massey

6D6 Energy Blast, Area Effect (+1), Continuous (+1), Double Knockback (+3/4), only to knock target down (-2), can be avoided with Dex check as if using Breakfall (-1/4), only against targets on the ground (-1/4), Reduced Endurance (x 1.25). Active points 120, Total with Reduced End 150, Real cost 43 Edit: Sorry, had to change that around to 3rd ed Reduced End rules. Edit #2: May have made a mistake here. I can't find Continuous or Double Knockback anywhere in the 3rd ed book. I'm not sure if those were added in an Adventurers Club, but I thought they both predated 4th edition. So this may be a 4th ed build unless I can find those somewhere. Edit #3: I'm good. Found it in the Champions III supplement.

1. We play 4th edition with elements of 5th incorporated into it. Sort of a 4.5 edition. 2. It's a great system for superheroes. We don't really use it for heroic games because I don't think it does those games very well.

Great! Then you understand that the person who balanced the system... was you. You had to do the work, deciding what to give away for free, and what to charge points for. You've spent time on the Fantasy boards discussing whether to charge points for spells or not. You've created game worlds and campaigns and carefully constructed a balanced game. But you are the one who did the work, ensuring that the Hero System would be balanced for your players. The point system didn't do that. The last statement is essentially correct. While you can certainly use it for heroic levels, the balance of the point system really falls apart. Now, a carefully crafted campaign can minimize that problems, but as I said above, at that point it's the GM who is doing the balancing, not the system itself.

I've avoided clicking on this thread since I posted earlier. I've been pretty busy and haven't had time to reply to (what I presume are) some perfectly rational, well-thought out responses to my post. I want to give everybody the courtesy of thoroughly reading their posts and thinking it over, and I just haven't had the time. However, I have skimmed a couple of responses, and while I intend to go back and fully answer things (if people took the time to read my long ass post, they deserve a response), I wanted to give a quick response to this portion here. The problem with heroic games is that the concept of "balance" is impossible to achieve from the game design perspective. That work all falls on the GM. It's too heavily dependent on equipment and genre to be otherwise. The most basic example is the fighter gets to carry around a free greataxe, but the wizard is paying points for his spells. In that game, Strength is very effective. But what about a Ghostbusters rpg? Every character is carrying around a free 5D6 Affects Desolid RKA (OIF bulky). Is Strength really that important to a Ghostbuster? You can't establish anything resembling point balance in a vacuum when you don't even know what the genre will be, let alone what equipment the GM will allow the players to take for free. It's an exercise in futility. How much is Spock's extra strength worth when everybody on the crew carries a phaser? He's probably stronger than Conan the Barbarian, but that strength is less important to our pointy-eared logical friend. +10 Strength is way way way less valuable than +5 OCV with phaser.

You mean like Zorro? Yeah probably.

That's still the first step though. You know how long I played D&D before I actually read the books? I think it was years. This was back in 2nd edition. I picked it up in bits and pieces. I'd read just enough to build the character I needed (and sometimes not even then). I remember being really surprised when somebody told me that thieves couldn't take weapon specialization. This was, of course, halfway through a game where I'd taken the specialization like two levels earlier and suddenly the GM noticed. Somebody who is playing one character over the course of the campaign will learn things about the system when they are ready to spend experience points. "How do I make my energy blast bigger? Oh it's here on page 206? Okay..." Or they'll want to add a power or a new skill. Let them digest it in bits and pieces, that usually works well.

I tend to build characters for them the first time. Then just say "if you're rolling to hit, or to make a skill roll, you want low numbers. If you're rolling damage, you want high numbers". I walk them through their character sheet and explain what each thing means, very briefly. "With a 15 strength, you're an athletic male, like a high school football star. Not a bodybuilder though.". Exact accuracy isn't really important, letting them grasp the gist of it is. Tell them what segments they act on, and a quick explanation of half-move, attack, dodge, and block. Then they're ready to play. Takes about 5 minutes. Are they gonna know everything about the system immediately? No. But they don't have to be. One guy wanted to play Beast Boy from the Teen Titans. A Multiform/VPP character for a first time player? What a headache, right? It actually worked out really well. I just gave him a character sheet for like 10 different animals. Each one had a specific uses that were easy for a new player to understand. I kept Speed changes to a minimum (I think everything mostly went on the same phases). "Okay, so the elephant is big and tough, and it does the most damage. But it's slow, you don't get as many actions in that form. You see how you normally go on phases 2, 4, 6, 8, etc? Well the elephant only goes on 4, 8, and 12. If you switch to it on a phase it doesn't go on, you have to wait. So only switch to an elephant on 4, 8, or 12." I think he had elephant, tiger, rhino, eagle, mouse (good for sneaking around but not something you use in combat), shark, electric eel, bat, dog, and monkey. And he grasped it really fast that certain forms weren't really for fighting. The dog can track people by scent, the bat has sonar, the monkey can climb, etc. Everything could still do some damage (I think the dog had a 6D6 Armor Piercing Hand Attack bite -- not lethal but it hurt like hell). And the guy had a blast with it.

At the very most, selling your Comeliness off would get you 5 points. That's to be Elephant Man ugly. I don't know any player who ever did that. But you can't balance the game within single digit points. If you try, you're pretending the game has a degree of accuracy that it doesn't have.

Then it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said it was led by the same people who created the game originally.

Long story short, 6th edition is chasing the white whale. Players have complained about small cost discrepancies with things like figured characteristics. "Strength is too efficient!" Yeah... kind of. Buying your strength up is efficient, except unless you're a brick you're still paying for dice damage that you aren't going to use. In a 12D6 game, buying a 30 strength isn't abusive, because a 6D6 punch isn't enough to get through anybody's defenses. Buying up primary characteristics to boost figureds tends to result in a small point savings, relative to the overall cost of the character. A 350 point hero with high primaries may end up saving 20 to 30 points versus a character with lower primaries who bought up his figured characteristics. This is a real discrepancy, but it's less than 10% of the character's cost. 6th edition separated primaries from figureds, but then they were faced with the idea that maybe figureds were overcosted to begin with. So Stun and End became a lot cheaper. But then the cost structure of Endurance Reserve was all screwed up, because you could just buy regular End for really cheap. The limitation Increased Endurance became an easy way to save points, because the price on that didn't change, but End itself is way cheaper. Which means that the value of the Charges limitation is all screwed up now. You can't change one fundamental aspect of the system without affecting the others. And that's what they did in 6th. Recovery became 1/2 cost, Endurance became less than 1/2 cost. That means I can pump both those stats up higher than a 5th ed character, and take x2 End cost on all my powers for a -1/2 (or x3 for a -1) for significant savings. You went from somebody saving 20 to 30 points (between 5-8% of total character cost) by buying up their primaries to saving between a third and half on their primary power set. 6th edition is rife with problems like that.

I jokingly answered earlier in the thread, but now I'll answer for real. This is going to come across as kind of rude. Sorry. No offense meant to anybody here. 6th edition is inferior because it is designed by a committee, based upon a false promise, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying system. It's the product of endless tinkering without an achievable goal or a clear direction. I'll try to flesh out what I mean by all that, but some of it is conceptual and may be rather hard to explain. Everything up to 4th edition was led by the original designers, and there's a logic to how everything was costed. Power X is about twice as good as Power Y, so it should cost twice as much. There's a basic concept of balance built into it from the very beginning. All the powers and characteristics are roughly scaled with one another. It's not perfectly executed, but it's pretty close. Moreover, there was a philosophy to how it was balanced. They valued certain abilities more than others, and so those were costed higher. These ideas were internally consistent with each other. Combat abilities are more valuable than noncombat abilities. Flexible powers are more valuable than those that are more limited. Therefore these things cost more points. If you built characters as they intended, and played the game as they intended, it had a wonderful balance. 4th edition Champions was almost perfect. And again, it was true to its philosophy. Now with a system as complex as Champions, you'll never get a perfect balance. There are just too many moving bits and pieces, and a powergamer will find the most efficient builds possible, while a person who has never played before will waste points on things that may never come up. That is unavoidable. But later editions didn't understand that. 5th edition, 5th edition revised, 6th edition, Champions Complete, all of them have tried to tweak the system to achieve some perfect balance that just isn't possible. And the biggest problem is, these changes didn't follow the original pricing structure of the system. The changes were made by people with a different philosophy of how the system should work. And those changes don't quite mesh with the underlying system. As an example, let's go to 5th edition, written by Steve Long (somewhat prophetically named when you see the size of his manuscripts). He had his own ideas about how the Hero System should work, and he modified it. Adders became much more common. The pricing structure for some powers was changed, but not for others. And while some of these changes were arguably good, others were not so great. It was clear that he was seeing the system in a different way from the original authors, but it was a modification of their system and not one built from the ground up with his own ideas. Long's philosophy appeared to be based around trying to make everything fit around a certain core set of game mechanics. Instant Change was removed as a Talent and modified to be a "My clothes only" Transform. Shapeshift was turned into a sense-affecting power. But one of the most glaring examples here is Damage Shield. In 4th edition, Damage Shield was a +1/2 advantage you applied to a power. If anybody touched you, or if you touched anybody, they were hit with that power. When 5th edition hit, it suddenly required you to purchase the advantage Continuous (+1). But, you didn't actually get the benefit that Continuous granted, which is that somebody hit with a Continuous power will be affected by it every single phase. No, you had to pay a +1 advantage tax because now you've got to change your Energy Blast to a Constant power before you can apply Damage Shield. Why is this a problem? Because it's a different game philosophy stacked on top of the previous one. While both follow the idea of "you get what you pay for", 4th edition was more focused on comparative effectiveness, whereas 5th added costs with the idea of making powers conform to a certain format. A 10D6 Energy Blast with Damage Shield in 4th edition was 75 points. That's the same as a 15D6 Energy Blast. Quite expensive, but you got the benefit that you could hurt your enemy when it wasn't your phase, without an attack roll, depending on what they did. Still might be too expensive though. In 5th edition, you had to buy it Continuous first. So now that power became 125 points, the same as a Twenty-five D6 Energy Blast. No power-gamer in the world would choose a 10D6 Damage Shield over a 25D6 EB. The two aren't remotely comparable. There are other problems as well. The cost of Major Transform had previously been based upon the cost of RKA, the logic being if you can kill them, you might as well be able to turn them into a frog. 5th ed wisely dropped having Cumulative be a +1/2 advantage (RKA is cumulative by default), but it added requirements that you had to pay more to affect different types of targets. Instead of "turn target into frog" the standard Transform became "turn human into frog". To affect any target, you had to buy another advantage. In this way, the cost structure of 5th edition became less consistent, more concerned with form than function. Abuse wasn't eliminated at all, the nature of the abuse just changed. I wasn't active on the boards during the time that they were soliciting suggestions for 6th edition. I think I had an account here but I had wandered off. But as I understand it there was a lot of discussion about what changes people wanted to see made. And while I like most of you guys just fine, good lord do I disagree with a lot of you over how the game system should work. I see questions on the Hero System Discussion page, and many of the suggestions are overly complex and extremely point inefficient. But some people feel like they've got to dot those "i"s and cross those "t"s. Again I wasn't involved in any of the discussions, but when I flip through the 6th edition book, I'm reminded of the adage "too many cooks spoil the broth". 6th compounds some of the mistakes of 5th edition and doesn't look back.

I don't have a problem with people on the team knowing one another's secret identities, but I don't think it's necessary. There are teams in comics where the people don't know each other. The housekeeper and the liaison could fall into that category as well, people who could reasonably know who he really was. In 6th edition, Defender has part of his face showing through the mask. Maybe he's got a real good jawline, and a sexy voice or something. As far as the date with Gravitar, I'd presume that it's a superhero date, not a conventional one. He'd wear his armor, she'd wear her costume, and they'd go flying around the city. They'd get take out, have a drink on top of a skyscraper overlooking the city, and engage in flirtatious banter back and forth. In the end maybe he takes off the helmet to give her a good night kiss, and he's got another mask on underneath.

Yeah but that’s the re-enactment. You don’t have to be that far for pistols to be inaccurate. We might be dealing with Star Trek distances, where ships fight each other super close onscreen, but are actually supposed to be farther apart.

I hadn't noticed this part. This makes things a lot easier. Pistols are really inaccurate at longer ranges. Beyond 50 feet or so, you have to be a really good shot. If this guy has a rifle and the enemy is only equipped with pistols, that's a huge advantage right there. In real life rifles would have reduced range penalties, and pistols would probably have increased range penalties. So if Bertolo is 100 feet away from them and he crouches down behind cover, and they're out in the open? They're all dead meat, man. They're probably shooting at him needing 4s and 5s, and he's shooting back needing 11s and 12s. There's also the possibility that some of the pistols were out of ammo after they shot up his squad.

But let's look at this from a different perspective. Let's take away extreme rolls and think about how this might have happened otherwise. I haven't seen the reenactment, but let's set it aside. The video would have been made decades after the fact, based on old war stories and shown in a cinematic way. All we really need to have is one soldier taking out six Germans. So you've got Bertolo, and he's hunkered down somewhere. And along come Hans, Fritz, Karl, Otto, Klaus, and Gunter. They think everybody in the squad is dead, and so they let their guard down. Bertolo has total cover, there is no line of sight between him and the Germans. But he obviously knows what is going on, and he's working up the courage to attack the enemy and avenge his buddies (Ego roll). He creeps forward and peeks over whatever object he's hiding behind. This is what he sees: Hans is the nearest to him, about 20 feet away, right in front of him. He is looking down at the ground, kicking a body to make sure the guy is dead. Fritz is 5 feet away from Hans, holding his weapon at the ready but his body is turned to the side and he is looking off into the distance. Karl is off to Bertolo's right, maybe 40 feet away. He is crouched down, his weapon on the ground, while he pokes at one of the bodies, looking for cigarettes or something. Otto is next, with his back completely to Bertolo. He is yelling something and waving his arm. Klaus and Gunter are out of sight, having walked behind a small building. Bertolo makes his Ego roll and combat begins. --Phase 12, the Germans are completely surprised. They don't get to act. Bertolo stands up and fires twice, once at Hans and once at Fritz. Dex 11, his OCV is 4. We'll say the Garand gives him a +1 OCV. Both targets are within the first 4 hexes and so receive no range penalty. Rapid firing, so he takes a -2 OCV penalty. Both targets are at 1/2 DCV. Betrolo needs a 12- on each one. Bam! 11. Hit Bam! 9. Hit. The Germans hear gunshots and start to look around. The GM lets them make Perception rolls to figure out where the shots came from and what is happening. Because this is the "realistic war" genre, the fog of war is a real thing, and they don't get Perception bonuses (they hear the gunshots, but they don't know where they're coming from). Klaus and Gunter make their rolls. They know gunshots are coming from the area where their squad is. Otto rolls a 12. He hears shots, and he knows they're close by, but he has no idea where they came from. Karl rolls a 13. He is startled by the shots. He swings his head around looking for something, but he's too surprised to process anything. --Phase 4. Bertolo is surprised to see the Germans haven't really reacted. The two guys he can see are looking around, but haven't spotted him. Bertolo aims at the guy holding the gun. Otto is at 1/2 DCV, so a 2. Bertolo has a 4 OCV + 1 for the weapon. He needs a 14-. Rolls a 12. Hit. Klaus and Gunter (on the other side of the building) take a half-phase to look at each other and make a decision, then they start moving towards the sound of the gunfire. Half-move. Karl tries to make another Perception check, this time with a bonus. Rolls a 15. This would fail, leaving him still clueless, but the GM rules that Karl can spend this entire phase figuring out what is happening. Karl suddenly realizes he's in a lot of trouble. -Phase 8. Karl and Bertolo see each other and make Dex roll-offs to see who goes first. The GM assigns Carl a -2 penalty because he's not actually holding his weapon right now. Bertolo says he wants to make a Presense attack, and the GM rules that he can do that first since it is a zero phase action. 2D6 base Presence, -1D6 for being in combat, +1D6 for being at a combat advantage, +1D6 for displaying a power (pointing a gun), +3D6 for the incredibly violent action of killing 3 guys already. Bertolo rolls 6D6 and gets 21 points, 11 points past Karl's 10 Presence. Karl is already at 1/2 DCV because he was kneeling on the ground. The GM rules he's basically at zero DCV right now due to the Presence attack, and Bertolo can act first. Bertolo needs a 16- to shoot Karl. He makes an easy shot and Karl goes down. Klaus and Gunter come running around the corner of the building (half move). Klaus fails his Perception roll to assess the situation. He sees his dead friends but he doesn't see the American soldier. Gunter makes his Perception check. The first thing he sees is the Amerikaner standing there having just blown away Karl. He raises his rifle and fires. Bertolo makes his Perception roll and has his full DCV (of 4). Klaus has a base 4 OCV, no bonus for the German gun. He's in the -2 range penalty bracket, needing a 9 or less. Gunter rolls a 10, and a bullet goes whizzing by Bertolo's ear. -Phase 12. Bertolo makes a Dex roll off with the Germans and wins. He aims at Gunter and fires. 5 OCV vs 4 DCV, -2 range penalty. The American needs a 10 and he makes it. Bam! Gunter goes down. Klaus is now the last one left. Klaus makes his Perception roll and finally sees the American just as the back of his buddy's head explodes. Klaus has to make an Ego roll. He rolls a 13, and decides that discretion is the better part of valor. If the movie Rambo had been made yet, that's who Klaus would think he was facing. He panics, turns and tries to make a full noncombat move away. Phase 4. Bertolo takes a full phase to aim and fire, getting a +1 OCV bonus. OCV 6 vs fleeing German's 1/2 DCV of 2. -4 range penalty at this point means it's an 11 or less. Bertolo's good luck continues and he blasts Klaus in the back. Fight over. And there you go. In real life, ambushes are extremely lethal, in part because the people being attacked don't know what's happening immediately. Our hero here gets several surprise shots, and a scattered enemy enters the combat at different points. Guys are having to run in and assess the situation immediately, and some of them just happen to be facing the wrong direction. Bertolo meanwhile knows exactly where they are, and when new people enter they happen to be directly in his line of sight. No amazing rolls required.

I don't see that as a problem. The original question was how do we describe this in Hero, given how unlikely it is. I think you've explained it. The guy won the Medal of Honor because it was so unlikely.

False. It suffers from a distinct lack of George Perez cover art.

We're still arguing because you keep saying crap like this: There are lots of book legal ways to do it, not just the Christopher way.

A custom perk seems to be a pretty easy way to handle it. Perk: Summon sword incantation -- 3 pts

Same here.

I've done that before. I played a Superman clone character with a "Kryptonian powers" Multipower. Heat vision, superbreath, Missile Deflection for catching bullets, Clairsentience for actively using his senses, and Danger Sense for Any Area to represent when he hears people cry out for help. I figured these were all powers that he was unlikely to use more than one at a time, so I stuck them all in one Multipower. Technically it's GM permission to do that with enhanced senses, but the GM had no problem with it. Pretty effective for building high powered characters on the cheap.

"Twice as powerful" is really just a generic term for how people are supposed to interact with the environment. Champions has an exponential curve for descriptive effects, but a linear one for gameplay. That way Superman and Batman can still be on the same team. A guy with a 30 PD can be "a hundred times tougher" than a guy with a 5 PD, without requiring a 500 PD. Our group has had a lot of success playing book characters, but for those adventures we've tended to run "concept games" where there wasn't a point limit and the GM designed all the characters. It was okay for one guy to be 1000 points and another to be 400, because the 1000 point guy wasn't just a 400 point character with 2 1/2 times the attacks and defenses. The high point guy had some expensive power builds, and was kind of wasteful with his point expenditures. Superman can have 200 points of enhanced senses, and enough telescopic vision to read a newspaper on a park bench while standing on the moon. It's cool, but it doesn't really make him that unbalanced.

Because virtually all of your powers in the VPP are going to require that anyway. For something you're always going to use, it's cheaper to put the Advantage on the Control Cost, rather than buying up the size of the pool itself. With a 500 point pool, you could have a 100D6 Energy Blast. But it won't affect anything without Affects Real World. So you're really looking at having a 33D6 Energy Blast that is actually usable. That's pretty cool and all, but it's Dr Destroyer level, not Omnipotent Being level. Put ARW on the Control Cost and now you're back to the full 100D6. It will cost you 500 extra points (+2 on the 250 Control Cost), but you're basically getting triple the value from your base pool. -- I'm still not clear on how the Succor is supposed to work. And you need to figure out a way to avoid getting automatically hit with every Affects Desolid attack that anyone in the observable universe happens to throw.

You need Affects Real World on the VPP.

Eventually you just run out of things to spend points on. A 5000 point cosmic VPP, every skill at 25-, 500 PD and ED resistant triple hardened with 75% Damage Reduction... You just end up flipping through the book trying to justify things.