Ockham's Spoon

Re: A House Rule for Healing - Might this Blow Up in my face? Both D&D and Hero limit healing to keep PCs from becoming nearly indestructible. D&D limits healing by keeping the number of times it can be done limited (only so many Cure Wounds spells or healing potions). Hero limits healing by putting a maximum on the amount of damage healed per day by a given Healing power. If you want to mimic the D&D style, get rid of the Hero limit on Healing maximum, but impose the D&D limit by forcing all Healing powers to be bought with charges. You just house rule in favor of one limitation over the other. As long as the number of charges doesn't get out of hand you shouldn't have any balance issues.

Re: More cosmic weirdness: diamond planet A diamond planet? More proof that truth can be stranger than fiction.

Re: Getting There: Non-Combat Movement As convenient as Multipowers are, I like this clean, one-line approach to superpowered Flight. Nice idea.

Re: The Five Families--an organized crime group, with a twist I will throw out Peter Lorre's role of Abbott in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much". You might also also tap Lorre's character Joel Cairo from the "Maltese Falcon". Lorre makes for some creepy and often idiosyncratic villains which could easily be played up.

Re: The Nightmare of Megascale Teleport If you want to overcome the slowness of Megascaled teleportation, just buy it flat out without the advantage. Way too costly to get to the asteroid belt, but you don't actually need a heck of a lot of teleport to effectively remove most people from a fight (100m straight up should do the trick in most cases; that is 4 segments they are out of the combat at the end of which they take 20d6 falling damage if they can't fly). You still have the limitations of the Grab to contend with, but whatever solution you come up with should take into account that the Megascale is only part of the problem, so its limitations can only be part of the solution.

Re: The Nightmare of Megascale Teleport You mentioned that due to immunities the villains don't die out on the asteroid, they just can't get back. How many villains do you have that can survive in outer space? This seems self-limiting to me if you simply don't give villains the Life Support they need to stay out there. Then this "tactical manuever" becomes murder. The hero might not have legal issues with stranding them there but capital punishment without a trial isn't going to go over well. Are the villains all going to the same asteroid or are they randomly scattered through the asteroid belt? If it is the same asteroid, one might expect the villains that are already there will lay an ambush. If it is a random asteroid, how does the hero find it? Does he have the appropriate super-sense or is he teleporting blind? And if he is teleporting blind, sooner or later he is going to end up inside the asteroid and he might not come back from that. I am not suggesting that you kill the PC, but point out the inherent danger of the operation so that they would only use this tactic as a last resort.

Re: Current Techology: Bullet-Proof Skin Why leave anything unarmored? As I understand it this stuff is very flexible, it just won't tear enough to let a bullet through (it would bruise like hell though). It is relatively stretchy so you wouldn't have your movement or (ahem) anything else restricted. The downside might be if you had to have surgery. The upside is that if your girlfriend is Loreena Bobbit, you might not need a surgeon in the first place.

Okay, bullet-proof with a few caveats, but this was too cool not to share: http://www.pddnet.com/news-utah-researcher-help-develop-bulletproof-skin-082211/

Re: The Force Good point. A Focus then, but make it OIF instead of OAF to represent the fact it is hard to take away and keep away.

Re: Life Support and NNDs Life Support is one of those powers for which utility depends heavily on the setting and the opponents. If your campaign is one that pits the heroes against the evil Time Raiders who have lots of aging/entropy powers that are nullified by immortality, then Longevity is going to be more useful than Immunity to Botanical Poisons or the ability to breathe water. Personally I see LS: Longevity as more of a defining trait, like background skills. Not necessarily useful, but important for concept. A good GM will try to bring them into play, but you paid 5 or fewer points for it so don't sweat it if it doesn't happen. That said, I could easily see the argument that Longevity should max out at 3 points for immortality, but that could be house ruled if it bothers you.

Re: The Force Nice work on the Lightsaber, but I think it could be streamlined a bit; if STR doesn't add damage and you can always pull it back to your hand, it is just an RKA with the special effect of being a energy sword. Remove the OAF limitation and make it Restrainable (-½) to represent the fact a Jedi can be disarmed. There is no need for Constant. That is for continuing effects like acid or poison or something. Most anything else can be represented by a series of discrete hits. Finally, in 6e Armor Piercing is only a +¼ advantage instead of +½.

Re: Religion in Science-Fiction? What Kraven Kor said. There will always be believers and always be skeptics. The believers will adapt their views to fit with the universe as they understand it, so religion in some form will never die. Since many religious explanations of science conclude with "Because God wanted it that way" there is no evidence to argue one way or the other, so it boils down to whatever the individual believes. Where science and religion become antagonistic is that transition period between a scientific discovery and the believers adapting their dogma to it. For Galileo that was a heliocentric solar system. Today in America it is evolution. In a SF setting, there will doubtless be some religious folk protesting some form of science (or alien species), but there will be plenty who are comfortable accepting both religion and science without them being mutually exclusive.

Re: The Force To counter Force powers by using the Force, just use the Block mechanic with the caveat that the Force can only be blocked by the Force. This is akin to saying you need a weapon or a shield to block a sword - you generally can't do it with your hand. To use it at range, buy Deflection. To represent using the Force to make Jedi better warriors, buy them Aid to DEX, OCV, DCV, DCV, and SPD (+2; DCV is in there twice because as a defensive power it costs twice as much to affect it). You could also buy them Overall Levels, Cost END. Most of your Force powers look good, but I will throw out a couple suggestions. First, why have a Detect Force and Detect Dark Side? I would probably roll that into one Detect and get rid of the "Vague" limitation, but that might not be quite the flavor you want. For the empathy power, why not use Detect: Emotions instead of Telepathy? Since you aren't sending, this is just as effective but cheaper. Higher level Jedi with full-blown Telepathy might ditch the Detect, but this would be the easy way for most of them.

Re: The Force If you want to go with the Force as a omnipresent entity that all Jedi have a Mind Link with but don't want casual eavesdropping, how about making "the Force" an alien class of mind, and the Mind Link only works with that particular alien class of mind. Now you can't get crosstalk from other Jedi because they are the wrong class of mind. If you want to be able to mentally contact other Jedi, use Mind Scan. The Mind Link could enable you to narrow the search field from "entire universe" down to "those connected to the Force". If you want to avoid having to buy Telepathy, you might then buy the adder for an additional class of minds (Jedi) with the Mind Link, with the limitation "only useable with Mind Scan".

Re: Blasters: why? Thanks everyone for the feedback. I should clarify that I am thinking specifically of personal weapons. Starships are going to use energy weapons or guided missiles because when you are moving at hundreds of meters per second and the distance to your target is measured in kilometers, bullets are just too slow. I like the versatility arguments, both ethical and practical, although I suppose that depends on the nature of the blaster. A laser pistol is probably not going to be set to stun, but an electron beam might, although either could be used for welding or some such.

So the blaster pistol is a staple of SF weaponry, because basically it is cool. But even if you have the rubber science to provide high energy density batteries of some sort to power them, blaster pistols aren't very practical compared to slug throwers. Slug throwers are cheap, less complex, and brutally effective. They might even be more effective than a blaster; I'd wager that a large caliber bullet wound could do a lot more damage due to hydrostatic shock and internal bleeding than just burning a dime-sized hole through someone. But blasters are so cool. So I am looking for a list of reasons why a SF society would use them in favor of bullets. I have come up with a few ideas, none of which by itself I find exceptionally compelling, but maybe in aggragate they could work. Can anyone expand on this list? 1. Blasters have no recoil and so are more accurate. 2. Blasters run on energy, but in the far-flung reaches of the galaxy people will still have energy generators while they might not have a munitions factory. In a similar vein, all energy weapons run on energy, while different types of guns require different bullets, so blasters don't have to worry about compatibility so much. 3. Bullets are heavy, and weight is a major consideration for space travel. 4. Spaceships and spacestations have extra energy shielding to protect from radiation, so you can "safely" fire a blaster while on-board, whereas a bullet might result in a hull breach. Any other ideas?

Re: Star Frontiers Conversion Depends on how closely you want to follow the original game. I never really understood why you needed a different weapon skill a large assortment of guns when they were all basically just guns. Realistically I might give energy weapons a +1 OCV to reflect that they don't have recoil. Or if you figure most of the ranged weapons don't have much recoil (gyrojets don't, and how much recoil do you have on a needler weapon?), maybe put a -1 OCV penalty on the slug throwers. So maybe WF:small arms would be fine, but you might break it out if you want it to be more granular As for the gyrojet build, I went back and looked at the old rulebooks, and you could use them at point blank range, but they had range modifiers as though they were at short range (range catagories being PB, short, medium, and long, I think). So really all you need is a OCV penalty, only at point blank range, slap it on an RKA and you are good to go.

Re: Star Frontiers Conversion Nice work on the conversions. The extra BODY build for the defense suits reflects they way they worked in Star Frontiers very well, although if I were building from scratch in HERO I would probably build it as extra Armor with the Ablative limitation. It has been years since I played Star Frontiers, but my recollection of gyrojet weapons were that they did a bit more damage than projectile weapons and they couldn't be used at short range (and they required a different weapon familiarity). I would probably build them just as RKAs with a custom limitation that they can't be used point blank. Since players are paying money for equipment, the exact value of the limitation isn't that critical. Also, I like the idea of gyrojets having no recoil in zero G environments, although I don't remember that being much of an issue in Star Frontiers.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings Concerning the paucity of gay characters in the Champions Universe, I think many of them could be whatever the GM wants. Most have no indication of sexuality one way or the other (at least in the older versions; I don't have the more recent stuff), so do whatever fits. In my own campaigns, romance usually plays a backseat role, so sexuality doesn't crop up much. I can suspend disbelief enough to role-play superheroes or elves or space aliens, but I am not a good enough actor to be a believable romantic interest so it doesn't happen much. That said, we have had characters that have run the spectrum sexually, we just never did much with it. One superteam had a running joke about the tabloids always trying to figure out who was dating who. But of the five members one was gay, one was lesbian, two were hetero but they were siblings, and the last was an asexual android, so there really was no possibility of a hookup. The only character I have run where sexuality was much of a issue was a shapeshifter with amnesia. She was hetero, but since the last thing she recalled was being a guy, she was a bit confused for a while. Mostly it played for laughs though.

Re: What does routine skill check, easy skill check & difficult skill check mean to y For me, "routine" means you don't even have to roll; if you have the skill it happens automatically. Why? Because it slows gameplay and there is still a 1 in 216 chance you will blow it if I make you roll which is embarrassing and aggravating for the player. Otherwise, the book gives modifiers for a lot of circumstances (especially check out the PER modifiers since they are grouped nicely); you can use that as a guideline when deciding penalties or bonuses.

Re: Spell of Deflection I was right on board with Indiana Joe and the extra levels in DCV until Hyperman correctly pointed out the potential AoE problem. But I so like the simplicity that I would be inclined to let the player buy the extra levels in DCV with the Area Effect advantage (+½) just so it could block AoE Accurate attacks.

Re: Powers with their own Speed? What will that accomplish? In our games we got around the problem of the gas grenade doing damage on different phases depending on who threw it by making work on the target's phases. This also allowed the target to lower his SPD voluntarily to avoid damage, like he might do if drowning. That said, I could see application for having a SPD characteristic for some powers in a similar vein, like being tied up in an electrified cable or something where the damage is continuous.

Re: The Whisper Behind the Walls When I have done swarm-type entities in the past, I just give them Damage Reduction Not vs. AoE attacks. Depending on how mobile the swarm is, it might also have a high DCV (it simply parts when someone strikes at it). That is the simple way, but kudos to Lucius for such a well written answer.

Re: Half Dice Options Just to throw in my 2 cents... In heroic level campaigns we have used the 1d6-1 over ½d6 as the bonus for having 2 pts of STR over the minimum for muscle powered weapons (i.e. if the weapon does 1½d6 with a STR min of 12 and someone with a 14 STR uses it, he can do 2d6-1 instead). This was more to get people to vary their STR levels than anything else though. Hugh makes some good points about standard effects and granularity which could be useful in some situations (I particularly like the example of a 34 pt Active attack being 7d6-1). But for myself, I have often allowed something like a 3d6 Aid to SPD have a "standard" effect of +1 SPD even though it is technically a point short. The standard effect rule in my mind is as much for convenience as anything, so I am not going to make my life more complicated by quibbling about one missing point.

Re: Setting, really: Corporate Champions? Privatized security firms! Of course! I should have thought of that. I could see big firms hiring paranormals who have powers that let them be electronics geniuses or super hackers, but those would be noncombat NPC types in most games. One could also see people with healing powers being sought after too, although not by most Fortune 500 firms unless their powers were pharmaceutical in nature.