Michael Hopcroft

Do you allow mages to push their spells when they need an extra-special effect? Not just for more damage with attacks, but also to go places faster (pushing a Movement Power) or go farther than they normally would (Pushing a teleport spell), to make Transforms that last longer, etc.

Re: First Supers in the World campaigns

Re: Lum! Yum!

Re: Lum! Yum! Unfamilaiity with Earth Culture, when it shows up in other genres, is usually listed as a Physical Limitation. it's a quirk in the rules -- you can exercise your will to overcome your Psych Lims if you really want to. but no amount of willpower will make you understand humans. Only experience (and buying off the disadvantage) will do that. By the end of the series, Lum might well have bought off that disad: she did attend Tomobiki High School and probably would end up graduating from there. what I'm wondering is how notoriously poor student Ataru will eventually earn a living. I can;t see him getting into a good college (or any college at all) and he doesn't have a large personal fortune like Mendou does. And he's very proud, which indicates to me that he would probably resist the temptation to simply take an allowance and live off Lum's family. (this pride and his laziness would be in conflict here.) Also, while Ataru is The Most Lecherous Being in the Universe, he is an extremely unsuccessful letch. He will try to bed every woman he meets except his mother, but only Lum wants to be anywhere near his bedroom. In fact, he has to fight her off with a stick -- she makes herslef that available -- possibly out of fear that sex with Lum might kill him.

Re: The solar system that never was For some reason, the link could not translate the page at all. Myabe it's been removed? That would bit a pity, as the idea of planets that aren't really there is an interesting idea that has some interesting roleplaying potential.

Re: Average Seperation It wouldn't be that great a stretch to psotulate a galaxy in which intelligence evolved only on Earth. After all, from the perspective on a species survival it isn;t all that valuable a characteristic and there is no reason it should be selected for more readily than any other. If one doesn;t want to go that far, it is more reasonable to think that the sort of tehcnolgocial stepping-stones required to reach the stars were only reached or survived on earth, and that by the skin of our teeth -- we very nearly didn;t survive learning how to split the atom, after all, and still mgiht not. The result would be a cosmos in which humans would explore as much of their spiral arm as they can reach for thousands of years and still nto meet an alien species. natural genetic variation would result in humans changign as they settle in different environments, so that in, say, 3,000 years we might encoutner human sub-species that are alien in msot of the areas that matter but that are still descended from Earth's gene pool. This, of course, assumes interstellar travel is possible at all, which all the evidence indicates is not true in the real world. any trip to another solar system will likely be essentially one-way, with no future contact with home at all.

Re: TV Teen Titans Writeups Blackfire is a Tamaranian. Starfire's powers are common, if not to her entire speices, at least to the royal family. persumably her parents have or had the same basic set. We haven't really explored what it means when all members of particular race have the same super powers, which means that among their race the powers are not "super" at all but part of everyday life. In the DC Universe, this was not really addressed with Superman because on their homeworld Kryptonian's weren't "super" at all (no yellow sun) and there are so few Kryptonians who migrated to Earth. If all Tamaranians have these powers and Starfire isn't all that special among her own people (well, maybe except for her status), one wonders how she ended up on Earth in the first place. pewrhaps it seems odd to Star that all the supers on earth have different powers and that so many humans have no powers at all.

Re: Lum! Yum! Lum could also shock people from a distance, as Ataru can testify. her shocks behave just like normal electricity, and are conducted by water Once she tried to shock someone while she was in the middle of a swimming pool and ended up electrovcuting everyone in the pool -- Ataru commented that the reason eh wasn;t incapacitated was that he was "used to it". Which acutally bodes well for his future with Lum -- maybe if he's inured enough he wil be able to survive acceindal discharges in certain, er, emotionally charged situation that might occur in the future. That is, fi Ataru ever comes to his senses and realizes that unconditional love (even if ti is posessive) is the best thing that could ever happen to him. Come to his senses? ATARU? Who am I kidding?

Re: Here Be Dragons! I am still fond of the Slayers dragons, the most intelligent of whom (Gold Dragons and Anicent Dragons, although by the time of the series the latter had been essentially wiped out) cna assume human form. In that cosmology, the intelligent Dragons or Dragon race (Ryuzoku -- did I spell that right?) were to the good gods what Mazoku were to Shabranigdo and the other demon lords. Thus there was a long-running rivalry between the two races. A thousand or so years before, the two races had fought a war that had ravaged the world. Dragons were very hard to kill, but a powerful Mazoku had a reputation for having killed thousands of them single-handed during the war. There were other dragons as well, but they were mainly mindless, rampaging beasts. The most prominent of these were the Black Dragons, which were sometimes used as pets and intidmation tools by bandit gangs, and the Lake Dragons, which were hunted by humans for food. Dragon Cuisine was the king of foods in the Slayers world, but very hard to prepare -- you had to let the meat sit for six months, for example, to let the poison gradually leech out. Since Lake Dragons were rare and hard to catch, Dragon Cuisine was a rare treat that only the very luckiest of people ever got to sample.

Re: help with wind spell ideas Since it's hard to blow and speak at the same time, and most spells are built with the Incantations limitation, an alternative method of producing wind might be in order. No, not that one. Gross. One possibility is a fan. Fan yourself, some object, or just the general direction in which you aiming the spell while you recite the incantation. In a pinch you can use your hand, but the spell might work better if you have a specially prepared fan for those occasions -- it wouldn't be expandable, of course, but it could be a part of one's standard costume --- or a symbol of your wind magery. If your Gm requires an expendable material component, a pinch of special dust that you toss in the air and blow away with the fan would be ideal. You'd need to practice to throw the dust in the air with one hand and fan it away with the other, but that can probably be assumed to be part of your learning how to cast the spell.

Re: Social "Combat' and "Duels"

Re: Social "Combat' and "Duels"

Re: What Do You Consider An "Animated" Style Campaign Contermpoary Western animeation has sort of outgrown \many of those limitations. A series like Teen Titans , for exmaple, has relatively heavy sub-plotting comapred to Superfriends -- each season, while often episodic, often has an overplot, and there are characters like Terra about whom you don;t knwo whose side they;re on until it's too late. The main style element that is applicable to conemproary animation such as TT, Justice League or X-Men Evolution is that combat and action is flashy, stylized, and not as deadly as it is in comics (at least on-screen). Characters frequely do things that should be phsyically impossible, like dodging machine-gun fire and leaping impossilbe heights even without Leaping. (Which you should encourage non-flying charatcers to take, by the way, unelsss their concept demands otherwise). I don't know how, for example, everyone else in Juistice league keeps up with the Flash, but somehow they do. For research into that style, some episodes of any of the DC animated series since Batman would be a good start. X-Men Evolution and the MTV Spider-man series would also be good. the HBO Spawn animation would be good if you want to see how to do a darker game in that style -- it shoudl be readuily rentable.

Re: Video Games Remember -- the Foirst Amendemnt doesn;t apply to you unless you agree with the Administration. Seriously, the FCC has had a grudge against escapsit "children's programming" for a long time. It is a long-standing belief that any rpogramming baltantly aimed at children that is not obviously education is not a good idea for children. Of course, MY opinion is that no child should be exposed to television utnil they turn 10. They should be playing outside or doing other things that are healthier for them than sitting in front of a flickering screen. The proiblem with that, fo course, is that cartoons by their vary nature are an often-guilty pleasure for adults and the cutback in network programming has hurt people who don;t have cable and who like a little escapism every once in a while. Now everything worth watching originates on cable, and usually stays there.

Re: Living Darkenss manipulation Could be an interesting hero concept, especially if a GM is willing to put up with a character with traces of anti-hero and a touch of the mysterious and slightly disturbing. (Post #750!)

Has anyone done a 5e updated writeup for the heroine of Urusei Yatsura, Lum the Invader? aka "The poster Child for What happens when you Fall in Love with the Wrong Man"? I personally found Lum adorable. Of course, I can see why alvoer who uncotnrollably emitted electric shocks when angry, enthusastic or otherwise emtional would intimdiate Ataru. But still, I sometimes think Moroboshi is blind as a bat to other people's emotions.

Re: Video Games

One of my favorite anime series from a couple of years ago was .hack//SIGN, which postualted that the hero was a child who had been trapped in a MMORPG gone horribly wrong. Not only could he not "log out", but his real body was in a coma in a hospital bed in japan, and his father was trying to get the plug pulled! I don;t know if it would be too mcuh metagame to have some other type of campaign turn out to be a MMORPS in whichone or more characters is a real person trapped inside. Although it would ex\plain such RPG conventions as "the world will never run out of rocs!" (the system generates some more), it would present quite a roleplaying challenge, especially if players in character start challenging and manipulating the reality of the setting. How would any of you handle this?

Re: Favorite Television Characters Veyr interesting quote. Is it DBZ canon or from a fanfic?

Imagine if you will that something lives in the abscence of lightt darkness itself is alive. Now imagine that you could manipulate lviing darkenss not only to create darkness fields but also to do other effects. And imagine the darkenss was sentient.... One could easily imagine a darkenss-manipulator who controlled existing darkness would be utterly formidable at ngith (so much more darkness to manipulate!), somewhat elss so during the day, and could lose access to a lot of his powers if put under a spotlight or other extreme forms of illumination.

Re: Yet another fantasy idea Interesting idea (or rather set of ideas, as this seems to be breakable apart into several modular themes that can be used separateky in duifferent campaigns.) It might also be intersting if the Natvie American nations had proven more reistant to smallpox and thus more resitant to the European invasion: instead of a quick campaign, the conquests of the Aztecs and Incas might have turned into a Vietnam-like quagmire for Spain, and Native Americans from more easily conquered lands might well travel to the Old World as trophies, slaves or diplomats. (perhaps Monteczuma had sent a peace emissary to Spain in an effort to end the war, although how the xenophobic Spanish counrt would recieve an obvious "pagan" is anyone's guess). Perhaps Azetc piriests have made their way across Europe and are trying to use their own blood-and-sacrifice-powreed reituals there.

Re: Here Be Dragons! Great wrietup! Can i get a .hdc file for the baby dragon? I'm thinking of giving it to a party of fantasy adventurers as a mascot, having been orphaned by a less ethical adventuring party.

Re: hanging PCs together Historically, many colonies (Australia, Guyana) were originally settled by prisoners. player-characters could all have been sentenced to trasnpoprt to the "New World" and meet while on the same ship. then, when they get to the prison, something happens and they find thesmlves free -- but alone and on the run in a totally unfamilair environment with no way home. Or the authorities could just drop off the prisoners in port, give them a few coins and say "You're on your own from here on in."

Re: Bardic Magic You can probably replace Incantations with the generic limitation "Must sing to use power", which would be worth about -1/4 less than Incantations but still be limtiing (because when you're in a situation where you can;t use your voice and hands you can't use the powers).

Re: Hero Designer in a Star Hero Campaign? I am a very happy Hero Designer user. The software is very handy for several reasons that have not been mentioned. It keeps all the character, vehicle, race, etc. stats in one convenient place on your hard drive, which can be wherever on your hard drvie you want it to be. It provides a convenient way for users to share data -- chsaracter files are surprsiingly compact, and you can give them to any other HD user to print and get comments on -- making it useful for collaborative settings. As your PCs and NPCs grow, you can alter their character sheets "on the fly" and print out new ones as needed.