Christopher R Taylor

Batman has such a big "family" now they could fill a small superhero world with just Bats

Doesn't look good for Aquaman 2. Thirsty women made Aquaman 1 a billion dollar movie but even with the Christmas Day surge it doesn't look like this one is going to even break even.

You're not understanding my point about how powers work, but that's okay. Merry Christmas!

That is part of why I house ruled them out of existence. Well, that and it breaks the system by reversing the proper order: if something is not universally applicable, then its limited, and should be a limitation, not extra cost. Telepathy just works on minds. Not working on certain minds is worth a limitation, not an adder.

You know that thing Murtaugh does in Lethal Weapon where he loosens up his neck before taking a really careful long distance shot?

I think that is a better depiction, there are folks who like to crunch the numbers and work things out.

I mean, this is stuff you could try in 4th edition Hero with exactly the same discussion. Is that a sign the game is more complicated?

None, unless its a campaign where you're all undead and demons. If anything its an advantage to not positively affect your enemies with an area effect spell.

I think some of the problem is caused by trying to make the Heal and knockback do two different things without buying two different powers. There is an advantages in the Advanced Player Guide I called "Accurate Selective" that you place on area effect to make it act like a computer game, where it hits only the targets you intend to without needing to roll for each one. I recommend building a compound power with that on each of the sections.

He was around 22-23 when he got the powers, there was no explanation how long he was in the war, but he was frozen before it was ended. So that's 2 years, maybe? Then he was unfrozen in roughly 2010 and lived until around 2020, so another 10 years or so. That puts him at mid 30s, when he went back in time and broke all temporal mechanics and rules and coexisted with himself for 75 years, putting him around 110. The explanation for why he aged is "we don't want Captain America around any more"

I am not sure that helps any. If the healing doesn't take effect, then there's not a roll, and hence no knockback. If you don't do anything to the target... you don't do anything to it.

He was active as two people at the same time, carefully never interacting, apparently. And none of that explains how the super soldier serum didn't keep him unaging, or at least very slow aging. Or make that movie any better.

It doesn't really, since he was both frozen in the antarctic as Captain America for decades and also retired and growing old (??? somehow? The super soldier serum greatly inhibits aging) with Peggy Carter at the same time.

My problem with this is that if it has no effect on a target... then it has no effect on the target. No knockback, either.

Making a good knockback-only or knockback-focused power is difficult to do for any affordable price. Knockback is pretty powerful (it disrupts and moves a target away, requiring them to get up and get back to you, and can put them over cliffs, etc) so it does cost, but that hurts when you're playing a heroic setting where points are at a premium. Just play any computer game that has knockback and knockdown effects to see how very powerful it can be, and why its restricted so much in these games. Telekinesis only to throw costs quite a bit too (it takes 10 STR just to lift a person, especially in armor etc). I hesitate to bring this up, but flight or leaping usable as an attack can work if you totally control it, but you GM probably will not be very pleased with your build. You can stack all kinds of limitations on it like instant and only to throw, makes it pretty inexpensive.

I am sure that the rules specifically say that stun only attacks do no knockback, but as a GM I would allow a power that is stun only to do knockback if it were bought to do knockback. After all, its the impact that does the knockback, not the lethal damage so its not inconceivable, its just not how the system normally works. You'd just count the Body as if it were being dealt to see if knockback occurs, even though no Body damage is done. Incidentally, different discussion, but this is why I think Stun Only should be a -¼ limitation: you're getting less for your points, don't do knockback, deliver no momentum (cannot push a button for example) and only in certain sorts of games is dealing no lethal damage a drawback. The drawbacks seem to outweigh the questionable benefits.

Something worth considering is that very few Fantasy Hero settings have knockback as an activated option, most heroic campaigns use knockdown instead. After all, Conan doesn't knock his enemies flying through walls or down the street. So that's another advantage, jamming active cost up even more :/ Its implied in the concept, but not the mechanics; you get the limitation on Blast.

I agree, Marvel has a lot of great content out, while DC has half a good movie in Wonder Woman and a handfull of great Batman content. While Marvel's latest stuff is no better than DC, they have more quality in their catalog. Aquaman 2 doesn't look particularly promising, but I thought the first one was pretty idiotic and boring and it pulled in over a billion box office so :/

I would allow someone to buy "does knockback" on a heal, if they had a good reason but as Lonewulf points out, for that to take effect you'd have to heal the undead which is probably not what you mean to do. If this was allowed, you'd roll the healing dice, and count the Body as if it was a normal attack and calculate knockback from that.

Marvel Cinema has a real problem because they were approaching their movies with the same sloppy, poor approach that has rocketed them to 9% of the US comic book market... when combined with DC. They were making movies by deciding on a character, then announcing the movie, then looking for someone to write and direct it based on a checklist of physical characteristics rather than experience, talent, and a love of the source material. They found the same formula that DC did with Superman, then just like DC abandoned it because they figured it was their brilliant leadership that resulted in the earnings. And everyone in the studio and Disney wanted a finger in the pie so they would get some of the credit for a billion dollar win and a cut of the profits. The result has been a disaster. They COULD have made new characters like She Hulk and Ms Marvel work, with better writing, directing, and planning, but were so sloppy and stupid at it the turned the most profitable franchise in movie history into a disaster. And for what? Not a love of comics or the medium, that's for sure.

I always lock down to focus on one project at a time because I find I am too easily distracted and will shift around between 20 or so ideas and projects and get nothing really done. I don't listen to any music either, so I can concentrate better.

Here's the thing. In an ordinary campaign, I would never as a GM allow a character to have a follower with more points than they have. But there could be a campaign I might design in which, for example, every player plays a sidekick*, and their "follower" is the main hero in the story. A campaign that focuses on being the sidekick and what they do, while the GM runs the main hero off doing main hero stuff, needing to be rescued, acting on leads you pick up, etc. Or a game in which you are the squire of a knight, or the guardian of a wizard. That's why there's no hard and fast rule: like almost everything in Hero, it depends. *I would link an obligatory The Tick episode with the sidekick lounge and the Mad Bomber What Bombs At Midnight but I can't find it on Youtube.

The difficulty is that magazines are essentially dead (even Popular Science and National Geographic have closed down), and there's not a viable online alternative. Particularly with modern culture where short form video is all anyone has an attention span for.

I have always enjoyed writing, but at the moment everything is on hold because we moved my elderly mother into the house and I have to attend to her more or less all day long. So no writing, no illustration, no publishing, and barely enough energy to finish a day. CS Forrester, the author of Horatio Hornblower once wrote that he would come up with ideas, then let them go fallow in his head. He likened it to lowering a log into the water of a sea and letting it build up plants and barnacles and such, then lifting it up after a time to see what grew while he was not paying it any attention. And I find that happens for me as well. So while I am not writing, somewhere in the back of my head its still working on plots and characters and dialog and descriptions and story structures and such. New things are coming up and I scribble them down because my memory isn't what it once was. Some day I'll get back to it and hopefully be richer as a creator for my experiences and the delay.

That is how I understand it. Right, you use extra stats before you get to the character's personal ones. If someone Aided your BODY and you were stabbed by a deer's antlers, it would take Body away from the Aided amount first. Well you could still use the Aid but it wouldn't do anything until some has faded away, or you have used some END in actions. In that case it would top it off, again.