ghost-angel

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers "psionic ability to drain someone's personality" is a power with an Attached Special Effect. That's not how you build Mechanical Powers. Prestidigitator is saying what I said from the start - they likely did not start with Energy Blast to build Ego Attack. They created a shelf of what Mental Powers do. They all have certain common characteristics attached to them. And then they listed a series of Mechanical Effects they wanted to fall into that category "cause stun damage" was one of them so a Stun Damage Power was built under Mental Powers.

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers It should cost anything. It's placing the Powers into a different class of Powers - effectively creating a New Power per Changing The Rules. I'm cool with that. How much does it cost to turn an Attack Power into a Sensory Power. Or an Adjustment Power into a Movement Power?

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers But do you have to break down the wall if the wall lacks the property to even interact with the attack? X-Rays in real life are a good example here. They pass through most solid objects rather nicely, but don't have to break any of them down.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... Many view the environment as stat-less. Gravity does not turn off, even if you reduce the planets speed to 0 for example. Looked at another way - Speed is a measure of how often you can act in a 12-Second (1 Turn) Period, it can be voluntarily reduced to as low as 2 as well. The Environment always acts, in fact, it can't not act. But it doesn't just act, it IS. Is reducing the Environments Speed to 0 explicitly forbidden? No, not really. What will vary wildly is how people interpret that. Most will say it's meaningless to do so, since things like Gravity aren't a Character in any sense of the word. So a huge Speed Drain/Suppress won't do you any good in their games. Some people would decide that it has meaning and use that to model a Time Stop like power. Like I said, the System has no context until you place a Game around it, then it games a significant amount of meaning depending on interpretation and desired effects.

Re: Water-based transformation If you have access to Conquerors, Killers, And Crooks then take a look at Riptide who does just that.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... Just because a solution has been put forth does not mean it will meet everyone's criteria as a valid solution. The System tries to make as few assumptions about the Game World as possible, which inevitably means that some solutions require that those assumptions be filled in by the GM and Group - since not everyone sees things the same way it's inevitable that what works for one group won't work for another. Relax.

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers You know what, I can get behind that. Makes total sense that varoius things could block a given effect. I also agree that it is an interaction between the two is key and it is not completely one sided.

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers If there is, it is an as-yet unwritten Advantage. And as we delve into this, I realize, the essential point behind my belief that Ego Attack is not merely an Energy Blast Construction; but a full on Mental Power with similar properties. I don't necessarily disagree with your position regarding Mental being merely an SFX. I think it might make things more complicated than needed however.

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers Are they stopped by walls? I mean, I know everyone plays them that way. I believe that yes, if you redefined a Power to go against Mental Defense then PD shouldn't stop it at all. But we always play it that way... are we misinterpreting a fundamental aspect of interactions? Perhaps the Mental Power aspect that gets added is that it makes an Attack "Non-Physical" and bypass Special Effect Interaction.

Re: The "Mental"-ness of Mental Powers Good idea on the thread move, should have done it myself. Moving beyond Force Wall Power. Let's say you're building a Base. You have the bases outer walls - these are brick and mortar walls. They provide the standard DEF Power (PD + ED). But nothing else. Some one looks into a window can see a Target. They can choose to Attack the target with a number of things. The window itself provides almost no defenses. Pretty much everything goes through. Say you have X-Ray Vision and are looking through the brick portion with it, your trusty gun isn't going through that brick, but your Brain Spike will easily ignore such a petty construct such as mere brick. Now, you're inside the base. The walls are made of plaster and wood beams. Unless you hit a stud, your gun will easily penetrate through, especially since you're wielding the .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world (blow a man's head clean off). But so will your Brain Spike, going through even easier. But lo! Our target is a mage and has erected a magic barrier - Mental Defense Force Field, say, and the sneaky punk made SFX look just like a normal wall inside a larger room! His office - the GM even left him add Opaque to it to complete the effect. Good thing you have your X-Ray vision, and you can easily see him. Your Brain Spike bounces harmless off the wall! Good thing you brought that .44 along (now you just have to remember if you shot five bullets, or six). Bang! passes right through that Force Wall and pegs the Target nicely. I contest, fully and completely, that the ability of a Mental Power to pass through a barrier lies solely in the properties of the Barrier itself. If you were to apply Line Of Sight - and just Line Of Sight - to your Laser Rifle (oh what superior ranged and targeting mechanisms the future will have!) you do not get to bypass any walls, barriers, Force Wall Powers or anything else. So it can't be a property of LOS. Likewise, if you are unable to Target your enemy with your Mental Power due to a lack of Line Of Sight you either 1) shoot blind which you can do with any Ranged Power or 2) Can't shoot at all. So Mental Powers have no properties that allow them to bypass a wall, barrier or Force Wall Power. That leaves the wall, barrier or Force Wall Power as the last element left. If a target creates a Mental Force wall and fails to add the PD (and/or ED) Transparent Advantage then it's going to suck when any Body is done to that wall and collapses (and the left over Body Damage passes right on through to Mr Target), but it'll stop a Mental Power pretty quickly. (which is why I believe you should be able to choose which Defense is a Base Defense for Force Wall and not require PD/ED Transparency for Flash, Mental or Power Defense Only Force Walls - but that's a totally separate topic).

Re: 6e Characteristics So. If the wall doesn't have Mental Defense it bypasses it because Mental Powers are "special." If the wall does have Mental Defense it doesn't bypass it because Mental Defense stop Mental Powers. Does it or does it not ignore the wall? If it ignores the wall (because Mental Powers are "special") then the walls apparent Defenses are irrelevant. If it goes through the wall unhindered then that is because there is nothing to stop it from doing so. Apply appropriate Defenses and there is something to stop it from doing so. No special properties are removed. It has simply encountered resistance. I refuse to reconcile the idea that because appropriate defenses are removed that Indirect is magically added.

Re: Order of the Stick Actually, it wasn't so much a send up to Steve Rogers as a reference to the fact that he's being resurrected in the Marvel Universe this summer.

Re: a question on bleeding Since the Bleeding Rules include Stun Loss in them, I would say that overrides the general -1 Body = -1 Stun Rule.

Re: Limited Power Limitation Conditional Power Costs Broken? They're examples. And it's not how often Condition X Occurs, it's how often Condition X Occurs In Your Game that's important. Recost Limitations as appropriate.

Re: EGO Attack Can't argue with any of that logic at all. Of course, raising the cost of Mind Control likely reduces the effectiveness to nearly useless. I'm not actually saying it was costed that way, but that it might have been. And if it were, our conclusions don't match for that reason.

Re: How to Build: Resistance to broken bones... Likely, both. Since it's a Special Effect that could have several different mechanical interactions it warrants a suite of capabilities attached to it.

Re: 6E, 1st non backwards compatible Hero? Indeed, if your game was balanced As Is in any addition, just moving points around but keeping abilities the same won't affect balance at all. Just points.

Re: a question on bleeding Thank you Hyper-Man, that's the passage I knew was in there but couldn't find. Passed right over it at least twice. sheesh.

Re: EGO Attack That's assuming that Ego Attack was costed compared to Energy Blast and not costed compared to Mind Control, in the first place. A reasonable assumption, given the Effects. But if Ego Attack were originally costed as a Mental Power First and not an Attack Power First, the original designers may have come to different conclusions than us. It would use a different set of Advantages, with different end results.

Re: MegaScale Missle Deflection Aha! you're trying to kick back to the Starship and not just off "somewhere" ...That requires Megascale on Reflection, yes.

Re: a question on bleeding I know END is reduced to 0 when Stun is reduced to 0. But I couldn't find anything regarding Body being reduced to 0 and any other Characteristic reduced with it.

Re: EGO Attack I have issues with the concept in some games, for sure. But that's more due to genre simulation than Power Builds and Mechanics. We just wrapped up a short game where one of the players was a Mentalist Sniper. Actually, we had two mentalists, one affected machines the other people. We fully and compeltely utilized that the powers weren't blatantly visible and game balance wasn't once broken by it.

Re: a question on bleeding Typo's happen. No worries. I recall a rule that your maximum Stun is reduced by 1 for every 1 Body you take. Or maybe it's you take 1 Stun for every 1 Body you take. Either way I can't find it in the book so I'm inclined to believe it's a House Rule being used in a game I'm in somewhere.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... Whatever. Strength Characteristic and Having/Not Having A Body are in no way connected.