massey

I live in a big, old house, with single pane windows. And 100 degree summers.

My electric bill approaches $600 during the summer.

You're still limited by points, and the agreed power level of the campaign. The discussion here is about a justification within the story for why somebody has a particular skill or ability. I'm simply saying that a character sheet can grow to fit the concept. "Always having been able to do it" doesn't mean that you're going to become outrageously powerful. In fact I think it helps prevent the scenario you're describing, because my XP expenditures are already mostly plotted out. I basically know how the character is going to grow. So let's stick with the Batman example. I'm going to build my knock-off character, the Rat-Man. He's basically intended to be Batman in every way, but with a rat theme, and of course limited by the fact that I don't have enough points to build my vision of the complete character from the beginning. So I spend my 350 points (or whatever the total for that rules edition and that campaign) and build my character. Now I can do a basic, bare-bones version of Batman on 350, but he's not going to have everything. Good physical stats, martial arts, utility belt, some amount of detective skills. He'll be a recognizable Batman-like character, but I'm going to have to cut a lot of corners. So in this example, let's say I don't give him any Knowledge skills, or Science skills, or Languages. I don't give him any vehicles, or a base, or even any wealth. He's supposed to have them, he might even be described as having them. They just aren't written down yet. "Rat-Man, aren't you an expert on DNA analysis?" To steal a quote from Bart Simpson, "As long as you have absolutely no follow up questions, yes. Yes I am." This gives the character a path forward. The early sessions of the game may never touch on Rat-Man's personal life. The other characters may never visit his home. Sure, he's "fabulously wealthy", but only in the sense that it is briefly mentioned, and never appears in the game Once I buy it, then people can come see my giant mansion. It doesn't require an explanation for where it came from -- the character was always rich. He just couldn't make use of it before that point. It does require a little bit of cooperation between the GM and the player. The GM tacitly agrees not to focus on aspects of the character that haven't been purchased yet, to not call attention to the fact he doesn't have it. There's no "the bad guys attack your mansion" scenario before he actually buys his mansion (or they immediately attack it and burn it down, which explains why he doesn't have it for the next few months in the game). The player, meanwhile, attempts to purchase core abilities as quickly as possible, and doesn't try to justify using abilities he's "supposed to" have before he's actually bought them.

Costs END Only to Activate (+1/4) is a big hit with our group. Movement powers, force fields, things like that are often purchased with this advantage.

How is your electric bill less than $100 for the entire month?

I really liked the first one, and wanted to see the second. It's just one of those things where you aren't paying attention and then a movie you wanted to see is no longer in theaters when you're ready to see it.

It's not only languages, that's just one example. There are a lot of reasonable justifications for spending XP. "I've been studying for months during my down time to learn this skill" is one of them. So is "I was thrown into this situation and had to learn on the fly". Suppose a plane crashes in the wilderness, and the character has to survive in the jungle for a few months before he finds his way to civilization. Justification for buying the Survival skill could be "Through blind luck and some half-remembered TV shows, I managed to live long enough to learn what I was doing". To me, having always had the ability in question is a good justification too. Suppose you want to raise your character's Body score. Right now, mystic urban vigilante Doctor Moonlight has a Body score of 10. But, in the course of gameplay he's never actually taken any Body damage, let alone be dropped to negative. But last session a superpowered werewolf tried to gut you (he missed with his claws before you zapped him with a spell). You looked at how much damage his claws do and realized that had he connected, you'd have been in real trouble. So you decide to buy up your Body score. "What's your justification?" asks the GM. And you tell him that you've always envisioned your character as a tough, durable guy, and his average Body score needs to be higher to reflect that. Assuming you aren't breaking some campaign power level guideline by buying it up, I don't see what the problem would be. From a visual perspective, your character has never had an appearance where he demonstrated a low Body score. The first time the "reader" sees him take Body, it's with his new improved higher score.

I generally agree with you on this. I liked Avengers 3, but yeah Age of Ultron wasn't that great. Agreed on Iron Man 3 and Thor 2. At this point, I'm basically prepping myself to check out of the MCU. I'm kinda done. I'll see Avengers 4, but there's no guarantee I'll see anything else. I am still working up the urge to see Ant Man 2 (I missed it in theaters and don't want to have to buy it just to watch it). Captain Marvel isn't really grabbing my interest either. This is not really a criticism of Marvel Studios -- they've done an amazing job and I never thought a movie universe like this was possible. The complete failure of every other shared universe that copycats have attempted proves how difficult it is. It's just that my appetite for superhero movies is completely sated at this point. There have been almost 20 Marvel movies so far, and that doesn't include the X-Men films or the other Spider-Man movies, or the early 2000s films (Affleck's Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Hulk). I'm burned out, just like I'm burned out on zombie movies.

I'm not a fan of the idea. One of the assumptions I use when building characters is that there are certain things my character can do, they just aren't on his sheet yet. Suppose I'm playing a Batman knock-off. Maybe I don't have the points available to speak any foreign languages, or to be rich, or to have my Knock-offmobile. As far as I'm concerned, I have those abilities, they just haven't shown up in my comic book yet. As long as the events of the campaign haven't specifically shown me to not have them, I should be able to take them at any time. For instance, if there's a session where a street thug is speaking Russian, and I have no clue what he's saying, to the point that our characters miss some important information, then it doesn't really make sense for me to take fluency in Russian three game sessions later, having "always" been able to speak it. But if that doesn't happen, I should be able to spend my XP on anything that hasn't really popped up yet.

Yeah, if I had to guess, revealing the Phase 4 films will tell us something about the end of Infinity War. They probably keep all that quiet until after the movie is released. Then we'll know if Cap and Iron Man die, and who is coming back, etc. A Hugh Jackman/Robert Downey Jr movie would make a gajillion dollars, so I'm sure Marvel is dreaming of that. But I don't know if the actors are willing to come back and do another one. Phase 4 is probably dependent on which actors they can get to return. I think the biggest challenge Marvel will face is going to be convincing audiences to stick with the movies after the current crop of stars bow out. Will people really come in to see Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, and Jeremy Renner? Can they continue The Avengers with those characters? I think they're going to have to start over and build up a different aspect of the universe. Go back to individual character movies and slowly build them up to crossovers again.

Seriously? A wealth inequality argument in college football? He wants the lower programs to break away and form their own playoff. I guess they can go join the FCS if they want, rake in all that fat cash. I wonder why those schools aren't rushing to do that.

When I was in preschool I would watch Scooby Doo on TV. At night I'd be terrified of whatever the villain of the week was, and I'd crawl in bed with my parents. Once I was also afraid to go to the bathroom by myself, because I'd flipped through a Disney book and the picture of the Tyrannosaurus from Fantasia scared me so badly. I was going to pee my pants if my dad wouldn't come to the bathroom with me (like 20 feet away from the living room). Another time I saw an ad for the movie Terror Train in the weekly TV guide that came with the newspaper. I think it was this picture: I was maybe 4 years old, and my mom had set me on the kitchen cabinet. Then she went to the bathroom. The newspaper was on the cabinet with me. I saw the picture again, threw it on the floor and started screaming. My mom rushed into the kitchen to see what was the matter, and all I could say was "Terror Train!!! Terror Train!!!" She had to throw the newspaper in the trash can before I would calm down.

Oh, Janos Skorzeny!!! I loved that show.

Is this a thread from 20 years ago?

205 points is still not much. Consider that a low powered starting hero is usually about 250. You guys have been playing for a year and you aren't even there yet. I'd say you're still in the range where there's not much room for error in character design. Metamorph characters are usually pretty weak. The truth is, a character with a lot of different powers (like a Superman or a Martian Manhunter) generally have to split their points between so many separate abilities that they end up doing nothing well. A more focused character will usually be much more effective than one who tries to do everything. You haven't given us any character sheets or anything, so I can't tell exactly why you're having problems in the game. I'm not up on Pathfinder enough to know what the game balance between classes looks like, but you know those powerhouse classes that everyone wants to play? A metamorph is not that. Metamorphs would be more akin to those classes that nobody plays because they are well behind the power curve. And you're wondering if they should be allowed because it's overpowering your game. This information just does not compute.

I guess I'm unclear on this. Are you asking what is possible, in the really real world? Or are you asking what is believable in a particular genre of fiction? In the really real world, the best specimens we're likely to see are professional athletes. They haven't been selectively bred, other than in the normal "famous athletes sleep around a lot" way. Not selective breeding in a Nazi eugenics way. And with our very large population, we offer tremendous cash rewards for people with outstanding athletic ability to come forward. So basically we're harvesting the physical cream of the crop, generation after generation, and giving them lots of money to engage in extreme physical training. The biggest, strongest, and fastest are selected and are basically given their choice of breeding partners. Wilt Chamberlain supposedly slept with 10,000 women. I wonder how many people in the NBA today are actually Wilt Juniors. One problem you're going to get is that historically, the standards for a "perfect human" are going to be different than what we've got today. When food is scarce, some guy who is built like Shaq is at a serious disadvantage. And cultures are going to value different things. Some modern athletes are so muscular that they literally sink in the pool. That's no good if you're a nation of swimmers. And then you've got plain old ignorance. In addition to racial goals (the Nazis wanted their people as white and blond as they could get), you've got other weird ideas. The royal families of Europe thought they were special, that they were "better than normal people" because they'd been selected by God. And so they had problems with inbreeding. Realistically, our professional athletes today are far more likely to fit our own ideal of what it means to be a "perfect human specimen". I'd say stats in the high teens to low twenties is reasonable for a modern athlete in their prime. Now, in fiction? Depends entirely on your genre.

As always with the Hero System, there's an easy way to do it and a needlessly complicated way to do it. And as always, some people prefer the needlessly complicated because they're just that way. So your villain has a water blast, and you want targets of that blast to be more vulnerable to ice attacks afterward. Okay, I can kinda see the logic there. But there are questions to think about before you put pen to paper and start creating a character. --Is there something special about your character's water blast, or is this something that all water attacks should have? --Are there only certain ice attacks that take advantage of this, or is it something that all ice attacks get the bonus from? --Does your character have the ice attack as well as the water attack? Does someone in your group have an ice attack? Or are you thinking maybe somebody with an ice attack just happens to show up? --How often are you planning for this to boost the damage of a character who is not on your team? --Are you okay with a 1 in 100 circumstance where the power logically should work, but as written it doesn't? One of the ways that Hero can get overcomplicated very quickly is when a person wants to represent a universal type of effect, and by god they want it to work every single time, no matter what. "I want my character to be immune to poison. All poisons." Sounds simple enough, buy Life Support: Immune to Poison. But what happens when you run into somebody else's character, who bought a 5D6 RKA defined as "poison dart". It's a super-duper poison, even effective against machines (because he forgot to put a limitation on it). Did your "Immune to Poison" ability account for maybe needing an extra 30 Defense, only against poisons? Probably not. It's impossible to think of every possible variation of power interactions. Let's look at the questions again. Is there something special about your character's water blast, or is this something that all water attacks should do? If all water attacks should boost ice attacks, then that's probably something the GM should handle by either making it a campaign rule (you take extra damage when you're wet), or all ice blast characters should take some bonus damage vs wet characters. It isn't really something that you need to build into the water blast -- because taking a dip in a swimming pool should do the same thing. Does your character have the ice attack, or is it something your friends have? If your character, Water Lass, wants to help your friend Ice Lad hit harder, you could use an Aid. Now, this will help Ice Lad, but if you just happen to have Frost King make a guest appearance one week, he isn't helped unless you use the power on him too. If a half-dozen agents show up, all with OAF ice blasters, they don't benefit unless you use the power on them individually as well. But you have to ask yourself... how often does that kind of thing happen? In 20+ years of playing Champions, I don't think I've ever seen a bunch of agents show up with ice weapons. You may be worrying about a situation that will never occur in game. So ultimately you just determine your level of tolerance for odd power interactions.

The thing that stands out to me is that the power level seems extremely low. A 25 active point limit is frankly pathetic when it comes to superheroes. Really you just might not have enough points to play certain character concepts. Has the GM run Hero before? Because it seems like there's a fear of allowing the players to have powerful characters, and sometimes that's due to inexperience. At very low levels, munchkinism can become more pronounced. If you have fewer points to spend, you have to be more careful in how you spend them, to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. That might be what you're running into here. For the game to be enjoyable, I've usually found that every character needs an attack power, a defensive ability, and movement. It doesn't matter if you swing from buildings or teleport across the city, or whether you've got a fire blast or know kung fu, or if you are bulletproof or can become intangible. As long as you've got attack, defense, and a way to get to the action, you're okay and you'll have fun. At very low levels, many players find they don't have the points for those 3 things unless they cheese it out. It sounds to me like most of your characters don't really have those abilities, and it's creating tension with the players who managed to get all three (because of a clever build, or more experience with the system). I think the solution is to increase the points totals, so that everybody can be reasonably effective.

I don't want to say that losing to Texas was worth it. Because Texas sucks and I never want to lose to them ever. Let's just say that overall my weekend was a good one. Despite the home repairs that are necessary after Saturday's loss.

When trying to duplicate a real life event, you need to decide if you want to try to reproduce the actual effects, or if you want a cinematic version of it. As Steve said, fortunately I don't have any experience with actual seizures. I've seen them on TV though. I have a few different suggestions for how to represent it: 1) Ego Attack -- buy it up to sufficient levels that you can knock your opponent unconscious. The special effect is that they flop on the ground, having a seizure. The attack doesn't actually have to last for minutes, in comic book terms we are only going to see them for a few panels. The attack takes them out of the fight, and when we see them they are jerking around uncontrollably. Somebody yells "oh no! Bob!" and then rushes over to help. After that, Bob is offscreen. For our purposes, Bob might as well just be unconscious. The seizure is over when the person recovers to a positive Stun total. 2) Mind Control -- "flop around like you're having a seizure". This power has the advantage that it can make someone continue to act over many phases. They are jerking around and are obviously still conscious, as opposed to an Ego Attack in which the spasms are just the special effect. It has the downside that a good breakout roll will end the seizure immediately, and the person suffers no ill effects after it is over. They aren't hurt or anything. 3) Mental Entangle -- similar to Mind Control, this can take somebody out of the fight. It has the same problems that once somebody breaks out, they aren't harmed by it. No "damage" was done. But while they're in it, they can't really do anything. 4) Flash vs all sense groups -- this will completely incapacitate the target, as long as it is strong enough to get through. Flash their hearing, touch, sight, everything. They can try to lash out (firing blindly), but they should have trouble even retaining their footing. Like Ego Attack, this doesn't actually make them flop around on the floor, but it is incapacitating in that they can't intelligently interact with the rest of the world anymore. On the downside, somebody with polarized goggles or ear protection might resist some of the more important parts of the attack, which means it won't always work right in the game. 5) Telekinesis -- just grab them and shake the crap out of them. This actually works really well in a lot of ways. It incapacitates them, it does damage, it makes them violently shake around. The disadvantage is that really strong people can be immune to your seizures. If you want to be versatile, I'd suggest a Multipower with one or all of the above powers in it. Your "Induce seizures" Multipower has a lot of different options based on your target. You select which effect you want to inflict, and you can cycle through them and layer effects on top of one another. If you're going after a brick, maybe you start with Mind Control or Flash because they've got a lot of Stun and you're hoping to one-shot them. If you're after a mentalist, perhaps Telekinesis will work better because they aren't that physically strong. Visually, all the effects look pretty much the same. On the comic book page, you wouldn't really know which effect the person had used -- you'd just know that people fall down and shake when it is used.

I disagree. A disguise kit can be obvious. You've got the fake beard, the Groucho Marx nose and glasses, etc. It's OBVIOUS what it is, until you make your Disguise roll (it even comes in a box, with "Disguise Kit -- Fool your friends!" written on it). Once you've made your roll, though, you are disguised.

+2 with Concealment -- 4 points OAF (-1), because when you see the gun, it's obvious it was made small on purpose so it can be hidden. You also aren't just across the board better at concealment, like you would be without the limitation Self only (-1/2), because having the gun doesn't make you better at hiding other stuff Real Cost: 1.6 points, rounded up to 2

You could build it as a bonus to the Concealment roll. Regular Blaster 2D6+1 RKA, OAF, 12 charges Concealed Blaster 2D6 RKA, OAF, 8 charges +2 to Concealment rolls, OAF

Regarding slasher movies, I've heard it proposed that the reason we have a surviving female is because it's easier for the audience to empathize with her fear. It's okay for our protagonist to run from the monster, because we don't expect her to "man up" and fight him. The entire audience, including the biggest manliest men, can place themselves in her shoes and so it's okay for us to be afraid.

No, I view complications/disadvantages differently than I do limitations. Regardless of what the book says they're for, I view disadvantages as player-defined story hooks for the GM. They are hints as to what kind of challenges you'd like to face. The GM picks and chooses the ones that seem interesting and makes a story out of them. Disads also work as an incentive for the player to define the character. Ever see a player struggle to come up with a name for his character? Disads help them lock down key parts of their personality and background. Pretty much every character will have max disads. Everybody ends up with the same point totals. I view limitations more strictly, because that's how you squeeze a 700 point character into 350.