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'70s TV Supers


wrestlinggeek

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Re: '70s TV Supers

 

I remeber a couple of Spiderman movies back in the day on TV. But are they from the '70s? And how would you do a stretching character on a '70s tv budget? Or is that impossible?

 

Focus the camera on the actor's hand. Then, while moving the camera physically away from actor, zoom in on the hand so that it appears to get larger. The end results is that it looks (sort of) like the actors arm is stretching towards the viewer. Cheesy, but cheap and relatively easy to do at almost any optical tech level. This technique accounted for most of Reed Richard's "stretching" in Roger Corman's aborted Fantastic Four movie.

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Re: '70s TV Supers

 

Ok. More accurately then: Never intended to be released. It was made only because the studio that owned the rights to make a "Fantastic Four" movie would have lost those rights if it did not begin production by a certain date.

 

It actually wasn't horrible. I've seen Horrible. Come to think of it I do believe I've at various times dated Horrible.

 

~Rex

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  • 3 years later...

I think you could do 70s superheroes just fine on 250 (probably even 150). Everyone has normal characteristic maximum, automatically. It is an absolute cap (no spending double to go past) unless that is your power. Powers are limited to what crappy special effects budgets can show. If you can't think of a suitably cheesy TV show special effect, you can't buy the power. Most opponents are normals, or groups of normals.

 

Most adventures will be fairly mundane. Help little Timmy's family save the farm from an evil banker. Mr. Drithers is going to have the sheriff take Tina's horse. Someone has been kidnapped, etc.

 

Characters shouldn't necessarily be Champions combat efficient (high Dex, enough Con + Def to take a 12D6 attack without being stunned). They are pretty much the only people in the universe who have powers and so won't regularly engage in superpowered combat. Superman could have a 15 Con and 15 r Def and would probably be fine -- he's never gonna get hit for more than 6 or 7D6 anyway. The biggest threat you might face is some guy might drive a car at you. Powers that are noncombat related are probably more common and more useful. Characters should probably have a psych lim "reluctant to change into super ID" (common, moderate) because they usually seemed to stay in normal ID through most of the show. They saved the Hulk transformation (or whatever) for the climax.

 

Players in their 30s may get a kick out of it because we remember those old shows. Younger players might not get the reference, though.

 

My suggestion would be to have players build 50 point "normals" and then give them another 100 to make them super. They shouldn't have to max out Dex and Speed in this campaign, even someone with superspeed might only have a 4 Spd given how they tended to react onscreen. But your NPCs should reflect that as well. An NPC martial arts villain would probably be just fine with a 14 Dex and 3 Spd. This would be a compressed normal stat scale, requiring you to redesign any NPCs you take from traditional HERO supplements, but it would fit well in the "we don't have a fight choreographer" 1970s.

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