TaxiMan

Re: Armor Piercing on normal attacks: Is it useful? Forget AP; buy Find Weakness. Same effect but better! You can continue to reduce armor, it applies to multiple attacks, and it might not be considered as part of the attack cost (slipping a little extra under the active point cap). Disadvantage is it takes a phase or more, and doesn't fit the SFX! But what munchkin player cares about SFX? The point is - is it worth the points?

Re: Who is... COUNT INFINITY? Not spending any time here, so I don't have a cool background etc., but maybe a different take on his powers / abilities. He has the power of "Infinity!" - anything he can think of using infinity as a trick. For example, he can freeze you in place, as you see the world recess from you at incredible speed. You are infinitely far from the nearest atom. You can't escape! (at least not by moving). He can make you infinitely small (see atoms whirling by, electrons the size of planets, and you STILL shrink!). Even as psychotic as he is, he's not stupid enough to make anything infinitely big. He can stop attacks with his Infinitely Hard Skin (of course, he can't move then). He can kill people with his Infinitely Funny Joke (anyone remember the Monty Python skit?). Of course, he can't listen and if you can't hear, it won't affect you. He can break into the toughest vault by making the door Infinitely Thin! Once he tried to make his bank account infinitely large, but it only blew the computers that tracked his balance. Shortly thereafter, all the S&Ls went bankrupt... He had an Infinitely Powerful Gun! Of course, it only worked once - the bullet and gun vanished at the speed of light from the recoil. He was hospitalized for months, the gun ripped his forearm off! And, .... he missed. Now he's afraid of infinite power, so he doesn't go that route. Not that he couldn't, though...

Re: Character growth potential and speed questions Growth doesn't have to be in combat abilities (like the skills being mentioned above). You can have a game where characters have the right damage classes and defenses, but are unknown, don't have a base, no contacts (other than friends from their pre-super days?), and aren't very skilled. Skill growth includes non-combat stuff and combat skills as they learn to fight. Also, you will likely find they attempt to use their powers in ways that their character sheets don't allow. An ice-blaster might want to make an ice ramp to divert a following car. Use the Power skill, but mark it down as something he might spend points on, if he wants to do it again & again.

Re: Hot Shot Pilot, Is it worth it? If he feels overcharged, he was overcharged. Your job is to make him not feel that way - he should shine in battles, NPCs should run to him to pilot, since they'll live longer, he should be getting awards & job offers & press, etc. Same as others have said, but hey! This is MY opinion!

Re: Say somthing clever... PLEASE! I guess so, I tried to give you some today & it barfs with "you must spread it around before giving it to Chuk again".

Re: Say somthing clever... PLEASE! I've taken to adding rep to anyone with 3 or less. Just for the heck of it. It's my way of saying "Welcome!", or making someone say "huh? what's that?".

Re: Wider, Shallower Variable Power Pools Don't forget to compare the VPP AP limit to campaign max. If I have a 60pt max for the campaign and a 120pt pool, then the limit is worth nothing. I'd have to examine each VPP to see what the limitation is worth. E.g., an Enhanced Senses VPP (where most powers would have trouble costing > 25pts) wouldn't get a limitation for "Limited to 25AP", whereas an attack VPP would.

Re: Range of Light

Re: Range of Light Man, this "getting the last post" thing is becoming a pain. Very nice flashlights, MagicPegasus! Random weird thought, brought on by your oh-so-reasonable 4" range limitation - what would Range Limited By STR mean for a flashlight? A flashlight you could throw or a light you could throw? I suppose in a Champions game you could have the latter, but what is the range of STR for a photon? It takes -1,000,000 STR to lift a photon, so I'd say Range Limited by STR would be a -0 limitation. I need to eat something. Food you perverts, regular old food!

Re: A question of size DR, do you HAVE to get in the last word? Just askin'...

Re: Range of Light Oh, I'm betting the Moon laser is either the best they can make it, or they need a 2k spot so they can guarantee they hit the reflector. Atmospheric abberation and all that you know chap, righty-o!

Re: Range of Light Dammit, DR, I wanted to be the last to post! Cool factoid about the Moon laser though. That doesn't jive with what I Googled, stuff I saw said you get a spread of about 1 milliradian / mm of beam width. Assuming a 1 mm laser pointer, that means it spreads 0.1% of distance travelled. The Moon is 384,403 km from the Earth (on average), but we can subtract the radius of the Earth (we're firing from the surface, after all) and the radius of the Moon (the laser hits the close side, not the center). Of course, we're ignoring lattitude and tons of other stuff but who cares anyway? No one is reading this, bwa ha ha ha ha ha! The Moon is 3475 km in diameter and Earth is 12735 so we can subtract 8105 km from 384,403 to get 376,298 km. So a beam that spreads 0.1% would cover 376.3 km at the surface of the Moon! Your numbers indicate a dispersion of only 2/376,298, or 0.00531 milliradians! Whoot! Awesome! I like banana cream pie, but nobody's reading this so Ha! Anyway, lasers are sweeeet! They flip out and chop the heads off damn-near EVERYTHING! I love lasers so much I could crap my pants! OK, even if no one else is reading this, I'm freaking myself out. Walk away man, just walk away.....

Re: A question of size Regarding main battle tanks and sand crawlers, the real way they get DCV is with range penalties. Optionally, velocity DCV bonuses. Something man-sized and close up is supposedly as hard to hit as something that is huge, far away, and still seems man-sized. Don't believe that works so well IRL, but then most of my attacks have "range based on STR".

Re: Range of Light Aaaaaannnnnnddddd FINALLY! Have I killed this thread? Not that it had much life left anyway, but I take perverse pride in how many I've killed.

Re: Range of Light How many posts about the divergence of a flashlight can be posted, if a poster can post posts about the divergence of a flashlight?

Re: Range of Light Oh yeah, a flashlight diverges tons more than a laser. I can focus a Maglite at 20' somewhat well, if I ignore the "penumbra" or whatever that extra light around the bright spot is called. Not sure how good it can be focused at 500', sounds like a neat science fair experiment. You'd need to mount the light solidly & go 500' away and look into the light. Find where it gets really bright & record position. All this because I don't think you could see a bright spot 500' away... Finally, the AOE Cone advantage is obviously too wide a dispersement for any well-focused flashlight. It would have to be defined down, e.g. "it produces a 15 degree beam". But my cheap household non-focused flashlights are pretty close to 30-45 degrees. Hmmmm.... I think I'll check one tonight.

Re: Range of Light Laser pointers are lasers, they emit coherent light. However, no laser has zero divergence. They shoot a very expensive laser at the moon in order to measure the reflected light, and figure out (to obscene accuracy) how far away it is. The amount of light bounced back (off precision cube corner reflectors) is very small, since the beam diverges along its 400k mile trek. Laser pointers usually have crappy optics and are cheap, and diverge a good bit. Shine one across a 40' conference room and you're likely to see a >5 mm spot (if it's good) or a longer, thinner smear (more likely). (This is a personal observation.) I Googled "laser diverge" & see that a diode (pointer) or a He-Ne laser (no optics) diverges 1mm / meter, so that would be about a 1' spot at 500'. So my "laser" comment was off by about a factor of 7x. Mea culpa. (The preceeding is offered for the purposes of spreading useless information.)

Re: Playing Head games For a power, I'd go with Transform BOECV, RSR, Limited Power (must speak, not vs. earplugs, only works with personal knowledge of victim or in-depth dialog). The Transform would add Psych Lims to characters. The power needs the advantage "expanded class of effects" if the Psych Lim can be changed, which it should. Use the partial Transform rules where the victim realizes what's happening even if not completely affected. It's cumulative, so repeat exposures are really dangerous. Recovery from partial effects is good R&R with family & friends. Recovery from a successful Transform is psychological counselling.

Re: "Common Sense" descrepancy First, I like MitchellS solution. Next, I wonder if you couldn't apply a limitation "Real Flesh" to martial artists that couldn't rip a car apart. Sure seems like a limitation. They'd have to use a weapon to damage stuff. The sticky part is, how much limitation and to what do you apply it? If the MA didn't have a "WF:steel thingy", it seems plenty limiting (-1/2 or so), but what can you limit? MA damage classes are already cheap & I don't think you're supposed to limit them anyway. So the question is, what limitation would you give a real flesh & blood martial artist for his attacks that can't hurt really hard things?

Re: Range of Light

Re: TK Application You can get a couple of extra attacks using Sweep, the - OCV penalties seem reasonable here given the SFX. Unless you can concentrate on multiple things at once... Extra Limbs + Stretching is cheap, especially if you've got high Strength. The damage problem can be addressed with Limited Coverage extra Armor or Damage Reduction, though I've never seen DR as a cheap way to do anything. You could go with limited Desolid (only for limbs, only to represent disposable nature thereof). You could still be grabbed or restrained by the limbs or injected with chemicals, but damage wouldn't do anything. If you really want TK, make a multipower. TK won't allow you to pull yourself up a building and it gets weaker if you apply AOE (assuming the same active points). Have several ultra slots to represent the various things you expect to do. Personally, I like the Extra Limbs + limited Stretching + limited Desolid.

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING" Are you looking for a construct that doesn't have the flaws you've mentioned, or are you discussing a perceived flaw in Hero? See my earlier post using EDM - it'd allow dodging this just fine.

Re: Crazy Idea to Remove the Math How about including HD 3.0 on a CDROM in the back of Hero 6.0 (and include USPD-lite prefabs!). Character generation problem solved. Now with really neat-o characters, don't you need the books to understand what it's all about?

Re: Where else do you roll down? I say change it for 6th edition - SOMETHING has to change so it'll be able to advertise NEW AND IMPROVED! And this way, no real change is necessary!

Re: Question about "DANGER SENSE DODGING" Thinking some more about it, I'm not sure what happens if you fail your activation roll. The SFX is that you didn't detect it with your Danger Sense - why should you lose a phase? Not perfect, but I could probably allow some unique Advantage ("don't lose phase if fail Activation roll; +1") if thinking on it further didn't show it to be broken.