lapsedgamer

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans Arc Dream's Godlike covered this territory very thoroughly. I'm not a One Roll Engine fan, but the background and support material for that game are worth looking at for background. http://www.amazon.com/Godlike-Superhero-Roleplaying-World-1936-1946/dp/0971064202 http://arcdream.com/home/?cat=6

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Jekyll was great. I agree the actor was brilliant in both roles, but I especially loved him as Jekyll. I highly recommend the series to anyone who has not seen it. Gina Bellman was also good. I did not expect her to have as much dramatic range as she did. I mainly remember her from Coupling, where she played a complete arihead. Too bad they didn't do more of them. Julia Stiles was a very good guest star on Dexter, and I liked the whole storyline for that season very much. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I don't think you will be disappointed. There were a lot of edge of your seats moments. Bakshi was an innovator for his time. His work often just doesn't stand up well in retrospective. You have to understand that he was making subversive and intentionally controversial material. He was making a sort of anti-Disney statement with his early films. His animation was meant to be the equivalent of underground comics set in motion. Some of it was memorable. Some of it was execrable.

Re: Tactics 3. Depends on the tone of the game. If I am playing true Dark Champions, yes. If I am playing action movie or pulp, no. 5. The real way this is handled is to talk, talk, and talk some more unless there is active shooting going on. The goal being to tire out the villain and get him to give up. You only shoot to attempt to save lives, and even them there are no guarantees that it is going to go well. The Hero System does not penalize you for this to my knowledge. Is there a specific example for this, or am I forgetting a rule.

Re: Common superhero types you've never seen in play Aquaman's problem is that he hangs out with people who overshadow him. He should rightfully be respected on the basis of his decent stats and fairly broad list of abilities, but it's hard to shine in a group like the JLA. That and his costume is kind of a joke.

Re: Common superhero types you've never seen in play

Re: Common superhero types you've never seen in play The problem with this argument is that there is an official build that does just this: Combat Luck. Resistant Defenses that represents the ability to get out of the way of attacks, not actual armor or force fields. The only restriction being that you have to know it's coming. If I had a player approach me with that power, I would point them to Combat Luck, not ban it outright. In a Hero supers build, you always need a little resistant defense to prevent ignominious death by random bullet or knife wound from a minion.

Re: Ways to manage a huge team with a lot of characters? We did something like this this once in college. Everyone had two characters. You chose which one you were going to play for that particular arc, and the other ones were doing something else off screen. When you wanted to switch to you other character, you could do it as long as it didn't derail the story. We usually restrcicted this during an ongoing arc, unless it made for a more interesting story. Most people didn't want to try to wrangle two characters at once, so it didn't come up that often. The secondary character earned half the XP of the main character per game. This wasn't an issue unless someone strongly favored one character over the other. Our rationale was that the old Justice League always had that rotataing roll call on the splash page, so why couldn't we.

Re: "Neat" Pictures I bet people buy books just because this person is such a mensch.

Re: Rise of the Planet of the Apes They had a Bonobo in movie (at least I think that's what he Alpha male in lock-up was), but I guess that's just a sub-species of chimpanzee. You could probably add a gibbon-based hominid and not break the original conceit.

Re: Rise of the Planet of the Apes I liked it as well. I like how they set everything up to make the sequel either a continuation of this story or a direct remake of the original. I also liked the prison movie they hid inside the main movie. It was almost as clever as when they did it in the last Toy Story flick.

Re: THE BOOK OF THE EMPRESS -- What Do *You* Want To See? So she is running what amounts to the ultimate nanny state.

Re: Champions Villains, Volume 3: Solo Villains It's not bad as pure speculation goes. Since there will never be a clear answer, it must be added to the list of possibilities. This whole line of inquiry is not meant to offend the management, only to vent some ire. I had money tied up in a pre-order for this title for just shy of two months before I finally just asked for my money back. That was seven moths ago.

Re: THE BOOK OF THE EMPRESS -- What Do *You* Want To See? I don't think she ever actually fights her own battle anymore. She has people for that. She has entire races devoted to that.

Re: Champions Villains, Volume 3: Solo Villains As a customer, when you wait a long time for something, you lose sight of why you needed, or wanted, it in the first place. Hopefully this print backlog will be solved before too many people forget about the book. If people are able to make due with the PDF versions of these items for long enough, why bother with a hard copy at some point.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I rented Sucker Punch just to watch the fight scenes again, as the rest of the movie is blah. The stuff looked good, but there was no there there. I made extensive use of the scene selection menu and fast forward. I was just watching the second season of Misfits online. I love how that show makes you cringe, spooks you out, and makes you laugh. It sometimes manages to do all of that in the same scene. There is one episode where they have a geniune creepy as hell super-villain who is as badass as Magneto in his own way, but has what should be the lamest power ever that should be played totally for laughs.

Re: A galaxy of humans I didn't know that they had officially fused the Aliens and Predator franchises. I always thought they were messing around in those films and that none of it was considered canon. My only real confusion then would be about the "bug hunts." The dialogue in Aliens made it seem as if bug hunts were a mission that the Marines had been tasked with before that film, yet they and the company were ignorant of the capabilities and morphology of the Xenomorphs. To me, there must have been at least one other species, more than likely more than one, that colonists had to deal with on other worlds prior to the ill-fated mission to LV426. I have this great book called the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual. I bought it years ago. I guess they are pretty hard to come by anymore, but it has a lot of non-canon details about the corps and their equipment. Actually, it would be a great resource for anyone who was doing a crunchy Star Hero game. They don't mention a lot of details about bug hunts in the book. Mainly they talk about suppressing colonial insurrections and dealing with incursions by other corporate/national interests. http://www.amazon.com/Aliens-Colonial-Marines-Technical-Manual/dp/0061053430

Re: A galaxy of humans The Alien Universe had at least three alien species in it IIRC: Space Jockeys, Xenomorphs, and Arcturians. Though it was never really made clear about the Arcturians because humans could copulate with them (male or female). I also assume that there had to be others because the Marines talked about "bug hunts" like they had happened before, though that might mean alien creatures with animal intelligence I suppose.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Not to be picky, but according to the meme wouldn't it be, "In Russia a** kick you." Just saying.

Re: Denying a character his OIF Clearly you have never read Planetary. Behold:

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I saw the first episode of Alphas. It was what I expected, a pastiche of Heroes and a cop show. It reminded me a little of that Heroes episode where they went into the future and Parkman worked for the Feds. You could make a fun campaign out of this idea with a little cribbing from No Ordinary Family and the 4400. The show had some interesting power builds and characters. The writing is better than No Ordinary Family so far. Worth checking out if you have a minute. I saw it on Hulu.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Is it just me or is Falling Skies actually kind of good. I mean, close to early Battlestar Galactica Redux good.

Re: THE BOOK OF THE EMPRESS -- What Do *You* Want To See? The mirror universe Champions. Perhaps they work for the Empress. I'm also hoping that the Imperial Battalion contains some good homages (rip-offs) of known comics characters, just to get that whole Marvel Imperial Guard vibe just right. I'm thinking some like Marvel's Guardian (Superman) or even the Four from Planetary. You know who you're talking about, but no one can get sued.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently?

Re: Sniper I hope this is not too critical, but the more I read about your concept, the more it seems suited for Dark Champions and not a straight superhero game. I would really check with your GM about the style of play and tone he is looking for for his game.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? I saw Green Lantern: Emerald Knights on DVD. Why is is it that this little direct-to-DVD animated feature is so much better than the Green Lantern movie? It had much better writing and acting than the live action film. The animation was very well done. Overall, it was quite enjoyable, and the story within a story structure they used was perfect. I don't know if it's considered to be in continuity or not, but they also show the origin of Kilowog, which was actually very well done. If you aren't embarrassed to be an adult watching animation, check it out.