Spence

Just finished it and I have to say it was really good. I am hoping they get a second season.

Yep...

Never having played the game or read any of the books so I came to the show with no idea. It is a good show and very well made. The story seems to be a bit disjointed, but that is probably because I don't know the story.

Eh... not really. They did put together stripped versions of both 5th and 6th. The Basic books. But they were just like CC and FHC, incomplete and designed as if they intended them to fail. Think of it this way. Lets imagine you have a two game consoles. Console one sells games on a disc like the PS4 and XBox. Buy a disc, load it and play. Console two has decided that anyone willing to play a game someone else designed is daft. So they sell the console, the source code and some resources and say "have fun". Which console sells and which one fails? Easy to pick. When Fantasy Hero Complete was put out it was also incomplete. It is even more sad because they actually had partially built the other half in the Val of Stalla which was given out as downloadable content but never mentioned in the book itself. If the material had been polished up and included in FHC plus the equivalent of a 1st level spell list so the people who wanted to play a mage had a starting point to reference, it might have taken off. The Basic books were not bad at all........as one part of a complete product. But after 3rd edition, Hero never tried to make "playable" games except for Champions in 4th. Hero in 5th and 6th stopped being a game played for fun, and became a dry programming language for mathematicians. In my opinion Hero has ceased to be a game, and has become a system reference document.

Duplicate post

Well, people think Deadpool and Batman are heroes not to mention thinking Harley Quinn looks like a 1980s streetwalker. So you are not wrong....

They came close with FHC, but all the "you can actually play the game" stuff was downloadable content instead of in the book material. I didn't even realize it existed until a couple years later and I come here. If a person actually found a copy on the shelf, they'd probably have no idea.

Yes, absolutely. But the majority of people here scoff at leaving their long term close knit group to actually go into public. The other issue it availability. I wanted to run Champs or Fantasy HERO so I went to my FLGS to see about ordering books. They are not in distribution. None of the FLGS in 75 miles can locate any Hero product via their distributors. If you occupy tablespace and use the lights, you should buy something there. I run a lot of horror because we can get the books.

A good point, but the method has to apply to self teaching. Coming into the system with no one in the group having any knowledge of Hero. A lot of people will talk about being introduced by another gamer, and then say they don't game at FLGS and only game with their closely knit group of long term friends. For Hero to expand it needs to be formatted so that Bobby can pick up a copy and actually run the game within 3 calendar days.

Ditto Still going strong, but I wish I had just discovered it and could have binged from season one.

And platform boots. Don't forget the boots.

True, but for me this is straying from the topic of new to Hero gamers. A new "I just bought my first book" gamer wants a complete, understandable set of rules. You, GM Joe and most of the people here on this forum are easily able to adjust, mix and match at will. But we are already here, we need to entice new players that have zero access to anyone that already knows about Hero.

Well IMO 5th and 6th set increasingly higher levels of complexity. Yes, secret ID can be replaced by a social complication. But really, what was achieved besides added hoops to jump through. 5th and especially 6th was riddled with low or no value changes that catered to rule accountants rather than rpg fun. Also all just my opinion. But "cool! I'll buy Instant Change" is way more funner than "so I want to Instantly change into my costume, that is cosmetic what?" Not intuitive at all. Still just my opinion.....

Fair enough, and probably true. My experience is based on FLGS sessions. Up until 04 I was active and then for the next 8 my job was on the road so that colors my take on gaming. At the FLGS Hero has been "too hard" or "takes too long" since the early 90s. Especially for the 90% of gamers I knew that also spent a lot of time on the road. That is why I would like to see something that assumes zero access to anyone who has even heard of Hero. Fantasy or Spy/Espionage may be easier to introduce. Even with the Marvel movies, most people have no idea what a superHERO is. When I ask someone who their favorite superhero is, I still get Deadpool, Venom and Loki as answers. Not supervillain, but superhero.

That may be where I first heard of it. I'm not bringing up anything new here 😁

Still missing my point. Even with a "guide", with the HERO system the new player would still be making decisions about something that they really have no concept of how it works in the game. I have watched and participated in games where the GM spent HOURS working and explaining and advising brand new players on building their characters. Only to have the end product be meh or the new player actually leaving "because Hero is TOO HARD" and joining the D&D game. But the times we gave them a character to try, they were able to quickly grasp the concepts and make their PC's after the session. In the supers games I played/ran all the players maintained multiple PC's. If you character was out for a while (captured, in the hospital, etc.) then you played one of your other characters. For new players, we would ask what kind of Hero they wanted to make and then one of us loaned the new player one of our PC's that was near. Perhaps a combination. A small short intro adventure with pregens, Brawl in the City. They get walked though a short scenario and have the short super-battle with the guide making explanations such as you suggested. Then a walk through on how the pregens had been designed with the hows and whys. Followed by a "let's design your new character" guide with suggestions.

The suits can will ALWAYS screw it up. There fixed for you

I understand how people would like to see a good GL anything, but for me the fun cool GL was utterly destroyed when they transformed him from magical to scifi, then from unique to just one of millions of GLs blanketing the universe. From fun and unique to just another extra. And we have a winner. This. But you have to remember, people don't want superHEROES. They want dark dark gritty we kill'ums like Deadpool or Superman running concentration camps for supers that will not abide with his interpretation of whatever. It's been over 15 years since I found a comic about superHEROES. And when I did, it was short lived as the writer decided to "get edgy" or to "be relevant" to real life and turned it into another turd. Next time you ask someone who their favorite HERO is, don't be surprised if they say Deadpool......

From what I understand, they have fitted JATO bottles for an extra bit of speed.

I really liked WW so I am pessimistally optimistic that this movie may possibly be good. They can do it if they don't decide to fix things.

I loved the original Starfire. Up to about 3rd ed. After that it was about 90% economic development game 5% starship combat and the last 5 the rest. The fun tactical space combat game ceased to exist over ten years ago. I tried to strip the tactical portion of the game out of the last two versions and it cannot be done. Systems no longer have straight forward costs. It is a mess. A game for the number wizards that love a game where 95% is one a speed sheet. I have used Starfire in my scifi RPGs before.

This is why I have always said each version of the game (Fred, 6th, FHC, CC, etc.) needed a complete adventure with pregen PCs that can be run right then and there with zero prep except for the GM to read through and go. Preferably short enough and basic enough the GM only needs 30 minutes max to understand the plot/story. The purpose of the starter adventure and PCs is not to establish the new players and GMs game world, but to give a on hand, already built example of how the rules actually work. A tangible example of how to build works for that genre. IMO HERO is not hard once you realize how things work in-play. In-play is the key. HERO especially, since chargen/builds are outside of "normal" RPGs. Now I never felt figuring combat mods and rolling effects were hard at all once the characters were created. I do feel that the game could benefit from a second "in-play" character sheet that has all the build info stripped out leaving only the info needed to play. HERO IMO is far easier to play than D&D any version and especially easier that Path(rule)finder. It is just HERO buries the game in walls of text, most of which is not needed once the character/npc is generated. Based on WotC and Chaosium's community guidelines I was formally writing up my Champs intro which I had run several times. But with the way HEROs community content program is written I cannot use GRAB or other official Champions villains. I used it not just as an intro to HERO, but to give new players an idea of what the different values actually do in-play. Now I need to replace the villains with a all new lineup, which means I have to redo everything and run more in depth play testing. But it is what it is.

That is me with anything zombie right now.

Nope, I fully understand that people are constantly changing definitions to add their own biases. But I stick to the definition as I can still read it in my deadtree dictionary. "Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance and risk-taking. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it usually involves conflict between opponents possessing advanced abilities, futuristic weapons, and other sophisticated technology." Weber's Honorverse is textbook Space Opera. I personally add the requirement to be consistent within the "technology" for the universe, but that is just me. Star Wars has to much magic, mysticism and literally no tech consistency between shows, which is why I personally call it Space Fantasy, not Space Opera. But YMMV