Doc Democracy

There are LOADS of threads on the boards on the philosophy of character creation in HERO and more ways to do it than there are members on the boards. :-) The others have given what I think is the best general way. Think of what it is you want to do. Describe the character in words and go into a bit more detail about the powers - ignore the rules and try not to think in game terms. Then go to the rules. If you are still struggling then bring each and every one of those to the boards and there will be a variety of suggestions on how you might want to go about it. Most of them will be legal, rules as written, some might suggest you stretch the rules, all of them will give you insight into how the system can be used. So dont leave yourself as a one-post member. Get back to us and get our brains working on this stuff. :-) Doc

Like JmOz, I am not new but I am not a prolific poster. My name has been a long running evolution, we used badge names in our local Glasgow convention and had fun trying to put clues in the names to who we were - my friends then tried to work out who was which badge name. I was playing with my academic qualification and my current place of work to create a new badge name. PhD and House of Commons comes to Doc Democracy. :-) I liked it and stuck with it - kinda Golden Age-y. My first game was Original D&D from the books, Blackmoor etc. Club at my local secondary school ran it and it quickly changed to AD&D when that came out in the UK in 1978 (??). Obviously I first ran a few dungeons using AD&D but the first game I ran for any extended kind of game was RuneQuest 2 - we loved it and played it for years. The first HERO stuff was the Champions box set (old grey book, cool street map, terribly typesetting!) :-) Currently I have a close group of friends who mix and match games. In the past year we have played TORG, Traveller, 13th Age, Harnmaster, Trail of Cthulhu, a couple of FATE based games and a HERO based mash-up of our favourite characters and settings (from the above games and settings and more) in a massive birthday weekend session. We also do an hour a week playing D&D 3.5 on Roll20 with folk who cannot get to the face to face anymore. Sounds like I play more than I do - we aim for fortnightly sessions and often fall back to boardgames when numbers are low. Most games are two or three sessions then we move game, setting and GM... :-) Doc

It feels like you are approaching this by starting with the idea of discrete powers. Some folk do it that way. Personally, I like to get a really good image of the character in my head, thinking of the look and feel and how he or she might appear in a comic book. Can't draw worth a damn but in my head I get great pictures! :-). So I try to paint those pictures in words, not in game terms. It is only once I have been through that process do the game terms and constructs really flow for me... Doc

Were you getting bored Lucius? Just scanning for stuff to keep you amused? :-)

Thumbsuckers by the late (great) Shel Silverstein

John, welcome to the boards, folk are friendly and will welcome your input. They will also look to crack jokes whenever you provide opportunity. I am hoping that you understand the barb here was more self-directed by Massey than seeking to make fun. It is the kind of map most young men had of that particular anatomy Massey..... :-) Doc

What are you trying to achieve? That is always the tricky bit and there are so many little aspects of gravity that sometimes the mechanics do not provide for. With the area effect TK you get an area where the people within can grapple with the TK either to be able to move freely or to not drift off the ground, yes? It is a pretty much all or nothing kind of thing, either you lift up or you do not based on a STR roll. You keep moving or you do not, based on a STR roll. That is pretty much how I have done things in the past but it has always felt not quite right...I always wondered how my STR helped me not drift off the ground unless I was actively grabbing onto something and in a zero-g environment (or low G) surely I would not drift unless something acted on me to do that...also all of the objects in the field would be lighter (or heavier) if those in the field wanted to use them. I considered looking to raise or lower the effective STR for the purposes of jumping, lifting and throwing which gave some nice effects. It did not have immediate impacts on movement that you might be looking for except for those characters who lost all of their STR and did not have, for example, flight. I needed to look at changing the mass of those in the field because changing the mass of the person with flight might overwhelm their carrying capacity, or teleporting capacity. I have no worked up builds, just a lot of frustration at never having played one that really felt like I had been manipulating gravity... :-) Doc

I dont think there is any need to look for anything exotic. I guess the game effect you are looking for is to cause the target to lose END, PRE and STUN. I see no need for linking to clairsentience or telepathy or requiring mental illusions. The nightmare effect is special effects. My thoughts are more on how you plan to attack. Does it happen when you attack in a separate way - like a slap or something and that night the target begins to get nightmares? Do you expect to find the sleeping mind and attack then? that then decides how you build it. Essentially though, it is simply a delayed effect drain with delayed return, just as you said... Doc

I really do love this idea. There is, in Fantasy gaming, this sentiment that once you have a magical amulet it will work, as if they all came off the same assembly line with great quality assurance programmes to ensure they performed to standard. Obviously this does not happen. Obviously there should be differences and places where the crafter got something wrong, cut corners or simply tried something different and it only looks like that kind of amulet... This kind of thing would begin to make some campaign differences - as you would be looking for the marque of good craftsmen or reliable guilds. Stuff without the right stamp or glyph would be subject to doubt as to its quality and then there would be line in counterfeit goods where sub-standard junk was being sold with counterfeit marques... So much additional detail that you could add and where you could legitimately undermine a players reliance on an item which suddenly stops working. Or as mhd pointed out had a fatal flaw that people might know about and exploit... Doc

Pyronide One of the things that many people find when playing the game is that there are some things that are cool to do exactly as it seems on the box - such as teleporting a car to a precise point and seeing if you can drop it on someone - and finding that it is not as cool in game as all the mechanics etc seem fixed to stop you doing it. Or that it is so much less effective and so you never actually do it. It is often much better to work out what you want to achieve in terms of game effect (I want to crush the bloke! or I want to pin him to the ground!). Once you have that in mind you look for the power that is best in terms of what you want to achieve (blast or entangle from examples above) and then describe the special effect (I teleport a car above his head and it drops on him). As far as this goes you are more likely to get the play effect that you want - you get the cool effect of dropping the car (or other object) and the game effect (crush, pin etc) without all of the exotic rules that might otherwise come into play. The thing about this is that you get to think about the advantages and limitations that come into play. If you limit those powers with "requires a reasonably large object within range of teleport" then the GM can sometimes prevent you from using it by putting you in a location where there are no such objects. Doc "Just thinking of how all the cool attacks I wanted to do that were kiboshed by GMs playing by the rules could have been replicated by a straight Blast on the character sheet..."

I think a villain along the lines of Madame Guillotine. She is essentially an assassin that sees her role as an avatar of the People, bringing those who seek to rule over the people and to gather too much power to themselves down a peg or two (often by killing them!). She does not discriminate between criminal ganglords who oppress poor housewives and small shopkeepers and Government Ministers that introduce legislation that take power away from the people at large. She could be an interesting villain in that some heroes might agree with some of her targets even if not the methods she uses... Doc

You know, came to this late and it is amazing the relatively few names that come out. I was going to suggest Nashville as a decent place - it has colour and actually has (had?) a thriving financial sector (I think someone described it to me as the financial capital of the South. However, then someone mentioned a waterfront and it is pretty much lacking that, so I moved to Memphis. I think a silver age campaign set in Memphis might be awesome....you have the whole Mississippi to play with...Chicago to the north and New Orleans to the south...

Hmm. I think possibly as a regulator but possibly not as a sponsor. :-) I could see the EDA becoming a royal pain in the behind and being the visual embodiment of the bureaucracy the team works for... Doc

I would hate for anyone to get the idea that I am trying to defend the EU bureaucracy. It is huge and interminable and intrusive in so many ways. A lot of it is however a factor of the difficulties in bringing together so many diverse nation states and trying to devise ways of harmonising legislation in lots of ways and to negotiate the differences in regulatory regimes. I do think, inefficient as it is, there is more accomplished towards living together and raising standards than would happen in its absence. Imagine trying to get these deals hammered out individually between supremely independent nation states... I do think that people find a way and that looking at some of the organisations (like the ESA) that find a way to leverage the EU infrastructure to get co-operation and then utilise some private sector structures to get things done, do actually get things done. I think this would be a great model for a superteam that could tap into national legislatures for legitimacy and yet remain open to Wayne Enterprise support and involvement.

Well, unlike the Avengers who might have to deal with one Federal Government regarding their legitimacy, any Euro group would have to consider over 20 different countries, languages and legal jurisdictions. I would imagine there would be far more problems for a group, accepted as legitimate and operating out of France or Germany, being seen as legitimate in the UK, Spain and Italy than a group, accepted as legitimate and operating out of New York, being seen as legitimate in San Francisco. I think it would depend on the style of the campaign. A four colour campaign is not going to get stuck on this kind of thing. They would be heroes goddammit and doing their thing. Concerns would creep in as the campaign tone veered down towards an iron age style where legislation rules and spandex is out... Doc

I think in this situation, where the European Parliament perhaps has not commandeered some of the central budget to establish a supergroup (where there would be less national wrangling as it would not necessarily involve the Council of Ministers) I can see them moving to the same kind of operation as the European Space Agency. The ESA is kind of a subsidiary of EU policy and operates on a buy-in style operation. When you ante up, you get membership in the organisation and some of the investment benefits (laboratories etc) are based in your country and you get some strategic say in future policy development. The operation is run for EU-wide benefit but with a much smaller guiding group. This would not need more than a few nations to club together and get agreement from the Parliament about authority. Semi-autonomous. I can see both France and the UK bringing in a few of the other nations such as Italy, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark & Finland - all of whom would pay lower subs and have lesser influence but utilising some of the territorial or science base of each to form a small group that would fund EuroForce. I would then expect to see other states such as Germany, Spain, Portugal and others bidding to get involved to ensure that their hero-types had a chance to get on board... Much more likely to happen than the more bureaucratic establishment of an official force as part of Brussels... Doc

That does not ring true to me. Not the bureaucracy but the politics and financing. There would be no individual financing - or it would be a buy-in project, the more you pay in the more influence you have on how it is used. I would see that every country would buy in, even to the detriment of their involvement in other projects. How much more prestigious could it be to have your national hero on the EuroForce?? Noone would want to be left out of the project, regardless of costs. But because everyone is involved,nothing would be decided simply and the deployment of the force difficult except for matters of humanitarian need. Another thing you need to factor in is that the UK and France are the hawks in the EU, it is these governments that will be at the forefront of any desire to get involved militarily. Doc

It strikes me as strange that you want to stop people making knockback powers by engaging knockback. The idea is that the power will generate knockback so I am presuming that the GM has agreed that it will be part of the game. As such it has to be open to the same kind of manipulation as other parts of the game. No point in telling people that they are having BadWrongFun. Personally I think Hugh's proposal nails it. Work out how much it would cost to extend damage AND knockback to the surrounding hexes and then limit that cost by an agreed limitation of what "only for knockback" would cost. There are other proposals but they are all a lot of added bureaucracy (and would be subject to different defences etc to knockback). Doc

Opale I think Dean was looking for you to throw out some ideas rather than to build a character based on an idea. I think what he would like is for you to dig out some real French archetypes from your brain and give them a superhero spin (and preferably a name)... I submit, for the audience, The Chancer. This villain is a likeable rogue. He has immense amounts of charm and personality and uses that for personal gain. He has no morals, no remorse, no pity and considers that he is providing an education to those that he fleeces. His powers are all about communication and would prefer to talk his way out of a conflict than fight. He will avoid direct confrontation unless he has prepared to have 'handers' available (people who will fight for him - often reasonable folk convinced that he is being unreasonably dealt with by those persecuting him). It amuses him to cause divides between law enforcement types who fight each other while he slips into the background. Doc

I think that it sounds great in theory and will depend hugely on the skills and knowledge of your players. I know two of my group would fly with this system and my troubles would be in restraining their exploitation of the system whereas the other three would be huge time blocks with either analysis paralysis or inability to elucidate what they want to do and arguing about the mechanics proposed. It might be helped by having them limited to particular strengths and having standard spells that they riff on (which would take less time to adjudicate costs on during play). Good luck, I hope all your players are like my good ones! :-)

Ooh! Just read this and I cannot believe that in all those recommendations I did not see Ash by Mary Gentle or The Lies of Locke Lamorra (and other Gentleman Bastards books) by Scott Lynch. Two if my most favourite fantasy books in the last decade.

I considered growth but it really does constrain verisimilitude as it unduly restricts movements of the squad. I do prefer using STR at range, with no range penalties...

Yup, you would use different numbers and descriptions in different genres. Superheroes need to be throwing lots more mooks around, though given the fact that they have bigger attacks - it would not need much adjustment! :-) The biggest issue with superheroes might be the need for the mook group to have much higher speed to fight multiple heroes...

PS: I think it is a good idea, it does reflect genre fiction, but to make it consistent with the rules, I respectfully proffer my suggestion above! :-)

Life Support 'feels' like it should be the answer but LS does not, by the rules, defend against Blast or Killing attack. This is where it is necessary for the GM to control builds to ensure his world is consistent. Every attack that has poison as its special effect HAS to take the limitation of "not effective against targets with LS: poisons", limitation dependent on how prevalent those anti-toxins actually are. Doc