THE PATRIOT

I'm a confident brick who can take the bullet. And a semi-dramatic role player. Teammates are itching to teach my guy some humility. I believe it may also have something to do with the time a player and I had a combat duel in a danger room scene on a rural farm. Well his energy guy ended up with his head up a holographic cows ass. We're all friends otherwise I would never have done this with just any old player in a gaming group.

The shockwave part is a seperate power in Champions, which is something that I only see heavy bricks like the Hulk or Super Man having. My guys at the 50-55 pts in strength brick. But he could hang toe-to-toe with a slug fest with the Thing for awhile before he would eventually go down because they've established the Thing can take a major pounding (Marvel Two-in-One when he took on Champion). Does anybody know how a the mechanics of a hydrant work? How much presure (punch) would a hydrant pack? Where would a hero find a main gas line under the street? We are duking it out in the danger room between the whole team of heroes to see what we can do and to release some frustrations with are player characters. (Actually I'm a little worried that the whole damn team is going to be trying to nail me in this combat.) I don't mind that though, I just want my guy to take out a few of them before I go down through some creative playing. One guy is a mutant cosmic energy blaster who flies, one's a battle suit with rockets and sensory equipement, one's a teleporting ninja, one's a DareDevil level Renaissance Festival reject who is definately going to try and nail me (but I should be able to take care of.) It's just the one guy who can shrink, grow, shape shift, oh yeah and stretch. I also figure my character is pretty fast and hard to hit. If I just go into dodge mode I can at least make them look a little silly teaming up on me and missing (hopefully).

The gas line and hydrant idea has been running through my head. What would be a good way to send an electrical shock through the water left on the ground from the hydrant?

Re: Re: How to take out a shrinking shape shifter??? You're a brick, use haymakers and beat the tar out of him. [/b] I'm not a super-brick, I'm a semi-brick...I can take more punishment than I can dish out though. I can lift cars and trucks...I don't think I could pull a oak tree out of the ground. I failed to mention this little shape shifting shrinking guy is also a brick. Now what???

Let's say I'm in a holgraphic inner-city danger room situation with a shape shifter who can shrink down to the size of a bug and fly. I'm playing a non-gadget using semi-brick who is combat savy. Using everything at my disposal in a city environment...what could I do to hinder him or detect him in a shrunken state. Any ideas on defeating him while he's in "Giant Man" form???

Oops, I'm busted. I'm so against the gray scaled artwork and then I get busted for using it on my Yahoo Group. Ha ha. Actually, I was trying to capture the look of a black and white photo from WWII. The twisting motion of the guy wearing the cape came out awkward. I really need to study the human form doing a twist of the torso to see how the chest moves and the abs kind of do a funny twist. I also tried to do a bit more simplistic line quality to capture a look of comic art of the 40's. (Kirby and Simon Captain America). It is a challenge to bring everything that you've learned to try and do the style of the first Superman's and Batman's. I have to be careful of my Yahoo Group being posted because I put artwork dating back to when I was 13 in order to pad my world with visuals of back ground characters. I should put up my drawing of Firewing from the Enemies days. I had fun with that one.

You guys really have been great to talk to about your views on art and drawing. It's funny how at this moment in my life I am branching out into so many different aspects of what is art. My wife picked me up a used pottery wheel at a art school, I'm practicing oil painting for the first time (I picked up over 40 vidios from a great oil instructor, Helen Van Wyk), and I can't begin to tell you what you guys have done for my inspiration to apply new techniques to my art work (whether traditional or digital (thanks Nate for the Photoshop tid bits). I have done much classroom work in figure drawing and I'm getting the itch to try it out again now that I have improved over the years. Besides it gives me a chance to see nude chicks with tons o' arm pit hair who look like Slash from G.N.R. (Ahhhh figure drawing models, ha ha) Had an old guy once get up on the platform. Everybody looked at each other with the look of, "great an old guy". That was until he removed the robe and had muscles better than any of us, looked like Sean Connery, and gave dinamic poses like a super hero. We all felt very crusty after that. Like I said before, you guys are a great inspiration for getting the artistic creativity going again. Thanks.

Christopher, thanks I really appreciate the help steering me into the right direction and the additional offer for help discussing the techniques you use. So you might be hearing from me soon. Thanks again. THE PATRIOT The GM Mac Daddy

No Mac vs PC debate here. I just have a really good connection with somebody in a computer company that rhymes with Snapple who has set me up with all my goodies. You mentioned about laying down two different tones of color and selecting the area they share and blending them together for tone. If I explained this correctly, could you explain where the blending tool or option is found? Here's another interesting one question for Photoshop. Can you take scanned in line art and turn all the black outlines of the ink job and adjust them to another color...say red or something. I'm guessing Marvel must being doing something to this effect for the Human Torch, who has no artistic ink lines. Thanks again, THE PATRIOT

NATO, as you can guess from other threads I've been basically teaching myself Photoshop. I started playing with the layers options and came up with this very technique you're talking about here. It's nice to know that I stumbled on a good method for coloring grey scaled artwork. I did one of Dr. Destroyer and the Armadillo drawings in CKC. I'm trying to find time to do the drawing of Dr. Destroyer from the FRED where his hand is touching keys from a holographic control panel. As much as I'm opposed to the grey scale artwork, once it's scanned into Photoshop and colored it does provide an interest texture to the colored artwork. About this drawing tablet for your mac (you have a Mac right?) which one do you suggest? Yes, I've been mousing it for all this time. Yikes! THE PATRIOT

Now this is brain storming. This could be a very interesting way to role play on the fly. It reminds me of the way a friend and I would play by phone ages ago in the 80's when we were just "kids". Heck, I could get the kids to bed and have an hour game segment before cleaning gets done from the mess the kids have made all day...okay maybe after the mess gets cleaned.

So what are peoples opinions on using OpenRPG? Does it add or take away from a person's enjoyement of playing? THE PATRIOT

I have a great deal of respect for the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul. I mentioned MCAD because they actually or at least did have, courses in "applied graphic illustration" translation in my world-super duper hero artist. I did take an introductory course in this at MCAD and found it interesting at the time but program was in a transition with not having instructors extremely familiar with many of the electronic aspects of production. Which brings me to this question. What's the best way, or professional way, to add word balloons to an illustration? Let me put it this way. When I've worked in Photoshop...the word balloons come out looking way too bitmaped. so there's got to be a way the pro's do this that I'm still working on. Do they have templates that you can use say in illustrator and export them onto an upper layer in photoshop? Or should I just stop using Photoshop for illustrations and teach myself how to finish my inked artwork in Illustrator or some other application? Everybody's been a great help so far and I'm getting more useful advice than I've hoped for. THE PATRIOT

So PRIMUS do's support the registration of heroes secret identities? Isn't there also a bit of tension between PRIMUS/SA's and masked heroes because they do keep their identities secret? Is this something that got translated into the new CU?