braincraft

Re: Lose Weakness

I think that this would be much easier if Find Weakness weren't a clunky legacy power that interacts poorly with the rest of the system.

That being said, while I'm not sure that introducing new penalties to sense/perception rolls retroactively changes the results of previous rolls, it seems like the best solution.

Re: BODY into STUN

Yes it will. If you have ANY "Resistant" defense' date=' ALL your defense applies against STUN from a "Killing" attack.[/quote']

 

So? Non-superpowered/pulp humans tend not to have a whole lot of PD. The Stun lottery means even low-caliber handguns can CON Stun low-CON characters. You can still get the result you're looking for, especially if you keep the resistant value low, so lightly armored targets can still take BODY (broken ribs, bruised organs) through type IIIa or lower protection.

 

If your characters are so tough that a little bit of PD and a kevlar vest will keep them from getting knocked tea over asskettle by a single lucky shot, good for them. If not, then there's no reason to use a complicated construct when a simple one will serve.

 

I'm not sure why you're so adamant about some 'realistic' representation of superheroes getting shot through imaginary bulletproof spandex materials. Even in a 'high realism' setting, I can pretty much guarantee you that no ruleset can imitate the unpredictability of 'reality' with any high degree of 'accuracy'. Why strain yourself reaching for an extreme degree of approximation?

 

I didn't mean to go on at such length when I started this post, but this sort of reality-wank is another one of my gaming pet peeves. Speaking as someone who has spent a number of years working in the medical field for both the military and civilian sectors, and as someone who has been gaming for even longer than that, the only systems I've ever seen that 'get it right' with regards to combat/injuries are the ones with the most abstracted systems, since anything that delves into too much detail inevitably screws it up. And even if you could somehow put in the work to make it perfect, congratulations: you've made a game where conflict is just as bloody and unpleasant as it is in the real world. Just the thing for getting all the PCs killed before their players can feel any sort of personal investment in them.

 

There's too much granularity in this system to pick this sort of nit. Drop it.

Re: Force Field with Various Methods of Activation and SFX?

A multipower should work as well as an alternative to Variable Disadvantage, though I happen to like VarDisad/VarAd for constructions like this.

Re: Aiden-Cath

I maed you a cookie but I incinerated it

I can grills cheezburger now?

Re: Madison Summers

My idea being that rather than simply having an arbitrary amount of defense against things that normal people don’t have defenses against' date=' this character is simply tough and may be able to shrug off affects of those types of attacks faster than most people.[/quote']

 

I respect that it's a non-issue for you, but I should point out that this sentence does not make any kind of sense.

Re: BODY into STUN

Just buy it as Resistant on some or all of your PD. It won't change the amount of STUN you're taking, but it'll reduce the amount of BODY damage.

Re: Chargeable Attacks?

8d6 Energy Blast

+4d6 Energy Blast, Full Phase, x2 END, Incantations, Gestures

+4d6 Energy Blast, 1 Turn, x5 END, Incantations, Gestures, Concentration

And Haymaker.

Re: Making Dancing weapons?

First of all, making a new character sheet is almost never the simplest solution.

Second of all, Continuous doesn't work the way some people think it does.

Third of all, AoE Selective is the best way of doing this, though you'll probably want Mobile or something like that.

Re: Madison Summers

Do you really need those few points from putting an activation roll on your flash defense? Is it so necessary to your concept that you couldn't just scale 'em back a bit?

My experience with activation rolls is that you either a) succeed on the roll, which makes it just a useless extra roll that breaks the flow of play, or fail on the roll, which makes the whole power seem like a waste of points and makes your character seem like a doof. Furthermore, it seems both unrealistic and damaging to play for this sort of power to be so unreliable - and if it's not significantly unreliable, it's a non-disadvantage that generates time-wasting rolls.

Sorry, but this is my pet peeve.

Re: Super Bark

a) 'Nonselective' has a nonintuitive meaning in HERO terms. Reread the AoE section, because I'm pretty sure it's not what you want.

That's a lot of dice in that energy blast; enough to one-shot most supers. What does he wreck with it? As an aside, I think the HERO system's rules for breaking stuff scale poorly for supers.

Re: The Geas Effect

"Broad range of task" All tasks must be discrete' date=' concrete, objectively verifiable and physically possible for the target to perform in his/her lifetime." Examples: "Walk from New York City to Los Angeles" is valid. "Find true love" is not. Negative tasks are generally impossible unless time limited. Examples "Never hit a woman" is not valid, because you could not verify compliance until the target died. "Do not hit a woman for 100 years" is valid.[/quote']

 

By your criteria, "Punch yourself until you die" is also valid. No amount of caveats or documentation can possibly make a power like this both broadly useful and narratively 'safe'.

 

Mind Control and similar powers are going to be abused; that's a fact. If you're not comfortable with that, you shouldn't be allowing it in your games.

 

The Death Note has similar problems; try looking those threads up and seeing how they dealt with this sort of thing.

Re: The Geas Effect

Depends on how smart you're allowed to be about it. If you're like Lulu, (I am making the reasonable assumption, here, that you have just watched Code Geass and want to port it to HERO) you can just geass people into being your eternally loyal slaves, which makes the limitation moot; it hardly matters if you only get one wish if you wish for more wishes. Of course, Lulu also has problems with implanting ill-conceived imperatives into targets that he might need something from in the future.

If you nixed the cheapness of creating instant brainslaves via Geass, I'd call it a -1 at least.

Sorry, broccoli murder-dudes!

Elsa needs Weapon Element: Acoustic Guitar.

Yeah, THAT Ghandi

Hey, don't look down on Shunamitism. It was good enough for Ghandi, it should be good enough for you.

Re: Focus - only to remove limitations

Variable lim is an elegant solution, though in a few cases you might actually want the Supress; for example, a spirit that uses a special charm to negate its own Desolid, but on occasion it might put that charm on another intangible enemy or object to make it easier for his friends to deal with.

Re: 'En passant' extra attack

Thinking outside the box' date=' maybe you could build a continuous, AE attack that only does damage under specific situations...like someone like "standing up or taking a step" when the PC is in combat mode. Make the attack be enough points to cover most of the PCs attacks, although lessening the APs in the attack to reflect its unusual nature wouldn't be unwise. Getting an attack off without planning it could easily justify it being at less than full power.[/quote']

 

Or you could use Transform.

 

Major Transform AoE Radius Continuous 0 END: All Opponents to Opponent with Susceptibility (taking move actions within reach of character)

 

Transform for everything! 6e could be 15 pages if you define all powers as special cases of Transform.

Re: [Characters, Hero Team] Strike Force One

TIM's defense is radically unbalanced. Automaton means he's utterly immune to Stun' date=' so only Body matters. With 40/40 defense on top of that, he can bounce anything up to and including Dr Destroyer's main guns.[/quote']

 

He's not immune to STUN, he's immune to being CON Stunned. If he were immune to all STUN damage, his defenses would cost three times as much.

 

Though I notice that it's not explicit on his character sheet that his defenses are Resistant, as one might assume, so even if he were a full Automaton you could destroy him with a pocket knife.

Re: We'll call this Plan B

Make it a Nerf gun' date=' or (if you're outside) a paintball gun. They'll still get the point! [/quote']

 

Nerf guns don't really have a lot of muzzle velocity. I can catch a nerf dart with my hand, but that doesn't prove anything about firearms.

Re: ROV character.

Duplication, with the main ROV being the mechanical superpowered villain-stomper, and the subordinate character being the squishy nerd with a remote control.

We'll call this Plan B

Pull out a gun and start shooting at your friends, and see if they bother to run or dive for cover.

They probably won't be your friends after this, though.

Re: Transform: Class of mind

I'd treat it as a Major Transform. Think of Mental Powers as being similar to NNDs or AVLDs, and the power you propose is essentially removing immunities to certain classes of power.

Re: Extended breathing: Howzat work?

You could always define your LS: Breathing as being total, with 1 fuel charge lasting X amount of time, recoverable by breathing some air and reoxygenating.

Re: Forcing a Step Backward

If you want to enforce genre conventions, you could also use a carrot instead of a stick.

How about swordsmen buying skill levels limited 'only against stationary targets' or 'only against targets who are not retreating'. That makes it a smart thing to use your half-move to back up, flank, or perform crazy acrobatic maneuvers.

Re: Multi-targeting spells

Ok.

Let's say, then, that every shot does area damage. How can I do that?

Buy AoE twice.

The easier way would just be to use Autofire or Rapid Fire.

Re: Can this be done x 2

Okay, this is the old 'spend points on a flashlight' thing.

Don't lay this problem on HERO, okay? It's a problem in every system. In Dungeons and Dragons, you can use a cheap length of rope to climb stuff, bind stuff together, tie people up, hang someone, or create a crude trap mechanism, even though it costs less than the magic spells that let you do all that stuff without rope. Does that make rope unbalanced? No, because

a) in almost all cases it's going to be an incidental use of an incidental item; once you've defeated someone and made it trivial to kill them or do whatever else, no one cares if you tie them up and bring them to the local law instead (or keep them as hostages or whatever). The rope isn't a new special ability, it's just taking care of an incidental detail that no one cares about, because the game is about bashing orcs/taking their stuff, or in some cases bashing supervillains/rescuing a busful of orphans from a volcano. Also,

Explicit powers and abilities within the game engine that permit you to do stuff like tie people up or create rope traps are generally much more useful and reliable than the free or nearly-free incidentals that you might otherwise be forced to use. If you tie up your prisoners with cheap rope you got at the store, the GM would be well within his rights to have them escape from the weak bonds or say that you're simply out of rope. If you tie up your prisoners with your Indestructo-Bonds, which you spent points on, the GM is going to have to come up with a serious explanation why you can't use a power you bought fair and square, or how normal criminals managed to cut through cable rated for holding super-strong villains. On the other hand, if you pick up Captain Napalm's Atomic Nerf Gun, you might get one or two shots off, but there's going to be some reason why you can't use something you didn't spend points for. Maybe it runs out of ammo right away. Maybe it's broke, and only Captain Napalm knows how to fix it. Maybe your character just doesn't feel like the weapon is sporting to use. Maybe UNTIL wants to confiscate it. But the mechanics are eventually going to insist upon a baseline to the otherwise malleable narrative, and the rebound is going to be harder the more you try to abuse your leeway.

If you want to use your napalm attack to commit petty arson, fine. That's incidental, and no one cares. You could just as well have bought a bic from the corner store and done it the old-fashioned way. But if you spend all your days as a player and/or GM accounting for the point value of every incidental effect, you're going to find that life is too short and the days are too long.

Don't pay points for a flashlight.