David Blue

I agree with what you say, Lord Liaden. Reportedly Ron Edwards wants Champions Now read, interpreted, played, and gamemastered as though we had never read or played anything before. One should go into it with complete naivety, and learn it as a wholly new thing. I don't know that I like that idea, but judging by the way the book is written that is indeed what the author wants. He has a different starting point from any version of Champions or Hero System that we've seen before, and he puts that before the rules, or rather doing things his way and not in some way one has experience with is his first and most important rule. In that context, with gamemasters and players forcing themselves to stick to an attitude of fearless naivety, there is some simple rule like the ratio rule to limit what will go wrong, or the limit will be reached when your campaign crashes, rolls, and burns at the outset. I support the ratio rule. It is not an adequate substitute for a gamemaster who is experienced, and who wisely remembers and applies his experience, but it is a lot better than what would happen without it.

The first Champions character sheet I ever saw was several pages of -1/2 this and -1/4 that, and Powered Armor Guy (as I'll call him) was well over 700 active points, on a base of something like 100 character points and 100 disadvantages.. He was not the most powerful character in the game; that honor went to Wimp To God Guy, who bought all his stats down, then back up again through his -1 OAF magic amulet. But Powered Armor Guy was quite strong. The player was proud of himself, and the young and eager gamemaster was impressed by all the hard work that the player had put into the game. Then there was Power Ring Guy. Superheroes are a power fantasy, and you should expect power fantasy behavior from young men who learn a game where you get more super-heroic if you take more limitations. Then there were characters who were not built on limitations; we simply had Acrobatics, Martial Arts, Stealth, and Detective Work, or whatever our ideas called for. So it would be 200 points spent, and say 220 points active, give or take an OAF baton and a swing line. According to the logic of the Hero System, all these character should have been equal and should have adventured well together, because limitations pull you back as much as the active extra points help you. That theory didn't work. In my opinion, this campaign, and many like it, would have benefited greatly from a ratio rule that said that if your active points are 1.2 times as great as your real points, your power build is too sophisticated and you need to pull back. I am sympathetic to the ratio rule.

In Iron Man 2 I saw Tony Stark spending experience points in his home boxing ring. Iron Man is a good advertisement for being generous enough with experience points that player characters can do reasonable things to improve themselves and have those things work like they should.

I too. A month ago an idea for a superhero campaign started tickling my imagination. When I started writing things down, just to get the idea out, it was in Hero. I would need a few key non-player characters, with solid definitions of what they thought they were doing, and why. Hero is good for detailed descriptions of a small number of human characters. I would need at least one vehicle, probably three. Hero has solid vehicle rules. I would need at least one base, probably three or four. Hero does bases. I would need one small agency and one big one. Hero does agencies very well. I would need a stack of small gadgets. Hero does gadgets, and what I needed most was already in a supplement. I would need some beasts. That wasn't a problem. I wasn't being forced to break the flow of my imagination. I could keep going till I had an overall, internally consistent picture of how the conflict would arise and how it might play out. From my point of view as a potential gamemaster, what I don't want is to have the key points of a new world swimming into view, and have that interrupted by some thought like this: "and I'll need to define that space ship / submarine, since the player characters will be spending a lot of time in it, but there are no vehicle rules (or there are but they are so bad that I'd rather not use them). Maybe I need to make some house rules for that, or swap in rules from another system."

I used to play, in Hero's great Psi High campaign. Since Hero Central closed, I haven't played or gamemastered. Without a place to play, Hero System is useless to me.

Re: Dating Catwoman plot seeds? If the relationship is stalled, or to get it started, be sure to use the ever-popular amnesia gag. This works particularly well with an isolated environment, such as a tropic island after a plane crash, or an icy environment requiring the two characters to cooperate closely to survive, and snuggle up warm at nights. Affected by the amnesia gas or whatever it was, neither character remembers their past run-ins or what any conflict would have been about; similar costumes (likely) and the simmering attraction between them are the only clues to what their relationship might be. Maybe they're already married, or at least engaged? Maybe if they haven't been, they'd like to be, and this is the time! In order not to railroad a player character completely, you can slip in hints from time to time that something is wrong. Going through the character's costumes and utility belts to pool survival tools could be sexy, practical and disturbing, as he wonders about his beautiful partner's lethal cat-claws and mini burglar's tools while she wonders what sensible, profitable purpose a miniature fingerprint kit could serve?

Re: Billionaires: Supervillains earn, Superheroes inherit Other inheritors: the Black Panther (T'Challa), the Sub-Mariner (Namor).

Re: Common superhero types you've never seen in play

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans

Re: Common superhero types you've never seen in play There's not many sidekicks in games. (Unless they're build on equal or nearly equal points, which is not correct in my opinion.) People want to play Batman, not Robin, Aquaman, not Aqualad, Green Arrow, not Speedy. Even when I've volunteered to take the sidekick role, other players and even the GM have been uncomfortable with the concept. For a comic book writer, it's reasonably easy to come up for things for the sidekick to do, even though Batman does everything better than Robin, and Green Arrow does everything better than Speedy (as well as never having been hooked on heroin). In games, everyone is pessimistic that it's going to work that way. Probably realistically.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans OK. Luck can be fine, in fact it can be built carefully and deliberately as a group advantage, in which case: great! The military might try to create statistics on fortunate and unfortunate events associated with supers. I'm thinking of the movie Master and Commander: the far side of the world. The men on the ship (including the unhappy man himself) were convinced they had an unlucky shipmate, and therefore an unlucky ship. Super or not, nobody wants to ship with a Jonah. And everybody would want to ship with an albatross. So, particularly for military applications of supers in that era and at sea, luck and the reputation of luck or unluck would be of great importance.

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass? There are similarities between mutants and a political party, since both are relatively cohesive groups with a strong sense of us-versus-them and chronic conflicts with other groups. But there are differences that make mutants more problematic, as a relatively impermeable in-group strategizing to some extent against non-mutants as an out-group. Unlike with a political party, which you could ultimately join if you wanted to, you're born a mutant or you aren't. And if you aren't, some of the things I suggested are taken from the comics, or speculations that are not inconsistent with the comics. The Angel has been seen with lots of hot human babes lying around his house, but he wasn't going to marry any of them. (I assume they were human, because no mutant seemed to regard them as anything but Warren's furniture, which is my point.) If you're human, you don't get to marry into the mutant tribe, or certainly not on anything like equal and honorable terms. The way Maddie Pryor was treated was stunningly abusive. What does it take to be someone Captain America regards as his kind of guy (or girl)? Any patriotic American qualifies. Doubly so if you've ever served in the armed forces. And though he does visually represent a certain antique White America, he casts his net wider than that when it comes to romantic partners and comrades that really count. An English girl, a German scientist, war buddies of different nationalities and colors - all of these can really count, for Captain America. He's just a kid from Brooklyn, he's not special or aloof. What does it take to be someone Professor X regards as his kind of guy (or girl)? Yes, it is possible to be his friend and not a mutant (Moira McTaggart), but there is a widely shared background assumption operating in Professor X-'s world that non-mutants are uninteresting, except to the extent that they are prejudiced, ignorant, dangerous and in need of careful watching. The rise of Captain America means more pride and power for people like him, which means you if you like the Red, White and Blue or would be willing to. The rise of Professor X means ... well at least more tolerance for mankind than Magneto would allow. But it's tolerance on limited terms. Ultimately humans have to accept that the "Tomorrow People" are to be mutant, not human, and that in the mutant telling of history those bygone, unloved humans are going to have a nasty, inferior, bigoted, heavily criticized image. I don't find it at all surprising that humans react to these different kinds of heroes in terms of what they stand for, and treat them differently in consequence, rather than lumping them all together because they are all powerful.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans I haven't noticed any problem with small arms resistance. Whereas the lucky guy who's never there when the hammer falls is a military cliche we had experience of.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans Mark Milton can relieve you of most military necessities except wisdom. If, instead of telling him, "find out if there are weapons of mass destruction there, and if so destroy them" you tell him "smash the military forces of country X, in order that we may occupy it and remove its weapons of mass destruction", then a short while later you may be the owner of a traumatized, defenseless country, minus much of its draft-age male population, and you could be looking at a very unpleasant diplomatic situation, as well as a long term drain on your military forces, trying to bring order to this mess. Ultimately, the only way for a Hyperion-class super to protect his country from the consequences of unwise "successful" wars is to stop taking orders. And in time, however much propaganda you feed him, he will think of that.

Re: Mook Archtypes #9: The Hero Killer Also Called: The Turk (based on Turk Barrett, from Daredevil comics) General Description: Medium brawn, strong on shamelessness and vengeful ambition, light on pretty much everything else. The Hero Killer is determined to kill a particular hero, but he has just enough awareness to appreciate that his odds of doing so solo are not good, so he works for a villain, waiting for The Day! When that day arrives, The Hero Killer will leap, elbow, shout and argue his way to the head of the queue to be the (sole) executioner. With big occasion nerves and a wildly over-elaborate imagination, he will thoroughly botch the task. (If he introspects on this afterward, he'll realize that he was nervous before but he'll be fine next time, and that what he really needed was a fancier plan.) Typical Abilities: Moderate to good strength and toughness (for a normal), surprisingly high PRE for a thug, and the ability to go straight-faced and with full confidence into schemes that even other bottom of the barrel thugs think are embarrassing. Since killing super-heroes doesn't put supper on his table, what gets him by from day to day is shaking down the disabled, dressing up as Santa and robbing kids at Christmas, kidnapping de-clawed cats and other family pets for ransom, and so on. If a scheme might just work, but only when carried out by a goon with immense effrontery and no character at all, the Hero Killer is on it, and any embarrassment when a hero frustrates the scheme Must ... Be ... Avenged!

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans I think if people had seriously used what we could have done in war, and the bad guys had taken the same approach, it might have developed like flying in World War I. Zeppelin raids and bombers were scary and destructive, yeah. But the real threat of flying was what spotter planes and zeppelins did for the effectiveness of artillery. Basically everybody who is in an open trench is in a lot of trouble, subjected to perfectly accurate artillery fire, and (given barbed wire and machine-guns) with nowhere to go. That pressure is intolerable, so both sides send up fighters to get rid of the hostile spotters (and when possible bombers and even fighters). In the same way, supers could do some spectacular things with big powers like weather control, but the key effect of supers would be in the combination of conventional military force and super-senses (or mental powers that can act like super-senses, such as mind-scanning). That would be unbearable pressure, so people would start sending out "fighter" teams of invisible ninjas, Delta Force vampires and so on, to knock out those enemy spotters at any cost. That would lead to super-bodyguards and "interceptor" squads.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans OK, I'll accept the consensus that in real life he would indeed be used. He wasn't the "Human Satellite" though. I'm not sure what satellites could have done about the "Iron Triangle" tunnel complex in Vietnam. EoG could have "monstered" it in the most atrociously one-sided fashion. "They're there, and there, and there, and there. Put one bomb there and one there, and all those guys will be trapped. The only exit for those guys is here..." Functionally, Viet Cong tunnel rats would be in "darkness and hiding" only in the way that blindfolds would put them in darkness. Earth walls would keep them from moving freely, but they'd still be 100% exposed to observation and attack.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans Having chewed over this for years (in character), some general thoughts on military powers... First, "damage is free". The military doesn't need supers to blow stuff up. They can blow stuff up. Your job is to help them. Example one: the military will certainly grab "Electrocution Lass" but that doesn't mean they have anything interesting for her to do. All that's going to happen is that she's going to get bored, bored, bored. Example two (theoretical): you don't use tunneling to dig holes in ships, even if you could. It's dangerous. One depth charge with unhappy timing and there goes Tunneling Tom. And it's pointless compared to what you can do, which is dig useful holes. Herbert Plumer's colossal mine, the blast from which could be heard in England, could have been dug as a quick, simple operation, and all the casualties taken during the long, long grind could have been saved. Example three (theoretical): if you lack a friend to tell you where your teleportation portals would be safe and effective for raids, you could still take your chances, but you might not do much damage before your luck ran out, whereas rescuing friends is a sure thing. The defense of the Bataan peninsula was a six months horror without hope or relief, but Portal Lass could have brought almost everybody back to the United States safely. As a rough rule, the more a (one trick) super is good at punching your face in at school, the less he has to offer in actual, all-out war. It's the guys who "can't do anything" on the playground but can change the weather in a large area or read minds or find minds that can turn wars topsy-turvey. For this reason, just dumping a bunch of kids together and "letting the natural leaders emerge" in conflict is not necessarily a smart idea. Exception: there is one power that is equally great face to face and in all-out war, and both the boys who had mind control and no inhibitions about making themselves maximum dude at school are now enjoying great careers as super-villains. I haven't seen animal control pushed, but for African style wars of banditry my impression is that it could be a formidable weapon, especially for an insect swarms specialist. A lot of countries would have no real defense to quite moderate military force plus a Lord of Locusts or a Mosquito Master. Mind Scanning can easily become the most dominating power of all, but it depends on who you are with and who you are up against. ("Khalif to Madhi: there are no unfamiliar minds in the area. We are safe. Excuse me, I have an incoming call. Hello?" "Reapers don't have minds, moron." *BOOM!*) Telepathy is one of those powers that are so good they can look better than they are. What do you do after you let your telepath wander around your insurgent war zone for a while, and he reports that you can't trust anybody? He can identify some bad guys for you. You can tear up their networks. With his help, you can find out every trail to the end of the trail. But after you kill the bad guys there will still be a completely inadequate supply of good guys. Just about everyone will sell you out. Will you quit? The experience of our main telepath was that, no matter how well you understand why someone will shoot you they still will, and, presented with bitter truth, nearly everyone will start inventing reasons why the kid must be wrong. To a strong enough telepath, "received wisdom" = "obvious untruths that non-telepaths don't have the courage to abandon". Transformation powers in general have a severe tendency to get out of hand, and vampires make magnificent elite soldiers. The process can also save war heroes, elite politicians with enough clout, personal friends with fatal diseases, and so on. For what it was worth (nothing) EoG urged that "Condition H" never be spread, no matter what the temptation... One trick ponies built on super-senses also have a tendency to turn godlike. Super-sight is not the worst power you can have, though it's close. The worst is an array of analytical-everything, including obscure detects, plus friends with good mobility and preferably invisibility usable on others to get you around for a good look at everything. I don't want to even think about what extensive analytical danger-sense could do. Another nasty option is global super-sight plus massive mind control usable by others, but our Christian mind controller wisely feared that if he pushed to develop "usable by others" it wouldn't be his good buddy with super-sight fixing all the world's problems (though that would be frightening enough), but rather he would be required to "hand over his power" and he might be the first one it was used on. So he was less than zealous about developing his power in that direction. In our bitter experience, super-luck is the most useless power for anyone but Mr. or Miss Lucky. Two rules of thumb: don't stand next to Mr. Lucky in a firefight, and the mission after Mr. or Miss Lucky surprisingly leaves the team or otherwise becomes unavailable to go will be bloody. The second most useless power (at least it doesn't hurt anyone else) is: precognition / future cannot be changed. "I've seen how this war ends. We lose. Nothing can stop it. I've also seen how this conversation ends. You're going to keep fighting anyway. But it doesn't matter to me. I know there's a bullet with my name on it, and inside a week I'm gonna be gone."

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans They didn't need to read the chapter on "How To Create An Embittered Super-villain", they just did it all naturally. This is all a campaign feature, though it took years for me to recognize it. We're now "the good ones" who stuck with the program, even if for years growing up we felt like the new movie Captain America / Steve Rogers. (Lab rats and performing monkeys, or worse.) Once you say: "It's OK Sir. You thought you were doing the right thing. And now it's our turn to try to do the right thing." you've got your hero concept all laid out. Only I think you have to play out those formative years, and take the gaming years to do so. Our enemies list includes an all star cast of embittered former program inmates. This is something the GM wanted: that in years to come we would remember: "I went to school with that guy!" The GM took the needed time (years) and used every military trope to build his foundations right, and it worked. I love this campaign! The main thing I would say about "Military Applications of Superhumans" is that it's a terrific field to explore in a roleplaying sense. I used to think that this was a bad way to build a heroic team. I've seen what a good GM can do with the military / Teen Champions concept, and now I'm a believer. Go for it!

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans By the way, the military did a lot right in this game. One thing they perfected was the use of (massive, one-trick) mind control for interrogations. The kid mind controller had Christian inhibitions about forcing people to do things against their conscience, so they didn't fight that. Instead, they set it up like a police interrogation, with mind controller boy behind one-way glass. Mind-controller boy would put the subject into a mind control trance, and telepathically order him to answer all questions truthfully and cooperate fully. Then they would wheel him away. The interrogator would do the interrogation. Then mind controller boy would be told to cancel the power, and the interrogator would do the interrogation again, but this time be utterly defeated by the steadfast subject, who would then of course remember having been asked about X, Y and X, but having held out. Mind control boy never learned any unauthorized information, including what he had made people reveal or do. He was troubled about it, but he didn't know - like the guy in the firing squad who might have had the one blank round. I think this probably how the military would do mind control interrogations, keeping all as in all the information for high-ranking, authorized "top men", not the "talent".

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans Well, that's the other concern of course. We also had in our band of one-trick-pony children a healer (with laying-on-of-hands), who quit before the military took over from the Department of State. Some of us were concerned that she would get stuck in a basement and told to heal, heal, heal. When you have unique healing abilities, there is always someone more important than you in official terms, whose need to be healed is more urgent than your need to date, grow up and have a real life.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans All I can say is, eventually it worked out well for me, the player, in artistic terms, though the character felt very frustrated at the time. Like the story of Hyperion (thanks to Starcloud for pointing that out for me) it had, in retrospect, a sad resonance that was worth everything. Except... I would have liked to rescue Gilad Shalit. That's something I think supers would like to do, and soldiers would be OK with them doing: rescuing soldiers of their own or allied nations, in captivity. This kind of operation can be impossibly awkward for even very powerful conventional forces. ("Where is he!?") But it can be simple for the right super. After EoG had built up his range enough, or even earlier if he could have scored a plane ride over the Middle East, say a short few hundred miles from the target area, it would have been simplicity itself to search every tunnel and basement, looking for the face of a victim matching a file photo. The same for any Americans in captivity too, of course: "Give me a photo and the general area to look, and I'll give you the man, or the woman. Where they are, what shape they're in, what security is like, any explosives or traps, what you're going to need to get through any locks, bars or cages, how many guards and how they act, where they sleep and relax - easy as watching ants in an ant-hive. Just tell me when you do the raid, so I'll be awake. I want to give you real-time on any surprises, and I love to see the looks on the faces of the victims when they get freed." I find it plausible that military supers would be very under-utilized because soldiers would be scared of what they could do (especially Hyperion!), and officers and politicians would be much more eager to insure themselves against mishaps and the perception of having made a mistake than they would be to encourage the freaks to extend their abilities in disturbing, scary ways. But I think the rescue of friendly prisoners in enemy hands could be an exception, even though the military benefit is objectively minor. I think soldiers would like the "all-seeing eye" or whatever it was backing them up. I think any senior officer who had ever been a prisoner himself (though that doesn't happen much any more) would be more likely to risk being seen to bend the rules a little to make this happen. ("Give the kid a 'vacation' in the area, why not?") Next scene: yellow ribbons, champagne corks popping and: "We found you. Just don't ask how."

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass?

Re: Superhumans and their families My gaming for years has been with a group where soap opera, family and family-type relationships (including a Castor and Pollux style friendship) dominate over beating the bad guys. We were "warned" up front that this Teen Champions game was going to be more Teen than Champions and more about relationships than combat, and so it has proved. To make this work, the GM did a lot of advance planning and made very smart choices, and has imposed the tightest character control I've ever seen, with every character coming into the game requiring a long negotiation process and usually a "shakedown cruise" solo adventure before entering the game. It's worked. Among the other things he did, the GM practically banned dull DNPCs by starting us young and frequently isolating us with only highly competent and interesting (to him) people for company. This is more fun for him, more fun for us (because these people are worth any of us having conversations with), and it raises the stakes (which should always seem sky high in teen relationships of course, as everything is all-important!) because when relationships with powered or just hyper-competent people crash and burn the consequences never end.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings OK, it's your thread.