Jhamin

Ultrawoman and Dynagirl The Power Rangers The Bionic Man The Bionic Woman Jake 2.0 Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap (EDM: Time, No Conscious control, only within own lifetime) The Sentinal

In the Rising Stars comics, all the supers in the world were created by one event and were raised together by the government in a special compound. This is why they all know each other and know what everyone's powers are. As they all share the same origin, whenever one dies their power is distributed among all the survivors.

And if so, what time and channel?

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I understand it involves taking a freelance job at Decipher while the legalities get worked out.

I once a scenario where Black Harlequin started collecting the hottest toy from each Christmas for the last 25 years. Cabbage Patch, Tickle me Elmo, Furby, Nintendo, X-Box, Power Rangers, etc. He put such a price on these things (financed by an earlier plot) that alot of the smash & grab super thieves were going after them. Why? He just wanted them. You don't get all the cool toys when you are locked in a basement & now that he was a supervillian he was going to make up for lost time. He also planned on replacing this years hot toys with some of his evil creations. He planned to hire the Destruction Company from high tech enemies to blow up shipments of toys so he could replace them. Once BH's "side plan" came to light Grab even ended up teaming up with my players to stop the killer toys from getting to the stores & tracking the few that were sold direct. It ended up being a nice way to underscore that Grab is in it for the money & not for blood.

Much has been made of the HERO vs. GURPS "universal system contest". As far as I can tell, the general consensus among many gamers is that GURPS does gritty better than hero (IE, if you shoot someone, they die) but HERO does cinematic better than GURPS (IE, if you shoot the hero he grits his teeth, can't take much more of that, then whoops the bad guy anyway). GURPS Supers is infamous for it's overly deadly combat system. If you are strong enough to shatter steel, then a villain with bones softer than steel is in big trouble. This damage scale is terrible for simulating spiderman vs. green goblin showdowns. The goblin's head would come off as soon as spidey socked him in the jaw. There are some optional rules to tone this down, but they really feel out of place in the framework of the game. For this reason HERO and it's fuzzy damage vs. str rules are by far the better of the two for *most* super genre games. I hate to pimp other RPGs on the Hero boards (I'm a HERO man all the way), but you may in fact have found one of the few oddball comics that is playing by the GURPS version of superheroics.

My personal favorite needs a few more years of supplaments before it is really going to work, but.. I would love to see "As the Universe Turns", a whole book of alternate timelines for the Champions Universe. It would be kind of like the old Champions in 3-D book, but with much more of an emphasis on alternate histories and less Cthulu and dinosaur men. There would of course be Nazi world, and Soviet world, and Egypt world, and Summerian world, and so on. It would come complete with alternate versions of the Champions for each parallel history. (the People's Defender & team in Soviet world, in Egypt world Ironclad would be out and the Living Mummy would be in but they would all still fight Anubus from CKC, etc)

Re: [Question] A few questions It's all about what kind of heroic identity it is and what kind of villian it is. Lets look at it this way: If you have an OIHID power armor guy who gets captured, the suit is somehow sealed so tight that no matter how hard the villian tries, he can't pry it off. He is unable to force the character out of Hero ID. Now, if the power armor hero gets captured by an evil scientific genius the GM could rule that the genius has enough brain power to work out a way of unlocking the armor. This is a case of special effects interacting (Tech Armor vs. tech minded-genius). A suit of mystic armor might not be removable by a tech genius, but a sufficently powerful mystic bad guy might get it off. An often missed part of the Only in Hero ID limit is that the character who takes it has to specifiy some way of preventing him from changing. This means that if you become a hero by putting on your un-removable armor, then if you get caught without your armor or if someone takes it away you have no way to change until you recover it. You might recover it by getting it back from whoever stole it or by going home & getting a new one. If Thor lost his hammer, he is up a creek until he gets it back. If Silver-Age Green Lantern lost his ring, he either needs to get it back or have another Green Lantern make him a new one.

So that is what that prickly feeling was.....

Which was pretty much what I was asking in response to the "What do you want to see?" question.

Which always seemed a little dues ex machina to me. The alternate Supes was x-treme, so his X-ray vision got to bore through Doomsday? It has never shown that kind of piercing power before. Or since

I want guidelines on superhero vs. Star Cruiser battles. In the comics, supers do it all the time. In Hero, it gets ugly to put even Dr. D against a Star Hero Dreadnought.

Just one more thing. Apparently, Hero was always meant to allow you to throw as many powers as you want in one action as long as you are shooting them at the same target. Problem is, while none of the previous editions said that you couldn't, 5th was the first version of the rules to explicitly say you can. Alot of people (like over 90%) had always understood that one phase = one attack power. When the rules said otherwise, people freaked. I know I did. While not really a change, it was in effect a heckof a change for most of us. Once you get used to it it opens up a whole new arena of combat and character creation.

Re: [Help] Suggestions for Campaign Limits This is moderatly high powered. Nothing wrong with that, but if you are trying to balance this many players in two groups against each other, then the more points you let them have the harder it will be. You can build a skilled and well rounded character on 200+150. If you are worried I would stick with that. Balance is easier. This sounds interesting. It also sounds really ambitious. I might start smaller, but then I don't have the free time I once did. You may be able to pull it off. When a buddy of mine tried pitting two different groups against each other it fell apart because each group had to go too far between sessions & it was impossible to hold onto the momentum of the story. If you can do it, let us know! It sounds like a blast. The only sure way is to build the characters yourself, but your players may not be cool with it. Failing that there will always be some characters stronger than others. You might get lucky but don't count on it. Assume you will need to add some allies to the mix on one side or the other at the end. Also consider how slow combat will be when it comes time to run the big fight with all those players. Many a cool climax had collapsed under the weight of getting 12 people together and all focusing on the game on the same night. The whole point of a limit is that it is a limit. If you make an exception for somebody then everyone will want an exception of some kind for their charcter. If you have an Armor limit than maybe only Colossus guy can be at that value and everyone else goes down from there. Otherwise this is going to get away very quickly with all those characters.

I suspect this will overly reward people who have bought their speed up. If I have a character with speed 4, I know I am slow but I also know that within most campaigns I will only go one or two times fewer than someone with a higher speed. Under this system I have a less than even chance of going at all on any given round. This system will average out in the end, but as most champions battles last less than a turn you will only see this in a long game. In a single fight you have a very real chance that they will get 3 or 4 actions before you even get one, depending on how the dice roll. That puts way more distance between the utility of a speed of 4 and 6 than currently exists. I also question the websites assertation that adding another die roll to each and every combat round is faster than just asking somebody to write down their phases & try to pay attention to what is going on.

Of course I seem to remember that back in the day the Dark Champions and Eye for an Eye gun lists were criticised for being really underpowered, even in a heroic setting.

Huh. I picked it up in St. Paul at my FLGS on Saturday. I haven't had time to scour it to my likeing yet, but so far it looks good. Lots of fantasy monsters, most with many options. If you have the Hero System Bestiary, it feels like a companion to that. So far I'm not seeing alot of setting specific stuff, but then I am still reading the monsters. I like how alot of the Giants and Trolls are stated out a big lumbering brutes, but their optional packages include of magic VPPs for those more fantastic Faerie Trolls. If you run supers or modern heroic genres, I don't know how much use you will get out of this. If you are Running Fantasy hero it would be a must have.

We may be going the wrong way in trying to write up Santa. Use him as a Patron. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe Santa shows up about three quarters of the way through to hand out Magic Swords and bows to all the little children so they can go whuup all over the Snow Witch and her hordes Werewolves and Evil Gnomes. Who wouldn't want the jolly one watching his back?

In my experience most player characters are in the 350-450 point range. Most of the villan teams are built on similar points. If you are going to field a combat machine villian who needs to be able to handle the whole team at once about 700-1000 is not unusual. Vipera is even more in 5th edition. She is supposed to beat down and possibly humiliate whole teams of heros. She is not typical, she is the one you pull out when the heroes get a little too cocky after beating Mechanon or Firewing. The official Dr. Destroyer for 5th tops out at over 2500 points. He is described as being able to take on a signifigent percentage of all the heroes in north america and kill several before being forced to withdraw. He is also not typical and sending beginning characters against him is more or less a death sentance. I suspect that you are seeing such high point totals on the boards because people are either trying to wow us with their mega baddies, or are simulating characters with 25+ years of comic book continuity to account for.

Hmmm. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, if nobody would offer any insight, then you did your best and they are a bunch of ingrates. It's is alot harder to run a game than it is to show up with a character sheet and some dice every week. Oon the other hand, if you spent all this time and all this effort on "your" game, then they might have been protesting a percieved lack of inpact on the setting. I know I have had this happen to me in my games in the past. I have gotten so involved in my own plots and settings that the players started to wonder why they were there. Your tone of total disgust with them seems to imply some adversarial elements had slipped into this game well before the big blowup.

Those guys were the best! They were fairly powerful and could stand up against some experienced heroes and most of them had fairly cools schticks or backgrounds. It was also really easy to replace villians lost or jailed and still stick with the theme. I remember that the leader had this whole thing in his origin about hunting down everyone who had benefitted from the tech Viper had stolen from him & had killed a hero named Lightspeed. I created an NPC hero called Lightspeed to help the PCs. A year later when Spectrum offed him the players went after him something fierce!

For me... 1) Do the rules not only enforce the Genre but encourage it's typical bits? I love games that have metasystems whose logical outcome are adventues typical of the genre they emulate. A staff weilding wizard in long robes is one example. If the wizard has no real need of either one in game, but keeps them because they are cool I won't like your game nearly as much as I would if the magic rules encouraged 6 foot long wooden dowels. 2) Does character creation allow for a diversity of characters beyond the examples. I feel that true character creation has to result in character who are different from each other through the blending of various character options in interesting ways. I am always a little turned off by games that have meaningless character choices that boil down to picking the premade that most closely fits your concept the then hoping for good stats. 3) Do I have a clear idea what the characters are supposed to be doing in your game? This seems like an easy one, but I find a suprising number of games fail in this basic regard. I'm all about not straitjacketing the GM & his players, but give me some coherent place to start. Genre books that talk about a culture without giving me a reason to ever play there are pretty but don't help me. Likewise a world so heavily metaplotted that there aren't any quiet corners for me to set my game in are annoying. Games that provide a rich world or a solid genre simulation then get out of the way and let us game are the ones I want.

You must never have played 1st Edition D&D. Expecially the Survival Guides. They had rules for figuring out what temprature it would be inside your chainmail vest after walking three hours, then climbing a hill during a light misting rain while carrying a halfling on your shoulders. Then they applied stat modifiers appropriatly. If anything, Hero was less complicated then the stuff that was out back in the 3rd edition days, and has chosen to refine it's rules set while the rest of the industry has gone mostly rules-light. D&D 3.5 is only complicated if you are used to Storyteller and it's ilk.

I got the -1/2 value by looking at alot of the other limits in the book and making a judgement call as to how often the 10' limit would come up. My general rule of thumb is: -1/4 limits are there, but do not limit the character often. Once every few games at most. -1/2 limits come up every 2-3 games, which is how often this would come up IMHO. -1 limits come up almost every game, every two at most. -2 limits constantly come up. Every time the character tries to use the power they have to overcome the limit. Do you have to touch the animal the entire time? If so you have to deal with having to keep the animal alive during a superfight while holding it. This is a pretty big deal and I would give it a -1. If it only has to touch you to start your powers, that isn't too awful, and might at most have a -3/4, but I would probably still give it a -1/2. Also note that if nobody can tell that your powers come from the animal, then enemies will not try to seperate you two intentionally and the limit would come up less frequently. This would reduce the value in my games by about -1/4.