Doc Democracy

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation That point is four more than you need to hit. If you need 11 or less to hit, 14 or less will get you 50% of the standard effect, 15 or more gets you nothing at all. As I said, I may shift the damage down a step so that the base hit is 10 or less rather than 11 or less, thus 13 or less would get you 50% of standard effect while 14 or more would be a complete miss. Yup. They will have serious combat consequences and so they should - I never really thought they had the impacts that they should have in combat. I hope that such things will make people think twice on how to tackle such things.

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Well, all of this is possible and I could build it into every martial arts character that I build or require my players to build it in as well. I wanted to build it into the system. Will have a look at your numbers - they may prove of interest! Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation They wont be simple. I am looking at a pretty complex rule of X style equation so that if someone does max out their CV their damage and defences will be sufficiently low that even a glancing blow from a low cv, high dice character will hurt or one of those reviled low dice area effects that are a bit too big to dive for cover from, or even simply something that I provide bonuses for clever thinking in combat suddenly brings that huge clunking fist into play. If the CV is high enough to make the difference you are suggesting then under normal rules they probably aren't going to get tagged either and be similarly invulnerable, though probably less viable as an attacking force. Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Appreciate the comments - they are helping to work things out in my head. I will comment more detailed later but if the possibilities are endless and help to vary how people in my group have been using the system, thus highlighting its versatility then I'll be happy. Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Well, these and autofire I intend to apply standard effect to across the board. They are less interesting damage wise as they are more uniform and have interests in other areas. I think that will be the case. I intend to apply it directly as written to mental attacks, this may have interesting consequences on character design as well.

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation There is, as I indicated, more need for the GM to test the characters for 'balance' as far as this kind of thing goes - I intend to work on the basis of combats where everyone rolls 13,12, 11, 10, 9 and 8 against stock stat blocks as indicators of viability. It is something that I am making more work for the Gm to hopefully intorduce some play variability. That 18 points does not buy you +3D6 nor does it buy you 50% damage reduction. It potentially goes toward maximising your attack and minimising that of your opponents. you still only have so much in your defence and so much in your attack. A 6D6 attack will never do more than 36 STUN regardless of the disparity in CVs. It might mean that you will do that 36 more often as you hit so well. A 36 PD would provide someone with absolute protection against your attack. I am hoping this provides another way for players to work theior defences and other things. When playing a game and the stock 12D6 attack does little damage to an opponent a player has to search for other ways to hurt/limit/suppress that opponent. With this system the little flourishes and combat descriptors that provide OCV bonuses will actually mean that the next attack with the 12D6 has more chance of hurting the opponent, the logic of trying something different will be rewarded by more than a better chance to hit and do no significant damage. Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation It is similar to one I was considering but it uses considerably more dice. There is an element of me that loves throwing a mountain of dice but it does take time to count them up, especially with younger players or ones not used to playing Hero. It also has a longer tail of damage that players love to throw (just in case they max out. I prefer having the four fixed damage counts with bonus dice for good dice rolling on the to hit roll. Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Tried it - didn't like it. One of my biggest bugbears is that the system as written encourages martial artists to have more defences than the genre would suggest (whether that come from combat luck or anything else). I wanted to see if I could hard-write something into the system that would allow for the very low defence very high agility character low damage character to compete toe to toe. I might have gone for this in the past but it adds to the complexity of combat (and probably to the time involved. My group (and they may be different from every other group int he world) sees hero combat as quite dice heavy and clunky compared to other systems (and I have some sympathies). We did a comparison test between Hero, M&M and SAS using a cross dimensional scenario with versions each character in each system. Me and another GM watched the results and even the time taken to count up dice was significant. As such I wanted to change things - make combat more variable in its results and make explicit differences to the damage that results in changing the chance to hit. In my scheme, if you improve your chance to hit by 4 you can significantly increase your ability to damage your opponent - under normal Hero rules you are only significantly more likely to hit them for roughly the same damage. Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation

Re: Power Build: Re-Pete Hmm. Lots of good suggestions based round duplication (which provides the exact SFX in the game system. I was wondering whether you might simply by huge defences that effectively stop all reassonably sized attacks completely. You would record damage as if the character had smaller defences and when his STUN/BODY total drops below zero then the character loses a phase while he 'falls unconscious and respawns' It means some spurious record keeping but would achieve the same kind of effect.... Doc

Re: Opposing Magic Systems

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation PS: though short fights are not something that I am advocating against either you understand....

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Not sure if you got it first time. Two evenly matched characters will hit each other 62.5% of the time. If they roll the number they need they will do 50% of maximum damage (standard effect). Say they are two bricks with 13D6 punches and 25PD. 3 as 11 +8D6 (0.5% of throws) 4 as 11 +7D6 (1.5% of throws) 5 as 11 +6D6 (3.0% of throws) 6 as 11 +5D6 (4.5% of throws) 7 as 11 +4D6 (7.0% of throws) 8 as 11 +3D6 (9.5% of throws) 9 as 11 +2D6 (12.0% of throws) 10 as 11 +1D6 (12.5% of throws) 11 39 STUN, 13 BODY doing 14 STUN 12 35 STUN, 12 BODY doing 10 STUN 13 29 STUN, 9 BODY doing 4 STUN 14 19 STUN, 6 BODY doing no damage 15 or more no damage will be done The most damage from this would be 39 STUN, 13 BODY plus 8D6 (28 STUN, 8 BODY on average). Such a fight will not see maximum damage (78 STUN, 26 BODY) unless something happens to remove the CV parity they enjoy. I was thinking of making the standard effect 10 rather than 11 and so shifting the numbers down one place. 10 is also a nicer number ot use than 11 (IMO ) Doc

Re: Bringing accuracy into the equation Didn't want to do that because it requires player input and adds to the seeming bureacracy of the system as people play it - some martial artists will and others wont and when is a character a martial artist and when is he not? My system means I have to put a good bit more effort into guaging the effectiveness of particular combinations of stats and powers but it doesn't require a player to know what would make his character more or less genre compatible. I want my game to guide people to the genre appropriate values. As you say though, it would be possible to do it from a character building perspective - I have just decided to do it from a system gameplay perspective. Doc

I've been here before but am now (hopefully) older and wiser. One of the reasons for this is that I wanted to make a system where a small fast moving martial artist could afford a small number of attack dice, knowing that they would do maximum or close to maximum damage every time they hit a slow moving brick. I also wanted the slow moving brick to be able to do glancing blows when they didn't quite land. One of the problems with Hero is that as the number of dice increase the more relentlessly the rolls made tend toward the mean. You get fewer rolls giving results towards the extremes. If a martial artist gets hit by a brick then the brick (usually 12-14 dice attack) will tend to do 42-49 STUN and 12-14 BODY) - often enough to stun the MA. Of course that means MAs begin to beef up their defences to plan for that eventuality that makes them look less like their concept but keeps them playable in game. My original idea tied the amount of damage done to the to hit roll but that caused me to write lots of charts etc. Didn't like that - too bureacratic. The next idea was to increase or reduce the number of dice thrown with fixed maximum or minimums (a 12D6 attack could do a maximum of 72 STUN and 24 BODY regardless of how many dice were thrown) but this means more dice and more time spent counting them. I have now moved to a different place. I plan, when I next run Hero to have damage done according to standard damage. So a 12D6 attack needing 11 or less to hit will do 36 STUN, 12 BODY if the attack roll is 11. Missing by 1 will do 90% base damage, by 2 will do 75% base damage and by 3 will do 50% base damage. For every one below the attack roll necessary the attacker will gain 1D6 to add to the damage done though damage will be capped to the maximums of 72 STUN and 24 BODY you can achieve with 12D6. I believe that this will provide a much better spread of damage and reduce the bureacracy and time spent counting dice. Any flaws in my reasoning?? Doc

Re: Building a smoke blade You thought about using Flash with the clinging smoke be the SFX? Doc

Re: Needed: Input I just want to point out that players really hate being made impotent (one reason that I never use mental entangles - my group detested it so much that if there was even a hint that an NPC had such an ability they were immediately targetted - possibly to the point of death). This has the potential to make the player feel really impotent in a situation where they need some ray of hope. So the players need to be able to trust you that they either dont need to get out of it - it is a holding scene and opportunities will come later - or that you will have left weaknesses in the device for them to find. I would tend to go with the latter and, personally, not write down the weaknes but allow any reasonably creative use of powers to knock it down. My descriptions would try to indicate that major power use is counter-productive and more subtle approaces welcome. For example, having Mr Lightning Bolt forgo his usual blaze of electricity and instead use small trickles of power to set up a resonance field that shorts out some of the circuitry and either feeds back into a huge explosion or simply allows him to use his normal strength to break free at a dramatically appropriate moment. Doc

Re: Taxonomy and modular design I think that I would be putting them in a different classs entirely. All Mammalia have the same skeletal base that they work from - certain things are elongated, fused or shortened but you can see similarities all the way through the Class. The Catavalans will have a different skeletal base template. They will also have significantly different DNA, proteins and probably everything else. While the phenotype looks like it is simply two added arms, there must be a whole lotta difference beneath that. If I did have another Class (Catava-mammalia) then I might keep the Order, Family and Genus the same. Different species name though. Xeno-taxonomy will get very confusing...

Re: Bmv Actually I aced this valentine's day. Mrs Democracy was so overwhelmed with her gifts (well chosen and appropriate without splashing too much cash) that she is the one grovelling for her lack of thought and insight. Doc

Re: Bmv maybe cause love=/= sex :-) I would have a different effect. St Valentine's Day 10D6 COM suppress, 0 END, trigger (14 Feb) continuous uncontrollable, not versus partners who have provided suitable gifts/cards to partner(s) on 14 Feb. negative COM provides negative modifiers to all social interaction skills with partners until suitable period grovelling has passed. Period may be shortened by production of gifts/flowers/dining out. Doc

Re: Taxonomy and modular design I was thinking that you might add 'Constructs' and 'Lore' as Domains in you r system. I would have missed Curufea's Supernatural bits - though I may have kept the elementals within Minerae: they just happen to be sentient Minerae - and put stuff like zombies and ghosts etc into the supernatural. Curufea's looks good as a start though. You have to decide whether you want a universal taxonomy (into which you could plug limitless types of stuff or whether you want a good taxonomy for the things you have (so you dont begin with many categories empty). Doc

Re: Need HELP with attacking weapons. I think you might have gotten a little distracted by what you want the power to do. If you want a power that removes an opponents ability to use a power then you would normally use drain or suppress or something like that. If you simply want to render focus based killing attacks inoperable then you might want to consider an area effect killing attack (only versus focus based killing attacks). You might find this a more effective way of disabling foci. It doesn't matter whether the result of the killing attack leaves the focus a twisted smoking wreck or changes it to a water pistol really.... Doc

Re: Creating a Mimic I've been toying with the Duplication power for Jericho type characters and was wondering if this would work here too. I was thinking that you might buy Duplication, usable as an attack to essentially create a duplicate of the person you want to mimic. You would then use another purchase of duplication to combine your character with the newly created duplicate. Now this requires some handwaving: You accept that the second duplication power can utilise the duplicate of the target for the second duplication power. You accept that if you split from the combined form that the duplicate immediately recombines with the original (with no damage/healing that would normally result from such an action) regardless of distance. You accept that the mimic character can be the holder of both duplication powers but that the combined form would be that of the created duplicate. If you can swallow those whole, then you have the ability to create a mimic character. You know the point value the character can mimic (I have ruled in the past for the Jericho style characters that if the character being modelled is a greater point value than the duplication allows that several powers are not quite under control and therefore not available). You could rule that all the powers were proportionately reduced but the way many campaigns work with active point limits etc you might find that all of the powers are then to weak to be useful. Better a limited set of effective powers than a full suite of semi-effective ones. Doc

Re: Obviously making hay I think it all comes down to individual special effects. With some special effects I would not be likely to allow a haymaker to take place - a projectile based rifle, frex, though energy weapons I would be more inclined to agree to. I see ranged haymakers as 'overloading the batteries' which would be signposted by increasing aura gathering round the hero or an increasingly high pitched whine as the energy built up. just like overloading a phaser in Star trek.... Doc

Re: Dealing with Stun, End etc in Fantasty If I recall there was an END cost per turn based on the weight and modified by STR. As such it effectively reduced REC for post segment 12 recoveries and if the armour was sufficiently heavy for the STR of the character then there would be a net loss of END per turn... Doc