Jeff

Please pardon me for bringing them up at what's probably a late date for most people here. I just picked up the 5th edition a few weeks ago. I suppose, on the whole, it's an improvement, or at any rate, fresh support for recognizable Hero is thrilling any which way. There are some specific changes that strike me as arbitrarily, well, bad, and I was wondering if there were reasons for them to ease the perplexity. There's also one specific change that I was surprised to find neither in the 5th edition rules or The Ultimate Vehicle. The odd changes: 1) Insisting that light generation go through Images rather than Change Environment. Images is basically there to create the appearance of something else. Change Environment is there to provide various relatively minor changes in the environment. (Duh.) Getting lit is a relatively minor change in the environment. It's not the appearance of something else. 2) Eliminating Instant Change and replacing it with a Transform on your clothes. It was essentially a convenience on the one hand and a tip of the hat to a genre bit on the other - replaced by a need to concern oneself with the BODY value of the wardrobe. It's particularly odd when there's an alternative just sitting there - Shapeshift with limitations. 3) The refusal to use Growth, Shrinking, and/or Density Increase and Always On for characters that are big, small, and/or dense all the time. Instead, we're to buy basically the same effects with other powers - when there _aren't_ other powers specifically to affect size or mass - and take disads for the drawbacks - when actually using those powers and Always On would conveniently define those drawbacks. These are the first times I've ever seen Hero Games development deliberately do things the hard way - when the tremendous flexibility of the system trots out easy ways with all its usual charm. The change I'm surprised wasn't made was suggested in an Adventurer's Club article on vehicles - tripling the cost of their defenses. It's done for the Takes No STUN automatons for the very same reason - if you don't have to worry about STUN, standard costs for defenses make BODY damage trivially easy to avoid. So - any word on what was behind these?

Well no - it's not like they have an audience for that kind of private function! In Mechanon's case, no particular body needs to be ageless when none of them is more than a temporary ride anyway.

Hmmm. Would that mean that, if there are four different targets in there, they're all going to be the center of their own Darkness field thereafter? It seems an odd result, but I guess that's something you risk with Usable as Attack powers. Also, this guy is either personally immune to his own Darkness, or he's not dependent on sight to navigate. If he is personally immune, I'd have to think as a matter of common sense he's still going to be vulnerable to Sight Flashes despite the Darkness - after all, it can't defend him on account of making the burst of light invisible. If he _is_ defended that way, personally immune Darkness just became perfect Flash Defense. If he's not dependent on the Sight Group to navigate, then your own Sight Group Darkness will be ineffective.

Usable as an attack probably isn't helpful here either - you can't see the target to target him effectively - that's the problem. But it's naturally an AE attack, so it might be one of the better ways to catch the villain. An explosive Flash (lightning strike) might be another way to a similar effect. It's not a tactical point at all, but it seems more fitting somehow to me - countering the evil darkness with something bright.

Darkness you can center on yourself without UOO - after all, you're _not_ using it on others - you're not even picking on a particular hex. It's in the power description. Just piping in, it's been said already - I'd've plunked down for an explosive EB off the top of my head. If you had buddies around who could help if not for the Darkness, a light-based Dispel on it may have been an idea, but I don't think you'd have quite the points to make it workable. Maybe a cumulative Dispel if you had enough time.

It's inferior to Flash in some ways. It's going to block your allies from seeing the target too; it's going to block LOS through that hex for them; it's going to evaporate if you're even Stunned, as that will turn off 0 END powers; line of sight isn't hard to break - turning you around will do it; and you're going to have to define a reasonably common defense to it (presumably not including "not getting hit", "Stunning the attacker", or "having non-Sight Targeting Senses"). You end up getting what you pay for. But more than anything else, you're going to need GM permission on it at least once over, and if it looks like you're just trying to get Flash on the cheap, I doubt you're going to get it.

Would Major Transforms to turn exhausted characters into fully rejuvenated ones or deeply unconscious ones into conscious or near-conscious ones be allowable? They'd replicate effects you could get through the use of other powers (END Healing, STUN Healing), but then, Transforms into blind people replicate enormous Sight Flashes.