Markdoc

Re: Supers vs. Military Just to echo what the others said, in our "Iron Age before Iron Age existed" game, the PCs actually did go up against military forces. With an OCV of 5, an Abrams is hitting many of these heroes maybe 1 time in a 100, and the Heroes are missing about the same. One on one, my Brick (the Warden) with his force field amped up had a hardened 60 rPD. He can laugh off small arms fire, with a DCV of 10 has little chance of being hit by a tank - and will survive if he does - odds are good it won't even stun him, even using AP ammo. Just going through flipping tanks over or smashing Bradleys and Humvees, he can destroy an armoured platoon in about 20-30 seconds, an armoured company in a minute or two. And with supersonic flight, by the time command has realised they've just lost a company and are ordering forces to converge - he's already sitting on a hill 20 kilometres away taking a breather. Now, admittedly those "heroes" were built on 450-500 points (I think the Warden was about 470, IIRC) - and most of us weren't spending a lot on non-combat skills. It'll certainly cost more to build to that level under 6E. It's also true that a really lucky shot from a tank would have KO'ed pretty much any of the the PCs in that group and would certainly have killed a few - but seriously, 3 or 4 guys descend out of the sky on an armoured division and 30 seconds later the battlefield is littered with burning vehicles, bodies and upside down tanks, while the attackers are unharmed and obviously just getting warmed up. What do you think happens next? I'm envisaging a fair degree of running away myself, mixed with a lot of "Oh please god don't kill me, I have a wife and kids at home!" What do you think happens to nearby divisions when the survivors start radioing through that 3 guys just trashed them in less than a minute, and headquarters has suddenly gone off the air because "Something just came up out of the ground!" and then there was a lot of screaming? When suddenly there's no air support, but they can see a big plume of smoke on the horizon just about where the airbase should be? What happens to divisional artillery when a guy who can take a hit from a tank gun and throw an artillery piece like a baseball, suddenly drops out of the sky? You think they're gonna take him on with sidearms? What happens on an aircraft carrier when a guy who can tear a bulkhead door off its hinges and throw it like a frisbee, comes up from underneath, tears a hole in its hull and starts ripping his way down the length of the ship through all the waterproof bulkheads? I 'm thinking you won't stop him with an M16 or a shotgun ..... And given that quite a lot of high-powered bricks have substantial flight, all of that could happen in a few hours over an area where the incidents are separated by hundreds of kilometers. The thing about supers is not just their raw power, but that - often - they have mobility that no conventional force can hope to match. So yeah, even with Champions rules and moderate to high points, a group of typical supers could indeed make life very, very rough indeed for conventional military. cheers, Mark

Re: Question about keeping equipment balanced in heroic campaigns? Yeah. We used to use equipment pools, but these days we just wing it and let encumbrance and practicality dictate. It's usually pretty obvious whether they can get the stuff or not. If there's any doubt and the players reeeeeally want something that's not readily available, well, there's an easy adventure thread right there. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars But what happens when they do sell it? Which in the comics has already happened on a pretty regular basis. Or when it's stolen, or seized by the government? (Which seems to happen even more often). Or duplicated by some new guy or by a government program - which also happens pretty regularly. The "it's not available" argument fails the "read a comic" test since in the comics it is available (and from multiple sources, usually). The question being asked is " Since it is clearly and obviously already available, and it clearly and obviously works, why isn't it used?" cheers, Mark

Re: "We don't need gas money" Since the power is flight and the object is merely a focus, you don't need extra STR - you just need enough flight to get it airborne. Since the OP wanted more mass =more speed, I'd work out what you wanted your maximum speed to be be and then limit the cost - so that (for example) you buy 20" of Flight (40 active points) and then break it down to 5" unlimited by mass (no limitation) 5" requires more than 200 Kg (-1/2), 5" requires more than 400 Kg (-3/4), 5" requires more than 800 Kg (-1) so that he requires objects of nearly a ton to get up to full speed. cheers, Mark

Re: room filled with water You can certainly do all of those things. You could indeed duplicate those things with other powers, but any of them (or even all of them) would be cheaper than the transform, for equivalent or greater efficacy, so there's no issues of balalnce This is a little trickier, but not too bad. The first answer is yes. You paid for a transform, and transforming foci is a viable approach - you still need to hit (at the standard -2 for targetting foci) and you still need to roll the transform dice, but yeah, that's doable. Number 2 is questionable. You haven't paid for this. As GM, I'd let it slide sometimes - you'd be able to short out much mundane electrical equipment - anything ruggedized (military gear, heroic gear) is going to be unaffected, unless it's really low tech. #3? No. If the barrier is impermeable to the people inside it, it's impermeable to you. Once it's up you can't create water inside it without indirect. If it isn't impermeable, the water runs out. This is the beauty of the rules set - since the level of definition is fairly granular, it's relatively trivial to see what is, and is not, possible. This is the way to go. Special effects are explicitly part of the game - but as I have indicated, the GM needs to adjudicate. Special effects are explicitly for minor effects, to allow simple things (like: I make it wet) without complex power builds to cover every eventuality. Note: minor effects. If the player wants to reliably create major effects - or even significant ones - he needs to buy the power(s) to do that.

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Re: NO everyman skills

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans Nah, Thed is The Goddess of Rape/ Mother of Chaos, among other fetching titles. The Broo also worship Malia, Mother of Disease, though. They are wonderfully disgusting monsters - so much so that I adapted them for my own game, though the players have encountered them but once. cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans Yeah, that's just a big snake, though. The name of the story and the general description implied that it was perhaps worshipped by the debased decendants of a forgotten cult, but apart from the effect it had on Conan, I don't recall anything suggesting it was other than an abnormally large snake. cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans That's an interesting thought, that I have never really considered. I can see it could actually be a problem, depending on how the GM handled it, though I have to say that it's never really been an issue in any game I've played in. cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars

Re: room filled with water No, it's not "My way or the highway". I'm trying (fairly gently, at this point) to indicate that you are wrong and that saying "Any rules construct is valid, no matter how ill-thought out" is in fact, not true. The ruleset was designed with certain basic assumptions in mind. All game systems are. Hero system makes those assumptions explicit in the rules themselves, and one of the explicit assumptions is that you pay for what you want and get what you pay for. That's why experienced Hero system GMs, when a poster asks "How do I build X" always ask "What do you want X to do?" Saying "I want to summon water" is fine, but it's a starting point, not the end of the process. The next step is defining "Well what do you want the water to do?". I'm not trying to step on the windpipe of a new idea (not that I mind doing so, of course ) because this isn't a new idea - it's a very, very old idea, which is repeatedly brought up and repeatedly rejected .... just as we are doing now. The reason we are rejecting it is because there are no mechanics involved in "water". How many active points of water does it take to douse a 20 active point firewall? How effectively does "water" stop an energy blast, if it's sprayed in the air? How much damage does "water" do if it is dropped on Emberlass? How much "water" is removed by a 10d6 Suppress? The correct answers are - in all cases - how did you build it? If you didn't build it, but just said "It's water! Duh!" the the GM has no way of adjudicating those interactions. If the GM is dumb enough to try and work the special effect as though it was an actual power, he opens the door to a flood (heh heh) of abuse. As pointed out it costs no more to create water with transform than it costs to create hydrofluoric acid, which will dissolve concrete and which will kill a human in very short order, even in quite small qualities. Why spend 90 points on an RKA when a 20 point transform will do the same job? Saying "I don't want to spend points on it, I just want it to act like water" essentially undercuts the entire rationale around which the rules are built, which is that the price structure assigned to powers is intended to keep different characters in relative parity - which in turn allows a very wide range of possible builds. Hero system is not perfect, but it's the best attempt I've seen so far in this direction. cheers, Mark

Re: room filled with water

Re: NO everyman skills Agree with most of this. My rule of thumb is that if a question can reasonably be replied to more or less immediately (for example, is a second income fully taxable? Answer: yes, but without unemployment tax - requires PS: Lawyer, tax preparer, or similar), or "How do I get to the town hall?" Answer: "Follow this road over the bridge, past Tivoli, it's on your left before the traffic light" - requires AK: Copenhagen.) then its base time is a phase, at most a turn. If it requires some kind of action "write up a report" then the base time is going to be the shortest that that action could plausibly be completed in: 1-5 hours, say. To overhaul an engine might take 1-5 days depending on degree of damage. In other words, start with the base and add penalties or bonuses based on whether it's really easy or really hard. To me it makes no sense to say - let's increase the time to make things more difficult and then increase the current bonuses to make it easier again. I've snipped out a chunk to get to this, since my conclusion is exactly the same. If we assume a base time for most simple tasks of phases to minutes, allow a big bonus for extra time - where needed, routine tasks and support facilities then most people with an 11- roll will be hitting 17- to 18- in their professional work week. The occasional mistake - and god knows they happen - is caught eventually and corrected. In other words, no roll needed. However the reason I'm opposed to making base times very long and then adding in huge bonuses for routine tasks in routine settings is that most games do not take place in routine settings where time is not important. In other words, if a GM takes the approach that base times should be substantial and then give bonuses for extra time, good support and routine tasks, they are more or less implicitly stating "I don't want to see a lot of skill use in this game". cheers, Mark

Re: Only Humans Need Apply: Campaigns with Just Humans Given that they were spawned by the Mother of Rape and their ... ahem .. proclivities ... they think of other beings as at least one thing other than livestock In-game, Broo were pretty much the one thing that every other race and creed agreed about! cheers, Mark

Re: Armor Wars These are all good points - but it should be noted that these boards are peppered with complaints that because heroes can't trash regular military forces with near-impunity it's "not like the comics" - which is true, but IMO, a very smart design decision. As to your last point, I allowed my players some latitude, but as I noted earlier, I required gadgeteers to provide some rationale why their gadgets could not be mass produced. The Whately effect would be fine, as would be "requires Osmondium, and I can only create so much of that" or "It's alien tech - we can barely use it, let alone replicate it" - whatever. This duscussion has mostly been about battlesuits, because that's what the OP asked about, but it applies, even more strongly, to all aspects of supertech. To take one example that bugged even my junior comic reading self at the time, when Mar-Vell is revealed to be dying of cancer, Tony Stark, Hank Pym and Reed Richards whip up a cure (One of them, I think Reed, even comments that it's odd they never thought to do it before ). Yay! Unfortunately it doesn't work on Mar-Vell because of his negabands, so apparently they go "Oh. Won't be needing this, then." No wonder people think all three of them are d***s. Seriously, though that encapsulates the problem. If those three can whip up a cure for cancer in a very short time, what about all the other stuff? In short, why does Marvel's universe even look anything like ours? We know the answer of course - to sell comics. And to be fair - I'm cool with that: I just recognize it for what it is. cheers, Mark

Re: NO everyman skills You could do that, but adding a lot of penalties and then adding a bonus specifically for the purpose of negating those penalties seems an odd way of proceeding - not to mention the fact that your +6 bonus is well above anything suggested for a routine task and still makes answering a basic question a dodgy option in less than a minute.

Re: Armor Wars Actually in his first appearance he's shown having the suit shot up in the lab and stating "Even Iron Man's repulsor beams can't harm it". Those are the repulsor beans which repeatedly turn military hardware into junk. Iron man is apparently aware of this, since he doesn't try to shoot him. He first proposes carrying them into nearby lake - which will kill both of them! And then tricks him into surrender. Stark seems to have more respect for the Crimson Dynamo suit (despite the fact that it looks ridiculous ) than you do. And you're still ignoring the main point, which is that even if not as good as the best battlesuit in the world - it's still lightyears ahead of current military tech: making it a very, very desirable item indeed. *and yeah, the knocking down trees thing was dumb - but comics were dumb back then. cheers, Mark

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Re: Armor Wars Heh. I guessing you're not very familiar with the Marvel universe - the first Crimson Dynamo came close to defeating Iron man (Stark eventually tricks him, being unable to take him down in a straight fight), and the second did defeat him - before being killed by the designer of the first suit, who had become a friend of Stark's in the meantime. Hardly B quality. This was before all the rejiggering of Crimson Dynamo suits (they're up to what? 12 models now?) - some of which included Stark Technology, others of which were upgraded wholly in the Soviet union from older suits by the Gremlin (pre titanium armour days). As for "beware tanks and helicopters" Ha! Crimson Dynamos' first appearance shows it as invulnerable to weapons more powerful than a tank's main gun. Indeed, Stark actually borrows and uses a copy of the original Crimson Dynamo armour from Bukharin when he needs a suit less sophisticated, but more powerful than his own. That was the Crimson Dynamo's whole shtick: not as fancy as the Iron Man Armour, but tougher. I'm guessing that you also forgot that Crimson Dynamo originally had the powers to control electrical machinery making conventional weaponry (tanks, helicopters, etc) pretty much a deathtrap when deployed against him - of that he'd been stomping around the US trashing things, completely unstoppable by conventional forces, for a while before Iron Man finally took him down (by faking the voice of his boss). Seriously, all you are doing with this line of argument is digging yourself deeper in the wrong direction, by pointing out ever more people who can (and have) deployed and provided to governments (who have then replicated) sophisticated battlesuits that make tanks look like toys. So question is, why aren't these incredibly powerful and amazingly useful weapons deployed by the military (actually the Crimson Dymano suits were - they turned up being worn by the Soviet Super-Troopers, who are after showing how wonderful they were ..... never turned up again, just like all teh other mass-produced suits). Kahuna's Bro' has it right. The reason this happens - the only reason is that it would turn the comics into science fiction ones. cheers, Mark

Re: NO everyman skills

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Re: Armor Wars Actually the reason I was posting about this is that while I don't really mind the "supertech never affects the real world" trope in comics, I require a higher standard for my own games. So I agree with what you said 100% There is no reason - in a game - not to treat the issue seriously and it could lead to exactly that sort of outcome. Personally, I think that'd be great. cheers, Mark