BNakagawa

Re: What Character Would You Do? I started this thread as a mini-protest to the infestation of WWYCD#blah threads. Nobody got the joke.

Re: PLEASE ! No more 'What would your character do ?' threads Just put them in their own section! Those people who regularly read and respond to them can go do so. The rest of us can read regular forum threads without having to skip over dozens of WWYCD#313484 threads.

Re: What to do about missing evidence? So now he's a kidnapper? You aren't helping. Any mage of any skill ought to be able to procure eggs of some other sort that can be altered to look like dragon eggs to the untrained eye. If they're very skilled, then even to the trained eye. If he's got some sort of honor code that precludes any sort of chicanery, then he's in a bit of a pinch. Of course, he's going to have to also state for the record what right he has to the dragon eggs. This isn't D&D and you don't automatically get stuff because you snuffed the previous owner. The world has laws and you either abide by them or you become a vigilante...or a villain. $0.02

Re: Favorite Abuses Examples of defenses that are usually inappropriate include a lack of anything (for example, "lack of Resistant Defenses", "lack of Mental Defense", or "not being a Dwarf") or a defined number of points of defense (for example"10 or more points of Power Defense"). guess where that comes from.

Re: Foil Powers! Don't forget: Sacrifice block. At least one normal in every batch HAS to fall and go prone right under a falling object of great weight, obliging the nearest superhero to swing/fly/run by and sweep them to safety.

Re: Favorite Abuses "Characters ordinarily shouldn't have more than one type of NND attack" -Fred, p171 Anything with more than +2 in advantages always gets a close inspection by any system savvy GM. It's stuff like this that makes me long for the days when NND was a separate 10 pt/d6 power.

Re: Favorite Abuses Hrrm. AP attacks aren't as unbalancing with FW as just raw damage attacks. You're trading 1/3 of your attack dice for 1/4 of his defenses. Generally not a good trade. Even worse if you make your FW roll multiple times. Might be better at leaking a body pip or two on a KA, but you could just use penetrating for that. $0.02

Re: Things that work in comics but don't work in Champions I played in a Champions game like that once. Literally, once.

Re: SPD + DC Balance Method There are so many ways to get around the End problem, I'm not going to waste time listing them. High SPD lower DC encourages playing the stun lottery. Depending on the average defenses, 4d6KA x8 might yield more damage than 16d6 EB x4. The other significant drawback of having 4 big attacks a turn is that a higher spd opponent (and how many opponents do you expect to face with lower spds than 4?) can waste phases to abort to dodge, go desolid, missile deflect, block, dive for cover to render your attacks less reliable/useless and still have time to hit you back. Net advantage: faster guy.

Re: SPD + DC Balance Method

Re: Good places to have battles...and stuff A church. During a wedding. PC involvement optional, but recommended.

Re: p.s.l. for hit location I got away with 3 such PSLs on a pc once, which had an extremely high CV and lots of other levels. On the balancing side, the PC generated 3 damage classes and had a style limitation that precluded converting levels into damage. Awfully useful against archers (bowstrings don't have much def), not very much so against armored targets. Previous to the events of the campaign, the PC had been trained to aim AT the armor (breastplate) and had a CVK. (hence the three PSLs)

I take the fifth.

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks Your tactics are great - in D&D. In the Hero system, and Champions especially, it's a lot more valuable to be able to blow a chunk of damage through defenses occasionally than it is to leak a few through reliably. You'll never stun anybody with a few points, but a whole chunka stun one time in six stands an extremely good chance of stunning a target. Anyone who's ever played this game knows how likely getting stunned leads to getting KOed (or killed) If you're taking a few points here and there, it gives you PLENTY of time to calculate roughly how many more attacks you can take before you're going to have to switch to putting levels on defense, aborting to dodge, block or running away. If you take a buttload of STUN in one go, and you get con stunned, you sit there with your ass hanging out waiting for it to get kicked. You don't get to adjust to the situation, the situation gets to adjust to you. Here comes the move through, the autofire, the haymaker, the offensive strike. Punch your ticket, you're going to KO-city. Your house rule may work great IN YOUR HOUSE. So keep it there. Don't go offering it as a fix for anyone else's problems without also explaining all the other baggage that goes along with it, like having to rewrite half of the villains in the CU, or else explaining why they are obliged to never take head shots when it might be the best way to take people down.

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks I've simplified the question. Would you be willing to tolerate an EB that just rolled 1d6 and multiplied that roll by the number of damage classes? This power has exactly the same minimum damage, maximum damage and average damage as a vanilla Nd6 EB. So, why wouldn't you allow this construct? Essentially, it's a stun lottery for normal attacks. It's a LOT faster than rolling and counting Nd6 damage, especially in high powered champions games.

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks The house rule I am objecting to uses the hit locations for the Stun modifier on Killing attacks, so your point on head shots doubling stun on a normal attack is irrelevant. Buy more DEF? Most of my bricks have maxxed out defenses already and still can't withstand 4d6 KA to the head if the house rule is in use. No fix there. The post clearly states that the hit location rule IN CHAMPIONS, where the hit location rule is generally not used, is a bad idea. Please try in the future to read messages a little more thoroughly before responding.

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks Look, you're talking about using random hit locations for replacing the stun roll. Great. So people don't get a 1 in 6 chance of maxing out the roll. What they get is the ability to automatically max out the roll if they target the head. That's -8 to hit, unless the target is already incapacitated, in which case it's -4. You can entangle people pretty easily, so a Viper 5-team can first catch somebody in an entangle that's transparent to attacks then drill people in the head with rifle slugs until they're unconscious. (this won't take long, trust me) Why does it make the low-DCV brick obsolete? Well, I've played Dex 18 bricks. Often they perform maneuvers that lower their DCV, including Move throughs, grabs and haymakers. There are numerous villains in the CU that can get a 12 OCV trivially. Among them are Vibron, Thunderbolt II, Thunderbird, Tesseract. Some go higher, like Mechassassin and Utility. Were I to play some of my slow bricks in a game with CKC villains and your house rule, they'd get KOed all the freaking time, because any villain with any tactics whatsoever would just shoot them in the head and be done with it. Hence, my assertation that your house rule makes the low-DCV brick obsolete. PSLs are cheap, the ability to shrug off KAs to the head is not. If your house rule was the norm in Champions (hit locations determine stunX) then I'd never play a brick again. I doubt anyone else would either. A couple of PSLs and anybody can KO a brick anytime they feel like it. I've been playing with HERO system hit locations longer than FH has been in print. I was one of the playtesters for Espionage. Please don't try to tell me how hit locations work. Assuming placed shots are available to all combatants, then your house rule is a bad idea for Champions. You seem to think that head shots are rare things, but in a game system that allows people to put up darkess (with personal immunity), area effect entangles that are transparent to attacks, invisibility and shrinking, and so on, it's pretty easy to design something that can catch people in the cranium without too much trouble. $0.02

Re: Nonlethal Alternatives I do not think it is required for every PC to have a non-lethal power for dealing with soft targets, but it is important (depending on genre) for players to adjust their tactics depending on the situation. For me, it would be supremely boring to have a cosmic VPP with no limitations, because you'd just pick a power that would solve the problem and then use it. I'm much more interested in having a limited power set and then trying to come up with inventive ways of using them. Characters who can do everything at the highest level the campaign will allow are not only boring to play, they're boring to be around. Why do I need to bring in my character when that guy's character does everything mine does and more? Oh sure, there's roleplaying stuff, but it's just a lot better to enforce some degree of niche protection to let every PC have their share of the spotlight once the dice start hitting the table... $0.02

Re: Does Champions encourgage conformity? Did any of those sessions involve fights between roughly equal opponents?

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks The default isn't to aim for a specific location? So, what, they only do that when they actually want to win fights? It's entirely obvious from context that this is applied to a champions game because every other genre uses hit locations as a default replacement for the stun roll. So not anyone in any campaign can do this, eh? It's clearly your house rule for a champions-ish game and I think it's a bad idea. Why? because I've had characters stuck in entangles before. If a nasty villain has a shot at you while stuck in an entangle, they'd have to be daft not to take a called shot to your head. You're a gimme and an average roll on 4d6 KA is going to drill you for 70 stun, less whatever defenses the entangle gives you, assuming it isn't transparent to attacks. I don't know about you guys, but 70 stun KOs most of my characters and con stuns the rest of them. As for why the low DCV brick becomes obsolete if hit locations determine stun rolls, well, it's only -8 OCV to target a head and it's only -4 to target the high shot which yields a head shot one time in three. You do the math. The only scenario in which this is not true is if called shots are not legal, which strikes me as just a little ludicrous. In a genre which supports find weakness and people shooting weapons out of your hands and so on, not being able to pick a spot on a target just doesn't fly.

Re: Eliminating Killing Attacks Then you have people buying PSLs vs hit locations and they always hit the STUN jackpot. That, and it renders the low DCV brick obsolete.

Re: All the superhero PCs I've ever played In what passes for chronological order: Angelica - winged mutant with freakishly high dex, martial arts Lant'zr - Alien with wings, claws Mayhem - Alien mercenary gun-fu guy. Later mutated into teleporter. Sniper - Originally Mayhem's DNPC, a half-Korean with guns and issues. Angora - Alien catgirl martial artist with a gun. Shadowcat - Shapeshifting catgirl. Mayhem's kid. Harrier - Half Tamaranian martial artist. Sniper's kid. JadeWing - Dead girl posessed by a dragon's spirit. Flying brick. (C p161) Twilight - Bunnygirl martial brick. Inspired by Daicon IV animation. Adeptus Mechanicus - Mutant kid who built a suit of WH40k armor out of junk. Mittens - Mutant teleporting telekinetic girl. (C p43) Arcana - Girl with magic bloodline, accidently summoned to this era by DEMON. Probably left some out. It's late and I'm still packing for GenCon.

Re: Magnatism and other Elemental Telekinesis I dunno, it sort of depends on the sfx of the TK in question. If your tk involves manipulation of magnetic fields of ferrous materials, then it might be able to strengthen the sheet metal enough to support the heavy object. Iron Man's armor functions the same way. Then it's your TK strength and not the strength of the object that's supporting the object. If, on the other hand, your sfx involves simply moving objects, then that's not going to help a thin metal sheet to support a heavy object.

Re: Reconciling Manga & Batman Now that's just cruel! She's no combat powerhouse, but she's the team's hacker and perhaps the best placed informant any mercenary team ever had. And a cute redhead! Stats be damned, every team of 3+ women needs a cute redhead!

Re: Powers and knacks you favor for your Champions characters I've played just about every viable character type except for mentalist. Never played a mentalist. I've played a large number of characters with various forms of martial arts, but they're usually not dedicated martial artists. I used to favor guns, but I've sort of strayed a bit from that.