Hugh Neilson

Maybe he has hairy legs!

I seem to recall Steve once posting that, for 5e, he was somewhat constrained in what he could do, while he had more free rein in 6e. I don't know what his 5e process was. Like most of us, Steve watches what other gamers do and cribs the ideas that work for him, I'm sure. There was a 5e Revised, but that was more cleanup than substantive change, adding examples and corner cases here and there. For 6e, Steve assembled a "sounding board" group. To the extent that created a "6e by democracy", well, perhaps, but only if Steve was the only 18+ YO, since he held the sole v

I thnk you'll need highly Megascale movement to Dive for Cover from Coronavirus.

To Mallet's point, what prevents the PC necromancer spending points on Lordship just like the King of the Realm does? The GM deciding that NPCs can invest those points and PCs can't means the two are playing by different rules. Setting the point cost so high that the PCs can't afford it, then giving the King extra points so he can is also different rules for the NPC. How did he earn all those CP? PCs have a lot more CP, and gain xp much faster than, most NPCs. But a few NPCs have way more points that the PCs, and/or are allowed to break campaign limits wh

The first and second ed had a sample combat with Ogre and some more typical thugs, but no one ever used those typical thugs, nor were Crusader and Starburst the templates on which characters tended to be constructed. If you viewed the examples in the back as mainly "typical Supers", rather than "typical single opponents, maybe with some normal henchmen, to take on a team of four PCs", power inflation started right out of the gate. Leading to specialized VIPER agents and gear designed to make them a better match for Supers than their "rank and file agent" brethren, a great example

I don't have the books in front of me, so I can't speak to the appropriateness of some of the modifiers, but the base construct looks right. Given every power must have a point of origin, Restrainable would mean, at least to me, any Grab, Entangle or similar restraint renders the power unusable. The combination is still achieving a -1 limitation, which should be just as limiting as an OAF. I'd also want to work through the mechanics - I think there are rules for changing CP for the target, and if you can change any power to any other, it seems like you could also convert a relat

4e followed the cube/square law. IIRC, 3 levels of Growth doubled your height and octupled your weight.

The theory is that the virus should evolve towards "more contagious" and away from "more lethal". It does not survive by killing its host, but by propagating itself to other hosts.

Lots of good advice on "how". It depends on how you want spirits to work in-game. My question is "why?". What is the purpose of the spirit? A confidante? An adversary? If it is an adversary, it is most important that it be one that engages and challenges the players, not frustrates and annoys them. In a fantasy game, they might well be desolid or transdimensional, requiring PC's to learn magic which allows them to retaliate transdimensionally, or engage it while ethereal themselves.

I think it's important for everyone (maybe Steve Long most of all) to consider just how unusual that Q&A Forum is. I don't believe that even the biggest players, like D&D or Pathfinder, make their top staff available to answer any and every rules question someone wants to post. Those games have a lot more resources backing them than Hero does. This is not "something Hero has to do to be in the game", it is a value-added which exceeds the norm - maybe someone else is aware of some other games that do this, but I doubt there are many, even if there are some. It

At a minimum, I'd allow an "expanded effect" adjustment power to affect all forms of rPD (or rED, or PD, or ED, or both). Further, I would consider treating rPD and rED as buying Characteristics as a Power. I'd also consider the ability to drain only the "Resistant" advantage, where the power only makes the target less resistant to killing attack damage. This is purely mechanical. The ability still needs to be appropriate for the game in question. But the mechanic itself should be possible, HISTORY LESSON: Back in 1e, resistant defenses could be Damage R

I'd say it's the way the game evolved in design and playtest. We'll set normal people here, thugs and agents here, and Supers start a bit higher than that. If we had started with lower SPD, DEX and CV across the board, that would have become the norm.. If you dropped agents by 1 SPD, about 3 DEX and 1 CV, then dropped all Supers by 2 SPD, 10 or so DEX and 3 CV, they would still interact similarly to how they do now, with agents becoming a bit more able to hit. But that was not an option after the 1e characters were published. A wholesale change to all published chara

Again, an assumption arising out of the sample characters in 1e. If VIPER agents had been SPD 2, DEX 11, CV 4, having a slow Brick who was also DEX 11, CV 4 and SPD 2 would be a lot more palatable, with heroes who were faster, more agile and had better CVs not needing to be as much better to show they were better than one of the Hordes of Agents. We could also have had more elite agents - high school student Barny Blake would not need better stats than an elite Special Forces member to be a competitive novice superhero whose powers did not revolve around speed, agility and/or mass

I recall the furore when the Adventurers Club print magazine published Sensor, who had a 12 SPD. "That's only there for completeness - no one should ever have a SPD that high!!" Of course, if the typical Brick in your game has a SPD of 8, making Speedsters within a 12 point range is pretty tough. OTOH, if the game had originally pegged slow Bricks at 2 SPD (maybe DEX 8-10 and CV 3), average Supers at 3 - 4 (and DEX 11-14; CV 4-5) and really fast characters at SPD 5 (DEX 17-20; CV 6-7), maybe an occasional solo mega-villain at 6-7 (DEX 23-26; CV 8-9), the SPD, DEX and C

I attribute that more to the challenge of using a fixed, formulaic model to convert characters from very different game systems. I generally prefer to grasp the system, understand that the character in question does pretty low damage, kind of average damage or super-high damage; is easy or hard to hit; is easy or hard to KO; moves really fast or really slow; etc., then translate that into the character I need for my Hero game. A lot of V&V characters do 1d6 or 1d8 damage, or have no significant defenses, or have normal human accuracy and Speed. That works fine in V&V. Mo