tesuji

"). This creates a pronounced bell curve with the average centering around 2.75, with the result that a KA reliably does more Stun but less Body than a normal-damage attack of the same DC, which is supposed to be the difference between them." I think you meant more body but less stun.

Book not in front of me... "Vehicle Merging (Monolith version) 36 Morph Vehicle: Multiform (1000 Character Points in the most expensive form) (200 Active Points); OAF Blue Vehicle (-1), OAF Red Vehicle (-1), OAF Green Vehicle (-1), OAF Yellow Vehicle (-1), Extra Time (Full Phase; -1/2)" I think BTB the multiple foci allows each additional required foci to raise the limitation value by 1/4, not for each to be applied at full.

My take on vehicle merging is a little different... Buy the BIG HONKIN' full voltron form as a vehicle. Give that vehicle a multiform to a lesser vehicle (Red) and give red an always on (at -0) inherent duplication to make the other vehicles. Net result, when the big V multiforms into the red sled, the others appear as well. you need only to add a limitation that you can only multiform back to the big V when all duplicates are present. -1/2 maybe -1/4

could you accomplish similar things buy applying a limitation such as extra time to the multipower? Example... I buy my normal magic multipower up to say 80 ap with the usual -2 worth of lims for my magic. net cost 27 points. I buy say an additional 80 ap with -2 worth of extra time making the additional cost something like 16 cp. The net cost for the pool is 43. Normal spells will cost between 1-3 cp (80 ap max / 3 / 10) Rituals can go over the 80 ap but that means they get the big whammy of -2 extra time (5 minutes to a day? book not here) is this the kind of thing you are looking for, just cheaper?

I dont have a problem with the book's version of does no stun. However, your piercing is not "does no stun" or even close. When a 10d6 eb hits a 20 defense guy and the frst 20 points of stun damage is blocked, that is NOT the same as taking "does no stun" on the first 6d6. most of the damage, stun and body, of attacks is blocked by defenses and does no damage. Thats the nature of the system's representation of defenses, not a case for a limitation. "does no damage until defenses are breached" is not a limitation, its a mechanic. Anyway, for my games, "only serves to lower defenses" would be either a -0 FX thing or an advantage, for the reasons already stated. Your games are probably radically different from mine and hence the different interpretations. In a super game, the notion of reducing the cost of your powers as drastically as applying -3/4 or even -1/2 on the first half of an attack (say the first 6d6 on your 12d6 EB) because they only count for beating defense would be absurd. The savings vastly outweigh the gloss in effectiveness. In an Heroic game where defenses were much much lower and where the res def clause were not triggered, its a different story. As a suggestion however, it seems to me that the preponderance of games and rules typically discussed are super-heroic in nature. It might save some confusion if you mention the "heroic, low defenses" campaign setting when you bring up house rules. As stated multiple posts ago, legal is easy. What you propose is every bit as legal as any custom lim. enjoy your games.

Re: Rules Q (not in the FAQ) the OCV penalty is based on the smaller target being harder to hit... so it would still apply. Even if you can hear the fly buzzing around, that doesn't make it as easy to hit as say a beachball, does it?

[/b] i have seen more than a few cases where, when "figuring new powers" that involve custom lims a preconceived notion of where it should point out colors the pricing given to those lims. **IF** you buy that only countering defense is a viable limitation and not just an FX, then yes. While some things can be shown to be a deficit in some cases, that does not mean they rise to the level of "limitation." How many attacks that matter IN GAME will be suffering reduced effect for piercing vs how many will be better off? The "drawback" of "doesn't do as much against inadequately defended foes" is not much of a counter balance for "does better in most other cases." Most of any attack, against foes that matter or against foes with defenses to stand up to the attack at all, do nothing more than bounce off the defense AND get the last bit of the attack thru. are you talking 20 RESISTANT defense? if so your numbers are based on a lot more than normal defensive levels. 20/10r is normal. 10 peircing reduces the resistant defense to 0... which means the remaining 2d6 rka goes against NO DEFENSE. Remember, without resistant defense you fo not get to keep the remaining non-resistant defense around against stun. your Ap shot ends up going against, assuming 20/10r... 5 vs the body and 10 vs the stun, while your piercing attack goes straight thru. The assumption i am making, which may be incorrect, from previous piercing threads is the following... if the piercing reduces the target's resistant defenses to 0, then the target is treated as having "no resistant defense" for purposes of the rule which disallws PD/ED against the stun of killing attacks if you have 0 resistant defense. IS THIS HOW YOU SEE IT? If not, then your piercing is different from the others I have seen discussed. If so, and you have repeatedly left this out of your analysis for these posts, i would ask "why?" regardless... keep in mind that "stun only" for Ebs is (was?) considered a -0 limitation because it prevents killing. The fact that a piercing RKA will be LESS LETHAL against low defense targets is not just a flaw but also an advantage. If i have a 4d6 rka and a target with unknown defenses, I have to worry about my shot killing him outright. If i have 2d6K with 10 piercing, i have no such worries (assume superhero game.) i could use less than 4d6K but then if he has full defenses, i waste a shot. With piercing, I can blaze away at full strength regardless. One could think of piercing as a safety shot that still works against tough foes. I do not see piercing as enough of a "flaw" to earn another -1/4. ***************** The following assumes that piercing does NOT trigger in the "no res def = no def vs stun" rule as i assumed aboive. IMO, it should be represented by -1/4 Does not KB and -0 piercing only on the dice in question that brings it out to 4 per DC. the loss in damage against unshielded enemies is offset by the reduction in chance of inadvertantly killing unshielded targets, like say the bystanders after you miss the badguy. if you are playing in a campaign where killing undefended targets is GOOD, then it might well be worth -1/4 or more. **************** IF as i mention above, piercing WOULD trigger the "no res def" clause, then it is probably an advantage. No amount of MORE D6 KILLING DICE or any amount of AP can ever prevent the use of some defense against the stun, while piercing could. Combined with the "sagety" listed above, this is better than a typical attack or even an AP attack.

How is this different from Ap? Its simply better. 12 dc ap rka is 2.5d6 which would get about 4 body thru (as opposed to your piercing's 7) and about the same amount of stun. same price, similar stun, +75% more body thru. same price. how is your piercing different than ap, you ask? Its better. *********** it is legal for the gm to assign any value he wants for his campaign's custom limitations, so any price you want to place on piercing is legal. thats a no brainer. piercing is legal at 1 per level, 3 per level or 234000 oer level. legal is easy if thats all you are after. balanced, fair, reasonable.... these are tougher. currently by the numbers, at 3 per, piercing doesn't seem to meet any of these. If your plan is to add it regardless and then try and manage the issues with campaign controls, then rock and roll. but if thats your goal, there was no need for the math. you wanted it to match the 3e cost, you assigned the lim values based on that gaol and achieved the results. mission accomplished.

so, if i read this right... in a 12dc game with 20/10 defenses... i could buy 4d6 rka and do an average of 4 body thru and something like 22 stun thru. i could buy a 2d6K with 10 piercing and get an average of 7 body thru and something like 19 stun thru since he had no resistant defenses after piercing and thus takes full stun. That doesn't look balanced to me. Unless you spend a lot of time throwing big killing attacks at nearly undefended targets, piercing looks like just an advantageous purchase. If your campaign does feature a lot of high power killing attacks thrown at low defense targets, it seems like a waste of time to take piercing... i mean... aren't they dieing fast enough already?

In FRED there are rules for using more than 1 charge. I think it was -1/4 for each additional charge per use... but book not in front of me.

I dont use rule of X but instead look at various metrics... Against what DCVs will they have 75% chance of a hit (only missing on 13+)? Against what DCVs will they have 75% chance of a miss ( missing on 9+)? Lather rinse repeat for OCVs and generally wanting no answers to be more than 25%. What is their stun number (damage which will con stun them on a single shot) and how frequent is that amoung my villains? What is the KO number (same as above but unconscious) and how frequent is it amoung my villais? Lather, rinse repeat for PC attacks looking for no number over 10%. IMO the olde adage of trading off OCV vs HITDIE is really not as valid a metric anymore because there are so many ways to reduce enemy DCV for a brief period. Sure the 4 ocv 18d6 move thru might seem plausible in a 12d6 10 ocv world, but after the first 3d6 entangle "entangle and target take damage" is timed to go off right before the move thru, this "trade off" becomes much less significant. Cvs vary a lot more widely than they used to in combat. As such i tend to balance the crunch level a lot more than i worry with the CV.

What you describe is certainly ONE genre of fantasy magic. others use magic as much less a representation of unknowable forces and much more as a tool. For example, the Jhereg series by Stephen Brust shows us a (IMO wonderful) fantasy world where magic is fairly commonplace and as a matter of fact magic items are commodities. The strong class structure is still somewhat medieval in effect (very much have's and have-nots and little between) but magical power playes a role in addition to station and money. I would hope FH would support both.

spend 4 to raise con to 28 saves 2 on rec saves 2 on end net cost free for free this raises your PD by 1 and stun by 1 as well as making you 2 points harder to con stun

i have a lot of the shadow world stuff. It was very good quality fantasy product, with excellent maps and detailed background. i agree that its stats were not hero friendly, however, thats not really a detriment in my eyes. I always restat things for my campaign anyway, so even if the were in hro it would not matter. You get your monies worth. One note, they are not very "moduleish" presenting a specific adventure but rather they introduce a lot of area info, characters and intrigues as well as story seeds and a stray adventure here and there.

As for rapid vision... this isn't clairvoyance, its an invention of the faq and the ongoing overcomplication of megascale. iirc, when i read through it a while back, it involves buying megascale on your senses, so that if you buy the megascale on sight up to match the megascale on your running, then you are able to avoid running into walls and such when running really fast.

If a power is in an item that can be taken away and used against you, then it is a UNIVERSAL focus. That is not what independent means. Independent means that WHEN, not if, the power is lost you will also lose the points. In order to replace it, you will have to repurchase it. Think of it as renting the power... you get it cheap for a while but eventually it is expensive. Buying your primary defense as independent is not a wise idea as you will have to keep repurchasing it since its not a good idea to just let it go.

enough to kill him before the vulnerability, making the vulnerability a pointless (in more ways than one) disadvantage. 1" megascale to 1 km per phase (the minimum scale down) equates to a velocity of 500" which means after the first 10-15d6 wall/car impact knocks him out he has a 250d6 case of road rash assuming no other solid objects get in his way as the pavement makes him into the world's longest thinnest roadkill. Doubling the 250d6 he takes from roadrash is irrelevent for a guy with single digit defenses, isn't it? As always, its up to the GM, but for my money, i would not allow the character to take megascale under the understanding that he will have megascale collisions frequently enough to be "common" given the lethality of them. *******aside*************** of course, i know its currently in vogue to make megascale dangerous and bad so as to prevent cheap megascale abuse and so we now have the "megascale senses." I just don't buy it. Megascale was invented to handle cheap strategic movement and was just constructed badly and so brought all this inaccurate nonsense into the game. Now, to prevent rapid strategic movement abuse, we have megascaled senses, which end up turning the cost right back up and making the whole notion of "for game purposes strategic movement should be simple and relatively cheap" on its head. How many comic speedsters or jetpack fliers and the like who zip from city to city seem to have such gross lack of control issues as we see with megascale? Can Flash see 100's of miles away just because he can run 100's of mile at a zip? No. Anyone got a date for HERO6?

First, rules... For the Eb slot, you took "can be missile deflected" as a LIM. Eb can normally by default be missile deflected. So this lim is not valid. For your vuln, you list unexpected collisions as common? Why would they be common? Does your character have a maneuverability issue that this is supposed to represent? Unexpected collisions should not be common normally, i would think. Non-Rules... Instead of spending 20 points on +3 DCV and +3 lightning reflexes, raise your dex to 38 leaving speed at 7 and you will save 2 points. Dex 38 = 84 plus Speed 7 = 22 for 106 as compared to Dex 29 = 57 [;us Speed 7 = 31 plus 20 for dex and init bonuses for 108. With such low defenses, regeneration (aka superfast healing) is a definite needed commodity. Maybe only 1 body per hour. With such low defenses, you need something to defray simple attacks. perhaps a missile deflection "super-dodge" or something i have seen speedsters take a lot is Damage reduction with "must see attack" and/or dex/activation roll required as another form of superdodge. As it stands now, an OCV 9 shot with 12d6 spread for +6 will be OCv 15 against you. Your basic DCV is 9+3 = 12 which means you WILL get hit and even 60% of the time if you dodge. (I don't know the campaign levels for your game but, under typical levels, you are underdefended (whether by evade or by tough) by a long shot. Considering you will frequently be the subject of ambushes, this lack of defense thing will likely prove more problematic than may be handleable.

IMO... The cost for multipower should have remained in the "paid by the most expensive character." this means the most expensive character form is the one paid for at the same scale as everyone else. that eliminates the 5/1 experience thingy. The true form should have been a separate issue, being simply a defined state for which form you revert to if multiform is dispelled or suppressed or drained or otherwise nullified. TRUE FORM is an FX issue, not an accounting issue. WHICH FORM PAYS THE COST **is** an accounting issue, not an FX issue. IMO the problem in HERO5 multiform is the merging of those two disparate factors. other restrictions may be needed but this would be a minimum. ********************* Might this make some character concepts which are valid and balanced illegal? maybe? but the Gm can make exceptions, right?