Chris Goodwin

I'm not sure we even need that. We have plenty of system, stripped down or maximized. I don't think we even need to reprint rules. I'm happy enough if book X plus Champions Complete (or Fantasy Hero Compete or 6e1/6e2 or Basic or...) equals complete game.

To look at it from a different direction: the $13.95 or so I spent on the D&D Starter Set drove about another $150-200 in sales to WotC. It would have been really nice if I could have driven that money toward Hero Games instead.

For a long term campaign, setting is king. I'll give you that. If all I have is a rulebook (assume Champions Complete for the sake of argument) and an adventure, I can get started playing. If all I have is a rulebook and a setting, I still need an adventure. If I have a rulebook and a couple of adventures, I can start a campaign. Personal experience here. I tried to run a Champions campaign. I had players, I had characters, I had villains, I had setting. I didn't have an adventure. I bombed. I didn't turn them in to Champions players. This was the group I'd been playing D&D with for two years, starting with the D&D 5th edition Starter Set and the 5e Players Handbook. True, the Starter Set assumes the Forgotten Realms, but it gives about a page of countryside map, not much setting other than the actual areas the adventure takes place in, monsters, spells, the minimal rules needed to play characters up from 1st level to 5th. To me, that is a complete game. This is not me saying what I think is needed. This me saying what experience, successful and not, has shown me is needed. The D&D 5th edition Starter Set is a complete game, IMO. In order to get a successful product line, we need more people playing the game. Period.

No, it is not. Adventure is King. Getting people playing the game is King. Supporting GMs is King. As far as a "complete game" (defined as discussed in this thread) is concerned, setting is useful only to the extent that it exists as a place to put that complete game. If all I have is an adventure with only an implied setting (see also any D&D module, ever) I can sit down and run a game with it. If all I have is a setting with no adventure, I'm still stuck having to come up with a goddamn adventure. Want more players? Get more GMs. Want more GMs? Support GMs. Best way to do that? Adventures, IMO. We know they're not profit leaders. They're still necessary. "Complete game" can stand in for "adventures", if by that we mean, an adventure with some pregen PCs, pregen monsters, enough implied setting to run in. If that has to include a magic system then so be it. I don't need to know the political situation between kingdoms X and Y and guilds zed and double-zed, to be able to run an adventure. I'm not trying to pooh-pooh setting, long term. But I'm here begging for something I can break out and have six players playing in an hour. I don't have time to come up with that myself, and I certainly don't have time to come up with that myself in someone else's setting.

To draw new player interest, we need more people GMing. To get more people GMing, we need to give them support. Hence, a "complete game" version of Hero that a GM can pull out and get six people playing within an hour.

"Floating fixed locations" is the terminology used in 6th edition. "Floating" because you can change it, and "fixed location" as a spot that you can teleport to.

And further, the toolkit doesn't stop working just because you have a big pile of prebuilt stuff. Once you and your group are familiar and happy with the system, pull out that toolkit! Build out further!

When I say starter set I'm also not referring to a beginner's set. The D&D Starter Kit happens to use the D&D 5th edition Basic Rules, but when I played through it we used the full D&D 5e ruleset. The existing Fantasy Hero Complete "starter set" (electronic supplemental material) uses the full Fantasy Hero Complete rules. There's no reason there can't be "complete game" sets that include everything but the rules; I'm fine if "complete game" includes the rulebook, even the full toolkit, as a separate book or books. Good question. Danger International is self contained and limited. It assumes not just genre but a particular play style (i.e. no powers, agent-level, gritty). In theory, yes, we could reproduce that, as long as we're assuming a genre and play style. No, it's not the toolkit -- and that's a feature, not a bug. Everything about the full HERO System toolkit ecosystem assumes everything is wide open, and that GMs and players will have full access to it. It's kind of hard to reconcile that with a pregenerated world, power sets, power systems (magic systems, psionics, etc.), source material (monsters, villains, spells, gadgets, etc.). Believe me, I've been told a number of times that what I want is "dumbing down" the system -- no, I don't. I want something that I can open up and be playing in an hour. There's no reason a complete game has to dumb anything down. "Starter set" doesn't have to mean for beginners! Pregenerated source material doesn't have to be "dumb".

All of the FH Compete pregenned characters and monsters come in PDF and RTF as well as HD. For that matter, the D&D Starter Kit included five pregen characters preprinted on full character sheets. There's nothing in theory stopping us from doing the same, although handing a book-format character writeup to a high-school age player and telling them "Transfer this to this character sheet," could certainly be a good exercise for them in learning the character's abilities, learning their way around the character sheet, and so on. For my own part, the book format has only slightly more info than my own notebook paper character format, and I've played characters off of notebook paper.

Last year I ran a Danger International game (Global Task Force Omega vs. the World Terror Front) at GameStorm. This year I'm planning to run a Robot Warriors game.

I don't think a "complete" game necessarily has to include the full rules, but it has to be enough for you to be able to sit down and run a game. The various D&D 5e starter kits (the Starter Set, Stranger Things, Rick & Morty, Essentials) to me constitute a "complete game", because with any of those (all of which I believe include sample adventures) you could sit down and run a game. I might also call them "minimally complete" because without other materials you can't do much more than that, but with the Players Handbook and all the free downloads (SRD, basic rules, etc.) you've got enough for years of play. Fantasy Hero Complete, with the additional electronic downloads including pregen player characters, spells, monsters, setting, and adventure, is almost a complete game. I say almost because the Val of Stalla sample adventure isn't quite a fully fleshed out adventure, but it's pretty close. It would need a plot of some kind and/or a number of NPCs with their own wants, needs, and conflicts brewing that the PCs can get involved in. (Elsewhere I've said that it is complete, but I'm partially retracting that statement.) I'm okay with, e.g., rulebook X plus additional material book Y equals a complete game.

That's what I meant. If it's my car, I have a reasonable amount of control over where the car is -- and if I can teleport it, even more so. But my point is, if I can set "the passenger seat of my car" as a teleport location, can I teleport that car to me? And per the original post, could I define my sword as a fixed location, and teleport it to me?

A "location" for purposes of Teleport, can be a moving location, such as a particular seat in a 747 or even a living creature (6e1 p. 300). Does that mean it can be an object? If I had a fixed location bought as the passenger seat of a particular car, I can teleport to that seat, if it's within my Teleport distance. If I had Teleport against others at range, and enough mass to teleport the entire car, and the car were within my range, could I teleport the car to myself? If not, then why not? If we're considering a 1-point fixed location, is the ability to teleport to a moving location better than the ability to teleport to a non-moving location? Should it not then cost more? If my location is the passenger seat of a car, then my "fixed" location isn't exactly a single spot. I can suddenly teleport to anywhere that car can be.

We need a sixth edition Resource Kit, badly. With everything the 5e one had, updated to 6e. For the maps, I'd like to see the original hex grid removed, and instead add two hex-grid layers: one with one-inch hexes at 2 meters, and one with half-inch hexes at 1 meter. Set it to the half-inch hexes, print it at 200% scaling, and you have what a lot of 6e groups use: one-inch hexes at 1 meter. Set it to no layers for gridless and scale it however you want.

I'm not sure that with a general Clairsentience power I'd let you target e.g. "Joe's apartment" if you weren't within line of sight, but I would let you pop a Clairsentience point "120 meters that way". You can reorient from there, get closer, then re-pop or move your point to a new spot. Focus in on Joe's apartment that way. I've sometimes done a GPS bug as something like Detect Lat/Long, with a Clairsentience with that Detect. Make it Mobile with a Limitation that it's based on their movement (as GM I handwave away the "max velocity" portions of the Mobile part if the user of the Power has no control over where it goes). I think the question is: if you're using Clairsentience with the Limitation "Only through mirror", do you have to know the mirror is there and be able to target it? I would probably say no you don't, but the Clairsentience points are fixed and you're at their mercy. In the Joe's apartment scenario above, if you're outside of Joe's apartment building, you could certainly cycle through the mirrors in the various apartments, but given that they're fixed in place you're getting a lot of bathroom views. If you knew approximately where to target it (e.g. third floor, building B ) you'd have a better chance, but you're still cycling through bathrooms.

Whatever game I'm playing in, whatever the genre, I want it to feel like the sort of media that contains the same genre of stories. I want the characters to do, and to be able to do, the kinds of things the characters in those stories do, with the same rationales and for the same motivations. Besides genre, there's also tone and feel. I don't need or want all of my games to have the same tone and feel. With Hero, I know they don't need to, because I've played in Hero games with tone and feel covering the entire range of the poll options. I can't therefore chose any single option. I vote "Any and all of the above."

I was thinking of a "small pool of water", and then I saw this, and then my drink almost came out my nose.

This is a thing I've thought about doing. Generalized Fixed and Floating Locations to Fixed and Floating... things? I was never sure what to call them. Slots? 5 points for Cramming is effectively a "Floating Skill Familiarity Slot:". Which makes 1 point a Fixed Skill Familiarity Slot, which gives you a Skill Roll at 8-. Coincidence? Some other uses could be dimensions for Extradimensional Movement, or slots for a Variable Power Pool in a game in which VPP has to take "only from known list" or somesuch. Shapeshift shapes. Configurations of Variable Advantage and/or Limitation. Anything else that this could be generalized to?

It wasn't that bad... your base -1/3" halved but rounded in your favor, to -1/2". Usually you'd also Brace and/or Set, each of which gave you a doubling, one of which canceled out the halving. "Half" Range Modifier in second-gen translates to -2 to RMod, and the default Autofire being 5 shots, the +2 OCV you used to get for that cancels out the -2. It was probably decided from there that Autofire didn't need an OCV bonus after all; if you wanted one you'd buy it.

FH 1e standalone didn't have Autofire, though The Spell Book introduced it and a few other Champions powers and modifiers as spells.

I have a tendency to forget power modifiers if they're not on the sheet I'm looking at. But then I'm also fine with playing the game with characters made in the ultra-minimalist notebook paper template format. I submitted an updated version of the first edition Fantasy Hero spell creation sheet, usable with any game in 4th edition plus. (Here.) I wonder if that could be adapted to a Hero Designer export template?

I mentioned this in the Share Your Magic System thread, but I've been plugging away at a document for Myth Adventures in Fantasy Hero. I actually ran a game of this, long ago. I'd love to have suggestions, ideas, feedback, and so forth. Is there anything you'd like to see in it? More of something? Less of something? Suggestions for how to do (thing)?

The cost of normal senses is considered to be the same as the point value one would receive for its loss as a Physical Limitation or Complication. Thus, the cost for normal sight of 25 points in 5th edition or 35 points in 6th. Also, the normal senses are considered to fall under the "simulated Sense Groups" rule. Normal sight is Targeting and (partly) Discriminatory because the Sight Sense Group is Targeting and Discriminatory. Agreed.

Poking away at Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures Hero for 6th edition, including the magic system. A recent reread of the series shows that most areas have ambient magic levels, barring direct interaction with force lines. For instance, Limbo (from Myth-ing Persons) is generally a low magic dimension, until Skeeve locates a force line to tap into; the home Skeeve shared with Garkin seemed to be similar, implying that much of Klah is like this, while Isstvan's inn on Klah is at the confluence of a number of force lines (thus granting it a much higher ambient magic level). I'm working on something akin to GURPS's mana levels for this. Feedback is requested and appreciated!

It's sad because it's true. It's funny because it's true.