AtomicGladiator

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...

Originally posted by Zed-F

There are ways to do a survival-oriented game well, and ways to do one poorly. I'd agree that games that are run poorly are to be avoided, and those that are run well are to be cherished, but that applies regardless of whether the game is survival-oriented.

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...

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.

Originally posted by Zed-F

 

You wouldn't play in a game where the PCs are not important figures in the setting? Why not? Any setting can be good if you have good people running and playing in it.

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.

Originally posted by Zed-F

There's nothing wrong with that, providing that the players know what they are in for when they sign up for the game. Not every game has to be about the movers and shakers of the game universe. For every success story, there are hundreds of folks just getting by; why shouldn't we have a game about them from time to time?

You're welcome to it. I just hope no GM of mine decides to take this route.

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

Originally posted by CrosshairCollie

I put a lot of thought into my characters ... backgrounds, logical Hunteds, other disadvantages. The Powers and Statistics are game mechanics, but what actually makes the character a CHARACTER is the disadvantages.

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.

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."

Originally posted by Chuckg

Outside of that, it's default 5e CU all the way. Helps everybody know the ground. And knowing the ground is key to creating well-detailed backstories that mesh with and constructively engage already-existing elements of the campaign.

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.

Originally posted by The Mind Master

If the PC's paid for the ship in STAR HERO with their own character points, then I can sort of see this. But it's of no use to include character points spent in a base that is owned by NPC's. What possible relevance does it have on gameplay?

A description and layout is much more useful. If a villain wants to poison this Life-Support food supply, for example, would he have to have some sort of life-support drain or supress? Could he steal the food, or burn it up? IMHO, the whole thing is silly. Just state that it has a food supply, and show me where the refrigeration units are where it is stored. And if there are refrigeration units, do they have to be bought as some sort of cold power, bought with a limitation (only to preserve perishable food items)? You see how ridiculous it gets.

 

 

Yes, you need to know the game mechanics for any weaponry and defenses of a base, also sensor devices like radar or sonar, but not much beyond that needs to be put into game mechanic terms. It doesn't come into play. Maps, however, do.

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?

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.

What's a nova?

Originally posted by Chuckg

> Make an Acrobatics roll and flip over in mid-air. If Leroy smashes into to you as you fly sprawling, that's one thing. If Leroy smashes into you just as you did a flip-over and landed a double-footed mule kick to his face, that's something else.

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.

"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.

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.

The Acrobat had a DNPC butler who THOUGHT he was a superhero. He got a few smoke grenades and some infra-red visors and took on the identity of Midnight Master. He beat up a few cheap hoods and got his name in the paper. This made him a target in the Great Supervillain Contest of yore, and brought hordes of villains after him for an easy win.

Acrobat and his team had their hands full protecting him while trying to figure out what the villains were up to. In the process Midnight Master became even more convinced of his abilities. He now considers himself a full-fledged hero and takes every opportunity to hang out with the "other" super-heroes. He makes it a point to meet every new hero who comes to town.

The Vintage Library has a wealth of resources, many many old pulp reprints I can't find anywhere else, both in electronic form and paper. They're not free, but they've got hard to find stuff. There's a lot of reprints of my very favorite pulp hero, The Spider.

http://www.vintagelibrary.com/pulp/index.cfm

The Shadow PDF site has quite a few reprints of Shadow stories from the pulps in PDF format, complete with the original illustrations. Nicely done, and free downloads.

http://www.shadowpdf.net/

Maxwell Grant's Shadow el al. site has a lot of the old pulp covers for download and some articles and links, I think.

http://webs.lanset.com/lurch/pulp/shadow.html

Curious how others have handled the power of teleportation when considering allowing it as an "abort" action when attacked. We have never allowed it in any of our campaigns because of the potential for abuse. However, you see this type of thing in the comics all the time.

The Fifth Edition says that generally, movement actions such as flying or running away are not allowed as an "abort" option, with the exceptions being Diving for Cover, decelerating or turning. However, "At the GM's option, characters may be allowed to Abort to other forms of movement in appropriate circumstances."

But what do you do to accomodate a PC who wants to play a character with "Nightcrawler" type moves, such as displayed so awesomely in the last X-Men movie? Under what circumstances would you allow "abort to teleport"? Would you make the player buy some kind of "abort" advantage for his teleportation? Or do most campaigns allow "abort to teleport"? I guess, since you can abort to turn desolid, that this might not be any worse...

Originally posted by Edsel

Would this happen to be the book in question?

 

The Science of Superheros

 

Also since this is the first time I've put a link in a page, did it work?

Link works!

I like your concept of adding +1 OCV/DCV with each blade. To me it makes them more distinctive and colorful than just giving them generic levels.

I have to admit that when I am working up GM creations I don't worry too much exactly how powers are bought or what the point totals are if the end result is what I want. Whether the skill levels cost 9 points or 15 really doesn't matter with GM characters IMHO.

Originally posted by zornwil

I'd just consider this SFX of Persuasion - persuasion by intimidation, persuasion by guile, etc..

Yeah, that's the way I look at it. Persuasion can cover a lot of different methods. But there's no problem in buying Persuasion and calling it "Intimidation".

Don't understand why such an entangle would need to be bought BOECV. That means you'd use ECV to target the victim. That's not necessary. It's just an entangle that works VS CON rather than STR, so why not just add that as a custom advantage worth +1/2, and throw in the other limitations and advantages as you need them....entangle takes no damage, cannot form barriers, fades over time or whatever. It's the BOECV that I'm questioning here.

EDIT: Yeah, you'd have to use the "cannot be escaped by teleportation" advantage as well, I'm guessing.

Originally posted by Count Zero

When I started to run Hero system I realized I was going to need miniatures in order to do combat well. I decided to use Heroclix

 

If you aren't too picky you can get some really good figures for your super hero game. Sure it is spiderman on the table, but instead he is a figure with swinging. I often use the recognizable characters to immediately give people the impression of what his basic powers might be. That way we don't get confused. I really recommend hitting Hero-Clix players up for their extras.. that way you get what you want.

 

Jonathan

Over the years, I have used a lot of different types of miniature figs to play Champons, both metal and plastic. I've never liked the 2D cardboard things.

But of late, I've gone the heroclix route, too. One advantage they have is that they are not difficult to customize. It's fairly easy, for example, to cut the gun off one fig and glue it to another, or even whole body parts. With a little paint, putty and an exato-knife, it's not too hard to create exactly the character you want. Of course, I enjoy this kind of thing. Probably too much trouble for those who don't. But I think it does add a certain something to the overall gaming experience.

Originally posted by Lord Liaden

Our group took on the roles of an ad-hoc collection of Earth's mightiest heroes, some from published Champions books and others of our own making. I got to play my favorite official 4E character, Nuada of the Silver Hand from Kingdom of Champions. I think the personal highlights of the campaign for me were dueling alone with both War and Death of the Horsemen, and helping try to delay Azog from passing through the rift from its prison dimension into ours until other of our teammates crashed one of the alien spaceships into the rift, collapsing it.

 

Hoo-hah! Heady memories.

Woah, now that sounds like a great time of gaming! You stood alone against War and Death of the Horsemen?!?!! Hoo-hah, indeed, never-to-be-forgotten! Our high-level campaign kind of peaked with the original 7 Horsemen adventure, one (NPC) hero actually died in that battle, and a PC became a Horseman himself, controlled by his evil aspect. It was our battle of all battles with huge amounts of damage being dished out all around, and felt more like a real comic book than anything we ever played.

When the dust settled, the group kind of realized we couldn't top this one easily, so we set aside those characters and started a whole new (lower-powered) campaign.

WOW! Looking at this and one of the other threads made me check out the 5th edition duplication rule and see it for myself. I've been lucky as a GM in that no one has ever bought duplication and I have avoided using villains with that power due to the sheer headaches of running them.

But looking at 5th edition rules, it looks like a wise move to ban this from my new campaign right from the start. Time to add on to the house rules...