John Desmarais
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Posts posted by John Desmarais
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On 4/28/2021 at 4:15 PM, eepjr24 said:
@John Desmarais - Let me know if you are interested in trying out the Roll20 character importer. I am close to ready for general release, although there will be bugs I suspect it will still reduce the work of getting characters loaded by a factor of 10.
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I'd love to give it a try. (Keying in characters into the Roll20 Hero character sheet has been nearly as much of challenge for the new players as creating their characters.)
On 5/6/2021 at 3:07 PM, Normthebarman said:@John Desmarais I'd like to put my name forward.
I'm just back to TTRPGing after a long hiatus, due to having young kids and a bad experience playing online many years ago.
However, I've spent the last 6 months on D&D 5e on Roll20 and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd enjoy playing my favourite RPG, Champions, even more.
I've been reading up on all of 6e recently, in the hope that I can convince my D&D group to give it a go, so I'm fairly familiar with the rules.
Based in Scotland but the time difference is no problem at this end, my D&D group runs to about the same time.
If your group is already full, best of luck with it and hope you all have a great time.
I'm full up at the moment, but if anyone drops I'll be looking for replacements.
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Planning a Standard Superhero level game (400 points, 75 in Complications). Basically using the Champions Universe (with the occasional odd tidbit ‘borrowed’ from other places). For those unfamiliar with the Champions Universe It’s a kitchen-sink type of setting, heavily influenced by the comics published by ‘The Big Two’. I favor clear distinction between good and evil (very limited shades of grey), with a feel more ‘four-color’ than ‘grim-dark’.
Experience with Hero System not required - I enjoy teaching the system to new players. You can ping me here or via Discord (John Desmarais#6750) if interested or if you have questions.
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On 3/21/2021 at 2:12 PM, Cybrinsanity said:
I've never played the Hero System nor any type of superhero TTRPG, But I love love love comics and such and was hoping to find a newbie friendly game if possible. West coat time preferably.
I’m looking to start a Champions game on Roll20. Lemme know if you’re still looking to play something. (You can also reach out to me on Discord: John Desmarais#6750) -
1 hour ago, Tech said:
Below is the link for the Haymaker! website, which appears to have long since been discontinued.
http://www.livelyland.com:4080/haymaker/index.html
On the main page is an email address which you might try. No idea if it's still valid. If you check the authors, you might find someone who might be able to help.
Let's say not so much discontinued as on an extended temporary suspension of publication.
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1 hour ago, Tjack said:
My favorite Golden Age origin is for the Whizzer, a Timely Comics speedster Marvel put into the Invaders. He got his speed after getting an emergency blood transfusion from a mongoose. I’ll say it again.....a mongoose.
Even if a cross species, no blood typing transfusion didn’t kill him outright. A mongoose is about the size of a ferret, how much blood could it have?
Modern day retconning says the shock just kicked off his mutant abilities.
It wasn’t a full transfusion. He was bitten by a venomous snake and then injected with mongoose blood to serve as an antidote (still pretty silly though).
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On 11/2/2019 at 3:19 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:
Well here's how one of my campaigns worked (this was a Golden Age game, set in the WW2 era)
PCs started out as pulp characters like Indiana Jones, getting into adventures. However, this world has superpowered bad guys, so they keep running into low powered bad guys that kick their behinds. They end up getting superpowers -- the first heroes in the world -- and begin fighting back against the villains. They set up a "base" of sorts in a warehouse, and start wearing costumes to disguise themselves so they are safe from the enemies while "not at work."
Each session, the PCs get some news about what is going on, are faced with a challenge, and have to go out and deal with it, or it comes to them. For example, the Hindenburg is in town and the PCs learn of a plot to blow it up and burn the empire state building down. The PCs get to the top where the mooring is (no, for real, they had a zeppelin mooring on the building then) and start evaucating people and try to stop the bomber.
Or they go to the New York World's Fair and terrible things start happening! Triffids attack! A huge robot goes berserk!
I’m curious, since they started as pulp heroes, I’m assuming they all gained their powers at the same time. What was the event that spurred the introduction superpowers into the world?
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23 hours ago, mattingly said:
Professor Querril and Voldemort.
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14 hours ago, sentry0 said:
You can do a lot with just a word processor... I created this PDF by writing a document in LibreOffice Writer (a free take on MS Word) and using their built in PDF converter.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y5hufEqzSfmn5OfIU6QNsj1WW-spQJx8
Yep. Just about any modern word processor can generate a PDF, and has reasonably good layout capabilities. Not as robust as an actual desktop publishing app, but the gap has shrunk a lot.
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15 hours ago, GM Joe said:
Yeah, 30 days isn't long. And given that I have a week of travel at the beginning of it, there's just far too little time to get something out by the program debut date, as much as I'd like to support the game in that way.
I’m going to make a valiant attempt.
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17 hours ago, Trechriron10 said:
I think the article mentioned about 30 days. Get hopping! 🙂
Aaaaagggghhhhhh! I not sure I can be done in 30 days...
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Btw, it was a fun game!
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On 10/13/2019 at 11:11 PM, pbemguy said:
I'm looking for a write-up of the comic book version of her (hex power etc.). Anyone got any ideas?
I tried http://www.sysabend.org/champions/ but her write-up comes up missing, and the Wayback Machine can't find it either. 😮
Looks like the link to the Sam Bell write-up is broken, but the one to Matt Ignash’s seems to work. http://www.sysabend.org/champions/gnborh/text/Scarlet_Witch-mi.txt
I’ll get the Sam Bell one fixed shortly (I need to fix a lot on that site)
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13 hours ago, Cygnia said:
Those look very tasty.
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8 minutes ago, sentry0 said:
Yes, in fact I now have experience writing code that will scale properly based on device size from another app I wrote.
It's unlikely that I will be doing much more than scaling it, to start. In the future, I may write screen size specific screens but that would be sometime off in the future, if ever.
Keen.
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I think I may have asked the before - but a quick scan of the last couple of pages of this thread did find it: Any chance of it becoming a true Universal App (unique support for both phone and tablet size screens)? The character import/view ability would be awesome on a tablet
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52 minutes ago, greysword said:
I don't have the two large blue rule books, mainly because 6E1 was going for about $200 at one point. Now that they are Print on Demand and I've been in the system for about 3 years, it might be time. 😉 Instead, I've just been using Champions Complete as the rule book, Hero Designer for characters (PC & NPC), and the various Villain Books and modules available.
In all honesty, if your focus is Superheroes, Champions Complete is an excellent book to use. It is a good example of what several folks have described in this thread as something they’d like to see done more often: system toolkitted for a specific genre and published as a stand-alone game.
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Didn’t see this posted, but figured it more or less appropriate.
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/FH5Essentials
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/FH5Settings
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On 5/19/2019 at 12:09 PM, Stirling.N said:
Because normally the is one SPD - 3, with one 2 and one 4 as outliers. This way they are 3 - 2.5,3,3.5 - with 2 and 4 as outliers. So there are 5 viable SPDs rather than 3.
How different would this be in play from halving the price of SPD?
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On 3/29/2019 at 4:34 PM, Scott Ruggels said:
Welp... I found the Rocket Rabbit hole to fall into. Atomic Rockets is the place for all thrust all the time space travel, plus Space colonies and all sorts of hard science, near future-y goodness. Pulling a lot of material on that. Might be of use to others of you here as well.
Winchel Chung’s site is great.
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> Should villains be more powerful than heroes?
In most of my games, the answers tends to be "yes". This is because, whenever a big "superpowered" fight occurs, I usually deliberately scale the fight so that the heroes outnumber the villains, but I still want to fight to be relatively tough. My reasons for this numerical disparity is to create easy opportunities for interesting teamwork maneuvers - which become less prevalent if the fight ends up being half a dozen, simultaneous, one-on-one fights. It's a stylistic choice, but one I enjoy.
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11 hours ago, megaplayboy said:
I and my old gaming group in Northern California had a "shared universe" with up to 5 different GMs(rotating duties) contributing NPCs and storylines. This universe persisted through several different superhero campaigns, with lots of the previous backstory being maintained into the newer campaigns. There were some conflicts over overall direction at times, but in general it was a blast to run/play in. Very similar to actual comic book universes, which have multiple titles, writers and editors.
My first Champions group was a lot like this. One primary GM and three others of us ran games in a shared universe (built loosely on top of the baked in setting for 3rd edition Champions), riffing off of things that happened in the other GM’s games. Fun stuff, but will probably never happen again for me as my current gaming life makes it much more likely that - if there are multiple GMs in the group - each GM will be running their own thing, probably a different genre, possibly a different system' then the others.
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On 3/22/2019 at 1:18 PM, ScrewySquirrel said:
Is there a way beyond GM Fiat to do off-the-scale feats of strength or speed?
<snip>
On 3/22/2019 at 1:18 PM, ScrewySquirrel said:But modelling any of these straight would seriously skew point values well out of the scale of normal gameplay. Is there something in the mechanics that allows this cinematic 'push well above your stats'?
So, lots of answers I’m this thread, here’s one more.
Is there a way to model them? Sure. It’s just points, and you can build nearly any effect if you spend enough of them. That said, actually doing so is not always the right answer - “...just because we can do a thing it does not necessarily follow that we must do that thing.”
As a GM there are a few questions that automatically go through my mind when things like this come up:
(1) Is this something the character is going to want to do more than once? If so, can it be built in a manner that could actually be purchased for the character? Is so write it up, apply some GM enforcement limitations, and make the character pay for it. If it’s truly a one-off stunt, see below.
(2) Will this have a discernible impact on Combat? If not, and if the character has some power(s) that I can rationalize into being appropriate, I say just do it. Make the character roll a Power Skill roll, maybe. If it will have an impact, I may still just let it happen, but there will definitely be skill roll(s) and costs involved.
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On 10/13/2018 at 9:10 AM, tigersloth said:
I find peoples adaption of their own superhero universes an intriguing and fascinating subject. Whats your universe like? who are the movers and shakers? is more a DC like place or Marvel? What elements of the official champions universe do you use? or have you eliminated or changed? do you use other games characters such as Mutants & Masterminds or Villains and Vigilantes or Heroes Unlimited? or is it a universe of characters you have completely created from whole cloth of your own?
Mine is a very heavy homage based combo of DC/Marvel with the serial numbers just barely scrapped off but using game characters whenever I can.
What about you?
My current game - set primarily in and around London - is one in which superpowers are a VERY new phenomenon. A phenomenon that, so far, the heroes have no idea of the cause. The heroes are part of an official government response team organized specifically to deal with superpowered threats beyond the capabilities of the regular police.
From a personal power perspective, the heroes are the “movers and shakers”, although they have encountered a small number of powered individuals who’s powers far exceeded their own (these people also knew more about the origins of powers).
There are no elements of the official Champions Universe (other than some villlains I filed the serial numbers off of because I was in a hurry) - nor any elements from any other Supers settings (RPG or comic). There are some elements I’ve adapted from,some (non-superhero) novels, but altered sufficiently if any of the players had read them they would not really find themselves at an advantage.
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12 hours ago, goldrushg said:
Thank you for the heads up. At this point I simply am not familiar enough with the current edition of the rules to make an informed decision, so my inclination is to go with:
1) What the Hero Games license requires (if it requires one over the other)
2) The preference of the impeccable Steven Long.
3) Any overwhelming and obvious will of the fans
4) The preference of my 6E character writeup creator person.
5) My gut.
...in that order.
Well with regards to #3, my preference will always tend towards “the currently available version”.
[LFP] [Roll20] [Thu 19:00-21:00ish EST] Champions (Hero System 6th ed)
in Player Finder
Posted
I've been playing with this on and off now for, well, a couple of months now. No luck. Loaded the script into my Roll20 game. I create a blank character sheet, copy/paste the .json export from HD into the GM note, assign the sheet to a toke, select the token, run it (!ImportHS6e --debug), edit, then save the sheet - but no Hero goodness in Character Sheet.