logomancer

Re: Gay and Bisexual Superheroes Since I'm a gay male, and most of the friends I normally game with are gay males, I can safely say that about 90% of all the characters we've collectively made have been gay. But, it hasn't come up in play most of the time and when it does, it's usually just a background thing: who are DNPC's are, etc. And anyone who make a character/villain gay so that they are "more evil," is just being disrespectful and showing their ignorance of what being gay is all about. (and this is not directed at Lemming, just whomever made that character). I've seen a lot of straight guys make gay characters to be "funny," but they're usually just lame expressions of their own ignorance and fear (e.g., the gay super who wore nothing but a jockstrap and fought crime through anal punishment).

Re: Green Lantern Object Creation... Technically, a Green Lantern Power Ring would do ANYTHING that someone willed it to do, so the effects are left up to the imagination. Over the course of the comics, Green Lantern's have done some pretty freaky things, including creating pure-energy constructs that were temporary, permanent, semi-permanent, etc.; to rearranging matter; to time-travel; FTL; co-location; and...oh...collapsing the space-time continuum in on itself (Parallax did that with the Central Power Battery he absorbed in the Zero Hour miniseries). This, of course, defies codification in Hero System rules (or any game system). Generally, you have to pick the "basics" -- flight, force field, TK-Frc Wall-Entagle energy constructs (however you build it), FTL, etc. -- that your character likes and build those. As someone else said in the thread, that's the problem with turning ANY comic character into a Hero System PC, there's always stuff that gets left out. I mean, Superman, Firestorm, Rogue, etc. all have the same issues -- powers that don't cleanly come over into rules. Just choose what you "need" to have fun and go with that!

Re: Green Lantern Object Creation... My thoughts would be to make a compound power that has both a level of TK strength (possibly requiring AE) and Force Wall, with appropriate adders or advantages to allow it to be of variable shape (by that I mean not just variable shape of area coverage, but literally, to form a chair, a bridge, or any other object). This allows you to create Force Wall objects that can exert strength on the world, carrying people over a bridge for instance. This would allow the GL in question to create whatever he wanted with his power and it would have measurable effects in game.

Re: Bashing people with chairs, lightpoles, automobiles... I agree to a point. If you have the strength to tie someone up with a lightpole, you should be allowed to do it without character point expenditure. However, it would take time (and a "reasonably cooperative" person being tied up). If Ogre wanted to tie a hero up with a light pole, the guy would have to cooperate or someone would have to hold him, or whatever while he did it. The character point expenditure would be required to do it as an attack, i.e., happens in 1/2 a second without consent and bam! you're stuck in a lightpole. The fact that there's a character point expenditure is that it's a practiced move that you can repeat as often as you want. Anyone can punch another guy. But to use your fists as effective weapons (i.e., martial arts), you have to expend character points to buy that ability to represent your training. To me, this isn't much different.

Re: Real World Issues in the Game World Yeah Totally...I had a space-capable super who had light-speed travel take probes to all the inner planets as a job for NASA. He made an excellent living. Keep in mind, too, that you can be more 'down to earth' with the real world. What about super-powered firemen or policemen? Construction workers? Lawyers with Telepathy, etc. There are plenty of interesting stories that can be told or can begin at such points. Just because you're super-powered doesn't mean you "want" to live a life of danger tracking down terrorists. Sometimes you get drawn in...

Re: How do i start my story? Tell all the PCs to build themselves coming from the same town, same local area, etc. Let them all "know of" each other at least, and have some of them have links to each other. Put that local area in danger, let them band together to defend it.

Why Tolkein-ish? You're totally right that the vast majority of fantasy fiction isn't necessarily "Tolkein-ish," but why then, is Tolkein-ish the standard? It came first. And YES real mythology came first, but The Hobbit/LOTR stand at the head of the modern fantasy fiction era, I think. D&D is practically an adaptation of the Lord of the Rings and Tolkein's worlds (although yes, with differences). And, probably because of the LOTR movies, everyone's got Tolkein on the brain because its the "last" great fantasy epic they've seen come to life in movies...that's pretty natural that when people think "fantasy" they fall back immediately to what they last saw/read, etc.

Ongoing Apocalypse While it can get a little overkill, it might be interesting to actually run characters THROUGH whatever apocalypse you end up choosing. Most of the game ideas I've seen are those that take place a bit after the apocalyptic action has died down (which is also a valid choice). There's some interesting drama in running literally during whatever "white event" is taking place. You can build some very interesting apocalypses this way, as the doomed dominos start to fall and the wierd mutations (or magickal creatures, or mutated magickal creatures) start showing back up to annoy the populace. How about an ice age that encroaches over a few weeks? How about the forces of darkness showing back up in bits and pieces, one city at a time? There's a lot of interesting things you can run extrapolating how the world would REACT to these changes. Read "Y The Last Man," or "The Stand," or numerous others for resources.

God Yes! I'm so tired of D&D3E rehashes...I mean, I know it's archetypical, but I hate it when people do nothing with the Hero System but recreate "how they did it D&D3E." To me, that just misses the point. I've seen other fantasy systems are are "off archetype." Talislanta comes to mind. But the danger with them is getting so far off archetype that you become unrecognizable. When I played a Talislanta game, I honestly couldn't keep up with the racial/class vocabulary enough to enjoy it. The best possibility is to somehow retreat the archetypes so that they are recognizable enough for you to "get" them quickly, but which are nonetheless different enough in execution to be interesting. And that's no small feat.