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Re: That number in those brackets I thought that when a number's in brackets it designates the number of charges available.

Re: Anyone ever tried a stat block auction in HERO? The idea I had before the stat block auction was to auction off the rights to buy up each stat individually, and make 15 the hard limit for all others. So, like, there'd be an auction for STR, and one player gets to buy his STR up to, say, 25 with no other maxima charges. Then there's be an auction for DEX, with a similar limit of, say, 26. The player who opts to instead bid on and buy up a less exciting stat, like CON or COM, will have spent few if any points trying to outbid the other players, and will then have a few extra points to spend on skills to compensate. I find the idea of a group where each PC has a different high stat appealing. Not sure how I'd handle new players. Or, what if there were a rule that no two PCs can have any of their stats be the same as anyone else's? They'd have to go at least one under or one over any other player's stat. But I don't know how I'd determine who got to pick their stat first. Maybe some sort of lottery. Thank goodness I have HERO System around to keep my mind off of RL.

One of the minor problems I've seen in HERO campaigns, especially higher-point Heroic-level ones, is that there tends to be a bit of uniformity among Characteristics from one PC to the next. I was thinking of ways a GM could ameliorate that problem at the start of a campaign by engineering some diversity into the group, and one of the things that popped into my head was a stat-block auction. If anything like this has been done before, well, I don't know about it. On the other hand, if I find out that this system has been described in one of the published HERO supplements I'll vomit from embarrassment. The version that came to me would be that the GM would type up a set of stat blocks, each quite different from the next, maybe twice as many as there are players, and then let the players review them all. Then the auction would begin, with the lowest-value stat block presented for bidding first, with the minimum or starting bid equal to the value of the Characteristics in the block. Players would bid Character Points, of course, and each stat block would be awarded to the highest bidder for the value of the next-highest bid plus one, kind of like how eBay works. I'm not sure how I'd handle the bidding, but in the end, the difference between what a player put in as a winning bid and the value of the stat block would be bought as a Fringe Benefit Perk. Has anyone ever done something like this? Is this totally insane? Is there a better way to do it? What would be the best way for the GM to accept bids?

Re: Post Apocalypse "holidays" 3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. -- Sarah Conner, T2

Re: Lucha Hero You mean like campaign or scenario ideas? I just recently enrolled in night school, and I jumped on the chance to take Spanish in order to have a few key phrases ready for when I start up my Lucha HERO campaign. That is, assuming I can find anyone willing to play it!

Re: Evil Corporations They could be using those inner-city payday loan shacks and check-cashing stands as recruiting stations for agents. A guy comes in who looks able-bodied, the clerk slaps an extra hundred down on the counter and says, "Plenty more where that came from. I got your attention? Good. How'd you like to make more money than you ever made in your life, and crack a few well-deserving heads in the process?" But the PCs find out about it through some street source and the investigation is on.

Re: Random Lucha update I can hardly wait to get my hands on this. I mentioned it to my gaming group and they looked at me like I had a purple mask covering my head.

Re: "Theme Music" and it's uses for setting and action? Yeah, I've tried it, but it can be a bit distracting trying to manage a playlist. Best to have a system that pulls up the appropriate music by a simple keystroke. For some music to try, check out http://www.noxarcana.com, http://www.midnightsyndicate.com, and http://www.freeplaymusic.com. All of those sites have free downloads of selected tracks (freeplaymusic lets you download any of them for personal use).

Re: Help with a name Jack-O Trick-or-Treater

Re: Suggestions need: Animal super villains Toren Atkinson has made a bunch of animal superheroes, in nearly every case making a play on the animal's name... http://www.thickets.net/toren/2006/06/20/

Re: Somebody knows where to find this? I ran a search for the words "anime," "female," and "pilot" at DeviantArt and a few decent-looking drawings came up.

Re: Power Skills, Xp, and Power Stunts Ultimate Skill has a more detailed mechanic for using the Power Skill to actually create temporary related power effects, but it doesn't let PCs get away with much.

Re: The Super Darwin Awards Years ago, back in the 80s, I was running a solo Champions game for my friend, George. He insisted on writing up his own character without my help. I urged him to let me help him but he wanted to do it on his own. He created a brick with a 60 STR and a whopping 50 PD. But he didn't know about Resistant Defenses. He thought a 50 PD by itself made him bulletproof. I started the scenario as a textbook bank robbery. The villain stepped out of the bank dressed in a homemade costume and holding bags of money. "Ha, ha, ha!" yelled the villain, "No-one can stop me! Nothing can penetrate my super-tough skin! I am invincible!" "Not so fast, villain," George exclaimed. He performed a Grab maneuver followed immediately by a Throw maneuver, and the villain went SPLAT against a nearby brick wall. Blood everywhere. Just then the SWAT team arrived. They pointed their guns at him in horror and ordered him to surrender. "No, I'm not the bank robber, this guy... it was this guy..." George stammered, "Wait, I'll go get the bank manager, he'll tell you..." As George was heading for the doors of the bank, the SWAT team leader yelled, "He's going back into take hostages! Fire at will!" "Good thing I have a 50 PD," George breezed, "Those bullets ought to bounce right off." "No, George, they don't," I informed him, "You didn't buy resistant defenses. You can't bounce bullets. If they were shooting Volkswagons at you, you'd be fine, but these are bullets, Killing Attacks. You have no defenses against them." I rolled, I rolled, and I rolled, and George was pulverized into a pink mist. Then he and I worked together to write up his next character.

Re: Acronym help!

Re: Acronym help! Interoperative National Security Enforcement Command

Re: The More I Kill, The Stronger I Get! I think for something like this, you'd just have this massive reserve point pool that he gets to access only under those limited circumstances. It's not really something that has to be written up all that carefully, since he's an NPC. After all, if there's one thing that will get under the players' skin, it's villains that are playing by their own rules, mwah ha ha ha ha!

Re: Post-apocalyptic wargaming terrain I wonder if these fellows will bring that stuff to Gen Con. I bet if they set that up in a foyer people would flock around it.

Re: Working Up The Spell Create Food & Water Yeah, you could slap enough Lims on that spell to make it almost free.

Re: Nonfiction books covering superheroes: any hints? Listen to the NPR story about the book here. And how 'bout a on the subject?

Re: Evil Defender... Maybe his costume gets stolen by a criminal, or maybe he becomes an anti-villain, someone who's acting evil but is ultimately trying to do set something right.

Re: Why you shouldn't play Champions while Intoxicated Your character wakes up in bed with Leech asking him what's for breakfast. The GM tells you that you're Stunned and you yell, "Stun THIS!" and punch him in the face. You tell the GM that if he'll just let your character wake up one level faster on the time chart you'll let him cop a feel off your wife.

Re: Raven I owned that supplement and used RAVEN in my campaign for a while. But I don't remember how they differed from VIPER, except that they seemed a bit more covert. They were more like SPECTRE from the James Bond universe, IIRC.

Re: Politics or not Sounds like a South Park episode.

Re: Politics or not Our Dark Champions urban fantasy campaign is rife with politics. Our GM is a politically-savvy sort who has our characters flitting back and forth between working for those who want Law and Order and those who want Freedom and Self-Determination. In the battle to balance the two, well, we've caused a pretty good deal of destruction. Not that I'm complaining. It all started when we rescued that imprisoned goddess, the one whose power was being used to electrify the city grid. Yeah, it's that kind of campaign. Next session's in about an hour. Can't wait.

Re: "Your girlfriend works for VIPER!" Huh? Or, if you want it to be more innocuous, she could be working for VIPER without really knowing that she does. She could be in charge of running a front company or non-profit organization, and perhaps has her suspicions that things aren't what they seem, but is getting paid well enough to opt for keeping her mouth shut and looking the other way. How about she runs a "safe harbor" shelter for runaway teens, without realize that VIPER uses it as a recruiting ground? She wonders why those same two guys who make the regular deliveries of food and clothing are so chatty with the kids, and once considered intervening when she thought she saw one of them slipping a kid a wad of bills, but she doesn't want to stir up any trouble that might hurt the kids at all, so she's turning a blind eye to it for now. Then later on, the heroes bust up a VIPER op and notice that one of the kids from the shelter is a VIPER agent and the whole thing comes unglued. Maybe he lies and says something horrible like, "Yeah, she knows! She knows all about it! She don't care, she's gettin' paid, she don't care," and the heroes are off to confront her. But then if VIPER sees the heroes in their costumed identities anywhere near that shelter, they'll blow it to Kingdom Come to cover their tracks, with everyone inside, if need be.