Nolgroth

Better that than Cherenkov radiation from spent fuel rods.

***shudder***

I just watched Shin Godzilla 

Legally Blonde

Godzilla is Legally Blonde?  Who would've thought....?

Ah ha, Vondy is back! Good to see you.

Things I do not particularly care for;

• Breakpoints at 13, 18, etc. I would have, long ago, wished Hero would have ditched the Char/5 and just made every point of Characteristic mean something.
• Half dice for normal damage attacks. This is a direct artifact of the Breakpoints and drives me insane.
• The Roll Low part of Skill rolls. I mean it's not horrific, but a Roll High system would have been more intuitive.
• An underlying assumption that because I have a High Score in X, Therefore I am Y (I have a High Intelligence Score, Therefore I am Smart). I a toolkit game, I would think that the opposite were true (I bought a lot of Skills, etc to represent my Intelligence, Therefore I am Intelligent). Just purely a taste thing.

What I like about Hero is that all of those little complaints that I have are so easy to fix. I can just decide to divide all the stats by 5, thereby removing both the Breakpoints, eliminating half dice for Normal attacks, and making each point mean something. I can, easily, devise a Roll High system.  I can also choose to remove Characteristics (except combat and attrition stats like PD, ED, Body and Stun) and go to an entirely skills based system wherein the skills and powers you buy reflect your character. Believe me, I have imagined ways to push Hero so far that it hardly seems like Hero anymore. It merely retains the core dice rolling and damage mechanics. I have even conceived of how to replace Body and Stun with Shadowrun like Condition Monitors and a damage system that correlates. At some point it ceases to be Hero but that takes a lot of stretching.

Well duh! The poor are just some abstract concept beneath the dignity of the upper class. Rich people, on the other hand, have a direct kinship. "That could have been ME!!!!"

People tend to lash out at perceived threats. Defraud those with wealth and power at your peril. Not only will you be smacked down, it will be done loudly and publicly as an example to others who might be thinking that they can get away with it.

Just part and parcel of life.

Oh darn? Not sure if it is socially acceptable to cheer just yet.

See now the case just gets juicier. It's like a written version of one of those "true crime" case files you see on A&E or something. If only you could interject interviews of random people who claim to (or actually have) information relevant to the case. I'm liking it.

Mothers of the Disappeared - U2

Just finished up Jezebel from the 10,000 Maniacs MTV Live CD.

tl;dr version: No surprises here.

As much as I dislike the guy, some of his ideas make sense. It seems only natural for the opposition to try and rebrand those ideas into their own. It's just as natural as, for instance, trying to use the opposition as scapegoats for failed policy. It's politics and there is a discernible methodology that becomes obvious when you step back and look at it with a detached eye. Right now, the American Left (read Democrats) are playing the field better than the Republicans. Despite being the minority party, they are outmaneuvering the Republicans at every turn it seems. The only Republican victory I have seem, is the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the SCOTUS. There might be a lot of little things that the Republicans have won on, but even the Right-slanted media isn't reporting on those.

If the Democrats successfully convince the voters that it is they, not the Republicans that are going to get tough on China and look out for the little guy, the sitting Republicans are legislating on borrowed time. With the Keystone Republicans running around in circles, waving their collective hands in the air, the thought is not at all outside of bounds of reality.

Star Frontiers is a huge inspiration. It was my first non-D&D RPG and I loved it. I could spend hours running ship-to-ship combats with Knighthawks. I still have multiple copies of the rules and modules around here. There is also a site on the web that has most of the original resources, with explicit permission from WotC to use it.

The X3 series of video games; I like most of the spaceship designs. The gameplay is mostly about trading and building an empire, which can be somewhat twirled into a game, but it is mostly the ships.

StarCraft; In my longest running game, one of the elder races, now extinct, were basically the Protoss. The Sathar from Star Frontiers were essentially replaced with Zerg.

Mass Effect; I consider the mythology, history, species and general setting (pre-Reaper Invasion) to be THE best sci-fi universe ever. In my not so humble opinion, Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and all the others cannot hold a candle to it. At the risk of diverging from the topic, it is for this reason that I will forever hate Bioware. They create this amazing universe and then deliberately (and with malice aforethought) piss it down their legs. Obviously a setting that I put that much stock in is going to wind its way into my own narratives.

Some Star Wars; Force powers (not Jedi and Sith) and Lightsabers. 'nuff said.

Firefly / Serenity; My second favorite setting. In many ways it merges the best of the Western genre with the best of Shadowrun and throws in a healthy mix of spacey stuff for good measure. All in all, it is the characters that make up the show that really stand out. The setting itself is decent enough to rips some stuff from.

The Cthulhu Mythos; Heh heh heh. What? Does this need some sort of deeper explanation?

Mission Impossible/Shadowrun; I like infiltration missions. Both of these properties are rife with infiltration. Shadowrun adds a nice bit of investigative legwork, from an RPG mechanics standpoint, to the process. 

Obviously there are other properties that I draw from. I have read, watched and listened to a vast amount of science fiction and fantasy material. There is no way that some of it doesn't get distilled into essential archetypes and makes its way over. The above listed are merely the ones that stand out in my mind as having direct contributions to the last science fiction campaign I ran.

Edit: Clarified and expanded.

I don't know about catharsis, but a good giggle never hurts.

Star Hero's ship construction is basically the same as default Hero's vehicle construction. At least for 5E, there were some example drive systems and such tacked on but it did not feel as interesting as other things I've played. Then again, I cut my teeth on Star Frontiers and the ship construction remains a highlight of gaming for me. I would love some sort of system for Hero that draws inspiration from that. You have a frame that is size x. You can fit only so much into the frame before you run out of space for the passengers and crew. You get to pick from a smorgasbord of pre-made components to assemble a ship. Each component has a Point cost but also affects the overall frame space budget. That sort of thing anyway.

In terms of space combat, it works out pretty well being as it is just Hero combat. I've known, in earlier editions, people to change the scale of the hex to 200m but otherwise it is just Hero. 

I have no opinion about GURPS Spaceships. I have only ever owned a few GURPS-related materials and I only owned them to use for idea mining. 

I think I might have that 1001 Science Fiction Weapons product. I went through a period where I was trying to support Indie writers inasmuch as my limited funds would allow for. I ended up buying a bunch of cheap stuff over the course of a couple of months. I'll check my stash of DTRPG products.

Western Hero runs really well as a gritty old west system full of tumbleweeds and dust.  Crank the lethality to the max and you get a real dangerous gunfighting setting.  First session I played in instead of ran, my brother got his head blown off by a lucky shot from some bandits.

That's the stuff Western's are made of!  Then the whole clan has to go after the bandits, who are some branch of another clan. You get a warring, feuding pair of clans with the ultimate showdown determining the victor. Train stations, corrals, main street and the local silver mine are all good locations for the showdown. Peacemakers, Remington 1875's, Spencer Carbines, and the ubiquitous sawed-off double-barreled shotgun all have to make their appearance. Oh and don't forget a little dynamite just to keep things interesting.

Love the cowboy genre.

Whatever it is you want to talk about, post it. We can contextualize it to Star Hero easy enough. Even better if you can.

I have not run anything like that, but it sure sounds like an interesting premise.

That would explain the burning and itching, I suppose.

I hope it ain't contagious. 

Sorry, I'm not questioning your taste. Your point, like Mrinku's on Champions 3e, is well made. The comic book layout was dazzling, more so in New Millennium. I agree that this concept should be used more. Justice Inc. and Pulp Hero(to a lesser extent) used images from the time period to spice up the text. That principle could have been applied to all their products a lot more, imho. Good artwork is a good hook for indecisive and wandering eyes.

I didn't take any offense nor interpret your message as "questioning" my tastes.

Speaking of C: TNM, you even have a point that the rules were way back in the book and that might put some people off. For me, that was a feature, as it allowed me to sort of jump into the setting and see what was going on before I started tackling the mechanical aspects of the system. Dresden Files Accelerated does the exact same thing to much the same effect. Again, I can see where that particular layout may not be comfortable to some people who, for the first time reading, just want to jump into the nuts 'n' bolts of a product.

But, as you so aptly pointed out, this is all a matter of taste. 

It was a joke, but not a very good one. I was referencing "oops, I made a poopy".

Doh!  I should have recognized that in the moment. Sorry to spoil a good joke.

Are we really calling it STD now? Can there possibly be a less fortunate acronym?

I am. And, well if the acronym fits....  (Star Trek Disappointment, Star Trek Disease, Star Trek Derp; go ahead and join in. Anything we come up with will be more entertaining than the show I'm sure. )

Depressing... you're saying there is no more than a 50/50 chance?

I'd say less. Right now there are a bunch of Congresscritters who would alienate their base unless they could clearly demonstrate mental incompetence on Trump's part. Unless or until they can find a good, solid reason to oust him, they/we are stuck with that baggage. Hope you haven't unfastened your seatbelt yet, because this ride is only going to get bumpier. 

Based on what I've read I will not be watching this series.  I would rather watch Star Trek Enterprise.

Me too, but I am one of those mutants that prefers Enterprise to just about every other series of the Star Trek franchise.

Realistically, short of crapping his pants and giggling, "Oops I made a poopy!" I doubt that Trump is going to be removed because of his relative ability. More's the pity.

Nolgroth, my experience with New Millennium was not a good one. I never played that version, but I have looked at it and I couldn't figure out where the beginning was! There was so much art for art's sake, and it was awfully engaging, but I couldn't find the content. I guess I was expecting more HERO content (and I think I'm not alone in this expectation). It was pretty, but I think the content suffered from the form.

Well there is the obvious "to each his own" kind of statement, but that's not really a useful answer. I was able to follow along in Champions: TNM. I thought it was no more difficult than some of the more esoteric comic book layouts. That said, it isn't the specific book/format that should be copied but the concept of making the page "pop out" in some way. Using a comic book format for a comic book game was brilliant. Hero Games could have followed the concept to make their products just a little more dynamic. Encyclopedia are for reference and ultimately that is what Hero Games books are. That doesn't incentivize a would be consumer to pick up the product and get excited about it, barring previous experience with the system. That's what I was really trying to get at. I just happened to think that Champions: TNM did a great job at it.

As to the content, a lot of people would have loved to have seen Hero in those pages. I am one of them, though I am far, far away from being a Fuzion hater. I actually like the system and would have liked to see more done with it from the Hero perspective. I am seriously considering picking up the Champions: TNM PDF products (lost my physical books to relocation relocation syndrome) from the store and soon, because I want something that is mid-way between the exhaustingly crunchy Hero System and the gooey goodness of Fate. It isn't a perfect solution, but it is well within my margin of error for usefulness. All that is an aside to the relative "health" of Hero. Or is it?

Is it too shallow to just say that the character looks cool?

Good for Ms. Larson. It IS a tired concept, leastways I'm tired of it. I was very happy that Wonder Woman did so well. Maybe we can ditch the whole "lady leads are for rom coms" attitude and embrace that females can play up just about any type of role.