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

Lovely write-up, AlHazred. Looking at it, I couldn't find the beholder's central eye anti-magic cone attack. So, 4th edition beholders lack this ability? If so, interesting. Chalk that up as 'old school' beholder action!

 

For the record: IMHO, beholders are the daleks of D&D.

 

 

~ Mister E ("When I say 'run,' run. Run!")

*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?

Still utterly confused. What' date=' exactly, does that have to do with the character stripping?[/quote']

 

I think I see the confusion. The "gaked" in the original post is, as I read it, a typo for "ganked"...not, as you seem to think, for "naked". Different things altogether.

Re: Gargoyle

I understand the limitation' date=' I just don't believe the limitations are worth the price savings. How many often will the character be ambushed? if it's all the time, cool may be worth the saving, although you're probably going to have some annoyed players. I'm with Escafarc, unless it can be easily stopped or is difficult to change, it's not really a OIHID.[/url]

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

The build looks fine but on a personal note it seems more and more people make all their characters OIHID. It feels like they come up with concepts that take advantage of that. I think this is a huge problem because the limitation rarely lives up to the point savings. I mean it's a -1/4 limitation so it should only come up 1 in 4 sessions... Unless you make every power and characteristic that takes the limitation come up 1 in 4 sessions. I dunno it just seems unfair to the few people that don't use it.

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

you might try giving the heroes lower level powers like a tv super-hero

thatway they still have power but things can happen to them

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!

It's a question of interpretation. The Clairsentience rules state you need GM permission to use it for LOS' date=' but the Mental Powers rules state that all you need is to know where the target is. To me, that means 'no you can't use Clairsentience to target your 10d6 LOS Laser Blast on someone halfway around the world'. As a GM, I'd allow Clairsentience (with the Targeting Sense modifier, of course) to work for Mental Powers unless some other circumstance precluded it.[/quote']

 

Let me quote you something from the very section on Mental Powers (specifically, 6E1 149, last paragraph before "Classes of Minds"):

 

"A character must establish LOS with his "naked eye" -- with his Targeting Senses unaided by any outside enhancements. Thus, he could use his innate Telescopic Sight to establish LOS, but not binoculars. Characters cannot establish LOS through Clairsentience, television, or similar methods."

 

So, no, you need a bit more than just "knowing where your target is". (Otherwise it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to claim that any old mentalist could try to take over the President each time he's making a live speech on TV.) My default take on using Mental Powers via Clairsentience would be to actually require Mind Scan as well -- with the Clairsentience potentially helping the character narrow down just where to 'point' his scan, of course.

Re: Please tell me why this is wrong!

More detail... The block of ice was created to snuff out a 180 Active Point napalm-like fire attack.

 

[...]

 

Change Environment seems to be a bit of a Pandora's Box. If I allow it to cancel 180 AP powers (for 30 AP of Change Environment) [...].

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!

Dunno... If she's jumping from a possessed animal to a new animal' date=' she should be able to get LOS on them with Clairsentience. She'd only need Mind Scan if she was trying to initiate a possession from scratch.[/quote']

 

Technically, Clairsentience can't be used to establish LOS. (Barring GM permission, of course.) So, strictly speaking, she would need LOS from her original body or else Mind Scan to get a 'lock' on a new target.

 

That may make more sense if you consider her body, not her detached viewpoint, the true source of her powers with this build, I suppose. (I don't think the rules ever quite define what, if anything, the physical location of a completely disembodied mind with not even an astral form to its name would be. ) If she's using a Mind Control/Clairsentience combo to 'ride' a cat that's a couple of miles away now and suddenly a big, mean-looking dog pops up, that's a problem because the cat doesn't automatically share her powers -- those are still rooted in her body (and most likely her brain) back home! Which of course means that if she wants to now take hold of the dog, she has to do it from there...

Re: How best to replace "Find Weakness"

Kind of. the problem with that approach is that you cannot simulate the further halving of defenses as you made more skill rolls in later phases. I kind of miss Find Weakness. Nothing exists that really can replace it.

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"

Using Combat Skill Levels to add DCs to an attack would seem to a be an approach in the same spirit as the old Find Weakness power' date=' though of course the mechanics are very different.[/quote']

 

Hmm, point. Similarly, I imagine one could replace Find Weakness -- for agents, at least -- with an appropriate form of Deadly Blow or Weaponmaster. (While their descriptions only mention killing attacks, I would have no problem letting them apply to other forms of attack under suitable circumstances. They're built using Combat Skill Levels not actually limited to KAs in any fashion according to their writeup on 6E1 447 anyway.)

Re: Icons - The Costume and Superpowers Store

Those are possibilities. I'm considering how best to portray some of those' date=' since I think the "Only in Alternate ID" Limitation recommends having it take a turn or more to transform, which a costume change would cover. He-Man's sword and GL's ring I think are one phase transforms.[/quote']

 

Full phase or more, actually (6E1 387, very first sentence). It can apparently be faster if there's some reasonably convenient way to prevent the ID change, too; the point being, I think, that while OIAID is supposed to be a Limitation, it's meant to inconvenience but not cripple the character. (Consider what being caught in the wrong ID when a fight suddenly breaks out could actually mean for somebody who needs a full turn or more to change. Best case, they miss out on a fair bit of the action; worst case, they get taken out of the fight altogether -- and possibly even killed -- before they can finish 'transforming' at all.)

Re: Sneaky GM Thing: Healing + other effects with Transform?

Cosmetic?

 

 

"Hey, why is your arm all bandaged up? Didn't we heal it with that orb thing?"

 

"Yeah, but the flesh was all black, right? And now it's... growing..."

"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

Can a Presence Attack be done at any time?

 

(There is a penalty for doing it in combat isn't there?)

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!

But what? Restrict their movement? Unlawful without a compelling public safety issue. Require them to wear protective suits? Under what statute? The 'Flu is highly infectious - and yet we have no laws that would allow us to restrict the movement or require the wearing of protective gear for people with 'Flu' date=' without declaring a public emergency and/or martial law[/b']. If the organism is ruled harmless, I can guarantee attempts to apply legal restraints to the people carrying it would fold like tissue paper at the first legal challenge. There is no legal right "to not get infected". To apply some sort of restrictions, you'd need to posit major changes in law enforcement, new laws and also create a new monitoring agency: the CDC has neither the interest, the personnel, the budget or the infrastructure to do something like this, and I doubt the regular cops would be much interested.

 

cheers, Mark

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

Kinda like 'The Human Bullet' (or whatever his name was) on the animated series' date=' 'The Tick'? You know, the hero that got to crime scenes by firing himself out of a cannon? [/quote']

 

Not having actually seen the cartoon but going with my imagination, I'd call that a special effect for Leaping.

 

The classic example for 'can't hover' would be an airplane that needs to maintain a minimum forward speed to avoid stalling and potentially crashing, of course.

Re: Flash Rebuild

Be nice if there were a 'partial effect' feature for Transform' date=' so by getting 1x body (rather than 2x body) you can get the effects of a 1 level weaker transform (i.e. dazzled, -2 CV).[/quote']

 

Partial Transform, 6E1 308?

Re: BioFix - We're here to help!

This' date=' however, is not. There are a few live vaccines in use today that are infectious and can be (and sometimes are) passed from the vacinee to other people. However, they have also been tested and shown to be safe, so the reaction of the authorities is "Who cares?". Transmission is not tracked. This is a little different, since it's not a vaccine, but if it's been passed as safe to give to people, then it's ... well, safe to give to people. I doubt that any restrictions would be put in place, or - if mooted - survive legal challenge. Hell, it's hard enough to restrict the movement of people who have [b']dangerous[/b] infectious conditions.

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

Aberrant made this same argument as to why there were no "supervillains" in their world.

Giving a lazy, dumb, two-bit thug super powers doesn't stop him from being a lazy, dumb, two-bit thug.

"Work? Why would I do that? It's even easier to take what I want now."

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!

Sorry if this was unclear' date=' but I'm not interested in how to build this. That's easy. I'm gathering thoughts about what might happen in (and to) the world if these things were created.[/quote']

 

Depends mainly on two things, I think: One, how thoroughly have these bacteria be tested and shown to be safe for human consumption without adverse long-term side effects? And two, how high is the risk of 'carriers' inadvertantly infecting others?

 

If this stuff is only experimental, highly infectious, and gets out of the lab, expect it to be treated as basically another epidemic no matter what BioFix claims.

 

If it's shown to be largely (or even, never mind realism, perfectly) safe but still highly infectious, the law would still take a dim view on the notion of carriers infecting others without consent. Expect BioFix 'customers' to be required to identify themselves as such and dress and act to minimize exposure.

 

If it's experimental but there is no great risk of passing it on, some people will jump on the new trend as they always do. If the bacteria turn out to be unsafe immediately, expect some tragedies and a bunch of lawsuits. If they don't, but are eventually revealed to do something nasty to their hosts in the long run (cause cancer, render them sterile, whatever), the backlash will simply happen then. And if they turn out to simply work exactly as advertised, we naturally transition to the next possibility.

 

If the bacteria have been thoroughly tested, shown to be safe, and there aren't any great issues with inadvertantly infecting anybody else (this may require them to be 'tailored' to their specific host), then they will inevitably catch on. As one side effect of this, one might expect mankind to take more to the oceans in the long run -- if you don't need to breathe underwater and swimming doesn't tire you out, that will open quite a bit of new territory for exploration, cultivation, and maybe even colonization.

Re: Icons - The Costume and Superpowers Store

No silly! The rats are the ones running the experiment. Didn't you pay attention to Adams?

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!

DER! My bad. I think that's backwards from the export format I use.

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' date=' of course they do. But a 400 point PC who gains 400 points of experience is likely to spend at least [i']some[/i] of that experience on increasing their DC, defenses (including STUN), and CV/combat levels. To not spend any points on improving them would tend to shift the burden on to characters who do. In campaigns I've played, we usually went up about 1 DC per 50 xp, which worked out to 1 or 2 DC per year. In a campaign setting where the top DC/AP/CV levels are permanently capped well below the aforementioned 16+/90+/12+ range, the "official" version of Dr. D is way too powerful to throw at any group of PCs who are limited in that way, regardless of how much xp they have. Because he'd kill all of them.

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.