beauxdeigh

Re: Is this Munchkinish?

Re: Is this Munchkinish? FH has a Scrying Mirror on p112. Clairsentience (Sight), Increased Range, Usable Simultaneously by up to 8 (and a few lims specific to a mirror). Pretty much how you'd postulated, SuperBlue. I'd go with it.

Re: Is this Munchkinish? That seems to be a good way to do it. I definitely would go with Clairsentience. It is exactly what you want. How to give everyone with LOS on the 'hole' the ability to see as well is the kicker. No book in front of me here, but Usable by Others seems the most plausible answer, but I really can't come up with any other options. EDIT: Anyone got either of the Fantasy Hero Grimoires? How do they handle scrying? Crystal Balls and the like? I'd definitely look at those resources for an example. Maybe even FH has an example. I'll look when I get home.

Re: Is this Munchkinish? Absolutely true, and, in fact, something I covered in the very next paragraph of my post. There are a lot of things you can do with Martial Arts that you cannot do with an EB. However, here's an easy solution if you just want to do Normal Damage (Martial, Basic and Offensive) Strikes through a 'wormhole': Of course that last limitation value can be debated, that's just my take. No, I don't know how much it would cost. That's what the book is for.

Re: Global Guardians - Champs by email (review) Hey, Worldmaker. I just wanted to let you know that I got your reply e-mail and have tried to respond this weekend. It seems the mailing lists are still down? The deal is this. Yes, we'd have to create some kind of template for every type of page (especially if the Database boys are going to be feeding data into them...that'll make things easier) but most of the style sheet work is done. I made up a Campaign Page template saturday morning, it took me about a half hour between chasing the toddler, weeding the yard and fetching for my pregnant wife. Also, since I don't know the structure of your website I've been hesitant to try to implement this (if SteveZilla wants to PM me), but we could create a master sheet (or sheets, actually) that can be imported to every page, much like the spinning UN symbol...but behind the scenes. I'll try to send that template to you again tonight when I get home. Else, I'll just attach it here.

Re: Is this Munchkinish? Yes, it would, and yes it would be 'munchkinism'. Martial Arts attacks all rely on STR of one sort or another, you'd at least have to have to give the same Naked Advantages to it. However, I'm really with Blue on this one. This is really a question of "What's the effect?" The effect is that she can strike people at range without passing through the intervening space. That's an Indirect EB. Buy the EB up to the max dice thrown by your Martial Art strikes and have a party. If that's the only effect you want. Now, I don't have my book in front of me, but a case might be made for Indirect Stretching (however that would be bought). I like this more, because you can do some of the tricks only allowed with Martial Arts - like 'Target Falls' and the NND attacks and the modifications to your OCV and DCV. I also like it because the effect could be neutralized by a standard block and might be considered Hand To Hand combat as opposed to Ranged. Trying to duplicate all of this with some kind of Wormhole Martial Arts Multipower with appropriate limitations and skill levels would be an intersting challenge (...wheels turning...) but the simplicity of the Stretching solution is just cleaner. I don't know if it's 'right' or the most 'legal', though. (Maybe if you make her buy Indirect on her STR as well as the Stretching...) In the end, she's an NPC in a game you're running. Do what you want. ooh look...post 100! That only took me 16 months. At this rate I'll reach 1000 posts by the Summer of 2016.

Re: Global Guardians - Champs by email (review)

Re: New powers help

Re: Global Guardians - Champs by email (review) Hmmm...sanskrit, huh? Sorry. I work at a place where I have to constantly translate 'High-Order Geek' to 'Common Geek', and I think that's what I'm used to. Let me see if I can translate the 'Common Geek' to English. I assume that everytime you upload a new character to the GGU site, you use an existing template of some type and just fill in the blanks for the characteristics, powers, disadvantages, etc. That wouldn't change. How the actual page looks in Internet Explorer (et.al.) wouldn't change. What would change is the text spaghetti behind the pretty colors that make it look the way it does. Most importantly, there would be whole lot less of it. Less of that stuff means less data being sent from your host server every time that page is requested by someone viewing the site, so any bandwidth costs you have could go down. It also means the amount of server space needed to store that page could go down. Everything you do to reduce the amount of data per page saves you on the overhead cost for running the game. You want to defray the cost of running the GGU, this and what Super Squirrel is talking about will help immensely. For example, right now, the Achilles character sheet (chosen because it was the first one in the list) is 105k...and that's before you load either of the images on the page. That's huge. I've visited that page three times in the last two days, that's more than .3MB of your monthly bandwidth allowance gone, not including the images. Yikes. Heck, when I get home, I'll redo the Achilles sheet with HTML and CSS and send it to you, so you can see how it works for you. Addendum: I see Squirrel is already getting his 'nuts' in order. I've got a few years of HTML/CSS and ASP work under my belt guys, if you need any of that kind of help.

Re: Naked Advantage Question I think the onyl legal way to do this is by buying Personal Immunity on the Multipower reserve and applying the advantage to every slot. However, I suppose you could just pay X points outside the MP for personal immunity on up to (X * 4) Active points of EB...but I sure as hell wouldn't allow it.

Re: Global Guardians - Champs by email (review) Worldmaker, one thing you could do right now to shrink the byte size of every character sheet is apply the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It would remove the need for every single font tag and color definition you're using and replace them with a call to a single short text file. Most current HTML books have information about them, and there are plenty of resources on the web about them. For example, the tags <b><font face="Arial" style="font-size: 9pt" color="#FF0000"> appears 140 times in the Achilles character sheet source, each with corresponding </font></b> tags...all of these would be replaced by one single line with the right CSS\: td {color: #F00; font-size: 9pt; font-weight: bold; font-family: arial, sans-serif;} It'd be a bit of work, but I think you'd appreciate the results. If the pages are smaller in bytes, that means less storage and less bandwidth and you end up saving money. Better still if all the characters were in a database and they were loaded by using an active server page, but I think Squirrel has that more or less covered.

Global Guardians - Champs by email (review) I think this topic has been done to death (and has even dredged up a little bad history, yuck), but I was a player in the GGU pre-reboot and have lurked the admin board since. No chat list, thanks, NGD is enough for me. So, I feel I could put in yet another perspective. That, and I need to pad my post count. In November of 2001 I submitted a character for the GGU. I spent a lot of time reading and understanding the developed material. I read the entire timeline, and most of the descriptive history, and all of the house rules. I looked over the existing characters and subscribed to the (then Yahoo) chat and question lists. I even posted a few times to each (at about the same rate as here). All my research and development paid off, my character was accepted to the (then) universal lurker list. In fact, my audit came back only 10 days after the submission. I had a couple of problems with some of the changes required by the audit, and it took another couple of weeks of occasional negotiating to get a character I was happy with, but the process then was surprisingly fast. Yet, it wasn't easy. WM's reputation, you see, had preceded him. I'd read some of the stories. I went through the chat list archives. I knew that if I caught him on a bad day, he could be a bear. Also, the (paraphrased) attitude of 'We have plenty of players, if you don't like what we say or do go pound sand' didn't help either. So, looking back at my archives, every e-mail I sent was overly ...what's the word I'm looking for... cautious. I did my best to explain in as polite terms as I could muster with fine detail why I was opposed to those changes I wasn't thrilled about. Maybe it helped, as WM was extremely open to debate, and I was soon on the lurker list and waiting. I started my first game the following January (2002). The first GM for that game lasted into March, when he disappeared or something, and our second GM took over. I was happy to have the GM pool there at that point, because it meant a game wasn't going to drop into limbo too readily, and the embassy format made the GM shift a bit easier. [As a side note here I'd like to point out that disappearing GMs were not our only problem. We had several players go AWOL, too. I'd experienced this before in other PBEM games I'd been involved with (I was even susceptible to it myself). However, the embassy structure and single lurker list made filling those gaps quick and easy. I'm not so sure how this handles now. The call for a fresh submission means a whole new audit process, and that takes time. No 'lurker list' to pull from.] GM #2 lasted all the way into early May, posting erratically at best, at which point GM #3 appeared. Finally the game solidified. It was an excellent game, we got to delve into our characters and their relationships began to form... and then in September the decision to jump forward four years was made (I forget why) and everyone got reshuffled to a new embassy game. The new game started up about a month later, in October. New team, whole new bunch of players, different GM. The new game rolled along fairly well. Where the last group had played down the whole pseudo-military aspect, the next group was more into it. I and my character adjusted. Different group, different feel. I didn't get as much interaction with my teammates. I think the focus for character development shifted to personal fiction and optional 'homeowrk' assignments at that point, and I think the inter-team relationships suffered a bit because of it, but a lot of good reading was available. I really enjoyed the fiction posted by the player of 'Los Hermanos' (a duplicator of epic porportions). This incarnation went for about a year (to October 2003) and then the so-called 'reboot' occurred. After that I decided I'd had enough. Not a lot of character development went on in that last year with my PC, as such I didn't have any desire to re-write him to fit into the new universe. A few of the member's whose work I enjoyed had decided to move on. Finally, in a game world that large, it was easy to get lost in between the big-time contributors unless you put in the same kind of work, and I didn't have that kind of luxury time available. I tried to make my posts quality and initiate PC dialogue, but most of it was short-lived at best, or outright ignored at worst. I originally signed up to the GGU because of the perceived structure that existed. It seemed like it was designed to handle the regular problems that a PBEM game suffers from. On the surface it all looked very stable and consistent. My experience, however, was very different. Nature, abhoring the vaccuum, created whole new stability problems to replace the ones that were well accounted for. Maybe I had the bad luck of choosing that time to get involved, but I'd like to wait a full year and see. Still, as I wrote at the beginning of this rambling mess, I've stayed subscribed to the admin list for the game world. A bunch of interesting campaigns have sped by, and there have been a couple of times I've been tempted. The reason why I haven't submitted is primarily due to lack of motivation, for the most part driven by the nagging doubt that the problems still remain. Anyway, that's my experience with the GGU. Take it for what it's worth. That and a fiver will get you a latte at Starbucks.

Re: Can Worldbeaters beat the military? And without so much as a "By the Dark Powers, I summon thee..." or "Arise from the nether pages, foul thread..." or even an "Ancient Spirits of Eeevil, Transform this decayed thread, to THREAD-RA, the Ever LIVING AHAHAHAHAHA!" Thread Necormancy has lost all of it's style, I tell you!

Re: Western Champion Crusader And that is type of story I would be looking for as an origin. It answers the Prime Question: What Makes This Character a Hero? It's the old story of Revenant from Champions III. You can pile all the points together that you want, and it will do all this cool sh*t, but all you've told me is the what. If you can't answer the who and why then you don't have a character, you just have a pile of points. I do have to say, JmOz, that this certianly isn't meant as any kind of insult to you. Your work is always pretty damn good, even here I can see where you are going with the character's abilities. I'm just of the camp that a sound background makes defining those abilities and skills a lot easier, not to mention more focused. You won't waste points on, say, a lariat if you don't have any reason why he'd learn that in his history. As for your other Western stars...you do have an Annie Oakley clone in there, doncha?

Re: Western Champion Crusader

Re: Welcome To The New Dark Champions Board! Excellent! Hey, Steve (or Ben or Dan), there are a few threads over on the Champions Forum, that would be better suited to this forum. Perhaps it would be a good idea to move these to "seed" the new forum? Like this one for example? Just a thought.

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER It's interesting. I've already died and tormented enough creatures to be resurrected (though haunting lemming was tempting) now I'm going through the Newbie Primer. Maybe I'll figure out how not to get killed (and how to pick some pocketses!)

Re: Longest Running Thread EVER You know it's going to be a bad day of fighting when... "You strap your Fists to your back and head out for some adventure."

Re: Heros of the Earth No problem, it's good to feel the Hero System synapses firing again.

Re: Heros of the Earth I will do my best. My original thought was much the same as Blue's, since I've done this very thing to simulate The Spot, punching Spidey through his portals. However, that really isn't the case here. These arms you are pulling up aren't the character's arms. As a result, I'd rule out stretching. Instead, I'd go for a Multipower: Arms from the Earth with slots for Punching _d6 EB, Grabbing _ def _d6 Entangle, and Hands at a Distance __ STR TK. You can put Indirect on the whole Multipower if you want, as well as add any limitations like, maybe, "must be in contact with surface limbs spring forth from", "effect reduced by range from surface"...etc. I would also consider adding a 'Takes no damge' adder to the Entangle limited to 'only from the PC's attacks'...defining it as "Squeezing" grabbed characters (EB), or taking their trapped foci (TK). Yeah, Tunneling is the obvious first choice, and really the best and most flexible. My next thought was, again, the same as Blue's. Given the appropriate Life Support, Desolid (only through earth, does not protect from damage) and additional Running (only while desolid), does efectively the same thing. Unless your PC would never actualy stay underground, I wouldn't do the Teleport. Yeah, this is Flight with some appropriate limitations, since a brick or blaster could possibly come along and knock your post out from under you. (And should and will.) That's all I got without a book. Hope it helps.

Re: Superassassins? I've had this group kicking around in the back of my head half written for quite a while now that you might want to pillage for some ideas. It, too, is an assassin team. I went with a special twist however. Y'see, I'm a big fan of the Batman rogues gallery type villians, and, therefore, love to use themes in my villains and villain groups. This group is no different. Six Members, color based names. Always kill with a weapon: modified revolver, special knife, trick rope, etc. Victim is always slain in certain places: Dining rooms, billiard halls, music conservatories, etc. Always refer to their current victim as "Mr. (or Mrs.) Boddy". And that should give it away. My assassin team is called CLUE. Much like the Riddler or the Royal Flush Gang they have a certian modus operandi, but they're still very dangerous. And they wouldn't have a problem going after a Superhero. Of course, the notes I have about them are at home, so I can't give much detail. Maybe later. However, a couple of points I do remember. I didn't worry too much about full frontal assault capabilities. As assassins, they're capable of fighting, but they mostly attack from shadow and surprise. I also set up the structure so that only one member on any given hit was the "trigger man" while some of the other members acted as support (get away transportation, intervene if something goes wrong, act as a distraction, etc.). I wanted them to stand out from your regular super villain team, and the usual "...and we're all here to kill you, Arachno-Man!"

Re: Combined Attack Not normally, no. But, if you're doing the Power Rangers type of mega weapon, it's going to have limitations on it already. Like "Only Succors the Red Rangers 'Mega Blaster' power" and "Only while all other Rangers are doing the same" , Adding the limitation: "Can only Succor the Red Ranger's Mega Blaster once (at standard effect)" isn't that hard to imagine. Besdies, it should be limited by number of uses anyway (END Reserve or Charges). This is usually a one time, 'finishing move' type of power. They don't go clearing the battle field with it. I know, I know. It's the old question: If the 'Blazing Sword' can take out any monster threatening Voltron's world, why doesn't the damn robot 'form' that thing right away instead of dancing around it for 10 to 15 minutes? Easy. They have to follow the plot and genre. Roger Rabbit couldn't escape the handcuffs until it funny to do so. So, the Power Rangers can't blast the nasty monster with their mega-weapon until they've proven they can't beat it any other way. It's not efficient, but it's dramatic. Which is really the point of playing these games, creating moments for your characters to shine, especially through the darkest of circumstances and direst of struggles. Pardon me, this answer has gone off tangentially into the rant zone. This is not to be taken personally by anyone, just me kvetching.

Re: Combined Attack That was me asking the same question a couple of weeks ago. Glad to have more comments on this, though. I think the best answer presented is using Succor. Still hammering out the details.

Re: Help with a construct: several characters -> one mega power. I haven't signed up for anything as yet. I just thought translating a regularly half-hour show (that's mostly fighting) into a 3-4 hour Con game would be fun to do, and hopefully fun to play. Especially if I get the feel of the genre right...which means I've had to subject myself to a bit more Power Rangers than I normally would watch. Eek.

Re: The Succor Solution Using Succor to boost one member's attack is another really good idea. I think it may be even with the UBO solution above. JMcL63, I understand your concerns, but in the interest of full disclosure, the source of this idea is the various Power Rangers tv series, and, in the show, whenever the Rangers join their weapons together, they're pretty much using stock footage. So, yes, the same member would be the "trigger man" a full 99.9% of the time, even though it's a team effort kind of thing. Good suggestion from LL and Dust Raven. More solutions always welcome! Hooray for thread necromancy!