David Blue

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings Suppose we shift the argument. Do you have anything you want to say about how to use gay characters / gayness (which is what "alternative sexuality" boils down to) to generate good soap opera in Champions / Dark Champions / Teen Champions etc?

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings It seemed like you were trying to bait Big Monkey, who was being quite nice and discussing thinks in a normal HERO-centric way. You were using that courtesy against him and trying to get inside his clothes and make the discussion about his possible issues. "You're completely indifferent so why argue about it? What's your stake?" These things are not your business. So, OK, if you want straightforward opposition, you can have straightforward opposition. What I said is my real opinion. I don't think HERO should go gay to appease people, whether they go the straight political demand route or use a more insinuating style of argument. I think it would make for lousy products. And over time I think cranking out officially gay characters under pressure to make the numbers, which is what this comes down to, would wind up extremely crude.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings I think Champions shouldn't go gay, or all affirmative action in any way. I don't think it should aspire to be more "alternative" than it already is and always has been. And I'm not indifferent to the proposed change, I'm opposed. In my experience it's tight, tight character control that makes "alternative sexuality" (AKA teh gay) productive. You need exactly the right character for your game. Preferably exactly the right player character, with the right player, and then you build your NPCs around that. The point is, this stuff is going to be useful, if at all, for the soap opera, and the way the soap opera works is going to be very specific to your game. I don't think file-off-the-serial-numbers-gay NPCs are going to improve enemies books or anything else. If some gamemaster needs an NPC brick whose origin includes "fisted with a radioactive lubricant" they can make that up themselves. It doesn't belong in HERO merchandise.

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans I hadn't thought of that. But yes. And don't get me wrong: Hyperion's story is great, as a comic though not as a bare series of events, and I have had years of huge fun playing EoG. But it had nothing to do with getting the maximum potential military effectiveness out of the character's power in either case. And I don't really object to that in terms of "realism". I see no reason to think that the actual military applications of supers would have anything to do with their real potential. 99% indoctrination and control, and 1% use, probably disgustingly unimaginative use from the super's point of view, is a much more likely scenario.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings

Re: Who are the greatest (?) super villains? Dracula, long-running star of his own great series Tomb of Dracula. He had an unlife full of incident and interest, an atrocious but plausible morality, and withering arrogance well supported by his consistent winning record and the fact that even if he was "killed" he was more than likely to be revived sooner or later and he knew it. He was a cloud of gloom that withered and destroyed everything he touched, and from time to time he would give people pointers on how to be more like him. (But of course they never measured up. Which meant that whatever happened to them next was their fault, really.) Classic Drac moment: a young girl was wandering out, upset with her parents. Did Drac bite the child? You underestimate his nobility! He got her invitation to remedy the matter, and he slaughtered the whole family. And then, despite this vast act of generosity on his part, the wretched, ungrateful child acted distressed! Already sated to the full, the Lord of Vampires flew off in a huff. (Leaving the girl presumably to deal with the guilt of having wished Dracula on her parents.) The situation of the "Drac Pack", the bit-player heroes in the villain's story was utterly grim, as they were ground down one by one, always facing killer villains, never with any real hope at the end of the tunnel, and always with their loved ones marked for kidnapping, hostage games and death or even undeath followed by the need for the heroes to dispose of them. Probably the guy in the worst situation was an actual descendant of Dracula. That didn't mean Drac had any restraint in dealing with him, rather Dracula was extra-hostile out of contempt that any descendant of his could be a wimpy human "hero".

Re: Military Applications of Superhumans I played for years a one power superhero whose power has now changed for good. He could see through all barriers except high energy fields, he could see through total darkness, and he had enough range modifiers with sight perception rolls that nothing within thousands of miles of planet Earth caused him to take any range modifiers. As for the rest, he was fit and smart, and eventually learned pistol, which didn't stop him being bullied by football players in high school, punched around by girls in military super school and so on. He volunteered to serve in the U.S. Government super squad. Generally the government kept him cooped up (awaiting orders) with other one note supers who had highly effective short-range powers and sometimes few inhibitions about using them. He did not have an especially good time. The government had a variety of means of controlling the super kids. The first was chemical blinding, and the threat of it. The next was lock-on blindness hoods. The next was the kids being moved everywhere in high-energy sight proof vehicles. The next was keeping the kids always in high energy sight proof bases. The main base the government team super kids lived in doubled as Stronghold. The difference between the cells the volunteer super kids lived in and the cells the captured villains lived in was a lot more theoretical than practical. Over time some of the kids started to go stir crazy. This was not to the advantage of the kid who didn't have a power that wasn't negated by the sight-proof environs. He started to go stir-crazy too. He requested that he would get a chance to look over any prisoners before they were released, so he could recognize them again. He also requested that he be told when prisoners were unexpectedly released, so he could catch up with them visually, and see where they went, who they hooked up with and what projects they resumed. He got patted on the head, and what he asked for did not happen. What mattered to the military was that proper procedure was followed and the super-kids were prevented from obtaining any information other than on a strict "need to know" basis. He went to his superiors and pleaded to be allowed to learn to use his power in an offensive manner: directing artillery and special drones he intended to build, coordinating widely separated friendly units on the basis of complete real-time observation, and finding "hidden" enemy units in caves, jungles, ocean depths and so on. He got patted on the head, and what he asked for did not happen. But he did learn to use a Springfield Rifle (which he did not have the Strength for) and a 1911 pistol, and participate in unarmed combat training (where he did a lot of getting hit, falling down and not getting back up) like a real soldier. He was also allowed to start on the skill track that would eventually have led to his being allowed to direct standard drones in standard ways - not the special drones he was asking to build, to be used in ways that would leverage his power, in other words not according to standard procedure. Even the Special Forces guy called in to lead the super-kids never really "got" what the Eye of God wanted to do with that power of his. EoG continued to make suggestions, and he continued to get patted on the head. Eventually EoG's power changed in a "radiation accident" defined as long term residence in a new sight-proofed compound with his eyes being battered by higher anti-sight radiation fields than ever before. (By the way, you know you're in the government team when your new "home" is surrounded by electrified barbed wire, guard dogs that don't like you, armed guards you are forbidden to try and get friendly with, and permeated by high energy fields to knock out your power.) After months of no power at all, the U.S. government's most trusted super-kid, now leader of the squad, developed some super-strength and associated PD etc., and now he does the "Hup-two-chree-four!" thing with confidence, as he always has the STR Min for his issued weapon. (When he is issued a weapon.) This is probably quite a realistic take on what the military would do with a patriotic kid with a devastatingly effective superpower.

Re: "Normals" gaining superpowers: how would they change in terms of mentality? You're welcome, Ragitsu.

Re: "Normals" gaining superpowers: how would they change in terms of mentality? Again, only commenting on the powers I've seen affecting characters as they grew in the game over the years... Precognition / postcognition can have corrosive effects on the sense of life and morality of the person who has it and everyone aware of it, as they gradually find that there is one timeline and it is unalterable. No matter what you do to save people whose fates have been seen, it makes no difference or actually causes the event you are trying to stop. (In the style of the Terminator timeline.) Whether the Young Prophetess saw the event as "past" or "future" makes no difference as far as averting it is concerned. So why try? If you're the Young Prophetess and you're in a love relationship but you see yourself making love to another handsome young man, why fight it? It's destiny! And if that breaks up the relationship, it was fate. When your downfall is assured anyway, why not bring scented oils and have a really good time? There are no important decisions, no turning points that have not already been decided. It's too late, always has been too late, always will be too late. The only issue is how much fun you have. The guy with the ability to summon and command creatures is shockingly uninterested in the power, compared to everyone else, mostly because he is interested in Jesus, who is not his to command. His only idea so far (after years of play) was to summon a flight of birds and make it fly around in formation to (of course) impress a girl. She wondered if that worked on all creatures, including homo sapiens. Yes of course it does. She thought he might be able to mind control her to kiss him. He said presumably it would work like that, and got back on the topic of Jesus, completely missing the hint. And he never found another use for the power to command all living things. (Except as required by self-defense, as needed on law enforcement missions and so on.) If you have that power, and are that nice, and that unworldly, you will either find yourself in bad company soon and come to a terrible end, or if you are surrounded by good people you may not need to use your power, because other people will gladly make your moves for you. As long as you just want to be a Jesus-loving, tolerant, even-tempered sweetheart, kind to your friends and girlfriend and good to your mother, everyone else's interest in allowing you to live the life you've chosen and remain the kind of guy you prefer to be is overwhelming. Whatever might make you bitterly unhappy should be removed, preferably before you ever see it. For a ladylike and ethical young woman in a nigh-intolerable situation, super-strength can be a disadvantage. It means you can't have a five-star crockery-throwing rampage even in a situation that fully justifies it, because that would lead to injuries and likely deaths. You just have to choke on your rage, or blot yourself out with sedatives, or do whatever you can to not lash out. Over time, that can be very destructive. Telekinesis with advantages that let it act like "proper" TK is a mother-beautiful power. If you like to make things, titanium will probably soon be your favorite metal. Basically, everything that has great qualities once it's worked into the proper form but that is unreasonably difficult to work is yours to play with. New adventures in engineering and art beckon! The only real negative is that it's easy to be a couch potato.

Re: "Normals" gaining superpowers: how would they change in terms of mentality? Again my reply is based on the experience of watching psi-kids with one power only grow into these powers. I've seen telepathy, regeneration and hyper-senses, so that's what I'll focus on. For good-hearted young teens, the main use of telepathy is giving permission for their true loves to read their minds, and ideally it is (and was) mutual. How many songs have been sung about love, and if only the beloved could know how much they are loved! With telepathy it is possible, and everything else is much, much less interesting. This can lead to young lovers hooking up as soon as they see each other each day, and just letting the link run till they have to go to sleep, letting the world pass them by. Telepathy can also lead to startlingly un-subtle behavior, as Kid Telepath realizes how much other people's complicated rationalizations for self-interest etc. are just that. Kid Telepath wound up with quite a "cowboy" attitude (after he outlived his obsessive love). A lot of people are no damn good, and even if you can see why, so what? They're still going to rob you, or shoot you, or whatever they've decided to do. Nobody knows better than a telepath that a goon with a gun is not looking for understanding, just money and no surviving witnesses. All that matters is to have a gun of your own and draw faster. Conversations with a telepath who's gotten tired to the point of not caring about sensitive egos and the lies people tell to cover up crass motives can be short, and hard to live with. Telepathy works on you too. If you want to know "why did I do that?" you can find the answer. But do you want to know? Maybe not, the answer might point to callousness or laziness or other things you'd rather not believe about yourself. On the whole though, in game, telepaths have been people who do know their own minds. Trying to talk them out of anything is fairly pointless. They know what they're in this for, or if they're going to leave there's nothing to say but goodbye. Based on experience in the game, most people don't want to hear the truth about what other people think. They put a lot of work into their patchwork of guesswork as to what is going in in other people, and they're reluctant to give up the answers they've arrived at. Their interpretations of others' motives can be hostile and self-serving, and this can make them reluctant to believe the truth about other people's good intentions. Over time, a telepath may just stop talking about such things. The other way to go is that a telepath may become a gossip. There was a player character like that. I don't know where that leads if it doesn't lead to the telepath being murdered, which it did. Regeneration is the best power for cheating at sports, because you don't use it in competition, you use it in training, where you practice every maniac maneuver till it works or till you've broken your neck dozens of times and it's obviously never going to work. Impressing girls with your dauntless courage is easy, as most of the time you can get away with moderately wild stuff, it's just that normal people have to refrain because that remaining time will have life-altering (or life-ending) consequences. For Regenerating Boy, all that bad luck means is the need to lie. (No, you didn't see me break a bone, look, it's fine.) Life becomes a casino where the more and the bigger you bet the more you can win - and if you lose you get your money back straight away. That's not necessarily an unmixed blessing. It can lead to antagonizing people you'd be better off not to pick fights with. Regeneration plus pain may not lead to restraint; it may instead lead to full exploitation of the power, plus self-pity, and disdain for others who are cowards unlike your manly, risk-taking self. "Daredevil" level senses has different effects depending on whether you think other people are entitled to secrets. Omni-Senses Girl came into conflict with X-Ray Eyes Boy over this (though with mutual respect and goodwill). Basically if you think God wants a world of light and truth, without secrets, you step into a room and take them all. (And then anyone with extreme super-senses of their own and a code of restraint has a fit.) The effect is that every latent potential becomes actual. If a machine doesn't work, but it could with some tweaking, with your help it soon will. And if everybody can get along with Irene as long as nobody (especially Irene) realizes Irene is a dyke, everybody will soon have the opportunity to learn tolerance in an atmosphere of complete truth, as Satan loves lies. (And if tolerance and forgiveness don't come easy at first, they may after everybody is forced to confront their own issues and buried secrets.) I don't know what kind of personality development that might lead to in someone who wasn't killed young.

Re: "Normals" gaining superpowers: how would they change in terms of mentality? My reply is based on having spent years playing a young teenager (who is now up to nearly 16), and has had X-Ray eyes and no other powers, and having seen super-luck in action. This is in a soap opera teen champions game, with more emphasis on relationships and psychology than combat missions and hunteds. Super-luck generally makes a teenager lazy, useless and blissful. There's no need to work at school, as mega-luck takes care of everything. Sports are easy, as the ball always bounces your way. The feelings of the hard-working former top students and athletes that you effortlessly outshine are not your concern. Relationships are a non-issue. Mister Lucky doesn't necessarily respond well to friendly overtures, because he knows someone just as good or better will be along soon. Everybody around Mister Lucky knows that they can be replaced in his life without effort on his part, so Mister Lucky will have no friends who need to feel needed and irreplaceable. If there's a bloody, terribly upcoming mission, Mister or Miss Lucky will be unavailable due to having won a free around the world expenses paid luxury trip or something like that. But if Mister Lucky does come on a mission that turns violent, don't stand next to him, because he's not the one any stray bullets are going to hit. Mister Lucky will probably be fine with that. X-Ray eyes have a lot of complicated effects on a teen. One is that he becomes aware of a world of cruelty, horror and death of which most people are oblivious - intellectually aware perhaps but emotionally blind. Most people never see dead people, but X-Ray Eyes kid sees all the bodies in the cemetery rotting, and what happens in hospitals as things go wrong, and inside factory farms, and what happens in animal pounds that children shouldn't see, and abuse behind closed doors, and so on. To get the difference this makes, remember how the life / choice debate is being changed by ultrasound: even lousy pictures can completely change a person's mind about whether there's someone real there. X-Ray Eyes kid gets that effect all the time, not just with unborn babies but with all sorts of things. This can lead to a great sense of responsibility and heroic motivation. It can also lead to anger and contempt for non-powered people, who seem morally blind. Architects put a lot of effort into "true lies": facades that make the scary-slender but (hopefully) well-calculated structures they build look comfortingly solid to the people walking over the bridge or under the ceiling. X-Ray Eyes kid doesn't get the benefit of any of those comforting illusions. Having his power activate for the first time when he was forty stories was up was terrifying. (He learned engineering and got over it once he was able to "do the math" himself.) Everybody around you acts stupid. They set off for long trips with gas tanks you can see are near empty, they wait for buses that have broken down a few blocks away, or give up and walk away just when the bus is about to round the corner. They smoke, and you can see what that's doing to them. They get lost, which you need never do. They're mostly oblivious to vermin, or human predators. They wake up at night, hearing sound, and they can't see anything, so they guess whether they have to get up or whether it's OK to go back to sleep. They don't know who's at the door. If he's the intelligent, strong-willed, responsible type, X-Ray Eyes Boy is likely to decide that he should be running everything, for everybody else's own good. Sex is a huge issue. Deciding to look at everything always is one logical option, but I can't comment on the effects. Deciding not to look can be the foundation of incredible willpower, and there are lots of reasons for it, ranging from moral responsibility to not wanting to accidentally see one's parents ... well eww! But the desire to look is always there. The effect of that was that the first girl to give X-Ray Eyes Boy permission to look her over any time it might be necessary (like to check for possible cancers) could show off to him any time, in public. (They're getting married soon.) Another issue is cheating, e.g. at cards. Again, there is a fork in the road. I don't know what happens if the character decides cheating is efficient and morally OK, but if he decides it isn't it can lead to him becoming an obsessive athlete in a sport where he has no advantage, to prove himself without an edge. (For my character, this was swimming. He's just finished his short career, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.) Telescopic N-Ray Vision lends itself to the development of a young character with a huge sense of vision and no limits. My own character certainly considered the possibility of using his power for blackmail. He rejected the idea with contempt. Why should he steal his neighbor's secrets and make hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars, when he can study mining geology, steal Mother Earth's secrets and make trillions? (And then be much better off for having no skeletons in his closet.) From a fairly early age my X-Ray Eyes Boy, aware that he had this power, was regarding himself as the rightful future owner of all the world's unclaimed marine salvage (the wine-dark sea would hold no secrets from him!) and then all the world's thus-far unclaimed mineral deposits. There are a lot of problems a rich person who sees issues that other people can't see can solve with money. There are other problems he can't solve with money, if only because he can't prove anything. If you think about what morally responsible, arrogant-to-megalomaniac, super-fit (swimming star) X-Ray Eyes Boy would be like, rich and grown up, as a laser-tag opponent, you can see where this is going. Of course the first thing he wants to build is an "Eraser" gun for shooting through walls.

Re: The Brick is now a dinosaur

Re: Character for review: Last Hero Last Hero was originally made in 4th Edition, and converted to 5th Edition and checked with Hero Maker 2.02. As you say, the difference is unimportant. The cost and effectiveness of a basic, reasonable, non-munchkin brick didn't change. It's changed now though, big time. Last Hero should have been called Last Brick, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Character for review: Last Hero In 6th Edition. Last Hero's characteristics appear to cost 203pts, not 155. Last Hero is as honest and plain Jane as a brick can be. He's not screwing freebies out of the system at all. If he's worse off it can't be because he's lost anything he shouldn't have had in the first place. It has to be because the game system is out to get him now. This character class is nerfed. I don't like to minimax, or Last Hero wouldn't be my idea of a good character in the first place. But I think it's best to play a character in a game system that's hospitable, not hostile to it. I won't make a 6th Edition brick. Energy projectors are better now. Or psionics, because that seems to be a privileged class.

Re: Your character's theme music! Captain Yoren, master and commander of the scout ship the Tingri Maiden, is a Space Hero Ael Yael alien, with a six-limbed pterosaur-like anatomy, a poet's heart (and the formal recitation skill to go with it) and deep wanderlust. (He also has a radiation accident in his future, as the campaign is slated to become Galactic Champions.) Yoren's theme song has to reflect his soaring on his natural wings, and his comfort drifting through space for long periods of time, to see another world, and another world, and a further world again. His theme song is Albatross. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSZHT2XvoLM Alexander Kije, code-name Sword, of the secret American black ops psychic squad, is a Dark Champions / Teen Champions hero, who can stand on a mountain in Nevada and find one person in Portland Maine, and has, and who is working on the ability to read fine print on the Moon. Of course he can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles (oh yeah). And his theme song needs to be rock-y and at least a little "tough": Sword doesn't just see far-off things and file a report, he wants to go and do stuff about them, up close and personally. His theme song is I Can See For Miles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4BBQMjbX3c Karl J.F. Sebastian, Spirit Master, it a Champions / Horror / modern magical hero. His family has one each from elemental powers of Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit. His siblings are typical Champions warriors, but he's not. His biggest feat so far is, in one night of power, to cure everybody in a hosptal: the blind saw, the lame walked, bodies distorted by cancer were cleaned out and made whole, and the corpses in the morgue awoke healthy and normal. He's headed for a military veterans' hospital next, to do that again. He's trying to leverage his power to recruit followers, in order build a super agency to defeat DEMON all over the world. His theme song should reference his healing power and his global ambition. His theme song is The Healer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXZ9DSrWgYw&feature=related

Re: Doctrine for beginning vampire slayers?

Re: Potential HC Campaign: SideKicks I mean they should be inefficient and costly in comparison to their fighting power. Grey Dixon, teen wonder acrobat and detective, should have an array of skills reflecting his mentor, and if unlike his mentor he can't also afford the characteristics and weaponry to make him efficient as a fighting machine, good. He'll be in the same team with people who will be inefficient in other ways, because they're sidekicks and not main heroes. Running Boy has to keep up with Running Man in long range long term non-combat movement: that's essential, so the two can show up together. ("If you can't keep up son, I can't use you.") Combat ability, however desirable, is secondary. Prince Possession gets his full ability to "ghost" into people, not a game-oriented limited version that also lets him have enough spare points to be super-Rambo. That doesn't mean the gamemaster should put the sidekicks up against cost-efficient villains built on the same points, so that the heroes consistently lose.

Re: Potential HC Campaign: SideKicks For a Teen Titans style game I have two suggestions: 1. Disadvantage points should be lower than usual. Sure, sidekicks have problems, but nothing like what Justice Leaguers have. The perfect physical specimen kid detective who hasn't earned many enemies yet just is not that handicapped a character. 2. For their points, player characters should not be able to fight their way out of a paper bag. There should be substantial mandatory point spends at the beginning on stuff that's Gee Wow and shows all kinds of potential but won't actually win a fight, like the ability of a kid speedster to sustain long distance overland runs at nearly the speed of sound.

Re: Potential HC Campaign: SideKicks Very interested.

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles? The other thing that made this battle-space unique for the three "rats in the roof" was the flooring, combined with a problem: the sniper-girl who couldn't see the enemy through walls could hit anything she could see, and the boy who could see anything wasn't skilled enough to hit the enemy if the flooring under him was bad - which it was. At the same time, our tail-licking Mind Controller generally could take over anyone he could see, but only after I'd used an AK-47 to knock open a hole to them so he could see them - or what remained of them, making Mind Control moot. And movement, crawling stealthily on narrow wooden beams under a low roof, trying to set up to use weapons we didn't have the STR for while taking heavy bad footing penalties, was painfully slow compared to the rate at which the bad guys were moving and taking over the school.

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles? The School Fight, in Psi High, no question. We were a school for psionic kids run by the American government and effectively by Special Forces, and though we didn't have to volunteer for anything, we started to, because a. we were psionic, the world was our oyster, right? b. Special Forces, talk about ultra-cool! c. we had enemies who thought of us less as "teen gods on earth" than "valuable property that ought to be kidnapped, brainwashed with high-powered mind control and put to use" - and why not do unto them, first? d. among the least pleasant of these enemies was a former schoolmate, a Mind Controller. There was bad blood there. Lots of bad blood. And cold, dead bodies. For various reasons including our youthful errors, the military program was ended, and the school became purely civilian, under politically correct State Department control. That meant of course no training, no guards, and absolutely no weapons. We didn't even protest this, as we were at each other's throats over another Mind Controller (Mind Control Boy II) who'd fled the coop, with some of us convinced he was a villain and others that he'd been railroaded. We students started making secret preparations to defend ourselves against the attack that had to be coming. Preparations had to be secret, they had to work on very little pocket money, they had to pass room inspection, and they had to work within the constraints of a poisonous high school cliquey atmosphere. In a way, it was like a prisoner of war escape movie. Month after month went by, painstakingly roleplayed out. Train, smuggle, tinker etc.. The state of play just before what we did not suspect was D-day: Peace-love-liberal Mind Scan Girl had become a deadly pistol shot and martial artist, and her boyfriend Regenerating Boy had tested himself against every bully in the school and was psychologically ready to do absolutely whatever he had to do. Too bad they had no pistol. Telepathic Boy, the arch enemy of the no-argument EVIL Mind Controller had become a killer shot with a shotgun, and was ready to defend his beloved girlfriend, also a Telepath. Too bad he had no shotgun. Mind Control Boy III had fought his way through a heavy barrier of suspicion, and was an accepted team member in "The [school] Watch" (a secret society to defend our school). The two other members of The Watch who did not get scooped up immediately when the mass kidnapping operation began were another boyfriend/girlfriend team: Invulnerable Mind Girl, who was obviously going to be first up against the wall when the "useless" ones who couldn't be brainwashed were disposed of, and X-Ray Eyes Boy. Invulnerable Mind Girl was also JROTC Girl and a rifle champion, and had been training her boyfriend for all she was worth, and she had smuggled a gun locker into the school, which was useless as that part of the school was immediately over-run by the attackers. Those two were just back from the World Swimming Championships in Melbourne, where X-Ray Eyes Boy had seen his life plans as a swimming star go away with a single 17 PS Swimmer roll in the final, while on her return to America Invulnerable Mind Girl learned that her father, a Marine, had been killed in Iraq. So soap opera trauma was in full swing. On the other hand, X-Ray Eyes Boy, played by me, had been fanatically thorough in preparing to fight. He'd built his team, he know the secrets of the school inhumanly thoroughly, he had a sword almost built (which turned out to be useless as it wasn't quite built enough when the attack came) and he had his utility kit Bag-O'-Fun, including a big box of door wedges. And he wasn't afraid to use them. The attack came in overwhelming force, with four psionic attackers, acting on complete information* about the school supplied by our former schoolmate, supported by fifty dumb and inept but extremely bloodthirsty jihadis with AK-47s, all rounded up by yet another Mind Controller: Mind Control Boy IV - one of the four psi attackers and the identical evil twin of our Mind Control Boy III. * Well, not really. Evil Mind Control Boy I didn't have X-Ray Eyes, and he didn't know about either the crawlway in the roof X-Ray Eyes Boy discovered, or the secret cellar where Mind Scan Girl was hiding three fellow psionic teen fugitives from the law that she'd found after he left the school and that he'd never met. Nor did he know that another student he had met - the one who regularly volunteered for Special Forces Operations duty - had undergone a power change and was now Invisible Boy. The fight played itself out like contending carrier strikes. First strike: you lose in one sweep lots of stuff you have put agonizing amounts of effort into. That's it: gone, baby, gone. (But if the tide swings in your favor, it can really swing.) Then, on one part of the field, the attack stalled: Regenerating Boy and Mind Scan Girl held the staircase leading to the secret cellar and their friends. Following the program, Those Who Resist Must Be Exterminated, the attackers grenaded Regenerating Boy in a confined space without thinking twice. They should have thought twice. After that, it was just a matter of time before there were five psionics in a secret basement with two AK-47s and a plan. Unfortunately, time was what the other kids didn't have. Or their friends - a powerless kid sister, a pregnant adopting mother, both of whom of course were slated for decapitation if they were lucky. Then, just with bravado and incredible rolling - the guy seemed to critical every roll - Good Mind Control Boy absolutely kicked the tail of his evil twin Bad Mind Control Boy, and the terrorists with him, and wound up with an AK-47 and spare clips. And he was able to get to a secret passage to the roof crawl space, where X-Ray Eyes boy with door wedges and JROTC sniper coach girl - lusting for bloody revenge for her father - received him with open arms. It is a sad fact that if you are on the wrong side of blocked doors and walls opaque to your sight but completely transparent to bullets, and the person on the other side of the wall - whose location and exact activities you are unaware of - sees you as a sitting duck a few feet away, and has a Kalashnikov and a stack of ammunition, what follows is not a fair fight. Especially if he can't afford to let you see him and bring your massive psionic powers to bear. X-Ray Eyes Boy opened with a warning burst into the stomach of the psionic girl holding the teleport gate open, which did not end her career as she was wearing body armor but which did make her an unreliable ticket out of the combat zone. At which point the irrelevant armored column headed to the school's rescue, which was never going to get to the school in time to do any good, became the highly relevant potential revenge column that was going to descend on everyone who hadn't cleared out by any means available while the getting was relatively good. In general (from what Telepathy told us about their views), the brave jihadis seemed to believe that the benefits of a school massacre outweighed any costs. Their mind-controlling and otherwise psionic masters took a different view of the balance of costs and rewards. The upshot was that none of the psi-kids was kidnapped or killed or even injured (other than Regenerating Boy, which didn't count), and though every available DNPC was at the school, only one got shot up, and he was OK. The only dead for the day were some overly zealous jihadis - and in that campaign, Mind Controllers seem to treat guys like that as just so many rounds of ammunition waiting to be scooped up and expended. The story of the fight doesn't make the location sound like much, but it was a big deal. The atmosphere of the fight was different because we'd put months of desperate low-resource effort into preparing to fight in that space or any other part of the school, depending on the attack, and because the High Tech High Dormitory was such a domestic space. There pregnant mommy was dropping off her adopted daughter and boyfriend at school when the AK-47 wielding fanatics pounced on them en masse, there Illusionist Boy (who I'd been counting on as our big Surprise Weapon) was being abducted naked in the shower by another mass of heavily armed kidnappers (but not before he managed to tap the rescue us trigger in the cell phone under his towel), while yards away, where Mind Scan Girl had once snuck Regenerating Boy into the Girl's (side of the) Dorm to go All The Way, his Cute Kid Sister was bawling her eyes out as if she was going to be killed or worse, which she would have been if luck and the brilliant fighting of Mind Control Boy III hadn't saved us all.

Re: Superhumans pulling an Authority

Re: Superhumans pulling an Authority I didn't mean to drift the thread. I said that I think that superhumans acting in the way the original post suggested would be vulnerable to flatterers, and they might wind up with unfortunate results for that reason. I also said, I think superhuman rulers could do a great job and be of benefit to mankind if: * they resisted the flatterers * they refrained from bulldozing any countries that were already providers of charity and instead functioned only as receivers of countries that were bankrupt in every way * they acted to sway people through the glamor and tradition of monarchies, through the appeal of superhumanly correct ideologies well explained, through the influence of a good example (successful countries that were once unsuccessful), through the legitimacy of social contracts, by validating their rule with the people in the countries they ruled through results (in human rights, security and economic terms), and only by appeal to force as a last resort. Since I think benefits are important, the way I see this working out well for the superhuman rulers, it seemed reasonable to talk about what benefits they could confer. I think they can hand out ample goodies. Reed Richards doesn't need to be able to give everyone a functioning copy of his best stuff, much less teach them up to the point where they can invent their own. It's enough for him to distribute technologies that are easily adopted and generalized, once people think of them, and that will change how mankind lives. I think that the alternate worlds, like Earth Six, that was revealed and destroyed in the Crisis of Infinite Earths, are plausible. Lord Volt, Lady Quark and Princess Fern rule, and it is good. It would be natural for her later to approach a suitable male superhero with the idea of his becoming her consort and them creating another benevolent monarchy, because it had worked before. She would know how easily it could work, and what to do and what not to do.

Re: Superhumans pulling an Authority

Re: Superhumans pulling an Authority