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Comic

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  1. "Nicvachinel" is a word for soothsayer, according to Popol Vuh. "Xmucane" is the 'Mistress of Shaping'. There's very scant literature I could find on legitimate priestess names for ancient Mayans, but those two words seem good candidates to me.
  2. I almost never wasted my players time, back in the day, with normal people in anything like the sort of conflict that used combat tracking. A street thug with flat 8-10 core stats and SPD 2 might tickle a little novice hero interest if they had a hostage or seven, a 1d6KA and five-to-one advantage in an ambush, but my campaigns generally had story arcs, and the people I played with had precious little free time to spend in addition to the regular story arc on the normal people in the criminal world. Soon enough, the stars of crime, terror and mystery show up, and they tend to be above thug. We concentrated on that. By and large, superheroes are steel, and normal thugs are tissue paper.
  3. You could buy +5 DCV Linked to your HA, as a 'Dodge/Strike'. Of course, in games with AP caps, that'd reduce your HA by 5 DCs below the campaign limit.
  4. I have a character, Merritt, with three identities: civilian, teen hero (Magneceptor), adult villain (Perul). The 'adult' villain was a result of his first attempted outing as a hero going badly wrong, and the media storm that followed. Being a bright, adaptable guy, Perul rolled with the flow and uses villain status to infiltrate the underworld. Magneceptor is a different costume, size, look, smell and psychic appearance (paid for with Shape Change). It's just one Secret Identity complication, but it supplies different rivalries and hunteds. I'd pay for Deep Cover, if either secret identity were long-established and reliably difficult to break at the time the character started out.
  5. You tell me. Are PC's in your experience generally more, or less, Marty Stu's than the characters you see on screen?
  6. Thor is an Asgardian god, and among the toughest of them. Of course he has rPD, and plenty of it. But even Asgardian gods have bad days. Thor's were around issue #370-400 or thereabouts, when He mightily offended Hela, and incurred Her wrath in the form of the withdrawal of Her Grace. His bones became brittle; He could not heal from injuries; He could not find remedy in sleep or in death. Now, Thor took this punishment like the Tough Guy that He is for a while, but eventually had to build armor so He could continue to move around as opposed to slither and slosh like so much crunchy gelatin. Over the course of several more fights, his armor got bigger, until the Frost Giants took note that Thor was wearing armor, which to them meant Thor was weak. And they piled on until Thor was nothing but an undying smear leaking into the ground. The reference was meant to allude to that parable, that sometimes it's the guy who isn't obviously armored who is more impressive. Something similar works with Batman. Bulletproof vest or no. Bulletproof cape or no. Bulletproof fabric or no. Somehow, Batman always manages to avoid or ignore bullets long enough to get the job done, and then he heals in remarkably little time to come back more dangerous than ever. It's not the mechanisms, it's the mysteries, that make Batman scary. There's something less impressive about a guy who needs armor, who uses it like a crutch. We see Tony Stark much of the time out of armor in the movies, and he's more in charge, more impressive, for that vulnerability.
  7. In any case, this appears to be where a GM and player need to work out what the power is between themselves. Could it be STR, only to catch, triggered by person falling into target hex? Sure, why not? Entangle? That's another way to catch a person, and when a person is caught by a hero the hero has the option of doing no damage.. no? Swinging, Usable By Other, Only to Land? Leaping, UBO, Only to Land? Change environment? Sure, why not? A lot of options. For what it's worth, I wouldn't even charge for this power, but call it a power stunt if the character had the Power Skill, and let the archer use a charge of the most appropriate arrow type to get the effect.
  8. Do I think the standard Champions character would wipe the floor with the standard Avenger? Clearly yes. Avengers aren't Mary Sues. They're built by storytellers telling stories, not players out to take every advantage in combat. As such, Avengers are far better builds for stories, given that the storyteller has to get them all through the story alive -- except when the dramatic death is the point of the story (because let's face it, Quicksilver's player would be whinging and crying foul and rules lawyering all up and down if that happened in game). Is this going to lead me to design my characters for good storytelling over game survivability? Heck no. But it ought.
  9. We used to do that with Force Wall, as running into a Force Wall could do no damage.
  10. But what's daring about a Daredevil who rigs the game by wearing armor? What's wondrous about a Wonder Woman who just jiggles away the bullets while reading tweets? A Batman who _could_ bleed and so far as the bad guys will ever know never has is far scarier than one who lumbers around in unobtanium-thread bullet-impregnable spanx. It's when Hel-cursed Thor put on armor that the Frost Giants detected weakness and pressed their advantage against him. Combat Luck is a far more fitting defense for these characters. In some campaign settings, I'd distinguish PCs from NPCs by giving PCs a few mandatory points of Combat Luck that NPCs just don't get, to heighten the threat to DNPCs and the peril to ordinary citizens. A world with a lot more low-level KA's is a world with a lot more Stun Lottery and reason to use stealth, defensive tactics and cover.
  11. I'll be agnostic about Cap's STR for now. It's not very much of an issue for me, though I tend to place Captain America in the 25-45 STR range from the way he's been presented -- and that's an enormously broad range -- let's remember that the upper end of that gives him the strength to throw his shield into freaking orbit using the Ultimate Brick extended charts.. so.. no, just no. Black Widow's SPD? That's easy. She's in multiple scenes in the same film where the pacing clearly shows her at least 50% faster in deliberate, individually targeted actions (whether single or multiple targets per se) than Iron Man. Not Tony, but the suit. Sure, it's possible to fudge and suggest her SPD is just a martial artist version of Iron Man's, and MA's are somehow more tactical than Energy Projectors.. but I just don't buy that, and there's zero need for it if Tony is SPD 3 (or at a stretch, 4). How do we know Quicksilver's SPD is really that much higher? Seriously? In a fight with the Avengers in close quarters at least a half move apart from each other, he still gets in attack actions as often as each of them that we see. Sure, some of his attacks might be massive AoE Selective, but this is SPDster Speedster. As for Happy Hogan being a SPD 3 agent? I'd argue SPD 1 plucky comedy relief.
  12. I agree it's translation folly to try to make cinema exactly match game mechanics, for a game based on the cells on a comic book page. That said, the same comic book page cell format is used in story boards used to plot action in movies, so this is arguably a doable feat most of the time. I'm surprised more comic-based movies don't use Ryan Reynolds Deadpool-style 4th wall breaking narrative over the action to get in the soliloquies and banter that just don't work in fast-paced fisticuffs. Or puts his hands up, yells, "Stop! Wait! I know what you're thinking.." to get in that line about the guy in the brown pants having the right idea. In a comic book, Deadpool wouldn't need the "Stop! Wait!" bit. He'd just quip over all the gunfire and explosions and it would have the effect of conveying the character as distinct from all the other guys shooting weapons. So yes, we have to count dialogue as out-of-action time, almost all the time. Still, I abhor SPD bloat. SPD is a relative stat, since it's actions-relative-to-the-other-guys. Unlike STR, we can't get a good measure of how SPDy a character is by what they are shown to lift or throw (which is often inconsistent enough in stories to be maddening anyway). What we can do is look for cues from pacing. We are lucky in Iron Man's case as we have so many referents to compare him to. Not just Whiplash, but also Rhodey, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Happy Hogan. For Iron Man to have 6 SPD means we have to scale all of these referents to him. Black Widow -- a highly trained normal -- would need SPD 9 or 10. Happy Hogan, not the sharpest tool in the shed, SPD 4-5. Every Extremis subject, SPD 6 too, including Pepper Potts. Captain America is faster than Black Widow by a smidge. Now you can sell me on a lot of things about Captain America. But SPD 10-11? That is SPD bloat. And we don't begin to have a hope of putting Quicksilver into the standard 12 SPD framework. So I'm comfortable with a SPD 3-4 Iron Man, tending to 3, and a SPD 5-6 Black Widow, a SPD 6-7 Captain America, a SPD 12 Quicksilver, Happy Hogan at SPD 2. That framing of the whole continuum of character relative SPD works in game sense, and is an adequate interpretation of what we see on the screen. It's remarkably consistent, too, which makes sense given the same story board technique as underlies Champions is at the root of screen action, and a lot of the guys who make movies see their characters much the way we do, too.
  13. .. I don't recall the veil being all that prominent.
  14. Yes. Hit Girl is very much the full combat package, capable of switching between a sharp focus on a single target at a time until it's down, and covering the field without focus on a single target, seamlessly. However, review her combat sequences closely, and you'll see it is dominated by linearity -- inhumanly fast, but still one target is cycled down through the attack sequence before the next observed target is oriented on, decided to acquire, and acted on in a clear OODA loop -- over combination maneuvers that rely on success in the previous part of the action to mount the next phase. This is not an accident, but appears to come out of the martial philosophy of her choreographer, similar to Jason Bourne's combat techniques. Hit Girl fights like a Navy pilot, or a practitioner of those chi-focus combat styles over the more balletic dance styles you see in Kingsman or Avengers.
  15. Two cinematic characters with higher SPD that couldn't be explained by multi-target maneuvers? Cleric Preston (Christian Bale) from Equilibrium. SPD 5. (Though he certainly uses multi-target maneuvers too.) Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz). SPD 6. (She tends to take on a single target at a time, but in very rapid sequence.) I don't think I've seen any character depicted with higher SPD on film other than in Star Trek. More speed? Sure.
  16. Here's another example. Galahad is by my count no faster than SPD 4. Between the time he knocks out his first target with a beer mug to the time he renders the publican amnesiac is roughly 80 seconds, the first attack arguably a held action combined with a PRE attack that delays the fight until Galahad is in most favorable position tactically. 25 actions, 75 seconds. An action every 3 seconds. Now, his OCV is at least 5 higher than street thugs, and his DCV similarly exceptional, but Galahad's clearly a highly trained martial artist. With SPD 4. Impressive as all get out, capable of mopping up a half dozen tough thugs, and SPD 4. Notice he doesn't one-punch any of them, either. In the fight the average knocks to knock out his opponents is 3 each. Of course, he was just fooling around, pulling his punches, holding back. Because all out, he'd have killed them outright. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXB6slJSbL4 From 0:41 seconds to 1:41, an alarming 25 attacks, though clearly many of them multiple attacks with a selective fire weapon, or sweeps, or martial multi-target maneuvers. SPD 4. There were fewer than 100 participants in the melee; we can charitably say Galahad got in 50 attacks that we saw in the two minutes or so he was on screen. If he weren't a supremely skilled combatant using every trick to maximize his attacks with weapons that feature selective fire and tactics that affected multiple targets by tactics, we might call him SPD 5, or at most SPD 6 if he were an utterly ineffectual buffoon who didn't know how to use his vastly superior SPD effectively. But Harry's a Kingsman, one of the most cunningly efficient combat mercenaries in the world. At SPD 4. Gazelle? SPD 4 too.
  17. Remembering the Champions combat round is an approximation of time, not an absolute clock-driven mechanism.. The Mickey Rourke fight is a bit messy to disentangle among all the maneuvers with the droids, but pacing it out looking at spread, multi-attack maneuvers, autofire and that one big AoE before Rourke arrives, we're looking at a SPD 3 Tony fighting smart and a SPD 4 Rhodes fighting with combat experience and military training. After Rourke arrives, SPD 4 BBEG vs. a SPD 3 & SPD 4, maximum. Those fights took a very long time compared to the number of combat actions. From Gulmira landing to final attack in the first scene is 1:22 to 2:15, I see half move/HA (1:27), EB (1:29), EB (1:31) EB (1:33) (I'd call those two spread EB), autofire (selective target 5 shot) (1:49), then full move HA (2:12) . Four attacks in 12 seconds, I'd call SPD 4. Very slow for next 16 seconds and then next 13 seconds with only 1-2 actions per round. Explain away the first Half move/HA as held action, that's SPD 3. Then dodge/EB at 2:50, next attack at 3:06.. this is not the Flash. This is plausibly a SPD 3 character.
  18. I'd use vehicle rules.. since this was pretty clearly an articulated flying armored space bug carrier, whether it had some aspects of a living thing or not. I don't think Hulk knocked it out. I think he destroyed it. With one punch. But it was a vehicle, and all Hulk had to do was overcome vehicle DEF + BODY. With one punch. A Haymaker, sure. But one punch. To stop Iron Man's 10d6 EB reliably, it would only take 16 DEF to _never_ take enough damage to bring down, even if Tony pushed his EBs until he fell out of the sky. And what vehicle with 16 DEF needs more than 10 BODY? So, 26 BODY in a single attack by Bruce. A haymaker, so 22d6 from one punch. Giving Hulk 4d6 HA due size of fists, that's still 18d6 from STR. I don't see him as a martial artist, though as one of the longer active Avengers (he's been on the run since long before Tony built his first suit of armor, and Cap was in a block of ice or depressed after oversleeping for 70 years after what was after all a career of less than four years, two of them on stage) he could have a couple of levels of skill adder from Dirty Infighting, say. 80-90 STR Hulk is about right. His huge size is all that keeps him from leaping off the planet and into orbit or beyond by accident at that STR level.. which in his earlier incarnations he wasn't really bright enough to avoid, I'd think. But then, that's as low as I'd estimate his STR. I could easily see arguments for much higher.
  19. ..are you saying there's something wrong with the quality of Robert Downey Jr.'s roleplay? Remembering a 90 minute movie takes upwards of 18 months of sometimes 15-hour workdays?
  20. Movie scenes are typically around 3 minutes these days. Assuming a typical adventure is five scenes, and acknowledging that good roleplay is worth bonus points -- who deserves bonus points for roleplay if not Robert Downey Jr.? (I could practically envision him as a real rich substance-abusing genius playboy narcissist with psychological issues!) .. Movies of 90 minutes are six five-scene adventures interleaved and mixed up into story arcs, five EP per adventure with a five EP story arc bonus for Mr. Downey, 35 EP's per movie. So assuming in the first movie he was 250 pts, he's up to 400 pts on live action movies alone. Though add in comics and animation, and he'd be in the thousands.
  21. I bet Cassandra could do them on 250 pts apiece credibly. Let's face it, they're pretty much all SPD 3 max.
  22. Comic

    Hulk Help

    My rookie 'hulking' hero: http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/90928-wip-metaman/?view=findpost&p=2418631 On the reasoning that the more he gets hit, the angrier he gets, you can model 'hulking out' on absorbtion + DI, Linked to Growth (Hulk Form), eg: Example Powers 12 Absorb 6 BODY Delayed Return Rate (+1/4) Increased Max x8 (+3/4) Energy to Hulking Out 'Angrier Hulk Get..' [-] 12 Absorb 6 BODY Delayed Return Rate (+1/4) Increased Max x8 (+3/4) Physical to Hulking Out '..Stronger Hulk Get' [-] 10 Bare Advantage ED 20 Hardened (+1/4) Impenetrable (+1/4) 'Nothing Hurt Hulk' [-] 10 Bare Advantage PD 20 Hardened (+1/4) Impenetrable (+1/4) 'Nothing Hurt Hulk' [-] 13 Damage Negation -4 DC Energy 20 AP Body Only (-1/2) 'Nothing Hurt Hulk' [-] 13 Damage Negation -4 DC Physical 20 AP Body Only (-1/2) 'Nothing Hurt Hulk' [-] 20 DI 3x 12 AP 0 END (+1/2) & 0 END on STR 15 (+1/2) Linked to HULK RAWR (-0) Visible (-1/4) 'Hulking Out' [0] 37 Growth 1 level 25 AP 0 END (+1/2) 'HULK RAWR!' [0] 10 Leaping, Megascale (as GM determines) 3 Life Support, Immune Radiation 20 Regeneration --- 160 total 'Rookie Hulk' Powers This example rookie hulking hero starts with 40 STR (higher if you buy up characteristics) at 9-12 feet tall and weighing a literal ton of trouble, with extra reach from size, able to absorb up to 96 additional AP in DI (about 14 levels of DI, an extra 70 STR or so along with KBR and DEF) with the special effect of density as 'uncontrolled violence' with the same detrimental effects to the environment. (AFAIC, a raging Hulk landing on you is as bad as a superdense neutronium anvil landing on you any day.)
  23. Depends who's pitching. Though I'd have thought Batman and Robin would have both played for the same team.
  24. So.. the red, white and blue vipers... do they hiss, "Don't tread on US!"?
  25. Elementals had a fanatical religious group torture hundreds of its followers to death in bizarre ways in the hopes at least a few would suffer in unusual enough ways to attract the attention of the Shadow Spear and be brought back with powers. Powers has Wannabes who will go to any NSFW extreme to either gain or increase their powers. GalaxyQuest had actors rise to the heroic proportions of the roles they played when thrown into the dire situations their characters used to portray. While not strictly speaking super powers.. who are we kidding? Since when is teleportation, disintegration, and space flight not super powered?
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