Christopher R Taylor

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.

From a comic book perspective, that's how characters like The Confessor, Spider-Man, Batman, Daredevil, The Question etc all were written: they handle this stuff.  From a Champions campaign perspective, I have long wanted to run a police campaign with very low-end heroes as cops on a special squad (like Alphacore, but they're more powerful).  You can do regular police stuff, special situations like SWAT engagements, and low end superheroes as well as mobsters, etc.

I'm sure Bats would do just fine against Spidey's foes, but it also depends on who's writing him. 

One thing I do have to say though is that characters that start out as low powered end up much more powerful than ones that start out as high powered. I am pretty sure this is because they are spending points on their character based on what has happened and not just guessing what they want.

We are taking that as the given by which "challenge" is to be judged (or so I assumed; this one could be entirely on me).
 
Given a teen with super-strength, super agility, damger sense, ranged restraints,  etc--
 
I find it difficult to accept that a 40-year-old normal human who fights bare-handed in a rejected disco costume presents a serious challenge to said bug-eyed teen.
 
 
 
 

Spidey’s rogues gallery started with low-pointed builds but most of them have been saving up their XPs over the years.
 
If you treated Spider-Man’s career as a solo Champions campaign, or maybe one where other players play the various villains and occasional team-up heroes, the internal clock in that campaign has been ticking away around 10+ years, and the external clock for several decades more. That represents a lot of table time, so even a stingy GM would have given Peter’s player (and those who keep reoccurring in his rogues gallery) hundreds of xps by now.

That version of Adrian Toomes got a considerable tech upgrade for the movie. The original comic character was much more basic, although his equipment did improve over the decades.
 

 
 
Doc Ock's body is supposed to be only human. First punch to the chin by Spidey should have taken him out. Although it's not mentioned anywhere that I'm aware of, I always assumed there was some kind of feedback from his artificial arms that strengthened his body. That was the gimmick applied to the antigrav wing-suit worn by Vulture above.
 
 
The were called the Enforcers, muscle and killers for hire. Original members were Ox (very big and very strong), Montana (expert with a lariat), and Fancy Dan (skilled HTH fighter and acrobat, shortest of the three but hardly a "dwarf"). Again, just human, but each exceptional in their way, and worked well as a team.
 
 
So you're okay with a kid in a red and blue webbed leotard and a bug-eyed mask fighting crime, but draw the line at a "deadliest game" hunter in an animal-themed costume?

Out of all the Dark Champions books, this one has gotta be my favorite. I thought the villains especially had interesting themes and unique write-ups, including their gadgets, what their henchmen dress like, and the types of crimes they commit. Really hope we can see a revival of this one day.
 

Wikipedia claims Sue Storm started using force fields in FF issue #22 (January 1964), but it's Wikipedia, so best to wait for confirmation from another source.

In the early comics all the super heroes fought against fairly weak foes.  A lot of the early supervillains used gadgets instead of having superpowers.  They also tended to be one trick ponies.  

As LL says, read the early stories.  He has trouble with enemies including:
 
 - an old man with a flying suit;
 - a pudgy scientist with robotic arms;
 - a cowboy, a bulky thug and a midget who knows martial arts.
 
Just off the top.
 
If you write Spidey more powerful, some enemies can be scaled up, but others don't make as much sense scaled up to match SuperSpidey.

I agree. At the start of his career, Spidey had trouble fighting opponents who were really just exceptional humans, e.g. the Enforcers, Mysterio, the Kingpin, Man-Mountain Marko.

Stretching is a power set I haven't done a lot with other than "this creature has tentacles" but it can be interesting if done well.

The party consists of three characters, each built as Powerful Heroes (225 points and 50 Complication points).
 
1) US Marshall Daniel Doyle (character image is Clint Eastwood from one of his early westerns): A revenant that keeps this a secret and is dedicated to hunting evil. Talented with a gun and durable.
2) Sergio Cortez: (character image is Antonio Banderas from the Mariachi movie): A bounty hunter of both men and monsters. A thrillseeking womanizer who is in this for the money. A prototype of Zorro without a secret ID who is very handy with a sword and very stealthy.
3) Samuel Smith (character image is Bruce Campbell from The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr): A cowboy with immense gun skills who is a weirdness magnet rather than an actual hunter.
 
Two of the characters are armed with cap and ball handguns except for Marshall Doyle, who is armed with one of the earliest brass cartridge weapons available as of 1855 (a French-made Lefaucheux M1854).
 
In the first session, Doyle and Cortez are tracking something heading west, which they think is a werewolf. They discover that both a small nest of vampires and at least one werewolf are in Fort Yuma. During the session, Sam is bitten once by a vampire and later by a werewolf, injured but not badly so.

After some delays due to holidays, illnesses and personal business, we had another session of the campaign.
 
Sam achieved the trifecta by getting bitten by a zombie, in addition to his previous bites by a vampire and werewolf. The trio intercepted a message to ‘Lord Black’ and ended up accepting a bounty from him when he confronted them the next morning. He had some Pinkerton goons with him at the time, and he was quite put out because someone burned down the eucalyptus trees he was growing to provide railroad ties for his planned railroad from Texas to California.
 
Most of the session was spent dealing with Bella Rosa, a headless witch with a sizable collection of severed heads she can use as her own. Her favorites were kept in a closet in her room.
 
The womanizing Cortez gets quite willingly seduced by her, and he ends up increasingly enthralled by her witchcraft. Doyle and Sam tried to figure out what to do about the creepy but beautiful witch and Doyle ended up using a quantity of dynamite to blow up her hacienda, and himself. Fortunately, he is a revenant and will eventually recover his missing BOD and regrow his lost body parts.
 
It is uncertain if the witch survived, but there was no body found in the ruins.

You know what makes Aquaman cool?  Um... nothing.  I like the character Jason Mamoa plays, but he's not Aquaman and he's not a superhero.  He's just a dudebro with powers.  Namor is a lot more interesting because he's such an arrogant jackass.  You can make an interesting water guy but not Aquaman.

You know what makes Aquaman cool?  Um... nothing.  I like the character Jason Mamoa plays, but he's not Aquaman and he's not a superhero.  He's just a dudebro with powers.  Namor is a lot more interesting because he's such an arrogant jackass.  You can make an interesting water guy but not Aquaman.

I FINALLY watched the Marvels on Disney Plus. It was enjoyable enough I wish I had just seen it on the big screen. The leads were ALL good, with Captain Marvel allowed to show feelings now that she was in this movie deprogrammed so she wasn't stuck in mandatory wooden mode like in her first movie. I'm a fan of Monica in the comics, and her actress did her justice given the set up. Iman Vellani as Kamala had already impressed me in her mini series, but she really shone on the big screen as the fan girl turned superhero. Loved almost every scene she was in. Fury made with some funny, but was not made to be the joke , which is different and I'm grateful. It was definitely comedic in tone for a lot of the movie, but I liked the balance in it.
 
If I had to sum up where it stands compared to other Marvel movies, I think I'd just say I liked it better than THREE of the Thor movies.

I think its best to just ignore the implications and consequences of high tech and superheroes on economics unless its for a specific one-shot scenario.  Why?  Because if you make the world so different and so alien to what we have now, it damages immersion and ease of understanding the world.  The main purpose of superheroes is to engage in power fantasy: here's what I'd do if I had x power/someone ought to do something about this problem.
 
See, Superman's very existence would change society, culture, and science.  He would transform the world.  But the comic books about Superman were about him beating up evil landlords and dictators, stopping mobsters, etc.  Why?  Because nobody put a cape on and jumped from things pretending to fly because they wanted to play out the socioeconomic impact of superbeings.  They wanted to be the guy that beat up the villains, bullies, and criminals.  They wanted to play out what it would be like if someone actually was powerful enough to stop the mafia or corrupt politicians.
 
If you make the world too different from what we now understand and live in, you lose that entire feel.
 
Its fine if you want to do a future-tech, sci fi Champions game, and everyone knows that going in.  But you can't have it both ways.

IMHO one of the best in the video series:
 
 

Multiform is how I would build it, yeah

The defenses are the key, in my view.  If these characters are tossing around, and soaking up, 12 - 18d6 Normal damage routinely, I'd expect that they have defenses in the 30s or higher.  A 15d6 Normal attack averages 52.5 STUN.
 
Normal defenses of 30 will block all BOD from a terminal velocity fall.  BOD from a 20d6 Normal attack is not going to get past those defenses, so there is nothing to double from a head shot.
 
Making the doppelgangers identical and then adding all the advantages of automatons means that they are massively more powerful than the heros, especially defensively.  If they are identical copies (not automatons) and can be knocked out, then the heroes will have to knock them out, then carefully and meticulously bypass their defenses to murder the doppelgangers.
 
Forcing the heroes to demonstrate their heroism by diligently slaughtering their foes seems a little odd.
 
We had a Supers game with an alternate earth scenario some years back, and realized very early on that we would eventually be fighting ourselves.  By the time that happened, it was a bit of a cakewalk as we knew the best tactics as a team to take down an identical team.

Are the doppelgangers going to have their defenses adjusted to equivalent points using the Automaton rules? With only 1/3 of the PC's defenses, you should be able to do the job with Haymakers, Move-Throughs and Pushing.
 
If their defenses are not adjusted, then Drain BODY or some sort of Damage Over Time attack are the only ways I can see.
 
 

I think its best to just ignore the implications and consequences of high tech and superheroes on economics unless its for a specific one-shot scenario.  Why?  Because if you make the world so different and so alien to what we have now, it damages immersion and ease of understanding the world.  The main purpose of superheroes is to engage in power fantasy: here's what I'd do if I had x power/someone ought to do something about this problem.
 
See, Superman's very existence would change society, culture, and science.  He would transform the world.  But the comic books about Superman were about him beating up evil landlords and dictators, stopping mobsters, etc.  Why?  Because nobody put a cape on and jumped from things pretending to fly because they wanted to play out the socioeconomic impact of superbeings.  They wanted to be the guy that beat up the villains, bullies, and criminals.  They wanted to play out what it would be like if someone actually was powerful enough to stop the mafia or corrupt politicians.
 
If you make the world too different from what we now understand and live in, you lose that entire feel.
 
Its fine if you want to do a future-tech, sci fi Champions game, and everyone knows that going in.  But you can't have it both ways.

The key with Multiform is to make sure that the characters are to design, not just "I wanna do a lot of different stuff".  In other words, use multiform to build a character with a theme and a concept, not just to have lots of characters.
 
I did make a guy who could turn into like 20 different superheroes, each a different build, but... they were random. He never knew what was going to activate when he turned on his superpower, and the GM chose them at random for me.  The concept was kind of like Miracleman's body suit thing, where they were all in this stasis and he could tap into them, but had no control over who.  It was kind of fun, but sadly the campaign didn't last long enough to really explore how it would play out.  So it was a tight concept, and controlled.  The GM could at any time just say "you get to be aqua boy this time" at will instead of rolling a random character, even if we were in the desert.