Chuckg

Wow. I have only one character who'd let somebody who did that actually get to claim unearned credit off me, and that's Starguard. Dr. Pain would matter-of-factly put out the true version of events at the press conference, but do so without saying anything unjustifiable about the guy. The Baron would... well, he doesn't *do* press conferences, so this guy can steal all the credit he wants.

And this guy could also find out that 10th-century German noblemen of Slavic ancestry consider falsely claiming credit for the deeds of another, especially *your* deeds, to be quite insulting...

My own comments:

a) Of course, that 'Cap would win eventually' assumes that both sides are fighting fair.

Batman. Fight fair. Now pull the other one, it's got bells on.

But Batman's not going to *tell* Cap that, now is he? Much better to surprise him next time.

Captain Marvel, draining Kyle's Power Ring? I really don't think she can handle that much juice... especially since, if this is Kyle's post-Ion ring, it *CAN'T* run out of juice. Ever. The most it can do is kick down to a lesser stage of output.

c) I also found it hilarious that Hawkeye would try that trick on Captain Boomerang's nemesis. Granted, it /did/ work for Hawkeye on the Whizzer...

Baron von Darien -- drops a tip to the police about a guy with a huge weapons stash at apartment such-and-such.

(The Baron would love to go search the place himself, but he's a *vampire* -- he can't go in the guy's apartment without an invitation. Hiring a normal PI to do it would be foolhardy, as this target's obviously got something weird going on. So option #3 is 'drop a dime to the cops'. If the guy's not doing anything illegal, he should get off, right?)

Oh! How's about President Thomas Beck (Morgan Freeman), from "Deep Impact"?

> Isn't that a problem with real vampires as well, though? If

> they can make others of their kind, why don't they just

> reproduce enough to take over the world?

Pre-industrial population densities and transport limitations pretty much guarantee that vampires will rapidly exhaust the available food supply if there's more than a couple of them in the local area(*)... and when you can't travel by day, long-distance travel gets kinda problematic.

And even a primitive hunter-gatherer can connect the dots on a basic enough level to understand 'too many people in the same place who want to eat the food, food be limited, everybody starves'.

(*) Addendum -- Remember, the average vampire has to kill around 3-7 people per /week/ to stay fed. It takes a smart vampire to figure out that it's possible to feed without draining 'em dry, and a strong-willed one to be able to muster the self-control to do it.

What does losing 1000-2000 people a year do to the average pre-industrial town's population curve?

Strictly speaking, a vampire in an average medieval village will rapidly turn the place into a ghost town, and then either have to move on or die of starvation. Maybe vampires are why so many small medieval villages managed to 'vanish', not ergot. At least, in the Champions Universe.

This would also explain why vampires create very few vampires... and why damn few vampires which are created manage to live out their first year.

Up until modern times, of course. But by then, at least in the mental universes I create, I see vampires as being almost a dying race... too few, too used to hiding, too unwilling to risk it.

If I remember 'The Mutant File' correctly, the 'potassium vampire' mutation was a sort of repeated "faulty expression" of what was supposed to be the next step towards Advanced Generation mutants. IOW, it's a recurring bug in the system.

And I do agree with the notion of making them sterile -- it's the explanation for *why* they're an evolutionary dead end, instead of for why they overran the damn continent five hundred years ago.

President Thomas J. Whitmore, from "ID4"?

(PS -- where was it definitively said that that George W. Bush, Jr., was not POTUS in the Champions U? ISTR that they very carefully left the current President unspecified.)

Telepathy only talks to people and reads their thoughts. If you want to command people, use Mind Control.

If you want to command people easily, use Mind Control on low-EGO targets... but use Mind Control.

SPD twelve?

Eeee-youch.

The game mechanic here is, your character has to succeed with an EGO roll before he can use that power, right?

This is represented in one of two ways:

"Requires unmodified EGO roll", a -1/4 power Limitation

*OR*

Psych Lim -- Fears Using Specific Power (Uncommon, Strong) -- 10 points

Not both.

And to deal with the Mind Control situation, the Disadvantage would be more appropriate than the Limitation.

Serving right next to such notables as Invisible Kid, Phantom Girl, and Matter-Eater Lad.

Exactly.

The 'feel' we're aiming for in our current campaign is an Avengers/JLA thing. We *want* Firewing to show up looking to prove something vs. our toughest member, because he's tough enough to have even odds of winning. We *want* to take on Doctor Destroyer in mortal combat, something that no team of starting heroes can realistically hope to do without major NPC backup. We want to have the fate of the world on the line when we roll out to answer the call, and we want to have backstories that are integral parts of the historic cusps of the game world.

Kinda hard to do that on 350. *g*

> You're likely to only get 2-3 thousand dollars per teller on

> duty. If you stay to clean out more than 2-3 tellers then

> you're almost garenteed that the super heros will show up.

a) From the DM's point of view, that's not a bug -- that's a feature.

If the villains really must get through a bank job w/o superhero response, then the answer is "pick a city without superheros, like Cleveland".(*)

(*) And yes, I'm aware that some people set campaigns in Cleveland.

(Which leads us to the time-honored question 'What blithering idiot *EVER* chooses to rob a bank in Metropolis, when they can just go a couple hours' drive down the Interstate and execute a much more likely-to-succeed bank robbery in Philadelphia?"

Of course, some criminals are idiotic enough to get into police stand-off situations in Gotham City, as well...)

c) The main reason that most bank robbers just do the teller windows and don't go for the vault is because they can't get it open before the cops show up. Any villain team with a decent brick or powerful energy blaster obviously doesn't have that problem.

In the 750-point campaign I'm currently in, Attack Powers cannot go over 90 Active Points w/o DM permission, which has only been given twice. (The brick has 100 STR, and the spatial manipulator has Tesseract's offensive multipower.)

Caveat -- the cost of the Reduced Endurance advantages does not count vs. that 90 point limit.

The highest defenses in the party are 40 PD/40 ED Resistant -- again, that's our 'Superman' type brick, Horus-Re.)

As a rough benchmark of power -- iIn our second session, our brick actually managed to survive a whole turn in single combat with Firewing

After taking a brutal pounding at range our brick finally closed successfully and got Firewing in a grapple where Firewing couldn't reach him with his primary EB, at which point Firewing started started using his explosive EB repeatedly at point-blank range, and turned it into a pure endurance contest of 'Who drops first?'

As it turned out, they both fell unconscious at the same time. That was the end of session 2... tomorrow is when we find out if Firewing will accept or offer a draw, or re-open the dance.

The most powerful ranged attack in the party is Starguard's 80-point Cosmic Power Pool, which at her (novice) stage of experience is mostly used for very simple effects, like EBs or Characteristic boosts.

The martial artist has DEX 35, SPD 7, and does 12 DCs w/ his Offensive Strike, 15 DCs if he uses his +3d6 baton.

So we tend to be versatile rather than overwhelmingly raw.

As for normal weapons -- there is no one in the party who has to worry about conventional firearms below the squad support level, even if we stand still and take 0 DCV. (Granted, the martial artist still has to use his Combat Luck to bolster his protective costume...) Several of us can ignore howitzers.

The closest game effect I can think of to what you're describing her is a Telekinetic Grab and Throw.

Pity we couldn't convince our DM to go for /that/ option.

(Seriously, though, what kind of opposition shows up in such a campaign?)

Mechanon is in the 'Champions' sourcebook, Ripper and Halfjack are in the 5e VIPER sourcebook.

Don't have any, wouldn't share my secret ID with them if I did have any, and would turn them in in a heartbeat... none of my heroes are friends with people who are murderers.

That is a *goddamn* good character.

Originally posted by phydaux

I agree. i've always felt 100 points of disadds is fine for a PC, UNLESS you're playing a 750 point campaign. In that case, Hunted by God is not unreasonable...

Heh. In our campaign, our strongest team member (Horus-Re) has Doctor Destroyer, Takofanes the Undying, *and* the *entirety* of VIPER (including Nama) as his Hunteds.

(Good thing he didn't take any DNPCs...)

These are just the three most recent (and most complete) that I've created. I've got a folder full of others, but they're nowhere near ready for prime time.

The one I'm currently a player in is a 750 point campaign -- 600 base, 150 disads.

It's an 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes' campaign, where 12 years after the death of all the original Sentinels at the Battle of Detroit, the new Sentinel team is formed by chance -- or fate -- from five of the most powerful heroes around, a mixture of both grizzled veterans and powerful newbies. The team is intended to have JLA-level responsibilities and notoriety.

OK, well, that's all of 'em. If you want, feel free to comment. Hope I didn't bore anybody.

History: -- Much less elaborate than the two above. Leon Stepczinski was a big kid from a poor family in Chicago who got into college on a football scholarship, but went into pro wrestilng rather than pro football because he liked the idea of still having his original knee joints instead of factory rebuilt models when he was 50. Eventually, he worked his way up the wrestling ladder to become WWF champion, and one of the most famous 'heels' in the sport.

(In this timeline, Dwayne Johnson was a beginning WWF wrestler who dropped out early to go find work as an actor instead, and later on became Hollywood's hottest action star. Ergo, Dr. Pain's career enjoyed the pre-eminence and status that The Rock enjoyed in the real world, albeit as a heel instead of a face.)

And then came the time that Pulsar attacked the Royal Rumble, seeking to bolster his rep (and impress Morgan Fairchild) by flattening some of the world's most famous pro wrestlers on live pay-per-view. While the rest fell to Pulsar's assault the energy blasts instead triggered Leon's latent genetic factors, turning his already legendary physique into an outright superhuman one.

It wasn't much consolation to Pulsar that the videotapes of him being choke-slammed through the floor made that particular broadcast the highest-selling DVD that Vince McMahon ever sold...

Of course, now that he was metahuman, Dr. Pain had to announce his retirement from wrestling immediately. And, of course, he became a supehero.

Personality -- Although he's no genius, Dr. Pain is much smarter than he's given credit for, having a healthy dose of common sense and fairly good retention skills. He'd gotten his Master's in Business Administration while on the wrestling circuit, and invested his money wisely. So he's quite well-off, and still popular with the fans even in his 'retirement'.

Leon is fairly laid back, and genuinely likes to use his strength and muscles to help out, but he's also proud... he doesn't like to take crap from people who, in his opinion, haven't earned the right to give it.

Now if he could only find some way to convince people that his 'Dr. Pain' wrestling persona was as fake as pro wrestling itself, and that the superhero Dr. Pain is actually *not* a dumb thug with bad dialogue, his life would be just about perfect.

Of course, his habit of reflexively falling back into his ring persona and dialect whenever he gets in a fight isn't helping much. Neither is the fact that he actually *likes* his hero name, and doesn't want to change it.

Doctor Pain - Character Sheet

Name "Doctor Pain", aka Leon Stepczinski

Player Charles Glasgow

STR 60

DEX 20

CON 30

BODY 20

INT 15

EGO 18

PRE 20

COM 10

PD 24

ED 24

SPD 4

REC 12

END 60

STUN 60

OCV 7

DCV 7

ECV 6

Phases: 3, 6, 9, 12

Total Defenses: 24 PD (24 rPD)

24 ED (24 rED)

Powers:

24 Steel-Hard Skin: Damage Resistance (24 PD/24 ED)

11 Used To Taking Punches: Physical Damage Reduction, Normal, 50%, STUN Only (-1/2),

Character Must Be Aware Of Attack (-1/4)

3 Stage Fighting: +2 Levels with HTH Combat, only for counteracting penalties to Pull Punch (-2)

7 "The Pain Injection": +3d6 HA, Hand-to-Hand Attack (-1/2), No Knockback (-1/4),

Only Versus Prone Opponent And Character Must Also Go Prone (-1/2)

Martial Arts - Professional Wrestling:

4 Hold -1/-1 Grab Two Limbs, 70 STR

5 "Chill Pill" -2/+0 Grab One Limb; 2d6 NND (2)

3 Slam +0/+1 12d6 + v/5; Target Falls

4 Escape +0/+0 STR 75 Escape

4 Block +2/+2 Block, Abort

4 Duck -/+5 Dodge, Affects All Attacks, Abort

20 Adaptable and Capable: +2 Overall Levels

Talents/Perks:

8 Contact: Best Agent In the Business, 12- (useful resources, own contacts, slavishly loyal)

5 Perk: Wealth ($500,000/year)

6 Reputation: Famous Pro Wrestler (+3/+3d6), only wrestling fans, 14-

Agility Skills:

3 Acrobatics, 13-

3 Breakfall, 13-

3 Climbing, 13-

Intellect Skills:

3 Deduction, 12-

3 Paramedic, 12-

Interaction Skills:

3 Acting, 13-

3 Oratory, 13-

3 High Society, 13-

3 Streetwise, 13-

Background Skills:

3 Scholar

1 Language: Polish (basic conversation)

2 KS: Business Law, 12-

2 KS: Classical Literature, 12-

2 KS: Finance, 12-

2 KS: Philosophy, 12-

2 KS: Professional Wrestling, 12-

2 KS: The Celebrity/Entertainment World, 12-

2 PS: Business Management, 11-

3 PS: Professional Wrestler (PRE-based), 13-

0 TF: Small Ground Vehicles

Disadvantages

10 Hunted: Pulsar, 8- (As Powerful, Public ID)

25 Hunted: ARGENT, 8- (More Powerful, NCI, Public ID)

20 Psych Lim: Honorable (Common, Total)

10 Psych Lim: Proud; Hates To Be Beaten Or Humiliated (Common, Moderate)

20 Psych Lim: Protective Of Innocents (Very Common, Strong)

10 Reputation: Big Dumb Macho Jerk, 11-

15 Social Lim: Public ID

350 points total

(note -- Dr. Pain was created for a campaign that never materialized, so his disads are unfinished. He's got 40 points of disads he needs to take.)