Calling All True Believers...
 

There's been quite a bit of banter here on Ironworks about doing something with Marvel superheroes in DC.
Now, there is a place to post art, discuss characters and work out details.
I'm uploading a bunch of graphics I have, even as this is being written, so come on over and join us if you'd like.
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/...ncraft_marvel/
'Nuff said.

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

In honor of the new yahoo list, I re-did the Cyke and Logan icons to better reflect their respective heights.

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That looks about right to me! :D Maybe I will go and make some more Marvel-related icons/pictures later on... (As an afterthought, of course.)

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It would be nice to have some more icons. :D To say I'm unhappy with mine (not counting 3/4ths of the Fantastic Four) would be an understatement. ;) I will probably re-do all of the ones I have, either b/c they're made from game captured graphics or they suck.

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Hmm - I do like your Mr. Fantastic (?) icon the best of them, I think. :)

Whenever I do get around to doing icons, I will most likely only do X-Men icons :D In addition, since I am an old fuddie, I will probably only do X-Men from around the time of the Siege Perilous (Wolverine, Psylocke, Rogue, Dazzler, Longshot, Havok, Colossus, Storm... and Jubilee?) and before (around the time of Dark Phoenix). Heck, maybe the old X-Factor and Excalibur team would be possible, too (and even the X-Babies - I LIKE the X-Babies :D ). I hate a lot of what has happened to the X-Men (and friends) since, so no new stuff for me!

But first things first (i.e. icons for my actual AD&D-based DC game :D ).

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I'm with you on the X-Men. :) The older the better, as far as I'm concerned. My line-up of X-Men (which doesn't necessarily reflect any actual line-ups) would be Wolverine, Cyke, Jean, Colossus, Storm, Shadowcat, Nightcrawler and Beast. There would be special appearances by Bishop and maybe Cable. :) I will be working on the above icons, except maybe Jean, as your icon is great. ;) I will mostly be concentrating on the bad guys to begin with, notably Magneto, Mystique, Juggernaut, Sabretooth and Toad. If I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll tackle the Sentinels. :)

But, like you, these are a lower priority for me than fantasy icons to be used in the Silver Blades story.

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Hmm - yes, I like your X-Men roster as well :D (Don't like Cable or Bishop much, though (around that time is when the X-Men started to "lose it," for me at least). I guess I will mostly do good guys (not a bit fan of most of the bad guys) ;) (The only bad guy that I like is, of course, Dark Phoenix :D - maybe I will do a Phoenix Force version of her icons some time soon...)

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I never read the comic book w/ Bishop or Cable, but I have a couple of graphic novels that I like.

A non-X-Man that I would love to see is Captain America. I was a big fan of him in the 70's and 80's. I always thought that he and Batman would make good foils for each other in the way that DC comics tried to do with Batman and Superman. ;)

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Ok, I could spout off about this for a while! How about the blob? the punisher? Omega Red? Spider-man? and some of spidey's enemies like Dr. Octopus, Venom, Kraven the hunter, ummm I could go on for a while on this...

-SilentThief

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

I always liked Omega Red. :) I don't recall ever seeing him in a comic book, but only in the X-Men cartoon...I take that back, it turns out that I have a graphic novel on my shelf that has O.R.

I would love to see all of Alpha Flight. They were my favorites for a long time, and I still have a soft-spot for 'em. ;)

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Hmm - oh, okay, the Blob is kind of funny :) Other interesting baddies might be Legion, Mystique's buddy precog (what was her name?), Pyro, and some of those aliens who beat up Colossus and friends just before Dark Phoenix was killed?

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Do you mean the Shi'ar, or the aliens that are the bodyguards of the Shi'ar royalty?

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Um... Was it the bodyguards? They all looked different; one of them was a huge, Colossus-type, except that he was stronger and could fly and do other stuff, too. :D Remember, they basically beat up all the X-Men (except for Phoenix)... ;) Uatu the Watcher also made his appearance around this time (and he kicked Wolvie a good one to boot... ha! That was almost a pun...)

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That's the Imperial Guard (I had to go and look it up).

They might be cool to do icons of, and of course an icon of Uatu, the Watcher. :)

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In SHUA, Nol Drek's wonderful FRUA super hero world setting, super power are given as items that are cursed. That way the player can create her own PCs and once they are created, you can't swap or remove the powers (unless you give the player that option).

I think this is probably the best way to go for now, at least until there is a way to give PCs/NPCs special abilities.

There are two questions then, what do we want and what can we do?

EDIT: I've added a database at the new Yahoo group and started filling it with ideas

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Do the superheroes all have a character class still? It is kind of a challenge for us, since magic-like powers and things will be hard to limit...

Wolverine: healing factor, adamantium claws
Colossus: steel body (high AC, invulnerability to most types of attacks), super-strength
Cyclops: optic blasts (spell?)
Nightcrawler: teleport (spell?)
Phoenix: various powers (spells?)
Storm: various powers (spells?)

etc...

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The problem with spells instead of items is number of uses and time it takes to 're-memorize' spells (or pray for them).

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I was actually thinking about this myself....
How does that cursed item/powers thing work?
Does each class get the cursed items at creation? Like each class is a superhero "type" and they get a power set when they're created? Or does the design teleport the PCs initially to a "character creation" map, and ask the player "Does 'so and so' want this power? No, then how about this power...?" Kinda like a "Give treasure" event?
If it's like this, I did something like that my first day using DC....
As some of you probably have guessed, or know from my posts, my character's name is Funky Dynamite. Funky is a rather hard character to recreate in DC. He's basically a Fighter that can cast spells, that's easily enough to do. But he has special armor. I made each piece of armor undroppable, he can punch like a Monk so I made a weapon, gloves, that do blunt damage. His gauntlets can shoot magic missiles, so I made a sling weapon the animation for which is a fireball. I also made his musket a sling and put in the appropriate sounds. He has a fire whip (incidentally, is there anyway to put a element on a weapon?)
This has made me think. I bet I can do his other abilities this way. I can even do some other characters this way too.
I've been thinking about something else related to this, can a pet be done with a cursed item too?

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

The way it was done in SHUA was too allow an initial 'character creation shop' for PCs, but named, ie.e Marvel or DC, heroes already had their stuff and would/could join the party as NPCs.

As for pets (and familiars) I hadn't thought about doing them as an item. What happens if they get killed? Well, maybe they always hide during combat and manage to jump away from pits and the such. :D

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Right now, I've got a limited database started, as I've apparently lost the one I've been working on for years. :( It has adamantium claws, adamantium skeleton, adamantium shield, organic steel skin, Super Strength 1 & 2.

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Hmm - that kind of thing sounds like it may work (we do need cursed magical items that work (shooting stuff, for example), though).

You lost the database, though?! Augh! :(

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Actually I was thinking about making the pet a ranged weapon. (You know, ready it during battle, when you fire it, it has the animation of the animal attacking the enemy?)

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Oh man, forgot something....
How does the super strength thing work, Uatu....

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ya know, this would be another place where "item" saving throws would come in handy. And this is an interesting idea, FD, which you might want to detail more (if you haven't already;)). You have an item (that is a creature) that you can attack with. Would that item (creature) would have its own HP?

DC cannot have an attack that does damage beyond one combat round except for poison. I think there should be a multi-round attack ability that the designer can use. It would be checked at end-of-round and do the proper damage then. Heck, the poison ability could be re-done as a multi-round attack; and the ability to do carry-over damage would eneable spells like "heat metal" or "melfs acid arrow" or other spells/abilities that do damage for more than just "instantaneous" HP loss. In fact, I already submitted this as a feature request over at sourceforge.

As another option, you could make an NPC that would be the creature. If you don't want swapping items between your player's character and the "creature" make the players use premade characters and make the "creature" a character type they cannot pick (like you make your pre-made PCs all types except, say; druid; and give the "creature" druid only items)

-SilentThief

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

Yeah, I was thinking about that, making the pet a NPC, but it would take up a slot in the party and to me that would pretty wasteful. After all an animal is not the size of a person (well, err, kinda). Unless the pet was something like Red XIII from Final Fantasy 7. He's -definitely- NPC material. But I would think pets would be better as weapons myself, from a program pov.

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I'm going to try it soon here, i'll give you a progress report on how it works....

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I thought that I would post the documents from SHUA so you could see what Nol did with items, special abilities and stats. (Note: to get stats for the individuals, we'll need to look in SHUA, which I can do later if there is an interest.)

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

Not sure how to give super strength to characters - just know that it has to be done :D

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The way I'm doing it is to create an item (cursed) called 'Super Strength 1 (up to 7). The PC readies it and voila! The PC now has a higher strength. BTW, Super Strength 1 equals a strength score of 19.

Now making the item is a little bit harder than making a sword, but not much. You'll want to make it not be a weapon and then give it a special ability. I usually give 'bless'. You then have to edit the script...don't worry it's easy. In the script the word 'BLESS' is replaced with 'STR' and 'true' is replaced with the absolute number, in this case, '19'.

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Another issue is that if the player decides to do a "human change classes" thru the training hall then that would allow them to get the skills/items of the NPC that has the forbidden class.

As for cursed items, I haven;t tried anything with them yet; but I'm assuming any "take item" event could take the cursed items from the players, if you ever had a need to.

SilentThief

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

This is interesting. You mean the Player has to make the PC ready it? Thus the super-power is not present right from the start? (For this reason I asked in the other thread if it is possible to make a PC/NPC ready an item...)

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

Hey, Manikus,
I was playing around with that script you mentioned, it works perfectly, but one small problem. When i have the character unready the item, the stat doesn't go back down to it's true value. Any way to fix that?

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

Dinonykos: Yes, there is that issue with readying the item. I have an idea that I will test in DC today though...
I thought about using quests to track/give super powers to PCs, but it seemed like a lot more work.

Funky Dynamite: If the item is cursed, they shouldn't be able to unready it. If you want them to be able to unready it, you have to add another script to the item to return to the lower stat or remove the special ability.

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I know that. I didn't make my item cursed, I just made my item removable. I was just wondering is there anyway to get the true value back after the item is unreadied

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Yes, there is. But, you have to give the item more scripts. You would have to make the item so that it set ASL that stored the original stat, then change the stat. Upon unreadying the item, it would need to retrieve the info from the ASL and use that to return the stat to it's original value.

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Ok, I thought adding another script was the answer. Problem is, I don't know anything about this script.
Forgive my ignorance, but what's a ASL?
ad how do I code a script to code for storing the original stat?

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Oh SilentThief...this is your cue. :D:D:D

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Ok, I've figured most of it out.
I want an item to increase a stat when it's readied and set it back to the original stat value when it's unreadied....
I was playing arround with the script editor tonight. (Duh, I didn't even know that there -were- deactivation scripts.) I got it to work...err...kinda.
Whenever I unready the item, the stat drops down to 3 (and let's say, the stat was 16 before I readied the item), this happens to whatever character I try the item on.
Here's what my deactivation script look like:
$RETURN $SET_CHAR_STR($IndexOf($Target()),false);
What am I doing wrong?

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

I have not yet experimented with some of the expressions you used in your script, but perhaps the script sets the stat to the base value of the specific race, not to the value that was rolled/set for the specific character, is that possible?
Which means in your case the base strength was 3 for the specific race.
Just an idea... :(

Re: Calling All True Believers...
 

I think Dinonykos might be on to something. :)
The word that I would change is 'false'. In place of it, you should either put a number or a variable (such as what is set in an ASL if you are using them).