Christopher R Taylor

My only problem with usable on others is that its a constant effect, so you can dispel someone's food? Plus active magic is perceptible in my game if you're a spellcaster so it would be kind of odd. Instead of making just food, it would be magic food.

I play mostly heroic Hero and this is exactly right, its tough to feel any real range of weapon variability if you have at most 5 ranks to work from. But increasing that range breaks ... just about everything else, so its not a solution at all.Some of the problems with Heroic Weapons come from there being an amazing lack of granularity at the heroic level. 2-6 Damage Classes doesn't give a lot of material to emulate the many weapons of the world. I'm solidly in the "don't fix what ain't broken, Hero is a great system that doesn't need monkeying with" camp, but the KA dice system has always been twitchy. Just treating KA as a normal attack with slightly different resolution and defenses would fix a lot of that. The d3 instead of d6-1 stun multiple didn't really work, despite being less widly swinging.

Hela is the more acceptable candidate at her age.

In a game, Hulk makes a better villain than hero. In a story, he makes a better hero because he's a much more interesting conflict.

Well established in comics by the reversal effect. When a superhero becomes a villain or goes rogue, they suddenly gain about 150 points in powers. Conversely, when a villain becomes a hero, suddenly they lose about half their power. Why? Because writing powerful characters is hard to craft a challenge with, but weak characters are easy to challenge. And lazy, sloppy writing. Super Speed breaks the game, as it were. Any GM in Champions knows this. The speedster utterly dominates combat, and a speedster with the kind of power level as Flash and the Supers would cost thousands of points. Writing speedsters means either you are ridiculously inconsistent (the easy, most common way) or have very debilitating effects on the character constantly so they can't speed their way out of trouble (lazy writing). Its very difficult to come up with a reasonable, constant, well-crafted challenge issue after issue or show after show. So you get... crap.

Right, Ego will make some effects more difficult, but it doesn't do anything against a mental blast. For example: Mind Control and Mental Blast both target DMCV by default, so ego does nothing for that. With Mind Control your Ego total is what the effect is compared to, so every point of ego makes a difference as to how badly you can be affected. Even 1-2 points can make a power lose one level of effect For example: if you have 10 Ego, and Brain Boogaloo rolls a 20 on his Mind Control effect, you're at Ego+10 effect. But if you'd spent 1 point for an 11 ego, then he only gets equal to Ego. Similarly, each point of MD also reduces effect - 1 point of MD would have the same effect. However, with Mental Blast, your ego is irrelevant to the effect. Mental defense acts like PD against a physical attack: the roll of 20 goes straight at your stun without any Mental Defense. Each point of Mental Defense lowers the effect by 1. For example, you have 30 Ego but no MD, a roll of 20 on Brain Boogaloo's mental blast does 20 straight to your stun. But with 5 points of mental defense, he only gets 15 points through. So MD actually is better than just buying up Ego, because it works for both attacks. Plus you can buy resistant on MD, to protect from killing mental attacks.

Maybe 1 more multipower slot with armor? He could block punches, claws, swords etc with it.

Yeah I have used minor transforms for create food and water (from existing food) or to purifty, and major (from nothing). Its pretty cheap, you only need 1 or 2 dice at most.

Having helped build those schools, I can say that was part of the "Bible" for the spells that Rob Bell gave us. You had to have x sorts of spells (a defense spell, a movement spell, a few attack spells, etc) and they had to have side effects, spell roll, etc. So there's a great deal of similarity but a cohesive pattern of magic and how it works between all the various types of magic, no matter how odd or different they happened to be. And that, to me, is the key: to make it feel consistent and united instead of hodge-podge of random types. *Edit: also, 4th edition side effects were a flat minimum cost for the modifier, so you could have a 5 point light spell that had a 30 point side effect :/

I didn't realize that Jasmine was that young. She has a follower tiger that's pretty scary. All of them have sidekicks from a little dragon to a snowman so those are probably worth considering

Finally replacing Ma Deuce? Its been a workhorse forever. For years it had the record for the longest sniper shot with a single round.

Well technically the average normal human being can't dead lift 100 kilos over their head even with a huge effort, so I think "normal" is a bit overstated in Hero. I've always considered 8's for base characteristics and the resulting figured (or their equivalent in 6th) to be more representative of a normal human being. Even so, your basic point holds; the game doesn't represent long term running or really any athletics very accurately. Encumbrance is something that doesn't come up terribly often in games but it probably should in many fantasy and more gritty modern settings. You can condition yourself to be able to handle loads for long periods of time - the military has a saying: sweat now so you don't bleed later - but most people do not. I always consider armor in my fantasy games to be well distributed, so that its not the same as carrying an armload of metal, and I treat it as half weight. backpacks and other carrying methods designed to distribute weight well and carry it easily do the same thing for weight carried inside. Both, of course, only for the purposes of encumbrance.

That's a flaw in the horse writeup; almost all animals can run very fast, but not for very long. There are some that can run a long time but its rare. Also, almost none of them can run tactically and carefully at measured speeds, so they are using NC to get that, and shouldn't have such big run speeds. I build my horses with fair running, then an additional boost of running that's x2 END cost, to simulate their inability to keep that up forever. Naturally, some horses are better at long distance running, so they might not have that particular feature.

I built a chart of 0 cost martial arts once, its worth digging up again. My idea is that anyone can do any martial arts maneuver, they're just lousy at it. All the maneuvers are the same: killing strike, etc, but they are built with the martial arts rules to cost 0 points, so they have heavy restrictions and penalties on them. Then I considered them free, everyone can try. Its just not very effective. Most of the tougher maneuvers take a full phase, for instance, because they require concentration and careful aim. All of them have OCV penalties.

I've found that varying the normal PD and resistant PD between armors (and ED) does a pretty good job of simulating different protection levels. Also giving armor piercing to pokey weapons (picks, for example) helps simulate their ability to penetrate armor. There are little things you can do with weapon design as well, such as: swords get +1 OCV (large attack area, easier to use) axes get +1 DC (leverage, hits hard) piercing weapons get armor piercing hammers, etc get +1 stun multiple maces etc get penetrating damage The result is that weapons feel different without a lot of complication. I do suggest trying out this though: give armor a 15- coverage, and if the roll is missed, then they only provide half protection. This represents joints, gaps, and weaknesses in the armor. Particularly well-made or enchanted armor will not have this problem. This spot can be aimed at with a -5 OCV targeting attack.

The way horses will go until they die is tough to actually simulate in hero. You can have them use up END until they start burning Stun, but once they run out of STN they pass out with no permanent effects. Not every horse will do this, of course, they all have their personalities and inclinations. Some love to run, some are lazy, some are stubborn, some are frightened, etc, etc. Famously, Seabiscuit was lazy and bored until he had something to compete against. In the final race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, who was just as competative, Seabiscuit outran the bigger horse and essentially ruined him. War Admiral was never the same, never as good. His heart broke, they said, because he just could not outrun the little ugly horse. They're very interesting animals, horses. As to how to simulate the game little pony that runs until his heart pops, maybe an ego roll to keep going when he's out of STN and burn body instead. With a riding roll and presence attack by the rider, bonuses can be given to the pony's ego roll, so he can keep doing it even when he'd normally stop.

In hero terms, they really are the same car. Its unlikely the new Strike Force book will have much detail on the races, but you can guess based on the bits of info you have available. Since there will be adventure hints and stories from the campaign, its likely both showed up again and you can learn more from there as well. And, of course, maybe you can get Surbrook to share some info since he has all the notes

I'm not sure Dr Strange really needs an extended origin sequence, he's a wizard. They are wise and know spells. Some short bits to show he was an arrogant SOB who learned his lesson, okay but I'm really burning out on 45-90 minute origin sequences. Nobody felt compelled to explain where Dirty Harry came from. We didn't have to see an origin story of James T Kirk until the new movies :/

The "batmobile" in Dark Knight returns was basically a tank, and yes it had guns. Rubber bullets. Honest.

That approach would probably work better if the rest of the storytelling wasn't all linked and sequential. I mean, if each episode was a story to its self in isolation to the rest of the series, OK. But if everything except how his powers work has direct and regular, meticulous continuity...

Has to be some kind of leverage for a bigger purchase price or something. I think I read somewhere that Marvel isn't even publishing Fantastic Four as a comic any more to kill the franchise.

I read somewhere they got partial rights to use them, maybe they'll make an appearance in the 2-part Infinity Gauntlet thing.

I haven't seen that show since it aired, but was she really that strong? Even the hulk only had about 30 STR on the TV show.

For most FH campaigns, I don't think real world misery and breakdowns from marching would apply. You're simulating Conan running 500 miles then beating up a sorcerer, or Lord of the Rings with Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas running across a thousand miles to track hobbits. But for a gritty campaign, say War Hero, yeah I could see some marching rules being appropriate. Although, ancient history is full of stories of very well trained armies forced marching and fighting pitched battles. Caesar was pretty famous for pulling that off several times.

As far a I'm concerned, the lack of a good Galactus story leaves room for Marvel Studios to do it right with the FF. But whether they will or not remains to be seen. In my opinion the best FF movie ever made to this day is still The Incredibles. And that film showed you could do a great superhero movie without it needing to threaten the whole world with doom.