Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[RealAlHazred]

I've always taken velocity to be the character's move, say 24 hexes for their Run.

Yes, but there's complicating factors. It's relative velocity, so if two characters are running at each other, you combine their speeds. And when you convert real-world things into game terms, you have to be comfortable doing some formulas; that's true of every game, though -- you can't just take a car that's got a top speed of 95 miles per hour and use "95" as the car's Movement Rate in D&D, for instance.

Hero requires addition and subtraction, and multiplication and division. There are no more complicated formulas than that. What amused me was the guy who said Hero math was more complicated than Villains & Vigilantes. V&V has a formula for calculating your character's carrying capacity, which is used to determine how much damage you do when you hit something, which as [ "Strength / 10" cubed plus "Endurance / 10" ] times "the character's body weight / 2". That seemed way more mathy to me than anything you do in Hero.

 

[Mad_Jack]

But…if a billionaire gave the scientists enough money for the science and an ISLAND full of large prey animals?

I'm now envisioning a scenario where, fifty years down the road, all the predators have died out and there's an entire island completely overrun by cows...

 

[Thomas Shey]

They do. But one of the things is most GMs constrain player character SPD to a small range (slightly larger in superhero games) just to make sure no one PC his the limelight. And you don't actually need a high SPD to reproduce most Speedster powers. It's a very flexible game. Once my players made superheroes in it, they couldn't stand the limitations of excessively class-based superhero games.

Well, in heroic scale games its pretty unlikely to see a very wide range because of Normal Human Maximum doubling anyway. While an extra point of Speed can be useful, its pretty rarely 20 points (in heroic games where you might start with only 100-150 points for everything) useful.

(None of this invalidates your point, just that its really only an issue in superheroic games in the first place, and only sometimes then).

 

[Scribe]

--

Weird, you all took a thread started on the basis of intolerance, and have only driven it further into the mud.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Some characters can be pretty simple and others ferociously complex depending on the builds (variable power pools and substantial limitations I’m looking at you here), so a lot of complexity can be avoided or even embraced at the player’s build discretion. But that higher end sure isn’t for newbs.

No, that's absolutely true. Though ironically you can have VPPs that are surprisingly easy or non-in-play time consuming too, but they're also usually pretty limited in some ways (non-combat shifting magic or gadget pools, or things like power copy types who are going to, effectively, just reuse someone else's build components). You really need to chase people with decision paralysis away from even those though (or larger multipowers).

 

[Thomas Shey]

We’re both wrong.

Well, from what I've seen of the two of us, that seems on brand.

I wasn’t talking about sums of 1 to N total- don’t even remember what that’s from-

Falling damage more or less works that way; for the first 10m (as of 6e) you take 1D6 per each meter, then it becomes progressive.

I was thinking of the martial arts maneuvers that require calculating a target’s velocity (v) divided by another number as part of determining damage and OCV & DC penalties or bonuses. That part is written as v/3, v/5, v/6, or v/10 (depending on the maneuver), and my faulty memory interpreted that as a √.

Ah, yeah. There's standard manuevers (Move Bys and Move-Throughs) that do that, too.

And calculating velocity is where it gets awkward. The formula I tracked down online is:

I think what you've forgotten is that Hero isn't using true velocity there. Its just using how far you were capable of moving in that action. In other words, when it says v/3, it means "the number of 2 meter increments you were capable of moving in during your action" so if you have a movement speed of 20m, its three. (I don't recall if it uses partial dice or not).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've always taken velocity to be the character's move, say 24 hexes for their Run.

That is what it is. The examples you see make that pretty clear. I could see how someone could misread it, though.

 

[Reynard]

[not here]

The one surefire way to get people mad is to tell them they don't need to hate on another game in order to love their favorite game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think what you've forgotten is that Hero isn't using true velocity there.

That formula was taken from a page talking about HERO martial arts maneuvers. It’s also apparently the formula used by their automatic velocity calculator.

(I’d look it up in my own books, but I’m feeling particularly lazy right now.)

 

[Scribe]

[not here]

The one surefire way to get people mad is to tell them they don't need to hate on another game in order to love their favorite game.

I sometimes feel it really is as simple as "Play and discuss better games, dont give the other guy the oxygen."