Chris Goodwin

See 6e1 p. 233 under Maximum Effect.

Time machine to a stone age world. Return with a bumblebee inside a clamshell.

It's really up to the GM what kind of ranged attack meets the definition of "ranged Strike". A HTH Strike can be a punch, kick, knee strike, and so on; it can be based on a character's STR alone, or STR plus Hand-to-hand Attack, or STR plus Martial Arts DCs. All of the Martial Arts maneuvers with "Strike" in the name (Defensive Strike, Killing Strike, Martial Strike, Nerve Strike, Offensive Strike) all qualify as HTH Strikes, as do melee weapon attacks. You're specifically asking about ranged Strikes, though. Called out in the definition that you quoted are guns and longbows. Those definitely count as ranged Strikes. But what else might? The key here is that 2-point Combat Skill Levels with a particular Strike (punches, or broadswords, or any particular other type of Strike) apply to OCV only, so the 3-point levels with "all HTH Strikes" or "all Ranged Strikes" should also apply to OCV only. Keeping that in mind, I'm going to fall back on letting the GM decide exactly which kinds of ranged attacks fall into the definition, based on the trio of common sense, dramatic sense, and special effects. Also note that when Steve Long is able to return and answer rules questions, his response supersedes mine.

Duplicate of thread posted in Discussion.

It might be a typo that got carried from 5th to 6th editions. You're right about what the totals should be. (This wasn't a Rules Question, strictly speaking, so I asked a friendly moderator or admin to move it here. )

Came here to say this. Anyone who can summon otherworldly entities is an adventurer-class threat and needs adventurer-class opposition.

Assuming you mean using the Barrier Power, bought to sufficient size to englobe multiple targets, I don't see anything in the rules that would prevent it. For targeting purposes, treat it as if it were an Area of Effect attack (6e2 p. 40 for specifics).

Change Environment is for adding penalties rather than removing them. Someone asked Steve why that is; if you've followed the Rules Questions forum for any appreciable amount of time, you know he doesn't answer "why" questions... but he did in this case! https://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/172-why-cant-change-environment-do-positive-effects/ Edit: I should add... feel free to ask a question in Rules Questions, but I'm likely to be the one to answer it, and I usually try to find past answers of Steve's that are relevant. He's answered more than once that CE can't remove penalties, only add them. If you can express a CE in terms of adding a penalty to something then it would work. Otherwise, Transform would do it. I like the suggestion of Tunneling as well. Edit edit: Aid to movement should work as well, but would also be temporary.

While it's not my preferred style personally, there's no reason you can't run a fantasy game at a superheroic level or with whatever rate of progression you'd like. If it's what your players want, and you're fine with it, then go for it.

Transform: ground into road, OAF (material components: wood and brick)

A quantum portal that the hirsute individual can walk through, passing them to another universe but leaving the undesired hair behind. (Yes, it's Extradimensional Movement, to "the dimension where a particular patch of hair is gone.")

Here's a highly technical diagram of my network setup at home. At the lower right is a Raspberry Pi running software called Pi-hole, which is a very good ad blocker. It doesn't block Youtube ads, but it does get most others. If there's something I can't use without viewing the ads, I can switch my phone to the external wifi (Xfinity's box), then switch back when I'm done. It's not perfect, and it obviously doesn't work when I'm not at home, but it's Good Enough.

Here's one I found that is at 4.4 stars with 677 reviews. The vast majority are 5 stars, and the developer has its own domain name and a postal address out of Cypress (the country). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adguard.vpn Edit: This one apparently is not an actual ad blocker. Hmmm.

The downside I can see from reading the reviews is that it appears to just stop working at some point. It looks like it goes through their VPN and they may monitor your traffic. And in a bit of irony, it looks like it's ad supported, so it could be that the point at which it stops working is the point at which it starts serving its own ads. ~10K downloads, 166 reviews, and it looks like about half as many 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews. I wouldn't touch it myself. Edit for clarity: Duke shared the link with me to the one he's using: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ad.clean.master The developer contact for that one is listed as a gmail address. It's looking even more sketchy.

Is it just the notation that's bugging you? Advantages are negative value in that they reduce the damage value of weapons while keeping the mass constant; limitations likewise increase it. It's effectively the same as increasing (for advantages) or decreasing (for limitations) the mass while keeping the damage constant. In other words, a 5d6 weapon with three lines worth of advantages will always be 125 mass units, whether you start with a 125 mass weapon (base damage of 6d6) and reduce the damage by three lines (yielding 5d6), or start with a 5d6 weapon (base cost of 16 mass units) and increase its mass by three levels (yielding a cost of 125). So, despite the notation, advantages always make something more expensive while limitations make it less expensive. Does this explanation help?

For anything that is a Carried weapon, I'd let them switch it out with any other Carried weapon of the same or smaller mass. For weapons with different ammunition types, I'd probably have the stats worked out beforehand so it's as easy as writing down which ammo they're loading. Optionally I'd let non-Carried weapons be switched out before a mission, which would take time and possibly a Mechanics roll. Another option is to spend Construction Points for more Mass Units than the robot can typically carry with its Chassis & Power Plant capacity; the capacity limits how much the robot can carry at any particular time, but the extras are for items the character keeps "back at base" and can swap those in and out as desired. A resource pool, more or less. Edit to add: In one of the games I played in back in the day, the GM created his own, fairly extensive, premade weapons list, and we drew from that for several campaigns. That can prove pretty helpful, plus there is at least one list of pre-created weapons in the book specifically for this purpose.

I'm pretty terrible at coming up with names for characters. An idle thought I've had: in most baby name books, you can find translations of names. My own first, middle, and last names mean "bearer of the anointed one", "little rock", "good wine". Each of those could be translated into some appropriately fantasy sounding pseudo-language, and then you'd have names in that language as well as words for them. As for Bob the Fighter... Bob being short for Robert, which according to Wikipedia... You could do worse than to grab the Old High German or Norse versions and make them your own. Hrother Eberht, warrior. Hroth for short.

Most of the games I've played in have gone Marvel style; a few have gone DC style. I was designing a location that went DC style in a big way. Edge City, in the fictional state of Jefferson. It has frontage to the Mississippi River, but is about an hour away from the Pacific Ocean. Don't think about it too hard. No, you can't use that as quick transit from the midwest to the west coast. (It was halfway between a campaign city and a story; a 1950's hero, Captain Justice, investigating a warehouse in Edge City, got sent forward in time by his nemesis, Albert "Skullface" Schwartz. Schwartz was in an industrial chemical accident that rendered the skin, muscle, hair, and all other flesh on his head -- and only on his head -- transparent. Skullface is a pretty typical mad scientist type who wears a realistic looking rubber mask; when he wants to Presence Attack someone he whips the mask off in one action. Anyway, no one believed Skullface when he told him he hadn't killed Captain Justice, just sent him forward in time, so he was being held on death row for murder. 50 years later, Captain Justice reappears in Edge City in the same warehouse. Cue Captain America-style "WTF" moment. He meets up with two modern superheroes, Stephen "Red Jack" MacBride and Kelly "Blue" Summers. Skullface having been in prison for the last 50 years, he has mellowed out a lot, and really has been worried all this time that he actually had killed Captain Justice.)

Per a previous rules question answered by Steve Long:

I'm not sure anything does. I thought 3rd edition Star Hero was a little on the weak side, and also suffered some for being the last product out the door before 4th edition. If I'd been in charge of Hero Games at the time, I'd probably have taken out all of the game mechanics, released it as a genre book for 4th edition, and included notes on how to use it with 3rd edition (Champions and Danger International), and also used it as a sort of "back door upgrade" for 3rd to 4th edition games. I'd done a lot of other SF gaming with Hero at the time, using other SF RPGs converted, with a group that was extremely good at doing that sort of thing. The starship rules didn't fit with the earlier vehicle rules in Champions II, the mecha rules in Robot Warriors, or the vehicle rules in 4th edition. They would probably work pretty well as an alternative system, if none of the other systems were desired. The technology section was pretty good, between the equipment guide and the section on tech levels. The advice on campaigning suffered a lot for there being so little of it (7 pages); the stuff on technology and tech levels generally likewise (5 pages); and there were also small sections on designing societies, and the use of aliens in games. It includes a bit of sample setting, along with a sample campaign framework and adventure. Nothing at all on space science or designing planets. All of the things it suffers for were artifacts of making it a "complete in one" third edition era standalone game, and of it coming out so closely before 4th edition. Not the book's fault, nor the authors'. Also, GURPS Space came out around the same time, and was probably a better Star Hero than Star Hero 3rd edition was.

No, per 6e2 p. 18: "Some Zero Phase Actions (such as turning on a specific Power) can only be performed once in a Phase." The GM can always permit otherwise if there's a good reason, meaning common sense, dramatic sense, special effects, and so on. But other than that, the answer is no. The same non-Attack Power could be activated multiple times across multiple Phases; in those cases, you would pay END for the "stacked" instances, and the Powers for which this is common generally address how this works in their descriptions. But, per 6e2 p. 18, you can only activate one instance of a Power per Phase.

For no points, a VPP can be changed out of combat without a skill roll, or in combat requiring a skill roll at -1 per 10 Active Points. Skills in the pool don't have to RSR to use. If I were going to make it no skill roll out of combat, or -1 per 20 in combat, I'd probably make that a +1/4 Advantage, as the difference in RSR between -1 per 10 and -1 per 20 is +1/4. In practice, a 60 Active Point power would take -6 at -1/10 or -3 at -1/20. +1 to Power Skill is 2 points, so not even taking the reduced cost of PSLs into account, the difference there is 6 points worth. Assuming a straight up 60 point pool, with 30 points in control cost, a +1/4 Advantage is 7.5 points. You're getting a better deal even if you buy bonuses to your Power Skill, much less PSLs.

The Ultimate Skill/HERO System Skills has some good advanced rules for using Computer Programming, including for hacking. I probably wouldn't go much further than that.

Scott, I've never forgotten those statistics. Thank you.

When I played in a Bushido Hero game lo these many eons ago, there were a number of skills from the original game that were brought into Fantasy Hero as PS's. Probably Tea Ceremony, I'm sure a number of performance skills like kabuki... I don't have any of the notes left, as it's been a very long time, but my foggy memory does recall some of that.