massey

This was the Crisis on Infinite Earths of the Marvel Universe.

Some of my favorite moments:
Professor Hulk, through the whole movie Geriatric Ant-Man, Baby Ant-Man The Portals opening for everyone who came back Tony meets his dad "Hail Hydra." Captain America with the Hammer The women of the MCU stand together and kick a$$ "And I...am Iron Man." "It's okay, Tony. We're going to be all right. You can rest now."

I loved the oneupsmanship on Vormir.
 
I loved seeing Valkyrie on her pegasus.
 
I loved the McGuffin keepaway game, and that just about everyone had it at some point.
 
But mostly it was great to see Captain Hammer Time!
(even despite being Captain Hydra.)
 
 

Just saw it.  Damn near perfect.   

High strength characters with lots of movement are fun.  Grab an opponent and then perform a move-through on something that doesn’t get out of the way, like the front end of a bulldozer.  Of course you angle it so that only he impacts the object, while you go over it.  OCV penalties don’t hurt as much that way.
 
Characters with high strength and Tunneling can have fun pretending to be the monster from Tremors.  Grab somebody who sucks in hand to hand and down they go.  If you can fill in the hole behind you, it’s a super awesome Entangle too.

High strength characters with lots of movement are fun.  Grab an opponent and then perform a move-through on something that doesn’t get out of the way, like the front end of a bulldozer.  Of course you angle it so that only he impacts the object, while you go over it.  OCV penalties don’t hurt as much that way.
 
Characters with high strength and Tunneling can have fun pretending to be the monster from Tremors.  Grab somebody who sucks in hand to hand and down they go.  If you can fill in the hole behind you, it’s a super awesome Entangle too.

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

A lot of it is genre dependent.  After all, Dick Grayson was a world class acrobat, and that's the excuse for why it was so easy for Batman to train him up.  It's not uncommon in the comics for people with high levels of athletic skill to suddenly bust out the kung fu moves, training or no.
 
A real world Olympic gymnast would probably have like a 13 Dex, Acrobatics and Breakfall of maybe 13-, then PS: Gymnast at 11- (so you know what kind of routines the judges like, etc).  Your coach makes a bunch of supporting rolls with PS: Gymnastics Coach, to try and give you bonuses.  You take extra time on your PS: Gymnast skill roll (practicing your routine ahead of time to try and get it flawless).  Maybe you have a 1 point perk (really like a limited bonus) for a particular type of event.  You'd hear the announcers say "she's very good at the uneven bars, her coach says this is her strongest event".
 
Then you take your whole team of like 8 different people, and you roll the dice and hope you roll low.  Whoever makes their roll by the most gets the gold, second most gets silver, third gets bronze.  But you could just as easily have somebody go out and roll a 16 and fall down on their face, as they could roll a 5 and get a bunch of 9.8 scores and take home the gold.  Sometimes the announcers will be like "oh she did much better two months ago in Greece, she looked really unstoppable then, but you can see today her concentration is just not there."

Give him a +1 bonus during the day, and a -1 penalty at night.  Don't charge any points for it, since it cancels out.

Give him a +1 bonus during the day, and a -1 penalty at night.  Don't charge any points for it, since it cancels out.

Personally, I'd just average them.
 
Figure out the limitation the skill roll penalty would give you during day. Figure out the limitation the skill roll penalty would give you at night. Set your limitation value on the power at the mid-point between the two.
 
That's assuming that days and nights are roughly equivalent in length on the world, which might not be the case if there are multiple suns or multiple large moons.

I think we all know that gymnasts are in fact all good at fighting.
 
My source:
 
 

So 1 PIP is both cheaper and 100% reliable vs. the more expensive and only 50% reliable 1/2d6 ??
 
That makes no sense at all.  I would houserule that instantly.

To put it bluntly, in the case of 1 pip penetrating, the RAW is an ass.

I'll go:
 
 
For a world-class concert pianist I'd give them a Dex of 12-15 and a PS: World-Class Concert Pianist 18-. And if really, really, really needed that extra granularity to highly specifically define just how good a world-class concert pianist this character is I might buy them some Skill Levels: Only for world-class concert pianism or something.
No more than 25-30pts probably.
 
Bonus question: They'd make a World-Class Concert Pianist skill roll. Dex and specifically manual dexterity wouldn't really factor in to how I'd handle that in-game. It's a skill, they make a skill roll. For a opposed dueling pianos type situation I'd....have them both make skill rolls and compare the degree of success.
 
For an Olympic Gymnast I'd give them a Dex of 15-18 and an Acrobatics skill of 18-. And if I really, really, really wanted that extra granularity to highly specifically define just how bad he sucks at fighting I'd take a Disad\Limitation: Sucks at Fighting for a -2CV.
 
Bonus question: They'd make an Acrobatics skill roll. Dex wouldn't really factor in to it. For competing floor routines I'd have them both make a skill roll and compare degrees of success. They might even get to make a complimentary PS: Olympic gymnast skill rolls to read the judges and pick a better routine.
 
Last bonus question: To me Hero is what they call "effect based" which means that the mechanics are just a way to represent in-game effects in the out-of-game mechanics. So, to me, a world-class anything (skill based) just need an appropriate "world-class" level skill.
Similarly I'm not trying to reconstruct reality in my games, just the cinematic\dramatic\narrative effects that I'm after for purposes of this fun game I like to play, so I don't need to exhaustively quantify what makes an Olympic gymnast "Olympic" exactly.
 
Either I'm making a player character and "Olympic gymnast" is part of the concept, in which case I need only hit those minimums and I'll likely, as a player, have more points than needed to hit a certain "Olympic gymnast" level of stats.
Or I'm making an NPC and I'm probably very point limited AND don't really care about the outcome (ie, the world-class\Olympic-ness of the NPC isn't going to carry any\much game effect (and since Hero is "effect based" then I don't have to model the effect, since it won't come up)) so I just need a quick way to shorthand, "Yo! Dude is agile, ya'll!".
 
Final note on gymnasts and concert pianists seems to me to be: How good are they really? Most Olympic gymnasts lose (only 3 folks get to medal out of tens\hundreds of competitors) and most folks performing at a high level are also attempting high level feats which carry increased risk (skill roll penalties) and result in failure fairly often (consider how many Olympic gymnasts fall, fail, flub, or otherwise botch their routines).
 
 
 
 
 

PS: Musician (Concert Pianist) 14-

It's a common enough "mistake" that it has given rise to a term which is widely shared and very commonly (if not universally) understood by anyone who has played the system.
 
While "unconscious" is the technically correct term, there's a practical difference between "out of action" and "needs to take a Recovery", both of which are degrees of "unconsciousness".
 
People tend to call the second state "being stunned", causing a need for the additional term.
 
Language does that kind of thing even in the presence of technical definitions.

Usually its just a matter of putting things in the environment that people can use like high tension power lines, gasoline tankers, big heavy stuff that can be dropped on people, etc.  One of my players always tries to find some other way of defeating people than using his actual powers directly, so its easy to get it to happen.
 
 
People tend to use that kind of term because Stun is a stat, so its to distinguish between "knocked out by reducing stun" and "dazed them by exceeding their CON in a single hit".  I prefer the term daze myself, several of us made the case for using that term instead of stunned in the rules for 6th.

I think this tread should actually be titled “dissenting views NOT welcome”.

I think this tread should actually be titled “dissenting views NOT welcome”.

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.

This is one of the nastiest powers I ever saw, though it was very expensive.
 
Desolidification, Area of Effect & Increased Area, Usable Against Others, Personal Immunity, Reduced Endurance
 
Go ahead, shoot him with an attack.  It goes right through him.  "Aha," you think.  "I'll shoot him with my Affects Desolid attack!"  It goes right through him, with no effect.  You see, he's not desolid, you are.  To affect him with an attack, you need Affects Real World (+2) on your power.  But why would you buy that, since you don't normally go desolid?  You wouldn't!
 
But for him to affect you, he only needs the regular Affects Desolid (+1/2) advantage.  Or none at all, since he has to choose a special effect that will pierce his Desolidification.  And he might as well choose a special effect that he uses himself...

The only problem with this is that it wouldn’t vary from person to person simultaneously. But I like where you’re going. 
 
How owe about buying DCV with a trigger for an activation roll every time the character is attacked? There’s only the need to keep track of Transdimensional Guy whenever there’s an attack roll against him, and not everyone else. The special effect explains the variable DCV for different attackers: “He was there a second ago . . . .” “No, wait, here he is . . . Oh, dang! He’s gone again!”

Well, the big problem with Con in 6th is that it really only has one use, and it functions in a way that it's really a binary state.  You either have enough, or you don't.  That means the cost structure is all jacked up because of it.  The Con that doesn't prevent you from being Stunned is worthless.
 
Suppose you are in a 12D6 game, and you've already decided to purchase 20 PD/ED and no special defenses.  How much Con should your character buy, and how much should you be charged for it?  Well, to be effective, you should probably have at least +12 Con.  That will prevent you from being Stunned by an average roll.  But of course, not every roll is average, and not every attack is a straight 12D6.
 
Buying +5 Con is only going to protect you in extremely limited circumstances (i.e., when the opponent has a really low power attack or rolls really poorly).  The points that don't actually protect you from being Stunned should be worth less.  Buying +35 Con is also going to protect you in extremely limited circumstances.  If your opponent rolls great, even on a haymaker, they probably won't get 45 through.  Since it isn't actually giving you anything, shouldn't Con past a certain point be virtually free?
 
I'm not going to fool around with bell curve charts to determine what the appropriate cost should be, but I think it's clear that there's a problem.  This doesn't even address the automaton power "Cannot Be Stunned", which seems to indicate that Con should never cost more than 15 points, no matter how much you buy.
 
When Con added to figured characteristics, there was still a reason to buy it higher even if we all knew the cost wasn't quite right.  Of course, the costs of some of those figured characteristics have been lowered in 6th edition, so perhaps the old cost wasn't as out of whack as people thought.  +10 Con (20 points in 5th ed) with 6th ed figured pricing would give you +5 Stun (2.5 pts), +2 Rec (2 pts), 2 ED (2 pts), and +20 End (4 pts).  So were 5th ed prices actually off base?