Re: [HOE] Running the perfect HoE Campaign

[Lister2500@aol.com]

<<So Try it people (I know almost none of you have ever played in a party without any AB's).  Make an entire damned party of HoE mundanes, and put them in an abomination filled city hunted by an undead Combine cyborg. Let me tell you, that will up every factor of the game a notch or twelve.>>

I've gotta say I recently had the pleasure of running a couple of adventures with a posse consisting entirely of norms. That was one brutal game. Between a nasty mutie gang, a group of 25 walkin' dead, and an omnipresent gore storm, the players were definitely fearing for their characters' lives. Quite honestly, it probably wouldn't have been as interesting with a doomsayer or syker around.

However, I've also got a Hell on Earth campaign that's been running since HoE came out. This has been a high-power game, with four servitors, multiple doombringers, and a near god-like mutant who thought he was the incarnation of Anubis all rearing their ugly heads. For PCs, we've had four sykers, two Templars, a cyborg, two junkers, a doomsayer, and a Lector. We've also had a crippled used car salesman, an old mercenary soldier, a hunter, and a huge savage. It probably looks like the arcane folks would far outshine the norms, but that's not the case. The spotlight has been shared pretty equally between them all, with the old merc personally responsible for the deaths of three of the four servitors. 

My point is that I've never had a problem with arcanes outdoing norms at every turn. I've let my players run wild with whatever they felt like playing, and the result has been a surprisingly equal power level. I think I managed this by balancing the arcanes' power with much more difficult roleplaying. The cyborg, for instance, has been almost completely emotionally crippled by the stuff he's gone through. 

I'm using AOL, so I apologize if this shows up funky.