DasBroot

A phase is a segment in which you take an action - even if you have a speed of 1 it's still only one second, as far as interacting with the combat mechanics is concerned - a person who did have a speed 12 who has phases on segments before, during, and after you is in no way waiting for you to finish your attack (so long as it's not a haymaker/delayed phase) or combat movement. Dramatically if you have a running of 12 and a speed of 1 it takes you 12 seconds to move 12 meters - but mechanically to the Speedster waiting attack you he pulls out bread on phase 1, peanut butter on phase 2, jam on phase 3, a knife on phase 4, spreads PB on one piece on phase 5, spreads jam on a piece on phase 6, Holds an action and KICKS YOU IN THE FACE on phase 7 when you suddenly move 12 meters in, puts the sandwich together on phase 8, and spends 8-12 scarfing it down. If he'd chosen to using passing strike on phase 4 instead of make a sandwich the speed 1 guy would still be 12 meters away. Same with phase 5 or 6.

You definitely don't need to be aware of the effect in order to affect it with Dispel, true, but throwing a Dispel as part of a Combine Attack at every foe you meet just in case is a waste of endurance/charges and action economy.

Technically you're linking the attack to the dispel since the dispel fires first. In either case another alternative to linking is using the COmbined Attack action. This lets you set up the proper Dispel without having to link the attack to a specific dispel (or having to link ANY attack at all thus allowing you to use any of your attacks instead). How you would know what Dispel to use is another question. Some sort of Detect Damage Shield or Detect Trigger (or both) power with discriminatory as a sense would be the easiest (and kind of metagame-y) solution, i suppose.

Not only is it reasonable it's pretty much how heroes who fly deal with being grabbed in genre (pinned so they fly them into walls, ceilings, buildings, or even straight up into the upper atmosphere or outer space). Unless they have wings or a jetpack or something (restrainable / focus) or the enemy is too heavy to lift this is just how it is. The closest the rules come to covering this, though, is using flight to add to strength to break free with your action.

Mind control with a fixed effect to not walk away linked to attacks or perhaps a very expensive and not practical No Range Continuous Area of Effect 'Zone of Control'?

Two equally skilled armed combatants with the same armor WILL spend a lot of time circling each other (holding actions) waiting for the other guy to commit and make a mistake. In real life one missed move in a sword fight means grievous bodily harm and perhaps death. It's realistic (but hey realism's boring - start swinging, hero) A phase is *one second*. I don't have a problem with the guy who acts first skipping around his opponent faster than his opponent can react - that's what winning initiative is all about. I don't have a problem with the guy who acts second skipping away after before the guy who acts first can recover from his attack, either. If the first guy wants to stop him then like massey mentioned there are ways in the system to do it. Hold a grab, or a trip. Use the cover action. In the right genre put him in a Barrier bubble or entangle him. Mind control him into dropping his weapon. Reduce his movement speed with change environment. Teleport him 10 meters straight up. Turn him into a frog. Turn his sword into a frog....

If I take 15 points of power defense I can't be threatened for walking away any longer?

Fair enough. Hmm. If you go with the 'bite does no lasting damage' approach to things you can skip the bite attack power entirely and just put 'requires skin contact' on the Mind Control. Mental transforms are neat as well but should definitely be reserved to be dependant on how malevolent the vampire is intended to be - mental transforms are downright evil to use, from both a mechanic and in game point of view - even if used for 'good' like trying to remove the megalomania from a villain. (Yes, the world is a better place for it and yes the villain is probably better off for it ... but it was a core part of their personality and they didn't work through their issues and adapt their personality and sense of self to compensate (buy it off) Instead they're instantly no longer the same person. In a way you killed them and replaced them with a clone with their memories.)

I would consider it more of a buffet, these days - there's a lot of superheroic content on tv, streaming services, and in theathers these days. The plate I bring to it is my free time. It's not as large a plate as I'd like. I'd like to sample everything in the buffet but my plate only holds so much per trip up - so my first trip up I fill it with everything I know I will probably love. Tastes I'll probably *like* have to wait for future trips up to the buffet, and tastes I've never experienced before might get sampled eventually (as long as by the time I get to go up to the buffet with the plate they haven't restocked anything I would consider first or second trip worthy to grab instead ... and these days they often do).

Unless doing so has a debilitating effect on the 'victim' (or area) then you probably don't NEED a power to feed - it can be covered by Addiction/Dependence with the level dependant on how common emotions that will suffice are in the setting . Addiction/Dependence doesn't specify how you ingest the subject of your addiction - that's up to you. Maybe you have to stand in a crowd with arms outspread, maybe a visible tendril of energy leaps from the 'victim' to the vampire. Whatever. If it has a negative effect on the target, though, then it has to be some sort of attack. I would go with a cumulative Mind Control (fixed effect - Apathetic). If there's also a traditional vampire bite involved then there would be a physical component as well. What I like for a vampire 'feeding' bite not meant to injure or kill (by bite alone) is a 1d6 HA, no str, with attack vs alternate defense (resistant PD). This means that a vampire can bite through the average person's PD unimpeded for minimal stun but is stopped by people wearing armor or who ARE armor (superheroes, etc). From there they can do whatever it is they do (drain BOD, killing attack, whatever) LInk the mind control to it instead of those traditional "I vant to suck your bluud" options and you have a vampire that can bite people, who lack rPD, but not superheroes or anyone wearing armor and 'drain' their good mood.

About the same, I would think - where Jakoby bought up str, con, stun, and tracking or discriminatory (or maybe just a few levels of perception) on his sense of smell Ward took CSL in firearms, contacts, and had a point sink in an unused framework of some flavour that he wasn't allowed to access for most of the session.

While it is heroic to capture the enemies those powers tend to fall into the 'non-proliferation' side of the fence as well, in general. A result of the same GM, actually - megascale x 10 armor piercing teleports in multipowers for everyone! No Body blasts / AoE, however, are a popular in slot 4 (though extravagant - *everyone* pulls their Body regardless with pull punch, which I do not penalize with an OCV penalty)

A few reasons. 1) Partly it's to keep the tactic rare and challenging when actually fielded. If being deprived of their targeting sense came up more often then more players would build around the 'certainty' instead of the 'possibility'. 10 points for a second targeting sense or 10 points of flash defense for your targeting sense (less point effective than buying a second one) in 400 point game isn't heavy, certainly, but it puts a GM in a position where they can either a) throw 'challenges' knowing that the players are immune to it to justify the points they expended or b ) not bother using said powers ... thus boiling down to a 'point tax' on characters because they took a power in anticipation of a situation which doesn't occur. For example one of our players, when he gets a chance to GM, is incredibly fond of hammering power defense with exotics attacks - so in his games everyone has 20 to 30 points of power defense (and all life support because he'll use AVAD to hammer that instead if enough people do this). He sulks about this and to get his revenge doesn't attack power defense - so those points are just sitting on sheets waiting for a day that doesn't come. Unless you build a character without it - because the second you do you can expect to be hit by a cumulative autofire transform and turned into a tree or something. Sometimes I'll make the sacrificial goat without any so that the other players can get away with less (15 ... just in case) and spend most fights totally incapacitated in new and exciting ways (like drained to speed 0 for an hour, etc). By keeping situations that would be trivially resolved by having 'x power' truly rare it lessens the chance that the players will be able to respond to the threat with impunity and that they'll have to think about what to do when it happens (and *then* load up on OAF continuing charge items to make sure it never happens again). 2 ) Related to part one - yes, my group (like many?) certainly follows a checklist when buying offensive capabilities. Every multi-power attack pool must have a single target maximum dice attack, an aoe without either selective or non-selective (so the targets personal DCV is ignored), and (usually) a Killing Attack to deal with automatons or scenery. Everything else is just gravy and thrown in there to flavor: A target hiding in a 'globe of darkness' is indeed just going to get 'fireballed'. In a way it's a repeat of the non-challenging challenge above but with a twist - the AoE them All and let the GM Sort It Out only works if you don't care about what else might be in the field WITH the foe. Captain Novabeam isn't going to (or at least shouldn't) fire his Cone Of Justice into Vantablack's darkness area - there could be hostages or explosives in there with them. That's why the sense option is superior but more niche - you're going to get mileage out of that AoE whenever you can hit more than one target with it at once which will *probably* happen more often than having to use Targeting Smell because you were Flashed or put in Darkness to sight.

It was one season but it wasn't a bad season, really. Unlike many of Fox's other victims at least the nasty cliffhanger had a chance to be addressed and resolved in the made for tv movies afterwards (I think there were four or five?)

Depriving people of their targeting sense is really cheap (both in cost and as a tactic) and shouldn't be done often in the name of fairness - but occasionally *should* be done (especially if other players have invested points into secondary targeting senses or flash defenses). I wouldn't take either a Darkness or Flash that hits targeting senses on any character I'd play (though I do take them occasionally for non-targeting senses to hamper an enemy without crippling them). As for using it to 'block' a laser - well, only by limiting the targeting sense. It stops senses and that's it: a laser fired into a field of Darkness to Sight would rip through one side and out the other unimpeded (unless something weird was taken on the laser blast). That's actually why I made it surface - so the villains could keep targeting her (by targeting the surface darkness - technically a handwave but a little common sense - if you shoot at the woman shaped shadow with an arrow you hit the woman inside, even if you didn't 'target' her because your targeting sense is blocked by a surface darkness...) without guessing where in the darkness field she was (cheap shots forcing her team-mates to both defend for her and deal with Vantablack in a hurry).

Exactly - I find it the most 'authentic' and 'dramatic' feeling defense. if I were going to stat up characters from any of my short stories they'd have damage negation rather than other defenses: 10d6 falling damage is a lot more deadly when you have a bullet proof jacket (6 DN to counter 2d6 RKA on most small arms) instead of 25 pd, for example, so a street level hero who can withstand small arms fire had better be careful when fighting on a roof top. Of course the same feel can be replicated by taking 'Real Armor' on said street level hero's PD - and perhaps should be, as DN stops the surprise shotgun blast from knocking a hero checking on an 'unconscious' thug over.

That's exactly where my mind went as well... so much so that my players faces off against Vantablack as a member of a supervillain mercenary group that attacked them in my last session. It looked (and acted) a lot like the antagonist that killed Tasha Yar in TNG "Skin of Evil". (The blaster was not at all happy with Darkness - Area Effect Surface, for the record. )

I've watched the trailer three times now and this is honestly the first Marvel movie I find myself not remotely caring about. I didn't care much about Age of Ultron, either, but I liked what I saw in the 'no strings on me' trailer. This one, though - pure neutral on the anticipation. I can't put my finger on why.

The Last Jedi and Bright TLJ was decent. Acting and dialogue were strong (for a Star Wars movie) and the shots were amazing. I really liked how badly the trailer 'lied' - it didn't tell the story at all. I think that's part of the backlash, though - people made their own movie based upon what they'd seen and the real thing didn't match it. Bright was decent as well - too much swearing, but it comes with the genre. I didn't really have questions going in but have a ton coming out. I'm still undecided if that's a sign of good setup or poor payoff. Time will tell.

I don't thnk they did a poor job of setting up the Inferni as being way more powerful than your average person - elf or not: Every time they were mentioned by anyone it was hyping them up. They did what they did because they were a secret society of super elven ninja who wanted to bring about the resurrection of the Dark Lord. Good enough for me. I didn't confuse them for a second with any of the average joe elves wandering around in that scene from Elftown. I would have liked to know more about the Brights in general - they seem to be rare but not unknown: there are more elves than the other races, but humans have Brights too. Do they all have magic wands? if so, what makes this one special? If not what can they do without one? When Ward was laid up in the hospital when the Feds came in they had 20 guys with body armor and rifles even though he didn't have the wand. Why?

It depends on why you dislike the very concept of Shadowrun. If you dislike it because it puts 'fantasy' races and rare magic in a contemporary setting then skip Bright - because like Spence said that's basically about the only similarity. If you dislike it because of the Matrix, dragons running megacorps, astral jaunts, giving the Native Americans back all the territory taken from them because they could make a volcano wake up, cybernetic mercenaries, and criminal protagonists fighting against bigger criminal antagonists ... well, you're not going to find that here. I'm a huge Shadowrun fan and I realized right away that if I was looking for that here I'd be disappointed. As it stands I think I'm neutral to positive about the film overall. It wasn't what I was expecting -but I'd probably watch more set in the setting.

I think Jack at one point did link his Champion's build for Statesman since he had his origin (as did Positron) in a Champions campaign. It's funny how things go - Paragon City and City of Heroes itself existed largely because they couldn't get the Champions license when they first started creating the MMO. When the second studio he worked for did finally manage to get the license to Champions for Champions Online, under his project lead, he must have been over the moon. As for the build itself - I like it, but Statesman suffers from a LOT of Superman Sydrome, where he's as powerful as he needs to be: He was punching holes through Independence Day sized Rikti motherships and his Praetorian (evil) counterpart survived 'assassination attempt via nuclear missile'. As the game and lore progressed he was definitely 'first among equals' - an Incarnate with the power of Zeus - the measuring stick (along with the other Incarnate - Lord Recluse) against which peoples 'power levels' were measured.

Nice and simple but you still end up with two people instead of one with that approach. Unless one of them takes Extradimensional movement and shifts to a pocket dimension when the Hero ID is activated in whatever fashion is chosen?

It's always fun to find a way to PAY for a disadvantage instead instead of receive points for one. You were on the right track with bonuses to Stealth in low light environments, I think. I see a Red (Car) Door and I want to Paint it (Vanta)Black: +2 with Stealth, Persistent (+1/4) (5 Active Points); Always On (-1/2), Conditional Power Power Only Works In Low Light Situations (-1/4) (3 RC)

You know, I don't really have a problem with places using security guards (robot or otherwise) to clear homeless people from their property: It's a place of business, not a shelter. (I have a problem with there being so many homeless in the first place and the infrastructure/accessibility/health problems that make hanging around public spaces and private businesses instead of seeking help the status quo.)