Chris Goodwin

This could be my new cause celebre. (Longtime readers will recall my former crusades on such subjects as the overabundance of dwarves, frigging elves, and not-hobbits and Normal Characteristics Maxima.) This totally points up the reason why requiring magic items to be Independent and charging points for them, in a word, sucks. If you're the GM, just build the item. Pretend it fell out of the sky or something. If necessary, you, the GM, have like a billion points or more to spend on magic items, and if you need more all you have to do is wave your hands and you have them. Anyway, there's a simple way around it. Build the ability to build magic items as a Usable By Others Power with Differing Modifiers. Make it Persistent and Uncontrolled if you feel it necessary. The UBO Power should be built with lots of Extra Time, Increased END Cost, and the like. Stick it in a VPP if it's the sort of thing you'd build once in a lifetime. Once you've done that, voila. You've got your one-shot magic item. I wouldn't even allow Independent on it because (get ready for a shocker, boys and girls!) no one is going to pay any points for it. Treat it exactly as if it were a Focus in your typical Champions game; if he's going to keep it, he pays the points for it. If he's only going to use it once (and I'd say this surely qualifies), or, say, sometime between now and the end of the session, he doesn't have to pay points. Problem solved. "But...but..." I hear you saying. Nonsense. Independent and permanently paying points for magic items should have died with first edition Fantasy Hero when the BBB came out. Nothing else in the system supports it. It's a specialized rule intended for one style of play. It is an inappropriate solution to the non-problem of "assembly line magic items". (For that, just make the process take a long time and many specialized Foci.) It's a weak spot. If you push too hard on it, it breaks, and if you build too much of a system on it, it'll take your system with it.

I caught a sort of vague riff on the cover to first edition FH, showing a group of adventurers on the right in combat with a big dragon on the left. Dunno whether it was intended or not, but it's kinda cool.

Does it have to be one page? Will three not do? http://www.herogames.com/FreeStuff/freedocs/HRO_int.pdf

Prior to 4th edition, Autofire defaulted to 10 shots, and gave you +4 OCV for 10 or +2 OCV for 5. Aside from that, you use Autofire to simulate weapons that, in the source, shoot multiple projectiles with one pull of the trigger.

Sure, I see what you're saying, and it does point out a possible flaw in the system. It's not perfect, true. But you've also chosen a situation highly unlikely to come up in actual play. If you assume numbers more consistent with published ranges, I think you'll get better results. Overall, given that combination of damage, defense, SPD and chance to hit, you've got about a 62% chance in any given phase of doing no damage at all (missing your to-hit roll and rolling less than 7 on 2d6), about a 2.5% chance of doing 5 STUN, and about a 38% chance of doing any STUN at all. Overall, you'll average about .88 STUN per phase or about 10.6 STUN over the course of a turn (taking your misses and your STUN bounces into account). That all took me about 10 minutes to work out by hand, and it would take probably longer than that for me to work out a general rule. (OTOH, if you're volunteering... )

Mine is quite a bit different. Essentially, it takes two characters, treats one as the attacker and one as the defender, then sees approximately how much STUN per phase and per turn the attacker will do to the defender. There's suggestions that the GM do up a matrix for each hero vs. each villain or each hero vs. the campaign average values. What the heck, I may as well post it. Chart: 3d6 Percent Roll Chance 3 0.4629% 4 1.8518% 5 4.6296% 6 9.2592% 7 16.2037% 8 25.9259% 9 37.5000% 10 50.0000% 11 62.5000% 12 74.0740% 13 83.7962% 14 90.7407% 15 95.3703% 16 98.1481% 17 99.5370% 18 100.0000%

I've got an idea for determining the relative combat power of characters. Before I post it, though, I was wondering if there was anyone out there with more programming ability than me who would be willing to turn it into a GUI-based (or, heck, text-based!) application, because it's pretty calculation intensive. In general, the idea is that it takes two characters and applies a couple of formulae to determine the relative combat power. A GM could also use the campaign's average CV, SPD, DC, and so forth to see where a character falls in relation. Any takers?

I've postulated an Advantage for Resistant Defenses called Rigid Defenses. Mainly, the Rigid Defenses would subtract their BODY from the BODY of a Killing Attack before determining STUN, rather than after. Rigid Defenses would also fall under the Self-Inflicted Damage rule. Rigid Defenses would be a +1/4 Advantage.

Another vote for Starlord.

Remember, in this case "bondage" was in the eye of the same beholders who brought you "Reefer Madness". The artists did like to draw pictures of women (almost all of whom were modelled by Bettie Page) tied up, but it was pretty tame compared to what you're probably thinking. Examples here. Don't worry, it's safe for work.

True Crime Hero? Exploitation Hero?

He obviously didn't think he wasn't playing out of character. That sounds like something of a separate issue from someone taking points for a disad and deliberately not roleplaying it. I have no idea what you can do about that except in-game consequences. He held the guy so someone else could kill him, he goes up the river for murder.

I thought SuperAgents was pretty redundant. I would have said Champions 3-D, but for an issue. It was a great book for what it was... but it wasn't the book I wanted it to be. Oh yeah. I want to add Autoduel Champions to the list, even though it's somewhat redundant and way out of date.

Ditto. Kudos, Geoff!

For me, in no particular order: * Strike Force * Blood and Dr. McQuark * Danger International * Robot Warriors * Fantasy Hero * Mystic Masters * Enemies: Villainy Unbound (hi, Scott! No, not sucking up!) * The Gestalt universe (hi again Scott! still not sucking up!) based on the campaign writeups from Red October, so far unpublished * The Golden Age of Champions

For the homing device I do it a little differently. Detect Current Location as a radio sense (perhaps with a -1/4 "Depends On Satellite Reception" for a GPS-based model) in an IIF Locator Bug (Recoverable Charges if you like), and a Clairsentience with Detect Current Location and -1/2 or so "Must Plant Locator Bug", Megascaled if you like. I house rule it that you can float your Clairsentience point by paying an Advantage (half your max range for +1/4 or all of it for +1/2) or you can do it for free if you have no control over the location; this would be a case in which you have no control over the location. Alternately you can use the optional adder in the FAQ.

Steve has several times said that this is not legal. However, Steve is not running your game.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I were writing something for publication. If there were any house rules in it, the Line Developer would reject it. Stuff from the Digital Hero archives would count as a house rule for this purpose. That's why I can't use 'em. Basically, anything that HeroDesigner will let me build without a Custom Modifier, I can use.

Flight, 0 END. Buy either 1" (if you just want him to continue to float) or all of it Persistent.

It depends on the specific pistol, but probably 15 in the magazine and one in the chamber, and probably 2-3 extra magazines.

Regeneration for STUN would be really groovy if you were in GM Discretionland and not getting your regular post-12 Recovery. Do it something like this: +25 STUN, Uncontrolled, Trigger: When Loses STUN, Gradual Effect: 5 Minutes, Only To Starting Value. Yeah, it's a bit wonky, but what it amounts to is that when you lose STUN, you regain 1 per Turn for either 25 Turns (5 Minutes) or until you get back to full STUN. Alternately, you could convince your GM to let Regeneration work on STUN (or Simplified) Healing as well as BODY; you might need to buy it twice. Another alternately: Buy something like +50 STUN, Only Vs. Reaching -20 STUN. With this, to put your Recovery below once per Turn, you'd need to be below -70 STUN.

The archetypal "always hits" attack is D&D's Magic Missile, which has been around for at least 25 years. So yeah, I'd guess so. The reason people want it in Hero is so they can do a Hero version of Magic Missile.

Okay. VPP is no good because you can't limit the pool. You end up paying something like 67 points for a spell that, in the source material, cost 15. I'd rather have that same spell cost 30-40 points than 67, because if I'm going to do that I'd be better off using 5th edition Variable Advantage. The other alternative is to use Variable Advantage and limit the whole Power with Limited To X Active Points. This is perhaps the easiest way to do it.

Re: Easiest Solution? Well, like I said there's a good reason I can't do that. I think that I can use a Multipower with Naked Advantages, at least Hero Designer lets it through. That won't get me necessarily any Advantage I want, but I can put in a bunch of common ones. So I can have a 60 point RKA, or a 30 point RKA with Area Effect, or a 40 point RKA with Explosion or Armor Piercing, with perhaps an extra slot for Variable Advantage in case of any oddballs. That might be the way I end up doing it. Thanks for your assistance, everyone.

That doesn't do me any good at all. I'd start with a 60 point RKA, for instance, and end up with a 60 point RKA with Advantages on it.