SpydirShellX

Re: Negative Statistics I wish. There's some game effects that work that way. But nothing easy to build. That kinda close to what I want. The problem is for that example is that it's continous/uncontrolled... meaning I want it to automatically switch between them when it finishes one without the character using it doing anything. Yes, but wouldn't it be neat if there were cooler effects they happened when they were so drained.

Re: Questions on regen/resurrect 1) 8 Charges Never Recover (+current life for nine) 2) Depends on the FX and powers...if the regen could prevent dying obviously the person couldn't come back. Zombie defined as a disease... immortal is probably immune. If both were based on coming back after death... depending on the SFX of each, but if they were 'balanced' I'd go with half-zombie. But each futher death would turn the character more and more into a zombie.

Re: New Judge trying to understand Unstoppable Healing Um... point one... he has to switch the powers in his phase. That means if he gets knocked unconscious when he's on the 2d6+1 regen mode... no ressurect for him. Transforms... none of the abilities there affect transform. As a GM... I wouldn't allow inherent on anything in a multi-slot. The idea behind inherent is that the power can't be taken away. Per the book (5ER p258) Inherent requires Always on.... I would include in this in preventing switched out of by a multi power. Ressurection is a stop-sign power. And the text in the book says that "A character buying Resurrection Healing must define a reasonably common way to prevent Resurrection from working" (5ER p188) Also, for the multipower. "In particular, GMs should require characters to buy Reduced Endurace for each slot, not for the reserve as a whole." (5ER p319) With these two and dropping the inherent, real cost of the reserve becomes 28 and each slot becomes 2 cost. It thus becomes vulnerble to drains (and frameworks have a particular vulnerability there). Not to mention a sudden hit if he is using the wrong mode... or whatever the ressurection's preventative device. Also, his heal any attribute... not sure what that covers... only characteristics? If then flashes still work. Not to mention, you don't have to kill a character to run the story. Wolverine, for example, has had some interesting stories and he's pretty much invincible. Entangles, Mental Illusions, Mind Control, Stick him in vacuum (orbit for the next 10 million years?), or get him framed an have him put in for a lifetime sentance in prison. It's a role playing game... make him role play character interaction rather than fights if he absolutely insists on having a character that can't be killed. He gets killed in a car accident in his public ID... how's he going to convince everybody that he's still alive?

Re: Luck as a Characteristic I think in the real world luck also tends to be a bit more specific. You don't get many people who are lucky at every thing. You have people who are lucky at card games, or at getting the last seat on the bus, or beginner's luck. I don't think dodging luck would be found in the same person who was lucking at poker.

Re: How to: model 'quicksilver' Personal Immunity. Quicksilver madness - that would be a difficult one to represent. As I recall, he needed an injection (which he was slowly becoming immune to) otherwise he blew the lid on his id. He basically started having no impulse control... and cosidering as the character started with very little impulse control to begin with.... Also, the madness would occur whether or not he used his abilities, but much faster when he started to use them. I'd want to define the side effect as some sort of hideous aglomination of Dependance and Psyhcological Limitation. Then have the side effect bump up the time on it. My other idea was a sort of END Reserve that was recharged by the drug, but when it dropped to 0, he went bonkers. The problem with this one, is that he could still use the power (and without limit) once he had gone bonkers.

Looking at the rules I noticed that negative statistics are rather weird. The primary ones all have nifty effects. Generally requiring a roll to avoid some effect. This means that they get harder and harder to avoid the effects. COM has a slight wierdness in that you can actually get an advantage for having a negative value (which is especially weird since there is no rule-based advantage for a positive value). The weirdness continues when we get to the figured characteristics. Suddenly we have a series of abilities that simply have a cut-off. At zero they loose all the benifits of positive values, (however neccessary positive values of STUN and SPD have) but they have no furthur effect. This actually matches the way powers and such are treated by adjustment powers. Seems to me it might be interesting to have "negative zone" abilities to go with the above powers. Anyway, in addition to the above thoughts, I have a question when a drain affects multiple characteristics at a time, it affects them in relation to the active points in the power. On multiple occasions I've come across a situation where I want to drain them all at the exact same rate, yet due to the way the points work, this becomes very difficult, if not neigh impossible to do. Example 1) Had a nasty attack that was deadly, but only in the long run. I'd like to build it as a Drain END, then STUN, then BOD - kinda like a long term enviromental effect. However, the problem becomes that END costs 1/2 a point, stun costs 1 point and BOD costs two. I'd like to drain at a Standard Effect rate of 1 point no matter the what it was effecting. Yet, in order to do this, I need to buy it a 1d6+1 drain (an annoying uneven amount to purchase), but for most of the effect I'm only using 1/2 a point. Now this ability has a lot of advantanges making it actually pretty expensive active cost (and thus END cost) for a function the probably won't even come into play. Example 2) Decided I wanted a character with a defender ability. So I provided this guy with Aid to his (or Others) all defenses at once(+2). However, they tend to cost differing amounts. Armor is 1.5 per point, Power and Mental 1 per point, Flash 5 per point (the character had 5 sense groups to defend), KB Resist 2 per point, and Lack of Weakness 3 per point (normal, resistant and exotic). Example 3) Drain all movement powers/ aid all movement powers. Anybody have any simple ways of overcoming this?

Re: Artifacts What happened to the Fortress of Solitude, then? Seems like that would be a far more likely place to stand the test of time than Metropolis or the ruined city of Metropolis or whatnot.... plus with a mixture of DC and Marvel, you could have the Fortress of Solitude located in the Savage Land (talk about a place time forgot). BTW, What's the walking stick in the OP about?

Re: PCs are not the most important in the world The way I ran the campaign, the city had one main defender. Which I promptly killed off in the campaign's introduction... thus in one fell swoop giving the PCs a good reason to work as a team, introing some of the badguys they might meet later one, hinting at some of the bad guy's potential weaknesses and strengths, and providing some backstory. Plus it tells them to think rather than let the bad guys gang up on them.

Re: Luck as a Characteristic Besides... should the skill levels count for the amount of knowledge about the game... or even Science Skill: Statistics as a roll to assist your luck-based gambling?

Re: Super Teams Compete! While the A-List shows up to finish off the foes "Looked like you needed help, citizen." ("Citizen" is superhero for loser.) and get to enjoy playing games of foosball and air hockey between patrols in their Fortress of Amazing-a-tude.

Re: Time travel Dr. Who style - Hero Universe The Law of Death seems too harsh too me in some conditions. I like the idea that it makes death have perminant results for the characters in a time travel story. However, there should be some limit where it doesn't apply. If the players want to put forth the effort required, it should be posible to undo a death. Where's the fun in time travel if you can't change things? Of course, I kinda like the concept of Temporal Momentum in my time travel stories. History has momentum and kind of rolls on past the small changes. This is very helpful for ignoring the minor changes caused by stepping on the wrong ant or so forth. Changes to the time line require effort. Death and Life tend to be two of the greatest forces for change against the time line. This is due to the fact that lifeforms tend to be one of the largest forces for change... otherwise objects would follow straight physics. Death - eliminates a lifeform and all decendants not yet conscieved that were originally decended from them. Life - While someone is alive, they make choices and choices change things. Saving a life or creating one tends to have great effect. In both cases, the power of that life or death carries with it the Temporal Momentum that the lifeform had. Thus killing Hitler for example would have a much greater effect on the timeline than killing somebody on the street... both however would have effects reaching beyond the immediate. However, that Temporal Momentum carries two problems with it. One, it's hard to change. Hilter would be very difficult to kill. A potential assasin might find random people getting in the way of shots, chance messing up his attempts. Generally a person who wants to make major changes to the timeline must work at generating his own Temporal Momentum first. Secondly, what happens to the energy when the change is made? Sometimes the momentum might skip over to something else. Ex. Twilight Zone? episode where Hilter (isn't he just a great time travel example?) gets killed as a child, so it ends with the nurse substituting another child for him. When he grows up, everybody thinks the child is Hitler. Even more problematical is if it jumps to the time traveller. Our time traveller starts wearing a funny mustashe and begins going megalomanical. (This one is hard to pull off since most of the players tend not to want there characters to have to flip over into bad guys) Other times it might stick around... Unluck anybody? The person saved might start having a series of accidents that try and return things to normal... think there was a series of movies based on that concept. Or maybe the time traveler starts having waves of misfortune follow him or her. Normally, I'd try an keep this aspect of the time traveling hidden from character knowledge. They have to work at things or things start not going their way... let them figure out why. Although having a villian aware of the 'rules' makes things interesting. Somebody traveling through time, killing off important people.... to make himself invincible/immortal. Basically, in order to stop a death of a time traveller (which tends to pick up a lot of temporal momentum during their journey), requires something equivalent. "There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Re: Analysis: Extra Limbs - SFX or Power?

Re: Seeimgly Strange Characters to Model

Re: Timing is everything Hmm... new idea For the full phase actions... Hold an action - if you hold an action until the start of your next phase, you can use it to perform a full phase action. You'd still probably have to keep track of whether you moved in the previous phase for move throughs/bys. You could turn the Recovery action into a action that only requires 1 of the new phases, but only recovers 1/2 REC.

Re: Timing is Everything!! The Character That was the first though I had when seeing the idea... now to remember how that episoded ended... Some sort of summon - anything that runs on a schedule. Trains, Busses, etc. Some sort of limited Clairvoyance/Danger Sense. Invisibility to Automated Detection - SFX of timing movements with cameras or dodging between pulses of the scanners.

Re: Inverted Hulk Type - Need Help with Limitation Value Are you sure that you should call that a disadvantage? It almost in this case allows your character to defeat the other disadvantage. I'd almost make the character purchase speciallized EGO or PRE to act despite being afraid.

Re: [Campeign Creation Project] Pirates of the Naebbirac Astroid Belt One of the earlier posts mentioned the idea of solar sails. In a multiple star cluster like we have, you could actually work in "currents" of solar winds. Not to mention that the solar sail method would be a good transportation method for anybody trying to avoid sensors. No active drive means less energy to detect... good idea for both pirates and those trying to avoid them. This could lead to all sorts of tactics. "Tacking" against the solar winds. Gravetic Anchors to attach to asteroids. Ion drives would probably be required for working against the solar winds or for chases... although even in a chase you might not want to use it since it could attract more trouble than it's worth. In addition, if we throw a few stars that fluxuate semi-randomly we can even get some weather. Also a black hole coupled with some phenomenon that spits out matter might be an interesting combo. ("The Maw and the Malestrom" comes to mind for names) "Aye, laddy... we pulled in tight near the maw. The gravetic compensators we rattling like ol' Yellowbelly's knees, but they stayed on our tail. Then One-Eyed Jack, he slid us right into Malestrom. Not sure how he did it, but that lost 'em..."

Is it possible to do a drain of a characteristic only to affect part of it? Ex. Drain STR only to affect lifting - doesn't do anything for Damage. Or Drain any Primary statistic only to cause the effects when it hits negative.

Is it legal to add a subtract movement powers simultaneously? Ex. The Superheroic Speedster is running at some speed? Supervillian Sloth drains Speedster's Running, but at the same time has a Running, UbO attack with lower running than speedster was using, but lots of NCM. Would Speedster suddenly be moving at NCM? Or if you did a similar thing, only instead of the Running UbO, you did Aid (Can add adders).

Re: Thoughts on Extra Time Covering you can declare you hit the target at any time. No tracking doesn't hit until the duration is up and automatically misses if the target has moved. Onset could be considered somewhat similar however, in that case you're already hit the target. There's no way for them to somehow avoid being hit even if they move. Now that I put it that way, maybe Offset should be 1/2 less of a limitation.

Re: Timing is everything My thought is about aborts. Previously if you took a full phase action, you could still abort (which took up your next full phase. As it stands, either you could go in debt 3 phases or 2 phases and there'd be a time between the first and second half of the abort that would be a problem. In addition, no longer could you move and then hold half an action for your abort. Unless you want the extra record keeping. Es. OK, I began blocking less than two phases ago, so I can still block.

Re: Random powers? Didn't he go around with an eyepatch for a while? Pirate right there.

Re: Killer Damage and Stun Damage Personally, I find the works "with GM's permission" about the equivalent of a warning sign power. There's the potential for abuse and people should be aware of it... but frankly it's so convinant for modeling certain things, that we're putting it in anyway. I see that warning yield sign and my first responce is to completely ignore it. 'Course I do the same for some of the stopsigns too, but that's kind what the they're there for, to ignore or not as the GM (and sometimes players) choose.

Re: Is this a valid build? My method for dealing with layered force walls is similar for the rules for attacking through objects. For each hex of the objects, it takes an additional point of BOD to get through it. When I deal with layered force walls (autofire or otherwise), I treat each "individual" force wall as if it were one hex. Thus there is some benfit to a single attack in layering defenses, but the main use can be that you might still have some of it up after a hit that breaks the outer part.

Re: Conversions...City of heroes? Was wondering if there's any good sites that explain the way City of Heroes characters work to those of us who haven't played the game?