Doc Democracy

Being lazy, is that in the rules? It feels like it is against the spirit of the rules but there are so many little wrinkles that I never concern myself with until I have to....(which is again due to laziness!). Doc

Hmm, this is another of those chicken and egg questions. How are temporal alterations enacted in your campaign? If that is consistent you buy the relevant defence. If, like many campaigns, there is not a tight relationship to that kind of SFX with particular mechanics then you are looking at a number of things. You can negotiate with the GM to have a SFX specific defence. Say, purchase damage negation to a certain level with the understanding it has a limitation (only versus temporal alteration powers) worth exactly the same as its advantage (applies to all temporal alteration powers) and so you pay for it straight. What that does is provide a broad defence on things that affect you. There is a grey area on things that affect someone else. If your opponent bought auto fire to reflect his time manipulation, would it affect that? A long conversation with the GM is in store.

Who is he trying to help avoid damage? Himself or other people?

What is the basis of the character's invisibility and desolid? The theme often suggests additional powers.

In my group I am the only one that cares about the numbers. I customise the character sheets to remove almost every trace of the background mechanics, only leaving the necessary ones visible. No-one has ever asked to check my work, to tweak something or create something themselves. I think Tasha is absolutely correct - we, on these boards, are the ones who want that stuff...and only us. Doc

It is, will go get a link and replace the earlier one. PS:done. Repeated here. :-) You can join the sandbox at https://app.roll20.net/join/1628298/KcEqwA

I have not seen that but it would be a great idea. Will suggest it on their forums. Would be nice for the last character to have spoken to have a speech bubble appear from it and a GM bubble near the top...

More than I did, just looked at the page when Lucius did his necromancy...

If you don't have the chat bar on top, for example looking at macros or characters etc, it bongs when someone enters some chat. As it happens, one of the things we are interested in is capturing a game log. As such we do a lot of chatting and meta gaming in the video links but everything in character is done in the chat bar. It keeps our eyes on it and so would work for my lot. I reckon it should be possible for always bonging when chatting, though that could get tiresome.... :-)

It all depends on what you want. I am now thinking that it would work purely through the chat bar. I could have a macro that gave me a graphic that had the information I have on the cards - it would simply mean instead of tapping on the turn tracker, I tapped on the macro, chose the right segment and then the chat bar would come up with those characters with an action on that segment, and those who would have an action on the next one... Doc

Probably not. I picked up the black and white, lettraset appearing version of 2nd edition when I was 14. I think it sat around for almost 3 years before I tried running it for friends because "it was too complicated". That was a pretty slim volume. I think I might have taken a look at 5th edition and run a mile and never come back. And I am the most likely of my group to be HERO friendly... It IS a barrier. However, I have successfully run HERO for groups of 10, 11 and 12 year olds who have picked it up and run with it. If you are introduced by someone who knows then that barrier disappears. Our problem is that, for a social activity, gaming groups are incredibly unsocial - they stick together, meet in private and rarely propagate between each other. Inviting new gamers is always a challenge as gamers are incredibly strange folk, even to ourselves... Teenagers are when you capture people, that unique confluence of curiosity, obsessive behaviour and the time to indulge both... Doc

This has been the core of a lot of previous threads. It should be possible, for example, to launch Glorantha HERO. It would eb a single book allowing GMs and players to game in Glorantha where all of the design decisions etc have already been made, where character building is described in the book (tweaked to give a good Glorantha experience but ideally not looking anything like a HERO character sheet and potentially completely hiding all the point cost stuff that dominates a HERO sheet). A lot of the terminology in Glorantha HERO might be different to that in the core rules even if it does exactly the same thing. Players would have no obvious option to build their own characters from scratch and the experience system might constrain how characters grow (or rather push them to grow in Gloranthan ways rather than HERO ones). Effectively all of the mechanics would be HERO but they would be hidden by a covering of Glorantha and, unless you were a HERO afficionado, might be completely unrecognisable. All that would be necessary would be a flash on the front cover saying "powered by HERO System". There could/should/would be a GM addendum available as PDF to explain the design decisions and how it all worked that would allow someone with the core rules to tweak and change stuff to their hearts content but there should be no need to know HERO, it should be playable from that book. I think that is what Tasha means... :-) Doc

Scott - I have upgraded you to a GM. It is the built in character sheet in Roll20 that makes a difference. There are settings on pages that affect what you might access that are available (as far as I can tell) through folk setting up services within the character sheet. Those settings would be useful for everyone else. Doc

The Bundle of Holding has had four bundles with recommended books for those building worlds - you might not be able to buy the bundles but you should be able to look at the titles and see if any take your fancy. They should all be available via DriveThru. peruse the bundles here - though you have to go back to November 2016 for the fourth and beyond that for the others... https://bundleofholding.com/index/pastbundles Doc

If someone was able to do a more interactive character sheet then Roll20 would be a much more friendly place to run HERO. There are a few things that would rely on access to the API that I do not have with my current subscription (and if I did would require coding skills that I do not have!).... :-) If you want to go look at the sandbox I have been playing with, you would be more than welcome. You can join the sandbox at https://app.roll20.net/join/1628298/KcEqwA and I will give you GM rights so that you can look at the guts of everything. Doc

I liked the campaign that started with a newspaper running trash stories on the PC heroes causing them to investigate each other only to find that a local crime boss was feeding the newspaper with pictures and stories that were untrue. There were several set piece battles to confront the crime boss but the need to roleplay their way out of a difficult social situation. The whole thrust of the campaign was to establish themselves as heroes rather than dangerous vigilante/probable villains. Doc

Lucius, what dont you get about rounding in favour of the PCs?? Of course it is not fair - they are the heroes after all!! :-) Doc

Oh no, you are not pulling me into this one....there have been a couple of threads debating this at length... I need to go look at the rule but it sounds to me like it suffers from the issue that other such tactics do, it does not provide an effective block to movement. I have given defender type fighters the ability to buy a power that effectively creates a barrier across an area which disappears if an attacker can win in an OCV vs OCV roll. In the meantime the passageway is really blocked. :-) Though I am now WELL off topic.... Doc

You are gonna have to give us more than that...

There would be room for a whole slew of rules to enhance the combat options IF you wanted that to be the focus of your game. HERO does not have default solutions for guarding a door, for example, or preventing someone running past you. It would be quite easy to build a lot of these things as powers, low end available as Everyman and points spent to make them more reliable. If I am hunkering down, defending and holding my ground, I should be able to reliably hold things up long enough for my friends to escape. I should be able, if I am good enough/strong enough be able to drive someone back, even if I am not damaging them. I should be able to sacrifice ground or combat advantage to avoid damage, or vice versa. In all these things, weapons would advantage or limit what was possible. It would require a decent amount of work to get it all in place but it would become a very rich, diverse set of options for combat based on hand to hand weapons. Fights would take a long time and become even more strategic. Which is not a terrible thing in the right games. Doc

You could think about arsing around with the speed chart. Faster weapons could go a segment earlier than the slow ones. So the SPD 4, rapier armed rogue goes on 2,5,8 and 11 rather than 3,6,9 and 12. The mattock weilding ogre goes on 4,7,10 and last on 12

Ooh, it all sounds awfully bureaucratic, doubling and tripling and rolls every phase of swimming... To me, that might be fine for a dramatic scene where the swimming is central to the action, it feels like a drag if it is just to get back on the boat I fell off while trying to awash my buckle.... Personally, I like the idea of swimming speeds being reduced by stuff - that is nice and simple. If the player is content, she can tootle around at whatever speed she can muster. I might even add an END penalty - adding ENC to the END spent while swimming while encumbered. If it is important to the player to swim faster, they might make a CON roll to boost their velocity (+1m/+1 END for each point the roll is made by or +1m for every 2 the roll is made by). If I was feeling nasty, I might require a CON roll modified by ENC to avoid all the extra END used while swimming being long term. I think this is less bureaucratic but provides the player with choices (always a good thing IMO). Doc

I appreciate where you are coming from but I think that this all stems from you assigning a special effect to a game mechanic. DCMV actually represents a number used to determine whether a mental power affects a particular character. Just as how OCV does not simply represent the ability of a character to dodge an attack. The mechanic is there to enable us to assign a number. It might be due to an ability to mask his mind, to stiffen its defences and repulse attacks, or deflect them, to absurd or dissipate its energies or extensive training in mental combat. Obviously some if that "could" be modelled with mental defence or other powers but they are just as easily modelled with DCMV. That is core to HERO. Now, as GM, you are entitled to make whatever rule you want and to make a psychic death cry based on a physical combat value, you are entirely within your rights. Though, is strikes me you have just said that it would affect everyone the same, regardless of their mental abilities which, surely, gives against the principled argument of the area of effect on the mental power? :-) Doc

Absolutely, and for a game where killing attacks are deadly, as GM, you use killing attacks less often. Most guards are armed with night sticks or single shot small arms. You now have an easy signal to the players. When you note guards have automatic weapons, they immediately know to tread carefully. However, fun has to be key element. I wasn't saying your game had to be like mine, just that a quick overview of what you mean by low-powered and the key tropes is a better place to start than point totals... Doc

I think that the first thing you need to do is not worry about point totals but instead what you mean by a low-powered game. I could run a pretty high powered game on low point totals but the characters would not be broad or deeply detailed. To my mind a low-powered game means that the characters are better than normals and paranormal in some aspect (or Aspects) but they would need to worry about guns, about being seriously outnumbered and that they should not expect to be able to barrel their way through challenges. This would mean my martial artist might be exceptionally fast and quick and able to deliver more damage with a punch than any normal human might expect to but being caught unawares by a thug with a sub-machine gun is a seriously life threatening situation. My Brick might be able to lift serious tonnage and to throw people around like rag dolls but he is not going to bounce bullets from his chest. My energy blaster might come with flight and force-field but his energy blasts might be less damaging than if he was carrying a magnum 457. I do not expect my characters to be all rounders. They will need to act tactically at all times. Like a real life original X-men. Cyclops can blast stuff but he has no defences or movement powers. Angel has wings but not much else. Beast is super-agile and strong but has no significant defences. Jean Grey is psychically strong but nothing beyond that. I played a great game where each player was built as an agent - so more than a match for any two normal thugs in a fight due to that but were enhanced with one signature effect. I was open to each player describing that to me and then I built that regardless of points. One player wanted to be invulnerable to damage, one wanted super-speed (all about the ability to move and do lots of things and have auto fire on his punch than anything else), one wanted to be able to remotely affect machinery another wanted to be invisible at will. It made all of them individual and distinct. Each of them had something they could contribute the others could not but no-one could do without the others. It made for a very different game, even though it felt like superheroes, it did not feel like our usual Champions game. Doc