David Johnston

Re: The Champion Protocols (ie how to take down your character) The Wizard of Oz Incorporated: All of his hardware is vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses. The Scarecrow of Oz Incorporated: Best handled with dazzle attacks to incapacitate his ability to make eye contact and instill fear. Without his protective costume he's vulnerable to sunlight, but not quickly enough to be an exploitable weakness. Stay out of arm's reach and try to use crossbows to put a quarrel through his heart, knocking him out. Tin Man: Tin Man is unpredictable since he's a suit of powered armour that can be operated by remote telepresence, given preprogrammed instructions, or manned by a human pilot. And it has electromagnetic pulse shielding. The fire-fighting foam cannon isn't particularly dangerous but it can knock people off balance while making the ground slippery. However, as suits of powered armour go, it's pretty physically weak. The best approach? Just bash it to pieces with a stronger brick who can fly. Or sneak up on it and use a shaped charge to take out the on-board computer. Even if there's a human pilot, the armour will be incapacitated. Lionheart: Lionheart is fast and agile but doesn't dish out much damage. His fast metabolism makes him vulnerable to gas attacks but also makes him get up quickly again, so be sure to restrain him quickly. Tea (Pronounced with two syllables): Tea's birds and rodents can only really be dangerous against someone who doesn't significant defenses but she's easy to one punch into unconsciousness. But be _sure_ she's out cold since her little friends can cause a lot of confusion while she invisibly communicates with them. Boris: Tea's modified bear can be put down with a couple of tranquiliser darts.

Re: Limitations and the Silver Age But Lex Luthor's brain in Metallo's body, making him Metallex was much cooler

Re: WWYCD: The Nebula Affair Tien Lung would do nothing. Quite literally. He'll simply meditate until she leaves him alone. Hellfire would attack. Riptide would point out that she is placing him in an awkward position since under the laws which apply to him he would be committing a criminal offense by subduing criminals so she can banish them. Therefore he'd take it as professional courtesy if she were to go off and do her own fighting.

Re: Help! I'm stuck in a disad rut! Futaba-Kun had accidental change into opposite sex when aroused or pregnant. For something a trifle more mundane, you might try petit-mal epilepsy, you go into a trancelike state when looking at a flashing light. Or how about Hunted: Ex-wife's attorney?

Re: Limitations and the Silver Age Quite a lot of them are steel jacketed. I'd probably suggest that it would be better to stick to cast and wrought iron as her vulnerability and assume that the process of turning iron into steel eliminates the faerie allergy for this character. She doesn't sound like she'll have good defenses anyway.

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments First you'd have to settle which Robin Hood you're talking about. Some _very_ different interpretations of Robin Hood have been around from the one who is fighting on behalf of the rightful King and stealing from the rich to pay Richard's ransom, to the one who when Richard returned and asked him whether John was responsible for the problems in Englands said, "No, you are for not keeping an eye on things.", to the unabashed bandit/revolutionary who regards himself as the King of Sherwood in his own right but treats his followers as equals. It's the same thing with Two-Face. Sure it's pretty consistent between appearances that he likes to flip coins, but the kind of thing he flips coins for change from writer to writer. If you regard all of his appearances as being the same character, then no he isn't predictable.

Re: Limitations and the Silver Age For Doctor Atomic I suggest a susceptibility to cadmium. IN the pseudologic of the silver age it makes sense that an atomic powered hero would be vulnerable to the material in the rods they use to suppress reactions in atomic power plants. For Athena I have an unsettling and probably unusable thought. Athena was a virgin goddess. But mainly I mention her just to say that her arch-enemy should be Arachne. If Solaris is dependant on sunlight he follows the noble example of Hourman and out of a sense of fair play, uses his name to tell his foes how to defeat him.

Re: Expressing English Language in Hero Terms Well as we all know the english language pursues other languages down alleyways, clubs them and rifles their pockets for spare vocabulary. So we'll need stats for the club.

Re: An Immaterial Question That depends on whether the Earth bought its gravity with "affects solid world".

Does the random generation process produce characters with foci or do you just turn them into focus characters as you see fit?

Re: WWYCD: Hero with "Questionable" Political Views So, why didn't the State just use her as breeding stock?

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments As I believe you mentioned earlier, no one believes themselves to be "Evil". I believe the Brother of Evil Mutants, The Brotherhood of Evil, the Sinister Six and and the Masters of Evil may dispute that claim. The Crusaders believed in conversion at swordpoint followed by execution to prevent backsliding. Evil by modern standards, certainly. Well, no they didn't. The closest approximation of that would be witches and heretics condemned to death who would be given an opportunity to repent their allegiances before an execution that would occur regardless of their repenting or not. We do the same things now with people we condemn to death. However, if this action truly did prevent the pagan from eternal damnation and allow him entry into paradise, is the act objectively "Evil"? Hypothetically? Sure. It gets a person who is not really entitled to be there into paradise under false pretenses. It's like forging green cards for Heaven.

Re: Help with a name please I think the name you've got will work fine.

Re: Are HERO gamers more wedded to more "realistic" game physics? Y'know if Damage Reduction becomes standard for charactets at that level, you could just go ahead and reduce the number of dice thrown.

Re: Another Clarification: Narrative meaning of combat Phase. Nobody gets my jokes.

Re: WWYCD: Hero with "Questionable" Political Views The proposed character wasn't German. He was a German-American who belonged to the German-American Bund, the pre-war American Nazi Party which, at it's height, had about 25,000 members. Note that in Marvel's version of World War II, during the war the Bund apparently went underground and launched a massive sabotage campaign so the hometown heros would have someone to fight. In reality most of the members of the Bund were interned and the remainder quickly disavowed any enthusiasm for Hitler.

Re: Types of Engery? Commonality of If you were going to define energy like you defined physical then you'd be left with two options: Burns Shocks

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments Doesn't matter whether they're synonymous if they generally go hand in hand. Incidentally, Magneto isn't particularly selfless. Plotting to put your own subgroup in charge of everyone else is obviously serving your own interests.

Re: How evil is this? Knockback blasts don't work well on massive types because massive types are built with knockback resistance (Growth gives you -1 KB per 5 points spent). It's about a -1 1/2 limitation I'd say offhand. I suggest it because the effects woudl be much easider to calculate.

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments Not especially. That just means most villains are evil and most heroes are good. We already knew that. Susano Like I said. I was trying to balance Superman's "by the book" philosophy against Batman's "whatever gets the jog done." If Batman believed in doing whatever it took to get the job done he would have long since started trying to kill his opponents, or at least set up his own more inescapable prison for captured villains. And he would not have objected to minutia like using mind editing on villains or popping Maxwell Lord's head like a zit. Heck, he might even start using guns.

Re: How evil is this? You might want to use a knock-back only energy blast instead.

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments Which makes it kind of useless for binning purposes. If just about everyone is in the same bin then there's no point in having a bin at all. Of course one might ask what the point is in having a bin anyway, but there is one. If Law and Chaos exist as active, at least semi-sentient forces or factions, (as in fact they do in Marvel, DC and Champions) binning determines how they react to you or how you react to them.

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments

Re: Superhero Comics & D&D Alignments Does Batman really strike you as free spirited? Impulsive? Flexible? Undisciplined? No, most incarnations of Batman are what D&D would bin as Lawful Good. Spider-Man is the poster-boy for superheroic Chaotic Good. He's the kind of guy who would save Jameson's life, then glue him into his chair.

Re: Another Clarification: Narrative meaning of combat Phase. Don't worry. We'll all be discrete about it.