Joe Walsh

It is a nice piece of work. The random dimension generator is my favorite bit.

I've heard HERO folks swear by UMA just like I hear GURPS folks swear by GURPS Martial Arts, and I do understand that additional combat maneuvers can be critical to some campaigns. But every time I read through those books my eyes just glaze over. I feel like I'm probably missing out on something, but it's just not apparent to me what it is. Someday I'll have to make a point to be a player in some campaigns that use the material in those books to good effect. That may help me see more clearly what bits may be useful in my campaigns.

Agreed. And that's the one exception to my not using Ultimate books.

I never really used any of the Ultimates books. I got turned off by the seemingly infinite procession of class-specific books for AD&D 2e, back when, and never really bothered with the 5e+ Ultimate books (tho I bought them all, silly me). What do you find useful about the two Ultimate books released for 4e: The Ultimate Martial Artist, and The Ultimate Mentalist (and wasn't Ultimate Supermage a PDF-only release, back when that was a new thing)?

Those were very good games! Excellent, excellent work in both cases. I appreciate the benefits of the 4e+ generic system method, but the all-in-one completeness of the 3e way also has its appeal.

Good catch! There's a load of potentially useful stuff in there. 432, An Eye for an Eye, is also potentially useful depending on the campaign (and moves more toward 5e in many ways).

His work was good. OK, I'm. It'll hopefully make good reading next time I travel by air.

Now that Hero Games is selling a pretty good selection of 4th Edition books in PDF format (and it's blessedly inexpensive to get most of them in physical format on the secondary market), I thought it might be worthwhile to anyone new to the edition for us to have a discussion about which supplements are most worth having. To me, the very most useful ones are: 403 - Classic Enemies - A nice collection of enemies that work well with the simpler builds you see in the Champions hardcover. 416 - Classic Organizations - Lots of orgs to chose from for inclusion in your campaign. 421 - Champions Universe - A nice overview of the official Champions setting. 423 - Dark Champions - Very useful genre book for street-level heroes and for gritty campaigns in general. 425 - Viper - A good-sized supplement on one of the most important organizations in the Champions universe. 430 - Justice Not Law - Hudson City, a fully-realized setting for your gritty, Dark Champions campaigns. 501 - Ninja HERO - Not just for martial arts campaigns, it's a useful supplement for anyone who is looking for more combat options and ideas. 507 - HERO System Bestiary - There are enough creatures of all sorts in here to populate several campaigns in just about any genre. Secondarily, and only based on the needs of a given campaign, the following can prove useful: 404 - Challenges for Champions - 10 scenarios for Champions 405 - Mystic Masters - Nice subgenre book for running magic-heavy Supers campaigns. 413 - Alien Enemies - Lots of alien-based enemies. 420 - Normals Unbound - Populate your city with a sprinkling of these folks to help bring it to life. 427 - Allies - A decent selection of potential allies. 428 - The Mutant File - Mutants were all the rage back in the day, and this book will help out anyone planning a classic Mutants vs. the World style campaign. 429 - Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies - A nice set of horrific enemies. 502 - Fantasy HERO - A good genre book for the most popular role-playing genre. Worth it for the Western Shores campaign alone. 503 - Fantasy HERO Companion - All the stuff they couldn't fit in Fantasy HERO, including mass combat and more locations, spells, items, and beasts. 508 - HERO System Almanac I - Lots of new optional rules, with commentary from the perspective of people who emphasize storytelling, mechanics, or role-playing. What's on your lists?

Lots of weasel words in that one: "in early development", "will likely include shows centered on", etc. Still, leveraging some of their most popular properties is an obvious move for them. We'll see how it pans out.

At first blush, I'd say that's about right. A generic system needs optional mechanics in order to best suit it to a given campaign purpose. If it just has a set of mechanics that is used for everything, then, mechanically-speaking, it'll always feel the same regardless of the campaign.

Using metacurrency to reward genre-appropriate in-game behavior is pretty common these days, particularly in the more narrative-focused games. It's a reasonable way to encourage players to work with the genre rather than against it. That horror game sounds like a great example.

Generic systems, to the extent they try to lend a particular feel to a given genre through mechanics, tend to rely on being toolkits. Being able to grab optional mechanics and bring them into a campaign is enormously helpful. For example, when it comes to horror roleplaying, GURPS has the Fright Check and BRP has the Sanity system. In fact, BRP has many, many optional rules (known as Spot Rules) that can be invoked to give a particular campaign its own feel. GURPS takes a different tact. In that system, just about everything other than the basic character stats and 3d6 roll-under is optional. It's a true toolkit. And beyond that, GURPS authors have done quite a lot of work over the years to explain how the system can be used to evoke the feel of a given genre (or sub-genre). HERO, of course, has some optional rules, some Toolkitting notes on how the system could be used in different ways, and the APGs as primary sources for how to use the system to achieve different ends. There are also some relevant bits in the genre books, but that varies a lot by edition. In 4e, for example, the Hipshot maneuver was in Western HERO and in Dark Champions, not in the main rulesbook like it was in later editions. 5e leaned more heavily on the Ultimate books (including Ultimate Skill) to show how to use the system in different ways. Discussions about Savage Worlds, Fate, and the other modern systems see similar questions regularly popping up about how to achieve a particular effect with the system. How successful any of these efforts are is often in the eye of the beholder, of course. And the feeling seems nearly universal that any given game still feels fundamentally the same no matter how many optional rules or rules shadings are put into use. And it's true, because if the fundamental rules change, then you're not playing the same game any more. You've gone so far down the Genric Universal Toolkit path that you've wrapped back around to every game having its own learning curve. The simpler game systems, such as TinyD6 (which is a house system used, so far, for fantasy (Tiny Dungeons), space (Tiny Frontiers), post-apoc (Tiny Wastelands), and supers (Tiny Supers)), have a lot less room to vary by genre. About all they can do, mechanically, is add some relevant archetypes and support them with the appropriate traits. The customer base doesn't want any more new rules than absolutely necessary. (I'm curious to see how TinyD6 will handle supers; I backed the Kickstarter but the book is in the pipeline). I have more than 100 game systems on my shelves (physical and virtual), and where I run across a nice mechanic I keep it in mind for the times when a system I'm using needs a mechanic to support a particular feel. It's often tricky to do this, but every once in a while it'll work great. That's where I intended to go with my posts upthread: figure out the effect you want to achieve, look at how it's been done before, and see if any of that is adaptable to the system in question. If not, use what you've learned to come up with a new way to do it, if possible. But if the system just doesn't bend that way, then perhaps a different system is best for the campaign in question.

How would you describe the feel you want to replicate from science fiction?

Mechanics can capture the feeling of a genre in widely varying ways. Take the Jenga mechanic in Dread. That works very well to evoke a feeling of dread in the players. The James Bond 007 RPG provides a classic example with its chase mechanic that's based on bidding and risk/reward. That alone goes a long way to evoking the feel of the movies. Savage Worlds' Dramatic Task mechanic is also great at evoking that feeling you get when your favorite fictional character is trying to defuse a time bomb, or take on a similar time-limited, high-stakes task. Or, take Lasers & Feelings' approach to Star Trek style sci-fi vs. FASA Star Trek's take (including the role-playing space combat system) vs. Far Trek's Talents. They all work well, depending on what it is you're looking to emphasize most about the source material, yet each takes a very different approach. In other words, the ways in which mechanics can be used to evoke the feel of a given body of source material seem to be nearly limitless.

Colon Blow or nothin', says I. ?

Could be retitled, "11 ways to eat dessert for breakfast." ?

Bricks and tanks do pretty well in most systems where combat is a major focus of play. They tend to be uncomplicated mechanically, but are rewarding to play because they are good at both dealing damage and staying in the field of play.

In terms of modern, easy-to-run games that are fun and well-supported, I recommend going with one of the D00Lite games (BareBones Fantasy, Covert Ops, FrontierSpace) or one of the TinyD6 games (Tiny Dungeon, Tiny Wasteland, Tiny Supers). As far as the classics go, the TSR boxed games are mostly pretty good for this purpose, as are many of the D6 System games (Ghostbusters, WEG Star Wars, Mini Six, etc.). Toon is also excellent for beginners, but it helps to be familiar with classic cartoons.

Don't be so hasty to judge; it may have been intentional. The GM may have been running a campaign set in Lake Wobegon.

Good idea! I went all-PDF on my 6e stuff a year or two ago, getting rid of all the physical 6e books I had. I've had no regrets. It's all there in PDF for reference, and that's all I need from 6e. (I did keep CC and FC. No sense selling them for the pittance I'd get.)

Yeah, nothing huge. The HA cost is another minor bit that's mentioned as being "obviously broken" in 4e. There are probably others. Personally, I haven't really needed to do much with 4e to make it work for my groups over the years. I've done rule comparisons, and objectively I can see that a later rule for this or that is an improvement, and I can see that it's nice to have the additional combat maneuvers in the core book, and so on, but in practice I can't recall anything being a big deal aside from the STUN lottery, which I house-ruled early on. Even so, it's nice to have the 5e+ tried-and-true rule changes to draw from if something ever did become an issue in one of my campaigns.

I was referring to Megascale and Change Environment, as mentioned upthread by LouisGoncey.

Errata is essential (especially rravenwood's excellent compilation), but it would be even nicer to have a 4e rulebook that was properly copyedited, had a comprehensive index, had internal page number references instead of "See {topic}," and included the two or three rule changes from 5e that seem to have near-universal appeal to 4e gamers.

I started with 2nd edition, which was a huge revelation to me at the time in terms of game design. Loved it to pieces. 3rd edition was a nice improvement, and HERO System really started to come into its own with the other HERO System games released at the time. 4th was wonderful. It brought everything together under one set of covers. 5th was OK. It fixed some things, and had some nicely crafted supplements. 5eR was too much of a good thing. To this day I still haven't read through the whole thing, cover-to-cover. Same for 6e, only more so. But they're beautiful books! Champs Complete is fine, and was a sorely needed return to marketplace viability in terms of rulebook size. But 4e will always be my sweet spot, and the one I return to (albeit with some good ideas from 5e). (I'd back a Kickstarter for a bugfixed BBB -- or even HERO System Rulesbook -- in a heartbeat.)

The Fuji is the One True Apple, as all right-thinking people know.