Jhamin

Re: 1-5 to 6th edition That sounds... Terrible! I'm really sorry. Good luck on recreating your work, and don't forget to archive the files this time!

Re: Impact of Figured Characteristics

Re: Martial Arts Resources It may be sad, but most of my contributions here are cartoons or things that may as well be cartoons.... - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Both the recent cartoon & all the various movies) - Power Rangers (any season, but the classic 90's 1st season got into some trouble with parents groups for Stuntmen being a bit *too* dynamic in their fights.) - Kim Possible (The Cheerleader Martial Artist, especially in the first season & the 'Sitch in Time Movie) - Justice League Unlimited was mostly an out & out supers show, but a few episodes (Esp "The Cat & the Canary", "Double Date" and "Grudge Match") focus heavily on the Martial Artists & Weapon Masters in the 'League. Grudge Match is notable in that they upped the animation budget for the big all-woman brawl at the end (Wonderwoman vs everyone else shows some fun flying brick vs. martial arts stuff). Also some really great martial artists vs. supers animation. - The Jack Kirby era Captain America comics may be a bit off topic, and are very much a product of their time, but they have some *really* great one martial artist vs. horde of agents type fights. I think these issues are collected in the essential Captain America vol. 1 I also know Anime has a real mixed reputation around here, but if you can deal with it... - Naruto episodes 48-50 features probably the best fight in the series, a Martial Arts speedster vs. a guy with Sand-Based TK. There are some other great fights, but this is probably the best outing you see from someone who would be considered a Martial Artist under the Hero definition of the term. (Be warned, there are a lot of Anime tropes in play here, including combat commentators and escalating "well I better start really fighting then" type stuff. - Trigun has a protagonist that is the definition of Gun-Fu. If all you care about is the fights, skip to the confrontation with the big bad in the last couple episodes. One of the best gun-based martal arts showdowns I've seen.

Re: How to Build This: Voodoo Defense This reminds me of a Naruto character with similar SFX but who did use it offensively. He had a full phase gestures power that required his target's blood to work. If he had the blood (usually on his weapon) & completed the ritual then any further damage (from any source) he took would be directed to the person the blood came from. It was played up as a spiritual/mystic type power. Usually, after the ritual was complete he would immediately stab himself in the chest killing his target. As for buying it? I kind of like the reflection take on this. Lots of skill levels & a GM handwave on the HTH part. Or we can break out 6th edition and buy: - Damage Negation up past the campaign damage limits, only after ritual is completed. - A NND Does Body 0End attack & a NND Blast, both with Variable Special Effects that mimic the attack the character got hurt with, only up to the amount of damage that would have hit the character. Both of these attacks are bought with a trigger that goes off & hits the target of the ritual when an attack is negated by the Damage Negation - LOTS of CSLs so your triggered attack doesn't miss. This is of course rediculously expensive, but the ability to make other people take damage instead of you should be. You are unhurt-able while it lasts. (As an aside, in the Naruto Anime the character with this power was beaten by an elaborate switcharoo that tricked him into using his partner's blood instead of his intended target's. Then when he was "Killed" his partner died instead & then he was offed before he could perform the ritual again)

Re: raziel (limited immortality) The important thing to remember when buying things in Hero is that all the crazy stuff that justifies things happening isn't important. We call that stuff special effects. If you buy a blast with Side Effects: Cracks concrete in a 10' radius around me, then that is what happens. You don't buy a separate attack for damaging the concrete because usually that is just a neat visual that doesn't affect the game in any way. When you want to start using it to take out the concrete men, well then it's a power. Most GMs will let you use the benefits of your Special Effect from time to time, but will ask you to pay for the extra stuff it does if you want to do it all the time instead of once in a while. So the question you have to ask yourself is: Is rebuilding the body in the spirit world part of the adventure? If so then some kind of EDM is probably a part of it. Or, From the POV of the rest of the group, does he just lay there until he finishes his spirit quest at which time he resurrects? In that case it's just healing w/resurrection. The whole "spirit journey" thing is just fancy special effects.

Re: AI with remote "puppet" body I think the real problem is that buying a character this way makes damaging them really weird. If you go by the rules of Physical Manifestation they will hum along happily until their phys manifestation gets broken, then they are out of the adventure until a spare can arrive. That isnt' fun for the guy who misses everything after the first big fight when his team keeps going on, and it isn't any fun for everyone else that has to wait for his new body to get to where the adventure is. If you give the physical manifestation Stun or a Rec stat, then you basically have bought a duplicate & should really just use that power. Some would see this as a feature, but from my point of view a character that isn't really there does all kinds of weird things to the gaming experience. There is no way to capture him short of blowing him up & most threats won't apply to him. This is also why "Takes no Stun" is one of the few banned powers in my group. I don't think there is anything wrong with that power, I just don't want to deal with a player character I can't defeat without killing them or doing all kinds of contortions just for his benefit. I really am leaning toward either buying duplication, or (and I'd go this way personally) just buying the body as the character with a mindlink to a computer and calling "the computer is really the character" the special effect on resurrection healing. Believe it or not, this is not a new concept. I've been seeing this build debated since 4th edition and I'm sure it's older than that. Personally, I think the thing that everyone forgets is that hopefully when you are done you have a playable character. Some of the posts I'm seeing show some really great Hero-Fu in their designs, but actually end up not being very manageable in a game where everyone else just wants to play their Flying Brick or Martial Artist. If your build makes your character take twice as long to play, it isn't' a good build.

Re: Looking for ideas - Silver-age villain group You need at least one really overspecialized weapons/gadget man. How about "MVP" aka Most Villainous Player? He is built around a baseball theme & can catch anything in his mit, throw baseballs with unerring accuracy, and plans to steal your home. If you are going retro you might want a "evil foreigner", but to make it work use a country we are pretty Ok with these days. Like Russia.

Re: Champions Background Information

Re: Building a "Superhuman Scanalyzer" Absolutely. But I'm still fuzzy on the Special Effect. This is Hero. Buying the power is the wacky thing that happens after you justify it.

Re: CHAMPIONS 6E -- What Do *You* Want To See? I strongly agree with Lord Lidden's early post saying that the Genre book really needs examples for different kinds of characters at different power levels. It is one thing to say that Hero is a universal system, but it is another to actually give examples of characters that would be at home in Daredevil Comic *and* characters that would be at home in a Silver Surfer comic. Then a short discussion of how and why they are build differently. This would let you really dig into the philosophy of how and why you build the Green Goblin and Brainiac differently, even though they are both Super Villains. I'd also love to see some kind of of listing of common genre "Campaign frameworks". Not mini-campaigns, but common startign points for games. Stuff like "live in a mansion & get called on the monitor screen when Molemen attack" or "Patrol a borough of New York because the people need protectors" or "Live in a school for young Supers". How they work and what the pro/cons of each are for a game. This is very much a part of the genre bits section, but a section like this would really help many newer players start a game. It may also be useful to actually spend a few paragraphs talking about "OK, now that we have laid out your many options in Superheroic gaming, here is the Champions Setting and here are the choices that Hero Games has made for our published setting". This would hopefully further ground people in how character creation around a specific setting and power level works.

Re: How do you build 'Swarm' (marvel villain) If I recall, he usually had masses of bees (far, far, more than made up his body) that would wander far outside of his immediate presence, and could be defeated separately from him, but that he could look through at all times. He could also create giant horse sized Robot bees that were capable of wrestling Marvel's version of Hercules. His combat style was to shoot blasts of bees at a hero who would then continue to pester his target after the initial blast. His mutant bees could sting people that were immune to artillery shells, but didn't like fire, cold, or insecticide. (Which was a problem when Ghost Rider showed up) Individual blasts never seemed that bad, but the cumulative effect downed many of his opponents. Heroes that fought him for a long time seemed to get overcome with poison gradually Personally, I'd buy him with: - fairly low Str & Dex (under 6th ed) and lots of Con & End as his distributed existence made him very tough. - A Penetrating damage shield - Flight, as his entire body is made of winged insects - Low PD & ED, but lots of Damage Reduction bought "Not vs fire or AofE attacks" - Hardened defenses, as his diffuse body makes AP and Pen attacks pointless - Continuous, Penetrating Blasts defined as his bee swarm blasts, linked to a small cumulative transform (to poisoned, helpless character), although this may be a special effect of stunned opponents - a summon that calls up swarms of mutant bees packing an area of effect version of his bee blasts. - Clairvoyance that allows him to perceive any area his summoned swarms occupy. - Mental defense (I seem to recall telepaths having lots of trouble with his hive mind) - A vulnerability to cold, smoke, and insecticide (Spider Man once beat him by mixing DDT into his web fluid) - In at least one case, he had giant robot Bees. Bought as followers, or perhaps just scenario-specific GM specials.

Re: Building a "Superhuman Scanalyzer" This is something that is so tightly tied to world setup that it isn't even funny. In Hero, and in fact in most narrative structures you have to work by the rules in your setting, not the rules of the medium. In hero that means you reason from effect, not game mechanics. So you could probably not ever (or at least no player of mine will) build a detector that sensed "Someone's Hunted" or "A Player Character". And by the same logic you probably can't/shouldn't build a detector that senses "a superhuman". What you can do is build a detector that senses a specific SFX, and picks out folks that radiate that SFX. In many "super" universes there are generally only 1-3 SFX for superhumans. (IE: Rising Stars had the comet). It would usually make sense for a detector to exist that could home in that particular SFX. Other universes often have any SFX you can justify but rarely allow a detector to go beyond on SFX. For example, in the Marvel universe there are Mutant Scanners aplenty, but they don't usually show Peter Parker or Reed Richards as anything unusual. Meanwhile Dr. Strange picks werewolves out of a crowd easily but could never tell you which folks have taken Super Soldier Serum and which haven't. As for Superheroic Hero games? Back in the days of 150 pts of disadvantages lots of my characters had "Detects as a Mutant" or "Mystic Aura". Now that we are much more limited in our complications I suspect that the SFX will just be implied.

Re: "He's bulletproof", "Fireproof", etc.

Re: 5th Ed: Flying Dodge I have always handled it like this. If the attacker hits even after the DCV bonus, then the attack hits and the defender moves (assuming they aren't stunned or KOed). If not, the defender avoids the damage & is able to use the movement to reposition himself on the battlefield. Or have I misread something somewhere?

Re: Hero Basic 6th : Destructible FOCUS and Power Armor

Re: How do you build Drives? A while back I built a short lived Star Hero game around the old Master of Orion II PC game. I decided to model the drives to work as they did in the game & then use some technobabble to explain why during play. The basic mechanic in the PC game was that there was a hierarchy of Engine types, but that they all performed in the same way, the only difference was that better engines got you there faster. The functions of the engines were: 1) Combat Maneuvering. You could travel inside a Solar System. Combat usually started with you some distance from a planet & it took a few Minutes/combat turns to reach Orbit. 2) General Maneuvering. In general, once you were in a star system you could generally reach any planet or Asteroid belt very quickly. It wasn't odd for one ship to defend 3-5 planets in the same Star System during the same month. 3) On the Galaxy map distance between star systems was measured in "Parsecs". If you sent a ship to another system it began travel & was out of communication until it arrived. It's speed was a function of how many parsecs it could travel per turn/month. A few of the interesting quirks of the game included: - FTL Ships could only travel to StarSystems. No fleets assembling in the void & then going somewhere. I chose to represent this in hero system by saying that you could only Enter or Exit Hyperspace if you were both in a Vacuum AND inside the Gravity Well of a Star - Once a ship launched to another star system you could detect them across interstellar distances, how far was related to sensor tech. You often knew several turns/months ahead of time if a ship was coming to one of your planets. - Fuel cell Tech was separate from engines. It was theoretically possible to have engines that could carry you farther in a Month/Turn than your fuel cells allowed you to go in your entire trip! (This was rare in practice) - Once ships were in Hyperspace it was no longer possible to redirect them. They were out of communication and would arrive at their destination barring accidents. - You could Jump to Hyperspace to avoid a fight, but only if the enemy hadn't researched (and installed) Warp Dissipation tech which would prevent access to Hyperspace for enemy ships until disabled. Fleets breaking off an engagement they could not win was common. - The jump to Hyperspace in combat happened one full (pc game) turn after you initiated it. Shields and Weapons still worked during the turn you jumped, but it was not possible to move while waiting. It was very common to lose ships to enemy fire after they had begun to Jump. The end result of all this was that Planets became the main battleground during the game, with occasional skirmishes between planets if everyone agreed to fight there rather than leave. You knew what star system enemies were heading for and could sometimes gather a fleet in time to defend it. No matter which planet they attacked when they got there your fleet could intercept. As defender, an investment in Planetary Defenses could often repel 1-3 battleships of equal technology to your own. A heavy investment might make some planets harder to damage than entire fleets. If as the attacker you wanted to bug out you likely could, but would then be stuck spending a bunch more turns/months heading back to a friendly system. From a gaming point of view, players had a lot of freedom in a single star system, and could travel to others, but the choice to do so was a major one. If events were transpiring somewhere else it would take literally months for them to get there once they jumped. This is the engine I built for the Millennium Falcon sized Exploration ship the PCs had. It represents an early engine tech, very early along the tech tree. More advance engines would have larger Multipower reserves & could propel their ships faster but would still retain the same slots & modifiers in each slot. The point cost and capability (In Hero terms) for the engines would remain the same for larger or smaller ships. Fusion Engines: Multipower, 80-point reserve, all slots Full Phase to Change Slots (-1/4) 64 real points 1) Fusion Thrusters (Combat Maneuver): Flight 40"; Costs Endurance (-1/2), Full Phase to Change Slots (-1/4) Real Cost: 5 2) Fusion Drive (Interplanetary Speeds): Flight 11", Megascale (1" = 1 Million KM; +4), Can Be Scaled Down: 1" = 1 1,000 KM; Costs Endurance (-1/2), Full Phase to Change Slots (-1/4) Real Cost: 5 3) Fusion Charged Hyperdrive (FTL Hyperspace Travel): Teleportation 5", Megascale (1" = 100 lightyears; +4), Can Be Scaled Down: 1" = 1 Light Day (+1/4); Extra Time (1 Week per Parsec, -4 1/2), Visible (-1/4) Increased Endurance Cost (7x END; -3), Costs Endurance (-1/2), Only in vacuum while in a Stable Stellar Gravity Well (-1/2), Full Phase to Change Slots (-1/4) Real Cost: 2 And separate from the multipower, but still considered part of the Engine: Engine Overload: Killing Attack - Ranged 10d6, Trigger - Security Command Code (+1/4), Explosion (+1/2); 1 Charge which Never Recovers (-4), Extra Time (1 Turn (Post-Segment 12), -1 1/4), No Range (-1/2), Real Weapon (-1/4) Real Cost: 37 They also had an End Reserve to represent their Deuterium Fuel Cells. This END reserve scaled with the ships so the bigger boys could power their big guns.

Re: Hero Basic 6th : Destructible FOCUS and Power Armor ....Or the Fantasy Hero Knight that has actually paid points for his plate mail for some reason. One crossbow bolt later & his armor no longer protects him from *anything* I don't know that we need to fix this. Or more precisely, I question if any fix we come up with will justify the increase in rules complication. As far as I can tell this is a debate of rules minutia that will require a fix that is likely to get in the way of most players that use the Focus rules quite happily now & never care about the chink in the purity of Hero Logic. If we have all used the "GM can ignore it" happily for decades, it doesn't generate play issues, and is *isn't* a constant lightning rod of debate, then does it really need fixing?

Re: Top 75 Spaceships in movies and TV

Re: [After-Action Report] Villainy Amok I enjoyed the book a great deal and used many of the plot seeds. For what it is worth, I viewed the product as something to use to pad out a game session if the hero's defeated my villains quicker than expected, or if the plot wandered away from what I had intended and I needed something quick to distract them. I rarely made anything from the book the "A" plot of my games, but I went almost a year using it to provide a majority of my "B" plots in a game session. If you are looking for constructive criticism and specific statements.... - The strength of the book IMHO was that it not only listed common genre bits, but went into detail on the many variants of those bits. You can only have mars attack so many times before it becomes tired. But when it's the mole-men, the martians, and so on it remains fresh. - Lots of quick plots that hang off of each of the common hero disadvantages (Complications now) were a godsend as everyone takes these but it puts a lot of work on the GM to make them worth their points. When you already have pre-made scenarios for them that can play out in the background it is much easier on me. - I found the wedding section overly-long. While I did say above that I loved reading about all the variation on Bank Robberies or Invasions, I don't think that Super Weddings support the same level of repetition in a game. I could probably have one or two before my players would want to know why they keep attending nuptials instead of fighting crime. It wasn't that I didn't like it, I just knew that all those variations were going to go to waste. - I kind of wanted the natural disaster section to go into more detail on interesting places for fires to break out or unlikely fallout from various disasters. I don't have the book in front of me at the moment, but I'm happy to comment in more detail later on.

Re: combat luck when grabbed

Re: Lucha Libre convention game! Is it wrong that I am this excited to find out the exact Font names used in Lucha Libre Hero?

Re: Multiform for Free? Frustrated.... I agree that Billy was a OHID. I think a much better argument can be made for Banner/The Hulk being different enough from each other that they were a Multiform. (The Hulks grasp of Nuclear Physics was almost as nonexistant as Banner's ablity to take Anti-Tank rounds to the chest) I am really liking the idea of making the player fess up to which one the main character is & building that one to campeign limits. The weaker multiform is a neat side ability, not an excuse for points.

Re: Difference between games?

Re: How to: Spatial Compression technology

Re: Post "gotchas" here