Doc Democracy

Really, the only way to judge that would be to play it and see what you think. If you allow it, you might see people take bigger movements, allowing them to dive in, hit and move away (possibly into cover) with no ability of the person attacked to intervene. The rules as written mean that if you run in and hit someone then you will have to be there to take the consequences of that melee attack.

Also. I maintain that while looking to our own world can be informative, it cannot be definitive on what happens in a fantasy world where a vast array of other forces, powers and laws of nature exist.

I do think that all clerics should be more powerful in their sacred grounds as well, possibly defences and additional offence possible.

It can make narrative sense, why should a minor god be able to give more power and/or abilities than minor gods. The question always, then, is why people worship those minor gods. (I ignored the D&D rules too, but D&D is not as flexible as HERO and so I am I terested whether we can make the world more interesting by making clerics more different based on who they worship).

I think in Greyhawk HERO, if you worship an extra-planar being, then you should expect power to exercise on their behalf. The question is whether there should be a difference between those who facilitate the worship of greater gods and those who facilitate the propitiation of arch-fiends. We are not seeking to emulate D&D, though should be glancing there to see if system stuff was seeking to drive setting tropes.

I have not read all the rules of any edition beyond the first.

😇 Ach, it wasn't just you, I need to understand that my brilliance will constantly go unappreciated. It is like the women in teams that suggest stuff, get ignored and watch a male colleague praised for repeating the idea. 🤔😇

One of the issues in D&D was when you diversified your clerics among gods, worshipping a lesser god restricted how powerful you could become. If you were to HERO-ify Greyhawk, how would you distinguish between Orcs worshipping Gruumsh (major god) and those in the Horned Society that have turned to devil's etc? What advantage might draw them there?

Hmm. So when Hugh says it, it is genius, even when I used it in the first response of the thread!! 😁😇🤐💪🧐🤣

I would say, in this game I might pitch ZED as SPD 3 with +3 for the shadows. It probably works better with the SPD chart. He would have phases on 2,4,6,8,10,12. The Shadows would get phases 2,6 and 10. Without them ZED moves on 4,8 and 12. Every character needs to adapt to its standards.

I usually work overall characters so it is hard to say about an single element but I am usually fine with SPD being 2 higher than the average if that is the character's main schtick. It would depend on hw it all worked in with everything else. Having those other locations is indeed useful as you can use one to simply attack rather than having to move and attack or having range modifiers. It does however provide some colour and allows opponents to work on limiting that advantage by taing out shadows. For me it adds to, rather than degrades, the tactical nature of combats (which is often, but not always, a good thing). It also adds to the character, it is not simply another ranged attack, it has quite specific differences. It obviously limits the use of teleport and melee attacks but that can result in some point savings. As for complicating things, my friends never say that I err on the side of simlicity if complex is more fun! 🙂 I guess it comes down to those playing (and GMing) about that metric.

LoneWolf is not wrong on any of what he says but a lot of this can be worked out in advance - these are all the things you and teh GM should have thrashed out ahead of time. As he said, if you use SPD changing RAW, it is a huge pain in the backside. If you dont then you need to consider what is going on. I had not thought about a shadow using a combat manouevre that changes the OCV or DCV, personally, the reason I did it the way I suggested is because, unless there is something that says otherwise, all the actions are, in game machanics done by ZED, they might just appear to be coming from the shadows and the shadows wil have a physical presence that opponents can interact with and interfere with your powers. @LoneWolf would you agree that a SPD 8 character is probably less of a time hog than a character with three duplicates (all SPD 5) or three summoned creatures (all SPD 5)?? Do you veto those inds of characters because they also focus too much of the game on a single player? My suggestions on SPD and how it changes were supposed to answer some of the concerns you might have. @migo2154 had a different take that I would accept - the shadows go on SPD 3 timings but if that coincides with a phase for ZED they go on the phase after, which would mean 3,4,5,8,9,10,11,12. Personally I would prefer the SPD 8 segments 2,3,5,6,8,9,11,12 with phases 3,6 and 9 being reserved for shadow segments. Zed would get segment 3 if at least one shadow was present, segment 6 if at least two shadows were present on that segment, and segment 9 if at least three shadows were present at that time. No variations. It would mean he had an odd 5 phase turn of segments 2,5,8,11 and 12 as opposed to 3,5,8,10 and 12 but he is a SPD 8 character after all. I would consider SPD 8 fine if other characters were at SPDs of 5 and 6, would drop to 7 if other characters were 4 and 5 and possibly go up to nice if other characters had higher SPDs. As you say, he will have to finance that SPD in terms of END and REC.

Do you not use END, or use something else? I have a number-friendly mind (moreso than my friends) and I find the distinction between active and real very useful.

You could agree anything with the GM that suits you both. As a GM, I would be content with two separate SPD tracks, one for ZED hitting the usual SPD 5 segments and one for the shadows on a SPD 3 track. With you paying for 5 SPD at full price and an additional 3 with some kind of limitation. The big question are how does it work when the SPD changes because a shadow is created or a shadow is destroyed. What happens, in your system, when shadows and ZED are supposed to move at the same time? There is a big advantage in being able to act twice in one segment, that might be a 0 limitation taken on the 3 SPD, cannot act in same segment as ZED. Doc

Me, Duke and LoneWolf are probably saying that the shadows are essentially SFX of other powers, they exist in the world and the advantages they provide can be removed by opponents by destroying the shadow, which must then be recreated by Zed. Because they are SFX, they are extensions of Zed and can do anything you pay for Zed to do. Essentially, the shadows are created and move away from Zed at whatever pace Zed can move. They then become floating points from Zed to attack from, perceive from, instantly change places with, etc. All you need to do is pay for those abilities. So, attacking and carrying out tasks, those come using indirect, or stretching (does not pass through intervening space). Swapping places is teleport, only to specific floating locations (the shadows). Spying would be clairsentience, only from those same locations. I suggested that, on his own, Zed has SPD 5, and that increases when he creates shadows, representing an ability to do more when shadows are active. If you stuck with RAW rules about SPD changes, that could get tedious, I would get a little loose with it. If you were moving from SPD 5 to SPD 8, your phases go from 3,5,8,10,12 to 2,3,5,6,8,9,11,12. I would suggest that you allocate phases 2, 6 and 11 to the existence of shadows and act on 3,5,8,9,12 in their absence. If it takes an action to create a shadow, Zed might spend segment 12 in combat creating a shadow, segment 2 creating another, segment three creating another, so he would be delayed until at least segment 5 in acting, if he wanted to be fully up to speed. If he chose to work with fewer shadows and different SPDs then you could work with the GM on what segments your phases would be, I dislike the RAW for this. Duke and LoneWolf gave steered clear of this and suggested the shadows extend his ability to act in a round but not how often he acts (truly, more sensible but leaves out (for me) the feeling that he can do MORE per round). It is a halfway house to using summons and duplication. Doc

This looks like an obvious application for duplication. I have real problems with duplication characters. Why? Because it allows one player to dominate a game. If there are four players with a character each, they all get 5 or 6 actions per round. If one If those players can duplicate into four, that player gets 20 to 24 actions per round, more than the rest of the group put together. As such, if I was given such a character, I would be looking at a character with perhaps 5 SPD and +3 SPD (physical manifestation) and a naked advantage to apply indirect to physical skills (from any of the shadows created when the SPD is activated). The swapping is, to me, effectively a limited teleport, only to the locations of the Shadows. The big thing for me would be what happens when a shadow us destroyed, does it mean that a new shadow can peel off and can only move at the movement rate of the core character? This means the player can move character and shadows but he gets only 8 attacks a round, stopping him dominating stuff. Attacks can come from player or any shadow, the player can instantly move to where a shadow is. Then you can ignore all the issues with slavery etc. Doc

There is limited value in referencing real life history as we are playing in a reality where the gods are verifiable real, where there are many different sentient species with varying modalities and some so alien that their morality may be incomprehensible. The idea that there is true evil, not people doing evil acts, is difficult in our relativist normality, where we might even choose to watch a movie humanising the Joker. The existence of absolute good, or absolute evil is difficult to comprehend. We tend to do poor approximations because we are stuck in our heads. Though the telling of historical stories is interesting and a reason I keep reading! 🙂

Ha! The male need to be accurate ahead of being right. 😞 So many times thinking about the words rather than the meaning/feelings behind them.... I am sure there is an "I am Spartacus" moment there for many men reading the strip....

Personally I think this is a positive. It is a failure of point-buy systems that they encourage players to seek copper-bottomed defences when there should be differences and holes. That is what creates drama, tension and drives tactical play.

I am wondering if we have been thinking about it all wrong and we should be retaining penetrating and getting rid of AP. I have watched the arguments ebb and flow and, as often, come to a radically different place. I am looking at AP being more similar to penetrating but the defences working in a very different way. What if armour piercing provided 1 BODY through defences and 1 STUN per dice in the attack. Additional levels of AP increase the BODY through defences by 1 and STUN by 2. First level of hardened removes the BODY and halves the STUN. Each level of hardened after that removes 1 more BODY, if necessary, and halves the STUN again. I think this then delivers the small but guaranteed damage, possibly including BODY, without mangling anything else and it means the defender pays increasing costs to deal with ever smaller amounts of damage. Doc

Never really had a game player playing a vampire. A clever vampire could wipe out a city, probably easier than a village as cities do have infrastructure underground. But would it? Vampires are predators, intelligent predators. They know they need a human population to prey upon. They know they have vulnerabilities and they know rogue predators stimulate extreme, organised responses. It is in a vampire's best interest to be in a position of power, preferably behind the scenes due to longevity. It is in a vampire's best interest that the city regularly finds and deals with "the most recent vampire plaguing the city". It is in a vampire's best interest to have as few competitors present in the city. So, a vampire, in control, can expect a city to continue running. A vampire out of control can be expected to be hunted down and dispatched. A vampire in control who is killed might result in a territory war, probably good for the city, OR an out of control vampire organisation which might spiral out of control as masses of new vampires rampage. Which could result in a ruined city, people fleeing during the day and burning things in the night. Now a haunted city, full of hungry vampires, holds a valuable artifact with which a brave adventurer, ready to combat these bloodsuckers, might enrich himself...

Something my group always has in their minds. When we were teenagers and they wanted poison on all their weapons all the time. I said that if that was good, then all their opponents would do so. If they didn't, only the most evil ones would and they could assume that anyone who did was an enemy. That truce has lasted almost four decades.

What a douche! You should have avoided his games....

This should be a Toolkit Principle. Great point that I often overlook.

I quite like the reasonably empty land scenario. The mundane death rares are quite low but the adult death rates soar. There are dangerous lands where the risk/reward is so high that young men and women are willing to risk their lives chasing big rewards because the alternative is often reasonably rigid social class structures. 🙂 It IS fantasy after all, and those monsters NEED big hunting grounds and LOTS of less than competent adventurers adding cash and kit to their lair hoards...