massey

I think you'll have at least one athlete who refuses to play, saying that the university doesn't value him as a human being, they are putting his health at risk, etc. And then it'll be a nationwide movement that gets a ton of attention, and then the NCAA will cancel the season.

You could test the players every week, take their temperature before practice and before the games, and not let people play if they showed any symptoms. College athletes are gonna be in the lowest risk group of people. But as soon as one athlete says "I don't feel safe, I'm not playing", what are school administrators gonna do? They aren't gonna pull some kid's scholarship, not in the current political environment. It would be a real bad look for a school to have some middle aged guy tell a group of young, 50% black, unpaid school kids "you have to risk infection with a potentially deadly disease or we'll pull your scholarship". I agree, I don't think we'll have anything like a real season this year.

The 50s and 60s were a completely different era. The rest of the industrialized world had been bombed to hell, and you could get a good job in the US if you could stand on an assembly line. But as the rest of the world rebuilt, American businesses became stagnant and uncompetitive. That led to all the economic problems of the 70s. Of course (to kinda bring this back around to something on-topic), in the 50s and 60s you couldn't get a good job if you were black. Or a woman. We've basically doubled the percentage of our population who are competing for jobs. Wages have gone down, but that's what happens when a bunch of people who used to stay home are now out looking for work. My understanding is that most of Bezos' money comes from his ownership of Amazon stock. According to a 5 second Google search, his salary is only $81,000 a year, and hasn't increased since the 90s. My wife and I made more than that last year. I'm sure he's received bonuses and things (he has some very nice houses, including the Beverly Hillbillies house, and you don't get that on an $81K salary alone), but his real money is that he personally owns 11% of Amazon. As that company increases in value, so does his net worth. You can't really tax that money without forcing him to sell his ownership of the company he built. That seems wrong to me.

Who knows if we'll even have football this year. Truthfully I can't get excited about the season. I don't think there's any way they can expect 80,000 people to crowd together in a stadium this year. With all those empty seats, every game will feel like a PAC-12 game.

Bezos is a lot more valuable to the economy than a guy who flips burgers. Does he work 50,000 times as hard? No, but "working hard" isn't a factor. Is he 50,000 times more valuable than a burger flipper? Yes, probably more than that. If you could pick one Jeff Bezos/one Elon Musk/one Bill Gates to add to your economy... versus 50,000 McDonald's employees... who would add more to your economy? Don't forget, Bezos started Amazon in his garage, and used to personally box up people's orders and drive them to the post office in his car. He grew his garage business into one of the biggest companies on the planet. Other people chose to invest their money in his company, and he made it grow. Part of the reason we're the world's strongest economy is because we don't demand that the wealthy pay for every social program under the sun.

Highly skilled players are murder machines with cosmic VPPs. Yes, I've used one. Yes, I could basically do anything I wanted with it. One of the nastiest parts is slapping limitations on the powers to bring the real cost down. Suppose you had a 60 point Cosmic VPP. You can have a 12D6 Energy Blast, or +30" of Flight, or a 30/30 Force Field. Or why not all three at once? Slap x5 Endurance (-2 limitation) on them and for a few phases, you can have all 3 powers going at the same time. Yeah, you'll run out of End fast. That's why you thought of that before the fight and Aided your Endurance, right? On the other hand, inexperienced players get totally shut down when you hand them a VPP. They can't wrap their head around it and they just freeze up.

Because of the actions of every elf player, ever?

I'm sure it'll be done badly. Ravenloft was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of Romania. It was basically the world of Universal monsters and Hammer films. And those movies have stereotypical "gypsies" in them. So you're left with this awkward situation. You say "real Roma aren't like the gypsies in the movies", but what you actually want are the movie characters. So you call them Vistani, and you're free to include movie stereotypes if you wish. But then someone comes in and insists that your gypsy stereotype group, who you renamed to something else, has to look like the real life people who are supposedly nothing like the movies... It would be like if you had a tribe of cannibals in a jungle adventure game. And to get away from the troublesome African tribe stereotypes, you change them and make them nonhumans who practice necromancy. So they're now a tribe of human-eating hobgoblins, who use bone magic and wear colorful tribal masks. Like you can still kinda tell what they're going for, but they changed it to avoid implications of racism. And then somebody comes in and says "that's not what real African tribes are like!" Yeah no shit. The more you make them like a real world culture, the more trouble you can get in. The purpose is to hit the tropes of the genre while avoiding any racist connotations. I'm not really sure how much of a market exists for traditional Ravenloft anymore though. The movies it is based on are really old, and I kinda doubt that modern day teenagers are that familiar with them.

I think you can model it, it's just with regular Str bought as a Damage Shield. Clinging (and Str usable while clinging) is ultra cheap.

I don't have that book, but think of it like this. Summon lets you bring forth a creature that has 5 character points for every 1 point you invest in the Summon power. So a 9 point Summon (with no limitations on it) would allow you to use the power and create a 45 character point creature. At its base level, the creature just appears, it doesn't have to obey you automatically (you can make an opposed Ego roll to force them to obey, but at its base level they only obey for a few phases). A 20 point Summon would allow you to bring forth a creature with 100 character points, which is significantly more powerful. If you add the Limitations gestures (-1/4) and incantations (another -1/4), then your 9 point summon would actually give you 14 active points of power (reduced to 9 points real cost). Thus you are Summoning a 70 point creature. Of course, your 20 point Summon would then create a 150 point creature, which is again far more powerful. You can use Summon every phase. If you are a 4 Speed character and have "Summon Skeleton" as a power (requiring gestures and incantations, and creating a 70 point skeleton), then you can use the power on Segment 3, again on Segment 6, then again on Segment 9, and finally on Segment 12. You can keep doing it every phase, getting 4 Skeletons each Turn, as long as you have the necessary Endurance (and presumably some way to get them to do what you want). There is a 5 point Adder that you can slap on the Summon power that doubles the number of creatures created, and you can buy it multiple times. So for +5 points, you get 2 Skeletons. For +10 points, you get 4 Skeletons. For +15 points, you get 8 Skeletons, and so on. But you're spending more points that could have instead been spent on more powerful creatures. Wizard A and Wizard B both buy the Summon power. Wizard A starts with Summon Skeleton, 14 active points with gestures and incantations, which reduces the cost to 9 points. This lets him call forth a single 70 point Skeleton every phase. He then upgrades it to Summon Skeleton Army, with three 5 point doublings. Now he Summons 8 skeletons every phase. This power has 29 active points, reduced to 19 points real cost with the limitations. Every time Wizard A uses his power, he brings forth 8 skeleton warriors who each cost 70 points. That can quickly become a sizable horde. His advantage over someone without the 5 point doublings is that he can summon his army faster. There was no upper limit to the number of skeletons he could have created, even before the doublings. It just would have taken 8 times as long. Wizard B doesn't bother with Summon Skeleton Army. Instead he spends the same 19 points on Summon Vampire. With gestures and incantations, he can Summon a single 145 point creature. So which is better to have, a group of 8 kinda dangerous skeletons, or one badass vampire? Because that's the choice you're making. Increasing the size of your summoned horde doesn't really cost all that much, but there's still a trade-off. You're giving up the ability to take more powerful creatures.

I wouldn't allow it. I know it's listed in the rules, but it's a really dumb idea. I don't think they thought it through very well. Clinging is a movement power, hence why it's so cheap. You're basically looking at a cheap auto-grab that doesn't cost End, and we don't want to go there.

Or you aim impossibly high and fail utterly, accomplishing nothing, instead of trying something that's actually achievable.

I'm not saying that it's just the occasional a-hole. I know there are larger problems than that. That particular point was about some numbers that another poster had thrown around a page or two back in the thread (I forget who exactly). They said that of the unarmed people who got shot in one year, only like 3 of them weren't either running away or attacking the cop or whatever. And someone else responded with a "that's 3 too many" or something like that. I'm merely saying that if we get "bad" shootings down to single digit numbers across the entire nation, then it's Miller Time. A friend of mine is an ex-cop. He told me that he used to carry a "throw down gun" that he could place at the scene if he ever needed to shoot somebody. Apparently it was a quite common practice, a lot of officers did it. This was back in the 80s, and I'm sure it still happens today. He also told me that this one time he arrested a guy (white dude), and as he's driving him to jail the dude starts threatening his family. "When I get out of here I'm gonna rape your wife..." He pulled over his patrol car, got out, opened the back door, and stuck his gun to the guy's head and told him how easy it would be to make him go away forever. After he had made his feelings clear to the man, he dragged him out of the back seat and beat the ever-living shit out of him with his night stick. Apparently it went on for a while. Then he pushed the guy back into the car and drove him the rest of the way to jail. He wrote down the guy resisted arrest and none of the other cops said a word. Was that a good thing to do? No. But I understand why he did it. And I understand why the other cops looked the other way. The Thin Blue Line is a real problem, but it didn't spring into existence for no reason. Pretending that we can just make it go away doesn't do us any good.

I'm not really talking about optics here though. You can phrase something in a more presentable way. I'm not trying to do that here. I'm not a politician, so I don't have to worry about that here. If we could reduce abuses by police officers by half, then that's a fantastic improvement and we should do it. The standard should never be "is this perfect?" because we'll never reach it.

Thank you. I'm way late in responding to things here. Real life intervened in the last week and I haven't been able to take the time to respond fully to anybody. I've heard the stories of being harassed by the cops simply for being black. However that's really outside any of my expertise. If nobody gets arrested, no police report is created, and it never goes to a courtroom. Cops can hassle people all day long without leaving any sort of paper trail. I understand that it can happen, but we don't really have any sort of way to measure it. Neither white people nor black people really know what the other group is experiencing. If a cop is a jerk, a white person walks away thinking "what a jerk", while a black person walks away thinking "what a racist". But without any real numbers there's no way to quantify it. The best solution that I can come up with is for black people to be ready with the cameras. You can buy a dash cam for your own vehicle for about 50 bucks. I think a nonprofit group devoted to supplying dash cams to low income people would be a good idea. Maybe set up a website where you could upload the videos of your encounters with the cops, and have volunteers screen each video. Collect the data, then file a federal lawsuit. The problem with relying on cop dash cams is that it's easy for them to park their car at an angle so the dash cam doesn't show anything. "I looked over my shoulder and saw him change lanes without signaling. Then I turned around and initiated a traffic stop." You gotta have your own video for something like this. Fortunately it's getting pretty cheap to do that.

I'm not going to try to get into an argument on this. I'm just going to state things as I see them. It will be kinda long. I am a defense attorney and was a public defender for nearly a decade. Some of this will probably offend some people here. So be it. I believe everyone here has the same general good goals and none of us are trying to be irrational or hateful. This is, at the same time, both a massive problem within our justice system and also a fairly minor one. In a country of 1/3 of a billion people, about 1000 people a year are shot and killed by the police. Of those, about 10% are reported to be unarmed. Some percentage of the unarmed people are either fleeing or attempting to commit suicide by cop (however I was unable to find those numbers).. A large number of them are also mentally ill (so they do unexpected things). Approximately 40% of the unarmed people who are killed by police are black (mostly young males). About 13% of the US population is black, but they make up a disproportionate share of all inmates in US prisons (accurate numbers are difficult to find quickly on this topic -- I've seen statistics anywhere from 1/3 to more than half, these numbers also appear to be going down). For raw population numbers, unarmed black people are killed at a rate 3 times what we would expect. But compared to how likely they are to be arrested by police, the numbers are much closer (this of course, makes us ask whether black people are unfairly targeted by police in the first place). However this does mean that police do not appear to be more likely to shoot black people in any given encounter (i.e., per contact). Any stance of "even one person being wrongfully killed is unacceptable" doesn't work for me. Mistakes happen. Accidents happen. Outright murders happen. We want to minimize these of course, but as TrickstaPriest said above with the person who set a cop on fire in Mexico, "that one person is an asshole and an instigator". Police departments in the United States are local. They vary from massive organizations like the NYPD and LAPD, down to small towns with two part time cops. You cannot have such a dispersed system and also guarantee against one person being "an asshole and an instigator". You cannot say that the entire justice system failed just because Officer Hardass decided to put a bullet in somebody. Single digit incidents across a country of 330 million people are not a sign of a manifestly unjust system. It's also possible for rational people to disagree on individual police shootings. I have not seen the video of the guy who got shot in the back after he stole the cop's taser, but I've talked to several people who have. Everybody seemed to have their own opinion on it. I've seen police shooting videos where I thought the officer should be prosecuted immediately, and other people say "nah, it's fine". And I've seen others where I thought it was perfectly justified (or at least understandable) and the cop gets arrested. People are going to see things differently. However, all that said, there are serious problems within our justice system. We need to change these things. Some of these are going to be extremely difficult to fix, and right now nobody is talking about many of them. Some of them would be easy to fix, but nobody is lifting a finger to do what is necessary. --Police unions have far too much power and influence. In my state, when an officer shoots a suspect he is not questioned about it until days later when he's had a chance to consult with his union rep and an attorney. That's part of their contract (source: a buddy of mine who is an ex-cop). Bad cops get rehired or are never fired in the first place because of union contracts. Even when something is "makes national news" bad, the unions are reluctant to go against their officers. --There is a political problem within the Democratic Party right now. African Americans vote Democrat about 90% of the time, but police unions are also major contributors to Democratic politicians. Taking on the unions is a career killer for local Democrat politicians. Republican politicians have no real incentive to take action (though they try to combat public sector unions on general principle, it's not Republicans who are getting shot), and Democratic politicians are paralyzed. Two of their largest voting blocks are in opposition to each other here. --Cops aren't tested for steroids. This is a major problem, it's obvious, and no one has ever mentioned it. I've seen these guys in the courtroom. Everybody knows who they are. They're clearly juicing and everyone knows it. Yet cops aren't drug tested, and they certainly aren't tested for steroids. I'd say at least 10% of cops are juicing. Now don't get me wrong -- I was once in a room with a client who was one big mean son of a bitch, he got mad at me and jumped out of his chair at me. I was very happy to see Officer Zangief (clearly taking some "Vitamin S") come in and smash that sucker into the wall. Cops deal with dangerous people, that's why so many of them take steroids. But we need to start doing something about it. --No one is keeping track of bad cops. Social media companies, instead of doing something useless like saying "we support BLM", could actually do something helpful. It would be trivially easy for Facebook or Google or another company that already mines our data to create an algorithm that scans news reports for instances of police violence and assembles a database. When somebody tweets out "my cousin Ricky got shot by the police", people should be collecting that. When a cop gets fired for illegal use of force, that should follow him. As it is, it's too easy for him to go to a different department and get hired there. But if a report was widely available, and you could see this guy had already shot 3 people and had 15 complaints against him? A lot less bad cops would get rehired. --Police are not trained enough in de-escalation. They're not trained enough, period. But they're especially not trained in de-escalation. Every cop who goes through the academy should know how to approach a suspect who is not actively resisting and talk to him in such a way that they don't start actively resisting. Too many cops go to violent confrontation too quickly. This is a problem that can be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed by spending less money. --Local prosecutors have very close relationships with the police. Prosecutors are friends with cops. They marry cops. They work with cops every day. It's hard to file charges against a guy who came to your cookout a month ago. Last week you were asking him how his wife and new baby are doing, this week you're trying to decide if it was okay for him to shoot a guy who had been to prison three times. In most circumstances, the cop gets the benefit of the doubt. Federal prosecutors need to take a much more active role in reviewing state police shootings. This is something the President can order at any time (yes, Trump could have already done it, but so could have Obama). Again, it's politically costly. In some states, apparently DAs have to present charges against officers to a grand jury. This is a total cop-out, when they say "the grand jury cleared the officer", because grand juries only see the evidence the DA presents. It's easy to softball it and intentionally fail to present enough evidence. Federal prosecutors and state AGs should review every single shooting that is even remotely questionable. --There are, in fact, some racist policies in use when it comes to law enforcement. I once had a case where a dozen police officers pulled up to a run down apartment building and jumped out, guns drawn. They rushed forward like they were conducting a raid. They didn't have any specific information about a crime being committed, they were simply flushing out anybody who ran. Of course my client and several others saw the cops coming and bolted. Fleeing from the police gives them probable cause to stop you, so 10 seconds later my client gets tackled and of course he's got a bunch of drugs on him and a gun. The problem is that my client was a total scumbag who had been to prison multiple times, so the judge was not interested in my argument that the police department's actions were unfair. Of course they don't do this in neighborhoods where dentists and accountants live. They only do it in high crime (i.e., black) neighborhoods. To put a stop to this, you're going to need groups like the ACLU or other well funded organizations to actually look at every arrest in a given city, look for disparate policing policies, and then sue them in federal court. But that's a lot of work, and nobody wants to do it. All that said, there are problems in the black community as well. --Young black men have a skewed perception of how likely they are to get shot. The actual chances of getting shot are incredibly low, but I've seen tons of videos of black men talking about how afraid they are when they are pulled over. I understand why they are (the same reason I don't want to swim in the ocean -- JAWS will get me). But this perception is not accurate. It also makes them more likely to panic and resist arrest. And that makes cops more nervous and more likely to use force. I've read several articles and facebook posts written by black people talking about how they had done nothing wrong, but they were so worried that they almost ran anyway. We've got to publicize that it's actually exceedingly rare for an unarmed person of any race to get shot. --While there are issues with a disparity in justice (black men prosecuted more harshly than white men), there's also a real problem in that a small number of young black men commit a very large percentage of the crime. I once represented a client who said you weren't considered "a man" in his family until you did a 20 year prison sentence. That's heartbreaking but it's true. It isn't racially discriminatory policing that is locking many of these guys up (that guy did a home invasion robbery on Christmas and pointed a gun with a laser sight at a baby). Many times an innocent person is stopped because he "matched a description of a suspect". But I don't think the cops are always lying when they say that. Frequently they are investigating a real crime, and the only description they have is "black male, average height, wearing a dark jacket". --There's also a fairly high tolerance for "victimless crimes" in poor African American communities. Driving without insurance? Driving while a tail light is burned out? Not using your turn signal? Not wearing your seat belt? "That's not even really a crime, man." I actually had a client say that. Combine that with a tendency to not pay tickets and you get suspended driver's licenses and arrest warrants. A huge percentage of my public defender clients got pulled over for some dumb traffic violation, the officer finds out they have a warrant because they didn't show up for court on the previous dumb traffic ticket, he goes to arrest them and then they would do something stupid (like run). And of course then there's something illegal in the car. I would suspect the cop of being a lying racist jerk, and I'd ask my client about it and he'd say "aww, hell no man I never use my turn signal..." Well, shit. Nobody is going to listen to any of my suggestions on how to fix any of this, and my post has gone on too long anyway. In real life I've remained quiet on this, it's too radioactive to touch, especially since I know a lot of cops and judges and prosecutors (many of whom are black). But I figured I'd try to offer my perspective on these problems.

I have like twenty clients like that right now. Actual Physical Control of a Motor Vehicle.

I'm a defense lawyer and 90% of my practice right now are DUI arrests. They never ever take someone's keys and let them walk home. I've had clients arrested after they pulled into their own driveways. Regardless of your feelings on this particular case, they don't do that for anybody, white or black.

Honestly? Generally our group hasn't paid too much attention to them. Hunteds have the problem that nobody else cares about your hero's chosen villain. The other players don't care and the GM doesn't care. Nobody wants to have the game interrupted while we deal with your Hunted. Chances are you didn't create a villain as cool as the Joker or Brainiac. We don't want to sit through the bi-weekly stomping of Taserface again. And players quickly figure out that they're gonna fight somebody every session anyway, so they might as well get points for it. Psych Lims just end up describing the character that you wanted to play anyway. Psych Lim: Doesn't take crap from anybody. Psych Lim: Smartass. Psych Lim: Thinks he's the smartest/toughest/coolest guy in the room. But you were gonna act like that anyway. Players don't tend to take things like Vulnerabilities, or other things that can affect them in combat. They end up taking things that kinda help define the character, as long as it doesn't cause them too many problems. It's not just one or two players who do this either, it's everybody. So we just end up kinda ignoring them.

That's true of any power though. If the Human Fireball starts glowing white-hot, and unleashes a searing burst of flame... there's nothing that indicates whether it's a 2D6 Energy Blast or a 10D6 RKA. And yet, "visible" is still considered a real limitation. It lets your enemies know that a power is in use, when they wouldn't know otherwise. Grailknight is correct when he says that Angry Smash Man should know before he swings that a defensive power is in use. But I think it still misses the point that any enemy who faces him can figure out what the power does fairly quickly, and will adjust their tactics accordingly. Last I checked, a visible power had to be detectable by at least 3 senses (or did they change that to two?). So Professor Plastic, with his visible Damage Reduction, might always have a somewhat stretchy appearance. He might squeak when he moves, or make sproingy-sproingy sounds when he walks. And he probably feels kinda like latex if you touch him. This would make him more obviously superpowered (and give a hint as to what those powers are) than somebody like Superman. It might make it harder for him to sneak around as well.

The biggest disadvantage that comes from obvious Damage Reduction is that enemies will immediately know the person is tougher to take down, and will adjust their tactics accordingly. Angry Smash Man runs over to engage Professor Plastic. He rears back with a mighty blow, lands a hit of overwhelming force, and sends the Professor's head rocketing backwards off of his shoulders... only to see it bounce back with a comically elongated neck that quickly shrinks back into place. The Professor's face has a giant fist-shaped depression in it, until he squeezes his nose and puffs his cheeks out and then it pops back into its proper shape. It is immediately obvious that Professor Plastic has a great deal of Damage Reduction. Angry Smash Man is going to have a hell of a time actually knocking Professor Plastic unconscious. It's not just the fact that the Professor wasn't killed or didn't get immediately knocked unconscious -- enemies that can take a punch are fairly common. No, this is a direct message that what he's doing now isn't going to work. So on his next phase, Angry Smash Man grabs the Professor by the throat, rears back, and uses Megascale throwing to chuck him into New Jersey. It's a real limitation because any character with combat options will immediately know to switch to a different attack or tactic.

Not every ability is appropriate in every campaign. Thematically not everything fits together. In a gritty medieval world, you aren't going to want your farm boy adventurer to fly off in his X-Wing. But in other campaigns, airships and magitech robot suits might be awesome. Those sorts of decisions are up to the players and the GM, to see if they can come to some kind of agreement on what to play. If you want to get a D&D vibe with different character types, which a lot of Fantasy Hero published materials (at least the ones I've seen) kind of encourage, then you're gonna have to deal with the free equipment problem. Because D&D doesn't let wizards wear armor or use good weapons. If you want to maintain that D&D feel, then you're basically allowing everyone but magic users to have free equipment. If you don't care about the D&D feel, and are totally cool with Zandar the wizard running around in heavy plate with a battle axe, then more power to you. But what I've seen with a lot of published characters are sucky wizards that spend all their points buying "magic spell" versions of equipment that the fighters get for free.

I think a lot of people today are influenced by anime and Japanese rpg video games. They don't want to play Conan, they want to play some character from Final Fantasy 17 or something. Looking at tabletop rpgs or old fantasy novels isn't necessarily going to tell you what your players are really looking for.

Here's something to keep in mind -- the actual stats of the mook don't matter so much as does how much lower they are than the PCs. Telling you that Vinnie the Snitch has an OCV of 5 doesn't help you if you don't know where the PCs should be. A difference in OCV/DCV of 3 or more will mean that the character with the higher number will have a much easier time of hitting his opponent, while the character with the lower number will have a much harder time. https://www.thedarkfortress.co.uk/tech_reports/3_dice_rolls.php#.XtFulkRKiUk This page has a 3D6 distribution chart at the bottom. In the middle column they have percentage chance to roll under a given number. So let's say that Vinnie the Snitch has an OCV/DCV of 5. If Captain Amazing has an OCV/DCV of 9, then that means he needs a 15- to hit, whereas Vinnie will need a 7- to hit the good Captain. 15- means the Captain is hitting 95% of the time, while 7- means the gangster hits only 16% of the time (about 1 in 6). Of course if Captain Amazing decides to dodge, his DCV goes up by 3 and Vinnie needs a 4- (less than 2%) to hit. Whereas if our thug dodges, his DCV goes to 8 and the Captain still hits on a 12- (74% of the time). So the OCV/DCV difference is important. Another thing to look at is the Speed differential. Having an extra 2 points of Speed is a big advantage in combat. A Speed 4 character will have a lot of trouble with a Speed 6 character if all other things are equal. The Speed 6 character can afford to block, dodge, take recoveries, or other defensive actions that the Speed 4 character can't. Then look at the average damage of an attack compared to a character's Def + Con, and Def + Stun. If your heroes throw 12D6 attacks, the average damage is 42 Stun and 12 Body. Hitting a character with 8 Def means they take 4 Body and 34 Stun. If that exceeds their Con score, they are stunned and lose their next action. If it exceeds their current Stun total, it means they are unconscious. What this means is that superheroes can often "spread" their ranged attacks and affect multiple characters who are standing side by side. If Captain Amazing shoots his Optic Vision at a crowd of thugs, (4 guys sitting at a card table), he may be able to hit all four of them by only spreading a few dice. If his 12D6 attack lowers down to 8D6, then he's still doing 28 Stun on average, minus their 8 Def and each character is taking 20 Stun. He will almost certainly cost all those thugs their next phase, and might knock them all out. In general, because I'm lazy, I tend to give generic thugs and mooks straight 15s in their primary physical stats. 15 Str, 15 Dex, 15 Con. Give them 10 PD and ED and a 3 Speed. 5 OCV/DCV and about 25 Stun is good. They'll carry weapons that are in the 6-8 damage class range. These are not meant to be threats to superheroes. They are very dangerous threats to normal people though. But most of the heroes in our games have OCV/DCV of 8 or above, Speeds of 5-7, and Defenses of 30 or so. They chuck 12+D6 attacks and so mooks are little more than targets for them. But that's how we like to play, mooks are just the warmup for the real fights.

Limitation: Looks like a dork while using it (-1/4 to -1/2, depending on how mean your fellow PCs are).