Old Man

Freefall Rushmore Groundswell Mercury Apollo 19 Delta V Still can't beat Gravitas.

One thing that I've found odd about fantasy is the lack of vehicles as BDO. Once in a while a ship or some other mode of transportation will be prominent, but I really haven't come across the fantasy equivalent of a USS Enterprise or Millennium Falcon. Has anyone seen anything like this?

The Chinese let dwarves have repeating crossbows? Shouldn't be a problem. If it gets unbalanced, you could limit the damage and/or strictly enforce ammunition limits.

Well, let's see: X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, All New X-Men, Astonishing X-Men, X-Factor, eXiles, X-Force, Excalibur, New Mutants, Generation X, Wolverine and the X-Men, Weapon X... I think I'm forgetting some. Alpha Flight and Fantastic Four are a couple of actually different teams off the original list.

But the real question is, which is better--dwarven weapons, or elven weapons? And how?

Ching Shih learned she had a gift for smuggling at an early age in the harbors of Hong Kong. Shortly thereafter, she learned she had an even better gift for running a global smuggling network. Taking the name of China's legendary pirate queen, today she plies the oceans in a luxurious (and very heavily armed) yacht, directing operations from its command center. It is said that she secretly owns a thousand ships and a thousand planes, including submarines, disguised aircraft carriers, bought-off warships, and stealth bombers.

IIRC the karate showed up in the books, but not the show or movies. Now I'm wondering just how good mirror universe Uhura was with that knife of hers.

I haven't actually seen the film but it seems like the RIPD (or something like it) would fit neatly into an urban fantasy game. I wouldn't want the entire party to consist of RIPD operatives but individual characters could be.

This makes medieval cities sound kind of like roach motels. I wonder if that is not an apt description.

It's a vicious cycle. Fantasy is only the second best selling line, so it gets less support, so it remains the second best selling line. Deeply irritating for those of us who prefer FH over Champions and have been playing it for decades. Still, it's not my money that's being spent on producing this. If we can get a standalone FH book I'll be happy.

(deleted)

I usually just hit the player really hard when he's not expecting it.

"Sorry Bob, it's phase 12. Fight!"

In Caine's case, that would be the voice of Finn McMissile. At least with moviegoers below a certain age. I'd forgotten he was in Jaws IV until I went and looked at his filmography. Poor bastard. Although it would have terminated anyone else's movie career.

What I want to know is, what did people in those cities do when the electricity went out?

Can we stay away from such basic puns?

There are some key differences between how the two tend to costume their heroes. DC heroes, like Uthanar said, tend to wear prominent insignia and very colorful, highly distinctive outfits. Marvel downplays the insignia and outfits heroes in slightly more 'realistic' costumes, or even street clothes (especially jackets). Honestly I think this actually affects how well the movie franchises perform--putting the X-Men in black bodysuits with yellow trim is way easier to pull off in a live action film, whereas look at how hard it is for DC to come up with a Superman or Wonder Woman or Batman costume that isn't hated by half of America. The briefs aren't red! How can we explain the giant red 'S' this time? How can she fight crime in a strapless top and a bikini bottom? OMG they put her in pants?! He can't even turn his head! Nipples!! One other thing Marvel does that DC really doesn't, AFAIK, is team costumes like the Fantastic Four or X-Factor:

Exactly. The mechanics and biomechanics involved in striking an opponent are far more complex than most people realize; that was the point of my post, anyway, which was supposed to just scratch the surface as far as figuring out how to model attacks using physics. I get a little irritated when I see things on TV that supposedly measure how hard someone kicks or punches, and they just give a number in pounds and expect it to mean something. Open hand/knuckle punching has exactly the relationship that you describe, in that the acceleration and energy transfer from the knuckles is faster, which causes damage to stay near the surface as opposed to being dissipated further inside the victim. Of course, the body part you're trying to damage really defines the most effective type of strike. If I wanted to KO someone via concussion or brain stem disruption, then I'd want to impart very high acceleration to the head very quickly--so I'd want to use a relatively hard body part to hit with, and the velocity of that body part would be more important than the mass or muscle force behind it. Conversely, if I wanted to bruise or disrupt internal organs, then I'm trying to impart force to a more massive target through a softer medium, so either I need to achieve displacement of the target with a more massive "weapon", or else disrupt it with a shockwave imparted at the surface, and abrupt acceleration is less important to either of these damage mechanisms. And then there's breaking bones, which is something else entirely...

I think this is backwards, at least for the larger muscle groups. From a physics standpoint, the simple act of punching someone can get pretty complicated to figure out. Force is about the best way to measure static strength. Force (mass times acceleration) also gives how hard you hit the victim, in pounds--but that has multiple components, because not only is your arm of a given mass moving at a given velocity at impact, you're also (presumably) still exerting force with the appropriate muscles, so you need to add that in. Then on the receiving end, what matters is not only force, but impulse--the force integrated over the time that it is applied to the victim. In most cases the impulse is likely to be about constant, so to maximize force you want to apply the impulse over a minimum amount of time, which roughly means hit him with your knuckles and not your mooshy palm. Finally, you want the collision to have as low a coefficient of restitution as possible, as that means that the maximum amount of kinetic energy is being absorbed by the masses involved--hopefully, the victim. Since that works as the square of the velocity, obviously you want the velocity of your fist to be as high as possible without sacrificing mass or power. And so on.

Incoming!

The best thing about that trope is that the only player who wasn't in on the joke was the one with the gadgeteer character. He always got upset whenever his quinjet got smashed.

Almost entirely as written; I don't have the time to rewrite or house rule large swaths of the book. Spells are the biggest exception--I work up a custom spell list for every spellcaster without exception. It's always critical to the character concept, what spells they sling.

I've always tried to build some sort of decent noncombat movement into each of my characters--Flight or Teleportation that takes a turn or two to wind up, for example. Sometimes I just can't work it into the concept, though, and then we have to go the vehicle route. I remember one campaign the team vehicle was (generously) bought out of the gadgeteer's points. It was a boring transport hoverjet type of thing, and it got totalled whenever possible.

IRL UV vision would provide an enhanced capability to determine what things are made of, since you'd be sampling a larger slice of the spectrum. It'd also provide slightly better underwater visibility in daytime. And it could provide a way to navigate in the dark undetected, since only you would be able to see the output from your UV flashlight. In-game it'd probably not really be worth the cost unless there's something about the campaign that makes it so--like being able to distinguish between members of an alien bug species, for example. Night vision (to go off on a tangent) works in a couple of different ways. There are straight up infrared cameras, which provide a black and white image on a screen. Then there are photomultipliers, which is how ze goggles usually work; with these, incoming photons hit a charged screen that fluoresces and emits more photons. The resulting image is monochromatic. Confusingly, photomultipliers pick up IR photons as well as UV, and at night, IR probably makes up most of the ambient photons flying around anyway. So night vision winds up being IR by default.

Why hasn't the common cold been cured yet? *cough*. *hack*