Soleil Noir

Says who? Exactly who gets to decide who "deserves" to live or die? By what authority? Using what criteria? I stand by my original statement -- every citizen, whether they wear a costume or not, has a moral obligation to give every suspect the benefit of the doubt, and to make allowances for contrition and rehabilitation, or just plain being mistaken in your accusation. And that's even more true in a world where, between mind control, mental illusions, masked identities, and shapeshifters (just to name a few) you may have no idea who or what you're facing down until long after the smoke clears...

Agreed -- Jameson's always had a personal axe to grind against Spider-Man, but to my knowledge the man's always been rock-solid when it came to journalistic integrity and the responsibility of the press (a couple of throwaway jokes from the 3rd "Spider-Man" movie notwithstanding)...

If I could have any power at all? I'd want the ability to heal any injury or cure any disease (in others, not necessarily myself). I'd start a tax-deductible charity where people could donate money, and I'd use the proceeds to travel around the world, anywhere I was needed -- epidemics, natural disasters, victims of war -- and save everybody I could get my hands on, free of charge. How grand would that be -- to be able to spend every day changing people's lives forever, without having to worry about making the rent, or attending business meetings, or making deadlines? To be completely apolitical, with no worries about reprisals from some supercriminal with a grudge? And if enough donations were forthcoming, to try to fund research to find a way to replicate my power, so that everyone could have the gift of long life and health?

Depending on which interpretation of the genre you're emulating (are they fairly feeble singly, like Romero's "Dawn of the Dead", or do they move at warp speed like the Zak Snyder remake?) I might give them the Physical Complication "Always considered in 'non-combat' mode" -- that effectively means that zombies are always 0 OCV, 1/2 DCV, and Hit Location penalties are halved. This would allow even relatively inexperienced fighters to score head shots on a fairly regular basis (even Carl Grimes has capped several), and that, one on one, it's pretty easy to avoid being grabbed unless you're surprised. Also in keeping with the genre, I might say that zombies have the Teamwork Skill when attacking in swarms, to simulate how the humans can be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers, even if the zombies are attacking with a 0 OCV. And from a metagame standpoint, I'd probably build the zombie virus as AVAD -- the first time a character is bitten, he rolls an Activation Roll; if the attack fails to activate, the character is declared genetically "immune" and can NEVER be affected by the Transform (at least, until the virus has time to mutate or if there's multiple strains of the virus). It may work in a two-hour movie for a single bite to be a death sentence, but in an ongoing RPG players are either going to be very frustrated or act in ways inconsistent with the genre if they can't afford to screw up even once. I'd probably also throw in a "Delayed Effect" Limitation, giving the PC's a chance to amputate or otherwise treat the wound before the infection spreads.

I'd prefer to lean towards the Superman philosophy, for one simple reason: the justice system is inherently fallible; and a death sentence, once carried out, cannot be rescinded. So no matter how convinced I personally may be of an individual's guilt, or how much I think that child molester or serial killer "deserves" to die, as a matter of principle I have a moral duty to grit my teeth and give every last one of them the benefit of the doubt, and to leave room for contrition and rehabilitation -- because I hope someone would extend to me the same consideration if I ever found myself on the stand, guilty or innocent. That's how you know if your justice system is truly JUST -- if it seems fair and reasonable to you WITHOUT knowing in advance whether you're going to be the accuser or the accused...

It depends on the philosophy of the hero, or whoever trained the character to be a hero -- Professor X made sure that the X-Men all received training in unarmed combat, so that they could defend themselves without revealing their secret identities or relying on powers (which can sometimes be suppressed or simply ineffective) as a crutch. They were also all supposed to be trained in the use and maintenance of the team jet, so I suppose you could add Transport Familiarity and Mechanics to the list.

Re: Battletech Starter Kit The one thing I'd say about this is "Caveat Emptor" (that's "Let the buyer beware", for those of you in Rio Linda). I just bought this set for my son, after he discovered my old stash of 80's Battletech stuff in the basement. The miniatures that came with the boxed set were in HORRIBLE shape -- fully half of them were missing limbs, had legs lopped off at the ankles, and were otherwise completely unusable. On the plus side, however, the company's ombudsman has been very helpful and is mailing us replacement miniatures at no charge; and assured me that they are switching manufacturers due to Quality Assurance problems...

When a character with Damage Negation is affected by an attack that affects more than one character (e.g.; an Area Effect or Explosion), how do you determine which dice of the attack are Negated? Are they selected at random, or should you re-roll with the reduced number of dice, or subtract the largest first, or what?

Mr. Cellophane takes Invisibility to Sight and Hearing Groups with the Advantage "Usable Simultaneously", and defines the special effect as sending out a telepathic command to people in his vicinity that they should completely ignore him. Later, Mr. C sneaks into the hideout of Dr. Insidious to rescue the Mayor. He grabs the Mayor and extends his invisibility around His Honor, so they can both sneak out to safety. Can the Mayor see and communicate with Mr Cellophane normally as long as they're both invisible? Or is the mayor simply aware that he's being tugged by the shoulder by some unseen force?

Re: Catalyst: A Champions campaign on Hero Central Are you still looking for players for the campaign? I don't currently have Hero Designer, but here is a link where you can download a MSWord file of my proposed character, Quantum Girl: http://soleilnoir.wikispaces.com/file/view/Quantum+Girl+350+1-28-09.doc Basically, Dr. Jenna Sinclair was a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It's widely known that there was a failure of the apparatus during one of its early test firings; what is not known is that Dr. Sinclair was bombarded with exotic energies during the accelerator's failure, causing her to be inexplicably "linked" to alternate versions of herself existing in parallel universes right next door to our own. As a result, she can draw additional mass from those other dimensions to increase her size or density, or shunt her own mass out of our Universe to become intangible or shrink. In addition, she has a limited ability to select which among all her possible quantum states will manifest within our Universe, giving her control over probability within her vicinity (Luck and Overall levels); and can even pull her parallel selves into our Universe for a short time (Duplication). From a game mechanics standpoint, she's built with a Multiform with the different forms representing each of the ways she can manifest her power. This was a necessary evil -- her stats scale according to her size/density (it never made sense to me that a hero would be just as strong and tough whether he's full size or one inch tall); and while I might have tried making all her powers slots in a Multipower, the rules expressly forbid making her stats Linked to more than one power. I also recognize that her Multiform gives her a lot of flexibility; but I'd observe that she can only use one form at a time (e.g.; can't increase density AND be Duplicated), and that she often won't be able to use her abilities at full power due to the environment not being able to accommodate her size/weight. There also tend to be other tradeoffs to keep her from being unbalanced (e.g.; at maximum Density she has the DEX and SPD of a normal human, a single AE attack could take her out when she's Shrunk to her minimum, etc.) I don't have a full writeup of her background just yet, preferring to leave things open-ended a bit so she can be tailored to fit well with the campaign and the existing characters. If this character sounds like a decent candidate to you, please let me know so we can hammer out the details.

Can a Succor power that has the "Variable Effect" Advantage be used to boost two different powers/stats simultaneously? Example: Booster-Man needs a little extra "oomph" to take out an opponent, so he uses Succor to increase his Strength. After a couple of swings he finds he's having trouble hitting his opponent; so can he now shift the effect of Succor to ramp up his DEX, while still paying the END and keeping his STR at the boosted level?

Is is normally Visible when someone has been the recipient of an Adjustment power? And if it's not the "default" for Adjustment Powers, would it be an acceptable use of the "Visible" Limitation for that power if you can immediately recognize both the person using it and the person on the receiving end?

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... That ain't the way *I* heard it!

1.) Player A uses an Area Effect Entangle vs. Player B, who currently has 50 pts. of Growth active (10 hexes tall). If the Entangle’s build is such that only part of Player B’s body is covered, would Player B still suffer the full penalties of being Entangled (e.g.; 0 DCV, unable to use Accessible Foci, etc.)? 2.) The rules state that, if Player A Grabs Player B, Player A suffers the appropriate OCV and DCV penalties for holding someone, even if Player B is a willing “grabee”. Would the relative size differences of the characters, due to Growth and/or Shrinking powers, make any difference as to the penalty assigned? Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to see that, in real life, carrying around someone who’s the size of a doll (A mouse? An ant?) relative to yourself would be far less encumbering than a person of equal size… 3.) Consider a situation where Player A grabs hold of a much larger Player B (e.g.; Legolas clambering up the giant elephant in “Return of the King”). Player B’s Casual Strength is enough to break free of Player A’s Grab. If Player B doesn’t make an active effort to brush Player A off of him, could Player A continue to cling to Player B – effectively still “Grabbing” B but not causing B to suffer any sort of CV penalties? As always, thanks in advance for your time....

Could Overall levels be used to increase the effective "BODY" rolled by Luck dice?

Re: Pleasure Effects

Re: Pleasure Effects

1.) Can a power with the Advantage "Only costs END to Activate (+1/4)" be Pushed? It *does* cost END, after all... 2.) If the answer to #1 is yes, how long does the effect of the Push last -- just one Phase, or until the power is shut off?

If a character purchases multiple Increased STUN Multiples for a Killing Attack, is the maximum STUN Multiple he can achieve "capped" at 6, or can the multiple go higher?

In last weekend's campaign we had a situation where one of the characters wanted to mark the MacGuffin the villains were going to steal as a Floating Teleport location, so as to easily track the baddies back to their base. The situation has already been resolved, but I would like to get an "official" ruling on a couple of things, for future reference: 1.) Is it possible for someone to detect that a physical object has been memorized as a Teleport location? 2.) Could that Floating Teleport location then be Dispelled, breaking the teleporter's connection to it? And if so, can Teleport locations then be bought with the "Inherent" Advantage to prevent that disconnect? 3.) If #2 is possible would the teleporter be aware of the fact that his memorized T-port location has been Dispelled (or that a "Stops Teleport" barrier has been erected between him and the location) when it happens, or would he only find out when he tries to Teleport and nothing happens? 4.) Could the memorized Teleport location be transferred from one object to another (say, with some sort of a Transform power) to trick the heroes into chasing after the wrong object? Would the teleporter get some sort of PER roll to notice that his T-port location had been shifted? Thanks in advance for your response.

Re: "Point inflation" in Hero I completely approve of the "point inflation" that's been taking place. It's giving us the latitude to design characters who actually can pull off some of the stunts you see routinely in the comics, without having to first accumulate several years' worth of XP. I also observe that it's a bit more necessary now -- there are a LOT more choices in terms of Skills, Talents, Perks, and the like; and there's also been a considerable "ramping up" of real-world equipment's effectiveness -- superheroes just don't seem quite as super when the semi-automatic rifle you or I could buy at any gun store would rival the average hero's best attack in terms of Active Point Levels. This Saturday, Megaplayboy will begin running a campaign for the crew here in the DC Metro area where the PC's will be in the 1000-1200 pt. range, and I'm very much looking forward to see how it plays out. By putting a fairly firm cap on Active Points for Offensive and Defensive powers, we avoid any problems with anyone running around with a 500 pt. Energy Blast; but we have enough extra points to pull some pretty spectacular rabbits out of the hat -- the TK elemental can throw a protective dome over the entire city, the duplicating martial artist can conjure up a full MILLION clones for crowd control or search & rescue operations, and the deposed alien monarch can damn near tug the Moon out of its orbit!

If memory serves (don't have the books in front of me at the moment), both the sample Shipboard Computer in the Vehicles and Bases section of 5ER and the communicator with built-in computer from the Gadgets section of the Champions sourcebook take a 1pt. Language Skill in order to be able to accept voice commands. However, the "ground rules" for computers in 5ER state that computers start out having no senses; and both sample computers are missing the basic Hearing sense -- which would seem to be a prerequisite for being able to hear those commands. Was this simply an oversight? Or does paying points for the Language Skill automatically allow the computer to receive voice commands, while still leaving it unable to hear anything else?

Re: Does this make ANY sense? THANK you, Checkmate.....I suppose maybe I was just looking for validation of some sort -- that I'm not the only one who thinks that a lot of the "official" rulings are counter-intuitive and just don't pass the "smell test"; and that the lack of rationale offered for those rulings make them seem unnecessarily arbitrary or simply Bad Calls. I suppose if Mr. Long DID start offering the "why" to his rulings, explaining himself online could quickly turn into a full-time job....but when I post a question to the forums, I'm doing it with the hope of getting some insight I hadn't thought of before, or hearing from someone wiser or with a better understanding of the rules than myself; and often as not, I'm just not seeing it....

(Sorry to be making the same post in two different sections; but this is a more general "HERO game mechanics" question but I accidentally posted it to the "Champions" section...) In the "Rules Questions" section, someone recently asked about whether 5-point Skill Levels vs. "All INT-based Skills" would apply to Background Skills like Area Knowledges and Science Skills; Mr. Long's response was an unequivocal "No", citing that it would be "unbalancing".... ...Except that the character could take those same 5 points, buy up his INT by an equivalent amount, and bump up all of his INT-based Skills, INCLUDING the Background Skills, and it's not considered "unbalancing"! I asked Mr. Long where the imbalance was, and wasn't this simply promoting stat inflation, and got the standard "I don't answer game design/philosophy" response. Does anyone else find this completely counter-intuitive and makes no sense? Has anyone else gotten frustrated by an "official" response that just doesn't seem to pass the "smell test", and you're denied the "why" part to the response that might offer the context as to how it DOES make sense? And yes, I know that I'm completely at liberty to disregard Mr. Long and play the game as I see fit, thanks very much. I'm just wondering: since Steve won't, does anyone else here see his point of view and can make the case as to how 5 point Levels boosting background skills is unbalancing, but 5 points spent on INT to do the same thing isn't?