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Christopher R Taylor

HERO Member
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Christopher R Taylor last won the day on December 12 2023

Christopher R Taylor had the most liked content!

About Christopher R Taylor

  • Birthday 12/09/1965

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  • Website URL
    http://www.kestrelarts.com

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Salem, Oregon
  • Interests
    Gaming, Theology, History, Music, Outdoors, Automotive and Airplane technology, Art
  • Biography
    Author of Snowberry's Veil, Old Habits, and Life Unworthy.
  • Occupation
    Author and illustrator

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  1. There's an X-Men character called Forget-Me-Not who has that power. People just don't remember him, but he's in lots of their adventures helping out and doing stuff that later seems like luck or some amazing coincidence. Its a great concept well handled in the comics. He does heroic things but gets no praise or notice.
  2. I usually buy automatons to 0 CON, REC, and END, then buy all their abilities to 0 END Cost. You can't push then, but usually they're mindless anyway so they won't have the willpower to push. Its a whopping savings of 18 points, so it doesn't exactly pay for any of their very expensive automaton abilities and life support but its a bit of a cost offset.
  3. Looking over Victorian Hero, looks great, nice layout, tons of info. I especially like the mentions of Carnacki, a very forgotten obscure supernatural detective. I enjoyed the short stories I read of his adventures. There were several ghost detective types but Carnacki was the best. If you liked Western Hero, this is a great companion, they both are set roughly the same time period, but from different perspectives. I'm still going through it but great first impression and lots of great content so far.
  4. Its an easy mistake to make. But when you write tens of thousands of words, you're going to make errors, and people who've never even tried find it easy to pick on that kind of thing. You know what professional editors say is an acceptable number of typos in a manuscript? About 3 per 10,000 words. They say that it is basically impossible to have a perfect manuscript unless its decades old and has been gone over constantly. A book like Victorian Hero has nearly 200,000 words. It drives me nuts when people nitpick stuff like that. Think about how many tens of thousands of errors multiple passes of editing caught, not the couple you spotted.
  5. Well, my thinking is that this is a complication that non-mutants do not suffer from, and that is a drawback that mutants face. Plus, it gives a specific mechanism to represent someone who can be tracked where others cannot.
  6. I think that is how I build mutants in my Champions game but its been so long since I ran anything or looked at my notes, I can't recall. A physical complication "can be detected as a mutant" could cover the mutant finding machines. Infrequently, slightly? Maybe? Its not like being detected means you're instantly in jail or dead. And it isn't likely to come up a lot in most campaigns.
  7. Yeah you can build it with entangle in 6th edition as well. Its a nasty effective power on most player characters. Mind you its not really stunning, but it can simulate that with instant.
  8. Yeah Darkness is perceptible, so the scanner would pick up a void, interference, and out on the street people might notice something around you like an effect that is blocking the detect.
  9. Well my concern with this idea is that this means you're distinctive to your fellow mutants: they have the negative reaction to you as well. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  10. Yeah, again without more details than the rules give its up to the GM how to interpret this stuff. Does not distinctive in some cultures mean a country you can go to or a region? or does it just mean "among your fellow mutants"? Or a special school run by a bald man? The only way to really judge is to based it on your idea of how it works or to look through examples of characters and try to figure it out through that.
  11. Yeah in a typical mutant detection campaign its a really bad idea to be discovered as a mutant but it takes special gear, which is a push -- and then there is the "not distinctive in some cultures" has to play in as well; not only will some people simply won't care if you're a mutant but mutants won't care. To me that looks like: Mutant: Distinctive Features (Not Concealable; Always Noticed and Causes Major Reaction; Detectable Only By Technology Or Major Effort; Not Distinctive In Some Cultures) And that's 5 points. I mean obviously Nightcrawler's complication is different than, say, Marvel Girl's but that's the baseline. That section "not concealable" is the key in this discussion; can you buy a device or take a power to cover up a distinctive feature that cannot be concealed? Sadly um, the rules don't actually say. No, seriously that huge two volume set doesn't actually say what makes a distinctive feature "unconcealable" or how that prohibits the use of things to hide it. It sounds odd to say that Mutants cannot conceal their mutanthood but that's covered by the detectable only by tech or major effort. Basically that means (to me at least) that its only possible to detect being a mutant in this complication with a device, but if you have that device you cannot hide your status from it. To some degree we can figure it out: this is a feature so distinct and obvious that even a disguise won't hide it. The Thing, for example. Having a gigantic pair of wings on your back (although Angel folds them away pretty amazingly well!). Spock can hide his ears under a hat or a cheesy 80s headband. A dwarf cannot hide how short they are without some extraordinary effort and device (two dwarves in a trench coat). Groot cannot hide that he's a tree even with Ben Grimm's fedora and overcoat. But its not even touched on in the rules, its just referred to. And obviously a power purchased to conceal something will, even if it cannot ordinarily be concealed. Invisibility can make a really distinct glowing amazing thing not visible (Ben Grimm being made so by Invisible Girl). Images can conceal a dragon, despite being 60 feet long and made of scales.
  12. Even if you don't go completely over to 6th edition, there are a bunch of good ideas in the rules worth splicing into an earlier version
  13. See, he probably thought he was losing that effort, but it was actually a hidden win
  14. Removing complications is a tricky thing to do in the Hero system, you either buy em off with XPS or eat it. You can give people complications with Transform (and in the APV I you can temporarily give them to someone with a change environment) so in theory transform could remove a complication as well. Invisibility to a detector seems a valid in between step to me, its vs an unusual sense and there's nothing in the rules that says you cannot target a specific use of unusual sense (you cannot buy it against ALL unusual senses).
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