Balabanto

Re: I made the GM cry.... It's only a successful outcome because it never came back to haunt them. And it should have at some point. The fact that after seven years, they still don't know who this guy is bothers the living daylights out of me. If I had a nebulous enemy for seven years, and I never had any chance to hunt down, track, locate, or gain more information about the villain for seven years, I would be livid. That's the sort of thing that gets my in character shorts in an uproar. My PC's will turn over every nook and cranny just to know more about a guy like this. No one's that competent and makes that few mistakes.

Re: I made the GM cry.... I can't even begin to think about how to respond to Hugh's post, because it confuses me. Hugh, in your Champions game, what exactly do player characters DO? Now, I stress this because people build long, complicated character sheets that are designed specifically for the purpose of beating up super villains! If your characters aren't going into combat, in a COMIC BOOK ROLEPLAYING GAME, just what are you doing playing Champions in the first place? Violence isn't overly heroic? I always thought the most important part of the comic books was those big one page panels with one guy knocking the snot out of the other guy! If your characters aren't doing any fighting in Champions, just what the heck are they doing? Superhero combat is part of the genre. It's expected that the heroes and villains will throw down, with massive amounts of property damage, innocents to save, and lives at stake. That's what takes up the most panels in most of the comics I've read over the course of my life. I would love to see how your game runs. But I'm not sure I'd like to play in it.

Re: I made the GM cry.... You would. But that's not how a competent investigation runs itself. You cut off the head of the hydra. This is why cops go undercover in the drug business. That's actually the worst part of the whole thing. The characters could hose themselves by mindwiping a cop. That would also be really bad. But the argument can also be made that these people will simply get their drugs elsewhere. This is why this argument falls down. Because they do. It's one thing to make a major drug bust if it leads somewhere. But apparently, there's been no ability to locate this guy for seven years. SEVEN YEARS! I would be furious if I had to investigate a villain for seven years JUST TO KNOW HIS VILLAIN NAME! That would really tick me off. Who cares about figuring out who the villain really is. That's not really important here, as far as I'm concerned.

Re: I made the GM cry.... This is easy. I am a flying anything.. I grab the mentalist and put him in a full nelson, and fly up, outside above the midst of his heavily armed agents who I know want to kill me. He has two choices. He can surrender, or I can die, and he can fall to his doom. Bring it on. Most mentalists are not physical powerhouses, and criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot. If the mentalist calls my bluff, then I die, but he does, too.

Re: I made the GM cry.... Are you kidding? And you were okay with this? I would be furious if I hadn't managed to even see my opponent and get a roleplaying scene with my enemy after seven years of continuous play. How does that even function? Enemies are characters, too. The way that you make a nemesis non-nebulous is by allowing the characters to actually encounter him/her, etc, and develop a rivalry/adversarial in-character relationship/etc with them. Villains should be characters you LOVE to hate, not a blank slate with a bunch of really broken mind control abilities.

Re: I made the GM cry.... The solution is to locate the mentalist and punch him in the face, and then force him to free the people under whatever form of duress the heroes feel is necessary, or to find a more powerful mentalist that can easily un-do what this guy did, not to flick a switch and hit a reset button. The situation irritates me because the catch-22 is supposed to be a moral dilemma. "How do we stop this guy without causing any harm to his innocent victims?" Well, it's my contention that "Harm was done." The key here is understanding that this was a four color game to begin with. Heroes are supposed to be compassionate, not play games with risk management and choosing the lesser evil to begin with. This stuff is awesome when it's done right, like in Rod Currie's Super Squad America, but far too often, it's not done right, and you end up with angry players, some of whom feel like they won, and some of whom feel like they lost. I wind up on the losing end of this a LOT. I am always in the minority when I stress a longer term solution to a complex problem, and a similar situation in an entirely different game is getting under my skin right now. People have forgotten that in Super Hero games, sometimes the best solution really is to just figure out the best way to sock the guy in the jaw, rather than look for an expedient means and make a deal with the bad guy or choose the lesser of two evils. While the GM was kind of a jackass, and I would stress that point above all others, that in a pure four color game you don't run things like this, the entire point was that the GM was not expecting the heroes to simply flick the switch. It would probably have been just as easy to sneak past the guards, kayo the mentalist, as he's not very good in physical combat, and then have a mentor hero fix it. And yes, it is HARD to not screw this up.

Re: I made the GM cry.... Really? A minimum of mental trauma? If six weeks went missing from my life, I'd do everything possible to figure out what happened. Six weeks weren't casually removed. They were stolen from me by a bad man, and the problem exacerbated by an ignorant kid. It really depends on the length of the campaign. The reason why I say this solution is generally BS is because people don't think about consequences before they do them, and most campaigns don't really last long enough for consequences like this to come into play. It's what I refer to as "I know the campaign is only going to last six months to a year, so I don't reasonably expect any fallout from taking this action."

Re: I made the GM cry.... See, clearly this is a case where telling them this is as bad as NOT telling them. Which means this is clearly NOT a four color scenario. If all choices are equally bad, it's not a four color solution.

Re: I made the GM cry.... The right solution to this situation is to find a way to isolate the mentalist from his followers WITHOUT HARMING ANY OF THEM. Eating up a month and a half of people's lives in a situation like this effectively creates a half a dozen more supervillains. This is key to concepts like "The Superman Revenge Squad" and similar tropes where the heroes didn't think before they randomly took a bunch of actions. It really sounds like the characters didn't do enough research before dropping the hammer here. Lord knows I wouldn't be saying "thank you" if a month and a half of my life disappeared. One of the things that makes superheroes heroic is that they put themselves in the shoes of people the villains victimize. There was no such attempt here.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Robin Hood: Prince of the City Batman in Bollywood Grapes of Toyland

Re: I made the GM cry....

Re: I made the GM cry.... I'm not sure this qualifies as a creative solution. Sure the guy loses his entire cartel, but you also create a situation where in the long run, some of these people might be very angry at you. As much as this guy tampered with their minds, there's also their psychological well being to consider. If they don't remember anything before working for the drug dealer, is that really any better than rehabilitative therapy and deprogramming? See, I wouldn't award any addtional XP for this, because a few years down the road, when one of these guys becomes a supervillain, YOU'RE the guy he's gonna remember, and you'll be the one who's the target of an unexpected and terrible revenge in a couple of years.

Re: The Five Families--an organized crime group, with a twist For the oriental crime boss, I recommend Chow Yun Fat's character from Shanghai. Forget everyone else, unless you really want Chow as your cleaner from "The Killer," which is his signature movie.

Re: The Nightmare of Megascale Teleport This is raping the rules. The correct answer to the problem is "If this is how they handle problems, maybe they need a few moral and ethical lessons on how to behave." Try setting them up against opponents who DO die when teleporting out into space. Hit them in their disadvantages instead of just letting them throw you under the bus by abusing the genre conventions. Second: If HE can do it, the GM has infinite points to do it better. The next time he tries this, tell them it fails. They all wear teleportation shields now. 5m Teleportation, 0 END, Persistent, Inherent, Only to Resist -2. Have a good day. Better yet, make it injected, so they can't remove it without killing the victim. He can't teleport them if they don't want to go. Period, and they have to forcibly turn the power off if they want to teleport. In this case, so what. He who abuses the rules makes for his own rules abuse.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares That might actually be watchable. I'm not sure that's nightmarish enough. Aliens: The Musical My Three Sons of Anarchy Seventh Heaven's Gate (Now there's a real horror story)

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Zack and Miri Make a Full Metal Jacket

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Mad Max: Adventures in Time And Space All Cthonians Great and Small My Little Pony in the Dark City

Re: You Make the Call I wouldn't allow this either. My advice is to buy a huge bunch of transformations for actions that count as "Performing the Skill" and still take the requisite time. For a 5E version of this, look at The Undead Skull's sheet in Foxbat for President, and convert to 6E with the requisite advantages.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Roman Polanski's "Weekend at Bernie's." Joel Schumacher's "Doc Savage" Michael Moore's "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" John Woo's "Pride and Prejudice" Christopher Nolan's "My Little Pony Movie."

Re: Conan: The Current Movie in Progress..... I hated this movie. I didn't get a Hyborean feel off it at all. The writers showed they hadn't read the source material at all. As much as Jason Mamoa NAILED Conan, the script was a thing of absolute horror that turned a grim barbarian into a whiny little pansy with daddy issues. Too much screaming! CROM IS A SILENT, COLD GOD! There was a total waste of Ron Perlman as Conan's father. This is not his best work, and it looked like he phoned in everything. Calling a Thaumaturgist a Necromancer, according to Howard's standards. Bad director! No biscuit. The city of thieves has a different name. About the only thing this movie got right was the Zingarans. They looked right and behaved right. This director was far more interested in making a tribute to the bad 1982 movie than in making a good Conan movie. If I had been writing this thing, I would have skipped the backstory of Conan's youth, (except for a brief scene about the sacking of Venarium), and had Conan arrive in a city to be picked by the director. The sorceress sleeps with him in disguise and the villain forces his aid to get the last piece of the mask from Rich Guy X, pretending to be a rich merchant. It's a good movie, as long as you make Conan "Bob."

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares When a sexy latina pop singer divorces, her life goes south and she starts a cult in Manhattan's Chinatown! She is...J-Lo Pan!

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares And this is a bad movie why? Twilight of the Gods: Ecks Bites Sever Now that's an absolute horror.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares War Games of the Spotless Mind The Shawshank Cthulhu Bridge Over The River Styx...This movie replays the opening scene for 90 minutes.

Re: Imaginary Friends Update I am 15,000 words in. I have completed the Imaginary Friends in question, plus the main villain, Mr. Wumbles. Tomorrow, I start work on a boy named Toby. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings