SSgt Baloo

Re: Strange But Useful Powers. Maybe. What if your pulp hero is standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert? Will raising his hand and shouting "TAXI!" instantly bring a Checker™ Camel* to his aid? * No more than 20 Drachmas carried as change. Rates are as follows: 2 shekels for the first ¼ mile, 6 shekels per additional mile. Your driver is Achmed. This business is certified by the Timbuktu Chamber of Commerce. Timbuktu. Come for the oasis, stay for the camels.

Re: Awwwwwww... What a cute little *AAAArrrrrgggg!* To Blue Jogger: Cool! The variable size power affords the Tigris lepus a better chance of being mistaken for a "cute, little, fluffy bunny". This means that prey animals will tend to ignore him until too late. Folks who've never heard of the Rapacius Rabbit might be tempted to take it home as a pet (or possibly dinner) only to discover that family members inexplicably keep disappearing.

Re: Speedsters: Okay! Okay! I'll buy the @#$% thing! (Sheesh! what a sales pitch!)

Re: Speedsters: Excellent character concepts! Would you be so kind as to describe how ETSZ works? (I'm convinced. I really have to get my mitts on the Ultimate Speedster.)

I was looking in another part of the board and I saw "Summon Vehicles" in the title of a thread. I got a silly mental image and an idea for an odd, but useful ability: Summon Taxi: The character, with but a sharp whistle and an upraised arm, is able to summon a 50-point vehicle complete with skilled driver/pilot (50-point character). The vehicle appears seemingly from nowhere and is capable of taking the summoner from where he is to where he's going, within the limits of the point constraints. Note: the player is advised to have several vehicle/pilot combo handy to save the GM trouble.

Re: Speedsters: Hey, this is all great stuff! Keep it up! Now I've read this far, I recall a couple characters (some not mine) who also had "speedster" abilities. One guy was able to turn himself into electromagnetic energy and teleport great distances along any conductor. He had to be touching the conductor at the start and finish points of his teleport, but if he was standing on railroad tracks, f'rinstance, he could teleport any distance along them. Likewise, if he was talking to someone on the telephone, he could teleport to the other phone's location if it was within range. Another character had a speed of eight and could teleport anywhere he could otherwise walk, swim, jump, or climb to. The special effect was that he moved so quickly you could barely see him. The last one was a character I made. He was a mutant who looked like a Humanoid tiger. Built to be an anti-kzin, Bob Tiger was everything kzin were not, except for the ability to kick [biblical beast of burden] and take names. With SPD 6 and 12" of running, he was capable of running at just short of 55 miles per hour.

I've run (and GM-ed for) a number of speedster characters in the past. I had to kind of creep up on the challenge of building a speedy character. My first build was a character with a Dex of 50 and speed 12. Of course, since we were limited to 250 points, that left only 70 points for everything else. Once I started playing this guy, I realized that SPD 12 and REC 5 means that Captain Zippy turns into Captain Gasping-For-Breath very quickly. I just bought Star Hero this month. Champions is next. I don't own Ultimate Speedster (US). If you have US, why should (or shouldn't) I buy it before I get Champions? Some of you are very experienced with this sort of thing. How do YOU create speedsters?

Re: Change the STUN Multiple Rule? I've never had an issue with stun dice at 1d6-1. examples: Die Min Max AVG 1d6-1 1 5 2.66666... 1d6 1 6 3.5 1d6+1 2 7 4.5 In the above chart, the first line represents a standard 1d6-1 stun die. The least you can roll is one. 1 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 16 16/6 = 2.66666... Not 2.5 There are six possible outcomes, but two of them are the same (minimum of one). When you add +1 (or more) to the stun die, you still have six possible outcomes, but the uplicate results dissappear. As before, the average is calculated by adding all six possible outcomes and dividing the result by 6. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21 21/6 = 3.5

I've always been partial to lucky characters. Luck dice, on the other hand, don't strike me as an easy way to do luck effects. Is 10d6 of luck as effective as a 10d6 energy blast? How do you handle characters with a load of luck dice?

Re: Anthropomorphic/Furry HERO Resources Whups! I forgot to check if the post I replied to was past it's "freshness date". Some boards frown on necroposting. Does this mean I'm subject to disciplinary action? Alas, that was about 20 years ago and 3,000 miles distant. (Short answer: No.) Sorry.

Re: Anthropomorphic/Furry HERO Resources I had a friend write them up in 3rd edition rules. He used duplication x4, 0End, Always on, and built the four characters with martial arts, nearly identical stats, and gave each of them a HTH weapon with ~8 dice (equivalent) damage. Plus some armor because of their carapaces. And, I provide a link to Youtube so you can watch the music video . I don't know if any of you will find it useful, but it's relevant!

I have no idea what the origin of the above pic, but I thought it was hilarious. Still do. The challenge I pose is this: Given the appearance of this creature (and the complete lack of anything in the image to give us scale cues), how would you write up this creature?

Re: The Intangibles... (sounds like a group name, eh?) I noticed that his attacks are bought with the power advantages: "Affects Desolidified" (AD) and "Affects Physical World" (APW). I'm confused. I thought that desolid characters didn't need AD to affect other desolid characters unless the other character's desolidification was of (GM's Judgement™) an "incompatible" special effect. F'rinstance, a ghost might not be able to affect (without APW) a Vampire's mist form because, even though it's desolid, it does not exist in the ghost's dimension any more than the dresser in my bedroom. Have I missed something?

Re: Aircraft that Never Were (BTW, love the thread title.) The aircraft designed by Vincent Burnelli, illusrated here did exist, but only a few of them. I always liked the concept but never heard of Burnelli until recently. The heroes in one of my WW II campaigns used an all-wood flying wing propelled by ducted fans to get around. It wasn't a VTOL craft, but it could take off in about 40 feet. I used to (and will again) draw aircraft that never existed. I even put together a small booklet for my nephew's son once, titled They Never Flew. Unfortunately I have since lost the original pictures. There are three that I scanned and posted on the web a few years ago. The links to them are at the bottom of this page. The Speedmaster is a racing plane. The fuselage is also the housing for an enormous ducted fan. The Gladius/Mace is a fighter/bomber. It's based on the XP-59 (the propeller-driven one that preceded the P-59A Airacomet). The engine is a gas turbine driving twin contrarotating props at the back of the fuselage. The "Floater" was a 1/10th scale prototype of a plane intended to compete with the "Spruce Goose". It was all wood except for the motors and a few other bits. The final product would have looked like the prototype except for the relative size of the flight deck and the placement of the ducted fans. In the big plane, there would be eight ducted fans in the wing roots, driven by engines similar to that in the Gladiator/Mace (but much, much larger).

Re: Aircraft that Never Were * The B-66 was the Destroyer. The Hustler was the B-58. Which one do you mean? I've heard of Pyewacket and up till now, I've never heard much more than "unmanned disk". As far as revisiting the technology, who can say that they haven't already? If its performance is that good, it might still be classified. After all, the most amazing thing about the F-117 wasn't that it was classified, but that it had been operational for years while everybody "knew" it was in development.

Re: We've Got the Missiles peace to determine... "Let's make peace the way we did in Stanleyville and Saigon "

I've always been partial to the depression/WW II era as a campaign setting. I'm starting this thread to exhange ideas and information about campaigns set in this era. Years ago when I was stationed in Korea, I was part of a pretty good-sized gaming group. We were all familiar with Hero System (3d & 4th ed. rules) and there were enough of us that there were at least three or four of us off-duty at the same time so we could game if we were so inclined. We tried to ensure that each sssion ended at a point where, if someone couldn't make it, we could explain that "Super-Guy" had other obligations so the rest of the team would fill in the gap as best they could. When it came my turn to run a campaign, I set the start date for mid-1938 (pre-war) so the players could see the changes in American Society and attitudes as war loomed on the horizon. I had already come up with the first version of my WW II Supplement, cobbled together from information gleaned from various sources, most notably the 3d edition-compatible Golden Age of Heroes. The first two PCs created for this campaign were both based loosely on Indiana Jones. One, whose name I forget now, was a "Great White Hunter" kind of guy, with loads of survival skills, plenty of skill in boxing and wrestling, stealth, etc. The other, Tex Jones, was an inventor/pilot with his own "super" plane capable of the astounding speed of 400 miles per hour, in other words, the sort of character I'd always wanted to play! I drew more than a hundred planes for this guy's character to have invented.* One adventure was based around recovering one of his prototypes which had been stolen from the Army. Other characters were based loosely on the Golden Age heroes. Superman, in Golden age form, was created for 250 points according to his description as printed in Action comics #1: "Able to lift tremendous weights (I estimated STR 50), leap an eighth of a mile (howevermuch superleap) and nothing short of a bursting sell could penetrate his skin" (resistant physical/energy defense). Golden Age Flash (not the name we used) was able to run about 300 miles per hour. One character was an elastic superhero (Elastico) with an Italian accent. It seemed like somebody had to vouch for this poor guy every few minutes. He had some pretty wild special effects for some of his abilities. He had extra HTH dice, the special effect being his fists swelling to the size of watermelons. He could superleap by assuming the shape of a ball and bouncing, he could glide by flattening himself into an airfoil shape. * Examples, the first of which is a 1930's-style racing plane propelled by a ducted fan within the barrel-like fuselage. The second plane is a Fighter/Attack plane based upon the original concept of the cancelled P-59 (the P-59A was a completely unrelated jet-propelled design). The last is a small-scale prototype for a very large wing-in-ground-effect cargo plane.

Re: 7 heroes summoned through time: who are they?

Re: Possibly Dumb Question about Characters with multiple IDS This is closely related to a question I have (so I'll ask it here): I've had multiple characters who have radically different secret and hero ids. When should I use multiform, as opposed to Instant Change or Shapeshift? Should I be using a combination of these? When is it just special effects?

Re: Santa Claus is coming (and man, is he ever pissed!) That's not Santa, but the Hogfather. He gives out sausages. Still, they do both seem to be in the gift-giving business...? Emphasis added. I've never heard of EtSZ -- please enlighten me?

A few days ago I posted in another thread about a character who was a ghost. I mentioned that the "spirit" rules might have made it easier to make such a character, however, upon perusing my 5ERulesbook I can't seem to find any reference to such rules. Were "spirit" rules 4th edition? Limited to one genre? A hallucination? If they're in the 5ER, where can I find them? If they're not, does anybody have a "ghost" character you could show me and explain how you did it? Thanx in advance!

Re: Peramonal communication

Re: Santa Claus is coming (and man, is he ever pissed!) Very cool! I had pondered the possibility of using Duplication or Dimensional Travel to provide enough Santa Clauses to do the job in one night (really, several nights -- Christmas isn't Dec 25 for everybody). Still, If you had Santa/Father Christmas/Father Winter in your campaign world, what would he look like? And I'd really like to see a write-up for Bun-Bun. I had forgotten about the Bun-Bun/Santa enmity.

Re: WWYCD: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish... The sentient cat without a name thinks: Oh, boy! More fish for me!

Okay, now that I have your attention... I once was very familiar with the Hero Sytem (4th Ed.) At one time I actually had the rules memorized. Today...? Not any more. Still, I'd like whichever of you are interested to participate in the following Christmas challenge: Write up one or more of the following: Santa Claus, his reindeer, the sleigh, Santa's elves, Santa's secret North-Pole base, Mrs. Claus, anything else you can think of that's appropriate (maybe Santa's got some enemies weve never heard of -- 'til now?) I am looking forward to seeing your excellent Hero-Fu demonstrated.