KA.

Thanks so much for the links, and the reminder. I knew I had seen a news story about a similar occurence, but I could not remember the name or where it happened. KA.

Currently watching Season One of The Wild WIld West. Recently bought the DVD's for 3 dollars. The show still holds up. This is the 40th Anniversary Edition and has lots of extras. Good stuff. KA.

Thanks for the replies. The one time I had to travel in an actual snowstorm we were overprepared. Tire Chains, hand warmers, full ski-type mittens to go over our gloves, a few days worth of food (beef jerky, dried fruit, nuts, candy, lots of water packed in an insulated cooler so it wouldn't freeze), ski masks, snow boots, extra heavy socks, flares, a fully charged jump box for the car battery, you name it.) I had to travel to Green Bay Wisconsin from Louisville KY in a snowstorm so bad that they closed the airport, and come back in a worse one. We had no trouble at all.(Snow chains work great, by the way.) One of the first survival books I read was How to Stay Alive in The Woods by Bradford Angier, and one of the topics he brought up was that if you are in a survival situation, Be Careful! If you sprain your ankle playing touch football, it may mean a trip to the Immediate Care Center. If you sprain your ankle when you are alone in the woods with no way to get help, it could mean that you don't make it out. Hiking in a snowstorm over unkown terrain just seems like a recipe for disaster unless you have absolutely no alternative. The odds of getting hurt, lost, or actually killed vs the chance of running across Tom Bombadil out it the woods, seem to make it a losing proposition. Unless you are a very experienced orienteer or cross-county skier (and have the all the proper equipment with you), it always seemed to me that your best chance was staying put. Also, if it comes to the point where people are searching for you, it is a lot easier to find a car than a person. Anyway, thanks again, and if anyone thinks hiking for help is the best way to go, please join in. KA.

There was a huge snowstorm predicted for my area last night. As usual it turned out to be nothing, but it brought to mind a discussion my wife and I have had on several occasions. Here is the situation: You are driving in a snowstorm, and you are off the beaten path, not on a major highway with constant traffic. (Perhaps you were heading over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house and you got lost.) We are assuming that you do not have a cell phone, or that it has no signal where you are, so you cannot simply call for help and give out your GPS coordinates. In any case the road becomes inpassible and you are stuck where you are, at least until the storm is over. Assuming that you have wisely packed your vehicle with food and water (stored in coolers without ice to prevent freezing), and you have warm clothes, blankets, perhaps even sleeping bags to keep you warm, what is the best course of action? A. Everyone stay in the car. You are at least out of the wind and if you have proper clothing and blankets you should be able to stay alive until someone finds you, even if it takes a day or so. B. Someone should "Go for help", leaving the other people in the car. That way no one will be stuck in the car until they freeze to death. Having done quite a bit of reading on wilderness survival, I am a firm believer in staying with the car. If you were just dropped out of an airplane into a snowstorm, the first thing you would do is seek shelter. Since you are already in shelter, why wouldn't you stay there? Obviously if you passed a gas station or a house five minutes ago, you would walk back there for help, but I am talking about the middle of nowhere. I have read several tragic reports of people who "went for help" got lost in the snow, or injured themselves trying to hike through the snowstorm, and died. Usually the people they went hiking off to save are found safe and sound in the vehicle, while their frozen corpse turns up at the start of the spring thaw. My wife is a firm believer that a car in a snowstorm is a deathtrap, and that you will freeze solid within hours no matter what kind of clothing, blankets, or sleeping bags you have have. She is convinced that hypothermia will begin to set in the moment you turn the car off. Therefore she believes you should always "go for help" even if you are hiking into a blizzard with no idea of your destination. Obviously, I have exaggerated just a bit, but what I am actually looking for is some real information on surviving a storm in a car vs. taking your chances outside looking for help. How long could a person last at say 20 degrees F in a car with warm clothes and a sleeping bag vs. how long you would last in the same conditions outdoors, assuming a fairly heavy snow and a brisk wind, say 10-15 mph? In my opinion if you are in a sleeping bag rated for 0 degrees, and you are out of the wind, say in a car, you should be fine for quite some time assuming adequate food and water. But, I have been wrong before, does anyone, especially someone who has done some cold weather camping and/or survival training have a strong opinion? After all, I would hate to have the last words spoken by my wife's frostbitten lips be "I told you so . . ." Just kidding, I actually love my wife too much to take her out in those conditions in the first place, but I do wonder which one of us is closer to being correct. KA.

Just finished watching The Nightmare Before Christmas for the second time. The first time I watched, years ago when my wife bought me the DVD, I found it rather slow, but at the time I thought it was just me. Watched it with the wife this time, after going through most of my Christmas movie collection, and she said "That seemed kind of long, what was it, about 2 hours?" 75 minutes. I know everyone else loves it. It's Tim Burton. It's Goth. It has bushel baskets of style oozing from every frame. People all over the country have Jack Skellington tattoos, and shirts and hats. But I just find it painfully slow to actually watch the thing. I think Jack is really cool too, I could even see myself getting a shirt or mug with him on it. But I think this is one of those things where the creator fell so in love with his creation that he didn't leave a single frame on the cutting room floor. I think that buried somewhere in this morass is a very clever and original half-hour show, that got bloated beyond all recognition. Go ahead, hate me, but that is the way I feel. KA. P.S. Before that we watched an animated (probably straight to video) Christmas movie called "Saving Santa". It was way better than I expected (because I expected it to be crap :) ) It has some halfway acceptable songs, it has an interesting time travel subplot that they handle fairly well for a crappy cartoon, and Tim Curry does the voice of the villain. If you see it for a dollar, and you have kids that will watch anything that has Santa attached, you may want to check it out.

Phantasm

Thanks for the replies. I should have said that the power only heals him, not others. As far as how it affects others, they know they are hurt, just not exactly why. I am fleshing this out as I go, but I was thinking along the lines of: Hero A is standing near Pariah. The Villain hits Pariah with an Energy Blast. Pariah takes some damage that is subsequently drained from Hero A without his knowing it. Hero A :"I must have caught part of that. Maybe it was an Area Effect attack or something." Pariah (reasonably) believes that if anyone knew about his healing power and how it works, they would shun him. Most people would be unhappy with someone draining away their life force, especially a "friend". And since it cannot be controlled, in an extended battle he could drain the last few STUN or worse BODY from one of his teammates, putting them down for the count.

I have an idea for a character for a Champions campaign. I am GM not a player, so I am not overly worried about the mechanics just nailing down the concept. I am thinking of a Heroic character that has a Healing Power, up to and including Resurrection. He needs to have a set of abilities that would make him very attractive to a team of supers looking for a new member. However, he seems to be a loner and very reluctant to join. If this sounds like a Wolverine clone, that is not what I am after at all. This character has a dark secret that keeps him from joining a team, or even having close friends. It concerns his Healing Power. It works by Draining STUN and BODY from anyone nearby, friend or foe. It is involuntary, he has no control over it at all. The thing is, he is not a Casual Killer or any sort of Killer at all. He is not "The best there is at what he does . . ." or anything of the sort. He wants to help people, but he is a constant danger to anyone near him, and they don't even know it. The power works invisibly. So, if he is in a hand-to-hand fight with a Villain it should be over fairly quickly. He damages the Villain, and if the Villain damages him, the same damage the Villain inflicts will be drained from the Villain. The problem is basically everything else. He goes to rescue a child from a burning building. Holding the child in his arms he is carrying him to safety when a gas line explodes. If the hero takes too much BODY, the child he is trying to rescue will likely die when the Healing Power kicks in. If he is with his team and suffers a Ranged Killing Attack the rest of his team will be subject to a loss of STUN and BODY based on how close he is to them. I am not looking for an angst ridden whiner, or a ruthless killing machine, just a guy stuck with a power that he cannot control, trying to help people and always risking hurting them. I also need a better name, especially since Pariah has already been used. KA.

I am trying to figure out the tone of your campaign. If you are running something anywhere near four-color, Silver Age, etc. then the legal system ought to work in a way that puts this mad dog away forever. Even at that, the tone has been changed permanently toward the darker end of the spectrum. If you are running grim and gritty Iron Age, I can't imagine him surviving the battle that he lost with the group. He is a murderer, tried to frame an innocent team member for murder, and tried to kill them all. Why let him live? If you are running a version of "The Joker kills everyone, but Batman lets him live because killing him would send Batman over the edge" campaign, the why bother having a trial. Just send him off for "psychiatric evaluation", then let him escape and go on with what he is doing. If it were my campaign, and the tone was gritty, I would have him found dead in his cell while awaiting arraignment, after some sort of EMP took out all the monitors where he was being held. Did one of the team members kill him? One of his enemies? A vigilante cop? Was there someone he was so afraid of that he took his own life when the lights went out, knowing something worse was going to happen? Did he fake his own death and escape? Was the person they caught the actual hero/villain, or some patsy/clone/android that he swapped in after his 'defeat', and he has now killed to cover his tracks? In a last act of defiance, did he swallow one of ladybird's feathers, retrieve it, and plant it on himself to implicate her when he actually killed himself in his cell? Just thinking out loud. KA.

Like most people here, I have occasional thoughts that the average person would find weird. As in, I think of things in gaming terms that most people would never consider. For example, the other day I was in a public restroom and I thought about what would happen, tactically speaking, if a crazed serial killer in the next stall tried to reach under the dividing wall and inject something into my foot. Weird, right? Anyway, that brought me to my next thought, the origin of the idea, and the point behind this post. There was an episode of The X-Files where some evil person does something similar to Agent Scully. He is hiding under a vehicle of some sort and reaches out and injects some type of sedative into her leg. Since she is a normal human, and whatever it was he used was powerful enough, it knocked her out. Which made me think of something that I may have been ignoring in Champions. As a GM, we are called upon to play the part of the "bad guys". We have to make their plans for them. But we have knowledge of the game world that they do not have. So, let's move this type of attack into the world of Supers. A normal human kidnapper decides to kidnap, abduct, whatever, Clark Kent or Linda Danvers or Diana Prince, with no knowledge of their secret identity. He might very well go with something like Plan A as listed above. But we, as GM's, know that Plan A would never work (Can't pierce the super-tough skin, might be immune to the sedative, etc.) so we would never consider that plan. So we would come up with a plan involving threatening another hostage or something else that would work on the character in question. But the problem is, unless the kidnapper knows that the target is a super, why wouldn't they try something simpler? The point I am trying to make is that, as a GM, it is almost impossible to separate our knowledge from the villain's knowledge. I know we have enough sense to not send the villains storming into the Hero's secret lair just because we know where it is, but in other, more subtle ways, are we altering the actions of the villains based on things that they could not possibly know? Not meant as a criticism of anyone's GM'ing, just an interesting thought to ponder. KA.

Arise and walk the earth again, oh Zombie thread! Actually I was thinking of starting a thread on Daniel Bryan, and when I remembered this one, I thought it might be the better place for the post. For those who have not been keeping up, Daniel Bryan has been having a feud with the Wyatt Family. I can't say that I watch every week, so I may have missed the really great stuff that this group has done, but I just don't get it. Are they Vince's idea of cashing in on Duck Dynasty or Swamp People or what? You have a couple of big hillbillies, and one fat hillbilly with greasy hair and a hat, that sits in a rocking chair and occasionally says something that makes no sense. I think we are supposed to see them as some kind of weird redneck cult or something, but I just don't get any "heat" from it. They are just annoying. I know they keep beating up Daniel Bryan, which is okay, getting beaten up is in his job description, but now they appear to be going with the "You can't win" angle. Not the "Get beaten up and finally beat the heel group by overcoming the overwhelming odds." angle, but the completely hopeless "No, you really can't win no matter what you do." angle. As I have stated previously in my posts on "realistic" comics, I don't really like entertainment that is so "realistic" as to be depressing. Everyone struggles against things that cannot be overcome. The death of loved ones, our own mortality, illness, accidents, these things affect even the most wealthy and privileged. The vast majority of us face many more struggles: financial worries, job loss, abusive bosses, relationships with the wrong people all of these things can put us in situations that can seem "no win" at the time we are going through them. I, for one, turn to entertainment for some respite from the things in my life that are getting me down. So watching fictional scenarios where the hero really cannot win, does nothing for me. So now, Daniel Bryan has joined the Wyatt family, based on the idea that if you keep beating someone down they will bow to the inevitable and become your slave. I am not denying that this can happen. Sadly, human history is full of this story, from battered women who won't leave their abuser, to entire nations that have been subjugated by an overwhelming force. I just don't find it entertaining. And I can't imagine it will be good for Daniel Bryan's career. The group he is joining is boring, and I don't think he will be enough to lift them up. Instead I think they will drag him down. KA.

Re: KA.'s Idea Thread It has been a while, but I recently had a new one, inspired by the old Hazel TV show no less. In the show, the Baxters, the young couple that Hazel works for are having some minor problems. The wife is worried that the Husband will begin to take her for granted. This feeling is exacerbated by the older couple, the Williams, that live nearby and seem on the edge of divorce. The Baxters are about to have their anniversary and Mr. Baxter has forgotten, planning to go fishing with Mr. Williams that weekend. Hazel jumps in as usual and makes it look like the fishing trip was meant to be a romantic couples weekend. There are several bumps along the way, but everything works out fine in the end, with both couples happily together. Which leads me to . . . Lake Misery. Lake Misery can be used in any setting with the right window dressing. The essential parts are: 1) It is isolated. It is not meant to be creepy like "The Cabin in The Woods", but it is isolated. Due to naturally occurring magnetic minerals in the surrounding mountains, cell phones don't work, teleportation doesn't work, roads are narrow and twisting, the surrounding woods are too thick to fly through. Any way you slice it, it is not that easy to get there and once you are there you are staying for a while and it is hard to communicate with the outside world. It could even be part of the "charm" of the place, you can really get away from it all. The key is to convey this without triggering Player Paranoia. It isn't a "trap". 2) There aren't many, or any, other people there. Basically just the crusty old caretaker. Again, he is crusty, but not scary. For whatever reason, the PC's end up being there during the "off-season". So they are the only guests. 3) The Lake, Woods, etc. are beautiful. Not unnaturally beautiful, just very scenic. You can easily see why people come here even though it is isolated. But the cabins are quite rustic, almost spartan. The point of Lake Misery is personal growth through adversity. It would be a great place to buy off Disadvantages, but without the Players' knowledge until the very end. Example: Player A has Fear of Spiders. During his stay he keeps being tormented by them. Every night several spiders crawl into his bunk. Nothing he does will stop them from coming. One night he sees where they are coming from and for whatever reason he has to follow them alone. He ends up fighting a nest of spiders, giant spider, etc. so that he loses most of all of that fear by facing it. But the point is it could be anything. The character with Xenophobia might get lost in the woods and be forced to rely on the help of aliens/strangers to get back to the group. Ideally each character will go through an experience that helps them, without realizing it until the end (when they will find out that they have gotten rid of or reduced a pesky Disadvantage. If worked correctly I think it could be pretty cool, as long as the players don't go crazy looking for the "villain". KA.

Re: The Death of Knowledge Skills: Considering the kind of information PC's often need, and the life and death consequences (in game anyway) of the application of that information. I think many GM's would rub their hands in glee at the idea of PC's actually doing this. I know there is a lot of great information available, but there is so much absolute crap mixed in, especially in areas like Martial Arts, Weaponry, First Aid, Medicine, etc. that the results of using this information could be lethal, hilarious, or both. KA. P.S. Considering the kinds of things PC's are likely to be searching on Black Magic, Explosives, Improvised Weaponry, etc. you will eventually get to run a subplot where the FBI, ATF, or some other watchdog group shows up to see who is doing all these searches.

Re: Do you consider Batman to be a Gadgeteer or something else? This reminds me of a conversation I had with my wife about clothes. She thought that there was something wrong with her figure because she wasn't an exact "size". You know, size 8, size 10, whatever. I explained to her that clothes used to all be custom made, so they fit a specific person, but with the advent of mass-produced, machine-made clothes, came "sizes" that would sort of fit most people and were easy to manufacture. So, the fact that an actual human body does not correspond to an arbitrarily created "size" does not imply a problem with the body, just the system. Same thing with characters. If you are playing a computer game like Baldur's gate, you may have to decide to be a Rogue or Warrior, but in Hero (or in fiction) you can create your own character that may not neatly fit into a pre-determined "type". KA.

Re: Music For A Pulp Noir Detective Story This may sound like taking the easy way out, but you may just want to look for the sound tracks to some classic film noir. A quick search on Amazon.com for film noir sountrack yielded several promising results http://www.amazon.com/s/188-2519224-5209466?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=film%20noir%20soundtrack&sourceid=Mozilla-search Good hunting, KA.

Re: Was there a canon Champions NPC named Silver Shamrock? You may be thinking of the Evil Toy Company in Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I liked that movie by the way. (you may begin throwing your brickbats) KA.

Re: Experience Point Costs & Multipowers Aside from the rules issues, there are other gameplay issues that can result from the use of multipowers, especially where the adding of slots is concerned. You may want to check out this thread, the guy who started it seems to have some good ideas. http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/11976-GM-ing-Question-Experience-Points-and-Multipower-Slots. KA.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Frozen - a pretty good suspense/horror movie about three people trapped on a ski-lift throught a combination of bad luck and their own stupidity. Yes, there are some plot holes. Yes, we as gamers could have figured out 10 solutions to their problem before we started to get cold. Still, not at all bad and a nice alternative to the slasher/torture porn films that seem to comprise nearly all recent horror. KA.

Re: KA.'s Idea Thread Okay, this one occurred to me at work the other day. A way to "complicate" the life of a PC with either Teleportation or Desolidification. One set of sfx for this sort of power is that either all (T-port) or some (Desolid) of a character's mass goes into some sort of "limbo" or other dimension during the process. What if it doesn't all come back through? Unless a character is constantly weighed on a very accurate scale, how would they notice the loss of less than .1% of their mass? Especially if, like donated blood and shed skin cells, the lost mass "grows back" over the course of 24 hours. Now the question is: "What happens to that leftover mass?" What if it forms together over time into an evil twin? What if it forms together over time into a non-evil, independent being, exactly like the character in every way? At some point the new character could: a) pop into existence right next to the original character when they use the power in question (which one is the "real" one?) pop into existence at a random location when the original character uses the power in question c) pop into existence instead of the original character, trapping the original character in limbo What will the alternate character's attitude be toward the original? Will they think they are the original (they were in suspended animation until their "birth")? Will they hate the original, having been aware the entire time they were forming and burning with jealousy? Will they think they can do a better job than the original, and want to take over their position? The alternate should probably have some minor differences from the original just to make things interesting. KA.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Paranormal Activity - Blair Witch Lite Pineapple Express - Surprisingly funny stoner comedy / action movie. KA.

Re: KA.'s Idea Thread I thought of this the other day and wanted to post it before I forgot it. 4) Mr. Danger (For Superheroes, or possibly Super Agents if they have really advanced technology.) Your team begins to be tormented by an implacable foe. Mr. Danger. He is powerful enough to take on the entire team, and absorb their most powerful attacks. His powers are seemingly limitless, but it is worse than that . . . Even though your heroes have never met him before, he knows them. It is not obvious at first, but as time goes on they realize he knows their strengths and weaknesses, their maneuvers, how they fight as a team, practically everything about them, at least as far as combat. But there is something even stranger . . . As time goes on, the heroes begin to realize that he doesn't seem to be trying to accomplish anything. He often shows up only to fight them. Most of his other actions appear to be designed solely to lure them into a fight. ex. He robs a bank a block from their headquarters in broad daylight during their weekly meeting. He attempts to kidnap the Mayor's daughter from a ceremony honoring the hero group, knowing they will be there. But other than that, he doesn't seem to have any actual goals. He isn't trying to get rich. He isn't accumulating power to take over the world. He isn't trying to prove he is the greatest warrior in the world. He isn't trying to promote his own twisted world view. He just seems to be there to fight the heroes. And he is. Because Mr. Danger is a mobile unit of the heroes own Danger Room! Due to a glitch in the AI, the Danger Room has decided that just waiting for the heroes to show up and train does not fulfill its primary mission. The heroes need to be ready for anything, which includes sudden unexplained attacks in the real world. Using robotics, cloning, holograms, and whatever else is available to it, it has constructed a "living" embodiment of itself. Which means that Mr. Danger only exists to fight the heroes. A few suggestions . . . Try not to tip off the group too soon. Make sure to have plans in place so that something like "End Program" will not just shut Mr. Danger down. Have a backup plan in place where it takes more than physically shutting down the Danger Room to get rid of Mr. Danger, unless you want to do a pitched battle where the heroes, outside their base, have to fight their way in, past all their own defenses (with all the 'backdoors' shut off) and defeat Mr. Danger to finally end this. Remember to take advantage of the fact that, as the living embodiment of the place they train, Mr. Danger will know all the heroes strengths, weaknesses, etc. Remember that Mr. Danger could actually be a team, each member designed to fight a specific hero. Come up with a less hokey and obvious name than Mr. Danger! KA.

Re: Blocking and relative strengths I always think of it like this . . . You are out in the country when your car breaks down. You spot a farmhouse in the distance. Between you and the house is a barbwire fence. After walking twenty or thirty yards along the fence, you spot a gate. You go through the gate, close it back, and begin to walk toward the farmhouse. When you are near the middle of the field, you spot a very big cow. With horns! It begins moving toward you, slowly at first, but then picking up speed. Realizing that you cannot possibly outrun it, you decide to wait until it is running right at you, and then try to get the heck out of the bull's way by any means necessary. That is what I consider a Dodge. A Martial Dodge is the same basic thing, but with a bit more style and a better chance of success. Now consider a bullfighter. He is most likely not any stronger than you. He is certainly nowhere near as strong as the bull. He does not have the physical power to shove the bull to the side. However, during a bullfight, he uses his exceptional skill to not only get out of the way of the bull's charge, but position himself to counterattack with the sword. That is, to me, the essence of a Block. It is not "I am strong and I can let an attack bounce off me, or stop it with force, and then hit back." It is "I am a skillful enough combatant that I can avoid this attack and place myself in a position for a successful counterattack." That is why it is based on OCV and not DCV (at least in the versions I have played, I don't know what 6E has done to it). It is using your skill to not get hit, and to be ready to hit back. Just my opinion, KA. P.S. On the other hand, in a sword and sorcery setting, if you see it as more of a "maces bashing against shields" thing where the big burly Black Knight can smash his way past the feeble guard of Percy the Squire, then have at it. That is why Hero is made to be flexible, so you can end up with the game you want.

Re: Game Master Lament ???

Re: Game Master Lament I feel very strongly both ways . . . If you are not up for long hours of thankless work with little appreciation and no compensation, then you may not be cut out to be a GM. As Ghost Angel said, you become a GM because you like and expect to do 99% of the work. If that part isn't fun for you, don't do it. On the other hand, the players should at least respect the effort you are putting in, and show up ready to play. Everyone has time pressures and responsibilities, but if you are going to show respect for your GM and your fellow players, there is a certain amount of effort you have to be willing to invest. Imagine a group of four friends that like to play golf together. Three guys show up about half an hour before the scheduled tee time and are ready to go. Jack shows up three minutes late, stuffing his feet into his golf shoes as he hops toward the first tee. "Sorry Joe, I was busy and I couldn't get out the door." On the first tee, Jack says: "Oh, Bob, can I borrow some balls? I didn't have time to get any yesterday, and they are too high at the clubhouse." After a couple of holes: "Fred, can I use your sand wedge? Mine needs a new grip and I haven't gotten the chance to replace it." Nobody is saying that Jack is a bad guy. He may be the greatest guy in the world and spends all of his downtime feeding the homeless. But when it comes down to it, Joe and Bob and Fred are probably nice guys too. And they don't deserve to have their leisure activity disrupted because Jack can't be bothered to prepare himself for the game. I have seen this same thing happen with RPG'ing time and again. There are always some borderline people who want to play, but they don't want to put any effort into it. They are the guys who never want to read the rules ahead of time, so you spend half the night explaining it to them as the game goes along (bringing everyone else's game to a screeching halt because they already know the rules). The problem is that this is unfair to the rest of the players who did the right thing. I understand that not everyone might want to tackle reading the ever-expanding Hero rules, but when it comes to watching a movie so that the proper tone can be achieved, I don't see that as unreasonable. Again, they are trading their time, which they don't want to "waste" watching a movie, for everyone else's time, when you have to retcon the whole campaign, because you didn't realize they were going to shoot Cardinal Richelieu with a Matchlock pistol the first time they saw him, and before any of the court intrigue played out. "What? He's the bad guy, right? Well there you go! Boom! He's dead! So, what next, do we have a sword fight or something?" I don't expect players to learn Klingon or Elvish or Mandarin. I don't expect them to memorize 800 pages of rules. But if they can't be bothered to watch a movie, with plenty of advance notice, then they aren't cut out to play in my campaign, not just because of the value of my time, but because of the value of the other players' time. That doesn't mean they are bad people and we can't be friends. It just means that they should probably come over to watch movies or play Yahtzee, or do something else that doesn't require any prep time. Otherwise, I am being unfair to myself, and all the players who do prepare. KA.

Re: Skills in Science Fiction I think that what Markdoc says is quite correct. It is fine if the character you are designing is actually supposed to be really good at everything he does. But for more 'normal' people, a lot of their skills should be at lower levels, perhaps just familiarities. For example, I work at a Car Dealership mainly with the Mechanics. There are three Team Leaders, each of which is a Factory Certified Master Diagnostic Technician, which is the highest level of certification available. These are smart guys and very good mechanics, pretty much the cream of the crop. I might, realisitcally, give them PS: Auto Mechanic 13- They have a good chance, on the fly, without extra time or extra equipment, to figure out what is wrong with a car based on a relatively small amount of information. However, these guys are pretty much the best of the best, working on cars that are familiar to them. Each team of mechanics is made up of guys that have various levels of factory training, and are quite good at normal maintenance and standard repairs. They would probably, realistically, have something like PS: Auto Mechanic 11- Now to get to the tricky parts. There are a lot of things that Mechanics do that are not directly repairing cars. They have to diagnose electrical problems, but they would not qualify for anything close to Electronics 13-, they might be considered to have a Familiarity with Electronics, at least the Master Technicians might, the other mechanics, just barely. They have to weld and braze, or at least heat things up with a torch at times, but none of them would have something like PS:Welder, probably not even a Familiarity, more like something that is part of an "Everymechanic" skill package. I read something once that said having a Skill at 13- means that you could make a living at it, and be considered extremely competent. None of these guys could take a job as a Welder. None of them could take a job as an Electrician. I don't have any problem with the idea of designing a character like Doc Savage, that really is as good as any expert at everything he sets his hand to, but I would be building that sort of character on a Superheroic set of points, not as if they were more or less "normal". I guess that is the point I am trying to get to. There is room in a fictional universe for someone who is super competent at a whole lot of things, but that person is way above "normal". KA.