Woodside Kid

Re: Help with balancing fighters with magic users I'm part of this campaign as well, and there's one or two things Hypnotica didn't mention. When we started the game, although we had the 5th edition book, the program we used (and still use) to build our characters was Creator. We're therefore stuck with a hybrid of 4th and 5th edition rules. This does, I admit, make for some interesting adjustments. From what I've seen in this thread, most of the suggestions given (and they are good ones, BTW) assume the GM is running a 5th edition campaign. What our GM was trying to come up with was a way to balance the costs of killing attacks so that our party didn't devolve into uberpowerful mages and wimpy fighters, using the rules loaded into Creator. Hope that makes things a little clearer.

Re: "So, Thor hits Superman with Mjolnir..." The problem is, there really isn't a way to stage this fight without seriously gutting Superman's powers (or, indeed, those of most of the DC A-list heroes). The difference between them is so great that every crossover in recent years has had to scale down the DC heroes' abilities in order to keep the conflicts from ending up in the "blink and you'll miss it" category. Assuming you ignore the occasional hiccups both Thor and Superman have shown over the years, stick to the average power level they display (and if you go by the companies' own character guides published back in the 80s), the fight is a no-brainer. Marvel's guide gives Thor Class 100 strength; he can lift (press) in excess of 100 tons. How much over 100 tons is never stated, but, seeing as he's never been able to run rampant over the whole Marvel Universe, it's probably not all that much over. As for the Man of Steel, DC's guide (which, before you ask, had the John Byrne reboot taken into account) stated that "he could easily lift the weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, were it possible to do so without destroying the structure." (Yes, that's a direct quote.) The key word in that sentence is easily; it implies that such a weight (on the order of 6 million tons) is nowhere near Superman's limit. A few years ago I made a conservative guess that that weight was 10% of his limit; that would make Superman something on the order of half a million times as strong as Thor. To me, that seemed to nail the lid shut on Thor's "superior battle skills." At that level, it's like asking the greatest martial artist in the world to stop a 5,000 ton freight train going 60mph; your skills ain't gonna matter one bit. As for whether or not Mjolnir or Thor's innate magic would affect Superman more than a normal person, in all the years I've read Marvel I've never seen anything that would lead me to assume that was the case. The damage that Thor and/or his hammer does only seems to be related to how tough the object is; I don't recall seeing anything where a character took more damage due to a vulnerability to magic. (Then again, if the Earth X miniseries is valid, the Asgardians aren't magical at all. ) If I were running a DC vs. Marvel campaign, I woudn't give Superman any extra damage from a magic attack. Of course, given his power levels, it would have to be one hell of an attack to hurt him. To be perfectly honest, I would avoid the issue completely and not do a DC/Marvel campaign at all.