Duke Bushido

That is, in my limited experience with it, probably the best summation I could offer you, Sir. To put it in broad terms: while it was a quick-and-easy play system for the most part, it just wasn't as... I hate to say "universal," but that was also an issue-- as it thought it was. It was a pretty slick "action movie" feel: there were broad sweeping options to do broad sweeping things, but it didn't really impart a unique feel to either very-low-end (like the newly-printed Western HERO, for example) or a particularly powerful or grandiose feel to the high end... Even that's not really expressing what I want to express.... It had a distinct sweet spot: one of those "let's take a break" game nights where you want to break out something quick and dirty and light and bash your way through some bad guys without too much regard for detail; quite literally "action movie" style. You could do acrobatic Kung Fu across rooftops, or any over-the-top Last Action HERO or True Lies kind of thing, and it was just _right_ for that. Go in any other direction, and it just didnt--- no; it could _do_ it. It could do it, but it couldn't make it _feeL_ right. I hope that makes more sense than I think it does.

I had the d20 version for some time. That is, I bought both versions (as I had never had any experience with the Tri-Stat system prior to that. I rather quickly passed the Tri-Stat version on to a friend, as I was rather non-plussed with it from the get-go. The d20 version wasn't.... I don't know what to say there: it's no secret I'm not a d20 fan, but it did allow for a much better overall experience than the Tri-Stat system allowed (at least in my own opinion), but it had a lot of problems and inconsistencies all it's own. Still, given the choice, d20 is the one I would play. Unfortunately, I lost it in the move from Savannah. Well, not that unfortunate: I regret the lost investment, but the fact is that it just didn't compare to what I could already do with 2e Champions. Still, the lost source material and artwork were quite a blow. I tried a time or two to get players interested in trying it, but ultimately, we ended up running a short campaign using Champions running gear and SAS settings and props. Because of the lack of directly compatible mechanics, most of the SAS stuff we converted by "the feel of the character" as opposed to anything else, but it worked. I think the most disappointing experience I have had thus far is that all the supplemental stuff (to include the Champions crossover) are all set around Tri-Stat, which I quite specifically disliked. Sorry I couldn't be more help, but I see Ninja-Bear has replied while I typed this; perhaps he has something a bit more useful for you.

These still exist. I used to get a hundred or so of them to pass out to kids at Christmas time, particularly those I could hear asking their parents if I was Santa. The last printing was 2003, but they have not been removed from circulation, nor are there any announced plans to discontinue them. They aren't seen often because they are only about 1/1000 of the bills in circulation. Given the relative "uselessness" of the dollar note at today's prices, I would have thought them to have become much more common by now.

They should should consider "the untrained civilian being yelled at by a guy pointing a gun at him."

Not my words, but poingiant, and I cannot find the original source at the moment, but something to the effect of "why have we ever accepted that if you don't just automatically do what a police officer tells you, when he tells you, how he tells you, for as long as he tells you, that he has the right to murder you? Why are we accepting that any police encounter can become an impromptu game of Simon Says and if you don't play perfectly, you get shot? Again, not my words, but I approve of them heartily.

And it looks like he was married, too!

Yep. I missed _that_.

Exactly. The "chip" is a computer in your brain (or whatever). There are already rules for computers.

I sat on this until I couldn't take it. Originally, I sat on it for the sake of Tribble, Sean, and any other Brits that might be on the board. But I can't take it anymore. There is a European Royal who is now, sadly, single. Which means that there is a chance for Ancestory.com to show it's value as a dating site.

If you are just shopping random opinions on why it's illegal, I'll toss out this one: Yes; my gut says that Clairsentience should, by default, tell you exactly where your target is, not just let you look at him. After all, you had to search around with your Clairsentience to find him, right? Stands to reason that if you know exactly where he is, then you know exactly where he is. _However_, I also accept that it doesn't actually have to work that way. You may just have a psychic link to a person that lets you see him and his surroundings all the time-- or at least whenever you wish. If he's in a walk-in pantry somewhere, that's all you're going to see, and you didn't even have to hunt for which panty. So in this case, Sure: it makes sense that it wouldn't let you be able to target from your brain to his, simply because you don't know what direction he is. Thanks to elevation and the shape of the earth, you actually have to pick one direction from what could be more than a hemisphere and fire away. Once you accept that possibility, there are others: Magic Mirrors that let you see the party even deep in the Forbidden Wood, but you don't know just _where_ in the Forbidden Wood. Even if you recognized a landmark, you couldn't just point your finger in precisely the right direction. One way to think of it is as a pair of mirrors. Two mirrors are angled such that one sees the party and the other mirror; the second sees the other mirror and you. You are seeing everything, but not in direct I-can-target-this-line kind of way. Mechanically, I _totally_ get it. It prevents getting Clairsentience at ridiculous ranges that allow you to fell your opponent while you remain safely protected by the bulk of the planet between the two of you. I don't know if any of that helps, and as I said: I found it hard to swallow, too, at first. However, the more you look at how such things are used in various works of fiction, the more "normal" it seems that you can see or hear or taste the target and still not know _precisely_ where he is.

The most infamous, surely. But my favorite was the Indiana Jones game,where they tried to trademark the word Nazi.

He's married, but she should go for Steve Harvey. Their outfits match too damned many times for them to not be a couple.

The Youth Group concluded the long-stalled (thanks, Corona!) Halloween special mini-run. At some point, the meticulous mind of the detective character grabs a jug of Delish-S softdrink (a long-running joke in my games, celebrating a particularly heinous concoction that even Truck's Tacos-- home of the chocolate-covered mayonnaise ball-- refuses to carry). Mycroft [grabbing a jug from a player about to throw it an approaching zombie]: No; I am checking the label. I have _got_ to know what's in this stuff, and who makes it! GM: You check the label, and notice that the first four entries are Corn Syrup, Orange Juice, Milk, and baby aspirin, followed by about seventy preservatives Mycroft's player: Oh, for Pete's sake! Why can't you just say "Sunny D" like a normal person?!

Mechani-clones.

"Press PLAY on tape"

Funnt this got bumped tonight. After months of hiatus, just ten minutes ago, we xoncluded the Halloween adventure. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Ditto, but given what it is referencing, I felt it best not to mention that...

You didnt get the one with the balloon!

I have three, actually. The first one is _not_ from a published adventure-- or any adventure at all, actually. It's from those simple little comic strips in the Champions II supplement-- the ones with Foxbat and Leroy trying to get the body of Mechanon. The ballon in front of the security camera, and the hanging up a jacket on the Mechanon "coatrack" both just kill me, even now-- what? almost forty years later? My first GM dumping lots of VIPER-related stuff at us, then us finally getting a look at VIPER agents with those realistically-sized-but-incredibly-goofy helmets they stole from the Spaceballs guys and all of us, to a man, declaring "Nope; not using those guys anymore" after a solid ten minutes of laughter. Then the one that I actually posted about some months back in the the "Quote of the Week" thread. From the earlier days of the youth group: there are enemy agents in a food truck. They are armed, and the food truck has been turned over on its side by the now-incapacitated Superman analogue. Two other supers are tied up with crowd control and run-away villains outside the truck. The speedster realizes that she is all alone versus the the armed men in the truck but that she doesn't have the defenses to go toe-to-toe with four machine guns. She runs down the street and back, building up her charge for her single ranged attack power (and it's a doozy. Hard to pull off and very taxing, but extremely effective if done correctly). She comes racing back and released her accumulated kinetic energy in a wave of destructive PD-damage, giving the truck a good crushing. Machine gun fire from the truck-mounted weaponry tells her that the guys inside aren't ready to surrender. She only has one more shot with that power before she will be too exhausted to move, but she runs back down the road and comes back, pushing her movement to gain an additional NCM (yeah; I will allow that from time to time) in an effort to maximize her output. She stops hard and short and releases the kinetic energy as a visible glowing wall that streaks away from her, blasting through the truck and ripping it completely in half, metal screaming like dying banshees and it is twisted and torn in an instant, chunks of debris either flatted on impact or ripped lose and sent tumbling away. "Oh!" says the player. "Should I have gotten the bad guys out first?"

"No; no! The _big_ dial..."

Working on that myself. I want to see if I have any questions for Christopher about it, as I would like to do a review and have that information available when I do.

Holy crap! It's a ghost!

That was it! Thanks, Derek! (I think we have all just witnessed me admitting that I flat don't use this rule )

All-- and I mean _all_ the stuff for 3e, except Champions itself, skipped my FLGS way back when. Didn't even know most of those existed until 4e, when I scored some back issues of a few gaming magazines. I didn't even know about Espionage until just a few years ago, and finally snagged a boxed set .... what? Two, three years ago? Hell, I posted about it when I finally found one.

Giant. Bear with me, here; I can explain. No; actually I can't. But everything from his brown and yellow costume to the lack of a signture crest or logo.... I dont really have the words for it, but to someone featured in a roleplaying game of "make anything you want, how you want," I was positively in love with just how uninteresting he was. no; I really mean that. I thiught it was just wonderful.