Lord Liaden

The only real concern I would have about this is that combat ranking is one of the benefits of DEX that you pay those hard-earned Character Points for. For my part, I'd be annoyed if my character lost that benefit for an entire combat due to a random die roll. However, if your players wanted the variety and all agreed to it, it could be interesting. I've had success in the past with adding variety by randomizing the Phases on which a character can act. The method I employed was suggested by Steve Perrin in his "GM's Discretion" column back in Adventurers Club #21. Each player rolls a D12 every Segment, and if the player rolls his SPD or less, he gets an action Phase that Segment. Although DEX still governs the order of action, the order of Phases would be unpredictable, which reduces some of the meta-gaming "I'll declare a Haymaker on my Phase 6 because my opponent can't move again until Segment 8" that some people find annoying. And the character's SPD stat is still applicable to how often he gets to act. Because the vagaries of the dice could mean that a given character might never roll well enough to get an action, Steve Perrin also suggested that for each die roll that a character misses, he adds 1 to his target number next roll, cumulatively, until he succeeds, when the roll resets to his raw SPD again. Don't know if that's what you're looking for, but it does work pretty smoothly and doesn't take long to get used to.

Personal favorites of my own devising: Deadeye (undead private investigator); The Wrath (summoned supernatural assassin/ punisher of the guilty); Airborn (super-acrobat hero); Newtron (genius gadgeteer, pun on "new", "neutron" and "Newton"); Hegira (Middle-Eastern speedster hero - name for Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina); Killer Bee (South American villain with shrinking and insect powers).

How about Invisible Power Effects? This would be useful for those powers that cause "bad luck", like Telekinesis, Change Environment or Transform. In conjunction with No Conscious Control, the possessor of the Power might not even be aware that he or she has been causing these things to happen.

As I mentioned on the previous thread, I've used 2-pt. STR in my heroic-level campaigns for some time, while keeping it at 1 pt. in superheroic ones. The other distinctions and restraints between the two levels obviate any need to change HA or extra DC for Martial Arts in my experience. I've followed the rulebook's suggestion of not allowing extra DC for MA in heroic games; as for HA in heroic games, it's limited to weapons, which characters don't pay points for and whose power level I control, or spells, for which a little extra "oomph" compared to STR has not been a problem, particularly since the increased cost of STR tends to promote spellcasters with lower base STR scores.

I'm one of those people who is quite happy with the cost of Strength as is for Superheroic campaigns, where it keeps STR competitive with other attack Powers in Damage Class and END use; but long ago decided to increase it to 2 pts. per point of STR in heroic campaigns, where small changes can make a significant difference, especially for sword-swinging fantasy characters. The suggested rule for END usage for STR in heroic games (1 END per 5 pts. of STR, rather than the usual 10) seemed like sufficient precedent. It's always worked pretty well for me, and I don't anticipate changing it.

You're welcome, but the real thanks goes to Steve Kenson for his generosity in posting this to the General Roleplaying board. I just moved it to what I thought was a more appropriate and prominent setting. And I'll say again here: Thanks, Steve! Freedom City is a great setting, and these conversions make it more accessible to Champions players.

The methods that you suggest for Eternia to acquire a soul all seem reasonable. If she has any Disadvantages associated with her soulless state, you might let her save up enough Experience to buy them off (perhaps partly acquired on a quest to earn a soul), then let her experience a "radiation accident" to buy them all off at once. As a source of occult lore in the Champions Universe, your first choice would probably be the Trismegistus Council, which barring some disaster should still be functioning in 2018. Witchcraft had a strong connection to them early in her career, so if you know her she can probably point you to where to contact them. Next best bet would be one of the benevolent mystics of Vibora Bay, Florida, including Robert Caliburn, the sorceror Dr. Ka, and the voodoo practitioners Brother Thunder and Sister Rain. There are also several prominent heroic sorcerors around Champions Earth who could still be active in 2018, including Dweomer of Ireland, Rhiannon of Wales, the Gypsy clairvoyant and mystic Zamara in Europe, Russia's Gyeroy Vedun ("Hero Wizard"), Rashindar of India, and Japan's Akumashibaru ("Devil-Binder"). All of these are mentioned in Champions Universe.

Since Desolid is vulnerable to powers defined as Mental Powers under the 5E rules (Mind Control, Ego Attack, etc.) that really wouldn't count as part of the special effects that the player has defined his character as being vulnerable. You might suggest to your GM that "mental powers" can be the SFX of other types of Powers that may be possessed by more supers: Energy Blast, Telekinesis, Entangle or others with "psionic energy" as their effect. With some of the broader interpretations of "magic" suggested earlier, that should provide enough variety that villain encounters won't all feel the same. I agree that an Active Point cap would keep an Affects Solid World Power from being strong enough to act as a character's primary attack, so he or she would have to go solid to use other options. Ultimately, though, if you can justify having Desolid and pay the points for it, you've earned the right to laugh at enemies' attacks whizzing harmlessly through you at least some of the time.

I thought I should repost this for Champions players who might have missed it elsewhere on the boards: I've downloaded the file myself, so I can say that it makes many of the characters in Freedom City almost immediately usable for a Champions campaign.

I certainly agree that this would be very helpful, especially for new HERO players. If you're new you don't necessarily know what everything is called, and if you don't remember its name the index, thorough as it is, may not help you find it. Even I, who's been picking up Hero Games products since 1983, have been thrown a couple of times trying to find something the name of which has been changed in 5E. For those who are unaware of it, there's a PDF file available on the "Free Stuff" page with all the Power Modifiers from FREd and several other books listed in alphabetical order, with page numbers to the appropriate books. If the pertinent part of that listing could be included in a few extra pages of a revised version of FREd, I think it would make the rulebook more accessible to newbies.

I agree: that sounds like just the right balance for the genre book and the expansion supplements. Steve Long knows what he's doing at least 90% of the time. (I had to leave room for us nit-pickers.)

5E p. 189 mentions how Breakable Foci can have exotic Defenses such as Power Def. or Lack of Weakness bought specifically to protect them from such attacks for a -2 Limitation. Is that -2 Lim cumulative with any Focus Limitation, or only -2 whatever type of Focus the Defense is bought for? Also, could you apply the same Limitation to more standard Defenses only to protect a Focus, such as Armor or Force Field?

I'm anticipating that the new Fantasy HERO will include a lot of suggestions on how to balance spell systems, and the effect of certain choices on the effectiveness of spell casters relative to other types of characters, particularly Power Frameworks. Spellcasting abilities are one of the elements that can give one character a big edge over others if not handled right. Old Man, you and I may be in the minority in approving of the old FH spell colleges. The type and amount of Limitations built into those spells made them very useful to characters as individual buys, without outpowering them relative to weapon or stealth specialists. And I for one thought that the sfx of the individual Colleges added a lot of unique flavor to them. I could never understand the protests of some people that all colleges were the same because they all had a damage spell, a Detect, a Dispel and a Force Field. There's a real difference between a FF defined as a flock of birds that surround you to block attacks, and a FF defined as turning your skin into reptile scales (both of which are in the book).

Re: REALLY Hostile Mind Control Just to review the suggestions in The Ultimate Mentalist (p. 43): There are two ways given to handle this. The first is to order the subject to hurt or kill himself, requiring an effect roll of "at least Ego +30." The other way is to order the target to "Die!" causing his heart to stop beating etc. In this case the victim takes damage as per Mental Illusions, 1D6 per 5 Active Points in MC. He takes Stun damage for +10 points of effect, Stun + Body damage for +20 points. The damage is applied against Mental Defense. Although UM doesn't specify, I would guess that those modifiers would be added on top of Ego +30 for "violently opposed." I would agree with Wyrm Ouroboros that acting to kill yourself and knowing that the outcome would be fatal should require an additional +10, unless the subject of the MC already had suicidal tendencies. However, to harm yourself knowing that the result would probably not be fatal ("Shoot yourself in the foot" and similar commands), I would require only the Ego +30 roll. I also agree that the wording of the command could make a great difference.

It can be hard to find nowadays, since it's been out of print for years, but I'd recommend Philip Wylie's novel The Gladiator. The lead character is widely considered one of Siegel and Shuster's primary inspirations for Superman. Although far removed from the contemporary era (the super-character fought in WW I!), and IMO with a streak of mysogyny which I find distasteful, this is still the most thoughtful study I've seen in what it would really be like to be born immensely physically superior to everyone else in the world.

If you'd be interested in a suggestion: reducing them to a size that would be suitable for stand-up figures would be really handy. You might lay them out onto one or more sheets that we could download and have printed on cardboard. I'm sure that many of us would gladly pay for that.

Champions Universe mentions the "almost-indefeatable" Viperia among VIPER's supervillain cadre, on p. 112. Given the generally increased power level among 5E villains, I'm not sure I want to see the definition of "almost indefeatable".

First of all, DON'T PANIC. TMK, I realize that the HERO System can be intimidating to a newcomer, but really, most of the apparent complexity comes from the many variations available - the basic concepts and mechanics are fairly simple. Rather than take up space on the message boards by going through it all, though, I'm going to suggest the places you can go where the fine folks at Hero Games have already done much of the work for you. First of all, assuming that you have the HERO System Fifth Edition Rulebook, reread pages 2 to 5, "Introduction to the HERO System." That will lay out many of the basic mechanics. Next, at the top of this page you'll find a link marked "FAQs". That will take you to a page with links under the general heading, "About the HERO System"; click on that one, "General Questions", and "Reasoning from Effects" for a basic tutorial on how to translate character concepts that you might want to use into HERO System terms. Then, as suggested by an earlier poster, you can go back to the top of this or any other page on the site, click on "Free Stuff", then "HERO System Documents", then download "The HERO System Genre by Genre", a free PDF file which outlines the main conventions of many different game genres (sci-fi, superheroes, fantasy, pulp, horror, etc.) and how to translate them into HERO terms. For each genre, there are suggestions for character abilities, sample gadgets, powers, spells, etc., plus sample characters tailored to each genre to use as examples for your own characters. Once you have that under your belt, Chapter One of the Fifth Edition rulebook, "Character Creation", should be easier to follow. Any further specific questions you have after that, you should feel free to come on back and ask.

Given that one of the options for breaking a Focus is that a single attack does double its Defense in Body damage, you could certainly argue that it should have that amount of Body. However, there are times when it's logical for a Focus to lose Powers when any Body damage gets through, such as a complex piece of electronics, so I'd like to keep that option available. OTOH, a simple weapon with one Power, like a sword, should probably have a Body score and not be destroyed until that Body is gone.

Just to clarify, Wyrm, any single attack which does Body damage to a Focus will only destroy one Power at a time, regardless of how much Body gets through its Defense. Otherwise, I agree with the previous posters that the Focus rules have some mechanical limitations. What I would like to see expanded in any future Ultimate Gadget book or the like, is various alternative ways to define Focus breakability and how it can be manifested. Wyrm Ouroboros and tesuji presented several appropriate examples. One that I remember from an official Hero Games book was in the Fantasy Hero Companion. The Spell College of Mentalism required the spell caster to use a crystal "attuned" to his mind. If any other person touched the crystal, its psychic balance was disrupted and rendered unusable until the spell caster could spend an entire day meditating with it in order to "re-attune" it to himself. This was taken as a Fragile Limitation on the Focus crystal; even though it had nothing to do with actually breaking the crystal itself, it was comparable in how the Focus was Limited. As far as Dust Raven's original question: considering that the rules allow for a Focus to be defined as having double its normal Defense for free, I think that that's sufficient precedent to say that it could instead have its normal Defense Hardened for free (the rules FAQ on Foci suggest something similar), or if there's a good justification, grant it an equal amount of Power Defense to resist Drains and Transforms. All of these could be considered variations on Durable. Since the description of Durable suggests that there should be a good explanation for why it is, you could specify that the Focus is Durable because of its special composition or construction, implying that it would be more difficult to repair or replace if damaged. One thing that I'm experimenting with is allowing for increased durability of the Focus at the cost of reducing the Focus Limitation, like reducing the Charge Limitation for Recoverable Charges etc. By reducing the Lim by 1/4, you could double and harden a Focus's normal Defense for purposes of resisting breakage, and give it Active Points/5 in Power Defense to resist Drains and Transforms. So an OIF Focus would only be worth a -1/4 Lim rather than -1/2. An Unbreakable Focus would be considered a variation of this; I think that the difficulty in replacing it inherent in the description of Unbreakable Foci is a sufficiently balancing factor. I decided on this construct after considering what you normally get for free with a Durable and Unbreakable Focus, and the advice in the rules FAQ regarding the breaking of Foci. Yes, I realize that an Unbreakable IIF would not give any Limitation cost break at all, but if you really want to define a Focus that's Inobvious, Inaccessible, and Unbreakable, IMHO you're not that interested in being limited, anyway. That's also why I set the Limitation reduction at 1/4; beyond that you start to lose any cost-break incentive to take the Focus Lim at all.

The latest update from Scott Heine on these boards can be found at the address below, as well as links to the new illustrations of the Protectors that Scott did on the old boards, and to the 5E conversions of them that Glen Sprigg kindly contributed: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=791&highlight=protectors Sadly, it does not appear that Scott has had the chance to do anything more with them yet, at least not anything ready to post.

No offense intended, jtelson, but I'm going to be chuckling over this phrase for quite some time.

I completely forgot about AVAR-7! I've even used him as a NPC in a couple of campaigns, with tweaks to put the "Variable" into "Advanced Variable Android, Reconnaissance." Guess I've got another 5E update to work on. Say, for you Star HERO and Terran Empire fans: any insights on which of the other galactic civilizations in the contemporary Champions Universe would be most likely to send such an observer here, if any?

I'm quite familiar with the Talislanta setting, and it remains one of my favorites. I've pondered how to duplicate the Sindaran's abilities in HERO terms myself, and the suite you describe would certainly cover most of it. But you're right, the resistance to mental influence is the trickiest part. In its most basic form, this ability simply means that the character is more resistant to mind-influencing Powers. There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that it is simply the special effect of one of the standard ways to resist Mental Powers in HERO: Mental Defence, Mental Damage Reduction, or enhanced Ego. The other way is to try to duplicate the "double chance to resist" capacity as it's described in the Talislanta rules. To my mind, the purest way to do this would be to buy the character a "second" Ego score equal to his normal Ego, with the Limitation, "Only for Breakout rolls to resist Mental Powers," which I would set at at least -1. So, if the Sindaran is attacked with a Mental Power, he gets his usual Breakout roll as soon as his Phase comes up, but if he fails that his "second Ego" would also get to try a Breakout roll before the Power would affect him. if he only gets one roll for each subsequent Breakout attempt, I'd put the Limitation even lower, maybe at -1 1/2. Hope that made sense.

Splits a single stream into several? Sounds like "Prism" to me.