Doc Democracy
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Posts posted by Doc Democracy
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Originally posted by MistWing
The advantage of the Continuous is that, if you don't break through it in one Segment, it's completely repaired. That it gets harder to destroy over time is just 'icing on the cake' (although, reasonably, there should be a cap on how strong it gets)
Yeah, but the idea of a High Def/1 Body entangle gives that effect - if you don't do enough damage to get rid of it it stay there. The special effects aren't a a tough shell but one that gives a bit and then rebuilds, the game effects are the same - you are back exactly where you started.
Originally posted by MistWingActually, a high DEF/1 Body Entangle won't work since a single 'Penetrating' attack will destroy it, as will any attack that bypasses the DEF and does body (NND-Does Body, for example).
This depends on special effects I suppose but why shouldn't a single penetrating attack destroy it, or a NND - does BODY.
Each of those are particluar attacks that might circumvent the mechanism by which the entangle rebuild itself.
I understand that in some circumstances this wouldn't make sense but in others it would be fine - the penetrating attack produces a deep, fatal flaw that cannot be repaired while the NND causes a flaw deep inside that spreads outwards making the whole much easier to break out of. Even by disrupting the mechanism that is normally protected by the entangle.
What special effects were you thinking of??
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Re: Continuous Entangle and SPD
Originally posted by MistWingIt was mentioned in an earlier post that I could make a regenerative Entangle by making it Continuous. As I recall, Continuous would cause the Entangle to effectively rebuild itself on each of my phases. My question is, how can I get it to go off every Segment. The obvious solution would be to buy up additional SPD to get a 12 SPD and apply a limitation to it. How much should that limitation be?
Hmm. Essentially what you want is an Entangle that is all-or-nothing. If you don't break out of it then you don't do it any damage. Yes?
I'd have thought that continuous Entangle is an odd construct for that. Personally I'd be looking at an advantage on the Entangle that makes it all or nothing. That way you don't have the question of whether the continuous slowly increases the amount of BODY available or how often the entangle goes off etc etc The special effects are that the entangle is continually be ing rebuilt.
As to the cost of the advantage, I've no idea. I'll leave that for someone else to speculate on but surely this is a cleaner way.
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Re: Merge Ability
Originally posted by memoraxIn my game I have two characters with two diffrent abilities to merge into one character. I was wondering how would you handle this?
Wouldn't the simplest way to do this be for each character to buy Multiform with the limitation that they need to be touching to transform. Each character would bear half the cost of the multiform which would be determined by the cost of the merged creature.
It might not be 100% kosher but it sure is a lot simpler than the numerical nightmares that I've seen here so far. This has the advantage that it is easy to see the rationale - both characters (I assume different players) pay something towards the cost of merging and for the loss of two characters the team gets one more powerful one.
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Originally posted by Agent X
What is targeting sense in the books for?
To allow you to target stuff onviously!
This is a difficult question because of the way it approaches other existing powers. Mind Scan is the way you target people out of the line of sight for the use of mental powers. Allowing targetting would step on Mind Scans toes but I feel, like Agent X, that this power should be allowed.
Might I suggest that the targetting allows the use of non-mental powers to be targetted and that if the player wants to target mental powers that he use mind scan. He could even put them in a multipower - low level scans (detect minds) allow him to locate minds and shoot guns or direct remotes towards those people but does not allow him to utilise his mental capacities nor to be attacked that way.
A high level scan opens up both him and his target to the use of mental powers.
A reasonable compromise??
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Re: Physics Check
Originally posted by PhilFleischmannRemember that density is not the same as solidity.
Good point. I think we were looking at game mechanics that might be used for heroes that were based on density decrease - which like you say may or may not involve elements of desolidification.
This is one of the areas where Champions powers and effects become quite tricky to disentangle.
Originally posted by PhilFleischmannI don't mean to stifle anyones ideas here. These are all useful power ideas:
1) An incremental Desolidification - passing through solid objects and allowing physical and energy attacks to pass through you without harm (or reduced harm).
That is what I have been talking about. I guess that at low levels you might call gravel a 1 or 2 DEF barrier and allow you to flow through it - like that fluidification power you were asking about...
Originally posted by PhilFleischmann2) Density Decrease - reducing mass but maintaining solidity and hardness, making it easier to move, climb, leap, float, etc. and possibly giving other effects as well.
This looks like it could possible be a list of small powers in an EC, potentially with related disads (vulnerability to KB and such). Easier to model - less interesting to talk about!
Originally posted by PhilFleischmannI want it all!
Which is of course why you play champions!
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Originally posted by Farkling
I'm not comfortable with this one...all those dice for a simple movement. Maybe just 1 DEF per D6 you have, with the extra D6 being " of movement. Also, as above, it adds a damage mechanic to a movement ability...unpredictable movement just doesn't work for me...and the extra rolls would slow combat down again.
Yeah - I think if I was using it regularly I'd encourage the player to use the 1DEF/inch per D6 unless they wanted to push it. The roll at 10D6 will come up as 10 so often the player will tend to do that anyway but the dice roll as an option is worth it, IMO anyway.
Originally posted by FarklingIt is pretty straightforward and east to understand though, and mechanically works. How do you plan to adjust the Killing DC's?
"Roll 2 1/2 d6 Bob, instead of the normal 3d6+1 ?"
It's when I come to these wrinkles I often give up as it never seems to balance very well. I'm very tempted to stick with the D6 for a D6 which makes it very useful for a desolid character fighting someone with a killing attack (as long as they too aren't using a killing attack). That fits with my 4 colour tendencies though. The more balanced approach would be to consider DC versus DC so 2D6 desolid would reduce the attack by 2DC. It all gets very complicated though!!
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I've been thinking of a density decrease power for some time and wanted one that was scalable rather than absolute.
What I cam up with was density decrease - you get 1D6 per 5 points and for that you can avoid 1D6 of damage when somone shoots at you but lose 1D6 of damage when you shoot at someone else.
In addition you can move through a substance if you can overcome its DEF on a roll. For example if you had 10D6 Density Decrease you would roll 10D6 and count BODY. Rolling the average of 10 you would be able to move 5" through a DEF 5 substance, or 9" through a DEF 1 substance but would be unable to penetrate a DEF 10 substance.
I haven't yet tried it in play but think it is as good as anything else that I've seen so far.
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Re: Random thought
Originally posted by EodinScaling discrepancies. An EC with 3 50-AP Slots costs 100 points. To add a 20-AP power, the EC now costs 140 points.
But to add another 50-AP power makes the EC cost 125 points. It shouldn't cost more to add a small power than a large power.
I've avoided this by essentially allowing smaller powers into the EC but only by paying the base cost. Adding the 20-AP power would cost the same as adding the 50-AP power. That keeps the EC intact - doesn't increase the price and allows the player, if he wants to put it into the EC to do so.
I prefer Dust Raven's suggestion though. I might suggest this in future.
I do like the idea of a unified framework rule though. I might even get round to thinking about it and making some suggestions.
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Originally posted by GenreFiend
Well, to me, performing "grotesque experiments" on people "just to see what happens," is far more villainous than robbing a bank.
My favourite villainous act in a comic was a short five pager at the end of a Superman comic.
Lex Luthor is in a diner in the middle of nowhere. He offers the waitress a ridiculous amount of money if she'll come to Metropolis and essentially be his mistress. He says he'll wait in the car park for ten minutes for her to make up her mind.
He knows she's married due to her wedding ring. She's actually married to the man who was the high school quarter-back - now gone to fat and drink.
As she agonises over it Lex drives off before the ten minutes are up. Now she will never know if she'd have betrayed her husband.
Pure evil.
True villain.
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One more thing
One of the things that I remember doing badly when we first started playing Champions was disadvantages.
Because teh rules said we HAD to balance all of our points with disadvantages and experience and that we could use up to 150 points of disads, that's exactly what we did.
We spent 250 points and found 150 points of disadvantages whether or not they were in character or not. And we had some pretty screwed up characters because of it.
As we got more used to the game and the ideas within the game we found it easier to describe disadvantages that actually rounded the characters and embedded them into the campaign.
My advice is don't sweat the disadvantages on the first few characters. Give them a few that definitely seem to fit the character - hunteds are often easy - as are psychological disads such as heroic and code against killing. But if you can't think of enough then don't worry too much about it - you might get ideas when the characters are in play.
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Originally posted by WhammeWhamme
Okay, my first reaction is that you are, uh, being a jerk.
'Only' 500 pts with 'Only' SPD 12?
Mere 150pt bots?
Here we are talking about villains the players love to hate and you want to call me a jerk for presenting a SPD 12 villain. Really makes the place feel welcome.
As Lucian pointed out (thank you
) The whole point of a challenge to the players is giving them something they have to think about. With lots of opponents or very powerful opponents there are standard tactics. They'd never faced someone with such a high speed and had to develop a whole new set of tactics to deal with him. They did that and got the experience for it. And the satisfaction of beating the man.Sorry you think I'm a jerk GM, good job you don't have to play in my games, huh?
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The villain all my players feared was based on Deathstroke from the Teen Titans - I called him Contract. I loved the idea of the mercenary villain and the players are aware that if they encounter the villain he will focus on his task rather than on beating the crap out of them so they aren't desperate to beat him - just to frustrate his intentions.
His main weapon is SPD 12. My games are essentially SPD 5-6 and the first few times he faced the whole group he wiped the floor with them. He was built on 500 points compared to the teams five 250 pt heroes with about 50-75 pts experience.
Eventually they learned they HAD to work as a team to beat him - they HAD to make sure they acted on EVERY phase to stop him recovering and taunting on the phases none of them moved. Even then they've had problems.
I think it was said before - players hate intelligent villains. None of his abilities are as good as the players except the SPD and it makes ALL the difference.
It was Contract that was paid to humiliate the heroes and rather than do it personally he constructed robots designed to take advantage of each hero. For 150 points each robot beat its hero 1 to 1 and then Contract appeared to defeat the robots - obviously with the press nearby.
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See, that's another good idea - and it mixes things up a bit.
Only problem is that you'd need to get a Marvel or DC set of cards to keep in the spirit of things...
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Originally posted by Damon_Dusk
I guess to me, in effect this isn't much different than the system I proposed, except you're still using the Speed chart. The main change is that instead of giving the faster characters actions at the end of the turn, you're allowing them to use them somewhere between rounds.
Yeah - pretty much the same but with the underlying structure determined by the chart. Like I said it was reading the thread that triggered the idea - I've never really considered changing it before and I definitely didn't want to do anything that would involve more dice rolling!
Originally posted by Damon_DuskThe base number of rounds in a turn are determined by the slowest SPD of all characters in the combat. Faster characters can insert their extra actions at the end of any round, but only 1 action each (initiative is determined by effective DEX as usual).
To make things simple, and coz gamers love 'stuff' to play with, I intend to use this rule and give the players with higher speed combatants tokens (those coloured glass bead maybe) which they can cash in any time they want to make an extra action. Makes the added actions a bit more active.
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I've been reading proposals for changing the intiative system in Champions evers since I first joined the mailing list years and years ago. I've never given them much attention as I happen to think that the speed chart is one of the features of Hero.
Anyway - it was when I was reading Geoff's post (I think) that I had an idea of my own. He was asking for an ideal system where in a SPD 4 v SPD 3 fight the extra phase of the SPD 4 person was randomised.
What about it being allocated instead??
My idea is that the main phases of a fight are dictated by the slowest SPD combatant. So in the instance of a SPD 3 versus SPD 4 both combatants would act on phases 4, 8 and 12. The SPD 4 character would however be able to use his extra phase any time after phase 3 (the earliest allowed in SPD 4).
That gives the higher speed character the chance to utilise his higher speed profitably and more unpredictably.
I would also limit actions to once per segment.
That would seem, on limited reflection I grant, a decent way to shake things up without losing the flavour and structure granted by the chart.
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I have been running Champions for a group of 12-15 year olds at the local church roleplay club. They have had no problems dealing with the mechanics of Champions in gameplay but they are completely overwhelmed about character creation - too much to think about.
My advice is to work on the rules yourself and ask the players what they want to play. The most difficult part is in asking the right questions.
I get all my players to right down (in story form) what they want their character to be able to do and then go away and design all the characters myself. This takes away the intimidation some players feel about the system and takes away the potential of players, who know more about the system, abusing your lack of knowledge.
I then expect to make several re-writes of each character as, during play, players are likely to say "But my hero SHOULD be able to do THAT!" and if I agree then it's time for a re-write - asking them what ability they want to lose - or to make less powerful to allow for the new ability to be added.
Essentially the system is no more than rolling 3D6 for task rolls and a variable number of D6 for effects. Players have to keep track of Endurance, Stun and Body. It's easy to play, the complexity is all in the background and provides you with all kinds of options that may make you, like the rest of us here, convinced that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Good luck and remember the best piece of advice you've been given is to come back and keep asking questions.
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Not sure if it's what you were thinking of but there was the Dungeon Hero webpage that converted AD&D to Hero:
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In the Decipher Lord of the Rings game they recommend that you decide whether small scale opponents are one hit opponents or perhaps 2 or 3 hit opponents. This way there is less bookwork and heroes can cut their way through swathes of opponents.
If a three hit mook gets hit by a good hit then the GM can decide that they go down immediately. This is a decent system and avoids considerations of BODY/Armour/Recovery and CDG.
Personally the balance between armour use on non-armour use in Fantasy Hero was one of my major plus points for the system. There was a real choice to be made and while wearing armour made it harder to hurt you it made you less mobile, easier to hit and more likely to get tired.
(Those encumbrance rules HURT!)
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Entangle was MY first thought as well but I'd have gone for a recoverable charge - finding appropriate stick! :-)
Another thought might be suppress bite attack with a destroyable OAF - the GM can decide how long it lasts depending on the materials to hand and so the damage it takes from the beast in question.
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I think you have to focus on results rather than on abilities.
If your max attack is 12D6 and max defences are 30 then such an average attack versus that defence does 12 STUN. You can then estimate the length of the fights.
If you allow an increase in attacks with no increase in defences then you have the average damage increased to 19 STUN.
The question is whether you increase opponents stats along with the PCs. If you don't then the opponents attacks do less damage and take more from the PCs - existing opponents become easy to defeat - not a bad result and you can move the campaign onto new villains and new challenges.
[Obviously the embarrassed villains go away and spend XP of their own and come back to haunt the heroes at a later date].
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Just a thought, and probably not a good one as I sit in my office wishing I wasn't at work!
Where I grew up a slot machine was called a one-armed bandit or more often a puggy. I was thinking that if you made the character a Scot he might think of himself as a one-armed bandit and use the code-name Puggy as a self-deprecating reminder. As the pug is a dog commonly associated with the Orient there are resonances...
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Invulnerability/desolid - new thoughts
I've been knocking an idea about in my head for some time and wrote it down for the first time in a discussion on the Usenet today. I thought I'd try ti out here as a more suitable place to get it knocked into (or out of!) shape.
I have always been a bit disatisfied with desolid as a power. It is one of the on/off powers in Champions as opposed to others that have more gradual effects. Then there is the problem of using it to model invulnerabilities - it means that the person is vulnerable to affects desolid advantaged attacks and they have to buy affect physical world. There is something wrong.
I've been thinking of a different way of buying desolid. I've not thought it through completely - that's why I'm talking to you guys.
My idea is that you buy desolid iin stages like everything else. You'd buy 10D6 desolid and this would allow you to avoid damage and walk through walls. If you were walking through a DEF 6 structure then you'd move 4" per phase (10 - 6 = 4). If you were attacked then you'd ignore 10D6 of the attack - so Grond's 16D6 punch would deliver 6D6 damage. Conversely if you attacked you'd reduce your damage by 10D6 as well.
This would mostly avoid the need for affects desolid style powers and affects physical world advantages.
If you were looking to purchase a invulnerability style power - either because you are so quick you avoid most of the damage or because you are so resilient the damage doesn't affect you then you buy the 10D6 as normal but instead of being able to walk through walls you get to utilise your attacks without ignoring the 10D6.
Opinions? Personally I'd be inclined to use this and remove desolid and damage reduction from my campaign.
Continuous Entangle and SPD
in HERO System Discussion
Posted
The eternal quest for the unbeatable power.
I think I'd be leary of allowing a does BODY flash to affect the entangle as entangles are either opaque or transparent. If transparent the flash and BODY would pass through with no damage and if opaque the DEF would count. (in my game obviously though I might discuss with the player).
Anyway. I think I'd come back to the all or nothing advantage to the entangle then. I think I'd be inclined to make it a +3/4 or +1 advantage as it does provide a substantial advantage to the entangle. This way the DEF+BODY has to be overcome in one segment or the entangle remains intact (or rebuilt as per the special effects).
This removes the need for extra speed to have it regenerate every segment or continuous on the power with the need to feed END or make it 0 END and have to set limits for the maximum BODY that might accumulate over time.
I guess it all depends on the special effects of the power as to what mechanics make it work most true to conception but I like to keep powers as clean and lean as possible.