Balabanto

I am still working on the background for the Doomsday Beast. Hey! The Doomsday Beast has a background? Well...yeah, true believers! Even a Doomsday Beast has a history!

Well, they did say it was "hard" to find.

The Foxbat says "Bwahahahahaa! Soon all the Borscht in Boston will be mine at last!"

Well, Blue Cloud, there are humans that live down there. However, they are not Nazis. The Nazis are involved in the history, though. The Reptile People's Weapons locker is finished, including the dreaded Kirby-esque Lava Launcher. Yes. That's right. I built a giant bulky cannon that fires globs of lava at things. Woo! Long live the Silver Age! On to Sreaa, The Doomsday Beast! That's right! "Where Lurks the Doomsday Beast!" will be a plot seed!

Really, this is Multiform with a trigger. Just get ready for the GM to really, really hose you over. If the game is four color, you're gonna be captured a lot. If the game isn't, you may face other, more unpleasant consequences.

A crotchety old man grows watermelons inside an old theatre and refuses to give it to drug lords to watch telenovelas. Mr. Majestic. No. Really.

Finally! The reptile soldiers are finished! Work got me in a little bit of a bind! On to their cult-classic weapons locker!

The only thing more wrong than this thread would be a character whose powers were based on work songs developed during the Pre-Civil War era, like Bluetail Fly, and "Jump Down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton."

Skills that have limited categories now take a power limitation if you can't do the whole skill. Some advantages and limitations can't be used with certain things at all. Review carefully.

What happens over Hiroshima in leather stays over Hiroshima in leather! 50 Shades of Enola Gay!

I choose a fate for villains based on what the players do. Let their actions affect those sorts of outcomes. They'll be happier. You will be too. I actually ceased using Doctor Destroyer when I hit time with a hammer. There were too many problems with his reboots to make him a viable enemy. For one thing, under the new rules, if your player characters are built reasonably and fairly, he will kill them all by phase three. I don't like villains that aren't meant to be fought. If a villain isn't meant to be fought, he doesn't need a character sheet. Part of the problem with villains like Doctor Destroyer is that they attempt to remove the necessity of knowing the rules from less experienced GMs. The other part is that more experienced GMs like me look at the new versions of Doctor Destroyer and Mechanon, and after five minutes of analysis, say "This guy would wipe the floor with any group in my gameworld, period. And he wouldn't break a sweat doing it." Now, keep in mind, I'm not talking about characters with 25 points of experience. I'm talking about characters with 200+. The one thing I do miss about modern Champions is that people don't take the time to actually know the rules of the game. Knowing the combat rules and how to apply a character sheet to them is far more important to understanding the game than character design. This game requires a lot of presence of mind.

My advice here is to keep it simple and try not to build the most obscenely complex set of powers imaginable. Player: My character's superpower is Quasi-Cellular Parthenogenesis! GM: Excuse me? Player: How do I represent this? Part of the problem with Champions is that people get caught up in the minutia of building their character design perfectly instead of simply but effectively. Things don't need to be perfectly modeled when you're a starting character. Reams of power limitations don't make your character better. They just make it more complicated. When everything is simple, the game flows smoothly.

I agree with you, Shiva, but at the same time, I'm not being fan defensive, I'm trying to ask questions, so here comes round two. 1) As gaming becomes available to a broader audience, is it possible that the people who were in that intellectual crowd are now coexisting with people who don't share the same level of intellectual thought and critical complexity? Originally, gamers came from a highly educated class of minds and were much more interested in the simulationist style of gaming. Right now, the pendulum has swung towards a more "gamist" interpretation, where the purpose of the game is different from what it used to be. 2) Does more or less complexity necessarily mean better or worse? My issue has always been that with options comes complexity. But new players to my game always say "Holy !#$!! He can do this math in his sleep!" This means one of two things: A) They aren't used to point based systems or Never really did math. 3) What skills does Champions teach? What skills do other game systems teach? How can we as gamers showcase this when we run Champions? When we run Fantasy Hero? When we run Pulp Hero?

The Building Grabber is finished. Reptile Soldiers should only take a few days. And then...Comes the Doomsday Beast!

Out of my entire group of players, they love playing Hero when I GM it. Most of them play other systems when I don't. However, that being said, they keep coming back because pound for pound, Hero is still the best superhero system out there. Other genres require the rules built in to get them to work, but when I want to play superhero games, I've tried to play other systems. They don't work in my head. Now, granted, there's a certain amount of pleasure in playing for a guy who writes for the system that might have something to do with that. But nonetheless, when they have a question, just like any other group of players, they ask me. I answer the question. We move on. This begs several other questions about gaming, especially superhero gaming, that I'd like to bring up at this time. And this is pretty simple moralistic stuff. 1) Have we become so narcissistic that the concept of teamwork has passed us by? Superhero games are first and foremost about teamwork. All I've heard in this discussion is "I, I, I," no offense to anyone intended. 2) Is the very internet we post on a part of that narcissism, or is it a true generational shift where people are simply more selfish? 3) Why are we unwilling to do the hard work of basic arithmetic? The math I do for Champions may be harder than the math I do for my day job, but so what? That gives me an advantage in my day job that I am simply unwilling to give up. 4) You get out of a system what you put into it. And that's why I like a lot of Hero's complexity and options. The more you put into something, the more you get out.

Rss'thak the Seer is now completed! We move on to a unique sort of vehicle next! After that, Reptile Soldiers, the Doomsday Beast, and The Dark Lady!

Thanks, Cassandra. Your private life is your own. I will raise you Brother Power the Geek with The Eraser Who Tried to Rub Out Batman. No. Really. I mean this.

It is the only rule that accurately describes the situation.

Actually, no. Attempt to interrupt doesn't matter here. This falls under "Guarding areas and ignoring opponents." (Champions Complete P 156) The problem is that once he enters the area, if he's holding, he can declare his intention to guard a 2m area around himself and punch the guy in the face. Even if the Speedster were to win the Dex contest, he still has to cross the intervening 2m, at which point the HTH attack goes off. The reason why it needs to work this way is this. Even if Held Actions require a Dex Roll, he still has to cross that distance. You cannot attack in hand to hand combat and pretend the intervening space doesn't exist unless you paid points for the advantage "Doesn't cross intervening space." Even assuming that this guy wins the DEX roll, he doesn't get to leave the area for free. Now, granted, it would be really cool for a Speedster to buy an Hth Attack that doesn't cross intervening space and tag the guy, but he would still have to pay for it. Then the villain guards the area and fails. If the Speedster had some sort of ranged attack, it would go off immediately. But in order to enter Hand to Hand combat, he MUST close with his opponent. If he does this, technically, the villain can even shoot him outright as soon as those 2 meters are violated.

Held Action vs. Movement is irrelevant. If you are holding an action, you get an attack on the way in. Period. Unless he provides a convincing explanation of why his maneuver is so surprising that the Villain should be at 1/2 DCV, flat footed or otherwise cockeyed, he gets to attack if he goes first. Unless the Speedster acted on his action to perform a Cover maneuver, in which case he takes the -2 OCV penalty and risks failure at the moment of truth, and the villain gets smashed in the face if he makes the roll, regardless of whether or not the villain has a held. 1) Held Action: May be taken at any time to interrupt another action. 2) Cover Maneuver: I take my action on my turn to Cover Fred. Fred attempts to do something. I shoot Fred. Hit or miss, my attack goes off then. If he had performed a Cover maneuver on his action, then the villain couldn't interrupt him with an HtH Attack. If he didn't, the villain gets to punch him in the face before his action resolves.

The Copper Club (Copper meets the Cotton Club) America's Top Pickman's Model!

This is the optimal solution if the character only has one power. However, if it's a multipower or other power framework, the hero should have to buy the entire framework and personal immunity with a -2 limitation that it only provides personal immunity to a limited class of persons, and other limitations to reflect the appropriate value. This is because you can have pretty much an infinite number of multipower slots, and VPPs have a point reserve, so if you want "Brother Magic" or something like that, where the Dunfries brothers can turn anyone into cheese and crackers except each other, they have to pay for the whole VPP cost, since that's everything the character can do. Is this prohibitively expensive? It can be, but that's the price of putting yourself in the hands of someone else's character.

Aliens partially terraform the world and move in! A gay man and his alien boyfriend await their collective parents for an uncomfortable evening! La Cage Aux Defiance! This is so painful I can't even think of anymore.

Sr'thoz is DONE! We have broken 40,000 words, too! Thar'ghoz, the King's Champion is next! Soon I'll have to take a gencon break and put some characters into MS word, but all the sheets should be done by the end of August.

Today, I finished the sheet for Sr'Thoz the Shaman. Background fluff is to follow over the next couple of days.