Koshka

Re: US civil awards? A big key-shaped thing that's supposed to symbolize "We think you're great! Come by any time!" I've been told the idea/term dates back to the middle ages, when someone really important might be given a genuine key to the city gates -- but personally, I don't buy that.

Re: Vigilante Cops and IA

Here's the setup -- I'm running STAST, the Ophidian Plague has just broken out in Millenium City, and we've got a new player starting this week. In the interests of not stalling the game while we get a new character meshed into the group, he's going to run Kodiak. Only problem, Kodiak is 20 points lower than the other characters, so he needs a boost. I'd rather not have him grab a rifle from the FBI office, in view of his poor eyesight Phys Lim. (I went through 4 years of junior ROTC with an out-of-date eyeglass prescription. Trust me, he wouldn't be hitting much.) I was going to have him ditch the bulletproof vest and "borrow" a force field belt from PRIMUS, but that's still going to leave some unspent points. Any other ideas for stuff he can grab for a quick power boost?

Re: DARK CHAMPIONS: What Do *You* Want To See? I'm glad to see Resource Points in the book, I've been in games that mixed custom (point-bought) gear with cash-bought, and the cash folks were getting away with an awful lot. If there's room, think you could put an example of poison gas or bioweaponry into the weapons chapter? I'd also like to see a more detailed rundown on explosives.

Re: Why does Nighthawk always get depicted getting the crap kicked out of him? But does it count as a goal when the kicker puts the "ball" through the support post instead of the net? Come to think of it, 4th edition Defender got his clock cleaned once or twice -- the cover of Hero System Almanac 1 is definitely a "Better Get Maaco"* moment. Maybe people don't complain about those because Defender's got armor to take the beating for him? *(For posters outside the US, "Maaco" is the name of a chain of auto repair shops. Their TV ads follow the pattern of showing a minor auto accident and one person involved in it saying "Better get Maaco".)

Re: Lady May Chiltren I'm not sure about allowing clothing (her corset) as a Phys Lim, but maybe at half value to reflect the fact that it's removable? I haven't done any costuming that would require a corset, but IIRC in periods where women wore them they wore them starting from early teens. I would expect that anyone who's that used to wearing something would be able to get around any mobility issues -- much the way that someone who wears high heels a lot (not me ) can walk at normal speed while wearing them. (The last time there was a corset discussion on a historical costume list I'm on, one person mentioned being able to touch her toes while corseted. And while you can't legally get whalebone stays any more, I believe the modern fake whalebones are just as stiff as the "original".)

Re: Your Inner Circle I've always left the Inner Circle of DEMON vague ... but if I were ever to use them in a long-running game, one of them would turn out to be a televangelist in his Secret ID. (BTW, don't waste your time e-mailing me Chick tracts. I'm Christian, I just disagree with some of the theology used in televangelism.)

Re: Minor player problem ... Radar was the company clerk, so he was in position to fudge the records on those packages. He also had a really good Contact roll with the scriptwriters

Re: Minor player problem ... False. One of my friends is former USAF (medical discharge), and she didn't get to keep any firearms. I'll e-mail her if you want to get it direct, but I've helped clean her house and would have seen any guns she owned.

Re: Silliest Disadvantage Ever I agree that this is a case of "poorly worded command", and Menton should know better. However, assuming Menton got a high enough result to make Ironclad paste a teammate, I would have Ironclad make his best guess as to what he was supposed to use as a weapon and swing away. After all, he knows what 4 of the 5 words in that sentence mean. He's supposed to hit Nighthawk with something, now what should he use .... If the Ming vase is the closest item to him, maybe he will use it (and only do 2d6 damage -- I can't picture a Ming having more than 1 DEF 1 BODY). Or, he might pick an improvised weapon based on his knowledge of arena combat and clobber Nighthawk with the antique oak table the collection of Ming vases were sitting on, doing close to his full STR damage and really trashing both Nighthawk and the Champions' superhero insurance rates.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... I was running a playtest the other night, using the Champions as PCs for simplicity's sake (not everyone has 5th edition characters yet). Nighthawk and Witchcraft were in one part of the underground villain base when they get a warning from the rest of the team in another section -- the villains are going to try to release poison gas into the air supply. Nighthawk takes out his rebreather and gives it to Witchcraft. Witchcraft: You're a gentleman. Nighthawk: No, I'm Overconfident.

Re: Publishing Fiction 1) Creative writing was never my forte in English class, but I'd be willing to give it a shot. 2) Assuming decent quality, I'd buy it. 3) I'm open on this one -- there's loads of good characters out there. It might be interesting to use some of the "minor" villain groups as opponents, though. (By "minor" I mean the ones that aren't getting the full book treatment. For instance, I think the Circle of the Scarlet Moon will be mentioned in one of the Mystic books, but if they aren't getting at least a good chunk to themselves they'd qualify as "minor".) 4) I'd like to see the stories cover a range of time periods. Galactic Champions, modern-day (4 color and Dark), and WWII supers.

Re: The Age of Man: Need Help! IIRC, Cuchulain (spelling probably way off) got his name when he agreed to "replace" a guard dog he'd killed by taking on its duties/role. (The name means "hound of [whoever the dog's owner was]".) Could you play around with that myth a bit? Either give the original dog more powers than the average guard dog, or use a Cuchulain variant who was actually transformed into a dog when he was renamed?

Re: Take the 5e Solo villains, and make a team out of them In VIPER -- I would provide a page reference, but it's at home and I'm posting from work. He's one of the senior members of Dragon Branch, VIPER's supervillain branch. (Can't really call them a team when they normally work alone for whichever Nest convinces the Council Of Thirty they need supervillain backup.)

Re: The Shadow Stats+Powers The movie Shadow was a nice blend of elements from both the pulps and the radio plays -- and having said that I expect to be flamed to a crisp by "serious" fans . Personally I'd call the movie power Invisibility with a fringe effect, and maybe toss in -1/4 for the "fringe" (his shadow) being more easily noticed than a standard fringe effect. I'm not quite sure how to model the bit where he gets pinned to the wall by the crossbow bolts and becomes fully visible. Sure, he just turned off the Invisibility, but was he forced to by the attack or did he figure "why bother, they know where I am"? (I got a DVD player for Christmas, anyone know if there's an extended release of the movie with more of that scene?)

Re: What character concepts make you cringe? I know one guy who almost always plays female characters. He does OK, but mainly because the games are kept at a G to PG rating, so he doesn't have to deal with the characters' sexuality. He just runs them as people. (To be honest, I think he'd have trouble RPing any character's sexuality, whether female or male.) As far as cringe factor goes, I had one guy who wanted to run a D&D minotaur in a superhero game.

Re: Campaign Advice: How to Enforce Style?

Re: What are the most annoying GM habits? In one online game, I went over a year without getting any XP -- because if you weren't still logged on at 2 AM when the GM wrapped up the session, you didn't get any XP. Wish I'd known that before joining the group. No one ever mentioned XP during the part of the game before I had to log off (I had to work the next day), so I assumed he was just really slow about e-mailing totals to people. He had a few other annoying habits, most notably the GM-PC built on double the points of the other PCs.

Re: So, Who Else Is Gonna Grab Galactic Champions ASAP?? Not soon enough for me

Re: Help: Sniper Syndrome Have you taken a look at "Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth"? [Minor Spoilers] . . . . . . There's some scenes where running away and sniping would be an effective technique, but there's some where it's just not gonna work. The outbreak of the Ophidian Plague, for instance -- I'm certain he doesn't have enough OCV to target the virus without killing the person it's infected. Or one chase sequence through an abandoned section of the sewer system.

Re: Anyone using Sidekick? I'm going to bounce this off the coordinator first, but right now I'm planning to make one of the games I run at a local game day be Sidekick-only -- probably an Alien Wars scenario.

Re: Help: Sniper Syndrome No experience as GM, but I played in a D&D game where one of the other players was the same sort -- the best AC and HP in the game, and spent every fight running to the back of the group. Some of the other players and I all agreed that we were going to (in character) cut him out of any treasure from any fights he didn't take part in. Champions doesn't give out treasure, but do you ever give Contacts/Favors out along with XP? If everyone else in the group gets a Favor from the person they just saved but Mr. Sniper doesn't "because you didn't do anything", it might get the point across. I also like the villains recognizing his pattern of behavior and setting up to zap him. A variant would be the villains grabbing a KOed teammate of his as a hostage/prisoner and being able to get away because Mr. Sniper is too far away to catch up.

I almost forgot (or repressed the memory of) the person who decides what your character's personality and disads "should" be and tries to push you into playing that way. In a one-shot game, one player informed another that he wasn't playing his character correctly "because my character's beautiful, so your [male] character would want to go off with her". The male character not only had nothing on his sheet that would add up to "thinks with his gonads", but this was a first-contact encounter in a Dark Champs-style game -- and he's going to run off with some strange woman with unknown powers? I assume it could happen with GMs as well, but I've only seen it with players. (Specifically one certain player.)

It only happened once, but back in college a couple players decided to take a smoke break in the lounge where we were playing. Turned out those hand-rolled "cigarettes" didn't contain tobacco . I suppose it was vaguely useful for me to learn that secondhand pot smoke gives me a screaming headache, but since I wasn't planning to try the stuff anyway .... To be fair, I will say the dorm lounges weren't posted as non-smoking. They still should have asked before lighting up, though.

The Tangent That Will Not Die!!! I'm in a 3.5 game (I know, I know ... ) where the GM comes up with very interesting scenarios -- when he gets around to actually starting the action. Two weeks ago, the party arrived in a town. He had the murder mystery all set up and ready to run for us. (We asked.) He then wasted over half an hour gaming out one character buying a dress so she could eat in the dining room of the fancy inn we were staying at. 1) The GM learned everything he knows about medieval clothing looking at people at the local renfaire, so his descriptions of what the dress shop had in stock made no sense. 2) The dress shop and its staff had no connection at all to the murder mystery. It wasn't the locale, they weren't victims, they weren't grieving survivors, they weren't suspects, they weren't even part of the town militia that's helping us with the search. 3) Several players, including the one whose character wanted to buy the dress, asked him to just fast-forward to "I pay for the dress and take it back to the inn" and he ignored them.