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Jhamin

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Everything posted by Jhamin

  1. The Black Mask lineage has become kind of an important background element of my Teen Champions campaign. As such, I've started to really appreciate my gaps in understanding around what kinds of adventures the family has had over the centuries. Each one is an extraordinary individual, and each of them has been a Skilled Normal (no out and out powers). They also each seem to fit well within the genre tropes of their era. Thing of it is, I'm not sure that I really know what the tropes of each 'Masks era were. One thing that I've noticed is that Black Mask I, by being involved in the US Revolutionary War has a whole host of stuff to pull from. Black Mask IV has a similar "schtick" around being involved in the US Civil War and reconstruction. Masks V and VI were cowboy Black Masks and I can dig into the "wild west" and "weird west" genres for a lot of their adventures, even pulling in some Jules Verne if I want to get fancy. The Masks from VIII onward start mapping pretty well onto more modern genres of Hero. Mask VIII = Pulps & WWII, Mask IX = Silver Age supers, Mask X = Iron Age supers (maybe not as grimdark in the ChampsU, but a good era to look at, and my continuation of the family Black Mask XI adventures in a semi-reconstructed "modern Supers" era. Which makes me realize the gaps in my own knowledge. What sorts of adventures & enemies did Black Masks II, III, and VII have? Black Mask II adventured from 1797 to 1818 in Boston, Black Mask III adventured from 1822-1850 in Philadelphia. I know a lot happened then & I could work them into real world events, but what were the big adventurous fictional tropes of those eras? What kinds of fiction would have had a mysterious do-gooder like a Black Mask at their center in 1810 or 1830? Black Mask VII lives in a similar gap in my genre knowledge. He adventured from 1876-1929 in Chicago and Montana. This puts him at the twilight of the American West but *before* the rise of Organized crime in Chicago and the many Pulp tropes that his Son Black Mask VIII would have been all about. He probably got involved state-side in WWI related events but he was based in Chicago which limits some of the tropes there. What were the adventurous fictions of *that* era?
  2. These are all great suggestions, please keep them coming! (I had another "Black Mask" question, but I think I'll start a different thread with it)
  3. As my Teen Champions game progresses, the PCs have been invited to spend a few days at the Black Mask's family ranch in Montana. (The PCs have "befriended" Black Mask X's daughter at school and Jennifer Ward insists they spend some time there over spring break. Son of El Espectro is also coming...) To set some context, I've advanced the timeline a bit in my universe. Jenifer Ward has retired and passed the cowl to the current Black Mask Amy Jo Woods (her former sidekick Silhouette). David Ward has passed on and the family Ranch is being cared for by Sharon Ward (David's Sister) while Jennifer and her Husband continue to live in Vibora Bay. So I'm thinking the Ranch was originally purchased by Marvin Carr (Black Mask VI) in the 1890s and has been in the Black Mask "Family" ever since. Something big and rambling "up above" with a hidden crime fighter's lair somewhere protected from casual visitors. As it hasn't been actively used as a Black Mask HQ for 100 years, the stuff there is mostly unused, but I'd love to put together an old-school crime fighter "trophy room" for it. Something that would have originally dated to Black Mask VI, but that has been added too since then by his successors (including Jennifer and probably Amy Jo). I'm looking for the Black Mask's equivalent to Batman's Giant Penny! I'm pretty sure nothing has ever been done about this officially, so I'm looking at this as a brainstorming exercise. As the only Black Mask other than Jennifer who is detailed officially is Jeffrey Ward, Black Mask VIII from WWII I'm thinking he would have added a piece of a Martian Tripod and several trophies from Nazi Supervillains from his time in the Defenders of Justice. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
  4. Well... yeah (Okay, they may need to wait until they learn multiplication) And some of those Minecraft kids are 11 now, which isn't much younger that I was when I got into gaming
  5. Final Fantasy 7, Baldur's Gate, Pokémon, and more and more are older than the High School kids playing D&D these days. Complexity means something different to kids raised on Minecraft than it did to us who used to think Axis & Allies was complex.
  6. The thing that concerns me about going back to 2e or 3e is that if these high school kids end up really liking the system I hate to have them find out that they were playing a game that came out before their parents were born and having to adjust to something multiple iterations newer. Take a look at Champions Begins. It does a great job of gradually adding complexity but is using the current core system.
  7. This. Watchers of the Dragon was a pretty well regarded late 4e book (written by Steve Long), but it had all the detailed writeups, long skill lists, and 3 point powers with 6 modifiers that people rag on 5e for. So it was absolutely possible to run 4e that way, it just became the "house style" once 5e dropped.
  8. He takes a lot of time to say what he has to say, but his content is very interesting. My understanding of this video basically boils down to: Kids are buying comics made for kids in numbers far, far larger than adults are buying comics at all. Too bad Marvel and DC decided they don't care about kids. A scholastic reader Miles Morales comic has 10x the sales of any of the Marvel Spiderman titles, which shows that they may well buy superhero comics but they aren't being given many reasons too. The YouTuber pitches the theory that both Marvel and DC decided to "age up" with their readers starting in the 90s and abandoned the traditional kid market. That worked for a while but now we are at a point where 30 years of kids have grown up on Manga (which has tons of adult stuff but *also* has tons of stuff for 8 year olds). Scholastic has pulled way ahead of both DC and Marvel. The "big two" traditional publishers don't appear in the top 5 comic book sellers in the big bookstores (which according to this video is where all the growth in comic sales is) So it sounds like third party takes (Like from Scholastic) on traditional comics are the only places these characters are still showing up for actual children. Kids in 2022 appear to be reading a lot more manga & not a lot of Spiderman. I know my life-long comic book addiction started when I was 7 years old & if its true that kids haven't been getting into stuff like that for 20 years.. no wonder comic sales are down. I've seen enough Manga that was pretty cool that I can easily understand how if you got into that when you were in 1st or 2nd grade you might not feel a deep need to keep up on Spiderman anymore. My Hero Academia, Naruto, and Dragonball seem way more popular than Batman among middleschool kids I run into.
  9. I think it was a PC trying something silly & his GM went along with it part of the way. If we are assuming Iron Man 3 was a Champions Session, "House Party Protocol" was Stark's player being cute and trying to make an army out of his backup suits/extra foci and some inventor rolls. His GM let him get away with it once but declared that they all came apart if they took any damage or failed a dex roll. He was then informed he wasn't allowed to do that anymore. In later movies, he actually bought the Iron Legion as followers but they were usurped by Ultron. He then appeared to give up on armies of troopers and went nanotech, AKA he re-spent his points and rolled the followers (along with a bunch of XP) into buying off his Foci limits entirely. It looked like he had OIHID during Infinity Wars (He had to activate his chest unit, which Endgame showed us was removable) but by Endgame he didn't seem to have any limits at all anymore on using his Nanites.
  10. Eh, he just doubled his foci a few times and his GM let each one be unique. I didn't get the sense that any of them were actually more powerful.
  11. I miss the Black Polo with the green "Hero Games" Logo I got at Gencon back when 5th Edition was new....
  12. As with all things HERO, this comes down to special effects. What are they hoping this drone will do for them? There is a world of difference between a treaded bomb disposal drone, a flying camera drone, and a US Navy drone with anti-tank weapons that can stay in the stratosphere for days. So we need to figure out what you want. Personally, I think way too many people reach for Variable Power Pools way too quickly. They have their place but I've found that 9/10 times people actually end up using 4-5 powers frequently and weird one-offs and you are better off building a power conventionally and then making them make inventor, power skill, or similar rolls to pull off the weird one time things they do with their powers rather than opening the can of worms that is VPP. One way of handling the Drone is to build it as a follower or (depending on how much control you have) a duplicate. A follower gets you another character but you have to deal with lots of issues with it being it's own thing that may want to help your character but has to be controlled separately. A duplicate makes it part of your character so you end up having pretty much total access to it. The down side is that because it is a follower or a duplicate a strict reading of the rules means that if it's destroyed you don't automatically get a new one. Going this route, you stat up the Drone like a character. Give it skills, powers, abilities, stats, etc. It can do what it can do. If you want them to be semi-disposable, you want to buy them as a special effect for a power. Likely as a foci. You have lots of options depending on what you want Buy Clairsentience defined as the drone flying around and beaming camera footage back to an eye piece. But attacks with the "indirect" advantage to simulate weapons on the drone. You make the attack rolls yourself & just say the drone is doing it Buy Mind Control to reflect the Drone flying down and rewiring technological attackers Buy Aid to reflect the Drone flying over and injecting combat stim drugs into your allies ... and so on. (I may be thinking of the Drones the Specialists troops have in the X-Com 2 video game for some of these examples)
  13. Honest question: What part of 5th wont you be using? My memory of 5th was that it added options but didn't really change much from 4th. What am I missing?
  14. The citizens of the alternate Earth you dump them all in. Earth B needs to pay up or have double the citizens with no extra resources. If your demands are met you put everyone back where you got them. Sort of the Anti-MCU Thanos.
  15. In fact, as I'm browsing the Book of Templates II, Patriotic Shield Boy Scout has an area of effect Stun Aid with Incantations called "Get Back in the Fight Trooper" So there are a lot of ways to do this.
  16. Yeah, this doesn't seem to die. I mostly think it was about how a revered director tore into the movies that actually make money in the modern era. I keep coming around to "Guy remembered for making gangster movies 40 years ago shakes fist at clouds about superheroes". I know his body of work is much larger and much more varied than that, I know he has made important and powerful movies, but he is from another generation. He was one of my Dad's favorite filmmakers and my grandparents thought his work was violent and crass. The part where he hates what the kids like today is not a surprise. Everyone these movies are made for is young enough to be his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
  17. It depends on what kind of a "leader" someone is. Personally I love leaders that actually make their teams mechanically better. Such as: - Combat Skill Levels (or even overall levels!) that were useable on others, requires a teamwork or leadership roll to reflect how everyone fights better when they follow the leader's plan - Aid to Dex/OCV/DCV (one at a time or all at once), Selective Area of Effect, reflecting how the skilled leader is coordinating the fight to get the drop on the bad guys
  18. This is the same thing I always think about with the various extra dimensional storage items in most Fantasy Games. I feel like when they (rarely) show up in fiction the "cool part" about a Portable hole is how they give you access to spaces where you need them, no matter how weird. Heroes often hide inside them. The hero is being chased, jumps in his portable hole, the villain misses them & runs right by. When they show up in the old Rodger Rabbit Movie, Portable Holes let people make a hole in a restraint, letting them escape. In RPG games, people always put up shelving and use them as portable store-rooms. Which fills a need I suppose, but I am always kinda disappointed by the lack of imagination. In Hero Terms, how they are used will be the big factor in deciding how you write them up.
  19. My thought is that it works against damage classes rather than amounts of damage. Most defenses block a fixed amount of damage, or reduce damage a fixed percentage. Damage Negation works against what was up until it's creation an abstract "behind the scenes" concept (Damage Classes) It seems like it works better to just remove the appropriate amount of dice from the attack before rolling damage, but it's weird to me that the attacker knows how much damage is being negated before the roll. Players usually work out someone's PD after they punch them a few times & weigh how much they seem to care. I normally don't tell them how much stun gets through on a roll. If you remove the damage after the roll, how much damage do you negate? Do you take an average amount out? Specific dice? Which ones? I feel like Damage Negation IS a good idea that has a place in the system, but we need some "best practices" around what was effectively a new kind of defense and how to make it run smoothly in game. The fact that there are questions makes me shy away from using it, which means I never get practice in figuring it out
  20. Did nobody watch the 60s episode where the guy who is half black half white, split down the middle is at war with the other guy who is half black half white split down the middle but with the colors on opposite sides? And they each think the other is racially inferior? Or the one from TNG where a local sees Dr Crusher heal a crewmember & immediately starts a new religion worshiping Picard and decides to sacrifice Troi so that his new god will magically keep the storms away? Or the DS9 where Sisko has a vision of himself as a pulp sci-fi author in the 1930s who experiences viscous, violent, racism and has his best work pulped because he dared to write about a future where Black Men can be captains of space stations? Trek was never subtle with it's wokeness. I'm loving Strange New Worlds. Its the first Trek that actually feels like Trek to me since the 90s. Asking the important questions. Edit: Upon further reflection... I think it's the fact that he keeps going into new situations with that hair and demanding respect shows a level of confidence that most people can't help but find sexy.
  21. Doesn't one of the actual legends involve Thor getting into a drinking contest with a cup that is magically linked to the ocean? So he has to literally drink the ocean to win? And does surprisingly well? Im pretty sure there is another one where the Gods make a bet with a Giant about building a wall, realize they are going to lose, so they ask Loki to get them out of it. Loki does this by turning into a female horse and distracting the Giant's magic stallion... and gets the Gods out of the bet but ends up pregnant. He keeps it and gives the foal to Odin to ride around on. MCU Loki is a piker compared to myth Loki. Norse mythology is out there.
  22. 5th and 6th are 95% the same. The biggest differences are the removal of figured characteristics and elemental controls being replaced by unified power. Don't get me wrong, those are big differences, but they only matter at character creation. (I've come to really appreciate the lack of figured characteristics, but mileage varies) Beyond that there are a ton of small changes spread over the system. Different costs for various things, different ways of calculating various things (usually simplifying them), and so on. I don't know that I would complicate things by stealing bits and pieces. I play 6e roughly 2/month and have been for about 4 years. I played 4e and 5e for decades before and loved them both. I really do think 6e is the best version but if you don't want to deal with all the fiddly little changes (which I really get!) then just play 5e and be done. Once you start mixing and matching editions you lose the "muscle memory" for the system and may as well have just gone full 6e and be done with it. Or as HeroGM suggested, play 6 and just use 5e stats with corresponding figured characteristics and costs.
  23. I... disagree. I started with 4e just fine & what I see of 3rd doesn't make me want to go back. I've introduced players to 5 and to 6, and both are fine. What I do hear a lot of from people trying to get into Hero is that they are super confused by what books they should actually use. Champions? Champions Complete? 6e? (Is that the same as Champions Complete? Sorta....) I 100% think its a presentation issue, but I don't think its a rules issue. In 2022 new players aren't turning away from Hero because of how END is calculated and going to an older formula isn't going to make them all come running back. I think we need to make it easier to know where to start, know how to start a game, etc. Less toolkit and more "here, do this" "Champions Begins" was a really great place to start. How did that go?
  24. I've been arguing this for a while. Give me something to *do* with all these tools. I don't need an Advanced Players Guide 3 or the big book of Talents. I need some adventures. Battlegrounds was *great*, but it was also published in 2003. The Island of Doctor Destroyer was republished a few years ago, but its a retread of something from the 80s. Let do some adventures!
  25. I think some of this is fallout from Hero being a Universal Tool Kit system that grew out of some specific genres. We are all mostly OK with guns costing points in Supers but being equipment you can have as long as you can justify it in most other Genres. We are OK with powers being a thing you expect most people to have in some Genres, but are wildly inappropriate for others. We are even OK with spells being made with the powers rules but PCs actually paying 1/5 or 1/2 cost for them for world-specific reasons. I think the issue with some of this is that we try to shoehorn the same skills system, the same END rules, the same cost structures into all these different Genres. As Christopher R Taylor says above, he ignored as much of the survival skill system as he could in an official product because he didn't need it for the Genre. I've long argued that the difference between "Cop: 12-" and buying 6 different skills to reflect Law Enforcement training was less of a Hero System change and more of a campaign guidelines change. I'm starting to wonder if that's wrong. I'm starting to wonder if just like every game decides if equipment costs points or not, if Hero needs a few more "dials" like this. Does being a scientist cost 3 points for a science skill keyed to your INT or does it require a dozen different skills? Is End used? is it 1/20 AP, 1/10AP, 1/5AP, etc. Can characters buy "super skill" powers like Stealth bought as the invisibility power with mods, or are they limited to the skill rules? etc If Hero were to hypothetically go down this road, I'd love to see a choice between lots of cheap skills, broad ranging cheap skills, or in a world where lots of people can buy SS: Chemistry for 3 points there is also a "Super Science" skill/power that guys like Mr Fantastic and MCU Stark and Banner have. It would all be campaign choices, because I don't think one size fits all (the current approach) is working well for Western Hero, Justice International and Champions.
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