Mentor

Re: Disadvantage I can see this method working with Hunteds or Vulnerability, but PsychLims, Physical Disabilities, and Secret IDs pretty much always affect how the character is played anyway. OTOH, rwarding the player for superior roleplying, properly executing his PC in the face of 5 of their Disads, for example, is fair enough.

Re: The purpose of a system - academic and geeky... Oddly enough, I came to the conclusion that Hero best supports Four Color Champions of all genres. The rules allow genre capabilities which fly in the face of normal physics, but still don't send gallons of "normal person" goo flying around from the impacts. Superman is IMHO the exception to all things when creating champions PCs for 350 points, unless one goes back to the old days when he did not "one punch" tanks into smithereens, but picked them up and threw them around until they were useless, or else the volitility of diesel fuel and/or gasoline was chemically converted to that of movie and TV fuels, exploding with every crash and gunshot. Now I admit that precise construction and deconstruction mathematics is less important to most of our GMs than it may be to someone else, so I too would fall into the "wing it" catagory, in which case RDU is right. I guess it is a question of preference.

Re: Disadvantage Or, you can swap them within the game itself. We have allowed players to dump one Hunted, by defeating them, and picking up another, who because of the game situation, started off as a normal villain, but this time its personal. Work it in to the campaign and everbody comes out ahead.

Re: Billy Deighton Great character. He does the Great White North proud.

Re: Pulp Locations/Vehicles/Nifty Stuff! Great work, Publius. I was going say that you missed your calling, but if Steve is thinking about calling...

Re: Favorite Super-Mercenary Fezzik. Immortal Turkish Brick who has to work for those more intelligent and charismatic than he. While his powers and abilities are limited to fighting physically, he is the best at it. After all, he is the Brute Squad. In the Midguard campaign, both Z'lf and Silhouette know that it is about to hit the fan when they hear that deep greeting from behind rumbling, "Hello, lady."

Re: The Network: Campaign Setting Idea I like the idea a lot, SS. I was reminded somewhat of Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle. Using either street level Champions PCs or military and scientific types like SG-1 both are possible in the Network setting. Good concept.

Re: Disadvantage Actually, as long as both the players and GMs know what they are in for up front, I don't have any problem at all with this method. Sounds like a fun approach. The genesis type games can be fun occasionally, but one of the best parts of Champions and Hero, IMHO is that unlike the "other " game system, a new Hero player character can have enough background and expertise not to be "Frist level' or a novice/rookie. Thus, under this origin, not only do the PCs know what their heroes can do, they are darn good at it too. You are spot on about the need for trust between players and GM in either approach, though.

Re: Bye all Well, he is just a disembodied head, so he could have some powers we don't know about.

Re: Disadvantage My only problem with YTBD is that Disads also are important in defining the PC and their motivations. Not only the players have to roleplay. So do GMs. Knowing that characters are overconfident, or honorable or hate spiders, or distrustful of men is important to a GM designing a universe. A GM should be engaged in interactive fiction, to quote Trebuchet, and be fun for everyone. Anyone sufficiently familiar with the rules can construct a stack of numbers optimized for attack and defense based on numerical probabilities for the points involved. How boring. As a player, I find that victory is only sweet when the encounters have sufficient challenge to make the possibility of the hero's defeat real.

Re: Disadvantage Well, you are right about the pain infliction of those kinds of Disads. But if a player takes points for extra damage from purple dinosaurs in our campaign, rest assured, not only can I promise that eventually purple dinosaurs will appear, I can also promise that they have to potential to hurt the PC, no matter how munchkinish one thinks the construction of their web of powers. As GM, I have an infinite number of points. That having been said, if a player designs a PC with a Disad that is either unbalancing for the campaign or rest of the team or not a real Disad, then my prefered method would be to tell the player before the character gets played and someone gets upset about it and work with them on an alternative or at least a tweek. Some players complain that GMs are hosing their character becuse "that was my concept" but if a player is really so selfish that they don't care about the rest of the players or the campaign appropriateness itself, then we know who the problem really is.

Re: Detect Vulnerability I consider both the terminology and the concept of Detect Vulnerability a tad Metagamish. I would be fine with sufficient research, investigation or Shadowing skill allowing a PC to discover a Vulnerability through roleplaying, but a discovering someone's Achilles Heel in one phase by rolling the dice just doesn't seem sporting. Using it as a Find Weakness or Telepathy SFX would be more satisfactory, but a really good description of the Power concept and SFX would be mandatory, IMHO.

Re: Disadvantage I disagree. Inflicting pain should not be the purpose of any disadvantage. It should be an adventure hook to involve the PCs with a personal connection. If I don't know what to set up for the next adventure and one of the team members has a Hunted Disad which has come up or which hasn't come up in a while and is due (yes GMs do that sometimes without rolling dice randomly), at least one member of the team has the opportunity to be the star of the adventure and really shine.

Re: Batman and How he does it. Being a mutant member of the Wold-Newton family, which gave us Tarzan and Doc Savage, among others, also helps.

Re: Question for you Traveller fans. I still have a boxfull of all the Megatraveller stuff as well as the 4th edition, which had potential. I especially liked the improved character generating system in 4th edition. I can still remember trying to convince people to play the original game where you roll PC dice for twenty minutes and either die or have two skills at age fifty.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Truth indeed. It is a natural law. The amount of attention one gets from cats is inverse to the degree of allergy or dislike for felines. I'm a cat person (dog person, too) so they generally ignore me until they want to be fed or let outside/inside.

Re: Pulp Hero, after looking it over I have my book on order and the PDF version in the laptop. Wow! The section on genres and genre mixing is really helpful in campaign and character designing. The product captures the flavor of the detective and horror aspect while the globe trotting adventure is addressed with maps, country names and global geopolitical background. The timeline is my favorite part, as I have been putting together a timeline for our own campaign, which is set earlier than this one, so I now have 40 years worth of adventuring ready. I think the rest of my group fears that I am giving up Champions for Pulp, but there is room for both.

Re: G.I. Spy- Great Pulp campaign inspiration Excellent.

Re: Evil Corporations We have several worldwide. Our first was Hasagawa Industries, a robotics and electronics company run by the twisted Hasagawa no Yoshio. (Actually the Japanese name of one of our friends and former players, who is half English/half Japanese of good Samurai background.) Another is the American chemical powerhouse Biodyne, named for a local cleaning supply outfit where Lord Ghee once worked, which has since gone under. There are others, but their nefarious undertakings haven't yet been revealed.

Re: YOUR Favourite/Funniest/Silliest Presence Attack Moment? My favorite PRE story goes back to the 1980s when I was still deciding if Hero was a reasonable system for non Super games. Our players wanted to be a villain team and they designed a number of terrorists and agents infiltrating the US. Trebuchet had designed a particularly tough and intimidating GRU thug. I decided to oppose them with...The A Team. Yep, the fearsome foursome whose weapon skills were the bane of auto tires, diabolical devices and handheld weapons everywhere. Anyhow, the plot was that the A Team had inflitrated their hotel but been captured by the communist agents, rather too easily, which demonstrated my lack of skill as a GM more than any inherent problems with the NPCs. IIRC, just as the PCs were about to off Murdoch, mostly for just being annoying, the door is kicked in by a heavily muscled African American male with a Mohawk haircut, wearing enough gold jewelery around his neck to prove his strength, ripping channels in the ceiling overhead with an M-60 machine gun. The effect of B. J. Barakas blasting the room with machine gun fire, bellowing "I pity the fool who lays a hand on my friends!", to the accompaniment of 7.62 casings jingling like little bells as the ricocheted of the floor and each other, combined with a really decent roll of the PRE attack dice, caused the majority of PCs to surrender immediately and in the case of the GRU thug who had like a 20 PRE himself, to faint dead away. Since then, I have decided that I don't as a rule like to use PRE attacks of that sort against the players, but the incident really sold me on the ability to design any fictional character or archtype with the Hero system and make him operate close to my view of their abilities.

Re: Super Prisons without Super Tech Wouldn't want to. It would be unheroic. Of course in a Dark Cahmpions game, it might be an appropriate plot hook.

Re: How much attention do you give to powers' Senses visibility rules? Sean totally gets the whole point of Star Trek.

Re: How much attention do you give to powers' Senses visibility rules? While that is the correct "official" definition of the "Picard Manuever" if you recall the very first episode of STNG, numerous geeks watched in anticipation of greater glory for Star Fleet and in his first televised combat encounter with the enemy, Jean Luc Picard spoke the immortal words, "We surrender" forever defining that as the Picard Manuever in the lore of geekdom.

Re: How much attention do you give to powers' Senses visibility rules? Purist! I prefer to view interesting as a relative term in this case.

Re: I could watch him get slapped around all day I pick The X Men. The only thing "uncanny" about them is how they accomplish anything with all the self centered whining, intrigues and backstabbing they are engaged in. From Cyclops' pouting diffidence, Storm's arrogance, Wolverine's homicidal insanity, Professor Xavier's apparant ineptitude for all his power, and countless angsty teen mutants of varying stripes, the X men have never, in twenty five years, struck me as heroic. The Justice League (the real and original good one) or the Avengers (before they were struck by the insanity ray) need to fly down and open up a warehouse full of "whupass" on the X Men. That was rather cathartic.