Chris Goodwin

Take 2d6 of Aid. Apply the +2 for any characteristics you want. Give it the Delayed Effect and/or Trigger Advantages. Buy it Autofire and buy the max way up. Pile about -5 worth of Extra Time, Costs END w/Increased END Cost, Focus, Gestures and Incantations, et fricking cetera. Put it in a Multipower. For just a few Real Points you've got effectively as many characteristic points as you want (depending on how many Triggers you set up). Once you've maxed out your Aid, switch your Multipower points to something else. That's why 5 point per d6 Aid is abusive. Yes, I played alongside a guy who did this regularly.

Sounds like Requires Skill Roll based on a CHA roll, with Burnout, Extra Time, Continuing Charges, perhaps Side Effects representing the possibility of being injured by failing the test.

I saw that. First time I've been sigged.

If you don't want superhero level mages, and also don't want superhero magically enhanced fighters, try this: require anyone who wants magical abilities to buy like a 10 point Power or Perk. Perhaps it is The Sight, or perhaps it is some funky genetic or spiritual thing. That'll burn up 10 of the mage's points, plus it makes it unlikely a non-mage is going to pay 10 points just for a couple of abilities. You might also see fewer mages overall.

Try 50+50 or 75+25. As for rapid advancement, give out lots of XPs.

A penny is probably something like 4 DEF, 1 BODY, and therefore could never do more than 5d6.

I would say no go on the Invisibility, on the same theory that Darkness vs. Hearing stops a Power with Incantations. IOW, if you can't make any noise, the Power fails. Go with the "Buy Off Incantations, Costs END." I believe that in a published character there is an example of a naked Modifier applying to more than one Power, though off the top of my head I can't think of which one.

Ok. We've learned what you've done with Hero (though that thread isn't closed by any stretch). What would you like to run with Hero? Or not Hero? One thing I've been mulling over is something I'm calling Tank Wars. There's a new online video game called Tank Wars (possibly on your GameBox III, possibly in the arcades), networked all over the country. You and all your friends are really into it. You get credits (100 credits = 1 point) with which to build your tanks, then you run them against each other in the arena. You can play in a free for all or have teams. The idea is that each player builds his character as a middle- or high-school student with a Multiform, Only In Tank Wars; the Multiform represents your skill at the game. Though, theoretically, Tank Wars the video game isn't limited to kids, my initial concept had school age kids or groups thereof at school talking trash to each other all day then waiting till they get home to settle it in the Tank Arena. Oh, don't forget the cheat codes. Once a month your system downloads a patch with new cheat codes; the old ones go away. You're expected to trade 'em with your friends, find 'em on web sites, etc. Sometimes they get released at odd times; it sucks if they come down while you're at school, even worse after you go to bed cuz there's always someone who stays up later than you and has all the cool cheats before you!

A list of the Powers can be really useful in designing a magic system. Heck, it can be really useful in other games. There's no reason not to include it unless you absolutely positively need the space for something else. It was kinda my point that there are people who are new to the system who are still getting the basic concept of the system. Not everyone who picks up FH3 is going to have ten years playing HERO under their belts; we've been seeing that for months now already with Champions.

Do you actually need to define it? Call it an active Detect IR Beam, Only For Detecting Possible Combat Hits. The definition of an active sense is that it emits some kind of beam detectible by others with the same sense. SFX it away that it takes an OCV vs. DCV roll rather than a PER roll to "paint" your target. So you roll your to hit roll and... BEEP! One night some friends and I discovered the joys of going hand-to-hand with Laser Tag.

Major Transform -- X into brightly glowing X. You're giving X the Images Power mentioned above except it's Persistent and Always On (perhaps Inherent) instead of Uncontrolled. Or the spell is an Images Power, Usable By Others. Use the UBO option and make it Uncontrolled.

Re: FH Requests (Long) Oh really? How do we know this? We know this because we've got two editions of FH already telling us this, plus scads of experience with the system. What happens when someone picks up FREd and FH3 for the first time and says "Wow, I'd love to run this stuff, but I can't figure out how to build spells? Should I build my Fireball as Area Effect or Explosion?" We've got people already asking this stuff on the boards for Champions;it would be nice to have it already available for FH. Yes, we definitely DO need that stuff. Dude! FREd is nothing more than two pieces of cardboard with a bunch of words inside. I happened to get a lot of use out of this. It makes it easy to say "Here's what you can and can't use to build spells." Make up a master, photocopy it a few times, hand it out to your players, and you're saving yourself a lot of time explaining everything at the beginning, or answering the same question from three players who were too busy writing down their spells to hear you the first two times you explained it. I would say cut it if you need the room, and if nothing else make it available as a PDF download.

Transform Target into "Me" (whether "Me" is evil necromancer, Agent Smith, etc.). Whether it's Mind, Body, or both depends on how it works. Agent Smiht transforms someone's Mind and Body, while the necromancer probably just transforms Mind. The reversion condition is being killed or Transforming someone else. Season to taste.

The thing about using Dispel against disease earlier and poison here is that you're building them as Gradual Effect. With Gradual Effect, the Power is in effect until the Gradual Effect duration is over, at which time the Power ends. With Dispel, you're shutting down the Power before its Gradual Effect is complete, preventing it from doing any further damage. So you couldn't use Dispel to bring back Characteristics that have been lost through Drain, damage, or any other reason except Suppress, but you can use it to shut down the Powers that are continuing to cause them. And there's no restriction on what kind of Powers you can Dispel. You could Dispel an incoming Energy Blast or RKA if you had a held action.

Why not just Dispel Poison for the antidote?

Has the Dogfighting Modifiers table been updated lately? It looks like it could use modifiers for DEX and SPD. As I recall, vehicles didn't have DEX and SPD when that table first appeared.... (Suggestion: +1 if your vehicle has higher DEX, +1 for each +5 DEX; +1 for each SPD higher.) Edit: Further suggestion: +2 for No Turn Mode; -2 for every level of Limited Maneuverability.

I don't recall. I thought it sounded like a pretty cool idea myself.

Pick up either the Illuminati card game or a bunch of INWO cards. Deal out a Tarot reading with them and see what happens.

Re: You sure this'll work? Ok, 36. I was picking a number out of the air. It measures the ship's ability to not be destroyed. It can be any or all of those things.

The shields in Star Trek don't act like DEF. Usually it goes something like this: And so on. No damage seems to get through until the shields are scrubbed away. Therefore.... Give the ship something like 10 DEF; it seems pretty tough on its own, but not overly so. The shields become: +100 BODY, Not vs. Destruction (-1/2), Not Protected By Base Vehicle DEF (-1/2), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), OIF Vehicular (-1), Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll (-1/2). Active Cost: 100 points, Real Cost: 27 points 10 PD 10 ED Force Field, 0 END Persistent (+1), OIF Vehicular (-1), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll (-1/2). Active Cost: 40 points, Real Cost: 15 points Healing: 5 BODY, Regeneration, 0 END Persistent (+1), Self Only (-1/2), Extra Time: 1 Turn (-1 1/4), Requires Starship Engineering Skill Roll (-1/2), Requires Functioning Vehicle Power Supply (-1/4), Only Affects Shields (-1/2). Active Cost: 100, Real Cost: 25 All hand weapons in the Star Trek setting have Not Vs. Starship Shields (-1/4 at most). Note that they could potentially cut through the ship's skin if their DCs are high enough. It's one of those common sense, fits the setting things that damage to the shield's BODY doesn't subtract from the ship's base BODY score when the shields go down. The BODY is Not vs. Destruction in the sense that the Enterprise has, for the sake of argument, 24 BODY. Giving it +100 BODY would ordinarily mean that the ship would be totally destroyed at -124 BODY. Instead, it's totally destroyed at -24 BODY. The Not vs. Successful Find Weakness Roll Limitation reflects the times when the starship's weapons are reconfigured to the opposing shield's harmonic frequency or whatever so that it can shoot right through them. If you don't like using Find Weakness for this, change it to Not vs. Weapons Configured to Shield's Harmonic Frequency (-1/2). The Regeneration reflects the ship's engineers working on the shields. You can season these writeups to taste. Comments?

If I were you I would ask the GM if you can alter your Powers somewhat; it sounds like you've built your Powers as Aids and Heals with Variable SFX and Variable Advantage. You might look at something like a Variable Power Pool, Only Herbalism Abilities (-1/2), season to taste. That way you could build lots of Powers that are Usable By Others. Your dilemma 1 sounds like Life Support or Power Defense, Usable By Others. Your second sounds more like a Dispel Disease; most diseases are built as Drains with Gradual Effect. Or perhaps a Life Support vs. Disease, Usable By Others; it might stop any more damage from occurring but wouldn't heal damage that had already happened.

Nearly all of the Disadvantages are situational in some respect. What you're not doing is linking them in the sense that that term is used in the Hero System, but setting them up so that situationality is a part of how the Disadvantage works. The Accidental Change/Danger Sense combo is one example.

I've always assumed that a Vehicle was like any other character in that it requires a base atmosphere type, "food" (fuel), "sleep" (time to cool down), and so on; Bob, I think you mention something like that somewhere in TUV (I just went back and looked but couldn't find the exact place). I would think that, for example, if you wanted a vehicle that could operate in air and space, or a vehicle that needed refueling only once a year or not at all, you'd buy various forms of Life Support for it. But then you need to differentiate between Life Support: Does Not Eat (i.e. requires no fuel) for the vehicle and Does Not Eat (i.e. a galley) for the crew. Or, for a ship that can't operate in an atmosphere, you can define its base "atmosphere" as vacuum; Life Support: Self Contained Breathing would then only apply to the crew. I think I'm not expressing myself very well today; I hope you get the idea.

An old house rule that was brought up on I think both of the previous incarnations of the boards was that the pool is the amount of Real Points you can have; your Control Cost is half the maximum Active Points of any one Power in the pool. So you could pay, say, 40 points for the pool but 50 for your Control Cost, allowing up to 40 Real Points worth of Powers of up to 100 Active Points each in the pool.

Figure that to get an optimum reentry angle, the pilot has to make a Piloting roll with whatever penalties the GM sees fit. If the roll is critically failed, the ship breaks up right then and there, no need to go any further. If the roll is just failed, roll 1d6 to determine (1-3) whether the angle is too steep (the ship takes more damage) or (4-6) too shallow (the ship skips off the atmosphere). If the angle is too steep, the ship takes +1 BODY per Segment for every point the roll was missed by. The pilot can attempt another roll each Phase (perhaps with a penalty for each failed roll), but that opens up the possibility he will crit fail or at least fail worse. Some ships have lots of bonuses to the pilot's roll.