Paragon

Re: 8pt CSL That's artifact of how you're doing things though; in the regular rules that's only an issue when someone's already hit 20 Dex even in heroic campaigns. Otherwise, you can just buy 3 points of Dex, sell back the speed contribution, and get +1 OCV _and_ DCV for six points. Not if they're all Dex skills; at that point you've saved a point. Again, until people have hit the NCM limit, its just as much a problem there barring houserules.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! Or when you need to end a fight quickly for any reason. At that point, a result that will end the fight a round later than you want is no better than one that ends it two rounds later (and may be no better than one that you lose). That isn't necessarily a common result, but it comes up.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps For offensive uses outside of wartime, I'd argue electricity is actually more common than fire. But while you're correct in general, that's an arguement about ED costing what it does in general in a lot of heroic settings; its probably overpriced in the first place for how often it comes up. Been that way for a long time though; this problem goes back at least to 4th, and probably earlier.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps Had a brain thing, obviously, but is it worth it even at 15 or 10? You can buy quite a lot of more consistent value out of that after all. You're preaching to the choir with me; the specialized defense limitations have always seemed overconservative to me; as you can see, I'm not entirely sure they aren't overconservative at -2 most of the time. You do run into the problem that if you set fire or electricity at -2, you _really_ need to crank up the limitation on things like radiation or sonics, though. Or at least regularly be hit by them in half, yes.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! These are the keys to this problem, really; the fact that a smaller amount of consistent stun is rarely as valuable as getting very little sometimes but a lot others. It becomes much more pronounced as the average damage approaches the defense value as you note, but even without that, the benefit of the intermittant gusts in taking down a target are not easily overstated; even in the case of characters with persistent defenses, being stunned potentially sets them up to get a lot of damage delivered to them that they normally wouldn't, including standard manuevers like haymakers and the like. Its easy to either intuitively over or understate this effect if you've happened to hit a run in one direction or another (and if you rarely see killing attacks of a size to be noticeable used, this effect is likely to be more pronounced), but the tactical realities of combat end up tending to favor those gusts more than a simple analysis of expected stun to target will tell you.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! Well, I'm not going to speak to their use in superhero games where the very high defenses go, but I will suggest that its still a better result than the current one; honestly, having everything less likely to stun is better than having the killing attack be the attack of choice in those cases. In heroic scale games, I'm rather convinced it tends to even out the field much more, however, as normal attacks actually do stun with some frequency if there isn't a big PD/attack discrepancy, and it pushes the two together considerably. I haven't seen a heroic scale game with high defense and low damage so the result may be less benign there, but see my comment above about that.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! I'd tend to suggest many of these are what I call "operational" solutions to a rules problem; i.e. many people recognize the problem, but essentially minimize it in how they use such attacks and allow them to be used, rather than addressing them systematically. That works after a fashion, if you consider that a good solution to mechanical applications issues, which some people do.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! If you haven't watched people fishing for it as a GM, and your GMs didn't have the habit, I doubt it'd be particularly noticeable, either. Out of curiosity, in your own game do you also use the normal dice stun multiples from the hit location chart? If so, that'd probably tend to color your view of it too, as it ups the variance in stun over the routine somewhat, too.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: 8pt CSL The problem is you also have to compare it to buying Dexterity for most characters, as the Mental Combat aspects is partly moot for them (its useful defensively but means nothing offensively).

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! I've seen that as a solution used by others; my own take is that there's a bit more mechanical overhead on bothering with the hit location chart just for that purpose, but YMMV.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! The problem is that you don't necessarily want them immune to them; you just don't want them to be the weapon of choice against them. The fact they often are is entirely an artifact of the stun lottery. As I said, you don't need them to do less damage, per se; most Champions characters are built so a 2d6 KA isn't too much a threat to them on Body. Its only the fact that about one in six rolls does 35 stun that suddenly makes it a superior choice against them compared to any other 6DC effect (note that this is somewhat damning with faint praise with a weapon that low, but the effect gets much more pronounced when looking at something like a heavy machine gun at 3d6KA compared to a 10D6 lightning blast).

Re: 8pt CSL To the best of my knowledge, they only apply to one side at a time, but as others have said, they can even be applied to Ego Combat as far as I know. Are they overpriced compared to Dex. Yeah, pretty much, always have been. Their only virtue is that in games that pay attention to overall CV, you can do a certain amount of flexibility in use of them in generating high end results at one end or the other at need.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps

Re: Real point caps?

Re: Real point caps? People want to play a lot of things, but that doesn't make it a good idea from a game point of view. More modest cases have more modest problems, but that doesn't make the problem any less present, it just makes it less severe. I question whether they're capable of doing the job by themselves, for good reason. Champions 1st had nothing like Active Point limits or the like, and one of the first lessons most groups learned was that point costs were not even close to enough to prevent this sort of problem from occurring. Conceptually limitations are a valid idea, but I don't think expecting them to do the heavy lifting here is going to work.

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! This still ignores the fact that a 1d6+1 KA will do 20-25 stun about one time in six unless you're using hit locations, where its 4d6 equivelent will do so immensely more rarely, and it has a maximum stun far higher than the normal attack can get. As I said, its not the routine result that's the issue, but the gusting, and the gusting actually becomes more pronounced as the die size of a killing attack goes down, as the base dice variance increases considerably over that of a typical superpowered one (where 3 or 4D6 killing attacks at least tend to flatten out the base Body the stun is multiplied by a bit). The net result is that if you're going to outright KO a lot of characters with one shot, or stun them at all, a killing attack is far more likely to do it. The fact it'll also frequently do less stun doesn't seem to counterweight that to me. I completely agree there; I've not had a lot of issues with stun from killing attacks using the hit location chart. Its the linearity of the stun die roll that's the main culprit (though the smaller number of dice involved in heroic games still produce some aberrations compared to normal dice, its usually fairly tolerable by itself).

Re: The great debate, this time with Java!

Re: Real point caps?

Re: The great debate, this time with Java! I'd say it _is_ a problem when Champions won't properly match these, unless you don't view the function of a genre game to at least vaguely match the genre, conventions and all. Now of course you can note that the modern Hero System is designed to deal with more than just superheroes, but since most of this involves stun gusting, and the focus on stun in the system is a carry-over from its superhero roots anyway, I think that's not as relevant as it could be.

Re: Simple questions on AP caps The only problem with it there, like with regular flawed defenses, is that its often too expensive for its utility. Even if you gave it a -2 Limitation for Only versus Fire (and I believe the canonical is only a -1) 50% resistant DR versus it is, what, 20 points? That's quite a lot for something that comes up in a small number of attacks, and probably even less after it becomes known you're resistant to it.