Tjack

What you’re talking about would be “The Book of Ordinary Stuff”. A game book three times the size of Ninja Hero or Mystic Masters that had nothing but the stats for everything in the world. No one would buy it ‘cause you don’t really need it. When the tornado or tidal wave comes, the GM just has to say “it destroys the the town.” And 99.44/100th’s % of players will never have the points to completely stop it. STOP SWEATING THE SMALL STUFF!!!!! This is “let’s pretend” not algebra class!!! Yes, rules are necessary to keep things from devolving into “Bang, Bang, I got you!” “No, you didn’t. You missed!” But obsessing over exactly how much of this power or that limitation takes you out of the child like joy and flights of imagination that this game can give you The GM/DM of a game isn’t like the dealer in a card game or the banker in Monopoly. They act as both a guide and a host for their players. And as such, there has to be a level of trust between them and the players. They’re there to challenge the players not to screw them over. They know what’s on your sheet. So if the GM says the catastrophe can be stopped than it can. If not then it can’t and the heroes have to help the survivors and stop Dr. Evil from causing the next one. I always love the story of someone at a convention trying to pin down Joss Whedon on Serenity’s exact speed vs. the size of his ‘verse. To which he replied “She flies at the speed of plot”. If you’re the player, just trust that your GM knows how strong the door is. And if you’re the GM than just give it your best fair guess and keep the game moving. I’m sorry if I come off a bit hot button on the subject, look through my posts and you’ll see I’ve always been very much on the side of story over rules, art over science in the game. Thanks, and I await the inevitable smackdown.

I forgot about the gorilla fighting. Although about half of those were her beating up a guy in a gorilla suit hired by Mr. Drysdale. The rest were her against a real one they liberated from the zoo. Even if I accept Lord Liaden’s lower estimation of Granny’s age I still stand by my opinion of the Clampett’s entire family tree being paranormal rather than just robust.

I think they’re referring to washing up between stages of food prep. Wash hands Cut up chicken Wash Hands Make salad I’ve worked in kitchens and it’s scary how many people act like washing up once at the beginning of the shift and once at the end is good enough.

Hell, once the plane takes off just pretend to sneeze on the guy sitting next to you and you’ll get the whole row to yourself. But don’t do it before takeoff or they’ll throw you off the plane.

To any and all...I never meant to say that one spell COULDN’T exist to do everything that Tywyll was going for. It’s just in the original post he never stated the the nature of the spell itself and I was saying how some GM’s like myself would balk at a book legal power if they didn’t agree with it fitting in special effect wise. And he might want to think thru the options. The story I used as illustration was about a player with a legal and correct write-up that I felt violated his special effect. For example if the Flash suddenly developed telepathy, you would say “this makes no sense”. And the answer “Well, he has the points for it.” doesn’t help. I may be wrong but I’ve always come down more on the side of special effect over point totals in the game. Too much of either side can ruin things but IMHO that’s how I see it. I invite discussion and debate on this subject, but it may be better off done in another thread.

Master Goodwin’s post above is most helpful and accurate about how the points and powers work in the system, but I want to try the question from a different angle. Magic is all about intent, and at least to me it seems that a spell for opening locks would be different from one about one that banishes entangles. While a power with variable effect might be book legal, if I were the GM I might not let a player have a power that made no sense to their special effect. I once had a player running a mutant weather controller “like Storm”. After a while he wanted to play a mentalist, but didn’t want to start from scratch so he tried to sell me on the idea that since the weather/lightning was electrically based that he could then read the electric impulses in the brain and justify telepathy and telekenisis. I told him he had three options. 1) Build a brand new character. 2) He could “crash” the old character and take half the points towards a new one. (a house rule at the time) 3) Let me come up with an episode to explain the change in powers. (LSH’s Lightning Lass becomes Light Lass) He wasn’t happy with any of them. He wanted to be a psionic who also controlled the weather. We finally decided that he could play whatever he wanted for other GM’s in the group (if they let him) but not in my campaign. A long story not made short (sorry) but basically I was wondering what kind of spell would give you all the effects you want. You might have to go with more than one slot to do everything you want. Maybe not as inexpensive that way, but more in line with a cohesive special effect.

I refer you to grown men discussing the sexual tastes of the characters in My Little Pony. Not simply porn, but discussions about who might like what...and how. Using this as a benchmark, everybody here is boring. Thank God.

Now that I’m thinking about it, that whole family tree was metahuman. Granny (Daisy Moses) was Jed’s mother in law and was a lady wrestler for a while at an age to have remembered the Civil War so in the early 1960’s so she had to be around ninety. Jethro had a twin sister named Jethrine (also played by Max Baer jr.) who was just as strong as he was. Their mother (Pearl Bodine) was Elly May’s aunt so she must have been Jed’s sister, and she had a sonic attack yodel that could take a man off his feet. Also don’t forget Elly’s animal empathy Now you have three family lines, Moses, Bodines and Clampetts all showing paranormal abilities but when the show went on location to BugTussle the nearest town to the Clampetts old cabin, the residents were odd and out of date, but not empowered. So what do you think happened? A meteor like the one that fell in Wold-Newton England and caused the mutations that gave that extended family tree it’s abilities possibly irradiating the water table. Special flora like the Wakandan “heart shaped herb” being part of the recipe of Granny’s Spring Tonic, it was mandatory for all family members and did have strange effects on city folk. Or could it be something even more astounding? It’s quarter to three in the morning here and I can’t sleep. This is what you get. “Y’all come back now, ‘ya hear!”

Friendly fire.

Bedfellows

....and we’re not the most hygienic of animals.

Guy’s named Nunzio don’t wear trilby hats anymore, they wear ugly a$$ track suits.

I’m in Massachusetts, one of the States that’s had somebody come down with it, but everything seems pretty calm so far. Boston has a lot of universities with students from all over the world so there’s a lot of worry about what’s going on back home.

Nazis, always Nazis. There is nothing better on God’s green Earth than pounding the everliving snot out of a bunch of those scumbags. Followed a close second by Klansmen. Do you know why Klansmen wear those hoods? So you can’t see their heads are pointed. Do you know why Klansmen wear those long robes? So nobody can see their wearing dresses.

Does anybody else want to hold him up and sing Circle of Life?

It depends, I ran a ‘30’s campaign based on the old radio show “I Love a Mystery” and the PC’s were all members of “The A-One Detective Agency” a kind of gumshoe’s version of the Adventures Club. The starting group were all supposed to be long time friends, so they knew most of each other’s history’s. As new players/characters came in they could choose to be old time members or have me fold them into the current story. This dictated how much they knew about the others. It’s a lot more fun do this kind of thing in game.

This is an oooooooold joke I loved back in jr. high school (late ‘70’s) but when I heard it, it was about three big Arab guys and one little Jewish guy on a train with a pot of tea. Old jokes never die they just mutate into something different.

What I was referring to was that the high mortality rate for PC’s that D&D is known for tends to make players more conscious of keeping a loved character alive. So points will tend to go into defense and attack slots before the more character rounding but ultimately useless types of skills. Superhero games generally aren’t that lethal, so putting points into more character rounding things is an easier call. When you have a house in a bad neighborhood you’ll tend to spend more money on insurance and alarms than on painting the garage. P.S. I never quoted myself before in a post, has anyone else done it?

IMHExperience, FH and D&D characters tend not to have as broad a skill set as Supers. Things like detective work and streetwise even though possibly useful in fantasy settings just aren’t a priority.

During John Byrne’s Man of Steel reboot after Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was his way of explaining the invulnerability. He was also the one who came up with Superman having a form of touch telekinesis to explain why large/heavy objects didn’t crumble apart when he lifted them.

The problem is with new players a word like “armor” can make things confused. Superman and Batman both have resistant PD (of different amounts) But Special Effect wise, Supes has a skin tight force field. While Bats has armor. When I started I originally thought all “armor”had to be Iron Man style.

I think it’s the Facebook guy.

Emmylou Harris’s version of Pancho and Lefty as part of the Ken Burns Country Music documentary on PBS.

Wow, a Stranger in a Strange Land reference. Cool.

Yes they do. The Brits are still bitching about Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins. Wait til Lin Manuel Miranda’s version sinks in.