David Johnston

Re: Using secret telepathy "Insider" trading without actually being an insider is the safest and most effective way to use telepathy to become rich.

Re: Dealing With Different Tech Levels of Star Hero One thing to bear in mind is that it requires infinitely less sophistication to figure out how to break advanced technology than it does to duplicate it. You need not understand how the grey goo devouring your world works to figure out that it can't reproduce when cut off from sunlight and dies if you hit it with a dose of X-Rays. You can even develop primitive countermeasures for advanced threats you don't really understand. For example you need not comprehend how a tank engine works to figure out how to dig a tank trap or even that it's going to be a lot less effective in vertical terrain.

Re: Name That Band Hero! Having watched thread, I think I'm coming to a conclusion. After the 80s there was a sharp downturn in song titles that sound good as names for superhumans. They became more wordy.

Re: Tattered Plot Threads I personally would go with "this is a brand new universe, which contains counterparts of your old characters."

Re: Building a collapsing/recharging force field. The problem with using forcewall is that if you have Indirect weapons to get around it, so will the enemy. And the problem with using 15 extra Body to represent the protection it gives, is that this approach overlooks the STUN. I'm assuming you don't want to get knocked into a coma. The simplest approach is just to get a huge forcefield with the limitation "not when you've been hit last turn".

Re: Villain Slush Pile Master Card: A ten year old with the magical power to animate illustrations and a deck full of collectible cards.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Night Ride Across the Caucasus by Loreena McKennit.

Re: What's the best way to conquer Canada? Of the three, I can only kind of vaguely envision water shortage as a motivation--and even then, desalinization plants on the coasts would be cheaper than invading Canada. Well that's why I included the terrorists, although I doubt that invading Canada, would be more expensive than building desalination plants.

Re: The Second Stringers Seems to me that his major power was the ability to listen to other people's phone conversations without need for a wiretap, and that's nothing to sneeze at when it comes to detective work. I actually had one character, The Masked Mystic who was a phony psychic, with bugging devices that were a bit ahead of their time. He'd then go to the cops and pretend the information he was giving him came from his nonexistent psychic powers. All the fighting was done by his bodyguard, a former boxer.

Re: Name That Band Hero! A nature oriented group Sylvan The Wolf Wild Child Mother Earth Mistral Wind.

Re: What's the best way to conquer Canada? There is one simple answer for your would-be conqueror of Canada. He's actually working for the United States in the first place. OK, it's a bit anachronistic. This isn't the 19th century and American politicians don't natter about Manifest Destiny any more. But assuming that terrorists are being smuggled across the Canadian border and there's some kind of desperate water shortage in the states, a superpowered American adventurer with some followers going back to the good old days and trying to take over Canada so it can be turned over to the United States, perhaps in the guise of American troops coming in to save us from the nasty old supervillain, might happen. Then again, who says you have to conquer Canada in the present? Mr. Patriotic American Loon could hop into a way back machine and try to make the war of 1812 turn out a little better for the the Americans.

Re: Help Requested: Name my Canadian team and it's members Iditarod also has nothing to do with Canada. That's an Alaskan thing. If you had a female stretcher you could call her "Stretchmark". I dunno. Maybe Black Gold? He's living petroleum? While Canada has volcanos, it doesn't have cool volcanos like Fuji or Mount Ranier. The last bout of glaciation smoothed over all of our volcanos making them rather stubby and unimpressive. On the other hand we do have quite a lot of citizens who are immigrants from India and it's not like Marvel's Thor lived in Norway. As for Canadian warships, almost all of them are named after Canadian place names. However there was the Protecteur...a refueling vessel with a nice generic name. Just French for Protector. Works. That's pretty utilitarian looking suit of armour after all.

Re: Wisdom Won't work. If you Detected the Wisest Course all it would do is tell you that there's one nearby. You'd need Discriminatory (and the mechanic would actually be closer to Intuition). I prefer Sense Folly.

Re: What's the best way to conquer Canada? As I recall it that's because it never happened. The President simply used the threat of it to force the Canadians into compliance with American demands and left it at that.

Re: Creating the Silver Age Team Well sure. Why can't his hunter be a chick? But failing that, how about Metallik?

Re: Momzer Robot Scan Detect a single thing (3 points), as a sense (2 points), Ranged, (10 points) Increased arc of perception 240 degrees (5 points.).

Re: Disad: Recurring Nightmare(s) It could interfere with your getting a full night's sleep, but there are no sleep deprivation rules. Maybe on those days, his skill rolls and CVs are at -1?

Re: Creating the Silver Age Team Go with the CVK. All Silver Age heroes need a CVK. Heck so do most of the villains. The presence of heros who don't have a CVK is one of the Signs that the Silver Age is over. Maybe Metallia instead of Metallar? Or add something like "the Pursuer"?

Re: Wisdom Paying points to get the occasional hint from the GM isn't going to destroy your roleplaying, whether you do it with my proposed "Common Sense" enhanced sense (which I'm heartbroken nobody critiqued) , or with established abilities like Danger Sense or Deduction. In fact it's far less of a roleplaying issue than the existence of Seduction skill.

Re: How would this be built? Yeah, that works pretty well. I dismissed Transfer because it's prohibitive to drain so many different things, but combining it with a mimic gets around that limitation. Maybe a little fancier than would be to my taste. However my answer to Morgdane's question is "The Variable Power Pool would let you mimic any of the powers from your victim. It would just take you a phase to change, less if you get an advantage on your control cost. So effectively you'd have more than one of your victims powers. You just wouldn't be able to use more than one of them at a time. I advise you to get flight and a defense to go with your NND and Mimic pool so you won't have to."

Re: How would this be built?

Re: Yet another 'how to build': Body-Swapper Stick a miscellaneous limitation on the multiform to represent those limitations. Maybe -1/2

Re: How would this be built?

Re: Help with spell construction

Re: Thoughts on Autofire - what am I Missing? Not especially. "Spray and pray" is notorious for not being effective unless you happen to be firing into a crowd of massed targets.