Doc Democracy

Re: Social effects No absolutes in HERO huh? As you say, there are already mind control mechanisms and a pretty vague PRE attack system as well as a score of social interaction skills. Why not make it all a bit more coherent? Doc

Re: Social effects So why would a fleshed out social interaction model make you unable to to describe the effect an npc makes without dictating a player's actions to them?? Doc

Re: Social effects

Re: Social effects

Re: Social effects Straight up answer. I'm not running your character. You get to do your job - I'm just giving you more information on which you can base your actions. As GM, I tell you the guy is convincing and the character believes what he says. The player does not. Do you allow the player to negate the NPCs talents as a conman simply because the player says he does not believe him? If so, then do the players accept the same result when the NPC sees through their ruse even though they rolled 3 on their Bluff skill? Doc

Re: Social effects Nor was I suggesting analogous mechanisms to deal with them....

Re: Social effects Going to step away for now - allow other people to talk. I may even see some comments on a system for social resolution for people that want to talk about those kinds of rules rather than whether those of us who would like them should do so.... Doc

Re: Social effects But it is what you essentially suggest for social conflict... Doc

Re: Social effects That is almost insulting. It implies neither me nor my friends are good enough to roleplay and we should go take some courses before we deign to open our HERO rulebooks again. I don't think you meant it that way but I would be uncomfortable with setting entry requirements for roleplaying... Some groups that I have played in have great fun quite far along the gamist axis of the N/S/G graph. Most of the arguments against this lie quite handily in the N axis - we shouldn't be trying to game social conflicts. I do not accept there is a serious difference between social and physical and mental conflicts with respect to playing a game. In all three there is a conflict between what the player wants to achieve and what the GM is prepared to allow. In all these cases a game needs a way to allow the characters to resolve the conflict that is true to the characters, not to what the players or GM feels SHOULD happen. We currently accept physical and mental models of conflicts but resist social models...I still dont see why. Doc

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Re: Social effects In such a game both the GM and players have to carry all of it, without any way to measure success or failure...

Re: Social effects Nor are they fantasy fulfillment. Players currently can ignore the character's pain, embarrassment or anything else as long as they get the action the player wants. This plays along with the pain ray thread. The character feels pain, the player decides the character is big and strong enough to brave the pain and keep charging the barricade. The character feels more pain than any mortal should be able to ignore. Big deal - victory is just around the corner - the player decides the character will ignore that pain and keep going. Currently the player has a big veto that does not go along with the 'role' playing idea - they can decide on a whim to ignore the role and play the game rather than the role whenever they want. If skills such as persuasion and seduction do not persuade or seduce then why spend points on them? Doc

Re: Social effects False dichotomy (IMO obviously) I think that with the proper tools it should be possible for a system to facilitate a GM to run this kind of thing rather than rely on their own social skills to do the job that the NPCs should be doing on the characters.... Doc

Re: Social effects So you rolled a few dice and told the player that he would not be successful - if the dice had fallen the other way then the NPC would have accepted the situation? You have finessed the current mechanics to do something along the lines that I am proposing (though we haven't discussed mechanics, just the idea that there should be any social conflict resolution). The end result that I would suggest is being able to say to the player that there is no way the NPC will back down despite his very best efforts - and have that not feel as if it is simply by GM fiat regardless of the character's abilities. It would be for the player to decide that he has exhausted all possible avenues except for handing over the weapon. Doc

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Re: Social effects My PC, a minor noble in the Imperium, is in a situation where he has boarded a Navy warcraft. He insists he is bringing a matter of urgency to the Imperium, the Navy insists that it is arresting him for being in a restricted area. When Sir Gabriel gets on board the vessel he takes the attitude of how he should be treated by the crew and for some time the GM is cool with that. Sir Gabriel will not however surrender his weapons to the junior members of the crew. The junior member of the crew will not allow Sir Gabriel to meet the captain until he has surrendered his weapons. Now, meta-game, I am trying to establish Sir Gabriel as someone to be reckoned with socially, not outside the background of the game nor the character. This is an important point in the game. The GM does not want to roll over and let me walk over his NPC without reason, I don't want Sir Gabriel to lose face without reason. Neither of us wants to push it to physical violence (and possible character death). How do we resolve it? (I've kept it system neutral to allow a variety of responses to this if possible). To me this is a prime example of where a social conflict resolution would be useful. It is too important for a single dice roll - the implications of success or defeat will resonate through the rest of this campaign arc. Doc

Re: Social effects

I was part of the Great Social Conflict Debate (second only to the Great COM debate) which I believe may define 5th edition in the way the Great Linked Debate defined 4th. Anyway. This morning while lying in bed waiting for my son to wake up and demand attention I was flicking through the disadvantage pages of the rulebook. I always liked the idea of using drains to 'add' disadvantages and, as such, all characters in my campaigns have all disadvantages at 0 points (so they do not disadvantage but they are available to be drained into full blown disadvantages). Now, having given some thought to social conflict etc, I like the idea that there could be short lived changes to character attitudes inflicted over the short term. These would be less acute than power use but possibly more chronic. There are lots of examples in fiction where the protagonists are convinced of some impossible for the reader to countenance belief that leads to actions that would not be rational beforehand being undertaken. How does HERO manage such things? Well. How about using PRE attacks or a more developed option with some social manouevres to impose very limited disadvantages (only within the social type disads such as rivalries and psych limitations). This would make characters believe certain things (The Blood foundation does good works) which might make them more vulnerable to more power related commands later on (Brother Blood is the saviour of the world and the sacrfice of Starfire is a necessary evil). I would imagine the effects being limited to what you might achieve via 1x INT on Mind Control and be an all or nothing style transformation where the belief will be broken by the right evidence or by a friend being more successful in social conflict than the original attacker. I haven't got a detailed mechanism as yet but I am looking to expand the current options to give players and GMs something more to work on when they are looking at situations where characters (PCs and NPCs conflict and neither player or GM want to concede ground). Doc

Re: Pointless Hero I have run a LoEG style game that was essentially pointless. I made up the characters myself and presented a set of pre-gens to the players for them to choose from (potted descriptions were all they were offered) and when they got the character sheets there were only the numbers they needed to play the game. There were no points on the sheets - I gave the characters what I thought they needed to use. Each character was so specialised that I dont think anyone really even noticed who had most points. I didn't give out experience as such - instead all experience was in the form of contacts, favours etc. Doc

Re: Pain Ray

Re: Pain Ray

Re: Pain Ray This is a classic problem of building stuff in HERO. There is the name, the effect and the intent of the power. You describe SFX - microwaves that cause pain; the intent - to make people flee until the pain goes away; and then your build - a mental attack based on CON that makes people feel pain. Now, your build replicates the SFX to make people feel pain. There is nothing there to make them run away unless the players or GM decide that those affected will run away. You might decide, instead, to make them feel scared but again there is nothing that makes them do so. The intent is to make them run away. I would probably use a single command Mind Control instead (Fly, you fools!) with the ability to over-ride by making a CON roll, or a STUN roll which should get increasingly difficult the longer the person remains within the area of effect - so I would ladle on a change environment that increased the penalty to the Mind Control the longer anyone remained within it... Doc