Comic

"Nicvachinel" is a word for soothsayer, according to Popol Vuh. "Xmucane" is the 'Mistress of Shaping'. There's very scant literature I could find on legitimate priestess names for ancient Mayans, but those two words seem good candidates to me.

I almost never wasted my players time, back in the day, with normal people in anything like the sort of conflict that used combat tracking. A street thug with flat 8-10 core stats and SPD 2 might tickle a little novice hero interest if they had a hostage or seven, a 1d6KA and five-to-one advantage in an ambush, but my campaigns generally had story arcs, and the people I played with had precious little free time to spend in addition to the regular story arc on the normal people in the criminal world. Soon enough, the stars of crime, terror and mystery show up, and they tend to be above thug. We concentrated on that. By and large, superheroes are steel, and normal thugs are tissue paper.

You could buy +5 DCV Linked to your HA, as a 'Dodge/Strike'. Of course, in games with AP caps, that'd reduce your HA by 5 DCs below the campaign limit.

I have a character, Merritt, with three identities: civilian, teen hero (Magneceptor), adult villain (Perul). The 'adult' villain was a result of his first attempted outing as a hero going badly wrong, and the media storm that followed. Being a bright, adaptable guy, Perul rolled with the flow and uses villain status to infiltrate the underworld. Magneceptor is a different costume, size, look, smell and psychic appearance (paid for with Shape Change). It's just one Secret Identity complication, but it supplies different rivalries and hunteds. I'd pay for Deep Cover, if either secret identity were long-established and reliably difficult to break at the time the character started out.

You tell me. Are PC's in your experience generally more, or less, Marty Stu's than the characters you see on screen?

Thor is an Asgardian god, and among the toughest of them. Of course he has rPD, and plenty of it. But even Asgardian gods have bad days. Thor's were around issue #370-400 or thereabouts, when He mightily offended Hela, and incurred Her wrath in the form of the withdrawal of Her Grace. His bones became brittle; He could not heal from injuries; He could not find remedy in sleep or in death. Now, Thor took this punishment like the Tough Guy that He is for a while, but eventually had to build armor so He could continue to move around as opposed to slither and slosh like so much crunchy gelatin. Over the course of several more fights, his armor got bigger, until the Frost Giants took note that Thor was wearing armor, which to them meant Thor was weak. And they piled on until Thor was nothing but an undying smear leaking into the ground. The reference was meant to allude to that parable, that sometimes it's the guy who isn't obviously armored who is more impressive. Something similar works with Batman. Bulletproof vest or no. Bulletproof cape or no. Bulletproof fabric or no. Somehow, Batman always manages to avoid or ignore bullets long enough to get the job done, and then he heals in remarkably little time to come back more dangerous than ever. It's not the mechanisms, it's the mysteries, that make Batman scary. There's something less impressive about a guy who needs armor, who uses it like a crutch. We see Tony Stark much of the time out of armor in the movies, and he's more in charge, more impressive, for that vulnerability.

In any case, this appears to be where a GM and player need to work out what the power is between themselves. Could it be STR, only to catch, triggered by person falling into target hex? Sure, why not? Entangle? That's another way to catch a person, and when a person is caught by a hero the hero has the option of doing no damage.. no? Swinging, Usable By Other, Only to Land? Leaping, UBO, Only to Land? Change environment? Sure, why not? A lot of options. For what it's worth, I wouldn't even charge for this power, but call it a power stunt if the character had the Power Skill, and let the archer use a charge of the most appropriate arrow type to get the effect.

Do I think the standard Champions character would wipe the floor with the standard Avenger? Clearly yes. Avengers aren't Mary Sues. They're built by storytellers telling stories, not players out to take every advantage in combat. As such, Avengers are far better builds for stories, given that the storyteller has to get them all through the story alive -- except when the dramatic death is the point of the story (because let's face it, Quicksilver's player would be whinging and crying foul and rules lawyering all up and down if that happened in game). Is this going to lead me to design my characters for good storytelling over game survivability? Heck no. But it ought.

We used to do that with Force Wall, as running into a Force Wall could do no damage.

But what's daring about a Daredevil who rigs the game by wearing armor? What's wondrous about a Wonder Woman who just jiggles away the bullets while reading tweets? A Batman who _could_ bleed and so far as the bad guys will ever know never has is far scarier than one who lumbers around in unobtanium-thread bullet-impregnable spanx. It's when Hel-cursed Thor put on armor that the Frost Giants detected weakness and pressed their advantage against him. Combat Luck is a far more fitting defense for these characters. In some campaign settings, I'd distinguish PCs from NPCs by giving PCs a few mandatory points of Combat Luck that NPCs just don't get, to heighten the threat to DNPCs and the peril to ordinary citizens. A world with a lot more low-level KA's is a world with a lot more Stun Lottery and reason to use stealth, defensive tactics and cover.

I'll be agnostic about Cap's STR for now. It's not very much of an issue for me, though I tend to place Captain America in the 25-45 STR range from the way he's been presented -- and that's an enormously broad range -- let's remember that the upper end of that gives him the strength to throw his shield into freaking orbit using the Ultimate Brick extended charts.. so.. no, just no. Black Widow's SPD? That's easy. She's in multiple scenes in the same film where the pacing clearly shows her at least 50% faster in deliberate, individually targeted actions (whether single or multiple targets per se) than Iron Man. Not Tony, but the suit. Sure, it's possible to fudge and suggest her SPD is just a martial artist version of Iron Man's, and MA's are somehow more tactical than Energy Projectors.. but I just don't buy that, and there's zero need for it if Tony is SPD 3 (or at a stretch, 4). How do we know Quicksilver's SPD is really that much higher? Seriously? In a fight with the Avengers in close quarters at least a half move apart from each other, he still gets in attack actions as often as each of them that we see. Sure, some of his attacks might be massive AoE Selective, but this is SPDster Speedster. As for Happy Hogan being a SPD 3 agent? I'd argue SPD 1 plucky comedy relief.

I agree it's translation folly to try to make cinema exactly match game mechanics, for a game based on the cells on a comic book page. That said, the same comic book page cell format is used in story boards used to plot action in movies, so this is arguably a doable feat most of the time. I'm surprised more comic-based movies don't use Ryan Reynolds Deadpool-style 4th wall breaking narrative over the action to get in the soliloquies and banter that just don't work in fast-paced fisticuffs. Or puts his hands up, yells, "Stop! Wait! I know what you're thinking.." to get in that line about the guy in the brown pants having the right idea. In a comic book, Deadpool wouldn't need the "Stop! Wait!" bit. He'd just quip over all the gunfire and explosions and it would have the effect of conveying the character as distinct from all the other guys shooting weapons. So yes, we have to count dialogue as out-of-action time, almost all the time. Still, I abhor SPD bloat. SPD is a relative stat, since it's actions-relative-to-the-other-guys. Unlike STR, we can't get a good measure of how SPDy a character is by what they are shown to lift or throw (which is often inconsistent enough in stories to be maddening anyway). What we can do is look for cues from pacing. We are lucky in Iron Man's case as we have so many referents to compare him to. Not just Whiplash, but also Rhodey, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Happy Hogan. For Iron Man to have 6 SPD means we have to scale all of these referents to him. Black Widow -- a highly trained normal -- would need SPD 9 or 10. Happy Hogan, not the sharpest tool in the shed, SPD 4-5. Every Extremis subject, SPD 6 too, including Pepper Potts. Captain America is faster than Black Widow by a smidge. Now you can sell me on a lot of things about Captain America. But SPD 10-11? That is SPD bloat. And we don't begin to have a hope of putting Quicksilver into the standard 12 SPD framework. So I'm comfortable with a SPD 3-4 Iron Man, tending to 3, and a SPD 5-6 Black Widow, a SPD 6-7 Captain America, a SPD 12 Quicksilver, Happy Hogan at SPD 2. That framing of the whole continuum of character relative SPD works in game sense, and is an adequate interpretation of what we see on the screen. It's remarkably consistent, too, which makes sense given the same story board technique as underlies Champions is at the root of screen action, and a lot of the guys who make movies see their characters much the way we do, too.

.. I don't recall the veil being all that prominent.

Yes. Hit Girl is very much the full combat package, capable of switching between a sharp focus on a single target at a time until it's down, and covering the field without focus on a single target, seamlessly. However, review her combat sequences closely, and you'll see it is dominated by linearity -- inhumanly fast, but still one target is cycled down through the attack sequence before the next observed target is oriented on, decided to acquire, and acted on in a clear OODA loop -- over combination maneuvers that rely on success in the previous part of the action to mount the next phase. This is not an accident, but appears to come out of the martial philosophy of her choreographer, similar to Jason Bourne's combat techniques. Hit Girl fights like a Navy pilot, or a practitioner of those chi-focus combat styles over the more balletic dance styles you see in Kingsman or Avengers.

Two cinematic characters with higher SPD that couldn't be explained by multi-target maneuvers? Cleric Preston (Christian Bale) from Equilibrium. SPD 5. (Though he certainly uses multi-target maneuvers too.) Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz). SPD 6. (She tends to take on a single target at a time, but in very rapid sequence.) I don't think I've seen any character depicted with higher SPD on film other than in Star Trek. More speed? Sure.