Tom Carman

Well, if he is invisible to sight then he is invisible to Magesight that is based on sight. You should build your Magesight with the advantages of sight (targetting, sense, etc.) but without the limitations. With that type of magical perception, you could see spells even when physically blinded.

In one of Diane Duane's Star Trek novels, the Enterprise's morale officer came up with a chess variant that he called 4D Chess. (Spock mildly objected to the name on the grounds that the fourth dimension was hyperspatial not temporal, but he was too interested in the strategic possibilities to complain much.) Pieces could not go backward in time, but you could "time out" pieces to reappear at a future moment of your choosing. The game became about very accurately forecasting your opponent's movements and getting pieces into place to ambush them, while fooling the other side into not doing the same to you. The scheduled return of timed-out pieces could only be altered by a one-for-one sacrifice of moves in the present

Although, one of the points of the book was that simply being smarter isn't always a good thing. The humans made a lot of trouble out among the stars, not so much because they were so smart but because they were good salesmen. And they were helped quite a bit by the fact that Centrans, having generally fewer highly intelligent people, tended to have a much higher respect for people with obvious intelligence. With a generally duller population and slower progress, Centrans also took a longer view in their planning (groundcars vs. the "iron road", "_Planned_ obselescence?!", etc.).

And then there's Christopher Anvil's Pandora's Planet, in which Earth is conquered by not-so-very-bright aliens. Winning the peace afterward was a lot trickier...

Not so much Pulp as Steampunk Fantasy: remember that their Michelson-Morley experiment conclusively proved the existence of the luminiferous aether.

Cap likely also has "Focus of Opportunity" on some of his shield abilities. Remember that while he pretty much always had shields, he didn't start out with that indestructible super-shield.

A phaser is just not all that complicated if handled properly. Basically it's a 3-setting multipower: 1) Stun with variable intensity and spreading. 2) Utility with variable intensity and focus (rock-heating to cutting torch), possibly Continuous. 3) Kill, with a wasteful boostable-charge option to do so much Body that a target "disintegrates". Blowing up the power pack can be house-ruled, possibly requiring a Power skill roll to override the safeties.

There are in fact rules for Surprise (covers the classic attack-from-behind) and Coordinated Attack and Multiple Attacker Bonus (you can't defend as well in several directions at once). Many if not most HERO combats are played out on a hex map with miniatures, which covers issues of "front", "rear" and facing. Just use common sense. Also, HERO is a somewhat generic system, so it probably didn't make sense to have too many special-case rules baked in.

OK, something is not right with the quoting function. I keep seeing an "empty response" message after I hit 'post', so I hit it again.

That sounds like what my brother-in-law refers to as "code vs loose ends".

That sounds like what my brother-in-law refers to as "code vs loose ends".

Sounds like Project Daedalus, with a different fusion plant and far slower pulse rate (1 per minute vs. 250 per second).

Re: Zeppelins Gasbags, yes, but the defining characteristic of a dirigible is the capability of being steered. Directing politicians in a useful direction is arguably harder than herding cats.

Re: CROSS: Secret Agents of the Vatican Source Book John Ringo novels: Princess of Wands and Queen of Wands (Special Circumstances). Haven't read the second yet, but I understand that the Vatican's special strike team puts in an appearance. Special Circumstances is government code-speak for "Stand down, agents; this is a job for those looney wackos that we don't acknowledge to exist."

Re: Limitation Value for Healing that Only Works on Self? I seem to recall Self-Only at -1.

Re: Hit Locations, too high or just right? In Supers games with a GM who has since moved away, PCs and super NPCs were not subject to hit locations. Normals (talking bystanders, not mooks) who took super-level attacks did roll for hit location. The point was that Normals were fragile, so watch your aim.

Re: Building "Combat Stims" or "Pep Pills" If the extra END is just for fueling this one autofired power, you could buy the power at Zero-END. And yes, Charges do switch from a Limitation to an Advantage when you have a whole lot of them.

Re: Modern Action Hero adventure seed- I am recalling a somewhat baroque plot arc in my old Space:1889 game, involving a Russian fur-trading company in Alaska. It was secretly run by the Okrana, salvaging gold from a thousand-year-old Chinese shipwreck and smuggling the gold (in the fur crates) across America and the Atlantic into central Asia to finance a move on India.

Re: Tiered Equipment or "How to fit Arrows and Antimarter in 60-90 AP" The "AP vs. primitive armor" is a good one. But for future armor vs. primitive weapons I would consider, not more defense, but converting a KA to Normal damage. The Body won't get through, but it still delivers a mule-kick of kinetic energy for Stun. As for those "primitive" rocks, clubs and maces, your fancy advanced armor may not be much more protective unless it can do something useful about that raw kinetic force. How good is Kevlar against a club?

Re: More space news!

Re: After The Magic The idea is older than that: Poul Anderson wrote short stories on the concept in the 50s and 60s (collected into Operation Chaos in 1971).

Re: Non-Phase Segments - what is happening then? GURPS combat actions do not involve anything analogous to END or Recovery. Try acting every second in Hero and combats will be either very short (everyone falls over from exhaustion) or very long (everyone buys Zero END on everything, so attacks do less damage and less gets through defenses).

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill Bad as he was, I much prefer Judge Dredd to Judge Death: "All crimes are committed by living beings, therefore..."