Steve

Well, in looking at the basic numbers, a medium tree has 5 DEF and 8 BOD, so an attack of 4d6 HKA (average of 14) should be able to slice through its trunk, or maybe a 3d6 HKA (average 10.5) with Armor Piercing. She didn't seem to be pushing STR and was instead showing extreme focus in her skill. Samurai armor is listed as topping out at 6 DEF in most locations (with sleeves and greaves only being 4), so mook samurai types in armor would be about as hard to cut through as a medium tree. I don't recall her cutting through a really huge tree trunk or metal armored men during the series, so a purchase of one die of the Weaponmaster Talent would seem to suffice. Then either buy a second die or add in a Naked Advantage of Armor Piercing with a sword for up to 45 Active Points of attack would seem to work. That would put Mizu in the Powerful Hero category at a bare minimum, but far more likely a Very Powerful Hero.

How would one build the ability to cut through a tree in a single blow? Is it just having enough damage dice, or would it involve an advantage like Armor Piercing? I was watching Blue Eye Samurai, and there are scenes where Mizu slices through a thick tree trunk (and others where bisecting armored humans happens). Is this just a matter of having a lot of damage dice, or is something else going on?

Bingeing Blue Eye Samurai on a weekend sick on the couch. Only two episodes left for me to watch.

How would you build a surface or an object that Clinging doesn’t work on? Some sort of drain on clinging built as a damage shield? Perhaps a Change Environment construct?

Bumping for another Christmas.

I’m finding it helpful in managing damage in my campaigns to use limited forms of Damage Negation. Just a few dice seems to give Rocky levels of toughness to Heroic characters. I’ve also toyed with giving sectional limitations, like how armor is built.

The party consists of three characters, each built as Powerful Heroes (225 points and 50 Complication points). 1) US Marshall Daniel Doyle (character image is Clint Eastwood from one of his early westerns): A revenant that keeps this a secret and is dedicated to hunting evil. Talented with a gun and durable. 2) Sergio Cortez: (character image is Antonio Banderas from the Mariachi movie): A bounty hunter of both men and monsters. A thrillseeking womanizer who is in this for the money. A prototype of Zorro without a secret ID who is very handy with a sword and very stealthy. 3) Samuel Smith (character image is Bruce Campbell from The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr): A cowboy with immense gun skills who is a weirdness magnet rather than an actual hunter. Two of the characters are armed with cap and ball handguns except for Marshall Doyle, who is armed with one of the earliest brass cartridge weapons available as of 1855 (a French-made Lefaucheux M1854). In the first session, Doyle and Cortez are tracking something heading west, which they think is a werewolf. They discover that both a small nest of vampires and at least one werewolf are in Fort Yuma. During the session, Sam is bitten once by a vampire and later by a werewolf, injured but not badly so.

My new campaign is an adaptation of the MHI setting, moving the timeframe back into the year 1855, so it shares a bit in the feel of the Deadlands RPG without taking all of its lore and backstory. In this setting, PUFF bounties for monsters exist, only their origin goes back to nearer the founding of the country. In the frontier regions, the US Army administers the payment of bounties, but only officers of Colonel level and above are aware of this. The campaign opens in 1855, Fort Yuma, at the trailing end of the Gold Rush.

I would recommend the Kazei 5 setting book. There is an entire section of the sourcebook devoted to full-body and partial conversions as well as another for cybernetic parts.

Wicked sorcerers tend to fall into one of two appearance types: devilishly handsome or sinfully ugly. Evil sorceresses tend to be more attractive on average than hideous, but haglike ones also abound.

I really like using Resource Points for this to help manage a heroic character’s load out instead of using character points on the sheet. While you’re still keeping tracks of points somewhat, it’s not as intense as it is for a Champions character. So I use Equipment Points, Contact/Follower Points and Base/Vehicle points.

The Blood Red King from the Gestalt setting had a strong scariness factor for me.

Combining a PRE attack with a long activation time is an interesting idea.

Back when figured characteristics were still part of the rules, I thought that lost BODY capped maximum STUN by however many points of BODY were lost since STUN was derived partly from BODY. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned that wasn’t a rule.

I’ve done multiple versions of the kitchen sink CU type of campaigns, like the Avengers, but for my next one I’d like to simplify things and be more focused. I’m drawn to the friendly neighborhood superhero genre or maybe something more like the X-Men or Fantastic Four focus.

Having both gives interesting possibilities. One is more like a John Constantine enemy, and the other a Doctor Strange sort.

I nominate him as someone that could get an update. A living nightmare has many possibilities.

Wasn’t there another one that originated in the Dream Zone or something like that? A nightmare that learned how to enter the real world? I’m totally blanking on the name and book he came from.

I can’t recall for certain, but aren’t there some supervillains or monsters that could be stand-ins for the likes of the Candyman or Freddy Krueger? Urban legend sorts of baddies?

Like the Marvel and DC universes, the Champions Universe is a pretty busy place. I’ve been doing some thinking, wondering how far to strip it down for a future campaign, to get down to the core elements. For example, instead of thousands of superhumans across the globe with a multitude of origins, the pool shrinks to a few hundred or maybe less. Instead of a multitude of superteams, there are very few. Instead of a multitude of alien races and invasion armadas every few years, there are only a handful of races and no mass invasions. The same thing for mystic stuff. The occasional demon shows up, but not the legions of hell. Bring the agent groups down in number to just maybe UNTIL and VIPER. I’m pondering a more manageable variant of the CU, but don’t want to cut into the bone. How much of the CU is bloat and fat that could be pulled out, but still leave the core feel of it intact?

A zero-point skill if ever there was one.

I would buy it, and I would find a way to use them.

I suppose relative STR might come into play. If there is 5-10 or more STR on one side, maybe the other party becomes increasingly irrelevant?

An oddball question, I know. Two character have to compete in a three-legged race together as partners. How would this be done under the rules? They would not be able to use their full running speed, so maybe half speed? Would DEX checks be needed to avoid falling?

I wonder. If you substituted orcs for the xenovores, with the orcs suffering the same horrendous losses in population that the xenovores did, would that “natural selection” leave a less inherently hostile species? I’m not so sure. They also gleefully ate other sentient species. Per my understanding of Tolkien’s writings, orcs continued in Middle Earth into the Fourth Age and were eventually hunted down to the last one.