DataPacRat
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Posts posted by DataPacRat
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Re: Boogiemen that are actually /scary/...
The boy eating spider' date=' is that something that the original poster made up or is it in that novel?[/quote']I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that Coraline is mainly spider-free, and entirely boy-eating-spider-free - that's just something I came up with, and am deciding whether to work out some more details or not. (Of course, first I'd have to figure out what sort of /universe/ would allow the basic premise...)
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Re: Yet ANOTHER WWYCD: Against your team
Bunny is fairly new to the whole supering thing, and is just in the process of /meeting/ her team-mates and learning their abilities. (Unless, of course, I were to write about one or more of the future versions of her who've time-travelled back to the present... if the BBCB wanted a silly fight, there could be half-a-dozen different Bunnies chasing one another around the city.)
So, I'm afraid that for her, this comes down to general tactics, rather than specifics tailored to her teammates' weaknesses.
Her general approach is fast stealth - assuming the BBCB only lets her keep one set of her interchangeable cyber-limbs, that's about 15" leaping, plus color-changing fur that gives her Invisibility.
If no other super-plots are pressing, she may try to out-endure her teammates: she has Unaging, eating 1/week, and sleeping 8h/week, so sneaking up while her team-mates are on a rest-break or napping is one option.
She's not an Aqua-Bunny (at least, not unless she swaps out her legs for a mermaid tail), but can hold her breath a good long time (4 points of Breath-Holding), so hiding in the water and then jumping out at an opportune moment could be fun...
She has a couple of detachable spy-critters to sense through, the size of mice, so once she finds her team-mates she can keep an eye and ear on them.
In a straight-up fight, though, she'll probably go down fast. She'll probably have cyber-arms with a simple +3d6 HA, and a regeneration of 1 BODY/Turn; no special mental defenses or power defenses - her primary melee tactics are Move Bys (or jumping up and down on goons' heads).
Of course, all that's just straight from her charsheet; with her life at stake, and Unaging to make it a /lot/ of potential future life at stake, she'll have plenty of incentive to become... creative. And test the BBCB's limits - such as bounding straight out of the city. Or start building survivalist-style weaponry and traps out of what's available - spears, pits, deadfalls, snares, nets, and anything else the environment has materials for (and using her speed to get past her team-mates to start building the next one). Think of Arnie vs the Predator, or Rambo, or any other guerrilla warfare cliche; after all, she /is/ underpowered against a high-powered enemy, just what they were designed for.
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I just read Neil Gaiman's spooky novel, "Coraline", where the title
little girl goes through a locked door and finds her "other parents",
who have black buttons instead of eyes... and that started me
thinking, and I've realized that it's been a long time since I've been
in an RPG - or even seen one - that was actually /scary/, that dealt
with the primal fears of childhood - of the dark and what might be
lurking in it, of what's on the other side of mirrors, of dolls that
never stop staring at you, of spiders and bugs and cocoons and dry
scratchy dust and little scuttling things seen just out of the corners
of your eyes... remember the first time you saw Tim Burton's movies
(Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Nightmare Before Christmas), when
/you didn't know what was going to happen/, and just maybe a little
boy really was going to get eaten by a spider... and then all the
grown-ups started treating the spider as if he were the eaten child?
I know at least half the fright-value of such things comes from the
lack of knowing - is a black cat bad luck, or a friendly guide? Will
you wake up one morning as a cockroach? Is eating that apple really a
good idea? - which kind of makes statting things out for an RPG a
catch-22. However, a few odd RPGs manage to do the trick - Puppetland
(where everybody is a puppet, but Punch has killed the Maker), or
Pumpkin Town ( http://www.memento-mori.com/games/pumpkintown/ )...
except that I've never been able to find anyone willing to try
/playing/ in such a system.
So, if you wanted to write up some sort of boogie-man in HERO, or a
shadow-scuttler, or that boy-eating spider (now having to deal with
his own horrors: brushing his mandibles each night, fitting in at
school, and eating vegetables), how would you go about it?
Hm... Something like "Mental Illusions 12d6, 0 END (+1/2), Persistent (+1/2); Self Only (-1), Only Works On Grown-Ups (-1/2), Always On (-1/2), Limited Effect ("He's an ordinary human boy", -1)", perhaps? But would that also affect home movies and store security cameras?
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Re: WWYCD: Fundamentalist against non-tech supers.
Bunny would certainly be a target of the rhetoric, given her general appearance as a humanoid rabbit, the fact she's from another planet, and, most likely, the fact that she's leans far enough to the left on most social issues to send a neo-conservative batty. (Her interchangeable prosthetic limbs and nanotech-based powers probably wouldn't make things any worse for her.)
Given her nanite-built-diamond Wealth, and her 'Pink Bunny' charitable foundation, she has a reasonable amount of Non-Combat Influence to point a finger and laugh at the preacher's sillier points.
Now, if this preacher fellow were to show up in Bunny's current game, one of the most likely ways to discredit him could easily involve putting some hidden cameras in place to reveal that despite his public rhetoric, the preacher had certain unhealthy appetites for the "non-humans" he claims to despise... and when /those/ tapes are threatened to be released to the media, or actually are, problem solved.
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Re: What Would Your Character See?
Bunny's greatest fear... is to lose her sentience, and become some sort of non-intelligent animal. Variations to make it worse might involve being trapped, limbless, in the traditional fluid-filled transparent life-support tube; having her body toyed with and altered by incomprehensible beings; being repeatedly impregnated by and birthing monstrosities; or retaining her mind while a non-sentient version of herself gains control of her body.
How would she overcome her fear? I'm honestly not really sure. If her mind is reduced to the level of a horse, there wouldn't be much of her left /to/ go about overcoming things. And in the latter option, lacking any physical control of herself, all she can do is think - and, not being a mentalist, that doesn't really accomplish much. (Which, of course, is part of the reason that this /is/ her greatest fear...)
Any suggestions?
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This isn't a What-Would-Your-Character-Do, quite, exactly; it's more of a what would /you/ do:
One fine morning, you wake up... but things are a little bit different: You wake up in the body of your usual WWYCD PC, with all their powers, in their world.
Have the two of you simply swapped places? Or are you stuck in a dream? Or is something else entirely going on? You don't have a clue - but suddenly, your Trouble Alert sounds (or whatever other method your PC uses to know when it's time to spring into action), and it's time for them to spring into action - except for the minor detail that /you/ get to decide whether to risk your life in feats of daring heroics that could very well get yourself killed, mind-controlled, or worse.
(Yep, it's the other main meta-game cliche - I figure we might as well hit them both at once.
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Somewhere in the RPG-multiverse, there's a person who's exactly like you, including the RPG-characters he plays and the forums he reads...
... except that, upon reading their universe's equivilent to this very post, a swirling vortex appears in front of them - and, lo and behold, it's the very PC that you write about in your WWYCD posts, on one of those interdimensional jaunts that PCs so often journey through.
What would your PC do upon discovering somebody who seems to have manipulated their life, their stats, their very existence?
What would the-alternate-you do upon discovering that a piece of fiction they created was actually real?
(I leave open to you the question of whether or not the alternate-you can continue to "edit" the PC by editing the character sheet, with or without the GM's approval, and the rest of the PC's universe...)
And if you want an Extended Variant - how about the rest of that PC's gaming-group PC companions also appearing?
(Sure, it's a cliche - but it's a /fun/ cliche.
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Re: A Simpler WWYCD: The Lights Go Out
Bunny would call up her charitable foundation, and tell them to consider this a trial run for a /real/ emergency, and start activating the phone-trees, ham-radio-trees, and other ways to get things in motion: opening up the shelters (with their backup generators, their lights should stay on for hours), have people drive around in the 'Pink Bunny Foundation' vehicles to distribute water and blankets, help jump-start stalled cars, knock on old folks' doors to make sure they're alright, and otherwise make friendly nuisances of themselves.
Bunny herself would be doing much the same thing, though with a rather impressive Leap that can get her through any traffic jam.
Once the power is back, Bunny would get a report on how well things went, how they could be improved, and so on, and hope that things will go at least as smoothly should a Giant Rampaging Monster rampage gigantically though the city, with the Pink Bunnies digging for survivors in rubble and performing first aid on minor injuries to free up the paramedics for more serious cases.
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Re: WWYCD: Registration
He sends out a public appeal to superheroes (and any other powered people who are willing to help) of all stripes to register with this organisation. The information will' date=' as before, be treated as need to know classified information (and no, "need to know" information isn't put on networked computers). It will be used (according to the appeal) to enable alerting the registering heros to future terrorist threats, hopefully in time to do something. Do you register?[/quote']Bunny: "Do you want something more than my home-phone number, cell-phone number, sat-phone number, pager number, fax number, email address, IM address, websites, mailing address, ham radio callsign, favoured radio and TV stations; those of my secretary; and those of my charitable foundation, all of which you already have?"
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Re: WWYCD: Lost in a world without Supers; 9/11/2001
Bunny is in a bit of an odd personal situation, given her Secret (and I know at least one other player in her game reads these boards, so no, I can't say
). But other than that...She's roughly human-shaped (in fact, she designed her body's shape on some popular human models - you know, the ones with staples in their navels...), but has fur, a rabbit-shaped head, removeable cybernetic limbs, a few symbiotic creatures that live inside her, can lay diamond-filled eggs, and can speak a thoroughly non-human language. I'm sure she'd be able to get the attention of High-Up People at the White House, and even if she can't prevent the actual plane-crashes in time, the fact that she knew about them beforehand will give her a certain amount of Serious Credibility.
She comes from a post-'01 timeline, and the fact that this world doesn't have supers and hers does, and the fact that "an alien has come to Earth" means that the butterflies are going to do rather strange things to the timeline anyway... so she'll throw caution to the wind, and start work on a program to Improve The World. (Funded by those diamond eggs, just like on the Earth she's more familiar with.) Including removing certain unpleasant individuals from their positions of power, on all sides of the globe.
Among other things, she'll try pointing out that the doctrine of abrogation, that some verses of the Qur'an supercede others, is unnecessary - and then that certain verses of the Qur'an suggest alternate modes of behaviour: "There is no compulsion in religion." - 2:256, and "You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them." (thus encouraging a rationalist, scientific Islam) - 17:36 are good starters.
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Re: WWYCD - a deal with the devil
The devil would be willing to let you define what was evil' date=' and even to [i']continue[/i] doing so after the contract was made, with only a slight amendment to ensure that, if you perceived something you felt was evil, but which had not previously been identified as such, you would have the option of including that in the contract instead of breaking it (basically, you alone, but not the devil, would have the option of redefining the terms).Bunny would respond: "Again, no joy. I'm a philosopher, but just an amateur one. I wouldn't trust anyone else's definition of what is evil for every single human being and what isn't - what makes you think I'd trust my own definition on that scale?"
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Re: WWYCD - a deal with the devil
Bunny, thanks to her nanites, already has the potential at a never-ending life in the material plane.
Assuming that she goes through all the rigamarole to confirm that Mr. Evil is telling the truth, she'll scratch her head, and then say, "So, you're saying that you think if I accept this deal you'll have better overall chances in the long run? And that I'd have to kill an innocent? /And/ that you'd remove humanity's capacity to commit acts that fit into a particular cateogory of 'evil'?
"What was it you said I'd want to agree to any of this for, again?"
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Re: WWYCD: Registration
Bunny would oppose the registration on philosophical grounds, and work to have it overturned. (Being able to lay nanite-built diamond-filled eggs buys a /lot/ lof lawyers...) Her powers are generally of two themes, either nanites within her body that can repair her and build a few things (and she's not letting /any/ Earthly government get their paws on those), and a collection of interchangeable cybernetic limbs (from ordinary-looking to "mermaid" to "winged"), which, since she's limbless without them, she'll argue should be treated as prosthetic devices.
And if that doesn't work - she may start skipping the nighttime rooftop patrols, and simply go for long jogs for exercise in the night (she only needs an hour or two of sleep a day); stop carrying around a police-band radio, and start carrying around a ham-radio with a broad frequency receiving range; continue cultivating a good relationship with the local gendarms (who'll probably be none too happy with the Feds' interference), maybe chatting with them while they happen to be working at some crime scene or other; and /definitely/ continue her charity work (diamond-filled eggs buy a lot of soup kitchens, too).
And if the DHS tries to intrude too much upon her privacy simply because she comes from another planet, well, she happens to have a fondness for Canada anyway, which is still within personal-jet range of most of the USA if big trouble happens there (as it so often does) and her particular talents would make a difference.
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Re: WWYCD 101:A question of faith
Another possible complication for Bunny's approach: happy that their sacrifice survived the sacrifice, the local villagers may ask her to come back next year to repeat the event (and the year after that, and so on and so forth). (And, if she's unlucky, decide to keep her around whether she wants to or not...)
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Re: WWYCD: Get Robbed...By The King
Among other things, Bunny would use the power of her shiny-black Centurion credit card (black is the new platinum, which was the new gold) to purchase one or more Burger King franchises within the robber's target-area.
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Re: WWYCD 101:A question of faith
One problem: the sacrifice must be a virgin and none of the characters in her game qualify.
Well, she'd never have done anything to disqualify herself while on /this/ Earth - and if it'll save the sacrificee's life (and that of future sacrificees), she's perfectly willing to fail to mention anything she might have done on any /other/ Earth.
Besides, it's an SF trope that prophets get to make up their own rules on the subject - see Michael from "Stranger in a Strange Land", for one example.
Another potential complication might be that her limbs are removable cybernetics - and, of course, those people who expect her to save them from a volcano will also expect her body to be perfect as it is without need of such "mortal disguises" - leaving her literally trapped on a pedestal. If anybody expressed a wish to imitate her appearance in this way, along the lines of a priest of Odin removing an eye, she'd put a stop to it as quickly as possible - if she had any say on the matter. I'm starting to have some strange thoughts about her ending up as a "deity" who has no input into what her church does in her name, which is usually where the PCs come /into/ things (anybody recall Llandru?)... hopefully, it'll be in the near future, and not after she'd been sitting in that temple for a few thousand years. (Of course, even if it is, the version of Bunny I use for WWYCDs is after the campaign Nexus is referring to, when she's had some experience with time travel...)
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Re: WWYCD 101:A question of faith
If I was the GM of that situation' date=' the giggles turning into evil maniacal laughter would stop the game for five minutes. I'd hug the player for doing it, then have my fun[/quote']Okay, since you put it that way - exactly what fun /would/ you have with poor, resurrected Bunny?
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Re: WWYCD #124 or so:Peace on Earth
Everybody's favorite fem-fur, Bunny, hasn't acquired any arch-nemesis yet... however, given her future time-travelling, it's entirely possible that she'll discover that one of her time-travelling future selves /is/ her arch-enemy, and the pair will eye each other warily now that Future-Bunny has been revealed.
Other than that - Bunny will whip out her cell-phone, her credit card, and call up her charity foundation's board for a fast brainstorm on how a temporarily enforced lack of violence can be leveraged to improve the charity's operations afterwards - for example, arranging for a non-violent containment of some extraordinarily-violent individuals (whether super-villain or just generalissimo)...
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Re: WWYCD 101:A question of faith
One possibility for Bunny would be to ask what method the sacrifice employed - and if it was something her nanites could heal her from (garrotting, chest-knifing, or something else simple), she'd volunteer to /be/ the sacrifice.
And then, after all the proper forms were fulfilled and she was officially "dead", she'd get up from the tomb and attempt a little creative myth-making about her being the /last/ sacrifice, based on certain mystery cults from Earth's own past (Osiris, Orpheus, Asclepius, and all those other dead-and-revived fellows)...
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Re: WWYCD choosing between two villains to stop?
Bunny would, at a guess, release one of her nano-birthed spy-mice (or perhaps the spy-snake) to keep an eye on the Minor crook, use her bunny-legs' (her usual patrol limbs) rather impressive Leaping to do a Move-By or Move-Through on him (she may jump up and down on him a few times first before hearing that police report, depending on the GM's timing), and then make her way to deal with the Major Villian - and, on the way, flip open her cellphone to call the local superhero headquarters and let them know the Major Villian needs to be dealt with now, oh, and there's a Minor Villian if any of the low-powered sidekicks need some live-target practice.
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Re: WWYCD: "Dude, you stole my shtick!"
Bunny, the lapine-woman alien with removeable cybernetic limbs, has already experienced something like this - another PC picked the name 'Bunny-Chan' (and was apparantly something of a Japanese Magical Girl); to avoid intra-party conflict, the shapeshifting Shifter temporarily turned herself into a /third/ bunny-woman.
Anyhoo - if reports turned up of another Bunny appearing elsewhere, Bunny's first reaction would be that there sure seem to be a lot of rabbit-themed superheroes these days. (I still grin when I recall one posted to these boards, a brick-bunny with the nom-de-guerre of "Thumper".) Her second reaction would be to wonder if her future self has travelled back in time (again), and she'd go and check for the message drops she decided some time ago to use to let herself know if such an occasion happened.
If it turned out to be anyone other than herself, she'd just shrug and continue on with things; after all, "Bunny" is a fairly generic name. (Oh, and /she's/ the one who "embraces being a sex object"; it's just that sort of game.)
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Re: WWYCD: Flipside
Bunny, the alien bunnygirl with a set of interchangeable cybernetic limbs, has two Psych Lims: a Code of Conduct (Follow the Two Laws: "Do no harm", "Protect the weak from the strong") and a Personality trait: "Wants to live forever".
The reverse of the latter is fairly simple, to something like "Doesn't care about living another minute -> Nihilistic daredevil". Assuming she happens not to immediately suicide in some manner, the Code of Conduct is slightly trickier... "/Do/ do harm" and "The strong should conquer the weak", perhaps?
So, instead of a potential-immortal who spends much of her large income on charities and other good works, she ends up as... a master to anyone she can enslave, and a slave to whoever can master her? (I sense a costume change leaning heavily towards black leather, shiny spikes, perhaps a whip, and other such dominatrix details, ending up looking sort of like a fuzzy version of Catwoman.)
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I'm thinking of writing up a PC with a certain degree of political power; so has anybody written up a package deal for, say, the US President, or some other modern head of state? The 10-point perk is a start, but not enough - and going the Landlord route with all citizens as Followers and all land as part of a Base seems a little too much.
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Should you ever split up an Elemental Control?
For example, I'm working on a telepath PC with two low-cost powers and two higher-cost ones; at what point would it be better to keep them in a single EC or split the EC so that the low-cost powers get a low-point EC, and the high-cost powers get a higher-point EC (and thus a higher point savings)?
And - assuming that splitting up the EC frees more points... would you, as a GM, let a player get away with such a construction?
Boogiemen that are actually /scary/...
in Champions
Posted
Re: Boogiemen that are actually /scary/...