transmetahuman

Re: Is MultiForm Broken?

Re: Elementals Sourcebook?

Re: Elementals Sourcebook? Do you happen to know whether the TPB collection available on Amazon (well, Amazon-associated sellers) collects every issue? I vaguely remember a publisher change or something...

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain? Tried (and failed) to find Citadel on the CU Villains list - was he from a different edition or something? Which book?

Re: Elementals Sourcebook? Haha, yeah.... more so than those other two. Loved the Elementals.

Re: Voidwarp Fun Ah, I thought you were trying to eliminate the attack roll. And I'm not up on Triggers anyway; I could be totally off. I seem to remember Steve suggesting some kind of Trigger build to replace Damage Shield altogether, too, which suggests it could be used to eliminate the attack roll somehow. But I'd still prefer the DS build.

Re: Voidwarp Fun I don't have my books handy, but I don't think a Trigger can target someone like that. I'd use a Damage Shield instead.

Re: Brainstorming a mystical superhero mansion and the people in it. You might find lots of ideas in one of these threads: [thread=10457]Constructing a mage's mansion - Nov 23rd, '03[/thread] [thread=14104]Mansion Plans Wanted - Feb 22nd, '04[/thread] [thread=14352]Avengers Mansion San Francisco - Feb 28th, '04[/thread] [thread=17962]A Mage's Mansion - Jun 6th, '04[/thread] [thread=57981]Brainstorming a mystical superhero mansion - Jul 29th, '07[/thread] [thread=58140]Brainstorming a mystical superhero mansion, version 2.0 - Aug 5th, '07[/thread] [thread=58600]Brainstorming a superhero team's staff, liaisons, and guests - Aug 23rd, '07[/thread]

Re: [Campaign Log..kinda]Small Wonders Ahhhh! Ahhhh! Get it out of my brain!

Re: [Campaign Log..kinda]Small Wonders "Must spread rep" yada yada. Thanks for taking the time for this, I'm really looking forward to reading more.

Re: Gestalt Now Available In Color Waiting for the B&W print version to make its way to my FLGS. GURPS Supers made me realize how little I like .pdfs of gaming books, even though I can spend half my day reading stuff online otherwise. And I'm just not enamored enough of color to shell out the extra $30. I thought it was funny-weird that the buy-button for the color version showed up on the Blackwyrm site before the buy-button for the B&W, though. The gods really do like to tease me, it seems.

Re: Heroes

Re: [Character] Riot (II), Revised As far as the too-young savant stuff goes, well, he's a duplicator. He *might* have had one dupe studying one thing while another studied another while another slept while another made pie... etc. With GM permission, as the saying goes, to let the combined form collate all the knowledge from each dupe. I actually expected that to crop up as his solution when I got to the part about him missing sleep and getting overwhelmed by his workload in the description.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Errr... ewww. Dude. Shouldn't that be "That had better not be a metaphor"?

Re: Build Question: Alethiometer I have; at least the latter two. What stuck in my head were the times it told Lyra what she "should" be doing - we learn later that there is sapience involved behind the answers. For this reason, I'd probably model it as the mother of all Organization Contacts - though I might add a 10-point Computer Link and some Transdimensional Precognitive Clairsentience in on top of that. Actually, I'd never stat it because I'd never, ever let a PC both have one and be trained in its use. IIRC, it could tell you anything at all, with absolute accuracy, including what would inevitably happen - the only reason Lyra wasn't omniscient was that she rarely asked the questions that I would have asked in her situation.

Re: Heroes I don't have enough faith in the writers to believe that they can come up with a structure that will explain Basically, sometimes things are changed because of foreknowledge, other things are unalterable, still others are self-fulfilling prophecies. People whose memories should be altered by having their past change are immune because of PC status (where is Future Hiro going to be, when Young Hiro reaches that point in normal time? Fifty bucks says they don't address it)... It's the most comic-booky aspect of the show. Anyone who's followed my posts know I hate time travel and precog in games, and I've got good game reasons for it - but I also hate that stuff, and anything that smacks of a plot being "fated", in stories. I think it's hackneyed, unsatisfying, and it actually undermines any heroism or *any* of the choices being made. I'd much rather all the unlikely coincidences were just coincidences, than some stupid fate thing going on.

Re: Heroes I'm a total sucker for "people with powers" stories. I think the writers made a lot of mistakes, some of them really bad. I agree with several of Balabanto's points. I really wish the guy who'd been lucky enough to be the one in charge of this concept was at least someone who'd glanced at comic books before, if only to avoid storylines and problem areas (e.g. defining the limitations of time travel & prophecy, instead of changing them every time the plot needs it, or the rehashes of that we comics readers & sci-fi fans have seen umpteen times. Why couldn't one of our own have gotten the show about superpowers named "Heroes", dangit!? But the 4400 (for instance) is worse on almost all counts, I can't even watch that anymore. Heroes has some really great moments, and characters that I enjoy watching. It's definitely not a superheroes show; maybe more an exploration of the different paths people take when confronted with the opportunity for heroism - and I'm fine with that. I'm hoping the writers will learn from some of their mistakes, and I'll definitely be watching it.

Re: Mental Sense I was going to object to the need for LOS, thinking about invisible mentalists and those N-Ray tunnelers, but it's written right there under Mental Awareness. I would let it work on someone behind you, as per the discussion of LOS, and of course exotic targeting senses of your own will affect your LOS.

Re: Would Marvel/DC Sue?

Re: Would Marvel/DC Sue? Yeah, totally a non-issue for most campaigns, and if it comes up I'll probably just assume that, though Marvel, DC, etc. do exist and did put out comics characters, their characters just happened to use different names than the ones me or my players want to use. Problem solved. It wasn't for a traditional crimefighters-in-spandex game, anyway - I'd think that would lead to some weird self-consciousness issues, not to mention severe camp at times. An existing history of comicbook supers probably works best in worlds where real supers have existed since at least the Golden Age ("The comics are imitating us, not vice-versa"), or worlds where supers don't go that route at all. This one is more of a cross between Gestalt, Willingham's Elementals, and Aberrant-without-the-rust-or-angst. More "demigods getting caught up in stuff" than "I want to fight crime, but I don't want to be a cop like normal people who want to fight crime" (absolutely no offense intended towards traditional supers, which I like too). I think some comicbook elements would be unavoidable for these guys, and there will be "code-names" for most, but the world's Marvel and DC would have a hell of a time even proving that they could be considered "super-heroes". It led to some interesting speculation about comics in more traditional supers worlds, though.

Re: Buffy-style Slayer and friends in Hero question

Re: Would Marvel/DC Sue? Interesting. The WWTBAS info is definitely relevant - but was NBC just going to extremes to cover its ass, or could there really have been legal trouble? This thread mainly came about because of my personal sense that most of the good names are taken, the list of old characters in Marvel and DC get more and more comprehensive, and truly original names seem to just get sillier and sillier (I think especially with homage characters/universes). Of course YMMV on that. But if I want a campaign where the players can freely use already-"taken" names, I'd like some ideas about how much things would need to diverge from our timeline. I mean, "cannonball" is a word in the dictionary; Marvel can't own it. If DC (or the real supers in this supposed campaign) came up with a Cannonball who was a short fat female swimmer/diver with water shockwave powers - nothing like the southern mutant with all the siblings except the name - what could Marvel really do? Obviously both companies can have a Hercules, Zeus, Odin, etc. Just as obviously, names that aren't words (Spider-Man, She-Hulk) would cross the line. But can a company actually own the use of the word "hulk" or "flash", or just own the use in particular contexts, in conjunction with specific imagery?

I've been thinking about campaigns where supers are recent phenomena, and history diverges when they show up. Also how "all the good names are taken" by Marvel, DC, etc. Supposing supers do co-exist with our major comics companies, I'd assume that most would know better than to take a popular, well-known fictional super's name like Superman or Batman - those that did would be soundly mocked and the press/public might even refuse to use the name the real person chose, coming up with something else. But what about the less well-known characters? Especially the ones whose names were taken from even earlier stories or myths? If someone innocently calls himself Goliath, or Cyclops, or Medusa - what would Marvel do? If the super has a secret ID, what could Marvel do? Would it make a difference whether or not the powersets are similar? I'm going to assume the idea of sponsoring the hero as a "real life" version of the fictional one won't often work - either the corporation requires more control or the super himself is uninterested. And of course there are the villains (can you imagine a dangerous meta holding a bankful of hostages, when one of them geeks out about how "he" was defeated by Captain America a hundred issues ago? And was shown to be gay when the character was revived last year?). Would the comics companies just drop the characters with the same name? Change the fictional characters' names? Try to sue? Ignore the whole thing? Thoughts?

Re: Sanctuary.....Anyone Use It ?

Re: Rant? Speed in Hero I haven't read the whole thread, so forgive me if this has been brought up already. I think there's a very obvious reason for SPD creep in characters, and why characters that "should" have normal-human speeds don't. The difference between SPD 2 and SPD 4 is huge compared to the difference between SPD 5 and SPD 7. If your PCs are clustered around the low end of the scale, the fast guys will be getting a lot more relative screen time than in a group clustered around SPDs 5-7. It ain't fun for a slower character to sit out most of the game because the other guys are getting 3 actions to his 2, or 2 to his 1. If I was designing HERO from scratch, with a time machine, I'd make "normal" SPD be 5 or even 10 (with a 24 segment turn), just so those first few increases weren't so disproportionately effective. Yeah, it'd mean all kinds of adjustments to movement and whatnot; I'm not advocating it now. But people shouldn't be surprised by SPD creep, and IMO shouldn't worry too much about comparison to normals when lowering the range can make the game measurably less fun for the slowpokes.