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Post by Tasha on Apr 2, 2014 15:33:10 GMT
I agree on the cost of CV vs. CSL's, to an extent; but 10 points for "+1 All Combat" that can offer +1 OCV, +1 DCV, or +1/2 of a DC vs. 5 points for just one of those three things does make some sense. Some. I can do 2 of those for 10 points and have them always be on. CSL's have to be allocated. Again the problem is that CSL's aren't that great of a deal anymore. Buying the stats are.
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gojira
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Post by gojira on Apr 2, 2014 15:41:04 GMT
Just curious: how much would you raise the cost of OCV and DCV for CSLs to be more balanced? 6 cp each?
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Post by CRTaylor on Apr 2, 2014 16:29:52 GMT
Yeah the CV thing is a bit odd. Rebuilding my bestiary I've just been relying on straight OCV rather than levels in almost all cases. I understand what the thinking was but when he raised the cost of some combat skill levels (12 for overall level) but it did create some oddities.
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Post by rjcurrie on Apr 2, 2014 17:02:41 GMT
Of course, to a large extent, point balance is meaningless anyway. As the true effectiveness of a character is more often than not determined by the player not the character sheet.
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kravenkor
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Post by kravenkor on Apr 2, 2014 17:41:03 GMT
I agree on the cost of CV vs. CSL's, to an extent; but 10 points for "+1 All Combat" that can offer +1 OCV, +1 DCV, or +1/2 of a DC vs. 5 points for just one of those three things does make some sense. Some. I can do 2 of those for 10 points and have them always be on. CSL's have to be allocated. Again the problem is that CSL's aren't that great of a deal anymore. Buying the stats are. I still more or less agree on the pricing, especially because CSL's can also "break CV limits." If you are using NCM, max CV is, what, 8? But you can have 8 raw OCV and then tack on CSL's on top of that (or merely to offset penalties if your GM sets a hard limit on CV like I do - 10 total CV, anything that puts you above 10 is just a fancy "Penalty Skill Level.") Not saying you are wrong and I am right; more offering my opinion on why I don't have too big an issue with the pricing of raw OCV / DCV compared to CSL's. CSL's can do things raw CV cannot.
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gojira
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Post by gojira on Apr 2, 2014 19:10:35 GMT
Of course, to a large extent, point balance is meaningless anyway. Yes, that's something I was leading up to also. For example, in Kazei 5, it says to ignore the AP cost of cyberhacking powers, which are pretty durn high most of the time. Other things balance those powers: genre conventions mostly. How often NPCs actually have good defenses to cyberhacking (often!), inhertant "realistic" player perceptions how hacking should work, and the fact that the actual limitations on cyberhacking are rather more limiting than the point savings indicate. Players can wiggle around conventions in a milieu and min-max characters, but I think that the milieu and genre combined go a long way to determine what powers and combinations are powerful, and which are distinctly less so.
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Post by CRTaylor on Apr 2, 2014 21:50:50 GMT
Ignoring point balance means two equally played characters can be wildly out of synch. If you like that in your game, that's fine; you can run The Avengers with Black Widow and Thor fighting side by side (sort of). But it makes building opponents challenging, to say the least.
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kravenkor
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Post by kravenkor on Apr 3, 2014 15:22:19 GMT
Ignoring point balance means two equally played characters can be wildly out of synch. If you like that in your game, that's fine; you can run The Avengers with Black Widow and Thor fighting side by side (sort of). But it makes building opponents challenging, to say the least. My thoughts on it too, to an extent. You can have characters of different point values that have the same combat capabilities, more or less; total points isn't the best place to balance from, but generally speaking, it does and can have an impact. The points - and more importantly the Active Points - of actual combat powers; attacks and defenses and tricks and movement are what matters. My take on it, at least.
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Post by Tasha on Apr 3, 2014 20:20:11 GMT
Just curious: how much would you raise the cost of OCV and DCV for CSLs to be more balanced? 6 cp each? Honestly, I would put the point costs of Skill levels BACK to 5er and earlier costs. Because I believe that since skill levels do have a lot a flexability, they are like a multipower in that they must be activated, and can only do one thing at a time. Unlike the CV stats. I would also place the Mental Combat Skill levels back under the umbrella of Combat Skill Levels. The split and raise in cost felt very nitpicky and kneejerk. 6e IMHO feels under playtested. The new point values for everything was argued out or just decided and then published. Later Hero Fans got to see what changes actually worked and which ones were mediocre to poor.
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gojira
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Post by gojira on Apr 3, 2014 22:35:03 GMT
6e IMHO feels under playtested. The new point values for everything was argued out or just decided and then published. I think there we agree strongly here. A much stronger play test period likely would have improved things immensely. I'm also not totally sold on the new cost of characteristics either, although I haven't tried it extensively. I like that figured characteristics are easier now (not figured), but the system also seems to lose something. Base characteristics each cost 1 point, and that's pretty vanilla. (Except for DEX, which is 2 points, but that isn't much of an exception.) And PD, ED, Body, Running, Leaping, Swimming, Flight, and Rec are all 1 cp per point too. It isn't terrible, but it feels overly granular, and a bit boring too. Although I can't say what I'd do about it though. Another annoyance, I just picked up Savage Worlds, and it uses a game scale of 2m = 6". Wasn't that supposed to be holding Hero back? And yet Savage Worlds seems to be just fine, and Hero lost a point in common with a popular game system. Feels like one step forward and one step back, at best. Admittedly I might be just grousing here with no real point.
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Post by CRTaylor on Apr 3, 2014 23:18:32 GMT
I agree, I think they rushed it out a bit too quickly. Its not that there are a lot of problems, but there are a few that would have been caught with more strenuous testing. I also suspect - perhaps uncharitably - that it was playtested by people who agreed with everything Steve Long wanted to do, so they weren't very critical or questioning of ideas. They certainly were very, VERY defensive about anyone who criticized it.
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Post by Tasha on Apr 4, 2014 8:14:21 GMT
6e IMHO feels under playtested. The new point values for everything was argued out or just decided and then published. I think there we agree strongly here. A much stronger play test period likely would have improved things immensely. I'm also not totally sold on the new cost of characteristics either, although I haven't tried it extensively. I like that figured characteristics are easier now (not figured), but the system also seems to lose something. Base characteristics each cost 1 point, and that's pretty vanilla. (Except for DEX, which is 2 points, but that isn't much of an exception.) And PD, ED, Body, Running, Leaping, Swimming, Flight, and Rec are all 1 cp per point too. It isn't terrible, but it feels overly granular, and a bit boring too. Although I can't say what I'd do about it though. Another annoyance, I just picked up Savage Worlds, and it uses a game scale of 2m = 6". Wasn't that supposed to be holding Hero back? And yet Savage Worlds seems to be just fine, and Hero lost a point in common with a popular game system. Feels like one step forward and one step back, at best. Admittedly I might be just grousing here with no real point. I think you mean 1"= 6' aka 1" = 2m or 2yd I think that the new costs for stats just underscores the fact that some Characteristics have unneeded and unusued Granularity. ie The primary stats are really only different in multiples of 5 AKA a 13 stat and a 14 stat have no difference ex cost. Also some of the primaries MAY be somewhat redundant now. The movement is bought at 1cp per Meter so it's really the same cost it's always been. I also wonder if BODY is a bit too lacking in Granularity. Perhaps a Body points stat that is close to Stun in how it scales. It would also allow old style KA's to go away with their issues, and potentially fix healing's lack of real granularity. KA's could then do the same number of dice per DC as Normal attacks, but only do half stun on the die. Normal Attacks could be the opposite. But that's a big change that will probably get shouted down.
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Post by Tasha on Apr 4, 2014 8:22:06 GMT
I agree, I think they rushed it out a bit too quickly. Its not that there are a lot of problems, but there are a few that would have been caught with more strenuous testing. I also suspect - perhaps uncharitably - that it was playtested by people who agreed with everything Steve Long wanted to do, so they weren't very critical or questioning of ideas. They certainly were very, VERY defensive about anyone who criticized it. When 6e shipped there were many people who wouldn't give the changes a try no matter what. THEY didn't give the changes a good chance they just bad mouthed the whole ruleset without actually trying it. Also I do know that the SETAC people had some input, but I don't know if they were actually allowed to playtest the new rules. I am really liking how Paizo approaches a Hard Bound Supplement. They release the classes and other rules they want to test. Allow anyone to download and play with the rules. They then watch what people say about the playtest rules and fix any issues that come up. I also get the feeling that it's a group effort over at Paizo. At DOJ/Hero it's really Steve who does the majority of writing and can and will rewrite something he doesn't like. This top down style of writing and minimal editing bit them more than once. Least of all with extended page counts for the books. All of the extra explanations and extra detail of specific rules should have been placed in a Hero System Wiki that allowed people to quickly search and find rulings/Clarifications that GM's and Players wanted. Brutally editing the Core Rulebook to be one volume along the line of what Derek did with Champions Complete.
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gojira
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Post by gojira on Apr 4, 2014 16:35:14 GMT
I think there's all sorts of ways that we could second-guess Hero Games' releases. I do agree on the lack of editing. All writers need an editor. I also think Hero Games was siloed too much. Jason just handled shipping, Darren just handled business, Steve just did writing, and nobody intruded much on the others' domains. The group effort by multi-talented individuals seems a better approach, as you point out.
I'm still not sure what could be done with Hero itself, and all of its problems are certain not due to just Steve or just any other single person. There's 4th edition stuff I think is nuts. It's fairly easy to find problems. But what to actually do about them is another question, and a difficult one.
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Post by Chris Goodwin on Apr 4, 2014 16:41:20 GMT
When 6e shipped there were many people who wouldn't give the changes a try no matter what. THEY didn't give the changes a good chance they just bad mouthed the whole ruleset without actually trying it. Also I do know that the SETAC people had some input, but I don't know if they were actually allowed to playtest the new rules. The 6e discussions in SETAC went from April to June of 2009. There wasn't any formal playtesting, because there really wasn't time, though some of us did play around with mechanics and such, and as far as I can tell I wrote up the first ever 6e character (no Complications, though). We all bashed on Power writeups, Complications writeups, and so on and so forth. Hugh Neilson, who is a Canadian tax accountant in his secret identity, posted dozens upon dozens of spreadsheets working out costs of items compared to other items. We all provided input, but I think Steve looked pretty closely at Hugh's numbers; Hugh worked out the costs for the Skill Levels based on the costs of the Characteristics, and ran through a bunch of "what if" scenarios treating them as Multipowers to determine the total costs. I think that Bill Keyes (teh Ebil Bunneh) and Gordon Feiner (ghost angel) (and, possibly, Robert "Oddhat" Dorf) may have done some stuff as they're local to one another and I think they game together frequently, but there wasn't a formal playtest process. I think Derek Hiemforth and Gary Denney (archermoo) are also local to one another but I don't know whether they game together or not. The rest of us were spread out all over North America, so couldn't have done anything in person other than what we did. For that matter, IIRC there wasn't a formal playtest for 5e either, and I don't think 5er went through more than a SETAC type review.
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