dialNforNinja

... so are you suggesting an actual gun that's just covered in shadows (for maybe a negative PER modifier to enemies trying to see details of it or where he's aiming, or that it's been drawn at all if he's in shadow) or a shadow FX Energy Blast with "looks like he's holding a gun" and "sounds like a gun" as Obvious visible effects? Both sound like they'd fit the concept. Well, an RKA vs. rED, anyway.

As a detective with shadow powers, you have no excuse if you do not include at least a couple meters of Stretching and call it "Long Arm of the Law." You know you want to.

Could well be - using the "flavor a meal" function to make the party members taste horrible so the wolf pack that attacked during the night would stop biting people long enough to get their armor on was what got me banned from replacing a wand of Prestidigitation when it ran out, back before I burned out on D&D and class/level systems in general. Alas, poor Least Wish. I knew it, Horatio. Biblically, even. :lol:

Well, he does jump into Dinosaur Neil's mouth carrying the antidote pill to make him shrink back down from kaiju-size, with dialogue that more or less states he doesn't expect to take any harm from it, so the acid resistance at least is almost certain. (Some kind of shrinking would not be unreasonable either given how rare kaiju battles tend to be...) I don't remember if he actually resisted being chewed or not; it's been decades since I saw the episode now.

I had a Champions Online character whose nominal backstory was being the reverse of the original Tron movie protag, a security program ejected into the material world to be out of the way. Her name was Digital Zoom. My main was Velocirapture. Of course, neither of their power sets really had much to do with speed, since CO treats superspeed as a secondary/utilty effect only related to how you get across the map, but eh. Bottlerocket wasn't nominally a speedster (though by then not moving around via the top running power felt agonizingly slow so I pretty much kept it on everyone) but the name could do as well. More recently I've come to like the idea of using Celerity as a speedster name. The Dash (The Fastest Girl You've Met) was a Flash-expy character (not mine) from the old Superguy mailing list. Her evil AU counterpart was Professor Backslash. Relativity Woman was also from SG, an older heroine who was more famous despite tehcnically being slower, as she could only approach arbitrarily close to lightspeed, not reach it, and suffered from time dilation effects IIRC. Just brainstorming: Tumbleweed Fade Bunny Slipper (possibly a civilian form name) (Bonnie?) Shrike Dart Charger (insert sporty car manufacturer or model here)

Named and shown for a few seconds in the 90s Tick cartoon but not explored in detail, I'm basically just running with the name here. The easy stuff is Life SUpport for breathing, probably food and drink too, maybe High Pressure to avoid damage from peristaltic action? Though that's not really the same thing as atmospheric/underwater pressure, so eh. Also, some amount of Regeneration to heal from damage that gets past his specific immunities. Being immune to acid and heat is mainly a matter of degree and how many points you're willing to spend on it, since Hero doesn't really deal in absolutes, by design. Still not too hard. Assume typical strong guy offensive tricks for playable utility, no need to go into those. The thing that's got me stumped for mechanics after thinking about the fluff is being immune (to a high degree) to having any living part of himself (in the cellular biology sense) separated from the rest - you can bruise and break things with crushing force, pierce him with spikes, even open gashes with a blade, but everything connected to the rest will stay at least half-connected, and blades cannot actually cut more than half way through anything; even a chainsaw would just end up with a stringy mess and scraping across the last bits until it jammed up. Which is admittedly serious horror movie territory, but we're theorycrafting here. My best guess is a bunch of extra rDef "only to prevent dismemberment" but that doesn't really seem to cover the ground adequately, so here I am. What do you think, sirs?

If there isn't one, perhaps some of our old hands could make one? It does sound like a very useful thing to have.

The Growth and Shrinking powers are more granular, dealing with a linear increase in height rather than doubling, with less things rolled in automatically if I remember the explanation someone gave in another thread recently, and accompanying lower cost for intermediate heights. I'd prefer to calculate mass as the cube of the linear dimensions rather than the listed... doubling I think? But that's not a (puts on sunglasses) big deal comparatively.

It would work for spells currently boosting stats, but you don't have to connect them to one to store or to use them. It's a very flavorful and unique system, but a pain in the butt to try to convert to anything else. Charges or a separate END reserve for each spell is really the only way I can see to accurately manage that, which would probably mean an entire page or two just for that in practice, but I knew going it it would be impractical. I [i]have[/i] played the game, even if it's been about a decade since my PSX got stolen, and managing it is bad enough when the computer automagically tracks the numbers. I still think buying the characteristics to the maximum boost and then limiting them by how many Charges/how much END/whatever is plugged in to power those extra stats is probably the way to go there, with the value of that limitation depending heavily on campaign circumstances, as how many and how high quality a supply of spells the character will typically have available for the purpose will directly determine how much of that maximum is available overall. For how much effect one of a particular spell has on a currently linked stat, probably some ratio of the AP value for one use of the spell versus the AP value for one point in the stat? That kind of evaluation is the main benefit of the Hero system, after all. Checking the wiki and a FAQ I find that in FF8 itself the MC ranges from ~6 in all stats at Lv7 to ~45 at lv100, while the strongest spell adds between .25 and 1 point per each (stacking to 100 copies of the spell) depending on which stat, with STR at 1/ea giving somewhere between a fifteen-fold to double-and-a-bit increase in FF8's linear stats. With Hero doubling on fives and tens and base stats at 10, 30 STR would be four doublings or a sixteen fold increase, and also 30cp. 30cp worth of increase (from the base value, not the character's actual stats as bought, so most of the stats would cap at 30, DEX at 20, SPD at 5, etc.) per stat sounds not-horrible as a first approximation with the caveat that you're not ever going to be able to have all of that on everything, or even most things, not much of any of them at the beginning, and certainly not without a lot of collecting and refining. (Which would be its own problem with practical implementation, as grinding for consumable resources is dull enough in a video game but utter poison on the tabletop.) That's still going to be pretty spendy, no matter how much you judge the Limitation of needing to plug uncast spells into it to actually get any of those stats as being worth. (Also, I must have been unclear - the spells gained from an environmental point stay until you cast them, the same as any others, it's just that the draw point only holds a few - three to maybe in theory fifteen? I vaguely remember seeing that listed as the upper bound, though I don't think I ever got more than half that from any draw point in the game - and takes a while before you can get more of what it provides.)

@Sveta8, it's not generic magic energy, you get one specific spell from a draw point, and I think only one specific spell from an enemy type at a certain level range - like, right outside the starting base there's a draw point for Heal spells. You can get a few of them off of it and then it's depleted until you've walked a certain number of steps, for example. It's not a general "magic energy" that you can then use for any spell - that wouldn't be unusual at all, since the normal system in FF games is that your HP/SP recovers at a save point and it translates pretty directly to the Hero standard "cast from END" or an END reserve.

Possibly the least popular entry in the long running series (though opinions, as ever, vary) in no small part due to the very different approach it took to magic and improving your character, it's nonetheless one of the games I find the most interesting for precisely those reasons. To briefly explain it, spells in FF8 are collected from points in the environment that naturally collect magic energy, from enemies during battle through the "Draw" action (they can also be cast as the same action rather than kept,) or by refining unneeded equipment, and stockpiled for each character. That much isn't anything too difficult, it basically just amounts to having them as Charges, and with the ability to stack up 100 of each spell, the only way that's even worth anything as a Limitation is that you can only initially gain or after using them recover Charges by finding an appropriate source or buying the items/spending the time to refine them. Casting only uses the stockpiled spell, as the game doesn't even have a traditional magic points system. Where it gets crazy is the Junction system - leaving out the whole side issue of summons (Called Guardian Forces in this game, but pretty much the FF standard Espers in lore and practical implementation) and how they enable the mechanic in-character - your stockpiled Charges of a particular spell can be attached to a stat to boost its value, with some spells more effective on some stats. Cast some of the linked spells, and the benefit goes down proportionately, so it's best to keep your most commonly useful spells not linked to a stat, or not one you need for your core abilities at least. Yes, this is absolutely game-breaking when fully utilized or only on one side, and its effect on game balance is the root of most complaints against it. Trying to get it approved for use in a game, or even to run a game with such a mechanic in use whether as a one-off or commonly, is probably folly even without considering the bookkeeping requirements for a pen and paper game rather than a CRPG. Even so, Hero can supposedly build anything, and this aspect is what's niggling at me this morning, specifically how to represent it. along with a variable stock of up to a couple dozen spells to begin with. My first thought is a Framework (I keep waffling on which, as a Multipower would need all the spells [32 in FF8 itself] premade and paid for even with no Charges for them, while a VPP can only use the ones currently active [and depending on interpretation might not even keep the Charges for ones not currently active] while a dedicated collector might have large stocks of every spell after a while) with variably Linked additions to Stats with the effect proportionate to the number of Charges and which spell they're linked to. This seems to be both a bit clunky and only loosely approaching the desired effect, but so far I don't have a better idea. What do you folks think? There is also the question of how to handle the Draw mechanic to gain Charges, from monsters and equipment at least, since access to environmental Draw points is pretty much entirely in the realm of RP and plot. Equipment used for the purpose is gone but it doesn't seem to bother an enemy at all or diminish their own abilities, and the spells that can be gotten are generally only loosely connected to their habitat or themes. Aside from just assigning them by fiat, I don't see any real system to apply to them, but how do you model the Draw ability to begin with? Is just giving the spells the Limitation that Charges must be Drawn in combat by using an Action on a Power check enough to cover it? And then the whole issue of getting them by consuming bought equipment... Doing that as the SFX of a Limitation rather than a power to generate Charges in its own right still just feels weird, though I suppose it makes sense within the system. Some method of creating Charges, at least with one or more for the desired spell already stocked, using Endurance might work better overall than directly translating the equipment-Refining aspect, and could still tie into Triple Triad cards made from transforming weakened monsters without the intermediate step of using them to make equipment for the purpose. (That's a whole other thing, but adequately represented with the Transform power so it's probably not worth more than the note.) Some relevant FF Wiki links: the Junction system the Draw command the Refine command the Card command

Has butt storage really spread so insidiously? Does no one keep local files anymore, that they can't even save two images? Woe, woe, the end of days has befallen unheralded! All is lost, all is lost...

Oh, I certainly don't dispute any of that, but it is useful to have a baseline to look at, and I at least find a line on a graph easier to work with than a series of inputs on a spread sheet or web site - and while not as much of a concern nowadays I suppose, I still tend to operate on the assumption that internet access may not be available everywhere I want to be. (There are still a few cell phone dead spots in the back of beyond and the twistier valleys, if nothing else.) That is a handy site for when it is, though.

Isn't it more limiting to have the Linked power only work on a successful hit, than every time the other power is used to attack, though? Between the concept being "recovers when the enemy is damaged" and the basic principle that you can always add more limitations for free if they're not worth at least -1/4, that sounds like the Limitation version should be fine. I mean, it's making the healing power less effective than just having it available at will whether or not there's a handy target you don't mind hurting, so it should cost less, no? Doing it the way you said, you could heal by firing into the sky - or at least, that's what it looks like from how you said it.

Thanks for the explanation, Duke! I can see where you're coming from with that... I think my preference would be to calculate height from the doubled mass or mass from the linear increase in height rather than specifying them separately, but I can see how that would not appeal without a calculator at hand if you're dealing with intermediate values at all. The car was probably Prowl, who is actually a Datsun 280ZX, but that just means he looks like a Porsche who decided he had too much junk in the trunk and went on a diet. He was pretty much Prime's second in command as much as any kind of command structure was ever shown. At least, the only other s1/s2 characters I can think of who had light bars look nothing like a Porsche, the closest being Red Alert who is very much a Lamborghini Countach with all the angularity that entails. An actual Porsche with numbers but no light bar would probably be Jazz, resident Cool Cat, voiced by Scatman Crothers in the cartoon, and probably the worst done by as supposedly included in the first Bayformers movie. That had his alt mode looking more like Bluestreak (who despite his name is silver and black, with red bits on his robot mode,) talking all tryhard "gangsta" as a bigger hothead than most of the characters who've been named Hothead, and killed like a chump to demonstrate "Megatron's" bad ass cred. RUINED FOREVER! The purple space-gun was certainly Shockwave, one of the big name Decepticons, left in charge of Cybertron while Megatron and his elites chased the escaping Autobots. His name was reused for the building-eating snake things in I htink the third Bayformers movie, but by that point I had entirely dismissed them as connecting to any other Transformers property on even the thematic level and didn't pay much attention. As for the motivations of the war, once upon a time it was just Evil Decepticons Want to Rule Everything vs. Good Autobots Want To Protect Freedom, to the point that Megatron's signature quote was "Peace though tyranny," and Optimus's was "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," then they added Decepticons having been built as military products and Autobots as civilian merchandise but having rebelled together against the Quintessons and only later split into opposing factions, then in more recent comics they turned it into Megatron raising a rebellion against an oppressive Autobot government and then going off the extremist deep end, retconned that two or three more times, and now I have no idea. There were something like thirty more or less related Transformers continuities when I counted them up in the mid-noughties, and that number has only kept growing.