Chris Goodwin

Points lost to Power Destruction were specified as coming back at the same rate as BODY, and it was further specified that Regeneration helped them come back at Regeneration's improved rate. 

I may have mentioned here and there a Star Wars Hero game... I've now been running it for a couple of months.  I've written up a document for it, which contains rules info and session write-ups, here. 

41 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

This is a GM thing as well: are the Disads in Package Deals counted against the other disses for purposes of halving value or are they unique and allowed to retain full value?

 

(I only mention this because a lot of us discovered PDs don't work well if the disses are treated as "normal," to the point that a character may have to take on several additional Disses because of category duplication in one or more of his packages.  Some GMs alloeed Package disses to kind if "slide", while others used it as a natural means of limiting the number of packages:

I think that back in the day we had packages count separately from regular Disads for purposes of diminishing returns. 

43 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

What's that?  The long-handed way to say "Elf?"

Nope!  It's the Drizzt do'Wolverine character with dual katanas, duster, mirrorshades, and a backstory that includes striking out on his own at age 3 after the orphanage he lived in (where he was sent after his parents died) was burned down, leaving him the sole survivor of at least two different tragedies.

2 hours ago, GM Joe said:

 

I agree, 50 points + disads is good for characteristics + skills alone...

 

 

...so would it be a good approach to offer Wild Talents from JI and the Magic system from FH as separate options that each included a note as to how many base points should be added if the option is included? +25 for each, or +15 for Wild Talents, +25 for Magic, or whatever makes sense as the base-line case.

We did that for our DI and Robot Warriors games as well.  It just seemed like it was tough to build a functional skill-based character on 75-100 total points.  You could easily spend 50-75 on Characteristics if you weren't careful, or even if you were. 

2 hours ago, GM Joe said:

I'm sorry about that, Chris.

😂😂😂😂😂

4 hours ago, GM Joe said:

It's just something I want to put some thought into so I can understand it fully. Maybe I'm missing something. Certainly I don't recall major complaints about this issue back in the 80s. But, there it is, so I want to understand it.

The group that Christopher Taylor and I were part of back then came to a consensus that 75 points wasn't enough to start with, so pretty much all of our games went with 100.  IIRC we kept Disadvantage values and diminishing returns as written in the heroic level games, and further if we were combining anything and the games had slightly different rules then the version in the game we were using took precedence. 

Joe, this is making me want to do more work on my "Hero System Third Edition" I've got in my Google Drive.  Not that I need to be distracted from my Star Wars Hero game or the D&D game I've taken on. .

17 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah the only way we ever played Danger International as action adventure stuff like Terminator vs Miami Vice, that kind of thing.  It would work fine for spies, we just didn't have any interest in hard core espionage.

That's not even mentioning the ridiculous number of science fiction and mecha games we used it with, or the western game.

Generally speaking it was action adventure, but there are a lot of different coats of paint that can go on it. 

2 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Shadowrun without the punk?

 

 

And maybe without the cyber.  Like, just regular people who just happen to be wizards and werewolves and fae and occasionally other things, having magical adventures in the modern world.  The thing is, I can't figure out what those adventures would be, without making it some other kind of adventure. 

Police?  Private investigators?  Military operatives (perhaps fighting incursions from underground tunnels)? 

Like, what do the PCs do?

I've always wanted to play in an urban fantasy game set in modern Earth where the supernatural was just out there and unremarkable, no Masquerade or similar.  Tried to run one a few times but never got very far.

Before I really started playing in 6th games regularly, first-gen Hero was my favored edition(s).  I was in SETAC and a big proponent of most of the 6th edition changes, but hadn't been in a regular game for years until 2019.  6th edition has grown on me, greatly. 

Everything is compatible enough from the beginning until now that you could pick up a character sheet from an arbitrary edition, and almost as is play it in any other arbitrary edition.  When you're sitting at the table, rolling dice and counting hexes, you'd be hard pressed to tell which edition you're playing.  That said, your original books haven't expired, so definitely play what feels right.

14 hours ago, Gilifron said:

My question is - is the 6e 482 page tome worth buying?

It should be noted that the 482 page Fantasy Hero 6e book is not the complete game; you'd need one of the core rulesets (6e1/6e2, Basic, Champions Complete, or Fantasy Hero Complete). 

On 2/17/2023 at 7:11 PM, Duke Bushido said:

Barely related note: has anyone seen Filksinger since Red October shut down?  I miss that guy. 

Used to be active on the Hero boards, into the early 'oughts, I want to say.  He was part of the Game Alliance of Salem that Christopher Taylor and I were both part of, and we gamed together a good bit back then (late 80's).  I can't remember his first name though... Tom, I think?  If so, I just looked on Facebook and saw him posting there as recently as January 1 of this year.  I have no idea if he's still involved with Hero and Champions at all though, but I kinda doubt it.  

On 2/20/2023 at 8:01 PM, Duke Bushido said:

More embarrassment:  fans of Shadow run talk about how awful the first edition was. 

Shadowrun fans talk about how awful every Shadowrun edition is.  

They're like Star Wars fans, in that they both hate the things they are a fan of.  🤣

On 2/20/2023 at 4:33 PM, C.R.Ryan said:

Well they have 3PO for most languages other wise the common languages seems to be common (I call the Galactic Trade Tongue, in my game) and Hutt. Wookie and Binary is a bit rarer.

 

I've had a lot of fun with my recent group and the Jawa PC. Jawas have sort of a pigeon trade language they speak to non-Jawas. The occasional translation problem (especially when the Jawa player drops an 18, not on the language skill just him panicking after blowing a skill check badly, he is prone to that in this game) is always hilarious. 

I looked at the language stuff for my Star Wars game.  I out and out specified that I wasn't going to nitpick languages, and the way I was going to handle it was the Han & Chewie way.  Neither of them speaks the other's languages, but they both understand them.  So, I reasoned, if you want to be able to do that, you can pick it up just by exposure in game, without spending any points.  Or if your background includes, "Human Raised by Wookiees", you can understand them and they can understand you.  

Every one of them bought either Wookiee or Binary with the -1 "Cannot Speak" Limitation.  🤣🤣🤣

On 1/24/2023 at 8:52 AM, Opal said:

"The Complete Incompletes" is a fan rule set that does so for every 4th ed/BBB characteristic.

 

Don't know where to find it...

That was written by James Jandebeur.  They are in Digital Hero 10, still available from Hero Games and DrivethruRPG.  I think they can be found online somewhere via the Wayback Machine, but a quick Google search isn't bringing them up anywhere but DH#10.

If you want a Fuzion-like system that is open licensed (via the OGL 1.0a), the Action! System is what you're looking for.  It was written by Mark Arsenault and published by Gold Rush Games.  It sits at a midpoint between Fuzion and Hero.  

The core rules can be had from archive.org:  

https://archive.org/details/action-core-free

They've been available at various times from DrivethruRPG, but not at the moment.  There are a bunch of extras that go with it that I think are all free, but I can't find through Google searching at the moment. 

The HERO System puts falling and movement into slightly different sets of rules, and the interaction between them isn't always straightforward.  

1 hex of Flight will let you hover; I'd rule that it would let you float safely to the ground as well.  Because I dislike "advantage stacking" (i.e. 1 point worth of a power with +6 1/2 in Advantages) I'd go with, say, 10m/5" of Flight.  Put a Trigger on it, and Only For Preventing Falling Damage, and (in 6e) the Gliding (-1) Limitation.  For me as GM, that would be enough.  

If the "general you" want more rigor, 120 meters or 60" of Flight/Gliding spread out across a full Turn would be enough to exactly counteract gravity.  120m/60" divided by the character's SPD would "technically" be enough, but I'm not sure I'd push the issue too much.  A character with 6 SPD could spend 20 points for the base Power, with whatever for the Trigger, let's wave our hands and say 30 Active Points, and -2 for the Limitations to make it 10 points.  I'd wave my hands a bit more and make it cost that regardless of a character's SPD.  30 Active and 10 Real points to ignore all falling damage?  That doesn't sound like too much or too little to me.  The one in my paragraph above is half the amount, and while I might like to see it cost more than 5 points, 10 is enough.

I had a Champions character who had a run-in with Truck-kun.  Blasted him through the Fourth Wall and into the main universe of the game.  

I used Drain STR (arms) or Drain Running (legs), both going against normal PD and recovering per month.  

(The character was called Greenstick...)

A lot of people played it as Vampions.  

Dean Shomshak wrote the Cabal of Flamboyant Justice, a Mage the Ascension chantry whose purpose was to perform magic openly by pretending to be superheroes.  It was awesome! 

How about malignant?  Tumors aren't evil, but they can sure cause a lot of trouble, and even kill you. 

I think the best we can hope for is for corporations to be benign.  I'm not sure we can say Hasbro is. 

Event signups have begun for GameStorm 23!  There's a new web site for signups, which should be in your email if you've purchased your badge already.  

I'm considering running a HERO System event. 

18 minutes ago, Grailknight said:

 

You should be asking that question of Opal, not me. The lack of third party buy-in was one of the various reasons that I didn't enumerate.

My question was largely rhetorical. 

11 minutes ago, Opal said:

The hope was obviously that 3pps would sign onto the toxic GSL to grasp the coattails of the runaway success that 4e theoretically could have been had the success of D&D ever had anything to do with how good a TTRPG it was. 

 

"Make a better product" often fails - marketing and legal shenanigans are at least as successful. 

 

And luck. 5e's success was 100% accidental market timing.

Good luck is when it rains soup and you have a truckload of buckets.  

It's possible Ryan Dancey had some idea of how wild the ecosystems around the various games would get, but maybe even he didn't.  

But seriously... we've asked the Hero Games guys why they never published adventures, and they answered: adventures do not sell.  Not to the extent Hero Games would need them to.  And -- as I may or may have not said in this thread, again I don't remember and am not really feeling like going back and looking -- while Jason Walters has made it as easy as pie to publish third party products for the HERO System, you still have to ask first, and asking is a barrier, however small that barrier is.  

16 minutes ago, Grailknight said:

 

No. They launched a product that could not garner the same following and support of the previous product for various reasons. Money talks and it said 4th Edition wasn't good enough. 

It had next to zero third party support.  Why would anyone support it when doing so would cast doubt on the legal status of everything else they'd ever written?

4 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

On 1/21/2023 at 7:02 PM, Hugh Neilson said:

What I have seen is people come to the Hero boards and ask where the free SRD is so they can play the game without paying one red cent to its developers. That is just as entitled and selfish as any unethical businessperson.

Also agreed.  Though that wierd xooyright loophole about mechanics versus flavor makes it a legitimate question.  I don't like it, personally, but it is legitimate.  Still, it doesnt mean that HERO- or anyone else- should have to provide one.  Buy the books and dig it out yourself.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what state is Hero Games in right now?  

It's hard to argue that WotC did anything but benefit immensely from the OGL.  It did so in two eras: the D&D 3.0/3.5 era and the D&D 5e era.  In the D&D 4e era it tanked; in the D&D 4e era it had the onerous "Game System License" which, among other things, said that if you published anything under the GSL you could never, ever publish anything under the OGL.  

Look what happened to D&D 4e.  

Someone is inevitably going to say something about D&D 4e's rules.  I'm going to call that a red herring right now.  Every new edition of every game will have someone saying something about its rules.  People were saying how bad D&D 3's rules were when it first came out.  People were saying how bad D&D 5's rules were when it first came out.  (People were saying how bad Champions 4e's rules were when it came out!)  

4e died on the vine because it wasn't able to attract 3pp support, and WotC wouldn't or couldn't provide it with the level of support on its own that an entire ecosystem sprung up to provide for 3e.  Now WotC are repeating the mistake with D&D 6e.  Doing the same thing, expecting a different result?  

Anyone remember "T$R" and "They Sue Regularly"?  At least two companies went under directly as a result of TSR suing them over providing third party support for AD&D 1e.  I believe I've recently read that Game Designers Workshop went under not as a result of being sued, but as a result of the potential that they might be sued, over Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys game.  (When one is sued, and one has to provide discovery, one has to pay staff to go through one's documents...)  

I've seen -- not here, that I can recall, but definitely elsewhere -- the idea that "lol u can just re-rite theyre roolz in youre own wurdz lol" and -- really?  Has anyone ever tried that?  I have.  It sucks.  Never going to again, until the next time.  Yes, copyright law allows you to do that -- but it doesn't say that the litigious large corporation can't sue you anyway for doing it, or for any other reason they want, and bankrupt you anyway.  "They Sue Regularly", remember?  

The thing about the OGL (did I post this here?  I can't remember if I did, and I've been talking about this in more than one place...) is that it was a promise of a "safe harbor": that they wouldn't sue you over things they couldn't sue you over, in exchange for doing this, that, and the other thing.  Respecting rights to certain things, voluntarily choosing not to exercise rights that you might otherwise be permitted to...  That right there is, honestly, what built WotC into the billion dollar corporation it is now.  

Sure, corporations are not your friend.  They can pretend all they want, and it's not people's fault for believing them.  It's not people's fault for believing them.  

It's not people's fault for believing them.

People liked D&D, and a lot of people build up an identity around things they like.  There's nothing wrong with that; we all do it.  Our house is a Honda household; others are Toyota households, or Ford households, or Chevy households.  I'm a Champions and Hero player from 1985.  

Regardless of the motivations, WotC did something that really upset a lot of people.  They took away that safe harbor.  (Honestly, I'm kinda pissed over that, because I wrote some OGL stuff, and "published" it in forum posts here and there and occasionally on my Google drive.  Nothing to do with any WotC intellectual property directly, but I'm not sure of its status now.)

It might not actually be legal for them to have done so, in fact, but until and unless that's tested in court any given person's opinions on that depends on what lawyer they're listening to.  

Anyway, WotC will either succeed or fail, and the ORC license coalition will either succeed or fail, and the world will go on turning...

I'm aware Hero Games will likely never release any part of the HERO System under any kind of open license, and I'm okay with that.  But, is there any way Hero Games could support the effort by Paizo, Kobold Press, and others, with the ORC?