Zed-F

Re: Munchkin Build Contest? Meh. Lots of superfluous advantages there. It's a lot more expensive than it needs to be. Rocket to the Sun: Superleap 1", Megascale xLots, UAA. That's all you really need. Flavour with other advantages and limitations to taste. You can plop the entire planet into the Sun if you want for ~5 active points and 1 real point. --------- But weren't we supposed to be talking something that might actually slip past a GM who wasn't totally blind? Most GMs can spot really obvious stuff like advantage stacking, power stacking, abuse of duplication/summon/followers/vehicles/etc. and so forth without too much difficulty. How about something as seemingly simple as: --- Succor xd6, 0 END Cost (+1/2) Flavour with Continuous or Variable Effect to taste. Start it up during non-combat time and just let it keep running until you need to do something. By then you'll have pretty much infinite AP in whatever you're succoring, since Succor has no maximum limit. And, just for grins, you can do it to all your friends too. There are legitimate uses for Succor, but pretty much all of them rely on END costs as a balancing mechanism; do anything that fiddles with that, such as buying an END reserve, charges, reduced END, etc. and the GM will need to start paying close attention. You can also milk the fact that the damage stacking rules are pretty obscure and tend to be not well-understood. A 4d6 AP HA (30 AP) doesn't seem too bad, but when you tack on 20 STR, a martial arts maneuver, perhaps a couple damage classes, and maybe some velocity-based damage (FMove martial maneuver, Stretching, Growth Momentum, etc.) things can get pretty obscene quickly. It gets worse with more/bigger advantages on the HA, naturally. There are plenty of odd corners in the rules that you can use to exercise your inner munchkin without being overly blatant about it.

Re: What rule don't people know?

Re: What rule don't people know? This is not strictly true. There are times when being stunned is worse. If you get stunned in phase 12, after you have already acted, you are stunned until your next phase. This puts you at half DCV and easy prey for a follow-up attack early in the subsequent turn, which will likely send you deep into negatives. If you get knocked out to some value between 0 and -10 in phase 12, you do not lose your next action, and your post-12 recovery will kick in and most likely bring you up to positive END/STUN again. If you do get targeted before your next phase, you still have the option to abort.

Re: Your Character/Game Equation Soulbarb: Batman + Buffy + Hellboy

Re: Superheroes, Power and Responsbility How about folks with healing powers, superscientist egghead types, witches in various fancy stockings with 'anything goes' magic, or cosmic power dudes who can pretty much do anything? In a world where people had superpowers, maybe there would be someone who's just plain better at the job of ruling than everyone else. That doesn't mean he'd be the one with power, though -- that would be the one who's better at convincing others he's the best one for the job: aka the super-politician. If you want to get 'realistic' about the effect superpowers would have on a world, I don't think anyone can accurately predict what would really happen. There are far too many variables involved. Anything from a complete and total breakdown of society, leading to a post-apocalypse world, to utopia on the other end, is a possibility.

Re: Dancing with the Heroes Soulbarb: In secret ID, would not be interested in competing. In Hero ID, would only win because all the other contestants would run away very fast. Sylph: Actually is a dancer, albeit not a professional one; she is taking university-level classes in Fine Arts and in time she could become a professional dancer, as she has the build and talent for it. This would show on stage, so with her grace, looks, pleasant demeanor, and actual dancing skill, she would do quite respectably. Her biggest weakness would be, being too modest and not sufficiently assertive. Revenant: Well he has the build and grace, but not the skill. VIPER doesn't offer much training in ballroom dancing.

Re: WWYCD: Out of cash Soulbarb: comes from a wealthy family. All else fails, she can call up her folks in secret ID, though she'd certainly have some explaining to do for what happened to her own trust fund. Then again, she's a street level heroine, so normally she doesn't need a lot of money for whipping up uber-inventions of the week. Sylph: is a poor university student. What money? Actually, she has recently started to collect some money from endorsement deals, but it's not like she's grown used to having it yet. Worse comes to worst, she can go the route of the US medical system and actually start charging for her services as a healer, but that isn't a step she would undertake lightly as she feels it's her responsibility to help those who need her help.

Re: WWYCD: "I" in Team Sticking with current characters only, and discounting those in non-superhero games. This is probably not going to end well regardless.... Soulbarb: If I were to throw in the high-powered version she would easily dominate the team, so I'll stick with her default street level version. Young woman whose soul has been bonded with a demon. Mainly a fast brick with an investigative/occult bent and easily acquired street-level gear. Among other things, has the ability to directly read the soul just by looking at a person. This will be a source of tension within the team as she (a) is not hesitant about using it on teammates, ( has an at best abrasive personality, and © is nevertheless the most likely candidate for team leader. Bronze-Iron in outlook. Sylph: Young woman who has been chosen as a Champion of Dionysius. Mostly she is a low-powered heroine specializing in plant control and healing. Not much in the way of experience or skill apart from power use. Normally she is an ultra-sweet but timid girl, but in times of sufficient stress (or inebriation) transforms into Maenad, an alternate persona with a substantially upgraded powerset (standard level superhero, concentrating on brick attributes while retaining her plant control abilities) who is as wild as Sylph is timid. Silver Age outlook. Revenant: Young man with a dark past, was a junior member of VIPER's Dragon branch for several years before falling in love with an undercover UNTIL operative and getting his head screwed on straight. Trained human (no meta abilities) who uses a hoverboard ala Green Goblin to get around. Not really a hero's hero, as he's (a) on the lam and ( more concerned about finding the woman he fell in love with (who's missing) than he is with traditional heroics, but he feels guilt about his past and so often pitches in anyway. Bronze age outlook. I'm going to assume they are thrown together in order to survive and eventually get back to their respective lives. They certainly wouldn't work together for any length of time by choice. - Soulbarb would consider Sylph too saccharine and naive to live, and wouldn't trust Maenad who should, by her standards, cause as much harm as she does good. (Whereas in Sylph's actual Silver Age game setting, the downsides of being a maenad are somewhat less severe.) Soulbarb would quickly realize that Revenant is more focused on finding his girl than on being a real hero, and would interpret his lack of commitment as untrustworthiness. Then again, Soulbarb is not very trusting in general. - Sylph would find both Revenant and Soulbarb to be overly violent and, in Soulbarb's case, downright scary. This would be even more true once she finds that they are both vigilantes who have committed serious crimes in the past. - Revenant is too jaded to find Sylph appealing on a personal level, and while Soulbarb is smart and edgy enough to be appealing, that whole 'reads my soul' thing would prove to be a real quick turn-off, since Soulbarb can be a pretty judgmental girl, and his conscience isn't exactly untroubled to start with. During the time they are thrown together, Soulbarb's take charge attitude, detective/leadership skills, and general street smarts would make her the most natural leader. While Revenant has a decent amount of street smarts, he lacks detective and leadership skills to go with them; given that and his relative lack of drive for hero work, he'd be content to follow Soulbarb's lead for the most part. Sylph is no leader material and would not take such a position under any circumstances.

Re: Opinions On Being An "Ex-Viper Member" At most 8- if he was a Joe Agent. Really, VIPER has bigger worries.

Re: WWYCD: Collected Soulbarb: (Street level): Thinks, So now what, I'm an action figure? The situation is a bit bizarre for her, but it can't be any worse than the time a half-dozen different dimensional duplicates paid her a visit all at once, right? She'll do what she does best, investigate... starting by trying to investigate a way out of the containment field. She may be able to find a weak point or whatever caused sleep mode to cease working properly, and keep working on that to worm her way out. Failing that, main force will have to do; now's a good time to try a few haymakers out, which she generally doesn't do. Next she'll start trying to figure out just how far this action-figure metaphor extends. Is a giant-sized kid likely to enter the room at a moment's notice? Sylph: Is probably going to have some difficulty getting out. She doesn't really have many powers that are suitable for breaking objects. If there are plants around anywhere outside the containment unit she can probably figure something out using her TK -- a drop from a great hight might work well, trusting the containment unit to shield her from the worst of the impact damage. Otherwise, she's likely stuck until someone comes to put her back into coldsleep, whereupon she can try to reason with them...

Re: WWCYD: Lethal Force is Authorized Soulbarb: (Street level) Well, she's mostly a brick, and mostly does normal damage. She's more into the capture and interrogate thing, and she wouldn't make it a priority to kill aliens unless there's no value to be had from capturing them. That said, if killing became necessary, she wouldn't hesitate. Since she already doesn't hesitate to kill humans where doing so is necessary... not much change there. (High powered): I guess we're going to start testing just how creating she can get with a magic SFX VPP, then... Sylph:While she's only got a (Common, Moderate) CvK, Sylph finds it pretty hard to actually kill sentient beings. Moreover, the majority of her powers are non-lethal. She's better-equipped to just entangle large batches of enemy agents to immobilize them, and let others do the actual killing. Most likely, she will be more useful as a one-person mobile field hospital anyway, so while she'll probably see some action she won't be constantly right in the thick of things. Eventually she will conclude that war is hell and will kill if she must, but she won't like it and will never be comfortable with it.

Re: MPA v. Sweep v. Combo of Two I seem to recall mentioning that combining a sweep and an MPA in the same manuever is unlikely to fly. Sweep and MPA are already GM-permission maneuvers, I really doubt most GMs will allow a swept MPA.

Re: WWYCD: Dead Man Running Soulbarb considers this a potential disaster waiting to happen and is not going to take a hands-off approach. She would investigate to find out how and why this fellow reanimated, whether he had any help, and what he's likely to do next. She has enough mystical knowledge and contacts, plus her Soulsight, that she ought to be able to unravel the mystery and deal with whatever she uncovers. Sylph, on the other hand, is a bit concerned but not sure what she can do about it, not having any particular investigative ability to speak of. If there is no immediate and obvious trail to follow, she'll have to wait for the guy to resurface and/or for the GM to get out the clue-by-four.

Re: MPA v. Sweep v. Combo of Two I don't think you can sweep (rapid attack) an MPA. It's either an MPA, a sweep, or neither.

Re: WWYCD: Washington, D.C. is no more.

Re: Favorite Anti-Brick tricks? The usual strategy against enemy bricks is simple: contain them first (or just ignore them,) deal with their allies, and THEN mop-up the brick when everyone can chip in. Most bricks are a pain defensively but no more dangerous than any other super offensively, and sometimes less so. So why hit the hardened target first if you don't have to? That's a classic bad guy mistake, because the GM wants the combat to go on for more than one or two rounds. It's not what heroes* should do. Here's another couple to add to the list: - INT drain. This will hit most bricks pretty hard. Hard to be effective when you're locked into the same action over and over. - Telekinesis. Pick the brick up and put him somewhere where he can't be effective, e.g. mid-air 10 stories up. Or throw the brick far far away, if he doesn't have good movement. - Teleport UAA. Same deal. * - or villains that are supposed to be tactically savvy, either, for that matter.

Re: 10 Global disasters that YOU team might encounter... The problem is that these were specifically described as global menaces. Most 350 point starting heroes simply do not have the power or especially the mobility to fight a global threat. You have to set things up so that the 350-point heroes can nip things in the bud, or else it's really a problem that's out of their league. Superdrugs -- do you really think a superdrug with global distribution is just going to have one lab producing it? Hardly. Now if it's a drug plaguing a city, which might potentially become a global problem at some unspecified future date, that's more reasonable. Engineered Viruses -- Again, if it's already a global problem, it's too late for 350-point heroes to have much impact in most cases. If you are preventing from getting released, well-positioned 350 point heroes could get the job done, but then we're not talking about a global threat yet, just a potentially global one. Asteroid -- silly. Why wouldn't the government just call in a higher powered team who's more capable of handling this sort of thing? Unless your heroes are the only team in existence, this seems contrived. Rift In Time -- Too unspecific. Where's this rift? How is it a global scale threat? If stuff is spewing out of it and hitting the whole world, just the cleanup from it alone is more than most 350-point heroes can handle. Again, nip in the bud before it becomes a global problem and you're talking. Alien Invaders -- 350 point heroes against entire armies of aliens? Not likely. How about deactivating their dimensional portal and preventing them from arriving in the first place? Much better. Volcanic/Seismic disturbances -- If it's a worldwide problem, with many locations, no. Not unless there are whole bunches of teams all doing the same thing at once. Send them after the local device producing the local volcanic/seismic disturbances, and you're good. ----- 350-point heroes can be great at solving problems before they get to a global scale. But if you want to talk about actual global menaces, after they've proven themselves to have a global impact -- i.e. not just nipping things in the bud before they do have a global impact -- you're going to need to call in the JLA equivalents to deal with the problem.

Re: Is this too dark for DC? I think it could be an interesting social experiment. Do some research on Norse society of that time and see how it functioned. Then set up your entire campaign world to mimic that set of social mores. Obviously that set of social rules, taken as a whole, is stable enough to self-perpetuate for a good long time -- since it clearly did in RL. The thing is, the people have to believe in their system and that that's just the way things ought to be, or as has been pointed out you'll get revolution in short order. Then plop your heroes into it, and see how they react. But as Treb said, this sort of thing may not have too much mileage inherently built into it. The problem is most modern people will not buy into such a social system, and so will inherently seek to reform it into something they are more comfortable with. If you were running a Fantasy Hero game rather than a Dark Champions game, you might get more buy-in on the part of the players, but even then modern sensibilities tend to come into play more frequently than they historically ought to. Set it in the modern world, and most people will assume that modern sensibilities should automatically apply.

Re: An alternative to CSLs? I've seen builds where Indirect is explicitly used to make a martial arts strike that is capable of penetrating any defense that is used to block it, e.g. I punch through the wall and hit the guy on the other side. Usually such an Indirect is defined as a +1/4 indirect "up to 1" away". This would logically also negate a block defined as 'block' -- though a point could be made that someone could use a block defined as 'I get out of the way' to defeat such a strike. Sounds like a GM call to me. Another example of an attack which may not be blockable (in this case, deflectable with missile deflection) is a classic "Immolate" style EB, where the target spontaneously catches on fire. This could be defined as an Indirect EB. On the other hand, there are plenty of Indirect EBs which are deflectable, so in large part this comes down to SFX.

Re: WWYCD: Washington, D.C. is no more. Soubarb: is (by default) a street-level vigilante in Houston, TX. It's unlikely that there would be anything she could do about it, short of search the web to see if she could find evidence of the perpetrators and/or funny business involving the new president. Given that this is a national security issue, there will be people far more capable at that job than herself on it immediately. Sylph: Contact Coach, the AI at the UNTIL-provided base for the New Pantheon, and see if there is anything she can do to help the survivors of the attack. Her healing powers are likely to be needed, and indeed put to the test.

Re: Sonics - tired power, need new ideas I had a character with the following voice based powers, though these were more due to force of personality/divine power and the words he was speaking than due to raw sonics: Herald of the Host: Summon Confessions: Telepathy Visions: Mental Illusions Guilt: Ego Attack Words of Inspiration: Succor Words of Comfort: Aid/Healing Words of Judgement: +PRE Words of Deliverance: Teleport My avian sonic blaster had a number of bird-themed sonic powers: EB/RKA - typical sonic EB NND vs. Hearing Flash Defense Hearing Flash with Does Knockback - extra volume 1" Tunnelling through DEF x (for knocking holes in walls, etc.) - harmonic vibrations Ranged DEX Drain - disorientation Change environment - confusing echoes (limited to places capable of producing echoes) Hearing vs. Images - Mimicry Summon birds, speak with birds

Re: WWYCD: The Jack-In-Th-Box Senerio Soulbarb: (Street Level) Definitely do preliminary investigation via her Blackberry PDA before even going near the thing. There's way too many pairs of eyes and cameras turned on it for her to show up as Soulbarb. While trying to figure out what it is and who set it up by running a quick search through the usual 'net rumor mill, and determining if this fits any known villain MOs, she will also be sure to keep an eye on the news for developments and to see if any of the city's other heroes are likely to arrive to deal with it. Once the initial research is done, she would probably go in her secret ID and poke around with her Soulsight for magic and/or for someone who looks suspiciously evil/gloating/etc. If it still triggered despite her being in secret ID, it would depend on what happened, but if the crowd starts running away she'll run with them (helping those who need help on the way) until she can find someplace to change forms. After that, it depends on the time of day/night and how much cover she can find to operate out of; since her heroic ID is likely to be even more frightening to bystanders than whatever comes out of the Jack-in-the-Box, Soulbarb really doesn't like publicity. Sylph: Wrap the box in a very large entangle barrier (instant forest) to make sure it can't open? Otherwise, she's got nothin.'

Re: An alternative to CSLs? 1" of stretching won't make an attack unblockable. A level of Indirect, however, might. I don't see any problem with a 1-hex accurate attack in certain kinds of settings. A wuxia game would be the perfect time to trot a 1-hex accurate HA or HKA option out, as part of a multipower of various special combat techniques the character has picked up over time. Anime-themed games or video-game martial arts, similar. Some kinds of high fantasy games offer similar power levels, as do some superheroic seettings, especially those focusing on weapons-play.

Re: Help needed for awkward concept Might be worth considering defining them as a DNPC too. At least for some fetters.

Re: WWCYD: De-Animator That ignores the very likely possibility that his powers will automatically turn off when he gets knocked out... though I suppose if he's exhausted other reasonable options first it might be worth a try anyway.