Unfortunate Character Choices - Sledge

This week: another supervillain from 1982's "Enemies" supplement for Champions. The awesome concept making this villain worthy of a place in a supervillain supplement? He, uh, lost a hand and replaced it with a sledgehammer. Yep, that's it.

Now I kind of like the idea of the hammer-handed-hero (or villain) but everything about this one from the illustration to the mechanics is lame. Technical issues:

• You have a hammer for a hand. What does that do for you in-game?  According to this it adds 2d6 to your Strength damage. With a 50 Str he already punches for 10d6, so the hammer takes it to 12d6, and that's it - no enhanced knockback, no armor-piercing, no extra Stun multiplier, no area effect slam or shockwave - it's just a rather weak damage bump. Wow.
• Speaking of that 50 Str, where does that come from? He can lift 25 tons - he didn't get that from an NFL workout program, I don't care what kind of drugs he was on! Was it part of the experiment that took his hand? It doesn't say. Having a 50 Str is a far more important and life-changing ability than having a hammer for a hand, yet we don't learn a thing about it in the paragraph of description that we get here. 
• Does replacing your right hand with a block of metal have any downside? Not according to the stat sheet. It offers no physical limitation (the most obvious disad) but it does generate a 15-point psych limit of being sensitive to insults about it.   
• His other disads are just random - double Stun from sonics, explosions, vibration, and radiation attacks? Why? How are those things related? A pair of Hunteds, OK. Then, of course, Secret Identity - Really? How exactly? He's a big bad dude missing his right hand and he somehow maintains a secret ID? Being generous, we can assume the hammer unscrews or something but what if it didn't? Does he work as a pirate mascot of some kind? This is just really not well thought-out.

So let's see what kind of thought went into attacks and defenses. A 12d6 hammer-slap against himself would  do an average of 12 Body and 42 Stun. His PD of 25 (another unexplained ability) will stop the Body and let through 17 Stun. With a Con of 28 he's not going to Stun himself and with 53 Stun he can take 3 punches before he's in trouble. That's not terrible. In Champions a 50 Str is a typical starting point for a "Brick" character so he's alright there. He's in serious trouble though if he gets attacked by a Sonic or Radiation blaster though - ED of 15 and 2X Stun means that a 12d6 EB would inflict 54 Stun (Average 42 Stun, 27 get through his energy defense which is then doubled) knocking him unconscious in one shot. That's pretty weak for a Brick type character. I've noticed a lot of this in older Champions write-ups - there are way too many 2X Stun vulnerabilities tossed around, especially on characters with low defenses.

So yes, I think this is a rather weak character though not as ridiculous as some (Frizbe). How could we make it better?

1. Better illustration
2. Make the hammer matter. Give it a shock effect, maybe a 3d6 NND Stun attack. Make it armor-piercing vs. power armor suits and let him be a nemesis for your battlesuit player . Give him extra knockback from a wallop. Anything to make him a more memorable and more effective villain. 
3. Give him a little bit more background. Many of the baddies in this book are tied to Viper or some evil organization - tie him to those and make him an enemy of them so you can set up an enemy-of-my-enemy situation with the PC's. 

For Atomic City I would probably recast him as a  cyborg and replace his whole arm with an obvious chromed replacement and something like a thunderhammer from Warhammer 40K The pro-athlete burnout/accident victim who seeks alternative means of power could work just fine as a superhero or villain. It just needs more than this guy got in 1982.