Solomon

Re: Killing Attack idea I think the idea has its merits, though I'm not enterely sold on it yet. I do find the additional STUN damage to be unnecessary, though, as it makes those attack IMHO too powerful against unarmored targets. The whole point of a Killing Attack should be to do more BODY damage to your opponent. The method you are proposing would make a "Killing attack, does no BODY" a very useful attack. Something of a disconnect IMHO.

Re: Clearing Away Soil That was what I was thinking, too. To look even cooler, add Ranged to it.

Re: Your PC's might be underpowered if... You tried to infiltrate COBRA as a recruit, but failed the shooting test.

Re: Your PC's might be underpowered if... You asked G'nort to be your team leader. He refused, stating he didn't want to associate with a bunch of losers.

EDIT: Wrong section, please disregard or remove.

Re: What skill would you use to see if someone is lying? Blimey! I got the question backwards! EDIT: Though, I do think those skills might be used defensively in some instances, at least as complementary skills. After all, if you have a working knowledge of Oratory you'll probably be able to judge things such as rethorics or body language. Bureacratics, less so.

Re: Sick of Wolverine Good to know. I've always been a fan of Colossus.

Re: What skill would you use to see if someone is lying? I, too, think that any Interaction skill would do, as dictated by the situation and opposed by either a PER roll or another Skill roll. Examples: Trading: "This car only got ten thousand miles under its belt and it's as good as new!" Bureaucratics: "Of course we'll deal with it. I'll talk to the Mayor personally" Oratory: "Vote for me! I'm honest!"

Re: Best published adventure Ditto. Easily my favorite early Champions artist.

Re: Dimension Brainstorming: The Dimension Of Lost Stuff Food for thought: In the classic Italian Reinassance poem Orlando Furioso (Roland Enraged), all things lost on Erth end up on the Moon. This includes lost immaterial things: lost sanity, lost love, forgotten memories etc.

Re: Super Football I think it could work very well in an ironic, post-iron-age setting such as Top Ten, where everybody and their dog got superpowers. In a conventional superverse such as Marvel and DC you'd have to stretch suspension of disbelief a lot to allow for multiple superpowered teams. OT: It's worth noting that several Manga and Anime sports series, as well as some Hong Kong comics, bordered on superheroics, at least when it came to the kind of abilities displayed by characters. "Kyojin no hoshi", "A****a e Attack" and "Akakichi no Eleven" come to mind In the latter, they had a character who could blow holes through brick walls with a soccer ball, another who could outrun racing horses, and another who trained his musces my being run over with a car! Then there's another Hong Kong comic whose name escapes me, where they had a goalkeeper with cybernetic hands and a forward who could project illusory images. And of course, you haven't truly lived until you've seen Shaolin Soccer. I'd love to run such a super-powered sports campaign. EDIT: Apparently the profanity filter doesn't like the Japanese word a.s.h.i.t.a.

Re: Best published adventure "Wrath of the Seven Horsemen" and "To Serve and Protect" are excellent but you'll probably need to ramp down the opposition. "Island of Dr Destroyer" and "Viper's Nest" are relatively straightforward and can make for a good primer on combat. Story-wise, "Crisis at Crusader's Citadel" might be your best bet to start a campaign. Unfortunately it's a V&V module. But I'd be surprised if nobody already converted it! Alternatively, "VOICE of Doom" has a similar "help out an extablished group" theme and is an outstanding module on its own. "Day of the Destroyer" might be my favorite Champions module ever, but I feel it works best as the climatic conclusion of a campaign rather than the start. I loved "Shades of Black" and "Shadows of the City" but they are rather grim in tone. I'm somewhat suprised nobody mentioned "Coriolis Effect" yet.

Re: Learning Curve? Please let me clarify what I was trying to say: In D&D, chargen is broken down into discrete steps, and at every step you only have to choose between a limited menu of relatively homogeneous items. You can swap one feat for another feat, one class level for a different class level, or a spell for another spell. In HERO, OTOH, every choice involves a vastly superior number of items... and in addition, those items are vastly diverse. With a given amount of points you can buy a spell, or a Talent, or, a Skill, etc. Of course in this diversity lies a lot of HERO's strength. On an unrelated point, it's also worth noting that, while character advancement in D&D can become mind-boggingly complex at higher levels, character building in HERO keeps a relatively constant level of complexity at every power level.

Re: Aggravating exceptions I think Bonedaddy nails it in one. Also, I think it's an argument in favor of getting rid of Figured Chars.

Re: Your PCs might be overpowered if... If you have a specific power tailor-suited against each and every Tyrannon avatar, and can activate all of them simultaneously... If you had to change HERO System from six-siders to percentile dice 'cause you coudn't find enough dice... If Superman is your civilian Secret ID (sometimes you just want to lay back and relax a bit)... If you ask Steve Long whether your character is a legal build, and he replies "I'll give you the address of some ex-colleague of mine, I no longer provide legal advice"... ... your PC might be overpowered.

Re: Learning Curve? Getting back on topic... I second the notion that HERO's gameplay isn't any harder than most other RPGs to handle - it's Character Generation that's hard to grasp. HERO's CG offers virtually unlimited freedom. Many players don't want such freedom. It's dificult to handle, it requires a lot of free space to process, so to speak. A game such as D&D breaks Character Generation down in sequential steps. Each step can be enacted indipendently. That means that even after you just finished writing your Half-Orc Barbarian, you can easily alter one aspect of CG and see the results, working by trial and error. You don't need to "navigate" the system - just pick a random direction, see what you end up with, and if you don't like it, just retrace your steps. In HERO, OTOH, you need to have a clear vision of where you are starting from, where you are going to and what course you want to follow to get there. Altering even a single aspect of a character might force you to rethink your whole character generation "strategy". HERO gives enormous freedom, but freedom requires a lot of care and attention.

Re: Summon: Weapon?

Re: Summon: Weapon? I'm rather wary of the jack-of-all-trades solution "Extradimensional Movement to my home rules dimension". KA Usable by Others still looks the best fit to me, but if I was the GM, I'd rather let my player build it on Transform than on XDM. It does break the "don't use power X to simulate power Y" metarule, but so does XDM, and on the plus side it's intuitively linked to the SFX. "Until object breaks or wears down" looks like an acceptable "healing" condition for such a Transform.

Re: Summon: Weapon? Generally speaking, I'd go with a KA Usable by Others. Yes, it's expensive, but it is a powerful ability. Such a character could conceivably arm a whole army or make a fortune selling his weapons. Maybe I'm really really stretching the rules here, but a possible compromise might be: - Buy KA Usable by Others only up to the number of close associates (say, x8 targets). - Buy the Perk Wealth as a Power with the special effect of summoning weapons.

Re: Musings on Random Musings So it's official, Nighthawk's the new Seeker?

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: Musings on Random Musings "Let them eat brioche"... a sweet French bread/pastry (mmmm... brioche!). But AFAIK Marcus is correct, the anedocte is likely fictional.

Re: Musings on Random Musings

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Weirdness at work, part deux. A guy (a regular, none-the-less, not some random passerby) walks into my cafeteria today and asks me whether we have condoms for sale. Oh, uhm. Come to think of it... maybe he was making a pass at me?

Re: Musings on Random Musings DoD looks like something I might get. Every country should hang to its own D&D clone... I got Das Schwarze Auge and I'm loving it. If I was rich, I'd resurrect a couple defunct Italian D&D clones. Mutant was the game that evolved (devolved?) into Mutant Chronicles?