Jhamin

XDM is the handwave to everything Suppress might work mechanically, but has all kinds of weird interactions. Ninja-Bear's write-up works well. I might go with a Mind Control: "Stay Still/Go to sleep (depending)", only if target looks at hand of glory, continuous, uncontrolled, combined with (as Opal suggests) a Desolid, only through locked portals. It won't be cheap, but this is a powerful effect.

Had he only snaptured half of all intelligent life in the universe you might have made an argument for his plan. You could have even dropped a line or two about the unexpected things that did and did not get snapped away based on "intelligence". The ecological damage that he inflicted by destroying half of all living things is a bit much.

dormammu I kind of agree. One of my favorite bits from the original comic was when (I believe) Dr. Strange realizes that the Infinity Gauntlet had fallen into the hands of a Nihilist. I don't recall if it was the original Infinity Gauntlet arc or a later sequal where Eternity basically Sues Thanos over messing with Reality. The Living Tribunal hears the case & rules that as Thanos doesn't actually want to destroy reality, just replace it with his version, the Living Tribunal wasn't going to stop him. Stuff like that was likely a bridge too far for the movies. They would have needed to setup the various cosmic entities and they had just barely gotten to Dormammu and the Supreme Intelligence, let alone the *really* weird stuff. Clearly the plot they went with worked fine. (And I feel the need to step back and comment that the Supreme Intelligence actually showed up as a character in a hit movie. I continue to be amazed these movies keep pulling it off....)

In which case, it is *VITAL* that Godzilla kill him in this movie. At this rate he will be bigger than the moon in another few decades!

I was always wondering why he didn't just adjust the caloric needs and reproductive frequency of every living thing in the universe?

"Challenges for Champions", P 48 Way back in 4th edition His brother was a master criminal who was killed by fellow inmates after the PCs sent him to jail. Now Jon Jones (No relation to the Martian Manhunter) has sold all his worldly possessions to become Red Raptor and take bloody revenge! This guy always bothered me. He apparently bought his super powers, which are Gravity Based, to aid in his revenge. Which is cool and all, but his background emphasizes how ordinary he was before his brother died but still just sort of assumes buying superpowers is easy. I'm not sure ARGENT existed at this point in the lore, but some kind of an excuse for *where* you can buy red gravity wings feels appropriate. If the gear had been invented by his murdered brother that would have at least made sense, but it is fairly clear that isn't where they came form. But that is me complaining about a 30+ year old book released by ICE, which owned Champions like 4 companies ago.

I dunno, personally I kind of hope to leave the "evil Feminist' organization in the past. It was obscure in the past and it's not an idea that has aged well.

This is a case where various things work mostly the same but have slightly different specifics, making it hard to use one to infer for another. Summon is an instant power. There is no listed limit on how many beings can be summoned at once in Champions Complete. You pay End once to turn it on (summoning however many things you paid for summon to callup) and then you are done. As I read it, If the power is bought to summon 2 things for 10 end, you turn the power on and it summons 2 things for 10 End. If you bought it to summon 1000 things for 20 end, then that is what you get when you turn it on, and you pay 20 end. Duplication is a persistent power, so you need to pay End to turn it on and then every phase you keep it on. It specifically says it takes a half phase action to summon a duplicate, so summoning 2 takes a full phase, but the power is either on or off. You aren't paying End per duplicate, you are paying End per phase the power is on. In your Case 1, you spend 10 End on the phase you turn the power on and spend both your half phases to summon them both. 10 End In your Case 2, you spend 13 End on the phase you turn the power on and spend a half phase to summon them both (leaving a half phase for something else). 13 End Teleportation with Usable Simultaneously (P 120 of Champions Complete) doesn't work the way you describe. Usable Simultaneously means the Recipient controls the power and pays End. What you are describing is much closer to Usable as Attack (Als0 P120) Grantor controls power, granter pays End, there writeup on P 120 doesn't allow you to hand it out to more than one person, but I'd probably allow it if that was how you wanted to build your power. The Usable as an Attack is important to how you should think about the power. You are doing something presumably bad to a target, like blasting them or punching them. As you pay End per blast or per punch, you also pay per teleport. (Personally, I'd buy Teleport, Usable as Attack, Area of Effect and just teleport everyone in the AofE zone with one attack and one End Cost, but YMMV). Use Simultaneously (which you mention by name) lets you hand copies of the power out to others, who can then use it like it was their own (including paying End)

Over on TVTropes they call it Flanderization. "The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character." Named after Ned Flanders from the Simpsons. In early seasons he was a basically nice, ordinary, prosperous guy who went to church and had a family that loved each other, in contrast to the Simpsons. A few seasons later he was a Christian Zealot that didn't insure his house because that was like gambling. He has gotten much worse sense then. Mr. Drysdale definitely got more and more cartoonish over time, but so did most everyone else on that show.

I remember reading an interview with several of the Star Trek: Voyager writing staff many years ago. The said it was a kind of terrible realization that they had about 1/2 the way into season one that they although their actual directive was to have a Star Trek show with new aliens (get away from the Klingons & Romulans) and less calling Starfleet to decide how to handle something, what they had *actually* done was give their heroes an overriding mission (get home) that motivated almost everyone. Worse, the realized the audience was actually pretty invested in this meta goal for the characters. The creators had failed to consider than when Picard & the Enterprise flew off at the end of an episode having resolved the situation of the week, they had resolved the goal of the episode. The Audience was satisfied. Previous series had never had a meta-goal the way Voyager did & they were now going to be committed to dealing with it every episode. As they were writing their early episodes it finally sank in that every time the crew ended an episode not being back in the Federation, they had failed to succeed in their meta goal. That was maybe OK for general "we are traveling" episodes because they were on their way to their goal, but every time there was a magical way home & it didn't work their characters increasingly looked like Charlie Brown failing to kick the football. Every time they stopped to check out a planet, people where going to ask "Why do they care? Why aren't they just going home?". It ended up being an issue the never really solved as the show went on.

I hadn't heard of that one, but I would probably allow it in my game. So "The Cleric, Holy man on a crusade against crime" could indeed pray for a magical computer. But as his VPP is "Magic Only" the computer could likely be dispelled by the Demonologist. (One spell vs another), but if Defender had built the computer with his technology skills, Demonoligist's dispels wouldn't work (Cant magically dispel the laptop if it isn't magic). I mean, a lighting bolt would fry it either way, but by magicing it up, it interacts with all kinds of other powers by dint of being magical. You can't use your VPP to get a purely technological laptop the way that a tech based hero could with their variable power pool. If "the Junk Drawer Janissary" had a VPP (with no special effect limits but a "must be in a Focus") made of up all the gear he has found on various superhero battlefields over the years he could conceivably have magical items, super-tech, alien bio-weapons, conventional weapons, toon-based hammerspace stuff (that he got that one time cartoons came to life), etc. He could not cast spells, as they are not foci based.

Yeah, I'm finding the old 70s and 80s cowboy cop movies a *lot* harder to watch since a chunk of my home town burned down this summer. Cops kicking ass doesn't read the same to me anymore. Turning the PCs loose to whup on whatever criminals need whupping doesn't really appeal to me.

Pretty much! Just accept that it was going to be messy and the way the characters acted would change when the writers did and not every writer had read the 1970s runs that clearly demonstrated XXX or YYY. Just roll with it. Keep having crossovers, keep having summer events, quietly pretend that period when Wonder Woman didn't have powers ever happened, stop hitting the reset button over and over, it never helps! The DC movies are basically Hypertime in action. The Ben Afflek Batman fought the Joker from Suicide Squad, who apparently killed Robin (but probably not his parents like the Nickelson Joker did), and from comments made this Batman fought Penguin and some of the other classic Bat-Villians, but none of that matters because right now this Batman is putting together the Justice League (which includes classic members WonderWoman, The Flash, Aquaman, and eventually Superman, but not Green Lantern because his movie was bad, but Cyborg is a Leaguer in this universe and not a Teen Titan) We can imply a lot about these characters, but we didn't need to see everything and *none* of them are in continuity with every version of them ever put out. Heck, the Justice League Flash manages to be totally different than WB Flash even though both were happening at the same time in real life. The MCU has thus far done really well with it's internal consistency as long as you don't think too hard about it, but it's only a matter of time before continuity lockout starts to choke things.

I lament that the fandom didn't embrace Hypertime as it was originally pitched. (Editorially, not in-universe) Basically Wade and Morrison had noticed that every fan had their idea of who a character *really* was and what things had and had not happened to their version of Batman or Superman or whoever. For Batman: In tone is Batman more Batman: Animated Series or Batman: Brave and the Bold? Or how about Dark Knight? or Silver Age? Or Golden Age? Had KnightFall happened? Was BatMite a thing? Which version of Joker had they fought? Was their Mr. Freeze more like Arnold or BTAS Freeze or the one from the silver age? Does Damien Wayne exist? Is he married to Catwoman? Etc etc Their solution was to just accept that continuity ended up being multiple choice. Basically, once an event happens and the fans like it will always sort of be out there, but people shouldn't be bound by it for all time. Pick your version of a character, they are *all* valid and you could tell stories that did or did not acknowledge various parts of the Mythos. The DC universe would continue onward as it was going & events would continue to happen and you wouldn't worry about a 6 issue run from 10 years ago unless people thought it was awesome and should be remembered. You could just quietly ignore stuff without reboots or cosmic resets, and if a new version of Batman from a Movie ended up capturing the popular imagination, then comic Batman could just start drifting toward that version without needing an in-universe reason for it. (Harly can just start wearing her video game outfit and it's fine) When folks time-traveled, they went to the version of the past you wanted to tell a story about. If a character traveled from the past to now, you didn't have to figure out exactly which issue they came from, it was just a version of the character that had the experiences you needed for your story, and generally fit what people "knew" about that character. Honestly, it was kind of like the Spiderverse before the Spiderverse. Fans *HATED* this. Most of the other writers *HATED* this. It lasted a few years and then everyone sort of agreed to forget it ever happened (which is Ironic, as that was what Hypertime was meant to do anyway)

As a product, this one would need to be handled pretty adroitly in the current political climate. What street crime is, who is committing it, and how the police (PCs) react all can be tricky in the era of Black Lives matter and "Defund the Police" I know Paizo ran into some problems when they released an adventure path where the PCs were all police officers. It didn't help that it dropped just a few weeks after the Minneapolis riots.

I go further than the original poster. Rather than going in % of heroes I like to build agents for end results: - The agents should have about a 20-30% chance to hit the hero. - A hit from an agent should do about 1/5 the Hero's stun after defenses. - Regular Agents should go down after 1 hit from a hero (their Stun + Def should be equal to or less than an average damage roll) - Elite Agents should go down after 2 hits from a hero Nobody is excited that an agent just got con-stunned and has 3 stun left and will be back in the fight in 6 phases. Just let them go down. The official Viper agents are *way* too tough for a satisfying Captain America vs 20 Agents type of fight. (Although I maintain that the old Kirby version of Cap had skill levels only to offset Sweep Penalties vs multiple attackers)

Excellent point. I was posting too quickly & overlooked the obvious. In my mind that's a lot of work for in-obvious results. You can get most of the way there by figuring out average hits vs average def and working out how long a fight will last. Simulating a game takes almost as long as playing it!!

First off, I would strongly encourage you to let your silver age heroes be 400 points. If you are used to older editions, now that 6th doesn't have figured characteristics or elemental controls the points don't go as far as they used too (Multipowers are still a thing, but unless you can afford some powers outside it your characters can feel anemic). In general, 400 point characters feel more like comic heroes. As to your real question: the biggest thing to sort out in a Hero team vs. Villain team vs. Mega villain fight is how long do you want a fight to last. You decide this when setting campaign limits. How many attacks are getting thrown around, how many are hitting, and how much damage is getting through? If a hero with a 12d6 attack, 5 speed, 23 Def, 8 OCV and DCV and 40 stun fights a mirror image of himself, he will - hit about (edited) 62.5% of the time (because his OCV and DCV match) - on an average roll his 12d6 attack will do 42 stun against his 23 def, allowing 19 stun though - Assuming he isn't con stunned, he will drop on the 3rd hit (having *just* avoided going down after the 2nd hit) - Given that he has a (EDITED) 62.5% chance to hit, he will likely get that third hit near the end of his first turn or early in the 2nd turn of combat (if he is unlucky). If it goes into the 2nd turn of combat, post segment 12 recoveries will mean he some stun is recovered, meaning you may or may not need an extra hit to drop the opponent depending on how high their recovery is. This is what happens if the character and his mirror just stand there and hit each other. If folks start dodging, blocking, multiattacking, etc things get complex. If someone rolls above average to hit, more hits happen faster. If someone rolls above average for damage, it may only take 2 hits instead of 3 to drop their opponent. This leads to a fight that is over in phase 5 or 8 instead of 12 or on the next turn. That is probably fine if the player feels like their good rolls are resulting in their character defeating enemies faster (which they should!) If you want fights to last longer, reduce damage, reduce the chance to hit by limiting OCV/increasing DCV, or increase defenses. If you want combat to go faster, reverse that. I personally like combats to last from 1 to 1.5 turns (10-18 segments). If an enemy goes down in less than 6 segments they feel weak, if it takes longer than 2 turns people get bored. In general, for new players I like to have villain teams that match the PCs pretty well but have one fewer member, that way the individual fights are pretty even but the extra manpower means the PCs are likely OK. An actually even fight will usually go the PCs way as they are usually much more focused on getting the most out of every action than you are as the GM running the Enemies. If you want a group of PCs to fight a master villain, that villain needs to be able to take hits from *all* the PCs and last for as long as you want the fight to last. So their Defenses need to be higher. Higher DCV means fewer hits land, but that can be frustrating for players. High enough Def to allow just 5-6 stun past defenses instead of 15-25 goes a long way to making it feel like attacks matter but that you need the team to take this guy. Lower defenses combined with Damage Reduction can be good for master villains as it allows weaker attacks to matter but doesn't allow one really lucky roll from doing too much damage & ending the fight quickly. While the PCs are fighting the bad guy, that bad guy needs to be doing enough damage to drop a PC in 1-2 hits. The bad guy is unlikely to be getting nearly as many attacks as the whole PC team, so they need to be able to make it matter when they do get an action. It is *very* common for master villains to have attacks 6-8 DC higher than the PCs for this reason.

I'd personally *love* to see adventure synopses and bad guys and such for hero's various genres. I ran a Pulp Hero game a few years back & it was only really possible because Pulp Hero got an enemies book. It was one thing to imagine the various pulpy tropes, but actually having a series of bad guys to base a game around let me put my effort into creating plotlines instead of writing up dozens of baddies. Having writups for in-universe antagonists helped my players create PCs that worked. As I understand what you are saying, you are talking less about an enemies book and more about a "campaign in a book" type situation, which in my mind is even better. I think part of the problem with Hero is that it doesn't make it easy for new GMs to actually get a game running. GMs are expected to do a *lot* of lifting compared to D&D or Pathfinder, which publish entire campaigns in a pre-made form. (I'm not saying I want full superhero Adventure Paths, but maybe a nice 10 session arc in book form, against multiple villains, would be great!). Right now Hero does a good job of setting up genres but outside Champions doesn't go very deep on what you should actually do session 1 or session 5. There have been a lot of Fantasy Hero books over the years (for example) but we have never actually seen what a group of PCs should look like and what their first 5 adventures should look like. Now to be a bit contradictory; In my mind, if this is a path you are looking down, Champions is by far the biggest genre for Hero and should continue to be pushed. We have several published adventures, but an actual mini-campaign would be a great resource. I know I've talked about how much easier I want it to be for new people to start a Pulp or Fantasy Hero game, but Champions needs that love too, and as it's already what Hero is known for, I'd start there. Assuming that works, I'd love to see the same for Fantasy Hero. Maybe a classic Tolkien/D&D style adventure or a Conan based one. I'd like to avoid a villain game or something that requires you are already deep into Hero/Champions lore before you know what's going on. "Agents of Viper" is pretty specific for example.

What are the odds Steve is posting these same images on the Fountain Pen Forums he frequents?

Well, now we know *why* Steve was writing a new 5th edition supplement every 6 weeks for a while there..... In all seriousness though, I feel like one of my changes from early to mid adulthood was when I figured out the value of spending more for the better built furniture, home finishes, etc. This room looks like something you will be able to enjoy for decades to come.

So is this a new piece of furniture you ordered? Or did you find something really great at a second hand shop somewhere? It looks great!

This is basically the plot of Watchmen. The entire story kicks off when Comedian points out that no matter how many purse snatchers or gun runners they bust, the world will likely burn in a Nuclear war anyway. (Probably an environmental disaster today). Ozymandias can't find a fault with this and dedicates years to a new master plan to avert this. His actual plan pushes him way over the hero/villain line for most people. So we once again come back to: Can a hero be proactive? I think on the level of busting organized crime or bringing down specific corrupt businessmen etc? Sure. They investigate, the DM drops leads, and they bring down the bad. On the level of ending social injustice, environmental damage, or the inequality of wealth and power..... well if you actually know how to do any of that I think there are *way* better uses to put that info to than a really good RPG plot.

At the risk of re-litigating Civil War, In the real world, filled with real people, Rhodey would be absolutely right. In the MCU, Cap became the ultimate soldier, chased down a Hydra spy, and was immediately assigned to a song & dance unit (literally) where he punched an actor that looked like Hitler twice a day. It wasn't until he defied orders and rescued the POWs that his abilities actually were used. When he got to the modern day, Nick Fury kept lying too him and giving people under his command secret secondary missions. It is important to remember that even though Nick Fury wasn't Hydra, he was all for the murder Helicarriers that could preempt unrest. As quoted above, that isn't freedom, it's fear. Cap was repeatedly shown that authority was not looking out for everyone. He was chosen to become what he was *because* a "weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion." Steve spent his entire time as Captain America learning to trust himself first. Tony Stark was one of the good guys, but I don't see his arc as being one of going from self-determination to understanding the need to work within a larger system. I see it as a man of deep contradictions struggling to reconcile his own sense of morality with his inability to live with imperfect choices and the fallout of the choices he has made. Once his sense of invincibility is destroyed (damaged by Vanko, broken by the invasion of NY, then flayed raw by the Killean) he goes from one plan to another that would allow him to do good without having to make decisions. These sources of authority repeatedly show themselves vulnerable to corruption (Military/Hammer), infiltration (Shield/Hydra), and manipulation (The UN/Zemo). The part where he wanted to submit the Avengers to the authority of the successor group to the group that he, personally, prevented from Nuking NYC seems very short sighted. Until he walked away, he spent his entire career as Iron Man trying to put the whole world in a suit of armor. He made the right call, but usually after he tried everything else.

"Isn't that the mission? The /why/ we fight? So we can *end* the fight? So we get to go home?" -Tony Stark I think it was in IM2 Stark is allowed to read the psych profile Black Widow made of him, which sums him up as displaying classic symptoms of a Narcissist. I think that was correct and was the fundamental thing thing that drove him. He *did* want to do the right thing, he *did* want the world to be a better place, but he eventually got sick of the kind of demands that was putting on his time and psyche. He built the Iron Legion and eventually Ultron because he wanted someone else to be able to defend the earth so he could go home & work in his lab again. After Thanos, he retired and lived at a lake with Pepper & their daughter & all his money. We saw that the world was in shambles but he left & it was mostly his guilt over the death of Peter Parker that got him to come off the bench. Stark was willing to make the sacrifice plays, and ended up making the ultimate one. He did go out a hero, but I saw a big chunk of the plot of Civil War as being about wanting to oursource the moral decisions. He wanted someone else to tell him where to go and who the bad guys were so he didn't have to feel bad about the choices he was making. Once he saw who those people were and what kinds of choices they would make he ended up going off the reservation almost immediately. Years ago some on the boards asked about what were the irreducible super hero genre bits. One of the ones I stand by is that Supers have to make their own choices. There may be government super-soldiers or sanctioned heroes, but the difference between a super-heroic protagonist and a guy who means well but the PCs have to go through is decision making. The Superheroic genre doesn't treat people who trust others to make their decisions for them as heroes. I think MCU Stark always made the right choice eventually, and *was* a hero, but it was often against his own wishes. Captain America consistently argued that the choices were always going to end up being on their heads.