transmetahuman

Re: Queer heroes

Re: Variable power upon arrival This has come up before; don't remember where exactly, and too lazy to search. IIRC, a majority of people agreed that the official, legal way to do it is with Heal (only vs living -x; linked) + EB (only vs undead -x; linked) + Transform (only vs objects, linked). BUT, most also agreed that an auto-selecting multipower (priced just like a regular multipower with ultra slots) was a fairer way to price it, and the method most people in fact actually used. I might be misremembering, though, cuz this happens to be exactly what I think.

Re: Legion of Super-Pets Scientists first called it a "protomorph"; one of the scientists' kids thought they were saying "potty mouth", and started calling it "Potty"... okay, I'll shut up now...

Re: Champions universe created by magic? Despite my Ode To Glumph post upthread, I'd never actually use the CU timeline/rise and fall theme in a world I was GMing. It's an attempt to justify tying the various genres together; an artifact of the game company and marketing strategy, and therefore completely unnecessary to me. I just brought the Glumph/"Primal Chaos" thing up as one way for people who do want to use the CU as written to do it. And I do think they're using "magic" in a couple different ways that could've been more clear.

Re: Champions universe created by magic? A more contemporary term for the kind of magic that makes superstuff happen might be "Primal Chaos". Not really controllable, not an energy (which RPGs and comics pretty much treat magic as), so much as a state. An antithesis to natural order. It's still "magic" in the sense that we mundane Earth-types use the word - it makes (or allows) impossible stuff to happen. But it's not "magic" in the "Dr. Strange is drained of his magical energy" sense. You could as easily use the word Glumph. The ability to use magic stems from a rise in the level of Glumph. The serendipitous, non-random way that mutation works in superpowered mutants stems from the rise in Glumph. Glumph causes physical laws to alter in the vicinity of certain gadgets but not in their exact duplicates (unless both are built by the same guy, who happens to be a Glumph nexus himself). Glumph allows magical energy to exist. Glumph makes luck a tangible thing rather than an exercise in statistics. Glumph multiplies the number of spatial dimensions; Glumph makes toast fall butter side up. Glumph is capricious, Glumph is unfathomable, Glumph Rawks. It is both a pirate, and a ninja. The problem stems from using the same word, "magic", for two (or more) totally different things. Or at least, that's one way of looking at it.

Re: Queer heroes Hell' date=' I'm [i']always[/i] interested in free game supplements. And I'm gay, so that goes at least double for a queer supplement. I'm having trouble picturing just what it would be, though. I think ideally, if you want to deal with "queer themes and superheroic gaming", I'd rather see the themes illustrated and explored implicitly through character and scenario designs, rather than explicitly discussed in some academic sort of way. I'm pretty sure I'd read it either way, though. What did you have in mind?

Re: Legion of Super-Pets

Re: Comic Book Physics The big problem with this, is players having different ideas about what sounds plausible. I thought I could totally get into a silver-age game if I set my mind to it, got into the spirit of it. Then I started (re-)reading some of the source material from the public library, and even my buttressed-and-reinforced suspension of disbelief plummeted screeching to the ground. I loved Barry Allen as a kid; now I literally couldn't get through a hardcover collection of it. Simply the fact that I'm the kind of geek who thinks too much about powers is going to cause some clashes with more casual, non-fannish players, I think (which could go either way - the fan accepting more goofiness, or less, than the non-fan). And I think plausibility might depend a lot on which era of comics the other fannish players are most familiar with, too. My big question is, how do a group of players + GM get to a consensus about these things before conflicts arise, without having played together for years? How do you communicate this stuff?

Re: [Totally fictional] A suicide note If I'd lived in a world where freak accidents demonstrably caused super-powers a ways back, my suicide-method-of-choice would have certainly been different. And almost certainly more lethal than the one I chose. Didn't Aberrant address the effects of stress-triggered Novas on those with major depression? IIRC, in that world, lots of suicidally depressed people chose bizarre methods because of that off chance. And more people went through with it. A dark side of that particular genre convention that I doubt we'll ever see addressed by Marvel or DC.

Re: Real world vs. Game world If I'm doing a fairly "realistic" game, the supers are gonna be government agents of one sort or another, anyway. If I'm doing a four-color game, I don't *want* the heroes to be bogged down with accounting details or fear of lawsuits (Why does everyone keep saying property damage by PCs Must Be Quashed At All Costs? It's totally in genre! And fun!), so I look for excuses. I guess I'd just handwave it if it comes up, by saying the government eventually foots the bill, as the cost of the strengthened Good Samaritan laws that allow vigilante superheros to work in the first place.

Re: Limitations and the Silver Age "Cold Iron" has no real life definition, so you have to decide for yourself what it means. Some games have it mean "cold forged" - ie only specially made, deliberately anti-faerie stuff, in practice. Some games have it mean a unique meteoric iron - even more rare; pretty much a kryptonite deal. In some, I guess, it could just mean any iron at a temperature below ambient. Faeries in folklore were repelled by iron, period (the "cold iron" thing started because of one line in a poem, iirc), so that might be more appropriate (and more hazardous). I think steel counted, since horseshoes were used to keep faeries away. I think bullets are usually made of lead, though (except steel-jacketed bullets?), so she probably wouldn't have much trouble with them.

Re: Limitations and the Silver Age Hadn't heard this story. Could you elaborate, please? I've just been reading the (Barry Allen) Flash Archive Edition hardbacks from my local library; I'd forgotten just how silly things got. Right from the start, he was saying things like "I'm going so fast gravity has no effect on me!"... as he was running down the side of a building. Or my favorite so far, "At super-speed I can detect the slightest differences in temperature! Wherever he went, there are traces of raised temperature in the objects he passed!" No more explanation than that; apparently super-speed includes IR Vision or something, and let him track better than a bloodhound.

Re: NPC: Cosmo, the Cosmic puppy ^.^ Hahaha that's awesome, repped when I can. I know players that'd try/want to kill it, though. I'd write him up differently, but I love the concept.

Re: How would you build a time/space Superphone? Exactly. I extrapolate a bit from this: every parallel universe (of the normal physical sort) was created this way (by travel to the past). Each can only be accessed from the universe which spawned it, or from those which it, itself spawned (that's an add-on, not extrapolation). There is one moving "present" shared by all, though of course the point in history varies from timeline to timeline. So there's a complicated network of parallel universes, all connecting, directly or indirectly, to an "original" universe, the one with the most history so far. Not an original setup, but I like how it lets you do "historical time travel" trips, or even trips to the (actually "a") future, without all that paradox PITA. I guess this could even justify a kind of precog: clairsentience of a connected timeline "further ahead" than the one you're in (unless you're in the original), but since the differences between 'lines are usually pretty big, and I don't like to cheat the players who spent points for it, I don't like PCs to have it. I allow retrocognition despite the Observer Effect by positing a vast Akasic (sp?) Memory type deal - all information is eternally stored; retrocogs aren't seeing (thus interacting with) the past, they're getting infodumps from the Cosmic Databank. (Sorry for the derail!) Argh.

Re: How would you build a time/space Superphone? Yikes. I think I'd chew my arm off before I let someone have that in a game (unless the "need to be a genius to really use it" thing translates to "this is just some fun fluff that the GM can and will clamp down on whenever it gets used anywhere near its actual potential"). My brain is spinning with all the cool, godlike things *I* would do with it. Back on topic, if you only use the "speed dial", I'd still use Mind Link. What kind of Mind Scan would you need to be able to target Telepathy on anyone with a cell phone, anywhere, anytime? That's a lotta points. Or is this Cyber-Telepathy dealie something completely different that I don't have the book for? If this is just fluff/color, used for pizza and keeping in touch when half the team is on a time jaunt, I'd just ignore that particular limitation on Transdimensional and plunk it on Radio trans/ceive. You get what you pay for, so you should only pay for what you get, benefits-wise. If it's as powerful as it looks, well, I might let you take it if you, the player, act as my abject slave for ten years first. But then, I hate time travel/reliable precog in a game. Hate, hate, HATE.

Re: How would you build a time/space Superphone? My first thought was Mind Link, but first, how exactly does the cell phone work? Can it call any other cell phone, or only other Time Phones? Assuming the latter, are all the Time Phones, umm, moving through time together (individual timelines broken up but congruent in some other dimension... if you call Jake up, then call him 5 minutes later, he'll have experienced five minutes even though he's in the Jurrassic and you're in the 18th century)? Or can you hear Jake screaming "Oh &^%$#!" then a sploorch noise, hang up, and call him back a minute earlier his time to warn him? Or something else entirely? I haven't watched Dr. Who since he was curly haired and wore a long long scarf.

Re: CHAMPIONS UNIVERSE II - What Do You Want To See? I'm going to throw in a vote for less new characters/teams/full-writeup-y bits, and more on society, customs, legal issues, and other sf extrapolation-oriented stuff. Ways that the not-quite-super-but-still-better-than-our tech (the manufacturable stuff) affects life. How the certain knowledge that Man Is Not Alone has affected religions, ideologies, etc. Mindrape Survivors self-help groups. How the tourist industry is dealing with Atlantis. The kinds of things that the latest She-Hulk series delved into, with the superhuman-oriented law office. There'll be tons of other books that are just as appropriate to put the write-ups; this is the book that should provide the context. I want to mine the ideas, I don't care about getting pre-crunched numbers and page space wasted telling me that the Secretary of DOSPA is darn good at crocheting. Broad strokes, and yeah, a de-emphasis on the U.S. It's the 21st century; there's a whole world right here now, not "out there". I realize I'm outvoted on here, but I had to try.

Re: A villian came up and bit me I know sometimes it's hard, but remember that as GM you don't have to play the character to his fullest potential. Okay, in optimum conditions he can wipe the floor with them, but 1) He might be stupider than you 2) He might easily be less combat-experienced than you (than you are at RPG combat, I mean). 3) As a player, you can have characters do things that battle-hardened veterans might balk at in real life - maybe this guy gets flustered a little, doesn't make instant, optimum decisions, maybe flinches or panics. 4) NPCs (and PCs) shouldn't always be played as if they know exactly what they can do and how their powers work - even experienced supers can have things radically change on them, and when no one really understands how you do what you do in the first place, it should be easy to justify some caution. 5) Most definitely, he shouldn't know exactly what the PCs can do! He's up against people who do impossible things; who's to say they can't pull some brand-new impossibility out of their, uh, capes? I make a big effort to sub-optimize the opponent NPCs; I just don't believe that everyone who gets powers becomes a battle-hardened ubertactician overnight. See how the combat is going, and emphasize or de-emphasize these kinds of things on the fly, to make the combat more fun. Categorically losing their very first fight probably isn't the best way to start a new campaign.

Re: Wwyd ???? (After questioning and presumeably eliminating the obvious "cheater" deals, like playing with time or immunity to all harm): Put off my answer for 30 or 40 years - or until it's worth it (disease, apocalypse, etc). "I'll get back to you on that, okay? Do you have a number or email address I'll be able to reach you at?" Since I don't believe in an afterlife, this life is the most precious resource I've got.

Re: Free Will I'm wondering if anyone's response would change if the mentalist's power was described as "Emotional influence: generating a tendency for good will towards all" rather than "control".

Re: WWYD if you could recieve ONE super power Dude. I'm not a villain til I get the dang power, if then - though you're right in that the part of me that wants *that* one is one of the darker (and, frankly, more sexual) bits. And I've already posted on here about how I'd probably be in the mob with a torch and pitchfork (or rather, way back from the mob with a sniper rifle) if I believed Charlie Xavier or anyone like him existed. It's a wish-fulfilment fantasy, though; I'm not really all that malevolent in real life. I'd really rather have that first one, if you're giving them out.

Re: WWYD if you could recieve ONE super power Iceman has "ONE super power", but he needs an EC to deal with the ramifications. If that means frameworks are fair game (tightly bound by a single concept, of course), I bet it'd change a lot of people's answers. My all-time #1 wished-for power is hard to do in Hero, and no fun for a game character anyway: The ability to psychically jump back in time at will to my earlier self and circumstances and play it all out differently, with my accumulated memories, as often as I want. Subjective immortality, 'precog' limited by the fact that every jump will alter what I remember about the last time through, the chance to explore every possible way of being me. With infinite subjective time and as much gambling winnings as I want, I expect at some point I'd start working on physical immortality too - but meanwhile I'd be content with a few subjective centuries bounded by the latter half of the twentieth century and as much of the twenty-first as I get before I'm too physically decrepit to have fun. If we're stuck with one Hero power (like I'd feel gypped), I'd be torn between teleportation with all the trimmings, full shapeshift, or mental transform IPE (sorry Deejmeister and Outsider).

Re: Ideas for the evil Mr. Smiley sought I don't think I could beat Lord Liaden's. Besides, I keep looking at the list of smilies right here and thinking of the possibilities... And that loyalty could be explained by

Re: Champions LARP You mean, like ?

Re: Attracting villians I so have to use this somehow.