randian

These seem like special effects, not powers. "Detach arm and punch bad guy at range" is a physical Blast and detaching your eye to look around is Clairsentience.

When the funding announcement was emailed they admitted the Champions 3E, Champions II, and Champions III pdfs they're including are scans. I'm sure many of us have seen bootleg scans of books, and their quality usually leaves a lot to be desired: misaligned pages, fuzzy or out of focus images, and of course massive size. I am quite disappointed.

As noted by others, this is going to look like 6E is being dumped (to the extent that, it not being in print and thus very difficult for new gamers to discover, isn't already considered a dead product line) even if that's not the intent.

I am disappointed there isn't a pledge just for the 3E, Champions II, and Champions III pdfs (with errata, preferably, since that's not specified in the kickstarter). I would think there'd some interest in that.

DriveThru is recommending steps that degrade the image quality of your PDFs in order to reduce bandwidth on downloads. It isn't 2000 anymore, an extra megabyte or two is immaterial. Personally, degraded or low-resolution PDF makes me feel cheated, I always prefer the highest possible resolution.

But do you still have a 3.5" floppy drive to use it in?

I'd have thrown the floppy disk out a long time ago, a floppy disk that old is highly likely not to work. I don't know anybody who has one of those drives either. I'd hope he's long since copied the pdf to modern storage.

Mannequin: Damage Negation (-6 DCs Physical, -6 DCs Energy), Usable Simultaneously (up to 8 people at once; +1/4), Grantor pays the END whenever the power is used, Recipient must remain close to Grantor, Trigger (Activating the Trigger requires a Zero Phase Action, Trigger resets automatically, immediately after it activates; friend is attacked; +3/4) (120 Active Points); Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (Mannequin takes the full effect of the attack; -1), Costs Endurance (-1/2)

Damage Negation is a Persistent power, why would it need a trigger?

Does it continue to work even though the character is not receiving phases to act due to being asleep or knocked out?

The question seems rather premature now that Hero is pretty much no longer on retailer's shelves. Hard to get players without eyes on the product. I see DC and Heroes Unlimited (both of which I thought were pretty dead) on the shelves these days taking Hero's proper place. I remember when Hero dominated the game conventions I attended. Only a few years, and it mysteriously died as quickly as it ascended, but it was great while it lasted.

Damage Negation can cause a few math issues but aside from that is just another defense. A very good defense that costs 5 pts for 3.5 resistant DEF and 2 pts of of Flash and Power defense. 

When did Damage Negation start giving Flash and Power defense?

Would that be viable in a superhero setting? In AD&D, walls, fogs, and suchlike can be effective at channeling the battle in your favor. Fantasy characters don't have nearly the same freedom of movement supers do though, what with flight and teleportation being staple powers. Total damage seems to be a problem too. Things like walls of fire won't deter a superhero, since there will typically be too few dice after the required advantages are added to do significant damage.

Can Frameworks and Levels be allocated on my Phase prior to making a Breakout Roll? I might have, for example, an Overall Level I would like to apply to the Breakout Roll.

More generally, can a Breakout Roll be considered a mandatory 0 Phase action? One may normally take 0 Phase actions in any order at the beginning of your Phase. 6E1 says Breakout Rolls "take no time", but does not explicitly deem them a 0 Phase action.

Can MCSLs be used to increase the damage done by EGO when attempting to break out of a Mental Paralysis? This is not obviously a "mental attack" for purposes of using an MCSL in this manner.

Consider a Change Environment that, for example, increases the range modifier penalty or imposes a perception roll penalty. Do characters outside the area of the change environment suffer that penalty when firing at or perceiving targets in the area covered by the Change Environment?

Does the Martial Escape maneuver allow escaping or breaking Entangles affecting the character using Escape?

At the +1 Level, 6E1 states: "Entangle cannot be attacked, damaged, or affected by outside attackers at all — only the victim can break free, and he can only apply his STR (or EGO, for Mental Paralysis Entangles) to break out."

Taken literally, in addition to being protected from outside attackers this means that said entangle is not affected by Blast, Killing Attack, Mental Blast (in the case of Mental Paralysis), Drain, Hand-to-Hand Attack, or any kind of damage shield. Is that the intended interpretation?

As I reread your original statement, I think I'd have to back off on the shapeshift.  Since you want it to stop flashes, it needs to be Darkness with a limitation.  My thought of Shapeshift to "normal", or to "generic humanoid shape" would cover preventing Analyze and other things like that from working, but they'd still be able to Flash you.

 

I'm still trying to figure out what the special effect of this power is.  Why does it work the way it does?  What does it look like?

I only mentioned Flashes because that's what Darkness does. See the thread title. I'm not wedded to Darkness, I just didn't think of Shape Shift at the time. I usually think of Shape Shift for actually changing shape, not its other properties. You'd probably have to restrict it to 2-3 specific detects. Buying all the basic sense groups is 20 points before Reduced END and such, pretty expensive for a power that doesn't really disguise you in the normal sense of that term.

Darkness, of course, would also prevent Analyze, though you'd have to get weird (Invisible Power Effects) if you wanted to not be walking around town like a black blob. A No Range, Fully Invisible, Personally Immune Darkness. It stops the Analyze, but the viewer can't tell why. Probably on the order of -1/2 to -1 on the "doesn't prevent perception by basic senses" limitation, depending on whether you still wanted to block flashes to basic senses and which other than basic senses you're letting through.

If the power looked like something then the people looking for abnormals would know something was up.

I would use the Absolute Effect rule and ask your GM for a threshold - when you buy enough Unusual Senses, the power is assumed to cover all of them.

 

Note that a similar rule applies to Invisibility (see 6E1 209) since it's a Sense-Affecting Power.

Not sure what you mean here. You could just ignore the bizarre "not assigned to a sense group" restriction and make Shape Shift work like Darkness and Invisibility: just buy the adder (3 points for Shape Shift) once for each specific unusual sense and be done with it. Three points is probably more in line with the practical value of a "shape shift vs detect" ability. There's a reason, after all, why Shape Shift vs sight is 8 points but Invisibility vs sight is 20 points.

APG1 had some thoughts on using Regeneration with characteristics other than BODY. It's not well-balanced at all, especially with STUN. It's useless at  one extra recovery/minute (14 points),  useful at once/turn (16), and horribly overpowered at once/phase or segment (18 or 20 points respectively).

A STUN regen at 1/segment costs 20 points for 12 points equivalent of REC. Hardly worthwhile. At 1/phase it's 18 points for the equivalent of 5-6 REC. At 1/turn it's 1 REC for 16 points. No sane player would buy it. The Expanded Effect version would cost 9 points for 5-6 REC equivalent in STUN, a better but not great deal if you wanted the BODY regen too. Using Regen on the other characteristics is hardly worth anything at all since it's so situational. Variable Effect would make your Regen flexible, but it's fairly costly.

That said, the STUN Regen does wake you up no matter how negative your STUN is, but that's not exactly a powerful ability. What would you pay for "wakes up faster after having already lost the combat"? Not much if you were me. You could just as easily model "wakes up from big negative stun" with Limited STUN for fewer points, or use an updated version of the 3E Knockout power.

I'm not sure I would put any Limitation on Shape Shift - as you describe it, the power would only apply to Unusual Senses, so just buy it for that Sense Group. I suppose if the character had weird emanations you would need to buy it for IR/UV, then you might have some sort of Limitation to make it not apply to normal sight.

If I read the Shape Shift description correctly, by RAW that doesn't work. You can't apply Shape Shift, or any other sensory ability, to Unusual Senses as a group, and the wording of the Unusual adder for Shape Shift doesn't say "any unusual sense", it says "any usual sense not assigned to a Sense Group". That implies that if the Unusual Sense you want to mislead is defined as Sight by one character and Smell by another, the Unusual Sense adder won't affect it, so you need ALL the adders making the power astronomically more expensive. This is unlike Invisibility or Darkness, which can specifically affect an Unusual Sense regardless of its sense group.

The idea for #1 was some sort of psychic or magical "nothing special here" field. It's not a "somebody else's problem" field, because it doesn't cause the viewer to ignore or forget the subject. The subject appears normal, but more stringent analysis reveals nothing. The subject has no powers or abilities that can be detected beforehand, though of course their effects (being bulletproof, fire blast) are detected normally. Were you to specifically do a "detect resistant protection" on the subject the answer would be no. An even stronger ability would be to add that he doesn't register as a mutant, a magician, or a robot, presuming he was any of those things.

Personal Immunity for Darkness is pretty cheap if you have the sense modifiers in question. For Invisibility generally the only modifier anybody cares about is Targeting. They could care less if their Analyze didn't work on you. Tracking is so rarely used, at least in a supers game, they probably wouldn't care about that either. Stopping Enhanced or Telescopic is a more interesting question. I can see you fine in person, but telescopes don't work is an odd but interesting mechanic.

Shape Shift might work for #1, though I'm not sure what if any Limitations, as massey suggests, would apply. Generally the "one shape" you get is obviously not you, but in this case you are always obviously you.

More like a Mental Illusion or Mind Control to me, you're there but I don't get any deep details.

Sounds overly expensive for the effect. For one thing, neither affect all observers.

Sounds more like shapeshift with a limitation.

I could go with that. Can you elaborate?

When blocking sense groups, allow only the normal sense to work. I have two concepts in mind.

1) Doesn't affect Targeting. You can see and hit me, but Discriminatory, Analyze, Dimensional, Microscopic, or Tracking don't work. Flashes and Transmit don't work (in Darkness). No application to Range, Rapid, or Telescopic.

2) Only block out of band senses. Normal sight works but UV/IR don't. Normal hearing works but Ultrasonic or Sonar don't. Doesn't apply to sense groups that don't have "normal" senses, like Radio and Mental.

(1) seems like a -1.5 or -2 Limitation. The primary reason you buy Invisibility or Darkness is to affect Targeting. (2) also doesn't have much effect but to a smaller degree. -1?

I probably won't have any luck getting a copy of that CD. My search for 5E Hero Dice has failed too.

Adobe introduced the PDF in 1993, which was after the release of the BBB. I remember hearing that The Ultimate Super-Mage (for 4e) might have been released in an electronic format, but I don't know if it was PDF or something else.

Yes, but 5E wasn't released until 2002 or thereabouts, some 15 years after the release of 4E. Plenty of time to release the BBB, Ninja Hero, Fantasy Hero, or others in PDF if they wanted to.