RDU Neil

In a "Broken America" I could see the North East industrial corridor would likely ally with Canada. The neo-Confederacy would be looking for allies... would they or the Union be more likely to ally with a collapsing British empire? It is a fascinating world, a post war America that is not the center of post-war rebuilding makes everything more interesting.

hah... well considering the timeline, he might have been that crazy white uncle no one talks about.

I really hope that Nike actually did create this. They may just be another money grubbing corporation running sweat shops... but this is great marketing!

Cool. Called it.

I was thinking of posting about this game in the Champions Now thread under Kickstarter heading, but I can add a bit here in response. Ron's rules in Champs Now asks the GM to do nothing more in terms of world building than create 2 sentences of a particular kind. From there, the players were to make their characters, disads, story hooks, etc. Then the world would evolve during play. (This both worked and did not work at all for our group.) My two sentences were... Superhumans are a relatively new phenomena, and the first ones did very, very bad things. Weird Science and Conspiracies at the University of Michigan Now... for our group, who have played many years together, this immediately kicked off certain people expounding on this, "Cool... that means X or Y and..." which is really cool, but I didn't want all the player's character concepts colored by the a few players. So I asked each player to come up with "one additional sentence" that built on/added to my original sentences. (These could have been general statements on theme or whatever, but they actually were more detailed and specific to world building and creating a history.) Storn - We four are on campus and gain our powers when villains try to rob a research facility, accidentally unleashing weird energies. (Actually Storn started with "We all have a shared origin event" but then he got more specific.) Rick - Decades ago in the vast salt mines beneath Detroit, space had to be cleared out for a new research facility--and an embassy. Joe - After Martial Law was declared, college attendance sky rocketed as a way to stay out of the military. Eric - The Singularity offers a path to surviving the coming darkness. My Commentary: While Ron specifically states that none of this world building should be done until you play, and it should evolve from what players put on their sheets (Hunteds, DNPCs, etc.) these guys refused to be so loose. As a GM, I usually have a very strong idea about the world I'm creating, but wanted to let the players really shape this... and they stepped up... not in the way Ron envisioned, but with a demand for group world building during/prior to characters being built. The world we came up with immediately veered from the expected idea Ron had of "Don't world build, just use the world outside your window and add supers!" It was clear none of the players were satisfied with that and so a rough but fascinating timeline and setting was hashed out. Relatively new superhumans became "over the past 20 years, after an unexplained event in the late 90's" A focus on 'weird science' was agreed upon, so this tossed the typical super-worlds where anything goes, magic, gods, technology, aliens, etc. We agreed that ALL super powers come from 'weird science' and accidents, with the scientific community having dozens of theories on what is going on to allow this breaking of the laws of physics by certain individuals, but there is nothing proven or even a consensus on one theory over another. The martial law statement then really shaped the world. We decided that immediately following the original 'event' the world was on the brink of war as thoughts of sneak attacks and nuclear detonations were considered... and when months later, people with powers started showing up in very destructive ways. In most places Martial Law ended after a few years as no military attacks happened, but it continued a streak of secrecy and security paranoia as more and more powered people began to appear. At some point, it was decided that a few super-powered people actually showed up and helped stop/defeat the destructive ones, and the first "heroes" were christened. The past 20 years basically happened as they have, but with the military deploying rare but useful metahumans in combat, corporations funding a few "super teams" as much as marketing ploys as real, active teams. The costumes and code names came out as a way to use tropes long established in comic books to make a terrified public more accepting of superhumans... but the paranoia and fear still runs deep. The Singularity is an even more popular and well known meme, as eschatological belief has grown... will technology bring about the end of days, or save us from it? Are superhumans the harbingers of doom or those will save us? The "coming darkness" could be many things, but it is a current that runs through society. (Think of all the political and social fracturing and upheaval of the current real world, and turn it up to 11 by adding superhumans and "weird science conspiracies" that might actually be true. Players wanted a clear villain in terms of a certain, secret gov't agency that was hunting supers, there is a draft that on the surface is simply about maintaining the military, requiring military training for everyone of a certain age, but there is a huge social division of this as some claim that people drafted on disappear, "die mysteriously" and that the gov't is using it to search out superhumans or experiment on people, etc. (The gov't is not a monolithic entity of course... it has as many divisions and agendas as the real world.) The salt mines of Detroit will factor hugely into the initial adventures, as the player didn't want this defined before the game, and he dropped the "embassy" part (mole men?) because he felt it no longer fit the concept. The shared origin "accident" was established, establishing the "Hunted" on Flanker's sheet... a villain team called The Hack. The players then wanted an event later that brought them together as a public super-team... and this was really cool. It was established that after they had individually begun displaying powers, the secret gov't agency showed up and tried to "sweep" them, but they fell back on their connections and the resources of some influential faculty at U-M and decided to "come out as supers" in the public eye (secret IDs, but public super personas) as a defense against being "disappeared." They've been an active super team for 8 months or so. Now we have four PCs who have a shared origin story and an established reason for working together... three have very overt and noticeable power-sets. The fourth is the shadowy, controversial member... the politics of universities, state and federal gov'ts, research funding and crazy experiments... along with shadowy crazy super-stuff... we'll be getting down to it in a week or so. It is an interesting experiment in using Ron's scaled down Champions Now rules... so we'll see what happens after a few playtest sessions, whether it works and we want to continue... or it peters out. We'll see!

I'd be fascinated by the narrower discussion of how you think a "non-post war" American South would facilitate the subjugated blacks of the American South in the 50s of actually wresting social control from the white slave-owner power base that has traditionally been in charge. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but I'd say that a fracturing America would more likely end up in a Neo Confederacy of sorts. (Also, I think a '50s era ceding Texas would almost immediately be at war with Mexico and that would be a complex mess (with other parts of the previous US siding with Mexico, etc.) Japanese win is, to me, much less interesting than this fascinating alternative "Broken America" that results because of the Japanese win.

I wonder if Maria Rambeau will have a daughter named Monica?

I was off the boards for years, but came back in the last year or so, because I actually had a chance to game regularly again. Bit of an old home week, kind of thing, for sure.

This... a hundred times over. In our playtest of Champions Now, everyone of my group is like, "Ugh... we are back to figured characteristics... bleh" The variation of characteristics and skill levels is so much greater... there is no inherent "everyone is a quick mini-brick at the core because nothing else is as efficient."

As stated... bennie can refer to any "benefit" but also refers to the "thing" you use (a poker chip, a glass chit, a counter, etc.) to show that you have a resource to spend. When I refer to a "chit" I'm speaking to a small glass stone of a color that indicates a certain "benefit allowed".

Ok, so more edge case stuff. I don't think Megascale has ever been used in years of playing in our group, an Change Environment only occasionally... but yeah, I could see that. I was thinking about more about changes to the core mechanics, like non-figured characteristics. Makes sense.

What 5th rules changes are you referring to? Personally, the only thing I really like from post-4th is non-figured characteristics from 6th. What was in 5th you liked?

First few episodes of the new Jack Ryan series on Prime, starring John Krasinski. I feel sorry for John. It is like Amazon got a bunch of out work network television writers on the cheap to create this show. It is plodding and flat and clichéd and aside from the occasional f-bomb being dropped, this could have followed Walker Texas Ranger on any CBS affiliate and been considered "good TV".... 25 YEARS AGO! This show is also another example of our thread on action movie clichés you hate to see... because in the first couple episodes two action set-pieces are not only just badly filmed, they require US Marines and J-SOC types, then the French Anti-Terrorist police to be idiots... just so the villains can get away/succeed. (Not to mention that bad guys are so stereotypical as to not be even remotely interesting.) There is a STOOPID stand-off scene with a grenade that should have resulted in Jack Ryan being dead by the end of the first episode if the villains weren't requisite idiots in turn. I give Amazon credit for trying different types of shows that it can produce, but this show falls into "boring to badly done" which is too bad.

Did that doctor have an unnatural resemblance to an Ewok? 'Cause that would explain a whole lot, actually. ?

Quick question for Fantasy Hero experts... if you used the "spells as skills" take... was it dependent on a GM created list of appropriate skills ("Here is the magic known in this world!" kind of thing.) or was it "player make your own magic skills?

From a yearly game that takes place in a 31 year old campaign. Me: "So you probably don't remember this, but these guys in the crystal armor and swords... they showed up in 1994, sent back in time to take out Capt. Hero. (A PC back then.)" Player: "Holy crap. We've played so long we are now IN the dystopian future that they came from!" Me: "I don't know whether that is cool or very sad."

I just turned the age that those exams start. Had my first one this year, all was good so I don't have to do it again for 10 years. The exam itself is nothing... the 24 hours before the exam is the horrible part.

Anecdotally, a good friend who lost his father to Prostate Cancer, had a big scare of his own around the age of 30... and he was a somewhat heavy drinker. He had to give up all alcohol and other things, and it shook him up, badly, as he knew what it had done to his father (who he was really close to). Having more than anecdotal data to back up the alcohol/prostate cancer connection is important.

Cool. I just sent a couple of one-way tickets to Beijing to the White House, envelope marked "You've Won a YOOOOGE PRIZE! You're AMAZING!" Let's see what happens.

Yes... in game play is very important... circumstances are everything. If the villains cry uncle after a simple bank robbery where no one was really harmed... ok. If the villains cry uncle after burning to death a busload of children... no, they get beaten down and a pushed RKA blast through the eyeball when down to make sure they never come back. As a GM, to expect heroes to play by silver age rules while the villains are iron age extremists, is unacceptable. It is why I really hate DC comics for the past 10-20 years. They made the villains more and more evil, murderous and destructive, while, for some reason, the heroes are supposed to just slap their wrist and put them in jail, where they will escape and slaughter 20 more people on the way out. I've been hating a lot of Marvel comics featuring Bullseye lately, because he is shown as slaughtering dozens of people in comic after comic, somehow miraculously surviving getting shot and clawed by Wolverine, whatever... and then he just goes back to jail to get out again, and I'm supposed to think this is interesting and satisfying to read? Bullseye would have been killed off years ago, with no regret, in my world. Named villains have no special status. PCs can do horrible things and pay for it, too. One of the greatest moments in 30 years of play was after the first decade, in a finale showdown with Dr. Destroyer, who had terrorized the world for 40 plus years and been unbeaten and the 'big bad' for a decade of actual play... his ultimate bid for supremacy (getting ahold of progenitor technology that would have made him godlike) was thwarted by two generations of heroes, multiple NPCs, world militaries, cataclysms and thousands dead world wide... the heroes finally beat him. Three of the most prominent heroes fished him out of the ocean where he fell, and landed with him on board a battle cruiser. He was unconscious in front of him, and they had 30 seconds before everyone else showed up. One was a massively powerful esper, one a massively powerful TK, and a third a galactic police officer type... they had a hasty mental discussion, purely those three PCs (the other six I had playing, this was a weekend long epic session, weren't in on it) and they debated "Should he be allowed to wake up?" They made the hard, moral choice that "No... he is too much of a threat, and letting him possibly return was a greater evil." They then put all their power into psychicly weakening him to disconnect him from his armor's auto-safety functions... then the TK reached inside and stopped the villain's heart. AVLD Killing Attack type of thing that he used maybe three times in decades of play. To the rest of the world, they simply stood there looking... then announced, "Destroyer, Dr. Zerstoiten, has died of natural causes." It was the ultimate "hit them when they are down" and one of them most heroic moments as well. It haunted them... their decision, and the lie... the necessity of it... but they never thought it was wrong... nor did I as GM. I was prepared, had they lost, to have Destroyer take over the world and completely change the game... the stakes are as real as make believe can be. All that said, a game mechanic that enforces a type of play you don't want. (We are silver age heroes, but the game keeps making me hit opponents when they are down... this sucks!) is a game mechanic you need to change.

Heh... just me being a bit hyperbolic. In the supers campaign, they are quite the heroes... but if we were to talk about our Secret Worlds campaign... an assassin, a mob boss, a criminal hacker, a ex SAS mercenary, a maybe-insane ex-VDU explosives expert, a mad-psychologists spreading conspiracy memes, and a pacifist yogi being corrupted into a kill squad lead by an ex-Mossad fixer. That game, good is... relative, at best.

So, by RAW, 0 to -9, the character is still standing, but knocked out? I'll look at the books. I've always played the mechanical result... DCV 0, has to recover and x2 Stun if hit... but your comment about upright staggering and not down on the ground was what I thought was different. So, if the punch that puts someone into 0 to -9 range doesn't do knockback/knockdown, the character is still standing, but effectively "unconscious" by the rules? I've always played it that way to an extent. I'll describe the villain as "they hit the ground, head spinning, there is a that brief rag-doll look... FOR THE MOMENT they are out of it"... at which point the PCs curb stomp him accordingly. If the character is "Con stunned"... I tend to say, "they stagger... not down, clearly trying to shake it off. You rang their bell!" which also tends to prompt a follow up, hoping to hit before they recover. If a character is -10 or more, I will indicate, "They are down, rag doll and not moving..." which tends to imply truly unconscious... but also tends to provoke a curb stomping anyway.

Hera android is sounding positively hideously terrifying. Spraying nano-bots at people the forcibly transform them on a physical and genetic level into an animal. I'm picturing this semi-sentient mist/sludge spewing from her outstretched hand and engulfing the unlucky victim who screams and screams until their screams become the honking cries of a goose or braying of a donkey. Nastiest... supervillain... everrrrrrr.

Whoa... missed this post earlier. I do like this idea, and it is worth considering. Nobody seems to really mind tracking Stun and Body (anecdotally, over 38 years) but they do hate tracking END.

I really, really like this interpretation. "Heavily Stunned"... very interesting. Do you allow actions in the "Heavily Stunned" state or is it just the "doesn't fall over" aspect. i.e. the character still can do nothing but Recover, and is at 0 DCV, they are just staggering up, rather than on the ground?