Gnome BODY (important!)

My group had that too! Very first time anyone Aborted they got hit through the Dodge two Phases in a row and KO'd. First and only PC KO of the campaign at that, our resident KO-magnet wouldn't show up until next campaign.

That's from the 5e version.

Looked it up. Ultimate Martial Arts has some very poorly considered rules on the subject. Namely, if you have even 1" of Flight, aren't currently using it, and know the attack is coming, you cannot be thrown for distance or prone. Period. You may still take damage, but this depends on the SFX of the throw.

Had the first session today and things went wonderfully! Thank you again to everyone who helped me find this niche! A very special thank-you as well to the individual who gifted me copies of Alien Wars and Terran Empire! I wound up going with a Jhinu as a result and it's definitely informed some aspects of the character I wouldn't have thought to flesh out otherwise.

I don't think it does anything that Trigger doesn't. Something like Trigger (+1) for ## AP of attack powers, Limited to only activate when a "minion" is defeated and only to target a "minion" adjacent to the defeated "minion" should do Takedown 1. Trim off that last bit and add a Trigger for movement and you should get Takedown 2.

To me, the effect of desolid is "You and most non-you things do not interact", not anything directly to do with defense. I think that's a lot of the reason for the disagreement. If I approach desolid from a different angle, yeah, I can definitely see how it'd become the thing to use for "can't be hurt" effects. Here I completely agree! The +1/4 level always seemed silly to me. If your SFX justifies your attack working against a particular SFX of desolid, why doesn't it just... work? What makes this lightning bolt so different from the half-dozen other lightning bolts in your Multipower? Why isn't the "weakness" in desolid letting either all the lightning or none of it through? The +1/2 level is even worse to me, to the point I actively wish it wasn't a thing. What in the world justifies an attack working on ghosts and cloud-people and somebody vibrating through matter and somebody a quarter-inch to the fourth-dimensional "left" and people made of light, fire, and radiation?

Emphasis is mine. But the problem is that even if the power has no perceivable manifestation, any random idiot can still see attacks passing right through the target.

The problem is that, as Ragitsu mentions, attacks that fail due to desolid pass right through. Even Cannot Pass Through Solid Objects doesn't help with this. Which makes it pretty obvious what's going on, and is absolutely not the "Superman Effect".

You can resist KB with Flight but not redirect it. See also my first post.

But HERO System should be able to deal in Sith. Or did Star HERO lie to me?

Invulnerability in general? GM Fiat. This character is invincible because. Go break his kneecaps with the mcguffin or find his secret weakness or talk him down while he tries to punch you or lure him onto a rocket headed to the moon or whatever, but superpowers to the face won't work. Invulnerability to one specific thing? Damage Negation, 100% Damage Reduction, or a whole lot of the relevant generic defense. Or GM Fiat, that works too.

How often do characters in your game Abort? What prompts an Abort? How does the possibility of Aborting influence your combats?

If I were a player, the immediate questions I'd have would be: - How much do we know about the person we got bodyswapped with? Do we know their Secret ID? (If so, can we actually do their day job? If not, aren't we homeless?) Do we know where their lair is? Do we know how to operate/maintain their powers/gear? - Is there anything we the players need to do / not do? My first instinct would be "I nearly died then found myself here surrounded by villains, I need to run away and call 911" for example. What about ditching the villain-costume and getting a hero-costume to get rid of the "Evil identity"? Should characters refrain from telling their loved ones what happened? - You've struck a pretty negative note at the start here, with a hero dying in the prologue. Is that the tone we can expect from this game, or just a framing device?

Throws aren't Knockback, though.

I am also unaware of any RAW support outside a Trigger construct. I agree with this for much the same reasons as I wouldn't consider allowing a character thrown along the ground to use Leaping or Running to resist the throw. The thrower is giving up the significant advantage of maintaining their hold and risking the target taking half the raw damage if they succeed on a Breakfall roll. (Though "I skid to a halt using my flight!" is a good description for passing that Breakfall.) Some obvious houserules would be that if the throwee has delayed or acts on this DEX, to permit them to spend a Half Move to reduce distance. Perhaps requiring an opposed DEX roll against the thrower. Perhaps also possible via Abort.

It sounds to me like it's not that you're not statting the ships, but instead that you're statting the ships in a much simpler system. You clearly have stats, given the lists of relative abilities. It's just not naval wargame stats. Which is about the way I treat noncombatant NPCs in HERO. Their combat statline is "DCV 3, KO'd by any two-digit amount of STUN, dying from any two-digit amount of BODY, Characteristics of 7 (10-)". Their noncombat statline is a handful of very very broad 'skills', like "Lawyer 13-, Parent 10-, US Citizen and Human 8-". Anything beyond that isn't worth tracking to me. I'd say it's more that you seem to be making the decision to zoom out on things that your group doesn't care about and zoom in on things your group does (like the deckplans). Which is just good GMing.

I would not accept your "Always On but turns off" construction. I also wouldn't accept this SFX-mechanics combination. Desolid is not for invulnerability, it's for inability to interact with and be interacted with by certain things. Furthermore, your proposed "Desolid, not against Mental Powers" is invalid. Mental Powers already affect Desolid. I have no idea what you're trying to do with Continuous as a Naked Advantage in terms of RAW, I can't see any way that would do what you say it's doing. And even if your power worked, what GM would allow it? Even if a GM somehow accepts your construct, this offers absolutely no defense against surprise or invisible attacks because the Trigger is dependent on your senses. Likewise, generic power rules state you cannot both turn a power on and off in the same Phase. Even if a GM accepts your construct, it won't activate if you've recently turned it off to be able to interact with the world around you. Even avoiding that detail, you're also rendered totally impotent (as you do note) by even the weakest constant damage effect. And lastly, by the definition of how Desolidification works, this can't provide some of the Life Supports you mention like protection from drowning. In summary, this doesn't work and even if it did it's nowhere near invulnerability. There's much better uses for over a hundred points.

But if "Telepath(s) read my mind and say(s) I'm being honest when I say I didn't do it" is admissible in a court of law, where the standards are way higher, why is the situation outlined in the OP a threat at all? Surely there's some reason that the hero can't just walk over to Mentat et al Legal and Mental Services and get their name cleared in a five-minute session?

How do you prove the telepath isn't wrong? Or lying? Or the shapeshifter? Or worst of all, inadmissible evidence?

But then the enemy shapechanger pretends to be the friendly shapechanger not pretending to be anyone and confesses on camera to lying in their last confession on camera.

Highly subjective opinion post below. The way I see it is that every power can be described both in terms of its flavor text and its mechanical construction. The flavor text is the narrative description of what the power does and how, the mechanical construction is the rules description of what the power does and how. These aren't highly distinct ways of describing something, like a painting and a photograph taken from opposite sides of the subject. They're supposed to be nearly identical views of the same thing, like what my left and right eyes see. The flavor text and mechanical construction need to line up. They're descriptions of the same thing, so they shouldn't be describing different things. If I look at something and my left and right eyes are getting wildly different pictures, something is wrong. I'm seeing two different things where there should be one thing. I shouldn't see differences unless I get up really close and try to find them. If the flavor text is allowed to become disconnected from the mechanical construction, the narrative and mechanics have been ripped apart and the role-playing game is falling apart. I, personally, am categorically incapable of role-playing in a situation where the narrative isn't describing what the mechanics are, I can play the mechanics game or I can role-play the narrative but I can't do both unless the two agree on what's going on. That's why I wouldn't permit flavor text of "I turn into an elephant." without some mechanical construction that validates turning into an elephant. This is also why I hate "Magic" with no further qualifiers as SFX. "This magic spell causes the caster to teleport, vanishing from where they are and appearing where they want to be.". Is that the flavor text or the mechanical construction? I can't tell, and that's a red flag. It suggests to me there isn't any flavor text.

Well, you get what you pay for. If what you've paid for doesn't include convincingly having the size of, having the shape of, and feeling like an elephant, you don't get that. And in my opinion, you shouldn't be allowed to have SFX that say "I have the size, shape, and feel of an elephant" if you're not going to actually have any of those things.

Definitely! M&M also seems to be a lot better at grokability. Some "why isn't that information here" issues aside, it's an easier to understand book even when dealing with equally crunchy subjects.

Yeah, your reading of those rules seems to match mine exactly.

6e1p279, emphasis mine.