Mike W

Re: Taking Characters from books and making them your own... I borrow characters all the time. The main thing is to make sure the character makes sense, balances with the campaign, and hopefully, can provide some good story elements. If this means modifying things a bit so be it. Personally, I found that most 4th edition characters needed to be tweaked to be effective. There wre simply too many that didn't balance against each other very well.

Re: Crowd control overpowering game bryanb I'm having the exact same problem in my campaign. a 1 hex AOE flashbang. Possible solutions - 1. start using "dive for cover" maneuvers until someone can engage the guy in hand to hand. 2.Invisibility helps. Can't flashbang if you don't know where the target is. 3.Missile deflect/reflect, depending on how the deflection and the flashbang are built - of course, missile deflect based off of TK/wing powers could be REALLY effective here. 4.Flash defense(but don't overdo it), gang up on the guy early. If he likes to blind peoople try to take him out - maybe try to blind him back if he doesn't have the defense for his own power. 5.As someone else already pointed out, force wall can help stop things before they make the intended target. 6. Images/illusions to make the character think the target is actually somewhere else 7. Things like Combat Sense and defense maneuver can make sight almost irrelevant. So can some targeting senses. 8. Try to make things a big melee, if you can engage some of his teammates who aren't protected from the flashbang in hand to hand, he'll probably be more reluctant to use it. Part of the problem I'm having with my player is that since he's a low grade power armor/gadgeteer type, several of the above don't work very well against him. Also, this is a street level campaign so some of the above powers don't occur very often(force wall, TK, etc). But I've still got some ideas for him.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Sorry, since we drifted off topic a second, I had to go back and count how many were meant to be respones to the last topic. NT: Powers you don't want your players to ask for(no power gaming stuff).

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Rolemaster: The GM's Edition! Now with all new tables to determine which room of your house you should play in!

Re: The Con Game I have LOTS of problems with this write up. Of course, I think the X-Men and Spidey are toast if you run this right since Mags has taken on a full X-Men team by himself before. Wolvie should not have the SPD aid. Needs equivalent energy reduction. Needs LS: reduced aging and immune to most poisons. Don't build his claws illegally. Just give him 2 1/2 D6 HKA and then buy a naked power advantage(AP x 2 on STR) so that his STR adds 1 for 1 to the damage. That would give him 4D6 or so which is a bit closer to reality. Wolive kills trained fighters on one hit all the time(e.g. - Hand Ninjas) - so he needs to be doing at least 14 BODY per shot. Add WF: Common Melee, Common Martial Arts, WE: blades WF: Small Arms Add Lang. : Russian, German, French And the rivalry isn't built right. Wolvie wouldn't kill Cyclops to get Jean, and not just because he knows it wouldn't work.

Re: Need help with my character I don't have a problem with Weirdness Magnet as a 10 point disad. We've used in our game for years and it works out good. And you can have a lot of fun with it. For example, that Girlfriend of the week could turn out to be the sister of the villain of the week. Or the villain's girlfriend trying to get back at him. Can you see the headline: "Hero Caught in Love Triangle with Pair of Villains" Weirdness Magnet gives you a license to pull this kind of stuff on a character all the time. Even "detached from humanity" and "girl crazy" can work together. The character is so obsessed with looking good and having fun that he is almost nihilistic and does not really regard other people as, well, people. So he is detached from humanity in that he can't form serious connections with other people; he may even struggle to care about them. It's not that he doesn't interact with other people; he just can't connect with them.

Re: Crowd control overpowering game Doppler - swinging can be abusive too if you work at it hard enough. Fusion grapple - clinging at range w/ 20+" of linked swinging, now target a bad guy the reel yourself in - instant move through - without the penalties since you've already "targeted" the bad guy. works great if the guy is flying or if you have a little flight or gliding, just enough to stay airborne. I'd say swimming is the hardest power to abuse because adventures in/around water come up less often.

Re: Crowd control overpowering game They can be a bit difficult. One of my players has a 1 hex flash vs. sight that is causing me problems. But there are ways around it. One thing you might consider is that if someone is using a power a lot and it is causing problems for villains...villains will naturally target them first. So on the opening 12 - dogpile on the guy with the ECV entangle. Also, start looking for alternative ways around the power. Invisibility for one. Look at the special effect of the power, can it be deflected?

Re: Feelin' philosophical... I think that the reason a lot of younger people aren't playing right now comes down to a few things. First, HERO hasn't been consistently out the last few years. It's hard for people to buy a product that isn't on the shelf. Second, CHAMPIONS has been the flagship HERO product - and there aren't as many people into comics anymore, which probably translates into a decreased interest in super hero rpgs. Third, HERO is, if not an "advanced" game, it is not an entry game either. I suspect that if you took a poll of all the people on this board, most of us started off in D&D or some other similar game and found HERO at a later date(college for me). You probably just have to give 'em time to find the game.

Re: Looking for Spidery names ... sort of. It occurred to me earlier today that WCW, for a short while, told Brad Armstrong to dress up in this ridiculous yellow and black costume(including a mask) and called him Arachnaman. Man was that lame. Bad name. Bad gimmick. Please do NOT repeat.

Re: Looking for Spidery names ... sort of. Arachnaphobia(like RobertEdwards suggested) is good. Tarantula has been done a lot, but that's because it works. Beyond that, it's kind of a crap shoot. You can name one after a spider species, but most just don't sound right(IMO). Maybe base the names off of powers instead(e.g. Madame Web, which hs also been done admittedly, but there aren't many good spider names out there).

Re: [4color] Why do you dislike the Iron Age style? (No flames, ok?) Actually, you could just as easily say that "all the people who think other people suck" are liberal, or communist, or socialist - since they feel a need to protect everyone from everyone else and blame other people whenever things don't work out just the way they want. There are plenty of people who have a pessimistic view of humanity in just about every political ideology, not just the conservatives.

Re: Human Shield I'm with Hugh, treat the human shield as cover and apply the usual rules for it.

Re: Need Help: Attacking through Images I think you've pretty well got it already.

Re: [4color] Why do you dislike the Iron Age style? (No flames, ok?) My biggest gripe with the current age is that there isn't enough dialogue/writing going on. Read a few comics from the 70s or 80s(especially Marvel, but DC is guilty of the same thing to almost as large of a degree) then read some new stuff. The new stuff reads MUCH faster and has much fewer words, much less dialogue per page. I think this is one of the reasons for all the 5-6 issue story arcs we see now, less talking, fewer transitionary words/panels means it takes longer to accomplish the same bit of plot development. I have other issues but those tend to be about specific writers/companies/characters.

Re: Linking a characteristic decrease to a power Side effect limit.

Re: Caps on Characteristics for Standard Supers Last comment, then I'll agree to disagree., especially since we've kinda hijacked this thread into a separate, albeit related argument. First, I didn't miss what you said, I think we just disagreed on interpretation(and there were a couple things you clarified later on that didn't look that way the first time you stated them). As for IM moving the mansion, he DID have help, and no 10 tons wouldn't be enough...but you wouldn't need anywhere near the 50 ton strength he had later on...class 25 at most at that point, but even that would be generally dubious. I tend to base things on overall figures, not isolated incidents. You can always explain isolated incidents as "writer's prerogative" or "pushing". And Doc, with or without the mantle is FAR more powerful in every way from his early apperances in Strange Tales vol. 1 and he was even back in the late 80s/early 90s before the writers took away his Vishanti powers and started giving him a new set of powers every year or so.

Re: Caps on Characteristics for Standard Supers MitchellS I've got about 80% of Iron Man vol. 1 including several of the first 10. When I say that his powers changed dramatically over that time and that he went through several armors, I know of what I speak. In his early appearances, he had about 10 ton strength, regardless of what they showed in the Avengers(and moving the mansion would require something fairly comparable to that, just to have enough strength to balance it properly. As for the rest, powers came and went - energy pods became an on board end reserve, a battle computer was added, boot jets were added, then enhanced to an extensive degree, a mental/psi shield was added, roller skates(!) were added then eliminated, an EMP pulse was added. All kinds of things were going on. Most of Jean Grey's power growth actually came after Claremont got ahold of her, long after the "teen" years. And it wasn't overnight. Dr. Strange is another character who is staggeringly more powerful than he was before. As far as uber villains go, I don't see any campaign lasting long enough to reach a point where any one of the characters is a match for Kang the Conqueror, Graviton, or most of the other "take on the whole Avengers/JLA" types. But it would be nice if the campaign lasted long enough that the GROUP could.

Re: Caps on Characteristics for Standard Supers Fbdaury - no reductio ad absurdum please. I can make ANY argument seem foolish if I take a worst case scenario approach. The scenario you just put forth is completely different from anything I have argued. The problem, as I stated it, is that healer types are very useful, but he doesn't make a very good PC if he needs a bodyguard. The guy doesn't have to be a buttkicker(ala Rampage Man), but if you've got a four or five man team, everyone has to be able to protect himself enough that the other players don't have to look over their shoulders all the time. If you think about genre, how many strictly healer characters are there in comics anyway. Very few that I can think of - and none of them normally sees much combat time. They are useful people to have around, but if you can't hold your own on the field, the rest of the team tends to get their butts kicked because they are too busy protecting you. I've seen it happen. Healer characters are fine as long as they can protect themselves.

Re: Caps on Characteristics for Standard Supers Nope, had one of those in a campaign before. REAL handy. But if he's gonna be on the field, he still has to take care of himself. A lot of fights, it's tough to spare a bodyguard and if the healer goes down, he's no use to anyone. If he can't fight, leave him at the base and we'll either take the casualties to him or call him in after fight. In either case, he makes a good support NPC but not much of a PC.

Re: Is a politician a good secret ID? No. A politician is not a good secret ID, especially if we are talking about someone who is running on a national level. Too much chance that your opponents hire some really good private eyes to dig up everything they can on you. The FBI would open a file on you if you got too prominant, just to make sure. Heck, a disreputable opponent might even use the FBI to investigate you. Especially if you were preaching any kind of "revoltuionary" message or seemed to be anti-government. Politicians should expect that any mistake they have ever made, any secret that they have will be dug up by their opponents by the time they become governor or take any national office. Which means you could expect the opposing party to crack your secret ID by that point. What they did with the info would depend on a lot of factors, but a secret known by that many people is no longer secret - and who knows what happens then, even accidentally.

Re: Caps on Characteristics for Standard Supers First, I would like to point out that I stated that characters CANNOT buy stats that don't fit their concepts, no matter how many points they have. BUT, I do not put any particular limit on how much it can be bought up - as long as it fits into the character conecpts. A brick in my campaign will almost never see a 25 DEX because it doesn't fit a brick to have those kinds of reflexes(the occasional Superman type might be a rare exception). But if he wants to buy his CON from 28 to 40 fine. It still fits the character(though I generally cap CON at 40). Second, many of those characters have actually gotten FAR more powerful, not just learned power stunts. At one point,it was a major effort for Jean Grey to use her TK to lower her teammates a couple hundred feet from a low flying plane. Now she could lower the whole plane. Iron Man kept refining the armor and many of those called for MAJOR changes. Two armor changes was enough to really power him up. The 1970 Red and Gold Iron Man had about a 30-35 STR, - he could lift a couple tons, but that was it by the time the Silver armor came in the mid 80s it was a 50 STR(about 10 tons), and by the mid 1990s he was pushing a 65 STR if not more by most campaign standards, since he was clearly a front line brick by that time and tossing around 50+ tons(and yes, I realize that there were more than two versions of the armor in the interim, but I'm not going to detail all eight or so armors he used during this time, suffice it to say that any two upgrades produced a noticeable difference in power levels, even in powers like STR, flight, DEF and repulsors that were in each suit). I'm not arguing that there are certain levels that characters shouldn't be allowed to go past. But I'm not willing to arbitrarily tell the power armor guy that he can only buy his STR to 50 because he only had the points to start at 30. If he wants 60 STR he can have it. Bricks would get a lot of leeway on this too. The rest, 20 active points is probably enough to cover what people would want to buy in terms of base characteristics. For figured, I would again see a lot of possibilities as say, the body manipulator learns how to hold onto powers and keep a lot more PD, ED or REC than he could to start. And certain characters have to skimp on a REC or STUN or things like that at the start because they have expensive concepts so again, while I would have limits on how high the character concept could go, I would base them on overall balance issues and not on where the character's stat started.

Re: Quirks and disadvantages Agreed. 1 point "disads" defines as quirks would not be a big deal to me, though I've never had cause to use them. And there are certain parallels in the comics. After all, Dr. Doom once let the FF escape rather than damage his priceless art collection.

Re: Quirks and disadvantages For me, it depends on the character. I have built characters who were supposed to have 150 disads but played 180(or more) on a couple of occasions because I had the character so fleshed out. Other times, I can think of lots of disads, but they don't add up to the requisite number of points and I have to scramble a bit to find a couple more so that I have enough points. It should be no surprise therefore that one thing I don't enforce very strictly as a GM is the "X points per category rule". I try not to let people have more 3 or 4 from a category, but I'm not going to tell them that they can't have 4 twenty point psych lims because the book says they can only have 50 or 75 points from one category.

Re: Things that work in comics but don't work in Champions I have seen it Champs before...sometimes I even let characters into the group with that idea in mind, though not if I think the differences are irreconcilable.