Spence

It was fun. I really liked the head butterfly lady and the fat guy who's been on other shows that I've liked. The swordplay was awesome and not realistic (but in a very entertaining manner).
 
I have a very real and huge problem retaining information from entertainment shows. I do a lot better when I binge watch rather than watching one episode a week for a while then waiting a year to start watching one episode a week again...which is exactly how I watched the show.
 
I might have a different opinion on how tightly everything hangs together if I went back and binge watched it. Lots of loose ends coming together and plotlines resolving themselves at long last doesn't work well for an audience member who doesn't remember if that character has ever appeared in a previous episode and if his memory if somehow jogged, doesn't remember which plotlines the character was involved in.
 
I got a lot of the broad stuff like the power struggle between the drug lords, Sonny's son, the lost city thing. But I'm sure a lot of the other stuff completely escaped me...because it escaped me.
 
I guess I was trying to say that a lot of what happened didn't seem to move any of the major plotlines forward and didn't seem to move any of the minor plotlines which I managed to remember forward any either.

I feel like Star Trek: Discovery is largely an attempt by the franchise to appease the long-neglected Life Science and Sociology majors in the fan base.

Rise I say, RISE!
 
OK,
 
I am also not one of those people who find it necessary to memorize every line said and every shot filmed so I can impress people with trivia.
 
Yes, I am with you on the Kids thing.
But there is another angle you may not have considered.  
 
The first being that the Enterprise as shown on TNG is not a representative example of Starfleet at its normal.  A while back I got a wild hair and did a little digging.   Luckily there are plenty of detail obsessed people out there I was able to answer my question by filtering through their work  
My conclusion was this.
 
Starfleet does not have children or non-Starfleet dependents on its ships.
Some Starfleet starships may and sometime do have families with children on board.  
The TNG Enterprise was a dog and pony show ship, its primary purpose was to prance around and play diplomat.  The ship class was primarily a science or exploration ship.  The other ships we see children aboard or hear about (like Cisco barely escaping the Saratoga) refer to science ships.  The Miranda class is a science ship.
 
Other Starfleet ships, especially those that are formally assigned to security patrols in potentially hostile areas do not. 
Yes, we see the Enterprise (TNG) doing those missions, but usually they it is because they are responding to another vessel or they happen to be the nearest available.   Only during an active war do we see her one routine war patrol and in those episodes (the few there were), the show made a point of evacuating non-Starfleet.
 
My point is if you only see the Love Boat, you will think that luxury liners are the normal conditions at sea.  Anyone that bases their ideas on a vacation cruise would be in for a rude awakening if they found themselves underway on a working ship. 
 
Also, your thoughts that a Starfleet ship being able to be a starter colony is not that far off.  The early (before Paramount) trek ship plans all showed the saucer section separation as being a one time emergency with the saucer able to travel at impulse speed until it landed.  Once down it could not lift again and was supposed to serve as initial shelter.  I always found it fun to look through the deckplans and in the original ones you found all kinds of stuff that could only be to allow a crew to survive if down. One of my really old deck plans even had a section in the lower saucer called "agricultural equipment storage".
 
Early Trek (before Paramount) had some cool ideas that they did not bring forward. 

And that is understating it.  I don't consider it part of scifi or fantasy because it is a category all on its own. 
Totally bad ass and I am very very very disappointed that there wasn't a 4th season. 

Exactly

Great minds think alike
 
I've been working on a set of "quick start" rules to be attached to a "starter set" that includes pre-gens and a small adventure arc.   Right now I have two similar and still very very rough ones.  A generic fantasy and a supers.  The issue for me is balancing how much to include versus keeping everything as minimum as possible.
 
Zero build info, just enough rules info to function/feel right and copious references to the rulebook.  Plus a generous helping of teasers about cool options in the rulebook. 
 
My objective is an all-in-one genre specific packet that allows a group of people to test drive Hero.  Enough to play that specific adventure, but not enough to do much more without buying the rulebook.
 
 
 
 

As Christougher said.  Playing Hero is easy.  In fact it is FAR more easy than many of the so called easier RPG's are. 
 
If.
 
And this is a big IF.
 
The GM builds everything for the players, strips all the build annotation from the character sheet. 
 
For example, the Wizard only needs know that the Flame Strike does X damage and costs X end (or mana, or what have you) and uses X skill to hit (if any). 
Ditch, hide, burn at the stake anything even resembling build annotation. 
Ditch, hide, burn at the stake any hint of characteristic build costs.
A un-sanitized Hero character sheet has sent more prospective players running screaming from the gaming table than than have ever tried to play it.
 
I've run Hero at cons before and had a difficult time getting players until I stripped the annotation from the sheets.
The sheet should have everything spelled out in plain language. 
I had a laminated playsheet with all the common things on it.
If the character sheet didn't fit on one side of a 8x11 page NOT using micro sized print, then streamline and remove things until is does.
Same with the play sheet. 
You don't have to use fifty zillion rule options for the intro. 
 
But the thing hero has than virtually no other game has is when a player says "that was OK, but I wish the rules let you X", you can actually say "It can, I just made this intro simple".   You shouldn't be surprised how many times that will make a new player a Hero convert. 
 
If you are borrowing another systems starter kit to base the intro on, I'd recommend the D&D one or the Pathfinder one.  I refer to both of them as "Generic Fantasy Settings" because file off the place names and they are practically the same setting.  And 9 out of 10 people can immediately understand that setting enough to play and what their PC's role is.  Leave generic fantasy and you will also need to explain setting and PC roles.

My Battletech mercenary group is named "Kzin Cousins" in honor of the Kzinti race and their emblem is a tiger's paw print.
 
I wish that Paramount could have used Kzinti but the legal battles surrounding THAT would have blown anyone's minds since they'd have had to deal with SFB and Niven (and maybe Niven's publishers).

I thought the definition was; if I do it , it’s fine. If the GM does it and it’s used against me then it’s Powergaming! 😁

There is something to that, the more players, the more sales of other products, in the end.  Its like paying for advertising; its a net loss but hopefully brings in more customers so it ends up a gain.  Hopefully.  And it is a fact of life with gaming materials: once everyone who wants that product has bought it... nobody will buy any more of them.  I mean, that's true with everything, but gaming has  a much smaller, if more fanatical, pool.  So the more people we bring into the fold, the more sales overall.
 
So yeah, its an investment and that's worth doing.

As Christougher said.  Playing Hero is easy.  In fact it is FAR more easy than many of the so called easier RPG's are. 
 
If.
 
And this is a big IF.
 
The GM builds everything for the players, strips all the build annotation from the character sheet. 
 
For example, the Wizard only needs know that the Flame Strike does X damage and costs X end (or mana, or what have you) and uses X skill to hit (if any). 
Ditch, hide, burn at the stake anything even resembling build annotation. 
Ditch, hide, burn at the stake any hint of characteristic build costs.
A un-sanitized Hero character sheet has sent more prospective players running screaming from the gaming table than than have ever tried to play it.
 
I've run Hero at cons before and had a difficult time getting players until I stripped the annotation from the sheets.
The sheet should have everything spelled out in plain language. 
I had a laminated playsheet with all the common things on it.
If the character sheet didn't fit on one side of a 8x11 page NOT using micro sized print, then streamline and remove things until is does.
Same with the play sheet. 
You don't have to use fifty zillion rule options for the intro. 
 
But the thing hero has than virtually no other game has is when a player says "that was OK, but I wish the rules let you X", you can actually say "It can, I just made this intro simple".   You shouldn't be surprised how many times that will make a new player a Hero convert. 
 
If you are borrowing another systems starter kit to base the intro on, I'd recommend the D&D one or the Pathfinder one.  I refer to both of them as "Generic Fantasy Settings" because file off the place names and they are practically the same setting.  And 9 out of 10 people can immediately understand that setting enough to play and what their PC's role is.  Leave generic fantasy and you will also need to explain setting and PC roles.

Yeah to me powergaming is an attitude and approach more than gritty numbers and definitions.  They're out to break the system and dominate, not to have fun or build an efficient character.  I know a guy who without meaning to always found the most efficient and best way to build something in a game.  He just had the knack for it even with games he just learned about.  It wasn't an attempt to pwn the game, he just managed to do well building characters.  If he played Skyrim, he'd build a stealth bow sniper.  He's not a powergamer, because he doesn't build to dominate or break the game, or "win" he just likes to build characters well.

It would.  HERO is exceptionally easy to PLAY - as stated earlier, roll 3d6 vs target number, lower is better.  Roll high for damage.  That's it.  The hard stuff is front loaded into character creation, but if you pre create the characters your players should be fine.

A wiki is better , because:
1) things don't get lost in long threads.
2) we can have a page of goals and goal discussions
 

Yes and no. 
 
For most of the time the only option was work via a licensed product.  But to license a product requires one to make specific commitments with specific timelines.  The license may be very reasonable, but just what reasonable is was never actually put out there.  Not that there is any reason to expect that, but unless you were in the industry or had a copious amount of free time and the ability to lose your licensing fee on a test, you were not going to do anything.
 
Now is completely different with the advent of the creative commons. 
 
I am personally working on something myself.
Not an excuse, but I work full time and am single.  That means I work plus my commute of an hour each way and then have to do all the adulting stuff.
 
Does that make me special?  Nope, I'm guessing most people on this board have their version of the same thing.
 
What is does mean is I do not have hours upon hours to work on a gaming product.
 
 
The open collaborative has been tried. 
Here on this forum. 
 
I followed along a bit and had planned to see if anything came up I could realistically help with.  The things slewed.  Too many people were trying to use the project for personal agendas instead of simply a game intro.  
 
So I backed away slowly and carefully like a deer trying not to provoke an attack from wolves....
 
 
 

Two things from the comics really cement my overall feeling on Thor. In Avengers Annual #9, a computer AI senses "power beyond computation" in the being called Thor. In Avengers #165, Count Nefaria, who has been turned into Superman and has beaten ALL of the other Avengers, shows genuine fear when Thor makes his appearance at the end of the issue. Thor is supposed to be larger than life. A true myth made reality. The characters shouldn't be changed to fit the actors. The actors need to adapt to fit the characters. That is their job afterall...you know....to act. I was extremely disappointed in Ragnarok and "Lebowski Thor". They were insulting interpretations of the character.

If I were ever to write a campaign setting for the Hero System, I'd use the Plot Point Campaign structure. I think this structure can be adopted for any system, and I'd like to see it become the preferred approach for all future Hero System campaign settings, regardless of who authors them.

Finally finished Into the Badlands, the best postapocalyptic wuxia intrigue series ever made.  If you like wire-fu, swordplay, excessive gore, and shifting loyalties, this is the series for you.  It has its flaws--in particular it felt very rushed toward the end, and the primary macguffin is never adequately explained--but this was a high budget production and it showed in the costumes, sets, and fight scenes that never got old.  In fact this series literally had two production units operating in parallel, one for drama and one for action.  Warning: Season 3 is as long as seasons 1 and 2 put together.  Netflix.

Cool. Offer still stands. Or if there is something else I can help with, let me know.

For me "Drunk Hiding in His Cup" Thor wasn't a bad storyline especially after all that had happened.
The added "Fat" portion was meh.  

Finally watched the first two episodes of WandaVison and it was..........  underwhelming? 
 
I really hope they are not planning to continue along the same line.

I think your right.  Like a D&D starter kit or GURPS boxed fantasy set.  Right now Hero is not really geared towards the casual or new player. It is geared towards a subset of the most aloft, egotistical, megamonicial control freaks in the rpg community who want mastery of every nook and cranny of the universe in question.  BWAHHH Haha... where did that come from? 😯

They went from publishing actual playable RPG's to publishing the rule structure to create your own RPG.
 
 
Exactly.  But I would propose that in addition to those two product types, "Hero Toolkit" and the "RPG  built using the Hero rules in the background".  Another one is a smaller "introductory" product that contains a "starter" game designed to allow the players to actually play a few sessions using pre-generated PC's and a pre-built adventure.  This allows them to "test drive" the game such as a generic Fantasy adventure.  Game play would present everything without any annotations or costs on the character sheets or stat blocks.  An appendix at the end would have full write ups for reference later.  
 
A person buys Fantasy Hero Complete but get hung-up because of the lack of pre-built spells and stuff.  I know of too many people that bought a version of Hero and then gave it up because they could not just play it.  So you have a "Intro" package, maybe via HoC, that presents a "generic" and complete adventure they can just play.  After seeing the game actually in play they will have many of their questions answered and can go on to their own ideas or just expanding on the intro.
 
 

How?
 
No; I'm not picking at you or calling you out.  I am asking you to hold that thought a moment.  How did it lead to confusion?  Remember that this was a Hero Games product released during the 3e of Champions.  There was no "Hero System" available to anyone who didn't pull it out of all the games that HERO had already published, and there were a lot of us who didn't know Hero Games was anything more than Champions.  Seriously:   Espionage was a 2e game.  I learned of it's existence sometime around the year 2010.  I finally picked up a copy about five years ago.  I saw a copy of Justice Inc sometime in the nineties, but it wasn't until the late 'teens that I owned it.  Same with a lot of stuff, actually.
 
I _did_ know Fantasy HERO existed, and owned it within a couple of years of seeing it advertised in Different Worlds, but even by that point, we were playing a Fantasy and a Sci-Fi game with Champions.   Bah-- digression!
 
At any rate: the original Fantasy Hero was a self-contained game.  There was nothing to confuse the spells with; there was nothing else in that book.  People playing Traveller were not likely to confuse a laser carbine with D&D's Magic Missile.  Knowing something about Champions didn't make Fantasy HERO some kind of trick.  Certainly it was easy for most of us to see the similarities (if I remember right, the "hero system" (such as it was) was bragged on a bit in the text itself.  But I can't see that it lead to confusion.  Until 4e came out, I owned exactly four "hero system" books: Champions (2e), Champions II, Champions III, and Fantasy HERO.  Well, I owned the Island of Doctor Destroyer (first one), but had lost it somewhere along the way.  I have it again now  (all three of them, actually, but I'd really like to have them all in paper:  when can we get yours in paper, Christopher?    )
 
Game stores weren't really a common thing throughout most of the country.  At that point in my life, I'd have to have heard about a gaming store, then gone to all the trouble to track it down (there wasn't an internet), and discovered that it was four hours from where I lived  (for what it's worth, eventually there was one within two hours of my home, but that was the nineties, and ten years later, it was gone).  That's how most of us were, across the country.  If you weren't in a relatively dense urban area, you lucked into gaming materials or, if you got _really_ lucky, your local grocery store accidentally got a copy or two of Dragon magazine and you'd comb through the adds looking for those "Send SASE to this address for our catalogue!" notices. (man have I played some really great and some really crappy games that way.     Expendables, Starships and Spacemen-- the list goes on and on.)  That's actually how I managed to snag Champs 2 and 3 and the Island of Dr. D (first one).
 
Anyway:  getting back to your comment-- specifically the part I added the bold to:
 
What else is there?  I stress that this-- the feeling-- this _is_ the point of any game.  Well, any RPG.   I have a couple of people who play in my HERO-driven space opera who play together in a D&D game under a different guy, but don't play in my FH game.   They've never played Champions (not into supers), and have tried my FH games, and their comments are "it doesn't really feel like magic, though."   Why not?   Because it's kinda like we do in the Frontier's Edge game (my space opera).  
 
Now to be clear, the only thing either of them knows about the game mechanics is how Skills work, how combat works, and-- well, generally what you'd expect a casual player to pick up and know after playing for six years but never actually having read a rule book.  In short: they're complaint _isn't_ that we're using the same powers constructs under new names or that the worlds are the same or that the underlying mechanic for my magic missile is the same as for my laser carbine---   their complaint is based only on what they know, and all they know is the roll to hit, calculate and apply damage, make a skill check, apply skill levels, record your END, and track your recoveries.
 
Their complaint is entirely that the game feels the same because the system is the same.  I won't lie to you or kid myself:  everyone here has heard me make similar complaints about d20 games over the years: Dungeons and Mutants, Starships and Dragons, etc.  And TSR does a way better job of burying the system than Hero does.  Hero _stresses_ the System, for Pete's sake.  They brag on the similarities.
 
There's not much you can do about that _except_ add as much flavor as you can.  You want your fantasy to _feel_ like fantasy.  if renaming something adds to that, then it seems that it is adding that feel.  It can really only add "confusion" if you are pushing against that feel or don't really want that feel to start with.  You don't name your Fantasy wizard Obi Wan; you name you sci-fi wizard Obi Wan, and name your fantasy guy Arkelos.  The difference is the feel.   That's the _only_ difference there is in HERO: how you make the game feel.
 
I can describe a vast, unexplored continent and all of its mysterious creatures and their incredible abilities.  Is it a land of hidden magics, peopled with impossible races whose ancient mysticisms hold sway over the sun itself?  Or is it Continent IV in the northwest quadrant of the recently-discovered eight planet orbiting Pygon II?   Are the characters the last of king's Holy Defenders, leading and guiding the remnants of his people to sanctuary after the loss of the kingdom and the king himself during the demonic uprising?  Or are they intergalactic scouts, each hoping to make a fortune with the discovery of precious ores on faraway planets?  There's a guy in the party with a secret.  Is he the man who accidentally raised the Demon Lord?  Or is he the leader of the failed revolution of the Satellite Colonies three star systems back?
 
Everything I describe on that land-- and the land itself-- is exactly the same, and the only difference is how you make the setting _feel_.  "Energy Blast" and "Magic Blast" are identical in mechanic, especially if you're using the same system.  All you can do is _everything_ you can do to push the feel of one over the other.
 
 
 
 
 
I fail to see how that is not important.   In fact, since these games are nothing but transitory works of imagination, I fail to see who that is not the _most important_ part of the the game itself.  Well, yours, and everyone with whom you play.
 

Yeah but I wasn't being clear.  FH 1st edition had different names for the base powers.  Force Field was called Ward, for example.  Life Support was called Adapt, Flash was called Dazzle. They had magical sounding names instead of Superhero sounding names.  It was a great feeling idea, but... it leads to needless confusion and duplication, and doesn't really enhance anything except my sense of satisfaction.
 
Giving a name to someone's built power is different than renaming the base powers that people build with.