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Christopher R Taylor

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Everything posted by Christopher R Taylor

  1. He was active as two people at the same time, carefully never interacting, apparently. And none of that explains how the super soldier serum didn't keep him unaging, or at least very slow aging. Or make that movie any better.
  2. It doesn't really, since he was both frozen in the antarctic as Captain America for decades and also retired and growing old (??? somehow? The super soldier serum greatly inhibits aging) with Peggy Carter at the same time.
  3. My problem with this is that if it has no effect on a target... then it has no effect on the target. No knockback, either.
  4. Making a good knockback-only or knockback-focused power is difficult to do for any affordable price. Knockback is pretty powerful (it disrupts and moves a target away, requiring them to get up and get back to you, and can put them over cliffs, etc) so it does cost, but that hurts when you're playing a heroic setting where points are at a premium. Just play any computer game that has knockback and knockdown effects to see how very powerful it can be, and why its restricted so much in these games. Telekinesis only to throw costs quite a bit too (it takes 10 STR just to lift a person, especially in armor etc). I hesitate to bring this up, but flight or leaping usable as an attack can work if you totally control it, but you GM probably will not be very pleased with your build. You can stack all kinds of limitations on it like instant and only to throw, makes it pretty inexpensive.
  5. I am sure that the rules specifically say that stun only attacks do no knockback, but as a GM I would allow a power that is stun only to do knockback if it were bought to do knockback. After all, its the impact that does the knockback, not the lethal damage so its not inconceivable, its just not how the system normally works. You'd just count the Body as if it were being dealt to see if knockback occurs, even though no Body damage is done. Incidentally, different discussion, but this is why I think Stun Only should be a -¼ limitation: you're getting less for your points, don't do knockback, deliver no momentum (cannot push a button for example) and only in certain sorts of games is dealing no lethal damage a drawback. The drawbacks seem to outweigh the questionable benefits.
  6. Something worth considering is that very few Fantasy Hero settings have knockback as an activated option, most heroic campaigns use knockdown instead. After all, Conan doesn't knock his enemies flying through walls or down the street. So that's another advantage, jamming active cost up even more :/ Its implied in the concept, but not the mechanics; you get the limitation on Blast.
  7. I agree, Marvel has a lot of great content out, while DC has half a good movie in Wonder Woman and a handfull of great Batman content. While Marvel's latest stuff is no better than DC, they have more quality in their catalog. Aquaman 2 doesn't look particularly promising, but I thought the first one was pretty idiotic and boring and it pulled in over a billion box office so :/
  8. I would allow someone to buy "does knockback" on a heal, if they had a good reason but as Lonewulf points out, for that to take effect you'd have to heal the undead which is probably not what you mean to do. If this was allowed, you'd roll the healing dice, and count the Body as if it was a normal attack and calculate knockback from that.
  9. Marvel Cinema has a real problem because they were approaching their movies with the same sloppy, poor approach that has rocketed them to 9% of the US comic book market... when combined with DC. They were making movies by deciding on a character, then announcing the movie, then looking for someone to write and direct it based on a checklist of physical characteristics rather than experience, talent, and a love of the source material. They found the same formula that DC did with Superman, then just like DC abandoned it because they figured it was their brilliant leadership that resulted in the earnings. And everyone in the studio and Disney wanted a finger in the pie so they would get some of the credit for a billion dollar win and a cut of the profits. The result has been a disaster. They COULD have made new characters like She Hulk and Ms Marvel work, with better writing, directing, and planning, but were so sloppy and stupid at it the turned the most profitable franchise in movie history into a disaster. And for what? Not a love of comics or the medium, that's for sure.
  10. I always lock down to focus on one project at a time because I find I am too easily distracted and will shift around between 20 or so ideas and projects and get nothing really done. I don't listen to any music either, so I can concentrate better.
  11. Here's the thing. In an ordinary campaign, I would never as a GM allow a character to have a follower with more points than they have. But there could be a campaign I might design in which, for example, every player plays a sidekick*, and their "follower" is the main hero in the story. A campaign that focuses on being the sidekick and what they do, while the GM runs the main hero off doing main hero stuff, needing to be rescued, acting on leads you pick up, etc. Or a game in which you are the squire of a knight, or the guardian of a wizard. That's why there's no hard and fast rule: like almost everything in Hero, it depends. *I would link an obligatory The Tick episode with the sidekick lounge and the Mad Bomber What Bombs At Midnight but I can't find it on Youtube.
  12. The difficulty is that magazines are essentially dead (even Popular Science and National Geographic have closed down), and there's not a viable online alternative. Particularly with modern culture where short form video is all anyone has an attention span for.
  13. I have always enjoyed writing, but at the moment everything is on hold because we moved my elderly mother into the house and I have to attend to her more or less all day long. So no writing, no illustration, no publishing, and barely enough energy to finish a day. CS Forrester, the author of Horatio Hornblower once wrote that he would come up with ideas, then let them go fallow in his head. He likened it to lowering a log into the water of a sea and letting it build up plants and barnacles and such, then lifting it up after a time to see what grew while he was not paying it any attention. And I find that happens for me as well. So while I am not writing, somewhere in the back of my head its still working on plots and characters and dialog and descriptions and story structures and such. New things are coming up and I scribble them down because my memory isn't what it once was. Some day I'll get back to it and hopefully be richer as a creator for my experiences and the delay.
  14. That is how I understand it. Right, you use extra stats before you get to the character's personal ones. If someone Aided your BODY and you were stabbed by a deer's antlers, it would take Body away from the Aided amount first. Well you could still use the Aid but it wouldn't do anything until some has faded away, or you have used some END in actions. In that case it would top it off, again.
  15. Volcanoes are the most destructive terrestrial natural disaster imaginable. They include multiple other disasters as a package deal, AND have their own destruction. Krakatoa blotted out the sky so badly with debris that there wasn't really summer in the northern hemisphere for a year.
  16. This is of course the dilemma all writers face: eventually everyone who wants to has bought your book. Sure every year a few people age in that will be interested and maybe pick up a copy, but the initial flood tapers off rapidly. So you write more books, and people buy them, but for a game company the hard truth is that you have an absolute limit of how many books will sell. Hasbro's answer to that was to try the Microsoft model of renting books, thus ensuring ongoing profits, but absolutely everyone hates that and stomped all over it. Their previous answer was to keep putting out books, even if they were pointless or damaging to the game, just to get sales. And of course, new editions. Hero has resisted this: they put out a new edition when a new edition is called for, not just to mine sales. Game Designer's Workshop is based entirely around the "put out new versions" model. But the truth is, if you're only after profits, gaming is a terrible way to go about it. Put out stuff as a fan who wants to support the hobby, not as a businessman trying to make money.
  17. Plus, the MTG earnings are largely propped up by the speculative buying of the latest Lord of the Rings set which had a one ring card... one of them ... buried in a zillion packs. So speculators bought mountains of cards hoping to get the ring, driving up sales. Now that the ring has been found, the sales have dropped off significantly, and the entire controversy has driven players and buyers away. So you get maybe one year of sales that way then what?
  18. Its rare someone is beaten to unconsciousness in a normal setting without suffering at least some body damage. That, plus if you want it really realistic, impairing and disabling damage combined with hit locations gives you pretty effective long term damage. But not a lot of games call for that or are what players want to play. if you want real world "getting punched in the face takes weeks to recover from" you're probably not going to be playing role playing games. But consider: if you get up after a brutal fight and shake it off with a witty quip, or if you get beaten into a concussion that takes weeks to recover from, you aren't going to be going on adventures until you're healthy anyway, which takes place "off camera" so what's the difference in the end?
  19. The kind of players I like to have are the ones who show up on time and keep coming back for a long term campaign.
  20. Hasbro has all but killed MTG with its idiotic stunts and D&D doesn't look all that healthy these days, either. Role Playing Games will never really die, but they're entering Whist territory these days.
  21. The only holiday adventures I've ever done for RPGs is Halloween, I had a yearly Halloween one shot I'd do. I can only remember a couple but everyone had fun.
  22. Here is an older thread about starting up a champions adventure
  23. See, that kind of thing makes for a fresh take, or at least an unexpected take on disaster. You could do Ragnarok too, or a war between Greek gods, same kind of "not zombies again" approach.
  24. Yeah but most of the really important stuff is shielded and backed up, so as I understand it, while people would lose things like their phones, companies would still have the tech they need. It would be a significant disaster, but a recoverable one unless something else was also making problems.
  25. A gigantic solar flare EMP would be one part of a good apocalyptic disaster scenario. Its not enough to really destroy things (they'd get rebuilt fairly quickly) so you would need something else in addition, like a plague or a war or some cultural destruction like a movement to oppose technology to really seal the deal.
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