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[RAM]

I still want to give a shot at acting as a mastermind for criminals. Drug addicts would be a good place to start as it should be possible to find some desperate enough to act on our plans without being able to identify us. It would give us some experience in that sort of thing, a bit of a reputation(Although one that would be largely anonymous, and therefore could be conscripted by other parties...), and hopefully some knowledge of the local criminal society. All with relatively little commitment.

For an example we could examine a nightclub. Plan an escape route, figure out local patrol routes and time-tables, figure out who they permit entry to, and plan out a way to blend back into larger society. Figure out where to place smoke-bombs to get the necessary coverage, and locate where they keep money... Then leave a note with all the necessary details for a desperate individual. They build the bombs, gain entry, fill the place with smoke, Grab what should be a respectable amount of money from alcohol sales, then make a casual escape in the confusion. Hopefully it all goes well and they will do whatever the next note says to.
 If it goes badly then all that the authorities have to go on is a note, a little knowledge, and some surveillance.

[Thecard]

Do we have anything special about ourselves, or are we just some aspiring pleb?  I ask because sometimes what seems like a harmless skill can be deadly in the right hands.

Jacques Louis David, and his amazing painting skills, for instance.

Spoiler: He's totally a villain. (click to show/hide)

He was a bit of a quirky fellow, and made some decisions that gave him power, though they made little sense.  For instance, it was likely his love of the classical republic that led to his earnest support of the French Revolution, rather than a chance for power.  He divorced his wife because she thought he was being too radical.
He was classical, which fits the bill for gentleman villains.
He was known by others as a "ferocious terrorist."
He was on the committee for public safety.  (No, it wasn't like public safety we have in most countries.  This was French public safety.  In other words, excessive murderating.)

He was the head of propaganda for the French radicals, and for Napoleon Bonaparte.  This guy was manipulative as fuck.  He turned a paranoid conspiracy theorist who was executed numerous people who were on his side and David successfully painted him as fucking Christ.  He's painted him as a martyr, and the stab wound from the assassin's knife is clean.  His surroundings are very defined, but there is a vast emptiness above him, suggesting ascension.
He was arrested for being too radical after the guillotining phase had worn off in France, but he got off because he painted a picture of himself where he looked innocent.  He was that good of a fucking painter!

So, yeah.  There's things we can do, if we have the skills to do them.  But so far, we seem pretty incompetent.  And not-French.

[GreatWyrmGold]

We won the lottery and have learned a bunch of random but probably-useful skills.

[My Name is Immaterial]

I suggest minor corprate espionage.

[Liber celi]

This game's back again, which makes me glad, and there is this discussion from page 2-15 again, which probably is inevitable. Since an update is impending, giving suggestions doesn't seem advised either...

[jasonred79]

But from my point of view...villainy as a "career" in the sense of "making money as an end goal" as you appear to be describing it had never even occurred to me when I started this.

Background

So now what?

You're 19 years old and halfway through your second year at the local community college. You don't know why your parents bothered insisting you go. It's not like there are any jobs anyway. Your cousins both have bachelor's degrees and they work in a kiosk selling tacos. Still, it does give you an excuse for not having a job and it's more fun than hanging around the house doing yardwork.

Either way, you want more than that from life.

January 1st, 2013

After an excruciating week of waiting, the check finally cleared. Your parents insisted you keep going to classes this past week, but unable to focus on your lectures you've spent every waking moment of every day planning instead. Scheming. What are you supposed to do with a mere $200,000? It's not enough to live on. You don't really want to live frugally and invest it. You definitely don't want to spend the next two and a half years finishing your degree only to end up selling tacos at the kiosk with your cousins. You're tempting to blow it all partying, but you know if you do you'll end up right back where you started. This an opportunity and you intend to make the most of it. But how?

You think about your cousins and how grateful they were to get a minimum wage job selling tacos. So much for their ambitions of becoming doctors. You think about your friends from school, studying accounting, physics, law...any number of things to allow them to one day become "good citizens." Bah. Just higher ranking slaves to the system is all they are. You're better than that. But if people like that are really so eager to become wage slaves, why not become the master? Surely none of the people who got ahead in life got there by doing what they were told and working hard at some menial dayjob. Surely the people who have real power are those who were smart enough to think outside the box?

"Outside the box." You toy with the expression in your mind, until one day your destiny comes to you in a flash of inspiration. You won't toil with the rest of the peasants. You won't settle for the mediocrity of a degree and a "better" paying slave job. No.

You will become a supervillain.

Ummm.... dude.

Your BACKGROUND above makes it clear that your backstory and motivation is that YOU ARE AIMING AT SUPERVILLIANY AS A CAREER.


Bob is not "angry at the world"
He is not a raving madman.
He is not driven by strange uncontrollable urges (like the Patient Zero zombie thread)

He basically has NO REASON to be a supervillian, other than your background story reason which is that "other career options suck so I'm going for supervilliany instead".

...

Personally, I think that the Bay12 members are SUPERB at RPing... (I wish my Real Life RP groups were this good!)
They're very much staying in character, in the sense that you have written Bob Mason as "an average guy, with average or below average everything, other than starting off with 200k in the bank... except that he has decided to become a supervillian as a career"

[Thecard]

The GM said that his (I don't remember, but lord is typically a masculine title, so I'm guessing you're a dude) idea of a super-villain is someone who does weird and needlessly complicated plots to gain wealth and power.  I think I remember him saying it's like instead of robbing Fort Knox to get the money you would legitimately buy a ton of gold, then blow up Knox to increase the value of the gold you bought.

[jasonred79]

The GM said that his (I don't remember, but lord is typically a masculine title, so I'm guessing you're a dude) idea of a super-villain is someone who does weird and needlessly complicated plots to gain wealth and power.  I think I remember him saying it's like instead of robbing Fort Knox to get the money you would legitimately buy a ton of gold, then blow up Knox to increase the value of the gold you bought.

The sad part is, with the "ultra realism" mode on.... HYPOTHETICALLY, if Bob Mason were ever in a position where he could pull off the Fort Knox gold plan, someone would number crunch, and come to the conclusion that it would be more financially rewarding to just steal the gold... mathematically, there is no way that Goldfinger's plan is better. Unless you are simply unable to transport the gold out of Fort Knox due to weight.



Now, as I said, I don't want to be negative all the time without anything constructive... so I'm gonna give some suggestions how to get this game moving into the right direction! (IMHO)


I think instead of all this ninja lockpick etc stuff (which conflicts with many bay12ers "let others do the dirty work" plan).... I suggest that our next step be:

1. Research Hypnosis, Mind Control, Stockholm Syndrome, Mind Control Drugs.
2. Build up a team of sleeper agents ala LCS... they act like normal most of the time, except a few hours a week where they give you money or help you on missions.
3. You shall build up your team in a geometric manner. You start off by kidnapping then mind breaking 1 scrawny guy by chlorofoaming him. Then you 2v1 another scrawny guy. Then 3v1 someone bigger. Eventually you work your way up so that you have a platoon of beefy guys who overpower+chlorofoam some top level athletes/martial artists.
4. You then secure yourself financially by converting some people with high paying jobs.
5. We move on to converting bodyguards of VIPS.
6. Then we get the VIPS themselves.

7. And thus, we have fulfilled our goal of becoming a supervillian!

[flame99]

PTW

[Wrex]

We don't have godlike charisma, and brainwashing people is -extremely- hard to do. It's also likely to backfire.


When I said "LCS style" early in the thread, I implied "attain loyal subworks to avoid getting our hands dirty". This excludes the videogame element of being the reeincarnation of Che Guevera, Adolf Hitler, And Karl Marx rolled into one in terms of charismatic abiltiy. That just dosen't happen.

[Thecard]

We don't have godlike charisma, and brainwashing people is -extremely- hard to do. It's also likely to backfire.


When I said "LCS style" early in the thread, I implied "attain loyal subworks to avoid getting our hands dirty". This excludes the videogame element of being the reeincarnation of Che Guevera, Adolf Hitler, Naploeon, And Karl Marx rolled into one in terms of charismatic abiltiy. That just dosen't happen.

You forgot one.
Sorry, I'm just that anal this time of the day.

[GreatWyrmGold]

We don't have godlike charisma, and brainwashing people is -extremely- hard to do. It's also likely to backfire.


When I said "LCS style" early in the thread, I implied "attain loyal subworks to avoid getting our hands dirty". This excludes the videogame element of being the reeincarnation of Che Guevera, Adolf Hitler, Naploeon, And Karl Marx rolled into one in terms of charismatic abiltiy. That just dosen't happen.

You forgot one.
Sorry, I'm just that anal this time of the day.

Wait, what would make us Napoleonic? Height or a lack of Hitler's strategic brilliance? Incidentally, bazinga on the last phrase.

[Thecard]

We don't have godlike charisma, and brainwashing people is -extremely- hard to do. It's also likely to backfire.


When I said "LCS style" early in the thread, I implied "attain loyal subworks to avoid getting our hands dirty". This excludes the videogame element of being the reeincarnation of Che Guevera, Adolf Hitler, Naploeon, And Karl Marx rolled into one in terms of charismatic abiltiy. That just dosen't happen.

You forgot one.
Sorry, I'm just that anal this time of the day.

Wait, what would make us Napoleonic? Height or a lack of Hitler's strategic brilliance? Incidentally, bazinga on the last phrase.

Spoiler: Dude, you just pissed off a history enthusiast.  Have fun with that. (click to show/hide)

Two things wrong with what you said ('least, two thing's I'm going to pick on):
1) Napoleon was 5' 6"

2) While you're right they were both idiots, they both had the same plans, and they both made the same mistakes.
 a)Napoleon was mainly opposed by Britain, so he decided to try and cut them off in terms of supply.  Did not work for Hitler either.
 b)They both allied with Russia, but it did not stand.
 c)They both united and were brought down by the major allied powers (minus Prussia/Germany in Hitler's case, because duh).
 d)Both were inexplicably charismatic, but neither knew how to really use that.
 e)They were both tyrants first in the Greek sense (of being rulers by popular vote) then became tyrants in the modern sense (evil, maniacal, and absolute).
 f)Both stirred up nationalism.
 g)Both invaded Russia, both points that became the turning point of the war.  Because they lost horribly when winter came.

Oh, and both faced a guerrilla war in a country they defeated early on.  As Hitler had France, Napoleon had Spain.

So yeah, pretty damn similar.

[LordBucket]

Spoiler: mildly annoyed GM responds to jasonred79 (click to show/hide)

Ummm.... dude.

Your BACKGROUND above makes it clear that your backstory and motivation is that YOU ARE AIMING AT SUPERVILLIANY AS A CAREER.

The fact that every third page of this thread is people either arguing or complaining about the nature of the thread is a huge factor in why I don't update it more often. It's also bewildering to me that you've somehow managed to interpret talk of destiny and thinking outside the box and the notion that you "won't settle for a better paying slave job" to mean that that this is all some sort of money-making career move.

The sad part is, with the "ultra realism" mode on....

Seriously, this thread has endured more than enough complaining about the realism. If you don't like it then don't post. I'm tired of saying it.

The Real World is a perfectly good, proper and valid story telling environment. Top Gun would not have been improved by having Maverick able to personally solo entire fighter squadrons just because he was the lead character. The Hunt for Red October would not have been improved by Ramius shrugging off his bullet wound and chasing down the gun-wielding saboteur and punching him to death.

Fantasy is fine, but fantasy just happens to not be the genre this particular thread is using. I don't understand why so many people want to complain about it, and my best guess is that some people are just not very grounded in the real world. That's come up a couple times now, where some people have very strange ideas about what does and doesn't fall into this apparently very strange place we call "realistic."

As demonstrated by this comment:

there is no way that Goldfinger's plan is better. Unless you are simply
unable to transport the gold out of Fort Knox due to weight.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

143 million ounces of gold ~ 4468 tons in Fort Knox. A standard US dump truck carries 35 tons. A typical forklift can carry two tons.

If you had 20 forklifts it would take them almost 100 trips each from the underground storage facility to your fleet of 128 dump trucks on the surface. It would take at least days, possibly weeks just to load them.

Fort Knox is also, incidentally, an army base with a long list of assorted armored, mechanized, infantry and cavalry groups, including two full tank battaliions and is the headquarters for five assorted army command groups. You think they're just going to sit there and let you do this? Even if you manage to use some sort of I Win Button to instantly take them all out like Goldfinger (thought he) did, you think there's going to be no retaliatory action?

Even if you do manage to get your trucks loaded, where are you going to take them? How are you going to drive 128 trucks off an army base to your own facility without anyone noticing? Without the military stopping your caravan? Without every intelligence agency in the world tracking your movements and following you wherever you go?

And you're reducing this to a simple afterthought about weight?


It doesn't escape my notice that the people complaining about the realism in the thread are generally the same people who have very strange ideas about what is and isn't realistic.

[Thecard]

Yeah.  It sounds really fucking counter-intuitive, but it is much easier to blow a military base the hell up than it is to steal a shit-ton of gold from it.  So much fucking easier.