Duke Bushido

You mean after I bathe in the appreciation and accolades of my players and count my gold or after I wake up and clean the table?

I know this puts me in disagreement with at least one person who rates as a rules guru-- a guy I have great appreciation for, actually, as he is the one who pointed me toward the original Red October way back when. But I'm kinda with Christopher: I would allow Change Environment to do the job. There are several reasons, the absolute least of which is "what is Change Environment for, anyway?" Seriously: with the advent of Transformation Attack, and the general mindset of "everything requires super-specific points counting," Change Environment has no reason to exist, period: everything could be done with T-Form. T-Form radioactive wasteland into non-radioactive wasteland. Done. T-Form: Environment. Which, I suspect, means you're changing the environment, which steps on the toes of a power that preceeds T-form and is intended to specifically Change the Environment. We never used to wonder about "Change Environment: Create intense winds" or "create intense magnetic fields" or any of that, until someone decided "Hey! You need an AoE Telekineses versus X to 'properly model' that!" Realistically, we still don't worry about it unless someone wants to use it as a controlled attack. We used to use "Change Environment: intense radiation fields" for characters who both manipulated radiation and wanted to take advantage of an enemy's Power Limitations ("Doesn't work in intense radiation fields" and the like). So now we have this weird waffle: Character 1 has "Change Environment: powerful cross winds" and Character 2 has "Telekinesis, no fine manipulation, Area of Effect, Uncontrolled, only to simulate winds," yet they both have the exact same special effects. Character 2 has an exact amount of STR he applies against flying opponents and people walking around and small cars and what-have-you. (I'd like to take just a moment to thank players who concoct this build then require me to apply it against every single piece of set dressing because they want to revel in the effects of their power ) while Character 1 has to trust the GM to take into account the effects of his power and what it does to the people and things within the area. Character 3 has an anti-wind power. Woo-hoo! The day is saved! Or is it? He's got Change Environment: calm winds. Too bad he's fighting Character 2, against whom he will need Suppress. So what's the difference, other than the build? I don't remember it being spelled out particularly specifically anywhere (though, in all fairness, there are a Hell of a lot of books now, and I'm not LL; I can't remember all of them ), so I have built a kind of quick-and-dirty rule that keeps the peace at my table: If the "environment" is the result of a character-created attack-based power-- for example, Killing Attack: NND, AoE, Gamma Zone Burst or some such thing, I will allow Change Environment to clean-up the after-effects that may remain, but the attack will have to be dealt with through other means. If the environment does KA: NND, AoE _because it is radioactive_-- say a nuke hit here fifty years ago or whatever, then no problem: Change Environment will work quite handily. It's really far too far beyond my bedtime to phrase that any better, but I hope it helps someone. I'm going to crash now; you folks have fun.

I'm not sure what you're missing here: is simply the existence of the choice, or the knuckle-whitening terror of doing seventy on bias ply tires as the attempt to follow every tiny bump and groove on the pavement at all times? That hurts. The "when I was a child" part. I was twenty-six...

I meant to say "disk." I meant to say "disk." I meant to say "disk." I swear to you I meant to say "disk." Not exactly a quote, but I feel it belongs here. Youth game was cut short by a display of histrionics the likes of which are rarely seen..... I swear I mean to say "disk." Instead, I let my age show. Two members of the party have headed to the courthouse to find the current and original blueprints of the building they plan to investigate. They are given the current plans simply enough, when one of them starts a conference call to the rest of the team and announces that they are waiting for prints of... well, prints of the prints, but they should catch back up to the rest of the team shortly. The other remembers that the building is very old, and likely has been remodeled at least once, and asks about the _original_ plans for this building. The custodian looks up and says "well, I am sure we have them, but it will take a while to get prints of them because we haven't gotten a lot of the old records on 'fiche yet-" Entire group: "FISH?! Why would you draw blueprints on FISH?!" _HOW_ do you draw blueprints on fish?!" Feral's player "So, when I become a fish, do i like, just _have_ the blueprints or something?" Player on phone: "I think I know why everything takes so long here...." Even after explaining microfiche to them, they just couldn't get back into the swing of things....

Odd. Mine is as well. Ever notice that no matter where you went, you had to walk _through_ the smoking section to get to either the doors or the restroom?

Tjack: I wanted to agree with you with most of your sentiments, but I _do_ think they shoukd pull up their pants. I get really,tired of walkinf through the grocery store, rqndomly encountering the pubic foilage of someone who should be able to dress all by himself. And I know Hydra is the popular,go,to (and thanks to all the googling that came out of a Captain America thread, I now sort,of know who they are. But i always thought Viper was a rip,off,of Cobra: snake motif, military structure, and absolutely,no valid reason to exist foe the first ten years or so.... Very Cobra.

I did a quick google, but I couldn't find it. I remember a few years back reading a well-researched article demonstrating sharp rises in brutality complaints and police violence in almost every police department within days of his seminars. Go figure.

I was also quite amused to realize that they were government spooks.

I am inclined to agree with Opal. While the absorption model could work, if you dont absorb enough BODY to buy enough dice, you could be in trouble. Now if That is something that interests you, then by all means run with it. I _would_ make an interesting weakness...

I am old enough to remember them being called Daisy Mae's Sometime in the 80's Catherine Bach's over-tanned bird legs just drove Li'l Abner's gal right out of the American consciousness.

I am sorry to interrupt this topic, but I try very hard to never miss an opportunity to thank Shadowcat for my paper copy of Traveller HERO. Thanks again, 'Cat.

I don't blame him! "Danger Scarf" is an _awesome_ name!

Coffee percolators.

For what it's worth (and mostly for Tjack): that style of lab coat is called "double-breasted." Old school or not, they are still readily available, and were in regular use up until the entire medical field stopped wearing actual uniforms and everyone decided that scrubs were just fine for every aspect of the field. Nothing says "professional" like spending the day in rumpled pajamas, I suppose. At any rate, double-breasted lab coats can still be found (an in colors) in use in facilities where getting soaked or sprayed with something hazardous or biological is highly likely, and on personnel who are naturally "cold natured."

I like the lack of deep details from 1-3. oddly, I _also_ like the organization book as laid out in 4e (but for some reason, not for Viper. I'd use it for a whole new organization: some of the ideas-- like the computer in charge of everything-- were just a little to out there for my personal taste with regard to what is essentially a global terrorist network. I like the uniforms from 5e, simply because they look like actual uniforms as opposed to left over props from something else. Problematic to that, I also fully accept that helmets of the proportions shown in 5e and in any comic book could not actually contain and protect a human head. Williams (1-3) really offered the only helmet that actually looked like it could protect, but he really went overboard with the Spaceballs look....

Depends, I reckon. Is he shackled? If not, how much damage does a paper spoon do?

Thanks, Christopher!

This will probably put me on outs with a large chunk of the fandom here, Brother Dean, but it had all the production values of first season Power Rangers........ Ah, that old chestnut.... It's ridiculous. Tires are not silent, and cars have horns. Brakes, also, are not silent, though we tend to think so because we can't hear them (assuming they are in good working order) from inside the cabin. Also, if you have air conditioning, your engine is going to be running at anything other than a complete stop:" there are no allowances to turn the compressor with anything other than the crankshaft. In the winter, you might have an argument, save for the point that, again: tires are not silent, brakes are not silent, and cars have horns. This is from the same group of-- and I say this without malice, though because it's negative it does tend to come off as insulting-- sadly under-educated or non-attention-paying people in the motorcycle community who believe that "loud pipes save lives." Thanks to the doppler effect, the only people who notice your loud pipes are all _behind_ you. Granted, those of us behind you are _looking_ for a reason to run you over to make that pointless crap stop, but the people that you think they are saving you from actually don't hear them until you're passing their front fenders. Notice that bikes with loud pipes are over-represented in accident statistics. This is because people are putting too much faith in something that absolutely _cannot_ work and not making the effort to keep themselves safe. But to get back to quite cars: how many times have you been walking through the parking lot at Lowe's (who encourages this ridiculous behavior every spring by setting up tables of bedding plants that spill right into the roadway) by a car with an engine running? More than once, I bet. When the majority of cars become electric, people will learn to look the way they already should have.

Because of the separation of actual mechanic and special effect. Frankly, the definition of "no action / reaction" is totally unnecessary: if I lift something with my strength, there is action/ reaction, but I still can't lift myself. Back on topic: Telekinesis the Power / mechanic isn't necessarily "moving something with the power of your mind." It is moving something without touching it, period. Looked at another way, it is Strength: only for lifting / moving (grabbing, I believe is RAW, but I know for a fact that it varies from GM to GM as to whether or not you can grab and hold someone with it), Ranged. Flight: 22" SFX: telekinesis / "I move myself through the sky with the power of my mind." It is simply a matter of not stepping onto other existing mechanics. As Flight can exist as something other than telekinetic tomfoolery, Flight exists as it's own power. As the ability to move yourself through the air with your mind is, mechanically-speaking, well-covered by Flight, you buy Flight and declare it to be a telekinetic ability. Same if you wanted to declare that you could use your telekinetic powers to whisk you away instantly to some other location: you buy the _mechanic_ "Teleport" and declare the special effect to be Telekinesis. I know there are _several_, but as I need them right now, I can't think of a single one, but there are several instances of "telekinesis" being bought for something that is not a mental power at all: magic ropes, gravity wells, etc. Hope that helps.

And in the other hoof is the thousands of people under thirty who get pennies in their change and make a big show out of flinging them across the parking lot when they walk outside.

Yep. I was pretty stoked about that, hoping to pick up some conversion pointers. All I can find (and all that may be the only way it published; I dont really know) was for Tri-Stat. I've got it, but it's not as much good to me as I had hoped. If anyone knows where a d20 version might be found, I would greatly appreciate a point in thw right direction.

As long as we're doing things from way back: S&H Greenstamps and the various dishes and cook pots that entailed. When I was a kid, my mother had this brass grocery list. No; seriously: it was two brass plates riveted together, sandwiching a hinge pin down each side. Along the length of the hinge pins were tin arrows that folded out away from the body of the piece, or flat into arrow-shaped reliefs in the face of it. When folded in, each arrow pointed to a staple good you might go to the grocery store to buy: eggs, milk, flour, aspirin, etc. You made your shopping list by cruising the pantry and flipping "out" the arrow for anything you wanted to remember. As you picked them up around the store, you folded the arrow back into its relief. When all arrows were folded in, you had all your staples. Now this wasn't a one-off thing, either. My grandmothers each had one (also brass), and I have seen them in tin, and in the late seventies I saw a few in plastic. But I haven't seen one since '81 or '82, and they were pretty rare then, now that I think about it. Given the way my memory is going these days, I sort of wish they'd make a comeback!

Two words: Team Knightrider. It's a real thing; it happened. And it was _so much worse_ than I could possibly ever hope to describe...... Available on Google Play, while that lasts. (Don't do it: that is an amount of life that will never be refunded, and never spent on worthwhile things like bathing cats or onion-eating competitions)

N-B: if you were _supposed_ to, I don't remember it that way. As I said, I lost my copy in the move (and every attempt to replace it has resulted in turning up the Tri-Stat version ), so I can't confirm this, but I remember the couple of times we tried making characters with it, we went with just buying stats (probably a few decades of Champions keyed us directly to that option). I recall the second (and last time) we made characters, we did "roll up characters" then used points to up them to where we wanted. Truthfully, it didn't seem to make much difference either way: with points, you skewed things the way you wanted anyhow. All rolling did was let guys who wanted to play non-super gadget types spend more points elsewhere. As I said, though: in the end, we just pulled out what we wanted to play with in the setting and put on Champions gear. Perhaps it's because it was just more familiar or more comfortable to us, but we had a much better time with it that way.

I think they are extremely right for character standees / paper doll type minis; character portraits, too. If I played any D&D-style fantasy, I'd probably contact the artist for permission to do just that with them. Nice find!