Lupus

Re: Stargate weapons

 

I may be wrong, But I believe they will STOP 30-06 AP!!! probably not multiple hits in the same region, I believe the ceramic crushes, disipating some of the energy and abrading/breaking/yawing the bullet so it is more easily stopped by the Soft portion, not iirc kevlar, or not all kevlar.

 

The doctors in Iraq and Afghanistan have had relatively few upper torso wounds to deal with.

Cool.

Re: Stargate weapons

 

Why not just make it a 3.5d6 AP K. That will shred most modern body armors. The Heavy "Interceptor" class IV armor will stop 7.62 nato or 30-06, so it is up to your viewpoint. Does that mean they are 13 Def, or say 10 def and on a lucky hit can be penetrated.

 

 

Edit

I sure wish I could watch the show still. I get NO TV reception.

Damn, that's harsh. Guess your place has its own advantages, though.

 

Do you know what reliability the interceptor armour will stop heavy bullets? And if it'll stop AP bullets? (Not that I know quite how effective AP bullets are in real life...) Not challenging here - I'm always eager for real-world information so that I can use it in games. It's the entire reason I got into Phoenix Command.

 

I'd prolly put the armour rating lower, with the understanding that just because BODY damage got through doesn't mean that the actual bullet did.

Re: Stargate weapons

 

Personally, I find it very difficult to reconcile all appearances of a single technology in any extended setting.

 

I'm a fan of Really Deadly Staff Weapons, myself. As in, more deadly than bullets, but perhaps less accurate and not as rapid-firing. And I've definitely seen them rip through real kevlar (say, SG-3's body armour). But, yes, glancing blows and major heroes survive. Therefore, I'd think about making them AVLD, defence is combat luck, with no effect against forcefields. (Or maybe something else odd, like making them AP PEN but not vs combat luck. Or something like that.)

 

The zat gun: The 'kill' effect works anything up to 15 minutes after the first shot. The target need not be unconscious at the time. And, indeed, people hit by them are often just stunned, but can recover quickly. But even when conscious, it appears that they can still be killed. If I were running a game, though, I'd make them much less absolute. Some kind of NND (or AVLD Combat Luck?) rather than an absolute transform. I don't like absolute effects in games.

Re: *yawn* build it

 

No, literally. I want to see if herodom assembled can make a writeup of a yawn.

 

Think about it. Yawns are the most contagious thing around.

...

 

you made me yawn. >.<

Re: New Character "Strong Guy"

 

I'm creating a character for an up and coming face to face game. The game setting is more modern, though not really rust age.

The character, though, is more of the classic "bright smile, American flag waving behind him, "here I come to save the day" type of character". He used to be a comic book character in the game world and, through a cosmological accident, became real.

He's the classic flying brick named "Strong guy" complete with "Strong-vision" and, possibly a PRE attack that does knockback.

 

The theme I'm going with is a sort of "man out of time" idea where he yearns for the simple life where bad guys are bad and good guys are good and there's never any doubt where someone stands - no moral ambiguity. He's the kind of character who calls everyone "citizen" and escorts old ladies across the street, but lives in a world that is nothing like that and knows that he's in a world that is nothing like that. So, he represents something the world has lost.

 

He's more serious than "spoofy" (though there's plenty of humor to be found in the concept and in the character). He's over the top, but he's also the moral center of the group.

 

Has anybody else done a character like this? It might help me clarify in my own mind what I'm aiming for if I could hear of similar characters.

Aww, not the X-Factor character? Could do with a writeup of him.

Re: Nothing personal Ben, but I killed you last night.

 

Why didn't my smiley work at the end?

You killed Ben, dude. The boards don't work for you no more.

Re: Marvel's Rogue

 

I know im beating my head against a brick wall, but rogues power drain should at least fit in somwhere in the drain/adjustment catagory.

 

If you use Multiform, its just not the intended use of the power, allow EDM universere of choice, "i am who i want to be".

 

8 billion characters, give me three dice and ten minutes and ill gen one that isint incuded.

I think the point of having 8 billion forms is that you don't fill them out all at once. The theme is necessarily limited, so hopefully the GM would be okay with working forms out on the fly when you touch someone.

 

Hands up anyone who'd actually want to gen 8 billion characters and bring them along to every game session? I doubt that , even with veryone on these forums, that we'd genned 8 billion characters between us.

 

Personally I'd never allow EDM like that. I'd also never allow EDM to simulate Wish spells, as given in FH. I'll note for the record, though (not a direct reply to Vorsch, more to the thread in general), that multiform doesn't get Rogue too well (a Rogue-like character, sure, but not Rogue herself) because her power draining should /add/ to her total points, not replace any. When she absorbs multiple people, she doesn't lose any of her own powers, she gains powers from each of the others. Which I probably wouldn't allow in a game.

Re: Exalted-style effects?

 

Invisibility to sense 'bureaucracy.' Single sense or sense group, up to GM. Targetting or non-targetting, probably up to how much attention it gets, or how big it is.

 

Prolly opposed by a bureaucracy check rather than perception.

 

That's the simplest system I can see. And a good rules-monger could prolly get the cost below 5 points for the basic version.

Re: The Authority:What the heck?

 

Want to make the Authority more "realistic"? Have them face a team of opponents (I won't say "villains, since the Authority already holds that space in that title) who are just as coordinated, just as powerful, and just as capable as they are.

 

Have them meet and fight, and as a result of that fight have about half the members of the Authority either permanently injured or dead. As in "gone for good" dead. And if you want double realism points, have the opponents *not* suffer that many casualties, if any at all, and put the Authority in no position to do a damned thing about it.

 

Why is this realistic? Because when you're being realistic, sooner or later you always run up against a guy you can't beat, no matter what you do.

...Very good point. By being 'realistic' they've ended up just as cartoony, if not more so, than conventional supers comics.

 

Good point.

Re: Military Facility Maps

 

I need maps of fake or real military facilities so that I can plot out a portion of an upcoming game. Anyone know of any good resources online?

This came up in a thread a while ago.

 

http://www.missilebases.com/

 

Got some maps of bases. Not typical military bases, but they've proven useful to me.

 

And I still have no idea about whether the site's a spoof or not.

Re: Teleportation, useable as an attack...

 

There's a canon character in CKC -- Tesseract -- who has almost exactly the same power.

Tesseract is the one with an NND Entangle too, isn't she?

 

I'm not sure I'd allow a Usable As Attack, with Range. Though Marcus is right - this isn't as bad as UAA Megascale movement.

Mostly, it depends on the genre of your game. When I run D&D, I don't bother making armour too harsh. Being able to wear heavy armour is part of the balancing factor of that game. Similarly, in a game where 'heavy fighters' from FH have an advantage in that they can wear heavy armour, you probably shouldn't be too hard on them for wearing it.

 

On the other hand, in my upcoming game, I'm gonna be discouraging people from wearing armour long-term. LTE costs, penalties to DCV for anything more than soft leather, penalties to movement for anything metal. Things like that. Also, since it's a very water-based game, any weight of armour ends up being deadly if they fall overboard...

 

Basically, they'll have to get by with light or no armour almost all the time. Until, of course, they get into set battlefield situations. If they have enough attacks against them, they'll value the extra protection. Think of Aragorn at Helm's Deep - the whole first film, he's unarmoured, because he has to remain mobile across country. But when he's pinned down and forced into a defensive battle where he may not have room to dodge, he puts on the chain armour.

 

So, in my game, I'm harsh on armour. You may not want to be so bad on it, though.

Makes sense. D&D has hit points, but HERO has a block mechanic and 1d6RKA penetrating autofire x20 attacks. That'll whittle away any number of hitpoints.

Question: why isn't chain more vulnerable to bashing weapons? I understand it won't deform to the same extent... but surely the flexible nature will mean that more of the force will be transferred to the target?

 

Plate armour has the advantage that it's really HEAVY. That weight, along with the 'spreading out the force', absorbs a lot of the impact. It'd take a /strong/ blunt attack to get through and injure a plate-armoured knight, whereas I could see a similar-strength attack pulverising the chain-armoured dude.

 

I just don't see these rules as being particularly realistic. But then, one of my pet peeves is rules designed to increase realism... but instead diverge from reality. One of the reasons I can't play GURPS.

Originally posted by Klytus

Hatred and bigotry rarely are rational, I never said that they were. But if we are to suspend our disbelief, the conventions used need to make sense. With the exception of the Thing, ane one of the Fantastic Four are normal-looking enough to move in next door. Heck, almost all of the supers in the MU and DCU look perfectly normal (well, except for having perfect bodies and the women being top-heavy in the extreme) People hate Spider-man because J.J.J. has him made out to be a costumed menace, but no one seems to think he's a mutant. How can the general public tell the difference between an altered human and a mutant? They can't. And to me, that simply makes no sense.

The important factor is that although the FF can move in next door, as far as the public's aware, the don't. As the comic-reading public, we know better - Johnny has his apartment, etc. But as far as the general Marvel public knows, they're isolated up in their ivory tower, waiting for another World-Spanning Threat.

 

It's very different to a family moving in next door, one of whom may possibly have tentacle-fingers concealed under that glove. And they don't go out saving the world.

 

It's the difference between having people to look up to as higher beings, and people who you have to be afraid of meeting on the street. It doesn't matter that Johnny Storm could drop his flame, and meet people on the street and they wouldn't know who he was. Perception says that he's a SUPER HERO - he's the modern Greek God. Mutants, though - they're scum who, apart from not having a useful purpose like saving the world, are EVERYWHERE.

 

Mutophobia is overblown in Marvel. But I hold that it's still not entirely nonsensical, from the point of view that I could see something like that happening RL, although probably not to the extent that it appears in comics.

Re: Black Scorpion

 

Originally posted by Mark Rand

Hermit's thread on Animal Motifs for Supers got me thinking about Black Scorpion. Sure, she was a B movie Roger Corman character, but the name has potential.

Let's start with a kunoichi, or female ninja. Instead of Darcy's somewhat skimpy costume, she wears a traditional black ninja costume with two changes, a black ski mask replaces the other mask and she adds clawed gloves. These aren't climbing claws, they scratch the crook and, maybe, put some kind of drug into him.

Besides the claws, she carries a sword, throwing stars, a weighted chain, possibly, a device for firing sleep darts, all bought, along with the finger claws, as a multipower. She also carries other weapons, bought as a VPP, and probably other specialized tools, bought either as a multipower or a VPP.

Her Scorpionmoble could be based on a Pontiac TransAm, last made in 2001, instead of a Corvette.

Nice. I especially like that there's no lame attempt to work in an actual tail. slavish devotion to theme can get silly. And ugly.

The Mutophobia doesn't make rational sense because it isn't entirely rational. But then, prejudice rarely is.

 

People already posting have hit the nail on the head - people aren't afraid of superheroes in general, but they are of mutants. Why? Because mutants might live next door. They could be at the same school as your kids. They could be /teaching/ your kids. Your employees could be mutants. Any moment now, one of them could just explode suddenly in a power manifestation and blow up the school. Or use their position as teachers to tell little Jimmy that mutants are superior and he should bow to them.

 

Think of the problems we have today - many religious people are worried enough about secular teachers, and many secular parents are worried about religious teachers. Expand that to a sub-group that many people hold is trying to replace humanity, and you get instant racism. And since you can't tell who's a mutant, most of the time... when you do catch one, you better beat 'em up so they don't get away and kill someone before the cops catch up with them!

 

I mean, I know enough people RL who refuse to get into cabs driven by Middle-Eastern men. They don't like them because they can't get 'terrorist' out of their mind. I mean, one's own family is more of a danger to an individual than terrorism - but that doesn't stop these people from feeling justified in their hatred of anyone with a Middle-Eastern appearance.

 

So, people love the Avengers and the FF because they're distant. They're in their mansion or skyscraper and they're 'saving the world,' whatever that means. They're Doing Something Good. Mutants are next door. They're all over the place, threatening to replace us as an entire species.

 

(And, of course, there's a nascent distrust of superheroes that even the Avengers have felt from time to time. It's only their world-saving antics that keep them safe.)

 

Yeah, mutophobia is played up too much in Marvel. It shouldn't be nearly so commonplace as it seems. But it's not entirely stupid. Just not rational.

Magic: this may just look like skills. A healer may specialise in using herbs and oils to cure diseases and heal injuries - possibly no more than a 1d6 healing (usable once on any individual), or perhaps just a high First Aid roll. Heck, you could call access to 'PS: doctor' a magical skill.

 

Under this system, magic is something like Conan stuff. Thulsa Doom didn't have a mind control spell - he just had Conversation 28- and a Presence of 40. 'Course, he could also turn into a snake and turn snakes into arrows... in the film, at least. I haven't read the books.

 

And, of course, a 'Wizard' may simply be a sage - someone who knows a lot of stuff. Simple divinations would be an enormous help in a low-magic game.

 

And I like the thing of orcs being the original race. The idea of them being naturally warlike works, too - they aren't evil, they're just naturally warlike and destructive. It's a psychological thing, so they can resist it. Just make sure you resist the urge to make them Fantasy Klingons.

I hated the Official Handbooks to the Marvel Universe. Its sciency explanations used too much /bad/ real science and not enough comic book science. Two things: superheroes don't require real-world explansions, and comic book science can simply work differently. Too much real-world stuff in comics saps the style.

 

For instance: Havok shooting plasma blasts and blowing things up is cool. Havok projecting heat waves to heat the air until it turns into plasma, and stuff blowing up from heat difference... well, then he's a heat projector, not a plasma thrower, and that's not nearly as cool.

 

A much better explanation comes from the Marvel SAGA game - that 'superhero plasma' in the marvel universe is a very low, basic yet still powerful manifestation of cosmic energy. Thus, it surpasses what we currently understand about physics.

 

Also works if you allow more leeway to explanations involving psionics and various other things like that. The Hulk, for instance - where does his extra mass come from? the answer: it comes from his rage. His mind takes over matter and increases his mass. I don't like all of the OHOTMU's 'extra-dimensional mass' explanations. Why can't superheroes simply bulk up by turning internal energy into external bulk?

 

And the 100-ton strength limitation was ludicrous - totally blown out of the water by the comics themselves.

 

From what I hear from one of the contributors, there were severe editorial constraints to the sciency things, wanting things too grounded in the 'real world.'

 

Comics are comics, and superheroes are SUPER! They don't have to live in the real world.

Another way of doing it is to assume that you don't have any higher G-tolerance unless you buy a power. This is a less good thing, in that it requires spending points. But it's better, because it gives you a definite system way of doing things. Use it if it's good for you.

 

Under this system, you buy reduced turn mode for flight... GM might require you to either have 'usable by other', or perhaps give you a kickback because you can't use it on yourself, only while piloting. This gives you the effect, without worrying about dice rolls all the time, or calculating just what effect it has beyond the printed rules.

If we're talking 'heavyweight' heroes or villains, we ain't talking 350 point PCs. We understand, Chuck, that the military isn't a pushover. And I understand frustration at seeing militaries constantly under-represented. I hate it when people don't properly represent power levels or whatever, for dramatic (or, more likely, lazy) reasons.

 

But chill! No-one's saying the military sucks. Just that a good team of supers can overwhelm them either by power, or by exploiting weaknesses (the latter, yes, does involve some knowledge of the military and their machines). Especially as most militaries train to fight other militaries, not superheroes. Yep, in a supers setting, you'll get military units that are trained that way. But you'll also get supers trained to fight the military.

Anyone with cable might wanna check out the History Channel series 'Conquest.' At least, it seems to be an actual History Channel production - if it's showing elsewhere, I apologise. I thought it was in-house.

 

Anyway, it's about weapons and combat styles. Has an actor (Peter Woodward), who knows stuff about things. It's mostly about medieval stuff, but also has odd digressions (an episode on bull riding? What the hell?).

 

As an example, the first episode I saw was about axes. It was brilliant. Changed my opinion about 'em. Showed them being used in what they think would be historical styles (as very little is known about actual medieval combat styles), and they were /fast/. Slow to get moving, but once they were moving, they could change direction very quickly. It went into the psychological aspects of axes - how a single axeman could break entire units, batter on shields, and force opponents onto the defensive by keeping up a constant flurry of attacks. It even showed how people can switch direction fast enough to feint - switch from a downwardsblow to the head to an upwards shot at the stomach in an instant.

 

Other eps covered archery (including explaining why continental European armies didn't use bows much), duelling (all the way from 501CE to the 1750s), knightly tournaments, and medieval 'weird weapons' for use against knights. Even had an ep on SWAT teams, it seems - haven't watched that tape yet.

 

It's a re-creationist's dream, really. And they're all using quite genuine weapons. Sometimes, they show the effect of weapons on armour, such as chainmail getting pierced by just about any solid blow (an axe, meanwhile, cut the chain shirt right down the sternum, without really noticing). In any case, it should be an incredibly useful source for anyone interested in learning about real-life aspects of weapons. So far, no game system I know is accurate enough to cover all the aspects of weaponry, so it's not about achieving absolute realism. HERO system isn't about that, anyway. But it can help avoid certain fallacies.

 

I got reminded about this after reading the earlier thread about 'speed factors' for weapons, which again raised the question of big weapons being slow. Conquest quite clearly showed that big weapons are not necessarily slow, nor are small weapons necessarily fast.

 

But for those who want to get more understanding about the weapons at hand, their historical contexts and how they were actually used in history, I'd really recommend this series.

Sorry for coming into this topic late. I haven't had the time to scan boards much later.

 

Quoting from http://www.seds.org/pub/faq/Space_FAQ_04_13_-_Calculations

COMPUTING CRATER DIAMETERS FROM EARTH-IMPACTING ASTEROIDS

 

Astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker proposes the following formula, based on studies of cratering caused by nuclear tests. Units are MKS unless otherwise noted; impact energy is sometimes expressed in nuclear bomb terms (kilotons TNT equivalent) due to the origin of the model.

 

D = Sg Sp Kn W^(1/3.4)

Crater diameter, meters. On Earth, if D > 3 km, the crater is assumed to collapse by a factor of 1.3 due to gravity.

 

Sg = (ge/gt)^(1/6)

Gravity correction factor cited for craters on the Moon. May hold true for other bodies. ge = 9.8 m/s^2 is Earth gravity, gt is gravity of the target body.

 

Sp = (pa/pt)^(1/3.4)

Density correction factor for target material relative to the Jangle U nuclear crater site. pa = 1.8e3 kg/m^3 (1.8 gm/cm^3) for alluvium, pt = density at the impact site. For reference, average rock on the continental shields has a density of 2.6e3 kg/m^3 (2.6 gm/cm^3).

 

Kn = 74 m / (kiloton TNT equivalent)^(1/3.4) Empirically determined scaling factor from bomb yield to crater diameter at Jangle U.

 

W = Ke / (4.185e12 joules/KT)

Kinetic energy of asteroid, kilotons TNT equivalent.

 

Ke = 1/2 m v^2

Kinetic energy of asteroid, joules.

 

v = impact velocity of asteroid, m/s.

2e4 m/s (20 km/s) is common for an asteroid in an Earth-crossing orbit.

 

m = 4/3 pi r^3 rho

Mass of asteroid, kg.

 

r = radius of asteroid, m

 

rho = density of asteroid, kg/m^3

3.3e3 kg/m^3 (3 gm/cm^3) is reasonable for a common S-type asteroid.

 

For an example, let's work the body which created the 1.1 km diameter Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona (in reality the model was run backwards from the known crater size to estimate the meteor size, but this is just to show how the math works):

 

r = 40 m Meteor radius

rho = 7.8e3 kg/m^3 Density of nickel-iron meteor

v = 2e4 m/s Impact velocity characteristic of asteroids in Earth-crossing orbits

pt = 2.3e3 kg/m^3 Density of Arizona at impact site

Sg = 1 No correction for impact on Earth

Sp = (1.8/2.3)^(1/3.4) = .93

m = 4/3 pi 40^3 7.8e3 = 2.61e8 kg

Ke = 1/2 * 2.61e8 kg * (2e4 m/s)^2

= 5.22e16 joules

W = 5.22e16 / 4.185e12 = 12,470 KT

D = 1 * .93 * 74 * 12470^(1/3.4) = 1100 meters

 

More generally, one can use (after Gehrels, 1985):

 

(Snipped because I couldn't format it into a table)

 

The Hiroshima explosion is assumed to be 13 kilotons.

 

Finally, a back of the envelope rule is that an object moving at a speed of 3 km/s has kinetic energy equal to the explosive energy of an equal mass of TNT; thus a 10 ton asteroid moving at 30 km/sec would have an impact energy of (10 ton) (30 km/sec / 3 km/sec)^2 = 1 KT.

So, using the thing there for working out kilotons, Fuzzy Gnome is in the ballpark - around 5 kilotons.

 

This gives an explosion far below Hiroshima. That's a heck of a lot less than 20d6 RKA, which is the number more approxipate for megaton-scale explosions. So using a simple move-through is pointless, especially as it's a linear damage adder rather than a logarithmic one. If you want, you can work out the crater diameter could be worked out from the above equations, and work backwards to an impact damage and explosion. (Keep in mind that crater diameter is the area of earth that's disrupted, not the limit of damage.) I'd personally put it at 10d6 killing or so, with a couple of increases to explosive radius. That'd be enough to create a sizeable area of destruction of earth, while creating goodly devastation elsewhere.

 

Anyway, hope that's some use. I mostly posted here 'cause I really like that page, and find it very useful in games.

Originally posted by Farkling

Maybe he's looking for a feel more like the Ultimate Stargate or Stargate Infinity cartoon...whatever it's called....

 

It was higher powered, but horrid!

 

I'd run SG-1 as a heroic game also...look at all that requisitione equipment...

Primary weaponry, backup weapons, rocket launchers, tends, alarm systems, limited hazmat gear, rations...

 

Add up to a lotta points if you have to pay for equipment. Though I might recommend giving each character an 'equipment pool' based on rank and stuff, that they could possibly increase by putting character points into it (say, on a 1-for-5 basis?). That way, you can have the 'basic mission equipment' that costs nothing, but anything extra comes from your personal points, allowing for customised stuff, extra supplies, etc.

 

But that may be getting a bit rulesy.

In my game: Had two characters who I merged into one. Fantasy game. One PC, the Paladin, had a father who died 15 years ago in a big uprising thingy. Had started a revolution in a city of evil type stuff, but then the guy he put on the throne went evil and had all the paladins attacked and mostly killed. This dude bought families and survivors enough time to get out of the city, at the cost of his own life. The other guy was still alive, a paladin who survived and was now serving as the PC's mentor. By weaving the two characters together, I decided that the dead father in fact just barely survived, had his lifeforce entwined with his killer (a bad dude verging on demigod status), and thus held the secret to defeating him. However, first he had to face up to his past, and then had to sacrifice his life - again. This all ended up getting revealed to the PC just as his dad was dying. Very teary moment (helped by use of music from the B5 finale). The player was distraught, but later was heard to describe it as the best session ever. Player loves her angst.

 

From a friend's game: Star Wars game. Not quite so much tying two plot threads together in GM planning, but rather having a difficult problem solved through player action serendipity - the player was pushing forward his own plot thread, which meshed with the GM's. It was a prequel game, played before any of the prequel movies came out, describing the clone wars and the rise of the empire. The thing is, there were PCs taking part in political maneuverings. They had real power, and could have blocked any 'Palpatine' getting into power. That's metagaming, sure, but people being people, it's hard to allow something like that to happen.

 

So, the GM had a fairly unassuming senator from a remote planet. He had a reputation for being fairly smart, but ultimately 'not real leadership material.' The GM, Ben, had to figure out how to get him into power. He had no idea. But then the player with the most political influence decided he was going to get his house to sponsor a candidate for the position of President. A fairly tractable guy, but still respected. So he chose this dude.

 

At that point, Ben called a break to the session, went into the toilet, and proceeded to quietly whoop in victory. He related this story months later when the players watched in horror as the unassuming candidate married into the Palapatine family... then went on to declare himself Emperor.

 

The player of the character who got him into power elected, after the game, to have his character tortured to death on board a star destroyer, because it was what he felt his character deserved.

 

That story has become legend in our little gaming group.