Cloppy Clip

You've done a good job: it only works with armour so naturally synergises with the warrior-types who've invested the most in that field, and the limit versus AOEs means that a wizard can still do heavy damage to a group with a Fireball, or the equivalent, so fighters don't feel like they're getting into superhuman territory. And it's easy to explain what benefit they provide, which I think is always a plus with Talents that I think are meant to be simpler conceptually than Powers.

I'd come across his origin story in Champions Beyond, but it's good to know there's more to read up on in Book of the Destroyer; thank you. And it'd be nice to see what Silver Age Champions would look like, but I can't think of anyone other than Darren I'd trust to do it justice. I was a bit late to the party, but after hearing the sad news I did some reading up on the various books he'd done for HERO, and I couldn't believe how much of the Champions univese was formally laid out by him. He left a tremendous legacy behind, even if he did pass much too soon. He's also the writer who got me into HERO in the first place, thanks to Lucha Libre HERO. A book I bought on a whim because it was discounted and sounded funny, and it turned out to be such a faithful and respectful treatment of the genre that I was an immediate convert.

Thank you for the comprehensive reply, Lord Liaden; I don't know how you have room for all this knowledge in your brain, but I'm glad you do! That link by Scott Bennie looks very useful. I'd gotten a general overview from the 6E books, but this is put together very well, and laid out nicely, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of this as a reference. The doc actually reminded me of something I'd been wondering: there are references to a character called Vanguard, who I think is the setting's Superman equivalent, but I haven't been able to find stats for him and Google indicates they were never published. Did they deliberately choose not to, or was it just a matter of the opportunity never coming up? And how powerful was he roughly supposed to be -- around the Dr Destroyer level, or even stronger?

There's a lot that can be done going down this route, and for what it's worth your example character sheet looks very clean and readable so cutting down characteristics does aid in presentation to start with. I think the ideas you have for replacing STR and CON can definitely work, and you can tweak the numbers to get the same results on average, but will you be okay with the extra randomness? For Stun rolls, that probably won't matter too much, but because lifting works on a geometric scale a difference of 4 on the roll would mean an 4-fold change in lifting ability. If you're focusing on the more heroic-level Fantasy HERO gameplay, would it be worth looking at tweaking the STR chart to either a linear one, or to the one from APG (I think the first one) that makes +10 STR double lifting instead of +5. But that's purely a matter of preference, and the core mechanic of replacing the STR stat with lifting rolls is sound enough to work with. And, since it bears repeating, that is a very nice-looking character sheet!

Thanks for the elaboration, unclevlad. Your point about reducing LTE being effectively Drain END is a good reminder to not overcomplicate things. My goal, which I'm still trying to decide how it will take form, is to make a dedicated healer something interesting to play in a regular game. I have a friend who gravitates almost exclusively to that role in RPGs (he's the one who always wants to play the cleric in D&D for example) and MMOs, and he's expressed an interest in trying this out in HERO. The problem seems to be, as you've all pointed out over the course of this thread, that unlimited Healing will drag out fights and slow the game down too much, so I'm happy with it not being too powerful. What I'm doing trying different ideas out here is trying to make up a way he can feel like the healbot of the party without throwing the game's assumptions about combat completely out of the window. This may be a tall ask, and I'm not exactly sure what form this would take in the end, so apologies for not being able to give better context. The feedback everyone's given so far has been helpful for working out where I stand with regards to everything, so please keep it coming if you may.

Sorry, I'm muddling myself. So, back in 5E, the setting was building up to future events like Luther Black's apotheosis in 2012 and the disappearance of magic in 2020, right? We're now in 2023, so a modern-day Champions game has to either change the timeline so these events are still in the future, ignore them and decide nothing came of them, or have them have happened in the past leaving the fallout for the players to deal with. What I'm wondering is, are there any other big events that were being built up to, that would now be set in the past and need to be addressed in a modern-day Champions? Hope that's a bit clearer. I have a bad habit from university of vomiting words out without thinking them through so much: great stuff when you need to get an essay out in time, but not so helpful when the writing wants to actually make sense!

I think I've seen a video on YouTube about the MMO; it looked interesting, but it seemed to have a low population that kind of defeats the social aspect of the game. Didn't know that things like Shadow Destroyer came from Champions Online, so thanks for that tidbit. I don't know how clear-cut things are, but is there a dividing line for 5E Champions books that sorts them into pre-Cryptic and post-Cryptic if I wanted to look at the differences between them? It would be nice and simple (and so possibly too much to hope for!) if everything after DOJHERO225 was in the MMO-affected timeline, for example. 5E didn't last until 2012, right? So if I didn't feel the need to play in the present day, I could set the current year of the campaign to 2009, or whenever they stopped publishing 5E books, and play forward from there. Were there any other big milestones that we caught up to in the real world to watch out for? Or was DEMON's apotheosis the big one? Thanks again for your insight; there's a lot to take in, but I suppose that's par for the course with a setting as vast as this!

This is a coincidence; I'd just been thinking about powers based on the four interactions yesterday. You've already got some good ideas in place, but hopefully some of these will be of use: A Barrier based on the Coulomb barrier could personalise the electromagnetic villain, as well as Images based on the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Gravity warps spacetime, so what about a Change Environment to aid or impede movement in the area around your gravity villain? Density Increase would make sense for the strong force, and fits in with the brick theme. You could also reverse the effect by having them reduce the strong interaction on a target as a Drain STR. I don't have much to add for our radioactive villain, but Sticky could be a fun advantage that fits the theme and lets fights get out of control quickly if the heroes don't think fast. As for names, I'm afraid I'm not very creative in that department, but a possible plot seed could take after the discovery that electromagnetism and the weak interaction unite at high temperatures, giving a story where the two villains are fused in some sort of experimental accident that gives the heroes a baddy with the powers of both combined, who might have their eyes set on taking Singularity's place.

In the Mental powers thread, I worked out a little rule-of-thumb for characteristics: in effect, the maximum a noteworthy characteristic could be was around 2.5 times the DC of an average attack (noteworthy being something that the character would stand out in terms of, like EGO for a mentalist or INT for a super-genius), with a range of 10. This gives good results for mentalist combat, and I later noticed means that the Power skill scales appropriately, so I'm generally happy to use this rule. Applying this to CON, and assuming that in the average campaign a combatant will have CON as a noteworthy characteristic, it looks like Stuns become harder to score as the DC goes up. This is definitely going to influence gameplay, but I think I'm all right making it a deliberate choice. At Heroic levels, Stuns can be a serious threat but you have the option to max out CON and fairly reliably avoid them, while when you get into Superheroic levels the chances of Stun drop off even for characters at the bottom end of the range. And, of course, an average bystander who doesn't have CON as a noteworthy characteristic won't last long at all. So the game will play differently at different levels, but I think that can be justified by how much more fragile characters can narratively be in Heroic-level games. So long as everyone making a character is informed about the effects of this guideline, I can see it being just another thing to help decide the level of play when we're planning out a game. Does that sound reasonable?

Hopefully resurrecting this thread isn't a problem, but I've been mulling over an idea for healing and would appreciate some feedback. And I might need some help expressing this idea in HERO terms, as I so often do! The gist of the idea is pretty simple: you buy Healing normally, but you also buy a naked advantage for Decreased Re-Use Duration with a limitation that replaces the attrition aspect of Healing. My ideas were some sort of Long-Term Endurance payment or a Side Effect where you take the damage healed, but I wasn't sure what the exact limitation values for these would be. I haven't been able to find anything about Costs LTE in the books, unless you're meant to do a Drain LTE Side Effect. And Side Effect's value seems to depend on how expensive the power used to deal the damage is, which depends on how you build said power. So how do these ideas sound? Are the limitations sufficient to put characters off Healing to the same extent as the Maximum Effect limit, or could they use a little tweaking? And are there any other good examples of limitations that could be placed on Healing like this?

Oh goodness, sorry for any alarm caused by my using the ability guidelines: I just needed some numbers to crunch to try out what we were discussing, and the table was too hand. This talk about damage models got me thinking, though: how often do we expect a character to be Stunned in a fight? 12d6 vs 24 Def has an average STUN of 18, which has a 53.3% chance to Stun a character with CON 18 and a 22.6% chance to Stun a character with CON 23. Even those two choices have a pretty big impact on how many times someone gets Stunned over the course of a fight, so how much variance are we allowing for? Should every character buy a fixed amount of CON, or does the game work all right if you have the Bricks able to soak up high damage rolls without falling down while Mentalists get knocked over by a stiff breeze?

I only have the info for 6E, but Champions has a table for superheroic games on page 135. This reproduces the table from 6E's first core rulebook on page 35, which has the guidelines for normal and heroic games as well. If there are examples from other editions then I'm afraid I don't know where to look for them, but the equivalent books would be my first guess.

Now that's an interesting tidbit. I didn't know the switchover from superheroes to science-fiction happened so close to the present day. Has this 2020 date been retconned, or is the Champions universe now divergent with real life in more ways than the obvious addition of superpowers? And, if it has been retconned, when does the changeover happen: is it when 6E was published, or sometime after that; and are the older books still compatible with current continuity outside of this change, or are there more changes lurking beneath the surface? Sorry, that's a lot of questions, so don't feel rushed to answer them all. Thank you very much folks for explaining this.

Very comprehensive, Lord Liadan, thank you! I don't actually mind too much if there's no references to Champions in the Fantasy HERO material. I just think that, if these different settings are all part of one greater meta-universe, I'll get a more complete understanding of it by reading about the different eras. Out of curiosity, were stats for Kal-Turak ever published? It'd be interesting to see how a Champions master villain would work in a lower-powered heroic setting.

It's something to start with, so that's a great help! And was the crossover mostly little fragments here and there, then? That's a little bit of a shame, as I was looking forward to seeing if I could spot any references, but it does make sense that you don't want your customers to feel bullied into buying 30 other books to understand the one they're holding.

I've been taking a look at some 5E Champions material that wasn't updated to the new edition and there's been a lot of great finds so far. As I understand it, the Fantasy HERO and Star HERO lines are part of the Champions timeline (Fantasy set long in the past and Star in between Champions and Galactic Champions), so I thought it would be worthwhile taking a look at some of those books, but I'm not sure which ones to focus on. If I start with Fantasy HERO, since I believe Takofanes originates in one of these settings and he's always been a fun concept, which books would be part of the greater Champions universe? The potential hits I can see looking through the Wikipedia article are the Turakian Age, Valdorian Age, Atlantean Age and Tuala Morn, along with Monsters, Minions & Marauders and Nobles, Knights & Necromancers. Does anybody have a good breakdown of how these books fit together and what a good reading order might be?

Judging it based on what's expected to get past average defences is actually a pretty elegant solution. Thank you, both, I'll play around with that when I get a moment and try and work out a general pattern. Some quick juggling of numbers and it seems like, using the numbers from 6E1 p35 for a maxed-out Standard Superheroic campaign, 14d6 Blast is about the same as 12d6 + 9d6 Blast against a Def of 25. I'm not sure that there's a simple formula you can plug numbers into, but that's definitely something to start off.

This is a little bit of an esoteric problem to have, but I'm looking at implementing a 'Rule of X'-type deal where only some advantages count towards the Active Point limit. As a starting point, think of the list of advantages on 6E2 p98, but this list can be modified as need be. But how would I class Linked powers? Two 12d6 powers apply separately to defences, so they're clearly not as effective as a 24d6 power, but there is still a big advantage over a straightforward 12d6 power on its own. So what would you treat this example as for the purposes of the limit: 24d6 (the total number of dice being rolled)? 12d6 (the DC of the strongest attack, ignoring all others)? 20d6 (this is assuming a limitation of -1/2, and working out the effective DC of the power accordingly)? Given the goals of wanting to allow flexibility with advantages while putting a hard limit on things that affect damage, which answer would you go with if you were in my shoes? Thank you.

The UOO pages can be intimidating, and I've gotten tripped up by them more than a few times, but I feel like if you're going to have a game that aims to be as comprehensive as HERO does then this level of excruciating detail is part and parcel of that. The different components of UOO do make a difference to how the power would work, so I feel like they're pages worth having and clarifications worth making, even if they can fry my little brain at times.

To be honest, that's how I assumed the duplicated defences worked when I first saw that power. I suppose there's nothing in the rules explicitly saying it must work that way, but I figured 10 1d6 Blasts aren't treated as a 10d6 Blast, so why should 10 lots of 2 ED be treated as 20 ED? Thank you for the responses and elaboration, everyone. I think this is another case where the rules on their own don't quite explain what the designers meant for someone only reading the 6E core, which is a hazard when building rules upon each other for so long in a single game! But knowing what was likely intended makes it easier to provide a reason when saying no to abusive powers.

I think some form of HAP are an important addition to the system as long as they're easy to remove for groups that have decided they don't need them, because this is at the end of the day a social game played by friends, and if everyone in the group agrees the result decided by the dice isn't doing it for them personally then a system that lets you tweak what happened without having to throw out all the rules and go freeform gives your group a useful tool to play with. There are problems with making spending XP the only way to affect things, because it puts players in the unenviable position of pitting permanent power against temporary power and will likely end up frustrating a number of them no matter how well you balance the trade-offs, but I can see there being promise of it as an option alongside HAP or something else that work more like Fate Points. This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember a GURPS supplement having rules for spending XP to gain temporary points. If I remember rightly, the rate was 1 XP paid to gain 5 points worth of abilities for the duration of that scene. This might feel more impactful than changing the results on dice, since the abilities bought would last for more than one dice roll, but even if there's no difference in it for you it could be another tool in your toolbox to play around with.

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but why would you need to buy those modifiers twice if treating Transfer as one power? Delayed Recovery (+1) on Drain 1d6 and Aid 1d6 gives you 20 + 12 = 32 Active Points, the same as if you applied the modifier to a combined Transfer that cost 16 points for 1d6. The same applies to Expanded Effect, and other modifiers. Was the intention for you to be able to buy different levels, or was it just a way of making the power more expensive?

I went and double-checked Multiple Attacks, and you're absolutely right. I'd misread it when I first went through the rules and had the wrong idea this whole time! Which ruling is this? I have to admit that when looking at 5-point doublings I did think about a VPP copied 100 times or so for 35 points, but I hope you'll credit me with at least enough sense to see where that could go wrong. But I haven't seen anything about a ruling saying they need to have the same setting. It would be stupendously open to abuse otherwise, so I wouldn't be surprised to see such.

I don't know what the rules are on reproducing rules text from books, but Champions Powers has a Two-Dimensional Form power on page 258 that looks like exactly what you have in mind. It consists of Desolidification, Invisibility, Flight (to represent the ability to glide on air currents) and Armour Piercing on STR (since you're so sharp). There are a number of modifiers in place to tweak those powers, but I'm not entirely sure it's okay to go through those in detail. Sorry I've been a bit vague here, but hopefully that gives you something to work with!

I think this gets to the crux of the matter for me. If I was thinking of buying Blast 12d6 and then buying three more copies of the power for 10 points with the intention of using them as a Multiple Attack then it seems to me that fictional concept was already covered by the Autofire advantage. That Autofire can be expensive and rack up the points says to me the game thinks this concept is worth a lot of points, so I'm wary about an alternative that seems to do the same thing for much less, let alone all the unintended powers that can be created with it on top of that. That's just my impression, however, and I don't have enough experience to tell where the breakpoint is.