Chimera 12

Re: Weapons/equipment out of nowhere If individual items can be taken away or destroyed and the character has no quick, easy way to replace them, yet can always pull out one of his other items...I'd buy that as the individual slots having an appropriate Focus Limitation, but not the reserve since the only way for an enemy to at least temporarily disable that is to run the character out of toys the hard way. Restrainable is a Limitation intended to reflect inherent powers with some Focus-like aspects -- if it can't be readily taken away from you, but a grab or entangle will prevent you from using it, it's probably Restrainable. The canonical example, by the way, is Flight bought as actual wings. I'm not altogether sure I see that applying here, though, as normally it's not legal to buy something both as a Focus and Restrainable (especially if your Focus is Accessible, in which case it's basically already Restrainable for free), but a character who could manifest objects at will but needed his arms free to properly use them might indeed qualify.

Re: Fantasy Hero vs Pulp Hero I'm not sure that quite cuts to the heart of it. After all, both high and pulp fantasy tend to have fairly clearly defined good and bad guys. Both can feature the clash of massive armies or the interaction of only a few main characters. And in both cases, the main characters tend to be somewhat larger than life. That said, here are my two cents' worth of opinion. -- One, I think there's a difference in how the respective characters are 'larger than life'. Namely, high fantasy characters tend to have actual larger-than-life virtues and flaws where pulp characters are more ordinary, relatable folks with larger-than-life capabilities. In high fantasy, a swordsman with a drinking problem is a flawed figure who's practically guaranteed to either find redemption (either by swearing off alcohol for good or else through a heroic death scene) or else come to a tragic end. In the pulps, he's just another human being -- and probably a proper badass with a blade when he's actually sober (and/or possibly when drunk; it depends on how serious you want to be here ). -- And two, high fantasy tends to go straight for the Big One. It seems that there's always this one thing that needs to be accomplished that drives the entire plot -- often the defeat of the setting's ultimate evil, though it could as easily be something as the quest for a Grail-equivalent --, and the heroes will be ultimately judged by how they measure up in pursuit of The One True Task. Pulp fantasy tends not to have that, at least not to anywhere near the same extent. Pulp heroes take their adventures as they find them; they may have longer-lasting interests, possibly even including the final defeat of some hated arch-nemesis (never mind that that trick never works ), and some of them may last long enough to eventually actually consider retirement...but it won't usually be just because That One Plotline is over and there's nothing left for them to do. Because there always is. Make sense, or am I just rambling?

Re: Only in Hero ID Hmmm. Is this what's confusing you, perchance? "A character with this Standard Power can change his original form into one or more other forms, each with its own abilities, personality, and Characteristics. [...]" If so, note that nothing in there says that the forms' personalities must actually be different from each other, any more than that their stats must be. Two or more forms having "their own Characteristics" doesn't mean that they can't ever have the same score in any of them, for example (and in fact, injuries do transfer between forms), and the same holds true for personality traits. In fact, unless given a specific Physical Complication, all forms share the same set of memories by default. That's how one of the examples of Multiform immediately following the above introduction can be a character with reconfigurable armor (a la at least one animated incarnation of Iron Man) -- nothing about that concept suggests that the man inside the armor has to change in the slightest.

Re: Please tell me why this is wrong! I'd call that a matter of special effect. Both the Human Bonfire and Molecular Agitation Man may have the same number of points in Change Environment: Raise Temperature Level, but if the Human Bonfire simply works by radiating off more of his own heat to while Molecular Agitation Man creates a field which heats up everything in the area from within, then the two effects will end up looking and feeling similar but distinct. (There's also, of course, the question of whether Change Environment was bought with any sort of Area of Effect at all -- if not, then by the 6E default it only affects a single target anyway.)

Re: Total NEWB question - Throwing Badger That's a silly way to write up that power. Clearly, a badger isn't so much an OAF as a recoverable charge.

Re: Only in Hero ID That could get a bit tricky to do with something like Only In Alternate ID, yes. At first glance, my reflex would be to try to rebuild the character with Multiform with his human form being presumably the "true" one, in part precisely because switching between forms that way is only a half-phase action by default. (The line between OIAID and Multiform is kind of fuzzy as it stands; in principle, you can do much of what you can do with one with the other as well, and their special effects may well be indistinguishable.)

Re: Injured PCs and healing time

Re: Big Honking Sword

Re: The best Superpet?

Re: Rules intention question Well, the presumption that it should be okay to use full power all the time might owe something to two particular sources. One, there's ye olde Fantasy/Wargamer Mindset. In a fair number of fantasy games (including, of course, the granddaddy of them all), hitting your enemies as hard and fast as you can is the way to win, and quite a few of them make killing said enemies the default solution -- after all, taking prisoners is a hassle and letting your foes run free after beating them is just begging for trouble in the future, right? Better just kill them so you can take their stuff with an untroubled conscience. (If you think you hear a faint sarcastic echo of the "STUN Damage In Heroic Campaigns" section on pages 6E2 119ff here...well, I won't say you're altogether wrong.) Now, superhero combat does pretty clearly function somewhat differently. But players -- and GMs! -- used to a steady diet of "kill or be killed"-style games or obsessed with "realistic" (i.e. lethal) combat results won't necessarily find that an immediately obvious conclusion to jump to and may either deliberately or unconsciously stick to what they're familiar with instead. Which means that, to cope, NPCs that aren't supposed to just die or get hospitalized need defenses suited to handling the PCs' biggest attacks, which makes lesser attacks less effective, which in turn just reinforces these players' belief that they were right all along...and so the circle continues. The second reason people might be tempted to go all-out at the drop of a hat is, I think, Hero's point-based character system itself. Character points are a limited resource, and after you've sunk a bunch of them into buying that lovely 12d6 Blast there's a distinct temptation to use that at full power as often as possible to get your points' worth out of your investment...after all, the argument might go, if I'm just using six or seven dice of it all the time, I might as well have spent the 'excess' points on something actually useful instead of extra damage that I'm always holding back anyway! All in all, actually having NPCs whose powers and defenses range all over the map -- and letting the players know about it, of course! -- still looks to me like the best way to get players to "get with" the superhero genre and its particular (and, I won't deny, at times peculiar) combat tropes. If the villains' defenses are always conveniently scaled to handle the PCs' full-bore attacks safely, then the GM really is just teaching them that the only way to win is to use full power all the time all over again.

Does a character with Desolidification need to buy his or her PRE with the Affects Physical World Advantage in order to be able to make Presence Attacks against solid targets while desolidified him- or herself?

Re: Injured PCs and healing time I'd consider the Sixth Edition default healing rules (recover your REC in BODY per month, half that under poor conditions, up to twice that with good hospital care) appropriate for 'realistic' campaigns where combat is supposed to be actually dangerous and injuries have to be taken seriously precisely because they do tend to stick around for a while. Handling natural healing this way (and assuming no 'magic' healing exists or is easily available) means that somebody who gets significantly hurt today is still going to be down some BODY from their normal maximum if they then get into a fight next week...much like they would still not be in top condition again already in real life. That said, these default rules may not work so well for genres where characters traditionally heal quickly between individual escapades -- pulp, superhero comics, D&D-style fantasy, and more than one TV serial where the hero is bedridden (though smiling) at the end of one episode but ready to jump into danger with both feet again as soon as the next one begins. For those, were I GMing, I'd use the advice from the toolkitting box on 6E2 130 and move the base healing rate up to REC in BODY per week rather than month...or, for really extreme cases, maybe even per day.

Re: nations with royal families You know, if it doesn't necessarily have to be a long entrenched dynastic monarchy, there's always North Korea...

Re: Create a Villain Theme Team! Any group with a public agenda needs somebody to speak for them. For the Neo-Luddites, The Voice of Reason is that somebody. A middle-aged man with no obvious superhuman powers or gadgetry who normally refuses to wear a mask or costume, he is a skilled orator capable of effortlessly inciting crowds to riot against the evils of technology and making even individuals dedicated to the concept of progress question their beliefs...who just happens to also be very good at protesting his innocence whenever the charge of using some form of mind control is leveled against him.

Re: Only in Hero ID That kind of seems to assume a borderline antagonistic player/GM relationship. As in, "players are expected to try to cheat and the GM must always be on his guard so he can catch them in the act and steer them back onto the straight and narrow if needed". I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. Moreover, for purposes of assigning a Limitation or not what's important isn't the reason why a character would switch back and forth between identities...only whether or not he actually does do so. And that's really a basic, fairly binary concept issue -- either your character is the kind of person who'd do that or not. Thus: -- If the character concept really calls for the character to have both a 'powered' and a 'non-powered' identity and both of them will see use in the campaign, that's OIAID. -- If the character theoretically has two identities but only ever uses one of them in play, he can safely be treated as only having that identity in the first place. Things that never (or almost never) come up in a campaign aren't worth character points either way. -- If the character starts out with two identities and powers bought with OIAID and then the player decides to abandon the 'powerless' ID, he should buy off the Limitation as soon as possible because it no longer really applies. Why the character might decide to jump into any particular direction really doesn't matter all that much. Coming up with excuses for just about everything they decide to do is something most people are naturally good at, after all.

Re: Beating Dr. Destroyer...how do (or did) you do it? In fact, possibly not even with Indirect. Usually, Indirect lets you project the source point of a power at some distance and/or allows you to let the power's path diverge from the default straight line...but what it doesn't normally do is allow you to have more than one source point per use of the power, and as a paragraph on 6E1 337 helpfully points out, once that point is set, even powers with Area Effect emanating from it interact with obstacles normally. Which means that an Indirect Mega-Area Blast you set off in a janitor's closet still won't expand past that closet unless it breaks down the walls and/or door first -- you can have the source point inside the closet or outside, but not both at once. (Unless, of course, there's some Adder or Advantage allowing that that I've simply missed. I'm up way too late once again. )

Re: Only in Hero ID

Re: Inflicting Drowning... I knew I'd read about a 'suffocation' power somewhere before, I just didn't remember to consult the APG as well as the core books. But yeah, I imagine that that would be pretty much the definitive 6E build: Buy the Entangle, then buy Change Environment: Suffocation as per the APG with 0 END Uncontrolled and Link the two. (You wouldn't need any AoE on the Change Environment because it's just supposed to work on the entangled target.) The "reasonably common and obvious" way to shut off the Uncontrolled suffocation part would be the target escaping the Entangle or at least the portion that actually covers the victim's mouth/nose/other breathing orifice being removed.

Re: Inflicting Drowning... You know, now I find myself wondering if there's a good way to build a power like "remove all free oxygen from the air in a given area". But I have a 6E-based idea for the Entangle in question. In the description of the Barrier Power, 6E1 mentions that while Barriers aren't inherently airtight, they can be made so at GM's discretion by Linking Life Support (Self-Contained Breathing) specifically to them. This doesn't appear to give anybody trapped by the Barrier Life Support (there's no mention of Usable Against Others, for one thing) -- it just makes the Barrier itself 'self-contained'. So, why not steal that concept? Link Life Support (Self-Contained Breathing) to the Entangle and declare it to be both airtight and tight enough that any character caught in it starts to suffocate right away unless they have suitable Life Support of their own...

Re: Only in Hero ID

Re: Beating Dr. Destroyer...how do (or did) you do it? I'd agree. If you can change your powers more or less at will, which a VPP does let you do unless it's one of those types that take a long time to switch around, then "only works under certain conditions/against a given class of targets" type Limitations aren't really Limitations. (Heck, depending on the situation they could be considered Advantages, though I probably wouldn't bother trying to work out values and then charging extra for those either. )

Re: Variable SFX or Indirect or Both? Hmmm, I'm not sure how to handle that in 5E. (I don't have the books and never did.) In 6E, I'd use the Alterable Origin Point adder (+5 to the base cost of the power to have it come from whatever body part you want) for this. Indirect really covers cases where the point of origin is somewhere else than you altogether or the power doesn't have to follow a straight path (with the latter bit being obviously not that applicable in hand-to-hand combat), and as long as the special effect of the power is basically "can grow sharp or stabby bits at will" I wouldn't require Variable SFX just for that either -- the type of damage, so to speak, isn't going to vary all that much. That said, if 5E does specify that Indirect at the +1/4 level does do what Alterable Origin Point does in 6th, that would seem to be the way to go.

Re: So, are Bricks more expensive in 6th Edition? Purely mathematically, a 6E "400 points with 75 in matching Complications" character is equivalent to an older "325 base points plus 75 from Disadvantages" build. The difference is in presentation and emphasis -- 6E pushes more of a "I get this many points to build my character plus that many to make his life interesting with" perspective than a "I get this many points to build my character and if I want more (which I do) I have to pile on Bad Stuff to get them" one.

Re: Strength Minimum

Re: Only in Hero ID Well, the guideline in the 6E1 writeup (pages 386/7) is "at least a Full Phase, if not longer". Of course, the way the text then goes on it may be possible to change more quickly if there's a reasonably easy way for others to prevent the change from happening...but in general I'd probably stick with that Full Phase minimum. Among other things, it means that if you don't want to be a sitting duck while changing you'd better have moved someplace safe in a previous phase because you certainly won't be doing it in the same one... On the other hand, since the Limitation is noted as most appropriate for the superheroic genre, I wouldn't worry too much about the change having to take a 'realistic' amount of time either. For most cases, requiring that one full phase -- one panel, if you will -- should IMO be enough; outside of combat the difference between, say, one full phase and one full turn will all too often be relatively trivial, while in combat it could easily be crippling enough to rate a higher Limitation if strictly enforced.