Mutant for Hire

Re: Complicate the Person Above Enforcer84 is the last survivor of Earth-84, destroyed in the Countdown to Infinite Identity Hour.

Re: Chronic Death Syndrome Excel's ressurections have to be bought with a triggered Summon as she doesn't come back on her own. As for Hyatt, I would buy her with a Dependence that costs her BODY and and a regen that only brings her back from death. What she's dependent on, I have no idea, though Excel did make the mistake of trying to take Hyatt's medicine once, I think.

Re: Robert E Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien? Tolkien tends to hail back to the classical view of there once being a golden age and we have fallen into dark and degenerate times. It's a pretty traditional view in a lot of cultures. While I'm not sure that Howard ever read Rosseau, to some extent I think they shared the same romanticized view of the noble savage. And I also tend to agree with some of the above sentiments. Tolkien was the master world builder, but Howard infused his characters and plots with an energy and vitality that Tolkien never managed. That said, there's a depth to the Lord of the Rings that the Conan stories lack. The flip side of that is that Howard was good enough that I for one don't care about that.

Re: Complicate the Person Above keyes_bill wasn't born a rabbit. He was an archeologist once who went into the forbidden "rabbit" temple in Tibet and paid a terrible price for his curiousity and hubris.

Re: New Powers Astral Projection Seriously, Duplication doesn't cut it.

Re: Let's make a Grue! How about Zork HERO? A RPG set in the Great Underground Empire?

Re: Why is Strength so underpriced? We need a FAQ in sticky at the head of the Hero forum and probably one at the head of the Champions forum (which contains a pointer to the HERO one for strictly HERO System issues). Issues for the HERO FAQ would include, but not be limited to: 1. Is Strength underpriced? 2. Is Damage Shield overpriced? 3. What good is COM? I'm sure there are others that we could come up with. The Champions thread would have FAQ questions like: 1. Who'd win: Batman or Captain America? 2. Who'd win: Superman or Thor? 3. Will CLOWN ever come back?

Re: Limitations You Would Like to See More Often I think GMs really need to work out an explicit list of dos and don'ts for character design: Don't: 1. Have a character who is a jerk No one likes to work with a jerk. Realistically, the rest of the team would ask said person to clean up their act or leave. So will the players controlling them. Characters that annoy the GM and the players will be tossed out of the team if they refuse to clean up their act, period. 2. Have a character who doesn't want to be a hero There is a difference between 'reluctant' or 'conflicted' and 'unwilling' or 'unmotivated'. No one wants to work with someone who has to be prodded to do the slightest thing. Realistically, they would be told to clean up their act or leave the team. Unmotivated characters will annoy the GM and the other players and will either have to have a change of light or be tossed off the team. 3. No loners or loose cannons. Loners and loose cannons both annoy the heck out of a team. To repeat a point, no one wants to have a loner or a loose cannon on the team. Again, either the character will have to clean up their act and become a team player, or they will be tossed off the team. 4. Secret IDs that don't do anything In general, if you have a secret ID and you want points for that secret ID, you need to put effort in to that secret ID to make it part of the character. A secret ID that just collects points and does nothing for the GM will annoy the GM considerably. 5. Ideologies and methodologies wildly different from the rest of the team While variety is the spice of life, there are limits. If most of the team has a code versus killing, having a casual killer on the team isn't going to work out. Realistically, while teams accept a certain range of views, there are limits to what they will accept. Acceptable: 1. Socially clueless characters or dark and moody characters One can be socially inept without being annoying. The brilliant inventor who is more adept with machines than with people, well meaning but not very good at dealing with people. Likewise the grim dark avenger who is somewhat short on polish and even politeness but nonetheless does not go out of his way to annoy people is also acceptable. 2. Reluctant heroes and conflicted heroes As long as they don't angst too much. That tends to be annoying. It's fine for your character to not be happy with their lifestyle or what they are forced to do, as long as they go off and do it. The important fact here is that the character's don't have to be talked into going. It's perfectly fine to have a roleplaying session to talk them into joining the team, but once they are on, they have to carry their weight without being ordered into it. They can be unhappy or whatever about it, as long as they don't whine too much about it. Once Bilbo agreed to go, he carried his weight. 3. Antisocial characters who nonetheless work with others Your character doesn't have to hang out and go bowling with the other characters after work. If they're quiet and keep to themselves and don't talk much, but quietly carry their weight of the load and do keep other characters informed as to what they are up to professionally, that's fine. The important thing is that they work in a group. 4. Characters whose secret IDs are functional. To use an example, the only reason that Batman has the secret identity of Bruce Wayne is that it gives him access to people and places and things that Batman cannot, or at least not without attracting attention. Batman otherwise has little use for Bruce Wayne as a person. A grim avenger who bothers to maintain a secret ID should list how functionally they use their secret ID as a tool to complement their superhero's work. If they can't then realistically there's no point for them to have one. 5. Ideologies and methods that vary only somewhat Superman and Batman have different methodologies, but in the end, Batman isn't a killer and (in most incarnations) there are limits to how far he will go to get information out of a subject. Superman doesn't like the fear and intimidation tactics that Batman does, but Batman most of the time manages to keep within the limits that Superman has.

Re: New Powers I don't know if I'd go with new powers. What I'd be more interested in is rebuilding the power construction system. Right now, various powers, Aid, EB, Force Field, etc. have various defaults for END cost, duration, range, area of effect, etc which you then modify with advantages and disadvantages. In some ways I think it would actually be simpler if you actually constructed a power from various bits and pieces. Chose the effect, chose the END cost, chose the range and area of effect and then calculated the cost directly.

Re: The death of El Aguila One of the themes here can be "free will versus destiny". Will the new El Aguila fall to the fate of his predecessors? Can the cycles of history be broken here? Will El Aguila always be drugged, shamed and commit suicide? As for the drug angle, there is a way to make an 'enhanced' drug that has interesting effects. First off, everyone reacts differently to drugs, some folks react more strongly than others. Give a drug that sends them in dreams to Tezcatlipoca's spirit realm. Or rather it tries to. Most people get little more than vague nightmares involving jaguars. Others make clearer contact with that realm, but not enough for anything to cross over. Those folks meet up with jaguars in their dreams who give them instructions (and the drug makes them pliable to obediance). The smallest group of drug victims are opened up enough for the spirit of a jaguar to possess them and to turn them into were-jaguars. Note that it's like one in ten who get programmed by the jaguar spirits and more like one in a hundred who get turned into were-jaguars. A few more respond powerfully enough to be turned into full supervillains of various sorts. The jaguar spirits can smell the potential power in some and drag those spirits off to Tezcatlipoca himself to deal with.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Everyone thinks that L. Marcus cosplays all the time. The truth is, that isn't cosplaying....

Re: Psychic Wars Well, the whole framing sequence of Children of the Lens implied that whoever was going through the record capsule was doing it because something had come up and they needed to be briefed on the situation. And the reason the book was unpublishable back then was because it was strongly implied in Children of the Lens that Kit Kinnison would mate with his sisters to produce a new race of Guardians.

Re: What in genre bit do you like that no one else seems to enjoy ?

Re: what to do with a psychic gorilla *sings* What do you do with a psychic gorilla? What do you do with a psychic gorilla? What do you do with a psychic gorilla? Early in the morning?

Re: Limitations You Would Like to See More Often Something to bear in mind is that a lot of players want to play Champions so they can get away from their day to day mundane lives. Why should they go to a game session and then spend time doing the sorts of things they're trying to get away from in real life?

Re: Limitations You Would Like to See More Often Spiderman ain't exactly a lurker. Superman isn't exactly one either.

Re: What Champions Books Would You Like Published in the Future? Just to be anal and pedantic here, but the New Mutants were never preadolescent. They were all 13-16 at the beginning of the series (and then aged on Marvel time admittedly). Teen Champions already covers that series.

Re: Limitations You Would Like to See More Often So maybe we need a variation of the Only in Heroic ID limitation "Only in Character" limitation. And make the character buy all of their powers with charges with a "can only recover charges by character having a life between missions"

Re: What in genre bit do you like that no one else seems to enjoy ? Players don't like it in general when bad things happen to their characters. Or when their characters get 'beaten' for any reason. They like to have control over their characters and to have a certain freedom of action. Not to mention not having the humiliation of being captured. It means the villains have 'won', even if only temporarily. Most players I know play games for empowerment, not to feel trapped and helpless. They get enough of that at the office.

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. You are the Brute Squad.

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. Do Ch'i attacks Of Unusual Nature work against Rodents Of Unusual Size? *hopes someone gets the reference*

Re: WWYCD: The Basics Can Recluse even go to the bathroom without complaining about it? I thought I mentioned "little old lady". Of course if Liefeld is drawing the little old lady she's... urrk. *goes off to be ill* I think this WWYCD is in some ways even more revealing of the characters than most of the other WWYCD threads...

A little old lady has a cat stuck in a tree and she asks for your help to get it down. What would your character do?

Re: Complicate the Person Above Log gets his handle because he is in fact a wooden statue carved from a log of the World Tree, animated to life by the Norns to usher in Ragnarok.

Re: Mars Colony by 2025? Well, these are nice and cheerful thoughts. You do realize that was supposed to happen according to the pessimists by the year 2000, for very logical and practical reasons. The fact is that the technology curve keeps changing the rules and keeps defying predictions. Not to mention human beings are amazingly adaptable creatures. Actually, I do think the colonization of other worlds is more or less economically unviable, and technologically extremely impractical with the human race as it stands. A post/trans-human race which can survive under harsher environmental standards is another kettle of fish entirely. The problem is for Mars, sans atmosphere and magnetic field, you've got a serious radiation problem down there. You'd have to set up a colony deep underground the planet's surface to keep radiation levels down to what human beings are used to. The moon has similar issues to deal with. I can see a lunar outpost set up for scientific research purposes, but that's about it, at least until we get to a transhuman species that doesn't mind lunar conditions. It's ego games. I think that a Mars mission would be valuable as a challenge, forcing us to stretch our muscles. Frankly, I think if we're ever going to settle another world, it's going to be terraforming Venus. Seed the atmosphere with genetically engineered bugs and nanotech to deal with the atmosphere, bind it down into solids and liquids, adjust the chemical balance until it's what we want. Sure there were compelling reasons. Scientific research and discovery, especially given the crude robotics at the time. You seem remarkably anti-technology, which hits the highest levels of irony when we consider how we're communicating over each other, by a technological network the science fiction writers never dreamed of in their wildest dreams.