How to stat a "magic suppression" grenade?

[Cygnia]

After all these years, I'm finally using the forums for actual HERO questions!

 

So yeah...supernatural/magic game and I'm coming up with a gadgeteer techie type who wants to use SCIENCE~! to help quantify What Is Magic Exactly?  And one of the ideas hubby and I brainstormed about was a "grenade" (for lack of a better term) than can Suppress a user's (magic) powers temporarily by coating the foe with basically a sticky propriatary "anti-magic" powder ("Oh...just powdered meteorite and silver and dried allum and rock salt encased in an inert gel.  Quite ingenious actually!")

 

Limited use, possibly with AoE...thoughts on how to stat this?

[Jhamin]

Mechanically you have a couple obvious choices: Drain or Dispel.  Either one will interfere in a given power.

 

Dispel is all or nothing.  The grenade will either shut down powers or do nothing.  On the other hand it is cheap so you will have lots of dice to roll.

Drain will always work, lowering the active point value of whatever it affects but the down side is that it costs 3x as much for a die of Drain as a die of Dispel.

 

By default you have to pick something specific to be affected, but If you want it to affect all magic, both powers let you take "expanded effect" to affect multiple things with one attack.  Affecting "all magic", assuming magic is common in your game is a +4(!) advantage... so something that can shut down a PC level wizard is going to be hundreds of active points.  If it only affects active spells or just Evocations or somesuch you can probably get it down to +2.  Still expensive, but maybe doable without going into GM fiat land.

 

As for the area of effect?  Well, good old AofE is always great, but the way you describe it I would think Explosion would be appropriate.  The target gets the full force and the effect falls off rapidly as you get away from the center of the blast.

[unclevlad]

Dispel won't do anything;  it's an Instant.  It'll take out any active spells, but that's it.

 

The Suppress variant of Dispel is not all or nothing...see 6E1 197, particularly the example.  This is what you want.  It's gonna cost ya because you need that honkin' big expanded effect advantage, and as written it's on a MASSIVE number of base points.  I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt they ever worked out that example.

 

10d6 drain (as suppress) == 100 points

all magic powers simultaneously is +4

AoE 30m is +1

 

600 (!!!!) active points.

[Spence]

Before any answers can even be attempted you need to define in game mechanics terms as well as SFX terms exactly how Magic is portrayed in your game. 

 

Hero has many ways to do do many things, but they all depend on the local game settings.

 

Magic is a very broad and very generic term that means many different things to many people. 

 

Also, which edition?

 

[Cygnia]

6E.  I'm trying to figure out from this GM how magic is portrayed too as I'm well aware you Live & Die by the SFX.  It's set in 1970's London with the thin line of the mundane world vs That Which Man Must Not Know.

[Cygnia]

What the GM said when I asked...

 

Quote

I’m not interested in restricting what magic is, really.

It’s important to me that it’s always possible for things to be mysterious. So while there might be some way that this particular magic plot element works, the next story might completely blow that out of the water. Magic is notoriously difficult to define, of course.

It’s more important to me that, whatever it is, it feels atmospheric, ideally a little scary. After that, things grounded in some actual basis in myth or the history of the occult is a definite plus. Subtle is much better than unsubtle — wizards throwing lightning bolts around aren’t really doing the sort of thing that magic does in appropriate genres.

Game mechanics are pretty standard for Champions here. Magic is solely a special effect — the Power does what the Power does. There are no special mechanics for magic per se — things like Incantations, Arrangement Foci, and Extra Time are good for making it feel right, of course, and as it happens I own the HERO System Grimoire, which has some decent suggestions for how classic things can be done as modifiers.

The main thing to watch is that most threats have some element to them which could be called magical. So limitations that are phrased as “Only Magic” aren’t really limitations — that’s close to “Only Powers” in this setting. The standard rule applies: a limitation that doesn’t limit the character isn’t worth any points.