Andrew_A

As someone who came late to the 6th edition party I can totally see the hate for the 2 tomes that make up the core books.  When I started to consider moving from 5th to 6th I was completely lost with regards to what books to even buy.  I had to ask on these forums for suggestions on what people deemed critical.  I'm glad I did because I ended up up getting some really good advice.
 
The single best piece of advice I was given was that all you really need to run is the "Complete" books.  I've read both Champions and Fantasy Complete cover to cover, no exaggeration.  They are really all you need to run a game, yes they are missing a setting but from a rules standpoint they are all you need.  I have the core books as PDFs only because they were unavailable to me from the site store at the time.  I open them up once and awhile, usually during character creation or after a game to look up rule I'm not familiar with...that's it.  I would never read them cover to cover unless I had them in print anyways but I would only read them cover to cover for my own personal edification not because I felt they were mandatory reading to play.
 
I treat them like Encyclopedias (God, I'm dating myself) in that they're good to have on hand for reference and research but I don't feel the need to read them when more concise and digestible books exist that give me what I need.  I don't hate them because they're dry or not what I think they should have been.

I think I addressed this, but yeah, if you don't care about mechanical bestitude a thread about mechanical bestitude is probably not your cup of tea. 
 
However, you obviously do care about the game itself and its viability to attract and keep players, and you obviously feel that the company's overall direction in the 6e era was detrimental to the game's ability to remain strong in the marketplace.
 
It may surprise you to know that I basically agree with you on that topic (though you would likely say that you don't care if I agree with you or not, and that's your prerogative).
 
However, I separate how I feel about the one thing (quality of system) from how I think about the other (market positioning), and other 6e and DoJ topics as well. I can appreciate one while bemoaning another. 

I can well understand that you feel that you lack the energy or time or inclination to "debate" or discuss this sort of thing. I will point out that it is an elective activity, no one inclined you to expend the time or energy to read any of this, craft and discard drafts, click likes or dislikes, or finally post. It suggests that you have some strong feelings about the current state of the game, perhaps even bitterness, and your professed lack of caring is a defense mechanism to avoid having to admit how much you actually do care.
 
I too am saddened and disappointed by the state of the game. I don't think it had much to do with the 6e core rulebooks themselves, I think the problems had already been well established in the 5e era, but the company got boosted by the Cryptic deal and was able to keep going for a while. Eventually the boost wore off / was spent and the weight of it all dragged them down. I don't know that for actual, that is just my observations from the outside. 
 
As the reason why I started this post in the first place was to understand what's behind the vitriol of the trend towards anti-6e commentary I had noticed, when in my mind I think of "6e" as the actual rules themselves, absent other considerations, I think your post might offer a clue that some of the disgruntlement and harshitude in the mix vis-a-vis 6e is fueled or amplified by some people's unhappiness with the decline of the game in the marketplace in the 6e era rather than purely a dislike of the 6e rules themselves. So whether you care or not, I appreciate your post; it has given me a clue towards better understanding the prevailing attitudes.
 

It is not a terrible question but we live in a different world.  I would like to think there will be more people playing the game that I want to play but I think if I want to GM, I will always find players if the game pitch is good enough.
 
I grew up in a time when, if there were no copies of a book in my local store then it was essentially impossible to buy it.  Now the internet has changed everything.  Right now, I can take a PDF to a local store and have a hard copy printed.  I can have 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th Edition printed as often as I want.  I will always have access to those books.  It is likely that anyone that wants the book will always be able to purchase a copy and print it out.
 
I do not think it is likely that games will ever disappear any more.  The system will always be around.
 
I think this means that game companies do have to re-think how they survive - re-selling old editions is easy.  Doing new things can be easier but when all the old editions are available, are there other things they need to do?  I think that the driver to produce a new edition - rather than re-print the old stuff a company would tart things up and publish a new edition.  If the need to have hard copy reduces, why go to the effort of doing a new edition.  This is probably doubly true of HERO where there are lots of things that are essentially the same??
 
I think the things that come out of this kind of discussion are the kinds of things that might sell, and thus might motivate talented people to produce text.  As such I think it is good to talk.  We might not necessarily change anyone's mind and talk past each other but it might inspire something the rest of will buy some time down the line.  It is especially good to talk when the discourse is polite, even when it gets robust.  So much more chance of positive outcomes.
 
Also, what else would I do when I was sitting at home?  Just watch TV, much more interesting to interact with folk all over the world who share an interest with me.  ?
 
Doc

So, I just want to get this straight. If someone phrases something in a way you associate with some group you have issues with, your reaction is to respond with some sort of passive aggressive spur that I was meant to interpret as an appeal to modify the topics title, plus aspersions that I'm trolling. When I respond with a clarification and invitation to converse your response is to double down on accusing me of trolling, and then inform me that you've classified me as a Nazi (of all things). 
 
I have to wonder...is everything going ok in your life? I don't remember you as being this combative.
 
If you did honestly assume that I was accidentally using phraseology that you consider to be verboten and wanted me to change it to avoid any unintended misunderstanding, a different way to handle it might be to say something like:
 
"The internet meme ', change my mind' has been appropriated, at least in my experience, by some alt-right groups, and you may want to consider rephrasing the topic to avoid any unintended associations."
 
I've not personally encountered the association you mention with the phrase and Neo-Nazism (or other similar groups). I've experienced it as a generalized internet meme. I don't have a problem changing it to something less offensive to you. However I (respectfully) suggest that you consider softening your approach a bit and not be so quick to escalate. 

Long story short, 6th edition is chasing the white whale.  Players have complained about small cost discrepancies with things like figured characteristics.  "Strength is too efficient!"  Yeah... kind of.  Buying your strength up is efficient, except unless you're a brick you're still paying for dice damage that you aren't going to use.  In a 12D6 game, buying a 30 strength isn't abusive, because a 6D6 punch isn't enough to get through anybody's defenses.
 
Buying up primary characteristics to boost figureds tends to result in a small point savings, relative to the overall cost of the character.  A 350 point hero with high primaries may end up saving 20 to 30 points versus a character with lower primaries who bought up his figured characteristics.  This is a real discrepancy, but it's less than 10% of the character's cost.  6th edition separated primaries from figureds, but then they were faced with the idea that maybe figureds were overcosted to begin with.  So Stun and End became a lot cheaper.  But then the cost structure of Endurance Reserve was all screwed up, because you could just buy regular End for really cheap.  The limitation Increased Endurance became an easy way to save points, because the price on that didn't change, but End itself is way cheaper.  Which means that the value of the Charges limitation is all screwed up now.
 
You can't change one fundamental aspect of the system without affecting the others.  And that's what they did in 6th.  Recovery became 1/2 cost, Endurance became less than 1/2 cost.  That means I can pump both those stats up higher than a 5th ed character, and take x2 End cost on all my powers for a -1/2 (or x3 for a -1) for significant savings.  You went from somebody saving 20 to 30 points (between 5-8% of total character cost)  by buying up their primaries to saving between a third and half on their primary power set.  6th edition is rife with problems like that.

I jokingly answered earlier in the thread, but now I'll answer for real.  This is going to come across as kind of rude.  Sorry.  No offense meant to anybody here.
 
 
 
6th edition is inferior because it is designed by a committee, based upon a false promise, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying system.  It's the product of endless tinkering without an achievable goal or a clear direction.  I'll try to flesh out what I mean by all that, but some of it is conceptual and may be rather hard to explain.
 
Everything up to 4th edition was led by the original designers, and there's a logic to how everything was costed.  Power X is about twice as good as Power Y, so it should cost twice as much.  There's a basic concept of balance built into it from the very beginning.  All the powers and characteristics are roughly scaled with one another.  It's not perfectly executed, but it's pretty close.  Moreover, there was a philosophy to how it was balanced.  They valued certain abilities more than others, and so those were costed higher.  These ideas were internally consistent with each other.  Combat abilities are more valuable than noncombat abilities.  Flexible powers are more valuable than those that are more limited.  Therefore these things cost more points.  If you built characters as they intended, and played the game as they intended, it had a wonderful balance.  4th edition Champions was almost perfect.  And again, it was true to its philosophy.
 
Now with a system as complex as Champions, you'll never get a perfect balance.  There are just too many moving bits and pieces, and a powergamer will find the most efficient builds possible, while a person who has never played before will waste points on things that may never come up.  That is unavoidable.  But later editions didn't understand that.  5th edition, 5th edition revised, 6th edition, Champions Complete, all of them have tried to tweak the system to achieve some perfect balance that just isn't possible.  And the biggest problem is, these changes didn't follow the original pricing structure of the system.  The changes were made by people with a different philosophy of how the system should work.  And those changes don't quite mesh with the underlying system.
 
As an example, let's go to 5th edition, written by Steve Long (somewhat prophetically named when you see the size of his manuscripts).  He had his own ideas about how the Hero System should work, and he modified it.  Adders became much more common.  The pricing structure for some powers was changed, but not for others.  And while some of these changes were arguably good, others were not so great.  It was clear that he was seeing the system in a different way from the original authors, but it was a modification of their system and not one built from the ground up with his own ideas.  Long's philosophy appeared to be based around trying to make everything fit around a certain core set of game mechanics.  Instant Change was removed as a Talent and modified to be a "My clothes only" Transform.  Shapeshift was turned into a sense-affecting power.  But one of the most glaring examples here is Damage Shield.  In 4th edition, Damage Shield was a +1/2 advantage you applied to a power.  If anybody touched you, or if you touched anybody, they were hit with that power.  When 5th edition hit, it suddenly required you to purchase the advantage Continuous (+1).  But, you didn't actually get the benefit that Continuous granted, which is that somebody hit with a Continuous power will be affected by it every single phase.  No, you had to pay a +1 advantage tax because now you've got to change your Energy Blast to a Constant power before you can apply Damage Shield.
 
Why is this a problem?  Because it's a different game philosophy stacked on top of the previous one.  While both follow the idea of "you get what you pay for", 4th edition was more focused on comparative effectiveness, whereas 5th added costs with the idea of making powers conform to a certain format.  A 10D6 Energy Blast with Damage Shield in 4th edition was 75 points.  That's the same as a 15D6 Energy Blast.  Quite expensive, but you got the benefit that you could hurt your enemy when it wasn't your phase, without an attack roll, depending on what they did.  Still might be too expensive though.  In 5th edition, you had to buy it Continuous first.  So now that power became 125 points, the same as a Twenty-five D6 Energy Blast.  No power-gamer in the world would choose a 10D6 Damage Shield over a 25D6 EB.  The two aren't remotely comparable.  There are other problems as well.  The cost of Major Transform had previously been based upon the cost of RKA, the logic being if you can kill them, you might as well be able to turn them into a frog.  5th ed wisely dropped having Cumulative be a +1/2 advantage (RKA is cumulative by default), but it added requirements that you had to pay more to affect different types of targets.  Instead of "turn target into frog" the standard Transform became "turn human into frog".  To affect any target, you had to buy another advantage. 
 
In this way, the cost structure of 5th edition became less consistent, more concerned with form than function.  Abuse wasn't eliminated at all, the nature of the abuse just changed.
 
I wasn't active on the boards during the time that they were soliciting suggestions for 6th edition.  I think I had an account here but I had wandered off.  But as I understand it there was a lot of discussion about what changes people wanted to see made.  And while I like most of you guys just fine, good lord do I disagree with a lot of you over how the game system should work.  I see questions on the Hero System Discussion page, and many of the suggestions are overly complex and extremely point inefficient.  But some people feel like they've got to dot those "i"s and cross those "t"s.  Again I wasn't involved in any of the discussions, but when I flip through the 6th edition book, I'm reminded of the adage "too many cooks spoil the broth".  6th compounds some of the mistakes of 5th edition and doesn't look back.

I think, on balance, my view is that, mechanically, Hero has not changed since it was first edition Champions.  It has a simple but effective mechanic that it has stuck to, despite a number of people pointing out that rolling high for good makes more sense.
 
What has changed is the way the powers are presented, and whether that is better or not is a matter of debate.  Certainly some of the powers are more logically presented but I have a problem with some of the maths (mainly how you go about calculation a modifier value - there seems to be some inconsistency and unfairness) and the detail.
 
By 'detail' I mean that, for example, Shapeshift is now a sensory power.  That sort of makes sense, I suppose, but it is confusing for new players and some old players too: actually building something that can change shape, as most people would understand the concept, is not straightforward.
 
Everything takes a lot longer to actually read, understand and build now.  1eChampions was a slim volume and you could still do (almost) everything that you can do with 6e, given a bit of imagination and a following wind.  I'm pretty sure there are bits of 6e I've never actually read.
 
If we are referring to 'build mechanics' therefore, well, it's Betamax vs VHS: Betamax may be technically better, but VHS is the one that actually gets used.  Got used.  Maybe I should have gone with DVD and BlueRay, but even that is showing my age.  How about Apple abandoning the Lightning Connector for USB C?  6e is definitely the best iteration in some respects, but not when it comes to excitement and fun, which is what the mechanics should be aimed at achieving.  The last time I really felt that was when I got my hands on 4th edition Champions, the Big Blue Book.
 
In summary, the actual game mechanics have never really changed - what we appear to be arguing about is the build mechanics.
 
The build mechanics have improved in some areas, not so much in others.  They have certainly become more complicated, which can be a barrier to entry.  I daresay if I went back to 4th edition now it would seem more limited, so in that way, 6e is better, but then I'm an addict and I'd get 7e if it came in 4x500page lever arch files.  I don't think all the changes have been for the better and I don't think all the things that could do with changing have been.  6e is (build) mechanically different.  I think I'll leave it there.

I will resist the temptation to derail the thread.  I have mentioned in other places things that I think would bring the system up to date and be more modern.  I am not sure what I would really pull for but there is no unifying mechanic for things in the system - the mechanic for skills is different from the system for skills resolution (even when the skill is actively opposed), the speed chart (one of my favourite aspects of the game) creaks a little and there might be some thought on how that might work in a modern system. 
 
Even D&D has upgraded and modernised how it goes about things (such as the use of advantage - taking the best of two rolls, etc) and I think it would behove HERO to recognise it probably did not get everything right in 1980 and have a good think about how the mechanics of the system might be brought up to date and deliver a system that better reflects the accumulated gaming knowledge of three decades.


Doc

Because
STR
DEX
CON
INT
EGO
PRE
OCV
DCV
OMCV
DMCV
SPD
PD
ED
RED
END
BOD
STUN
 
Do you want to explain to a non-Hero player that Hero has seventeen characteristics and you think that's NOT ENOUGH?
It's my own opinion that Hero would benefit from FEWER characteristics, not more.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary goes and buys some Striking Appearance

Outside of the art, I'm one of the few people who liked Fuzion. I never got to play Champions: New Millenium, but I really liked creating characters in that system. It just felt clean and streamlined in a way that HERO 3-5 never did.

I just also wanted to say that I’m not an edition snob. Play and have fun! But also point out that some of the complexity of newer editions is to give you more options to make characters to your vision.

That's how many points I have.

Wow. For a people who threw off a tyrannical monarchy, tamed the West, won two World Wars, split the atom, overturned institutional racism, went to the Moon, and built the biggest economy in the world... you guys sure throw the towel in fast.

Yeah... was reading this here... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/26/democrats-primaries-upset-joe-crowley-alexandria-osacio-cortez?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=279391&subid=24646434&CMP=GT_US_collection
 
And I don't see why this is a bad thing. It is exactly what the Democrats need. Assuming the staid leadership realizes it. She may not be a Dem party member, but as Crowley did, the Dems should back her fully.
 
As Old Man said, the Dems have become Republicans (while the Republicans have become extremists in many cases) and that is the problem. The whole country has swung so far to the right, that Hillary is considered a liberal. (She was a Goldwater Girl for christsakes!) I mean, I voted for her as the best candidate for the job at the time, but I really don't like the mainstream Democratic ties to Wall Street and the like. I'm much more of a Democratic Socialist in leaning, but not a Bernie-Bro ideologue. The fact that Bernie is considered "radical" is just another indication of how far the Center has swung right.

'Effing Canadian optimism!
 
 
 
 
?

Guys, I agree what's happening is wrong and bad, but it isn't a sea change in the nature of American politics or the American people. Watergate. Vietnam War protests. Segregation. McCarthyism. Japanese internment. Dust Bowl migrants. The pendulum swings. Nothing is broken yet. It does more harm to give in to cynicism and despair, and stop trying to be better.

Canada also detains migrant children, sometimes for months at a time

Because they really don't care about life and families. It's a cover.
CES

Why isn't the "Pro Life" (read: Anti Choice), "family values", "What about the children?" crowd screaming at the top of their lungs about the injustice meted upon the separated and corralled children of illegal immigrants? They should, in fact, scream so loudly that their larynges are torn to shreds from the sheer exertion.

The rate of change is strange. Remember when the idea of treating Canadians as a US enemy was so silly they made a John Candy movie out of it?

Trump's indignation at other countries' trade practices is an act, playing to his base. From the start he's told them that their problems are the fault of other people, that they've been mistreated by everyone who isn't white working-class America (except of course for him and his rich friends). The Donald isn't concerned with fairness, but with getting everything he can that he thinks will make him look good. Just like this meeting with Kim Jong-un -- he made grand promises for what he expected to achieve, but in the end settled for vague non-binding "commitments" to denuclearization. Trump gets the photo-op he craves, something he can sell back home as deal-making. But Kim gets much more, the international recognition and legitimization of his regime that his family has always wanted.
 
It also occurred to me that Donald Trump tearing up the deals, arrangements, and systems established by his predecessors, is so that he can try to establish new ones he can credit to himself. He wants to remake the face of America in his image, to stamp a giant "TRUMP" across it like one of his buildings. I've come to believe he doesn't understand or really care if anyone but himself benefits from that. I also suspect it's why he seems such a fan of Vladimir Putin, because Putin has more or less accomplished that with Russia. Aside from obliviousness to the ethical issues relating to his ruthlessness, Trump doesn't seem to appreciate that Putin accomplished it through patience, discipline, and calculation -- all qualities the Donald lacks.

Just over $17200 with just over two days to go.  Kicktraq has the upper side of the trend line over the goal, so it's definitely possible!  
 
Seeing if this works.. 
 

It's close.  Just over $16K (out of $20K) with four three days to go.  I'd really like to see this succeed.

That is chief among the reasons I honestly hope that it doesn't meet funding. It will be bad for the Hero system, not good.

As I always say, "I don't like it" is not synonymous with "It's no good." Subjective taste and objective quality are both valid, but entirely different measures. I can appreciate a fictional entertainment for its production values, cinematography, intelligent script, skilled acting, etc., yet not enjoy it. OTOH I can recognize that something is poorly put together while still having fun watching it.
 
For the record I put the Dark Knight trilogy in the former category. I admire what it accomplished but have no desire to watch any of those movies again. But I'm also no fan of the Batman character generally. (Now that may bring the haters down on my head.)