BoloOfEarth

Re: nbc heroes tv series Hiro Nakamura I beg to differ. I'm pretty sure it was GM Intervention to advance the plot.

Re: Ideas for a circus/carnival themed villain team I've always liked the name Highwire for a circus-themed villainess.

Re: Caution : Superhero at Work That's uncalled for! My three year-old niece would be highly insulted!

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Hey! How come my home phone number is the only one on the list... three billion times?"

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From last night's D&D game: "19 Charisma, and I can't even get my own wife in bed." During a battle, all OOC: Player 1: "What's their touch?" Player 2: "Well, it's a gentle caress..." Player 3: "Orcs? Don't they like it rough?" Player 2: "I wouldn't know..."

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From a D&D game a few weeks back, I had forgotten the quote before: Our sorcerer, after being told by a paranoid player to Detect Magic on a note to make sure there are no Explosive Runes: "I don't know if it's poisonous - do you want me to lick it too?"

Re: Jokes How many lawyer jokes are there?

Re: Jokes Had to steal this one from Readers Digest, as it fits me so well: I have CDO. It's like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only it's in alphabetical order as it should be.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Honest! The pig was alive when I started! NT: Just once, I'd like to hear my spouse/significant other say...

Re: Where's it's base? Oh! This one sounds like a great idea! Repped, BTW. The groteque monster mastermind can just wear bandages coming in and out, or else arrive and depart in an ambulance. Give it a research wing, and you have a ready-made excuse for bringing in lots of high-tech goodies. Put it in a gang-overrun part of the city, and the mysterious benefactor funding the hospital gets lots of public kudos (and makes the heroes look bad for suspecting foul play there). Plus, injured gang members and runaways make great test subjects with few next of kin to question what really happened.

Re: Where's it's base? How about an old Atlas-F missile silo? This one has a private airstrip for bringing in supplies and new equipment. Nice house. Tons of storage and lab space (over 20,000 square feet of space in the silo alone). 105 acres in Adirondack State Park near Lake Placid. Capable of withstanding a direct hit from a nuclear weapon. And it's for sale, for a mere $2.3 million! All is needs is lots of chrome and doors that go "whoosh!" and it's the perfect villain lair.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From Sunday's Champions game: The heroes are getting ready to battle the Ravagers, and they are trying to recall the members' names. "There's Ravager. Hangman. That werewolf. And Pestilence." "Oh! And Flatulence!" - - - - - - - - - - - - Hangman is fighting Styx, a mutant regenerator who believes he is undead. (He discovered his powers when he woke up in his casket following his burial.) Hangman: Y'know, one of these times, I'll hang you, and it'll take! Styx: Been there, done that.

Re: Wierdest powers... Any of the Deuces from the Wild Cards books. Like the ability to change your skin into any color, the signature (and only) power of Mr. Rainbow.

Re: A bit of fun in an old Champions game. I hear their covert strike force is Silent but Deadly...

Re: I need you advice? Assistance, Help? To directly answer your questions (just noticed, I never did that): (1) NPCs helping the PCs by providing skills they lack is okay, so long as they don't overshadow the PCs. If the NPCs are doing too much, that can be just as frustrating to the players. Now, the NPCs helping the players learn the skills they need, then slowly taking a back seat... that's a horse of another color. Example: PC is working with MCPD detective Baker. Baker shows PC how to quick talk a mook. PC learns Conversation skill. At a later interrogation, PC watches Baker unsuccessfully try to intimidate a different thug, but notices something in the thug's file about a kid sister. After Baker storms out of the interrogation room in a huff, PC points out to the thug that BigBadGuy's latest plan might endanger the thug's sister, convincing him to spill the beans. Now PC has done something that the NPC failed to do. Makes the player feel quite good, and he's likely to try something similar again. (2) Just let the PCs struggle? No, this will aggravate the problem IMO. (3) Always placing them at the scene of the crime feels contrived after a while. Don't forget about DNPCs. I had one plot involving Utility, using subsonics to put everybody to sleep, rob a bank where one PC's mother and adopted daughter were standing in line. They were never in any real danger, but them being there (1) made it personal, and (2) gave the PC some inside info on what happened. Contacts can be used in similar ways. Maybe their UNTIL contact asks them to help him with a personal issue - his niece is hooked up with an organization that makes him nervous, and is actually a front for a Demonhame. They look into it, and maybe their roll with that Contact goes up one for free. (4) As somebody said, what seems blatant to you might not be to the players. Without knowing the plot and clues themselves, I couldn't say.

Re: I need you advice? Assistance, Help? That's a good point, Evil Steve. Even if your character has the skills (like Conversation, Deduction, and Forensic Medicine), it can be frustrating if you can't do those skills yourself or don't understand the results of a successful roll. And roleplaying those skills should be fun, not frustrating. If I had a skill that irritated me personally to use, I'm not likely to use it much. *Shrug* Not sure how to resolve that problem. It would be boring to just say "Okay, roll your Conversation roll. Made it? All right, the thug lets slip that BigBadGuy is hiding in the DynaPlast warehouse on Seventh." But if the player isn't quick on his feet verbally, he's not likely to even try using Conversation if it means he has to roleplay it. Likewise with other investigative skills. Perhaps, I dunno, let the players help each other out OOC, even though their characters couldn't actually be chiming in. If SuperDood has Deduction but his player can't mentally connect the dots, maybe HyperGuy's player can help draw the lines in if he gets what the GM is saying, and can present it in a way that SuperDood's player can understand better. And if HyperGuy's player is a verbal slowpoke, maybe SuperDood's player can suggest some things to say that might cause the thug to spill the beans. BTW, QM, I hope you're not taking any of this as slamming your GMing. Since we don't have a lot of the picture, much of this is wild (and probably wrong) shots in the dark.

Re: Jokes My apologies in advance to people from Kentucky and Mexico for the following joke: A Kentucky couple, both true rednecks, had 9 children. They went to the doctor to see about getting the husband "fixed". The doctor gladly started the required procedure and asked them what finally made them make the decision--why after nine children, would they choose to do this . The husband replied that they had read in a recent article that one out of every ten children being born in the United States was Mexican, and they didn't want to take a chance on having a Mexican baby because neither of them could speak Spanish.

Re: I need you advice? Assistance, Help? I've used Mike W's suggested "fake newspaper" in my campaign, almost exactly like he described (a recap article, plus 2-3 articles on odd stuff that the heroes might investigate, and usually one small filler article). You can do the same thing with reading off news from the radio or TV, though. Assuming that your players are not rabidly against investigating, but maybe just aren't highly motivated to dig for clues or simply don't know *how* to investigate... I found that, if you make something compelling enough, they'll investigate it and try harder just to satisfy their curiousity. Basically, try for a "WTF?!" moment. Example #1: A group of VIPER agents are robbing local branches of a particular bank -- but only taking the coins and leaving the dollar bills behind (other than a few agents pocketing handfuls for themselves). Example #2: Prominent citizens are doing very odd and illegal things -- the mayor robs a liquor store, a local millionaire is caught rolling drunks for spare change, etc. Then, this same thing happens to one of their DNPCs, doing something clearly out of character, and he/she doesn't remember doing it afterward. Example #3: A number of animals (of the more intelligent variety) are stolen from the local zoo, and replaced with stuffed versions of the original, each with nearly the same coloration and markings (in some cases, dyed in manually). As to investigations vs. combat in general, I've found that my players all like at least one combat a night, even if they're investigating something that they aren't near the end of yet. And sometimes, they just don't want to play detective but want to beat heads. No problem with obliging them in that regard.

Re: Rare meteorite found in Kansas field I don't know if it's because of that wierd glowing meteorite, but post #7 on this thread... it's just not there!

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From Sunday's D&D game: My character, a rabidly-orc-hating ranger, is trying to go off by himself in the city to do some stuff he doesn't want the rest of the party to know about. Unfortunately, we have a number of Big Baddies after us, so we're supposed to be travelling in pairs, not running off alone as I'm trying to do. (Other player) "Go ahead, take off by yourself. Leila has the Reincarnate spell. (checks book) And there's only a 4% chance you'll come back as an orc."

Re: Jokes Alex's joke reminded me of a joke I posted two years ago in the "Clean Joke" thread: A former Navy man is at a party and talking to the wife of a Navy officer. She shows him her necklace, which is made of little semaphore flags. "Isn't it great? It says, "I love you" in semaphore!" Now, the former Navy man is a bit rusty on his semaphore, but he knows that there's no semaphore flag for "love." So he scribbles down a description of the flags to check afterward. When he gets home, he looks up the flags in an old manual. They actually read, "Request permission to lay alongside."

Re: Is "Way Station" a suitable addition for a superhero campaign? I seem to recall an episode of a show on SciFi channel (Ray Bradbury Presents?) with something similar to this type of transfer, but the life force and intellect don't leave the original, they're just "created" at the other end along with the body. Once a "good receive" signal is sent from the receiving end, the original is vaporized automatically. Due to a communications problem, a woman is sent but they don't immediately get the "good receive" signal, so they hold off on vaporizing the original. (Maybe the receiver wasn't working properly, or the signal was blocked by interference of some sort, don't remember.) The technician chats with the woman, they become friends, and when they finally get the "good receive" signal, he can't bring himself to vaporize her.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Where am I? Who are you? What is this place? What's a new theme?"

Re: Firewing vs. Gravitar? Of course, if she did mop the floor with Firewing, you can imagine the glossy shine! "It's a floor wax!" "It's a supervillain!" Sorry, I'm channeling first-season SNL.

Re: Why should I buy Champions? Many people here swear by HeroDesigner, which is the character creation software that Trebuchet mentioned early in the thread. (I still use Creation Workshop, an older software that I don't believe is available with Hero templates anymore.) Some people have homemade software for tracking combat, creating speedsheets, dice-rolling, and so on. I'm sure somebody else has links to those, unfortunately I don't.