dialNforNinja

I found a post on Stack Exchange about building a massmind character that suggested using the Follower perk, which seemed like a reasonable approach as explained. It also mentions the (fantastically expensive) 4e villain Tyrannon who had an entire army of transdimensionally Mind Linked subordinates, which sounds like a great enemy idea. I'll have to see if I can find the relevant book somewhere for cheap. I'm posting the link to both the Playing A Horde thread and my own about Shadow Clone not-Duplicates-like-HERO-does-them copies, for the benefit of later searching. https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/125324/how-to-build-a-hive-mind-character-in-hero-system-any-edition

I found a post on Stack Exchange about building a massmind character that suggested using the Follower perk, which seemed like a reasonable approach as explained. It also mentions the (fantastically expensive) 4e villain Tyrannon who had an entire army of transdimensionally Mind Linked subordinates, which sounds like a great enemy idea. I'll have to see if I can find the relevant book somewhere for cheap. I'm posting the link to both the Playing A Horde thread and my own about Shadow Clone not-Duplicates-like-HERO-does-them copies, for the benefit of later searching. https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/125324/how-to-build-a-hive-mind-character-in-hero-system-any-edition

Maybe mix in some Barrier with the Images and Telekinesis I started from? That at least gets you BODY and ED/PD, though even with Non-Anchored, Mobile, and Reconfigurable it's still a bit of a logical stretch, and if anything is costing the points for Barrier to make it less effective than an Image backed by TK to affect real objects. Then, with Barrier specifying that it has to be contiguous it's also an obstacle to having more than one clone, where the Images could fill however big an AoE you buy to use them with. (And on that note, is the listed "one meter cube" default for Images supposed to be the maximum bounds of the effect, or configurable volume? It would be plenty of volume for a even a very beefy single human and the 2m AoE modifier could support eight at 2m tall by 1m wide and 1/2m deep, but if it's maximum bounds you'd need the 2m version just to fit all the positions a human can get into, and that's assuming the area is mobile to suit the Image rather than fixed to the ground or the user.) The Barrier rules do suggest a possible way forward for a new energy-clone Power if you want to go that road, at least. Either way, it's still the one character running them, with the same number of actions and so on, so while they'd probably be effective decoys and an arbitrary number of extra hands for all your pet-bathing needs it's still not a real solution for Naruto-like independent shadow clones. Including some Barrier and Entangle fluffed as having a bunch of copies form a human wall or dogpile a target works, though it's strapping even more disparate bits together with, at best, Unified Power, to try to achieve a relatively simple SFX concept. Can you buy Speed limited with "Only to have clones act independently?" Would that even be a meaningful Limitation, anytime the character wasn't in their secret civilian ID and intent on preserving it? (Which would of course be covered by the Complication of having a secret ID in the first place, not a Power Limitation.) Honestly the effect on the action economy is the only reason I can see to have Duplicate so expensive as it stands, but all the same justifications for adding more actions here apply as in the "Playing a horde" thread, as that aspect is exactly the same. Maybe Summon: Copy of Self? That still ends up costing hugely as well, by the time you buy all the CP and a decent level of obedience so they won't just flip you off when you tell them to go jump in front of that attacking doombeast for you.

Duplicate as written makes sense for, say, a villain with a cloning machine Usable As Attack and built from a VPP for Evil Gadgets of the Month to be disposed of when his scheme is complete, who then decants a copy of a politician and messes with the laws, or a corporate officer and embezzles a load of cash, or a hero and proceeds with the standard reputation-blitz and mirror fight, but doesn't fit the "easy come, easy go" mook horde duplicator type at all - you'd be better off refluffing a speedster and swapping the actual movement power for a big chunk of Stun/Body so he can soak lots of hits "with disposable copies" and maybe END/REC to spam a lot of powers per round. Which, yes, works, but not too well and feels like a backwards work-around compared to flipping straight to the power whose actual name is what you want to do. Having multiple rules options for any IC SFX is one of the system's biggest strengths, but can also be very obtuse and confusing when you just want to do the thing and not mess around trying to be clever about it. Arrrgh... Your borderline-abuse example is why requiring that the most expensive form be considered the base for Multiform makes sense - though Champions Complete does specify that to qualify as a "lesser" cost character, it must be lower than the base character's cost minus the points spent on Multiform, probably specifically to head off that kind of trick.

... D'oh. Of course it does. I blame the NIghtwing-style details on motorcycle guy.

Who is Lady Punisher in the second post? You did specify this was DC stuff, not Marvel. Is that truck supposed to be an articulated cab and trailer? If it is, I have my doubts about the available clearance when you try, or go over a hill. If instead it's a solid frame, it probably has a turning radius of approximately a jillion miles with only two steerable wheels at the front and two sets of dualies in the middle. Looks cool standing still, though.

So, first off a fairly basic question about Multiform. Here's the second paragraph about it on Champions Complete p80 and thje first on p81: So can you have an alternate form that's more expensive than the base form or not? Coming from Mekton the idea of building your "true form" as the most expensive and any others as the same or less is hardly an unfamiliar one, but the text outright contradicts itself here, and there's a certain logic in having the Power represent civilian form turning into a hero or monster and as the "true form" being what the character reverts to when shocked/knocked out/etc., as is common in many, many examples across all kinds of media. Champions Powers doesn't go into it, sticking to a 300cp pool for the alternate form, and it's short on explanations anyway; I don't have 6e1 or 6e2 to see if it's worded differently there. I dug my #451 Big Blue Book out of the closet finally, and it does specify that the base form should be the most expensive, but presumably the power descriptions were changed between editions for more than the sake of adding more words, so the question is still open. Now, as for Duplication... I have never once in any media seen it handled like Champions, with a duplicate that gets killed being permanently lost. Frankly, it's insane in game design terms as well, to have some of the CP invested into an ability just up and vanish in what is usually considered a super-common event for duplicator characters (since it means you can show them eating lethal attacks and not have to come up with a new one for the next issue/episode/etc. or deal with parents' groups screaming about age-inappropriate themes in Little Jimmy's cartoon show) with no means to recover them. Champions Powers has a variation that resurrects dead duplicates as long as part of the body can be recovered, but that is 200 Active Points and still treating the dupes as real separate bodies made of normal body stuff and so on. So, short of being the GM and just ruling that no, that's stupid, duplicates aren't permanently lost, though they might only recover between scenes or with down time, how would you design a power to work like (for the most obvious example) Naruto shadow clones? My immediate thought is Image+Telekinesis so they can look, sound, and feel real and affect things normally, adding some Clairvoyance or Mind Link or Telepathy for the information transfer if keeping that aspect as well, but as previous experience on these boards has shown me my immediate thought (and second and third) is usually still bassackwards to the way HERO System is supposed to work and either drastically oversimplified or overcomplicated. So, I put the question before the Council of Grognards.

The curse of the artist: Close your eyes for five seconds and look again; you'll always see something you want to change no matter how great anyone else says it is.

Powers don't show up at all with the Observe Skill I want to model - even most fanfics only had them detectable for people who "join the party" - those kind of things are assumed as class level features in the D&D/FInal Fantasy ripoff style paradigm of The Gamer's IC system. Sometimes that's implied to show up at high skill levels, but most fics don't last that long, and the original manwha is honestly kinda meh, with an infuriatingly stupid MC, so I only read the early part. Like i said in the thread title, IC his game mechanics are nothing like HERO. What he gets is: Name Title (usually a job title or accomplishment; gives the character relevant bonuses like extra damage against undead from Zombie Slayer) Character Level (if this is too much above the user, it and everything after is just question marks) Health (derived from STR and END, recovery determined by END) Mana (Like HP but with INT and WIS) Strength Endurance Intelligence (as in "solve the math problem" or "invent a new spell," not "do the smart thing," because...) Wisdom (making good decisions is WIS and WIS is Jee-Han's dump stat, since he stumbled into a Skill to replenish Mana) Luck (would be very hairy to give a formula, but basically never has an explicit effect anyway, the more so since Jee-Han's plot armor could make the token kid in an action movie look like a popcorn mook. Supposedly affects critical hit and loot drop rates, and games of chance?) I want to say there was a DEX stat as well, but I'm quite sure there was not and that's just my bias toward "power, finesse, and resistance" game design talking. These stats are linear. "Status effects" that give various bonuses or penalties, like Well Rested, Easily Distracted, or Fire Resistant, (sort of like Titles in that respect but usually lesser and not things that anyone would really find notable in a "celebrity gossip" sense) along with the usual MMO buffs, debuffs, and HoTs/DoTs Whether the character likes, dislikes, or has no strong opinion about you (I'm less sure this is even included after thinking about it more, or it may be based off a Wisdom+social Skill (if he had any, which on top of leaving WIS as his dump stat Jee-Han does not) check in fanfics I'm conflating with the canon, such as it was.) And that's it, for characters. Objects just get a description, durability rating, and a bit on any special abilities or noteworthy historical events, if again they aren't too powerful to use Observe on. While it doesn't logically work as Sight by HERO terms, it is explicitly tied to looking at the subject and reading the popup window when used, so it absolutely can be Flashed as Sight, or for that matter blocked with a blindfold or if he can't give the verbal command. Of course, this is the kind of detail I should have provided the first time around...

Most of the costumes I design either have a utility belt, a regular belt wide enough to be hiding a thin interior pocket like a classic travelers' money belt, some kind of Liefield arm or leg band-o-pouches, or a breastplate to stick a little cargo box on the back of like a Stormtrooper's donut and twinkies. A couple of times I've given a female character a Sailor Moon style butt bow and claimed it's a well-disguised fanny pack, and if worse comes to worst you can just say there's a hidden pocket at the small of the back. I really like the bow-pouch actually, but just try and get a group together who's willing to play a game of magical girls, or even let one person play one in their "serious" game of let's pretend about grown adults who go out in brightly colored pajamas with the underwear on the outside to punch bad guys in the face.

There is no GM, just musing about how to do strange things in the system. It would probably end up too number-crunchy and time consuming to use even if the GM was me anyway - the Stats visible wouldn't be Hero's plethora, more like the D&D-by-way-of-Final-Fantasy ripoff of your stereotypical grindfest trash MMO, which was why I mentioned using a conversion formula in reverse. Level gets hairier the more I think about it, especially when the IC game system is based on MMOs that don't include gear in that at all and typically have the equivalent to Powers folded in unevenly. While supers games usually default to CP or an equipment pool bought with CP, I would be inclined to leave any gear and possibly some Powers out of the calculation, especially since one of the things that sometimes trips up Jee-Han (the manwha MC) is that people may be more capable or dangerous than their level suggests, or even thier stats if they have a particularly effective Skill. Your suggestions in general make sense though - it seems I'm still thinking too much in terms of IC effect rather than rules mechanics when I try to do these things, which pretty much means coming at them backwards in HERO system.

I don't know how many people here are familiar with "The Gamer," a Korean manwha that had a burst of fanfic popularity a few years back on a couple of other forums I follow, but a basic summary is that one day the MC wakes up with what amounts to an MMO interface complete with popup alerts, stats and inventory pages only he can see, and (most directly what I'm asking about) a Skill (in the IC terminology) that he can use to analyze objects or people he's looking at to see their name, level, title, a brief description of their attitude toward him, general situation and/or personality, current status effects, and stats, unless they're some large amount higher level than him. Now right off the bat HERO doesn't have levels, and that is its largest attraction for me to be honest, but I'm not worried about that part, there's any number of "convert D&D to HERO" guides that can be used in reverse to generate a stat block at need, and just about anything else he does that isn't adding to normal Stats is Life Support or playing with a Magic VPP/Multipower combo functionally the same as Witchcraft's setup in the example characters. My question is exactly how to model Observe using Hero. Just slap Analyse onto normal sight? 15cp (including the half-price Discriminatory to get the prerequisite full effect rather than the normal inferior version) is cheap for a pretty damn powerful information gathering ability. Maybe require a Perception or Divination skill check as well? It just works or doesn't in the source material, with relative levels being the only determining factor, if modified by tthe level of the Skill. It's not a bad solution, but it doesn't feel like a good one and I don't have any better ideas, so that's why I'm asking here. I only have Champions Complete, Champions Powers, Hero System 6e Martial Arts & Skills, and the two APGs, so if something similar is addressed in another book or an older edition please summarize instead of merely giving a page reference. Oh, and 5e Ultimate Vehicle, but that seems unlikely to be relevant. I'm a barely even a dilettante at this collectible textbook game of ours.

See, I knew folks were sitting on some great stuff! Once upon a time on another board I made a topic, "If you were a B-list supervillain, what villain would you be?" My own entry was HVAC, Master of the Elements! (pronounced aitch-vack) who could raise or lower the ambient temperature by fifteen degrees and control wind speed and direction up to fifteen miles per hour (That's total speed if against the wind, or added to existing wind speed.) His signature job was burglary with the getaway planned via hot air balloon, proclaiming "NONE SHALL DENY THE POWER OF HVAC! My mastery of the elements ensures that I can outrun any other balloon!" and his common takedown was being pursued by any other method than in a balloon. e: I remembered another of them just after posting - Smalltime had the ability to make poeple's skin look young and healthy, though it would wear off after a month or so... and rather than use this directly to make money, would open beauty shops and repackage cheap product into custom bottles to sell for premium prices claiming that it was his secret formula lotion that caused the effect, under the (admittedly not implausible) theory that rich old ladies were more likely to go for that than letting someone use superpowers on them as such.

One of the things I particularly liked about GaoGaiGar was that the components of the main super-robot actually do set up a barrier to keep enemies from disrupting the combination process... and at least once or twice, a boss type got through the barrier and wrecked some face until the supporting cast could come to the rescue.

I've noticed that the covers on Champions Complete and Champions Powers feel really light weight even compared to older paperback game manuals like Mekton Z or the BESM series, so I thought about converting them to hard covers. I know there are professional businesses that handle such things, but oddly enough they want to get paid for their time and I'm kinda broke, especially when there's so many parts of this collectible textbook game I haven't got yet So, I turned to the repository and font of all human knowledge, YouTube! After a couple hours of poking around and staunchly resisting getting sidetracked, this appears to be the most concise yet useful video on the topic, since it specifically addresses so-called "perfect bound" (IE single pages glued together at the spine, easy to manufacture but also prone to losing single pages or breaking into smaller chunks as they wear) paperbacks: Repairing a paperback book to hard cover Has anyone else tried such an operation? How did it turn out? Any tips or warnings to share?

Fighting blind has a default penalty that you'd use with Darkness, so I figured you'd set it up as fractions of that per increment, or half outright if doing it the reduced-bookkeeping way. My personal inclination would be to take whatever the effect radius is and divide that by two, so there would be effectively four bands if you were looking through it, the outside where you have 1/4 the penalty, the near inside with 1/2 the penalty, the far inside with 3/4, and beyond that total concealment. This gives a reasonably graduated effect without lots of gnarly math and a huge table to check against. Three bands would also be effective enough mechanically but halves and quarters tend to be more intuitive than thirds. I guess you could do 25%-50%-100% but that would probably be a smaller Limiter, -3/4 or -1/2.

Why would you not just use Darkness with a Limiter, say -1, for Partial Effect? Then apply the modifer-per-hex and duration however you've decided to do it anyway. I ask not because I think the suggestion above is wrong, but choosing the best right way seems to be the trick to grokking Hero System and I'd like to know the decision process for why Change Environment is better for the purpose.

That one could be just as much of a problem, though - say he annoys a grouchy old lady and she grabs his ear, or starts smacking him with her handbag... better hope he can pull that reflexive murderfist response! I'm not saying to just do it out of the blue like a jerk, of course, but including an NPC who doesn't like supers and thinks the modern generation is too disrespectful etc. is perfectly fair game, and blowing the RP (or at least some social checks in lieu of RP as it's entirely unsurprising if a gamer is not a social genius IRL) and having her become irate is legit too. People like that pester the heroes all the time in genre media, if perhaps mostly because bad things tend to happen when they try it on villains.

Didn't Western Hero just get a new release? I'm sure I saw something about that... maybe it was just an official PDF version without a system update?

Not... every "weird" character concept is sex related, right? I mean, even my two were "tentacle monster but without the rape" and "her nickname was F-Bomb" but... we can be creative without involving procreation? Reaching back further, one of Ten-tickles' precursors was called Traveler Among Strange Angles, an academic who discovered hints of intelligent life in other dimensions, became obsessed with studying it and proving his hypotheses right when they were ridiculed, and eventually mutilated himself to better fit in and fled to our dimension when certain deeds that had been necessary (if distasteful, at least until his morality shifted closer to the strange beings he had discovered as well) at the time but which were completely unacceptable among his own kind led to an angry mob descending on his isolated laboratory just as the means to finally open a portal suitable for physical transport were completed. Traveler had a generally similar schtick of only communicating telepathically, though with the more explicit SFX of forming glowing ideograms around himself and then blasting them at the target(s), but a less refined humanoid form that was more a matter of having cut the trunk of his treelike natural body in half partway up to become "legs" and vivisected and stitched his two major tentacles back together around an implanted framework to form arms with defined shoulders, elbows, and fingers. I figured that was a little too much body horror for a supers game that wasn't Rob Liefeld 90s style Rustiest Grimiest Bloodiest Pouchiest Iron Age (Yes, TASA wore a bandoleir and several arm/leg/etc. bands with pouches for personal items, since the defunct extra stomach his species normally uses for such a purpose was in the part of his body cut in half. Even Ten has a utility belt like that, but hidden under the flowing cloth of his sash) and cleaning out the Lovecraftian madness eventually turned into lampshading H-anime cliches for humour. Though I did resist the urge to name Ten's Armor Piercing attack "Penetrating Tentacle" somehow, up to now. Seriously, though, there's gotta be more stories to tell than this. We're gamers! We live for our weird game night stories! I know you've got 'em, so come on, spill!

Wait, Lucha Libre Hero? Really? That's awesome. And not just because I've always wanted a story where a Luchadore beats up Bane and takes his mask for shaming the spirit of Lucha (he uses guns, and both uses and sells drugs) and that's why Nolanverse Bane has that goofy fang-face instead of looking like the comics and animated versions.

If he's the GM and the general concept has been approved anyway, why not just use a VPP, when it's the kind of situation it's designed for? Multiform can certainly work, of course, and might even end up more cost-efficient depending on what a VPP Pool and Control Costs end up needing to be to cover all the bases. Edit: Thinking about Multiform got me thinking about a Kamen Rider build, and raised a point that could easily apply with powers-form-a-book: What about having a vehicle in some but not all of a Multiform's slots? For a Rider I was thinking that it could be justified by saying it still exists but advanced forms are too powerful/physically strong/etc. to use it safely, but for powers obtained from a book it could be some kind of force/energy projection, a Summon in game terms perhaps. Does it sound legit?

Oh, that is SO getting yoinked the next time I do an actual speedster build. I've got a big grinchy grin and can barely resist the desire to cackle and rub my palms together just thinking about it.

Oh super very NO on just one player having that kind of power, no matter the relative point cost. Like I said before, probably the only way it would ever get in game is a "Speed Force Masquerade" sort of deal where anyone relevant to the plot is just as fast and they have their own society of some sort going that only indirectly affects the Slow World, or something like that, and at that point it's campaign SFX and properly a freebie since everyone gets it. Even for a PBEM it would take up too much of the GM's time and attention from the rest of the players, and while it could work in solo mode if you're just going to write prose you might as well not bother with game mechanics as such, whether it's your OC Wheelz the Donut of Steel or just plain Flash fanfic. It was just an attempt to explore the envelope of the system, pretty much.

It's entirely possible that's my misunderstanding, but while however many actions you get per turn are resolved on the specific phases they fall on for game purposes, do they not supposedly still fill the whole twelvish seconds in-universe? Perhaps this is another artifact of my perspective being to look at what happens in character and only then poke at the parts bin of mechanics to see what can make that happen, rather than pulling some shiny factory-fresh rules out of their wrappers and slotting them together, then trying to figure out what in-character effects will tie them all into a theme and signature schticks. Putting it like that sounds sort of derisive, but I'm trying not to be - it's just that the latter seems to be the standard approach for Hero veterans, but it's more alien to me than ... than a gate to Qliphoth, to use a Champions setting reference. That at least I could toss a paper airplane through with a note conveying my Champions Online character Lady Cthulu's disregards (If that cow Ao'Qepoth thinks she's going to conquer Earth and take all the chocolate for herself, she has another thought coming! ) but coming at character design without designing the character first is just bizarre. All of your other points were interesting too, but I don't really have anything meaningful to say about them. Basically I just nodded along saying "Okay, yeah... yeah... that makes sense..." etc. I do appreciate you taking the time for the analysis though!