Theron

Re: I just can't get into Cosmic Level play I remember my shock when the BBB came out advocating 250 pts as the basic starting level for supers. Up until that point, my games had always started at 225 and done quite nicely. It's all a matter of scale and perspective, IMHO.

Re: I just can't get into Cosmic Level play To each his or her own. The last campaign I played in regularly was, I suppose, "cosmic level", in that we threw point limits out the window. While it certainly was a great deal of fun for most of its run, I'm looking forward to the next one I run being more conventional in approach. By the end of the campaign, I think we'd found some downsides that weren't reflected in my "Pointless Champions" article, but due to a fair amount of out-of-game acrimony, I don't know whether they were problems inherent to the style, the GM, or just a byproduct of personality conflicts and burnout.

Re: Code VS Killing Poll Superheroes not killing was an artifact of the comics code. From a gaming perspective, I prefer to play #1 or #2 in most of my PCs. Occasionally #3 if the setting warrants it. But I'm not very good at playing grim and gritty PCs as a rule. I can GM such settings, because I'm painting in broader strokes than if I devote all that attention to a single PC.

Re: Timelines Depends on the game. For a straight-up four color world, yes, I'll use them, because I tend to break the fourth wall quite a bit and treat the campaign as an ongoing comic and the players as the readership. So a timeline like that, full of stuff the characters might not know or bother to know is just added "fan service". For a game like my upcoming Agents of IMPACT setting, I keep things a bit more vague. Everyone knows supers have been around since the 60s or so, but since so many of them are tied up in ongoing Cold War maneuvering, it's a shadowy history unknown by the general public or even the soldiers fighting the war.

Re: Liberty or Freedom League? Centurions would also work with the Centennial City theme. It also invites a pseudo Roman theme to the HQ, if you're into that sort of thing.

Re: Liberty or Freedom League? I'd go with Liberty League. The Silver Age was big on alliteration, and you've got the whole L. L. thing going as well. Of course, I'd be tempted to call them the Centennial Sentinels myself, but I'm a weirdo.

Re: Advice on Versions Brandon says I'm special!

Re: Autoduel Champions, Alkahest I've still got my copy of Autoduel Champions somewhere. I was such a complete-ist back then. It was also the first place that SJG published the helicopter rules for Car Wars.

Re: Campaign Help needed If the new strain of superhumans is significantly more powerful than the previous minor mutations/whatever, you can rest assured that every government worth its salt will be standing up, paying attention, and trying to figure out what threat these beings pose to the status quo and how best to counter any such threat. The phrase, "shoot it or recruit it" springs immediately to mind.

Re: Name My Character Orm

Re: Old Habits Die Hard I'm sure I read Shelley's stuff at one point in the past decade or so, though it's been a long time. I know what you mean about the "first language" thing. I compare it to being a COBOL programmer. I know there are better, more elegant, and less time-consuming ways to accomplish what I want, but at my age*, I just don't feel like learning a new language to do it. *I'm exactly 18 years younger than the dawn of the Atomic Age. You do the math.

Re: Old Habits Die Hard The background has changed quite a bit over the years, and the current incarnation is far from set in stone. Here's the gist of it, though. It's set in waning years of the Cold War, 1988 or so. Reagan is still in office. Superhumans are a known but relatively rare quantity. 90% of same are either operatives of various national agencies or freelance crimnal/terrorist mercenaries. The PCs are members of IMPACT, the Inquiry into Metahuman and Paranormal Activities, Capabilities, and Technologies, the US Government's superhuman watchdog agency. They investigate paranormal occurrences, catalog superhumans according to threat level, and protect the nation from domestic and foreign metahuman threats. Stir in a big bowl of intrigue and paint in various shades of gray morality. NPCs include a number of modified CU characters, along with a bunch of my own, and a number from other sources (such as Green Ronin's "Crooks" book). Sort of WildCATS meets Stormwatch meets The Six Million Dollar Man, really.

Back in February, my group put away a 3+ year old Champions campaign due to a rather rancorous split with the GM over non-game issues. I swore that for a number of reasons (chiefly, the fact that before the split, I was already a bit vocal about feeling burned out on the game and the genre), I would not take up the GM seat anytime soon and most certainly would not run supers. And if I did end up running supers in the future, I almost certainly would opt for a more streamlined system than Hero. Well, I blew the first one. I've got a game set up and waiting to run this month. I now seem to be blowing it on the second front. Between that short story anthology GOO published, "Astonishing X-Men", the "Ultimate Fantastic Four", re-reading "The Ultimates" and my "Stormwatch" TPBs, along with Justice League Unlimited, I'm finding myself compelled to dust off my notes for a superspies campaign I created over a decade ago that never got a fair shake. And yesterday, I finally broke down and bought Hero Designer, having found that it actually WILL run on my archaic PC. I guess it's really just bowing to the inevitable. After all, I've been playing Hero/Champions for 22 years now. For all the things about it that drive me up the wall, it's still the system I know best. But I'm running my Feng Shui/Exalted/Crazed HK Fantasy campaign nonetheless. I just wish I had more time to game (and prepare).

Re: Finally Picked up Heroes 5th and Champions... Champions perpetuated the physiology/physiognomy confusion that's plagued comics since Claremont got it wrong and superhero gaming copied him. Physiology: An individual's physical makeup. Physiognomy: Either an individual's face, or the Victorian pseudo-science of attributing personality traits based on facial features. F'rinstance, Ironclad has both an alien physiognomy and a mutated alien physiology. But I'm pretty sure all his cool powers derive from the latter, not the former.

Re: Looking for Villains and Vigilantes info Try here.

Re: What do you like about the various ages of comics? I've never been able to wrap my head around the term "Iron Age". Years ago, Peter David referred to it as the "Lead Age" and that's what stuck.

Re: Seeing cartoons in Champion terms Dr. Quest is a NPC and a Plot Device Generator. Jonny, Hadji, and Race are the PCs.

Re: New Justice League anime tomorrow? Just saw it. Pretty darned good, I daresay. The host of cameos alone induced geekgasms.

Re: Iron Age on the brain! I think GOO is supposed to have their Authority sourcebook for Tri-Stat d10 out at GenCon. Shouldn't be too hard to work up some conversions from there.

Re: Midnight Hero I was looking at doing package deals for races, professions, and heroic paths (though the heroic path would be more of a one-time only bonus rather than the series of level-based advancements.)

Re: Why must humans rule? In Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos and Khaavren novels, the Dragaerans (the people who run everything) are basically elves (tall, thin, extremely long-lived, some have pointed ears, etc.). (OK it's fiction, not a game setting. But it has its earliest roots at the gaming table.)

Re: Standard Adventurers Pack In the old Chaosium version of RuneQuest, it was possible to purchase a pre-assembled Adventurer's Pack. Very handy and a great idea.

I'm considering adapting Fantasy Flight Games' Midnight setting for d20 to FH. In many respects, it seems like a good match. The authors already did a bang-up job of divorcing the setting from a number of standard D&Disms and what's left seems like it would be fairly easy to convert over, in terms of feel, if not precise mechanics. Has anyone else done anything with the setting?

Re: GMs, which character concepts did not make the cut in your game? The worst ever wasn't a concept, it was a rules interpretation. The guy decided the rounding rules applied to Characteristics. Unmodified Characteristics. I ended up having to make an entire page of house rules just to deal with that guy's interpretations of the BBB.

Re: Your Gaming Group's Jargon "Hush, you fellows" (delivered in as Ben Stein deadpan a manner as possible): Used when a character or player manages to be especially unimpressive. Comes from a long-ago pulp one-shot where the GM managed to completely hose a scene by saying "Hush! You...fellows...", when he should have said something like "Silence, dogs!"