ZootSoot

Re: Which is your least favorite archetype to play?

Re: Biggest Brains in DC Which is where the Corvus had her best line in our current campaign: "Don't feel bad Dr. Richards, you are still the smartest man I've ever met . . ."

Re: Ape Name Needed

Re: Biggest Brains in DC Both Marvel and Dc have this idiocy going for them, it's currently worse in Marvel where we have a character who is considered the seventh smartest person in the world. Unfortunately intelligence does not scale clearly the way strength does. Batman is the world's greatest detective but is he smarter than John Henry Irons? Ray Palmer? Lex Luthor? Is science Luthor smarter than business Luthor? And, again, in Marvel it's worse where high intelligence is at least as common as super speed is in DC. Saying that michael Holt is the world's third smartest person is proof that the world's third smartest person does not work as an editor for DC.

Re: Evil Schemes for the Average Megalomaniac The most dastardly plamn imaginable for any Dr. Doom type villain. Patent your technology and make it available on the open market. Soon everyone is dependent upon your tech and you own everything and you can activate your back door program whenever you want to shut down, pre-empt or take over other folks machines. of course the heroes will never be able to stop this nefarious scheme and the campaign will end with the villain triumphant, unless his mental illnesses act up and make him do something breathtakingly stupid . . .

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero "To share, with the entire world, the awesomeness that is Meatpackage Man." "I discovered a method to induce zero-point particle generation. No one remembers. I developed a hybrid grain that would survive in desert or arctic conditions and would make famine a historical artifact. No one cared. I developed a smart drug that would take a child through the equivalent of twelve-years of quality primary and secondary education in a period of four hours. The pharmaceutical and education industries blackballed me. Then I accidentally set Eurostar on fire and my phone never stops ringing . . ." "I have no hands and I must box . . ." "I put on the costume to surprise my girlfriend and ask her to marry me. She surprised me when I caught her with my business partner, Hank. Rather than ever admit this shame (except, for some reason, to you) I have lived the life of a costumed crimefighter ever since." "This is the perfect outfit for avoiding process servers . . ."

Re: WWYCD: Mirror Universe That's why we exist. That and the fact that it let us call ourselves the new Sinister Six: Ishtar Sword Dancer Gangway Fall from Grace Po'Boy The Corvus. Thinking about it more closer I think our mirror universe duplicates would be nano-controlled Thunderbolts agents . . .

Re: WWYCD: Mirror Universe Given that my campaign is currently set in a post Civil War Marvel Universe and we are anti-registration vigilantes who are devoted to the overthrow of Iron Man, Shield and the government (or at least the Superhuman Registration Act) I can't imagine what this world would like for us. Are our counterparts lameass Initiative members?

Re: WWYCD: The True Champion has Arrived! The Deserter would accept the straight up boxing match rules. He would then be Champion's nightmare opponent. He is clearly strong enough to be in this fight, he plays by Champions rules, he pretty much sucks as a boxer (he'll hit Champion about as frequently a naturally occuring lightning) but he will not go down. Eventually Champion will slip in Deserter blood and/or Deserter will get the luck shot that CON stuns him and then puts him out with another punch or two . . . and the fifth one will kill him.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever

Re: WWYCD: The Nebula Affair The Deserter: would simply go after her. Don't know the special effects of Duress but he can probably get out and get back in under an hour. Might offer to take her back home to Andromeda if that's something she wants. PO' Boy: "Whatever, @$#%." Then unleash his invisible, indirect, continuing RKA attack on her and keep her stuff as a trophy.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever Can't read through all this now, but am I the only one who remembers that when Spiderman beat Firelord it was right at the beginning of huge mysterious power-up he was going through that was ultimately identified as his coming into possession of the Captain Universe power? Captain universe is both cheesy and sleazy but is surely explanation enough for that victory . . . The worst comicbook superfight ever? Just from a logic point of view everything in DC comics reeks with half the characters having "superspeed" which means that not only should they win every fight they have with non superspeed characters but they should already have done so . . . Maybe the worst was a non-superpowered confrontation in which an FBI strike team consisted of a man his wife and her father. Can you imagine the fibbers putting this group together? But then we would never have had the new Professor Zoom without it . . . another reason to hate it, I suppose.

Re: WWYCD: "Dude, you stole my shtick!" Ishtar--Would be terrified that this is the real (or at least an avatar of) the ancient fertility/sexuality goddess and would go out of her way to avoid any contact. Sworddancer--Is a legacy character. There has been a Sworddancer for over 1600 years and each has been chosen by his/her predecessor. The legacy would force her to investigate and remove the impostor in one way or another. Luna--Hates comic book tropes and she would immediately make her displeasure known. Tomcat--Would change his super ID again. He's not territorial and has used many different code names before. If he had his druthers his new code name would be Armando, which is what it was until his teammates insisted he could not simply use his real name. PO'boy--Would laugh it off. Nobody can believe he uses his codename, there's not much advantage in stealing it.

Re: A Question of Utmost Importance Norse mythology is a mythology. Which means that you aren't going to find a definitive answer as to which story is correct, because they are all regional and tribal variations. Even the notion of Odin as the supreme god is not definitive but seems to have been adopted as a way to ease (or oppose) Christian converts by making the Christian God the equivalent of Odin. Thor was the only god strong enough to lift Mjolnir which was designed for him; Magni was strength personified, nothing could be too heavy for him to lift so he could lift Mjolnir too. There was (is) a design flaw in the hammer. The handle is too short, and since it strikes as a bolt of lightning (Thor being not only the god of thunder but the very word thor meaning thunder), the head of Mjolnir returns to its hurler white hot. To compensate for this Thor always caught it with an iron catcher's mit. Like everything else in Norse mythology the gods obtained Mjolnir by treachery, bad faith and unpaid bills. Ragnarok is the cosmos' bill collector.

Re: DC versus Marvel: different styles That power level difference is mostly Marvel propaganda trying to suggest that their characters are more human. While they may be officially weaker in a panel by panel comparison Marvel characters do pretty much everything DC characters do. the main difference is that DC has more characters at the top level of power and Marvel has more mid-range and low-powered supers. But at the top of the power level there ain't a frog's whisker of difference in power.

Re: DC versus Marvel: different styles The strongest differencebetween DC and Marvel is stylistic. DC is a mythic world where metaphors are real and ethical beliefs have the same weight as the laws of physics. While some effort is made to claim that certain things are not known, they are only not known to the general inhabitants of the DC universe, the reader knows exactly what they are. Green Arrow was in Heaven before he chose to come back. You can sell your soul to the devil at Hell.com. Good always triumphs is not just a conventional belief it is a fundamental unerpinning of the universe. In the DC universe the Amazo android can have all the powers of the Justice League, and it means exactly that and as you increase the JL roster the powers of the android expand and if you disband the JL its powers vanish. Or you can have a character like The Quiz who has every suerpower you haven't thought of. Or the Flash can find his way home through the timestream because of the anchor of his "love" for his wife. Marvel is more indefinite. Various claims about divinity and such are made, but the truth of such claims is disputable. The Good Guys win in Marvel but no one claims this is an inherent part of the universe. The nature of good and evil, God (or lack thereof), the afterlife (and its existence) are no more known in the Marvel Universe than they are in our own. There are weird conceptual things in Marvel (a mutant neutralizer that works equally well on Warren Worthington III and Emma Frost; or Spiderman's strength of will carrying him to victory in a fight in which his internal organs have been turned to paste), but they don't have the same sort of dominance they have in DC.

Re: The Riddler - adventure ideas Only one, this guy is doing this because he wants to show off how smart he is, not because he wants to get caught. Therefore go get some back issues of Scientific American and base his "clues" on the math games and puzzlers they have a regular column for. Or use some similar resource, particularly you might want to look at "sucker" wagers in all their forms 'cause otherwise this guy is gonna be The Big Loser.

Re: Crazy campaign ideas (Silly or serious) Tired of all the teen-supers campaigns my groups favor I once proposed the following: All the players are between the ages of 88 and 102 years old, with all the attendant problems, particularly dementias related to aging. They are all selected (probably illegally) to be the first human subjects of a drug meant to halt and reverse this particular problem. It works to an extent (the idea was to write up characters with huge numbers of skills, appropriate to their ages, then apply a progressive system of stat reductions then give the players the points to make the characters superheroes), but has the side effect of granting these geezers powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. The first superpowered individuals the world has ever seen, and they are all octogenarians or older . . .

Re: Sick of Wolverine I missed him killing Northstar (though I have read it around here before). Was it slow and painful? Agonizing and sadistic? Did Northstar have to crawl through his own blood and filth? If the answer to any of the above is no, please don't tell me, I need the fantasy . . .

Re: Speedster Question...

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? You only have to read a few Julie Schwartz Superman comics to realize that right and wrong were pretty much what Superman said they were. Herbert Hoover used the FBI to combat Martin Luther King, Jr. because King was breaking the law. When SCOTUS says that it is okay for the state to take your home and give it to Wal-Mart to build a supercenter the lawful hero is the one enforcing the ruling. Justice and law are not necessarily synonyms. Crimefighting on the level of stopping muggers and rapists is one thing, beating the snot out of people building a better life form themselves and their families by selling cocaine to yuppie scum is another.

Re: Will the real Jolly Jonah Jameson please stand up? JJJ is a tricky character because back in the day Spiderman's story was all about Ayn Rand's Objectivism. According to that "philosophy" most people are cowardly and sheepish and will do anything to pull down someone who isn't (that is, Spidey). JJJ was conceived as being the embodiment of that sheepishness and whenever we actually delved into his mind we found a cesspit of self-loathing. Later (much better) writers saw this as a mindless conceit and gave us a JJJ who was motivated by paternal pride, journalistic ethics, concern about superpowered individuals robbing normal people of the chance to be heroic, or making his paper profitable. Unfortunately as writing duties pass from one writer to another, too many remember the bad old days and revive the concept of JJJ as an ethical cypher, a vile, evil little man far below even the worst of Spidey's costumed foes (kinda the role that the Dursley's serve in the Harry Potter saga).

Re: Is Crimefighting Ethical? This is the source of a lot of culture clash for me. In my home group we run a lot of games about people with superpowers, but who are not professional crimefighters and we run a few games about non-powered (or nearly non-powered) vigilante groups. I always feel weird when I find myself in a game about superpowered professional (whether paid or not) crimefighters. Besides, the crimefighting thing seems to be a thin veneer for reactionary oppression of the common man.

Re: DC Suckverse? Awful, awful, awful example! Moore's Hyde is the worst perversion of a great horror character currently out there. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is a retelling of "The Ring of Gyges" parable, it is not about separating good and evil, it is about escaping the social consequences of indulging in evil impulses.

Re: DC Suckverse? Or we could see what was done once before. Wonder Woman operating without any superpowers pursuing a pseudo-feminist agenda . . .