Opal

Re: OKay here's a toughie... If you can't affect people or objects at all, you can build a time stop as teleport (since, really, all you can do by stopping time is move yourself somehwere else 'instantly' from the PoV of those 'stoppped.'). If you can move, but not harm, people or objects, you could buy it as UAO teleport. This is if you litterally stop time, not just stop time locally for a small area like the 9th L D&D spell - that works better with EDM. And, yes, the 'Speed Zone' does seem to work pretty well for this sort of thing. It's a lot of hand-waving, IMHO, but it works.

Re: how do you deal with guns and superheroes in your campaign

Re: Breadth instead of depth

Re: Sell me on HERO 5th ed. I wouldn't mind if people wanted to compare Hero as it existed in the BBB to any other system today. Or even, really, to 3rd, though it was decidedly scattered about the various games that existed at the time. For that matter the change from 3rd to 4th didn't make they Hero /System/ more GURPS-like - though the marketing of Hero from that point on has certainly been in the 'universal' mode championed (npi) by SJG with GURPS as the poster child - GURPS did use different mechanics for different genres, and from 3rd to 4th, Hero largely abandoned that practice.

Re: (really) Super Tuesday "Sorry, I wasn't born in the US, or on Earth... or any of the myriad dimensions in which an alternate earth exists."

Re: Speculation on Hero Releases in 2099 Tricentenial Hero: Heroic adventure set in an Alternate History in which the United States of America survived to the year 2076, and beyond. Rapture Hero: "we really mean it this time." Champions: the /New/, New Melinium.

Re: Discussion on costs of Characteristics You could make up half the difference by selling back STN, which would put the Brick more in line with his comrades in that regard. For a 60 STR brick, that would leave 25 points to make up. That could be 5 HTH CSLs or 8 or so skills.

Re: Discussion on costs of Characteristics

Re: B-movie inspiration See if you can find 'Fugitive from the Empire.' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082027/ If you liked Hawk the Slayer, you should like it, too.

Re: how do you deal with guns and superheroes in your campaign The relative power of PCs and general NPCs (as opposed to actual antagonists) has a lot to do with campaign style. If you want the campaign to really focus on the PCs and thier exploits against the 'bad guys,' with less emphasis on politicking and third parties, then the NPCs back-filling the world can be quite weak. It might be even more critical to humanize them, of course, since you want the players to care about them, but most players don't slip into a sufficiently sociopathic outlook to rate the humanity of NPCs only on thier ability to beat up the PCs. If you want more the sense that the PCs are cogs in a much larger, more dangerous world, then you need a /lot/ of people, even background characters of no real importance to the plot, to be as tough as them. It keeps them 'in thier place.' I'd assert that the superhero genre tends more towards the former than the latter, with the PCs being exceptional in many sense of the word, including power and responsibility. On a related point, in a superhero setting, a person without powers can certainly be dangerous to supers, on par with them, in fact - but he's not a 'normal' in the Champions! terminology sense anymore, but a super with non-powered F/X, be it super-human training or exceptional equipment.

Re: how do you deal with guns and superheroes in your campaign

Re: Dune HERO I actually ran a Dune setting (Deep Umbral realm) in Mage the Ascension, the shields were gauntlet-constructs and the 'slow' strike trick was a touch spirit effect. The slow strike thing is a bit odd. I'd take it as being a matter of skill. You need to devote so many levels to making the right kind of attack to penetrate the shield. Thus, you don't have as many levels to devote to OCV (or whatever). The shield would presumably get a limitation for this. The laser-shield interaction was a device to shift things to melee combat. You could enforce a bit of sanity on everyone and just say that lasers "don't work against shields" (a limitation on the lasers). The fact that they don't work against shields on a MAD basis notwithstanding. As a general rule, I like no-range/self-only Force Walls, but, are shield-users able to interact with the environment (open doors and the like, for instance)? If so, FW doesn't work so well. A Force Field or Force Wall can still be overwhelmed by damage, of course, and again, I can't recall exactly how shields reacted to overwhelming force.

Re: how do you deal with guns and superheroes in your campaign I missed that, where Haymaker became useable with ranged attacks, I mean....

Re: Sell me on HERO 5th ed. Yeah, ever since the only guy in my group who liked GURPS moved to Oklahoma, I haven't much kept up on it. I didn't even know there was a 4th edition of it. I had no idea it had made substancial changes to make it even more Hero-like. Afterall, Hero changed very little from 4th to 5th.

Re: Missile Deflection You'd want a level of missle defection that was just 'deflect anything,' then tack on the limitation, only vs magic. The difference between that and an advantage to deflect 'any magic' is that the Apts don't vary with the prevelence of magic in the campaign.

Re: Missile Deflection I like to think of missle deflection as an adder that lets you block ranged attacks. Going by defenses, first, then allowing a limitation for vs various F/X would work fine, I think. Going by how things are targetted would also make sense. (And give you fewer categories: DCV, hex, EGO, that's about it, right?) Thing is the relative frequency of F/X will vary with the campiagn, so you want the value-flexibility of the limitted power limitation.

Re: How to build this nice knock-out spell I was thinking of you when I said it.

Re: how do you deal with guns and superheroes in your campaign I make normals really normal - 10 BOD is the most normals tend to have, many have less - and guns relatively tame, even the military ones (2d KA is about the most normals will ever pack). I also run KAs differently, aplying the STN multiplier only to the BOD that gets trough resistant defenses. Thus, bullet proof heros/villains really are bullet /proof/. Another level of it though is response time. In theory, the military /could/ use anti-tank weapons against super villains. But, they'd have to mobilize, and by the time they've gotten aproval to do that, they villain has gotten away and his back in his secret ID. Thus, superheros are needed because 1) they have unusual powers that can take down villains who are immune to conventional weapons 2) they can respond very quickly (high SPD, good movement powers, very small groups) and 3) they aren't bound by law enforcement and military procedures. Currently, in my campaign world, supers are also performing an important 'morale function,' since there is a war on.

Re: Star Wars arms and armor

Re: How to build this nice knock-out spell I only saw the movie, but isn't part of the deal with the Others that they want to keep themselves a secret from the normals? This spell sounds like a power that renders the 'secret' disadvantage they all share much less inconvenient. Anyway, if normals and getting around them are important to the plot, and the 'secret' disad is supposed to be meaningful, yes, this should be bought as a real power that actually knocks people out. If normals are supposed to be strictly window dressing, then the spell is, too. If not everyone can do it, then it should be paid for, but it shouldn't cost a lot, like a Change Environment. It could even be a perk: "Can cast Sleep" with all mortals having a disad (for 0 points) that they fall asleep when the spell is cast.

Re: Another one: beam weapon I'm not sure it wouldn't work that way by F/X. Hero doesn't go into the physics of attacks that discharge all thier energy against the first thing they hit vs those that 'blow through.' I think, it doesn't generally worry about the latter kind. When the AE line hits something smaller than it's crossection, it'd continue on unabatted, anyway. When it hits something larger, it'd probably be OK, as a matter of F/X to say that it only bores a hole defined by it's AE trough the target, but continues on it's way, rather than blowing up the whole thing and stopping.

Re: Discussion on costs of Characteristics The Age limitation would obviously come in on that one, and would (IIRC) make it more efficient to buy up a couple of figureds to max than to buy up CON at double. Rather than buying up figureds (which Age also imposes a maximum upon), he could have an END battery and some strong defensive powers, or if he needs to boost a stat, Aid.

Re: Regeneration Some of the add ons, like Does not Bleed, were pulled straight out of obscure corners of the rules (the 4E Automaton rules, I think it was). I could see pricing them differently based on the optional rules in effect and the nature of the campaign. Does not Bleed for 5pts in a supers game would be fine. In a low-DEF game with optional bleeding rules, 15 would be well worth it. I'm a big fan of the 5 points doubles, thing, the time chart (at least, the one I remember) does more than double though so 10 might not be out of the question - but that makes per-turn regeneration a 70 pt power, beyond the old standby 60 pt limit, and, let's face it, with BOD damage generally pretty easy to defend against, it's not that powerful an ability. Again, it's something you might want to re-price in a campaign dependent sense. In a game where killing is the prefered mode of winning battles, regeneration, especially very fast regen, is more a powerful ability.

Re: Missile and homing missile Missles as vehicles are really overkill - as involved to build as a character, for very little payoff. A simple way to model a homing missile is with No Range Modifier. You can add limitations (as with the 'Anvil' in the post above) to make it feel more like a missle chasing a target. I'm not sure in 5th ed has some new advantage for such things. You could use a continuous, uncontrolled, AE: selective-target, attack. The condition for ending the uncontrolled aspect would be it finally hitting something or shooting down the missle, I guess. But that would be a very expensive power for very little real return.