Michael Hopcroft

Re: "Fantasy" withoiut Magic Several fantasy tropes are possible without magic. Fantasy races are quite possible, as variant of humanity or as other species who emerged into sentience. Thus the presence of, say, elves, does not neccarily require the presence of magic any more than the presence of Neandethals requires the presence or absence of magic. Other tropes in the fantasy genre might be possible without magic. Fantasy need not neccarily be assocaited with the past. It's A Wonderful Life is a fantasy -- it wasn't called one when it was made, but that was because people didn't use words like "Fantasy" in the 1940s nearly as often or as broadly as we do now.

Is it possible to use the standard fantasy tropes in a world with no magic? If magic is defined as "any action that violates the laws of cuase and effect", then magic is logically contradictory and therefore CANNOT exist. most fnantasy GMs don;t enforce a ligikcal cosmos, but if you did then there can;t be real magic. What there can be is a pervasive belief that magic exists, leading many people to think that magical effects are possible or even common. And you can have numerous con artists and charlatans taking advanmtage of that belief to sell worthless postions, take money for putting non-existant hexes on people's enemies, etc. Character can go to magical helaers who claim tot reat their injuries but in relaity do nothing -- and who then claim "the stars were wrong" when the patient, to their surrpise, dies.

I'm trying to figure out how to write up Yuko, the anti-heroine of CLAMP's new urban fantasy manga XXXholic, for Hero. Yuko is a fabulous character. Obviously she's a powerful mage, with a reach that extends throughout the infinity of universes. Apparently she's been alive for hundreds of years (she may have an affair with Clow Read in her past) and knows just abotu every mysictally-oriented character in the CLAMP multiverse. As for personality, she is wheimsical, eccentric, and treats poor Watanuki like the burnables. If CLAMP had been the creatoe of Doctor Who, the character would have turned out a whole lot like Yuko. She reminds me of a much prettier William Hartnell. Anyway, she's a really compelling character, I want to knwo more about her, and I think she would be a lot of fun to have in a game.

Re: The Invisibles Writeups

Re: The Invisibles Writeups It comes down to the children's inexperience. Given time, Dash will learn to focus his speed into power, just as given time Violet will learn to toughen her forcefields and make them more reliable. As it is, now, both are novice superheroes at best, with plenty of raw power but little experience or skill. It's hard to model the sort of inexperience in stat terms because stats model, in a sense, potential. Even if you give the characters disadvantages they will have to buy off as they get experience, it's hard to exactly model the effects of knowing you CAN do stuff but not knowing precisely HOW.

Vietnam War HERO One question I would have before doing a search for references is the power level of the game. Do you want elite troops such as Rangers or Green Berets, or are your PC's grunts running thought the jungle, draftees essentially trying to just do their jobs and stay alive long enough to get rotated home? Elite characters who be at a higher point level and could justify higher skill levels. But the draftees, though not quite as competent, also provide excellent opportunities for character-based roleplaying. Troops in Vietnam faced many more obstacles than just the Viet Cong and the NVA. many of the soldiers also had battle things like drug addiction, trauma, and hearing about what was going on at home as the world seemingly unraveled around them.

Re: Dolls The realtionshoip between a 200-foot-tall robot and a one-foot magically-animated doll is questionable at best. Aside from which, as I have stated before, Shinku doesn't even use a sword. She's more of an energy manipulator.

Re: Saiyuki writeups?

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here? For the love of God, don't remind me. Reading Synnibar is a very bad experience, but I have a bad Synnibar experience that probably trumps you all. When i was touring the Northwest con circuit to promote the first edition of HeartQuest, I happened to run into the game's designer, Raven S. McCracken. A leather-clad, hypersexual man who was pormoting his next game at the same cons and seemed unaware of both his poor reputation in the industry and his own complete lack of talent as a game designer. (He was promoting a collectible board game that rivals his earlier work in its sheer awfulness.) Not only did he start lecturing me on how to be a success in the RPG bsuienss, but after reading HeartQuest he uniltaerally declared himself my biggest fan. How that's for a ringing endorsemnt? The designer of the worst RPG in human history loves my game. I was contemplating suicide for the next three weeks. It's like being told your screenplay is great by the author of Super Mario Brothers.

Re: Hooray for Newbies! why are you suddenly here?

Although the HERO System is not as commonly used for comedy as some other games, I've been seeing a lot of stuff lately that seems to be, if done properly, gamable but which involves characters who have traits that are distinctly humorous. First of all, how do you model comedic characters? Obviously there are a lot of ways to use Disadvantages to reflect humorous traits. Characters with particular obsessions have Psych Lims, a character can have a Phycial Lim to reflect being clumsier than their DEX would indicate (i.e. they're OK in a combat but tend to trip on their own two feet out of it -- the Usagi Tsukino syndrome). How you would reflect a character who is naturally oblivious is a good question -- I'm tempted to try modeling Azumangah Daioh's Osaka-chan, but she would be difficult.

Re: Dolls

Re: Dolls Shinku does have powers, of some sort. In fact, this little dolly kicks tail. Usually the tails of other dollies her size, who have their own mystic abilities. But Shinku's enemies have the power to animate just about ANY doll and turn it into a weapon, as Jun discoevrs to his discomfort. Shinku does not use a sword, Captain O. But she does seem to have some sort of elemtnal ability to attack at range. her display of power does not make Jun any happier about becoming a doll's servant, but evidently the only thing that would make Jun happy is if the world outside his room suddenly ceased to exist and he could be all by himself forever. Did I mention that Jun is a complete and total jerk?

What is the best mechanic to both price a ranged attack that is harder to use Missle Deflection?Reflection against than a normal attack and to use that attack in play? I was thinking of something along the lines of grenades that fly in unpredictable ways, missiles that fly evansively towards their target, etc.

The new anime series Rozen Maiden psoitis a goup od magically-animated (presumably) dolls with strange powers. One of them, Shinku, has intersposed herself in the life of an obnixous young hermit named Jun, declared him her "servant", and proceeded against his will to make his life very interesting indeed. Being a doll poses problems for a character. Shinku is only a foot tall, and most of the people she talks to are intially surprised when she speaks. Although she has soft skin, she looks like she's made or porcelain. She dresses extremely elbaorately, usually in the same outfit. It is uncertain whether she is capable of doing things like changing her own clothes. Although she can drink tea and eat food, apparently she does not excrete (Jun has to explain to her what a toilet is), and it unclear whether she actually needs food and drink to function or whether she just likes tea and cakes. As for Jun, he has to be one of the most obnixious anime anti-heroes I've ever seen. He seems to resent the entire universe, and his nasty, uncaring attitude buts his very sweet and caring older sister through seven kinds of hell. Shinku declaring him her "servant" and forcing him to do what she wants is defeintely a form of well-deserved comeuppance....

With the various writeups of the charatcers from The Incredibles that have been posted, I'm still waiting for Edna Mode, fashionista to the superheroes. Knowing her (or the character who is equivalent in your campaign) is a great advatnage for a superhero. Not only can she repair damage to your costume, but she can design a new one for you if the need arises (as long as you don't want a cape). And she has a virtually encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes, superpowers, and the like -- she knows enough about the effects of seemingly every imaginable superpower that she can quickly design suits that match the powers. Pity the poor supervillain who tries to kidnap Edna. If the rescuging superheroes don't beat the villain within an inch of their life, Edna's arch, acid comments are likely to drive the villain completely beyond the pale of sanity....

Re: The Invisibles Writeups Finally saw The Incredibles today -- fabulous movie! One interesting note is that Sydnrome's agents were a lot more supers-savvy than agents usually are in comics and media. One in particular got very close to actually managing to shoot Violet and actually used all kinds of anti-invisibility tricks to detect her. He knew there was an invisble opponet around, and he used various ingenious means to figure out where she was. Violet was lucky to live through the encounter. The kids actually did come across as very inexperienced in using their powers in combat. They were clever, but they didn't know any of the trcisk that a more experienced hero would know as a matter of course. Dash, for example, was surprisingly easy to hit for a speedster -- he'd never been in combat before and didn't know to keep his entire body moving at all times just enough to make himself more difficult to hit. Since their inexperience nearly got both Violet and Dash killed, it's good to see it reflected in their writeups. Jack-Jack is very difficult to model. being an infant, he has a very limtied grasp of his surroundings, but seems to recognize danger and instinctively react to it. he seems to be an extremely powerful metamorph who can change himself into any form of matter or energy (lead, pure heat) or into other types of creatures. When he gets older he'll be perhaps the family member with the most raw power.

Re: Future Boy Conan? There is a perfect example of this in the very episode of this very series, when Conan's grandfather squares off with an Industria agent who becomes one of Conan's main adversaries later in the series. They have a brief but very insightful argument about morality. He thinks the Industrians are wrong because they brought weapons to the island for ther own purposes; the Indisytrian agents blames Granfather's generation for the war and the suffering that she, as a child of the postwar era, endured as she struggled to survive the calamity. It later turned out that grandfather had tried to flee the planet suring the war, but the spaceship crashed -- he suspected that the ship itself "wouldn't let them" abandon the planet as he had orignally planned. Grandfather's fate may be symbolic of those who would run away from a problem rather than face it head-on -- he was the last survivor of the spaceship's crew, and his last request was that Conan go out into the world and interact with human beings rather than live in isolation and repeat his mistakes. So even realitvely noble charatcers in Future Boy Conan can easily be viewed in shades of gray rather than as a black-and-white dichotomy of good and evil. As I go on in the series I wonder if even the most violent of the characters who oppose Conan and Lana will have good, sound reasons for doing what they do -- even if what they do is horrible. Industria is a totalitarian nightmare of a state, but those who run it actually believe that what they are doing is the best way for mankind to survive even as the spirits of many of the people they command are crushed by their extremely rigid social order. Perahps they believe human beings can't handle freedom in the sense that we understand it and that they need to be dominated and controlled.

Re: Love/Lust Potions I just got this image of a Warrior Nun type of character being given this potion by an adevrsary. If there are modifiers to the Seduction rol this COULD be used on PCs if you really want it to be, with everything that implies. Of course, if it does get used on a PC in my game, i would take the player aside, explain a little bit about what's going on (not neccesarily everything) and ask them a.) how far they were comfortable with their character taking things and b.) ewhat sort of long-term effects of the action they would consider acceptable to keep the game going. If the PC has a vow of celibacy (Social Disad) and is determined to live by it, then rather than forcing the player to play against type I would create circumstances that, even if the character is under the effects of the potion, the unvierdse itself is working towards keeping their vows intact. In a different system, one of the PCs in a game I was in tried to seduce my PC using illusion magic. Since I assumed my PC had taken a vow of celibacy (he was a powerful priest), and i knew the other player was doing this just to wresltle with my head, I played out his efforts to resist the temptation ine xcyur\ciating detail. Not only did it work, but I roleplayed the situation so well i got extra experience.

Are there some characters that are TOO evil to ap;pear in a Champions game? It seems that in many comics there are characters who represent something so foul that their very existence seems to be an offense against the universe. One example that leapt to mind, and prompted me to think about this issue, is the Batman: the Animated Series villain the Sewerking from the episode "The Underdwellers". the Sewer King had taken hundreds of orphans off the streets of Gotham City and turtned them into his perosnal army of theives. He treated the children, none older than ten, liek chattel, holding them to such a strict code of silence that they literally lost the power of speech and denying them everything that even approached free will, all the while stating that he was the only one who cared about them. Batman was so revolted by the Sewer King's treatment of the children that he was sorely tempted to be judge, jury and executioner -- and this from a man who consistenly refuses to dispatch mass-murderers like the Joker! Another example of this sort of character is the Silver Age Sentinels character Bloody Mary, who enslaves and murders children as her main modus operandi. Are some characters and the concepts that they represent so evil, vile and morally repugnant that they literally have no place in a game? Do they lead gamemasters in directions that a reasonable person refuses to go? Are some things so foul that even imagining them in a "safe" context like an RPG is demeaning?

What sort of thing would help if I wanted to play inthe world of Kiyazaki's classic post-holocuast TV series Future Boy Conan? (Which, like Detective Conan, has no link whatsoever to Howard's barbarian warrior-hero....) Basically, a combiantion of war and tectonic disaster has swamped most of the Earth under the sea. Mankinf survivies on scattered islands in the vast world-ocean. Conan, the hero of the series, is a young boy who with his astronuat grandfather are the sole inhabitants of Remnant Island. It's an idyllic life that is shattered when a girl from a distant island named Lana washes up on the shore -- with government agents from Industria (a totaltitaran techno-state) in hot pursuit. Conan sets off to resuce the girl from Industria and the oddessy is on. The show was made in 1978, but holds up amazingly well. You can see many plot elements and visual tropes that would show up in such later Miyazaki films as Castle of Cagliostro and Laptua: Castle in the Sky. the Conan/Lana dynamic in particular would be strongly continued in Laputa.

Re: Putting extra "oomph" into a spell But wouldn't that cause characters with high Skill to push more often than usual because they can avoid the worst effects simply by making their Skill rolls, no matter what ther willpower? This may be the effect you're looking for. This may be a reward for taking the Magic skill at high level that you want to build into your magic system. I wonder if this is what you want to do, though, if you want to keep Pushing as a rare option that is used mainly in life-or-death situations.

Re: GetBackers: DC fodder? Dr. Jackal kills almost a score of lesser "retrievers" in one epsidoe in a particularly brutal way -- but then again the Joker is also a vicious killer. The GetBackers themselves tend not to kill without great provocation, and even spared Dr. Jackal afetr defeating him even though if any aniume charatcer ever blatantly deserved to die it's him. Good question. I think the possibility of death is very real, and the heroes continually find themselves literally staruing death in the face. In addition,t hey are very far from being bulletproof or having reduced vulenraility -- they're tough, but not superhumanly so despite their powers.

Thsi weekend I goit to watch a whole bunch of new anime at a friend's hosue, and one of the new series I saw was GetBackers -- which seemed to me like it might be prime DC fodder. On the other hand, many of the important characters have superpowers, so I'm wondering how it would work. The heroes of the series, Genji and Ban, are 'retrival specialists" who use their natural ability and minor-league superpowers to retrive lost and stolen items. The powers do not seem intuitively the sort of powers that would be most useful for this kind of work: Genji is a human 'electric eel" who generates electricity from his body and can perform a variety of effects with it, while Ban has the severely limited but frighteningly effective power to cause people with whom he makes eye contact to see a 'dream" (usually more like a nightmare usually) for one minute real time and thus be incapable of interacting with the real world suring that time, as well as a "200 kg grip" (if I got my sums right that's about 460 pounds of pressure when he has someone in his clutches -- doesn't translate into punching strength, so this would be STR with a severe Limitation). Among their recurring enemies are Lady Poison, a chemistry genius who uses various perfumes for a variety of dangerous effects (she and Ban have a history), and Dr. Jackal, a vicious killer who has a seemingly unlimtied number of scalpel-like weapons stored inside his body that he can summon at will. On the other hand, the "transporter" No-Brake was one of the more intriguing characters, who seemed to have no power at all except that he is an exceptionally nervy driver who is nearly impossible to intimidate on the road. the GetBacksers would also have the disadvantage of being very bad with money and thus perpetually broke. Although their services are usually expensive, they have the habit of doing things that reduce their income, from taking on free work when the client has a particularly compelling story to making foolish assumptions about the job that cost them a lot of money. (They once blew a 2 million yen fee because they thought a traget was a shipment of platinum and it turned out to be an especially prixzed melon....) Would you run this game as DC or low-powered Champions? And does it really matter?

How would you write up a spell that enchants a weapon or similar item for a limited period of time. An example would be a spell that causes a wepon to affect beings who would not otherwise be effected by it, but when the duration expires it becomes an ordinary weapon again.