Duke Bushido

There. You are now on the to-done list.

I'd rep that if I wasn't all out. I've put you on the to-do list.

On what date? Was it the 4th, or does the 4th celebrate some after-sifning ceremony, or the pre- formal written surrender when the white flag was being waved over the battlefield? Yes: I like history. I pointed out that there were several people who do enjoy detailed sourcebooks, and even mentioned you and myself by name. I didnt mention LL because I suspect everyone here already knows that, and realistically, the vast majority of us are here are GMs; GMs like the background stuff, or we wouldnt be GMs: there is a lot of work, most of which goes unappreciated or not even fully understood. The greatest portion of Players I have encountered-and again, not all players, but most- are interested onky in what the character is doing right now and- if you are really luck- why he is doing it. I cannot count the number of modules, city books, and world books I have used for multiole campaigns, and none of the background every really comes up. It rarely goes beyond "let's find out why the adversary is doing what he is doing. If it goes beyond his parents- sometimes,grandparents, its met with "yeah, okay; I get it: [two-word synopsis of motivation, such as "bad blood," or "border dispute"]; moving on." To reiterate: put it in there; thats fine. Just know that it niether necessary nor likely to come up in game play.

Well, not _all_ of them, but for the most part, it does accurate....

I hate doing this to you, Dean, but I have to answer with "it depends." What am I going for, campaign-wise? How powerful are the heroes (not in points, but in relation to "normals" and the like)? Who are the Players? How relevant are the agents to the setting? To this particular plot? To the characters themselves? Sometimes three well-drilled and well-equipped agents can stymie a super (remember that guns were invented to up our power level. That trend doesn't just stop because the science is now all comic-book-y. High tech gear is a great equalizer, realistically, and depending on the game, high-tech gear _is_ a great equalizer). Sometimes six or eight men have a chance of routing or capturing-- or possibly killing!-- a super. Sometimes they're all just a bunch of Joe Anybody's dressed up in matching suits-- like the neighborhood watch with backpack lasers. Hmm... All that being reviewed, I suppose they are, after a fashion, set dressing indeed.....

I wish I had something useful for you, but I straight up pull something out of the air and keep on rolling. The key is delivering it with a straight face and without pause. Work it into either the current conversation or your descriptive prose several times, immediately, so you remember it again ten minutes from now. Rough guidelines: Non-human town founders? _Any_ collection of three to five syllables. _Anything_. It's fine. Just make them flow smoothly. Start working it into the conversation to buy yourself some time before one of the Characters asks "oooh! But what does it _mean_?" Use that time to decide what it means. Human town founders? Okay. Small town? Surname. If you've done that recently, surname-ville, surname-ton, surname-shire, Suname-burg (try not to use burg): Asher, Asherville, Asherton, Ashershire, Asherburg. Medium-sized town? Industry-ville; Industry-ton, City of Industry, Industrial workers City. Copperville. Copperton. The City of Copper. Copper City. Large city? You can almost go back to any collection of random syllables, just make them sound either vaguely old world or very fanciful (And honestly, I find that the amount of grunge and filth I expect in the city influences that decision a lot. The filthier it is, the more "old world" I lean for the name. No; it doesn't make sense, but no one has caught on yet.) It doesn't really matter, I don't believe, so long as you delivery it with a straight face and without hesitation.

Finally! An internet comic highlighting the problems of the rest of us:

I went through the desert on a song with no soul..... I got really famous for a song with no soul.... The grocery store is playing my song with no soul... There is no escape from my song with no soul... It felt good to be out of the rain.... I went through the desert on a song with no soul.....

This is the third or fourth time I have seen that name mentioned here. At the risk of sounding like a peasant, who is he? Thanks.

You misspelled "won't."

Precisely. Ideally, this is the thrust of the adventure; this is why the characters are here: they are taking part in th e change, and their actions will affect the resolution of that change. This is another source of adventure: peaceful doesn't mean without strife, or without conflict completely. Highway men, thieves, con artists, cattle rustlers, organized crime- these all exist even,in times of peace. There are social ills as well: prior to the Civil War, the slave states in the South were remarkably peaceful. That doesn't mean there wasnt a serious wrong that needed righting. Precisely: Player-class characters assisit them with their overwhelming problems, stumble into something resembling a larger plot, and the game is underway. Getting back to generations of history built into a world book and why it just doesn't matter: Millions- billions, hundreds od billions, maybe- of people throughout history has known and understood history and knew it all the way back to Creation- some said their God did it; others said _their_ God did it; others still said it was the work of a pantheon. Some said it was all spontaneous: put enough dry corn in enough flannel shirts in enough hayfields, and mice will spontaneously burst into existence. Others will tell you that it doesn't matter if a pond is manmade: leave it to sit long enough, and it "just naturally" have fish in it. A host of other folks will tell you that everything that ever would exist in all the universe was pressed tightly in it own unique singularity until the compression got so incredibly powerful that it threw up and the universe was born. This goes on with shorter spans of history, too. According to the textbooks, North Korea's last leader birthed himself from a grizzly bear or some such nonsense. I think the current one walked out od the mountains as an infant or something equally ridiculous. Paul Bunyan single-handedly created every famous feature of the American landscape, and Cher thinks Mount Rushmore is a natural phenomenon. The simple fact is, no matter which person or group got it right, that means that the majority of the himans ever to exist had absolutely no clue what the history of their world really was. In some cultures, they still don't. I may be wrong, but I am betting a number of indeginous Amazonian tribes are basing most of their universe on $hi7 their great-great grandparents totally made up, and Google Earth has yet to reveal any significant telescopes on the Sentinel Islands. _All_ of these people share a common history, at least to a point, and damned few of them know the actual "correct" one, and even the most scientific one is still being filled in even today. Yet none of this has in way affected their adventures in any way. The Sentinelese know only "outlanders bring death," so they defend themselves by delivering it themselves. How many slaves in the American South do you suppose were taught any sort of in-depth history? Of what culture? Of what continent? Realistically, they were likely taught by ther elders "we are slaves and if we act this way or that, our lives are a tiny bit less awful," and a few stories of past events to help reinforce those lessons. But it didnt stop them from fighting as hard as they could when given the chance- some for freedom; some for the status who (I cant imagine why, but I wasnt there). Others risked everything to run away for freedom, and others helped hunt them down. They had adventures (no; I am,not romanticising a horrible situation, but "they voluntarily went up against great odds in the face of horrible and mortal danger for a sliver of a chance to change their lot in life or that of someone else" is absolutely nothing if it isnt an adventure. The Crusades- or, as I tend to think of that period: yet another reason I dont suffer from any sort of "white pride"- were adventures almost identical to many a D and D game. The river Brioq (which probably means "river" in the local tongue) was created when the continental shelf of this land lifted the neighboring landmass, a collision that raised a seven-thousand mile long mountain range nearly two months hard rising from this point, and brought from the crust of the land a massive subterainean glacier, exposing it to the sun foe the first time almost a million years. The run off from these mountains filled what was once dry arid plains at their base, creating the inland sea around which seven city states have wasted and waged a quiet struggle of political and economic leverage. Unbeknownst To any of the folks living in that land, the center of the inland sea lies over the caldera of a massive volcano, and the sandstone crust that seals it will, in seven hundred years, give way, draining sea and drying this river. The icy water pouring onto the hot mantle below will create an explosion that will wipe life from this entire half of the continent. Today, though, the Brioq gives way to hundreds of marshes and swaps along its path to this point, where the rocky granite lands create multiole series of rapids and broad slow shoals before meandering down the the fishing villages above the largest delta in this hemisphere. Evaporation from this delta keeps the humidty high, but the cool coastal breezes in the delta (about dive hundred mikes south of you) condense the moisture, and even in the warmest seasons-- Dammit, Tommy; they are chasing us! Do we see a way across or not? Is it wide? Is it slow enough foe the horses? Will they freeze? Hurry up, Tommy! As soon as we clear the county, we need to head east to the seaport. Is ther any cover, in case we have to make a stand? And That, Sir, is _all_ the crap your Players will give a out the history of the Brioq River valley, its ecosystem, and its impact on trade and development during the last two centuries. I absolutely gaurantee it. Like I said: I enjoy a lot of it myself, as do others. But when one sets out To write such a detqiled sourcebbok, one needs to understand that he is writing it for _himself_, for no one else will enjoy it as much as he does, even if it is delightful, and he shoukd approach the project knowing full well that what he is doing is unnecessary and for the most part, completely wasted.

Thank you! Thank you so very, _very_ much! I managed to get through the Seventies myself, and the only interesting thing about was the amount of work put into exploring the entire spectrum of brown. That wasn't good, either, but it is mildly interesting to reflect on. Polyester, shag carpet, leisure suits, horizontal pin stripes, knit pants, Vaseline-smeared camera lenses, pretensious or boring movies, cars with zip codes and body lines you could shave with.... There was absolutely nothing that came out of the seventies that made them worth living through.

Yeah, I get it. It just happens to be my go-to example of "too d@mn3d much fretting over politics and social structure."

Ditto, and for the exact same reasons. That, and it makes soap opera-like politics come up a lot less. A little clash here; a little run-in there, but none of that VTM slog....

Nope. I learned them for the tests-- I actually still remember some of the tests-- that is, taking the tests that covered that period-- but all this time later? Nope. Heck, by the time I got to college that information was gone. Seriously: when will knowing that ever impact my life? They cancelled Cash Cab years ago, and we don't have taxis here anyway. I made it to sixty-one years old, and I can say this with absolute certainty: after .... I don't know how you guys say it-- do you do the England thing with "Year 10" or do you do the Freshman, Sophomore, etc thing? Anyway, two years before the completion of public school was the very last time I ever had to know either of those things, period. No one has ever asked me since, and having forgotten it who knows how many decades ago has had _zero_ impact on my life. Unless your PCs are the instruments of change in your game (and let's be honest: they really should be), who did what umpteen decades ago isn't going to be important to them, either. All the players care about is what their PCs are doing now, and what changes their own actions will bring. I cannot offer a single reason for why I have never met one. Seriously; I can't. I know why I never met one back home-- Circle, Alaska is probably not a globally-renown community I have lived in Brunswick, Savannah, and a few other places in Georgia (as the places grew, I moved on. I'm not a city sort of person at heart), and while I have no doubt that they are about, I have never actually met one. I have met people from India (incredibly warm and friendly people!) ; I have met people from the middle east (amazing food!), but not actual practicing muslims (I know it goes counter to the political narrative, but atheism and choosing your own religion are global concepts; it's just harder in some parts of the world. Like Texas. ) and no one practicing-- is it Hinduism? Is that correct? No offense intended to anyone if it isn't, of course.

Exactly. Dont get get me wrong: its wonderful, at least for those players who are into it, to have lots and lots of stuff. But I have found that in general, about two pages is all you really _need_ to get started. The rest of your document or background is a guide for what players will learn as they navigate the world or ask questions. Even the history of your world is ptetty much something you do for you, or to make NPC stories interesting: most players flat don't care how the county lines and country borders got to be where they are, or what family was killed a hundred years ago to install the current royals, or what great battle is responsible for the destruction of the bridge that once existed where the "river pier" sits now, etc. Why? Because they care only about what the world has become as a result of those things, excepting only where those things specifically relate to their characters (you are all part of a secret society dedicated to restoring the rightful ruler to his throne) or the main thrust of the campaign (it is now time to restore the rightful ruler to his throne). This is not a shortcoming in the players; this is reality. To this very day, I have no idea who went into battle with Andrew Jackson, and if it wasn't for Little Jimmy Dickens, I probably wouldn't know it was in 1814. Similarly, I have no idea who surrendered to Washington, or where, or even though I know it was July 4, I have no idea if that was the date of the surrender, the negotiations, or the signing of something. I know Henry Ford popularized the gasoline engine, but I have no idea who invented it. And on and on. And you know what? I dont know because I don't need to know; I live in the world that resulted from those influences, period. What I deal with on a day to day basis in my life has absolutely nothing to do with any of it. There is nothing I can do to change that, and nothing I have to do to react to any sort of direct, straight-line-from-Ford-to-me impact. You can shout 'cars!', but we all know Ford didn't invent them, and assembly lines were on the way anyhow. Ben Franklin and electricity? There is So much mythologizing about this subject that it is impossible to know what's true and what's romantic fantasy. Same with religions: give me some local ones, period. I live in rural Georgia. I have never met a practicing Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist. Before the internet, I knew _nothing_ about these religions, and today... Well, the little bit I know today is less than useless to any non-gaming part of my life. Your players are the same as we are: we know what we have to do to cope with the world around us because we have some small idea of what the world immediately around us is. We don't really have any practical use foe how it got that way. The players instinctively understand that there characters don't need to know it, either, and if the players themselves aren't interested in setting time aside to read your fancy world build, they aren't going to. There are exceptions- myself, Chris, Scott (who may correct it and hand it back to you. ), etc, but for the most part, your massive full-world detailed build out is for _you_. The players want just enough to make characters and interact with the locals, then they want to roll some dice. 😕

This was actually one of the things I loved most about the old Shadow World stuff: each module had the info you needed for the area in which you were playing, period. If you bought a new module, you learned about a new area, but you didn't actually have to set the adventure there. The "planet full of large islands" approach has, to this day, been my favorite approach to Fantasy worlds. Granted, I might not do islands specifically (though I have, because I like the impression of separation and isolation the ship travel imparts to the Players), I tend to stay with isolate cultures with some knowledge of their nearest neighbors, very limited trade, and not a lot of other interaction. It just makes more sense for non-technological ages and agrarian cultures, as well as large cities (and by extension, continent-conquering kings) pretty rare. It takes the burden off of me in that I don't have to build an entire planet that the party just isn't going to see anyway. It also allows me to fill in the world as we go in a manner that works with the story at hand: should the party need a healer to raise a comrade, there can be one two days ride from here if there needs to be. If the party needs a city, or if some pursuers need a logical source of intelligence, that can be arranged much more easily than buying someone else's book and learning "this city is only accessible by magic means, and is in the dead center of a thousand square miles of desert," or, as it could be paraphrased, "I am sorry, Lewis; you're going to have to make a new character." I have found this to be true of setting books myself, both for my players and for me. My rule of thumb is "if you aren't willing to spend a couple of evenings sketching up the maps, the setting is too big to use." Maybe you can work it in later, or borrow from it as your own world grows, but yeah-- no one is going to soak it all up thoroughly enough and in enough time to get playing while excitement is high. I have, in the past, tried to make the argument in favor of over-detailed world books that they give you the option of a number of starting places and you can pick the one you like and work outward from there, but the reality is, at least the last twenty-odd years, the authors go to great lengths to link everything together in such a way that you and the Players are going to have know about that, too, if you actually want to play in that setting with even the slightest accuracy. Don't get me wrong! Campaign books are a labor of love, and I _get_ it! I have had a few campaigns that I would _love_ to sit down and write up the entire world, in minutiae, and share it with the world, but I also understand that the bulk of this information is, well- more or less useless to someone wanting to use that setting, because it locks out most of the things they would like to decide for themselves, or locks them into things that may bite them in the rear later on. And of course, a super-detailed history can be renamed as "all this amazing stuff that the PCs had absolutely nothing to do with, and a lot of it is more amazing than anything they are ever going to be able to do away, so give up now." Players want their characters to have an impact on their world. Some players want their characters to have a large impact on their world. Too much detail just makes this goal harder to achieve. And, if I remember correctly, spread randomly though dungeons, stuffed into the pockets of orcs, griffins, and owlbears. Keeps them safe, I suppose.

A lot of us, I think, are like Asperion: give me a few details-- not a lot, but enough to build a character that makes sense here-- about the region and nearby villages or races, and I'm good. I trust the GM to provide more as either we need it or to answer questions as we get curious. I hear (well, I _read_ ) the phrase "campaign document" on this board a lot. I have made a list of things for myself, and on occasion have handed out a few for unusual campaigns (like my Ta'LaKreth campaign was enough of a departure from our "usual stuff" that I prepared a handout of nearly two whole pages prior to character generation...... Yeah; I find anything more than 2 pages or so (not including character building requirements / limitations, of course) to do nothing but cause glazed eyes, a slight drop in excitement, and in the end, only half the players are going to read the whole thing and only half of them are going to remember it for the next session, meaning it becomes a "let's stop the game and flip through that thing again real quick" problem in a hurry. I don't know why, but things the Players bump into on their own, during play, or answers to their specific questions, they tend to remember forever, and are more inclined to take notes about, just in case. Besides, there have been a few times where the game versus the document has painted the story into a corner no one was really happy with, so we revised it, making it a couple of hours of creativity that we just threw away anyway.

Odd man out here (again. Go figure). I rather _like_ "medieval" stasis (where Medieval = whatever setting the game is in). It's something I view as one of the unique markers of the genre. Honestly, I find it to be one of the very few things that actual justify the existence of magic. We have a problem; we work for a solution; a new technology is born; we use it to change the world. With magic in the mix, it's easier to justify "we have a magical coping mechanism, so there's no real reason to change things." I don't know how else to explain the idea of "a generally unchanging or very slow to change world" is an important part of creating that fantastic feeling, at least to me (and that may be one of the reasons I don't care much for Turakian Age-- don't get me wrong: I _appreciate_ it; it's just not at all my thing). I have history-- at least, in some campaigns; in others, the history of the prior ages has been lost for whatever reason-- and that history contains changes and upheavals and shifts, etc, but generally-- not always, but _generally_, the current age is on the end of "a thousand years of peace" or some other very, very long length of time. Generally, the campaigns are set at the beginning of oncoming change, and if possible, the PCs are ultimately going to be a part of enabling, creating, or preventing it (because I'm not stupid: peace makes for poor adventuring). That change may be huge (as in: history will close this Age and declare a new one) or even relatively small, from a time-immemorial point of view (as in "the decadence of the nobles has become so great that the peasants are talking about revolt" or "the lands of Hyuster have gone barren and their armies have begun to march on their neighbors in search of new lands" kinds of things). Like Hugh, I have noticed that "the presence of humans moves the needle considerably," in as much as the time between great advancements grows shorter and shorter with each new advancement (fantastic for Cyberpunk; sucks for Fantasy). Accordingly, I also tend to reduce the size of the human population, or find other ways to reduce and slow their impact on the world (remote kingdom on a far-away continent, etc, etc). Not always, mind you, but quite frequently. And of course, there are a few campaigns where I have removed humans altogether (you guys sit this one out. Go over there with the elves. No; you're not the same-- you will be back in some future campaign; they won't.) The idea is that the non-human races, for whatever reason, have less overall interest in making huge strides in technological advancement or in having a global empire or are generally more concerned about their impact on the health of the world overall, etc. No; there is no way to prove that this would be the case, but for all the same reasons, there is no reason to prove that they _wouldn't_ be like that, either. I do _not_ want this to sound remotely political, but in thought experiments over the years, simply removing large-scale capitalism does wonders for keeping this relatively homeostatic. Create races that have various cultural, spiritual, or religious reasons to not want large-scale capitalism or wealth beyond "a certain level of security," and you can drop lots and lots of the impetus to pave the world or burn foreign lands. Not all of it, mind you, but enough that what's left can be kept in check with minor interesting points in history that still allow for that four-thousand years of the same borders" thing.

Had a very short one-off last weekend when I went to pick up the bike I accidentally bought. Best line of the night: "Don't quote The LEGO Movie at _me_, Mo[Sam Jackson} Fu[Sam Jackson]!!" No; context does not help.

If I recall-- and I may well not-- he was spat out instantly, leaving the Tick to deliver the pill, with all the amusing antics of getting his nigh-invulnerable head worked between the teeth, etc. Perhaps "foul flavor" is the secret to his indigestibility!

What with him not having been explored, I would simply have a minor Disadvantage / Complication: No nutritional value. Being indigestible doesn't in any way necessitate any sort of immortality or invulnerability. Plastic is indigestible, as are oyster shell, bone, and other things. It doesn't mean that they can't be cut up into pieces small enough to eat, nor does it mean that teeth and persistence won't reduce them a fine paste of saliva and particulates.

Haven't done one of these in a while, so why not? Why your username? -I wasn't clever enough to use a character name when I joined up, and to this day am sort of jealous of those who did. Thinking about it, though, I realize that there aren't as many people doing that now as there once where. There aren't as many people as there once where! Anyway, it's my name-- the Duke part, anyway. The rest comes from a quick riff made by a friend several decades ago, and it ended up becoming an actual nickname. So yeah... I'm Duke Bushido in 3D, too, at least in certain locations along the coast. Why your avatar or if no avatar why not? - The image has degraded some, but originally it was something of a joke. It's a mon, sort of, created by a young lady I was dating even back before there were AOL disks in your mailbox twice a week. She had some interesting items in her home, some with her family's kamon on them (she was a native of Japan). I asked about it, and learned... well, a lot more than I really needed to know, and certainly more than I remember. At any rate, one day, on a lark, she decided to create one for me (she was pretty skilled with watercolors), based on her impression of me and the things that I enjoyed (she embellished a bit ). The background is a stylized high desert plain at sunset; the sunset is a stylized Japanese flag (I am no less curious about other people and places than anyone else, but I'm not exactly a Japanophile, either: she had to point the flag reference out to me. In this case, it was intended to represent her and her family-- I was definitely interested in her, and her folks were amazing) settling into America-- the desert in the picture). near the horizon is one of the motorcycles I had while we were dating-- wait. I still have that one. At any rate, it's a motorcycle. On the other side, more in the foreground, is, according to her, "an American cowboy," though that looks a lot more like Native American buckskins to me (I also don't think she had a really good grasp of cowboys, considering that her only experience with that was what she might have gleaned from television, most of which was in Japan in the 70s), with what she claimed was a "cowboy sword," which, after much question and answering and referencing the covers of some of my library and some VHS footage we finally figured out was a cavalry saber, which to her eyes (and presumably low-budget entertainment exposure) looks a like a katana to me. No; I am not really into swords, at least not since, regardless of fringe instances and corner cases, overall, Gun is Paper to Sword's Rock. . For those wanting to disagree that this is not typically the case, I would like to take just a moment to point out the ratio of gun-related deaths on the battle field to knife-related deaths (any size knife, really) and gently rest my case. But in her understanding, they were Cowboy Swords, so that's what it is. Evidently, any American that rode a horse outside the city limits during the Western Expansion was, by her exposure, a Cowboy. I'm sort of cool with that. What area do you live in? - Toombs County, Georgia. I'd be more specific, but anything more than that requires a pronunciation guide that I no longer enjoy typing. I am almost exactly seven-and-one-half miles from the dead center of absolutely nowhere. What's your profession? - With the exception (on this board) of Chris Goodwin, who knows it to be the truth, very few people believe that my job title really _is_ Professional @$$hole. No; I am not making that up. I am a commodities buyer who is also tasked with inventory tracking and identifying and preparing for production trends and demands, including catching a trend as it happens and being prepared for it within three weeks in spite of shipping times that can take three months. Somehow, I manage to pull it off. I won't bother with the myriad of things I've done before, because at my age and in my health, I expect my current job is the last job I will ever have. Oh-- I also have the second job, from which I was hired for the current main job: I assistant manage a building materials supply house (the one that I ran for a decade or so). Again, similar tasks, but this time to include personnel managing, too. Not as self-inflation, but to highlight that I am pretty good at the commodities thing: I do that same job for the supply house and only work there twelve days a month. (I think most of us are IT geeks here :)) - I enjoy being the blatant exception to the rest of you. (Though I have suspected for years that Hugh is actually some sort of accountant. ) Are you Windows, MAC or Linux? -No. Not even a little bit. I think my favorite environment / OS was Sega Genesis, though Turbografx 16 was pretty sweet before that. When it comes to computers, if it's something that I am expected to patch, or write any bit of code, or "examine the syntax" or any form of "parse"-- No. Not only can I not do it (unless it's for the C64 or the Timex Sinclair, mind you, but I suspect it isn't), I have no interest in doing it. If I buy a car, I expect it to be complete, able to do what I bought it for. If I buy a piece of software, I expect the same. "Glitches," "bugs," "interface issues" and things like that-- not cool. The past twenty-five years or so, we've been giving these problems some sort of "pass," as if it's okay for software to not do what it was written to do "because we can do a patch" or whatever. That lead to some sort of creep-in of "put some of this on the user" and that tendency pretty much means my only interest in a computer is for work or for the internet. I don't have to know how to design and build the car to make it run; I don't know why I should need to know how to design and modify software to get it to do what it claimed it could do on the back of the box. My Sega? Every time. It does every single thing it claims to, every single time! Even all these decades later, I have never had to modify a table or write a code or turn in a service ticket. Just awesome. In terms of "got what I paid for," the Sega flat out murders every PC I've ever bought after Windows 3. Are there TV shows and/or movies you like to binge watch? -Not really. There are shows I have liked over the years, but-- and it might just be a memory thing, but once I've watched it, I remember it. Watching it again later just annoys me for the lost time. What drew you to the Hero System? -Somebody else was running! My Traveller GM was PCS'ing in a couple of months, and I had just about given up finding a new group (I could have found thirty, back in those days, if I liked D&D, but I don't, so.... Hmmm... perhaps that's because I'm not an IT guy? ) I stayed because after going through the character generation process and the SFX / mechanics separation, I immediately recognized the universality of it. I liked the combat modeling and the speed chart and the lack of "roll for initiative." Skill Levels and-- well, there was just a boatload of things I liked about it; I can't really go into it all and expect anyone to read it-- or to even want to scroll around it! Which edition did you start with? - Man, I can't really answer that one. Having already given a multi-paragraph response, and having been kind of drifting off the board a bit more of late, I am almost loathe to hit you with another one, but here goes: Bear with me, because I have been insulted for making this claim before; I never reali-- just bear with me, okay? I started playing Champions in 1980. Once upon a time, I joined this board. my signature line used to say "HERO Fan since my mimeograph of the first edition!" I had no idea, until Scott Ruggles helped me figure out how this was possible-- thanks again, Scott, if you're lurking around this thread. My first GM was a guy named Jim. He had moved to Hinesville (Where I lived at the time) from California. We stay deeply in touch: one of us calls the other once every five years or so. Man, that's _tight_, right there. One of his players got word I was looking for a game that wasn't D&D. He invited me to try "this superhero game my friend runs thrice a week" (yeah... those were the days, weren't they? The Golden Age of RPGs....) and I thought well.... I'm not the biggest fan of superheroes, either, but good God! It's _not_ D&D! ( I really wanted another Traveller game, but that didn't happen until I bought the books and started running it myself, I'm afraid) So Jim had the superhero game. It was mostly typed up mimies-- which, for those of you old enough to remember that era, was pretty stinkin' _normal_. At least, it was normal where I lived: the closest game store was a nine-hour ride. Eventually we got a local one that was really just a small handful of small-press games, a few things for D&D, some locally-produced modules, dice, and a precious handful of minis (for fantasy). A few years later, we got a game store only two hours away! Woo-Hoo! Anyway, mimieographed, typed, even hand-copied rules were the norm for most groups. Everyone _wanted_ to by the rules, and most of us _did_, on that rare occasion that we found ourselves in the presence of real books for sale (I lived 90 minutes from the nearest bookstore, let alone game store!). I never batted an eye that Jim was running from a manila folder filled with mimies, typed sheets, handwritten sheets, and notes scribbled everywhere. That was _normal_ in Liberty County, Georgia back then. The only reason we had any games at _all_ was soldiers on the army base who had moved to the area from exotic places with game stores and paved roads and stuff..... So we played "the superhero game." I don't think anyone-- even Jim-- called it anything but that. I asked about it three or four times, as I wanted it! Not because of the superheroes, but because of the universality of the system, and the way the system worked from top to bottom. I loved it! Jim said he got it from a friend in California who got it from his buddy Glenn; his buddy dragged him to his GM's house and his GM shoved the rules at him and begged him for his opinion and he took it home to read it but but lost it before he finished it and found it again when he was moving-- such things as that. Then one day Jim had to go back to California for a couple of weeks. When he came back, he had two copies of Champions 1e; one of which was autographed (I still have that one; he gave it to me when he packed up and moved right after 4e came out: "Reckon I'm gonna go to 'Vegas and marry my pen pal." Which he did. And no one batted an eye because we had always been taught that people from California were "kinda weird...." ) His little brother (who off-and-on gamed with us) was given the manila folder right after Jim got Champions. Anyway, as we read the book, we realized that Jim had found the game we had been playing while he was away on vacation! (it really didn't click that he had gone to a gaming convention: we didn't have a strong grasp of gaming _stores_, let alone massive get-togethers of vendors and players! Skip forward many, many years. I have posted that story four, maybe five times (longer and shorter versions of it) here and elsewhere when asked "How were you playing this game in 1980 when it wasn't published until 1981?!" (honestly, I never actually realized that until the first time I was questioned about it, then I had to go look! Now I had my own boxed set then (2e), and I had never actually opened the 1e book Jim gave me, so I never knew it wasn't something from 1975 that Jim had mimeographed and then bought himself the actual book in 1981. The last time I told this story, I got _insulted_ for telling it. That was right here on this very board, actually, by someone who I don't think appreciates that I have told exactly _one_ intentional lie in my life( very long story), and no random stranger on the internet is _ever_ going to be important enough for me to lie to him or her. Either way, I haven't told the story since. But in recent years, Scott Ruggles has become active on the board, and was active at the time that happened, and once I put two and two together, I realized that this was the Scott Ruggles from the old days, and he was kind enough to shed a lot of light on what most likely happened, based on what I knew and what he knew: Jim was either a player or a friend of a player in a playtest group. According to Scott, several of the early playtesters ran groups of their own and tested the game with their own players as well as the game in which they were players. One particular tester, Glenn I-am-already-afraid-I-have-misspelled-Scott's-last-name-so-I-am-not-going-to-try-Glenn's T-something was notoriously bad about letting copies "get away from him." There is a very good chance that the edition I started with was a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy of some version of the playtest rules, and in Scott's words, "there were a _lot_ of Jims in and out back then." I don't know it to be true; I can't ever know it to be true; I will never claim it to be true. However, it fits everything I know, everything Scott knows, and is the only explanation for how we could have been playing it in 1980. While I will not ever proclaim it to be verified fact, I admit that it's really fun to give into the idea every now and again. What have you used the game for? - Everything. Seriously. One playtest campaign (and I confess, I begged for it until Jim capitulated) of "everything goes! Any character! Any genre! Any adventure! Go!" because I wanted to prove to them that Champions was absolutely generic owing to the separation of SFX. After the success of that, we used it for pretty much everything (except Traveller. I have done lots of sci-fi with it, but Traveller has a special place in my heart). The next not-superheroes game was a science fiction game I ran myself (my first GM-ing!) based on John DeChancie's Starrigger series. We would pick up cheap small-press stuff as the years went by (Expendibles, the original Starships and Spacemen, Star Frontiers, and a whole host of others). If we liked it enough to play more than just three or four times, we ended up putting it on Champions running gear. What point system have you ran or played in? - It's been so many years since we've done anything _off_ of Champions, I don't remember which ones were point-based and which ones were not (except GURPS. I thought that was a straight-up Champions rip-off on my first read through. It took a while before I noticed that GURPS handles the bottom end the way HERO handles the top end: that's really what it was made for. I suppose technically Car wars is a points system we just call them dollars instead of points. I have never put Car Wars on Champions running gear..... (No. I am not going to do that.)) Do you still play or GM the Hero System? - Both, though since the other two games are _still_ on Corona hiatus, I've only been GM-ing of late. Our there other games you play? - I have gone on long enough already that I won't bore you further with a list of everything I remember playing. Suffice it to say that the only games that see play in recent years are Champions (HERO System, but after all these years, I _still_ just call it Champions), Traveller, and once in a blue moon we'll all be a little irritated with each other and a game of 1e VTM breaks out for a session or two. On an A to F scale how do you rate the system overall - Which version? I find 2e to have been my personal sweet spot, and become less and less in love with each subsequent edition. Followup question: If you rate the system below B- why are are still playing or using it? = Because I still play a version that I find to be an A. What are some house-rules, if any, you use in the past? -I won't bore you with those, either. I don't have a lot of over-all house rules, but like anyone else, I have campaign-to-campaign rules. Well, I tell you what: I will share _one_ house rule, just because I've posted it here often enough that I don't expect anyone to be shocked: I allow modifiers at 1/8. That is, I have allowed an Advantage priced at +1/8; I have allowed Limitations priced at +1/8. If you could put together a 7th edition what are some things you add, omit and/or change? It would be six or seven hundred pages shorter. I would eliminate every single "here's a list of several variants of the same rule," as I have a nasty habit of assuming that people are intelligent enough to make variants when they feel the need, and that they would likely come up with something far better-suited to them than any "official variant" I could ever prescribe for them. I have always felt that the "GMs and Players are encouraged to change any rule that isn't working for them or to ignore any rule that they don't care to use" is more than sufficient in that regard.

Well that's neat! Thanks!

I had only the basic rule book for nearly two years (I leave the boaed from time to time, foe extended periods. I completely missed the existence of 6e until it didnt exist anymore. EBay, book traders, etc (the foeum store had only BR at that point: I nees paper copies to read from)). Granted, ive been playing since 1e, so I had a leg up enough that I dont know if its possible to play from I ly BR, but I cant imagine they wouls have bothered to publish it if it wasnt possible. I think you will be fine.