NestorDRod

Re: Stun Only vs Reduced Penetration. Well, other than the fact that Reduced Penetration was put in with Killing Attacks in mind (to help simulate the high-damage/low penetration aspects of things like animals' claws), I'm not sure what your concern is. Do you feel that RP should be -0 or that STUN only should be -1/4?

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. That isn't helping, Dave.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Marta wears glasses now? She must be suffering eye-strain from constantly following Ling-Ling's "assets" when she jogs.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Poor Mike. Ladies and gentlemen, witness what happens when one posts late at night after very few hours of sleep. For the record, I'll edit the quotes in the hopes things will be a bit clearer. Mkreedi: "In the world of 40k, the movie Event Horizon is better known as 'Tuesday'." Zane: "Well, it does make a handy training film." Strahd: "I'm barely making these shots." (Promptly rolls an '02'. 01 is the best you can do.) GM: "This [event] would cause the deaths of 9 billon people in the hive city." The table: "Who all gave their life in the service of the Emperor!" Mkreedi: "The pity factor doesn't work in this universe!"" Strahd: "I need to wash off the Emperor's justice. It's all over me." Mkreedi: "I'm looking at her like dogs look at helicopters." Strahd: "Absolution is not my department. You can try her," pointing to the Tech-Priest, "but she's not in the mood." GM: "The three magi have gifts for you but they're not frankincense and myrrh." Zane: "I'm going to do an experiment and make the green die the tens." (Promptly rolls '55') Zane (pointing to the dice): "I swear, I can see them snickering at me." We now return you to your regularly scheduled mayhem. Mike, please don't hurt me.

Re: Champion's PnP in Paragon City And maybe some day Eden Studios will release the CoH RPG they have been promising for the last four years, or finally admit they're not up to it, release the license, and let someone who can actually do the work bring it out. I'm sorry. Did that sound bitter? I was going more for mild disgust and quiet resignation.

Re: So, what don't you like about HERO 5th?

Re: So, what don't you like about HERO 5th? Actually, if I recall correctly, you can use STR to resist Knockback, but you have to explicitly call it. Of course, this may be a deprecated rule in 5e. Wouldn't be the first time I've suffered from version-itis...

Re: Im in san fran @ java one. any gaming?? It did? I am saddened. Wait, which one? The game store or the comic-book store?

Re: How to build your own Iron Man suit — for real Found the magazine I was talking about. It's Popular Science, May 2008. It has a CGI picture of the exo-equipped soldier on the cover. The article features the Sarcos suit. Definitely potential source material.

Re: So, what don't you like about HERO 5th? Sorry, captain, but the moment someone starts applying "real-world" laws to RPGs, especially superhero RPGs, I tend to tune out. One of my favorite quotes comes from a Shadowfist card (Shadowfist is the CCG that inspired the Feng Shui HK Movie Action RPG). It was the flavor text for Grenade: I don't consider a rule broken if it doesn't emulate how things work in reality. I evaluate it based on how well it models the genre it's supposed to represent. IMHO, believe this is a concept Steve & Co. need to keep upmost in their minds as they look at 6e.

Re: How to build your own Iron Man suit — for real Popular Mechanics did a nice article on this very subject about a month ago. It included references not only to the Japanese nurse exoskeleton (it helps nurses carry patients in case of emergencies), but the US Army "super-soldier" prototype they're working on.

Re: Im in san fran @ java one. any gaming?? I'm officially jealous. I normally make the trip but this year circumstances said otherwise. IIRC, there's both a game store and a comic book store in the mall next to the Convention Center. You might find some leads there. Have fun, get lots of trinkets, go eat at the Stinking Rose. You bastich.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. Um, forget I said that. No, really.

Re: Champions Seminars At GenCon: What Do *You* Want To See? Wow. Um, yeah, what he said...

Re: Origin 'Disadvantages' I was going to say, what you're describing sounds pretty much like Package Deals. Or at least what they were designed to address. The trick is to make sure the PDs are not so restrictive you end up with "cookie-cutter" builds. I remember having a discussion like this some time back when talking about the Brave New World RPG, with its use of power archetypes, and converting the campaign concept into Hero. Each archetype could be defined using a PD that a player would use when creating his or her character.

Re: Champions Seminars At GenCon: What Do *You* Want To See? Hmm... Considering the Hero System's strength as a genre modeling system, a seminar on how to take well-known characters and adapting them to Hero would be a good way to showcase its capabilities in that regard. Perhaps something inspired by Susano's postings in that subject.

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one...

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Point taken, sir. I did forget to account for the cost change. My bad. Like I said, though, my issue is with the effectiveness of Flash, not Flash Defense.

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Well, that's sort of the point. With a SPD 3 mook, a Flash resulting in less than, say, 4 Segments, has a good chance of clearing before he has to take his next action, i.e., the Flash doesn't affect him. Yes, yes, I know, his DCV is down during those 4 Segments, but he isn't doing anything during that period anyway. I don't follow what you mean exactly. SPD already affects how quickly someone recovers from being Stunned or how much STUN a character can Recover per Turn, so why not Recovering from a Flash? SPD represents reaction time; how quickly your character can process input and respond to it. If we establish the base effect of Flash as overpowering or otherwise disabling a character's sense, why is it illogical to expect a person with a faster reaction time to overcome the effects quicker? Again, I'm confused. Having the Recovery based on Segments instead of Phases cuts down the base duration of the Flash already. Adding Flash Defense just cuts it down even more. Assuming a 60 pt. Flash gets you a result of 12 BOD on the roll, using my suggested change, a target with 10 points of Flash Defense would be affected 2 of his Phases. Using RAW, he would be affected 2 Segments. How is that making Flash better off? The issue is not the effectiveness of Flash Defense, it's the efficiency of Flash.

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Sigh. The smart thing here would be just to drop this whole discussion, but hey, never let it be said I'm not a glutton for punishment. You're right, I didn't read up on the changes to Flash. It was a simple case of versionitis; after playing Champions for 20+ years, I didn't go through the effort of reading every single page of 5e to catch every single change to the rules. Allow me to explain something about the situation I described. I was not expecting the Flash to be a wildy successful maneuver; I certainly did not expect it to do more than lower the villain's monstruous DCV down to a bit more manageable level for a Phase, tops. I was trying what I thought was a dramatic and cinematic solution to help at least nudge the odds a bit to our side. But instead of being at least somewhat helpful, it ended up a total bust, not because of the maneuver, but because the rules mechanics failed to live up to the expected effect. That's what soured me to the Power. Nothing spoils the fun more for me than having the rules get in the way of the story. It's like playing in a swashbuckling game and realizing that, following the RAW, the most likely outcome of trying to swing across the room on the chandelier is that your character will fall and break his fool neck (a situation that happened to me in another game altogether many moons ago).

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Well, when I saw the price change in 5e, I figured someone had realized taking the auto-AOE from Flash made it overpriced and had lowered the cost accordingly. Had I been writing the character in 4e, I wouldn't have added the Flash in the first place, because of the prohibitive cost. Which is all irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Having Flash recovery be based on Segments rather than Phases causes the power to be less capable of properly modeling the effect it's inspired by. IMO, the ideal construct for the Power would have the BODY result of the dice representing the number of the target's Phases that he is affected. So a higher SPD character would recover quicker.

Re: I think this explains it! Eh. Pretty sophomoric joke (sophomoric, get it? ) I like the bit about having Lord Cthulhu be the lunch lady. Talk about "mystery meat"!

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Well, unless your teammates have a) a higher SPD than you, or haven't acted yet on this Phase, they're in the same boat as you; they can't attack before the target recovers. My gripe is based on an actual game situation. I was playing a holy-warrior type character and I had given him an AOE Flash, No Range defined as "Holy Light." Because of the campaign, it was limited to 30 AP, so it was a 3d6 Flash The team was fighting some uber-enemy with a high SPD and oodles of CSLs and was basically mopping the floor with them. I realized that the PC's "Holy Light" was exactly what we needed to level the playing field. So I called moving up to her and unleashing the attack. I roll, I hit, and get my 3 BOD on the damage roll. That's when it was revealed to me that 5e used Segments, not Phases, a big surprise to me. The upshot was that not only did his teammates fail to take advantage of her Flashed state (they'd already acted that Phase) but she was back in action with no effect by the time her next action was up, and to add insult to injury, took advantage of the fact I had moved up to her to hit my PC and send him down to negative STUN in one attack. Oh, and to make it even worse, the GM told me afterwards he had neglected to notice he had given the NPC Flash Defense, so the attack would have been utterly ineffective anyway. Double A waste of points, period.

Re: Flash, Flash Defense, Cost Vs. Value Personally, I don't like the 5e rule, since it makes anything but very high-dice Flashes pretty much ineffective. So, my character succeeds in Flashing someone for 3 segments. Unless the target is Speed 6 or higher, he'll lose maybe one action tops (and that if it occurs at just the right point in the Speed Chart). OK, so during that time, the target is DCV 0. Unfortunately, unless my PC has a Speed 5 or higher, he won't get to take advantage of that on his next action before the target recovers. Essentially, you lose the ability to enact the classic action-movie scene of throwing a flash-bang into the room and rushing in to take out the disabled mooks. Recovering by Segments deviates from the norm in the game. If I damage someone, they heal at a rate based on their REC. If I Transform someone, they recover in a similar manner. But if I affect a Sense, everyone recovers at the same rate? People complained about Flash being overpowered, which IIRC is why the automatic Area Effect was removed in 4e. With this change now, Flash has become pretty much a waste of points.

Re: New trick arrow! Oh God, the mental image that summoned up almost made do a spit-take all over the monitor. My cubemates in the office were wondering what had made me start chuckling evilly. Rep to you, sir.