Chimera 12

Re: How best to replace "Find Weakness" On a bit of a tangent, depending on how old the original books are one possible option to update those characters might also be to forget about Find Weakness altogether and instead spend those points on other skills or talents that just plain didn't exist back then but do in 6E. For example, do those agent writeups have the Teamwork skill already? If not, they probably should...

Re: D&D 4E Beholder Eye Tyrant *hunts down, finds, and checks D&D4 Monster Manual* That's true. The 4th Edition Beholder Eye Tyrant (which basically corresponds to the 'classic' Beholder) doesn't have an anti-magic central eye. Instead, its central eye lets it make a single-target attack that, if successful, leaves the victim dazed (limited to only one action/turn, easier to hit, and unable to flank) until the end of the Eye Tyrant's next turn...and it does so as a minor action, so the central eye can almost always be used in addition to other attacks or else up to three times in one turn by itself. It's a bit of a nerf, I suppose, but then D&D4 doesn't have as many grand, sweeping anti-magic effects as previous editions took for granted any more. Beholders still work as the Daleks of D&D just fine in my book.

Re: Beating Dr. Destroyer...how do (or did) you do it?

Re: Gargoyle While I agree that a Limitation that isn't a Limitation in practice shouldn't be worth any cost breaks, OIAID is one of those Limitations that rely on the GM to properly enforce them. In other words, if you take powers with it? That's a way of telling the GM "I want this complication to come up; I want to be caught in the wrong ID often enough that not having my powers instantly available is actually a problem." (And it should be a problem distinct from just having to maintain a secret ID; you presumably already got the points for taking that Complication. No double dipping, please.) For the poster child for this kind of Limitation, think Focus. If your character has an ostensibly Breakable OAF weapon, but it's always conveniently at hand whenever he needs it instead of lying forgotten at home from time to time and the GM never has anybody actually try to break it or take it away from your character...then what did you get the -1 Limitation for?

Re: Gargoyle Only In Alternate ID is a Limitation because you genuinely only have the powers taken with it while in said alternate ID. Powers without it stick around in any identity you might have -- you may not want to use them in an obvious way so as not to blow your cover, but that doesn't change the fact that if you changed your mind you could do so at any time. So, our Gargoyle character here is limited because, anytime he's just being plain old Andy Rogers, he literally is just a normal person (though with unusually high SPD and a couple of extra senses). A couple of common muggers could be a genuine threat unless he risks his secret by 'monstering out'; that's not a problem that, say, Clark Kent has to worry about in quite the same way.

Re: Epic level Champions To be honest, I'm not sure how much "lower everybody's power level" is going to help in a thread about how to run a specifically high-powered game. On the other hand, now you've got me wondering what kinds of powers a superheroic TV might have...

Re: Calculating Real world speed to Hero Speed in 6E For those of us using the metric system, it's pretty easy. One hour has 300 12-second turns and one kilometer has 1000 meters, so something that moves 1m/turn is going at 0.3 kph. (You can almost see it move. ) Of course, in-game movement is measured not so much per turn as per phase. Well, 1m/phase is basically just your current SPD in m/turn, so 1m of 'movement' translates directly to SPD * 0.3 kph, and conversely you can get a good approximation of how much movement to buy for something whose speed in kph and in-game SPD you both know by dividing said speed by the same SPD * 0.3. Keep noncombat multipliers in mind here, though. For a lot of real-world things the only rating you'll easily get is probably their top speed, which in Hero terms would usually be noncombat movement and on occasion might include some degree of active Pushing as well -- a cheetah trying to run down a gazelle, for example, definitely burns up END quickly.

Re: My Cat Is Possessed!

Re: Please tell me why this is wrong! Whoa. 30 AP of Change Environment cancelling out 180 AP of a fire-based attack? Dispel and Suppress wish they were that good...

Re: My Cat Is Possessed!

Re: How best to replace "Find Weakness" Well, there is the optional APG rule (presumably) referred to by Steve which lets multiple levels of Armor Piercing halve defenses that many times, at an increasing Advantage cost per level of course. But yeah, Find Weakness kind of always was its own special snowflake. As of this writing, I'm honestly not sure how to best model it -- or at least its precise mechanics, as something that simply has "I know how to hit you where it hurts" as a special effect isn't hard at all -- using only stock 6E parts.

Re: How best to replace "Find Weakness"

Re: Icons - The Costume and Superpowers Store

Re: Sneaky GM Thing: Healing + other effects with Transform? "t seems like the Orb should mark the person it healed, with dark tattoo-like images on the areas healed." Sounds Cosmetic to me. If the OP wants a significantly more powerful or insidious side effect than just "leaves a mark", then we can talk about a higher class of Transform.

Re: Sneaky GM Thing: Healing + other effects with Transform? Sounds to me like the most natural way to build this would indeed be Healing with a Cosmetic Transform Side Effect.

Re: Taunting The Presence Attack itself takes no time, though any actions accompanying it take whatever time they usually would (6E2 138). And yes, Presence Attacks in combat are at -1d6 effectiveness, presumably because anybody in combat will have other things occupying his or her attention as well. Depending on the situation, other modifiers may also apply and compound, compensate for, or even readily overshadow that. Also keep in mind that while Presence Attacks are rather flexible, some of the modifiers and result descriptions were clearly written with an eye towards straight intimidation attempts and won't necessarily apply to taunts and goading as-is. (For instance, speaking just for myself I probably wouldn't apply the usual bonuses for a "violent action" accompanying the attack, but there might be an extra die or two to be had if the target had an even vaguely applicable Enraged or Berserk.)

Re: BioFix - We're here to help! There's one key difference here, though: the flu occurs naturally. It has no designer that the law could plausibly hold responsible (you can't very well drag Mother Nature into court unless you have a fairly unusual campaign setting) and few if any people lining up to catch it deliberately. It's just something we have to live with. Not so with these designer bacteria, obviously. The law certainly can touch BioFix and their customers, all of whom (presumably) chose to become carriers on purpose.

Re: Quick Question from a New Hero

Re: Flash Rebuild

Re: BioFix - We're here to help! Well, the emphasis was supposed to be on highly infectious. As in "an OxyGen carrier could go shopping and end up casually infecting a significant percentage of the people he encounters on the trip, whether they actually want OxyGen in their bodies themselves or not". I'd imagine that even if the stuff was demonstrated to be perfectly harmless (and let's face it, that trick never works anyway), some basic rules to reduce the frequency of that sort of scenario occurring in practice would be laid down. If it's just "well, you might catch something from spending hours in intimate contact with a carrier", then that's a different issue altogether.

Re: Top 10 Insupportable Premises in Comic Book Universes That's a good point. Especially since said thug might actually enjoy some success that way -- superheroes always crawling out of the woodwork in the nick of time to foil supervillains is another one of those comic book tropes, after all. (Which owes its existence to the fact that the comics are about the heroes, of course. Thug-Man's half dozen successful bank robberies before he ran into Captain Justice may be mentioned in passing, but it's a pretty safe bet that we won't see each of them drawn and written in loving detail -- it's not Thug-Man's book.)

Re: BioFix - We're here to help!

Re: Icons - The Costume and Superpowers Store So the Tailor is really just an intelligent lab rat in a 'man suit'? Hmmm...yes, it all makes sense now.

Re: Batman! Collect them all for 350 Points! Well, if you think about it, it's a bit weird that the standard format for character writeups has the cost follow the value for Characteristics but precede everything else for Powers and Skills in the first place. We're used to that and nice formatting helps as well, but it's not inherently any more 'natural' than simply listing everything cost-first and being done with it.

Re: Beating Dr. Destroyer...how do (or did) you do it? Well, yeah. That could be a problem because I would imagine that there are groups/GMs out there who decide on caps for their campaigns once and then never go back and think about changing them because, by and large, they work for those campaigns. And as long as they're not eager to move out of their comfort zone (and who's to say they're Doing It Wrong by staying there?), it sounds like the official writeup of Dr. D(*) -- or at least the purely mechanical parts of it -- is useless to these groups because they either can't really use him as an antagonist at all or else would need to reinvent him to fit their particular campaign needs anyway. (*) Which I haven't seen yet myself, mind; but from this thread, he does manage come across as just another invincible uber-NPC whose entire character sheet might as well read "HA HA YOU LOSE" and be done with it to me.