CandidGamera

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... I love this thread. From the same Mutants and Masterminds game as my previous. My character, Commander Nova, has been duplicated by a Fetch - basically a spirit who knows what I know and looks just like me. This Zombie Master fellow we'd only just discovered recently, magically bound, in a coffin, offers to help us in exchange for letting him go. He becomes very irritating. This goes on for a while - he finally points out that leaving him there is basically allowing an evil necromancer to have access to his vast Zombie Powers. Cmdr Nova (Me) : "Better the devil you don't know, than the devil you don't like." Zombie Master : "Oh, ow." We were trapped in a nether-realm between the land of the living and the land of the dead.. and our conclusion lead us to a graveyard, where there were stones with our names on them. The obvious conclusion was that we'd have to dig our way back to the land of the living. The cat-girl begins, using her natural talons, to dig her way home, her PC pantomiming the scraping of dirt. Me : "You should've thought've that before we left!"

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... I was in a tremendously fun Mutants and Mastermidns game this weekend. The GM is using the 'Middleton' setting form Omlevex - think Sunnydale, but moreso, if you're unfamiliar. Or Eureka, but for magic. Each of the players basically grabs one of the default templates and starts thinking of names, etc. One of the characters is a Dr. Prybylak, a Polish scientist researching Thanatology - and our first adventure contains his origin. His experiment backfires, transforming him into a revenant-type. The player is unable to come up with a 'superhero' name immediately, speculating it should be "Doctor" something. The explosion leaves him dazed, so he's stumbling around his lab, with clouded sneses, menacing anything unfamiliar in his path - such as my character, who'd arrived just in time for the big boom. I explain my presence to the dazed creature, and he doesn't quite grasp it - but his lab assistant, the third PC, does, and directs him to calm down, thusly : "Doc! Chill!" I and the Doctor's player kind of exchange a glance, and there's a great moment of synchronicity, as we both say : "Doc Chill!" And thus, his superhero name was born.

Re: Who are the top 5 most powerful characters in your Campaign. Been a while since I ran my Champions game, so it's hard to recall.. There was Ar'Nath, the Atlantean Wizard - the leader of a secret group of wizards; his spirit was unkillable. He was the big nemesis for the game. He possessed the body of an NPC teammate of the PCs for the bulk of his appearances. There was Meme, party NPC and living MacGuffin. He's the one Ar'Nath wanted to possess, but was prevented from acquiring. Meme is bonded to an astral nexus - he can affect and is affected by all human thought. In game terms, he cannot fully exploit this ability himself (though Ar'Nath could've) - he can duplicate skills of anyone nearby*; he has a Danger Sense; and he can tell by looking at an individual whether that individual is human or not. (Handy for seeing shapeshifters and aliens.) *(Nearby meant a varying radius, depending on how 'crowded' the local astral plane was. In a city like New York, he had an effective one-mile range before the background noise was too much to sort through.) Ar'Nath planned to possess him and use him to ascend to the Presidency. There was Paragon and Justicar - both aliens (Rigellian, I believe) modelled on J'onn J'onnz, Manhunter from Mars. The overall power level of the campaign was down a notch or two from four-color superheroics, so they were toned down a bit. There was a telepath, the name escapes me now, powerful enough to hijack a person's body - he was the only telepath capable of that feat. There was the White Russian, a dimensionally displaced Superman analogue, though similarly dialed back like Paragon and Justicar. (Ironically, the Russian had a vulnerability to heat based attacks, whereas Paragon and Justicar did not.) Breakdown, the world's most powerful telekinetic, capable of disintegrating matter with his mind. The enigmatic Mr. H is a definite top-five contender, though. A representative of a cross-dimensional corporation that took a passing interest in the campaign world. Never really got to show off his powers, but his direct inspiration was Hamilton of Wolfram and Hart from Angel, Season Five.

Re: MtG (Fallen Empires) Hero Conversion Wasn't the Ice Age sort of a sudden thing? I don't remember getting the sense they were 'preparing' for it - but it's been a while. I do recall the central theme of Fallen Empires was each color being its own worst enemy - Goblins and Orcs vs. Dwarves in red, for instance. There may even be an official map of Sarpadia somewhere..

Re: Wierdest powers...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From D&D, this weekend. All OOC. Eric : "It's the archetypical 'shooting ducks in a barrel.'" Me: ".. Fish. It's 'fish in a barrel.'" Eric : "You don't shoot fish in a barrel!" Me : "You don't shoot ducks in a barrel, they'd fly out!" That led to a amusing fifteen minutes or so, culminating in the following. Andy : "That was more fun than a barrel of parsley." Me : "Ah, that old cliche."

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Woo! With the new job, been far too idle on these boards for far too long. What better place to make a triumphant return than one of my favorite threads? I've been playing in a TORG game that just kicked off recently, and as the Nile Empire-based British Archaeologist, it's my job to deliver the pithy bon mots, a la James Bond. Some of these will only make sense to fellow TORG-ophiles. (after dumping our vanquished but still living enemies into the Croc-infested Nile, IC) "Shame they have to be going. I thought we got along swimmingly." (in regards to an NPC Russian Agent on our side who just kept getting back up after going unconscious, OOC) "He's Agent Weeble!" [later amended to 'Weeblovitch'.] (in reference to my successful use of a Reality Storm against a Cyberpapacy agent, in a small Dutch town, OOC) "The community of Middledam today reported a brief outburst of melodrama, downtown. Film at 11." (in reference to the same incident, IC) "Sorry, Reverend. You've just been excommunicated."

Re: Phantom Stranger Don't Ask is my favorite DC Heroes adventure ever, simply because it stars both Ambush Bug and the Phantom Stranger, my two favorite characters. Kid Spectre and Deadboy are amusing too. And where else can you get a Stat Block for Cheeks? (Cheeks has APs of Flying equal to the Strength of the character throwing him.) I don't recall whether or not When a Stranger Calls gives the Stranger a stat block, though. Sometimes the Stranger is regarded as a plot device and therefore unstattable, but the later DC Universe RPG's magic supplement gave him an entry, as I recall.

Re: Phantom Stranger

Re: Phantom Stranger Indeed, that's Doctor Occult - one of DC's oldest characters. He debuted a few years before Superman.

Re: Phantom Stranger Let me guess - "When a Stranger Calls"? I only know of two Stranger appearances in DC Heroes Adventures..

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From Origins. The Auditioners, run by CpSpaulding. A pal of mine was taking on the role of Barnraiser, Amish Pacifist Brick. He was ragging on the team's blind speedster - Speedbump - a little much, I felt. So I had to pipe in: "Wow, you're a Mean-onite!" There was also an excellent bit where we got to visit a Star-Trek themed German restaurant. We had rented out the entire place, and were seated as soon as we came in. As we received our menus, I was struck by inspiration. "I'll have the 'What Does God Need With a Bratwurst'." This prompted several other Star Trek themed German dishes from the rest of the table.

Re: Rifts HERO? Hmm. I came up with some conversion factor for the Credits based on a midpoint between two extreme examples.. I don't have the information handy, though. I'll have to check when I get home to see if I still have my notes.

Re: Campaign apocalypses: anyone ever done/been in one? I had a three-tier superhero campaign - really three linked campaigns in three eras - the overarching plot was Atlantean sorcerors trying to summon up the local equivalents of the Old Ones, bind them to their will, and take over the world. They performed the first part of the ritual in the first campaign, the second in the next, and finished it in the final one. The PCs got to take on Cthulhu's immense form, bound to the will of a sorceress, while other superteams dealt with the other two abominations. Pretty fun.

Re: Surely someone can do something with this: Oak Island Oak Island was on the shortlist of adventure ideas that I never outlined for my Third Eye Investigations game. If we'd gone another season, it would've been there.

Apologies if this has been discussed before in recent memory. What do folks do for power stunts in their Champions games? Personally, I treat it like a power push, if the stunt is logical. A character with an Electrical Blast wants to recharge a battery? Sure. Power push. If the active points of the stunt become important, I base them on the active points of the power. If it becomes a regularly used stunt, make them buy it. (Perhaps transforming the power into a Multipower in the process.)

Re: If You Had To Play a Marvel Character… Spider-Man appeals to the wiseacre in me, but the swashbuckler in me prefers Nightcrawler. Hercules would be another fun one. I don't feel he gets enough respect in the comics.

Re: If You Had To Play a DC Character… Blue Beetle. Ambush Bug. Oh, wait, that's the same as the ones I play on the LiveJournal roleplaying community I'm in. I like the funny ones.

Re: Time Traveller Knowledge - Precognition, KS, something else...? Time Traveller in my last Hero campaign - let him have a KS : Future Events skill. As he changed more history by his presence in the past, I would lower the skill and refund a few points.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Heh. The Tomorrow-Boy bits remind me of a player in my last HERO game, the Third Eye Investigations Superhero-Noir game. He was from the future, and had come back to change the past, and his schtick was future pop-culture references, which the player and I had fun inventing. "Hard to believe Keanu won the Oscar for MacBeth.." "I didn't think Jerry Bruckheimer's 'The Hobbit' stayed true to the books.."

Re: Andromeda done right as a campaign. The McGogg are their Irish cousins. They're a lot less destructive, till they get a few drinks in them.

Re: Rifts HERO? I guess I don't get why the Ley Line would be a Force Wall, nor do I get who would be paying the point cost for it..

Re: Thread necromancy! I'd say: "Pass. Good luck with that."

Re: Comics you loved...but apparently no one else did All hail the Ambush Bug. I love that DC Heroes module - finally managed to snag a copy. Kid Spectre's stats were also particularly memorable there. And Cheeks' APs of Flying equal to the Strength of the character throwing him.