Chuckg

Well for a start, you can follow DC's own editorial policy and shitcan everything that's from Pre-Crisis continuity if that specific piece of info is in any way contradicted by something from Post-Crisis continuity... And then you can follow DC's other editorial policy and do the same for pre- and post- Zero Hour material... ... and wouldn't ya know it, that takes care of most of the inconsistencies right there. (Not just for Batman, but for a lot of other DC characters as well.) Which was the point of those two exercises to begin with.

> I bet you bought into the DC (crossover) issue wherein > Bruce Wayne beat Spawn too. Never read it, and thank you for adding yet another data point to the growing pile of evidence confirming that on this issue, you're more than happy to let assumptions and prejudices substitute for knowing what you're talking about. And you are no closer to proving your point that any metahuman can beat down Batman just because they're metahuman than were an hour ago.

True, although not as much of an intellectual challenge as the Joker is... ... and, since Angelus is undead, Batman's Code vs. Killing absolutely does not apply. I.e. -- Batman gets to work out all of his sublimated desire to obliterate the Joker *on* Angelus. (Unless somebody tells him about the soul/no-soul thing, at which point Batman pulls out the phone and hits Dr. Fate, Jason Blood, Zatanna, etc. on speed-dial...) *ew* "Bruce, I know he was pretty sick, but... strafing runs from the Batwing? Hellfire *missiles*?!?" "Hh." (Seriously, while Angelus would be an entertaining Batman villain, and he'd be superior to the second-string lineup, he wouldn't be any tougher for Batman to deal with than the first-string lineup already is... i.e., good stories, but no Batman wipeout.)

Nightfly = obviously doesn't know a damn thing about Batman canon and is operating solely off of preconveived notions and popular prejudices.

Whamme -- one other thing. The fact that *Sarah Michelle Gellar* knows Tae Kwon Do doesn't do a goddamn thing either way to show that *Buffy Summers* also uses TKD... and looking at what she does on the show, she doesn't.

Starguard -- smile, give him a hug, and go to sleep feeling really really really vindicated in her beliefs that even though some people do bad things, people are generally good. (Note -- if it turns out that she's wrong, she'll be devastated by the betrayal.) Baron von Darien -- is quite intelligent, and knows that very few things are more useful than a genuine defector from the other side... ... and few things are more damaging than a fake one. So while he'd be the essence of charm and diplomacy, but also be politely up-front to the person in question that there will be an understandable reluctance to fully commit to trusting him until after a suitable probationary period. Doctor Pain -- "Uhhh, yeah, the Deacon, whatever. But I'm not takin' my eyes off you until I'm *sure*, got that? BTW, you still got this debt to society to pay for these outstanding warrants. And since you're a good guy now, you're not gonna resist arrest, *RIGHT*?"

> Any 1st year comic fan knows that Batman is endowed w/ > exactly "0" super-powers. [snip] And any 2nd-year comics fan knows that intensive training and martial arts skills can make up for that, as a lot of titles -- in both companies -- have devoted considerable time to proving. The logic of 'anybody with any metahuman stats, however marginal, can kick Batman's butt sans utility belt because they're metahuman and he's not' is way, way, over-simplistic.

Whamme -- there is a way that both statements: 1) 'Buffy is physically only a little ahead of Xander SPD-wise(*), not way ahead of Xander' and 2) 'Xander fights vampires and demons in the Buffyverse to at least some useful effect' ... can both be true simultaneously. And that is, if the vampires and demons in the Buffyverse are also relatively wimpy specimens when compared to standard supervillain power levels. Which is only the God's honest truth. Compare the average Buffyvamp to, oh, Marvel Comics vampires, and it becomes crystal clear. (*) Note for those who don't bother to read -- that's "SPD-wise". STR-wise, DEX-wise, and PD-wise, Buffy's all over Xander like white on rice, got it?

Starguard -- frantically warn the Sentinels. Then activate her Power Cosmic, fly up to Destroyer's death satellite *before* it activates, and nuke the holy living hell out of it until there ain't two quarks of that bastard left sharing the same cubic light-year. Baron von Darien -- urgently warn the Sentinels, use his Eidetic Memory to recall the exact ephemeris of the death satellite (which was in an after-action report he'd have read at some time in the intervening twelve years), and strongly suggest to PRIMUS that they have Victory or some other space-capable superheroine fly up there and zap the bastard, or convince the Air Force to hose off an ASAT at it, or something. Dr. Pain -- urgently warn the Sentinels, mention there's a death satellite up there somewhere but he doesn't know where, and... ... well, truth be told, given that they've got one hour *plus* the entire time of the battle (which went for /hours/, IIRC) before Destroyer actually activates the satellite, it's just possible that a fast and discreet search by all available spacegoing assets (superheroic and otherwise) can actually find in time and zap it. (Especially given that it's most likely going to be directly overhead or nearabouts at H-hour, thus narrowing down the search cone.) Remember, folks, the reason that Destroyer's orbital WMD attack succeeded so well is because nobody suspected it was there until it was too late. But anybody from the future already knows about it.

I agree with the original conception you had... 10" (or however far you want) Knockback Resistance; Requires Unmodified Acrobatics Roll (-1/4), Only Reduces KB Damage, Not Distance (-1/2) I.e. -- you get slammed for 15" of Knockback. You take 15" of Knockback. You go flying across the battlefield to land roughly... ... and you take KB damage as if you'd flown only (15 - 10 = ) 5 hexes. So KB up to N distance doesn't damage you at all, and then starts damaging you only lightly.

Since it's nothing but a repeat of what I've already shredded, I'm going to ignore most of your post, but a couple things needs nailing down... > Xander is human, yes. Normal CHA Maxima? > That term is *meaningless* in a superheroic game, [snip] No, it's not. Even in a superheroic game, the vast majority of the NPCs are still subject to Normal Characteristic Maxima. The superheroes live on an entire planet full of people whose stats are at or below the limits set for Normal Characteristic Maxima. Six billion of them, to be precise. It is *not* "meaningless", even in a Superheroic game. It's *still* the benchmark for normal, that the PCs are allowed to exceed, being Superheroic. The campaign might revolve around the PCs, but that's not the same as saying that the PCs are the only damn people in the world. The fact that a Superheroic campaign allows for the existence of a SPD 6 or 7 player character does not change the fact that his DNPC Aunt May is still SPD 2... it only means that the PC is moving 3 times as often as Aunt May (SPD 6 to SPD 2), not just 2 times as often (SPD 4 to SPD 2). So your logic that the term is 'meaningless'... isn't logic, isn't accurate, and isn't true -- and that's not an opinion, that's an actual fact, right there in the Big Black Book. [snip] > Xander does only a little worse than Riley in combat. Riley > is 'best of the best' with 'supertech' drug enhancement. Yet again, your opinion is completely *not* borne out by the show. Remember when Xander, while under Dracula's mind control, fought Riley? Remember how long their fight lasted? Riley can literally beat Xander down with one hand behind his back and with one punch... 'cause he has. As far as the DCU suffering 'DEX and SPD inflation' -- again, if you have to change Buffy's character sheet to make her 'competitive', then all that is is an admission that she has to be upgraded from her currently very low level of power in order to fit in the CU... which is exactly what we've been saying all along.

Do they have any DNPCs? As of right now, those DNPCs are living in Hell. a) If the authorities know their IDs, then their DNPCs are now under continual surveillance If the authorities *don't* know their IDs, and the DNPC in question has any Psych Lim like 'Honest' or 'Law-Abiding' or whatever, then that DNPC gets to live with the internal agony and turmoil of 'Do I turn him in or not?' c) If any villain out there knows your secret ID, he can now feel absolutely free to work out his grudge against your friends and family without having to worry about the standard amount of Unholy Wrath that descends upon the heads of people who screw with the families of cops... 'cause you ain't White Hats no more. For that matter, any supervillain who's been holding back on trying to kill the PCs because of the complications involved with being a 'cop-killer' or 'hero-killer'... don't have to worry about that no more either. d) When a team of heroes goes bad, other superheroes respond quickly. They have to. Something like this could make all superheroes in general look bad. Granted, any superhero team will first check things out to make sure that your team isn't mind-controlled, replaced by doppelgangers, or other such usual explanations for when a hero suddenly 'snaps', but once they find out that you're really you, prepare for the hammer of Thor to land upon your head. Speaking of Thor, whatever equivalent your campaign world has of the Avengers or the JLA, the players had better be prepared to meet it. e) Make your players curse the name of John Walsh, and rue the day they ever heard of 'America's Most Wanted'. Post their pictures on the TV news. Have TV info-specials run micro-analyzing their lives. Have everybody who ever didn't like them breaking the sound barrier to reach the nearest journalist and get in their cheap shots. f) Oh yeah, and did they remember to cash out all their bank accounts *BEFORE* going whacko? Won't they be surprised when they stick in their ATM card and it comes back 'Account disabled'. g) *cue Bat-signal* If there's a superhero detective out there in your world who's really really good at finding people who don't wanna be found, then he's really really going to be interested in what the party's up to. The players have turned traitor on everything they ever believed in and fought for. This means that it is entirely karmically appropriate to have everybody and his brother in your game universe treat them like lepers.

> Why are they based on NCM? > They're human, but as you pointed out, so is Foxbat. Your argument has no logical consistency whatsoever. A moment's thought would have reminded you that even Foxbat lives upon a planet where over 99.9+% of the inhabitants still have Normal Characteristic Maxima... and we can easily see how Foxbat stacks up against them. Do you even *use* agent-level characters in your campaign? > NCM is a judgement call, and one I disagree with. Buffyverse > characters are clearly *not* limited to NCM - at least half > the cast can justify some form of superhuman > characteristics, on the basis of being metahuman... In case you weren't paying attention -- and you obviously weren't -- you might, perhaps, have recalled that I used *XANDER* as one of my Normal Characteristic Maxima benchmarks, re: how much faster than him Buffy appeared to be going in turn. (Answer -- a little faster, but not significantly faster.) And given that Xander's role on the show was to be Normal Guy...? Sheesh. I'm trying to be polite, but it's growing harder and harder to do so when you can't even give me the minimal courtesy of reading what I write. Or, for that matter, of maintaining any kind of accuracy re: Buffyverse canon... [snip] > The depowered ep does show a Buffy who'd barely > mastered her innate Slayer fighting ability. Dead wrong. The depowered ep is in late season 3, by which point Buffy has already been a Slayer for almost four years (remember, she'd been a Slayer for almost a year before coming to Sunnydale.) [snip] > Well, vs mooks I get the feeling Buffy isn't really giving her > all. She is not very focused. Cop-out of the most extreme order, and unproven assertion besides. You are arbitrarily *assuming* that Buffy was 'holding back' because you wish to *ignore* the clearly demonstrated canon that her hand-to-hand combat skills actually don't show that much skill or technique. > I mean, she sort of plays around in these kind of scenes. Again, proof positive that you don't know what you're talking about -- *every* single example I gave is from an episode where Buffy was operating in a completely serious mode. [snip, re: Buffyvamps ignoring] > Gunfire, yeah. Sharp cutting things and explosions? No, only > in special cases. Do you even *watch* "Angel"? Angel has been repeatedly stabbed in the chest and *ignored* it, has detonated milspec *concussion grenades* less than three feet away from his own head and gotten right back up, and Angelus once got shot so full of arrows by Holtz's men that he looked like a freaking *pincushion*, and yet since none of them had hit the heart, he barely even felt them. Short of penetrating their heart with wood, cutting off their head, setting them on fire, electrocuting them, or striking them with physical force *FAR* in excess of a Slayer's (i.e. -- Glory), there are very few ways to quickly incapacitate Buffyvamps. In Champions terms, they've got obnoxious Damage Reduction, and some Resistant Defense as well. [snip] > Okay. Main point: I say, write up Buffy for (comparison to) > CU as if she was a character in a superhero universe, > *because that's what you're putting her in* Again, if you'd bothered to pay attention to the thread, you'd have noted that shortly after I delivered my little lecture about how low-powered Buffy is, the topic of conversation then turned about how and why to, ahem, buff Buffy up to where she'd fit in the campaign. The point is, however, that we acknowledge that Buffy needs *changing* to fit into the CU, because she does not fit as is. You, as far as I can tell, have been arguing that Buffy *does* fit as is, and this is simply not true. If you want to rewrite Buffy and up all her stats way into DEX 35/SPD 7/etc. range, hey, it's your campaign. OTOH, if you want to tell me that Joss Whedon has *already* put Buffy there, then that's *not* something you control -- that's something that would actually have to be shown on-screen, which it damn well hasn't. In case you haven't figured it out by now, I like accuracy, and I don't like confusing the right to have an opinion with the (nonexistent) "right" to ignore facts in favor of wishful thinking. Zornwil -- sorry, but one of the drawbacks of using the standard quote function is that it makes it very cumbersome to reply if you're trying to intersperse your own comments in response to the other guy's. OTOH, I am at least trying to keep the ">" markers properly lined up and spaced, even if he ain't.

I've just noticed that so far, nobody in this thread has even touched upon what is, by far, the most useful thing Buffyverse canon has to offer to a Champions campaign... Wolfram & Hart. Take DEMON, ditch the robes, and put 'em in three-piece suits. Hide the ritual chambers in glitzy skyscrapers in the heart of the financial district. Shield the inhuman machinations of the foul servants of the Kings of Edom beneath the facade of one of the most respectable, or at least one of the most well-connected, law firms in the world. And watch your players /sweat/.

Vampires? That party's set up to fight /Demon Princes/.

> > I said "at /or slightly above/". Obviously, Angel, Buffy, and > > Riley >are 'slightly above'. > Really? Since all we can judge them by is 'relative to each > other' there is no real. You mean there's no normal humans in the Buffyverse? You mean there are no scenes of Angel, Buffy, or Riley fighting against or alongside normal humans in the Buffyverse? No such comparision standard is even /remotely/ available? /sarcasm off We can not only judge them relative to each other, we can also judge them relative to the unaugmented people in the cast. [snip] > Buffy vs Angelus? I agree, probably a match. > Riley vs Angel? I'm working off memory here, but I thought > Angel was doing a lot more than his human opponent. I have the film clip. Riley and Angel were trading blow for blow until Riley temporarily knocked Angel back with the stun gun, and then Angel pulled off a successful Block, got Riley in a Grab, and then commenced Grab and Cruish and Grab And Throw. [snip] > no, she pulled off the same thing. She could sense > something was not right. *goes and rereads the shooting script* Yeah, she was getting all egotistical about how Jonathan was a better fighter than her and how impossible that was. You are correct, though, in that Willow didn't make her Deduction roll first. [snip] >>> And Foxbat is human, right? >No, Foxbat is a 350-point martial artist in a superheroic >campaign, >and as such does not have Normal Characteristic >Maxima. >So, because characters are based on NCM in your write up, Over 95% of the Buffy cast is limited to NCM, and I have seven seasons' worth of opportunities to see how Buffy looks alongside of them. Your attempt to characterize me as just making arbitrary assumptions with no basis in canon is wrong. [snip] > However fast humans *can* get, that's what BuffyDex should > be higher than. That's my point. And why should Buffy be superhumanly fast, again? What from the Buffy show supports your assumption? Seeing as how in the CU the absolute peak of human potential is SPD 7, then either Either Xander is a SPD 6 human next to Buffy's SPD 8 (your logic), or Buffy is a SPD 5 low-end metahuman standing next to Xander's SPD 3 or SPD 4 (my logic). Now, which one makes more sense given what's actually on-screen? [snip] > Well, that was earlier on. And later on. > It's been literally years since that episode. Season 5 finale, 'The Gift" -- Buffy fights a mook vamp in the opening vignette and takes three shots to the face from it in return for the two shots to the face, one shot to the knee, and the stake in the chest she manaegs to deliver back. Season 6 early episode, "Flooded", Buffy fights the nameless grunt and again, takes at least as many punches as she gets. Season 6 later on, where she fights the superpowered *Warren* for God's sake, and he proceeds to manhandle her like a cheap cigar -- and while Warren had massive STR and PD on her, Warren had *NO* combat training whatsoever. That's just what I can remember specifically off the top of my head, and it's by far not the complete list. > You're right that she doesn't fight smart much, but then > again, she doesn't really need to. That's precisely my point -- for HTH, Buffy relies almost completely on her powers. Take them out of the equation, she's got virtually *zero* HTH skills to fall back on. [snip] > Assuming the slayerverse is heroic, yeah. It *is* heroic. Just look at the cast members who *aren't* Slayers or vampires. The whole damn paradigm of both shows is "low-end metahuman surrounded by a loyal party of agents and even lower-end metahumans". Heroic campaign. [snip] > Yes, but there was a lot of explosives (and the slayerverse > ground rules state NO resistant defenses... Correction -- the Slayerverse ground rules state no resistant defenses *for Slayers*. We have repeatedly seen bulletproof demons, and even the average Buffyvamp pretty much ignores gunfire. [snip] > And Caleb *requires* the First, Strictly speaking, no. We've seen physical power comparable to Caleb's granted via demonic rituals that even losers like the Trio could execute. [snip] >IIRC, he hit the head -- x2 STUN, x2 BODY. Your calcs are off. > Both times? Again, IIRC, yes. > And head shots are an optional rule anyway... Ah, but this is a Heroic campaign.

> 1) Riley, IMNSHO, is not 'Normal Characteristic Maximum'. I said "at /or slightly above/". Obviously, Angel, Buffy, and Riley are 'slightly above'. [snip] > 2) Buffy *is* faster. Since the combats have to be at a speed > where they can A) be filmed and be understood, this > doesn't really get shown. Faulty reasoning. 1) It's long since been possible to show or at least imply superhuman speed on-screen, on a cheap budget. They do not do so. 2) We have seen Buffy temporarily stripped of her powers... and she was still moving at least 90% as quickly, /relative to the vampire she was fighting/, as she moved when she was at full strength. She was obviously much lower on STR and DEX, but she apparently didn't have that much superhuman SPD to lose. > 3) We saw equal CV, yeah. Dexes? I'm pretty fangy was going > first. /sigh/ Again, you're trying to debunk an argument *that I never actually made*. I *explicitly* say in my prior post that while Angel and Riley have equal SPDs, Angel has a clear DEX edge. > 4) SPD? This is impossible to quantify. Wrong. > Among other things, SPD 4 vs SPD 6 takes a full turn to be > noticed. I mean... say A is DEX 20 SPD 4, B is DEX 21 SPD 6. How fortunate, then, that both fights I used for my SPD benchmark -- Angel vs. Riley and Buffy vs. Angelus -- lasted at least one full Turn. AAMOF, Buffy and Angelus looked to be going for two. [snip] > The ED? No. That's a NND in my book. In addition to the cattle prods, we see that Slayers get burned by fire like ordinary people. No resistant ED. > Also, 'dodging' combat luck seems appropriate. One level, at most. Witness Faith vs. Angelus with a shotgun ... Faith did *not* have enough Combat Luck to rely on safely, she *had* to Abort to Dodge -- repeatedly. > Rapid Healing? I say no. They regenerate at an 'out of > combat' rate. Maybe 1/hour? (If that *is* what rapid healing > is, ignore this...) That *is* what rapid healing is. > Don't forget Superstar, where she was aware enough to > detect the world altering. That was Adam. Buffy didn't know a damn thing was going on until around the first or second commercial break, and IIRC it was *Willow* who first made her Deduction roll after looking at the yearbook. [snip] > And Foxbat is human, right? No, Foxbat is a 350-point martial artist in a superheroic campaign, and as such does not have Normal Characteristic Maxima. > So why is he more dangerous? Equal SPDs, at least an equal DEX, enough Damage Classes to hit as hard as the average vampire, and he can glide. Throw in the Dreaded Ping Pong Ball Gun and Buffy vs. Foxbat is not a fight, it's a massacre. Hell, he's even got freaking Slayer superleaping (Foxbat has a 4-hex vertical superleap... which is how high Faith was going in her fight vs. Angelus.) [snip] > And let's not even go near combat skills... Let's not, because Buffy's are extremely rudimentary... I mean, jeez, count how often she gets hit -- by mooks. If it weren't for her nPD soak, she'd be Knocked Out in virtually every fight. Buffy beats the crap outta people by bulling her way through on sheer Slayer superstrength and resilience, and going off the base CVs of her DEX 20. Stripped of her powers, she has virtually *no* HTH ability worth mentioning... and that's not speculation, that's canon. > Well, from what I've seen, a Slayer really is some kind of > super-martial artist. Actually, they're a low end brick with DEX 20. > I'd add Caleb and the Mayor (Explosives do killing energy > damage. )to that list. (Although not as high powered > threats) Caleb and the Mayor are not world-ending threats, they're local ones. And the Mayor *died* from explosives. > Why Caleb? Well, one hit KO's are hard. Especially given... [snip] IIRC, he hit the head -- x2 STUN, x2 BODY. Your calcs are off.

Probably put the immune party into a Hibernaculum and kept him on ice while Tom Thumb researched how to customize the B-Mod to get around the guy's defenses.

Oh yes, and re: your Initiative comments... One of my fellow Buffy-watching friends is an ex-Marine who used to be with FAST (Fleet Anti-Terrorist Strike Team), after doing a hitch in the 1st Security Force Battalion. His comments -- well, forget the month. According to him.. give him a company from Force Security, arm 'em up appropriately, and they'd flush the Sunnydale sewers in three days to a week.

Re: vampires with guns... The only Vampire: The Masquerade campaign that I played in that I ever liked was the one where the DM thought the same way you did... ... so the Methuselah that was our group's patron was an unusually intelligent one, who fully grasped the potential of modern weapons. You haven't lived until you've wiped the sneering smile off an Antedeluvian's face with an anti-rank rocket, while being backed up by fifteen ghouls with Special Forces training and full kit. (How did we avoid violating the Masquerade, you ask? Simple. We painted the vehicles green, wore fatigues, and said we were fighting terrorists. And had bought enough dots of Influence that the genuine authorities would back us up on that. Then again, this was the campaign that ended with our Methsuelah patron going up against a Great Bane in epic battle, while we were busy re-staging Helm's Deep with automatic weapons, holding off more Baali than I want to think about from interfering with our patron) Re: well-trained agents in general -- again, I enthusiastically agree, and recommend doing the same to all DMs. You don't even need to study real military tactics -- just pick up some of the simplest concepts from your miniatures wargaming friends, and then watch your 'Black Hawk Down', 'Tears of the Sun', and 'We Were Soldiers' DVDs over and over again, trying to pick up the sense of how and why they're moving like that. OTOH, one point of disagreement... Re: the rest of the JLA -- considering just the classic 'Big 7 +1' lineup... ... two of them (Flash, Wonder Woman) can disengage pretty much at will from any conventional military force that they can't outfight, and they can outfight entire regiments. One of them is potentially more powerful than Superman (Green Lantern), so you'd have to find and hit where he sleeps. (Possible, yes... but if he has any reason to be on the alert and moves his stuff from his apartment up to the Watchtower, good luck!) One of them has a single obvious weakness... but flamethrowers are very short-ranged, and napalm delivery's too slow, and outside of that one weakness he's worse to deal with than the Big S. (Martian Manhunter). One of them is -- or at least was -- the head of state of one of the world's superpowers (DCU Atlantis was nowhere near as irrelevant to the world as MU Atlantis is), and as such is somebody that you really have to think twice before sending military force after. And one of them is virtually unkillable with bullets or bombs (Plastic Man). ... and as for the last one? Let us kindly draw a veil over what happens when even the most highly-trained agents with guns try to tackle the Batman... 'cause that kind of scene is what he was *made* for. Especially since however smart and dirty you can fight, he fights smarter and dirtier.

[snip -- ah, heck with it, this ain't the 'Buffy' forum anyway] Edit -- but everything I said about the Initiative still stands.

/gag/ If what SMG uses on the show is actually Tae Kwon Do, then I'm actually Queen Victoria. (Sarah Michelle Gellar might practice TKD off-screen, but the Buffy stunt crew is using God knows what.) As for integrating the Slayers into the world... what makes the most sense to me is that 'Slayer' isn't a title that passes on only at death, but that it's a natural response of the 'magical ecosystem' to too many vampires being present in a given locality at a given time... i.e., sort of like Captain Universe. It bamfs around to where it's most needed, and the Council has to keep whipping out the scrying pools to follow it. (Granted, it's still staying in one place for a minimum of several months at a time. and for truly epic infestations or master vampires, it's stayed around for several years...) As for how powerful a Slayer needs to be in Champions -- remember Viktor, from the movie "Underworld"? I'd say, something about 2/3rds as buff as that.

> I think the SPD & DEX are a bit higher. I think it was shown > that Buffy outclasses Riley by a high degree and was holding > back. Problem is, Riley and Angel weren't holding *anything* back against each other ("Yoko Factor"), and they were moving at equal SPDs. Likewise, Angelus (and Angelus shares Angel's character sheet save the Psych Lims) and Buffy are evenly matched in SPD. (Ditto Faith and Angelus, as we saw last season on "Angel") Buffy does have a clear DEX, STR, and PD edge on Riley, true -- but then again, so did Angel, as witness the *resuilts* of their little tussle in Yoko Factor. Riley's about STR 20-25 and DEX 18-20, and Buffy's STR 30-35 and DEX 20-23. (Not to mention that Buffy's nonresistant PD can soak Riley's best punch, whereas Riley's PD isn't above NCM.) But when it comes to SPD, Buffy doesn't get that many more actions than Giles does... or Willow, or Xander. Neither, for that matter, do Angel, Faith, etc. And, of course, Buffy and Angel... and therefore Buffy and Riley... have the same SPD. [snip] > I just think if there were actual supers to a significant > degree, we'd find the slayers suddenly tougher as well at > least for "story telling" sake. The problem with the story of the Slayer is that it's not even consistent with its *own* stated premises, let alone real-world logic. How can one girl be the scourge of vampirism when Buffyverse canon establishes that vampires reproduce as easily as they have been shown, and are spread out everywhere in every city? Buffy could kill twenty a night -- and that's well in excess of her average night -- 365 days a year and not even *begin* to cut into the vampire "birth" rate. Any well-trained and well-equipped gang of normals can make vampires and demons die faster than the Slayer can. (Examples -- Gunn's old gang and how they scourged their 'hood, and Holtz's original crew and how they made Angelus and Darla run for their lives across the length of Europe... when the Scooby Gang can barely make Angelus run for his life across *town*.) Edit -- for that matter, the only way that season 4 BtVS could *avoid* showing that any well-trained group of agents should be far more effective in vampire-mulching than a single very minor metahuman was to curse every single military character on their show with an absolutely unrealistic -- indeed, positively absurd -- amount of blithering stupidity, and then bald-facedly make the claim that these were "the best of the best", when what they actually acted like were the guys who couldn't make the cut for 3rd Edition VIPER trainees. (AAMOF, for DMs who want to bring back the old "green-suited circus clown" standard of competence for VIPER, look no further for your inspiration than the Initiative.) Makes you wonder what makes the original Shadow Men and the Council of Watchers think that they're so important. Granted, the knowledge base of the Watchers is nigh-indispensable... but it'd be equally as useful, or even more useful, if it were handed out to multiple gangs of vampire-hunters armed and organized like Holtz's crew than it would be doled out in dribs and drabs to one girl at a time. (For that matter, Wesley's best career move after getting canned from the Watchers would not have been to go to LA as a rogue demon hunter, but to go to Washington DC and look up the group that succeeded the Initiative and hire on as their only available *really* expert consultant.) Of course, if you want to import the Watchers into the CU, they're /already there/... who do you think the Trismegistus Council /are/, anyway? BtVS has had many enjoyable character-driven arcs, some of them so extremely well-written as to compare with or outshine the original literary inspirations, but the *plots* have never really held up, and the setting doesn't even begin to come close to the same standards of internal consistency as, oh, the 5e Champions U. Hence the poor fit.

Much as it might pain some fans to hear it stated in such bald terms, in any world with four-color metahumans Slayers are inconsequential chump change. Buffy's powers... * DEX and SPD up around Normal Characteristic Maxima or slightly above (even powerful vampires like Angelus aren't *that* much faster or agile than the most well-trained of humans -- remember, Buffyverse vampires are much low-powered than most other vampire conceptions in fiction, and Angel's fight vs. Riley Finn gives us a good benchmark for relative SPDs between Angel/Angelus and a Buffyverse human in peak physical condition with minor augmentations -- and Buffy only matches them SPD and DEX wise, she doesn't significantly exceed them) * STR in the 30-35 range * A very high nonresistant PD... but /no/ resistant PD (Slayers have been given life-threatening wounds with ordinary knives and bullets), and no ED worth mentioning (Slayers have dropped from single hits by normal cattle prods). * The 'Rapid Healing' Talent from Fantasy HERO 5e, all 5 points of it * A No Conscious Control dream-based Precognition, and it's been mostly ignored for the past 3-4 seasons anyway ... well, heck, we're not even past 250 points here. We might not be past 200. There are Ravenswood Academy students who can blow right past this power curve, let alone any 350-point starting character. *Foxbat* is a greater HTH combat machine than Buffy can ever dream of being. Hell, *Bulldozer* is a more fearsome force than Buffy. (Although granted, even Xander could fast-talk Bulldozer into punching the nearest electrical junction box and KO'ing himself.) So how do I think Slayers fit into the default CU? Going off the canon material and the power levels displayed, as a barely-remarkable bit of background noise.(*) AAMOF, the only entities I can recall from Buffy that would actually be significant Champions villains were Adam (and a team of 350-pointers would consider him a low-to-medium threat), Glory, the Judge (if allowed to reach full apotheosis... he's a *solo* 350-point adventure villain at reduced level), and Dark Willow. (*) The 'Super-Slayer' from the end of season 4 is being ignored here because that was a literally once-in-a-lifetime plot device.

True... but again, that has *its* own unique set of problems... as the 'Squadron Supreme' series brilliantly showed.