Chris Goodwin

The Cabal of Flamboyant Justice! That's perhaps one of my favorite things ever written for Mage: the Ascension. Back around the time I realized the World of Darkness wasn't a single line but several largely incompatible and completely irreconcilable ones. If I could've found anyone willing to run a campaign in this style that might have saved it for me, but alas.

At the table I've heard many quick GM calls that have you roll against a similar skill at a small penalty, but nothing that would reach a level where it would need to be standardized. If you want a model for how you might do it, GURPS' skill system sounds like what you might be looking for, or the HERO System language similarity charts might work as well. I'm not saying use GURPS instead of Hero, but their skill system is at least not incompatible with ours.

I'm pretty sure this is it. I have a recollection that when I first opened Fantasy Hero, once I realized that it was the same system I started looking for the differences. And I was probably thinking to myself something like "Oh hey, I like this. I like this too. I'm not a hundred percent sure I like this but I'll wait and see." And that "looking for the differences" bit seems to have haunted me ever since, because I can rattle off half a dozen differences in the deep details between any two Hero System edition/rulesets without cracking the books. If you were playing FH 1E, you were starting with that book and its default assumptions for how to build spells. If you wanted to import Champions powers to build spells with you could have, but it was definitely a GM permission call. Magic items, monster abilities, or character special abilities used the same system, which meant that you could use the system to mimic powers, but it felt like you were dancing the Limbo to do it. Point costs were balanced against spellcasters though, which is probably most important. And the Spell Book supplement did add a few Champions powers reskinned as Fantasy Hero spell effects. One of the things I absolutely loved about the Robot Warriors mecha build rules was that you don't use Powers to build them! At least not "Hardware" (weapons, armor, movement, and one or two other pieces). Steve Perrin wrote Robot Warriors, and I've always assumed it was he who designed the Hardware subsystem, and it was freaking genius! It generates Hero System stats, uses Advantages and Limitations, but uses "Hero System doubling" to come up with mass values without any reference at all to Character Points. Different, but fully compatible, and (to me at least) they feel... heavy? Like massive pieces of equipment. "Systems" are closer to Powers, and use points rather than mass, but even the ones with the same or similar functionality to powers have different names. (If building them with Powers had felt right enough to me, I wouldn't have been nursing that conversion document along for nearly four decades. 😅) Similarly with Justice Inc. psychic talents. Some of them are named the same as their Hero System counterparts, but they work differently while generating results that map to a Hero System character build. (Sometime after 4e came out I tried to build those with Powers, and it was somehow even less satisfying than building Fantasy Hero spells with powers.) Interestingly: Justice Inc., Danger International, and Robot Warriors all included "gadgets" rules that sent you to your Champions books in case you wanted to use them. I don't know of anyone who did though. (Duke, if anyone did I'd guess it was you!) DI described the gadgets it came with (comms devices, drugs and poisons, gas masks, and so on -- the sorts of things you'd see in a modern military or James Bond adventure) in terms of plain language rather than build code. The 3e Star Hero book, the very final product released before 4e, used more or less the powers rules for alien abilities and technological devices, but it used those names to describe the subset of powers for each of them. I honestly never played anything using that book, and I've never even heard of anyone who did, but it's possible that someone out there did. So.... there's something unknowable yet definite among all of these that -- in my own fully subjective opinion -- really make things feel different.

For some reason FH 1e never seemed like super powers to me. But every version of Fantasy Hero since then has. And I've been trying for decades to figure out why. FH 1e had a set of assumptions baked into magic. FH for 5th and 6th gives the GM enough leeway to effectively replicate the 1e assumptions, but I'm not even sure that would make it feel to me like the 1e system. I wish I could figure it out. It's been bugging me all this time, and I think I've played Fantasy Hero all of four times in the intervening years. I wrote up an entire framework for attempting to recreate it, and while I think the rules and guidelines should in theory do it, they don't. Conversely, I ran a short Robot Warriors campaign about five years ago, using the Robot Warriors mecha rules with 6th edition, and it was just like 1986 again. I don't get it. 🤔

I think this was pretty much the expectation back in the day. When money costs were important in modern day games we used dollars rather than money points, or else we were part of an agency or military and whatever equipment we needed was issued to us.

Hugh Neilson had once proposed to start MCV from a base of 0 rather than 3. Characters would buy bonuses to hit with their Mental Powers and penalties to opponents' Mental Powers attack rolls. Mathematically it's more or less the same as starting everyone from a base of 3, and eliminates any questions about whether a non-mentalist can sell back OMCV.

For Money Point costs, I think it was intended to be 1 MP per Damage Class for weapons, and 1 MP per kilogram of mass for armor. That doesn't seem to be stated in Danger International anywhere, so it's possible that that was an on-the-fly translation my group at the time made using the similar section from that era's standalone Fantasy Hero game. (That game had 1 silver piece per DC or kg, and the same point cost for money chart was used in there, with 1 MP = 1 sp and 10 sp to 1 gp.)

There aren't any. They're third edition standalone games. You didn't pay points for firearms; they were "normal equipment" that it was assumed everyone would have reasonable access to. My thinking in suggesting them was that someone could look at the rules and more or less eyeball needed Modifiers to build them in modern editions.

The latest new variant is KP.3, descended from JN.1, itself an omicron variant. https://www.prevention.com/health/health-conditions/a61142758/kp3-latest-covid-variant/

I'm sorry for your loss.

Danger International pages 54-55 has some rules for shotguns. I know next to nothing about shotguns so I have no idea how true to life they are.

How about a list of conditions that exist in Hero? Stunned* Unconscious** Bleeding Dying Grabbed Entangled Flashed (targeting) What are some others? * "CON Stunned" isn't a thing, even though it's a colloquialism that a lot of us seem to have picked up. ** Different condition markers for the different levels of unconsciousness would be a good idea.

During the run-up to 6th edition, I had an idea to treat the Mental Powers with a sensory component (mainly Mind Link, Mind Scan, and Telepathy) as if they were Detects. Detect and Transmit Thoughts, Detect Target Location, and Detect and Transmit Memories, respectively. Telepathy becomes a hostile version of Mind Link, which would be built as a Detect with Transmit. The idea goes back to Justice Inc., in which the psychic abilities deemed most available to characters of the era were effectively Detects or Skills, further considered to be the equivalent of No Conscious Control. You could attempt to deliberately focus and use them, but doing so was at a big penalty. (In fact, the Mind Link power more or less was a straight import from Justice Inc. to 4th edition via Strike Force.) There's nothing inherent to anything about them that requires a diced effect vs. EGO, other than the need to balance attacker and target and to provide some form of resistance. These could be combined with either Mr. Taylor's notion of Transform-like mechanics (bringing back a diced effect after all) or something like the penalty structure in the Images power. (The Light Illusions power in the Champions II supplement was diced...) We don't seem to have any trouble with STR vs. STR dice contests for "grappling". So why not EGO vs. EGO similarly for Mental Powers? Along these lines, another suggestion I had for a "body control" power in the pre-6th discussion was using Telekinesis, making it EGO vs. EGO rather than STR vs. STR. There's nothing in principle that would make this "wrong", but I think there was a conceptual gap that I couldn't seem to get people across, as there was a lot of pushback. We seem to do okay with Entangle as a mental construct, using EGO vs. MD/BODY though. Consider the EGO vs. EGO Telekinesis (or rather, Psychokinesis) to exert mental force rather than physical force, and assume that it can't be used to lift targets into the air unless they can fly under their own power. (Consider: Psychokinesis is to Telekinesis as EGO is to STR; Mind Control is to Psychokinesis as Animate Object is to Telekinesis.) If we really wanted to keep diced effect, we could bring back negative Characteristic values, and use Drain or Suppress EGO in conjunction with Detect/Transmit Thoughts. Getting someone's effective EGO down to 0 or below has certain effects, including not being able to resist when you tell them to do something. We could easily change the effects of EGO, EGO+10, EGO+20, and so on, to become EGO 0 to -9, EGO -10 to -19, EGO -20 to -29, and so on. (Looks like levels of unconsciousness...) If we still had Figured Characteristics we could postulate a "mental REC" with a base value of EGO/5 + PRE/5, which one might use to recover "Mental STUN" (or call it Mental Resistance?). (I like the idea of giving PRE something to do in Mental Powers, and I'd also suggested for Alternate Combat Values, basing a Combat Value on each of the Primary Characteristics. STR/3, CON/3, INT/3, and PRE/3 were all considered by me. Alas, Combat Value came apart in the Great Decoupling as well.)

Wouldn't most species similarly refer to their home planets by names that mean "the ground", "the land", or similar? I think the best that we could hope for is either a transliteration of our spoken versions of our words for "people" and "land" respectively (probably in the language of whichever country makes contact with the aliens first) or a catalog number out of some registry somewhere. "We are the 877206's from 9901-red triangle-red triangle-blue square-57." Also, why do designations in alien languages use our letters? They would not call our system "9901-JJP-57"!

I can't help but wonder how much of this is personal experience and how much is just people repeating what they've heard. In my experience, HERO works at least as well as GURPS for fantasy. I've played in a lot of Fantasy Hero campaigns and at least one yearlong GURPS Fantasy campaign. And played in a little bit of GURPS Supers as well, in fact. With the right dials-and-switches settings, in my experience, GURPS isn't terrible for superheroes. And as I said, Hero is at least as good for fantasy as GURPS.