austenandrews

Re: Eureka HERO ? Cute idea, though I'd hate to see Carter's sheet stacked up against most of the others. Talk about PS: envy!

Re: Horror Hero: Cliches to Avoid And a deleted scene implied she also had sex with Lambert(!).

Re: Horror Hero: Cliches to Avoid The trick is to make them all seem suspicious.

Re: Horror Hero: Cliches to Avoid

Re: Horror Hero: Cliches to Avoid Personally I dislike the "chosen one" cliche, where the battle against evil boils down to one character being a maguffin. That's endemic of many genres, of course, not just horror.

Re: Horror Hero: Cliches to Avoid Come on now, really good horror role-players would revel in such acts. When I play horror, I'm the guy who goes outside to check out the strange noise, walking backwards with my flashlight.

Re: Steam Power in Fantasy I wrote a few licensed books with a steam-ish component.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone? Maybe the DS is a living thing.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone?

Re: From the mouths of babes

Re: Your favorite team flavor... Whoa, major necromancy! Typically I've ended up with either Avengers-style teams (established well-funded A-list team, though each hero is not necessarily A-list) or Defenders-style teams (ad hoc formation, informal character-driven organization).

Re: Hero System for Horror gaming I always do this, even with Hero. I'm the polar opposite of those guys who need game stats for flashlights - very rarely will I actually do a full writeup of a monster or even an NPC. If I want X effect, I write up X effect with little regard for what Powers/Advantages/et al. are required. That stuff is for point balance and as GM, I'm not beholden to balance. When I run horror the game effects serve the mood, not themselves. That said, Hero has enough general mechanisms to use as guidelines that I don't run into mid-game mechanical conflicts. If I can resolve Champions power interactions on the fly, power interactions in horror are a piece of cake. Absolutely. I mainly invent critters unique to the given scenario. When I do use an established monster, I generally make my own version (unless the book version happens to be a good match for what I had in mind).

Re: Hero System for Horror gaming That's really more CoC than the horror genre itself. The whole "spiral into insanity" was a gross generalization made by Chaosium. Sure a lot of horror winds up with everybody dead or worse, but vastly more involves heroes who ultimately overcome the horror. The catch is that the body count might be higher than other genres, and you generally don't win by throwing more bullets at the enemy. The "powerlessness" is not literal. One always controls something about the scenario. Often the trope is to persevere against apparent powerlessness until the hidden solution is at hand - which is quite compatible with the "Tactician" puzzle-solving mindset, in my experience.

Re: Hero System for Horror gaming Pretty much goes for any genre - don't run it unless the players want to play it. Of course the corollary also applies - players shouldn't play in a game that they don't enjoy. It can ruin the mood for everyone else.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone? I imagine some enormous shifting moire pattern calculated to deliver various periods to various areas. Or something.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone?

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone?

Re: A Fun and Creepy Thought I'm always interested in novel ways to go extinct.

Re: A Fun and Creepy Thought Yikes. Makes you want to recalculate the frequency of life-bearing planets in the universe. Apparently not only the solar system but the galaxy itself must be amenable.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone?

Re: Hero System for Horror gaming Which demonstrates why I said the GM and players all have to be on board. Some players don't want to feel powerless, ever (per SketchPad's Batman comment above). Some players can't stand their character getting killed or maimed or losing a loved one (per CourtFool's crushee comment). Some players can't refrain from mood-killing goofiness. Some players are just psychologically wired to play against tone or genre. Not that it's impossible to run horror with these types of players, but it's harder. You have to fall back on mechanics a lot more. For my part, if I have to consult a number to see how scared my character is, I'm on the outside looking in and it's not really horror anymore. It's a mechanical simulation of horror. I want the real gut reactions, like you'd get watching a horror movie or reading a scary novel.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone? Surely the mass of the sphere would be negligible? If we somehow managed to render the total mass of all solar bodies into the shell, it would still be a drop in the bucket. What would be the interior surface temperature of a shell 6 million km in diameter? What would the shell have to be made of to withstand that temperature? Or might it be possible to construct a ginormous magnetic containment field? (I don't expect anyone to have these answers, btw. Just musing.)

Re: pulp inventions I love the "smashed to bits by angry farmers" part.

Re: Dyson Sphere (shell) - Dysonica Anyone? Has anyone run the numbers on a Dyson shell built close enough to the star to have 1G on the outer surface?

Re: From the mouths of babes The story I recall from my own childhood (maybe first grade) concerned several adventurers who donned heat-proof suits so they could enter the lava-world inside a volcano and defeat the monster inside. The monster had a giant spike for a face. They nicknamed it Pinocchio. When they defeated it, they discovered a bejeweled crown as a treasure.