AngryBug

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER You don't care about my feelings at all! It's always just take, take, take with you, isn't it?

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER Not sure I'm following how this would work (sleep deprived, not tracking too well...). Is this like "Questions", like from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?

Re: A Thread for Random Musings In my completely objective, totally unbiased, neutral opinion, my two sons are the cutest, most adorable little boys in the entire universe.

Re: My House Rules. Comments Welcome Personally, Worldmaker, it really doesn't matter to me if you change your house rules or not. Like I said, I can see the reasoning behind most of them, even the ones that violate the rules as written. I'm just curious about the reasoning behind the eyes thing, because I just honestly don't get it. It looks to me like a metarule created because of a few players trying to sneak some extra points with no good character conception reason, and I just want to know if there really is some other reason for it, because it violates my personal idea of common sense. A GM's rules are law for his own world, as far as I'm concerned, and I don't personally like to argue rulings, or see other players argue about them, once the GM has banged his metaphorical gavel down. I really am just genuinely curious why you don't think distinctively inhuman eyes are worth any points, that's all.

Re: "Ultimate" means 'last' Right, then the heroes all turn bitter and jaded and there you go- now you have an Iron Age campaign!

Re: Any Good Non-Four Color Super Game Needs:

Re: Superhero High School Have you watched any episodes of X-MEN: Evolution? It's the current animated version of the group, and they've made most of the team high school students. I'd highly recommend it as source material for how to handle most of your questions. It is available on DVD if you don't get the show. As for your questions, by the numbers (with the caveat that if you ask 100 people, you will get 100 different answers, all of them equally valid); 1.) Personally, I would start at Base 150 + 100 pts. Disadvantages, and encourage characters based around a single power (New Mutants, most of the X-Men). My reason for this is that it allows their powers a lot of room to grow as they do, so you can assume most characters would be in the 350 pt., or Standard Superhero, range by the time they are full-grown adults. Keeping power levels low also means they will need to learn a lot of teamwork if they are going to survive to become those adults, since as teenagers they will lack the raw power and the skill of older, more experienced heroes. Smaller powers are also easier to work with in a smaller setting like a school. 2.) Why would it be? Big Badass Supervillains don't go around attacking other supers for no reason; they're too busy plotting to get rich/take over the world/destroy the universe to bother with a high school, whether said school has supers in it or not. During the course of the campaign (or as part of their background, read: Disadvantages) characters may encounter BBSs and acquire them as Hunteds (as in any other campaign), but other than that, unless they're looking for recruits (see #3), they would have no logical reason to care one way or the other about the school. 3.) Probably, and so would some supervillain teams (I refer you both to the classic X-Men comic and again to XM:E; both series feature rival groups of "good" and "bad" young mutants- X-Men/New Mutants vs. Massachusetts Academy/Mutant Brotherhood). The good guys would be more likely to want to train, help and protect the "kids", the villains more inclined to twist and use them for their own evil purposes, but it's all in how you want to play it. 4.) and 5.) This is where you have to decide on the tone of your campaign, specifically the attitude of the general (read: non-powered) public toward those with superhuman abilities. Are supers feared and hated? Then revealing their powers might be unwise; secrecy, atttempting to act "normal" and not use their powers openly would be required. If and when they are "exposed" as supers, they could face open prejudice, hostility, even expulsion from school or violence (XM:E takes this approach). Are supers considered a normal part of society, although a minority one? Then there would likely be special classes for "Gifted" students, perhaps even powers-only intramural teams and the like. If supers have a certain prestige in society, schools may even compete to attract super students, all-super schools may develop, and a certain fame, or at least notoriety, would be attached to these "special" students. Admiration and hero worship or jealousy and resentment would be what they might expect from normal students. Are supers just beginning to emerge in the world? Perhaps environmental change, alien intervention, a mystical cycle or some such is causing superhumans to just now begin to emerge. This approach allows your players to have an impact on just how this "new breed" will be seen by the larger public, who will have few, if any, preconceptions. 6.) Depends on whether your powers allow you to sneak in and out of your room after curfew. That's my 2 cents worth. I'll just reiterate that there's no "right" answer. Spider-Man started out as a teenager with a lot more than 250 points, for example. If your concept is for 750 point teenagers who attract the interest of every supervillain on Earth, I say go for it! The key is usually to decide what kind of feel you and your players want the game to have. Good luck! I hope some of this is useful!

Re: After the Ultimate Evil... what? Yeah, it was only after "The Best of Both Worlds" that ST:TNG got really good. I guess it depends on whether or not you want to continue as things were.

Re: My House Rules. Comments Welcome Hello? Anybody? I didn't mean to kill the thread, really. I was just cleaning my keyboard and it went off...

Re: After the Ultimate Evil... what? First, I hope you have/had at least an entire session as an Afterword; time to reflect, wrap up loose ends, etc. You could even spend a session or two with the characters , not the players, just dealing with "what now?". Then...? End the campaign, start the sequel? "Champions: the Next Generation". Failing that, Theron's idea's pretty good, make the campaign new by changing everything. It could even be a direct result of defeating said Ultimate Evil, a contingency plan they set in motion beforehand, like on Reboot when Megabyte engineered a system crash that went off just after his defeat. If you don't want to wreck the world the team worked so hard to save, how about losing it instead? An encounter with "Dimensio, Master of Time and Space" turns the campaign into Sliders or Lost in Space for a while. If the "same old, same old" has lost its spark, its time for a dramatic change of some sort.

Re: Answers & Questions Q. Have you seen the sucker marks all over Douglas' back? (sorry) A. Because the wombat ate the red ones, of course.

Re: Answers & Questions Q. Okay, class, today I want to hear those battle cries... What's yours, Inferiority Complex Man? A. I don't profess to know the meaning of it, but I have seen the mark on Douglas many times this last ten years.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER What are you saying? You don't think I can handle complex ideas? Is that it?

Re: Any Good Non-Four Color Super Game Needs: Guns, guns, guns and guns Hero whose headquarters is a dirty old run-down warehouse DNPCs whose only purpose is to be killed, sending hero out for revenge Heroes who never smile unless someone is about to be horribly killed The sun almost never comes out, and if it does it's only seen through dark, dramatic-shadow-casting venetian blinds A hero with barbed wire or spikes stuck into/through his arm

Re: Silliest Disadvantage Ever Not to mention woodpeckers... VULN to fire, Enraged by lumberjacks, Berserk when Dorothy tries to pick his apples...

Re: A Thread for Random Musings You know that Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Counterpoint", I think it's called? The one where the Voyager crew are smuggling a bunch of telepaths to safety through this region of space occupied by this really powerful race of telepath-hating paranoids and they have to keep hiding them all, along with Tuvok, the telepathic Vulcan, who Janeway claims is dead when the telepath-haters ask about him, in a kind of transporter stasis, like the kind that Scotty used to survive in for eighty years (or whatever) in the Next Generation episode "Relics", because telepathy is illegal in their stellar regime and any telepaths found on board will be captured and killed and the Voyager will be confiscated and turned to scrap or something if they're caught hiding telepaths, and then the Captain of the ship that keeps boarding them shows up and he claims that he's on the run, now, from his own people because he's decided that, hey, telepaths aren't so bad after all, and he and Janeway start to work together on the plan to smuggle the telepaths to safety, and he's supposed to be developing this close relationship with Janeway even though the two of them have no chemistry together and he never, ever, not for one second seems like anything other than a duplicitous git, and in the background for, like, every scene there's this piece of music with a strong counterpoint -get it?-, and then, just when they finally get to where they're supposed to hand over the telepaths to a ship that will get them out of that part of space the alien Captain guy turns out to have been -gasp!- just pretending all along to be a good guy, and he really still just wants to catch the telepaths and his ship is on its way to arrest them all, and Tuvok, the telepath, who's been hiding in the transporter beam so the alien regime doesn't know Voyager has a telepath on board says, "I'll be on the bridge" just before the telepath-hating aliens show up, and then -ha,ha!- it turns out Janeway never really trusted the alien Captain and she's outwitted him and there are no more telepaths on board, except for Tuvok on the bridge, of course, but the telepath-haters don't notice him even though he's supposed to be dead because any telepath found on board will be arrested, and then Janeway looks all wistful, like she wishes she really could have trusted this guy, and then the alien captain lets Voyager go, ostensibly so the whole incident never appears on his record, but you're supposed to just know it's because he, too, wishes it could have worked out with Janeway even though they have, you know, no onscreen chemistry whatsoever, and Voyager and a misty-eyed Janeway go on their merry way. You know the episode I mean? I really hate that episode.

Re: Any Good Non-Four Color Super Game Needs:

Re: Alignments Perhaps (!?) I'm naive, but isn't the whole reason the D&D alignment system works so well it's simplicity? Trying to come up with a chart that shows every complex facet of how a character or monster will interact with others seems needlessly, ummmm...., well, complex. If you're talking specifically about some sort of heading for monsters in sourcebooks, perhaps having a short description of general characteristics like "Animal, Predator", "Reclusive, Dangerous when Cornered" or "Greedy, Amoral" might be enough shorthand to let you know whether it is worth reading the particulars in more detail, without needing to create a whole system for charting every conceivable combination. If you're talking about figuring out how NPC characters will interact with PCs, that's what background, personality and/or Psych. Lim.'s are for. Isn't interpreting those for your own campaign just part of being a GM? And what ever happened to picking the NPCs and creatures you need/want for your story and working backwards from there to see how they fit in? I mean no offense by any of this , and I freely admit I may be missing your basic point, but I just don't see what the payoff would be for creating an "interaction chart".

Re: Any Good Non-Four Color Super Game Needs:

Re: Science of Superheroes

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER

Re: Marvel's Rogue Of course Rogue can be done with HERO- anything can be done with HERO! Just look at all the different approaches on this thread alone! Which one is the "right" one depends on which version of Rogue you're creating. Movie version? First appearance? Rogue/Carol Danvers? X-Men:Evolution? Game balance is a completely separate issue. If the player's vision of "Rogue" costs too much for a given campaign, then it's up to the GM to decide what to do about it; raise the point limit for that one character, consider "Rogue" to start at a lower power level and "grow into" the character conception, whatever. It all depends what players and GM want out of the game. If the campaign is "X-Men", then getting it as close to "right" as possible is more important than point caps. If the character is a Rogue homage , have her start lower powered and grow. Even Superman couldn't fly in his first appearance (and the Thing was lumpy and weaker, and Hulk was grey, weaker and smarter, and Iron Man had transistors, etc., etc., etc....). In any case, while powerful, Rogue is never (to my knowledge) shown to be unstoppable and all-powerful. When her foe is Juggernaut or Magneto, she absorbs a fraction of their power, leaving them conscious and somewhat weakened, but still in command of most of their abilities. I think she can be created as a workable character for any superheroic campaign, following the truly wise advice posted here. How powerful she is depends on the campaign, doesn't it?

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER The thought occurs that while, with enough posts, this could become the longest thread ever, in order for it to become the longest running thread ever, every thread started before this one has to end. Technically speaking, I mean...

Re: Answers & Questions Q. You wife threw you out over a Christmas Wish List? Why? What was on it? A. No, no, no, no... it's only ice cream...

Re: Looking for HERO stats for: "Bullseye" It is if it's sticking out of your throat. The "obvious" in OIF refers to being able to tell where the power comes from, not whether it looks like a weapon before it's used. A green ring is just a finger trinket until it creates a giant hammer to bash your head.