Cloppy Clip

There's probably going to be some big consequence I haven't thought of, since I'm just spitballing, but could you use the same rules as the ones for combining STR to determine the total BODY of multiple objects? Work out the effective masses of each wall or barrier or what have you, total them up with the effective mass of the target based on the Object BODY rules, and convert back to a final result. That said, thinking through this as I type it out, it causes a bit of a problem for Barriers. I suppose we just have to accept that the system will have these edge cases it doesn't handle well, when everything's so interconnected and it uses two different scales. And that bit about different types of walls gaining different rates of BODY per thickness took me by surprise too when I looked it up. 😅

On page 172 of 6E2, the rules for determining the BODY of an object also follow the doubling rule: +1 BODY (the average amount dealt by +1 DC) equals x2 mass. And if you do twice the work, you'll get twice the effect so that tallies. To clarify a point I've seen some people get stuck on, the energy spent isn't always the same as the actual work done. Energy is just the capacity to do physical work, and damage is only a specific kind of work. So a lightbulb will spend its energy putting out light and heat all around it, while a pulse laser focuses the spent energy as heat onto a small point. Both can use the same amount of energy, but the laser will be much more efficient at dealing damage. And a gun with a greater muzzle energy can actually do less work to the target's body because the bullet pierces it much more smoothly, thus spending less energy inside all those squishy organs. The inconsistency comes when some other elements work on a linear basis: velocity damage and throwing distance (there are tables in the Advanced Player's Guide you can use to convert both to a geometric scale, but be warned that the realistic throwing table gets the formula wrong and increases throwing distance by too much). On their own, either way would work perfectly well, but you get some friction when trying to mix the two together, but I suspect that's due to the game being designed to be played on a tabletop with a grid and all, meaning those more realistic movement speeds and throwing ranges would quickly get out of hand.

I can see two ways to go about this, depending on your tolerance for maths and assuming we're going with "Doubling energy adds +1 DC". The first is to just take the progression used for STR and work out the minimum stage needed to get the required energy: 1 Mt = +0 DC 2 Mt = +1 DC 4 Mt = +2 DC 8 Mt = +3 DC 16 Mt = +4 DC 32 Mt = +5 DC 64 Mt = +6 DC 125 Mt = +7 DC 250 Mt = +8 DC 500 Mt = +9 DC 1 Gt = +10 DC If working at a different level than megatons you can subtract or add lots of 10 DC to get to the right level. So to work out 100 kt, we'd first subtract 10 DC to get to 1 kt. Then we'd look up the smallest stage that's at least 100, which is 125 or +7 DC. So going from a base of 1 Mt = 200 AP, or 40 DC, 100 kt would be 40 - 10 + 7 = 37 DC. The advantage of this method is you don't have to do any calculations beyond shifting up or down in lots of 10. Otherwise it's just looking up a table. If you don't mind doing some calculations, however, the expression to get the difference would be log2(X/1,000,000), where X is the TNT equivalent of your weapon. So, going back to 100 kt, we'd have log2(100,000/1,000,000) = -3.32..., which we can round to -3 and stick on to our base of 40 DC to get 37 DC, same as the previous answer. For nearly all cases, these methods will give you the same answer give or take 1 DC, so just use whichever one you find more natural. Hope I've understood the question correctly and this helps, and apologies if not.

Thank you for expanding on this, Christopher and LoneWolf, it helped me make a lot more sense of how AVAD can apply. Now it all seems quite elegant, as I can fit the pieces together. And thank you for answering my original question, Simon, and so promptly too!

Would it be possible to generalise the All or Nothing limitation (6E1 308) to other attack powers, like Blast or Killing Attack? And, if so, would its value remain the same?

Thank you for the comprehensive post, Duke, although I have to admit I wasn't seriously entertaining the idea of forming an army of Supermen -- it was more a way of trying to grapple with my problems with using Transform to grant powers, since there seemed to be no limit given enough time, why not do such? -- but your ideas about infinities give a lot of food for thought and, I think, reflect my own preferences a lot. In the end, I think this thread has done a good job of showing why Transforming people into Superman is not the way to go, and I'm personally pretty happy with my Followers solution. Now if only I could wrap my head around these non-standard Matching Complications... 😅

Thank you for the quick response, and that sounds worth looking into, especially for $5. Even if the second one is only 'good' as opposed to 'great', there could still be a lot there that's worthwhile.

Thank you, Beast. I notice on the store there's an Almanac 2 as well, and neither will break the bank as pdfs. Would the second one be worth picking up as well, if it's mostly going to be used for inspiration for 6th edition games?

That sounds really interesting, Opal. Do you remember where it was published? I did a quick Google and wasn't able to find it, but knowing that it's out there is still very useful so thank you!

Seconding a request for more info about this Reliable modifier.. Going back to the original question, though, I think that without the rules for hit locations and such in the game I'd go with either the Entangle or the Drain option, depending on what felt more appropriate. Entangle physically restrains its target, which matches the fiction of an arm or leg that can't be used, but the hit location rules give out penalties for impaired or disabled limbs, so Drain would better match the mechanical side. This did get me thinking, though: some of the hit locations have random effects when disabled, where one of a few options takes a penalty. With Drains and other adjustment powers you can buy a power to split the effect between different game elements (on page 137 the example of Drain STR and CON 4d6 (half to each) is given), but the division is fixed when you buy the power. Would it be terribly wrong to buy it as a random choice, so you would have, say, Drain STR or CON 4d6 and then, each time you used the power, you would roll to determine which characteristic was drained?

Stepped away from the thread for a bit and there's been a lot of activity! LoneWolf, I think you've hit on the original idea that got me thinking about a houserule, and I agree that repeatedly applying a beneficial Transform to a willing target goes against the spirit of the rules, if not the letter. Duke Bushio and Scott's discussion about the origins of Transform gives some context, though, and I'm now thinking that if it was originally intended as an alternative to a Killing Attack (15 points per d6 either kills them or does whatever else you might like to them) then it might be best to focus on Transform as an attack, and ignore the uses on willing targets without very careful attention paid to what's being done. Things like this are useful to come to the forum for, since I had no idea about the specific history of Transform, and that explains a lot of the logic behind how the power works. The rules are very comprehensive on how each element works, but not necessarily why. Still, for my purposes, I think the Followers perk works for what I have in mind, since the targets of the empowerment would otherwise be powerless, unimportant characters I feel like it makes sense to just introduce them as Followers, since that has the same end result. I do have a quibble about Followers, though. When you buy the Follower, you specify how many points they have and then take the corresponding about of Matching Complications. But the table on page 34 doesn't seem to have a clear relationship between points and complications. Is there a general guideline to know how many Matching Complications a character who falls in between the different levels needs?

Thanks everyone, that's some great advice. Thinking over it, and having a look at the perks section of the rules (one I'd mostly skipped over on my first time reading through), I wonder if the Followers perk might not be the simplest way to go about what I had in mind: you end up with an ally with powers of some description, but the SFX is that, instead of recruiting this person, you've granted them the powers yourself. Now that I think that's taken care of, I do have one silly question about Transform duplicating other powers. Page 307 is quite clear that you shouldn't use Transform to replicate other powers, like Christopher says, but page 306's "Adding or Removing Abilities" seems to be saying that powers can be granted as a part of the transformation (e.g. giving someone wings gives them Flight). But in comic books you have examples like Superman, who looks exactly like a human but has a large array of potent superpowers. Where would you draw the line, personally? For me, it feels like the question of whether there's an example of the result in the real world matters; so, if Kryptonians are a part of the universe then a Transform might be able to turn someone into Superman, but it would definitely be off the table if they aren't.

Looking at the rules for Transform, you can add points to the target by increasing the amount of BODY needed to effect the transformation, which makes sense. I'm having a bit of a problem with the implications of this, though. If I wanted to buff up my friends, what would stop me from taking Major Transform 1d6, Improved Results Group (+1) for 20 points, and then just taking however much time I need to give them whatever combination of powers they desire? Since it's helping them out, they wouldn't necessarily object to spending some time being hit by multiple Transforms if it means 2,000 points or something equally ridiculous at the end of it. Even if you don't come up with a healing method that doesn't give you a time limit, the REC per month is going to be simple enough to keep ahead of, leaving the way open for unlimited gains. While the GM could roll up their newspaper and give a light smack to anybody trying to cheese the rules like this, I feel like there is some value to granting powers like this, and it'd be a shame to put a blanket ban on using Transform on willing targets like this. So the idea I've cooked up is that the BODY from the extra points is treated as a sort of Power Defence instead, so each use of Transform has to overcome the penalty before it can start to affect the target. That way you could still grant your friends 2,000 points of free powers, but it would now need a minimum of Major Transform 67d6, which has a base cost of 670 points that feels much more reasonable if you want to throw those kinds of numbers around. Although this does have the knock-on effect of making these kinds of Transforms a bit easier if you were going to do it all in one go anyway: adding 25 points to a 10 BODY target would now require a roll of 25 instead of 30 if you wanted to do it in one shot. Are there any other side effects to this houserule to watch out for? Is the problem I've identified even a problem at all? I'm still new to this game, so having a more experienced set of eyes take a look and see if anything springs to mind would be greatly appreciated.

That would make sense to me, but I'm getting tripped up by what I found in 6E1 on page 357 under Power Frameworks. I don't know how much would be okay to quote on a public forum like this, but it says (loosely) the Recipient keeps the power and can keep using it even if the Grantor switches the Framework to another slot, as long as it has the 'Recipient controls power' element of the UOO as in UBO. Is there another rule somewhere governing when the recipient gets to keep the power, because I'm sure there must be some limit on this, but I can't find one. The wording of 'transfer' was a mistake on my part, because that's not quite what's going on. If it helps, what I had in mind was: 1) Character A buys a VPP worth so many points. 2) Character A assigns the Pool in their VPP to a power with the UBO advantage. 3) Character A grants this power to Character B in accordance with UBO. 4) Character A assigns the Pool to another power. 5) (This is where my problem is) 6E1 357 seems to say that Character B keeps the power they received in Step 3 6) Repeat Steps 2 to 5 with Characters C through Z and onwards? And that Step 6 seems very problematic to me, for obvious reasons.

That's an interesting perspective, and would be very useful if a player would sign up with the Spider or a similar deal, but this talk of mortgaging power points and playing around with things like that seems a little complicated to me. I can understand changing your character build if you're unhappy with how the PC plays but still enjoy the concept, as long as it's not too disruptive to the game, but I don't think it should be something you plan on doing as such. So I think we might be in the same boat here. 😅 I've been having a closer look at Transform, and I think Major Transform should be enough for adding powers, with the extra BODY to overcome based on the points, but it's got me wondering about the limits of this power, since it seems useful for so many situations. Could I fuse two characters together if I rolled enough BODY for both of them with a Severe Transform or something? In that case would their points be added together, or what would happen there? And could you do the same in reverse, transforming one person into two separate characters with their points split in half? Or does Transform depend on one target = one character sheet? EDIT: Hold on, and apologies if I've missed the mark here. I was taking another look at the VPP method, and from what I'm reading you can't apply UBO to the VPP, but you can apply it to a power created in the VPP, transfer that power and then switch the VPP without the recipient losing access to it. Is there a limit on how many times this can be done, or on how long the powers last for? Because otherwise this just seems like a cheaper way to do my original idea, and with virtually no limits either. Am I missing something here?

I know, but when you have all these rules to play around with it's very tempting to try and work out how something fits together mechanically, at least for me. I suppose I could justify it by saying I'd want to know how to build such a character if I was ever playing instead of GMing, but I know that's not a danger that's likely to occur. The VPP for each minion could work for a different concept, but one of the ideas I had here was that a power was fixed once given for any individual. In effect the Head would be drawing out the potential power the minion hadn't, up until that point, realised. So for this case the VPP wouldn't be necessary, and you'd be back to Christopher's suggestion of calling it the origin of their power. I think, as far as representing this with game rules, a Major Transform feels like the best approach still. And if there was a character or part of the setting I didn't care so much about fleshing out mechanically, I could always handwave things like this away as game effects. Thanks again for the help, everyone.

I don't have Turakian Age, so I might be missing some context, but am I reading this right in that the PCs will not be candidates from the four factions, but instead will be sent in by the Dark Lord to oversee the process and (subtly?) try to influence which faction leader wins out overall? Kind of like a twisted take on UN election observers? For me, the best approach would a fairly hands-off one, where the Dragon Lady has given the PCs their orders, but they have a lot of leeway in how to interpret them, either because they're trusted servants of Kal-Turak or because the city is a long way from Kal-Turak's power base so communications take a while to filter through. That way you can let the players decide how far they're comfortable going in the pursuit of evil, and if you have anyone who might be uncomfortable playing an outright villain they can play a character who might have noble intentions about helping people, who must then struggle not to become complicit in the evil around them. With that in mind, I think having a clear outline of the goals and motivations of each candidate would be useful when starting the game. You wouldn't need to have any of them statted up until the players actually come across them, but having ideas of what they'd be like as rulers if they won gives the PCs something to go on when deciding who they want to support and who they definitely don't want to win (the strongest contender you mentioned will probably fall into this category if they go ahead with the assassins!). All in all, that sounds like a really creative idea for a game, and I think your players will love it. As long as everybody knows not to push too hard if it makes someone uncomfortable there's a lot of room to explore evil characters, and a lot of fun that can't be had with the traditional hero archetypes.

Thanks for the answers, guys. I think I was getting tripped up by my experience with Mutants & Masterminds (a similar game, but with enough differences to make problems like this occur), where the Transform effect can't change the number of points a character has, so the way to do this power would have been a Variable-type deal. Having a closer look at HERO's Transform, I can now spot the guidance on added abilities adding to the BODY required. And, come to think of it, the problems Transform has for this kind of thing might not matter so much in this case, as the Legs would all presumably be willing to wait around for the Head to get enough Transforms off, and the powers wearing off over time would just encourage them to come back for top-ups. (Even the part about balancing points added with Complications gives me the idea for sneaking in some brainwashing with the powers, which would be nicely in-character for the villains). But, even if I will go with Transform for this, seeing that worked example of how to do it as a VPP was more than helpful, unclevlad, so thank you for taking the time to do that. If I understand right, my mistake was thinking that you could somehow add UOO to the VPP as a whole, where what you would actually have to do is add UOO to each power created by the VPP before you hand it out? That explains why I could only find guidance on the latter in the books, at least. That bit about adding Requires a Skill Roll with the same skill used to change the VPP seems a bit sneaky as you say, but it gives you one more tool to finetune the powers.

Sorry for the unclear question, but you answered it much more comprehensively than I was expecting, so thank you very much! I know there's been a lot of material for the game over the years, and that broadly speaking most of it is compatible with any edition (right?), so I'm interested in what might be useful from older editions for a 6E game. I've picked up Fantasy, Star and Western HERO for 6E, but if the older genre books are still applicable like you say then I'd definitely be interested in branching out. But, to answer my question of older material not represented in 6E, you've given me a lot to go off, so thank you very much. 😀

Late to the party, but this was a really interesting discussion that opened my eyes to some new ideas. Thank you for that, everyone. indy523, were there any other key ideas you settled on for the final version of your houserules that weren't mentioned in the thread, because what you posted really got my cogs turning. Could these rules for spirits be generalised to creating templates lacking different characteristics? That sounds worth looking into, but are there any major differences (besides flavour) between the Horror HERO and Almanac versions? If not, which book would you recommend for general use when converted to 6E? And are there any other novel features like that that were never updated through the editions?

I'm afraid I'm back with some more muddled questions, so a huge thank you in advance to anybody who can help me out! I've got an idea kicking around my head for a villainous organisation patterned on a spider, with the leader being the Head who can grant powers to each of the eight Legs that serve underneath them. While it would be possible to handwave this, I've been having some fun cooking up ways to build the Head's power, and what I've settled on at the moment is a form of VPP with Usable Simultaneously (up to 8 Recipients, +1) as an advantage on the Control Cost, but there are a few problem areas I'm not sure about. Firstly, I can't find anything in the rules covering this situation, so I'm not sure how the Pool is divided up. If the Head buys a Pool of 80 points, would each Leg be able to access 10 or 80 points worth of the VPP? My gut tells me the first is more balanced (that the Pool is divided among Recipients), but I can't find a rule that actually spells that out. Also, I'm not sure how to judge the value of a limitation I feel is quite important for the concept. The VPP is necessary to give each Leg a different power, but I want each character's power to remain fixed once they've obtained it. So if Character A receives Blast 2d6 the first time the Head grants him a power, that's the only power he can ever receive from the VPP. It's a little counterintuitive, but what would the value of VPP Can't Change be as a limitation? That's what I've got so far. It's an odd power, I know, and one I should probably hold off on until I have some more experience with the system. But I figure jumping in at the metaphorical deep end will be a good learning stimulus if anything, so I hope you don't mind me plowing on regardless.

Book of the Empress sounds like a good choice to look into, as well as these other books. Is Champions Complete basically the same as the core rules + Champions, but presented more concisely? So, say if I got Complete, would it be worth getting Champions as well or not really? Oh, and I hope I've fixed this, but got a bit confused with the reactions, and thought the red arrow pointing down was somehow going to give me more choices to pick from. So, sorry for the (temporary) downvote, steriaca! 😅

This is all a bit above my paygrade, but would there be a better book to look into learning the game from than the core rules for 6e? I went for that since, from what I gathered, it seemed the most recent and comprehensive, and I can follow along well enough reading it for the most part. Would anybody suggest a different edition to start with, or is it more a matter of familiarity with whatever you learnt the game on? I hope it's not an imposition to ask these sorts of questions: coming into a game with as much history as this one leaves me a bit boggled, but in a good way. I feel like there's so much to learn, and I want to try and take it all in as fast as I can, even if that might not be the most sensible approach!

Thank you again for the elaboration. I think I was getting caught up in treating the special effects as the power ('This power involves going to another dimension, so it should use EDM'), when just working out what I want the dimension to do for the game, and then building the power for the character around that is much more workable. It's probably obvious to people who've played this game for a while, but I really hadn't thought about it like that, so thanks again for breaking it down for me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised given how large the rulebooks are, but there's a lot of depth to this game, so I'm glad there's such a knowledgable community here to help out. 😀

Thank you for the follow-up suggestions and endorsements, everyone! How compatible are the 4th and 5th editions with 6th, which is what I'm using? Are there any major rules changes, or can I slot ideas from previous books into a 6th edition game? Also, how feasible would it be to treat someone's personal dimension as a kind of base with a Change Environment power, or something else if appropriate, to simulate the conditions of that dimension? That seems like a fairly efficient way to put a price tag on different ideas to me, and I can't find any rules explicitly naysaying it, so I think this might be a useful way to get a starting point for what should and shouldn't be workable.