I am unofficially a Marvel Superhero

Cafe Society
1

Seriously! Last night I got to clowning around with my DnD pals, and since our DM wasn’t showing we crated characters for the old Marvel Superheros game.

This is what I rolled randomly:

Cyborg (only brain left) [OK, first I rolled Plant, but after a few salad jokes I begged my GM to allow me another shot, at which I rolled normal human which he disregarded because we weren’t playing such, and then we just averaged it out. yes, I know its cheating, but it has very little game effect as such]

“Reborn” into new form after death.

Weakness: Energy Allergy, Negates Special Powers so long as it is applied. I chose Magnetics, in the fervent hope that we wouldn’t meet magneto.

Fighting 10 Good
Agility 20 Excellent
Strength 10 Good
Endurance 10 Good
Reason 20 Excellent
Intuition 6 Normal
Psyche 40 Normal

Hmm… Well, poor rolls there but not too critical, I thinks. Other character are about the same.

I randomly roll to receive five powers.
I get:

Body Resistance (20 Damage Reduction) [appropriate]

Total Memory Recall [likewise]

Detection/ Internet Tracking [variant on normal tracking]

Unearthly Martial artist (rating 100) [I pause for a moment. The ONLY Marvel hero character to have this is Iron Fist. I gape and gasp in awe at getting something reall, really, good. I am happy]

Natural Armor Skin (30 DR) [Nice! Combined with the above I’ve got the toughness of Collossus and can take a couple of Nuclear-scale attacks).

I named my charcter Android #17 :smiley:

Other PC’s wound up with the Gravity manipuation and an ungodly Gateway-opening power to all the past, present, future, and anywher in space within some 50 lightyears. He decided he was Sir Issac Newton, and that he faked his death. When he understood gravity, HE REALLY UNDERSTOOD GRAVITY! Well, I gues she neded to master it so’s to keep the apples from falling on his head all the time.

The other guy is a mutant Agent of Shield with electricity conduction/transformation and the abiltiy to alter the density of objects. Useful combo.

After we fought each other - its required the first time heroes meet - we went on an adventure to save the world. We fought some Sentinals, escaped, and just accidentally invited Nimrod to come back to the past for a visit. :slight_smile:

I hope we get to do that game again some time!

As a humorous aside, my Gm related a story about an old character randomly rolled who had exactly two powers: He was permanently transformed into a humanoid panther, hence some weak claw attacks that mgiht fail to hurt a normal human… and low-light vision. The rest of the group looked at the character, wrote in a minor cold resistance and such, and then sent him out to work at geek concentions while they made up a new PC.

Marvel SUperheroes. Its fast, its fun, but man, the character creation system about as predictable as an electron.

Got any wierd charcter creation stories from your campaign or something to share?

2

Do you have the Ultimate Powers book? Adds like 300 more different powers to those already existing. I made some pretty unbeatable characters that way. Of course I never knew anyone who’d play so all I did was create characters and draw comics about them.

My first comic was the New Generation fighting Jason Voorhees (featuring the DEATH of REDUCER!!!) Yes, that Jason Voorhees. I created stats for him and everything.

Unfortunately I let a friend of mine borrow my Advanced Marvel set AND the Powers book years ago and never saw any of them ever again.

Anyone wanna sell me a set?

3

Weird, I was looking through my old player’s handbook, wishing I had someone to play with around. Must have been some sort of alien mind control satellite or something…

4

And here I thought you were going to tell us you got a No Prize.

5

It has been a very long time since I have played. So it is hard to remember all the characters I had floating around. In one campaing we all played ourselves (current age, similar background, the job could be different etc) but with super powers. Even if the character was a lot stronger/bigger it was always explained as a side effect of that mutation, alien invasion, etc.

In this campaign, I played a gay male stripper/prostitute with that plastic man type of power where I can expand or contract various parts of my body to varying degrees. I thought it would make me an ideal pornstar. There were a few other minor powers and the game surprisingly took a humourous edge. In retrospect it reminds me of a time where I played a Dwarf in D&D who thought he was a smurf in a serious campaign.

6

Ahhh…just thinking back on some of my characters doomed to obscurity because they were never played. Gonna have to break out my giant binder filled with character sheets.

I always wanted to try out Sculptor. He had a bunch of flying spheres that could travel 20 spaces and when they hit a character, they’d burst into hundreds of threads that held with Shift X strength. Buddy, you weren’t getting out of that. Not only that, but while you were captured, Sculptor could then touch you and turn you to stone. He made a living out of selling such “lifelike” statues. Muhuhuhaha!!!

7

For those who want some superpowers, click here. That felt about as random as Marvel Super Heroes.

8

That’s what I liked (and still like) about Champions. Character creation is point-based, rather than roll-based, so you get to create the character you want to play.

9

True, Champions is great that way, but I’ve always liked Marvel as well. The game lends itself to faster gameplay and more flexibility and improvisation in powers. Plus you get those spiffy adjectives to describe your power levels. It just feels right to describe your character’s ability to charge his hands with electricity as “Monstrous” and his fighting level as “Incredible.” :wink:

FWIW, though, I’ve played far more Champions. It’s a wonderfully flexible system. I haven’t yet found a character that can’t be modeled under the core rules.

10

We have Champions, but we wanted to try something we could create characters for in one night, not three weeks and the use of a computer spreadsheet and scientific calculator.

11

Now now, since Champions 4th Edition, there aren’t any square roots or complex-exponentials in the character creation rules any more. :wink:

12

And they still call it champions? Their new motto should be Champions, no longer for math geeks anymore.

13

Yes, I do prefer Champions, and there was a long lost prequel to it called “SUPERgame” that I helped playtest.

But you know, sometimes being an ordinary human is a good thing. We were plaing that old TRS game about futuristic mutants (there was Metamorphisis Alpha and another…) and eveyone else was super duper mutant of some sort. So I- rolled randomly, and got- and stuck with- despite cajoling by all- a “pure-strain human”. Completely underpowered compared to all.

However, games later, the GM ran a module. Turns out all the security, robots & such were all programmed to attack any mutants- but obey & open only to a “PSH”. Heh. I had some cool space armour, blasters, and 2 pet robots- one security & one maint. Who kicked ass then, huh?

14

“NoMan” from the long lost T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic. A scientist smind is put inside a robot body. There are a dozen or so of these, and he can transfer hs consiousness between them. (Oh, and he also has ONE cloak of invisibilty. but that’s easy).

One robot body is easy. Having several, but one at a time, was too hard for me.

15

12 different robotic bodies?

Easy:

Variable Power Pool, can only be changed while at his lab.

16

I took a look at the Champions system, but no one has the 4th edition. Anyway, this was quite possibly a one-shot session, so there seemed little point in expending a lot of time in character creation.

I have, however, created an idea for a character should I ever play Champions: the Super-Hero groupie.

No! Seriousl! His powers come from his amazingly large collection of comic books. He’s actually part of a large family of super-villains (and occaissional reformed heroes). All his relatives are mighty sorcerors skilled in the black arts, mighty mutants with strange abilities, deadly cyborg warriors , mystically-empowered monsters, super-scientists, and so forth. However, no matter how much they tried, he simply never displayed any such power.

When they left daddy’s plutonium slugs laying around, he didn’t get mutant powers (and they had to run the de-gamma ray on him), when they gave him the Junior Planetary Conquerer chemistry set, he made crystals… that DIDN’T turn into huge terrors from the stars and eat the city. When they left the Necronomicon out, he couldn’t pronounce the syllables properly. AND NOTHING HAPPENED! He’s the White Sheep in the family. They still love him though.

Essentially, he has a sky-high knowledge skill about villains, absolute immunity to any sort of fear whatsoever, and a whole lot of contacts. Plus a little good luck.

I really want to play that character sometime.

17

Oh, sure, tracer. If you want to do it the easy way. :smiley: I’m sure you could work out something more labyrinthine with elemental controls and ultra-slot multipowers.

Back to the OP, I was rolling up some random characters over the weekend and noticed the dice never failed to give me a Feeble stat. There’s something very disheartening about rolling the ultimate brick…with a Feeble endurance. “I can lift tall mountains! Toss bulldozers 5 miles! Catch a bullet with a pair of chopsticks! Fear my–gaspgaspgaspwheeze Water!” Or a mentalistic with a Feeble Psyche. Gee, thanks a lot, dice.

DrDeth – sounds like Gamma World. Beautiful game.

18

Reminds me a character a friend told me about. His powers deal with luck. He has a massive multipower that manifests as coincidence.

If a supervillain shoots him, a bus will drive up out of nowhere and crash between the villain and the character (force field). If he needs to attack the villain, a convenient bird will fall out of the sky and smack into the villain, etc. Evidently, he was rather annoying.

19

Well, not that lucky. Actually, that’d be a tremendously powerful ability.

20

Actually, when you talked about having 12 robotic bodies, my first thought was to use Multiform. (That way, each of the robotic bodies could have its own Skills, Disadvantages, etc…)

In 5th Edition rules, only one of your forms (called your “true form,” usually the weakest of your forms) has to pay Points to have all the other forms. I believe you could buy the entire Multiform with the limitation “Can only change forms in lab”, which would be worth at least a -1 if not a -2 Limitation on the cost of the Multiform.