The Monster

Re: Invisibility In my Champions game, I've got one "ghost" PC: invisible, desolid, and primary attack is TK Affects Real World, Fine Manipulation, using martial arts maneuvers. Had I the chance to start the campaign over, I'd probably disallow the character, or at least demand some serious limitations and reductions. The problem I have with the Invisible/Desolid combo is that it's too binary - either it is totally invulnerable & undetectable, or the opponents have the perfect counter (i.e., just the right enhanced sense and Affects Desolid). There's no sense of uncertainty, no risk versus reward; it either works (and therefore kicks total butte-oxen) or it doesn't (and the character is crippled). So, as GM, I have to choose whether or not to allow that character a free romp for an adventure, or to deliberately build baddies to screw him - and neither option exactly gives me great joy (my other option is a mentalist, but I ran a powerful mentalist in one of the first adventures, and some of the players still haven't stopped gritching about that one). And, of course, the Affects Real World attack means that, unless the character is in a "yer skrood" situation, he just tosses baddies around pretty much willy-nilly. I know, this is pretty much an "inexperienced Champions GM" whine/rant (I've run Hero for decades, but almost never Champions); but it's an illustration of how easy it is to get stuck in a corner over these powers.

Re: Top Signs You Need to Rethink Your Playing Style.... When every issue or question, power or action demands a binary solution: either you always succeed, or you sometimes fail and you/it is therefore worthless.

Re: PRE Drains For my Necessary Evil character Darklord, I built a big radius Drain PRE: 4d6. That's not enough to really hamper most supers and bosses; and in fact, since PRE attacks can be resisted either with PRE or EGO, it's certainly not going to scare anyone away. *But* it is enough to drop most normals to less than zero, which invokes the special rules for negative characteristics. Basically, it's a handy way to paralyze the mooks and mass victims, annoy his villainous allies (personal immunity, but regular radius effect!), and just plain look really kewl.

Re: Atlantis? What do you do with it? I've only used it for my Pulp setting, and only for a con event "Depths of Evil." The conceit was that the Deep Ones were contacted by Nazi occultists, and provided them with "Atlantean" magic and metal to make super-u-boats, as part of an unholy alliance to wreak havoc on the navies of the world. Atlantis was really just a bunch of undersea ruins, little more than local color. (Though Unterseehaven Atlantis does have a really nice ring to it.)

Re: Need ideas for Steampunk Over-The-Top Game You can push this even further over the top: a true 3-D envelopment as the robotic bronze warriors also are delivered via the tunnel dug under the Pacific by mole machines. Of course, this strategic tunnel links to the secret tunnels everyone *knows* are hidden under Chinatown.

Re: Help: Mental Imagery into a Campaign World Here's a different angle of approach: some questions which might affect how things get built. I throw these out as examples, the idea being to look at the problem from specifics rather than starting with the keystone (kind of like building from effect...). Some may have easy or quick answers, but there's implications and ramifications that may not jump out at first. Do you want the PCs to be sponsored by a human organization? --if so, does the org have great resources, or is it an underground group? --if so, how much authority does the org have over the heroes? (sent on missions, assigned regular beat/territory, etc.) --if not, how do the heroes get together and get set up? Do you want the PCs to be sponsored/appointed/called by a supernatural entity/ies? --if so, how specific is the supernatural sponsor? (i.e., somewhere between the unnamed Powers from Hunter and Archangel Michael himself) --how much intervention does the sponsor offer? --is the nature of the supernatural sponsor questionable (e.g., Devil appearing "as an angel of light") Might there be different sponsors (human or supernatural) for each PC, with the tension and competition between them a plot point? Do you want the heroes to be set in one place (a city, region, or small country), or roaming worldwide as needed? Are the PCs and their activities tolerated by local/world law enforcement? (I'm presuming mostly not, by your earlier descriptions, but even that may mean tension rather than outright hostility & arrest warrants.) Do you want the heros to all be human, or allow a mix of races/creatures? --if human only (as in Hunter), does that mean all other creatures are bad? Or which ones, and how do you tell? --if a mix, are they unique (as in Hellboy), or are they simply reflective of the surprisingly large population of nonhumans walking among society in general (as in, say, Buffy)? How relevant is the Church (or churches) to the heroes' struggle? Source of power, information, expertise, enemy, clueless... Religion will be one of the first places people turn to when forced to deal with the occult (the occult being the other). For that matter, how relevant is pop occultism to the heroes' struggle? Does anybody who knows the Truth give a rat's patootie about Tarot decks or dreamcatchers, etc.? The struggle the PCs get involved in: is it an ongoing "eternal" struggle against Evil (kind of like cops vs. organized crime), or is this something that only surged (or resurged) recently (the Shadowrun/Earthdawn mythos comes to mind, with eons-long tides of magic). --if it's a recent surge/outbreak, are the PCs the first to realize it? ...and so on. Some of these questions may spark some concepts or connections, and they're the kind of thing that could indicate adventure hooks. And they're the kind of thing that would have to be answered fairly early in the campaign.

Re: Dark Elves: Compelling? Agreed (and repped) - I feel the same way about "dark" anything. "Dark elves" (as a player race) have always seemed to me to be an excuse for munchkins to have their own favorite race. The only thing I've ver felt "compelling" about dark elves is the compulsion to slap them and their player. Attitude? Me? Naah.

Re: Top Signs You Need to Rethink Your Playing Style.... When a character who isn't *guaranteed* to KO a super in one attack is too weak (regardless of genre!), and it's unacceptable to play a character who can ever, theoretically, be damaged or even hit by anyone else, ever, using any kind of weapon.

Re: Do you use miniatures? For our Champions campaign, one guy in our group customized some of his (large!) collection of Heroclix - so we actually have true-to-character minis! There's such a wide variety of Heroclix that you can almost surely find something suitable, even without painting or customizing. In general, I prefer to use minis, or at least sketched maps and penciled character moves. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Re: Looking for another character name Mobile Armored Special Tactical Intervention Force MASTIF ...and because the world demanded it: Battle Armor Deployment: Advanced Security Squad BADASS (or, more precisely, BAD:ASS)

Re: Tell us about your Pulp game! Monomolecular nose hairs.

Re: Elementary, My Dear Watson And it's more legal than drugs! Have you seen "They Might Be Giants?" Delusional(?) "Holmes" (George C Scott IIRC) teams up with his newly appointed therapist (of course, named Doctor Watson).

Re: Submarine Aircraft carriers of the world! Wow. SSNCV. Looks great, though - the perfect weapon to counter those flying aircraft carriers from Sky Captain. (Just to be OOC, though, one wonders if this concept is being seriously explored today with RPVs?)

Re: Magic Teleport Mirror Depending on where this mirror is and how you use it, you might add Fragile. I had an adventure once where the PCs tried to haul away a magic mirror they found in a bad guy's house. They almost made it until one of them rolled really badly on DEX while maneuvering it down a spiral staircase!

Re: Help: Mental Imagery into a Campaign World I mentioned In Nomine because it deals with the war between Heaven and Hell, pulling in a whole lot of Catholic imagery and background (properly traditional Christian theology it ain't, to be sure, but it reads as a potentially great game!). In that game, the players are generally assumed to be angels and demons, with direct conflict between the two on a very limited basis, and keeping it secret from general knowledge is very important (open war being reserved for, well, you know, The Finale). Personally, I like your idea better - the idea of empowered humans fighting a desperate battle against less-restrained evil humans and other things. Of all the White Wolf line, Hunter is far and away my favorite setting (never actually *played* any of them except Adventure (their unsupported pulp setting). As far as more general themes...not sure, but one idea struck me. There's a small amount of hysteria building about the foretold end of the world - cable TV at least has had shows about Nostradamus and others whose predictions seem to either peter out about this time, or actually include dire warnings about the next few years. Of course, there's the Mayan calendar cycle (which Shadowrun played up to extremes), which also seems to indicate an apocalypse coming up soon (2012 or so IIRC). Perhaps that could be a springboard: the powers-that-be want to weight the odds in their favor as much as possible - by digging out all the old artifacts, revitalizing the mystic disciplines, awakening the unspoken names, etc. Puts a bit of urgency on the old "ancient guardian order" trope. Speaking of White Wolf, I always imagined that the world according to WW/Masquerade was more what the vamps *wish* the world was like, with them ruling cities and reigning untouchable above the masses of cattle, yadda yadda. What if, in reality, very few places were so subjugated and hospitable to vampires? What if the struggle was ongoing and of varying intensity depending on the location and time, with local dominance changing hands once in a while? VtM gives way too much credit to vamps, and the common knowledge gives way too much credit to the way things seem to be. Vampires, living effectively forever (until destroyed), and the Church, the one institution on earth which can claim an unbroken line of succession going back more than 1500 years (much longer than just about any vamp has ever been alive) can play very long-term games; and while the vamps can't afford to have their existence be general knowledge (for fear the cattle will stampede), the Church would rather not have word get out because the occult feeds on fear, so it's better to not have people know than to have them paralyzed by fear (and perhaps turn to occultism themselves to resist). Does that help at all?

Re: Tell us about your Pulp game! ...with FRICKIN' LASERS ON THEIR HEADS!!!!!!

Re: Tell us about your Pulp game! And there's always the Inquisition, which seems to show up in every single RPG ever published, regardless of era or genre.

Re: Pulp Era Vehicles for Hero System? Another "me too" vote for the Vehicle Sourcebook. It's probably my favorite Hero sourcebook so far, because it's just as cool as the rest *and* it's been truly useful multiple times in my games (the others are cool, too, but not truly useful nearly as often). Lots of examples of period vehicles through many periods, including pulp.

Re: modern fantacy story seed, needs quick grow fromula I can imagine that easily... "It's for my WIFE!!!" "That cow doesn't deserve it!" "Well, neither does your harpy of a girlfriend!" ------------------------------------------------ See's Candies gives out free samples to everyone who comes in. Are they part of the plot, or do they have an antidote? ("Oh, you want the Old-Fashioned Special Anti-Demon Butter Cremes!") Their secret service, the Women in (Chocolate) Brown (not Men in Black, no sir!) are ready to respond! ---------------------------------------------------- The Salvation Army bellringer turns pickpocket or outright mugger, braining people with their little coin bucket. "It's for CHARITY, you pig! Hand it over! All of it! Now!" ---------------------------------------------------- The unflappable store manger, already being insanely greedy, is unaffected by all this, and happily rings up sale after sale to the crazed and/or desperate mob. Even selling things at grossly inflated prices(...oh, wait, that's too much like real life...) , or just taking the credit card in exchange for the demanded toy. ---------------------------------------------------- ...yeah, first prize might be the sporting-goods store (though many malls don't have one, at least not a fully (ahem) loaded one with guns and all); second place goes to the big kitchen store (have you SEEN some of the knives in there?)

Re: How would you build? An easy way around this would be to build the character with a basic set of powers that he can access regularly, like any super; then in addition he has the big uncontrolled VPP/MP. Because it would be pretty much unplayable if all his powers were a random selection from moment to moment (or even adventure to adventure). And even if the player is willing, it would be unplayable for the GM when planning, if she didn't have at least a basic grasp of what powers would available.

Re: How Fast Do Rogue Planets Move? Rogue planets can get moving pretty fast if you can get a Wizard planet to cast Haste on it.

Re: Hmm, didn't find these Sciences listed in Ultimate Skill... In those fields? Dive For Cover!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Re: Help: Mental Imagery into a Campaign World Would using ideas from Constantine and In Nomine work as a broad background? Only where the PCs are not angels/demons, but the lesser servitors/agents thereof? Just musing...

Re: Has anyone done a skilled normals game Thing about skill rolls vs reality is that skill rolls generally are the chance of doing the task when under a certain stress level (i.e., combat or other threat looming), and in a single short space of time (a single round or single time increment for that skill. (I remember an old Murphy's Rules panel pointing out that in Hero, a person has something like a 25% chance of picking up the coke bottle from the table in front of them - amusing, but when you consider that, if you need a roll to to it, it means other things are going on, including the pressure of getting in in one grab within a couple of seconds.) I, too could claim an 8- in general repair (Familiarity: Mechanics??) - but the only time I succeed at doing anything is by taking a lot(!) of Extra Time, including Research (a Complimentary Skill Roll), and a nice bit of luck anyway. And then there's the times, like when I replaced the toilet, but ended up calling the plumber anyway, because the leak was still leaking. Turns out I actually did the toilet replacement just fine; the leak was in the connection behind the toilet! So the task I *thought* I had to accomplish was a success - but it was the wrong task. Of course, that's part of the skill roll anyway, but an interesting twist from a GM's perpective.

Re: Steampunk/Victorian fantasy setting questions A truly magical alternative would be to propel the bullets with something other than chemical explosives. Have a magical gunsight which allows the shooter to form a magical attraction between the next bullet and the chosen target - big adds on accuracy, but useless for indirect fire, and rather slow (but probably not slower than muzzle-loading rifles!). For indirect fire, one could teleport or TK explosives onto a certain point on a map, or have them guided by remote viewing through a flier. Then it doesn't really matter what metals are used for the gun, as long as they don't burn the user or short out the mana.