Storn

Alien Knight, your Min/Max comments are interesting and important. Since I made up two of the characters out of 3 PCs, I wasn't worried. But this group is not min/maxed at all (if anything, a bit weak). But we are playing superspies in a superhero world. These folks have a LOT of skills and it brings down their impact considerably. However, since I have them up against similar foes to themselves (other superspies), they tend to not be anywhere min/maxed at all. I have one villian who is PL 15 and would get his butt kicked in a stand up fight. I do agree that Armor and Protection are powers that you really have to judge against the attack of the players. As for Mooks, I make sure that they have the "gang fire" Feat of up to +5 for ATT, a corresponding -5 to DEF. Reflecting perfectly the comic book tactics of Hydra, Cobra etc. They get hit easily, but occasionally they hit with Kirbyeseque energy siiphon accelerator . But I did have one fight where PL 4 mooks went down very quickly against the players. Almost too easily. But I'm learning as a GM. I remember the early days of Hero, when my 125 pt character was going up against speed 4, dex 18 .357 magnum weilding bar fighters. (I was 14 dex, 3 speed). Early GM. My character was smeared. We learned from that.

>>>M&M is purely a superhero game. It's core mechanic is d20 System-based, but there's enough difference between it and other d20 games that you might almost as well be changing rules systems when you switch between them.<< I actually disagree with this statement considerably. I can take the base stats of ANY d20 character, monster etc and run in it easily with M&M. Do spells and all abilities cross over neat? No, of course not. But if I want to set my superheroes up against a dragon from Monster Manual... it is really pretty damn easy. so easy, I can run it out of the Monster Manual opened.... so there is a lot of d20 product and support out there to dip in. Do I care if the points match up perfectly?... nope. I want ease of use. Want to play Sci-fi, yeah...that's pretty easy (maybe a bit bland and generic, but it would work just as well as d20 Star Wars and probably better). Want to play fantasy? good lord, that is supremely easy given the product out there. There are even quick and dirty ways to use spells out of the Player's Handbook or any d20 product. >>A wonderful adaptation from the king of karma systems, MSHRPG. Are you also allowing the heroes to keep a karma pool?<<< I played Mshrpg a couple of times 15 years ago. I don't remember karma systems at all. If it is similar, I'm not surprised...I just do it so that the minor underlings may get a Villain point if the story needs it...but the majortiy of the Villian points are for the main Villians.... useful for simulating that comic book convention of "I planned for this contingency, my hover bike will whisk me away from those pesky heroes as the warehouse burns down around their ears!" or what have you... So saying M&M cannot do these things is a bit shortsighted. Can Hero do them? Oh yes, and in a lot more detail. But not everyone is into all that detail. In some ways, Hero is more work than converting M&M to a fantasy game... because there is so many decisions to make. Now, I like making those decisions, but others want to run something out of Greyhawk... or Dark Sun or some setting. This is where Hero doesn't come up to the bar. Terran Empire will be an interesting test if Hero gamers are interested in settings besides Champions.

I am GMing M&M now. In a co-GM'd superhero world that up to now has been Champions and the co-GM will continue to run Champions. I REALLY like M&M from a GM stand point. It is child's play to keep track of damage resolution of multiple NPCs... much easier than Body, Stun, End costs for powers, Con stuns, various defenses etc. etc. Having said that; I think Hero/champions is a bit more solid in the combat dept. There is a real keen depth to a good combat in hero. But we threw out the speed chart years ago...and that has simplified and bettered and sped up combat for our group significantly (1d6+SPD, if initiative is over 11 person gains a second action after all first actions, 17 or better, 2nd and 3rd actions after all other actions. 4 intitatives to a Turn (or equal to 12 phases the ol' way)). We also do not allow a free REC. You have to burn an action to take one. Which also speeds up combats. But M&M does play faster (I do not use all my villain pts for all my villains, rather a grab bag that they all draw from... keeps the combats a bit quicker). We will probably play both for some time. My co-GM is excellent at handling numbers of a detailed Champs combat. I'm not. So that is the reason I use MM.

I think that leather armor, against any kind of killing attack becomes DMG reduction..allowing full PD vs. the Stun, but not adding any of itself. Just my 2 cents.

I add "blackmailed." I've done this a few times, "you work for us or.... its Stronghold, soap on a rope and Grond in the shower." Note: I've done this after talking it over with players. I would not do this just because I felt so. It is an amazing motivator though....

The continuing saga of UNTIL Black Ops is up on the Green Ronin thread of the same name as this one. Someone mentioned wanting to know when i did that.

Re: SWEET! heh. Nope, this is a damn good thread. Don't have any add'l comments at the mo'.... but I'm sure someone will spark something up. Aglar, neil and I have done some PBeM games. We both have a real hard time keeping them going for any length of time. But it has always been Champions and I did a really high level fantasy game once(which bombed quickly). Doing something gritty online might be a lot of fun.

Nato, thanks for your comments... Loved your Foxbat tank illo in UVA! >>My question is, do you tweak it for black and white publication after you finish the coloring?<<< About 60% of the time, I tweak after I've converted to Grayscale. I'm getting better at knowing what colors will do what when converting. It used to be about 90% of the time. I play just a tad with Brightness/Contrast... and usually a tad is all it takes. I feel that my stuff has been printing ok compared to Chris's. Chris's line work is phenominal, but the grayscale seems to get a bit washed across the board. Chris and I have talked about this. I really try to staying towards the light end of the spectrum... I suggested to him the same thing. This is where working in color helps me. A light yellow, next to a light blue will give me a nice range of Light grays when converted. They will be awfully close, but not identical. I try to make sure that in the color version there is some white left, it seems to ground the color into a range that will work in gray. I also go from 0-70% Value and then skip to a 100% Value (black). I try to stay away from the 75%-99% Value range...it will all read as a black mass when printed, as opposed to 75%-99% Gray. I did 5 illos for Millennium City (a low amount due to time constraints on my end) 4 of them where color. I was going to color the 5th, but I scanned in the grayscale work and I was happy with it. So that last one, I did some minor tweaking of Gray application. For what it is worth.

And pass up a chance for some self-promotion on public boards? Sheesh, perish the thought. No, seriously, my website has the info under "Character Commissions". My website is in my sig below.

Well said. I think you are onto something there. I would certainly love to do artwork for a new D.I. I would certainly like to see some of the things you've mentioned explored.

Re: excuses ah Pruttm, you reminded me of something I wanted to say. Coloring over pencils is the exact same process of coloring over grayscale. Exactly. So if I can do it, computer newbie I am, anyone can color any illo that is grayscale. In fact, it is no different in theory, than an underpainting that is the basis of thousand years of art. You do need Photoshop though. And a wacom tablet goes a long way to making it easier. 1) scan in your art (or get an electronic version of grayscale art) 2) Under "Image" is "Adjust". Under Adjust is "levels" and "Brightness/Contrast". Both which can be used to lower or raise the blackness quotient of the picture. I actually make my pencils darker. But for grayscale, you might want to play with Bright/Contrast to darken the dark lines, but minimize the gradients. 3) Under "Image" is "Mode". Under "Mode" change Grayscale to RGB Color. Now you can slap some color around. 4) Under "Window" is "Show Layers" (if it isn't already out). There is a little arrow to the right on the "Layers" box. Click on it. Select "Duplicate Layer". 5) Now you have two layers, select the one on top, now in the box is a pull-down menu that should say Normal at the moment. Change it to Multiply. Now, all that gray will stay while you can apply color over the gray. 6) Paint away in the colors you want on the Multiply layer. I tend to use "Wet Edges" on the paint tool... but you don't have to. 7) If you want highlights, build "New Layer" and do your highlights on that, do not set it to Multiply. I tend to do my Highlights at 85% because I do like a bit of texture to come through...there is a slide scale when you select a brush tool to allow this. But if you don't, set to 100% 8) When done, "Flatten Layers" and you can save as a tifff, jpeg...what have you. This method does take slightly more time than blasting in color into a line drawing. And how many times has there been a "little space" and your fill tool as painted 65% of the pic and you gotta go find that little space to fill it? But not much more. And you will have the rounding of the form because the shadows and the highlights are already there in greyscale. You won't have to supply as much. And you will get something that is much more "real" looking that the filled-in look of say, heromachine.

I love Raven, but I'm going off on my own a bit with the organization. To me, they are European in sphere of influence, not guady like Viper, and very interested in the status quo. but I'm curious (respectfully) why you think they suck. Can you elaborate?

Now this is only my opinion, but the realistic, gritty stuff is right there in FRED and is , game mechanically, easy to do. Super-powers and various magic frameworks are much more complicated, game mechanics wise, and therefore get more attention. And Champions, superheroes, is really the flagship genre for the system. It sells. Therefore, it gets more attention.

I wholeheartedly agree. Even in Champions, I've been worried about my characters death...and the odds of that happening are pretty low. Yet, it has happened. But at heroic level, with hit location? You better believe my character is going to be worried about death!!!!! One shot to the head and you are checking out of the combat, maybe the whole enchilada! Or you can die from multiple wounds, which is damn easy to happen at heroic level. But like Call of Cthulhu, death is at your shoulder, the intensity of the game experience and the actual role-playing seems to go up for me.

It is a matter of degrees and balance to be sure. Ok, if the PCs commit several killings over the course of 3 or 4 adventures...not out of bounds for such a campaign... "Realistically":" 1) hauled into court. 2) demoted, 3) Promoted. 4) In therapy and on "rest" 5) dead. and probably a bunch of other "likely" happenings to curtail or make difficult the ability of that PC to continue "adventuring"...or in modern terms, being nuts enough to put oneself in harms way. So it is tough, like Neil said, to get a game past 3 evenings. Yes, shadowy organizations can "cover" things up. Or the adventures and violence have to happen in such a way that is SO -below the radar. I'm not saying I don't like these games or have no imagination... if you knew me you would know quite to the contrary. Its just that I see problems in running them. And I've had experience running them. They are very hard in some respects. Partly because of "realistic" tendencies of the players in those sitiuations. Neil knows this about me, I get into a DI situation, and it looks hoary... I call the cops. If its corruption and scandal.. I call the Washington Post. Those are realistic reactions. But they tend to rip the adventure away from the player characters. So its very hard to build a situation w/o railroading the players that they are motivated to 1) not call the cops. 2) still put their lives on the line. 3) role play as realistically as possible (fear, not want to die, come to mind), (Jason Bourne is a kick-ass assassin...but the dude is scared a bit after those fights. He doesn't want to die and the crux of the character is he is scared by himself). 4) keep the body=count low enough to have adventures, but not cause massacres. 5) Do not use the media. 6) Avoid some obvious cliches; "you are stuck in a building with terrorists trying to get the hoozi-whatsits-macguffin". 7) the missions need to have emotional resonance. Playing Seal team 6 on varied missions becomes a wargame and not role-playing without personal involvement. I've done a lot of military campaigns... they all can really easily suffer from lack of personality. Who has time to talk about feelings when some mortar shells are landing all around you? This is all a tightrope. Not that I dislike it. Lastly, I would LOVE to play in a game like that. I just am not wild about running it. I think Neil has the same feelings. He wants to run in it, but not necessarily play in it.

Collect them All!

Acroyear, its a sketch. Like someone commenting about day job, well, I have one too. It just "happens" to be related. So a bit of detail lacking in the hand was intentional. The watercolor look is intentional. lack of detail in the cables is simply called "lazy". I didn't want to spend a ton of time on it, because its not meant for publication. Since i'm not lazy at all (I can say with all confidence) in my work, if I let some hobby sketches slide a bit...well... this is just a doodle and just fun. I'm not going to put the same pressure on myself that I do for a pro job. also, Neil has stated many times that he likes the flow, the sketchiness of my pencil work. I was trying to keep that, yet present something that was in color and was indicative of the character it was meant to display. Experimental? You betchya.

Re: Relieved... Neil, I think you are misinterperting at least one of your players. Me. I cut my teeth on the Hero system thru Danger International. It was the game of choice for several years. I LOVE D.I. style games (as I enjoyed your cyberpunk games too). I preferred Top Secret to D&D any day of the week before D.I. I love lethal combat systems, it plays to my strenght as a tactician. My major problem with D.I., besides the high mortality rate issue( the cyberpunk game grounded to a halt after my ex-leionairre took a bullet thru the skull, but for the record, I don't mind high mortality if I know tha t is to be that kinda game.), it that it is set in the real world. Sounds contridictory doesn't it? But what I mean is that the PCs by the very nature are going to be involved in some pretty amazing adventures, even if they are more "realistic" than Dark Champions or Fantasy games. Three deaths in a gunbattle in a city even like NYC is going to stir the waters... and I've seen D.I. games hand out casualties of much higher numbers. So it is hard to sustain the sense of disbelief... that these PCs are operating in a shadowy world. Lastly, I simply prefers Spies and Internat'l Mercenaries to Private Eyes and Cops. I just like that canvas to tell stories better. But the problem with a Spy, is that one Spy at the right place can change the path of history. It might not be evident up close in the game, but can easily happen. So, again, the sense of disbelief, for me, gets challenged. If the solution calls for teh taking out of the French Prime Minister... and it happens...boom, we are no longer gaming in the real world. WE are gaming in an alternate history. which, for some reason, bothers me a bit. Yet being constrained to nothing to change the world bothers me as well. And this can happen in a Chicago based P.I. game too. PCs mess up and the L gets bombed. Well, that has an enormous impact on the city of Chicago. Economic, folks trying to get to work... we address that in the game....boom... alternate history time. Which is why I prefer something like cyberpunk. You can do all the tropes of D.I., but there is a bit more flexibility. We can whack the Prez of the US if the story takes us there. If Mexico needs to be the shining star of the future, with very little corruption and democratic society...boom... it can be so. But to say that I'm not interested in a game like that... well...that just ain't so. The real problem you have is that RDU is the 800 lb gorilla. The demand for playing that campaign is paramount. Not only fromt he players, but from yourself. You have stated on these boards that you are a continuity freak. Well. RDU is the haven of continuity. It has been going on for a long time. It is very seductuve with its width and breath and scope. It is the reason that I'm running a spy campaign. Yet it is set in RDU and it is superheroes. I think for a D.I. game to succeed, it would have to be entirely removed from RDU, completely and utterly. It is not D.I. with supers or psionics or even low level Talents.

103 viewings, 126 downloads (not sure how that happened) and I get two comments!?!?!?!?! One from my player. Geez folks, tell me it sucks or you like it or something. After all the complaining I heard about not enough colored art, I give y'all some for free... and I get the chirping of crickets. Sheesh. and Neil, any chance you could throw the stats up for a friendly dreyogg?

Since I'm running Mutants and Masterminds, but in a predominant Champions universe, I thought I would share some of my doodles as I get them done for my game. I'll post stuff here occasionally. this particular beastie is being written up in MM, but was already featured as a Champions critter. Neil has the file on this one (as do I, but it is so buried in my mac, and it is a creation workshop file and won't be read by my mac) I'm hoping y'all can convince him to post it here. Anyways the art is below. Have fun. {If you are curious about the MM stats, here is the thread to that...page 7} http://www.greenronin.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1570

Re: Re: Re: The Ultimate Sacrifice... seems to me, that I do recall wiping out a whole group of fantasy characters.... but it wasn't very glorious (and some phenominal bad luck on the players fault). But that was sorta part of the game . What it did do was elevated the bad guys into a whole lot of success for them and changed the world a bit. I too, liked the baseball bat Paladin saving the universe. That is kinda cool. It all came down to a Louisville Slugger at the right place at the wrong time.

Mike sent me an initial write up of Silk Hurricane. It looked great. But I will let him post it, it is his creation.

sure...Neil. I'll keep that in mind for Cyberblade. Thanks for the idea! (grin)

No. I just eyeball it. Both Cyberblade and Bryan Fury were done in Hero before we translated them to MM. I have not gone the other way. And if I did, I would just eyeball it again. Especially for d20 fantasy to fantasy hero. I have a lot of experience running FH, so I feel confident on how to set critters to challenge, but not overwhelm characters. RDU neil is continuing the Champions end. I'm running the MM end. I'm not running both games.

OT Mister Vimes? I miss your old avatar. I loved that cigar chombing dude.