MitchellS

Re: Some Thoughts On Rules Homing's a type of attack that keeps coming at you until it hits you [or it's deflected, or tricked into hitting something else, or runs out of energy trying to hit you]. It's completely independent of the character once it's released. Think Darkseid's omega beams or Yondu's arrows [i believe he could control misses with a whistle]. In Champs it's handled with the Nega-Beam power [though I find that convoluted and overly complex].

Re: "Official" rules? Who cares?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? You get to use them at a whim as long as it fits within the genre. You're limited to needing hero points but if you don't have an actual hero point to use you can achieve the same effect by using extra effort [which is very similar to Hero's pushing] and suffering the fatigue penalties.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? 350 starting points is a suggested "guideline" for a standard superhero game. I don't think people are confused by the word in that context and I don't think anyone is confused by it within the power skill.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? The same for Ultimate Skill:

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds?

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Yeah, and that 7 int small child doesn't have it either. Unfortunately Grond is 2 points lower then the child too.

Re: Power as Def I'm not much into making a power weaker by giving it an advantage. You make something weaker by giving it a limitation. If your 4d6 drain doesn't work as well as my 4d6 drain due to yours giving characteristic defense then yours should have a limitation on it.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? There's a vast difference between the two systems in regard to stunting. Assuming we use the optional power skill rule you can do a 100% stunt with a -9 roll and a -4.5 limitation. That effectively means you're going to need a 20- roll to have a 62% chance of success of getting the stunt [and even then you're only going to be allowed to use the stunt once or twice before you become required to buy it]. So you're looking at a cost 15-20 points to be able to stunt [and if you don't pay those points you can't stunt at all]. How often do you see superheroes fail their power stunt in the comics? I think they answer you're looking for there is never. I'd also say that most power stunts in comics are not caused by "dire circumstances" but are rather just interesting ways of choosing to use your power in that panel. Sure there's the occasional "dire circumstance" stunt where Banshee needs to stop the missile from hitting the island and killing everyone but those are the exception, not the norm. The amount of limitation required to do these casual stunts is excessive, IMO. The two systems aren't comparable [and that's not even taking into account all the other things you can do with extra effort and hero points in M&M].

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Again, the point was that many villains who were weaker then Grond got rebuilds that accounted for the point inflation. Grond didn't.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Those rules were published in the Champions genre book long before getting reprinted in the Ultimate Brick. And no one can can really believe it takes only 91 body to destroy the planet when it takes 40 body to destroy a tank.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? I think the point of the thread was to complain about why Grond doesn't perform the same way in 5e that he did in 1e-4e. In early editions Grond was a group threat unless you had fire or mental. In 5e he's a pushover who's been surplanted by other villains who he used to be superior to.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy?

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? If you'd read the entire thread then you'd have noticed that I did a short breakdown for how the Champions [sans mentalist or pyro] would take out Grond in a turn [and most people consider the Champions under built as starting lever characters].

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? I have 3 house rules. One deals with aura costs [damage shields in Hero] because M&M's taken the same approach to duration that Hero did [i don't agree with the extra cost in Hero too]. The other deals with movement mph [i consider the mph listed to be accelerated instead of move action]. The final changes the shrinking costs extras for strength to power feats [though I'm starting to think I misinterpreted something Steve Kenson said about it]. In 1.5 years of play those're the only house rules we've needed. At it's core M&M's 4 color. It's more about playing Batman in the JLA rather then alone in Gotham City. If you want to seriously get into subgenres then you need the optional rules book [M&M breaks its game down into core and optional rules in 2 books rather then putting them all in 1 book like Hero does]. Mastermind's Manual contains all the optional rules you'd ever need to make a game as lethal or dark as you can imagine. M&M's subgenre books do basically the same thing Hero's does: tell you the best way to use the M&M rules for the various subgenre. They have 2 subgenre books out now [Golden Age and Agents of Freedom with Iron Age due out in the summer] and the upcoming Paragons campaign setting's [Gen Con book] entirely about doing darker "Heroes" style games [first supers] with M&M.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? IIRC, this was covered in the other M&M thread. The Ultimate Skill clearly states that power skill is limited to 30% of the power stunted from unless 30% doesn't give you enough active points for 1-2d6 of effect. There's nothing in any of the books which agrees with your posted method.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? Hero players have a certain mindset that seems to like to make things more complicated then they need to be. M&M's a game that thrives on simplicity and player/gm interaction. Often those two things don't match. Hero players spend a lot of time trying to deconstruct every aspect of the game. That usually just ends up confusing the non Hero gamers who couldn't care less how something was built, but only care how it works.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds?

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? You'd also need to throw in the transparent to physical addy, as well as the indirect addy on all your attack powers. And then you're going to get back to that question about whether or not you really want to spend such a large chunk of your 350 points on a single ability. There's not doubt that there's ways to do it in Hero. The trick is to be able to do it at a reasonable cost and not requiring to break the rules in order for it to work.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? Overall I think the thread's getting sidetracked with the same topics this subject always gets sidetracked with. It's not really about which game is better. Both games work equally well. It just comes down to the level of detail you want in a game. Some prefer the cloaked versatility of M&M and others prefer the obvious versatility of Hero. I happen to prefer M&M for supers because I find it to be more in tune with the comic book genre then Champions. There are other genres I'd use Hero for [like the SWAT game I mentioned above].