randian

Re: Stacking Damage Reduction?

Re: House Rules

Re: Gun-Kata or Gun-Fu, Anyone? If your goal is to break through walls, barriers, and car doors, I think Tunneling is a much better fit than an Autofire Penetrating RKA. Define the special effect of your Tunneling as "shoots a ring of bullets".

Re: House Rules I disagree. The great (in my opinion) advance of Hero is that special effects rarely change the result of a game mechanic. You don't get extra STR when using TK against an iron door, you don't do extra stun damage with sonic attacks against targets with extra-sensitive (in the +PER sense) hearing, your fire blast doesn't do extra damage to Paper Mache Man, and your radiation RKA doesn't render metals brittle. The "real world" or "logical" result of a Power is irrelevant. You don't get to kill Thor with a greatsword to the head just because you knocked him out. His skin is super-tough even when knocked out. Similarly, you can't Transform an unconscious Darkseid into a bunny. Not because doing so is somehow undramatic or a bad special effect (humiliating villians is quite fun after all), but because his Power Defense leaves you unable to do so. What's the point of the Persistent category of powers if they don't work when you're unconscious? I think ignoring game mechanics because it's dramatic is a really bad idea. Can you imagine being told by your GM "I know your Colossus clone doesn't actually have an "extra stun from Magnetic attacks" Complication, but attacks from this villain are going to do double stun to you anyway because I think it's dramatic". Perhaps you have a phlegmatic disposition, but I would be livid.

Re: House Rules I've never played in a Heroic level game where the characters had enough defense to avoid taking body on an average hit with a killing attack. Getting hit in the 3-5 or 13 was always painful. It therefore is no surprise that you can easily kill unconscious characters with head shots, since Heroic games tend to use hit locations. However, I've never had a GM that allowed automatic death shots even to unconscious characters. You don't get to ignore my BODY characteristic just because I'm unconscious. Maximum damage to any hit location you wanted, sure. It doesn't take long to kill you doing double BODY after defenses combined with maximum sword damage. The idea that somebody with a 2d6 RKA gun can kill a brick with 25 fully resistant PD just because he's unconscious is absurd.

Re: House Rules Then we agree to disagree. I don't think the author intended to imply you can ignore both the persistent defenses and the BODY characteristic of an unconscious character. I have posted the question in the Rules forum to clarify.

Last paragraph, first column: "A character in this state of unconsciousness (-10 STUN or worse) can be killed automatically as a Full Phase Action by any character with the means to do so (a Killing Attack or other powerful attack) who makes a successful Attack Roll against the unconscious character." What is meant by this? Does it really intend to imply that an attacker can ignore both the persistent defenses and BODY characteristic of an unconscious character?

Re: House Rules

Re: House Rules Hero always considers unconscious creatures as unwilling unless the power is beneficial, like Aid, Healing, or some sort of defense usable by others. Furthermore, since reducing defenses is a voluntary act, an unconscious character's defenses are always at full strength unless they were tricked into lowering them while awake and couldn't abort to raise them again before being knocked unconscious or those defenses aren't persistent.

Re: DnD 3.5 to HERO 5e Conversion

Re: DnD 3.5 to HERO 5e Conversion

Re: DnD 3.5 to HERO 5e Conversion

Re: DnD 3.5 to HERO 5e Conversion That's an artifact of 3 things: 1) WotC deliberately overpriced +LA templates. Multiple templates compounded the problem. 2) The benefits of LA were fixed, but the cost was variable. What cost you 1000xp at 2nd level is now costing you 25,000 xp at 10th. 3) The benefits were fixed, so what is fun or even overpowered at 2nd level is mundane and trivial (and thus hardly worth the xp) at 10th or 15th. Nonstandard abilities should have been given a fixed xp cost. Then as you level you are given the opportunity to pay the fixed cost again to gain another increment of the ability. That's not very D&Dish, though. It's rather more like Hero

Re: Immovable Force Field Is there any reason Barrier won't work for this purpose?

Re: 6E What happened to HKA? You can't apply that reasoning to superheroes. Size and power are no more related in a comic than they are in Hero. Comic logic no more limits what a baseball bat does than it limits what a small handheld box (Mother Box) does. Again, you ignore opportunity costs. Time spent training to use a bat or sword is time not spent improving accuracy with your punch, lifting massive weights to improve your strength, learning a combat maneuver, divining the secrets of the Negative Zone, or convincing a Hunted to go away. While we as players model opportunity costs with character points, characters model them with time. Ben Grimm might not be using a bat because a) it really won't work to improve the damage he can inflict it will work, but he erroneously believes otherwise c) it will work, but only if constructed from certain substances which are not now available d) he's spending time in therapy (buying down a Complication) rather than weapons training e) he's spending time in the hyper-gravity chamber (improving STR) rather than weapons training. f) he thinks bats are for sissies g) he's out testing his improved Seduction skill on blind chicks Any, all, or none of these might apply to Ben Grimm.

Re: 6E What happened to HKA?

Re: What powers for "denial" specialist? I never thought of Drain as a denial tactic. Now that I think about it, since Drains became ranged in 6E they're a lot more appealing.

Re: What powers for "denial" specialist? At +3/4 damage shields are darn expensive in 6E. In a 12DC game 6 or 7 dice of damage shield isn't much of a deterrent. Unless damage shield is your main attack, I think they're better for villains, who aren't point-constrained and can afford damage shields large enough to be a significant deterrent. As for things like triggered attacks, not only do they suffer the problem of lower damage due to their cost, but I think any attack that relies on the opponent is suspect. I could do 12 dice right now, or 10 dice, but only if you can't delay tripping the trigger? There's no contest, really. Triggers make great flavor powers, but as primary attack powers I think they're terribly deficient.

Re: 6E What happened to HKA? That can be mitigated. That's why I like multipowering HA and STR (or even better end-only-to-activate Density Increase). Use HA only to provide flexibility through advantaged attacks: the 1 hex accurate HA, the armor piercing HA, the affects desolid HA. Use the DI slot for general STR goodness like full normal damage attacks and resisting grab/entangle.

Besides the obvious: Flash/Darkness/Change Environment/Enhanced Senses for sensory denial, Trip/Entangle/Barrier for action denial. Yes, I know there's some conceptual overlap here. Those powers are nice but they don't actually take anybody out. I don't mind being a force multiplier too much (I loved battlefield control mages in D&D 3.5), but is it too much to ask to not be totally worthless every time a teammate can't immediately stomp on my opponent? The general environment is far less constraining in a superhero game than it is in fantasy, where the opponents have far fewer options for going through, over, or around obstacles or simply being unaffected by your abilities. One doesn't see Flash Defense or Radar very often in fantasy! I'm also unsure where to go for defenses. I'll have relatively low STR and STUN, so high DCV like a martial artist? Invisibility or a personal darkness field to make them 1/2 OCV instead? That's more in theme. Is 1/2 OCV mechanically better than high DCV? You can't hide where you are with darkness, but you're immune to flash attacks which is cool.

Re: Gravity powers If you want to suppress Flight in an area, buy Change Environment. It has a "reduce meters of " feature.

6E1 157 (Movement Powers) states: "Characters with unusual Movement Powers (such as Flight or Teleportation) can use those powers to get to their feet as a Zero Phase Action after being knocked down, and without moving any distance, if they buy this +5 Character Point Adder". Since Position Shift does not require I actually move, does it still function when that movement mode has been reduced to zero, either by a Change Environment or an Adjustment Power that lacks "Can Remove Adders"?

Re: 6E What happened to HKA? Almost. A StunX die is 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Why does this game have such strange dice?

Re: 6E What happened to HKA?

Re: 6E What happened to HKA? I'd say the number of characters for which that power suite wouldn't be multipowered approximates zero, as are the number of characters who would buy an HKA and have 10 STR. A much less absurd cost is more like 15 (25 STR) + 30 (multipower) + 5 (slots) = 50 points. 5 points is practically in the noise on 400 points.