Clonus

Re: What might a Gliesian be like? Endoskeletions are far better for dealing with gravity. That is why the really big land creatures on Earth are all endoskeletal

Re: Disturbing Character premises... I once played a character inspired by the artwork of the artist of the New Mutants. I can't remember how to spell his last name, so let's just call him Bill S. The guy who invented Warlock. In his honour I came up with a shapeshifting stretcher who could never get his proportions quite right. His arms and legs were always different lengths, one eye was larger than the other and he'd do things like stretching one of his eyes out on an eyestalk to look around a corner for bad guys. I called him Phreak.

Re: Predictions for the year 2000 His batting average wasn't bad at all.

Re: Ideas for Neo-Victorians in StarHERO Well, odds are good for any game set millenia in the future that not only have the people in it gone through some kind of horrible collapse but that they have set up some kind of madly conservative social order which eschews innovation. Which of course makes them nothing like the real Victorians who were madly inventive and adored nothing so much as the idea of "progress" but something like a widespread picture that many people have of the era looking back on it. So what traits of Victorian Britain (and Europe) might the ersatz version have? One is a clearly stratified social order with nobility, a "middle class" consisting of business men and highly educated professions, and a "working class" consisting of servants, factory workers, shop clerks and the like, and a truly astounding population of prostitutes. I'd suggest that the nobility might be defined by their exclusive access to the best life-extension technology with the often wealthier middle class constantly angling for marriage or elevation for service into the nobility so they can move up from their second-class life-extension to the good stuff. Meanwhile the working class normally live a short and comparitively brutal existence.

Re: The Hero Forum's Fattest Man in Comics! Ego the Living Planet. He's so fat he's spherical.

Re: Astrogator's Handbook

Re: Mutant Detectors The question with mutant detectors is always "what are they detecting?". What Marvel ended up with was a distinctive brain wave pattern that only people with a certain genetic complex generate, said genetic complex also being one that ensures that you get superpowers, with the precise powers you get apparently being the product of other genes. Alternative you can imagine a kind of n-ray ala Star Trek tricorders that bounces back with lots of information about the genetic makeup of whatever it hit. By and large though, the whole "mutant" concept works better if you abandon the radiation accident as a separate power source category. That doesn't mean you'd be stuck with mutants and only mutants of course, you'd still have magical transformations, super soldier serums, surgical enhancement, martial artists in touch with their ki, aliens, genetically engineered symbionts or whatever. But anyone who "gains" powers from random exposure to life-threatening phenomena probably already had them in the first place just waiting for the right circumstances to manifest phenotypically. Of course such "latents" might still be harder to detect.

Re: Worst. Hero. Ever. Cable went through a long period in which the only thing anyone, including those putting out the comic book, knew about him was what he looked like. Everything else about him was decided after the fact.

Re: Grandiose Schemes

Re: Vitals Head shots are even worse than vitals. As for armour, I note that a "short vest" covers area 13. This doesn't seem consistent with the idea that area 13 is the crotch, rather than the heart and kidneys. Also of course, there's nothing particularly vital in the crotch to explain why you take 2x Body from shots there.

Sleeping Beauty The characters discover a century-old wrecked space yacht. In it, along with a lot of other junk some of which is valuable, is a cryogenic suspension capsule containing a beautiful girl. When the players realise that she's apparently the missing rightful heir from back then and in theory her claim to the throne supercedes that of the unpopular current Emperor descended from her cousin...what will they do?

Re: Resistance is Futile... The intelligence is too high. Borg Drones are dumb as well as slow, presumably because their brains have little computing capacity left after contributing most of it to the Collective. Also they probably could adapt to bullets.

Re: Hero (and Villain) Poseurs... There was a magazine article which featured a group of Inferior Five influenced wannabes like the Weasel (who had a gimmicked Ferrari that was mostly notable for crashing every time he kicked in the afterburner) and Poefellow (Who had a "trained" raven that would randomly poop on any participants in a fight). I used them once.

Re: Worst. Hero. Ever. Well no, not Power Girl. She only has a tiny fraction of Superman's power. She's lame because her breasts have turned into a silly joke.

Re: Grandiose Schemes Reset the cesium master clock for the United States, screwing up things like railroad scheduling all over the country, in order to pop open a time lock. Spread a world-wide disease carried by women that only kills men. Accelerate an asteroid to relativistic velocities aimed at an inhabited planet.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. But the ability to dance will.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. Too extreme for me. I want DEX to have some connection to physical combat and I wouldn't be comfortable with the default CV being 0.

Re: The Hero Forum's Hottest Man in Comics. The hottest man in comics? Gotta be the Human Torch.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. I'm not talking about actually trying to dodge but just Supe's usual day to day DCV, which totally tanks. And yes, Superman had powers when Jimmy Olsen knocked him out with a thrown rock. (It was a rock from Kandor.)

Re: The Hero Forum's Hottest Woman in Comics. Personally, I just can't see it.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. He doesn't, though. Can't dodge to save his life, as he proved when he needed to dodge to save his life. Jimmy Olson once took him out by throwing a rock at his head.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. The thing is, Spider-Man's dexterity really is only marginally better than Cap's. He's fast but his ability to connect and avoid being tagged just doesn't radically outclass Cap. Same thing with Nightcrawler. His acrobatics are over-the-top, but his fighting ability is nothing special for an agile character.

Re: DEX levels in your campaign. That's solidly based on the original source material. In comic books, characters like Batman, and Captain America are almost never overmatched in terms of their ability to hit, dodge and manuever because if they were, then they'd be worthless. The only exception's are certain super-speedsters, and even then their ability to connect is usually not equal to their elusiveness.

Re: Disturbing Character premises... Ah yes, I remember the idea I had for transporting my Runequest PCs to an alternate universe where humans were extinct, but ogres weren't... They didn't just make that up out of whole cloth incidentally. For example, in the earliest version of "Sleeping Beauty" to be recorded, the story doesn't end when she wakes up. Instead she marries the King, goes off with him to be his wife but has mother-in-law problems. Specifically, her mother-in-law is an ogre with an appetite for the two babies our narcoleptic heroine gave birth to while comatose. Her children are saved, the ogress is killed and Sleeping Beauty lives happily ever after...with her at least half-ogre husband who rapes comatose girls, speaking of "disturbing".

Re: WWYCD: Dead Enemies are no fun. Hellfire would switch to an alternate ID and try to only use her physical strength and not her fire. If only she didn't have Bad Temper and a compulsion to flame on every time she loses it. (And yes, that response should reveal my Secret Identity to people with great memories. Curses.)