LoneWolf

I have to agree with Christopher on this. If your character has no knowledge of the attack and it is not obvious what the attack does they may make the wrong choice. If the character had some sort of applicable knowledge skill covering the attack they would have a chance to figure it out.

One thing that people are not taking into account is the pain can be caused by many different things. Pain in itself is just a sensation that is designed to warn you of a wide variety of things. It is a kind of generic signal that something bad happened to your body. So, the first thing to do is to separate out the cause of the pain from the pain. In many cases people are blaming the pain for the effects of the cause. In @Unclevlad’s latest example did the pain cause him to lose consciousness or was it the back injury that put him out? You could build an entire character around the idea of pain and have a wide variety of effects.

Like anything else in the game, it depends on the special effect, and what you want the pain to do. If the goal is to knock someone out some form of Stun only attack will work. This could be an NND or other exotic attack or just a plain Stun only attack. If you want the pain to cause other effects, you need to build those using other powers. One way would be to use a limited form of mind control. A single command drop the item you are holding because it is causing you great pain would simulate this. Another way would be a change environment requiring an ego roll to continue your action. Like I said it depends on what effects the pain causes. This question is kind of like asking, how would you build an electrical attack. There are many right answers to both of these questions.

I should have specified I was talking about damage negation in my comment on knockback. While normal defenses do not reduce knockback damage negation does. If I have -3 DC of damage negation the attacker rolls 3 less dice to determine damage on a normal attack. That is going to reduce the knockback the attack does.

Most super heroes have a CON of at least 18. With a CON that high you probably rarely get sick anyways. That same CON will mean your character probably handles the illness better than normal.

I have to agree with Hugh on this. What he is saying is a fundamental concept of the Hero System. A limitation that does not actually limit the power should not reduce the cost of the power. This has been explicitly stated in every edition in one form or another. The one thing that should be brought up, is that you don’t have to actually take body for it to have an impact on the game. Body also is also used to determine knockback. If a character has stun only, they can still be knocked around by the attack without actually taking BODY. If the campaign is using knockback than Stun only should be worth some limitation. At that point the argument is not whether it is a limitation, but rather how much it is worth.

I would say that if you can manage to totally destroy the head it counts as being decapitated.

Resistant Defense that works vs power is not power defense, it is still resistant defense. If you have stacking power defense from multiple sources it is still one pool of power defense. The only time having multiple sources might all get drained is if they have the limitation Unified Power. If you had power defense and resistant armor that provides power defense with Unified Power both would be drained when hit with a drain affecting either.

I am assuming you are talking about a drain that affects multiple things simultaneously. If that is the case you roll the damage and apply any power defense. If what you are draining is considered a defense (including the power defense) half the amount drained and apply that to the characteristic. If the characteristic is not considered a defense, then apply the damage after subtracting the power defense to the characteristic. The Linked limitation specifies that if either attack reduces your defenses the other attack the other attack applies first. This prevents you from linking one drain to another to be able to drain a character's power defense. So, basically you get the power defense vs all on the first attack.

I suggested basically the same thing in an earlier post. The book suggested that an impairing hit to the head kills an unimportant NPC or creature. Any hit to the head that instantly kills the creature could be considered a decapitation hit if the has any specific weakness vs decapitation.

It is in 6th edition 6E1 page 392.

Sounds like the limitation requires multiple users, combined with extra time and maybe a focus.

That is one reason I actually like getting rid of figured stats. It lowers the incentive to buy up primary stats. It seemed like every character had at least a 23 ST and 23 CON including the supposedly frail magic based character.

With figured stats buying a 40 CON cost 60 points but gave you 63 points of figured stats. If you bumped it up to 43 CON, it cost you 66 points for 71 points in figured stats. Bricks with figured stats cost less than other types of characters. If I bought 45 STR and 43 CON, it cost me 101 points and I got 117 points in figured stats. You could then buy down your END to save even more points.

I created a spreadsheet that you can change the base DEF to compare an equal amount of points in DR vs DN. DRvDN.xlsx