bigdamnhero

I agree Heroes should be heroic; but Normals should still be roughly normal to give us a good baseline.

True. Someone with 16 END & STUN would come in at more like 8 Turns & 120m. Agreed. That's typically only going to be a life-or-death thing, not a "Watch how long I can hold my breath" thing. Ah, I felt like I was missing something, thanks! I've usually just burned 1 STUN for 1 END for simplicity's sake, but you're right. (And in this case I think adding a certain amount of uncertainty to the equation is a good thing. Revising the numbers based on an average of 3.5 STUN rolled each Phase: Johnny Eights lasts 78 seconds (Turn 7), covers 104m Joe Normal goes 96 seconds (Turn 8), covers 128m Jane Heroic also makes it 96 seconds (Turn 8), but covers 288m or if Jane reduces to SPD 2, she lasts 144 seconds (Turn 12), but still covers 288m Thanks again, those numbers seem like a much better fit!

I was playing around to see how long/how far my PCs could swim while holding their breath, and how that compares to the typical person. (Why, you ask? Oh, no particular reason, just wondering... ) 6e1 p130 says a character holding their breath "expends a minimum of 1 END per Phase" which is in addition to other END costs (per Steve). Ignoring Encumbrance and so forth, Swimming costs 1 END per 10 AP, which means 1 END per Phase for most heroic characters. So Swimming while holding your breath costs 2 END per Phase. So Joe Normal comes with 4m Swimming, SPD 2, 20 END & 20 STUN: Assume NCM => 8m per Phase => 16m per Turn Burns 4 END per Turn Can go 5 Turns on END => 80m Then another 5 Turns on STUN => 80m 10 Turns = 120s = 2 minutes => 160m total before passing out I swim like a rock so I may not be the best judge, but 2 minutes and 160 meters underwater seems like kindof a lot? A quick websearch sez an average person can hold their breath for 2 minutes, but that's while not moving. Of course, most people holding their breath in the pool are probably smart enough to quit when they run out of END... Meanwhile Jane Above Average has bought her stats up to 6m Swimming, SPD 3, 30 END & 30 STUN Assume NCM => 12m per Phase => 36m per Turn Burns 6 END per Turn Can go 5 Turns on END => 180m Then another 5 Turns on STUN => 180m 10 Turns = 120s = 2 minutes => 360m total before passing out Or she could reduce her SPD to 2 to conserve END, which means she could hold her breath for 15 Turns (3 minutes), but would still cover 360m. I was also curious how much one point of LS: Extended Breathing (1 END per Turn) would change this. So Joe Normal now burns 3 END per Turn (2 from Swimming, one from holding his breath), which means he can now hold his breath for a little over 13 Turns and cover 213m. Jane Above Ave now burns 4 END per Turn, can go for 15 Turns and can cover 540m! So first off, am I calculating all this right? And second, what do you think of those times & distances?

I have a bunch of friends who love Fifth Element, which is why I thought I'd give it another try. Admittedly, I have a pretty low Milo Jovovich tolerance, but that aside it just didn't work for me.

The Fifth Element. I hadn't seen it since it first came out, didn't care for it much then...and didn't really like it any better this time around.

Sure, and I like all those settings. (Tho I wouldn't classify most of Burroughs' stuff as fantasy per se, but that's another topic.) I'm not saying fantasy game have to be based on Tolkien - just that the vast majority seem to be. You just don't see a lot of other works/settings that are based on/paying homage to those settings the way you do with Tolkien. Excluding rpgs that are specific to those licensed properties, how many original rpg settings have you looked at and thought "Oh, Yet Another Lankhmar Rip-Off"? And to the previous point, most of those worlds are pretty light on "alien" races, aside from monsters.

Fair enough. To some extent you just have to come up with new names for them. But it's still an interesting question. One of the reasons I got burned out on high fantasy, especially in RPGs, was to some extent they all feel like the same game world I've been playing in since I was 15, with at most 10% variation for "My elves are different..." Gaming aside, I think that sense of YATRO* is a big part of why the fantasy genre has always limited mass-market appeal (ie - outside of core fandom) compared to SF. So personally I like the fact that most SF universes feel a little more distinct/unique, particularly when it comes to alien species. Even if you're just stealing everything from existing material, there's enough variety to choose from that you can mix & match into something that feels unique. But OTOH, to what extent does the "commonality" of fantasy races (and other tropes) make it easy for players to jump in to a new game world and feel like they already know what's going on? But does that recognition factor help sell games? Does that lowering of the learning curve help players to learn & immerse themselves in the setting quicker? * Yet Another Tolkien Rip-Off

I just came across a reference to the 10th Century Muslim scientist & scholar Ibn al-Haytham describing a process for removing soft cataracts from the eye through the use of "a large incision in the eye, a hollow needle, and an assistant with an extraordinary lung capacity." A Persian physician named Ammar ibn Ali also claimed to have used the procedure with great success. So restoring the High King's vision may not have been quite as far-fetched as I thought! Once again, Strangeness: Truth > Fiction.

My brain was mush the other night so the only quote I can remember from this week was from before we started: "Oh, I brought desert." [dumps a bag of mini chocolate bars on the table] "Nah, I'm on a diet." "Not on game night, you're not." "It's a rule. Like There's No Crying In Baseball? There's No Dieting On Game Night." "Good rule."

I understood their desire to make Danny more of a work-in-progress. Seeing someone develop into a true hero is generally more interesting - especially to non-comics fans - than a hero who's already fully formed, and all the Netflix-MCU shows have explored that to some degree. I just thought it was really poorly handled. The whole thing felt like they were writing the scripts the night before filming, especially compared to how tightly-written the previous shows have been.

Shin Godzilla. Thanks for the recommendations, that was a lot of fun!

QOTD, planning a (possible) Friday night binge party for Defenders... "What about inviting [dude]?" "I don't think he's seen any of the Marvel/Netflix shows, so he wouldn't know what's going on." "Well, he's got 48 hours to catch up." "...Yeah, you could make it. 24 episodes of Daredevil, 12 episodes of Jessica Jones, 12 episodes of Luke Cage...and read the Wikipedia summary for Iron Fist." "Ouch. I mean, yeah. But ouch."

Who doesn't love Miss 20 pounds of crazy in a 5 pound bag?! Great show, and one of the few where the character interactions get deeper an more complex as the show progresses.

World Wildlife Fund: the RPG would be a VERY different game experience.

As other have suggested, the 1st thing I'd would be to pick up Luha Libre Hero. While it's geared specifically towards Mexican wrestling with their masks and B-movies where they fight monsters & aliens, the wrestling bits would translate north of the border easily enough. There are rules for playing the crowd and so forth. Plus it's just a REALLY fun book to read. And I'm not a wrestling fan at all. I can't remember if this is in LLH or where I picked it up, but if you assume the wrestlers are actually trying NOT to seriously hurt one another, have them make a PS roll or something to "soak" the damage while still making it look convincing.

The problem with the extra STR solution is 1. sure the character can now carry 600+kg without penalty, but the gear still weighs 600kg, which comes into play when they're being lifted/thrown or simply climbing a rickety staircase, and 2. technically if you hand the bag off to someone else it weighs 600kg for them. You can of course hand wave both those points and call it sfx.

Yeah, been there. For awhile my group played with a house rule that hexes were DCV 0 instead of 3. The practical effect was to make Area Effect attacks absurdly easy to target. It worked okay for that game because it was heroic modern, so the only area effect attacks were things like hand grenades the characters weren't paying points for anyway. If you decide to use it in a game where point costs matter, I would suggest upping the cost of the AOE Advantage by at least +1/4, if not +1/2 to maintain balance. Of course if you're playing superheroic, the difference between DCV 3 and DCV 0 might be small enough not to make a difference. The DCV 3 hex rule is one of those things that only makes sense from a game mechanic & balance standpoint. Honestly, my advice is to acknowledge it doesn't make much logical sense...but go with it anyway.

Last time we did this I went with Transform: I'm normally not a fan of using Transform to simulate existing Powers, like Shrinking. But in this case: 1. Shrinking, UAA, Persistent gets real expensive real quick, and I felt like it cost more than the power was worth; partly because... 2. The only real mechanical effect was to let a character ignore Encumbrance, and we weren't really tracking END costs closely anyway. And 3. The 3d6 Transform meant the character could only use it on items of 5-6 BODY or less. We handwaved this occasionally as appropriate to the plot, but it basically meant she could only use it for relatively "mundane" objects, which was the player's intent.

I did once play in a game where instead of inventing his own aliens the GM just imported races from different films/shows/books like Klingons, Wookies, etc. I was skeptical at first, but it actually worked pretty well for a light-hearted game. The main advantage was that every time we met an alien the GM didn't have to pause the action to explain who they were and what they were like; "Two Klingons walk into the bar" and everyone already knows what to expect.

What he said. They're all fun, as long as everyone is on the same page. My default preference is probably for medium-hard science, but I've also run Flash Gordon-style games where Mom ear irrigation appt science works however the plot requires. I would also say I see Space Opera as a type of plot structure separate from how hard the science is; you can have space opera with hard or rubber physics. Edit: OK I have no idea how autocorrect decided to insert "Mom ear irrigation appt" in the middle of that. But it's nonsensically awesome and I'm leaving it in!

You had me at Steven Chow + Pig Demon!

Yeah, it's almost like excessive inbreeding is a bad thing. Whodathunkit? Right. Tho in this case Olaf did leave at least one son, the aforementioned Sigtrygg Silkbeard. The issue is further confused because Ireland has like 5 different "levels" of Kings, so not all Kings are created equal.

Despite 40+ years of gaming and sci-fi fandom, I have somehow never run a sci-fi campaign. (Unless you count one near-future cyberpunkey game I ran based on GDW's Dark Conapiracy setting.) I'm really not sure why not. I have run a few SF one-shot convention games, which were based on: 1) Firefly 2) Hero's Alien Wars setting 3) Buck Rogers Currently playing in a Star Wars game with heavy influences from Traveller as well as Futurama. The Grand Space Opera campaign I've been writing in my head for years and may even get to run Some Day Dammit is a mishmash of: 1) Babylon 5 2) The Expanse 3) Valerian and other old Heavy Metal SF stories 4) another French comic called Scourge of the Gods IIRC? 5) Saga (comic book) 6) Traveller The New Era 7) Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series 8) and a little Farscape and Blake's Seven thrown in for seasoning. And if your thinking most of those sources are mutually exclusive, that's the point. Some Day Dammit...

Yeah, given that it hasn't been done before now, I would've assumed he wasn't crazy about the idea. Bummer. Part of what makes Astro City work is that it's about so much more than just punching/blasting each other; there are supers fights, sure, but they're generally secondary to the character interactions and "what it's like to live in a city that has regular super-battles." That would take a deft hand to pull off and (I hate to say it) Champions might not be the best system for it. But if you could make it work, it could be a very different type of RPG experience than your usual supers game.

I generally think of Dodge and DFC as basically the same thing except with one mechanic for attacks targeting the individual and a different mechanic for resolving area effect attacks. A bit oversimplified, but in other words if a player says "I Dodge" before learning the attack is AOE, then that's Dodge gets changed to a DFC mechanically. Would I let a player DFC against a non-AOE attack? Probably, if there was some reason for it like diving behind a wall. That's probably more realistic than dodging bullets while standing in place anyway. DFC against a melee attack? Maybe, again if it seemed to fit the situation better than Dodge. I don't think it's ever come up, as the consequences of ending up Prone usually outweigh the benefits. The only potential for abuse I can think of is if the player had a high Breakfall score and was trying to use DFC as some kind of free Abort To Move cheat code. Never seen anyone try to pull that tho.