Balabanto

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares MegaTron: He fights for the Decepti-users!

Re: Imaginary Friends Update Just finished Location 55. We're at 93,000 words and have 25 locations to go. Note: Designing locations like "hallway" is a lot less exciting than designing locations like "Command Center Platform," and "Nuclear Reactor." Believe it or not, this means we're actually almost back to being on schedule. Gencon ate my brain a little bit.

Re: The Forgettable Man Buy Pretty Hate Machines and take a look at the Plain Jane sheet. That might be a good jumping off point.

Re: Attractiveness - Comeliness Vs. Striking Appearance Well, the problem was that in my game, people actually had "Comliness Wars." It was STUPID. And Useless, and defied the logic of the rules. Those points were better spent on other things, except that people used this statistic to try and substitute for every social skill in the game. This is why striking appearance is so much better, because now it modifies those rolls, but you still need to buy the skills. Use the social skill modifiers for Striking Appearance and ask them how they're using their skills to obtain those modifiers. Make them roleplay it out. Then tell them to roll dice.

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill This is why my game doesn't have any true dark vigilantes a la The Punisher. Because after the first thousand deaths or so, the real response would be to call in my world's equivalent of the Avengers to fix the problem. Or, to use the Marvel Universe theory of language "Frank Castle, I say thee NAY!" The ridiculous idea that a guy like the Punisher could exist without being thought of as a villain by existing superheroes is crack on a stick.

Re: Imaginary Friends Update Well, we're up to 91,833 words, with 34 locations left to go on the map. (Location 46 took all night. It's the MOST important location in the adventure.) Then I can do the defense table, and then get to work on the adventure text. It looks like we'll be kickstarting the project in late October/Early November.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares He came from the future to save the x-men's tv.... Larry, the Cable Guy.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Teen Beowulf Beowulf by Night Buster Beowulf and the Banshees of Blue

Re: Laminated Color 24x30" Modern Genre Hex Mats (A Kickstarter) Ooooh! Soon, Maxi-Mart!

Re: Laminated Color 24x30" Modern Genre Hex Mats (A Kickstarter) That was me!

Re: New Pyramids! Heck, this even has use in my Champions game (Considering my last quote of the week where Sebek just escaped confinement, heh, heh, heh. Unfortunate for them.)

Re: Laminated Color 24x30" Modern Genre Hex Mats (A Kickstarter) I dropped 400. I may go up to 1000 later.

Re: Gods with Off Switches vs. Loaded Guns. DC vs. Marvel in Character Design. The problem comes in the fact that RPGs are run in groups. You can't use the DC model for running a roleplaying game, because everyone else exists pretty much to kick the Kryptonite out of the way for Superman. Superheroes with flaws are much more interesting. I tend to go for a more late 60's to early 80's Marvel/Astro City style approach to superheroes. It keeps the power levels a little lower, but it keeps things from getting out of hand, too.

Re: Imaginary Friends Update Yahoo! I finished keying an entire page of map. Only 55 locations to go. Then an object defense table!!!! Then at last, it will be on to the adventure text, and then it will be done. Our current word count is... 87621, and we have 175 pages of map keys, characters, and object defense tables. It doesn't include maps, or art. Most of the adventure text has yet to be written. We're probably looking at around 225-240 pages when done.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Including the famous scene where he's chased by numerous hindus. "You'll enjoy the taste of snake, Pliskin!" --------------------------------------------- Doctor Zhivago in Wonderland Horton Goes to the Glitter Dome The Big Sleep of Bartholomew Cubbins Lolita in Wonderland (Wait, that might be a little too close to the original)

Re: Imaginary Friends Update Well, sadly, the whole map will not be keyed by Gencon, so it will be COMING WITH ME! That's right, I never really rest, plus, you'll get a chance at the hero system party to see what my garbage chicken scratch looks like before Bill Keyes gets ahold of it!

Re: Quote of the Week from my gaming group... So, I'm running a random one-shot in my Champions world due to attendance issues, and the heroes are battling these crocodile men, trying to prevent them from freeing the alien Sebek from his mini-pyramid prison. Well, the players rolled like !@#!!!!. Sebek got freed, and escaped, but the crocodile men and their priests didn't. So here are some quotes from this debacle. Auron: Hey, Coach bag! (Me, snickering) Silver Sentinel (Cursing under her breath because she can't say things outright most of the time): I wish I could say "Just hit someone." And, after the action was over... Auron (OOC): I loot the priest. Me: You find a loincloth and some sandals. Auron: I neatly fold them, place them on a podium and attach a note that says "ass-clown."

Re: Delaying and Interrupting - How Do You Play It? I sure hope so. I've been running the game this way since 1981.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Breakfast at Dunwich Robert Deniro and Sean Penn star in "Midnight Milk Run" There Will Be Blood Simple

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete I'd like to point out that I write Superhero adventures for Blackwyrm Games and work pretty hard at it. Feel free to check them out if you haven't already. There will be a new one called Imaginary Friends coming soon. But it is likely you guys will have to kickstart it.

Re: LET'S HACK: The Turakian Age The problem is that everything was interconnected to the point of ridiculousness as far as Kal-Turak destroying the world, even to the point of undermining the CU with the phrase "All superpowers come from magic." Some of us are nitpicky about that stuff, because we're big fans of Hero, and it makes us think "Why would we want something like that in our setting?" In general, it's best to have multiple origins of things rather than a single unified timeline. I think I would have been happier with Turakian age if it had no link to the CU whatsoever, just like I would have liked the CU way better without that one statement.

Re: What version of Luck do you use in your game and why? I hate Heroic Action points. They reward incompetence and promote sloppy tactics and grandstanding. There's this little thing called teamwork that the game was based around. Heroic Action Points pretty much remove the need for it.

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete The problem with this is that this is not how roleplaying games work. It is how comic books work, with the magical power of writers fiat, but the moment that you insert the twin factors of power level via character points and rolling dice, that becomes extremely unlikely. Like writers in comics be darned. The GM is creating the setting. He can make the setting so that there's no need for finagling that stuff. Insert your controls at the point of origin rather than forcing yourself to figure out why the heck things work that way later. If you, the GM, take a little time before the campaign starts to set up your parameters and stick to them, the game runs itself after a certain point. And this is really what you want, because worldbuilding should be about characters, and not about tailoring encounter situations to the needs of the PCs. That means that as a GM, you have failed. You don't want to create a world where the obvious metatext is that the heroes are always going to win, even if nine times out of ten, that is going to be the case. What you want is a world where even if that metatext is there under the surface, the possibility of failure exists. The problem is that so many people run the system "Rules Light" that there's a kind of sense that "The GM is here to provide us with the feeling of victory." You have to choose your words carefully in this environment, and be careful what you say to people, but... The GM is there to provide the players with a set of challenges. How the players deal with those challenges is up to them. So building the setting the right way out of the box takes care of the problems that disparate cohabitation creates. Here's why. Let's say a group of player characters get into a dispute with another group of PCs. (And yes, I am aware that in my game, some of these characters may be played by the same people.) For whatever reason, a fight breaks out. This is the real reason why you have to do this. Because if a fight does break out between player characters, you want that fight to be fun. It's a classic part of the superhero genre. The GM has little say in the result other than to adjucate the rules. Plus, grossly disparate power levels leads to a whole host of not-fun stuff in cases like this. "Why can't I be as powerful as Doctor Dortmunder?" If there's one thing I've learned, it's that players are much more concerned about the people sitting around the table next to them and what those PC's can do than what villains and NPC's can do. And I've been doing this a real long time. Maybe it's an east coast thing. But I tailored my world to prevent stuff like this from happening. Wars of escalation between player characters are what break games into tiny little flinders. So I regulate the power of the game very closely in order to keep fun and story high, and disputes between characters at the level of characters. A limited range has always been better, and keeps things entertaining. No one feels like they're on the low end of the curve. Few are ever on the high end. But the game WORKS, and has worked for a long time. You can build a setting where this is the rule rather than the exception. It does function. It may not be to everyone's taste, but not every game is for everyone.

Re: Imaginary Friends Update Well, I finally finished drawing the map after dealing with work stuff. Now I can key it. Hopefully I'll be able to get the whole thing keyed by Gencon.

Re: New Kickstarter has an interesting take on a SuperVillains as PC RPG Tasha didn't say you had to buy it, Rod.