Opal

Not to be confused with... The Xterminators, mutants using their powers against destructive termites and other indoor pests "without chemical pesticides." The Ex-Terminators, reformed assassin robots from the future. (OK, technically cyborgs and androids, too.)

The Lady of the May Given her name by the English press, this mysterious fey young lady appears where groups of workers, surveyors, prospectors or the like gather to start a new development project in a park or wilderness. The transgressers are rarely seen again, but the population of local endangered mammals often enjoy a slight population recovery.

Y'know, I suppose they would, if they were frustrating the villains' plans. But the doing impressive damage/poor defenses character (the classic glass cannon) is dealt with just by hitting him, and when the impressively fast (and not much else) guy get's taken down my a martial throw, he probably stays down. So they may not feel the need to look for schneeky ways around them. Overall, though, I feel like over-specialized characters aren't as fun as reasonably balanced ones that just have some personality and some meaningful Disads. Rule of X, from Fuzion, I recall had an issue with incentivizing specialization like that.

I recall D&D 4th Ed did that, too, by default, for all 'powers' (yes, they had a format for class abilities used for spells, prayers, and even martial arts, that was generically called 'Powers'). It was a block with the Name at the top, in a color indicating how often you could use it, followed by an italic description that had no mechanical impact that the player could change at whim, and then all the game stats.... It was one of many things D&Ders seemed to hate about that edition. Funny to see it coming back - I guess as a suggestion to the DM might allow, it's OK.

Healing was, by the time I started playing D&D in 1980, one of the two big things the Cleric did (the other was Turn Undead). You 'needed' a Cleric because modules put extra undead in undead encounters because the cleric would just turn them, anyway.... but, more importantly, because without one you couldn't heal the party up. Not in combat when someone was about to die, and not even 'back in town' where, yeah, 1 hp or so a day, depending on the exact rules in use, vs a whole slate of Cure spells from the Cleric each day. Interestingly the Cleric went from no spells at first level in 0D&D, to starting with spells at first level, and getting *bonus spells* from even modest WIS, so most Clerics in 1e AD&D started able to cast 3 cure light wounds each day. It seems like there was a recognition that the party really needed the Cleric's healing to keep the game moving.

I was not replying to your comment. I have no plans to reply to your posts in the foreseeable future.

It would bounce an average roll on 18d, so, yes. It'd be like having a 50 pd in a more typical ~12d attack campaign.

Damage Reduction can be a good fallback for a character who's mostly supposed to be hard to hit, or one that's supposed to be very tough when the campaign's damage varies wildly high sometimes. (I'm not so sure it's a great solution for system artifacts like 5x STN mods, which do make damage vary wildly high, so DamReduct, only vs stun of KAs when a '4' or '5' multiplier is rolled might be legit and not a house rule, so an option if no one else sees the issue with superman getting KO'd by a hail of machine gun fire.) It does represent a significant investment in defenses, though. I guess for high-power, that's not too bad.

Not that you even need to dodge to be very hard to hit, but active defenses in general can be overwhelmed or worked past. Especially if you need different actions - like dodge vs dive for cover.... ...in the comics, a character can often be untouchable (until the author decides otherwise) but in any RPG, even Hero, someone's going to roll really well, or you're going to find yourself without the right defensive option available, and get pasted. Problem is, when the author does it, it's for a good reason, but the dice have no sense of drama. (Just like there are tweaks to keep the STN lotto from ruining the bullet-bouncing trope of the classic bricks, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to tweak things to keep an untouchable master inviolable when appropriate.)

I mean, you can straight up model D&D (not model what D&D tries to model and fails badly at, but D&D itself, with all it's perverse mechanical foibles) in Hero. The idea that being able to do so in a non-arbitrary way takes anything away from that seems silly to me, but I played & ran D&D for a long time, used lots of variants, made many of my own spells (and there is a method to the madness of D&D spells and 'balancing' them to their level), and so have long, long since seen behind that curtain. If you were to cook up a magic system in Hero, and run a game using it sharing only the final point cost and a description of each spell, you could achieve the same sort of wonder-by-ignorance effect for the players. Because, really, that's all it is, it's not magic feeling really magical, it's just the cheap sense of wonder you get between encountering something for the first time, and eventually understanding it or just getting used to it. In contrast, I feel like a VPPs in Hero, or the magic systems of games like Ars Magica or Mage: the Ascension feel more like they're 'really' magical, precisely because they aren't just a finite set of arbitrary spells made up by some ex-insurance actuary in the Midwest who figured magic-users should be something like wargame artillery.

That reminds me 'high power' and 'large point totals' can be quite different things. A character built with 200 more points might have a much bigger attack, or a high-point power with fewer limitations. A character with 200 exp could have the same point total, but might have a greater variety of powers and skills rather than throw around more dice. Campaign limits or guidelines can have a lot to do with that, too. In a high-power campaign, you might want high active point totals on powers, so higher DC and defense caps, dramatic powers that do a lot. But you may or may not want to have similarly greater stats, like SPD or large numbers of skills or 10 overall skill levels, those guidelines might stay closer to the norm, especially if the idea is, y'know, the alien only just gave you that Power Ring last week....

Nope, the idea is that a KA that doesn't do BOD just bounced off with no effect, and that one that doesn't bounce simply does STN in proportion to the BOD that gets through. Non-resistant defense just isn't relevant to killing damage in the variant. For me, the STN lotto nicely captures some classic bits, like the character who is fatally wounded but not unconscious, who still gets to make a dying declaration or set off the self destruct device or whatever, or the character who's shot and drops, but it turns out the bullet 'creased their skull' or some such and though out of the fight, they recover later. But those bits shouldn't apply when machine-gun bullets are rattling off the ironman or superman type character like raindrops. To put it another way, the point of a Killing Attack is to kill, and if it sometimes rolls a high STNx and KOs someone you were trying to kill, well, that's it not working so well for you, but not that bad for them, really, since KO'd isn't as bad as dead, and it could have killed them. When the target had enough resistant defense that the KA can't kill them, nor even do 1 BOD to them on a max roll, though, the STNx becomes a bug, not a feature. ie if a KA can't even potentially kill a target, it shouldn't do anything to that target. (For 'realistic' armor, like bullet resistant kevlar and the like, I used the 'flawed' limitation, so some body gets through, every time. I've considered much more detailed variations, like 'Damage Resistance' converting killing to normal damage instead of technically making your defenses resistant - an odd distinction and it made you roll the same damage twice if someone had it, which felt off; Stun mod being fixed at two if the resistant defense stopped all BOD, but wouldn't have stopped double the BOD; etc)

I mean, that's an amusing example because 12 BOD 36 STUN is a 3x stun multiplier, and the defenses are 10r 20n, for a total of 30. So, standard rules, you'd take 2 BOD (12-10) and 6 STN (36-30); but, under the variant I was talking about, where the STN mod is applied only to the BOD that gets through, you'd take 2 BOD (12-10) and 6 STN (2 * 3). So, wow. Let's say the stun multiplier die was a 6, for x5. Now the example would be 10-2 = 2 BOD and (12 * 5 = 60) 60 - 30 = 30 STN, vs 10-2 = 2 BOD and 2*5 = 10 STN. Hm. I find a high STNx, especially the one based on hit locations, very reasonable for FH or DI or any lower-power game, since it makes it pretty easy to toss around KAs, but KO characters instead of kill them, at least some of the time, which can be good drama. The consolation of being dropped by a high STNx when you have no rDEF, is that you weren't shot three more times and killed outright. 1d3+1 isn't really reduced, it's an average 3, which is higher than 1d6-1 (average 2.33) and can still give a x4

Yes, against targets with reasonably high resistant defenses, killing attacks like bullets just bounce off, which is about right for a high-power champions game, anyway, if you're 'invulnerable' you should be invulnerable. No, the point of KAs is that normal defenses don't stop them. I did also do a lot of variations on it. When I was running that variant, it was 4e (BBB) and Penetrating was a thing, that's a 1/2 advantage that let the body count of a damage roll get through defense that would otherwise bounce it. Put that on a KA and each die would, on average, put 1 BOD through the target's defense to take the stun multiplier, of course, Hardened stopped it. I also had a similar limitation for armor, 'flawed' that let most attacks go against the armor as if they were penetrating. I agree that KA dice were often a little high and that your idea is a workable one. If the whole penetrating/flawed thing is too complicated, another similar way to eliminate the stun lotto that still potentially lets some STN through, is to use the stun multiplier for the BOD that gets through, and when no BOD is inflicted to use a fixed STN multiplier of 2. You can also vary things by using the STNx from the hit location table for normals (because, perhaps ironically, the STN lotto is actually on the realistic side), and then a fixed or restricted STN mod for supers, like 1/2d6 or d4-1

In D&D the Cleric is a bit of an aberration, or system artifact. It's not something that immediately jumps out when you thought about pre-D&D fantasy genres, in which healing would be a either a big deal (quest for the blue rose to save the King from the assassin's rare & deadly poison) or a throwaway detail ("You're wounded. We have a flower in Colchis which heals and soothes..."), not the prime contribution of a main character who is doing it in every scene. D&D hit points do capture the dynamics of a cinematic battle, in which the monster comes on strong, the hero reels, recovers, and goes on to vanquish it. They do it with the Cleric class or healing potion as a sort of ugly kludge, but they do it, and very successfully over many years. (briefly, D&D came up with a less ugly kludge in which a new class called a 'Warlord' helped the party rally with inspiration instead of divine intervention, but that's fallen by the wayside). Bottom line, though, Hero has STN & REC, so you don't need a D&D-style healer to get that same heroic dynamic.

It's been quite a while.... I remember creating an elven school of fencing called Kiriluin ("The Blue Sword") And Taranda was a two-weapon style based on the movements of a large spider. ... and, yeah, I'm sure there were others but it's been too long.

You can just set campaign guidelines were you like. So if you want to allow attacks up to 20d and CONs well into the 30s and defenses in to the low 40s, there won't be a lot of stunning the toughest characters. You also don't have to inflate /everything/, like you can leave DEX/SPD at the 'normal' superheroic ranges, for instance. STN lotto's always a problem, if someone's tossing around a 6d KA, I suppose it's even bigger. What I did was apply the multiplier only to the BOD that got through resistant defense, making bouncing bullets - and, at this level, anti-tank weapons and very small nukes - a lot more practical.

Team Amerika Conceived when the Soviet fiasco in Afganistan was at it's height, the idea was to create some much-needed propaganda against America's superheroes. The team that seemed most vulnerable was the Pentagon, so, on a shoestring budget and rushed schedule, a sleeper team was pulled together to pull off crimes in the guise of it's current members. The attempt failed on multiple levels. The sleeper agents' training was poor to the point some of them even had obvious accents, and they were not well-matched to the superheroes they were meant to impersonate, using barely-similar powers or kludged together tech that was less than convincing to anyone who'd even seen footage of the originals in action. Plus the Pentagon roster was always changing. What's more, as right-thinking communists the members were more concerned with the greater good for the greater number, and hesitated to actually commit crimes that would cause further harm to members of America's crushed proletariat. So when they did rob a bank they'd make sure it was a big corporate bank and they'd distribute the money to the poor; when they kidnapped a rich man's child, they'd demand he capitulate to a union's demands instead of collect a ransom, and so forth. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they disbanded and resumed living in their secret sleeper-cell IDs, since America really wasn't that bad a place to live, afterall. But when the Pentagon finally disbanded, some of them returned to heroeing, this time for real, at least for a while. Presumably, today, they're all dead/depowered/retired/whatever, but if one were to surface, they might prove more popular than ever. Obviously, 5 members, each should imitate (however badly) a member of the Pentagon over on the Hero Team Theme thread (though it's always possible one was stuck imitating a member who was already gone by the time they got here) To start: Kirill Kuznetsov had been a boy during the Great Patriotic war, but had few memories of it beyond hunger, his family were 'ignorant superstitious peasants' and he lived up to that stigma, seeking out the legendary witch Baba Yaga and gaining a boon from her. As a boy, he never new hunger again, and grew into a strapping young man, but she cursed one of his eyes to emit a deadly ray so he killed anyone he looked at. That was his story, the operatives who found and trained him as a super and taught him to control that deadly glare, told him he was a mutant with powers that manifested, quite typically, at puberty - CIA documents referred to him as 'Balor'. He was assigned to imitate Stripes of the Pentagon, using his deadly eye-beam, which was at least red, and given a balky taser-like gauntlet to imitate Stripes shock attack. The impersonation went poorly, Kirill was significantly taller and more heavily built than the real Stripes and didn't have a strobing force-field to hide behind, his halting diction was also nothing like that of the natural orator who took so well to the role of team face. The "Stars" who accompanied him was a failed Olympic gymnast trained up as a stealthy martial artist who employed metal throwing stars, she retired back to her sleeper-cell ID after a few missions when they discovered the real Stars was a boy and relative non-combatant (she could be brought back to impersonate a different member of the Pentagon is someone wants). Some years after the Pentagon disbanded, Kirill, having obtained American citizenship, returned to the super-hero arena as the patriotic 'Red Glare' "Is patriotic! Is right there in National Anthem!" Letting his past fade into obscurity. After a decade or so in that identity he returned to Russia to visit family and was never seen again.

(Stars & ) Stripes It could have been the plot to a romance, a wounded soldier, a compassionate nurse, a make-shift hospital in an old roman church bombed out by the nazis, the two, alone shelter in it's catacombs... but it was not romance that blossomed, but superpowers. They never spoke in detail of what they found down there, but speculation runs that it was more likely cthonic or mythos than divine magic. In any case, the pair emerged with superpowers, 'Stars' could shroud herself in 'black light' becoming virtually invisible & throw 'white light' 'stars' that could cut through steel, 'Stripes' could protect himself with a strobing force field and blast enemies with either a deadly ray of baleful red heat from his right hand, or a stunning white blast of electricity from his left. The press played up their romance angle, and the two made brief appearances at the occasional USO show together, displaying their powers while Stripes gave a rousing patriotic speech. But, in reality, they rarely worked together - Stripes powers were useful on the front lines, while Stars powers made her a natural assassin often working with commandos behind the lines. After the War - and Korea - they mustered out but Stars was soon recruited by the CIA, she worked overseas ostensibly as a spy, but probably also an assassin, until she vanished under mysterious circumstances, never to surface again... speculation includes simply dying in a failed op, or possibly suicide. Stripes was recruited to join the Pentagon, and he was a solid contributor and one of the longest-standing members, becoming the team spokesman, if not leader, eventually. Stars was replaced with a kid sidekick (not counting as one of the five members) of the same name - represented as his son with the original Stars (and when that didn't add up, adopted orphan - neither were true, he had been recruited from a pool of disadvantaged young mutants, the backers just wanted a wholesome-seeming backstory). The new Stars had no similarity to the original, he was a regenerator who could extend that power to others temporarily, by touch. Over the years, as he grew up, he received extensive martial arts training and various attempts at gearing him up to a full super, but it never quite fit his temperament, and he rarely fought aggressively. Also, as an adult, a relationship grew between Stars & Stripes, only, this time, the romance was real, even if it had to be kept strictly secret. Stripes was also inconveniently up-standing and would have blown the whistle on the teams shadier operations or resigned in protest when one of his colleagues was unfairly ruined, but the powers behind the scenes knew his 'shameful' secret, and he was kept in line by blackmail for many years. In the 80s, Stripes became less and less active in field operations, but continued to be a spokesman for the team, looking drawn and haggard at times. The official story was that he had been badly wounded in a battle with The Ripper (from classic enemies), and had never fully recovered. He died several years before the team disbanded. A few years later, Stars came out.

BLOCK Chain The PR experts charged with assembling The Informers, where desperate to complete the team before their planned first appearance, so when they received an application from a "Block-Chain" defending an impoverished neighborhood, sent her an acceptance email without a second thought. She turned out to be a chain-weilding street-level martial artist, defending her block from gangs - with no STEM connection at all. Undeterred, they called their principle who provided her with new nanotech chain of self-replicating links keyed to her so that it moved like an extension of her will, and, if broken or snatched away would repair itself and return to her. In the meantime, they gave her a crash course in cryptocurrency buzzwords, but it turns out, the discipline and determination to train yourself up to superheroic levels of martial skill works on book learning, too, and she was quickly giving expert-sounding lectures on the subject... and in just a few months had even mastered it, to the further surprise of all involved. "When Bulldozer grabbed hold of my chain, he thought he could use his greater size and strength to drag me around, but each link of the chain builds itself with its own authentication, so it moves only how I want it to." So, I was responsible for that debacle, so I'm just throw'n it out there. Whoever wants to post the next team idea, go for it.

I had no idea this was going to be so tough.

I can't keep the details of the rules from different editions straight, but, at some point, wasn't Reduced END was a power modifier, rather than an advantage? In any case, if you're paying the END on the STR you're adding to a R.END attack, why would it be pro-rated to account for an advantage it's not getting?

I guess, like 2/4... teams of agents that are trained & kitted out to take down supers, especially to deal with a specific super, can do so with sufficient numbers. But mostly they're there to overwhelm normal security or provide security against anything short of supers (and raise the alarm if it is supers) or provide cannon fodder/specific tactical support ("when Cpt Everything enters the room, throw this switch, then that switch, you'll be fine, I promise... no, really, there's an invisible force field....") or commit well-orchestrated crimes be it for gain, terror, or whatever else their masters' objectives may be.

3e feats could be seen that way, sure, but he was talking about 4e powers. 4e stole from Hero even more dramatically, in that powers were game mechanical bundles that you could assign special effects to - they came with a sample description, but it was open to being what you wanted. So, another answer is simply to let non-casters go ahead and buy powers. Excellent point.

Math is confusing and scary?