David Johnston

Re: Help with spell construction Well like it or not, Mind Control is one of the better ways to control someone's mind. But there is an alternative. You could go with a Mental Transform: Into a Coward. That will ensure that the character will put all of their skill levels into defense, and will choose manuevers focussed more on staying unhurt than on dealing out damage, and will try to get away from the fighting if they can. Then just set the heal rate so you can count on them retaining their Psych Lim: Coward for a few minutes.

Re: The Second Stringers Yes, but I came up with Marvel Man about ten years before I ever heard of the Tick (as the fact that he was a Superworld character indicates. Boy that system has been dead a long time).

Re: Teleporting Oxygen into and out of a hex Basically an NND but only one that would do a lot of damage in an airtight or at least poorly ventilated space. Otherwise the air just whooshes back in or out

Re: Some Villain Powers Help? I'm rusty with Hero, just getting back into it. That's why I've been saying some silly things. I forget that the way to build a power is to look at what it actually does and not what it looks like. So let me try again: In order to represent someone with the power to create tsunamis what you need is an area effect energy blast, (requires a large body of water nearby) To represent flooding an area with water (and keeping it there) that's a Change Environment that can do a one point NND killing attack to people with the defenses being not being air dependant or swimming to the surface. Once again, dependant on enough water being handy. Additionally, you'll want telekinesis that isn't area effect and doesn't require "large" bodies of water. Proximity to city plumbing will do.

Re: Wisdom Common Sense: The character can tell when he's acting like a fool (the GM warns him when a course of action will likely lead to an unfavourable outcome based on what he knows) Cost: 12 points Complimentary characteristic roll for Seduction. Base characteristic for PS: Model. Trigger for Psych Lims involving reactions toward people prettier than you. That's about it.

Re: The Second Stringers Secretariat: The worlds fastest secretary! Marvel Man: Designed in Superworld, with 75% clumsiness and 40 points of protection. The perfect man to defuse a bomb, provided you were a long, long way away. He also got around with gigantic amounts of Superleap to maximise the amount of damage he'd do just arriving. I Can't Remember That Guy's Name: A PC who attempted to turn breakdancing into a martial art. He was also the only person in that particular world who wore a superhero costume. They look a lot dumber when you're the only one making that fashion statement. Captain Chaos: A pudgy 14 year-old boy with poorly controlled telekinetic powers that would just sort of randomly trash the area whenever he got worked up. The PCs would very politely refer to him as "The Captain". It's amazing the kind of respect you can get when everyone's afraid you'll go "Carrie" on them. Phreak: Had stretching powers. Couldn't remember exactly how his body originally fit together, so all of his limbs were a different length at rest and one eye was three times the size of the other. He was my tribute to both Bill the Cat and the artist who created Warlock, apparently to make virtue out of his liabilities. Phreak's most memorable trick was his ability to create eyestalks for his eyes and stretch them around to take sneak peaks.

Re: Mechanics vs. SFX... Where is the line?

Re: Mechanics vs. SFX... Where is the line? Well, no. You just plug in lasers where bullets used to be and vice versa. Hardly a complete rewrite. (I'm going to take a wild leap and assume that improvised throwing weapons are "always" going to be more common than energy attacks unless you are roleplaying intelligent clouds of gas on Jupiter or in the Sun or something.

Re: Mechanics vs. SFX... Where is the line? Because each of those attacks is an descending level of commonality. The first includes every improvised throwing weapon and rocks are everywhere. The second is the level of the most commonplace mundane weapons in the modern world, guns. The third is superpowers and super-tech. (In a campaign where nobody used projectile weapons there would just be no point in getting the middle level and you'd drop it.). It is not fundamentally different in principle from "only versus physical projectiles" being less of a limitation than "only versus lasers". That it is written this way is a legacy from earlier editions to be sure. I figure if you bought your telekinetic shield as Missile Deflection then obviously it isn't wide enough to stop a broad cone of napalm and the napalm just flows around the shield. If you wanted a TK shield that acted like an entire invisible wall then you should have gone ahead and ponied up for the force wall or forcefield. The grenade's easy to screw with because it's an OAF and being vulnerable to missile deflection is just part of that limitation.

Re: Transform vs SFX His armour comes back damaged. Why you may ask? Because, his armour is a creation of his imagination, and his mind knows his armour was damaged. It's going to take him a while (and maybe some psychotherapy) to revisualise himself as not being damaged when down in his subconscious he _knows_ he was damaged.

Re: the point cost problem

Re: Looking at the Universe Timeline Well my reading of the timeline is that the gadgets don't actually stop working. If you carefully preserved one in 2020 away from oxygen, it would still be in working order in 2400. But if you continued to use them, battle damage and general wear and tear would eventually irreparably damage them and with the super-geniuses dead of old age (or once again battle damage), nobody could duplicate them. The immortals are another matter though. The magical ones would have to retreat into restricted areas or go into suspended animation or whatever, but the non-magical ones would in theory continue all through the intervening time. Of course only characters with Regeneration back from the Dead and Unaging are truly immortal and there are only a few of them once you leave out the magical ones.

Re: Some Villain Powers Help? Or you could just give her "Healing (Regeneration), only for duplicates". That way her duplicates will "heal" as they are replaced by other possible futures.

Re: Some Villain Powers Help? I'd suggest going with a killing attack for the earthquake. Since it only affects buildings and buildings have no STUN, an area effect RKA seems like a more efficient (and easier to count) approach. Now if you look on the object table, you'll find the values for a variety of walls. Destroy the walls of a building, and the building comes tumbling down. For the duplication the answer is actually in the rules under "Feedback", a limitation for Duplication. If injuries to the original also hurt the duplicates, then that's a -1/4 limitation. As for the "Hydrokinetic", well area of effect Telekinesis will move entire hexes of liquid. Weight no longer matters because you are moving each molecule as a separate object. But your Telekinetic strength still determines how hard it can hit.

Re: They wont die

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing? This is all part of HALO HERO - a conversion you can find on the Star HERO boards which I decided one day would make a fun project. I'm through the entire human arsenal and building the alien weapons next. During the process, I built three weapons (the Assault Rifle, Battle Rifle, SMG) with Autofire in varying forms. The AR has it at 10, the BR has a burst setting (3) and the SMG is pimped at 20. I yield the argument that hosing someone with 20 rounds of 1d6+1 when they have 7 rPD armor is nearly impossible to harm. Not really true. Even assuming the armour doesn't have a failure chance (and really it should), by the law of averages Mr. 7 PD should take quite a lot of stun. For the purposes of a videogame the distinction between being killed and being knocked below -31 stun and waking up a week later after the fighting is over in an enemy POW camp (assuming they didn't just kill you while you were out) is inconsequential. Either way you go back to a save and try again.

Re: When should a GM allow missile deflection?

Re: Scenarios For Power Outage? Not really. The inhabitants of the city proper are extremely unlikely to run wild even with city surveillance knocked out and the disgruntled run down surburban areas don't have the kind of population density that breeds rioting. While there's a lot of high tech stuff, anything that would obviously directly endanger someone's life if it had a power interruption is going to have a backup. You'll have people trapped on the elevated train and that sort of thing, but not a massive crisis. You might be better off going with something like a computer virus causing widespread and erratic failures that have to be dealt with.

Re: Power Stunts Maybe they rewrote in it the revised edition. But in mine it says: Characters shouldn't use Power to provide Advantages for their Powers or to overcome Limitations (except in rare circumstances), nor should it provide bonuses in combat.

Re: Power Stunts It may be flexible, but it's useless for direct combat purposes. It's the thing you'd roll on if you were an electrical projector who wanted to provide electricity to a hospital when the emergency generator failed in a blackout, or if you wanted to disrupt a tsunami by flying past it at hypersonic velocities, or if you wanted to spin around in circles at superspeed to slow a falling victim's descent. I figure DEX tricks would mostly consist of duplicating noncombat DEX skills you did not in fact have, but only once or twice before you'd have to buy the skill. So you can wriggle free of your shackles one or twice but after that you have to get actual Contortionist.

Re: Patriotic Heroes

Re: the point cost problem Provided that power using characters have the same access to equipment that the nonpowered characters do, this is only a problem provided that the actual powers in question are no different than the equipment. If Communications Officer Sybil's telepathic powers are things that can't be duplicated by technology, then she isn't getting shortchanged by paying points to get the ability to do things normal people can do either themselves or through equipment. Her points were well spent. So one answer to the problem is just to buy powers that can't be readily duplicated by technology in the campaign. At least not readily portable "normal" technology. But what if you want claws or energy blasts, powers that are going to be not very different in their effect from knives and blasters? Well, one obvious alternative is to discount the cost of the powers which duplicate readily available equipement. If off the shelf night vision goggles give people nocturnal vision, comparable to what Security Officer Sekhmet gets for being a catwoman and her claws are only better than a knife in that they are harder to take away, then give her night vision a Limitation to reflect them being less of an advantage. But what, you may ask, about the goodies that many GM's like to give out, the quasi-unique items, the Precursor relics and one of a kind prototypes? Well provided that there are enough to go around so everyone gets a more or less even share, that doesn't pose much of a problem. Failing that, by gosh let them go ahead and have to pay the points for the super-equipment if they want to keep it very long. If it's that unique and useful, the player is probably going to want to make it an actual part of their character. Have you seen the kind of tantrum a D&D player can throw if he loses his "special" sword?

Re: Patriotic Heroes The Old Soldier is a ghost. He can't be permanently killed and he either can pass through solid objects and turn invisible or use extradimensional travel. Yes, that's right. The Old Soldier doesn't die, but he does fade away.

Re: Scenarios For Power Outage? Of course in reality there has to be a lot of tension built up before a blackout will trigger rioting. If people aren't angry and on edge, they don't turn to violence easily. Ideally for maximum chaos you want to have your blackout during a heatwave, there should have been at least one racially charged incident of violence that recieved publicity in the recent past and the economy should be a bit rocky. The power failure should also start after sunset on a night with little moonlight. If you don't have at least some of these kind of preconditions, blackouts tend to become rather convivial events with minimal violence. Compare the relatively pleasant experiences of the recent Eastern blackout of a few years back and the 1965 blackout in New York immortalised in "Where Were You When The Lights Went Out", with the nightmarish 1977 blackout in New York which occured during a heatwave, after the storeowners had gone home and while the city was in a terrible financial crisis. So if you want to do a blackout with full on riots, you need a city that's ready to blow in the first place. As for the rest, power failures knock out traffic lights. People are supposed to treat every light controlled intersection as a four way stop sign, but in heavily urbanised areas, traffic will slow to a crawl as traffic snarls spring up everywhere. You can beat a car home just by walking, and that's part of the problem as hundreds of thousands of people do just that. Hospitals have their own emergency generators and so do radio stations so that people can get information through battery powered radios, but their airconditioning goes off. The phones will keep working unless something else brings down the lines. One of the most theoretically dangerous problems in a blackout is what happens when the airport's power is knocked out just as several planes are arriving. While the control tower has emergency generators so they can use radio to warn off planes and divert them to unaffected airports, the landing lights and the radar will probably be knocked out. This has never actually been known to happen. The timing is pretty unlikely. Apart from that, there's an increased risk of house and apartment fires caused by people using candles for lighting. People in a subway will be trapped but in no real danger although it's likely that someone somewhere will get in touch with their inner claustrophobe.

Re: A very strange build for critiquing. Normal weapons aren't characters. And a 30 point character's CV is going to suck anyway. He's far better off giving the sword itself a CV and leaving the follower to just be the answer to his physical disabilities. Which is why he doesn't care about getting a better sword wielder, of course. Because he does the fighting. His wearer just carries him around.