David Blue

Re: Opinions: A 'Hero' Stealing Their Gear.....????

Re: Opinions: A 'Hero' Stealing Their Gear.....???? I don't think she's at all shaky on the good / bad thing. She's right, and she should keep doing what she's doing. Imagine in future every Christian artifact was owned by a museum, and wasn't allowed to be used for any other purpose than museum display. Imagine that somebody then got hold of a bible, read it, believed it, and started to preach from it - that is they use the holy item exactly the way it was intended to be used. Would they have the right to do so? I would say: of course they would. Or, imagine if a museum disinterred your grandfather's corpse, and against his will, your will and your family tradition, put him on display like a bug in a glass case, and the law supported it. Would you have the moral right to "steal" your grandfather's corpse and see that it was properly reburied, if you practically could? I would say: of course you would. Part of responsible conservation (in the sense that a museum conserves things) is to recognize the moral limits of your claim on things. "Anything that the museum has, it keeps, and claims as its own property no matter what counter-claims come up" is not an adequate rule to follow. There's no fixed rule for how completing claims should be adjudicated, especially with all the odd cases that can come up in a superhero world. But I'd say demonstrating that your ownership of the items was in line with the intentions of the creators and historical owners by actually transforming into something in line with their intentions and then acting in accordance with their values would be pressing your claim in the strongest way short of proving that you personally were the items' creator and owner. It would be very reasonable for the museum to want to negotiate a compromise solution. The elf hero could spend regular time in the museum and allow visitors. Even if it was only a fifteen minute showing a week, the attendance would be huge - enough eventually to make up for even a huge dollar loss on the item. The elf hero might be filmed and scientifically examined, and sign over the rights to that data to compensate the museum for its scientific loss. The elven hero might say that his code was against both those things, but he could undertake a quest to compensate the museum with other items that could be legitimately examined and shown to the public. If the elf hero didn't do anything like that, when reasonable compromises were on offer, then yes that would be unheroic. But if the museum just took the attitude that they owned everything and what the elves wanted with their own sacred items was of no importance, then they'd be acting like a typical nuisance hunted, and morally they could be treated as such.

Re: Songs that inspire(d) you to make a Champions Character I've built this guy repeatedly, using different mechanics, for different games. I don't have the character sheets any more (and I'll be very pleased if someone else can do a good build), but I still have the inspiration of The Hardest Part: Twenty five tons of hardened steel rolls on no ordinary wheels. Inside the armored car ride two big armed guards; in a bulletproof vest, shatterproof glass. Overdrive, we're gonna pass! Twenty five tons of hardened steel rolls on no ordinary wheels. The hardest part of the armored guard big: man of steel behind the steering wheel. Nitro and acetylene open la machine. No short heist, no overnight: big money take ya to Brazil. Bulletproof vest, shatterproof glass. Overdrive, we're gonna pass! Time bomb, greasy mob, count down, hurry up, come on! The hardest part of the armored guard: big man of steel behind the steering wheel. In a wire mesh cage with a twelve gauge. Radio, we're coming fast! Oh need to feel some hardened steel, deliver the big money deal. Of the armored guard, here's what I heard: I'll tell you that he will, no matter what you feel. The hardest part of the armored guard: big man of steel behind the steering wheel! Twenty five tons of hardened steel deliver the big money deal...

Re: WWYCD: "He'll be back." Remote would take the view that a fight for species survival over-rides all other considerations. He'd fight to the death for future humanity and for the extermination of the machines, using all his technological prowess. To that end, while remaining organic, he would become harder than any machine: more implacable, more logical, more ruthless and more strategically directed. He wouldn't care at all who started it, or whether humans became machines voluntarily. He'd be a Protector (from Larry Niven's fiction) in every way that mattered.

Re: Pet Powers The "red shoes" multipower: * running * swimming * leaping preferably bought with reduced or zero Endurance. I originally bought this focused in a pair of red shoes for my first regular Champions character, a martial artist. And yes it was inspired by a girl who when she put on a pair of magic red shoes couldn't stop dancing. I like athletic characters: sprinting, jumping, swimming, diving, running long distance, clinging and climbing and swinging and doing insane chases on bicycles and stuff like that. Super-athletes, though a comic book staple, are inefficient compared to power-gamed-up characters. That was why my martial artist had a pair of red shoes. The neat thing about a "red shoes" multipower is that if the gamemaster retaliates by giving his non-player characters something similar, the game is improved, not least for the athletic hero.

Re: Top Signs that you need to rethink your GMing.

Re: Wild Card's Hero

Re: Would this be simpler?

Re: Integrating "normal" things into a "Super" world I used to run with a rule that everybody liked so much that all the people I knew adopted it in their games: all super-attacks are twice as effective if fired at someone without a super-body. I defined a super-body as 100pts or more of characteristics bought straight or in effect. (That is, a battlesuit counts. But if you don't want to be reduced to jam by the first attack that's fired at you while you're out of your suit, buy your hundred.) This worked because it was a very simple rule, and everybody understood what kind of player characters were wanted and why, and players could use the rule to their advantage and I and other gamemasters were fine with that. If you wanted to graduate from mook-ness by buying up your PRE and COM, OK, I figured good-looking and impressive people were in genre, so go for it. If you wanted to make your DNPC Competent to get their hundred and be easier to rescue alive, great. Super-bodies were visible if you knew what you were looking for. The special effect was that someone with a super-body had the most common superpower: the ability to look great in a superhero costume. If you were a "hardbody", well, you were a hard body. I figured that was in genre too, and everybody seemed to agree. I'm a strong believer in simple solutions and in starting with the source material.

Re: Real life powers... (Adv's vs Lim's) Balance? Life Support 50pts N-Ray Vision 10pts Telescopic Vision for sight group +13 vs. range modifiers 20pts Telekinesis 60 STR, affects porus, fine manipulation, 0 END 165pts Flight 12" 0 END 36pts Armor +6rPD +6rED 18pts Flash Defense +1 sight group 1pt This would enable me to find people in trouble, for example on foundering ships and in mine cave ins, and rescue them with my telekinesis, as fast as I could fly to them, all day every day, endlessly, no sweat. Only as noted above: few advantages, no limitations. No. I'd ask them to explain this theory to people whose lives I saved.

Re: Integrating "normal" things into a "Super" world Did you try 1/2 Damage Reduction, and if so how did it go for you?

Re: Integrating "normal" things into a "Super" world

Re: Integrating "normal" things into a "Super" world Restatting everything would be way too much work. Letting the chips wall where they may works reasonably well for dumb bricks with very high resistant defenses and regeneration. Mighty Rogg is based on the Hulk, Ang Lee movie version. He's supposed to fight the army, but because of the way Hero system works, they flatten him, and it's not even a fight: one pass and he's out like a baby. But since he's back to full body by the time he wakes up, and his personality is not such that he has to internalize and be dejected by the fact that he gets one punched, who cares? I just play him in character and in genre, minus the bit where after he roars his defiance and the army takes its first shot he's still standing. The gamemaster was kind of shocked that the game system does that, but I the player realized that Hero and supers are far apart as genres, so I wasn't bothered, and when you're happy what more is there in gaming? Not using realistic heavy weapons at all is a good solution. Why should realistic heavy weapons show up when realistic, that is genre-appropriate, supers can't? Keep the villains using bizarre magic weapons, and basically pretend normal weapons don't exist. In another game I'm playing in, we'd be hosed if we ever had to fight soldiers, or really even cops, but as long as the big kids don't show up it's not an issue. One thing about this: with magic or psionics, you want to be careful not to give mind control to anyone but a player who understands and will play with your campaign limits. Bribery and wealth might also be a problem.

Re: WWYCD: Welcome Divinity? How come?

Re: PA Hero: Kamandi's World Kamandi was a hoot, but for exactly that reason tough to do as a game. You have to get the tone just right, otherwise you can't keep both your license to be loopy (which you need) and the deadly seriousness of (say) the bulldog cavalry about to be slaughtered by leopards with modern (for the 1970s) arms - both going successfully in the same scene. Above all, to run Kamandi, you have to not slap down the main character when he's showing extreme confidence and belligerence. If Kamandi thinks he can take down an entire hotel full of sentient wolves with the equivalent of an improvised stink-bomb, he can. When he thinks he can talk not only back to but down to armed gorillas, imperial tigers and so on, he's right. His friend Ben Boxer, who's interchangeable with the X-Men movies' Colossus, has no edge over Kamandi, who's super-power is that he's feisty and active. The player has to rely on that and push the game forward vigorously, and the world has to confirm he's right.

Re: Top Signs that you need to rethink your GMing. When, with scenarios / sessions that consistently finish around 10pm if the rules lawyers don't show up, you consistently have 11pm or later finishes when the rules lawyers can make it to the session, and then the non-rules lawyers, as if on signal, find familiar places to crash on couches, chairs and on the floor, as the bitching goes to 12 midnight, 1am and even 1:30 or 2am, and you're still not ready to make the call and distribute experience points. (With those not present or who have departed of course missing out, or having post-game rulings and time-line revisions go against them.) Because the non-rules lawyers, as they remind you individually from time to time, looking right in your eyes, have to work the next day. - The willingness or unwillingness of the gamemaster to say, "no, that's it, events will not be changed and I don't want to hear about any more one last things, here's your experience points, get out" can have a disproportionate effect on the enjoyment that some of your players (the non-rules-lawyers, those who work for a living, and those who have a long drive home) get from the game.

Re: WWYCD: Welcome Divinity?

Re: 'Divine' Characters

Re: Politics or not In fairness, there was more to the scenario than described - like ongoing killings and enough supernatural vengeance to keep a group of heroes busy - and this was a long time ago and I'm shaky on some details as the number of victims shows, and the gamemaster did decide to abandon that scenario. In other words, apart from the central problem, this was a good piece of plotting, and the gamemaster also showed good judgment in letting it go. On both counts, well done. But the central problem - that the scenario made no sense and was even insoluble unless you shared the scenario designer's assumptions - was as described.

Re: Politics or not It is fatally easy, once you start mingling controversial political and moral issues with superhero plots, to make doing the scenario successfully or just playing your genius character as "smart" depend on agreeing with the gamemaster. This isn't so bad (though it can still be annoying) when the writer of a comic controls both the plot that's intended to teach the readers a moral lesson and the designated smart character who will solve the problem in the proper way and perhaps spell out the lesson. But in a game it can work out very badly indeed.

Re: Politics or not In Psi High, we recently had a short but in my opinion funny political sub-plot. Simon, a good guy bitterly disappointed in love, resolved to forsake love and instead embrace the evil power of politics. He began his ascent to dark and loveless omnipotence by running for high school president, and to fit himself with a false personality to facilitate his career, he consulted his two remaining friends on what they wanted in a politician. As it happened, these friends were Tamara, a gun-crazy conservative with a habit of wearing pro Second Amendment message T-shirts, and her new boyfriend, a warm fan of Dick Cheney. Simon heard his friends out politely, and then (for other reasons as well), instead of remaking himself as the kind of guy they wanted to vote for, he fled the country and returned to Japan, thus exiting the campaign. "Sell my soul for power" is abstract. "100% conservative voting record" with specific issues mentioned and Dick Cheney as the model to aspire to was horrifyingly specific. - In my experience, politics doesn't work out well in superhero games unless it's as light and easy as what you might get in a situation comedy, or unless you play solidly to superhero conventions, like a race for district attourney where one of the candidates is not just wrong but secretly a mob boss or something like that. If you're going to go all Bronze Age, tell your players up front that this is what you'll be doing, and that the politics reflect the comics you have in mind and not anything in the real world. And if works best best if you catch and kill your own, with conservatives mocking conservatives (or at least playing them broadly, as in the example above) and liberals mocking liberals. - Two things I would steer way clear of: the topic of abortion, and (unconsiously) letting a plot depend on a political assumption that not everyone may agree on. A friend, a very good gamemaster whose great strength was making up plots, devised a "ghosts of vengeance" plot where what looked at first like a "normal" series of superpowered slayings was really the work of the ghosts of every human being that had ever died at an abortion clinic that had been running for many years. These ghosts were an abortionist that had recently been killed by a pro-lifer, and I think three (or possibly just two, three total?) other noble pro-choice workers who had been killed over the years, and whose "accidental" deaths had not really been accidental but caused by malicious anti-abortion agitators. It would not be possible to defeat the angry spirits of justice, but it was possible to stop them, that is to lay the ghosts by bringing out the truth, by seeing that all those guilty of killing at that location were properly punished, and by reassuring the spirits of the righteous departed that their good work would go on. The scenario was intended partly to do something a bit different while being as fair as possible to both sides in the abortion debate, with the heroes playing the "middle" role of peacemakers, preventing unlimited vengeance against bigoted pro-lifers. In the end, ideally, every player would finish the scenario feeling happy or at least satisfied - but thoughtful. I had to point out very gently certain flaws in this scenario, the first of which was that the critical supernatural clues about how all the slain were rising and all the blood shed must be answered for were either incomprehensible or misleading unless you held the proper assumptions. If you thought that only one human being had ever been killed at the clinic, the abortionist recently slain, then the clues led you to discover that there had been two or three other innocent victims crying out for vengeance, and then you could solve the plot. If you held another assumption about what happens at an abortion clinic, the clues were either incomprehensible in context (where nothing corresponding to what you would expect to happen ever happened) or else they pointed to a supernatural and therefore false explanation for the recent murder. In effect, you could only do the adventure by agreeing with the gamemaster's beliefs, and if you didn't realize you had to do that, and if you didn't simply share his assumptions, you would fail. Scenarios like this will not help your game or your gaming group.

Re: Top Signs that you need to rethink your GMing. The player characters keep track of how many years it's been since you said you were going to start enforcing the focus disadvantage. You keep the players who don't already have focus-based characters from retiring their loser non-focused-up characters and bringing in focused based winner characters instead ... by banning the practice and insisting that they wouldn't be happy if you let them do that anyway, because you're going to start really enforcing the focus disadvantage real soon now. This story has not changed in two or more years, and the players can tell you, at least to the month, when each anniversary of your first telling of that story comes around. The gadget-based characters get a total rebuild with each new addition of experience, always reconfiguring themselves to become ever more invincible. Meanwhile, the players of the non-focused characters spend their points indifferently, but they each have a replacement character sheet for what they want to play if you ever relax the ban on new focus-based characters, and that is the character sheet that gets updated with loving care every time experience is distributed.

Re: Top Signs that you need to rethink your GMing. Your player characters know everybody in court on a first name basis, and spend more time defending themselves there than on any other activity in the game. Players discuss during combat what they're going to be charged with this time, and their defenses and extenuating circumstances. They know and discuss your favorite charges and civil damage suits. Player characters have psychologists routinely updated with any changes to their psych limits or life circumstances in anticipation of the next court-ordered evaluation. Nobody bothers to keep track of how much more "community service" they have left to run, as (a) they know they'll be sentenced to more before this runs out, and ( they agree that the group has become in effect a system of court-ordered self-incrimination anyway. Also, nobody bothers to buy Wealth as they know the court will take it. Both players and player characters loudly discuss why Agent Max Justice doesn't do some fighting himself before the rest of the team is unconscious, humiliated and / or up for more property damage charges again. (Agent Max Justice, or your equivalent, is the NPC government agent team leader with off-the-shelf foci who can take out any two team members simultaneously, and can probably take out the whole team himself if he wants to. His regular keen observations on player character frailties and failures under fire are vital in influencing the court in the direction of sufficient leniency to keep the game going.)

Re: The Incredibles and Registration

Re: 'Divine' Characters