Doc Democracy

I think Bolo has it. Stick with the characters you like but get something in there that increases your ability to bounce back - if you are going to be dumped on, it is good to have the resources to get yourself back in the game. You might have a friendly ghost that comes and heals you, you might have amazing regenerative abilities, you might be a mechanoid with a reset button that someone can push to re-boot you (bundle of STUN and REC with an activation roll of some kind, or a continuous Aid to STUN and END that kicks in if someone else pushes the reset button). There are a number of ways it can be done but it is definitely no fun to be dumped out of the game and have to sit and watch. You might also have a duplication triggered by a KO (perhaps this would be the friendly ghost that can heal...) Just rambling now, I will go back to work... Doc

If you want to do belt and braces you already have the idea of ghosts and spirits and possession, allow the spirit of Fox to animate someone, something else, not 100% of who he is or why he NEEDS to talk to the heroes. He might possess the body of an NPC or contact used by the heroes and be able to rpovide snippets of information. It may be that when they get the journal there are encrypted passages or cryptic clues that only real Fox would know about. This is where having even a partially amnesiac Fox right there could be crucial... Doc

If I could remember who it was I would credit them, but I am sure I remember someone propose extra limbs, invisible power effects, with some STR, 0 END, only to carry stuff with invisible extra limbs as a way of doing the bag of holding idea. When picked up by the invisible limb it effectively vanished - being carried invisibly and the amount effectively limited by the amount of STR available to carry it.

As long as it is only artillery then I am kind of cool with that - the villains go for me because I am noble, fine. The GM constantly twists my nobility to make the game a misery of conflicted choices, not so much. I am fine with conflicted choices as long as there are compensating factors elsewhere such as when I choose to throw myself in front of the death ray heading towards the innocent children in the playground then I auto-succeed and get praised for it in the press. I am content to potentially sacrifice my character for such scenes. As it goes I got my character killed in just such a fashion in at least two games as it gave me an excuse to walk away from the game without a bad taste in my mouth. 🙂

This is precisely what I want to avoid in my games. I refuse to accept that Batman is responsible for the Joker and what he does when he escapes from prison. He only escapes because the author wanted him to, he only has thousands of murder because we insist on taking a continuity of 50 years as canon. If we could escape from the prison of continuity, we could appreciate each story for its own merits, we know the Joker, we can assume lots because the author chose to use that villain, we do not need to castigate the hero for acting heroically. I think the thing that makes superhero games superheroic is the iconic nature of the protagonists and anything that work against that iconic nature diminishes the genre and makes the superheroes merely heroes and often not even that. Doc

I agree, one of my most enjoyable games was a recreation of the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The GM parcelled out Sundance to one player, Butch Cassidy to another and the other four got a squad of Bolivian lawmen. The first problem for the outlaws is to get to the stables - they are in the cantina with two pistols and 12 bullets each, their rifles and ammunition is on their horses and then they have to get out before reinforcements arrive, the Bolivians have taken up positions on the walls in cover but the outlaws are MUCH better shots. Bolivians go down more quickly and fire less often but the outlaws are hugely outnumbered. The GM was simply there to adjudicate and timekeep. Fantastic game for a convention, used a custom system that recognised the difference in class but still made it dangerous for the outlaws simply to run for the gate to the compound and freedom...

One thing I would recommend to all rookie Champions GMs, do not reuse the vast majority of your villains. There is nothing that will make players leap from the heroic path fster than if they believe that their victories will be undermined by a revolving door at the local supervillain prison. There is something to be said for a recurring villain, the head of a particular group that crops up again and again over a campaign can be satisfying when she is defeated at the end of it. The one exception to this would be any villain chosen as a Hunted by a player. That villain is given special privileges - you should tell players that at the start. You can assure them that when a villain is caught they will, except in the most unusual circumstances, remain jailed EXCEPT for those villains they choose to be Hunters. Those villains always find a way to plague the PC. The comic trope of returning villains is simply due to 50 years of writing comics - there is a need for villains against whom to pit the heroes and, when there are iconic villains already created, writers will want to use them. None of this is likely to be true of your campaigns - they will be time-limited, the villains are not likely to be iconic to anyone but you and there are thousands out there to use. As far as peli-kinetic goes, I have been toying with the idea of modelling this kind of thing with a transform that switches an object from an OAF to an IIF. That is indeed what you are doing, taking an obvious, accessible thing and making it inobvious and inaccessible. I think this is a minor transform, it is not actually changing the nature of the thing, just how it interacts with the game world...it would be for you to decide how people would access those items if they had captured Peli-kinetic. Doc

I thought you were quoting the table, but if this was your calculations and the table deviates from them, then of course, I am 100% with you. 🙂 Having checked the table, I see they have velocity of 10 (correct) and distance of 10 (incorrect). This reflects HERO's whacky movement conceit where all the movement in a phase happens in the segment in which you take the phase based on your velocity. So, velocity 10, you move 10m. It is why you get 10m in first segment, 20m in second, 30m in third for a total of 60m in 3 segments. Obviously we know that in 3 seconds, the distance travelled will be, 45m Table should be 5m, 20m, 45m, 80m, 125m, 180m IF you presume that the acceleration is constant. In reality air resistance will be increasing as velocity increases and so the increase in velocity will decrease as speed increases and so both the distance travelled and the current velocity would be less than the Table suggests and it would take longer than 6 seconds to achieve terminal velocity. I can understand why they went with a more standard format for the table, in one segment the acceleration happens all at once and the movement happens after that. In those circumstances the table makes game mechanic sense if not physical reality sense. 😄 Doc

I thought you were quoting the table I still have not checked it, but if this was your calculations and the table deviates from them, then of course, I am 100% with you. 🙂

To be correct, [distance travelled] equals [initial velocity] * [time] + 1/2[acceleration] * [time] * [time]. To be fair, in a falling scenario, initial velocity is zero and so Marcus' equation is correct for that first segment. [distance travelled] equals 0*1s + (1/2 * 10m/s/s *1s *1s) which equals 0 + 1/2 * 10 which equals 5m. I reckon the table is good....

OK. So we are talking about situations where terminal velocity is unlikely to be a factor? Like all real HERO problems you need to think about the action in game terms rather than real life things. A person falls off a building and your hero leaps off to catch them. That is a common trope for flying heroes. You want your non-flying hero to catch the person but I am lacking a purpose for that because now they are both falling. What does the hero do then?? It is what happens next that would tell me how to model it. Doc

OMG, I was impressed that I managed to finish the thing once. I loved the first two books, enjoyed the next three and ground my way through the rest. I think the world is great, the story was worth telling but it took too LONG. I reckon there is an amazing five book series here, six at a push. I did not think the ending was good, at least not good enough to warrant the effort poured into reading the 14 books (or just short of 12,000 pages and 4.5 million words).

Only in purely quantity terms, I would prefer 10 lashes to 11....

My son is now 14. He is heartily sick of my repeated response to the question of who would win between two characters...."Whoever the writer thinks will make the best story". He has however started using it with his friends.... Doc

I think it would be more helpful for the author to suggest what to do for characters that have a power you might not want in the scenario. If it clairsentience that would destroy the plot, then the author should seek to provide something that nobbles the clairsentience and provides something else for the character involved. It might be that an early encounter exposes the clairsentient character to an artefact that overwhelms the sense, taking it out of commission for the scenario. The character then discovers that if she focusses on an object like she was going to use the clairsentience, it suffers catastrophic integrity failure and falls apart (RKA, NND, Does BODY, inanimate objects only). That way the character gets a fancy new power to play with during the scenario. Doc

Another Perfect 10.

A perfect 10

But more angular and less cuddly...

If you want an active defence, why not just replace the static 11 with a roll by the defender, GM does not have to use it, all villain's could "take 11". you would then hit if your OCV+3D6 was greater than opponents DCV+3D6. Doc

When I played with my last group of teenagers I switched from roll low to roll high and switched it all around to tell them every task in or out of combat required them to beat 10 on a modified roll. Skills were listed with modifiers rather than target numbers - so Counterfeiting +3 rather than 14 or less. So, in combat, they would roll 3d6, add offence, subtract defence and, if the end result was greater than 10, they succeeded. Out of combat they would roll 3d6, add skill bonus, subtract difficulty modifier and, if the end result was greater than 10, they succeeded. Noone ever asked me why we used 10, people like 10 more than they like 11. 11 is an awkward number... 😄 Doc

There could be all kinds of ways of coming up with a base pool. In Neil's example the rolls made by players to contribute to the Plan would add dice based on how well they made their roll. The GM might decide to give them bonus dice for all kinds of things. You actually add fewer dice than you would add chits. If you think about it one chit is good for exactly one intervention. One dice could be used many times. I would probably add one die for every two chits you would normally have added - and the first dice are often worth more than later ones. When you roll 12D6 you might expect to lose 2 dice if not one or two more due to rolling so many dice. 12 drops to 8 faster than 8 drops to 4 (on average). The last few dice can last a long time. Do a couple of practices, just roll the pool until you have no dice left and see how many throws it takes to get to zero. Do it several times for 12 dice, 8 dice and 4 dice. You would need to get a feel for how many to give out and players need to get a handle on what the probabilities are of a pool suddenly vanishing on them. Doc

Yeah but I reckon he is the fruiting body of this particular mycelium...it is now more obvious, more prominent and threatening to expel spores that may take decades to completely eradicate.... 🙂 Doc

Try it once as a pilot. It worked really well at my table, the discussions were not as simple as "Is it worth spending a chit", it was what are the chances of us losing our pool, is this the thing we need?? It is interesting to watch them be very casual when they have a large pool (though this is when they have the real chance of losing lots of dice) and then become incredibly stingy as you get down below 6 dice. In the last session, the last two dice went on the first roll - 2 sixes. In the first session the last dice was used four or five times before they rolled a 6.

I am firmly of the opinion that if Bush and Blair were corrupt enough to go to war on the basis of lying about WMDs that they would have been corrupt enough to ensure that we found WMDs. I think that Dean's right in that no-one believed Iraq when they said they had none and, I believe it is correct that, Iraq was, through back-channels telling its local enemies that it remained in control of sufficient quantities of chemical weapons. If they had none, they should have been more open with weapons inspectors, though that would have made them weaker in the local political context. I am concerned with the opinion that all politicians lie and that Trump is no different in that. I am constantly amazed at how he will dispute any issue that does not suit his message, even those that most of us would readily accept as factual. My bigger concern is that I am beginning to see other politicians take the same tactic. Look at those politicians in the UK defending Boris Johnson (police were called to his girlfriend's flat due to domestic disturbance) where, because police have not arrested anyone are talking like there was no need for anyone to be calling the police so it must all have been made up by politically motivated opponents. Dangerous stuff. Doc

I fully intend to put all of the characters, villains and scenarios of my Golden Age game in the thread I made. Will not be professionally put together but I intend to have my GM notes there.