Chimera 12

Re: Gladiators vs Werewolves "Cause of death?" "Brain melted from puzzle overdose. Bad way to go."

Re: Umm is this legal? It does sound like Clairsentience with the "Only Through The Senses Of Others" Limitation is what you're looking for here. Mind Link is nice, but it's primarily for communication -- you'd use it to "talk" to your bird and perhaps to have it report back to the best of its ability, but like Telepathy it wouldn't provide direct sensory feedback. One thing worth keeping in mind if going that route, mind you, is that the base range of Clairsentience is really quite limited. If you want an avian spy who can report to you from literally miles away, applying Increased Maximum Range or possibly even a low level of MegaScale is probably a must.

Re: Chuck Norris Facts as Powers for HERO? I'd go without the PhysLim; we don't know that Chuck can't cry (and indeed the mere suggestion that there is something he cannot do might be considered heresy by some), only that he doesn't.

Re: Detecting plants I'm sure you could build that one in much the same way.

Re: Detecting plants Teleportation doesn't require LOS, though. Check 6E1 300; what's needed is simply the ability to perceive the target location in some fashion, preferably with a Targeting Sense. And Clairsentience bought with Targeting (explicitly allowed according to, ironically enough, 6E1 179 just above the part you quoted) certainly qualifies as one.

Re: Why doesn't 6e use hexes as a unit of measurement? Using hexes only "saves a step" once you've already made the step of converting from real-world units of measurement into them in the first place. The meter on the other hand happens to already be a real-world unit of measurement, so while it's a bit of a change for me as well I'd honestly think that the shoe is more on the other foot...

Re: Gladiators vs Werewolves Of course the gladiators win. The movie's set in a historical context, even with the fantastic element of lycanthropy thrown in, and historically Rome never did become the center of a new werewolf empire. That said, in another context -- some random fantasy world with its own Rome-equivalent, say -- a stable of professional werewolf gladiators could make for a legitimately awesome setting element.

Re: Character concept for Easter And here I thought, just going off the thread title, that somebody was looking for advice on how to stat up the Easter Bunny. As for the Lance of Longinus (a.k.a. the Spear of Destiny, if memory serves)...my first impulse would actually be to give it no powers whatsoever. Make it the genuine article, but it's just an old piece of Roman military hardware that completely failed to earn any special magic by merely shedding the blood of Christ. Of course, that might be a bit boring. So I could think of three or four alternate approaches off the top of my head: 1.) The Lance is actually holy and blessed. In this case, it could have special powers in combat against "evil", or to help your side achieve victory in battle (more boosting morale or granting luck than hurling fireballs, mind ), or even the power to cleanse and heal wounds. 2.) The Lance is actually cursed. It's quite possibly preternaturally deadly in combat and may inflict wounds that never fully heal, but its wielder cannot put it down for long, will never know peace, and will probably die an ignoble death. 3.) The Lance itself has no special powers...but it acts as a convenient focus for the powers of its current wielder, who may or may not be actually aware of that fact. 4.) Again, the Lance itself has technically no special powers, at least none whose existence is easily proven...but it nonetheless occasionally acts as a 'lightning rod' for what appear to be legitimate miracles, which might be powered either by the commonly held faith in it down through the centuries and arguably even today...or, who knows, maybe by an actual Higher Source.

Re: Science Fiction League of Extraordinary Gentlemen A "League" of popular SF characters may run into the problem of being only suitable for a one-shot scenario. If Jean-Luc Picard, Luke Skywalker, Captain Future, and Kai Allard-Liao "just happened" to suddenly all run into each other in a bar on Babylon 5, it's a pretty safe bet that the first thing on all their minds would be finding out how they got there and discovering a way back home to their respective native realities -- and that once they found one, they'd use it ASAP. You could declare that, well, tough luck, they're stuck in the B5 universe for keeps now -- but forcibly separating them from their canon backgrounds could easily rob them of much of their appeal. One way around that might be to introduce a way in which they can keep in touch and visit each other after their first big common adventure. Easy travel between different realities isn't much part of many SF settings (okay, Star Trek comes close), but allowing for it in a limited way -- as in, mostly just Our Heroes and maybe some helpers -- may be the most painless way to keep such a League operating. Trying to mash their different universes together so they all end up somehow coexisting in the same setting after all might also work, but woud involve a lot more work figuring out all the side effects. Just for starters, which version of Earth are you going to use?

Re: THE Grim Reaper Arguably, Death should just have a high PRE in general. Maybe not so many points in Interaction Skills, though.

Re: Linked Compound The reason you generally wouldn't apply Linked to Skill Levels is this: they're by definition already only usable in conjunction with another Power or Skill or otherwise under specific circumstances. And as long as those circumstances apply, the number of Levels you have available is generally fixed, not set in proportion to another factor -- most RKAs presumably don't normally get any less accurate just because you're using less than maximum power, for example. Thus, for most applications I could think of, Linked wouldn't actually add any restrictions to your Skill Levels that aren't already there. So it's not really a Limitation in this case.

Re: 5e: Clairsentience/Precognition Awareness True. That's because 'true' precognition (as opposed to simply being very good at making guesses about the future based on present information) already is time travel: information about the future moves back in time to arrive in the past. Which is why it's hard to pull off in a game where the players and GM aren't precogs themselves.

Re: Dream Park Hero? By my understanding, pretty much, yes. Or at least pretty close -- the current version of FATE hasn't quite settled down yet and so Spirit of the Century and, for example, Starblazer Adventures use mechanics that differ in small ways in execution. I expect that the Dresden Files engine won't be exactly like SotC either. As for the quality of the engine itself...well, I haven't had the opportunity to try it out in practice, so I shan't comment. Though some of the core concepts certainly sound intriguing enough.

Re: 5e: Clairsentience/Precognition Awareness Even in its constrained form, the ability to hit a target in the past from the future can quickly induce both GM and player headaches. Consider the following scenario: Yesterday, a precog tried to see what you would be doing tomorrow. You don't know about that yet; the perception point will only pop into existence at the point in time the precog is interested in watching. Today, you get attacked out of the blue. Why? Well, because the precog got a headache yesterday from a power you don't even yourself know yet you're going to use on him tomorrow and got ticked off enough by that to decide to teach you a lesson. Perfectly plausible sequence of events so far. However, it's only today yet, and for the precog to have gotten his headache from your attack yesterday you will have to attack him tomorrow...whether you want to or not, and no matter what condition the attack on you and other events until then may leave you in. That's where the "GM and player headaches" element comes in, of course. Time travel into the past is hard enough to handle well in fiction, where the author at least (hopefully) has the complete control over everything that happens. At the gaming table, where that isn't generally the case...it's at the very least going to take both a GM willing to do a fair bit of potentially heavy-handed railroading and players who honestly don't mind that.

Re: Quick Question from a New Hero

Re: Eldritch Wizardry VPP Well, the same is true for "Magic". Just set it at "Just As In Real Life" and watch the point value plummet towards zero. Really, at this point we are talking campaign-dependent Limitation values and player/GM negotiation. If I have a "Fire Magic" VPP, how much can I get away with? Blasts and Killing Attacks are probably a given, as are defenses against both fire and cold. Can I have Desolidification bought as a flame form? Clairsentience, Immobile IAF Bonfire? Healing via "fanning the spark of life"? Decisions, decisions...

Re: 5e: Clairsentience/Precognition Awareness I was thinking about this a bit back when, but didn't immediately reply because I can only look at it from a 6E perspective and wasn't sure how much that would help. That said, from said perspective... Awareness should be reasonably easy: just buy a Detect Clairsentience/Precog Perception Point (uncommon object/phenomenon) with suitable modifiers. You'd probably want it to have Range, Sense, and 360-Degree Perception to make sure you don't simply miss such a point popping into existence behind you at a minimum; add Targeting, Discriminatory, and possibly Analyze to taste. Note that you could potentially take advantage of the Simulated Sense Rule to get some of those 'for free' by assigning your Detect to the right Sense Group. Dispelling Clairsentience is technically tricky. It's a Constant Power, so strictly by-the-book you need to target the user with the Dispel...who, by the very nature of Clairsentience, may not actually be anywhere in sight. Pre- or retrocognition make it even worse since theoretically the character using the power may be long dead already or not even have been born yet! As such, while I can't currently come up with a relevant cite from the rules, I'd certainly allow Dispel to simply work on a perception point and shut that (but not necessarily any others the user may have going simultaneously) down if it hits and gets enough points on the effect dice. However, trying to actively attack the precog runs into issues. The reasons why few sane GMs will allow attacks that can travel through time into their campaigns should be reasonably obvious. ("Can I Mind Control Dr. Felonious's past self to prevent him from attacking us five minutes ago?") Moreover, just because you've found the spot some precog is using to watch you you don't automatically have line of sight to that precog himself (and technically he doesn't have LOS to you, either; by default, Clairsentience can't establish that). I'm currently drawing a bit of a blank as to how that sort of thing could be made to logically work at all, let alone within the rules.

Re: Review Gargoyle

Re: Eldritch Wizardry VPP

Re: Review Gargoyle Well, if you say so. Personally, I see Multiform as thematically appropriate whenever an actual shapechange is involved, as seems to be the case here -- the gargoyle form is actually physically different from the human (it has wings, for starters!) even if it has the same personality and skill set, and so Multiform fits. Only In Alternate ID is more something I'd use for characters who somehow pick up powers when 'in costume' but are otherwise still easily recognizable as the same person (well, modulo the Clark Kent effect, anyway) -- a Power Ranger or Sailor Scout, say, or a power armor user who hasn't bought his suit as a Focus because it's not supposed to get inconveniently damaged or taken away in actual play and is thus more of a special effect. I'll freely admit that the dividing line can get a bit fuzzy, but this case still looks more like one for Multiform to me, even if it's purely in terms of fluff.

Re: Acheiving a re-roll function The Advanced Player's Guide includes a few options for letting players use their characters' Luck to gain a number general-purpose re-rolls (either entire rolls or individual dice) or alternatively earn points that, much like HAPs, can be spent to add to or subtract from rolls throughout that session. A given re-roll that doesn't achieve a better result than the original may be repeated for free until a better result does come up. This does still ultimately limit the number of re-rolls you can get per session, mind. If you're looking for something along the lines of a special attack that always lets you roll twice and use the better result, Luck may not be the way to model that. But as a sort of luck-in-battle power that simply lets you re-roll a few crucial attacks each session, a version of this with a suitable Limitation applied to the character's Luck strikes me as one way to go.

Re: Review Gargoyle "Accurate Selective", APG p. 134, yes. It increases your Area of Effect Advantage by +3/4 and simply lets you choose who in the area gets affected by the attack. (Something that struck me while looking this up: by a strict reading, both this and regular Selective seem contingent on hitting the target area in the first place. It's not clear to me that either necessarily applies if the area attack itself misses in the first place and thus scatters to somewhere it wasn't meant to go, though of course the GM is always free to rule that it does.)

Ironically, the last answer managed to be clear, concise, and obvious...while helping me not at all. Let me try to rephrase my question, then: Let's say a character has the ability to grow to Enormous size, bought as 50 points of Growth, which is itself based on a 113-point Size Template notionally brought down in cost, in part, by applying the Limitation "Costs Endurance" to its point total. Now he wants to activate that power. Does he pay 5 or 11 END to do so? (Since he does in fact get all of the Template's benefits while Growth is 'on', the general 'Active Points / 10' rule would seem to indicate the latter.)

A quick clarification, please: The "Toolkitting" box on page 6E1 230 explains, basically, how to arrive at the Growth costs by applying a standard set of Limitations to the cost of the respective Size Template. One of these Limitations just happens to be Costs Endurance (-1/2)... ...so, since it could be argued that the Power's Active Points are really in the Template, should the END cost of Growth be based on that or just on the actual points invested in Growth itself? (For background, a house rule I'm considering would among other changes alter the total point costs of the larger Templates. I was looking into how to derive the cost of Growth from the new totals when the above thought crossed my mind.)

Re: Review Gargoyle The first thing that came to my mind when looking over this character was "okay, a guy who turns into a gargoyle at will...wait a minute, no Multiform?". I'm still wondering why that is, to be honest. Seems to me that that would be the Power to use to model this kind of concept.