Nekkidcarpenter

Re: Go home, Superman! Or of course, the big bad villain and the uberhero are actually the same guy......... For added plot points, he's schizophrenic and doesn't know it. His good ID is actually good:thumbup: and his bad ID is actually bad. His good ID is grateful to the players for stopping his bad ID and begins a treatment program. Everyone agrees that it wouldn't do anyone any good to expose him since he's honestly unaware of his other persona, and maybe he even has to be talked out of turning himself in. Better if you have a mentalist who can verify the truth after he recovers from his 'episode'. Or if your players are vulnerable to suggestion.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills It sounds like your 'roleplaying' opportunities are whatever the GM chooses to lead you around the nose by. Personally, I MAKE the skills that I buy useful. My character engages in actions other than combat and is actually capable in those situations. And with a good gm, when characters make interesting characters and attempt to use the skills they've purchased, the plot hooks they face are often tied in with the skills they bought. Watch a few episodes of any crime drama and you'll see someone with a tie in to their 'useless' skills. And now speaking as a GM, it's a hell of a lot more interesting and fun to make up scenarios for characters with a wide range of interests than ones whose skills are Stealth and Acrobatics. 'Let's see, what kind of adventure would appeal to these specific characters? Oh, I see every pc in the group has Breakfall. Well, that'll be a fun one to design. A Breakfall scenario.'

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills Hey, I'm an American. We make fun of Canadians. I'm not going to say it's right, it's just what we do.

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills Well, I've finally found some game related things I definitely disagree with Hugh on. The truth is most people suck at their job. As someone who has devoted considerable time and thought into becoming a good carpenter, I can tell you that I am in a small minority, and that holds true with every job in the construction field. Since Skill modifiers apply to familiarity's as pointed out earlier, that means that most of the time people are rolling a 10- to 12-. Fifty to 75 % (rough approx) of doing a job correctly? That's just about right. Now it may well be that in Hugh's field all of the practitioners are skilled, motivated people, and that is also the case for all the people who work at his local grocery store, hardware store, electronics store, beauty salons, etc. but I doubt very much its true on this side of the Never Never land border.

Re: The Perfect Power Build Getting back to the point of the thread................. Actually, I didn't intend it to be a discussion about this power but to encourage others to post power builds they really liked. Anyway, the first power, the Defensive Throw based one. Yes, you have to roll a successful Block each time you're attacked to Throw the attacker. It also get more difficult the more times you're attacked (cumulative -2) which is why IMO this power isn't broken. It was in fact used on a 4 Speed Martial artist when there were multiple 6+ Speed characters attacking her, and they eventually overwhelmed her ability due to that fact. Also note that as a Throw it does Str damage. The ability becomes dramatically more expensive if you buy either Str or Damage Classes (see UMA). The second ability, the Tport to the ground one, doesn't suffer from the same limitations. Note that it is Selective Target, and doesn't do any damage, but it also doesn't matter how many times you try it. As a Damage shield it would only work on people who succeeded in hitting you, but as an AoE Continuous Triggered attack you get to throw people down pretty much at your whim. Still interested in seeing other people's cool Power builds.

Wasn't paying attention.............

Re: "Guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism..." You want to be in a deathtrap? Jeez, just buy a hybrid and drive 40 on the freeway.

Re: Permanent Death by Transfer I am kind of leery of the 'others only -1/2' limitation. I doubt there will be enough times when you're at -Body but you really need a few points of Strength to justify giving this -1/2.

Re: Forth wall perception? Personally I wouldn't bother to give the guy anything. In a typical table top game Everybody breaks the walls sometimes. It's amusing and fun. But as a repeatable schtick it would probably get old fast and the character would almost certainly overdo it. Plus, what's the point? Does the character want to get Disad points for it, does he want to pay points for special abilities, or does he just like the idea of being disruptive? I really don't have any idea what other effects could happen.

Re: The Bat Volvo Some of you guys seem to be missing the point. It's the car. Chicks dig the car.

Re: Bricks Get Hosed, Or Not And you didn't even take into account what is basically a 'free' limitation that people rarely take on their armor; Visible. In Seans example of a rocky shield around yourself, it's a perfectly acceptable way to shave points. Or the cheesier option for point savings on Armor; Always on. I usually disallow this, as I suspect most gm's do, even though it's within the rules. If the armor is bought with Visible then I may allow a 1/4 liimitation for Always on depending on the sfx.

Re: Move-Through Broken? I'm going to read all of Sean's posts cause they always give me ideas. What if Noncombat movement ceased to be a straight doubling of combat movement? What about revising it similar to the way Haymaker was revised, by simply adding AP of effect rather than doubling it? Perhaps 2" of movement for every 5" of base movement at a penalty of 1/2 OCV and -2 DCV? This helps with the ridiculous example I posted earlier where a character moved 1" beyond his combat move and took a -13 OCV penalty, and also reduces the damage of the noncombat move, which should make it less attractive as an option. Characters could still buy doublings and those would have the standard effect and standard penalties. Another point I wanted to bring up about an earlier example was about the improvised AoE attack I described earlier. Suppose instead that the character holding the bus or car had snuck 'Accurate' into the movement in a multipower slot? Suppose his Megascale movement was bought with Accurate?

Re: Bricks Get Hosed, Or Not Aha! You're a rational anarchist! To quote Heinlein about laws 'If I find it tolerable, I follow it. If I find it intolerable I break it. I am free, no matter what laws surround me.' Cool when political philosophy turns out to be the underlying theme of 'Bricks get hosed'

Re: The Perfect Power Build That was kind of the problem I had with using it. I thought about making a size or weight cap to it, but it goes against the grain as one of the basic tenets of that type of martial arts style is that its using opponents own size and weight against them. I thought about kb res or clinging being useful also, but I couldn't really decide what was reasonable and still kept the flavor of the power and made it useful. Couldn't come up with what I felt was a balanced build so I went with the advantaged martial arts instead.

Re: How do you keep your dark knights from going "squish"? One of the problems with the 'squishy' effect is that players rarely notice the 'squishy' bad guys. As a gm we sometimes go to a lot of trouble to make semi - equivalent enemies, and if a pc one shots them they do so with the sublime confidence that they succeeded because they're the good guys. Another problem I find is damage output. One guy is playing a rock elemental and another is playing a blind martial artist, but the martial artist isn't willing to concede that the rock guy can hurt things that he simply can't. So you end up with a much narrower range of damage than sfx would seem to indicate. Your brick hits for 12 d6 and the martial artist does 9d6. This isn't representative of how much harder the Thing can hit than Daredevil. And then since the range isn't very broad, the martial artist goes around attacking and damaging things that by sfx he shouldn't be able to hurt. And that becomes kind of standard and so the villains tend to represent that also. And martial artists, who used to only have to take damage from other martial artists, suddenly have to survive attacks that do nearly as much damage as the brick's. So how do I keep the dark knights from getting squished? I don't. PC or NPC, if they fail to get out of the way of a big attack they go splat. But I also make sure that for every time it happens to a PC they get at least a couple chances to do it to an NPC.

Re: Move-Through Broken? There are obviously some problems with that as well, both from realistic and game related standpoints. Batman has just spotted the Joker running toward the BIG RED BUTTON. Having just escaped from a deathtrap his utility belt is gone and he's low on End and Stun. He starts running after the fiend, pushing his running (from 14"-19") and ends the phase at 1 Stun and 0 End. His next phase the diabolical fiend is 15" away, 1" past his full move. If he pushes his running again he'll be knocked out before he gets to attack and Joker will reach the BRB. So the Batman goes to noncombat speed. He attempts his move through. 'Okay, I'm moving at 15" so that's -3 OCV and my normal OCV with HTH is 13 so that's....' 'Wait a second! Page 363 states that your base OCV at noncombat speed is ALWAYS 0.' 'Ok, so my base is 0 but I have 5 levels and...' 'Nope. It's just 0. Oh, except for the -3 from velocity. Roll at -3 vs. DCV 10.' 'Soooooo, if I was moving at 14" I'd take the -3 and be OCV 10. If I just Pushed my running to 15" I'd take -3 and be OCV 10. But because I had to use Noncombat movement my OCV is -3'

Re: Move-Through Broken? And we could have different types of bullets for different environments. Little scuba masks and fins, radiation suits, big knobby tires, et al.

Every Hero gamer knows what it's like to come up with an idea for a cool power and have no idea how to build it, or worse sometimes, have a bunch of different ideas but no ability to decide which is the best one. We read examples, we talk to other people, we build it a bunch of different ways, and then suddenly there it is: the perfect build. Here's one I'm pretty happy with. It's a power for an Aikido master who dwarf's O-Sensei with her ability to effortlessly throw any number of people to the ground who attack her. 27 Aikido Throw (40 AP) Custom Power: As if Defensive Throw was bought with the Advantage 'Trigger: no time to activate, resets automatically, 2 or more conditions apply simultaneously (whenever she's attacked in HTH). Limited Power: Based on Combat Luck Modifiers (-1/2). +1 OCV, +1 DCV Block, Target Falls. An earlier version that I found a little bit munchkinnish-- 1" Tport, must go through intervening space, usable as attack only, Trigger, Position Shift (From vertical to horizontal only), Aoe radius (surrounding Hexes only)selective target, 0 end, Invisible, Continuous. If you got within 4 meters of this power and you seemed threatening, you automatically got knocked down. Hopefully other people have some 'perfect builds' they'd like to share.

Re: Hero name One of the most brilliant and insightful hero names I ever saw was in the pages of Doom Patrol during Grant Morrison's run. The old school character 'Robotman' was the brain of race car driver Cliff Steele in a robotic body, and Morrison changed his name to more appropriately reflect his identity. The characters 'hero' name became.........Cliff. The kid turns into a freaking DINOSAUR. Is anyone really going to suspect that the dinosaur named Billy is in fact little Billy from down the street? It's the comics after all, a land where glasses-as-disguise regularly fools the best investigative journalists on the planet. Also, try and put yourself in the kids shoes. How would you like scenarios like this happening? 'Swift Razor, what do you make of this?' 'SWIFT RAZOR, What do you make of this?' 'DINOSAUR GUY!' 'Huh? Oh sorry.'

Re: Bricks Get Hosed, Or Not

Re: Champs Universe question I'm entertained by the idea that they are in fact just a case of parallel development and actually have nothing to do with each other. Each came up with their costume independently and eventually saw the other guy in the newspaper or something, or possibly just ran into him with absolutely no prior knowledge. I'm going to put an npc in my gameworld with exactly that same kind of backstory and have him in a costume almost exactly like one of the newer and lesser known pc's. At first he's going to be a little flattered that the pc copied him, after that who knows?

Re: How do you encourage your players to buy more skills I hate it when I recognize that I have nothing of any more use to add to a discussion. It makes me consider the possibility that it's happened before and I failed to recognize it, and tried adding something anyway.

Re: Move-Through Broken? That seems perfectly reasonable.

Re: Move-Through Broken? I'm not going to repeat my comment from elsewhere about your 'knowledge'. Base OCV is your Dex based CV, not counting levels, correct? (trying to imply that the character had 11 lvls when it was in fact only 5)

Re: Move-Through Broken?