Christopher R Taylor

Right, if it could go either way, give it to the player character. If they probably wouldn't make it, let them just barely pull it off, gripping to the edge of the building with their fingernails. Use a DEX or appropriate roll to get up safely. This is HERO games, not chump games like real life where you'll probably fail and die.

Well, that depends. Is the landing significantly lower than the launch point? If its even, then no, you fall through like Neo in the Matrix. Leaping does not gain from run speed. If you have a drop then you might make it, from sheer momentum as Rich McGee explains. As a GM I'd just wing it, this isn't supposed to be a physics simulator. My instinct would be to look at the angle and just guess, based on experience throwing and dropping things through life. You go this fast, you go this far before air resistance causes your forward momentum to slow and stop. If you have some roll like Acrobatics, I might give you a better chance of landing it parkour style. You'll still take fall damage from the difference in height but with breakfall you can mitigate it.

As a more specific answer to this question; Flash does not deal any body damage, its not actually using the damage rules at all, it has a separate mechanic which uses the normal damage rules to count body, but only to determine the effect. Its like flipping a coin doesn't actually involve any payment or wealth, its just a device to determine an outcome.

That's probably the easiest system: you can leap from any substance you can move through up to your normal leap distance. The problem with that is Flipper could jump x meters on land because he'd buy Leaping to jump out of water. And I think we can all agree that Flipper would never cheat. I think the previous mention of 1/4 your movement to leap from momentum out of water works fine as a quick ruling.

Yes, that is in the rules:

To the best of my knowledge there are no actual rules covering this, but what I would do is give a percentage of the velocity in jump, say 25%, because you no longer have any thrust and momentum will die out pretty quickly. Adding an angle would help but is probably too complicated to bother with in a game.

Clairvoyance with postcognition does actually work well but you'll need all the senses you want to gather data from (which can be expensive, but it probably ought to be).

Yeah its going to be a really, really rare circumstance, but maybe some villain creates the flash gun that does killing damage to anyone without resistant flash defense. As a GM I would probably bop with a nerf bat any player who tried to buy that sort of build, but its theoretically possible.

Takes No Stun is in the powers section under Automaton; No Hit Locations and Does Not Bleed are just in the powers section.

Its amazing anyone learns to play D&D based on that standard. The truth is, all games look complicated and confusing when just reading the rules. But when you sit down and start to play, they fall into place easily enough. That's how 99.99% of us learned how to play ANY of these games: a buddy invited us to play and we dove in, learning as we went. Almost nobody learns to play a game by reading the rules and thinking them over.

This is the problem with trying to emulate the comics; The Hulk held up the Himalayas in Secret Wars. Now, he's very strong, but it doesn't matter how mad he gets, he's not going to be holding up billions of tons of rock. Every so often writers get a bit crazy in what they have characters do and you have to hold those outliers as mistakes or exceptions rather than how to build a game or a power. Spidey could easily uproot a small tree but I don't know how big a tree it was (don't recall that issue).

I would probably approach this as the tree using STR to hold on to the ground, and the character trying to use STR to pull it up. So you could just do a simple formula, like 5 STR per meter of height gripping strength with the roots, and its a simple STR vs STR contest. That makes an apple tree of around 7 meters have 35 STR to hold on to the ground, and a sequoia of 92m have 460 STR. Mind you the Hulk could probably rip up a redwood and beat you over the head with it in the comics, so there probably should be a cap of some sort to make it possible to emulate the comics.

Yeah I have been in one of those games. One fault GMs can fall into is to try to win, or at least to feel disappointed that their villains are beaten too easily. So they keep making the villains tougher and meaner and the PCs feel like they're in an arms race that requires them to be even more powerful and deadly. The concept here is that as a game, its about fun, and failure, misery, and being defeated is not fun. Its even tough to get some players to handle temporary defeat followed by amazing victory. This is where, in my opinion, the Avengers movies failed: they made the misery and loss and failure too total and the victory too minor and filled with suffering, regret, and misery. You didn't get that sense of triumph when Thanos was disintegrated, just a sense of relief. The first Avengers movie did it perfectly: very tough fight, almost a loss, incredibly challenging, but total triumph and redemption in the end. The second one... less so, because the stakes were so odd and felt so minor even though they were built up to be enormous. They evacuated a floating city. Yes, the claim was it would somehow blow up the earth yadda yadda, but it never felt like that was what would happen.

Yeah, it worked in the movie for batman to not save Rachel, because it got her out of the picture and gave us Two Face. But it was a bad Batman story, because Batman utterly failed and Joke won (over and over). Its like Superman murdering Zod by twisting his neck slightly after a 10 minute battle where he couldn't harm Zod at all, next to people too stupid to get up and walk away from the death beam. Heroes find a way. Especially Batman.

Classic Batman story with Neal Adams art

Once again, the reason the Joker has to be taken out now is not because of anything innate in his character, but because of the way writers have been writing him. Each new writer thinks they have to top the previous one. Frank Miller tried to show Joker at his most unhinged, most horrible so that Batman had to take extreme measures to stop him -- and later authors took that as a base line and wanted to make THEIR Joker story even more awful. In the end, they turned a sinister, somewhat deadly clown who did tricks like turn every fish in the harbor into Joker fish... into a mass murdering psychopath who slaughters by the dozens, or hundreds. THAT Joker has to be taken out. The Joker he started as, no.

It kind of is, but that's the place a lot of fantasy martial arts stuff goes. And I could see buying it as a special maneuver to cut through objects, but not than blanket "I just do enough damage"

I just want to go on record here as finding this horrific and shocking. Anyone doing 18 damage classes in a heroic game has really lost the plot in my book.

You could as a GM rule that if you roll x or lower then there's no visible or audible trace of your passage. For example: if you make your roll by 5, there's no sound. If you make your roll by 8, there's no visible damage to the rice paper. This is more old school Hero, but certainly within the concept of the skill. It just represents someone with astoundingly great stealth or an amazing effort doing things beyond the believable.

Well if you abuse the system anything can be overpowered, but as I have only run Multiform in previous editions, it may be less problematic than it definitely was in the past. Thanks for the update on the way Multiform is built, I was running from memory of 5th (I think? Might have been 4th) edition. In any case, the character that I ran a game for was definitely underpowered.

Correct... but as I said, IF your alternate forms can change into any of the other alternate forms without going back to the primary form first, THEN they have to buy those forms. But even if you aren't down any points in those forms, you still are in your main form, and a weaker character and trust me, that character feels it.

You could in theory do it with tunneling, dig a hole through the tree the width of the trunk and voila, it falls. The thing is, the rules aren't precise about dealing damage to objects like trees. You have two choices in the rules: things that break and are ruined, and walls that are breached. For the ruined things, reducing the Body to 0 results in a broken machine that doesn't work any more. For the wall, reducing the body to 0 creates a 2m x 1m ("human sized") hole. I interpret this to mean that you deal with objects by 2m square areas; you haven't knocked down the entire Great Wall of China by blowing a "human sized" hole in it, just this one section. You can break a crane by damaging this 2m area where the controls or engine or the base of the crane arm, etc. So if you want to knock down a tree, you have to do enough body damage to the section (or sections) of tree you're at to break it all the way through the trunk. This might take a few attacks to take down a Sequoia, for instance, but for most trees, one 2x2 meter area is sufficient. The entire tree hasn't been turned into wood chips, just that section, which causes it to fall. But a tree definitely has resistant PD; anyone who has chopped wood knows this for certain. Quite a bit of it, actually, given how hard you have to swing an axe (dealing killing damage) to cut though a log, even with the grain. In the rules, a tree is given 4-5 rPD and 3-4 rED (fire bad). The Body total ranges from 5 to 11 to get through a 2m area. That might be a bit low, in my estimation.

You have to buy all the multiforms in the main form making that character weaker. You have to buy every form your multiform can turn into, making each of them weaker. 5th made it less penalizing than 4th by giving you the doubler effect (5 points for each x2 forms) but still, say you make Ronin who can turn into 5 other forms, but those are still points that the main form gets no use from. That's 250 points/5 for the first form, then +5 for 2 forms, +5 for 4 forms and +5 for up to 8 forms, in this case 5. So your base "true" form is now 65 points down from every other character. "But," you say, "everyone pays for powers!" Indeed they do. But these powers directly impact the characters ability, they can use all of those powers in their single form. Multiform points are points in your character that this character never uses. Its just points gone from their total. So Ronin is a 195 point character in a world of 250 point characters. Each form that the other forms can change into are also crippled in this way. See, Duplication you're using all those forms at the same time, so you're using all of that power at once. Multiform you only use one power set at a time. The reason I see this as a problem is playing the campaign and seeing "dang Ronin is just flat out weaker than everyone else" in action. It was frustrating for the player, and for me as the GM. Being able to turn into a different set of powers is valuable, but not that valuable.

It could be. But its hardly unreasonable to expect a character who could fly in Issue 17 to fly again in issue 18 when they encounter traps on the ground. If this causes the story not to work, that's not because of unrealistic expectations of a reader, but poor writing on the part of the comic book. Things have changed quite a bit, I agree. Back in the Silver Age, readers were less interested in continuity than gee whiz fun. Today, people have read, and played games, and talked about it and won't put up with what readers used to. But I don't really call that a problem for anyone but lazy and unimaginative writers. Yeah he had 6 character sheets: one for each element and one for his normal form which was sort of a ninja. Unfortunately because of the way multiform worked in 5th edition (and as far as I know still today) basically he ended up with 6 different characters all of whom are weaker than every other character in the game for the dubious advantage of variety. And since he had no control over which element he'd show up as, the advantage was even more questionable.

Mmm pickles. Seroiusly though, some systems do lend themselves to more lethal combat than others, although if you use the optional rules for hero like hit locations, disabling, impairing, bleeding, etc its quite lethal as well. Particularly given the lack of resistant defenses (unless you're Clint Eastwood in A Few Dollars More) and mortal level stats.