Lord Mhoram

Lets see..... My two primary Champs characters: Ballistic - A supermage that used to be a supersuit ex cop (don't ask). He'd like it at first glance, because of the "clean" aspect mentioned, but as days wore on, he would become more and more frustrated with the lack of personal choice on things. He'd want to drive his own car. He was cop to help things become safe, but he knew what was too far. He would consider MC too far. Black Cat - A classic philosophy spoutin, mystic powers martial artist. She would like it most of the time. She is a very self controlled and centered person. She could be very comfortable there, with the caviat that there is somewhere nearby that one could escape the control and let one's hair down. She would think, as a city fine- as a country or world, way too much.

My best bit from champions was something I GMed. It is rather long and convoluted, so bear with me. I ran a modified combination of the Time master adventure from Champs presents (1 or 2) and the Horror world from Champs in 3-D. Begin with the PCs having to fight problems from outside time, each appearing with a very extravagently described energy field around them (and the sound effect "shhhvvvvrrt"). One of the fights, they fight Thor, who chooses one member of the team, the team supermage, and goes after him, calling him a coward, a traitor to his race and other things. Everyone is perplexed. They find the time thing, go back in time, stop the bad guy and come home. To horror world. So they are fighting to find out what happened and why this is the way it is, while trying to stay sane (ego drain things from the Lovecrafting beasties). They find that they have to go back to the pulp era to stop a ritual summoning. This somehow was stopped in thier normal timeline, but not now, so they had to go fix it. They wander through the astral looking for the gate to where they want to go. All the characters are hurt, and most are pretty close to insane- and the players are playing it to the hilt. The supermage has been fighting like a madman, first one in on most fights (an approach to madness I subtly encourage and/or even suggested). So they get to the gate, and the mage (as normal) scans through the gate to sense what is there... lo and behold a major extradimensional power. He jumps through and blasts it. It's Thor. He hits him in the back. Thor turns around, and angrily asks (as he prepares an attack) why he was attacked as Thor was saving the humans, then Thor dissapears with a "shhhvvvvrrt". The PCs then realized what happened (given the original Thor fight was months ago real time), stopped the summoning and saved the day. And the players were amazed that I knew it would be the mage that attacked Thor months ago. It was just one of those moments where every little thing just fell into place.

Well, back from work, so I can drop some of mine. Rolemaster game. The GM was also our champs GM, and he was taking a break from supers. This was a college game, and the GM played favorites. In champs he had no upper DC limit, and mixed 250 pt characters with 500+, and didn't work to get us involved....So characters I ended up playing, unless I really Minmaxed were effectively useless (the favorite was a good player, and retired his powerful character so we could have more fun). That is background. So in rolemaster, everyone is on even footing, and I'm playing a sorceror and he does well for months. Never hurt badly, contributed to the group, and we got attack, he was hit with a 00 E crit, and died. Just like that. Extremely frustrating, but that is part of rolemaster the chance to get a nasty crit, but getting to roll such things on the bad guys. My other really bad moment was also a rolemaster game. The GM was trying some new rules, ones that due to my background with Champs I saw could be abused mightily. And I wasn't over being a powergamer- so I did. However I really roleplayed the characters and while they had the capacity to be totally obscene, they never were. So a situation developed where one of my characters wanted to do something (he was a fightermage and potentially a better fighter than the primary fighter) and he was 5th or 6th level. Due to my abuse of his changed rules, and some mighty fine tactics, I beat a 15th level fighter one on one. At which point the GM asked for my character sheets, and I gave them to him. He said "You could take over the whole party with these two" to which my responce was "Yeah... why would I want to" and he was totally flabbergasted. So I should have seen the next thing coming.... We were at a climactic fight, and one of the players get really lucky and scores an open end crit on the main bad guy and drop him in the second round. GM is visibly annoyed. Next session he said _he_ was going to roll all rolls, including all character rolls, behind the screen from then on. I said "Well if you are going to roll my characters stuff, you might as well play them too" handed my characters to him and left.

The best villians I've had have been more because of character interaction with them, then the actual write ups... Golden Avenger from the original primus and Demon. My world was the first wave of hypernormals and so I switched his hatred of mutants to hatred of hypernormals, and that was enough to sent him into villianhood. When primus was absorbed into the Marshall's office, he went rogue with a bunch of equipment, and about a third of the agency. He was a thorn in the side of the heroes for years, and ended up being the black kings knight in Genocide (which didn't show up till near the end of the game). PSI - I introduced them for one reason, a supervillian team that the PCs could deal with on a permanent basis, because they were so nasty they could not be dealt with any other way. Thier stuff ran for 5 years, and when the final confrontation happened most of PSI were killed or lobotomized. The players told me that is was one of the best plots that they had played in. I've always had a fondness for Foxbat, Muerte and Terror inc too.

Don't have time to share mine, must go to work, but here is one I ran across the same day I saw this thread. This is from RPG net.... http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12210

Morrison's JLA and Astro City is what got me back into comics after a decade long disust at the industry.

I and another GM did a big crossover crisis thing. We had a whole "dimensional destruction" plotline. We ran it for about 4 months. Our two champs campaigns were running concurrently (he'd do a plot, I'd do one), and the characters were fairly closes in power... not exactly but close enough. So I took some GM PCs into his world, along with some of the players doing same, and characters from his ended up in mine. On my side of the overplot I had all sorts of dimensional problems around, and had published characters drop in. During the chat session after the game, I very carefully steered the conversation to favorite superheroes. I then wrote up who everyone's favorite superhero was, and in the next session near the end, introduced those particular heroes into my world for the adventure. I then handed out the character sheets, and said "Here you get to play these guys for a couple of sessions". Everyone was surprised, and it went over very well, and a great time was had by all.

Geoff Johns. Geoff Johns. Geoff Johns. That would be sweet. Or now that his health is improved, give Busiek a shot.

I agree. Most of my annoyances are nitpicky. To be honest I used the phrase "not four color enough" as a counterpoint to the original comments. I think what Hero games is doing is perfect from a business standpoint, but they didn't read my mind and make the campaign cater to _my_ personal tastes... which they should have. :D

I do such things. Mostly I was complaining about what this said about the tone of the world.

As someone who has every HERO book published, back to 1st edition, the rules making that change would pretty much put me in as a grognard and I would then seriously consider whether the new rules were for me. STR is just fine where it is. Yes small sampling- I've played with over 100 players in 2 states, half of that heroic games. Never once have I seen an abuse of STR. So you can put me in the vocal opposition to changing STR. If you think STR is not working for heroic games, houserule it, like was menioned earlier- using the guidlines in FREd. Edit- removing a particulary snide comment that was unneeded.

I don't like the actual CU setting much myself. I find the villians just a tad to nasty, and find in the timeline entirely too many "All the heroes banded together to stop the huge menace and died" - Destroyer in 75, Demon in 81, takofones in 87, the whole detroit thing.... Every "major" villian at the opening of CKC has a KA, except Istvatha who has that EDM as atttack. Every member of the Crowns of Krimm, half of Eurostar... Again, not that this is neccisarily bad, just not my style. I try and have only 10% of villians and heroes to have killing attacks. I go for a very Silver age feel. Bright suits, shiny heroes, lots of rubber science. The new CU is just bleh to me. I use bits I like and characters that grab me (I love Dr Silverback). But as a whole I was very dissapointed with the whole CU. I loved the new rules, I loved the genre books, CU was just not my style. It just wasn't four color enough for me.

Ariel by Stephen Boyett Tech stops and magic starts for no reason. Because of that it is a little apocalyptic.

Dunno how much what I have to say here will help, as these are mostly campaign examples, and they don't break personality stereotypes as much as others.... First off are Black Cat and Gibralter. BC is a martial artist. She was the classic zen type, but absolutely no stealth skills, nothing other than some KS's PS's and combat skills. The sneaking MA was way to overdone at the time I built her. Gibralter is a classic brick. However in her secret ID before she got her powers she was a private eye. So the brick in the group was the detective and the sneaky one. The third is Ballistic. Ex cop (dropped from the force for excessive violence) hired by the brilliant scientist for head of security and wore the supersuit. Classic cinematic streetcop attitude in powered armor. After a couple of years I got a little tired of the character and did a rewrite. He had a mysic accident and had to learn magic to keep from "blowing up" from the mystic energies within him. So we have a supermage with a supersuit (now farily downpowered and without most of its offence besides strength) with a somewhat nast attitude. I think he may be a fairly unique mystic.

In one of the myriad incarnations Alfred was a british commando before he followed family tradition and became a gentleman's gentleman for the Wayne family. There have been a couple of instances he keep villians out of the batcave.

Also a lot of silver age had the whole fantastic science attitude. Barry Allen was a scientists, Hal Jordan went into space, the FF were piloting a spaceship, plus Reed's who schtick. And lots of talking apes. Talking apes are very silver age. Hmm.. talking ape who is a scientist. And have silver in his name......

I love the new cover. The old one was nice, but simply put there was no magic of any sort on it. Any fantasy book should have a little bit of magic on it somewhere. I didn't see any superhero "stuff" when I looked at the cover. The chick in blue to me screamed "Holy Warrior" and the blue shooting out of the spear is either magic weapon kind of stuff, or the power of her faith made manifest physically.

*Blushes* I try. I've GMed for too many years not to see what another GM may be going through due to my actions. As to what solution. That is a tough one. I have been increadibly lucky for the last 13 years I have not had a bad player in the entire time. Well, a couple but they drifted out within 2 or 3 sessions. So I can usually just talk to them and say "Hey, the character isn't working, it's messing up my fun and some other player's, let's see what we can do to fix that, while keeping the character the way you want it." When that isn't available having the GM build them seems overkill, but rather that than no one having fun.

This is what I try and do with any game I start. I work with my players in building thier characters. The experienced builders go at it, and I look over and make world specific suggestions, and the people that are a little more unfamiliar with the system and I pull up to the computer pull out FREd and fire up HD.

This is one I have heard before, and I just don't understand. Part of what I love about HERO is the ability to build the character exactly as I envision it. If I had a GM that insisted on building the characters himself, I would think strongly of not playing- I would not have any kind of connection to the character. My relationship with my character begins at concepts and grows to fruition during building. Sort of like a baby, if someone else builds it, there is sort of a surrigate mother feeling, the sneaking feeling that this character is not mine. Having characters someone else builds is fine for Con games or one shots but for a continuing game I just can't understand it. Now if the the GM is having balance problems, let me know what and where and I will be perfectly happy to stay within these guidlines. I once built a character with a medium sized cosmic pool (about 30 points). After the first adventure, it became clear that he was just too versatile for the game, and I asked the GM to let me retire the character and build a new one.

And the Miracle Machine. And Brainy when he went crazy, and how Matter Eater lad proved the points he spent to have the superpower to be able to eat anything were worth it. (If any non legion fans are interested I'll do a summation later).

I'm coming into this one late so.... Doom. Magneto (for his deep characterization) Ultron Darkseid. Lex - I prefer the precrisis lex, primarily because of the childhood relationship between lex and clark and the reason he went villian. Joker Now a number of villians that have not been mentioned- primarily Legion of Superhero Villians. The Fatal Five - Especially the mid/late 80's Emerald Queen. Tharok, Validus, Persuader and Mano. Great team. Mordru - Great villian. Stupid weakness- and has been used to great effect in the current run of the JSA. And if you want a big hulking monstrosity and don't want to use a big lizard nothing beats the magesty of Chemo.

I am a font junkie. Those were some really cool sites. Thanks. I haven't found a close match, but I just love fonts of all sorts and sizes anyway so Wooohooo!!

In my years long transworld fantasy game the PCs & major NPCs.... Epic High Fantasy. Character started on 100+100 Edison. Cyberpunk street samurai/intrusion expert. Male. Fell in love with magic- the first time he felt he belonged somewhere was when he got his first connection to the ambient magic field. Elizabeth. Otherwise known simply as "the Doc" Female old west doctor. Had done work with some Chinese and Indians, and as a result tended mystic and had some Gung Fu training. Ended up a healer and a really naster person with a sword. Becky. A low powered superhero with light powers, and a minibrick. A native half elf - minor utility mage and really nasty with a staff. Trained Aeolian for combat. Aeoliean - A native. Young elven bard, who joined the group after they started to get famous to chronicle thier adventures. Sheck Stonebone - A gnome, in the mythical sense. Earth mage and ended up with a magical amulet that let him change into a gargoyle. Starbright. Female Giantess fighter.

I just don't like online gaming of any sort. Never played multiplayer Doom even though I was/am a Doom freak. Didn't like MMORPGs. If I'm at my computer I am reading forums or being interactive in this fashion *gestures around* Part of it, I'm sure, is that my wife and I both game, and we always have solo campaigns that we run for each other. So why bother with online gaming, if I need a gaming fix, I just call "hey dear!...." and I am set. I have also had a stable group (having a spouse that games helps that, you have 2 of the 4 needed for a solid game already) for well nigh on 12 years now. So online gaming just doesn't have much attraction for me. Although my reasons are not likely to be common ones.