assault

Re: Difficulty reaching Super-Hero status Of course this is true, but it can still be a pain in the backside thinking of yet another such possibility. That's why I prefer to limit their frequency at the beginning. Besides, Doctor Doom doesn't show up in virtually every issue of Fantastic Four, even off-stage.

Re: Difficulty reaching Super-Hero status Not in my campaigns they don't. They get one 8- Hunted at most, and maybe a Watched. 30 points, at the outside. Anything more and they become a pain to GM.

Re: You've taken over the world. Now what? You let them know that you will vapourise them if they try. Are you a supervillain or a mouse? Besides, you will be appealing to their patriotism. After all, nobody really likes (insert list of people "nobody really likes"). And your rule is good for business, too. There's none of that tedious mucking about with unions. Workers know their place. Business is booming... The Churches are on your side. Some of them will support you voluntarily. A few may need to be purged somewhat, but a brief chat with their leadership should take care of that. Really, you are the saviour of the nation. If a few criminals and degenerates need to be locked up in camps, who cares? EDIT/PS: I've just noticed that David mentioned villains trying to take over Cuba. That's been a common theme in my past campaigns. A lot of supervillains have wound up rather dead trying. As a tribute to that, the version of Assault I am currently playing in a PBEM has a contact with the Cuban government...

Re: Where would you go? Mars Picking up some suitably attractive company along the way, of course... And dealing with minor issues like life support etc.

Re: You've taken over the world. Now what? To quote from Star Wars: --- Governor Tarkin: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away. General Tagge: But that's impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy? Governor Tarkin: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station. --- That and a whole bunch of hired gunmen will buy you quite a bit of security.

Re: Ravenswood Academy Yearbook Fair enough. I personally prefer to roleplay within the conventions of the genre. They are, after all what makes the genre distinct from other genres. And the cheesy bits are fun. The convention I would really like to play around with is the Cold War anti-communist one. I think it could be an interesting hook for a game with the right kind of players. The "right kind" in this case would be the "left kind".

Re: Ravenswood Academy Yearbook

Re: On Multiform and Potential Abuses Thereof....

Re: On Multiform and Potential Abuses Thereof.... Hang on. Does he have a VPP inside a multipower? Whoa.

Re: Ãœbermensch What about it? Philosophically, it's nonsense. As a source of character ideas, it's fine.

Re: On Multiform and Potential Abuses Thereof.... To put it bluntly, this character looks like more trouble than it's worth. Let's see: he's got Vehicles nested inside Multiforms nested inside a Multipower, and apparently has a VPP as well. Is that correct? If so, my response would be: "no... freakin'... way".

Re: Tattered Plot Threads Exactly. Ease the shock on the players, and they'll do your dirty work for you.

Re: brainstorming Well, to cut him some slack, he has a nice series of 21 year intervals going. It's just a piece of unfortunate phrasing. How about: First characters are in 1942. The USA has just entered WWII...

Re: Tattered Plot Threads This seems like the best idea. It eliminates the "rude shock" aspect, which would be the thing that would annoy me. FWIW, one of the best DnD games I ever played in collapsed when the DM magically transported us to the other side of the world, away from our supporting cast and everything we had built up and accomplished. It was one of a number of games being played by members of a club in a local setting, and this shift was supposed to get us more involved in the campaign's overall metaplot. Sadly, this was motivated by our groups' success - we were rising stars, and my character, in particular, was one of the highest level PCs in the campaign - and it completely drove us out. And, of course, failed to further the metaplot. That experience had a lot to do with my suspicion of sudden random shifts in campaigns. Of course that doesn't apply to radical changes that are previously discussed and/or foreshadowed.

Re: brainstorming Two comments: This seems a bit too limiting. These characters won't really be able to afford superpowers, and won't even be particularly impressive normals. I suggest something along the following lines: 1942. 100 points, with up to 100 in disads. 1963. 125 points, with up to 125 in disads. 1984. 150 points, with up to 150 in disads. 2005. 200 points, with up to 150 in disads.

Re: Tattered Plot Threads Well duh. This is why they will be ticked off when they discover they can't get home. Sure. But it won't stop the characters from trying to return home, which means that they will tend to remain strangers in the game universe, and not settle down and make new lives for themselves. --- Most of all, it will negate the whole point of the players being able to play their old favourite characters. Instead they will end up playing characters with the same names and powers, but with completely different motivations and supporting casts. This change is as radically different as DC's Silver Age reinventions of Golden Age characters like the Flash and Green Lantern, or some of the horrors perpetrated on far too many characters in the 90s. (Incidentally, note the difference between good "reinventions" and bad "horrors" in that sentence.)

Re: Tattered Plot Threads The problem is that they are likely to be unimpressed about leaving "their loved ones and their lives" behind, and will want to get back to them. It's a good motivation for a dimension-hopping campaign, but it's bad news for one where you want them to stay put. This problem is actually worse with good roleplayers than with bad ones. The latter probably won't care about the change, while the good ones may. You could get around this by collapsing the characters' home dimensions into one, Crisis on Infinite Earths style. That doesn't necessarily sit well with what is known about Istvatha V'han, but you could add a McGuffin that could cause the collapse. I'm sure V'han would be really "impressed" about a gadget that could cause the multiverse to collapse. She might even help the PCs ensure that the potential Crisis on Infinite Earths is limited to just being a Crisis on A Few Earths. What is the McGuffin, and where does it come from? Maybe it's something to do with Tyrannon the Conqueror, or maybe it's related to the Qliphothic Realms... The problem with all of this is that if you start your campaign with such a big bang, the rest of the game might seem anticlimactic! Hmm... In fact it would make a neat limited duration game. It would probably too long to be satisfying as a Con game. A PBEM would work. You would need to do a fair bit of foreshadowing, so people would care when everything hits the fan and characters start dying...

Re: Queer heroes The thing is that if the *players* are gay (queer, whatever), you could allow them to provide the "gayness" of the character's personalities. All you would really need to do is provide the characters, say they are gay, and let the players would run with it. --- Incidentally, Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass supposedly had a relationship in the Legion of Superheroes. It was really only hinted at, but it was rather specifically not denied. This was probably the best way for the male (hetero?) writer to deal with it, IMHO. I won't bother to explain my theories about Cosmic Boy and Night Girl, except to suggest that Night Girl may only be a Girl at Night, and briefly mention the black bustier Cosmic Boy used to wear in the 70s... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Boy

Re: The Second Stringers Hmm... I missed this thread... Personally, I'm a firm believer in trained normal characters being viable, so characters with lame to non-existent powers aren't necessarily useless. Then again, I haven't ever really thought much about the reverse case of physically incapable people with effective powers, apart from the occasional Professor X "brain in a jar" type. I would be quite happy to play a character like Air Wave, whose main power was that he could make a phone call from anywhere, almost like he had some kind of mobile kind of err... phone. OK, that was in the 40s, but still... He would be a perfectly viable character to play simply because he could potentially fight as well as any other character without "real" powers.

Re: Comics you loved...but apparently no one else did

Re: Comics you loved...but apparently no one else did The Australian Cyclone Comics titles from the 80s, especially Southern Squadron and the Jackaroo, deserve an honourable mention. They were doomed by the size of the market they were in, but were really cool. http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/c/chaloner.htm

Re: Creating the Silver Age Team Just to be polite, and if anybody cares: I have decided to introduce a character called Glamour Girl in my silly Legion of Superheroes homage setting. I had already decided that one of my characters' real name would be Phan Servis, and Glamour Girl would be just right as her codename. Think of a cross between Princess Projectra (powers), Dream Girl (looks and personality) and Saturn Girl (founding member with psionic type powers). So there.

Re: Funny Hero Thread Seeker. 'Nuff said. Most of my characters are notionally serious, even when they just happen to be dogs, monkeys, robots or small boys. Or have names like Uranus Lad or Phan Servis.

Re: Teen Zombies (undead in a teen champions game) A teenage necromancer is certainly... different... Is she one of the good guys?

Re: Blue Beetle's Disads? The compulsive eating thing is a lot like Max Lord killing him. It makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears, close my eyes and shout "Didn't happen" over and over again. In any case, it isn't necessary to fill out his disad list.