bigdamnhero

Fixed - thanks! I'm thinking of general literacy. I can only read one language myself, and while I recognize that limits me in some ways, I'm still light-years ahead of someone who can't read at all. Video definitely has advantages, sure. But it also has limitations. Reading is a much more active process that engages your higher thought processes in a way that passively watching video does not. Mrs. BDH & I were actually talking about this just the other day, about the difference between reading a book on a subject vs. watching a YouTube video about it. For starters, even a really good video can only go into so much detail. And even if they were of comparable length, think of the difference between auditing a college class where you just sit through the lectures, vs actually doing the readings, writing the papers, etc; you may learn the same facts, but you're far less likely to understand and internalize the thoughts and concepts behind them. You're also much less likely to pause the video to think about what they just said or wind back to an earlier, related passage; I'll occasionally do that with some videos, but I do it with books/articles all the time. Video is great for learning practical, task-oriented skills, like how to install a garbage disposal or fix your sprinkler system or whatnot. But it's not the same as getting an education on a topic. What Mrs. BDH and I concluded is that a post-literate society that relied exclusively on video learning would most likely result in the vast majority of people being trained at job tasks (mechanics, moisture farmers, etc), while relying on Droids to do all the Smarts Stuff. Only a tiny fraction of the elite who learned to read would even be capable of understanding actual science, let alone actually doing science. In other words, it's look a lot like what we see of the SW universe. No wonder innovation is at pretty-much a standstill. But the larger question I'm pondering is not just about text vs video, but about how most inhabitants of the SW universe seem completely uninterested in verifiable knowledge. Sure, the 5 seconds of evidence in the HISHE vid* is hardly conclusive, but in the actual film (IIRC) no one even seems to consider the fact that hey, maybe we should go looking for some evidence? They just go from "He Said She Said" straight to "Fuck It, We Can't Possibly Know." Similarly, when people make ignorant claims about major historical events that happened in their own lifetimes, no one bemoans "Geez, read an effing history book will ya!" or attempts to introduce any evidence other than their own verbal testimony. It's as if the entire galaxy has stopped believing in the existence of objective, verifiable facts. Functional illiteracy may be the underlying cause, but its hardly the only problem. (And yes, I very much do see signs of this in our society currently, and yes that very much scares the hell out of me. But that's an NGD discussion.) * Which I hadn't seen before, thanks! Long before we had the Internet or even TV, we had newspapers. It took longer for the news to make its way around, but it still got there. There's no technical reasons I can think of most planets in SW couln't have their own planetary Net of some kind; even if it was only limited to existing knowledge and only got a "current events" update once a month when the news ship hypered in; even if it was something as primitive as local newspapers or a news feed at the library or whatever, rather than getting news updates on a smartphone-like device - it would still result in a much different level of knowledge and awareness than what we see in the movies. But AFAICT this has never existed in the movies** even pre-Empire. And importantly, no one seems to miss it or comment on its absence. Remember in B5 when Earthgov shut down/took over ISN and what a big deal that was? There's nothing comparable to this in SW. ** I believe the holonet is solely from the expanded universe?

Since it came up in the What Have You Watched Recently thread: K is for The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. One of the best works of "Narrative History," giving you a real feel not only for what the battlefield was like, but the decisions facing the various leaders and why it all played out the way it did. The American Civil War is not one of my favorite periods, but Killer Angels will always make my top 10 military history books. Also: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Dunsany's most famous work and a classic of pre-Tolkein fantasy.

Spotlight, the 2015 film about the Boston Globe's investigation into the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal. Very well done and well acted. Surprisingly slow-paced, I like how they let the story build slowly from a story about 1 or 2 priests, to over a dozen, to nearly 100, to more than twice that. As for the subject, there just aren't words....

Gettysburg is basically the film version of the book The Killer Angels, and really does it justice. One of the best and certainly one of the most historically-accurate war movies ever made. (A story I heard was they hired a bunch of Civil War reenactors as extras and wound up with a small army of historical advisors who were only too happy to make sure everything was done right, even down to correcting the buttons on some of the uniforms.) Need to watch that one again!

I don't have that book at hand, but something like that IIRC. This was back in 4ed or 5ed.

Ah, duh. Seems obvious when you say it like that. Thanks for helping me past my brain fart!

The latter: Movement & Actions apportioned per Segment instead of per Phase. So normally a SPD 3 Character with 16m Running "stands still" on Phases 1, 2 & 3, and then on Phase 4 moves 8m & attacks. Under our system, they'd move 2m on each of Segments 1, 2, 3 & 4, and attack on Phase 4. Two non-movement 1/2 Phase Actions would be spaced out similarly. Even as I type this, a small part of my brain thinks "Yeah, that actually makes sense..." But then the part of my brain kicks in that remembers what an unmitigated pain it was, and how much complexity it added for no discernible benefit...

A thought/question about Automaton defenses. A Character with Takes No Stun has the cost of its defenses tripled, but those defenses are not automatically made Resistant by default; you have to buy Resistant for them separately. That’s fine; I understand the cost basis behind that. But I’m wondering what if anything is the purpose of Automatons having nonresistant defenses? I’m looking at some old Automaton builds of mine, and I realize I’ve usually bought up their nonresistant defenses out of habit, and then made a certain percentage of that resistant. Is there any benefit to a Takes No Stun zombie or robot having, say, 5 PD / 2 rPD vs having 2 PD / 2 rPD? I canna think of one.

Quick clarification: 6e2 p130 states that a character who is holding their breath "expends a minimum of 1 END per Phase." Is this in addition to END costs from Movement, etc,? For example, if a character is holding their breath, and Swimming at a cost of 1 END per Phase, do they burn 1 END per Phase or 2 END? Thanks Steve.

I've been playing this way for 20+ years, and I literally can't think of a single time it's been a problem. If someone abuses it to attack and then run for cover that's 6m away, I will sometimes let the Bad Guy take a parting shot at their backs, stressing the fact that this is not a board game and most of this is happening nearly simultaneously. Hmm..Never thought of this, but it makes some sense. I would still say that attacking takes a 1/2 Phase action, so your 12m runner could move 3m, attack, and then move 3m more, but they would still normally be limited to 6m of movement. In other words attacking still means they're limited to a 1/2 move, but they can split up that 1/2 move however they like. I do sometimes let my players take a "Free 5-foot Step" like in D&D if they want to adjust their position a bit while making a Full Phase attack or the like. Seems like that would really slow down combat significantly. Not just because of the extra die roll, but because so many more attacks will be blocked. If everyone gets to block every Phase, you haven't really mixed things up, you've just made the "standard" attack more complicated. One thing we did try a few years back was opposed rolls: essentially the attacker rolls OCV+3d6, the defender rolls DCV+3d6, and high roll wins. Sounded good in theory, but we felt like all it did was add another layer of randomness to combat results and we ditched it after I think 2 sessions. I would recommend you resist scratching that particular itch. We tried that too once, and quickly decided it was a complete PITA that added no value. IIRC, that one lasted 1 session... Yeah, I'll sometimes give their opponent a small DCV boost if the players are getting repetitive of unimaginative, basically a Predictability Penalty, the opposite of a Surprise Bonus. (Making it a bonus to the NPC's DCV rather than a penalty to the PC's OCV "feels" less like punishing the player, even tho the math is of course the same.) Personally I dislike this because it discourages exactly the sort of dynamic combat you're trying to encourage. I would much rather assume that moving is the norm, and characters can always Brace for a penalty if they want it. YMMV of course.

I'll second Nolgrath's praise for Tulsa Morn. I've never had the opportunity to run a game in it, but just reading it was great fun.

Sneak peek of Amell on American Ninja Warrior. The dude's fit all right.

Wolf Girl has 45 STR, and Claws built as 1d6K Penetrating. That’s 12DCs at +1/2, which works out to 3d6K Pen with STR. (And yes, she bought Pen for the full STR+HKA, not just the HKA part.) She wants to do a Move-By with 20m of Running. Halving her STR rounds to 23, which is 5 DCs, which at +1/2 Adv comes out to 1d6K Pen. Adding the Claws back in brings us back up to 9 DCs, 2d6K Pen. (The 1d6 from the HKA is not halved, right?) 20m of Running adds +2d6, which is really +2 DCs because of the Advantage, so that gets us back up to 11 DCs, 2d6+1 K, Pen? Wolf-Girl takes 1/3 of that as Normal Damage, which works out to 4d6 Normal. Does that all look about right? I’ll be honest in 30+ years of playing Hero this is the one area that’s still a little fuzzy to me. I tend to handwave it a bit in game, but I have time to think this one out between sessions. Thanks,

I think that's true of all of SW, not just the expanded stuff. It's not like Lucas et. al. thought through any of this stuff deliberately, they just threw out whatever sounded cool in the moment. It's a fun geek mental exercise to try and make sense of it all, but you're right we don't need to take it all that seriously. True. But understandable, since RPG characters generally spend more time talking than they do communicating by writing. Right. I suppose you could go the other direction where I have 4 points in speaking, but my reading/writing is only at the equivalent to the 1 point level. But for most games that feels like more detail than it's worth. Actually we have that exact situation in my current campaign: one character started out illiterate, but has been having the Priest teach him to read Latin. The character has 3 points in Latin plus 1 point for Literate, so mechanically he went from completely illiterate to completely fluent overnight. But the character has been roleplaying it as if his reading is at the 1-2 point level. Given how rarely it comes up, neither of us feel like it's worth splitting points over.

Ethical Egoism probably comes the closest, the idea that the first ethical principle is self-interest, except here they explicitly extend it to cover "...or the interests of people I care about." Which is an interesting position to take for people who are allegedly driven to help others. I actually think someone could make an awesome series of YouTube videos examining the moral choices of movie & TV characters from an ethical viewpoint, but that someone would need to have put more points into KS: Philosophy than I did.

Saving The Human Race on the CW Seed. Six 6-minute mini-episodes about one of the few male survivors of the zombie apocalypse desperately trying to repopulate the species get laid as often as possible. Or at least y'know...once. Very funny, with a Shaun of the Dead feel to it. I love that the Internet is making it so easy now to tell stories that don't necessarily fit within the conventional formats. The premise of this show wouldn't be nearly enough to last a full season, but for 36 minutes it's kindof awesome.

As an aside: I do feel like the Arrowverse shows are playing the Death Only Counts If It's A Named Character trope a little too heavily lately. Aliens attack the DEO and there's "no time" to get everyone out, but Alex makes it out so that's cool; we're not even going to try and save the others. Air Force One gets blown up, but the only two named characters aboard survive, so yay. (Contrast with the same scene in IM3 when Stark busts his ass to save everyone on AF1 even after the Pres has flown.) Etc, etc. Just like in early seasons of Arrow where Ollie would mow down armies of nameless security guards and only get moralistic when it came time to kill the Main Villain or not. I know it's a pretty common comics trope, but it bugs me. I think it's also a symptom on Berlanti's completely individualistic take on morality. (I ranted about this a couple weeks ago on the Arrow thread.) Killing is bad not because the victim has a right to live or because it's bad for society, but because "it stains the killer's soul." Of course Kara should prioritize her friends' lives over the lives of thousands of others, because "our relationships define us as individuals." It's all just a very shallow, self-centered way of looking at the world, especially for people who consider themselves heroes. I mean But this overall "Bad things only matter when they happen to people I personally care about" vibe is kindof wearing on me.

OK, that was a massively fun episode! Supergirl's balance of action, humor, and genuine emotional moments has always been what makes it a step above the rest of the Arrowverse IMO, and this episode brought all three of those together strongly. Edit: Oh, and I loved that Kara & Winn were not even remotely surprised by

Oh, and what was the deal at the end with

What recent innovations are those? Not being argumentative - genuinely asking. I always got the impression that other than the Empire's obsession with Bigger Is Better, technology had been pretty much flat since before the Clone Wars? I think the question "Is Star Wars really SF or fantasy?" is a good way of looking at it. Not that there's a simple binary answer, but the society definitely looks & acts more like a pre-literate fantasy society than most SF societies. So yeah, going back to my earlier question of what would it looks like to run an RPG set in a futuristic society of functional illiterates with no tradition of journalism or history: the answer is take fantasy society tropes, but add spaceships and ray guns.

How does it compare to season 1? I thought the show had potential and some great ideas, but tried to handle too many different unrelated stories at once so it felt really unfocused to me.

I agree that failing to look at them as low-cost marketing material was a real wasted opportunity. But lack of modules was a thing all through the 5ed years too, not something new with 6ed. They pretty clearly had a strategy that Hero was a niche game that was never going to have broad appeal, so they focused on targeting their existing audience rather than trying to bring in new players. It worked for them for awhile - Hero averaged one new product every month for 7+ years - but we're seeing the long-term effects now. Bottom line: what killed 6ed AFAICT was that the core rules textbooks undersold.

I've never heard that Hero/DOJ needs Cryptic's permission to put out new CU material; my understanding was they can more or less do whatever they want with the pen & paper stuff other than they can't license it to any other 3rd parties? AFAICT they've already put out material that contradicts or goes beyond what was done in the video game. (Champions Beyond for one thing; some of the Destroyer/Shadow Destroyer material in CV1?) So unless you've heard/seen something I haven't I'm not sure that's an issue. In general, sure. But my understanding was that for Hero Games specifically most of the modules/adventures they've published have been more loss, and less leader. Obviously I don't have access to any actual sales figures. I don't like it, but it's hard to blame them for not throwing good money after bad. No worries. I probably should've inferred that on my own. Are you talking about an official company presence? If the former, I thought they used to regularly have booths at GenCon and Dragoncon(?) at least through most of 5ed; AFAIK that stopped once 6ed didn't sell and the MMO money dried up. Or do you just mean no one's running Hero games? I only go to my local (Denver) conventions, and I'm lucky that between me, the Ebil Bunneh, Surbrook, Oddhat and others there are always plenty of Hero games to play. Hero probably comes in right behind D&D, PF & Savage Worlds for largest number of games by system; at most Genghis Cons you could play a Hero game every slot if you were so inclined, and most are sold-out tables. But that's because several of us made a deliberate push to get more Hero games by running games and encouraging others to do so. I can't speak for the national conventions, but from friends who do go to GenCon and so forth it sounds like there's at least a few Hero games running? I do think one place Hero/DOJ has really fallen down on has been their marketing. (What marketing, you say? My point exactly.) I understand they've never exactly been flushed with cash, but there are a lot of really low-cost things they could have done to get word out and maintain interest in the system. Even something as simple as putting out a set of convention-ready modules that prospective GMs could download for free in exchange for agreeing to run it at a con/game day. They used to have the Legion Of Heroes or whatever it was called, but they didn't ever seem to do much with it.

Well then you don't know me, or any of the other GMs on this forum who are always going on about the custom campaigns we're running.... But again I recognize I'm not the majority of gamers, and I agree for most people good campaign material that you can run without a ton of prep is a big draw. The Savage Worlds Plot Point campaign model you mentioned is a good one IMO, because it gives you the outline of a campaign while still leaving room to customize things for the individual PCs. I think it's the main reason SW sells so well. (Personally I find the quality of SW's Plot Point campaigns varies pretty widely, and I tend to re-write the hell out of them until they're barely recognizable anyway - but again, that's me. I'm a writer first and foremost.)