Andrew Cermak

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? It is said that she was "barely defeated." That implies a stroke of luck or genius on the heroes' part, and argues against assertions that she came ill-prepared. And since we know nearly nothing about what she came with, how she came with it, or how she was repulsed, the only basis we have for criticizing her is that she lost, and as a comic-style supervillain losing is her raison d'etre. She does, after all, have Overconfidence bought as VC, Total. She's designed to give the heroes a chance to win, even if she doesn't realize she's doing it.

Re: Worldwide Champions Canada is slated to get its own book.

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? I think even Iron Age would be more focused on in-the-trenches blood and sweat than strategic concerns. It's hard to be grim and gritty in the general's tent.

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul?

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? They don't really say anything about the detectability of EDM at all, do they, other than it's as visible as any non-modified Power is? That's an argument from silence, and therefore not an argument at all. As it is, Detect EDM, Megascale, is a pretty simple game construct. Cosmic Awareness from the USPD might often pick it up as well, but I don't have the book handy to check the power's details. We don't really know all that much about the Archmages at this point. At any rate, the possible (but not certain) fact that they failed to detect small incursions doesn't mean those incursions were non-detectable.

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? Lots of fiction, especially of the comicbook variety, suggests that incidents of cross-dimensional travel are highly visible to those who are able to look for them, even at great distances. Perhaps V'han has learned that, since every time she sends in scouts she alerts scientifically and mystically advanced civilizations to her impending invasion, it's best to send in a force large enough to attack and defend on its own. Perhaps she then learned that, in many cases, those "scouting parties" were all that was necessary to get the job done.

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? Even highly successful military juggernauts have lapses. The US had the Bay of Pigs, and that invasion was built on intel. We could have won that, if Kennedy had wanted to commit more and better forces, but he had reasons for not doing so. Presumably V'han had her reasons as well.

Re: Which villain needs an overhaul? When you own 100 million dimensions, losing a war costs you pennies. Winning one nets you pennies. Seriously, cost-effectiveness? Why should she care about that? On an empire the scale of hers, scarcity ceases to have meaning, which means economic concerns cease to have meaning.

Re: How do construct the ability to activate others' powers? First of all, let me correct myself; it's actually in DH #14. #7 has the Object Creation Power. Activate is an Instant, No Range Standard/Attack Power. It costs 10, 20, or 30 points, depending on how large a class of beings it can target (the Power assumes it is being used on some subset of machines, but allows the GM to expand it to other targets.

Re: How do construct the ability to activate others' powers? Regarding the original topic, the Digital Hero #7 Heroglyphs column presents a Power called "Activate" that does this.

Re: "Brick Trick" While there's nothing like this in the Ultimate Brick, it does sound like the sort of power that might be in Dark Champions as a "Super-Skill." I don't have the book handy to check, though.

Re: Anyone get DC: TAS yet? The art really is terrible. Just awful; some of it's nearly Blood of Heroes bad. And that's especially disappointing considering how cool the new villains are. They deserved better.

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord There's ample justification for this, actually. Not this extreme, perhaps, but he does get a lot stronger when he's mad. Firelord. Rhino. Iron Man 2020. Titania. The three use rule was surpassed a long time ago.

Re: Which Edition of Champions/Hero System Worked Best for Your Champions Campaign? 5th. The overall quality of the 5th edition line is head and shoulders above any of the previous editions. 3rd and 4th had some great supplements, mixed in with some absolute dross. The incoherence of the pre-5th CU is another strike against those editions.

Re: M&M to HERO I made a conversion matrix like this for M&M, but I abandoned it after I realized how easy it was to tell the converted characters apart from "natural" Champions characters; they just didn't "feel" the same. I do my conversions now by loading up a similar character in HeroDesigner and adjusting it to fit; they feel much more organic as a result.

Re: Why does the USS Iowa only have a 10 Defense? I feel the exact opposite to be true. With the exception of the DEF of the warships (which I feel is likely the result of an error), I think the vehicles work perfectly fine in relation to each other. It's against other published characters that they make less sense, so the more the campaign focuses on vehicle vs. vehicle, the better off the vehicles come out.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO Frankly, I consider a few of your posts to be the rudest in this thread. "Discussing ways in which to make this great game better" shouldn't involve insulting the people who are breaking their backs and risking their own dollars to keep this game on the shelves, and for you to say that they don't know how to run their business as well as you do is insulting in the extreme.

Re: Summon to simulate seeking projectiles And people like to use superhero RPGs to simulate things they see in comics.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO Besides which, hasn't Steve repeatedly announced his plans to release a free "Teach Yourself the Hero System" .pdf? So that's two independent efforts DoJ is making on this front, and yet your whining goes on. And that's not even counting the mass appeal of the Hero genre books, which IME, outside this forum, are the most praised books DoJ has published to date, and which are apparently seeing a fair bit of use by non-Hero gamers.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO The print run sold out and another's on the way, so it'd be hard to label it a failure, ya think? Or maybe all the copies just vanished alongside the equipment write-ups in your copy of 5ER. So, if the goal of Sidekick was to create a stripped-down version of the rules that would be less threatening and easier to learn, and that would sell, please explain to me exactly how you think it failed.

Re: Summon to simulate seeking projectiles In comics, they often do.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO Well...I think it's unfortunate that Hero's sales aren't commensurate with the quality of the product. But no, I wouldn't want them to change their focus. What I would like is for certain individuals to recognize that the RPG market isn't the ripe plum waiting for the picking they think it is, and that the legions of casual newbies looking for a game other than D&D/d20 they think DoJ should be catering to just aren't out there.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO The analogy extends further than you'd like to think. There's only one OS with any significant share of the market. Other OSs that try to compete on its terms are squeezed out or languish in obscurity. Most users will never use another OS in their lives, and have no desire to change or indication that they should change. The only OSs that survive and flourish (relatively speaking) cater to experienced users looking to do things that the dominant OS can't handle. HERO will never have the RPG mass market. It isn't up for grabs any more than the OS mass market is.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO Maybe you should read the book you're criticizing. Sidekick was created specifically to address this concern. You are harping on a non-issue.

Re: Biggest whine about HERO What, you've taken surveys? If so, please post the data. But it seems more likely that you're just generalizing your own biases about what's useful and what isn't, and pretending they have some objective value.