What about a speed of 12?

[Soggybag]

4 hours ago, assault said:

 

Sorry, I must have missed something here.

 

What is the "2 end per inch of movement" referring to?

 

‘If I recall correctly the rules say  movement costs Endurance. If you’re moving every phase that’s even more Endurance you’ll need to have on tap.

[assault]

Movement costs endurance, but not that much.

 

From page 37, 1e:
"All movement costs END pips at the rate of 1 END pip per 5 inches of base movement distance used. Noncombat movement at multiple distances does not increase the END cost of a movement action."
 

So, not a character with, say, 10" Flight (only works when the character is touching a surface, +1/2) has to spend 2 END to use their full flight.

 

In this case, that would cost them 13 points. Of course, they could reduce the END cost to 0, bringing the cost of their flight back to 20, with the limitation in place of course.

 

That's makes them a pretty slow speedster, but they can do it all day.

OK, I'll do a full example draft in another post. Nothing more than a first draft, mind you. I wouldn't play it.

[assault]

OK, a first draft of a 12 SPD speedster, using 1-3e rules. In this case, 1e is identical to 2e and 3e.

 

Characteristics first.

10 STR 0

38 DEX 84

18 CON 16

10 BOD 0

10 INT 0

10 EGO 0

15 PRE 5

10 COM 0

12 PD 10

14 ED 10

12 SPD 72

6 REC 0

36 END 0

24 STUN 0

Total Characteristic Points: 197 points

 

Powers/Skills

 

20 10" Flight, 0 END (only works when the character is touching a surface, +1/2)

 

5 0 END cost on 10 Str.

 

(The sample characters in 1e tend to list their reduced endurance costs separately from the related powers. Naturally, I did this in the case of the STR, but not in the case of the flight. That's the real 1e way to do things!)

 

10 Armor (+3 PD/+3 ED)

 

30 Martial Arts

 

Total Power and Skill Points: 65

Total Character Points: 262

 

---

 

Review:

He can't run, can't take a hit, can't throw a punch, and costs too many points.

 

He's a good first draft though.

 

Yes, he could be a scene stealer, but his actual role in a fight would tend to be crowd control, agent suppression and Martial Throwing everyone in sight. He's not tough enough to be one of the heavy hitters.

Personal comment:

I love building characters like this. The simplicity!

 

It's a shame that he would have to either take lots of Disadvantages or ruin the simplicity with Limitations. :(

[Soggybag]

4 hours ago, assault said:

OK, a first draft of a 12 SPD speedster, using 1-3e rules. In this case, 1e is identical to 2e and 3e.

 

Characteristics first.

10 STR 0

38 DEX 84

18 CON 16

10 BOD 0

10 INT 0

10 EGO 0

15 PRE 5

10 COM 0

12 PD 10

14 ED 10

12 SPD 72

6 REC 0

36 END 0

24 STUN 0

Total Characteristic Points: 197 points

 

Powers/Skills

 

20 10" Flight, 0 END (only works when the character is touching a surface, +1/2)

 

5 0 END cost on 10 Str.

 

(The sample characters in 1e tend to list their reduced endurance costs separately from the related powers. Naturally, I did this in the case of the STR, but not in the case of the flight. That's the real 1e way to do things!)

 

10 Armor (+3 PD/+3 ED)

 

30 Martial Arts

 

Total Power and Skill Points: 65

Total Character Points: 262

 

---

 

Review:

He can't run, can't take a hit, can't throw a punch, and costs too many points.

 

He's a good first draft though.

 

Yes, he could be a scene stealer, but his actual role in a fight would tend to be crowd control, agent suppression and Martial Throwing everyone in sight. He's not tough enough to be one of the heavy hitters.

Personal comment:

I love building characters like this. The simplicity!

 

It's a shame that he would have to either take lots of Disadvantages or ruin the simplicity with Limitations. :(

 

You might not need flying. If you can move 6” per phase. That’s 72” per turn with no point cost. The 10” flying allows 120” of movement. 

[assault]

The flight allows him to move over water, up the sides of buildings and so on.

 

It also gives him access to non-combat movement rates which increase as the number of points of flight increase. He would almost certainly buy his flight up with experience.

 

Even without those factors, 10" flight gives him a 5" half-move in combat. That's not a lot, but at least it's better than the 3" half-move he gets from his default running.

[Cassandra]

As Jackie on Powerless said "It's murder on shoes, you get bugs in your teeth, and you don't have an excuse for being late anymore.

[Doc Democracy]

I played a SPD 12 speedster (Swift) in a Golden Age campaign for three sessions before retiring him - my friends hated him.

 

He had Martial Arts, AP, Autofire and Reduced END on STR.

 

Each punch did very little damage but he threw an awful lot of them very quickly....

 

He could move in and attack and attack and move away before anyone got a bead on him.  He did steal the limelight as it was ALWAYS my turn.  All of the downsides folk have spoken about were true of Swift.  I got rid of him for a stage magician type with a tiny VPP.  Magnor the Magnificent.

[Soggybag]

55 minutes ago, Doc Democracy said:

I played a SPD 12 speedster (Swift) in a Golden Age campaign for three sessions before retiring him - my friends hated him.

 

He had Martial Arts, AP, Autofire and Reduced END on STR.

 

Each punch did very little damage but he threw an awful lot of them very quickly....

 

He could move in and attack and attack and move away before anyone got a bead on him.  He did steal the limelight as it was ALWAYS my turn.  All of the downsides folk have spoken about were true of Swift.  I got rid of him for a stage magician type with a tiny VPP.  Magnor the Magnificent.

 

You’re reinforcing the idea that Spd 12 is probably best for a villain, a villain everyone would hate. Which is possibly a good quality in the case of a villain. 

[assault]

I wonder if the impact of scene stealing could be reduced in a smaller group. In some cases it could be worse, obviously. A two player group where one player's character is completely dominant is no fun for the other. But what if the player of the non-speedster is the stronger personality, and the speedster's player tends to listen to them? In effect, the speedster would often be carrying out plans the other player made, which is much less annoying for that player.

 

This is complicated by speedsters not really being good characters for inexperienced players. The very frequency of their phases mean that player indecision can waste a lot of time, and their usually comparatively weak defenses means that they can come unstuck very quickly.

 

So the ideal speedster player is one who is both experienced and willing to defer to other players.

 

A little sad: the Golden Age Flash was the de facto leader of the JSA until he was given his own title. The Silver Age Flash played a similar role in the early issues of the original run of the JLA.

 

I guess such speedsters have to settle for being Quicksilver.

Or use builds less dependent on Dex and Spd. Perhaps 29-33 Dex and 7 Spd. The reduced cost might allow for a less one-sided build, but most of the savings would be swallowed by reducing the number of Disadvantages the character takes.

[unclevlad]

One thing of concern with a SPD 12 villain is how easy it might be for him to escape...which may or may not be a bad thing.  But something to keep in mind.

[Soggybag]

2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

One thing of concern with a SPD 12 villain is how easy it might be for him to escape...which may or may not be a bad thing.  But something to keep in mind.

 

I think this would be the plot. You have a guy that may not be that tough but keeps getting away. Once the group figures out what’s going on they need to think of an outside the box solution. 

[Christopher]

13 hours ago, Tech said:

In our campaign, we have one hero with a SPD of 10. No one has a higher SPD (on the hero side). The problem I see with a high SPD isn't cost but player compatibility: is this person going to be a glory-hog? It can be a problem if not carefully observed. It's the glory-hog aspect I watch out for. 

I have at least 2 concepts taht call for a "Permanently duplicated" character. 2 or 3 characters, largely identical (as they have to be with Duplication). Wich offset the cost/reduced per Instance power via coordinated attacks and the like. But I never actually played them for this exact reason. I do not trust myself not to try to hog the spotlight.

 

I think SR4 suffered from this problem in particular. There are only a few sources of extra Phases (Wired Reflexes, Adept Powers, Spells). And characters that lacked them might only act once in a combat round, while some allies might act 2-3 times. Wit hSR 5 they fixed that, by just allowing any high initiative result to act more then once (basically after each pass, substrat 10 for the Initiative result).

 

2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

One thing of concern with a SPD 12 villain is how easy it might be for him to escape...which may or may not be a bad thing.  But something to keep in mind.

Sometimes you just need to play the Villains suboptimal. Make him so drunk on his new power, he does not even consider escaping. Or maybe he has to protect something (like his doomsday device of the week).

It is important for GM's not to play mooks to smart.

 

Or as Soggybag said, make it part of his Shtick to escape. Make him not have that much of a effect on combat in turn (unless it is against other speedsters).

[Christopher R Taylor]

I had just one character with 7 speed and he dominated the game, completely.  7 Speed moves on some weird phases and so often its like a quantum leap even up from 6.

 

The best use for 12 speed I think is not so much a speedster as a time controller.  He's not so much fast.  You're all just that slow.

[Doc Democracy]

My Deathstroke equivalent was SPD 12.  I only used him in one adventure but he was fantastic as a singleton villain.  The heroes had to defuse a bomb but Deathstroke was standing guard and so one hero had to get to the bomb while the other four had to keep Deathstroke busy until it was disarmed. 

 

They struggled in an early encounter where he wiped the floor with the five of them.  Then they thought about the fight rather than simply piling in, heroes delaying so that they had every segment covered to prevent him from resting for a segment and getting a recovery or potentially getting a free haymaker (both of which happened in the early fight).  They also knew that they could barely afford to lose people, there was a downward spiral if one of them was knocked out of the fight.  They knew they would win if they simply took up enough time, but they knew that they could not afford to just defend or he would speed off to the bomb person.

 

He was a great villain, not hugely expensive and the players feared him in a way they did not other villains that cost much more and had more raw power available to them.

 

Doc

[Scott Ruggels]

On 11/4/2018 at 8:12 PM, Soggybag said:

 

That’s brilliant, especially for a villain. You don’t have to worry about balance so much. Makes for a fun combat, maybe easier to GM, you’re only rolling dice and making decisions once a turn!

 

It was even better for him, because most of our heroes were Brick and Brick Hybrids, the bot was all defenses and knockback resistance, (and extra senses to find invisible characters) and one  High OCV  REB.  It was shaped like two styrofoam coffee cups  stuck together at the open ends and it has one slit eye, and a parabolic reflector around it's equator and had only standard movement of 6 inches, on it's gravetic repulsors, only about a foot off the ground. (Gravetics were why it had such high knockback resistance.  Needless to say, this is why we panicked. All the GM would have to do, is after the first low damage roll, was to intone funereally, "Bounce..." Eyes went wide around the table and the panic set in. it was great! It took us for ever to take that down.  (This was in the old Champions II days, and it was built as a character, with 100 Stun, or something. I never got to see the character sheet for it.) It was great for roving Villain Defense, especially in confined spaces. It was a cat toy, for Siberian Tigers. XD

[Vanguard]

On 11/4/2018 at 9:03 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

One of our GMs used a a low speed, a really low speed, that scared the hell out of all of us. it had a speed of 0.8 (estimated). If you  buy your speed down, you get a whole lot of points, So the Shafer Death bot was born. When Activated it would go on Phase 7, then next  turn on Phase 8, and then next turn Phase 9... ect. ect...  It turned a coordinated team of superheroes into panicked screaming monkeys, when it one shotted the brick, and then slowly turned its attention to the survivors.

 

 We then had 13 segments to take it down before it  shot again, and we were speed 5 and 6.  it managed to shoot again and took out the  Speedster. Taking it down was one of those heavy sweat incidents. 

 

I don't get it. 

 

How, with a speed of .8 was it able to move on Phase 7 one turn, then phase 8 the next?  How was it able to advance phases, granted it only got the one action but why were the phases it acted on changing?

[Lord Liaden]

The only "official" published SPD 12 character I'm sure of is the assassin Taipan, first appearing in Champions Worldwide, and most recently in Champions Villains Vol. 3: Solo Villains. As in line with what's been discussed here, he's intended to be able to take on whole teams of heroes. Not the biggest DC attacks except for this "Taipan's Bite" with a few Charges, but extremely high CV and tactical Movement. Runs out of END quickly if using his full-strength abilities every Phase, but deadly in the short term.

[Christopher]

4 hours ago, Vanguard said:

 

I don't get it. 

 

How, with a speed of .8 was it able to move on Phase 7 one turn, then phase 8 the next?  How was it able to advance phases, granted it only got the one action but why were the phases it acted on changing?

I think you are mixing up "Phase", "Segment" and "Turn". All 3 have a very specific meaning in Hero.

 

"When Activated it would go on Phase 7, then next  turn on Phase 8, and then next turn Phase 9... ect. ect...  "

It was a SPD of 1. Except slightly less then 1 (0.8), so it would be 1 Segment later every Turn.

[Vanguard]

On 12/25/2018 at 4:26 AM, Christopher said:

I think you are mixing up "Phase", "Segment" and "Turn". All 3 have a very specific meaning in Hero.

 

"When Activated it would go on Phase 7, then next  turn on Phase 8, and then next turn Phase 9... ect. ect...  "

It was a SPD of 1. Except slightly less then 1 (0.8), so it would be 1 Segment later every Turn.

 

Yep.  That's exactly what I did.

 

Thanks Chris

[Badger]

On ‎11‎/‎4‎/‎2018 at 7:26 AM, bubba smith said:

speed 12 might count as super speed or a flash type hero

 

Yeah, I always figured Flash would be a SPD 12.