On 30 Mar 2007, at 01:23, Gary Sturgess wrote:
>
> The reason I think transforming heroes (by which I did indeed mean
> characters that can change their shape) are problematic is because
> some such
> concepts essentially give you a completely new character sheet.
> Indeed, with
> a freeform "change into anything and get appropriate powers"
> concept (not at
> all difficult to simulate with Champions, or indeed pretty much any
> decent
> supers game) you're going to be doing a lot of hand waving - and that
> strikes me as a pretty ugly "mechanic".
From what I remember, in Champions, it would be "not difficult" in the sense that the mechanics support it, but possibly quite difficult in play because it can involve quite a bit of point-juggling. It's not something I would want to do on-the-fly without a lot of experience.
The more common versions, with a limited number of forms should be easier to do. As I said, HQ already has Puma People and I don't see any obvious problems in that. The only thing you might want that seems to be lacking is guidelines on designing the alternate forms. I can't see any obvious issues with working out your own rules for that.
>
> I'll re-read the example on ranged combat as it seems I'm suffering
> "versionitis" here (haven't looked at it closely since HeroWars,
> where I
> recall it being a bit thorny).
>
I think, as I said, the issues are a bit different in the Supers
genre. The main issue as I remember it is that most obviously
defensive abilities don't usually allow a way of striking back (which
makes the results of exchanges hard to narrate). In the super hero
genre this is less often the case. The attacked character usually
has some way of hitting back, or if they don't a trick that lets them
turn the tables.
> As far as simulating cosmic powers with affinities, I didn't make
> my point
> very clearly. I was not by any means suggesting that HQ couldn't
> simulate
> something like Green Lantern's ring. Instead, I was pointing out
> that one of
> the clearest ways to abuse HQ is to buy a broad ability that can
> apply to
> virtually anything, and advance that to the exclusion of everything
> else.
>
Maybe I didn't make myself clear. I meant anything (or almost
anything) that would be equivalent to a Multipower in Champions - a
power with multiple (generally exclusive) uses - would be well
represented as an Affinity.
>
> To return to duplication - a duplicating hero in most supers games
> controls
> all his characters duplicates, and they are often of identical
> capabilities.
> If you do that in HQ with followers, you're trivialising the
> ability (it is
> no different than a non-duplicating hero who happens to have a
> couple of
> sidekicks). How does one come up with ways to represent such a
> power so that
> it feels like a superhuman ability instead of just something akin
> to "Batman
> and Robin"? Would the suggestion be to actually allow the player to
> have
> multiple actions, basically controlling multiple characters, or
> would you do
> it with some combination of an augment plus followers?
HQ abstracts almost everything. In most cases it's all in the narration. And I would suggest that using Followers and/or augmentation as the best HQ method of handling it. Mechanically I'd generally use the duplicating power instead of a relationship, and the duplicates would not have significantly different abilities from the original - and really is there anything else required ? I suppose you could have a resistance to creating a new duplicate - but that option is available anyway. But I can't think of anything obvious that is missing on the mechanics side.
Surely the real point about Batman and Robin is the relationship between them, not the fact that Robin is represented by the game mechanics as a Sidekick.
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