Duke Bushido

I'm not,even,sure breathatarianism would work: veggies are living things, as are the microbes we murder in our lungs, sinuses, and digestive systems.

So we agree, then? The whole concept is buggy?

I am,so sorry for starting all this. I just thought that was funny. For what its worth, I find the "killing without a good reason" part of your example to be more chaotic rhan lawful. I like mist of,what Hugh said, but- full disclosure- I always thought the whole alignment system,was Lawful Stupid anyway; I classed it up there with "racial evil" in terms of its value to the game: it detracted more rhan it helped. Sure, a lot of the distraction was because of the inability for any group of more than two people to agree on what they meant and how they should be represented. , but like anything else problematic to the enjoyment of the game, I threw it out. Using Hugh' examples, I think the bulk of the human race falls into Chaotic Neutral anyway.

And dont forget Scott Hall.

How did she not know that?

I have run out of rep, Track, but you're welcome, Sir. I think most of you know I am not the biggest fan D&D ever had, but for further amusement: with regard to alignment, I have quite routinely taken "chaotic" and "generally by accident" to be sort of interchangeable.

I have found a real-life example of Chaotic Good. Enjoy.

In actual game play, they are "points of interest" for a moment or two. If the Players are forced To interact with them, then they just want to get through the exercise and hop back off the rails as quickly as possible. If players take an actual interest or bother to remember the existence of such creatures, the use them as libraries, but even then, they tend to focus on the hear and now and what is immediately relavent to the plot at hand. I have never had inquiries like "tell me about the dynasty seven generations before this one" or "who lived here before the great wizard of the last age raised the mountains from the earth?" I have never even had the question "was there a time before these mountains?" Effectively immortal beings get questions like "have the elves ever been defeated?" Ah, yes... Back in the days of Etrofian, there was a master tactician in the armies of the hill people- some say he was connected dir-- Yes or no, Dude. Have the been defeated? Yes; they have. Great! How was it done? What took them out, and can we adapt it to this situation? And that's about it. And really, it doesn't bother me. They didn't sit down to read a book; they could stay home and do that. They didn't come hear to listen about ancient politicians and geological events and mighty warriors buried in time. They sat down here to be their own kind of hero, and to live their own story. I get it. Sure: it's always disappointing when some of your favorite material never comes to light, but I totally get their point of view. Besides, I tend to view all that un-uncovered (it's a word! Probably.) material is just a leg up on the next build anyway. Recycling and all that....

Dude! I remember that one!

Eh; you can't see the dents from that angle. turns out that no matter what you tell your hired help about the turning radius on a twenty-one foot long truck, they are still going to try to turn it around in a stand of planted pines. I didnt really "get into" anything as I got older. Riding, writing, and wrenching have been my passions since I was a kid. I have gotten _out_ of a few things as my age advanced: chasing women (I caught one, so....), hair styling (no need anymore), and a thirty-four inch belt (like I said, I caught one. I can relax a bit now. ) I have also gotten out of drag racing (too expensive and too much time that I don't have anymore) and out of dirtbike racing (too old and I heal too slow). I still dabble on a bit of street racing (I know; I know- believe me, I know! I just finished watching that trial myself). thinking about it, I havent done any leather tanning or bookbinding in a couple of decades, either (I quit because I didn't want to learn and invest in the modern veggie-based dyes, etc, and the traditional,stuff was getting hard to source in less than industrial quantities). I grew up farming, so there is _zero- chance I want to sink a food plot in my backyard, though I do put in a few tomatoes every year just because they keep telling me you can't grow them around here, and I have both a grapefruit and a fig tree that are hyper-productive, but I think that is because I ignore them as hard as possible. Monte (the across-the-pond neighbor-lady's cat has drug up a couole of buddies, but I am not terribly into that either. looking back at it, i've been pretty fortunate: almost everything,I have ever wanted to do, I did while I was young enough to do it fully and well. the last couple of years I have worked half-heartedly at rebuilding my Hero Games collection, but really, I have regained everything I ever had (for what it's worth, the third-party magazines are the hardest), so now it's just picking a few things from 5 and 6e that sort of interest me. the only thing I can really pretend is a new interest is the plan I am working on to build a camper I can pull behind the Valkyrie. Apparently my wife is getting too old to sleep in a hammock tied to the bike and a tree under a tarp hung the same way. And, in her words, "I want something I can shower in!" i've got something workable that excites me, but I doubt I will ever have time or funds to pull that off, so I am not terribly excited by that, either. crap. I think I might be done living.....!

Oh: Our Freight Train: Though he doesn't wear braids. The character designer there doesn't have an option for a low, tight hair cut for people of african ancestry.

Weird. Ours wears green pants, too. Though he also wears a white tank top and no mask and what the heck is going on with his head /face / mask thing? Is this a real thing?! In other news: I've gotten this far in my heist:

Thanks, N-B. I just watched a couple of his videos; pretty solid stuff. I had to adjust the playback speed, though. I didn't think it was really possible, but I can't hear as fast as he can talk.

First things first: the "first thing" being something that I have learned I was completely wrong about out here in the ether: Those things that you think are not worth mentioning because people will recognize from your behavior and past patterns that these are always implied are, in fact, the things that should be said in quintuplicate before actually moving on to the point because, given the choice, people will gladly forsake everything they have ever known about you in favor of seizing the tiniest potential opening to vilify you and your entire lineage-- a behavior that I find to be really, _really_ weird, since I don't know anyone who actually does that _in person_, but millions of people seem to think it is the sole purpose of online communication. So, in the interest of the personal safety of my great-great-grandchildren (should any of our collective DNA make it to the survival ships orbiting the sun before we finish making the earth inhospitable): This is the important disclaimer: There are as many different kinds of people as there are people. Many-- most-- maybe even all people-- are good at something, and less good at other things. This in no way reduces their value as people, nor their talent nor their intelligence, nor our need to keep each other in the highest possible regard. Problematically, when we want something done, we want it done by someone who is good at whatever "it" may be. Out of necessity, and perhaps convenience, we tend to rate levels of competence or skill of knowledge or whatever-- we rate people, okay? Yes; it _can_ be taken in an extremely derogatory vein: "Yep. Duke's #1-- at being butt ugly!" That's not a good thing-- even having ratings-- or having to rate people at all, or compare them to one another-- isn't the best possible thing, but it is also both a convenience and a necessity in terms of evaluating individual strengths and weaknesses. However, it's vital to keep in mind that evaluating individual talents or abilities is in no way an assumption of overall superiority or inferiority of a human being as a whole and valuable person. Now that I have done the necessary complete destruction of the focus on the actual point by pushing it way back on the timeline of exposure, I want to quickly revisit the quoted excerpts above: I have a hypothesis on this; I have had it for years, but as some folks can be-- what's the buzzword right now? "Lit?" "Woke?" Or are we still using "triggered?"-- by something as simple as not knowing what a fish knife is, I _rarely_ express it online. I have, but it has always turned into a "look how awful that person is for having an opinion," and I don't bother pursuing conversation. However, I am going to put it out there one more time, as it seems appropriate here.... In the early days, RPGs were a hobby for a small subset of people-- most of them were readers and writers, thespians and artists. That is, most of the earliest gamers (I still refuse to use that term in reference to video games; I won't apologize for that, but at least all who have read this will henceforth know exactly who I'm talking about when I _do_ say "gamers" ) were pretty creative people. These early gamers had to have a lot of imagination, particularly if you wanted to progress beyond level 3 in D&D (yes: I am old enough to remember when the D&D rules stopped at level 3. So are a lot of you out there: do NOT let the knowledge that this was once normal in gaming ever die!). If you and your group liked the game you had going, you had come up with everything beyond 3rd level yourself, and for most of the early gamers, it was no-brainer easy to do. You had to build your worlds whole cloth; you had to build your earliest adventures whole cloth (especially if you weren't really big on TSR games). The takeaway from this is more-or-less that these early games worked (and as far as some of us care, still do work) because the people that were using either were themselves or were playing with people who were imaginative, confident, and creative enough to draw from what was there and extend it forward as they needed it expanded. We all remember when gaming hadn't gone mainstream-- when there were movies on television extolling the horrors of Tunnels and Trolls and the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons (and the satanic nature of Smurfs, just to remind us of the perspectives against which we were working at the time). We laughed at it the way we laughed at Reefer Madness, and eventually, our little hobby started becoming more and more mainstream. (Personally, I think videogames took the heat off of us-- remember when those weren't "normal things" for kids to play with? ). As it became mainstream, more people were exposed, and more people became curious. Remember that "curious" is its own trait, separate from imaginative; separate from creative; separate from self-confident. ALSO NOTE that the previous suggestion specifies that these traits are _separate_, but at NO POINT makes any claim that they are in any way mutually exclusive to any or all of the others! There. Disclaimer 2, out of the way. The upshot is that we began to get more people who were interested in the hobby who were not _originally_ interested. Why weren't they interested before? Where they lacking something that made gaming compelling to the earliest adopters? Some personality trait that made gaming immediately appealing? Perhaps these late adopters lacked the self-confidence to risk being labelled "weirdo" or some other form of "them!" by their mainstream friends? I can't say that this is what happened; it's just a hypothesis that, after decades, I have no real way of testing. Perhaps they lacked just enough confidence that they couldn't bring themselves to do it until more and more people survived the experience-- the second mouse gets the cheese, after all. Maybe the lacked the imagination to fully immerse themselves into the game, or to really picture the scene dotted out on the graph paper. Or the didn't have the creativity to craft together an interesting character or contribute to a story-- there are a million maybes: maybe they had just never heard of gaming! Maybe they lived in an area where there were no gamers to introduce them to it-- who knows? One thing that makes me want to test the hypothesis is the recent resurgence of "old school" games-- now that the internet makes all things available, and new generations of people can be exposed to everything, there is a core of people who want to play _those_ games: the games that practically _mandated_ creativity, imagination, and self-confident game masters and players because there was nothing else to support them beyond "how to get started." I suspect that few of us are playing with all the same people we started playing with, way back when. I really can't say that it is better to be playing with the same people for 40 years or to have rotated through a hundred different friends over those same years. I see pros and cons to each possibility, and myself? I still do play with four of the people from the old days, but I have a couple of other groups that rotate people in and out with semi-regularity. Each is _different_ from the other, but neither is really "better" or "worse." Anyway-- The more people there are that lack whatever trait it is to fill in their own blanks, the more call came for rules addressing these blanks. The more people there were that could not extend their own games in way with which they were comfortable, the more call there came for supplemental material. The more people lacked the confidence that what they were doing was perfectly acceptable, the more call there was official guidelines about pretty much everything. The constant expansion of rules doesn't apply to just Champions, either, obviously; so let's not assume that I am claiming it is (disclaimer #3). The fact that this rules creep tendency followed the mainstreaming of gaming and the increase in "non-traditional" RPG Gamers from the early days at least _seems_ to support the hypothesis. In short: rules creep is a direct product of an increase in gamers who are not comfortable without these additional rules. Look at all the various gaming forums: "how do I X" threads far, far outstrip "I ran into X, so I Y. Check it out!" The internet has actually kind of made this worse by giving a false sense of "smallness" to the world: i want to do this the same way you guys do. Why? Well, because you guys might be using the rules better than I am. There are currently no rules that cover that. You will have to draw on what exists, and then kind of intuit what seems to be the best modifications to address your problem. Oh. Well how did you guys do it? "I want to make sure I am playing it the same way you are. There are no rules for it, but I will feel better if other people are doing it this way-- you know; just in case." Let's face it: I would _love_ to sit across a table from pretty much _any_ of you guys. That's not hyperbole. It might be because I don't get enough time as a Player and so I'm grasping at straws, but I suspect it's because I really enjoy most of the ideas and such that I hear from you here and it makes me curious (and a little excited) about what your games are like. The reality, though, is that I will _never_ sit across from Chris Goodwin, or Lord Liaden, or Doc Democracy, or Hugh Neilson, or _any_ of you folks, ever. The world is too big, and time is too small. All that being said, why am I worried that I am not doing something in the same fashion that you are? There is no realistic reason I would want that-- no _practical_ reason (no offense intended; it's just a fact of geographic distribution (disclaimer #4). The only possible reason it would matter to me is if I failed to find official rules guidance and thus opted to settle for a consensus from experienced players well-versed in the rules. I could go on and on and on and on, but I'm going to try to stop at having merely gone on and on, as I _believe_ (perhaps incorrectly) that I have made my hypothesis clear, and have presented it in the most inoffensive way possible (though I am sure that I will proven wrong on that count both immediately, and again in twenty-eight months by some new member looking for something to get worked up and angry about. Such is the internet).

For what it's worth, I think a lot of us noticed that, presented up front, even before the first of the rules. And I know at least one of us really appreciated it. I can only rep a post once (without GM permission, which I don't seem to have... ), so don't think it stalkerish, but I'm going to randomly rep another dozen of your posts over the next few days. Just remember that this is most likely what that's all about. And thanks, Derek. I know a lot of us claimed that we could have done it, and some of those probably _could_ have done it. But you _did_ it. That's a crap load of work, and I can give you at least one concrete example of someone who has appreciated it every time he looks through that book.

I'm kind of like Scott-- the bulk of my fantasy games are travelogues, as my Players seem to enjoy "quests" more than intrigue, though they do insist on some heroics and derring do along the way.

Seriously, though: I have no idea. "Getting into grilling" means having a budget that allows buying _meat_, and just using it to experiment with! So.... no idea how my grilling would be, should I try it. It also means having time to create a fire and get it "just right" for cooking on, which means-- should my grilling actually be awesome-- not eating until midnight or later....

is that not in the HERO store? The PDF, I mean? The Character sheet in that will work fine with 1, 2, and 3e.

This is one-hundred percent true; the resolution is far too low for clean prints. You only _really_ need something in the order of 32 dpi to make something look fantastic on a screen. You need way, way, _way_ more than that to make it look good in print. In general, anything under 150 isn't worth printing, and 300 dpi is "reasonably crisp." I prefer 600 to 1200, but the files are massive, which is why you don't see many of them. Some time back, Spence sent me a debound 4e (and several other books) that I intend to use to scan 4e myself and see if we can get that scan used for the POD. Alas, I have to wait until winter (the shorter sunlight hours mean slightly shorter work days, meaning I have a few minutes in the evenings to do stuff like this) before I can really begin.

I am considering just going to a bus terminal somewhere and picking out a healthy-looking person and harvesting my own donor organ; that's how much I miss coffee.... Yep. Not Starsucks, though. That's the absolute nastiest coffee I have ever had; I don't miss that a bit. I miss all other coffee though. I was told two things about coffee by my doctor: Stop drinking it. Normal people do not drink three pots a day. It was my favorite hot drink; it was my favorite cold drink. I'm going to go somewhere and be all maudlin for a while.....

Bagels. Eggplant. So far as I know, that is all.

First one worked fine. Second one yields "access denied."

Yes. All of villains-- to include agents and henchmen-- get experience. Not always as quickly as the heroes, since the heroes are-- well, they are in every situation, whereas the villains sort of rotate in and out.... I always thought that this was the norm in the source material-- heroes with whacky goofy villains back in the sixties and seventies who are now facing world-shaking foes, and don't give two rips about Calendar Man anymore....

Has someone announced a change to the source scan? If it hasn't changed from the original, I can offer proof that it isn't. If it's been changed, then I'd like to try again.