Doc Democracy

This is where I instinctively went...

I treat HERO as a broad amalgam. 🙂 I have played so long I can guarantee that, at the table there are a bunch of things I do that might have changed but, in my head, I am playing the most recent edition. I am all in on no figured characteristics, I am all in on the core book being a toolkit, hence thus thinking on how I will use it to build the game. There has been so little real change in the fundamental syste,m that I am happy to draw things in from any edition, just as long as they fit the game I want to play. I presume, as you reference them without comment, that you think they are good and that the closely align with the Greyhawk milieu?

If you are concerned about misrepresenting deafness, you could simply say that the islanders have restricted hearing (possibly not being able to hear in the treble ranges). That simply provides them with a hereditary defence against the sirens but leaves them interacting essentially normally. However, unless you want to sell the scenario or run with people outside your usual group, sensitivities are more easily managed, no? My group has been gaming with each other for over 20 years, I reckon we could put anything in the game as long as talked about it first.

Yeah, I fully expect to have enough packages to make it easy to spend 90% of their points based on setting focussed packages, with a few tweaks for personal preference.

Thanks NB. Much appreciated, it is a good point to ensure that the package does not require additional investment.

I have been doing some reading because a feature of Greyhawk is the variety of non-human domains. As such it is important to ensure there is decent guidance on the variety of peoples that comprise those domains. Unlike a lot of other stuff though, I think Fantasy HERO has done all this work for me. I don't think there is any real need to tweak the packages for the standard demi-humans. My big ruling will be that, if you want to be an elf, or hobbit, or dwarf, you need to take the package and work from there. That is the baseline. My question is whether I present that as standard base character + elf package, or an elf base character with fewer discretionary points to spend. I think HERO folk might prefer the former but, as a game, it looks better as the latter? I was also wondering if there are any good package deals for humanoid types out there. Would not want to stop folk playing orcs, goblins, giants, Griffin's or almost any intelligent creature. A key feature of the system is it's flexibility and this does a run round of the inflexibility of D&D where you needed new races and classes and the balance (if there was any) would be in a big black box.

See, if I was going to buy into this, I would have Deduction 3 reduce the moderate difficulty of 6 down to average difficulty 3, and then roll the standard 3 dice. It takes away the potential for the expert to roll a result of 12 but it better demonstrates the value of the skill. I would also not make the skilled character roll for an average difficulty task, their skill has reduced it to 0 difficulty, play into the competence... GM: As you are walking through the Great Hall you can see there are doorways and galleries stretching away into shadowed recesses. Player: Great place for an ambush, can I see any sign of one. The GM knows there are 3 archers in two of the upper galleries (moderate difficulty check) and a more poorly hidden (average difficulty) swordsman lurking near a doorway. GM: "what's your perception? 3? Quite impressive! You can see a swordsman near a doorway to your left, roll the dice to check if he has back up."

Well, we could, but it probably is not what we want to spend time doing and, even if it was, and we did create this system, by Committee, on the boards, it would not be "my own superhero rpg system". Scott has given you a pretty good overview of how you might start going about it but if it is to be your system, the creativity and decisions really do need to come from you. The boards would be an excellent place to discuss the pros and cons of system development you are considering but probably not the best place to generate that development.

Thanks. If I was getting something out short-notice I reckon I would gave done the same. Unfortunately I have time and so my brain refuses to allow me to do less work... 🙂 How are you handling alignment? Physical limitation (as alignments make you susceptible to some nagics and nit others), psych limitation as they should drive behaviour, reputation (because they can be detected etc), or something else?

I am currently planning to run Greyhawk using Fantasy HERO. I am musing about it on a thread here, would be interested in knowing what you did to tailor the system.

He is right too, and I think the key driver for their existence was the efficiency of characteristic based characters, especially the brick. Characteristics are essentially framework powers and to make a blaster character competitive with the brick, ir martial artist, there was a need to give them ways to save points equivalentbto investing in characteristics. A lot of that has been leavened out with new editions but the fingerprints remain in the system. Doc

In Combat, we can always sacrifice speed for raw movement. 🙂 So, for those 30 points, you can have 20m Flight with 8xNCM, you can have 30m Flight, or you can have 20m Flight with megascale on 10m of that Flight. The question remains, if you have the ability to vary the megascale, is NCM no longer a useful purchase? I am fully bought into the fact that more metres gives you greater manoeuvrability but if you decide to convert some of that into speed, is megasca.e the obvious solution?

Rather than a multiplier, you might find that using a naked advantage, so buy 15m of Flight and a naked advantage applying megascale to 5m of Flight. Would you allow 8x NCM on that? Would you allow it to apply when only 5m of megascaled Flight was being used? Did not notice any explicit prohibition on the combination but my instant instinct is that it doesn't feel right.

I need to spend more time reading the detail of rulebooks. What gives 15m Flight with 8x NCM more manoeuvrability than 15m Flight with 1km Megascale? I am asking but also dipping back into the rulebook. 🙂 Being on the boards makes me read detail FAR more than playing the game does!

That does make it more useful, would not significantly change the speed of getting places, though I wonder why anyone would take non combat multiples rather than megascale?

I went and looked at a book! 🙂 The uncertainty thing may have been a board discussion or perhaps an earlier iteration of the advantage but you are correct, to a point. Reading the advantage and the power, if yu want to stick to rules as written then there are two wrinkles. The first is that you can stop at any distance after you have moved the minimum distance. So if you are moving megascale then that first minimum metre of movement equals 1km, that is a minimum distance if you are using that scale of advantage (and may be the source of my earlier confusion). If you have 10m of 1km megascale teleport you can move to any distance between 1km and 10km. The second wrinkle is that you need to see your destination or you risk missing it. If you cannot see your destination, you need to make an attack roll on the target hex (DCV 3) at -5 and further modified by range penalties. If the attack roll fails, you miss the target "by 2m in a random direction for every point the roll is failed by". I would presume that those would not be megascaled metres! The second wrinkle, if I was GM, is something that I might not fuly implement (or possibly waive entirely). The SFX of must pass through intervening space seems to make it redundant (it does not feel like a commons sense application) but I might consider reducing the value of the limitation as it would now be conferring an advantage. I reckon I might require an attack roll at -5 to make the mode of travel slightly random (the must pass through intervening space means that you would not materialise inside a wall, another advantage). Doc

As GM, I always want to make sure me and the player are on the same page with this. I am content to vary it a little bit depending on context etc, but it is important that we are both aware before a key point in the scenario! 😄

Haven't looked at my books or really thought about this. I like the idea of it, and as a GM would be looking for ways to make it work. 🙂 My first rules as written quibble would be the megascale thing, my understanding is that there is a resolution difficulty - you cannot be particularly precise with it, 10m Teleport with megascale would allow you to be within 1km of where you wanted to be but it would be impossible to guarantee you would land on a specific roof, no? I would also, as GM ask you what the must cross intervening space means. Is it simply that people can see you as you move (at about 300Km/hr by my reckoning) or could people seek to prevent you getting past or attacking you? Doc

Yup, that is right. 8 or less essentially means untrained/unskilled. Instead of giving a negative, you might simply add 3 to the range number, meaning the character needs 13 or better to succeed (just to stay within the frame of adding things rather than taking away...)

I made the characters in the standard format for reference when I was making the custom sheets - nice to have that So, 11 or less on 3D6 is exactly equivalent to 10 or better. If the skill is 12 or less, it is +1 on the sheet, 13 or less +2 etc. For combat, it is essentially the same, just add OCV to the roll and DCV to the target number, so attacking a DCV 5 opponent needs 15 or better to hit on 3D6+OCV. It is all a matter of presentation but the process of simply adding and everything being a +something made those D20 adherents much more comfortable.

It is actually the next thing I am thinking about for my Greyhawk HERO thread. What should the character sheet look like? I am wondering what I want to highlight to players to emphasise the setting, what the key elements of a Greyhawk game should be, which is a different question to what the key elements of a D&D or HERO game should be.

It is something I do now for any game I intend to run. It doesn't take too long and I get the sheets I want. It is my conceit that character sheets are how the players interface with the game, the window into the setting and system. I think most character sheets provided with RPGs are there to help players create characters, what I term "build sheets", rather than encourage them to play characters in the game to be run. I sat down and thought "what do my players "need" to play the game?", stripping away detail and numbers and putting in text and flavour I wanted my players to be looking at and thinking about. I found it has given me a different perception about the system, helped me see the toolkit much better as just that, confidence to hide stuff the players probably won't care about. It definitely made a difference to how my players engaged with the game. In one instance I decided to present the system to look like D20. All tasks required players to roll 10 or over to succeed in tasks and all skills presented as an adjustment to the roll (Bureaucracy +3). That helped a lot of players to transition. Doc

I had a look, not uploaded any Fantasy HERO sheets. I did the sheets on this link using PowerPoint, looking for ways to play Justice Inc, Danger International and Champions with sheets designed to highlight the genre rather than the distemper but giving players the information they need to play the game. Have a look, would be pretty simple to do the same for Fantasy HERO characters.

I think that @LoneWolf is right. A lot of your problem might be what you are focussing on. There are few differences in the numbers in many characters statistics and, if you are using the standard character sheet, then those numbers take up a lot of prime real estate on the character sheet (top left of the page). I am a keen advocate of bespoke character sheets for play - which make it more likely that the sheet emphasises what is different between characters rather than all the things that are pretty much the same. It can be a little bit of work to design a sheet but it pays off at the table (the provided sheet is a useful reference for building the character and may be needed for very specific point cost stuff that come up from time to time).

I am thinking that it should be dangerous just being close to a warrior on the battlefield. I am thinking about a very small area effect which is active whenever the warrior is fighting, possibly NND, does BODY, that can be countered by being a warrior or having an rPD of 5 or more.