Zane_Marlowe

Re: Urban Fantasy Hero I am very interested to know this too.

Re: S.H.A.R.D. - Super Hero Acronym Resource Directory Others have used SWORD for other stuff, I created this one: Superhuman Warfare Offensive Response Division: It's a SHIELD homage, but it operates much more like the Directive if you've ever read that book from the Aberrant series. Incidentally, I tend to think that projects are going to be given codenames that are suggestive, even if they're not necessarily acronyms. I may name some group Project AEGIS and not worry about whether it means more than its etymology suggests.

Re: Most Obscure Reference You've Ever Worked Into a Game I ran a victorian game where the characters were recruited by Jack Sparks, who was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes in Mark Frost's book "The List of Seven." In my game, it was Holmes' alter ego during the hiatus between his "death" at Reichenbach Falls and his later return. When I described him, I used the physical description Conan Doyle supplied in Holmes' introduction. Their base of operations was a freighter named "Reichenbach." None of the PC's had read Frost, but none of them got the Reichenbach reference either. Later in that game, I shamelessly cribbed from Anna Kostova's book "The Historian" for historical places related to Dracula. I also got the floorplan to Bran Castle, and printed location maps from Google Earth for Istanbul, Alexandria (of Lighthouse fame), and the monastery where Dracula was ruputedly interred. (Of course, by that time the players had good reason to suspect the Count was long gone.)

Re: SuperSquad America: Replacing Challenger I'm a fan of having someone come out of left field, unknown to Supersquad America. When supergroups click, it's often a matter of kismet, serendipity, whatever, and it isn't always the obvious person who is the best person. Why not have someone be discovered who fits the role in some way? Or perhaps someone whose powers emerged as a result of the actions of the original challenger (e.g., John Henry Irons becoming Steel after an inspiring encounter with Superman). By the way, if you value the core concept of the character as moral paragon, you should be talking about that more than about whether or not he's going to be in battle armor. I'd start looking for candidates who would take the challenger's mantle reluctantly if at all, and it would be chosen for him (or her) by the Supersquad after they see the person's contributions in the role they were born to. Perhaps the person could be tested or "challenged" by some trial that shows them exhibiting this kind of moral fortitude, and they are thus identified as the heir to the Challenger's mantle.

Re: Politics or not My group is primarily composed of my fellow ph.d students in a program that specializes in political philosophy. Two of us are rather conservative, two or three more at least are fairly liberal, but everyone does pretty well. Why? Because incorporating politics into a game adds depth (as a previous poster commented) and stakes for the general public. The danger is that you can get preachy if you try to characterize political realities as the GM rather than letting your NPCs (or other players) do it for you. If the GM is the one telling you that everyone on welfare is a junkie or (to swing the other way) that every corporation employs illicit means to gain and keep competitive advantage in the market, then that judgment is now written into the world, and you lose the relevant political verisimilitude in those players who don't agree with the GM's view. If, on the other hand, you invest those views in the mouth of a well-placed NPC (say a social worker who has wide experience with the welfare population, or an experienced forensic accountant employed by law enforcement), then players can still enjoy the world, even if they don't like that NPC's take on it.

Re: Hero's List Card is Mormon. The Watchmen book is a kind of historical book too though, so before I thought there were problems with the depiction of those characters, I'd be interested to know whether those characters were "appropriately" gay for the period (if that makes sense). In any case, the author's main claim is that these kinds of characters "aren't allowed" in some sense, but that's a stronger claim than that they're merely underrepresented because it adds intent. I'm not sure there is any more intent in any of this than that the writers don't see a requirement of their stories that they include social messages about homosexual representation. In other words, on my view, a good story is color-blind, orientation-blind, etc. People may want to see themselves in these kinds of art forms, but I think that's a concern that will be established by the market before it's established by activism.

Re: [Power Build] Blur Just curious, why not invisibility given that there's a "fringe" effect that could be enough to tell people where you are (as a blur would), but would make targeting difficult? (Blur in this sense would be a strong haziness, so REALLY blurred!) Alternately, why not damage resistance to simulate that the shots fired at the blurred character just don't manage to hit squarely?

Re: Build Question Thanks for the build advice guys!

Okay, so an idea occurred to me today about a variation on the normal super-intelligence build. Basically, because I want super-intelligence and telepathy to be ultra-rare powers in the superhero environment I'm building (and therefore highly prized among competing factions because they are so powerful in the hands of the subtle and clever), I'm going to make my "world's smartest" guy be someone who manages to do it with a kind of telepathy (two birds with one stone and all that). Here's how it works conceptually. The character has the ability to telepathically link to the processing power of other people's brains and parallel process intellectual tasks. You ever daydream? Find it difficult to focus on some task? Thought it was the lack of sleep last night or the post-lunch food coma didn't you? In fact, that's just you losing a few cycles to this guy's processing needs. The power would of course have a certain kind of limited range so that if he's all alone he has just himself (thinking your way off a desert-island is a problem). People who were affected by it wouldn't necessarily lose intellectual capacity in most cases, but perhaps if he's trying to do tensor calculus off the top of his head to compute reentry speed and vectors to a planet he's never visited in a ship he's piloting for the first time, if there's only six people in the room, they're going to have some problems concentrating. When he wants to design the next great piece of rubber science, he goes to a baseball game or a rock concert. So there's the concept, I think you get the gist (feel free to add thoughts or ask questions). My thoughts for how to build the power? Aid INT with a limitation of some kind based on the number of people around? Aid INT linked to a Drain INT of some kind with area of effect? I'm curious to know how you guys would approach this. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Old Enemies Let's not forget Giotto Tarvolio, that pesky halfling whose business as an itinerant merchant covers his late night activities as a skilled and resourceful cat burglar. I'm almost certain he helped himself to one of those hard-won artifacts in the original party's possession, and when he gets a town or two down the road, I'm likewise certain it'll fetch a pretty price for him. He's not REALLY a bad guy, but making a decent living means working twice as hard when you're half as tall, and honest labor is for chumps after all. Cheers!

Re: Vehicle Actions and Crews Thanks Bob! (Nothing helps this sort of discussion like having the author weigh in!)

Re: Vehicle Actions and Crews That's interesting. I suppose one might reign-in this circumstance (if it was necessary) by imposing situational penalties to OCV for the gunners since the vehicle's motion may make targeting more difficult as targets whiz by or change aspect faster than they otherwise would. That would be highly situational however since two vehicles moving parallel in the same direction at full-move would be effectively at rest relative to one another. Thanks for the reply!

Okay, so here's a question occasioned by my reading the Ultimate Vehicle. In their section on Complex Vehicle Actions on page 172, they describe prominent characters aboard a vehicle as being able to act in addition to the vehicle's normal actions in a phase. However, the examples suggest that the characters can be operating weapons on the vehicle in addition to the vehicle's own actions (e.g., driving). So here's my question. Let's say that I have a vehicle with three weapons and I have a PC crew of four (a pilot, and a gunner for each weapon). Can the vehicle's action be to take a full move (i.e., can the pilot crew member use HIS action to pilot the vehicle this way) and the crew fires all three weapons since they all have actions as well? If that were the case, then it seems that vehicle SPD would not really limit how many attacks one might get (since crew complement might allow more). Instead, it would limit when one could act, and how often the vehicle performed its complex of actions each phase. Am I missing something, or is this how it works? The example on 172-73 suggests that the vehicle is still limited to a half-move and attack even while crewed with multiple members, but I can't see why this would be if the pilot chose a full-move and had gunners to perform the attack actions. Thoughts?

Re: TE Starship Design Theory Ultimate Vehicle has a lot of interesting stuff in this line. You might check it out.

Re: Anyone Have PA Hero yet? I picked it up at GenCon and have read through it. Some initial thoughts. 1. Production Values: I liked the numerous quotes and references to particular sources in the genre that were woven into the descriptions of the themes and genre elements. I'll agree with others who said that the art was 50/50, and partially disagree with those who suggest that art doesn't make that much difference. Especially in this genre where images can help description a lot, I think that some of the art might have been better chosen. Overall, this is a quibble more than a complaint (it's more of a complaint in the Enchanted Items book that I also bought; yeah, I know art's pricey, but at least the unique items might have had better coverage). The book is well laid-out and has the usual genre/character/GM sections that the genre books do. 2. Written quality. The book's high points are its discussions of thematic elements (in plotting, villains, character types, etc.). I won't get into the details of those treatments, but suffice it to say it's usual Hero System Standard Goodness. 3. Settings. There are several good settings, and each is very different from the others. There are settings with High Apocalypse Mutants, far future fantasy settings, a zombie world, and a very interesting religious apocalypse setting. I was disappointed that there was not a military post-apocalyptic setting ala Twilight 2000. However, the ingredients are present if one incorporates Dark Champions and the vehicle sourcebooks, and I think such a setting could be managed anyway. I was also interested to see that while they included the notion of mutated animals in one of the settings, there was no discussion of how one might setup mutant animal (N)PC's in conjunction with the Hero System Bestiary, which seemed like an obvious choice. All that said, it's a worthy buy. Plenty of good stuff on scavenging, social breakdown, various ways to end the world, and themes to include in story elements. The things I'd like to see I think could be included in a Hero Plus supplement, and especially for settings (which seem the most likely to proliferate from this genre) this might be the best way to approach them given the wide range of the genre.

Re: Why hasn't magic changed the world? Besides the rarity of magic users (which solves things), there's also the point that wizards are often isolated scholars and/or hermits who are "subtle and quick to anger" when one meddles in their affairs. People might not have ever conceived of wizards being useful to the general populace because by and large they're not interested in improving society. That would be to adulterate the purity of studying of their art for its own sake. If remaining focused on study was not sufficient, it might even be that Wizards are so powerful that they live secluded lives of principled restraint, above the concerns of the mortal plane. Wizards are much more likely than other folk to know when they're being used for some high and mighty scheme that would, more than likely, merely raise some upstart lord's political profile, rather than advance any meaningful aims of the wizard. It might also be that lords who might order such widespread change as a wizard might accomplish would be reluctant to be dependent on outside power. Either as a matter of personal hubris, or as a pragmatic requirement ("why not just follow the wizard? He's the one with the REAL power here"), it might be that nobles are aware that for wizards to use their power in this way is to also give them political power, and no noble worth his salt would willingly cede the least political power that he had to give. Of course, that assumes that nobles even understand what magic is capable of, and that they have the imagination to think of it as a kind of technical mastery that would solve problems they have in areas unrelated to arcane knowledge. That such imagination is the product of a modern mind, not a medieval one is perhaps the easiest way to solve this question.

Re: Top 5 Jedi College Fight Videos I'm going to sound a note of discontent. The RVD fights are certainly fun to watch, but they don't seem like real fights to me because there's too much spinning and too many moments where they pass up obvious moves to strike the other person at a vulnerable point. Of course, I had this kind of problem with some of the prequels choreography, but I'm not going to get into a longer discussion with all the fanboys. At least I can say of RVD that they didn't seem as committed to killing one another as the movies suggested of Anakin and Obi-Wan.

Re: 4d6 Major Transform: d20 Gamer to Hero Gamer! I'd also remind you that the last couple issues of Digital Hero have published freebie articles on migrating from d20 to Hero, and how the concepts change and why. I thought it was very insightful.

Re: Malign Hypercognition Disorder (MHD) Something to note is that values exist along a separate axis from intellect. In other words, you don't have to be smart to be good, and you don't have to be smart to be evil, so whatever is true of being smart isn't something that indexes or scales with whether one is also good or evil. People who are really smart in the way you describe, and who do the villainy you describe, seem to think that they can redesign morality the same way they can redesign whatever it is they're knowledgeable about (i.e., some branch of science or engineering). They think that morality is a species of reasoning. There are certainly philosophers who thought this, but most people seem to find their real moral intuitions more deeply embedded than that. If so, the bad guy can mistakenly believe that morality is just a species of reason, and good guys can be every bit as intelligent in principle as the bad guys if you want. I say that for every Reed Richards there's should be a Victor von Doom. One need not take this view, but I think the most compelling SF I've read is the stuff by Strazcinsky and Card that suggests that all our science and technology have (will) ultimately done is innovate new ways to carry out old motivations--our flaws and virtues remain what they've always been. That said, I like the idea of the intelligence being granted by some mental malfunction that meds fix, and that that malfunction influences the character to evil in the ways described. It's a great setup I think I may adopt at some point, but I think the person in question always had a little evil in them if they become clearly evil when they gain power.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Hero -- What Do *You* Want To See? For what it's worth Steve, there have been a few people voting for stuff in the vein of Twilight 2000, and I'd recommend some treatment of military PA given that you've got so much good Dark Champions stuff out there now. I'd even recommend including in the settings chapter, but it sounds like you've got that pretty well locked up at this point. This might be best served by the Amrica setting, or at least by presenting some extra options for running it, but that's my $.02 on that. Also, something I'd encourage some thought about is that PA as a setting has been a major cash cow for Palladium books, and I'd urge some further reflection about whether the market was as unresponsive to this genre as you've said. My home campaign is building on some of the themes I liked about the Rifts series (roughly the supernatural vs. technology elements), and if those guys can sell literally dozens of books on the strength of high concept alone (many players agree the system isn't equal to the concept), then I'm optimistic about Hero Games being able to pursue a similarly creative (but obviously distinct) setting project.

Re: OIF: Items of Opportunity Something I haven't seen mentioned here is that I've never played, or allowed a player to play, an opportunity weapon that didn't require either an activation roll or a skill roll to establish that the opportunity existed in the particular situation. If it didn't, then depending on what it was, they may or may not have been able to reroll on consecutive rounds to continue to try to find the opportunity. Depending on the environmental setting and the nature of the attack in question, the activation roll should be adjusted appropriately as well. I do not expect to find good HKA weapons of opportunity in the middle of the ocean or on a sand dune in the Sahara.

Re: Make everyone fight at your level... a heroic fighter in a supers world. If you were capable of inflicting high stun and flash attacks on some target, then you've got control of the combat, and I think that's the key for this concept. It's like bullriding. There's a lot of angry meat that is trying to hurt you and you're trying to manage the situation and stay just a step or two ahead of its attacks. The key trick is having a variety of additional methods to tame a variety of other particulars, such as what to do if you have a brick with high defenses against your normal methods, or a speedster who's just going to hit you first and recover more quickly. This is where maybe a VPP might come in handy, either as equipment (as Team Achilles did) or as a series of martial arts disciplines that require prior meditation to properly attune the mind and body. These could be specific suppressions, or perhaps armor piercing, etc. Oh yes, and don't forget to sweep the leg!

Re: Make everyone fight at your level... a heroic fighter in a supers world. Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is a reference to Stormwatch: Team Achilles. If you haven't read this before, it's highly insightful to this conversation. Case in point, first issue we're introduced to how these guys think about engagement with supers: "Fighting a super-human opponent doesn't have to be an automatic death sentence. Most of them have no combat training to rely on. They just woke up one day and could shoot flames out of their hands. This reliance on their powers makes them an easy target for a well-trained fighter. Special forces close-combat is all about staying close. Deliver sharp and sudden debilitating strikes with elbows, forearms and knees. Aim for the joints. Control the opponent and keep pounding him no matter what. Everyone's got a weak spot. Never back off from an opponent the way people always do in the movies. Don't give them time to adjust." This suggests to me that the key problem for the martial artist is just being able to get close. Once you're inside, it's find weakness, flash attacks, low-level HKA (joint attacks), and other kinds of high-stun stuff that will ensure that the other guy just doesn't get an attack off. If he does, your high DCV should make sure he has a bad chance of hitting. That said, in the fight I quoted from above, they finished the guy with his own pistol, and afterward one of the agents thought he'd broken a couple ribs. Again, if you haven't seen this series, check it out. The battle in issue six where the Swede kicks the snot out of Midnighter is the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.

Re: A Thin Moral Line...?

Re: Victorian / Western HERO Firearms I actually created a prefab with a variety of Victorian-era British, German, French, and American rifles and pistols. There's also a bayonet and a bowie knife in there. I didn't spend much time on all the classic western weapons because it was a European game and people were producing bolt-action rifles at the end of the century. You can find the prefab here.