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## Breaking HERO 6e - the Aid is too damn cheap.

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Josh_Kablack
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### Breaking HERO 6e - the Aid is too damn cheap.

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:32 pm

6e aid is 6 points per d6. It's still range touch, fade 5/turn, and 6e makes quite explicit Aaron Alston's 1990 clarification that Aid is an attack action.
So, let's say my group decides to convert everything in our Champions game over to 6e. Let's further say that I will be a player in the next arc, powers are capped at 60 active points/12d6 and that more than one of the characters on the team buys the maximum Blast as a power.
I am now faced with an option of what to buy. I can buy a 12d6 Blast or similar attack power, or I can buy a 10d6 Aid to Blast.
If I take the 12d6 Blast, then my attack action with it deals Hit Chance * ( 42 - Enemy_Defense ) damage
If I take the 10d6 Aid to blast, then my attack action allows a team member's blast to increase by 10d6 active points, or an average of 35, which is another 7d6, which averages out to +24.5 damage. Thus instead of attacking to deal Hit Chance * ( 42 - Enemy_Defense ) average damage I can cause a team member's next attack to deal Hit Chance * ( 42 + 24.5 - Enemy Defense ) average damage. So against any opponent with 18 or more defense (and enough Stun to survive the first attack), the 2-action combo of Aid + Blast is more damaging than the 2-action combo of Blast + Blast.
Not only is "18 or more defense" damn near every supervillan opponent in a champions game, but Aid has a fade rate of 5/Turn, so that's not one PC's next action, that's +24.5 damage per hit for their next SPD actions, and progressively lower Aided damage for 6* their SPD actions after that. This is a buff that usually pays for itself on the next single attack and then pays dividends for the rest of the combat.
The tradeoff for this is that an enemy isn't being attacked during the Aid phase and that Aid isn't ranged. So this is a losing proposition if I am giving up an attack which could deny an enemy actions (via stunning, entangle, disarm, KO) or if facing an enemy who has only small AoE attacks such that they can more effectively damage the PC group when teammates are adjacent. The first of those is gonna happen sometimes in superheroic, as superheroes do fight mooks, minions and agents a bit, but the second of those is vanishingly rare. So the risks of using this strategy are really low.
If instead, Steve had stuck with the FrED cost of 10/per 1d6, then a 60 active point Aid would only increase Blast damage by +4d6, so the trade off would be giving up a 42-defenses attack for +14 damage to the next SPD attacks - which only pulls ahead on the very next attack if facing opponents with Defenses above 28, but does pull even with 3 successful hits even against opponents with 0 Def. In this case, Aid is a better tactic against heavily armored foes and in longer fights, but Blast is better against lightly armored foes and in short fights - making both choices valid instead of one massively superior in the common case.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:35 pm

I haven't seen 6e yet. But Aid has always been broken. Always.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:39 pm

On the plus side, Mermaid titties on page 132.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Red_Rob
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Post by Red_Rob » Tue Aug 02, 2011 11:15 pm

HERO has so many little loopholes and tricks making any character at all forces you to adopt the Den's attitude to min-maxing: You decide how badly you want to rape the system and proceed from there. So, how far are you going to discount your powers with power disadvantages? How many powers you can't even use at the same time will you stuff into that Multipower?
Seeing as you'll have to run your character past the GM anyway you may as well just flat out ask him if he thinks the aid thing is stupid or a legitimate tactic.
Hell, for a +1 advantage you can make the points from aid fade at 5 points per hour, and another +1 advantage makes it affect 4 stats at once. You then increase the activation time to 5 minutes for a -2 limitation and BAM, you got everyone in the party an extra 35 points of Str, Dex, Con and Body that lasts all day.
Everything is broken in HERO, its just up to the GM to make sure all the characters abuse the rules to an equal level.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
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Ice9
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Post by Ice9 » Tue Aug 02, 2011 11:30 pm

Add is actually less broken than in 5E. Yes, the base price was lowered. However, Decreased Fade Rate was made more expensive, Expanded Effect was made more expensive, and the option to buy up the cap directly was removed (the new recommended method is extra dice of Aid, with Limited Power: Only to Increase Maximum). If you really wanted to push it, 5E Aid could pretty much double the strength of the entire party, at the cost of a few minutes preparation each morning.
In this specific example, of course boosting powers past the normal cap is strong. Many GMs would not consider doing so on a frequent basis to be kosher, any more than buying a combination of HA-boosting abilities that Voltron-ed together to 20d6 would be legit in a 12 DC game.
Overall though, HERO has never particularly enforced balance. Things are priced for normal usage, and if someone finds an edge case the solution is "don't do that".
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Ferret
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Post by Ferret » Wed Aug 03, 2011 2:24 pm

Can you still do a floating Megascale perk? I thought that was pretty fun.
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Psychic Robot
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Post by Psychic Robot » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:34 pm

any generic catch-all system is bad

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> > Chamomile wrote:Ant, what do we do about Psychic Robot?

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Thu Aug 04, 2011 12:14 am

The thing is you're way underselling the power of boosting an attack, because of knockback. Your example was a 12 die attack against an enemy with 18. That averages 5" of knockback and 5d6 of impact damage on the far end - no damage at all unless you roll well. But if you add 4 dice to the original attack? That's 4 more inches of knockback, and crucially four more dice of impact damage on the far end - which almost all goes to Stun.
Four bonus dice of damage doesn't do 14 more stun on a hit, it does 27 more stun on a hit.
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Ice9
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Post by Ice9 » Thu Aug 04, 2011 7:01 am

> Can you still do a floating Megascale perk? I thought that was pretty fun.

Yes, but it isn't as ridiculously good now.
They realized that the "trade-off" of Megascale was not really a trade-off, because everyone just used Multipower/Naked Advantage. So they repriced Megascale +1 higher (1m = 1km is +1 1/4) and said that it could be reduced to any extent you want (so you could say that 1m = 100m, or 36m, or even 1m). It's still handy, don't get me wrong, but only in the sense that any Naked Advantage is handy.
This does enable one new thing, which is that you can do:
Teleportation 1m, Megascale (1m = 10,000km; +2 1/4), 3 active points.
... and go anywhere in the world. I mean, you could still do it previously by using:
Multipower, 38 point reserve
2u Teleportation 5", Megascale (1" = 10,000km, can be scaled down; +1 1/2)
4u Teleportation 4", x125 non-combat
... although it might take a couple jumps. But the new way is much cheaper.
Last edited by Ice9 on Thu Aug 04, 2011 7:21 am, edited 8 times in total.
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UmaroVI
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Post by UmaroVI » Thu Aug 04, 2011 11:50 am

Aid is too cheap, yep. Our group came to the same conclusion, and bumped it up to 8/die. We also banned using any manuevers that apply OCV penalties with any powers that don't need to roll to hit (ie, no Rapid Attacking an Aid). This last one isn't as dumb as it sounds because many of those manuevers - such as rapid attack - also cause DCV penalties.
Barrier is the other "really needs a fixin'" power in 6E, we doubled the price of DEF and BODY for barriers.
On a more general note, I think these two are the only "really bad, must fix" parts of 6E. There are other things that can stand tweaking, but my view is that the goal of HERO balance is not to prevent people from making broken characters but rather to make broken characters easy for the GM to spot - since you can't possibly do the first in an open-ended system. If someone comes to you with shit like this:
1/2 d6 Ranged Killing Attack, Variable Advantage (NND: Life Support: Extreme Heat, NND: Flash Defense: Hearing, Penetrating x2, NND: Knockback Resistance; +1.75), Area of Effect One Hex Accurate (+1/2), Autofire 5 (+1.5), Does Body (+1), +1 Stun Multiplier (+.25)
You know damn well that they are fucking with you. You don't even have to know much about HERO to have a pretty good suspicion that they are fucking with you. It's not the sort of thing you can miss, and only realize is a balance problem after a few sessions.
By contrast, a MP with a 12d6 blast, a 10d6 Aid Blast, and a all-body no-defense Barrier doesn't look that bad; it's just 3 out of the book powers. But it's really bad.
Last edited by UmaroVI on Thu Aug 04, 2011 12:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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UmaroVI
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Post by UmaroVI » Thu Aug 04, 2011 11:54 am

> Ice9 wrote:

> > Can you still do a floating Megascale perk? I thought that was pretty fun.

> Yes, but it isn't as ridiculously good now.
> They realized that the "trade-off" of Megascale was not really a trade-off, because everyone just used Multipower/Naked Advantage. So they repriced Megascale +1 higher (1m = 1km is +1 1/4) and said that it could be reduced to any extent you want (so you could say that 1m = 100m, or 36m, or even 1m). It's still handy, don't get me wrong, but only in the sense that any Naked Advantage is handy.
> This does enable one new thing, which is that you can do:
> Teleportation 1m, Megascale (1m = 10,000km; +2 1/4), 3 active points.
> ... and go anywhere in the world. I mean, you could still do it previously by using:
> Multipower, 38 point reserve
> 2u Teleportation 5", Megascale (1" = 10,000km, can be scaled down; +1 1/2)
> 4u Teleportation 4", x125 non-combat
> ... although it might take a couple jumps. But the new way is much cheaper.

You actually can't quite do this: powers have a minimum base cost (usually 10 points, although the GM can vary it by campaign), so you can't get 1m of Teleport with +4 in advantages; you'd have to buy at least 10m before advantaging.
That said, it's not really THAT different and yeah, it's not super expensive to be able to go anywhere in the world.
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Ice9
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Post by Ice9 » Thu Aug 04, 2011 10:44 pm

IIRC, the base cost is an optional rule. And obviously not completely universal - some powers have a fixed cost below 10 AP, and I don't think many GMs would say "No, you can't have just 6m of Leaping, or 5 power defense". This might be a case it was used though.
Last edited by Ice9 on Thu Aug 04, 2011 10:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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