BigJackBrass

Re: Weird Science Projects

Well, I think I know how I'll be spending these cold winter's evenings...

For another weird, yet compellingly practical, science project try this one: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/beer/

Re: What's wrong with the electricity....?

How would you slide out? Wouldn't the Timer die' date=' too? Or would that be the puzzle of the day?[/quote']

 

Definitely the puzzle of the day. Possibly longer if they couldn't find the answer...

Re: What's wrong with the electricity....?

Funnily enough I'm about halfway through that book at the moment. It's decent stuff, even though Stirling does seem to enjoy assembling a pretty unlikely crew in his books. Following his advice, whenever there's a major upheaval in the world you should immediately seek out an SCA member, because they seem to be the ones who'll survive.

The book ties into his earlier series where Nantucket is whisked back through time, which is also a good read (and has the same unlikely mix of characters; indeed, there's a loose connection between the blacksmith from that series and one of the characters in Dies the Fire.)

Importantly it's not just electricity that stops (and not all electrical activity, or else everyone would simply die): gunpowder now burns slowly, so the guys with the guns are no longer the ones with an easy threat to hand.

So far it has some interesting ideas for gaming, although I think I'll use it as an alternate Earth in my coming-soon-I-kid-you-not-I-mean-it-this-time Sliders rip-off, Slideways, rather than a campaign world for any length of time. Sliding into a world where anything electrical you're carrying suddenly dies has a nice feel of Fringeworthy about it, too.

Nothing really in-depth to say until I've finished the novel.

Re: movies/t.v. vs comic books

Batman's early costume was not armoured. In Batman Year One he used an ultra-light weight hang-glider, but there's no doubt the electro-firming cape from Batman Begins is much cooler!

Indeed in one of the wonderful Neal Adams issues Batman is shot with a speargun: there's no armour to help him and he only avoids a serious wound by controlling his body to "catch" the projectile with his muscles (and he still takes a minor wound from it). Just the sort of pseudo-realistic nonsense I love about comics, such as The Hulk reversing direction mid-jump through sheer strength...

Batman's armoured costumes are one of the big letdowns in the films for me. I like the fact that he was an exceptional man in a costume, using his tremendous athletic abilities, rather than a fellow in a near-immobile suit of armour. At least the latest film manages a compromise of sorts.

Re: It seemed like such a good idea...

..by simply tying him to a chair and duct-taping a plastic bag over his head. (Forgot to buy Life Support' date=' I guess.)[/quote']

 

Gaunt didn't breathe. We never found anything that could kill him, but then Golden Heroes isn't Champions... I doubt I could have built him quite the same way with Champ (for a fair cost). Mind you, maybe a point-build system would have helped me to spot the problem. I guess I just watched too much Captain Scarlet when I was young.

 

The worst mistake like this I've made was as a GM, allowing a player to take his Teleportation with Useable On Others. Every non-flying villain they met simply got teleported straight up a few stories.

 

Ick. Not terribly heroic, eh?

I was young, I admit. Heck, I wasn't even playing Champions at the time - it was a Golden Heroes game, as I recall - but it seemed like such a great idea for a character.

Jason Gaunt, The Bulletproof Man. He wasn't going to be a typical destructive super, throwing cars and blasting cosmic radiation willy-nilly. No no, this was going to be an almost ordinary guy doing his best in a world of supers. Gaunt's power was basically that he was almost impossible to kill. Shoot him, fry him, bury him in concrete... he'd survive, and sooner or later he'd get out and get on with the job.

And he sucked badly. Pretty soon whenever a supervillain spotted Gaunt they adopted a variation on the Soon-to-be-Patented Anti-Bulletproof Man Tactic: Drop a bus on him. An hour later he might have crawled out, or a friendly hero might have picked the bus up, by which time he'd missed the show. I was forced to retire him.

Twenty years later I can see the glaring mistakes I made, but I still understand what I was trying for with that character. Has this happened to you? Have you taken a great and noble concept and found that the character simply doesn't translate into gameable material?

Re: HERO Crib Sheets

Try picking up a copy of Sidekick (or ten -- one for each player).

You trying to bankrupt me, man?

Sidekick will almost certainly be the version of HERO I'll be running, not least because these sessions are likely to be in the evenings of a Scottish hiking holiday we're all going on (Can you imagine this? I meet a bunch of people gaming and we get on so well we're off on holiday together... eight or nine of us... and even my resolutely non-gaming girlfriend likes them so much she'll be along too... Does this ever really happen with gaming groups, 'cause I'm starting to worry that I've walked into The Wicker Man) and I don't want to load the car down with the main book. Suggesting that everyone gets a copy of the PDF might be a good idea, though.

Edit: And for starters I'll direct them to the Introduction to the HERO System. Maybe I can avoid the whole need to compile a cribsheet.

Re: HERO Crib Sheets

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not looking to duplicate anything already covered on the character sheet (and indeed I think that it does a better job than most at putting information right in front of the players) but for total beginners there are some things that look a bit daunting about HERO, even though these are experienced non-HERO gamers.

I'd like to get a few essentials down to a single sheet, including a quick characteristics glossary (I can picture having to answer "What's PRE again?" questions a lot) and include a further reduced version of the Combat Summary. With so many players I suppose I'm most concerned about play really slowing down once we have multiple characters taking actions. For general skill use and similar actions I don't anticipate much of a problem, but having played in games such as Fireborn with this group I've seen what can happen when you introduce a lot of people to a new system.

My gaming group is almost a victim of its own success, with at least nine regular players. As you might imagine, keeping everything running smoothly is not always easy and only works at all because they're a pretty good bunch.

I'm keen to run HERO for them, but I don't want the apparent complexity to get in the way of things. To that end I'm working on crib sheets to give each player, listing key abbreviations, options and mechanics so that people who can't see the GM screen and don't know the system - and that'll be almost all of them - have most of the answers they'll need right at hand.

Have any of you produced something similar? I'm interested to see what has proved useful - or not - to help me compile my own version (which is probably not going to be genre-specific, by the way, since I'm aiming at a dimension-hopping game.) Thanks.

Re: Best supporting non-super character in comics?

Well yes, I'll admit that Woozy has had superpowers of a sort... (not that he exactly uses his abilities.) This aspect has been seriously toned down, though. Still, given how many "non-super" supporting characters have temporarily had superpowers or adopted heroic personas over the decades I'm still going to stand by Mr Winks, despite his taste in shirts.

Re: Best supporting non-super character in comics?

Lois? Alfred? Jimmy? Mere hangers-on.

No no, for a real example of the indispensable ally, the indefatigable Everyman, there is only one character worthy of notice:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Woozy Winks.

Re: Gentlemen, start your engines

In a similar vein, I think I've mentioned this one previously, but what the heck:

 

http://www.indygear.com

*Looks guiltily at Wested leather jacket, Akubra fedora and WWII gasmask bag hanging nearby*

Ahem, yes... I might possibly be familiar with that one, too...

Re: Infiltrate the facility

Perhaps a classic double-cross: The characters are hired to run a security test for Draconis by stealing a dummy prototype from their own facility. Naturally, this will discourage PCs from inflicting lethal damage (I hope!) The patron turns out to be representing a different corporation, the weapon is not a dummy and Draconis is the unwitting target (so their security people will use lethal force if necessary.)

Or perhaps there are factions within Draconis and the characters really are working for the company they think they're working for, it's just not such a simple situation as they believed.

Apologies if this link has been mentioned before (I searched the forum, but found nothing). The NAGSSociety website listed a terrific link this week and it's so appropriate for a pulp campaign that I thought you might like to point your mice in that direction:

http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm

The rocket-propelled bicycles initially caught my attention, but I suggest having a look at the Monowheels page. I know what's going to be showing up in my game very shortly...

Re: Hyperdrive!

I tried, I really tried, but this sci-fi sitcom is the most tedious drivel I've seen for years. Everything that's wrong about trying to make sci-fi funny is packed into one convenient half hour package. Especially disappointing given that Nick Frost is in it. And there's very little of use in a game, either.

Re: N/t

Yeah, and you wait an hour for Abyss and then three come along at once...

Re: Concept Cars

Something considerably more modern, but with its heart in the right place:

http://www.kudzumonthly.com/kudzu/jan03/Atlantic.html

I shun cars (my preferred mode of transport being a Brompton folding bicycle, or my feet) but even I thought this was a beauty when it was first shown to a drooling world.

Re: Clever Future Weapons

Hm, dropping into this one a bit late, so apologies if anyone has already mentioned this:

K.W. Jeter wrote about a fantastic device in his novel "Death Arms," the C.I.A. Slow Bullet. Essentially it's a bulky gun that fires one, very slow moving bullet. But the bullet is large, and almost impossible to stop. Once it has acquired its target the bullet continues forwards towards it, drilling its way through obstructions it cannot negotiate. Sooner or later it will catch up with whoever it was fired at, and when it reaches close range an automated voice starts announcing that this is not a violation of the target's civil rights. Then it kills them.

Sooner or later one of my players is going to get on the wrong end of such a thing.

Re: Has HERO achieved maximum desirable complexity?

The more one uses HERO the less of an issue its complexity seems to be. It is, after all, generally straightforward, but with lots and lots of layers of detail. I think a larger problem than whether things should get more complex or not is that the system suffers from an aura of perceived complexity. We often ask what could be done to get new gamers into HERO: for many of them actually getting them to understand that the game is not a mathematical nightmare would probably do it. Everyone seems to agree that HERO can "do it all" but the general view leans heavily towards there being a great cost in complexity.

That aside, for me the system is plenty complex / detailed enough right now.

Re: Pulp Hero Resources

Retropolis, the future that never was. Neat stuff with cool designs on it - I'm just not sure what to do with it...

 

http://shop.webomator.com/retropolis.shtml

Fabulous link, thanks. Those pictures are just begging to become a game...

Re: Building the Sliders timer

I should also add that I'm using this thread partly as a learning experience. In the past I've used HERO much more for characters than objects and equipment, generally picking things from equipment lists or making a judgement about how an item works. With a new gaming group I'm finding that their tastes lean a bit more towards the crunchy, so I'll be moving into the item construction business, I suspect.

Consequently it's very helpful for me to see how more experienced HERO gamers model an item like this (and to be honest it's also interesting to see if anyone has picked up on points from the series I might have missed). Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions so far.

Re: Building the Sliders timer

Thanks for the suggestions - some interesting ideas there.

I don't think it needs stats. It's a plot device (literally' date=' in this case).[/quote']

 

Generally I'd agree. Putting stats onto every last thing is not my style, but here the situation can be seen differently. Because at least one of the players is likely to have the skills necessary to build or alter the timer - and because repairing or changing it could be very important in the game - I feel the need for some very concrete numbers before they start tinkering. Mind you, every time I watch the show I see more inconsitencies, as is the way with television, but at least once I've defined what I think is reasonable we have a base from which to work.

 

Speaking of work, running late! I'll have a more serious look at your ideas when I get home. Thanks again.

Re: Ridiculous things in comics that you don't mind.

The Hulk's trousers. Why on Earth didn't Banner get his tailor to make the rest of the suit out of the same material? The trousers are the only thing to survive the change. Heck, why don't the military use the fabric to armour-plate their tanks?

And regardless of the decade, who told him that purple suits are a Good Thing?

Having missed most of the episodes when they were first shown here in England (late 1990s) I've only recently had the opportunity to watch Sliders from the beginning. Mind you, I'll be abandoning it at the end of season two, because I've heard nothing good about it beyond that point, and they got rid of John Rhys-Davies.

All besides the point, however. I've been looking at ways to run a cross-dimensional campaign (which is why I picked up the Sliders DVDs), possibly with HERO, so I have been wondering how best to model the timer. As seen in the show, after the pilot episode, the timer is randomised and not tuned to send the sliders back to the world they just left. Since Quinn's main sliding machine does not exist in all alternate worlds the timer also appears to function separately from it, on top of which it is apparently self-charging. It may be a McGuffin as much as anything else, but I think that establishing how it should operate in HERO terms is going to be important if the players decide to start tinkering with it.

Of course, it doesn't help that the show is contradictory about the wormholes, either. In one episode Quinn worries than a single extra person sliding with the group will drain too much energy from the system, then in the next they drive a van through a wormhole, with two extra passengers... Good grief, do TV writers not understand that, story bedamned, there are people out here who need gameable facts?!

So, any suggestions as how best to stat this gadget?

Re: Comics that I miss.

ROM and Micronauts (the original version) both, certainly, even though one was based on the most disappointing toy ever and the other on some of the best.

I really used to enjoy the old Marvel UK Captain Britain, back when he has the staff and his original outfit (so much better than the generic flag hero getup he wears now). The series was utterly bonkers, of course, and full of errors, but I don't read comics for pure literary merit and factual veracity.