Klytus

D'oh! How could I have forgotten Bane and Harley Quinn?? Two thumbs up for these two.

You don't need Concentration on it, I think. The DCV level's shield is there all the time, but you have to deliberately activate the Desolid version of the power when you have a Phase - thus showing that it requires more concentration (the word, not the Limitation) than the reflexive gate.

A lot of good ones have been mentioned already, so I can;t avoid repeating a few. 1) The Joker. Hands down, he's the best of the worst. Not a trace of super-powers anywhere, but a briliant mind unhindered by ethics, morals or sanity. He can match wits with the best of them, and has even brought the DCU to its knees. 2) Lex Luthor. I like him much better after post-Crisis. Again, he is the example of how a normal man can shine in a universe flooded with super-powered pajama-boys. 3) Magneto. Not for his powers (which I do like), but his complex depth of character. His cynical disregard for normal humans is well founded once you know his story. And now that the U.S. has set a new standard for launching pre-emptive strikes against our enemies, how can we find fault with Magneto for wanting to do the same against humanity - whom he perceives to be the enemy of all mutants? He has the right idea (save the mutants) but the wrong way of going about it (conquer the humans) 4) Ra's al Ghul. another bad-guy with depth of character. Ra's may be irredemably evil in deed, but he truly does believe that he is working to save the world from itself. Like Magneto, right idea (save the world) wrong way to do it (purge the Earth's population). 5) Darkseid. No complex motives here: he's a power-mad evil despot who wants to conquer as much as possible. He has no delusions about how his genius makes him superior to others, or that he has some inherent right to rule. He wants power - needs power - because that is the only thing that pleases him. As much as I like deep characters, I find Darkside's shallowness curiously refreshing. He is also powerful he could personally take down the 5th Edition Dr. Destroyer in nothing flat if he wanted to - so you gotta love that. Yet he prefers to use slavishly loyal underlings and minions to do all his dirty work, and he has a whole world full of them - a world full of gods no less! Dr. Doom dreams of becoming Darkseid when he grows up.

Why not split the difference? Buy levels in DCV that have the Limitation: Must be Aware of Attack (-½) to represent the "reflexive" teleport shield that is there all the time - maybe even include an initial expenditure of END to create the field so it isn't there even out of combat. On top of this, you can also buy Desolidification, Only to Avoid Damage (-½) to simulate the creation of an ever larger teleport-gate that only works when you concentrate on it (spend half a phase to activate the power), but which can be used to avoid even larger effects like an Area of Effect or Explosion. But combined with the DCV levels effect above, you are never totally without your warp-gate defenses. As it is MIssile Deflection, it also simulates the fact that anyone in hand-to-hand can simply sidestep the gate and pummel you.

According to the Ultimate Martial Artist, the kind of leaping you see in your typical "Black Belt Theater" is best simulated as such: 1) Allow the player to buy up to, but no more than, twice the normal amount of leaping for his STR, and make it Skill Roll Required: Acrobatics. For the more over-the-top Anime style films, there is no practical upper-limit to the amount of Leaping one can buy. For the "Jumping Up the Walls Trick" I'd buy it as a form of Clinging, with the same Leaping limitation of Skill Roll Required: Acrobatics. You may wish to add some other limits: Only to Climb Up, Must move at least 5" Each Phase... that sort of thing.

Going by the model used by Superman in the comics, he has many different types of Super-vision, but he has to willfully activate them. He does not see Infrared, Microscopic, Telescopic & X-ray all the time. I would say this "setting" should be the default. Altamaros has a good idea with the -0 Always Active Limitation.

If that is the feel you are after, then KA's are the way you want to go. Yes, I've been reading this thread the whole way through. My comment about the difference between EB's and KA's was not about the STUN lottery, but in the stated purposes of an EB and KA in an attempt to answer your original question: let your desired end results define what you want the attack to do. Since I did not know (and it appears you do not know either) what this end effect you want is, I was trying to offer you suggestions that might help you with your final decision. Again, I offer the same advice I did before: what is the end effect you wish to achieve? If you want the heroes to bleed, go with the RKA's. If you want them to take STUN, go with the EB's (maybe add +1d6 to it). If you want both, use the KA's with the high STUN Multiplier.

IMHO... If you want attacks that are designed to take down heroes without killing them, go with the EB construct. If the agents are out for blood, then us the KA's. Using KA's for STUN is pure cheese. A Killing Attack is meant to KILL THINGS! Killing Attacks are made to chew through barriers and blow holes in people. They do BODY first, STUN second. Energy Blasts (and other normal attacks) do STUN first, BODY second. Besides of which, unless ALL of your heroes have strong Resistant Defenses, somebody is going to start bleeding after thos RKA's start flying. If that is the effect you are after, go for it. But to my mind, UNTIL-style agents, who are trying to capture their foes, would go with Normal attacks. Its the VIPER-style agents that would use the Killing attacks.

I'm all for that. If there are genuine instances of "whoops!", those should be available on a downloadable and constantly updated FAQ.

I think the problem is that it makes it appear that if you want the "right" rules you need to go out and buy more than just the 5th Ed rulesbook - which sort of violates the idea behind hero. The extra books were supposed to be "nice but not necessary." Now it appears that you need to buy them anyway for rules errata - which looks a lot like a cynical trick to sell more books.

I'm in total agreement with what has been said so far. No power, Limitation or Advantage (even the ones without the Stop signs) can be used unless the GM says its OK. Personally, I like the MegaScale advantage, but it only gets used in my games for movement. Many characters in my games that can fly or teleport have a MegaScale version of that power. It ends the "How do we get there in time?" problem. If this friend of yours wants to put MegaScale on his normal leaping as opposed to spending the points for a specific long-range jumping power (like the Hulk) then he is a Munchkin and needs to be treated as such. If he wants a seperate power, however, there is no reason I can think of to deny him a "get me to the scene of the crime fast" movement power. P.S. Dang... this is only post 200 for me? Maybe I should just think comforting thoughts about quality over quantity...

Oh yeah... I remember this show. Automan was a computer program/AI (writen by the shows other main charcter - Walter Nebiker (sp?) who was a computer specialist for the police) which could project itself as a hologram. Thing was, if Automan drew enough energy, it could be solid. His costume was something right out of Tron with the. At first, Automan could only manifest at night, logic being that he tapped into the city's power grid, and when people started getting up in the morning and turned on all of their appliances, there wasn't enough power for him to stay manifest. As the show went on, though, he overcame this limitation by setting up power reserves. Automan had a side-kick of sorts: Cursor. It was exactly as the name implies - when Automan needed a car, Cursor would "draw" one.Of course, being a computer car, it behaved exactly like a car would in the early 80's computer games, right down to making 90-degree turns. When Automan "merged" with Walter, it was essentially Walter entering the hologram of Auto. I do remember a few times when Auto would walk through a wall, but Walter would bounce off and act pretty much like a guy who just walked into a wall. I don't remember him being able to walk through the walls like Automan could... but my memory may be fuzzy. I mean, it has been 20 years since I saw this show. Anyway... here is how I would build it (I don't have FREd handy, so I don't have costs) Desolidification. Useable On Others, User and Owner Share Power. Do not buy the Ranged advantage, yet limiting the range further to "Must be Merged" insead of just touching may be worth a -1/4 Lim.

This is exactly how I've handled it in my games. Of course, velocity can give you some obnoxious amounts of damage if you have the right combination. Say... a brick who throws a shrinker, who then grows to full size in mid-flight, thus adding growth-velocity bonus dice to the overall damage. I have one villian team that uses this tactic. Just on a standing throw, this FBS can do 21d6 if done as a Move-By, or 32d6 if done as a Move Through! The shrinker in question has 75% DR only vs collateral damage when changing size (she needs it!)

I never said anybody had to play a pure brick... I'm just surprised that in all of my years of Champions (13+ years), I've only run into one player who actually likes the pure-brick.

I have just the opposite problem. In our gaming group, Bricks are the least favorite archetype! And when we do see bricks, there is nothing "normal" about them. The brick my wife made, Dynamo, is an absorber. DocMan has two bricks: one is a shape-shifter patterned after Odo from DS9 with growth, shrinking and density increase in a Multi-Slot Multipower. He uses a spreadsheet to calculate the point allocations and mixtures of the various combinations. Then there is Star Sentinal, a brick much like Venom (an alien symbiot on a normal man) but with a few extra tricks like a flash-attack and strecthing with a battle staff. DocMan's wife played Anaba - who started out as a brick for simplicity of learning the system. But when we did a redesign, Anaba became something that almost defies an archetype. The only time I've ever seen anyone in our group play and keep a "pure" brick was a friend who played Crusher - a former college football player who got mutated after taking steriods. He has all the standard brickish traits with two notable exceptions: SPD 5 and DEX 26. I like bricks, though, which is why my bad-guy bricks tend to be nasty muthers. I wonder if I'm not trying to tell my players "Don't you wish you could be this tough? Pity you aren't a pure brick though..."

That's even worse than what our idiot half-orc barbarian did in one of our games. A major battle had just concluded in an underground lair. At this point, she attacks a charmed enemy soldier - who is still under the effects of a Charm Person spell! And yes, boys and girls, this was before they had a chance to question him about anything. Her excuse, "Well I thought the spell was going to wear off any moment now." "Are you insane?!" says the spellcaster who Charmed the enemy. "That sepll will last for hours!" "Well I didn't know!" says the orc defensively. "Did it occur to you to ask how long the spell would last before you went and did that?" "...." Well, none of us could accuse her of poor roleplay: she has the role of "stupid half-orc" down cold.

Ok, I'll bite: What book?

I think it is because simply having mental defense makes it far to easy for the Invisibility to be comprimised. Mental Defenses are common enough in my games that it would be worth a -1 Limitation on this power, thus making it almost useless. Mental Awareness, however, is not that common. I also think that needing mental awareness to "see" someone using psionic invisibility just makes more sense to me. The way I see it, Psionic Invisibility is not so much as commanding another person to ignore you, but generating enough "psychic static" that they simply don't notice you - a Sombody Else's Problem Field. Having a mind shielded against direct psychic assault is not helpful in defending against this. A mind that can "see" psionics and psionic effects, however, is not only able to "see" the static, but see through it as well.

As the Fantasy genre is my favorite, and having bought all the 4th Ed Fantasy Hero stuff, the 5th Ed Fantasy Hero has been on my "I want this" list anyway. My main hope is that it has a good magic system. D&D magic is OK, but very limited. Mage: the Ascension is very good, only there is no limit to how much magic you can use except for Paradox, which I don't lik eeither. I've heard wonderful things about Ars Magica, only I've never given it a serious look. ::And now, a very lame attempt to get the thread back on topic:: At the very least, are there any good spells for throwing things?

::smirks:: Well, I figured on calling the place "The Screaming Viking". Only it wouldn't be run by a half-orc, but rather a very high-level retired Barbarian with his greataxe on the wall behind the bar. So long as the axe stays up there, all is well.

In the 4th Ed Ultimate Mentalist, it recommends buying invisibility as a mind trick (i.e., you are simply creating a mental fog that causes people to ignore you) with the Limitation: Not vs Mental Defense.as a -¼ Limiatation. Personaly, I find that too limiting, as many folks besides mentalists can have mental defense. Being visible to Mental Awareness however, makes much more sense to me. Since Mental Awareness is, in effect, a sense that is part of the Normal Sight group, how would I construct this sort of invisibility?

Oh! I like this idea. A lot. I may steal it. I might also have to go get Fantasy Hero once I have the ca$h for it...

There is one bit of cruelty I once saw used in JLA I'm going to spring on my players one day. A team of bad-guys, all of whom can fly, all wearing armor. It isn't battle-armor like Defender's, it simply makes them all look 100% identical. They each have compeltely different powers, too, only there is no way to tell who's who by looking at them, and they always fly around, cluster, then break appart again to make it nearly impossible for the heroes to keep track of them. "Which one did I just shoot?" "Is the one comming after me now the flame-dude, the mental dude, the brick, or someone else?" The only way the JLA was able to beat them was by disrupting their radio communication. Without it, even THEY couldn't tell each other appart, and they lost their ability to coordinate without being overheard.

And in the original version of Shadowrun, you could stuff a grenade down your shorts and suffer - at worst - a Moderate Wound (it takes three Moderate Wounds and 1 Light Wound to be killed in SR).

I don't think it was matter of "forgot" but rather ommited for the sake of brevity. Air resistance, while very real, is also an unquantifiable variable because it depends on the surface area of the object being thrown - and bricks throw everything from manhole covers to cruise liners. Having to account for the amount of drag generated by items like that and everything in between would be staggering.