astralfrontier

What is the rule for seeing if the target is Stunned, when Coordinating one or more Autofire attacks? Cumulative STUN of all Autofired hits, first attack's STUN only, or other?

What are the consequences of successfully Coordinating attacks with Autofire? Do you use the highest rolled STUN from each attack for purposes of checking if the target is Stunned, or all of them, or is it handled another way?

I'm designing a low-powered NPC super with a single power: damage he takes affects his willpower and ego, not his body. The worse he's hurt, the less motivated and confident he becomes, though physically he stays intact. What is the simplest and most straight-forward way to build this sort of power, given that Hero has no "sliding Willpower score" a la White Wolf?

Thomas Temple would point out two things: first, that presumably anyone (such as a villain) can follow this homing signal if it's just a regular radio broadcast, and second, if Heather really is kidnap-prone, hasn't this genius just complicated the problem by giving people yet another way to find her?

A general observation I'd like to make about running "this sort of game" is that it's pretty similar to any sort of "gritty military conflict". Sure, the counter-terrorists wear their bullet-proof vests, but they can still get taken out pretty quickly if they don't get out of the line of fire. I'd carefully regulate any Killing attacks you allow into the game, aside from conventional weapons. High-damage normal attacks for super-powers, and less damaging but more lethal RKA guns, will keep the fear of death and pain a presence. Tune your resistant vs. non-resistant defenses so that people often get knocked out but rarely outright killed. Give PCs liberal Recoveries when unconscious, and skimp on Recoveries for NPCs.

I'm not going to bother with exact DCs or precise analyses of damage done, since you're asking "how do I run this sort of thing", not "what are some X-Men movie writeups". First, a few baselines: Mystique can hold her own against Wolverine. She can also effortlessly beat the crap out of about 20 guys with guns who have her covered. Wolverine can single-handedly take out a large group of commando soldiers. This means high DEX, SPD and DCV. Define stats for your elite military guys in the campaign, and set the combat-focused PCs' stats to where they can reduce a few such NPCs to paste with minimal effort. Everybody else gets proportionately less. I would also give every character in the game at least some Combat Luck. Mostly, these characters will count on their DCV or other special powers (like Regeneration), rather than full-on PD and ED. The uniforms are established as body armor, I'm not enough of a fanboy to require that someone actually get shot on-screen to verify that they work as such. Give everybody DEF 7 kevlar, minimum, OIF, Real Armor. Don't bother with partial coverage or weight or any of that. Cyke's optic blast doesn't seem to be that deadly. Sure, he can rip out large chunks of masonry with it, but I'd say his "uncontrolled" attack is stronger than his normal blasts, so don't assume the damage is all that great. Similarly, Storm can do really big weather effects (like tornados) but she doesn't have a REALLY big blasto effect against individual targets. In general, the strongest blaster should have an attack that can drop a lightly-armored typical person with a single shot. Martial artists will operate on a lower scale, doing maybe 8-10 points of STUN per successful hit.

Hero is designed around Game Effects. To effectively create powers using it, stop thinking in terms of "I can control shadows", and think like "I can control shadows to (a) bind people in place ( blind people © grab objects or people (d) and so on". Then buy the powers that represent these things, such as (a) Entangle, ( Flash or Darkness, © Telekinesis, or (d) other powers. As for Move Throughs, ask the player if he's ever been in a car wreck. Did only one car's passengers need air-bags and seat belts?

This sounds pretty fair to me, and my GM is reading this thread for peoples' opinions as well. Developing the necessary forensics and genetic knowledge is something that'd be good for the character and an under-used NPC doctor in the game as well.

Detect only gives you presence and intensity, as described. The character's goal is to be able to compare DNA samples against each other, for example to confirm that a pool of blood was actually the victim's in a murder case. I wouldn't intend for any sort of DNA analysis to reveal more than a conventional forensic examination could otherwise, though.

My character, Thomas Temple, has a "matter sense", right now bought as Detect Matter with various enhancements and such. I want to expand this to let him directly analyze DNA samples with his powers, but rather than buying outrageous levels of Magnification, I thought it might be more appropriate to take a separate power, Detect DNA with Analyze, RSR SCI: Genetics or somesuch. Does this power also require Magnification, or is the fact that it can't operate at larger scales good enough?

I haven't seen LXG (a shame), but I would guess the power gives you three things: 1. you can't really be hurt, 2. you can't be identified (it's just a swarm of bats) and 3. it lets you move from place to place easily. So, buy Desolidification, Costs END Only To Change (+1/4), Limited Ability to Pass Through Things (-1/2). This lets you get your 'bat' body into various places, like through half-closed windows, that you'd have difficulty with otherwise. Add Shapeshift, Sight and Hearing, Costs END Only To Change (+1/4), Linked to Desolidification (-1/2). Finally, buy Flight, Only While Desolid (-1/4, probably).

Thomas Temple has no experience with time travel or precognition, but he has years upon years of hostile history with telepaths, and will assume it was telepathic intimidation rather than a genuine warning from any "future self" of his - after all, if it really was him, either "here is why you should stay away" should have been explained, or "I cannot explain due to paradox concerns" should have been heard. He's logical and focused enough to give such warnings to himself, and forestall his own curiosity, assuming the warning were genuine.

Thomas Temple would bag the DNPC and stash her for later - no reason not to throw away a potentially useful bargaining chip, even if his intentions are going to be rather more innocent towards her personally. Following that, wait for one villain or the other to win, then bust heads while both are weakened - he can repair the property damage later with his powers.

My vote for most abusive power is the 16384 cultist Followers who have Aid vs. Aid, and the last follower who has Aid vs. the PC's 'Divine powers' Variable Power Pool. All things considered it's pretty cheap, as long as nobody kills off your followers en masse.

If they aren't the ONLY supers in the world, then whoever else has powers is probably now setting themselves up as kings of the world, raiding military bases for weapons and such for their loyal followers, and so forth. So the real enemies of the campaign are probably super-warlords. And you probably have cults of people surrounding "neutral" supers. If there are no other supers, of course, then you probably screwed up. Lower the point values of your PCs.

The "Spawn armor" from the movie would make a pretty unique "power-armor" suit. If you don't like mystic origins, create a chameleonic "active weave" using nanotechnology, and give it similar powers. Stretching, Images (no range), various HKA/RKA attacks, possibly Regeneration, various movement modes..

"Stepping outside time and affecting things" is a pretty broad range of options. If you can do ANYTHING YOU LIKE while time is frozen, up to and including stabbing people in the gut, going to the store and getting additional knives, coming back and stabbing them some more, etc., then the power has gone well beyond "standard superhero" and you are rightfully in the 500-point bracket, or higher. Put the book down and just free-form RP this godlike character's powers If you don't like the EDM solution, you can approach the problem more comprehensively. Simply moving yourself, people or inanimate things around without actually causing them direct harm would be Power constructs such as: Missile Reflection (At Range), Teleport UAA (Must Cross Intervening Space), Entangle, and Desolidification (only to avoid taking damage - you timestop and side-step). To freeze time and inspect a situation from all angles could be bought as limited Clairvoyance, and Rapid bought on the Sight sense group (if everything is frozen, though, you're unlikely to get much value from Hearing, though arguments could be made for taste and other senses). Simply moving yourself would be Teleportation (Must Cross Intervening Space).

Genre Convention #41a: "Reality-altering events" often come in the form of cosmically powerful supers, each with their own distinctive callsigns, costumes, and sometimes their own separate comic-book lines.

Genre Convention #40 Many heroes (and some villains) will be endowed not only with superpowers - their destinies are so clearly marked out that even their given birth-names will be some sort of linguistic witticism or suggestion of their origins, powers or personality (e.g. alliterative names like Billy Batson, or Scott Free aka Mister Miracle).

http://www.memesis.org/m/memesis.php?id=256 Opinions welcome. This is a fairly general article; I could also write up a specific discussion of advantages and limitations and how they affect mentalism, if there is interest.

I'll write something based on this. Expect to find a URL posted here.

Another simple solution is to treat mental powers as just another attack form, with regards to how you are expected to balance the game - characters need an ECV in the 7-13 range and 10-20 points of overall Mental Defense on average for a Standard Superhero campaign. Minor characters will obviously not have these ratings.

One point I haven't noticed, and which I feel compelled to bring up, is that "mentalism" is a very generic sort of concept. Some power constructs simply do not exist in some fictional universes, and others exist and are "balanced" because they can be thwarted. For example, telepathy in the Lensmen setting works via "thought-waves". You can get a thought screen that blocks incoming (and outgoing!) telepathic powers, you have Mental Defense, you have Telepathy with a serious Megascale, but at the same time your really significant powers (like memory retrieval and editing) must work up close. With interstellar distances, this can make it quite difficult to just mind-blast an opponent into oblivion from orbit - you must be up close, and even then, the "trickier" telepathic powers are hard to learn. Tune your allowed mentalism powers based on how they work in your setting. Work out a coherent model for telepathy, and apply it as a standard to all characters (PCs and NPCs) in your setting. Require characters without significant telepathic experience to buy limitations on what Powers they can use via Mind Scan (and maybe Mind Link as well). Play around with "standard" limitations on mental powers. Case in point: "The Shadow" (the movie, with Alec Baldwin), which features three mentalists: The Shadow, Margo Lane, and Shiwan Khan. The Shadow's Mind Control seems like it was bought with Reduced Penetration - he can't just Mind Control Khan into giving up, or Margo into forgetting about him, but he can dominate his uncle easily enough. Margo has Mind Link and Mental Defense, but not much else. Khan has Mind Control enough to overpower most mortals, even Margo with whatever Mental Defense she has. By using some of the same limits on mental powers as on physical ones, mentalist combat can become a lot more tactical, ESPECIALLY if most of the PCs have access to at least a degree of Mental Defense (natural or artificial).

I'd ask my players about it, then use it as a campaign element if people were so inclined. I also imagine that being "caught on camera" is just one more factor in that activation roll that most Secret IDs are bought with. If your idea of getting into costume is to run down the alley and pull open your shirt to reveal a particular letter of the alphabet loudly emblazoned on your chest, well... the camera caught it, congratulations. If on the other hand you are accustomed to jumping down a nearby storm drain, or disappearing into a small local supermarket, or just shimmying up through the emergency hatch on an elevator, you probably don't risk detection as much. I believe that comic-book conventions can survive the "reality check" if used properly. For example, a great deal of recent anti-terrorism activity in the United States has been due to the twin-towers and Pentagon attack. But for how long do you think people have been attacking government installations and major military bases in the Champions Universe? Because this sort of thing is JUST a bit more ongoing, it is naturally not going to inspire the sort of knee-jerk response that has put people like "privacy what?" Ashcroft in the legislative driver's seat. Thus, ubiquitous cameras and other sort of privacy-destroying controls may not be an issue. The first time a major villain tried to hose the White House, everybody clamped down, the civil rights movement stepped in, there were a few high-profile court cases about the abuse of the system, and the government quietly stepped it back, and now people move on.

You may be thinking of the "New Purple Gang", which is not the same thing as is being detailed here.