Matt the Bruins

Re: What does a Time Elemental do? A DMV clerk.

Re: Examples of Damage Negation Bears are one animal I've always heard you want a LOT of penetrating power for should the need arise. Of course, John Candy's character in The Great Outdoors might disagree...

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #2: The Superhero Gallery! Looks very nice! Excellent combination of options that allow for quick customization of a playable character. It reminds me of those great Empyrean templates from Hidden Lands. I'll sheepishly confess that my eyebrows were racing for my hairline when I read that Titan Option sidebar until I realized that you get +5 pts of STR for every 10 pts of Growth in 6th Edition.

Re: Humans nearly went extinct I've heard a much smaller number postulated for another bottleneck in Africa about 200,000 years ago, hence the "Mitochondrial Eve" whose descendants eventually supplanted the children of all her female contemporaries. I don't know how highly regarded the theory is, but it proposed a total Homo Sapiens Sapiens population that could have been as low as 4,500, with 1600 or so breeding individuals.

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Someone tell me, how is this horror supposed to arouse women... ? I suspect it's not so much a case of actually being an aphrodisiac, as of women saying "Crap, I never thought he'd actually go through with that dare and eat the thing. Now I have to pay up..."

Re: Favorite Marvel 'What If?' I think "What If Doctor Doom Had Become a Hero?" was my all-time favorite.

Re: Single Most Powerful Super Hero EVER!!! Bendis is quite fond of making Strange useless for vague, poorly-explained reasons that ignore previous stories. Depending on how you interpret his latest storyline, his raw power may have been halved back to his pre-1974 level (with the half supplied by the Ancient One being passed on to Jericho Drumm). However, that was how powerful he was when he took down Dormamu dozens of times in the 60s and early 70s, and for his first defeat of Shuma-Gorath, which has a pretty good claim to being Marvel's ultimate evil. He was always about wise and strategic use of what abilities he had rather than just having more power than anybody else.

Re: How do you build a vampire template in 6E? Ha! That's my rationale for how vampirism got started in the first place in games with a mystical slant. Someone came back wrong.

Re: New friction(less) power I foresee grave repurcussions to this power. Trust me, you do not want to be nearby when the guy holding the Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator suddenly yells "Oops!" [ATTACH=CONFIG]34672[/ATTACH]

Re: Single Most Powerful Super Hero EVER!!! The Spectre has been the agency for (re-)creating the universe in at least two stories I'm aware of (Crisis on Infinite Earths #10 and Zero Hour #0), so he'd be pretty hard to argue against if he's allowed to play in the super hero sandbox as opposed to forces of nature. Of course, everyone and his dog manages to find some loophole or exploit a weakness to beat him at some point.

Re: Math Wait, what? There was an orange d10 in the Dungeons & Dragons Basic set I bought back in 1982. The most complex rules I can recall reading were the magic system for Mage: Revised, which (combined with the snotty attitude of White Wolf's webmaster) led to me throwing my hands up and abandoning the game company entirely. I can't actually recall any specifics about the process, but considering I used to play the 2nd Edition without complaint I think it must have been a nightmarish tangle.

Re: CHAMPIONS POWERS: What Do *You* Want To See? Something I'd like to see is a sample write-up for the new Projection-based astral form complete with builds of the suggested Invisibility, Life Support, and Movement powers that should go with. It's a pretty frequently-seen power in comic book mentalists, mystics, and the like so it would seem worthwhile to have a published model for superheroic players to build from. (I'm grateful that it's no longer standard to build that power as 140+ active point Duplication that won't fit inside any reasonable framework; I'd just like to see an example of how the Limitations on the assorted components should correspond to one another.)

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! Speaking of good ol' Defender, I was shocked when I saw the write-up in the 6th Ed Basic Rulebook this week and realized just how many points of correspondence there were between him and the Tuskegee Airwoman powered armor character I'd built a few weeks ago in complete ignorance of his stats (same STR, within a point on the armor's resistant defenses, even uses bolo entangles). Clearly, I need to add a bit about the USAF pirating James Harmon's designs to her backstory.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Just ask Virginia Hey...

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #1: The Cover!

Re: Strangest Perk you've seen? I played in a game many years ago where one of the characters had a perk-like oddity (called a schtick, I believe) that they could start a Three Stooges-style pie fight at any time by getting into an argument with someone. I don't recall the game system, but it was comedic and multi-genre (though not It Came from the Late Late Show).

Re: Champions Sneak Peek #1: The Cover! Very nice! I love the dynamism of the scene, with that great tilted view as if seen through a news camera while the cameraman is running for cover. And the Champions look great! (Less thrilled with Grond, but I assume the artist was constrained by Cryptic's redesign of the character.)

Re: Hulk write-up from Game Trade Magazine 2003

Re: Abberant conversion Terminal velocity for a flat human body is roughly 120 mph in earth's atmosphere at 1g acceleration downward. Wind resistance and gravity balance out after about 600m of falling.

Re: A Playable Black Bolt I once played a mute character who handed out printed cards to communicate (think Magic 8 Ball sayings), and I only spoke aloud to the GM while playing him.

Re: Cannot Combine Duplication It seems to me that being unable to recombine would override such things as the Duplication power being Drained or Dispelled. Also, it would definitely prevent someone from being compelled to recombine by Mind Control, or otherwise coerced into doing so, thus losing the extra manpower.

Re: How can you make the stone age cool? Yeah, but they could invent the slingshot, the missionary position, and feminism! Also modern dentistry complete with tooth-whitening, if Ayla's anything to judge by.

Re: A Playable Black Bolt Since the OMGWTFPOLARBEAR!-level sonic attack isn't something that Black Bolt uses more than once a decade or so, and not at all without causing devastation all around him, it seems like that could reasonably be built as a Complication. That electron beam that he'll actually use in a fight probably maxes out at 14-15 DC or so, maybe in the same ballpark as his physical strength. It might still take some watering down to build him as a 350-400 pt character, but you could at least get a similar feel for a homage at that level.

Re: Pleasurable Attacks? I once designed a background villain that had Negative Skill Levels and Drains against DEX and BODY constructed with that special effect (also bought with OAF Hentai Tentacle Weapon).

Re: Enough to Destroy A Planet? I don't know, I'm thinking if you fire any sort of beam powerful enough to completely penetrate a planet (assuming it's not something like a neutrino stream or a pico-meter radius laser that interacts with almost no matter on its way through), a lot of its energy is going to be spent vaporizing material from the contact point inward. Cubic miles of superheated vaporized rock venting back up the path of least resistance sure isn't going to be good for the ecosystem, even if it doesn't actually have too pronounced an effect on the overall structure of the planet.