Mike W

Re: The Interogation Skill as a "Lab"

Re: Absolutely Indestructible? I'm with Shaft on this one. If it has ANY power what soever, just make it an unbreakable focus. Otherwise, you need lots of hardened armor. about 30 pts hardened is enough to stop just about anything short of a nuclear bomb(since items don't take STUN).

Re: 7 heroes summoned through time: who are they? Ok, my personal list of 7 that I would want(in no particular order) and sticking to real life or low powered fictional characters: Sherlock Holmes Jasper Maskyllyne Natty Bumpo/Hawkeye Athos I'll have to think about the rest.

Re: Coming back to HERO... I think anything in the 4-7 player range is pretty doable. The key thing is to have everyone's SPD, DEX, EGO and any other key stats handy. If you have a SPD chart with all the heroes and villains listed in order from fastest down to slowest, it helps speed things up a lot. Also, if you use the hex map, I found that coding the bases helps a LOT. I use blue for heroes and red for villains. That way, everyone can quickly tell where their potential targets are and who is fighting the most bad guys and needs the most help. In fact, I find that players often have targets picked out by the time their turn comes up, which further speeds things along.

Re: Time Travel and Potential Plots. Time Travel is the ONE thing I absolutely forbid in my CU. It creates logical conundrums and alternate worlds at a staggering rate. On the other hand, as a theoretical exercise, if I WAS going to allow it: Have someone already wealthy buy up every old dollar bill he could get his hands on then go back in time and open an account with a bank that survives into present day(Chase Manhattan). With proper investing at the right times(easy enough to do since you have history on your side) said wealthy individual becomes so filthy rich going forward that he can buy and sell countries - and attempts to do so. The Library of Alexandria has a wealth of lost knowledge..all sorts of plots(mystic or otherwise) are possible. Something specific to the HERO CU: Have someone go back in time with the intention of changing who wins the Martial Arts tournament Green Dragon fought in. Maybe someone like VIPER decides to go back in time a few hundred years, set up a base on some dinky island, call it a country, then send their champion through time to win the tournament several times in a row. Thus, VIPER's country becomes a superpower far greater than the modern US in present time.

Re: Pondering CSLs I'm not sure how well, this is going to compute. When you're dealing with things like this you have to balance utility with practicality. After all, an 8 point CSL is less useful than +3 DEX which gives you OCV and DCV simultaneously, plus various other benefits and will only cost you 9 points(most of the time). So you can't really make the 8 point CSL cost any more than that. That said, I would base everything off the 8 point level since that is the true +1 with anything CSL level. All other CSLs are lesser versions(remember that 10 point levels apply to non-combat and combat stuff both). I'd also say that "only ranged" or "only hand to hand" is -1/2, which is the same as "no range". If you apply that standard, it then 8 points at -1/2 is 5, so it would balance that far at least.

Re: Water, Water Everywhere . . . I remember that. The angle of entry is critical. Fired straight down, the water does almost nothing to slow the bullet. On a more realistic angle(say 30 degrees or so) the water was actually breaking up modern high speed bullets within about 3-5 feet. As in, Adam was fishing the bullet fragments off the bottom of the pool while the target was unharmed.

Re: How Many U S Heros ? I think it depends on the type of superbeing. And personally, I like an attempt at statistical modeling, just to give the universe some coherence and make it seem a little less haphazard. It also helps me to fit characters, both PC and NPC alike, into the world. It may not work perfectly, but still, I find it a useful exercise. For example, you are going to get a lot more heroes based on supertech in the US than in Cuba. And not just because of the population difference. The US has a more advanced tech level and a lot more people with the income to push the envelope trying to develop new technologies. I think that you can make a case for statistical analysis playing a role in the distribution of super tech, mutants, mystic heroes, and martial artist based heroes, at a minimum. Though you may not be able to statistically predict the overall number.(In other words, I may not be able to use statistics to predict how many power armored heroes will emerge, but I can use statistics/logic to assume that the majority will be in places like the US and Japan that have both the technology and the economic development to foster such things.). The overall numbers are left up to the GM. I think that 1 in 1 Million is a good place to start, just to give a baseline. You can always adjust up or down. But 1 in 1 Million leaves you with about 300 supers, total, in the US. I would imagine the number comes from the old Marvel Comics assumption that 1 in 1 million humans were actually mutants, and frankly, it seems like as good of a number as any to use as it makes metahuman level characters suitably rare that there isn't one on every street corner but yet allows you to create a large number of metas to work into a campaign.

Re: How Many U S Heros ?

Re: How Many U S Heros ? Well, theoretically, the US should have several hundred metas. If you just take the "1 in 1 Million" number for mutants, that's 300. Not counting any uncounted illegal aliens. And since the US is so technologically advanced, you can add in a large number of tech based heroes. Throw in some martial artists and a few people who have relocated from other countries(or planets or galaxies) and you can easily hit 500 or more and still have room to grow the list a lot with people who have mystic powers or powers they obtained through accidents and what not. But the number of those who are active(and heroes) will be less than that. I usually have 30-50 that I keep track of regularly. I have a few others in an "as needed" file to be used for contacts, plot devices and what not. The rest are just "out there somewhere". I tend to keep the numbers of teams small. Partly due to being a comic book guy. I mean, if you look at Marvel, the Kings of Team Books. How many teams do they actually have? Well, you have X-men, Avengers, Fantastic Four. And that's about it. There have been a lot of other US based teams(Defenders, X-Factor, X-Force, New Warriors, Midnight Sons, Champions of LA, Thunderbolts) but by and large, not more than one or two others at a time, and given that FF are explorers as much as superheros(and half the time aren't even on planet it seems like), that gives you about 3-4 prominent super teams at a time - and that's about right. So I put one in New York, one out west someplace(usually Los Angeles or Denver). I have a third team that kind of roams the country in general. And the players make four. After that, for every "team" hero, I add one independent hero; that usually gives me around 40 heroes when the players set down to do character creation(3 teams of 6-7 and around 20 independents). It also leaves me a couple open slots to add people as I need them either for plot devices or to fit into the PCs backgrounds.

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? AGain, I would argue that it depends on the character. Some characters who have been around a long time, the break point is fairly clear.

Re: The 2006 Mopee Awards! This is why comic buy list contains nothing but back issues from the 1970s and 1980s. By the time I finish reading all my old stuff, it will be a few years and I'll just go through and re-read it all again and again and again...

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? I would disagree that Cap hasn't been pushed far enough to test that. After the Masters of Evil broke into the mansion, destroyed all of his keepsakes and tortured Jarvis in front of Cap - he didn't kill a single one of them next time he saw them. He played rougher, no doubt, but at no point did he attempt to do anything that might have killed them (and yes, I'm counting tossing Hyde off the mountain; Cap knew very well Hyde would live through that, which Hyde did without any lasting injuries). And there have been other times too. But that's part of the difference between Cap and other characters. Cap won't be pushed into deliberately killing someone. As for your personal character, it's not a fair comparison because 1. Every character has a breaking point. Only you can determine the break point for your character. and 2. Given your views, it's pretty circular reasoning. "I'm right because that's how my character would do things," doesn't exactly fly for the general argument. If you want to play him that way, hey he's your character go for it, but I don't think he applies to the general discussion.

Re: Is anything in the system correctly priced? At risk of the obvious, if we answered "yes" to this question, wouldn't the boards shut down to lack of activity.

Re: Boring I'd consider this largely a roleplaying aspect. If you're trying to put it on a character sheet it's a disad. Several ideas for which have already been suggested but it's probably a 5 point DF or very small Psych Lim which gets on everyone's nerves. If you're actually trying to write it as a power...it's probably a highly specialized PRE attack. (+X PRE only to bore the heck out of you).

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out?

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? Well, the villain can be pretty sure. This is especially the case with well known heroes who have established personalities/psych profiles. No crook believes Capt. America will kill him because Cap has made it clear through his actions that it just won't happen. But the same villain wouldn't take any odds on Wolverine. You can also liken it to the superheroes being "police" of a sort. No matter what you do, the cop is only allowed to shoot you in certain circumstances. And given the natural resiliency of most supervillains, they might get a nasty beating, but far more often than not, the hero would have to commit deliberate murder to kill the person rather than incapacitate them. I agree that comics have gotten too edgy and have lost touch with a lot of things(most importantly what made them an effective story telling medium in the first place). Above all, the current empshasis on "realism" is ruining them simply because they were never meant to be "realistic" in the first place. They had their own rules and if you were willing to accept those rules, everything worked just fine. At their core, they are fantasy and science fiction. I mean, most comic book science is somewhere between shaky and patently absurd. There are only a handful of characters in all of comics who are remotely possible in a "real world" scenario. Sticking to the "Big Two" I see, depending on how much credit you give to the stories of martial arts masters: Batman(somewhat, but not the JLA Batgod), Daredevil, Electra, Punisher, Robin - and the list is already getting thin. And Electra was resurrected once. Even Capt. America clearly has superhuman agility and strength(at least as a combination. He's got the strength of one of those World's Strongest Men competitors and the agility of an Olympic Gold Medalist and it seems highly unlikely you can have both given what each demands).

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? (Off Topic) Not necessarily. Joker is obsessed with Batman. He doesn't care who is under the mask, but if he found out, he'd probably use it against Batman. Even if you take Joker off the list, you still have a LONG line of candidates willing to do evil things to anyone they think Batman cares about - in either identity.

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out?

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? Most likely, Massachusetts and other states that are ultrastrict on self defense would find themselves over run with supercriminals and have to spend a ridiculous amount of money either hiring superhero deputies(if you could find any willing to do it under the circumstances) or investing in a lot of money in high tech gadgetry in the hope that they could use supertech to control the problem. It would also probably have a very high military presence as backup. This is one of those cases where the genre convention requires that you suspend realism a bit in order for the universe to function.

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? The secret ID does seem to be on it's way out, largely due to it not being very plausible. But at the same time, I think that the companies have dealt very poorly with the ramifications of such, at least they haven't done so in a realistic manner. That's always been the problem. A secret ID isn't terribly realistic, but to realistically deal with the result if everyone had a public ID does not necessarily make for good storytelling. After all, how often can you kidnap the character's girlfriend? How many family members can you kill? before it just gets old and no one wants to read it (to say nothing of what it would do to the character's psyche and social life). Yet those kinds of occurrences should logically be very common if everyone had a public ID. A sort of "middle ground" might work where the authorities know, but the general public doesn't is a bit more realistic, but probably anyone who really wanted to know could take the time to find out one way or another, if they were rational about it. This is one of those areas where I think the new emphasis on realism really hurts both the comic genre and the storytelling in general. In the old days, there was a sort of "code of honor" amongst the heroes and villains that there were certain things you just don't do. Heroes don't kill or get over rough, and villains don't track down the hero and mess with their family; that sort of thing. Such a "gentleman's agreement" isn't as unrealistic as it seems, give the stakes. Sure there would always be exceptions, but they were just that EXCEPTIONS. Now, it seems like "realism" has been used as an excuse to say "all bets are off" and the line between hero and villain is getting very, very thin. And I think that's a shame. For one thing, if the hero isn't any better than the bad guy, why should we care about the hero?

Re: Rationalize this.... Yes, but I would require the martial art to be based on cinematic brawling and a style disadvantage. Also, I would give them the "Deathlok disad" where if they are KOed or CON Stunned the computer goes off line and they don't have access to the fighting program(and the martial arts moves) until the computer reboots.

Re: Whould you buy...CHAMPIONS SOUTH OF THE BORDER and CHAMPIONS OF THE RISING SUN. I'd rather see a Champions Worldwide type of approach. While I might set an occasional adventure in England or Mexico or such, I can't see myself setting an entire campaign there - so an entire book dedicated to England or Canada or Mexico or any one country is a bit much for what I really need. But one that lets me set an adventure or two in several different locations would be much more useful.

Re: A Renaissance Man In the traditional sense, give him several well rounded skills, including some knowledges. Make sure to give him Etiquette, Dancing, and some Contacts.

Re: Skills? How many points are normal? In 4th edition, when you only got 250-275 points to start, having 20-30 points of skills was normal (though I'd usually shoot for 30-40). The extra 100 points we get now are generally used to buy skills and round out characters more. The AP caps generally haven't changed in most campaigns, at least not that I've noticed.