Hey!
I love the whole cyberpunk genre, especially in manga comics like Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Eden and Blame!
While its really easy to adapt most aspects of HQ i have problems assigning Strength and Mass abilities for cyborgs, androids and powerarmor. Has anybody here some suggestions for me, what numbers/masteries would seem to be appropiate?
Everybody knows what the first 4 masteries mean:
M=journeyman
M2=master
M3=hero
M4=beginning of godlike power (demigod like herkules maybe)

but beyond its getting difficult. Who has experiences with such people *lol*?
al the best
Christian

Der_Renegat wrote:
While its really easy to adapt most aspects of HQ i have problems assigning Strength and Mass abilities for cyborgs, androids and powerarmor. Has anybody here some suggestions for me, what numbers/masteries would seem to be appropiate?
Christian

For example a horse is large 5w while an elephant is large 18w

Well, it always comes down to a HQ-philosophy discussion....
I understand that all the ratings are just meaningful for the story and that you dont need an absolute scale, like you use to have in simulationist games.
But if you think about cyberpunk, its quite possible to have a lot of very different characters (powerwise) in your story, from mundane to really, really powerful (think: "Battle Angel Alita" with all its mad cyborgmonsters). So here you have a kind of a scale, that relates to your story and thus you have to come up with numbers.
For example: you are in a cyborg bar: you have normal biological humans, humans with implants (NeurotransmitterM3), humans with bionic arms (bionic armsM3), a full cyborg (mass 10M, artificial arms 10M3, plated bodyM3) and a monster cyborg-3m high (Huge M5??).
Surely you can narrate everthing, a jumbo jet falling on your head means you are just dead, no roll needed.
The whole idea for this topic was inspired when i read that post about the heroic scale here in this forum, where somebody assigned ratings for middle earth characters. I found it quite revealing, how powerful certain characters are, because it explained a lot of story details for me, for instance seeing how powerful gandalf might really be.
And it showed, its possible.
I have deducted some more meaning of masteries (and they are all from the HQ rulesbook):

M-journeyman
M2-master/among the best in the community
M3-great master, hero/among the best in the region
M4-M5-demigod/among the best in the country
M6-M8-ruler/founder over/of elementary aspects of the world (saint, magical lord)
M8-M12-creator of a „universe“ (view of world or actual world)



soru said:
„What can cause more of a problem in sf games is equipment. Players are going to expect to be able to walk into a shop and purchase a blaster or gauss pistol or starship, which really isn't handled well by the default 'pay 1hp get a new ability at 12' rule.“


Actually ist 13, not 12. But never the less, what do you think is the problem ???
I would give all equipment a keyword with abilities and a rating.
If you want your campaign to be heroic everybody can make full use of the equipment ratings, whenever he picks it up. Or you handle it like a magical object in HQ, that maybe has a very high rating but you don´t know yet how to fully use it. So you buy a new ability and raise it seperately.

all the best

Christian

Der_Renegat wrote:
I have deducted some more meaning of masteries (and they are all from the HQ rulesbook):

M-journeyman
M2-master/among the best in the community
M3-great master, hero/among the best in the region
M4-M5-demigod/among the best in the country
M6-M8-ruler/founder over/of elementary aspects of the world (saint, magical lord)
M8-M12-creator of a „universe“ (view of world or actual world)
Christian

Der_Renegat wrote:
soru said:
„What can cause more of a problem in sf games is equipment. Players are going to expect to be able to walk into a shop and purchase a blaster or gauss pistol or starship, which really isn't handled well by the default 'pay 1hp get a new ability at 12' rule.“

Actually ist 13, not 12. But never the less, what do you think is the problem ???
I would give all equipment a keyword with abilities and a rating.

Donald wrote:

Der_Renegat wrote:
Where did you find the latter? page 19 goes up to 1w4 which represents best in the world. I remember seeing some higher levels somewhere but that was for gods and their equals such as true dragons and true giants. I can't recall any of them going above w7 or w8 and that was for their best ability which wasn't necessarily particularly useful.

It's in the Game Aids section under Sample Resistances, p274 I think. Greater Gods and such go up to 1w12.

Personally, I would not get to worrried what a mastery actually means. I look on it as a relative scale. Sometimes I think of it as linear, sometimes logarithmic and sometimes exponential. Whatever is right for the game at that point.

If I have a setting where characters are immortal, 3000 years old and not bound to be unchanging by some "cosmic compromise", well HQ is the rule system to go with, because it is open ended. It all depends what is mutable within the setting.

Glorantha is Myth, so heroquests change Glorantha. Not every setting has that feature. Some purport to emulate realistic settings. I think that SF would actually scale to the Enterprise/ISD being a pretty major god - either craft is capable of devastating an entire world.

Sorry, I'm wandering of topic, so I'll stop there.

Cheers,

Graeme

As a narrator I wouldn't have a problem with a player buying a starship and trying to fly it with a pilot ability of 6 or even 13.

Mac Logo wrote: It's in the Game Aids section under Sample Resistances, p274 I think. Greater Gods and such go up to 1w12.

Personally, I would not get to worrried what a mastery actually means. I look on it as a relative scale. Sometimes I think of it as linear, sometimes logarithmic and sometimes exponential. Whatever is right for the game at that point.

soru wrote: For a SF game focusing on gear, it's probably a good idea to give equipment the same amount of emphasis as vanilla HQ gives to magic.
<snip>
Equipment skills could be affinities, say scientific equipment 3w1 with 3 feats: spectral analyser, environmental sampler, hyperspace tracker. Operating a different piece of gear encountered in play would mean an improv penalty, but it would only take 1hp to add it as a feat at your full affinity rating.

Donald wrote:
I'm not sure that the resistences are quite comparable with the levels of mastery for characters. I suspect they include augments and community support bonuses which for the gods are going to amount to two or three masteries in themselves.

Donald wrote: I like to understand the numbers so I can pick a number as required without having to look it up in the book.

Scripty wrote:

Donald wrote: I like to understand the numbers so I can pick a number as required without having to look it up in the book.

In this way, you can scale your challenges to the character's capabilities.

In this way, you can scale your challenges to the character's capabilities.

soru wrote:
Personally, I find this backwards.

....

So, for example, if for the purposes of your story you need a NPC than can unquestionably and self-evidently resist any direct attack by a band of experienced and fully augmented heros, then maybe you need to use a god, saint or greater spirit. No problemo, use one, there are plenty out there. That does a lot less damage to suspension of disbelief than suddenly having a random lunar official be mysteriously unkillable.

soru

Hello,

Everyone, be nice to one another.

Best,
Ron

That PC's pretty strong, but I think he'd have a tough time against a Giant... We'll make the Giant Strong 12W.

Mkay. So, I'm to take it that you can't see a preternatually strong 6' tall human taking on a 9' tall giant of average strength.

I'm thinking that your "suspension of disbelief" is rather finicky.

For examples of how even a normal man could take on a 9' tall giant, please reference:

David and Goliath
Conan (can't remember the story, but the picture's on the front of the book)
Sinbad
Theseus and the Minotaur
etc.
etc.

It seems to me that you're just being facetious here. It's obvious, to me, that you have some unfounded problems with the HeroQuest system. I'm not interested in making converts of disbelievers. Make up your own mind about the game.

I have given a fairly common sense and rational answer to your objection. It's at least on par with Elves in LotR's not aging and Superman flying in the air. If you don't buy it, that's fine but it is still a valid response and one that works for me and a number of other people.

If you don't think that a human with 1w strength should be able to take on a Giant of 12w strength, that's fine. You can run it that way in your setting. I have, however, seen 8 year old boys pull down 30 year old men in Aikido and have, myself, been thrown around by little old men who I could swear that I'd be able to kick their tails. My suspension of disbelief is a bit less stringent than yours, I suppose. GURPS may offer the level of "realism" that you seek. Personally, I prefer setting consistency over a subjective "realism". We are after all dealing with all sorts of fancies of the imagination...

It's obvious, to me, that you have some unfounded problems with the HeroQuest system.

Uh, dude (Soru), you attacked his methodology, and he just defended it. He never once said that his method was superior to yours, nor that you had to accept it. He just said, well, what you're saying in the last post. That you can do it either way effectively.

Read it again.

Mike

soru wrote:
HQ is by far my favorite game system. But I don't think I would like it the way you apparently run it.

...

In my opinion, it would be a mistake to forget that the HQ rules can also be used to create stories that do have, say, as much plausibilty and coherency as an average hollywood movie.

Your opinion may, of course, vary. But please try to avoid giving the impression that your way is the only way to run HQ, or that there is some vast weight of narrativist theory backing up your ruling that giants aren't really all that strong.

soru

Apologies for a bit of overuse of sarcasm and rhetoric.

I do think you'd be just fine in one of my games

I was presenting this as an alternative to having a big list of resistances and modifiers, which seems to be what you and DerRenegat are fishing for. If you are familiar with the ratings listed in the book itself, I personally don't see a need for an expanded "Book of Resistances". You might. That's fine. Make one.

Soru,

I think my perspective is quite a mainstream one, so this may or may not be of interest to you, depending on whether you want to support mainstream players in your games.

Playing in one of your games (at least once you have figured out whats going on, which might take a few sessions), you would have no idea how strong you yourself were, no idea how strong your opponent was, but nevertheless you could confidently be certain that you could beat them (at least if the GM was giving off 'this is a challenge' vibes, as opposed to 'this is a plot device').

Der_Renegat wrote:
In the manga Eden there is a big combatrobot, with a weapon in his arm. A kind of hydraulic ram, he uses to crash armor of enemyrobots/androids. One use and an armored head is smashed into pieces.
So, how strong is that? I have no idea.
Maybe its true, maybe i dont need to have an idea, all i need is calculating the difference in numbers i need for him, to beat any opponent i want him to beat, that is in my relevant story.
Maybe my mistakes comes from the idea to design characters for a world and not for a story.
Maybe i still cant get used to the idea, that designing worlds for HQ works different than in other rpg´s

Is there a quick and dirty way to assess the probabilities so that it becomes easy to say

"Your rating is X, I should have a tiny but non 0 chance of beating you, therefor my rating should be 1/n of X"

"Your rating is X, I should have a better than 50/50 but not automatic chance of beating you, therefor my rating should be N times X"

"Your rating is X, I should have a better than 50/50 but not automatic chance of beating you after I account for Y worth of augments therefor my base rating should be N times X less some function of Y"

I have a feeling there should be an easy rule of thumb along these lines, because HQ probabilities aren't really all that complicated, but the way masteries cancel and bump and so forth might make this harder.

It's pretty complicated becuse of the masteries. In general I tend to think in terms of increments of difference:

Difference of X has how much impact on the higher side winning?
5: significant, but not very
10: pretty significant
15: Higher side will win most of the time.
20: Higher side will predominate
30: Higher side is almost assured of winning
40 (w2): Lower side barely has a chance to win in some circumstances
60 (w3): Low side has a 1:400 to tie, but can't win.
80 (w4): high side wins, period

Hero Points are, of course, not being considered here.

Mike

Thanks for your help clarifying some of my points in earlier posts, Mike. My statement that Soru would have no problem in my games wasn't meant to be a prod. It was just a statement that I think he and I would get along/function just fine in each other's games. It seems Soru is taking more of a partisan position in this discussion. That's fine. But I'm often finding myself having to defend (or retract) statements or points that I didn't make (and wouldn't make for that matter).

The crux of this issue can be traced back to my response to the following statement:

Donald wrote: I like to understand the numbers so I can pick a number as required without having to look it up in the book.

I am seeing a discussion of Use Charts vs. Not Use Charts. Actually, the discussion should be framed as "Use Charts Exclusively" vs. "Get Familiar With Charts, Never Have to Look at Them Again" (unless you're completely stuck).

soru wrote: It seems at least one of us, and probably both of us, is misunderstanding the others positions. I would certainly never look any numbers up in a book during play.

soru wrote: I'm pretty strong, but not superhuman. I just beat a giant straight up in a tug of war, on a not especially good set of rolls, without even spending a hero point.

soru wrote: The numbers just said that hapenned, and I simply can't visualise it, so I can't narrate it. System breakdown.

Can you agree that this is some kind of problem, or are my concerns completely alien to you?

soru wrote: If my grasp of you position is right (and this is based from some of your posts to other threads, so could be way out or obselete), you would write down in your notes:

3. at this point, the player will be challenged to a tug of war by a giant somewhat stronger than them.

soru wrote: I think that approach is incoherent, because it selects a description (giant) before you know the number (10W). Exactly the same issue as saying 'I chop his head off, and bid 5AP'.

soru

I'm not reading you here. A sentence ago you said that you rolled a 1, the giant rolled a 20. That’s a pretty good roll in my book. You don’t really give clear numbers from what I can tell but

soru wrote:
The numbers were posted upthread, a starting pc with a high strength and a giant with less than a mastery advantage over them.

Thers a table somewhere on the hw-rules list that gives exact percentage chances, but I think those numbers give the giant something less than a 65% chance of winning, given that a full mastery is a 75% chance of a win.

So the human wins on a completely unexceptional roll, not an outrageous fluke.

soru

Your math is right, Scripty, but the 75% statement is a generalization, not a specific figure.

What you're not getting is that Soru made two statements. He gave the example of the one and twenty result as one that he would accept in terms of beating a giant. Then, separately (and I had to read it twice to understand, too), he's saying that the examples above where the player has around a 25% chance to win or so, breaks his SOD.

So basically what we have here is Soru disagreeing with your choice of differentiation of power.

That is, in creating the contest, you did say that it would only be stronger, but not overwhelmingly so. Whereas he expects a giant to be overwhelmingly strong. His assumption (incorrect) is that you choose that level because you don't care about the strength of the giant, and only care to set up a 25% chance to win.

Which isn't true. Scripty just has his own view of what makes for the difference. It's just a matter of opinion. To an extent it has to do with how much "outside influence" you think the dice represent in the modeling. If everything was all "outside influence" you could just flip a coin. If there was no "outside influence" then you'd just say the giant wins because he has the higher score. The HQ scale is somewhere in between.

Now, we could set that arbtrarily except that the rules do show some actual values in ralation to each other. If we want to be consistent with those at all, then we have to make the differences similar.

So, a difference of 15 points in one conflict has to be equal to the relative odds shift of the difference of 15 points in another conflict. Still, that leaves a lot of wiggle room. Enough wiggle room that, occasionally, a GM is going to make a choice that seems odd to some player. And that's all I think has happened here. Scripty has leaned a little farther into the "outside influences" than Soru finds comfortable.

No harm, no foul.

Mike

I don't think I can realy get my head round the difference between determining ability (or resistance) ratings from a universal scale, and determining it relative to a known value. Surely they're the same thing?

For example, hwo do you detemine a reference numeric scale, such as a strength scale? You do it by looking at the different things in the game that have strength scores (men, horses, elephants, giants, etc). You start with one of them (say a man) and assign it a numeric score, Then you take another (say a horse) and assign it a numeric core based on how you'd expect them to fare against each other. Then choose another and repeat the process. This is exactly the same process that is being proposed for the relativist method, it's just done in advance. Ultimately they're the same thing.

As for a character beating a giant in a tug of war, we just don't have enough context to know whether this is sensible or not. If you have been raising the character's strength every session for the last 20 sessions and he's now got a score of 5w2, then presumably he's already been tearing doors off walls and crushing golf balls with his bare hands anyway. Him beating a giant shouldn't be that much of a surprise - maybe unlikely but you know the guy's much stronger than the average joe. It's not out of the blue. Anyway maybe the giant was clumsy and just got caught off ballance.

I can see the text that tells me you guys are disagreeing, but I just can't see what the real root cause of the disagreement is yet.


Simon Hibbs

Mike Holmes wrote: What you're not getting is that Soru made two statements. He gave the example of the one and twenty result as one that he would accept in terms of beating a giant. Then, separately (and I had to read it twice to understand, too), he's saying that the examples above where the player has around a 25% chance to win or so, breaks his SOD.

So basically what we have here is Soru disagreeing with your choice of differentiation of power.

That is, in creating the contest, you did say that it would only be stronger, but not overwhelmingly so. Whereas he expects a giant to be overwhelmingly strong. His assumption (incorrect) is that you choose that level because you don't care about the strength of the giant, and only care to set up a 25% chance to win.

...

No harm, no foul.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: I don't think I can realy get my head round the difference between determining ability (or resistance) ratings from a universal scale, and determining it relative to a known value. Surely they're the same thing?

Get off it Scripty. Soru's said repeatedly that he does do things on the fly. The difference between you two is minimal, and has to do with the fact that he wants more "proof" of the validity of the result than you seem to need.

Scripty: I don't want to always have to refer to a chart. So I make stuff up on the fly.

Soru: I don't want my suspension of disbelief ruined, so I make sure that the results are reasonable.

Note how neither of you are actually attacking anything that the other person is saying. You're both attacking what you see as implications - but which aren't there. It's getting old. We all get what each of you are saying.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Get off it Scripty.

...

Note how neither of you are actually attacking anything that the other person is saying. You're both attacking what you see as implications - but which aren't there. It's getting old. We all get what each of you are saying.

Mike

You didn't attack Soru, you mischaracterized his argument badly. You were saying that he had implied that you should always look things up in charts. When he distinctly said that he doesn't always do that, nor is that what he's advocating. You say it's using a civil tone, but it sure seems to come off to me as having exactly the same tone that Soru used previously that annoyed you so much. You're both overstating the other guy's case to have something to attack.

I'm not going to go line by line - that's bad form. But you aren't being attacked any more so, if I were you, I'd quit acting like you are. Now, I've probably overstepped my authority with these suggestions, so I'm getting out of this debate now.

If you still have questions as to what I mean by "outside influcences" (and I meant influences in-game that weren't directly involved in the conflict, not metagame influences), please contact me about it in PM. I'll be glad to go on there. But not here.

Mike

In the interest of killing this dead horse, I have PM'd you, Mike. I'm still at a loss. But see no further use in going on with this on the forum.

Just for the record, Mike's pretty much on the ball about my position.

To answer scripty's question:

Again (for the third time) what's the rating of the human and giant in this phantom contest?

By applying my suggestion, you're not going to be making Kobolds at Strong 10W to challenge a player with Strong 7W. That would be silly. No, but if you had a Giant NPC and (here's the important part) KNEW YOUR CHARACTERS' CAPABILITIES, then you could say...

hmmm.... That PC's pretty strong, but I think he'd have a tough time against a Giant... We'll make the Giant Strong 12W.

soru wrote:

By applying my suggestion, you're not going to be making Kobolds at Strong 10W to challenge a player with Strong 7W. That would be silly. No, but if you had a Giant NPC and (here's the important part) KNEW YOUR CHARACTERS' CAPABILITIES, then you could say...

hmmm.... That PC's pretty strong, but I think he'd have a tough time against a Giant... We'll make the Giant Strong 12W.

I was under the impression you were defending the figures you yourself posted (i.e. starting pc 7W, giant 12W). If you agree with me that they are not the best ones to use, then can we end this discussion?

soru

Hey, Christian, if you're still reading, did we answer your question in there somewhere?

Mike

Hey Mike !

hehe :-D

there is always so much more to learn...*smile*
and i did!

all the best
yours
Christian

Let me give a little more detailed answer.
I got into HW about summer 2001 when i heard of the german edition.
I m dedicating a lot of time understanding this game and i very often experience difficulties, still after all this time owning it, thinking about it, writing adventures or reading dicussions at forums like this or the yahoo group.
Part of the difficulties come from my roleplaying background, with games that worked totally different than HQ.
Another part is that even with the new HQ edition some topics are still hard to understand.
And another problem i must admit i have, is understanding other people in all these forums, for me its about understanding a game and getting inspired and not so much about my ego or my personal view on a „world“. So sometimes i find it really tiring that 90% of a discussion is just rubbish. I m about information and if i read a thread thats 90% about personal debates i m often disappointed. But i guess thats what its like. I just try to ignore everything thats too personal.
So i opened three new threads, all related for me in certain questions and as a summary i got some very good new insights, yes!
About my initial question that made me create this thread: well, it did not turn up the way i expected, but in the end all my questions were answered (i guess...).
I guess my biggest misunderstanding was the whole rating and mastery thing. I m always looking for a deeper meaning, like five masteries make a demigod, but this is not really a rule but more of an aid, i think. The numbers are actually very relative, i guess ,depending on the story.
Another problem is probably how you imagine your gameworld. Everybody has another cyberpunk world, what you like and what you dislike. Also i dont think everybody has read the manga books im getting inspired from.
„Eden“ is very much in the near future and „Ghost in the shell“ even a bit further in the future, technologically speaking.
„Blame!“ is my overmanga, it blasts me everytime. But its really posthuman, technologically speaking.
„Battle Angel Alita“ is a mixture of both, more comic-like, with all those cyborgfreaks.
Most people will perhaps know the cyberpunk genre from rpg´s like „Shadowrun“ or „Cyberpunk“.
So in the end you have to design your world all by yourself (or use a published one).
I guess you dont have to be able to imagine everything or look for hidden powerlevels in the masteries, because all that you need to understand is how the numbers relate to each other and thus create powerlevels for your adventure. I knew that before, but also i forget about it a lot, maybe because other rpg´s worked differently.
all the best
Christian