sinanju

Re: Most PCs... Yeah, I love MPs and VPPs too. I use them often. Of course, I've been playing Champions since 1st edition, so I've got a really good idea of what I can do with the powers, and can build a power on-the-fly while other players are having their turns so I don't hold up the game. (If I can't, then I use one of the powers I've already built or pass up my phase while "my character tries to figure out what to do next.") I like using VPPs _because_ I enjoy making up powers on the fly. The price of that kind of flexibility is power. I played a VPP-using character in a round robin GM game once, where each player in turn ran 1-3 sessions for everyone else. It was a very fast n' loose game, and we gave each character 25--yes, 25--XP after each GM's run. The game ran for quite a while and we ended up with very high point-total characters. And while my VPP gave me a lot of flexibility, by the end of the campaign I couldn't really compete with any of the other characters when it came to raw power. I could duplicate any power any of them had...but never at anything like the power level they had. They could pour all their points into powers directly; I had to pay for the pool and the control cost both.

Re: Wearing the Cape / West Pacific Supers I havent' read the West Pacific Supers series (and from the description above, sounds like I won't), but I have read--and enjoyed--the Wearing the Cape books. I recommend them. I also recommend the "Velveteen vs _______" series of shorts by Seanan Maguire (aka Mira Grant). They're series of shorts posted on her livejournal and/or her website about Velveteen, a superheroine in Portland, whose power is the ability to bring toys to life to fight for her. She's a former member of Super Patriots, Inc. As a former member of Super Patriots, Inc. (emphasis on the Inc, and all the corporate middle-management and PR flaks and general douchiness), she is of course labeled a supervillain by them at first (as all former members are). Not that there are a lot of ex-members. Though they don't actually BRAINWASH you (in the superpowered sense), they get their hooks on super kids early and the cult-like indoctrination and constant supervision and stage management take their toll. Imagine the worst money-grubbing Hollywood PR flak working for Disney combined with an intolerably controlling stage mother--only worse. It's not a happy life. Velveteen is glad to be away from it, but life away from Super Patriots Inc isn't a bed a roses either.

Re: The Villain City I second this. I'd also suggest looking at Chicago. The corruption and cronyism there is legendary, as is the way criminals have intertwined with government, labor and business. The costumed villains are probably mostly going to be outsiders, or second-tier bad guys. The REAL powers in the city are too busy running things (or enjoying the fruits of their ill-gotten gains) to be running around getting into fights with costumed heroes. Besides, they have a) lawyers and the cops on speed dial in case some bloody-minded vigilante takes it into his head to come after them.

Re: Genius Tricks Another option is "+X Overall Skill Levels, Usable By Others" (with whatever ads and limitations you think fit) to represent superior planning. The Super-Genius coordinates his allies' actions, and they benefit from his brilliance.

Re: Trying out but comparing unfavorebly to Dc universe for me. missing something

Re: "Neat" Pictures It's the difference between "My parents, Ayn Rand and God" (two people--and that's quite a set of parents you have there) and, "My parents, Ayn Rand, and God," or four people in the introduction your book.

Re: Superhero settings vs People with Powers settings Yes indeed, as anyone who's ever read (or watched) period BBC dramas knows. You can have a "wealthy" family who possess a huge estate, but lack the money to keep it up or to maintain the lifestyle to which they are accustomed and/or are expected to present. Reed could easily own the Baxter Building and still have little or no cash flow for (or beyond) basic maintenance. Throw in, as mentioned, the high costs of his research and invention* and he could be bringing in millions or billions...and spending it just as quickly. *In the real world, fab plants to manufacture computer chips cost billions. They're affordable only by very wealthy companies, and then only because they can sell them in huge quantities to recoup the investment. And that's for one kind of very specialized piece of technology. If Reed wants to build some super-gizmo, how often does he have to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools to build the gizmo because the rest of the world is nowhere close to his level of science? He's gonna blow through his income like the federal government.

Re: Mind Control with Dog Collars This. Definitely this. If it's being used on NPCs, no write-up is needed. Just play them as you think necessary. If it's being used on PCs, I still wouldn't write it up, I'd just require the PC to make an EGO roll to ignore the pain if he disobeys. If the pain is great enough, perhaps an EGO roll every phase not to just stagger/fall writhing in pain, plus another (if he makes the first one) to act in defiance of his commands. But since it's not actual MIND CONTROL, I would still leave it up to the players to decide how their characters respond/

Re: Storm Of Lead - Your Thoughts?

Re: Adversarial Answers

Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? Whereas, I hate them with a white-hot passion. They're a contaminant, ruining any scene they're in.

Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? I've done the same. I required the players to create 3-5 people they knew/interacted with on a regular basis. And like you, I didn't use them as 0-point DNPCs. I just wanted to make sure the players were connected to the game world, that they weren't friendless orphans wandering through a world divided into a) faceless masses and enemies to be vanquished. I regularly do the same when I create PCs for other peoples' games. I write up several friends/relatives/lovers/coworkers/whatever for my character but very specifically don't take them as DNPCs. They're color, not Complications.

Re: Feng Shui Portals? My understanding is that nobody is stuck in the Netherworld UNABLE to leave because of a critical shift. They CHOOSE to remain there, because the world outside has changed beyond their ability to cope with it. (It's true that some folk have abilities--spell-casting or chi powers--that would be adversely affected by changes to the outside world, making them much less powerful than they once were--but again, they CAN leave, even if they choose not to. But otherwise, yeah, the Netherworld is simply an Extra-Dimensional space with portals to specific places/times (which can change by GM fiat but not otherwise). You might need to make a KS: Netherworld Geography skill roll to know where the portal you want is located, but that's about it. Of course, it may lie beyond a lot of dangerous areas in the Netherworld, and/or be heavily fortified by hostile forces.

Re: Storm Of Lead - Your Thoughts?

Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? More importantly, why don't the people writing these shows ever seem to give a moment's thought to practicality? Yes, I understand that writing an entertaining story requires conflict, and easy fixes don't provide that. But characters who have to be written as morons so they don't take advantage of obvious, easy fixes ALSO destroy the story. A lot of shows would profit by emulating the "five year old child" rule from the Evil Overlord's list. Keep a five-year-old (or a group of fans, or even just a couple of writers who can take off their 'writer' hats and think like ordinary people) around and ask them, "In this situation, if you were Character X, what would YOU do?" If the answer shreds your plot, you have a choice. 1. Keep the idiot ball in play and hope your viewers won't notice or care. 2a. Establish some convincing reason earlier in the story why the character can't or won't do that, and hang a lantern on it (i.e., communicate to the viewers that, yes, the character considered that option but it was unworkable). That will buy you a LOT of suspension of disbelief. 2b. Have the character try the obvious answer, and find that it doesn't work for some (convincing) reason. Then at least, the character doesn't look like a moron. 3. Rewrite the story so that option isn't even a possibility. But options 2 and 3 require more work, and more time, and thus we often get option 1 instead. I don't know about that. Regeneration (Claire), Flight (Nathan), Power-Mimicry (Pete), Telepathy (Matt), Superstrength (Jessica), Teleportation/Time Travel (Hiro) and whatnot are, save for power-mimicry, fairly common superpowers.

Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? I disagree. I think it was the aggressively, arrogantly, abysmally stupid writing that led (and not nearly soon enough) to the cancellation of Heroes. The first season was actually pretty darn good. We got a slow reveal of characters with interesting powers, and some techno-babble backstory to justify it. We had a great villain in Sylar. There were bobbles, yes, but mostly it held up. Then we got the climactic battle in New York City at the end of season one, where things went horribly wrong. They didn't kill Sylar. Zachary Quinto had become too popular with viewers, so they let him survive and become a tiresome, ongoing threat, and then flirt with redemption, and then become a threat again, and on and on and on and on. Peter Petrelli, who originally only could copy the powers of people who were actually present, was an interesting and limited variation of the X-Mens' Rogue. Then they changed it so he permanently copied the powers of anyone he met, which all too quickly turned him into Superman. And so they were forced to introduce his kryptonite--the inability to think his way out of a paper bag. If he had two brain cells to rub together, he'd have been invincible. So he didn't. Later they nerfed his power, so he could only hang onto the most recent power he'd duplicated, which was too little too late, because he was still an idiot. Ditto with Hiro. His power set (teleportation and time travel, complete with "freezing time" ability) made HIM a virtually invincible character as well. So he got nerfed too. He spent a season dinking around in the past to no useful effect, then devolved from a plausibly-nerdy but intelligent guy into a moron. And sadly, the idiocy was contagious, affecting nearly everyone sooner or later. Including the writers. (A worldwide solar eclipse? REALLY?) I think that the underlying problem was that the creators probably had never really thought past the first season storyline. Then they had to scramble to keep it going when they found themselves with a big hit. Plus, Tim Kring, the creator, openly admitted that he wasn't a comics fan, so he was ignorant of a lot of the tropes (both good AND bad), and fell into a lot of writing problems he could have avoided with better understanding of the strength and weaknesses of superhero/people-with-powers stories. But the basic concept of people with powers who didn't wear costumes or use code names, dealing with problem both mundane and superpowered? That was what attracted me to the show in the first place.

Re: Superhero settings vs People with Powers settings 1. Spandex. 2. Openly Acknowledged Powers From a plot-mechanical sort of view, a lot of urban fantasy characters (weres, vampires, witches, mages, cyborgs, zombies, psychics, etc) are as powerful as street-level supers, if not some mainstream superheroes. They have "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men" and fight similarly-powered opponents. Save that it all takes place mostly in the shadows, where the average man in the street probably doesn't know they exist, and that they're all wearing leather pants civvies, they might as well be superheroes. But those two things make a big difference.

Re: Small Town Superhumans?

Re: Small Town Superhumans? I proposed such a game once on Jack Butler's Global Guardians site, though ultimately I decided not to pursue it. But it may yet turn up in my fiction. The Prineville campaign (based in Prineville, in central Oregon) would have been a Teen Champions game. All the PCs would have been locals who were discovering that they all had superpowers. There was a reason for that. Decades earlier, a supervillain with almost complete control of his own body (down to the genetic level) had "retired" there after one too many thumpings by superheroes. He could manipulate his own DNA to give himself superpowers, and could, with time and close contact, do the same to others. But doing so was--unsurprisingly--extremely dangerous. Unlike your classic mad scientist who eagerly tries out his nifty new scheme on himself, he took a different route. Posing as a local doctor, he manipulated the DNA of children in the wombs of many patients during "exams". He also sometimes masqueraded as different womens' husbands/lovers and impregnated them, doing the same. Prineville developed a reputation for having an unnaturally high number of stillbirths and birth defects. Local, state and federal investigators have studied the place extensively, but have been unable to pinpoint any cause. Not chemical contamination, not radiation, nothing--recurring rumors of "radioactive meteorites" to the contrary notwithstanding. Still, the town has a relatively large number of teens and young adults with genetic maladies ranging from mild to severe, as well a lot of kids who died at birth or of complications later in life. But it was not in vain--the supervillain learned a lot from these experiments. The newest crop of kids (the PCs and their peers) have a much lower rate of bad mutations, and many are beginning to evidence actual superpowers. The supervillain is starting to find excuses to examine these kids and learn exactly what traits they possess, and how to duplicate them. The kids, meanwhile, are dealing all the normal issues of adolescence PLUS superpowers and all the problems they can entail. (This was, essentially, the Smallville concept, only with a group of heroes not just one.) Eventually they were going to get enough clue to piece together their common origin and have to deal with him. For extra bonus angst, some of the PCs with romantic feelings toward one another might discover that they were half-siblings, who shared a supervillainous father despite what they--and their parents--had believed.

Re: Mystical tests of character? "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." --Adm. James T. Kirk A "test" like that is pointless. In real life, jerry-rigging ways to get around a seemingly insoluble problem is exactly the sort of out-of-the-box thinking and creativity Star Fleet (any organization, really) should be rewarding. If it's just a hypothetical scenario, where nobody is really going to die, it's just words. 3 a.m. dorm-room philosophizing. "Sure, I'll sacrifice myself." It doesn't mean anything.

Re: For whom the (dinner) bell tolls... Iron Maiden is an adventurous eater, always ready to try to new things. She likes trying out new restaurants, especially upscale ones when she can afford it. But occasionally she likes to eat comfort food--the sorts of things she ate when she was a child (and poor): mac and cheese, various soups and simplye homemade dishes. The Black Knight grew up in the 1930s in the midwest and was a young married adult in the 40s and 50s, very traditional. He's now in his 20s again (physically), but remains a product of his environment in some ways. He's a real meat-and-potatoes kind of guy on a daily basis. But he's also an adventure addict. He'll try anything once, twice if he likes it.

Re: Mystical tests of character? My Vulcan puts himself into a deep "healing trance" to stretch the available ration of air so they can both survive. Of course, while in that state, he could easily be jettisoned by a panicked (or ruthless) civilian who could, in the words of Riply in Aliens, "they he could make up any story he liked." But that level of trust in a stranger is also a test of character. My doctor uses some nifty drugs from his medi-kit to affect the same result. My engineer reverses the polarity of the neutron flow (i.e., tinkers with the ship's systems) to stretch the amount of air available. My Captain pulls a spacesuit out of the airlock storage bay and either by wearing it, or simply bleeding the air supply into the lifeboat does the same. My highly trained but non-officer nameless crewmen build a better recycling system to stretch the amount of air available. (Hey, if the Apollo 13 crew can do it using stone knives and bearskins, so can my 23rd century trained starship crewmen.)

Re: Vampires Unmasked I'm not sure about that. I think it would depend on how common vampires are. I've imagined a world in which vampires are known to exist--but they're few and far between. So to most people, they're rather like the Mafia. Yes, everyone knows they exist, and that they prey on ordinary people. But most folks have never (knowingly) met one.

Re: "Neat" Pictures In Empire Strikes Back, Vader was casually pummeling Luke with all kinds of objects (not all of which were lying around loose when he started) using Force TK. I'm pretty sure Vader could just hold the alien at bay with his TK. (For bonus style points, he holds it out of reach with TK while he telekinetically chops it into pieces with his lightsabre.)

Re: OIHID or Why Doesn't Billy Batson not Change Back? I would model it as "the actor isn't worried about the 'bullet' SFX, but getting hit in the face with a prop gun would hurt."