Christopher R Taylor

Its an easy mistake to make. But when you write tens of thousands of words, you're going to make errors, and people who've never even tried find it easy to pick on that kind of thing. You know what professional editors say is an acceptable number of typos in a manuscript? About 3 per 10,000 words. They say that it is basically impossible to have a perfect manuscript unless its decades old and has been gone over constantly. A book like Victorian Hero has nearly 200,000 words. It drives me nuts when people nitpick stuff like that. Think about how many tens of thousands of errors multiple passes of editing caught, not the couple you spotted.

*yoink*!

Well, my thinking is that this is a complication that non-mutants do not suffer from, and that is a drawback that mutants face. Plus, it gives a specific mechanism to represent someone who can be tracked where others cannot.

I think that is how I build mutants in my Champions game but its been so long since I ran anything or looked at my notes, I can't recall. A physical complication "can be detected as a mutant" could cover the mutant finding machines. Infrequently, slightly? Maybe? Its not like being detected means you're instantly in jail or dead. And it isn't likely to come up a lot in most campaigns.

Yeah you can build it with entangle in 6th edition as well. Its a nasty effective power on most player characters. Mind you its not really stunning, but it can simulate that with instant.

Yeah Darkness is perceptible, so the scanner would pick up a void, interference, and out on the street people might notice something around you like an effect that is blocking the detect.

Well my concern with this idea is that this means you're distinctive to your fellow mutants: they have the negative reaction to you as well. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Yeah, again without more details than the rules give its up to the GM how to interpret this stuff. Does not distinctive in some cultures mean a country you can go to or a region? or does it just mean "among your fellow mutants"? Or a special school run by a bald man? The only way to really judge is to based it on your idea of how it works or to look through examples of characters and try to figure it out through that.

Yeah in a typical mutant detection campaign its a really bad idea to be discovered as a mutant but it takes special gear, which is a push -- and then there is the "not distinctive in some cultures" has to play in as well; not only will some people simply won't care if you're a mutant but mutants won't care. To me that looks like: Mutant: Distinctive Features (Not Concealable; Always Noticed and Causes Major Reaction; Detectable Only By Technology Or Major Effort; Not Distinctive In Some Cultures) And that's 5 points. I mean obviously Nightcrawler's complication is different than, say, Marvel Girl's but that's the baseline. That section "not concealable" is the key in this discussion; can you buy a device or take a power to cover up a distinctive feature that cannot be concealed? Sadly um, the rules don't actually say. No, seriously that huge two volume set doesn't actually say what makes a distinctive feature "unconcealable" or how that prohibits the use of things to hide it. It sounds odd to say that Mutants cannot conceal their mutanthood but that's covered by the detectable only by tech or major effort. Basically that means (to me at least) that its only possible to detect being a mutant in this complication with a device, but if you have that device you cannot hide your status from it. To some degree we can figure it out: this is a feature so distinct and obvious that even a disguise won't hide it. The Thing, for example. Having a gigantic pair of wings on your back (although Angel folds them away pretty amazingly well!). Spock can hide his ears under a hat or a cheesy 80s headband. A dwarf cannot hide how short they are without some extraordinary effort and device (two dwarves in a trench coat). Groot cannot hide that he's a tree even with Ben Grimm's fedora and overcoat. But its not even touched on in the rules, its just referred to. And obviously a power purchased to conceal something will, even if it cannot ordinarily be concealed. Invisibility can make a really distinct glowing amazing thing not visible (Ben Grimm being made so by Invisible Girl). Images can conceal a dragon, despite being 60 feet long and made of scales.

Even if you don't go completely over to 6th edition, there are a bunch of good ideas in the rules worth splicing into an earlier version

See, he probably thought he was losing that effort, but it was actually a hidden win

Removing complications is a tricky thing to do in the Hero system, you either buy em off with XPS or eat it. You can give people complications with Transform (and in the APV I you can temporarily give them to someone with a change environment) so in theory transform could remove a complication as well. Invisibility to a detector seems a valid in between step to me, its vs an unusual sense and there's nothing in the rules that says you cannot target a specific use of unusual sense (you cannot buy it against ALL unusual senses).

Chris Goodwin posted what I was thinking, its damage negation / damage reduction with an activation roll. If you really want it to be based on the player's roll, then you can add that as a side effect: does not work if attacker makes DEX roll, -1 DC of DN per x points DEX roll made by. I have to add though; I cannot puzzle out exactly what the DEX roll is meant to simulate. Is this supposed to be some Gun Fu move where you do Kung Fu as you shoot? How does being particularly agile result in a reduction of the UFO's protection?

sounds like something I should dig up

Never heard of the SHADOW book

Yeah that's what I usually do, use adders to offset costs

I miss the palindromedary Also in 6th edition in the Advanced Player Guide I i think, it has a Stunning option for Change Environment, you can hit someone with it and it stuns them unless they make a successful CON roll. The only problem I have with the build is that you stay stunned until you make a breakout roll which I think violates the basic concept of stunning. CON Roll penalties are pretty cheap to stack on.

You can use the "Adders" option to put in single categories, not bother with re-coding it. Unless you're doing an extremely heavy computer science -focused campaign where it is incredibly critical if you understand unix but not Apple OS, for example, it seems excessively fiddly and complicated to do so, though.

If you want a character to just appear to be different things, like the octopus, its just flat out shapeshift, use touch for how its shaped (and thus appears to be formed as) and sight for the colors and believable in pattern etc. Stretching allows a character to "ooze" through smaller openings, basically you can fit through any opening the size you can make yourself small enough to fit through: So basically you can fit through small openings by stretching to be longer, for example. It takes 5 points to be able to do this, each 5 points a doubling you can stretch to. Shapeshifting allows you to shrink or grow your form slightly, so you might be able to use that to fit through something slightly smaller using that. Desolidification would work to allow you to fit through anything, stack on some limitations like how it doesn't protect from damage and cannot pass through solid objects and it works.

If you wanted, you could also add in the maximum amount of bonus damage your martial arts totals into the naked advantage cost. "STR+Martial Arts damage 45 points" Then you can have your armor piercing area effect punch. But be aware of this rule: Advantages are not optional. So your punch is ALWAYS area effect armor piercing. Sorry miss hostage. Sorry about your cafe Mr Grocer. Sorry about the Batmobile. And GMs be very cautious with this kind of build, it can crack your campaign's structure and limits very quickly and cheaply.

I think a few lines of clarity would be useful: Martial Throw either does, or does not do full throwing effect. Martial throw either does, or does not work as a moving attack -- or requires a full move element to gain this ability. As I said, the rules are a bit ambiguous right now. I'm fine as always with GMs doing what they want (doesn't that go without saying?) I'd just love to know how the official rules are supposed to work.

I would agree with you on this, and that's how I understood it, but in the 6th edition martial arts book on page 249 it says: If a character uses a Martial Maneuver with the v/10 Element (or v/6), such as a Martial Throw, he doesn’t take damage if he fails to do Knockback to the target. The v/10 Element doesn’t impose any requirement on characters to do Knockback or suffer damage — that’s one way in which they tend to be better than the standard Move By or Move Through And the only way I can figure how to interpret that is that they think you can do a martial throw by crashing into/going by your target.

But he doesn't have to use a martial maneuver. He can just grab someone and do it, right? But none of that answers the basic question :/

Good, bad, or indifferent, its meant to simulate martial arts. Which are different than just grappling or brawling. Grabbing something and throwing it is not the same as how martial arts works. The rules seem to indicate that you get the same results and it acts the same, but aren't very explicit or clear about it. As for the argument that martial artists are not typically gigantically strong, sure. But they also balance on leaves, run up walls, etc in movies and other source material. Its just not part of the genre to legsweep someone and send them flying for meters.

I can't run games any more so