David Blue

Re: Because I Must! devlin1: "IMO, he's clearly a Responsibility of Power/Thrillseeker kinda guy, although I don't believe he'd seek the thrill if he didn't have the power to begin with. He may say something else to his wife, but it's our actions under pressure, not our words, that define who we are." I agree with you that actions count most, and Mister Incredible's actions reveal a hero. Mister Incredible seems a straightforward guy. And yet you put him in two categories as once: Responsibility of Power/Thrillseeker. So it seems you can be a simple, straightforward, genuine hero, yet not fall neatly into any one category. "Everyone" seems to like the DC categories of villain and hero motivations (with individual variations to the categories, and some new categories), and I do too. But I think there's a right way and a wrong way for a gamemaster to use them. The right way is to generate NPC that aren't all the same - like every villain being some slight variation on a thrillseeker, or every NPC hero being some slight variation on a dark avenger, when you didn't mean for it to be like that. The DC motivation groups keep genuinely different options that fit the genre constantly before your eyes, and that's good. The bad way to use the DC motivation categories would be to expect player characters to fit them, and assume that if a character submission doesn't fit neatly into any one box, the hero's motivation is lacking or unclear. Even Mister Incredible - who's as heroic as you could want - doesn't pass that test. So it must be a flawed test.

Re: The President wants to talk to you A previous adventure with the nationally known hero group that has great skill dealing with national & international problems started with a mission from the president, and eventually involved a spectacularly nasty device - state-wide area effect fully invisible mind control nasty, Satan Bug nasty, a Bad, Bad Thing that ought to have been destroyed at once, despite its scientific (or magical/national/historical/whatever) interest. The great and famous group handed over the doom item instead of destroying it, on the president's solemn promise that it would only be studied briefly (by "top experts!"), and then cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die destroyed. If that promise was broken, the president has no working relationship with the great and famous group; or at least one of its members, probably the leader, will never forgive the president. Maybe even future presidents would not be trusted after a breach of faith like that. The president meant to keep his promise, but life is full of surprises. A senior Primus (or your top agency) guy has done a runner with the doom item, which should have been destroyed by now. He may have had inside help (in pressing to delay the destruction, of the item till he could flee with it). The president does not trust his own agencies till they have done a serious internal investigation and explained to him why the item was not destroyed on schedule. Also, the defector may be (is!) hooking up with a loitering villain or villain group that the lesser-known hero team has beaten before. (There should be objective reason to think the heroes can do this, though a senior Primus guy loaded for bear will certainly make it harder. Otherwise the president would be silly to give the lesser group a job where failure might have such large implications.) Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make good the president's word, retroactively. Destroy the doom item. If you get the traitor, bonus. If you get the villain (group), bonus. Any information on confederates, possible buyers, whatever - bonus. If you can do this without the great and famous group finding out anything till the president can tell them in person "but we did ultimately destroy it like I said we would" - sweet! But focus on the one essential task. If this is the mission I strongly recommend that the president be telling the player characters the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Otherwise, you have more or less thrown away your option to start any future adventures on a basis of patriotism and trust. Also, if the heroes do this (and don't kill civilians or otherwise mess up while doing it), the next time the heroes ask this president for something (including a pardon for someone who wants to go straight) the answer should be "Yes!" If you want to gee up a rivalry, have the director of Primus present and strongly recommending that the hero team not be used. Primus (practically) never messes up, and finding one of its own guys (who designed all the routines that would be used to find him) should be "a slam dunk". In this option, my assumption is that the president has a pretty good idea the top Primus guy has his heart in the tight place and is not one of the possible traitors (or he would not be present). The free information is how this mess-up happened (since the blind overconfidence of Primus will be on full display). The story idea is that the president would explode and tell the director of Primus to stay completely out of the case and out of the hero group's way, thus reinforcing the hero group's responsibility: it will all be up to them, with no Primus cavalry riding to the rescue. (But if you picked an item so big that if the heroes fail the campaign ends, you can have Primus rescue them - and the director of Primus, having made good his "slam dunk" boast and proved once again that Primus can cut corners with good effect, will gloat about it till the heroes want to strangle him.)

Re: Because I Must! The Incredibles is a great superhero movie, full of classic characters, so I'll apply the scheme to that. * Idealistic: Frozone: "the greater good" * Avenging/atoning for a personal tragedy: No hero, but Oliver Sansweet "You ruined my death!" * Inherits heroic "mantle" (Silver Age Green Lantern, Buffy): maybe nobody, maybe Violet, possibly Jack-Jack, but it's too soon to say. * Thrill-Seeker: Elastigirl "up there with the big dogs" the Dash (obvious love of speed and fun), Edna Mode (truly loves her work). * Reluctant/Shoved into it: Mrs. Incredible, who'd rather just be a wife and mother. * Apprentice/Inspired by another hero: Incrediboy. Leaving Mister Incredible, whose motives are in question. (With Mrs. Incredible consistently defining his motives in ways that boil down to accusing him of selfishness, and Mr. Incredible not denying it but acting quite differently when we see him in action). Mister Incredible seems not to fit any classification scheme. Rather he embodies the title of the thread: "Because I must!"

Re: Sex and the Single Superhuman To me, sexuality is critical in defining my characters. But somehow I usually define them in ways that lead to them not having big, bed-hopping sex lives. Orgone Man (with super sexual energy powers) - a thoroughly straight-laced mentalist and energy projector - just wanted to get married and raise healthy kids, and be a good, faithful husband and father. No female supers were interested in that agenda, so he wooed and won a perfectly normal non-super who was. Everybody kept not getting that he was about healthy, unblocked sexual energy, with conservative notions of "healthy". Gladiatrix - something like a combative and highly exhibitionistic living vampire - kept picking up male admirers on account of her party-going showoff ways and huge COM and PRE. Mostly this meant nothing to her. The exception was a hero she thought well of and who was smitten with her. She went the full show-and-tell honesty route: "You're not a fellow Devourer. You don't smell like a potential sexual partner. Of course I look good, we all do, all the better to eat you. To me, you're a walking, talking pork chop." This didn't lead to a deeper friendship but to a crushed ego and severance of all ties. All other Devourers were villains, hence Gladiatrix had nothing to do but save the day, show off as much as possible, be idolised by crowds (how do you know you're having fun if nobody applauds?), and go home alone. Chain Lightning - a Billy Batson/Captain Marvel transformation to energy projector - was smitten with sexy female supers. The feeling was only mutual in his super ID. He wound up getting bent out of shape about it, but decided that even though his initial heroic theatrics had only been to get girls he was never going to get, it was worthwhile for him to be willing to die or risk death to defend his "fellow normals" from the full-time superhumans who (in general) regarded normals as a lesser species and cheerfully trampled on their rights. He went from doing the right things for the wrong reasons to doing the right things for good reasons (in the context of the campaign). Last Hero (who I haven't played but would like to: an androgynous large brick, defender - "the last, best hope" - of an almost-extinct hive race) -wants a boy/girlfriend. Object: sunsets together, beaches, going to movies, massages (requires a really, really strong friend), even a house-mate. But "sex" as to Last Hero means "reproduction" and nothing else, and "reproduction" is about doing whatever will best protect/aid the hive mother. Though "female" in the same sense that a warrior ant is, Last Hero is the ideal "safe" boyfriend who's happy to be "just like a brother" and never wants to do anything. He would likely wind up as the significant other of a super with major issues she wasn't willing to deal with, or a succession of such troubled individuals. All these characters would be completely different or outright unthinkable without their sexualities.

Re: The Gilded Age Campaign It's hard to see the Spider not training the Punisher. With the attitude and the two blazing .45s in their iconic images, it's like: "that's my boy!" Actually, there may have been an excellent reason for mobsters to gun down the Punisher's family (that is, his father and anyone else present). Revenge! It would be embarrassing to have to tell the don that one of the Spider's sons had survived and was even more violent than his old man, as well as being burly rather than a hunchback. But I doubt the embarrassment would survive long.

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign Kirby: " Um, David Blue, you do know that this thread is about a GM asking if he should start new players at the 350 start point that the 'veteran' players started out or should they be given bonus experience, right?" Kirby: "Yeah, but Hooligan didn't post anything about sidekicks when starting this off. Maybe David Blue is going off of someone else's comment; it just seemed like he was creating his own scenario. Oh well." Sorry if I drifted off-topic. I just started with: what do you do when a player comes in late on a game where the established players have a metric load of experience points - which sounded to me like there would be a big, big, big power imbalance there. My answer, which I stand by, is that you can solve this in various ways, including giving the new player no breaks at all, but - BIG idea - the GM has to work out a solution, and make sure that all the players (not just the most obviously relevant ones) know it and are working in harmony with it. And that includes the GM sticking to their own plan. Going from the no-breaks option, which is the one I'm familiar with and the one requiring the most by the way of suggestions or solutions, I tossed in various ways the GM and the player can make the extreme imbalance option work. (If there are no options for the player to work with the GM on this, that might be seen as an issue.) I didn't mean to shift away from stuff that seemed on-topic (an extreme imbalance of power with a new player) and look exclusively at sidekicks. Kirby: "What is "this situation" you are referring to? I don't see how NPC villain agents would affect a new character." That's the "this situation". You have experienced players running characters with metric loads of experience, and an inexperienced player with much, much, much less power. Does shifting from a focus on big bad guys to floods of agents for a while make it easy to run Thor and Hellcat together? If you do this, have you in effect removed the problem of needing to give the new player unearned points? And if you stick to the idea that there has to be a good combat challenge for the stronger players, built on maybe two-to-three times as many points (or active points) as the newcomer, I don't think changing the character of the (still-high) challenge from uber-monsters to floods of agents helps the wimp. If anything, it might hurt. But I might be dead wrong about that - maybe that is how you get Superman and Robin to work well together in games. I was just tossing that approach out there. Nexus: "I think he's referring to the weaker sidekick character being knocked out . . ." You think right of course.

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign My best advice for the newbie in this situation is: try to find a sense that nobody else has or will soon have, and buy that. It makes it much, much easier for the GM to give you stuff to do. A designated class of opponents is an idea that may be worth trying, though personally I've found the negatives outweigh the positives. The idea is, you pick a concept like "Demon-slayer", then in every mixed fight you look for your designated opponent type. If all goes well, you get a steady diet of opponents on your own weight class, with any special abilities you may have bought being relevant. Nobody questions why you always pick those guys to fight, so it looks better. The down side is that what you are likely to get instead is nothing, then an all-designated-opponent scenario, with your special opponents being built to fight your elders and betters. After 20d6 Mega-Rays have unsurprisingly proved their superiority over wimpy exorcism powers and "Demon Slayer" has once more been scraped off the ground and sent to hospital, there's no more character concept left. Do stuff. Though everyone will prefer for you to wait your turn, if you do (a) it won't come, and ( you will probably die. The biggest danger to latecomer wimps is: you patiently do your (specialised and non-duplicated) job as occasion offers, like Cypher or you are cutely useless like Hellcat (or characters I've been), and you wind up dying because you've made no impact and nobody needs you. In this area, roleplaying games model the source material very well. Figure on lasting about one phase in combat. Buy the biggest attack and all the OCV the law allows. Use it. That's your chance to get something to celebrate. Don't worry about END or anything like that, it won't be relevant. The GM will likely hint to you that there's a range, like 40-60 active points, and your character being junior and all . . . Ignore that hint, for if in some misguided sense of good-guyness you follow it, you will not get to be lucky even occasionally, and that will make you duller to the GM, which is death. Do not bother with one-roll skills, the kind where you dog after the other players for the whole scenario and then get to make one (1) roll to decipher ancient runes or whatever. It's easy to miss that one roll. Miss it in two scenarios, and someone is likely to drop a couple of points and have that skill at 18-, so scenarios don't get held up by the wimp. Do not have an origin. I'm serious. An origin is a very significant point, where the character becomes capable of capable of dealing with top-level opposition and likely accepts the responsibilities that go with that. Having all the gaudy, emotionally intense and unlikely events that attend an origin, when the character in fact has not made it to the top level and is not ever likely to make it, is dumb. It seems over-wrought and fakey because it is fakey. It's better to just say "I'm a mutant" or "I'm a gymnast and I decided to study martial arts and fight crime" until/unless you become someone whose success demands an explanation. Do not have a "dark" character concept. Sooner or later, your large, grim, scarred hero is going to be shaving his legs to look good in Robin trunks. You know, "sidekick" is a game that looks better at fourteen than at forty-four. Also, waste no points on Presence: it won't be wanted, and with the onlookers laughing at Looser-Boy it also won't work, the penalties from your won-lost record will kill you. My best move ever: leaping to the front of the second most experienced hero, doing my Presence attack, something like "You guys had better give up because [steps aside and points] HE's the BLACK PHANTOM!" Even though I felt I was being resourceful, the GM still based the attack on my reputation, not BP's, with the usual result. (But everything worked out for the best in the end, because in retrospect this was far the funniest gaming I've ever done.)

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign One thing I'd like to throw open for other people is: how do you find agents work in this situation? In my experience, the idea that weaker characters are agent-crunchers is wrong: agents are worse than big villains, because you get overwhelmed by numbers of guys built to fight your betters (with Improved Turtle Armour TM or whatever) and therefore over whom you cannot obtain an adequate margin of individual superiority. Also it's wall-to-wall killing attacks, often autofire, and unlike Lord Megathreat they really don’t have anything better to do with their next phase after your force-field goes down than to hose you. You'd be better off charging the big guy practically every time.

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign Having been that newcomer/rookie/wimp, repeatedly . . . I think the BIG thing for the GM is to decide what your solution to a late-joining player is going to be, then make sure that the new player and all your experienced players are with your program, then stick with your solution, whatever it is. If you give the new player only enough points to be a sidekick, make sure you know what you will do with a sidekick, and that the player knows that too and can wait for their programmed good bits during the long periods of play that will be frustrating. (E.g. the long fights where after the first action or two the new player's character will be "resting" face down in the dust.) And the GM had to deliver on those good bits. And you need a experienced player with an experienced character who positively wants to do this. Personally, I love playing a wanted sidekick, but playing Incrediboy for session after session after session does not rock. Experienced characters are superior to new characters not only in power but also and mainly in flexibility. If your bit is a skill, and another player character with far superior characteristics and levels buys it (perhaps he had intended to anyway), you just became Superfluous Boy. This is even more true with powers: very experienced characters are likely to have been rebuilt in ways that make the best use of their points, so a tweak of a gadget or a couple of points in a new ultra-slot (with limitations) has the same effect. It is big help if the GM plans things out with all the players, not just those most obviously involved. The more players you already have, the truer this will be. The small thing for the GM is: do not give players "patents" on point-optimising ideas. If Joe owns the focus thing, and Jim owns activation rolls, and so on, a latecomer comes in and essentially builds a plain vanilla character, with active points being not far above real points, everything else being staked out. I once did this in a game with 200 starting points, no freebies for newbies, no limits on active point totals, no damage/def/etc. limits, and experienced players with about 100ep, tweaked to 500-700 active points. It was - memorable. In that setup, the big characters grow far faster with experience than the plain-Jane latecomer wimps do. The longer you play, the more you fall behind. Another hint: take the inexperience of the player and the probable non-optimisation of their character into account in balancing fights. An inexperienced player with their non-optimised rookie character can be far, far weaker than a "weak" villain built on fewer points. Finally for the GM, if you're going to do V.O.I.C.E. or an Apocalypse style adventure where the idea is that "none but the strong will survive!", you may want to consider holding off the introduction of wimps till afterwards. True, the stronger characters can protect Supernumerary Lass during the crisis but nobody is likely to have much fun doing that, and the bonding dynamic that pulls together heroes as a team in time of crisis will tend to strongly define those who aren't effectively contributing to the team as not part of it.

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign Having been that newcomer/rookie/wimp, repeatedly . . . I think the BIG thing for the GM is to decide what your solution to a late-joining player is going to be, then make sure that the new player and all your experienced players are with your program, then stick with your solution, whatever it is. If you give the new player only enough points to be a sidekick, make sure you know what you will do with a sidekick, and that the player knows that too and can wait for their programmed good bits during the long periods of play that will be frustrating. (E.g. the long fights where after the first action or two the new player's character will be "resting" face down in the dust.) And the GM had to deliver on those good bits. And you need a experienced player with an experienced character who positively wants to do this. Personally, I love playing a wanted sidekick, but playing Incrediboy for session after session after session does not rock. Experienced characters are superior to new characters not only in power but also and mainly in flexibility. If your bit is a skill, and another player character with far superior characteristics and levels buys it (perhaps he had intended to anyway), you just became Superfluous Boy. This is even more true with powers: very experienced characters are likely to have been rebuilt in ways that make the best use of their points, so a tweak of a gadget or a couple of points in a new ultra-slot (with limitations) has the same effect. It is big help if the GM plans things out with all the players, not just those most obviously involved. The more players you already have, the truer this will be. The small thing for the GM is: do not give players "patents" on point-optimising ideas. If Joe owns the focus thing, and Jim owns activation rolls, and so on, a latecomer comes in and essentially builds a plain vanilla character, with active points being not far above real points, everything else being staked out. I once did this in a game with 200 starting points, no freebies for newbies, no limits on active point totals, no damage/def/etc. limits, and experienced players with about 100ep, tweaked to 500-700 active points. It was - memorable. In that setup, the big characters grow far faster with experience than the plain-Jane latecomer wimps do. The longer you play, the more you fall behind. Another hint: take the inexperience of the player and the probable non-optimisation of their character into account in balancing fights. An inexperienced player with their non-optimised rookie character can be far, far weaker than a "weak" villain" built on fewer points. Finally for the GM, if you're going to do V.O.I.C.E. or an Apocalypse style adventure where the idea is that "none but the strong will survive!", you may want to consider holding off the introduction of wimps till afterwards. True, the stronger characters can protect Supernumerary Lass during the crisis but nobody is likely to have much fun doing that, and the bonding dynamic that pulls together heroes as a team in time of crisis will tend strongly to define those who aren't effectively contributing to the team as not part of it.

Re: Kill Bill nexus: "I would give her high skills in areas like Tactics, PS: Assassin, etc. In her field, she was among the best otherwise she esteemed to a fairly normal woman mentally." I agree with that. Nobody seems to think The Bride is a genius. ("Silly rabbit." "… just smart for a blonde.") But she is "the greatest warrior." Elle knows it. Bill knows it. The Bride proves it. And she's highly educated, not just talented. nexus: "I saw Bud as a bit of a has been physically, but mentally sharp. Elle's use of the snake came across as more sadism than concern over directly fighting him. She liked snakes, she liked to see people suffer." Hmm. I like that. I think you're right. That's how Elle was. And she loved poison. Like using the word "gargantuan", the snake trick wasn't something she had to be forced into. And on reflection, Bud's willingness to take anybody on in a stand-up fight seems consistent with a code. Bud wears his cowboy hat. He stands his ground and fights. That's some kind of Western bad-man's macho code of honour, it's not about any great physical confidence. So defining him as a physical burnout is OK. Nexus: "This is all just my opinion and as usual there's really not a "right" way to do a character in Hero. I can see where you're coming from though. Sometimes we let our appreciation of the character cloud our objectivity when evaluating their performance in game terms and I like some of your suggestions." Ditto. Dr. MID-Nite: "Of course most of what you say is true, but the hard part of building most characters is simulating their great strengths, not their weaknesses." Yup. (laughs) If everyone had been saying - build her as a 75 -pointer, I'd have been saying, c'mon, this is a giant, buy her big enough to be what she is! It's just that folks here seem bright, and everyone had already picked up on the main areas where she's huge, especially with the speed. Dr. MID-Nite: "For the O-Ren fight, I'd say The Bride lost Long Term END given the length of the fight with the minions." That works. Dr. MID-Nite: "I don't really think Go-Go was stronger." I still do. I thought Go-Go was a beast, and that was a great win for The Bride. What a fight! But you always get these issues where people will see things different ways. Dr. MID-Nite: "Having said that, the Bride's most important stats are DEX and SPD, with the rest open to lots of interpretation. I'd also add lots of BODY." Yes, DEX, SPD and lots of BODY - and I'd add one more characteristic I think we've all been underestimating: comeliness. Sixteen just isn't enough. I'd go all the way to 20. Everybody agrees The Bride is a dazzling beauty. The policeman was moved by the blood-splattered "angel". Bud remarked admiringly on The Bride's physical attributes. The whole plot runs because Bill was smitten, and he's a fool for blondes, but it seems to me what he really wants is movie-star glamorous blondes. All the female Vipers are dazzling, because Bill is crazy for female beauty, and nobody else gets into Bill's team except his brother. But The Bride is second to none. [Esteban, an 80-year-old pimp, appraises The Bride] Esteban Vihaio: If I had met you forty years ago, you would have been my Number One lady. The Bride: Well, I'm flattered. Esteban Vihaio: You goddamn better well be. COM 20. Absolutely. Darn it, she's as pretty as Uma Thurman! Victim: "Bud's shotgun probably had several levels of increased Stun multiplier - wasn't it loaded with rock salt?" Yes it was - but not everyone would be comfortable with "several levels of increased Stun multiplier".

Re: Kill Bill In what follows, I'm not putting the character down. I loved both movies, and I was cheering for The Bride all the way. But when everyone's saying "buy!" somebody has to say "but don't buy too much!" The Bride was strong enough to squeeze herself against the ceiiling to avoid being seen by Gogo, but I'd do that as climbing. You need her strength to be lower than Gogo's. They tested it. Gogo was stronger. (And I think that was deliberate, playing against the schoolgirl image in every way.) You need The Bride's constitution to be low enough that Bud can count on dropping her with the shotgun and then totally pacifying her with his injection, with all the time in the world to spare. You also need to think about her endurance and recovery. She needs to be put at a real disadvantage from her workout with the Crazy 88, even after O-Ren lets her take some full recoveries. You need her to get beat up real good by Pai Mei, but you may decide he's a godlike being who doesn't need stats, and just wins by GM fait. I would. She should not be wildly intelligent. She doesn't see the wedding rehearsal massacre coming ("Bill, it's your baby" - "Bang!"), she gets tricked by Copperhead ("Bang!"), and by Bud ("Bang!"), and by Bill ("Bang!"). She wasn't in favour of being shot by any of these people, and it's not like the setups were all unfair. She wasn't going to allow Bud a fair fight, even though he was clearly available for one, she was going ninja surprise attack on him. It's just that he was a lot smarter than her. And it was luck not wits that saved her from the shotgun lady (when she bent over, and "Bang!") Ego is not a big issue. But not going overboard with psychological disadvantages is. Every time she's put to the test, whether by Pay Mei with his attitude or Bud with the spray or Bill with the truth serum darts, she backs down. (Wisely, as it always turns out.) So she's not totally crazy. I think you should consider giving her a find weakness with anything, and extra damage stacked on it. Otherwise, how do you take down a monster like Gogo with a nail? And she got through the coffin. Maybe she needed the torch for that. All the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad characters seemed to have similar and high speed, though with Bud you can't tell. But Elle Driver didn't seem to think it would be wise to just attack with brute force and kill him, even though that would have been the best way to leave a death scene consistent with The Bride having killed him. And Bud thought that having that sword of his as an ace in the hole would do him some good, he didn't figure he'd be outclassed anyway if it came to that. Susano's numbers looked like a great start. But the main thing you need to play The Bride is the complete collaboration of the GM.