Joe Walsh

Aha, so all the Marvel Netflix shows, plus Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, are moving to Disney+, with a new content control category for parents for the more adult-oriented content. Nice, but a bit inconsistent with putting Hit-Monkey on Hulu instead of Disney+.
 

Wow, this thread exploded.
 
So a lot of repeated dead horse beating
 
But a few items, well beaten but none the less true.
 
In no particular order...
 
1) In Play Character Sheets vice Full Build Character Sheets.  This is still a must.  You simply do not need all the annotation on the character sheet in play.  It is simply a wall of numbers and arcane text for the new player.
 
2) Actual Campaigns and Adventures.  To work a campaign has to contain all of the key information required to play.  That means anything not contained in the core rulebook MUST be in the Campaign/Adventure.  If a campaign requires the purchase of yet another book in order to run it, people will pass.  A "One-Sheet" is a different animal.  The "Plot-Point" format is perfect. A supers campaign is not like a fantasy campaign (like D&D/PF) or a horror campaign (CoC).  You do not have to meet Dr Destroyer, Mechanon or Galactis in every campaign.  A character can complete multiple campaigns before they are powerful enough, and that is OK.
 
3) Build criteria, as in point values and caps.  For a campaign or adventure this is determined by the campaign or adventure.  It is not something left to the purchaser to figure out.  Make a decision and mark it as such. Players can always ignore it.  But a player, especially a new GM needs to know so they can plan.
 
4) Play Cards.  I have started calling play sheets this to avoid confusion with Play Character Sheets.  A Play Card has all the information needed to play the specific character on one sheet.   I  am currently tinkering on one to be laminated so a player can make quick notes. 
 
5) From the beginning Hero has always been easy to play.  Character creation, while not difficult once you realize how it works, us completely different and almost counter intuitive to new people.  But I completely disagree that combat drags out more than other systems.  Most of the issues come from familiarity and paying attention.  If a player is actually paying attention they can immediately tell you their action.  It is why I ban devices at the table when I run.  If you want an example of a mind bogglingly complex game that is Pathfinder with its 2 million class variants and 52 volumes of stuff.  I have yet to see a PF game were every action wasn't accompanied by the player and GM flipping pages and pages and pages to verify what they were doing.  Yes, yes...I  know I your game it never happens
 
6) Campaign Setting. Hero doesn't have one.  They have all of the ingredients, arguably too many ingredients.  But nothing organized into a format that a GM can pick up, prep and play. 

Nor I, but these sanctions have been much greater, and come *much* more swiftly, than I imagined possible. I imagined weeks of dithering while governments argued with each other and tried to make up their own minds. Putin probably did as well. While I am no military expert (nor mind reader), I suspect his plan was to wage a short, victorious war and present the rest of the world with a fait accompli. Governments would huff and puff, but nobody would be ready to go to war with Russia for the sake of a country already conquered. The Eurowimps would wag fingers, but would admit they needed Russian gas and oil more than they needed principles. Americans would be hamstrung by internal hyper-partisanship, and wouldn't act without strong allied support.
 
I have not words to say how happy I am this has not happened. Putin is clever, but this time he totally misread the room. It appears he did not, in fact, have a strategy tree by which he could change his plans to win something no matter what the West did in response. He can still "win" in Ukraine, but it will be a bloody, brutal slog instead of a chess-master's brilliant gambit. Instead of breaking up, NATO looks like it's getting new members and new resolve. Russia's trade and financial ties are unraveling. While Europe still needs Russian oil and gas, this will accelerate the search for alternate energy sources, steadily impoverishing Russia and reducing its economic leverage. And, intangibly, just an attitude of disgust toward Russia. Machiavelli warned that while it can be good for a prince to be feared, no prince can survive contempt.
 
Not one path to defeat, but all paths to defeat, in one field or another. I hope the Russian people -- and the Russian generals -- are coming to understand this.
 
Dean Shomshak

Meanwhile, the ugliness continues in Texas...
 

I'm noodling around with the idea of Champions Lite. This would be a free, limited version of the full rules. It would not have every Skill, Power, or Complication, but would have enough to let the players build straightforward characters and try the system out without spending any money, and without the more complicated rules to confuse them.

How Marvel Is Expanding the MCU Into 7 Different Branches
https://thedirect.com/article/marvel-mcu-branches-expanding

I finally saw The Mitchells vs The Machines and I loved it. I put it off for a long time because it looks like a silly mess, but I admit that the Oscar nom got me curious. Fantastic animation and several genuine laugh moments. Pretty clever writing and a dog/pig.

No thanks, I'm straight.  Appreciate the invite though.
 
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 7:  Stop making him sympathetic!  Stop it!
 
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 8: Okay, that's better.  But what's up with Simpson?
 
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 9: Oh, Hogarth.  I thought you were the smartest character, not the dumbest.
 
Jessica Jones Season 1 Episode 10: I keep forgetting this show is rated R and the next thing I know there's so much blood.
 
Kilgrave is easily the best MCU villain there has ever been or probably will be.  I am impressed.

I knew I'd watch it, but I didn't expect to binge the entire series on the day it released. 
 

I'm just amazed that I'd managed to avoid this plague for almost two years!

Okay, I've been following both this thread and the To-Hit thread, rolled it around in my head for a while, and I'm throwing this out there:  Several folks think (and I agree) that a single book that has a playable superhero game, rather than a toolkit to make a game, would sell and bring new players.
 
Existing examples of single book Hero games:
Lucha Libre Hero Narosia PS238 Traveller Hero Western Hero Widening Gyre I propose we test letting other people put their money where we think they would...
 
As a *very rough* first draft:
 
Product: Four-Color Champions (working title).
 
Purpose: Bring new players into Champions. Hopefully get them interested in broader Hero System products.
 
Method: A single book, BBB sized or smaller, that contains rules needed for Champions ("Powered by Hero System!"), plus tips on how to play, power levels, a sample hero team and villains, including an organization (Viper?) and master villain (Dr. Destroyer? Mechanon? New?), a city setting developed enough to start a campaign (either Millenium City or a new [to Hero] city), and a ready to run scenario that launches the players and GM into that city. Brief info on the world. Concentrate on four-color, MCU-style power levels and play style in a present-day world setting, don't try to cover everything.  The MCU movies are very popular, try to pick up on that wave of interest.
 
Funding: Kickstarter. Start with a nice color cover and minimal B&W interior artwork; stretch goals would add more artwork and then upgrade it to color. Mention (and have) plans for future supplements: more linked adventures, a city development book; also to use Kickstarter.  Maybe have a second adventure, linked to the first, at a high enough stretch goal to fund it.
 
Staff:  Writer. Editor. Proof-reader. Artist(s). Project coordinator.  There are several pro-level, accomplished Hero authors.  Christopher Taylor is concentrating on his fantasy setting and I respect that.  Derek Hiemforth.  Shadowcat.  I am neither a writer nor an editor, but I can proof-read and coordinate.
 
This project requires Hero Games buy-in and approval. Possibly re-use and modify text from Champions Complete and other previous Champions products.
 
What does Herodom Assembled think?

During all my most active years of playing in various Champions campaigns, we never used any published superhero settings. The settings, such as they were, were always "home brew", at least in the sense that they were not the Champions Universe, they were not DC, and they were not Marvel. They were just "the real world", but with superheroes and supervillains added. Of course many (but not all) villains and organizations were taken from the Champions supplements in order to save time, but the CU timeline was never used, unique CU cities/locations were never used, and the backstories of the villains were pretty much just ignored. The basic structure of play each week was: hear about the new crisis, investigate the crisis, stop the bad guys in a big fight at the end. Wash, rinse, repeat. Each session was like a single issue of a comic book that was not part of some over-arching plotline. Naturally, all of this pre-dated the whole Crisis Comic Book model of massive serialized crossover storytelling that has ruined comics (IMO), and maybe people have forgotten how to play their campaigns any other way. But when it comes to superheroes, a detailed setting with a new large-scale crisis plotline every year is a dubious and unappealing idea in my view. But maybe that's just me and nobody else wants to play silver/bronze age style supers anymore.

As you probably picked up on, my opinion of the published setting differs from yours, but there's no need for us to agree on that.
 
Ownership rights to the Champions Universe really isn't an issue, practically speaking. Steve Long brought his lawyer skills to bear on the sale contract. DOJ Inc. retains the rights in perpetuity to publish books using that setting, subject to approval of specifics by Cryptic Studios (or whoever owns them -- the company was just sold again recently). However, Cryptic seems to have ignored developments on the TTRPG side of the franchise for years, letting Hero Games publish what they want. Truth to tell, Champions Online isn't receiving much attention or support from their corporate masters these days, either. Moreover, if the MMORPG company folds Champions Online, the IP rights revert back to DOJ.

Here's an ugly thought---
 
though before I go any further, for the purposes of full disclosure:
 
I really, really, _really_ don't like the published setting.  
 
So there; that's out there.
 
Now moving beyond that:
 
Howzabout building a setting that is different from the one that HERO doesn't actually own anymore?  Something that can be entirely theirs, or at least available not at the whim of a videogame company?
 
 

Okay, so let's look at some rough history.
 
Paizo began, publishing Adventures for D&D 3.5.  But decided to go off on their own, and use the D20 license to publish their own system, we now know as Pathfinder. The product was a very Publishing adventures was supposed to be a losing proposition, but they made enough money to put out a magazine.  These magazines would put out Adventures that were linked to the Next issue of the magazine, and after a year, they would publish the adventures in a hardbacked book for $50, and start the next year's adventures in the magazine.   This has resulted in a very lush game world (Golarion) for Pathfinder, and a lot of material.  I do not know how well Second Edition is working out for them, but I would assume that since the stats in both editions are similar, if not the same, then the current published material should work. 
 
Now it has become evident, that the quality of computers has increased in capability since the early 2000s, pushing more work and productivity onto the rank and file worker, and sucking up vast amounts of time at home with ever more capable games.  So Marc W. Miller's  lament, that people don't have time for imagination seems apt.  IF we remember, both Traveller, and Hero were conceived as generic systems for running what ever you wanted to, but in Traveller's case, the player base became dependent upon published material, either modules, or magazine articles. Like Paizo, some of those magazine articles became collected into books.  Today you can see the fruits of that productivity in https://travellermap.com/, where the planets from  all the published Traveller material can be accessed on a single large, scalable, continuous map of all the Traveller sectors and subsectors.
 
Hero had a magazine for a while, but it went defunct with one of the sales, and did not continue.  Very little of that material was collected into separate books and adventures, but I also9 think Hero was a bit too early in the cycle to change the assumption that it was a system for home brew.  However there are a lot of questions on the Hero Discord about the original Champions Superhero group, and Millenium City, that there is interest in the published materials.  What was once true, that Adventures do not sell, is no longer the case, and that I would suggest something like the Paizo model be taken up, but in PDF form.  Adventures published in chucks, and then gathered at the end of a scheduled time period into a whole.  People don't have3 the time to Homebrew any more, and those that do, could help out by writing it down and publishing a PDF through Hero.  Somethi9ng like Champions Begins is a great start, but there should be a money making product for the company that helps the Novices along, after CB.  These are just my suggestions, but I would like to hear other ideas.
 

What? Killgrave is a great guy. The best!

I don't believe that's the key.  Understand:  
--US gas consumption is ~300 million gallons.  
--a gallon of gas has about 5.5 pounds of carbon, therefore produces about 20 pounds of CO2.  (Oxygen has a higher molecular weight.)
 
So *every day in the US alone* about 3 MILLION TONS of CO2 get generated.  Just from burning gasoline, not from any of the other ways.  I mention that to note that people don't understand the scope.  Each and every day.
 
From USGS:
https://www.usgs.gov/programs/VHP/volcanoes-can-affect-climate
 
So fossil fuels aren't small.  Quite the opposite;  they are, I believe, THE LARGEST single factor.
 
This is a prime example of the ecological problem.  No, one person, 100 people, even 10,000 people don't have that much influence.  But there's 7 billion people.  And their cars, and industry, and animals.  
 
https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/food/animal-agricultures-impact-on-climate-change/
 
 
It's the scale that people can't comprehend.  
 
Now...forest fires?  The massive fires we've seen the last few years?  Not sure, but actually, it wouldn't surprise me that those are also worse than volcanoes, because not only do they emit massive amounts of CO2, they destroy a significant amount of carbon capture.  This is also a major concern with the rain forest destruction.
 
To Mr. P's point:  if you want the most obvious examples of how much man can do, it's probably the major dams like Hoover.  Lake Mead covers about 250 square miles.  Its overall impact on weather might be hard to say, but its creation *massively* impacted obviously the lake area, and the entire downstream area.  Granted, that isn't on a planetary scale;  it's one dam.  It can't have influence over that large an area.  

But people are everywhere...so they can.  

The other form of climate denial I've encountered from people who ought to know better, is that human CO2 emissions are small compared to volcanic eruptions and things like that, so they can't be significant. Maybe the climate activists should be trying to stop volcanic eruptions! <snerk>
 
They forget human CO2 emissions happen on top of those natural sources. Here's the comparison I've devised, though I haven't had a chance to try it on someone who claims to be scientifically literate and rational:
 
Imagine a swimming pool. There are numerous faucets pouring into it, ranging from fire hydrants to dribbling taps. There are also numerous drains, both large and small. Some taps and drains are open all the time; others open and shut on a regular schedule. But over time, inflows and outflows balance. The water level fluctuates little, if at all.
 
Then you turn on another tap, that's stayed shut all this time. There is no corresponding new drain. It doesn't matter how big or small the new inflow is, compared to the other taps. Fast or slow, the water level rises. Eventually, the pool overflows.
 
Fossil fuels are one such tap. There are others. As a percentage of Earth's total carbon cycles, they may be small -- but decade after decade, it adds up.
 
Dean Shomshak

Climate science is largely the study of feedback loops. For example:
 
Higher temperatures → greater evaporation of water → higher atmospheric capacity to store heat → higher temperatures Higher temperatures → loss of sea ice → reduced reflection of sunlight back to space → greater heat absorption at the surface → higher temperatures  
...and so on.

Finished S1 of Peacemaker. Great ending to the season! So far this series is comfortably in my top 10 supers shows. We'll see what S2 brings!

One of the more sobering pieces I've seen was a climate scientist being interviewed some months back, saying that it's not a matter of _if_ Florida will be lost, it's a matter of how quickly -- how much warning/time we'll have to move the population of an entire state.

Dearthwood is on the back burner for now, simmering as I work on the Player's Guide and Jolrhos Codex.  I don't know when I'll get back to it, I might put out a beginner Fantasy Hero adventure first.

Currently I'm at work on another novel, so my gaming books are on the back burner but I've started work on this new module and have been working over the years on it based on an old game I ran in this setting.  The core concept is that this is a huge forest on a key trade route between two major cities.  Long ago there was a kingdom there, which fell under mysterious and awful circumstances.  From then on the forest has been suspect and over time its gotten worse and worse.

OK pretty pedestrian so far, but what I'm trying to do here is make a large sandbox adventure area for a campaign to run about in quite a while, whether trying to find out what went wrong or just to have a place to adventure.  And there's a problem with the forest: its corrupted by fell forces.  And the first interesting bit I'm working into it is based on an idea from the old Avalon Hill game called "Magic Realm."  In that, the game board was built of hexagonal tiles to make a different layout every time.  And the tiles could be enchanted by casting a spell on one of them, which flipped it to the other side, revealing a slightly different layout and some other effects.
 
So I'm working that into this adventure where you can "flip" map sections you're in to cleanse it from fell influence -- temporarily at least -- which changes things about it, such as encounters, types of creatures and herbs in it, and more.  There's a lot more to it but that's a teaser to what makes this more than just another evil haunted wood scenario.
 
Over time I'll touch into this post and add bits, and when the novel is done and at the editors I can start to write again on it, building the scenario.
 
Stay tuned.

Whatever the full story is, I have it from my campus COVID honcho that I am OK to go back to campus, so I will be returning tomorrow to hand back graded exam papers.  Thus I can resume my official task of infecting students' minds with scientific knowledge, as opposed to their bodies with d----d hitchhiking viral dirtbags.