Duke Bushido

Ans to be fair, I doubt either will come up with something better than the DC RPG of some decades ago. Admittedly, I was never really a comic book kid, but I know a solid game when I play it.

From many previous discussions, Hugh and others already know that I agree with them regarding the sketchiness of NCM as a Disadplication. The off-chanted mantra "a Disadvantage that does not limit is worthless" in itself suggests that this disadvantage cannot even be applied until a character has bought increased characteristics to such a point that the coat exceeds the points earned from NCM, as until that point, there has been zero "complication" to the character: until the disadvantage break-even point, the points gained from the disadvantage directly remove the actual problem by paying the additional burden until this point. This means that the character's out of pocket cost for,his characteristics is precisely the same with or without the Disadplication. It has not limited this character. A disadvantage thtlat doesnt limit, etc. Now should the character want more increased characteristics than the Disadplication value will offset, then you have a small case. I say a small case, because even then, the character is only limited once. As soon as he pays the double cost, the characteristic he bought still behaves one-hundred percent in all ways like any non-limited characteristic. Yes- there is an endless debate here, but for my money, this is much better set into the category of "campaign rule" than a Disadplication. I could, following the logic of NCM as a Disad, fund my energy-blast martial artist By selecting "Disadvanatges" such as NCM, movement costs double; power armor may not be bought as Focus, and other such "penalties" for things I have no intention of buying anyway. I clearly admit that I have not seen everything, but I can honestly say that in 40 years of playing, I have never seen anyone who took the 20 points for NCN ever actually buy a characterisitc over that NCM-- his concept simply didn't call for it.

And I beliebe you are absolutely right; Thanks to you all.

Forgot to mention- and at some point, they should have to return the favor in a much bigger, much more critical way. No player likes to be rescued by NPCs, even if he is playing that NPC. And yes: we all know this is about the characters, but being captured is something that players take _personally_, no matter what they espouse. They may not even realize it, but watch their joy and personalities change going forward. The only thing worse than being captured is being rescued by a powerful NPC or even a team of them. Witness all the threads all over the net "and then we had to be rescued by some GMPC--" and yes, in their minds it is _always_ going to be a GMPC (meaning that each memory bumps up a bit more resentment), even if it is some throw away character that you whipped up on the spot because they had scewed themselves so badly that you had no other contingency for things going this sideways..... Anyway, players don't like it. So, if you just opinion shopping, consider this: What I mentioned above: their last big battle was a failure, but they don't know it. The substitute characters find their player characters and revive them. They go back to playing their regular characters. Have a story arc. Six months from now, the "regular" PCs stumble across the characters who rescues them in the exact situation they were rescued from. They make the rescue- it is more frantic, more critical, more danger to the characters being saved, and there is no way that anyone but the Pcs- be it powers, personality, skills, whatever- could have possibly rescued them. Then when the NPCs are rescued, perhaps the mentalist or occultist gasps out something like "thank the Great One! You recieved my message! You found us!" Which _is_ a variant on who shot JR, _but_ it is a nifty variant that means that the player's accomplishments were never taken away, _and_ that they were never actually captured, _and_ that they get to rescue Famous Hero Team, and the indignity of capture was just a last-gasp plea for help from a telepathy that, owing to whatever, was poorly but symbolically sent. Just a thought, of course, but it _does_ undo a lot of rhe captured /rescued damage to the EGO for the players. For it to work, though, it absolutely _must_ have been their most recent big battle.

Well, my fokks just came back from New Mexico early this morning.,,,

I rather like your players finding their characters, HOWEVER-- Dont fall for that "it was all just a dream" who-shot-JR nonsense. Whatever EP they earned, they earned, etc. Whatever they accomplished, they accomplished. This way the effect they have had on their world is real and not horribly retconned. At the absolute most, I would go to their most recent big battle. They were captured during that battle (so they only have one thing that needs redoing, and they will have the advantage of being super-motivated to dish it out on the boss fight). Going back any further than that very much robs players of their accomplishments, and that can easily lead to resentment.

Oh, cool! So they dont have to wait for April 15?

And Defender was an OG hero. It is his character sheet that is analyzed during the "how to build a character" section in the first two editions. Possibly the third as well, but I don't remember for certain.

In the saddlestitched editions, it wwas called "Only in Appropriate Form." It first appeared in a Doug McD / Steve Petersen writeup of a Shapeshifter called Changeling in an issue of Different Worlds Magazine. It qas based on "Only in Hero ID" amd pricing varied from -1/4 to -1/2 depending on how many alternate forms were denied that ability versus how many had it, and how difficult shapechanging was. If I recall (I have the magazine somewhere, but couldn't find it in a month if I started looking now), Changeling had Instant Change and the only limitation to his forms were that they had to be animals, so all of his various form-related powers were at -1/4: changing was super easy, and there are a myriad of animals that share special abilities (flight belongs to over half of all insects and almost every bird and even a select set of mammals). This was how Shape Shift was done back then. Even when modern SS ahowes up in Champions III, a lot of us stuck with "appropriate form." Okay, I apologize; that didn't add anything to the conversation, but I wanted to chum up and say "wow! For a hip shot reaction, you nailed it! Well done!" The rules _do_ let you change into a vehicle: You can use Shapeshift, Appropriate Form, Accidental Change, Multiform, or whatever else you can think of. What the rules do _not_ let you do is build a character using the vehicle rules.

I won't do any specific examples because-- well, there are many excellent and interesting ones posted already, and because outside of the youth group, death is on the table in all of my games (though there are varying shades of difficulty getting there). To answer your question, though: Yes. I have presided over many, many Champions deaths since the early 80s, and I think Megaplayboy's most above sums up how the bulk of them come about. The never-discussed upside of character deaths is that I don't have a Manhattan with eleven-hundred superheroes working at any given moment, nor a guy who was 45 in 1940 still being 45 in 2023.

It is certainly valid to do so, if it isn't a problem for the GM. However, the vehicle rules are for building what is essentially a piece of equipment. In this case, the player is building a character, for whole "being a vehicle" is a special effect of having whatever set of abilities he posses as a vehicle; he is not just a piece of equipment. Similarly, I think, an,argument for Shape Shift of even Transform: self. I wont make them, of course, since I genuinely despise what has become of both of those powers. But as Ninja-Bear points out: any rule can be ignored if the results are agreeable to everyone involved.

This And So very much this. Those are the best answers for Any of the lqter editions. If, for whatever reason, you insist on using automaton rules, then build one form of the character, add a list of abilities assigned to the other form, and use the limitation :only in appropriate form. GM may or may not want to see an Instant change up there, too. That is the best answer for saddle-stitched editions.

Man, I _wish_! I could use the downtime....

Okay... If I was going to build this- and that is an "if" written in a font size generally reserved dor the sighting od actual gods, because dor my game, there is absolutely no way I would build this: it just _is_, and this is what it does, now in or out; I have things to do..... But _if_ I was foinf to build this-- and again, I don't build plot devices because they are plot devices, and since the GM has infinite plot points, it seems silly to waste prexious rime tracking each and every one of them- If I recall, they stepped into a chamber of some sort, did they not? OAF, Immobile, and whatever is the current version of "real weapon" ir "independent" or "universal focus" or whatever it is that means pretty much anyone can use it-- Then build it as Life Support with appropriate limitations: must remain unconscious and inside machine are pretty- ha! Autocorrect made that "Maxine' for some reason, but as hillarious as that is, that is not really the direction I want to take my game.... Anyway, those are some big limitations, in my opinion, to tack onto Life Support, making it reasonably inexoensive to build but again: why bother? It was absolutely just an enabling device for the next dew bits od the story, and not something that brought actual recurring advantage to the party; it just moved them from one part of the story to the next, and in that regard, building it is akin to statting out a bus pass. Now id you want to build a starship that has a bank of these in lieu of hospital beds, that is marginally something else.

I totally understand what the creator was going for here; I really do. However, I wish he had found a shorter, punchier way to lead with the second part, because sometimes I have to be slapped with reminder that there are those who who cannot see the simple fact that people are people. but leading as it does and with that picture under it, instead of the intended effect, I cant really focus on the second part because the whole thing comes off as a Hillarious riff on "Wu Tang is for the children," and I laugh reflexively, only then to be slapped with a lot of very tiny text to have to absorb while laughing, and the end result is more "You are an awful person for finding humor here" than it is a reminder that we (those who believe humanity means all humans are equally human) believe exactly that, and will support you against the bigotted morons. Instead, it kind of makes me feel like one of the morons for laughing at something with a classic joke construction. 😕

A laudable idea, I think, but I feel it would be more prudent to create a whole new team. Anyone exposed to "OG CLOWN" would still be choking on their own bile when they heard "CLOWN has struck again" on the evening news.

CLOWN. Absolutely no contest. No other annoyance, no other published or homebrewed villain has ever come close. Even as an amateur etymologist, I am completely at a loss to find any words (that wont get me banned) to describe what a horrible, horrible, horrible idea CLOWN was in every possible way, or how unfathomably desperate ICE must have been for something to publish. Never in the history of the written word-- and I am including fan fiction and furry porn here- has anything so absolutely awful ever been put to paper. CLOWN has ended not one, but two different campaigns under two different GMs for me. I was a player in a then-six-year campaign. The GM had bought CLOWN at some point, and had been itching to use them, and finally worked up just how to insert them into our game. Keep in mind that we had gone through, if I remember correctly, about eight story arcs with this campaign-- we were all young and single,and gamed a four-hour session on Wednesday evenings and all day on Sunday. It was an old-time comic book kind of game-- as you all know, I am not comic savy, but I believe it was what you call Golden Age: there was still a strong feel of the pulp era's two-fisted justice, heroic characters were good of heart, thought, and deed; villains were simply born to villains, and moral ambiguity was the most impossible of fiction. We were the clear-cut good guys, glib with our one-liners, delivered as surely and consistently as our blows with every sock to the jaw, and in our off time we sponsored school events, electoral participation, fiscal frugality, and children's toothpaste. The public loved us, the police thanked us for our help, and the President would call and tell us how swell we were. And we- stalwart examples of ultimate goody twoshoes, all costumed and superpowered Jesi to a man- were driven to brutally murder each and every member of CLOWN- not even with rays of mystic energy from magic amulets or cosmic beams of radiation or even a merciful sniper's bullet, but with brute force- bare fists and bludgeons. Their propensity for escape and the beyond irritating, hyper-stupidity of their very concept was so insanely irritating that we, the players, about the third time they made an appearance, made a pact, and the next time we captured them, rather than take them to jail and let them wreak,even more havoc, we tied them to poles and beat them like concrete pinatas until there was nothing left but a thick liquid on the floor of our secret cavern headquarters, then turned ourselves in for it. Six year campaign, done. Eight players, and to this day, none of us regret having done it, and that particular GM, so far as I ever heard, ever attempted to use CLOWN with us or any other group. Totally worth it. Fast forward four years or so to a different game under a different GM: There were six players, myself and one other from the group that murdered CLOWN. This campaign had been in play for just over two years, playing six-hour sessions on Saturday mornings (while the GM's two little kids watched cartoons, finished homework, etc). One day we raced to a crime scene to find CLOWN fleeing the scene in that obnoxiously-concieved car of theirs, dealing life-threatening mischief to bystanders even as they fled. Five of us begged off and quit the game on the spot. Apparently only her brother (the sixth player) had never been exposed to CLOWN before. For my opinion? Save Wings of the Valkyrie. The worst thing in it was the emotional and ethical dilemma over the necessity of having to save Hitler. That absolutely pales in comparison to having to endure the existence of CLOWN. Only one HERO Games product has ever been pulled from shelves and banished from official preservation. Unfortunately, it wasn't the best possible choice for such treatment.

Great. Now I gotta go re-read Grunts.

Overheard at work: "Sure; he _seems_ like a nice guy, but really? He's... We), he's.... I don't know... He's... He's the kind of guy that wouls feed your dog a plate of boiled greens right before a long car ride."

Agreed. No secrets! You got a package. What did you order? Oh, that's a set of points and a points plate for a Kawasaki 750 H2 triple. You don't have a Kawasaki H2 triple. Ah. So it was just the one package today, hunh? In the interest of open communication, you should be on the lookout for a much larger package, probably on a liftgate truck.....

admittedly, that was a hyper-condensed recounting of events from across six or eight months, but by the time she knew we were going to get married (took her a while. I knew it on the first date. She didn't believe me. (Who's crazy now, Woman?! ) I totally admit it: I got lucky. I am a bluntly open person. There wasn't anything she didn't know pretty early on, so there was nothing to wonder about how she would react. Now as for the proposal, it was more like this: I got phone call that the ring I had specified had been completed. I swung by the jeweler's on the way home and picked it up. Timing was great! We had a weekend trip planned, etc. I went home, and she was asleep on the couch (she had worked a double, and wasn't home when I left. I was still three years away from having my spine crushed, so I took the cat off of her (they both enjoy napping in the sun), squatted down, scooped her up, and carried her to bed. She opened an eye as I was sitting her onto the bed, mumbled something that could have been a thank you or a curse, and sort of smiled (so no help there; a sort of smile is a sheepish thank you or a mean spirited curse. See, I haven't always been crippled, but I can't even remember a time before hearing problems, even back in childhood). As I straightened up, she saw the receipt in my shirt pocket (because like an idiot, I followed that habit) and grabbed it, jokingly mumbled "aww, did you buy me something...?" Then her eyes bugged out and she jerked upright, wide-awake, wider-eyed, spouting ejaculations of surprise that aren't really fit to repeat, waving the receipt about and sputtering half-thoughts and half-plans (not a small amount of which were thoughts on discouraging me!) Then she calmed down and said "Okay; fine (because she is so romantic), but one more year. When we have been together for three years, we can get married. So we can buy a house at eight months, but marriage is a serious commitment? Yeah; exactly." Great! But what if I want more? What if I decide I want to shoot for first prize? You will have to get kneed in the groin at least twice a week while we sleep. Sweet! Sweet? Well that"a way better then the current twice-a-night arrangement! That was over twenty years ago. I hate past tense me; younger, muscular, uncrippled me. I really wish he had tried harder for first prize.

Not only do I not really understand the question, but the answers thus far are making me feel like I should make a heavy investment in lottery tickets, to boot! When we were dating: You have a motorcycle! Two motorcycles! I _love_ motorcycles! Yeah, me, too. Why do you keep them on the driveway like that, with the truck? Don't most bikers keep them in the garage? It's a one car garage. It only holds twelve bikes. Hunh? Ohhhh...... Wow! That's quite the library for a single guy! You have an entire wall of books! I am impressed! No; those are games and gaming books. Pleasure reading is that wall over there. Those... Those are technical manuals. I know! Aren't they awesome?! Oooh! I filing cabinet! I love an organized man! Yeah, that one is for character sheets, though, the one for records is in between the washer and dryer. What is the one in the bedroom? Instruction manuals and warranty cards for power tools. Tell me these aren't for paintball or nerf or something.... No; those are real. What's this wierd ghost toy on the television? That"s Earthworm Jim. The cat loves him. Cat? Yeah. When the sun is on the TV, he sleeps up there and grooms Earthworm Jim. When the sun is not on the television, he is on top of the water heater. What do you mean? He doesnt run around and play? Nah. He's like twelve. Really, he's the perfect pet. Wherever you left him yesterday, that's where he will be until you move him. It's more like owning the pelt of a cat, really.... You were going to look at my car...? Oh yeah; let me open the garage. Wow! It's full of motorcycles! I told you; it holds twelve. So anyway, got plans for this afternoon? I don't know. Why? What have you got in mind? I dunno. Get married? Damn right!

One of many, many reasons I don't believe D and D became a role playing game until some point during third edition.

Another option for eoutine use of the skill is to reseve the roll in case it becomes relevant; As you and youe companions begin to scale down th wall, there is a lurch in the line. You freeze in your tracks as you realize the piton above you has moves, and is slowly pulling out of the wall. "I try to acramble back up above it so I can reset it!" Okay. [Makes a roll] you almost make it! The Putin comes loose and the jerk on the line snaps it and sends you deopping to the floor twenty feet below! "I roll my luck dice!" Wow! Two sixes! Just as you drop, you are instantly snatched to a stop, hanging from your pack harness. As you carefully look around, you see the stone masons left an oak timber laid into the stone here, probably to start th next few courses of stones. It sticks barely four inches from the wall, amd,you swing slowly and precariously by the strap on your pack harness. Your compainionss silently mouth their relief and start carefully dangling a line toward you. Have you bought a new pack recently? No. So this is the same,one you repaired a xouole of sessions ago? Yes; I suppose it is. And what was your leathercraft skill? Dice start rolling...

I don't know id this helps anyone (or if it is even appropriate here), but I use a methid originally designed just to speed things up, but it works well for skills in general: If you have a skill level of 11 or greater, if after all your modifiers (posistive and negative) are applied, you cannot fail spectacularly. You can still fail, but not "you accidentally hit your friend" fail. If I may borrow Chris's example above, the xhracter may have missed the nad guy, but he xould have easily flipped or spun his way through the window. Further, if you havw a score of at least 11 or less, you do not roll for routine uses of that skill: I want to write a script that will log each time the lab is accessed. What is your xomputer programming? 14 or less. Arw you doing amythinf fancy- hidden transmission of the data or making the script hidden? No; I just want a simple,script that tracks what keycard,opened rhe door and when ans stores the data for later retrieval on-site. Okay; no need for you roll for that. If your skill is less,than 11 or less, you roll, but if it is a routine use of the skill, you cannot fail spectacularly.