casualplayer

Re: So: What Superpowers would your Parents get if they had a "Radiation Accident" Hopefully my parents would get regenerative powers because their healths are both poor. Who would have thought that decades of bad decisions would take a toll on a body? Back before their hope was eroded away my dad would have gotten supercowboy powers and my mom kitchen queen abilities. They both tried but neither were hero material.

Re: Help me grok HERO! These stats are fine if your antagonists are built on similar stats but will completely outclass cops, soldiers, mooks and government agents. Hakkonen, if OCV is +3 or more over the target's DCV it is into the "shooting fish in a barrel" range. If your players have 9-10 OCVs your enemies will need 7 DCVs to be anything but target practice.

Re: Help me grok HERO! Hakkonen, fun campaign idea. I've played in something similar. I will say that characters made on that many points will be very difficult to keep in Middleton. That's enough points to make any of the animated Justice League. Lots of the problems you are bumping into will fade away if you make characters on 250 or even 150 points. Then the players will be tough enough to rough up some cops or break out of jail but not so strong that tank shells bounce off.

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill The public turned on Wonder Woman when she ripped Max Lord's head off. They will turn on you. Just ask Wonder Woman.

Re: How do you work gaining Package Deals during game? Lots of different ways. I generally try to make packages as close to a net zero cost as I can, benefits - drawbacks. If the player doesn't have the cost up front they can owe me. You also don't have to allow newly transformed characters full access to all of their abilities, having them gain skill and access at about the rate they pay xp. If points get in the way of your story, choose the story.

Re: Let's talk about movement Buy movement per turn but allow the character to apportion the meters per segment out however they choose. If the character moves more than total movement per turn/SPD in a single segment it counts as a full-move, with all the penalties and limitations involved.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Rome looks plausible and not preposterous. That doesn't happen often, or often enough, in cover art. Lovely piece.

Re: World War Two Campaign The way to keep your protagonists from single-handedly winning the way is to keep those hands busy somewhere else. Constant reminders of how valuable the PCs are to the war effort and how damaging to the war effort their deaths could be will keep them from blitzkreiging Berlin hopefully. Incorporating an object lesson character into the backstory, someone who tried and failed miserably, might be necessary. Most characters should be able to beat a squad of men but not an entire army. They both can't and shouldn't try to win the war alone, because a large part of the feel of Golden Age games is the camaraderie, Us vs. Them, Together We Can Do This!

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete Modules are a GM's purchase and very few systems have enough GMs out there to make a module release a success. You can loss leader it to attract interest, you can keep churning out modules as a low cost way to keep brand awareness high and secure shelf space, they are a great trial run for talent but they are never a revenue stream. They are nearly always one-and-done, disposable.

Re: World War Two Campaign

Re: World War Two Campaign I specifically said anything greater than 100 kph tended to be a core concept power, not rule it completely out. Lots of characters could hit 100 kph speed on foot: Robotman, Hourman, early Supes, WW. That would probably be the recommended cap for your heavy cavalry characters. Then you had your light cavalry/carrier pigeons like Flash, Johnny Quick and Air Wave that speed was just about all they did. In teamups they would draw fire while laughing at those slow, fat bullets until the heavy cav and shock troops arrived, the shock troops usually arriving on motorcycle, characters like Black Canary, Captain America, Wildcat and Batman, or on wing. Due to cornering limitations and road conditions 100 kph was usually fast enough to catch a mobster's car or beat a train in a footrace, unless it was a Sivanamobile or something. The fastest train or car of the era didn't top 200 kph. It was a luxuriously slow and frantically urgent era.

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete On the bright side people stopped kvetching about the interior art. On the other, holy kerfuffle Batman! Frequent usage and reference combined with fondness leads to nicknames. I plan on frequently using and referencing this book along with anticipating a great deal of fondness. PHB and DMG and such. So I tried to get out in front so we don't end up with another Fred. Mea culpa.

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete Complete sounds great. Sticky thread the bejeezus out of the forums when this is available and I'm good for at least one copy. Thing needs a nickname though. I nominate "Rhino."

Re: World War Two Campaign One of the most important things to do, and hardest to enforce, is make sure that the characters can't move or communicate too quickly. To be able to do 100 kph on foot was amazing, more than twice that a core concept superpower. Blowing away the fog of war with reliable long distance communication will end the war before you know it. An amazing amount of people can't imagine how slowly a world with switchboard operators and prop-driven planes moved.

Re: Help me grok HERO! Apogee seems like a great Heroes/Alphas-level character to me. Powerful enough to give a handful of cops or gangsters a problem, not knocking over office buildings or ripping armored cars in half.

Re: Order of the Stick Catholicism: if it feels right, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Do you use Teamwork? Why in the world would anyone want to discourage their players from acting like a team? I thought that was the greatest feeling a gm could achieve, knitting a group of loners into a force to be reckoned with. If your villains can't withstand a teamwork blitz maybe your villains could use a boost or a return to villain school.

Re: Order of the Stick An actual racist comment from someone not of the human race, because I doubt Malak cares what shade skin flat-tooths have.

Re: How have you used "The Monster?"

Re: How have you used "The Monster?" I used him as an example of how broken Figured Characteristics used to be. 60 STR/30 DEX/ 30 CON was the basis of a guy who could fight entire teams! It's really amazing that everyone 5th Ed and earlier didn't just start with that 150 points spent and then make their character with what was left.

Re: Getting Stronger and Tougher the More I Get Hurt I second Martin2's suggestion, and used this power construct in a character of mine called Impact. Linked/Conjoined Damage Reduction/Negation to the Absorption. Works like a charm. I also like to have the STR absorbed be 0 END, so that I don't have to keep recalculating END Costs/usage, so 3 pts absorbed gives me 2 STR 0 END. YMMV.

Re: VPP discusion It's not that I don't like Frameworks with Limitations; it's that I don't like non-sensical character design. If your character concept is carrying gear then the character should be built so that just about any and all variations of using that gear should be possible. Like Sean Waters said, I shouldn't have to put my night vision goggles away so that I can use my rebreather and tear gas pellets if my SFX is a utility belt. It's a point-conserving design rather than a power-modeling one. If your Swiss Army Powers gadgeteer character can't half-move swing and throw a gadgeteerarang at a bad guy, is this really the character you intended to make? If the character can't use its swingline, smoke pellets and uv goggles simultaneously, is this really the character you intended to make? It's alright. I lost this battle years and years ago when Steve Long himself started publishing characters with "Whatever Weapon/Device I Happen to be Using" MPs. Very efficient right up until the point where you realize you actually built a Bag of Holding with improbable inventory and an arbitrary cap on how many items you can withdraw.

Re: Facing and Passing

Re: VPP discusion One of the reasons why writing up a utility belt using MP or VPP is a point-shaving abomination IMO. Steve's answer goes back to the ban against nesting power frameworks in other power frameworks. It's needlessly convoluted, and a VPP is already a MP with nigh-infinite slots anyway.

Re: Balancing social skills and role playing I'm right there with you up til this point. The whole idea of ratcheting up the skill rolls is to be able to succeed under adverse conditions. If you can shoulder the penalty for a well-lit, open space with nothing to hide behind while people are watching you, and still succeed, then that makes you a force to be reckoned with and those were points well spent. Batman's disappearing in plain sight shtick and such. [ATTACH=CONFIG]42702[/ATTACH] Most just punt this kind of thing to a Skill constructed as a Power but I've never been a fan of that.