Law Dog

Let me share some of my ventures into what may be considered getting close to the line by some (and perhaps snickered at by many as being rather timid).

One of my 70's villains was Kung-Fu Smith. The name is a blantent swipe at Black Belt Jones http://us.imdb.com/Title?0071221 which stared Jim Kelly who was also in Enter the Dragon. It was classic Blaxploitation. He was basically an African-American martial artist with an attitude. His partner was Disco Pirate (who was Caucausian) and had an odd mixure of Disco and Pirate accoutrements including his vibrocutlass. Needless to say, both were basically street level villains.

I have a Chinese villain from the 80's named the Collective. Duplication with shrinking and a multipower to simulate some very interesting effects(He falls apart into a hundred little martial artists).

I have a group of Mormon based villains named after verses in the Book of Mormon. I stole the idea from Bill Willingham who had a televangelist create a team of "heroes" in the Elementals universe based on the same same concept using the Bible. This one fit in really well with the "Avatar" concept that my game was based around with extra-dimensional Patrons choosing human representatives.

I had a group of college students in an accident at a physics lab gain powers and call themselves rather tongue-in-cheekly "The Misfits of Physics". I don't remember them all, but one of them could cause matter to disassociate along it's molecular faults. I called her Cleavage, and of course, she had a large chest. The only other team memeber I can remember is Steadfast, who could cause matter to come to rest in relation to other matter.

Well, those are my faux pas.

Originally posted by Acroyear

 

It's mostly parody, though. Making fun of stereotypes we've either lived with or been accused of having. They never really last long, just when the campaign takes a humorous turn for a while. Typically, it only works when you don't have a Captain Whitebread around and, of course, group comfort levels. We're kind of beyond taboos...

Thanks for all that campaign goodness, Acroyear. I'm wondering do you ever fear that the campaign will accidentally tip too far into humor when such characters arrive ala The Savage Dragon (which I know somebody will disagree with, but to me, that comic is just one overly long joke) or past that into the land of The Tick?

I can definitely see where being overly sensitive to PC can cause as many problems as being blantantly racist. In fact, since somebody found seasbaby's superfriends site yesterday ( http://www.seanbaby.com/ ), you can see how by trying to include some diversity, they actually made a mockery of their newly created heroes. Black Vulcan (in the long standing tradition of putting Black before the name of an African-America hero), Apache Chief (was he really a chief?), Samurai (I wasn't aware the wind powers and invisibility were samurai powers, always though of that more along the lines of mystical ninjas), and El Dorado (did he have a Midas touch that he never revealed?), on top of being poorly named, they were insulting. Of course all the characters were pretty stupid on the show.

What is pretty amusing is the original core group was pretty diverse. They had two white, New Jersey males (Batman & Robin), A Kryptonian raised in Kansas (Supes may have looked Caucasian, but he is an alien), A half-Atlantian from Atlantis (Fishman) and Wonder Woman was a clay statue imbued with life and raise in a quasi-Greek fashion on Paradise Island. We're not just talking racially diverse, we're talking species and culturally diverse.

What about Atom Smasher (nee Nuklon), who I know is Jewish and I believe Marathon from Strikeforce: Moritori was also.

And, of course, in the hearts of Seigel & Shuster, Superman was, too.

Re: Re: Ethnic stereotyping in heroes and villains

Originally posted by winterhawk

Funny you should cite both of these examples.

I swear, Winterhawk, I'm beginning to think we may be two alternate personalities. First the "Phillip" story and now this.

The question is What level of stereotyping are you comfortable with in you game.

I don't think that anybody is going to disagree that making a villain called Blood Nazi and making him a sadistic killer is going to offend anybody, but how comfortably would you be in your game with concepts or names that bordered on what some folks would classify as racist/sexist/homophobic/ect?

Probably nobody would be too awful offended by an Irish character named "Lucky Lass" with luck manipulation and shamrocks on her green costume, but how comfortable would you be with a Mexican character that could shoot out a slippery substance and called himself Greaser?

How about an openly gay villain that was what is called in the homosexual community a queen? Some folks will argue that this is bad since all homosexuals aren't this way, but some are. These same folks might argue that making an African-American, or for that matter a person of African decent, a villain is a bad stereotype.

The line I had to draw in my game was a guy who wanted to play a hero called the Klansman. Unlike the Klansman from Kingdom of Heroes, this guy was a Klansman as in Ku Klux . . .

He wore a white outfit that was reminicent of the KKK robes and caried a staff that turned into a flaming cross. I told him no (although wouldn't mind using such a character as one of the warped "heroes" that a hero team have to stop from doing something criminal).

So, what goes too far for your campaign and do you conciously censor yourself on matters of race or other social identifiers when designing heroes and villains?

Here's the link to those pages. Funny stuff.

http://www.seanbaby.com/super.htm

1st edition was indeed intimidating. With all the acronyms and words like "pip", if you didn;t have somebody to teach it to you, it was like learning a foreign language. The font they used on the first edition also made it look more like a technical manual than an RPG.

Originally posted by Blue

c) something demeaning to the individual like "Lawdog Lolita" or "Guardian Gidget".*

 

 

 

Hey, now. Law Dog is nobodies Lolita.

Originally posted by Doug McCrae

With everything on a -5, how did they manage it? Golden Paladin must've been a monster of points efficiency.

Well, a monster something anyway..

With his one charge armor and one charge sword, I'd say he way definitely a one shot wonder. Man, somebody taps your armor for a 1pip stun attack and it poofs. I let their attacks past right through his armor and no damage after the first attack with the sword.

Originally posted by Dr. Rune

That someone was Sally Field....and, yes, it was before my time too.

 

Doc

But the New Gidget from 80's syndication wasn't.

Oh, the Horror!

Originally posted by Uncle Shecky

"Jailbait" was my first thought too. The media knows she's actually 19, but I could imagine a newspaper running her picture with the headline "JAILBAIT?"

 

So it's technically incorrect, but I think it would stick.

And that's all it takes to get the media stuck on something.

Jailbait.

Heh.

Originally posted by winterhawk

Are you my twin? A chronal duplicate of me? A clone?

 

I could have told this story with 'the names changed to protect the goofball'.

I'm an alternate personality. Check the IP address. It's YOURS!!!!

Que Twilight Zone music . . . .

On a more serious note . . . I guess there is a limited number or player personalities out there and when certain combinations get together, similar actions occur.

We were looking for new playing in an old fashion 250 game back around '91. My friend put up file card at the local game store and got a call from a guy named Phillip. My friend said he didn't think this guy was going to work out because he sounded like a grade-A paste-eater on the phone, but I figured we might be wrong (Axiom #1: Go with your gut). Phillip shows up for the supers game with one of the characters that ticks me off to no end, the displaced D und D character. Two main reasons I loathe this particular type of character, 1) It's trite and shows an inherent lack of imagination for a supers game and 2) everybody I've ever seen playing this type of character has always played it badly. So Phil (I tend to shorten up peoples names whether they want me to or not), hands me this "Golden Paladin" with limitations on the armor and sword like 1 charge and independant. He had managed to get everything down to (-5). I tried explaining it to him, but he insisted that once he turned on the armor and the sword (He defined the armor as summonable and the swords "on" was drawing it), that all he needed was one charge. He got whiney, I let it pass, he started acting like a spaz in game, the other two heroes beat him down royally and his character wound up in jail. We didn't see "Phil" again.

Yeah, Yamo, I saw you giving him a pretty good drubbing.

Admittedly, Hero can be slow for combat and keeping track of stun/body/end can be an exercise in bookkeeping, but it's the tradeoff you make for incredible detail and versatility.

His other arguments were weak. And the one about Hero fans being rabid. Give me a break. For every Hero fan you find that's obnoxious, I could point to two insane Palladium fans, when the game was more popular and can now point at half a dozen "d20 only" people.

Here's the thread

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?threadid=38335

Out of 10 gripes, only 2 that have any true validity. Sure beats the pounding that Palladium took.

Re: Re: character concept question

Originally posted by Chaosliege

I ripped the Idea off of an old TV show though. Anyone remember AutoMan?

Heh.

"On a scale from one to ten, I'm an eleven!" --Automan

Originally posted by Kevin Scrivner

So how do those powers differ from magic powers, which by your theology would also be a gift from your god? Why are those powers usable for both good and evil, but magic can only be used by evil?

 

---

 

Thought I'd already answered that. The other powers have a naturalistic explanation, no matter howoutrageous. Magic, on the other hand, is an attempt to illegitimately access and wield supernatural power. Whether it actually works or not is beside the point; it's the motive and attitude that matter.

Very clear to me. All non-magic based super abilities in Kevin's game run off of "comic-book physics" a standard genre convention. Magic in this universe is a whole different animal and those who wield it are being endowed with the power from a source of great evil. I'd wager that if a "good" character tried to access this power in this universe, no matter how noble the intent, they would find it to be a corrupting experience.

So this character is some sort of ecdysiast?

Originally posted by Derek Hiemforth

Not to my knowledge. (I'm 97% sure he did not.) However, he did borrow a lot of concepts from Hero for GURPS, and he mentions Champions as one of GURPS' main influences in the main GURPS book. (Perhaps that mention was the source of the idea that he was "linked to" the Hero System.)

That sounds right to me.

I still bust out in laughter whenever I see the GURPS power of Walk through Ice.

On a more positive note, you can even observe the Hero influence in M&M and SAS. Good solid concept hold up over time and imitation is the sincerest form of flatery.

Re: Re: Re: Moses

Originally posted by MarkusDark

Too simple actually, because his response has weight and merit. There were many a witch tried and condemned who 'practiced magic' but actually only did rudementary apothecary formulas that are now accepted as simple fact - like penicillin.

 

 

And we are back to my original point that this is not a true fact, but pop cultural myth. These cases were few and far between.

You might be surprised at what level of understanding the supposed "primitive screwheads" are capable of. It's kind of fun to believe that they were somehow simpletons, but the historical evidence just doesn't play out when you actually take the time to examine it.

Of course, tomorrow you have the opportunity to check out the new Marvel game, too. Inquest Gamer 96 has the basic game included. I'm fairly excited based on some good things I've heard.

Hoping it is actually good.

Re: Moses

Originally posted by Blue Angel

Besides, isn't all advanced technology simply a form of magic. Imagine showing a TV to 8th Century peoples. To them an auto would be truly mysterious...

 

 

 

Simple answer for a simple question - No.

Originally posted by Storn

 

But M&M does play faster (I do not use all my villain pts for all my villains, rather a grab bag that they all draw from... keeps the combats a bit quicker).

A wonderful adaptation from the king of karma systems, MSHRPG. Are you also allowing the heroes to keep a karma pool?