Doc Democracy

Seconded.

It is a project, something to occupy me when I have time on my hands and want to get my HERO books out, or get my Greyhawk books out. I reckon the details I am agonising over will ensure I can answer all the questions my group might have so that is good. But I am under no illusions that most of this work is for me. 😄

Did you agonise over the details like I am? 🙂 I think my game will start next year and will probably start with the Fate of Istus....

I did not. 😞 My friend is the HD person and I only beg his time when we are definitely going to play the game. Not there yet.

Have a look at the character sheet template I was thinking of using...

Well, it was 20 years nearly since @paigeoliver made the comment, and nearly 15 years since they last visited the site. 🙂 Not sure you are going to get an answer. Blazing away is an optional manoeuver on page 384 of FReD.

You guys are AMATEURS!! Don't you realise that the chemtrails are depositing self organising nano-particles onto our skin that make perfect reception and signal boosting for the virus activation? It is almost like you haven't been reading the literature....

Oh. I forgot. I did not write down characteristic values. STR of 10 was not worth writing on the sheet, it is default implied. A STR of 15 or 20 was written down as STR +1 or STR +2. This was useful as it neat STR bonuses to a skill roll could just be added, it also meant hitting someone was a matter of adding that many dice to the damage roll.

I found, in this situation it was indeed all about presentation. I fixed on the idea of rolling 10 or higher, when no modifiers were active, to be a success. 10 is the normal difficulty. Everything on the character sheet was presented as +something. So Stealth +2 meant that when rolling stealth you rolled 3D6 and added 2. I had hero character sheets, Stealth +2 equates to a 13 or less roll, Stealth +4 would equate to 15 or less. A difficult (+3) task meant the difficulty number rose to 13. I also worked on campaign average for combat. The average was CV 5 for a heroic fantasy. So melee attack +3 was OCV 8 and parry +4 was DCV 9. Combat worked the same as skills with defensive numbers adding to the difficulty of a combat task. In the above example attacking at +3 meant rolling 3D6 and adding three to beat a combat difficulty of 10+4. Sheets looked VERY similar to D20 stuff but it was pure 6th Edition HERO they were playing.

Following up from Dan, you should be using that when it is important that the characters remain undetected or trying to stealth past someone. For someone with the -0 limitation, there would be no additional difficulties but for those that got points for the limitation, you would put penalties on whatever skills they were using to get them past unnoticed. Doc

Before our spam filtering software got significantly better, I used to glance through the public mailbox, dodging the extreme porn, to look at the names that were randomly generated. I seem to remember getting a few brilliant NPC names from there.... Doc

I am with @Grailknight, it is entirely about what you are likely to need. NPCs in my games usually begin as a name and a couple of sentences on an index card. If players are interested, then those notes grow, and when they exceed the space get a page in the campaign folder. If they are actively helping or opposing the players then they will eventually get a character sheet in the campaign folder.

Use Voldemort. Big bad guy, lots of minions. Been big in wilderness lands now reaching into the civilised nations - running drugs or intimidation, taking over local thieves guilds. But he is nasty. Blood sacrifices begining to creep into "civilians". Got a bunch of soul gems that allow him to recoup his power if he is killed. PCs, ideally should kill him in the first instance (using some irreplaceable magic item, only to see his organisation still exists and then find he is there again. Each soul gem he loses reduces his power, bringing him closer so that they dont need another irreplacable magic item to kill him again... Then you have the barbarian shaman, riling up the natives, taps into the power of nature to make attacking the barbarian homelands very expensive for armies - floods and earthquakes are massive tools against invading armies...the shaman will also have animal spirit boosted bodyguards.

That is the slight wierdness of what I am doing. I want to aim for the tropes of Greyhawk without seeking to replicate D&D, so magic schools and levels of ability/spells etc but not necessarily vancian magic.

Well, personally, I thought that conversations were more original when we were talking 1st edition on Usenet...

I think once the narrative impetus of the OP fades, there is a tendency to drift into well-worn paths of conversation.

It is the Bushido Paradigm, as a thread progresses beyond three pages, the likelihood of it shedding any further light on the original question diminishes geometrically.

Actually, if you are skilled in the use of the weapon, STR might not be (and perhaps should not be) the deciding factor in that knife fight. I think that I would be content to see the damage each of those opponents delivering with slashes and stabs being reasonably consistent. The 10 or 15 STR character has options in picking up bigger weapons that do more damage - an advantage in purchasing that STR. I am reasonably comfortable with that. But there is not much else to talk about. If I had a range of threads buzzing, I might have given up on this a week ago! 🙂

You missed one. You could buy 4D6 Killing Attack, no range. That costs 40 points. This almost wrecks the "free STR" argument as, for lower values, it is cheaper to buy the power direct. It is not the big thing when you are talking weapons though as that 1/2 limitation gets a bit lost among all the others. I thought it was worth mentioning though, in the interests of honest debate. 🙂 Two points to this. 35 STR will never be useless in a Fantasy HERO game, or any heroic setting. The ability to wield that power gives you huge advantage over those limited to 20 STR. Also, if you think your troll should be doing more damage with weapons, buy them +xD6 HKA with weapons. In HERO you should be paying for what you get. What I never understood was why, if they kept adding damage due to STR, why they got rid of over-applying STR to a tool, damaged the tool. So adding 3D6 ka to a dagger, applied that damage to the dagger as well. You troll could use it to punch through a wall but neither the wall or the dagger are much use after it. 🙂 Doc

We are all in the gutter Duke but some of us are gazing at the stars! 😄

I don't think you have anything to worry about. I reckon you might get a simple game that is essentially a wrapper on the system, but you would always have the option of pulling back the covers and tinkering with the engine. Doc

We are in different philosophical places but I think your position is consistent. I reckon you add complexity to do all that stuff and it possibly leaves players incentivised to buy characteristics that enhance efficiency rather than match concept. Like figured characteristics drove high STR, DEX and CON characters.

Not sure how you took that from what I said. I mean, being upfront, I would be trimming the number of characteristics, but allowing the continued existence of STR, I am content with lifting and normal damage. Just don't see the justification for additional HKA on top of the normal damage. I think that puts you in the camp of it being an option in an APG to create a game, not default for core rules. What is your position on STR boosting other powers where it "makes sense", or other characteristics doing it in addition to STR?

You get the benefits of having the STR by buying the STR. Why should that purchasing get you free HKA as well?? There is already a case that STR should be 2 points per point, if you are adding in free HKA then that becomes much stronger. No? I think that the concept of the core rules as a toolkit to create the game you want to play would/should provide guidance on doing almost anything at all (otherwise it would not be universal). I think that if you add STR to HKA because it "makes sense" then you need to open up the potential for STR and other characteristics to add to other powers when it "makes sense". My preference would be for this to be an addendum to the core rules rather than have one element of that approach baked in and the others not mentioned. I have you pegged as the author of the next edition. 😄 you got the time and money to go for it??

You mean this IS something that alienates newcomers? There are SO many bits of the system that are not about verisimilitude. A quick example might be using Flight, only touching a surface, to simulate running up a wall. All the time people come onto the boards using powers to deliver game effects that are not the "common sense" application of the power, driven by the name of the power. People that cannot separate SFX from powers find it difficult to get the most value from the character building sub-game of the system. Lots of people bounce off it hard. Some are content for others to build for them, others wander off to other systems.