David Johnston

Re: Alignment Issues

Re: Location of Gotham City Without getting into the official answers, when the question mattered to me, I put Gotham in Massachusetts and Metropolis on the Great Lakes.

Re: Crude Combined Marvel/DC timeline to use as backstory to a Supers campaign Him, I'd rather forget. Bruce Wayne never struck me as having the makings of a family man. Particularly since the only women he's attracted to are supervillains.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War The one where he paid Titanium Man to have a staged fight with him in order to convince Congress that they needed to stay out of the way and let the heroes do their thing. But then at the last moment after he'd testified on that topic and used TM's scripted announcement that soon all the heroes would be out of his way because the government would be going after them to sway congress, the Stamford Incident happened at the last moment, complete with a camera crew to show all the dead kids in glorious technicolour. Needless to say, a few dead kids on-screen does a heck of a lot more to sway public opinion then a thousands of dead adults with no film crew to record them. Also needless to say, the timing is suspicious.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War Who says? The Mutant Registration Act arose out of just such things, and so did this one. Don't forget that Stamford did not cause the Registration Act to be introduced. All it did was counterbalance Iron Man's publicity stunt and shift a few votes, enough to narrowly pass a bill that otherwise would have narrowly failed to pass.

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War 1. No. People with powers are required to register, but they are not required to work for the government. You can hang up the cape. 2. No. The act is not an ex post facto law. People who have been superheroes but aren't now, or had powers but don't now aren't required to register. The act is also not a bill of attainder. It doesn't say "Captain America is a criminal". 3. Yes...or to be more accurate they haven't _shown_ the criminals getting due process. A forgiving reading might assume that in most cases these people are either getting trials or will at some indefinite point in the future get trials. Bear in mind though that in real life there is often a time frame of many months of imprisonment between a person being arrested and them actually getting a trial. That's why people convicted of less serious felonies often get sentenced to "time served". However it is extremely unlikely that the act itself says "nobody who violates this act gets a trial". The cases, however few or common, where due process is being violated are going to be statutorily enshrined any more than there's a law that says you can shuffle a prisoner from containment facility to containment facility to keep his lawyer from finding him. 4. Not a consideration. Considering the difficulties involved in restraining even many non-powered supervillains, 616's Supreme Court would have long since ruled that some very extreme methods of restraint aren't unusual at all. Dude, in real life they ruled concerning capital punishment "Sure, it's cruel, but we already do it, so it ain't unusual".

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War The act doesn't violate citizen's constitutional rights. Constitutional rights have been violated in the course of the enforcement of the act on a couple of occasions, but the act itself doesn't do it, unless the Supreme Court chooses to rule that the interpolated "right to privacy" covers the right to conceal your superpowers, something which would be impossible to know in advance of the ruling. And I don't believe a court similar to the current one would in fact make such a ruling.

Re: Alignment Issues If that is true, then I did not understand your point. Are you saying that people's reasons for doing what they do should not matter?

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero Yup. I recognised the reference.

Re: WWYCD: Red Garden Anyway, I started out trying to figure out how to design the girls of the Red Garden, and I realised it can't really be done. Here's the setup: The girls are revenants, brought most of the way back from the dead to kill the beast-men. However the only thing that keeps them alive is their own will to live. If they do not risk their lives on a regular basis, they lose will-to-live, and eventually they'll just passively let themselves be killed or if nobody does the service for them, they'll commit suicide. As they continue to fight they get more and more powerful, but if they lose morale and start thinking about how futile their situation is, they'll also lose will-to-live. For some reason drinking lemon juice helps prevent this, which frankly I find the weirdest part. But there's another danger as well. If they start feeling that they are on their own and can't rely on each other they'll start to go into berserker rages and eventually will become what they are fighting if they retain their will-to-live. Therefore the girls have to stick together to stay sane and alive. (It's a Japanese thing. The team is indispensable. And since the girls are American, they have a little trouble mastering this concept.)

Re: Crude Combined Marvel/DC timeline to use as backstory to a Supers campaign Ehn. If DC can kill Superman, so can you. I was actually thinking that, given all the Silver Age Superboy and Superman Junior stories, it might be a nice touch for the Golden Age Superman to die as Lois Lane is pregnant with their child. Naturally the boy is also named "Clark" after his father, is mostly raised by his grandparents in Smallville since Lois is a globe-trotting workaholic and eventually he makes his debut as Superman II in 1986 saving a space shuttle from disaster. (Giving a nod to the Byrne reboot). You might even go so far as to let history repeat itself by involving him with a reporter named Chloe Sullivan.

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero Which was of course Fearless's motivation.

Re: (best ever...) reasons for becoming a superhero Look, when people in costumes just keep showing up to commit mayhem all around or on me, do I really have an option?

Re: WWYD - Marvel's Civil War Neither. Riptide just swims across the Pacific and hangs out in Japan instead. They love him in Japan. (Hellfire actually did work for the government, but she was Canadian).

Re: Re-Imaged Hero(ines) Poor boy. He looks sick. Really, all these institutions handling radioactive materials ought to be more careful. Sometimes I think it's my fault. If I didn't go around covering for their mistakes, if I let more people die from their carelessness, maybe their government would watch them more carefully. Oh, look, now he's "tossing his accounts", as they used to say. It's his body trying to cleanse itself of the contamination, trying to live. It won't be enough. I walk up beside him and put my hand on his shoulder and say "Hey, mister? You look pretty sick. Maybe you should go to the hospital." I'm just making conversation. Actually there's nothing a hospital can do for him. I'm the only thing that can save him. But should I? I offer him tissue to wipe his mouth and he thanks me. What a nice guy, polite even when he's feeling so sick. Will he stay nice? Give some nice people a little power and they can't handle it. They just turn out awful. Is it better to live in corruption or to die innocent? "I'll be fine," he lies without knowing it, muttering under his breath "I have to be. My aunt and..." Well...I guess I'm just not the kind of person who can cross her arms and let someone die when he's right in front of her. I concentrate and the power flows out of my palm and into his body. I'm no healer. I can't take away his poisoning. But I can change him into someone who doesn't have to worry about little radiation. He'll probably look back on this day and figure out this was the day his life was changed forever. Maybe ruined, depending on how he handles the powers I'm giving him. I don't wear a costume. I don't fight crime. I look like I'm only 13. I've looked that way for almost a century now. Who am I? I'm the unnoticed reason why this city has ten or a hundred times as many "heroes" and "villains" than anywhere else. I hope I always stay unnoticed, because I'm Power Girl, and if they ever spot me, I'll be in a lot of trouble.

Re: WWYCD: Red Garden The girls do not attack the superhero/vigilante unless he has a Looks or Reputation disadvantage that might lead people to fear him. However, their first reaction on seeing the hero (assuming he's flesh and blood) is to say, "Oh god, what if it bites HIM?". Three of them fiercely attack their opponent while the fourth (the one in the "good girl dress") frantically tries to stay in between the crazy guy and you, begging you to go away. The crazy guy seems to be moderately super strong and fast, has at tendency to lope on all fours at times, and his eyes really reflect any ambient light. His vocabulary seems to be limited to "grr". The girls...well the girls seem like they can really take a pounding for otherwise normal people and seem to want to finish their opponent off. If intimidated, (which isn't difficult for the typical person with superheroic presence), the girls tell you that the things they fight look like they're people, but they aren't. Oh, incidentally, if you have an ability to detect magic, all participants reek of it. If you are a mentalist (or consult one concerning a captive crazy guy), there seems to be nobody home in his brain. Just a bundle of murderous reflexes.

Assume that your character is in a very large city and he or she sees a group of teenage girls walking down the street around midnight. They seem a bit stressed, and one of them has a baseball bat. If you take a close look, they seem a bit mismatched. One of them looks pretty much like a streetwalker, one of them is the jeans and sweatshirt type, another is in fashionably expensive capris and the last is wearing a polka-dotted dress that screams "I'm a good girl, I am." There's none of the standardisation of style you'd expect from a high school clique. Also, they seem to be looking up in the air at something you can't see. As they walk along, they encounter an unarmed nutjob who as he sees them, growls like a werewolf and charges very fast. The girls do not seem to be surprised by this, and the sweatshirt girl pulls a knife. Both the crazy guy and the stressed-out girls seem fully intent on killing each other. What do you do? (Red Garden is a Japanese cartoon series)

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out? But isn't that really my point? The villain doesn't know the hero's breakpoint. So why try so hard to reach it?

Re: Alignment Issues What one is is expressed in what one does.

Re: Secret IDs: In or Out?

Re: Around the World With A New Character Each Week The Creature: was actually Arvin Hasselbladt, a b-movie writer/producer/director who manage to get his hands on a strength assisting exoskeleton being sold at the auction of a deceased inventor's estate and created a reptilian monster costume to wear over it with the intention of using it to make cheezy horror movies. His publicity stunts wearing the costume quickly escalated into a whole career of fighting crime (and certain heros who were inclined to judge a book by it's cover.). The Creature was hunted down and killed by Bounty for an extremely wealthy music producer with a taste for illegal thrills who believed (correctly) that The Creature was out to get him.

Re: [Worst Ever...] Reasons to be a superhero I'm making a mint off endorsements! I want to eliminate all my competitors before taking over the world. Ahahahaha! The dental plan totally rules. I'm afraid of death, but superheroes keep coming back from it.

Re: Genocide

Re: Genocide Is it realistic that people could have a "one-drop" rule which said that if someone had one identifiably African ancestor, then they were not white, regardless of their actual pallor, but as long as people didn't look very Asian, they were still white?