Vulcan

Re: Characteristics in an EC That was our old GM's bylaw for character creation. "Guys, you can mak your characters as reasonable or as munckin as you like. But remember, whatever you guys do with your PC's, I get to do with the NPC's... and Mechanon has a lot more points than you do." We made a point of keeping things reasonable.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Either: Keep your lily-white hands c;ean and let the bomb go off, killing however many people - an congratulate yourself on how you're 'still heroic because you didn't stoop to torture.' - or- Sigh, and get down to getting the informtation by whatever means are available. Since saving lives is ulimately the goal. (And while I know which way I would choose - and that I slanted these options to reflect that! - there is really nothing wrong with choosing the other way. It's all a game, after all. This kind of conflict can make for some GREAT roleplaying, so long as everyone remembers it's just a game.)

Re: Telepathy and the Bill of Rights I'm not going to get into the arguements about how court-friendly information obtained by telepathy would be. However, in the aformetioned 'little girl buried alive' case I'm more concerned with saving the girl than the court case. With any luck, the evidence unearthed (quite literally) with her will be enough to make the case - at least, in a world where TP is real.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Never read Dark Knight Returns, not a big fan of Iron Age - much more of a Bronze Ager. So how does one rip someone's arm off to save their life? Especially Supes, of all poeple? Surely the big blue boy scout had another option... I maintain: sloppy writing.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Shock, then, could have killed GA just as easly. There was a case recorded in Vietnam where a chopper pilot was shot in the big toe and died within a minute from shock. Not from the wound, which was almost negligible. Not from blood loss, which was also minimal. From shock. More to the point was the second part of that: If Supes had time to rip off GA's arm, he certainly could have intercepted the arrow instead - or blown it off course, or vaporized it with his heat vision... Supes has too many options to resort to that level of violence against not only a teammate, but a teammate who was a normal! It was sloppy writing, that's all.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. I would say that the Green Arrow incident downgrades Supe's CvK, because ripping someone's arm off can be fatal! There's some pretty major blood vessels in the upper arm, after all! Besides, if Supes had time to rip off GA's arm, he had more than enough time to catch the arrow instead. I'd put the whole incident down to bad writing and ignore it for justifying anyone's CvK.

Re: Favorite 60-point Power Construction I'll get the crackers, who's bringing the whine?

Re: Casual Presence Agreed, and sounds good.

Re: Change of Fortune First, I'd be rather...upset with the GM who used my 10-15 point perk - THAT I PAID POINTS FOR - as a disad! Second - I'd be annoyed with the GM who made me allocate my next 10+points in XP to buy off disads and buy a perk. Third, I'd get over myself and get on with the game.

Re: Casual Presence We've generally called it 'common sense PRE attack' and use it only to determine if a combatant surrenders. Of course, situational modifiers apply, and it's not done quite so strictly as the PRE attack rules. It's part handwave to justify goons giving up rather than risk getting pasted...

Re: DC-What if you had to draft a superpower registration act? Nope. Sir Johnstone is a British supervillian.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Who said anything about mental torture? Regardless of depcitions in various movies, there is no pain element in TP by the RAW! All TP does is read the information from the mind, so how does that equate to torture? It's like 'torturing' a hard drive by installing it in a computer and reading the contents...

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. That's where the "Common Circumstance" comes in. If you take the 20-point CvK, not only will you not kill, you will not allow others around you (including allies and police, possibly even trying to get Death sentences commuted to Life) to take actions to kill and you will take actve measures to stop them. As oppose to "Uncommon Circumstance," where you measure your own attacks to the defense of the target - but won't stop an ally from vapoizing a villian. You may protest it, but it's his choice and you won't interfere - but you (depending on other psych limits) might well arrest him for murder afterwards. The original (4E) Dark Champions had a great discussion on what the various levels of CvK meant. I'll have to see if I can dig it up and post it.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Under the same circumstances, I would vastly prefer the team TP to get the information his way. Torture is not something a hero should do lightly. But (and this depends on character psych limits and player temprement) it is an available tool, and sometimes we don't like the tools we have to use to get the job done. YMMV, of course.

Re: What would happen if Los Angeles County vanished? No, I mean you're upgrading the neighbors?

Re: What would happen if Los Angeles County vanished?

Re: Champs-What if you had to draft a superpower registration act? I'm on hiatus - my last two characters were killed or crippled in their first game session (this is not a record for our game, either) - awaitng either a major shift in the plotlines, or a new campaign to start. But if you know about another Champions game in St. Louis that is looking for a player, let me know!

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. And sometimes bad choices are made. This is the other side of it, because sometimes you're wrong and have to deal with the consequences. Torture is not a tool for the faint of heart, not just becaue it involves inflicting severe pain on a fellow human being, but because the fellow human being may not know what you need to know. And now you've inflicted severe pain on him for no reason.

Re: It's a matter of integrity Good point about the reputation. I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking about the ending to Dark Knight when I made that post. BUT: If you have a total CvK, and you not only won't kill, but won't allow others (like your teammates) to commit acts that have potentially lethal consequences, could it not be argued that not torturing the guy for the information to save the little girl becomes an act of moral cowardice, rather than moral integrity? Not sure one way or the other, myself. But then, I'm an old, ignored Roman god, what do I know about Christian standards?

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Or worse: "He still isn't talking. Heal him so we can do this again."

Re: Champs-What if you had to draft a superpower registration act? I'm stuck in a campaign based on this whole premise. And it sucks... I agree that a superpower registration act could easily lead to discrimiation - or even a 'round-up and eliminate' order. However... In Marvel, young mutant's powers emerge spontaneously - even dangerously - in their teenage years. And because the young mutant has no experience with this new capability, he has very little to no control over it. This very thing is what brands Marvel's mutants as being so 'dangerous' - because one day the kid down the block explodes into flames and burns half his class. Now everyone things he's a villian, because a 'good person' would have controlled himself... IF the technology exists to detect these 'prepowered' mutants, then isn't it the responsability of the govenment to find these kids and arrange training for them before their powers emerge, not just or the sake of public safety, but for the sake of the kids themselves? Of course, once any sort of 'metahuman paranoia' sets in, this is a practical impossibility. This sort of thing is best done quicky (Gold/early Silver Age), before the public gets the chance to settle into a Bronze/Iron Age view of supers. Once that happens, well, there is not going to be any right answer for a superpower registration act. Criminals won't willingly register, heros might not register out of fear their sercrets will be betrayed, and no matter how draconican you make the laws, some super somewhere will slip through the cracks and cause problems...

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps. Assuming of, of course, that the GM's world has magic... or that the GM allows such power contructions. Interrogation (rather than outright torture) is the most reliable way to get information out of an unwilling source. But Interrogation takes time, and sometimes the need to get information quickly outweighs other concerts. Sometimes being heroic means sacrificing your reputation to save the little girl who's been buried alive.

Re: Space drives. For that matter, somewhere in the Battletech/Mechwarrior suplements there is an actual chart of how long it takes to get from the jump points to a planet, based on the accelleration of the ship (in G's) and the stellar class of the star. (Although I make no claims about how accurate they might be...) I would guess that the number assumes the planet is right in the middle of the habitable zone around the star (the equivalent of 1 AU for Sol), so some fudging could be done for hot planets being a little closer, and cold planets being a little farther. Habitable moons of a gas giant would likely be signficatly farther out, and asteroid bases could be quite a long ways away from 'normal' planetary location... Of course, BT sets the jump points where they are because of the technology of their jump drive, and their method of recharging it. The ships can likely jump a bit father in, but the 'jump points' are really just the volume of space where the gravity of the sun is balanced by the effect of the solar wind on the huuuuuge solar panels the JumpShips deploy to recharge their jump drives. I might still have this stuff somewhere, PM me if you're interested and I'll go looking for it.

Re: Code vs Killing, but Gods a little fuzzy about kneecaps.

Re: superuseless superpowers Ewwwww!