Sailboat

In a heroes-for-hire mercenary campaign, I was able to talk my team into going off-mission to help a citizen WITHOUT a contract or even expecting payment. When she expressed her gratitude afterwards, my hero affected his best Golden Age good guy manners and replied: "You're welcome, ma'am. Just *not doing our job.*"

Back a couple of decades ago, I had a neo-Confederate group try to start a second US Civil War. At that time it seemed far-fetched.

I don't know whether my players felt the same way, but in my entirely homebrew campaign the villain I felt most uneasy inflicting on my players was Doktor Endlosung, a Nazi holocaust-themed medical madman with poison gas and barbed-wire-based powers. The absolute worst villain in all of comic books is probably Willy Pete in Empowered. look him up if you're curious.

So I have a character for a new campaign (I know, right? Exciting!) who has a 4d6 Aid to END. I know END counts as a defensive ability, so the total on the dice gets halved, which makes it 7 character points on average, which is 35 END. As an Aid, that can put the target above starting values, and 5 points if it fade in the post-12. But I have questions about how this works in practice. So let's say on starting Seg 12, I Aid myself +35 END. Immediately in the post-12 that fades to a mere +10 END. In my next phase, can I Aid myself again? Is repeating that possible until I reach the cap of (max that can be rolled on 4 dice, that is, 24 points)? END I use for powers comes out of the extra temporary Aided END until I use that up or it fades, right? In later turns, let's say I still have +35 END from Aid that has not yet faded or been used, I could use Aid again up to the 24-points-Aided cap, right? But then I'd have to wait for some to fade before I could "top off" again? Thanks for any insights you can provide.

Thanks, I will see what I can manage. I am keenly aware it may prove too expensive or otherwise draw GM disapproval. When I proposed to build a version of this for a Mutants and Masterminds campaign, the GM immediately balked. He thought it sounded like I was trying to attack more often than other characters, which is a big no-no in that system. Champions, however, does contemplate at least the possibility that one character might act more often than another in a turn.

Some time back, I ran a campaign for ten years before finally resting on my laurels. While moral ambiguity has its charms, most of the time I wanted the heroes to face evil that clearly needs to be stopped. For that, history was my best source. I have a long historical memory, and the pages of history provide an almost limitless rogue's gallery of people who *should have been* punched. So my gallant team of meddling do-gooders faced Nazis, evil cultists, the KKK, an attempted second US Civil War, terrorism (not all of it foreign, some of it from homegrown Cold War intellectuals), conquistadors, corrupt politicians, quasi-legal government agencies spiraling out of control , computer hacker hangs, Stalinists, and so on. Another trope I played with was the reluctant/unintentional bad guy. Standout creations in that trope: * a powerful being who got swayed into villainy by peer pressure from his more nasty associates * a mild-mannered congressional aide who turned into an out-of-control monster when sufficiently threatened, and apologized profusely afterwards * and my personal favorite, a young special-needs boy with game-breaking time-travel powers who was good-natured but gullible, and was repeatedly targeted by villains wanting to trick him into using his powers to aid their nefarious schemes

Intetesting take. How would that work mechanically?

By way of introduction, this idea came from the Storm Summoning powerset in City of Heroes, an old but beloved MMORPG some of you may be familiar with. The powerset has two powers which create "entities" that fight on their own--after creating them, the character can move on and do other things while these powers continue to attack bad guys. The net effect is a force multiplier, as the powers continue to fight while the player is free to act on their own, albeit with the upfront cost of having used actions and resources to start the powers. But it's also damned cool. 1) Lightning Storm: a cloud that hangs in the air for a while and throws out targeted lightning bolt attacks at regular intervals at nearby foes. 2) Tornado: a small whirlwind that runs for a while, chasing after bad guys on its own, and attacks them by engulfing them, manhandling them, and doing continuous DoT Both these powers have properties that seem tricky to represent in Champions: a) they are intangible, do not block movement, and cannot be targeted/attacked. Enemies know to ignore them. This would seem to be unsuitable for a summoned pet...? b) while their target prioritization seems somewhat random, they do not attack friendlies, only enemies. This might be too tricky to pull off in Hero; certainly "does not affect friendlies" is cheesy and won't pass GM muster...but maybe a semi-intelligent summons could apply it's own judgment when choosing targets? I could *maybe* live with versions that target indiscriminately, although I would have to be much more circumspect about using them. c) the player can only have one (or two, with significant investment of late-game resources) of each of these powers in play at any given time. For Hero system play, just one at a time would work. They run for something like 30 seconds...the exact duration could be changed a bit without ruining the concept. What's the best way to do this in Champions/Hero? I like Summons, bought to be loyal, but them being targeted seems wrong...since they are reasonably easy to re-summon, drawing fire off the caster would seem almost too good to be true. Is there any better way to do this, perhaps with Continuous? I am hoping the clever build gurus here can propose some way of doing this that makes sense and will pass GM approval.

How would one build a "bag of holding" in 6e? I don't know how much of the power should be special effect and how much points-based, as I am mostly seeking a way for a magical character to explain carrying a lot of stuff effortlessly. Basically an extra dimensional space through a focus to carry weight and bulk. Not really sure how to go about it.

I was NOT the GM for the misadventure I am about to relate, but it's the worst example I know of. D&D. The DM's wife was a writer and wanted to see what this D&D thing was all about, so we set up a little party for a campaign. * Elven Rogue (me), sailor by trade, good with knots. * Dwarf fighter, strong and tough. * Halfling of some flavor. * Halfling bard of some sort (DM's wife). So the absolute opening scene of the campaign: we open a door and are confronted by a chasm with a river of lava in the bottom. We must cross to continue. My sailor Elf with rope and high agility manages to get a grapnel across and shimmies over. We have to make dex rolls, which frankly not many first-level characters are good at. The generic halfling goes over next. Then the DM's wife. She rolls a 1. Down she plunges toward searing molten lava! Signaling to our doughty Dwarf, still on the starting side, to anchor the rope around his waist and brace himself, my Elf leaps into the abyss, swinging down to save his companion, the DM's wife, and the entire campaign. A perfect roll! The elf snatches her from certain death. Both their falls are checked momentarily by the Dwarf's brawn as he performs a belay. He rolls a 1, and is yanked off the ledge. You knew this was coming, didn't you? All 3 of us plunge into fiery death. The halfling is the sole survivor, left alone in the hostile side of the chasm with no rope and no way home. The DM's wife, who, as a published author, is used to having *total control* of plot and characters all to herself, storms out of the room without a word. Campaign *finis*. She never wanted to try again.

A character taking a recovery as an action is at 1/2 DCV. Is her MDCV affected?

How about Champions of the Pacific Rim? You could consider Japan in or out of that definition depending on the amount of material you have. But pick up Indonesia, Micronesia, Polynesian culture, New Zealand, New Guinea, Sumatra-Borneo, Java, Krakatoa, sharks, garbage patch (ok that's in the middle), maybe China, Singapore, those sorts of things. All sorts of thing for heroes t concern themselves with -- storms, smuggling, piracy, human trafficking, poaching, Easter Island, maybe a Space X splashdown gone wrong, and so on. It's underused as a locale, despite being the biggest one on Earth.

Necro-ing this topic to add a few characters. I never made a player character who was too weird, but during 10 years as a GM, I made some strange NPC concepts. I did play one PC who wasn't especially weird, but his concept came out of my own contrarian response to something in the rules. The Extra Limb rules in early editions said you could get a bonus to OCV by attacking unexpectedly with the extra limb(s), but not to DCV, obviously, because that makes no sense. Well, I set out to imagine an extra limb that could plausibly help with dodging but *could not possibly* deal damage...and thus Flying Squirrel was born. He was a successful and popular character in a years-long campaign. For NPCs, possibly the strangest was the Gerrymander. When subjected to stress and fear, milquetoast political consultant/campaign manager (picture Rick Moranis) Gerald Manders would involuntarily turn into the Gerrymander, a weird, flat, segmented dragon-like monster that was constantly twisting, folding and unfolding, and producing extra appendages with claws. The apparently mindless, raging monster absorbed physical blows and energy, putting the points into Duplication....when a sufficient point total was reached, it would divide into two Gerrymanders, and so on. I statted him out to 8 total duplcates, but the most we ever got into play was 2. He also had a big self heal that was bought as some sort of permanent thing, but linked back to the Duplication, so it essentially only went off once each time he duplicated (so that the duplicates would be scary instead of nearly dead). The secret to defeating the beast was to stop beating on it and employ gentler means of absorbing the rage....one time they hurled it into deep water. (Unlike the illustration in the Wikipedia article, my version lacked wings.) The players developed a much better approach -- keep Gerald Manders safe and blissfully ignorant of conflict and stress. In a few adventures, babysitting Gerald and keeping him unaware of scary things was considered a prestigious and critical job. "What was that loud crash!?" "Oh, it's trash pickup day, Gerald. Now tell me about the demographics of District 11, that sounded fascinating." My hands-down favorite NPC was Stevie Far-Traveler. Stevie had pretty over-the-top time travel powers, the kind you never let players get their hands on. He was also a Down Syndrome kid. Sweet, innocent, friendly kid who didn't usually recognize when he was being manipulated by bad guys. Clearly, an existential threat to the timeline and a complete wild card. Possibly the safest thing to do would be to lock him up, despite the moral repugnance of doing so -- his power was vastly dangerous. However, no government or villain could control him for long, as he was for all practical purposes invulnerable (being able to see everything coming) and could disappear into time and space on a whim. He showed up periodically through the campaign, smiling like a cherub, sometimes remembering the players (the first time they met, he remembered them as friends) and sometimes "before" he had met and grown to trust them. He arrival was usually associated with some high-pucker-factor threat like a railgun tank from the far future (he thought the touchscreen controls were a video game, and was happily blowing up the landscape), or "Hey guys, wanna see a Tyrannosaurus?" Sometimes villains would attempt to bribe, nab, trick, or control him. The players tried to be protective of him, but he was never around for long, as his attention span was too short and there were so many interesting things to see.

Any way to update HD without downloading the whole zip file again?

Long time ago I was in a super duo campaign, but we must have been difficult for our GM to balance -- I was a metamorph brick with stretching and damage reduction, but my partner was a martial artist with a stick. Most foes that could challenge me were a serious threat to him. The GM struggled to pose danger to me. Eventually we were at our school prom. I was with Nadia, a sultry beauty. The lights went out and pandemonium ensued. Eventually we made our way to the outside, just in time to see Nadia being hauled into a Soviet VTOL jet fighter. Her kidnappers escaped when we were unable to Fastball Special my martial artist partner to stop them. As we watched the jet head for a Soviet jump-jet carrier off the coast, it finally dawned on my brick that the GM had at last found an appropriate rival for his staggering power. Open mouthed, I turned to my friend. "The Soviet Union stole my prom date?!?" [Turned out she was descended from the Romanovs and a potential heir to the Czar's throne.]