character concept) will only end in tears. It is a game system. It is not a perfect simulation of the real world. I would probably rule it by just saying that he can lift 200 gigatons, so he should do damage like an explosion of 200 gigatons of force -- blow the whole side out of the mountain, if not crumble it entirely. BODY damage is, pardon the pun, immaterial. Dirt is easily dug not because it has low DEF and BODY but because it is not one object but thousands of tiny objects which are all slightly sticky. If you want to get into the actual materials, then when punching a brick wall, you should figure out the tensile strength of the mortar versus the material strength of the brick, and distribute the pressure appropriately until one fails or it resists the pressure. GURPS can probably do that for you, but HERO does some abstraction for the sake of getting on with the game. It doesn't always coincide perfectly with the real world, but it does a reasonable job of simulating what happens in a superhero comic when someone tries to punch through a wall.

Re: Breaking large volumes Yes, but, depending on its purpose, a wall is intentionally strong vertically, usually incidentally strong horizontally, and relatively fragile laterally. Stress is designed to be dispersed horizontally and vertically, so it is relatively easy to break the wall material's tensile strength laterally, depending on the flexibility of the material. Find a steel door and swing an ice pick at it. Go to Yosemite and swing the ice pick at El Capitan. In which case is the ice pick more likely to penetrate all the way through? In which case is a chunk of stuff likely to come off if the ice pick doesn't penetrate? Long story short: if it really helps, treat the mountain as a wall a few miles thick. And anyway, HERO's partially geometric Strength scale doesn't translate all that well to real works physics. It's a gameplay mechanic so The Hulk doesn't need a STR of 1000. I'm saying that each hex of a mountain is not a separate object. Dirt is treated that way so that a hole can be made, but it's not a hole in the sense that a hole through a wall is -- the dirt is not penetrated or destroyed by punching it, just displaced.

Re: Breaking large volumes The main difference to me is that a wall in general has support on two axes but not on the axis of the attack -- in other words, there is nothing behind the wall to support the resiliency of the wall, so all you need to do is break the wall, and the wall parts obligingly get out of the way, so you now have a hole. In the case of solid stuff like a mountain made of stone, each bit of the outer edge of the mountain has the rest of the mountain supporting behind it, meaning each hex is not treated as an individual vertical barrier to smash through in isolation to all else but rather as a portion of a whole. Secondly, unlike the wall, punching the stone into the mountain just pushes it in, not out of the way, so it forms a wound in the body of the mountain rather than a hole through a hex of stone.

Re: A new approach to Killing Attacks This actually makes superhero games deadlier. Bad guys will need souped-up KAs to do anything to supers, which means those KAs are very deadly. Consider a standard energy projector with a 15/15 Force Field and 10 BODY. With this system, a 75 point KA is totally ineffectual, while an 80 point KA instantly puts our hero at -6 BODY and bleeding to death. In RAW, a 5d6+1 KA would put our hero at -6 BODY only by rolling all sixes.

Re: Linked/Compound Powers and a How to Build I guess I don't get it. What's an example of a compound power with two elements to it where the two elements are not connected in the game world in any way?

Re: Linked/Compound Powers and a How to Build Commonly, if one element of a compound power is drained/transferred/suppressed/etc., all elements are affected simultaneously, because they are all just separate mechanical representations in the game system of what is a single ability in the game world. This is usually not true of linked powers, except in the case of a drain/transfer/etc. that affects multiple powers sharing a special effect.

Re: A new system of disadvantages I would suggest just ditching that and adapt the Burning Wheel voting method. At the end of each session, have a vote. Players can nominate people who acted particularly well in accordance with their personality traits. Give those characters who get at least a nomination and a second 1 XP.

Re: Shadow run conversions That was my thought as well. Just have everyone who has a link buy Duplication, and the duplicate is the character within the system.

Re: Fei Long's Fists of Fury: The Rekka Ken Sounds like an NND punch to me. Or maybe Autofire Penetrating.

Re: To Kill, or just To Mess Up Real Bad...? But yeah, this system heals a bit fast for most games, I would think. Or am I reading it wrong?

Re: continuing charges alternatives I agree with you, but I would just go with an END Reserve if it was getting that complicated.

Re: To Kill, or just To Mess Up Real Bad...? Certainly, but being laid up for months in the hospital can be just as bad. And if I am to be true to the source material (I play supers), when a superhero actually truly dies, it's a major thing. They don't just twist their ankle and keel over dead, or bring in Dr. Doom only to be dropped in an alley by a random mugger with a knife. I think it would be nteresting to have things like that happen, but not randomly to the protagonists. And besides all that, so much effort and thought and emotion goes into a HERO super that just killing them off because of a random dice roll seems unfair to the player. Are they collaborators in this story or aren't they? If they are, shouldn't they get some say? I don't think they should get a veto vote, but I think they should have a voice.

Re: To Kill, or just To Mess Up Real Bad...? I just say that a PC doesn't die unless the player agrees that the death is dramatically appropriate to the situation. But I also don't use things like random pit traps of death either.

Re: While we're changing the system, change damage How about this: For every 1 rolled on your to-hit dice, you can set 5 points worth of your effect dice to the best possible result. Thus, for one 1 rolled and standard damage, set one die to a 6 and roll the rest. For three 1s, set three dice to 6. An effect that gets one die per 10 effect points could set a half die to 3 with one 1 on the to hit roll (and roll the other half due if left over) or set a full die to 6 with two 1s. An effect with 15 points per die sets a half die on two 1s, a full die on three 1s.

Re: A Complete Overhaul of the Hero System Combat and Skill System It's an interesting idea. It's extremely fiddly, though, and like was mentioned, I can't even count out tube of beads in advance because I just have to dump then out and recount them to make adjustments. Or have literally hundreds of beads and dozens of tubs on the table. And even then, once I've determined success, I have to push the beads aside and pick up the dice anyway to determine effect. If what you want is to eliminate the odd numbered hump at the center of the bell curve and emphasize the difference between CVs, seems to me it would be easier to do something based around Fudge dice.