OddHat

Re: Wild Card's Hero Sounds interesting. My old Wild Cards world had Supers going back to Atlantis (of course) and before, mostly falling into the general humanoid types of mythology and folk tales (lots of back story borrowed from Farmer's Blown). WWII brought Nazi experiments in creating Super-Soldiers, with the Wild Card bomb a weapon that was intended to turn civilians behind the lines into uncontrollable monsters. PC intervention changed the effect of the virus, so that it instead left the victims minds and memories mostly intact. "Aces" were still able to pass for human; more common "Jokers" couldn't, but both had roughly the same chance at exceptional powers.

Re: Wild Card's Hero

Re: Wild Card's Hero He survives and escapes, but I don't know what happened to him in later books. No one really seemed to get happy endings in Wild Cards. I sometimes think about getting back into the series, but the relentlessly grim "lets see how we can degrade characters this time" thing killed my desire to read the books.

Re: Wild Card's Hero The bit with Isis comes up when Captain Trips / Isis Moon briefly becomes president of Vietnam. The ambassador from Korea shows up, and greets Isis in Korean; Isis learns, to her shock, that she can't speak "her" language. It's part of Captain Trips arc towards accepting that he may have MPD.

Re: Wild Card's Hero Side Note on JJ Flash: He tests Negative for the Wild Card, and believes he's from a world of traditional four color superheroes. Captain Trips uses that as part of his attempt to argue that his "Friends" are souls trapped inside him rather than aspects of his own personality. Cosmic Traveler looks exactly like a comatose man that Captain Trips once tracked down. Trips believes that the Traveler's spirit now shares Trips body. Isis Moon can't speak Korean, a fact which severely traumatizes her when she's forced to confront it. Previous to that, she'd been convinced that she was truly a separate individual from Trips.

Re: Wild Card's Hero

Re: Wild Card's Hero

Re: Wild Card's Hero Yup. Satin Kitty stopped even earlier. Shame, as the first three or four books rank as some of the best Iron Age superhero fiction ever.

Re: Wild Card's Hero Black Eagle wasn't soured on Democracy; he wasn't even actively Marxist when he left America. He was a Communist during the Great Depression, because "All we got out of Russia was pictures of factories working at full capacity", and because "The Communists didn't care what color a man was, they'd call him Comrade". HUAC revealed his extramarital affairs and old Communist ties, causing him to lose his status as an untarnished symbol of aspiration; he couldn't deal with the shame and refused to accept the threat of jail time for contempt, and so fled to France.

Re: Wild Card's Hero Love these! Leo Barnett should have Healing, 12d6, Fully Invisible and Requires an Ego Roll; he performs faith healings that actually work, even though he doesn't read as infected with the virus.

Re: How would you do it? Not tough. 1) He buys desolid normally. That he's stepping out of the timestream is in this case just SFX. 2) He buys an NND Hand Attack, Affects Solid World, at a total of (+1 advantage for NND and +2 for ASW) +3. Expensive, but it's a powerful ability and he'll get his point's worth from it. He doesn't get to add his STR damage to it unless he also buys ASW for his STR and Does Body for the HA (Steve's ruling on a similar power). Now he can run through people and HA them to his heart's content.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos Cat eating corn.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos If I ever do an India adventure, this will be the background music.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings If you hate your job, your students, your customers, or your clients, quit. Seriously, just quit. You are hurting people. Your problems finding other work are beside the point: You are taking out your crappy life on other people. You are causing unprovoked damage to people who have nothing to do with whatever pissed you off. If you have any compassion left in you, any wish to see yourself as or be seen as a worthy human being, quit. You know it's the right thing to do. Do it.

Re: The Inconceivables! Quite possibly the best line, ever.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Good for you! No way to meet friendly potential partners quite like showing off the special qualities of your privates in public.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I don't think I was correctly socialized.

Re: WWII Era Superheroes and Villains Great entry, and thanks for posting it.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings I bruise a lot more easily these days. A decade ago I rarely, if ever, found bruises after a workout. Then I started to find a bruise or two, here and there, if someone kicked me during sparing, or if I hit myself with a weight. Now I find bruises but can't figure out how I got them. I suppose I should buy some sugar strips and test myself for diabetes. OTOH, it could just be aging.

Re: Order of the Stick

Re: Musings on Random Musings I know a guy who does something similar as part of his kungfu training. He often invites people to kick him in his crotch, and claims to do an exercise involving a wooden hammer, a plank, and his privates. I've refused an offer to observe his training. Kungfu is weird.

Re: Order of the Stick I disagree. You can build 50 point characters or less in Hero System with game smashing power levels, assuming the GM lets it pass; we're a much better system for munchkins.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Even when you agree with him, Bill Maher is still pretty much a dick.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings People who say "Dogs / Cats can't love" know nothing about animals, or love. And I'm speaking as a man who thinks love comes down to brain chemistry and architecture.

Re: Order of the Stick I wonder if, in D&D 3.5, your character can make progress in his class after the character dies? I suppose he should, so long as the GM keeps running adventures. I'm guessing the "Kill the cleric in one blow" thing was the Improved Critical feat, or some sort of Great Improved Critical.