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Post by Neros on Jan 13, 2012 9:10:32 GMT -5
Hello everyone Been some time since there has been any updates to this part of the forum, but me and my players are still working with 2.0, trying out the system. And during our last game, we kinda got and epiphany about how strength and using stuff as a weapon could work, which will make it much more balanced and fluent. According to the rules for 2.0 about weapons at the moment:Wielding a heavy axe grants you 2x damage. You simply pick up the axe and place stones into close combat.. Wielding a car grants you 2x damage as well, however to use it, you have to place stones into strength and then into close combat. So bonus-wise, there is no difference in wielding a car or an axe. The only difference is that you have to place stones into strength as well as close combat, even though the effect of using the car is the same as the axe.. Although, the car would probably only last a couple panels before breaking. Maybe its weight is the number of panels it can be used to smash stuff? So at the moment in my real life games, we are testing how it works without the need to place stones to lift things, and so fare its been allot more interesting to be a character with high strength and its not breaking the system since there is no real superior benefit compared to normal weapons. A creative player however, might be able to squeeze out a situational modifier for using a large object in some way. Like swapping people away, creating a cover for others ect.. Any input on this or is this part of the forum completly forsaken?
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Post by malice on Jan 13, 2012 20:38:35 GMT -5
While hitting someone with a car would certainly crush the bejeezus out of them, hitting them with an axe hacks the bejeezus out of them. I know the car hurts more, but the trouble we have is that we don't exist in a world where you NEED to hurt more. The axe worked great, there was never a place for the guy who picked up cars. Thus it's hard to really know how much more badly it hurts (Obviously a lot, but how much is a lot?) and there are added complexities like the axe was designed to be wielded while the car was not.
Another area where MURPG (and therefore MURPG 2.0 as far as I know) doesn't differentiate is weapon size. An axe twice as big as a man wielded by someone twice as big as a man should hurt more than an a normal axe wielded by a normal man. I don't think it does unless the person statting them out thinks of it, and then they have to pay stones for that extra oomph. So if the big guy picks up a car, is it still better than his big axe?
I think the original MURPG and MURPG 2.0 went the route of simplicity when asking all these questions. It's a bit of a let down when you're in the mood to get intricate, but you don't have to think or work as hard either. It's a simple game, always has been, so the axe and the car do the same damage. Not because that's correct or ideal, but because it's easy. You end up justifying the rules rather than the rules justifying you.
The trade off is that you don't have rules that feel perfect, but you have rules that work so you can play the game without stopping to work it out all the time.
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Post by Black Sam on Jan 14, 2012 14:54:00 GMT -5
I'm lurking in this area, though I don't have any specific comment for your idea just yet. I too am toying with a lot of the 2.0 rules for my house rules set. In fact, I'm testing some more stuff our Sunday night -- I'll see if I can work in a heavy axe or a car or two... ;D <<edit>> Since we're talking 2.0 here, I just posted my own House Rules in the house rules section (strangely enough.) There's a lot of 2.0 in them, if you'd like to take a look... murpg.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=revisions&thread=15341&page=1
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Post by Neros on Jan 15, 2012 11:26:18 GMT -5
Malice: That was allot of explaining, and I may have misunderstood it, but as fare as I can understand from it: you agree that although its rather simple and by fare follow reality with the way it works, its better than adding more rules and making it more complex, potentially disrupting the flow? Black Sam: Please do. As I said, when the two are compared with the version we thought of, they seemed much more balanced than before, since the Strength character no longer has to pay for a bonus others would get for free. But I can take a look at your house rules and see how they look
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Post by takewithfood on Jan 18, 2012 5:40:56 GMT -5
Lifting heavy objects should definitely not be free. However, I can see that maybe you shouldn't have to pay stones for objects well beneath what you can max press. But there are a couple of points as to why hitting someone with a car shouldn't actually be as effective as hitting someone with a weapon designed to be wielded by people: 1. The most important lesson I learned while collaborating with people on these rules is to remember that we're trying to emulate comic books here. Logic doesn't have to rule. Dumb things happen in comic books all the time. (I urge you to watch all of this guy's comic book physics videos; he's like the original Sheldon Cooper.) 2. Speaking semi-realistically, I can just barely lift my fridge; I've done it before, when I had to clean under it. However, despite being able to just barely lift it, I can't think of a situation in which I could effectively use it as a weapon. Likewise, I can lift my television with much less effort, but it would still make a terrible weapon. I'd much rather fend off an assailant with the claw hammer (which weighs maybe 1 lb) than most any heavier object in the house. Anyway, please don't take the "current 2.0 rules" too seriously. What I have written down there, I wrote ages ago, and it was meant to be the framework for a more streamlined set of rules - but the streamlining process never happened, as the test game never really got off the ground. I mostly copied the Strength rules from the usual house rules for lack of a better idea at the time. If I recall, I had been considering doing it this way: For lifting, an object's weight = the difficulty to lift it. However, resistance was only 1/2 the weight, rounded up. Resistance only goes up if you're lifting an object at the limits of your strength. GMs can also add resistance for particularly awkward objects if they like. So, for example: Pretty Strong Man has a strength of 4 and for some reason he needs to hold a car over his head for a really long time. The car has a weight of 4, which is right at Pretty Strong Man's limit. The resistance is initially only 2 stones, which he can easily afford, but because he is lifting at his limit, the resistance will increase by 1 stone at the start of each subsequent page. Thus, he pays 2 stones for the first page, 3 stones for the second page, and 4 stones for the third page, at which point his arms give up on him. That's a good minute and a half, roughly. Luckily, his fellow super hero, Even Stronger Man, arrives on the scene. Even Stronger Man has a strength of 5, and so can lift the car without suffering an increase in resistance. Because he has a durability of 3, even he will tire of this in about an hour.Not too complicated, really. Hell, I encourage GMs to handwave most of this unless the story actually hinges on how long someone can heft something heavy. As for using something heavy as a weapon, I think I was just going for something along the lines of letting people using anything at least 1 or maybe 2 points below their own strength score as a weapon, gaining appropriate weapon stats. ~TWF
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Post by Neros on Jan 20, 2012 13:12:19 GMT -5
Only having to use half the stones to lift an object helps allot, but the problem I am having with it, is that you don't really get anything for the stones you use, compared to what you could have gotten if you just said you started with a weapon, where you don't spend stones on lifting.
For example, a motorcycle (I think it would be the equalivant of +1 since a car is 2x damage), would give the same bonus as a knife/handgun. So why waste energy and not just say that you have a knife from the beginning?
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Post by kito on Jan 20, 2012 16:31:17 GMT -5
normlay the reason in comic books is they don't have a knife and it is easier to chuck the motorcycle at the fleeing car then to fly after it and try to get it to crash on its own, not saying using a car as a weapon is a good ideas but it is better than no weapon.
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Post by takewithfood on Jan 22, 2012 1:20:56 GMT -5
Well, I'm comfortable not forcing people to pay stones for lifting when they're just attacking with something. It's pretty safe to assume that the energy they're spending on lifting the thing are going into the attack - I mean, that's sorta how physics works, and why being hit with a heavy thing hurts so much.
~TWF
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Post by Neros on Jan 25, 2012 3:21:34 GMT -5
Doesn't sound to bad to say that when attacking, no stones are needed to lift the object, and when just lifting, stones are placed as normal (or half the cost, which sounds much better)
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Post by ultron2099 on Aug 18, 2012 22:59:44 GMT -5
Keep in mind the lifting scale is a range scale. Hulk can lift 100 tons, so picking up 80 tons shouldn't be much of a deal, despite it being a level 10 weight.
Did some math calculations, and I think I've hit upon something that would work. Take the heroes str lvl, and if he wants to toss something, he can pick anything up to -1AN of his strength and toss it a max of -2AN on the area/leaping scale. If he wants to throw something farther, then just slide the scale. toss a -2 weight -1an distance, a -3 weight full distance.
EXAMPLE: the hulk, lvl 10 an a 65 ton (-1AN) object goes 1500 feet,(-2AN) a 40 ton (-2AN) bulldozer a full mile, (-1AN) a 20 ton (-3AN) jet fighter over three miles away,(AN) Once you hit the distance limit of area/leaping, shift to flight distance, the next level being lvl 7.
so that 7 ton elephant (-4AN) he tosses 10 miles away (poor elephant), that -5 weight huey helicopter goes -2 flight or 20 miles. At lvl -6 strength he's down to picking up 1/2 to 2 ton objects and tossing them -1 distance or 100 miles. anything under -7 of his strength, aka 250 to 1/2 ton, well ... good luck ever finding it.
Spider-Man lvl 5 strength picks up lvl 4 object (car weight 1000lbs to 2 tons) and throws it 25' lvl 3 picks up lvl 3 object (city mailbox 500lbs) and throws it 50' lvl 4 picks up lvl 2 object (refrigerator 200lbs) and throws it 100' lvl 5 picks up lvl 1 object (32" crt tv 40lbs) and throws it 200' lvl 6
This is if everyone picks up and throws with the intent on hitting something at that range or just tossing it for range.
i THINK this system might work better then the current blanket rule that is currently in use for our heroes/villians to throw things.
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Post by takewithfood on Aug 20, 2012 6:07:32 GMT -5
This seems pretty functional in terms of distances, and is quite similar to what I'm currently using in many ways. (Everything on that wiki is subject to change as I'm basically testing the lot of it out right now.) How many stones does all of this cost, though? You haven't addressed that yet. ~TWF
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Post by ultron2099 on Aug 20, 2012 9:15:55 GMT -5
How come any character can pick up a grenade or spear or throwing axe or knife and throw it and use range combat to hit the mark ... including the hulk and thing and iron man and thor and what not .... but if they want to pick up a bolder and do the same, now they are charged more stones for picking up what to us but not to them is a heavy object and throwing it? isn't lifting things and throwing them a pretty natural act?? If you want to apply a makeshift weapons bonus, for such thing as ripping out a light post or picking up a car and then trying to swat someone with it, isn't that just a modifier to close combat applied to the stones??
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Post by Pope Mega Force on Aug 20, 2012 10:49:48 GMT -5
I think flavor comes in to play once it gets to that. And mind you I'm not justifying the way it works, merely offering an explanation and workaround of sorts. If I throw a spear and it smacks you in the chest, it's gonna hurt and do damage but that's pretty much the end of it. Most GMs will be happy to say it hurts them and then they get their action and everyone is hunky dory (save the guy who took a spear to the chest) and he won't have to worry about it staying in his chest unless it does massive damage and kills him. At that point though, he has more problems than the spear sticking out of his chest.
However, let's say I take a car and heave it at you. Your toughness or dodge or whatever negates a fair amount of damage but if you've been hit by the car, you're now under a freaking car. You now have to spend stones to get out from under it or pick it up and throw it back.
I'm not going to say it's the perfect excuse, but those extra stones can cause someone else to spend more stones and can add a lot of flavor.
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Post by takewithfood on Aug 20, 2012 11:13:44 GMT -5
How come any character can pick up a grenade or spear or throwing axe or knife and throw it and use range combat to hit the mark ... including the hulk and thing and iron man and thor and what not .... but if they want to pick up a bolder and do the same, now they are charged more stones for picking up what to us but not to them is a heavy object and throwing it? isn't lifting things and throwing them a pretty natural act?? Because light objects are lighter than heavy objects. Maybe I'm failing to understand your question, but it seems to me that you asked me why it takes more energy to throw a car than a knife. EDIT: If I understand what you're getting at, this is just a problem with MURPG in general: If you have Agility 10 and Close Combat 10, you're a veritable GOD at martial arts.. but it will cost you 20 stones of energy to really show it off, which is likely more energy than you even have! Doing fantastic stuff costs a ton of energy, even if you'd ordinarily think that it shouldn't. I have some ideas for countering this, but it requires a pretty big overhaul of the system, which I haven't bothered getting into just yet. In my rule system it costs zero stones to pick up really light objects, and really light is defined as a weight of only 1/2 your Strength. So, for argument's sake, if we give Iron Man a Strength of 9, he can pick up Weight 4 objects (such as car) at no expense. However, objects heavier than that cost energy; picking up a weight 5 object, such as a helicopter, will cost him 3 stones of energy every page (1/2 its weight, rounded up). Now, chances are he recovers more than 3 stones every turn anyway, so he could still keep this up almost indefinitely: but running around and flying and shooting and doing other strenuous stuff while lifting a helicopter over his head might tire him out, if he spends energy more quickly than he recovers it. If Tony lifts something at the extreme limits of his strength, such as a tank (weight 9), he's really pushing himself. To represent this extreme stress, the number of stones he needs to spend to carry it increase by 1 every page. It only costs 5 stones on the first page, which is probably still within the number of stones he recovers, so no sweat. But then it's 6 stones on the second page, 7 stones on the third, etc. Pretty soon he's dipping into his energy pool, and inevitably he'll completely wipe himself out after a few minutes of lugging an entire tank around. This works fairly well within the confines of natural strength limits, too. A typical athlete (Str 2) can lift a fridge (weight 2) all on their own, but they can only hold it for so long. A typical Joe Nobody off the street (Str 1) probably can't lift the fridge alone and would have to get a friend to help him. However, a professional weight lifter (Str 3) can not only carry the fridge for a really long time, he actually has enough additional strength to chuck it a good 10 feet! That sounds pretty reasonable, don't you think? Yes, and that's exactly what my rule does. All you need to do is prove you have the strength to actually pull it off (check your Strength vs the difficulty) and you can use a heavy object as a close combat weapon, gaining the appropriate bonuses for it's size and shape. ~TWF
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Post by ultron2099 on Aug 20, 2012 13:17:49 GMT -5
What I am arguing against is the heave heavy object purchaseable under range combat for 3CL cost. so, unless that is payed for, characters can,t pick up heavy objects and chuck them?! it just sounds bogus. why not just apply targetting penalties for using non conventional artillery?
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