lapsedgamer

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Oz is a little over the top, but yeah prison is a nasty place. I had to stop watching that show because it was so depressing. I can't imagine prison is fun in the UK either though.

Re: What Champions Universe character would you gender change? That would actually be an improvement, as Sunburst is sort of a lackluster master villain anyway. I would make her Japanese and call her Amaterasu. Change the origin a little bit, snd the experiments that created her could have been after Hiroshima. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaterasu I'm now officially sold on that idea. YMMV.

Re: What Champions Universe character would you gender change?

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? Maybe this pent up demand and passion for the book will equate to sales if they can ever finally bring the thing to market. So there's that I guess.

Re: Back to Basics Designs Actually, the way you do things is very well suited to Golden Age characters. They tended to be very simple an straightforward, with very limited applications of their powers. Also, the threats were generally not super-powered, so you could have someone like Al Prat as a reasonably effective hero. He was essentially just a strongman/acrobat/boxer with a bad attitude. You would have a hard time making that concept viable nowadays, without some added oomph. Guys like Daredevil and Batman all have extras added in now. The last remaining character I can think of that is still like that is the original Wildcat, and IIRC he was supplanted by some sort of were cat creature recently. Heck, in the Golden Age even guys like Green Lantern were just as likely to throw a punch as use their powers. Anyway, nice builds.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? I know you are joking, but that is a time-consuming proposition. The reason most of us like published write-ups is because they save time. For my part--and I suspect others would agree--I can't sit around and make up Champions in class like I did in high school, or blow off my other responsibilities to do it at home like I might have done in college. Gaming time is a precious resource now. If I get a chance to run a game, I really don't want to have to think about more than Who, What, When, Where, and How as far as setting it up goes. If I have the Who and Where covered using published materials, that makes things much easier to deal with.

Re: Welcoming Women Who Game I am being a little facetious here, but...OK, clean bathrooms in a single man's enclave? Clean to the average lady's no-hovering standard? I think someone already suggested XDM, so that was a little redundant. The thing that you have to always understand about men is that when we meet any woman who is within our parameters for attraction, we automatically see them as a potential date. Always. Many of us are more adept at hiding this than others, but the thought still passes through our minds until we have explored its feasibility. This may take a few seconds, or we may obsess about it for years, but don't for a second fool yourself into thinking we don't see you that way. The key is to be more subtle and realistic about these things, and learn to let it go when it's not a likely outcome, which most of us figure out at some point in adolescence. Not being a woman, I suppose I can't really grasp how annoying the knight in shining armor thing can be when it is neither solicited nor warranted. I think it's a default mode for many young men, even the ones who don't spend all their time pretending to be paladins and the like. It's another thing that you have to grow out of. Anyway, I'll stop joking around and flirting with a full-on derail. I will rep Lucius if I am able. EDIT: Damn, I can't rep Lucius again yet.

Re: Fangberry Thicket w/ Chew Spiders 6E Wow. That thing is deadly. Nice build.

Re: New Campaign Idea: "X-Men: First Class" As The Only Canon I actually have always thought that Marvel missed a chance at an interesting storyline by not having the Sentinels be men with tech instead of AIs. You saw that a little in God Loves, Man Kills, but they never really played with it too much outside of that.

Re: New Campaign Idea: "X-Men: First Class" As The Only Canon I didn't have a moment's issue with that actually. I assumed that when Magneto said that he and Charles built Cerebro, he was talking specifically about the version shown in the movie, which was clearly an upgraded model. The fact that he didn't mention the prototype is easily glossed over because he really had no reason to mention it in that context. Your bigger problem is with the seemingly random appearance order of characters. There's a White Queen in Wolverine who looks to be about nineteen or twenty, but the same character appears in First Class, thirty years earlier, looking to be about twenty-five or so. Wolverine and Mystique don't age like everyone else, so that's not a problem. Still, there are certain issues that you have to deal with. I mean Hank McCoy is in all four X-Men movies, if mainly in cameo. Which version is the one you really want to go with? It's a mess unless you just pick a continuity and stick with it as you suggest.

Re: Storn Sci-Fi Character Art Thread OK. Why does this guy feel that he has to have his pistol in hand during this procedure? What could possibly threaten him while he entering a planetary atmosphere that could possibly be taken out with pistol ammo? I'm just saying.

Re: What Fiction Book (other than Science Fiction or Fantasy) have you recently finis I've read several Vachss novels, and though they vary in quality, I have generally like them. Blue Belle was one of the ones I liked. I always thought that Flood would make a great movie. I even had it cast in my mind. Keep in mind this was the early to mid 90s when I thought this up. In my version, Burke was going to be played by Ray Liotta. Max the Silent was going to be Jackie Chan. Especially because Chan couldn'ty really handle too much English back then. Nowadays I might go with Gerard Butler and Jet Li. To me, Vachss was Stieg Larsson before Stieg Larsson was.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? You have left out a perfectly viable option: They mean well, but events may overwhelm them, so there is nothing further they can do. As far as I can tell, they have been forthright in their commentary, which is appreciated, and I have have said as much MORE THAN ONCE. The thing that bothers me is when people try to tell me that I am somehow wrong or disloyal, or some sort of heretic, when I state my displeasure about something the company does. The company trades upon the good will of a very small group of people. They have established a relationship that is something other than strictly commercial with the folks that consistently buy their books. Though not a cult, Hero fandom is definitely an insular community with some characteristics of a religion to some at times. Hell, I still buy books for a game system I haven't played regularly in years because I am rooting for Mr. Long and company. I have spent hundreds of dollars over the last ten or so years, just because I do not want to see Hero vanish from this Earth. However, there is a dark side to our collective loyalty. Notice how people fly to the company's defense when any sort of criticism is leveled, or a anyone expresses even the slightest displeasure about something. It's OK to like something, but be unhappy about certain things about it. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing deal. DOJ staffers aren't obligated to respond to me. They can certainly ignore me, or any of us for that matter. However, I take it as a sign that I am backing the right horse when they do. Heck, they could ban me outright. They are paying the freight on this message board after all. I hope that my behavior is civilized enough that I will not merit this, but I couldn't complain if they did. I take it as sign that the folks at DOJ mean well when they do not take such drastic action in response to criticism or questioning. To me it is a sign that they understand the nature of their relationship with their customers. It means that all the money that I spent on goodwill gestures over the years at least went to a good cause. They seem to be fighting the good fight in a pretty inhospitable business climate. That doesn't mean that I am not occasionally unhappy with something they do, or that I should stifle myself if I have a question.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? Though you have some good points, I will never believe that any business I support has no obligation to keep me up date on a product they promised, even if it is to say that they aren't making it any more. Though it's an example not on the same scale, and DOJ seems to be handling their issues in a much more up front way, ask Netflix how that whole "We're just going to do what we want, and the customers will have to adapt" model is working.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? I just looked though the APG II PDF, which I bought on a whim. With the exception of the new time powers and Object Creation, there seems to be nothing in there that is Earth shattering. The useful content could have been put into about twenty pages and sold as an extra. I'd rather have the villain book. I know the printing set-up is different, but I'm talking about the time and energy.

Re: Soulpyre/Simon Philip Carver Jr Not a criticism, but a question. Do you run a low SPD game? A SPD of 2 for the demon form seems like it wouldn't work in most campaigns operating with the standard superheroic model where average SPD tends to hover around 5. Otherwise, everything seems very legal and easy to understand.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? I think it's cash flow more than anything. The printers want to be paid up front for a print run, so the company has to commit large amounts of capital to getting their books printed. They can't always afford to do this. They have said as much on the boards, so I don't feel like I'm out on a limb here. I suspect that it would be very hard to find a printer that would be willing to extend credit. With PDFs, they pay the designer once to set it up, and they just earn, as long as they can afford to host the files.

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf?

Re: Fangberry Thicket w/ Chew Spiders 6E See, you're not cruel at all. If I was doing this, I would set up a a sort of maze with the needed berries inside, so that the players shad to deal with the limitations imposed by the thorns. I would also set the spider on them in Phase 12/ I'm mean like that sometimes. Anyway it sounds like a great game. I wish you luck, rep to you for an interesting idea that's not just the standard dungeon crawl while still preserving some of that flavor.

Re: Fangberry Thicket w/ Chew Spiders 6E You are touching on one of the great sticking points of Hero gaming. Does everything have to be modelled with points? I feel very strongly that the answer is no. There are two ways to look at this thicket: 1) The thicket is a character or base, or a piece of equipment attached to a character or base. 2) The thicket is a part of the environment. I prefer to treat the thicket as part of the environment. You just write down the game effect that you want it to have and know that that's what it does. No one asks a forest fire to pay points for itself. No one asks a rain cloud to pay points for itself. You just look in the chapter on Living in a Dangerous World and use it as a guideline. Apply the effect as needed using common and dramatic sense. A thicket of thorns that is not sentient and/or mobile is just a feature of world your characters inhabit. In this case I would rule that it acts as a Change Enviroment that cuts all movement in its area of effect down to 2m per phase. Additionally, it inflicts 1/2D6 AP killing damage every phase that you remain in the area. I assume you want it to be nasty enough so that anyone who is not wearing at least decent armor will want to stay away from it. To avoid the effect, you must be desolid, small enough to avoid the thorns, or go over, under, or around it. Give the players enough info to make a reasoned choice and move on. Maybe show them something tough caught inside and dying. Don't lose a lot of time thinking about points. If you do it that way, all you have to do is build your spiders with Environmental Movement (Safe in Fangberry Thicket) if you so choose. That assumes that they have a special dispensation. However, it sounds like any small enough creature can pass through unharmed. In that case, you can ignore adding it to the spider's character sheet. If you really want to go all out. You can build the thicket as a base for the spiders. It would have all the stats of a base and buy the Change Enviroment and Area Effect AP Killing Attack with No Range, 0 END, Constant, Persistent as powers. Add a limitation about the size of creature involve, and there you go. Some folks would want to add a Trigger, but I don't see the need. All the points for the powers would go on the thicket's sheet, which would then be bought by the spiders using the base rules on their collective character sheet. You could actullay do it the other way around too. That would be as if the bush was in charge of the spiders, which might be a nice trick in a Star Hero setting. When in doubt, I vote to save yourself excess work.

Re: Champions Villian Voulms Beyond 3: Is There Room For More? There was some great stuff in Digital Hero in the way of NPC heroes from the past, that I would like to see updated. Maybe as some kind of PDF. Is that on anyone's mind?

Re: Champions Villains Volume Three: Solo Villains when will it be on the shelf? Mr. Watts has done a very good job here explaining things. Hopefully, we will see the book at some point. I will not say, however, that DOJ has never banned folks or shut down negative threads. To some extent the passion of this discussion seems to have brought out the information that has been shared. I do agree that the tone is a little strident in places, but there is a flip side to this argument. How many other companies are so dependent on such a small, passionate group of dedicated consumers for their continued existence? No one else is buying this stuff but us, so a little give and take is only smart IMO. That being said, I vote that we cut them some slack now that it seems that here is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Re: Need a name for batlike hero Other than a few animal-based powers, this guy seems like more of a Darkforce manipulator than a Man-Bat homage. He actually reminds me more of Nightcrawler without the teleport than anything else. I think Umbra is the way to go.

Re: APG II Commentary/Discussion thread Most of this stuff I think I can pass on. I am interested in Create Object and Probability Manipulation. If it's not too much trouble, could someone give me a quick rundown on those, so I an see if I want to spend the money. They seem ripe for abuse.

Re: Women of the Champions Universe (Fanpictorial) Flashover is also a pretty good starting point for a Human Torch build, if anyone desired to do one. Nice artwork.