massey

The long and the short of it.
 
If you like swords you will be able to find all kinds of arguments to support them.
 
If you do not you will be able to find all kinds of arguments to prove them a bad idea.
 
In the end you will go with what you like.
 
P.S.  I think swords are cool have them in my Scifi games

For that matter, I would expect the Gun of the Future to use sensors and computers to aim itself. The wielder onbly supplies judgement about when it should be fired. But that's really boring for a game.
 
(For my Planetary Romance campaign, I did have it that in space combat, the only role for humans was to decide to fight. At the speeds and distances of spaceship-to-spaceship combat, humans just can't think or act fast enough. But I also made the conscious choice that spaceship combat would never happen in the campaign.)
 
I suspect the real reason for swords appearing so much in SF was the desire for cool illustrations on pulp magazine covers. But "realism" arguments are shifty. I greatly enjoyed an internet essay on why World War Two was obviously fictional, and trite, badly written fiction at that.
 
In the Lensman series, it was axes, not swords... super-heaqvy axes of advanced alloys, wielded by soldiers in powered armor. They were for boarding enemy spacecraft, for chopping through bulkheads (and enemy soldiers) without the risk of shooting through hulls or vital equipment.
 
Ultimately, though, setting design is more about rationalizing choices made for style, not some Platonic ideal of techno-social forecasting. There's a tradition of swords in SF, but not so much anyone's obliged to include the trope.
 
Dean Shomshak

If your players aren't happy with the, "rule of cool," then you aren't going to have swords in your SF game. They'll have to make do with a bayonet on the end of their plasma rifle.

Why do you need more than swords being cool?  Any idea anyone has for reintroducing the sword to warfare will be a blatant excuse that doesn't hold up under serious scrutiny anyways, why bother?  Swords are cool, that's why the setting has them.  No more explanation needed. 

God I really hate these arguments.  I can't even read the entirety of the thread without wanting to yell at people.
 
This is why every limitation I ever put on a character is just a variety of Limited Power.  I don't take Focus of any kind.  I take "Limited Power: Kinda like Focus but it works like this instead -- blah blah blah".  Or at least I'm going to treat it that way if I ever get into a discussion on this board again.

I would think that an Obvious focus that generated an Inobvious power would only Obvious to someone capable of sensing the Inobvious power.  Consider the following scenario involving four people, Allen, Bob, Charles and Dave, standing in a room:
Allen is wearing a Helm of Telepathy, an OIF that grants Telepathy, and is using his Telepathy to read Bob's mind. Bob is the target of Allen's Telepathy attack. Charles possess the Mental Awareness enhanced sense. Dave is an ordinary human with no enhanced senses. In such a scenario:
Bob, as the subject of the attack, would be aware that Allen was attempting to read his mind, and that the power originated from the Helm of Telepathy. Charles would be aware that Allen was targeting Bob with a Mental Power, and that the source of the power was the Helm of Telepathy. Dave would be unaware that Allen was attacking Bob or that the Helm of Telepathy provided Allen with powers.

That sounds near enough.

An early description of the Legion was that most Legion members had one power, while Superboy had lots of powers.

That's one power in the same sense Magneto or the Flash have one power, of course...
 
The LSH were a major inspiration for GC. It's unfortunate that the published book seems to have ignored this in practice - one of the reasons why I personally found it disappointing.
 
At least in the bits of LSH publishing history that I am familiar with, there is no hint that the LSH were "teen heroes" in the sense of being low powered or inexperienced with their powers. The few cases where that happened where either Legion Academy or Legion of Substitute Heroes stories.

There could be issues making characters like Phantom Girl, Triplicate Girl and Invisible Kid viable. They joined early on though, and could therefore be treated as relatively well trained compared to many of those that joined later. That's gibberish for "martial artists". Of course, Invisible Kid was killed off, and Triplicate Girl was retired to become an instructor at the Legion Academy (after one of her duplicates was killed off), so really only Phantom Girl needs to be handled like this.
 
(A second Invisible Kid joined later - but naturally was less experienced than characters that had joined later, and so is less of an issue.)
 
The stealth based characters occasionally were used separately as a Legion Espionage Squad, where Invisibility, Shrinking, Shapeshifting and so on were more useful than being able to zap people with lightning.
 
In any case, this is for the published Legion. A homage used in a game can avoid such issues. Maybe the characters with limited defensive powers "just happen" to be the skill monsters and martial artists...

To answer the original question, whether you limit the AP to 40 points really depends on what you intend the kids to be doing.
 
40 active points isn't enough to reliably blast through walls or scrap killer guardbots even in a normal Champions setting, much less in the future when there'll be more exotic and durable materials available. It certainly isn't going to be enough for an individual teen hero to be able to face off against an alien warship.
 
If you're planning on corporate espionage adventures, street crime, and summer vacations at resorts, 40 AP is plenty.
 
If you're planning on them going after criminal syndicates which have vast resources or against alien armadas, 40 AP probably isn't enough unless you're planning on all the heroes dumping all their XP into increasing the AP of their attacks for the foreseeable future until they are all able to blast their way through a bank vault.

I've not read the silver age space age stuff. But I get the idea that the characters are all actually quite powerful. Isn't Superboy one of the... um, I don't know the team name. But they get name dropped on the forum quite regularly... I'm certain someone with a better knowledge of Silver Age DC will chime in with the correct name of the silver age, teen, space, team I am thinking of. There's also Invincible. Pretty powerful teen there.
 
I guess my point is they can be powerful. At the very least they need some way of getting around the galaxy in a hurry and surviving in space. Okay, not that expensive in points but these things add up. Maybe not as powerful as the full on Galactic Heroes, but more powerful than the level suggested in Teen Heroes.
 
I gotta say I think the defining point of teen heroes is not the power level. It's the drama. Teen drama revolves around teen issues. Dating. Mom and Dad just don't understand you (Cue Lumpy Space Princess: " My parents are horrible idiots.") School is stressful. Peer Pressure. ("Be a hero, say "No!" to Pompalphoosian Pleasure Pops.") It could be funny to be the most powerful hero in the galaxy, but still be running scared of the school principal because you don't want to get banned from Prom.

Reading is on decline because the writers suck and want to cram their own propaganda at the readers. Same with the artists sometimes.

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

Like most of philosophical leanings the more pure they get the more dangerous they get.
 
You can't boil down the complexities of existence and the human mind to a couple of bullet points.  Merciless competition is just as problematic as a world where the social safety net is so good you don't have to compete at all.
 
I had friends in high school who had this as their career plan:  Get pregnant and pretend I don't know who the father is.
I've known people who spent their entire working age years on welfare and their kids grew up and got on welfare.  The reasoning was simply that they couldn't make that much money with a job.  So why bother?
 
Granted I lived in an area with very good social benefits at the time so they were correct to some degree.  There was no entry level job that would pay even close to what they made not working at all.

Why would you not just use Darkness with a Limiter, say -1, for Partial Effect? Then apply the modifer-per-hex and duration however you've decided to do it anyway. I ask not because I think the suggestion above is wrong, but choosing the best right way seems to be the trick to grokking Hero System and I'd like to know the decision process for why Change Environment is better for the purpose.

Not for lack of interest; it's a lack of time issue for a lot of us.
 
Here's the bad news:
 
It's this level of speed for which the "speed tricks" like the speed zone and autofire and AOE: Trail (Can someone _please_ point me to that write up?  I heard it mentioned a couple months back, and I'd like to compare it to the home-brew we've been using for a couple of decades.  Thus far, I've come up zilch.   ) and other such things were created.
 
Once you get to "ludicrous speed," it's just more cost-effective and mechanics-compliant to go the "simulated power" route.  But enough of that: I won't try to talk you into something that you've specifically said you don't want.  If you want my honest opinion, it's going to take handwaving some bits no matter what build you go to.  The only remotely affordable thing I can think of is "Running: megascale, 1" = 1/4 earth's circumference" or something to that effect.  (No; I did not take the time to look up the distance light travels in one segment), and even then is going to vary based on your SPD.  
 
Also, going from the video you offered as referenced (just finished watching it), that end result?  Where they are patiently waiting for the light to actually move?  Clearly that's much faster than light.  I can't recall what changed were made to FTL after 4e, but work up some handwaving to do it in an atmosphere, and run with that.  I expect the turn mode will _suck_, but Skill Levels can be used to reduce that (get lots of them).  The most significant problem with moving FTL, of course, is that your eyes don't work anymore.  Well, they work, I suppose, but once you can actually see light as a thing to itself, do you still see what it's bouncing off of, or just a billion shards of lighting creeping towards your eyes?  You can take all the "Rapid" you want, what happens when you read faster than the light itself can get to you?
 
On that matter, how much "rapid" is that?  What is the movement of reading, anyway?  What is the movement of hearing?  Personally, I would flat out ignore and hand wave that.  I can read 10 times faster than I can when I'm not using Rapid.  Well how do you read when you don't use Rapid?  What is the "standard" reading rate?  I've got a brother who could bankrupt himself on books.  Do you remember the old William Johnstone "Out of the Ashes" series a couple decades back?  He read the first four in a day.  Those things were huge, too  (and not great, for what it's worth.  The first two were strong; the rest just started slipping down and down and down...)    So what is the "Standard" reading speed?  The "Standard Hearing Speed?"  It was the utter pointlessness of that exercise that made me dismiss "Rapid" before I even finished reading it when it first hit the rules.  It's just .. well, seeing as how using "Cramming" or variations of speed reading have worked for a quarter-century, it's just unnecessary, and silly to say 10, or 100, or even one billion times faster than a completely undefined baseline.  That old "I want double my pay!"  "Fine; you're a volunteer anyway." gag.
 
We usually just hand waved it as a speedster schtick.  GMs that were a bit more anal  (No; I don't mean that as an insult: everybody's anal about something, even it's just being anal about not admitting that you've got something you're anal about) making sure every possible gag you could ever pull from a hat in the unforeseeable future before your character retired or died might make you buy "speed reading" or "speed tasting" or some such thing.
 
Taste and scent are both based on physical contact to keyed chemoreceptors: that are based on touching physical particulates to specialized cells (remember that the next time you experience someone else's flatulence).  When you are moving fast enough to watch light crawl, those particles are deadly to run into: the scent of that one old church lady who bathes in her perfume will kill you just as surely as running through a cloud of daggers.  Further, as scent itself _is_ physical matter, it will affect light.  We don't see it now, but if you're perceiving so fast you can watch light flow into a room, cross over to a mirror, and bounce back out...   Well odds are even air itself is going to be a huge barrier to actually being able to perceive_.  You see what the small amount of milk suspended on "clear" oil did in that video.  That glowing blur will be the world around you-- the entire world.  it's all you will actually see.  Well, that is to say, it's all you will actually see if you're trying to build this perception using "rapid" or trying to stay in keeping with any level of real-world science.  I _absolutely_ understand that you can handwave  that away and say that "it just works," but at the point-- well, that's when Rapid falls on its unnecessary ass yet again.  Why aren't you just handwaving that moving that fast allows you to perceive that fast (the way we have for a couple of generations now) so that you don't shift into super-photonic speed and lose the ability to see the walls in front of you?  (Remember how a Move-Through works: even though you don't use your STR in an accidental Move-Through, you still get to take 1/2 of that V/3 damage when you hit a wall at C+....)
 
Granted, MegaScale still requires additional modifiers (or Adders?  I don't remember.  Our homebrew version handled that part differently) to be able to travel locally.  I suppose you could reduce the cost somewhat buy using a Multipower, but I'd probably go with Variable Advantage (limited to scales of Mega Scale) and ... well, and yet again hand wave the sudden lurch between traveling ten-thousand KM per hour and dropping down to a mere thousand KM/hr.  I know Variable Advantage requires you to spend all of it's value, which is a bit harder to do know that reduced END is a two-step process, but you can pre-created a list for each "stage" of movement.  Still, it's going to be pricey.
 
 
 
 
This brings up another issue with "Rapid."
 
A century of _what_?  A century of staring at the oil painting that the traffic in the street has effectively become?   How do you play this out?  Know; I mean, I _do_ understand that part:
 
"Tell you what, Kevin, you take the next six hours and ask me anything you'd like about the scene in six cars at the intersection and the eighteen buildings you can see from here.  I'll answer every question and write them down in case it becomes relevant for next week's game.  The rest of you guys can home and we'll meet up again next week.  Terry: your turn to pick up the popcorn.  And don't get that double-butter crap; it stains the maps and gets all over the papers...."
 
We all know that's going to make for an _awful_ session.  So what do we do instead?  We uh...  we handwave it.   Again:  Look Kevin, you take the rest of your phase and look around.  Do you have that pre-rolled list I asked you to generate for your PER rolls?  Strike off your first ten rolls, and here's the three possibly important things you notice...."
 
Or:
 
"How many levels of "Rapid" did you buy?"
 
uh...  Sixteen!
 
"Okay, you spend the rest of your phase checking out the scene.  Anytime you want to remember something from this scene, you've got a pool of sixteen points you can add to your INT roll to simulate remembering a detail you noticed.  We'll mark them off as you use them."
 
Or:
 
Okay, make a PER roll with a +16.  For every point you make it buy, I will detail a clearly important thing
 
Or who knows how else, but we're going to handwave it, because the other players didn't come here to watch you spend a hundred years walking around the intersection in front of Rosie's.  (or was it Rose's?)
 
 
 
 
 
This is probably why the Flash is often pointed to as "the most powerful character is [whichever one he is with  DC, I think? ]'s universe.  For what it's worth, at first blush, it seems you're in the rules, but if I were you, I'd hold off for judgement from someone better versed in the newer editions to give some feedback (I don't always remember all the new "no; not unless you buy this"  stuff that the newer editions have added    )
 
And it sounds like you totally understand what would happen if you actually turned it lose in your game.    
 
 
 
That's the problem, though: if you actually _are_ fast enough to see that, you can't.  If we're staying literal, I mean.  The playback speed shows that light moving the length of the bottle far slower than any observer could move the length of that bottle: the observer is existing faster than light.  As long as he's actually moving faster than light, that light will never reach him.  Now there are people on this board far-more physics-talented than I am, and they may be able to shoot every single thing I've said completely full of holes, but based on my _admittedly-limited_ knowledge, you can't make this work _and_ stay within the realm of literal movement.  You've got to simulate it, and unfortunately most of the best simulations for this use speed as a special effect for a number of totally-not-speed powers.  
 
 
 
I have _got_ to re-read 6e EDM, apparently.  How did we go from stepping into a dimension to "stepping into a dimension per phase?"  I won't get to it any time soon, but I've got to get it done, clearly.
 
 

 
Well done!
 
 
 
 

Get killed by a sewer clown.  Then you'll float too.

+4 OCV (only when opponent is dodging) ;D
 
 
There's a Dodge roll?

Yeah, normal characteristic maxima is usually for heroic level games.  Indiana Jones instead of the X-Men.
 
Defenses should generally be scaled to the attacks you'll have in the game.  Somebody who has 1.5 times the average dice in Defense is going to be fragile.  If you've got a 10D6 campaign, then a guy with 15 PD and ED (including combat luck, armor, force fields, etc), is going to take a lot of damage really fast.  In my experience, somebody with that level of defense should probably have something else as well to make them more survivable.  It's okay to have 15 PD and ED if you are a shrinker (whose DCV will normally be extremely high), or if you are mostly invisible (so people generally don't shoot at you), or are mostly desolid (so their attacks pass through you).  But otherwise you're gonna be face down in the dirt most of the time.  If you want a character who is fragile that's fine, but fragile they will be.
 
Somebody with 3 times the average dice in Defense is going to be tough.  In a 10D6 campaign, the guy with 30 PD and ED will take forever to go down.  Blast him and blast him and he'll just shrug it off.  I've found that between 2x and 2.5x the average dice gives you a good range of defense.
 
When you're building a character, you also want to make sure that they won't be Con-Stunned by the average attack roll.  If it's a 10D6 game, every character needs to be able to take at least 35 Stun without it passing their Defense plus Con.  So if you've got 20 Def, you need a 15 Con at a minimum.  18 to 20 is better, because sometimes people roll above average.  Losing an action because you got Stunned is a great way to remember how awesome your iPhone is and start checking Facebook during the game.  You don't want it to happen too often.

The way I built the ability to castle for a character whose power was to do just that was a linked pair of teleports: teleport you to there, and them to here (as an attack, ranged).  Its pretty cheap unless you want to teleport people miles away.
 
However, although he's hard to spot, I like Ninja-Bear's idea of side effect.  You wouldn't get the "only to swap places" limitation on the teleport on yourself, but this would make it work:
 
Castle:  Teleportation 15m, Ranged (+1/2), Usable As Attack (+3/4), Grantor can only grant the power to others, Grantor pays the END whenever the power is used, Recipient must be within Limited Range of the Grantor for power to be granted; Only to swap places (-1), Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (Teleport character to target's former location; -1/2)  34 active cost, 14 real cost, 3 END

No we can't.  This is a thread for advice to a rookie GM, who is building characters for his players.  You are free to build your character however you like, but let's save the "your character has a low attack because sucking is part of his concept" for another time.  We want example characters to feel useful, every single one of them.  A degree of sameness is necessary.  The BBB builds are wonderful for that.

Grrk.  Sorry but that description makes my brain malfunction.  I would never ever understand that.  I mean, clearly it works for your group, but I've heard of people doing it that way and I just can't wrap my head around it.
 
I think of it the following way:
 
If you roll an 11, you hit a DCV equal to your OCV.  For every point you roll under 11, you hit one better DCV.  For every point you roll higher than 11, you hit one worse DCV.

No we can't.  This is a thread for advice to a rookie GM, who is building characters for his players.  You are free to build your character however you like, but let's save the "your character has a low attack because sucking is part of his concept" for another time.  We want example characters to feel useful, every single one of them.  A degree of sameness is necessary.  The BBB builds are wonderful for that.

No we can't.  This is a thread for advice to a rookie GM, who is building characters for his players.  You are free to build your character however you like, but let's save the "your character has a low attack because sucking is part of his concept" for another time.  We want example characters to feel useful, every single one of them.  A degree of sameness is necessary.  The BBB builds are wonderful for that.

No we can't.  This is a thread for advice to a rookie GM, who is building characters for his players.  You are free to build your character however you like, but let's save the "your character has a low attack because sucking is part of his concept" for another time.  We want example characters to feel useful, every single one of them.  A degree of sameness is necessary.  The BBB builds are wonderful for that.

I think Kinetik's character sheet is wrong.  He's listed as having 9 PD and 8 ED, and then he's got a "protective suit" that gives him 6/6 additional.  If you look at his total Def on the right of his PD and ED listing, it says 15 PD and 14 ED.  But he's also got +10/10 in his powers section called a "protective aura", with the limitation 'only while moving'.  So his total should be 25 PD and 24 ED.  That's not that bad, really.
 
But Kinetik isn't really a great build.  He hits for 9D6 and then he has some minor 30 point attacks that aren't gonna do much more than be annoying.  I think they tried to get too fancy when they built him.  One thing that really makes a character useful is to just have one attack that is straight dice damage at the campaign average.  Kinetic doesn't have that -- his normal dice attack is only 9D6.
 
Witchcraft is the only member of the Champions to have less than 20 Def, and she's a mentalist.  The thing about mental powers is that they don't have a range modifier -- she can be sitting on a rooftop half a mile down the street and still hit just as effectively.  That may be why they gave her lower defenses.
 
On your character build, I'd drop the Damage Reduction.  It's a pain in the butt to calculate during battle (particularly the 25% version), and you could probably use those points elsewhere.  Generally Damage Reduction isn't worth the points compared to just putting more into PD and ED.

Yeah, normal characteristic maxima is usually for heroic level games.  Indiana Jones instead of the X-Men.
 
Defenses should generally be scaled to the attacks you'll have in the game.  Somebody who has 1.5 times the average dice in Defense is going to be fragile.  If you've got a 10D6 campaign, then a guy with 15 PD and ED (including combat luck, armor, force fields, etc), is going to take a lot of damage really fast.  In my experience, somebody with that level of defense should probably have something else as well to make them more survivable.  It's okay to have 15 PD and ED if you are a shrinker (whose DCV will normally be extremely high), or if you are mostly invisible (so people generally don't shoot at you), or are mostly desolid (so their attacks pass through you).  But otherwise you're gonna be face down in the dirt most of the time.  If you want a character who is fragile that's fine, but fragile they will be.
 
Somebody with 3 times the average dice in Defense is going to be tough.  In a 10D6 campaign, the guy with 30 PD and ED will take forever to go down.  Blast him and blast him and he'll just shrug it off.  I've found that between 2x and 2.5x the average dice gives you a good range of defense.
 
When you're building a character, you also want to make sure that they won't be Con-Stunned by the average attack roll.  If it's a 10D6 game, every character needs to be able to take at least 35 Stun without it passing their Defense plus Con.  So if you've got 20 Def, you need a 15 Con at a minimum.  18 to 20 is better, because sometimes people roll above average.  Losing an action because you got Stunned is a great way to remember how awesome your iPhone is and start checking Facebook during the game.  You don't want it to happen too often.