massey

Re: Superman Averts World War II? I think you're scaling those up way too high. Look at the 5th Ed revised rulebook, page 487. A howitzer round is listed as a 5D6 RKA explosion. A heavy bomb is 6D6. That's about the level you need.

Re: Superman Averts World War II? No it wouldn't. See how easy this is when we're talking about a character with no writeup? Even if we're talking about the 5th ed overpowered 5D6 double-armor piercing RKA of the M1 Abrams, that's still not enough to kill a guy with 20 rPD. It'll knock the poop out of him, but he'll live. WWII weapons will be quite a bit less than that.

Re: World War Two Campaign The reason there weren't a lot of Axis supers during the real Golden Age is because people didn't want to read about super fights. They wanted to see Captain America punch Hitler in the jaw. Baron Von Badguy is the closest you'd get to a Nazi supervillain. They didn't want to see German supers. So most supers tended to be American. Now the problem that you have is that we've had nearly 70 years to sit and think up ways that Superman could have ended WWII. Any reasonably intelligent player with access to a history book and a little imagination could probably walk Superman right into the heart of Nazi Germany and kill Der Fuhrer without even being so much as spotted by a single soldier. So you've got to think of ways to avoid that. Generally that means either making the Axis powers much more effective or making the supers much less effective. Here's how I would do it. 1) The Axis powers have a military advantage. In real life, once the US got on a war footing and got its industry involved, it was only a matter of time. The Axis simply didn't have the production capacity to match up. In the game, that's not the case. The Allies will probably lose unless the supers can get in there and smash some military equipment. 2) The Axis powers have supers. While they'll probably have fewer supers than the Allies, it's enough to keep Superman from just hanging out in Berlin and smashing stuff. 3) Nazi science/magic. Yes, they'll try to get stuff like the Ark of the Covenant. Yes, they'll resurrect Frankenstein's Monster. Scientists with death rays and mind control helmets and things like that will challenge the heroes. None of this stuff is reproducible on a large scale, but it's enough to keep the heroes busy. 4) Nazi plot device. See Spear of Destiny. The Nazis have something that prevents instant takeover by the heroes. Maybe Hitler has a big ass chunk of Kryptonite he carries with him. Maybe he's got powers of his own. Whatever it is, it prevents the big-name heroes from just ending the war in an afternoon. It may even make a direct assault into Germany "too risky" for Allied command to allow. 5) Heroes don't know their own strength. They aren't necessarily going to use their powers in the way that could best help the war effort. Remember, this campaign is beginning in the late 30s. No one has seen Dragonball Z. Supers have appeared very very recently. Even they are adjusting to their own powers. How fast can Superman fly? How high can he go? He really isn't sure. He hasn't ever really found a limit. Regardless, the idea of flying into space and dropping asteroids on Berlin just wouldn't occur to him. Characters are very straightforward with their powers. The Flash isn't going to kick up sandstorms in the Sahara to limit Rommel's visibility. Weather Manipulator isn't going to rain out all the roads and bridges in Germany. Basically this is your excuse to prevent noncombat applications of powers that can't be countered. 6) The military doesn't integrate with heroes. Air Wave doesn't act as a communications hub for the Army. Flash doesn't relay positions of enemy troops across all of Europe. Even if characters suggest things like this, the Army simply won't make use of it. The leadership doesn't trust the heroes. See the above point: no one has developed any superhuman warfare tactics yet. General Stick-in-the-mud just won't listen to your great idea to have Superman ferry munitions across the Atlantic. The most they'll do is send a few trusted heroes to go punch Nazis in the face. No one is going to think beyond "punch Nazis in the face". 7) The heroes don't have perfect knowledge. One thing that prevents them from launching a decapitation strike is that they don't know where Hitler is. Even if the player knows that XYZ battle took place on this specific date, the character doesn't. The fog of war affects heroes too. I'm sure Superman could have made a huge difference at the Battle of Midway, but that's only if someone finds him and tells him to be there. I see Pearl Harbor happening pretty much as it did in real life, because there simply won't be any heroes in Hawaii when it happens. They'll find out after its over. M.A.S.H. lasted longer than the actual Korean War. While it was clearly Vietnam-in-disguise, you can learn a lot from the way that show was handled. Specific dates, battles and such weren't important. What is important is to get the feel right. While you should probably know when certain key events happened, it's not important that your game follow those dates. It's easy enough to say "Spring 1942" and have Captain Flagsuit fighting with the resistance in France.

Re: Superman Averts World War II? I'm not really sure of the point of this thread. Are you asking how Superman could stop WWII? Or ideas for a world where he did stop it? Or are you asking for what the logical outcome of nabbing Hitler would be? I think it's relatively easy for a Superman knock-off to avoid getting killed by German soldiers. He isn't limited by things like air bases, a need to refuel, a need to fly in the daytime, etc. You've got a 10 Dex 2 Speed German soldier trying to point a nearly immobile cannon towards him while he streaks across the treetops at 200 mph. With his senses he will see them before they see him. The German army isn't the issue. I think it would be more interesting if he really did stop WWII. Not delay it by 5 years, just stopped it. Trashed their supply lines, wrecked their capability to wage war, captured their leaders. The US never mobilizes for war, the Allies go back to business as usual. The Great Depression drags on for another 20 years. Little military or technological development. No space race. No Cold War. No development of computers. The modern day might look like Batman The Animated Series, a cool, dark, 1940s feel where art deco never went out of style.

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? Except, it's, umm, not an analogy. The game is about the PCs, because they're the ones playing in it. I've been in a few games where the GM was bound and determined to tell his story. NPCs showed up and did all the cool things. NPC heroes fought NPC villains, and the players were just along for the ride. Those games sucked, and that GM quickly found himself without players. He can sit at home and tell stories to himself about his cool NPCs. I'm not saying you run games like that. But in the end, gaming is a social experience that centers around the people involved. If your characters can't handle V'han, then she's probably not appropriate for your campaign. A group of street level heroes probably shouldn't be fighting an extra-dimensional conqueror, any more than a 1st level wizard should be taking on a Great Wyrm Red Dragon. But the idea that heroes who dare thwart the villain should inevitably be crushed, well, that's completely out of genre, and makes for poor gaming. It sounds too much like "I can't let my NPC lose". You don't have to be one of those GMs who spends their nights working out battle plans for how the dragon is going to kill the party. "So, he'll swoop down here, and then he'll breathe fire, and then he goes over here to his secret stash of healing potions, and then he drops the cow carcass that is infested with rot grubs on them... because this is how dragons would really fight." If she's not usable in your campaign, she's not usable. But remember, there's no one playing her in the game. You don't have to defend her honor. She's a villain who is basically an interdimensional President Bush. It's okay for her to sit back and say that the heroes misunderestimated her.

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? True, at the end of the day, she can't commit all of her forces to the invasion. She can't commit 1% of her forces. She's committing somewhere on the order of .001% or so of her forces, because the rest are busy elsewhere. The feeling shouldn't be "oh she could conquer Earth if she really felt like it." It should be "she sent Invasion Force 5724, the Black Death Division, led by General Maugetar." It should feel like she made a real effort, otherwise it's a direct slap in the face to the characters. I've seen threads come up before about the military versus super heroes. One big advantage supers have is that for all its high tech equipment, the military has a logistics trail 1000 miles long. It's reliant on satellites, fuel trucks, unarmored guys sitting around at base back home, big fragile transport planes, etc. A handful of guys with unusual powers can make short work of military equipment. Aquaman can rip open a hatch on a submarine with little danger to himself. Any hero with flight and life support can take down the entire GPS network in a few hours. Guys with desolid, invisibility, and teleport make a royal mess of the command and control structure. Istvatha V'han's forces, advanced as they may be, may suffer from the exact same problems. Sure, that giant ship hovering over the city looks cool, and it's got a big force field and lasers that can shoot down incoming aircraft or missiles, but inside it's just purple guys with funny foreheads in yellow jumpsuits. So when Nightcrawler teleports in with Colossus in tow... V'han's forces simply aren't equipped to deal with the great variety of powers and threats presented by Earth's superheroes. They're dead men walking against a lot of the more esoteric power types. Your normal 12D6 energy blaster with a force field and flight is pretty straightforward. Yeah he can wreck her communication domes, and give the workers trying to assemble the Domination Array a hell of a time, but at least you can understand what he can do. Unless, of course, he can see different types of energy, and traces you back to your dimensional portal, and plays saboteur on the other side, blowing up fuel tanks and shooting at important electronics before he returns home. Stuff like that can set your invasion back weeks. Guys with weirder powers are even harder to deal with. How do you prevent Menton from sending invasion trooper #24765 back to the command ship with a suitcase nuke? Or just reaching out with his mind and making the pilot steer that ship directly into Mount Everest? These are problems that governments in the Champions Universe have spent decades trying to solve. As a result they have loads of tech that's based purely around stopping whatever the bad guy did last, and counting on the heroes to do the rest. I would think her conventional invasion forces would be far fewer in number, but somewhat superior in tech, to Earth's conventional forces. Think the alien planes from Independence Day. Drop the shield, they can be destroyed. With the shield, they're untouchable. A lot of her tech would be based around having certain support structures in place. These things aren't meant to be shot at -- early 21st century societies aren't supposed to be able to strike at these locations. Putting your command post on the dark side of the moon should make it 100% unassailable. It's the same reason our aircraft carriers don't carry physical armor, because nobody is going to shoot battleship guns at them. After all, when you've got a space cruiser orbiting the planet with a death ray that can blast enemy jets or rockets out of the sky in an instant, you don't need adamantium airlocks or heavily armed guards on board, right? She'd probably supplement her conventional forces with a few pieces of supertech designed to crush resistance in a week. A mind control tower that pacifies a city (which is why she doesn't need billions of soldiers to invade). A weather control device to turn the elements against the locals. A transmitter that jams all communications on Earth (except for hers, of course). Stuff like that will make her regular army nearly unbeatable. Add in 2 or 3 supers on her side, guys who are just there to kind of supervise and deal with any unusual situations (like the occasional lone planetary super, or a weird piece of military technology that they haven't prepared for) and she should just be able to roll over everyone. Until, of course, your heroes smash the mind control tower, and suddenly her 100 or so soldiers are facing ten million pissed off New Yorkers. The jamming device is busted and now everyone can communicate again, and the mothership has a density manipulator kicking holes in the hull from the inside.

Re: Istvatha V'han - why can't she conquer Earth? The answer should be that the heroes are the difference. Yes, there are various factors preventing her from bringing the full force of her armies against Earth, but even with all that, she'd be able to do it if it weren't for those meddling heroes. Remember, the game isn't about Istvatha V'han, it's about the PCs.

Re: EPIC Champions--unofficial material, what should I write about? When running a high-end game, the most important thing is to make sure that all characters are able to contribute. If you have a team with Batman, Superman, and Aquaman, then all three of them should be able to have a roughly-equal influence on the outcome of the game. Too often, Champions games become dominated by combat, and so the character with the most obvious combat abilities gets the starring role. In our Batman, Superman, Aquaman example, you should include a healthy dose of investigation in your campaign, and water-based adventures should be frequent as well. The best solution to the problems of high-powered games is communication between the players and the gamemaster. Everyone should be on the same page as far as what the campaign will involve, what will be needed in terms of characters, how they will interact, what the players are looking for, and what they should expect. It's not good for the GM to shoot Batman with a 10D6 energy blast and watch in horror as the character is blown in half. "You only have 3 ED and you took vulnerability to energy blasts???" "...It fit my character concept." Okay, that character concept sucks. Moreover, it doesn't work in a "high-powered" game. It can help if the GM assists players who are new to this style of campaign with the types of characters, and gives sample writeups. Never played a 1000 point game? Not sure what is considered good defense for a martial artist detective at that level? Your GM should have a good idea. It's also okay to use non-standard power constructions in your writeups. Someone mentioned this earlier, that sometimes Green Arrow has a high DCV simply because enemies choose not to shoot at him. As I was flipping through some comics a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that Cyclops of the X-Men is not a martial energy projector (or at least, he doesn't have to be). He operates closer to a brick than anything else. He hits like a truck, and is usually one of the last men standing in a big battle, even though he has no obvious defensive powers. I sketched up a quick version of him, giving him a low dex, a low speed, a giant attack, about 10 PD and ED, and 15/15 combat luck to put him squarely into "normal hero" levels of defense. However, when he's leading the X-Men, he gets an extra 10/10 armor because of X-teamwork. Yes, I'm sure you'd love to shoot Cyke, but Wolverine is in front of you and wants to claw your face off. Or Colossus is in the way and ruins your shot. Or Jean Grey is subconsciously influencing you not to shoot her boyfriend. The game effect is 10/10 armor. It will go away if he's the last man standing. You could even make the armor "visible", at least in the game mechanics sense, where villains realize that Cyclops will be easier to put down once the rest of his team is out of commission. Using powers like this and constructing characters creatively can change the way certain characters interact with the game. You might even create a "JLA package" of team abilities for the heroes that are normally lower powered. +5 DCV with the effect of "holy crap I'd better shoot Superman instead", or 10/10 defense "only when within 4 hexes of a guy with invulnerability" can be used to make some characters more survivable. I think over-use of those sorts of packages might make the game more bland (you don't want everyone taking the exact same thing), but judicious application of a few of them might be just enough to make a normally underpowered character into at least a useful team member. Remember, ALL the heroes are powerful. Green Arrow's normal boxing glove arrow might only do 8D6, but it's okay for his nerve gas arrow to be a 16D6 NND explosion if that's what it takes for him to hurt Solomon Grundy. Just because he's one of the "weaker" characters doesn't mean he should be useless in combat against anyone but mooks. He's still a big-name hero, even if he can't bounce bullets off of his chest. One of Batman's biggest assets is, well, his very large amount of assets. A vast fortune comes in very handy in a lot of cases where just punching someone or being strong won't cut it. Now, the big guns should still probably be the most powerful in combat. When it comes right down to it, Supes will hit for more damage and will take more damage than anybody else. Everyone having their own special flavor of 25D6 attack isn't what we're looking for. But everyone should have the ability to be effective considering the jobs they handle and the villains they will face. Introduce villains with more exotic powers. Give them motivations that don't involve murdering the heroes. Count Vertigo shows up and he wants to steal all the gold. He uses his Vertigo Effect, a 20D6 Flash versus all sense groups, Area Effect Cone (special effect being that people can still see and hear to some degree, but all targeting senses are screwed). Superman, with his 100 PD and ED, is affected just a much as the Black Canary. The Count, of course, gets the gold and escapes. Now the heroes must track him down. The players have a responsibility as well. The guy playing Superman has the responsibility to watch out for his teammates. Part of the responsibility of playing the guy with 30 extra defense and 5 extra dice on his attacks is shielding the little guy. It's taking on Darkseid. It's stopping the bridge from collapsing when you could totally kick that giant gorilla in the nuts for 25 dice. Make sure that if a player is going to play the powerhouse, that he's okay with doing everything that goes along with it. Likewise, the guy who plays Hawkman should know that he's not supposed to run up and punch Darkseid in the face. Don't tempt fate, my son. When the really big villain comes along, and everyone knows "This is a job for Superman", don't get mad and sulk. Also, when players are building characters, it's their job to make sure they've got something really cool that they can do. Be like the Legion of Super-Heroes. Have something you can do that nobody else can do. Don't build a character who is going to get killed in 5 minutes, and don't build a character where your concept is "I'm just like Superman, only not as good." If you're playing Aquaman, having a 150 point Multipower for undersea animal summoning powers is good. Just giving him a 40 Str + 10 when he's in the water is not. The final guideline, and possibly the most important, would be that the heroes should win, generally at whatever they choose to do. Not every fight should be hard. Batman should solve most crimes easily. Superman should be able to get to the disaster in time. He should be strong enough to lift the collapsing bridge. To make an epic game fun, the players should feel like they really are the most powerful heroes on Earth. Don't just give them victories. "Lex Luthor tries to rob the bank with his robot. You smash it easily, Superman. I guess roll some dice or something." That's not exciting. The villains will generally have some sort of plan to deal with Earth's Mightiest Heroes, even if it's just getting them out of the way. But when the heroes make a plan, let it work. They are the world's greatest heroes, after all. Sorry if that was disjointed and poorly written or planned. I was thinking about this the other day, and then wandered back to the Hero forums after a fairly long absence, saw this thread and just did an info dump.

Re: Richest Man in the World Disease Yeah, this is definitely a player vs player (and GM) conflict. What Shadow Lord did was not unreasonable. I doubt any of my characters would have done it, but it wasn't crazy or psychotic. It could have played out as well or as poorly as the gamemaster and other players chose to make it play out. You wake up one day, and suddenly it's all over the news that the nanotech blueprints have been released. At this point, you (as GM and players) have a choice to make. 1) You can allow this to go smoothly. The nanotech develops in different directions, eliminating the chances of a universal off-switch that makes everything from supertanks to artificial hearts stop working. As a GM you can declare it to be so. As a player who is a super-genius, you can do research to diversify the technology. Maybe its much harder to develop an airborne "vaccine" than originally thought. This is your chance to play super-heroes in a futuristic world. 2) You can hit the kill-switch before anything happens. I highly doubt that medical labs are already stuffing this junk into people by the next morning. 3) You can screw Shadow Lord over, making the game world play out a scenario that screams "I'm right! You are wrong! See everything that happened? It's because of YOU!!!" 4) Nothing happens. The nanotech blueprints may be all shiny and cool, but nobody without advanced scientific skills and production facilities can make sense of them. Third world countries have trouble installing plumbing and keeping their people from getting eaten by lions. They certainly aren't gonna be a hotbed of supertech development. "Oh, crap. Nanotech is hard." Or maybe countries don't want to switch everything over to a technology when the "off" switch is sitting there on the internet. You know, maybe this is just Darwin at work - if you build all this military hardware and give your enemies access to the power switch, then you obviously need to die to keep the gene pool strong. I have no sympathy for anyone here. If a GM has his world self-destruct just to punish a player for something that doesn't seem all that unreasonable, I blame the GM. It sounds like this campaign is about to collapse under its own weight.

Re: Richest Man in the World Disease 15 points spent on Wealth? Humbug. That's 15 less points to spend on STRENGTH! You should be happy they spend points on Wealth. Our group spends them on powers, and then TAKES the wealth.

Re: Swallowing a Man Whole Depends entirely on what you want the effect to be. In many games, if you're swallowed, you're just dead. So an 8D6 killing attack, or something like that, would be perfect for a fantasy game. "Sorry, Ragnar, you're dead. He swallowed you." Or, if you wanted to be gross, you could use a Transform, continuous, to... well, the less said there, the better.

Re: QuestionL Would you consider this unfair or rail roading? I dislike the scenario because it breaks my suspension of disbelief. It's at odds with what I know of the game. It's the same problem I have when I see this arise in Superman comics. Champions combat is very very fast. Even if you take 3 turns (which should easily be long enough to stop the bad guy0 fighting and defeating the villain, little more than 30 seconds has gone by in "real time". I find it hard to believe that you don't have an extra 30 seconds to waste saving your friends and family. Especially if the heroes DON'T have city-spanning flight or transportation powers. Seriously, if I'm playing Captain Strongarm with a 70 Str and 7 inches of Running is my best movement, then I think I'll take my chances with pounding the bad guy and then calling DNPC Lass on my cell phone. Otherwise, his only option is to run outside and call a taxi. The timing is my issue with it. Anyone with superspeed should be able to arrive before the minions strike (I completely don't believe that the master villain has timed the attack on the DNPC down to the segment), and anyone without it can't do anything very quickly anyway.

Re: Modern day Angels? Jacob wrestled with an angel, so I'd put them at the high end of human stats (maybe at or just 5 points above whatever your human max was - across the board). Then I'd give them a whole bunch of powers. So you won't have angels with 75 Str, but they'll still be powerful. So, one of mine would be something like (just off the top of my head): Angel Str 30 Dex 33 Con 33 Body 25 Int 30 Ego 30 Pre 35 Com 30 PD 20 (fully resistant) ED 20 (fully resistant) Spd 6 Rec 15 End 70 Stun 70 20" Flight (wings) 10" Running 2D6 HKA "firey sword" (not a focus, he summons it back to his hand instantly) 5 Body Regeneration/Turn 30 Mental Defense 30 Power Defense 10 Flash Defense (all senses) Angelic Powers Multipower 20D6 Dispel vs evil magic/possession Healing Aid Mental Illusions (for sending visions) Desolidification (0 End) Invisibility Shapeshift Then they have access to an infinitely large Cosmic VPP if its use is a) necessary and justifies the use of God's time. It should be something suitably impressive, with blowing trumpets and light shining down from the sky.

Re: Normal-proofing your Bricks? Uh, the ENTIRE THREAD is about keeping your brick from getting beaten by non-powered characters. The player envisions his brick not getting beat up by Daredevil. I don't see how giving the Human Torch extra burninating is going to counter that. It's called "more than one villain" and "having characters do different things at the same time". "Bob, you're slugging it out with Titanicus Rex on the roof of the building. Jimmy, you are chasing Bloodninja Murderstab down the staircase." See? Easy. And the only thing it requires from a GM is that he talk more. I've found with most GMs that the more they get to talk, the happier they are.

Re: The Champions Protocols -- Story-focused version Am I the only one who found the actual Tower of Babel schemes to not only be uninteresting, but also needlessly complex and/or likely to fail? I know this is completely off-topic, but these are the schemes I'd have used on each Leaguer. Superman - A fake Lex Luthor plot - one that leads him in circles. Or a distress call from somewhere in outer space. You'll keep him gone (or busy) for days. You don't really want to kill him - you just want him out of your hair. Or, if you're really hard up, trap him in the Phantom Zone. Wonder Woman - You know, a real bullet would have been more effective. Since her powers vary from writer to writer (tying up doesn't work anymore? damn...there goes THAT plan...), go with something that'll work regardless. You're Batman - you've got magical friends. Bribe Zatanna to take away her powers. Kyle Raynor - Give him a box that says "for instructions on how to keep an idiot busy for hours, turn box over". It says the same thing on the other side. Flash - Tough to deal with him without killing him. Maybe kidnap Linda and hide her in a high-energy physics lab. When Flash comes to rescue her, you turn on the equipment and he's catapulted into another dimension ('cause you know his vibrational frequencies and stuff) - a dimension without the speed force. Aquaman - I dunno, he's friggin' Aquaman. Who cares? Dump a barrel of oil in the ocean or something. He's hot-tempered enough ('cuz he's trying to be like Namor) that he'll react stupidly and violently. Prompt him into aggressively attacking some organization or group that will stomp him. Plastic Man - "Here's $5000 and a ticket to Vegas. Have fun." Manhunter - Well, umm, magnesium doesn't burn upon contact with air, but... He's the one you use the fear gas on. He doesn't actually have to BE on fire, just believe he is.

Re: Normal-proofing your Bricks? Hawkeye has average level hero defenses. He's got a 10 PD, a 5/5 armored costume, and then 3 levels of combat luck. He's got a decent DCV - just lower than martial artist level. So, let's say an 8 or a 9. He also generally sits at the outskirts of a battle, at least 8-12 inches away, if he can help it. He's got range levels to make up for it. So let's say he's got enough movement to stay at that range. He gets, we'll say, an extra 4 DCV from range against most foes. So now he's at a 12 DCV, effectively. He's got some pretty basic martial arts, including a martial dodge, so he could theoretically put himself at a 17 DCV. He won't get to attack, but that's exactly what he's going to use when somebody points the Hulk-killer gun at him. Hawkeye doesn't suck. Not everyone should have a Hulk-killer blast that they use all the time. If you've got something like that, it should generally cost extra endurance, or have a lower OCV than your normal attacks. You are, after all, giving it your all and shooting at a target who doesn't try to avoid attacks. So if Nova Lad needs something to hurt the brick, give him the 16D6 EB (it's a mere +4D6 above his normal). Just make sure that it's at x5 Endurance and that it has "beam limitation" on it so it can't be spread. People won't shoot it at Hawkeye too much because they can't afford to lose all the END if they miss. If you want bricks to NOT dominate the game, give them problems to face beyond mere dice damage. If you want the martial artist to shine, then have him take part in a running, jumping, swinging and flipping battle across the rooftops of a city. He'll run down fire escapes, leap through windows (smiling at the woman taking a bath as he passes through), do backflips off of telephone poles, and the like. The brick will always, ALWAYS be the best at standing in one spot and trading punches. That's his thing, after all. Energy projectors get to do funky tricks with their power set, as well as have flying shooting battles in the sky. Martial artists should get to fight in weird cramped environments, fighting a dozen men at once and doing mind-blowing acrobatic maneuvers, like leaping off the roof of a building and kicking through the rear window of the getaway car (landing safely in the back seat in the process). A martial artist makes a poor brick. Don't try to make him fit that mold. People don't remember that time when Batman punched a super tough guy really hard. They remember when he moved so fast that he took the Punisher's guns away from him and then beat him like a woman who left spots on the dishes.

Re: Grond, underpowered pansy? Not much to say here, except: 1) Grond is less powerful than he used to be. 2) I believe the size of the hole doubles for every *2* Body above the destruction of the original hex now (meaning Grond will only do an 8 hex hole on a punch, or a 32 hex hole on a haymaker). and 3) Some skyscrapers actually DO rely on their outer walls for support. The WTC was a prime example. Something like the Empire State Building is a heck of a lot more sturdy - it's a million tons of concrete and steel, and can take a pounding. I've always felt that Grond needed damage reduction, at least on his ED side. Perhaps give him 50% damage reduction that lasts only for the first turn, that way he'll fall down later in the fight, but he doesn't get punked early on.

Re: Boogiemen that are actually /scary/... Horror: Rosie O'Donnell, naked. And horny. For you. Must get away... must get away...

Re: WWYCD: Fundamentalist against non-tech supers. Sentinal builds a device to short out the preacher's cybernetics. Let's see how persuasive he is without his goodies. Sentinal wears power-armor, but he has teammates with powers, and this individual is obviously intent on making life more difficult. Sentinal's teammate, the Infraggable Krunk would probably grab the preacher and take him for a ride as he patrols the city, to show him that Krunk is a good guy. "Krunk not demon. Krunk friend." As Krunk bounds across the city (I really don't know how he's supposed to notice any crime while he's "patrolling", as all he does is jump around and he completely lacks any enhanced senses to actually see what is going on below him), I suspect the preacher would at least learn to temper his statements, lest Krunk take him for another "ride".

Re: The thing's I've learned playing a Brick... Superleap lets you cover a LOT of ground. And no, black mage, 30 Str only costs 3 End. Str costs 1 End per 10 Str, unless you're playing in a heroic campaign.

Re: The things I've learned playing a Speedster... God gave Passing Strike to you.

Re: WWYCD: Discovering the nature of reality? "Thanks for the big schlong and the hot girlfriend." "No problem."

Re: WWYCD if a supers-eating wave swept reality? I don't ask the GM if he's ending the game when he does something like this. He DOES end the game because everyone gets up and leaves. I don't care about anything afterwards. If a buddy of mine calls me up and says "Hey, let's watch the Superbowl," then I expect to watch the Superbowl. I don't expect him to pull out his home movies and try and make me watch that during the second half. Sure, he may eventually turn the game back on, but then again, he may not. Once I see his plan is markedly different from what I had agreed to, I'm leaving. I'll go watch the second half somewhere else. Skipping over the boring intervals? The WHOLE THING is a boring interval.

Re: WWYCD trapped in a quarantined, plague-infested city? The purpose of super-heroes is to save the day, not to beat up other super-heroes. Your premise is not valid for a broad majority. This is evidenced by most everyone in this thread saying "my character would solve this problem quickly". Doctor: "See, Mr Super-Hero, to save everyone else in the city, this girl must die." Girl: "I'm ready to do what I have to do to save everyone." The Punisher: "Alrighty then." BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! "It's times like this, makes it all worthwhile." Most superheroes have abilities which will let them leave a city any time they want. Many superheroes have super-healing powers that will allow them to save the day. Many are immune to disease. Many are super-smart, and can cure the disease on their own. Then there are the characters (like Frank Castle) for whom it's totally inappropriate to seek them out for such advice. "Puny doctors no hurt little girl! Hulk SMASH!!!" Plus, you've got a very sketchy understanding of medical technology. Most writers say "stick to what you know". If you try to write a legal thriller, and you know nothing about the law, it's going to suck. If this thread is any indication, you've got a poor grasp of medical practices and procedures. Stick to other things.

Re: WWYCD if a supers-eating wave swept reality? Isn't handed to me on a silver platter? Son, I've gamed with the meanest GMs on Earth. They'd kill at least 2 characters every week, just to keep the blood flowing. I am not scared of your adventure. I don't care about "blah blah basic hope in the human condition". You know why? Because it's NOT REAL. This sounds like an excuse for the GM to preach at us for several sessions. In real life, we would keep our fingers crossed, say our prayers, and hope for the best. In a game? Dude, the game is over. The game is over when Superman becomes a guy with straight-8s and no powers. The PCs now lack any power to act. You've forced the world into a crappy version of Harrison Bergeron. You know what happens in Harrison Bergeron? He gets shot and dies. I'm not going to sit around and listen to the GM wax poetic and detail the struggle of humanity for 6 sessions. That's lame, and most GMs have some pretty stupid ideas about humanity. The game is over because we're no longer playing super-heroes. Now we're playing "how does Corky avoid drinking Drano". And supervillains aren't dangerous if they're suddenly stripped of their powers, cunning, resources, and contacts. Me: "Oh gee, it's Galactus. I'm scared. Good thing I've got a Saint Bernard with me. Sic 'em, Cujo!" Cujo: "Grrrr..." Galactus: "Aaahhh!!!"