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Post by reiphil on Dec 31, 2009 10:31:19 GMT -8
I want to drain wisdom... so your will save is terrible and you get KOed on every hit
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Post by Joseph Barros on Dec 31, 2009 12:36:52 GMT -8
Another power under review is Drain. What about Drain is under review? Not sure other than the fact that it is a power that has been pegged as a potential problem by the M&M creative team. Ultimate power reduced its effectiveness slightly, but for now I'm just going to watch. Combining it with slow fade in particular seems to be the problem at higher power levels; being able to render an opponent helpless in a single stroke is pretty uber.
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Post by Joseph Barros on Dec 31, 2009 13:03:53 GMT -8
I kind of figured Duplication may be overpowering, but then again I didn't know what caliber of enemy I would be expecting to fight. Looking forward to your set of "campaign rules" you're going to set on powers; it'll make it much more balanced, fun, and give us a guideline on how we can build our heroes. I would actually enjoy retcon-ing my powers completely if it comes down to that. Cause I really do enjoy this game, the RP component is great. But if we have heros running around with powers to great of the campaign or are broken with the right combination of powers, it will become a one man show. I generally don't like too many house rules. Anything over five is ridiculous in my opinion. This ended up being a good starter campaign, because the threat is not one you can just beat down... unless you can rationalize nuking 25,000 innocent civilians. I do wonder if maybe some of you overvalued feats and powers over skills. As a group you guys failed a LOT of secret notice and sense motive checks. With the exception of Stephen's sense motive, dividing 2-3 power points among those skills would have moved things along much faster as a lot of what you guys started noticing later on, would have been noticed much earlier. Not to mention some of the various other skills like computers, investigate, gather information, etc. While a single skill point technically means you are "trained" 1-4 skill points still means you are at a basic level and the DCs you are up against reflect that. 5-8 is professional, 9-12 is expert, and 13-15 is mastery. More than 15 makes you eligible for a Nobel.
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Post by reiphil on Jan 1, 2010 1:45:43 GMT -8
I have at LEAST a 5 in every skill that I took. I just rolled horribly.
Skills I didn't take but should have: Investigate, Gather Information, Notice
Skills I should've invested more in: Sense Motive
Some of the skills i didn't even realize were there, ie Notice/Investigate. But I figured things like Computers would've come in handy, which SHOULD have. But during our investigation sequence, I rolled an amazing 2 5 5 2. Ended up spending my Hero Point in order to get shit going.
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Post by frobones on Jan 1, 2010 11:20:27 GMT -8
Any changes I need to make to my Duplication power before tonight?
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Post by frobones on Jan 1, 2010 11:31:27 GMT -8
I do wonder if maybe some of you overvalued feats and powers over skills. As a group you guys failed a LOT of secret notice and sense motive checks. With the exception of Stephen's sense motive, dividing 2-3 power points among those skills would have moved things along much faster as a lot of what you guys started noticing later on, would have been noticed much earlier. Not to mention some of the various other skills like computers, investigate, gather information, etc. While a single skill point technically means you are "trained" 1-4 skill points still means you are at a basic level and the DCs you are up against reflect that. 5-8 is professional, 9-12 is expert, and 13-15 is mastery. More than 15 makes you eligible for a Nobel. Well, in my case I didn't overvalue power and feats over skills. I took ranks in skills that seemed appropriate for the character of my hero. I considered maxing out Sense Motive, Notice, and Gather Information... then I thought to myself: "Is Yulis Truesgard really a known expert at that skill?" Usually the answer was no; I was no budding Sherlock Holmes, being at a professional level or lower seemed more believable.
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Post by Joseph Barros on Jan 1, 2010 14:16:06 GMT -8
Just get rid of the Heroic extra on Duplication.
As for skills my point wasn't to max them out, just that they seemed to go unnoticed. A 10 might be too high, but a 5 or 6 wouldn't be. I liked what you did with your knowledge points though.
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Post by frobones on Jan 2, 2010 0:20:43 GMT -8
If I take the most expensive rank of the Morph Power (you can assume any form of the same mass), would I then be able to Morph myself and appear to have a set of clothes? Like Morph and Mystique.
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Post by frobones on Jan 2, 2010 19:28:39 GMT -8
I guess I'll ask a few questions to get the ball rolling on what we can and can not spend our acquired power points on. So far the crystal clear rule is NO new powers. But what about: - Can we have new Alternate Powers of Base Powers within reason?
- Can we learn new feats?
- Can we learn new skills? can we raise known skills to the limitation of the PL?
- Can our powers gain new feats or extras?
- Can we apply new flaws or drawbacks to our powers?
- If we raise our attributes (Str, Con, etc) and they are not "super powered", how high can we legitimately raise them?
- Any limitations on how high we can raise combat skills (Attack, Defense, Toughness, Damage)?
- Any retraining of Power Points within a power? Like switching around extras, flaws, feats.
Well, these are just a few off the top of my head... may come up with more.
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Post by reiphil on Jan 2, 2010 19:44:02 GMT -8
Are the power points we're acquiring counting towards the maximum we have at the next power level?
IE when we've acquired 15 PP are we now Power Level 7?
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Post by frobones on Jan 2, 2010 20:13:43 GMT -8
When we do fight the big bad evil giant robots down the road... would I be able to hero point that I had bought a Military Helicopter in the past and that it's conveniently stored at a nearby military installation?
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Post by reiphil on Jan 2, 2010 21:47:17 GMT -8
do you have hero point minions that you can summon to pilot said copter?
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Post by frobones on Jan 2, 2010 22:05:03 GMT -8
do you have hero point minions that you can summon to pilot said copter? My Pilot skillz and 4 available Dupes is not enough?
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Post by Joseph Barros on Jan 2, 2010 23:49:32 GMT -8
I guess I'll ask a few questions to get the ball rolling on what we can and can not spend our acquired power points on. So far the crystal clear rule is NO new powers. But what about: - Can we have new Alternate Powers of Base Powers within reason?
- Can we learn new feats?
- Can we learn new skills? can we raise known skills to the limitation of the PL?
- Can our powers gain new feats or extras?
- Can we apply new flaws or drawbacks to our powers?
- If we raise our attributes (Str, Con, etc) and they are not "super powered", how high can we legitimately raise them?
- Any limitations on how high we can raise combat skills (Attack, Defense, Toughness, Damage)?
- Any retraining of Power Points within a power? Like switching around extras, flaws, feats.
Well, these are just a few off the top of my head... may come up with more. *New powers are pretty much off limits for now. I might allow some exceptions, but those would be along the lines of say someone who can control temperature learning the blast power to blast people with ice or heat. The same character trying to learn time control... yeeeaaahh, not so much. I'd rather people focus on the few powers they do have rather than dipping into a bunch of different ones trying to make the most mechanically optimized character sheet they can. In the comics, while supers often get better at what they do, they rarely gain brand new spanking powers and when they do it is usually under some very extreme and specific circumstances (i.e. Archangel or Caliban). This is going to be my rationale for character advancement in general. *New feats/new skills/improved skills/extras are generally OK, but get approval first. Not necessarily because I will say no, but some feats or skills might require some kind of training time... you can't just mid fight stand to attention and say "whoah. I know kung-fu." All power point expenditures can only be done in between adventures when you have downtime. One possible exception would be using extra effort to use a feat you don't have and paying a power point to make that feat permanent. Ask me before you do it though. *New flaws/drawbacks will need an in game catalyst. Tell me what you want and I can figure out if it's doable and how. No general rule here, just case by case basis. Same with any and all re-training, though I will be much less flexible here due to the inherent difficulty in "unlearning" things you know. *No, you cannot Hero Point a military chopper, because it is EXTREMELY FUCKING ILLEGAL for a citizen to own such a thing (or rather the rockets and machine guns attached to them.) You would also seriously be breaking character. Yulis has a mission to make a difference in the world and do the right thing... I can't see why he would want to own a creation of such terrible devastation. Even for "defensive" purposes, if robots assault a city would you really open fire on into the crowded streets or possibly miss and blow out the side of a building killing people inside? Not to mention the rubble reigning down on the street. I don't think so, but nice try. *Attributes and combat numbers can be improved via training in between adventures within human limits. 25 is the cap without having to be paranormal. However, getting past 18-19 or so will require a little more explanation, but nothing extreme; just having to spend time focusing on them which could affect your character's personal life in order to reach the pinnacles of physical human achievement. *After 15 total accumulated power points the power level will be raised to 7 which of course raises the limits for how high your power and skill ranks can be. The biggest challenge is going to be ending the campaign. In DnD it's kind of a race to the level cap, and technically there is no level cap in MnM mostly due to the lack of classes. Furthermore, taking a group of characters at power level 6 and building them to power level 15 (Superman level) is going to be very difficult to explain (small time hero who eventually trains to go toe to toe with Thanos unaided. Iceman can't do it, so neither can you.) I'm thinking of maybe going to power level 8 with our current characters and then starting anew at a different power level, but in the same world affected by the actions of your previous characters. That's something we can discuss as a group however.
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Post by Joseph Barros on Jan 3, 2010 0:14:29 GMT -8
Oh yeah and Morph: You can do that, but dirty clothes will still be dirty. Also, I don't want your dupes having that power, so when you make a dupe that dupe will be a dupe of your current physical appearance.
I do have one question though... is morph really what you had in mind for your character concept or are you picking it for optimization reasons? For example, I'm sure Wolverine's creators agree that concealment would be a great power for Wolverine, making him much more powerful... but that's not the concept they had in mind when making him, so no concealment (or flight, or alternate blunted blades, or growth/shrinking, or mind reading etc. etc.) You can do what you want here, but I really want people to get out of the DnD mindset of picking what is going to maximize your numbers and instead go by what fits the concept best.
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