Lemurion

Re: Seacouver, Washington: take 3 Actually the easiest way to do it would be to move Vancouver BC and dump it just north of Everett. Instant Seacouver.

Re: Paging Dr. Mid-Nite! I really liked this, but I don't remember the Golden Age Hourman having flight. He ran and leaped a lot, but I can't think of any story where he flew.

Re: Brainstorming superhero team liaisons Now that you've got the allies worked out, it's time to put some effort into the enemies. Figure out who the players are up against, give them some personality. In many ways allied NPCs are a sideshow. The game's about the players. Keep the focus on them and give them lots of hooks to work with. One of the most helpful things I've found is to never define anything until I need to. That lets me twist the plot to whatever will move the game forwards. You probably can't share your plots if your players read here, but it's a good idea to come up with a few, especially if you can get multiple hooks to interrelate. (Without forcing.)

Re: CU - Wold Newton If I remember the story right, Fafhrd and the Mouser were on Earth somewhere in the third century BC as they adventured among the post-Alexandrian successor states. I also have to add a plug for the current Ballantine Reissues of REH. I have all six and am pumped for the next two.

Re: Secret Identities and Teammates As a GM, I do find it easier if all the characters learn each other's SIDs over the course of the game. However for the characters it should be a major trust issue and as such should not be forced. I don't like the idea of a player trying to coax other players to have their characters to reveal their SIDs because it's what people do in team games.

Re: Brainstorming superhero team liaisons I would limit the liaison to someone who stays out of missions. Let the players run the missions unless it really needs a skill they don't have, and in that case have them escort someone who's only good at that and otherwise needs babysitting.

Re: 6th Edition Hero System I've been playing since 3E, have most of 4E and a lot of 5E. Getting me to buy 6E is going to be a trick. I already have a ton of money in the system and I don't want it invalidated. I also don't want to spend the money unless I get enough bang for my buck. So in a perfect world, 6E has to add new stuff that's at least as backwards compatible as 4E. First things first: That means any wholesale revamping of stats or mechanics are off the table. Changing the prices of the primary characteristics or how skills work is going to destroy backwards compatibility. I see two ways to go from here: First option, keep the rules essentially as they are, but fold them into a vastly expanded version of Hero Designer. Essentially the note or definition on the power in HD will reflect the full text of the manuscript. The other option is to take the current 5ER, plus the Ultimate Series and as much as possible redact them into a single volume. The end result would be a bigger book than we have now, but for everyone but the absolute completist it would bring new information. There are my thoughts.

Re: Where did this come from? Looks like maybe it came from a movie. I'd love to know where though. The picture itself looks modern, but the setting looks late 20's early 30's. The big monster in front looks late 20's but the monoplane in the background seems more early 30's.

Re: Looking for House rule suggestion END really only matters in Superheroic games. It's usually not a problem in Heroic level and few of those last long enough for it to really seem odd that the person would not run out of END.

Re: The artwork drives me nuts It's also important to note that it's often not-- can't play this, the artwork is bad-- so much as people picking it up, not liking the artwork, and then putting it down and spending their hard-earned shekels on something else. Bad art can easily be the determiner of which product someone buys. The only way a business can grow is to bring in new gamers. I've been buying HERO for 20 years, I'm not the one they have to impress. It's the kid who only knows D20 that needs impressing, and having crappy art is a way to turn him off before he has time to see the underlying system. It's not about getting great art for all products, it's about avoiding crappy art. (At least for me.)

Re: Favorite Green Lantern Alan Ladd Wellington Scott. Wielder of the Starheart the OTGL.

Re: The artwork drives me nuts Buying everything is not going to change things. If you buy everything you are reinforcing the current situation. What may have an effect is not buying books with art you don't like, and buying either two copies, or the book and the PDF of the ones you do like. If books with better art show improved sales, and books with poorer art show a drop in sales, that is what will have an effect. Otherwise we're just talking.

Re: The artwork drives me nuts Here's the way I see it. Art is part of the whole; and many judge the whole on the parts. If I pick something up and see that the art is not only bad but conspicuously amateurish, I am going to wonder about the product as a whole. Unless it's something I really want to pick up for other reasons, that product has to do more work to impress me enough to lay out money for it. As has been said before, a lack of art can be fine; anything except art which makes the product as a whole look shoddy. Once the product looks shoddy, people don't want to buy it. Art may not be the be all and end all, but bad art hurts.

Re: The artwork drives me nuts I started playing Champions almost 20 years ago, back around the beginning of 1988. It's always been my favorite RPG, but the art is becoming more and more of a problem. I tend to divide things into threes-- positive, neutral, or negative. I don't need a positive on the art, but I do need that it not be a negative. Too much of the art is moving to the negative and VVV is the worst example I've seen. Reprint books having reprint art is fine. But no art is better than ugly amateurish art.

Re: Cyberpunk Hero? I'm not looking forward to Cyber Hero, but then again I have the previous edition and that could be said to have scarred me for life.

Re: The artwork drives me nuts I just looked through VVV recently, and some of the art really is bad. It's the kind of art I remember seeing in some of the fly-by night games from the eighties. I'm another who doesn't need really good art to sell me on a book. I like having character art to show to the players, but I don't know that it's necessary. This topic comes up pretty often, and I know B&W illustrations don't have the grab factor of color, but I think something needs to be done. A lot of the art in VVV was bad enough to actively turn people off; and that's where the problem comes in. We don't need products with great art but no art is much better than art that actively turns people off. I don't know if VVV suffered from special circumstances, but it is something that needs to be looked at. I'm going to vote for less art in future products rather than the really bad art that shows up in some of them.

Re: Wold Newton: A letter from Clark Savage to Kent Allard I like-- you do good WN/

Re: What Kind of Heroes do you GM? I'm going to start with what I don't like: I don't like gun-bunnies, sword wielders, pure martial artists, or people with primary killing attacks. A lot of this is because I want more of a silver-bronze feel, and those characters don't fit it as well. I see Champions as a game to replay the classic comics tropes where only they can stop the villains. If they have the same kind of tools as anyone else, they're no longer special. I like characters who get into the setting: not too powerful, not too weak. Themes are very good. I ran a pulp supers campaign recently that was great because everyone bought into the tone of the game. I'd run it again but I've moved. A big thing for me is that the characters can't seem like they'd burst out laughing when they look in the mirror because they can't take themselves seriously (Foxbat as always excepted.)

Re: New scientific discovery? The backbone of pulp... In my games, I use the fact that Pulp based technology always scales perfectly. A "pulp" based steam engine that's ten times the size gives at least ten times the usable power.

Re: 4th Edition books? I second Normals Unbound and also have to say that all of the 4E Hudson City stuff was well done as well. I have and use a lot of both 4E and 5E.

Re: why the UNITED NATIONS? (for global super-agency) I've just been reading UNTIL, Defenders of Freedom and it puts a very good case for using the UN. I think anyone who has a real problem should at least reserve judgment until they can read it. So far I've only had one issue with it: They used the annoying variant spelling of Marshal with the additional 'l.' It should only have one "l" not two. But that's just my own linguistic prejudices speaking.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) That one couldn't exist. Didn't happen. It's inconceivable and no one could play something that far out from possibility. Even HERO has limits.

Re: why the UNITED NATIONS? (for global super-agency) People use the UN for two reasons: One: it's the obvious choice-- there really aren't any other global political/diplomatic organizations to use as an alternative. Two: as has been said before-- it fits with the genre.

Re: What's the best hero suppliment! Strike Force is the best supplement I've ever seen-- however I was limiting it to current DOJ HERO products. I also think Strike Force owes some of its deserved reputation because it was the first such supplement. Some of the general gaming rules it brought in had never been previously articulated. If it came out now it would simply be very very good-- not as great as it was at the time.

Re: What's the best hero suppliment! I really like Pulp HERO and Hudson City.