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CLOWN for 5th Champions


The Vanguard

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Re: CLOWN for 5th Champions

 

Bad! Bad! Puns are bad!

 

What?! Puns are the highest form of humor! How can you say that?

 

Actually, the Punisher has been a feature of my games for years now, either to give a light hearted session to a serious game or as a major enemy in a silly one. It was eventually revealed to be something like the Enigma Force, with the power possessing random individuals and giving them the ability to reshape reality, if they could come up with a Pun about it. It has no host at the moment, much to everyone's relief.

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Re: CLOWN for 5th Champions

 

CLOWN is only fun to people watching what they do - it isn't funny to those being subjected to thm. CLOWN doesn't just annoy the characters, they make them look and feel like total and complete idiots. It is the sort of behavior that garners more buy-offs of Codes against Killing than anything else.

 

Small wonder CLOWN had such a small following.

 

While this is true to an extent, a careful GM can work that to his advantage. One darkish batman type character IMC became the target for CLOWN (they decided she had no sense of humor). She got very irritated and angry for a while, and then decided to strike back. Broke into thier base, and changed all of thier gimmicks, put comical remarks in all the bedrooms, and reprogrammed the computer. She then hijacked the airwaves with a CLOWN cartoon which made them look stupid. They declared her cured of her lack of sense of humor and much later in the game when a really _serious_ villian was causing her problems she called them into to help humiliate him.

 

But I do agree that kind of situation takes a lot more work by both the GM and Player to pull off. Mostly I use CLOWN as characters that go after NPCs. If the PCs get involved they get a little fun poked at them but not mcuh.

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Re: CLOWN for 5th Champions

 

The last time I used clown something really interesting happened:

 

We had a Cyborg Samuri in the group (With honor codes etc), the character could not stand CLOWN (The player was a good sport).

 

Do to fate Merry Andrews managed to save his life (2 of his hunted had been rolled for this adventure).

 

So at the trial mister serious Samuri felt honor bound to speak on the behalf of the clown...

 

The judge was so touched that he gave Merry a suspended sentence as long as the Samuri would vouch for him...

 

Merry became the team's Monitor Duty/tech guru guy...

 

"We need something to stop grod"

 

Take those three Selzer bottles over there...

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Re: CLOWN for 5th Champions

 

I don't know about the execution, but I miss the idea of CLOWN -- super-powered pranksters who mean no harm but are terribly, terribly inconvenient and have a habit of making their opponents look even sillier than they are. Especially since if a real threat emerges to the world while they are in the midst of one of their pranks, they will drop the prank and help the heroes in surprisingly effective ways -- then turn around and complete the joke once the threat has passed.

 

The thing that makes a group like CLOWn difficult to run is that the jokes have to be funny -- which is a lot harder than it looks. It has to be the sort of thing that the players, even as they wipe the bana cream off their faces, have to admit is funny. it has to be so funny that even the vicitm of the prank must gudglingly admit that a.) it was actually funny and b.) he may have deserved to be taken down a notch after all. the sort of prank that makes the superheor who has gotten too full of his own angst or publicity realize it's time for him to lighten up.

 

These plots are difficult to come up with. On the other hand, I think a good superhero campaign needs that kind of levity once in a while, especially when things have been getting grim and ultra-serious for a while.

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