Christopher R Taylor

Knock you down, wrap you up, blind you with debris their wings stir up, stomp you with area effect feet, bite limbs off, knock you flying, stun you with a roar, terrify you, cause you to at least temporarily go insane, destroy your equipment, off the top of my head.

I think I have heard that rumor but I never saw the box set to know for sure.

City of Heroes is really feeling its age though, could do with a graphical, gameplay, and setting update.

Almost all legends have at least some slight basis in reality: there probably was a guy Robin Hood is based on (possibly more than one), for example. There probably was an Aurthurian king (not called arthur) but the later Norman stories are probably based at most on noble ideals, types of knights known in the past, etc rather than anything real. There was no Lancelot, but there probably were some knights people knew in the past that were that kind of ideal knight who failed because he took the chivalrous ideal of love too far with his noble lady.

The origin of holidays is religious (Holy Day) so that would be a major contributing factor; the faith and religious traditions of a community determines which days they set aside as holy. Modern holidays tend to be noteworthy cultural events or the birth of someone we want to commemorate; in the past sometimes they were days for remembering some great military event or victory but that seems to have gone out of favor these days. It could rise again, with noteworthy victories given their special day. Tyrants in particular like to impose holidays to impose their ideas and cultural demands on a public: celebrate my birthday! Celebrate the foundation of our new 1000 year reich!

I would love to have a lot of the old Hero covers as posters; Justice Inc, Danger International, Fantasy Hero (any of the editions), Lands of Mystery, Champions 4th edition as you say, there's been so many great ones.

I usually use late medieval, but without gunpowder. So there are some advances like compass and even pocket watches, but no guns or cannons. If I was going to use a historical setting it would probably be the 14th century because it was such a turbulent, eventful time period. Always plenty to do.

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.