How would I make this power?

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

Light moves at roughly 3E8m/s.  If you move somethingE1m/phase, then simple unit conversion indicates you need (rounded) 1E8 SPD to operate at timescales similar to light.  So just buy a hundred million points of SPD and you can interact with light at speeds similar to it!  Simple! 

 

But seriously, what game effect are you looking for?  Super-fast reactions?  Amazing evasion?  Completing mundane tasks in near-zero time?  Super-movement? 

Until you can express what you want in HERO System terms, you can't make it into a HERO System construct. 

[Hugh Neilson]

Buy Skill Levels only to offset penalties for moving up the time chart.  10 points for +1 with all non-combat skills, only to offset time chart penalties.  Each step up the chart is a -3 penalty, so taking a minute to do something that would normally take a day is 5 steps up - you'll need 15 PSLs to counter that.  Toss on a few unlimited 10 point levels to simulate the fact that, since he can just keep trying, he can do things beyond what would seem applicable for his level of expertise.

 

That's still 100 points for +15 levels to offset time chart penalties (-2) and +5 levels with all noncombat skills, though.

 

The starting point, as GnomeBODY notes above, is defining the in-game benefits you want from your speed.  You don''t buy "Massive Speed, 100 points" and then argue what you should be able to accomplish with this massive speed.  You decide what you want to accomplish with that massive speed, and pay for it.

[dialNforNinja]

I don't really see why you think I haven't defined what I want to do "in Hero system terms." I want a character who acts and reacts ten trillion times faster than normal. Period. No make an Xd6 attack and call it "punched 500 times in a second" if he wants to punch you 500 times he punches five hundred times, and probably takes a break every two or three to read a book so his knuckles don't get sore. If he wants to run to NYC to pick up a genuine New York Thin Crust pizza, he doesn't break out Life Support: Does Not Require Food (8hrs, UOO) he runs to NYC and buys a pizza. Why is this hard to understand?

 

e: Sorry, I lost my temper a bit. Expletives deleted.

[Hugh Neilson]

Why is it so hard to understand that " acts and reacts ten trillion times faster than normal" is not "defining the game effect", but "defining a special effect".  The game effect is that "he can travel vast distances in a single action", or "he can inflict amazing damage".  Having an accelerated running speed, and hitting someone hundreds of times in a second, are the special effects of the mechanical powers used to achieve those effects.

 

Does your character who acts and reacts ten trillion times faster than normal also tire (spend END) 10 trillion times faster than normal?  That seems like a reasonable interpretation of your build, however it is one which renders the concept completely unplayable as no character has enough points to buy 10 trillion END and enough recovery to ever get it back.  Throwing one punch is a bit tiring, so if your logical ability is to throw 500 punches in a second, the logical outcome is that it is 500 times as tiring, isn't it?  If not, then your character's ability extends beyond "act and react trillions of times faster than a normal person".

 

You want to punch 500 times in a single attack?  Well, that would be a +4 Autofire advantage on your strength.  That could be up to 640, so you simply define it as up to 500.  You probably also want to tack on 0 END, for a further +1, to avoid spending 500x your STR END cost each time you do this, and you'll need a lot of penalty skill levels to hit with a lot of those 500 punches.

 

Now, let's assume that you spend enough points to make that effective, and that your GM is open to you rolling a few hundred individual damage rolls.  If you have a 15 STR, and you are in a typical Supers campaign, you will do no damage whatsoever because the typical Super has over 18 Defenses, and will take no damage from a 3d6 attack.

 

Is that the effect you had in mind?

 

Being able to run to NYC is simple - Megascale on your running.

 

Your complaint is no different from the fellow who spends 2 points on life support:  safe in intense cold, and then cannot grasp why he is not immune to every attack with the special effect of "cold". Because you buy in-game effects (like Damage Reduction:  only vs attacks based on cold), not an ill-defined "resistant to cold" that you then try to leverage into something worth more than what you spent.

 

For concepts that have extreme versatility, we have the Variable Power Pool.

 

BTW, if you are looking for an "I automatically win" button, Hero does not have one, by design.  Much like the Flash can still be shot with normal speed Captain Cold's freeze ray, a Hero speedster is not immune to challenge by anyone lacking his same special effect.  If the effect you envision is "I am so fast that I can defeat any foe before he can even blink", that will make for a pretty boring game so I doubt you will find any RPG which supports it.

 

Although, since we are just saying he experiences time at a rate of, say, one century per second, it's not a problem for long since, logically, he also ages 100 years in a second.  "Behold the grandeur of Captain FruitFly" - good thing a soliloquy takes no time...

[dialNforNinja]

All right, we're clearly thinking at cross purposes - "he is fast, so he can do this" versus "he can do this, so he is fast," and "he's using massive END so how could this even be played" versus "he has Life Support: Does Not Age and centuries to recover END between uses, my god this is even more abusive than I thought and can never be played." Beyond that, some web searches (ignoring everything with a rem.uz address because I'm still being stubborn about that 🙄) reveals that what I need is APG2, which (at least judging by the reviews and a Q&A thread from a couple years ago) essentially does exactly what I came up with here, in pages of detail because that's just how Steve rolls. "It's horribly expensive and probably no GM will ever allow it" sure sounds familiar at any rate

 

As for Hero not having "I win" buttons... well, that's obviously untrue, as in nearly any point-buy toolkit type system, and most others as well. Nixing those is (part of) what the GM is for, because otherwise all you need to have one is an attack that's far above the defence levels of the campaign, or an NND whose special defence isn't available.

[dsatow]

More real physics problems:

 

If you are interacting with solid objects at the speed of light, the friction with the air will cause you to burn up, assuming you could move through the air.

 

If you are moving at the speed of light, you might be blind.  Moving towards a light source would make it way brighter than normal.  Moving away from a light source would be completely dark.

[dialNforNinja]

Those two problems were addressed, between shifting over to a Speed Force dimension and using Transdimensional senses and Strength to affect "the real world," and adding Spatial Awareness as tachyon perception with the Discriminatory, Sense, and ... whatever the third adder was that I can't remember to be what he's perceiving things with. Being in the Speed Force presumably also takes care of relativistic mass causing problems with local gravity, too.

[Duke Bushido]

17 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

Wow, nothing? I guess that means I get to try weaving a silk purse on my own then...

 

Not for lack of interest; it's a lack of time issue for a lot of us.

 

Here's the bad news:

 

It's this level of speed for which the "speed tricks" like the speed zone and autofire and AOE: Trail (Can someone _please_ point me to that write up?  I heard it mentioned a couple months back, and I'd like to compare it to the home-brew we've been using for a couple of decades.  Thus far, I've come up zilch.   ) and other such things were created.

 

Once you get to "ludicrous speed," it's just more cost-effective and mechanics-compliant to go the "simulated power" route.  But enough of that: I won't try to talk you into something that you've specifically said you don't want.  If you want my honest opinion, it's going to take handwaving some bits no matter what build you go to.  The only remotely affordable thing I can think of is "Running: megascale, 1" = 1/4 earth's circumference" or something to that effect.  (No; I did not take the time to look up the distance light travels in one segment), and even then is going to vary based on your SPD.  

 

Also, going from the video you offered as referenced (just finished watching it), that end result?  Where they are patiently waiting for the light to actually move?  Clearly that's much faster than light.  I can't recall what changed were made to FTL after 4e, but work up some handwaving to do it in an atmosphere, and run with that.  I expect the turn mode will _suck_, but Skill Levels can be used to reduce that (get lots of them).  The most significant problem with moving FTL, of course, is that your eyes don't work anymore.  Well, they work, I suppose, but once you can actually see light as a thing to itself, do you still see what it's bouncing off of, or just a billion shards of lighting creeping towards your eyes?  You can take all the "Rapid" you want, what happens when you read faster than the light itself can get to you?

 

On that matter, how much "rapid" is that?  What is the movement of reading, anyway?  What is the movement of hearing?  Personally, I would flat out ignore and hand wave that.  I can read 10 times faster than I can when I'm not using Rapid.  Well how do you read when you don't use Rapid?  What is the "standard" reading rate?  I've got a brother who could bankrupt himself on books.  Do you remember the old William Johnstone "Out of the Ashes" series a couple decades back?  He read the first four in a day.  Those things were huge, too  (and not great, for what it's worth.  The first two were strong; the rest just started slipping down and down and down...)    So what is the "Standard" reading speed?  The "Standard Hearing Speed?"  It was the utter pointlessness of that exercise that made me dismiss "Rapid" before I even finished reading it when it first hit the rules.  It's just .. well, seeing as how using "Cramming" or variations of speed reading have worked for a quarter-century, it's just unnecessary, and silly to say 10, or 100, or even one billion times faster than a completely undefined baseline.  That old "I want double my pay!"  "Fine; you're a volunteer anyway." gag.

 

We usually just hand waved it as a speedster schtick.  GMs that were a bit more anal  (No; I don't mean that as an insult: everybody's anal about something, even it's just being anal about not admitting that you've got something you're anal about) making sure every possible gag you could ever pull from a hat in the unforeseeable future before your character retired or died might make you buy "speed reading" or "speed tasting" or some such thing.

 

Taste and scent are both based on physical contact to keyed chemoreceptors: that are based on touching physical particulates to specialized cells (remember that the next time you experience someone else's flatulence).  When you are moving fast enough to watch light crawl, those particles are deadly to run into: the scent of that one old church lady who bathes in her perfume will kill you just as surely as running through a cloud of daggers.  Further, as scent itself _is_ physical matter, it will affect light.  We don't see it now, but if you're perceiving so fast you can watch light flow into a room, cross over to a mirror, and bounce back out...   Well odds are even air itself is going to be a huge barrier to actually being able to perceive_.  You see what the small amount of milk suspended on "clear" oil did in that video.  That glowing blur will be the world around you-- the entire world.  it's all you will actually see.  Well, that is to say, it's all you will actually see if you're trying to build this perception using "rapid" or trying to stay in keeping with any level of real-world science.  I _absolutely_ understand that you can handwave  that away and say that "it just works," but at the point-- well, that's when Rapid falls on its unnecessary ass yet again.  Why aren't you just handwaving that moving that fast allows you to perceive that fast (the way we have for a couple of generations now) so that you don't shift into super-photonic speed and lose the ability to see the walls in front of you?  (Remember how a Move-Through works: even though you don't use your STR in an accidental Move-Through, you still get to take 1/2 of that V/3 damage when you hit a wall at C+....)

 

Granted, MegaScale still requires additional modifiers (or Adders?  I don't remember.  Our homebrew version handled that part differently) to be able to travel locally.  I suppose you could reduce the cost somewhat buy using a Multipower, but I'd probably go with Variable Advantage (limited to scales of Mega Scale) and ... well, and yet again hand wave the sudden lurch between traveling ten-thousand KM per hour and dropping down to a mere thousand KM/hr.  I know Variable Advantage requires you to spend all of it's value, which is a bit harder to do know that reduced END is a two-step process, but you can pre-created a list for each "stage" of movement.  Still, it's going to be pricey.

 

 

 

17 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

 

 

Alright, standard modifier for powers is +5cp to double non-damage effects, but looking at the time chart it's more like x4-5 per step after you get to an extra turn so call the base effect one turn per external phase and +10cp per step after that. That still ends up being something like +130cp for a subjective century in a phase, but you're getting a century in a single second so it's hard to complain.

 

This brings up another issue with "Rapid."

 

A century of _what_?  A century of staring at the oil painting that the traffic in the street has effectively become?   How do you play this out?  Know; I mean, I _do_ understand that part:

 

"Tell you what, Kevin, you take the next six hours and ask me anything you'd like about the scene in six cars at the intersection and the eighteen buildings you can see from here.  I'll answer every question and write them down in case it becomes relevant for next week's game.  The rest of you guys can home and we'll meet up again next week.  Terry: your turn to pick up the popcorn.  And don't get that double-butter crap; it stains the maps and gets all over the papers...."

 

We all know that's going to make for an _awful_ session.  So what do we do instead?  We uh...  we handwave it.   Again:  Look Kevin, you take the rest of your phase and look around.  Do you have that pre-rolled list I asked you to generate for your PER rolls?  Strike off your first ten rolls, and here's the three possibly important things you notice...."

 

Or:

 

"How many levels of "Rapid" did you buy?"

 

uh...  Sixteen!

 

"Okay, you spend the rest of your phase checking out the scene.  Anytime you want to remember something from this scene, you've got a pool of sixteen points you can add to your INT roll to simulate remembering a detail you noticed.  We'll mark them off as you use them."

 

Or:

 

Okay, make a PER roll with a +16.  For every point you make it buy, I will detail a clearly important thing

 

Or who knows how else, but we're going to handwave it, because the other players didn't come here to watch you spend a hundred years walking around the intersection in front of Rosie's.  (or was it Rose's?)

 

 

 

 

17 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

 

 

 

Even that is only a factor of about three billion to one, not ten trillion, though, so we have to go deeper (foghorn!) 317,019 years precisely, so following the 1-5-25-100 pattern that's 500, 2500, 10k, 50k, 250k, close enough to five more steps, so 202cp total on EDM, plus Spatial Awareness: Tachyon Perception (32cp) given the Discriminatory (+10cp,) Sense (+2cp,) and Targeting (+10cp) modifiers along with Rapid x13 (+39cp,) for 93cp and a total (still not including Transdimensional on whatever needs it though) 295cp. Let's see, Transdim is +1/2, so that makes our non-photonic Tachyon sense cost 139cp. I'll be merciful and say normal STR is "indirect" enough to just get Transdim applied on its own instead of requiring TK with Fine Manipulation and a bunch of skill levels to make the roll meaningless, so just 6cp there for a minimal superhero STR of 13. 202+139+6=347cp

 

Ouch! But it is just barely possible within a standard 400pt build, if you don't raise Characteristics much above the baseline and let your actual ten-trillion-times-normal super speed be the whole of your powers.

 

Well, we knew going in this wasn't going to be cheap. I guess you could just ignore the photon speed issue much like it ignores air friction and put Rapid and Transdimensional directly on Sight to save a hundred or so points, but when the point is to be able to dodge laser beams like they're nothing but snails that seems to violate the internal logic of the power, let alone our measly earth-logic, and even when powers make no earthly sense I still feel they should have internal consistency.

 

What do you think, does it pass the sanity test? It would break the game completely to actually use, but as a construct within the rules, I mean.

 

This is probably why the Flash is often pointed to as "the most powerful character is [whichever one he is with  DC, I think? ]'s universe.  For what it's worth, at first blush, it seems you're in the rules, but if I were you, I'd hold off for judgement from someone better versed in the newer editions to give some feedback (I don't always remember all the new "no; not unless you buy this"  stuff that the newer editions have added    )

 

And it sounds like you totally understand what would happen if you actually turned it lose in your game.    

 

 

12 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

Being literal is the point, so you actually are fast enough to see light move like the camera in that video,

 

That's the problem, though: if you actually _are_ fast enough to see that, you can't.  If we're staying literal, I mean.  The playback speed shows that light moving the length of the bottle far slower than any observer could move the length of that bottle: the observer is existing faster than light.  As long as he's actually moving faster than light, that light will never reach him.  Now there are people on this board far-more physics-talented than I am, and they may be able to shoot every single thing I've said completely full of holes, but based on my _admittedly-limited_ knowledge, you can't make this work _and_ stay within the realm of literal movement.  You've got to simulate it, and unfortunately most of the best simulations for this use speed as a special effect for a number of totally-not-speed powers.  

 

 

12 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

 

so you have three hundred thousand years per second to do whatever, even if you'd usually use far less than that for any purpose that involved interaction with slow events. Though I did forget to account for only having SPD 2 normally, so add another +10 to EDM: Enter the Speed Force to account for being spread out over six phases rather than just happening in one, making the final result 357cp.

 

I have _got_ to re-read 6e EDM, apparently.  How did we go from stepping into a dimension to "stepping into a dimension per phase?"  I won't get to it any time soon, but I've got to get it done, clearly.

 

12 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

edited: Life Support to avoid aging instantly and needing all the food and water in the world, plus the Absolute Time Sense and Eidetic Memory talents sound like good investments for the highly limited remaining point budget, too

 

 

Well done!

 

 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

See?  That's the issue with speed and perception and all that.

 

By the time I get all that type up, you've got a half-dozen other replies!  

 

[dialNforNinja]

53 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

I have _got_ to re-read 6e EDM, apparently.  How did we go from stepping into a dimension to "stepping into a dimension per phase?"  I won't get to it any time soon, but I've got to get it done, clearly.

It's entirely possible that's my misunderstanding, but while however many actions you get per turn are resolved on the specific phases they fall on for game purposes, do they not supposedly still fill the whole twelvish seconds in-universe? Perhaps this is another artifact of my perspective being to look at what happens in character and only then poke at the parts bin of mechanics to see what can make that happen, rather than pulling some shiny factory-fresh rules out of their wrappers and slotting them together, then trying to figure out what in-character effects will tie them all into a theme and signature schticks. Putting it like that sounds sort of derisive, but I'm trying not to be - it's just that the latter seems to be the standard approach for Hero veterans, but it's more alien to me than ... than a gate to Qliphoth, to use a Champions setting reference. That at least I could toss a paper airplane through with a note conveying my Champions Online character Lady Cthulu's disregards (If that cow Ao'Qepoth thinks she's going to conquer Earth and take all the chocolate for herself, she has another thought coming! ) but coming at character design without designing the character first is just bizarre.

 

All of your other points were interesting too, but I don't really have anything meaningful to say about them. Basically I just nodded along saying "Okay, yeah... yeah... that makes sense..." etc. I do appreciate you taking the time for the analysis though!

[eepjr24]

10 hours ago, dialNforNinja said:

All right, we're clearly thinking at cross purposes - "he is fast, so he can do this" versus "he can do this, so he is fast," and "he's using massive END so how could this even be played" versus "he has Life Support: Does Not Age and centuries to recover END between uses, my god this is even more abusive than I thought and can never be played." Beyond that, some web searches (ignoring everything with a rem.uz address because I'm still being stubborn about that 🙄) reveals that what I need is APG2, which (at least judging by the reviews and a Q&A thread from a couple years ago) essentially does exactly what I came up with here, in pages of detail because that's just how Steve rolls. "It's horribly expensive and probably no GM will ever allow it" sure sounds familiar at any rate

 

As for Hero not having "I win" buttons... well, that's obviously untrue, as in nearly any point-buy toolkit type system, and most others as well. Nixing those is (part of) what the GM is for, because otherwise all you need to have one is an attack that's far above the defence levels of the campaign, or an NND whose special defence isn't available.

So I pulled out my APG2 and did some ballpark numbers.

 

I went with 1 trillion times faster than a speed 12 hero. 

 

Enter speed zone at "1 trillion time" is 11 levels beyond what the time chart goes (so you would have about 11 million days to act on your DEX in the segments when you had "real world" actions). That would run 450ish points. 

Picosight - 60 points

Dimensional on sight - 10 points

Touch affects normal world (10 STR) - 5 points

 

Beyond those you would need to be able to maintain 45 END per phase for 12 phases (540 END) and have a recovery enough to get it back (540 REC), so I'd opt for 0 end on the EDM instead for another 225 CP.

 

So somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 points for the speed zone power, then whatever else you wanted the character to have. This will still not get you perfectly what you want I don't think, but I'll let you read what Steve has to say and decide for yourself.

 

EDIT: This probably does not matter, since it looks like this is a thought exercise, but I would not let one player have this unless it was an all speedster group or PBEM or the like where I could handle the complete session in multiple pieces.

 

- E

Edited July 13, 2019 by eepjr24

[dialNforNinja]

Oh super very NO on just one player having that kind of power, no matter the relative point cost. Like I said before, probably the only way it would ever get in game is a "Speed Force Masquerade" sort of deal where anyone relevant to the plot is just as fast and they have their own society of some sort going that only indirectly affects the Slow World, or something like that, and at that point it's campaign SFX and properly a freebie since everyone gets it. Even for a PBEM it would take up too much of the GM's time and attention from the rest of the players, and while it could work in solo mode if you're just going to write prose you might as well not bother with game mechanics as such, whether it's your OC Wheelz the Donut of Steel or just plain Flash fanfic. It was just an attempt to explore the envelope of the system, pretty much.

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

But if everyone gets it, why bother putting rules to it?  A fight starts and everyone enters the Speed Zone and combat works as normal while the non-combatants don't get turns. 

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, dialNforNinja said:

It's entirely possible that's my misunderstanding, but while however many actions you get per turn are resolved on the specific phases they fall on for game purposes, do they not supposedly still fill the whole twelvish seconds in-universe?

 

 

You are absolutely correct, Sir.  (unless of course, my own understanding and yours are flawed in precisely the same way).  This, I suspect, is why we refer to "when can act" as "Phases" as opposed to Segments.  "Phase 12" means that your action _begins_ on Segment 12, and runs until the start of your next "Phase."  If this weren't the model, it would not be possible to react to something that happened on Segment 2 by "aborting" to another action: if you were done acting at the end of the Segment, you would not still be "maneuvering" about to make that call.

 

Or that's how I understand it.  I seem to recall numerous suggestions over the years to model movement precisely this way to (and I hate this as a concept) "make it easier for new people to learn."  I don't hate Segmented Movement-- I use it myself for really, really fast things, but the idea of teaching someone the _wrong_ rules to make it easier to learn the right ones:  Okay, great!  Six sessions in, and you've got a fantastic grasp of the wrong rules.  Now forget all that, and here's a new set of rules!"   yeah.  That'd charm the Hell out of me, I assure you....

 

But enough of that.

 

 

1 hour ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

 

Perhaps this is another artifact of my perspective being to look at what happens in character and only then poke at the parts bin of mechanics to see what can make that happen, rather than pulling some shiny factory-fresh rules out of their wrappers and slotting them together, then trying to figure out what in-character effects will tie them all into a theme and signature schticks.

 

Well if it helps, I still use (many, many copies of) a thirty-seven-year-old rulebook.  I was totally turned off by the cover of 3e (that logo!  Oh my God!  And that nauseating color scheme!  The art was amazing, but what they did to it when the colorist got hold of it!  And it introduced the layout that would become the 4e layout, and I never warmed up to it.  It felt too....   uppity.....), so I never upgraded.  I crib a bit here and there, but nothing much past 4e, and not much of that.  When 5e came along-- well, we'd been playing for nearly 30 years.  We had enough house rules that we didn't really need someone else's.  Our gaps were filled in, so we didn't do more than read that.  Etc.

 

What I'm taking way too much time to say is that there's nothing _new_ in what I'm saying.     I don't use any new rules.  Honestly, I try really hard to stay out of these "How do I build" or "let's pull apart the rules" type threads simply because I'm the least qualified (and interested) when it comes to the newer editions.

 

But I think you've got it together, as far as the ideal way to construct a character:  Look at what happens _first_, then figure out how to model it.  Honestly, the only thing I could suggest further is to totally ignore the special effect-- you know, while keeping it in mind.     That's not as obtuse as it sounds:  what I'm getting is that sometimes there are ideas or concepts that are harder to get your head around just which part is SFX and which isn't.  Speedsters are one of them, simply because it's so _obvious_ that their power is _speed_.  So you start to think "how would I do this with speed?" or "What's the best way to show that I can do this because I have speed?"

 

Not far enough.  Speed is nothing but SFX.  As a half-crocked "proof" of that:  a character has a movement of 60".  if it's running, it's speed.  If it's flying, it's speed.  If it's T-port, it's just distance, as T-port is, game-wise, "instant."  He didn't _move_ there per se; he just _got_ there.  But even then, Running can be "running," or it can be Limited Flight or very bizarre Swimming or even "tunneling, only through the air, and only when feet are touching a surface."  Yes, it would take a jackass to do that to the GM, but it's-- scratch that.  I don't think Tunneling is movement since Steve took over.  I think it's just "really fast lock picking" now.  .  Or, if you're just dying to burn points, perhaps it's "Shrinking: usable as attack, the planet earth and everything on it. Personal immunity."  Once the planet shrinks, he takes one or two steps, and re-inflates the planet.  if he's only got 2" of movement and a SPD of 2, but can cross a continent that way, is it speed?

 

Speed is just another special effect.

 

 

it's a matter of removing _everything_ from your idea: get to the bare-bones, which is nothing more than the effect that the character has on the world and those people in it.  "He can perceive at such a rate as to make him incredibly aware of details, because he has time to dawdle and look for them."  That's not necessarily (or in my games, _at all_ )  "Rapid."  That's not even a "sense," really.  That's increased levels of PER (skill levels, or what-have-you) and INT-rolls when remembering details.  Not a hundred-and-three points of Rapid.  That's insane.  Well, unnecessary at any rate.  Certainly pricey in the build you presented.

 

Seeing the light creep amorphously into the space you currently occupy?  _That's_ a special effect of those bonuses / skill levels.  That's the speed part.  I have no about you are familiar with the more common speedster tricks: auto fire or even area-effect on strength-based attacks, change environment to create wind or fire, bonuses to DCV because you move so fast even in one hex that you're hard to target, or because it takes a _really_ clever angle to trip you up and prevent you from moving out of the way...    I can't remember seeing this in any published book (not that I've read a lot of them), but I've had more than one speedster presented to me with bonuses to OCV on ranged attacks, the SFX of which were "I run right up to him so it's harder to miss, blast him with the Fish Missile gun, and run right back where I was."

 

Why not?  It's speed.  It's a power that at it's base has _nothing_ to do with speed, but how the special effect is applied makes it nothing _but_ speed.  For shirtless Australians, it's "Martial prowess."  For powered armor guys, it's a targeting system."  For your guy, it's speed.  It even plays into your idea for perception:  He has effectively one hundred years to line up his shot.  Granted, he could beat him to absolute _dust_ in that time, but for whatever reason, he's decided to spend the next couple of decades lining up the perfect shot.  Really going to be irritating if you miss that, so ....   buy some Skill Levels (or more OCV, if you're using 6e) and really simulate that super-speed perception thing.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, dialNforNinja said:

 

 

Putting it like that sounds sort of derisive, but I'm trying not to be - it's just that the latter seems to be the standard approach for Hero veterans, but it's more alien to me than ... than a gate to Qliphoth, to use a Champions setting reference.

 

Use as many as you like.  I get almost none of them after 3e.  

 

As far as the approach-- Honestly, Amigo, I'm not just saying this.  I've been playing and running this game for _decades_  (damn.  That hurt more than it should have....), and have taught a _lot_ of people how to play  (at least, how to play 2e), and I can say this as a promise:  the more you fool around with making characters-- and in the early days, everyone does it.  You'll have folders full of characters-- good guys and bad-- that you will sock away and never see again, because character building is sort of the "solo" game for HERO fans.     But the more characters you make-- and believe it or not, the _more complicated your visions for these characters becomes-- the easier it will be to recognize when you are being guided by SFX and not mechanics.  Seriously:  the really odd stuff, once you see that there is only a tiny handful of shays to do it, and you have to figure out how your guy is using his power to get that effect (once you know what that effect is)....  You'll have this moment where you'll suddenly realize you can, if you were so inclined, fit any power into any elemental control--- well, _you_ won't have that moment, because they don't exist anymore (replaced by "Unified Power, it seems, at least in feel)-- but you'll have that moment where you realize that you can build every single power in the book and justify it for any character because he could use his powers 'thusly....'  That, Sir, is when you have really come to understand what is SFX, and how they should have _no_ bearing on what the power actually does; just what it looks like when it's being done.

 

 

1 hour ago, dialNforNinja said:

All of your other points were interesting too, but I don't really have anything meaningful to say about them. Basically I just nodded along saying "Okay, yeah... yeah... that makes sense..." etc. I do appreciate you taking the time for the analysis though!

Well thank you, too, Sir.   It was quite fun, and honestly, when I can actually do it, I like to help.  It's  a personal weakness.  :lol;
 

[Chris Goodwin]

On 7/12/2019 at 4:29 PM, Duke Bushido said:

It's this level of speed for which the "speed tricks" like the speed zone and autofire and AOE: Trail (Can someone _please_ point me to that write up?  I heard it mentioned a couple months back, and I'd like to compare it to the home-brew we've been using for a couple of decades.  Thus far, I've come up zilch.   ) and other such things were created.

 

Advanced Players Guide, page 135. 

 

But it's done with 6e core mechanics, and can as easily be done with prior editions' mechanics.  AoE: Line or Hexes, with enough Extended Area to make the number of hexes equal to the character's movement.  Viola!

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah one of the speedster tricks I came up with on my last hero I've played was Stooge Slap (line effect attack); he runs up and back, smacking everyone in the line

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Chris Goodwin said:

 

Advanced Players Guide, page 135. 

 

But it's done with 6e core mechanics, and can as easily be done with prior editions' mechanics.  AoE: Line or Hexes, with enough Extended Area to make the number of hexes equal to the character's movement.  Viola!

 

 

Thank you, Sir!

 

I've got APG 2, but not 1 (yet). It sounds very much like our own design (had to come up with this first for a Force Wall generated by a Speedster that trailed behind him.  Later we adapted it to AOE), save that we added bits about it being "centered" on the character and being mobile (again, because it was originally for a Force Wall).

 

Still, it's nice to see other options.

 

Reckon I can shell out for the PDF in lieu of finding the book at an affordable price....

[dialNforNinja]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah one of the speedster tricks I came up with on my last hero I've played was Stooge Slap (line effect attack); he runs up and back, smacking everyone in the line

Oh, that is SO getting yoinked the next time I do an actual speedster build. I've got a big grinchy grin and can barely resist the desire to cackle and rub my palms together just thinking about it.

[Christopher R Taylor]

It didn't come up very often but it was loads of fun when it did

[ScottishFox]

On 7/12/2019 at 8:56 AM, Hugh Neilson said:

our complaint is no different from the fellow who spends 2 points on life support:  safe in intense cold, and then cannot grasp why he is not immune to every attack with the special effect of "cold".

 

I've had this come up with LS:  All terrestrial toxins vs. The Stabbing Beast (avatar of a death god) who's scorpion stinger and spray blinding poison.  Sorry, sir, your LS: terrestrial poisons doesn't make you immune to poison-based attacks nor flashes.

 

Had another guy add a trigger to his teleport so it would let him teleport away from harm when targeted by AoE attacks w/out the drawbacks of Dive for Cover.  Sorry, you can't have immunity to AoE damage for the cost of a 3 point multipower slot.

 

Very open-ended systems like HERO require a commitment to good faith efforts by both the players and the GMs.

[Christopher R Taylor]

The important thing is to make sure people understand the way powers work and the way they are going to act in the game when they are creating characters.  If they don't understand how life support works, its up to you as the GM to help them know that before the fighting starts and it comes up.

 

Quote

Had another guy add a trigger to his teleport so it would let him teleport away from harm when targeted by AoE attacks w/out the drawbacks of Dive for Cover.  Sorry, you can't have immunity to AoE damage for the cost of a 3 point multipower slot.

 

This I would allow, then work out ways to get around it as a GM   Like, the AE fills an area he can't see out of, so his teleport doesn't help him any or causes him to port into something that causes damage.  Its a legal construction, and I like to reward creativity.

[Doc Democracy]

I would question how the power "knew" it was an area effect attack and thus able to trigger.  Aborting to a movement power I am fine with.

[ScottishFox]

2 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

The important thing is to make sure people understand the way powers work and the way they are going to act in the game when they are creating characters.  If they don't understand how life support works, its up to you as the GM to help them know that before the fighting starts and it comes up.

 

 

This I would allow, then work out ways to get around it as a GM   Like, the AE fills an area he can't see out of, so his teleport doesn't help him any or causes him to port into something that causes damage.  Its a legal construction, and I like to reward creativity.

 

Just can't.  If I allow (or reward) something like this the next triggers are for melee or ranged attacks.  Now for a whopping 9 points he's invulnerable to melee, ranged single target attacks and AoEs.

 

But wait, there's more!  For just another 3 points he can set a trigger on invisible to mental sense group plus invisible to sight group (limited:  Only to prevent line of sight for mental attacks).

 

I actually don't like the idea of being able to defensively activate multipower slots as it bypasses the key weakness of multipowers (having to allocate points to specific slots).

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Just can't.  If I allow (or reward) something like this the next triggers are for melee or ranged attacks.  Now for a whopping 9 points he's invulnerable to melee, ranged single target attacks and AoEs.

 

Just make sure you enforce everything, like when and how you can change multipower slots, and give characters more abilities that he can't dodge.  Also there are suggested limits on the number of triggers people can have, etc.  For example, you cannot use a multipower slot that you don't have active, so his triggers could not reset unless he had that one active.  That means he can teleport dodge some attacks, but not all of them all the time.  He'll look like Nightcrawler bamfing away from people but they'll still get hits on him sometimes.  Its just a fancy high DCV.

 

Quote

I would question how the power "knew" it was an area effect attack and thus able to trigger.  

 

Sure, triggers can only sense what your normal senses are able to, so there are limits to how and what it can tell is there to respond to.

 

[ScottishFox]

11 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

For example, you cannot use a multipower slot that you don't have active, so his triggers could not reset unless he had that one active.

 

Hmm, so unless he had that power active he'd have to Abort to activate the ability which would at least cost him his next Phase and prevent him from doing it at all if he'd already gone.  I may play test this during our next session to see how the group feels about it.  I'm worried about copy cat syndrome.  Trigger seriously impacts action economy and is like very cheap units of speed.

 

The same guy already bought a trigger so that whenever he blocks an attack it fires of a HKA counter-attack.  Block + attack is much stronger than Block then attack first next phase.

 

I also like the idea of combining that with a DEX contest along the lines of holding a phase to strike an enemy when they get close.  You don't automatically go first so there's a DEX contest to determine the order of events.

 

HERO is good about not having a lot of absolutes so I like to have some sort of roll involved rather than complete immunity.