Armitage

Originally posted by Lord Liaden

I think the Transdimensional Advantage will give your Detect the ability you're looking for: FREd p. 174.

The FAQ also has a Sense Adder, Dimensional. +5 for a single Sense, +10 for a Sense Group to sense into a single other dimension. +5 to sense a related group of dimensions. +10 to sense any dimension.

Re: Tell me about - webrpg.com

Originally posted by THE PATRIOT

Okay so I'm looking into PBEM possabilities and I was directed to this site. Problem is there doesn't appear to be any specific information on just what the product is. Can anybody give me an idea and recamendations?

The last time that I looked at it, it was basically chat room software with sound effects, dice rollers, and fully interactive maps and miniatures.

Once they started charging a fee, I switched to OpenRPG, which does the same thing (no sounds though) and it's free.

Originally posted by RDU Neil

OMG! I'd never seen this before. I think I just peed myself at work.

 

I don't know what is worse... the freaks trying to pull this off (especially lightning lad and his "whoops!") or the scary peasant girl type trying to activate her Clapper at the end.

You should also check out "Gamemaster, Gamemaster, What Have You Done?" from Breakfast of Demons.

It's the kind of movie that makes you say "Thank God I'm not that bad." over and over and over...

Tha characters are mostly around a gaming table, but there is also an outdoor LARP scene. And considering that one of the actors is a hand puppet, it gives it a whole new dimension.

Originally posted by GamePhil

No, it's actually a teleport system, though I don't think it is actually extradimensional. The guns are described as having teleportation equipment installed so that he can bring them from one of his bases and send them back at need.

One of the villains in "Murderer's Row" is a demon that pierced Earth's dimensional barriers by finding a pocket dimension full of guns and hitching a ride on one of them when the Harbinger summoned it.

Re: Caliber - DC chart

Originally posted by Glabutz

Has any one wrote a caliber - DC equivalent chart ?

From 4th Edition Dark Champions:

4.7mm 1d6-1

4.85mm 1 1/2d6

.22 1d6-1

5mm 2d6

.22 LR/5.7mm 1d6

.221 1 1/2d6

.223/5.56mm 2d6

.25 1d6

.30 1d6+1

.30-06 2d6+1

.32/7.65mm 1d6

.357 M 1 1/2d6

.38/.380 1d6

.40 1d6+1

.41 M 1 1/2d6

.308 2d6

.44 M 2d6

7.62mm 2d6+1

9mm 1d6+1

.45 1d6+1

.45 M 2d6

10mm 1 1/2d6

.454 2d6+1

11mm 2d6-1

.50/12.7mm 3d6

14.5mm 3d6+1

The rules state clearly that Clairsentience can't be used to establish Line of Sight for Teleportation.

Can it be used to study an area for a Floating Fixed Location, or do you still need direct Line of Sight since you're still using it as a Teleport target?

Re: Power Armor Bob and the Niftium Engine Rockets

Originally posted by Proemial

For instance: Power Armor Bob flies by use of attached rocket packs. They have unlimited fuel (due to his Niftium Engine). However, he can cause the rocket packs to detach and strike like missiles (RKA, or a PD affecting EB. Makes little difference). Each time he uses a rocket attack, his maximum flight speed decreases. When he is out of rockets, he can neither fly, nor fire off more rockets.

You could put Flight and EB/RKA in a multipower with the Lockout (-1/2) Limitation on the attack. Then when each Charge is used it ties up a portion of the Multipower until the Charges are replaced.

Re: My opinion

Originally posted by AGLAR

I don't see how they can keep this one trick pony going for an entire series. I loved the first and third movies, but I do not think it has legs to survive.

 

Just my .02 cents....

Well, I distinctly recall thinking

"A girl killing vampires. It was an amusing movie, but I don't think it will last as a series."

It's a matter of finding branches that lead way from the one trick while remaining thematically linked.

Re: Villain XP

I base it off the system of awarding points to players in a villain campaign that was presented in Adventurer's Club #13. I cut the original numbers roughly in half though, since the original article wasn't xp, it was scoring points for a one-shot game.

Crime earns good money. 1 point

Crime earns great money. 2 points

Crime earns unique prize. 3 points

Crime humiliates hated enemy. 2 points

Target guarded inadequately. +0 points

Target guarded adequately. +1 point

Target well guarded. +2 points

Target very dangerous. +3 points

Capturing an enemy and leaving them in a deathtrap. +2 points

Killing a hero. +1 point. (Not cumulative with above)

Flamboyance and spectacle. +1-2 points

This system gives heroes an extra motive to stop a villain who's on a crime spree. And gives villains another reason not to kill heroes.

Originally posted by lemming

I once played a character, (supers) names "The Mime". Big VPP, but I had to act out the powers.

That's funny. I once created a professional assassin called The Mime. He had the power to create invisible force constructs.

Kill targets with an invisible sword or shoot them with an invisible bow and arrow.

Trap opponents in an invisible box.

Make a quick escape on an invisible bicycle.

Originally posted by Deejmeister

I played in a D&D game once where one of the players had lost his voice the day of the game. So our DM ran a scenario where a whole town was under a silence field. We couldn't talk to each other about anything but game mechanics, and had to invent ways to get each other's attention in character and hand signals. It was quite fun. (Did I mention the demons, or the fact that most of our spells had verbal components?)

And did the party wizard meet the love of his/her life while hiding from the demons?

(Vending machine not required).

Re: Number 6 With A Tire Iron

For some reason, when I saw the title of this thread all I could picture was an Englishman in a black suit brandishing a tire iron and shouting "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

Re: Wildcards: Croyd aka The Sleeper

Originally posted by Super Squirrel

Anyone have even the faintest notion how to go about building him? I'm thinking of using some similar incarnation of him as a 'for hire' bad guy and 'for hire' good guy. I'm just lacking in a way to start.

 

I suspect that the best approach is a dedicated portion of the character is Multiform or maybe Accidental Change with huge bonuses.

 

Input is openly accepted.

I'd lean more toward a massive Variable Power Pool with a reduced form of Character Has No Choice Regarding When or How Powers Change (-3/4 instead of -1).

His Powers are totally random, but he can prevent them from changing as long as he can avoid falling asleep. And even that control is limited, as shown in one of the last books. He essentially became the Wild Cards Superman, a dozen or more powers, all at high levels, but was only awake for an hour or so.

Re: Something Funny

Originally posted by Tim

Reminds me of Cartoon Network's Superfreinds/Power Puff Girls commercial...

My favorite is still Page 37 of Champions.

Seeker never looked more intimidating.

Originally posted by Agent X

I personally wouldn't be offended. Still, if events get too depressing, I believe I would move on. I like fairly upbeat games. If I wanted to be depressed I would watch the news (Oh wait, I do watch the news. ) Anyway...

The campaign's not intended to be depressing.

I've scattered mysteries throughout the background as plot hooks. This was meant to be a big one.

Who did it? How did they do it? Are they still around?

A less depressing event: the visions of several precognitive superhumans resulted in a large number of arrests on September 10, 2001.

Originally posted by Acroyear

The only issue I have with things like, say, a terrible genocide of an existing people is...

 

What if the game is still going strong 2 years from now... and two years from now they are the dominant people in the region? Or have some other significant impact? (just saying for argument's sake).

The entire country was wiped out, the minority and the majority. That's where the "not as much control as he thought" came from. The person in question tried to strike at his people's oppressors and ended up killing everyone instead.

In these instances, since you are altering history, anyway... why not make up a people and small chunk of some places to be their country? It's not uncommon in comics and you don't lose anything.

The entire point of the campaign is that it's "Our World" until the alien invasion in 1992 that created superhumans. I don't want to create countries out of thin air.

For example, on May 18, 2000 an Army officer named Lino Oviedo attempted a coup in Paraguay and failed. In the campaign he was a superhuman and is the current dictator of Paraguay.

On February 9, 1998, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze survived an assassination attempt when gunmen attacked his motorcade. In the campaign he died because the assassin was a member of Homicide, an international group of super-assassins.

Does anyone have good/bad experiences with campaign backgrounds that caused major changes to the world before play began?

I'm talking about changes extreme enough that overly sensitive people might be offended.

I'm in the process of updating an old campaign. Originally superhumans were created in 1985 and the campaign began in 1995. Now it's 1992/2002 so I just shifted events ahead seven years in most cases. I've lost thing like Desert Storm and the Soviet Union's collapse, but I've made do.

In August 1997 a superhuman with flame powers (Human Torch clone) went on a PCP rampage through downtown Miami. Turns out he had a version of Nova Flame. Construction of New Miami was pretty much complete at the end of 2001.

But this is the one that potentially worries me:

I asked myself "What if a member of a violently oppressed minority gained access to immense power that they couldn't control nearly as well as they thought they could?"

December 1996, a national capital vanished in a green fireball.

A week later, inhabitants of the country started dying of a mysterious disease that didn't spread beyond the country's borders and only affected natives of that country.

Four months later, 24 million fatalities and the nation has officially ceased to exist. The international community authorized massive airstrikes with incendiary and energy weapons because there was no way to properly dispose of all the corpses before normal disease became a crisis issue.

Given current events, I'll only mention that the minority in question started with "K" and rhymed with "bird".

Originally posted by dbsousa

Isn't the Thing Jewish? I heard on NPR that they retconned him, and started playing up the Golem imagery...

Yes. In FF#56 (485) they revealed that the Thing was raised Jewish but lost his faith as a child after his brother died.

And in response to the question that inspired this, Doc Samson is Jewish, as is Sasquatch from Alpha Flight.

Re: FTL vs. megascale Flight

Originally posted by Uncle Shecky

Is Faster-Than-Light Travel necessary now that we have the megascale advantage for Flight?

 

Here's a comparison:

10 pts. FTL gives a movement of 1 LY/year and costs 0 END.

 

1" Flight (assuming no minimum power cost) is 2 pts. Add megascale: 1" = 10 trillion km (approx 1 light year), for +3.5 and 0 END for +0.5. You get a movement of 1 LY/phase at 0 END for only 10 pts!

With FTL Flight you could fly to the Moon or Mars in a few minutes.

With MegaScale Flight you would overshoot the target by a light year or more. Unless you bought the extra +1/4 Can Be Scaled Back to 1"=1km, of course.

Originally posted by Tetsuyama

Did you have any ideas on where to get source material for it? It's been a long time since I've seen the show, and I haven't found much about it since then. I remember that it was a pretty cool show, and that it seemed like it would make an awesome RPG, but it's been so long that I've forgotten a lot.

A quick Google search produced over 4000 hits, so there are quite a few fan sites.

There's a small webring at

http://l.webring.com/hub?ring=galranger

I seem to recall that one of these sites (Guild, maybe) had a page of technical specs. Ship armaments and FTL capabilities, distances between planets, Super trooper backgrounds, Series 5 Implant data, etc.

Fortunately, I obtained all 65 episodes on tape a few years ago.

Just went looking. The technical specs are at

http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Set/4721/gr/index.html

including a timeline that reveals details not covered in the show, like the alien invasion that led to the creation of the Super Troopers in the first place.

I had long wanted to run a Galaxy Rangers campaign and had planned on using the (unfortunately) discontinued Alternity RPG. After all, the basic rules covered the characters from the show perfectly: Cyborg, Mutant, Mindwalker, and Hacker.

But the Hero System handles the super-hero-esque power levels of the characters much better than Alternity, even with the various fan-created variant FX Power rules.

e.g. A Fraal Mindwalker (Will 16) could lift 160kg with the Telekinesis-Psychokinetics Skill.

Compared to Niko lifting multi-ton boulders on the show there's just no comparison. Granted, the Mindwalking sourcebook has rules for drastically scaling up effects by spending extra psionic energy points, but it's just not the same.

Re: Vindicated

Originally posted by Aroooo

Okay, I'm not trying to sound like a jerk or anything, but I finally got my copy of TUV, and on page 130, it says you CAN build a missile as a RKA with the Extra Time limitation. I feel vindicated

 

On a serious note, as I've been working on my B5 ships, it makes more sense building missiles as RKA's instead of vehicles if you use the Dogfighting and Intercept Combat (instead of mapped combat).

 

Aroooo

The previous edition of Star Hero had a -1/2 Limitation called Slow Missile.

An attack with the Limitation wouldn't actually hit until the end of the segment when it was fired. Anyone within range can use a Defensive action, i.e. Abort, to attempt to shoot the missile at any point along its flight path.

The missile's DCV equals the OCV at which it was fired and any attack with at least half as many damage classes as the missile will destroy it.

It could probably be adapted to 5th edition with additional Limitations as the travel time is shifted down the Time Chart. Using Extra Time as a guide, maybe -1/4 for end-of-segment and an additional -1/4 per step down the time chart. You can make additional attacks, making it better than Extra Time, but it's balanced by the interception capability.

Originally posted by Super Squirrel

A person created a tiered system for their character. He had four 'gears' and each had a new and harder activation roll to turn on. He was built in such a way that fourth gear had the multiplier of a -15, -13, -11, and -8 all stacked together. I swear that if you took away all his limitations you were looking at close to 1200 pts worth of powers on a 350 game.

Sound like Quantum from Dragon Magazine #111.

A 3rd Edition character built on 643 points. But the character had 5 different power levels (quantum levels), each harder to reach, and each level was actually 300 points.

Level 1-Normal state, weak powers.

Level 2-Normal fighting level, +1 Limitation (3rd ed., remember)

Level 3-Hurt or angry, 1 game in 3, +2 Lim.

Level 4-Rarely reached, +4 Lim. (?!?!)

Level 5-Goddess Level, +8 Lim. (Ouch)

Level 1: 25 STR, 23 DEX, 4 SPD, 10 PD/ED, 10/10 FF, 10d6 EB.

Level 5: 65 STR, 43 DEX, 12 SPD, 30 PD/ED, 30/30 FF, 26d6 EB.

Also various levels of Flight, RKA Ranged END Drain, Radius Flash, Entangle, Force Wall, Telekinesis (130 STR at Level 5), Desolidification, Invisibility, Power defense, Ego Defense, Flash defense, Lack of Weakness, Life Support, Regeneration , Danger Sense, and enhanced senses.

All for 643 points.

(Oops. Just looked more closely at the article. The character was created by George MacDonald.)

Originally posted by John Desmarais

Well, I probably won't be using Terran Empire, but I do plan on eventually revisting my earlier attempt to get players interested in a based on the Honor Harrington setting.

Except that the starships would be disgusting by the Star Hero and Ultimate Vehicle rules. I was just looking at the specs in David Weber's "The Universe of Honor Harrington" in "More Than Honor".

A battlecruiser with its inertial compensator's safety margins cut to zero can pull 500 G's of acceleration.

Obviously that could be done more cheaply with MegaScale Flight, but it still outperforms anything in normal Star Hero, and the Inertial Compensator itself would be hideous.

Force Field 998 PD?

And the amount of Force Wall needed to create the impeller wedge...?

Maybe just a Limitation on weapons. Cannot Damage Dorsal and Ventral Sides of Ships When Target's Drive is Active.

TUV specifically states that a vehicle may not buy the Advantage "Noncombat Acceleration/Deceleration" to improve the number of inches they can accelerate or decelerate per hex.

Can a vehicle still buy the Advantage to reach noncombat velocity in a single Phase, as long as they still accelerate 5"/hex?

On a related note:

The AIM-7 Sparrow missile has SPD 6 and 40" Flight with a x32 multiplier and a 1 minute fuel charge.

Using the standard movement rules it would require 1 minute, 4 seconds (32 Phases) to reach maximum velocity.

Similarly, the Nuclear Space Missile; SPD 6, 40" Flight, x1000 nc, 1 minute charge; would require more than 33 minutes (1000 Phases) to reach top speed.

Should these missiles have an Advantage somewhere?

Rapid Noncombat Movement, maybe? Then the Sparrow could reach top speed in 5 Phases and the Space Missile in 10 Phases.