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Joe Walsh

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Everything posted by Joe Walsh

  1. Unfortunately. I remember the 2008 election, when McCain sang his little ditty. And before that, back in May of 2003 when a senior Bush official said, "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran."
  2. I can't believe how fast time flies. Who'd have thought it was time to start another war already!
  3. Yup! Even with the one megahit single -- Take My Breath Away (which they didn't write) -- the album peaked at 61 on the US Billboard charts, whereas their previous album, Love Life, had made it to 23 without any such assist. Yet the songs on the former are as great as any they recorded previously, IMO.
  4. Berlin, Like Flames. From their third album, the last one before the original group broke up. The album was a commercial failure, but I consider it an unqualified artistic success.
  5. Rise of Skywalker - A decent end to the Skywalker saga. The movie was better than I'd expected. The End of the Fxxxing World, S2 - We're about half way through season 2, and it continues to be as good as the first season. It's funny and discomforting at the same time. The Aeronauts - Felicity Jones picked another good one, and did a fantastic job once again. I feared I would be disappointed by this streaming-only movie, but it turned out to be a compelling and enjoyable adventure story that was well done all around. Great stuff!
  6. Just for the record, I would totally be on board with a 6e quickstart, or a 6e patterned on the 4e BBB, or a 6e boxed set a la 2e / early 3e. I like 4e (and, to a slightly lesser extent, 2e and 3e) because those editions are all over my post-AD&D years. A 5e presented more like the BBB or the HERO System Rulesbook would have been most welcome. It just came at a time in my life when a giant tome simply was not practical and therefore not welcome. 5eR even moreso. 6e? I can get behind all the rules changes if presented differently....except the decoupling of secondary characteristics. I know the logic of it, and I tried....I really did. It just turns out that it's one of those things I can't get past. Call it nostalgia, call it old dogs/new tricks....for whatever reason, it just isn't something I can embrace. Despite that, I would fully support a new, beginner-friendly core book or even starter set...were it to be on offer. Because further splintering HERO just doesn't seem helpful at this point. The issues just aren't that big, in the end.
  7. She does seem to have PS:Speaker of the House (16-) at the very least.
  8. And Mark Meadows makes 21. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mark-meadows-is-now-the-21st-republican-to-retire-from-the-house/
  9. It is a pretty great mechanic. Like I said, I'd remove it to make the game more welcoming to those who aren't fond of math if I could do it "without losing the way that formula elegantly handles (for mathophiles, anyway) the question of how to make something harder to hit. So many games just ignore the issue, and I appreciate very much that HERO addresses it without requiring a defensive 'avoid being hit' roll for every attack, like some games do." [Emphasis in original.] For better or worse, I've been unable to come up a satisfactory solution so far.
  10. Exactly! Get 'em in the door and interested, show them a good time, and they'll do the rest.
  11. It is important to show where the system gets its strength, but couldn't we do it in moderation? We could limit it to, say, two power modifiers per power, and restrict multipower slots to ultras. Something like that. We know what looks complicated, and we know what's complicated in use. It seems like we could avoid that stuff for a newbie-friendly product without leaving them in the dark about the way the system works. We could give them something clean, that's easy to learn from and use, but that's still true to the system.
  12. I can totally respect that. And, to be honest, it was only that mention of the issue by Wayne that got me thinking about how it may be a stumbling block for folks new to the system. I respect his judgement a lot. Even so, I can't recall a player having an issue with skill throws, since the target is on the sheet and it's still 3d6 roll under. It may be more of an aesthetic issue than a stumbling block.
  13. I was being unspecific about what could have saved HERO because we've been down that road many, many times before. As much as I enjoy the exercise, I wanted to spend more time talking about what we could actually do. But, yeah, for me personally, I'd go back to 4e, give it a good edit, apply the errata, and add a few things that most of us seem to agree on (like megascale, stun multiplier of 1-3, etc), offer it for POD, then call it a day. That'd be my perfect edition. But the perfect edition that attracts folks at a better rate than Champions Complete? That's probably not it. I don't think my game design skills are up to it, but my #1 thing to fix system-wise in order to make it more newbie friendly would be to make 11 + OCV - DCV (or OCV + 11 - 3D6 = hittable DCV -- same thing only different) a thing of the past without losing the way that formula elegantly handles (for mathophiles, anyway) the question of how to make something harder to hit. So many games just ignore the issue, and I appreciate very much that HERO addresses it without requiring a defensive "avoid being hit" roll for every attack, like some games do. If I could fix that and make it a unified mechanic that works for skill throws, too, I'd be very happy. But, again, it's probably not something we can make happen in the core game even if we could come up with the perfect solution.
  14. Did you mean to quote Chris instead of me?
  15. I'm not sure we'd need to appeal to everyone. But adapting in the opposite direction of the market doesn't seem to have helped. Same thing happened with Traveller 5. It's the type of giant systems-oriented book that the hardcore fans wanted. And that's about all that was interested in it -- except many of us actually run older editions, so it doesn't seem to be much more than a shelf hog for most. Heck, even the author has stated publicly on more than one occasion that he runs Traveller in a very loose, off-the-cuff way. Thank goodness the game was also licensed to Mongoose, who put out a new edition of the most popular version of Traveller, slightly updated for modern tastes, and did much better.
  16. Yeah, I understand why HERO System was developed as it was, but I'm afraid it just made HERO less appealing to the general role-playing public. We can only work around the edges to help it out at this point.
  17. It could be helpful if we returned to simpler builds for published characters, like was the norm for published characters up through early 4e.
  18. Thank you for doing that research, Chris! So, the concept goes way back to 1984: characters can only make one attack per phase, but that one attack can involve using multiple Powers that go off together. The quoted section goes on to reinforce this regarding Multipowers: "A character couldn't throw different parts of a Multipower together, because the Powers don't always go off the same way. But a character could have several Powers in the same slot together, so long as they all go off at the same time together." We also know that "one attack per phase" can mean attacking multiple people: area affect, autofire, and sweep all allow that. So, multiple Powers and multiple targets were explicitly OK at least as far back as 1984, as long as you'd paid for the ability to do that. The exception is the case of Sweep, where you don't have to pay for it, you just have to be in the right circumstances. But that maneuver was introduced in 1985's Fantasy HERO 1e as a unique bit for that genre. In that game, it is restricted to the Common Melee Weapon group and quarterstaffs. Four years later, in the BBB, that weapon proviso was softened to "usually" limit it to "big weapons," but to then say that it can be done with bare hands as well.
  19. So many products back then had so many unstated assumptions built into them. They rarely had the rigor of even today's small press products. Out of curiosity, who did you ask?
  20. Great point! It'd be nice if we could, without increasing complexity otherwise, just stick to one attack roll per phase, making the various types of multiple strike attacks work within that boundary one way or another.
  21. I would love to know the extent to which George MacDonald and Steve Peterson were involved with the BBB, because it seems pretty plain on the subject at times, but then muddies the waters. For example, under Ambidexterity it says, "Ambidexterity [removes the penalty for off-hand use], but does not allow the character to attack twice in one combat Phase. (To attack more often in a turn, buy more SPD.)" That seems pretty clear to me. How many times you can attack per Turn is determined by SPD. Elsewhere, it makes clear that attacking ends your Phase. And autofire can hit multiple opponents but is a single attack roll, which supports this view. But then that same Autofire entry goes on to muddy the waters with the way it allows characters to spray Autofire across multiple hexes. In that case, each hex with a target in it gets a separate roll. And then there is Sweep, which says, "For each target after the first, the Sweep takes a cumulative -2 OCV for all the attacks that the character makes that phase." That seems to make it clear that it's not just a single attack roll per phase. So, it's ambiguous. There was clearly a lot of copy-paste in every edition. And Rob Bell was a college student and superfan who seems to have been given primary responsibility for 4e (but, again, I don't know the facts; it's just the impression I get). So it could just be an oversight that the rules are inconclusive. It was all just copied forward, and no one gave it a second thought. "Of course you can attack more than once per phase! Ignore that admonition in the Ambidexterity entry!" But my interpretation has always been that Sweep and spreading Autofire are exceptions to the general rule of 1 attack roll per Phase, and they are the way they are because they were the best way to handle the given attacks. The entry for Sweep even supports this, ending with, "Sweep is usually performed with some sort of (large) hand-to-hand weapon such as a two-handed sword, but it may be done bare-handed." The implication being that this is not something for general use. But, then, there's that weasel-word, "usually." It's a bit ambiguous, in the end. Which makes one wonder why it wasn't ever clarified while George MacDonald and Steve Peterson were involved. There are clear statements indicating one attack per phase, and then there are clear exceptions. If they'd intended those exceptions to be more generalized, wouldn't they have said so? Or at least left out the unambiguous statements that were contrary, such as the one under Ambidexterity? We'll probably never know. I think the last time George gave an interview that talked about HERO System was around the time 6e came out. Long ago, in other words.
  22. Right, NHS. Too much whiskey! 😜 I hope you're right, and the perspective that the Conservatives will privatise as much of the NHS as possible is just a bugaboo. There are a number of folks in the UK on other boards who worry otherwise, however. 😥
  23. I love "The Cat Came Back." Richard Condie did some amazing stuff! Here's my favorite Condie short:
  24. As far as the economic consequence of Brexit, companies have been fleeing since the referendum. So my expectation is that post-Brexit, the Conservatives will look at the tax roll and announce that austerity is needed, and use that to cut, cut, cut anything that helps average people, such as the NIH.
  25. I'm continuing to listen to Hank Williams' repertoire. The guy was freaking amazing. I have not been a country music fan, but my maternal grandfather was, and I wanted to check out what the fuss was all about. Man, that Hank could write. As the book with the "Complete Hank Williams" CD set says, when he died at the age of 29 while on the way to a concert, he had "recorded sixty-six songs that were released under his own name, an astonishing thirty-seven of which were hits. The standard was so impossibly high that no other singer has come close to eclipsing it. When you consider that Hank wrote almost fifty of those sixty-six songs and that many of them are still among the most performed songs in country music, it underscores just what a brilliant, incendiary career it was." He suffered from a congenital back problem that caused him pain his whole life. His first marriage was to the great love of his life, Audrey, but their marriage was torture for both of them and ended badly. But still, when she died decades later, she was buried next to him (despite him marrying someone else after divorcing her!). He died in the back of a car, on the way to a concert, from a combination of pain pills prescribed by a quack doctor and his painkiller of choice, alcohol. But from all that pain came a lot of great music that has since been recorded by scores of artists. It's really stunning to me. I knew about Janis Joplin, Bon Scott, and other artists who died young and left an amazing legacy. But I didn't know much about Hank Williams until now. Now that I do, I feel closer to my grandfather (who died before I was enrolled in kindergarten) and I better appreciate a type of music and a musician that I'd given short shrift to in the past. And that makes me happy.
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