TheTemplar

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... From Last Sunday's installment of "The Defenders:" Fantastic-Man, Nighthawk, La Esperjisma, Defender, and The Tornado! all rush to Paragon Park where the beautiful but wholly evil Celtic Goddess Carmen is seen walking with a giant Golem of some sort. Upon engaging the pair in combat, the newest self proclaimed member of the Defenders.... Foxbat... leaps from the trees next to Nighthawk and takes aim at Carmen with his ping pong ball gun. GM (As Foxbat): Ha ha! Never fear, Defenders, for your friend and companion Foxbat is here! Forces of evil, Fear the Amazing Ping Pong Ball gun! Nighthawk: .... Nobody fears the Ping Pong ball gun...

Re: New FH GM looking for advice Thanks guys. Very helpful suggestions have been made here.

Re: Your favorite PC vs.. Well, my fave PC is definitely The Tornado!, my speedster. My fave comic book supervillain is PROBABLY Galactus...I don't think I need to tell you that wouldn't be much of a contest, as all Gal really has to do is stomp T!'s hex and all the DCV in the world won't matter. On a more realistic level, I'd say T! could probably hold his own against my #2 fave - Gorilla Grodd. But then, Gorilla Grodd has alot of experience fighting Speedsters...so maybe not.

Re: Player vs. Character To me, it all comes down to character concept. Our GM typically sets up scenarios where tactics & pre-planning come into play and are generally rewarded. However, my speedster lacks the patience for that sort of thing and is typically the first one on the scene. I've been in many rumbles waiting on the others to show up where I spent most of my phases moving and dodging, just trying to keep the villains distracted to buy time for the others to arrive. Some would call this a form of tactics... I suppose. Maybe more so if it was planned for me to do that, but that's typically not the case. Altough, I can think of more than one occassion where the rest of the group showed up assuming that I had already started mixing it up and the team's master tactician had planned accordingly. Of course, there are plenty of times where they show up just to save my bacon for biting off waaaaay more then I could chew, but that's just all part of playing the character, to me.

Re: NPC concept in progress....help needed I think a summon wmight be the best way to go. Not that point concerns are TOO much of an issue when dealing w/ NPCs, so long as the general concept works. Whether or not the original character remains seems to be more of a side effect than anything - whether you go duplication or summon.

Re: Adventure Seeds--Title Tag "He ain't Mechanon, He's my Brother." The danger alarm awakens the PC's in the middle of the night following a string of bizarre robberies. Several state-of-the-art components have been stolen from several local research facilities including a prototype Cold Fusion powercell, a next generation mother board with a processor capable of reaching speeds in excess of 20.0 Ghz, and perhaps most disturbingly, a black-box government funded device used to track, measure, and analyze temporal waves. (Suit the first 2 to the technology level of your setting. If that's just ridiculuosly far beyond the tech level of your campaign, don't use cold fusion, just some sort of power source that's more effective/ effecient than any currently existing standard technology, and trim the speed back on the processor.) Reviewing surveillance cameras doesn't provide any answers, as it seems they all shut down right before the items were stolen at each location. In fact, after further review, every electronic/technological device in the entire building shut down at each site just before the items were discovered missing. (This may give the PC's a bit of a clue as to who they're dealing with. If they deduce that it is Mechanon, and know the location of his local base of operations, great. If not, continue.) The heroes need to come up with some way of tracking the stolen equipment, either by following a hard to find trail of clues to be determined by the GM, or by scanning the city for unusual power spikes if they have the capability. Regardless of how they find it, once they locate where the items were taken, they discover (or confirm) that Mechanon was behind the whole thing, and he plans on using the components to travel back in time to the exact point where the first living micro-organism develped... and destroy it. However, Mechanon had not yet adjusted all the settings on the temporal analyzer, and during the ensuing fight, the device is accidentally triggered, sending the heroes and Mechanon back in time... ...to 1976. How will the heroes make it back to their correct time? Will they team up with heroes from this era such as Lyric, the folk-singer hero, or Disco-Doll and her sidekick Boogie Boy? Will they be able to find Mechanon and stop him before he finds a way to recharge his device and complete his plan? "Memories of the Minotaur" "How's the Squid today?" "A Day in the Life of (Hero or Hero Group name)"

Re: Who is your campaigns "Bad Guy they love to hate" Ours was (is?) M'Bomba - the Zulu (I think he was Zulu) God of Death, walking the earth in human form. He had these grand, glorious schemes of restoring Africa to its former glory... by scrapping the rest of the world. First he tried street drugs and phony vaccinations that were laced with a genetic toxin that turned people into mindless, man-eating zombies. Then he spied on us for many many months to learn our tactics & our weaknesses before assembling a legion of supervillains (all who had a serious beef with one member of The Defenders or another) to try to take us down, along with his newly designed ultra-powersuit, which exploded..presumably killing M'Bomba, because, "Nobody could've survived that explosion!" Finally, disguised as the seemingly well-meaning diplomat he had been posing as all along ( who was himself allegedly being hunted BY M'Bomba) he tricked our Lobbyist/ Greenpeace Tree-hugger and our multi-bajillionare into helping construct Terraforming devices, which were supposed to convert thousands and thousands of acres of Sahara into habitable, fertile land.... when in actuality, they were to wipe every continent other than Africa back down to bare soil. However, he is now imprisoned in a reality altering device, along with the member of our group who was actually his lapdog all along, under the watchful eye of Mobius, in the realm of some rather powerful cosmic entities... so, I'm sure we've totally seen the last of him.

Re: Adventure Seeds--Title Tag "What are you looking at?" Chaos erupts in the stands of the Campaign City Warriors, the local professional sports franchise. What apparently started as a bout of fistacuffs between two drunken fans quickly spilled over into other sections, and even onto the field of play. To further complicate matters, local law enforcement is unable to reach the stadium as all traffic around the stadium complex is in gridlock, with collisions and reports of road rage 700% above normal for an average weekend afternoon. Throughout the next thirty minutes, more and more reports of domestic disturbance in the areas surrounding the stadium continue to pour in, and the pattern continues to spread. What is causing this outbreak of violent behavior? Who would even dream to do such a thing? The pattern is clear, but how is it spreading so quickly? Can the heroes find and neutralize the problem before the cause reaches the Campaign City Nuclear Power Plant, just 2 miles away from the arena? Next 3: "Grand Theft Automaton" "Alien Invasion" "Of Mice and Mole-Men"

Re: Favorite Superhero Lines Spider-Man is the king of the one-liner. From the Spider-Man XBox/ PS2 game based loosely on the first movie w/ a bunch of extra stuff: Spider-Man (when meeting Shocker for the first time): "Who are you? Padded Man? The Human Quilt? No, no... I got it! The Cushion!" And from the video game sequel... Spider-Man (upon again encountering Shocker): "Hey, Shocker, you're looking good! Did you get reupholstered?"

Hey all you GM's out there in Herodom, I'm a long time DnD player who's been converted to the d6 Light and have been heavily involved in playing in a Champions campaign for about 4 years now - I've even filled in as a guest writer/ GM on a couple of occasions. I can manage combat effectively and run scenarios pretty well, I think. But, despite my best efforts, the FH campaign that I'm trying to put together has faltered twice. I'm now on the cusp of being ready to launch my Turakian Age campaign, have the first several adventures laid out and have grown very familiar w/ the setting, etc. But, I keep coming back to this recurring problem of participation. I had a group of 4 players originally, 1 bailed on us, and then RL got the best of that campaign. I then tried to restart w/ just the 3 remaining players - had characters drawn up, and then that died before it ever started. I don't know if my players just really aren't all that interested in doing FH, or if it really is just a matter of scheduling woes. Those of you who have had long running, successful FH campaigns - how do you do it? Is it just a matter taking the players you have and running ahead full steam, whether everyone makes it to sessions or not? Do you start with more players than you intended just to make sure that in case a couple of people miss, you still have a core group? I really want this to succeed, so any advice you can give would be super appreciated. Thanks!

Re: What's the most outrageous plot your PCs have ever been subjected to That's awesome... Our group's last holiday adventure? "How the Foxbat Stole Christmas." Outrageous? Yes. Fun? Oh GOODNESS yes! ...of course, sadly, at the end Foxbat ends up trapping himself in some sort of alternate parallel dimension that somehow completely erases his existence on this plane from the minds of all living here. Which, has led to our Player group's signature quote... Foxbat. Who?

Re: Help with a character concept I don't have ReFRed on me in the office here, but off the top of my head you'd need... Extra Limbs (of course) 2 RKA's for the guns, each w/ appropriate limitations (Charges, Clips, Beam (if firing bullets,) OAF, Real Weapon (if gun maintenance is going to be an issue in your campaign....that one isn't often appropriate for Champs games) Then you'll need most of (if not all of) the following Skills/ Talents WF: (appropriate firearm type) Ambidexterity (I'd take at least 1 level to start, then buy it up to reduce the OCV penalty.) Ranged Two-Weapon Fighting Rapid Fire (or Rapid Attack Ranged...I can't remember the specifics of what it's called) Fast Draw (which has variant reloading rules tied into it, iirc) Now, the Ambidexterity and Two-Weapon fighting rules cut off at 2 weapons, iirc. So, if he wants to pack a 3rd or 4th gun, they'll still be subject to the normal penalties whether he has Ambi & TWF or not. But, if he just wants to tote 2 and reload w/ his other 2 hands..that's all I can think of him needing. I believe, even w/ the additional limbs and Rapid Fire, it may still take a Full Phase to reload in combat..but, again, I don't have FREd on me so this is all just from memory. Hope it helps.

Re: Solving for Speed Seems to me that the easiest fix is to have your players keep their movement " in line w/ their SPD score. I play the Speedster in our group and last time I checked I have the highest SPD (9,) the highest DEX (40) and the highest movement (30".) My move through does 14d6, and my move-by does 8d6. Now...our team brick's move-through makes mine look like a sneeze, but that's because of the STR difference. Which makes perfect sense. I mean..I'd rather get shot by a 90 mph bullet than get blasted by a 50 mph cinder block. (Note: I have NO idea if that's an accurate bullet-speed. I just know that's my character's In-Combat MPH.) Personally, I wouldn't see how a SPD 4 or 5 character could justify a move of more than 15-20", unless they had mondo levels of Growth and were just striding 30" at a time. But, that's just me, and I'd probably need to see the entire character concept as a whole before making a decision on that if I were GM.

Re: Storn's Art & Characters thread. Wow...somebody's High Priestess of Lolth in the NWN mod I'm building just got a new character portrait. That is awesome. Dig the hilt work.

Re: Clix mod challenge Much obliged. I'm pretty sure I've got one of those Gotham PD boys. I'll play around with that when I get home. I think that head w/ the Flash's pose should do the trick.

Re: Clix mod challenge Hooligan - Fantastic work. I've been tempted to try my hand at modding, but I don't think I have the patience or the Clix supply for it. I was thinking about making a modded fig of my Champions character The Tornado! (pic link below, art commissioned from Storn - 2nd pic from the top in thread) but I'm having a hard time thinking of a head to use. Any ideas or is this one you'd be interested in having a go at? http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=463&page=31&pp=15

Re: Hurting opponents in specific ways You could also make a compound power, if you don't want to use linked for whatever reason, although it sounds like the whole "Linked" thing was just a misunderstanding.

Re: This week on "Champions"... The Defenders (Sunday at 3 ET, 2 CT); A meeting at the Headless Cross is cut short when meta terrorists threaten civilians in downtown Paragon City. Fantastic-Man, Nighthawk, Crucible, Tomorrow Boy, La Esperjisma, Ghost Speaker and The Tornado! all race to the scene of the crime in the D-Jet only to discover that the terrorists are none other than...themselves! Or rather..the original charter members of the team. They stand face to face with darker clad versions of Fantastic-Man, Nighthawk (to be fair...there really is no darker clad version of Nighthawk),Justice, Liberty, and The Tornado! Throughout the battle, it becomes clear that these villains are not all that they seem, but it is only when Tomorrow Boy is knocked through the window of a nearby building by the impostor Liberty that he discovers all the villains are illusions under the control of one of Nighthawk's old enemies, the sinister mistress of illusion, Mirage, who after receiving instruction from a digitally scrambled voice, flees the scene, along with her all too realistic holograms. Upon returning to the base, the team discovers their computer system had been hacked while they were fighting the illusory villains and all their personal files, including secret identities, have been stolen by Tomorrow Boy's Arch-Nemesis/ Ubernerd, the high tech criminal Cybermind. How he got into the base is still a mystery, and after an exhaustive search, the team calls it a night. After all going their seperate ways for the night, The Tornado! returns to Headless Cross the next day to find only Fantastic-Man at the base, along with a curious note that reads "Gone to Avalon." Neither the superstrong Fantastic-Man nor the super speedy Tornado! being the best at unraveling mysteries, they can only speculate as to who left the note, as none of their companions can be found. They breathe a great sigh of relief when Nighthawk shows up at the base, but their joy is short lived, for Nighthawk brings with him grim news of the formation of an Unholy Alliance of Supervillains so formidable, that it will take all the combined might of The Defenders to stop them, and all led by a master archvillain believed to be dead, for surely "no one could've survived that explosion." Is there anything Fantastic-Man, Nighthawk, and The Tornado! can do about the threat of this Unholy Alliance? Who has left for Avalon? What has happened to Ghost Speaker, La Esperjisma, Tomorrow Boy, and Crucible? Tune in in 2 weeks to find out! Same D-Time, Same D-Channel!

Re: Storn Art from Idea to Full Picture Year 2 Well, I'm working on an Ice based PC to take the place of my Speedster (The Tornado..already drawn by Storn but I think he's labeled Twister on the website) after he retires, so I can give you a few of the ideas I was thinking about for him if there is in fact still interest in Ice based characters. His name is Frostbite, and I wanted to depart somewhat from the Iceman clone ideal. So, to that end, he doesn't have Ice Slide powers and isn't particularly quick or dodgy. In fact, he's more or less an artillery tank. He DOES make his own armor out of his own Cryokenetic abilities, as opposed to relying on there being moisture present in the air to freeze. It's created via a chemical process going on inside his body because of a symbiotic martian essence living inside him...but I digress. As I've been envisioning the character, instead of looking like just an ordinary guy except iced over when he "ices up" I had thought about him icing up with some sort of space-age looking armor sculpted from the Ice. I had been thinking something along the lines of a Terran Marine from Starcraft, except the suit is all Ice. Makes him look bigger and tougher to make up for his lack of speed and mobility (he has no movement powers other than the standard running/leaping/swimming powers.) The Armor is pretty strong (20/20, which is good for a starting character in this campaign...I would say not QUITE starting Brick levels, but close.) In addition to his Ice Armor FF, his EC also includes the standard Ice Blast EB, Ice Block entangle, Ice Wall FW, and Ice Sheet CE. Don't know if that helps you conceptually at all, but since you were talking about Ice character ideas, I thought I'd share. The other character idea I'm working on fleshing out is a Supermage - Robed, Hooded, Dark hued Reds and Blues...or possibly Blue and Yellow but not wanting to turn him into Dr. Fate, and some sort of cool arcane runic-looking symbol for his insignia..but there's already a pretty sweet looking supermage over on Storn's site w/ some cool looking cosmic spandex...so I may end up going w/ that. Anyway, that character's name is Dr. Impossible.

Re: How would you build this That's good. I don't have any resources w/ me in the office, and I'm just firing this off of the top of my head, but "Summon" might be a power worth looking at, given what you're trying to do - that being conjure up a specific weapon out of a predefined group of weapons. Not sure if that'd end up being more/less point effecient for you (if efficiency is even a concern) but it might be worth looking into.

Re: FH Racial Balance question for the GM's Or, as the Gnome Priest/ Sorcerer found out last night while fighting a trio of Ogres, fun to throw at the very least.

Re: Your Favorite Useless Power Energy Blast 12d6; STUN only (-0); Limited Power - Only works vs. Automatons (-1 3/4)

Okay, I snagged this from a question about applying CE:OTA to a FF, but what about on a defensive power that doesn't normally cost END - specifically, Armor? I'm working on a pretty straightforward build that is probably 80x simpler than I'm making it..so, if this is totally obvious, feel free to throw a tarp over me or something.

Re: FH Racial Balance question for the GM's Actually, the first three adventures will be the 3 full scenarios given in FH Battlegrounds, which offer a good mixture of combat and problem solving, as well as allowing plenty of opportunity for non-combat skills to shine. Also gives me plenty of time to test the group dynamics and figure out what tone of campaign they are looking for once we've moved beyond the initial phases and really begin to explore the TA. Even if he had 35 STR, it really probably WOULDN'T be that big a deal. I'm one of those worrying balance obsessed GM types. It's not like he'd be SPD 5 w/ 35 STR, afterall...and as Killer Shrike pointed out, all the STR in the world doesn't do him a bit of good in attacks as soon as he doubles the DC's in his weapon.

Re: Do You Design Characters for the Team?? Well, the first character drafts that the players came up with for our current Champions game consisted of 2 Flying Bricks (though, vary differing SFX - 1 a mass-manipulator, complete w/ DI and desolid, and the other a Wonder Woman clone) and 3 Energy Projectors. One scientist/robotics type, one Nature/mystic based, and one Iceman clone. Somehow, from that, we developed into: Flying Brick Mass-Manipulator/ Super team leader guy Speedster guy Martial Artist/ Master detective guy Mystic Healer/ Winged Nature guy Fire-based Flying EP/ Ex-VIPER guy Cyber aged super genius teenager/ super scientist/ gadgeteer/ psychokinetic/ from the future guy Shape Shifting/ awesome field medic (possibly future power absorbing) gal Sometimes team balance just falls in your lap, I guess!