Alien Knight

Everybody loves DOOM! Yeah, gotta include Doom. If you want a good example of why, pick up the last four issues of the Fantastic Four. It's a great Doom story and quite chilling. I think the writer really pegged Victor and his relationship with Richards.

All is brick... Bricks are popular in hero for two reasons: 1 -- Point efficency: You just can't beat STR and CON for massive point kickbacks in hero. Leave you plenty of points to play with. 2 -- They're just fun. Bending steel in your bare hands, shrugging off horrible things that would kill any lesser man... Although you don't see too many female players who play bricks. They tend to get more cerebral. Most of the female bricks I've seen have been played by guys. Go figure. Anyway, in a campaign, all bricks, all the time can work. Had a pretty good run with this team: Bludgeon -- Viking God of Strength. Strongest brick, kind of weak on the defenses in my opinion, but so what. Brains of a goat. The Iron Genreal -- Solider (I think) who had gobs of density increase. Highest defenses in the group. Normal intelligence, but more berserks than I've ever seen on one character. Snarl the Dinosaur Man -- Janitor who could transform at will into a 10' bright orange dinosaur/human hybrid. Member of the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation. Not the strongest or the toughest, but had tons of recovery and a bunch of super senses. Also the team's aquatic specialist. Go go godzilla. Had brain the size of a walnut. and out of order: Bonsai -- Martial artist with shrinking powers. Brick light with about a 35 STR plus martial arts. Functioned as a cross between Arthur from the Tick and Jimminey Cricket. Oddly enough the campaign was fun while it lasted, we usually got our man and the battlefield rarely survived any conflict the Birck Brigade was involved in. When the weak guy has a 75 STR, EVERYTHING looks like a hammer...

Re: Are you engaged in the DEX race? I'm sorry but, "Hulk LIKE to be touched," is just SO wrong...

Submitted for your approval My personal best would have to be when the Blue Scarab (and the Sidekick Squad) responded to a report of a super-powered robbery in a penthouse suite atop a tall building overlooking the city. The Scarab burst in through the balcony, suprising the three villains and made a rousing speech. "Surrender villains! You are no match for the righteous might of the Justifiers!" That was about the point I realized I was alone. The Scarab was the only member of the team who could fly. Crossfire and Zoom were still lumping it up the stairs.

Well, here's how we've done it... We always treated it like a 'suprise move' for a +1 to +3 bonus depending on how stellar the GM thought it was. Acting skill vs. Perception can be complimentary if you want a mechanic. Example I can recall is Snarl the Dinosaur Man purposely missing an opponent with his scaly fist to instead smite him with his mighty tail. That help any?

Hmm, this one's tough: The Ibis -- My main attacks are mental and, as a flaming brick, I'll wager my sun bolts are useless too. If he won't talk I'll need to subdue him using my magical abilities. To contain the damage I'll want to whip up a sand storm with my Egyptian Magic. While he's distracted, I'll call on the power of the Nile and hope he follows comic-book logic and is succeptable/vulnetable to water attacks. Once he's subdued, I'll use my ability to turn back the clock and see what brought this on and hope my other super-senses are enough to scope out the bad guys and bring them to justice. The Blue Scarab -- After realizing my telepathic powers are a wasted effort, I'll have to try and wear him down. With my scarab agility (stop laughing), and likely speed advantage I'll need to keep ahead of him and plink away with my power ring interspaced with entangles and telekinesis to keep him off balance. After he's down, I'll use my psychometry to find out what made him go bonkers, then mind scan for the hostages, teleport to where they're being kept, and kick bad guy patootie. Shrike -- First, make a joke about how I'm going to be fried chicken. Then swoop in and do my best for damage containment. He's a brick with (presumably) an energy blast which is one of Shrike's least favorite things. As the fastest thing in the air, I'll want to taunt him mercilessly while pelting him with eye beams and use my (probable) speed advantage to missile deflect now and again. Assuming I win (and that's a big IF), I'll need to find out about the heist later and hope one of my more detective-oriented teammates figures out the connection and clues me in. Oh, or my contact in the paranormal crimes division. He's a smart guy. Doctor Web -- I'm going to take a legendary beating. With any luck I can keep him distracted with webbing and get him to chase me to a less populated area. My best bet is going to use a lot of dodging and blocking (hey, I got spider strength) and hope I can last long enough for him to cool down. Maybe use the environment to my advantage in the form of fire-hydrants, extinguishers, etc... After the fight, I learn about the heist, put two and two together, get five and go off to try and find the bad guys. Snarl the Dinosaur Man -- Snarl beat stuffing out of flamy man. Then Snarl get pizza. Bright light. Must be energy blast. Villains get what they want. Snarl and another brick in a serious fight would turn downtown into a smoking crater at best. Well, assuming the big guy isn't distracted by a butterfuly or something and wanders off in the middle. I like this scenario. Nice and devious.

That's wild, I played in a game where our team was called the Protectors. We started in Boston and later started a second campaign where the team was based in San Fran. The Midwest team was based in River City (Detroit) though. Other teams include: Shadow Force -- Upstate New York, I forget the city's name, same place as KFC headquarters. Aegis -- Central City: A fictionalized version of Chicago. (Current Game) ICE -- International team based in Iceland. Ninja Strike Force Takashi (Ok, so they never really had an official group name): Took place in cyberpunk Detroit. There were more, but those lasted the longest and had actual set locations.

Good point Yeah, that's a good point. GURPS suffers pretty heavily from, "if it ain't in the book, well, too bad." M&M also suffers from that, but to a lesser degree. Yes, you can make your own powers and some people really like the system that handles it. I am not one of those people. I like to see where the numbers are coming from. You're also right about characters taking a while. Might I suggest that you play a few sessions (a fight or two at least) with random pre-gens to get your players used to the system and how things work, then start the campaign? A big resource is going to be the Powers Database. That is going to be EVER so helpful to a lot of players. The ragged remnants of my group and I discussed that last night and determined it to be the best idea for a HERO book in some time (possibly ever). Kudos. Golf clap. Promotions all around. Anyway, back to chargen. After a while it comes pretty naturally. Sure I need to refrence the book now and again, but I can do it freehand in about an hour, less if I'm using software. Keeping in mind that the best villans are the recurring ones, it's not as much effort as you'd think. Now doing the artwork, that's time-consuming. Not a system related thing though. Drawing a super-hero is drawing a super-hero no matter what stats you plug into him/her/it. I wouldn't worry about being up to the task of GMing HERO. Other than the combat system, you're looking at GURPS (more or less). You know GURPS, so this won't be as big a leap as you might think. Sure the rulebook is HUGE, but it's mostly the toolbox for character/campaign design. Go nuts. You'll probably have a good time.

Aha! Ok, that really matters. HERO characters tend to have a real Marvel-ly feel to them. In my experience with the system (since the 80's, I've got the blue boxed set) beginning characters tend to have the power levels and range of capabilities you find in your average mighty Marvel mag. M&M doesn't capture that as well for me. Granted I've only run four games with it, but the quirky d20 mechanics (I know, I know, use 2d10 instead, sheesh) seem to make things a little too, I dunno, random. There are some things I like about M&M over HERO, but at the end of the day I think I prefer the way HERO allows you to simulate whatever your imagination can conceive over how M&M handles things. Of course this is just my opinion, your mileage may vary. I intend to buy everything from both companies and mine them ruthlessly for ideas regardless. ;>

Well getting them to learn two systems was pretty easy. Everybody wanted to try out the new kid on the block. Fortunately, everybody and their dog is at least passing familiar with d20 so the learning curve wasn't real steep. I'd like to know how the experiment comes out too. Last night was game night and out of five players, I had two cancellations and a no-show. We did spend some time talking about the system though and I got a bit more of a player's perspective. One of the guys mentioned that he didn't like the canned powers aspect of M&M. (Curiously, this is the guy who's character has 10 levels of Sorcery.) I found that kind of odd as I thought the character creation rules made things a lot easier on the players. Shows what I know, eh? From what I've seen of GURPS supers (admittedly not much considering the volume of GURPS stuff I own), M&M is a lot less lethal. Like HERO, it's dang hard to kill somebody accidentally. In GURPS I keep thinking, "10d6 attack vs. 15 health points. Oh my." That's actually a good thought. What kind of supers game were you considering for your campaign? Street level? Four color? Golden Age? Mystery Science Theatre 3000?

Ok, that's close Ok, to start with, that's almost how villain points work. The GM starts with a pool based on the number of players who show up and their respective character levels. Tonight I'm running the last session in M&M format for my experiment in which system works best with my group. Four out of five players have told me that they'll be in attendance and all their characters are PL 10 so I'll have [10 + (10 + 10 + 10)/2 ]/2 = 12 villain points. Not that I've really had to use these, the players are really stingy with theirs and generally finish the night with most if not all their points unspent. Anyway, I'm still not sure how I feel about M&M. On the one hand, combat is pretty straightforward compared to hero. I find hero combats tend to devolve into wargames. That's not a BAD thing, I like the occasional wargame, but it doesn't feel like a comic-book combat to me. M&M character creation is bone simple. Other than the tendancy to min/max (and this is really rampant with my players, your results may vary) this has got to be the most player-friendly supers creation system since V&V. I have one player that is floored by HERO, it's just too complex for him to deal with after a day at work. One thing I did notice about M&M is that you have to be pretty careful about making villains. A PL 11 villain can easily be untouchable by a PL 10 hero. The same works in reverse. Because of the way Protection works, pretty much every one of my PCs are immune to mooks. ANYWAY, to make the point. You could just do what I'm doing. Start a campaign and switch out systems after X adventures. When you're done, see which one works best for you and your group. It's the only way to be sure. Happy Gaming!

Tough one Hmm, well then with my more recent characters: 1) The Ibis: First thing's first, I use my Canopic Jar attack to seperate his soul from his body. While he's touring the underworld I'd quickly use my ability to turn back the clock to see where he hid the bomb. That accomplished, I don't trust my force field to stop a backpack nuke, so I'd need to send it far away, probably use my magical powers to drop it into limbo or something. By this time the bad guy has probably recovered from being Jarred, but with joker-esqe gadgetry he's not much of a threat anymore. 2) The Blue Scarab: Mental powers make everything better. Grab control of his mind and frog-march him to the bomb, then make him disarm it (or use telepathy to get the instructions directly and do it myself). That done, I use my power ring to beat him unconcious for the authorities. 3) Shrike: I'm in serious trouble. If I'm solo, damage containment is going to be the best I can do. First I need to contain the villain, my telekinetic powers should be more than enough to stop this guy, but I don't dare hurt him. Next, we try and find the bomb and pray that my super vision will help me detect the bomb. Once I find it, all three of us are going into space. Hopefully I'll be able to get rid of the thing before it goes boom, but if not, well, at least I went out in a blaze of glory. If I can't find the bomb, the whole train is going into space. The loss of life is unfortunate, but the number of people that are going to die if I let the plan come to term is going to be a lot more than the number of passengers on the train.

Activation wierdness Perhaps the best we ever had was regarding a variable point power pool with a skill roll to change powers. Our players: Mirage - A teleporting martial artist The Holy Avenger - An avenging priest of Mars despite a templaresque costume and a big iron mace. We called him the Holy Roller largely because it annoyed the player. The villains are getting away in their escape plane. Mirage, being a versatile teleporter grabs the Holy Avenger and teleports to the hatch where they proceed to cling to the ship's hull while the Holy Roller attempts to make a new entrance with his mace. After a few rounds of accelleration, the bad guys electrify the hull and gravity begins to take its toll on our heroes. It's too far for Mirage to teleport and he can't drop the velocity anyway so he turns to the Holy Roller and says, "Ok, you can fly us down now." The Holy Roller replies, "Fly? I can't fly. I thought you could fly." Mirage's eyes get big as the ground starts to loom closer, "Wait a minute, I KNOW you can fly. I've seen you fly!" "Well, I can't fly NOW." Much groaning around the table and the Holy Roller attempts to configure his power pool. Failure. Mirage gets this brilliant idea to teleport UP so that the Roller gets another chance to remember how to fly. Poof! Up goes the dynamic duo and the Holy Roller makes another attempt. Failure. Mirage starts to do some math regarding his speed, his ability to group teleport and how fast they're falling. Gravity is going to win this little race. Soon. He teleports again and looks at the Holy Roller's player pleadingly. He rolls to configure his pool. Failure. Mirage's player howls in frustration and the GM announces that this is the last call. If the roller blows this roll, both characters are going to hit at critical velocity. In this particular campaign, 30d6 means they're both likely to take some body. Mirage is probably going to be at death's door with his 20 defenses, so his player is a little worried. He makes the final teleport and looks at the Holy Roller's player who rolls and...succeeds. By one. There was much rejoicing.