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Re: New Writeup Game! Fix the "Weaklings" Thanks for the kudos guys. I'm getting really tempted to throw a Cypher knock-off into a teen angst supers short campaign I'm running soon and then let him have his training after a few episodes so I can then reintroduce him post upgrades in the later arc.

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord I think it is a hard call on the reflexes for Mainstream vs. Ultimate Cap. Mainstream cap is scary in the agility reflexes department, sometimes throwing his shield at the start of a hail of gunfire, dancing through it all, recovering the shild at the end after it took out all the fguunmen on one side, and then having it back in place for the one guy left in front of him with a shotgun. I /think/ I remember him doing something similar to the old Wolverine "Grab the gun pointed at your temple out of the other guy's hand before he can pull the trigger" trick as well. His dodging is just off the hook though, and the workouts mentioned previously by Hermit, also almost always include huge gymnastics routines over varied terrain and in mind-boggingly complex patterns. It could just be that he has high skill levels and lightning reflexes (in game tertms), but it seems to me that while he does have those, he also has a really solid Dex and Speed. It just always looks effortless. Ultimate Cap is similar, but he also has the serum that created the Hulk in their world. He has low level regen and is just flat out tougher than a perfect speciman would be. He dodges, but not to my recollection as well or often as Mainstream Cap.

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord A late addition but, yes Deathstroke is Cap on roids. Or as someone stated very accurately, Ultimate Cap with Logan's healing factor. Pick up Identidy crisis where he is levelling several square city blocks while fighting alongside Dr. Light against Hawkman, Green Lantern (Kyle), Flash (Wally), Green Arrow, Black Canary, Zatanna, Atom and Elongated Man. I love Captain America, but standard continuity Cap is just flat out not in that league. Ultimate Cap however.... "Sorry about that blood on your face Banner." "What blood do you..*SMACK*" "That blood." Plus, Ultimate Cap fights a lot dirtier....The recent "use the Hulk against the skrulls" issue had me crying with laughter.

Re: New Writeup Game! Fix the "Weaklings" There was that "new" version of Falcon from about 5 years ago IIRC. He had tougher armor, the flight pack was detachable and could ram people and I think he had a cable claw thing. All o fit was made by the main man of Wakanda, Black Panther. It lasted for like all of 2 issues. And the mutant thing...heck, even at the time I thought "Wow, Falcon must be tanking if he's suddenly a mutant." Some other ideas though...add some HTH damage with the wings. He was used them to buffet enemies in a shoulder-block type of attack. Not sure how he keeps flying after that, but I digress. Also he should have a bucket load of skills. Not counting things like a strong local reputation, there are his PRE based skills (He should have bureaucracy and streetwise at the very least) and then some KS/AK skills. Being a street hustler/drug dealer/social worker/government offical tends to leave with a lot of esoteric skills. The +8 with Martial Manuevers seems a bit high...I'd also be tempted to give his Dex a minor bump when flying as he seems much more capable in general when he has room to move. I'd suggest some levels with flight. Just my 2 pence.

Re: New Writeup Game! Fix the "Weaklings" Cypher: His mutant ability to deconstruct and understand any language began to filter into other aspects of his life. But it really took one beer guzzling, cigar smoking, 5'3" hardcase to bring it all full circle. Logan: "So, you tell me you can read any gambler and break the bank by readin' their body language?" Doug: "Yes sir...it's strange, I can almost tell how they'll bet just by the most minute shifts..." Logan: "And you still fight like a sissy boy..." Doug blushes. Logan sighs: "Look kid, ya got the tools you need to be a real asset to the team, you just don't know it. Now come on, we're going to the danger room to play bloody knuckles until you can read me well enough to not get hit..." Most of the other New Mutants only knew that Doug was getting beat on pretty hard, and that when he wasn't buried in a book, he was in the gym. As the summer passed, Doug's frame began to fill out and his performance in the Danger room exercises began to amaze his classmates. It all came to a head however when a misunderstanding with an enraged Roberto DaCosta ended with the Superstrong mutant flat on his backside after a perfectly executed takedown. And for all of his solar powered strength, Bobby just couldn't get out of the lock that Doug had him in. It was almost as if each minute shift was countered as it began.... Powers: Cypher is a mutant with the ability to comprehend, understand and deconstruct ANY form of communication. The more alien the method, for example pheromones, the longer such understanding will take. His body has adapted to suppliment his mutant power and his senses are now almost as acute as Logan's. This ability to read the most minute shifts in body language make it almost impossible to lie to Cypher, and he has become an excellent tactician since most of the time he will have some idea of what his opponent(s) are doing almost before they can do it. This tactical acuity has been enhanced by actual training in small unit tactics under Cyclops and Cypher has slowly grown into the role of Battlefield leader. Due to his ability to read body language and the shifting play of balance and muscle, Doug had the potential to become a world class fighter. He could always find an opening, or slip a blow, he just didn't have the training to back this talent. This potential has been expanded upon by an intense training regimen hoisted upon him by Logan and even at age 18, he is one of the deadliest Hand to Hand combatants on planet earth. A real world equivalent would have Doug as a 7th degree Black Belt in several forms of unarmed combat. Strength: Cypher has the strength of a human being of his height, weight and build who engages in intensive daily exercise and martial training. Game stats...basically good physicals (18-23 depending) and most of his combat powers bought as levels and lots of them, based on a power use roll. Any martial arts would be a generic form, and I'd possibly include Find Weakness for him as well. Lots of Skills and of course Universal Translator at disgusting levels.

Re: Along time back to HERO/Champions. Abso-freaking-lutely. Rhino helmets rule. Also, if you happen to like to make urban heroes who used to be pimps/pushers but then became Superhero/Social Workers, there is a nifty arms attached wing harness in there as well. You might say that making that character would be a "Snap". (I slay me...)

Re: In this issue of Millennium City Full Contact... Darn...like the one book I didn't get in my massive post E-bay selling off old RPG's and then buying 5e stuff frenzy. Was he any good?

Re: In this issue of Millennium City Full Contact... Current CU? Hurm....I'll have to ponder that a bit. Some of the top runners seem to be Fiacho, Cheshire, Shadowdragon, Green Dragon, Nighthawk, Shugoshin and the so far unstated Nightwind (Yengtao baby). 4th Ed? Either Andreas Pantatholos or...shoot...that guy from Watchers of the Dragon who was like 900 points and had the massive VPP for MA.

So I was looking through Gadgets and Gear (Which flat out rocks! Awesome book Steve!) and I got entranced with the idea of the theme constumes and weaponry. Basically, the idea is as follows in broad strokes as I continue to build the players. A villain team with an animal theme, but all who have technological powers for the most part. Their group name is the silliest part. Without fruther ado, I present: WYLD KINGDOM!! Rhino: Use the Rhino helmet and the rocket skates, slap them on a weakish brick archetype and watch the move-throughs follow. Porcupine: Use the Porcupine suit with all options, add the Multi-Gauntlet as a secondary weapons array in the battlesuit and add some boxing and science skills. Eel: Eelskin suit bought to the highest levels, some Snake style Shaolin Kung-fu and some hefty B&E skills. Condor: Use the Arm Wings and add some Savate, as well as some bulletproof spandex. Not sure what his/her role will be as Condor is mostly just a flying version of Eel right now with less options/powers. Black Widow: Use the Doc Ock arms "follower" construct and add a Venom attack. Almost definitely strong science skills as well. So that's it in a nutshell so far. Any other ideas or help with the anemic names would be appreciated.

Re: Other Super Hero RPGs as Sources I use V&V and Superworld for villains and the occasional plot idea when the brain misfires. In fact, the group's Martial Artist, Paragon, got his nemesis from the Superworld Three pack. Deathfist makes an almost perfect skewed mirror image for the squeeky clean Yengtao specialist.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Sidenote from before on Martial Arts. The question was..."Why? Do you rehearse angry thoughts and unprovoked lashing out in your martial arts classes? Or do you rehearse calm self-control and defensive use of force?" Well, neither really. Most of the arts I've taken are "Hard" or "Hard/Soft" styles like TKD, Goju-Ryu, Kenjitsu and some basic self-defense. In those, There wasn't a lot of introspection, more of a do it 10000 times until the move becomes muscle memory. However, all 4 also had the emphasis on what a good "Kiai" could do in terms of force and the application of it. Self-control, yes. Calm? Not to my perception. Defensive use of force? Hardly ever. One of the patterns for Goju-Ryu had no less than 12 groin strikes and 6 throat strikes and it was very very clearly a take an opponent out so completely that they will never ever get up again type of thing. I won't say that each of these styles didn't have some introspection and inner reflection (With the exception of the self-defense course) but once the "bell" sounded, you put on your war face, harnessed that adrenalin and tried as hard as possible to put the other guy down. I think that there is a perception about martial arts that is just not universally applicable and that is about spiritual enlightenment. It is there for many of the styles out there, I found some great inner peace with Kenjitsu, but it is also absent in many of the more modern and lethal styles like Krav Maga. All of that said, I'm still much calmer and more willing to think/talk my way out of a confrontation when I'm taking classes. YMMV though.

Re: Goofy hero names that you still love We had one like that...his specialty was move through's. Massive running and a FF at 0 END that only stopped collision damage. His name was Slamdance.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept?

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Badger3k, thank you thank you thank you for touching on something I had completely forgotten. By Agemegos reasoning, I should be more violent and likely to lash out when I am actively taking martial arts classes. I'm currently not and my aggresion level is profoundly higher than when I am. I'm looking at getting back into it over the next month (Assuming the finances pan out) and also looking forward to the decrease in my aggresiveness. I can base this off the following: Due to the time/money conundrum (I usually have one but not the other) my attendance at classes is spotty at best. When I'm training regularly, sparring regularly, have my adrenalin much higher than normal for longer periods...I'm less aggressive. I've been on and off classes 5 times in the last 15 years and this formula always holds true. Many of my fellow students state the same thing. When they take classes and spar regularly, they are less physically aggressive in day to day situations. As for killing orcs might make me a racist.... Just no. Feel free to cite whatever sources you want, whatever reports and treatsies you can find. I'm not buying it. If anything, gaming in general has made me more accepting as I met people from other cultures who were in my gaming groups. Strangely, none of them started to call me a cracker after a long orc killing session either. The face to face dynamic of gaming enhances the chances that you won't turn into a racist IMHO, and the MASSIVE benefit gained from talking to someone from a different background than yours far outweighs the very very very minor possibility that killing orcs on sight might make you view things differently in RL. If you are predisposed for whatever reason to dislike/hate/fear a given ethnicity, then claiming that killing orcs in D&D made you do it is right up there with "no one told me dumping hot coffee in my lap would hurt". I'm normally not this blunt, but seriously, if killing orcs on sight becomes the reason you think you are racist or are becoming more racist, you have much deeper issues.

While reading Hero a day got my on this train of thought, it's not because any of those awesome characters have goofy names, but the fact that one of them leads the national mexican hero team. That reminded me of one of my favorite goofy names... Az-tech. I loved him in V&V, but I wanted a more Iron Man type of guy. He's been a back burner project for...hmmm..decades now. Another is, of course, Psi-borg. Any other slightly goofy names that you just love anyway?

Re: Learning from mistakes *Nod* After that I did make one change and that was not to assume that my group would always be "on". The other thing was to remember that the guy who almost always got the clues was Matrix. So in some instances, the clues would get more obvious or a luck roll would come into play so that the heroes would get a salient piece of info and never feel that they missed out on the chance to kick evil's butt for goodness.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? I agree with your second paragraph completely, but...I think the predication here is we don't know our groups/players well enough to know if they are going to be able to handle a game where "clearly defined evil by appearance" will lead them down a slippery slope. Now in the beginning of any newish group, this can be a hazard. However, I'd think that a few sessions would enable you to see what caliber of folk you are gaming with and take whatever measures you consider appropos. This could range from making sure more impressionable members understand the concept of RL ambiguity to simply not gaming with that person and saying "Dude, it's a game. The orcs are not a zionist conspiracy and you are frankly creeping me out. Good luck in the future, I won't be back." Because really, in the end, that's who you are responsible for. Yourself and your kids. If they and you are settled firmly enough on planet earth, the difference between an orc and a RL anything else will be clear enough so that this is never an issue. Not taking you to task per se, just outlining my own sort of personal responsibility idea.

Re: Learning from mistakes I had a similar(ish) and somewhat goofy event occur in one of my older games. One of the players wanted to go through a massive radiation accident and buy off his focus. He was hands down the most powerful mentalist good guy on the planet already. He was also Blood (from Blood and McQuark) and was basically having an insanity moment where he was trying to throw off the vestiges of his heritage from ole Azor. We dropped all sorts of clues, including big showy manifestations of a gigantic blue wombat in the sky over several cities (The wombat thing was a weird continuing thing through several games, but that's another story). The PC's proceed to completely ignore every single clue, hint and portent (There were 15 all told) so in the end, Matrix (Our hero) mind controlled the entire world for 15 minutes, decided he didn't like it and went on as a hero. To this day only Matrix's player and myself know that any of this happened. I'm not sure what I really learned other than my group, which usually pounced on clues like a cat on tuna, just missed these entirely.

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? I reiterate from before. ANYTHING can attract a fringe element. No, there have been no studies about the effrects of RPing in a game that encourages casual racism, but there have been studies about RPing and Heavy Metal and Video games being the steep slope to drugs, alchohol, satan-worshipping and raunchy sex. First off, I never got any of these side benefits from my hobbies or musical tatstes, so more than anything, I feel ripped off. That aside, the results, every darn time, are that for the vast majority of people these hobbies or entertainments have no appreciable effect in any of the mentioned/studied areas. For a small group, yes, it happens. My counter is that a small group also thinks they have been probed by aliens. Some folk will gravitate to certain things regardless of the setting, stimulus or peer pressure. Others will follow a path and accept something wholeheartedly and without reservation. And here we get to the sermon. THAT IS NOT MY PROBLEM. This is the same thing that upsets me about the think about the children camp. Yes, there are times and places that are more appropos than others, but long and short, don't ride roughshod over my right to enjoy sick humor or foul language because you can't handle your child. The same rule applies here (loosely). Don't mess with my hobbies just because the same group that would insist they saw Elvis at the bowl-a-rama plays RPG's and turns into a bunch of anti-social tools because of it. Sorry for the random and bitter nature of my post, but I have no tolerance for the idea of mandated protection based on the actions of a small minority that probably needs councilling as opposed to legislation.

Re: Character Transformations We had a few characters in older games that either went through radiation accidents (A guy who basically went from Angel, to Archangel with the metal nasty wings), Many radiation accidents (A character I played based completely on Kohl Drake from the Canadian comic book "Dragonforce", he started as a buff normal human and then had three "transformations" as he became more and more draconian. Man he was fun...) and complete rewrites where the characters "died" in true comic book form with no body left behind. One was a cyborg who started off like Wonderman, and then got rebuilt as Robocop, eventually getting rebuilt again as something more like Superman. The other was Sabre from the Blood and Dr. McQuark who was on the team as a PC and took one for the team when he got hit with the Worm Wand (IIRC) from the 7 horsemen. He almost died but his actions up until then and in that one act of defiance caused him to be reborn as Courage. He became fear's worst nightmare even as his own marriage fell apart due to his increasing detachment. So yes, any flavor of transformation is fine with me, and when part of the tale, I think it's great!

Re: I Got It!! I got mine new back in the day, along with my NM copy of wings that I can't sell because then my collection would no longer be almost complete and it would keep me up nights. (Yes, I know I need some help for that). On a related note, does anyone know where I can get a copy of the original GAC? Not the 4th ed version, the older one. I just missed one on E-bay recently and the seller hasn't returned my e-mails asking if he'd sell it privately. IT'S ALL I NEED MAN!!!

Re: Is "evil race" an intrinsically rascist concept? Here's the problem with your response or more accurately, the actions before your response. I was interviewed by the NY Times about 7 years ago along with my girlfriend because we LARPed. We were asked why we did it, we explained it was fun to play act. He asked what we did for a living and we told him (IT Liason and Admin Ass't respectively). Then he asked if we drank blood or ever thought we were REALLY vampires. After I stopped laughing I explained to this man what I'm going to explain to you. Any movement gathers a radical fringe element. Look at right to life. The radicals of that group promote their agenda by killing people...kinda defeats the ideal of the name, no? Anything in this world that has an ideal or requires some imagination is bound to pick up a very small and very weird subset that the majority don't even want to associate with under any circumstances. As a sidenote, we got mentioned in one sentence of the article, ousted in favor of the more colorful young lady who came in full costume, wearing fangs, who said she loved bloodsports and spurned the sunlight. The first I had ever met associated with LARPing btw, and I used to help run a 200+ person quarterly event. Now, my question. WHY are you looking for this information? I'm expecting a media or academic paper answer honestly.

Re: Alien Wars review in Pyramid Real life has enough of those "Darn, I thought that was gonna work..." ideas as well. Not just trench warfare, but gross underestimations of the enemy beforehand (The US opinion of Japan before WW2 springs instantly to mind), improper equipment (The light machinegun whose name I can't remember in WW1 that we issued to US troops instead of the BAR for security reasons), etc. etc.

Re: Team Shuttle Help? You might also try "Concept aircraft" and "Aurora" for the vaporware replacement for the Blackbird. I got a nice set of images of a blended wing mothercraft and a smaller needlelike parasite shuttle that way that represents my players' plane. They use the whole thing to go crosscountry, and the parasite shuttle to go crosstown. Best of both worlds that way, you have the X-jet to look chic and the quinjet when you need to actually park the darn thing.

Re: Sci-fi the 60's way: Strategic Space Command *Bow* Thankee kindly. I even submitted my own proposal for a LPH (basically) that would be used for the galatic equivalent of the Gator navy. It looks like a Leif Ericson that needs to go on a diet. It's in the forum under "Other ships" IIRC.