Duke Bushido

Actually, that is very much like the majority of my magic systems. My write ups are a lot simpler, though. I call the Limitation "Prepaid" rather than building out END Drains and all that. It simply meams,that the caster must pay the END price up front for the duration he wishes the spell to run. Like yours, he pays from his personal END or Mana or Special Sauce or whatever is powering magic in that game, and he may not recover any that has not been used up by the spell. I usually base the value at -1, going up if there is a large END cost to run the power at full value for a turn or so, or if it is a Defense spell (nothing sucks like having to pay END on 50 pts of Force field when you only needed 10, and that END is just kind of hanging out there until you use it up). I tend do resuve the value for Instant powers or if there is a small END Cost to run it for a turn or so. Oh- and I increase the value if it is a useable by others: you can just leave the Force Wall up until the magic juice runs dry and then recover that END normally. If someone else is controlling the on and off, he might want to hang onto the balance for "just in case" purposes. Not uncommon to assign large END requirments a -2; certainly not uncommon to assign a Usable by others a -2, and absolutely normal for large END requirements UBO. If you are poweing from personal END instead of Magic Star Stuff, I would start at -1.5 instead of -1, and adjust from there. Assyming typical heroic level END values of course. The only problem I have ever dound with this is the old Fantasy Trip problem, where players start giving you some seriously buff wizards: "Jake, was his END supposed to be 34 or 40? You've got it kind if screwed up here; it looks like-' "Right! Three hundred and forty; that's correcr!' Yeah.... Guess again....

Sorry, Joe; I missed this question when it first went up. No, Sir; I did not. I waffled a bit over "civilian vehicles" and "light duty vehicles" which upset one player in particular who could not accept that his F350 was legally a "light duty truck." My own sticking point was the fact that it is harder to drive a 40' straight truck than a semi (well, it was at the time: semi trailers were limited to 40' back then (53' now) and spread axles hadn't even been invented yet) because of the typically lower frame clearance and up to 12' of tailswing, bur then I though about buses and RVs etc, and finally just ledr it at cars ans lumped RVs in with cars and straight trucks in with heavy trucks.... Then there was the problem of what makes X different from Y, and realistically, the biggest difference between a bus and a straight truck is cargo capacity and a stick shifr (back then), so probably anyone who could drive could drive an empty truck and a simple car licence lets you pull a 40' camper trailer, which are typically 6" wider than a semi trailer and the whole thing just fell apart. Dinally I looked up the licence classes in my state, asked the pkayers to pick one, and they could drive that vehicle or under with that one skill. Pay a point to handle a trailer, and one more to deive a stick (these are more modern add-ons to our real-world heroic stuff) and called it good. We had a member here a long rime back who complained about nuclear-related stuff and the way it was versus should be handled in games. Why? He was stationed on a nuclear sub for years (dint remember what he did, though) and was way more familiar with the subject than is the typical game author. By his own admission, he "knew too much about it" to actually _game_ it. I have a similar problem related to driving: I grew up farming, meaning I grew up operating tractors and what the game calls "equipment." (For the record, if you can drive a stick, you can figure out a tractor in ten minutes if the controls are still marked. Well, certain controls: drive is a combination of stickshift and forklift (attention memelords: I was forklift certified before it was sexy!), excper you generally only shift _once_. Generally. In my cottage, a small part of my work life is still equipment operator (though I am a bit rusty on a high-hoe, not having used one in a couple of decades. Everything else? No problem). When I ledt home, I started driving truck, and I spent my first ten years in GA (well, 10 of the first 12) moving houses (yes, actual houses; not mobile homes) and mobile homes (what most people assume you mean when you say houses. I did both: I was an oversize-certified shanty shaker). And as I think everyone here knows, I have been riding motorcycles since I was 9. I own 5 right now. Nothing there is meant to be brqggartly-- considering most people here are academics or solidly white-collar, it _couldn't_ be bragging; I am the hillbilly in this group. It is meant to explain that, like our lost friend the submarine guy, I know too much about the hands-on of the subject to _ever_ find a good gameable representation of it. I get it. The problem is that any category is arbitrary. For example: I peomise there is less,similarity from one type of equipment to another than most people realize. Beinf able to run a panloader is entirelt different from being able to run a roller compactor, which is difgerent from a backhoe, which is not like a crane, etc, etc. In reality, there is no such catch-all for construction equipment. We went over that one. The closest I have ever xome to this is that set of plans from boys magazines in the late 69s and early 70s with the circle of plywood and the reversed-polarity vacuum cleaner motor (or 3; it was best with 3 motors). Couldn't really steer it, but it stopped when the cords pulled out of the outlet, so.... I wonr go over the rest because I was only trying to make a point without belaboring it. Aufdice it to say there are too many similarities between differing categories and too many difference within one category to allow attaining any kind of accurate simulation using categories. You will end up with that accursed Language Chart everyone is so in love with, but for wheeled engines. Best thing is to either find categories that work for you (I would suggest "skid steer" instead of "tanks," as there is a good bit of similarity between tracked vehicles and fixed-wheeled vehicles that steer by altering wheel speed from one side to the other, but they- it is your project). Anyway, find categories that work well for your concept- however broad or narrow you want them to be-- or do what I did and mostly abandon them. Though I do have skid steer (plus a point for tanks as the readout are more complex, the speeds faster, and the forward view is lacking) and I have airboats separate from boats, but other than that-

In my cirlce real-world, I am the onlt person I know who made good in his decisiin to biycott the snd movie when it finally landed. Thwt'a really all I can claim, since I haven't bought anything for DnD since the 80s, and I would rather have the itch od my inner eyelids scratched with a razor blade than have anything to so with Magic: the Marketing, so it isnt like I can boast of sticking with that boycott; I haven't been boycotting so much as not buying things I have zero interest in. Still, I was curious about the movie, but I will never know. And crap like this makes it always to keep not wanting to give them a dime.

Can only cast once between nightly rest periods: -1. There. Now it's a one-shot. As you said: you are playing HERO. You can do whatever you want, my friend! Fine by me; I always thought that was silly anyway, and I get that you want _the setting_, but not necessarily the _system_ to be faithful to the original.

Ah; you are right, of course. I was picturing one and naming the other. Apologies all around.

As others have said (sorry; got distracted with the kids and did not get back online), Loubet did some other stuff for Champions, but his most significant contribution os the cover of Justice, Inc. If you are collecting factoids on the various HERO-associated folks from the early days, my favorite bit of Loubet art is the cover of the original pocket-box Car Wars. Yes, with the 80s strioes and the van and the dude all cyborged into his command chair-- that was Loubet. He also did the little portrait of some contest winner as an autoduelist behind the wheel (brown hair, bored face, small chin, red uniform, looks extremely happy to finally be behind the wheel). It is just such a breathtakingly _emotive_ piece (you can literally _feel_ the subject's joy in the moment) to be otherwise a very simple piece. I have an odd appreciation for Loubet: I respecr his line art work and admire his skills, but it doesn'r have special appeal to me. His paintings, however, are fantastic. But That is probably more than you want to know, so I'm just going xome to an awkward sans-segue stop now. I remeber noting that the villains seemed,to be, where there was extant example of the characters. They got a quick painting over the line art, giving them a sincere comic book feel: colors and outlines all at once. I remember being a bit non-plussed that the colors were more akin to paintings- color-based shading and blending, etc- instead of comic-typical (at least at that time) solids and black for sharing- dont get me wrong; I one hundred percent understand that this painted look was far superior in terms,of detail, etc, but after going through massive shrinking and then the dots-upon-dots printing style of the day, they were a bit less,impressive, I think, than they would have been done in a more comic-traditional coloring scheme. One of my back-burner projects is to do high-res scans and pull the out the line art, resulting in black and white files I can use as-is or color any way I would like, and to see what the painting look like with strategic sections of the line art removed. I am willing to bet that, the costumes at least, are heloed considerably by this. But I digress. There were three sets total: heroes, villains, and "other,' which had police, bystanders and such. Did we use them? Well, yes and no. Our local library had a color Xerox with all the lenses for resizing, etc. We copied all of them and used the copies. We used the heroes and villains once or twice as miniatures for our own characters and villains, but ultimate we too sharpies and wrote on the 'backs' of them who was who, since we never used the official universe or its characters. Even after 4e, we only ever used two: Foxbat (eventually) and a tweaked version of 4e's Cheshire Cat. To this day, that is the full extent of our love for the official characters and settings. Wait- when I got the 4e GM shield with the paper minis, my then GM-in-training ran a short but fun "you play the villains" campaign that resulted in the death of pretty much all the 4e heroes and a sizeable chunk of the villains to whom we had current access, but that was really the only joy we ever got from official characters. Now we used the _crap_ out of the pilicemen and civillains set, burning copy after copy of that set. The best "use" we got from the cardboard heroes was inspiration. Almost immediately after we cooied the first set, we took our remaining nickels (man, I am _old_!) and began screwing with character sheets and the xerox machines various resizing options. (I know we can do a lot with digital imaging, but we will never be able to do it crisply and cleanly as we did with simple glass lenses). Within three our four weekends, we had worked out the "perfect formula" for reducing the character portraits on the character sheets down to the identical size as the cardboard heroes and we printed the crap out of those across the next ten years or so- PCS, NPCs- anyone with a chracter sheet portrait. We would print multiples of recurring characters and Pcs, and of course, it is a wonder that we disnt wear the ink off of the original "cops and such" set! Those law enforcement and civillains saw use in Champtions, Traveller, Tunnels,and Trolls, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Space Master, Starships and Spacemen-- they were our go-to civilian NPCs for pretty much every RPG that had an included map, and as actual PCs during our brief foray into Paranoia (we used colored pencils on the white space around the characters to indicate security clearance.) I recall a couple of the guys ponying up for a couple of packs of fantasy heroes ("they never have the perfect magic user!" was a common complaint) and I-don't-remember how many packs of monsters for fantasy. I bought the Champions ones and the Car Warriors set (_a_ Car Warriors set? I don't remember if there others). Full disclosure: I bought them with an eye toward using them more NPCs, as we never played Var Wars as anything but a tactical game. I always wanted to find a Traveller-appropriate set, but given GDWs unusual choice for map scaling (15mm, more like old-school war games of the past), I guess Steve Jackson figured there wasn't enough universal appeal to risk it. At any rate, we used them, but only to photocopy into soemthing we were willing to cut up, Mark on, spill drinks onto, and- in moments of triumph over a particularly difficult fiend, smash with a fist or immolate with a cigarette lighter (oh yeah... I am going to cast one last fireball....) (Unasked for aside: none of us smoked. _None_ of us. For whatever reason, most of us carried lighters. I was dating a gorgeous young lady who smoked; Robert had been a Scout his entire life (he was also the only other one that carried a knife). I have no idea why the others had lighters.....) Well, I guess I jumped the gun a bit on that one; didnt I? So.... _kinda_..? As the originals were called Cardboard Heroes and printed on cardstock, we took to referring to our xeroxed copies as "Paper Dolls." We still do, as we still use a lot of them. Granted, over they years, each of us has been able to buy a mini here and there for favorite characters-- and of late, pre-colored minis are available, amd that has been the most wonderful thing for me.... IF THEY WEREN'T ALL FOR FANTASY!!! But it is still difficult to find minis for superheroes or Westerns or certain niche one-off campaigns, so paper dolls still see a lot of action at my tables. Maybe not as much as they did at the supers table (thank you, FDW3773!), but they still see action. It is wierd: when you are young and trying to pay bills and go to school, you had to be very budget-minded, especially about things that you couldn't eat. Today, making ten times as much money as you thought you would, there is even less budget for entertainment. Personally, I don't think cheap easily-acquired character stand ins are ever going to go away. It isn't as big for mine as it once was, mostly thanks to almost-affordable color plastic minis (but only for fantasy and either World War, so far as I can tell), but it is still a part of it. Super Squirrel (who hasn't been here in ages) and Scott Ruggels have both posted in the past on using custom Shrink Dinks as minis. I would _love_ to see some nice clear up-close shots of that!

I have them; yes. What would you like to know?

All of those sound better than _any_ Star Wars movie.

You remind me of q guy who wanted me to rebuild his deck some years ago-- "What's that worth? A case? Two?" Uh, Billy.... _my_ kids dont drink....

The best thinf I can tell you is this: Don't be angry about what happens or will happen. I heard a bit in a speech a xouple decades ago that I recently saw illustrated, Two people who haven't seen each orher in some time discover each other again and begin talking. "You have changed" said one, after a few minutes of conversation." "I am changed. Things have changed me." It is not always that a person is at fault for who he becomes.

That's it. Back in the box. If you can behave and fight off the crazy, maybe we will let you out again next year....,

Ummm... Sure, but there really isnt much to tell. The only part remotely difficult is hammering down how "broad" or "narrow" a chosen skill is going to be. To go with an example in another thread: Driving. Are you limited to 'civillian vehicles, up to and including RVs and maybe 10-ton straight trucks with automatic transmissions? More limited that that? Or would you prefer "if it has a seat and crawls across the earth, I can handle it?" Then you know which category you have: just cars and pick-up truck type things? That is pretty narrow. Might even be an everyman at "basic" level. That I cannot do. First, my computer is very near deas (I have been complaining about that for some time now) and as such it doesn't recognize this boars (I have to use my phone to visit here) or the scanner (for those wondering why no more scan work was being done lately). Further, I dont use the HERO designer stuff. I am techno-illiterate for the most part-- not to the point that "hook your computer up to a firewall" lead me to burn down the house or anything, but on the rare occasion I drop into rhe HERO designer forum, I have absolutely zero GD idea what language anyone is speaking or what the f they are talking about. That is probably my own fault. I did play with the HERO Maker software way back when, but very quickly realized that I derived considerable pleasure from the pencil and paper approach and gave the sotware away to friend way more into that sort of thing than I ever will be. To this day, I can't even read a character that isn't on a 2e character sheet without having to really stop and study it for a few minutes. If you have specific questions though, and we have ever run into such a situation, I will be more than happy to field them.

Oh: also, yes; I cant think of any other Hero game that uses polyhedrons save for some suggested alternative rules in a couple of magazines. However as you point out, Steve has probably included such "official options" by now, sinve his hobby seems to be take every rule from every game and make it an official option.

I dont know how to answer that. I have had many occasions to use it, and have it a few different ways, but never the way it was intended, as every time I bring it up, the players if the day are equally divided for and against, so all these years, and it has mostly been a map of swanky place when I needed one. I should also add that I did not buy it for Espionage! I bougt it to use with Daredevils, which we were all pretty big into at the time. I had never owned or even heard of Espionage! (At least, to know it was a Champions-related thing; obviously I could see it written on various things) until this century. And at one point, Stormhaven did service as a noble estate during a siege campaign. Very nice place to be trapped for a few weeks.

It was in the lineup for Espionage. Publication was delayed for a numbrr of years (there is a very tragic explanation in the forward). Mugshots 1 is perfectly usable for Espionage, as it is largely a collection of short (and very good) pulp-esque adventures. No; the character write-how arent for Espionage, but if you have Mugshots 2 and Stormhaven, conversions are easy enough. Even if you don't, conversions arent really necessary, either. Just jot down some partial characters and you're ready to run. (Was Stormhaven on your list?)

No longer have docs or software (didnt have a computer, so they were useless to me anyway at the time. Gave it all to a friend. Still have the book and all its hideous early computer graphic 3-D glory, though. Is there something specific I xould look up for you?

Decide just how wonky you are willing to let things get before renaming 'car.' I had considered "civilian vehicle" once for a heroic level game, and was promptly reminded that this can include RVs and trucks up to five tons. I felt silly having that pointed out to me when my own "civilian vehicle" in the summer of 78 was a used school bus I had cut into harvest truck. Well, that and the motorcycle I moved here on.

I don't believe that he is regeeeing to social "mechanics'. I believe he is referring to narrative resolution of tactical action. This is a sticking point for,both of us, actually: for Scott because he enjoys the plotting and logistics od mapped and diced combat, and for me because my fate riding on the throw of the dice is a kind of religious fervor for me.

I am very proud of you! Most people forget Mugshots 2.

Sure; I'll bite! This thread is now four pages long. This is in large part because all od the active participants in this thread have very diggerenr opinions not just about how named, defined, official maneuvers are to be interpreted and which ones are important and which are not. 5e was the first edition of this game- from core rules to supplements and genre conventions to adventures to- to whatever- to be written _almost entirely_ by one man. He isnt going to have a lot of disagreement with himself. (To rectify this, I have generously volunteered to do all the disagreeing with him: one on one just kind of simplifies this, and,having already spent a couple of decades really not liking the original Dark Champions, I was already practiced. Path of Least Resistance amd all that. It has been a thankless job, but you are all welcome anyway. ) The same,can be said of 6e, where an even larger percentage of the material was written by one guy (which made my job harder: do you have any idea how hard it is to maintain disagreement when you are in total awe at the volume of output?! Wow!) Look at the earlier examples that you cite. Sure, a,lot we're written by L Douglas G, but not all,of them. And even of the ones that were, going through contributing names and, where available, editors, you will find each of these books had different creative teams We all know that persuasion qmd debate are an important part of deviding what goes into these books (unless you are just going to show off and write almost an entire product line by yourself. Twice. Like some kind of show off. Or cyborg. ), amd we,know that diggerent people are foinf to have different ideas, etc, etc. There is also the chance with a recurring author or lead writer of editorial team that after having spent time with his previous rules, he found something lacking or superfluous, and took this new opportunity to make what he felt to be a much-needed correction this time around. Given a third opportunity, he may devise that it was better the first time. Now keep in mind that I have absolutely no facts to suggest that this was the case in the instances you cite, but I am willing to bet that it has a large degree of accuracy.

Oh Dear Fates! Of all the-- ! Dude! "Many of us blah blah blah in the days of wall-mounted home phones." I hate to break it to you, but I remember when houses were built with special recessed areas in the wall actually called "phone alcoves" specifically to house the thirteen-pound beast that kept you in touch with the word, and,when a phone jack looked like a headphone jack (and I will not,be taking question about what happens after you notice this and own headphones). I remember when not eberyone had a telephone! Our house was a house with no phone! Who is this guy trying to make feel old? Thirty-something's? Forty-somethings? You are going to have to go back further than that to touch me, Buddy. Amateur.

I havent watched it yet, but everyone here better damned well remember toilet paper, for Pete's sake!

Actually, you should toss in sone Beastmaster and find something for Cynthia Rothrock to kick, and you have a masterpiece on your hands that will far outside the Jackson films.

Well that's one I haven't seen before. Good for him! Before going forward, let me say that I am not terribly familia with 4e Elemental Control, as I neber dound a compelling reason to move beyond 2e. With that qualifier understood, I can honestly say that almost every over-stuffed or overpowered EC build I have ever run across has always been either a misunderstanding or deliberate misapplication of the EC rules. In general, the overall,savings breaks out roughly equivalent to the 6e replacement "Unified Power," or about a -1/4 over all. A truly experienced player can push that a bit, but in general (at least in 1 and 2e), if you werw usinf the rules correctly, the savings weren't huge. I have always suspecyed that a lot of the hate directed at EC (at least, that which does not come from believing the objectively false idea that points equate to game balance and,character equality) comes from improperly-applied buulding rules.

Check with your GM specifically about powers that ordinarily are Endurance free but have taken the "Costs End" limitation. Back in the day, most of us would allow such a power in an EC (though somw of us would not allow the cosr savings, and,instead made it a -0 Limitation as a requirment to put such a power into an elemental control.