wolfrunswithfox

I've had good luck using the trigger modifier to model characters who can do more than a normal person in a single action. In this case, adding a Trigger: When a grab maneuver succeeds to the character's hand attack would create the effect it sounds like you're looking for (plus extra limbs for the arms themselves, as others have stated).

Also, midnightninja, feel free to post anything here in the power factory thread or wherever else. Especially since you did all the work on that barrier write-up. I just had the idea, and I can't be the first (or hundredth) person to think of wing-wall as a power.

Current build of the character, as requested by midnightninja. Sorry it took so long to finish this off and get it posted. I went on vacation in the interrim and didn't have a lot of time to fine-tune the mechanics. Questions, comments, and criticisms are welcome. Forge, Daughter of Vulcan Strength 30 Dexterity 15 Constitution 30 Intelligence 15 Ego 20 Presence 20 OCV 8 DCV 7 OMCV 3 OMCV 5 Speed 4 PD 5 ED 5 Recovery 10 Endurance 50 Body 25 Stun 50 Running 12m Leaping 4m Swimming 0m Total Characteristics: 190 Language: English (Fluent with Accent; Latin is native, 2) Teamwork (12-, 3) PS: Smithing (12-, 3) Weaponsmith (12- 3) Power Skill: Crafted Arsenal (12-, 3) Skill Levels: +4 with crafting skills (12) Total Skills: 26 Striking Appearance (Beauty, vs all characters) +2 to interaction skills and +2d6 to Presence Attacks (6) Fists Like Iron HtH Attack +2d6 (10) Made of Sterner Stuff (24) 5/5 Resistant PD/ED (15) 5 Power Defense (5) Life Support Extended Breathing: 1 endurance per minute (2) Diminished Eating: Once per week (1) Diminished Sleep: 8 hours per week (1) Child of the Forge (23) 20 Resistant ED (Only vs Heat and Fire -¾, Unified Power -¼) 5 Flash Defense: Sight (Unified Power -¼) Life Support (Unified Power -¼) Safe in High Heat Safe in High Pressure Safe in Intense Radiation Golden Winged Armor (87) 15 / 15 Resistant Protection (OIF -½) (30) Flight* 30m (OIF -½, Restrainable -½, Lockout -½) (12) Extra Limbs* (OIF -½, Limited Manipulation -¼) (3) Stretching* 3m (OIF -½, Limited Body Parts -¼, 0 Endurance +½) (3) +4 OCV* (OIF -½, Only to Block with Wings -1) (8) Barrier* (31) 2m tall x 6m wide x ½m thick 15/15 Resistant PD/ED Non-Anchored, Opaque (OIF -½, Restrainable -½, Feedback -1, Lockout -½, No Range -½, Mobile +¼) Crafted Arsenal (20 + 60) Variable Power Pool (80 Control Cost, 60 Point Pool) (Only Magical Equipment -¼, Changing Pool Takes Hours -¼, Can Only Be Changed With Access To Workshop -½) Total Powers: 230 Total Points: 446 Complications Distinctive Features: Sets off Metal Detectors (Not Concealable, Causes Major Reaction, Dectectable by Simple Tests) 15 Hunted: Keeper of the Iron Vaults (Infrequently, More Powerful, Harshly Punish) 15 Hunted: The Unmakers (Frequently, As Powerful, Harshly Punish) 15 Physical Complication: Sinks Like A Stone (Frequently, Greatly Impairing) 20 Social Complication: No Legal Status (Frequently, Major) 15 Total Complications: 80

Visage of Divine Beauty: Striking Appearance (Beauty, vs all characters) +10 to interaction skills and +10d6 to presence attacks (Unified Power -1/4) Cost: 30 active, 24 real Flash (Sight) 4d6, Trigger (when you make a presence attack, trigger takes no time and resets automatically +1) (Unified Power -1/4) Cost: 40 active, 32 real Not only can you cow most enemies easily, but the very sight of your beauty is enough to make them go blind!

Let's start with a classic: Smoke Bombs: Darkness (Sight Group) 7m radius (OAF -1) Range Based on Strength (-1/4) Cost: 35 Active, 16 Real Add Targeting to your hearing (for 10 CP) and you have a classic cinematic ninja: drop a smoke bomb and fight at full strength while everyone else is blind

I have run a lot of games at a wide variety of player levels (from 1 to 13). While games can work at many player counts, how many people are at the table has a huge impact on how the game feels (probably even greater than the system you choose to use). In my experience: Small games (1 - 3 players) are best for focussing on internal conflict and resolving backstories. These games are great because it's easy to get everyone engaged and there's time to really focus on whatever the players find interesting. Players need to be ready for a lot of spotlight with characters that have a lot to offer and explore. This is not the best place for casual players. Medium games (4 - 5 players) are best for GM-driven narrative. These games are great because there's enough variety in your player and character bases that someone's always ready to move the story forward. Players need to be willing to bite the plot hooks and not bog things down. Large games (6+ players) are best for drama between characters. These games are great because you get to hang out with all your friends and rapidly develop a pool of shared stories. GM time is the bottleneck in these games; players need to be ready to role-play among themselves without GM interaction and/or enjoy spectating other people's spotlight scenes. To make your group of 9 more managable without turning people away, try some of these ideas: Recruit one of your nine players to be a GM, then split the group between the two of you. This can be particularly good if you have a single venue that can host both games. The last Pathfinder game I ran actually did this - every session we introduced two adventures and the players split themselves into two groups of four to tackle them. If noone else is comfortable GMing on their own, recruit a couple of them as assistants. They can help you out by playing major NPCs, running enemies in combat, and running scenes when the party splits (which a large party inevitably will). Having tried both, it's a LOT easier to run for 7 players with 2 assistants than it is to run for 9 players with no assistants. This also gets your assistants some experience on the GM side of the table, which can help them be more comfortable with the idea of running their own games. Split your group up and divide your time. If you have two nights per week to game (and can enjoy running two full games without burning yourself out), great. Otherwise, you can alternate groups in a once-per-week timeslot. In either case, you can occasionally run giant "cross-over" events with the whole group (preferably after building up in both games). Gear up and just run the big game. It's a lot of work and will require patience from your players, but it can also be very rewarding when it works well. A couple points to remember whichever approach you take: There's nothing inherently wrong with turning people away. Sometimes its better to run a good game with half your friends than an over-crowded game with all of them. There are a lot of factors that go into that decision besides game dynamics. As you add more players to a game, it becomes more important to make sure everyone is on the same page about what type of game they're signing up for. Larger games restrict your ability to adapt the style of the game to cater to one or two players that aren't having fun. In my experience, this is actually the hardest part of getting a large game working well. People have trouble communicating honestly when they're worried that a "wrong" answer will get them excluded from something. Watch yourself for signs of burn-out. Running large games (or multiple games) can get stressful, and you need to make sure you're having fun as well. Good luck and happy gaming!

Have you considered adding a trigger to your teleport? That would allow you to use telekinesis for the actual disarm (which seems like the most intuitive fit to me) and then teleport the item away immediately without spending a separate action. The teleport portion might look something like this: Teleport x' Ranged (+1/2) Usable as Attack (+1 1/4) Trigger (When user successfully disarms a target with telekinesis, Zero Phase action to activate, Zero Phase action to reset +1/2) Only Inanimate Objects (-1) For removing Inaccessible Foci at combat speeds, the only thing that seems to make sense to me is transform. Transform xd6 Equipped Target to Unequipped Target. Minor Transform. Reversed by donning the lost equipment (which appears nearby). All or Nothing (-1/2) Can affect any or all equipment (+1/4) Expanding the teleport's trigger condition to also trigger on a successful transform would add another (+1/4) to its modifiers.

Thank you very much to everyone who responded; this has been extremely helpful. I liked both Scott's deflection suggestion and midnightninja's barrier write-up, so I ended up using them both. The current version of the character has three wing configurations: flight, barrier, and extra limbs with an "only for blocking" OCV bonus. Since she should only be able to block attacks within her wingspan, it seemed easier to just give the wings reach than to dial the range on deflection down to 3 meters or so. I was originally planning to put the three configurations into a multipower, but the active point discrepancy made that awkward (enough points in the pool to activate the barrier would also be enough to activate flight and limbs at the same time, which the character should not be able to do), so I used lockout instead. This had the side benefit of letting me define the barrier's lockout as also preventing the creation of multiple barriers (per APG 1). Thanks again to everyone who helped out!

For a different take on "murder by healing", remember that in many medieval/fantasy settings, most injuries are more dangerous due to blood loss than direct trauma. This indicates that a healer or life mage almost certainly has the ability to help the body replace lost blood. If you apply that ability to enemies who aren't actually in need of it, you could artificially spike their blood pressure. Lucky enemies just fall over relatively painlessly as their heart gives out, less lucky ones succumb to a stroke or cerebral hemmorrhage, unlucky ones look like they're blushing until they sell up an burst (bleeding from anywhere and everywhere). On a character sheet, it might look something like this: Drown in Blood: RKA xd6 No Normal Defense (Defense is lacking a circulatory system or having a way to quickly get rid of the excess blood) This has the morbid side effect of creating an attack that you can "defend" against by slashing your own wrists. In either case, traumatizing for both the targets and the onlookers (as the OP described).

As a relative newcomer to the system (with a lot of experience with others), the thing that makes Hero stand out to me is the flexibility of its powers system. That changes the way players approach character creation; in other systems you need to either modify your concept to fit the mechanics or risk having a mismatch between how the character is modelled and how you visualized them, but in Hero you can come up with an idea and be reasonably confident that the system will let you build it in a recognizable form (even if it's off-the-wall). Even GURPS, which specifically tries to be flexible and permissive in character creation, falls far short of Hero in this regard.

I would appologize for my response being delayed (I'm new to the boards so my posts still need to go through moderation), but since it led to me being ninja'd by a ninja, I'll just assume it was meant to be.

I would recommend a somewhat simpler approach. Start with something like this: Alchemy: Variable Power Pool (x base + 40 control cost): Only Alchemical Preparations (-1/4), Can only be changed with access to a lab (-1/2), Changing powers takes hours (-1/4) That puts the price for the control cost at a nice round 10 CP. It also gives you a fairly normal variable power pool that can only be changed in the lab. To handle the ability to recharge items on the road, build the powers in the pool with the Charges limitation, applying the "Charges are expensive, dangerous, or otherwise difficult to recover" condition to represent the time, ingredients, tools, etc that the alchemist needs to prepare more of their recipes away from their lab. Perhaps I'm missing something due to not having read the Grimoire yet, but I don't see the need for triggers on most alchemy powers (I'm visualizing some attacks/dispels and a lot of aids/transforms). I could be wrong, but I suspect the intent of the rule allowing triggers to persist after the pool powers have changed is to prevent effects that have been specifically set up (land mines, magic mouths, etc) from disappearing from their installed locations due to the hero reallocating their powers elsewhere. I might suggest a rule of thumb of "install all the alchemical surprises you want in fixed locations, but if you're going to carry it with you, keep it in your pool". If you'd like to give them some additional flexibility, perhaps add a second VPP like this: I Still Have Some of That: Variable Power Pool (x base + 40 control cost) Only alchemical preparations that have already been prepared/used in game (-1/2), y Charges per day (-???) This second pool (probably with a substantially smaller base than the primary one) would allow the character to (a few times per day, represented by the charges) rumage through their supplies and find a charge or two of something they'd used previously. That would give them a lot of the same "I prepared a big batch of this and it's still good" flexibility without worrying about tracking a lot of persistent triggers.

Another option would be to add some CSLs to the sniper rifle with a custom "Only with a spotter" limitation. Since it requires another character taking dedicated action, I'd expect "Only with a spotter" to be a reasonably high-value limitation (I'd eyeball it at -1). This has the advantage of putting the spotter mechanics on the character sheet of the player who brought spotting up in game. I only have experience with 6E, so I appologize if my suggestion isn't relevant to the edition you're actually playing.

I'm currently working on a character who is a power-armor / gadgetteer archetype with magical special effects (a daughter of a forge god who uses her abilities to create various magical items). She has a variable power pool for custom-build gadgets, but I want to render her "regular" equipment/powers separately. In particular, she has a suit of armor that grants her both resistant protection and flight (via a pair of golden wings). I have encountered a few issues in building this that I would like some advice on: 1. It seems like the flight should have the limitations OIF (because it comes from a suit of armor) and restrainable (because she can't fly if her wings can't move). However, Champions Complete says that "a power should not take both Restrainable and Focus" (page 115 in the description of Restrainable). Given that caution, is there a better way to model this? 2. I have a mental image of the character interposing herself between an energy attack and some innocent bystanders, shielding them with her armor's metal wings. I initially tried to build this capability as a barrier, but couldn't manage to make it feel right (since the barrier is created touching her, moves with her, is attackable even when it isn't acting as a barrier, etc). My current inclination is instead to model it as resistant defense with the useable on others and area of effect modifiers (as well as lock-out with other uses of the wings). Can anyone think of a good way to make the barrier approach work? Would the resistant defense version need both area of effect and useable on others, or would the effect be accomplishable with just one of those?

If you want to run a plotline like this with the character, have you considered adapting the Focus limitation and asking them to apply it to their wealth perk? If you look past the physical flavor, the primary narrative effect of Obvious Inaccessible Focus is that it is sometimes unavailable (to take an example from the MCU, Tony Stark spent most of Iron Man 3 witho ut his OIF suit powers). In the case of a character like Bruce Wayne or Oliver Queen, applying OIF: Corporation seems like a good way to represent a wealth base that is normally accessible, but can be taken away temporarily (because of legal/political shennanigans, or because the wealthy individual happens to be on the moon at the moment). In terms of the social contract of the game, putting the focus limitation on a power is the player saying "Hey GM, you should take this away from me sometimes" and getting some points in return, which sounds like exactly what you want here.