Chris Goodwin

I very much like this bit... ...but to me the strict separation between "divine" clerical magic and "arcane" wizardly magic is a D&D-ism that I'm honestly tired of even in D&D. To me, "shards from a weapon of a god that was destroyed in battle" puts me in mind of a crashed starship. I might have gods that are superpowerful beings, or Ancient Aliens, or something else, but if I'm going to lean into D&Disms I'm going to do it in D&D.

Every commercial ranch dressing tastes like yack. I recommend homemade using the Hidden Valley packets. Make it according to the recipe once or twice before you start doctoring it. (edit) Which is one cup of mayonnaise, one cup of milk, one packet, whisk until mixed, refrigerate for 30 minutes before use. Me, I like dill. Lots and lots of it. YMMV, of course.

It's one of the sample magic systems in the FH genre books for 5th and 6th. FH 6e p. 298; it doesn't look like I have the PDF for the 5e version to hand, but I know it's in there too.

I very strongly prefer tailored. I can't stand kitchen sink (D&D style) tropes that are included haphazardly just because someone thinks it's "not fantasy" without them. Give me something different -- not just strangeness for its own sake either; but something really different and neat that makes me think of it in a different way. I am quite happy to see technological elements in fantasy, again not kitchen sink, especially not kitchen sink high tech mixed with kitchen sink fantasy. The Thundarr or He-Man type mixture doesn't really appeal. Give me something like Eberron. (I'm currently reading a web serial called Worth the Candle which is scratching a lot of those itches. And would strongly recommend giving it a chance, up through chapter 14 -- the end of book 1, at least. It's an isekai, litRPG style story, only good -- very non-weeb. It's on Archive of our Own and Royal Road; easy to find via Google, but I'll provide links if requested.)

Transform is not usable on the self. It's others only.

I agree. I think everyone (including me) is going to add their own ideas for whatever they've wanted "fixed". We've got six editions worth of material that's largely compatible from first to last that any of us can pull in as house rules to any of our games, regardless of what edition we're running in. I've got various house rules documents spread out here and there made up of my own fixes and additions, and I'd bet money that every one of us has something similar. When sitting at the table eating snacks and throwing dice, you'd be hard pressed to tell what edition a given Champions game was running under without a careful look at the character sheets. "Edition" is only meaningful in terms of what is currently available and recently supported. Me too. I don't want that to change.

For a 7th edition, I would add something akin to Mutants and Masterminds' Feature. A minor power defined by the player and GM working together, costing 1-10 points. Something like a Power equivalent to a Perk.

We always had ranges, like 200-225 and 225-250. The high end was always the max.

It's still derived from INT.

It doesn't, necessarily, but no image is perfect. Images charges more for less imperfection (greater PER penalty). Potentially, we ought to give more skilled creators a better chance of fooling a target; with Images that's easy enough to do: additional PER penalties based on a Skill Roll.

It doesn't, necessarily, but no image is perfect. Images charges more for less imperfection (greater PER penalty). Potentially, we ought to give more skilled creators a better chance of fooling a target; with Images that's easy enough to do: additional PER penalties based on a Skill Roll.

Yes!

I've usually gotten better results basing it on mass than on volume. Do you have the mass of the pyramid?

It occurs to me that Justice Inc. (first-gen) has its own versions of several Powers, which while not an exact fit to the Images (4th+) mechanical structure, are probably closer to that than they are to the diced-comparison mechanic. I believe Mind Link (4th+) came out of Aaron Allston's usage of JI Telepathy in the Strike Force campaign to represent a dedicated link between two characters, as it didn't exist in any form in first-gen other than that.

If we go back to reasoning from effect: if I want to make one or more other characters perceive something that isn't really there, we have two different Powers, with two different mechanics; one of them is a Mental Power, with all of its implied special effects, and one is not, with its own set of different, implied special effects. Over time, most of the power pairs like that have been collapsed down into one or another Power; we used to have Armor and Force Field, for instance, but now we have Resistant Protection. We used to have Flight and Gliding, now we have Gliding as a separate use case of Flight, and a Limitation for Gliding Only; Aid, Healing, and Regeneration have been combined and separated in various permutations as well. Mental Illusions and Images seems like the sort of thing that would have been collapsed into one as well, except that this line of discussion indicates why that probably wasn't done. If we were going to collapse the two of them together, using the 3rd-through-6th edition typical design paths, we'd probably end up with an "Illusions" Power. At its base, it would probably be Light Illusions and Sounds combined for its base mechanic. To go against a Targeting Sense group would probably cost 5 points per d6, against a non-targeting Sense group probably 3 points per d6. Adding Sense Groups would be an adder, +10 points for a targeting group and +5 points for a non-targeting group, or +5 for a targeting sense and +3 for a non-targeting sense. You'd roll the dice, compare to each viewer's INT, and that determines how likely the target is to accept the illusion as real, probably the same charts from Champions II and FH 1e. It probably would be based around an area, would have a cost for increasing it; probably would start at 1" radius, +10 points for +1" radius. It might require an Attack Roll to precisely place the area, but it wouldn't require one to affect viewers; it's assumed that it would affect anyone who can sense the Illusion, regardless of where they're viewing it from. If you wanted to make it equivalent to a Mental Illusion, you would in this case be applying Limitations to it. You could add Single Target Only (-1/2?) to affect only a single person in a single hex, assuming you haven't bought up the area, though that Limitation might require you to roll an Attack Roll (normally OCV vs. DCV) to target the viewer. If you wanted to make it fully a Mental Power, affecting only that target, you'd need to add Invisible Power Effects and Based On ECV. Probably a Modifier for Works Against Ego rather than INT. There might be an exception condition that allows you to build it to affect the Mental Sense Group in this particular case (probably similar to the exception conditions making Regeneration a Healing build in 5th or Suppress a Drain build in 6th), and it would affect any Senses the target possesses, or maybe you'd just have to suck it up and buy it against all of the Sense Groups; I think Steve Long probably would have gone with the former, myself. If you wanted illusionary attacks to do STUN and/or BODY to the affected target, you'd buy those as separate Attack Powers, linked to the Illusions, probably with the "Requires Ego+20" or "Requires Ego+30" Limitations . This change would have been one of the changes that might have set a number of us on edge (Duke and myself, in particular ) and we'd be having a probably slightly different discussion in this thread. Note that besides Mental Illusions and Images, we have two other Powers that affect senses in some way: the Transmit adder for Enhanced Senses, and Shapeshift (affects sense groups).

How about a Multipower with two slots: one is the regular Blast, the other is Blast, Only Vs. Entangle?

I think what Duke is getting at is, in Champions II it was Light Illusions; you rolled dice and compared it to INT. However, I did a bit of digging, and in 3rd edition at least, both Mental Illusions and Telepathy were compared to INT (not EGO) as well. Mind Control and Mind Scan were both compared to EGO, as expected. (It was called Images in FH 1e, with the same mechanic as in Champions II; FH also had Sounds, which was the same mechanic but for... sound.)

Thanks for the shout-out, LL. I've got a better version of it in my Google Docs: A Look Back at Previous HERO System Editions.

I looked through The Ultimate Speedster again, and I'd like to second my recommendation of it above. It goes into some detail about toolkitting movement, including running movement per segment rather than per Phase; it also goes into general detail about characters moving at more or less vehicular high speeds. It occurs to me that a vehicle's ground movement acts more like Gliding, only on a surface, plus some small amounts of ground movement for acceleration and maintaining speed. 6th edition makes Gliding into Flight with a Limitation; it would seem to me that you could apply that Limitation to the vehicle's ground movement easily enough. Star Hero suggests that 120m of Flight per Turn in 0G and a vacuum yields 1G of acceleration, and suggests buying it Cumulative. 1G of acceleration is a 0-60 time of 2.73 seconds, which if it were me I'd round to 3 seconds. In freedom units that equates to about 20mph per second. 5 mph comes to 2.2352 meters per second, which Aaron Allston rounded to 1" per segment in Autoduel Champions. I'd probably round it to 2m/segment and call it good. Car Wars tells us that some vehicles accelerate as slowly as 2.5mph/second (1.1 meters/segment, round to 1), and that some will accelerate as fast as 15mph/second (~6.7 meters per segment, which looks like it can round to 7). (If you want better rounding: 5mph would round to 2m, 10mph would round to 5m, 15mph would round to 7m.) This gives us a range of acceleration values of 1-7 meters per segment squared, with as high as 10 for supercars, 15-20 for faster vehicles (usually rocket powered). 5 meters per segment, cumulative, would be 60 meters per Turn. Divide that by the vehicle's SPD; for, let's say, a SPD 3 passenger car, that would come to 20 meters/Phase (note that's 40 Noncombat). With its base of 12m, we spend 8 points to go to 20 meters/Phase. We spend an additional 5 points to buy that total 20m with Cumulative (or in Hero Designer, buy 8m of Ground Movement, add the Cumulative Advantage, and click the "apply to base Characteristic" checkbox), and this becomes 60m per Turn, Cumulative. We can constantly increase our velocity by 5 meters/Segment, up to whatever our total max ends up being... Note that this will only account for a total of 20 meters/Phase, so whatever else we need will end up being on top of that. Our cruising speed (combat move) should be, let's say, 62ish mph, or: 336 meters/Turn, 112 meters/Phase, 28 meters/Segment. We've already got 20 meters/Phase, so 112-20 = 92. That's Gliding, though, or effectively Running built with the -1 Gliding Limitation. 46 points. +8 meters per Phase, Cumulative (8 points, plus 5 more to make 20 cumulative, for 13 Real Points), plus 92 meters per Phase of Gliding (46 points), means we've spent 59 points on ground movement so far. Our total max is 112 meters per Phase, 336 per Turn, 28 per Segment. We don't even need to buy up a Noncombat multiple; so our max is 125.268 mph (56 meters/Segment) going noncombat. (If you insist, we buy the Running usable as an additional Movement mode: Flight, for a +1/4 Advantage, then we buy it as Gliding (-1) and Only Along A Surface (-1/4). I'm willing to let a +1/4 and a -1/4 cancel out for less math if you are...)

Hey, I resemble this remark! (I had colored pencils too... )

Additionally, the original vehicle rules from Champions II (the first-gen supplement) are more like what you're describing than anything since 4th edition. The rules in Autoduel Champions, Danger International, and Justice Inc. are based on the ones there as well. Besides segmented movement, vehicles there have acceleration, deceleration, max range stats among others, but no SPD score; they include rules for determining when a character can use their SPD. Mass and size are effectively "figured" based on the vehicle's Size, DEF, and BODY. Champions II is also available in the Hero Games store, and I recommend checking it out (not least because I prefer that era's vehicle rules to the current). Danger International also included dogfighting and vehicle chase rules (not included in Champions II, but they should have been). DI and Justice Inc. both include subsets of the vehicle movement rules optimized for cars, but none of the design rules from either Champions II or Autoduel Champions; vehicles there are considered equipment, in the same way that weapons are. The vehicle construction rules in Autoduel Champions are adapted from Car Wars; Aaron Allston wrote Autoduel Champions and was a pretty regular Car Wars developer for a while as well, so this is not surprising. You can see the Car Wars influence on the movement and vehicle control rules if you squint, very much filtered through a first-gen Champions and Hero lens. Even though Autoduel Champions includes the Car Wars helicopters rules, it doesn't convert them to Champions; if you wanted to build aerial vehicles, it wouldn't be that hard to convert, between the rules in Champions II and the ones here. (As part of my dream "Champions Pi" compilation of first-gen rules into one volume, I wanted to expand the vehicles section to include all of the movement, dogfighting, and chase rules from the standalone games.)

You might be tempted to have players roll a Driving roll on every trip. I wouldn't do that. Instead, I'd use what my old group from the 80's called a Luck/Unluck roll. Roll 3d6 plus any Luck dice the character has (which is often zero); count the levels of Luck. Roll 3d6 plus any Unluck dice the character has (ditto); count the levels of Unluck. Subtract the lower from the higher to find net Luck or Unluck. Net levels of Unluck would require a Driving roll, with the exact result depending on both the net levels and the amount by which the Driving roll is failed. (If my math is correct, this means that a typical person with neither Luck nor Unluck dice will have an unmitigated three levels of Unluck slight more often than 2 2/3 of every thousand trips.) The typical Everyman has an 8- Driving roll. Note that failure doesn't necessarily mean catastrophe, though this is a "daily driver" rather than a focused adventure. How does a driver reduce their chances of failure? Same way you do IRL. Give yourself Extra Time to reach your destination, drive defensively, know your route (Area Knowledge as complementary), keep your car in good condition (oil changes and other routine maintenance as recommended by the manufacturer). Of course, a route you drive every day might grant you an automatic +1-3 bonus rather than requiring an Area Knowledge roll. Of course, the net levels of Luck are as helpful as net levels of Unluck are unhelpful. 1-3 levels of Luck can get you there faster, with less fuel usage and tire wear, or even mitigate a crit-fail on your Driving roll. One level of Unluck might not even trigger a Driving roll; two would for sure, but even a crit-fail on this roll wouldn't necessarily result in a catastrophe; it might mean a flat tire, running out of gas, engine trouble, a ticket, or being late to work. Three (or more) levels of Unluck would trigger a roll, with possibly dire consequences for a critical failure. Active opposition (an adventure, in other words) trumps all of the above, of course.

As a matter of fact, yes! An Acrobatics or Breakfall roll lets the target mitigate some of the effects of the Martial Throw. The same would apply here for a Driving roll instead.

Back on topic: there's a thread here I started some years ago with a link to a document I wrote with some ideas for characters, Talents, and mechanics. I did PIT maneuver as a Martial Throw with Weapon Element: vehicle. I do second the use of Autoduel Champions along with Danger International and Justice Inc. Also take a look at the Ultimate Vehicle and Ultimate Speedster from 5e.

I will so attest. That was seriously one armored package!