casualplayer

Re: Need another 10 points in Disads--help! The limitation Amnesia to me say "Cripes, I can't afford all the skills an ancient Welshman would have." Unless he's sterile, I would have the wandering DNPC that's a child/grandchild/great-grandchild of his. How can he refuse to help his own flesh and blood? Also lets the GM mess with your Amnesia as how are you supposed to know if the supplicant is telling the truth about being related. And yes I know your character's gay, but how does he know if he's always been gay? He can't remember! Maybe he was a breeder in the past.

Re: Name This Gun I'd just call it the Extinguisher. Snuffer? Paste pot pistol?

Re: Skills System - Out of Synch? Sounds like the kinda things you expect heroes to do.

Re: Skills System - Out of Synch? An 11- means that you are going to fail slightly less than half the time in neutral conditions. There is no aspect of life where that is acceptable in crucial situations. 11- should not be considered competent, maybe entry level at best. Fresh out of college you may have an 11- in your trade, in which case you will be lucky to get secretarial or beaker washing work. If you have an 11- Journalism score, your editor has to revise your stories ~40% of the time and you blow deadline often. If you have an 11- in a physical stat you can't perform consistently and the talent scouts just shake their heads in sadness. From the way you are describing it, Dust Raven, I don't think your GMs have assigned negative modifiers often or at all. A 20- diminishes quickly in a heated situation and GMs are supposed to put you in heated situations. An 11- becomes "fat chance" when the heat is on. Look at it this way, 11- is a D in ideal testing conditions. Like I said before if you cue off published stuff 11- seems to be acceptable but it really isn't. Too many people have been getting too much for too little for too long.

Re: It Costs Too Much! Man, Increased KB shouldn't even exist. It should be DC bought Only for doing KB. It's not too expensive, it's just a bad idea.

Re: Why is Strength so underpriced? Strength is overpriced because Halliburton got a no-bid contract to provide STR to the refugees from Detroit/Millenium City.

Re: Shared Powers by Heroes of Common Origin It would probably require a handwave of the AP limits but can't everyone just buy their power Usable By Other and have a limited number of people who count as Other? Just the members of the Voltron team would qualify. Or I suppose the comatose person could have bought all the powers UBO and he passes them around through directions conveyed through Mind Scan or Mind Link communication. Then someday he can wake up or be possessed and repossess all the abilities to make an uber-baddie.

Re: Skills System - Out of Synch? Something that I have noticed in a lot of characters, forum-spread and published is that people run with just the base CHAR + STAT/5 level at 3 pts. Maybe a few levels to multishare between some related skills or some Overall Levels "if they aren't being used for something important." Don't any GMs make things difficult? Sure your 11- Combat Driving might get the car started but I don't want to be a passenger when you hit an oil slick and are rolling at a -4 to the roll. Maybe an actor with an 11- Acting roll can make a living if only slightly less than half of his performances suck. Catch a doctor with an 11- KS: Diagnosis on a good day and he may notice what's wrong with you. The reason why, say, Nightwing is a renowned acrobat is because he has like a 30- Acrobatics roll. He can have his hands tied, be standing in mud, not stretch out, have no prep time and still peg the 4 somersault standing leap across the chasm. An 11- means you blow it in the clinch. Often. You aren't "good" until you approach 20-. Which means in an emergency you are somewhat reliable as you are modified downward by -4 to -8. The system isn't out of synch. The use of it is.

Re: Superhero Baby Names. Do you mean a lot of kids named Victor or Victoria? Caesar? Brutus? Gaius? Maximus? Apollo? Gabriel? Metraton? Angela? Pharaoh? Moses? Samson? I may not get the point. Most names are derived from heroes that lived so long ago that we don't remember the original hero. Robert the Bruce? Charles Magnus? Bodicaea? (sp?) Phoebe? Athena?

Re: Character Building Challange

Re: Character Building Challange Wouldn't the core character just have the Possession (Desolid/LS/Clinging) power, and a couple Followers with powers bought Only When Possessed by the Core Character? Much cheaper to make the Followers pick up the tab for the powers even if the SFX of the ability is that the Core Character "bestows" the abilities when merged.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? New Dar Williams. Love her cover of Comfortably Numb.

Re: Question of the GMs I could never resell my HERO books because they have been written in so much. I hardly ever do a full write up of characters because it's really not worth the time and effort, but I sure will pimp out Thok until he is barely recognizable but more useful to me. Why redesign the wheel over and over again? By the time I was done with Shamrock he was a Hollywood stuntman named Davis, and since the original character sucked liked buttermilk I had something useful at the end.

Re: Liefeld's Titans All the hobbits will look like Troll, and you will never see their feet. Legolas will look like Shatterstar. Aragorn will have a cybernetic arm. Gandalf will look like he can bench press a balrog. It'll be great! Honestly, Liefeld's stuff is no more stylized than some of Kirby's stuff. The important difference is that Kirby could do anatomically correct work and Liefeld can only draw "comic-style." All he can draw is limited perspective fights and poses. It's definitely sour grapes wondering how the heck he managed to break into comics when the rest of us labor in obscurity, but what can you do? My liking of a comic is usually the kiss of death; I've only rarely been able to recognize "popular." Try to imagine the circumstances that led to Liefeld getting the Titans gig. Was the editor clueless as to ol' Robby's rep? Did he think it would increase sales? Methinks someone showed up looking for work and the Teen Titans drew short straw. Could have been worse. Imagine his Batman!

Re: Liefeld's Titans I have had a long-standing love affair with The Doom Patrol. I still have mental scars from when Larson took over from Lightle on the Karma/Lodestone reboot. Then Grant Morrison and Richard Case arrived, and my patience was rewarded. No I avoided that Spidertravesty like the plague. Not my cup of tea.

Re: Liefeld's Titans Here I am...doo, doo, doo...look at me...doo, doo, doo. Nice sig quote Paragonalpha. I want all of you Haters to fess up. Who bought X-Force whatever the heck # it was or Youngblood #1? I have both, but they came from the quarter bin because I wanted to see if they were as bad as I remembered. They were worse. Erik Larsen-cuts his teeth at DC, does Savage Dragon regularly and steadily (not my cup of tea but props to the man.) Liefeld, Infantino, Silvestri, Portacio, etc-cut their teeth at Marvel, can't hit a release schedule to save their life, totally dependent on "look, we swear we aren't actually Mutants" flavor-of-the-month books. Coincidence, I think not.

Re: Disadvantage Point costs, relative and expressed, only matter if you focus on the scribbles on the paper and not on what the points represent. Points spent on powers, characteristics and abilities shouldn't be viewed as an arms race, pissing contest of "Who Can Destroy the Car Quickest?" like in Street Fighter's bonus round. They should be seen as a way to a means, the means being "this is how I want to tackle adversity." If I spend a lot of resources on bricky stuff then I want to punch threats. If the GM sends wave after wave of the unpunchable, shortly you will have a textbook example of a bad game. If players acquire Disadvantages with any other motivation than "this is how I want the GM to mess with me and make my life interesting" then you are really stretching the definition of role-playing. Wargaming may be more accurate and a lot kinder than calling it Munckinism or pointsmongering. 20 points in Dependence is dramatically different than 20 points in Vulnerability, but then 20 points in STR is dramatically different than 20 points spent in Martial Arts.

Re: Liefeld's Titans Awwww, Kestrel's in it too? Gail Simone is like the spiritual heir to Barbara Kesel (probably still recovering from the CrossGen War) and now she's riffing on Barbara's characters. That is almost tempting enough to overcome willingly subjecting myself to eyeball-searing Liefeld pencils. Was I being too generous by saying Liefeld's pencils "weren't awful?"

Re: Liefeld's Titans

Re: Ever have one of those moments when... Nothing gets the point across like having the villains whoop the player's butts. If they fall apart in the middle of combat, take advantage of this as the antagonists should. Have the main bad guy call them the incompetent heroes that they are. Sounds like too heavy a diet of Image comics, or Ultimate Gobbledygook. The bodycounts did mount in those books, and consequences went by the wayside. Taking steps during character creation can help with this. Insist that the characters have a reason to adventure other than wanting to have cage matches on city streets. Less evil, more hero. Most characters are written up as one bad day from becoming villains, and it's the GM's job to create bad days.

Re: Is Power Girl/Kara Starr the DCUs Gladiator? This newest incarnation of the Legion has no shelf life and won't long outlast the departure of Mark Waid, when he gets bored. Paranoid, militant, antisocial teenagers. With superpowers. What a great book. I have mixed feelings about Shikari. I love Dawnstar, so giving her "slot" to someone else horks me off. I have always wanted more non-humans in the Legion, so I was glad to see her there. I didn't follow Shikari's era of participating in the Legion so I am not familiar with her character, and honestly didn't know she was a Dawnstar riff til I read it in Chaim's Legion Helpfile. I honestly doubt that she's Waid's cup of tea, but who knows with that guy? I didn't know that Power Girl's upcoming origin was going to involve the Legion. I have a sense of dread coming over me.

Re: Is Power Girl/Kara Starr the DCUs Gladiator? Heh, and Aquaman too. It's the Atlantis thing. Apparently they are all the same Atlantis. I've always wondered what the heck happened to them in LoSH times. The Arion patch was weak, but he was Kupperberg's baby also and "wouldn't it be cool if they were related?" No, not really, but I was just glad to see PG survive the Crisis. Now if someone would just stitch up that rip in her tunic before she flops out in combat.

Re: Is Power Girl/Kara Starr the DCUs Gladiator? They are about to do Power Girl's "definitive" origin in JSA Classified. Should spill the beans on her powers also. Geoff Johns, the writer, really needs to get his ego back in the box though. He completely invalidated the origin that her creator Paul Kupperberg gave her. Paul was the one that first introduced her as Earth 2's Supergirl and he did her post-Crisis, Arion's my grandpa revamp in Secret Origins. I have some hatred also for Gerard Jones, who surgically depowered PG in JLEurope, and Bart Sears, who drew her as a Penthouse Comics sight gag. It would be amusing if she was DC's Gladiator. John Byrne made Gladiator's powers will based, carried the concept over to DC with The Man of Steel and it was jettisoned when they ramped Supes back up to pre-Crisis power levels. Perfectly good power justification just lying around DC's offices.

Re: Dudes, I need help building a city. Unless you are really into mapmaking, steal one from an existing city. Invert it, rename the boroughs and features and you are practically done. Cities do have regional flavor so using Buffalo for a California city will feel off though. Hacks plagarize, artists steal!

Re: Play By e-Mail: Submissions for Millennium City This may seem like a dumb question, but can STR go above 40? Also do you have any house rules that might affect character creation? No called shots? No NND does BODY? No stopsign powers at all? Not that that would stop me, cuz' most of that is cheese, but I want to be on the same page. I'm about 2/3 done with a Power Armor character called either Redeemer or Psion. If I want a "Repulsor" in each gauntlet, is that full buy + 5 points for other gauntlet or full buy twice?