Chat about the game...

Okee doke, got questions. I have BOH and wonder if the Accuracy skill is used here as I didn't see it mention in the house rules pdf. Also, what get used for the AVs of powers in these here parts, the Acting Attribute or the APs of the power itself?

GM has gone off to bed so you will have to wait until tomorrow to get the answers to your questions and more.

I saw the first two episodes of that Julie Newmar show you were talking about where she plays a robot in female form. It's on the Roku Channel, if memory serves, along with the old 60s Batman TV show.

I didn't include Accuracy but I have been thinking about players being able to buy skill dice for their powers so that's something I'll give some thought to today then anyone that wants to add dice to existing powers (for the three players who have been running characters without the skill dice) can buy them at a starting character rate rather than paying the inflated improvement costs. Watch this space, I'll have a look/think as it's something that's missing. All the skill dice thing came about because a pile of Hero Points would basically get the guys through the adventures and without much in the way of challenge. The dice restore the challenge and HP are more spent on character improvement rather than doubling stats every time there's a challenge.

APs of powers are used for AV still. I have thought a lot about buying AV/EV/Range separately and giving more HP to build characters with. It's still an option but we also have a side game called 'Lore Knights with Jade Hood and Iron Fist' where the new rules get tested. That is a definite option.

So to sum up...

1) I will look at buying skill dice (accuracy for powers basically) in the next day or so
2) For the testing stuff out game we may see one off adventures with the optional rules for buying AV/EV/RV separately and also possibly splitting Dex if you use it for attack and defence in the same round.

Example: A character with 9 Dex takes on a character with 7 Dex. The 7 Dex guy puts 5 into Opposing Value, 2 into Acting Value. The 9 Dex guy puts 6 into Acting Value, 3 into Opposing value.

I think Mutants and masterminds splits Dex into two stats and in Dc Heroes Dex is by far the most important stat with AV/OV/Initiative/Base Movement and manual dexterity/stealth tasks all tied up into one stat.

Don't worry too much about 2) yet as that's something I'm thinking about but not planning to implement any time soon. It adds a slight level of crunch and the point of House Rules is to make things easier (for me particularly as GM).

Oh and another thing. If you look through the datafiles you'll see Adrenaline Surge and Minor/Serious/Catastrophic Burnouts pop up A LOT. Both of these give great bang for buck but really mix things up when an iffy roll is produced. The Lore Knights (our game set in 1940s Britain with Nazi supers galore) have a lot of characters with this sort of thing and the dice have really messed them up on occasion. You may decide to cook something up with this combination (or at least use burnouts) but all burnouts are +1 shown so Minor 3/Serious 4/Catastrophic 6. The latter gives -3FC obviously but gets triggered quite a lot, so beware that you don't put all your eggs in one basket...

An example of combat...



Should be self explanatory if you know the DC Heroes/MEGs rpg.

AV9 is Swordsmith Dex. 2D Martial Arts (1D Acro) means he has 3 dice from M Arts and 3 dice from Acrobatics. He's using 2 Dice from his m Arts and saving 1D from Acrobatics. That means roll 2D12 plus 2D12 from Martial Artist. As long as the first two dice don't fail (3 or less or burn out a power) take the best two dice from those rolled and discard the rest. Add it to the Acting Value for the Acting Value total.

Major Oak has Dex 6 which is his OV6. I assumed 1 die for attack 1 die for defence but David M (the player) may change that next time round. Roll 2D12 + 1D12 from Martial Arts and pick the best two to use, discard the other and add to Dex 6 for an OVT (Opposing Value total).

Compare the AVT vs OVT. 8 points difference. On the red column that equates to +4 Effect value which is also the number of knockback Aps but nowhere near enough to knock Major Oak back thanks to Density Increase. +4 effect added to Swordsmith Strength of 11 means 15 Effect Value. 15EV - Major Oaks RV of 13 = 2 RAPs.

And that's it. No column shifts, no looking stuff up, nothing. Just rattle off a fight. In a post I can sort out a dozen or more combatants (though that does make more time as I look up their stats) quickly and easily. We've had some epic scraps in the last year or two and doubtless there'll be more to come!

My eyes sort of glaze over as he puts up all those numbers during fights     
All I know is that the dice tend to hate me.  Sometimes, they trick me by giving me a good roll, just to get my expectations up and then when they are at its highest, go back to doing bad rolls while giving the bad guys good rolls.  

Yeah, there's no 'sexy/interesting' way to put the crunchy mechanics stuff down on paper, so to speak.

As long as you understand it and I have a vague idea of what's going on, it works fine.

We have another possible player, Andy, who I've RP'd with on another site (the Marvel Universe RPG site) for a number of years. I was running a one on one game over there for him which ended successfully (when so many others fall by the wayside). He's expressed an interest in joining in which makes three players and I'll put it out on that site in general to see if anyone else wants in. With three players I'll pad out with a couple of NPCs. I was thinking a talking ape and a guy from the docks who punches stuff (or is that the same thing?) or someone who can move stuff with their brain as NPCs.

Got possibly one more player coming from the old Yahoo Allstarsatwar group. Thought I'm not sure if he wants the 50's game or a different time period. Might want to check your emails to find out if they have subscribed and are waiting approval, every day for the next week or so.

I was thinking a talking ape and a guy from the docks who punches stuff (or is that the same thing?) or someone who can move stuff with their brain as NPCs.


Brain Fart!  We got a pic up in one of the 3 hero/villain portrait chats of Gorilla Sheriff.  Might want to take a look at him.    

I found Gorilla Sheriff.  Here he is.





Also, we need to figure out what city we will be adventuring in.  I suggest we do like DC and make up our own city.  Just need to figure out where it is.  Maybe California since we have our new lady hero being a Hollywood actress?  It could be some place south of Los Angeles but north of San Diego and leave it at that.

I just put in Ruby City as a place holder.  If it is in Southern California, it more than likely will have a Spanish name.

Ideas?

If you want a chimp instead ....

I'll be tapping you up for ideas on 50s Americana style stuff David. It's a decade that mostly passed me by (because my mum was born in 1950 is one of the reasons, and I wasn't around for another 20 odd years...) but have some ideas. A made up city is fine. Ruby city will be as good as any.

I started making a list of things in my head that such a city might have...

A main street or streets full of banks that need robbing
A dockland/mobster quarter where shady deals go down
Outside of town an Air Force base where rumours of Aliens being investigated are constantly denied...
A large science lab where strange noises and lights are seen at night
An observatory which spies distant objects in space
A library where a ghost is said to haunt, Ghostbusters style...
Teenagers that vanish and turn up later with no memory of where they've been
Straight and crooked cops, determined randomly
Two football teams - The Red Rubies and the Ruby City Rumblers that hate each other
A tall building that looks extremely attractive to overlarge apes/insects/giant women

Southern California had a huge population boost during WW2, it was one of our more sparsely populated states before then.  Both war plants and military bases for the fight against Japan were built in California.  So it has lots of military bases.  Edwards Air Force Base is a huge air force base in the desert.  Much of the military-industrial complex is situated in California, both north and south.  It has at least one famous observatory there.

Disneyland hasn't opened yet.

July 17, 1955
Disneyland, Walt Disney's metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opens on July 17, 1955. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits.

This is a map from 1926, only the state highways are marked.  Let's place Ruby City between Santa Ana and San Diego, between those two rivers that sort of run parallel to each other about halfway between those two cities.  The distance between those two cities is about 100 miles.  Population isn't as huge as it is now. 

Santa Ana's population was 46,000 in the 1950 census.  Significant growth was recorded between the censuses taken in 1950 and 1960, with the population growth over 120% to reach just over 100,000

San Diego's was:


year rank population

1920 93 74683
1930 53 147995
1940 43 203341
1950 31 334387
1960 18 573224
1970 14 696769
1980 8 875538
1990 6 1110549

  So let's make Ruby City's population around 100,000. 


Water is not plentiful in Southern California.

How many inches of rain does Southern California get a year?
The normal seasonal rainfall measured at downtown Los Angeles is 14.77 inches, of which 92% falls between November 1 and April 30.

The interstate system hadn't been built yet in the mid-1950s.  So two lane highways were the norm back then. 

here's from Wiki

Interstate 5 (I-5) is the main north–south Interstate Highway on the West Coast of the United States, running largely parallel to the Pacific coast of the contiguous U.S. from Mexico to Canada. It travels through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, serving several large cities on the U.S. West Coast, including San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Portland, and Seattle. It is the only continuous Interstate highway to touch both the Mexican and the Canadian borders. Upon crossing the Mexican border at its southern terminus, I-5 continues to Tijuana, Baja California, as Mexico Federal Highway 1 (Fed. 1). Upon crossing the Canadian border at its northern terminus, it continues to Vancouver as British Columbia Highway 99 (BC 99).
I-5 was originally created in 1956 as part of the Interstate Highway System, but it was predated by several auto trails and highways built in the early 20th century. The Pacific Highway auto trail was built in the 1910s and 1920s by the states of California, Oregon, and Washington, and was later incorporated into U.S. Route 99 (US 99) in 1926. I-5 largely follows the route of US 99, with the exception of a portion in the Central Valley of California. The freeway was built in segments between 1956 and 1978, including expressway sections of US 99 that were built earlier to bypass various towns along the route. US 99 was removed in 1972.

Contents

• 1 Route description
  
  
  
  • 1.1 California
    
  • 1.2 Oregon
    
  • 1.3 Washington
    
  
  
  

Route description

Lengths
[th] [/th][th]mi^[1][/th][th]km [/th]

CA	796.53	1,281.89
OR	308.14	495.90
WA	276.62	445.18
Total	1,381.29	2,222.97

California

I-5 in the Newhall Pass Interchange where it intersects with I-210 and State Route 14 near Santa Clarita
Main article: Interstate 5 in California
The southernmost point of I-5 is at the Mexican border at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, one of the busiest border crossings in the world.^[2] Beginning at the border in San Ysidro, which is part of the city of San Diego, as the John J. Montgomery Freeway, I-5 goes through the suburbs of Chula Vista and National City before reaching downtown San Diego. It then parallels the Pacific coastline, going through the northern suburbs of San Diego, bisecting the University of California, San Diego campus, and passing the I-805 merge (where it becomes the widest Interstate in the United States for a short stretch), before passing through several North County coastal suburbs and then through 18 miles (29 km) of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in northern San Diego County. Here I-5 is also known as the San Diego Freeway.


Side note - if you find Bakersfield on the map?  That's where I grew up.     

About there ^^^ then?

And these are the major earthquakes in California in the 1950s.  Legislation to build more earthquake proof buildings was passed after 1952.  Prior to that, finding any building over 10 stories or so was rare.  20 or so stories is about as tall as they get back then.

1952 Kern County Earthquake (SCEDC)
1952 Kern County Earthquake (NEIC)
1952 Bakersfield Earthquake (SCEDC)
1954 San Jacinto Fault Earthquake (SCEDC)

Admin wrote:

About there ^^^ then?

yep. And look! There are some island out there where a mad scientist can build a lighthouse for his experiments or smugglers can hide at. Lots of birds nest there btw. And depending on the time of year, lots of seals too.

And welcome to Andyman. PM the GM is you have questions or post them here. Hope your stay with us is a long one.

Second new player in a week. Must be a record.

Found Escape Velocity under High Speed Movement on page 153. It is 14 APs.

We've been bouncing around how Magic Sense can automatically detect all magics regardless and trying to figure out how to block this .. well, I just found a power in BOH 2 that answers that, Obscure. Pg 89.  Buy it with the Area of Effect Bonus, make it 0 or 1, and anything magical on a magician gets obscured.  Just 0 if it is on the person?

So besides buying the amulet, when Prof. Wynde gets enough HP, he needs to buy Obscure for himself and his amulet. 

Being a mage type is harder than it looks.  Probably why there are so few of them.  

Caer Alwyn must have this with an AOE to cover the village.

Updates later on (it's 0004 and I need to hit the sack). A few days off so we'll be back up to date all being well.

With regards Power Skill Dice...

I'm thinking a flat +2 FC on powers to buy a separate 'Skill value' for each dice power. This allows you to roll dice when using the power instead of having to buy them with Hero Point dice.

So an Energy Blast FC3 would mean to buy Skill Dice for that you would pay FC5 and it would be listed separately on the character sheet, purchased separately for every power. There is an Accuracy Skill in Blood of Heroes that we do not use that is FC7 and blanket covers powers so that the player is accurate with all physical powers. Instead the player would have to develop dice for each power separately. Slightly more expensive this way but more realistic (so to speak) because you might practise a lot with Energy Blast but not so much say, with Disintegration or Flame Project (unless you want to set stuff on fire a lot).

Example: Frostbite buys 7 points for Energy Blast and...



So he can use up to four dice to blast energy attack with. Usual rules apply with regards if you attack with a certain number of dice you defend with less defensive dice and vice versa depending on whether you attack or defend first.

Thoughts? I'm thinking at the next HP rewards (not this one) you can spend points at the starting level of cost to buy Power Skill Dice.

How would it work if you just want it to increase your chance to hit only? Lightning Bullet's specialty is to do a multi-attack with his touch only Lightning Attack, I want to be able to negate the minuses for multi-attack and later add bonuses to hit with it. I could limit it so he can't use Crit Blow or anything like that, if it comes out cheaper that way.