Karmakaze

Re: Will Stronghold Or it's linked to her flight somehow.

Re: Will Stronghold I'd almost have to give her a Power Pool, though a lot of it could be filed under Change Environment and maybe a Cosmetic Transform. There would definitely need to be a limitation that appropriate plants need to be present. Probably the most impressive noncombat thing we saw her do was grow an appleseed into a tree so she could climb up it (at which point she pulled an edible apple off the tree). Arguably that's a Major Transform (appleseed to adult tree). I could also see that as the SFX for Leaping, since the point of it was to get up to a roof from the ground. In combat, she had to be near a window in order to summon ivy from outside to create an AOE Entangle. Maybe a multipower with the Change Environment, Transform, Entangle, Herbopathy (telepathy or mind control, only vs. plant minds) and then a lot of points in the Power: Plant Manipulation skill. Warren Peace would be pretty simple. He clearly has Combat Luck (because he survived being thrown through a wall) and most everything else he did falls under Blast.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Love Letter To Japan - The Bird and the Bee

Re: Will Stronghold Will is the son of two superheroes, one is a brick and the other is a flying martial artist. At the beginning of the movie, Will is being sent to a school for metapowered kids, even though his superpowers haven't come in yet. At this point, he'd be built as a normal teenaged boy in reasonably good shape. About halfway through the movie, he starts displaying his father's super strength. He pulls doors off their hinges and throws another meta through a couple of walls. We see him doing a casual strength lift of about six cheerleaders at one point. He also has an AOE Knockback "brick trick" wherein he punches the floor and everyone in range falls over. In the climactic end battle, he also turns out to have inherited his mother's flight (though not necessarily her martial arts training).

Re: Alas, no more Independent! Huh. To me, what you're describing sounds more like the Focus limitation rather than the Independent limitation. Here's what the limitation says, as written: (Hero System Fifth Edition Rule Book, page 193; Revised, page 297-298) "...and a character can lose the points he spent on an Independent Power forever." Whereas something with an 8- activation roll isn't erased off the character sheet if you fail the activation in one instance. It's the permanent CP loss that's adversarial, not that the character sometimes loses the use of the power. Also consider that if you're not taking the character points away forever and still considering the limitation to be equivalent to an 8- less activation, that means the character should not have the use of the power in three out of four instances. By my GMing style (and yes, YMMV) anything that's going to be stolen that often is a plot device more than a power.

Re: Alas, no more Independent! The thing is, role-playing games aren't really games of chance. A player taking Independent isn't gambling on some random outcome, like a poker deck or slot machine, he's gambling on the GM's goodwill. I realize that this will vary quite a bit according to game mastering styles, but generally (as a GM) I have enough control of the game universe that I am the one who decides whether a plot element that could take something away exists in the first place, and whether or not to enforce it should the players invoke that element. So from the perspective of the PC, it's the randomness of the universe at play, but from the perspective of the GM (and probably the player), it's an active decision on the part of the person running the story. Taken that way, a player taking Independent is gambling that the GM won't punish him for doing so, which lends an antagonistic element that I don't care for.

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Feel Good Inc. - Skye

This is a nice visual aid if you're designing a settled ringed planet. (found via a post on metafilter. Also of interest, this comment about using the rings like a sextant. And some side debate about whether the light absorption would have prevented or retarded human development.)

Re: Order of the Stick http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/GiantITP/ootscript

Re: Alas, no more Independent!

Re: Thanks Eric... I assumed from the art that it was intentional.

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive Or it was reverse alphabetical! (Well, ok, maybe not.)

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive You can if you have a netbook! (I assume. That is not from personal experience.)

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive

Re: Speeding up combat "Restrict SPDs" is Dead Wrong One of the techniques that turns up at convention games is scrapping the SPD chart and just going around the table clockwise. That's sort of the ultimate in compressing SPDs and it does, in fact, speed up combat. You lose some granularity as a price of that, of course. Most of my convention pre-gens are SPD 3 and 4, precisely to reduce complexity. I try to have it be about the same of each. I'll sometimes scrap the DEX portion of combat order and call 3's clockwise and 4's clockwise on the appropriate phases. I don't, myself, scrap SPD entirely, but I've seen it done without harming enjoyment of the game.

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive Looks like two New Jerseyites have theirs. Mine isn't here, so now I need to wonder if it's my local post office being lousy again. (They have a habit of not delivering things and then finally leaving a "last warning" slip without ever having left a first or any other notice.)

Re: Chocolate in Pre-Columbian New Mexico

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Essentially, "bird, bird, pretty bird, I'm going to pull off all your feathers" (as in preparation for cooking) and then lists all the parts of the bird that are going to lose feathers. I've seen it pop up as a "learn the body parts" song for that reason.

Re: And 6e print books start to arrive Sadly, can't check on mine because it's a GenCon PreOrder. On the other hand, I'm in New Jersey, which is a bit farther from the sourcepoint than California is. I have to allow for transit time.

Re: CHAMPIONS 6E -- What Do *You* Want To See?

Re: 6E1 & 6E2 help One of the tricks with this is that Batman and Superman don't necessarily have different power levels. (I know, I know, Kryptonian vs. 'normal' Earthling... bear with me.) When Batman is in his own comic book, he deals with threats that Superman probably wouldn't bother with. Yet, when Batman and Superman are teamed up in Worlds Finest or the Justice League, Batman is able to defeat as many thugs and threaten as many supervillains as Superman is - he just uses more tools and less direct force. So Superman has spent his points on powers, and Batman's spent his on skills, contacts, and gadgets, but they can still be the same point-level. To get a gut feel for how points and stats relate to power level, I'd refer you to the tables on SE1 p34 (Character Types Guidelines and Character Design Guidelines), SE1 p35 (Character Ability Guidelines) and SE1 p48 (Characteristics Comparison). Those make good guidelines to start with.

Re: 6E order sighting: Big stupid poopy liarpants I just hope we don't have to wait for a customs agent to read through the books! (Though if we could convert some of them...)

Re: Quote of the Week From My Life. My mother used to say, whenever we failed to find something that turned out to be in plain sight, "if it were an alligator, it would have bit you."

Re: What's a good introductory adventure? Didn't Villainy Amok have a chapter on the traditional bank robbery scenario? (I'm at work, so can't check my copy)