dialNforNinja

Those two problems were addressed, between shifting over to a Speed Force dimension and using Transdimensional senses and Strength to affect "the real world," and adding Spatial Awareness as tachyon perception with the Discriminatory, Sense, and ... whatever the third adder was that I can't remember to be what he's perceiving things with. Being in the Speed Force presumably also takes care of relativistic mass causing problems with local gravity, too.

All right, we're clearly thinking at cross purposes - "he is fast, so he can do this" versus "he can do this, so he is fast," and "he's using massive END so how could this even be played" versus "he has Life Support: Does Not Age and centuries to recover END between uses, my god this is even more abusive than I thought and can never be played." Beyond that, some web searches (ignoring everything with a rem.uz address because I'm still being stubborn about that 🙄) reveals that what I need is APG2, which (at least judging by the reviews and a Q&A thread from a couple years ago) essentially does exactly what I came up with here, in pages of detail because that's just how Steve rolls. "It's horribly expensive and probably no GM will ever allow it" sure sounds familiar at any rate As for Hero not having "I win" buttons... well, that's obviously untrue, as in nearly any point-buy toolkit type system, and most others as well. Nixing those is (part of) what the GM is for, because otherwise all you need to have one is an attack that's far above the defence levels of the campaign, or an NND whose special defence isn't available.

I don't really see why you think I haven't defined what I want to do "in Hero system terms." I want a character who acts and reacts ten trillion times faster than normal. Period. No make an Xd6 attack and call it "punched 500 times in a second" if he wants to punch you 500 times he punches five hundred times, and probably takes a break every two or three to read a book so his knuckles don't get sore. If he wants to run to NYC to pick up a genuine New York Thin Crust pizza, he doesn't break out Life Support: Does Not Require Food (8hrs, UOO) he runs to NYC and buys a pizza. Why is this hard to understand? e: Sorry, I lost my temper a bit. Expletives deleted.

Being literal is the point, so you actually are fast enough to see light move like the camera in that video, so you have three hundred thousand years per second to do whatever, even if you'd usually use far less than that for any purpose that involved interaction with slow events. Though I did forget to account for only having SPD 2 normally, so add another +10 to EDM: Enter the Speed Force to account for being spread out over six phases rather than just happening in one, making the final result 357cp. edited: Life Support to avoid aging instantly and needing all the food and water in the world, plus the Absolute Time Sense and Eidetic Memory talents sound like good investments for the highly limited remaining point budget, too

Wow, nothing? I guess that means I get to try weaving a silk purse on my own then... Alright, standard modifier for powers is +5cp to double non-damage effects, but looking at the time chart it's more like x4-5 per step after you get to an extra turn so call the base effect one turn per external phase and +10cp per step after that. That still ends up being something like +130cp for a subjective century in a phase, but you're getting a century in a single second so it's hard to complain. Even that is only a factor of about three billion to one, not ten trillion, though, so we have to go deeper (foghorn!) 317,019 years precisely, so following the 1-5-25-100 pattern that's 500, 2500, 10k, 50k, 250k, close enough to five more steps, so 202cp total on EDM, plus Spatial Awareness: Tachyon Perception (32cp) given the Discriminatory (+10cp,) Sense (+2cp,) and Targeting (+10cp) modifiers along with Rapid x13 (+39cp,) for 93cp and a total (still not including Transdimensional on whatever needs it though) 295cp. Let's see, Transdim is +1/2, so that makes our non-photonic Tachyon sense cost 139cp. I'll be merciful and say normal STR is "indirect" enough to just get Transdim applied on its own instead of requiring TK with Fine Manipulation and a bunch of skill levels to make the roll meaningless, so just 6cp there for a minimal superhero STR of 13. 202+139+6=347cp Ouch! But it is just barely possible within a standard 400pt build, if you don't raise Characteristics much above the baseline and let your actual ten-trillion-times-normal super speed be the whole of your powers. Well, we knew going in this wasn't going to be cheap. I guess you could just ignore the photon speed issue much like it ignores air friction and put Rapid and Transdimensional directly on Sight to save a hundred or so points, but when the point is to be able to dodge laser beams like they're nothing but snails that seems to violate the internal logic of the power, let alone our measly earth-logic, and even when powers make no earthly sense I still feel they should have internal consistency. What do you think, does it pass the sanity test? It would break the game completely to actually use, but as a construct within the rules, I mean.

Well, that's why she's an archvillain. Fortunately she's also a patriot; in one campaign outline I wrote the fallback position if the party couldn't stave off an alien invasion was that Gaia would appear and have the remaining orbital defences allow a path through so the invaders would make their beachhead in Australia, so her most loving creatures could give them a taste of what to expect from their new nieghbors, so to speak. The Dread Emu would then have claimed the #4 spot in causing casualties among them, after snakes, spiders, and sheep, but edging out drop bears and gympie gympie shrubs (Dendrocnide moroides,) other human efforts only taking #6 combined.

I want to say something about CLOWN being an absolutely essential organization to include, but basically I've seen the cover of their book and that's it.

Looks like you have some good suggestions for the original question, but considering the theme I suggest a couple more sidekicks/wanna-bes, or perhaps copycats to provide a false lead for the party while they're trying to deal with these guys: Bushrabbit and Cane Toad They're a couple of my stock characters when superheroing leads down under, along with archvillain The Dread Emu and hero team Platypus Man, Argent Wombat, and Tassiewolf.

So I'll start right off with the elevator pitch: Scorch is a ghost. Previously the fire-using heroine Firebomb (F-Bomb to certain close friends) she overloaded her powers to create an explosion big and hot enough to immolate a cloud of airborne bio-warfare nastiness when a certain villain's plot was not quite foiled in time, her only remnant a shadow etched into the sidewalk and up a wall. Some time later, however, that shadow peeled away... and Summer awakened to find herself in a strange twilight existence, less than paper-thin and able to stretch long distances like, well, a shadow on the wall. Despite this mostly immaterial nature she still interacts normally with the physical world, and can even be hurt by normal means. The only vestige of her former powers left is the ability to make herself burning hot, and sometimes burst into flame at moments of stress. Not that she lacks for stress, looking for her place in a world that knows her former costumed identity as a martyred hero, and no longer able to just take off the costume and be another civilian. I think this is probably the weirdest character concept I have ever had, or perhaps tied with Ten-tickles Therapist, a stereotypical H-anime tentacle alien who's actually just a sports medicine and massage specialist who crashed on earth after a hyperspace accident. F-Bomb was the character I made to try out Champions Online's fire blaster F2P character class, a tall black woman in a typical skimpy flame-themed uniform with an orange domino mask, a big also-flame-colors afro, and an F-logo belt that's one of the Foxbat costume parts you can get during the annual week-of-April-1st special event. Naturally, the whole character design grew out of trying to come up with something to do with Foxbat's stupid belt What are the oddest character ideas you (or your player group) have come up with?

Hopefully since it's been a week now JK7 won't mind me using the thread for a different "how do you build...?" question; it seemed pointless to make a new one when this has a suitably descriptive yet generic title. So... let's talk about speed. Serious speed. Speed like The Flash for real, not just normal tricks with speed SFX. This kind of speed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ As a reminder, I only have Champions Complete and Champions Powers (or the 4e BBB, if that butters your muffin more) to work from, so if it's already been addressed in, say, DOJ2331: Linear Algebra Hero, just pointing it out without explaining how it was done doesn't help much. Now, actually doing what they do in the video is relatively easy, Detect: Rapid for Sight, +3 per x10, so just count the zeroes on 10,000,000,000,000 and it's 13*3=39cp, and you too can have that camera for the low, low price of an Obvious Inaccessible Focus (-1/4), Immobile (-1), Not Expendable (0), Fragile (-1/4), Universal, total -1 1/2 aka 16 Real Points, whatever that works out to in Herobux. I know Fuzion is practically a cussword to most Hero fans, but porting it through Option Points would make that $80,000 I guess? No, can't be, given the point value of various example guns and vehicles. They never mention the cost of the system in the video AFAICT, but I must be remembering the conversions wrong. Actually doing things at that speed, though... I'm going to be stuck with Extra Dimensional Movement again to "enter the Speed Force" or something, aren't I? 20 Base Points for a single dimension, any physical location (+5cp) potentially, but only corresponding to the real world (-3cp), not dealing with time travel for sanity's sake (+0), so 22cp to start off with, but what does that actually get you? And of course you need Transdimensional on your senses (Well, probably on Detect: Spatial Awareness modified with Rapid as above since light is moving at a snail-like few millimeters per subjective second and sound doesn't exist) and STR and any other powers to see and affect the real world, but my question is how do you actually model the character having subjective hours or days (or realistically years if not centuries) to do stuff in the time it takes a normal bloke to throw a punch? Obviously there would be problems with this in a game setting unless the entire team was speedsters, but then the base level of the power would be free anyway since anyone relevant to the campaign has to have it and it's not actually an advantage unless they're better at it than the new waterline - but I'm not trying to build something for actual game use at the moment, just figure out how it could work at all. ... though now that I think about it, a story where someone gains ridiculous speed powers and discovers there's a Masquerade of speedsters going on in an otherwise frozen world would be kinda cool, if probably better in prose than a game. Maybe add that the speed is linked to Shrinking, so you have (relative to the mini-speedsters) the kind of massively huge planets often included in Xianxia web-novels to go with the trillions-of-years-old dynastic civilizations and so on. Going back to the realm of normal powers described as speed tricks, "I stepped off to the Speed Force dimension and built/retrieved/etc. this gadget" would be decent SFX for an equipment VPP, wouldn't it?

While it is on my list of things to get I don't yet have the Martial Arts book, and as a big Abe Lincoln fan the lack of Chokeslam in my options is annoying the heck out of me. If someone has a free minute or five to look at the custom martial maneuvers system, could you? No "grab" like the Choke Hold because you're not holding them at the end of the attack, just a bit of NND damage for when you pick 'em up and shake 'em, then Opponent Falls for when you toss them on the ground like a litterbug with a used kleenex. Remember kids, always make sure your villains are placed in the proper receptacles! Maybe a DCV or OCV penalty if needed to make the points work, due to compromising your balance until you readjust. Because piracy is bad and the only Hero System book in my FLGS is the 5e Vehicle Sourcebook so I can't just flip to that page for five minutes "while browsing" myself, yanno? Really, it's such a classic bit for Bricks and physical archvillains, I'd have thought it would be in the main books long since.

I know I love it! No thanks needed, it's what we're here for after all. I'm happy to help. On the subject of making stand-ups out of soda bottle plastic, I have a vague memory that is in fact the same kind of stuff Shrinky-Dinks used to be made out of, so while it would definitely need testing before you set your heart on it, you might be able to do that good old trick with it if you find the right oven temperature. I know that soda bottles actually start out as a thick little blobby thing attached to the molded neck and threads, then get heated and blown into a bottle-shape mold, so it is at least plausible. Hm, yup, this video does a lot of it, though using the flat top/bottom of the kind of plastic bin fresh sandwiches and salad greens get sold in rather than a bottle for the literal copy-the-Shrinky-Dinks-commercial segment. It's way too hot for me to try it at the moment, but I have like three of those sitting in my trash right now

What's the legality of something like that, anyway? Would you need to get some kind of license agreement to make and sell a Hero-based card game? I'd expect so, and certainly if it had Champions or Hero branding - Champions might be tied up with Cryptic depending on how that was written, even. And like I said before, game design is hard, more so when you're going to be writing something down and releasing it into the wild for people to try to use without a GM as such to make adjustments and smooth rough edges on the fly. Looking at card game POD suppliers led into spending all day poking at stuff on thegamecrafter.com and finding a nice NASA image of the Crab Nebula to turn into a hexmap background, and while I only have vague and simplistic "if you can count you can play" mechanics and a long pile of links (that would probably add up to about a $35-$40 set by a quick eyeball estimate) to show for it, it is a really nice image, and big enough to fit onto the Medium Six-fold Board without getting all pixelated so it's a decent size map with 1" hexes, as confirmed by cutting up an old pizza box to fold the same way at the same size. And rockets versus crabs against the Crab Nebula as a backdrop amuses me perhaps more than it really should. Best of all, googling my title reveals that somehow no one has used "Conquer the Crabs!" in anything but a blog post about cooking. Which, you know, got pretty far afield from vaguely wondering what it would cost to get some cards printed for myself with Hero stuff on them, but I saw something out of the corner of my eye and it was really shiny so I had to look closer

The Champions Character Creator Cards were the general inspiration for what I suggested, only made even simpler for mass-market appeal - you want to be able to play by buying a starter deck and reading the cards you draw with occasional reference to the HI2P mat, and let the "collectible textbook game" (I love that phrase! But I'm a nerd and a bibliophile, so...) be the mermaid you can see out on a rock from that mass-market beach, making bedroom eyes and promising any character you want, any power you want, it's all right here big boy if you move up from $10 decks and $1 booster packs to $20-$40 rulebooks Like, literally make a CCG that is a gateway drug to the full on game. Superheroes are big again thanks to the Marvel (and I guess DC... well, Wonder Woman was good...) movies, why are superhero RPGs still a niche within a niche within the niche of gaming as a whole?

For freeform games or as a quick, simple mechanic for snap rulings, d6 minus d6 is nice because it's +/-5, so it's immediately intuitive how good or how bad the results are, without even comparing it to a stat or a target number. As for the actual question of how to use Luck/Unluck... if how it's written up in the books doesn't butter your biscuit, my inlination would be to take a cue from BESM, and have the player roll for it at the beginning of the session, then for each point of Luck they can have one reroll, and if the result is worse, well, they can use another reroll unless they're out of Luck Unluck, of course, means the GM can tell you to reroll, though if the player gets a better result then I'd let them have it, and even play it up because that's the kind of thing that makes for a memorable moment of awesome. Likewise, I'd probably only call in the Unluck roll on a moderate success, rather than spoil the excitement of getting a really awesome roll by making it not count. The game is about having fun, after all, and ALMOST doing something really cool except the GM said no, you can't, is not fun.

If you really want a Champions answer to CCGs, make pregen cards with their stat blocks and non-Multipower slot stuff on one side and a character portrait on the other like the ones that came with the Marvel Super Heroes box sets back in the day, then lots and lots of powers cards with a purty picher of it in use and the rules for it in a text box, to put in your MP slots as they fit. Take a Hero In Two Pages in smaller type so it's one landscape side with counter tracks for END/BODY/STUN and other product ads or something on the back to fold up and slip into each starter deck box, and make the box long enough to fit three RGB glass blob counters, a map pawn with some kind of spinner or clix thing to differentiate between players who get one in the same color, and three dice inside on one side of the deck of cards. Include a poster-size play mat/map and a second deck in "deluxe" starter sets. Rarer heroes have more EXP and/or bigger MP Reserves... I dunno about rare Powers. Game design is hard!

Sadly, no. Kung Fu Chef, who emailed to say he probably wouldn't make it, did indeed not make it. Goo Girl also did not show up. Speedster and Bug Guy were there before me (the game tables supposedly get set up at 7 though the shop officially closes at 8, and Game Night runs up to 11, I arrived at a minute or two before 7) but were already playing Magic, and "just wanted to finish this game" -- No problem, I set up my stuff on the open table, and the Pathfinder guys even helped since they were setting up at the other non-Magic table at the time. But no, "just finish this game" turned into a few games, and then someone showed up about 8:30 with a big box of booster packs and everyone sat around opening them and taking turns picking cards, and I'd had enough of that so I packed up again and left. And I thought it was annoying just listening to my nephews going on and on about their damn cards... Gah, just thinking about it is pissing me off again.

It occurred to me after waking up that either of these could still be used for the classic ninja replacement trick to switch with a nearby object, unless you add another Limitation to that effect, either Only Works on Living Target, which still allows animals, or Only Works on Humanoid Target, which still allows statuary and aliens/animals close enough to human proportions within the weight limit and could lead to some funny moments depending on exactly how closely "humanoid" was enforced. This lowers the Real Cost a bit more but doesn't affect Active Cost, however the rest of the modifiers should be applicable to both except for Position Shift and there's no need to add Ranged to the 30AP version any more than the 60AP version when UAA already specifies range and the range you buy for Teleportation is always going to be well under Standard Range, hence falling into the Limited Range element of UAA. Making those changes does drop the AP a bit, so if desired you could increase the range Teleportation is usable at to 17m while still staying under AP budget of 30 or 60 points, in case the villain set up his ambush to happen when you're just outside the normal round number breakpoints. Castle: Teleportation 15m (15cp), Usable As Attack (+3/4), Grantor pays the END whenever the power is used, Grantor can only grant the power to others, Recipient must be within Limited Range of the Grantor for power to be granted; Only to swap places (-1), Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (Teleport character to target's former location; -1/2) 26 Active Cost, 10 Real Cost, 3 END + Only Works On Living Target (-1): 7 Real Cost + Only Works on Own Duplicate (-1 1/2): 6 Real Cost +2m Teleport: 30 Active Cost, 12 Real Cost +2m & Only Works On Living Target (-1): 9 Real Cost +2m Only Works on Own Duplicate (-1 1/2): 7 Real Cost Sneaky Castle: Teleportation 15m (15cp), Position Shift (+5cp), Usable As Attack (+3/4), Grantor pays the END whenever the power is used, Grantor can only grant the power to others, Recipient must be within Limited Range of the Grantor for power to be granted, Invisible Power Effects (Fully Invisible; +1); Only to Swap Places in the same position (-1), Side Effects, Side Effect occurs automatically whenever Power is used (Teleport character to target's former location; -1/2) 55 Active Cost, 22 Real Cost, 5 END +2m Teleport: 60 Active Cost, 24 Real Cost, 6 END + Only Works On Humanoid Target (-1): 16 Real Cost + Only Works on Own Duplicate (-1 1/2): 12 Real Cost +2m & Only Works On Humanoid Target (-1): 17 Real Cost +2m Only Works on Own Duplicate (-1 1/2): 13 Real Cost You could also raise Castle's range up to 34m within a 60AP budget, or trade 5m increments of that for Increased Mass modifiers to allow for switching with heavier objects/bigger living things. Hm, would bushes or (small) trees count? Praise the Log, for the Log shall save you!

Fucking Magic crackheads, why did I even bother? 🤬

That's some more good advice, but at this point I'm heading out the door, sooo... Back to being almost as nervous as excited. Wish me luck!

YOINKED! That is a really great little power, and I will love it and hug it and hug it and call it George. George Castle. George Castle the private detective/bodyguard, who has never let a client take a scratch.

If you make them with three-and-a-half or four panels and leave a tab on the first one, you can put a slit in the fold between the third and last/inside one to tuck it into, which also lets them be disassembled and used as a bookmark between sessions. A bit harder to get a weight to stay in the bottom, though like I said leaving some tabs along the bottom edge too lets you tape a coin on. If you've got a scanner or just a good close-up mode camera to get them into a computer you can easily flip an image to get the second forward side, no additional drawing required Time may be a little short today, but I'll share the templates I'm making later when I get a chance. Happy to help! It was a big hit at the table when I brought them out the first time, too. Literal jaw dropping, since that character was using a very recognizable unique weapon and was posed exactly to suit it, so it couldn't just be a kitbashed commercial figure. I mean, it also was obviously not up to modern commercial figure sculpt quality, but at least a decent match for what you used to see in the ads in Dragon Magazine back in the day... sadly, all of that stuff was among the lost in a house fire 2012ish. At least my BBB, Mekton Z/Z+, BGCRPG, TOON, and some SAS/BESM stuff were in my car at the time, along with a load of laundry, laptop, and my dog. Not really broken up about the D&D and Rifts books, because I was and am so very done with class and level systems, but my Transformers collection and gaming miniatures were a heavy blow. ... I had something else I meant to say, but I can't remember now. I have to go do a thing for a bit anyway.

I can't say how well it will work until later tonight, but I thought of a way to logically explain why rolling high is good for damage and low for everything else: "Just remember that when you roll the dice, you're always asking 'What could go wrong?' Of course you don't want much to go wrong for you, and a lot for the enemy."

It's not the same thing and probably more expensive besides, but if the two duplicates are both projections you could give the original Desolid and Invisible or Extra-Dimensional Movement and Affects Real World/Transdimensional on Duplication, either way only available when there are two duplicates active, and have him teleport or return to "where a duplicate was just dispelled" while leaving the other in place, or dispel and pop to "where the duplicate that wasn't killed" was, like a photon forced out of quantum superposition. A different concept I guess, and yes, more expensive, but it's so cool...

I'm actually half decent at drawing character portraits, to the point that the one lasting game I was in I had one printed on cardstock most of a normal page high with folding tabs on the sides to stand beside my character sheet for everyone to look at instead of my own ugly mug. I'd probably do a quick 3D model and print a tiny render of it these days, though at tiny size nearly anyone can draw on a close enough costume with a provided outline, so I'll make a sheet of blanks and bring them along with my box of coloured gel pens for the "talk about your long term character" part of the night after the pregen quickie, to hopefully generate more engagement and interest in the game. Thanks for the suggestion! I prefer the Marvel Super Heroes style tac-map stand ups where you have the character in a 3/4 forward view, flip it on the next side so the corner is the "forward" pointer, and either a proper back view or the front silhouette filled in with black on the back side of an equilateral upright prism, with a hex nut in the bottom as you said or just a coin taped to some tabs left on the bottom edge for the Q&D version. If that's the same as the SJG ones you mentioned I don't know, but I like 'em. For putting actual effort in, well, I sculpted and painted my own 25mm scale dude out of Green Stuff on a bread bag twist-tie armature with a nickle for a base in that game, and cut a silhouette of him out of the side of a clear soda bottle and stuck it in a flattened blob of Green Stuff to switch the mini out with when he was invisible, so ... Looks a bit like the evil Defender from the cover of Champions in 3D... which is awesome. I thought "I want to use that guy as a character!" from the moment I saw it too, unlike classic Defender's normal red, white, and blue. Video game Defender is a bit sleeker and was my image for Armsmaster from the Worm web-serial by Wildbow up until I made him as a Transformers G1 style Target Master (He's the blue one) but still isn't as cool as Mr. Black & Gold with red. My Target Master looks better in those colors too I think, though I only just realized right now that the trim on the back of the legs/barrel of the bolt launcher looks a bit like classic Defender's chest if you squint. Huh. Definitely the most important part! It's what we're all in it for! They were a lot of fun to make, and hopefully should be decently balanced for that level of offence/defence. Just Plain Tough might be on the edge of too much with 6 resistant PD/ED when most of the guns are around 1 1/2d6 to 2d6, but as long as it's on the near side of the line that should be fine for That One Tough Guy or the main antagonist. I've noticed that about MA myself, but it's how it happened to work out in this case. As you say a point or so either way is not super important and when I go about actually picking out a few sets of maneuvers to slot in there is room for more flexibility, but the whole point was to do a bunch of 30pt packages to drop in. I suppose I could formally do some that are set up for nine or eleven or twelve points worth as well, but eh. We'll see how much time the rest of the prep takes, since this evening is game night. Which does mean I should go back to bed, but you know, insomnia. edit: Oh, and since non-game superhero stuff is still at least sort of on-topic here... have you seen Adam Savage's Iron Man suit? It's pretty damn awesome. Edit 2: Two more for the 30pt powers list, to have an even thirty: * 30 Immortal II: +4 BODY -and- Life Support (Does not age) (5cp) -and- Regeneration 1 BODY per Turn post-12 (16cp), Can Heal Limbs (+5cp) * 30 Immortal III: Regeneration 1 BODY per 20min (10cp) -and- Resurrection (specify vulnerability SFX) (+20cp) Edit 3: repeating myself from the other thread for ease of future reference: I can't say how well it will work until later tonight, but I thought of a way to logically explain why rolling high is good for damage and low for everything else: "Just remember that when you roll the dice, you're always asking 'What could go wrong?' Of course you don't want much to go wrong for you, and a lot for the enemy."