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Re: Telling YOU about the RCU! Do you have an older copy of the Champions of Justice picture? The only 'cat-woman' who has belonged to the CoJ is la Chatte (AKA Sylvie Breie) daughter of l'Ours Noir. But she hasn't been active with the team for a while. I left her out of the most recent team shot. The women in the current team shot are Charcoal (in the grey) and Chakram (in the gold, stanfding on a floating blue disk.) Chakram is very new. I'm still converting the Hero Designer output into one of our usual pages.

Re: Help with player knowledge vs. character knowledge How long have you been in MKE? And I'm not sure how far north the Sandwich fault goes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Chicago_earthquake That one woke me up. It was my 36th birthday. I remember thinking "next time I'm awoken in bed on my birthday wondering if the earth moved, I'd better not be alone."

Re: Help with player knowledge vs. character knowledge By the way, northern Illinois does get the occaissional earthquake. Not really big ones, and not often, but we get them.

Re: Luthor-type villian I *AM* doing it. Andrew Mahn went from being the head of a multi-national to President of the U.S. Savinien's main PC in my group is heading up the investigation, so I ain't saying anything more.

Re: Power up a TV or movie character.

Re: Super Metals Feminum - the name Amazonium had on TV.

Re: Super Metals Shazamium - a bracelet of this allowed a person to pass, ghost-like through objects. Sivanium - used to make very life-like robots. and Marvelium - a material so tough that a ghost-like person with that bracelet I mentioned still couldn't pass through it. All from a late Golden Age captain Marvel story.

Re: Telling YOU about the RCU! ...

Re: Running jokes in your campaign In one game I was running back... 1990 or so, the PCs were boarding a rocket to fly to the satellite where the bad guy was. Someone asked "How long will it take to get there." By brother quipped, "Just maintain a conversation the whole trip, and it'll take no time at all. Talking takes no time." Poking fun at the basic version of the rule that allows for monologuing. The comment is oft-repeated.

Re: Character: Tarzan Hmm. I missed the whole swinging vs flight debate. Since I thought the write-up was magnificent from the get-go, I obviously have no problem with using Flight. Swinging always seemed like a weird combination of a heavily limited version of Flight, combined with the specific power to create something to act as a swingline, anyway.

Re: Character: Tarzan To qute M. d'Arnot... Magnifque!

Re: How Many U S Heros ? On my campaign world, I had (until someone started a Vegas game) taken the approach that villains basicaly left Vegas alone taking the "you don't urinate in your own wheaties" approach. Whether to launder your take quickly, or to just lay low, Vegas would usually a good place to go when not committing super crime.

Re: Galactic Champions Actually it was MitchellS' initial response to Dave's initial observation. My apologies to Dave.

Re: Galactic Champions 1. Agreed. That's why I went to Low, Medium and High. 2. Also agreed. But I think that goes back to the initial point where even the low end of the GC scale is very high compared to what we're used to.

Re: Galactic Champions I think the issue of how do the Champions 3K characters compare to the Legion of Super Heroes, I think the issue has to be addressed sans points because we don't have write-ups for the Legion characters (and using the DCH write-ups leads to discussions of "the write-ups are wrong") and because with nearly 50 years of existence under their belt, and the varigies of differing reading habits means that there won't be agreement on the exact level of power a character wields. What can be said is that Champions 3K are all pretty well point balanced against one another. But if you were to compare them against the characters in the present day CU, they'd mathematically overwhelm the majority of them. Their powers are of a magnitude comparable to some of the most powerful villains in the CU. As I recall, the median attack for the Champions 2K characters is 12d6. For the Champions 3K characters, 18-20d6 is more common. On the scale of the CU, the CU3K are all on the high end. For the Legion, I'm pretty sure we can agree that Mon-El, Superboy, and Wildfire are/were all near the top tier of power, both offensively and defensively. There are a lot of characters who may have high damage attacks but not much in the way of defenses (Sunboy, Lightning Lad). And then there are the characters whose powers weren't offensive, no matter how powerful they were (Projectra, Invisible Kid, etc.) But, if we want to compare them to their counterparts... we can turn to the source material. Back in 1977 or so, the LSH met, battled, and worked with the JLA and JSA. If memory serves me, there was Superman, Batman, Green Lantern (Hal), Green Arrow and Black Canary from the JLA; Doctor Fate, Flash, Hawkman, and Power Girl, and (maybe) Green Lantern (Alan) from the JSA. There were quite a few Legionnaires present. I think Wildfire, Sunboy, Shadow Lass, and Chameleon Boy got the most air time. But already we have the dichotomy of having teams, from the 20th century, with the uber powerful (Superman, Dr. Fate, Green Lanterns) and the gimmicked up humans (Batman, Hawkman, etc.) In short, the teams were all fairly comparable. Each had some talented, weapon-using normals; mid-range powered characters; and the uber types. Which goes back to MitchellS' original point. On the CU scale, the Champions 3000K characters are all high-end nigh-uber. On the DCU scale, the Legion had some low-end, some high-end, and a good deal of middle. ----------------- In the campaign I run, the Champions of Justice in the RC Universe (http://www.rcuhero.net) my two staunchest most reliable players each have one character which is a talented, weapon using character and a nigh-uber powerful character (actually Jim has two, but there's a long story there.) But I run a game where I've said "Not Everyone is in the Same Weight Class." (And where I'll split the group up regularly so players can have multiple characters - they just rarely meet.) And in a lot of team battles, both Longbow and/or Keymaster will hang back, letting others do the heavy hitting, while they do more to figure things out. Spectrum and Eidolon tend to come across as forces of nature. But the thing is, with the multiple character thing, it almost always falls into the Spectrum/Keymaster relationship and the Eidolon/Longbow relationship. Spectrum/Longbow and Eidolon Keymaster aren't options - that's Jim/Jim and Savinien/Savinien. And Keymaster and Longbow are too similar. They fill roughly the same niche, so it would be a special circumstance that would have them both. And Eidolon & Spectrum.... with them both being so powerful, imagining the threat that could threaten them both is just.... difficult. But I've had other players that could never handle either end. If they were on the low end, they kvetched that they weren't more powerful. And if they ended up on the high end, they hogged all the attention they could. And for all their character's power, had so little panache that they never received the kudos they craved. But when both Jim and Savinien had their own campaigns (also set in the RCU) something weird happen. They were both ostensibly running "lower powered games." Jim's was mostly a "beginning heroes trying to grow into something more." Savinien's was an inherited ex-military supers campaign. Now in Jim's game I played a Captain Marvel (Shazam) pastiche who had inherited the power, but was still growing into the roll. But part way through the campaign run, there was massive player turnover. Captain Miracle had a head start on all the new characters and became the "this is what you're aiming to become" guy. Problem, most of the new players didn't want to grow into their roles. Some of the concepts didn't lean towards that kind of growth anyway, particularly Savinien's Eidolon character (he began here). It became awkward, and their were a lot of arguments. Conversely, in the ex-military game I was playing one of the most human guys (basically a Captain America pastiche, minus the colour scheme). The big gun was a very effective energy projector with a really good force field. There was a lot of "Ion Storm, blast _________." But there was one character, kind of a Navy SEAL with very Firestorm-esque abilities. His player's knowledge of science was fair. The GM's knowledge of science was fair. And frequently the player found himself pushing against the limits the GM had set. It became awkward, and their were a lot of arguments. The player was Jim. Even as I got frustrated with both of them, I was amused by the irony. Essentially Jim and Savinien were doing the same thing to the other. In both cases, the player felt the character wasn't being allowed to live up to the character's potential because the game master wanted to keep them more grounded, and less powerful. And at about the same time (we were alternating GMing - in any three month period, we'd each take a turn GMing.) What does this have to do with Champions 3K? Not much. But I use it as examples of the dangers of shoehorning concepts, and the value of not adhering to point balance.

Re: How Many U S Heros ? I think the idea of an even distribution of parahumans is silly in any campaign environment includes supers who aren't accident of birth (what Marvel calls Mutants.) Whatever things cause people to get powers, wherever those are concentrated, there would be more people in those locales getting powers. Places like "Silicon Valley" or the Research and Development Corridor of Chicago's west-central suburbs would have more people getting powers. Of course, that doesn't take into account people moving. As far as other nations go, the thing to also recall is just how American the idea of the super hero is. Using China as an example, besides what, I think it was Kevin Schultz, said about the Chinese governement killing its resident supers, I think it is also likely that any other supers would be conscripted into a special military regiment. They wouldn't have capes and tights. Just an military rank and uniform. I think in a lot of countries, the notion of becoming a super-hero jsut became one gains powers, would be a very bizarre concept for the locals (more so than it is in the U.S.)

Re: Galactic Champions And this is why "Point Balance" is a sham. The Atom (Al Pratt) is not built on the same number of points as the Spectre. Ant Man isn't built on the same number of points as Thor. Invisible Kid isn't built on the same number of points as Wildfire. The upshot of this is that it takes an emotionally mature gaming group to be able to play in a game with this inherent "unfairness." But that said, I think David's initial point is a valid one. Hero Games' books do take the approach that the higher the year is, the higher the point total should be. I think they're mistaken, but they're the publishers and can make that call if they want.

Re: (worst ever)...reasons to be a supervillain I just look better in purple and green than I do in red and blue.

Re: Location of Gotham City Well, Wonder Woman was living in New York City proper in the early 1970s, so the question could have existed then. In a number of 1950s and 1960s "World's Finest" stories, they said that Gotham was "just across the bay" from Metroplis. They didn't say which bay,

Re: [CAMPAIGN] KoK Fantasy Hero Well, I'm over at Savinien's... Now if Lez would just get here.

Re: Need an organization name Development Institute for Specialised Emergent Advanced Science and Engineering. Their headquarters is the Center for DISEASE Control.

Re: Destroy that Focus! Usually the sight of a Japanese school girl's panties will destroy my own ability to focus.

Re: Constant vs. Persistent If I'm dancing the Lambada ("the Forbidden Dance"), I'd do it with Reduced End Cost. The joys of mild dyslexia.

Re: Movement in a Jetliner!

Re: Dr. Jones denied tenure. Actually, there were a number of assertions made that, I didn't quite know from whence they came. Like the statement that he hadn't taught more than four consecutive weeks of classes, ever. I was under the impression that we had only seen two specific adventures that occurred during his time at the university. (Temple of Doom was unclear on the matter, as I recall.) It was kind of amusing, but... I found it lacking.