Kevin Schultz

Re: WWYCD: The Life Pod Jake the Troll - We've already established that she's hot, so he'd go on the Jake Richards Color Theory of Hot Chick Morality. Is she wearing black? If not, then she's ok. Jake can get away with this because he is Myth Made Manifest - his own nature warps reality around him to match up with Myth, Story, and Legend. Thus, this theory actually works when he's around. Shinji Miromoto - would examine the Dark around her, and try to ferret out her fate and destiny via passive magics - if said dimensional energy is freaking out, then he'd advise the UNTIL folks about it. Otherwise, he'd leave it in their hands. Icon - Emma would probably be on the UNTIL crew itself, if only as one of their metas. She'd go with what her training suggested.

Re: Humans are "Special" The two series I think of when I hear this question are the following: Uplift - where the main 'human' ability is that they evolved naturally, and thus are culturally predisposed to find their own answers as opposed to just looking it up in the Great Library. The Dammed - a series by Allen Dean Foster, where humanity's ability is their barely-contained violence and lack of empathy. This makes them excellent soldiers, as well as being functionally immune to mind control. And, as a previous poster mentioned, they're the second-best long distance runners, behind the wolf-like species.

Re: [Character] Dozer Hm...I see no mention of Gobo, nor the innate need to manufacture structures out of an edible radish compound. This, sir, is no Doozer. Kevin "Cast your cares away, woories for another day!" Schultz

Re: Regeneration/Healing Another thing to remember is that, in terms of game mechanics, Regeneration (Healing+Always On+Extra Time+ Regeneration Only) really isn't a very efficient damage mitigation tool: it's 20 active points per level of Body healed every Turn. Yeah, the limitations get it down to 7 points or so Real, but that's still going to run into campaign caps fairly quickly. (4 BODY/turn = 80 active). Also, most Champions fights last only a couple of Turns; the ability to heal is mainly a way to limit down-time between fights, rather than to help IN a fight. Finally, in most Champions games, STUN is more important than BODY. Probably a better "model" of regeneration-as-defense would be an insanely high STUN and REC, and a moderate PD/ED (as others have suggested, to "heal fast"). A another option would be as follows: SPD 4 - represents your normal speed. SPD 4 (Only to take full-phase recoveries) Insubstantial (Always On, Only when taking Full-Phase Recoveries, only to prevent being inturrupted while taking a full-phase recovery, can still be hit.) That last bit is a bit of GM handwavium to represent the fact that the character automatically 'rests', and retrieves his full-phase REC bonus, even if someone is hitting him. Note you'll have to watch this build fairly closely - especially if the character has a moderate level of PD/ED and a high CON, it's concievable that many opponents simply can't do enough damage to get through his REC. It's actually for reasons like this that I believe Regeneration is costed the way it is (post-12 phase recovery only) - the way I describe it above, it may get too good, too fast.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Yes, the ED (enhancement diversification) cap still exists. It's just easier to reach with Inventions than it was with TO/DO/SO enhancements. That's the main value for split Invention enhancers; normally, most people slotted for hitting the cap in 1 thing: damage, hold duration, debuff, or whatever. That would take 3 slots; the remaining 3 would be slotted with Acc/End/Rech, or some combo. with split enhancers, you can reach or get near that cap with multiple enhancement types.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game On the CoH forums, Arcanaville has done some very interesting and in-depth mathematical analysis of the scrapper secondaries. One of the interesting points she makes is that /regen isn't actually the best in general: dark armor is. It's just that for SOLOing, yes; regen is better. Dark Armor actually does better in groups, but is more difficult to play. They both blow Reflexes and Invinciblity out of the water, though.

Re: Your character gets 50 points for a base Jake the Troll - Under the Mountain, baby! Just call me Mr. Underhill. Huh? Oh, yeah, that's totally a Tolkien rip, isn't it...Anyway, it would rock! And he could have his friends over, and maybe he could convince a valkyrie (if he could ever find one) to scope out his pad when his parents weren't there. Shinji Miromoto - Super Interdimensional Fortress JX Alpha. In his case, it really WOULD be an interdimensional fortress, probably off in a stabalized portion of the Dark Dimension. The Dark Congress has some schematics of such bases, but they tend to be tied to the life energies of the builder, and as such violates the Evil Overlord principle of "Never design a base that will self-destruct upon my own demise." Icon - Eh, probably just a nice office near Quantico. She's got federal connections, so she really doesn't NEED her own base.

Re: What if the Justice League was really a league? I believe sports leagues are self-contained; they're self-policing and exist independently of the government. for example, the current football league in america was originally two separate leagues, up intil a couple of decades ago. That's what the Superbowl originally was - the two leagues battling it out, to see which one was the best. While some leagues are large enough to have significant political clout in cities to the point of pressuring local government to grant them tax breaks and whatnot, I don't think there's any specific laws regarding a given league having a monopoly on a specific sport. That's also why people sometimes set up competing leagues: you can see this happening a lot more in martial arts and boxing than in (say) baseball, though.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game After playing around with the latest issue, I've ended up suspending my account again. It's not that I don't like the implementation of Salvage or Inventions: I do. It's just that Iv'e got 5 lvl 50 toons (1 of each primary hero AT), and 5 more up-and-coming ones. I've determined that the rates for Rare pieces of salvage are extremly low; I think maybe I've got 8 total over the last month of play, playing 2-6 hours a day. Which means it takes extreemly long to build IO's; not to find the recepies, but rather to either 1. find that 1 piece of salvage, or 2. build up the 2-5 million influence it takes to purchase that piece of salvage. I think there's an option in the task forces to get a piece of rare salvage, but I'm really not in the mood to do that 50+ times per toon. That's just too much work, IMO. I'll come back later when the dust has settled, to see if they've come up with anything that works better for me.

Re: Make everyone fight at your level... a heroic fighter in a supers world. I think the issue is that buffing him into superhuman levels only covers STR and DEX (and the associated PD/ED) - it doesn't cover using superpowers against him. Specifically, it doesn't cover, say, using telepathy, or insubstantability, or Teleportation, or anything else that isn't directly countered by traditional kung fu maneuvers. And once you start getting into powers that can cancel THAT out, you've effectively destroyed the character concept of "normal trained martial artist that can debuff people down to his level".

Re: Make everyone fight at your level... a heroic fighter in a supers world. Oh, right - yeah, I keep on forgetting the name of Desolid/Insubstantial in HERO. You'd have to get GM handwaving for people to not use Affects Desolid on you,though. In terms of Attack,I'd probably use Surpress [any superpower, 1 at a time (+1/4), Only to tone it down to Non-superheroic levels (-1/2), Extended Effect (2x), Autofire (+1/2), Penetrating (+1/2)] - and define it as "hitting certian vital Chi points". Purchase up a high OCV for this one attack (perhaps actually IN the superheroic range), and you've got a viable, but probably balanced, power. This has the advantage of making it a non-trivial task to use the power on someone, as you need to hit them multiple times for the effects to take place. However, once they DO get into HtH combat with the individual, they can fairly rapidly have their powers drained.

Re: Make everyone fight at your level... a heroic fighter in a supers world. Option that I haven't seen yet: Insubstantial is currently the 'default' power that can describe invunerabilities to certian effects. So, in theory, you could describe his power as the following: 1. Insubstantial, with "non-superheroic abilities" defined as its weakness. 2. STR, with the Affect Real World enhancer on it. The SFX is literally "Kung Fu" - which actually means "great accomplishment". This is a technique that allows him to test his own great accomplishments (ie, his training) fu against others. EDIT - wait, that only gives you the invunerability, not the other part...dang. Although that begs the question: this build makes the individual immune to superpowers, but not against indirect uses; someone could still drop a building on his head, or kill him with knockback-induced trauma. It also doesn't make him immune to being shot with an assualt rifle.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? The Pilgrim of Hate - one of the Brother Cadfael episodes. I originally saw them on PBS, and really liked them at the time. For some reason though, they don't seem to stand up on a repeat viewing.

Re: Duo I'd personally recommend avoid buffing anything that deals with DC's, CV, PE/ED, DEX, STR, or other common problem areas. The reason for this is that most games are set up so that it's relatively easy to cap your core competency: having a max STR or maxed DEX isn't really that hard, and having a sub-optimal STR or DEX that only increases in a certian circumstance really isn't that very efficient. (yeah, I know - it's not all about min-maxing. Still...) Thus, instead of going "deep" (ie, improving your core competency), I'd recommend going "wide" - having a variety of minor powers that don't infringe on someone else's schtick, but represent things that you wouldn't normally purchase, but now can get at a reduced cost. Some examples: "Back To Back" - Combat Maneuvers I-IV, Only when within 1 hex of my ally (-1) "Right behind you, chum!" Teleportation 1", Single floating location [my ally] (3 active points), must move through intervening space (-1/2), only to cover maximum NCM distance in 1 phase (-1) "Expert Coorination" (+5 Teamwork, only with specific ally -1) "Nice shot, old Bean!" (+5 Single Ranged Attack, PSL Only -1/2, only on a teamwork roll -1) "You're the best partner EVAR!" Luck 3d6, Only to Assist Ally (-1) "I know you better than I know myself" (Telepathy, suface thoughts only, only to predict what target is likely to do)

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Word Wars - a documentary about tournament scrabble players. Interesting enough, but I think I prefer my documentaries to be a bit heavier in facts and whatnot; lately, the ones I've watched mainly just follow people around and show what they do. Millenium Actress - an anime about a guy putting toegether an interview/documentary about a famous (fictional) actress's career from the 1930's-1960's. It does a really good job of mixing her memories of her childhood with her memories of making movies, and how they intertwine and flow between the movies and the memories and the action taking place in the interview itself. A Very Long Engagement - a very French quasi-fantastical movie about a woman seeking to know what really happened to her fiance during WWI. While I find Audrey Tautou an attractive woman (and holy, crap, was that just Jodi Foster?), I'm finding her acting style of determined-yet-innocent girl to grate after a while. The movie itself was well-filmed, though

Re: The Hero Forum's Hottest Man in Comics. I do admit that Mr. Jackman is indeed a handsome man.

Re: CHAR: The Hellrider (Witness my unbridled munchkinry) Mien Eyes! MIEN EYES!

Re: The Hero Forum's Hottest Man in Comics. Hm...in the "I'd like to look like that" school of judging appearance? I'd go with Mid 20's Peter Parker, as well. Nightwing has a similar look IMO, but for some reason I prefer the S-man.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. Normals have a SPD of 3, Heroes have 6. This is to reduce headaches for me, as I'm actually a novice GM. DEX, like any other characteristic, is considered a power, and thus falls under the campaign max: base 40, boostable up to 50 via other powers. Those who are paying attention to this have DEX of 23; those who aren't tend to have DEX of 12 or 15. If it's your core concept power, it can be 60, boostable up to 80. No one is currently doing this.

Re: WWYCD: Dead Enemies are no fun. Shinji Miromoto - probably has evidence of Dark Taint at the scene; he would immediately point out that there is an entire organization of people who exist, with the exact same power set as he, who would be charitibly described as "ethically-challenged". He'd also call up said organization, and explain that someone is being terminally stupid with their powers, and would they please send over a laywer, thank-you-very-much. Icon - someone shanked the Bucaneer? She'd roll her eyes, assume he was just being petty about something, but she'd turn herself into the Argus City Special Case Squad, and would be back out on the streets in less than a day. Jake the Troll - Not in a campaign where this would occur.

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game Re: salvaging - anyone can do inventing. It's mainly an issue of getting random drops by doing missions, and selling/trading the salvage you need in order to make various "recepies" - a recepie is basically a list of stuff you need to build the specified enhancement, temp power, or whatever.

Re: Character Backgrounds I think I may approach character background from a different way. Usually there's something I want to be able to do in-game, and thus I design a character around that ability; at that point, I end up looking at the character and say to myself, "would this be interesting to play or tell a story about? If so, what would that story be?" And then I start writing from there. But I do agree that for me, the two feed off each other.

Re: The Composite Superman I always figured that playing someone with super-intelligence would kind of like playing a Chaotic Neutral Cthullu worshipper; we, as players, cannot understand the thought process of someone that smart, and thus their actions look extremely foolish and/or neigh-incomprehensible.

Re: Modern Age vs Silver Age Historically, it's similar to asking "when did the Renisaiance start?" While it's useful to have a general year down, pointing to the specific act of carving the doors of a certian church in italy really isn't all that useful except for getting a good grade on a high school history exam. Literature, like other forms of art, tends to build on itself. Seminal works or events may epitomize an era or be a landmark, but they're rarely "the start" or "the end" of anything. At best, they're useful abstractions.

Re: Modern Age vs Silver Age Godlike as Golden Age? Nope - It's set in the 1930's, but that doesn't make it Golden Age any more than me writing a story set in Ancient Greece makes me Aristotle. Ages in comics refer to the themes, styles, issues, and conventions. They don't refer to the time period that the story is set. It is certiany true that many stories written DURING that time period reflect the age, though.