Crusher Bob

And since no one has thrown out a sample distopia beyond the standard 'Nazi World' here's one: The Green Revolution was not Televised Because of comic book physics, you can't develop fertilizer from petro-chemicals. So while crop production got a massive boost for both pesticides and farming mechanization, there weren't mass amounts of fertilizer available to renew the soil. This meant that great increases in farming technology were able to greatly boost the population, until the soil ran out. So any wars past around 1930 had food security as a major issue. For example, WW2 really was about Germany trying to seize Russian farmland, and exterminating all those useless mouths. Because no distopia is really so bad that Nazis couldn't make things worse. And there are a lot of secondary effects. Examples: dust bowls and similar arising from over farming Skirmishes and sometimes outright wars fought over fishing grounds, even though the oceans have been horribly overfished. Other things to note: things that might sound like a simple solution to this problem either only help a little bit, or just make things worse. At least, until the PCs come along. In a normal world, the PCs might be willing to let the guy who is stealing bread to feed is family go, but when there really isn't enough bread to go around, whose faces are they going to punch in to fix things?

The problem with original dystopian settings is that it can take a lot of setting material to get the players sufficiently motivated enough to punch everyone in the face. One of the advantages of Nazi World is that the players are already motivated to punch everyone in the face, you don't really need to tell them anything else. Compared to say, Worm, it can take tens of thousands of words to convince you that everything needs a good punch in the face. So unless you are the sort of person who likes to write a large amount of campaign background material and your players are motivated enough to read it, you probably need an immediate hook to motivate the players

This sort of thing is normally done by having campaign caps on this like a limit on active points of powers, a limit on CV, a limit on Defense, and limits on speed. For best results, it's better to have explicit trade offs in the caps instead of simple limits, beucase careful character generation can often max out all 'simple limits'. Sample 'forced trade offs' style campaign caps The following are 'equivalent' trade offs: 10 active points of an attack power +2 OCV and +2 DCV (together) 10 total points of PD/ED 1 point of speed. An 'average' hero has the following: 50 active point total attacks 7 OCV / 7 DCV 25 PD and 25 ED 5 speed You can go up for free in one category, and can trade off an increase in one category for a decrease in another. It's not possible to be 'two up' in a category. So, for example a legal character is 60 point attacks (+1) 7 OCV / 7 DCV 30 PD and 30 ED (+1) 4 speed (-1) And another legal character is 50 point attacks 9 OCV / 9 DCV (+1) 20 PD and 20 ED (-1) 6 speed (+1) A more detailed version of this sort of thing can be found here

Hmm, a base with an extradimensional location might be possible too, with enough points to pay for a portal into and out of the base.

Hmm, things you should probably think about adding to your world write up: What kinds of origins are acceptable? For a bit of humor, see the song lyrics for Ookla the Mok: Super Powers Are any of these origins not acceptable? Other than having having super powers, how exceptional are the power recipients supposed to be? For example, in Worm, power recipients are mostly 'normal' people, so someone who is particularly strong willed, clever, rich, etc can compensate for a 'weaker' power. While in the Marvel and DC verse, superheroes tend to be exceptional people in addition to having their powers. How much influence can the characters be expected to have on the setting? For example, if you are playing heroes in the Marvel Universe, you probably don't have to worry too much about changing the shape of the world when you do stuff. But if you are going to be one of the to 30? or so most powerful people (out of ~300 heroes) in North America then you can expect a lot of fallout from what ever actions you take. Softer characteristics: How much PRE and EGO are typical heroes supposed to have? If heroes are supposed to be 'normal people' then 15 EGO and 15 PRE makes you pretty impressive. The same scale of things that would terrify 'normal people' will also work on the heroes. Things like fear, PTSD, and maintaining enough motivation to keep heroing despite a lot of psychological pressure might be a big deal. Example: a police procedural that covers the mental health impacts of being a officer. But if you heroes are supposed to be exceptional then you can expect things like EGO 30 PRE 30 heroes to be much more common. You can impress most people by just walking into the room. And you'd expect the themes here to be stuff like noblesse oblige, power and responsibility, and how much you change peoples minds just by doing stuff. Example: Mass Effect

I'd say that the most important aspect of world building is that your world is well defined enough that you can add things to it that can then feel like they've always been there. So it should be more focused on things like appropriate themes, exact genre conventions,

In addition, 'good' encyrption falls somewhere between 'can't be decrypted at all without the key' (properly implemented one time pads) to merely 'if you used all the matter in the universe to make a computer and tried to brute force this problem, it would still take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe'. Alas, IRL encryption is broken because someone did something stupid, and for a game, having your good roll on decryption produce the result of 'this guy used his birthday and pet's name as a password, so you're in' isn't very satisfying. It's not a much of a reflection of the PCs great skill, except possible to find out where some idiot did something dumb. If you want to have a story about breaking encryption, it's better to do stuff like find the right buy to rubber hose attack, break into someplace to steal the decryption key, plant cameras to watch the guy enter his password, or something like that. It also has the advantage of involving more players. ----------------- [edit] Using the 'guessed' plain text attack, it's apparently possible for a modern PC to break 3 rotor Enimga in a matter of seconds, and 4 rotor Enigma in a matter of hours. What's a 'guessed' plain text attack? You assume your message contains some bits of known text, for example 'Heil Hitler' and then check if your potential break has that text in it. Part of the reason why the British were very good at breaking Enigma is that they knew the general message formatting and vocabulary, so we able to make very good 'guesses' as to the message contents. Just brute forcing the entire keyspace of a 3 rotor machine seems to take a modern PC 'hours to days' and brute forcing a 4 rotor machine is 'around two orders of magnitude more difficult' (i.e. weeks to months) But WW2 was the earliest days of computing related math and technology, and considerably better encryption techniques have been developed since then. In addition, one of the oldest (one time pads) are still unbreakable, though it turns out that generating 'good' one time pads is a bit of a difficult problem and robust solutions were generally not available until after WW2.

One thing that might be worth looking at is something like police use of force guidelines, or military ROE when engaged in operations other than war. If it would have been legal for a cop to shoot that person, then it would almost certainly have been legal for a metahuman to punch that persons brain out of their skull. You avoid the PCs killing people 'by accident' by not motivating them to use that kind of force. In the genres where the heros aren't allowed to have bodycounts, the villains aren't allowed to have bodycounts either. Also remember that the lower levels of CvK simply match the mentality of the ordinary person. So, they won't kill prisoners, or whatever, but might be perfectly fine about shooting that guy threatening a civilian with deadly force. ---------- If you want to have some sort of legal follow up: If the PCs have some sort of legal authority, then something like the police internal affairs will bring them in. A representative (lawyer) will be sent by the Police Union/ etc to defend/advise the character. The IA cops will take the heroes/officers uniform, weapon, etc for forensic evidence collection and take witness statements. They'll ask the officer/hero in question for both a verbal and written report on when happened. Then the officer will probably get several days of paid administrative leave while the IA guys do things like actually collect any forensic evidence and do witness interviews. If the IA guys decide that the officers use of force was illegal, they'd turn it over to the DA for actual criminal prosecution (hint: this almost never happens). It's also possible that the IA guys would recommend censuring the officer in some way that isn't criminal prosecution, such as forcing them to take training courses, official letters of reprimand, or whatever. In the case as described, the officer would talk to IA for around an hour, spend several hours doing paperwork, probably have an appointment made for them with a psychologist, and then have several days of paid admin leave.

Here's something else handy to keep in mind when building champions characters: CON Stun Avoid DC 0.25 0.5 0.75 0.9 8 25 28 31 34 9 28 31 35 38 10 31 35 39 42 11 35 38 42 46 12 38 42 46 50 13 41 45 50 53 14 45 49 53 57 15 48 52 57 61 This lists the total Def + CON totals you should have to avoid a CON stun at least that % of the time. So, for example, if you want to resist CON stuns vs DC 12 at least 75% of the time, you Def + CON total should be 46. That's one of the reasons I prefer to set the 'average' defenses to average DC * 2.5; it keeps the required CON from being really inflated. Someone with low def (25) at this level needs CON 24 to have 50% CON stun resistance from DC 14 attacks. This also means they have something slightly less than 90% resistance to CON stun from DC 12 attacks.

Persinette Not sure how SPD that requires a skill roll would work. Roll at the start of every turn to see what your speed will be? Feels like the multipower and VPP need some cleanup. It's not really clear what 'sorts' of powers go in one place vs the other one. In addition, the use of naked advantages in the VPP to modify slots of the multipower is right out. But what it looks like you might be able to do is use the VPP to hold all the non-gesture, etc required powers, and then have the multipower have those limitations on it. This may let you add gestures as a limitation to the pool of the multipower, getting a few more points. Wings of the Fae I'm not sure you can stack gestures and restrainable, since they both are limitations about the movement of body parts. Seems to have low CV, low STUN, and low REC compared to the other characters I've looked at so far, but doens't seem to gain anything with these trade offs. Seems to be able to fight while invisible, but still very very weak from something that attacks PD. A DC 15 or 16 attack vs PD, which would be reasonably common in this setting has a good chance of reducing her to 0 STUN in one hit (DC 16 is 56 STUN, minus 19 PD leaves 37 STUN left over as damage). Looks like you can't fight behind a 'Mystic Barrier' because I think it would go down the moment you allocated your pool to a different power. (would have to double check that... Hmm, no, barrier is classed as an instant power, so you could put up a wall, and then fight from behind it. So the allocation of defenses may end up being a build choice, as long as you have the time to erect a barrier to hide behind.

Discussion on whether you could be mind controlled into turning your armor off is here: Consciously not using powers In general, I think when you are building a team for 'display' they should each take advantage of different 'build tech', both so the team doesn't share the same weakness and so that you don't keep using a particular type of build tech as a crutch. Here's an outline of how I think CV/DC/Def/SPD limits should be handled: You define a CV/DC/Def/SPD set as the 'average hero'. Each character is then allowed to be higher than normal in one category. In addition, they can trade off for higher in one category by being lower in another. In general, the distance between 'average' and 'high' (or average and low) is as follows: CV: 2 CV (example, if CV 7 is average, then a character who is OCV 10, DCV 8 is 'high', and a character who is OCV 7, DCV 7 is 'low) DC: 2 DC Def: 5 Defense (in both PD and ED, so if Def 25 is avearge, PD 30 ED 20 still qualifies as average, and PD 30 ED 30 is 'high') SPD: 1 point of speed I know these trade offs work reasonably well at CV 7 DC 10 Def 25 SPD 25 Will have to fire excel up to check how they compare at higher average points. --------- But I do know that it's probably better to move the power level that certain die amounts equal rather than to push things too high. Setting really high average points means everyone starts needing things like mental defense to avoid a blowout vs someone with appropriate DC mind control. -------- So, for example, if you define your averages as CV 9 DC 12 Def 30 (Avg DC 12 * 2.5 = 30; Somewhere between average DC * 2 and average DC *2.5 is generally where to set this.) SPD 5 Then the guideline for Valkyrie becomes: CV: High (CV 11) DC: High (DC 14) Def: Low (PD/ED average 25) SPD: average (5) And Storm Front CV: Average (CV 9) DC: High (DC 14) Def: Low (PD/ED average 25) SPD: high (6) Or something like that. ---------------- Then, there are generally 3 different ways to be awesome at combat that aren't straight up damage and defense: Mental powers (mental attack, mental illusion, mind control) Adjustment powers (drain, transform) Sensory manipulation (flash, invisibility, darkness, etc) In general, every character should have some response to two categories, but not a strong response to all 3. here is the last time I put together a team of heroes for display.

Persinette Haven't really looked yet, but noticed 'Sleep' and 'Deeper Sleep' in the multipower. Are these supposed to be additive? If so, that's not allowed: 6E1, p 398 So you'd need to be 6d6 mental blast in a variable slot, or make the other 2d6 of mental blast in deeper sleep a linked power or something instead. May have also missed similar things in the multipowers of the other characters.

British Lion Is he meant to be on pain killers (25% damage resistance) 'all' the time? If not, his defenses look weak compared to the rest of the charaters. He's SPD 6, and one of the classic trade offs for speedsters is lower defenses, but Storm Front is also SPD 6 and doesn't make the DEF trade off. Only looks like CV 9, DC 13 so he seems considerably weaker than Valkyrie and Storm Front in combat. Should't he have more EGO, mental defense, and PRE defense, as the batman type character? Looking at Valkyrie, who can do something like DC 12 PRE attacks, poor British Lion starts off at PRE +20 (awed). If the person doing that kind of PRE attack has some advantages, he can easily get to 'cowed'. In addition, with EGO 13 and only 3 resistance and no mental defense, he's pretty easy to interrogate or mind control.

Storm Front Looks like CV 9, DC 15? with two levels to allocate, so really CV 9-11, DC 15-16? Fighting a similar powered character means taking 27.5 STUN from the average roll DC 15 attack and being CON stunned too. Is wiped out by any mental powers, sense affectors, and most drain attackers. Weather Powers multipower has so many slots that it might be better to do as a VPP instead. A quick count says you spent something like 61 points on multipower slots. "Wind Cushion": turns out that knockback resistance is a special power, so should only go in power frameworks with GM permission. So you should make a note of it. (Also, breakfall is the same way, skills qualify as special powers) Seems to fly at around 316 km/h so able to get across the city quickly under own power. Will say that Storm Front appears to have many more 'interesting' combat options than Valkyrie does.

Valkyrie Ung, looks like a bad case of running right over the campaign limits. As far as I can tell, she can produce the following combat 'stances' OCV 14, DCV 14, DC 17 HKA (4d6 HKA + find weakness + 2DC from strike Maneuver), with 3 overall levels still to be allocated OCV 13, DCV 11, DC 18 HKD (4e6 HKA + all 6 strike levels allocated to DC, +2 overall levels allocated to DC, +2 DC from the strike maneuver) With 1 overall level left to allocate So it looks like her average CV is around 13, with around DC 18 attacks. Vs DC 18 normal attacks, you'd take 37 STUN (out of 50) and have no chance of resisting CON stun. Against a DC 18 killing attack, you'd lose 8 BODY. Against a D18 mental attacks, you lose around half your STUN and are CON stunned as well. Against DC18 mind control you are looking at an EGO +40 result with an average roll. ----------- Next, 'sublime strike' makes any combat maneuver not covered by these skill levels a really bad alternate choice. That's +6 OCV or +3 DC, against someone you really have to work to fight, you'd always want to do that. With your unified powers, something like 4d6 or 5d6 Drain STR (which would be an incidental power in a DC 18 game) is enough to drain a vast majority of your added stats. Since you have almost all your stats in a unified power, almost any drain that targets stats is going to hit them all. Even a bunch of minions with 3d6 drain STR 1m AOE weapons make your character significantly weaker. If this was set up to be your 'weakness' that would be fine, but all of the characters in this group seem to be build using the same 'unified power build tech'. This means that any opponent that has a AOE drain or can hand out drain guns to minions, or something similar, almost auto wins against the team. Against a single hero, that's fine, since one of the purposes of the team is to cover your weaknesses, but it's the whole team... ----------- Not sure why 'always on' on tough skin is worth (-1/2). If it supposed to make things like medical treatment on you harder, shouldn't that be a complication instead? If it's in response to the recent "can you mind control someone to turn off their defenses?" I thought the consensus there was that was probably a (-/+ 0) advantage most of the time? Note that you can't normally put naked advantages in power frameworks, so you should make a note that 'Asgardian Close combat' does this' Vambraces of Defence may be better built as a bunch of bonuses to the block maneuver, since no range deflection that requires an abort seems to be the block maneuver under another name. Is there any specific reason you did it as no range deflection? Maybe make touch of truth work vs Mental defense, instead of power defense? It's a 0 cost swap. ----------- Is there some form of team transportation available? Otherwise, how does she get across the city to stop the bank robbery (or whatever)? She can run/jump at 60 km/h which at least spares you the indignity of having to take a cab, but it's still may b e abit slow. [edit] Whoops, sorry. Was looking at Storm Front as well when writing this up; Valkyrie doesn't have find weakness. But she can still manage DC18 attacks by allocating skills levels to DC...

Is the globe supposed to be up 'all the time'? If so, doing it as PD/ED and growth (you turn into a big sphere) might work. Or is he supposed to be able to bring others inside the sphere with him? Does the sphere prevent him from doing things like going through doors or crawl spaces? What about picking things up with his hands? What's the exact advantage of no one being able to see what he is doing inside the sphere? If flame powers come out of the sphere and set people on fire, then it's just like your hero having flame powers and being in the form of a big black sphere, isn't it?

Hmm... 6E1 has this to say on p128: So it looks like there is some ability to turn off persistent powers. I guess if you didn't want shenanigans to happen with your defenses, you'd make them inherent?

Hmm, I would presume the power would have to be non-persistent. Otherwise I guess it's a drain vs the power with the SFX of mind control? AVLD from power defense to mental defense should be a +0 modifier, so a drain with 'AVLD mental defense (+0), incantations (-1/4), target must understand the language spoken (-1/4)' on a drain would work for 'mind control vs constant powers...'

The other reason you normally don't see 'really high' defenses in a slot in a multipower is because of campaign limits. In Hero, points aren't really a good limiter of character ability. You can get the ability to destroy all life on earth for quite cheap in real points. I'd guess 25 or so real points would do the job. So a proper Hero campaign design document contains a list of active point limits, and then a way to force you to trade off different amounts of DC/CV/Def/SPD or people who are good at character generation can just meet all of the caps. Of course, doing things like that really really more the sign of a bad player, but a good campaign document should head off most problems like that.

Default is that powers have to be automatically perceiveable by at least two sense groups, and barring specific GM permission, one of those groups has to be the sight group. So questions to ask yourself: Ca this guy set people on fire, with no one having any idea that he did it? For example, If I'm in a room full of witnesses and shoot someone (barring the unreliability of human perception) then it is obvious to everyone that I shot that guy. If it would require a perception roll to notice that I shot that guy, then that would be an inobvious power. And if no one could associate me with the sudden fact that the guy other there now has bullet holes in him, then that is an invisible power. So, could your guy stand in a crowd, set some people on fire, and not be noticed doing it? If so, he probably has some form of IPE. If not, then it's just SFX, and despite how the power 'looks' the game effect is still that people can easily notice who is responsible. Indirect: When you use 'line of fire' are you talking literally about a line of fire, like if you were using a flamethrower, or something similar? Or are you meaning to use the specific rule term 'line of effect'? Lacking a literal 'line of fire' may or may not be some form of IPE. Not needing a legal 'line of effect' is some form of indirect. Can your guy set people on fire through things that normally block line of effect, but not line of sight, like a thick pane of armored glass? It it harder for him to set people on fire that are in cover?

Yes. that was the problem with the characteristics modifying the 'figured' stats like STUN, END, etc. For example, if you wanted to make a tough character, the cheapest way to do that was to make your character strong. The bonuses you got from having a high STR were worth more than the STR itself. So if you wanted to be tough, you were strong. In addition, every champions character was an olympic or even superhuman gymnast, simply because DEX determined your OCV and DCV. So even the bricks had to have high DEX. In 6th edition, concepts like the clumsy brick and the tough guy who isn't also very strong are now possible without cripping your character.

Official answers here. Note that taking a recovery is a special case action, and you can't trigger move on the same phase.

Most questions you have about the chances of dice rolls can be answered by Anydice, though some more esoteric mechanics need someone who knows all the little fiddly bits of anydice scripts.

Hmm, UBO one other or grantor is only (+1/4), right? And that can't be used by the bad guys. So, a UBO (+1/4) that anyone who takes away your focus can use may well be (+0)... You get half price for 'extra time - only to start' on constant powers, I'd assume a similar modifier on things to set up a trigger.

Have been investigating triggered movement as a power construct for speedsters (discussion here The power construct is adding the following: -------------- Trigger: Trigger condition is set when trigger is created (+1/2) Activating Trigger is non-action (+1/4) Setting trigger is a 0 phase action (+1/4) Trigger expires: trigger only lasts a single phase (-1/4 less) Total (+3/4) To one or more forms of movement. -------------- The 'trigger expires' limitation is added to the power construct to require that speedster guy has an action in the phase that he wants to use triggered movement. This means that if he wants to use a defensive trigger move, he'll have to abort an action, so he can set and fire the trigger. Unless of course, he set a defensive movement trigger on the same phase as someone tries to hit him... -------------- Here is what I think that does: 1. you gain the ability to move after otherwise turn ending actions, such as an attack. Example: I set my trigger to be 'after I try to punch that guy' I take a half phase action to move next to him, attack him, the trigger goes off, and then I move away. 2. you gain the ability to move after (or before) a full phase action, such as multi attack or taking a recovery? (special highlight: is taking a recovery a special class of full phase action, which may restrict this?) 3. you gain the ability to use your triggered movement when aborting to block or dodge. Example: I abort an action, set the trigger, dodge, and use the triggered move. 3a. Does this ability grant you something similar to the interception ability? Example: speesterguy sees someone pull out a gun and shoot at a baby! speedster guy was not holding an action, so he can't use interception. He could try diving for cover, if he could dive far enough, and blocking the attack with his face (i.e. taking full damage from the attack). However, speedster guy has the triggered movement construct. So he aborts an action, trigger-moves next to the baby, then uses the block maneuver to block the bullet. 4. let me avoid h-t-h attacks with the triggred move, in a way similar to flying dodge? 5. let me 'chase' people who try to flying dodge or trigger move away when I try to punch them. Example: speedsterguy is trying to punch anti-speedster guy. He knows that anti-speedster guy will trigger move away when he tries to punch him, so he sets the trigger on his movement to 'when anti-speedster guy tried to move away from me'. So, when speedsterguy goes for the punch, antispeedsterguy's triggered move goes off. But then, so does speedster guy's triggered movement. Letting speedster guy 'chase' his target down to delivery that punching anyway. ---------- Other Questions: --------- Can you move at non-combat speed during a triggered move (taking the appropriate OCV and DCV penalties)? --------- If you buy triggered movement as a naked advantage on your regular movement, what are the restrictions on using it? Example: I have 24m running, and the above trigger 'on up to 12m of running' as a naked advantage. Can I full move 24m and then trigger move 12m? Or am I limited to moveing just my full move in a phase, like flying dodge? -------- What's an appropriate modifier for 'stretching: only to still hit people who flying dodge or triggered move away while I try to punch them'. This seems like something much more limiting than a (-1) but I'm not sure what limiter would be appropriate. My first though was (-2) as it's a very specific circumstance for the power to work.