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wrestlinggeek

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Everything posted by wrestlinggeek

  1. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? This just occured to me the other day: Two very specific individuals in the "superhero community." The guy that everybody likes, and the guy that everybody respects. Note: these don't actually have to be male. And by "everybody" I mean most members of the aformentioned superhero community. The guy everybody likes is the one everybody talks to, confides in, or simply is fond of. At the big superhero gatherings, he's the one who will make everybody laugh despite the gravity of the situation. Or he will act as peacemaker between rival supers. He's the one they all want to hang out with, and the one who could join any team he wanted. And God help any villain who ever actually takes him out, because that villain will have every superhero in the world coming after him. In the Marvel Universe, this is Spider-Man. In DC, it's Nightwing. The guy everybody respects is, well, self-explanatory. He is the one they all listen to, the most noble, most heroic of them all. Doesn't have to be the most powerful, but it helps. At large gatherings, he will pretty much have no choice but to take charge of things, as everybody will defer to his leadership in any case. If he is a member of a superteam, he will spend more time as chairbeing than any other member. In the Marvel Universe, this is Captain America. In DC, of course, it's Superman.
  2. Re: What makes a great Iron Age campaign setting? Fallable heroes who realize and try to rise above their limitations. Not just physical or power-level limitations, but people who knpow their not as noble, heroic, and just good as they should be, as they want to be, as they're perceived to be, and are constantly trying to rise above that. Yes, they fail, and they grieve for their failures, and determine to try harder next time. And that is the difference between really good Iron Age stories like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and just exploitative drivel, like most of the rest of what is considerred Iron Age.
  3. Re: Your game/setting/campaign's feel That campaign I have in my head right now would try to emulate the DCAnimated Universe in feel, with a dash of early-to-mid 1980s Marvel thrown in. The time period when all those liscensed properties were incorporated into the Marvel Universe (GI Joe, Transformers, Rom, Micronauts, etc.), and it felt like anything could happen.
  4. Re: DC and Marvel: What Makes Them Different? Given recent events, something that stands out in my mind is that DC does continuity-wide reboots when they are not needed, and Marvel doesn't do them when they are needed.
  5. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain?
  6. Re: The Powerpuff Women (or "Grown Up in Townsville") Wow, freakboy. Iron Age indeed. Rusty Iron, at that.
  7. Re: Superhero settings vs People with Powers settings Related to the above; openness vs. secrecy. In a Superhero setting, the existence of super-humans is both widely known and, usually, socially accepted. When people gain powers, they put on colorful costumes and go out to adventure in the public eye. In a People with Powers setting, most of the population have no idea these super-humans are out there. And when someone does find out, the response is usually disbeliefe, panic, or a desire to expose the "inhuman monster." When people in thses settings gain powers, they first tyr to figure out the best way to hide them, and then use them in secret to advance their own personal agenda.
  8. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? Talking Gorillas. 'Nuff said.
  9. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? Kaiju! Giant prehistoric monsters bent on carnage and destruction. And some of them breathe radioactive fire.
  10. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? Robots! Giant sentient machines who wage a mellenia-old war on Earth. Man-shape AIs who are dedicated to the detruction of all organic life. And giant piloted war-machines who defend our coastal cities from...
  11. Re: What elements should a great superhero setting contain? The Greatest Hero of Them All. This can be the first superhero in the world, the most powerful, the most respected, or some combination of the above. But he (or she) needs to be the shining example that others look up to, and who sets the standard they are compared to. This can be a PC or an NPC, depending on the setting, but either way, he should fulfill the role of the Hero above all others.
  12. Re: 13 Things learned about supers gaming Or at least watch the Avengers movie and animated series (the one currently running on Disney XD), JLU, and Young Justice. As well as any of the Warner Direct animated DC movies.
  13. Re: Small Town Superhumans? I have catually done both a supers game and a Vampire game set in Asheville, NC. They were both pretty fun, while they lasted, and I see no reason a longer campiagn set in a rural or suburban location wouldn't continue to be fun. Of course, given the nature of superheroes, as mentioned above, just because a team is based in a small town doesn't mean they're going to stay there.
  14. Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Scooby Doo and ReBoot.
  15. Re: DC/Marvel Characters in Your Campaign For me, as with almost all things in gaming, it depends. I've had campaigns where the DC and/or Marvel heroes are in the background. I had one where the team was funded and trained by a retired Batman. In that one, Superman showed up near the beginning to tell them to keep their noses clean, and several adventures later, to tell them they had been doing a good job. I have had campaigns where these characters are exactly what they are in RL, fictional characters. But those are usually the ones where "the world was exactly like our real world until a little while ago when real superheroes started appearing." If I'm running a world where superheroes have been around for a while, then any superhero fiction is based off real people. And I have wanted for a while to run a campaign where all the DC and Marvel characters have aged in real time, and the PCs are the current generation.
  16. Re: Superhero Costume Party This thread has gotten me thinking. If I was a vampire, then on Halloween, I'd go full-out Bela Lugosi-style Dracula. Tux, opera cape, pale makeup, the whole nine yards. I might even put in some cheap plastic fangs.
  17. Re: Public vs. Secret Identity You know, I keep seeing this "nobody really believes that Clark kent isn't Superman" thing, and I say "Why not?" Let me put it this way, if Brad Pitt, under a different name, worked in the office with you, and had for months before a Brad Pitt ever became a movie star, and still worked there even afterward, you wouldn't say "I have it! Brad Pitt's Secret Identity is Bob!" No, you'd say "Gee, Bob sure looks a lot like that Brad Pitt guy." Especiall if Bob was a little shorter, wore glasses, spoke differentlyand was not quite as buff as Brad Pitt. Most people in the DC Universe these days don't even realize Superman has another identity. After all, he wears no mask. They figure he must be Superman 24/7. And why not? After all, if you were Brad Pitt, with all his money and fame, would you take eight hours out of every weekday to go work in an office? And if you were Superman, with all his power and ability, would you bother putting on a suit and pretending to be a normal human?
  18. Re: You Don't Have to be Crazy to be a Superhero, but it Helps! The thing that gets me about Marvel's whole Mutant-Hate angle is that not only can otherwise normal people tell who is a mutant and who is not, but (especially in the X-Books), every single non-mutant in the world is a rabid, torch and pitchfork wielding, fanatical anti-mutant bigot. Of course, it did strike me as funny when, during Kurt Busiek's run on Avengers, there were groups protesting outside of Abengers' Mansion, and the group protesting that they had too many Mutant members was right beside the group protesting that they didn;t have enough minority members, and nobody noticed the irony.
  19. Re: Things That Exist in a Superhero Universe On the whole religion thing, I think a large percentage of the population in most comic book universes consider the pagan gods walking around to just be more supers using that as a theme. I even seem to recall seeing something like that involving Thor and Hercules in an old Avengers issue. And with a fair number of "ordinary" superhumans doing exactly that, it's easy to see how the line can become very blurred in most people's minds. Plus, if you think about it, what is ther real difference between mythological gods, as presented in comic books, and other super-humans?
  20. Re: Things you never see in a comic book I seem to recall that in the New 52, Lois and Clark are not married. I'm not saying "not any longer." I'm saying, "in the new continuity, they never have been. Yet. And Supes is putting the moves on a certain Amazon Princess, so you never know if they'll get together at all."
  21. Re: Genre-crossover nightmares SuperFriends: Chandler, Monica, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe have to get past their personal problems long enough to use their powers and abilities to stop the Legion of Doom.
  22. Re: Time Frame for Appearance of Superhumans It completely depends on the campaign I'm running. Sometimes, the PCs are the first supers anywhere ever. Somtimes superhumans have been around as long as humans, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly. Sometimes supers will appear fpr a while, disappear for a time, and then reappear. Sometimes any power origin is possible, sometimes all powers stem from tjhe same event, and sometimes there is a meta-origin which makes it possible for other power sources to work. If I ever get the chance to run the campaign I have in mind right now, it'll be one where superhumans have always existed, but not continuously. Supers start cropping up every 40 years or so, hang around for a few years, then disappear (retire, die, lose their powers, whatever), only for their succesors to show up after 30 years or so. So there was a Golden Age in the '30s-'40s, a Silver Age in the '70s, and the PCs would be the first of the new generation.
  23. Re: What would you do if you were a mutant? I would do the same thing as I would if I gained superpowers from any other source: Figure out just what I could and couldn't do, and how best to use that to improve the world. You know, back during the whole tsunami/powerplant disaster in Japan, two of my coworkers and myself were discussing what we would do if we had Superman's powers. I said the first thing I would do is fly to Japan, find its top nuclear scientist, and ask him what I could do to help. We figured out that if we all had those powers, I would be Superman, one of them would be Ultrman (Superman's evil counterpart), and the other would be Dr. Manhatten (the man who can do anything he wants, but has no idea what he wants to do).
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