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Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Okay. I think Superman should be a cosmic level character. What does your Superman look like? What would see play in your game? I felt we needed some representation on the other end of the scale. Too many writeups lately look like they stepped off the set of a low budget 1970s TV show, where Shazam has to save a horse from Old Man Murdoch so the bank doesn't repossess the family farm. Remember the old Incredible Hulk/Daredevil/Thor TV movie? Electric Company Spider-Man? That's what you get on 250. That wouldn't get play in my campaign unless you want Sammy Davis Jr sticking his head out the window to talk to you as you climb the side of the building.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Superman Str 175 Dex 38 Con 75 Body 30 Int 33 Ego 35 Pre 60 Com 20 PD 75 ED 75 Spd 9 Rec 50 End 150 Stun 160 +3 Overall, +2 OCV Acting 21-, Breakfall 17-, Comp Programming 16-, Concealment 16-, Conversation 21-, Cramming, Criminology 21-, Cryptography 16-, Deduction 16-, Demolitions 16-, Disguise 16-, Electronics 16-, Forensic Medicine 16-, Interrogation 21-, Inventor 16-, Inventor 16-, Lipreading 16-, Lockpicking 17-, Mechanics 16-, Mimicry 16-, Navigation 16-, Oratory 21-, Paramedics 16-, Power 16-, Research 16-, Security Systems 16-, Sleight of Hand 17-, Streetwise 21-, Survival 16-, Systems Operation 16-, Tactics 16-, Teamwork 17-, Tracking 16-, Ventriloquism 16-, Weaponsmith 16-, PS: Reporter 16- Scientist: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Dimensional Physics, Engineering, Genetics, Mathematics, Nuclear Physics, Physics, Robotics (all 16-) Linguist: French, German, Italian, Japanese, Kryptonese, Russian, Spanish (all completely fluent) Scholar: Kryptonian Culture, Politics and Current Events, Superhuman World (all 16-) Traveler: AK Earth, Kansas, Metropolis, United States (all 16-) Contacts: Batman 14-, Wonder Woman 14-, Cadmus 12-, Star Labs 12-, Legion of Superheroes 8-, US Gov't 13-, United Nations 12- Press Pass, 10 pts Wealth, Reputation: Man of Steel 14-, +3D6 Base: Fortress of Solitude Absolute Range Sense, Absolute Time Sense, Bump of Direction, Eidetic Memory, Lightning Calculator, Lightsleep, Speed Reading x1M, Universal Translator 16- DR 60/60 Hardened, all PD/ED Hardened, 50% PD and ED Reduction, Resistant, -15" KB Resistance, -10 Lack of Weakness, 15 pts Flash Defense (all), 15 pts Mental Defense, 20 pts Power Defense Autofire x5, 1/2 End on Str Missile Deflection (bullets), Reflection, Reflect at any target LS: Full 2 Body Regeneration 165 pt Multipower - movement 50" Flight x8 ncm, 1/2 end, no turn mode 20" Flight 1/2 end, megascale 1,000 km per inch, scaled FTL - 15 LY/hr 50" Leaping x8 ncm, accurate 20" Leaping, megascale 100 km per inch, scaled 40" Running x8 ncm, 1/2 end 15" Running, megascale 100 km per inch, scaled 25" Swimming x4 ncm 10" Swimming, megascale 100 km per inch, scaled Tunneling 20"/20 Def, fill in hole, x8 ncm Tunneling 6"/20 Def, fill in hole, megascale 100 km per inch, scaled +8 PER all senses, Nightvision, IR Vision, UV Vision, N-Ray Perception, Microscopic Vision x1M, HRRH, Ultrasonic Hearing, Targeting Hearing, +24 vs Range mods (all), Rapid x1000 (all) 150 pt Multipower 30D6 Energy Blast - Heat Vision 10D6 RKA - Heat Vision 25D6 Dispel Fire (4 powers simultaneously) 90 Str TK, affects porous, affects whole object Change Environment, 32" radius, -4 PER rolls, 10 pts TK Str, -4 Dex rolls, -4" movement, -5 Temp adjustment, alterable size, multiple combat effects, varying combat effects 15D6 Entangle 150 pt VPP, Cosmic, limited class of powers 3D6 Luck Plus appropriate disads. 2857 points.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. You're right, characters don't exist in a vacuum. You've got to compare them to something. And when you compare them to standard published characters, this Superman comes up short. Face it, Superman isn't a starting character. He's not a 250 guy. If you're running a Justice League type game, it's okay to give people more points. Otherwise you're just playing a guy who looks like Superman.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Wow. We build characters very differently. I don't think he should lose to anyone in the Champions Universe. He's the original superhero. My version would beat Dr. Destroyer. I don't want a Superman who loses to Durak. I want All-Star Superman.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Superman's value relative to that of the rest of the Earth is something that would probably make him uncomfortable. He's familiar with the Nazi ubermensch concept, and doesn't like it. I don't think anyone else would like it if he started subscribing to that philosophy either. He becomes less the good-natured Kansas farmboy and more the dark overlord. My writeup for Clark would vary depending on what background I want him to have. For instance, the Superman 2 Clark clearly was a baseline wimp. After he loses his powers he gets beaten up by a trucker. Several years ago our group fooled around with a Marvel/DC combined universe, where characters generally appeared whenever they first appeared in comics. So in 2012, Superman has been kicking around for nearly 75 years. "Clark" (I'm sure he'd have used a few new identities by this point) from that world would probably be superhuman due to his Golden Age background. Even without yellow sun, he's probably a 40 Str or so due to his high gravity genes. Regarding the VPP, that's there for a lot of reasons. Normally Supes' heat vision might be a 5D6 RKA or 15D6 Energy Blast. But it could just as easily be a Transform, or an Area Effect NND, or something else. The visual is the same, energy shoots out of Superman's eyes. But the power writeup is different. Superbreath might be Dispel vs Tornado, or a Summon: Tornado. Then you get weird things like Dimensional Movement, Usable Against Others, OAF, when he flies to the Fortress of Solitude and zips right back with a Phantom Zone Projector. And what about when he uses crazy combinations of powers, like flying into outer space faster than light, then turning around and using his telescopic vision so that the photons that left Earth two weeks ago are just now hitting his eyeballs, so he can see into the past? I guess you could put a ton of multipower slots on there, but for the effect I want a VPP is a lot easier.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Most of the time, Superman operates as Divine Fireman. People trapped in a burning building? Superman swoops down and saves them when no one else can. Car stuck on the railroad tracks? Superman swoops down and saves you. Cat stuck in a tree? Superman swoops down and saves it. That's like 99% of Superman's day. Occasionally he stops a crime. There are still muggings and bank robberies and things like that that take place in Metropolis. Most of those happen very quietly and don't even attract the attention of a guy with super-hearing. But sometimes he's nearby, and he saves people. His goal, more than catching the bad guy, is saving the innocent people. He'll let the bad guy get away so he can save the helpless person. That's why people love Superman. Now, he's powerful enough to catch the bad guy most of the time. Bank robbers shoot at him (of course he catches the bullets so they don't accidentally ricochet and hurt anybody) and then he grabs them, and everyone cheers. Superman can operate that way in even this gritty, dark, real world of ours. I don't see anything that will challenge his morality most of the time. But that doesn't account for supervillains. Knowing Superman operates the way he does, many supervillains would be content with a distraction. They have tied a helpless woman to railroad tracks on the other side of the city. Any moment now, she will be crushed by a train. Superman flies away to save her, the villain gets away. But here we have the example of the psycho villain, the one who wants to blow up a bunch of innocents. And kill Superman. How does Superman get around the 4 bomb plot? Well, we'll say the villain has some heinous scheme. "Disarm any of these bombs, Superman, and the others will explode!" So Superman uses his powers creatively to disarm all the bombs and avoid any problems... until the bomb no one told him about explodes and kills a bunch of people. "Ha, Superman, no cheating!" says the villain. The villain then repeats his demand that Superman bring him a bunch of kryptonite so he can be killed. There are actually like a hundred more bombs in the city, and if Superman doesn't comply, everyone dies! So what does the hero do? Superman's code versus killing has always scaled with his powers. The Silver Age Superman, with his total code against killing, will always stop the villain. The power is there on his character sheet in the form of that 250 point Variable Power Pool. Area of Effect, Megascale Dispel vs bomb. Special effect: superspeed. "Not only did I disable the three bombs you planted in the schools, I also disabled the other hundred and one bombs you had planted throughout the city. You don't think I'd take you at your word, did you? Oh, I also followed you back here thanks to all the clues you left on your bombs (microscopic vision x1 billion is very useful for reading DNA). Off to jail with you, villain!" Superman did this kind of crap all the time with Lex Luthor back in the 60s and 70s. He was always powerful enough to avoid any "no win scenario". Sometimes he'd fake his own death. Sometimes he'd use a Superman robot as a stand-in. Regardless, he always won because Silver Age Superman was built on ten thousand points. A less powerful version of Superman may not have that option. But then, he has to consider other factors. Even if he lets the villain kill him, what guarantee does he have that the villain won't kill all the children anyway? He doesn't. At that point, Superman's morality forces him to protect the most people possible. That's not done by killing himself and allowing the evil villain to torment the city forever. It's done by finding and capturing the villain.

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill First, in regards to the Death Star: Second, in regards to heroes killing villains, in a normal superhero campaign it should be a focal point of the story. When it happens, it should be important. I played a son-of-Superman character several years ago who killed a villain accidentally (hilariously, as it happened in the same phase, on the same dex, as other player's trained-by-Batman character accidentally killed another villain). Caught the badguys by surprise, punched him full force, guy's armor failed its activation roll. Rolled awesome damage. Guy rocketed backwards into wall, armor fails activation roll again. Rolled awesome damage. Guy is dead. Look over at other villain (apparently made of crystal, or was that glass...) who is currently in the process of fracturing into a thousand pieces due to trained-by-Batman's sonic grenade. Oops. Repercussions? We were a lot more careful in the future. Nobody was around to see it. Nobody found out. But we learned that despite having been kicked around in the last few adventures by villains a lot more powerful than us, that our guys did wield a lot of power and needed to be careful. The growing pains of teenage heroes. Supervillainy is a dangerous profession, and sometimes results in getting killed. Nobody sheds a tear for Professor Executioner when Avenging Angel swoops down and cuts his ass in half with a fiery sword moments before he detonates the gamma bomb. His sword was the only thing that could penetrate the Professor's force field, and if it just happened to go through that field into his unprotected innards, well, that's what you get for building a gamma bomb. But in traditional settings, killing a villain shouldn't become the default way to get rid of him.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. It's not a world that acts superficially. You can have a lot of great characterization in that kind of setting. Superman just operates in a world that doesn't explicitly break genre conventions in order to make the character useless. So... your villain has secretly planted a fourth bomb in a school, and when Superman stops the other three, the last one explodes and kills a bunch of kids. Haha, Superman, look how stupid your morals are now! You caused all those kids to die because you tried to help people! Oh wait, no, you really didn't. I'm the guy who killed them all. Well, you didn't stop me! Okay, so how does that affect Superman now? How does it make him immoral? Psycho blows up school. It's all Superman's fault somehow. Riiiight. Let's say the guy who tries to help people is outdated versus the pointlessly nihilistic villain. I'm tired of the idea that comics filled with so much Iron Age-rust that I need a tetanus shot after reading them, are somehow more "realistic" or "mature" or less "superficial" than the Bronze and Silver books I read as a kid. There's a feeling of disillusionment and contempt that fills those books. Like the people writing them hate everything about superheroes. I will agree that Superman doesn't belong in those books. But just because most modern comic writers have an endless hard on for the Sex Pistols doesn't give their work more depth.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. I guess I misunderstood what you meant then. Certainly there should be some villains who try to set up some inescapable trap for the Man of Steel. Generally in a universe where Superman is allowed to operate as Superman, he's smart enough and/or powerful enough to win anyway. Doing things like cutting important wires in the bombs with his heat vision (tuned into the invisible spectrum, of course) from outside the building so the henchmen don't notice. Or grabbing all the bombs at superspeed before anyone can trigger a detonator. Regardless how he does it, Superman should be able to save the day with the creative use of his powers. Them's the rules in a Superman book. I think we're in agreement that when you put him in a game, there's got to be a certain amount of dramatic tension, so the character and the game have to adapt to one another.

Re: Speak with the dead

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Superman's attitude doesn't make sense in a world where you are going to force him into a contrived moral dilemma every 20 minutes. Otherwise he's fine. I truthfully don't believe that villains are going to have as their chief motivation the desire to push Superman so far that he feels compelled to kill. "Hey, I killed Lois Lane and your parents and stuffed them in a refrigerator. I'm on my way to set a child on fire. Better kill me first!" Superman is a fictional character. His world has certain rules. Every fictional character has certain rules. James T Kirk doesn't get shot by a Klingon assassin while he's boning a green chick. This need to break genre conventions to make everything darker doesn't mean that the character is somehow flawed. There are types of stories beyond "gritty darkness" (I'm not going to say gritty realism, because I don't find those settings realistic at all).

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. It depends how you run it. Silver Age Superman shouldn't fight Captain Baby-Rape, who has his superpower of escaping any confinement whatsoever, no matter what. "Better kill me this time, Superman!" SA Superman's universe doesn't work that way. The character only makes sense in a world that is at most Bronze Age. He shouldn't be put in situations where the only moral solution is to violate his code versus killing. I've seen some campaign worlds where the most moral thing Superman could do would be to just hurl the entire planet into the sun and be done with it. On the other hand, it's fine to have Superman be uncomfortable with Batman's methods. "You broke that guy's leg." "He pointed a gun at me." "You didn't have to do that." "Not all of us are invulnerable." You have to reach a compromise between your world and the character within it. This can be difficult when one guy wants to play Adam West Batman and another guy wants to play the Midnight Mink. You can use the DC model for games, but I don't think most people do. Again, the kryptonite is there so Superman doesn't solve the problem on his own. In a classic DC style game, the villains can't stand up to the heroes in any sort of fair fight. Villains are generally masterminds or one-trick ponies. They get in a cheap shot, grab the loot, and disappear. Superman's powers are as much for their noncombat application as for combat.

Re: Speak with the dead Detect: Ghost - 3 Discriminatory - 5 Range - 5 Perceive into other dimension - 5 Transmit - 2 There, 20 points and you can speak with the dead. Whether any particular ghost is still around, or wants to talk to you is another matter.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. Both types of characters have their uses, and both have to be adjusted to fit in a campaign. It's no fun if the first time Superman runs into kryptonite, the villains dogpile him and he winds up dead. Part of the genre rules of the "god with an off switch" is that said off switch will come up with some frequency, but is not fatal, and can be overcome by the character somehow. Loaded guns are great, but it's likewise no fun if the game just revolves around how you can't use your powers. It may be interesting that Spider-Man has to sew his own costume, and when it gets torn he has to spend a few hours stitching it back together, but unless you're a major genre fiend you don't want to spend the entire game trying to find ways to not turn into the Hulk. Playing a campaign, especially with multiple people, requires using a bit of both and letting it all slide when the story needs it. If I were to write up a Superman, I'd give him a big susceptibility to kryptonite (both Stun and a Drain to powers), and a disad where he is Stunned when first exposed. He'd also have a vulnerability to kryptonite-based attacks. Anytime you see him suffering more than his susceptibility would account for, the villain bought it as a power.

Re: Mythos of the Werewolf [ATTACH=CONFIG]44287[/ATTACH] This illustration is from Maurice Sand, who died in 1889. So the concept goes back at least that far.

Re: Alternate Benchmarks Speedsters don't have to have high speeds. The trend in Champions is for them to be high, but it's not necessary. You could be a Speedster with Spd 3 or 4. It just depends on how you want to build the character. Speed not only represents reaction times, it represents importance. Think of a comic book. In a battle, how many panels does a given character appear in where they get to do something? That's Speed. Spider-Man is always there, jumping around, bouncing off of walls, dodging, kicking people in the face, talking trash. High Speed. The Thing is always there in a brawl, trading punches with the Invader From Outer Space. Pretty high Speed. Mr. Fantastic is in the background, tinkering with some device before he appears at the end and uses his Cosmic Dealyflotchy to defeat the Invader. Low Speed. Where is Quicksilver? Where is the Flash? You usually see some blur of costume-related color in the background, zigzagging all over the place. But actually on panel, doing something? Not so much. They don't necessarily have a high Speed. That's not to say a 10 Spd character is wrong. I have a Speedster with a 10 Spd. It does seem to be the Champions standard, superspeed equals high Spd. But if you're looking for alternative benchmarks, it doesn't have to be that way. I think you could give speedsters huge movement rates, a lot of powers like Invisibility and Desolid, some pretty big attack powers, and just leave them at campaign average Spd and they'd be just fine.

Re: Last Dance With Mary Jane... Agree. My characters also don't go after jaywalkers, speeders, those who cheat on their taxes, or other non-dangerous crime. My Batman clone might call the cops, but that's about it.

Re: Alternate Benchmarks [ATTACH=CONFIG]44263[/ATTACH] There you go.

Re: Alternate Benchmarks You're probably too young.

Re: Alternate Benchmarks Are those the changes they made? I haven't looked at 6th. Seems vaguely familiar. Did they move the Champions to San Francisco too?

Re: Mythos of the Werewolf Now thread, rise from your grave...

Re: Dodging a Mental Power Sure it does. It aborts your action. Oh wait...

Re: World War Two Campaign I was thinking about it last night. The Allies and Axis might have a gentlemen's agreement. No assassinations. While Superman probably could fly over and capture Hitler, there's nothing preventing Captain Nazi or anyone else from doing the same thing to President Roosevelt. So in unspoken agreement, both sides avoid superpowered decapitation strikes. Targeting Hitler for a non-government connected super could be difficult. How do they find out where Hitler even is today? There's not a big red arrow pointing him out from the sky. Most heroes don't even speak German. So you fly over to what you think is Germany (might be France, you don't speak either language and the map totally lied to you, there aren't big lines on the ground separating them ) and look for a short guy with a bad combover and a mustache? He'll probably be in a... government building or something. Somewhere. Hmm, this is harder than you thought. That's not to say that there aren't heroes who can do it. It's easy enough to build one. But most characters probably won't have the abilities they need. How do you find where Hitler is hiding? How do you know you haven't captured a double? There are ways to do it, but do you have those powers? Hitler escaped assassination a number of times. I think it's easy enough to give him a half-dozen levels of combat luck, danger sense, and a few good hiding places. That way players who want to try to take out Der Fuhrer can have a nice adventure without the GM just saying "no you can't do that". Of course, like any supervillain, Hitler is pretty good at getting away.

Re: Superman Averts World War II? We still are talking vague numbers here. The 20 rPD was a number I threw out. And I disagree with some of the numbers people are using for the weapons of the day. That 7D6 x2AP RKA is more powerful than the book writeups for an Abrams cannon. When you're looking at those numbers, ask yourself "how many hexes of solid rock will that blast through?" The question with Superclone is do you want him to be killed by WWII weapons or not? If you want him to get killed, you'll write him up to get killed. If you want him to live, he'll live. You seem to believe that he's going to stand with his back to an artillery piece while he's taking a leak or something. But whatever, it depends how you write him up. Of course, there are millions of people who survived fighting in WWII. These are normal humans who didn't get shot in the chest by anti-tank rifles. A Superclone who can't survive those big hits would probably be better off just dressing as a civilian. Fly over the front lines on a moonless night, or just go around them. Avoid tank cannons. Tear up rail lines. Dress as a German soldier and just break someone's neck if they ask for your papers. Pretend to be a normal guy and they won't drop 1000 lb bombs on you. I'm reminded of the Superman cartoon where he dressed up like Batman and pretended to be a normal human. Batman's villains kept trying to catch him in these deathtraps, kept shooting at him with normal guns, etc.