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AtomicGladiator

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  1. Well there was Champions Presents with the "No News of a Thaw" adventure dealing with mystical creatures from Inuit mythology. And that book also contained my all-time favorite Champions adventure, "Menace out of Time" which had its climax in the mystical realm of Tsurlgra. That was a gem...
  2. The point I was making is that the original post was describing a poorly-run game. I don't know if it was intended to be a "survival-oriented" campaign or not. I'm not sure, but it seems that what you describe as a "survival-oriented" game is really just a campaign with nothing more than a cosmetically different setting. If characters are still allowed to achieve goals that are important in the context of the story (though they may not be important to the entire region or world), then it's just a matter of scale. We're not talking about anything really different. For a specific example, assume a post-holocaust campaign where resources are scarce. Low-powered characters manage to help a starving village fight off bandits who are stealing the crops. That kind of adventure is not different, except in a cosmetic way, from super-hero saves the city. Then, perhaps the PC's wander to another city and there help find a plant that provides medicine, possibly help get a rough sort of hospital built. Whatever. Again, this is just a cosmetic difference, a variant of the old knight-errant scenario. The point is the PC's do have significance in their setting and make a contribution. Is this the type of thing you are talking about? If so, I don't really see a difference except in scale and scenery. But if you are talking about a campaign where the main accomplishment a PC can hope for is to escape with his skin, that just doesn't interest me. Have you played in the type of "survival-oriented" campaign you mention? Can you describe it more specifically? Because what I'm envisioning from your comments is just the cosmetic difference I detailed, not the more radical difference. Maybe we should start a different thread for this...
  3. I like to play characters who can dish out hefty doses of physical damage. I like to have at least ONE powerful attack, even if I can't use it all the time. But it can take a lot of forms and personalities. I've played a power-armor character who is assertive and bossy but a real team-player (and with an incredibly powerful "nucleon-energy blast".) I've played a martial artist with a dark, vigilante mentality, cynical and suspicious(and a wicked offensive strike with his staff). And I played a rather happy-go-lucky size-changer with amnesia, who loved to eat and who spent much of his time in combat shrunk to small size with a DCV of 17. (But who could shoot up to normal size under a foe for a devastatingly powerful attack). I've never created a mentalist to play as my own character. The times I've played one in "pick-up" games, I didn't enjoy it. I like to POUND.
  4. Well, that's not exactly what I'm saying. My post was responding to this earlier description: "A GM who thinks that, in order to keep the game from getting 'out of control', the PCs should always be low-powered compared to the setting, nothing they do should ever change anything in the setting, and they should always be scraping for the bare necessities of life, never getting past "Where's the next meal/load of uel/maintenance/starship payment coming from?" This sounds frustrating and abusive. I like to have some sense of success in a campaign as a player. Even if my character might not be "important" in a way that affects the entire campaign world, I like to feel that he has made an "important" contribution at least on some smaller level. I like to achieve goals that go beyond paying the bills each month. The above description strikes me as a campaign where the PC's are kept as supporting characters, never allowed to accomplish anything significant. They never get to be the ones to throw the One Ring into the Cracks of Doom, they only get to be lowly bit-players, watching on the sidelines. At least that's the way I understand what the above post is talking about. I've heard about this kind of GM who really doesn't want the PC's to progress past a low-level character, and kills them off if they start getting too much experience. The characters don't have to be rich, honored or especially powerful for me to enjoy playing them. But they have to be *important* in the sense that the main characters of a novel are important, whatever the setting. If the main characters in a novel are not important to the story, it's going to be a dull book. Likewise if the PC's are not the main focus of the campaign it's likely to be dull. Even so, I prefer to be an important character in the setting. Maybe that's why I enjoy the Champions genre, because as a super-hero you are automatically important in the scheme of things. And I like a sense that my character has accomplished something worthwhile and important. Maybe I'm a "Builder" type described in 4th Ed. Champions.
  5. You're welcome to it. I just hope no GM of mine decides to take this route.
  6. Here are a couple of other links of some places: Convention Center http://www.itu.int/telecom-wt99/press_service/information_for_the_press/floor_plans.html Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/visitor/vi_fl_english.htm Performing Arts Center http://www.hecfi.on.ca/hp/HAMPLAN.HTM
  7. I know where you're coming from, I have some characters like that, and in the main, I've had good GM's who helped make these kinds of things work well. And usually, I enjoy it if the GM brings in some surprises from my character's background for me to react to and roleplay ("Your twin brother you thought was killed in the radiation accident that gave you your powers is actually alive and now brainwashed into being a super-villain.") . But I don't like it when the GM suddenly creates a whole new back-story for you and imposes it on you. Suddenly you feel like you're playing his character instead of your own. I have one GM who hasn't quite got it yet in this area. Of course, he's inexperienced and learning. But in his campaign, I not only feel like I'm playing his character, but also that I've got to stick to his script. It's like the players just become actors in a play that he's written. Everything is forced along a certain path to tell his story. We participate as actors, but not as fellow-creators of the story.
  8. Relatively mild, compared to some posts but it was annoying at the time... Our team of adventurers had an extremely wealthy pair of guys as members. Had to get to a different city for some reason I don't recall, so one of them decided to buy a van. Went to car dealers, but no one in the city seemed willing to sell us a van. The GM gave us all kinds of difficulty over this niggling detail until he finally relented and let us find a dealer actually in the business of selling vehicles. So we set out to the next city. Halfway there, the GM rules that we run out of gas. Run out of gas? we all objected as one. Why? "You never said you stopped to buy gas."
  9. I guess I enjoy creating my own world too much to stay bound within the CU. It would be very difficult for me to submit to that. I get ideas from the books, take some things I like, ignore others, create new things or take them from other sources. For example, VIPER and DEMON exist in my campaign, so does PRIMUS. But UNTIL does not. There's no such thing as Millenium City, we generally choose NYC or Washington or some other real-world city. Lots of background info available there, and the players have a much better sense of what the city is like if they've actually been there. Plus, I love to create my own villains, change up the ones in the books (including things from their history) and add significant things in the history of the campaign world that directly involve the PC's background. If I want to use the Ultimates or anyone else, I don't give a hang if they're currently "official" or not. There's really not any extra work involved, it's just a matter of using the 4th Ed. versions of the team instead of the new versions. Or use the new versions of some characters and the old versions of the others. I don't see any difficulties.
  10. I tend to agree with your point about Life Support. Sometimes things get overly complicated when you try to look at things through the filter of "how would this work in game terms?" For example, it makes sense on one level to equip space vehicles with endurance reserve power packs and "auxiliary" endurance reserves if the first one should fail. But realistically, what GM is going to take the time to subtract the endurance from the battery for every system in operation in the ship's phase? What a nightmare! Easier just to assume that the ship's designers created a power system that can power all the ship's functions and let it go at that. To micro-simulate these things does get ridiculous. Does any GM really mess with this kind of stuff?
  11. It really depends on the tone of your campaign as to which name is better. IHA is a pretty bland name for a 4-color type campaign that features characters with names like "Doctor Destroyer", "Viper", "Defender", "Firewing" and so on... The name "Genocide" fits that genre, with a more dramatic, colorful name, realism aside. But in a more "realistic" campaign, where characters maybe dress in black jumpsuits instead of yellow spandex, the IHA name would fit better. Me, I can't take the black jumpsuits any more seriously than the yellow spandex, and find the latter a lot more fun...but that's just me.
  12. Yeah, I'm a sucker for creative use of skills and powers. Of course, the problem is that Leroy can control the timing and path of the strike, you can't. All you can do is fly along a prearranged trajectory. Still, I love creative moves by PC's and if this character was aware of Leroy's attack, I'd allow the attempt you describe, giving it a pretty hefty penalty, and root for the PC to make it. Hey, they do it in the comics! A player who pulled that off would have to feel good after that.
  13. "Batter UP'" sounds good, I like that. While the mechanics sound realistic, they also sound burdensome and tedious to me. (First calculate his velocity, then look up the velocity chart, then add half DCV, etc.) But maybe that's good, because it will discourage the players from using it all the time. I have a similar manuever I'm mulling over, and wrestling with ease of use versus "realism". I think I'm opting for simplicity, and just give the thrown guy half DCV if he makes a DEX roll and and a DCV of 3 if he fails it. (Falling folks have a DCV of 3, I think it says). On the other hand, such maneuvers might get addicting for PC's, if they're accomplished too easily. So I'm still debating. If the guy being thrown had enough flight to break free of the STR of the throw, I might rule he could try a Move-Through, but not otherwise. Superleap would be useless, he'd have no way of controlling his path or his timing. If it was a PC being thrown and he had acrobatics, I'd let him use an acrobatics roll to attempt to add a bit more DCV, and the same for levels of flight or such like.
  14. Someone bought the 5th Edition rules for me as a Christmas present. I had seen a copy and felt the changes were not significant enough to merit buying it, though I was glad to see a rulebook back in print, and I've tried to support the new HERO by picking up supplements. I'm not a game mechanic, so the tweaking of various costs didn't interest me much. I've played Champions for years, and I have a sense of what is going to unbalance a campaign that's not really based on costs of power points. Points are a nice yardstick and help you enforce some things, but 4th edition rules are adequate for that. In my experience it's mainly certain PLAYERS who you have to watch carefully, not so much the powers, if you get my meaning. The greatest, most useful thing in 5th Edition to me is the beautifully detailed index so that you can find things quickly. I love that feature. Some powers, etc. have been more thoroughly defined with extra options and "adders". But there's nothing conceptually new that couldn't have been done before under the 4th Edition. It's an improvement in clarity and mathematical balance overall, and that's appreciated. There's greater detail about most things, but the downside is that it's even more cumbersome and overwhelming for a new player to try to grasp. The old rules ran about 215 pages with a 70-page sourcebook. This hits 360, and its just rules, no sourcebook or characters. Yet I'm glad I have the 5th Edition. And one of the main reasons is the HeroDesigner version 2. It's is so much better than previous character-creation software that I used in the past. I really like using it. I too have tons of HERO expansions/supplements. Of late, I have picked up The Ultimate Vehicle, the UNTIL Database and Shades of Black in recent months. They're all well-done, a cut above previous HERO supplements in production values. But be warned when buying new adventures. Write-ups for the major characters in Shades of Black are not included with the adventure. You have to buy them separately in the Killers & Conquerors enemy book and the Champions supplement. I understand that's also true for the Champions Battleground supplement, though I don't have the book. Overall, the real value for me in the 5th Edition is that it sparked my interest to drag out my battlemat and play Champions again. And that's worth a heck of a lot.
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