Pattern Ghost

Re: A rundown on some material in some books I have been writing. Sounds like you have a well thought out game plan.

Re: DoA Characters We rented DOA once for my brother in law's 360, but didn't get into indepth play, as the inlaws are MMO geeks and not into fighting games. When I buy my own 360 (next month maybe), I may pick it up, as I do like fighters. I'll report back to ya, if it's not too late.

Re: A campaign for my kids Had you not already ordered the Hero stuff, this is actually a project I'd suggest the old Marvel FASERIp system for. Free nowadays (TSR basically gave the fan sites permission to make the PDFs available), and a very simple system to pick up and play for new players. Of course, you can build a pretty simplified version of Hero by paring down the optional rules, too.

Re: Stronghold superhuman classification system I don't see how it'd be easy. The place would have to take super powered break out attempts into consideration from super villains. Those defenses should be stout enough to challenge a hero team.

OK, let's hop into the WAY wayback machine and see what our FIRST superhero characters were. I'm not talking about the first one you played in an RPG, but the first superhero you EVER created. For a lot of us, that'd actually predate the entire RPG hobby. Of course, if your first superhero was actually created for an RPG, go ahead and share. My first character was: The Blue Comet! Created: c. 1974 Inspiration: My blue PJ's with a comet on the chest, and static electricity. Appearance: Blue body suit (with feet), with a comet on the chest. Built like George Reeves version of Superman. Powers: The Blue Comet could fly, and smash through stuff, especially stacked cardboard boxes. He had a personal force field that sparked like blue static electric sparks when hit. Equipment: As a member of the Space Patrol, The Blue Comet had a personal space fighter. Affiliations: Member of the Space Patrol. Sometimes partner of the Cougar Kid. (My brother's creation.) He was my first, though later the same year or early the next, saw the creation of the Cobra Kid, later upgraded to King Cobra. More on him later.

Re: A rundown on some material in some books I have been writing. I think the biggest hurdle to getting this published is the size. It's a twofold dilemma. On the one hand, if you're publishing a physical book, you must look at the size of comparable products already in print. That will determine the length of your project, because of packaging concerns and print concerns. Proposing projects too far outside the norm can be a futile effort. On the other hand, you have PDFs as the second option. Size works against you here, as well, because most people are unwilling to read large amounts of text off the screen. Have you ever read The 10% Solution by Ken Rand? It's an excellent little book on self editing. It might help you when it comes to trimming down the final page count of the books, which is really the biggest hurdle I see to getting your project published. It won't take all the pain out of the larger part of trimming down the work, but will help when it comes down to final edit time.

Re: AlcheMecha I like her, nice character concept. Could work very well as primary brick in a limited DEX/SPD campaign, too.

Re: Concubine Seeks New Position Well, it looks like the character upgrades are decided, though I'll throw out one of my ideas, since I didn't see it mentioned (or missed it): Arm her with a tasp.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Eek! Don't tell me that, we're about to go in to Season 3.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Oh, also just watched Zero no Tsukaima and Zero no Tsukaima: Futatsuki no Kishi on http://www.crunchyroll.com Fairly decent anime about a girl who summons a guy from Tokyo to an alternate world to be her familiar. Mostly comedy. Enough funny moments to be watchable if you like lighter anime.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Just finished Season 2 of The 4400. Getting interesting. Too bad they canceled it. Just watched In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale with Jason Statham and a cast of well-known but not overly talented actors, directed by Uwe Boll. Overall, not terrible on props, costumes, sets. HORRIBLE dialog. Really bad acting except for Statham, who did the best he could with his bad lines. I don't know if I'd put this one all on the direction or on the script, but any director with half a brain wouldn't have shot that script, so it's a toss up. I can't say it's the worst fantasy movie I've seen, though. Also watched 27 Dresses. I likes Katherine Heigl. Not terrible, not great. You can kind of tell we get two at a time, one pick for me, one for my wife.

Re: EC's cannot have non-END powers!!!! The "Firewoman" on the Spidey cartoon was Firestar, and her power was microwave generation. I can only guess she used an aluminum costume to generate the flames. =P

Re: Decoupling Movement from Speed or Segement moviement I think this has come up in the past, but I'd be at a loss to figure out what key words to search for since the forum search doesn't like three letter words. =( The biggest problem to me in divorcing the two concepts is that Hero is very much a turn-based game (not "Turn," I'm talking about taking turns to go, not game terms breaking down units of time), and in any turn-based game, each player typically has a list of things they can do on their turn. In some games, they can do things on the other player's turn as well. If you wanted to divorce movement and SPD, you'd basically be saying that movement is something it doesn't have to be your turn (phase) to do. In the case of Hero, you would also have to consider if it's something you want done on nobody's turn (segments between phases), which is probably the only way to do it with the variable SPD of characters. (That's assuming you want to keep SPD, and simply disconnect it from Movement.) So, the first step would be to calculate the character's maximum movement per Segment. Next, you would simply allow charcters to use their movement at any time during combat time, including off segments. But that sounds horribly broken to me. I think if the combatants are mainly melee, it would create some crazily long combats as people reposition (act) on phases that nobody can attack or use powers (every other act). That's a pretty huge change in the combat rules. Now, it's less of a problem if you toss out the SPD chart altogether for combat and read the SPD chart as "Attacks/Actions per turn" like other, more abstract, games. Of course, that also has a pretty large impact on a lot of game rules too.

Re: Questions concerning Massacre (HD) Who is Massacre?

Re: A Classic/Full Metal Alchemist Combine I think OAF (Surrounding Objects) looks a lot like what's been written up as OIF (Objects of Opportunity) in the past. I think the idea is that you can't really take away something that's going to be picked up on the fly and used up.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Duffy, Rockferry. New Welsh lass with a nice voice and sound. (Kind of jazz/soul thing. I'm not a music critic, so I just identify things by "like", "not like", "Mariah sCarey", "rap". It's usually a pretty accurate scale, though not good at identifying anything but rap, really.)

Re: There is some new art http://www.champions-online.com/gallery/concept_art

Re: Ask Cryptic 5/2/2008 Technically, I don't think they quite qualify for the status of "game" anyway. More like "toy," same as something like SimCity or the Sims.

Re: Ask Cryptic 5/2/2008 Well, it does work for boss encounters, from the design standpoint if not the social standpoint. It's just the easiest model to follow for doing them. That doesn't mean the end encounter of a scenario always has to be one big boss that can one shot everyone except the high mitigation guy with a healer on him, either. Why not track down a super group and take on a five vs five (or however many the group size is) fight instead? Having every group encounter use a boss mob is the bigger issue. Having a boss mob require a tank and healer to take down is the easiest design route. If there were alternate means of taking down a boss type target, then people would simply find the most efficient group composition for that fight and demand only certain player types for missions. You'd have the same problem, it just may be a debuffer you're waiting on instead of a tank or healer, for example. If you make boss encounters that any group composition can handle, then you run the risk of watering things down. It's not easy to offer true flexibility in a large boss fight and keep the difficulty level high enough to present a challenge. Creating more tanks doesn't solve the tank problem. The job requires concentration, situational awareness, and the willingness to take a load of crap off of your group (at least in a pick up group) for any failure. It's a high stress job for many people. Even if everyone's a tank, you won't find many people willing to step up and fill the role in the group. You also still have the problem that some archetype or build is going to be recognized as the most optimal for the tanking role, and a lot of people will demand that character type over others. Now, if he's talking about eliminating the need for tanks through some creative encounter design, then that's a different matter. I'm not sure what his statement will look like implemented, though. Too early to tell at this point. EQ2 actually has scalable instances that can be done solo or with smaller groups. Tabula Rasa, I think, has scalable instances (saw mention of it in a beta tester's notes, but no idea of the live game). If WoW took some of the grind out of alternate gear advancement, they'd have a good thing going. They need to lower the honor requirements on the PVP gear and the badge requirements on the badge gear a bit, IMO. They did a good job reducing the rep grind, now if they just reduced the other grinds by a bit, they'd be a lot more casual friendly. Jack has said the game will be solo friendly in a couple of interviews now, so I'm holding out some hope for good solo or small group content.

Re: Ask Cryptic 5/2/2008 I find "traditional super-hero terms" to be an interesting expression. I'm not picking on this post particularly, sbarron, so sorry if it seems like I'm singling you out, but the terminology subject has popped up here and there since the Champs Online board went live. As far as I know, the terms we Hero gamers use for describing superhero archetypes originated with Champions material, and have only been used to describe character types in regards to an RPG. I've never seen any literature about comics or from comics companies use this terminology, and don't recall any non-RPG playing comics fans using these terms. I could be wrong, and would love to see examples of the terms outside of a Hero/Champions context, b/c I'm just curious about it. But, given that it's just our terminology for breaking down archetypes -- and a good one in my opinion -- does that make it the default "correct" way to speak of characters? I'd love to see a MMO successfully break away from the EQ trinity of tank/healer/dps, but that model has been copied so often precisely because it works. It makes it possible to design encounters that require a group to take down a single, impressive target. Perhaps CO could move the emphasis of end game grouping away from that dragon slaying model and to more many on many encounters versus villain groups instead of a single archvillain, (while still having some AV or big monster content), or have more problem-solving or investigative missions, perhaps requiring a team to pool their non-combat resources. If CO doesn't break the holy trinity of tank/heals/dps (and if they follow CoH's model, add in /debuffer), then yeah, you're going to be seeing people looking for a tank, heals, dps not a specific archetype. It may not sound in-genre, but a group role does not necessarily have to be tied to one archetype. Sure, most Bricks will probably be tanks and most tanks will probably be Bricks, but there may be offensive brick builds who don't hold aggro so well, and defensive Energy Projector or Martial Artist builds that can hold aggro and take enough damage to tank certain content. You might build an Energy Projector with good healing capability, and be able to fill either a DPS role or a Healing role. But, I wouldn't expect people to adopt archetypes over group roles in trying to fill groups. Archetypes define how you do stuff, group role labels define what you do.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns

Re: Storn Art from idea to Full Picture Year 5 Oh, I'd just like to add that I've enjoyed reading the entries posted since my last check on the thread. Some interesting background bits in a lot of them.

Re: Storn Art from idea to Full Picture Year 5 Any word on the Shard and Greyhound commissions? I'm guessing they're in queue still. Looking forward to seeing them, as well as whatever Storn picks from DT.

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine If you thought Parallax was bad... meet Big John. After sucking all the juice out of the Central Power Battery, Big John is bursting with energy and ready to go on a rampage! Ok... but this thing IS addictive. =P

Re: A DC Animated-style HeroMachine I think the guy on the right is the Green Yellow and Red Lantern.