Doctor Agenda

Re: My Superhero Universe

To pick a nit, shouldn't U-man's End Cost for his eyebeams be 10 instead of 20?

Re: My Superhero Universe

Ultraman was a wholy original design inspired by an obscure superhero from the 1930s. I'll be updating him' date=' and I have a few more 250s to put up.[/quote']

 

Obscure, huh? Is he inspired by someone other than Superman or Captain Marvel, or are you having me on?

Re: A 'realistic' supers world?

Yeah, I don't recommend it as a great source of ideas, okay if you want to run the adventure with newbie supers.

Re: My Superhero Universe

Consider U-man's writeup stolen with only small alterations for my current campaign. You do good work, and I'm in the market for 250-point characters. Glad to see you got enough posts in for your Rep to show.

Re: A 'realistic' supers world?

I thought so. The character section was sparse pickings for me, but I got a lot of ideas for organizations and terminology.

Re: Concepts You Just Can't Build on 350 points.

About an immortal's skills...this might be a place to use Multiform: have an alternate form with an earlier skill set that is accessed through 'flashbacks'. Have THAT form pay the Multiform cost because it was not as experienced as you are now. Need to shoe a horse, translate ancient Greek, or pilot a clipper ship? Just think back.

The Multiform option for imitating powers is the way to get the closest build to Rogue, IMO. Just buy enough different forms to carry her through her career. 64 should be plenty, and if it isn't you should be able to come up with 5 points by then to double it. In this case the base character pays the cost, as her alternate forms are her plus the powers she's sucked up. The power-sucking options are still pricy, but Multiform still simulates what she does better than a power pool. I would not allow alternate forms over the level of the other PCs, but others might.

Re: A 'realistic' supers world?

I've got a thread lying around here somewhere that was a solicitation for ideas for my game that has superpowers appearing on Oct 12, 2007, to the accompaniment of global seismic activity. The breakout event is called the 'Vibe' and powers are related to the desires and or personality of the altered person. PCs have started a paranormal talent agency and a school for young paranormals (most schools did not allow their paranormal students back after winter break). Under alternate identities they rescued a couple of hundred prisoners (mostly children) from Camp 22 in N. Korea. They've only just recently fought paranormals in their own weight class (super-thugs hired by the Aryan Brotherhood after we captured about thirty of them). Some 'Alts' have paratechnology that can't be reproduced by normals and some are geniuses who will have a big impact given enough time. One of the latter is the guy with the flying car prototype (nearly 10% of the population got a LITTLE power and 20 points can make you a genius or savant, he got it by random roll, fair and square). All kinds of factions and organizations are springing up, and a Paranormal Registration Act is being wrangled in Congress, slowed by Alt congressmen worried about their own rights.

A sourcebook for M&M called Paragons came out recently. It is a really good source of inspiration for this kind of game.

Re: New Character: Lady Liberty

LS: Intense Head is more like a disadvantage, isn't it? Oh, you must have meant Intense HEAT! I suppose I shouldn't have brought it up, were I a proper gentleman.

Re: WWYCD: Out of cash

*laughs* I like how you think; this is the same sort of thing I'd do. If your heroes can travel the world, why not capture large bunches of 'most wanted, high bounty, too-powerful-to-grab' targets?

 

Freedom is the only real character of mine who had major resources (i.e. Money); unlike Reed, or Tony, or Lex, or any other common 15-point-wealth character, she didn't have an umbrella corporation. Her money was typically bought a) difficult to dispel and/or invisible power f/x, to show that her financial empire was both huge and concealed.

 

Again, a Shadowrun mindset.

Gracias. Interesting use of advantages on a Perk. I hope she doesn't take the invisibility on her wealth to such an extreme that she could pass as a bag lady.

Re: New Character: Lady Liberty

Captain Invisible or Captain Invincible?

Re: Batman

Drifter has got to get some trick boomerangs. How can he go on using '8d6 EB Range Based on Str, OAF, 4 recoverable charges' throwing irons after I've seen this splendid array of smokarangs, flasharangs, razorangs, gasarangs, bolorangs, shockarangs, BOOMarangs, and whatever-I-might-happen-to-needarangs?

Re: where do the villains get the MONEY?

Bank jobs are too high risk/low reward.

 

ATM jobs, however, seem cool. An ATM, particularly in a highly travelled area, can have upwards of 50 thousand bucks in it.

 

Although I think banks would start protecting them with NND gas and sonic booby traps if things got too out of hand.

In my Desperate Measures campaign, Power X, the paranormal representation agency, has contracts with most of the city's banks to monitor their cameras and quickly alert several highly-mobile combat-worthy paranormals of any bank robberies or ATM shenanigans. So far it's the ATM heists that have kept them busier. One time they caught up with a Brick who had run off with the whole machine.

Re: Finding Players...

This is not a fast way to do it, but you could start a Champions or Superhero RPG Meetup for your local area. You might be surprised to find out how many people would be interested.

Re: WWIYCL? Living Among Giants

Drifter--"Does this town really need TWO brooding streetwise costumed crimefighters? At least Vesper has a spiffy car. On the other hand, I know what 'Drifter' means. It means HE's the one who should have the spiffy car and the other guy should be gliding around rooftops like a bat out of hell."

Re: Champions games you've run

In no particular order:

Legacies: All characters had to have a connection to the Defenders of Justice, eg, Optimus II. Set in Old Detroit. Ran a modified Wings of the Valkyrie to great effect.

Desperate Times: The Vibe causes .0001% of Earth's population to develop powers at the standard superhero level on Oct 12, 2007. As if that weren't disruptive enough, .001% get them at the low-powered superhero level, .01% at the high-powered hero level, and so on to 10% +0-25 base and +0-25 disads for some ability (if you get zero points, you're latent or the change isn't worth points, like being able to eat a little more without gaining weight). This leads to a very event-packed five months, including the players founding both a paranormal employment angency and a super-school. I just got the M&M Paragons game last weekend and it's got a lot of great ideas for a game like this one.

Storm Dragons: The characters all have some connection to mythology and included Magni, Modi (the actual Norse gods), Marduk (a man possessed by the Sumerian god's spirit), and Kali (a shapeshifting robot who wound up betraying us). My memory of the other characters is fuzzier, I think we had a Norn some of the time. Those Olympians were always giving us trouble. It was a 350-point game, back when that was considered high-powered.

Re: Champions games you've run

West Guard: Name was swiped from Aaron Allston's strike force. World was mostly 3rd-4th Ed Champions Universe.

 

There were three of us. We each had 2 characters (yes, I, the GM had two "GMPC"s who served as a) A Worf Brick (Used to show how tough the opponents were) and the token scientist so I could esplain things))

 

It was a blast, I had to work around a broken powerful character and a broken not powerful character.

 

But if I had it all to do again we'd have invited a few more players. (Beyond me, my best friend and my brother)

Like 15 years ago I ran a South Guard game, 3rd Edition. I don't remember EVERYTHING about it but it featured a brickess named Steel Magnolia, a former mummy called Remnant, and some other PCs. It lasted a couple or three years and they eventually became Earth Guard.

Re: The Amazing Darkon

I dunno ... I had a great character in the 80s that used Remarkable in his name

The Remarkable Roachman? Sounds like a token hero to me!

Re: Hurl Lightning from another’s lightning ability…

But then anyone can use them or take them away from him.

 

And really, do you want someone to steal your thunder?

LOL, I'M not going to mess with the Son of Zeus!

Besides, they can be partly personal: if you can't handle lightning you shouldn't touch lightning bolts.

Re: Minimum megascale inches?

You can get a advantage to let you scale your 10,000 km down to 1 km, I think it is +1/4.

Re: Hurl Lightning from another’s lightning ability…

I have a character with a similar power.

 

The character: Rebound, has the power to absorb, and expel energy. She is built with a 50 point VPP with the limitation Only to mimic the SFX of the last power absorbed. And she has a 4d6 absorb (any energy attack) 1 minute return rate, absorb to VPP

 

The GM and I have agreed that the lim on the VPP means that the base pool is unaxcessable if she has no energy absorbed. The character is a ton of fun, but with that being her only actual power there have been a number of times during fights where the character feels useless because nobody on the team is an energy projector, and she can't shoot unless already hit.

 

So unless "Son of Zeus" has other powers (the lightning being only a backup power) I think it may be best to give him an item (like a belt, staff, or arm band) that allows him to shoot his bolts with some regularity. Either that or he is going to be shoving his hand into the electrical socket a great deal.

 

I would consider giving him something like this:

 

Armband of Lightning: 10d6 EB (lightning), OIF (golden armband with lightning bolt symbol) (-1/2).

 

I would also consider giving it 8-10 charges (it needs to sit near an electrical source for a given amount of time to recharge). But I would consider keeping its end cost even if it does have charges.

 

Gojira's idea is good also.

Or a few lightning bolts he can grab out of a quiver, say 10d6 EB (lightning), OAF (Quiver of Lightning Bolts) (-1), with 4 charges (-1?).

Re: from little plot seeds, mighty games do grow: Share your ideas!

There have been sightings of large Velociraptors in the Maze section of Utah's Island in the Sky state park. Now a camper has been eaten. Time for a dino hunt in the most complex system of canyons in the world.

North Korea's Camp 22 is a pit of human rights violations that stagger belief. A prisoner is empowered when an experimental biowarfare agent is tested on her, giving her an ability (Desolidification maybe or megascale Teleport) that allows her to escape. The rest of her family is still in the camp and she is begging the heroes to help her rescue them, if they haven't already been executed for her escape. All they have to do is invade North Korea and find one family out of 50,000 prisoners in an area the size of Los Angeles. You can check Camp 22 on Google Earth for horrid details, it is not a read for the faint of heart. It does give a good description of the concentration camp, though.

Re: People with Powers

And not just from escapes. "I can grow foot long razor sharp claws and I don't bleed anymore. Who's the bitch now?" There will be a period of readjustment of "political" power to the realities of "military" power inside the prisons. I'd estimate a 25%-75% fatality rate amoung current gang leaders. In many cases this is not such a bad thing.

Hell you might even get people breaking IN to settle scores with inmates. Ayrian Nation for instance has pissed off a LOT of people.

In my setting (similar enough to yours to be confusing at times) prisons are prime recruiting grounds for combat alts to send to war zones--commuted sentence and a decent salary in return for military duty, and you don't have to figure out how to hold them without comic book technology. Of course all this was after the initial wave of prison riots ran their course. Now I'm thinking gangs might be a good source of recruits, a lot of them could be had for less than six figures and bangers are more likely to have combat alts than the general population. I hadn't thought about Alts breaking into prison, but it makes sense.

Re: People with Powers

Fortunately I've got 90% of humanity not directly affected, although in most games a superhuman population over 5% would be considered ultra-high. In effect, everyone's swords got a few inches longer, so the balance of power is roughly preserved in many cases. In a place like Darfur, though, OUTSIDE paranormals may be likely to step in due to the infamy of the government's and militia's actions. The US will ship as many combat-worthy Alts as it can to try to finally secure victory in Iraq.

Hostile governmental relations will take on a rock/paper/scissors quality of countering each others paranormal operatives, like you defending your secret installation from their invisible saboteurs with your psychic guards.

Re: Marvel High

If Captain Marvel is dead (likely, given his cancer), Minnie should have his nega-bands, and most of his powers except for cosmic awareness come from them. In that case, she would probably go by Marvel Girl or something.

Re: Black Alice (Original/Marvel Universe)

Thanks, you've inspired an 'Alice' character for my super school.