dialNforNinja

Remember this from the early, _fun_ days of the internet frontier?
 
https://www.theyfightcrime.org

I have a few characters I've made off of completely random comments by my players.  Entire plot twists spun up by a stray comment or two.
 
One such character spawned from, "Oh, Ned the Baker, I'm going to write that down because I'm SURE he's a key player in the story....".
He is now you snarky !@#$. 
 
Little do my players know, but Ned the Baker will be the one that will resurrect them with his mystical pastries should they fall in battle.
 
His powers are a variety of buffs, self-only, usable by others, delayed effect, OAF - baked good, that essentially can be used by anyone who eats one of the enchanted pastries.  He needs a few hours near a stove or open flame to recover his charges.
 
I can't wait to spring this guy on the players.

My weirdest was Little-Leg Boy who was made for a Legion of Superheroes try-out day (a one shot which we weren't sure whether it would become a campaign).
 
He had Imskian ancestry but rather than being able to shrink his whole body like a full-blooded person from Imsk, his left leg was shrunken except for phases when he expands it to full size for a surprise attack with a "returning to full size" damage bonus.
 
Little-Leg Boy walks on a set of crutches which have bonus running so he gets around faster than most people who have two full-sized legs.
 
He's also a master of the martial art of Crutch Fu.
 
The LSH weren't sure what to make of him. His "power" wasn't a clear advantage. That iteration of the LSH didn't allow members with technology-based powers but his "tech" compensated for his handicap (while his handicap doubled as his power). Yet he was an effective combatant even without the crutches. How could they turn down a handicapped person solely for being handicapped or deny him the use of his crutches?
 
It didn't exactly help the LSH's decision process that the rest of the players brought PC's who would have had trouble being capable of making the Legion of Substitute Heroes roster.

Here's one I forgot about (long, long time ago).
 
As one or two of you know, I wasn't much of a comic book kid (or adult) but I did have some exposure to the old Captain Marvel comics (the loft over the milk room was packed with lots of things from the childhoods of older relatives, including a couple dozen of those).
 
I always sort of liked the character, so I did an "homage" in the character  The Billy Battalion.  I'll cut to the quick of the origin:
 
In some unremembered military conflict, Billy Johnson was a drafted soldier.  During a firefight that was going horribly against his team, he lost his footing, slipped into a ravine, and came to light in a cave.  In this cave was a Shrine, and it put him in mind of his own rejected Church-filled upbringing, and he began to pray to God, right here before this strange foreign diety, toward the end, he just kept repeating "Help Billy, God.  Please, please, help your poor little Billy...."  And Poof!"
 
The super version was the player character.  He could hang around as long as he wanted to, but when he was ready to stop being Billy Battalion (the schtick was that he was needed elsewhere) or got knocked out cold, "Poof" again and there was some guy standing there.  Or some woman, occasionally.  That guy was invariably named Billy, William, Will, Bill, Willie, and all kinds of really distant permutations.  If there was nothing close to "Bill," then his last name would be something sort of approximating "Johnson."
 
Getting odder:
 
Keep in mind that this was before Multiform and Duplication and anything else we'd look at today to make such a character.  The character was a set of powers and bonuses, period, with 125 pts spent on "Host."  Jim would grab some random NPC out of his file, we'd apply the powers and characteristic bonuses, and Bam!  That was Billy Battalion, at least this time.  While Billy was his own personality with his own memories, he also had the memories of the NPC, and their personalities would have some affect on his own-- not a lot, just enough that he was never _quite_ the same person.  The Host had an effect on how he looked:  Caucasian athlete with a 17 STR?  Cool!  And that +35 to that, it was awesome!  Slender Asian woman with an 8 STR?  Well, he was less than half as strong!  He was also a (not slender, with that +35 STR) Asian woman.  Sometimes he was hispanic, black-- it all depended on the Host, chosen randomly.
 
  The only Skills Billy had were those that the Host brought with him.  (that got really odd for characters that worked with Billy more than once  .)   Most amusing part (at least to me) was a bit Jim (my GM at the time) added:  the NPC host remembered _everything_.  They remembered being "taken over" by Billy Battalion, they remembered the bit of the adventure they participated in (and in great detail), and anything that anyone let slip (like "real names" or where the loot was, etc).  Further, Billy also remembered everyone he had inhabited, flawlessly, and forever.  And he _loved_ them all, which made for quite a fan club.   
 
Oddly enough, during that campaign, Billy became something of a media sensation (though I think that was just to put me personally on the spot every now again to come up with a new angle for the personality during an interview).   The campaign was short (played through in something like a dozen all-night sessions, and the character was never revisited.  Still, it was _lots_ of fun, and that was probably just about the right amount of time to spend with that character.
 
I have no idea why I didn't remember him when this thread first went up.  It was great!
 
 

One of my favorite oddball concepts came about when I wanted to play a more support class but didn't want to be stuck constantly patching up boo-boos. I wanted people to seriously consider other options before they came to me to get fixed up...

The core concept was a semi-brick with powers that revolved around SFX of incredibly rapid healing. To the point were almost all his defense was bought that way. The party initially accepted him because he seemed pretty buff and said he could heal people and tell what was wrong with them just by looking (a medical diagnostic sense/discriminatory/analyze) which was odd enough. The party had a collective heart attack in the first fight when he ran up to the biggest bad on the street and took a massive haymaker. Because of his SFX it appeared that he was flung across the street in a welter of blood, gore and snapped bones. Only to stand up calmly as everything sort of sucked/slithered or snapped back into place with sounds almost as bad as the initial hit... lol.. "just a scratch"
I based his healing others off the ability to 'loan' his own powers temporarily to the other person with the side effect that caused him to take exactly whatever damage they healed while they had the power (or his immunity prevented). If they were stabbed, the wound would slowly open up in the same place on him, etc.
It did not take the party long to realize his other limitation... he really liked pain. a lot. a really, yeah, inappropriate amount... And was always on the look out for things he hadn't felt before. The team got pretty hesitant to let him heal them when he was asking like a junky... "is that a stab wound? looks like it hurts a lot, never been stabbed with a bowie knife before, I would love to help you with that.. can I mmmmm heal it for you?" Never had to worry about being a band-aid dispenser. heck, some other players wouldn't accept any healing from him at all... Like, nah, I can heal it naturally...
Also made for some fun combat "tactics" as he would seek out the opponent who either hit hardest or did damage in a way he hadn't felt before... "ooooh, never been frozen to death yet..."
I ended up actually picking up a limitation in play because it became an exploitable issue that he left so much bloody mess (and DNA) everywhere after a fight. But it also made for some unique presence attacks.

And, yeah, it ended up that his hero name became "Scratch" because of that indelible scene in the first battle.

Oh man, I have a bunch for this.
 
1. The contrary player
In my early days of playing Champs, back in the 80s, I was enthralled with the game's freedom and convinced I could work with any idea a player had.  A friend of a friend basically trolled me and decided to make the most obnoxious character and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.  The character was some kind of lizard guy with no arms or legs, and was deaf, blind, and mute.  30 years later, I am still mortified I didn't see what a bad idea that was.  We actually attempted to play, but this contrary guy continued to make it as difficult as possible.  I don't recall how long that lasted, but needless to say, we never played with him again.
 
2. Leather Apron
I made up a horror villain to mess with my players.  I took the name "Leather Apron" from Alan Moore's From Hell.  Earlier in the Jack the Ripper murders, he was being referred to as "Leather Apron" before the Jack the Ripper name took hold.  The character had two weird powers.  One of them was him having a face that resisted being remembered.  I defined it as a constant, persistent Int drain on everyone who saw him, limited to only effecting the memory of Leather Apron's face.  His other weird power was a Mental Illusions power that made the victim believe they were communing with a Lovecraftian monstrosity in orbit around the Earth.  I refused to confirm or deny whether or not such a creature actually existed and if it did, what its connection was to Leather Apron.
 
3. Stickman
I just made a guy whose power was being a skinny little stickman.  The GM didn't get the character's potential until I pulled off a neat little stunt in the middle of a fight with a swarm of Viper agents.  I was standing atop a stack of crates on a shipping dock and I slipped between the crates to hide within.  The particular skinny power was a limited form of Desolidification which let him slip through the cracks of just about anything.  
 
4. O-Lass
An old friend who has since passed away, was enthralled by Phil Foglio's old humor/erotica comic XXXenophile.  In one issue, there was a character named Orgasm Lass.  He wanted to play her and I hesitated at first, not because of the content (my group was pretty open to all kinds of weirdness), but because I wasn't sure how to make her.  Finally I realized a combination END/STUN drain, limited to a particular category of targets, could simulate what we were looking for.  Lou played her for quite a long time.
 
5.  Mr. 1920
One of my players had a very weird concept and I did my best to accommodate.  Mr. 1920 was a man who lived in the 1920s but would dream an avatar of himself into modern times.  That psychic avatar was the character he played.  His weirdest ability was a constant aura that extended out about 2 feet or so from his body, that temporarily transformed everything within it to an equivalent technology or style from the 1920s.  If someone tossed him a cell phone, it would appear as a telephone from that era.  People standing right next to him would have their clothes temporarily transform into the style of the 1920s.  The aura even provided additional defense against high-tech attacks, essentially neutralizing them as they made contact with the avatar.
 
6. Servo Sally
The same player who played Mr. 1920 had another idea that was basically the reverse of that one.  A young boy, the son of a great scientist in the far future dug around amongst his father's weird tech gadgets and picked out what he assumed was an exotic video game controller.  It let him play the Servo Sally game, allowing him to control a female robot hero as she fought for justice in a 21st century American city.  The Servo Sally robot was the character in the Champions game, being actively controlled by a boy in the future, who was unaware that his video gaming was effecting what an actual robot was doing in the past.
 
7.  Little Sister Sadness
I just recently made this NPC villain for my current group.  I based her on one of my Champions Online characters.  She has the power of Super-Sadness.  In CO, she just used powers from the Darkness set and I called them the powers of Super-Sadness.  In Champions proper, I was able to fine tune that even more.  Her powers include a black mood form (multiform), tentacles of despair (entangle), depressed gaze (Mental blast w/eye contact required), Cry me a River (water blast, AoE Line), and finally Presence Defense called "Already disappointed".
 
8. The Signal Ghouls
This is a villain group from my current campaign.  These are creepy weird science techno-cultists who have discovered the ability to detect weird mystic/psionic signals from across time, dimension, and space.  They latch onto transmissions between godlike alien entities and have mastered the ability to farm those signals for materials (psychic/psionic/mystic) that they can turn into components or weird weapon fuel that they sell to the supervillains, mad scientists, and evil wizards of the world.  Functionally, I can use them in a variety of ways, as weird creepy punks for heroes to take down easily, or as part of a more serious story, they can be a stepping stone toward more serious threats, like the villains they sell to, or even the beings whose transmissions they are mining.  

dialNforNinja threw down the gauntlet so I'm retelling the two strangest concepts ever thought of for our campaign.  😜

First up... Amoeba Man! A cabbie driver who had the ability to change into a giant, floating amoeba that -cough- used Ego Attacks. His first (and fortunately only) appearance went something like this: the other heroes have already arrived at a bank being robbed by villains and have never met Amoeba Man. So, even with his weirdo concept, how does he decide to make his entrance? While driving his taxi, with a passenger in the back no less, he crashes his taxi through the large glass bank windows, changes into a giant amoeba and blorps/floats out the cab & towards the group. The poor passenger in the back runs screaming down the street!
 
I think it's a natural reaction to his but everyone, both villains and heroes, stop and stare at this, um, something-or-another. It's only because A.Man uses his 3d6 Ego Attack on a villain that the heroes didn't attack it. Btw, it was 3d6 with an 18 Ego because the player spent so many points on Enhanced Senses, Damage Resistance, etc. He wanted to have Duplication every time he was hit but fortunately the power Duplication had only just come out and I was not going to tell him, much less allow it!
 
Second... Photogen! A photographer who had an injury and became a cyborg but still normal appearance. The original concept was (again) lots of Enhanced Senses. He wanted to be able to take a picture by blinking his eyes and pulling the photograph out of his stomach.... 😵 Oh, and he had no attack powers; managed to get him to agree to take a 10d6 Lightbeam attack (Stun only). This concept fortunately only last two sessions.
 
I think it's only appropriate we use Amoeba Man with a group of other villain reject ideas from time to time for a joke once in a long while.

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?

Ha! 
 
I did the same thing with an NPC "hero" that needed occasional rescue. 
 
I was inspired by Goat from Megas XLR. 
 

As a GM, I once created a villain (The Recycler) who ran the city dump and built a giant mech out of junk people had thrown away.  His goal, IIRC, was to punish people who didn't recycle.  Needless to say, he got... wait for it... trashed.
 
One of my current favorite villain teams had a strange out-of-game origin.  I was looking at characters I'd like to put together into a team, and had Ankylosaur, Armadillo, and Airstrike (a flying powered armor guy).  Initially, I was thinking of a bunch of people in powered armor, but then I noticed their names all started with the letter "A" -- and thus, the A-Team was born.  Currently, they have about 8-10 members, and members are allowed to belong to other teams as well.  Their only requirement for membership:  your name must start with "A."

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.

They have to:
 
The shock and awe of such an astounding feat of mechanical engineering in action, preparing to kick the butts, is an overwhelming Presence Attack of unimaginable proportions.  It's easily--   _easily_! - - PRE + 100.
 
What else makes sense? 

It's a Plot Point; Build the Lions (or if you're going for the other series the various ships), build Voltron, use Vehicle Rules, hand wave the combining as Cool Stuff That Happens; Give the players different roles in Voltron like you would any Starship style combat.

Ah Christopher, I think you are missing the point, this is a soliloquy performed through the medium of interpretive dance...and (as we know) soliloquies take no time.
 
Doc

Voltron probably isn't supposed to take so long to combine, but for dramatic reasons everyone (including the villains) go into holding patterns and wait while the long sequence takes place.

Not really an unusual concept, but an unusual campaign.   Due to numerous weather-related cancellations one night, only my brother John and I showed up for game night.  (hilarious, since we both rode motorcycles through the storm to get there).  Jim, refusing to let the evening go to waste, announced "Screw it!  You guys make characters!"
 
Sure!  For what?
 
I don't care.  Whatever you want.
 
What kinds of characters, then?  Personalities?  Powers?  Maybe a hint at genre?
 
Tell you what:  Duke, you go into the den and surprise me.  John, you stay right here and surprise me.  I'm going to get a couple of lanterns in case the power goes out and pop a couple frozen pizzas in the oven while we still got power.  Back in a few."
 
Twenty minutes later, he called for our characters.  I had made an eleven-year-old Japanese-American orphan with a powerful TK and a couple of mental powers who was looking for his allegedly-kidnapped father.  John had made an adolescent dragon.
 
"Cool."  Said Jim.  "I can work with this."
 
 
And he did.  For about three years.  It was a total blast.  

The weirdest characters I ever played as a player is the Ze Giant Robot and the Coca Cola Kid.
 
Ze Giant Robot is a 3' Gundam suit wherein a 6'6" man contortion-ed himself into.  The idea was, the French became enamored with the idea of giant robots and took scale model designs from the TV to make the suit but the error in scaling made the suit 3' tall.  Not to let good equipment go to waste, they got a contortionist to enter the suit and pilot it.  Those crazy frenchies.
 
The Coca Cola Kid is a walking advertisement for Coca Cola.  He's essentially a martial artist with Coke Can nunchuks.  When he was feeling tired, he'd pop open a can of Coke and get refreshed (END and STUN aid).  He lost his job at Coca Cola when New Coke came out.
 
A friend of mine played the Mime, super powered mime.  Basically, anything he could pantomime became real (though invisible).  If he pantomimed a wall, then an invisible 12def wall appeared.
 
PS: we made much weirder villains, but I don't have enough space.

Hmm, so unless he had that power active he'd have to Abort to activate the ability which would at least cost him his next Phase and prevent him from doing it at all if he'd already gone.  I may play test this during our next session to see how the group feels about it.  I'm worried about copy cat syndrome.  Trigger seriously impacts action economy and is like very cheap units of speed.
 
The same guy already bought a trigger so that whenever he blocks an attack it fires of a HKA counter-attack.  Block + attack is much stronger than Block then attack first next phase.
 
I also like the idea of combining that with a DEX contest along the lines of holding a phase to strike an enemy when they get close.  You don't automatically go first so there's a DEX contest to determine the order of events.
 
HERO is good about not having a lot of absolutes so I like to have some sort of roll involved rather than complete immunity.

Just make sure you enforce everything, like when and how you can change multipower slots, and give characters more abilities that he can't dodge.  Also there are suggested limits on the number of triggers people can have, etc.  For example, you cannot use a multipower slot that you don't have active, so his triggers could not reset unless he had that one active.  That means he can teleport dodge some attacks, but not all of them all the time.  He'll look like Nightcrawler bamfing away from people but they'll still get hits on him sometimes.  Its just a fancy high DCV.
 
 
Sure, triggers can only sense what your normal senses are able to, so there are limits to how and what it can tell is there to respond to.
 

The important thing is to make sure people understand the way powers work and the way they are going to act in the game when they are creating characters.  If they don't understand how life support works, its up to you as the GM to help them know that before the fighting starts and it comes up.
 
 
This I would allow, then work out ways to get around it as a GM   Like, the AE fills an area he can't see out of, so his teleport doesn't help him any or causes him to port into something that causes damage.  Its a legal construction, and I like to reward creativity.

Yep! This is a real thing! It has stats for all manner of supernatural beasties, too (notably werewolves, vampires, and "Franquestein" (the monster). It looks like it will be a lot of fun (and, as mentioned, it's a self-contained game). 

Long ago I came up with Burl Boy/Wicker Man. BB was a Pinocchio-like animated puppet around three feet tall, carved out of a burl from an oak tree once sacred to the Norse gods. Burl Boy animated spontaneously, but the woodcarver who made him was horrified by the "abomination" and threw him out. BB fell in with a gang of homeless boys, but eventually was adopted by a traveling superhero team. BB could compact himself into a hard wooden ball to roll and bounce about at considerable speed, and to hit people and things with great force.
 
After a few years Burl Boy became tired of always being treated like a child because he could never "grow up." (I.e. I was looking for a change.) After his team saved a reclusive druid, the druid imbued the living puppet with the ability to sprout new growth from his body which would weave together into a roughly humanoid form nine feet tall, resembling a wicker man from pagan sacrificial rituals, possessing superhuman strength. The puppet body would "ride" inside the upper part of Wicker Man controlling it as though it were a mech, with his face sticking out from the front of its head. Burl Boy could cause the Wicker Man body to wither and crumble away when he wanted to resume his normal proportions (done with Multiform, of course).

One of my players seemed to specialize in weird character concepts.
 
For Fantasy Hero, he wanted a mage with an "exploding porcupine" spell, whose primary spell component was a live porcupine.
 
For Champions, he proposed Frat Man and his trusty sidekick, Keg Boy (aka the Boy Kegger).
 
He also talked about a version of Waffle Man well before the one that appeared in Mystery Men.  His version would jump on foes from up high, flattening them and branding them with his distinct criss-cross waffle pattern.
 
Another player proposed that each character on the hero team would pay points for his or her own car (but all of them were Yugos), and that the cars could come together like Voltron.  Only in our case, it would have been Yugotron.
 
Thankfully, none of these character concepts made it as far as an actual writeup.  But they've been the source of running jokes in our gaming group for years.

Not that you would see this in FHC, but one of the examples in 6e1 uses 1 pt of Killing Damage at a 5 cp cost. Really, that only means the difference of a pittance of stun, but that would change the defense required. And the example is listed as AVAD, defense is LS: Safe Environment [High Pressure], so you could always take that route as well.
 
It does make sense that 1 pt of Killing Damage in a CE would cost 5 cp. As that is what it would cost to buy it straight up.
 

It is 1 Point of Normal Damage (Body + Stun) that is triggered when a Target is in the CE Area Of Effect, they take the point when they first enter the area, and every time the Character who activated/controls the Change Environment has their Phase come up.