Pariah

Re: 7 heroes summoned through time: who are they? Okay, since nobody's mentioned either of these folks, here are two suggestions from the Old Testament. (If we're considering Beowulf and Gilgamesh, why not?) Samson: Okay, he really wasn't that heroic. Most of his life was spent in hedonism and self-aggrandizement. But his strength is undeniable. He'd be a better person to have as an ally than an enemy. Gideon: An inspired leader and a capable warrior. Once he'd delivered Israel from its enemies, he too refused to become king.

Re: Who are the top 5 most powerful characters in your Campaign. RE: Who are the top 5 most powerful characters in your Campaign? For my list, I'm using my long-running (and now retired) Tempest campaign. In no particular order: Surge: I'd never GMed someone with a VPP before, and I had NO IDEA just how devious and resourceful one of my players could be. The said player voluntarily retired this character because he could sense that Surge's presence was unbalancing the campaign (or at least the GM). Black Cat: Who says martial artists have to be about stealth and finesse? Black Cat was designed for one purpose: to beat the living cr@p out of anyone who deserved it. And she did. She became particularly obnoxious when her Darkforce powers started to overcome her personality and turn her toward the dark side, at which point she went from 'powerful superheroine' to 'lethal threat to the rest of the team'. Probably my greatest and most challenging GMing experience. Gibraltar: 'Tempest' was an excellent name for this hero group, because the changes in personnel in both players and characters was almost mind-boggling. Through it all, one constant remained, and that was Gibraltar. She started out as a private detective with density-altering powers and ended up as Brick #1 on the planet. Yes, she was that tough. We used to joke that her character quote should be something like, "Don't get mad at me. It's not my fault you want to change characters every 50 points." Mister Owen: Magus Supreme (and mayor) of the extradimensional city of Byzantium. He was impervious to most forms of magical and mundane harm, but had no offensive abilities whatsoever. Hence, he recruited Our Heroes. I never actually built him, but his defenses would have been a bugger. Plus, he would have had more than a hundred points in Contacts. Everyone knows Owen. Earthmover: My world's Juggernaut clone. He was designed to be a threat to the whole team and did a pretty good job of it right up to the end.

Re: WWYCD: Fuel for the fire The snarkier, more cynical side of me has this answer, though: Blow the thing. Strike at maximum power. Make it a point to ignite the gas. Take out the whole city block, if that's what it takes to kill the thing. It's not my universe. It's not my character. It's not my Rep that gets screwed if civilians die. It's not my DNPC's that fry if they happen to be too close when the big bang hits. Given all of that, WTH do I care if we lose a few civilians in the course of saving the city?

Re: WWYCD: Fuel for the fire I am admittedly a newbie here, but after reading several of these WWYCD scenarios, I'm convinced that the correct answer for most (or all) of them is pretty much the same: Yell "IT'S A TRAP!" /akbar

Re: How do you know if a character name is already being used? Personally, I find I get the best results if I brew it up fresh at home. But that approach isn't for everyone, and home-brewing Whoop@$$ without a permit is illegal in some states....

Re: Time Travel and Potential Plots.

Re: Time Travel and Potential Plots. I ran a time-travel story arc a few years back where the characters ended up going into the future, seeing what the world was like and learning that they were the cause of it, and then having to come back to the present and try to keep it from happening. Some of the details: One character survives an assassination attempt. The best the team can come up with for the shooter's identity is that it looks sort of like an older version—father, grandfather, whatever—of a gadget-wielding hero in another city. As they're trying to figure out what to do, the shooter shows up again and tries to kill the team martial artist (Black Cat). Bad idea. She cleans his clock and takes him to team HQ, where he reveals that he actually IS the aforementioned gadget-wielding hero...from 20 years in the future. He explains that these two heroes were (or will be; the biggest problem with time travel adventures is knowing which verb tense to use) involved in a superfight where an innocent bystander gets killed. This bystander is actually the daughter of a mid-level Genocide leader, who uses the event as an excuse to start a holy war that ultimately kills the heroes. This has an Archduke Ferdinand effect: a Genocide-hating former hero group comes out of hiding and declares war on Genocide. Superheores start choosing sides (destroy Genocide on one side, try to maintain the status quo on the other). Pretty soon the whole metahuman community is involved. Genocide, on the brink of losing the war, forms an alliance with VIPER for increased manpower and supplies. With VIPER's resources and Genocide's technology, the balance shifts and the VIPER-Genocide alliance starts removing superpowered opposition at an accelerated rate. Within ten years VIPER has betrayed both Genocide and Doctor Destroyer and removed practically all opposition. End result: in the shooter's time (20 years in the future), VIPER runs everything, and only a handful of supers, a band of former heroes and villains now united in their struggle for survival, remains to oppose them. (And he explains all of this in exquisite detail in just a few seconds, thanks to the magic of the zero-phase soliloquy). The shooter is recalled to his time by a built-in temporal homing beacon, and the heroes tag along. Once there, they see the conditions of the world, meet the Resistance (which includes a couple of notable enemies from their own time), and have to help fight off a VIPER death squad, in which fight one of the team's longtime nemeses is killed. Debating what to do, the decision is ultimately made to send the heroes back to their own time and encourage them not to let the innocent bystander get killed. And if she does, they'll have to find some other way to keep the incident from escalating into a war. So, using various clues the shooter and his cohorts had given them, the heroes started trying to figure out how they were going to keep future history from repeating itself. Imagine the players' dread when the critical fight was over and they realized that they hadn't managed to save the bystander after all...

Re: How Many U S Heros ? Just a thought: The "one in a million" thing gives the US a potential superhuman population of around 300 high-grade metahumans. Human nature being what it is, I would probably assume that somewhere between half and two-thirds of those will be looking for money, power, and/or personal gratification with those gifts. In other words, somewhere between 100 and 150 will be superheroes, with 150-200 supervillains to fight. In the campaign I'm running now, I've told the players that every major city in the US is considered to have about half as many superteams as major professsional sports franchises. NYC would have 4-5 superteams, someplace like Houston, Atlanta, or Minneapolis would have 1 or maybe 2, and smaller 'major' cities like Indianapolis, Green Bay/Milwaukee, and Salt Lake City might only have one, if any at all. Oh, and there has to be a team in Vegas. Face it, supervillains would be drawn to Sin City like moths to a campfire. Someone's got to help keep the place safe.