Vulcan

Re: Perks and negative cost And if, as a GM, you want to allow such a thing then you can! There is a specific caveat in the main rules book (in 5E it is in the bottom of the sidebar on p.336): Just because something is explicitly forbidden doesn't mean you can't do it (with the GM's permission). So ultimately nothing anyone says about something being against the rules is true. The rules depend heavily upon the GM's interpretation of the rules. So if you are okay with characters having a 'negative cost' base or vehicle, go for it. It's your game, after all, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't run it your way! But at the same time, telling someone else they are wrong for following the rules as written is a bit less than cool. (Not that the people being hostle to you in this thread hold any moral high ground given the aforementioned caveat, but at least the main body of the rules are on their side. Along with a fair amount of experience with what can go wrong with people getting an unrestricted amount of points back from 'negative costs'.) Like I said, how I would handle the cost of a 'negative cost' base or vehicle is I would make it a disad, not part of the normal character build. The player how only has to come up with 145 points of disads instead of 150 (or howeve the math comes out after the 'negative cost' is accounted for). That way all those limitations on the base now formally affect the character in some small way as well...

Re: Powerless Vigil would fight DEMON tooth and nail to keep the world as-is. And since he's a hacker, his best tactic would be to crash the computers DEMON uses for spell-checking...

Re: What defines Hero ID I tend to use 'Shapechange' and 'Linked to Shapechange' a lot rather than 'OIHID.' I never bought the whole 'glasses as an adequite disguise for Superman' thing anyway.

Re: Perks and negative cost tesuji, I think there is a bit of a disconnect between what you are talking about and what the people arguing with you think you are talking about. HEROS has long had a division between people playing the game as a roleplaying system - "sacrificing character for concept" is the usual term - and people playing the game to make the absolute most point-effective character possible (and granted, the line is blurred pretty heavily in the middle by player who do both to some degree or another). How does this relate to your argument? Well, things that can give points back to a character are pretty heavily regulated in HEROS. Most campaigns have a set maximum number of points you can take in Disads. You are only allowed to sell back one figured characteristic. Sure, you can sell back primary characteristics, but generally the cost of compensating for it isn't worth the exchange. In short, there are only so many ways to get points. So while you may be talking about a perfectly reasonable build, without showing us exactly what kind of build you're talking about (both of base and character), well, bases and vehicles with 'negative costs' raise a cry of "MUNCHKIN!" among many people. Now the way I would deal with the negative cost base/vehicle is that I would say it counts as part of your charcter's disads. This dovetails nicely with the Contact/DNPC rules, solves your problem with cheap base w/gun 'costing' just as much as cheap base w/o gun, and avoids the more abusive aspects that can arise with things giving points back to the character. Besides, having made many characters with bases and vehicles in my time, getting one actually worth having that costs negative points is harder than it looks...

Re: UN Supers headquarters Are we using a world with UNTIL, or is the UN as corrupt and useless as it is in real life?

Re: Powerless Vigil would be overjoyed. He got to live a normal life, grow up as a normal kid, his mother and grandparents were never killed because of his having powers... His rat b@$t@rd father never showed up to destroy his life... And if someone threatened to undo it he would fight - war to the knife, and the knife to the blade.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Game misconduct... roughing the listener... visual is denied!

Re: Free equipment side discussion. Fair enough.

Re: Changing into a costume One phase? I know it takes me a lot longer than 6 seconds to change clothes! I guess that's a minor superpower known to all supers.

Re: Free equipment side discussion. Of course, then Thug with a .50 cal. Desert Eagle can't kill a hostage with 8 BODY in one shot without GM fiat.

Re: CSL's, while surprised and DCV question This is the best argument I've ever heard for dropping NCM entirely out of the rules. Have you considered posting this on the 6E discussion? At any rate, well said. Repped. Edit: "You must spread Rep around before" yada yada... Someone else please get him for me!

Re: Free equipment side discussion.

Re: Free equipment side discussion.

Re: I am your NEMESIS! Once upon a time, a GM I gamed with did something similar with his version of the Golden Avenger. He gave him a Fully Variable Special Effect Energy Blast and Detect (not Find) Weakness, Discriminitory, Ranged. And if the Detect Weakness found nothing, a second scan (Bought as a Transform: You to You with exploitable weakness) would turn something up...

Re: Free equipment side discussion. Of course, if we downgrade the official writeups of 'real' weapons to make them harmless to supers (1&1/2d6 RKA for assault rifles) then Dark Champions-type games become a lot less lethal, and loose some of their flavor. Or in other words: downgrading things to match the superheroic game ignores the probems that will cause heroic level games. I think the scaling issue is a reasonable optional rule, either for the Supers sourcebook or for whatever reincarnation Digital HERO recieves once 6E is up and running. Should it be in the main book? Certainly not; it is far too genre specific for that.

Re: Hero is TK projection of kid in coma Not just the current state of the comics industry, but the stories told themselves count as tragedies. Not to mention (IMO, anyway) tragically bad!

Re: CSL's, while surprised and DCV question I might agree with you about inexperience... But he's been GMing Champions for our group on-and-off for something like 15 years now. He was a pretty fun GM for most of that time. Even in the beginning of the current campaign things seemed pretty cool. It's just that as time goes on the PC's seem less and less relevent to the plot. Part of it is that we are playing street-level superheroes in an Iron Age world - and we're expected to play Silver Age characters. It's just not working anymore, now that we're facing epic-level villians to boot! Sorry, guys, I didn't mean to turn this thread into a pity-party. Back to the issue at hand... (Incidentally, the characters I've played with the longest combat lifespan have been the ones with token defenses, high DEX and SPD, and 3-5 DCV levels! )

Re: Expanding Normal Characteristic Maxima In some settings it might almost be an advantage! For example, when mutants are hated and hunted and there are robots that can detect mutants, being a 'mere mortal' puts you beneath their notice...

Re: CSL's, while surprised and DCV question You mean D&D? Not really, but he does like d20 Star Wars. But Champions seems to be his main game.

Re: The Super drugs I'm not certain if there were ever any hard-and-fast rules for it, I think the GM just handwaved it. Certainly none of the PC's ever deliberately took the drug... Call it a Transform with a 14< side effect (Addiction) and an 8< side effect (horrible death). Permanent powers would be more of an origin story than an effect.

Re: The Super drugs In our game the GM intorduced a drug called 'boost' that would temporarily give a normal super powers. The side effects were psychological addiction and a pretty good change of terminal physiological overload (say, super STR without the PD to withstand using it...). However, on a few people, it triggered latent 'mutant' powers, and is the origin of two of the PC's who were exposed accidentally when one of the labs was blown up by terrorrists... (it's a long story).

Re: Why do the Champions waste so much time being "good citizens?" I may have to steal that one...

Re: CSL's, while surprised and DCV question Well, 26/6 doesn't come up often, but back in the early part of the game one of the MA's first opponents was 26/6 when he was a 23/5... And when the PC's were restricted to 60 AP a routine opponent had a 10d6 AEH Line attack... It's that kinda game. And it kinda sucks.

Re: Heroic Level Hit Locations I note in passing that this appears to be a heroic level game, not a superheroic one; the superheroic tropes might not apply to this game. (Edit)... and never even noticed it was a six-year-old thread...

Re: CSL's, while surprised and DCV question He likes to sit on PC power levels pretty tightly, 23 DEX / 5 SPD is pretty high in the current game (the dedicated martial artist is 26/6, but he's also has the second highest point total of 393 in a game that started at 250). Most of us are around 20/4. Having said that, the GM isn't likely to allow either unless he feels it fits the character concept. Whether we feel it does or not. Anyone running Champions in St. Louis?