Doc Democracy

It only matters when a player says they want a cool power like that villain had...then you need to be able to get that build right. I guess the rule is not to make undocumented powers ones that players might want in their next character.... ?

I do hate to nitpick (I don't! ? ) but I do believe you mean the reigning British Monarch.....

The vagaries of groups and experience. If it is not an issue for you, ignore us! ? Everyone has to play the game in front of them, noone else's.

My Deathstroke equivalent was SPD 12. I only used him in one adventure but he was fantastic as a singleton villain. The heroes had to defuse a bomb but Deathstroke was standing guard and so one hero had to get to the bomb while the other four had to keep Deathstroke busy until it was disarmed. They struggled in an early encounter where he wiped the floor with the five of them. Then they thought about the fight rather than simply piling in, heroes delaying so that they had every segment covered to prevent him from resting for a segment and getting a recovery or potentially getting a free haymaker (both of which happened in the early fight). They also knew that they could barely afford to lose people, there was a downward spiral if one of them was knocked out of the fight. They knew they would win if they simply took up enough time, but they knew that they could not afford to just defend or he would speed off to the bomb person. He was a great villain, not hugely expensive and the players feared him in a way they did not other villains that cost much more and had more raw power available to them. Doc

I struggles with the concept of criticals are bad for players for a long time, I did not believe it for what seemed to be reasonable, rational reasons. I am now convinced that, over the long run, criticals are bad for players (which does not mean they are not fun or that they stir the pot as far as combats go). Criticals are even more bad for players if they tend to end combats - they are random, so you dont get to choose when there may be criticals, though TORG had rules that would mitigate that. If you think of your average combat - 5 attacks a turn and it might last for 4 or five turns. That is maybe 25 attacks per character. If there are 4 on either side of the combat, then you have 200 attacks, which means there is likely to be one critical in every combat. There are many villains, none of which the players have a visceral attachment to. They do not care if one of them is taken out of a fight or potentially killed etc. The GM can easily adjust and add in another villain if there is a need later in the session. If it is the hero that is one-shotted or killed then they sit out the fight (boring), get captured (which they hate) or get killed (which makes them hate you!). ? The risks to each side are the same, the consequences are much higher on the player side. The nature of an RPG is that the heroes participate in every contest, the villains rotate in a wide arc. Each hero therefore suffers more critical hits than any individual villain just by the nature of things and the players are more concerned about detriment to their hero than to any protagonist villain. I am not against critical hits, nor is Hugh, it is the impact of those things on the immediate game that is at issue. If you have fight ending criticals you need some narrative method for players to avoid that, if you do not, then you need to make the criticals interesting to make them worth the bureaucracy. Doc

I played a SPD 12 speedster (Swift) in a Golden Age campaign for three sessions before retiring him - my friends hated him. He had Martial Arts, AP, Autofire and Reduced END on STR. Each punch did very little damage but he threw an awful lot of them very quickly.... He could move in and attack and attack and move away before anyone got a bead on him. He did steal the limelight as it was ALWAYS my turn. All of the downsides folk have spoken about were true of Swift. I got rid of him for a stage magician type with a tiny VPP. Magnor the Magnificent.

Say you were rolling 4D6 blaster damage with one of the dice wild. Your average roll is 14. If one of those dice rolled 6, then the end average result is 17 or 18. It is not a huge overpowered effect. There is a small chance that the added dice is a six bringing and such events means the average damage goes up to 23. If the wild dice rolls another six, the average damage goes up again, this time to about 29. Given that the three sixes are about equal to the one in 216 chance of the 3 in HERO, this is worth looking at. Damage has increased from 14 to about 29. In SW you compare that against a strength roll. If strength was 4D, then you have suddenly gone from, on average, getting a stunned result to 15 higher which is "Mortally wounded". If strength was 3D then you are looking at going from"wounded" to "killed". I would say that this is relatively equivalent switches - a critical roll that happens once in every 216 times changing a result from minor to possibly instant kill. The big difference for me between the systems is that this is where I would, in Star Wars, use a force point to double my STR roll and keep me alive (punches the result back down to about 4 or 5 higher and merely wounded). Vanilla HERO rules do not provide that potential for heroes to mitigate dice rolls of that nature. Doc

But it doesn’t make sense, in terms of the power, for someone else to do damage without also damaging the entangle.

It might be, I actually avoided buying it because I have issues with the author of the novels...

Even those books were broad and designed for a GM to build his own campaign/game. You could not pick it up, create a few characters that were game specific and play five or six sessions. In each one you had to get your head round the game system and everything else, it was like a Ferrari with no body work, all the nuts, bolts and infrastructure on show. My my thoughts for these would be that all the GM decisions would have been made and baked into the game. A neophyte GM with neophyte players should be able to pick it up and play it almost immediately. It would have no rules in it that were not needed for the game at hand and no powers/talents/skills just in case. A fully baked cake rather than a pantry full of ingredients, or even a pantry with a few cookbooks. My favourite of the old ones was Justice Inc, I LOVED that box set. But instead of Justice Inc you would sell a game called The Shadow, or The Land that time Forgot, or The Untouchables. Each one would be set up differently, with different aspects of the core rules exposed, just the ones needed for that particular game. i would like a HERO nerd download to be available where the author explains, for those with access to the core rules (and an interest in such things), what decisions she made in setting up the game. I would also expect a lot of design time given to the character sheets as these would be almost everything the players had and would need to ooze campaign detail and colour. That is my vision. I would want to launch each game with a “celebrity” group playing the first adventure online. If you were really going to push the boat out, there would be Roll20 available packs for each one so that those inspired by the online videos could immediately go play the game... Doc

only issue with transparency for me is that it allows anyone to attack and do damage with that form.

Not if you make the attack NND....or indirect, only from within the entangle...

You want the crush to simply do damage or are you looking to invoke the suffocation rules (which would be more complex)?? I would have two attacks, one would be and entangle, the other would be an attack (only when caught by my entangle).

One thing that is often mooted but I don't think has yet been done, is a Powered by HERO style game. A ready to play game, using the HERO system underneath, but tailored for a particular genre. The book would be all that anyone needed to lift and play. Expert users would be able to tinker with things (if they had the core books) the assumptions/builds etc would be available online for those hardcore users. For everyone else it would simply be a pick up and play set of rules with an adventure and characters all ready to go... It is something I daydream about doing, perhaps when I retire and have endless days to fiddle again.... Doc

I have never won the day so I guess I had better take pleasure in the four downvotes that tell me I am doing a good job, huh?? Couldn't find a way to see what posts were downvoted to take even more pleasure in seeing whom I had offended. ? Doc

I am Champions kinda guy NB, when I pull out the HERO System it is usually to do superheroics....

Well, online is everything these days and superheroes are as much about the visuals as anything else. I think I agree with the idea about the setting. I think you need to begin with building an audience. Start streaming a group actually playing the game, find a group people will watch that is actively playing and give it some marketing and begin to spin off stuff from that. I would love love to see Darren Watts running Golden Age online with a group of players. If you get enough traction you sell the campaign material, the city, the villains, the organisations. You sell seats at the table. Everything. It has to begin with people seeing other people playing a game and enjoying it. That in itself, if it is done well, generates cash but it builds a potential market for everything else. Doc

In 6th, rarely, in every other edition, almost certainly....

would be a possibility, a grenade that jams brainwaves, mentally freezing everyone within the area of effect... I think you would use CV to hit the target hex but would probably need to use OMCV to affect those within the area of effect but there would be no need for line of sight. Invisibility would not defend against this...

That is interesting and possibly something Steve has opined on previously. Mental Powers require line of sight. If you have no line of sight can they be used (I envisage the situation where there is no targetting sense that can be used)...???

The usual response for an absolute effect in HERO has been to take the largest such power in the campaign, build a defence that would effectively stop that and then, as GM fiat, describe it as Immunity to Mental Paralysis (encompassing EVERY power that might be so described). It might be expensive but such an all-encompassing power probably should be.

Sounds like someone is talking mechanics instead of game effects. If a player tells me he wants to be immune to mental paralysis I ask what that looks like in game. Why immune to just mental paralysis and not other mental powers? What about mental paralysis with alternate defences? Would he also be immune to that? I would need more detail on the power intent before coming to an answer about a build. Doc

You need to look for how you want to model it and then decide on what kind of limitation it is worth. I think you could twist yourself in knots trying to replicate taking BODY, or using a kind of limited Barrier power. You would have to remember that the Barrier has to be advantaged to allow you to fire out while someone else cannot fire in. Complicated and expensive very quickly. Instead think about what you want. Will it function (when it is active) like regular armour? If so, we have the right power. Describe how it will fail. If the armour is not breached will it lose coherence? If so, does it lose more coherence when it is breached? How many hits (whether they breach the defence or not) before the armour fails? Will it be proportionate to the damage taken (more complex) or not? Once you have that detail, you will be able to see how often the armour is likely to fail in-game and you can assign a number to that. My immediate thoughts, if you want to go with rules already written down, is use physical manifestation. You can rule that damage that exceeds the defence goes through to damage both the physical manifestation of the defence as well as the character as normal. Your instincts are good though, while this kind of thing feels aesthetically pleasing, it can quickly become burdensome in gameplay and slow things down. It might be easier for the player to have a set of chips and every time they take damage they throw one away (decide the conditions under which they return - like a phase where the character is not hit or when the armour is switched off/repaired etc), when there are no chips left, the armour has failed. Doc

I think this is generally true UNLESS the campaign trope is against it. I ran a very enjoyable game where I asked the players to have a singular power. Much more like the original X-Men. one player had invisibility, another had invulnerability, another had super-strength and one had eye-beams. It was a very interesting game precisely because they did not have rounded characters. In a normal game though, everyone needs to feel comparable in the basics to have fun. Doc

Just heard that Greg Stafford has died. Glorantha has lost its creator. ? https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/8417-greg-stafford-condolence-thread/