Mall shenanigans.
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Ahh-hahahaha! I do actually like these 2-hour episodes, they’re so crunchy. 
God, that cover is amazing. I’ve never seen anything more radical in my life. XD
Oh man, I have a villain team called the Cleaning Crew, but these guys put them to shame! XD
Ah yes, Fabuloso, the most delicious-looking cleaning solution ever! 
Hooray for a functional Christopher! That’s the best kind!
Hmm, an intentional space rock? What could that mean?
Gee, what did hot dog boy do to deserve this much disrespect? XD
Man, I really want Wipeout and Sk8blayd to interact, but I’d much rather he show up in a Wipeout comic than she show up in a Sk8blayd comic.
Ah yes, the classic mall sports supply store chain, Sports Stuff.
A schmirp golem! D:
I need pictures! Pictures of Wipeout!
You mean Darth Mall was the administrator all along?! 
Cinnamon lady? I think there’s a song about that…
Ah, so the intentional space rock is completely unintentional in terms of explaining anything D:
“Heroes of San Alonzo” sounds like a good creative process prompt.
I’m glad someone asked what happened to her after Oblivaeon, that was my main question coming into this episode.
Oh my god, Christopher actually just used to go by “Chris”? D: I feel like everything I have ever known is a lie.
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This episode was legit great, and I’m grateful to whomever suggested it. It was peak pre-teen drama with superpowers which is absolutely the best thing ever.
And Wipeout is so adorable I love it; it’s the bow that really sells it. (I say as an inveterate bow-wearer when I was a teenager; I collected hairbows the way some women collect shoes or nail polish.)
That said, man I forgot how dark Wipeout’s origins were compared to how lighthearted a character she is. I also had a chuckle at them deciding on Spencer’s Gifts as a store because, uh, they were really skating over the type of stuff you could actually find at a Spencer’s Gifts back in the day.
(Also as somebody who has gotten way too into the Remedyverse universe lately, I couldn’t help but have a chuckle at a janitor that hates puddles.)
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It might be the biologist in me talking, but it took me like three rereads of this sentence to realize you weren’t saying invertebrate and I was very concerned for you.
I mean if there had been a way to have a permanently installed hairbow socket on the back on my neck, not gonna lie, my teenage self probably would have been tempted.
What’s the Over/Under on number of letters in the next month being addressed to “Christopher and Tommy”, “C&T”, etc?
”Christopher and Tommy, reading letters to you…
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This episode was great and Wipeoit is great but I just have to take a moment to say that Adam said that when the Fanatic comic launches in 2018, Captain Cosmic isn’t on the Prime Wardens yet.
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I really liked this story! I can see why she wouldn’t have had much mainstream success - “Storm but for mall crimes” feels pretty niche - but it’s a cool little mystery plot, and I like the resolution of “now all the shop-owners co-own the mall together,” it’s a nice reward for stepping in against the villain.
Two hour long video about a hero who uses water powers when their RPG doesn’t actually have water powers. Would have been nice if they’d taken ten minutes to hash out how they’d model her in-game.
You could make it a Hallmark power easily enough, but then you’re shafted on Red ability choices because that category expects you to be using one of the two “Signature Thing” powers. Even if you opened up the keywords the Hallmark ability list is still kind of narrow. You could make it Materials which would handle the control part of her power set, but the water creation thing probably calls for either a narrow “only-makes-water” Transmutation or a specific Water Hallmark again. You could also make it Element/Energy for more offensive Red choices, but every new E/E type added devalues specific damage inversion abilities just that little bit more. And unless the GM lets you bundle water-breathing and aquatic adaptions into whatever your Water power(s) count as, she’d need Swimming d8+ or Principle of the Sea to avoid drowning risks. That latter one doesn’t seem real appropriate for someone who lives in a freaking mall, although at least she could talk to the fish in the pet store with it.
Granted, she can probably use three or four power choices getting her power set together, but having some insight on how (say) Banks or Chalker or Menard would have built her (or other aquakinetics like Mera) would still have been good. How come none of them ever get on for an RPG special, eh?
First, building a character for the RPG is not a common thing they do on the podcast. Second, the main section of the story was 50 minutes as the first ten was banter and then you got to the questions section which was an hour. Third, this isn’t a character that is used beyond the multiverse era or that they seem to have any major plans for. The post just comes across as being entitled to all of this stuff off a podcast you can listen to for free.
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I really would like to see their approach to a water-power hero in the RPG though myself. I’ve taken a crack at it twice myself, and it looks like I just re-skinned the Cold power, alongside Principle of Cold. But Materials was definitely the other option I had in mind.
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I love the look Wipeout got in the cover art, but the whole costume discussion hit me weird because apparently I had generated a very distinct idea of what Wipeout’s costume looked like that was not actually from the letters page at all!
Maybe this is a better look for her modern RPG-era look, but i always imagined her hero costume as a short sleeve wetsuit in teal and orange, not too far of from this:
Maybe with the accents more curved and wave-like to lean into the water theme.
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Just based on the Red powers, materials feels more “correct” to me, but they are very similar lists so i can certainly see it going either way.
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You know, I don’t care for being called entitled one bit. They’ve done a terrible job of supporting the RPG and fulfilling the massively overdue kickstarter, and they certainly could spare a few minutes now and then to do some minor boosting for the game on what amounts to their main contact point with their fan base. But you’re right about one thing - hoping for even token RPG content on this cast is pointless, and it’s time I just stopped listening to it.
I’m going to back Sonvar up here. You have every right to be upset, but there’s a time and a place to have discussions, and you both have a pattern of putting those RPG discussions in the wrong time and place and rejecting suggestions on what a more constructive time and place would be. There is a distinction regards validity between how you feel about a problem and how you react to a problem, and in this case you’re not being criticized on the former but on the latter. Please take the criticism in the context I suspect it was meant, and move on.
As for the episode itself:
Yeah, I remember thinking in my head “this feels like an OG Power Rangers plot”, where you have some real goofy feel-good framing story about saving the town community space with some wildly unrealistically idealistic but still heartwarming resolution, and I genuinely enjoyed it greatly.
This convo was interesting as I feel it was a situation of “Christopher’s attitude is how it should be, but Adam’s attitude is closer to how it currently actually is”.
Speaking as someone who also likes her middle name better than my first name but it’d just be too much work at this point in my life for not enough gain.
You know, now that you put the thought into my head, I could also imagine her dressing this way once she graduates to standalone hero.
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Didn’t they answer this question a couple weeks ago? There’s no "water,’ because the question is what you’re doing with it. Wipeout’s power use feels like a telekinesis power, with water being the flavor text. the “trappings” as Savage Worlds would say. I did something similar when making my shadow-based hero. tendrils of shadow that can restrain or lift? TK. Jumping between shadows like a portal gun? Teleportation. Done.
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Yeah, they did have a discussion on that, in Episode 152:
What do you guys have against water (limited game effects related to it, none of which deal damage; not an option for damage type)? How am I supposed to make a character who sends their foes to a watery grave with these options? While it’s not listed as an element/energy type in the RPG, just use it anyway [heck one of the live-stream characters added “bubbles” to that list]. The trick is that water is not frequently expressed as the “element of water” it’s generally depicted as “hammering down” on the opponent and so generally gets melee or projectile typing. Otherwise it’s often given the Cold type. They don’t have a problem with water, just that the word “water” doesn’t inherently tell you what the water is doing. It’s the same reason that lava doesn’t do “lava damage”.
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That would be why I’d generally consider Water to be a Material (and have used it that way with a few characters in my Venture Comics setup); I agree with C&A that it doesn’t quite fit as a damage type, and all of the elements are also damage types, without physical (non-energy physical, at least) forms. Water can be shaped, it can be solidified or steamed, you can do weird things with it.
I wouldn’t use TK for Wipeout, because she creates water and TK doesn’t create things. I’d probably let her use it to survive underwater, although she’s probably not as fluid as if she was literally using Swimming or similar tricks (which makes sense, she presumably tries to ‘swim’ through water by just throw the water at things and letting it carry her.)
But I also agree that while it’s a cool conversation, we shouldn’t expect RPG content from the podcast directly any more than we would expect C&A to sit down and discuss what Wipeout’s hero deck would look like. They might do it in passing, but if the episode’s not about that, it’s not about that. Generally, it’s about the lore.
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they were talking about Wipeout being very unique, but they forgot someone
I can see some kind of almost crossover between Darkstyfe + Painstake and Wipeout with the bad guy from this episode the evil magic using businessman being up their alley but still being obsessed with the mall and the kid hero.
Also had the idea that the insurance deal was run by the same demon company that Busy Body worked for. That is why the guy did the review at midnight it was a monster, but it still thought the mall was a better venture to back than a parking lot.
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I mean… slightly different attitude, but I kept thinking about Riptide from Wearing the Cape. SoCal water creator/manipulator, only in that case it was a former villain who helped the heroes after a quake, and went legit in the process.