bigdamnhero

Yeah, I saw that one when it came out - powerful movie. Unfortunately, I'm no sure I could watch it again now that the scene of Hitler berating his generals has been used to create so many hysterical memes.

I'm writing an urban fantasy game for a convention. One of the characters is an engineer with a Gadget VPP of various gizmos she's invented to work against different types of creatures. One of the weapons I want her to have is a water pistol filled with holy water for use against against vampires and so forth (ala Lost Boys). Or maybe instead I'll do it with a paint ball gun, with the balls filled with holy water (ala Harry Dresden). Now the fact that it does damage to certain creatures is due to their Susceptibilities. On her end, it's just a plastic gun that squirts water. Or it shoots plastic balls that to most people just sting a little and splatter you with harmless water. Either way, obviously it shouldn't be very expensive. But I don't want to just give it to her for free either, if only because it needs to take up some room in her VPP. (Conceptually, if she carries the holy water gun it's a tradeoff with something else, so mechanically it needs to have some RP value.) So my question is: how do you build & balance something that has no in-game effect most of the time, yet is highly effective against certain creatures? One option would be to build it based on the effect it has against vampires, and then give it a huge ol' Conditional Limitation. That doesn't seem terribly fair to me, tho, since what's causing the damage is the target's Susceptibility, not the attacker's Power. But since it's all in a VPP, the PC isn't actually paying points for the slot anyway, so maybe it's a wash? Either way, it's been a long time since I played paintball or played with a super soaker, so I have no idea regarding range, charges, etc? Thought I'd see what others think. Thanks!

I just checked the Genghis schedule: Looks like my games (Scott Field) are all full up. But it's not uncommon to have a couple of No Shows, so if you're at the con swing by at muster and see if you can walk in with a generic. Ross Watson's Shadows Angelus game always sells out about 5 seconds after registration opens, so no luck there. Robert Dorf has room in his Lucha Libre Hero games, which are always a total blast. Mike Satran has room in a couple of his Champions games. I've never played in one of Mike's games (yet!), but he has a great rep. It looks like Mike Surbrook has a seat left in one of his StrikeForce games - it doesn't get better than playing Strike Force with the guy who wrote the book! I think Bill Keyes is only running Savage Worlds this time around, but his games are always awesome anyway.

Hi guys, welcome to Denver! I do have a bi-weekly Hero game in Denver. (Running FH at the moment.) But we're full up. As in literally there's not enough room at the table to add add another! Sorry! The only other regular Hero home game I know of is in Ft. Collins. Hero usually has a pretty good showing at the local gaming conventions, especially GenghisCon, so I highly recommend that. I think there's a Hero game in every time slot this year, or at least close to it, tho several of them have sold out by this point...

Another thought occurs to me: I enjoy that style of play, as do a lot of people. But some people find it gets too repetitive. And I think some (non-murder-hobo) people's resistance to playing superheroes stems from a (mis)perception that superheroes is all about simplistic plots built around "Bad Guy Show Up, Punch Bad Guy, Repeat." Definitely don't mean to dis your gaming, and I get the logistical concerns that made longer storylines difficult! Just pointing out another perception issue.

I have certainly played in a few railroad games. I remember one Pulp game I played at a convention, where we literally spent 4 hours following the Mary Sue NPC around watching her be badass. Needless to say, I didn't play with that GM again.

I completely agree. But I think "ethical/heroic PCs" is a separate issue from "superhero genre tropes." You can wind up with Selfish Bastard PCs or Ethical Hero PCs in any genre, regardless of power level. I've played in "people with superpowers, but without comics tropes" games where the PCs nevertheless tried to be good, heroic people. And I've played in plenty of other genres where the PCs were selfish dicks, either by design or because of who was playing them. Just depends on having players who want to do more than just kill things & steal stuff, and a GM who rewards them accordingly. Ironically, my last Champions campaign the PCs were actually supervillains. But they were all 4-color villains, and played accordingly; they were probably less villainous overall than the "heroes" of some D&D games I've played in. Yeah, those players exist, and are jerks. But I don't actually run into too many of them, and they're usually pretty easy to manage when they do show up. I guess maybe I've just been really lucky in who shows up for my games, because it sounds like we live in very different worlds.

Amen. When I first started putting together a new game group after moving (~12 years ago), that was a topic of discussion. My new players wanted to play 4-color Champions, but had a hard time reconciling that style of play with certain genre conventions, like Revolving Door Prisons. Once we were all clear that they would be rewarded, not punished for Doing The Right Thing, it all fell into place and everyone had a blast.

I disagree with almost every word of this. Without derailing too badly: Of course ethics & morality can be taught. Like most things, some people "get it" more quickly and naturally than others, and some people will never get it. But the vast majority of people can learn to do better. There's an entire field of study around what works and what doesn't, with numerous studies backing it up. (I'm too busy/lazy to look them up right now so you'll have to do your own Googling - sorry.) Most people think they're ethical; and more to the point, most people (non-sociopaths) want to believe they are good, moral people. So at its most basic level, part of ethical instruction is simply teaching people what the rules are. A further part of ethical instruction is helping them be better at ethical reasoning and better at recognizing their rationalizations for what they are. Just helping people develop basic empathy goes a long way. "Right" and "wrong" are to a certain extent social constructs, true. But even if you think they don't exist as universal absolutes, they can still be improved over time: hence why we no longer accept things like slavery and bear-baiting as being okay. That was kindof the whole point of the Enlightenment BTW.

That's a really good point. Some people just like FPS; some people like roleplaying. Neither is wrong unless you're expecting one and get the other. Hmm...I wonder if there's a difference between people who mostly play pre-written modules vs people who play home-written stuff? By their very nature, most modules tend to be more self-contained and about "achieve this extrinsic goal." After all it's hard to focus on character development when you're writing for "a party of 4-6 adventurers of level X."

Again, I don't feel this is true of most superhero comics anymore. Some, yes, and those are the ones that tend to get the most attention from ex-fans who haven't actually picked up a comic in years. But both Marvel & DC have made significant attempts to make their universes less Iron Agey in recent years. Marvel has titles all over the place, from straight-up Silver Age goofiness (Squirrel Girl) to Bronzish (Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man, among otehrs), and yeah some Iron Age stuff (anything with Wolverine on the cover). I haven't read much of Civil War II* but it seems to be driven by a genuine moral disagreement rather than pure tribalism. Over at DC, I haven't read much of their latest reboot** but it's pretty clear an attempt to move a little more 4-color after fans universally rejected the New 52 grimness. And that's just the Big Two: there's Indie stuff all over the place too. For RPG purposes: that just means you have to be clear about what type of comic book game you're in, since "comic book" can cover anything from camp to grimdark. * Mostly because I'm tired of big crossovers, but that's another thread. ** Mostly because I'm tired of reboots, but that's another thread.

Yeah, the Iron Age of comics was pretty awful and certainly poorly-suited for a Champions campaign. But if you stopped reading comics in the 90s, you may have missed that most comics have (mostly) gotten over that. Nowadays you can get anything on the spectrum, from simple silver Age silliness, to more genuinely complex. Sure, there's still some Iron Age stuff out there (pretty much anything with Wolverine in it), but it's hardly the majority anymore, let alone ubiquitous. The superhero genre is far from dead. Most "under 30s" I game with base their superhero expectations far more on films like the Incredibles or the DC Animated shows. All I have to say is "this is a 4-color superhero game" and absolutely everyone gets that. "People with powers" is definitely a different genre. Not my favorite style of play but it can be fun, as long as everyone understands that it's not a superhero game and agrees which comic tropes are/aren't in play.

Yeah, I haven't seen the last episode yet but "meh" is about the nicest thing I can say so far about the first two. A shame - the first three seasons were beyond brilliant.

Well put both of you. I agree the rewards system in the bigger problem. But I would argue the way D&D* portrays evil as something that certain people are rather than things that people sometimes do exacerbates the problem. I'm good, they're evil, so killing them is not only necessary but essential. The murder hobo rewards system would be harder to maintain without an alignment system that neatly defines who it's okay to kill without remorse. * Tho the problem is by no means unique to D&D; its practically ubiquitous in fantasy. Citation needed for the bolded part. I mean, I share your disdain for that attitude, but it seems no more prevalent among the young gamers I meet than it was when I was their age. I mean, our generation invented the murder hobo style of play, so it seems unfair to blame it one These Kids Today. And I've heard plenty of Old Geeks defend Supes killing Zod as kewl & badass and whatnot. So I really don't see it as an age thing. Well, I run a lot of convention & demo games, and I almost never have that problem. Granted, that may be partly because I write my blurbs in a way that makes it clear this isn't a murder hobo game, so players who want that experience don't sign up for my games. But I have had a lot of D&D/PF players drop into one of my games when their table doesn't go off. It's usually pretty easy to retrain them; you just have to explain the conventions/expectations, and then reward the behavior you want to see more of, even if it's just by handing out Hero Points/Bennies/whatever. In fact, that's easy to do in a one-shot because loot/XP doesn't carry over to the next game so it's already removed as a reward. Too many GMs like to punish PCs for doing the right thing; just make it clear you're not that guy. (And again when I do have a problem, it's more often with older gamers who are more set in their ways, not youngens.) Oh yeah, no contest!

Yeah, they did kindof go back and forth between Loving Homage and Vicious Send-up. I was never really a Narnia fan, so that part didn't particularly bother me. What really bothered me was in the season finale when they had Julia

I highly recommend Jill Lepore's biography of Marston, "The Secret Origin Of Wonder Woman." An extremely interesting dude, who Lapore presents warts & all.

I also think a lot of roleplayers get so used to that sort of B&W, easily-detectable morality that it becomes an expectation. Thus even 4-color supers becomes "morally vague" when you can't reliably cast Detect Evil to know who the bad guys are. Ironically, I spent some time last week hanging out with a bunch of "story" gamers who are completely contemptuous of any games that involve combat or mechanics of any kind. Their perception of supers was that it's all just punching people, so they weren't interested. To be fair, that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. (It was rewarding to hear a couple of people who have played in my games talk about ways I use story and narrative choices and all that in my supers games. But I was clearly being held up as the exception to the rule. Nice for me, but doesn't help the genre.)

I'm really enjoying the discussion on the nature of magic vs science, but rather than continue to derail this thread I figured I'd start a new one. See you there (if you're interested).

I think this is a lot of it. D&D set the baseline for RPGaming and defines expectations for a lot of people. So even people who like superheroes might have trouble seeing how to fit them into their existing paradigm of what an RPG is supposed to be. A big part is that D&D/PF are *so* built around the concept of gaining XP & GP, so genres where that's not the focus just doesn't compute for a lot of folks.

Binged Season 1 of The Magicians. The first few episodes were weak and consistently tried to juggle too many different plots. Once it got past its "Hogwarts for Sexy, Drunken 20-Somethings" premise and the plot got going, there were some nice stories. But then the season finale just completely dissolved into WTF. I think I'll wait for the reviews before watching Season 2.

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me "That sounds like a cool game, but I only play fantasy..."

Say a character has a 6d6 attack (30 AP) and has a Naked Advantage like Armor Piercing that applies to 30 AP worth of attack. If a character has 2 CSLs with that attack, and wants to put those levels into damage, thus pushing their damage up to 7d6, can they use the Armor Piercing with the full damage? Or would they need to buy the Naked Advantage up to 35 AP to cover the damage from the CSLs? Thanks,

Oh, I'm certain they didn't do it on purpose - that's why I found the juxtaposition so funny! Um, I never claimed they did. What they said was "Until the last century or so, cities could not survive without direct water access." That is a demonstrably false claim. The majority of the world's major cities have certainly been built near water, but there are and have always been exceptions. (Tehran, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina...) If they'd said "Most cities are built on water" or "Direct water access greatly contributes to city growth" or something like that they would've been fine. (And note that would not have taken any longer to say.) That's what I mean about them misstating general trends as absolutes. There were several other places where they did that, like finding one place where several towns are all exactly X miles apart, and then claiming that as some kind of universal rule rather than a good example of a general principle. It's not that they're wrong exactly, they just overstate their case a few times. It's a fine video, I enjoyed it, and I'm sorry if you thought I was slamming it or you. I'm just saying take it with a grain of salt.

A few from last night's FH game, including a follow-up to this quote from last session: This week one of the PCs gets into an argument with Edmondo - Aeddan: "Great, now I’m the lamp." Thyri: "No, the lamp won." Our heroes are debating the implications of some new information (which would require too much context to explain and isn’t relevant to the punchline) - Geralt: “It doesn’t have to mean ____, it might just mean _____…” Abida: “Yes because the approaching apocalypse means we need to take optimistic assumptions.” The GM (me) is making up a new NPC on the fly - Edmondo: "Who is this guy?" GM: "He's...a trapper." Edmondo: "OK, what's his name." GM: "Um, John." (beat) "He's Trapper John." Lastly, I was kindof proud of this little monologue, which I totally adapted stole from Ardant du Picq - NPC: "Among my people, it is said that five brave strangers will not dare to attack a lion. But five others, less brave, but trained together, knowing each other well and sure of each others' reliability, will not hesitate but attack resolutely. Some call this the essence of training armies in a nutshell. If you hope to defeat the lion that you face, the five of you must become an army, rather than five strangers who happen to be traveling together."

...and trying to explain it rarely improves the experience.