Joe Walsh

Yeah, once we got to 4e Normals definitely had skills and such. Give 'em a professional skill and a hobby skill, plus the everyman skills, and then allow for Goodman-ing the straight-10s stats to gain more points to spend, and you could build a pretty interesting character starting with a standard Normal. Then with 5e's switch to already-Goodman'd Normals with straight 8s, some of that flexibility went away. Did you end up adopting the modified time chart from Hero System Almanac / 5e? (And please, call me Joe.) Good point. And the starship tour was pretty cool too. Exactly! I can't imagine how frustrating traditional RPGs must have been for folks who wanted to replicate another medium rather than the feel of it before RPGs tuned to that existed. Of course, for best fidelity they should also be playing dodgeball at the same time. 😁

That makes sense. Hard to upgrade if the new edition isn't available for purchase where you shop! (Those of us with easier access to RPGs may have bought more new editions of things, but we probably had buyers' remorse more often, too. 😄) You were a lot more thoughtful than I was at the time. It took me until well into the 90s to fully figure out that just because there was a new edition didn't mean I needed to buy it (and if I bought it out of curiosity, that doing so created no obligation to play it to "get my money's worth out of it"). Reminds me of when one of the players in my AD&D group said something like, "Yay, I gained another level...but that just means I'll be fighting tougher monsters, so is there any point?" Wish I'd thought of that before buying AD&D 2e, MegaTraveller, Paranoia 2e, Shadowrun 2e, et al. 😂 (Heck, just seeing the task system in Travellers' Digest and thinking, "Hmm, seems interesting, but it's so much more complicated than what we're doing, and there doesn't seem to be any benefit..." should have been enough to warn me off of MegaTraveller, but I fell for the hype anyway. 🙃)

I wish I'd been that smart. 😄

Thanks!

We finished S1 of Tales from the Loop (Amazon). This sci-fi show was one of those where each episode is just barely good enough to keep you watching. Every episode was just OK. We have no interest in watching a second season of it. We also finished The English (Amazon). Clearly the filmmakers know the history of filmed Westerns and use it to good effect at times. Some scenes are very good. But each episode as a whole was just ok, and the ending of the series was simple and unsatisfying.

Yeah, the granularity sure tripped us up. Especially for heroic level / normals. We ended up having to back off and take a more holistic view of all the stuff that makes up a character. It would have been nice to have something like Normals Unbound or Everyman (not to mention if they'd included a good roster of example characters in each of the 3e heroic games).

Thank you! (Just having a group that wants to work together so everyone can have fun goes a long way.) We always played it that way because on page 7 of 1e and 2e, and page 11 of 3e, it says, "A normal person is considered to have the base value for each characteristic, on average."

AC/DCs T.N.T. album. I'd forgotten what a great album that is. I listened to so much AC/DC in my youth that I don't really bother much anymore. Decades later I can still "play" any of their songs in my head, essentially. But I decided to throw on the first side of T.N.T. this morning on the way to work, and I gotta say pulling into the parking lot at work with the title track playing was pretty awesome. Bon Scott was such a clever lyricist, and as a performer he did a great job of selling sexy, or funny, or lascivious, or goofy, or menacing, or whatever an individual song or line called for. Much respect.

Espionage! is the gift that kept on giving.

That's seems like really solid reasoning. If, as other sections in HSR imply, the 4e Haymaker was intended for more than just punches, then having a separate Kick would have been seen as redundant...until you consider the different OCV/DCV mods. But if the modifiers for Kick were seen as unbalanced vs. the harder-to-overcome Haymaker modifier, that resolves the conflict...and may also help explain why Kick never made it to the non-Champions 3e Hero System games. We may never know for sure what the thinking was back then, but as far as I can tell that's a reasonable explanation given that it's clear in other ways that 4e needed at least one editing pass by someone who didn't know the game at all. I'm still thinking of reintroducing Kick someday, though, just to see how it goes. Flying Tackle (or maybe just call it Tackle) is a shoe-in, I think. The idea of making Grab and Hold work as Duke discussed is intriguing, too. I like the idea of a Killing Blow for the masses, too. I just need to think about it a while longer.

Thank you! That makes total sense. I never did move on from the punch-specific haymaker, but given that the game did, it makes sense to get rid of Kick. The thing is, to me 4e was pretty clear Haymaker was a punch-specific thing. I understand different people interpret it differently, but the 4e entry itself seems pretty plain to me: But, like I say, different strokes for different folks. It's just curious to me that Kick was dropped with the publication of 4e yet they went with the "all-out punch" explanation for Haymaker. One of the 6e changes I liked best was the updated Combat Maneuvers. It was nice to see more hand-to-hand attacks added outside of Martial Arts. Heck, I didn't own a copy of Ninja Hero until well into the 4e era, when a local game store had it marked down. It was a little too in the weeds for me. My earlier Classic Traveller experience taught me to be careful about buying expanded subsystems that are used at the table before it's been proven our group needs them.

From the AP article on the Scott Adams issue, regarding the phrase “It’s OK to be white": Parker Molloy goes into this in much more detail (including links to the 4chan hate channels where this whole thing was born) in her report, "An Overlooked Detail in the Scott Adams Dilbert Story": https://open.substack.com/pub/presentage/p/scott-adams-white-grievance-dilbert

Looks like Scott Adams is about to transition to a new phase of his life. ‘Dilbert,’ Scott Adams lose distributor over racist remarks

Neat! i must have missed that. I'll have to take a look. Huh. Seems like -2/-2 vs. -0/-5 would present a significant choice to players, but apparently not. Again, wish I could remember what my group's experience was at the time. 🤷‍♂️

Sure, but don't modifiers matter (-2/-2 vs. +0/-5)? And couldn't its damage have been modified the same way as the modern Haymaker if it'd been brought forward? How so? You do end up prone at the end of that maneuver, which seems a reasonable price to pay for a -2 OCV attack that does normal damage and makes your opponent prone. What am I missing? Are you sure? Kick was only in Champions, never any of the other products, including ones without a refined martial arts option. Seems like there was something else keeping it away from the heroic-level games. It's been so long that, honestly, I can't remember what I thought about it at the time. Was I disappointed they didn't carry Kick forward to 4e, or did it make sense because we didn't use it much? Wish I could remember. Couldn't Kick's damage have been changed similarly to how Haymaker's was, leaving the option for a different set of modifiers for the same effect? Strangely enough the descriptions of Killing Blow in Espionage, Justice Inc, and Danger International all mention "breaking arms" specifically (in addition to knee drop, throat punch, and kidney strike, which are more like what you're referencing). 3E Champions? No, they kept that pretty simple. Hold was in Espionage, Justice Inc, Danger International, Fantasy Hero (3e), Robot Warriors, and Star Hero. All also had Grab, interestingly. They existed side-by-side in many Hero games for a long time, somehow. Maybe so. I just remember characters attempting flying tackles in b-movies and the like. Often while wearing a three-piece suit and dress shoes! 😄 That's cool.

Ever consider bringing forward some of the old rules that were dropped along the way? Sometimes old discarded rules are brought back in the official rules, of course. In 6e we regained the Trip maneuver that was last seen in Fantasy Hero 3e, for example. The "Kick" maneuver, however, hasn't made it out of Champions 1e-3e. And although "Hold" was used in every non-Champions game from Espionage to Star Hero in the 2e and 3e eras, it hasn't been seen since. "Killing Blow" and "Flying Tackle" were in Espionage, Justice Inc, Danger International, and Star Hero but disappeared with 4e. Kick: -2/-2, damage x1-1/2, lands at the end of the following segment. So effectively it was another OCV/DCV modifier choice for a Haymaker like effect. Hold: -2/-2, both stopped. OK, hard to understand why this one stuck around so long, with Grab being better from a modifier perspective AND granting the opportunity to harm the opponent (which Hold does not). Killing Blow: -2/-2, (STR/15)D6 Killing. Nice to have a killing attack available for hand-to-hand combat in some genres. Meant to simulate bone-breaking attacks and the like. Flying Tackle: -2/both are prone, x1 STR damage and knock down. This one seems particularly reasonable, given that it's something any untrained combatant could attempt. I believe it's somewhere in Martial Arts now, but I'm not sure it needs to be locked away? Wow, they sure did like their -2/-2 back in those days! Have you tried bringing any of these maneuvers back for non-MA characters in more recent editions? More broadly, have you brought forward any of the other rules that were dropped along the way? How did it go?

Next Sunday.

I'd been hearing good things about Matt "We should improve society somewhat" Bors' Justice Warriors comic book and now that I have the trade paperback that includes the first six issues (plus some bonus content) I have to say it really is pretty danged good. It's set in a dystopian future where a small elite hoard all the wealth while they enjoy life removed from the rest of society. The political leader is both stupid and vain, and is surrounded by self-serving and craven political advisors. Obvious pump-and-dump schemes are perpetrated on the populace without any repercussions. Police see it as their job to protect property at all costs, and will kill any member of the teeming masses who steps out of line. But despite that wildly improbable premise, the story is very good. And the setting would be great for a Champions campaign. It's hard not to take campaign notes as I read it. Worth checking out if you're into political comics, dystopian settings, and the like. (Posted here in the Politics thread because the content is very political. If this isn't the appropriate place, let me know.)

It's cores all the way down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/24/new-earth-inner-core-layer-metallic-ball/

Ugh! That's too bad. Thanks for letting me know; I don't get over to CotI much any more. He was so dedicated, I'm not surprised no one's been able to step up.

Oooh, I'd love to have a translation sheet so I could easily use HERO with all the TFT and T&T solos. And, sure, the GURPS and D&D solos too while I'm dreaming. I started down that path a few years ago, but got bogged down in the issue you've identified: making combat interesting without it being complex for someone new to the system. The premise I landed on was that having tactically meaningful choices to trade off between chance of hitting, chance of being hit, and the amount of damage at risk was what powered many RPGs that had combat systems that were fun and engaging all by themselves over the long term. There's obviously much more that can be on offer, but those seemed core to me at the time (going from my notes, which include capsule write-ups of a bunch of systems analyzed along those lines (why do I do that to myself?)). Fortunately HERO has plenty of those three tactical options in the form of Combat Modifiers, Combat Maneuvers, and Hit Location rules. Not quite as clean as an intentionally designed combat simulator like Melee/Wizard and the related GURPS system, but still very good when compared to a lot of other systems out there. It seemed to me at the time that it should be possible to go with select maneuvers (probably pulling in one or more maneuvers from Martial Arts while collapsing a lot of the standard maneuvers down to the generic attack at +0/+0), add some Combat Modifiers, and call it a day. But I never got further than that. Whether that's helpful I don't know. Maybe I was way off base or maybe I'm misinterpreting my notes. But, for what it's worth. Undoubtedly! The Kickstarter campaign page has a decent explanation, but the tl;dr is that the three-book version is the more recent and theoretically less errata-prone edition. I have the three-book version, but since I don't play T5 I haven't really looked into the errata issues.

Is watching the French documentary "Super-Vilains: l'Enquête" worthwhile? It sounds interesting: "Comic book writers discuss how they make the villains who take on the superheroes." But it's rated 5.4/10 on IMDB and there are no written reviews. HBOMax has it, so I guess I should just give it a go, but I wondered if anyone on here had taken a look?

Still, I appreciate the peeks you share. It's so fun to learn what other people do with the infinitely interesting (to a few of us anyway) HERO cyclopedia of rules. I have so many text files of saved posts (with attribution of course) that it's becoming unmanageable, yet I still get that thrill when I see someone's new-to-me take. It's a sickness. Ah, the 90s: such a time for dreams to die. But now I'll always wonder what could have been if things had worked out for your plan. Yeah, not exactly banner carrying stuff. Did he get a chance to give SNW a try?

🤣 Sorry about that! I'd used "Ransom" for decades because Out of the Silent Planet was the first sci-fi novel I read. As a kid, though, I hadn't realized what the protagonist's name really meant. I kept using that because I was known by it even long after I belatedly realized the meaning, only changing it more recently. On RPG boards I went with GM Joe, since I'm usually the GM and also because I was a big fan of GI Joe as a kid (back when they were 12" 'action figures' who could plausibly make out with Barbie). I doubt many are interested in this, and it's definitely off-topic, so I'll spoiler-hide it: CT stuff is so expensive now! I gave my copy of the Atlas of the Imperium to someone who needed it to produce T4 stuff and never did get it back. Now it would cost an arm and a leg to get a copy in good condition. Not that it's worth anything in play, of course. We have it all on a website now, errata-free. What I wouldn't have given for that back in the early 80s! That first edition was pretty great. We did what we'd always done and fixed the problems we found. It was worth it. 2e worked for us, too. Then I waited in line at GenCon to get a signed hardcover copy of 3e the day it was released (it was so great when GenCon was in Milwaukee which is about an hour's drive from my home) and never used it. Eventually I sold it off, but I still have 1e and 2e! Well, it's been a long time. Great stuff! Just one question: when are you going to get the time to write up Duke's HERO System for publication by our hosts? It really should be shared. 🙏

Ah, I think I get it now. Thank you for being patient. It takes me a minute sometimes. But that's an interesting approach. As @Steve pointed out, we already have a model for "every skill" in the Jack of all Trades skill from Traveller HERO, which puts it at 4 points per +1 (only to negate skill penalties) for all noncombat skills. Under 6e it'd be 5 points for the same thing. Which implies a broad group like we're talking about would be 2 points per +1 under either edition (rounding). Hmm.