So, last time in my Heroes Unlimited character creation series the power of science managed to create a vaguely competent rogue character in a system that is incredibly unkind to rogues. That was fun. Now, though, we've got the Hardware power category.
I have Words about this power category.
So, Hardware characters are Heroes Unlimited's crafting class, and if you've ever seen the kinds of rules Kevin Siembieda writes for crafting you can already see where this is going. It's already a bad sign when the third paragraph of the category description outright tells you that
anyone can get the appropriate skills and make the same shit that your superpower's supposed to be about making. It gets worse when you look at the actual rules and realize that, for instance, your chance of making a custom computer from entirely off-the-shelf parts is 53% and it takes you an average of 2-3 weeks to finish it. Oh, and your electronics construction skill only goes up by 1% per level so it will
never be any good.
Oh, but Hardware characters get a bonus nobody else gets! They can raise their special Hardware skills above 100%, so they can soak more of those penalties.
Eventually. After
multiple real time years of playing your worthless character at the XP rate Kevin expects people to use. Oh, and the example he gives uses a hypothetical skill of 135%, which is
actually impossible for any of these skills.
Oh yeah, and this is
after Kevin buffed Hardware characters for second edition. In first edition you get a starting percentage for your Hardware skills and
that's fucking it. By which I mean Hardware characters in first edition
do not get better at their special skills as they level up. The rules in second edition are Kevin's idea of fixing them.
I know Kevin doesn't exactly like when people "ruin" his games by doing things he didn't plan for, but seriously man, what the fuck is this bullshit?
On a related note, there was one FATAL and Friends thread on Something Awful where the topic of Palladium's brewing skill (which
specifically doesn't apply to fancier types of alcohol because I guess letting players just make wine would be overpowered or some shit) came up right around the same time that one of the devs for Myriad Song confirmed in the thread that yes, a starting character in that game who's focused on crafting is in fact meant to be able to just build anything in the book out of the gate. Their justification for this, which I absolutely agree with, was that
crafters should be good at crafting. I feel like that's the thing Kevin doesn't get and the main reason crafters suck in Palladium. He's too focused on making sure they can't do anything that will break the kinds of games he likes to run to realize that he's making them spectacularly unfun from the perspective of actually trying to play them.
So, our tools are shit, but what can we do with them?
Well, Hardware is the first power category I'm going to spend more than one episode on because it has four different "areas of expertise" as Kevin calls them. There's the Electrical Genius, who can hotwire all sorts of shit that you aren't typically described as hotwiring when you break into it, hack computers, and as mentioned earlier build a computer out of off-the-shelf parts in three weeks or less. Then there's the Mechanical Genius, whose big thing is being able to make what the game refers to as super vehicles...and you're already gonna have one when the game starts so why even bother with the skill? Then we've got the Analytical Genius, who can figure out how any sort of technological or magical
anything works and use it (and whose skills actually sort of work, due to this part originating from something Wayne Breaux wrote). Lastly, we've got the Weapons Expert, whose thing is building, modifying, and shooting guns. I'm not gonna go over all four of these because the first three are almost the same class, but the Weapons Expert is different enough to be worth a full episode.
For today, though, I'm gonna be making an Analytical Genius, because they're the best of the first three. I originally thought to do a Mechanical Genius because they can make super vehicles, but Analytical can do that too.
Stats aren't particularly great at IQ 9, ME 7, MA 7, PS 9, PP 12, PE 15, PB 10, Spd 13. At least Dr. Torque (who I've already named and come up with a general outline for because I've been planning for Hardware for a while now) has loads of PE to help her out, but I was kinda hoping I'd at least get an IQ bonus on the one character who has nothing else going for her beyond skills.
Her initial HP roll is a 4 for a pre-skill total of 19, and as a Hardware character she gets 35 SDC.
For Dr. Torque's education I rolled a bachelor's degree, which means depending on where she lives she might get in legal trouble for using a protected title she doesn't qualify for in her codename. Not that she cares. At any rate, as a Hardware character she actually loses one of the skill programs she'd normally get from her education in order to cover her Hardware skills, though as an Analytical Genius she gets it right back.
Actually, the sheer amount of skills she gets as an Analytical Genius makes choosing three skill programs difficult. I do, however, need to make sure she gets the skills needed to actually drive her supercar and use its systems, which means I need to include the Pilot: Advanced skill program. She can't make the most of this program because she isn't allowed to actually learn any advanced piloting skills, but she can at least benefit from the rest of what it offers.
For the record, the only characters who are allowed to get advanced piloting skills outside of the military are the ones who go to trade school or get a doctorate. Yes, you can totally become a doctor of helicopter piloting in the world of Heroes Unlimited.
The main benefit of taking the advanced piloting program is that it's the only way Dr. Torque can get the Weapon Systems skill, which lets her get a bonus to use the guns she'll be putting in her supercar. It also gives a 50% skill level in Read Sensory Equipment, which means she only fails to comprehend what the dots on a radar screen are half the time. Beyond that, she also gets the Pilot Race Car skill, which isn't actually about driving race cars but rather
anything that goes at more than 120 mph,
whether or not it's actually going that fast. Maybe if it worked like that in real life we'd have fewer Lamborghinis and Porsches going to rich idiots who only want them as status symbols and can't actually appreciate them.
She also grabs the business and domestic skill programs. The latter includes Computer Operation, which says some interesting things about who must've been handling the online side of the business in the Siembieda household at the time this was written, but it also means that she has a whole 55% in cooking. Yes, you need a degree to be able to successfully not burn your lunch more than half the time.
The extra skills from being an Analytical Genius are
absolutely bonkers, by the way. Almost everything even remotely science-y is included, with the baffling exception of Basic Electronics despite that being a prerequisite for some of this stuff. Thankfully it also comes with six secondary skills (in addition to the ten Dr. Torque already has from her education!) so that particular omission is easily fixed. And since it also gives me a replacement for the skill program she didn't get on account of her Hardware skills, I don't need to waste the good bonuses on my Physical program! It's a shame skills suck in Palladium or this would actually be really good.
Those 16 secondary skills let me polish off everything else I wanted from regular piloting skills, all the physical skills I wanted, Basic Electronics so the build is legal, and a few weapon proficiencies for the road. Really 16 secondary skills is more than anyone should really need, especially with all the other crap we get from education and being a Hardware character.
Now we add Dr. Torque's Hardware skills. The big one is Analyze and Operate Devices, which lets her figure out how absolutely anything under the sun works and then use it. And by anything, I do mean
anything. She even starts out able to make most of the rolls the game suggests reasonably well out of the gate, which as mentioned before is evidence that this class wasn't Kevin Siembieda's idea. Her second special skill is Build/Modify Armour, which sounds very random but it does mean that she can make better body armour than what anyone else can buy, including a special kind that doesn't use the armour rating rules and instead just acts as extra SDC. She can also put concealed guns into her armour, which is actually pretty cool. She also gets the Communications: Electronic Countermeasures (Jamming) skill, which is even more random but I guess maybe you might roll it once or twice over the course of a campaign? The description talks about using it for guerilla warfare so I assume it's copied from somewhere else, as is the Palladium way. Presumably Kevin pasted it in because I can't imagine it making enough sense to be part of Breaux's original idea.
Next we're told that our character has a workshop that they've spent 2d4x10,000 dollars outfitting. I honestly couldn't tell you the point of this roll, but I did it and I guess Dr. Torque spent $70,000 on her tools. There's no mechanical effect whatsoever for rolling low or high on this so I guess she just got a really shitty deal for whatever reason.
Now we get to roll a budget, and on an 80 Dr. Torque had $2 million to spend on whatever stuff she's already built. The book suggests that the budget might be enough to build a "modest" exoskeleton using the robotics rules, which is just hilarious if you've actually read the robotics rules, but it's a lot better for putting together a super vehicle.
The first thing we need to do with Dr. Torque's budget is have her make some armour. Her skill lets her build any armour in the book but with an extra 10% SDC (or 25%, but that comes with combat penalties) and 2 more armour rating, all at a cost of 10% of what it costs to buy. It also lets her install integrated weapons in her armour, with the GM being the final arbiter of what's allowed. As such, I give her two suits of enhanced class 4 armour, each with an integrated AMT Hardballer pistol. The game gives no guidance on how much the added weapon costs, so I just acted as though she's bolting regular mass-produced guns to her gear and thus used their full price. I also picked up two sets of that special concaled armour. Regular class 4 armour already has an AR of 17 and 280 SDC, and Dr. Torque's enhancements boost that to an AR of 19 and 308 SDC. She could potentially tank a heavy machine gun on full auto with that kind of gear!
(Mind you, if the gunner got to fire again she'd be dead, but still.)
Next up it's time to make the Torquemobile, because you just
know it needs to be called that. The rules for this are taken directly from Road Hogs, which is the vehicle expansion for After the Bomb (which itself was originally an expansion for TMNT and Other Strangeness until Palladium lost the license for that, but that's another story). Since After the Bomb is a post-apocalyptic furry RPG there's a bunch of stuff in the rules that's more suited to a Mad Max-style environment than a superhero story. For instance, the section on armour opens as follows:
"Having weapons is nice. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other people on the road with similar ideas. To keep them from putting holes in characters and vehicles, you'll need armour." - Erick Wujcik as reprinted by Kevin Siembieda, Heroes Unlimited page 140
There's also plenty of stuff about how you're supposedly salvaging and repairing the vehicle, and there's one particular option you need to buy for your car to have a tachometer. All of which makes sense in the post-apocalypse, but is significantly more absurd in the late Nineties.
Anyway, before anything else we need a body for the car. To me the best option is probably a sports car, which is reasonably tough and gets a discount when buying its maximum speed up.
After that we need to buy its speed up, which the rules are quick to remind us means more than just buying an engine. This system classifies vehicle speed into a list of speed classes with higher classes being faster. As mentioned before this is where sports cars get an advantage because their engines cost less than regular cars from speed class 14 (top speed of 210 mph) on. I have enough budget that there's really no reason
not to just go for the maximum, which is speed class 26 and represents a maximum speed of 600 mph and a cruising speed of 160 mph.
Armour is pretty simple, but you need to buy it separately for the car itself and the passengers. Heavy vehicle armour doesn't set us back a whole lot, and gives an AR of 18 with 1,400 SDC. Passenger armour isn't as good, but making it heavy and using plexiglass windows gives the passenger compartment an AR of 14 with 450 SDC.
Weapons are kinda limited, and a lot of them don't have ammo costs listed. As such, I stick with a 7.62 mm machine gun.
I also get a bunch of optional systems. Specifically, I replace the regular seats with ejection seats, install smokescreen capabilities, add an alarm and tamper-proof locks, install a radar, armour the tires, install a stereo system (yes, you do have to buy this), add an automatic drink dispenser (which can dispense exactly two kinds of drinks, each chosen from a different list—clearly we need to stop those pesky munchkins from having both soft drinks
and fruit juice available at the same time), an engine readout package (which includes all the shit you'd expect your car to already have, including a tachometer so I guess if you don't buy this you have to figure out when to shift by listening to the engine). The last two things I install are a super fuel efficiency upgrade that makes the car use 10% as much gas (with no rules for how much it uses normally, of course—what, did you expect the vehicle rules to be complete or something?) and an oil slick dispenser.
All that didn't even even cost 200 grand, so I'm gonna need some other cash sink. Since I already gave Dr. Torque Pilot Airplane, let's go with a plane. Amusingly enough, a chassis for a twin engine transport plane only costs $80,000 so I guess the TorquePlane's gonna be a DC-3. I spend a cool million bucks giving it a speed class of 27 and a max speed of 640 mph. I then give the plane heavy armour for the body, cabin, both engines, and fuel tanks. For the plane's weapons I go with an autocannon and a set of ten missile launchers. I further equip it with chaff launchers, uber-fancy luxury accommodations, a pressurized cabin, and a radar targeting computer. That leaves me with $30,280 for whatever else I want.
I honestly don't know how the fuck much the game wants you to pay for ammo for the autocannon I bought for the plane, so I guess it just sits there looking scary. I do, however, make an educated guess that the 7.62mm machine gun uses regular 7.62mm rifle ammo since real machine guns of that type do. I also grab a fuckton of ammo for Dr. Torque's integrated pistol and a few suitably corny accessories. Then I grab some high-end computers because I have the money and it makes sense, and I also make Dr. Torque the first character I've made for this series who has a cell phone!
The computer prices are interesting, because the profile for a high-quality desktop computer says it costs $4,000 which I can actually see a sufficiently fancy pre-built computer costing these days, while the listed price for a high-end laptop is a much less reasonable $6,500. I honestly don't know what a good laptop would set you back in 1998 but I can't imagine it'd be
that much more than an equivalent desktop.
For background rolls Dr. Torque is the first born of her unspecified number of siblings, her weight is listed as "obese" and she's short, the disposition roll says she's a schemer and gambler, she has $6,000 in the bank, her land of origin is "Mexico or South America," and she comes from a lower class family in a small city or large town. Since I already listed English as the only language she knows that Land of Origin result limits the places she can be from that make sense. I'm gonna say her name's Linda Carter and she's from Guyana, because that's one of the more sensible countries a South American person who only speaks English could potentially come from.
So, how does Dr. Torque stack up? She's about as good as she could've been, honestly. Literally the only reason she has the plane is because I needed to burn a lot of money and while I could've also given the car a hover mode she couldn't get the necessary piloting skill. Her custom armour does a lot of heavy lifting, and the fancy vehicles are handy too. Other than that, her only real asset is a massive list of skills that are mostly useless outside of her unique options. In the end, her ability to contribute will fluctuate wildly based on how much unique stuff she ends up finding, which tragically leaves her as something of a "Mother, May I?" character since that's entirely up to the GM.
Still, maybe she could get her hands on enough money to build a robot. Yeah, just wait until she manages to scrounge up a cool 20 million bucks or so...
Next time, we'll take a look at the Weapons Expert and their mutant power of...small guns? Yeah, whatever you say, game.
Character Sheet:
Name: Linda Carter
Hero Name: Dr. Torque
Age 24
Gender: Female
Alignment: Scrupulous
Level: 1
XP: 0
IQ: 9
ME: 7
MA: 7
PS: 19 (+4)
PP: 14
PE: 20 (+10%/+3)
PB: 10
Spd: 31
HP: 24
SDC: 87 (+40 from concealed armour)
AR: 19
Armour SDC: 308
Attacks per Melee: 5
Melee Damage: +4
Parry: +3
Dodge: +3
Roll with Punch: +10
Pull Punch: +3
Initiative: +2
Knockout Punch: 20
Pin/Incapacitate: 18-20
Save vs Coma: +10%
Save vs Magic: +3
Save vs Poison: +3
Power Category: Hardware
Area of Expertise: Analytical Genius
Money Spent on Workshop: $70,000
Budget: $30,280/$2 million
Education: Bachelor's Degree (- 1 skill program)
Skill Programs: Business (+20%), Pilot: Advanced (+20%), Domestic (+20%), Physical (+10%)
Secondary Skills: 16
Skills:
Acrobatics (70%/70%/80%/60%/+15%/+5%)
Advanced Mathematics (75%)
Analyze and Operate Devices (80%)
Anthropology (30%)
Art (45%)
Astrophysics (40%)
Athletics
Basic Electronics (30%)
Basic Mathematics (65%)
Biology (40%)
Body Building & Weight Lifting
Boxing
Build/Modify Armour (80%)
Business & Finance (55%)
Chemistry (50%)
Chemistry: Analytical (45%)
Climbing (60%)
Communications: Electronic Countermeasures (Jamming) (70%)
Computer Operation (60%)
Computer Programming (40%)
Computer Repair (35%)
Cook (55%)
Dance (50%)
Electrical Engineer (45%)
Gymnastics (60%/70%/70%/80%/+5%/+5%)
Hand to Hand: Martial Arts (counts as 3 secondary skill picks)
Horsemanship (50%)
Intelligence (42%)
Law (general) (45%)
Language: English (98%)
Literacy: English (98%)
Mechanical Engineer (40%)
Navigation (70%)
Paramedic (50%)
Pilot Airplane (70%)
Pilot Automobile (60%)
Pilot Motorcycle (60%)
Pilot Race Car (75%)
Pilot Truck (40%)
Prowl (35%)
Radio: Basic (65%)
Read Sensory Equipment (50%)
Research (70%)
Robot Electronics (40%)
Robot Mechanics (45%)
Running
Sewing(60%)
Weapon Systems (60%)
Weapons Engineer (40%)
WP Automatic Pistol
WP Automatic & Semi-Automatic Rifles
WP Heavy Weapons
WP Sub-Machinegun
Wrestling
Money: $14,160
Items:
2 suits of upgraded (+10% SDC; +2 AR) class 4 armour w/integrated AMT Hardballer
2 suits Hardware - Analytical concealed armour (40 SDC each)
Torquemobile (super car; stats below)
TorquePlane (super plane; stats below)
2,000 7.62 mm rifle rounds
2,000 .45 ACP rounds
3 magazine clip pounches (automatic pistol/4 clips)
100 magazine clips (7 round/.45 ACP)
Web belt
Cell phone
Basic phone with answering machine
High end personal computer with flat screen monitor, colour printer, and modem
High end laptop computer
Torquemobile Stats:
Body: Sports Car (300 SDC/2 seats/1,300 lb. max load/1 turret max)
Speed Class: 26 (600 mph max speed/160 mph cruise speed)
Vehicle Armour: Heavy (AR 18/1,400 SDC)
Passenger Armour: Heavy w/plexiglass windows (AR 14/450 SDC)
Weapons: 7.62 mm medium machine gun
Optional Parts:
-2 Ejection seats
-Smokescreen
-Theft alarm system
-Thief-proof locks
-Basic radar system
-Armoured tires (AR 10/20 SDC)
-Stereo system
-Refreshment dispenser (coffee and soft drinks)
-Engine readout package
-Super fuel efficiency
-Oil slick
TorquePlane Stats:
Body: Twin Engine Transport (500 SDC/2 crew (48 people)/16,000 max load)
Speed Class: 27 (640 mph max speed)
Vehicle Armour: Heavy (AR 12/900 SDC)
Crew Compartment Armour: Heavy w/plexiglass windows (AR 15/550 SDC)
Engine Armour: Heavy for both (AR 14/400 SDC)
Fuel Compartment Armour: Heavy (AR 14/400 SDC)
Weapons:
-Autocannon
-10 Anti-Aircraft Missiles
Optional Parts:
-2 Anti-missile chaff dispensers
-Luxury accommodation
-Pressurized cabin
-Radar targeting computer
Background Info:
Birth Order: First Born
Weight: Obese
Height: Short
Disposition: Schemer; gambler who likes to take chances
Life Savings: $6,000
Land of Origin: Mexico or South America
Childhood Environment: Suburb, a small city or a large town
Social/Economic Background: Laborer/lower class
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