Ockham's Spoon

Re: Has anybody experimented with removing Speed? I would pretty much concur with the other posts. Just put all the PCs at one SPD so they all have the same number of actions, and most of their adversaries should also have the same SPD for the sake of convenience. I do this regularly in heroic level games just to speed up combat. This keeps things simple, but you still have the flexibility of using the SPD chart if you need it when the PCs are facing a "boss fight" where the villain needs the extra SPD, or to slow down the opposition in case they are fighting plodding zombies or something.

Re: Mirror Sword? Christopher, you are like the gamer's encyclopedia. Wow Well now that I see what is trying to be accomplished, I would pretty much have to agree with Christopher on how to handle it.

Re: Mirror Sword? I haven't played Zelda, so I am not clear on exactly how this is supposed to work. Does absorbing the elemental attacks just boost the damage from the sword, or does it allow you to use the elemental attack as though it were your own? If it does just boost the damage, what effect does the "elemental" part have that a regular sword blow doesn't?

Re: Teleport Dodge, did I do it right? What you are doing sounds a lot like Dive for Cover to me. If that is the case, I wouldn't buy a power at all, I would just say the sfx of this character's Dive for Cover is teleport instead of literal diving. If that isn't the flavor you want, I would agree with the other posters that No Conscious Control doesn't belong, but the build otherwise looks okay.

Re: Jokes So the helpful technique I use to make long jumbled passwords is to take the first letter of each word from a phrase, poem, or song lyric. For instance, take: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them The password becomes: ORtrtaORtftORtbtaaitdbt To make it more secure, replace numbers in the phrase with the actual digit and an asterisk or some other special character to denote line breaks. Then we get: 1Rtrta1Rtft*1Rtbtaaitdbt Easy to remember but really hard to crack. Sorry if that is too much of a thread-derail, but if it helps anyone it is worth it.

Re: Tags I can certainly see an appeal for people unfamiliar with the system, especially if they are coming from a d20 system, although this could require a lot of work for the GM upfront. It could also give the setting a more coherent feel which would be good. I think a lot of people have used a Common Limitations shorthand for different spell systems (e.g. necromantic magic) or weapon sets (e.g. all guns), which strikes me as similar, although not with the pre-calculated levels. Your suggestion would just be taking it one step further. I have considered doing a similar thing myself, but invariably I default to the greater flexibility of the full Hero system. That or I am too lazy to put in the extra work.

Re: Consuming a defeated Foe to gain his Power; It's the Demon Way. Depending on how the demon powers are built/absorbed, either a VPP or a Multipower would be the easiest way to do it. The problem really is matching earned XP with the new powers, especially if they are getting stronger and tougher instead of developing new low-level abilities that fit easily in the VPP or Multipower. From a storyline perspective, a demon might get very powerful very quickly, but XP aren't doled out like that. So for a PC you might want to either have a reserve pool of unspent character points to draw from or have the GM hold back some XP during the course of gaming so the demon can receive a large chunk when he absorbs another.

Re: Asteroid mining vs. moon mining. I don't actually know one way or the other, but I imagine there would be more political issues involved with mining the moon than asteroids. Who has mining rights to the moon?

Re: Miracles vs Magic: The Faith Reserve Of course if the END Reserve costs are too much for a Heroic level priest, you could always put limitations on it to bring the cost down, like "Requires Prayer Roll" or "Side Effect Xd6 Drain vs. END Reserve when sins are committed" or somesuch.

Re: need a name... Okay, here are a few ideas: "Fury" after the mythological Greek dispensers of vengence, or on a similar theme "Nemesis". Less flattering might be "La Cucaracha", since it is seemingly impossible to stop cockroaches and insects have the greater proportional strength and all. I don't know if the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo has been around long enough to pull names from, but when I read the description of the character my first thought was "Salander".

Re: Order of the Stick It has been a while since I played D&D, but is there actually a rule that would allow you to snatch an arrow mid-flight and then use it to stab someone? I know I could model it in the HERO system of course, but D&D?

Re: AoE HTH attacks and Blocking I know we are talking about Blocking, but wasn't Dive for Cover created to leap out of the way of AoE attacks? That is not as convenient as a Block, but still effective. That aside, a character can use Missile Deflection against an AoE if the sfx are appropriate (grenade, possibly a Molotov cocktail, and even a fireball if the GM rules that the ball is deflectable prior to the explosion). As for blocking dragon's breath or a giant's fist with a shield, I don't think you can reasonably say that such a block would prevent the attack like a Block manuever, but rather it would reduce the damage, possibly enough that no damage was taken but not necessarily. In that case Christopher has the right idea, just buy a Multipower slot with extra defenses in it to represent the shield taking the brunt of the attack. (Although that does beg the question in a Heroic level game, how much defense does my warrior's shield provide when the dragon breathes on him?)

Re: Time Hero Time travel in stories can be really cool the way everything ties together and works out, but RPG's are generally too chaotic to have tidy endings like that and you end up with a bunch of causality problems. I have only ever run one successful time loop scenario in which a group of Fantasy Hero characters found their own dead bodies at the bottom of a canyon. Later they ended up traveling back in time to the point when they would have been killed and found themselves at the canyon again. They were attacked by a band of magically created duplicates, which they managed to defeat, hence the dead bodies. But as well as that worked out, it required a little fudging on my part to make the number of bodies in the canyon match in both time settings. A better use for time travel in my mind is just to allow heroes to explore past/future civilizations, and either have them fixing temporal problems caused by other time travellers or just assuming that a small group of people can't seriously impact history enough to create causality issues. Either that or allow for lots of timelines, but even that can cause problems (so we killed the master villain here, but there are 500 other timelines where he kills us? How many of us are there?)

Re: Space Currencies While Active points can give you a guideline for the cost of stuff, mostly I wouldn't use it. Especially when you consider the law of supply and demand for something like high-tech military equipment which might be 10%-50% better than standard gear, but can cost 10 times as much (if it is even legal to own outside of the military). Instead, use prices to help define the SF setting. Do you want to encourage planetary exploration? Then make travel cheap. Are blasters considered and elite weapon? Then make slug-throwers cheap and blasters expensive. If you want a gritty setting, then basic food and supplies might cost a lot; a more space operatic setting that stuff would be inexpensive and plentiful. And those prices may vary from place to place depending on how remote it is or what the government is like on a particular planet.

Re: Miracles vs Magic: The Faith Reserve I like the idea of making the arcane magic and divine miracles separate, and the END Reserve models that nicely, although as Christopher points out it could require a significant allotment of points. You might also make divine spells run on Charges, which would only be recovered by praying. That would make clerics a bit less flexible but solve the problem of having to buy an END Reserve. Of course having to follow the restrictions of one's faith might make the cleric less flexible as well, so perhaps the lack of flexibility in spell-casting would be appropriate.

Re: What is the strangest super power you have allowed from a SFX? You could go with the rule about accelerating recovery, but this gives a bigger boost. And you are right about adding END to the mix to make it more useful. Originally I didn't write it up that way because the mentalist who used it was the leader of a team of gun bunnies that used charged ammunition mostly, but if I use it again I will have to add the END. Good call.

Re: What is the strangest super power you have allowed from a SFX? Some of my favorite odd sfx are mental power tricks. Here are a few I've used: Mental Derail: Entangle per Mental Paralysis rules, no DEF. This is the telepathic ability to flood the brain with mental noise so that the target loses focus for a moment. Anyone can break out of it, but strong-willed (high EGO) characters do it faster. On Your Feet Soldier!: Healing vs. STUN, Ranged. Mind Control ability to jolt a comrade back into action. Of course this is straight out the comics, as Prof. X has done this for the X-men. Hey, That Really Hurts!: Aid to any single incoming attack, Based on ECV. A mental illusion that a hit was more painful than it should have been. This is one of the few Aids you would use on your enemies instead of friends.

Re: Flight based on self telekenesis I would go with OIF, metal object of opportunity, and give it a -½ limitation. But not all objects of opportunity are equal, so there would probably be some penalties if the object wasn't entirely suitable, like having to make a DEX roll to stay on that trash can lid when he gets hit or not being able to use both arms if one of them is hanging onto a crowbar to keep himself aloft. If you don't want to deal with that messiness, then you might want to drop the limitation to -¼, especially if he is only rarely out of his armor in which case the limitation comes closer to "Only in Hero ID" than a focus.

Re: The Power to cloud men's minds I think Lord Liaden's idea of defining the PER for this Invisibility with EGO instead of INT is excellent; all the flavor without having to really change anything (in 6e anyway). I had a couple of characters with a similar abilities in a 5e game. For one the Invisibility sfx was psychic cloaking and was built with with "Requires Skill Roll" only in this case the skill roll was defined as an EGO vs. EGO contest. For the other, the character had Mind Control and the sfx was "I command you to forget I am here". Here the "skill roll" was defined as achieving EGO+20 result with his Mind Control. He didn't have to take an extra PHA or anything to activate the Mind Control any more than he would have for a regular skill roll, but it simulated the power of his Mind Control to become "invisible" well. You could do the same with Mental Illusions, but obviously this build only if the character has that power to begin with.

Re: Restricting/Redefining DNPC I think the shift to more competent DNPCs has its roots in the idea that historically women are portrayed as helpless and in need of rescuing. That stereotype doesn't sit well today. But I think there is also a feeling that if the DNPC is too incompetent they can come off looking like a fool, and that undermines the emotional pull the hero might have toward that individual. Who wants to rescue some idiot that keeps ending up in dangerous situations? Shouldn't we just let natural selection take its due? Granted that can have a lot to do with how well the NPC is played and the nature of the dangers, but players want to like their DNPCs and that is easier to do if the DNPC's can be respected, which often means being competent.

Re: Compound Eyes I've always wondered about that. Thanks for the info

Re: Creating your undead horde, one corpse at a time Not to muddy the waters, but if collecting body parts is a time consuming part of the spell, then you can be pretty certain that the first score of undead would be given the task of gathering more bodies to speed the process up. But that is probably not worth taking into account for stuff that essentially takes place off-panel.

Re: The Wondrous Lady Teodora, Player Nonpareil

Re: Do You Allow Damage Reduction for Other Defenses? I wouldn't have a problem with someone wanting to buy Damage Reduction for Flash or Power Defense, but if I were to do it myself, I would buy the regular defense with the limitation "Allows 50% of the effect through" because it would be cheaper. If the defense didn't affect AVAD and NND attacks, I would give the limitation a -1 value. If it did affect them it would be a -½ or -¾ depending on how common those attacks were and whether the full value or only 50% of the value could be applied toward an AVAD attack.

Re: Compound Eyes Animals with compound eyes do detect movement very well, but they can't see fine detail well. Essentially you have a limited surface area for light reception in the eye. Humans use that area for a single image with fine detail resolution. Insects replicate the same image with each eye facet many times, but that means the resolution of each image isn't as good. When you go to swat a fly though, the movement coming toward it gets multiplied by all the facets that catch it, so the movement is easy to see. The fly might not be able to tell whether you are using your hand or a newspaper to swat it, but it hardly cares as long as it gets away. A digital analog would be that a human has a camera that takes a single picture with 10 megapixel resolution. The fly's camera takes 100 identical pictures with 0.1 megapixel resolution each. Yes I pulled those number out of thin air, but you get the idea.