Doc Democracy

And, if tradition holds, will be discussed in 6-9 months hence.
 
 

 
 
My standard answer is "it depends _entirely_ on the feel I am going for at the time."
 
  

Different take on the above. If a player pays points, then the item paid in points for, will return to the character. They cannot lose it permenantly. Items paid for in money can be lost, stolen, or damaged,permanently. This was discussed 6-9 months ago already. 

First I call each session an “issue” and not “episode.” Anyway, I get inspiration from comics, often team books because I have a group of players. The Defenders, Avengers, Justice League (to a lesser extent because of the high power level) in a standard game, but that would change based on the campaign. Outcasts or teen games would be different. 
 
I like to watch old crime shows from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s because it’s pretty easy to change victim and location and boom, now you have a whodunit that was pretty easy. 
 
A supers game can pull from anywhere because of the range of abilities and power level. Supers can handle a Cthulhu so bust out your Lovecraft. Digitize the heroes and put them in a video game, Tron style. Perhaps they need a Fantastic Voyage and will figure out unexpected and unintended ways to use their abilities. 

Dude (the gender-neutral one that my generation picked up and I failed to outgrow); I _wish_ I knew how to answer this.  So far, I am with Taylor:  "yes."    
 
 
I...  I dont know what to tell you.  I just sort of throw some things on the table in the first couple of sessions; whatever piques the player'a curiosity, I run with.  When the game bogs down or they show signs of losing interest, I make hard turn and see what happens.
 
I start with an investigation of a robbery of a museum by costumed villains who have recently been seen scoping out an observatory, and we end up in an abandoned silver mine where an ancient Aztec God is being stylistically summoned by masked luchadores.   Then dog-sized robots are terrorizing the city, ripping up sidewalks and taking up soil samples then disappearing down the storm drains which leads to very disoriented clones showing up to their doppleganger's jobs- even when their dopplegangers are there, which just kind of naturally leads to hibiscus plants spitting incendiary seed pods because the local gymnasium is a front for an area-old breeding program attempting to selectively breed immortals, but only because a mastemind villain my players killed in the '80s is involved.  Of course, no one knows that until  the boring stone stolen from the Neanderthal tool display at the museum is found hanging from the branches of the Christmas tree that was wreaking havoc downtown, and suddenly one of the heroes finds a flyer for an old fish cannery in a hobo camp full of zombies and remembers the old cannery is now some zany new-age cult and decides the party needs to investigate their church and learns there may be a connection to the abandoned submarine base out in the lake, and now it is time,to tie everything together, somehow, because someone has discovered the hypo recorder and is steadily screaming to his fellow players "Do _not_ put me in the comfy chair!"
 
 
yeah.  Not kidding.  That's how it goes, almost every time.  But I can't tell you how it happened, or where it came from; just that it's a lot of fun.
 

 
 
 
 
Oh dear!
 
I left out the bit where to clones started exploding.
 
 

As someone who works in a democratic institute, I appreciate the humour, but have concerns that this is entirely the kind of thing that anti-democratic folk build upon.  If you get convinced that you can trust no-one, that there is no value in voting and that those who seek public office should be barred from it, then you open the door to populists like Trump, who tell folk that he is the ONLY one you can trust and we can all see where that gets you.

It is an insidious tendency and undermines both our democracy and our democratic institutions.  Once it is mainstream that you can believe nothing then there is a chance that you will believe anything.
 
I work with politicians every day and I can tell you that they are human beings like the rest of us, the vast majority of those that I meet have honest intentions to make things better, even if their version of better does not match with mine.  I do see their public presentation be skewed by party political stress and the fact the media constantly looks to highlight those that speak differently from their party and forcing the tendency not to deviate from the party line in public discourse.  Intheir work I see nuance and humanity, I wish everyone could have the same insight and engagement.

Doc

You made me go back and look at ancient character sheets that I have kept for decades! 🙂
 
What I found was that, in my group at least - I have no other reference - that secondary characteristics were indeed bought up, but only after we had bought up primary characteristics to the point that one secondary had already been bought down drastically and a second had reached an acceptable point and the gains from buying primaries could no longer be realised because the system forbade you buying down more than one secondary.  It shows that the designers had already seen that primaries were too good a deal and that the astute player would ramp up CON and STR until every possible secondary had been bought down, exploiting the value in that relationship.
 
The reason, in my group, that secondaries were bought up was because, after a certain point, the rules prevented us exploiting buying them down...
 
I tend to avoid these conversations because I am a characteristic extremist, well out of alignment with most others on the boards.  However, what Chris said resonated with me
 
 
We had no access to anyone else, we had to learn it among ourselves and, like Chris, our first characters both players and GM were not viable in combat - they failed in multiple ways as we found out what worked, what didn't and settled on values for baselines in the game that the figured characteristics did not help very much at all beyond giving us vague suggestions that characters with a high con might be expected to have higher ED (but not PD) higher REC and much higher END than baseline characters. 
 
Unlike Chris, those unviabe characters were indeed supposed to be played, and they were.  We learned by making those mistakes and changing how we did things. 
 
Doc

 

You made me go back and look at ancient character sheets that I have kept for decades! 🙂
 
What I found was that, in my group at least - I have no other reference - that secondary characteristics were indeed bought up, but only after we had bought up primary characteristics to the point that one secondary had already been bought down drastically and a second had reached an acceptable point and the gains from buying primaries could no longer be realised because the system forbade you buying down more than one secondary.  It shows that the designers had already seen that primaries were too good a deal and that the astute player would ramp up CON and STR until every possible secondary had been bought down, exploiting the value in that relationship.
 
The reason, in my group, that secondaries were bought up was because, after a certain point, the rules prevented us exploiting buying them down...
 
I tend to avoid these conversations because I am a characteristic extremist, well out of alignment with most others on the boards.  However, what Chris said resonated with me
 
 
We had no access to anyone else, we had to learn it among ourselves and, like Chris, our first characters both players and GM were not viable in combat - they failed in multiple ways as we found out what worked, what didn't and settled on values for baselines in the game that the figured characteristics did not help very much at all beyond giving us vague suggestions that characters with a high con might be expected to have higher ED (but not PD) higher REC and much higher END than baseline characters. 
 
Unlike Chris, those unviabe characters were indeed supposed to be played, and they were.  We learned by making those mistakes and changing how we did things. 
 
Doc

 

You're right in that there's nothing but word of mouth out there, but that word of "mouth" is now spread electronically. 
 
I feel comfortable saying that there is no person getting into the HERO System who doesn't have access to either an experienced player -- otherwise whose mouth is the "word of" coming from? -- or the Internet in some way.  I'm happy to be proven wrong. 
 
And any person creating a character intended for actual play in a game is going to have a GM who is going to look their characters over, check their stats for viability and whether they meet the campaign guidelines, and advise them where they don't. 
 
And if they do?  If they happen to create a character that somehow slips through? 
 
The world dies in nuclear fire --
 
No, it does not.  Nor does the patient die on the table.  Nor do the Gaming Police show up and haul everyone away to Gaming Prison. 
 
We admit that we made a mistake, and we fix it. 
 
My first two Champions characters were made using just the rulebook, without reference to a GM or an existing game.  I'm fairly certain they weren't viable in play, mainly because I didn't have a clue where the stats, including the Figured Characteristics, came in relative to any particular set of campaign guidelines.  In my defense, they weren't intended to be; they were me playing with the character creation mechanics in order to learn them.  (I'm pretty sure Feline came to about 180 total points -- this was third edition).  I showed them to my friend, who by then had been playing Champions for a couple of years, and he told me -- nicely, in case anyone was wondering -- why they wouldn't be viable.  My third character was as viable as a character could be that was created using only the third edition corebook and none of the supplements, which everyone else in the group had...
 
Figured Characteristics aren't an automatic protection from non viable characters, nor do they allow you to disclaim decision making for each one.  (Unless you've gone full Goodman School of Character Efficiency, and have built your characters with way-out-of-any-coherent-concept levels of STR, DEX, and CON, but if you're that person then nothing in any part of this discussion applies to you.)  You're still looking at them to decide whether the 8 base ED from your 38 CON is enough or whether you need more. 
 
I'll tell you what eliminating Figured Characteristics did do: it made it so that we don't need 28 DEX or 38 CON to hit the minmax breakpoints on CV's or Figured Characteristics, which means we build to concept rather than arms race, with housewives or grad students gaining energy powers and 25 STR and 23 DEX.  SPD 4 and DEX 15 are viable in play in a 375 point Champions game. 

This is exactly what I needed. You hit the nail on the head that the inspirations are contradictory.
 
I usually do pick two semi-contradictory elements and try to weave them together. This was the most extreme. But your brainstorming really got my neurons firing! Bringing in the gladiatorial angle is what I needed, plus all the other suggestions. Very cool, and this was exactly the help I was dreaming of. : )

Hmm.  So what you are suggesting is that we see superhuman increasingly get involved in politics, possibly to the point the execute an effective coup where participation in executive politics and governance is based on personal power.
 
This process, which the PCs may be investigating, has, in the shadows, been supported and provoked and potentially subverted by the aliens.  Driving human societies to this, driving them to take-up offers to be made super. They then manoeuvre elections away from broad suffrage to gladiatorial contests, broadcast as part of the bread and circus element of authoritarian societies.
 
Is that it?

In this era I heartily endorse what you say.  I was quoting a joke I read before I was old enough to vote, which puts it >~50 years in the past.

So it is, like many narrative systems, very important to set up the contest: what victory means, what failure means and the consequences of each, with a handful of fuzzy edge elements you might throw in to qualify both victory and failure.
 
You say normal 8 round tracker. I presume longer teackers are easier for PCs, shorter ones harder.  I also presume that turning red sooner makes it easier because PCs get access to those abilities for longer in the scene?  Though that feels a bit counter-intuitive...

For me, looking simply at the game implications, a novice is creating a weapon that has all the limitations of a real weapon.  I would base the cost on whatever weapon is being summoned. I would do it this way because if, in combat you are deprived of a weapon, and you have another, you would probably be roughly as disadvantaged as the mind blade wielder. You would not change the cost of a weapon if a character had a bag on many things and just kept pulling weapons out of it in combat.
 
The experienced user simply removes the focus element.  He can no longer be disarmed or be deprived of the blade.  If the blade was restrained he would abandon it, move his hand, summon another and attack, no loss.
 
Ultimately the player gets an advantage because they have paid points for a weapon rather than something the character acquired through wealth, craft or theft.

I can join the chorus of appreciating simpler sheets for play, divorced from build sheets or hero designer files.
 
Watch your players, if they can't find numbers they are not obvious enough.  One place the game mechanics drive a bit of confusion is conflating ability stats with game stats.  By that I mean things like STR, DEX, INT etc sitting beside SPD, REC, END and STUN. 
 
I would have a combat box where all these useful numbers sit together.
 
In the Supergirl sheet, I would probably remove the detail from the Enhanced physiology, just note that asterisked features are enhanced, then add some asterisks through the sheet. The GM needs the detail, the player's playing sheet just needs to know what is linked in this way.
 
I might also push it out to two sides.  I would put the picture, the background and the complications on one side, possibly bulking them out with some strategy hints and tips.  I would then add a bit of text "colour" to the powers to encourage players to play the power and not the numbers.
 
 
Yeah, when I was younger that was no problem, today it is becoming more of a challenge. 🙂
 
Doc

I think that rule is there for someone using stuff beyond its intended use to achieve an effect that is reasonably directly covered by a power that costs more.

Kind of, but I wouldn't call it universally true.  The GM can use whatever tracker length they like, but longer ones are usually used for big, epic scenes - the climax to a multi-session story arc is an example the designers use - and shorter ones are often minor scenes with an obvious "win condition" that the heroes don't need as much time to complete.  In practical terms that usually translates to difficult scene (following their guidelines for scene construction) = longer tracker while easy scene = short tracker, but again there will be exceptions.  The encounter budget system seems optimized for moderate scenes with the 8-round 2/4/2 GYRO tracker, but it work for easy and hard scenes fairly well.  I think the design goal was to have the tracker almost equal the expected time for the heroes to win (or have a Total Party Knock-Out), with the ideal situation being that every hero has something meaningful to do on their turn (even if it's "just" Boosting a fellow hero) until the win/loss condition plus an extra round or two as allowance for PCs going Out (at which point their options are sorely limited).  Action economy is pretty important, as you might expect.  Makes challenges (which often require multiple Overcomes) more meaningful than they'd be without time pressure.
 
The spread of GYR rounds is also important for determining hero (and, rarely, villain) effectiveness as you surmised, and the more Red rounds there are the more impact those potent Red abilities will have.  Pretty rare for a scene to last more than two rounds once you're in Red, both because the team is now firing on all cylinders and because you may have a TPKO from heroes going Out back in Yellow.   By comparison, Green rounds really limit the PCs, and often get spent doing Overcomes on existing challenges, swatting some minions, or putting out mods with Boosts and Hinders rather than whaling on villains.  The book's suggested epic scene tracker has a 1/6/4 GYRO spread IIRC, and I don't think I'd ever bother with more than two Green rounds in an action scene unless something really weird was going on narratively.  Green is the calm before the storm in an action scene, Yellow is where the bulk of the action is, and Red is where the end (whatever that might be) is near.  Having the scene tracker run out is almost always beneficial to the villains, but what that benefit is can vary a lot.  Maybe the heroes get a fiat KO and wake up partially healed in a prison or deathtrap, maybe the villain's gadget/ritual/scheme seriously changes the world and everyone has to deal with that (Thanos snap, summoning Cthulhu, etc.), or maybe they just stole what they wanted and get away via a pre-planned escape scheme.
 
Worth noting that there are a few ways to use Red abilities before the tracker is in the Red, including just getting beaten up really badly early on.  A big part of the game's tactics involves around deciding when you need to (say) invoke a twist to use a key Red ability while still in Yellow.

Hmm.  So what you are suggesting is that we see superhuman increasingly get involved in politics, possibly to the point the execute an effective coup where participation in executive politics and governance is based on personal power.
 
This process, which the PCs may be investigating, has, in the shadows, been supported and provoked and potentially subverted by the aliens.  Driving human societies to this, driving them to take-up offers to be made super. They then manoeuvre elections away from broad suffrage to gladiatorial contests, broadcast as part of the bread and circus element of authoritarian societies.
 
Is that it?

I go with Doc's last post.  Why complicate it?
 
Use the stats for whatever the weapon is.  Ditch Focus, keep Real Weapon.  Focus goes away because, as noted, it can't be disarmed.  Real Weapon stays, I believe, because that's the basis for the weight considerations.  If you don't have Real Weapon, don't you throw out the Min Weight, and therefore, the lower STR bonus to damage?
 
Since this is based on the Psionic Warrior's Psiblade from 3.0...I'd go further.  Skip real weapon.  Skip focus.  They're powers...period.  No weight.  Not breakable.  Not disarmable...which is also pointless, as Doc notes, if it can be recreated at a thought.
 
For the most part, I don't give a darn about whether it's a mace, hammer, or staff...altho the latter might have reach.  I ONLY care about
a)  normal or killing
b)  reach
c)  damage DCs, and possibly other effects.
 
The rest is just visual SFX.  So yeah...options to start with:
2 slot MP, one for normal, the other for killing.
3 slot MP, with the 3rd slot incorporating the reach weapon
Small VPP...you get a MAJOR limited powers bonus here (at least -1, for HAs and HKAs only).  This is looking ahead, to when you start adding the psiblade powers, which make things a llittle trickier.  The starting VPP might be pool size 20, control cost 10;  half phase to change powers (no reason to go to zero phase);  no skill roll to switch.  HAs, HKAs only is -1, so the control cost is 25 / 2 == 12 points.  As I say, this would only make sense if the plan is to allow a very versatile mindblade...AVAD, AVAD does body, AP, etc.  Otherwise, add slots to the MP. 
 
 
 

So it is, like many narrative systems, very important to set up the contest: what victory means, what failure means and the consequences of each, with a handful of fuzzy edge elements you might throw in to qualify both victory and failure.
 
You say normal 8 round tracker. I presume longer teackers are easier for PCs, shorter ones harder.  I also presume that turning red sooner makes it easier because PCs get access to those abilities for longer in the scene?  Though that feels a bit counter-intuitive...

Hmmm.  How many players do you expect to have?  That value (H in the rulebook) determines how big your scene budget is, which is kind of a starting point.  It sounds like you'll want a moderate or even easy action scene for the rescue and escape (since they're secretly supposed to get away).  The normal 8-round tracker is probably fine, giving you two rounds in Green (where the tension is low), four in Yellow (as the action heats up) and two in Red (hopefully the climax where the heroes have to get away with the prisoners before overwhelming reinforcements trap them).  Since they're intended to get away, having tracker run out should maybe just give them some disadvantage going forward - or perhaps they get a reward in the form of those two "doomed by plot" prisoners surviving if they finish early, while a tracker exhaustion leads to them being gunned down horribly bravely delaying pursuit for the heroes?
 
From your description you'll want to spend one of your H "elements" on an environment ("Sinister Nazi Laboratory" or somesuch) whose twists will gradually put NPC guards and researchers into play, apply effects to one or both sides (eg an alarm might Boost the baddies with the Min die, while breaking a bunch of chemical flasks in a lab might Hinder or Attack everyone there), introduce a new challenge (eg a security gate slides shut, requiring an Overcome to bypass or force open).  Elaborate to suit, but remember that the environment will do something every round so you want to think about a variety of potential twists so you don't have to repeat them too often.  Environment twists usually start out with very small game impacts in Green, are roughly equivalent to a modest hero ability in Yellow, and can really produce huge changes in Red, with Major twists being stronger than Minors at each tier.  So don't be surprised if them seem trivial initially - they mean more and more as time goes by.   
 
Using another element or two on free-standing (ie not generated by the environment turn) challenges to represent the perimeter defenses or maybe breaking the prisoners out of their cells or whatever would give people some Overcomes to deal with, which is usually a good idea.  It helps generate twists to complicate things, and it lets heroes use the Principles and overcome abilities rather than just punching things all the time.  Experienced players frequently come up with crazy ideas all on their own that are best treated as Overcome actions, but for newbies challenges act as signposts for "think of a cool way to use your powers and abilities" points.
 
The rest of your budget can be spent on the baddies.  Sounds like you want mostly regular soldiers and maybe some tougher leaders, so a mix of minions and a few lieutenants as leaders is best.  Doesn't seem like you'd want an actual full-blown villain here.  They don't have to be actual infantrymen - the lieutenant mechanics are a good way to represent armored cars, halftracks and tanks, for ex.  Durable, but not so tough a hero can't deal with them in a few Attacks.
 
One thing the rules gloss over is mapping.  The game's very theater of the mind when it comes to ranges and positioning, but I still find it's a good idea to split a scene into at least a few different broad locations.  In this case, maybe a couple of different outer perimeter sections (maybe one backs on a forest and the other drops off as a cliff so the players can choose to use one or both to fit their powers?), a vehicle park in front of the lab building, and a few different interior sections (actual lab space, holding area for the prisoners, maybe a barracks or personal quarters/offices if they might matter).  Maybe a guard tower, Nazis love guard towers.  Usually best to have somewhere between H-2 and H+2 discrete (albeit often abstract) location so the heroes can split up or concentrate a bit.  Movement rules are pretty abstract as well, but I wouldn't let it get in the way of drama - don't count how many locations it is to the perimeter on the way out if a hero is just running like mad to beat the scene tracker, especially if they have mobility powers.
 
A single moderate difficulty action scene usually takes my groups under two hours to play, maybe three if there are a lot of distractions.  If you want a longer session you could throw in social scenes as endcaps or even just hit pause on the tracker and shove a short one into the middle of the action when the prisoners are first found (especially if the heroes have been fast and sneaky and the scene's still Green or low Yellow).  Remember to give them their Hero Point for social scenes, even if it doesn't matter in a one-shot.  You could also endcap with montage scenes before or after, although tend to go pretty quick.
 
If you really need to stretch the time, you could split things into an initial action scene where they fight past a patrol getting near the lab, montage to recover and sneak into the lab itself (using Overcomes) without alerting the guards, then start a second action scene as they find the prisoners just in time for a second patrol that found the remains of the first one to pull up and sound teh alarm.
 
No matter what you do, the usual GM proviso about no adventure plan surviving contact with the players applies, of course. 
 
That's a whole other kettle of fish, but you can do a lot more than just super-brawls with the GYRO system and different time scales on what a "round" is.  I ran a three-month election campaign for city mayor as a single very extended action scene (with other more traditional-format scenes nested inside it) and it worked out dandy.  All you need to make an action scene is some kind of deadline to provide urgency and justify a scene tracker, and election day is as good for that as the countdown timer on a bad guy's doomsday device.
 
Hope that helps some.  Best of luck if you do try running it.  Very different system from Hero, but it has its merits. 

I think I did and got no uptake, the forums don't seem particularly active and I may not gave hung about long enough.
 
I was thinking of setting up a one-off, possibly using Sentinels for an arc of the Golden Age HERO game I am playing with my group.  I converted the characters but when I thought of the first scene I froze.  This first encounter us supposed to be the characters escaping from a lab where they had been getting experimented on.
 
Obviously the environment us important, lots of things that might interrupt or complicate the scene. There are the guards to defeat and a perimeter defence to breach.
 
So, the scene tracker.  How long? When to change G to Y to R? What happens if the tracker ends? Do I need another scene with higher stakes?  How long should that be?
 
I reckon this would become more obvious with experience of the game but I wanted the one off to go well. Any hints and tips would be useful, I want that first scene to get easy but, for plot reasons, not too easy (they are being allowed to escape but should not know that).
 
I was also wondering about whether and how the GYRO system might be used for the meta plot of the adventure.
 
Two heroes were captured,  the scene begins with the other heroes breaking in to free them, there will be three other prisoners, one of whom will escape with them, the other two will die/be recaptured. They need to get to London and return to their secret base.
 
Actually, this is all in their minds, the nazis are watching to find the location of the secret base and the surviving prisoner the captors way to communicate with the heroes. I want each scene to have the potential of giving away the secret, possibly using an additional GYRO counter.
 
Or am I being too ambitious? 🙂

You might better off asking over on the publisher forums, but as long as I'm here maybe I can help.  What are the question(s)?  If it helps any I did a two-part article on how I design an action scene over on my blog, the first part of which is here.

Vide Doc Democrqacy's admonition, here's All Things Considered's recent interview with an Oregon Representative who seems like a very earnest public servant. His special interest is public transportation and making cities more walkable and bikeable. Naturally, I'd never heard of him before this, because loudmouth lunatics hog all the media attention. And the media usually let them.
 
Though Mr. Blumenauer has also decided not to seek reelection.
 
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211949662/an-exit-interview-with-democratic-rep-earl-blumenauer-of-oregon
 
Dean Shomshak

As someone who works in a democratic institute, I appreciate the humour, but have concerns that this is entirely the kind of thing that anti-democratic folk build upon.  If you get convinced that you can trust no-one, that there is no value in voting and that those who seek public office should be barred from it, then you open the door to populists like Trump, who tell folk that he is the ONLY one you can trust and we can all see where that gets you.

It is an insidious tendency and undermines both our democracy and our democratic institutions.  Once it is mainstream that you can believe nothing then there is a chance that you will believe anything.
 
I work with politicians every day and I can tell you that they are human beings like the rest of us, the vast majority of those that I meet have honest intentions to make things better, even if their version of better does not match with mine.  I do see their public presentation be skewed by party political stress and the fact the media constantly looks to highlight those that speak differently from their party and forcing the tendency not to deviate from the party line in public discourse.  Intheir work I see nuance and humanity, I wish everyone could have the same insight and engagement.

Doc

As someone who works in a democratic institute, I appreciate the humour, but have concerns that this is entirely the kind of thing that anti-democratic folk build upon.  If you get convinced that you can trust no-one, that there is no value in voting and that those who seek public office should be barred from it, then you open the door to populists like Trump, who tell folk that he is the ONLY one you can trust and we can all see where that gets you.

It is an insidious tendency and undermines both our democracy and our democratic institutions.  Once it is mainstream that you can believe nothing then there is a chance that you will believe anything.
 
I work with politicians every day and I can tell you that they are human beings like the rest of us, the vast majority of those that I meet have honest intentions to make things better, even if their version of better does not match with mine.  I do see their public presentation be skewed by party political stress and the fact the media constantly looks to highlight those that speak differently from their party and forcing the tendency not to deviate from the party line in public discourse.  Intheir work I see nuance and humanity, I wish everyone could have the same insight and engagement.

Doc