Silver Age Sentinels (Tri-Stat) -- and Streamlining Hero

[Samurai]

Like mmadsen, I was really hoping HERO 5th would be a major rewrite along the lines that he posted (fewer stats, getting rid of some of the formulas, making everything work together better, etc) Instead, it was a very minor patch job on 4th ed instead of a major rewrite. I'm sure that made a lot of Hero fans sigh with relief, but not me...

There are already a host of alternate SAS rules suggestions being bandied about on their forums, and several of them address issues like "High Defense is too hard to hit" and "How to model strong but clumsy brutes."

ACV and DCV may use all 3 stats evenly by default, but changing that is incredibly simple! The default rule says (Body+Mind+Soul)/3... You could instead say it is (2xBody)+(Mind+Soul)/4, or weight Body even higher if you want... One of the best things about SAS is that it is so adaptable and easy to change. Everything is modular.

Weighting Body as more important in ACV also increases the basic hand-to-hand combat damage of a normal person (which is their ACV score), so the brainy, skinny guy now does less damage and hits less often than big dumb guy. You can also add skills like Unarmed Combat or abilities like Attack Combat Mastery to give a character a better chance of hitting than another with similar base stats. If the big guy actually knows how to fight and the skinny guy doesn't, the skill levels will shift the balance even more. Without skill levels, both of them are normal kids with no combat training or experience at all...

One of the most common changes people are making is comparing margins of success in combat die rolls... so instead of just beating your ACV to hit (and the defender just beating his own DCV to dodge), it is also an opposed roll. If both succeed at their rolls, you compare the margins of success to see what happened. This makes combat more relative to each character's abilities and reduces the chance of dodging every blow, even with a high DCV. The variation I prefer is that if the attacker has a higher margin, they do a glancing blow for half damage instead of missing completely as the rules normally say.

 

[mmadsen]

No wonder you do not like Hero.

I don't dislike Hero. "Champions had many great ideas, but few of them required the kind of complexity the system's known for....Champions' stats -- and its figured stats in particular -- are needlessly complicated."

There's a difference between seeing room for improvement and disliking something.

Anyone who would take a simple process and convolute it to what you just wasted time writing really should not be playing the game.

You seem to miss my point entirely. "Deriving these fixes might not seem simple, but the end-user doesn't have to follow the derivation; it's the end result that's simple."

The end result of my convoluted derivation is a simple stat system with small-integer values starting at 2:

Body -- Physical Strength
Dex -- Physical Agility
Mind -- Mental Agility
Soul -- Mental Strength

PD = Body
ED = Body
Spd = Dex
Rec = 2 x Body
End = 10 x Body
Stun = 10 x Body

OCV = Dex
DCV = Dex
ECV = Soul

You listed all these formuli, but what you forgot to mention is that is that those formuli are only used during character creation.

Does that mean they can't be and shouldn't be streamlined? Making a Champions character is a major effort -- and the extra complexity I just streamlined out was complexity that didn't add anything.

 

[mmadsen]

ACV and DCV may use all 3 stats evenly by default, but changing that is incredibly simple!

Yes and no. By using all three stats evenly, ACV and DCV require you to buy up all three stats (or one stat three times as much) to raise your Combat Value. If you weight Body infinitely (as I would be tempted to do), then buying up your Body ups your ACV/DCV, one for one -- and gives you all the other advantages of a higher Body stat. This could work if the three primary stats weren't so cheap, but that's a big change to make.

One of the most common changes people are making is comparing margins of success in combat die rolls... so instead of just beating your ACV to hit (and the defender just beating his own DCV to dodge), it is also an opposed roll.

An opposed check scales much better across power levels. As I pointed out earlier, GURPS uses attack and defense rolls against a fixed difficulty, and its combat scales notoriously badly for just that reason. High-defense characters can avoid almost all attacks, even from high-offense foes.

 

[mmadsen]

My group actually PLAYED the game the other day...

Excellent, Valanti -- some playtest data!

Damage is wacky. Most normal weapons do very little damage, armor is cheap, so everybody uses Special Attacks or Massive Damage. Only that usually means that you take enough to fall over in just a few hits (or, in my case, ANY time I was hit).

I had some fears about combat reading the rules.

Even a "perfect" human only deals out 12 points of damage with a hit (ACV = 12). To raise that at all, he needs to take Massive Damage (2 pts for a single attack, 5 pts for all), and that raises his damage by 10!

One level of Force Field (4 pts) grants 20 points of damage reduction. One level of Armor (3 pts) grants 10 points of damage reduction. In contrast, a level of Tough (2 pts) grants just 10 Health Points. I don't see much point in buying extra Health Points. You can buy Armor to subtract 10 from every attack's damage for just 50% more than 10 Health Points cost via Tough. If anything, we want a system where heroes and villains duke it out -- one with lots of hit points -- not one where they're either immune or immediately taken out.

We learned that the Defensive Value has to be capped around 15, since if it's higher characters rarely get hit unless (a) they're swarmed with more attackers than they have defenses or (b) the attacker rolls a critical which cannot be dodged. It also does extra damage, so you're likely to go down because of it.

I take it you didn't use the Trick Shot rules. If you use them, the quick rule of thumb is to reduce your own ACV until your chance to hit (roughly ACV) equals his chance to miss (roughly 20 - DCV). That maximizes your chance to land a shot.

 

[mmadsen]

Tri-Stat Silver Age Sentinels' skill system gives each skill a cost, per level, in skill points. That cost depends on how useful the skill is, in game. Thus, a combat skill like Ranged Defense might cost 12 skill points per level, while a challenging real-world skill like Writing might cost 1 skill point per level.

Skills only go up to level 5, giving +5 to the appropriate Stat when that skill's involved. I suppose this limits abuse potential, given their low overall cost, but this means that talent overwhelms training.

But wait, 12 skill points per level is a low cost? Yes, because those are skill points, not character points. In effect, a skill point is a tenth of a character point, and, thus, a level of Ranged Defense only costs 1.2 character points -- appropriate since a level of Defense Combat Mastery, usable against all attacks, costs 2 character points.

Every character starts with 30 skill points. Extra skill points cost 1 character point for 10 skill points -- in the form of one level of the Highly Skilled Attribute. Fewer skills give one bonus point per 10 skill points traded in -- in the form of the Unskilled Defect.

I like the way the system guides players toward a reasonable number of skills -- you get 30 skill points, and you have to make an effort to take a Defect to get your character points back if you want fewer skills -- but I'm not sure I see the need for multiple kinds of points for character building.

 

[Valanti]

Excellent, Valanti -- some playtest data!

I had some fears about combat reading the rules.

Even a "perfect" human only deals out 12 points of damage with a hit (ACV = 12). To raise that at all, he needs to take Massive Damage (2 pts for a single attack, 5 pts for all), and that raises his damage by 10!

Yes - of course you get to add weapon damage to that (which is still terribly low - a stick does something like 6, while one of the biggest guns adds only 20-25).

One level of Force Field (4 pts) grants 20 points of damage reduction. One level of Armor (3 pts) grants 10 points of damage reduction. In contrast, a level of Tough (2 pts) grants just 10 Health Points. I don't see much point in buying extra Health Points. You can buy Armor to subtract 10 from every attack's damage for just 50% more than 10 Health Points cost via Tough. If anything, we want a system where heroes and villains duke it out -- one with lots of hit points -- not one where they're either immune or immediately taken out.

One of the PCs had Penetration for his attack - wiped out 40 points of Armor with each hit, so getting extra Health Points does have some value.

I take it you didn't use the Trick Shot rules. If you use them, the quick rule of thumb is to reduce your own ACV until your chance to hit (roughly ACV) equals his chance to miss (roughly 21 - DCV). That maximizes your chance to land a shot.

No. Frankly, my character's main defense was not getting hit (a 19 DCV originally and 3 extra defenses), and I figured that if I started using the Trick Shot rules, so would the GM, and then I'd probably be toast.

 

[am181d]

If Silver Age Sntinels were to release an Astro City supplement, I'd buy that immediately, but I doubt they would. Such a brilliant comic, and it's wrtier abandons it to write friggin' Thunderbolts!

Stupid Kurt Busiek.

Kurt Busiek didn't quit writing Astro City to write Thunderbolts. (Astro City isn't even cancelled; he's working on a new set of five issues as we speak.) Kurt Busiek stopped writing Astro City because of long term health problems that made it difficult for him to write in the more complicated style that Astro City requires.

(I'm not actually making that up, though it sounds kind of fake. You can do a google search for Kurt Busiek Astro City interviews over the past two years and he'll probably mention it in 75% of them.)

 

[mmadsen]

One of the PCs had Penetration for his attack - wiped out 40 points of Armor with each hit, so getting extra Health Points does have some value.

Perhaps I'm misreading the Special Attack rules, but doesn't Penetration (Armor) cost as much as just doing more damage? You have your choice of 20 more points of damage or 20 more points of damage only against Armor.

 

[mmadsen]

Second Wind

One mechanic I really liked, at least in principle, was the Second Wind. If you're using the optional Damage Difficulty Penalties -- that is, at 75% health, you're at -2 to all rolls, at 50% -4, at 25% -6 -- then you can get a Second Wind (and ignore those penalties) if something happens to sufficiently motivate you.

This is, of course, perfect for superheroes (and pro wrestlers). To get the Second Wind, the character has to make a successful stat check against his best stat. Personally, I think it should always be a Soul check. (I can see a similar mechanic working in Champions too.)

Another mechanic that really belongs in a superhero game is Pendragon's notion of Passions. If something particularly important to the hero is at stake, he can become inspired to greatness or disheartened and driven to despair -- effectively a Soul check (treat the Passion as a skill) to gain short-term bonuses or penalties.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Kurt Busiek didn't quit writing Astro City to write Thunderbolts. (Astro City isn't even cancelled; he's working on a new set of five issues as we speak.) Kurt Busiek stopped writing Astro City because of long term health problems that made it difficult for him to write in the more complicated style that Astro City requires.

(I'm not actually making that up, though it sounds kind of fake. You can do a google search for Kurt Busiek Astro City interviews over the past two years and he'll probably mention it in 75% of them.)

I know what you are talking about Drew. I was on the Astro city mailing list when it was in full swing (joined up during the Confessor/Bridwell Invasion arc), but Astro City was coming out *very* sporadically and people were getting kind of snitty about it when Kurt Busiek's Avengers, Iron Man and Thunderbolts titles were coming out like clockwork, while Astro City was going 6 months between issues (well, it went 6 months once).

Kurt posted to the list citing his health issues as the reason for the delays, and everyone was pretty sympathetic. He claimed it was easier for him to get Marvel titles out because they didn't require as much thought as Astro City, but rest assured Astro City was not being cancelled.

When called on that on another list he denied it vehemently, claimng tht he sunk his heart and soul into every title he did, and could be expected to put the same level of care and craft into Iron Man that he put into AC.

It just went on and on and on like this. Busiek's reasons for his actions changed dramatically depending on who he was talking to. The man who was apparently "too sick to get 'his baby' (Astro City) out on time kept adding Marvel titles to his workload...but not spending any less effort on each of them than on AC...but unable to get AC out becaue of the amount fo effort it took.

After awhile I got tired of waiting, and got tired of the bullsh|t.

If Kurt Busike just wanted to coast, and rake in the easy money writitn Marvel titles, then that's fine. The man was sick and needed to kick back a bit. Understood.

The reason I was on the mailing list was to get info about the title from the horse's mouth. If you are going to slack off on a title, say so. Save me the trip to the Comic Shop.

His comments, collected, could be boiled down into this: "I'm too sick to do Astro City, but not too sick to do Thunderbolts, which I assure you takes the exact same amount of effort. I'm also adding Iron Man to my docket, which will take the same amount of effort that I put into everything. Expect the Marvel titles to be out on time. Astro City? We're doing our best, but I'm sick. Aslo I'm adding the Avengers."

Heh, call me a bitch I guess