Chris Goodwin

I need a current equivalent to the first edition Fantasy Hero Variable Advantage. It worked differently than Variable Advantage works now. Back then you bought your base points in a spell, then applied Variable Advantage to this. You then had as many Active Points to work with as your base points, and could use any Advantages as long as the total didn't exceed that. For example, if you had a 60 Active Point Ranged Killing Attack with Variable Advantage, you could have a 4d6 RKA, a 2 1/2d6 Armor Piercing or Explosion, a 2d6 Area Effect, etc., as long as it maxed out at 60 Active Points. I can come up with a couple of possible workarounds (multipower, VPP limited to variations on one Power, naked Variable Advantage with Limitations), but I'm curious as to whether anyone can get anything closer. In this particular instance I can't use house rules, otherwise I would do so. Any ideas?

I'm with D-Man, Escafarc, and Liaden. What's worth more, the house-rule-less integrity of the system, or getting what you want from a system that is supposed to give you what you want?

Fortunately, the esteemed Mr. Long has already given us an easy, relatively painless way to do just what you want. See FREd, chapter 6 beginning on page 347, and paying particular attention to page 354. Yamo, I know you don't like house rules, but consider this: is it worth it to go with an incredibly baroque construct that just drips with gooey, melty mozarella and Velveeta, or would you rather go with something whose relative point cost fits in with the pre-existing construct similar to the one you're trying to come up with?

And that is why I'm in no danger of taking away Champsguy's Munchkin King title. He'd have that sucker down to 35 points.

I think I've got the winnah and grand champeen. Never was, probably never will be, and never should be approved. http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5392#post88576

KS: Appraisal Works for me.

Arthur -- check your private messages. Even more gross: Cost Power END 562 Grosser Than Gross: Killing Attack - Ranged 6d6 (vs. ED), Area Of Effect (One Hex; +1/2), Accurate (+0), No Range Modifier (+1/2), No Normal Defense Standard (+1), Does BODY (+1), 1 million Charges (+1), Megascale Range (1" = 10000 km; +1 1/4) (562 Active Points) 90 Long Range Targeting: Telescopic +60 to PER Rolls (only to offset the Range Modifier) (Sight Group) Powers Cost: 652 Check this out. You can stand back about 5 million kilometers or so (+60 PER vs. range modifiers should be enough to cover that distance so you can see your target), then Blaze Away with all 1 million charges at a single 2-meter hex on the surface of a planet. Again, approximately 4,269 of them will hit the 2-meter hex you're aiming at. The ones that miss will scatter 1" away for every one point by which you miss. Since the Area of Effect is not Megascaled, the ones that miss will scatter 2 meters away for every point. The maximum you can miss by is 15, so the maximum scatter is 30 meters away. One million 6d6 RKA shots hit in a circle (okay, a hexagon of hexes) 60 meters in diameter. The NND defense is Force Fields. Very few planets have Force Fields, so you've just done on average 21 million BODY to a 60 meter in diameter circle. How much BODY does the Earth have, again? And even if you're not Blazing Away, your target is DCV 3, no matter how far away you are. If you can see your target (+60 Telescopic Sight PER, remember?) you can hit him at DCV 3. And if he's being a pest and Diving For Cover, just Blaze Away at him with a million charges. If you still cant hit him, Megascale your area to 1 kilometer; you're then hitting a circle 30 kilometers in diameter with 21 million BODY.

I think he was just asking for common weights of the sorts of stuff you'd find in a fantasy game. (I'm reminded of the joke about a physicist attempting to predict the milk output of a dairy cow: "First, assume a spherical cow...")

Actually, you do hit if you roll a 3. FREd p. 259. But even after all of that collateral damage, it's still only worth +3d6.

How much BODY does the average city have? I bet it's less than 6,970,117.

Sick Power time. 2d6 RKA, 1 million Charges (+1), etc. etc. Blaze Away with this Power. It uses all 1 million charges. In order to save rolling 3d6 a million times, assume that 1 in 216 of them hit. Approximately 4,269 shots hit, doing a total of approximately 29,883 BODY to the target and approximately 79,488 STUN if you roll 1d6-1 or 89,649 STUN if you take a straight 3 for the STUN multiple. Of course, if the target has 12 DEF he takes no BODY, and if he has 60 total DEF he takes no STUN. So that's why you make it Armor Piercing and at least double Penetrating. Note that you now have 995,731 shots that didn't hit the target. That's an awful lot of collateral damage, doing on average 6,970,117 BODY to the environment, bystanders, etc.

Now that I think of it, here's a house rule from my house rules page: You might use some variant of this to represent using the attack to heat up the object.

You can "shut off" your normal senses in ways that are good enough to protect them from Flash attacks (close/cover your eyes, plug your ears, hold your nose, etc.). I would assume you can do the same for Enhanced Senses.

Just use your RKA for disarm attacks. Perhaps a Limitation on it to the effect that the only attacks it can directly make against characters are disarm attacks.

Some I have played that stood out: Subbei, a ninja (I was 16, what can I say?) in a Bushido FH game. (The GM was a Japanese history buff, so the character ended up being more like a historical ninja than a guy whose purpose is to flip out and kill people.) Jotaro Godutsu, samurai, in the sequel to the above campaign A shugenja whose name I don't recall, in the abovementioned sequel Myself, in the "October Game", a crossworlds game where we played ourselves. I transformed into a ki-rin (yeah, from the AD&D1 Monster Manual). I ended up being the combat monster of the group. (Two edition translations have caused the character to end up at something like 450 points, where it was 300ish before.) A winged folk whose name I don't recall, in a game run by Bob Greenwade Fast Freddy, a fake priest in a game of con men An assassin, in a game that 17 years later I still feel bad about having singlehandedly broken up An elemental mage in an Arabian Nights styled campaign Dominique the (title varies), a female wizard who was reasonably combat worthy in her own right but whose main purpose was powering up the warriors via an Aid spell, run in a Greyhawk based FH dungeon adventure Scores (okay, maybe a score or so) of characters I wrote up but never played

I like this one. If the players are always coming up with "generic" DNPCs, or never flesh them out, have one PC's DNPC generic girlfriend be another PC's DNPC generic wife. Of course, there's no guarantee there won't be combat involved....

Close but not quite. It should be an HKA with the Usable By Others Advantage on it. Buy Ranged through an OAF: Bow, Focus Of Opportunity. (Or is RKA the "official" way to build a bow nowadays?)

Mind Link.

http://groups.google.com/groups?num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=%22major+tom%22++group%3Arec.games.frp.super-heroes&btnG=Google+Search Also if you do groups.google.com searches on the phrases "jukebox heroes" or "king crimson" you should find a few.

VPP with Extra Time to change points around. Take hours to research your Concerto For Microwave And Cuisinart spell, one Phase to use it. Your mages will work within the guidelines; they'll keep an array of combat spells (perhaps two or three) with points set aside for Stuff I Need Now.

Historically, I think this is part of the problem minimum costs were intended to address. Anyway, I'm sure that mathematically there comes a point where it is more cost effective to buy Flight, Only On A Surface, than to buy additional Running. I think that if you buy off your base Running, that point becomes 0" of Running. Of course, that falls into the realm of gaming the system rather than playing the game, and should be discouraged, with violence if necessary.

History lesson. Flight is 2 points per inch because as far back as first edition Champions, it was determined that flying was a common ability in the comics, and that it should be cheap to reflect this. Flight, Only In Contact With A Surface was a pre-4th edition construct used to build speedsters by taking advantage of ridiculous noncombat multiples given Flight way back then. I don't recall the exact formula, but by buying 10" of Flight, you could get something like 140" per Phase of noncombat Flight. Running had the straight 2x noncombat. So if you wanted a speedster, you bought Flight Only In Contact etc. You got the added bonus of being able to do common speedster tricks like running at insane speeds across water, up walls, along wires, etc. So, it's basically a historical artifact that has stuck even though the mechanics of Flight have changed somewhat.

Suppose almost all of the individual Green Lanterns were destroyed, but their infrastructure remained. The Big Green Lantern power battery, perhaps archives spread throughout the galaxy, maybe fragments of a ring found floating in space (what would one of these do?), etc. Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the Green Lantern Corps.

Someone is confusing damage with force. Doubling the damage does not add +1 DC. Doubling the force of the attack adds +1 DC. Doubling the damage of an attack would add as many DCs to the attack as the attack's original DCs.

Re: rule.alt for Autofire..anu? Answer: It's not. It just costs more. I'm not NSG, but I had to give my two cents.