KawangaKid

It's a long shot -- but that tuft of hair, plus short height and shape of head BEHIND Hercule Poirot screams Tintin to me.

For the longest time, I've been toying with a Champions campaign that was NOT super-villain / crime-fighting centric. Instead, it would've been a Thunderbirds (as in, "Thunderbirds are Go!") type of campaign. Saving people from natural disasters, building failures, accidents (pre-, during, post-) and real 'support the police & firefighters' work in a grey area of the law. Sure, there'd be some occasions for brawling, but it'd be an even share with investigation, rescue, and exploration. I remember that the character builds would be very different for a team, because the non-combat focus would require greater emphasis on different powers to rescue people trapped in buildings, lost underwater, etc...

Well, I think it adds flavor. Most definitely. It certainly worked for Fading Suns as a whole.

For me, while I enjoyed the rich detail of the Terran Empire setting, I have a related, similar response to the 'maps' comment. Some of this falls on the 'art', but it's a bigger thing than that -- setting design. I think I was looking for something in the setting that gave the Terran Empire its character visually, perhaps: - ship designs broken down by manufacturer or major factions; - uniforms, clothing, and space suit design - interior layouts of ships, arrangements of space stations, and yes maps of settlements, towns, and cities. Sadly, I seem to have misplaced my paper copy (or it got discarded in one of the flooded storage incidents, and I didn't notice). I'll have to pick up a digital copy.

Would it damage the 'brand' of Hero to release some things for free? Also, for pricing, is there a page count + b&w / color + images/no images standard that's being followed?

It’s got potential, but I’m afraid about them doing too much for shock and not for a good story...

In Batman: Year One, we saw how a boy who'd dedicated his life to fighting crime finally figured out how to become a one-man crusader against the underworld. Many of our super-hero campaigns assume we're more or less fully fleshed out as a hero, along with all our powers / abilities / skills. But what about a campaign that's about how you go from Talented Normal and get experience bonus jumps (due to trauma or accident or intensive training) as you grow into a low powered hero? First off: what are our inspirations for this? Perhaps these... Batman: Year One any other (Hero): Year One series The first halves of the Arrow and Flash TV series Batman: Nightwalkers The entire run of Smallville Are there any gaming source material out there for this?

well, all I’m saying is that there’s still an opportunity here with the new community content approach. but finding the right factors to capitalize on a boom can be tricky. Look at all the would-be gaming industry giants that didn’t make it in the d20 era. in addition to reawakening the Hero market, we should continue with initiatives that create a new generation - something like the character creation cards they came out with, perhaps? in any case, I’m eager to see what people come up with, and if there are hard market numbers out there that can give insights. Starting to feel like this is all armchair quarterbacking now.

the easiest way to do this is to create modern day pulp characters or danger international characters, I feel. Asking someone to build a full on super-hero may be a bit too much. In a way, this is similar to DCC which tends to start off people with 0-level characters, making character creation even easier than the classic roll 3d6 x 6 times approach and choose a class. Another approach: a campaign with a random power roll-up for low powered characters, then slowly award points to build up their characters.

I hear these are record years for GenCon, and the indie RPGs / storygames are really an area of growth. In the absence of more detailed numbers, I'd hesitate to talk about the main reasons but I'd hazard that HERO can make a comeback with the right product line strategy and a good marketing approach. Note: I'm not saying that we should entirely ditch the strengths of HERO. I've written some articles about it, and I believe that HERO is about characters and story as much as any other RPG, but a different kind of storytelling and tolerance for plausibility than others.

For us publishing newbies -- any recommended tools for creating & laying out PDFs?

I'm posting this here, my latest blog post on Champions (and the Hero System), because I though that it might help some of the folks currently planning to work on Community Content for Hero. None of it is really mechanics or even anything new for long-time aficionados -- and I'm sure some of you might have other takes. But in light of many of the gaming trends these days, I think it's important to celebrate the confluence of factors that keep Champions & Hero relevant and -- dare I say it -- unique in the game-o-sphere.

Eager to work with some of my old gaming buddies on filling out the corners of the HERO System offerings -- and to remind people to go out there and be HEROes!

It was nice to see Marc Dacascos again, and not just as a stereotypical boss level fight.

Yes I may have to go the PayPal route, and set up an account. UPDATE: Tried PayPal, and it worked. I guess there was just an issue with the normal Credit Card payment gateway. The Philippines gets tagged as a source of credit card fraud from time to time, so some gateways do that, I guess.

I just tried paying, but it rejected two of my Credit Cards. Both still have balances and are in good standing -- is there a problem with the Payment Gateway? Or is there just a security issue with credit cards from the Philippines?

It'll be tricky -- HIM is kind of a Mxyzptlk meets Mephisto character, wildly powerful but somehow defeated through emotional or moral triumphs.

One of the things that seems to be a natural outgrowth of this exercise -- a discussion between the two of us regarding the differing powers and power levels of the girls. As mentioned above, they initially seem to be interchangeable and have many shared powers -- but occasionally the stories show how they're different. A new challenge for me: how to build & rebuild the characters so that those differences come out in play (Bubbles at a lower power level given her friendly nature, but terrible when enraged as in the S01 episode "Bubblevicious".

From my blog: The Powerpuff Girls, it turns out, aren't a pure rip-off of the Kryptonian power set. Each of the girls have their own unique powers -- and that's just from the original series. I won't go into the two other series that have aired since then.In order to build the girls in the Hero System, I'd follow the following process: create a base PPG template of powers add in the individual powers and abilities of each girl tweak the stats and complications for a completed character sheet. 1. the Base PPG template Fortunately, www.writeups.org has DC Heroes character sheets for each of the girls: Blossom Bubbles Buttercup These will not only help to build my base template, but will also help in the next step on how to add in the individual powers of each girl. However, not everything necessarily will be reflected in these stats, so I'd have to go to a Wikia page for an 'in fiction' explanation of those abilities. 2. Individual Powers and Abilities It turns out that Bubbles has the ability to talk to animals, and that Buttercup is the fastest of the trio, and that Blossom has both fire breath and freeze breath. Thank goodness for fandom wikis which keep track of this sort of thing. 3. Finishing off the character sheet I'll be honest in that I'll be trying to not only be faithful to the builds based on the two sets of source material above, but I'll also be balancing them against each other, point-wise. This is partially due to my longtime Hero System habits of wanting to know the point totals, but also to show my son how allocation of the same amount of resources can result in very different results... and different options for play.

My son kept asking questions about who could defeat whom when encountering superheroes and video game characters across a variety of media, none of them comics. so I decided to run Champions for him, with his fave supers, train him in the ruleset, and then eventually have the PPGirls come up against the many different iterations of Superman and family. So far: a damaged Superman robot that was controlled by Mechanon. also: I plan to use it to teach him about science (villains galore) and math (System and puzzles), which he needs instruction in.

This is a welcome return. My West Coast Metropolis & Gotham were San Angelo and Night City respectively.

He’s dead? When did he pass on?

Some argentine tango tandas...

Not a bad idea. Someone needs to Defend the original timeline. 😁

Longtime fan and Hero gamer. Prided myself on pen and paper calculator work on character sheets. But now I'm running for the next generation and I want to simplify my life... Some help?