Tom

Re: Does Seeker still suck? iirc, Club is a freebie anyhow as far as Weapon Familiarities go... However, he still needs to buy the Weapon Element with his MA to get the manuever bonuses unless I'm mistaken.

Re: more gun bunny goodness. A few years ago I was looking over the price list for Krieghoff... The second highest option added $50k to the base price of the gun... The highest option was POR...

Re: Called Shots and Champions

Had a situation come up in play where it was necessary for a character to break through a Force Wall bought as being Mental Defense... Pretty straightforward, double checked the book to make sure, and discovered what I consider to be an oddity... The method is simple, you roll your dice and total the BODY (as if you had rolled a normal damage attack) and if it exceeds the defense of the Force Wall you break through... My problem is that an Ego Blast (a straight up, do damage attack) has less of a chance to break through than any other mental power of equivalent Active Cost (ignoring adders or advantages)... I'm thinking of making a house rule (not that I really expect it to be an issue very often ) that with an Ego Blast , just sum the dice and apply that against the defense (ala an RKA). My only problem with this being, and RKA is 15pts/full d6 while and Ego Blast is 10pts/full d6... Thoughts?

Re: Hero Central opinions wanted I've only glanced through Global Guardians once or twice, certainly not enough to make a comparison, but I've been playing on Hero Central for about two years now. I've certainly been having fun, but being as open as it is, it means you will find GMs and games you don't care for -- just like FtF. However there are a number of games going in a variety of genres and starting your own game is fairly simple. Take the time to lurk through a couple of the games, and the layout of the Players' Page makes it fairly simple to get an idea of the post rates. Pop into the chat -- by and large we're a fairly friendly bunch and we're more than willing to inflict our ideas and opinions on anyone brave enough to ask ...

Re: Agent combat.... Everyone has had good points, so most of what I'll say is a repeat... To be credible: --The agents have to be able to hit the heroes. --The agents have to be able to hurt the heroes. If the agents cannot hit without an act of diety, or if they do hit the heroes can ignore the attacks, then the heroes are going to treat the agents as nothing more than a minor diversion from the real objective. If you've got the 5e VIPER book, go through the weapon's section. VIPER has a big toybox with weapons suitable for almost every occasion. Given the 4/8 team setup, I make every 4th agent a heavy weapon specialist. You don't have to consistantly gear up for a hero-stomp, but equip agents realistically for their mission. If the agents are robbing a bank, and the heroes are supposed to be on dimension X, or dealing with a planned crisis across town, arm them to deal with cops and if heroes show the agents get creamed and the heroes look good on the 6 o'clock news. If they expect to deal with heroes, give the agents something that will make the heroes take notice -- heroes will learn to cream the guy with the grenade launcher or BFG early, just like real life. If the target is the heroes, arm the agents to stomp heroes -- staggering attacks can be vicious. Open with AOE Flash or Entangles to drop the heroes' DCV then hammer them with attacks they're known to be weak against or NNDs...

Since time is going to be a problem for you, a chat game is probably going to be even more problematic than FtF (something about juggling time zones in addition to work and kids, etc...). Take a look around at Hero Central. It's not chat based, but it isn't exactly a pbem either. More of a play-by-post. Hero Central

An additional point, which has been touched upon but not mentioned directly, is a NRM attack can be used while blinded (Flashed or Darkness) while a LOS attack cannot. Granted, the NRM attack will suffer the appropriate penalties, but can still be utilized. A LOS attack cannot be used if you cannot 'see' the target. Period.

Just a clarification, does a character who has taken the Disadvantage 'Dependence' with the 'Weakness' option (pg 214) lose 3 Active Points from effected characteristics... (ie: 23 DEX reduced to 22 DEX) ...or are the characteristics reduced by 3 points? (ie: 23 DEX reduced to 20 DEX) Thanks for making the time, Tom

With an unstabalized autofire weapon, no. Automatic weapons fire faster than the user can recover from the recoil. Only the first shot is actually aimed. Every other round goes where ever the barrel happens to be pointed at the time... Granted this is real life, and fiction tends to work more, dramatically... Incidentally, there is a reason the military changed from the 'full auto' of the M16A1 to the '3 round burst' of the M16A2. It was a waste of ammo...

I've never heard of it either, but wierder things have happened. When I was with a MP unit in Germany during the first Gulf war, we carried hammer down on an empty chamber -- but we were also an activated Nat'l Guard unit carrying M1911A1's which are a single action autoloader...

The full mag plus one is for the extra shot. Carrying hammer down on an empty chamber, may or not be departmental policy. I was taught (armed security) to carry with a live round in the chamber, hammer down, safety off (a moot point with a Glock ). Another point that was taught, was to either always unload and load every time or to keep your weapon loaded. A side note on extra mags. Police duty gear usually provides for either single or double pouches. I usually see officers wearing a single 'double pouch'. There are exceptions. I just saw an officer a bit ago wearing two double pouches, so you can have individual officers carrying as much (or little) ammo as you like. Here is a web site with the some examples of police duty gear... http://www.safariland.com/index.html

CAP10 restrictions only apply to civilian owners (magazines manufactured prior to '95 are grandfathered), military and police users are not effected by this legislation. 9x19mm and .40S&W are the two most common law enforcement rounds and the standard capacity runs 14 to 17 rounds depending on make and model. 15 rounds is probably the most common capacity, and some officers will carry with a full magazine plus one in the chamber giving them an extra shot. The makes I've seen most frequently are Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Glock, and Sig Saur. Two spare reloads is typical. Specific carry requirements will vary between states, and individual departments.

During the short period where I actually started picking up comics on a regular basis... A-Next. All of the "new" Avengers were chained to the wall (except Mainframe) and helpless when a huge hole gets blasted in the exterior wall. There stands Mainframe with a handful of other heroes the team has encountered saying: "Can the bad guys come out and play?"

I recently ran Black Paladin (among others) against my group of supers. The long and short of things being he was the only one of the villains to be KO'd/captured (luck of the dice type thing). The heroes were in Brazil and in a bit of a hurry (and the team leader figured BP would eventually escape anyhow), so they took his armor and mace and dropped them in the Atlantic with a spell of concealment. Bit of a predicament for the ol' GM thing. Then I remembered that 3rd plot seed for Force... (Who says the Golden Crown has to offer itself to a PC... Bwahahahahahaahahah....)

Uhm... Since when did the MP5 not have a rifled barrel? In terms of barrel length vs "power" the issue is how much time the propellant has to burn before the round exits the barrel.

In general, that is correct. If you've bought a weapon with points, you are not required to have the appropriate Weapon Familiarity to use it. The gripe in this case is that Nighthawk doesn't have a Weapon Element with his Martial Arts which would allow him to add the bonuses of his martial techniques to his weapon. In other words, Nighthawk doesn't receive any "non-proficiency" penalty for using his billy club w/o a WF ('course the WF for clubs is free ), but he can't add the +2 DCV and +6 DC of his Martial Strike to it because he didn't buy a Weapon Element with his Kung Fu.

Last MSRP I saw on a PSG-1 was $10K, however, unless things have changed with the new administration, it is no longer legal to import it into the country (BATF ruled it to be an assualt weapon since it would accept the high capacity magazines of the German G-3 rifle). Keep in mind that this cost include a hard case, scope, and bunches of accessories. The Barret M-82A1 (last I looked a couple of years ago), ran in the $3K range for the base rifle and went up to something like $6K for the cased and scoped version. Toadmaster, I recall reading an article on handloading for the .50BMG quite a few years back (maybe up to 10 years ago, I really can't remember for sure), at that time there was only one comercially available press which was big enough to handle the cartridge. I can't recall who the manufacturer was, only that it was an "O-frame" press (if that helps any).

I'm not sure of the legality of a pistol in that calibre off hand, but it's certainly nothing I ever want to fire... As a side note, .50BMG is available on the commercial market though it is probably special order in most places and I figure most people would seek it out at gun shows. There are a number of commercially produced rifles chambered for .50BMG, mostly for guys who want a REALLY big gun for plinking with....

To help put yourself in a "period" frame of mind, try to find The Complete Superman Collection. My wife picked it up on DVD on a whim at the local library to help entertain the kids over the weekend, and we were both surprised to discover that it was a collection of original animated "shorts" dating from 1941 to 1943. Quite worthwile in its own right, it should help put you and your players in an appropriate frame of mind.

There was a sci-fi book series that used that particular premise, iirc. Though, in it, the US found it needed live troops to deal with a terrrorist style threat... It's probably been up to twenty years since I read those books, so my memory is a little hazy. The article you linked jogged my recollection only somewhat.

I hate to be too picky, but I am... The weapon pictured is a break-action handgun. A modified TC Encore.