griffinman01

Re: Clairsentience with time modifiers (5 ed.) It's pretty much word for word what's in 6e according to psyber's quote.

Re: Clairsentience with time modifiers (5 ed.) You could offset those penalties by buying Penalty Skill Levels just like for Range modifiers or called shots. It kind of defeats the purpose since you'll be spending the points you saved on the power to make it usable again. However, one thing you could try discussing with your GM is an alteration to that limitation by making it only a -1/4 but you only suffer -1 per time interval.

Re: Rules question: HTH Limitation I remember that from the original book I used (not sure what edition it was but it had the original Heromaker software on a floppy disc).

Re: Hit Locations, too high or just right? I've always assumed that Vitals were pretty much any internal organ (heart, lungs, etc) which is why it does as much damage as getting shot in the head (at least in terms of Body). As such I'd pretty much assume that any chest armor would probably stop them just for simplicity's sake (I wouldn't even begin to get into an argument about picking specific arteries to hit in order to bypass someone's armor). As for the penalties, they're harsh but fair. I can agree that shooting accurately while under fire is damn tough (unlike the movies) because I have a hard enough time hitting a stationary target that accurately at the firing range. Trying to do it in the middle of a fight would be tough and would require some serious skill on the part of the shooter (though things like scopes definitely make it easier). If it's a big issue in-game though, just buy a couple of combat levels to help out with called shots. They'll still be tough, but you'll have a better chance than a 3 with them.

Re: He's not Bigfoot! He's just a really tall, hairy guy! Nice

Re: He's not Bigfoot! He's just a really tall, hairy guy! This is something that I wouldn't spend Character Points on since it all seems like a disadvantage. I'd go with the Distinctive Features that other people have posted, possibly put a Hunted/Watched by the reporter, and perhaps a slight reputation of "Bigfoot" (I think of it as someone being mistaken for a celebrity. He's not Bigfoot but he looks enough like him that people could make the mistake and hound him like he is). The only positive I see out of this would be if he was trying to intimidate people (ie PRE attacks) and he'd like to try and pretend that he actually IS Bigfoot to make the target freak out.

Re: How do GMs out there handle late arrivals I've never had the problem but I would put them at the same level as everyone else. I keep everyone in my adventures at the same EXP so that there's no competition for bonuses or anything. I do have bonus exp for optional objectives (such as finishing a fight in a certain time limit, using skills to uncover some hidden facts, or defeating a villain a certain way) but that's a communal thing that everyone gets to work for. If the team manages to beat the villain before he has a chance to fire up his ultimate attack, I see that as a team effort and the team should be rewarded. A newcomer is the same way. If you start someone at 25-50 points below the rest of the team it'll make them feel weaker than the rest and it seems like they're being penalized for not being there from the start. Being late to each game is a different matter. I typically have their PC tag along with the rest but have them do stupid things (typically getting the snot beat out of them in some hilariously embarrassing way)

Re: Random elements in Character Construction I've never done randomness in terms of character building but I opted to do some randomness in character background for my Teen Champion scenario. Since we don't get much of a choice in what environment we grow up in I decided to randomize certain factors and then have people pick a back-story to explain them. They ranged from whether or not your parents were happily married/divorced/deceased, how much money they had (dirt poor to filthy rich), their general attitude (overprotective, short-tempered, free-spirit, etc), their knowledge of the PC's powers, and number of siblings. It led to some funny backgrounds such as my PC not even being aware that she had powers (she has extreme luck) until she had it pointed out to her by the headmaster and our mage character being from a rich family who thought her whole wizard get-up was her way of coping with relative isolation at home. The main problem I typically have with randomized stats is that it often creates problems if one PC rolls much better than the others. In D&D I've had someone get a warrior with 18 STR, 17 Dex, and 17 Constitution with no stat being less than 13 while our mage had to put his only 16 in INT in order to make him usable. The warrior loved it because he could do a lot without much help while the mage hated how he couldn't do most of what he wanted. In champions you don't get that kind of potential problem with bad rolls and I kind of like that aspect. Randomness can be a fun tool to mix up character creation, but I don't think it should be the sole determinant when it comes to actually building a character.

Re: VPP Active Points I'm inclined to agree with this since the framework is just another way to buy powers. Each individual power needs to be less than 50 active points but the framework would generally have to be as much as that or more in order to get it to work.

Re: How do you feel about House Rules? I only use house rules for situations that are usually too difficult to try and work out normally (or if the situation isn't in the rules as far as I can tell) or if something doesn't seem right to me about the RAW. For an example of both: 1) I had a player ask me how knockback works against a grabbed target. His brick wanted to punch a guy being held by my average STR individual and we both agreed that the hit would probably rip the character out of her grasp which would be a benefit to the grabbed character (he gets out without having to spend an action) and for the PCs (he was going to be punched into a wall). The house rule I came up with is that you treat it as a break-out roll where the knockback is the amount of body rolled. So if the punch did 8 body and the grabber rolled 5 on the breakout roll (using the bonuses from the martial grab) then the guy would be broken out of the grab and fly back 3 inches. That was the best way I could come up with at the time for an unusual situation. 2) I never liked how throwing an object never gave a damage boost compared to your normal attack because it was always felt like it should be more useful. If you pick up a car and throw it I would think it would do more damage than getting hit by the same guy just by simple velocity rules. To make is simple I made a house rule that you added dice equal to the DEF of the object (the harder it is the more it hurts, and this also tends to correlate with weight) up to the Def+Body as per RAW. Now people have a reason to try and throw a car in combat. House rules don't work in every situation or campaign so results may vary, but I take the stance that sometimes you have to clean things up to make it easier and more fun in the heat of combat. If it takes more than a couple of minutes to try and dig up a specific ruling for an odd situation (another example was how much more damage would you get by grabbing a guy and then doing a jumping piledriver (6 inches of vertical leap) versus a normal piledriver), then it breaks the flow of the game so, as the GM, I'll often rule the best I can on it off the top of my head as a house rule for that day and then find the 'correct' way later on.

Re: Going First I don't recall a rule like that but it sounds like a good idea. The big question would be if the 20 dex person decides to not act when asked at the end of the segment, could he still abort when the 30 dex person acts in that situation? In any case, it seems that either method could work.

Re: Going First I just found this which might help figure things out in the 5e Revised Rulebook (pg 361): Generally, Holding an Action does not affect a character’s Combat Value. If a character Blocks, or uses some other Combat Maneuver that affects his CV, in a Phase, and in his next Phase declares a Held Action, at that point he loses the CV modifiers from the Maneuver. Just because he chooses to delay his Action doesn’t mean his Phase hasn’t occurred, and that ends the effect of a Combat Maneuver. However, his Combat Skill Levels, if any, remain allocated as they were until he changes them. This still doesn't mean player B can't keep aborting if Player A acts first, but if Player A holds his action and Player B does the same, his dodge bonus goes away.

Re: Resistance is useless I find this a real issue too. As I said earlier, in every situation, be it real life, comic books, or fantasy, you can do some serious damage to a person without resulting to blades and guns. How often do you see people get killed with baseball bats in mob movies, or have heroes get broken bones and cuts from getting punched through a wall, or a knight getting an ogre fist in the face. Each of those situations would do massive amounts of stun and generally knock the person out in Champions but I doubt any one of them would do BODY damage. If a super hero in a 400 point game had 24 Def, you'd need to do at least 20-24d6 worth of normal damage to inflict BODY (assuming you don't tank it with a ton of 1s) which would be kind of moot against the average of 80 or so STUN you'd crank out with the same attack (not to mention the 24 or so inches/meters of knockback you'd suffer) just so you could give them a couple of scrapes and cuts, maybe a cracked rib if you're lucky. Something tells me that if the Hulk punted you through a building you'd probably take more than a couple of scrapes, but Champions doesn't seem to cover that. In all honesty the only time you ever see body damage is if you bypass defenses (via Find Weakness a few times) or you use a killing attack. Frankly I'm curious if there's a better way to do this.

Re: Going First It really seems to me that it should be that the bonuses last until the next Segment where the character has an action begins. That or, in the event of the DEX roll for simultaneous actions, the person who wins gets to decide the order in which they attack, ie: using your example, Player A and Player B want to go at the same time and Player A wins the DEX roll so he gets the option to have Player B use his action first in order to force him to act.

Re: Going First You could do what you were saying and keep aborting, but the problem is I don't see how you'll be able to attack in that scenario. It sounds like you'll be trapped on the defensive since your bonuses will fade when your next action would come around, meaning that you'd either be open to attack on the following phases or you reapply your defenses using your next action. Plus, by continuously aborting you're forfeiting the ability to move, keeping yourself in place which opens you up to having people move around to your back and then shooting you there at 1/2 DCV (making that Dodge kind of useless unless your DCV is so bad that half of 3 (or 5 with a martial Dodge) is an improvement). So by going last you can abort to your defensive maneuvers by sacrificing your ability to act in any other fashion, leaving you open for potential exploits later on. One other thing I'm not sure on is if the speedy person acts at the same time as the slower person (who had aborted to a dodge), does the dodge bonus still come into effect? The rules state that it lasts until the beginning of your next phase so if both players act on the same dex (thus requiring the dex roll) is that considered your next phase or is it until the exact instant you get your next action?

Re: Resistance is useless This was exactly what happened my previous campaign where people were using KAs simply because of the STUN multiplier. The allure of doing upwards of 60-70 stun (using 5e rules) off of a 3D6 HKA (which happened a LOT) versus a 9d6 normal attack (max of 54 STUN) was pretty high and a number of people were doing just that to the point where I had to nerf them by using a 3x fixed STUN multiplier (the equivalent of using a 2x fixed one in 6e from the sound of it) to keep things more balanced. It went both ways too since I had one PC take around 50 STUN from a single KA in the start of a match that just about floored him for the whole fight. Eventually even the players wanted the change since those who didn't have KAs as their main abilities were getting pissed at how fast the big baddies went down. Most of them would get to throw one punch before the villains would hit the dirt. The STUN lottery is a huge double-edge sword because you don't want to make the KAs so weak that they do no real damage (ie using a 1-2d6 against 10 rDef simply because you don't want to hit 50 STUN on the attack) or run the risk of one-shotting the guys. I had the PCs fight alongside a tank (along with some soldiers) that had a 4d6 RKA to take out a giant monster. As I designed the fight, I was worried that I would hit a 20 body 5x stun multiplier hit that would take the guy down to near nothing in a single shot. That was the fight that I instituted the fixed 3x STUN multiplier and I've never had an issue with the STUN lottery since. Attacks that did high body would still do high STUN (15 Body would be 45 STUN, leaving the guy bleeding and on stunned as it should be) without running the risk of KOing them in one hit. To quote the Book "Remember, a Killing Attack is just that — a kill- ing attack. It’s used to kill or maim other characters. Characters who don’t want to seriously injure or incapacitate their opponents should choose another Power to build their attacks with. A character should never buy a Killing Attack simply because he hopes to obtain high STUN Multiplier rolls. STUN shouldn't be the core point of the killing attack and I have a hard time accepting anything that would make it the core point again. It was bad enough having the risk of a 5x STUN multiplier hit and I'd rather not have to spend the time agonizing over the possibility of a lucky roll ending the session in a single shot. EDIT: Found a couple things that needed to be fixed.

Re: Resistance is useless In order to help mediate the complete randomness of STUN coming from KA I've started using a 3x STUN multiplier for all normal KA (if you purchase +1 to it you use 4x and so forth). That's one less die to roll and it keeps it reasonable in both extremes. I hardly ever see killing attacks do less than 10 STUN or more than 30-40 in most cases (this is assuming a 2d6 or 3d6) making it a little more balanced. The reason why I made this change is that I had people hitting 60-70 on STUN from killing attacks and that was stunning people on normal 5e rules. If you try to use the proposed idea of rDef being the only defense on STUN for killing attacks, even 30-40 STUN would probably stun most people. Try getting that same result from an appropriate amount of normal damage (6d6-9d6). I agree that it's odd that 1 point of rDef giving 100% of your PD against the STUN is odd, but I think having STUN from KA going only against rDEF is going to really keep killing attacks from working as intended. For example: You take a 3d6 HKA against a normal super hero who has 12 rDEF. The average BODY from that attack is going to be 10-11 and, assuming you're using my 3x STUN multiplier house rule (which is pretty much the average anyways) you get 30-33 STUN. From that attack the hero takes no BODY and roughly 20 STUN, which would probably stun most heroes built on 250 points. If you up it to 4d6 HKA and say 16 rDEF (to simulate more powerful heroes) the results are about the same (average damage is 14 BODY and 42 STUN resulting in no BODY damage and 26 STUN). The body from this 'killing' attack is negligible compared to the ability for the attack to stun the target. At this point people would probably see Killing attacks as a cheap way to bypass normal defenses (similar to Armor Piercing) so they can stun people easier. Killing attacks are meant to kill and yet using this idea it sounds more like the STUN is the real threat from it. People will buy more rDEF (It's half the cost of regular DEF after all) to try and keep from getting stunned by these killing attacks, further reducing the actual BODY they'd take to the point where they would probably take a Tank shell to the gut without a scratch. At this point they're no longer killing attacks and you pretty much lose anything that would actually deal any BODY damage. This would make the BODY stat worthless because nothing would ever touch it.

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: The thing I always look at is that, even in today's smart phone society, people still go to school and learn facts/knowledge that you can't easily find on the internet. I'm a scientist and I can tell you from experience that trying to find anything really scientific through a google search is nearly impossible. Not only that but, as other people have stated, a lot of the information that's posted is wrong (either due to malicious intent to mislead people or simple misunderstanding) so search engines are a mixed bag. As someone who's done some teaching I can assure you that google is generally just meant to be for quick facts and no real knowledge. You can't expect to find and understand the complete history of the Roman Empire, the biochemical function of proteins, or how a car works in a minute search. A lot of this is identifying what kind of data is readily available through a search engine. You could identify a chemical as toxic pretty easily, but it would be a hell of a lot harder to find out how to counteract the toxic effects. This is where the GM would have to draw the line on the ability so that people who have KS: Industrial Chemicals or SS: Chemistry get what they paid for. Personally I'd limit it to quick facts: The name of the current president of a company, when did WW2 start, is Cyanic acid corrosive, etc. If you're looking for what the company does, the causes of WW2, or what are the differences between Cyanic acid and isocyanic acid, then I'd say you're SOL and can't find the info in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, you have to deal with the whole reception thing. EDIT: A fun way to determine if you could use it for a specific fact is have the player physically try to find the info himself in 30 seconds or so on his/her smart phone.

Re: Resistance is useless I still use 5eR so I had no idea that they changed that little rule. I'm not a fan of the change (it doesn't make sense to me that you'd have any defense against a sword/gun without some kind of armor or thick hide) since I didn't think it was broken in 5e. I kind of like psyber's idea about decoupling stun and body. In all honesty the only way you see body damage as it stands is when it's a killing attack or the attack is disproportionally large to the character (something like 22D6 attacks against 20 def) which isn't the case. You see it all the time in comics where normal, non-killing attacks, do body damage (broken bones, cuts, internal bleeding) but in order to get that effect in Champions you'll generally hit the guy so hard they'll be knocked out and probably half a mile away before they take any real physical damage from the attack. By using the resistant defense versus body, the odds of you seeing some body damage occur in normal fights goes up by a considerable amount. The downside that I see (and as also pointed out by psyber) is that it would also nerf killing attacks to the point of uselessness. Assuming that every d6 of normal damage (5 points does for 1d6) does 1 body then 3d6 would do 3 body, which is roughly the same as 1d6 of killing attack (3.5 on average) for the same price (not including STR bonuses and the like). It's a hard thing to balance out and the only thing I can come up with is doing something similar to automaton defenses where you get 1/3 of your normal defenses to resist the body damage from normal attacks and then any resistant defense is added to it. That or just accept the rule as it is.

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: Knowing how google works and what kind of hits you can get on broad searches I think it would also be pretty funny for the occasional misinformation to pop in. In all honesty, I agree that it shouldn't be a skill but a factor of the technology. I think that everyman skills should be stuff that you can inherently do as a human without any equipment. With regards to google, I would probably have it be a basic (11-) roll that would follow normal KS restrictions, but at a reduced cost (say -1 to the roll rather than -5 per level). You could do expanded time or have computer programming as a complementary skill. Though I think in most cases the GM could just give you the info without the roll unless it's a major plot spoiler.

Re: Knockback I actually see people in my playgroup buy KB resistance a lot. Most of our melee characters purchase some of it simply because they want to stay in the fight rather than getting knocked prone and have to spend time getting back up and then using the rest of their action to run back in for another round of the above. Obviously the slower/heavier people tend to buy this since it fits the character a bit more and the martial artists tend to not get hit in the first place. In most cases -3 of KB resistance (6 points) is enough to keep your footing in most fights I've been in (using 250-300 point characters) and that's something that kicks in all the time. Its worth depends mostly on how often you find your character picking himself off the ground. If you're doing it off of every shot then 6 points is a pretty cheap price to pay considering all the time you waste recovering from it.

Re: Fear Aura This sounds a bit more in the realm of supernatural rather than basic fear. I'm thinking something like an H. P. Lovecraft kind of creature. Since you're talking about weak-willed individuals I think the MC might be better simply because of the nature of the characteristics. PRE is pretty much charisma, confidence, bravery, and the ability to impress/awe people. EGO is mental fortitude and strong will. If you're dealing with something that's otherworldly and beyond human comprehension, even the bravest of individuals may curl into a quivering ball simply because this is something that they've never seen or dealt with. If we were talking about a snarling bear, then that would be PRE since that's straight bravery but with this we're talking something terrible that would probably have a long-lasting effect on the mental well-being of the target. I've been planning a Lovecraft-style horror adventure and I've been asking myself this same question. I'd go with the MC simply because I think the longer effect is more appropriate for this kind of fear. I mean, seeing a monstrosity from the nether dimensions would probably take people more than a phase to get over.

Re: Fear Aura Either option will work so I guess the real sticking point is how 'scary' this thing is supposed to be. With animals a PRE attack would probably be the best option but if you're talking some kind of hell-spawn that would cause near insanity just by looking at it, then I think the MC version would be more appropriate. As with most things, the proper way to build it is entirely based on the nature of the power and what kind of effect you want it to have.

Re: Pre Attacks It seems to me that PRE attacks should be treated more like Strength contests rather than a mental attack. In other words, rather than assuming a target value you actually have the target (setting the target at 30 PRE) roll the appropriate dice for his presence and use that as the target value. That would put a bit more randomness into the equation and make it so that people with an equal presence could actually intimidate each other. Then you can implement some kind of downside. Something like what I outlined before where if you fail a PRE attack by 10 (you roll 15 and the target rolls a 25) it's as if you got hit with the attack instead, making you miss a half phase.

Re: Fear Aura Actually 5th ed has a "Fear Infliction" power as an example of Mind Control: Mind Control: 10d6, Telepathic (+1/4) (62 AP) Set Effect (Run Away as fast as you can -1/2) cost: 41 points All you would have to do is set it as a persistent ability, give it some kind of AoE effect (I'd say explosion so that it gets weaker the further you are from it, making you less likely to run if you're 30 meters away versus right next to it) and 0 END. It'll be expensive, but you could reduce the effect since 10d6 seems awfully powerful unless this thing is supposed to be some kind of Elder Demon that'll make even the most hardened hero soil themselves. The difference between this idea and what psyber624 suggested is that this would be more 'long-term' since it'll require breakout rolls from the targets and also potentially force them to run back to the fight for a few turns. The PRE idea would work for the current phase and would have to be re-used each turn (to a lesser effect).