Lord Mhoram

Re: I made the GM cry.... Man, am I lucky. My first Champions GM was a control freak like that, with pet NPCs (and PCs) and railroaded plots. Ever since then, I have had great luck. Of the 5 GMs I've had since only one was bad, and he just didn't show up half the time. With no warning. The other 4 have been wonderful. Of course I married the best one.

Re: What is a Superhero to you? You're showing some serious geekitude there.

Re: What genre is Champions really about?

Re: What is a Superhero to you?

Re: I made the GM cry.... The tone is fairly correct. but the villian is paranoid/arrogent enough to psy surgery his goons, and we are starting young supers on our first mission. So the statement fits from the internal storyline. It's not the GM who would get revenge for the players screwing up his plot, it is the arrogent villian trying to get revenge on the starting teen supers for destroying his master plan. The GM is not a retributive type, but he villian seems to be.

Re: I made the GM cry.... He does drop by from time to time, as a lurker. And I fully expect there to be further repurcussions from this. OOC we all figure the team just picked up a new hunted for free. Part of what made it so cool, is I think that the mindwipe thing was sort of thrown in there for color to keep the team telepath from getting too much info, and I just sort of keyed on that. And we had done the major portion of the plot. We had stopped the first big distro of the drug. Finding out how it was distributed and stopping it was a secondary adventure. For those that remember me posting him, this is the group with Terminal Velocity.

Our new teen superteam has been invistigating a new drug ring. New designer drug, new cartel. Our team telepath did a scan on one of the thugs we captured. Got the info on where it was made (which confirmed what we suspected by normal investigative means). After about 8 or 9 phases of her looking through his mind, his memories go black. She can go back beyond a month and a half (about the time he started with this new cartel) and they come back. After a successful KS mental powers roll, she relealized that this was a "erase memory" trigger psychic surgeried into the guy by his boss, who had also hit him with a mental transform of total loyalty- he had never done drug deals before (mostly muscle) and had a brother who was destroyed by drugs, and avoided it, and here he is doing work for drug stuff. So the head of the bad guys is a mentalist who does psychic surgery on his underlings, to make them loyal and have a memory wipe of the time they were with him if they get mentally scanned. So as we were planning to do a recon on the drug making site - situated inside a major chemical company.. a few bad people were making the drugs on the side on the graveyard shift... and trying to decide what to do about the gang I said "Well, we could just scan every employee going in on graveyard and the failsafe will hit, and they lose the last month and a half, and they guy looses his entire cartel. It will just return them to the state before they were mindcontrolled into being criminals" The GMs responce to which was to theatrically bury his face in his hands. He said he figured we would do something a bit off the wall, but not that far off. So I got us an XP for a creative solution.

Re: Reconciling Manga & Batman He had chi but more in the real world sense then a wild wuxia sense. He also had a lot of find weakness... to point that he could punch through intertron. And running by the old AC DC to Hero conversion, and the first edition legion book for the DC heroes game KK had an 8 or 9 speed (I don't recall) damage in the 20-24 range and a CV int the high teens, low twenties range. I still remember when Blackcat (the PC that is my avatar) hit those kind of numbers after 10 years or so in play, as she was modeled after KK to some extent. As to the orignal question, the way I handled such things in my game.. "regular" chi which could do superhuman things but still be in the sortof "normal human" template - targeting hearing, extra damage increased perception anyone could do with training - You could see Cap, Bats, Shiva, Badger do these sort of things. The hover in the air, shooting energy blasts out of the hands over the top thing was also chi - but only from people who are reincarnated (not everyone was) and so they had lifetime after lifetime to develope thier chi and thus it was much more superhuman and obvious. Not a solution that would neccisarily work in other games but it did in mine. And KK could take down either one (Bats or Goku).

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Actually the refernces to Teresa and the love story had been from a drift to Donaldson in general. Those are reference to Mordant's Need. The Gap doesn't really have a love story. There is a lot of umm... shall I say sweaty people, but not much love- lots of hate and anger tied up in the previously mentioned act, but no love. Be warned the first book - The Real Story - is one of the most brutal books I have ever read, and is actually just an expanded novella that leads into the rest of the series. Things pick up after that, and get very intense and really really cool.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... True, although Teresa was possibly more broken than any of his other protagonists. Totall passivity to the point you don't believe you really exist. Plus I just like the love story in those books.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it...

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... On direct topic, I have been re-reading the Gap series by Stephen R Donaldson. Oh man, I had forgotten how good these things are. The politics in the Martin books seem almost kindergardenish compared to the backstabbing and manuevering going on in this series. The books can be brutal, but they are amazing. I've started rereading all the Donaldson stuff leading up to the new Covenant book due out middle october. One of the things I love about Donaldson, is that his charcters go from helplessness into power. And the helplessness is usually some form of being broken (Leprosy, being abused, having no self image). So every main character is a story of self discory and discovery of power and growth- and he doesn't use the "innocent just starting out in the world" cliche to do it. Given that means some pretty horrible things happen to those characters in the beginning (or just before the story starts) but, oh man where they end up is great. From someone broken to world striding hero. And as counterpoint most of his books have a character that falls into the "so noble it makes you eyes hurt to look at them" kind of character. My namesake is one, Min Donner is another. So we know that SRD isn's just about brutality and nastiness, he has the noble people there as well, just never the heroes (well until the end of the books). And yeah, I love the internal monologues and psychodrama too.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... I think what happened is that his editors were vitims of his success and didn't have the guts (or authority) to reign him back. A really good (or even mediocre) editor from books 7 on would have been fabulous. I've been told by people who read the later books that the last one got better on that front. So when I mention Martin and Jordan in the same breath, I apologize to Martin, the only thing there was waiting for the next book, and / or the series to be finished.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... Yeah. I finished the Game of Thrones and started the second book, and decided not to read anymore until the series is actually finished (after having been burned by Jordan). And GoT was one of the best fantasy books I have read in a long time. I'm also waiting for Turtledove to finish "The Darkness Saga", but the end is in sight there.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... The sequel is as good (if not better) than the first. Part of the fun in Hyperion is figuring out which other writer's styles each of the pilgim's tales are told in. Some are very obvious, others are not so.

Re: Group Formation Schticks For my college game it was mostly just location. I ran a series of semi-solo bits with each character paired with one of the others, then ran the first full team run, and because they had all already met most of the others, a loose team formed. For my Mystic Masters game they were all recruited for a specific mission by the benefactor and ended up staying together. In my JLA-esque game they will all be recruited or volunteer for the worlds pre-eminent superteam, for which there will be a semi-open call.

Re: Selling people on Hero system when they're already inclined against it...? This whole discussion is one I'm thankfully immune to. Our group plays HERO. Pretty much exclusively. I've been a HERO-ite for 19 years; my wife has 22 under her belt, my players have 20, 19 and 15 years with the system, and for eveyone it is thier system of choice. When we need a player, and put up the ad in the local GS we ask for HERO players. So our only discussion are which genre to run.

Re: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the HEROic Unbeliever Whoops. It's a fairly obvious one, but that was stupid of me to forget. http://www.stephenrdonaldson.com/ It's on the botton right.

Re: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the HEROic Unbeliever Don't have much help here. Never did much in the way of direct conversion. I had the equivalent of Haruchai and his Giants in my last FH game, and am keeping somthing very like his giants in my next one, but other than that. The whole thing in doing the land isn't the mechanics but the feel of the thing. Also somewhat off topic, but commenting nonetheless for those that might be interested- Due in October The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - The Runes of the Earth. The prologue is posted on his website.

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord I would assume you meant Morrison. Waid took after that, and toned down the "Batgod" aspect of the character. He was actually irritated that bats figured out every plan, and in his first story arc, which involved physical laws going haywire and people and things disappearing, had the classic "parlor scene" where Bats was about to explain what was wrong and how to fix it (to flash and GL IIRC) and just as he says something like "... and what is wrong is..." and disappears, just so Bats couldn't save the day. Morrison was the champion of the Batgod. Waid used it, because he didn't want to break tone from the previous writer that much.

Re: Galactic Champs and time travel

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord Doing a quick web search it is Amazing Spiderman 269 and 270 apparently.

Re: Spiderman Vs. Firelord Using gamespeak, I also think spidey's player used a bunch of Autofire maybe penetrating attacks, and fasttalked the GM into letting him push his speed. And I loved it. I thought it was a great story. The whole running to the FF, then the Avengers, then the X men trying for help and they all not being therer. They get back get the message and respond "Oh crap we have to find Spider-man before Firelord kills him" and they all show up at the same time, just as Spidey finished off Firelord and collapses from exhaustion. The look of incrudelousness on thier faces made an problems of suspension of disbelief moot.

Re: Use of Mutants and Masterminds

Re: [eBay] 4th Edition HERO, Rifts and other RPGs Like New The 4th ed Ninja hero would be worth it just for the Valhalla and Shinobiyama.