Opal

Has anyone mentioned Fuzion or Wildstrike?

There should be a "fall down the rabbit hole" side effect.

The Dissidents ideals seem a little behind the times.  They could update to anti-globalization, anti-"fascist," de-platforming, defund/de-militarize police...

...and some old issues are back on table,  like abortion.

They could take down media/internet infrastructure to silence anything from right-wing rallies or a campus lecture, to advertising campaigns.  

Several of the heroes could catch their attention.

A real Angel? A woman, at that? What's her stance on abortion?  

Thumpers secret ID could be targeted for kidnapping, blackmail, or some more elaborate plot.

Rainbow Warrior and Escudar might be targeted for recruitment.  You could have the Dissidents (or just some of them) come in and help them against a villain with military or corporate ties or who espouses the right ideology to draw their ire.

I'll second or third Transfer, and add that I thought I recalled an advantage (maybe in 3rd?) that  added a STN mod to power attacks (maybe it was transforms?)

Teleport should probably just be teleport on an activation roll with some STN backlash when it fails.

I suppose you could go with all Transforms that heal, but it'd be pretty arbitrary. 

Heroes could make their calling pay legally: bounties, reward money, PI work, high profile security, bodyguarding.

They could liscence themselves out to toymakers, movie studios (featuring Incrediperson as themselves), ghost writers, video games, etc....

10 hours ago, Steve said:

Did the EPA have their own superhumans or agents armed with high-tech weaponry?

Agents, yes, and they had technology like mutant detectors and power suppressers.

And the setting was fairly hero-friendly.

In my old champions campaign, since so many mutants were the result of environmental contamination, the EPA was given jurisdiction over superbeings...

Fluer (d'Moustarde/ de Ypres)

Fluer was named for the poppies that famously sprang up in the fields after WWI, by parents who had both served and been exposed to mustard gas.  She was their only child that made it to term.

In WWII, she served as a nurse, like her mother before her.  

In her 30s she realized she wasn't aging. Afraid she'd be dissected or worse if discovered she faked her death and assumed the fabricated  identity of her own daughter. She figured she'd do that every other decade forever...

But times changed quickly and such tricks became harder and harder, she slid deeper into the criminal underworld trying to keep her secret and was finally recruited by Versailles.

Fluer doesn't age, is virtually immune to poison and disease, and recovers from injuries, even loss of limbs in a matter of hours or days, without scarring.  She can emit almost any organic chemical that is liquid or gas at body temperature at will, but in amounts sufficient to affect only a small radius around her.  But, she can expand the area by hijacking the biology of local plants ahead of time, causing whole fields to suddenly bloom and emmit the chemical of her choice.  Thus, though a mutant, she prefers to pass herself off as a wielder of nature-magic. 

In her cover IDs, Fluer appears to be a homely, gawky young woman of 18 or 20.  Masked and wearing a tight super-suit, though, she pulls off a femme-fetale look.

Though she came to villainy reluctantly, Fluer is a cynical, world-weary old woman (she's over 100) and resigned to her role.

14 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

I liked piercing as a concept but it sucked in practice; the cost was not worth its effect.

I have to agree. Might've been better if hardened defenses didn't stop them. They were essentially limited damage.

But I did like putting normal piercing points on a villain's EB to make it  lethal.

10 hours ago, BNakagawa said:

On the other side of the ledger, I've never seen a power advantage that helps EB do more body damage...

3rd had "piercing points" that could make a normal attack deadlier to low-DEF targets 🤷‍♂️

You could just be totally anachronistic and sanitize it like it was still the early days of political correctness...

Yeoperson

Yeopersun  (to avoid "son," as also masculine, I kid you not)

If you have multiple races in the setting 

Yeobeing 

Or like D&D did with Lizardmen

Yeofolk

Or not-draconian-we-swear

Yeoborn

You could work from Freeman the same ways as above, or to Dune-ish Fremen, which still contains "men", so hey, Fremyn could be fun.

I've read novels were the used Freeholder and shortened it to "Holder" that seemed to flow pretty naturally. 

You could make up a word with no etymology, at all, too.

Wir'rin

Voldhn

Quaeoi

Nye 

When I was playing fast & loose back in 3rd I might have gone AE radius on 6d, increased to 6", and 6d explosion, giving you a 12, 11, 10, 9, 7d explosion... I know I did stuff like 12d eb with explosion on only 8d....

If I build a character for fun, I probably do it in 4th or something resembling it.

If I were to run it'd likely be 4th w/variants, or 5th "Hero Lite"

My opinion of pbp/pbem is colored by the fact I've never seen one get very far.

My impression of KAs was that they worked very well at modeling deadly attacks vs normal targets with no resistant defense, especially at the low end, which got very random.

A bullet wound could be potentially fatal without even stunning you, or KO you but leave you stable.

But it produced inappropriate results against "invulnerable" types in supers.

My solution was to apply the STN mod to BOD inflicted after defenses. Simple,,and made KAs about killing, not KO'ing.

With any D&D adaptation, you gotta check the spells... 

'Obviously' he was using Telekinesis.

Cute that they used Witch Bolt for Sith Lightning... I've seen players make that connection, before...

....except, canonically, Vader can't use it.

5th edition worked pretty well as it was.

So did 4th.

Don't see the need.

I suspect giving up EC for Unified would hurt characters who had any common limitations on their ECs, relative to other frameworks and bricks... points did still matter in 5th...

On 7/1/2022 at 8:58 AM, Christougher said:

Did you ever notice all the prehensile hair types are female? Does nobody want to see long haired men? Call him Handlebar, maybe give him a mulletpower of various tricks...

Well there was The Mustache and Russian Beard in /The Tick/, the 90s animated series, that is.

There's been something of a table-top renaissance going on for, maybe 8 or so years, now, and D&D came back big around 2016, and has been doing extremely well.  (Sadly, it was the execrable D&D 5th edition that was there to cash in on it.)

I like doing FH magic in Schools, with DM-designed package deals to gain access to DM-designed, very thematic, spells.

The review I read of Champions that spurred me to actually buy the game mentioned STN/BOD prominently, pointing out that it was routine for fights to end in KO, but possible for a character to be conscious & dying - quite impossible in the D&D of the day.

Once I saw it, I was taken both with the way phases felt like panels straight from a comic book (or story board), and with the way the SPD chart let some characters be much faster than others without overwhelmingly tilting combat in their favor. 

(and, of course, by the system of Powers & Special Effects... and adv/lim & disad)

That other games don't have such features is just a testament to the dysfunction of the RPG market, where the only game you really compete against is D&D, and you can't be part of the market if you're too different from D&D...😞

I made a point earlier, well, maybe I didn't. 

In combat, what's going on is usually unambiguous, people are attempting to sove a problem through violence.  The stakes could be life & death, acquiring/denying an objective, escape/capture, establishing dominance, or even just sparing. 

In a social a interaction, people are probably talking, maybe dancing or furtively signaling or something, but the purpose of the interaction, the stakes and approaches, aren't nearly so clear or consistent. 

And, while most RPGs give you fairly detailed combat, they often give you only binary checks for social "skills."

But it's not like you can create a compelling vision of a high stakes conversation from some non-actors talking "in character."  

You don't expect players to duke it out in a combat, you model the combat abilities of the character, abstractly, instead.  

But it's very common to say "just RP it!"

In Hero, you can build powers quite precisely to concept. There are both combat and non-combat powers, and some that might be used for either.

Then you get to skills, and they're uncustomizeable and do their thing or not on the basis of one roll.  And there's tons of em.

One thing in notice in RPG discussions is that there's different schools of thought about whether a game "supports" something.  Maybe just different bars.

Does a game support a playstyle or a genre or a tone or character archetype?

For some, it's 'yes" only if the system mechanics are hard-coded to force that style, tightly emulate only that genre, or have a single-choice-point option that neatly encapsulates that archetype.

Or, it could be 'yes' if the system gives you tools & options that you can use in that style, or to create a campaign in that genre, or a character that matches your vision of that archetype.

For others, It's 'yes' if the game doesn't completely block you from playing that archetype or in that style or genre, even if doing so will put you at a stark mechanical disadvantage.

I think if you use the label "social combat," for a system focused more on interaction and less on combat, you've already lost. 😏

But,  if you do think about scenes in genre fiction that you might consider a "social check" or "social contest," chances are pretty good they're character development, exposition,  forseshadowing, or some sort of drama/suspense based on the viewer knowing something one or more of the characters involved doesn't (or vice versa).

Lol, really radical idea:

"Skills" don't exist, instead "Cannot make ______ checks" is a limitation on the stat. Or a disadvantage like "Ignorant" or "low animal cunning," maybe, "Im a doctor, dammit, not a circus accrobat"

No limitation on INT, you can roll full INT for any "INT skill."  No Disadvantage limiting you to a profession,  you can make any sort of check.

"Training in a skill" could be  levels, of course....

Wait? Is he just growing out of the tiger's back??