Vanderbilt_Grad

Paladium Books has 'Ectoplasm' as one of their standard low level psychic powers. You should be able to flip through just about any core game book to find it ... and can gain some nifty ideas for Wraith in the process.

This looks very well done. About the only thing I might change would be to raise her Int to 18 or even 23. As it is her science & tech skill rolls are a bit low IMO. It would also be nice to have the higher perception roll as a ‘cat.’

MP – looks a lot better now. In any event you probably ought to go over this construct carefully with your GM anyway. Disads: Take several Psychological Limitations (50 points worth) that reflect your view of the PC. For instance does she avoid killing (Code vs Killing) or not? Is she honorable or not? Does she have any hang-ups about how her tattoos make her look? Is she a willing participant in the battle of good vs. evil or is she a pawn & dupe of the ‘kindly old man.’ Etc. The gangs probably ought to be less powerful hunted … unless you are talking cool martial arts tongs. 15 Hunted: Hising Chiao the evil Chiang Ku Dragon and his Tattooed followers, more powerful, 8- 10 Hunted: Kindly old man … really a good Chiang Ku Dragon, more powerful, watching, 11- (If you don’t make him a watcher he might make a good contact)

OK. First off I’m not too sure about the -1/4 for must be in loose clothing … IMO the gestures covers that aspect already since what you are really after is that she has to touch the tattoo. Second characteristics in MP slots already don’t affect figured characteristics so you shouldn’t have the -1/2 limitation on them. Third why does she know Karate but speak Mandarin Chinese? It seems more likely that he would study Kung Fu or speak Japanese IMO. This is more of a judgment call than anything else but it just seems odd to me. Fourth I’m positive that were I GMing the game I would not allow this bad girl to have the Normal Characteristic Maxima disadvantage. It doesn’t really fit the T-Man concept from Rifts and your tattoos let you get around it so it really isn’t a disadvantage to the PC. Fifth the DNPC roommate & Secret ID are going to *really really* hard to maintain with all the distinctive tattoos. Role playing wise even with the standard Superman glasses convention I just don’t see how these would really work for long with this character. “Gee that gal on TV has the exact same tattoos that you do … hmm you even look like her too….†The summons look OK to me … but what kind of creatures does she create? I wonder if the Tattoos would work better if each were bought with one recoverable charge having a duration between 1 turn and 5 minutes depending on the Tattoo. While paying End for powers is the standard HERO model it just doesn’t seem to fit the original Palladium T-Man very well.

Probably via a physical disadvantage or a variation on accidental change.

I think that the idea of only recovering END for the reserve at the base is fine ... but I'm firmly of the opinion that you ought to be paying for REC on the character rather than having the base doing it via an ability. Assuming a Speed 5 PC & Base End Reserve: 36 End (360) 4 REC (12) Only at base (-1/2), 1 Charge of 1 Minute (-1), Incantations throughout (-1/2) Total 40 points This would give you a big end reserve that could be fully recharged at the base once per day. If you buy the Rec via Healing or something else with the base IMO you are violating the maximum that if there are two ways to do things then generally the most expensive way is the correct way.

I agree that the Ablative Armor (-1) and Healing works. However IMO what you are *really* looking for is a limitation on the Armor that is ‘like ablative but can be fixed more quickly.’ Leaving aside the blood stuff for a moment if you had said something like Ablative that is fixed automatically after every combat then the GM might have assigned that as a -1/4 limitation. That’s where I start with for your power setup. In essence what you are looking for is a slightly limited form of Armor. Something that should probably be *cheaper* than unmodified Armor. Next lets look at healing … in general Healing is very expensive. In fact if you don’t have a MP or VPP then you will probably end up spending more for the Healing than for the Armor. I have a problem conceptual with spending *more* for Armor + Healing than would have spent just paying for Armor. Secondly Healing is pretty darn limited. You can only heal your Armor *once* per whatever arbitrary limit you have between healings (well you could keep rolling until you get a higher roll but I don’t really count that) … unless you tack Cumulative on the Healing which will make it even *more* expensive. If a player came to me with this sort of Armor + Healing setup without healing as a slot in a MP then I would probably simply turn the PC down & tell them to figure out a way to do it cheaper.

That Iron Staff would be limited to being pumped up to 2d6 with both STR, DCs, and Martial Maneuvers. So you would have a 2d6 AP HKA which I don’t personally think is too unbalancing even with Find Weakness. Keep in mind that Find Weakness takes an action to perform so unless Chun has a speed of 7+ I wouldn’t have too much of an issue with that setup. Now if you make the staff a magic 2d6 AP HKA *before* adding STR, DCs, and Martial Maneuvers which will result in the 4d6 AP HKA you were aiming at then I would look a lot more closely. That’s an 18 DC attack which can possibly be augmented by Find Weakness … in a FRED 350 superhero game with 12-14 DC maxes I probably wouldn’t allow it for a PC. And you still haven’t explained how an Iron Staff is a HKA….

Active Points Limits *and* a DC limit IMO. Variable Advantage is a tough call. If I were using both a DC & an AP limit I would count the HKA as a 60 AP power and I would count the final attack as a 18 DC attack. So if the game has a 12 DC limit this would clearly be over that. In generally balancing powers is tough & requires a lot of GM discresion. Campaign limits are not a bad thing but IMO good concepts that break the limits should be allowed from time to time ... provided that they are not too unbalancing in the GM's opinion.

What about just putting a limited version of the Variable Limitation on your armor. Normally it would be Ablative but you could switch it over to Side Effect (6d6 damage). That would 'heal' the Armor and simulate 'blood loss.' Then you could switch back to Ablative with 'fully healed' armor. Maek sure to buy up CON & BODY some if you go this route. Rengeration would probably be helpful too.

I like Moon Knight but this one isn't even close.

Looks interesting! My only quibble would be with the use of OIHID with Desolid. In effect the Desolid *is* the hero ID & thus this limitation is granting something for nothing IMO. Instead I would do something like Full Phase activation for the Desolid & change all the linked limitation on the MP to OIHID & define the 'Hero ID' as being desolid.

Numbers 6 & 8 are not necessarily true especially if the powers in the slot are not instant.

Animals can easily be done via summons. It would help to have the bestiary. Weapons are easy. Just get HKAs, Hand Attacks, and maybe an RKA if you do the bows or are going T-Archer. Individual power effects are easy too. EB or RKA for lightning bolt. Area hex EB or RKA for fireball. Etc. The real trick will be how you build the PC. Do you want to translate the PPE concept? If so you might want to build an END Reserve to represent the PPE. If not you can just have the tattoos drain END normally. The tattoos could be bought individually converting them 1 on 1 as best you can. Example: Flaming Sword Tattoo: HKA (2d6) Only costs END to activate +1/4 (37 points) Heart with Broken Chain: Str (+20) Only costs END to activate +1/4 (25 points) Bought individually this could get pretty expensive. The cheapest route would probably be to buy a MP pool and put the tattoos as individual slots … but then you would be limited to activating only a few at a time. An alterative would be to buy each tattoo in a EC … then you could have them all active at once but it would be more expensive. As I recall the Tattoos do take an action to activate so maybe if you bought full phase activation for the whole construct it might get cheaper. In general IMO it’s not worth it to convert every tattoo. You don’t need a sword, a spear, & an axe as separate tattoos. Just get an HKA and define it as a weapon tattoo and then describe the appearance when you activate it. Similarly you might want to see if it makes more sense to buy a lot of individual summoning powers or just buy one flexible summons instead.

Bah. I spent nearly 30 minutes searching and still missed it. And that's on top of all the time I spend looking through the FAQ earlier.

Well I read through the FAQ & searched the Rules Questions board with no luck, so I posted a question for Steve there. Interesting discussion. I had just started wondering how the math would look on this construct when I looked here again.

Let's say that Multipower Man has a MP where it is hard for him to change slots but easy for him to use the powers once he does. For instance if I want him to have to make a skill roll or take extra time to change slots ... but the powers themselves will not have these limitations. How do I buy this? Do I apply the limitation to the slots, the reserve, or both? Follow-up. Is there an appropriate limitaion to make changing MP slots take a half phase action instead of being a 0 phase action?

Couldn't you add area to the damage shield? Ego Attack (6d6) 0 End, Continuous, Damage Shield, Area Radius, Several Radus Doublings, Only to amount of stun done to him. The ego attack would affect everyone in the radius but those who did no damage would take none in return with the limitation. Those who hurt him would hurt back.

I was trying to avoid taking this too seriously but as long as we are talking physics … tossing objects into the sun is more difficult than it appears on the surface. True the sun has a lot of gravity … but there is another important factor, the Earth’s orbit. The Earth travels around the sun at a more or less fixed speed and radius. As the object thrown heads towards the sun the object retains the orbital momentum, but as the nearer it gets the shorter the effective ‘radius’ of the object’s orbit. In effect the object speeds up as it nears the sun & this helps prevent it from falling in further. To get the object to ‘fall’ into the sun you would have to throw it away from the Earth in the direction opposite of the Earth’s orbit with a speed equal to the Earth’s speed around the sun. Then the sun’s gravity would take over and the object would just start to fall in. And let me tell you throwing something with enough force to overcome the Earths orbit is magnitudes of order more difficult than just getting it out of the Earth’s local gravity well.

Perfect. Thanks.

I'm honestly not sure that this is true. One of the reasons that martial arts are so badly misunderstood is all the Hollywood 'flash' that makes it onto TV and into the movies. XMA did have some redeeming values ... but I'm still not convinced that it was really a good thing overall.

This one probably ought to Cost End + Increased End cost (pictures someone keeling over in exahustion after a prolonged use of the power), have an activation roll (can't do it every time), and have some sort of nasty side effect if the activation roll fails....

I was talking about a multipower pool, not a VPP. My thought was that I wanted to modle the effect on the shapechange power. Really that is similar to what I see the character as doing. For instace I see him growing claws ... and I see it taking more than just a 0 phase action to do it. Shapechange takes a 1/2 phase action to do & that seems like the perfect model for this pool. If he were actually fully changing shape I would just buy that power & link the pool to it, but he isn't so I have to find some other way to limit the pool. Delayed phase isn't bad but from what I could tell changing powers would still be a 0 phase action. The character could move on dex, change powers on half dex, and then attack. Extra segment doesn't really do what I'm looking for either, though both are worthy thoughts and I thank you for posting them.

I’m creating a character who has a 75 point MPP with special effects that I’m envisioning as being a little like a very limited shapeshift, for instance growing claws or toughening skin (and no he doesn’t possess the Shapechange power). One of the limitations I would like is for his MPP to be a little harder to change than normal. I’m looking at making it take him a half phase action to change slots. My thought is that this should be worth about -1/4 if it is a non-attack action and -1/2 if it is a half phase attack action. Thoughts?

Well the sun *does* have a lot of growth..... Oh, and he didn't take a running start.