Balabanto

Re: Rejected Superhero Names A strange mutant from Africa, he possesses the powers of the worlds largest antelope! Rage when attacked! Super Lifting Capacity Graze endlessly! He is... The BONGO! (That's right. The worlds largest antelope is called a Bongo. It's silly just saying it. You know those Bongo drums people always talked about? Well...guess how they're made.... )

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Bitten by a radioactive donkey, he has gained the powers of stubbornness AND sterility! He is... Jack Ass!

Re: MancerBear's Art Den This lucky gentleman has gotten the artwork nod for Foxbat For President. Wish him luck, true believers...

Re: A Thin Moral Line...? If he's killed that many people, that's nonsense. They would place him in solitary confinement. Forever!

Re: A Thin Moral Line...? The real problem here is that Marvel has retarded law enforcement logic. Back in the day, when Frank Castle had killed 400 or 500 people or so, that's about the point where someone like Henry Peter Gyrich would step in and say... "Captain America...please tell your fellow Avengers to do something about this guy." Several days later, The Punisher is on a roof with a rifle, waiting to whack some mob boss, when the sky darkens, lightning blows his rifle up, and standing around him in thunderous noise are The Mighty Avengers, as Thor stands there with his whirling hammer up and he simply says... "Frank Castle...I say thee nay!" End of story. At least, that's where it should have ended.

Re: Disturbing Character premises... Wait for Foxbat For President... Heh...heh...heh...heh...heh...

Re: Champions or Hero System v5 ??? As for 5th edition VIPER, I am not a fan. I really wasn't too happy with Mystic Serpent Worshipping people, or the fact that Viperia got a weird upgrade and spontaneously changed ethnic groups. The character A) Was too powerful as it was and this flies in the face of everything I've always wanted out of a villainous organization like this one. What is wrong with having the leader of an organization of agents that functions well with supervillain backup being a highly skilled, intelligent, and competent AGENT that is just a better agent that his subordinates? Apparently, this thought process left the building before 4th edition even started. And that bothers me.

Re: Superhuman women and normal women That actually pleases me in some ways and bothers me in others. On the one hand, a hero should stand for moral certainty and that which is right. On the other hand, the Superhero genre is about violence. As such, showing sex in a POSITIVE light is VERY important. The problem is that showing sex for it's own sake has become secondary to storytelling, and it takes away from GOOD plot and GOOD story. If I wanted porn for my 2.50-3.00 a month, I could download it from the internet for free.

Re: Im back, It's not about hardcover vs. softcover. When I write an adventure for Hero I pay for the color stuff out of my own pocket because I KNOW that without color it doesn't have the feel I want. Many of us forget that this is a hobby, and that Hero Games won't function unless the people who write the sourcebooks are making money. As much as I don't want to admit that pretty art and bright colors sell books, they do, especially with superhero product. The thing is that Hero is a toolkit, and therefore, they also have to target Fantasy, Science Fiction, and other genres. The vast array of sourcebooks that they produce prohibits color art and hardcover books unless the freelancer pays for it out of his own pocket. Yes, I lose money on my projects for Digital Hero. I admit it. It hurts. But it's a GAME. We play it because it's fun. I write these things because it brings joy to others, not because it makes me money. I know that if I am very successful, or even moderately successful, the appeal of this comes from moderately sized gaming conventions paying me in twenty five years to sign stuff and smile at people for two hours, not right now. I get it back in fun.

Re: A Thin Moral Line...? I agree that the Punisher is a villain also. Of course, I run a twenty year champions game called Legacies which actually respects the lessons of history, even if many of my players don't.

Re: Rejected Superhero Names By Day, he is an operations manager for a large corporation, where he crunches numbers to find ways to save money... By night, he crunches crooks to save people... He is... The Optimizer!!!!! Now, we could call him the Maximizer also, but that's A) Even worse, and guess what... Maximize is NOT a word. That's right, it technically should mean "To operate under a set of rules which are defined." But that's redundant.

Re: Champions or Hero System v5 ??? I'm just going to echo Mr. Angel's sentiments Glenn. There's no question that we've missed you a whole bunch. You are needed.

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Burning with electric current, teenage cheerleader Marion West hides her secret desires for light poppy intellectual rock, while simultaneously maintaining school spirit and concealing her bisexuality! She is Kid AC/DC!

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Ninety Years Old and Trained In Martial Arts With a Mop, she was accidentally irradiated by her grandson's science project! She is... Aunt Mayhem!

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Using his mighty superstrength in his bovine themed armored suit, none can match his heroic demeanor or his rearward firing flame projectors! He is... The Bonnacon!

Re: Superhuman women and normal women Actually, I think people usually pay a LOT of money for those sorts of comic book art regardless of who the artist is if they have any talent whatsoever.

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Evil Quails at the Thought of... Soap in Coffee Cup man... Villainy is doomed at the hands of... The Leper-chaun. He grants your wishes! But your body parts shrivel and fall off! No one can defeat the power of... IRS Man! (Yeah! We all REALLY want to reject IRS man)

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Actually, he was in issues 15-16 of the revised Elementals comic. On to more rejected superhero names. Fornicator Lad Fornicator Lass The Deadbeat Dad, and his sidekick, Born out of Wedlock Baby The Sodomite Papaya King Electric Shaver Man Electric Shaver Woman

Re: Favorite lost villain group Actually, the villain I'd most like to redo is Dr. Megaton. He rocks. He seems silly, but if you read his 4th edition background, he's actually CREEPY! Doing unlicensed atomic experiments in SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOODS? "What's that, Doc?" "Well, Timmy, that's just a thermonuclear storage device. It puts out over 400 Roentgens per hour of power. There's just this little leak problem. Tell me, son...do you want super powers? They say that you can get them with enough...exposure to radiation....You don't mind Radiation...do you, Timmy...?" There's really not much you need to change on this guy....

Re: Superhuman women and normal women Actually, there have to be slight imperfections. When they made the woman perfectly symmetrical and all of her features were absolutely even using Digital technology, the "perfect woman" looked average. And plain. But to get back on topic, I think that we're walking back onto that dangerous masculine ground where we're evaluating things far too much from that masculine perspective. When we look at the "Super Woman" that most comics write, that woman is more "masculine" in behavior than many male characters, because of the way they are written. Why don't we try making female characters that actually represent what social observations tell us, that women are better group communicators and operate better in small units. I won't hit the essentialist nurturing model because the essentialist model is somewhat broken. On the one hand, we have Wonder Woman now written by Jodi Picault. It's nice to have a woman writing Diana. Yet, simultaneous with this, they have gone back to Diana with the glasses and her hair up in a bun. The irony does not escape me here, that Diana can only be "Wonder Woman" when she is not bound in the constraints of masculine society. I really hope they don't bring back the bracelets thing. Poor WW's suffered enough.

Re: Favorite lost villain group Well, that's why every so often I try to produce some updated old stuff. Foxbat For President DOES contain stats and updated backgrounds for his old gang, though I had to change the butler because Steve gave him a different butler. Hope you guys like it.

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Captain Intolerance! The Leper! Woman Man! (Don't ask how it works, true believers, because we don't know!) Plutonium Frog! CyberVulture...Hey...wait...I play that guy.... Cigarillo The Undying Sedimentary Trilobite Man! Rescue Lassie When She Falls Down the Well Lass!

Re: Superhuman women and normal women The problem here that I'm seeing is that a message of empowering women need not necessarily be a feminist one. That leads us into a tricky trap, because many of us are men, and do tend to perceive all forms of feminism as one, when in fact, there are several different dimensions to feminism. Many versions of feminism have a tendancy to break down when applied to women who break steel with their bare hands, teleport, etc. Is it empowering to have super-powered female role models in a super powered world? More than likely, yes. Is it essentialist? No. If a guy want to grow up to be just like "Americana," and she's the symbol of America in your game (And let me tell you, there's a sheet I'm looking forward to publishing in Legacies), it's not a bad choice either, unless he wants the operation too, in which case she might look askance at him herself, because SHE grew up in the 1920s. It was very important to me to have a woman be the symbol of America in my game world, because like America, Anna is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, but she will break your heart sometimes... A lot of this stuff that we think of as "Feminist" is really "Historicist," which was the point here. When we talk about a "feminist message," this is actually a loaded term. There's feminist historicism, essentialist feminism, and a half-other dozen types of feminisms, (And I don't use that term lightly) and all of them should, in various ways, inform us of the complex meaning of the "Superheroine." The problem that we face here is that comic book superheroines are primarily written, informed, and explained in a genre written in and conceived of by men. How different Wonder Woman or Catwoman might look today if they had been written by a woman from the get-go, instead of Marston or Bob Kane. Culture informs heroines as surely as heroines inform culture. How does a character like the aforementioned Americana reconcile her beliefs during a period of 1950's cult of domesticity when she was raised in the loose and liberal flapper era? That's historicism talking. But if we change the sentence to read: How does a character like Americana reconcile her beliefs in herself as a woman during a period like the Cult of Domesticity of the 1950's? Now it's essentialist feminism. We're treading on VERY dangerous technical ground here, and we need to be a little more careful in how we think about this.

Re: Rejected Superhero Names Detergency Queen Drag Queen Evil Beagle Villainous Organizations: P.E.R.T.---Papal Emergency Response Team! G.O.A.T. ----Geriatric Organization for the Abolition of Timesharing C.O.M.B.A.T. ---Camels Organized to Mentally Battle Alien Tanks

Re: Favorite lost villain group The other thing that people forget is that Champions was designed on a scale of logarythmic progressions and not a linear one. A 4 SPD is the fastest a normal human can be. That's 4 times as fast as an average human. a 5 spd is not 5 times as fast as an average human, it's 8 times as fast as an average human. a 6 is 16, and a 7 is 32 times as fast as an average human. For the record, this means that Your character moves faster than people can blink, which effectively means they punch you at an invisible level. They're reacting at a speed so quick that even the most talented real world martial artists would lose their teeth because they can't see the blows coming. In Champions, 11d6 isn't "A little" more powerful than 10d6. It's TWICE as powerful as 10d6. A character that throws 15 dice is 32 times as powerful as a character that throws 10d6. That's SCARY. People often forget that Steve Peterson and George MacDonald weren't english majors. They were engineering and math majors. This system is designed to a precise set of engineered specifications, which is what makes it the best roleplaying system ever developed, as long as you're willing to make the effort to understand what the specifications mean.