bwdemon

Running a pre-release demo of Hunter for several people, some of which were of the "unwashed gamer" type, one of which was wearing a rancid leather vest (no shirt underneath), on a hot August day... I've been to a lot of conventions, mostly large, and I've been hit by some pretty evil stenches in my time at those, but this was absolutely vile. Needless to say, it was one of the fastest demos I ever ran.

I, personally, liked the movie a lot. However, I will say that I never read the comic and I don't tend to be a psychotic purist, so the more militant among us may or may not care for it... From the view of someone who went into the movie with no idea of what he'd see, I can say I enjoyed it immensely.

My opinion on this is that players can be both number crunchers & roleplayers... the two aren't mutually excludable and some people will truly be neither. Competency (or a lack thereof) does not define the depth of a role or the ability of a player to execute it. That said, I agree that caps on power levels will help somewhat. However, this will allow the number crunchers to diversify, creating characters with fewer deficiencies. So there'll still be a difference, it'll just be in the number of ways that a given character will be useful. One of the things I've toyed with is setting aside points at character generation that *have* to be used on noncombat/background skills. This doesn't hinder well-developed characters at all and it enforces at least a little depth on the worst of the shallow number-crunchers. On the flip side of that, make sure that the roleplayers aren't making superheroes without the "super". If the average VIPER agent is a bigger combat threat than the character, then maybe they should work on that aspect a bit. If they spend all of their points on noncombat powers & skills and whine about someone who put more points into combat powers & skills, then they've got nobody to blame but themselves. They built the character the way they wanted to, after all. Finally, I'd like to add that many roleplayers are as guilty of number-crunching as the worst "Hulk Smash!" brick. I can't begin to tell you how many people I've seen carrying the banner (cross?) of roleplaying while controlling a character with enough social skill to unite the world with nothing more than a smile. These are the characters with 21- skills in things like Oratory, Persuasion, and Seduction. They can get anyone to do anything so long as they can get them to look at or hear them for a couple of seconds. It's incredibly powerful, but in a sneaky way. Do the roleplayers really not know the system or are they just abusing it in a different way?

The government! Nobody can mess with supers like a Senator with a cause. Plus, you've got all the various conspiracy angles, paranoia over superpowers, a massive military, and other goodies that make any government a solid choice.

Under old (2nd edition) autofire/AE rules: 2d6 NND, autofire, AE (radius). The character rarely ever hit with under 6 shots until the thankfully short-lived game ended.

From a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game... GM: "I'm not sure the rest of the Pack will want to contribute as heavily (toward establishing a Pack Totem) as you wish them to." Me: "They will pay homage or they will pay the consequences." From a Werewolf: the Wild West game... GM: "...you are overconfident and arrogant." Me: "It's only overconfidence if I fail. It's only arrogance if I'm not better than you." From my first Vampire: the Dark Ages game and my first experience with White Wolf's games... Me: "Let me get this straight. You want all of us to attack an army of literally hundreds of armed soldiers led by an ancient vampire of untold power and all we get is the five of us and a handful of militia?" GM: "Yes..." Me: "Die alone, suckers!" (my character proceeds to flee with all due haste, nobody ever said Vampire was a heroic game... you can only live forever if you don't get yourself killed!) From a Champions game... Friend: "Shrinking is the best power! My character's unhittable! I bet I can take out Adder (assassin with HKA+Poison attack) easy." GM (playing Adder): "What's your Dex & Spd?" Friend: "23 & 5" (grinning smugly) GM: "Adder has a 24 & 6, so he'll go first" (rolls a 3) Friend: "****!" From that same Champions game... Friend: (just came upon a group of villainous agents) "I've got a DCV of 20, there's no way he'll hit me! I'm going to walk through these guys..." GM: "The first agent tosses a stun grenade." Friend: "......." (that silence was worthy of any quote I've heard. Heheheheh)

I had a friend who performed blatant acts of rules bending/breaking and hid them out of a desire to protect his CharGen secrets. He was a big fan of "Secret Wars" style mass combats, creating characters of a given point base and having them brawl FNAR, an there was no need for a GM (no story), so we made the characters and went on an honor system. Eventually I'd find out what he was doing and show him that it wasn't legal, but until I found out, things were pretty rough. Here's the three worst offenses... First, he thought that density increase added to your figured characteristics. Thinking this, he realized that one level of DI (old rules) was worth negative total points and he went nuts with it, making a character with 20 levels of DI. Before I realized what he was doing, this character found himself KO'd from a round of NNDs from a pack of agents. With 20 levels of DI, we couldn't get enough strength between all of the characters there to pick him up to carry him away from the scene. Next, and this was his most abused effort, he discovered negative figured characteristics. Only one figured characteristic can be negative, but he neglected to remember this and started making characters with CON scores in the thousands. Almost overnight, his roster of characters got WAY more powerful. Eventually, I got him to fess up as to how he did it, showed him the rule, and that was the end of the problem. Finally, I watched him roll his dice one-by-one and toss each successive die at any result that came up a 1 or 2 in order to change the result. As you can guess, this didn't last long either. Though it isn't a rule, it's pretty bad to see someone try to justify this... For all the headaches caused by the above, there were still some good times, so I don't regret it. I just remember them as some of the worst examples of rules interpretation that I'd ever seen.

I was introducing my wife to a Golden Age game and she was learning the character and rules from scratch. At some point, one of the other players started asking me questions about certain powers and among them were questions about enhanced perception powers. My wife suddenly says "do I have super vision?". Her character didn't have any sort of vision enhancements so I said "no", to which she replied... "Sweet! I'm unsupervised!" Maybe it was just because it was late or maybe because of the way my wife said it, but that had us laughing forever!

So sleeeeeeepy... Here's one of my worst from many years ago... Playing a speedster, I came up against a villain named "Sandman". Having been a loyal fan of comics, I assumed he could turn his body into sand and had other similar powers. My character was faster and there was no element of surprise, so I went first. Trying to end this as quickly as possible, I attacked him with four multiple move by attacks right off the bat, hitting with all of them and stunning him. I then learned that his namesake power had nothing to do with sand, but was an always on END Drain (prior to damage shield rules). Four 10d6 END Drains (prior to current Drain rules, really only 5d6 Drains now) later, my character couldn't so much as breathe, let alone fight. That fight taught me not to assume that a similar name means similar powers and to look into reduced endurance occasionally.