Duke Bushido

Who calls an Asterisk a s --- ah, never mind. It's probably that same group of lunkheads that have no clue what an octothorpe is....

You really shouldn't find any 5 or 6e write-ups for Crusader. Sam died in the 90s (the 4e / Fuzion era). It was part of a published adventure with a "Dark Champions" overtone, but at the moment it escapes me as to which one it was. Anyway, he was mortally wounded, made it to his girlfriend's apartment, lived long enough to spill everything to her, and died.

I disagree. I posted the example here a while back where Steve Peterson himself published that character as a Multipower and bonus characteristics with the limitations "only for reasonable animal forms" amongst others. Oh-- nevermind. Technically illegal because you can't put one framework into another-- I misread the VPP of _multiforms_; I read it as "multiple forms." I take back my objection. Carry on!

Off topic: I _know_ what it means; you can skip that part. Can someone tell me just how Splatbooks came to be called by this ridiculous name?

How? No; I'm not picking at you or calling you out. I am asking you to hold that thought a moment. How did it lead to confusion? Remember that this was a Hero Games product released during the 3e of Champions. There was no "Hero System" available to anyone who didn't pull it out of all the games that HERO had already published, and there were a lot of us who didn't know Hero Games was anything more than Champions. Seriously: Espionage was a 2e game. I learned of it's existence sometime around the year 2010. I finally picked up a copy about five years ago. I saw a copy of Justice Inc sometime in the nineties, but it wasn't until the late 'teens that I owned it. Same with a lot of stuff, actually. I _did_ know Fantasy HERO existed, and owned it within a couple of years of seeing it advertised in Different Worlds, but even by that point, we were playing a Fantasy and a Sci-Fi game with Champions. Bah-- digression! At any rate: the original Fantasy Hero was a self-contained game. There was nothing to confuse the spells with; there was nothing else in that book. People playing Traveller were not likely to confuse a laser carbine with D&D's Magic Missile. Knowing something about Champions didn't make Fantasy HERO some kind of trick. Certainly it was easy for most of us to see the similarities (if I remember right, the "hero system" (such as it was) was bragged on a bit in the text itself. But I can't see that it lead to confusion. Until 4e came out, I owned exactly four "hero system" books: Champions (2e), Champions II, Champions III, and Fantasy HERO. Well, I owned the Island of Doctor Destroyer (first one), but had lost it somewhere along the way. I have it again now (all three of them, actually, but I'd really like to have them all in paper: when can we get yours in paper, Christopher? ) Game stores weren't really a common thing throughout most of the country. At that point in my life, I'd have to have heard about a gaming store, then gone to all the trouble to track it down (there wasn't an internet), and discovered that it was four hours from where I lived (for what it's worth, eventually there was one within two hours of my home, but that was the nineties, and ten years later, it was gone). That's how most of us were, across the country. If you weren't in a relatively dense urban area, you lucked into gaming materials or, if you got _really_ lucky, your local grocery store accidentally got a copy or two of Dragon magazine and you'd comb through the adds looking for those "Send SASE to this address for our catalogue!" notices. (man have I played some really great and some really crappy games that way. Expendables, Starships and Spacemen-- the list goes on and on.) That's actually how I managed to snag Champs 2 and 3 and the Island of Dr. D (first one). Anyway: getting back to your comment-- specifically the part I added the bold to: What else is there? I stress that this-- the feeling-- this _is_ the point of any game. Well, any RPG. I have a couple of people who play in my HERO-driven space opera who play together in a D&D game under a different guy, but don't play in my FH game. They've never played Champions (not into supers), and have tried my FH games, and their comments are "it doesn't really feel like magic, though." Why not? Because it's kinda like we do in the Frontier's Edge game (my space opera). Now to be clear, the only thing either of them knows about the game mechanics is how Skills work, how combat works, and-- well, generally what you'd expect a casual player to pick up and know after playing for six years but never actually having read a rule book. In short: they're complaint _isn't_ that we're using the same powers constructs under new names or that the worlds are the same or that the underlying mechanic for my magic missile is the same as for my laser carbine--- their complaint is based only on what they know, and all they know is the roll to hit, calculate and apply damage, make a skill check, apply skill levels, record your END, and track your recoveries. Their complaint is entirely that the game feels the same because the system is the same. I won't lie to you or kid myself: everyone here has heard me make similar complaints about d20 games over the years: Dungeons and Mutants, Starships and Dragons, etc. And TSR does a way better job of burying the system than Hero does. Hero _stresses_ the System, for Pete's sake. They brag on the similarities. There's not much you can do about that _except_ add as much flavor as you can. You want your fantasy to _feel_ like fantasy. if renaming something adds to that, then it seems that it is adding that feel. It can really only add "confusion" if you are pushing against that feel or don't really want that feel to start with. You don't name your Fantasy wizard Obi Wan; you name you sci-fi wizard Obi Wan, and name your fantasy guy Arkelos. The difference is the feel. That's the _only_ difference there is in HERO: how you make the game feel. I can describe a vast, unexplored continent and all of its mysterious creatures and their incredible abilities. Is it a land of hidden magics, peopled with impossible races whose ancient mysticisms hold sway over the sun itself? Or is it Continent IV in the northwest quadrant of the recently-discovered eight planet orbiting Pygon II? Are the characters the last of king's Holy Defenders, leading and guiding the remnants of his people to sanctuary after the loss of the kingdom and the king himself during the demonic uprising? Or are they intergalactic scouts, each hoping to make a fortune with the discovery of precious ores on faraway planets? There's a guy in the party with a secret. Is he the man who accidentally raised the Demon Lord? Or is he the leader of the failed revolution of the Satellite Colonies three star systems back? Everything I describe on that land-- and the land itself-- is exactly the same, and the only difference is how you make the setting _feel_. "Energy Blast" and "Magic Blast" are identical in mechanic, especially if you're using the same system. All you can do is _everything_ you can do to push the feel of one over the other. I fail to see how that is not important. In fact, since these games are nothing but transitory works of imagination, I fail to see who that is not the _most important_ part of the the game itself. Well, yours, and everyone with whom you play.

That's pretty much what we've always done. I know I've said this before, but for this conversation, I will restate it: we needed vehicle rules before there were vehicle rules. The universality of the character building rules made it fairly obvious to us that we could build them as Characters are built, simply by doing what you said-- defining a base vehicle-- and using the existing system. The "base" vehicle seemed obvious to us: A man-sized vehicle, since the system was built around man-sized characters. So we opted for a motorcycle-- roughly the size of a person. If you wanted to make it bigger, you used Growth and followed the mass / volume rules for that. Shrinking did the same. Powers (particularly Shrinking) were often bought with limitations like "only to reduce mass" or Growth: Only to increase volume. We hand-waved out the need for size / mass powers to require END, etc, as they were essentially just the specifics of the vehicle in question. Seems like we had at the time a couple of rules for components simply because-- well, there _had_ to be components! Things like a minimum amount of volume or mass that must be considered to house motor / engine needs, life support needs, etc. When Fire, Fusion, and Steel landed, it really helped us establish a sort of scaling system. Robot Warriors was pretty helpful when it came out, but FFS was the _snit_!

You know, I don't think I have ever felt as much appreciation for another human being to whom I am not married as this statement made me feel for Steve Long. I detest (no; not past tense: I really can't let it go) Seeker, and for all the reasons LL mentioned. He might as well have had massively-outsized shoulder pads, been covered in pouches, and had a single glowing eye... Obviously, I had to check for myself after posting. However, I was still at work, and my AC's weren't. At any rate, the character I was thinking of was not Nighthawk; he bore a superficial resemblance in the cover art, however.

Okay, and a few quick things I wanted to touch on (if no one objects) that I didn't even want to try to do on a phone on break at work. That's helpful, sure. But that's not all that happened when the existing Talents were broken down that way. First, the flavor of "Talents" was removed-- more on that later. Second, --well, obviously the pricing was changed to match the various powers, etc, and just because I hadn't planned on bringing that up, and there is no need to detail that one, let me also lump into Second the valid complaint made by someone else (I couldn't find it again, or I'd have quoted it for proper attribution; I apologize) that it made Talents.... completely unnecessary. Third: It stopped them from being actual Talents. Christopher- -and think one other person, but again: I couldn't find it-- mentioned in regard to problematic Power builds that didn't really replicate the Talent that you could "just handwave" the differences. That's what Talents _were_. They were special cases-- often cases of a single unique ability that _didn't_ quite fit into Power or Skill mechanics, and just as often things that were binary as opposed to graduated: there weren't a lot of talents that you could by additional damage classes for, or extra effect for. And now there aren't. I can build Instant Change as T-form, blah-blah-blah. But T-form let's me by additional dice. There's also the "heal back" mechanic. So now we just handwave that I won't heal back-- eliminate a mechanic from a unique power in spite of having worked some serious contortions to make it fit a power mechanic, then ultimately just gave up, beat it with a hammer until we got it lodged in the hole it doesn't quite pass through, and called it good enough. So... we gave up a unique mechanic: I changed instantly-- and swapped it for the "more precise" build that requires handwaving. Oh-- my Power Defense should require that I buy additional dice of Instant Change, shouldn't it? Nah; handwave it. Much better. The accolades for these changes-- well, there are always going to be folks who like a change and folks who don't, so there's no point in arguing that. However, the accolades that come specifically from those who have always proclaimed that precise mechanics are the heart and soul of the System... those are a bit confusing with regard to some of the Talents build from Powers. All that said, you are quite right: Seeing them built that way? It can help a new GM when trying to determine what a Talent might be worth or where he thinks it should be costed. However, it overlooks both utility of the final build and the fact that Talents existed to _solve_ the Handwaving "problem." There are many here who have voiced a serious disdain for handwaving, after all, yet the system was changed to create... more of it? In the past, the general rule of thumb (at least for myself and the very few other GMs I know personally; I have never discussed this beyond that circle because-- well, because I had no intention of doing it that way anyhow, so it didn't matter at all to me) was to first try to find a power build. If a precise power build couldn't be determined-- say there was some handwaving required-- Boom. It was a Talent, and the mechanic for that Talent was "it makes X happen." So you don't have "T-form, self-only, only to change Y (costume, form, shape-- whatever). Other players start thinking "Hey, I've got T-form! I should be able to do that, too!" Well, there's a bit of handwaving that makes that happen-- "well why can't we wave that hand for me, too?! I've got like nine dice of T-form! I paid way, way more! I should be able to do it, too!" Before: "Well, I've got Instant Change, so poof; I'm a waswolf." Man, I wish _I_ had instant Change. Maybe I should have bought so much T-form.... (Yes; I know: Instant Change is a Power or something and not a Talent, but that just hit me, and I've done too much typing to redo it all. Insert whatever "it was a Talent and now it's a power but requires some unique leeway to make it work right" build here, okay? ) Showing one or two, an perhaps even "building" those examples from the ground up, noting things like "well, in the end, there's really not a lot of utility to Bump of Direction: just because you know which way is North doesn't mean that you know which corridor will get you there", etc-- let's just say its three points. That sort of thing. I think that would have been far more helpful, help control the Points Creep that each edition seems to add, _and_ preserved the idea _and the feel_ that Talents are truly unique things, and not just re-labeled Powers. I mean, a lot of us already relabel powers anyway: who has more than four characters whose sheets actually say "Energy Blast: ED" or "Blast: PD"? Now who has character sheets that say things like "Voltaic Shock" or "Gout of Flames" or "Acid Blast" or "Big Ol' Gun"? Congratulations. By the new standards, those are now Talents, every single one of them. Or there are no such things as Talents. Take your pick. On the plus side, it has legitimized a _lot_ of handwaving that some of us have been doing over the years for certain Power Builds simply by being a long, long list of Power Builds with handwaving. So.... break even? if "feel" isn't at all important to you, I mean? No arguments here. In fact, I think you'll find that there are lot of us here who have been saying the same thing. And that hits the nail on the head, right there: Very limited utility; how often does it come up? Certainly not enough to by Detect plus Images: Audio Hey, if you need frikkin' _Images_ to make light, then you should need _Images_ to make sound, right? Of course, sound carries in a wide cone-- well, a radius, really, so buy a _lot_ of AoE for that... So... fifty points? Fifty four? Who cares?! It's damned near a plot point instead of a build anyway, so _really_, what's it actually _worth_? The other side of the coin is "if the player bought it, the GM is obliged to give him his value for it." Well, since that schtick will get old in roughly two consecutive adventures or less, I'm wiling to be it's one of those things eventually just gets pushed off the table (making it another part of the system that you don't actually use). As a point or two for a Talent, I can work it into an adventure a couple of times; sure. As a Power build? To get utility for points spent? Nah. Not going to build every third session around your singing voice, but thanks for asking. Man, I don't even want to get started on the Grimoires. We've got spells and variant spells and cantrips and such we've been using for years-- Crap! I need to get back on that! Sorry, Chris--! Things got busy and it dropped off my radar.... Anyway: Yes. I like that, at least as of 5e Fantasy HERO, there were guidelines of "here is how a spell is built; have fun with it" (I have yet to read FH 6e cover-to-cover. I've skimmed it a few times, but Dude, that's a serious block of time when you're busy adulting....) The official Grimoires are clearly written for people who are extremely experienced with the system, and an absolute hot mess for beginners wanting to learn. And because of the layout, they are also a bit difficult to use a reference material. Rather than special effect, grouping by -- what do we call it? "Base Power?" That would have been _much_ more helpful as a reference. I am putting a lot of hope into Greg's Grimoire, and hope to get the POD soon. As soon as I can figure out where I need to buy it and how I need to buy it to get the paper dolls, anyway. Well, it does have Normal Characteristic Maxima-- I'm _not_ saying "that's a guideline," mind you: it's the closest thing we have to a guideline regarding Heroic Level _anything_, and we have to extrapolate from that: if a really good sword roll can one-shot kill a guy, and his normal PD is-- wait! A normal guy doesn't have rPD, so I have to do 21 Body to straight up murder him-- no; wait-- bleeding rules! Most one-hit kills in adventure literature are mortal wounds so they can gasp or say something then die a phase or two later.... so... 11 Body... an HKA is going to average 3.5 per die, so 3.5 or 4dice-- no! Str Bonus, dammit! I forgot that! It can only double, though.... how often does a normal strength character get a one-hit kill on an opponent...? Okay, so 10 STR would add... half a die? Okay, so we're at 3 dice for the sword.... You see where I'm going, of course. And you have to do that with _everything_ if you're using the System! It's maddening! Well, I suppose you don't. You could by the system, the genre book, the weapons book (a large bulk of which features not-fantasy weapons, so that's fun if you're looking just to play fantasy). You'll need to pick up at least one of the setting books, too.... Even then, you're not really going to have a guideline as such for character building. You may (or may not) get some prebuilt weapons or spell ideas, though. You can see the problem: if you want an off-the-shelf fantasy game, you're going to need an entire shelf to store it on. Oh, crap! Adventures! Campaigns! There are "seeds" through most of the modern stuff, but let's face it: "Seeds" boil down to "put in that same level of work, add some basic cartography, and point your efforts in this general direction," and as such, for the new-to-HERO GM, are nowhere near as helpful as we try to convince ourselves they are. I believe there are a few PDF adventures (haven't looked in a long, long time) and some of the HoC stuff may include adventures; I don't know. As it is, you can't use the seeds unless you are already very experienced _or_ have some guidelines, and are willing to put in the work to build the world (or buy the world) in which the adventure (that you will also have to build and populate) takes place. You have clearly not been playing UNO with the right people. It's an absolute tactical assault when we get together, with loads of political intrigue as alliances are forged and dropped repeatedly-- and in some cases, outright purchased with bribes and promises... There's really nothing like leaving a guy or two with twenty cards in his hand when you slap that last card on the table.... This was you, right? Tireless: Reduced Endurance 1⁄2 on Strength, Leaping, and Running 10 Planted: Knockback Resistance 10m 38 Tough: Resistant Protection 15 PD, 10 ED 10 Tough: Power Defense 10 8 Tough: Life Support Extended Breathing (1 END/5min) That's from you (truly excellent) 6e revamp of the Island of Doctor Destroyer. Those are renamed powers. Renaming the powers though, that's a relative term. I mentioned that I know two people who started with Fantasy HERO (original edition). For them, the HERO System is "renamed Spell Components." It's all about perspective. It's also the drawback to "accessing the code" for the program you're running. Either it's hidden, or it isn't. If you prefer it hidden, you either need to not be a GM or stay away from the HERO System, because the GM is all up in it. However, the powers alone are not the only place from which the "magical feel" is drawn: There is the magic system you will build as well. Most of us, I think, put a lot of work into making sure it's not just "I use a power and mark off the Endurance," but something that feels as though the character is drawing from some external well of energy or truly manipulating the very fabric of reality. You have to rename _everything_: the Powers, the Advantages, the Adders, the Limitations-- not just rename them, but how do they _look_? How do they _feel_? I mentioned just a couple of days ago that rather than "Extra Time," I use things like "Ritual" or "Complex Arrangements" or "Righteous Prayer" or whatever. It's _all_ Extra Time, ultimately, but _not to the players_. Knowing that it's Extra Time-- well, that's the GM's curse, and the price you pay to run a HERO-driven game. At least, it is _now_. Now that it's a generic system with genre books and a have-at-it attitude. I _wish_ I could tell you that it doesn't _really_ sap some of the feel-- some of the fun-- from the GM, but I can't. However, Powers or Spells, I will always prefer "Web of Living Stone" to "Entangle." Still, that doesn't mean it has to affect the players the same way. Honestly, I think this is why so many of us make the use of magic skill-based: just to move that little bit away from "I attack him with my Energy Blast!" It doesn't necessarily mean that as the GMs we don't know that Brushain the Sorcerer isn't just attacking him with his Energy Blast, but it still makes it easier for us to sell it to the players. No reason _they_ can't have fun, right?

I have friends who started with HERO via Fantasy HERO; a couple od them had moved away to new places away from their old DnD groups, werent able to find new ones-- by even that point, DnD had grown into multiple books to play "a real DnD game" [/high-nose jackass] and, not wantinf to invest in an encyclopedia, picked up several different games to try. Two of them landed on Fantasy HERO and just fell in love. Its things like this that make me harp so strongly on the importance of a one thin book game. You don't need the whole damned system to play a game. Realistically, what with all the "options" and campaign guidelines limitations the GM must set specifically _because_ of the options and open-ended nature of advancement and building, you actually _can't_ use the whole system in _any_ game. Even the two most recent Complete books (I almost said "current," but I caught myself. Where does the time go?) Are _not_ complete, simply because they tried so hard to incluse so much of the System that there was no room for a setting, world-building, a campaign- you got HERO System Basic with genre-appropriate art and build examples. FHC gave you a paragraph of sample races (guess how detailed that was? To skip having to detail them, they were all straight Pathfinder /recent DnD rips; if you dont know Pathfinder /recent Dnd, buy some of those books! There's a bold marketing tactic. ) The original Fantasy HERO was a _genuinely_ complete game, it still holds up today, it's an excellent gateway drug to HERO, and doesnt leave you with that "I was cheated; I have to buy all the rest of it to make sense of this!" feeling that the "Complete" books do. It doesn't have all of the modern system. It doesnt even have all of What was the system back then. It flat made crap up in places! And it was Still rhe whole game, and didnt suffer one bit for anyrhing that wasnt included. It even had room for a chatty, casual feel, unlike the Complete books and their bullet-points feel, teying to make room for the entire system. You dont need the whole thing to have a solid game that some lunatics might play for thirty years (lookin' at _you_, Duke! You and your degenerate friends! How dare you declare that a thousand extra pages of rules are superfluous to a good time, let alone the antithesis of one! Freak!) Seriously though: it's entirely possible to do; it's been done. You just have to get your heas wrapped around the idea that you dont nees the whole system, but you cant do that if youre unwilling to admit that youre not using the whole thing anyway.

Hell, I didn't even know that!

EDIT: Scratch what I just said. I suddenly remember Nighthawk on the cover of the Adventurers Club that contains the article about "The Hero and Legal System--" or something to that effect. Perhaps it was in some sort of side material: magazine article, something?

Its all good. I just like to drop periodic reminders of the value of complete self-contained games.

Just gonna leave this right here....

I was trying really hard not to say that.

Gotta be his. They arent standing on the same plane. And ahe cant posaibly have intestines.

An argument can be made that he is Detecting his own pitch, and adjusting himself accordingly, ultimately allowing him, with the means he has At hand, and perhaps practice, produce the perfect pitch. Still, I personally felt the big push to break Talents into Powers was a bunch of self-serving bull snuckles to begin with, for most of the reasons mentioned already.

Well, according to this Nigerian Prince that used to e-mail me all the time, Google Play cards are _the_ ticket.....

Laddie... don't think you ought to... rephrase that...? [/Scotty] in all seriousness, though: The earbox should get a STUN multiplier. It's unbelievably painful, can easily result in permanent damage-- and I mentioned insanely painful when done correctly, right? Actually, rethinking it, it's more like a Flash that does damage. Either way, though: As you can see, N-B, you're not alone: an Indirect Power described as a maneuver is clearly something we can all accept, with the right justification.

Yep. I would allow all of those. Especially Cynthia Rothrock. I am all about allowing bearhugs for Cynthia Rothrock.

Do what now?

It would, for me, depend entirely on-well, in this case, I hate to say SFX, but that is the best word I have. At any rate, desceibe how you see it working, etc: if you can sell me on hiw you picture it working, I would totally allow it.

I see no reason to re-imbed the video to respond to it; I hope that's not bad form. At any rate: if social media and the companies that host it make a strong move push against fascism, nazi-ism, and terrorism, and _you_ lose followers.... Maybe that's the sort of thing that should make you think about who you are and how you're doing?

Yep. Fire, Fusion, and Steel (an old Traveller sourcebbok for ship building) is a fantastic resource for creating a ship-building system, even if you only use it as inspiration. The biggest problem you are going to have designing a building system,for Star Wars is that there is only one difference between the ships (at keast in the source material): the number of people they can carry. You can hop in a fighter and travel to another star system. Speeds dont seem to vary to any significant degree, life support appears infinite, and you dont launch fighters,against capital ships unless there is a reasonable expectation that your fighters are a match for the capital ship. I suppose you could take a distinctive feature limitation for the size of the explosion when its blown up or something.