Weldun

Re: Soon I Will Be Invincible Must spread rep, yadda yadda. Someone hit nexus for me, I'm having enough trouble keeping track of what I owe jkwleisemann!

Re: To all GMs about a power combo In this case, it's definitely a linked effect.

Re: Maelstrom Nice. I especially like the VPP.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From tonight's L5R Game. Some Imperial Magistrates were being somewhat uncooperative in answering some of our questions, so in frustration I decided to insult him. Lion: Were you born this obtuse, or did this take some form of special Scorpion training. No, it was you mother dropping you on your head after having glanced at your face without first bracing herself. Scorpion: *spluttter* Take your stance. *Enters his Iaijutsu stance* Crane: Well, if you would just answer our questions. Scorpion: He insults me, my clan and my mother! Lion: Now, I'm sure that your mother was a wonderfull woman. *Enters his stance* A shame your father never knew her that well. Crab: For a moment there, I thought that you had rolled over on me Oyajiisama, but then you make me proud. For the record, I won. One stroke, him unconscious, I even took three raises simply to mark his cheek. And people try to tell me that Lion Bushi don't make good duelists.

Re: Soon I Will Be Invincible What, nobody is going to mention Super-Folks?

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Okay, I'll admit it's got advantages over the other one. (Loads faster, for one.) Here are two more from me. Lynx and Tempest.

Re: Meta-Backgrounds

Re: Meta-Backgrounds Fair enough. A meta-background is any other detailed thinking that went into the creation of the character. Not just, "Hey, I'll make a sound-based energy projector with X rough background." It's not for everyone, and sometimes the meta-background fills itself in as you go, but I enjoy them. Like I said, I shouldn't have posted this while down with the Flu.

Re: Soon I Will Be Invincible

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine For my character, Nightwalker.

EDIT: This character has since been revised. Previous version left posted for comparison. Background/History: I blink the spots out of my eyes. I'm lying in a pile of rubble, it's night time, and there are sirens blaring everywhere. "Spirits!" I curse, as I try to pick myself up. The run had gone south the instant the dragon had shown up. "It's just a short snatch and grab out of Chicago" Badger had said, "How bad could it get?" I chuckle, ruefully. "How bad? How about a Dragon, a Mantis shaman, a Wasp-spirit hive with one seriously pissed off Queen and some sort of Hard Core covert ops team? Inside the quarantine zone!?" Details were starting to get clearer now and I can actually sit up now. Just as I finally coax some feeling back into my legs, some sort of sec-goon flies over to me. Wait, flies? Yep, those are boot jets. Never even heard of those, must be cutting edge mil-spec. No logo, not good. To tired for a spell, where's the predator? Frag! No gun? The sec-goon lands next to my head, "Hold still, emergency workers will be here for you soon." Emergency workers? In the QZ? I scope him out astrally. This fragger's clean! No magic, no cyber. What's going on here? I look to my left and see my sword's aura peeking through the rubble. I doubt that'll help, but at least the goon probably can't see it. I switch my perception pack to the physical world and start scanning frequencies on my headcomm. A lot of chatter on a tight group of channels, search and rescue stuff. Okay, maybe I've been out of it longer than I thought, but if so, why aren't I bug chow. The sec goon is still hovering near me. "Go, I'll be fine. Other people might need you more than me." The goon nods and the flies off. I decide to risk summoning a small spirit, nothing too big. With the Chi-town manasphere so fragged up and with all this damage, I don't want to run the risk of a toxic, so I call to the heavens. "Spirits and Fire!" That was too easy. Way too easy. The wind spirit waits patiently, it seems ammused. "It has been some time since we have been called." It's voice resonates in my skull. "Come away, oh little one, come away. This place is not safe for you." With that, it picks up my sword and I feel it presence wrap around me, a the familiar feeling of a spirit's concealment. As I stumble out of the ruined building, I am overwhelmed by the sight of several people flying, while dressed in brightly coloured clothes. And more sec goons, not as heavily armoured as the other one, with UNTIL stamped on their shoulders. What the frag is going on? Nightwalker has found himself a stranger in a strange land. The world he left behind was a world of magic and cybernetics. Life on Earth had fractured into races once thought to exist only in fairy tales, and magic had returned as force to be harnessed and channelled by those select few with the talent to do so. Corporations ruled their dominions as nations unto themselves and a great many people didn't officially exist at all. In this new world, he sees nations that only existed in history for him, technology that is at once, decades or even centuries ahead of his worlds, and yet is prevalently antiquated by his reckoning. He has assured himself that this is not his world and although the relative dates place him in the past, it is not his world's past. For a time, he survived on the street, bouncing from shelter to shelter, as Detroit is rebuilt as Millennium City. All he has from his own world are his implants, his sword and his under-armour. And his magic. As the days went on, he began to notice that many of the homeless were being rounded up for construction work by heavy set men. He decided it could be a good way to earn some money, but discovered that while the workers were technically being paid, they had to "rent" hard hats, tools, and the only food and water available was on-site at exhorbitant prices. Enraged, Nightwalker called up a spirit to aid him, and thrashed the mobsters within an inch of their lives. He made them give the workers their money back and then sent the workers home. But he should have realised. He had just made powerful enemies, and he had no friends. No safe houses to hole up in, no fixers to broker a truce through. This was worse than being hung out to dry, because at least then he could try throwing some cred at the problem, but even that wasn't an option. All he had going for him was that it had been particularly cold that day, and his scarf had concealed his features. As mob enforcers began to rough up some of the homeless, trying to find the "freak", he kept stepping in, and even killed a few of the more viscious gangsters to make a point. Soon, the mob placed a bounty on "The Nightwalker's" head. Things were looking up. Personality/Motivation: Nightwalker is still a little bewildered by this world, but has learned to adapt. Through the rescue of a prominent hacker, he even has a basic identity, but he doesn't use it too often, knowing how flimsy falsified identities can be. He has come to identify with the homeless of Millennium city, most of whom were displaced either by Destroyer's attack or the subsequent rebuilding. Having been displaced by some unknown event in his own world, he has no friends or family apart from the ones he has made here, and having known the pain of having it all taken away from you, he will fight tooth and nail to keep what he has gained here. Quote: "You know your doing well when your opponent starts publicly crying for help." Powers/Tactics: While not particularly powerful, Nightwalker has a wide variety of abilities that mean that he excels at information gathering and can hold his own in a fight. His tendency to enter into a beserker rage whenever he is seriously harmed means that he will often be alone and unsupported, as he will try and put some distance between himself and those he cares about. To compensate for this, he attempts to confound his enemies with his spirits rather than face them head on, although his spells and sword have proven effective in this area so far. He knows that it's only a matter of time before the mob offers enough for one of these "supers" to take up the contract, a prospect he does not look forward to.

Re: You Are President! Any votes for The Spectre wouldn't count, as he would require a Congressional waver to be elected, and they're not retroactive.

Re: Elemental benders (Avatar)

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Sort-of. Here's the same character when he's "on the job", so to speak.

Re: Meta-Backgrounds Oh, very nice. This gets repped.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine Here's one a character I've yet to play in his civilian identity. Yes, his civilian identity. He's a lawyer who advocates for supers.

Re: Meta-Backgrounds Actually, Killer Shrike hit the nail on the head. Even opened my eyes. (I'm feeling a little better now.) A meta background is basically the thinking that went into the character's creation, beyond the character's backstory, which most of us do. He answered for everybody.

Re: Elemental benders (Avatar)

Re: Attack of the 150-point Housewife :eek:I just had a "gutter-level" parse! Took me a while, didn't it?

Re: Meta-Backgrounds

Re: How Would You Make Green Lantern? At which point, you've been double dipping. Take another look at what you posted.

Re: Elemental benders (Avatar) Here's an alternate build, it also got another 20 points to spend in some skills. Which you are lacking in. You could spend them in, say, KS: Earthbending, (2pts for 11-), Sc: Geology (2 pts for 11-). What are this guy's hobbies? What else does he know? Toph was quite knowledgeable of High Society, Ettiquette and Bureaucracy. She chose not to use them, but she had the skills nonetheless. Hoist is also a good one, if you can get your hands on Ultimate Brick or Ultimate Skill. It's usually for super-strong characters, but it will let you get the most out of that TK. Skills are are a common oversight on the part of new players, hell, a lot of old players forget them from time to time. As for books, there are two your group may want to get, expecially if you're all new to the game. The first is the UNTIL superpowers database. It's a compilation of a very wide selection of power builds, and can be quite informative to new players when trying to figure how to build a particular power. The second is the Ultimate Skill. It's a book devoted completely to skills and it's almost as thick as the main book. It contains detailed descriptions of how background skills work and what each and every skill covers.

Re: Meta-Backgrounds My Bad. I shouldn't have posted while I'm sick. Just to be clear, a meta-background is the in-story background of the character, but the background of the character's publication. As you can see with the Specter's write-up, this is the background of the character as if there really was a comic with him in it. To contrast. This is the Spectre's Background. Where as this originating post is the Spectre's Meta-background. If anyone can explain this better, I would be most grateful.

Re: What happens when a new GM doesn't understand game balance Sometimes this is all that needs to happen, other times you need to walk away. Confession time, I really screwed up a Mekton game, once. I built the PCs mecha to be tough and versatile, and I succeeded. I then built the bad guys. I wanted them to be mooks, low cost and low defences. But I wanted them to be a threat, so I upped the speed and maneuverability and then I added (and here's where it hurts) two 2k weapons with a BV of ∞ (Mekton players know what this means, but in champions terms, 1k is equivalent to a .50 caliber machinegun round, and a BV of ∞ would translate to Autofire ∞), and then cross-linked them. Now this could have been fixed, but I made the mistake of constantly commenting with such things as "I can't believe this, you have more than 3 times their point value and they're you up the !" My players did the right thing by telling me that they weren't playing any more and why. Fortunately, I agreed with them and asked if I someone else could run a game while I re-examined my GMing style. Nowdays, my mooks are that, mooks. They're lucky to hit, and they're lucky to do serious damage, but are enough that the PCs can't afford to ignore them. My goons can hit almost as often as the PCs, and can do almost as much damage, but aren't much harder to take out than mooks.

Now many of you are probably wondering what I mean by Meta-Background. Well, just as a character has a background story, they can also have a second background. Allow me to demonstrate by giving the Spectre's Meta-Background. ***** The Spectre started as a mildly successful Pulp character in a series of novels and radio plays where he fought a "villain of the week". He was created to cash in on the success of similar characters that had achieved popularity in the era. In the very beginning his incredible healing powers and apparent lack of fear were his only abilities, but after the controversial Warbound, where the He almost has a sexual encounter with his own daughter, the character was quietly forgotten in the years of WWI. In WWII, a small, independant comic book company began trying to find a way of making their mark in War comics, an editor who had been a fan of the Spectre's stories when he was younger aranged to hire the now 67 year old creator/writer to begin work on the New Spectre. However, before the first issue could go to print, the creator died of a heart attack and the company was forced to purchase the rights to the character from his estate. But it seemed that the title had a curse, for just as the purchase was completed, the company's senior accountant fled the U.S. having embezzled most of the company's remaining money. Forced into bankruptcy, they themselves where taken over by a larger company that fortunately saw some potential in the initial stortboards. The new company published The Spectre, the amzing fearless man for nearly three years before readership dropped off. Having tried to explain The Spectre's powers, the company had re-written his to have control over some of his body's metabolic processes, inlcuding brief bursts of superhuman strength and the ability to slow down the progress of poisons within his body. Fans grew disillusioned with a character that seemed to be changing simply by writer's fiat. During the 50s the company tried to breathe new life into the title and character, explaining his powers further by having the Specter set off a mutant detector. Combined with the re-occuring villains of DEMON and the Van Helsings, and some of their best writers, the Spectre enjoyed sporadic popularity for over 40 years, but his title never became more than a quarterly, due to the fan demands on writing quality. To keep him in the minds of the general fan base, the Spectre was repeatedly used in cameos and one-shot team-ups. The character's big popularity boost came when he was used temporarily in the new line, The Skeleton Crew. The team's lineup still in flux at that time, he was brought in hamfistedly during the Eurostar incident, by Deus Ex Machina. He was simply in the area. Retconning the character to have been a Kingdom city resident in the late 19th century, the editor was fired and the Spectre was dumped rather unceremoniously in an alternate dimension. But a write-in campaign surprised the publisher and since then, The Spectre has been an important and integral part of the Skeleton Crew title. ***** So, does anyone else have a meta-background for their character(s)?