Mike W

Re: What's your comfort range? (More Questions than question) My heroes generally start out at around 350. With XP they can go a lot higher over time, but the game world basically assumes that a 350 point super is fairly average in combat, so the high point guys get more options and eventually become above average in more ways, but I try to keep everyone with a certain range of CVs, DCs etc. I don't care for cosmic stuff. I think too often it loses flavor at that level.

We've all done it. We went looking through our other "stuff" - Cds, books, comics, whatever, to try and find inspiration as either a player or GM. So what is the most obscure thing you've ever come up with. As a GM, I'll plead to dredging up the Credit Card Soldiers from a Thor storyline. One storyline, lasted about 1-2 issues, and they were never heard from again. But they made for a good mystery for my players.

Re: The Super Darwin Awards Hmm, funniest bit like that I can remember is a guy I played with in college had a TK guy with a Force Field. Not a big one, but one that was vital to his defense(he had about 10/10 without it). Only problem was, he NEVER remembered it. To the point it became a running gag. After about 4 months he FINALLY remembers to put the thing up...then immediately walks up to a ticked off Grond. Like I said, it wasn't THAT big. Grond made him into a very nice wall hanging and it was months before he recovered all the BODY damage.

Re: Moving Hit Locations I seem to remember reading in the Ultimate Martial Artist a mechanic where you could dedicate OCV levels to adjust the hit location. I don't remember there being a defensive option, but I suppose you could do something similar. At that point, you would have to compare the two and take the net difference. E.G. Attacker assigns 2 levels and Defender assigns 1 so attacker gets to modify the hit location roll by 1.

Re: Songs that inspire(d) you to make a Champions Character "Delta Dawn"(Tanya Tucker version all the way) Originally, I made a Malkavian for use in a Vampire game. But I rewrote her as a Champs character. Haven't gotten around to using her though, but then I haven't played Champs in my original universe in a long time. Basically, she wanders around town looking for "a mysterious dark haired man" who is her lost love(as per the song). Of course, to help her look for that lost love she has scads of ESP and super senses and one heck of a Streetwise roll(also some LS). Equally of course, since she's known to be a bit crazy, not many people believe her when she tells them anything, so she has a little bit of the Cassandra effect going as well.

Re: Who are the top 5 most powerful characters in your Campaign. Hmm. This would probably change if I dug out the character sheets from the last campaign I ran that didn't focus on Marvel/DC characters(and I don't run as high powered as some on these boards. I've never run a campaign where attacks over 15D6 were common, and anymore, I usually limit things to a bit less) but some definite candidates would be: Omni Concept: Power armored hero. Short version of the background: Think Tony Stark as a family man. Powers: Heavily defensive suite of powers. Has 35/35 DEF and every "dink" defense known to man(e.g. full LS, Flash Def, Power Def, even a bit of Mental Def as a psi-screen). You basically have to go through his DEF to hurt him. And he has 70 STUN. Offensive suite includes the usual suspects(EB, Super Strength) but also TK vs. metals, and a neruo whip NND EB among a long list of other powers. All at around 60 points of effect. And he has an Invisibility stealth mode. Hard to run that and everything else for very long, even on 200 END, 5 REC reserve. But he rarely has to. 23 DEX gives him good CV's for a guy with his power level. Fighting Strategy: Basically, he can take a beating like few bricks can, so he tends to fight defensively at first, trying out different weapons to see which one will work best on you then getting more aggressive as the situation warrants it. Why he's one of the best: While he has few stats that are very high level, he's above average to well above average with everything, can take a heck of a beating, as much or more as most bricks(he's got 60 STR, 35 CON and bought the figured CHAR to go with it), and one of the widest assortments of weapons out there. Simply put, there is very little he CAN'T do so he just has to hang around long enough to figure out which weapon will take you down fastest. Proteus Concept: Shapeshifter who acquired powers when* government doctors decided to splice some alien DNA into him to help save his life. Personality: Edgy, action junkie with is passively suicidal. He hates what he's become and struggles to maintain his human-ness. Powers: Big VPP for Shapeshifting(60 points, +2 on CC for Cosmic control), natural armor, claws, enhanced senses. Martial Arts(JKD). Lots of skills and overall levels. Enhanced baseline physical stats(30 STR, 23 DEX, 30 CON, 20 BODY). Some LS. Several levels of Regen. Fighting Style: Very aggressive. He likes to stack more HKA on his claws, armor up, and wade in. Can do amazing amounts of BODY with claw attacks and when facing a single damage type opponent(anyone who only attacks ED or only attacks PD) he can load up his DEF on one side and be virtually unstoppable. Will not back down and will try suicidal attacks(tackling an opponent off a skyscraper, for example) because he doesn't care if he dies. Why He's On the List: Huge attacks. Potential huge DEF. And a reckless attitude. The guy wades in and engages in some of the shortest, bloodiest fights. Has the restraint not to kill but won't hesitate to do so.* One of the few people capable of ripping through Omni's armor. Typhon Concept: Villain named after the figure from Greek mythology. Some think he IS the monster capable of taking on the Greek gods from ancient myth. Powers/fighting Style: Growth. Lots of it(Typhon is 100 feet tall). STR is 90. Has 75% Resistant Damage Reduction vs. Physical and Energy. 60 CON. 40 BODY. 50/50 Resistant DEF. Why He's On the List: Typhon is kind of like Juggernaut from Marvel comics. Only a handful of beings can even hope to hurt him. And he's the second strongest being on the planet.

Re: PRE Attack Find Weakness?

Re: PRE Attack Find Weakness?

Re: Comic Book powers that don't work as well in gaming Powers I Don't Care for as a GM(some of them I don't care for as a reader/writer either):1. Time Travel1a. Time Travel(can you tell I really hate time travel?)2. Precognition3. Instant one shot powers(instant kill, instant paralysis, anything that takes a character out of a fight in one hit such as Grey Gargoyle's Stone Touch power but this also applies to powers like Rogue's Power Theft)4. High Level Mentalists - too many times they just overwhelm opponents if there isn't another mentalist to oppose them

Re: The cost of killing damage The Standard Effect x3 multiplier smooths it somewhat but you still much more variation. Mainly, it caps the high end at something that is equal to what a comparable Normal Damage attack could do. If you have a normal 12D6 attack, then the damage range is 12-72 but most rolls will be mid-30s to high 40s. If you have a 4D6 KA and play the STUN lottery, the range of STUN possible is 4-120 and will vary wildly from one hit to the next. If you apply the X3 Standard Effect, then you get the same 12-72 range of possibilities, which I think makes sense. You will, however, still hit the high and low ends more often. It's much easier to drop a 7 on 4 dice and get only 21 STUN, something you'd hardly ever see with 12D6. On the other hand, it's also easier to end up with 20 BODY and 60 STUN. The KA is still very volatile, but it is now volatile within the same range as a comparable Normal Damage attack.

Re: The cost of killing damage To respond to your critique: 1. The variability of damage is a drawback in some situations though. Yes, there are times when you are glad you have a KA because it means you might get lucky and get really high damage, but there are times you don't WANT that really high damage but get it anyway. I've accidentally hospitalized supers with a 4D6 KA because I rolled really high. Not good if you need to question them, not to mention the fact that it's bad for your rep. Makes people think you play rough. And a string of low damage rolls is more likely with a KA. So while the variability of damage can be an advantage sometimes, it can also be a big liability too. 3. True, but there is still a natural reaction to someone carrying around a big sword or gun, or claws that screams "killing is what I do". 4. People, tend to gang up on characters that have large killing attacks and who are known for using them. You learn quick who has them and who doesn't(and vice versa, the villains learn which heroes have and use them). Those big killing attacks have a much greater chance of one scoring one hit knockouts and hospitalizing people, even though they also have a better chance of bouncing. because most of the time people figure it's only a matter of time before the guy with the KA scores a "one shot KO", they tend to gang up on them quickly. That ability to score a one punch knockout, especially if it might do significant BODY or get enough STUN to hospitalize you tends to scare people. They'd rather fight Grond with 90 STR than an assassin with 5D6KA, even though Grond has more damage classes.

Re: The cost of killing damage There is already an option to remove the STUN lotto and assign all KAs a STUN multiplier of 3. It's in the rules, and we've been doing it in my group for years. It works well. You can still get some high rolls but the one shot kill is tougher to come by. Rolled all 5s on your 4d6. Great job, but it's still 60 STUN. Impressive, but not so much that a brick is suddenly going down from one hit(a martial artist might).

Re: The cost of killing damage Killing damage has several drawbacks: Mechanical drawbacks: 1. Since you are rolling fewer dice, it is more eccentric. That is, you have more very high and very low rolls. Generally, this isn't good. You can accidentally injure someone more than you intend. You can also roll low several times in a row and not do any damage despite consistently hitting. This presents all sorts of problems when it comes to pulling damage and the like as well. 2. Killing damage does less knockback. Opponents are less likely to take KB damage. They are also less likely to end up far away from you when you are trying to clear room for yourself or your allies. Roleplaying drawbacks 3. Killing damage can have much more serious consequences in some campaigns. Killing people in a 4 color campaign results in all sorts of legal troubles. Even having that potential tends to get you extra attention from law enforcement types. 4. People with large amounts of killing damage become big targets for opponents because they are scary. People REALLY don't want to get hit with such lethal force, so opponents tend to gang up on you more and hit you with their biggest shots early to try and drop you quick.

Re: Intuitive Knowledge

Re: Intuitive Knowledge Rather than make it a skill, per se. You could just give him a version of Transform "broken item" to "repaired item" or whatever you wanted to call it. Essentially, he has the inate ability to Transform or change the object in question(fix it, or if you want to make it more broad, use a broader category of transform) but he has no skills so he can't explain how it works or even how he did it. He "just did it".

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Giant Robo on DVD. Good stuff.

Re: New Mechanic: Manipulation (Campaign Rules) Houdini's escapes and escaping a grab by another character are two different things. Having highly flexible fingers isn't going to justify a bonus to escaping a choke hold. It might however, give you a bonus to trying to pick a lock behind your back.

Re: New Mechanic: Manipulation (Campaign Rules) It might be worth having a Manipulation skill - if we can figure out how it differs from Sleight of Hand, which is what currently gets used for manipulating objects in your hands at a very high level. In short, we need to define what it will do and what will remain the province of Sleight of Hand, which despite the name covers more than card tricks and the like. In any event, I think Manipulation, if we can work it out is likely a 2/1 skill though and not a 3/2, espeically if you don't want to base it on DEX. I understand the template analysis, but really, I think it's a bit unnecessary. Generally speaking, we just use the human baseline and then add or subtract as needed. If it doesn't balance out then you have to pay points, or take Disads, or both, to make it balance and that works well enough. Creating more templates, to me, is more work to achieve the same effect. In the end, the templates need to be roughly equal if they're going to be playable and they need to be expressed in a form that makes the interplay between them as compatible as possible. As for the how often questions, I do think there is a difference between how often the rules MIGHT come up(whether we choose to use them or not) and how often we actually use them. Hit Locations is used a lot in some game genres. So is long term END. But we don't want to create a large set of rules just for one specific situtation that may only come up once in our entire playing careers, do we? So in that sense, I think the question is valid. We need to determine how often the rule MIGHT be necessary, not how often we'd actually use it since different GMs will inevitably enforce(or not) optional rules differently.

Re: New Mechanic: Manipulation (Campaign Rules) But this still generates two questions: 1. How often is something like this going to occur? Pretty much every "playable" race in any game I've ever played(HERO or otherwise) basically presumed humanoid shape and arms. 2. Why not just give the Flavians a skill with manipulating DNA and then say that the Arcturians can't do it without equipment? Basically, just build the DNA manipulation thing as special racial ability with the Flavians' unusual arms as a special effect that allows them to do so in the same way that you might give another race Extended Breathing because they can breathe methane and humans can't. For that matter, what can a character with Manipulation do that a character with Sleight of Hand can't do? Sleight of Hand is basically nothing but fine manipulation of objects in your hands at a level that most people can't begin to manage. I'm still trying to see how this is going to come up often enough in the game to justify going to that much trouble. Having a list of modifiers for a DEX roll would be useful but addint a whole new skill for Manipulation?

Re: New Mechanic: Manipulation (Campaign Rules) I think a good part of the reason we always ask "why do we need this rule?" is that it's a natural part of our process. Before we decide to add more rules, we try to see if the current rules can handle the situation. If they can handle it well, then there is no need for additional rules. So part of our trying to understand the new rules you want to hammer out is trying to figure out what they can do that the current rules can't - and that basically boils down to the question of whether we need them or not. The next step is to try and figure out if the new rules are going to cover something that will come up often enough to justify the effort of writing a new set of rules - especially one as detailed and complicated as you tend to favor. After that, the general inclination, for most of us I think, is to fit them as neatly into the current system as possible. Hence why most people in this thread are wanting to take the Manipulation based on DEX option rather than creating yet another stat to keep track of.

Re: New Mechanic: Manipulation (Campaign Rules) I don't see Manipulation as complimentary to a grab or escape. Fine motor skill won't help you with either one. That's pure grip strength. I'm not entirely sure we need to create a whole new Manipulation stat for this though. I mean, we could just take the modifier list and call them DEX modifiers. True, DEX doesn't necessarily equate to the kind of hand-eye coordination that manipulation covers, but it's currently designed to cover it and I don't think Manipulation is likely to come enough to justify pricing it out as a separate ability - unless we can come up with a pretty large list of skills that it can be complimentary to. Even then, it should probably get costed at 2/1 rather than 3/2.

Re: How do you keep track of your villainous organizations First rule: Give each one a separate niche so that they don't step on each other's toes. One is the mystic type. One is your basic, supertech take over the world type, etc. Second rule: Limit it to no more than 3 or 4. Any more risks duplication. Third rule: Every week, sit down and write down one thing that each organization did. It helps generate ideas. If they look like they're getting close to doing something important, then it's time for some heroes to step in - probably the PCs.

Re: What were the best Marvel titles of the 70's? Dr. Strange's heyday was the 70s and his title had some good stories in it. And if you get some of the late Strange Tales issues, you can find some very surprising writers doing one shots(Chirs Claremont, for example). Marvel Two in One and Marvel Team Up had some great stories too.

Re: STRONGHOLD -- What Do You Want To See? Possibly some guidelines for who gets assigned to stronghold and who doesn't. Do you have to have superpowers to get assigned there or will they assign a high end martial artist with no actual super powers? What about someone whose powers are all tech based? If you take the normal human out of the power armor, he's just a normal. Granted he might have some very unusual friends.

Re: New Mechanic: Effective Range Well, real world weapons don't necessarily travel "further than they should". It's just that so few people are capable of making a shot at such extreme ranges that the extra range is meaningless - to say nothing of the fact that there are often objects which keep a bullet or other weapon the full distance that it is capable of going. I mean, good sniper rifles can fire a bullet over a mile, but who can actaully hit anything at that range? Virtually no one. I don't really see this limit of being much use because of that. Plus, most games don't have big enough battle fields for the limit to come into play. In Champs, for example, you hardly ever have to hit anyone more than 15 or 20 inches away(and even those are unusually long shots given how much move most Champs characters have(and the fact that so many fights take place in the city where buildings and such restrict the battlefield lines of sight). It might be of use in Fantasy Hero but that's about it(maybe Space Hero for ship combat). Almost any other genre, the battlefields are usually far too small for the limit to matter as even at 1/10 the base range, an EB would still have an effective range of 30". More than enough for almost any circumstance.