Chris Goodwin

I did it with a STUN + BODY Drain (because she can and has killed with it) linked to Telepathy, with a mimic Variable Power Pool. My fourth edition writeup of Rogue is here.

That seems to be up there with my old AD&D1 idea that, since clerics couldn't carry edged weapons, how do they shave? I finally came up with a first level clerical "Shave" spell, the material components for which were a clamshell and a bumblebee....

I once had the idea of wizards implanting mana into "coins" which they could use for currency. Since it was a commodity, any wizard could later pull the mana from the coin (causing it to vanish) to use in the casting of spells.

teh game is d02: know no limit! it is teh r0xx0r!!!11!11!!! tehre is no d2 nor no d6. it is teh d02!!!11!!!

Lightning Rod (character sheet here). Loads and loads of defenses vs. electricity and no defenses against anything else.

Might be a combination of Rivalry with X and Psych Limit: In Love With X. Though I'd worry about giving too many points for it. Maybe just Argues With X that slowly mutates into In Love With X.

It has been explained to me thusly by Steve Long: A vehicle has mass. It can carry additional mass equal to the amount it can lift with its STR. So if there was a 1600 kg vehicle with 30 STR, it could carry an additional 1600 kg for a maximum load of 3200 kg. Not how I'd always thought it worked, but hey.

At one time salt was used as money. In fact, just about any commodity that was easily portable, difficult to counterfeit, didn't easily decay, and that people wanted was used as money. Heck, you could create your own money right now if you wanted. You could write up slips of paper that say "Redeemable upon demand for ______, payable by (your name here)" Probably not too many people would accept it (it's basically an IOU) but, after all, that's what US Federal Reserve notes are. I've always thought the idea of gold "pieces" assumed a standardization across states that might not have existed. In reality, most countries had their own currencies, and a lot of historical currencies are actually units of measurement. (Shekel was originally a unit of measurement of weight, and "peso" is the Spanish word for "weight".) Me, the next time I run a fantasy game I'm going to use one ounce gold 20-mark coins, one ounce silver 1-mark coins, one ounce copper 1/10-mark coins, and one-tenth ounce copper 1-cent coins ("cent" being the Latin word for one one-hundredth).

Re: Shapeshifter and Movement This is incorrect. See FREd p. 195.

An easy way I've found for making off-breakpoint stats matter is to have ties go to the guy with the higher stat. The bottom line question to ask is this: is everyone having fun with their characters? If the answer is yes, then why change?

I don't see a huge need to make fundamental changes to the system in order to prevent the "breakpoint problem". I think the best way around it is to reward the behavior of not building characters to breakpoints. IME, people most often build to DEX breakpoints because combat is important in the game. If you give the noncombat types a bit more to do you'll see more varied characters. If your sessions are of the "30 minutes of roleplaying, 3 hours of combat" school, then yeah, you'll see more cookie cutter types. And anyone who hasn't read John Kim's article that I linked earlier, do so.

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/herosystem/essays/breakpoints.html

Maybe something with Invisible Power Effects?

Re: Short-term Disabling Blows I know that other people have already given their answers, but I'm going to go ahead and give mine. 1. STR Drain, probably limited to "Only STR In Gripping Hand". Possibly Entangle. 2. Entangle or Running + STR Drain. 3. Entangle, possibly STR Drain. 4. Flash is the obvious one. Seldom used is Entangle, Blocks Sight and Hearing Groups. 5. DEX Drain, probably. 6. You could put them all in a Small Thrown Object Multipower. Could be an object of opportunity if you don't have a specific object in mind. For the Entangle, you'll want to make it transparent to all attacks at the +1/2 level, and Fully Invisible as well. Using Entangle for number 4 would mean you could make it something like a single Power: Entangle + Drain STR, DEX, and Running.

Re: Re: Re: Re: How does sharpness affect a sword? That sounds like it would be an NND Does Body, pick the defense that is reasonable (include "dulling spell" as a possible defense).

Both. There would have been stuff like "Can go through walls" or "Reload all of your Charges". The machines would all be networked into a central server, so all of the cheat codes change on a monthly basis. The ones that worked last month don't work this month. I'd though of having one unlucky guy who can't get the new cheat codes...but then it turns out that all of the old ones keep working for him.

Came up with a campaign idea based around a bunch of kids playing a video game very much like Cyber Sled, but I never wrote anything up for it. It would have been pretty cool, with rotating cheat codes that let them break the rules in fun ways.

Epiphany about Dark Champions and the pulps Okay. I don't mean to hijack the thread, and I'll start another one somewhere if it warrants it, but reading about this film just helped me realize what Dark Champions is about. It's the pulp stories, brought forward to the modern day -- not necessarily their attitudes, but the kinds of stories they tell. They were about things like street level crime, costumed crimefighters, private investigators, the Untouchables, reporters, international adventurers, espionage, and the like. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks.

Maybe. I've often wanted to do it myself, but I don't know how much sales to expect. Asprin has licensed out the series in the past, specifically to Mayfair Games (for both a board game and a D&Dish supplement back in the 80's). I don't think it would be too hard to contact him to ask, but whether he would grant permission and how much he'd ask for the rights would be another story (assuming Mayfair no longer has them). If I was going to form a company to produce it, unfortunately it would have to be OGL. There's no way a company could afford to pay two sets of licensing fees to make it feasible in Hero.

Depends on common sense, dramatic sense, and whatever seems to work. Could be a day, a week, a month, or more depending on what the Focus is. A wooden staff might take a day to carve and enchant, while a super high tech powered armor suit might take a month to rebuild. There is no specific rule in the books on the subject.

Got another one, which I know for a fact would never happen. DOJ gets the license to do the RPG adaptation of Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures series. The Ultimate Dimension would be a great companion volume for this.

I didn't know this. I've always thought of Dark Champions as a subgenre of Champions and separate from the nonpowered modern genre, but I can see where you're going with it (the other way around).

I dunno. (a) It seemed to me that the original Dark Champions was linked with the Champions Universe in some way, hence not the Real World, and ( Harbinger of Justice.

A couple of things I noticed about your Ennervation Power. First off, you probably want to buy it Constant. Secondly, note that you're only transferring not 1 BODY but 1 Character Point worth of BODY per Phase. That's 2 END, and removes 1 BODY every other Phase. On the Soul Burner, knock off the Only Recovers Via Ennervation Limitation. You were right to not buy any REC the first time, but either you recover by Transferring END in (and note that you'll lose points from it, so eventually you're going to have a 0 point END Reserve into which you occasionally transfer points) or you have a REC. What I'd do if I were you would be to transfer BODY to the END Reserve's REC, then buy up the Transfer to 1d6. Finally, the Whirling Death, Summon Necrothrall, Ferrus Barrier, and Ferrokinesis Powers on the Computer seem to be there only for the purposes of reducing their overall cost (the base Rust Lord character gets them at an 80% cost break).

Got some more. The Ultimate line of fantasy archetypes, one book for each (warrior, wizard, priest, rogue). Includes not just a bunch of Package Deals for each, but stuff on their organizations, notes on running a party full of them, running equivalents in other genres, and so forth. Dark Champions: the Real World. Characters are all 75 + 75, no Powers other than gadgets that exist in the real world, no Talents, no weirdness. Skills only. Mundane equipment is free. These are people in the real world who put on masks and pretend to be superheroes fighting crime. It can go anywhere from goofy ("Angle Grinder Man" and the woman in New York who befriends women who have too much to drink) to dark and grim (psychotic nutbars who put on masks and drive vans full of guns).