Kenn

Re: Balance versus flavour Before I ever got involved in role playing games, I read something that Jules Feiffer wrote about how fighting crime in one's own weight class had something to recommend itself. He was, however, making a sarcastic comment about the art in the comics he grew up with. I went on in another post a few months ago about how I think game balance is a sham. I'd post a link, but that's proving problematic for me. Anyway, as such, I'll make allowences for flavour at the expense of point balance every time. I'll try to make sure there's something for everybody to do, to feel useful, etc. because players need that.

Re: Batfox, part deux! Multiform character defined as two different heroes that had been caught, essentially, in a transporter accident.

Re: Batfox, part deux!

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever By flying faster than 1088 ft. per second. I don't care how super your hearing is, you're travelling faster than any noise you make. (Of course, the noise you're making should be very, very loud as the mach wave hits...)

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever At least on Earth-2, where he began his career in 1939.

Re: Going out with a bang Heh. When losing characters, if the player is continuing, the character has always slipped into retirement or NPC-dom, or been passed off to another player. And in the one main case where that happened, the new player did so much better with the character it's really not funny. If I've lost a player, it's usually been a sudden bit of business, and frankly, real life stuff always took precedence over keeping the campaign clean. In most cases I again, just allow the characters to retire. Once however, I did have a player who was leaving the country (to study in England for a semester), and new ahead of time (and this was in 1991 or so, so on-line gaming wasn't happening) so he asked me to have his character killed off. Well, my then co-GM ran the next story. The heroes were in Kuwait, standing guard to keep the war (Gulf War) from going "metahuman". Well, a new super-villain called the Scud, who's not-at-all-secret identity was Saddam Hussein (he'd had his scientist make him a living WMD) attacked, and the former PC of the player who'd left got the worst of it. Kind of goofy. But it meant that in the game world, Hussein was removed from power years earlier than in real life. One of those sharp left turns from reality, I guess. As far as leaving a game... I've only done it a few times. In one fairly bizarre D&D game I only played a few sessions, and I think after I stopped playing, the character was sent home (a gameworld where no one is a native.) The only Champions game I ever left while it was still going on, I actually left twice. It was an on-line game. It was still in the first initial meeting of the characters (the heroes were being recruited by the U.N.) and my character just walked out saying "get someone else from the U.K." The first time. After the GM begged me to forgive and come back, I did. Within a month I regretted it. Many of the problems persisted. Too many obviously deliberately obstinate NPCs, and circumstances that smelled of being rigged. In the middle of the press conference at the U.N., announcing this new U.N. backed super team, a super villain/terrorist type popped up at Liberty Island, threatening the civilians, and the statue, the usual stuff. Now as a GM, I knew fairly sure it was intendeed to be dramatic timing, despite feeling forced. Next problem, about half the team couldn't fly, or at least not quickly. We don't have our Official Team Vehicle yet, so the U.N. agrees to just let us use one of their helicopters. We go to the helicopter. We take off. The UNLiason (who'd previously just been a pain in the @$$ bureaucrat came along) My character objected, seeing as he was a civilian. The PITAB then reached into the compartment under his seat and pulled out a jet pack and a blaster rifle (and maybe a force field belt.) So maybe it's standard issue, so my character checks under his seat, and of course, there's nothing. (If there had been, I probably would have left it there, but...) So... the villain JUST HAPPENS to attack during the U.N. press conference. The U.N. JUST HAPPENS to have a semi-armoured troop helicopter standing-by at the U.N. building. And the PITAB JUST HAPPENED to sit in the one seat where there was a jet pack and blaster stored underneath. It was so forced it wasn't funny. So, I started playing the character that way, since the chain of coincidences had reached the point that it looked like a publicity stunt set-up. And the GM had the gall to aske me to stop playing my character that way, since it wasn't, it really was a chain of coincidences. So my character left the copter (he flew, just a lousy NCM), carrying his archer teammate (played by a buddy of mine who'd had enough of this crap too), and as we approached the island, the transdimensional interface in my character's gear that let him fly, etc. interacted badly with the explosive arrowhead's in his teammate's quiver, and our characters just blew up, and we got out of the game. Don't know how the GM reacted. For the record, the campaign never got past the fight on Liberty Island.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever No. That was me. I had beans for lunch.

Re: Bad Powers Flash Defense vs the Touch Group. 10d6 Energy Blast - emitted from either his sphincter or his phallus. To add insult, make it Always On, so he needs a ruby quartz diaper (or prophalactic) to control it. I'm not sure of the build, but he gains the ability to use his feet like they were hands. But the trade off is that his fingers and thumbs on his hands shink and become as useful as toes.

Re: Body, Mind, and Spirit - Have you made use of these? How? So Elle MacPherson, Stephen Hawking, and Denny Colt walk into a bar...

Re: Can "naked advantage" cancel out Limitations? Kind of like having the limitation "Always On" on one's optical energy blast, and then buying the "Not always On" through an OIF visor?

Re: How would you build Bumblebee?

Re: A Question for the Super-Tech designers amongst us Make the guy playing Providence cough up the two points. It was a silly thing to leave off.

Re: Worst comic book superfight ever From that same series... Could someone explain to me how the mostly human (except for her weather control abilities) Storm could have been trading blows with Wonder Woman (you know, strength and speed to rival the gods, or Superman.) I mean, maybe Storm could beat Wonder Woman by throwing a hurricane at Diana or something. But when they showed Diana kicking Ororo in the head, and Storm stayed conscious (and alive, rather than being decapitated)... That was messed up.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... It's been several weeks since I finished it, but Jasper Fforde's "The Fourth Bear." In the city of Reading, Goldilocks is missing, presumed dead. And it's up to Inspector Jack Spratt and Seargant Mary Mary to find the killer. It also addresses the messed up thermodynamics of the middle bowl of pooridge being the coldest. This is the second of Fforde's "Nursery Crime" novels, which kind of spun-off from the Thursday Next novels (third one, to be precise.)

Re: [CAMPAIGN] KoK Fantasy Hero So was it me who was playing Ithan and Todd was playing Crend or was I playing Crend and Todd played Ithan?

Re: Question: What different Game Systems for Superheroes? I still have my Superdudes supplement, but I lost my basic TWERPS rules.

Re: How would you build Bumblebee? Silly me. I read the topic heading and was thinking "the version from the comics or the version from the cartoon who shrinks" since I was thinking of Karen Beecher Duncan.

Re: An Old Quiz, But A Nice One. You scored as a Method Actor. You think that gaming is a form of creative expression. You may view rules as, at best, a necessary evil, preferring sessions where the dice never come out of the bag. You enjoy situations that test or deepen your character's personality traits. var img_str1=""; var result_str1="";Method Actor 92%Storyteller 83%Tactician 83%Specialist 50%Butt-Kicker 42%Power Gamer 33%Casual Gamer 25%

Re: How would you model this? I'd have him model a nice Armani suit.

Re: Balanced Opposition How experienced are the players of the four heroes? How experienced are you at game mastering? And a lot of it is what kind of dynamic you want. If you go with one villain versus the four, you need to make sure he can avoid or suck up a lot of the team's attacks. If you go for a roughly similar number of opponents, than you can probably count on it degrading into a number of 1-on-1 fights. And a lot of it is based on what kinds of heroes are in play. In short, there is no rule. A lot of it, until you start to really know the player's gaming styles and the heroes they're playing will have to be guess work.

Re: A question for the old timers... Marvel has an android monster/villain called Dragon Man. But in context I believe MitchellS is correct and that they were just parodies of Gargoyle, the guy in the red suit with the gun (who's name I've forgotten) and Flare - i.e. the Guardians.

Re: Making the math easier Okay. I'm trying to go through this, and my head is hurting. So I'm going to go with a specific example. My character has a 10d6 Energy Blast, @1/2 END, OIF wrist bracer. The cost, according to the hero system is (10 * 5) * 1 1/4 / 1 1/2 which is 41.66667. Converting this to what I'd type into the calculator (5*10)*1.25/1.5 It could also be (5*10) * (5/4) / (3/2). Now, if I understand Robyn's suggestion, the idea is to just multiply the cost of all the Advantages and Limitations by 4. This gives us (5*10) * 5 / 6, which will still result in 250 / 6 or 41.666667. Which is what we'd get in the first place. The main problem I see is the chance to forget a step. Right now, if there are no advantages, it means the step where we multiply the base cose by 1 and zero-fourths can be skipped. And if there are no limitations, we can skip the divide by 1 and zero/fourths. With this new method, the multiply by at least 4 for the advantages, and the divide by at least 4 for the limitations is always needed. And then there's the base cost. Is that suppossed to be multiplied by four as well? That just seems to me to be an extra complication. If just the advantages and limitations are multiplied by four, then the two will cancel each other out. (4/4 = 1, after all.) I guess I can understand that fractions and decimals can trigger people's math anxieties and I'm painfully aware that there are a lot of people who are worse at math than I am. So I can understand the desire to remove them from the calculation. But be careful, because there's a chance to over complicate.

Re: Your favorite team flavor... The campaign I run is, in theory, an Elite Guardians game. And at least a part of the time, they actually act that way. Because there can only really be one set of Elite Guardians of the earth (cause if there were more they'd still be responding to the same threats) the people who have wanted to run on the same game world have gone more for the family/Clubhouse models.

Re: Music Instrument Familiarity *Heh* It's my brother who got most of the musical talent in our gene pool, and our sister got the rest. Me? I'm musically inclined when I lean on a piano. Still, it's an interesting thread.

Re: Weird Talent Fonzie's ability with that jukebox was cinematic, but far more than luck.