Gnome BODY (important!)

To elaborate on my complaints up-thread: At a glance, it's similar to HERO system. Point-buy, buying ranks of powers, stats, and skills. Powers have a cost per rank, and modifiers can increase or decrease that. Power writeups are shorter, feats are present, and the math only involves fractions if you go below 1 point per rank so it's "simpler". I think that's where a lot of the praise comes from, it's perceived as easier to run/play than HERO but just as flexible. The basic combat routine in M&M is "Roll to hit, target rolls to resist". The to-hit roll is basic D&Dism, you roll 1d20+your accuracy and hit if you get 10+their defense or better. The resistance roll is them rolling 1d20+their bonus against 15+your damage rank. If they fail by 1-5, they get a cumulative -1 to resist more damage. Fail by 6-10, cumulative -1 and they lose their next movement action. Fail by 11-15, cumulative -1 and they half their movement and lose all their movement actions for the rest of the fight. Fail by 16+ or by 11+ a second time, KO. Non-damage attacks use a lower threshold to resist and omit the cumulative -1s, on top of allowing a new check to reverse the effect (no penalty if you fail) every time the victim gets to act. What this means in practice is that combat is basically (generally very slow) Russian roulette. The average attack has a less than 50% chance of doing anything to anyone but a mook, but a non-zero chance of instantly KOing the supervillain. There's zero predictability as to what the result of an attack will be and I've seen both heroes and villains going down instantly due to nat1s and full pass around an 8-player table having absolutely no effect on anyone. There's metacurrency that permits die-tweaking, but it's consequently so critical to horde your metacurrency to not get instantly knocked out that either the entire metacurrency system falls apart or the entire combat system falls apart. Or both fall apart at once for different people! Balance between characters is provided (in theory) by the Power Level (PL) system. Your accuracy bonus and damage bonus can't have an average greater than your PL. Same for your not-get-hit bonus and your not-take-damage bonus, your other not-get-hit bonus and your not-take-damage bonus, and your not-suffer-mental-effect bonus and your not-suffer-physical-but-not-damage-effect-bonus. This sets up a system of "tradeoffs". Want to hit often? You don't hit hard. Don't mind getting hit a lot? You won't take damage often. But there's a giant pile of things that ignore this. You can purchase an attack that always hits, and you can still give it a damage bonus equal to your PL so the guy who sacrificed damage for accuracy looks like an idiot. You can buy invisibility, which gives attackers a -5 to hit which is basically the same thing as +5 to your not-get-hit bonuses but doesn't count against PL. You can regenerate to reverse damage, be outright immune to weak attacks or certain SFX, staple three attacks together to snap the action economy over your knee, the list goes on and on. And none of that counts for PL calculations, making PL questionably useful. Skills have a problem mainly because there's so little guidance given. Your skill bonus is capped at 10+PL. The default PL is 10, so the default skill cap is +20. Many examples, including example characters, imply that +6 to +8 is a good bonus. But looking at the rolls required in the example adventures, that doesn't bear out. You really do need +doubledigits, and ideally in the +16 to +18 range to be really successful unless you like blowing your metacurrency on skill checks and thus losing combats because you can't reroll your bad save. It also has a bad problem where powers obsolete skills. If I have flight that's usable underwater, the entirety of acrobatics and athletics are meaningless. Invisibility has no rolls, stealth has rolls. And it's cheaper to be invisible to human senses than it is to max your stealth bonus. Being outright immune to social skills is cheaper than capping your social defense skill. So on and so forth.

Mutants and Masterminds: Held up very well up until combat. But in combat, there's exactly one correct choice and everything else is wasting your turn. Damage is the king of offense, and nothing else even comes close. It also has horrible problems with combat taking forever, because it takes two rolls to do anything at all. Over half of all attacks do nothing. It's a soul-numbing grind where combat is "I sure hope he nat1s first". The Power Level system is an attempt at getting all the heroes on the same playing field, but between an adamant refusal to say "Your PL 10 hero should be pushing the maximum numbers of PL 10" and a massive host of powers that give bonuses that ignore PL, it falls apart badly. To say nothing of how dysfunctional it is with skills. BASH!: In the three campaigns of BASH I played in, the system never managed to survive chargen. The granularity is so absurdly high that even +1 Brawn or +1 Agility compared to your opponent makes you mostly unhurtable or unhittable. Inevitably, the PCs who took one of those high were utterly invincible and the PCs who didn't were getting slapped around like ragdolls. The huge granularity also makes "cool flavor power" absurdly expensive, since even a little something is competing with a +1. Unfortunately one of the worst systems I've experienced.

I apologize too. It's a rough time and I should be way more charitable in my assumptions. More clear in my communication too, I can easily see why you'd think I meant "can't find". PMs should be open now, I had temporarily put you on Ignore to stop myself from continuing the tangent-argument RE Justice and Forgiveness that started in the Fantasy Races thread (I think it was that thread?) and apparently when I took you off the list a couple days later it kept blocking PMs (I probably screwed up unIgnoring). My bad there, sorry again! I'd love to see the write-up!

I'm gearing up to pitch medical specialist with a side order of detective and cybernetic technician to the GM right now and crossing my fingers hoping the hole exists! Thank you all for your help with this.

Speaking with the GM was the first thing I did! Neither of us saw any obvious holes that would be routinely useful. I think part of the problem is that the team doesn't have a well-defined purpose and just "does everything". I assume the sensor jock can do EW. Those are both Systems Operation as far as I'm aware, I've been told they've got a 18- to that. The technology person has the relevant skills for repair work. I'm not at all OK with being a backup. I recently quit a pair of campaigns because of spotlight hogging, I'm not willing to build into being a secondary character.

The combat specialist apparently took the WF needed to be a/the gunner. Probably the same for demolitions. These are close to 200 point characters, everybody's got a lot of skills. I'm not sure how I'd build a quartermaster beyond the obvious set of Background Skills. Additionally, what would such a character do during a mission? Logistics work seems like more of a between-missions thing. @Duke Bushido@Lord Liaden In this trying economic time, I don't have the inclination to throw down money on a completely unnecessary book for a game I'm not even in yet. Suggesting I don't know about the store on this site is very condescending, and I'm not sure you thought through what you were posting.

I'd call that Stretching, Does Not Cross Intervening Space and Clairsentience, Only to Locations Stretched To. Main difference between my construct and dsatow's is that my version permits your detached bodyparts to be attacked to hurt you. If that's not what you want, definitely use dsatow's version.

This sounds to me like a conversation that should involve your group, not some random strangers on the internet. Tell them you are [enthusiastic/ambivalent/hesitant/concerned/whatever] about the idea but before moving forward to [saying no/saying yes] you want to have a dialog about [the questions and concerns you have, such as the ones you raised in your post] so you can be sure everyone's on the same page and onboard with the idea.

Thank you for the idea! I'll bounce it off the GM, see if he has any thoughts on the matter. Aliens are allowed. Even homebrew aliens seem to be allowed, the infiltrator is playing some sort of shapeshifting blob that I can't find a match for in the GM's copy of Terran Empire. I don't however have access to a copy of Alien Wars.

I'm (probably) joining a Star Hero campaign (Terran Empire setting) that's already in progress and am looking for ideas on a character to play. The party is the crew of a small ship and works for a corporation doing what I can only really term as "odd jobs". Past adventures have apparently included "Go to Planet A and find why the natives aren't trading with us (and fix it)", "Go to Planet B and find out why the week-old colony has gone radio-silent", "One of our ships went missing with a full load of cargo. Bring it back.", "Explore this system for exploitable resources.", and "A man was murdered and one of our operatives framed. Prove he didn't do it.". I'm trying to figure out a skillset or concept for my character that would be helpful in such a wide variety of situations that doesn't double up with an already occupied niche. Psionics are not allowed. Right now the crew has the following covered: Captain, face, spy, infiltrator, criminal contacts, technology person, engineer, sensor jock, pilot, navigator, dedicated combatant, soldier. I'm sure there's niches filled I'm not aware of, I don't have access to sheets. I'm having trouble finding anything that isn't already well handled by this crew to insert a new crewman to handle. So I turn to you, people who've played this genre more, and ask: What does this crew need that they don't have? How can I make my new guy helpful without stepping on somebody's toes by doing their job better?

One thing to note: Mind Link isn't enough to share senses in the "I see what you see" sense, it can only share senses in the "Tell you what I'm seeing? OK, I'm seeing a red firetruck. Slightly scuffed front bumper, dented on the right side too. License plate is..." sense. You need Clairsentience for "I see what you see". I fully agree with Duke, "computer built into you and unable to interact with the outside world except through you" isn't a Computer, it's SFX for why your character has the appropriate skills/characteristics/powers.

I think that rather than assign "penalties", I'd restructure the problem. The stone under the character's feet is moving out of the way. The question at hand is "can the character stabilize themselves before their footing totally vanishes and they fall". That sounds a lot to me like "can the character act before the environment", which is a DEX vs DEX roll. I'd assign some roll to the loose stone based on circumstances (did the PCs suspect the bridge might be faulty, do they know anything about bridges/stonework, are they being slow and careful, so on and so forth) and have the fall guy try to win the roll-off to not start falling. More generally though, I think I'd probably move the focus over to rolls to preempt the problem instead of negate the problem. Background Skill roll to recognize the bridge as unsafe, character behavior to secure themselves against faulty bridges, PER roll to notice cracks, and if none of those succeed, "Suddenly, the stone on the left side of the bridge gives way beneath $PCNAME's feet! $PRONOUN barely manages to grab the edge, but the bridge is shaking as more and more stones begin to fall free! What do you do!?".

Depends on a bunch of terrain and mobility factors. If the robot can backpedal fast enough (and has room to do so) that it keeps its front armor facing the entire hero group at all times, it wins everything forever. Likewise, encountering this thing in a cramped tunnel where you can't easily get past it makes it a lot more threatening (until you get past it). If even one PC is fast (and survivable) enough to race around back, or if the terrain allows PCs to force the robot to choose which target it faces, it's a pushover. Another major consideration is the turn-based structure of time. Can a PC in a one-on-one fight circle around the thing and declare a shot from behind because "It can't turn while it isn't its turn"? Or can the robot rotate to face during somebody else's turn because "time doesn't freeze for it because it's your turn"? Basically, the effectiveness of a "keep front towards enemy to win" foe is directly related to how well it can keep its front towards its enemies. Unless you know how well this robot can do that, it's very difficult to say how effective it'd be.

Yeah sorry, it's a real bad habit of mine that my group keeps trying to get rid of but without much luck. Not quite that soon, luckily for everyone Aborting against higher-DEX foes. FREDp383 says "Any modifiers from a Maneuver remain in effect from when the character performs the Maneuver until the beginning of his next Phase." and p356 says "A character’s Phase begins on his DEX in each of the indicated Segments.". So if you have DEX 21 SPD 4 and Dodge in Segment 3 (or 4, or 5), your Dodge ends at the start of DEX 21 on Segment 6. IE, if a character does nothing but Dodge they can maintain a permanent +3 DCV. There's no "gap". But if you'd held your action from Segment 3, it'd "wear off" at the start of Segment 6. For that reason, this character cannot act (except via Trigger or Abort) before DEX 21 on Segments 3, 6, 9, or 12.* IE, if a character does nothing but Hold Action, they cannot maintain permanent readiness. There are "gaps" for a higher DEX character to do something first. *: There is an explicit "GM may override this" clause: "(The GM may, if he wishes, let a character Hold his Action until his next Phase begins, but if he chooses to use the Held Action before his Phase occurs, it takes the place of his Phase — he cannot have two Phases in the same Segment.)"

Because when your next Phase comes up you lose the held action. FREDp360, "he loses any Held Action when the next Segment in which he has a Phase begins".

How does the initial attacker Block? He's already made an Attack Action. Or are you proposing yet another Trigger to "Automatically attack whenever I declare a Block" (or vice versa)?

I know what words mean. Your justice-god implies that "You did a bad thing." "I won't do that again." is injustice because no punishment was applied. That figuring out the reason a villain is doing wrong, correcting it, and having the ex-villain turn their abilities to the greater good is wrong unless you first make the villain suffer. Your justice-god is evil.

Why does "cosmic justice" require vengeance? Why does forgiveness cause injustice?

I had a couple paragraphs typed up, but really now. If you were going to pose this question about 6e Rules-As-Written to Steve, why bring it to us first? It comes off as pretty insulting to ask a question only to turn around and ask somebody else the exact same question.

The big problem you're going to run into is that "Target cannot move for five minutes" basically means "Target loses" and HERO System will make you pay an appropriate amount for such an overwhelming effect. The problem you'll run into with a Drain DEX is that even at 0 DEX you still get a 9- roll to see if you can act. Debilitating, but not totally paralyzing. A CON Entangle would work, though has the problem that with enough DEF it can be inescapable for some targets unless you allow Haymakering the CON damage roll (which opens a different can of worms). Mind Control and Transform would be the other obvious options, and both should work sorta-well.

It absolutely can. HERO is very easy to grok as long as you don't have to touch chargen and you don't touch anything outside your own sheet. The thing is that HERO needs to be streamlined at the individual player level instead of at the system level. Character sheets with rules on them would solve basically everything.

I submit it isn't. I'm not saying anything's wrong with your idea, but "humans with fish bits" is still humans. I didn't see anything that meaningfully rendered them culturally or mentally distinct.

At the most basic level, you'll see a sharp divide between "combatants" who invested relatively heavily in fighting and "noncombatants" who invested relatively lightly. The same will follow for other areas, but this is where it will stand out the most. Combat will either suck for the combatants as they steamroll everything, suck for the noncombatants as everything trivially defeats them, suck for you because you have to build elaborate multi-level encounters, or some combination of the above. The same will follow for other areas, but this is again where it will stand out the most. No, because a significant balance problem can result from rational actors with differing investment priorities. Other significant problems arise due to differing investment efficiencies, player execution skill, or ability to predict the obstacles presented by the GM. Additionally, "rational and balanced" characters require useful information as input to the character design process. Being just a couple DCs or CV off from the rest of the party can cause serious problems. Caps and baselines provide that needed information while also communicating the expectation of "these numbers shall be adhered to".

1) I don't feel they have a useful purpose in a fantasy RPG. Any mechanical or role-play distinction can already be explained by magic ("Bob, how come your cleric is a hundred and seven?" "Oh, he completed a holy trial of faith a while back and was granted agelessness. Third sentence of the backstory.") and I don't trust people to be able to appropriately role-play "other species" in real-time (it's hard enough getting some people to role-play anything beyond 'wacky gimmick'). It's certainly doable in writing-time, but I don't play PBP or PBEM so that's a nonfactor to me. In my experience "race" is just a mechanical template that winds up underwhelming for what should be such a big deal and a coat of role-play paint on top of a very human character. 2) No. Give me good old humans-only any day. 3) Non-human characters who act human. Species-as-culture. Species-as-real-group. Crossbreeding except as "a wizard did it". Any time a character's species doesn't matter. 4) One is the number for me. 5) In my experience, they boil down to stereotypes or visual aids. I hate that.

I've used Leaping, Usable As Attack, Instant. If you hit, the target moves. Nice and simple.