casualplayer

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics

Re: CHAMPIONS UNIVERSE: What Do *You* Want To See? Champions Universe and CU:NotW were some of my favorite books from 5th edition, so I'm hard pressed to suggest ways to improve them. But I'm also not sure what you could include that would make me want to repurchase them for a new edition. I idea-mine books like these for things I can use in my own world, and unless there are dramatically more or different ideas to mine, I'm going to be a tough sell. If hardcover also means color interior art, that would be a draw. A solid century of new or dramatically re-envisioned pre-history would also.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Cheap at twice the price.

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics Wolverine's done lots of things that warrant a pretty hefty STR, from snapping his chains in Mesmero's circus to hefty leaps and the mentioned one-arming of full-grown men. But his DEX is probably too high in those beloved Different Worlds write-ups. Tough to say though, because Logan was a little dervish in his first Hulk appearance. It's all relative. Wolverine's character was such a min-maxed combat wombat though that Thunderbird's player suicided his character and quit the game!

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics Or that. IMO, Champions, and HERO System, works best when you define the human mean and deviate from there. If you would describe your character's agility as good then you are +1-3 above the mean, great is 4-6, exceptional 7-9, etc. It lets you have your super-agents guest star without being completely outclassed, or even a liability. It makes it so Legolas and Booster Gold don't have the same stats in some areas. It makes origins a little more plausible as a normal person can stumble into his radiation accident and become super without having to be a Olympic-level gymnast and track star "normal" before coming into powers to explain how my mystically imbued self has a DEX of 23. DEX was always the real sticking point because all of the other stats could somewhat be explained and justified. Why the blue blazes would stumbling across a Crown of Krim make me more agile? Well, because if I didn't take advantage of the slaved CV benefits of hefty DEX then I would be at a serious disadvantage to all those who did.

Re: LETS DO IT AGAIN: Arguing over characteristics It also lets your players take Damage Reduction versus Mere Mortals to feel super-Super.

Re: Plot vs. Rules - Species Burnout A lot of people croaked in Strikeforce Morituri at some inopportune times. Poor Snapdragon combusted at the coming out party! Some didn't make it out of training. The GM always has the power and resources to snuff out a PC. If your players don't trust and communicate with you well enough to make this a non-issue, this might not be the right genre. You're pretty much hiring them on for the show but saying their character isn't going to make it to next season.

Re: What does a Time Elemental do? Time elementals' nature is to minimize unnatural meddling in the timestream. That's why you have to summon and bind them to get them to do otherwise.

Re: Order of the Stick That was an awful long wait for a page of meh.

Re: Bad character design or broken rules ? The easiest way I've found to have familiarity with a broad suite of vehicles, weapons, knowledge skills, etc is to ask the GM what the penalty would be for being unfamiliar and then buying enough conditional Skill Levels to overcome those penalties. If the GM says riding a camel would be a -3 penalty to your Combat Riding: Horses and you have 3 Overall Levels Only for Always Looking Like You Know What You Are Doing then you are just as good on the back of a dromedary as you are on an appaloosa.

Re: Would you play a game with pre-generated characters? Play one? Sure. I've torn one out of the back of a module and said "Let's get going!" Played Mordenkainen in one mini-campaign, Caramon in another, Legolas in another. There's a few alignments I have problems wrapping my head around or Psy Lims that I find distasteful but it's good improv practice. I also used to do con games and an annual Halloween Call of Cthulhu game, where you can't burn the time making characters or making sure that the party will find a way to gel. I also ran a scenario for my Champions game where I had everyone pass their character to the left and run that character in-character for the evening. It was a lot of fun watching everyone get a taste of what made each other cool and often inaugurate new uses of powers and innovative tactics that the original players hadn't thought of but readily swiped once they got their characters back.

Re: Sources of inspiration for a game

Re: Physical might: Strongest characters in comics and other media, and benchmarks Is there a reason why no ladies made the list, other than most of the ones who would likely be included are female versions of men who made the list? Suprema and Supergirl and Mary Marvel and She-Hulk and such. Makes me think there needs to be a non-derivative powerhouse female. There was a window of time when She-Hulk started weight training as Jen Walters and was so strong she had to wear a restraining suit just to function.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I like the way you played with the vantage point, Storn. Stretching the perspective.

Re: Designing superhumans based on the five Japanese Elements One of my old players had an elemental Multiform character, originally thinking he only had 4 forms because of the Western shackles on his thoughts. Eventually he discovered that he had a fifth form, Void, and could travel the spaces inbetween. He had insane levels of Teleport and EDM but it required a skill roll for him to avoid getting "lost." Sometimes he would arrive before he left. He also had the Plexus Vortex power of opening up a portal and pulling everything in a radius in, flushing things to a different place.

Re: Truth-Telling Gaze Sounds like Single Command: Stay put and tell me the truth Mind Control to me, with some restrictions like Eye Contact necessary and such. Mesmerism.

Re: Double Sucker Attack To get the suckers to fall for it you have to position yourself in the right spot between the two suckers, convince them that you are a tempting target right then and there, then get out of the way of both blasts. Lots of Skills that would come in handy for the first two parts: Acrobatics, Breakfall, Acting, Oratory, Stealth and so on, then don't get hit. I've had this effect happen when a character with +DCV based on Acrobatics Roll rolled exceptionally well.

Re: Pinning a Limb To The Wall I beg to differ (don't beg, just differ.) You're trying to emulate pinning someone through their flesh to a nearby surface. First you have to be able to impale the target, even if just through the forearm or hand (Just!) Then there has to be a nearby suitable surface, within KB/KD range I would say. Then whenever they try to move from that spot they cause more damage, and foreknowledge of that potential damage should encourage them to stay put. Sounds like an attack that upon reaching impaling BODY worth of damage places a Triggered amount of damage that occurs if the target tries to move from that spot, probably some NND Does BODY damage since you are already past any rDEF that might be applicable. I would either force a EGO Roll to knowingly trip the Trigger or maybe a PER Attack insisting the target to stay put. Pinning without impaling? Extra Limbs Physical Manifestation sufficiently Indirect, only able to be used with Grab/Martial Grab/Ranged Martial Grab. Both instances are obviously going to Lockout the weapon used for pinning, although I guess if it was a Brick Trick you could use debris and rebar and surrounding materials. Just a thought.

Re: Silly question 2: Borealis in mourning.

Re: Silly question 2: Well, by crikey, let's make it fit in the Champions Forum. How about: Black Paladin, in a Cat-in-the-Hat chapeau Obsidian, after being mistaken for a statue by pigeons Black Harlequin, in his last encounter with Harbinger of Justice.

Re: "Rolling a Critical" Crit 3 means that Officer Anonymous of the Local Interference Patrol can lay your 400 pt hero out with his standard issue sidearm, which I don't find dramatic or heroic. Crit 3 means that if I throw 216 bullets at you, odds are bad things are going to happen. Crit < Half does mean that you have to make sure that for every point of OCV the character is above the campaign mean DCV, he should inflict 1 DC less than the campaign mean DCs to be "balanced." It's also real cheap to buy Damage Reduction Only versus Perfect Strikes. So if you use the < Half crit rule and let the player buy 15 DC in a 12 DC game and let them have +3 OCV on the campaign mean DCV, on rolls of 3-6 bad things are going to happen. So don't let them do that. But if you want to have martial artists that are perfectly content with doing "only" 9DCs, because virtually anytime they want to they can do 6 STUN/2 BODY x DC exerted to low DCV mooks and bricks, this rule works great. A permutation that I use that I haven't mentioned yet is that I have Crits happen whether they would be desirable or not. If you unleash your full building-smashing strength on a civilian or a creampuff villain and scorch off a 5 you likely just committed Manslaughter. I find it encourages restraint and precision rather than just Alpha Strike, 1 Turn-and-done combats. It also makes my players somewhat in awe of the power they can unleash.

Re: "Rolling a Critical"