Doc Democracy

I am not saying it is the only way to play high power Champions. In my experience it is how Champions has been played extensively in the past - just looking at the published characters. Look at the Dex and CON scores of characters in 4th edition characters. Those were rarely related to concept - it was about point efficiency and delivering gamable PCs. That stuff does not have to be the point of the character, or even be the primary thrust but things that make a character competitive will often over-rule strict adherence to concept. (again, all in my experience, and my groups have tended towards gamist play than narrative). I am not sure I follow. Are you saying that if I buy high defences, or high SPD, or high STR for my character that it invalidates certain concepts?

I like the idea of the fixed pool, where they can see things diminish and the end draw closer. The key for me would be that the campaign would need to have a discernable end-point, a goal that the characters are seeking to achieve so that their sacrifice might be for some greater good. I would also like there to be some random element - not simply spending 10 END and crossing it off the pool. I think I might ask the player to roll a dice for every END they burn, count BODY to remove from the pool, sixes get rolled again and double each time they are rolled, so the 10 END power means that 10D6 are rolled, 2 1's, two 6's and ther rest scoring in between. That is 10 off the pool, but the 2D6 roll again, a 4 and another 6. This time the BODY count is 2 for the 4, 4 for the 6 and the six rolls again. a 5 costs another 3, meaning a final total of 19 from the pool.... You might think it is evil but it ramps up the tension of spending END from the pool which is what a horror game probably needs....

Yeah, but that is what we saw always in the game, folk had high CON, high STR and high SPDs regardless of what their character background was, just to be competitive. People had decent resistant defences, because they didnt want to take BODY damage, not because their concept demanded it. The need to stay competitive is a reality in the game, it is best to accept and accommodate that, because otherwise you will ensure certain concepts are rarely ever used. I allow my players to build the characters they want to play and to have them competitive in the game. I dont demand that well-trained individuals stay away from high characteristics and high defences, I certainly do not expect them to have SPD 2/3 because they are not superhuman, while their firneds build superhumans running about with SPD 6 or 7. If you are going to be cosmic heroes, built on 1000+ points then I think that you will act more often and more effectively than normal humans, you will be on a different plane and most often, I see that with high SPD characters. And, if one player has a character acting 12 times a round and another is only acting 6 times a round, it begins to get boring. So the SPD tends to drift up to the fastest player.... Doc

If one player takes SPD 12, every other PC will be at 10 minimum, even if just for the spotlight time. However, it is such a valuable thing to be able to act more. END does become important but there are plenty of ways to manage that, not least by good use of 0 END powers, END Batteries and drains that add to END.

I can see no reason, in a high powered game why everyone is not running at close to SPD 12. More actions is almost always better and while 10 points per point is a huge investment for a 300-400 point character, once you are spending 1000 points, 100 points to act in EVERY segment is invaluable... I agree with the CV comments. I will presume CV 16 for the campaign for the purposes of this example. Losing 3 points of DCV takes you, on average, from getting hit 62.5% of the time to getting hit 91% of the time. Every point after that makes little difference. If you rely on DCV rather than defences then you are possibly more affected. If your DCV is 5 above the campaign average (DCV 21) then you get hit 9% of the time and when that is halved (to 11) then you get hit 98% of the time. A massive difference. If you were to impose a flat -5DCV then the same situation goes from being hit 9% of the time to getting hit 62.5% of the time. Still a significant difference. Doc

I think things get easier and easier to justify when you think of harmonics, possibly going as fas as Tolkein and Middle Earth where the universe is a harmony and everything emerges from there. I will take duplication. The character taps into the harmonics of the universe, sees how things are built from the vibrations of tiny strings that make up sub-atomic particles and how changes to those harmonics can result in cganges to the fundamentals of the world. The character knows its own harmonics absolutely and, with the expenditure of his power can re-purpose matter around them to replicate his own harmonics, resulting in multiple versions of the character that can all act independently. I think I would gave an END cost for this and I might think about how long duplicates could sustain themselves if the original character is unconscious. I think it would be impossible in a vacuum with no other material to work with. Doc

Surely the key book is the UNTIL powers database? Lots of powers suggested.

Have you considered a Suppress STUN, allowing the 0 END as waking someone up is most common effect you can imagine? You might choose to make it a small cumulative effect, possibly invisible effect, to allow the effects to creep up on the target without them realising they are under attack. So, over time the Suppress STUN grows to the point the target is asleep and stays that way until someone wakes them up.

I think I like the multiform but only because it include memories. If it was just skills, I think I would set aside a pool of points and add the variable advantage to the pool which allowed it to be used to build skillsets, limited to the last person killed and eaten (I am presuming that it is the eating that is important, rather than the killing and I am wondering how much after the person had died would the monster be able to gain memories and skills?). If the multiform wasn't working for you , you could combine this group of skill points with some Retrocognition (clairsentience in the book I think) where the focus will be the presence of the person in the digestive tract. The skills will be inherently available and the monster would search the memories of the dead person to see what they had done, who they had spoken to, what they had said. Doc

RAW, yes. You do not get an advantage "affect solid" by taking a limitation. I might, as a GM, agree to interacts with attacks as normal, as +0 limitation, as it probably cancels out.

So. Are you pleased this is going to be D&D, with some fairly hefty restrictions on what folk can do? Or would you prefer they were content to play Fantasy HERO?

A huge skeletal claw, reputedly from a giant Japanese lizard.

I have an attraction to the Damage Negation route, though the limitations you would need to add, to model the degradation of the curse and the need to be able to apply it to someone else, and to be useful against healing and not other attacks, and where it exists, independent of the caster etc is likely to make it less clean! It also needs additional stuff to negate natural healing which damage negation would not touch. Sometimes a Transform is the right answer because it avoids very complex builds... The best narrative thing about the triggered damage is that healing could make things worse for the cursed one and it would take a VERY confident healer to take it on, believing they were more powerful than the curse.

I actually use the phrase with the people in my team, drafting documents, to stop them putting in excessive hours trying to make a briefing document perfect, long after it is good enough to go out.

The Transform route looks the way to go though, you get a lot of flexibility in how it works. And you can include natural healing with the more proactive sort. An alternative might be POW Def, only versus healing and dispelling magic, always on, persistent, 0END, usable as an attack. You then apply the limitation that it ablates under certain conditions. A big enough dispel would get rid of the curse. The big issue is that it does not prevent natural healing. You might want a reasonably sized suppress REC only for healing purposes. Doc

Yeah, I gave them all in PDF, but I got a chunk of them in hard copy, they were difficult to come across in the UK.

Ideal - if they are talking about how they could do it, giving them the chance leads to a pretty heroic outcome. It also highlights the value of a bit of planing and strategy in HERO combat....

I think the one Assualt mentions was from issue 8 (1986)...

Duke is right, the closest I came to a TPK in my Champions campaign was not the horsemen of the Apocalypse, it was half a dozen sidekicks of a western themed villain which were termed "the Guys and Gals". The Gals had a single attack, a garter that they threw and wrapped round the opponents throat. Cannot remember the actual build but it was "supposed" to make a hero lose an action dealing with it. In actuality, they found it difficult to remove and suddenly I had three of my five PCs lying on the ground slowly choking to death... It wa solved by a fire themed PC throwing an area effect power that fried all of the garters and a not insignificant amount of damage to his fellow heroes....

Not finalised yet but I wanted to begin thinking about what character sheets might look like (it helps me focus on what needs to go on them)...had to take a snapshot to avoid going over space...

I was lying in bed this morning, procrastinating to avoid getting up for my morning cycle. I thought I would think about character sheets and drifted to how things might be presented. I made, inadvertently, a massive decision. I was going to dispose of characteristics, or more specifically the non-infrastructure ones. I need STUN and REC etc, but the classic ones like STR, CON, etc. I am working out what that means and my start is that it is all presentation. If you want a strong character you buy +1 w STR skills. One of those skills will be lifting. The STR chart becomes a difficulty chart for lifting, lifting 100kg is +2 to difficulty and goes up +2 for each step in the chart? You would also have an indicator of the HTH damage you might want to buy to reflect that lifting power in a fight. What about stunning in combat. Well, if you take 10 STUN in a single blow you need to make a health check, That simply means rolling 10 or better on 3D6, that difficulty is increased by 1 for every STUN above 10. You can buy +1 with Health which may also be used when measuring impact of fatiguing activity, resistance to other things that test your health. This seems to me to work fine for PRE, DEX, INT etc. It cleans up the system into two things, just skills and powers.

I think the first thing I would want to understand would be the purpose of the sanity and shock stuff and, given that the system is chock full of tools, I would be looking to the existing kit before adding anything new. For instance, in Cthulhu the big thing is that you slowly go mad, you accumulate strange tics and phobias until you cannot function. Now that sounds to me like picking up complications in-game. We have mechanics to do that. We might call it Transform and Pow Def in the toolkit, but it would be trivial to label things Horror and Resilience. In HERO the options are great, you can add physical complication, psychological ones, dependencies, social complications and reputations and everything us already costed out. The big difference is that the purpose of the Transform is vague, or random, and you might be counting up potential before applying rather than counting down. I think that the target for impact would be when Horror exceeded EGO (minus the number of existing complications). You might have, or build up, a defence to these things but that could be eroded by knowledge of Mythos. We do often leap to additional systems rather than adapting what we have. Doc

I am disinclined to settle for a relatively limited format but the Samiel example is what I am thinking about - a VPP can deliver the flexibiity but it would be the same kind of thing - the VPP would be limited to known forms but there could be lots more variety of forms and a chance to try forms previously unknown (more dfifficulty).

Working my way through things still. The core classes are not terriby difficult to deliver a kind of class like advancement and to take the old level descriptors. My current thoughts are focussed on druids. I am quite keen to get druids away from being a kind of cleric. I was wondering what folk thought were the core identifiers of druidism. My intention is to work through the special abiities in the PHB and use that as the core advancements. So, Nature sense and animal companion to start - can innately identify plants and what can be eaten and whether water is drinkable. Woodland stride - not inhibited by natural growth etc when travelling Trackless step - cannot be tracked through natura grounds Resist nature's lure - +4 versus abilities of woodland creatures Then progressing power of Wild shape Venom immunity - immunity to organic poisons (those from animas/plants) More Wild shape steps A thousand faces - can change appearance at will. Then more wild shape steps. It seems like a druid is more about shapeshifting than manipulating natural forces (or anything to do with the elemental planes). I can live with this as the additional spell stuff pulls more to nature bits. I think, therefore that wild shape is a key feature of being a druid in Greyhawk. My concern is doing this in HERO, I was reaching for multiform but you need to pay for each form individually. It is not shape-shift because he gains abilities like flight and enhanced strength, vision and other natural abilities. I am therefore thinking it needs to be a heavily prescribed VPP??

I like using DN/DR as a special effect specific defence. If a character should be more resistant to fire then I want a defence that works against all those attack forms regardless of how they are built. I don't think it us entirely RAW but in my games, that is the very specific use I put such things to. 🙂