Jaxom

Re: Help with Power: Regen as Armor The answer to #1 is sometimes. That's where I am really digging for the help here. I'm trying to figure out which tools in the HERO tool-kit allow me to weld together these two powers... I want the Regen Recovery at the end of each segment if and only if I didn't use armor that segment. I want it to be automatic in every segment and not something that requires it to be my phase or requires me to think about activating it or changing from one power to another. The example I gave which leads to #2 I meant that to be before defenses. The idea being to demonstrate that the amount of available Regen is also the limit of the amount of armor and that if that armor is used then the Regen is not. The Regen builds that Hyperman posted are fascinating in their use of Trigger... I can think of some very interesting uses for that Trigger since it would be on every attack. Again, it's not what I was looking for because the effect I am thinking of should be limited to a fixed amount per round. I can certainly think of other effects where the build Hperman uses could become very handy.

Re: Help with Power: Regen as Armor This is exactly what I am trying to figure out to a T. All of the builds here are perfectly valid but don't hit the heart of this issue I am after which is to properly model a very specific effect... If I can regen 5 points of body (and in theory 15 points of stun at the same time). Then how do I build the actual powers in such a way that I can, without conscious action (i.e. on every segment including those where I have no action) protect from (armor) or repair (regen) exactly 5 total points of Body and 15 total points of Stun? And that should include the case where I get shot once for 3 Body and 18 Stun resulting in a net loss of 3 Stun and regeneration of 2 Body. I know I can build similar effects, but is there a legal power build that results in the above numerical effect which is the correct modeling of the special effect I desire?

Re: Help with Power: Regen as Armor I'm less concerned about the defenses and more concerned about the right flavor and feel. I could easily build a viable character taking powers and building special effects on after the fact... What I am after is something that fits the special effects. The character doesn't really have any defenses. He just regenerates so fast that it becomes hard to stun him on his feet for any meaningful lenth of time (even a second). For the concept I have in mind I would normally just buy my regen and be done with it, but since he is supposed to be brickish in nature, the rules will require that he has defenses or he'll spend his life being stunned on his feet. So approaching the build the question is more what do I add to regeneration to provide the appearance of armor/defenses in proportion to and in place of the regen if it gets used? Don't get me wrong, the suggestions here are certainly valid builds... They just don't seem, to me, to link well to the regeneration and the idea that if I get hit and spend my regeneration not being stunned by the punch this segment then I don't get to take regen as well.

Re: Is "Hollywood-style" decompression accurate? Ummm, don't think about Total Recall or you'll wind up with an aneurism. Remember that in just about any model of a stable atmosphere for Mars the top of Olympus Mons is still above it. That means that you just fired a bunch of atmosphere out the top of a volcano that would, by definition, have put that atmosphere at escape velocity... Oops. They *did* have a bunch of high winds while the generator was working as I recall, but they died down fairly quickly which would imply they wanted to produce a complete planetary atmosphere in the few seconds that they showed... Although I have not done the math, that should result in some really nasty wind-speeds well above and beyond what they showed but then again maybe you just need a much longer scene (I forget off the top of my head gasses expansing into a vacuum).

I have a concept, I do not have a build. I am looking for suggestions about how to legeally combine these two powers to get the concept right. Concept is a character who can regen so fast that it acts as armor during the segment he is hit. If he uses it as armor, he does not get the regen for that segment. Think Wolverine without the adamantite... He's not extra tough, no special resistances unless he puts on a flak-vest. But he heals so fast that if he gets punched once per segment he doesn't even get stunned. Like I said, I have not built it, but the powers I am thinking of would be a combination of Healing (Regeneration) bought to the segment level (armor every segment, not only on my phases, if that is even possible) and armors with custom limitations. The limitations would be similar to the standard "Armor only up to the amount rolled for Absorption" limit which is, as I recall, a -1 but might vary by GM decision since it would be only once per segment unlike Absorption which I believe can be used on every attack in the same segment. The regen would have a similar but inverted limit, "only up to the amount not used as armor". In the end, I may find I am too limited by Active Point caps but since this is superheroic I figured I'd ask for ideas and see what people could suggest so I could push some numbers around and see what I could make of it.

Re: Analysis of the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek Ok, granted I am late to the topic for a week off, but the real take-away here is that people who do statistical analysis today are so busy worrying about the message that they want to deliver that they cannot even answer the questions that they pose for themselves. If the hypothesis is that wearing a red shirt and beaming down to the planet with Kirk is a death sentence, then the relevant data is how many red shirts survived beaming down to the planet with Kirk. There are, of course, interesting corollaries like the what happens to the landing party if there are no red shirts and what happens to red shirts if there is no landing party. But the simplest answer to the question, what happens to red shirts who beam down, remains unanswered. We know how many die and in what circumstances but have no clue how many beam down and survive, rendering the answer to the fundamental hypothesis unreachable.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From last weekend's session of a long-running pulp hero campaign... The party is an international group who tend to get involved investingating strange and possibly supernatural events. Most recently they have discovered that the Thule society (the Nazi's interested in the supernatural) have been trying to steal something from a cave in Finland. George (OOC): I don't think you can be out of range of a god. Later... Sven (OOC): I made it by 12 and still failed? George (OOC): See, that's what you get for messing with a god.

Re: Various Star Damage See, I ducked this one because that's not the only component... The "temperature" of a stellar atmosphere is quite definition dependent. Where in the star is your character hanging out? Is he on the surface of the photosphere which is what Blade describes? Further in, further out? You have stellar gravity to worry about. F=(GmM/r^2) so a ratio of Earth gravity to solar "surface gravity" would be Msun/Mearth * Rearth^2/Rsun^2. This is 2e30/6e24 * (6e3/1.4e6)^2 or 3.33e5 * 1/232^2 which is about 6 Gs. At photosphere distances sheer is not an issue, but if you go deep enough it would be. Magnetic fields are huge, roughly 3000 times those at the earth's surface and easiliy 1000 times stronger than the kinds of fields that are experienced near high voltage transmission lines and home electronics. Atmospheric pressures are also larger and would bear calculation and compensation for. In other words, hand wave this. You will be happier for not having someone invincible in your campaign.

Re: Ghost in the Shell Cyberbrain. As with all builds, this is going to come down to "what game effects do you need" (telepathy, illusions, etc.) and then apply the right adds and lims. Keep in mind that if this can be done to you as well you get the points for a suceptibility if you want them.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT These assumptions are a terrible place to start. What you are trying to determine is the energy in a Haymaker so find a better model for it. Try a shotput. I know I am an average male so I'll go out and throw something for you. Or go with vertical leap or something. There are a so many better ways of measuring the ability of the human body to do explosive work. Heck, a quick google search on "average human vertical jump" produces a whole collection of scientific papers on this subject. The point is that lifting requires an extrapolation like "we'll assume that some fraction of lifting can go into a punch" while a vertical jump is essentially the same set of mechanics as a kick (which is already modeled in HERO). The place you get uncertainty in this is in what you convert as real-world energy into a punch. Clean that up as much as you can and you'll get the most reliable starting point. I'd have to guess that differences in this approximation are why different versions of this spreadsheet vary the way they do.

Re: Modelling Explosives : TNT I hesitate to point this out, but assumption 2 is fundamental to this conversion and has absolutely no bearing. The reason a human can lift 100 kilos 2 meters is that he's 2 meters tall. It's often done in a clean-and-jerk which is not a single movement and isn't going to yield meaningful measurements. Maybe this should be done using shotput or something where you could argue a single motion and then get total energy output without any limitation on size of the human. (To be explicit, compare a typical human to a bodybuilder with dwarfism. I get to claim 100kg and 2m but he gets to claim 150kg and 1 meter so he is less powerful?)

Re: Astrophysics question Simple thought experiment invalidates this. Light travels at different speeds in different media without scattering or coherent light beams would not be possible in anything but a pure vacuum. A laser could not exist nor could a rainbow which is an example of coherent light separating specifically because of differences in speed in the medium. Your statement about photons leaving the sun is essentially correct but this is a different realm of physics (scattering). It's also why the sun radiates what is essentially a black-body spectrum around 5000K.

Re: The Perfect Power Build This conversation seems to have focussed on the second power example (the missile deflect) but I want to try and drag it back to NekkidC's example because this addresses something that I have been thinking about for a long time for a martial artist. In a prior life, I was part of a group which had a very negative experience with a speedster and so I often think about interesting powers and effects which might be applied to speedsters. This throw is an example that I have tried to come up with many times and with little success. Here's how I view the game effect of this little gem... Correct me if I am wrong... You could take this power for 27 real points and otherwise be normal characteristic maxima and you'd be *invulnerable* to move-by and move-through. You'd be speed 2 and a speedster with speed 12 could move-by, be thrown (segment 1), get up (segment 2), move-by again, be thrown (segment 3), get up (segment 4), move-by a third time and be thrown (segment 5) and get up (segment 6) without spending a single action? I assume that you would at least have to roll a hit roll to throw the incoming attacker? You're not technically using an abort so you are not facing the rule that you cannot abort to an offensive action but the limitation that someone be both close and threatening you is not much of a limitation... It's in fact granting you a benefit since if you'd bought this as some kind of damage shield you'd be tossing your friends around too. Much as I love the elegant simplicity of the build, the more I think about it, the less inclined I would be to allow it in my campaign. As a GM I would find myself asking how a brick, speedster or other "melee-focussed" character would be able to do anything to this character. And I'd also wonder if you, as the player, would be pissed at me if the opposing bricks rapidly figured out that they would much rather stand back and beat you with a car.

Re: Staring into the sun At the root, I am going with the Darkness answer... The rest is special effects and lims. As I recall from memory, you'd want to haggle a special lim with your GM, something to the effect of "effectiveness reduced by Flash Defense X points per point of Flash D" (looking for a function like Power Defense when you write it up). You could also take a linked Flash but I can never recall how you'd write the advantage on it... I'm thinking Continuous since the idea is to do the flash damage every time and as long as someone is looking at you. Or maybe as a Damage Shield? Finding the right mechanic for what I am envisioning here is beyond me at the moment...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Oh man, I have *so* been there. (You must spread some blah, blah, blah.)

Re: Astrophysics question Vinnie the Pooh.... I may have to build a super-powered mafioso with ursine powers just to use that name. And give him a henchman who is an astrophysicist to supply them with really evil homework sets (or weapons if the find a need).

Re: Deep holes on Mars

Re: Deep holes on Mars Faulty CCD. This hole appears on *every* image and is where the instrument manufacturer put his thumb to press the CCD into the mount while building the instrument. Seriously though, NASA is a political organization and as such has some inherent flaws. Back when I was in grad school there was a mission to repair an ailing satellite. One of our profs saw who the mission planner was, handed a sealed envelope to the grad students and said "read this after the mission". He had the three failed attempts at automated or robotic repair and the eventual human spacewalk down to within 15 minutes each, including the successful spacewalk and announcement just in time for primetime news on the east coast. Since that time I have been a bit more skepitcal of any announcements on NASA headers. Generally, you can attribute the words to the required politics for funding the programs the author is interested in. This would also be why I am no longer an academic....

Re: Need Book Recommendations I'm not sure how the release was handled... It may have been a serial. Tiger! Tiger! is definitely the same thing. And yes, Steakly's works are mature subject matter as I mentioned before. Lots of violence and some sexual content. Definitely something to read and judge for yourself before providing it to a young teen. Neil Gaimon is in the same boat. A lot of his stuff is accessible, like Stardust... Some is questionable depending on what your tolerances and the age of the child are... Like Neverwhere, American Gods and a few others...

Re: Need Book Recommendations Tastes depend on the student, but you might be able to get him involved in some fantasy stuff as well. Typically things that I think of as brain-candy (i.e. an easy read that is not a deep plot) include Ramond Feist's Riftwar Saga (starts with Magician: Apprentice) Eve Forward's _Villains_By_Necessity_ Terry Prachett, just about anything... The irreverence should capture any kid. Alfred Bester has a couple of classic sci-fi works, _The_Stars_My_Destination_ and _The_Demolished_Man_ Neil Gaimon has some appropriate for that level like _Stardust_ and then _American_Gods_, _Anansi_Boys_ and _Neverwhere_ although those may be a bit mature More mature in nature (subject matter mainly) John Steakly _Vampire$_ and _Armor_ And of course all the earlier suggestions merit consideration of course... I just didn't feel the need to repeat them.

Re: Square Nebula The central star is a Be star... (I know Cancer is familiar with them, but that's a B star with hydrogen emission lines for those not familiar...) The image is land-based IR composites. That would suggest a lower temperature than I would expect in most B systems. Without optical images, it is hard to tell whether or not this thing is still covered in its accretion disk (which might explain the temperatures in the IR)... My specialty was (10 years gone now) planetary nebulae and they're the ones that are good for all the symmetrical tricks... B stars are not candidates for planetaries though because they are too massive... Unless something wonky happens, this thing is a supernova in the end (too much mass to support with electron or even neutron pressure as a cooling dwarf). That combined with the short life expectancies of B stars would lead me at least to think that this is the remnant of an accretion disk that is being burned off. If that's the case, you'd have to appeal to edge-on and opening angle, as Cancer suggests. I'm seeing some people claim that this is bipolar ejection, but without spectroscopy results you couldn't claim that with any certainty. It's just as likely that this is gas in place being illuminated by the star... I say that based on my own personal bias of course (some of the most interesting planetaries were the ones with clumps of dense material moving at the the wrong velocity for the rest of the nebula)... And of course, if this thing really is edge-on as is suggested, spectroscopy can't give you any information about velocity of possible ejecta anyway. Regardless, a cool image and one which implies all sorts of interesting dynamics which is why I got sucked into nebulae when I was a grad student. (Arguably, spectroscopy can give you a picture of an equally interesting set of Dynamics which Cancer could probably expound upon at length but I never found atmospheric dynamics as interesting as the massive gas flow dynamics of nebulae.)

Re: Character Concept Question I like the concepts around zeros in physics that have been mentioned... I'd avoid ranged stuff but give him nasty touch attacks or "auras" (Area of effect, zero range, probably with hole in the middle or personal immunity)... Cold comes to mind (zero thermal energy). Disintigration is an option (zero binding energy or potential energy). Zeroing specific stats or abilities (drains). Mind wiping (zero mind). Darkness (zero light). Silence (zero sound waves). Mind Control (zero will). Could also do vacuum-related powers... Thunderclap, suffocation, explosive decompression... Might be able to stop any chemical or nuclear reaction although I am less certain how to build that in HERO. Physically he's straight 10s. He's nobody (at least nobody noticable). Might be invisible and undetectable but might also be built using illusions as an indistiguishable norm (like the computer agents in The Matrix who could be any person in the matrix).

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... If you name it The Lusty Wretch is the party guaranteed to find the villain inside?

Re: Theory Discussion: Defense Alternative That is exactly what I am suggesting. The precedent is well established with things like "armor, only up to the amount rolled for Absorption". Instead of having a power, Absorption, you simply replace that with "X-number of dice". It's still exactly the same limitation but represents a different special effect which is all about how Hero is designed. The value of the limitation never changed based on the amount of absorption you took so there is no reason barring GM fiat that you could not apply it here. Heck, you could even build partially variable defenses by taking the first 10 points of armor without the limitation and the next 6 with the limitation. I think that covers every possibility that has come up in this thread.

Re: You know you've got problems when... You know you've got problems when the team's healer has a berserk tied to the use of healing powers. You know you've really got problems when the opposing brick figures out that the healer is in melee and smacks him.... "That's 24 Body and 19 inches of knockback into the bulkhead 5 inches away. Are you alive before you hit the wall?"