Chris Goodwin

Everyone knows I'm not normally one to suggest a Power, but how about a Summon with the appropriate bits and bobs applied? Call it something like "I Know A Guy..." Lucius, if you would do the honors?

I don't know, but that might just edge out "They Live" for best fight scene in film.

Yes, Mark Williams too. He's sort of the first-gen iconic Champions artist!

I would say that if you want to start the game with Contacts, then you'd buy the Perk. If as a player you ever need to ask the GM, "Do I know someone who...?", this definitively answers the question. But another reason to have them in the game (I'm not sure if anyone was questioning this, but I'm addressing it) is so that NPCs can buy them. If you as GM don't want to mess around with Contacts, you might think about repurposing Well Connected. Someone who is Well Connected obviously knows people, so they're more likely to know someone in situation X, so they get a bonus to whatever you roll to decide if they know someone. Or work up some other kind of perk that gives a character a bonus to that roll.

Storn Cook!

I'd have pegged that exactly the other way around. I used Fixed slots to represent different settings of a weapon or gadget, e.g. a Star Trek phaser's stun, kill, vaporize settings. Multi slots to represent someone who has a certain amount of maximum power output; they can switch it from one use to another, but they only have so much. I can't think of an example off the top of my head. Human Torch, maybe?

According to 6e2 p. 10, voice can be treated as a "sense" (it literally puts it in quotes). So.. Entangle, blocks a sense (voice).

"Stunned" has always meant what you call CON-Stunned. "Unconscious" is when a character takes enough STUN damage to leave them at 0 or negative STUN.

Assume I'm the GM. Bob and Alice are quibbling over points. Carl, meet Hugh. Hugh, Carl.

Well...you'll be mathing it out to the extent that they have values, right? Same in all versions? See, here's what I'm getting at when I say "editions don't matter". "Mathing it out" is really where they matter the most, which is to say... not very much at all. I can, within probably a few decimal places of 99.9% accuracy, build the same character in at least 5th and 6th editions. Any edition, if I'm willing to import parts from one or another, but for the sake of this I'll stick with those two. They'll have different costs, and one or the other will take some build-gyrations, but I'm confident of this statement. The big difference? The costs. What I'm getting at is: with very few exceptions, the differences between editions are point costs. And that's what we're quibbling over. If I want to build the Thing with 18 DEX, 10 OCV and 4 DCV -- which build I'm accepting for the sake of argument -- I can do that in 5th edition, without resort to Combat Skill Levels, thusly: DEX 12 (6 points) +6 DEX, Does Not Improve DCV (-1/4) (14 points) +12 DEX, Only Improves OCV (-3/4) (21 points) 30 DEX for purposes of OCV only (therefore OCV 10), 18 DEX for all other purposes but DCV (therefore 18 DEX), and 12 DEX for all purposes (therefore 4 DCV). Total cost is 41 points. Even less if I want to hit the breakpoints, but ... at this point, really? (I put those particular Limitation values where I did because "Does Not Improve DCV" doesn't limit as much as No Figured Characteristics (-1/2), and "Only Improves OCV" limits it more than No Figured Characteristics.) When all is said and done... yes, it was easier in 6th edition. DEX 18 (16 points), OCV 10 (40 points), DCV 4 (5 points), +0.8 SPD (8 points). Total cost is 69 points. The difference is... in 5th edition we've done more pencil writing and pushed more calculator keys. In 6th edition we've spent more points. (I said pencil because I'm not sure you could get this build out of Hero Designer, without using your pencil anyway.) Which edition is better? Whichever one you went into this more inclined to like. What's the real difference? Point costs. It's like we're quibbling over whether Aid should cost 5 points per d6, or 10 points per d6, or 6 points per d6.

Before 6th edition, the way to build a character who was a highly skilled combatant without being an Olympic level gymnast was... to not buy them Acrobatics Skill. Just kidding (just serious?), but where I was really going with that was, Combat Skill Levels. I'd have rather seen the CV's either not decoupled from their former parent stats, or to have kept them coupled together within themselves as CV and MCV. Let me ask another question. Regardless of edition, if you (the general you, so anyone can answer) were going to run or play in a "Pointless Champions" game with no maximum points, what would you do with OCV and DCV? Assuming your edition of choice is 6th, would you have kept OCV/DCV at DEX/3? Assuming your edition of choice is not 6th, would you have set them as desired? To be honest, I probably would have kept them at their DEX/3 levels, regardless of edition. If I wanted to separate them I probably would have done so with Skill Levels. I guess a follow up question: if your edition of choice is 6th: when you're building a character, what is it that leads you to build one CV higher or lower than the other? Character concept, sure, but what specifically? And what leads you to buy OCV or DCV rather than Combat Skill Levels, or vice versa?

I don't think he thinks that. I didn't, until I looked a bit more into the Thing and saw that he's at peak human agility; he's also rated at non-superhuman speed. So yes, he could very well be close to a match for Usain Bolt. I mean: he played (American gridiron) football, and made it through United States Marine Corps basic training, OCS, and flight school. When we look at Hal Jordan and Carol Danvers for Dexterity, speed, and SPD, we ought to be putting Ben Grimm right there with them.

6e2 p. 98 has a list of what Advantages are typically considered to add to DC (including the "final list is up to the GM" disclaimer). Range Based On STR is not on that list, nor is Reduced END, and I wouldn't consider it to be one that affects the way damage is done to the target. It seems to me that there's a quirk of some kind in Hero Designer that's displaying it as +1 DC. It looks to me as if it should be +2 DC, and I'd just treat it as that. It's a "cross out machine gun, write in pizza oven" kind of situation.

When I've played under 6th edition... actually sitting down at the table and rolling dice and counting movement and BODY and STUN... I was hard-pressed to notice a difference between 6th and other editions. If you had looked really closely you could tell, but it was pretty hard. Sometime during the period between the last year or so of 4th edition and the first couple of years of 5th edition, I decided that the way I would run my games forever henceforth would be: if you can describe what you want your character to do, I will figure out how to make it work within the rules, even if I have to come up with some new rules. Now it's "... or use some from another edition". We have one system, spread out through a bunch of games from 1981 to the present; gameplay is close enough that the editions are completely illusionary, and every piece exists as part of the toolkit. It's almost enough that the real differences are: 1st through 3rd used 1 END per 5 Active Points (and levels of halving to reduce it), a -1/3" Range Modifier, and diminishing returns on Disadvantages. 4th and 5th used 1 END per 10 Active Points (and a flat Advantage to reduce it to half or zero), range modifier based on doubling distances, and caps per category on Disadvantages. 6th is just like 5th, except it decoupled Figured Characteristics and got rid of Comeliness. There are plenty of dials and switches GMs can set... Knockback or Knockdown? Impairing/disabling wounds? Hit Locations or not? To me, we can add END Cost and Range Modifier and Disadvantage handling to that. All of this nitpicking to figure out which edition is better? I have to admit I've done my share of it... but I don't think it's relevant anymore. We can all get ahold of very nearly every Hero Games publication, ever, legitimately on PDF, and use whatever pieces and parts from whatever book we want in our games. It's all "the HERO System". Does it really matter if one part was invented in 1981 or 1985 or 1989 or 2002 or 2009?

I myself favor the Action! System over Fuzion, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it's freely available under the Open Game License.

Ain't almost nothin' perfect...

I see this as a reason SPD shouldn't reflect movement... but I'm not in the least advocating that we decouple those. It's been years since I've seen an OHOTMU, but there's a Marvel Wikia that says this about him: It also puts his "Speed" rating, which measures movement, as "normal human". I'd put his SPD at a hard minimum of 4. I would say that he might very well count as an Olympic class sprinter. "Peak Human Speed and Agility" for sure says DEX 20, SPD 4. My point is, I've seen "The Thing is slow and clumsy" a lot, and I wanted to break that meme. He's not slow and clumsy. He gets tagged by agents a lot because why waste time dodging when their attacks will bounce off his rocky hide?

Just to point out... Ben Grimm ran with a street gang as a child... played football in high school, went to Empire State University on a football scholarship, and served in the US Marine Corps as a test pilot in WWII. I'd say that qualifies him for at least DEX 18, SPD 4-5.

If your magic system has all spells Require A Skill Roll, some GMs base the Active Point penalty on the total number of Active Points worth of maintained spells, not just the current one.

Can the staff be taken away from him, and if so how easily? How easily can he get it back? This defines whether it's a Focus or not. The ability to teleport it about him is entirely a special effect. If it lets him use his other (non-Ranged) Powers through it as if he were touching them himself, then just buy it as additional reach (Stretching, 2m). If you're trying to apply Usable On Others to Teleport in order to use on the staff... that's not even necessary, given what you're describing.

If you have Mind Scan, here's a tip: scan villains the first time when you have them in line of sight. That way, at that time you'll have no penalties for number of minds in the area (you're scanning one mind); once you've Scanned them you'll have familiarity with their mind, and can get a familiar mind bonus for next time you scan them. If there's a teleporter in the group, scan them and maintain the scan as long as you can. Buy levels with your Ego Roll so that when they do teleport, you're less likely to lose the Mind Scan. Here's one I've wanted to try: when the villains are in an area doing their crime, back off and let them steal the thing. Then follow them. Mind scan their teleporter as above, if necessary. Once they're away from the city, preferably closer to their own base, then show up and start pounding on them. Alternately, follow them and engage over an unpopulated area.

I'd say, describe it just the way you did, make your Breakfall or Acrobatics roll, and you did it. Max of a half move if you want to attack after. I think the half-phase to pick it up is if you're a non-Breakfallin' pregnant yak type who leans down in combat to pick it up.

4 hours. I think I had half an hour or so left at the end.

Mostly it's for building powers, and involves switching to the right sheet, entering some data, making some choices, then copy-pasting to another sheet, repeat until done. It has no saving functionality, except for saving a copy of the whole spreadsheet. To make multiple powers you need to repeat the above process multiple times. But it does the math for you, which is not nothing!