Markdoc

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated Love that series. Indeed, it influenced the last champions campaign I ever ran cheers, Mark

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated It's also not how we ever played the game: chances are good that if you encounter mythos creatures in game a) you're going to die and you've already failed. I think the goal - certainly how published adventures are written - is that the players know that over time their PC's sanity will degrade and that if you take too many risks, degrade faster. The overall feeling this gives is a kind of "against the clock" feeling, without any actual clock. It's just that the players know that they only get get so many shots at the ring. It's not like D&D, where if things are going bad you can always pull out, heal up and come back for another go. In addition, there's often the temptation that you can try to use mythos magic, which offers the possibility of blasting your way through the opposition ... but also the certainty that if you do it'll cost you dearly. The only question is how dearly. CoC is not, I think a game for long-term campaigning, where characters develop over years of play. It's more a defined story arc game where you play a scenario through. If you survive ... you win and get to retire. If not ... well, not. properly GM'ed though it can be a blast and quite a different feel from most other games - though it's years since I have played. cheers, Mark

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated The problem is not with the concept - which is easy enough to explain - it's in getting them to do the math. For some reason, it really seems to be a stumbling block with some people. In the end, I got so sick of being asked "How do I calculate this again?" or "Do I need to roll high or low this time?" that I simply swapped to "roll high" and watched the problem vanish. Had it been one person, or even one group, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and thought it was a bit weird. But there's been at least one person in each of 4 groups now - and I found that other GMs have had similar experiences, so it's a non-trivial number of new players. Is it worth making the change? Personally, I think so. New players who stumble over math in-game are players who walk away thinking "Hero is hard to play". Even if it's only a quarter of people (which seems to be about the rough estimate judging from the last time we had this discussion) that seems like a lot to turn away for no real reason. Mathematically, "roll high" is no different to "roll low". There's noting inherently superior to the method we use now: it's just "what we've always done" - and that for me, is a really, really weak excuse to do anything. To me, it's more that if you lose nothing mechanically, or in terms of system design, why wouldn't you choose the option that makes it easier for new players? cheers, Mark

Re: A Whole New World In terms of bad guys, have a look at the Demons from the novel "The Shattered World" (which, by the way, would make a great fantasy setting!). They live "under" the inhabited world and while in same ways are stereotypical demons are also interestingly fleshed out. cheers, Mark

Re: Who is sticking to 4th or 5th Ed HERO Thanks for that. I bought it as soon as it was available and yeah, I have always thought the paper was darker and rougher than I liked. I actually prefer the 6E printing I have significantly. cheers, Mark

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated Except that D&D gaming boards were filled to overflowing with complaints about THACO and the 3.0 design team made its elimination in favour of a simple and intuitive unified mechanism a priority. Many gamers cited that change as one of the two best things about 3.0 and although the grognards hated it, there's no question it was overwhelmingly popular with the fanbase. Of course, there's no need for Hero to follow in D&D's footsteps (after all, we wouldn't want our game to get too popular .... wait, yes I would!) but the arguments here sound uncannily like the arguments in favour of retaining THACO and in hindsight getting rid of it was a smart design decision. cheers, Mark

Re: A crazy way to handle damage? A simple approach would be to use standard effect on all attacks - and then use the hit location table for damage multipliers. This would give you somewhat more volatility - especially for large attacks - but this would be countered by the fact that Defences would be more efficient: attacks would do slightly less damage on average, but would have the potential to do much more (edit: or much less). This would also speed combat significantly, especially for games with large attacks. Instead of counting the dice, you'd know your 14d6 negablast does 14/42 BOD/STUN - all you'd need to do is roll location. The DM could simply multiply whatever went through DEF by the location multiplier - which in most cases would be 1. Edit: This would change game balance however - high OCV characters would have the option to swap accuracy for significant increases in damage output, and low DEF/high DCV characters could very easily get pasted by a single good shot. I don't think those are necessarily bad changes, but combat would play differently from standard Champions: it'd be far easier to one-shot a character, especially if you got the drop on them. It might, on reflection, give a slightly more comic-book-y feel to combat. A lot of hits would do no significant damage and a few would do lots. Small attacks would do no damage at all to high DEF characters and killing attacks would only really be useful against targets with little resistant DEF. cheers, Mark

Re: Supers vs. Military Modern weapons have been increased in damage over the last couple of editions - but that's probably because of all the people who complained that they were too wimpy before This has never been a problem for our groups - we just made our top line supers super - so we had Bricks with hardened or partially hardened rDEF in excess of 50 and PCs with 18d6 AP normal attacks or up to 8d6 HKA. Those characters performed like the heavy hitters of Marvel or DC, annihilating conventional military forces, trashing buildings during their fights, etc etc. It is a relatively simple fix. If you want supers who can perform at that level, give them the points to do so: and then give them suitable threats to deal with. cheers, Mark

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them? There is no "right" answer ... it's a question of what works for you. There is a wrong answer, though which is that free gear puts mages at a disadvantage in a fantasy game. It ain't so. I've played in many FH games, with multiple GMs and every one ended one of two ways: 1. Almost all the PCs were or became magic users 2. The rules placed heavy restrictions on magic to stop it dominating combat. Now it's possible an inspired GM could work around that, but "mages are disadvantaged by free gear" is clearly not the default. cheers, Mark

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them?

Re: Real Costs for spells and how you handle them?

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated It's very, very easy - at least at the heroic level: my problem is always keeping the PCs alive, when giving them credible opposition. In last night's game they faced a "tentacle monster" - it caused them a lot of grief, but did relatively little BOD, since it had no killing attacks. However, it left one PC unconscious in knee deep water: she was drowning to death, when one of the others got to her. Last week's game they faced a giant snake - one player took 9 BOD (in a single hit, after her armour), was seriously unconscious and about to be eaten, when another PC mindcontrolled the snake to spit her up and flee. The session before that, the PCs fought some sharkmen: one PC down into negative BOD and almost bled to death, two players down with significant BOD in addition to masses of stun. We would have probably had a PC fatality, had the guy with mindcontrol not rolled a near perfect attack and turned one of the berserking sharkmen on the sharkman shaman The mechanisms for lethality are: 1. Not too much magic/psionics/rubber science. If players can buy 30 rDEF, they will. If they are stuck with more "realistic" options ... well they can't buy 30 rDEF 2. Hit locations. That's it. All you need for a gory game. Point in case. The best armoured PC in my game has partial chainmail armour (with the amount of swimming, climbing, jumping, etc, anything heavier is impractical, most of the time.) The strongest PC in the game can dish out 3d6 HKA with his sword. These examples indicate the sort of range NPCs cover as well. Do the math - it's entirely possible for a single blow to hit an armoured bit and still do 24 BOD - a one-hit kill, essentially. Unlikely, but possible. Hits to unarmoured bits are even more lethal. BOD damage during fights is the rule, not the exception and most of my PCs can only take 2-3 good hits at most - when they are in armour. Without armour we're talking 1-2. In a modern setting, body armour will stop most - but not all - BOD from regular firearms, but take a hit to the unarmoured bits and you can easily go down badly wounded or dying. Again, that's realistic. Seriously, Hero is a very lethal system when you are not playing superheroes, and my problem is always avoiding unnecessary fatalities (we've only had one PC fatality in this game so far and that was with player consent). As we ramp up toward the climax, though, I have put the players on notice that things are going to get dangerous, so fatalities are a real possibility. cheers, Mark

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: GMing style, what else apart from 'Round the Table'? Simple, I run plotlines that involve all - or most - of the PCs. When I can, I hook their backgrounds and complications in, but that's frosting on the cake, not the whole thing. Occasionally a sub-plot related to one or other player directly takes the focus, but the group plays as a group, so the others are all involved. When you alternate GMs in a shared setting, it makes far more sense for a GM to run a story arc until it is finished and then let it lie for a while, so that all the players can pick up thread of the next game. Usually there's no problem in starting your next turn as GM with "Several months later..." and that means each GM can run a game which involves all the players. cheers, Mark

Re: Supers vs. Military It'd actually be pretty freaky living in a world with supers - in that regard, the closest to realistic is probably Marshall Law It's not just villains rampaging about and being at least partly reliant on forces entirely out of your control, but think about it- All that stuff you tell your kids about "monsters aren't real?" Well, they are real. Not just individual freakazoids like (say) Sabretooth, but actual monsters - all over the place. Also ghosts, multiple races of malevolent aliens, actual evil gods from the dawn of time, beings from other dimensions who'll cut you up and stick things in you just for lols, etc. That'd make anyone kind of paranoid. Add to that, imagine reading newspaper articles about that giant glowy thing in the sky. According to the avengers it was a portal which almost consumed the entire earth - but it's OK, they fixed it .... this time. According to your buddy who knows this guy who knows this guy, that's the third time the earth was almost destroyed this year. Maybe he's full of it ... maybe he isn't. Who can tell? And then add to that exactly the kind of mind control and mindwiping you talk about here. Like: "You member Johnson in Accounting? Turns out he went on a homicidal rampage last week and killed 30 people. He claims he was possesed. Who knows? Could be true." Or even simpler you wake up one day and find that you can't remember anything about the last 3 weeks. Neither can anyone else in the entire city. Even if it doesn't happen to you, there'll be stories about it. It would mean that ordinary citizens could be sure of nothing. You couldn't be sure that you and our whole family - or even your whole world - might not suddenly be wiped out, without warning, at any time. Even more extreme, you couldn't trust your memories, or even your self identity. You might be you - or you might actually be a construct. Or your memories might all be false. Your wife might actually be a mutant. You might be a mutant or an unwitting host for an alien parasite, yourself, without knowing it! I honestly doubt anything like today's civilizations would - or could - exist in the Marvel universe - which is why, like the writers, I prefer not to go into these issues cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans

Re: Supers vs. Military

Re: Supers vs. Military

Re: Supers vs. Military These sort of discussion go on all the time in military forums .... "Yes, but" Pretty much all of the points being made here are good ones - but to my mind, it just illustrates why, if you want to play in a classic supers universe, it simply best to willingly suspend your disbelief. As Megaplayboy said, supers fight supercrime and the military doesn't deploy supertech .... because. If you follow logical lines of development, you end up in a game of Marshall Law or (at best) The Authority. I speak as one who has been there - back in grad school we started a champions game set in the "near future" - the 1990's as it was back then As the GM's supervilians behaved more like super-powerful mobsters than weirdoes in suits, things escalated pretty rapidly. Fights turned ugly. Bystanders, cops and DNPCs started to die. The military was called in. Our first big victory over the major "evil superteam" turned to ashes as they escaped from prison - the next big fight in downtown Manhattan resulted in mass destruction and hundreds of civilian deaths. My character ended up killing some of the villians responsible (despite a code vs killing: one of them was taunting me with the fact that all these deaths were my fault for letting him live the first time round and he was going to do it again) - and then had a nervous breakdown. We got flayed in the news for the destruction, even though without us the death toll would have been many thousands instead of a few hundreds. As the game ground on, the superfights became battles to the death. Collateral damage rose and the public turned against heroes: martial law was declared. The army started to deploy and then manufacture captured supertech .... costumed vigilantes were outlawed ... superpowered weirdoes were to be arrested or killed if they resisted. Our team - or at least the survivors - fled the US, kicked over a small African nation to set up a nation where super-powered beings could live ... an international crisis over this rogue nation started brewing. At that point the campaign collapsed, mostly due to player trauma. We'd signed up to play Champions. My character took "Code against killing" for pete's sake! Two of the early PC casualties didn't even have any resistant defence! If this sounds drearily familiar, remember this was 198-freakin' -5! A year before the first issue of the Dark Knight was published! Genosha didn't exist back then, nor did Cable. Aquaman still had both hands and no beard, Wolverine didn't kill people (indeed the wolververse didn't exist yet). The Joker was a sinister clown, not a serial mass-murderer. I stopped reading mainstream comics in the late 80's when they started taking the exact trend we had played through 3 years before. Now to be fair, the GM had told us he wanted a more "realistic" take on supers and his game, while rapidly becoming very grim, did not contain any WTF!? moments. Pretty much everything we tried turn to c*** but it wasn't as though any of it felt like we were being arbitrarily stiffed. It was just .... grim. Everything was grim. And it must be admitted that I still recall pretty vividly the big battle in Manhattan - it was much higher intensity than most superbattles, for the players as well as the characters. But we learned a useful lesson* - a battle like that would have made a great climax to a game - but you can't run a game like that full time. Players need victories too. * Well, maybe some of us did: the same GM went on to run a series of GrimDark campaigns, where the PCs were used as punching bags by an actively malevolent universe. We even coined a phrase "Mike-capable" to describe characters built to survive in his games. Talking to the GM afterwards, he was actually blindsided when the game ended: he thought it had been going well. His original plan had been for the players to become a government sanctioned team - a sort of super-powered delta force. Us fleeing the country took him by surprise, but then the idea of setting up a country took his fancy. It'd be the players against the whole world, supers against whole armies! There'd be superbattles that devastated whole cities! It'd be epic! It'd be great! ..... and then we quit. Interestingly, apart from a few one-offs that I ran, I don't think that gaming group ever did a supers campaign again cheers, Mark

Re: "Leadership" multipower Yup, at first glance, that looks pretty good. cheers, Mark

Re: Supers vs. Military Right - and although Ian makes some good points, that cuts both ways. Any powerful super who finds himself or herself targeted by the military probably knows where the seat of government and major military headquarters are. It's precisely these sorts of discussions why it's best not to talk about "realism" in a comic-book universe. If a powerful bunch of supers finds itself at war with (say) the US, it's unlikely to content itself with beating up tanks on the battlefield - they'll teleport or drop in from orbit into the White house or the Pentagon or Cheyenne Mountain and start tearing stuff up. This sort of threat is precisely why the government would be wanting to deploy battlesuits in the military - and cost be damned. Tanks aren't much use when the supers are in ur base killing ur doodz. cheers, Mark

Re: "We don't need gas money" That was my first reaction too - then I noticed that the OP specified he wanted to be able to use it on other PCs as well. If it's inanimate objects, it's just a focus. If it's other (willing) characters he needs UBO and if it's anything - including unwilling characters - it's UAA. cheers, Mark

Re: "Leadership" multipower I'd keep it simple - one (or more) overall levels with usable by others. That way the leader can add +1 to attack, or defence - but also to things like a roll to resist mind control or fear-related (ie: PRE) effects. He can also help (for example) CON rolls to keep weary trooper on the march, help them make coordination rolls to hit a foe together, etc, etc. Simple and flexible: no dice rolling involved and no worry about area effect - as long as they stay within sight of the leader, they are good to go. I might limit it by "Must be able to hear as well as see leader (-1/4)" if it reflects commands, but that's about it. If he bought two levels, he could also use it to increase damage by one DC. Cheers, Mark