transmetahuman

Re: One-Trick Pony Campaigns Just for the record, it's not an X-Men or even mutant campaign I'm thinking about. I probably should have used examples from the LSH, as well; Xanth Talents were as much of an inspiration, too. I agree, a lot of the appeal of this kind of game is figuring out how to use your one power most effectively - I'd assume most PCs would choose fairly versatile concepts. Of course I don't mean to limit things to a single Champions power; more a single special effect, and that more narrowly defined than most Champions elemental controls. Power skill will probably be ubiquitous; coming up with unthought-of uses is half the fun. What were some of the differences you noticed in the 1TP campaigns you played compared to more general supers? I'm not asking so much about character design; more how things worked out in play.

In the beginning (before secondary mutations, healing factors that somehow enhanced your senses, and nearly every telepath also having telekinesis &/or astral projection/clairvoyance), the X-Men were designed as one-trick ponies. Each was a normal person, with one specific "extra". Some mutant powers were more versatile than others (Iceman vs Cyclops or Angel), but for the most part each had to rely on teamwork to get done what needed to be done. I've read a lot on this board to discourage such concepts; the big one seems to be that lacking superhuman defenses will get you killed real fast when you don't have the X-Men's plot protection powers at work. On the other hand, people do seem to be playing X-Men based games, as well as Legion of Superheros games (another big herd of ponies). What are your experiences with such games? How do the characters stay alive without ubiquitous bulletproof spandex or combat luck? Are they fun to play, or do you quickly drop the campaigns for concepts that allow more versatility? What if powers were even more strictly held to concept (ie, no, you can't fly because you have a sonic scream, because that's just stupid; no, having an EB doesn't always justify having a FF)? What should a GM of such a game watch out for, what can he do to make it more fun?

Re: Ben 10 (again!) I think they'd be a perfect example of good time to waive the rules' injunction against making a Follower also a DNPC. They fulfill both functions, they do help him out a lot from what I've seen. I think it makes sense that they're both.

Re: Not quite a WWYCD: YWUA your PC... I don't have any current PCs (or even beloved old ones) to use in these threads, but I can pretty much guarantee I wouldn't take up super-heroing - any more than I'm currrently inclined to become a cop. I'm just not driven enough to risk life limb and sanity even *if* I was making a living from it. Maybe with a powerset on the order of Superman's... but, nah, even then I'd be more likely to give NASA a call and play space explorer. If my situation *was* based on a beloved character, I might go a little out of my way to not ruin his reputation or to help his dearest friends (on the assumption that we might be switching back soon), but I'd do my best to avoid risking our body. Certainly come clean about it to teammates but lay low from the public. And let the teammates know any OOC info I knew about his/their enemies and other problems. And if we don't switch back in a few months, I'd set up my own life and career. Until I made some close friends or got a lover, and the genre conventions/cosmic principles of the world inevitably forced them to die at the hands of a supervillain, giving me a more personal reason to be a crimefighter...

Re: Villianous/Heroic Powers It goes all the way back to Plato, with the story about the Ring of Gyges in The Republic. Probably something Tolkein had in mind when creating the One Ring, too, though its corrupting influence didn't use the same philosphical mechanism. Plato's ring gave invisibility, but the supposedly inevitable corruption came from the ability to do things anonymously, without risking getting caught - a luxury that invisible folks in superhero worlds don't really have. They didn't have fingerprint/DNA/footprint profiling back then, or he'd have probably used a different example. Now that we've got this internet thingie, our society is a living test of his argument.

Re: Characters that give you nightmares trying to design Ooh, ooh, whose was the second powerset she permanently stole, after Ms. Marvel's? Do you know offhand in which issue(s) of which book she went through the "manifest anything i ever absorbed" phase? My (usually quite tame and suppressed) power-hungry dark side just sat up and drooled; I wanna go look up the synopsis on uncannyxmen.net. Rogue is a problem even in GURPS 4th, which has an advantage/enhancement combo that might have been designed specifically for her. The problem is, it only steals powers, not physiological stuff or skills/memories. For the points you need to make her in either system, she ought to be more effective than the rest of the team put together (even when she's not effectively "the rest of the team put together"). On the other hand, the Mimic is actually a little easier to do in Hero, I think, and much much more expensive in GURPS.

Re: Who are the greatest (?) super villains? My gonads would like to vote for: 1) Seamus O'Grady from Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and 2) Lucy Diamond from D.E.B.S. My gonads have pretty juvenile taste in movies, yes. The rest of me has a taste for semi-sympathetic villains, with comprehensible motives and a lack of over-the-top mindless visciousness, but they're mostly covered up-thread pretty well already. I gotta mention one of my all-time favorites, though: *) The Mayor, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (tv series) Okay, none of these are from comics, but they all definitely qualify as super-villains.

Re: Special School - decent Teen Champions source material Cool, something to read while waiting for the PS 238 folks to put more freebies up. Thanks!

Re: Ravenswood Academy Yearbook Hrmm. Guess I made a bad assumption based on all the places online I've seen it done, then. Thanks for the warning. Alright, I'll say it might be illegal, but *I* wouldn't consider it unethical; not for something like this. Why are pics from model sites different, then?

Re: Call Captain Planet!

Re: Ravenswood Academy Yearbook When I read the posts asking where to find model pics (especially of average-looking folks), the first thing I thought of was myspace.com - profile sites like that have tons of pics of normal teens and twenty-somethings, and no (or very few) nudie shots to sort through. As long as you're using the pics for a limited-audience, unpublished work like this, I don't think it'd be illegal or unethical to use them (but I'm no copyright lawyer).

Re: Help, Rune Mystic Yeah, I saw it the first time; didn't get a chance to read it through. My impression was that it was just about crafting magic items. If a lot of what I said duplicates what's on there, I'm not really suprised. If you're implying plagiarism, I'm gonna have to take offense. It's not like there's a lot *else* that's been done in fiction with a generic rune caster.

Re: Help, Rune Mystic I might go with something like: Rune magic always involves putting a rune on the target of the effect; therefore it has severe limitations in that you need the target right there, and sitting still for being scribed upon. To balance that, rune magic is better at long-duration stuff (lots of 0 END Persistant or END only to activate), and maybe better at warding/enchanting structures, if you can put runes around the structure. It also kicks butt at creating permanent enchanted items. You probably need to 'learn' each rune seperately, but each rune (or combo of two runes, like in the verb/noun systems) gives access to a lot of related abilities. Maybe contradicting the warding stuff before, but I kinda see rune magic as only altering the thing inscribed. It can be used for traps, but not like D&D fire traps (effect springs out from the object/rune), more like "the wall is incredibly sticky" or "the sword is animated" stuff (which might be done with a triggered RKA aimed at the victim, but the *special effect* is that the magic is on the sword). Completely alternately, you might look at runes from the POV of their role as "things that are read" - triggered effects from reading; knowledge-based stuff. Just stuff off the top of my head. I don't have any of the HERO mystic books at all, so I don't know what direction they go with it.

Re: Queer heroes

Re: Queer heroes Thanks for the Gaylaxians reference, I'd never heard of them before. Might try to make it to the Atlanta con in '07. I don't know how serious you want the game to be; if I was doing it, I'd probably steer clear of Village People-esque stereotypes, and just have your normal variety of supers who happen to be gay. That doesn't help you much here, though, so I'll throw out some cheesy Village Superpeople types, too. I don't know any tribal self-classifications for lesbians besides riot grrrrls, so can't help much there. For the guys: leatherman, of course (batman/midnighter) drag queen, equally of course (sonic sounds good, why not?) bear (shapeshifter or bestial maybe?)... cub sidekick would be very appropriate here cowboy (laconic sharpshooter, maybe with blaster pistols) gay 'skinhead' (wolverine/juggernaut-type brawler?) twink (maybe tweeker-like speedster?) steroidal circuit party bodybuilder (brick, of course) radical faerie (mystic?) maybe an extreme body-mod enthusiast who got the opportunity to take it to cyborg levels. More serious advice would be to first make sure the normal super archetypes/team roles (brick, blaster, psi, etc) are filled, then pick themes and personalities after that. edit: whoops, just caught your second post. oh, well, i'll leave these up for entertainment value (maybe they'll spark ideas, too), and try to bring some more serious characters next time.

Re: Funny Hero Thread Oh, sweet jesus. If I could rep you five times for this, I would.

Re: Superheroes and Religion Well, obviously, it's because only god-fearing souls would actually try to help their fellow man, and all of us atheist types are evil. Eeeeeeevil.

Re: Evil Organizaitons They need you to register to use that link. Sorry, I'm on too many things as it is.

Re: What Comic Book Titles are you Buying (Not Reading, Buying) Buying: none. Due to recently finding a suprisingly large selection at my local public library, though, I've been re-/introducing myself to these in TPB: Ultimate X-Men (first 13 books - 78 issues! ) a few other scattered Ultimate universe books Astro City (4 books) Planetary (4 books) Transmetropolitan (tons of em, oddly enough) The Authority (just the 2nd book though - more engaging than I expected) Looks like there's a bunch of JLA & X-Men stuff to put on hold when I'm done with this crop, too, and I'll be combing the catalog for whatever else I can catch up on. Couldn't find any Top Ten, the other title I wanted to check out based on these boards. I stopped buying long ago from a combination of being poor, the crossover cons (and X-plosion of spinoff titles), and the way the tag-team writers were twisting my favorite characters to ridiculous, soap-opera levels of unrecognizability. I also pretty much hated the ongoing contest for More-Bada**-Than-The-Last-Guy in characters. Reading the synopses on uncannyxmen.net almost makes me want to never pick up an x-title again (except Ultimate, and I'm curious what Whedon's doing (did?) with his book). But I seem to like the iron age more than I thought I would, so long as there's some writer continuity. If I find myself with unallocated disposable income, I might start buying Ultimate X-Men/FF/Spider-Man, Planetary, and definitely Astro City so far. Gotta try to find that Thing series, too, according to whoever it is on these boards that keeps plugging it. And maybe the library will turn me on to some others, and pull me back in to comics after all.

Re: "Look, up in the sky! It's Super Saint!" Christian-themed heroes

Re: Silliy Silver Age Villian

Re: So that's what you think?

Re: "Look, up in the sky! It's Super Saint!" Christian-themed heroes I like my heroes heroic, too. They're the good guys, and they should act like it. I don't want to play in a game with selfish jerk "heroes"; I don't even want to read about them in comics. But there is no objective standard; no supernatural consequences for choosing the wrong hierarchy of values - if one character chooses to value selflessness above honor, or vice-versa, or defines "honor" in a way that our culture finds strange... the only consequences will be social. My only concern is that the PCs are likeable, can work together as a team, and have some plausible, heroic reason to want to risk their lives protecting the presumably innocent.

Re: "Look, up in the sky! It's Super Saint!" Christian-themed heroes I prefer agnostic worlds. I wouldn't let in a PC (or NPC) whose origin implied that one religion was the Truth, and I personally can't suspend my disbelief of those attempts to create cosmologies where "they're all pretty much right; they just differ in the details". So: no holy, unholy, angelic, saintly etc. characters; no Norse or Egyptian or Celtic or Aztec or (etc. etc.) gods; DEFINITELY no objective Good or Evil; nuthin. What the character believes his powers stem from is another matter, but I wouldn't let a player get blindsided by that and be made to feel his character is a fool. It's fine if that's what the player wants, though, and there are definitely NPCs like that. For one supernatural oriented campaign, I came up with a shiny new cosmology that allowed for/explained (and therefore limited the concepts of) ghosts, different afterlives, a not-intinsically-evil (but usually pretty nasty) kind of demon, occasional reincarnation, magic in general, alternate universes (but NO time travel or precog, my other inflexible character ban), telepathic abilities, dream realms, and probably a few things I'm forgetting. No creator, no objective good or evil. But every religious person in that world was just plain wrong, so I wouldn't want to use that for a generic superhero world. Better to just let things be unknowable. If someone just *has* to play a ghost or reincarnated spirit or something, I guess I might let em, so long as they don't know the big answers either.

Re: 1930s Superboy and the 21st Century LSH Thanks for the link; interesting to see the differences from the version I'm used to (it wasn't the Kents that found the ship, for instance). And "THE SKY - DARK AND FOREBODING!" just cracked me up for some reason.