Duke Bushido

Going further with Derrick's suggestion of backing away from accurate realism in favor of game balance, you might consider building it as a nerve strike, with perhaps a small amount of penetrating Body (deoending on the power levels in your game). Still pretty brutal, but perhaps not as table-tilting as the real thing.

Just touching on this: Classic Traveller never went into detail about what went into a tech level. Personally, I never found that odd, as most games of the era either "left it up to you" or figured you could understand the underlying logic well enough that it wasn't worth detailing on their limited budget. I say that to point out to any younger folks (young folks playing HERO! Ha! I slay myself!) that this sort of thing was _so incredibly normal_ that the tendency was to assume that there was something already stated that gave you the information you needed to answer your question (word processors, digital documents, and a sharp drop in printing and publishing prices and options have changed all that, though). Anyway, we always assumed that the tech level- much like the law level- could be seen as a result of the other statistics rolled, and didn't really bat an eye at having to use that information to "figure out why" either of these were like they were: High water percentage? Less-than-ideal atmosphere? High population? Well most likely any and all resources were being pumped into keeping people alive- food production, shelter-- that 20 percent land mass might only be half arable- or habitable at all- and the overpopulation has resulted in a sub-standard educational system, and the higher-tech items are specialized toward farming, building arcologies, and air purification; not starships and weapons. Low population, fifty-percent landmass, good air? Even a High planetary population, with so much land, could be a very frontier-esque world, with no single settlement of more than a thousand people: not the ideal situation for think tanks and large-scale industry. Again: I am not saying we were _right_ (and honestly, more recent versions of Traveller may have mandated certain reasons; I couldn't tell you), but it worked well, was kind of fun when you had a tough combination, and we still use it today. Oh- meant to add: We usually allowed a variance, particulalry on balkanized world's (perhaps a hundred years of warfare has pulled the citizenry away from high-tech pursuits and toward more urgent survival technologies?) that the tech level was the average; there was always a chance to find a place here or there whose tech was one level higher, and perhaps two levels in a very narrow field or via importing items related to a specialized on-planet need.

Sorry- Fire, Fusion, and Steel. The "how to build,everything in Traveller" Book published during The New Era ... Era? It was availabke as a stand-alone and came packed-in with the deluxe box. There are some,errors here and there, but firtunately they are _glaring_ and easy to spot, and even easier to work around. It remains one od the more expensive TNE books on the used market.

Wow. That... Uh... That should certainly take the fight out of them....

It amuses me greatly that no one is using Esperanto, Sorry, Harry.

In the Traveller HERO campaign, I use FTL (the Power) for simplicity, with a few modifiers here and there, but to be honest, in two decades, the build has never come,up as a game thing. In other Star-faring games, I dont bother writing it up at all (the FTL drive, I mean. Sub-C movement gets simple write-ups of necessity: who is how much faster than who, etc, but I have found that typically,nothing happens outside of character interaction during "fast travel," it has never been necessary to do more than say "it is going to take four days to get there; how do you spend your time?" Sure, travel,by map is fun, and lots of people on both sides of the screen like to map it our leap by leap, but you can still do that without actually,building the drive: Your ship has Drive B, and it can go X-far in Y time at a fuel cost of Dollars per X. Then just map out leap by leap or insert and exit or gate to gate or whatever the enabling device is for the particular game. Of course, I dont bother statring up vehicles fully with the HERO vehicle system, since there is nothing in that system that defines parameters: going strictly,from,the vehicle build rules, I can put nine people on a skateboard and travel at mach 4 just because I bought some powers that say I can; there is no real explanation or justification needed beyond "I spent the points." I still use the homebrew system we put together back when we were playing 1e on the rare occasion I need to stat up a vehicle, but other than those times,when the players need to shoot at or not be shot by one, it is not particularly,necessary. Vehicles in most of the games I have been,in on either side of the screen were primarily enabling devices that did little more than move the characters from scene to scene in an acceptable fashion. The notable exception is our Traveller HERO game, but to be honest, I use FFS from TNE to build the ship, then convert _that_ to HERO terms (because FFS wont let you put nine people on a skateboard and run around at mach 4).

I realize this is a fictional weapon from a fictional setting, but human v human, batleth versus sword, I see sword coming out on top more often than not, simply because of how humans have culturally-ingrained responses in melee combat. I expect that Klingon v Klingon melee, armed with batleth or whatever, features a lot more forward pressing and aggressive corner thrust and even short slashes- each attempting to press an onslaught against their foe. Granted, that is based on my personal "understanding" of a compltetly fictional culture. I accept that I can't really think of a relatively safe way to spar that way, but I would really like to see it. Now; for the record, I think the batleth is as goofy and cumbersome as anyone else does, but again- I am thinking about based on what we humans do with weapons that are used entirely differently.

And people wonder why I dont know the difference! Good news! The adress doesnt take you to the video. It dows take you to several pages of videos, and some of them were interesting, but apparently I have to install the Twitch app to watch them? There is probably a work-around for that, but my phone refuses to acknowledge that, so if you'd kindly just tell ne if anything interesting came up, I would aooreciate it. Thanks, BJB!

[Sorry; double post]

Ditto, for us old guys who Until this moment thought "podcast" meant "youtube video you listened to while doing something else with your eyes and hands."

Flash cards? Okay, kidding, but it goes back to the folks above saying that it depwnds on what you are trying to achieve: define the desired end result- the effect- and work backwards. For instance, if you want eavesdropping to be impossible, then any sort of hand signals are right out, etc.

I don't know, Sir. I call it "Batman," myself.

My son uses it. You know kids: they want all that flashy high-tech new-fangled stuff..... (Grumbles incoherently in 2e....) .

I promise you, Space Opera was _never_ well-received. I liked it though. Well, at least up until the newest iterations (there is a lot of new material available online). I still play from time to time. I liked SpaceMaster, too. (And I was inclined to: I liked the first RoleMaster game, even though it was a bit sluggish). Things that were well-recieved that I did not like: Twilight 2000. I bought it because I thought I would love it- you start play right at the moment WW3 ends. Problematically, you start in Poland, a place I know- well, frankly, I know more about Mars, Phobos, and Deimos than I know about Poland. Ultimately, my Players didn't know much either. At the time, half my players were military (I never was; lousy knees kept me out of the service- I tried three times), and they wanted to stick to the military roots of the characters and setting, and I could not provide the "feel' they wanted, because up I did not have enough knowledge and had zero personal experience. The other half of the group was like me: didnt know crap about the military, but going further, they wanted nothing to do with playing a military-centric game. Yeah- that wasn't the game's fault entirely, but it set up a miserable experience. Would have been nice if the game had been set in the same hemisphere in which I live, though, or at least given some ideas as to terrain, climate, culture- sure, we could totally fake it, but if you live in Liberty County Georgia (I did at the time), your players know when you are describing Liberty County, Georgia. The system was a huge disappointment to me (to clarify: it was not unworkable or even particularly,difficult; it was just... Blah.... Bland and uninspiring) Another well-recieved game I didnt care for was Mega-Traveller- the combination of a system that was essentially identical the underwhelming system of T2000 and the baked-in revolution setting.... I won't say I hated it, but I went right back the Traveller Book as soon as we had given it a few solid tries. (Yes: I love my LBBs, but I personally found The Traveller Book to be a great sweet spot for Classic Traveller that is agreeable to most Players). Paranoia. Hated it. "Hmmm... How fast can thr GM kill the entire party?" Fast enough that you get six copies of your character. Yeah, it had a great laugh factor- the existence of it and talking about it- but playing it just... Well really- How do I not get killed by the GM? We can call it a game and pretend that I am doing all the right things to stay alive, but honestly, I am still alive only because the GM has decided to _not_ hit me with a six_pound supersonic meteor. Playing Paranoia does little for me beyond making that point painfully, 'suddenly this hobby seems a bit goofy' uncomfortably obvious, and I can't push it from my mind while .when the subtext of all conversation is "I hope we don't die in hillarious ways for absolutely no reason!" These have already been mentioned, but still: put me down for not being terribly impressed with BESM or any of the other Tri-Stat (tri tac?) offerings. They may have been fun with a different group or in a different setting (I can't help but think of a fast-and-loose group story telling effort replacing Trivia at some upscale bar while half-drunk revellers and their dates make up skills and roll dice and hoot and holler when it is their turn to control the narrative: that is the vibe I get from Tri Stat; that is the reason I bought the d20 version of SAS (and I have never made a secret of my general dislike of d20, so you have a good guage right there). Warhammer 40k. I dont mean the tactical wargame; I mean the actual RPG. Everything you might dislike about the wargame, it exists in similar fashion in the RPG. Sure, the gothic is fun for a bit, but that bit fades quickly (human self-defense of the psyche: you get numb to constant grimdark and even gore, to a point, when it is poured over you in buckets for hours on 3nd. And the religion angle never stops- it's an incredibly poor choice for escapism for those of us who live in the Bible Belt. Thematically.... Well, there's a reason my wife calls it "Catholic Traveller." C'thulu- any of them. There is the minor reason that the over-arcing metastory is identical to that of Paranoia (give the GM a whole city packed full of fishmen?! Surely my fragile sanity will survive that!) and of course, a selfish, nothing-to-do-with-gaming reason: Lovecraft was a guilty pleasure as a kid, and I knew very few people who were familar with it, and oddly enough, I liked them all. I also learned that Lovecraft wasnt well-known amongst most of my peers... Until,after the games,started coming out (not much internet back then), and within just a couole of years, I was so over-exposed to Lovecraft and Love-alikes that I just got sick of it, and I haven't really enjoyed it since. While it wasnt the game's fault per we (congratulations on a successful product, after all), I still blame the existence of Call of C"thulu for my now almost-distaste of something I used to love. Yeah, I know.... Fate. Nothing too deep here, comment-wise; I just didnt like it. I am nit a die-hard I-need-rules-for-breathing" kind of guy, but I do need enough rules to percieve the framework within which the game is played. A three-fer: Kult, Chill, and Underground. I _know_ they arent the same game, nor even similar in system, but they all trigger the exact same,_kind_ of distaste, and I cant really define it any better than (forgive me) this: You have this absolutely,_stunning_ new girlfriend. She is almost perfectly the girl,you have imagined of since you started thinking about girls. Her quirks are all minor, really, except that one obsessed kink that kind of makes your skin crawl. Every time you have inimate contact, she starts pushing towars satisfying that kink, but the truth is that just _thinking_ about it kills,your mood _for days_. It"s just on3 thing- one thing!- and it is her entire reason for initiating, and everything leading up to it is glorious, but the idea of going durther teiggers that bile-in-the-throat reflex. Clearly, while everything about her is fantastic, onve you start getting really into it, that one thing is problematic enough that you realize the two of you will never be compatible.... Feng Shui. Now I can't say there was anything fundamentally wrong with the game, because I barely knew the rules (I was invited to play).. I will honestly say that I would be unable to give an objective look anyway, as I dislike the genre. (Wierdly, I liked Bushido, mostly because there was a _sort of_ realism there that Feng Shui was proudly distancing itself from.) Now this last one Will likely catch me some flak, so let me remind you that none of my answers are attacks on these games: the question is "well-received games you did not like and I am answering that question, period. Villains and Vigilantes. Didn't like it. Played a lot of it; never liked it. Sure, my list is longish compared to many of the others, but weirdly, this is (not all but ) the bulk of the set of those games which I did not like. Wierd that so many were very popular in their day....

I have no links, but there are a couple of eBay sellers that sell plans for reproduction coaches, wagons, etc. From time to time, the pictures they post are good enough to print (if you sont mind some pixelation and fuzzy jpeg-ery. I have printed them and then kind orf retraced them with a Sharpe to clean up the lines. I am also not a complete jackass- I went back and bought a set of buckboard plans when I had the funds, just as a thank-you. Anyway, it's one option.

Amd just like that, we are back to "just because it is not a rule doesn't mean it is not rule, and we should clarify if not being a rule means it isn't a rule. I just got over the last instance of that and came back. You folks have fun. I hate to sound like a college girl, but I am _done_. Peace.

Isnt there a "club's" forum on this board that folks have used for that ?

Why plan a combination attack with your twammayes when you have 500 points of powers you can bring to bear all by yourself? Why calculate an attack, fall back, attack again plan when powers cost half the endurance they used to, and Endurance ia cheaper than tap water? Why manage any power, when for twice the cost, it doesnt cost endurance at all? Hammer away all you want; go full-bore nonstop. Figuring zero End _roughly_ doubkes the cost, you can essentially,build rhose old 250 pt characters, but with zero regard for Endurance use or management. No. The _mechanic_ are the same; the way the game is played is not, because the old concerns have been replaced with different ones. Someone above pointed out the differences between Barrier and Force Wall. You do not uae Barrier the same way, relying on aspects that it doesn't have anymore. You can't. You don't have to play to the strengths or avoid the weaknesses ofbyour characteristics, because you no longer have to carefully allocate your spending, pickinf and choosing what Characteristics you will boost and which you will not in order to afford your endurance-free power builds. You want straight 40s? No biggie. You've got pints left! Which of your sixty (or less) points of disadvantages may affect the scenario at hand? Rhe mechanics are the same, period. The play is not. You can use chess pieces to play checkers and the game remains the same. Add thirty reserve pieces to each side, and the way people play will change. Flying kings- anybody play that crap? It is _not_ the same as rwgular checkers. Seems like it: only one thing is changed. That one thing, though, radically changes how you play the game.

For what it ia worth, "house rules" is exactly what the system presents them as. Why does HERO Designer track them? You would have to ask Dan (Simon on this board) who designed maintains, and offers support for HERO Designer right here on this board. (Word of caution: he is rather moody, so watch your phrasing.) If you are looking for guesses? Popular demand? People have been using them since 4e so far as I can remember. (I don't, but I dont give a rolly red rat's rump about "active points," either, other than Endurance costing). AP caps are a,near-universal house rule and a non-stop point of discussions all over this board. In fact, they are so popular that a number of people dont notice the passages that discuss them specify that these are not rules; you may find them helpful. As AP itself has to be tracked to determine the final cost of every build, it makes sense that HD tracks that. Once you are tracking something, it is not that hard to build a limit or a filter on it. I think it is quite likely that Dan hinself thought "well, it is popular, and helpful to a lot of people, and not much more work than I have done already, so..." Or he May have been asked to do so by someone else in the company who thought that. Again, it is just an opinion, and you can likely get the exact answer from Dan.

Scott, I regret that I can only give you a single trophy for that. The changes to Endurance alone- both in how the End cost is calculated and in the pricing and mechanical changes to Reduced End- have radically altered gameplay in terms of short and long-term strategies, and have taken away the fine-tuning granular trade-offs between END conservation and overall cost of a particular build. Sometimes, you just opted for 1/4 or even 1/8 End, either because of the cost, or for your concept. That build, in turn, affected how you played the character and the decision he made. Yes: "you can still go ahead and charge him some END even if he paid for zero end"-- so the one guy at the table who believes that strongly in concept will do it. The other five guys are trying to figure out why on earth they should feel inclined to do that if "free" is the exact same price. There is so much more to be said about Endurance _alone_ before going anywhere else, but suffice it to say that Scott is quite correct: If "roll 3 dice and compare against OCV/DCV" and "this is how you count and record damage" and "these are the two different types of defenses" is, for you, the sum total of gameplay, then no; it hasn't changed much. Outside of that, most of it has changed considerably. Given that above, in this very thread, is the comment "endurance is way to cheap," I dont think all those changes are inherently better.

I started with 1st edition. I bought into second edition. I own every single edition (because I am dumb like that, but in the interest of transparency, let me state up-front that I bought 3e Champions at some point in the last ten years; my game store at the time never carried it; I didn't know it existed until 4e came out, which my game atore stocked deeply). That includes both versions od 5e, as well as both versions of Sidekick and I own HERO System Basic (no idea why we stopped calling it Sidekick: there is a universe of distance between the appeal of those two names). I own Espionage (the fist non-Champions game to use the Champions engine, which would become in 4e "The HERO System." I own DI, Fantasy HERO, and even Lucha HERO and MHI- if it uses the 'HERO System," I own it, even PS 230-whatever the heck it was, and Champions Complete, - Dude! I own the weird ones, too: new Millennium (odd man out: I kind of liked that one, but I already had Bubblegum Crisis, so I could find all the missing bits that New Millennium seemed to have skipped), Champions Now, and the LARP. I have read every single one of them multiple times (except the LARP: I have made many attempts, but without fail, I am sound asleep before getting thirty pages in, which is weird, because I generally,enjoy Watt's style, but there is something in that book that is the absolute cure for insomnia: it is better than every Microbiology textbook I ever read! ) All that being said, I have never found within any of these a solid reason to move beyond 2e. Don't think that I am badmouthing the new stuff! I am not; I just dont seem to have ever encountered any of the problems that later editions claim to fix. Now the next is one-hundred-percent opinion; I don't want anyone to think I am trying to claim this as a fact or even that I think,it is a fact- for what it is worth, I didn't used to think this way! A few too many discussions with the diehard core of the fandom kind of pushed me to thinking this: I don't think that _most_ people have ever had the problems these editions are meant to fix. I really think most of the endless revisiins and options come out of the endless discussion hunting the snipe of mathematical perfection and total equality. Moreover, I think a sizeable chunk of problems that folks have encountered over the years (and no: I am not going to be discussing them- got tired of rehashing the same discussions over and over) come more from an inability to let go of a preconceived notion than an actual lack of something in the rules. That is, failing to catch a variation or broader application of an existing option. Short answer: I play 2e because it meets my needs. I don't play newer editions because I don't have the additional needs those new rules are meant to address. The changes to rules- for the needs of me and my players- are nowhere near worth thumbing around through all those books to double-check something.

It's a minigame before you play the game. Realistically, you can, with a bit of familiarity, roll up a Traveller character in under ten mimutes; using the original (ie, "unexpanded") character generation rules, you can do it in under five minutes. Unlike most roll 'em games, though, the entire process lets you choose from different themes (careers or other "life paths"). All you are doing is rolling up you skills and a few random perks (maybe), but the thematic way in which the tables express the results is both kind of fun and extremely helpful to folks who have trouble coming up with backstories for their characters-- the skill generation system is quite literally presented as "you life up until the moment this adventure starts." You absolutely do not have to use the story generated, of course, but if you are given to explore your characters, the entire process is a little bit addictive, and I personally believe it had a lot to do with Traveller catching on and its incredible staying power.

Well, Stev doesnt answer rationale/ design philosophy questions, so we will never know. We can make assumptions, though, and considering this was during the era of a chunk of the fandom echoing the idea of "reduce everything that can be reduced /combine everything that can be combined" that gave us a new and reduced Instant Change built on Transform that only has to break _one rule of Transform_ to actually work, I think we can safely assume that this was something else that grew out of that overall concept. Taylor has once well-defended the idea that the new version is more flexible, because it is possible to modify one side of the power without affecting the other. He is not wrong, of course, but I maintain that we had already been doing that for years when it fit the character via custom or "limited" limitations and advantages, which still generally resulted in builds less cumbersome than doing it by the current guidelines. I am not saying the new guidelones don't work; I am saying that always could do that, but it was really only useful for two specific effects: when thw effect of one was limited to _but necessarily equal to_ the other, such as the ancient crime who drains the life from ten maidens but only adds a scant few days to her own life (amount Aided or Healed (edition-dependant) limited by amount Drained) or the reverse- say the Hero has an ability that allows him to "borrow" a small amiunt of vitality from a person, but it supercharges him beyond what he took (amount Drained likited by amount Aided or Healed). I have even used this build, some,years ago, for a fantasy game: Unbeknownst to the Pcs, a beloved NPC immortal sorceror was only "immortal" because he had unlocked the secret of transferring life from one person to himself. To sum it up, he Drained Body and he 'Healed' Body into a latge pool. The Healing was limited to the amount Drained, but it was prerry common to roll _less_ than that amount, meaning he had to take more than he received. The Body Healing was bought with a ridiculous upper limit (because there reallly isnt one in 2e, which is my preferred edition) and to fade at 1 per day (which is stupidly expwnsive in 2e, but he was more or a subplot than an active adventurer, so...). Body would be lost through normal means such as combat, etc. He also had a Disasvantage that he just lost 2 Body per day, regardless of injury, which constantly kept him on the prowl. At any rate, him and Billy Batalion (a literal everyman superhero) wherw the only two instances where I used a cobbke similar to the current rules. For evertrhing else, Transfer has workwd just fine. I even reworked Billy Batalion to Transfer just to save space on the C-sheet. (though eventually I ditched it entirely, realizing it was just a special effecr of him existing at all, and as such, didn't actually need to,be written up). Well that drifted a bit....

Honestly, the 1e pocket box went pretty quickly if you didnt stop for fist fight breaks....

"...the best _kind_ of correct!" seriously,though: For me, there is no difference. I grew up in Circle, Alaska and we played on the ice that formed on the Yukon, and we tried to live on the ice that formwd everywhere else. for me, if your special effect is "ice sheet," and your target fails a DEX roll, he _will_ fall down, period. He is also likely to suffer other movemebt penalties, but that takes us back to old-school CE where the GM was trusted to make reasonable judgments about what could oe did happen. let's try to avoid "Old CE," since that is not what you are asking about. the only potential argument I see here comes from the crowd from the four-page discussion about this a few months ago: there are those who are pretty convinced that it was impossible to knock someone down prior to Ninja HERO and the "target falls" element. to stay completely in the clear, I strongly suggest that you instead buy _Martial_ Change Environment if you want the chance for someone to fall. (that is now going into my lexicon, where it will sit proudly next to Martial Sneer and Martial Persuasion. ) sorry, I started seriously, and got sidetracked. forgive me. getting back on course: I _personally_ think it is okay as written in the first, and that anyonw failing a Dec roll who has nothing to grab for support _will_ fall, meaning that the second one is superfluous _to me_. now if you _want_ them to be different- if you want the fiest one to mean "automatically fall upon failure," then either build them different (ie, add the ... What? One-and-a-half point or so, on average?) Martial element "target falls" to the second one, or spell out a range of possible results in the first one. my two cents, offered freely, and worth every bit that you oaid for them, I am sure.