Lord Zod

Re: Creating a "Turn Undead" Power There's alot I'd like to add to this discussion, so I'll break it down into four parts. 1. There are, of course, dozens of ways to hand "Turn Undead," mechanically. None of these is the one true correct way, but there might be only one way that best fits the "flavor" you're looking for in the campaign. Also there is the fundamental issue of whether this is an ability of the cleric or limitation of the undead, or a combination of both (I see no reason why it should be one or the other. Some undead could be more or less vulnerable to turning while some clerics are better at it than others). With all that in mind, I'd advice any player who wants this ability to talk to the GM about how they want to handle, the same for any power that has implications for the campaign's setting/metaphysics/physics/watchamacallits. 2. I have to ask. Why are so many people suggesting Suppress Summon or Dispel Summon as viable options? Summon is an instant power. You can hold an action to Dispel something that someone is about to summon as they summon it, and you can use Suppress or Drain to remove or weaken a character's ability to summon things. But none of these powers are supposed to work on a creature that's already been summoned. Technically, that would be like using Dispel HKA to restore lost Body and Stun. I don't mean to be rules lawyer here, obviously a GM can allow these powers to affect the ongoing effects of instant powers if he wants to. I just want to point out that this would be that particular GM's houserule, and several people have presented this option as if it were not a houserule, but supported by the rules-as-written. Personally I would consider a house rule like allowing a character with, for example, Dispel Magic to convert their dice of Dispel to an equal active points worth of Mindcontrol (with limited commands "act normally") for countering magical mind control, or RKA for "dispelling" magically created barriers or "banishing" summoned creatures (if they aren't killed instantly then maybe they take damage from being wrenched from the material plane, or from fading from it, but Dispel is an All or Nothing power anyway, so maybe the attack should have to either kill or KO the summon or have no effect, likewise unlike true "Counter" Mindcontrol, a Dispel that fails to break the target free imediately doesn't give him bonuses on subsequent breakout checks). In my opinion, Dispel is a bit underpowered as written, largely because of its limited utility against instant powers. In my opinion, a house rule that gives Dispel free rain to eliminate the ongoing effects of instant powers would make it too good, but my "power substition" house rule beefs it up sufficiently without actually making it superior to limited forms of Mindcontrol and Killing Attack. If you wanted to go further, you could allow Dispel to turn into All or Nothing Healing and use it to Dispel damaging powers after the fact. Sorry if Part 2 has gotten a bit off topic. I think its relevant considering the implications that houserules for Dispel, Drain, Suppress, or Summon could have for a Turn Undead power. 3. Speaking of house rules, the hero gamers in my area and I have been ignoring the rule that only automatons can buy the powers in the automaton section for years. We haven't found it to be unbalancing at all. I don't know if this will change the way any of you think about or use automatons, but to us an automaton is just a character that is immune to presence attacks and mental powers (though we allow mental powers like cyberkinesis and necromancy, that affect "robot class minds" or "undead class minds" to affect them). The trade off is just that an automaton can't think for itself or act independently, and has no everyman skills. No all undead and robots are automatons, and not all automatons are either robots or undead. We've even seen an NPC who was a "philosophical zombie." To all appearances they were human, but just happened to be an automaton. The point I'm trying to make is just to throw my support in with those who have said that one GM's version of the undead doesn't have to be locked into the whole automaton thing. 4. There are many ways to build turn undead, but here's one I don't think anyone else mentioned yet. If people don't like the idea of presence attacks affecting automatons, there's always Drain Presence instead. Automatons have no Ego scores, but they still have Presence scores, and therefore should still be forced to succeed on Presence checks or flee in terror if their Presence scores are reduced to negative values, fleeing automatically if they hit -30 or negative their normal presence (whichever is lower). Wow that was a long post. Sorry for the inconveniance?

Re: How many plots do you have going? My first time GMing a campaign, I had the PCs start a prison break on a ship and run off to become space pirates. I came up with the "brilliant" idea of giving each of the 40 or so NPC prison inmates a name, backstory, and plot hook. And I had 10 PCs, (we have a low gm-player ratio in my area and I couldn't say no) many of whom had multiple plothooks prepared in the their backstory. Between 50 and 60 plotlines starting from day one! As a first time GM, it was a terrible mistake. Only a tiny fraction of those plotlines went anywhere over the course of an year long campaign. For the next campaign I ran I had exactly 2 very straightforward plotlines at any given time; the sidemission of the day and the ongoing arc. It ran alot smoother. Of course the plot was really the least of my problems in the first campaign. The point of the second campaign was really for me to experiment and learn so I could be a better gm. I mostly focused on learning to make balanced encounters and scenarios that are fun for everyone. And learning to say "no" the the players every once in a while. And to not have more than 6 of them. The campaign I'm currently planning will also be a learning experience. I'm going to work on developing more atmosphere and more involved plots and deeper characters. So I'm thinking 4-ish plotlines at once at first and more like 6 -8 when the campaign is in full swing. In some of the campaigns in which I've been a player, the plots threads are so seemlessly interwoven that its hard to say how many "plotlines" there are.

Re: How do you keep your dark knights from going "squish"? Hero has several manuevars to choose from when you absolutely, positively need to not be hit. When in doubt, dive for cover. But none of these manuevars are fool proof, there's always a chance of failure, even with a luck mechanic, power, or houserule. Hero has special effects divorced from mechanics, so there's no reason why a mere mortal has to have low defenses. He could have defenses with the special effect of being so lucky all his hits turn into near misses. But some players are going to insist one playing squishy characters, with low defenses, and putting those points somewhere else. But if the real question is what to do when all else fails, and a player built their character squishy, and got unlucky and got hit by a big attack, then this may be harsh, but I say let them get squished. Sure, its no fun to get knocked out in the opening phase and sit out the rest of the fight. It's also no fun (for many of us anyway) when there's no challenge, no illusion of danger. Failure makes success taste better. Squishy characters as supposed to have to fight that much more intelligently to survive. To me, that challenge is the attraction of playing such a character. They need teamwork and decent tactics to make sure those big guns can't even find them. And with the points they save on defenses, the character should have all the skills and abilities they need to pull that off. The rest is up to the player. This scenario is a bit extreme, but consider, it's also no fun to have to spend points on something the other characters get for free. "Hey everybody, I'm the brick, I bought up my defenses to somewhat above average levels." "Okay brick, your job is to stand there and take punches for us as the villian targets you exclusively for no reason. The rest of us won't buy any defenses at all and spend the points on cool stuff because we know the gm doesn't have the heart to hit us." Yeah, that's example is a little silly, but it really is doing the players a diservice if you show favoritism by having the villains never pick on the little guy regardless of their motivations. If the brick wants to jump in the way and take the hits for his friends (because that really is the bricks job) then let him. But don't make it automatic. When I gm games, I try to make villians fight as dictated by their personalities. Sadistic villains hit people when they are down, vengeful types attack whoever hurt them the most, cowards pick on weaklings, overconfident types attack the most impressive target and ignore everybody else, real crazies pick their targets at random. I don't pull any punches and I let the dice fall where they may, but at the same time, I never use a problem without a solution or an unstoppable foe. Let the players form their own tactics, and use teamwork, ingenuity, and their own strengths, instead of learning to rely on GM mercy to make sure their weaknesses and disadvantages never come up, weaknesses they chose to have in exchange for strength and power in another area. Sorry if that came off a little preachy. I'm just saying, characters have strengths and weaknesses. If a player doesn't like his character's weaknesses, then maybe he shouldn't built the character that way. If its not genre appropriate for this type of character to get knocked around, but the mechanics and the way he's built say he will be, then build him differently to properly emulate the genre.

Re: Hit Locations for Melee (particularly Fantasy/Mediaeval) combat

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) Larry Hawkins lived in a world overrun with so-called superheroes. Where most mere mortals looked up at the sky and marvelled with awe and admiration at the handsome flying men, beautiful soaring women, and shaggy jet-powered apes that defended them, Larry's heart raged with jealosy everytime he looked up in the sky. One day, after a humilating rescue from a burning building by the city's most obnoxious champion, Larry pledged that just as ancient Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it to man, he would steal the power of the superhumans for himself. Applying his technological genius, Larry built a formidable suit of powered armor, capable of siphoning the energy off of superhumans and projecting their own power back upon them. He became the archvillian Promethius. Promethius has defeated several major superpowered criminals, but only because he draws no distinction between them and the heroes he fights. He has deluded himself into believing that he is the people's champion, sticking up for the little guy, striking a blow for all of humanity everytime he knocks another star out of the sky.

Re: God Package... Awesome write-ups, and I loved the story of the Olympians' battle with their Roman clones. I have a nit-picky suggestion on the issue of whether or not the gods actually needed to sleep and eat and such. I seem to recall several stories about gods suffering from various mortal complaints, like lack of food and water, but not ever being able to die to escape from the torture. They get hungry and need to eat to maintain their comfort, but can never starve to death. Similarly, they get drunk all the time, but you couldn't kill them with poison. A fellow PC in my current game plays a character based on the ancient mariner. He's not exactly a god, but he's in a similar situation in that his immortality grants him greater opportunity to suffer. He has Life support Immortality which functions as normal, but his other tricks, like Doesn't Eat, Doesn't Sleep, Doesn't Breath, etc, all have the limitation (-2 by our group's consensus) that they only prevent him from losing his last point of stun, endurance, body, or whatever. He doesn't need air to breath, but without it he could hover at 1 end and 1 stun forever. He'll be mad with hunger, but never actually collapse from starvation. Can't starve him, dehydrate him, straggle him, or poison him to death, but by the time your done trying you can knock him over with a feather. I think that's in the spirit of the myths. Okay, it was just a thought, back to your regularly scheduled divine slugfest!

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... An old one from our retired Sci-Fi game. The PCs had taken an orc alive, stripped him of his weapons and armor, and brought him back to their ship to interrogate him. PC: "Allright scumbag, you're going to tell us everything, troop positions, attack plans, everything. Lets start off with exactly how many trucks you have." The literal minded orc's confused response: "Ha, you fool, I have no trucks, I am naked!" That line has been repeated within the group many times since. Eventually they got out of him that there were more trucks than he could count on his fingers and toes, but if each of his fingers and toes was a hand itself, then all of their combined fingers would be equal in number to the number of trucks his tribe possessed. You would think that the PCs would have been more grateful, what with him independently inventing multiplication just for their benefit.

Re: I need a function! The Magelleanic Shroud Ancient earth astronomers once called these the Magelleanic Clouds, believing them to be satellite galaxies to our own Milky Way. In 3095 AD, the first human made space probes to visit the Magelleanic Shrouds discovered that they were not clusters of stars, but infact the largest holographic projections ever concieved, each one stretching many light years in diameter and producing emissions designed to duplicate the readings one would detect from actual satellite galaxies. Scientists have speculated for decades over what ancient and technologically powerful alien civilization could have produced the machine which generates these holograms, and why, but the source of the projection has never been discovered In 3124 AD, unmaned probes revealed that the holograms hide the dead bodies of two immense creatures, floating just outside of our galaxy. The term Magelleanic Shroud, coined by the press, has been used to refer to the projections ever since. The origin of these creatures, their age, the cause of their deaths, and how they could have grown so large, and how they did so without being crushed by their own gravity, are all mysteries that we can only hope will be answered by future generations. Next: The Iambic Fossil Scoop

Re: The Character Idea Thread I have a few suggestions for the swarmbots but they're all a bit odd. Perhaps you could use Multiform and the Requires Multiple Users limitation. A group of swarm bots gather in one place, activate the power that they all bought and then cease to exist, replaced by their more powerful multiform. They could buy several multiforms of varying power requiring varying numbers of users. Duplication might be a bit less clunky, but there is the problem of the original sticking around when the duplicates are made. Another solution would be to give all of the little swarm bots the power Summon Big Swarm Bot, with the limitation Requires Multiple Users and the Major Side Effect "character dies when power is used." Then give the big swarm bots the power to summon a horde of little swarm bots, with the same side effect limitation, but without multiple users. Okay, all three of those ideas are a little weird. My favorite is summon, which is argueably the weirdest, but I think it would be the easiest to run.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Yeah, Rocky was played by Fireg0lem, who also happens to be the helpful Player B in my quote above. It sounds like a silly idea to use the "monster" from the Rocky Horror Picture Show as a big dumb brick in space pirate game, but he was actually one of the more enjoyable characters from that game. Even if he did end up unbalancing the game fairly badly, through no fault of Fireg0lem's. He had a habit of leaping into clusters of enemies and detonating grenades, without taking them out of the bandolier on his chest. We almost had to change his name to Captain Collateral Damage Came up with a lot of fun quotes too. "Excessive force is never enough" has becom an often repeated slogan in our group Dr. Zaius, looking over test results: "Well son, you are what we call a Frank, which means..." Rocky: "My name is Rocky, not Frank." Dr. Zaius: "Nice to meet you, son, I'll talk slower." "Hello, my name is Rocky, but it is also Frank." "Dr. Zaius says that I have a special power called 'Brain Damage'" "Yes, Rocky has object permanence" And who can forget his battle cry of... "Koala!" Fireg0lem, Onyxclaw, and Roy the Ruthless all played in that game, and their characters ended up forming a rock band. There must have been some good quotes involved in that. Onyxclaw, do you remember any of your song titles?

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... This is from a sci-fi space opera campaign I ran, that just came to a close a few weeks ago. The orginal premise was that the PCs would escape from a prison ship in the first session and then become space pirates, but since I wanted to give the PCs a lot of freedom in deciding the course of the game, they turned out to be more like freelance mercenaries than pirates. The campaign lasted about a year, and this happend after about 9 months. The PCs have just finished a particularly long mission and are looking for work. Some of them start talking about maybe getting a letter of mark to do some privateering. Player A: "I couldn't do that. If we're going to turn into a bunch of pirates, my character will strike out on his own and I'll just have to quite the game or make a new character or something. It's against everything he believes in." Me: Stunned Silence. Player B: "Um... Player A, the GM originally pitched this to us as a game about being space pirates." Player A: "Yeah, I know, but I forgot about that when I made my character." Now I look back on that and laugh, but I swear, at the time it was like he smacked me in the head with an axe.

Re: Simplification of Combat I'm not a big fan of M&M, myself. There are some good ideas in there, but on the whole I found the rules to be a bit unbalanced. There were just to many holes for my taste. And I just hated that whole Damage Save thing. But to each his own. As for these proposed changes, I can certainly see how they would speed up combat. For people who have a problem with slow combats it would certainly be handy. I was once stupid enough to gm a weekly game for 10 players, and some combats were a nightmare. One giant shoot out lasted about 3 phases of game time and 4 hours of real time. On the other hand, I personally find these changes to be a bit too radical for my tastes. I like the hero systems tactical approach to combat, with all its manuevars and options, and some of the things you suggest to cut are a big part of that. And the concern about Hero losing too much of its identity if you change it that much is really a genuine concern for alot of players. Running a combat with those rules just wouldn't feel like Hero to me. I like that "Hail of Mookfire" rule, I think I might try it some time.

Re: Science Familiarity Chart? I don't want to stray to far from the original topic, but I thought you might be interested in hearing about some other alternate ways of dealing with science skills. I saw a talent called Universal Scientist posted on this website. I'm sure some of you are already familiar with it. http://www.globalguardians.com/houserules/houserulesindex.php The website had a new talent to go along with all of the groups of skills that have skill enhancers. It's the same idea behind Universal Translator. Another alternative that I'm familiar with was recently devised by fireg0lem, for a game he's about to start up. He created it in order to encourage characters to become superscientists and superscholars while still allowing them to specialize in different fields and leaving them with plenty of points for superheroing, because it's just that kind of world. To that end it isn't grounded in realism quite so much as your system, but it's working out so far for its intended purpose. He's abolished skill enhancers all together, and the language relation chart no longer has an effect on point cost, though people can still understand languages related to the ones they know if there are 3 or 4 pts of similarity. He uses a doubling system for knowledge and science skills. 2pts gets you 9+(INT/5) with one science skill. Every additional 2pts doubles your number of science skills. So for 4pts you get 2, for 6pts you get 4, and so on. Before long you're Doc Savage. You can also swap out 9+(INT/5) with one skill for Base 8 with two skills, but the gm discourages doing this past a certain point because it starts to get silly. Knowledge skills work the same way. Languages (in case you're curious) work the same way, if you replace "9+(INT/5)" with "Idiomatic, Native Accent (the 4pt level)" and replace "Base 8" with "Fluent Conversation (the 2pt level)." All of this, of course, might be of no use to you whatsoever. It wouldn't work so well in a more realistic setting. But sharing ideas sometimes leads to interesting results, so I thought I might as well toss it out there. Good luck designing your Science Familiarity system. It sounds like it has alot of potential.

Re: "To Protect and Annoy" I seem to remember that there were a lot of great lame superheroes in the recent X-Force series. The one with Mr. Sensitive as teamleader. The whole team existed more to get publicity than fight crime. Can anybody remember any of their lame recruits and rivals? Marvel also put out a book called the Craptacular B-sides,. Ofcourse The Tick is a never ending source of not-so heroic heroes. In addition to the Civic-minded Five, mentioned above, there was a superhero team in The Tick comic which Tick and Arthur joined. It's roster included Rubberducky, a stretching type, and a character I think was called The Runner. He's as fast as 10 fast men.

Re: "To Protect and Annoy" A while back I was in a Iron Age superheroes one shot game. The PCs were a superhero team commissioned by the US government called Strykeforce. We spell it with a Y because its dumber that way. A super-powered terrorist hacker called Hato caused a space station prison full of supervillians to crash into France and our team was sent in to mop up. The government sanctioned french heroes accused us of violating France's sovereignty. The French Heroes Vitesse = The french superman, taken down in one shot by Ripper, a villian with knife and lots of findweakness. La Triumph = A flying brick, other than the flight he's the french version of The Thing. Never did anything note worthy other than being torn in half by a supervillian's giant scythe. Dragonseal = An annoying arrogant French version of the Humantorch. I think he was the teamleader. Set me and half of Paris on fire but never got a successful shot off against the enemy. Got blown up by antimatter. All together they were completely ineffective and just got in the way, but the characters in Strykeforce were alot more wrong. Twitch = Roy the Ruthless's character, the Flash on crack. His primary attack was to smash himslef into his opponent at supersonic speed, then regenerate from paste. Abondoned us at one point to eat a sandwich, but saved the day in the end. Paragon = My character. Somewhere between spiderman and Superman, with the brain of Reed Richards. He was the team's frontline fighter and therefore spent most of the game unconscious. But worst of all was Hida Tsuzua's character, John Ashcroft. He had mental powers and fought by summoning captured brainwashed terrorists to charge at the enemy and blow themselves up. He died.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Onyxclaw, you forgot about our other friend, D. R. Cochran. The school changed it's loggins to first initial, middle initial, then first four letters of last name. Alrect isn't so funny, but things only got worse for the good doctor.

Re: Your character's theme song would be? I don't want to get off topic, but I posted this on another thread and I thought it might be relevant. Now that I think about it, reading the rules on Change Environment and Self Only again, the correct way to build the power is more like Personal Soundtrack: Change Environment 1" radius, -3 OCV Penalty (15 Active Points); No Range (-1/2), Self Only (-1/2) (7 Real Points) If you build it the other way, it makes your allies harder to hit too, but it also makes it harder for your allies to hit your enemies. Which would be handy for showing up everybody else, and isn't that what having a personal theme song is all about? I think I'd also buy extra Presence for when the music is playing. Wait, now that I look at it again, you can do the same thing with levels of DCV that cost END. I give up, let's just talk about music.

Re: Mute Characters It takes alot of cooperation from the other players and the GM. Still, I think that playing characters who have communications issues, whether it be because they are mute, don't share a common language, or just have a complete cultural disconnect, can be very rewarding. I wouldn't do it more than once or twice with one group myself, the other players would get tired of it. But for that one campaign, I'd have a really memorable character. I GM the campaign Onyxclaw mentioned above, and her character's culture shock has become one of the driving forces in the campaign. I insisted on her eventually learning to talk to the other characters only because there were 10 PCs and it was starting to get time consuming. In a smaller group I don't see any reason why you couldn't keep a mute PC around indefinately.

Re: Your character's theme song would be? Wallace the Red: "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeplin Paragon: "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" by the Smashing Pumpkins Stanley Skullstomper: "Feed My Frankenstein" by Alice Cooper Raymond Kensington: "I am the Walrus" by the Beatles Boris Klashnikof: "The Lords of the Rhymes" by the Lords of the Rhymes

Re: Would you allow this or is this too cheesy?

Re: to map combat or not to map combat. It's not champions but this might be helpful. I played in a Fantasy Hero setting that due to it's epic nature had a couple of pretty huge scale battles. In some cases there would be thousands of warriors in an area with mountains and valleys and other terrain obstacles. Yet we had to keep the scale to a size where the PCs can have a direct influence on the outcome of the battle. The GM came up with a mass combat system that was in many ways a quick and dirty version of the regular hero system rules, with a unit of men with identical stats represented as one figure with a body score representing unit cohesion. Unique figures, like PCs, were units of one. We used two different scales for both distance and time. We uses a standard sized hex map for the big battle, and allowed each turn of combat on that scale to represent a minute of regular scale combat. If a PC and an important NPC moved into the same hex for a personal duel they would drop out of the big battle, and fight out one turn of combat on the personal scale. Okay I guess that was a little long winded, but in my experience the best way to handle large scale combats is to use two maps. One for the bigger area using a larger scale and one using the standard scale for characters occupying the same hex of the larger map. Kudos to Onyxclaw for devising a simple way to manage two scales. I have to admit though, that a standard scale champions battle filling an entire room would be pretty memorable.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From Fantasy Hero "Lets just level a small village, and then we'll play it by ear." Get-rich-quick scheme #1 "Okay, so we'll teleport to another part of the world, kill a crocodile, cut off it's head, come back, present it to the king, tell him it's a dragon, and collect the reward money." Get-rich-quick scheme #2 "As long as we're assassinating a public official, lets do it openly. That way we can get a price put on our heads, and as people come to collect it, we can keep killing them and taking their stuff. If we get tired of that, we can transform the corpses to look like us, and turn ourselves in" The rest of the party didn't like these plans. From Star Hero "The doctor said I have a special power called 'brain damage' that keeps psychics from hurting me." These last two were mostly funny because the character is 100 year old dragon "I've been rollin' with my homies" "Hey chica, you want to go steppin'?"

Re: Creative uses for Change Environment Ever notice how Action movie heroes become more badass when their music is playing? Here's why. Personal Soundtrack: 4" radius, -3 OCV Penalty, Personal Immunity (+1/4) (37 Active Points); No Range (-1/2) (25 Real Points) I think I might also buy Images to Hearing linked to this power and link this power to it. That way everybody can hear the music. If the character actually has an cd player or something to listen to while they fight, like Abigail Whistler's i-pod in Blade Trinity, then that's an OAF. Which Reminds me: Product Placement: 1" Radius, -1 PER Roll (5 Active Points), OIF (Brand Name Products of Opportunity, -1/2) (3 Real Points) AND Wealth (10 Active Points); Linked to product placement (-1/4) (8 Real Points) PER roll penalty is for people to notice that you are selling out to merchandizing.

Re: Mental Powers It seems to me that all of this argument is really not about the issue of classes of minds itself but about the issue of fitting characters into the right categories so that nobody gets a free ride thanks to their background or sfx. I think there are better ways to fix this than eliminating classes of minds altogether. I think classes of minds are vital to doing mental powers right. In most of the source material, fantasy fiction, superhero comics, and science fiction, mentalists are extremely limited in terms of who they can affect. If you make a Druid that can control the minds of animals, his power shouldn't work on humans. A supervillian with the power to control the brain chemistry of his foes should not affect computer terminals. Sure you could give these characters a limitation to model this and have all mental powers affect all targets with ego scores by default. But IMO that would be unbalanced. It would make mental powers too good. The power to control animals, people, and machines are all different powers that happen to work the same way mechanically. And I don't you will ever be able to convince me that they do not possess equal utility to each other or to any other power with the same cost per die. Except maybe Ego Attack. Maybe you think its unbalanced to have an attack power that by default can't do damage to any target you aim it at, like a RKA or EB could. Then you can always just assume the developers didn't have Ego Attack in mind when they made the class of minds rule (they aren't infallible after all) and allow Ego Attack to work on anything with something resembling a nervous system. And it would be so simple to just fit all PCs into the people, or sentient category. If your smart enough to be a viable PC then you are not an animal, even if you are talking cat. If you are an advanced AI, then maybe you should count as a human and not a machine. Maybe you should take a physical limitation and count as both. The real problem is that one distinction, Alien vs Human minds. I'm all for modifying this. You could reason the "Human" means your own species and "Alien" means every other sentient thing. (Everybody's an alien to somebody after all, and it does fit some source material if mentalists need "extra training," ie 10 more pts, to affect other species.) This maybe too limiting in some games where aliens are very common or are uncommon but still allowed as PCs. Another solution is to merge them together, call it sentient minds, and let advanced robots fit in too. You could also assume that "alien" was never really meant to refer to elves or people from Krypton but to truly alien and bizarre extra dimensional beings. HP Lovecraft monsters fit in their own category, counting neither as sentient beings nor as normal animals, yet certain mentalists trained in the occult can control them and harness their power. The whole point is to make sure PCs and major antagonists don't get a free ride, and that really isn't hard to do. If you use one of my suggestions in the last paragraph, which all stick to the rules more or less as written, though they may be different interpretations, then you can have your supers campaign where strange visitors from another world have no advantages of disadvantages over Earth's homegrown mutants, still allow for quick and easy construction of animal empathy and cyberkinesis type abilities, and maintain your prescious canonical rules. Maybe I'm wrong on this one, but would we be having this discussion if their were originally only 3 classes of minds? If it really that big a deal for the power to affect people, animals, and computers to count, by default, as different abilities? Would this be an issue if the developers had specifically stated, not as an option or suggestion but as an official rule, that all sentient beings, human, alien, or android, and therefore anything remotely resembling a viable PCs, were all in one category, by default? Or is it that important to you that Mentalla the Enchantress be able to use her powers to seduce bears, house cats, playstations, and i-macs?

Re: What are some interesting disadvantages you have used? In a star hero game I gm, one of my potential players asked if he could take psychological limitation: "wants to create as much chaos as possible, thus introducing more entropy and accelerating the eventual heat death of the universe." I didn't let him because I was afraid he would actually find a way to destroy the universe. ---------------------------------------------------- A play a sort of eccentric viking warrior named Wallace in a low fantasy campaign. He's contributed to making the game much less serious, in small part to his psychological limitation. He carries an iron flask around and talks to it when he is lonely or needs advice. It's name is Shiny Willy. Eventually Shiny Willy became "GM hits the players with the obvious stick." He gives great advice. Later I bought dice of luck with the psychosomatic limitation IIF shiny willy. Having his imaginary friend around makes him more confident. ------------------------------------------------------ I know a guy who... okay I admit it was me, forgive me, I don't know what I was thinking at the time. In a one shot game, I played a character with the psychological limitation "Marks his territory by urinating on fallen foes." Fortunately, he never won a fight.