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What happened to HERO?


Tywyll

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6 minutes ago, Ternaugh said:

 

It was built on 6e Hero according to the back of the book, but is heavily modified to fit the setting, and wouldn't be easily adaptable to other games/settings. 

 

Yeah. Come to think of it, it was Kamarathin that was 5E and has a 6E conversion document. 

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10 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said:

My point to you Spence about bad assumption is that you (to me anyways) implied that the older editions would automatically make you a Non-killer Super  The Rules don’t.

 

Your point is well-taken, NB, but I believe from the context of his posts he was implying that the era itself-- the portrayal and perception of super heroes at that time-- were less likely to produce the interpretation of a murdering hero.   For the most part, he's got a valid point. However, the game was published right about the time we did start to see an uptick in such characters.  And after the whole Bernard Goetz (sp?) thing in 1984, there was a _huge_ spike in "judge-and-jury" type characters.  The actual "Goetz scenario" was used in TV and movies and presented in a favorable light!  I expect it was likely used in comics, too.  In fact, I think the DC one from Teen Titans-- Vigilante, I think it was-- still pops up now and again.  (could be totally wrong; I hear fellow geezers discuss him when I'm in the comic store in Statesboro (free gaming tables, and I have a group there).

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9 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

My point to you Spence about bad assumption is that you (to me anyways) implied that the older editions would automatically make you a Non-killer Super  The Rules don’t.

 

Hmmm... I went back and read it and no where in any realm of thought did I say that the rules would in any way suddenly program the player minds.  I have no idea how you managed to insert this into my post.  I am not trying to be antagonistic or belligerent.  I just do not see it.

 

 

I started playing Champs in 81/82ish.  Back then comics still actually had Heroes in them.  Sure the "new" breed of "kill'em must see blood flowing and all good guys need to be closet nutcases" writers were gaining their stride.  But all in all if you talked to a comic fan they understood Superhero.

 

That is the environment of RPG gaming that I played when I started Champs and it persisted for a while.  Slowly degrading until by 5th and especially 6th the villain was by far the "coolest" attraction.  

 

It is like D&D.  I still have way more fun playing OD&D or AD&D.  Back then our games were about Heroes saving something.  A Village, a Town, a Kingdom and so on.  Since then D&D has firmly become murder-hobo's "a kill'in and tak'in their stuff".  D&D 5th was a great step forward in rules and they put out some great Adventures with a capitol A.  But you will notice the last few have been more in the line of crawls.  That is because the great story lines are usually passed by to be "a kill'in",  It is not the rules, it is the players.

 

I do think that the pre-5th/6th rules editions were better because they were still GAMES designed to have fun.  

5th and then 6th with a vengeance, abandoned the "fun game aspect" in order to pursue a lunge for perfection in a direction supported by a very tiny but very vocal slice of its fans.  After which the silent but larger portion of their players moved on and found "fun" games.  Perhaps not perfect, but fun.

 

But I am not fond of the 1st through 4th edition rules because they somehow are able to control my mind.  I am fond of them because they were the rules in play when I was able to play great Superhero games.  Games where the need to explain the concept of not killing everything in sight was the exception, not the rule.  A time when even new players were immediately trying to plan a way to resolve the situation while minimizing injury and loss of life. 

 

A time when the games were FUN. 

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9 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Your point is well-taken, NB, but I believe from the context of his posts he was implying that the era itself-- the portrayal and perception of super heroes at that time-- were less likely to produce the interpretation of a murdering hero.   For the most part, he's got a valid point. However, the game was published right about the time we did start to see an uptick in such characters.  And after the whole Bernard Goetz (sp?) thing in 1984, there was a _huge_ spike in "judge-and-jury" type characters.  The actual "Goetz scenario" was used in TV and movies and presented in a favorable light!  I expect it was likely used in comics, too.  In fact, I think the DC one from Teen Titans-- Vigilante, I think it was-- still pops up now and again.  (could be totally wrong; I hear fellow geezers discuss him when I'm in the comic store in Statesboro (free gaming tables, and I have a group there).

 

Pretty much. 

And yes they had begun to write the killers and mental cases into comics, but they hadn't usurped the concept of Hero yet.  Even with the spike of killers that appeared, the superheroes were still superheroes and we were basing our games more on the lines we grew up reading in the 60/70's. 

 

I would be more inclined to believe that the decline in comic quality (from my point of view) was more likely to have influenced the feel of a ruleset and a game.  Not just Hero, but most of the other supers games since 2000 on just don't feel Heroic. Once again, they don't feel Heroic to me. 

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My memories coincide with Spence's. I started playing Champions at Flying Buffalo back in '83, and back then the PCs were expected to be heroes, not morally gray vigilantes. Using Killing Attacks on villains was seen as a moral failing, whether your character had a Code Against Killing written down or not, and it separated the mature players from the "munchkins" (as we called them) who still played (A)D&D. The murderhobo lifestyle was alive and well even in 1983, but it did not pervade our Champions games. In fact, I can only think of one PC who became infamous within the group for playing a street-level vigilante and getting villains killed (usually by accident). The blowback within the team was so extreme that the character had to essentially go into hiding, changing his superhero name and costume to avoid being brought in by any of his former teammates.

 

Then the '90s saw the rise of "dark roleplaying" (what we called "dork roleplaying") in the hobby, and it all became rather distasteful to me. If there was ever a product in desperate need of rebranding IMO it is Dark Champions, which should have been renamed Action Hero in 2004 when the murdering vigilante angle was de-emphasized over more general action movie tropes.

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It all depended on the game.

 

Generally killing even in self defense results in an inquest.

 

There are games which allow gray areas and games which do not and while those often depend on the maturity of the players,  sometimes the murderhobo is the players ginning up a reason to fight each other.

 

Generally in eighties games a player who went off the reservation became a potential mini adventure and a source of experience.  Or a way to write a darker story...or a way to launch an alien invasion plotline with the murderous player perfectly sane and also the only one who could detect doppelganger constructs.

 

The Hero tropes were enforced in other ways.

 

It was (at least in the Tulsa area and on some bases in Okinawa which had a lot of gamers) fairly common to have disasters where characters who had abilities to mitigate the disaster could pick up a bit of experience here and there which added up.

 

Get a bunch of people out of a burning appartment and you got a gold star. Put the fire itself out with suppression or drains or giant melting snowball entangles and you might get some actual experience, and even if it wasn't a lot it added up. 

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2 hours ago, zslane said:

My memories coincide with Spence's. I started playing Champions at Flying Buffalo back in '83, and back then the PCs were expected to be heroes, not morally gray vigilantes. Using Killing Attacks on villains was seen as a moral failing, whether your character had a Code Against Killing written down or not, and it separated the mature players from the "munchkins" (as we called them) who still played (A)D&D. The murderhobo lifestyle was alive and well even in 1983, but it did not pervade our Champions games. In fact, I can only think of one PC who became infamous within the group for playing a street-level vigilante and getting villains killed (usually by accident). The blowback within the team was so extreme that the character had to essentially go into hiding, changing his superhero name and costume to avoid being brought in by any of his former teammates.

 

Then the '90s saw the rise of "dark roleplaying" (what we called "dork roleplaying") in the hobby, and it all became rather distasteful to me. If there was ever a product in desperate need of rebranding IMO it is Dark Champions, which should have been renamed Action Hero in 2004 when the murdering vigilante angle was de-emphasized over more general action movie tropes.

You made the point far better than I was able too.

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12 hours ago, Spence said:

 

Pretty much. 

And yes they had begun to write the killers and mental cases into comics, but they hadn't usurped the concept of Hero yet.  Even with the spike of killers that appeared, the superheroes were still superheroes and we were basing our games more on the lines we grew up reading in the 60/70's. 

 

I would be more inclined to believe that the decline in comic quality (from my point of view) was more likely to have influenced the feel of a ruleset and a game.  Not just Hero, but most of the other supers games since 2000 on just don't feel Heroic. Once again, they don't feel Heroic to me. 

That’s the disconnect I had with you Spence and said about assumptions. My friend knew that I liked Super heroes, though I really didn’t read a lot of comics most of my knowledge is from cartoons. We he asked me what type of hero I said Ninja cause it’s the ‘80s and ninjas were the rage.  My point is that the rules don’t convey no killing or being a hero, the players/GM does. And yes I learned in a hurry what was expected in the game. 😁

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4 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

That’s the disconnect I had with you Spence and said about assumptions. My friend knew that I liked Super heroes, though I really didn’t read a lot of comics most of my knowledge is from cartoons. We he asked me what type of hero I said Ninja cause it’s the ‘80s and ninjas were the rage.  My point is that the rules don’t convey no killing or being a hero, the players/GM does. And yes I learned in a hurry what was expected in the game. 😁

 

Of course,  within the genre conventions, killing is somewhat allowed in war even for supers.

Especially with alien invasions or invaders from another dimension  or as a situational necessity in a classic prehistoric lost world adventure. 

 

Game Masters who have players who want to hack and slash with their human tanks upon occasion should encourage their players to buy him the appropriate sourcebooks to run such crossover adventures.  I meant to say Game Masters should encourage their players to be paragons of virtue, they're supposed to be heroes. 

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On 12/31/2019 at 12:16 PM, Solitude said:

Hmm..

 

Well I just spent several hours on the main champions forums.

My perception is that rather than opening the game up by getting rid of unnecessary math ditching figured characteristics brought about more sameness of character designs.  Everyone may as well buy a high presence because they don't get much out of constitution since it no longer affects your recovery, endurance, stun, and energy defense.

 

Things people agonized over regarding characteristics did add time to the character generation process but it brought about some design choices that the game evidently (admittedly this is only from reading for a few hours) no longer sees.

 

Is Champions Now going to return to figured characteristics?

 

From my understanding, the delinking of figured stats had/has nothing to with getting rid of maths . . . 

 

The probably that 6th has is that ALL of the supplemental material is just cut and pasted from previous editions instead of being rewritten.  So while there are no more figured stats in 6th and CV has been decoupled from DEX, all the pregened characters still use the old rules because they've just be copied from one book and pasted into the next.

 

It's real hard for a player (new or old) to get used to the changes when everything they look at for ideas are still using the old systems.

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4 hours ago, ScottishFox said:

 

WHAT???!!??

 

Did they also remove classic killing attacks as was discussed long ago and just make it normal damage that bypasses non-resistant defenses?

 

I will wait and see what it looks like. 

Losing post segment twelve recovery and reduction to six phases?

I wasn't kidding with the Bicycle with training wheels picture. 

 

But maybe with the players Champions gets today we need a version with training wheels. 

 

The players coming into the hobby now do not have the advantage that having lived when all math was done manually brings, hell, some of them had calculators even learning polynomials.  They don't easily do calculations that the people learning the game in 1981 did automatically and without thinking easily. And they didn't have any classes where they had to learn to focus on one thing for more than an hour and a half straight even if they were what is now called ADHD.

 

These are life skills that my generation (and most of the people on this forum are my age or maybe ten years younger) which are now expected to be learned later in life. If you make a game fun they can learn them playing the game. Hopefully they will want more.

 

I thought about all this as I began to work on some pregens and a campaign yesterday to teach players what sort of  implementations of restricted powers will get them accepted within a campaign.  I need to get a copy of sixth edition to make sixth edition write ups, but If Champions now is due soon I might as well get that also. And the Steampunk book.

 

Anyhow I am tentatively on board with the simplified game idea. 

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Back from the Holidays,

 

So, reading back a bit,not just makes me more convinced that a crowd funded re-issue of the 2nd edition boxed set, with perhaps a new adventure added may work.. I don't think that Champions, as 6th edition is, is suitable for the modern, non literary gamer. Champions complete might work if pared way down in the verbiage and re-edited, but it lacks adventures. But  this may be a broken record comment. 

 

Also the rise of morally gray, killer heroes in comics was a result of the demise of the comics code authority, and the influence of UK based writers brought it who had a decidedly different take on comics than the comics code savvy Americans. 

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IMO, regressing to EGOx1, EGOx2, EGOx3 rather than EGO, EGO+10, EGO+20, etc. and the old Reduced Endurance cost structure is a Very Bad Idea. That's why I don't endorse a 2nd edition re-issue. Too many things were fixed after 2e that shouldn't be re-introduced into anyone's game today, even in the name of "simplifying" it for newcomers (which I do think is a laudable goal, depending on how you go about it).

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2 hours ago, zslane said:

IMO, regressing to EGOx1, EGOx2, EGOx3 rather than EGO, EGO+10, EGO+20, etc. and the old Reduced Endurance cost structure is a Very Bad Idea. That's why I don't endorse a 2nd edition re-issue. Too many things were fixed after 2e that shouldn't be re-introduced into anyone's game today, even in the name of "simplifying" it for newcomers (which I do think is a laudable goal, depending on how you go about it).

 

I agree that a lot of things were fixed in three. It I remember correctly three was where endurance costs dropped to one per ten active points.

 

However,  I preferred the old multiples system for ego because ego attacks particularly mind control are so powerful.  I ran high ego characters because that was as effective as having some ego power of my own and after the change I found myself coming up with character concepts which justified having ego defensive powers.

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In my experience, I started hearing comments from players about the Hero System being difficult to get into during the 4th edition era.  IMO, the best presentation of the Champions game was 3rd edition, though I liked some of the changes that were made in 4th edition.  However, there were some rules in 4th edition that I think needed to be cleaned up too.

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43 minutes ago, PeterLind said:

In my experience, I started hearing comments from players about the Hero System being difficult to get into during the 4th edition era.  IMO, the best presentation of the Champions game was 3rd edition, though I liked some of the changes that were made in 4th edition.  However, there were some rules in 4th edition that I think needed to be cleaned up too.

 Most of my play was with third because it had such a long run and because I was young and lived in the barracks. 

I don't know that I thought the differences between third and fourth were that important. 

 

The thing that really made fourth for me was the campaign sheet.  Play a short scenario with pregens,  and give that sheet full of requirements,  ask me about its, and hell noez to new players and see what they come up with.  

 

It takes away the first couple of rounds in approving their characters. 

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5 hours ago, Solitude said:

I will wait and see what it looks like. 

Losing post segment twelve recovery and reduction to six phases?

I wasn't kidding with the Bicycle with training wheels picture.

 

I honestly don't get what you mean with the training wheels stuff.

 

Six phases, 12 phases or 29 phases is all pretty arbitrary.

 

Post segment 12 recovery? Meh. It just means that you have to use one of your phases when you need to recover.

 

Also, END costs are 1 per 5 Active Points, not 1 per 10, so you will need to recover more often.

 

The game is actually harder to play well. Character generation is a bit easier. That balance seems right to me.

 

There is one problem with the 6 segment turn: it's too easy to buy a 6 Spd. But there are other demands on your point budget that make it a non-trivial choice.

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2 hours ago, Solitude said:

It I remember correctly three was where endurance costs dropped to one per ten active points.

 

No, that was a 4e change.

 

4e rationalized the various 3e "pools" into the VPP framework. 4e rationalized Detects and Senses. 4e unified the Skill system. Etc. Etc.

 

I'd argue that by any reasonable measure 4e was the most dramatic and effective update to the rules since the game's inception. Rolling back to any version prior to it would be like asking people to give up their smart phones and go back to rotary dial landlines. 

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1 minute ago, zslane said:

No, that was a 4e change.

 

4e rationalized the various 3e "pools" into the VPP framework. 4e rationalized Detects and Senses. 4e unified the Skill system. Etc. Etc.

 

By any reasonable measure I'd argue that 4e was the most dramatic and effective update to the rules since the game's inception. Rolling back to any version prior to it would be like asking people to give up their smart phones and go back to rotary dial landlines. 

I've never had any problems with players being distracted by rotary dial landlines during play. 

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8 hours ago, ScottishFox said:

Did they also remove classic killing attacks as was discussed long ago and just make it normal damage that bypasses non-resistant defenses?

 

This area is a bit odd. They didn't "just" make it anything, and instead provided a set of dials and switches (Advantages and Disadvantages) that can be chosen to model a particular power. There's no generic "killing attack" any more.

 

I really need to study it to work out what is going on, but at the moment I'm happily ignoring it.

 

To be honest, there are a few potential deal breakers, at least in the pre-publication draft that I am looking at.

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