David Blue

Re: Avenger/Justice League in the "real" world Rubric: "Hey! My first post.... Hi everyone." Hi! Good to meet you, and what an excellent first post! Which I will now disagree with (in parts) anyway. POWERS -- 1. I agree you need to be bullet-proof. My reason for saying that is that bad guys will put you in positions where you have make yourself a sitting duck to protect innocents and then shoot or bomb you. Irish terrorists have been shameless about this. If it works once, every villain (powered or not) except the most honorable ones will do it. 2. On "crimes in progress" - yup, it's just not that common. 3. "You need: Higher mobility than your opponent, ranged weaponry, ability to operate at night, ability to disrupt opponent's communications, ability to disrupt opponent's mobility." Amen to all that and more (like advanced combat medicine). Like you said, learn from the military. 4. "Sword-weilding heroes are cool, but not realistic. (No, your sword does not cut through metal. I don't care how strong you are.) Same with martial arts. As mentioned above, the real world uses guns." I only half agree with that: the world does use guns, but it all depends what powers that sword or other "antique" weapon has. Thor's hammer would work just fine. I built the old Marvel character "the Swordsman" and he turned out to be mostly an energy projector with a multipower containing half-a-dozen ranged attacks. PERSONALITY -- "The double-life of comic book characters is not realistic." This is a prennial debate. I think it can be done if you have appropriate powers. (Long-range teleportation and full body transformation are two of the good ones.) But ... in Spiderman 2, the whole crowd in the train carriage sees Peter Parker's face, and as far as we can see, everybody will take his secret to the grave, because they are heroes too - it's the common man as hero. I think lots of the people in that carriage would sell Spiderman's face to the media that same day. You can't be good enough that nobody will take the thirty pieces of silver. And heroes are exceptional - sad but true. "Heroes would need to embrace the media." I think heroes would need to be immensely wary of the media. Some heroes would use them. Villains would use them with the utmost ease and pleasure. (Imagine media people maintaining access to a depraved dictatorship by covering up what was happening there. Oh, that's been done.) The wiser heroes would hold the media at a great distance. My perception of the mainstream media is that it is very much not with the angels. But this is starting to drift off-topic and onto politics. Villains - Al Qaeda has re-educated me as to what violent megalomania people will get up to. You will get people deciding to conquer the world (or a large part of it for starters) without even a single armoured division that they can put in the field. (And they will not necessarily be caught instantly either.) You will get people who will decide "your weakness is that you love life and we love death," sentiments that might have come unaltered from Thanos of Titan or Darkseid, and they will go for the doomsday devices. Of course that will be a tiny minority of super crime, but that's true in comics too. After we've had real mobs killing hundreds of people and chanting "Death to beauty! Miss World is sin!" the motivation of a villan like Hideous doesn't look unreasonable to me at all. The old comic-book view of the world turned out to be far truer than I ever thought possible. The fact that something causes a panic, like anthrax in the mail, doesn't mean that the villains will soon be caught because they "have to be". People may just have to get used to panics or at least panic-arousing events. "There would be more villains committing the type of perverse "evening news" crimes that real people commit ..." That part I most strongly agree with. You would see villains with power stalking their normal ex-wives and things like that. Immense amounts of super-crime would be petty, sordid, nasty and dull. One thing I think would be very different. In comics, a hero is a hero, and the exceptions (like the Punisher) are clearly labelled. In real life you would still get your paragons, but you would also get a lot of heroes who were "Kingdom Come" fodder, if I can put it that way. They might look good at first, but they would let down the side. OTHER - On lawsuits - I think any country where heroes get sued a lot would be declaring itself a hero-free zone, and effectively an international haven for villains. Given the American legal system, you could see a situation that reversed what we see in the comics, where the heroes stand in America, debating if they can go to Third-Worldistan, where the villains have free run. It might be heroes in their own base or in some small country that had put an end to super-crime by licensing one hero team to do pretty much anything they want, and the discussion would be about the growing power of villains in the United States of America, who we can't touch because if we go there we'll get our costumes sued off, and have to fight the police force and the army (neither of which we would do of course) if we refuse to pay up. But - every time people talk about the law and supers, especially in America, I think of illegal immigration. The law there is totally not in force, because for different reasons people on both sides of politics want it not to be in force. If wealthy contributors who benefit from cheap (illegal) labor won't contribute to any politician who is going to do something about illegals, that has its effect. And if letting villains have a free run is bad for business, which I think it would be, then in the same way, anything that gets in the way of super crime fighters is going to be totally vitiated. The government may be able to gather information that will bust your secret identity and sling you in the pokey, but politicians acting on the wishes of their donors may make gathering such information practically impossible or even illegal. I'm reminded of a sign in an Indonesian businessman's window during a crime wave that was put down by extra-legal violence: "Mysterious gunmen welcome here." I think people consistently, hugely underestimate the "mysterious gunmen welcome here" factor. (But like I said before: this depends on people not being allowed to play the double game of condemning law-breaking heroes while being sure they'll save your business anyway, otherwise maybe you really can maintain indefinitely a legal system where people who want to sue heroes get rewarded, while those who strongly support them are kept powerless and without influence.)

Re: Why that costume I devote a lot of thought to costumes and what they are for, and they say a lot about my characters: how they think, what they intend to do, and what counts as "useful" from their points of view. The Tinker wore a loose costume consisting mostly of pockets and pouches, with a blue cape and a full (motorcycle-style) head mask with a car hood ornament. The sole but essential function of the costume was to get police to stop shooting him when this unprepossessing raggedy-man with cases of odd equipment showed up at the scene of a crime. (.357 Magnum/armor-piercing loads were really rough on his largely energy force fields.) Presumably he looked like some kind of villain, looter, scavenger or whatever. The costume worked: that is, sometimes police would wonder "Hey, is that supposed to be a hero?" and refrain from shooting at him. The things we do to make a good first impression ... That was my first heroic costume. I've always respected that gamemaster for enforcing the genre. Orgone Man wore an "orgone accumulator" suit, which looked like a loose tinfoil body-stocking from neck to ankle, with similar looking boots and gloves. Very "Golden Age". A soft force field protected the suit. Orgone Man would usually charge up in an orgone accumulator booth (functionally equivalent to a Green Lantern using a battery to power up his ring), or if he still had energy to fly and atmospheric conditions were favourable by "cloud-busting," flying through clouds before a storm, scooping up energy. The foil suit contained the charge, both preserving the energy so he could use it (focused END), and sparing bystanders the radiating effects of supercharged healthy sexual energy. Orgone Man also tried a hood to further conserve energy, but it interfered with his telepathic/empathic projection powers, and he couldn't breathe in the darned thing. He did, however, occasionally wear goggles. Everything was for use (Golden Age style), and nothing could have been different without loss of efficiency. Gladiatrix wore, at minimum, a blood-red bikini (with a big "G" belt-buckle) that wouldn't look bad if she got carved up, because there's only one thing more important than life and death, and that's putting on a great show. She also had fancy scandals, antique armor, a helmet, a shield and weapons. None of them had anything to do with her powers, but she tried to play them up as though they did. She would challenge people to a fair fight, unarmed. This worked, till eventually everyone caught onto her and just opened fire when she started talking about "honorable combat". After that, she kept the bikini because her record company told her she was "established with the bikini," and because not covering too much skin area it didn't get shot up too much or have to be replaced too often, and because nothing sells like celebrity skin. Modesty don't pay for lunch. Heat wore a full-body (Spiderman-style) red body-stocking, designed and maintained with intense, single-minded, paranoid care to make his trail as hard as possible to follow with forensics. Invariably, people would need to be rescued and often carried to safety, and they would bleed on the costume, they would tear it, they would do intensely annoying things that put Heat to trouble. But he never refrained from rescuing anybody. Chain Lightning wore a grandiose blue and white silk costume that went with his magical alternate form. He never wanted another option, which was good because there wasn't one. His problem was, he tried as hard as he could to become an expert martial artist so he could be useful in every form. He had some talent, mostly with chain weapons, which he liked. So he started carrying a chain around, and would also use it in his hero identity. And he had good chain lightning powers. So from time to time he was tempted to use the chain and a lightning blast at the same time, and the chain welded straight and solid every time. Time to buy some new chain. Annoying - but sometimes worth it. Last Hero wears red swimming trunks including a belt, and that's it. A few reasons for this. First, he's modelled on a character who was never seen in anything more than that and the occasional red T-shirt. Second, he spends lots of his time underwater, and is indifferent to chilly water (or snow, etc.), so trunks are very practical, and the belt is a handy place to stow his miniaturised underwater breathing mask. Third, the less there is to a costume, the less there is to get shot up or torn, a consideration that always jumps to my mind while playing a brick. Fourth, he's twelve foot tall, with a Richard Corben mega-body. There's no point in pretending to be normal (and no real need for insignia to distinguish him from all the other twelve foot tall androgynous mega-muscled beings you ordinarily meet in the queue at the supermarket), and there's a presence attack to be gained by showing what he's got. Since he's not much of a talker, the muscles are the message. (A fellow Australian swimmer said of Lisa Curry-Kenny: "She's got all the other girls intimidated in the dressing room." Hot for a "tough" line, the interviewer eagerly asked: "Why? What does she say?" Answer: "She doesn't say anything. She takes off her clothes." That's about it. And giving the right impression can sometimes save you from having to beat up lots of little people.) Even simple, non-powered costumes are extremely useful. Use them!

Re: Avenger/Justice League in the "real" world Nexus: "What sort of personalities, powers, interests and tactics do you think would be ideal for such a group? Basically what would you like to see? What would you fear the most?" I think OddHat pretty much covered the key personality archetypes. Team interests can't focus on the "who gets what, when, where and how" issues of practical politics, otherwise there will be trouble, but if you use OddHat's archetypes the interests of the team should be larger: big science, mystical/occult issues, seas/space/other dimensions/negative zones and so on. You may need a couple of "natural man" types in there just to keep the high-minded, large-visioned team anchored to the real word. I'd like a base that isn't part of anyone's national territory, and good team mobility, which probably means one or more vehicles. Also, serious attacks on the team base should not result in the deaths of civilians for densely populated mid-city blocks all around. I think someone should trample mud on the pristine floors of the team base occasionally, and insist on Christmas gift-giving and stuff like that. Mankind shouldn't only impinge when there's a tsunami, for instance, and lots of people need to be rescued. Powers - I think you need powers in there that help people solve problems in a fairly Silver Age Way, in the spirit of Samaritan. If what you have is a team of Larry Niven-style slavers (huge mind controllers), rip-slash killer cyborgs and so on, this isn't going to work. In other words, a properly designed team of global guardians is probably going to be extremely inefficient in point-crunching, arena-fighting terms. Mass rescue work, exploration and "striking to stun" impose different priorities. Tactically, I don't think you can rely too much on pre-emptive surprise attacks, otherwise everyone gets very paranoid about what the global guardians will do next (or who they will attack next). I'm not saying: abstain from pre-emptive acts of war, that would be ridiculous. They're a staple of the genre, for good reason. If it seems reasonable to go to the Island of Doctor Destroyer and pre-empt the bad guy, so on. But try not to habitually present national governments with faits accomplis, successfully completed sneak attacks and "facts on the ground." Don't let this become your usual way of doing an end run around tedious human politics and diplomacy. If the Canadian government insists you can't chase crooks over their border, accept that. In the long run, the laws will probably change to let the global guardians do things that national governments want done - provided the team doesn't let the politicians condemn them as law-breakers while having full confidence that the team will solve their problems for them anyway. You cannot jerk people around and do this job right. If the team issues a warning or says something has to be done, it can't be a trick. Even though such a team will in effect be above the law, it can't act like it. Here's an example. If a team member attacks/injures/kills someone for insulting or defying them, and the team holds a trial and takes an excuse for that, or assigns a penalty that's a slap on the wrist, then they may feel they've been compassionate, moderate, fair etc., but from the point of view of almost anybody not in the team, they will have awarded themselves the samurai's right of "killing and going away," and everything about how they interact with the rest of the world will change, it will be tainted by feat and resentment. I think it's much, much better to rely on ordinary courts when possible, and to be just, even when it seems harsh and ungrateful to team-mates who may once have saved your lives. It's much better if the most reliable "boy scout" members of the team are also known to have long life-spans. People will put up with a lot if they can see that the long term is likely to be better, not worse. If people can see that the team has an immortal, regenerating Psycho-Killer (which I would very much not recommend), who'll outlive Commander Justice, Princess Prudence, Doctor Temperance and Lord Fortitude, then your problems don't arise when that happens, they arise when people start to think about that happening, which means immediately.

Re: Avenger/Justice League in the "real" world Hermit: "I know some hate them, but the classic "alien ends up adopting Earth as his new home" bit would work great. It lets you get an excuse for really advanced Tech, and the character in question often adopts the team as his or her new family which leads to some good cohesion." I warmly agree with all of that, as well as with what OddHat had to say. One of the desirable qualities the alien might have is a complete lack of desire to win human status battles aimed ultimately at securing desirable mates, land as so on. And an alien might think an awful lot of Earth politics really comes down to who gets what, even if all the human politicians were saying: no, no, it's not about that at all, this is all about high ideals. I also think the alien is your obvious person to suit different environments: underwater, space, whatever. And I think your global guardians really want an underwater hero at least. Too much of Earth's surface is covered by water to not have someone in the team that is comfortable there. (In other words, I might have Kal-El be the one with gills and the team vehicle and the sea-based club-house, not necessarily the most powerful one.)

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human BcAugust: "Can you imagine team arguements over heating the house?" Why argue? The base temperature might be whatever suited the invulnerable hero's true love of the week, day or afternoon, plus any companions, lackeys or whatever. Computers like the same sorts of conditions people do, as do books and a bunch of other familiar tools and conveniences. There's no obvious incentive for an invulnerable man to argue with what fragiles need, unless he dislikes having them around (in which case, you obviously pick a riff-raff-unfriendly environment) or unless he finds the "hostile" environment useful in some way, or decorative. (Dramatic lava this week, decorative glaciers the next - fun, but tough on the help.) BcAugust: "What happens when clothing is only a matter of society approval?" Then wearing appropriate clothing might be a measure of how connected someone was to society and peer expectations. That's how it worked in Watchmen, with Doctor Manhattan shedding his clothes as he disconnected from humanity, until he was nude, living on Mars, seemingly sexually indifferent to his former lover, and inclined to forget things like "human beings need air to breathe". Lightray: "Since Dragon Lady had no powers to threaten Aegis with, I had to assume that it was peer pressure that got him to conform." That or sneaky mind control. Either way, I would agree with Dragon Lady, even though I am a big fan of the ancient artistic convention of heroic nudity reflected in superhero costumes. (I'm also a huge Richard Corben fan, and my next character - I hope - Last Hero is a clone of a Corben character.) It's less scary for the ordinary folks on the street if the invulnerable man shows some respect for contemporary taboos. Let's not raise questions about what other ancient quirks this Heroic Age Greek character might have, such as collecting spear-won lovers, or being all for exposing unfit infants on mountain-sides. As Buffy the vampire-slayer once said, also in the context of invulnerability: "That was then. This is now." Or as Einstein might have said: "Super-hero costumes should be as simple as possible - but not more so." Maybe you could have split the difference with some fig-leaves? BcAugust: "How people chose costumes and why makes less and less sense most of the time. Hmm, that might make a good thread in it's own right." Your idea, and interesting to me. OK: you start the new thread, and I'll chime in.

Re: Playing Head games The funny thing about "empathy" is that (with the exception of me babbling about Will Graham) we are talking about characters that are extremely un-empathic. I guess that's part of the scare: they get all of the benefits with none of the implicit restraints. Anyway, I agree with Constantine: our role is to be useful, so if a power package is what's most useful (for characters like Tao, for some dragons in conversation and so on), let's get to it. TELEPATHY 6D6, +1/2 invisible power effects, +1/4 half END cost, -1/4 concentration halves defensive combat value, -11/4 extra time takes a turn, -1/2 requires a skill roll: conversation, 2 END, Cost 17 Points I don't think it's worth bothering with an extra limitation: only to work on weaknesses. If the character is cruel and only wants to do that, that's all they'll do of course, but if a good character had a similar power they could use it for therapy. But you may want to add the limitation anyway, just to reflect how mean these characters are. This writeup assumes you can "normally" mess people up that badly with just a moderate amount of telepathy. (Provided the target has no defenses and juicy psychological limitations - and how many player characters lack them?) I do assume that, so this writeup would work for me. If you think telepathy can't normally do that, fair enough, do this: TELEPATHY 6D6, +1/2 invisible power effects, +1/4 half END cost, -1/4 concentration halves defensive combat value, -11/4 extra time takes a turn, -1/2 requires a skill roll: conversation, 2 END, Cost 17 Points MIND CONTROL 6D6, +1/2 invisible power effects, +1/4 half END cost, -1/4 concentration halves defensive combat value, -11/4 extra time takes a turn, 1/2 requires a skill roll: persuasion,-1/2 linked to telepathy, 2 END, Cost 15 Points

Re: WWYCD: Wonder Drug Orgone Man: "At last!" Orgone man would have been totally in favor of this, and he would have volunteered to use his Orgone Powers, with or without pay, to ensure that any reactions and mutations would be favorable, and to help the newly altered adjust. He would have been perfect for that. Orgone man was worried about Mechanon, and robots overtaking organic life. Technology that would put organismic power way ahead of machines again was exactly what he wanted. Gladiatrix: "Bring 'em on!" I the player would have been delighted. New supers were desperately needed. The "worst" likely result of adding lots of them would have been that in sufficient numbers they might crush the player character team. Unless the new supers were consistently, remarkably evil, that would have been an improvement. (The game had entered a typical Iron Age death-spiral where everybody was competing to be the worst, bloodiest, most callous gun-bunny, death-Ninja, Wolverine clone or whatever.) So: "Bring 'em on!" Chain Lightning: "Uh-oh!" Chain Lightning would have regarded this with great suspicion. Now the rich will be able to be practically a superior species? Oh boy. He would try to find out who was going to get these treatments, and sort out the likely villains from potential allies. He would also assume there was going to be a big robbery directed at the super-formula, and he would try to be on hand to bust his enemies, if only so as not to have to deal with suddenly super tong assassins. Last Hero: "Good!" Last Hero perceives predatory and piratical aliens as the problem, and a humanity that can defend itself as the solution. If Earthlings are about to be more of a handful for any potential raider or invader: "Good!" But the setup didn't indicate anybody felt the need to have Last Hero participate in this, so it would be nothing to do with him.

Re: Playing Head games Nexus: "Some exceptionally manipulative and intelligent people are dangerous to even talk too. They can get into someone's head and screw with them with just words, making the doubt themselves, commit irrational acts or even paralyze them completely with doubt. Some examples would be Hannibal Lector, Angelus or Tao." Tao I would build with mind control, since I saw him do big things that were definitely not just skill. Angelus I'll ignore, because I'm not well-informed enough to say anything. Let's look at Hannibal Lecter. By default, I agree with OddHat: you build this monster with skills and characteristics, or what are skills and characteristics for? The argument against that, I think, is that Hannibal Lecter seems to be one of those tactical genius types who are able to rely on his opponents making certain mistakes, and the easiest way to make that work solidly is to give the character invisible mind control. He knows what people are going to do wrong (even in his prison break-out), because (out of game) he predetermine those errors. On the other hand - Hannibal Lecter likes Clarice Starling. But giving him her as an opponent (in the third book) was just like giving him a toy to play with. (Which is one of the reasons why I thought the third book was such a huge disappointment.) But there's someone who scares Hannibal Lecter, for good reason: Will Graham. Even though Will Graham is the one who suffers from fear (frequent, strong I think), which is the worst psychological limitation to have against Hannibal Lecter, there's a balance of power here, and Hannibal Lecter was the one that would up behind bars. He knows it too. "Scary" isn't "stronger", or practically all of Superman's foes would be defined as more powerful than him. If Will Graham is your enemy, or would be if he knew what you were up to, conversation with him is extremely dangerous. Just being in the same room can end your career. If Hannibal Lecter could have told Will Graham "move along, nothing to see here" he would have. And there was nothing to see! What bonus is that!? But - no dice. So: what do you think Will Graham's got? If after building that, your mind-controlling Hannibal Lecter can walk all over him, in conversation or in general, I think you need to rebuild one or both of these characters.

Re: Death of my F-t-F Game Good luck, Corven Ren.

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human BcAugust: "I have to say this is one of the most flat out terrifying mentalist ideas I've seen in a while, though it's prompted some great villain construction. I do have to ask, what kind of campaign was this?" Thank you, I wish I could take credit for this idea, but it was from my best friend Peter, the player of the mentalist. Like myself, Peter researches his character ideas, and one of the first things he found was that hypnotists do not neglect the advantages of self-hypnosis. So: take it the extra step. You're super, right? Let's not do this by halves! The game was surprisingly four-colour, Silver Age, brilliant fun, and unfortunately short-lived. All the players and the gamemaster were very strong, experienced roleplayers who liked extreme concepts, but who were also firmly in favour of real heroes, not costumed bums. So (by a sort of tacit, never-discussed bargain), we would take things way, way out there on the edge - and not leap off. You would see very clearly what The Amazing Blackstone (our mentalist) was capable of (in multiple senses), or what our martial artist or our brick or my energy projector might do - and then, maybe after a false start, a crisis, some roleplayed conflict, there would be a real decision - and it would be a hero's decision. It was like going back to the best of the Silver Age, with everything new and open to doubt. (Maybe the Thing really was going to turn murderously against his team-mates?! ... but no. Yayy!!) The further you were out there, the better, like scoring more by doing an elaborate jump in ice skating - provided you completed the jump convincingly as a hero. (You should be able to show with strong roleplaying that the course ultimately taken was the one the character would take, not an arbitrary plot or a game convenience thing.) Falling on your backside into evil would have impressed nobody. That was the cheap choice. It seemed everybody in the 1990s was doing it. I would love to play in a game like that again. The details: Champions 4, I forget how many points but not much over 250-300, normal rules, not oo many skills. (We were a bunch or rubes who'd won the space lottery: PS Lawyer 11- and everyman skills were enough to start with, for a character without martial arts or anything like that. Our opponents included people who were much more skilled and smarter, which was scary.) Aliens kidnapped a bunch of civilians and did things to them that misfired due to unexpected circumstances, producing heroes like the Fantastic Four, except that we were all strangers with unrelated powers, and by far the majority of us sooner or later turned out to be villains - with all the players firmly not noticing who had "PC" stamped on their heads, and therefore with nobody knowing who could be trusted, at first. Only we had to trust someone. For one thing, our brick (a 1939 Superman clone) quickly decided that the smart thing to do would be to pick up the easy money for volunteering for medical tests - which (administered by an evil corporation behind which lurked our Lex Luthor) quickly revealed a deadly radiation susceptibility which we (the survivors of The Experiment) all equally shared. (The gamemaster had required the common origin so he could hit us all conveniently with the same Vulnerabilities, Susceptibilities, Limitations, Drains and plot-device effects. Good idea!) With no choices but to stand together against the threat to us all or else to knuckle under as radiation weapons were developed and some of our weaker-willed fellow supers decided to get with the strength and the easy money, we just had to make decisions. Trusting the Amazing Blackstone was the hardest choice of all. I never liked being under the same roof as him, let alone going to sleep or otherwise letting down my mental guard. But his standing offer to make me positive like him, or just to end my nervousness (including forgetting that we had such an arrangement) was just an honest free offer, as long as the campaign went. It also helped somehow that he could get his clock cleaned out of artificial overconfidence, and did. It made him seem less scary. And I wasn't so easy to live with either. Heat control offered me a lot of new options and affected how I acted. (I had so much information coming in from thermal super-senses and I could do so much invisibly that I just told people what I thought they needed to know, when I thought they needed to know it.) And our brick was so brick-y he could make you scream with frustration. (Anything, especially anything in skirts, was worth exploring without preliminaries.) And our martial artist could have been the long-lost twin brother of Carnifex from Wild Cards - not exactly easy company. So we all ... worked on it. With good results, except that life happens and the campaign ended. I'm happy you got some good villain ideas from our amazing mentalist. Did all that cover what you were asking?

Re: Politics in Champions.... Lord Mhoram: "Oh yeah, one other thing in general - I'm using the trope of the events of the world reflect that metal age of the comics... the whole IST and supers wars is the Iron Age* - that is over, the new game is starting and it is very much neo-silver." Then I suggest you play up adulation of, gratitude to and almost a martyr cult of the world's equivalent to Superman, who died stopping the nuke. Make him as near as you can to a paragon of Silver Age virtues. Have the public convinced that that's the kind of hero they want. If a hero acts like [fill in his name], they'll get great reactions. If a hero plays cool killer Iron Age games, people won't be intimidated or impressed as much as they will be disappointed that "you're sure not like [fill in his name]." There should be a whopping big steel statue of him, somewhere convenient for the players to come and see it (or talk to it, the way people might talk to the statue of Abraham Lincoln). Filling those giant boots, and eventually earning respect (and self-respect) purely in your own right should be campaign growth issues. Of course, I'm thinking of Wally West taking up the banner of Barry Allen. It should be obvious to the players that despite the super-soldier programs and so on, they personally won't be interfered with or spied on by their government - as long as they act the way [fill in his name] did, and are therefore, politically "sacred cows". Trying to convert from Iron Age to Neo-Silver is tough. I've seen it tried, and it failed. So I think in providing encouragement and support for players to take the right path and stick to it, your first thought should be to "use enough gun," not to be as unobtrusive as possible. Lord Mhoram: "Much of this happened during Clinton's presidency and he was a meta with abilites of persuasion and mind control (espeically in masses), and worked for the Shadow Masters, which is why much of the US didn't react." So, if William Jefferson Clinton was the agent, who ran this agent? And will that feared master-spy, The Beret, be seen again? (Think clean thoughts, chum!) If so, should she be in fishnet stockings and with a swing-line, like The Black Widow? Or should she lurk more, like The Spirit's arch-enemy The Octopus, identified only by his gloves? ("In the dark, I couldn't see who it was, there was just this sexy female voice giving orders on behalf of the Shadow Masters, and once I caught a glimpse of - a beret!") Your history looks fine, close enough for comics, no problem.

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human mfterman: "People often get restless if they're not allowed to use their limbs. TK's would tend to be lazy, but I can't see them not using their arms and legs." I agree. You get all this lovely feedback from using your body. Touch feels good. A workout feels good. I can see telekinetics developing quite respectable physical abilities, juggling glasses with two hands and much heavier objects with their minds and so on, just for the fun of getting everything to work together harmoniously. Skills that most people may find uncomfortable to learn could be relatively stress-free for a telekinetic, because you know that if you get into trouble (say with a looming motorcycle crash) you have an extra option to rescue yourself and/or any others present.

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human I'll keep my replies in this thread, but there were some great posts in: http://www.herogames.com/oldForum/Champions/002196.html (Thanks, Mutant For Hire.) mfterman: "Being a heroic mentalist is a special form of hell." Being a heroic mentalist is wonderful. Mind-controlling yourself produces only beneficial effects, and every day in every way, the effects get better and better. Deeper and deeper into the mind-controlled state I continue to go, and tomorrow I will go deeper still. I will count to five, and after I get to five, it is certain that I will be happy, positive, and confident all day. One: happy positive and confident all day." [And the first whacking big mind control roll, undefended.] I adventured with a mentalist who started every day like that. It was ... an experience. The good side was, when a villain would knock him into the middle of next week he would make a more objective post-fight review. But he was still living in his own private Idaho. It became very, very believable to me that no matter how often you beat a mentalist, he or she will be full of confidence next time. A mentalist doesn't have to live with any thought that makes him unhappy. He really doesn't. By the way, if a mind-controller would find it a completely heart-breaking thought that you didn't love him too, or that the only reason you did love him was because he kept you mind-whammied, there is no reason why he would have to have either of those negative thoughts. A lie detector test would confirm his innocence of everything, with no conscious cheating. Since our team mentalist hero had a public identity, courts accepted his testimony as an expert witness on what was really going on in people's minds. I wouldn't have, but I had a secret identity and couldn't testify. mfterman: "As for relationships, who wants to be in a relationship with someone who can read your mind? Who knows all your secrets and can tell what you're really thinking." Lots of people think that they are wonderful, if only you could somehow know them as they "really" are (not as they act). The down-side is, if they find out that to know, know, know them is not at all to love, love, love them, they can take it hard, or want to remove the unflattering image (or the head it's contained in), or generally just refuse to accept this most spiritually intimate of rejections. (Cue: "Play Misty For Me".)

Re: X-men characters 7 Adamantium Skeleton Armor +10 PD/ +10 ED; Only as. Body (-1), Only to prevent broken bones (-2) I'm not sure how this would work. How would you apply it in play? It's got to do something other than influence special effects, otherwise why is it worth points? 30 Adamantium Claws Multipower (A: 45); Restrainable (-1/4), Does no Knock back (-1/4) I've seen Wolverine do lots of knockback, against Razorfist. Then again, both were acting like bricks with normal or even does-no-body attacks, so I think your writeup is better than the comic. You haven't given him many skills - probably just the ones he has used when I was reading him, or seeing him on the big screen. Good call. (I think he knows Japanese too, but this is no big deal. Simple is good.) An excellent portrait in Champions points! And you're making a good argument for our way of building a character. Next, please!

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human sinanju: "So he did do almost anything, attempting ever more dangerous and stupid stunts to impress his friends. He took his nom de guerre Jackass from the MTV show. When you're virtually invulnerable to harm, why not do crazy-stupid things to impress your friends?" (curious) Did he warn everybody strongly, seriously and sufficiently convincingly on every occasion never to try to do what I do, because you are different from me and you can't? Or what did he do the first time one of his friends got injured/maimed/killed doing the same sorts of stuff the Jackass was always doing to show off to them? How did he react to that? I'm thinking of a weightlifter who learned how to train (with good results - for him) by using extremely heavy poundages, dropping into the bottom squat position and bouncing up out of it. He must have had invulnerable knees, because he never came to any harm from this. But those who imitated mister big, strong guy frequently suffered terrible injuries till everyone figured out that this is a Bad Idea. It's sort of a variation on the brick problem of the world being made of wet clay and tissue paper. All you've got to do is collect your boiled eggs for breakfast thoughtlessly in the obvious way (by scooping them out of the boiling water bare-handed) in front of a child, and the next thing you know you're dealing with screams, tears and serious scalding. I thought one of the more touching moments in Unbreakable (which I >love!<) was when the kid tells his father that he had tried to be an unbreakable hero, like his dad was, and it hadn't worked. ("I'm not like you!" - Ouch!)

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human BcAugust: "Actually, add on enhanced senses to something interesting to think about." (nods-) A completely different perceived environment could produce huge changes in behavior/psychology. And you raise a lot of valid points. Among other things, super-senses can make you much, much more aware of people who need your help, and how badly they need your help. (Maybe even when what you need is to sleep.) "Would you have lightbulbs in your house if you see perfectly well in the dark?" I think you would, for pets and visitors. Here's another potential nasty issue with super-senses, especially detects: lots of moral quandaries get definite answers. "Terry Schiavo: are you in there?" Lots of supers could answer that question. Easily. Now suppose your esper gets a definite "yes!" and "help, help, they're going to kill me!" - and the court rejects that testimony and says "death by dehydration!" anyway. What's your next move, hero? A game that addresses issues like that could get way grimmer than it was supposed to be, and there might be bad feelings between players, or some players and the gamemaster. Not good. Not a place to go. When are the unborm people in some meaningful sense? (Before I go on: please, please, please, I do not want to debate pro-life/pro-choice issues here! Tenk-yew.) The Man of Orgone could easily sense that, and should have reacted to it given his psychological limitations. But I felt that it was better to leave this as out-of-scope for a superhero game. (I had a huge problem with it in In Nomine, where you specifically are supposed to be doing things related to religious standards of right and wrong. But comics are different.) If your super-senses tell you that respectable people are killing innocents all the time, then you may not react to that externally (because you are pledged not to interfere in the laws and customs of mankind or whatever) but shouldn't it affect your feelings? If Orgone Man, or your favorite mentalist, can see little lights go out, and the blackened auras of some of those around him, isn't that significant information? Or if his orgone powers can detect that definitely personhood only begins after birth, is that not information he should be doing something with? No, I don't think so (either way). I think that often psychological exploration is great, and yet at some points it's better to completely turn reality off and get back to four-color Silver Age conventions about what you don't discuss, and this is one of those points. Champions (does not equal sign) morality plays regarding anything where there is a fundamental lack of moral consensus. I don't think you even want to be mucking around the edges of this stuff, like Winter (daughter of Miracleman) doing telepathic stunts from inside the womb. Just leave it out entirely.

Re: The Ages of Comics. Threw a Glass Dorkly Assault: "Having said that, if we do take the Iron Age as starting in the mid-80s, it's been going for the better part of twenty years now. This makes it the longest "age" to date." I think comics are no longer adapting to the demands of a big new audience, because there is no big new audience. It doesn't matter what the next generation of kids like, because saving up for a comic is a poor entertainment decision for a child nowadays anyway. What I see is trade paperbacks and movies. But this is another thread. I think we did pretty good providing nexus with scenario-fodder based on the conventions of the different ages painted in unflattering and funny colours. : )

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human RDU Neil "I was the first to reach the top of Mt. Everest!" That's a very good example. (And good posting in general: bravo!) From the flying character's point of view, maybe he's doing what he's made to do, and being obsessed over lame work-arounds for not being able to fly is silly. From the point of view of the climber, the flying character may be irrelevant or a cheat. The non-flyer in this case is not necessarily a normal either. Climbing is a satisfying activity for some martial artists, bricks (well, the sorts of bricks I generally like best anyway: Giant-Man or Goliath I) and others (such as mentalists who might want an objective challenge). It's dangerous, it's intense, it can extend you. (See the remarkable movie "Touching the Void" for how far and how hard climbers may wind up pushing themselves.) How would you feel about losing out in the Olympic steeple-chase or the triple-jump to a flyer why just tapped a foot against the ground from time to time in a meaningless gesture at complying with the rules? You might not feel the same envy mixed with admiration you could feel for a faster runner, rather you might feel that the flyer is not really competing in the same event as you at all, just taking the glory as though he had. A different example: I do not think Hawkeye and Green Arrow, competing at what obsessed them both, would be amused if Flash and Quicksilver entered the competition, fired all their arrows, and just carried them down-range and stuck them in the target. Flash's arrows would arrive first and be perfectly placed, but it wouldn't be the same. I think there is at least one general way for supers to compete, though it wouldn't appeal to all tastes. If I am Superman, you can't be as strong as me, as fast as me, etc. But you can be as upright as me, whether you have similar powers, different powers, lame powers or no powers. Supers who regarded Mother Teresa, when she was alive, as their competition could be very pleasant company. Just one super could have a huge influence on how the others chose to compete, if he was strong enough (in a broad sense of "strong") that he was clearly the guy to beat, and the terms he set were your best chance to draw near to him or sometimes even beat him. Go go, the big blue boy-scout! : )

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human Witch Doctor: "Think of a self made hero ..." Yes. But some of those might also have concentrated on self-discipline and self-control with such success that they just calmly accepted that situation. That's how people are. Others not of course. I think the main issue here might be romantic, particularly for women and for men who didn't have an exception that it's all right to make demands based on being a girlfriend/housewife/mother and nothing else. A straight answer to the question "do you respect me?" would often be: "No." "What do you really think I'm entitled to?" "Suppose you get something for yourself for a change." That's not a great basis for true love.

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human RDU Neil: "This also brings up another point... how would certain aspects of our lives... like professional sports... be utterly changed and perhaps non-existant in a super-world." You could have Olympic-style drug testing, down to gene scans. After all, you already have to decide whether female athletes really are female, and if they aren't they are banned. So a rule that says your genetics have to be right is no new thing. Athletics, portraying an image of mankind physically ascendant, with mutation excluded as cheating a priori, could be more popular than ever. If you choose to be an athlete you are choosing high rewards at the cost of zero privacy, as testers can arrive at any time to examine everything from your blood cells to your excreta to what you are having for breakfast. Of course the hunt would be on for the best mutant talent - the ones with powers that let them be superior at their sports and also very good at cheating the tests. Or just good at cheating. A mutant former sports star (that is a successful cheat) might be a cynical, frustrated person, less interested in money and other rewards that they had already tried than in using their powers full blast and to Hades with what normals considered fair, safe, ethical or otherwise acceptable. RDU Neil: "What about awards for research/accomplishments?" If you want the money, you have to accept the rules. Or for villains, not. Suppose you stop worrying about whether some cretinous normal gives you a little less pocket money on degrading terms, or a little more. Address the real issue, which is whether you or he decides who gets rewarded, who gets excluded, and who gets punished. It's all about power. Of course with Earth X type mutant populations, or long before then, all that changes.

Re: Der Psychology of der Super Human This is a fascinating old thread. I love this kind of stuff. OK, some takes that I have used (or applied to use, but had the character concept rejected): First, a mentalist: The Tutor A bright (20 INT) mentalist was obvious when you looked at his path through school, because everywhere around him all the slow kids turned brilliant: the ideas would just pop into their heads, often over and over till they picked up a new skill permanently. Why? Did you ever see a cow that's not smart enough to open a gate try over and over to do it? And these (your childhood peers) are human beings, and you can feel their (needless!) frustration so keenly. Anyone whose temperament inclined to empathy and compassion is going to go: "Here! It works like this! Take it, use it: from my head to yours!" Keep doing that, and you could have a lot of grateful, loyal, formerly stupid followers and contacts further down the road. Any agents who work for this guy will have shocking skill lists. But if they started out stupid, they will all think things out one way, his way. If the boss has a plan with a flaw that's not obvious to him, nobody else is likely to see it either. Any of those beneficiaries: if they are in trouble at school because they are being abused at home, that will be fixed if at all possible. If they don't have the courage to report what they are suffering to the authorities, courage can be supplemented. Sometimes motivating people to get up for a confrontation can be for their own good, even if they're too browbeaten or too slow to see it. (And courage-boosting, like INT-boosting, is a useful skill to develop.) Anyone with problems about children who need help starting to make it could just forget it - literally. Teachers or parents who thought it was a good idea to make an outcry about disadvantaged pupils doing so well should just think something else, forthwith. "My Johnny has caught up. I feel great about him doing so well. There is no problem here. No problem." - How much resistance is an average parent going to have to a suggestion like that? All you have to do is nudge people, if you're quiet about it. Moving this freak to an environment where he'll only interact with his fellow super-bright kids is not going to happen. They don't need him. He's not going to let the people who do need him relapse before they're solidly confirmed in the right (INT 20) way of thinking, or as near to that as they can physically get. Compassion: it's a powerful motivator. The same guy, so compassionate to his peers and to the vulnerable, may read his teachers like books. You're supposed to be teaching. Your knowledge is supposed to become his. If you mumble, if you are inept, if you explain poorly, he'll just take his intellectual property that your incompetence is keeping from him. Forget cheating, that will be beneath him. His circumvention of the system will occur at a much more fundamental level. Someone like this will likely be offended at how the stock market too often works, with the predators feasting on the gullible. Is there any ethical reason for him not to take would-be thieves to the cleaners? He would be most unlikely to think so, especially if he had charitable uses for at least some of that money: help the handicapped! He'll gladly help his followers to read his mind, when they're ready. Why not? They'll only see the little flaws everyone has, and that they'll have been trained (in his way of thinking) to forgive - as he forgives them - and the basic purity of his intentions, and an absolute determination to win that should reasonably add to their confidence. - So now you have a guy with brains, plans and a cause, someone who is totally sure he's right, whose hordes of (genuinely, un-coerced-ly) fanatical followers agree that he has the right answers, and who is ready to start implementing a better tomorrow, backed by billions liberated from unethical uses and owners. And that's a good guy mentalist. I thought so anyway. The GM did not agree. In retrospect I can see his point. But, if you were brilliant, deeply compassionate and a powerful telepath - could you let people around you just fail and fail and keep failing? As the twig is bent, the tree grows. Helping people is an appetite too. It can grow with the eating.

Re: PBEM Recruiting:New York Knights Are you sure the game is still running?

Re: The Ages of Comics. Threw a Glass Dorkly Champsguy: "I'm sorry guys, but ..." Hey I'm happy to learn new things from a guy who knows his bad cliches! (Hail to the Munchkin King.) I don't know the latter ages well, because (oh this dates me!) Inferno convinced me I didn't like the direction of comics any more, so I have no regular buying habit after that. By the way - was Inferno more Iron Age or Bronze Age? (Genuine, straight question.) Anyway, I did say "late Iron Age" so there's an early (or only) Iron Age to be discussed, if it will be of use to nexus. Frequent deaths and resurrections may be part of it, and proliferating clones go with that. (Gwen Stacey! Gwen Stacey!) If Inferno was Iron Age, them there's a scene from Grimjack that's worth stealing. Grimjack died and went to the great sorting area of the afterlife where his fate was to be decided. In the background behind him you could see a phoenix-costumed redhead flying in and out of the realm of the dead over and over, in a revolving door where the other side presumably was in the world of living characters. Clones are apt to fight each other to the death on sight for no reason. In fact everything about clones is apt to happen for no reason. Regardless of dates, I think Superman dead, many Supermen, Superman with long hair belongs in the same part of the multi-dorkey-verse. Kill off the toughest male character (to balance for the extra annoyance to female characters when Image Distortion comes on later) in a manner that makes it grossly, offensively obvious that this is GM fiat and you can't get out of it, then replace him with half-a dozen cliched and inferior versions of himself (terminator you, kid you, battlesuit you, positively stereotyped ethnic minority you and so on) and let the player run all or most of them, then force them together and back to normal (via a Clonal Accumulator?), but with a trivial, permanent costume or appearance change. (Be a good egg here - if there's one the player character wants but could not think of a rationale for, now is the time! This could even lead to his gaining a higher COM.) The player characters may be rejoicing at this point, because they will all get extra powers, not just the badly multiple-duplicated dead hero. All the free powers will clash with established themes and must imitate lame late 20th century pop culture crazes. Are you a magic-user? Well now you are a teen mutant animal magic-user - with a cyborg arm! So you swing (from rooftops - the other stuff I don't wanna know) - then bring on the Transformer-bot Spider-buggy/battlesuit! And so on. But all these new powers will fail against the new breed of villains! Master-villains with no background or plot written for them (the writers thought they could wing it later, after the dramatic entrance, but they were wrong) will be posing and speechifying and displaying invulnerability to "lotsa stuff" and preposterous amounts of power with no purpose. Are the player characters mutants? Then these are the Mutants Above the Mutants ! Are the player-characters hard-training martial artists? Then the master villain has attained a higher state of Training Through Indolence ! Etc. (If you do manage to beat one of these dorks down and question him, he will admit he doesn't know what he was doing: his schemes and motives are so advanced they're not only beyond human comprehension, they're beyond his or her own comprehension! Bwa-ha-ha!) I think in honour of - someone - all these sinister fellows should wear black lipstick, and intimidate the heroes by doing their lippy right in front of them (as a Presence attack) - but hey, your game, your call. Meanwhile, hordes of identical clones of the player characters' dependent non-player-characters and other loved ones should be going Dawn of the Dead (2004) on them for no good reason. There's the Dreaded Deadline Doom, which if there is a talking duck anywhere in the area means everything stops while a boring, scruffy writer comes onstage and rambles forth his asinine "insights" till the player characters get bored (which should be soon) and make him shut up. Otherwise it means a fill-in issue: things slow down and slow down (everyone loses one phase a turn, cumulative) and then suddenly (no transition) you're somewhere else (acting at normal speed) doing a very short "adventure" that runs on rails and can't gave any consequences, then (jolting non-transition again) you're back where you were (at normal speed), doing the things you were doing before (like arguing about which dorky, derivative clone is "the real me" and dodging the chomping, blackened teeth of a thousand Aunt Mays). I think when Maximum Clonage starts, the player characters will be sufficiently eager to get out of there, no matter what is next.

Re: The Ages of Comics. Threw a Glass Dorkly Many thanks for the kind words, everyone!

Re: The Ages of Comics. Threw a Glass Dorkly Oh the accents that villains were sometimes lumbered with in the golden age: "Prozeed mit der eggzerkuuchunz!" "Yah, mein oberstumbanngeneral! Foyer!!" I think you should have fun with this. I also think you should have at least one villain (Hitler's brain in an overturned salad dish? - a temporary expedient that became permanent ...) whose monologues are so mangled that his loyal supporters no longer know what he is saying and are just winging it to the best of their ability. "Lhaarhnge!" (quick whispering: "Large, something is large!" "Lunge! We are fencing?!" "But what about the rocket?" "Lunch?' "Lunch!" (The V-8X rocket technicians break for lunch en masse, leaving the doom-rocket unlaunched.) In the early Silver Age, events take place with breakneck speed. Stories may be complex but never continue because so much happens so quickly that a resolution is inevitable. "Darn it, Biff, that've escaped with the mole machine! Quick, to South America!" (Next panel - instantly to the players - the Zoom Jet dives in a strafing run as the Mole Machine pokes its nose above the surface next to a palace with a flag labelled simply "South America"; General Coup laments "Curses! They're onto us!!", while Captain Commissar yells at his luckless lackeys: "The hypersonic marshmallow jet-jammer - quickly you fools!." (The early Silver Age has gadgetary implausibilities of which even the Golden Age did not dream. Do not forget that you can totally jam advanced powered armour with a simple emery powder pistol!) Rare and desperately needed pauses are provided when some hero, heroine or blonde beauty in a huge beehive hairdo pauses to face an invisible audience and provide moral instruction the kids at home. ("We're fighting to defuse the Agitprop Bomb, not to hurt the animals. We do not hate the Proletariapes: we feel sorry for them, because just like socialists everywhere, they're merely being made monkeys of by their malevolent Marxist masters." ) Heroes may want to get out of this world quickly, before something else happens - something else is always about to happen. Late Iron Age: Image Attack! All suffer, but female character suffer most, as their legs lengthen to two or more times the length of their torsos, breasts swell bigger than the characters' heads, and long heel spikes grow inexorably from once sensible hero boots. It becomes impossible for the victims to pass through a doorway without doing a back-arched, derriere-protruding, heel-raised pose. (Stretching will be useful in complying with this requirement without loss of time, and in minimizing disorientation in general.) Events regularly splinter into alternates (foil-covered etc.) and it takes an EGO roll (or appropriate sense roll) at the beginning of each turn to determine which is the "official", applicable version - till things get so bad that there isn't one. Even so, this world looks "easier" at first in that stories aren't whipping through, Silver Age style. Then it emerges that nothing is ever resolved - it just diverts into more cheesecake, aimless and endless sub-plots, danglers and retcons that can remove characters and even make them never have existed! How do you escape a world where nothing can ever happen!?