casualplayer

Re: CHAMPIONS VILLAINS -- What Do *You* Want To See? When I used Professor Muerte, one of my super team so often frustrated and humiliated him that he subjected himself to both the Feur and Giganto procedure to give himself the power to get his revenge. Lots of power but couldn't stand on anything but specially treated floor panels without slagging the ground beneath him. One sacrifice throw later and Muerte was headed for the center of the planet.

Re: Special Effects

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated The DCs assigned to weapons in Hero are bland and overcomplicated.

Re: Writeups for Cellphones [5e Champs campaign] That's exactly what I had in mind. I tried to put one over on you and now I am ashamed.

Re: The best Superpet?

Re: Order of the Stick Some spells just make you wonder why they bother putting walls around cities.

Re: Killing Damage in 6e Even a broken culture is right twice a day? The problem occurs with it being next to impossible to resolve the Heroic with the Superheroic. Damage systems that work quite well for Conan or cavemen break down dramatically when you try to make them work with people as strong as an industrial press. And vice versa. Should Superman get +4d6 damage for hitting me with a lead pipe? Something we have been neglecting is the limitations on damage capacity due to the resilience of the weapon. Our hypothetical knife is going to go smoosh if we try to do more than twice its PD in DCs. We get one good stab out of the penknife then we gotta get another penknife.

Re: Killing Damage in 6e Exactly. So why would you ever want to buy someone with a mid-range STR and a mid-range HKA? Under the new rules why not always make a brick with a pocketknife, and get the maximum normal damage and killing damage option? Did 6th Ed make Wolverine into a sub-optimal build? Much better to give Colossus a commando knife.

Re: Order of the Stick It's almost like they are gearing up to add two new members to the OotS.

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated You must be able to use "squamous" in a complete and meaningful sentence before being allowed to run CoC. Your GM didn't get it. Desperately in need of reading some Lovecraft or at least some REH. The 80's were very condusive to horror and horrible thoughts. Barely staving off the destruction of the world kinda resonated.

Re: Who is sticking to 4th or 5th Ed HERO Actually if 6th ed had red peppers in it, I would be staying with earlier editions too. Suckers give me wicked gas, and nobody needs to be increasing the amount of gamer gas.

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated The value of an index increases with pagecount; Hero's index is pure, unalloyed gold!

Re: Killing Damage in 6e It is inelegant and just a beacon for abuse. I can only imagine how many Convention characters are going to show up with this kind of Power Penknife construct. What 6th should have done is turn Killing into a Naked Advantage on STR/Blast that allowed the character to use the alternate Killing Damage rules for damage dealing. I'm thinking +1/4. Want to be able to use all of your STR as Killing, then advantage the whole total. Want to only be able to use partial, then it's a partial advantage. Penknife- Naked Advantage: Killing Damage for up to 10 STR, OAF: Fragile (3 Actual, 1 real) There's also the other portion of HKAs (and HAs and Martial Arts,) damage stacking, which could have also been turned into an Advantage Aggregate or Conjoined. Cumulative is already taken. Something that works like Teamwork with yourself or an MPA Only against a Single Target and only requiring a single roll to hit. Something that turns multiple sources of damage into a before-defenses combining and application rather than afterwards. I'm thinking +1/4 again but with all components of the combination having to have the Advantage.

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated I think the general distaste of the videoblogger's review of the game was that he said specifically that he was not familiar with the system or well-versed in the rules and he decided to review the system anyway. Why let a little thing like facts and research get in the way of having and voicing an opinion? I've done published reviews before, gaming and otherwise, and his behavior was sloppy, unprofessional and lethally damaging to his credibility.

Re: GMing style, what else apart from 'Round the Table'? I like to plot sessions to movie length, an hour plus 15-45 minutes. I've found that is the functioning attention span of the average gamer, before the Monty Python/Princess Bride/I Attack the Darkness impulses take over and make role-playing less and less possible, although still a good time spent with friends yukking it up. That doesn't mean that I won't run 2 or even more sessions in a sitting, just that I plan a cliffhanger or denoument leading to an intermission at about that window. It's not such a long window to cool your heels if you happen to get cold-cocked or seperated.

Re: How to pull it off Have VIPER hire Masquerade or nearest equivalent to impersonate an official the heroes are familiar with. Have Masquerade contact the heroes and task them with recovering the maguffin. Drop some foreshadowing or a little something "off" so that the players don't feel railroaded. Maybe make things seem a little too scripted, like detailed information about the thieves that only a villain might know or foreknowledge so thorough the heroes wonder why the authorites don't just handle it. Sic the heroes on the thieves and, since it involves Hzeel bits, might as well have Warlord's goons show up also, maybe even sent by Masquerade in another form to hedge his bets of recovering the items or maybe even have Masquerade tagging along in the form of one of the War Machine. Nice three-way battle, with lots of opportunities for ebb and flow. You can go all sorts of directions after that. Maybe a grudging team-up with the War Machine to get the Hzeel bits back "and then we'll see who gets to keep 'em" combined with a rescue mission for the people Masquerade supplanted. VIPER has to know they are stepping on The Warlord's toes by targetting this item, so they are going to want to hide deeply their involvement to avoid open war.

Re: Discriminatory IR vision? Why should you get any sensory Adders for free? If I define it as Scent Heat like a reptile do I get free 360 degree sensing? For a decent visual of what IR Vision No Discriminatory looks like, just watch Predator.

Re: I'm curious, why is Dex still more expensive than other characteristics? Pure Goodman School. If you got down to figured characteristics and were interested in raising 2 or more of ED, REC, END or STUN then you went back upsheet and bumped your CON. Back in the day. Not sorry to see that go the way of the dodo but, in all honesty, I did it an uncountable number of times. The only way to prove to people that going first isn't All That and A Bag of Chips is to whup them with a wizened white eyebrow sifu with a DEX of 8 who spent those DEX-sink points like Hugh suggested. Or use Kung Fu Panda. Agile, certainly when food was on the line. But fast? Nope. Resilient and tenacious won the day.

Re: CHAMPIONS UNIVERSE Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! That's it! The Fraims' stuff looks like that old Jeff Butler art from Marvel Super-Heroes. Somebody's got to get those guys a thinner tipped pen. Their layout and composition is usually pretty good but that fat line style can't help but look cartoonish. The old guard will buy ChampU whatever the cover but I hope it is just the thing to catch new eyes. My kids dug it.

Re: I'm curious, why is Dex still more expensive than other characteristics? It's aesthetically displeasing to have one primary stat cost differently per point than the others. IMO one of the few 6th glitches but easily remedied.

Re: The Hero System is bland and over complicated What HERO really needs is a highly successful MMORPG to channel people's attention toward the pen-and-paper gaming. Or not. The other real breakthrough enabler was novels. D&D was a basement dweller's game before Dragonlance caught the eye of the curious and casual player. A genre mashing series of novels showcasing the roller-coaster possibilities inherent in HERO System, paired with game supplements assisting in duplicating that wild ride at the table, could be just the ticket.

Re: Armor Wars In the Marvel Universe most of the high-end armortech is stationed as close to the Latverian border as treaties will allow, to maintain detente with Doom. That's how I would justify a curiously appearing scarcity were I to be running something in the Marvel U. DC has a billion Rocket Reds and OMACs running around. No problems with dissemination there, but DC is a sci-fi world with no pretensions to otherwise.

Re: Armor Wars The only thing that overcomes the military's ingrained conservatism is the will to win. Initially they are always fighting today's war with yesterday's tactics, strategy and gear. There are the elite units who are only tasked with getting the mission done who will be early adopters and innovators (SAS, Delta, SEALs, etc) but the bulk will have their decisions made by old soldiers in the rear with the gear.

Re: Armor Wars The best form of light cav is always going to have a place on the battlefield.

Re: Order of the Stick Yeah, there's Alen, Neal, Lena, Lane......