Christopher R Taylor

I don't really understand why he's ducking. Maybe for aiming? That thing is no cover.

Part of the reason people are recoiling from using Minor Transforms might be that they are thinking in terms of 5th (10 points per d6) rather than 6th (5 points per d6). At that cost, I agree Minor is too much. Its also why you should at least drop the 6th edition cost structure (Cosmetic 3/d6, Major 10/d6, Total 15/d6) into your 5th edition game, if not move to 6th.

Yep, that's the plan. Lots of recipes, lots of details on end results, lots of information on how to run trade skills and make them part of a game, costs, equipment required, etc. Its a bit tedious to make, but I think it has some value for fantasy gaming and can be used in pretty much any game system with very minor adjustments. It will be specific to my gaming world in terms of ingredients, but the concepts can be used anywhere that has dragons, etc.

I think reduced penetration works fine to reduce body damage while doing lots of stun, particularly on a normal attack. Its just the reverse approach to increased stun multiple: it does less body rather than more stun.

I do like the concept of maneuvers to increase damage or accuracy. They make sense in real life too: you can hit someone a good 99 times out of 100 if all you want to do is contact, but you're not going to do any damage that way. And you can hit a lot harder if you don't care about actually hitting, just pure impact. So sacrificing a damage class to get +1 OCV or one OCV to get +1 damage class seems very reasonable to me. But no matter how much I sold or explained them, nobody actually wanted to do it.

The trick is coming up with how to make stuff magical, without requiring a mage around to enchant them. Some substances could easily have magic in them innately - dragon bones, etc. I'm looking at something like was in EverQuest, with creating mana in a bottle the way Enchanters did in the MMOG, which then is used in trades for enchanted products or activating enchanted potential in materials

This is a great point, and I think its worth considering finding a way for lower end stuff to scale down better. If all you play is Champions, then its no problem, you're knocking down buildings anyway. But Fantasy Hero, I found many of the most interesting spells were the cheapest - but some concepts were not worth it because of the cost. Why does Flash Defense vs Taste cost the same as vs Sight? Why does Clairsentience with smell cost the same as with sight? There's little stuff like that which could be tweaked, I think.

5 points is enough for this, in my opinion. Its why some builds don't work in Hero; you try to simulate them and they end up just being nonsense.

Jeweler is probably the focus, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to work it into a player tradeskill as opposed to just a job. I mean, I could put janitor into the book but it has no bearing on player characters. What I might work up is something like sockets in Blizzard games; small augments you can add to items

This is turning out to be sort of a self-solving problem. As I work up each trade skill and create the fantasy materials in the world, the trades are creating themselves. You can make armor out of Dragon's bones, but that's not really blacksmithing, it falls better under stonework. And you need leather and cloth to make armor. And the leatherworker needs woodworking for parts, and so on...

Its less useful in personal builds (although there are people who hate rolling low so badly that its worth the points to avoid it), but very useful for stuff like magic items. That sword that never rolls low is really nice, that energy blast for PowerBlastDude, less so. Other genres: learn to love them too

I think an advantage that adds +1 to the minimum you roll on each die would be a useful addition: your d6 becomes 2-6 rather than 1-6 (2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) for +1/4. Each +1/4 increases that one (3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6). The average doesn't change much, but you won't get low rolls.

Sure you could do that: naked special effect addition, maybe a +1/4 naked advantage

I really wish they'd stop just abandoning everything that went before every expansion. Why not go back to your garrison, and have portals from there to the new content? Why not have a portal to the farm in Pandaria from your garrison and grow herbs there? It seems like they put so much work into an expansion then just pretend it never existed when the new one comes out. Why not use previous metals in the new recipes, and add a few new things? You could put follower missions into the garrison to let them go find you supplies. Go get me iron, go get me dreamfoil...

The interesting part is that The Mandarin was chosen as Tony's arch enemy specifically because he uses magical rings as his power source: magic vs technology. So in this world, Tony the magus would go up against some techno guy!

In this universe, consecrated is a fundamental change. In a universe like ours, where consecration has no discernible combat effect, its cosmetic.

I agree, but I don't think that's a bad thing, so much. I think writers got a bit carried away with "its a comic!" and "superpowers, whee!" because they often weren't taking the work very seriously. The first guy that said "Superman flies so fast he goes back in time" wasn't thinking about a long-term permanent thing for the character or some established universe. He just had a story to tell and went "what if??"

If you don't want people using drain and dispel to shatter things, then just deal damage to it directly like normal. However, I would think that taking 'real weapon' on an item would make it more, not less vulnerable to breaking attacks and effects.

Or every point you hit by you can raise the minimum by one; so instead of a 1 its a 2, but it doesn't increase the maximum damage. Still I share eepjr24's concern, however that's pronounced. Its giving high OCV more damage without any kind of defensive offset other than buying up DCV. There is precedent for rolling well meaning a better hit in Hero, but its not very pronounced, and while conceptually this appeals to me, its not something I'd want to actually put in a game.

That's how I did it: areas that are holy or unholy are change environment. I slipped in a few minor effects like +1 to magic skill roll for necromancy in unholy areas, but that's not necessary.

Firstly, I think a GM who makes certain powers or power combinations off limits to non-mages is going to have some frustrated players, especially the more creative ones. Well, the premise is "how to make them seem different" and the proposed solution is "make superpowers have to make scientific sense, and magic not" which leads to "some stuff either one can and cannot do." Magic only seems and feels magical when its inexplicable and surprising, when it does things you can't and don't expect. If a mage pulls a gun out and shoot someone, it doesn't matter if the bullets are made of demon bones and summoned in the chamber rather than using a magazine. It just doesn't seem magical.

Just buy Dispel Body, and it works fine. Inanimate objects have no recovery, so they stay drained or dispelled, and Body is the target to make things break or die. That's why magical substances in my world tend to have power defense. Drain has a continual effect, it just stacks each hit. Dispel is all or nothing (unless you buy cumulative, see Hyper-Man's post above). So you can get different effects. Dispel might seem cheaper, but it has an absolute top end it can affect, while Drain can go forever, so it depends what you're trying to simulate.

Sif might be in there, she's not a huge name for some reason and never really caught on. I have always liked her in all her appearances.

Seems to me the first thing to do is to not try to explain or systematize it. Don't apply science to the magic stuff. How does it work? Who gives a damn, its magic. Focus on the hard science for superpowers, so it has to make sense. Ignore all that for the magic, its crazy and magic and it doesn't make any sense. Magic should be able to do things superpowers cannot, like warp time and space, summon things, create stuff out of nothing, etc. Avoid simple energy constructs and have the magic be stuff. Instead of an energy force field, its a shield made of shards of mirrors. Instead of an energy blast, a dragon's head shows up and blasts fire all over the target.

I'm kind of buried right now with work but some time I plan to get back to this project again. If anyone else wants to do conversions and put them here, that would be great, too