ForgetsOldName wrote:Back before many of you were born and 2.0 was under development, I used to play a game called Champions. It was bought by a competitor and squelched. Although it was primarily known as a superhero game there was a spinoff that was used for fantasy RPG. It was criticized because characters tended to be very powerful, and the reason was that the intent of the game was for players to be able to create and play any power you could think of. After using it for a while and writing some of these really odd powers and spells, you started to think of things a bit differently.
HERO System? HERO is in its 6th edition, and has been continuously published since I started playing it back in the late 80's / early 90's, when it was on its 3rd Edition and (from what I recall) was still owned by Iron Crown Enterprises, aka I.C.E. To my uncertain knowledge, it has never been squelched, because though GURPS became more famous (based off its shameless commercialism), HERO had done it first - and I believe had done it better. (I still prefer 5e, but 6e has a few things that are definitely interesting.)
ForgetsOldName wrote:If I were to write up these blindfolds I'd have a few questions. I might start with telepathy with advantages, namely, it's always on, there's no roll, it works for things that have no minds (this is not clear--can he see the ceiling about to collapse on him?), it works for anything and anyone in your range of vision.. And there would be many disadvantages. It has a focus object (the blindfold) which can be taken away, it interferes with normal vision, it's obvious to anyone who sees it that something odd is happening, it only works on things you can see, you only get a small class of thoughts--thoughts about what visible thing the target will be doing next. Other possible ways to do this would be unable to be surprised and always surprises (two other standard powers), or even faster than light travel or teleportation. I would determine which of these powers would be a good base power by asking questions like the one about ceiling collapse. Also whether it only works in this room, only against these guys, whether it only works for a monk, whether he's blind fighting otherwise.
Hate to say this, but you, good sir, are violating the Second Rule of HERO System: "Ask what it DOES, not what it LOOKS LIKE." (The first rule is 'If it's not actually a disadvantage, you don't get points for it.") What this LOOKS LIKE (so far as we are aware) is that it gives a very, very short glimpse into the future, which might be built as:
HERO 6e wrote: Precognitive Clairsentience (Sight Group), Rapid: x10, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (64 Active Points); Precognition Only (-1), OAF (-1), Limited to Only One Phase (-3/4), No Range (-1/2): 15 points
Toss 'Independent (-2)' in there (which means it can be taken away from you permanetly), and you're down to a 10-point cost. That said, we can't really answer the question Rule 2 tells us to ask: we don't know what this blindfold
actually does, only what it looks like. Does it improve your defense? Your offense? Can you choose which? We really don't know yet, so for all practical purposes, we can't build the gizmo, only guess.
But whatever it is, in both HERO system (and for practical purposes, Pathfinder), we should be watching what it does, not what it looks like it's doing in order to do what it does.
ForgetsOldName wrote:The cool thing about this system is that every power, combination of powers, advantage, and disadvantage had point costs and cost multipliers associated with it, and someone had already gone through and created all the standard DnD type spells and assigned points to them. They also picked their point values so that the first level DnD spellbook spells all came out roughly equal. It's kind of amazing the fun stuff PCs will come up with if you give them some sort of oddball item like an Anymug, which feels like a toy but turns out to be insanely powerful in the hands of a smart dwarf. I think that's why people thought Champions was overpowered. It's like the pyromancer who asks "Can I heat his left eyeball up 25 degrees?" instead of wasting her time on fireballs.
Actually, they built their powers so that if it was very useful, it was very costly, and if there were several ways to do something, it would cost approximately the same amount - witness the cost of a hand-to-hand attack with the Ranged benefit (a thrown knife) or just a straight-up ranged attack - both were 5 points. HERO never cared about 'levels' the way other games did; after all, 20d6 is 20d6, whether it's a 1st level spell or a 9th.
As well, HERO had built-in brakes. Sure, a Variable Power Pool became very dangerous in the hands of someone who knew a) how to use it, and b) how to describe their choices within the metaphor they were required to describe it as. As someone on the foremost-but-now-sadly-spare HERO system site Hero Central (
http://www.herocentral.net) used to complain about it in the hands of a certain someone (me), 'A Variable Power Pool is an Ultimate Power Pool, I guess.' Because many, many things can be described under the aegis of ... 'fire magic', or 'psychics', or 'magnetics', or whatever. Unless you paid for that flexibility (and yes, you paid through the nose), though, the power you bought did exactly what - and for the most part, ONLY what - you paid for it to do. Unless you bought it to circumvent a wall, you couldn't make your Flame Spear go around it; you had to put a hole in the wall first.
