Grrl Power #149 – Let’s cut to the chase
I know some people are a little impatient with the press conference, so I’m compressing it a little, I think it will only last 5 or 6 more pages, and I’m also making sure that I’m not repeating myself. Most of what’s been talked about is new information and nearly everything we’ve yet to cover should be as well.
Here’s a fun article about (tabletop) Superhero RPGs. Personally I think the Marvel RPG was the best one. Not the SAGA one. The 1984 version that got honorable mention. The reason it was so memorable was that instead of having numbers for ability scores, there were ranks. Feeble, Poor, Typical, Good, Excellent, Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing, Monstrous, Unearthly, Shift X, Y, Z, Class 1000, 3000, 5000, and Beyond. Not “and beyond” like et cetera. Beyond was an actual rank. How is that not the best stat system in the world for a superhero game? My friends and I always thought there should be a “Marvelous” rank in between Remarkable and Incredible, and there was probably room for one more rank in between Incredible and Amazing.
Anyway, Dabbler is a highly evolved version of a character I rolled up in the game. Basically there was a table you’d roll percentile dice against for origin (mutant, altered human, cyborg, etc) and I rolled a 00 which meant roll for a dual origin, then I rolled 00 again. I think she started off as an alien mutant cyborg? It made me think it’d be funny to have a character that was basically a little bit of everything and she evolved from there.
As for the rest of the games on that list, I’ve played about half of them. And when I say played, I mean my friends and I had a bad habit of buying RPGs, learning the character generation systems, building characters, then never actually playing the game. I’m a terrible rules rapist, trying to min/max and squeeze every last drop out of character generation systems. If I remember my timeline correctly, Maxima’s power set evolved from an exploit I found in the Champions system where I was able to build a 250 point character that could transform into five different forms (like Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk) each with 200 points to spend, only all 5 bodies looked exactly the same. So he had a super strong body, a super fast body, super armored, etc, and he played it off like he had all those powers at once, which made him seem like a 1000 point character in a 250 point world. That idea merged with the new “Silver Surfer only gold and female” chick I was drawing since she didn’t have a powerset at the time. She just existed so I could draw a “nude” shiny chick. Obviously like Dabbler, she evolved pretty far from her origins as well.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Now we need to find someone with the power to summon random elephants on command.
Ahh, but you are forgetting that the press conference is taking place outdoors. First you need somebody who can summon a room.
That is one of the best pranks I’ve seen in quite awhile
I played 5th Edition Hero on PbEmail with Guardians of the Galaxy for a couple years it seemed. Great folks but the drama and RL finally closed it’s doors on the Web. A google search finds some hint at a restart under the title Butlerverse, but not much meat there yet. I played a shapeshifting pile of sand with growth and tunneling powers called Zand, and yes it was the power pool mess all linked with shapeshifting bought to 0 End with a limit of Costs End to start only, etra limbs and 10″ stretching. Weee. I took the name Zand in City of Heros and camped out there for 5 years as well, and now I play Dungeons and Dragons online quite a bit. (Only MMO I know with built in audio chat for teams)
I currently play Hero 5th edition. If fact I have a session this Wed. Our hero team is based in Detroit.
Detroit? Any chance you’re anywhere close to royal oak?
I live in Lincoln Park.
Heh heh, loving Sydney’s face :D
Someone needs to turn that into gravy :P
One minor thing: the last panel might have been better have a “FLIP FLIP” sound effect to imply Ari skipping a few pages, rather than just tapping the next part on her list (unless she just has a list to remind her the order of things and she has everything memorized… wait, is Ari a robot? O_o)
You are also assuming she’s actually skipping – my take is that she basically stopped for questions, and this is ‘getting back to topic’. She’s playing with the papers not to read them, but to remind people she has prepared remarks and wants to continue them.
Basically, she’s saying ‘back to business’. (Oh, and ‘this is my show’.)
I thought the “tap tap” was her squaring up her sheets, like your typical news anchor or talk show host.
Yeah, but that’s not as funner as the idea that the Queen-Empress of PR-Spin would be caught out and have to adjust her orchestrations
Sorry, in most cases those papers are part of the pr-spins.
I’m willing to bet at least some of hers are blank, and just there to make it look like she has more paper.
I’m an old style Dungeon master from the days of first edition Dungeons and Dragons and I played with Gygax a few times. In reality that was your first hero gaming board game series, at least technically speaking. It came before all the others at any rate. Admittedly it was also a villains game as well since you did have evil players as well as good ones…
DaveB- you know if you’re concerned that you might be boring or losing people with the presser you could do a few panels each one of the girls daydreaming. Of course Dabbler’s is likely to be really censored and she might share it with the most prudish at the conference to watch them squirm and wiggle.
Or even a bigger chance for fun and mayhem- let Halo daydream (yeah flashback in a flashback) that or make her mind wander. That can take a page and yes it will make presser go longer, but it will also allow you to make the funny.
That’s why I’ve been sticking the “not at the conference panels” in, like the future shot of the Olympics or the Lincoln team up. I don’t want to take up space with non-sequiter daydreaming though.
Not board yet… I like the actual linking of history lore and fansy, not what I would do but that is probably why your now famous world wide…
You know know what Marvel character rolled 00 a couple of times on the Origin table? The Black Knight. He inherited a genetically engineered horse and a bunch of weapons from his uncle who was a supervillain, and then he gets a magic sword from his ancestor who is the ghost of one of King Arthur’s knights. He’s also a Marvel superscientist.
I see someone has already pointed out that your Champions “exploit” is basically making Ultra Boy from the Legion of Superheroes. Which seems legit.
As for the Press Conference, I’m glad it seems like the cast is going to get to talk again. It’s startling to realize how quickly Sydney has been rushed into all this, though. The bank robbery was earlier that same day!
when folks say Marvel RPG do they mean the 80’s TSR game that today is “Four Colour” (a more generic Supers RPG) or do they mean the cica Y2K Marvel in house RPG? played and own both as well as played many iterations of the various DC RPG’s, Hero system Champions, Silver Age Sentinels (that uses Tri-Stat) also own GURPS and most of the Supers line (IST & Supertemps are fab though dated references), Heroes Unlimited, Mutants & Masterminds.
All this and I’m not a “Supers” Comic Book or RPG fan normally, I tend to the “Realistic Grim Dark” or the “Comic”.
Something with Grrl Power just clicked with me, and I love it.
Personally I was talking about the one DaveB described in the author’s comments above. Sadly I had to get rid of the system, along with a bunch of other stuff I no longer had room for, years ago, so I cannot look up the details, but very likely the earlier one. Heartbreaking as it was to see it go, but, if you live in a tiny place you have to make sacrifices.
You can download it. It’s official abandonware accessible at https://classicmarvelforever.com/cms/
Oh awesome! Thanks. You just made my day!
I just realized something.
Assuming 1-to-1,000,000 is a constant throughout history. AND WE KNOW that until the early 19th century, the human population was relatively stable with slow growth (at less then 200,000,000 until after the plagues, less then 100,000,000 during the age of the Roman Empire, less then 15,000,000 before agriculture). SO THEREFOR the “super” population was always less then 1000 people world wide until the great population boom of the Industrial Revolution (over 200 years ago). Wiki says the first Billion people was in 1804.
Combine rapid population growth with an Unprecedented flow of information from the 4 corners of the world (that even 10 years ago, was NOT possible).
Then ARC, had little choice but to go public now. Because waiting until something went down, would have looked like a huge conspiracy and coverup. I would even suspect that the percentage of people believing in “supers” would be increasing too (probably 75% before conference, to 90% after, always a couple people who lack faith in what they see before them (or lack faith in what the US government says)).
Really going public now was the only rational thing they could do.
Not disagreeing with your logic or conclusion, but it would not be necessary to make the assumption that you did at the outset. The one thing we do know that increases the number of supers is being in an industrialized nation. So if you go back to pre-industrial times, it is not unreasonable to assume that the proportion of supers was less than in the present day. Which strengthens your basic argument, even if it makes the older figures higher than I would project as the upper limit.
Yes, but, in the “Non-Industrialized” world there would be a lower population density. China and India are both relatively industrialized now and have seen the corresponding population boom.
Industrialized nations have many modern conveniences. In London (pre-industrial revolution) the infant mortality rate was 74.5% (1730-1749), but even early on in the Industrial Revolution the number drops drastically to 31.8% (1810-1829). All because of a grow middle-class who was able to providing better for their family and better technologies that aided in keeping people alive (like running water, I could go on all day about running water in regards to our modern society). I know we sometimes think of India and China as poor, but in reality they have a growing middle class. (source is wiki on world population: subsection modern era)
But if you look at a non-industrialized nation you see the much higher infant mortality rates, you see far more diseases, that much of the Industrialized world stamped out, and you see better education for people.
Imagine if you will that you had super strength, but you lived in a very poor Non-Industrialized area. You would know that you were uncommonly strong, and can do the work of many men, but so what? You would never know how rare being that strong is. The people around you might not even know and just assume that you are unusually strong as well, and think nothing of it (until they needed heavy lifting done anyway).
Now I have a slightly new thought. What if the higher percentage in Industrialized nations is only because we know to look for supers. A poor nation might not give two craps about supers, unless it feeds the people (non-corrupt) or lines their pockets (corrupt). Maybe we have more because we look for them.
Look at a lot of the stories that came out of the pre-industrial age, and you could say that supers have always been among us. They have just been hiding that they are around.
To name a few Samson, Hercules, the 10 immortals from Chinese history, and look at all the gods that are supposed to be out there.
I found the TSR Marvel RPG to be pretty useless as an RPG. The rules were unclear, inconsistent, self-contradictory, and generally poorly thought out. Unless your stats and powers were Superman-level good, you’d fail at anything you attempted more often than not. The “its defensive power has a higher rank than my best offensive ability, so it’s impossible for me to do anything to it” problem that someone mentioned earlier was endemic. Or “I have phenomenal powers on a baseline human chassis, so I have zero margin between ‘bounces harmlessly off my defensive power’ and ‘kills me outright'”, or “I can use my Monstrous Weapons Tinkering to build a laser that can one-shot Galactus from orbit, but I have normal human Agility, so I can’t hit anything with it, because gods forbid that anyone without superhuman stats be able to succeed on even the simplest tasks as much as half the time”. And the random character generation system that was designed to be able to randomly produce anything from Thor to Aunt May would actually do that in use, so your typical party of randomly-generated PCs made the Justice League look like a model of egalitarianism, which is very bad in a role-playing game.
If you weren’t actually going to try to put a bunch of them together and have them fight crime, that random character generation system, especially with Ultimate Powers, was awesome, though. I’ve rolled up many times more Marvel characters than I’ve ever played. My usual character-generation mechanism is to roll up a couple dozen randoms and actually play the one that’s the least (or the most!) insane. Most of them turn out useless, ridiculous, or completely incoherent. Frequently all at the same time. But they’re often hilarious. I think my favorite was the sentient hallucinogenic gas who was a lawyer.
Balancing issues are not a system problem they are wholly in the remit of the games master. If he puts in opponents that cannot be defeated and does not either provide an alternative or allow players to improvise one, then he is doing it wrong. Although I am ok with randomness, having fixed power levels with precisely known outcomes actually makes a games masters job very easy. The only time my players found opponents invincibly tough for them was when I had a need for that. A reason which served the story and everyone’s entertainment at the end of the day, once they had found a way around the problem.
Whereas too much randomness (open-ended re-rolls, for instance) can be a nightmare and I am glad that I never needed to GM in such a system. One occasion in particular sticks in my memory, when I was a player. Before we even chose what we were doing, I said that I fancied playing something where I could have a mastermind-type character. Someone with minions. I did not particularly care how weak they were, just so long as they were not incompetent and would be loyal enough to fight for me. One of the group said “sure, I have been wanting to run this system that has Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion in it”.
So we created our characters. Mine just being a smart character with trivial magical power. And minions. The GM had been wise in choosing to make them very weak, but in keeping with the spirit of my intent he gave me enough that I could afford to loose a few, and not be bothered. He did what many GMs cannot resist, of course, and introduced us early on to one of the principle characters in the setting, choosing one that he knew we would recognise. The Eternal Champion himself.
One problem being that the GM had not paid attention to the players’ backgrounds. The plot railroad that he started to try and push us down ran contrary to over half of the players’ rationales and motivations. And were not particularly in the interests of the rest. Which was the stage when he brought in the muscle. Figuring that the most powerful character in the setting would be able to strong-arm us into doing what we were obviously not going to do without coercion. Bad idea.
We were not suicidal, this guy is like the combined equivalent of King Arthur and Merlin, and we were starting characters. So we discreetly signalled to each other to retreat. And I volunteered half my minions to “hold him off for a minute” whilst we did so. All the players then conferring on how we might evade him and find a way to hide. So the combat kicks off, my first minion fires his crossbow. And rolls up. And up. And up. Well basically carrying on until the Eternal Champion is automatically killed.
We kinda lost enthusiasm after that session. If the most powerful character in the universe can be killed by the weakest possible minion, purely at the whim of the dice… bleh.
That whole story lacks common sense. There’s a time for railroading, and that’s new players that don’t know what they’re doing. With experienced role players, you pay attention to their backgrounds and follow through with that. Yes, you can still use that background information to railroad a little, in the vein of giving them motivation to choose your route, but nothing more than that.
As for the fresh minion killing the badguy, that’s being a slave to the dice. Unless the guy gets a critical hit, a redshirt shouldn’t win against the big bad. Maybe get a few hits in, but he should ultimately get wasted. Big Bads are for the heroes to kill, not some nameless mook.
Yea. But to put it in context the guy was a player most of the time, so didn’t have much games mastering experience and was trying to get to grips with an overly-complicated system for the first time. I guess that is why he did not pay attention when we told him which faction we were aligned to, and then tried to get us to do something that would harm our people whilst aiding their enemies. Had he left us more wriggle room, I could have probably found a way of shifting the mission path so that we could go where he wanted us to But to make it clear that we were there to oppose the mission, so we helped our faction and were not branded traitors the moment we headed out.
Which I don’t actually agree with myself. The redshirts were there to die whilst holding off the big bad. Even with a critical he should not have been allowed to win. Trouble is, once the decision has been made to allow the dice to resolve something it can cheapen the experience if you do not live with the result.
The problem being that he did get a critical hit. In a system where you rolled on a chart to determine the results of the critical hit. And the top of that list allowed you to go up to the criticals normally reserved for more powerful attacks. With no limit on how many pages onwards (in the book of criticals) it could go. We were pissing ourselves laughing at how it started out as being about as dangerous as a wasp poking at you (crossbow vs Eternal champion), through double damage (two wasps), to double and no chance to resist. And still going up.
As a group we never objected to the DM choosing not to roll dice if he felt the time or story did not justify it. Personally I would have been happy with “the minions shoot, one hits, with a flesh wound.” But the GM (and a couple of the other players who were real fans of the system) were keen on pointing out that half the fun of that game was the critical hit system and so we were just playing it straight.
And we were pissing ourselves laughing at how unbelievably high the results went. From literally the weakest possible table all the way up to something absurd like “shot through the brain, with no chance for any defence, automatically killed, familiar caught in path of attack and decapitated, spouse hit by ricochet and killed too, a flammable container explodes setting fire to all henchmen and the target screams in a really girly way so the gods despise their cowardice and refuse any attempt to resurrect them.”
Possibly the last few might have been exaggerated. But not by much.
See, this is where understanding comic book conventions comes into play. I would have let the redshirt win. Then without going into the denoument, allow you guys to keep keeping on. Then both sides of the war would start dissapearing. The redshirt would be on Letterman, Leno, Furgusson talking about how awesome he is to take out a threat to everyone. Still, more and more people up the food chain would start biting the big one.
Investigations would eventually point to the redshirt, just to have him reveal that he was the big bad all along and that the guy that was the target was his minion all along. Thus, both sides have to put aside their problems with each other, and fight this whackjob that not only wants to wipe you out regardless of who says otherwise, but now with the public in love with him, any attack on him would enrage everyone.
And this is how I interpret a lucky fluke critical.
Heh.
I admit, I’m a killer GM, but I like to think that I’m a tough but fair one. I make all these deadly threats, world threatening monsters and otherwise things that would just love to chew people up. But if they can figure out a working solution, for the moment, problem solved. I think people are having their most fun when they’re having to figure things out on the fly. It helps that my group agrees with Nintendo Hard scenarios.
But at the same time, I’ve always said that the dice should never get in the way of a good story. Which is why my notes don’t feature difficulties. Back to the killer GM bit, if the player is willing to do something really cool and his roll to make it is off by one or two, well then I guess the difficulty wasn’t quite as hard as it appears at first sight. Whopsie! Of course, if the roll is really bad, you still do that cool thing, you just died in awesomeness, that’s the way things go.
A good GM realizes that each dice roll can be used to enhance the story. There’s always a way to interpret the dice in a way that helps you, such as what I said about the lucky fluke critical. I understand if the guy is primarily a player, being a GM and a Player are two different disciplines. However, any good actual GM understands that they’re telling a story with the Players. Even the good Killer GMs understand that while you kill your darlings, this needs to be fun for everyone or you have no one to kill but yourself. My advice for new GMs is simple, don’t railroad unless the players aren’t sure what to do or you have new players. You should never let the dice dictate the whole story. They’re there just for random factors, not to decide every little step. And finally, always provide a way out that doesn’t require dice rolls. Chutzpah yes, PCs are supposed to be a cut above the rest. Let them find badass ways to solve the problem, but if all else fails, let them reroll new characters. Death is a part of life.
Except for F.A.T.A.L., if you find yourself playing that, then somewhere, you’ve already failed.
Oh my God, Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re gold.
A press conference is as good a place for exposition as any. Better than introducing a throwaway character for it. ;)
Grrl Power the SHG? (Supah Hero Game) — instead of edge you need the rule of silly, rule of sexy, and rule of funny etc… by decribing powers w/five marker ranks you already have a bases for power levels. Special cases might exceed that- just make the markers a different color for them. Then you have a FABULOUS spectrum to use too…
You also have many writers here as fans- (including many Baen Authors) who have experience in game creation and alt history world building.
Say- in this world to end WWII the US dropped a very unstable super onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He’s now retired -alone- on Bikini Atoll – which explains the naval testing there and lingering radioactivity. He has a pet radioactive lizard that was near 12 feet long back in 53… in 69 he called DC and said, his pet said it had a craving for real sushi and was on the way to tokyo… ie Godzilla. :P
simple bumps in timeline to keep it semi-accurate but average human/civvie would read as tech or think it’s a movie. Tokyo Builders (a very minor superhero group used only for rebuilding after natural disasters…The Architect, the recycler, the mason, the carpenter etc) rebuilt the city overnight so folks think it was all a movie set with awesome effects. When in fact the effects on film had to be stepped down or stepped on to look more fake.
The entire Ginsu knife craze was created by another minor japanese superhero- a descendant of the legendary samurai Muhashi (sp?) able to project a vibrafield /forcefield along and around any blade held in his hands…(no wonder he was the demo/spokesman for this shitty product).
etc etc….
Heck with the point system Battle Card system would work too! Action/defense cards, trump cards (silly, funny, sexy and OH CRAP!) , villain cards etc, challenge cards (you play these to challenge another player who needs to beat the challenge to win a point or take one of yours. You can spend a point like edge to activate a trump card. (hero’s like Dabbler , Math and Sydney would have TONS of free trump cards or powers that can be used for surprise.)
Well, let’s see one of the attributes has to be confusion. After all Sydney can substitute that for any skill check.
Just use Macho Women with Guns modified for the use of superpowers. That’s what I presumed Maxima actually was created under actually.
There’s a question. Is Max gold everywhere? Is the gold in all of her tissues or is it just the epidermis? Since she’s based on the surfer does that mean she’s got the surfers ken-doll anatomy? Or barbie-doll in her case? Okay I guess that sounds like four questions to anyone other than me…..
Well, she did comment about her annual GYN appt, so she probably still has lady parts – how… sturdy… they are could be another matter
Plus, we can see that her lips and tongue are not golden (eg, #66, yelling at Sydney). Oddly enough, so are her fingernails. I think we’re told somewhere her lips aren’t sticked. I think it’s reasonable to suppose her fingernails aren’t polished.
Of course, that doesn’t really give much information other that some specific corner cases. More interesting is, is the gold for tissues that can armor up, and if so, then keeping her mouth shut would
be key (presumably the fingernails are armored for other reasons). If a doctor were to run a optical widget into her ear, would the inner ear be golden, or would she be in danger of a kaboom affecting her hearing? Or something?
My tentative conclusion would be, she’s not gold everywhere, and the gold tissues aren’t the cause of armoring. A personal telekinetic field that contours with her body is. Basically contact telekinesis, once the bullet reaches her. That would go along with why she could lift an ambulance with one hand on a quarterpanel (not even a lifting point), with lots of torque left over.
So I suppose it’s more of a racial/pigmentation thing for her then. Like how black folks have pale palms. Have we seen an image of her palms? It could have something to do with a power source, like her epidermis is golden so she can absorb a certain type of radiation. Or it could just be a quirk like Nightcrawler being blue.
Honestly, we HAVE to get to see Joel’s first reaction to Sidney as Halo some day. I’m envisioning a customer walking in & telling Joel to turn on the news. Evil to Joel, & a devious way to break up the wall of data with some story-progressing funny.
I am entirely in favor of this plot twist. The option of him being somewhere in the back of the crowd (there are going to be gawkers after the stuff at the bank) works too.
I find the lack of chest hair in panel 2 strangely disturbing.
Too many Hormones related to muscle development (and General Manliness) can cause the vast majority of men to lose hair and/or grow hair in odd places
Personally, I’m loving these notes about the past jammed into a press conference. The conference itself is pretty interesting too, what with the press being overall, pretty okay with the ARC set up. Excited to see this ‘big reveal’ for the press as well. Also if Sydney can keep her mouth shut.
Third panel, upper right corner.
Spice must flow?
Good eye you have there spotting the Fremen in the audience :D
Anyone else couldn’t help themselves giving the drunk lumberjacks Canadian accents??
not just CND-ian, full-on Bob & Doug MacKenzie, eh?
I kept on picturing them with their heads flapping up as they spoke, South-Park style.
What do you mean Canadian accents? We don’t have an accent; its everybody else that does! Actually there are some distinct accents in Canada, such as some parts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Also, when a native French speaker (like most of the people of Quebec, but a few other places too) speak English, they speak with a distinct set of accents.
OY! Dave! What about the Marble Maiden? (As mentioned in #65)
So, I’m re-reading Grrl Power from the beginning, just as a refresher, and I realized something. If you call the Archon base Arc-Home, and consider it a safe refuge, then it should be called “Arc-Home Asylum”. For all you Batman fans out there.
Archon Secretarial Pool = Archetypes.
Archon Response Units = Arc Reactors
Archon Glee Choir – Arc Larks
How about “Belle of the Balls” instead of Halo?
This is going to be a bit out of left field, but when Heatwave’s powers are manifested, she simply looks like a ‘taller, stronger, fuller’ version of her ordinary appearance i.e. no Fire-Elemental Look to it like Fire and The Human Torch, correct?
“I know some people are a little impatient with the press conference”
Not me! It’s giving all kinds of juicy history and organizational information. I don’t find it at all dull or boring. I’d rather it went on longer, as long as we kept learning more about ARC and the pre-ARC supers history of this universe.
I will admit to some confusion as to whether Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox was supposed to be an early super (and his sidekick) or just a folk tale that arose after some (er, quite a lot of) poorly distilled liquor was consumed by a bunch of lumberjacks…
Not even the people advising ARC will likely know for sure, unless they are using supernatural resources to check. Given that even in a world where supers do exist, folks will still like to tell camp-fire tales. Some of which may be retelling of encounters with supers. Others will just be made up on the spur of the moment. And the ones that sound good will get repeated, regardless of the basis.
Obviously the dog was a projecive illusionist that could only make himself look like a giant blue ox. Not all powers are winners.
What is a non-projective illusionist? Delusional?
I would not object to the power to look like a giant blue on on demand. Great party trick. Handy to scare off muggers. Might get worshipped as an incarnate deity in India. And opens up exciting career opportunities in the circus industry.
Harem would make a great magician’s assistant. He would put her in the cabinet (hopefully NOT shaped like a refrigerator). Then after waving his wand, another one of her copies would simply step out of the box on the other side of the stage. She wouldn’t even need to use her powers. Unless of course some rude audience member said it was all a fake. Then she would be handcuffed, tied in a bag, locked inside a trunk, and thrown into a tank of sharks. After a few moments of suspense, she would appear back on stage alive and well (to copious applause).
Kinda wakes you wonder if Houdini was really just a super.
Well he did die doing a stunt.
Did he? Did he really? Or do we just think that he did?
he bit it a few times but he had rez potential source unknown to do additional acts later. he apparently ran down the rez potential and stayed dead after one stunt.
Houdini did NOT die during a trick.
Some idiot (probably drunk) heard that he could take a punch to the stomach and not even flinch so he slugged him in the gut and made his appendix or kidney burst. Houdini really could take a punch to the gut without flinching if he was ready for it. He used to brace his stomach and clench the muscles. But without a warning, he couldn’t clench and wammo, burst body parts.
Madness! Clearly Babe the blue ox had the ability to make itself appear to be a normal sized bulldog.
six of one half dozen of the other I think, like a lot of mythology
Wow, if an artist had drawn this human powered helicopter in a comic, I would have dismissed it as ‘entertaining fantasy but totally impractical’.
Well, it IS totally impractical. I’m betting that the trial had to take place inside the enclosed arena because the smallest wind would send the thing flying off course and uncontrollable.
Impractical if you are thinking of replacing bicycles with peddle-powered helicopters. But it was fit for purpose, namely claiming the $250,000 prize for building a man-powered helicopter.
And who knows where it might lead. Personally I am envisaging what could be done with a lighter-than air vehicle. The terms of that prize were very specific, and I guess they excluded balloons or similar, but I can see that we might have a leisure industry growing out of this proof-of principle, once more practical versions can be made. After all, the Wright-Brothers did not try to market their prototype for mass-production.
DaveB if you are looking for some source material for future street scenes, remember that Google Maps have cycle-mounted cameras in some areas. So you can get close-ups of people walking in realistic settings, in 3D, so you can pick and choose your angle as it passes.
This path in Tokyo is of particular interest, if you follow it ahead.
hehehehe.
+1
Wow, they grow pigeons big in Japan
I made 2 clicks down the path.
I found a group of people wearing pigeon heads. Like a helmet, but looked like pigeons.
I love Japan.
*Click… clickclick* Noooooo the next button doesn’t work any more!
Erm… *cough* alright then, ’till next time…
Waiting on a list of powers for those character sheets I promised you months ago. No, I have not forgotten. Yes, I imagine you did.
It´s been going around on my mind forever but without any details, I can´t really make them unless you dont mind them having huge holes in them
Now imagine a smart-a** like the 11th Doctor being among the reporters and piping up something like:
“Aren’t those ‘ABC’?” (Telling the true identity of Sydney’s orbs.)
Quickly followed by:
“And do you really want them next to a ‘XYZ’-Hybrid?” (All the species Dabbler is part of)
And then he/she will have to explain how/why they know all that
I really doubt any incarnation of the Doctor is enough of an ass to out someone who is trying to blend in. Unless they happen to be blending in by wearing people suits.
BULLDOG! Yay Bulldog! I love the comic anyway, but as a bully owner I was ecstatic to see you draw in a bulldog. I meant to say so Monday afternoon but life caught up with me.
Whoot, BULLDOG!
I’d assumed that Max was gold outside, and that’s all. I can’t think of any creature anywhere that is the same colour as its epidermis, inside. Marvel scratched around with this with Ben Grimm as The Thing – he sometimes appears to be made of rock, something like Terry Pratchett’s Trolls on Disc World, but they have never really worked it out. Pratchett’s trolls weigh a LOT more than a human and have various issues with this.
It’s the same as Hulk. The Green One is typically around seven feet tall in looks as though he weighs around 400lbs but some versions of him are literally colossal. She Hulk is consistently the size of an exceptionally large human, though. Pratchett’s adverts this by saying quite specifically that trolls can be pretty much any size, because they grow through life and live pretty much forever; but they become increasingly sessile with age and the really huge ones are so sedentary that people don’t always realise they are trolls at all. Detritus and the other active trolls seem to be around 8ft tall, as they can clearly use human-size buildings
There’s an earlier strip that shows Max discovering she can blast holes in walls, she seems to be in her teens there.
Hmmm, here’s a super-law question for ya, if you have the ability to turn invisible/intangible, is it illegal to follow someone around telling them to kill themselves or others?
Not an expert, but I’m pretty sure it would be. ‘Inciting to commit suicide / murder’, or something like that maybe.
Agreed. Fairly clear-cut in my opinion. Pretending to be ‘voices in the head’ might be a laugh for the person doing it. But it clearly could incite somebody to commit suicide or tip a susceptible individual into psychotic behaviour. Either of which is very much a crime.
I would have assumed so too but I googled the real life application first. Apparently several lawyers would disagree with me/us. https://www.lawqa.com/qa/is-it-illegal-to-tell-someone-to-kill-themselves2
Take note of the jurisdictions cited. It is illegal in the UK as it falls under the 1961 Suicide Act as aiding, abetting or counselling suicide. Likewise many EU countries prohibit assisted suicide, although I have no idea whether encouraging it verbally would be covered under their specific laws. Switzerland (not an EU country, albeit being in Europe) permits assisted suicide and so has a ‘suicide tourism’ problem with people from other parts of Europe going there to get clinical euthanasia.
You could probably hit them with harassment if you couldn’t nail them for creating mental distress.
yeah but like the others inferrred, it SHOULD be illegal in real life. Once you add in the ability to effectively pretend to be a voice in their head it’s pretty much mind control.
For a second, I thought that might be a battlepug in panel 2.
” And when I say played, I mean my friends and I had a bad habit of buying RPGs, learning the character generation systems, building characters, then never actually playing the game. I’m a terrible rules rapist, trying to min/max and squeeze every last drop out of character generation systems.”
And now it makes sense that I enjoy this strip so much You’re me! I do the exact same thing, and have continued the tradition while I am away from my gaming friends over the past twenty years. I bet you have even got certain characters that you try to create a version of in each new game, like I do…
maybe some people get desperate with this sort of stuff but personaly i love it, this kind of world building and attention to detail and with the real world is very rare in any story really and some could definetly use it