ghost-angel

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... On the other hand, Intagible Characters are often built with Desolid. In which case you just don't buy Effects Real World on your STR and that problem is solved.

Re: 6e Characteristics I don't know how to explain the contradiction in your own arguement. But I'm going to try. You encounter a Wall. You have X-Ray Vision and see your target. You have a choice: Your Brain Lance (Ego Attack) or your Colt Python (Gun). You may TARGET with BOTH ATTACKS Scenario A: The wall has no Mental Defenses. It has Physical Defenses. It is made of brick. You use your Brain Lance, you suffer no Ranged Penalties, you encounter no Defenses. Scenario B: The wall has no Physical Defenses. It has Mental Defenses. It is made of magic. You use your Colt Python, you suffer Ranged Penalties, you encounter no Defenses. You have Not placed Indirect on your Colt Python. It can pass through both walls, one it has encountered resistence (Defenses). One it has not (No Defenses). Your Ego Attack is acting in the EXACT SAME MANNER. There is no Idirect Property, you are using an Enhanced Perception (N-Ray) to establish Line Of Sight with a Targeting Sense and Attacking a Target through a Barrier. One of which has no defenses letting your attack through unhindered, one has defenses thus lowering your Attacks effectiveness. If you had Indirect on EITHER Power you could ignore (Bypass) the Defenses. If that's not clear, it never will be. I have officially reached my Give A Sh-- limit on the topic, and in fact surpased it by a good 5 posts. Have a good game.

Re: 6e Characteristics Either way - if you have to overcome a barriers defenses you have not bypassed it. That's common sense. And yeah I'm reading p116 now. It specifically says that barriers don't stop Mental Powers - AS LONG AS YOU CAN ESTABLISH LINE OF SIGHT. It says you can Target through walls, not ignore the walls defenses. That's why I say it how no Indirect Properties. You can target a gun through a wall with N-Ray Perception too. You just have to overcome the walls Physical Defense. EDIT: and I stand corrected, p117 does say you can target around a corner without LOS. It suffers the same penalties as pretty much any attack made blind.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... You can model intagible characters in Hero, but they aren't particularly cheap. If you sell STR to 0 and define movement (most likely Flight) as non-muscle powered (telekinetic flight if you want to call it that, or any number of things) then the movement issue is null. If you base none of your effects off of STR, then yes Not Having STR and STR 0 are effectively the same In Play.

Re: 6e Characteristics If the purpose of bypassing a barrier is to bypass the defense of the barrier - but mental powers can bypass barriers unless that barrier has mental defense. Wait... the conversation stopped making sense. There's no point in bypassing a barrier if you still have to overcome the barriers defense. None At All. Line Of Sight does not need Indirect to operate. I contend no Mental Power has Indirect on it - it may look like Indirect but as long as you must over come the defenses, you might as well not have bypassed the barrier in the first place. AND YES - you DO have to draw Line Of Sight to target with a Mental Attack - IT SAYS SO IN THE BOOK. It even uses "a tiny speck on the horizon does not count as LOS" for Mental Attacks. They do not have magical properties that let you use them without seeign a target. I don't know how it could possibly be made any clearer in the book that you must be able to Target with a Targeting Sense to Attack with a Mental Power. The GM may allow you to Hail Mary an Ego Attack around a corner, but that is not RAW. That's a House Rule. This conversation has now become tedious. I'm going away. Go do whatever you believe will work in your games.

Re: 6e Characteristics

Re: 6e Characteristics I answered this above - but in the middle of everything. What's mispriced is that the more Advantages you add to a Power the further drop you see in Utility to Cost ratio. Everyone on the boards has a sort of unspoken agreement to use 60 Active Points as a Benchmark to compare the many various builds we come up with. Once you reach over 20 Points / D6 Of Effect you Utility has dropped so far as to be nearly effectively useless. Only inherently Cumulative Powers are truly useful at low dice (Transform. Drain.) After that threshold almost everything gives you less in utility than you theoretically paid for. I have a serious problem with that - and I don't have a perfect answer either. --- Furthermore, this just occurred to me - the only reason anyone questions Ego Attack is because it can have a Theoretical Build off of another Power. I have yet to see anyone state that Telepathy, Mind Scan, Mind Control, or Mental Illusions also needs to be priced at 20-25 Points/D6. How useless is a 2D6 Mind Control in a 60 Active Point Game with anyone who has an EGO over 1. Completely. Why is 1D6 Ego Attack 'priced right'? Just because you can build it with something else? Hogwash.

Re: 6e Characteristics Oh, and for the record - I don't believe any of the Mental Powers should provide Mental Awareness for free either. Especially Ego Attack. So there's that as well.

Re: 6e Characteristics I contest the idea that Ego Attack has any Indirect properties at all. What does Indirect do? 1) Bypass defenses - not barriers - defenses. 2) Alter the Origin Point of the Power, without altering perception of who originated it. Ego Attack goes right through windows and walls because none of them have any Mental Defense. Otherwise Mental Defense Force Wall would be utterly pointless. And since you can purchase a MD Force Wall that means Ego Attack must pass through it, not bypass it. So, you are not bypassing defenses, you simply aren't encountering any. You have not moved the origin point - it clearly comes from the Attacker. For those able to perceive it. Ego Attack Based Off Of Energy Blast: AVLD - versus Mental Defense (barriers do not normally have Mental Defense, and are "transparent" to Mental Attacks by default) +1 1/2 ECV to ECV - I've never been convinced this is more than a +0 Limitation, but hey, I'll be nice and call it +1/4 Line Of Sight - No Range Penalties, Perceive With Targeting Sense = Attack +1/2 Invisible Power Effects - 2 Sense Groups +1/2 Total: +2 3/4. Best Case Scenario - I'll concede that it costs 18.75 Points/1D6. I won't go into the Endurance Issue because if you want to "cost it correctly" you want to pay the actual Endurance of the Active Points involved. Here's where the pricing goes wrong In My Opinion (should I bold that?)- Individual Advantages are priced correctly on an individual basis. Take one, or even two, and they tend to remain fairly priced for the utility you're going to get in Actual Play. Once you reach above the +2 Range things tend to go badly. The number of Dice you can use for Effect becomes so reduced in the "average suggested superhero game" as to be virtually useless. You're better off putting points into straight attacks. At even 3D6 (20pt/D6) with 0 Defenses you're getting an average of 12 Stun through. A 12D6 Energy Blast will punch through "average defenses of 20" and do 22 Stun on average. It seems the combination and lumping of Advantages has worked against you, they are now costing you more than they are providing in both capability and utility - as a whole. OK, so where's the breakdown? First - several of those Advantages do not deal directly with Damage. Remove IPE (useful, but has nothing to do with hurting, you can gain some tactical advantages but only if the GM allows them - and as many have you pointed out, you don't). In the bucket. Second - Line Of Sight. Looks like it might affect Damage, after all you're more likely to hit. But to get more Stun through it's likely more effective to buy Penalty Skill Levels, especially since most of the time you're with 'combat ranges' of under 32 Inches anyways. In the bucket. ECV to ECV - direct combat influence. Leave it in. AVLD - direct combat influence, especially since we're trading to a rare defense. Leave it in. That leave us with a total +1 3/4 Advantages. Cost of 13.75 Points per 1D6. Absolute worst case scenario? Ego Attack should be 15 Points/D6. not 20, and most absolutely not 25. But then, I also believe AVLD is way way over priced. Should be +1 - why would I take a +1 1/2 Advantage on the chances I get 'some' damage through, chances are I lowered my Dice to low I can't bypass anything that would have the defense to begin with or again would be better off with a straight attack. I'd rather take NND and deal with the all or nothing. So, +1 for AVLD. That brings the cost down to 11.25. Call it 10/1D6. There, that's my reasoning. Take it, leave it, burn it, burn me. I don't care.

Re: 6e Characteristics Also incorrect. 5ER p266 - the Power in question need only be Ranged.

Re: 6e Characteristics You should reread Line Of Sight under Mental Powers (5ER p116). If you can perceive the Target with a Targeting Sense you can use a Line Of Sight Attack. In English: If you can see a Target through a window with your Normal Sight (a Targeting Sense) you can use Ego Attack. You do not need Indirect on a build simulating Ego Attack.

Re: END to END Reserve Attack Sounds about right, yes.

Re: END to END Reserve Attack In this case the Transfer is merely a Special Effect for a Drain END, an END Reserve and a Recovery for said END Reserve. Drain END - reduces targets blood supply END Reserve - where the blood goes Recovery for END Reserve - how the blood gets there. The Recovery would have something like "Only when Drain END is used, Can only REC up to amount of Endurance Drained from target."

Re: END to END Reserve Attack Sean is right- what you're doing is placing a Limitation on the Recovery of your Endurance Reserve "Must suck blood" or something similar.

Re: 6e Characteristics

Re: Qwyjibo is up I bet the just smoke the competition though

Re: 6e Characteristics There is no aspect of Ego Attack alone, by itself, that let's you attack a target through a wall. You must be able to perceive the Target with a Targeting Sense. Ego Attack does not provide this ability. If you have a character and purchase only Ego Attack you have only one Targeting Sense - Normal Sight - that you can use to attack someone with that Power. Not through a wall. Not from a very great distance. Not from the coffee shop in Tahiti. From Visual Range. To say "but you can use Ego Attack to attack a Target from a great distance through solid walls" means that you have purchase one or more other Powers, most likely some form of Enahanched Sense that allows you to see through the wall in the first place. We can walk all over the book finding "abusive power combinations" - it's a failed arguement. No matter if the cost of Ego Attack is 5 Million points per 1D6 or 1 Point per 1D6 - Attacking through a wall from a great distance is not a default capability of Ego Attack by itself. So - I buy Ego Attack, I have no Enhanced Senses - I must keep my Target within range of my Normal Sight. They go around a corner, I must follow. They hide behind cover, I must find a way around it.

Re: Qwyjibo is up but did they have to light in fire too.....

Re: 6e Characteristics Now you're 1) adding Game conditions 2) Applying application of Other Powers on top of Ego Attack. I fail to see how either one proves the cost of the Power to one direction or another. All you've done is manage to state that a Combination of Powers will prove unbalancing, and in your games at that. The arguement is made of paper.

Re: 6e Characteristics Also remember - all those nifty Advantages work exactly once for the target in question. After that they know what you hit them with, where you are and can react appropriately. That's an aweful lot of points to pay for a surprise attack. . .

Re: 6e Characteristics It is not just about comparative cost. Comaprative Cost is merely a place to start. In many cases we will find it is a good place to stop too. But not always.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... I haven't had a chanec to use the Speed Zone, but it's not nearly as cheezy as some people are making it out to be. there is more in it than "I EDM and can act alot" - at the most basic level you get one additional action in your phase. After that it starts to get expensive. Think of it as breifly moving to the space where the Blue Men are.

Re: 6e Characteristics I didn't say they had no meaning, I said there was more to it than Points. This is not a binary situation. Take each Advantage in that list and weigh it on its own, and it will more than likely come out to be a correct value for what it is providing. As more and more Advantages get stacked on, the individual utility starts to come at an inflated price, until the "price" is correct for all of them combined, but the price has managed to far out strip usefulness and utility. Then you have to look at what you're doing, and getting, and how that is actually going to apply the majority of the time and say "is this price fair or inflated or undervalued?" I'm willing to bet 90% of the time, it is fair. But every now and then the price for utility is way overblown. at 25pts per 1D6 in your "average suggested superhero game" you can get a maximum effect of 2D6, and that's not even including any other possible Advantages you might want to add to model something specifc. That's nearly useless in actual Effect, regardless of use and application. At least in my opinion.

Re: 6e Characteristics There's more to game balance than mere points. I don't play Superheroes nearly as much as the rest of you it seems, either.

Re: Finding something Hero System can't model... The Speed Zone is EDM.