Klytus

There's also the problem that Beast was A-OK so long as he was one of the Avengers, but when he's in an X-title, he's just another mutant. This is why the anti-meta human prejudice in my games is not limited to just the "mutants": normal folks have no way of knowing a mutant from a magician. Besides, its the powers that freak out the anti-meta bigots, not how they get them.

That sounds like Pocket Power: a 4'7" female vilain in my gameverse. Her powers are all psionic in nature, but it's stuff like range 0 TK and invisible force fields, so she appears to the world as the super-strong and super-tough brick.

My campaign tends to strike a balance with the whole "mutant-problem" issue. To the majority of the general pubic, mutants are "cool, neat and fascinating", but they are also regarded with fear. I mean, lets face it, folks who can shrug off bullets or toss cars are scary to behold! Governments tend to see mutants and metahuman as problems to be dealt with - after all, it is almost impossible for normals to contain most metahumans without the aid of other metahumans. There is, however, a very powerful minority that fears and hates all metahumans (and not just mutants) to the point of targeting them for extermination. So being a mutant or some other type of metahuman is a Distinctive Feature in my game, as there are those who can track you and will try to kill you simply because of that fact. But it is not the all-pervasive prejudice mutants face in the Marvel Universe.

Anybody remember the article by Dean Shomshak "How Far did Grond Throw You?" in AC #20? That gave some good alternate rules on throwing for distance. BTW, according to the article, Grond can chuck a small yacht, a lear jet and/or a garbage truck into orbit.

Is this the same chart that has Superman being able to throw a cheeseburger into the next galaxy?

In my campaign, there is Captain Champion, who fills the role of Superman/Captain America. Meta-humans have been on Earth since the Dawn of Time, only the world governments worked hard to keep their existance a secret - mainly to keep them under control. The Champion appeared in the U.S. in 1970, the first public super-hero in history. He isn;t so much for Truth, Justice and the American Way, but Truth, Justice and the American Dream. He is not only very powerful, but noble, heroic, friendly, ... all the things you'd want in a good role-model. Like Superman, he has inspired a whole generation of heroes to follow his example. He became known as Captain Champion when he actually joined PATRIOT (my version of PRIMUS) and was given the rank of captain to form the first govt. sanctioned super-hero team, the Champions. He is still active in the world, but it is always off in the sidelines so he does not overshadow the players or their exploits. I simply find having him there is useful for me: its gives the campaign a sense of history. It also fuels my nostalga, as I am a big fan of Supes, and wanted to have an iconic hero like him as the standard of what being a true hero is all about.

Reminds me of my very first Dark-Champions style character: Trenchcoat. This was in 4th Edition, and I built a mostly-normal dude with an armored trenchcoat & fedora as his costume, a shotgun, lots of points into a vehicle, and 70 PRE. His M.O. was to come crashing into a place in his car, blow someone away with his shotgun, then made his PRE attack, which thanks to modifiers was a least 14 dice. Since Trenchcoat was a vigilante targeting street-scum, this would leave all of his victims helpless with fear while he finished blowing them away. Once the GM saw just how gross this was, we ended the campaign.

Ack! This is all reminding me of mey VERY first Champs character, way back in the days of Champs II & III. This guy was so lame, I have apparantly blotted his name from my memory! I remeber he was a martial artist with a magical talisman that gave him enchanced senses and flight. I also remember that I didn't invest too many points in defenses or STUN, because I had such a high DEX and SPD, the whole idea was not to get hit. I trust you all see where this is going? No matter how much I dodged, aborted to dodge/dove for cover, this dude kept getting wasted! One shot would STUN me, then I'd get knocked into la-la land by someone else. I think this dude even lost to the Geodesics! But somehow, I can't help but feel even if I knew more about how to make a good character, this dude would STILL have been a failure - just like my poor Rolemaster half-elf in my previous post.

Oh I agree. I spent the past 2 days getting all caught up with it.

One Wee Lass in our Saturday D&D games once pulled off the statistically bewildering feat of rolling eight (8) 1's in a row! And this wasn't counting all the 1's she rolled while doing practice rolls to get the unluck ot of her dice! And then there was a half-eld character I once played in a Rolemaster game. I only got to play him once because while he had awesome stats, he must have been cursed with 10d6 of unluck - combat only. When playing this guy, I couldn't even run into a WALL on purspose. No matter how solid my defesnes, I was always getting hit and taking criticals, too. He met his ignoble death when I was using a pair of magic boot to fly up after a wizard. I got my leg cut off, and since boots only work in pairs, I plummeted about 30', adding further injury to injury. The icing on the cake was the fireball the wizard cast - which I, a recent unwilling ampute, was unable to dodge. The spell killed me. But on the plus side, the fireball cauterized that nasty leg wound

A trick from the ultimate mentalist: how about an Entangle based on ECV (+1) , Transparent to Physical Attacks (+¼), Works Against EGO, not BODY (+½) then toss in Mental Power Based on CON (-½). This might not hold your average brick for very long, but considering that a CON above 30 is rare, 6d6 of this type of Entangle can hold somebody still for a very long time. I'd suggest an additional Limitation to simulate how the effects wear off eventually.

The Masquerade is a rule that is spoken, written, and harped upon at every opportunity. It is the #1 rule in vampire society (well, at least one sect of vampire society). Violation of this rule is punishable by Final Death. Sorry I didn't expalin that in my post. But WhammeWhamme is right on the money about the fallout of this incident.

How could I have failed to post this sordid tale of epic stupidity? The game is Vampire:the Masquerade (yeah, most of my stories are from that game system - it's where we do most of our playing). Two of the characters in our group: Sid, a Nosferatu vampire (the ones who are ugly with a capital UGH and look like monsters) and Dennis were sharing an apartment. For reasons irrelevant to this story, they woke up one morning (er, evening rather) without blood and were ravenously hungy. When this happens to vampires, they go into frenzy, but it is still possible to exert some control over your actions. Dennis' player makes his Self-Control roll and says he wants to go out the back way into the alley. Sid's player, on the other hand, doesn't even bother rolling dice. He decides to ride the frenzy for all it's worth. "I'm going out the nearest and easiest exit. I guess that would be the window." Undaunted by the fact that it is two stories up, out he goes. After landing on the street, he says "I grab the first warm body I can find and feed from it." With a dark smile and evil chuckle (never a good sign!), the Storyteller obliges. When Sid regains his senses, he sees that the lifeless body in his hands is a uniformed police officer. Then he notices that he - having just gotten out of bed -is wearing nothing except his boxers. Looking up, he notices the half-dozen or so horrified witnesses who saw the whole thing. He realizes that he just broke the Masquerade big time! The second Sid looks up at them, the mortals all scream and run away in terror. Exercising the same calm and rational thought that got him into into this mess in the first place, Sid pulls out the cop's gun, and while waving it about cries out, "Wait! Come back! I can explain!"

Actually, *I* thought the best part was the response to my line of "this charming specimen of orchood." I think it was DocMan who said... "Now there's a set of words I never thought I'd ever see used in the same sentence."

I love his origin. Its entirely believable, his reactions are believable, he seems like a human being to me. All of which makes him all the more scary as a villain. Its easy to fight bad-guys who just want to steal everything or blow $hit up for no reason. But I feel for this guy. If I were a hero in your game, and knew about his past, I'd be spending as much time trying to save him as I would be in thwarting him.

Thing is, if you are the GM, you are unencumbered by point costs. I don't like this mechanic, though. This is more a representation of INVULNERABLE as opposed to unkillable. Besides of which, Desolidification doesn't do squat vs mental attacks, so an Ego Attack which does BODY damage would kill this dude nicely. MY take on Unkillable... Massive amounts of BODY, plus even more massive ammounts of BODY with the Lim: Only to Calculate the point of death. So You have an uber-villian with 50 BODY, but he needs to be reduced to -200 BODY to be slain. Add in scads of REC and Immortality Regeneration, and you have a foe who can be defeated, yet not (easily) killed.

The one villain that gave my players the heebie-jeebiez doesn't quite fit into any of the standard archetypes... though I guess hes best defined as a mystic. The Elementals (in my campaign) are a group of ... wait for it... elemental creatures. They are lead by Void - an utterly silent creature who looks like a human silouette carved out of the fabric of reality. He has one mental attack, an Ego Attack where the SFX is filling your mind with emptiness. What makes him truly ugly, though, is that he is always Desolid, but his STR and Drains (one is a 5d6 Drain vs BODY, the other a 3d6 Drain vs All Powers of All SFX) can affect the Real World. Unless you have magical power FX (which most of our players do not) he's untouchable. I think it is simply the effect of the silent and unstoppable foe that creeps the players out.

I was thinking about this, but then I realized that we already built the coolest (IMHO) mystical villain of all on this board. Let me jog your colelctive memories: Torquemada.

Thanks, Shrike. I hope like my next quote just as well, though. I change my sig line every month, and I noticed that on these boards it changes that sig on all the old posts as well. So, it would kinda look silly for you to have to retract your praise because you find my next tag line less than lovable

Personally, I'd just remove COM as a stat and replace with a Perk and/or Disads. In our games, almost all the femal characters who buy their COM over 20 (and most of them do) also take the Distinctive Feature DIsad: Very Beautiful - Difficult to Conceal, Extremee Reaction.

In a Champs game I ran in college, one of our players had a mentalist who was known as "Genius". This fellow wouldn't know humble if it was Grond giving him a haymaker. He was not easy to get along with. He found fault with everyone and made sure they knew how he felt about their flaws. Genius was a hero because he was so full of himself, he believed that he was the only one smart enough and capable enough to protect humanity from the consequenses of its own stupidity. Naturally, he eventually "turned to the dark side". He'd gotten so fed up with human idiocy, he reached the point where he felt that they were no longer worthy of his protection. They were suckers to be exploited, not sheep to be guarded. He was a very straight-forward criminal: he simply used his powerufl mind control to force banks to give hime large amounts of cash. So great was his contepmt for law enforcement and super-heroes, he had no worries about being caught. But even when he was a villain, he never lost his Code Vs Killing. To his mind, only idiots needed to kill, and he was not an idiot.

That all depends on style. Pantera can at least pass for human in certain circumstances. Ocelote is a cat-man, and there is no disguising that. If you want dangerous, you can't do much worse than Pantera: 2d6 HKAs which are 4d6 with STR added and a Find Weakness 14- with them! Never mind her SPD 7 & DEX 35... The Ocelote had a (IMHO) cheesy 40 pt Limitation: Dependence 3d6/segement on his magical amulet. Yeah, he'd die if you removed it, but 1) you'd have to rip it off of him, 2) there is no reson to do that, as it isn't a Focus, and 3) unless you're playing Dark Champions, no one is even going to try.

True. But there are few things more disheartening than getting screwed over by an idea you gave to the GM.

Re: Re: The NCM Debate Yes, the NCM is there, and worth 20 points. Only thing is, no one in my gaming groups wants to come anywhere near the fool thing! I use the 20-30 benchmarks as a guildeline (but not a strait-jacket) on character concept. You want a DEX above 20? Why? Simply being a mutant energy-projector isn;t a good enough reason. Want a DEX in the high 20s? This is fine if you're a martial artist or speedster type. Want DEX over 30? Not gonna happen unless that kind of DEX is as important to the character concept as STR over 30 is to a brick. P.S. Go Superman!

I agree 100% about Aquaman. As far as strength goes, I remember a slug-fest between Namor and the Thing, and the Thing lost. A big deal has always been made over namor's strength, while the one thing you hear most about Arthur is his aquatic telepathy - but he's pretty frickin' strong, too. As was hashed out in Amalgam, the two are dead-even when it comes to Stats and combat skill, but Arthur has the edge over Namor with his ability to summon sea-creatures to help. I'd go with Aquaman.