Duke Bushido

Yep. Not sure why, but locally, if you 'love football," (ugh) you either play it, or you sit your three-hundred-eighty pound carcass on a barstool or two and watch it for hours on end over an endless stream of very tiny chicken wings slathered in some sort of flavored syrup. Locally, there is no in between. Cant see that getting.... Well, I wanted to say "better," but I realize I am forcing my own thoughts on health as "good," when everyone involved seems pretty happy with the current situation, so let me just say that I can't see it getting different as time goes by, save for a decreasing number of people in the shape to actually play.

Why? I can pay next to nothing for the ols school movement Multipower- some ultra alots on Flight; Flight with a high NCM; Running; Swimming; and maybe some Swimming with a high NCM, then perhaps some ultra slots on Enerfy Blast, EB area effect; EB affect Desolid, another ultra MP for FF 40 ED, FF 40 PD, and FF 20/20, Yet a -1/4 for "Antler Powers"- say two different attacks, some missile deflection, and a highly specific sort of entangle- throw an HTH KA in there for goring something-- is just too much, should be extremely uncommon, etc, etc. The whole discussion just falls on its face when the other option is "yo, how about a power pool, then?"

To this day, we play it a bit different. Some things just "felt" better using EGO instead of INT. Ego for mind control; Int for illusions- that sort of thing. We have been playing it that way for decades. To be honest, though, it wasn't about any mechanical problems, as much as it was about what felt right for the powers and how we perceived them to work.

There is a world of difference between high _ranking_ and high _level_, my friend. What you see here are some high _ranking_ Level 0 and Level 1 Holy men. At best, the can cast "bless;" the ones with a few EPs can cast "baptize." That's about it. You need to find a combat cleric.

Wow! Now _that_ is a feat of strength, by God!

Slightly slower than the old Honda Fat Cat. However, if I recall, it is semi-amphibious. That is, it will float _next to you_ if you need to ford a River; it not carry you across a river. More impressive, I always thought, was the Russian 2-WD version of this.

I still play old editions. I dabbled in 4e for a year or two, but douns myself eight back in 2e shortly after, and I have never seen anything in newer editions compelling enough to make me change. Given the compatibikity backwards and forwards, if something I want does finally come along, I will likely just double the END cost and drag it backwards. If it is any help, I can tell you what I see. I see pretty accurate comic book characters (so far as I know, anyway) and pretty accurate pulp-esque Latern B Jaw versus the Swami type character builds. Obviously, this is all from one point of view: my knowledge of comic books is pretty thin, and at sixty-three years old, even what I do know is pretty dated (I wasnt a comic book kid, and did not become a comic book adult). So let me skip ahead to my 4e experience: Everyone had every defense. There is no softer way to say that: by the third oe fourth character, everyone had some od everything, defense-wise. It hasnt changed in the rules, so I suspect that is still kind of the way that the game is played: "stadanrd defense package" or some such thing. No matter what you want to call it, everyone had a little bit of everything, "just in case." Sam, your character's name is Crowbar. His powers are based on turning his body to iron. Your powers are Growth, Density increase, plus 20 STR only in HERO ID, resistant hardened PD and ED. This all makes sense.. I get the Knockback Resistance, and thank you for not foing overboard on that. Explain the Flash Defense? Okay, fine; your sunglasses are super sunglasses. Explain the EGO Defense? "Well, it is so much cheaper to mind control someone now, so I figur3d I had better take some, just in case...." On top of the 30 EGO?! "Well, it is so cheap to mind control someone now.... I figured I would buy a few dice of that, and a higher EGO gives me a higher OCV--" You're a brick! You are -literally- a human boat anchor! How does mind control fit into that?! Things like that. The old methods lead- at my tables; do remember this is anecdotal- to people more comfortable playing to type: bricks didn't buy EGO defense because Ego powers were _expensive_! People wanting to build an Egoist character went all-in. I mean, they _had_ to if they wanted do be a real threat. You didnt have that Egoist PC who also had an,incredible STR and a few martial arts maneuvers. You got the comic-classic (and pulp classic) mental powers guy. The TLDR version is that I found the total investment in mental powers required to be effective resulted in players much more comfortable in building characters who better-exemplifies the actual sort of character they wanted to play with a lot less dabbling in Ego Powers "because they are more effective now."

It isn't a musing; it isnt a quote, but I have no idea where to put it. What it _is_, though, is a level of preparedness I cannot fathom. You all know I went out of town this weekend. I wont say where or when, as I dont wish to cause any problems for these people, but we wnt through one small town and witnessesd a wake- lots of people- as many as eighty people- crammes into a rint front yard with their mourning clothes on, earing from paper plates, sedately talking to one another. There was a bouncy house set up for the kids..... Man, it just feels so wrong....

You stick to the dramatic premise or ghosts / demons / what-have-you from other realms wrwaking havoc in the real world, and being part of a team,with high-tech methods of dealing with it. Who the characters are is up to the players, but lean into the drama. That game kind of leaned into the goofiness instead, and specifically aimed,doe the vibe from the cartoon.

Bad news, Heroes. The drive on which my high-rez 2e projeect is stores,is suffeeing mechanical issues. To be honest, I hadn't installed,it in years- since the kids were actual tiny children. I cant be one hundred percent certain, but olfactory clues suggest grape soda was involved.... However, I do have a pretty lousy copy from the Bundle of Holding some years back, and a complete (but not great) scan of the entire 2e boxed set done by someone else, and a (also not great) scan of 1e-- which includes THE CORRECT CHARACTER SHEETS!- well, most of rhem. Somwonw filled onw out and colored in a character- Anyway, it isnt the stuff I _wanted_ to send, but it is the stufd that I have available until new computer money breaks loose from wherever it has been hiding.... With any luck, Jason or his agents can pull out what they need and make something of it.

I don't know- what it 3e? 2e? The brown box with the Elmore cover- or at least, the Elmore-esque cover) really seemed to get the kinks out- at least, as much as any other TSR game ever did. I rather enjoyed that version of the game. My first exposure to a Dice Pool mechanic. The system was solid; I have heard (without verification) that the mechanics went on to appear in later games. Solid mechanics, and briefly, there was support in terms of adventures, but it never tripped my trigger. More than anything, I suspect this is because I really didn't like the property. I went in thinking it was foing to be a quasi-serious, potentially tense dramatic thing with quirks and twists-- the original movie succeeded because no matter how people remember it, it was _not_ a comedy. It was a kid-friendly horror with funny bits. Anyway the property was that God-awful cartoon version of Ghost Busters which, like most 80's cartoon, were essentially extended-run toy commercials. The game didn't lean into the toy commercial aspect, but it kept leaning into the bad slapstick of the cartoon instead of the drama of the movies. Just kind of a turn off right out of the gate for me. Certainly a similarly-minded group could have steered it in a different direction (though the rules showed hard cartoon bias), but the group I was invited to play with _loved_ the cartoon for reasons I dont really get... Still, the mechanics were _solid_, and I would liked to have found some other game built around them.

A family thing came up; wont be home until tomorrow. I appreciate the offer, but honestly, it will be just as easy to copy the file to the flash flash drive and drop it in the mail Monday. It works well,enough: that is how we did Western HERO, Horror HERO, Cyber HERO and the Adventurers Club books, so I have to say that the method is quite well-tested. Oh, and if you are wondering, no: no one is hurt or injured. I had a chance to pick up a running, low-miles Goldwing engine and gearbox for the sweet price of "come get it," but it had to be gone be today, and it was quite a ways to travel.... It is a "family thing" because we all went, just for some together time, so we havent hurried at all.

I have been hearing this same argument for decades, and here is why it is invalid: All power frameworks are a cheat; all power frameworks (save one) reward you for having a "tight concept." The difference was the type of concept: having three different multipowers, each filled with powers that you know in advance you will not use concurrently (anyone else old enough to remember when the "movement Multipower" was so accepted that we all know to this day what was in it? Or the "attack multipower" for your blaster character?). The difference is that rewards for _tactically_ tight concepts were somehow A-OK, yet rewards for _thematically_ tight concepts were "ooh! That's a horrible dirty cheat!" Then along came power pool or, as I prefer to think of it, the mutlipower of everything, which allows a 250-or actual Superman, and is still somehow way more okay than a tiny discount for sticking to a theme. The whole argument is wierd.

6 and a half inches worth of kilometers. (Which said phone just changed to milimeters. Again! Yeah, I will fix it before I post. Ballpark it at something like a hundred and seventy kilometers, just eyballing it. In it's day, it was stupidly, eye-turningly large. Now everyone is making phone calls on their televisions.

That is the phone, Sir. Both measurements are given on millimeters. Dont know why the phone cannot accept the existence of this unit of measure. Should be fixed now.

Oh, Dude! Did you ever ask the right guy. Problem,is still the same, though. File was done at 1200 DPI (for hyper-crisp printing) and my computer still hates Dropbox. I think I still have your address, but just in case, shoot me a PM and I will get a flash Drive in the mail. If I can get the scanner up and going again, I would like to give you at least the correct 1e character sheets as well.

For whatever it is worth, even 1.5 meters roughly 5 ft tall. I have a half-sister that is 4'10. It just seems really, really awful.... Must be the constant high-G thrust or something....

I dont usually so PDF reading, sure; I am glad I have them, and in cases like T5, where I haven't been able to find affordable paper copies. It isnt even an aesthetics thing (though it kind of is that as well). The fact is that, even though it is part of my job and hanging out here, stafing at a screen is actively unpleasant for me. It isnt too far removed from staring into a 15 watt light bulb for hours on end. Unpleasant. I am not going to type out all my thoughts on T5- so far I have more than I ever want to type (which is saying something, I think), and I am exactly 54 pages into this 656 pqge book. I did want to take a moment to share my excitement that there is now an official size for the one-credit coin. (Yes; Miller seems,to have taken a few tips on how-to-Steve EDIT: page count reference; not a control freak reference. Thanks for the PM, Hero. ). For what it is worth, on page 54, we have a nice size chart (presumably to get us Americans a quick metric refresher) demonstraring that the one-credit coin is 7 milimeters. This actually seems kind of small, doesn'r it? Well, I thought it seemed rather small. At least until I scanned across the chart and discovered that the average human is 1.5 MIlLIMETERS tall! Coins don't seem so small now, do they?

Ans then later on we find out he burned it down himself to kill the vampires that ran the place? And now he is on the hunt for the mastermind behind pop sensation Britany Spears? And he doesn't know the difference between a fedora and a trilby? And he has a full beard that somehow stops growing just below his jawline? That guy?

Most of those, I believe are going to come down to your magic system: If your magic is a Power Pool that Requires a Skill Roll, you will get one price. [You are also not playing 2e unless there are Gadgets involved. ) If your magic is a skill with modifiers determined by the AP of a particular spell, you will get another price. If each spell is its own skill, you will get a third price. If each spell is a complete power build, you will get a fourth price. Throw in things like mandatory advantages and limitations, and all of those pric2ws may or may not change again, depending on campaign mandates for the pricing of said modifiers. From a rules-alone standpoint, there is no balance problem here. From a GM standpoint, it is still the same crapshoot that it has been to this day. This is a GM thing as well: are the Disads in Package Deals counted against the other Disads 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 Package Dealss don't work well if the Disads are treated as "normal (subject to halving with recurring instances, etc)" to the point that a character may have to take on several additional Disads because of category duplication in one or more of his packages. Some GMs allowed Package Disads to kind if "slide" (retain their full value regardless of previous or subsequent instances), while others used it as a natural means of limiting the number of Packages a character would start with: "I want the Dwarf package, the Merchant package, the well-Travelled package and--" "Tom, you realize that's already five Physical (Social) Limitations, right?" "Oh." So this, too, is not a rules issue; it is a campaign rules issue. What's that? The long-handed way to say "Elf?"

Barbecued potato.

Okay.... I got to Kay-OZZ-ee-UMM and just decided he's doing it on purpose....

Ha! We have that in common, Amigo!

Remember that JI had Powers (after a fashion) and a more extensive / expensive selection of skills; it was a 3e product. Personally, I though upping starting points was less than ideal: everyone is effectively straight 12s to 15s, 3 Speed. The difference between characters is skills (the on-paper, problem-solving, tactical differences, I mean: who is good at what. Dump an extra 25 pts on mere mortals, and you lose some specializarions as everyone can afford to overlap. Just my 2 cents, mind you, and worth every bit of what you paid for it, no doubt.

Eh. I may be weong about this, but sisnt 6e do away with the half value for third and fourth instances; quarter value for fifth and sixth? If that is the case, and you too about through editions, that would be a third way to handle disads; Joe is just sticking with what is already there.