Matt the Bruins

Re: A multistage VPP If I remember correctly, the master villain Tyrannon from Mystic Worlds is also built with an additive VPP that can only be used when some rare conditions are met. If there are multiple gradations through, I'd say that ghost-angel's suggestion above would be the better way to go about it.

Re: VPP and "Limited Class of Powers" Also, the zombie hordes Mordru raised in that Legion story arc back in the early 90s flew through interstellar space. It's certainly a surreal concept, but not unheard-of.

Re: My Craziest Idea Ever? You can take a look at MegaScale Growth in action at about 2:30 in. Seemed to come in handy.

Re: Dracula: Super-Pimp! Heh. Good actors don't need special effects!

Re: Magic and Desolidfication I think that would depend on what exactly vampires are in the campaign. A reanimated corpse that grew fangs postmortem but has no actual mystical powers might not be able to affect a desolidified character. But a tangible hungry ghost with no reflection or shadow that can pass through door jambs and cracks in window sills? Probably its physicality is magical enough to touch the character. On the other hand, a werewolf likely transforms by magic but I don't know that its attacks are necessarily magical aside from the passing-on-lycanthropy aspect. Probably would pass right through him unless it had some special attack defined with a magical SFX.

Re: VPP and "Limited Class of Powers" I think I've said before that "Magic Only" seems a pretty shaky justification for a VPP limitation to me given that it's about the most versatile special effect there is. (And some magicians like Gyre even combine magic and technology.) I can see Fantasy Hero style conventions like "Must Memorize Spells From Spell Books" being worth limitations, but is there any power in 5th Ed Revised that specifically can't be bought with magic as its SFX? I do think it's appropriate for things like Dr. Yin Wu's Chinese Sorcery VPP, where there are obligations he has to fulfill to maintain his powers and a list of culturally-based spells he has at his disposal. But I don't see Takofanes being hampered in any real sense by the fact that the powers he invents on the fly are using magical energy rather than cosmic.

Re: Paladin Benetar Incredibly cool. But for shame, only crediting this noble knight of Love with a 13- at singing!

Re: What's in the moon? Green cheese!!! More seriously, if I were going to have people digging on the moon, I'd probably either have them find a monolith or the cthulhoid "watchdog" from Warren Ellis' run on The Authority.

Re: Superhero Legacy 2: He took my old ID! Super Model would probably say "Good riddance!" to the code name at least if someone else actually claimed it. She doesn't have a signature costume though, and she's both internationally famous and inhumanly beautiful, so I don't think actual mistaken identity would be possible except by the most ill-informed of newscasters. Kurzhaan the Conqueror uses his own proper name, so it's doubtful someone else would choose to emulate it, and he doesn't conceal his face in public. He did get to the 21st century by a time travel snafu though, so if a doppelganger turned up he'd at least consider the possibility that his timeline was being crossed in subsequent trips and it actually is him. Definitely worth investigating to see what's going on. Earth Girl would be pretty hard to convincingly imitate, what with being made of animated soil and plants. She's not really into fame or glory so I don't think another super hero co-opting her name would be that much of a concern for her. If it looked like there was a new earth elemental in town, she might try to meet just to find out if Gaia has generated a new one due to some failing on her part.

Re: Odd Swords -- Real or Fantasy? That quote was my immediate thought as well. But hey, if you find yourself facing down a cartoon duck and rabbit maybe it's the weapon you want in hand? While I'm in a thread surrounded by weapons experts, are there real world edged analogs to the tonfa-esque blades Kroenen was sporting in Hellboy?

Re: Limitations on VPP Pool Ah, I'd assumed that they would be one-use-and-it's-gone arrows, and you'd have to pay more character points if you wanted to replenish your supply in the future. Honestly, I don't think that 5 uses per day is restrictive enough that I'd allow the kind of cost savings my Summon build represents. It doesn't seem worth significantly more limitation than, say, a Gadget Pool that has to be changed in a lab. The -1 3/4 you'd get to the Control Cost for the 5 charges plus OAF strikes me as just about right.

Re: Places to Fight I've run fights set in Antebellum mansions, British pubs, Chinatown opium dens, Himalayan temples, inside a collapsing skyscraper and on the street looking up at another, in a lab on an alien world, and in speeding cars on the streets of Manhattan. But the best ever involved a climactic fight on the dirigible mooring mast of the Empire State Building during a thunderstorm, with a zeppelin full of the villain's flunkies hovering overhead.

Re: Superhero Legacy. Passing on a Name I don't think any of my characters are interested in passing their code name and heroic legacy down to a new generation. Super Model was snarkily named by the press, so it's not like she's particularly fond of being called that herself, let alone interested in saddling someone else with the code name. Earth Girl is an avatar of Mother Nature, and when her season is done a new person will be chosen by that divinity to carry on in her place. She won't have any say in the matter. Kurzhaan the Conqueror is immortal and millenia old, so not making retirement plans anytime soon. And his legacy is hundreds (or possibly thousands) of people cursed with lycanthropy in the present day, so he's mostly concerned with not getting killed by a lucky "descendant" who's desperate to find a cure.

Hi Steve, hope you're doing well. I couldn't locate any questions on this particular permutation of Damage Shield, so I'm crossing my fingers that I'm not being repetitive. If I want to create a Damage Shield Hand-To-Hand Attack that adds its damage to the attacker's STR rather than the character's in order to reflect very hard, inflexible skin that does less harm to an average person slapping the character than to a bare-knuckle fighter punching with his full might, what sort of Limitation (or Advantage) value would you suggest? Would it make any difference to the value if the character in question is super-strong as opposed to merely average in strength but extremely tough?

Re: The Champion Protocols (ie how to take down your character) Super Model is your standard flying brick, but has no Life Support or exotic defenses beyond her nigh-impenetrable skin. Flash-bangs, tear gas in an enclosed space, or any sort of mental attack should do the trick. Earth Girl is an earth elemental who's made out of animated soil. Breaking her contact with the ground and surrounding her with man-made materials weakens most of her powers and makes her vulnerable. If someone has the wherewithal to get her off-planet entirely, she's completely helpless. Kurzhaan the Conqueror is a werewolf with considerable skill at sorcery. He's essentially unkillable except by silver weapons, can take lots of punishment, and is almost impossible to take by surprise. However, he doesn't have much in the way of defenses while in human form unless he devotes his magic to creating them. Sonic attacks to soften him up, lots of bullets to take him down, and heavy sedation to keep him unconscious afterwards would be a good plan.

Re: Adonis and his ladies (New Mastermind and henchwomen) I can't write up and post a build since the base character is DOJ intellectual property, but how about Mechanon Mark XXXVI-XXIV-XXXVI, infiltrating Adonis' genetics program to learn from the failures rather than the successes and figure out new weaknesses of carbon-based life? I love the idea of a negligee-wearing fembot with Mechanon hiding inside its circuits.

Re: Limitations on VPP Pool Ice9's mention of Summon made me recall that 5th Edition Revised does mention the possibility of using that power to "create" inanimate objects that are themselves built on character points. I think that may be a better way to model what you're looking for than using a VPP at all, given the limited number of one-shot uses. Going by the approach for that listed on p. 223, let's see how that would look: 8 Omni-Arrows: Summon one 60-point Trick Arrow, Slavishly Loyal (+1), Expanded Class (any type of trick arrow; +1); 5 Charges which Never Recover (-2 3/4), Restrainable (-1/2) It's awfully cheap, but then again it's a case of using the points you spent a few times and they're gone forever, so a GM might allow it as long as the actual arrows themselves were built according to campaign limits and with appropriate limitations like OAF, etc. Were it me, I'd require you to make up a list of potential arrows beforehand so I could OK them before play began.

Re: Dr. Yin Wu -- Archmage? Emphasis mine. Right there is a pretty convincing argument for not becoming the Archmage.

Re: Powers to make life better Invisibility to Hearing Group, No Fringe, Usable As Attack (+1), Area Of Effect (10" Radius; +1 1/4), 1 Continuing Charge lasting 6 Hours (+0), Ranged (+1/2) Just big enough to envelop the bar across the street and all the motorcycles parked around it.

Re: Limitations on VPP Pool My suggestion is that if not having a cheap, high-powered one use omni-gadget is a dealbreaker for you, put the Hero books down and go pull Mayfair's DC Superheroes out of mothballs. It's easier to just play the game you're set on playing with pre-existing rules that suit it than trying to revamp a different system into doing the same thing.

Re: Aura of Solipcism As built it can work against PCs who don't have Mental Defense (or have very, very little of it), but the idea is for the intitial encounter to be with what appears to be a mind-controlled mob, and once that's overcome the PCs find out to their chagrin that people don't get better from the mind control once they're knocked out. And the effect can continue spreading once Patients Zero are taken into custody.

I've been trying to think of a way to build a particularly horrifying slow-build power for an antagonist something along the lines of what Agent Smith could do in Matrix Revolutions, and wanted to see what folks think of this combo: 45 Aura of Solipcism: Major Transform 1d6 (target's mind into duplicate of character's mind; heals back by Psionic Surgery [Mental Transform]), BOECV (Mental Defense applies; +1), Area of Effect (2" Radius; +3/4), Continuous (+1), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2), Works Against EGO Not BODY (+1/4) (67 Active Points); No Range (-1/2) 13 Area of Effect (up to 8" Radius; +1 1/2) for Aura of Solipcism power, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +1/2) (30 Active Points); Gradual Effect (1 Hour; -1 1/4) 1 MegaArea (1" = 1 km wide and broad; +1/4) for Aura of Solipcism power (4 Active Points); Gradual Effect (1 Day; -1 3/4), Increased Endurance Cost (x5 END; -2) [5] 28 One World, One Mind: Mind Link, specific group of up to 1028 duplicate minds, any distance, Psychic Bond (70 Active Points); Always On (-1/2), Only With Others Who Have Mind Link (-1)

Re: Stun Maximum Ah, sorry about the Transformer misidentification. I've seen its planet-eating scene on Youtube, but not the movie itself, and when I searched for it I hit an online post calling it Megatron.

Re: Thor's Hammer, Mjöllnir He currently can change back to non-powered Don Blake when he wishes, but I don't believe he's forced to. He also inherited his father's cosmic power, so I'm not sure that the hammer is actually necessary for controlling storms, etc. anymore. He may just continue using it for such out of habit.

Re: A snake tail instead of legs Flying Snake says no.