Haerandir

Re: Are the 5th edition heroes to weak? Honestly, no, they're not. I never said I agreed with every editorial decision made by DoJ. Though, frankly, I'd say that in the course of a typical session most PC's will encounter roughly 10 times more ordinary people than they will NPC heroes. So you could make the case that they are more useful to more players, if you want.

Re: Are the 5th edition heroes to weak? ... And the rest of us either don't care or can see the logic in not wasting publishing resources on character writeups that will be, at best, mildly useful to a small fraction of the customer base a couple of times.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Ex-Storn-dinary!

Re: Takofanes help

Re: Difference Between rPD/rED and PD/ED

Re: Law & Order: Spandex Vigilante Unit Ditto on the rep, but am I the only one who saw the title of this post and thought, "Well, at least it'd be an improvement over the other L&O spinoffs..."?

Re: Wwycd: They Blew It!! Renaissance Man: "Hah! This reminds me of the old days, when they used to burn witches... There was this woman in Thuringia... or was it Bavaria? Anyway, the villagers thought she was a witch, you see, so I had to help her out. She was VERY grateful... Oh, right, the government. I guess I'll just fake my own death again and start over with a new identity. Won't be the first time." Asbestos: "Oh, man, I guess I gotta take the money and go. I mean, it's the law. I'm just a guy who's immune to fire, I can't fight the government. I better call Mom and find out if we have any relatives in Canada or someplace where I can crash. Hope I can find a job there..." Saber: "Hmm... This'll probably blow over soon, and I've kinda been neglecting my off-world responsibilities. Time for a quick tour of the sector. Here's hoping things will be more or less back to normal in a year or two." Empyrean: "Hah! I've spent years on the run, hiding from the Warlord. I'm used to it. I'll never leave!" Phosphor: Duplicate Empyrean comments, substituting 'Viper' for 'Warlord'. Wind Dragon: Duplicate Empyrean comments, substituting 'Yakuza' for 'Warlord'. Wow, that's a lot of characters who spend most of their time on the run...

Re: Human Sacrifice powered END Reserve question

Re: Human Sacrifice powered END Reserve question See, this is exactly why I always used to model human sacrifice with Transfer.

Re: Are Jacks of all Trade Effective PCs? Having played a JoAT in a recent campaign, I will second (or by now third, possibly fourth) the general attitude of cautious optimism. Like most character types, the well-rounded utility hero has both an upside and a downside. The upside is, naturally, versatility. It's always a bad feeling when the party realizes they don't have the requisite powers or skills to resolve a certain challenge, and not every GM is able or willing to tailor scenarios solely to the party's abilities. The three major pitfalls I noticed while I was playing Renaissance Man include: That armor's too strong for blasters!: As has been pointed out, a 9d6 EB is of questionable value in a campaign where villains are designed to be able to handle 60 to 75 AP attacks routinely. Naturally, you can get around this by specializing in fighting agents, sneaking around and investigating things, using creative combat maneuvers, etc. But you have to know the rules, know the genre and be prepared to accept your role when Dr. Destroyer turns up. It helps if your GM is flexible enough to create opponents tailored for the different members of the team, but sometimes that just means that your cool character concept is creating more work for them. One possible workaround for this issue is to have attacks at (or close to) the campaign standard, but to also have reasons why you won't or can't always use them. Step aside, Amazing Man! I have the perfect power for just such an occasion!: When you have an ability that you don't get to use very often, it's very tempting to use it whenever the opportunity arises. Sometimes, this leads to the utility character butting in on someone else's spotlight time. This is particularly dangerous if you've built your character very efficiently using Multipowers or VPPs to get a wide variety of abilities without sacrificing much overall power. Definitely make a point of giving the other players an opportunity to propose their solutions to the problem before you jump in. Let Mikey do it, he does everything...: I ran into this one from time to time. We'd run into a strange situation that wasn't clearly anyone else's specialty, and everyone would turn to me. After a while, we got to the point where the GM and the other players would just use me as an excuse not to have to deal with 'boring' stuff. "Bah! We could sit here and puzzle this out, but there's bound to be something on Renaissance Man's character sheet that'll handle it. Roll some dice, Jesse. There, you succeed. Now, who wants to order pizza?" This isn't necessarily a problem, unless it happens frequently. Dang, gotta get back to work.

Re: A D&D paladin in my Marvel Avengers campaign. Well, given that it's a supers campaign, it's hard to rule out any characters on concept alone. The Avengers have had several medieval- and magic-themed characters on their roster, so there's certainly a precedent for it. I suppose it really boils down to whether the GM or the other players object for some reason. Some people might object to the inclusion of continuity from another game/universe, particularly if your game is set in a faithful recreation of the Marvel Universe ("Don't cross the streams!"). However, if that's a problem, you might be able to file off a few serial numbers and still do it. As for the horsey, I'd say it should make the transition with the character. It's part of the paladin schtick. You can have a paladin without a magic horse, of course, but if the character ever had one, it's not unreasonable to assume the horse came across along with her, or followed later. It *is* a magic horse, after all. If you have access to the 2nd edition AD&D Complete Paladin's Handbook, there's some good discussion in there about the nature of D&D Paladin Powers, which might be helpful in working out how to make your powers translate usefully into Champs/Marvel terms, especially when it comes to special effects.

Re: Villain Summary Charts/Tables In Books I've used them a couple of times, for campaign planning purposes, and did the same with the chart in Classic Enemies in the last edition. However, I've also wound up compiling Excel spreadsheets of villains, too. Sometimes I've wanted to be able to sort on some piece of information that isn't included in the chart (such as max potential STR), or wanted to include characters from multiple books with homebrewed characters. I'd say that they're a minor convenience, but their absence wouldn't be a deal-breaker for me in buying future supplements.

Re: Favorite Super-Mercenary Like everyone else, I'm fond of Utility, though I'm not sure he really qualifies as a 'super-mercenary'. Sure, he'll fight heroes for money, but he's not really profit-motivated. He'd fight them anyway, any cash that happens along is just gravy. Of the four listed, the only one I've ever actually encountered was Lazer, in the very last 4th ed. campaign I ever participated in. My character in that campaign, a chi-based super speedster named Wind Dragon, not only took him out in one phase, but was forced to expend another phase saving Lazer from plummeting to his death after he went unconscious and lost control of his jet pack. Not an auspicious appearance for him. Still, it WAS memorable...

Re: Is Power Girl/Kara Starr the DCUs Gladiator? Maybe the presence of her counterpart reinforces her self image in some obscure fashion. The subconscious is a funny place.

Re: Cell phones don't work underwater... /Tolkien Geek Mode ON Technically, that's Palantiri, not Palantirs. /Tolkien Geek Mode OFF Why, yes, my online handle IS Elvish, why do you ask?

Re: How Do the Friction Manipulation Entangles Work? An example of a condition that would allow them out of the entangle is for someone outside the radius of the effect to extend a stick, rope or even just a hand to the victim, who grabs on and pulls himself to 'frictive' ground. The stick or whatever, after all, wasn't part of the effect and thus still provides normal friction. As for the pseudo-science... Um... "Woogie-woogie, you're all slippery! I can do that, because I'm Slick!"

Re: What kinds of abilities should my charater have? I had an idea for a precognitive character once, who had a gadget pool of "Items I figured would come in handy". Essentially, whenever she was about to leave the base, she'd grab an assortment of small, concealable gadgets. As the adventure progressed, whenever someone would say something like, "If only we had about 100 meters of fishing line", she'd pull it out of her pocket. Naturally, she couldn't TELL anyone what she was bringing along, since that might alter the course of events that led to it being necessary/useful.

Re: Aberrant Some threads on this board already cover this topic... You might want to check out the following: Characteristic and power conversion guidelines: http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/Champions/001538.html Conversions of specific powers: http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/H...ion/001328.html How to handle Taint: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=627252 HERO writeups for a number of published characters: http://surbrook.devermore.net/adaptionsrpg/rpg.html#AB Note: I cribbed this list from Lord Liaden's Other RPGs converted to HERO System thread: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23298

Re: Hello and question about powers and such On the subject of villain campaigns, you might want to monitor this thread for ideas: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31116

Re: Advice on NPCs Foes Desperately Needed Well, this sounds like quite a conundrum. Your PC's defenses are quite low if they're going to be facing 12d6 EB's. I think you could do several things. One, make sure that the parent's defenses are similarly weak compared to the PCs' attacks. You can make the parents 'tougher' by giving them proportionately higher STUN values. Make sure you describe the effects of any solid hits the kids land, so that they know they're making progress. Two, rather than slinging 12d6 EBs, give the parents attacks that are 'powerful' and 'scary' in general terms, but are ineffective against certain types of targets. Such as their children's defenses. Think NND's that the kids might reasonably have defenses against. This works especially well if you gear each parent up to be a powerhouse against most foes, but relatively helpless against their own child. Alternatively, set them up to be terrifying to their own child, but relative pushovers for one or more of the others. That way, if the players figure out the situation (and you can give them very broad hints, especially if they make appropriate PER and skill rolls), they can pull the classic 'rotate opponents' maneuver and go from getting their heads handed to them to sudden domination. Three, an extension of #2: Give the parent's huge weaknesses for your players to exploit. Maybe the magic-using parents require burning incense for some of their spells, and the air-powered character can blow the smoke away, disrupting their attacks. That sort of thing. Again PER and KS rolls will give you an excuse to feed this info to your players, especially if they have some appropriate skills that they haven't gotten much use out of before. Four, give the Morlocks the ability to support the PC's. Have one of them manifest the ability to project a Force Field that's Usable by Others, to beef up the PCs' defenses, particularly ED, for instance. Hint to Rigel's player that she could do the same if she doesn't want to put the smack down on the parents. Also consider Aids to STR and/or Dex, Healing, that sort of thing. It sounds as though the parents are fairly subtle supervillains, so there's no real need to make them the kind of kick-butt combat monsters you'd see fighting 350+ adult superheroes. You can make them much more specialized and vulnerable than the usual run of super-thugs and master villains without disrupting suspension of disbelief. Other than that, don't be afraid to fudge dice rolls to enhance the flow of your story...

Re: Superpowers that haven't been thought out... Well, at least he's immune to his own powers. But probably not so safe from the bad luck incurred by all those broken bathroom mirrors...

Re: What have you done with the Asesinos? The only time any of Los Asesinos have appeared in any campaign I've been in, it was El Muerto Obscuro, who was played as a slightly loony "LessPow" Hunted for a 500-point character. He wanted to be taken seriously as a supervillain, and set out to destroy a big-name superhero... Unfortunately, he chose The Man of Tin as his arch-nemesis. This was a poor choice on two fronts. A) As noted above, the Man of Tin was significantly more powerful than EMO. The Man of Tin's name was well-deserved... He was all offense, very little defense (unless you were attacking him with microwave lasers). So, assuming that EMO ever managed to get close enough to the Man of Tin to take him out, the general response would have been, "Well, sure. Anyone can sneak up on a man in a tin suit and gank him. Let us know when you defeat Thrag the Invincible!"

Re: Slade, time management, and you.... OK, I've gotten home and played with the numbers in Hero Designer, and my advice is to just ignore what I said about Duplication earlier. It's MUCH too cheap for the effect it generates.

Re: Slade, time management, and you.... I've toyed with this effect in the past. One thing I came up with that may be more trouble than it's worth: Duplication. With the right Limitations and Advantages, you can set it up as a sort of 'mental' Duplication, that would allow him to have several separate 'minds' working at once in one body. Obviously, he'd need to have the appropriate number of limbs free to complete any given maneuver, so he couldn't, for instance, pick a lock and hold on to someone in the same Segment. I'm at work, so I can't put together a full writeup of the power, but that's the direction I was tending in last time I was working on a Deathstroke clone.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Actually, I've done it, as well. Neil's just quicker on the draw.