Agent X

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates What makes you think she'll be 30 hexes away from all of them? She was surrounded... and they have movement powers too.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates No, they don't have to shut the fight down immediately. They have to remove the danger to innocents immediately. You should never be allowed to use the words "in other words" because whatever you say afterwards is incongruous with what your interpreting to mean "in other words". C'mon dude, I'm using a published plot seed. And Gravitar has a certain kind of personality that affects her effectiveness. You have a history of ignoring context and just wanting to read off numbers and pretend that this is a video game where you get to play your side of the video screen in the most strategically/tactically sound method possible. That might work for the Warlord but it doesn't work with Gravitar. Period. As far as Gravitar's obliviousness, she doesn't have any special sensory suite that matters. It's not that hard for an enterprising team of superhero hunters to exploit that. Gravitar has built-in personality traits that can be exploited. Which is very genre. She also has built-in combat weaknesses that can be exploited by the right team of 350 point supers. Nothing you have said can change that. The only person here who seems bound and determined to rewrite Gravitar is you - by ignoring her plot seeds and her psych lims and her goals and her methods and by thinking about what you would do if you had that power. And you don't seem to have much respect for numbers (when it comes to being outnumbered) either. Incredibl's plot made sense. The behavior was genre and it was as reasonable as anything anyone else has suggested and it even paralleled a plot seed, only instead of fighting an ex-lover she's fighting the IHA.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates No. If Gravitar and Holocaust are duking it out, they're really going to be worried about the most dangerous threat to them, which is each other, especially considering that they are angry at each other to begin with. As far as protecting the innocents, they may have already cleared out the closest blocks OR the heroes may just save all those innocent folks first, basically being ignored by Gravitar and Holocaust. Have you ever seen two lovers argue or fight? They often aren't paying much attention to anything else unless someone physically makes them. I can't even believe I have to explain this to you. I have to assume you're just trying to build your best case scenario as the only possible scenario.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Nah, I'm saying the team could ambush her again.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates You're right. They don't have a free ambush. They have a free ambush with Holocaust! distracting Gravitar. Not so sure Holocaust and Gravitar will kiss and make up to fight the good guys. I don't know why you're assuming that is what would happen. And why do you get to decide what is "routine" for Gravitar anyway? She's not so well defined in every area, nor is the game so rigidly plotted out, that a GM couldn't build up that sort of plot concept. The character description does not suggest that this is entirely atypical. Indeed, the fact that it is a plot seed, one of few, would do nothing but suggest otherwise if it suggested anything at all.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates One of 'em was apparently hitting her with mental illusions. Another had an NND that could pop her. How long was the flash messing with her? And what stops them from reforming another ambush? Starting off with another flash attack? What's she gonna do, fly in and fly out when she gets flashed until she doesn't get flashed anymore? That sounds more like someone replaying a level of a video game than roleplaying.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Doesn't sound particularly effective to me.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates CKC p. 159, "...since they [Holocaust and Gravitar] take their anger out on each other by battling in the middle of New York City. The PCs have to stop this "lover's spat.""

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Or that demeaning.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Now, now - no one said rampage like Godzilla. I could swear somewhere there is a plot seed with Gravitar getting in a huge public fight in a city. Might have something to do with Holocaust. I'll try to look it up. And why did you add "randomly" to my question? Why don't you answer the question I asked you instead of twisting it? I really think you're reaching with your position.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates So Gravitar never rampages through cities? 'Cuz that's about the only way for her not to make herself open to a possible ambush like the one Incredibl described.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates I just don't get what is so strongly overconfident about thinking the best tactic to deal with four supers of much less power who have bushwacked me and not done much damage to me but blind me is to use my area affect TK to pin them down. Why should Gravitar assume she can move out of range of their attacks by flying blind into the sky, especially when she has to right herself? Sometimes, when you are at a disadvantage, the least intelligent thing to do is to try to run. Considering the Ambiguity of Gravitar's position, I can't see how her moderate overconfidence wouldn't kick in. Choice 1: Right myself and fly up some. Allow any possible opponents to strike at me unanswered. If they tag me with move throughs or ranged haymakers with me at half dcv, hopefully it won't be enough. I place all the intiative in their hands. Choice 2: Right myself and attack with my area affect attack and place as many possible opponents off-balance as possible. If it doesn't affect some of them, it's sort of the same problem as Choice 1 just not as much, surely some of the enemy will be neutralized. If that happens, hopefully, I can get away next phase somehow. If it works real well, everything is gravy.

Re: Question about 350pt campaign limits... I think it's a poor choice to speed up the game. I'd rather look at the combat rules than set the game up to have a "one-punch" ko become the norm. If you want to speed up the game use more standard effect attacks or get rid of the Post-12 Recovery or the like.

Re: Question about 350pt campaign limits... A caveat on the diminishing returns. If the character has long-range attacks then it takes a while for the OCV to have diminishing returns as it effectively allows the character to pick the "sweet spot" to make it much more difficult for the target to hit him/her. Also, the higher the OCV the more effective any maneuvers that bleed off OCV become like move throughs and rapid fire attacks.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates These are some clues:

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Good Grief! She's not built with the specific adder that is required for her to not have to use a 1/2 phase if she is knocked out of position. Reason to effect is obvious on that - She apparently can lose her composure for 1/2 a second if someone manages to jostle her. As far as the moderate overconfidence... She has to be strongly or totally overconfident to stick around for more than 3 seconds if she gets knocked to the ground, flashed, and takes a little stun?

Re: Question about 350pt campaign limits... I'm not knocking them for other folks. I just don't use "hard" caps. My "soft" caps really aren't "soft caps" - they're more like where I think the norm over the group should be. The gamers I play with, if you give them a "hard" cap of 12DC and 30 pd/30ed and 6 speed what will happen is this: player 1: 12DC, 30 pd/30 ed, 5 speed player 2: 12DC, 30 pd/30 ed, 5 speed player 3: 12 DC, 28pd/25 ed, 5 speed player 4: 11 DC, 30 pd/30 ed, 6 speed player 5: 12 DC, 23 pd/ 30 ed, 5 speed I'd rather see something like... player 1: 17 DC, 15 pd/ 20ed (+20 ed vs. one form of energy), 4 speed player 2: 14 DC, 35 pd/ 20 ed, 4 speed player 3: 12 DC, 25 pd/ 25 ed, 6 speed player 4: 10 DC, 30 pd/ 30 ed, 5 speed player 5: 9 DC, 22 pd/ 20 ed, 8 speed I didn't use combat values in the example but I think you get the idea.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates I'm just trying to candidly point out to you how your behavior is being perceived by others. Read back through these posts and you might pick up that others are hinting at what I've said outright. I can't stop you from badgering someone but I can point it out. Frankly, I think I'm doing you a favor. Not as much of one as if I'd PM'd you but I really don't think you deserve the benefit of that on this thread.

Re: Question about 350pt campaign limits... I like the eyeball approach. If I'm running a game using CU villains from Champions, Champions Universe, Millennium City, and CKC then I tell the players that their characters need to roughly correspond with those 350 (or a little more) points characters in the books. That means abusive builds are right out. What that means is I don't really have a cap or somesuch. What I do have is an eye for how the characters match up with each other and the world around them. That means, range-wise, the group as a whole will average out in the suggested range in the book although they will probably be higher in defense. What does that mean for the villains? It means I might apply a small increase in their defenses to even the score or I might not. Case-by-case I got tired of running games with caps where everybody basically ends up with nearly the same numbers.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates I'd say badgering someone and claiming you know more about how their game works than they do and trashing their players is a personal attack. tr.v. badg·ered, badg·er·ing, badg·ers To harass or pester persistently.

Re: By request: Gravitar vs. Ultimates Why don't you accept the fact that you don't know enough to be this critical? None of your conclusions are solid because you are assuming a whole lot of things out of context. Incredibl doesn't need to write down exhaustive notes about his adventures just so he can justify how things turned out to you before he brings them up as his experiences. And, btw, what you are doing is very much a personal attack. You should back off.

Re: Choking The Life Out Of Someone Don't listen to Steve Long on this one. Many of his rulings strike me as poorly thought out. I get the feeling he doesn't actually use the system in play very much.