Wolfgar Lyles

Re: Material Girl That should be done via the Merging Modifier for Desolidification found in the APG. Merging allows a Desolidified Projecting (another modifier) character to inhabit another character or object - no Clinging or Life Support required.

Re: Gender Changing and "Instant Change" Cosmetic Transformation. Pretty much everyone knew Ranma's secret in fairly short order. The only people who typically didn't know were his antagonists, who typically would be in love with one form and rivals with the other. They usually found out quickly unless they just happened to be particularly dense. The biggest inconvenience female form presents Ranma is he just freaking hates being a girl. Note in one episode Ranma winds up cursed that any water warmer than frigid will burn and scald her horribly, preventing her from turning back to male form.

Re: D&D 4E Style Minions Well, there your mistake isn't in making the guards so fragile, it's in making the fishwives and housecats so tough. Obviously if it's not meant to be a serious threat or challenge to the players and you are using these minion style of rules, it makes sense to just make everything that isn't supposed to be challenging wet cardboard. Whether it matters for the low end to be so compressed is if the PCs are routinely fighting mobs of guards and housewives in the same day, and chances are that they aren't. So it's mostly theoretical.

Re: Material Girl It really isn't. A Summoned Being with low EGO is easily controlled by the summoner, but is also extremely easy to influence by others with any kind of mental powers. Likewise for this build she'd be vulnerable to having others kick her out of her construct with competing mental powers. It also appears to be possible you can just buy the thing as Antagonistic at a low level and skip the tasks altogether, although if you have a ready method of controlling it anyway you should get -0 for the limitation.

Re: Knockout Gas No, it's not just you. You can come close but after a point it's just not worth sweating the minute details and more expedient to just let it go. RPGs have multiple masters to serve: game balance, novelty, realism, drama, genre tropes and conventions, etcetera. It's likely impossible to satisfy any of these agendas perfectly, and definitely impossible to do multiples simultaneously, so in the end we have to take some short cuts and settle towards personal preference.

Re: Gender Changing and "Instant Change" Cosmetic Transformation. Just so I'm clear...you don't need to take Multiform or Shapeshifting to appear differently in OIAID, right? And what about Accidental Change? You do you need a power or OIAID first to qualify for that first, right?

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage I prefer to build regeneration effects with Regeneration and Healing, and I'd be building most of the effects, so it's cool. I think Christopher has the best solution so far.

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage Really I'm trying to model Vampire: the Masquerade style aggravated damage. Aggravated damage in that particular game is very hard to heal from - point of order that most forms of supernatural healing like regeneration or healing magic simply don't work on it, and anyone suffering same has to heal back usually at normal, mortal rates. Now this is easy enough to deal with when we are talking about creature weaknesses - I can just give them a Weakness/Susceptibility and be done with it. Some attacks though do aggravated damage to everybody, from vampires to werewolves to spirits to mailmen, and I can't really give everyone a Susceptibility/Weakness to these powers because either I'd be giving free character points for a complication everyone has or I'd be undercosting any powers that qualified, so I thought a simple Aggravated advantage I could slap on KAs would be the simplest way to solve my problems.

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage Power Defense UAA does have some appeal, as it could allow higher end healing abilities to still punch through. Regeneration an issue-in fact, probably the main issue-but saying it's affected the same as Aid and Healing optionally are doesn't seem too bad. Nah, less than that. Plus there is more than one attack that would work like this, so it would have to be reworded somehow.

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage I apologize. I didn't understand your initial meaning.

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage I thought about it, and this wouldn't do what I want it to do-in fact, it's the opposite. Healing, Regeneration, and I Can't Believe It's Not Healing! would still work but not mundane REC. That's a semantic wriggle trying to get around the rules. as it stands, I want an attack because an attack can hurt and kill people, which Transform is not supposed to do. And I told you such wouldn't exist. Any mundane plant for this campaign would be in limits of modern medicine, and modern medicine within this campaign would be confined to the Paramedics skill. Well for starters, Transform works against the wrong kind of defense, so I would have to switch it over to an AVAD. For seconds, Transformation requires double target BODY to affect, meaning that targets would somehow be more resistant to the attack types of this nature when that doesn't make sense for what I'm trying to do. Thirdly, a target who suffers less than full double BODY is mostly unaffected-again, not within the scope of what I'm trying to do. Fourth, the damage should be cumulative with KA from other sources, and Transform "damage" is not. Fifth a character should be killable via this attack, and Transform are specifically not meant to be injurious or lethal-although they may frequently be equivalent. (Now that I think about it Transform could make for an awesome Feign Death style of effect a la Romeo and Juliet, but that's for a different game.)

Re: So, just to eyeball a custom advantage Naturally. For the campaign I'm thinking of we are talking about supernatural healing effects that pretty much all PCs and major NPCs will have access to-either healing magic or supernatural regenerative abilities. Not appropriate for this particular setting. No mundane plants would have access to healing abilities, and there wouldn't be "super skills" as such. Transform is cumbersome, misrepresentative, and specifically verboten from hurting people.

I was thinking of making a custom advantage for my game for attack powers where the damage from them can't be healed by healing powers, but only by natural REC. I presuming a campaign where healing powers are fairly common. What do you think it should be worth? +1/4? +1/2?

Re: D&D 4E Style Minions Just ignoring Defenses, STUN, and BODY and doing this seems the most elegant solution.

Re: Material Girl Summon+Desolidification (Projection, Merging)+Possession. Done.