RavenX99

Oh, right... I traded him a Clockwork Hero for a copy of RG once. I should have thought about how much he was always writing for that.

I'm always a little curious... do you think Aaron wrote such detailed notes because he knew he might want to publish, or was Aaron just that way?

Accidental Change doesn't rip a character out of the world for a few weeks. That feels like a pretty huge complication, and I don't feel the two axes of Physical Complication really reflect the severity because it doesn't really consider how _long_ the complication is affecting. It's the same points for a PhysComp that knocks you out for 5 minutes. you lose the fight you're out of the "adventure"... your immediate plans are disrupted you're just "gone" for 1-6 weeks... short-term plans are disrupted, you have to make excuses to everyone about where you were, you could lose your day job, etc. Hm. But these also feel like the same results of being knocked out for 5 minutes, leading to being captured and detained. 🤔 As a GM, I'd be really reluctant to put this kind of thing on an NPC, unless I planned to never actually roll for that 8- and just declared it happened as a plot device where I found it useful to the story. But also, it's an NPC, so points aren't really important here, unless you're writing for publication.

I own a lot of Aberrant material... never played it, but thought about using the setting with Hero. Also thought about Wildcards, but Wildcards is so close to "anything goes" that it wouldn't look all that different from a lot of other superhero RPG. (Modular Man being a good example of how far they stretched the idea of "alien virus gives you super powers".) So I kind of see Wildcards as being that "narrow focus, but the GM has given you so many 'outs' you don't really need to adhere to the theme too strongly. Plus you can play aliens."

I think it was Allen Varney who said something like "all the rest of us delve deep into the mine to dredge up a handful of gems, and Aaron just dipped his bucket in the well and it came up full every time."

I'm trying to imagine this as a convention scenario, how players would react to it. Sounds like a lot of fun.

Cool... so did you roleplay through that event, starting with PCs that didn't have powers yet? Or was it just background?

That sounds pretty cool. Have you gotten by-in from all the players? Wondering about the setup... have powers been popping up for some time, or is it a sudden world-wide phenomenon? I think the latter would be interesting to play... the whole "the world has never seen superpowers, and now you're in the middle of how it reacts when dangerous individuals suddenly appear."

I've been watching the entire X-Men movie franchise in like 2 weeks, and it really made me think about this... in the movies, there are no other supers, just mutants. In the comics, the "mutant panic" didn't feel so real because there were so many other supers... "Cap'n America and the Avengers and that sorcerer dude are the good guys, but them damn muties, they need to be locked up!" It's a lot more believable when it's just "damn muties" and _none_ of them are considered heroes until the shift in Dark Phoenix. So I really think this kind of focus can mean a lot if you want to explore something like "mutant panic" without diluting it. Or like my cyborg game, CHROME... the whole focus was megacorps and misuse of technology and using people as tools. (Because the cyborgs are all "owned" by somebody.) I was reading some commentary on the Gestalt universe, and how Bennie diluted the concept by giving players so many options to have powers without being a gestalt. And this is one of the dangers of such a narrow focus... you really need all your players on-board with the concept. Because either you're pushing them into a concept they didn't really want to play, or you're diluting the world concept by letting players create exceptions. And I've learned when you let players create exceptions, over half your players will want to be an exception, because so many players are looking to be "more special" than the other special people. (I once had 5 players agree, with no objections, to all play wood elves from the same village with no contact with the outside world... exactly 1 player gave me what I asked for. I got an outcast who was not allowed to interact with the village, one raised by humans not knowing they were an elf, one who had left the village to apprentice to a human fighter, and a human who wanted to be an elf. They were all interesting concepts, but they broke the fundamental nature of what the campaign was supposed to be about.)

The Champions universe, like Marvel and DC and the Forgotten Realms, is a kitchen sink of ideas... super science, mutants, magic, aliens, beings from alternate dimensions, you name it, it's all in there. Have you ever run or played in a campaign setting where the source of superpowers was limited to a single source? All mutants, all from an alien virus (Wildcards), all super-science (super soldiers, cyborgs), all psychic manifestations, etc? (Scott Bennie's Gestalt setting always fascinated me.) My wife ran one of my favorite campaigns with an all-cyborgs theme.... there were no innate superpowers, only cyborgs and robots. I find the constraints really satisfying, as the world and story having a solid thematic basis really helps things hold together. You can have really great adventures in a kitchen sink, but I feel the constraints make it easier to achieve when everyone is on-board with the idea.

And this is my concern... relatively few knew about it, and the material is of varying quality, but it's this little piece of hidden Champions history that I feel would enrich the community to preserve it where everyone can have access. One of the fun things about APAs is that writers often talk about what's going on in their lives, projects they're working on, etc, and I find reading through those in Haymaker! archives to be more compelling than the game material.

OMG, someone remembers Clockwork Hero. I'm actually looking at scanning the whole collection and making it available, but I'm working through the legal/ethical issues. Scott Heine wrote stuff for it that he later reworked and sold to a publisher, so I'm talking to him about his contributions, and I probably need to see who I can find from the original authors. The big problem is that technically, I don't have the right to copy anything but my own work... everyone participated with the understanding that the APA was distributed to a limited audience. There's one author I've searched for off and on for _years_ and have never been able to find.

I like my comic book movies to be mostly-serious, with occasional bits of humor. Ragnarok went way over my usual limit, and I still loved it. I think it helps that they set the humorous tone in the opening scene, with Thor explaining to his long-dead cell-mate. And I think the script-writer really knew how to make it work. I just wish they hadn't spoiled some of the best funny scenes in the trailers. All the best verbal competition between Hulk and Thor were in the trailers... raging fire/smoldering fire, "who won" "I did" "That doesn't seem right," etc. There was a lot to like about this movie... my only real issue is, as another reviewer put it elsewhere, it felt like two different movies crammed together. The invasion and destruction of Asgard is a serious thing, and they spent little time dealing with that. I suspect this was intentionally a light interlude before The Infinity Gauntlet, which I expect to be much more serious.

sentry0, I was recently in much the same place you are... I played 4th edition heavily back in the day, but I'm just getting into 6th and ramping up for a new Champs campaign, and I've spent a lot of money on PDFs, some of which I feel would have been better as later purchases. "Champions Complete" seems a good starting point... but be sure you get that an not just "Champions". The latter is a campaign sourcebook that spends hundreds of pages on what it means to run a superhero game (the spirit of my hero Aaron Allston lives on), but is not a rulebook. If you want campaign setting information, that's "Champions Universe," though I think villain books would serve you better in the beginning than the world book overview in the beginning. I have 6E1 and 6E2, Champions Complete *and* Hero System Basic (don't ask)... Champions Complete would be my starting point if I bought just one book, especially if I wanted paper. If you're going to get 6E1/6E2, then Champions Complete is kind of redundant. I only got it to have physical book to pass around the table (because I have 6E1/6E2 in PDF, which is my preferred format.) From there, the Villains books are pretty core, but that kind of depends on where you want to go... as you note, the 5th edition books are still very compatible. Point costs change, but the basic rules at the table really haven't, and there's a wealth of information in the 5th edition library that hasn't been reproduced for 6th. I just finished reading the VIPER book and it was great.

Re: Zero Information I'm with you here. I have enough trouble with players who submit characters that are inappropriate for the campaign even when they've been given adequate information.

Re: Nanotech / magical self-growing structure This is good... I hadn't considered Barrier. (Barrier's new to me... I just knew that it more or less replaced Force Wall, but haven't looked at it yet. I didn't realize it was a lot more than Force Wall with a new name.) The interesting part is that with the removal of a minor restriction (it moves very slowly), this becomes a very different creature... even with that restriction, if you dropped it on the bed of a sleeping person, it could entangle them before they wake up. Remove the restriction and it could strike and grab with vine-like limbs. And it's very likely that my son might decide to go that route... one side of me feels like the solution should be capable of scaling that direction. Transform is an approach I hadn't considered, but it doesn't look like a bad solution, if the GM doesn't mind coming up with game stats for freeform metal structures. One thing I like about the Transform option is it makes the power clearly dependent on the source material... if there is no metal left to Transform, then it stops growing. That has a bit of elegance to it that the "only with a source of metal" limitation doesn't. The thing does need a bit of intelligence, because it's supposed to be able to react to new situations and solve problems on its own... my son is very insistent that his creations are alive and free-thinking, even if they do think slowly. (I like the story potential of created "slave" beings that evolve into independent thinking, with the ability to refuse their "master's" orders. I could create a whole sub-plot around that at some point.) That "intelligence" could be hand-waved, but I'm thinking that an Automaton with Transform (and maybe a couple supplementary abilities, like Stretching, Entangle, etc) might be a "clean" way to do it. I'll need to do a little building to explore some of these options. (It's also worth noting, the solution should make sense to a bright ten-year-old. Could be a good rule of thumb for HERO in general.

Okay this one is a little odd. I was a HERO Guru back with 4th edition... I've grown a little rusty, having skipped over 5th edition. So I've been getting back into it with 6th edition, and teaching my 10-year-old son to build characters. So, of course, he throws me a curve-ball and I'm trying to decide how to best handle it, to distill it down to the essentials. My son's character is a magical blacksmith/armorer, and one of the abilities he wants is to craft "metal plants"... marginally self-aware, capable of growing (by absorbing metals) to form bridges, ladders, barriers, etc. But not at combat speed... something like six to twelve hours to grow a bridge across a 15' chasm. Independent... he can plant one and walk away and it will follow its last instructions. Once the bridge (or whatever) has served its purpose, the "core" of the plant can shed the excess growth and return to its portable form. At one level, I'm inclined to call it something like a 5-point Perk and hand-wave the actual mechanics since it's all out-of-combat effects and of marginal utility in a superhero game. On another level, I'm drawn to find an elegant way to stat this out. (It could be a lot more useful in a heroic level fantasy game.) My first inclination is an automaton with Growth and appropriate advantages/limitations to make it take a long time, require a source of metal, etc. I thought about abstracting it... a ladder or bridge is a very limited Flight, Usable By Others, or Barrier, etc; takes 6 hours to activate, etc. But it's not terribly independent of the character. I suppose I could build an automaton with those powers. How would I approach this if it was combat speed? Throw down a "plant" and bam, Barrier in a few segments. Or a bridge to allow the normals to escape. Would combat speed fundamentally change how it gets built? Thoughts?

Re: Do you think this use of Personal Immunity is reasonable?

Re: House Rules I go the other way around. Get rid of Resistant Protection and the problem is solved. No more goofy "apply an advantage to an advantage to get the right cost" problem. Everywhere you want Resistant Protection, buy DEF + Resistant and the math will be right and obvious. (And Hero Designer's math will be right without programming an exception or jumping through hoops.) As many sacred cows as got blasted out of existence since 4th, I'm surprised this one is still there, causing mathematical convolutions in published books to get DEF + Resistant + (More Advantages) to match the cost of Resistant Defense + (Advantages)... when it's Resistant Defense causing the problem.

Re: 6E books question... bit confused on what to buy...

Re: 6E books question... bit confused on what to buy... There was nothing "not serious" about my response... I wasn't taking offense just to have something to argue about. I just normally don't voice my annoyance so readily. For the exact reason of what resulted... it doesn't do any good and tends to make things worse. Again, in case you missed it, my apologies for being pushy. It's not my place to "teach you a lesson" about how to treat newbies. Sure, I've been managing online services since back before spam was invented. I've never been on a forum that has such draconic measures against spam, treating new members as if they have committed a major infraction. There are better ways to deal with it.

Re: 6E books question... bit confused on what to buy... No, just that fans make more fans. I am a "customer" in terms of "selling" me on the system and the community. The fan community is Hero Games' greatest marketing asset. Sorry, I've been involved in managing multiple online forums since 1986, including another RPG fan community for 12 of those years. I tend to think a lot about the role of the fan in terms of the success of a game system and the publisher, and that community members have a responsibility to the community, but I can forget that most fans really don't think about it, or care about it. I'm projecting my value system onto others here, and I shouldn't be doing that. bigbywolfe, my apologies for being pushy. I'm not really being the best of newcomers here. Certainly not unreasonable. It can be pretty frustrating when they do that (and I've dealt with newbies who come right out and say, "Yeah, but searching is too much effort, it's just easier to ask for the answer I want." I've spent a lot of time not just trying to teach them to fish, but trying to instill the value that learning to fish for oneself is desirable, valuable, and ultimately necessary.) But that thread didn't mention the APG at all, which was a part of the OP's question. I found that thread, but it did not answer my question (which was unspoken, but basically the same as the OP). I think it's worth noting that to the person reading the question, a new post and an old thread may look like the same question... but to the person posting the new question, they may not be the same question. A little more info: I actually own PDFs of the BR and the APG. I got them as a special-offer bundle on RPGNow for, um... $10 back in January. The fact that BR and APG were bundled together seemed to imply that they went together... first you learn Basic, then you learn Advanced, that's how most RPG systems with Basic and Advanced titles work. My initial question (to myself) was just how much overlap there was between BR/APG and SE1/SE2. How much of the system did I now own, and how much was still to be had? I was rather surprised to find that BR was entirely a derivation of SE1/SE2, yet APG was all new material. Before I skimmed the APG, I half expected that Basic+APG would be the same material except split on different lines (beginner/experienced instead of characters/combat). $10 would have been a great deal for just the APG in PDF, but I was disappointed to discover that I still needed to buy both SE1 and SE2 to get all the rules.

Re: 6E books question... bit confused on what to buy... You'd be surprised at how hard it is to locate those threads via search when you've never seen them. I looked, and I couldn't find a thread that answered the question as clearly as this one did. And my Google Fu is actually pretty strong, but the names of the books are very common and the question is a little vague to pin down in search terms. Okay, if you say so. If you didn't think about how your words came across, nothing further I say will help. Nobody's shouting. You're just in all-out defense mode at this point, trying to shift all the blame to me for the way your words came across. I assume you're already a fan of the system and the community. We are not equals here. You are the established member of the community, and I am the newcomer. You have a responsibility to the community that I do not. (In fact, I'm a second-class citizen here, unable to fill in even basic profile information or set some preferences, restricted from having an avatar or sig, forced to fill in a Captcha for every post. Before I even start participating, I already feel like I'm not quite welcome here, treated as a user who has broken the rules before I've even done anything. I have to admit, I probably would have shrugged your comment off and left it unanswered if I wasn't watching that post counter that says I gotta have twenty good posts before the system stops treating me like a criminal. I really feel weird posting without getting to put on my "face" first. )

Re: Traveling in your typical modern day sewer: what rolls for illness? Still, people die in car crashes every day, but we don't roll for a chance of accident when the heroes drive down to the mayor's office to give him the bad news. I wouldn't worry about infection from exploring a sanitary sewer (nothing really "sanitary" about it exploring it) unless something happened to increase the risk... as others have said, wounding, ingestion, etc. Now, one question might be, what are the chances of accidentally sustaining an injury (out of combat) while exploring said sewer? Me... I'm likely to not worry about rolling dice and make dramatically appropriate decisions. If it seems right for the story, somebody gets cut and infected. Maybe we roll some dice to find out who, or to disguise the fact that I "just decided." (I've been away from the Hero community for too long... I'm not sure how y'all react to to that kind of thing.)

Re: 6E books question... bit confused on what to buy... Thank you, just the thing I wanted to know. Throw Basic at my new players, buy APG for myself.