Doc Democracy

Re: Mental Powers - another approach I was wondering what effect effects were but left it alone. I am however _very_ interested in what you think the negative effects would be...

Re: Mental Powers - another approach

Re: Mental Powers - another approach Thanks - some of the maths done for me. I love it when that happens

Re: Mental Powers - another approach

Re: New FH GM looking for advice Hmm. Real life is a bitch that seems dedicated to taking away gaming opportunities. I think that the first question is whether your group is interested in gaming - if they can't make a commitment to gaming then you'll never get ANY game running. I find that people that want to play will play just about any game a GM is willing to run. More directly to your question, I think you have to have a fixed game day and run on that day regardless of whether everyone can make it. This means you have to be careful to get sessions to finish at points where characters can jump on and off depending on player participation. Our group has six people. I think you need around seven to ensure you usually have four or five available on any given game night (and if all seven turn up it isn't completely unmanageable). Doc

Re: Mental Powers - another approach I guess no one wants to force you to change but Sean encapsulated my problem with mental powers. (thought I'd quote from the EC thread for context)

Re: How to do this Celtic myth power? Hmm. I was thinking of a Desolid - triggered by a blow that would cause the death of the character. The down side of this is that an affect desolid attack would circumvent it but it would provide the last gasp death prevention. I might - as Sean suggested - see how much this power - or another that you liked cost and then buy a Perk for that cost. Doc

Re: Mental Powers - another approach Well, for the example above, for each phase that the victim does nothing or is not further controlled they recover 5 to their resistance (the value of their ECV). When the resistance goes above 0 they break free completely and before that they'd be able to resist more extreme commands. I'm sure this could work - but I do need to give the costs some thought. Doc

Re: Mental Powers - another approach That'd be good. I like seeing other ways of doing things - especially for mental powers...

Re: Mental Powers - another approach

I was reading Sean's thread on ECs and his last post focuses on one of my long standing bugbears with mental powers, you need 10 to 13 dice in your mental powers to be effective. A corollory to that is that mental powers are an extra mechanic to the system for people to get their heads round. I was thinking whether it might not be possible to use the existing damage mechanism for mental powers. If you have 5D6 Ego Attack you cause cumulative STUN and the effect is reduced by mental defence. If you have 5D6 Mind Control you have almost no chance of doing anything substantial to your target. I submit that it should be possible to attack your opponents INT, PRE or EGO cumulatively until it gets to -10, -20 etc. Opponents would recover based on EGO CV (get ECV back each phase recovered and post segment 12). This would possibly simulate someone struggling for control of another's mind and would also remove the breakout roll - but give a finite time for someone to recover their senses once the mentalist stopped influencing them. Anyone used a system like this before. Thoughts by those that haven't? At least it has the merit that it uses the same damage/recovery mechanic used in physical combat. Doc

Re: Demigod of Everything You've had some pretty cool ideas given you already but your initial request had me thinking. Sure you have all of these specialist Gods that worshippers want stuff from, what does this demigod of everything have that requires his presence in the pantheon? I was thinking that he might be the representation of life/sentience, without these the need for Gods disappears but because worshippers have life/sentience they do noit worship him. He does notr have the power to grant life/sentience to individuals, just ensures that it exists in the universe...he will never recieve the worship necessary to become a major god but the gods need him lest they too wither and die from lack of worship. Doc

Re: A great way to make your players go, "Oh No"...

Re: Need Italian Names I always find that soccer teams are good for ethnic names. Italian teams have a goodly proportion of italian players. See here for two leagues worth of players....

Re: The Akane Tendo Culinary Institute Surely something of a Reputation accompanied by a Physical Limitation - not worth more than 10 points in total I think but definitely where the colour comes in. Doc

Re: Build this: Repulsion Field Well done for going to the effort of actually putting points in! You're construct is missing the potential for the repulsor field to be overcome and the attack does damage. You could save some points there...

Re: Adjustment powers... As I said - I wasn't promoting this as an answer but expressing an interest if people had tried it. I think it is true that one drawback would be that playability could suffer if arguments about applicable defence SFX arose. Personally in your example I would be more flexible - I think that an argument could be made for the main defence being spiritual/mystical as that is the source SFX of the power affecting the victim. As Dust Raven suggested - if you want to use an SFX based system there might have to be more thought put in as to the constructs you'd allow in the game (thus giving you the choice of compromising the range of the system to allow SFX based adjustments). As GM you might find better SFX based defences (Magmaman's damage shield provides a defence as it burns away the grass as it tries to take hold, StrengthGuy's strength provides a defence as he tears the grass out of the ground as he wades through the area of effect. I'm not sure what I'd give - possibly take the DC in an attack or power as the points of power defence it provides. Doc

Re: Build this: Repulsion Field Hmm. Main effect here is reflecting an attack back at an attacker. You've got to start with reflection thus your stuck with ranged attacks, which probably makes sense given the special effects. The reflection should be limited by 'only versus attacks that cause no BODY or STUN' - the limitation to be determined by the relation between average campaign attacks and the character's defences. More complicated if you want it to include HtH...but I'd do that by using a damage shield with standard effect damage. If defences were 21PD the I'd use a 7D6 EB damage shield with a 21 standard effect, limited by 'only versus attacks that cause no BODY or STUN' and 'only causes the same damage as incoming attack'. It couldn't be more than 21 STUN but it could be less... Doc

Re: Adjustment powers... As I said earlier, I was thinking that a player, when buying an adjustment power could have to choose one effect that had full effect and two that had a lesser effect. Or would have to choose a single effect but could get a cost break if they allowed a greater range of defences to affect the adjustment power. All decided early on and relevant to the special effects. If the psionic above decided that only Mental/Psychic based defence worked then that's what it would be regardless of the cold. If he wanted a cost break he could include the cold based defence as also working. (Hmm. Not sure if I'd allow someone with both types of defence to stack against that - I'm inclined to). BTW I'm not saying that this would definitely be better but I was interested in seeing what a system based on SFX might look like. Doc

Re: Adjustment powers...

Re: Adjustment powers... Good work - I'd have repped you if I could - you'll go onto my list.... I was going to wait and see what categories they used in V&V - that would seem a reasonable list to begin with - yours though seems just as good. I was wondering whether you'd be able to get discounts as you buy more and more categories (obviously if you wanted someone who was integrally resistant to power manipulation that's what you'd want). I was also wondering if when you buy your power defence that the initial purchase could affect 2 or 3 categories - or was worth full against one and half against another two - like Chemical defence would be good against some kind of gas attack but would be worth half agaionst poisons and biochemical attacks via viruses... Doc

Re: Background on Cyber Ninja Pirates in Space That's what I'd expect - something that heps you play the game and emulate the genre - not something that necessarily looks like HERO. If you wanted a HERO tie in then I think you'd put a document on the web that ran through the HERO decisions you made to get the game to emulaet the desired genre. People with the toolkit could then decide whether they wanted to use those same decisions or whether they wanted to tweak Cyber-Pirates in a different direction to get something they wanted out of the game that you didn't want or simply didn't think of. Doc

Re: Adjustment powers...

Just been reading the EC balance fix thread that has turned a bit into an adjustment powers thread. I was wondering if there are many house-ruled adjustment powers out there. Has anyone actually gone to the trouble of designing an adjustment powerset that uses SFX rather than being power based? I assume that they'd be pretty similar to the current system but cost more as they'd be more applicable and have fewer defences against them (I'd assume that most power defences would be SFX based as well?) Doc

Re: EC balance fix