Joe Walsh

On other boards, I've seen quite a few former fans attest that they stopped playing HERO System at some point because the game's presentation was becoming the opposite of what they wanted.
 
HERO fan that I am, even I would never hand anyone I've ever known 5e or 6e -- or even my own favored edition, 4e. None of those books presents a game. They present a toolkit, from which a game can be assembled. Most people aren't interested in doing that, and even if they were, they don't have time for it.
 
Instead I'd go with Champions Complete, which is the closest thing to 1e/2e/3e's presentation that there's been in a long, long time. Plus it's a current product that gets support.
 
That said, there's nothing wrong with using 3e if that's what your situation calls for. I use plenty of older RPGs because they still work best for me and my group.

My preferred is 3-4th edition.  The most fun I had as a player was the Fantasy Hero playtest.  Followed closely to a couple of Aaron Allston con games.  As a GM, it was running Fantasy Hero 1st edition and second, but back then the settings were deeply home brewed, relying on history, cheap and cheesy fantasy novels I bought from the College book store for the bus ride home, and long conversations with othe local GMs.  
 
those editions encouraged discounts on package deals to give players a deal, and to give set lists of spells and characteristics and powers to produce a member of some fantasy race, or job, or magic style. You would have points left over to individualize your character, and package disads didn’t count for halving.  If I were to run Fantasy Hero for new players, I would go with the early editions and inform them that D&D emulation I would consider in very bad taste.  there are far fewer pages in the early b editions of FH, and Danger International is a fun read. This is a lot more surmountable than 6th Edition. 
 
Those that say the play is the same are wrong.  Movement is halved, and divorced from beloved 25mm hexes representing 6 feet or 2m on tan Chessex battle maps. Turn mode has been added for characters. Endurance costs are different, and while most powers have been made more granular, and proscribed, barrier has uselessly combined effects. It used to be Forcefield would transmit stun from an attack to a character, similar to armor or rPD, whereas nothing was transmitted through a force wall, unless it was blown through, like a brick wall or tank armor. It was very easy to conceptualize the differences mechanically and build to spec.

Then Com was removed, and replaced with striking appearance for bad reasons.  COM was the stat that generated so much roleplay. Comeliness was taken as positive attractiveness. You paid points the higher you went. Was Sue Storm more attractive than Mary Jane Watson? If you had two very attractive team members, that often generated a lot of non combat interactions. Negative attractiveness paid you using distinctive looks. Large humanoid made of orange rocks, gotta be The Thing.  Then there was how growth and shrinking is handled now.  It used to be you would buy X levels of growth, to get the size you wanted, then you would buy off the END with appropriate Disads like can’t go through single doors, and others. You then had a character, other people around the table understood as “large”, without the 6th edition hand waving, reducing a power to a mere special effect. When l first started playing Champions with the first edition, it was 200 points plus Disads. I would take fewer disads than the other characters, and while I didn’t hit as hard as the others, but I was often the last one standing. Now the point totals are astronomical, and Dis-er- “complications”, if I understand correctly, are a fixed amount for the campaign(?), so everyone is the same number of points(?). As such the current edition’s strict enforcement of balance and getting what one pays for has removed the previous editions’ mercantile transaction between players andnGM and have replaced it with a Tax audit interaction. As such the 6th edition reference rules read like a tax accountancy text book.  Gone is the breezy information and sly humor of Bruce Harlick, or the cautioning notes l, the depth, and occasional dark humor of L. Douglas Garrett, or the confidence building good cheer of Aaron Allston.
 
Champions Complete does not have the tax problem but it lost the organization of 4th edition and it could use a revised layout with no change to the text.  Still, it has the aforementioned flaws of being a 6th edition rule set. D&D 5e acknowledged that there were imbalancing things in the game but those things could be compensated for  (Fireball as a 3rd level spell). But 6th edition has little wiggle room and tends to over complicate builds. The skills are a prime example of that.
 
I think I have already talked about the skill specialization where a 2-3rd edition character would have Doctor. A 6th edition character would have to take biology, anatomy, thoracic medicine, cardiology and would be a dandy heart surgeon, but not as useful setting bones or plugging bullet holes. The specificity also effects the cost of skill levels, and once again making the point costs astronomical, and character generation immensely slow, unless
one buys Hero Designer which is like having to buy TurboTax to file your taxes.
 
I expect some of you to come to the defense of 6th edition, and that’s fine, but it is to me, not fun. I may have to learn it, but it puts me to sleep. 
 
Champions Now, while inspired by 3rd Edition Champions, is a bit too modern , a bit too idiosyncratic, and too narrative focused, to feel like Champions of old. The wargame roots of the old game are gone. To me, it’s not Champions without a 12 segment speed clock. I see narrative is what you tell after the game, but what is most important is putting together a solid character personality because it should be characters that drive the plot, not the other way around. 
 
So if I wanted to teach new folks Hero, Duke may be the most correct, starting with second edition Champions. 
 
Scott - proud Grognard. 

I started with 1st edition.  I bought into second edition.
 
I own every single edition (because I am dumb like that, but in the interest of transparency, let me state up-front that I bought 3e Champions at some point in the last ten years; my game store at the time never carried it; I didn't know it existed until 4e came out, which my game atore stocked deeply).
 
That includes both versions od 5e, as well as both versions of Sidekick and I own HERO System Basic (no idea why we stopped calling it Sidekick:  there is a universe of distance between the appeal of those two names).
 
I own Espionage (the fist non-Champions game to use the Champions engine, which would become in 4e "The HERO System."  I own DI, Fantasy HERO, and even Lucha HERO and MHI-  if it uses the 'HERO System," I own it, even PS 230-whatever the heck it was, and Champions Complete, - Dude!  I own the weird ones, too:
 
new Millennium (odd man out: I kind of liked that one, but I already had Bubblegum Crisis, so I could find all the missing bits that New Millennium seemed to have skipped), Champions Now, and the LARP.
 
I have read every single one of them multiple times (except the LARP:  I have made many attempts, but without fail, I am sound asleep before getting thirty pages in, which is weird, because I generally,enjoy Watt's style, but there is something in that book that is the absolute cure for insomnia: it is better than every Microbiology textbook I ever read! )
 
All that being said, I have never found within any of these a solid reason to move beyond 2e.
 
Don't think that I am badmouthing the new stuff!  I am not; I just dont seem to have ever encountered any of the problems that later editions claim to fix.
 
Now the next is one-hundred-percent opinion; I don't want anyone to think I am trying to claim this as a fact or even that I think,it is a fact-  for what it is worth, I didn't used to think this way!  A few too many discussions with  the diehard core of the fandom kind of pushed me to thinking this:
 
I don't think that _most_ people have ever had the problems these editions are meant to fix.  I really think most of the endless revisiins and options come out of the endless discussion hunting the snipe of mathematical perfection and total equality.
 
Moreover, I think a sizeable chunk of problems that folks have encountered over the years (and no: I am not going to be discussing them- got tired of rehashing the same discussions over and over) come more from an inability to let go of a preconceived notion than an actual lack of something in the rules.  That is, failing to catch a variation or broader application of an existing option.
 
Short answer:  I play 2e because it meets my needs.  I don't play newer editions because I don't have the additional needs those new rules are meant to address.  The changes to rules- for the needs of me and my players- are nowhere near worth thumbing around through all those books to double-check something.
 
 

On other boards, I've seen quite a few former fans attest that they stopped playing HERO System at some point because the game's presentation was becoming the opposite of what they wanted.
 
HERO fan that I am, even I would never hand anyone I've ever known 5e or 6e -- or even my own favored edition, 4e. None of those books presents a game. They present a toolkit, from which a game can be assembled. Most people aren't interested in doing that, and even if they were, they don't have time for it.
 
Instead I'd go with Champions Complete, which is the closest thing to 1e/2e/3e's presentation that there's been in a long, long time. Plus it's a current product that gets support.
 
That said, there's nothing wrong with using 3e if that's what your situation calls for. I use plenty of older RPGs because they still work best for me and my group.

Trump is a symptom, not a cause. 
 
In other words, the problem is way, way worse than you realize. 

Honestly, the 1e pocket box went pretty quickly if you didnt stop for fist fight breaks....
 

 
 

Car Wars is fast if you're talking about in-universe time.  
 
Six hours to play out a ten second long duel!  

While I like tactical starship games, and have and played many of the ones people have mentioned above.  Starfire (2nd or 3rd editions) is perhaps my favorite.
But for RPG's IMO they just don't work.
 
I have moved to a model where ships are just like a fantasy games castle or tavern.  They are a location for the PC to act in.
Instead of an actual map or grid with the "ships" moving around.  I use a "plot" where the players ship is always the center and everything else are "targets" that move around the "plot".  The plot is laid out in rings for range and marked off in segments for direction. I am in the process of making a new plot for the Star Trek 2d20 I will be running at the local con in August.  Like most paper and pencil games the plot/map is mostly 2d, but I have found the layout spices up the games and the players seem to get into it fairly well. 

Exactly which politicians are you talking about?  Ones that never got elected?  Because I assure you in Big Coal country/Big Oil Country/Big Natural Gas country giving even a hint that you do not stand behind the local industry is a quick road to to an inglorious defeat.  I say this as someone who was born and raised in Big Oil country.  So unless the politician ran as a sleeper agent pretending love fossil fuels but secretly wishing to save the planet and there were enough of these sleeper agents to make a difference, then nothing is going to happen.  And even in my conspiracy theory for good, the change doesn't last.  All of the sleeper agent candidates get voted out to office the very next election, and as soon as president who is willing to sign them into law is in  office, a raft of legislation designed to to viciously gut environmental protections would be made into law.
 
So, no, it is not the job of politicians to stop mollycoddling their constituents.  It is the job of constituents to stop mollycoddling their elected officials.  Unfortunately, first the constituents must decide for themselves that the wellbeing of the planet is worth the risk of financial hardship.  See Cygnia's article on white parents rallying against a black educator in their own county and continuing to hound her even after she moved away, if you want to see what sort of people constituents are. 

Economics will destroy the market for fossil fuels in short order.  The cost of renewable energy is already significantly less than any fossil or nuclear source (despite government subsidies for fossils), and doesn't come with the same regulatory, capital, or environmental hurdles.  Of course it can't happen soon enough for purposes of climate change...
 

 
 
 
 

Off hand, I can't think of a single instance of conservatism where maintaining the status quo *didn't* involve different rules for different people... though the intent might be disguised Fiscal conservatism is a prime example. Fiscal conservatives present themselves as merely concerned with governments digging themselves into financial holes they can't get out of. But what expenditures must be avoided or cut for this prudence? Why, the welfare state. I don't remember ever hearing a self-described fiscal conservative ever saying, "We shall simply have to slash our military budget and hope for the best." Much less, "Corporations will simply have to pay more for the benefits they gain from government," or "We can still afford pensions and health care if we raise taxes on rich people." No, the pain of austerity must be borne by the less affluent. So in practice, different rules for rich and poor.
 
The current Republican obsession with "election security" similarly tries to present itself as a hard-headed, prudent concern for accuracy and reliability (against those wild-eyed liberals who'd hand a ballot to anyone willy-nilly), but is rather unsubtly code for "Keep Black people from voting."
 
I will grant that some conservatives have become fairly slick at presenting liberal innovations as creating new privileged groups or new oppressions -- opponents of affirmative action were quite brilliant at selling this -- but it's usually not hard to spot the defense of an old unfairness hiding behind the accusation of a new unfairness. So I think my formulation stands.
 
Dean Shomshak

Pathfinder is actually the perfect analogy for SFB--a house of cards built out of a mishmash of inconsistent rules.  And since I played it from the baggies up through Captain's Edition I got to watch that house of cards grow and shift. 
 
But my main gripe with SFB isn't the complexity or the rules holes, it's how slow it played.  Especially damage allocation.  Tactically, though, it was wonderful.
 
 
The strength of SFB (for RPG-focused purposes) is decisions.  Players can make decisions about energy allocation, movement, weapons arming and fire, and shield reinforcement that all directly affect the outcome of a given turn (or impulse ).  You could easily assign each function to a different player and it would all work pretty seamlessly, except that there's no mechanism for character skill influencing die rolls. 
 
(I wonder what would happen if players controlling different spacecraft disagreed on what to do on a given turn.  What if the engineer player refused to arm torpedoes instead of full movement?  What if the tactical station reinforced the left shield instead of the right, forcing the helm to turn a certain way?  What if the helmsman just slammed on the brakes?)
 
The only tactical starship combat systems I can think of that expressly have character interaction are the ancient FASA Star Trek (which I never played) or possibly Star Frontiers Knight Hawks (which I never played with characters).  You'd think Brilliant Lances would be perfect for Traveller since it's, like, Traveller, but I've never even seen it on the shelf.  I know it has hooks for characters since later expansions cover cybernetic character-ship links.  Out of other such games I've played:
 
- B5 Wars doesn't have character rules but is pretty SFB-like with a cleaner ruleset.   
- Silent Death is great for fighter swarms, though it might be a little lethal for RPGs.
- Traveller High Guard is a good game but has no character interaction and you'd have to cobble together a movement system for it.
- Full Thrust has good movement and damage but it'd take some work to convert for a Traveller campaign.  (Although FT is popular enough that there might be a conversion online.)
 
 

The answer to gas prices is simple: the capitalist fallacy of unlimited growth. They won't accept one ounce of lost profit.

White Parents Rallied to Chase a Black Educator Out of Town. Then, They Followed Her to the Next One.

For computers specifically, cosmic rays are a problem and become more of a problem as circuits get smaller and lower-voltaged.  Back in the day when I was analyzing astronomical data, it was hard to miss a cosmic ray strike on the detector since it would leave a maxed-out white streak where it hit.  Spacecraft do not have atmospheres or planetary-scale magnetic fields to deflect cosmic rays.  So there is a plausible reason for a minimum size for spacecraft computers.
 
Not that modern computers are necessarily small.  CPU die sizes are getting smaller, yet data centers still exist, and they pull eye-watering amounts of electricity to run.  Like climate-change-significant amounts.
 
Furthermore, having worked on some projects for the Navy, I can say that naval computers are just NEBS3 compliant servers, the Network Equipment Building Standard being a measure of environmental (temperature, humidity, voltage, shock range mainly) resistance.  NEBS3 is not so awesome that you couldn't disrupt such a server with a sufficient power surge or physical shock.  (I should add that modern navel vessels are generally unarmored and intended to avoid battle damage rather than withstand it.)  I could very easily picture a shipboard engineer scrambling to diagnose and change out a fried PCIe card in time to reboot the main radar before the next salvo of missiles arrives.
 
Lastly, I can't think of a worse ship-to-ship combat system for Traveller than SFB, but I used to wipe the floor with Klingons (and everyone else) using web caster-equipped ships.  Especially the DPW, although that has more to do with the literally overpowered ship rather than my skill.
 
 

This story of the bloodsuckers who are consolidating the market for the products that keep people with diabetes alive is just infuriating:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/
 
That our political system allows this to continue no matter which party is in control of our government is doubly infuriating.
It seems we have no choice at all.
 

I suggest that you ask the question in the Company Questions forum.

When my friends and I watched it way back when, we couldn’t seem to help ourselves from riffing on the bits it seemed to steal from Star Wars. Not a surprise given who produced it.
 
The Evil General was also given a costume seemingly made for mockery by teenaged film goers like we were.

When it was first released to theaters, I hadn't expected Willow to be fantasy's Star Wars, but I'd hoped it would be a fun adventure. And it was, sort of. There were some good lines and some good moments. But in the end it just wasn't very well done, like most fantasy films.
 
I rewatched it a few years ago, and still see it that way. It's OK, but unremarkable.
 
Will they improve on it with a series, or will they just try to give the audience more of the same? I suspect the latter.
 

When it was first released to theaters, I hadn't expected Willow to be fantasy's Star Wars, but I'd hoped it would be a fun adventure. And it was, sort of. There were some good lines and some good moments. But in the end it just wasn't very well done, like most fantasy films.
 
I rewatched it a few years ago, and still see it that way. It's OK, but unremarkable.
 
Will they improve on it with a series, or will they just try to give the audience more of the same? I suspect the latter.
 

And it's still available, as a pretty reasonably priced PDF for anyone interested in this little bit of supers RPG history:
https://www.chaosium.com/superworld-roleplaying-pdf/
 
Also worth mentioning "Bad Medicine for Dr. Drugs" and "Trouble for HAVOC", both of which are available as inexpensive PDFs that are compatible with not only Superworld but also Champions 1e-3e!
 
I love how intertwined so many companies and authors were back then, especially Hero Games, Chaosium, and Steve Jackson Games.
 
 

It doesn't really seem to be a conservative/progressive problem. Cory Booker was famously in the pocket of big pharma.

I played a lot of the '80s Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one) and had a good time doing it, but the way their product line worked made the game feel like it was really hard to take it away from it's "simulate Marvel Comics of the '80s" roots and the Character Creation system was so bonkers as to be unworkable without the group basically sitting down & deciding what they were going to play.  I had a good time & still think of it fondly, but my group had moved on for several years and bounced off GURPS Supers (too bloody) when we found Hero, in the form of the 4E Big Blue Book in the early '90s.
 
Had Hero not existed there is a good chance I wouldn't be playing supers at all.

This story of the bloodsuckers who are consolidating the market for the products that keep people with diabetes alive is just infuriating:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/
 
That our political system allows this to continue no matter which party is in control of our government is doubly infuriating.
It seems we have no choice at all.