screamingtongue

Re: Emotional Binding Actually, I've decided on a telepathic Mind Control, only to control emotions, with no range. And any other powers (drains, aids, etc.) just take a -1 limited power: target must be mind controlled. I feel like this captures the effect of what I was going for pretty well.

I'm building a team of superheroes, mostly just for fun, based on a story I've written. For the most part, these characters are fairly straightforward. But one of them has a rather interesting ability, the ability to bond her emotions to someone else's, so she can control what they feel. I figure this can have a variety of combat effects such as amplifying pain (draining/damaging STUN), making somebody afraid (draining PRE, EGO, or both), or having the reverse effects (boosting STUN, PRE, EGO, etc.). Where I find things get tricky is in capturing the exact way her power is supposed to work. As I said, she binds her emotions to those of others, meaning there is a kind of enduring effect. She has to touch a person to start with, but contact does not need to be maintained. For example, if she was battling a thug and she wanted to make him afraid to begin with, she would have to physically touch him to start the process. But if she breaks contact with him, she could still make him afraid again without touching him, or amplify any pain he might be feeling, again, without touching him. This seems like a job for Mind Link, but that's meant for willing participants, and is supposed to allow for two-way communication and sharing of thoughts (rather than doing anything coercive). So I'm kind of stuck. I need a power (or potentially another mechanic) to represent her binding her emotions to other people by touching them, which would in turn allow her to use her real powers (altering the emotional state of her victims).

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger I checked, and on 6E1 138, it states that a power that is bought incrementally must be adjusted by enough to adjust it an entire point up or down, so this drain wouldn't take effect until the character's speed reaches -10 AP. Also, I could potentially add a limitation that would make it so that the staff can only drain one point, total, from SPD. So no matter how low the enemy's points get, it always counts for -1 SPD at most, and any lower than -10 AP just counts for recovery purposes. It provides me with an additional limitation to reduce the cost of the staff, and keeps the staff from being overpowered.

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger Am I misremembering the rules for drain? I thought that you would have to reduce it by a full 10 points before a character would lose 1 point of SPD, I didn't realize that draining a single point would be enough.

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger It just seems like with so many ways for the attack to be neutralized or rendered less effective, the -1/4 limitation offered by "Only Affects When Attacking with Staff (-1/4)" does not account for very much, and without those other limitations, the cost gets too high. I suppose I could increase the value of the above limitation. Would a -1 or -1 1/2 limitation for that limited power be too high? Considering that a drain could normally be used any time, with its own target, does forcing it to coincide only with regular attacks made with the staff count as only working half the time or less than half the time? Because, again, I just feel that the cost is too high for a mere 2d6 drain if I drop those other limitations from the build (it would come out at 29 RP, so high that the character wouldn't be able to afford this enchantment at all).

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger I wrote up the 5d6 part wrong, I know that. It should be a (25) not a (20). And 25 * 1.5 = 37.5, so shouldn't the AP be 37? And yeah, somehow I missed the easier way to write up reach, and that it was supposed to be 1 point per 1m (because if you actually do the math with all the power modifiers, it doesn't work out that way). And I feel like the STR Minimum and Two Handed limitations are iffy, but I think I'd accept them since, if the drain can't be used without the staff striking a blow, then the STR minimum and two handed limitations still technically apply (ie. the drain also gets penalized if STR drops below 10 or if the character only has one hand free, in that it cannot be used).

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger So here is the full build for all three powers the staff has (including its reach). Does this look good? Taproot (37 AP/11 RP; 1 END from use of STR): 5d6 Hand to Hand Attack (20), Reduced END (0; +1/2), STR Minimum 10 (-1/2), Real Weapon (-1/4), OAF (-1), Two-Handed (-1/2) Taproot Reach (3 AP/1 RP): Stretching 2m (2), Reduced END (0; +1/2), OAF (-1), Always Direct (-1/4), No Noncombat Stretching (-1/4), Only To Cause Damage (-1/2) Taproot Enchantment (50 AP/13 RP): 2d6 Drain SPD (20), Reduced END (0; +1/2), Area of Effect (Damage Shield; +1/4), Constant (+1/2), Persistent (+1/4), Only Affects When Attacking with Staff (-1/4), OAF (-1), STR Minimum 10 (-1/2), Two-Handed (-1/2), No Range (-1/2)

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger She can't use the enchantment without the staff, and the staff has to hit the enemy as part of an attack in order to trigger the enchantment. So, basically, whenever the character makes an attack (any attack, including martial maneuvers) with the staff where the staff hits an enemy, the enemy should also be on the receiving end of a drain. It seems like all the limitations that the staff's main HtH attack has (except maybe its "real weapon" limitation) should apply, but I'm not sure about this, since with the enchantment's use being limited to its use with the staff, that seems to be already covered by the damage shield and the limitation where the effect only triggers when the staff hits somebody. On the other hand, the -1/4 for that limitation doesn't seem to quite capture how limited this drain is, and since the drain would technically be subject to all of the listed limitations (considering that the enchantment cannot be used effectively at less than 10 STR, cannot be used at all if the focus is taken away, and must be used with two hands), it seems that in order to make it worth buying the enchantment, these limitations would have to apply. When the staff cannot be used effectively (or at all) neither can the enchantment. Hence my confusion. After writing it out like this, my gut says to apply the limitations (all but real weapon), because only with those limitations would the cost of the enchantment be worth the points.

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger Christopher, I'm with you so far. I like your build that allows for combining both attacks with martial maneuvers, I just have one other question (for now, at least). Would the enchantment take the same limitations as the staff? In particular, would it be subject to Focus, STR Minimum, Real Weapon, and Two-Handed, like the staff is?

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger Regarding the same staff, if I consider the staff itself Very Difficult to Replace, do I apply the added -1/2 limitation to the focus limitation for all of the staff's powers (its base attack, its reach, and its drain) or just the enchantment power, the drain? Since it's technically not difficult to find a staff or weapon that could do 5d6 hand-to-hand damage, it kind of seems like the staff's base attack shouldn't take the added limitation, and nor should the reach for the staff. But at the same time, these are all part of this particular staff, which is hard to replace.

Re: Quick Question about Linked and Trigger The staff was bought as equipment, using resource points from the APG. It's pretty much the second model you outlined. Every time the character connects an attack with the staff, the staff also drain's the target's SPD. It does not cost END to use, and it triggers with every attack. In the initial build, I simulated this by jointly linking both powers, but (the drain took a -1/4 linked limitation, and the base attack took a -0 linked limitation). But I'm getting I should build it either with the Trigger advantage, or with the Damage Shield advantage, but keep the Linked limitation at the same cost? Which advantage is more appropriate? The model I saw in the Bestiary had Trigger costing a full +1, which would seriously boost the cost (and I'd like to try to keep it in the same range, but I might have to drop its effectiveness to do that anyway). So, trigger or damage shield?

I'm trying to run a 6th Edition modern fantasy game, and for one of my players, I'm building them a staff with a built-in drain SPD enchantment that triggers on any enemy that gets hit with the staff. I thought of doing it with the "linked" limitation for both the staff's main hand-to-hand attack and for the drain, and I thought this would be the right way to go about it, but then I was just browsing my 6th Edition Bestiary, and I saw that the Blood Demon has something similar, where its drain attack also brings about its aid, and this is done using both a "Trigger" and a "Linked." Do I need to worry about giving this staff the "Trigger" advantage as well as the "Linked" limitation, or is the way I already built it, with the "Linked" limitation, sufficient? I feel like the rules for Linked kind of imply that Linked alone is good enough, but then I was thrown off by the way that demon's power was built.

Re: Buying Equipment with Money Unfortunately I don't have any of the genre books, so their recommendations aren't of much help to me. I was surprised to find the economic guide in the bestiary, and thought maybe there were formal rules for equipment pricing. I think I'll stick with my original pricing scheme, then, and adapt bestiary recommendations to them.

I'm curious about how money works with powers and equipment in heroic campaigns. None of the manuals I have go into much detail on this, and I had worked out my own system (where money is arbitrarily worth 100 x 1 character point, so a piece of gear with a 25 point real cost would cost 2,500 points of money). But I received the Hero System Bestiary as an early Christmas gift, and it has some specifics about money near the end of chapter one, where animal parts are worth the AP of the powers they support, multiplied by modifiers for how rare they are, how much demand there is, and how high a quality they are. Does/should equipment follow the same rules? For example, this set of pistols: Kinetic Pistol (20 AP/11 RP): 1d6 + 1 RKA vs PD (20), 4 Clips of 6 Charges (-1/4), STR Min 7 (-1/4), One Handed (-0), Real Weapon (-1/4) Double Pistols (+5 CP) Assuming that pistols are common enough in this world to meet demand, and that these pistols are of average quality, and they are not in any other way distinctive, would they be worth 25 dollars (or whatever monetary unit the game uses), as an identical power that stems from a part of an animal would? Or are there separate instructions for buying equipment with money in a guide somewhere?

Re: Planting Mines and Bombs So what I'm getting is that I need to focus more on explosives that deal high damage than a wide area. The NPCs will plant these on key support pillars rather than planting them on, say, the entire perimeter of the bottom of the building. So should I adjust the rules for explosive Area of Effect to scale it down, concentrating the blast? Also, should this be a killing attack or a blast? I'm thinking probably a blast with armor piercing, but even then, based on the beam stats given in this thread, it'd have to be at least a 25d6 just to reach the lower limit and destroy a 10 PD, 20 BODY beam, and even this wouldn't be a sure thing if more 1s were rolled than 6s. The problem is that the active points for this attack will become so inflated that the NPCs will almost always fail while planting it. The construct above gives it a bare minimum of (25d6 * 5 = 125, * [1 + 1/4 + 1/4] = 187) 187 Active Points, which, at the standard penalties for a power which requires a skill roll, imposes a -18 modifier on the roll, rendering it impossible without absurdly increasing the skill for the character. It could be half that for a lesser limitation, but that would still be a -9 modifier, which would make it nearly impossible to ever plant one of these bombs without blowing yourself up. This construct only includes a minimal cost for Area of Effect, as well as the armor piercing advantage. It completely ignores other advantages like Trigger, and potentially charges, which would rocket the AP cost even higher, making it even more difficult to set the charges. I guess I could potentially buy the skill as a focus as well, buy the skill roll up to a really high positive modifier, and limit it to use only with these bombs, to represent that the bombs have been designed to be easier to use, or that the characters have a detailed instruction guide with them. I don't see how to build this bomb and make it usable by anyone other than someone who's got something like a 30- skill roll.