Lethal Combinations

We all know the good guys are not supposed to kill the bad guys...that is what sperates us from them, but once in a while we run into villians so morally corrupt and dangerious we need to step over the line and put an end to their evil, forever.
In this thread let us discuss just how we go about doing our "wet work".

The character I have used over the last 16 years is an altered human created with the original game named Za Zen. He is a student of Busheido, a martial artist and master swordsman with a number of powers (IN phasing, Ex light Gen, Ex Dark Force Manip, Ex Air Control, and Ultimate skill with a long bow) talents include martial arts A, weapons specialist w/MN mat str Samaria sword, and computers.
He does not have a code against killing but rather a warrior's code, so no taking of innocent life, no dishonorable acts, etc...

His most powerful attack (assuming it gets through) is the Rain of Shooting Stars. It is 100 EX intensity solidified light arrows fired in a shimmering cascade at a target (the bow is solid light too, I got tired of loosing wooden ones) this is a 2000 pt focus attack, which ZaZen cannot stop once commited, leaving him vulnerable to blind siding. Protection above RM30 will stop the direct attack (although not the potential blindness and heat given off) This is usually used on demonic enemies and vampires but it would also be a pretty effect weapon against an advancing army.

the Red Line is Za Zen's 150mph neck high fly by with the blade extended. If the target's armor is beaten with a FEAT, you see a red line on his neck before his head falls off. I have used this tactic the most, even if it doesn't kill the bad guy it usually hurts him/damages his armor/scares him so bad that the fight is very close to an end. Force fields can really ruin power dive attacks like this one.

The Tornado of Glass is self explanitory. ZaZen utilizes a plate glass window worth of broken glass in a tightly focused 15 foot tall tornado, he then fixes his target in place with a dark force spike, jutting right out of the side walk and allows the tornado to spin against the target, like a record turn table under a stylus, stripping the flesh from the bone. (this tactic was employed against a zombie-like creature to extract a mystcal item it had swallowed, which was powering it. ZaZen probably would not use this against a living human/mutant villian).

Phasing allows a miriad of nasty stuff like un-phasing your sword in a target's skull or, once you have developed the power stun, taking them into phase, putting them half into a solid object like a granite slab or steel I beam and then unphasing them to allow the mat strength of the object to tear them apart. Also works really well on robots.

Since Gateway is a power stunt with Dark Force, I have concocted a couple gateways like a trip to prison for the regular criminals after arrest, the Vault for super bad guys and a stone wall or the Mindinou Trench for villians flying or charging at me. The only "One Way" ride I created was in case I ever had to go up against something like Ultron, a villian undefeatable by normal means, and that is a time/space Gateway to ground zero of the Gamma Bomb test site in the New Mexico desert that spawned the Hulk, one second before the blast. You show up and BOOM.

Holy...By Shai-Hulud man, did anybody catch the number on this motherf****** truck? Man...have you posted this guys stats?

But yeah, I think (and I have never tried this) that the most effictive method of killing someone would be to teleport them into the sun.

I HAVE COME TO REAP THE SOULS OF THE LIVING!!!!!
And perhaps, order a burger.

Hmm...just my opinions... don't take offence... none is intended.

Rain of Shooting Stars:
Wow... you had a Judge that actually allowed 100 Excellent rank attacks as a single action? And allowed energy solidification as a free effect and heat and blinding as attack freebies of it... just with EX Light Generation and Ultimate Skill (Bows). Geez...

Red Line
How do you achieve the 150 mph? More importantly... your Judge allows an attack that kills with no roll to resist or anything of the sort... just beat armor rank with a feat (material strength? agility? charging? what?) and poof your dead. Can villains do this... is so it must be a very death laden game.

Tornado of Glass
Hmm... I can see this one... but with Excellent Darkforce your grappling them with at best Excellent strength so most Marvel character could get free and with excellent air control and feeble material strength glass your doing Excellent damage a round and only to things with basically no armor. Still very cool. Unless of course you Judge is allowing 100 attacks a round again or something.

Phasing... technically with Incredible phasing you can't phase your Monstrous sword into his head... or you can... but only with Incredible affect. So its basically an Incredible attack that ignores Incredible protection.

Gateway... oh yes... uber-hoss power... but at Excellent rank... that's an Excellent Agility feat to avoid going in. So even Good agility characters could avoid it on a Red feat. Of course, since I could easily see a Judge ruling this a blindsiding attack... your chances are actually better.

Cool abilities and you must have a very talented judge to allow such things and still keep the game balanced and interesting (and survivable). Though I seriously doubt many other Judges would remotely allow most of that in the form you describe. Quicksilver has CL1000 rank Hyper-Running and many Judges cringe at allowing him 100 Good rank attacks a round... let alone 100 Excellent ones off an Excellent/Unearthly combo... and I've flatout never seen a Judge allow an instant kill attack only requiring a feat to beat armor... that's just silly (just my opinion though).

You also don't mention having many stunts that you'd need for some of these actions... like increased speed and the ability to solidify light... and given that these are all killing acts... and so many of them on one character... their karma and thus stunting and power advancement would be utterly in the garbage.

I had wondered what Wolfspider's judge was doing these days....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2005 09:33PM by Alabar.

sway- the concept of an auto-kill has never occured in a game you were playing? You never had a character take, say, 5x their health in damage in one round?(getting riddled with a mini-gun, a building falls upon them or they are a 36 point character getting a plasma blast for shift x damage) or take catastrophic damage like having their head cut off or being cut in half?
You roll a six to survive that and you aren't going to just start losing ranks...your dead.
Any other RPG would kill you off, Marvel even mentions this in the huge character books under those giant Esat German insects that fought Henry PYM (even though their pinchers only did 10 points of damage, if you failed to save vs a kill you were cut in half, horrible example but I believe both Helle and Seth have hand of Death attacks that just kill your character, it is lame to do it to a player if your judging but the game allows for instantanious death)...on that note the notion that somebody walks by and rolls you around and you are OK after someone drives an I beam through your chest is absurd (unless you have a power that can grow you a new set of organs and a new spine). I guess you could freeze the body and thaw it out later like chrio and bring the person back if you had a proper lab and a doctor with amazing skills?

The key to having the game remain doable is not resorting to this kind of stuff all the time. For example: The team I was in when we first started killing bad guys were all mutants, except my character and an Asgardian. We fought a lot of regular bad guys and killed none of them, until we went up against a mutant supremicist group, who first tried to kill off the non-mutants and recruit our mutant members. Then they decided to just wipe our group out, mutants and all as race traitors. It was a really dark game that took a long time. We ended up fighting them in the abandon tunnels under Chicago and not arresting them. They had killed off a bunch of our contacts and crippled one of our team members, so we wanted revenge. After that initial event it was a little easier to use lethal force, so that becomes the test, to not become a gang of killers.(the guys I killed were those evil mutants, nazis, weird aliens, vampires and a zombie-guy....half of them weren't technically "alive".)

and yeah, I have a lot of power stunts, since I have a relatively low powered character (even my scariest attack wouldn't hurt most high ranking villians, so I usually end up fighting for my life) but that is why I'm in a team.
If I was solo I hope I wouldn't be stuck fighting guys like the Black Talon and the Trapster (that would be depressing) but I would definately be dying at the hands of the Super Skrull or Dr. Doom.

I have played with several judges and they usually see a character with 50 power stunts as a player with 50 different ways to not have any effect on the powerful villian they have chosen to plague the campaign with...so getting to attack someone 100 times with an attack that won't hurt them sounds fine (until you use it a little later in a different situation, on someone else where it actually works).

If you were judging and wouldn't allow the half dozen power stunts I use (not all of which are lethal), I'd live, but I'd go over them before we started so we wouldn't waste time during a game.

150mph/10 area is max air speed for Ex air control
[homepage.mac.com]

Nope never... in a Super-game at least. Especially since a 36 health characters are rare and even more rarely played. Not many folks jumping to play Vagabound when the genre is super-heroes. 5x health... never happened but even with a kill result... unless your out of karma you're fine. Head cut off... okay... see that's minion or civilians death. RPGs don't tend to have set rules for that sort of thing (lord help me I'll never understand why people don't get this) because that's not how heroes work in any genre. RPGs are Role Playing Games... Role Playing is story... story is character driven... primary characters in stories can't just be up and killed... or the story ends. Spiderman can bend steel beams... and even when he's not pulling a single punch do to extreme rage... he never seems to punch a hole in Doc Oc head. Likewise the enraged Hulk slugs Spiderman and yet Spiderman who should be all means be putty from such a blow is severally wounded but he'll live. The only time primary characters die is due to A. Good Writing... dramatic moments that play out the characters swansong in some way (no mechanic needed for this... the Judge simply has it happen... usually after conferring the player and usually at the end of the campaign... ie. the end of the story... or... B. Bad writing... cheap ploys to show that their story is gritty and realistic or more hardcore than other stories (notably this is half the reason why comic book deaths are so often not-so... because the death's themselves are acts of poor writing covered in the shock factor of "someone dies!!!"... mechanics wise this always breeds arguements too... because if someone can just walk up to Sue Storm at the mall and blow her brains out before she can raise her force... why haven't any of the FFs villians just paid a street mook Sue wouldn't recognize on the spot to do just that? Not to mention the utter joy of constantly rerolling new characters because after a few outings the Kingpin would just hire an assassin to snipe all the heroes in their sleep. And having it "used sparcely" is simply ludacris... common thugs can easily cap most the Marvel Universe's heroes... but usually choose not to? How very nice of the them. Choosing to allow assassination tactics in roleplay is removing things from roleplay period... you're no long playing a role in a fantasy story at the table... you basically doing a logistics report on real life death. Which I guess could be fun for the umm... more morbid minded crew out there... but its not roleplaying. RPGs like comics, movies, and all other stories aren't run by the rules of physics and life-and-death... they are run by the rules of storytelling... and inherently so... even when you declare a game as "gritty and hardcore... and uber-realistic" you're still just telling story with friend and thus are bound by the rules of storytelling... relying on brutality or body counts to make your story seem "cooler" is poor storytelling plain and simple... and saying its for "realism" is simply a making excuses to cover bad storytelling.

Anyway... moving on...

Odd example with the bugs... never seen it... could be more specific on the book in question? As for Seth and Hela... Seth and Hela are entities... Entities can do pretty much whatever they want... and Entity auto-killing you is the Judge being an arse... plain and simple. The rest of those things sited are assassination tactics which just plain don't work well in RPGs period (especially when the true "balance" test of anything is duality)... being able to instant kill by saying your character thrusts an I-Beam through them is great... right up until the Judge has a villian auto-kill your character by flatting him with a billboard. Whats good for the goose is good for the gander afterall... and since you say you've been playing this character for years... the Judge in question is again apparently being overly lenient and letting it slide as one-way.

As for the Star arrow thing... come on... attacks that can't hurt anyone...

EX rank attacks can affect alot of heroes and villians... infact... in the Marvel Universe... most actually (all the X-Men, save for Collosus armor and Jean if she raises her Force Field in time), Spiderman, Daredevil, the majority of the Avengers... the entire Fantastic Four (well you could snipe Sue and Johnny though), Ironman, Thor, and the Hulk would be out of the question... but then they are more often used in Galactic campaigns anyway. So 100 EX attacks is hardcore in any campaign... especially stunted off an Excellent light control ability (or the Ultimate Skill power... which since its always Unearthly is at least more reasonable). I mean... Excellent damage is machine gun fire and plasma gun blast rank and Captain America's punches and a swat from Daredevils staff and Dagger's daggers and Wolverine's claws. 0ne hundred volleys of that in a signal round is lethal to all but characters whose power center around being immune to physical harm.

Do you have him posted online anywhere? I'd love to see this character and his progression. A 16 year old character is very impressive.

My question is what is to stop the baddie sent to said Gamma blast from turning into another Hulk. Just because it's ground zero doesn't necessarily mean he'll be anniliated. I'd certainly hate to see the karma loss for bringing another Hulk into the world.

only the gm ruling and possible plot device hook

Now that I think about it that brings up an interesting question. We've seen what happens to people that get a lesser dose of the gamma radiation that Bruce Banner got (She-Hulk, Doc Samson, Abomination) so what would have happened to Brucey if he had been closer to the blast and gotten a higher dose of radiation? Now granted at ground zero he probably would have just vaporized, but what if he hadn't? Can you imagine how sick he could have been then? And in this case a being that was already nearly unstoppable (because Za Zen couldn't finish him off) is now getting a good ole dose of gamma power! A person already with super powers becoming Hulkified is just scary! Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh...here come da gamma!

Beware the JuggerHulk!!:D

Actually, I think I can precisely guess what the result would've been if Bruce had been at ground zero and hadn't just been vapourised. It's called GODZILLA!!!

Out of curiousity, how much damage would a gama-bomb do?

I had assumed enough to kill almost anything from earth and biological (assuming it didn't have UN100 or better radiation resistence) I'm assuming ground zero would be at least shift z 500 blast and equal heat...I guess Juggernaut would survive that, then again he wouldn't even be effected because none of the radiation would get through. Or are you thinking class 1000 in a very limited area?

This could be a really good plot twist..since it is also has a time jump so the new villian would be created 20 plus years before my character got his powers...I knew I should have created that portal as an infinete regress instead.

I'm getting ready to judge a game where three heroes meet and discover newspaper clippings of them arresting a pre-WWII crime boss, leading to time travel and a detective story for them to solve.