Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sir Whiskers" data-source="post: 1507434" data-attributes="member: 6941">A couple quick points:1. I believe 3.5 clarified that ethereal and incorporeal are two different states. As far as I know, there is no spell or magic item that will allow a character to become incorporeal. There are a number of ways to go ethereal. Ghost touch weapons only affect incorporeal, not ethereal.2. As far as I know, ethereal creatures cannot affect the Prime Material plane at all. No spells, no attacks, nothing. Ethereal creatures can be affected by creatures on the Prime Material in a number of ways, such as force effects and gazes.As always, if I'm wrong about either point, anyone feel free to post a correction.This gets to the heart of my point. SWR is absolutely right that the example I proposed is expensive in Hero terms, though it is barely doable in a normal supers campaign - the character will likely be a "one-trick pony".But notice the differences:Hero: Invisibility: 69 points, invisible to everything (60 points gets you invisible to almost everything).D&D: Improved invisibility: invisible to sight, see invisibility spells. Vulnerable to true seeing, blingsight, tremorsense, certain spells.Hero: Desolidification: 40 points, vulnerable to Affects Desolid powers and one special effect.D&D: Ethereal: invisible to sight, immune to most effects. Affected by see invisibility, other detection spells, all force effects, gazes, certain spells.Hero: Energy Blast: 60 points, 2d6, Affects Physical World, NND, AE: Radius (5"), Invisible power effectsD&D: No attacks possible from Ethereal plane to Prime Material.With Hero, the player (with GM approval) decides on the scope of the power (just what is the character invisible to, what is he vulnerable to), while D&D "hard-codes" these aspects. It is possible, though expensive, to create a character in Hero who is almost untouchable. It's impossible to do so in D&D (at least without using non-core, usually non-WOTC sources).If Hero operated in the same manner as D&D, it would ban certain powers as inherently problematic. The same with certain combinations. It doesn't. It warns against them. The closest the system comes to banning things is to focus on certain methods used by players to munchkinize their points (putting a multipower inside an ec, etc). D&D, on the other hand, allows problematic abilities only after they've been significantly limited. If an ability might become a problem (stacking of critical threat ranges), the system bans it (in this case, the stacking of crit ranges). Because D&D's limits are hard-coded, the system is constantly being tweaked in an effort to keep ahead of the few who abuse the system. The system takes on this role, rather than leaving it to the GM.Lastly, I think we should be careful of losing the forest for the trees. Detailed examples can help illustrate a point, but they can also obscure it. Viewed from a distance, the difference in the systems seems fairly obvious - Hero provides the basic building blocks and trusts the GM and players not to put them together in a way that ruins a campaign. D&D has already assembled the blocks into larger, fairly inflexible, units.</blockquote>

Verification