Jump to content

Comic

HERO Member
  • Posts

    2,962
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Comic

  1. It's been a long time since I set up a campaign world, but some mistakes I wouldn't make again: 1. Make it too different from the real world. People get confused and lose attention: it's entirely possible for GoT fans to know every intimate detail of the history and current events of Esos and Westeros, they choose to be fans of that series; it's pretty hard to get a sometimes changing band of roleplayers to commit your new world to memory meme-by-meme. 2. Make it too like the real world. American cultural intolerance (and constitutional law forbidding) of UN law enforcement on US soil would make UNTIL impossible, and UNTIL is a very integral part of so many pre-made villains that it's a lot of work to rewrite the whole organization. 3. Make it too much like the out-of-the-box game world. Switch it up. Make Lung Hung a hero, sort of a combination of The Shadow and Robin Hood from a Chinese setting. Make Oilco a front for VIPER. Let your players know that sure, they can _read_ the source material, but in my campaign world, some of the game source material is propaganda put out by Demon or C.L.O.W.N. to confuse superheros. (Indeed, C.L.O.W.N.'s greatest trick is to convince the superhero world C.L.O.W.N. never existed.) 4. Forget fun, because something else is more important. The fun is the whole point. Have a sense of humour. 5. Stick to the plan because it's the plan. Fun takes precedence. Be flexible. Prepare, and have notes, but be ready to stow them for another day. 6. Fail to plan "E" for when the heroes demolish plans "A" through "D". Have outs, like that some nemesis is feeding false information to the heroes, or a seeming villain is really a secret hero, or vice versa. But don't waste time with outs for outs for outs. If you get past plan "E", pull out TFOS.
  2. While I _like_ 'General Science' (at a -5 roll for specific sciences), I'm forced to agree that it's not capturing exactly what I want for the character, other than emulating the effects of an Arts & Science degree program. If the Arts side of that can equate to KS: Law, then certainly the Science Skill can correspond to a specific single discipline, too. I'm going to start with Electronics, I think, as the core of Aematlon's scientific side; he's mostly on the lookout for concealed electronics using his x-ray vision, and figuring out what they do and how to counteract them. He's an action-oriented beginner, right now, not an inventor. There's plenty of justification for him spending XP on other science knowledge, later.
  3. How much more impressive is 40 STR than a knife? It's true you can throw a knife with deadly effect (on a lucky throw); 40 STR can leap as far as a normal can throw a knife with accuracy. 40 STR can pick up a truckload of knives and throw it at a gas station full of school buses. 40 STR can pick up a tour bus and use it to swat other tour buses like badminton birdies. You can't drop your 40 STR by accident, or be disarmed of your STR by a skilled opponent on a lucky shot, or have your STR broken by an attack that overcomes its DEF. And there's no normal knife wielder in the world who wouldn't be disarmed easily by our 40 STR Rampager. There aren't even that many knives that 40 STR wouldn't shatter like peanut brittle, even casually. 40 STR with KB against a normal with 2 DEF on average does 6 BODY and leaves the victim lying flat on their back 1" away with standard damage.. which is 1 BODY less than a standard knife; but if Rampager is attacking hundreds or thousands of times before brought down, some of Rampager's victims will fly over fifty feet and impale in brick walls, knocking substantial holes in buildings and demolishing them, on one punch, using standard game mechanics: the more common but so much less extreme outcomes of knife knockback won't matter much side-by-side with the video of that. Joker in the Christopher Nolan Batman had a knife.. bombs, heavy machine guns, armies of thugs.. and everything, all the harm Joker did as carefully planned mayhem over the course of his whole career the Rampager could do casually using just STR in the course of a few minutes. Movie Bane wouldn't even register for Rampager. Ras Al Ghul? Snapped like a twig by Rampager, and his invisible knife-wielding ninja army too. Drop one single Rampager into one of the Transformers movies, and suddenly the Decepticons are only special because they can fly away to space.. Which they'd likely do, if Rampager let them. That's how much more impressive 40 STR is than a knife.
  4. Flipping this on its head.. is a 40 STR 'hero' "going after the bad guys" going to be better, the same, or worse, all things considered, for the same tactics?
  5. If I'm on a rampage.. am I going to be holding onto the idea of pretending to be 'a normal guy', or am I going to be hiding my face, so when I get away I can resume a normal life.. or am I on a rampage, so not thinking straight enough to do such clever things? Sooner or later, the tactics of the inexperienced fall to the tactics of the experienced. Everyone's inexperienced at having 40 STR; all police forces in major US cities know about dealing with rampages.
  6. "Here I am, in the wheel well of a transcontinental jet. Even with all my power, it's uncomfortable. I don't think it could kill me outright, but it's a long, nasty fall if I nod off from the thin air and chill." Mentally, Aematlon edited his thought bubble. He'd want that for later, to compose properly into some novelization. He couldn't very well write as fact that he was stowing away on flights much faster than his own top speed, with much better navigators guiding them. It wouldn't look heroic. It wouldn't inspire confidence. And it would get him standing in front of a judge trying to explain why he shouldn't go to jail, if he was lucky. Twenty six days to the Anniversary. The start of the chain of events that led to Powers being hunted, hounded, and sometimes the lucky and smart few became iconic brands worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- sometimes all three -- was only two decades ago. Before he was born, but his reading showed what a huge change the world had been through in so little time. Triphammer Technology was everywhere now. The cyborg CEO claimed to have no Powers, but he traded blows with the greatest of the Powereds for all of that twenty years, first in jet armor, then bit-by-bit replacing bone with titanium, and humanity with machine. It took a great deal of resourcefulness to remain undetected by Triphammer in America, between satellites and microdrones and plain old fashioned snitches. People were living longer, thanks to Triphammer's cybernetic advances. Ordinary crime wasn't down.. it had been heading steadily down before the new security grid over America, and now all that was heading down was rate of Americans without criminal convictions. How had that happened? It would make a great story, if it could be traced to its roots at Power Childe. The birth of Powers, and of tyranny by the Powerless, in an America where one could not hold office if one were Powered. Aematlon was heading into a Registration city, if he was heading to the Power Childe Club. In his mind's eye, Jim Adams fingered the contract offer from the UN. They were forming a league of World Class Powereds to deal with situations the Powerless -- even the Triphammer-armed militaries -- could not. Aematlon's ability level was head and shoulders above the usual, and he exhibited competencies the bureaucrats were desperate for.. even while holding back, and keeping his own secrets. They had a standard mind reading Triphammer scanner on him the whole time, but all it got was the Boy Scout manual and the national anthem, even as he passed the interview and physical test with flying colors. They were particularly accurate at plotting maximum flight speed, and Aematlon's respectable 150 mph top rate was well-documented. Which was all to the good. It gave Aematlon more latitude in his plans. It's odd, he thought. A villain is just someone who won't divert from his own plan to help someone else achieve theirs. How would Jim know, given Aematlon's ultimate secret goals, if he had fallen into supervillainy? The acceptance letter from Stanford Law, and the carefully negotiated terms of the internship at the Lamark Hammer Memorial Hospital's legal aid clinic as a substitute for one unit popped up on his imaginary storyboard. Positioning. Preparation. Timing. The UN knew Aematlon as a Boston-based Powered. Boston, with its liberal views of Powers, a safe haven far from the madness of the West Coast and its Powered Camps and Registration Enforcement Drones. Stanford and the Lamark knew him as James Adams, an Ivy League former sport scholarship prodigy freshman law school student and legal aid support volunteer with an interest in medicine. They gave him access to statewide medical records and all areas of the hospital, all under the nose of Triphammer Security. Adam James was the public name of the author of Plug, and its red-hot blog. So the UN wouldn't know its new hero with outstanding scientific understanding of biology from Boston.. alibied by having just an hour ago left the UN compound in Piscataway.. was the same mystery figure who.. Aematlon launched himself from the plane's underbelly, undetected, and let the turbulence kick him around a bit before righting himself and dropping full speed toward the city below, aiming for a large luminous "H" he could see below. He slowed, still a blur, passing the never-locked emergency doors to the helicopter landing pad of Power Childe Memorial. It took him moments to find the closet and dress in scrubs, the low light of the just started midnight shift assisting his stealth. Room by room the silent figure flitted, his ability to see through walls helping him avoid unwanted discovery. Each patient he came upon, he healed with Aematlon's penetrating power: diseased and lost limbs and organs were regrown, weakness dispelled, diseases either eliminated or abated to the point nature and ordinary medicine might finally defeat them. Three or four patients a minute, it was better than an hour before the miraculous recoveries were discovered, and a hubbub ensued. This diverted attention to the upper floors, and freed up the normally more intensely populated middle and lower floors, as staff rushed to examine a hundred or more patients who were suddenly whole and well. By sunrise, Aematlon had healed everyone in the hospital, to the limits of his power. And James Adams was due in class in a couple of hours, so he would need to be seen in the student cafeteria for breakfast in minutes, alibi establishingly. What would the world do, when suddenly seven hundred and thirty nine people -- the same number of lives as Hunger took ten and twenty years ago altogether -- in such dire condition they resorted to PowCh Mem for care.. were made whole? Adams didn't understand Aematlon's powers; he didn't have the resources to study them himself, and he certainly wasn't going to trust them to the UN -- or any other institution -- without understanding them better. Now, he was in position to gain access to every aspect of every investigation into them for hundreds of cases, both as a legal aid intern and as one of the UN's Powered Investigators. And he could do it in a Registration City without needing to register, due UN diplomatic immunity for its agents. And James would have a story, ready to blog on Anniversary Day.
  7. Is this just a normal kid with a (ghost) follower? And does the follower have to follow the game limits, since Always On Desolid exceeds the caps?
  8. Be better if there were a coffin beside it labelled, "Reserved for Current Occupant".. and the edge of a third on the one side wall (interdimensionally impenetrable, but very warm to the touch) with the "ant" still visible on its boilerplate.. and the edge of a fourth on the opposite side wall (interdimensionally impenetrable, but intangible to touch) with "Res" on its title plate?
  9. It's a useful concept, but IMO only to counter Invisible Power Effects; anything else, you automatically know what you've suffered and how, in my reading of the rules, no matter what you're made of, except if you have a potent Physical Limitation: Leprous, Unaware of Injury. I'd make it considerably less expensive, unless adding Tracking or "Detect Cure" aspects.
  10. For Special Base, might one recommend "High Tech" (eg: Nanofiber, Metamaterial, Aerogel, Phase Changing/Memory Metal)?
  11. I'm thinking that my next character will definitely have a Major Transform: Enemies to Friends, with the usual language components.
  12. You've just described the kiss between Uma Thurman and Chris O'Donnell in Batman & Robin. Wayne Industries, the source for the R&D funding behind Poison Ivy. Mad Science, the only possible explanation for George Clooney's costume.
  13. Wait. What? When did Mad Scientists, Ruthless Businessmen and Vigilante's become villains? You've just described Bruce Wayne.
  14. I was about to click "Like This".. but it's more "Respect the Truth of This." There are scientists like Stephen Hawking today who worry about artificial intelligence becoming a rival for us.. It appears artificial muscle and skin could be far more dangerous in the short term, in the hands of any average lunatic.
  15. You'd want Flash Defense, Sonic Flash Defense, LS: Need not Breath, Damage Negation Electricity, and Clinging to counter the flashbangs, gas grenades, tasers and water cannon of riot police. If he has those, then your low power rampaging Brick would wade through everything short of a hail of heavy rounds or lucky AP shot. If he's the sort to pick up cars and use them for cover while charging, he could keep going until cars run out or he's taken down by some heavier special weapons and tactics. Of course, he's not getting away, given the slow, slow rate of low-powered movement, if pursued by observers in helicopters or using drones.. unless he finds some deep water and swims for it. Is it wrong that my mind goes to the builds that make for a worse massacre?
  16. Well, if you're looking for genetic engineering.. Sabre-tooth pangolin, anyone? https://www.youtube.com/embed/1hOscvzd-jI
  17. So.. a campaign setting where superheroes are treated like exotic, dangerous wild animals: in some places poached for their parts (but not always killed outright), in some places caged in zoos, often penned up in reserves, or requiring special licenses to keep and ship. And a small group of player characters have escaped this treatment to find each other and band together.. but which one is the traitor?
  18. I believe Steve Long has proposed one ample solution: http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/91478-new-pdf-superhero-gallery-expanded/?do=findComment&comment=2438537 It shouldn't be too hard to adapt a Force or Light character template for a playable Dr. Solar-type at a starting level.
  19. Dr. Solar, the original, had two aspects of clairsentience: 1. Sonic retrocognition: by selectively amplifying the fading reverberations of sounds in the molecules of a location, Dr. Solar could eavesdrop on what had been said there in the past. 2. Split existence: while leading a life (in isolation except for a few minutes of heavily shielded contact) on Earth, Dr. Solar had a second version of himself in mental contact with the first, wandering the Universe and exploring its wonders in the form of pure energy. He appeared uninterested in using the split existence to spy on local events, given the form was even more lethal than the solid one.
  20. After seeing Turtle Armor, back in the day I came up with P.A.N.G.O.L.I.N. Armor: Sadly, this bipedal, arboreal, tunneling, scent-spraying, prehensile-tailed anteater with scales reputed to bounce rifle shots and defy lions and leopards, claws that crack open concrete-like termite colonies, and a prehensile tongue so long it is anchored in the creature's hips is now "the World's Most Hunted Animal" due some sick urban myth and diet fad in Asia, and has fallen to very low numbers in the wild.. and it doesn't fare at all well in captivity. Ungainly on the ground, it is the fastest digger of any mammal as a ratio of body size, can hold its breath 20 minutes by storing air in its stomach underwater making it amphibious, and in the trees is a true master, with some even having patagia that allow them to glide. It's as if a Champions player built them.
  21. Though, to be fair, "Di Moore" is hilarious!
  22. He's a flying teleporter with desolid, an RKA, and clairsentience who can boost his powers with radiation. His life support and resistant defenses are average. He has susceptibility to his goggles being removed, and vulnerability to drains. Oh, and he has the side effect: causes cancer after brief exposure. I don't really see the fuss, as this isn't a terribly hard build to achieve with balance and have points left over for Science: Nuclear Physics, his only apparent skill other than perhaps Power skill and CSLs. The problem will be when you try to integrate Dr. Leading Cause of Cancer with a team, or any of his opponents realize shooting his goggles and running away will be more fun than a barrel of monkeys with lightning flying out of their butts.
  23. And yet frogs and bats are dropping off faster than megafauna.
  24. Every actor on the planet. If we run out of roles, we can just write up new characters.
  25. You know, the guy you want for a write up like this is Hyper-Man. He's awesome at shoe-horning the depth and sense and flavor of any character of any power level into a quite moderate number of points. If Hyper-Man can't do it, no one.. Oh. Uh. That's you. Heh. Um, to quote Tyrion Lannister, perhaps you could try to want something different?
×
×
  • Create New...