CU Villains Analyzed and Classified

[Lord Liaden]

18 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

Anyway, when people are done with other discussions I'll move on to the next stage of the analysis. But don't feel pressured; I'm enjoying this, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

Oh, sorry. I forgot you mentioned there was additional analysis. I was about to start another tangent, but it might get too lengthy, and this is your topic. For my part I can wait, and your stuff is nearly always thought-provoking. Please, analyze away.

[steriaca]

7 hours ago, DShomshak said:

I think CLOWN was a fundamentally bad idea. One prankster villain, okay, it's a classic type. A whole team? With enough points lavished on them to make them quite likely to win confrontations, at least in the old 250-character point days? No, I don't think so.

Nothing says you have to use CLOWN as a group. You could always have Merry Andrews over here, Fox of Crime over there, April Foolmaker down south, Balloon-A-Tick up north, Slapstick in Hawaii, and Tee-Hee wherever the open road will lead it.

 

In other words, it's your game. You don't HAVE to keep the team together if you don't want to. (Also, you don't have to use the team at all, or even as written, but that is a given anyways).

[Duke Bushido]

3 hours ago, steriaca said:

Nothing says you have to use CLOWN

 

I think stopping there makes this better.   :D

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DShomshak]

Oops, bad timing. Eyes burning; think it's pinkeye; will try to get to Urgent Care to see if there's anything I can do that I'm not doing already. I'll be out at least a day, so tangent away until theDean Shomshak

[Duke Bushido]

Until the Dean Shomshack _what_, exactly?!

 

("Gets cured" is high on my hope list, but I just need to be sure...)

 

 

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

Get well soon, brother. 👁️

[Ninja-Bear]

52 minutes ago, DShomshak said:

Oops, bad timing. Eyes burning; think it's pinkeye; will try to get to Urgent Care to see if there's anything I can do that I'm not doing already. I'll be out at least a day, so tangent away until theDean Shomshak

Foxbat strikes again!

[Lord Liaden]

Tangent it is, then. 🚀

 

I'm wondering whether any of you have made significant modifications to the backgrounds of any of the published CU characters to fit them into your own campaign worlds; or conversely, if you modified characters from other sources to make them fit any version of the Champs Uni?

 

For my part, I've often brought characters from earlier editions of Champions into my somewhat-altered-CU games. Previously on this thread I mentioned the 4E heroes Myrmidon and Quasar, and how I made them members of official alien races. Elsewhere on the forums I've discussed adapting the Seven Horsemen, from Wrath of... , by changing the Old Ones from that adventure module to the Elder Worm. The Worm's Lovecraftian style, and the timeline of their involvement in prehistoric Earth, make them a near-perfect fit, and the various published iterations of Slug can provide just about any level of challenge you want for your PCs. And heck, Fear the leader of the Horsemen even wields a magic Worm Scepter!

 

I wanted to add specific defined lieutenants for Takofanes so that PCs could oppose his plans without having to be experienced enough to face the Archlich himself. I culled supernatural villains from various Champs sources, one example being Mordeki the Unspeakable, the undead knight who in Classic Organizations is a member of 4E DEMON's Inner Circle. It was simple to move his era of origin to the Turakian Age, and to say that the evil he pledged himself to in his grief over the death of his love, was Kal-Turak/Takofanes. Mordeki is one of the very few servants of the Ravager of Men to survive to the modern era.

 

I also made The Baron, aka Baron Jean de Lear, from The Mutant File, a lieutenant of Takofanes. I never thought that that powerful vampire fit comfortably with the anti-mutant org Genocide. However, his motivation in serving the Undying King is essentially the same: position himself in the coming war between humans and, in this case, Takofanes, so he can jump to the winning side. One change I did make was to declare the Baron's real identity is Jean de Morphant, one of only two survivors of that ancient occult lineage, along with his distant cousin Giles de Morphant, aka the Black Paladin.

 

I brought Malais the Dragon, from Champions: The New Millennium, into Takofanes' circle. I decreed him to be the brother of Brangomar the Shadow Queen, who helped her conquer her Shadow Realm in the dimension of Faerie. But Brangomar tricked and betrayed him, imprisoning him in a cave in Faerie. Takofanes found Malais and freed him, promising to help him get revenge on the Shadow Queen, in exchange for his service. (BTW Malais and Mordeki get along like peas in a pod. Neither is a stranger to dragons or undead knights.)

 

Per his 5E/6E write-up the undead that Takofanes can Summon top out at 800 CP. While thumbing through my copy of Adventurers Club #13, I noticed that the supernatural monster called Crypt is also 800 points. Crypt is described as a type of undead, but resembles no creature from any folklore known to the modern world. 💡  Crypt is a literal combat monster, but comes with some pretty severe Disadvantages/Complications that knowledgeable or observant players can use against him. So I made the creature an example of Tak's top-of-the-line conjured undead, which I named "Ravagers" in his honor.

 

Okay, enough blathering about the sorts of things I did. Any adaptation stories of your own you want to share?

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I rebuilt Genocide into a more general 'against everyone who doesn't fit the plan' extremist racist group rather than just anti-mutant.  I haven't actually used much from the CU villains roster, because long before I got into champions I had a superhero universe I and my brother were creating together with the Seattle-based Guardians team as its center.

[Duke Bushido]

Just Foxbat and company.  I have already been over that ?hopefully in this thread).

.they are rhe only published characters I have ever used, so...

 

 

[steriaca]

Tiger has reworked GENOCIDE into The Purity Knights. Basically the Knights and Rook Robots have analogs in GENOCIDE, while the leadership is different (basically the leadership has changed from super beings in hiding [one hidden mutant, one vampire, and a few normal humans] to humans with skills and equipment able to face supers in combat). Basically the same group (not going the IHA route in case you wish to use them also in your campaign), but different leadership. 

[Lord Liaden]

Yeah, I stripped out the vampire, secret mutant, and anti-Wakandans from the leadership, and stuck with the White King and Black Queen. They fit the normal-human-with-tech motif of the rest of Genocide. I kept the Pure Earth Society from The Mutant File, and added the Institute for Human Advancement, as fronts and lobby groups to advance Genocide's broader agenda. I know a lot of Champs gamers object to the name "Genocide" as too big a turnoff to recruitment, but these front groups present a more benevolent face, and a filter to find those truly committed to "the cause," who can be inducted into the true organization. For fanatics, "genocide" perfectly sums what they believe mutants will do to them, unless they do it to mutants first. And to be frank, the last few years have demonstrated that fanaticism sells much more widely in the West than we used to think.

[Lord Liaden]

Going back over your initial categories, Dean, I have to quibble with your analysis of "cyborgs."

 

* CYBORGS started out as normal people but gained powers by having bits added to them. Usually tech but I extend the concept to magical additions (such as a magical gem permanently affixed to the character’s body) or other surgical modification. Examples: Interface, Fiacho, Cairngorm, Howler.

 

It seems to me that including magic types such as Cairngorm infringes on another of your categories:

 

* ENCHANTED characters were given powers by magic: a curse, a spell cast upon them, a magic potion, or the like. Examples: The Basilisk, Black Fang, Harpy.

 

Cairngorm is not an ideal example, because since the Earth Gem which gives him much of his power can't be taken away from him, in that regard there's no practical difference between him and supers empowered by a spell or potion. Consider that Takofanes' magic crown and scepter can't be taken from him, either. Does that make him a cyborg too?

 

I would argue that the cyborg category is so closely associated with technology in precedent and popular conception, magic doesn't really fit with it, even magic that's grafted onto a person. Especially if you assert a separate classification for enchanted characters.

[Ninja-Bear]

To LL last question, I’ve updated the Geodesics and added a new member Manifold a stretcher. I also updated Sledge at one point too. I’ve also reworked, wait for it, several martial artists for a more Street Level game. In that I made the Tombstone Kid just living.  He styles himself as a gunslinger from the Old West but basically he unchanged. And he worked for El Captitan. 

[DShomshak]

The limits of cyborgs:

 

I won't argue that the boundaries have to be exactly where I drew them. This is also, btw, relevant for the Robot/Construct category, and for the same reason: I decided to privilege the quality of "builtness" aspect over the "tech or magic" aspect. But I do see the argument the other way. In which case the two CU characters I classified as magical constructs -- Corundum and Oubliette -- become supernatural beings, while, yes, Cairngorm and Evil Eye are filed under Enchanted. The enchantments just happen to be concentrated in artificial and physically distinct bits that are at least theoretically separable.

 

(And I might have classified Tak as a magical cyborg for the Dragon Crown, except I did try to keep power origin categories down to 2 -- not counting Mastermind or Alien -- by focusing on the most important powers. And the Dragon Crown, for all its presumed importance as one of the Crowns of Krim, doesn't do more than Aid mgic that is already ridiculously powerful. And the Scepter of the Undying King is just a special effect, since it can't be taken from Tak even in principle. So I just file Tak under Supernatural Being, Sorcerer and Mastermind. YMMV.)

 

Oubliette, btw, was one of the more difficult choices for me. Corundum's entry clearly calls "her" a golem. But Oubliette, though called out as an artificial being, seems more like a spirit in many ways. Conversely, suppose Takofanes calls up a few damned souls, shreds them and melts the tatters into a new demon that will follow all the rules for demons from then on, including the potential to be Summoned? Built, in a sense, but in that case I think I'd file the character as a Supernatural Being. <shrug> Edge cases, man. Though one can sometimes generate interesting characters specifically by seeking edge cases.

 

Incidentally, cyborgs -- whether one insists on pure tech or not -- are another case where the CV books seem oddly deficient. I remember Marvel having entire teams of bionic villains; and there were quite a few pre-5th ed Champions villains to draw upon, IIRC.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

PS: Thanks for the kind wishes, my eyes feel much better now, thanks to antibiotics.

[Lord Liaden]

Yup, 4E Champions had cyborg villain teams too: Cyborgs Inc. served VIPER, while the aforementioned Doc Digital created or subverted cyborgs for his Cy-Force.

 

My favorite concept for this type of villain came out of Scott Heinie's adventure module, To Serve and Protect, which gave us the Protectors (still my favorite published Champions NPC hero team). Psi-Borg was a mentalist's brain in a robot body, making him both physically and psychically powerful. It would seem a natural concept for a comic-book villain, but I can't recall one quite like it from either DC or Marvel.

 

Why would Oubliette not count as an artificial being because she's a spirit? Why must artificing be confined to physical materials? This is a comic-book universe. The genre routinely transcends the boundaries of what's possible in the real world, so it stands to reason that commonly-assumed categories of labeling would often be inadequate.

[Lord Liaden]

One thing I'm struck by for the characters created or overseen by Steve Long, is that a great many of his supervillains became villains as a result of some traumatic origin that completely changed their personalities. I don't mean in the sense of a personal tragedy that warped them emotionally. I mean something that physically altered the way their brains work. Maybe it's my drama background, but I find the most interesting and compelling characters are those with a through-line to their stories. I want to understand the steps in their lives that led them to become the heroes or villains that they are. That helps a great deal in truthfully playing them, or in the context of gaming, role-playing them.

 

There are many elements of Steve's game writing that I very much admire, but I can't help seeing this aspect of his characterization as rather lazy. I don't know whether this element doesn't interest him, or if he just doesn't think about characters that way. Either one could explain what I consider his most notable non-character, Doctor Destroyer. As presented first in Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks, DD can be summed up as, Power, Intellect, and Arrogance. There really isn't anything more to him, no depth or shadings. I looked forward to Book Of The Destroyer adding some role-playing meat over those megalomaniacal bones, but Albert Zerstoiten's ego and ambition seemed to be fully formed at childhood, like Athena emerging full-grown from the brow of Zeus. BOTD is full of missed opportunities. Zerstoiten's parents each get one scene from when he was a boy, then are never mentioned again. No mention of any romantic involvement over his lifetime. He was the youngest student at university, coming from a poor background, but we're to believe he was never bullied? Serving under the Nazis had no effect on his thinking about humanity? When he discovers the Vale of Javangari, and the natives worship him as a god, his thoughts amount to, "That's how it should be."

 

Not that I'm trying to suck up to Dean because it's his topic , but his character creations almost always have a story behind them, and origins with some sort of emotional impact in the classic comic-book sense. You can follow why they've come to think and act the way that they do. For my part I find that sort of character more interesting and compelling than "Brain-Damage-Man."

[Christopher R Taylor]

I never cared that much about going deeply into the villains of the story.  If I were to write a book, sure, but just running a game: here's the bad guy, some notes on personality and behavior, lets go.  Certainly none of my players ever cared.

[Lord Liaden]

Decades ago I ran the original Island of Doctor Destroyer for my game group, but embellished it with more background info provided by UNTIL about DD, and more interaction with him remotely, before the final confrontation. I included the PCs getting Zerstoiten's mistress at the time, Countess Natasha Alexandrovna, to cooperate with them against Destroyer.

 

Almost a (real world) year later, I ran Scott Bennie's Day of the Destroyer which is in some ways a sequel to that adventure. As GM I relished the horror when the PCs discovered Alexandrovna's body, which DD had taxidermied and mounted like a manikin. I don't think the payoff would have been as rich if I hadn't laid ground work with them for who and what Doctor Destroyer really is, and what you risk when you cross him.

[Ninja-Bear]

17 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

I never cared that much about going deeply into the villains of the story.  If I were to write a book, sure, but just running a game: here's the bad guy, some notes on personality and behavior, lets go.  Certainly none of my players ever cared.

I always liked the original Enemies Books. Roughly a paragraph or two and the villains are given enough background to run.

[Duke Bushido]

20 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

One thing I'm struck by for the characters created or overseen by Steve Long, is that a great many of his supervillains became villains as a result of some traumatic origin that completely changed their personalities. I don't mean in the sense of a personal tragedy that warped them emotionally. I mean something that physically altered the way their brains work.

 

Getting into "personally uncomfortable" territory here, Sir.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

20 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

There are many elements of Steve's game writing that I very much admire, but I can't help seeing this aspect of his characterization as rather lazy.

 

If you had asked me as recently as an hour ago, I would have told you that I could not imagine myself defending Steve's ideas about HERO and Champions.

 

Now before any Muskrat-esque condemnation of me starts again:

 

I am _not_ denigrating_ what Steve has done.  I am not blasting it, insulting it, or anything else.  I realize that in this general ambivalence about what Steve has done with the properties has not stopped me,from being dumped on for not being a rabid fanboy of it, which leads me,to wonder why I bothered with the disclaimer once again.

 

 

Okay, so for total disclosure:  

 

I have never kept secret that I don't like the bulk of what Steve has done to the game and to the setting, even goinf back to his earliest stuff back in 4e.  I am _ambivalent_ about it, though, because I know I don't have to use or even to accept it.  I make my purchases because I want to do what I can to support the company as best I am able.  I will continue to do so as I can even if Steve is the only guy who ever writes for it again.

 

Not liking something is not the same as hating it.  I understand that there is an increasingly-large percentage of western culture that has lost the ability to understand that there are more than two positions- worship or destroy- on any given thing.  It's a shame, but I am not here to address that.

 

I also want to point out that while I do _not_ like what Steve has done, I still very much _appreciate_ what he has done: if only for a few more years, he kept the game alive; he injected fresh life and fresh ideas and even got the game back in front of the gaming audience for a while.  No one else had done it in a couple of decades.  He slowed the death spiral, at least for a moment.

 

All that being said, I have to defend this "lazy writing" technique of someone having their brain altered and becoming evil.

 

First:  a small number of people here today are still here from the time i opened up about this:

 

Ir happened to me. I had a traumatic head injury that resulted in a complete personality overhaul (and considerable difficulty in judging the passing of time.  Can't have a total win, I guess).  If the mods will forgive this:

 

Once upon a time, I was a straight up "unforrunately our content filters will not allow you to honestly describe yourself."  There were probably all kinds of influencing factors from my life that combined to result in that, but let's not play Freud right now: I was a self-centered, spiteful, hateful, violent bastard who may or may not have had a deathwish. (For the record, in spite od being acused of it, I never saw it that way.  I just wanted to keep pushing- pushing every thing, all the time, until the universe submitted, and I did not care how big the challenge was.  I only tell you that as someone may be wondering what goes through the head of someone accused of having a 'deathwish;'  it was, for me, nothing more or less that deciding that God Himself was going to have learn his place in the pecking order.)

 

In defense of Steve:

 

Right off the bat, we know that this is quite possible.  I am not the only case of getting new life through brain damage.  Typically, it _does_ go the other way: subjects lose emotional empathy; some lose the ability to experience sociable emotion at all.  Sociopathy has been reported to develop, and the tendency for recurring violent and tantrums are know to be life-long results of brain trauma.  Certainly, there are many other outcomes- I went the exact opposite direction, for example, and the fast majority lose some degree od higher brain function- maybe just a don't bit (say the inability to remember if something was last week or last month or last year, like yours truly here.  (Dont fret:  I have learned a lot of tricks that make this much less problematic than it once was. ))

 

The General trend, though, is results that are to varying degrees detrimental to the individual.  

 

The second most common outcome is detrimental to society: loss of empathy, loss of an ability to maintain or even formulate attachments, all the way to becoming routinely violent, combative, and solipsistic.  Sociopathy, as stated above, is a known (if less-likely) outcome.

 

Now these are from,"real world" causes of physical change to the brain, the staggering majority of which can be lumped into the category of "skull pinata"-  massive or repeated blows to the head resulting in blunt force trauma to the brain.

 

There is also piercing of the brain (bullets, knives, bits of pipe, railroad tamping rods, and what-have-you.  Anyrhing that manages get physically into the brain that probably shouldn't be there- tumors are in this category as well).

 

Then we have changes inbthe brain brought about  by prolonged psychological factors such as routine abuse, long-term job stress, and myriad other things.  These we are more familiar with resulting in psychotic episodes or "breaks" such as the infamous post-officw massacre from which we derived "going postal" and still mock the term "disgruntled" somethinf on the order of three decades later.  

 

More common than breaks, however, is nothing.  That is, no massive release.  The brain changes slowly; the peorsonality is subsumed,and altered quietly, and the subject lives forever in misery.  We tend to say "quiet misery," but this isbonly to make ourselves feel,better about looking agter our fellow man, because few of these subjects do not find relief in creating patterns of abuse and ill-will to those around them.  Perhaps it would be better-termed "quiet violence."  As horrible as it is to accept, those who have a single,violent break are much healthier inbthe mind, and more likely to be treatable: their survival mechanism- though admittedly poorly- has made an effort to effect a change to make their encironment more positive.  Those who don't will continue to get worse, and never come up on the radar as needing help.

 

We as a society _really_ dont want to admit that the guy who "went postal" was likely the most sane person ("most sane" is not the same as "sane;" let's notbput words in my mouth) in such a situation because that would require us to admit that not only has society failed that person, but that it failed far, far more far, far worse, and somethinf should be done.  We are busy, and don't really want to take on anything else right now.  As long as the suffering is silent, there is no problem, right?

 

Again, these are the real-world causes of physical changes to the brain that result in alterations to personality.  There are lesser-studied sources: pollutants, chemicals (outside of recreational drugs and some anti-psychotic, of course), heavy metals, and so on.

 

Steve is writing about a stylized comic book universe where brainwashing works perfectly and the Manchurian Candidate is real.  He is writing about  magic that recreates anything on a whim, hypnosis makes a soft VOOO-vooo-VOOO-vooo-VOOO sound when the enslaved character walks past the camera, and a small vial of serum turns cowardly Albert Snapankles into the hulking stone-jawed Captain Courageous, defender of the downtrodden and hero of the people.

 

Accidents result in super powers.  Doctor Pilsby stands before a rack of OSHA-violatingly-stored and uncataloged chemicals, which explode and bathe him in an unknown mixture of.. Well, all of rhem, yet he does not lose his face and massive chunks of flesh to acidic dissolution; no!  He gains the abilty to read minds, peer through walls, and implant his will directly into the minds of others.

 

Terry Hawthorne goes for a dirtbike ride through the desert and takes a shortcut across that old "abandoned" 1952 airforce base only to find himself at the center of a nuclear explosion!  Yet he isn't  vaporized!  Instead, he rides out from the other side of the explosion astride a mechanical tyranosaurus, built from the wreckage of his bike and the bomb through sheer force of will and his new cyberkineric superpower!  How is he foinf to explain to his mom that the green probably isn't going to wash off?

 

 Lance Valiant is bitten by a snake during a drug binge while on a camping trip, yet he doesn't die a horrible, painful,death.  Instead the venom interacts with the various drugs and mushroom toxins and he gains super-powers!  He can spray a sleep-inducinf neurotoxin from his eyes, spit the most powerful acid known to man, and melt his legs into a twenty-foot serpent's tail  that lets him race across the ground at over one hundred miles per hour!

 

A baby alien crash lands on earth, and rather than dying because our atmosphere is phlogiston-poor, he discovers that the phlogiston of his native world works to supress his native superpowers!  Against all odds, he looks exactly like us, too!  Of only there was some way for him to learn how to-  holy crap!  An older couple- in mid-lament of their childless marriage, no less!- just happens to be passing right at this moment!  They instantly adopt this godlike infant, and,somehow they manage to raise him without accidentallycgetting killed by a temper tantrum.  Not only that, but he understands that he must willingly let his tormentors torture him (and he must also really,want to save these horriblenpeople when they are in danger-you know: because he is the only,one who can keep his personal,demons alive, even though no one would fault a 'mere,huma' for being unable to save them) -- somehow they instill morals so powerful that space Jesus doesn't take over the world in a fit of teenage angst.

 

And so on, and so forth. 

 

What I am getting at here is that it is impossible to overstate just how stylized and 'perfect' the comic book world is---

 

But there are criminals and plots and misdeeds at every turn---!

 

Yes.  And there are _always_ super heroes on the case, just in the nick of time,  to thwart them over and over and over again, because it is a stylized and perfect universe.  Even those "big looming plota that threaten us all" like the anti-mutant thing and...  Crap!  Who was that oil company that Iron Man used to fight all the time?   They made that goon squad of snake people....

 

Anyway, even those threats are completely static.  They never get better; they never get worse.  They just _are_.  Galactus never eats the earth, and he never stops trying.  The fiant robots-with-watchcaps never kill all the mutants, and the powers that be never stop funding them.  Tony Stark loses his company, and,he gets it back.  Superman dies, but only for little while.

 

(For what it is worth, the constant mandate to return everything to this idyllic status quo is one of the larger turn-offs for me with regard to  the supers genre.  There are others, but that status quo thing is maddening.)

 

 

 

 

Thus far, we have established brain trauma creating villains is, at least in theory, quite plausible on the outside fringes of the results-of-brain-damage diagram.

 

We have established that rhe comic book universe is heavily idealized.

 

I think we can take it as given that thw Champions Universe we know and some,of you love today is in its entirety the creation of Steve Long. 

 

Something that we don't discuss a lot here is the shift in our social attitudes about bad guys.  We have discussed  it with regard to Fantasy more than anything- we all seem,to be happy with the shift away from the concept of "evil by nature" as applied to "evil races" and,"good races."  Once upon a time, we were perfectly with "all orcs are evil."

 

The thing is, culturally, we know that evil exists, but we also grew up, and we finally understood that the filundamental - well, not even a flaw, not even a mistake, but the evil inherent in the assumption that evil is tied to ethnicity.

 

We grew up, and we are still growing.  As there are daily fewer people our age and even fewer older, we dont really appreciate (or notice) that we are still growing.

 

 

Now all this beinf taken into a single conversation on a single topic: 

 

Steve is a modern person with all that entails.  He is a comic book fan, an,RPG fan, and by all accounts I have ever heard, a genuinely likeable person.

 

He has created a comic book universe- stylized universe with clear cut good and evil and an overall status quo of "things are okay; people are generally decent."

 

It is _hard_ to breathe life into something and not, on a level, come to love it.  You create a character, and you like him.  His sesrint is to,be a villain.  As you develop him, you realize that you don't like that he is desrined to be a villain.,,you feel that. You are doing him wrong; you don't want this to be his fault.

 

Make it not his fault.

 

You can go the "life of trauma" route, but it is overdone, and in truth, it has become as tedious as evil races.  Sure, we know thatvlife of trauma is a real thing, but at this point we have been aware of it real-world long enough that we know we don't get world conquerors; we get school shooters.  We don't get criminal kingpins, we get serial killers. 

 

Worst of all, we know that the majority of people in these circumstances dont react this way, and that they are not beyond help.  

 

In short, we have matured enough that it only works in a stylized idylic world when used _very_ sparingly.  Even then, we as an audience are more inclined to expect that character to be a goon of some sort, even if he has powers.  We _want_ that villain to be a goon of some,sort: not clever enough to get help; not motivated enough to be his own person.

 

Why?  For whatever reason, that _satisfies_ us.  Is it the fate we wish on our own tormentors?  Does it reflect what we, as we have grown, have done with the worst of ourselves within ourselves?  Locked the bits of ourselves we have abandoned into,the dead-end of,non-existence in the backs of our minds?

 

Or does it just makenit easier to ignore that the problems,that creatwd rhis villain are _real_ problems ans that we are _still_ more comfortable not axknowledfinf that?

 

Better for the audience to avoid it; better to give him,someone who ultimately is the victim   od something _totally_ out of his control, something he could not be expected to have had diagnosed and to have worked out in therapy.

 

Also, there is fascination-of-the-moment.  Not the best term,  but it works well enough.  

 

It is a term for "getting wrapped up in the exploration of an idea."   Let's look at my earliest super characters.  After my first character (a brick), I went for a couple of years where all my supers- all of them- where powered armor users.  Why?  I was not a comic book kid, and I was really uncomfortable with the "I was bitten by a radioacrive chemistry set and now I can fly and breathe fire."  Technological sources were much more palatable to me then.  Even after powered armor they tended to be gadget users of some sort 

 

From there I went to "magic amulets" (fantasy gadgets)  rhen to aliens.  It seemed,more reasonable to me that aliens should have unusual abilities than it did that they would look like humans: i had a harder time making them humanoid than I did giving them telekinesis.

 

_eventually_ I got comfy with xomic tropes, but it took aomethinf on the order of decade.

 

I am not saying that this is what what ia going on with a guy who has been doing superheroes for decades, but at them moment, all other factors _outside_ of supercillainy considered, it might just be that this is an idea he is currently,stuck on exploring until he is comforrable with other reasons for an idylicly-stylized character to become "evil."

 

 

Now:

 

As I have said, I dont like the vast majority Steve's contributions to the game, rules, included. 

 

I have done all of this to defend his choices.

 

I hope his few Muskrats here will leave me alone about not liking his stuff.

 

I still appreciate that he did do _something_ when no one else did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

Duke, first of all, If what I wrote hurts you personally in some way, I deeply apologize. I in no way intended to trivialize real people who have experienced personality changes as a result of brain damage from physical trauma. I'm very aware that that happens, much more often than most people realize. And let me be clear, I don't deny that such a traumatic alteration could potentially turn a person psychotic or sociopathic or "evil." There are many supervillain examples from comics, like Two-Face and Dr. Octopus. These characters often started out as notably good people, and the fact their goodness became so twisted through no fault of their own adds to the character's tragedy.

 

My objection isn't that Steve Long uses that plot point for a villain's origin. It's that he uses it so frequently. I characterize it as "lazy" (while certainly not calling Steve lazy -- his work ethic is legendary) because it obviates the need to build a background that logically leads to a person becoming a villain. Why bother, when everything they were and all they went through gets washed away in a moment? This one thing happened, and now they're evil. Now where's the next villain?

 

Your point about a creator loving their characters doesn't inevitably lead to them doing this out of love. Creating a villain with understandable motivations based on their life experience, with a logic behind their actions that you can recognize, even relate to, IS an act of love. Yes, it requires more time and effort, but that effort has produced some of fiction's most memorable villains. As the old saying goes, people like the guy in the white hat, but they love the guy in the black hate. Love to hate, perhaps, but love nonetheless.

 

Now, following some of the implications of your arguments, I could see someone claiming Steve is actually denigrating people with a trauma-induced mental illness by making so many of them villains. I would not be that person. I don't see Bruce Banner/Hulk as slurring people with multiple personalities, or Dr. Doom those with facial scarring, or the Kingpin fat people. It has to be dealt with and viewed on a case-by-case basis, preferably by making the victim someone who clearly did not deserve it to add that indisputable tragic dimension. I would just have preferred that Steve didn't make so many of those cases.

[Duke Bushido]

Two things:

 

No; you didnt bother me.  As one of the people who was already aware of it, I figured you'd get the ribbing.  I missed.

 

It doesn't bother me because I got lucky: I became a _better_ person; I won the lottery.  Can't be upset about that. 

 

 

Second:

 

As,you said, _you_ don't see a thing to be insulting a given group.

 

_I_ dont see it, either.

 

Probably lots of people don't.

 

It is a distinct possibility that a lawyer is aware of other potential problems, though, as he writes for a small cash-strapped company.

 

 And, as also offered, it is also qyite possible that he is going through his "powered armor" phase right now.  That it is something that he is enjoying playing with- or at least was, at the time of the writing. 

 

I can't fault him for that, either.

 

 

Now I have seen people in the past discuss changes they have made to published villains (quite recently, in fact) to make them more to their liking.  I have been cajoled,for stating that i only buy a single published villain book to have as examples of character building, because I dont generally like Steve's published characters.  I was told how easy it was,to make them something I _do_ like.

 

Brain remodelling is easy enough to remove:  have them be born evil, if you prefer.  Or mistreated, or natural psychopaths- whatever.

 

Or go my route and don't buy them.

 

But then you lose the right to complain when more of them,dont get published.   

 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I don't think the payoff would have been as rich if I hadn't laid ground work with them for who and what Doctor Destroyer really is, and what you risk when you cross him.

 

I agree, but I don't think that requires a multi-page writeup of how he stubbed his toe as a kid and learned to hate concrete.  This gets into the nature vs nurture argument (are bad people bad because they have bad influences or does it come from within?) but I think its good to have bad guys who are just bad, for the good guys to defeat.  I mean, this is a hobby we play once a week at best for most people, a few hours at a time.  Its a time to escape and have fun, and while every so often having a moral challenge is an interesting twist, nobody games to be miserable, conflicted, morose, or wracked with guilt.

 

Bad guys being good guys might make for good storytelling or movie making -- or not, as the case may be -- but it doesn't necessarily make for good gaming fodder.  The goals are different; I'm not playing the hero in a movie, so seeing them deal with the problem can be entertaining or even instructive.  In gaming its almost always wish fulfillment and escape.  Your gaming group may vary, of course.

[DShomshak]

Back from the weekend's gaming!

 

One consequence of this project was that I had to actually *read* all the villains' origin stories. And yes, many of them were a bit repetitive. However, I won't blame Steve Long for that because I don't know how many characters he created specifically for those three books.

 

Perhaps oddly, considering I tend to go into my villains' histories and personalities more than perhaps many readers care, I am completely okay with a basic "Person gets powers and becomes a criminal." It probably says something unpleasant about me, but I find it *entirely plausible* that many, perhaps a majority, of people would become criminals if they suddenly found they could do whatever they wanted and almost nobody could stop them. Hummingbird is my favorite, paradigmatic case for this: Her telepathic and mind control powers appeared when she was a teenager, and she did what most teenagers would do with such invasive powers. Or at least as teenagers are often portrayed.

 

It's the *heroes* who I think need greater care in explaining why they risk their lives to fight the villains. But that is another topic, worthy of its own thread.

 

I am more dissatisfied with the sheer repetition of origin stories. Yet another explosion in the lab or exposure to toxic waste... Sure, they're classics, but for me they slide from "trope" to "tiresome" when I see them all together. I am sure it doesn't feel that way to players in actual games since, as Chris Taylor observes, the players often don't care. But it's also why I atgtempted the "Shared Origins" project: origins that had a *reason* to happen over and over again.

 

Anyway, I hope I soon have time to move on to the next stage of analysis. Honest, I do have something. I hope other people find it interesting.

 

Dean Shomshak