Duke Bushido

We use END. It is calculated from real cost, which had a radical affecr on the amount of END purchased and even some effect on the amount of REC purchased. I don't know _why_ we do it that way, it is simply that this group- the evolution of the group I joined in 1980 or so, and in which I learned to play, has always played that way. My suspicion is that my first GM didnt really have a head (or perhaps the patience) for math and this was the end result. After he left and I got pressured to take over GM duties, everyone else was very resistant to doing it "the other way," and eventually I stopped trying. As I said, none of the original players other than me remain, but with that one group, I still do it that way. Honestly, the only measurable impact I see is, as I explained, in END-related builds. I run two other groups who "play it right," but I must honestly say that I have found no significant advantage to one over the other (save the Reduced END is more popular when calculating from AP. Knowing the AP of a power doesnt really tell me anywhere near as much as telling the dice that are in it, and any unusual modifiers; I get that from either build style.

To this day, I have a group- the group that has evolved from my original group, though I am the only "original" member left- That doesnt give a rat's root red rump about Active Points. We sont count them; we don't figure END from them-- they just arent a thing. If my other groups were better at math and customizing via modifiers, we wouldn't use them in those groups, either.

Doc: For what it is worth, I suggested "loosening the MPA rules;" that was intended to allow a feeling of more per round- such that each "clone' could attack separate targets without penalty (or perhaps allow the purchase of skill levels to offset this penalty. However, buying SPD +1 as a power (an END-costing Persistant power) with the SFX of "shadow guys running around" would give a nice cleanliness to their popping in and out- might even include a limitation that the SPD can be forcibly shut down if both shadow guys are attacked in the same phase, etc. There is more you can do, but to be honest, as this was specified as a player character, I was trying to avoid an excess of "doing way more" for the same reason you (and I ) don't really like Duplication for Pcs: too easy to dominate the game, even id being careful not to.

Indirect TK, and an indirect PD-based ranged attack. SFX is "a shadow guy did it" Get just a little bit loose with the MPA rules- not much, but a little. T-port., SFX is "swapped with a shadow guy." This works almost exclusively becauae of the stipulation that one hit tales them out: reasonable by attacking the source. Targets get a PER roll to see the source- it's a shadow guy. There's more, but I think we can see the drift of this: Why pay for duplicates or summoned characters who, from the description, are quite literally SFX. If they can wrestle, get some TK. However, if one hit dismises them, they arent going to wrestle particularly well... Still, from what we have been given, spending pointa to create these guys is, thus far at least, some pretty expensive over-thinking.

Well, _yeah_; I _might_.... If somebody made a _good_ one....

Creative uses of Indirect can achieve two duplicates.

Deciding it needs to be done. Once I can't get around that, I'll get it figured out.

Wet. I am going to be wet for Halloween. Since I first came to Georgia in '79, it rains on Halloween. Every single one of them. Dude, I'm a sixty three year old curmudgeon. Be thankful when I have pants on, let alone a costume. If you see me on the front porch, it's because I don't want to walk upstairs to pee.

Wierd. Any RPG that I really, _really_ liked had in common that there was no D20 (or 4, or 8, or 12, for that matter)

Dean has pretty much nailed it. Though I am not sure why he ommitted the obvious supremacy of bald guys with large beards.

You know, that is actually pretty accurate! When you see a sporting competition (the kind that doesn't involve engines or any sort of sport ball), you generally have pretty equally,matched competitors. Their onky shot at outdoing each other is pushing, and pushing hard. Neat.

Think nothing of it, Sir. It'a nice to have a chance to pull my own weight around here now and again, seeing as how I am _passignly_ familiat with 4e, and useless for anything after that. First edition- and even though I havent played 1e in decades, I will never forget this- said "ocaisionally." That'a why I wont forget It! Hey, GM, when can I do this? Jim.. Ocaisionally. Don't make it a habit. If I recall there is only like two sentences of guidelines. Wait; let me get my book.... Okay, 1e p35, right column, last entry. Nope. Only _one_ sentence of guidelines: "Occasionally a character may need to exceed the normal limits if his powers to perform a heroic action." That's it, this is followed by two sentences of instruction and an example. Now to be fair, that single sentence does imply both that this should nit be done routinely and that it is best reserved for not an action or an action taken by a HERO, but a heroic action- something perhaps with the air of "either this works or I die trying." Granted, that is all simole implication (when you craft a sentence properly, you can get enough information in it that you really don't need two thousand pages explaining it. At least, so ling as your audience can _parse_ a sentence well..... At any rate, the examole given if a HERO pyshing his STR to be just barely,avle to hild up a wall long enough that an old lady can escape- again, it drives home that Hail Mary aspect of pushing. Now I know 2e by heart, and without looking, I can tell you that it is the exact same thing with a few more words in each sentence (the HERO gets a name- "Golden Swordsman," if you were wondering), etc, but it is essentially the same exact rules and example. I also know that Champions II, while it added some new wrinkles to combat, added nothing to Pushing, nor dis Champions III (I just double-checked C-3; I dont use it as much and wasn't certain) 3e is a little more detailed again, although the three-sentence rules (identical to 2e, and found on p78, last entry of the perfect bound softcover or same place in the saddlestitched rules book from the boxed set) and the same wall-on-an-old-lady example is punched up a bit and now features a HERO named Brick (in spite of the existence of a villain named Brick, or perhaps Brick's heel turn had reversed; I dont know). It is interesting to note that two pages prior to this entry there is a whole new (for this edition) section called "adding damage," and that section mentions Pushing by name. However, mostly it says Pushing, Martial Arts, Skill Levels, maneuvers, whatever might add to STR damage- cannot be used to morw than double "normal" STR damage. (It also says that if your STR is bought Armor Piercing, then for every addition,an 1.5 DC of damage, you may add only 1 DC. There is no mention of if this additional damage is AP or not, but given the dice reduction, I would assume so. I consider this do be the first official statement that any added damage must have the same modifiers as the base damage. I would like to note that all 3 of the old editions set a hard lumit of 10 points on Pushing. 4e I remember well enough to state that Pyshing was divided into "super" and "heroic," with Heroic requiring an EGO roll (with any modifiers the GM found appropriate). The character could push by 5 pts if the EGO roll is successful, and may add one point for every point by which he made his EGO roll. No; I am serious: there is no enforced upper limit beyond what the dice say (though with heroic characters, outlandishly high EGO scores arent terribly likely). I will have to double-check, but I do not think it gives advice on skill levels for this roll, but I can tell you that I have had more than one player try to push his EGO and then try to push something else with his no-higher EGO. no; I never allowed that. okay, just pulled the book down and looked. For rhose following along a5 home, it is BBB p 169: Pushing. interesting things to note: The first formal rule that characters must declare a push _before_ checking for success, and are kiable dor the END of the push regardless of success (keep 'em honest, Bruce!) Gone are the suggestions of "occasionally" or noble sacrifice. It simply says a character may push his STR. It mentions the possibke inclusion of GM-assigned modifiers, and towars the end of the paragraph, it says essentially 'don't do this too muc' without guidqnce on what you much might be, though it suggests the GM assign negative modifiers should a character do it 'roo much", as defined by the GM apparently. lots more mechanics and technicalities, but less actual advice. for Super games, it states outeight that pushing is much more common, which is eather stealing a bit of the noble sacrifice angle or implying that any character you build should not be enough to face the world in which he lives; I cant say which. Other than that, there is no EGO roll required, and it is capped at 10 additional points, with a final sentence stating that the GM may allow pushes of greater than 10 in "unusual circumstances, such as saving the universe," so maybe mundane pushing is pretty common after all. Oh, and in the same,old wall / old lady example, the hero is now Jaguar. hope something there helped.

I have only just last week been introduced to the term "ensh!tification" (thanks, Chris! It is much less offensive and slightly more accurate than the term I was familar with before). (There is a Wikipedia entry, for anyone not familiar). It started, I think, when Vampires went from cold-blooded, calculating monsters to neo-gothic Edwardian fops (I hope that means what I think it does; if it doesn't, then sincere apologies to anyone offended: it was not intentional), then moved to werewolves, and suddenly we have Disney zombie high-school romances. Gad! Alternatively, make it cost END (say 1 pt per Phase or something) run it from and Endurance reserve, etc. Still not cheap, but sometimes it breaks out a bit cheaper than a fuel charge, especially if you put limitations on the reserve and throw it in a framework. Well that's new (-ish. New to me, anyway. Multiform was new in 4e (to our group). We dqbbled with it a bit, but have never used it after that. However, your xomment has left me with the idea of "non-combat Multiform," which has me gigling like an idiot. "Let me show you de move dat make me famoos..." Sorry; that's a quote from one of those shot-on-VHS movies from 30 years ago. I wish I could remember the title, becauae I would love to watch it again. anyway, here is how Multiform became verboten at my table. I have mentioned Davien many times before- a habitual problem player to the point that I have recieved three or four PMs over the years asking me if he is am amalgamation of my problem players over the years. I am saddened to report that he is not. He was just a purebred jackass. He loved to demonstrate his "incredible intelligence" by finding unique ways to rape the rules. (If he was as smart as he thought he was, he would have realized that we could _all_ see the loopholes and we chose not to exploit them in favor of the spirit of the game.) When the rules changed so that the base character no longer had to be rhe most powerful form, Davien turned in a character that, like the Kevin Bacon social experiment, was six degrees from God. Essentially he turned in a character whose only power was Multiform, upon which he had spent almost all of his points. His alternate form spent most of its points on a Multiform of its own, which had a Multiform, which- and so on, until we got to the point that he was trying to bring a 1200-and-some-point character into a 300-point game. fortunately, after that argument settled, he decided he didn't want to play in that campaign, leaving the rest of us to saner devices. (yes: the God-Tier form was positively crippled with Disadvantages, but _still_....) yes; I know evertthing wrong with this (there was an argument, after all), but _still_, it did point out the potential for framework abuse. Even then, though, these forms could be simulated via a Power by pre-building each form. And there is the "double forms for 5 points thing- the initial spell is expensive, but once you learn it, it isnt too difficult to get better at it.

While I very much liked the comment, it is also _exactly_ the reason I hold out that Multiform should be considered to be a framework: so you dont take your 80 percent discount and then shove it into another framework.

Quite possibly. Nostalgia makes folks believe some wiers things when it'a a nostalgia completely important to them. Heck, Harley Davidson has built an empire from a marketing campaign that is quite literally nostalgia for a time that never actually existed. Still, if he had quietely faded away after that adventure, then later adoptwra of Champions would have been innocylated against the potential to want him kept around. Yes. It also, despite the cover blurb stating otherwise, was absolutely not an adventure.

I am more curious about how he can regrow an arm and it will have metal bones and claws already installed.

Way ahead of you, Sir. seriously, though, these are words to live by. I have been doing some testing for the last fifty years or so, and I think he's right! I have never condsidered this, and it's awesome! I love it! Problematically, though, is that it can't restore you to full value if you ever took a single adjustment greater than your defense. If the attacker bought the return rate down to a level that exceeds your lifespan... And, as you pointed out, if power defense didn't apply to the attack... I dont remember for certain, but I _think_ 6e regeneration is some,sort of screwball Healing derivative; is it not? At any rate, were I doing this in my game, I would use Regeneration as-is, except declaring that this instance of Regen is specifically for DEX (o4 whatever). That just seems,the simplest place to start. Modify as playtesting suggests. I think that for 6e- what with all characteristics costing the same and no characteristics derived from any others, this would be even less likely to cause problems. If you really feel it should for whatever reason cost more, make it a build: Regen: Variable Effects. Done.

I am goinf to need some parameters to determine what is or is not in the set of "fight them." If you mean direct fisticuffs and energy blasts, then, give your qualifier of "never," I have to say "rarely." I mean very rarely, at least in supers games. It might take experience earned during a two-year story arc, and it might take the skillful coordinated efforts of the entire team, but almost all of my villains can eventually be taken down with direct confrontation. The trick is _getting to them_; discovering who is behind it all and developing the what-it-takes or finding the mystic McGuffin- whatever, that makes it possible. Certainly for the very powerful villains, I leave other options such as the resource attrition others have mentioned above, or myatic entrapment or some hokey phantom zone trap, but I always try to leave at least avenue open- if difficult and treacherous- to direct confrontation, because over the years I have noticed- particularly in sypers games- that while players are indeed _pleased_ when they can seal Molochai the Executioner behind the Great Barrier of Kaphoon or trap the Magus inside his crystal prison, and that they celebrate and go "we won! We did it!," they seem,to much more _satisfied_ when they finally get that one go-for-broke chance to actually knock him on his ass. It's a visceral thing that, guilty pleasure or not, we like as human beings: socking the bad guy right on the nose. The problem with sub-cosmic Dr . Destroyer isnt his overall toughness: it is that when used "properly (within the CU confines of who he is and how he operates) you never get to him. There is always another layer (like taking out a couple millionaires people to 'fake his own death), and if you happen to pass him on the city sidewalk, that, too, was planed, and there is always an escape. It's like trying to get a photograph of Jehovah, and there is nothing about the character that really makes you want him to be part of the story anyway. As LL pointed out, thw Book ofbthe Destroyer pointed out all kinds of options for him in power level, history, plots, goals-- But it did exactly nothing to make him interesting. If you want a villain of that level that incites curiosity, wipe Destroyer out of your universe and replace him with Kreuzritter from Silver Age Sentinels. He has had exactly 1/10000 as many words written about him, and is still infintely more interesting, even while being a stereotype at heart. Dr. D was a 1e villain written for one specific groyo's campaign and pulled to play the (undetectable) bad guy in the only 1e adventure ever written, and frankly, that should have been the end of him. His only appeal has aleays been "well, I dont have to write up a planetary scale villain if I chuck this guy into my adventure," and I have no idea how that has carried him for forty years.

This being the case-- and her3 is somrthing you will almost never hear me recommend, as I loathe its very existence and double-despise its use as the crutch upon which complicated builds are proppwd so as to,avoid either the cost of the buulding itself-- might I recommend the Multipower of Everything? It is more commonly known as Power Pool, but for a mere 19.99, you can get 9.99 worth of every single possible thing, 9.99 at a time. Multiform iant going to let you make dizens and dizens if super powered characters. It will let you make exactly as many as you can pay for. Throw five hundred points into power pool, and you can spend the rest if your life making new versions of yourself, and it is all book-proper. You know how some Swiss army knives are 3/8 of an inch thick with four different blades or tools, and others are 3/4 of an inch thick with eight blades /tools, and then there are the chunky 1-1/4 inch thick display case Swiss army knives with eighteen tool bits in them? Buy a 500 pt power pool, and you get a swiss army knife that's eight-hundred thirty six miles thick and do what you want. Reinvent yourself a thousand times in one campaign. Just remember you can only apply the time limit discount to the pool points, as time lumit does not affect the control cost; it only affects your access to the pool. Neat! Discounted swiss army knife!

you remind me of a story I have told before, about a new player who was not comfortable with the role-play aspects of the game, so he would detail his actions and, as GM, I would do a flashy, glamorized re-telling of the action. at one point, he was preparing a mighty blow against a villain- a blow that would deal a considerabke amount of BODY. One of the other players recommended a "subdual" type attack, to which Kevin replied "yeah;that's right. I'm gonna poke him in the STUN, but really hard!"

All the answers you have received are correct; I just wanted to add a bit for clarity in understanding the reasoning: Multiform is a power. There is a lot that goes with it; you can have all kinds of powers when you activate it, and a whole new body or whatever, but Multiform is the power. The time limit you want affects the single power "Multiform." It is to the cost of that power that the modifier would be applied, and it would be paid for by the 'form' that paid for Multiform. If a character had Flight with a time limit, the limitation is applied to Flight and paid for by the character that paid for Flight. Like Every power, Multiform is treated the same way. For what it's worth, I have always argued it should be classified as a framework- still work the same, but be classified as a framework. But it isn't.

I dont know how that works in 6e, or in the original FH (we used Champions rules for pretty much every genre until 4e), but that has, since the 80s, been one of my favorite Drain builds.

I actually kind of like that! I am nowhere near my books (at job 2 today); what would that work out to, price-wise, in 6e?

Sorry for the delay; most of my spare time the last few days has been dedicated to try8ng to find NOS body parts for a 25-year-old motorcycle. Needless to say, it is not going well.... At any rate: Hugh is correct (in several things, which I think we are generally used to, at this point. ); in the saddlestitched editions, Regeneration was prices at 10 points per BODY recovered, and carried a (generally ignored) minimum cost of 20 points. However, in these early editions, the character recovered 1 BODY _per Recovery_. Thus, he regained one BODY (per 10 points in Regen) every post-12, which lines up with Hugh's assertion that he healed [flat amount] per Turn, but it overlooks the fact that with the phrasing of the rules, he also gained his Regen in BODY any Phase in which he took a Recovery. And of course, you couldn't move it up or down the Time Chart because there was no Time Chart. In the early editions, the powers that we would come to think of as Adjustment Powers had a cost mechanic for delaying their fade rates, but as you paid individually per _Phase_ of that delay, it got crazy expensive to hold onto your adjusted abilities very long. Further, Regeneration had no such option within its mechanics, as it had no fade rate (suggesting that it isn't- or at least _wasn't_) an Adjustment Power (an assertion that I very much agree with). Well... It could be made less expensive with the use of Limitations, but typically,they were custom limitations (most often, at least at the tables at which I played, was "not in combat," which GMs assigned a value from between -1.5 to -2, except for that jackass Duke, who assigned it a -1 to -1.5 depending on how long it took for the character to regenerate, and _insisted_ that if you did nit declare that you were spending that amount of time to regerate, then you, in fact, were not Regenerating. He Also had the infuriating habit of pointing out that the character had to spend this time doing nothing, as the official write-up tied the power to taking Recovery, which had specific rules. No "regenerate as I run down this hallway after the bad guy" stuff here, at least not without a pricey custom advantage. This Power also got soggy with the "Useable on others" Advantage: in order for _them_ to heal, _you_ had to take a Recovery. Fortunately, "Useable _by_ others popped up in the next book or two, and fixed that. at any rate, while it could be made more or less pricey, as Hugh points out, it really couldn't be made more cost effective: it was even cheaper that a Drain that fed your BODY: let me introduce some of the more recent discoverers of HERO to the 2e Transfer Loophole: in 1e and 3e and all editions after, the details of Transfer are nailed down pretty well (even if they seem,to vary with each one). In 1e, the power called Characteristics Transfer and specified that you take from a characteristic of your choice and use the drained points to enhance in your character that same,characteristic. Cost is based on the Characteristic being drained; roll the dice and whatever the total is, subtract that amount from a target's characteristic and add it to your same characteristic. If 2d6 Drain: BODY rolled a 9, then 9 BODY was deducted and was added to the attacker's own BODY. in 2e, the decision had been made to allow Transfering (and other Adjustment Powering) of any attribute a character had: BODY, STR, Flight, Power Defense-- whatever. To achieve this, the verbiage grew and changed a bit. Now, for the first time ever, you could drain from one ability and use it to feed an entirely different ability! Another change was that you no longer drained or transferred power "levels" directly, but insted draind Power Points-- the actual character points spent into the ability. This was actually completely necessary; outside or Characterisitics, most things are measured in Dice. You cant drain 11 Energy Blast, because EB isn't listed or purchased that way. However, if you drained 11 Power Points of EB, your target lost two dice, and you gained them. These editions had no such thing as "maximum points adjusted" limits, so a popular 'take him out quick' attack was to T-fer or Drain STUN or BODY (I always like REC, myself) and use the points gwined to increase your Transfer, creating the Loop to Victory approach to drooping opponents in a hurry. Two things remined the same: you could not award the points to an attribute you did not already posses, and the pricing was based on the cost multiplier of whatever you were Adjusting. Non-characteristics were assumed to have a cost multiplier of 1. so here came the loophole: Transfer: Drain from END and add to X. why? Because END had a x1/2 cost multiplier! The price for Transfer was (15pts x [cost multiplier], so if one targeted END, those 15 it's bought him _2_ dice of Transfer! And since You were draining Power Points this time, it didnt _matter_ what you drained away from, because the points you gained came from the points spent on the ability: if I Transfer 10 power points from END, it is still 10 power points, and it still nets me 2d6 of EB or up to 5 BODY. Now suppose I opted to fuel BODY and pull from END. For 15 Points, I can expect to _average_ 7 points-- power points-- which is 3.5 BODY restored. This is the closest you ever got to a "better price" on Regerate BODY, where 20 points pts you regenerate 2 BODY._however_, it cost END by default, required an attack roll and physical contact, and began to fade _immediately_, so this build didnt come up often, and of course, a GM with _any_ Adjustment Powers experience would take a blowtorch to your character sheet. . This exception, so far as I remember, was not available in any other edition (becauae we gained even more verbiage) Right there. No matter what edition you are playing or how good you are with power modifiers, nothing is as cost-effective (with regard to Adjustment Powers) as Power Defense.

Tardy to the party, but the most common skills-related house rule I do is to eliminate characteristics bases. All skills start at 8-; buy up from there.