Captain Obvious

Yeah, well that's true, but I think arcadian magic and arcane magic will be at odds often enough that such a one-way bonus should be worth some points somewhere....

Just go with it. Although bricks and energy projectors are standards in super campaigns, they're not indispensable assuming you have people who can engage in hand to hand and ranged combat. After a session or two, things will probably fall together for you....

Honestly, I still haven't gotten over the giddiness that FREd is out, after all those long dark years when Hero disappeared from the store shelves....

-1/2 is pretty steep for a mere +1d6 bonus to dispel. Some suggestions for alternatives: Put a cap on arcane dispels and suppresses. Add a limitation to arcane dispels and suppresses -- 1/2 effect vs arcadian magic (-1/2) Make all arcadian magic difficult to dispel, and then give arcadian dispels and suppresses some bonus dice only to dispel arcadian magic I can probably come up with more if I have time to think about it....

The Berserks are from Dark Champions.

If you dislike hexes because it's harder to map a rectangular building onto them (a common complaint), then our very own Fitz has already solved your problem. He has posted on his website some offset square grid paper PDFs you can download and print, which allow easier mapping of rectangular spaces but without the whole diagonal distance warp. Here's the link: http://mojobob.netnet.net.nz/roleplay/props/mapping.html

It would seem that a Mental Awareness Perception roll would pick up the nature of the energy. Any sort of Mental Aid or Mental Healing or whatnot would be an easy follow up at that point.

In my opinion this calls more for handwaving than an actual writeup. I would say that these spells essentially let a character cast any other appropriate spell without having to actually study it, but with reduced damage. (Assuming of course, that I remember correctly what it is these spells do...I've only played 1st ed D&D, and not for about 15 years....)

I don't care what you say. If you don't buy the DEX etc down, I'm taking that bag out for a drive if I ever find it. Well, I don't have it all statted out anywhere handy, but here's a quick outline of a nice little magic item I came up with once. The Irresistable Hook: Summon Fish, Extra Time (5 minutes), OAF, random effect (can summon a trout-sized or large shark-sized fish), limited to fish within the body of water it's dangled in Not worth much to most adventurers at first glance. Throw them into a survival situation, though, and they'll kiss your feet for one. If there's a fish in that pool of water, this thing will catch it....

Ah yes...metarule 6. That one is obviously broke from the get-go. It implies that all Area Effect powers of more than 10 active points must buy AE 1 hex and double it from there. I think what that one is meant to do is to prevent somebody from working out some way to duplicate an existing power by putting limitations on another power, thereby getting it cheaper than it should be. Some other nice ideas, by the way, Shrike. I obviously haven't thought too much on this particular issue, because nothing jumped out at me when the question was originally asked.....

Aha...that makes sense Phil. Thanks.

Well, if you've decided the Martial Artist won't be the descendant of a 442nd RCT super, I'll do a quick rework of the character concept I've mulled over the course of the day to better fit your weapon-master concept. Major Jane Okimoto aka Yonsei, granddaughter of retired WWII hero Staff Sergeant Albert Okimoto aka Nisei aka Amerika-no-Fundo, and daughter of Lieutenant Clay Okimoto aka Sansei, killed in action against the North Vietnamese hero Tet Tiger. Brought up by her widowed mother and her grandparents, Jane was immersed in war stories, imported Japanese traditions, and pride in the US. As a child, her grandfather taught her as much Jiujitsu as his age and old war wounds would permit, and upon graduating high school (as valedictorian...her mother and grandparents would allow no slacking academically) she was admitted to the US Military Academy at West Point. Since then, she has received extensive training in intelligence work and weapons. Her family's legacy of service to the nation has opened many doors for Major Okimoto, which has only caused her to push herself harder, so that she won't feel that she's getting a free ride. A formidable hand-to-hand opponent, she has never reached the level of expertise her grandfather had in his glory days, however, she makes up for this with her marksmanship. Major Okimoto is an accomplished sniper and has qualified as an expert in every infantry weapon used by the US Army. Due to her personal accomplishments as well as her family legacy, the Department of Defense has granted her an exception to policies excluding women from certain duties, and she hopes that her example will result in an end to these policies altogether. She has completed Airborne training, Special Forces training, Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, and Army SCUBA training. She speaks fluent Japanese, Russian, and Arabic, and a little Chinese, Farsi, and Serbian. She is an accomplished interrogator, intelligence analyst, and electronic warfare operator. As a member of the SPIRIT team, Yonsei has access to all weapons and equipment in use by the US military, including experimental prototypes and specialized and nonlethal ammunition. She wears a US Army uniform, with a stylized fist (her grandfather's symbol as Amerika-no-Fundo) with a kanji number 4 superimposed on it as her unit insignia. Just a little something I came up with today between things-that-required-attention.....

OFFICIALLY...I don't quite get what JmOz said. PERSONALLY...Bob's way makes sense, and is probably the way I would run it in most cases. Would anyone care to give a more detailed explanation of the official way?

For your martial artist, why not use a Japanese American with any sort of Japanese MA style. Perhaps a descendant of a super connected with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of WWII....

Probably the cheapest way to do something like this would be to buy Extradimensional Movement Usable on Others (to send them far far away) and a linked Shapeshift Only to Replicate the Character Sent Far Far Away. Still not too cheap, but possessing someone is a pretty powerful ability. Of course, you could just heap limitations on a regular old Mind Control and bring the cost down, and perhaps even get something more in line with a traditional possession. Maybe now that the subject is opened up, more people will throw in their ideas....

Sorry, man. I remember having seen them when I was surfing in my WebTV days, but right around the time I got a real computer with a real working modem (at least one that didn't use the term "baud") the Herogames website had fallen into a gray melancholy time, and a whole lot of things disappeared from the archives....

Your double meaning won't remain, Tim. English is unusual in that "attractive" and "relatively" can both be expressed in one word. I've found that most online translators are fairly good for western European languages, and fairly bad for eastern Asian languages. Some people at work were bored one day and used babelfish to come up with their own answers to engrish.com by translating from English to Japanese and back again....

Wrath of the Seven Horsemen would probably be a good place to start, since they've already modeled somewhat more traditional versions of the Four (and threw in three more for good measure). This weekend, when I get time, I will scrounge around and find my copy, and give you an overview on their powers. That should at least steer you in the direction you want to add your tech related stuff too.

Yeah, the Protectors rocked. I liked their agent backup...not too many supers seem to realize how useful it is to have someone to handle routine guard duty, investigations, heck, even someone to pull their behinds out of the fire every now and then. Not that the Protectors needed that too much. They were pretty effective in combat since they actually developed coordinated maneuvers. The Protectors are pretty much everything a super group should be. (edit) except for that whole Coatlicue thing, that is....

The best way to handle the netrunner problem in my experience is to have corps keep their really interesting stuff off-line. The netrunner has to physically enter the building to jack in to the system, and has to be protected while doing so. Alternatively, the rest of the group has to enter a building, and only the netrunner running interference with the automated security systems keep them from getting toasted in the first 60 seconds. Keep things happening in both the real world and the net, and you never have to deal with players sitting on their hands waiting to play.

What's so hard about rafflurs? Most of them are simply weapons with fairly high damage dice and few charges. The M-4 just has some shotgun-like limitations added to it. No big deal.

I would make them keep real points constant. If they want their quad-lasers to do twice the damage of an unmodified quad-laser, then they need to come up with -1 in limitations to balance it, probably by adding activation rolls, burnout rolls, charges (most Star Wars tech doesn't seem to have charges normally), making them fragile foci, etc. This is actually a fair amount of book-keeping, but if they plan ahead and spend some time out-of-game working on it, the in-game disruption won't be too bad....

The guns are less effective than the ones in FREd because FREd has more modern weapons, whereas Western Hero's weapons use black powder and didn't have as much punch. You can pretty much use the weapons straight out of Western Hero without a problem. The only difference between them and 5th edition would be point cost, which doesn't matter in a heroic level game anyway....

Re: Apocalypse Hero The movie was pretty, well, "B", admittedly, but the book wasn't exactly high literature either....

No JI at my local shops, but there is a 4th Ed Bestiary and a copy of the VIPER's Nest adventure....