NestorDRod

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Yeah. It reminds me of a story a fellow gamer told me a while ago. She was stuck with a somewhat lame group playing D&D, bored out of her skull as they tramped around, doing the usual XP-crunching and fighting over loot. They'd come across a goblin (or kobold, or some other such nuisance monster) and captured him for information. The interrogation session had gone as expected, with the players fumbling around, trying to short-circuit the adventure by forcing the GM to reveal his secrets, when the GM decided to stop the foolishness and have the rest of the monsters attack. The GM went around the table, asking for each player's first action. He got the usual "I draw my +2 Sword of Killling Things Dead", "I cast my nifty Pump Me Up spell", etc. When the GM got to my friend, she hissed, "I slit the prisoner's throat," using her best Natasha voice. The table froze as everyone stared at my friend for a second in shock, then continued on in a more subdued tone. It tells you something about the game that that was the highlight of the evening for her.

Re: Superheores with Disabilites, a thought experiememnt I recall Storn showing an illustration in his Art & Characters thread of a woman using crutches with a poison (or disease)-touch power. Assumedly that would be an example. The closest I ever came to the concept was a character for a white-event campaign, where the event that imbued the PCs with superpowers (a comet strike) left her legs paralyzed. She discovered she had telekinetic powers, but only displayed them in her alter ego. She hid the fact that she couldn't move her legs by always floating and otherwise mentally manipulating them.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far I just didn't bother. If my character ended up 25-50 points lower than the rest of the group, I dealt with it. As long as it kept true to the concept I was working with, I was happy. But, YMMV, and all that...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... The only quote my muddled brain can cudgel up after 24 hours of GM'ing at GenCon: During the Hollow Earth Expedition adventure, Cola, the Cargo Cult Alchemist, uses her Voodoo Teddy Bear to curse her foes into total ineffectiveness. The player mimes Cola stabbing the teddy bear repeatedly while muttering, "I hate you all. I hate you all." My comment. "Oh no. Cola's gone emo."

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Got 'im for you.

Re: PS-238 Characters Exactly. A character is given a Skill based on an alleged aspect of his background that hasn't even been shown in the source material, yet another character that has consistently demonstrated performing that Skill doesn't have it. Tyler's tactical. 'Nuff said.

Re: PS-238 Characters

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... *blink* *blink* I am so yoinking that line to use somewhere, somehow. It's about as bad as the vampire referring to one of the NPCs as his personal "juice dispenser."

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far That's cool! Do you use anything else from the book (e.g., the Science Police, the superhero store)? It's always struck me that the campaign setting would be ideal for running a Silver/Bronze Age game. With a proper RPG backing it up, of course.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far

Re: Mutants and Masterminds: Why did you stay/come back? Ah. My apologies. I misunderstood the nature of your request. I now recuse myself from the discussion.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far God, Ysgarth. What a memory. It was first put out by Ragnarok Games, who also published Space Quest, a SF RPG game that, er, borrowed a lot of concepts from D&D. I knew one of the authors and played in a lot of games he ran. Man, do I have stories about those games. Edit: Jeez, it looks like it's time for me to check in at the old folks' home. It wasn't Ragnarok, it was Tyr; dug up my poor dog-eared, beaten up copy of the game to confirm. I remember coming across Ysgarth when playing Space Quest, though; perhaps one of the authors also wrote for it. Too many years, not enough brain cells.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far Got that book. Interesting setting. Calling it a RPG is extremely generous, though. It was totally devoid of any rules. Really, their idea of creating a character was "Come up with what he can do then make up some way to play it."

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far You're welcome to disagree, but I have the books to back me up (still have them after all these years). I'll gladly go down to the basement and dig though the boxes for them if you need specific page numbers. And, yes, I do recall the change in skill and spell costs for character types, but to call them "Classes" is, IMO, stretching the term quite a bit. As for self-defeating? I suppose if one's intent was to build some uber-efficient character, yes. If you were building a specific concept, it certainly got you there a hell of a lot easier than D&D.

Re: Mutants and Masterminds: Why did you stay/come back? I have sort of have the opposite situation. Our current GM has little experience with Hero and therefore little interest to use it. He's been using M&M and is quite comfortable with it, and since a number of the other players are d20-savvy, that's what we're using. Ironically, my wife has the same attitude towards the d20 roll. She hates the flat percentile, especially since she seems to roll low an inordinate amount of times. (No, really, most of the times you can count the number of times she rolls above 10 with the fingers of one hand and still have enough fingers left to pick up the die.) Personally, I'm not finding it that hard to adapt. Pretty much any problem I've come across stems from just unfamiliarity with the system rather than any issue with it itself. I like how the rules take a couple of steps away from the "define everything as an effect" concept so that, for example, I can create a character with Weather Control without having to put together a multipower of heavily modified slots that approximate what I want to do. I also like the use of Hero points, especially for invoking a one-off feat or power on those special cases when you want to do something just that once without having to purchase the feat/power and haul it around "just in case." Bottom line, M&M allows me to play a RPG dedicated to playing comic-book heroes, and that's what I'm looking for.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far It absolutely did. While the basic books (Melee and Wizard) did not have any disadvantages, the full game indeed did allow you to define flaws that would give you back points. And the distinction between magic-users and non was simply a matter of buying the necessary skills/abilities. Keep in mind, TFT was to all purposes GURPS v0.1.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far Let me slightly correct myself. Traveller had a skill-buy system, or I guess even more accurately a skill-selection system. The "points" were more years of experience than direct-point allotment but the choice was still in the player's control. Or you can blame my flub on a combination of having only a couple hours of sleep and possessing a Swiss-cheese memory. It is true, though, that Traveller was my escape from the D&D mindset. TFT shoved the body into the casket and Champions nailed the lid shut. I never looked back after that.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far How about "Resource"? Maybe not specific enough, but it gets the point across, more or less.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far Sure. I'll need to dig out my old books to cross-check and refresh the memory banks, but I can provide the info if you so desire. I based my comment on my memory of using a lot of stuff from Danger International and Star Hero, for instance, in our games, then seeing the stuff in the 4E book when it came out. So I don't have a delineated list of items right off the top of my head, but I'm confident I can put one together with a little research.

Re: 6E Rules changes confirmed so far And that's a factor to consider when comparing the transitions. A number of those changes listed for the 4th Edition already existed, but on the specific genre books. 4th Edition simply combined the genre-specific rules into one homogeneous self-consistent set and made the jump to a "universal" system, for better or worse. Well, I know in my case I was already doing mash-ups of rules between the books for my own games, so having the system properly merge the various mechanics overrode any concern about character changes.

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... We had this week's run of our Mean Streets campaign on Friday due to scheduling issues and we were all a bit tired, so the flow of lines wasn't as plentiful as usual. We did have a winner, but since it was induced by an outbreak of the Smut Field I'll have to spoiler it to keep it away for impressionable eyes...

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Heh. I remember someone pushing me to run a game in the WoD universe once (using the Mage: The Quickening book, IIRC). I forget the exact chain of conversation but at one point we were discussing the idea of playing in a "World of Insufficient Light". In a related topic, we were playing a street-level superhero game that deviated a bit from the standard Dark Champions setting. The GM referred to it as "Seared Champions."

Re: Rakshasa is Up "Laugh with me! HA HA HA HA!!!"

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... Oops, just remembered another one from the Mean Streets game (our name for the street-level supers campaign). The group assembles at one of Gil's many offcies to review some security-cam footage they've obtained. Gil starts performing magic with image-enhancement software with the computer embedded in his office desk. Sybil; "So all this time, your really were just this big nerd." Gil: "Yes, you've discovered my shameful secret. All of my action figures are cherry."