sinanju

So our gaming group has been playing a "round robin" Champions game for a couple-three months now. The PCs are characters from any genre, any period. They're all caught up by Forces Unknown and dropped into a new game world, facing a new challenge, each adventure--kinda like Sliders only without even a gadget/timer. Each player has to take a turn as GM for up to three sessions in a row; when he's done (after the PCs have dealt with the situation du jour), he turns the reins over to the next player in line, who drops the PCs into a new world, facing a new problem to be solved. We started as 225 point characters, with up to 50 points of Complications. We agreed (god help us) to 25 XP per session (which accumulate but can't be spent until the next GM's game)! Now we're up to 550 point characters. By the time I take over shortly, we'll be 625 point characters! What the **** do I do to them? We have a 21st century teenager with a cosmic power pool (100 + 75)--that would be my PC. We have an ancient druid with Multi-form, and some hideously powerful forms. We have a 51st century immortal Roman Legionaire with a sword/gun of death. We have a Jedi ("I'm NOT a Jedi!") with a lightsabre, mind control, etc. We have Not!Captain America (probably the least powerful character in the group, sadly). We have a pseudo-Superman with STR 120, hideous defenses, and explosive eye blasts, among other things. Given the phenomenal growth rate, and the plethora of points to spend, we've collectively acquired defenses for almost everything. (And whatever we might have missed initially, and had exploited against us by one or another GM, has led to PCs acquiring the missing defenses....) Make no mistake--it's been a heck of a lot of fun. But I'm up next as GM and I'm not sure what to throw at them that will a) challenge the group, and not kill half the group. So far, I'm thinking of starting with something like a cross between the monster from Cloverfield and the alien probe from Monsters vs Aliens. That should keep them busy for a while, but I'll still have at least two more evenings of gaming to fill. Alien Invasion? (Complete with orbital death ray satellites?) Kryptonian Conquerors (At last--foes worthy of their attention, and they were so bored!) Any suggestions for concepts? Or for power builds? Anyone? Buehler?

Re: WWYD - Battlefield Iron Maiden would fly into the middle of the conflict, start grabbing combatants (those without--or with minimal--movement powers first) and just fly off with them (she's got some hellacious NCM flight speed) and dump them somewhere far from the action. Lather, rinse, repeat. If they come back, or resist, start pounding the crap out of them. Heroes or not, if they're ignoring the threat to bystanders from their brawl, they need taking out ASAP.

Re: Library Cataloging System for a Multidimensional Library Until you have a meta-numbering system for clearly identifying the different universes (and thus the books published in each one), you haven't got a prayer. Preferably the universe numbering system would be objective, and clear enough that deciding how to identify any newly-discovered universe would be obvious. In practice, it's almost certainly go be subjective; you start with an arbitrarily determined "base" universe, and define all others by how they vary from it, perhaps with something as simple as the order in which they're catalogued by the library (not necessarily the order in which they're discovered). And even then, most books won't be identifiable by which universe they come from unless you have the...can't think of the word for it, the "chain of custody" they use to authenticate ownership of works of art, the "pedigree" of the book in question so you can be sure it came from Universe X1743A. Any way you slice it, it's going to be a nightmare to administer.

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear What he said. If you "reward" your players for stowing their equipment by having it stolen frequently, you have no right to complain when they decide that the only reasonable response is to carry everything with them always. If you make it clear that they _can_ safely leave their things stored somewhere (with rare exceptions that probably are plot-related), they're more likely to go along with it. If the players act like they're in a deathmatch with every NPC in the game world...maybe they're right.

Re: The Singularity? I thought it was mentioned near the beginning of this thread, but the novel you're thinking of is THE TWO FACES OF TOMORROW. It starts with a disaster on the moon. A computer (with control of a lot powerful equipment) was assigned a job and went about it a completely logical--but unexpected and destructive--fashion that might well have killed a LOT of people in different circumstances. The characters were concerned that such accidents would become more common as computers got smarter, but not "human" smart, so they were thinking of creating an Artificial Intelligence which WOULD be, well, intelligent. But what if it turned hostile? Would they be able to pull the plug on it? They decided to install said system on a space station and experiment, essentially goading it into coming into conflict with humans--if that was possible. If worse came to worst and they lost control, they could limit the damage...and know not to build a system like that again. Things did not, I'm sure you will not be surprised to learn, go according to plan.

Re: Solar Systems Like Ours in the Minority Yeah, but until recently we didn't know for sure that there were ANY other solar systems. We assumed so, but we didn't KNOW. Now we do.

Re: battle Wear vs. Town Wear In a GURPS Fantasy game I ran, I instituted the "hot, sweaty armor" rule--basically, the minuses to DEX for wearing armor applied to all skill rolls when a player insisted on wearing his armor all the time. Not particularly realistic, but neither was wearing armor 24/7.

Re: Moving Violation

Re: The Singularity?

Re: Time Travel in Sci Fi and Games....The Good, The Bad, and the Oh so Ugly... My favorite example of time travel is the Netherworld of the game Feng Shui. The Netherworld (a weird underworld environment) can be accessed via various gateways into the world as we know it. Some of these gateways open into other times and places. HOWEVER, time passes at the same rate in all the various periods which are accessible via the Netherworld. That is, if you leave our world right now, and step through a portal into China in 1850 and stay for 24 hours, when you come back to our world, the same amount of time will have passed. It will be a day later than when you left. This conveniently prevents a lot of the time travel shenanigans that give gamemasters (and writers) headaches. Because you can only go to the widely separated time periods to which portals exist (and as GM, you get to decide what those are), there's no going back to yesterday to fix our big screw-up. You can't GET to yesterday, only to (for instance) 1850 China and New York in 2200 AD. It also means that if your buddy Bobby Redshirt goes to China in 1850 with you and gets killed there, you can't use time travel to undo it. Time is still moving forward in all the various eras, and at the same rate. It's remotely possible that you could try to use "delay mail" (Doc Brown sending Marty McFly a telegram, to be delivered a century later is an example of this) to leave a message and TRY to change things. But it's extremely unlikely to work. As time travel gags go, it's pretty bulletproof.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Exactly. There ISN'T an answer that doesn't deal with observers and frames of reference. You're asking a question that has no answer, because it's based on incorrect assumptions. It can and does. Whether the train car is moving a .9 C and an observer is stationary, or the train car is stationary and the observer is moving at .9 C, the results are the same. That's the whole point of relativity. The only absolute is the speed of light in ANY frame of reference. Time and space are relative; duration and physical dimensions can and will be perceived differently depending on your frame of reference. There is no absolute answer to "how fast is the train car going"; there is only an answer in a particular frame of reference.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Reality is objective, and reality says that the only thing we can say for sure is that light moves at lightspeed. Everything else--the mass, dimensions, and even the rate of time passing for any given object depends on your frame of reference. There is no single answer that is "objectively" right. Everyone in a given frame of reference can agree on figures, yes, but that's only because they're all in the same frame of reference. Observers in a different frame may see something entirely different, and their observations are correct too.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ???

Re: Morrow Project Especially if you steal from the Classic EC horror comic story, "50 Women 50!" In that story, a sleeper ship has been sent out to colonize a distant star. There are 100 men and women in cold sleep, and one guy left awake (or awakened periodically, I forget) to keep an eye on the ship systems. At some point, he decides that he doesn't care about the mission. It'll be a century or two before the ship gets where it's going, so why bother? Instead, he wakes one of the women to be his...companion. Until he tires of her. So he kills her and awakens another. And then another, and another. He figures he'll work his way through the whole shipload of attrative young women eventually, but so what? It should take a lifetime, and he's got nowhere to go. Thinks don't, of course, work out that way. But then, it was an EC horror comic, so what else would you expect? But just think...your Morrow Project team awakens to find that some good percentage of the intended female population of the project are missing (dead). And a lot of the food, equipment and tools intended for their use have been eaten, used, or destroyed.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? And that's my point. "What the light actually does" assumes a privileged frame of reference (and a privileged observer) who can tell us what "really" happened, and assumes as a consequence that what the other observers see is wrong. Or incomplete. That's not how the universe works. "What the light really does" depends upon your frame of reference--i.e., the relative motion (and velocities) of the train in relation to any and all observers. Everyone within a single frame of reference can agree on the sequence of events. Our experience on earth for the whole of human existence has been bounded within a single frame of reference, so we make use of concepts like "simultaneity" and an unvarying sequence of events because it works in that environment. So do Newton's laws of motion. But like Newton's laws, that's only an approximation, a rule of thumb that applies only to velocities below a certain fraction of C, and which are only valid in that environment. Beyond that point, what common sense tells us is _wrong_. When you begin dealing with velocities far higher than anything evolution equipped us to deal with, rules that work just fine for that environment no longer apply.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? No, the reality is that all of the options are equally real. There is no privileged frame of reference and thus no privileged observer who can tell us definitively what "really" happened.

Re: So how did you guys learn the system? I learned from reading the ORIGINAL set of stapled together Champions books. And then the supplements. And then the newer editions. So I absorbed it all gradually over many years. I imagine that's not a lot of help....

Re: Waking up with not-so-super powers I'd like the ability to see thru anything but living flesh, at will. Not only would I be able to see anyone naked I wanted to, I'd also be able to tell at a glance when someone was really most sincerely dead. "How do you know he's dead?" "I can see through him."

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. An absolutely fascinating investigation into how the brain works, from how the brain processes visual images (and why television and movies can fool the eye as a result), to how it handles language, spatial relationships (and seems to map more abstract concepts into space/time-based coordinates), and lots of other amazing things. As he describes it, the brain is...modular, I guess, is the best way to put it. What we think of as "intelligence" or even simple perceptions like sight, are actually the sum total of numerous sub-modules all doing their own small part, and then higher-level modules integrating the results. Almost every page provides fascinating insights--I highly recommend it.

Re: Instantaneous Communications plus Time Dilation Equals ??? Well, actually, you can. The whole basis of Relativity is that the only constant is the speed of light. Everything else folows from that. Whether you're moving at a snail's pace or at .99C, you will still see light moving at lightspeed. Since the only way that can work mathematically is if the speed of passage of time changes with (meaningful) changes in your velocity, you get time dilation effects. And redshifts in light coming from distant galaxies that are moving away from us at large fractions of C. Your intuitions about constancy (an "objective" universe) are based on a brain which evolved in a single frame of reference, where nothing ever moved at more than an incredibly tiny fraction of the speed of light, so relativity effects were negligible. Questions of simultaneity don't arise because everyone and everything on earth is in the same frame of reference. Newton's laws of gravity aren't exactly right, but they're close enough to right to be useful, just like our intuitions about simultaneity and the like are good enough for a single frame of reference. But when you start working with velocities and forces at the levels Relativity is concerned with...they're not. However much it offends one's sense of reality, Relativity works. There are real-world, practical problems that can only be adequately addressed if Relativity is taken into effect (the timing of GPS satellite signals, for one). Even if Relativity is eventually superceded by another theory, that theory will have to explain everything Relativity explained, just like Relativity had to adequately cover Newtonian physics (and answered some of hte questions Newton's theory couldn't, like the known but inexplicable issues with Mercury's orbit around the sun). The universe IS objective--but some of the standards we take for granted on a daily basis (simultaneity, constant rate of time, etc.) aren't, in fact, actually fixed. They can change, based on other criteria. (It's kind of like having a Platonic yardstick that is always exactly a yard long...unless forces beyond anything we could ever hope to apply are applied, in which case it will stretch or contract. For all practical purposes that yardstick is always exactly a yard long. Under the ight circumstances, however, it isn't.)

Re: What If: You were the world's 1st superhuman? First I experiment with my abilities. I'm levitating? Can I fly? I can! But how fast? Let's find out. And hmm, blasting through the air at Mach 2 doesn't seem to hurt me. Cool! And just how strong am I now? Find out. When I discover that I'm invulnerable I'm even more excited. Learning about my regeneration will have to wait until I actually GET injured. I keep my abilities secret from the world. I'll tell my wife, but that's all. I'll spend a LOT of time flying around, mostly at night, wearing lots of black so as not to be noticed. I'll get a wrist GPS unit (Garmin makes them, among others) with waypoints I can set so I can find various fixed locations. (Flying at night when I don't have a noctural creature's eyes is going to be difficult. Nothing more embarrassing than flying through power/phone lines, or having to fly low enough to read street signs along the way). I'll try to discover how how I can fly, and how long I can fly before I get tired--if I get tired. I won't be playing superhero. In the real world, the odds of stumbling upon a crime in progress that I can prevent are astronomical. Ditto for disasters in progress. Even long-term crimes (hostage taking and the like) aren't likely to amenable to my interference. Other than being bulletproof and capable of doing lots of damage with my bare hands, there's nothing I could do that the authorities couldn't do--and I'm not trained to deal with volatile hostage takers. I'd hate to get someone killed. Cleaning up after disasters sounds better except that, again, being superhumanly strong doesn't mean I'll be much help in searching through rubble. I'd be as likely to kill someone by shifting the rubble as help them. That, too, is a job for people who know what they're doing. If I DID ever decide to go public, it would be in a fully concealing but easy-to-assemble outfit. Jeans, boots, shirt, jacket, gloves, mask and goggles to hide my appearance. I don't want people to know even my skin color. I'd also talk as little as possible. Six months later, I begin to suspect that there are other supers, and that some sort of super-alien will be arriving eventually. I'll track down and talk to the starlet--she's the only one I'm likely to be able to identify. I'll try to find out what powers, if any, she has now, and if she saw anything else in her visions that I didn't.

Re: Likelihood of a Country Producing Costumed Heroes

Re: Heroes TV show regeneration That's pretty much the whole schtick for one of my characters--Victor Kruger, the Black Knight. He named himself after the John Cleese character in Monty Python & the Holy Grail because, like that character, he takes lots of damage...although unlike the Cleese character, he heals almost faster than he's injured. I built him with 3/4 Damage reduction, low resistant defenses, and lots of regeneration. The SFX is he takes ALL the damage, it's just that most of it regenerates so fast that it has no game effect (except to make him look like an extra from a zombie flick). What little does penetrate his defenses heals very quickly. Wolverine, Claire Bennett and company only WISH they healed as fast as Victor.

Re: Happy Halloween! What Would Your Character Wear? Iron Maiden tends to dress up as...Iron Maiden and drop in on open parties, as described in her blog: Title: The Great Thing About Halloween... You can go out to a halloween party and nobody knows it's you. Even if you're wearing an amazingly authentic Iron Maiden costume. I'm just saying.... It's nice to get compliments on your costume, and even nicer to have people compliment you on your attention to detail. (Though let's face it, my costume isn't all that hard to imitate--it's all commercially available items. My stunning fashion sense comes in how I put it all together like a master chef! Yeah. That's it.) Though not...everyone appreciated my halloween costume. I love fandom. I really do. They're my tribe. I was a fangirl long before I decided to become a superheroine. But one of the less endearing traits of my fellow fans is this tendency to pontificate on things about which they know a lot less than they like to believe they do. So to the Authenticity Nazis who lectured me on my mediocre Iron Maiden costume, I say: nuts to you! We didn't stay long at anyone party, though we hit three or four that night, but it was fun while it lasted. *Yes, Wild Lotus was there too. People thought it was a very clever costume idea, two women dressing up as Iron Maiden and Wild Lotus. Hell, if we'd stayed, we probably could have won the costume contest. But that wouldn't have been fair--and besides, they'd have expected us to unmask and that just wasn't gonna happen. And at every party while I was being lectured by the Authenticity Police, Wild Lotus was being swarmed by horny frat boys. Not that I can blame them. I'm straight and I think she's hot. Which is not to say that I didn't have a few admirers too, but something about statuesque red heads seems to bring them out of the woodwork. Still...I had fun. Which was the whole point of this exercise. P.S. To "Gandalf" at that last party: I confess, you kiss very well. But you really need to work on your close. Suggesting that "we invite (my) red headed friend to join us" when we haven't yet established that I'm going to "polish your staff" was just...dumb. And rude. And if you're wondering how I vanished while your back was turned--next time, look up.

Re: Browncoat Mal Reynolds on Castle Castle (caught in costume): "I'm...just...trying out my Halloween costume." Daughter: "What are you supposed to be?" Castle: "A space cowboy!" Daughter: "First, there are no cows in space. Second...didn't you wear that, like, five years ago?" Castle: "So?" Daughter: "So don't you think it's time you moved on?" Castle: "I LIKE it."