Ockham's Spoon

Re: Dungeons, suitable for crawling or delving? You might also check out http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/DungeonMaps/One_Page_Dungeon which has a wide variety of dungeons summarized in one page (they run a contest each year). The brevity means nothing is fleshed out, but it has some nice maps and great ideas.

Re: Faery Kin (Balance) & Rules You really just need to decide what you want faery kin to be like and make a racial template for it. Sure a small character will have a high DCV, but they will have to pay for it and so will have fewer points for other things, so it should balance out. How do you envision faery kin in combat? Do they use magic mostly or regular (though small) weapons? Can their small weapons inflict normal damage, and if so why? Do they use magic/poison to make their tiny weapons do more damage or make the target fall asleep? Is the STR of faery kin limited, or could one of them pick up a normal human and fly around with them? Do they take more damage from physical attacks do to their size, or does their magic nature make them as tough as a much larger human? There are no wrong answers as long as they fit your conception, but you just need to define what the faery kin can and cannot do, and then build their racial template accordingly.

Re: Jokes Okay I would rep you for the antics at Target if I hadn't just repped you for the leprechaun joke. Thanks for the laughs

Re: Reason for creating team. My favorite way to get a team together is pick the PC that is most likely to want to have a team, whether its because of moral imperative, vengence, mutual protection, or whatever, and talk with the player. If you can convince one of the players to recruit the team it takes much of the burden off of you and makes for some good role-playing. All you have to do is provide encounters so that the heroes can meet eachother under circumstances conducive to cooperation and then let the PC do the heavy lifting. If none of the players are willing or none of the PC's have the appropriate personality, you can also try having an NPC bring them together for reasons of their own, someone like Professor X or Nick Fury. Write the NPC into each character's background as a trusted or respected figure and have them call the hero up. Personally I find that having a non-powered or low-powered NPC founding the group works best so the PCs don't get upstaged. If the NPC is wealthy, it also gives the heroes a way to get a base without having to raise their own money.

Re: Stalker Chick Or you could just take any villain that strikes your fancy, male or female, and use the character sheet for your stalker. Just change the name and Complications and possibly tweak a couple of of her powers, especially if you change the sfx. It sounds like you have an idea about the personality and background already, so use that in place of or to compliment the existing background. I love writing up new characters, but I recycle character sheets like this all the time for the sake of expediency.

Re: What do charges cost? I was going to chime in, but Chris Goodwin pretty much covered what I was going to say, so just read his post again.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. I didn't realize that Ruma was a woman at first either, but as noted earlier given the context many people probably would mistake her for a man, especially if she is supposed to be squared-jawed and muscular. You might try giving her a braided ponytail or something similar which would be a more feminine hairstyle, an probably more practical too. Nice artwork in any event.

Re: Order of the Stick Maybe I my caffeine levels are too low to pick up on this, but why did Redcloak go to so much trouble to cover up Tsukiko's death (having the wights eat her and then each other with the last one immolating itself) only to casually mention it to Xykon the next time they meet?

Re: Jokes A little esoteric there, but it made me smile

Re: Order of the Stick As much as I hate to see the Resistance crushed, from a storyline perspective it is a good plotting. Despite the valor and competence of the Resistance, they are still out-witted and out-gunned by Redcloak, which establishes him as that much more formidable a foe. It will only make his confrontation with the OotS that much more dramatic, and the OotS are the main protagonists, not the Resistance.

Re: One for the purists Its funny that you say falling damage is a bit steep, because it isn't actually as dangerous as it probably should be. Sudden deceleration is pretty traumatic, and should probably be some kind of NND attack that does BODY, but for the sake of cinematic play we don't usually do that. Still your point is valid, since it is a simple way to dispatch with an enemy by levitating/teleporting/throwing them into the air and letting them drop to the ground. Falling time and injury in comics and movies is so ambiguous that I think the GM would be well within his rights to fudge it in a game if it makes dramatic sense.

Re: Hitting 'Til It Hurts The Move Through analogy is a nice idea, but I think you have to factor the defenses of the target into the equation. No one is going to break their hand punching Mr. Fantastic, but they might if they hit Thing full force. For super hard characters I would make them pay for a damage shield. But if you want to apply this for a martial artist trying to punch through a brick wall or to a brawl in a fantasy tavern where someone is wearing plate armor then you would need some kind of guideline, like using the Move Through damage as suggested earlier.

Re: Damage Negation! Damage Negation is great for representing invulnerability, and for this reason alone it should kept around. I also like it at low levels to represent toughness; currently I am using it in a campaign for non-automaton undead (vampires and such). As Sean pointed out, it means more BODY damage gets through than with regular defenses, but it makes it hard to stun or knock out the monsters, so the heroes are more likely to kill than KO, which is just what I want. It also means that "mystic" weapons designed to kill undead are easy to make: just throw on a few levels of Reduced Negation. In my case it is easy to remember to use DN because in any given fight a fair fraction of the combatants have it. If I only had one hero that I had to keep track of that might be more problematic. The other issue with DN is attacks with advantages, and that is more problematic. My recommendation is that you keep a chart handy to scale the attacks appropriately. If not, you can fudge it a bit; a +¼ advantage won't change the attack, a +½ drops it by a third, and a +1 by half. For low levels of DN it won't make that much difference.

Re: How would you write up this acrobat in 5th or 6th Edition? Quite an impressive stunt. I can't ride a regular unicycle let alone do juggling tricks on one. I have to wonder how many hours (years) of practice it took to be able to do it. __________________________________________________________________________________ "One of the most effective forms of birth control is the unicycle." - Demetri Martin

Re: Destroy Your Geek Cred!! What establishes geek cred anyway? There is so much out there: comics, movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc. that no one could possibly keep up with all of it, so if you have never seen Dr. Who or read The Hobbit that just says to me that you were busy with other stuff. And is hating Jar Jar Binks make you a pure geek because you think Lucas screwed up his own vision, or does liking Jar Jar make you even more completely geeky because if it is Lucas it has to be good? To my mind, watching Star Trek doesn't make you a geek. Learning Klingon does. It is a matter of how absorbed you become in fantasy worlds that determines your geek-level. I have never been in the hip crowd to be sure, but I think I officially stopped being a geek when I had kids and didn't have time for it anymore.

Re: Order of the Stick Only if Redcloak thinks to cast the spell. Depending on how he finds out, he might just chalk the whole thing up to another random attack by the Resistance and not investigate fully. So the secret might be safe, but the Resistance can't really bank on it.

Re: The Cage Opens Nonviolent doesn't necessarily mean defenseless. Sure the aliens will be taken off-guard at first, but then they would finds ways to de-fang humanity. I see a couple possibilities. First, they could offer economic/diplomatic perks to humans that agreed to join their peaceful society. Lots of people would likely jump at the chance, not just for prosperity but because peace is an ideal much of humanity strives for even today. Second, they could make humans peaceful. This might be through some sort of mind control (mental, technological, or medical) or done by unleashing a wildly contagious retrovirus that would literally change humanity into another peaceful society.

Re: Psychic Flashes The info the hero gets from the flashes is useful, plot point or not, so I think he should pay a little something for it. In my campaigns where I have a psychic that has visions for the sake of advancing the plot or building tension, I usually build it as KS: Random Events for 3 points. That is much cheaper than a Clairsentience build and accomplishes the goal of giving the heroes the info they need when the GM wants to give it to them.

Re: The Treasure Thread Repped for you. And me. A crown that is a double-edged sword too. Nice

Re: Multiple reduced penetrations I think that Reduced Penetration is really what you want here. Dividing the attack into two parts does not mean it actually consists of two smaller attacks, it just reflects the fact it doesn't penetrate armor very well. A tiger's claws would reasonablly be built with RP, not because a tiger has only two claws but because the damage comes from multiple relatively shallow cuts instead of a single, deeper slash like you would get from a sword. Similarly, buckshot can't go through armor easily so RP is very appropriate, not because there are only two pellets but because the effects of RP fit the sfx well.

Re: Adult Entertainment I am thinking that it would be difficult to have a magazine that focused on naked metahumans because your source material would be limited. In the real world there aren't magazines dedicated to only naked actors (that I know of), and although I am sure it is a sales boost to Playboy when they get a celebrity to bare all, that is hardly their bread and butter. So really you could come up with any plausible porn mag name and just let them feature supers when they can rather than being wholly dedicated to it. Or have a magazine dedicated to supers that has fantasy spreads with naked models playing the parts of the supers for most issues but with an occasional photo shoot with an actual metahuman; I won't try to top the names that have already been posted for that case.

Re: Only Breathe's Through Skin Well that is an interesting point. I wrote "choke hold" but really meant any attack intended to cut off the air supply by restricting the windpipe. I don't know if strangle holds are mechanically different enough to warrant an exception. Sure they might impede the blood flow, but in the short term that is primarily important because the brain needs oxygen which they might be able to absorb through the skin on their heads (although I guess brains tend to be pretty oxygen-hungry organs so that might not be enough).

Re: Only Breathe's Through Skin I would buy them the Automaton power No Hit Locations, Only for choke holds (-2) for 3pts and give them a Physical Complication: Skin must be uncovered to breathe (Infrequent, Affects Greatly, 15pts).

Re: Immunity to Psychic Powers For what it is worth, I asked Mr. Long a while ago about using Damage Negation for Mental Invulnerability, and although it doesn't cover mental Entangles, it does affect powers like Telepathy and Mind Control (subject to GM decision though, so a chemical like sodium pentathol might still work on a psychic null even if regular Mind Control didn't). The problem with Mental Invulnerability is that there are so many effects that could have mental sfx that no single defense would cover all of them unless the GM allows a pass with a custom Desolid or Automaton rule. The best thing to do might be for the GM to rule that all mental powers must be bought so that they are affected by Mental Defense. That way your psychic null can just have a high EGO and high Mental Defense (Resistant, Hardened, Impenetrable, etc.) to cover all the bases.

Re: Unususal premises for Superteams