Doc Democracy

Re: what books should I buy next? Well, for good superhero GM help I would recommend Villainy Amok - fantastic guide to putting an adventure together and a nice jolt to the imagination. Doc

Re: Steampunk Star Wars (Needs Better Name) Asks the two headed beast? I think that the idea of the Jedi should be limited to one - and I think I'd give the vast array of Christian sects a miss - otherwise we'd be having a range of Jedi fighting each other for the truth... I think I would avoid using the Jesuits - Rosicrucians sound better but I might go back to the depths of Christian history to get a sect that seemed to disappear but instead has been at the heart of all religions seeking to unite into one acceptance of the true Force. Was there a steampunk James Lovelock? Doc

Re: Ogrecave 6E interview If they only went a tad too far we weren't doing our job properly!

Re: Ogrecave 6E interview I guess you realise that this isn't likely to attract an answer. If Steve started answering questions like this he'd never get 6th edition or anything else finished... Moving to a multi-book system will be a shock and it can take some time to get the balance of what should be in what book just right. I'm looking forward to seeing if a full colour and multi-book presentation will draw the number of people that everyone has been claiming it would... It'd be sad if Steve had been right all along.... Doc

Re: Ogrecave 6E interview I did not think of that! However, we know he will keep it under wraps til Gencon, I know I could not let a manuscript lie that long without tinkering - I am presuming that Steve is the same - tinkerer author of a tinkerers game! Doc

Re: Ogrecave 6E interview You're going soft Steve - I'm sure what you meant to say was that the only person who can tell us 100% about what will be in 6E is the you who has just finished the manuscript - the you we are speaking to now might change his mind and be less than 100% reliable! Doc

Re: Social effects Lucius Wouldn't it have been easier, even the first time, to simply say "I think it is an unworkable idea - not one I'd use or think is feasible" You seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time combatting an idea that no-one will ever force you to use... Doc

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? I think it depends on how much complication you want to add to the system but I would be all for certain locations adding pain but not serious injury while others add more serious injury with little extra pain... Doc

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? I agree with Hugh, it is good to be bringing the mechanics together and this would be one way. I think when thinking about it, the idea of a killing attack is to kill. Normal attacks rarely do BODY damage. If we are looking for a mechanism then it should be one that reliably delivers BODY damage. What about adding dice to BODY rather than to normal damage? Doc

Re: Regenerating defences I'm sure that having used it the limitation obviously works for you and your game. Did you consider setting the limitation based on the DC of the game. If the game maximum DC is 12 then -1 limitation provides a -1 limitation. If you want more than that then the limitation should be less - the defence will fragment much more slowly... If you want less then you should get more - the defence will evaporate very quickly.... Doc

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? Yeah, but the story lies somewhere other than the average. Average means not so much as far as HERO combat is concerned. Damage is lumpy because everything that is less than the defence might as well be zero. Anything above the STUN# is a bonus due to the added effect. So, the big thing about KA with the 1D6-1 is how often you get results that give you STUN# and possibly the average damage that gets through the defence. People have looked at this before and there is a point for every combination of DC and defence where KA begins to average more through defences and stun the opponent more often. Most games play at points where similar DCs of normal and killing ar past the point of parity. Doc

Re: Social effects I think that a successful PRE attack could make someone hesitate and facilitate the use of social skills... It was this kind of thing that I was hoping to explore - where do PRE Attacks sit? How do they fit together? Can they be combined with favours, contacts etc? It is possible to influence people's personality by using transform to add disadvantages, could that be intergrated in some fashion for more fantastic genres? I wasn't intending to debate the rights and wrongs of the system but what might be potential systems to make HERO more coherent about social interactions. Doc

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? thank you!

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? Hmm - going to have to learn how to do tables here, huh?

Re: Someone Please Explain This to Me? Normal Killing STUN [color=DimGray] BODY[/color] [color=DimGray] BODY [/color]STUN 01 49 [color=Silver][color=DimGray]14[/color] [/color][color=DimGray]13 [/color]13 02 49 [color=DimGray]15 16 [/color]32 03 40 [color=DimGray]12 12 [/color]24 04 38 [color=DimGray]11 15 [/color]15 05 39 [color=DimGray]12 14 [/color]14 06 40 [color=DimGray]11 16 [/color]48 07 43 [color=DimGray]13 12 [/color]60 08 48 [color=DimGray]13 14 [/color]14 09 40 [color=DimGray]12 20 [/color]60 10 37 [color=DimGray]10 17 [/color]17 OK. Tried it. I felt as though I had generally thrown well for the normal dice and pretty poorly for the killing. As it turns out, I have done 48 STUN after defences for the killing attack and only 29 for the normal. In two of the killing attacks I have scored 20 STUN after defences which begins to approach a stun result amount of damage. None of the normal attacks would stun a PC with base CON. Doc PS: with a base 3x multiplier rather than random 1D6-1 I got 56 after defences - improvement there but only one that was approaching stun values...

Re: Social System Mark From everything you have written you have developed the rules in HERO into something a bit more than they are RAW. You haven't expounded on whether contacts and favours get used or given out due to these (possibly rivalries and hunteds could come in as well). However, you have been actively using a hard social system for years. I think that the system could be set up to serve you better (a bit more coherent than it currently is) and to bring new GMs to that level of use more quickly. The current rules on social interaction (and the way you use your advancement of that) do not apply to PCs if the player wants to play the 'out of character' card. There is no reason that a more developed social system would have to apply to player characters. Obviously (given my many posts) I would recommend that it did but I think that a more developed system should be in the core rules and that the compromise could be that the application of the rules to PCs could be waived by agreement within the gaming group. Doc

Re: Regenerating defences

Re: Social effects Maybe I should invite him to come to the House of Commons, treat him to dinner in the Stranger's, ply him with drink on the Terrace and then get him to sign up to social resolution systems in blood, witnessed by a group of MPs. Doc

Re: Social effects You know. That is where I started. Both the GM and the player have different ideas of what the character described on the character sheet would reasonably do under a particular set of circumstances. Now, on one side it may be claimed that the GM dictating what is reasonable will ruin the player's enjoyment of the character. The other side of that is that the player being unreasonable (because the GM knows what his reasonable solution is) then that ruins the GMs enjoyment of the game. It is certain that if neither gives way the game will be ruined. The question was how to resolve such an impasse. In an RPG, that kind of the question is usually settled by dice. If the GM is not bad and the players are not bad and a proposed system is not bad then I cannot see how the outcome will be bad. So bad GMing rather than bad system? I'm not sure that follows. I think the people heavily into roleplay, unless what they are looking for is LARP or improv acting (and I think neither are bad if the group is willing to accomodate), can get more out of a system where there is a hard social system - it should allow a wider range of roles to be available.

Re: Social effects

Re: Regenerating defences The big problem as I see it is bureaucracy. There are already so many things to keep track of, if you make this complex it is opne more thing that might get lost. I think I'd be looking for a simple system. Build the thing in blocks. If, in one turn the defence takes x number of hits greater than y DC then the defence is removed of z phases, the defence will 'heal' in q phases. That will require notation on the character sheet but should be a simple matter of a number and a few boxes to tick. Personally I would fix it so that x = q. You would tick off the boxes as the defence takes the hits and erase them as phases tick by until it is healed. For effect you could build a series of such defences so that they slowly go down over time, the outer defences cannot heal until all the ones below it are full. This requires less thought - just a lot of ticks on a character sheet. Doc

Re: Social System Cross posted from the Social effects thread. I was hoping we could compare and contrast with the systems already put forward. This is not HERO as written (though it is pretty close). I think that I would like this detailed out for people. Essentially you could be using skills that would set things up for the final roll. So any one interaction in the group adds modifiers (-4 to +4) based on success that build to a final resolution. Obviously this could work itself up into a self-sustaining mountain of supplementaries and so you might want to limit the number of skills that might be used over any one period of time. You might want to use a one-off skill that allowed you to use more skills - persuade someone to give you a minute to listen to them. Doc

Re: Social effects This is not HERO as written (though it is pretty close). I think that I would like this detailed out for people. Essentially you could be using skills that would set things up for the final roll. So any one interaction in the group adds modifiers (-4 to +4) based on success that build to a final resolution. Obviously this could work itself up into a self-sustaining mountain of supplementaries and so you might want to limit the number of skills that might be used over any one period of time. You might want to use a one-off skill that allowed you to use more skills - persuade someone to give you a minute to listen to them. Doc EDIT: Cross-posted to the thread where we were talking mechanics rather than belief systems.

Re: Social effects That would be my fault. It's where I was focussing in the first place. However, I agree. A system that allowed for longer dramatic skill use (whether or not it was interactive or with an inanimate object) would indeed be welcome. Doc

Re: Social effects