pbemguy

3 hours ago, Ockham's Spoon said:

 

While I understand it in the context of this discussion, it sounds bizarre to classify Homeless Person as a profession 🤨

 

 

Agreed.

2 hours ago, phydaux said:

You forgot Island of Dr. Destroyer

Confession: I voted for Day of the Destroyer but I thought I was voting for Island of Doctor Destroyer!

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Though you _could_ take "Escape from Stronghold" and rework it to include an escape from Stronghold.  Or any actual adventure at all, really.  It was really nothing more than "here's this super-prison idea we had, and some random thoughts how you could maybe use it in your campaign, if you want."

 

 

OMG, this is an awesome idea. Then you also get an updated superprison.

By the way, The Great Supervillain Contest still remains one of my favorites.

Okay, I can access it now. I will contact them. More in a bit!

Thanks! I will look into this. I will contact them directly and report back.

EDIT/UPDATE: I can't actually access the Hero Machine site from where I am right now. Blocked. If someone else can look into this, it would be greatly appreciated!

In the movie, he hands out this:

What would your card say?

On 6/18/2020 at 5:27 PM, Panpiper said:

 

I generally prefer to avoid too many hunteds in any case, often building characters with none at all. They are not just a problem for her, they are the same for all players and sometimes even the GM. Rules as written, if every player has a hunted, virtually every scenario will feature one or more of them. Non-combat hunteds can also derail the intended narrative flow of a game.

I GM mostly and I love the multiple Hunteds and non-combat Hunteds. They do totally derail everything and that's why I love them! It goes back to when I first started playing and I'd have a vague adventure idea and then everyone's Hunteds showed up.

Which reminds me: it bugs me when Hunteds are incorporated into the game in the "wrong way" (which is something I was guilty of when I first started). In my opinion, the wrong way is when you roll the Galloping Galooper's Hunteds and then plan around them: Okay, Green Dragon and Foxbat show up, so the characters have to stop them from robbing a bank. Wrong! (IMO) The plot should stay the same, e.g. some villains are robbing a bank, and Green Dragon and Foxbat also show up specifically to attack The Galloping Galooper.

But I digress. I should have one of those cards like The Joker to hand out on the bus: "I digress. A lot."

I just pick a job that you can put "freelance" in front of.

The characters I've played that pop into my head were:

photographer, musician, substitute teacher (eventually lost the job for not showing up to gigs, became a freelance IT guy), paid superhero (like the Avengers)

Some of my players have used recently:

private investigator, homeless person, mercenary, CEO of tech company, bookstore/cafe owner

14 hours ago, Pariah said:

On a more serious note, there are people making good money today from blogs and YouTube channels. This could be a real possibility.

 

This one is ideal. But it doesn't have to be a person making money off videos of her superhero self. Many Youtubers make money--even millions--playing video games. So a scrappy little Youtube gamer who occasionally misses upload schedules because he's in a supervillain dungeon could scrape by.

I barely know my sinestra from my destra, but how are you running the campaign? (email? messenger?)

I'm working on the idea elsewhere in this forum: A Shared Campaign World Wiki for Champions

The idea is simple: we build a full campaign world that people can use for free. Hypothetically, parts of it could be printed out by Hero, but my position on this is that we all walk away from the profits and see this as increasing the value of the One True System.

Yes, I know:

ANYWAY, my question is: Where do I get my "free" character art for the superteam I am about to build on that thread. Should I use HeroMachine 3? Does anyone have any cool HeroMachine 3 designs that I can plunk into the campaign? If so, post 'em here and I'll use them!!

PS: I know that the way we'll be using this art might seem to contravene HeroMachine's agreement--could this be argued to be commercial use? Sure. But if we get to the point where that becomes an issue, I'm certain we can deal with that.

The city details can be worked out, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to start with the city's main superteam? AIn't that why we're all here?

Team Name:

Members:

I based these categories off New York CIty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

Anyone can fill this in. Literally anyone reading this!

Name: Rush City

Country: United States
State:
Region:
Constituent counties:
Historic colonies:
Settled:    (year)
Consolidated    (year)
Named for:    (Where does the Rush name come from?)
Government
 • Type:    Mayor–Council
 • Body:    Rush City Council
 • Mayor: (name of mayor)

Population:

Major airports:    
Commuter rail:    
Rapid transit:    
 

10 hours ago, cptpatriot said:

One of the things about using real locations is the use of real world politics. I would vote to completely avoid using any real world politicians.

I totally agree.

8 hours ago, steriaca said:

Well, I created the fictitious Prince A Pal arcade and restaurant chain. I'll probably would put the thing up there.

Nice!

I think we could ask for a wiki here at the site but I see no reason why we can't start building right here on this thread. No sense asking for a wiki if we don't show we're serious. It will be easy to copy-and-paste off this thread into a wiki.

I think it makes sense to make fake cities, a la DC. I'm going to use a fake city name generator.

Here's the site I used: https://www.mithrilandmages.com/utilities/CityNames.php

I came up with Rush City. When I Google that, it's the name of a real town in Minnesota. But there's no reason we can't use it.

Okay, the fake city....let's be funny and locate it where Metropolis is supposedly located...you can't copyright GPS. Metropolis is south of NYC, down the coast a bit, according to my source.

So there's a start. Rush City.

41 minutes ago, Tom Cowan said:

hmm? do you mean HERO Designer?

Could be. Help me out. I have literally thousands of Champions hours under my belt. But not with creation software.

I thought the software was called HeroMaker. Sorry!

I think you'd be "other" then! I knew there would be an other!

How many people use the pencil and paper method to make their characters?

I honestly never use the software. I use the Champions rules as a stress reliever. I will at least once a month sit down and make a character just to clear my head.

I just want to know: how many people still use the old school method?

(This plays into the idea of a wiki on another thread. I feel like the pencil-and-paper people might be more into the wiki? Or am I wrong?)

On 1/3/2019 at 6:43 PM, Pariah said:

And I've got to tell you, here's something really cool about building a character with pencil and paper. I've had to relearn how a few things work, like END (Holy cow! How did my heroes ever stay awake for more than a Turn?!) and proper Elemental Controls, but I'm now able to create a new character in ~30 minutes, start to finish. It's been a lot of fun.

 

I can't be the only one who still uses pencil and paper? Like, no matter what edition, I still sit down with a piece of paper, a calculator, and the book. Does anyone else do this?

Well, these days I usually use Notepad and a PDF of the rules--usually it's 5e, but I have 3-6 as pdf files. And I have the Calculator open. I tried Heromaker but I really have always been in love with the pencil-and-paper method. I run mostly play-by-email games now--a lot!--but to me, the pencil/paper part of it is almost sacred. I find it *so* relaxing to work through the character creation "manually" I guess you'd call it.

Am I the only one?  (I have no problem with the software. But to me it's like, honestly, a microwave dinner compared to cooking it yourself. Like, I'd use the software in a pinch but it's not something I'd enjoy. Which is no offense, I think the software is well made.)

I guess I want to get a feel for how many people still do pencil and paper...?

42 minutes ago, Sketchpad said:

You might run into some problems from the retail chain.
 

 

It is my life goal to get a Cease and Desist from Weird Al... 

She's quite good in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

...named for the Italian explorer Vittorio Spatula.

I vote that we call the campaign city Spatula City if we go that route.

Agree or disagree?

It's why I think the shared creation of the campaign world (by wiki) will work. (See other thread in this forum.)

I build things in Champions sometimes JUST TO BUILD THEM. What would Heath Ledger Joker look like? What would Elsa from Frozen look like? I have no intention of ever putting them into a game.

Anyway, my son plays Minecraft, so now I do too. This mindset exists in Minecraft. You spend hours poring over specific Redstone code etc. just to get exactly what you want. My son has the Champions mindset, but he uses it in Minecraft.

So that's why I think Champions is the game of the future. It's got that Minecraft "I can make anything I want and I'll take three hours to do it and I'll ENJOY those three hours."

Like, D&D, that's more like Fortnite. You buy more books so you can do this specific thing, but you're basically trapped by what's available, and there's less emphasis on "making it yourself."

Thoughts?

Oops. I thought this was the title of the new John Grisham.

7 minutes ago, BoloOfEarth said:

Long ago I created a supervillain, Snafu, whose schtick was luck.  IIRC, she had a 60-point VPP that took no time to change, to represent the wide variety of bad luck that could befall a foe.  (She still had to target them, it wasn't a No Conscious Control thing.)

Yes, I did the same thing. A VPP of random stuff that helps the character. At one point I had a lightning bolt hit one of her opponents. It was a little cloudy, but the WTF moment was priceless.

You can do the "ballet of fortune" like in one of the Superman movies, where Clark steps on a guy coming out of an open manhole etc.

Or naturally occurring Rube Goldberg stuff can take the sting out the power and make the players laugh:

"A young woman's bikini top snaps, a guy in a Tesla swerves off the road gawking, hits a fire hydrant, it sprays out and knocks the gun out of your hand as you're about to shoot Snafu."

4 minutes ago, Sketchpad said:

If folks work on this, I would recommend putting it all together under a Creative Commons licence (https://creativecommons.org/). Might help protect the work and the creators.

Excellent idea!

Another idea I had while finishing my coffee was that we keep the campaign world based on the real world, i.e. New York and not Gotham/Metropolis etc.

The reason I suggest this is that we could use Google Maps to help the project and not be bogged down trying to design Spatula City.

That being said, people may want to go that route and I want to make this work, so if everyone wants to build fictional cities, we could go that way.

I also have no idea if we would build it on an external wiki site (any suggestions?) or try to set up the wiki to be based here at herogames.com. I feel like it would work better if we based the wiki at herogames.com

We've been talking about what we can do to propagate Champions. Could we, together as a group, build a wiki that fleshes out an entire campaign world? We could have a blurb at the top that says, "Your contributions may be compiled into a campaign book and printed out. These profits will go to Hero Games."

Like, if we made a huge campaign wiki, then we could then take excerpts of it and print it out. (The campaign world would have to be completely fresh. We couldn't borrow anything from existing intellectual properties.)

The key to it is that we stat all of the characters in Champions. Probably 6E should be the standard, but I would also want to see 5E conversions. So, we start a wiki, and anyone can edit it.  Has anything like this been attempted?

(I would recommend, don't contribute idea that you are attached to or plan to publish yourself later. Only contribute stuff that you're comfortable becoming part of this bigger thing.)

I just thought of it over coffee a few minutes ago and I perhaps haven't considered the ramifications, but I wanted to key it in here while I was still excited about it. To me, what Champions has that other games doesn't have is a skilled, imaginative fan base. (I'm not dissing other games. I just mean I see Champions enthusiasts as having a certain something special.)