Tradewind

Re: Superheroes Sponsored by Corporations (Such as the NFL) Tradewind, my namesake on this board, is a corporate sponsored superhero. He's sponsored by a medical and chemical engineering corporation. One of my favorite concepts in the character is that when villainy is slow the corporation sends out the CommuNazi to do battle with their mascot. The CommuNazi happens to be played by Tradewind's lead writer Barry who generally sits in a van near the site of his heroics and feeds him witty lines.

Re: Question on a power build Personally I would put in some way for the to remove the darkness actively rather than simply having to wait it out. One good one, if you don't want it to be something as simple as washing it off with water or something, would be to get a certain distance from you.

Re: How to Build: True Duplication Yeah, I built this guy once before for a GM who simply house ruled it as a 20pt adder (the more I look at it though the more I think that a multiplier seems more reasonable) and he had a Teleportation ability called "Already There" which basically just gave the game master the excuses to have him wherever he was needed. Hadn't thought of the Contacts idea though, that's an interesting one.

Re: How to Build: True Duplication Damage when recombining is already covered in the rules so I'm not or worried about that. Conceptually (a desperate, vaguely suicidal father trying to save the world from his son) him being beat up through the averaging mechanic is fine by me, my issue is him having to go out of his way to keep a specific one of him alive. I fully intend to, with this character, dump the majority of my XP into doubling the number of duplicates I can potentially create until I get enough that it is functionally infinite, but no number of dups help when a single well placed killing attack can end all of them permanently. Ooh, and yay, no longer a probationary member, I really hate having to decipher those scrambled words.

Re: How to Build: True Duplication The real effect that I'm looking for here, beyond the general idea I've described, is a Duplicator who simpily doesn't need to track which one was the 'Original', I just find that to be a headache and leads to exceedingly cautious play (at least with the original) which goes against my concept. I want to be able to throw some duplicates together and charge, not particularly caring how many and which ones die.

Re: Cheap Supers Right when it first happened things would go into absolute chaos, even without the super serum killing people you'd see thousands if not millions of deaths as people experiment with their powers or attempt to identify powers in less than sensible ways ("Maybe I can bounce, let's head to the roof!"). Most likely, at least at first, the government would try to crack down, sending the FBI and Homeland Security to every reported sighting, I'd give it about 6 months or so before enough people have 'Sup'ed Up' that prevention would no longer be considered a viable option. Fast forward to two years in society would likely re-balance itself, there would be laws on the books to punish the guardians of children under the age of 17 who 'Sup' and there would be debates in congress as to how to classify and categorize people with powers for forensic purposes. This would be different than the X-Men style 'Registration Act' though mostly due to the fact that gaining powers is a choice. Most likely the debate would be fairly similar to the push and pull of gun control in the United States, and likely even only two years in most states would have power classification and registration (and fines for failing notify the authorities if you take the serum). Most likely the balance of power between crime and law enforcement would remain roughly the same after the initial chaos, after things are proven safe it's probable that taking the serum would be all but mandatory for law enforcement agencies and similarly almost every criminal would happily take any edge they could get. You'd see some early spurts of vigilantism but inside a year you'd probably see a major crackdown on such activities in most large cities while small cities could go either way, embracing the extra help or not tolerating such activity at all. All told I think you'd see about 20% of the US's and 10-15% of the rest of the worlds population choosing to take on abilities. At least that's what I'd expect in that scenario.

Re: First time making a character would like some advice Actually I just looked and saw you bought DCV, so yeah definitely buy 3 levels of 0 END, Always On, Persistent shrinking. Much more efficient and represents the character better.

Re: First time making a character would like some advice The first thing I see is that you should probably buy persistent shrinking, I'm assuming that's what the hard to perceive power was supposed to indicate. 3 levels of Shrinking will only give you -6 on your opponent PER rolls, but will also give you +6 DCV which this character could use.

Re: Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device I'm not sure that Ranged and Indirect required, could be wrong though. In particular indirect seems inappropriate since you have to have line of effect to the target. The only 'barriers' that you can go through are those that are permeable.

Re: Inspiration Right now my three favorite characters are TripliKate - I've never seen another similar character power wise, she's a duplicator with a parkour/martial artsy bent, but the character is very similar to the classic female superspy. Undercover Blues, Alias and La Femme Nikita in particular. Rabbit - Again I came up with her power set, energy blasts from the feet allowing super jumping but her personality and story inspiration were from Jubilee from the X-Men. Honestly in the end she doesn't seem a whole like like Jubilee, but still that's the character I have in my head. Prime - This guys the opposite, power wise he's pretty much your classic duplicator (with the exception that all of him are 'base' duplicates saving me the book keeping of having to care which one dies), personality wise he's more mine. Vaguely inspired by a Young Justice comic he's a father who's kid is a supervillain who is trying to correct his mistake.

Ok, so the rules for Duplication in the main book (all of my experience is with 5th Ed so I don't know if this has changed) are geared toward a Multipleman type character who creates hordes of duplicates to fling at an enemy, or a 3Peat type who keeps to a limited team of quality individuals. What I want to build though is a character who creates perfect and identical copies of his relatively ordinary self in large quantities. Where I run into difficulties is I want these to be true copies and therefore not have to keep track of a 'base' character, with each duplicate making his own duplicates as needed. Now note that I am not trying to make a mega powered character here, I don't want this ability to allow me to create more duplicates per turn or more duplicates total that I paid for originally but the rules just don't seem to support this idea. The overall effect that I'm going for is a multiplier who can send his duplicates around the city on patrol and whenever one of them comes across a crime they would have the duplication power to deal with it. Is there a way within the rules that I can build this character (I generally play at 250 points)? If there isn't a way within the rules how would you house rule it, as an adder or a power advantage or in some other way? This problem really vexes me because Hero System can let you do almost anything else, this is literally the first time I've come across a character concept that I just couldn't seem to make fit within the rules.

Re: Running for a Villain Team Ok, so I've had a small inspiration from the book Masked and I was hoping I could get some feedback/advice for how to pull this off. The idea is basically that one of the most powerful superheroes in this world has the ability to force someone to be moral, basically he has a power cleanses people of all negative thoughts and feelings and leaves them as a perfectly moral being. Now of course this basically means he's killing the original person and creating basically a heroic zombie without any free will. As a result it opens the field for 'good guy' bad buys who belive that freedom of choice is more important that temporary justice and real villains who want to kill the king of the superheroes. Are there any really glaring flaws in this? My requirements are really that there needs to be tiers of opposition and there needs to be a reason for a group of bad guys to work together towards a common, long term goal.

Ok, so some friend of mine want to to run a game where the PCs are super villains in a super heroic setting. I'm game for trying but for the life of me I'm having difficulty constructing a plot where villains would be compelled to work together. Any suggestions from GMs more clever than I?