BoloOfEarth

19 hours ago, Barton said:

Foxbat, my players hate him the most.

17 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

Ahhhhh... I love Foxbat, he's my most favorite hero.

1 hour ago, Hermit said:

Much as I love him, I've had to cut down on my use of Foxbat for my players' sake

To show how much I like Foxbat...  see below.

In a past Champions campaign, I created the Foxbat Five (25% better than the Fantastic Four, because... Five).  They were always a lot of fun, both for me to play as well as (I believe) for the players to battle.  The best was when the Foxbat Five dressed up as villains from the 1960s Batman TV show and tried to kidnap Adam West and Burt Ward at a mall opening (forcing them into ill-fitting Batman and Robin costumes).  Without knowing the FF were going to show up dressed as Joker, Penguin, Riddler, etc. the heroes decided to wear costumes for the *same* villains.  It was epic.

But yes, he can get tiring with over-use.  You need to create just the right adventures for Foxbat.

I've heard a lot of players hated the members of CLOWN.

For the past 35 or so years I've been the one running the Champions games in our group, so as a player I'd have to go back to 1st or 2nd edition Champions, and trust in my notoriously weak memory.  That said, there was a home-brew villain from my first Champions GM's game, whose name I don't recall right now.  He only had one attack, which IIRC he could only do like 3-4 times a day but could burn through a bank vault door.  However, his build was abusively over-defensive - his defenses were so high that when our brick martial artist attacked him from behind with a pushed, haymakered Martial Kick, the resulting 42d6* attack didn't even CON-Stun him.  Most everybody else's attacks pretty much bounced without doing any STUN damage.

* Midnight, our blind brick martial artist, had 60 STR.  In the bad ol' days of 1st edition Champions, a Martial Kick did 2x damage, and Haymaker did 1.5x damage.  So pushed STR (14d6) x 2, x 1.5 = 42d6.

22 hours ago, Michael Hopcroft said:

It makes for smashing films.

 

NT: Things to feed the Knights of the Round Table if you run out of Ham, Jam, and SPAM.

Batman (1960s TV version) will dish them up some Wham!  Slam!  KA-BLAM!

NT:  A new, modern Knights of the Round Table is being formed!  Who's on it, and which knight / king / etc. are they replacing?  (e.g. Lance Bass as Sir Lancelot)

1 hour ago, Pariah said:

New Topic: War. What is it good for? (Degree of difficulty: "Absolutely nothin'" is not an acceptable answer.)

The three "R"s - Ratings, Ruling classes, and Rich people's bank accounts.  Anything further would need to go into the Politics thread, and would likely get me banned regardless.

On 8/26/2023 at 8:00 AM, Michael Hopcroft said:

NT: Subtle signs your belief that you can speak Elvish turns out to be massively untrue.

Your hands are shakin' and your knees are weak,

You can't seem to stand on your own two feet.

Who do you think of when you have such luck?

You're in love... you're all shook up.

3 hours ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

I think the scariest part of that song "Born to be Wild" is when they find a head out on the highway.

Well, they were looking for Ed Venture.  Maybe that was his head.

The video above reminded me of a story of a man who came to the unfortunate conclusion that his 90 year-old father required more care than he could provide.  However, having heard horror stories of how elderly can be treated in many such places, he diligently searched until he found one that would take great care of his father.  About a week after moving his father in, the man came to visit and see how things had gone that first week.

As they sat in the dining hall talking after having a nice meal together, the father started to lean to the left, but one of the staff quickly came over and sat him back up straight.  A minute later, the man's father started to lean to the right, but another staff member ran over and moved him so he was sitting straight again.

"Well, it certainly looks like the people here pay close attention to you," the son said.

"Yes," said his father, "but they won't let me fart."

45 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

What was the players' age range? For the under-30s, when you mention the show they think of Jim Carey.

Upper 50s to low 60s.  Definitely the Bob Barker-era crowd.

A month or so ago, I ran a Champions adventure pitting the heroes against a circus-based villain team.  The leader of the Big Top was a mentalist named The Barker, whose real name was Robert Wright-Price.  The circus was named the Wright-Price Traveling Circus.  

If any of the players got the Bob Barker / Price is Right connection, they didn't mention it.

2 hours ago, death tribble said:

They ask you to pout and show a bit more leg

 

NT: To escape further Russian retaliation what do members of Wagner now call themselves and why ? (Naming themselves after other composers classical or not is recommended)

They hire Dwayne Johnson as their new commander and call themselves Rock-maninoff.

As a GM I've killed a few PCs.  

The first was totally by accident, and mainly due to a quirk of power interaction the player had unknowingly included during character creation (but also due to overpowerful NPCs).  The PC hero had Absorption, with his defenses dependent on how much he absorbed - so if both got Drained or Suppressed, his defenses effectively took a double hit.  Two Genocide Pawns (used as-is from the Mutant File book - never made that mistake again) attacked him, one with a dampening field that suppressed his powers, the other with the mini-gun.  Tore him to shreds.  IIRC, I offered to undo it, but he said it was okay, he'd come up with a better character.

Another was at the player request - he didn't like the character he had drawn up and wanted to go with a new one, while giving the old one a nice heroic sendoff.  To be honest, though, I don't recall much about it, as it was decades ago and that character was only in a handful of adventures before we pulled the plug on him, so not highly memorable.

A third I actually turned into a non-death, with the player's cooperation.  Really nasty villains had a bus full of hostages, with the bus's axles chained to the axles of a fuel tanker, with one of the villains (fire powers) ready to blow it up if the heroes were winning.  The heroes pulled a nice distraction while one of them unhooked the chains and another got onto the bus to drive it and the hostages away.  All was going great, though the fire guy did set fire to the tanker as the bus was pulling away.  They were trying to get the bus far enough away from the burning tanker before it would explode, when Tempest (wind-based character) decided to use her wind TK to grab the burning tanker and send it off the bridge, away from the bus.  Problem was, that meant pulling it toward where she was flying.  Winds fanning the flames made sure the tanker was going to go boom, which it did basically in her face (taking out part of the bridge in the process).  We played it off as her dying in the explosion but her body wasn't found, likely buried underwater in the rubble from the bridge.  She resurfaced a few sessions later, with amnesia and disguised, manipulated by a mentalist villain to turn her against the heroes until they figured out who she really was, captured her, and restored her memories.  It was a great storyline, overall.

59 minutes ago, unclevlad said:

Reported just now.

The head of the Wagner military group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is being listed as a passenger on a plane that crashed.

 

Uh.  Huh.

 

You don't tug on Superman's cape................

Gee, doesn't seem suspicious at all!  Nothing to see here, move along, move along...

41 minutes ago, Pariah said:

New Topic: Weird Restaurant Combinations (e.g., we have a place locally that serves tapas and sushi)

 

All-you-can-eat buffet, featuring only tofu and kale.

Open a third party call center there. 

3 hours ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

Spotless giraffe born at Tennessee zoo believed to be the only one in the world

 

 

The zoo is holding a vote to name the calf on their Facebook page. 

The obvious name is, of course, Spot.  Or as I would spell it, Spaht.  (I'd also name a dog Phydeaux instead of Fido.)

Edit to add:  I suppose another acceptable name would be Dot.  

Been binge-watching iZombie, which I've always enjoyed.  If you're not familiar with it, the main character is a zombie who works as an assistant Medical Examiner, where existence of actual zombies is a secret from most people for the first two seasons.  When she eats brains, she has visions of things that happened to the victim, takes on traits and skills of that person, etc.  which she uses to help a homicide detective solve murders (initially passing herself off as a psychic).  This show was a lot of fun, moreso during the earlier seasons, though I still enjoyed the later seasons.  For an RPG-type crowd, I suggest watching the D&D episode, as well as the real-life superhero episode.  A bit over-the-top, but IMO in an entertaining way.

5 hours ago, unclevlad said:

 

Perhaps this lawyer's heard how many of Trump's lawyers in the past have also been indicted....

And how few of them ever get paid.

On 8/9/2023 at 7:00 PM, unclevlad said:

Yeah, well...

Just for grins.  Let's say you were the winner.  Simple question:  lump sum, or annuity?  No right or wrong answer, as different situations, different motivations.

 

Here are the numbers:
https://www.omnicalculator.com/finance/mega-millions-payout

 

Basically:  pre-tax, $800M and change for the lump sum.  Annuity, starts at $23M+, increasing every year...it's $36M after 10 years.  Max is $96M.

 

Almost everyone takes the lump sum;  I think I saw only 1 winner of a 9-digit prize that took the annuity.  But this is somewhat different, in that it's SO huge...let's face it, even after taxes, the first year alone is likely several times more than our individual lifetime earnings...including projected retirement.  $13M net?  I'm good right there.  Why?  The entire lump sum all at once offers some chance that you'll be STUPID with it.  The annuity says, ok, well, your stupidity shouldn't crush you forever.  So I think I'd actually do the annuity.

I read an article a long time ago, where even some people that took the annuity still ended up broke.  IIRC, they were spending more than they were getting each year, so they borrowed money and put the annuity up as collateral.  And then didn't pay off the loan when their next annuity payment came in, so the lender took the annuity.  (It's been a while, so I may have some details wrong.)

Lots of dumb people out there, as well as not-as-dumb people who just aren't ready for a windfall.  

8 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

The problem is, what do you call people from the United States? Staters? Unies? USAs (pronounced "oosas")? "Yankees" has derogatory implications. There really isn't a decent-sounding alternative to "Americans."

I read two fun short stories many years ago, where each narrator was an archaeologist or historian researching a long-lost people.

In the first, the researcher referred to the long-ago people as the "Nacirema."  It took me a while to realize that he was talking about modern US society. 

In the second, he said that some skeletons were wearing uniforms with "US" pins on the collars, so he referred to them as the "USans."

I think the second one could work to refer to citizens of the USA.  (Though I actually like "Nacirema" more.)

So, I asked in a different thread but got no answer.  Is Hero Games going to have a presence at GenCon this year?  Are they sharing space in a booth in the exhibit hall?  If so, I'd like to stop by and say hi.

I'm signed up for a few Hero Games (Delta Flight, Crisis on Champions Earths), though not as many as I would have liked.  I'm going with my wife, daughter, and son-in-law so I had some schedule obligations that conflicted with other games.

Hope to see people there!

49 minutes ago, Logan D. Hurricanes said:

America has an interesting literary heritage. 

 

44 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

*makes note to avoid Klapman*

His real title should probably have been "Why Many Women Are Not Sexually Attracted To Me."

I went into the local pizza place and they had this out...

My namesake character (Bolo) was created back in the first-edition days, and my players and I pretty much maxed out the disads for as many points to play with as possible.  Bolo was Vulnerable to Fire Attacks, Vulnerable to Explosions, and Hunted by Firewing.  (Yeah, not the smartest collection of disads.)  I remember one time he got one-shot taken out by one of Firewing's agents with a Flame Grenade.  

On 7/22/2023 at 1:16 AM, Ternaugh said:

One of the items that I bought on Amazon Prime day was scheduled to arrive Sunday, but ended up on my doorstep today. It's a big and heavy box, with a 300 page instruction book and 1872 pieces, including some Lego plutonium and whitewall tires.

"Heavy".  Heh.  I see what you did there.

"Why are things so heavy in the future?  Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?"

(On a side note:  As I was typing in the quote, as soon as I got to "Earth" my laptop automatically filled in the last two words.  I approve.)