Gideon

So, I finally played the game with my "god" character. I actually took two of the names suggested. He is Sharos Havensoul The Wanderer, but he operates as a hero under the name of Archon. The other character: Dr. Matheson, I've played before, but its a game we only play about once a month right now. I haven't decided but I'm leaning towards either Neutron or Doctor Density. If people have other ideas I'd love to hear them. And again, Thanks

He isn't quite a "hero that is a pantheon". Think more Firestorm and the Professor and less Legion. His powers increased (all background stuff) because he houses their essences, and he can attempt to commune with them, but most of the time the "essences" remain dormant.

I like some of the suggestions so far, but I still can't decide. If it helps Dr. Matheson also has powers pertaining to torque (the GM has called it "mass shifting"). He has powers like an HA with double knockback, and an area of effect "shockwave" with zero range and requires striking a surface. These powers are in a multipower that also includes his density increase, and all of them are fixed slots (purposeful major character flaw. He uses one of his "special momentum based attacks" his density returns to normal.) The deity character, I had hoped to NOT use a name that referred to his being a "host" to the rest of his pantheon. Its something about the character I had actually hoped to keep secret IG for a while. @Hyper-man: Beta-Ray Bill is one of my favorite Marvel characters. Simply "Gamma-wave Bob" doesn't fit either of these characters, regardless of how much I like it as a name. (no gamma waves, not named bob)

So I'm in two fairly new games, with two different GMs, and I cannot come up with Hero names for either of my characters. I have both of their normal identities down, I know their powers, personalities and even what they look like, but I simply can't come up with Superhero names for them. Please help. Thank you in advance. Character #1: Dr. Bill Matheson helped build a private use spaceship, and was part of its crew. Shortly after activating the ship's hyperdrive, the engines malfunctioned and exploded. The ship was hurtled back to earth, and upon crashing the survivors discovered they had super powers (very much like the Fantastic Four or U-Foes). Bill changed from being a 5'10" tall, 146 pound man with an average/ thin build to a 5'1"tall 300 pound man with an athletic build. He has control over his density and mass (similarly to Vision, but he hasn't learned how to decrease past his "normal"). I want him to have a very golden age or silver age style name, but I have drawn a complete blank. Character #2: This character currently has no name at all. The campaign is taking place in space and is going to be very "cosmic" in scope, and very classic Marvel in style. My character is the last Deity from an alien pantheon that was destroyed in a Ragnarok-like cataclysm hundreds of years ago. Originally he was the demi-god of heroism. He was a mortal who was tasked to go on several odyssey-style quests. Upon completion of the tasks, it was determined that he truly exemplified the qualities of a hero the gods felt their worshippers should strive for and he was granted god-hood. When the cataclysm that destroyed his pantheon (and the world he was worshiped on) came, the leaders devised a plan to save the pantheon. They all transformed into a form of energy and retreated inside the Hero-god (my PC). So he now hosts their consciousness and roams the galaxy helping people. The results are that he has gained significant power and a few minor extra abilities. He also has the ability to (occasionally) ask the other gods for information or advice. As the "hero-god" he is meant to be very similar to Marvel's Thor or Hercules. He is strong, can fly, incredibly tough and has a magic sword that can shoot bolts of raw energy. I want him to either have a really awesome "Deity name" ALA Thor, or a cool "Galactic Superhero name". Again, thank you for the help.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares 30 Days of Dark Knight

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares how about: Where the Wild Hogs Are Where the "Wild Things" Are Where The Wild Bunch Are and my personal favorite, but also the most obscure of the references: Where the Wild Palms Are

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares if your going for crossovers like that how about: The Shining Time Station... "Heeeeerrrrreeeeeeeesssssss Thomas!!!!!!!!!"

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares True Glee (Vampires in a high-school glee club. How could this not be great.) Stargate Busters (Lets see what happens when Jamie and Adam get recruited by the SGC) Everybody Loves Dexter America's Got Trauma Bucky O'Bright (Space rabbit fighting evil with rainbows and flying unicorns) Little House in Space 1999 (The Ingalls family living in Moon Base Alpha)

Re: Life (Energy) living conduit... Heal+SE? The time chart starts at once a segment, and DRD doesn't say it has a minimum, so I would rule that if you are willing to take the +2, go for it.

Re: Non conductive powder I disagree. Speed represents how many times I can take combat significant actions in a turn. Why would this have any bearing on how fast I recover from being blinded? Personally I find it more balanced that a high speed character is penalized more by flash than a low speed character. The benefit of a high speed is more actions 99% of the time. The benefit of a low speed is actions on phases other don't go, and fewer actions lost to flashes. Wow, what a trade off. If you want a high speed character to recover faster from flashes I say buy it as a power.

Re: Have you ever built the same character more than once?

Re: Life (Energy) living conduit... Heal+SE? Multiple healing does not stack when used in the same 24 hour period unless you take and advantage on your healing called "decreased re-use duration". The advantage is expensive though: +1/4 ever step down the time chart. So once every 6 hours is a +1/4, and once a segment is a +2. The side effect should only work if the power works. So if you can't transfer your energy (IE: its a robot) you can't get drained. But that would be my take on it.

Re: Have you ever built the same character more than once? As far as PCs go, while the answer is yes, it is with the caveat of "not in the same game". In Champions, I have made just over a dozen PCs, and I have made sure that none of them are very similar. I have two bricks for example: Mesa is 7'4" 1,000 lbs. He has no secret ID, and is married with kids. He went to college for cultural anthropology and linguistic studies before gaining his powers. He is basically a really big, white version of Power Man. Titan has traditional growth powers (ala Giant Man and Colossal Boy) allowing him to be anywhere from 5'7" tall weighing 173 lbs to 68' tall weighing in at 177,152 lbs. He got his GED while in jail after being arrested for working as a Viper trooper. After gaining his powers, he turned his back on Viper, changed his name and joined a super hero team. They still don't know his origins. Except for some standards: teamwork, power, resistant defense, leaping, power defense... the characters have almost nothing in common. And I did that very purposefully. But like most others have said, this works when you have a small group of PCs you are talking about. I believe when it comes to characters (especially villains in comic books and super hero RPGs) you can end up with too many. So my comment would be to do a combination of all three. Part of this depends on how you run your game though. If (like some) you run a living world type game where all those characters are supposed to exist together, and all the heroes in all the games you've run all operate on the same earth, then don't nuke. Kill some of them off perhaps, but don't simply nuke them out of existence unless your players have never seen or heard of them, they never did anything you think was significant, and there is someone else very similar you like better. However, if you have a character who has never seen play and is really close to one who has (or your campaigns have no continuity between them) just nuke him. The option I find better most of the time is to simply combine characters. This can be as simple as saying: "well, you see Heroes Inc. never captured Freeze-man so I didn't feel it necessary to announce it to people that Iceberg was the same person when Super-Squad fought against him. None of the PCs were the same, so they never would have known." At this point you can go as simple as Nuking "Freeze-man" and retro-continuity fixing things so that "it was always Iceberg the whole time." You can even take parts of the nuked character and "give" them to the other character. Or if you want you can go the more complicated route and make a new third character that combines what you like from the other two, and once he's finished scrap both of the originals. Characters you don't feel you can do this to (or you really just like too much to nuke this way), make different. It shouldn't be hard. Different skills, minor power differences (elemental fire VS radioactive fire VS super-heated plasma fire). If you get stuck, you can always ask for advice. I'm sure people here will be willing to help.

Re: How Much XP to Award? I can't argue for or against anything already said here. All I can tell you is how the GM I play under usually does stuff. He awards about 1XP per game session of a story arc, + 1 to 3 extra XP depending of how hard a time the group had/ how well they did. The main difference between how my regular GM does it, and how most of the people who have posted seem to do it, is that he awards the XP only after the story arc ends. So this means we will go 2-4 sessions without actually being awarded any XP. Its not that we haven't earned it, its that we haven't gotten it yet. He also generally doesn't allow players to spend XP in the middle of an adventure. The notable exception is to permanently buy your character something you just performed as a power "stunt" (new use of your powers you used came up with on the fly and used the power skill to perform). For individual players he awards "Cool Stuff" points (yes its a silly name) in addition to XP. If a character does something really awesome, makes a really funny/quotable comment figures something really important out/ stumps the GM they get a CSP immediately. 1CSP = 1/3 XP.

Re: How to Build: Team Communicator Over all I do like it. If directional/ non-directional is in the books then go for it. I'm sorry, but I would never put the fuel charge on the radio. If a real world watch battery will work for months, then a high-tech-comic-book-super-hero radio battery should work non-stop for at least 2-3 days. Not that it matters its a -0 anyway. Hero Designer says that affected as radio and hearing is a -1/2, so take that for what its worth. The book says that one aspect of HRRP (such as TV only) is worth -1/2 to -1, so radio only is worth at least -1/2

Re: Is DOT overpriced It may be overpriced as an advantage, but I think its amazing as a limitation. I have a character who is a mentalist doctor who has a minor healing power. He tricks a person's body into healing faster. In combat, the power is only good for stabilizing someone, but it keeps working for a while afterwards. Healing: 2d6 body standard effect, plus healing 2d6 body standard effect DoT: 7 damage increments, Damage occurs every 1 day, Character cannot use DoT power on a victim until after the fist use of the power on that victim has accrued all its damage intervals (-3 3/4), linked to healing: jointly linked (-1/2) 40 real points, 24 active points

Re: Help with power According to 6E page 141, column 1 paragraph 5 Defense Powers: OCV and DCV count as defenses against Drain which halves the results of the drain. So you actually need 40 points of effect to get -4 DCV. If your lucky, you could achieve that on 7d6, but most likely you would need 10d6 to 12d6 (14d6 if you want to standard affects it).

Re: [FREd] Hero can turn into, and control, any material touched. Technically you can break any or all of the rules with GM permission, so I don't generally take that into account when discussing builds. I don't have the book, so I didn't know about that character. I am surprised though, that they would publish official Champions setting material that breaks the rules.

Re: [FREd] Hero can turn into, and control, any material touched. Can't link a framework (or power in a framework) to a power outside the framework.

Re: Cloud Computing Telepath (5ed) So you understand, from your description I was thinking that the character doesn't actually get smarter ("...low INT, and she relies on Mind Control of other people to “bootstrap” herself up to super (evil) genius levels"), but instead gains access to the skills, knowledge and training people around her (or those she is linked to, or those she has mind controlled, however it is determined). If you allow skills to be purchased as powers (and they can be frameworked (don't know about this one, never tried)), I could see her with a mimicry VPP of nothing but skills. It wouldn't be cosmic, because she needs to at least spend some time around the person to gain access to their skills. The VPP (as well as her INT being boosted) gives her an interesting quirk of possibly not knowing how her own devices work when "in the field". Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she would still know how to use the devices, she simply wouldn't know how they do what they do.

Re: Cloud Computing Telepath (5ed) How about Mind Link and over all skill levels (or non-combat skill levels) with a custom limitation (must be using mind link) and you could even limit it so each purchase of skill levels requires more people in the link.

Re: [FREd] Hero can turn into, and control, any material touched. OK, first, if she always gains the same powers, regardless of the material absorbed, I would simply give her a multipower with variable SFX. Regardless of how I would build this, though, there are mistakes in the VPP you designed. 1)Applying OIAID (Only In Alternate Identity, AKA Only In Heroic Identity) to powers means that: it takes either a minimum of a Full Phase for the character to change into her Alternate (Heroic) Identity, or there is an easy way to stop her from changing. This applies in both 5E and 6E. You have the VPP built so that it takes her a half phase action to change it (which would indicate to me that it only takes her a half phase action to mimic a given material, thus changing into her Heroic Identity), and I see no easy way to stop her from altering her form. Even with the "VPP Powers Can Be Changed Only In Given Circumstance" as long as she can attain contact with an inorganic substance (any rock, metal, foam or plastic, or synthetic material) she can activate her powers. Since she doesn't need direct skin contact, she can do this as long as she is not nude and suspended in the air or water (there is no indication of how much of a given substance she needs to be in contact with. So her bra clips, underwire or possibly her bra itself, anything nylon she is wearing, her earrings, belt buckle, shoes, rings, cell phone, etc are enough to allow her to change). 2) 5E page 311 column 1 paragraph 4, and 6E1 page 399 column 2 paragraph 3 under the header of Linked: "A character may not... (a) Link two slots in the same Framework to each other" (both paragraphs are identical). Even if you could, the Linked limitation would not be worth -1/2. Both in 5E and in 6E, linked states: If a greater power is linked to a lesser power (her DI is 70 Active, her Armor, HKA, RKA, both EBs, HtH, TK, and Healing are all 75 Active) Linked is worth only -1/4. If the greater power is constant or in use most or all of the time the limitation is worth 1/4 less (dropping it to -1/4), and a lesser instant power that can be used in any phase in which a greater constant power is in use is also worth 1/4 less (dropping the limitation to -0)

Re: How Do I Build This? In some cases I think having it work the way Mr. Long intended it functions, in others I don't. That's why I posted this thread. For instant attack powers having things not drained together can work really well. For constant powers it often makes no sense at all. EX: I am Grasshopper Man. I have Shrinking (.032m tall [about 1 inch], .0004 kg mass, -12 to PER rolls to perceiver character, +12 DCV, takes +36m KB). Total Cost: 36 points. And Leaping: +24m (total 28m), (12 active points), linked to shrinking (power linked proportionately, greater power is constant, lesser power can be used in any phase greater constant power is in use) (-0) Total Cost: 12 points. While I understand that this is a -0 limitation, so some people would say "why bother" I think it makes sense for this type of character. For ease lets break the character's shrinking down by "level". Using the chart on 6E1 page 281, this character has 6 "levels" of shrinking, and say that the character needs to activate a "full level" of the power at a time. Each "level" of shrinking would therefore grant the character +4m leaping. The problem with powers not being drained together is this: Grasshopper Man has all of his shrinking active (thus he also has all of his leaping available). Dr. Shrinker, uses his un-miniaturizing ray on Grasshopper Man (Drain shrinking 5d6). Dr. Shrinker rolls well and manages to drain 18 points from Grasshopper Man's shrinking. He goes from (.032m tall [about 1 inch], .0004 kg mass, -12 to PER rolls to perceiver character, +12 DCV, takes +36m KB) to (.25 m tall [about 10 inches], .2 kg mass, -6 to PER rolls to perceive character, +6 DCV, takes +18m KB). Maintaining 18 points worth of shrinking now counts as using 100% of the power. Therefore strictly according to what Mr. Long told me, Grasshopper Man would retain all +24m of his Leaping even though logically his SFX says he shouldn't.

Re: How Do I Build This? Thanks Hugh. Now I just hope my GM agrees with you.

I posted a question about linked to Steven Long. I thought when two powers were linked proportionately that if you drained the greater power you also drained (or at least restricted the use of) the lesser power. According to Steven Long, I was wrong. Now my question is: How do I build a power that works the way I thought linked was supposed to? I know that Unified Power is not correct for the effect I want. According to its description (6E1 page 395) two unified powers are always affected by negative adjustment powers together. What I want is something that represents that the lesser power is drained along with the greater power, but not visa-versa. Example: Again using the Lightning Bolt Spell (RKA 2d6 + Linked Flash 4d6). The character with Drain Magic 3d6, Variable Effect (any one Magic power at a time; +1/2) chooses to drain the RKA portion of the spell. He succeeds in draining 10 points, reducing the RKA to 1d6+1, because of how the spell is built he also prevents me from using 10 points of Flash restricting it to 2d6 (although not necessarily actually adjusting it at all). However, a character with Drain Light 3d6, Variable Effect (any one light power at a time; +1/2) drains the flash portion of the spell. He succeeds in draining 10 points, reducing the Flash to 2d6, but the RKA remains unaffected.