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Opal

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  1. Like
    Opal reacted to assault in High Powered Hero Campaign   
    With the DR thing, there are two main cases.

    Mighty Maid (the Maid of Might, MM) is a brick. She can handle normal 18-20 d6 attacks fine. Not all day, but fine. Smaller attacks mostly bounce off her defenses. For her, DR is a bonus that allows her to deal with high Stun KAs and similar.

    Flying Mammal Man (FMM) isn't a brick. He tries not to get hit. He needs a buffer for when he does get tagged, but it really doesn't matter if he gets flattened on the second or third hit. He can also be taken out by smaller attacks. For him, DR is the core of how he works. His other defenses can be quite respectable, but trying not to be hit is what he does.

    Obviously, both spend a lot on defenses, but FMM spends a lot less than MM. He can possibly take her down with some of the gizmos in his Useful Belt, but he's not a slugger in the same way she is.

    These are the two reference points against which the other characters are compared. FMM is actually tougher than some of the others.

    If both of them work, things are fine.
  2. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Scott Ruggels in High Powered Hero Campaign   
    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.... 
  3. Like
    Opal got a reaction from drunkonduty in No place for a cleric?   
    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.  
  4. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Lord Liaden in High Powered Hero Campaign   
    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.... 
  5. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Nekkidcarpenter in High Powered Hero Campaign   
    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 
     
     
  6. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Quackhell in Create a Hero Theme Team!   
    (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.  
     
     
  7. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Quackhell in Create a Villain Theme Team!   
    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.
     
  8. Like
    Opal reacted to Ninja-Bear in No place for a cleric?   
    The Barbadian with 14 Body in the last Fantasy Hero game I played disagrees. I ended up killing him. Some was to bad rolls and some was I tried stuff just to see how it would work. He did get an epic death though. He sacrificed himself to kill the head Orc. 
  9. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Ninja-Bear in Martial Styles in your campaign   
    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.
     
  10. Like
    Opal reacted to assault in No place for a cleric?   
    I tend to overlook D&D style clerics.
     
    Any priest types I use tend not to carry the D&D style baggage.
  11. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Quackhell in Create a Hero Theme Team!   
    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.  
  12. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Sundog in Create a Hero Theme Team!   
    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.  
  13. Like
    Opal got a reaction from Lord Liaden in My BIG baddies   
    Giants were opponents of the Gods in both Norse and Greek (the Titanomachy) mythologies, so those are places to look for inspiration.
     
    In one setting I used, giants were an "elder race," slowly vanishing from the world, leaving behind ruins and cryptic monuments, and represented in the present by isolated individuals wielding strange powers that might be magic or technology, holding onto ancient fears, grudges, ambitions, or just habits, with tired monomaniacal zeal.
  14. Like
    Opal got a reaction from drunkonduty in How powerful are your agents?   
    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.
     
  15. Like
    Opal got a reaction from IndianaJoe3 in How powerful are your agents?   
    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.
     
  16. Thanks
    Opal reacted to bluesguy in Body Stun and Hit Points   
    And since Hero combat is suppose to be a cinematic style, here are some examples:
     
    Stunned & Knocked out ~48 seconds in this clip it sure looks like Aragon is stunned and knocked out. Stunned (and we think he has been killed) at ~1:11 and at 1:38 he looks dead or at least knocked out Lots of Body (and a poor Stun multiplier) - might be stunned ~1:20 1:51 More body and better stun multiplier 2:36 < 0 body and he is dying but not stunned or knocked out
  17. Like
    Opal reacted to Ric Conway in Good Pulp Movies to watch   
    Darkman (Sam Rami directed, Liam Neeson stars)
  18. Like
    Opal reacted to Cancer in Good Pulp Movies to watch   
    Movies that have elements you could certainly use include
     
    The Maltese Falcon for more of an intrigue-type story.
     
    Romancing the Stone has some useable parts, too.
  19. Like
    Opal reacted to GhostDancer in Good Pulp Movies to watch   
  20. Like
    Opal reacted to L. Marcus in Good Pulp Movies to watch   
    And whatchamacallit, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.
  21. Like
    Opal reacted to L. Marcus in Good Pulp Movies to watch   
    The Shadow, with Alec Baldwin and Tim Curry.
  22. Like
    Opal reacted to Christopher R Taylor in Some good abilities for warriors and rogues   
    And, of course, martial arts are another option.  Remember: Martial Arts are not an eastern Asian thing.  They are simply regimented, stylized combat systems of regular patterns.  Boxing is a martial art, but so is one school of fencing or a particular region's teachings on how to fight as a knight.
  23. Sad
    Opal reacted to death tribble in Create a Hero Theme Team!   
    Math Man !
     
    This hero is a mentalist. He projects mathematical formulae into people which acts like an ego blast, it can also act as an illusion so that they do not notice their surroundings which is useful for a team mate to get close to them. Bombarding a robot with mathematical formulae can overload and shut them down which Math Man ! was delighted to  discover. It can also work as a mind control 'Flee or suffer more math questions'.
    He can explain after a battle how he used maths to defeat the enemies.
  24. Thanks
    Opal got a reaction from steriaca in Create a Villain Theme Team!   
    The world knows Jackdaw - or Jack Daw - as one of those bizarre theme villains, only a little more coherent than the likes of Foxbat.
     
    He orchestrates overly complex bird-themed crimes, throughout Europe and the broader Westernized world, with grandiose goals that could never work even if they were carried through. As it stands, he has inflicted a lot of collateral damage - though no direct deaths - and driven up insurance rates wherever he operates.  So heroes & law enforcement begrudgingly take him seriously. 
     
    Jackdaw wears a high-tech battlesuit that looks like an all-black reject from Battle of the Planets, including a beaklike visor and feathered cape that actually let's him fly.  He uses some sort of bowdlerized 'martial arts' - mostly judo with hints of wushu when pressed - but primarily depends on gadgets and a huge flock of trained and/or robotic birds (generally raven-sized in spite of his name).  He stands over 6' and speaks with an exageratedly cultured old-fashioned "mid-Atlantic" accent.  He never betrays anger or fear, but affects boredom or amusement, instead.  He has been foiled every time, defeated many, but never captured. 
     
    Jackdaw often fights as a member of ThinkBank, but he is generally considered a dupe or hireling. 
     
     
     
     
  25. Like
    Opal reacted to Sundog in Create a Hero Theme Team!   
    Vector Rainbow
     
    VR (yes, she is well aware of the initials) is an astrophysicist by trade. She was involved in an experiment, an attempt to model the inside of a star. She was at the ground zero of a "superpower event" that empowered at least four other people as well.
    Her real name is Raquel Washington, and she makes no effort to hide it. She has the power to create light constructs in the form of skeletonized structures, vector lines and beams, both solid and laser in nature. Her riff is to start with a line of white light, and then slowly break it down by colour until she has a complete rainbow hanging in the air.
    Raquel is African-American, and she loves going to inner-city schools and less privileged areas like the one she came from. Her family is very proud of her, though she's gotten a certain pushback from extended family, who aren't sure about the whole "rainbow" thing.
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