Trebuchet

Re: 1905: The New Century Campaign Still going, but Mentor hasn't felt like posting synopses. We've had about a half dozen sessions and hope to squeeze in another one later this month.

Re: Superhero Noir Repped.

Re: Stalin versus Hitler You are joking, right? You don't really think Marx and Lenin weren't fully aware that communism could only be applied by terror? (Their own writings show they understood that ugly truth perfectly well and that caused neither of them an attack of conscience.)

Re: New to Hero System - kind of... Yes, I've even run it in Ubuntu Linux and I know there's a number of board members using it in other versions of Linux. Java 6 is better than Java 5 for running Hero Designer in my experience.

Re: New to Hero System - kind of... You're a very talented artist. You could do well here with some commission work; there's a ton of people here (myself included) with no artistic ability. Welcome back to Hero. There's quite a few of us here who've been playing Champions/Hero since the early 80's, so you're among friends.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Just finished watching/listening to the concert video of one of my favorite albums, Jeff Wayne's fantastic The Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. It featured the London Symphony Orchestra. Until last week, I never knew it had been done as a show.

Re: "Es lebe die Freiheit!"- German Resistance Champions

Re: "Es lebe die Freiheit!"- German Resistance Champions Hitler Youth was mandatory for boys. Membership in Bund Duetsche Madel was not required for young women (ages 10-18) prior to 1939, but it was certainly the norm. Anyone not in it would have attracted attention - not a good idea in Nazi Germany. There were other ways to be exempt from the draft, including being in certain militarily critical industries.

Re: Normal/non-super/average people I've used Hero for non-super for decades (I first decide Hero could do anything when I tried it to build a sage character for a fantasy game instead of AD&D and it worked perfectly). Since then I've used it to do several levels of supers, fantasy, spies, and pulp era. Hero was originally designed to do supers and I think that bias still shows a bit, but I think it'll do almost anything pretty well.

Re: Caps and averages for your campaigns This was our experience as well; which is why when we switched from 4th Edition Hero to 5th we dropped the caps we originally had required. Happily, it increased the diversity in the team; a couple of characters (including mine) actually got slightly weaker in combat.

Re: Caps and averages for your campaigns There were several years in which we only got in one game session. Things have become more regular since about 2004; and we manage 10 or 11 sessions a year now.

Re: Caps and averages for your campaigns Our campaign started in 1992 as a 200 + 150 Disads, but most of the characters now have 60+ XP and one just topped 100 XP. Power creep has been minimal; characters have focused more on broadening combat capabilities (versatility is its own strength) and acquiring useful non-Combat Skills. We don't use caps anymore since we all have a pretty good idea of where our characters should be relative to one another and proposed changes have to be discussed and approved by all 5 GMs, but our averages are about: DEX: 23 (Low 20; high 43) SPD: 5.5 (Low 4; high 9) Active Points: 65 (High 95) Damage Dice: 13d6 (Low 10d6; high 16d6 - Pushing, Haymakering, and/or Move Through not included) Defenses: 26 (Low 12; high 33 and 25% Resistant and Hardened) CON: 25 (Low 18; high 33) We worry more about protecting each others' schticks than the numbers.

Re: "Es lebe die Freiheit!"- German Resistance Champions Neat idea, Herm. I've been reading quite a bit about Nazi Germany lately so I think it'd it would be a natural for a WW2 Champions campaign. I'd call the team White Rose in honor of its first martyr and to honor the real life White Rose group who were murdered by the Nazis for passing out anti-Nazi literature.

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? I finished Saul Friedländer's excellent two books Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939-1945 last week. I'm about halfway through Ian Kershaw's massive 1056 page tome Hitler: A Biography (An abridgement of his two books Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis).

Re: Start of an Alien Invasion My thought would be to leave global communications intact because there's no upside from the GMs point of view to eliminating it. Everything you destroy or disable reduces possible storylines. How will the heroes know the invasion is worldwide and /or find each other if communications beyond the horizon is eliminated? You can always have the aliens discover the mistake later if it becomes necessary.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Mammoth Genome Decoded -- Clones on the Way?

Re: What ratio of superhumans to humans do you use? We figure about 2000 metahumans of all levels - from one-trick-ponies to immortal demigods - so I guess that gives us about a three million to one ratio. The assumption is that at most a few hundred participate in the "superhero/villain" thing; most operate behind the scenes or aren't interested in anything but their own pet projects. That number includes those few using high tech to operate as supers. Guys in less powerful "turtle armor" equivalents or the like are considered police/military assets rather than supers

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Free Strike Why not put on some sort of Limitation that prevents the character from hitting both his original assailant and the new "target(s) of opportunity" in the same Phase? Perhaps it could be a variant of Lockout? That way he "aborts" to attacking only the new target(s)s and has a Power that penalizes Move By/ Move Through/Passing Strike. And of course if the bad guy stays within 6" then the hero can deal with him the old fashioned way.

Re: Free Strike I'd want to know more about the brick in question. If he's that slow, what sfx would let him get in automatic attacks against six attackers (which few high speed characters can do)? Why can't he compensate by Holding, by doing a Move Through with Pushed movement, or buying more SPD and/or Running? Why not use a Ranged attack or buy an AoE with Personal Immunity? Please don't take this the wrong way, but my feeling is that adding Powers simply to compensate for perceived combat weaknesses instead of working within the game to overcome those weaknesses is metagaming.

Re: Nazi Flying Saucers

Re: Shunamitism

Re: Various Powers at Edge of System

Re: Various Powers at Edge of System This so reminds me of the masters of temporal fugue - i.e., short-term time travel - from Roger Zelazny's classic Creature of Light and Darkness. Watching two or more masters of in combat (and perhaps dozens of their other-time duplicates) must have been almost impossible for others to follow.