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Doc Democracy

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Everything posted by Doc Democracy

  1. I agree, but I reckon there are going to be a chunk of people that dont become aware of the need for such decisions until they are well into the game and others that make ad hoc decisions, or assume stuff because they played earlier editions 20 years ago. I think people starting with NTH create their game, if they stick with it long enough but the failure to recognise them, means we probably lose a chunk of those people that end up thinking HERO is too complicated.
  2. Yeah, I have a problem with that kind of fixed value power. I reckon the cost should be based on the campaign limits, possibly with a floor and ceiling values, rather than being absolutely fixed. The reason I mention floors and ceilings is because, no matter how many points players are given, some things are not worth that much (like life support and enhanced senses) while others should probably not go below a certain value (like desolid). All begins to sound a bit complicate though, doesnt it? 🙂 Doc
  3. I just wrote a post talking about instant change. I think Desolid has a big relationship with it. It is a black box to allow players to have something cool. It was fine for years but the more us geeks talked about it, demanding standard pricing for things the more the non-standard nature of its existence became exposed. Even just the fact that it is a standard price. It should probably vary its cost depending on the starting points of characters in the campaign. Limitation valuers should also be campaign dependent. I think it probably is now too cheap, a 40 point power that cost 8 END was a big investment for a character built on 150 points+points for disadvantages. For 6E characters, 40 points that costs 4 END is not really the same investment. Doc
  4. I think a strength of the system (and a problem sometimes for GMs) is that there are often lots of ways to achieve an effect in game. The best thing I get from seeing the details of someone's build is to get insight into how they did it, how they looked behind the understood or implied game effects and used that mechanic to deliver something else. For instance, I liked to see how Steve deconstructed instant change and gave a build. I did not NEED that to use instant change in my game. I still dont. What it did do was give me ideas on how to achieve similar things when players came, stuck on how to do a build. I have learned so many things on these boards by people saying Energy Blast [sic] is not an energy blast, it is a way to do damage to someone at range. If you want to lift someone into the air and drop them to do damage, then Energy Blast is probably what you should be thinking about, and everything else is SFX.
  5. I will put my hand up for 1E Champions. I think you missed out a category though, those who just run a game under 6E without trying to "create" a game from the system toolkit...
  6. Yeah, but removing line of sight range and adding area effect (anyone who can hear voice) covers most of that. Defences could be an issue, though similar things can prevent other solutions. There are hand wavy things with a few things. I like Dean's solution but Detect feels fundamentally hand-wavy to me when you get to speaking and writing and reading. I am however, fundamentally accepting of waving hands to achieve a reasonable solution to say yes to a player for a cool power. Doc
  7. To be honest Duke, you bring a kind of New Testament take to 2E, even if your commitment to it might be quite fundamental...
  8. Says the man shouting from the midst of the biggest cloud of woodsmoke seen on the North American continent in recent history...
  9. You are 100% right here. Duke says we ruled too much about 2E and wanted the true answer to Al, our gaming queries instead of being content with a few rough options and a steer to doing what was most fun. Steve Long was probably the right answer to the wrong problem. He dedicated himself to getting all the details folk argued about in the rules sorted and pushed into the main rules. What we needed was someone who was more focussed on game theory, boiling the system down to its essentials, who was the ghost written by someone who was focussed on delivering gameplay. And Steve writing a bunch of Almanacs outlining options on how to use the rules if you wanted to nail down the details. A lean, flavourful core. A suite of genre books that provided the spices to deliver specific types of game and another suite for the number geeks who wanted detail on what that cool thing should look like in HEROcode.
  10. You are going to have to explain how understanding spoken words helps you read or write a language you don't know...
  11. You should count yourself lucky that it has only gone two pages...
  12. The classic build for this would be Telepathy, "only to allow those you are speaking to to understand". The SFX is that you are speaking in tongues and everyone hears you in their own language. It does not allow you to read or write those languages. Doc
  13. I think the difference us whether you want to do it reliably or not. Whether you want to gave to roll dice. The power I suggested would work reliably unless someone sought to intervene. Personally, if it wasn't so much of a pain in the ass to do, I would gave every character have an SFX based VPP, where they could do anything their SFX justified. That would feel superheroes, if it wasn't for the constant calculations on whether I could fly at that speed, shrugging off bullets while carrying the ark of the covenant....
  14. Doesn't feel right. So, when that happens to me, I look at what I am trying to do in words. I might be wrong, so forgive that, the principle still works. I want to be able to selectively move a bunch of people, or objects, from one place to somewhere else before anyone can react. Is that it? Because, now I have written it down, it looks like an area effect, usable as an attack, teleport to me. You move people, selectively, from an area to where you are. Limitations: You need to be able to lift them; They need to be within a full move; It is restrainable (if someone grabs you, etc); You must move through the intervening space. Everyone you teleport ends up next to you. The SFX, you run in, grab everyone, and bring them out. No questions about damage or anything else. Doc
  15. Yeah, I agree with @Ninja-Bear. I would say that, RAW, the grabbed person is grabbed and now moving at the speed of the grabber. There would be all kinds of issues should the grabbed object exceed the ability of the grabber to lift which I do not think are covered in the rules except to say that both characters might take move-by damage and the "strength" of the attack might be used as casual strength to immediately break the grab. It is all very situational and so many things can change what happens in this kind of thing. I am not sure whether the purpose of the manoeuvre is to do damage or just to grab? Doc
  16. Amazingly, my golden age team is in a very similar situation. It is 1937 and half the team were captured by the nazis, while trying to help the Spanish republicans. The nazis want to learn the location of their super-secret hideout, and more specifically the code to enter it. The scenario will begin with dream versions of the heroes that were not captured bursting into the holding cell and helping them escape with the aid of a Polish hero. They will find it easy to escape the lab, then the compound until they get to Poland. From there they get to London with a package from the Poles that they want the British to analyse, something they claim could neutralise the SeelenRustung being used by an elite corps. There will be numerous chances for the players to spot the ruse. Things will be too easy, or too difficult, or wrong, or might change when double checked, like in a dream. If they learn early then it will be about getting out of the dream, if they don't then it will be overcoming challenges with increasingly heavy hints to the dreaming characters about the false versions. Ultimately a fight between the characters dreaming and the false dream versions. When they win, it will be just in time to see the real versions of their uncaptured team-mates crashing into their holding cell. almost identical to the start of the dream, except, every challenge will be more difficult... Doc
  17. I think you need to be thinking about a different machine for that. Possibly just a good bed away from all commitments...
  18. Well, you are using 15 words to do what 8 words in natural language covers. If I was going to be pedantic then I would question whether someone in cryo-sleep was concentrating and ask whether the character was aware of events further away. But I won't do that, I understand they are game mechanical effects regardless of the word used. As a GM, I think I could police the custom limitation more easily. I do think that, even allowing for a liberal interpretation of what is meant by concentration, it leaves things a bit open.
  19. I am in the life support camp. However, I would not use concentration etc, I would simply have the limitation "Character in catatonic state while power in use". You can cost that however you want but, as already pointed out, this is not something expensive for a base unless you begin adding in significant numbers of chambers for LOTS of people.
  20. I think it depends on the group. Some groups are entirely task-focussed. If the in-game authority signs off that the task is complete, then they are happy to take the reward and move to the next task. Some groups take ownership and begin wanting to go beyond the strict definition of the task to broader societal issues. That is when it matters what the background of the game is - both the laid down in-game realities and the in-group sensitivities. The more involved the players are with their world, the more the GM has to layer on the things that are needed to prevent people going to extremely in any one direction. If one, or more, of the players is talking about going full Apocalypse Now on the already defeated village then the GM might remind them that the village is within the realm of Duke Nice who might deprecate the actions of the goblic raiders but would be equally distressed about a defenceless village being massacred and raised to the ground. It is his decsion on whether residents of his demesne live or die, and his liegeman only gave them rights to deal with the raiders, not the potential of future ones. He might remind them that it is unlikely there will be no witnesses and while some people might laud their actions, there will be others that would be horrified by the slaughter of women and children of any kind. You might also indicate that these goblins are part of the Red Claw tribe, one that extends quite broadly across the land and that, should they hear of this atrocity, might prioritise the death of these perpetrators, and their life might be detrimentally affected if they go ahead. The GM, in this kind of situation, needs MUCH more information readily to hand to talk about the broader societal consequences of these kinds of actions. It will rarely be kill good, mercy bad. Or vice versa. Of course, they might have been tasked with eradicating the village by their superiors. Then all the variety of different responses still apply with slightly different elements, possibly changing the perspective of the players about their superiors and how they interact with them. I can see some of the my characters following through on what they have been tasked, whether they agree or not, while others would defiantly refuse to do certain things. It also might depend on how the GM lays it. As the warriors are defeated and slain, the GM might fade away with a village in flames, making no reference to dependents, another might have used the fight to give cover to dependents fleeing in a variety of directions. It would be a real GM decision to choose to present the dependents as a problem for the PCs to consider. Doc
  21. If you are a face to face group, I find the best thing for that is to have physical tokens, glass beads or poker chips or something and a hat or other receptacle at the side of the table. Players are likely to have those things in their hands, especially the ones that also like fiddling with their dice, and so be quite awre of them. If they want to use them, they throw them into the hat, which begins to accumulate tokens. I keep thinking that I want to do something with that hat and the tokens inside it, but I am never sure what fits. One idea, was that I did not use HAPs as normal. I would give out tokens instead of experience points, the used tokens are the core pool for what I had out at the end of the game (adding things in for specific stuff - like player invokes a complication). When a player uses a token, THEN they mark down an XP on their sheet that can be used for growing their character. Doc
  22. Of course, in my current campaign, I have pledged to my players that any villain captured an imprisoned will never escape unless they specifically request another scenario featuring that villain. In essence, every villain put in prison "dies" for the purpose of gameplay. I do not have the same need as comicbook authors to write the ultimate Joker, or Doctor Doom story. Though the principle is the same, it's not Batman's fault that the Joker lives to kill again, it is the fans'.
  23. Yup. I reckon two or three of the superheroes in my games have died. I tend not to kill a character due to bad rolls but, if they have "died" in thus way, I will find a bendy physics reasons for them to survive. I then talk to the player, saying that I am open to finding a heroic death for their character somewhere in the next few sessions. If they are up for it, and so far it has been three for three, I build scenarios where there may be opportunity for an heroic sacrifice and, if they take it up, they probably won't survive but I will guarantee their sacrifice will be successful. RIP Vortex RIP Firelord RIP Black Ninja Doc
  24. I think one of the problems with SPD is that it is a game mechanism masquerading as quickness. It essentially tells you how many game actions you get in a game turn. There is a general feeling that a fast character should have higher SPD. Even just saying it feels like it makes absolute sense. However, like many common sense things, it isn't actually true. When Flash is in the comics he tends not to get more panels devoted to him than any other character, not even more than poor old Green Arrow who just fires a bow. That suggests their SPDs are pretty similar regardless of what velocities they might be able to achieve. Speed should be an SFX, not a characteristic. Doc
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