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Warning: Alternates Active while base Power is active

C

Cobalt-Blue

Member
Using Super Powers Companion 2, whenever I apply the Switchable (primary) and the Switchable (Alternate) I get a warning that My alternates are active while my base power is active. Is this a bug or am I doing something incorrectly?
 
Cobalt-Blue said:
Using Super Powers Companion 2, whenever I apply the Switchable (primary) and the Switchable (Alternate) I get a warning that My alternates are active while my base power is active. Is this a bug or am I doing something incorrectly?
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If I recall, you have to actively turn off one of them; it defaults to both of them being toggled on.
 
Check on the "In Play" tab. You should only have one of the primary or alternate powers active at one time but I think the default might be to turn on the checkboxes for any power when you create it so you'll see that warning. It just wants to have only 1 (or none) of those powers in a given switchable set active at a time so it's probably showing any trait changes that might be affected but only by the right power(s).
 
Thank you. That took care of the problem. I'm switching from Mutants and Masterminds to Savage Worlds to see how it works. I'm impressed so far.
 
Cool, tell us about it. I am a fan of M&M (my first game with Hero Lab). I have not gotten around to playing Supers with SW yet but having the data available will be great.
 
I will let you know how it goes. I used Mutants and Master Minds to define characters from two of my published novels. Now I'm trying it with Savage Worlds. We'll see how it works out.
 
I'll be interested to hear about it, too; one of the things I find a warning sign is that I've heard a disproportionate number of SW dissatisfaction stories coming from people using Supers. I have a suspicion why that is, but it can't be anything but a suspicion.
 
Paragon said:
I'll be interested to hear about it, too; one of the things I find a warning sign is that I've heard a disproportionate number of SW dissatisfaction stories coming from people using Supers. I have a suspicion why that is, but it can't be anything but a suspicion.
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I'm curious as to your suspicion. I've found some limitations so far. I'm learning the tutorial in HL to try and fix some problems that are created by it. If you don't to publicly state them, please share them with me in a PM.
 
I think I would encourage folks to voice their concerns or any issues they run into publicly. In a few cases it's just not being used to some of the ways Hero Lab itself does things (like using that In Play tab, such as in the original post here) but others might just be a bug or maybe something that could be improved in general and I think those are always useful to get out there.
 
zarlor said:
I think I would encourage folks to voice their concerns or any issues they run into publicly. In a few cases it's just not being used to some of the ways Hero Lab itself does things (like using that In Play tab, such as in the original post here) but others might just be a bug or maybe something that could be improved in general and I think those are always useful to get out there.
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I don't know if Paragon has a ob with another company or even with Lone Wolf or Pinnacle or Green Ronin and may not be in a position to speak freely on a public forum. I am interested in hearing what s/he has to say.
 
If it's superhero game, I've played it, all the way back to Champions 1st Edition and Villains and Vigilantes. I have some favorites, and some not-so-favorites. Some are overly complicated, others are overly simplified. Probably among the best are Mutants and Master Minds, Hero System, and my personal favorite was the D20 version of Silver Age Sentinels. But since I'm looking for something with a computer based character generator, and leaves pretty much Hero, M&M, SW, and 4th Edition GURPS Supers (which is just a disaster and unintelligibe--and that's coming from a huge fan of 3rd edition.)
 
Well, its not a problem with HL, so its not entirely relevant here, but--

One of the features that provides an interesting dynamic in Savage Worlds is the exploding dice. Its also potentially a problematic one, but because most of the time you're only rolling two dice, the likelyhood of getting a massive open-ended roll is low.

And then there's Supers. Where you can, without too much difficulty, be rolling six dice for damage at one time. I can see where this could produce some relatively low incidence (but still too common) results where people with avowedly enough Toughness find they really don't--but if they improve it (and there's only so much room to do so) they suffer from having such a high value normal opponents can't touch them. So GMs discourage it. And then the players end up feeling much too brittle.
 
Wow. It's too bad you live in Kentucky. We're very similar. More or less the same here. I still have my first edition Champions book.
I like Hero for character generation, but it's a total nightmare for combat. Glaciers move faster (but you gotta love that speed table...).
For combat, Savage Worlds rules.
GURPS was my favorite system for years, but it never worked for superheroes. However, once I played Savage Worlds it's hard for me to play GURPS any more for anything.
I've never done M&M, and Silver Age Sentinels turned me off with the three stat system.
 
Paragon said:
Well, its not a problem with HL, so its not entirely relevant here, but--

One of the features that provides an interesting dynamic in Savage Worlds is the exploding dice. Its also potentially a problematic one, but because most of the time you're only rolling two dice, the likelyhood of getting a massive open-ended roll is low.

And then there's Supers. Where you can, without too much difficulty, be rolling six dice for damage at one time. I can see where this could produce some relatively low incidence (but still too common) results where people with avowedly enough Toughness find they really don't--but if they improve it (and there's only so much room to do so) they suffer from having such a high value normal opponents can't touch them. So GMs discourage it. And then the players end up feeling much too brittle.
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I can see where that will be a problem. I tend to play out my plot-lines with my wife using a game system. I can see her complaining about a character she developed in M&M suddenly being "brittle". The problem I'm having is creating characters that are "broad in power" instead of deep. I'm trying to create an edge that can be purchased to grant extra Super Power points. Haven't quite got the hang of the editor yet. Had to uninstall HL and reinstall it once already because I screwed up the generator. (Somehow I ended up with starting 4 color heroes with 168 points. I'm still not sure how that happened.) The more I kept trying to fix it, the more the starting points climbed.
 
CapedCrusader said:
Wow. It's too bad you live in Kentucky. We're very similar. More or less the same here. I still have my first edition Champions book.
I like Hero for character generation, but it's a total nightmare for combat. Glaciers move faster (but you gotta love that speed table...).
For combat, Savage Worlds rules.
GURPS was my favorite system for years, but it never worked for superheroes. However, once I played Savage Worlds it's hard for me to play GURPS any more for anything.
I've never done M&M, and Silver Age Sentinels turned me off with the three stat system.
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I'm not sure where you live. I didn't care for the SAS Tri-stat system, but I LOVED the D20 version of it. I tried running a Tri-Stat BESM game that we finally had to abandon because the players figured out how to break the system. But there were some good story-telling times in that one--including the roving gangs of boy-bands having dance offs in weird twist on the West-Side Story plot.

What's happening is that I'm doing a reboot on several of my novel universes and doing my own version of Amalgam to clean up several plot lines and start an entirely new storyline with some old fan-favorites. If this works out the way I'm hoping it will, I may approach Pinnacle about doing a source-book for the setting.
 
As far as damage vs defense in Savage Worlds superheroes, I agree it takes a bit of work to balance. It's not as easy to plot how much defense you need versus how much damage is being dealt. Then you throw in the Heavy Armor rules, and it gets fun. I've played Supers in SW a lot more than I've run it.
We've got a guy in one of my groups that likes to over-analyze everything. He did a work up on exploding dice, and it was his contention that it did not add that much of an advantage. While his numbers are solid (they always are), it doesn't feel like they tell the whole story. It feels like it happens more often than his numbers say, and it certainly produces more of a reaction when it happens (as opposed to rolling more dice). It's just exciting. It makes the GM's job tougher, because of the tendency for characters to get lucky and one-shot your bad guys. I recall being concerned during a Deadlands game about throwing a Werewolf at them when they had a distinct lack of silver weapons, and then the Huckster blew it out of it's socks with a Bolt spell first round.
Also - a word on the term "exploding" that always makes me chuckle. The term from Savage Worlds is "Acing", but I've rarely heard anyone call it that. They always say "explode". The term explode is from 7th Sea. Although, in the Second Edition, they've unfortunately limited when dice can explode rather severely. But that's what everyone says.
 
CapedCrusader said:
As far as damage vs defense in Savage Worlds superheroes, I agree it takes a bit of work to balance. It's not as easy to plot how much defense you need versus how much damage is being dealt. Then you throw in the Heavy Armor rules, and it gets fun. I've played Supers in SW a lot more than I've run it.
We've got a guy in one of my groups that likes to over-analyze everything. He did a work up on exploding dice, and it was his contention that it did not add that much of an advantage. While his numbers are solid (they always are), it doesn't feel like they tell the whole story. It feels like it happens more often than his numbers say, and it certainly produces more of a reaction when it happens (as opposed to rolling more dice). It's just exciting. It makes the GM's job tougher, because of the tendency for characters to get lucky and one-shot your bad guys. I recall being concerned during a Deadlands game about throwing a Werewolf at them when they had a distinct lack of silver weapons, and then the Huckster blew it out of it's socks with a Bolt spell first round.
Also - a word on the term "exploding" that always makes me chuckle. The term from Savage Worlds is "Acing", but I've rarely heard anyone call it that. They always say "explode". The term explode is from 7th Sea. Although, in the Second Edition, they've unfortunately limited when dice can explode rather severely. But that's what everyone says.
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I sort of figured that was what it was. Since I've only read 7th Sea and not played it, I tend to think of it as acing. I've had games do that to me before. A critical hit and then a critical failure once when a character tossed a jet at a villain ended the whole adventure as it took out the main bad-guy in a single shot. And it was a female character's revenge on her boyfriend for accidentally shooting her in the face with a laser because he was caught in the blast too.
 
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