CrosshairCollie

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings He's been shown naked before, from the front. There is nothing there.

Re: What If? Fertility Control Indeed. Plus, since magic is common, presumably it could be used for things other than just the medical references made. I think one reason farmers tended to have a dozen kids was to put them to work on the farm; if the farmer knows a magic spell or two to assist with farming (creating water, some minor plant growth sort of stuff) then he doesn't need so many kids.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings Which strikes me as kind of ridiculous, since those parts are for reproduction (which robots can't do) or for enjoyment (which Data can't do because it's an emotion). On the other hand, part of Data's storyline was how he wanted to emulate humanity, and my artificials never have that issue.

Re: "Electromagnetic pulse" Suppress: how to handle the effects? I wouldn't allow it at all, because it's the wrong power.

Re: Alternate Sexualities in Champions and Supers settings Sexuality is a non-issue for my characters. They don't form romantic relationships (just not something I'm interested in dealing with at the table). The closest I've come to having a character have a relationship in the last ... at least 5 years as Vixen dating someone on the football team at her school in a Teen Champs game, and she was only dating him because he was on the football team. Instant path to popularity. I'm not sure we ever bothered giving him a name ... This is another reason why I play a lot of artificial characters (robots, golems, genetic constructs, etc). You don't have to worry about a character's sexuality when they don't really have a sexual designation.

Re: Spells/Powers only useable when mark exposed True, but there's no denying that there are similarities.

Re: "Electromagnetic pulse" Suppress: how to handle the effects? A robot could theoretically have a Phys Lim: Characteristics (etc) Affected By EMPs, if you want to get that picky about it. As far as Transform goes ... no. Transform should not be used as a haphazard replacement for any power construct that happens to be inconvenient at the time, no more than 'Extra Dimensional Movement to a dimension where this robot is shorted out' should be.

Re: "Electromagnetic pulse" Suppress: how to handle the effects? I generally build my EMPs as an RKA, Area Effect, Penetrating, only vs electronics.

Re: What defines a Superhuman? Talents are just pre-packaged powers, though. If I buy 'Quiet As The Night: Invisibility to Hearing, requires a Stealth roll' on a character, representing that he is damned stealthy ... does that require him to be a superhuman?

Re: Spells/Powers only useable when mark exposed Good points. I tend to think of Restrainable as 'the superhero version of Gestures' and consider them the same limitation.

Re: Summoning Question In most cases, I assume the 'Summon' is just forming magic into an expected shape. You aren't actually pulling a tiger, elf, or Earth Elemental from somewhere else to your location. You're just shaping magical forces into a simulacrum of another living being. So it can look like whatever you want it to, human, dwarf, elf, or otherwise. The exception would be summons with 'creature must inhabit area' or 'creature arrives under own power', which are more like 'calling' than Summons to me.

Re: armor and endurance I never think about it, mostly because it adds a level of complexity, bookkeeping and, well, realism that I don't usually don't want to mess with.

Suppose that only people born with a particular mark (Distinctive Feature) can cast spells or are born with innate magical abilities. These abilities can only be used if the mark is exposed; so, to use one example from the thing I'm thinking of converting, some people have an 'evil eye'; one eye that is just white, with no iris or pupil. If that eye is covered, they can't use their magic. Another type of character has a black hand; if they're wearing a glove on that hand, none of their magical abilities function. Would this be best handled with a Power Limitation on all the powers, or a Physical Limitation? it seems like a variant of restrainable (probably the -1/4 version), but I'm not sure if it's legal to combine that with Gestures (which some people still need).

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass? Well, duh. Not in the real world. In a superhero worlds, physics are violated more frequently than a five dollar prostitute. Seriously, 99 percent of superpowers simply DO NOT WORK by the laws of real physics. Growth runs into the square-cube law. Speedsters should have their faces melted off from friction. Every energy projector produces more energy than he takes in, violating the laws of conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics. If you're already bending physics into a pretzel, no reason biology shouldn't join it in a game of Ultimate Twister.

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass?

Re: Ok GM's weigh in. We've been talking players CvK...how do you handle these things Once in a while, yes ... these would be the rare villains with 'Casual Killer' or 'No Regard For Human Life' or whatever. I rarely use these villains, and typically only once; they usually get the chair (or Hot Sleep).

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass? Strong Guy: "All right, that's it! Stuff like this happens to the Avengers and Fantastic Four all the time, but they're not 'cosmic-powered freaks' or 'superhuman vermin'! We deserve respect! We demand respect! And we won't get it with the pejorative term 'mutant' in popular use!" Reporter: "Are you saying you don't want to be called mutants anymore?" Strong Guy: "That's right. We prefer the term 'Genetically Challenged'. Or 'GeeCee' for short."

Re: The cranky thread Too. Frelling. HOT.

Re: Ok GM's weigh in. We've been talking players CvK...how do you handle these things Not sure how relevant this is, but ... The CvK thing goes on both sides of the good guy-bad guy fence in my games. Just because a villain is brawling with you doesn't mean he's trying to kill you. Most supervillains aren't killers, either. Unless they've got Psych Lim to the contrary, they play by the same rules (on that front) as the PCs do, meaning that the zero-point 'reluctance to kill' applies. If they get in a situation where they think their only options are going to be surrender or killing someone to escape? They'll surrender. They don't take hostages because they know that's a line; as soon as you cross it, some police sniper with a rifle full of questonite bullets is gonna be setting up on a rooftop. And killing a superhero? They can be so cliquish ... rough 'em up and it's all in good fun, but kill or cripple someone and HOLY CRAP. You better hope they can combine traction treatment with Hot Sleep.

Re: How can mutants be discriminated against while other "supers" get a pass? Best guess: Using terminology from the old Marvel games, 'Normals' still consider 'altered humans' to be human. Even monstrous altered humans like The Thing were once human, once 'one of us'. On the other hand, mutants are not only a separate species ('homo superior'), but they come to be through a natural process of evolution, rather than a freak accident that could happen to anybody. The existance of mutants is nature's way of telling normals, 'you are becoming obsolete'. Mutants are here to replace humans, and that scares the crap out of some people.

Re: What defines a Superhuman?

Re: Is Kinetik a casual killer? Indeed. This is another one of those things that works fine in comics, where the author has total creative control of the situation. In a game, if Spidey's player suddenly snapped a DNPC's neck that way after having pulled the same maneuver countless times without hurting anybody, well ... there would likely be an argument (unless the player and DM worked it out ahead of time as a story point, of course).

Re: When, if ever, would your character kill? I can't recall any time the Joker has threatened to use a nuke, but I do recall him selling one to Middle Eastern terrorists during the Death in the Family story arc. He mentioned he was saving it for a rainy day (so he would certainly have been willing to). Of course, at the end of Death in the Family, Batman had decided he actually was going to kill the Joker and made something of an attempt at it, but Joker got shot by one of his own henchmen in a poorly-controlled helicopter and had a 'mysterious death' as Batman bailed out and Joker didn't before it splash-landed in the Atlantic(?). We all know, of course, that the Joker gets off on Popularity Power. He just makes DC too much money to kill off.

Re: What defines a Superhuman? Some of us can remember a time when Batman was 'mortal'.

Re: What defines a Superhuman?