Jhamin

I have my issues with the presentation. I do think that 4e was the height of accessibility for Hero, but the big blue book was *very* focused on Superheroes. I agree that the 2 volume version of 6e is probably not the way to get new players and that Champions Complete was a much better entry product. When it gets down to how every rules change since 1982, 1984, or 1990 has been a step backwards, along with other threads on this board about how a bunch of super dated setting stuff like Eurostar is still relevant in the 2020s or discussions about how you basically can't have investigations in the age of cell-phones I keep coming back to my growing feeling that a lot of the people who are still posting here are mostly nostalgic for their high school & college games from 30-40 years ago.

That is a house rule. Its probably not one that breaks the game, but it *is* a house rule. You can't expect the official rules of a power framework to conform to a house rule without some hand-waving.

Well, lets hear your thoughts. I for one am curious.

4e was my introduction to the system, so clearly the Big Blue Book was a winner for me. I feel like the rules crunch was more about presentation than complexity though. Compare 4e to Champions Complete, they are pretty similar. 6e admittedly hasn't got the content that 4e did, but it has a lot and 5e had more than either, but very few people point to 5e as their favorite. other than "it was when I ran it the most", was there something specific we have lost? Or is it just nostalgia?

Long ago on another board I remember someone reviewing the 2nd edition of a board game. They were a superfan of the first edition and claimed to have played it over a hundred times. The review was full of stuff like "I can remember every rule of the old edition, but have to look up how do do things in the new edition" or "the old version had simple line art and this has full color illustrations and I have to re-learn which picture goes with what card". I gotta say, it was frustrating to read. The entire review was "they changed it now it sucks" but he never had any actual critiques of the changes. The reviewer was just mad it wasn't the same. I'm not saying that is what people are doing here. Just a couple posts up I lodged some complaints about presentation, but I really agree with Christopher. Hero 6 is 85%-95% the same as Hero 3. Rules are better explained and quantified, but back back in the day that is what we wanted. If you don't like Hero 6 I"m not sure what changed from Hero 3 that made 3 good and 6 bad. To try to bring this back in a more useful direction: What about 3e does 6e not do? What do people miss that a hypothetical 7e could get back too? Other than include the group you played with in High School? Hero probably can't help you there

The unfilmed 13th episode would have been amazing. I kinda get why it wasn't filmed though. The budget would have been crazy. Everyone who needs more though, should google it.

I'm still rocking my Middle Man sig here on the Boards. You are in for a treat.

I would also say that Icons is a very narrative focused game where as Hero is a very crunch focused game. There are different schools of gaming and people tend to have very strong opinions about them. It makes a lot of sense that someone who loves Icons would hate Hero. As for Hero: I feel like the later editions started to have a "The correct way" about them. This is a special power, that is a standard one, this can or cannot be in a framework... it got tedious and while mechanically more consistent and going a long way to define edge cases, it wasn't making anything better to game with. Personally, I'm all in on 6E but don't let it get in my way either. I feel the actual mechanics have gotten better but the presentation has gotten dryer, which is the real problem. I also tend to house rule away the pedantic stuff. I let the undead hunting martial artist buy "affects desolid" for his Str and let it apply to his maneuvers so he can punch ghosts even though the Ultimate Martial artist is very clear that he has to buy that for each maneuver separately. Whatever. Handwave. That said, I think 6e is a lot more coherent that the older editions, which is why I use it. I also think there are a lot of people who love 1 or 3 or 4 because that was what they learned when they were 14 and you never love anything as much as something you discover when you were 14

When me and my group played it, it helped that we were all Comic Nerds and actually *wanted* our supers games to simulate the comics we were reading at the time. I remember one player feeling put out that there was no way his gadgeteer hero could even hurt the Abomination.. but then when we talked about it we realized he had basically made a Hawkeye type character and those kinds of Heroes would just never fight the Abomination in the comics and if they somehow do the mission is to distract and escape not to actually have Hawkeye take down the Abomination so we shouldn't make his character do that in the game either. It was basically us self-discovering the idea of campaign limits. This really prepped me for toolbox games later on The chart was a ton of fun. The key was to try not to have rolloffs, they weren't fun. The person initiating the action rolled. If you wanted to grab someone you rolled your fighting. If they were actually spending actions resisting you you rolled your fighting vs a difficulty of theirs and the color you needed depended on what the difference was. It worked if you assumed that most of the time they weren't actually spending an action resisting you, they were spending an action attacking you back & most rolls were largely unopposed. If their fighting was way better than yours it turned into a question of "how come Kitty Pride can't roll well enough to pin Captain America if he is focusing on keeping her from doing that?", which when you said it out loud made complete sense. The game specifically called out that they rated things in categories and that if two characters were in the same category that didn't make them the same, it just made them similar enough not to worry about the difference in a world of teenage mutants and Jack Kirby space-gods. If you actually looked at how comic battles played out in 80s era Marvel Comics the game worked surprising well It was a lot of fun, but had it's limits. The system's "sweet spot" was from around New Mutants on the low end and the Avengers on the high end. Street Level Daredevil vs Punisher stuff didn't work right (noone did enough damage, fights lasted forever) and the granularity evaporated once you hit Thor/Silver Surfer level stuff. Those fights sorta worked, but the cosmic heroes started to all seem super samey stat wise. Also: Defense powers were kind of Over Powered. The system worked great if you were tough but not actually armored like Spiderman, Thor, Cyclops, etc. Characters with actual defensive powers like Invisible Woman, Colossus, and Iron Man could outright ignore a lot of threats (like Spence mentions) and it warped encounter building if you had parties that had mixed levels of defense. There was a strong temptation to make sure all your characters had body armor or force fields because of how efficient they were. We dealt with that with some home-brewed campaign guidelines that forced PC defenses to all be pretty similar so it was more fun for everyone to participate.

I played a lot of the '80s Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one) and had a good time doing it, but the way their product line worked made the game feel like it was really hard to take it away from it's "simulate Marvel Comics of the '80s" roots and the Character Creation system was so bonkers as to be unworkable without the group basically sitting down & deciding what they were going to play. I had a good time & still think of it fondly, but my group had moved on for several years and bounced off GURPS Supers (too bloody) when we found Hero, in the form of the 4E Big Blue Book in the early '90s. Had Hero not existed there is a good chance I wouldn't be playing supers at all.

When my heroes ended up in Japan I ended up having them meet Zen Squad from the old 4e Allies book. I'm actually a power rangers fan so the part where they are all employees of a big company that somehow work at an orphanage & fight evil in color coded suits was right up my alley.

Finally saw Bill & Ted face the Music. I wasn't up to running a game Saturday so my group decided to have a movie night instead. I remember reading a review when it dropped that it was exactly a 3rd Bill & Ted movie. If you disliked the older ones you would dislike this one in the same way, but if you found the old ones fun or charming, then you would feel the same way about this one. I really agree. It *felt* like a 3rd in the series, not just a decades later nostalgia pic. The musical duo's increasingly desperate attempts to unite humanity via the power of Rock, combined with their surprisingly successful run at Fatherhood made for a fun time.

Yeah, I disagree with your premise but that doesn't mean its a bad idea or that you are bad for proposing it. ... now lets just not talk about the Oxford comma. Things are going so well.

In a long ago internet meme, one of Strongbad's emails posed the question: "Would he use his powers for good? Or for awesome?"

I re-read that era of Teen Titans when I started my Teen Champions game a few years ago. I would argue that in terms of total points they were a lot more even than that. The new characters were all powerful but inexperienced while the older characters had "been around the block" a few times but not in ways that overshadowed anyone. Sure, Robin had years of experience under his belt but rarely used any of his access to the Bat Cave & was mostly the team Skill Monkey & martial artist. Wonder Girl and Starfire were both portrayed as heavy hitters & it wasn't clear which one was more powerful. Wonder girl had years of adventure behind her, but Starfire's "offscreen origin story" implied the same about her. These were not her first superfights. Changeling's previous experience was largely negated by his emotional issues. Kid Flash was pretty Overpowered but I would argue wasn't really a PC for most of the game. He came in & out of the adventures and really, really tried to focus on college. Another think I noticed when I re-read the New Teen Titans? None of them were teenagers. They were all twentysomethings with trust funds or more, fancy apartments and designer clothes. Changeling spent a *lot* of time bumbing around his parent's mansion. The couple that worked did so for fun, not need, and while several were in school they all had more than enough free time to fight HIVE. Kid Flash was the only one that seemed to really care about school. (Then again, after having Batman as a mentor for over a decade, college probably seemed easy)

First off I think it's cute you think "we" ever believed in American Exceptionalism or Whig History. Everyone is 20 once and middle-aged eventually. I remember the early 2000s as when my country lost it's collective mind after being attacked, invaded Iraq... because, openly setup a surveillance state, and told everyone to keep shopping lest the terrorists win. Don't presume that no one caught the hypocrisy or that everyone expected Afghanistan to go well. Lots of folks doubted we would do any better than any of the other Great Powers that were going to "fix" them. Thing of it is, I had a lot of discussions with my elders about how this was in no way new. Idealism breaks down once the world steadfastly refuses to be horrified by what horrifies you, the same crimes keep getting committed, and no one goes to jail. We had a discussion on this forum a couple years ago that overlapped this: "Can Heroes be proactive?" The discussion was about if it was possible for heros to just go out and root out the things that were bad instead of just waiting for crime to happen & reacting too it. I remember that discussion vividly because for me it happened against the backdrop of the George Floyd Riots. I remember replying to that thread while the Daunte Wright protests were happening. The thing we kept coming back too was: What were the heroes going to do to "make it right"? Beat up the protesters? Beat up the "bad" cops? (how could they tell which ones those were?, all of them?). Does punishing crime just hold up corrupt systems? Does tearing down those systems create anarchy? Basically, Superheroics breaks down when presented with an even cursory examination of the actual complexity of the world. Batman & Superman have the advantage of an author who makes sure their heroics work in the context of their worlds and they never beat the crap out of an innocent person. A big part of the appeal of 4 color comics is that there are good guys and bad guys and you don't really need to worry about if General Zod has a point. Our actual world never gives us that kind of clarity. So, to return to your query: Is Istvatha V'han our lord and savior? Maybe? The Book of the Empress talks big about how she likes to make everyone happy so they they don't force her to obliterate them, but lets assume she actually makes everyone happy. How? The books talks about improving technology but also keeping out of local moral and religious affairs. So abortion, human rights, religious freedom, etc would explicitly be exactly the same under her regime. I'm sure food and security would solve a lot of the problems of the world but how are they given? Airdrop? Welfare State? The book doesn't say. Are we better off under the Empress? I imagine the TVs are higher-res, the internet is faster, and no one is hungry... but then what? Is that all there is? Do we all get more meaningful jobs? Or are a bunch of us still going to be manning the drive through for not enough money? Is there a new way to be that makes us all better people or do the taxes just go somewhere else and our lives are basically the same? Under the current system in much of the world there is at least a fiction that we can find ways to better our positions in life. Under the Empress is our cage just gilded to a higher degree but the choices are no different?

The immediate and obvious implication of brining Wrath into the modern CU is that Slug as a representative and ruler of the Elder Worm would almost certainly drop everything else he was doing to go get the Worm Scepter away from Fear. As Slug is a master of Elder Worm magic, in his hands it would *not* be uncontrolled and based on guess-work. If you have sufficiently setup Slug in the game, everyone would understand this is a very bad thing. To the point where PCs might have to work with Fear to keep that from happening.

Rewatching old episodes of "Night Court" on Amazon prime. Nostalgic for me, but *man* does this show not age super well. John Larroquette's loveable sex maniac character is less loveable and a lot more cringe in 2022. Brent Spiner's recurring role as a luckless hick is still kinda great though.

I never saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I suppose I would need too if this got past just a forum thread. In the context of that movie, Egon likely needed that to keep operating his experiments, but was their any indication that amount of fuel was only good for X long or was it more than you could only power Y things with it? If it's the latter, it isn't that it is a fuel charge, it is that it represents a semi-inexhaustible power source but can only power so many things at a time at such a level. Like if you had one Solar Cell that can't run your whole house but you could keep a cell phone charged forever. I just checked & It appears the proton packs are good for 5000 years, not millions. Either way, I'd buy them 0-end and call it a day. We never had *any* indication that ammunition or power supplies were ever a thing the Ghostbusters were conserving. I'd have to see how many points makes sense. Their total lack of physical ability, their general inaccuracy with their gear (low OCV), and buying "Parapsychology: 15-" instead of 1 dozen different specialty skills (KS: Cults, KS: Psychics, KS: Ghosts, KS: Spirits, KS: Sumerian Gods, KS: Atlantis, etc) would let you get their point totals down pretty far. It would be about figuring out where they are playable while still reflecting the movie source material.

I agree with Chris Goodwin. If I were going to run a Ghostbusters game I wouldn't use any of the stuff earlier in this thread. - Not only are the Ghostbusters Heroic PC, they are actually pretty low point total PCs. Nobody had a 14 Str, 14 Dex, and a 12 Con. They just aren't that physically impressive. In the second movie they do a big heroic shoulder-to-shoulder "we're the Ghostbusters!" and Peter looks them up & down and tells everyone to suck in their guts. These guys aren't the kinds of Heroes that justify a Swat Team writeup. --Physically I'd give them all 8s in Str/Dex/Con/Body. --I'd say Egon has the best Int & Int Skills with some basic mechanics, research, and inventor --Ray has a very good Int & Int Skills while also having good mechanics and probably the best research and lore skills. --Peter needs to be a lot more charming and a lot less skilled than the writeups showed. Sure, he had a degree in Parapsychology but Ray & Egon had to explain everything too him, so it looked to me that he may have had the degree but not a skill roll any higher than 8- or 11-. I'd also say Peter has the best Ego and Pre of the group (he always recovers from weird effects fastest and deals the best with the weird scary stuff) --Winston, as presented in the movies, is not as good at anything as the other Ghostbusters but has a player that is a lot more focused on survival for his PC than the others. Writeup-wise he should be fewer points. - The Proton Pack writeup is really all over the place. Once again in the 2nd movie someone asks if the Proton Packs are still good and Egon comments that their fuel source lasts for millions of years. The Ghostbusters are NOT conserving them at any point so I don't know why the early thread writeups had fuel charges. I would probably define how you want them to work (I'd say a RKA vs non ghosts linked to a drain vs ghosts movement or maybe even a affects-desolid body drain), call it equipment, and then not worry a lot about the real point cost.

My thought is that if Ravenswood it too far from Millenium City, just move it closer. We won't tell. I will also say that with kids as rich as those at Ravenswood I would expect a lot of "Sweet Sixteen" cars available to bum rides in. In a highschool game I'd probably let a 16 or older PC buy a normal car with their wealth or a relatively cheap "4 wheeled friend" perk to reflect the beater they got running over the summer. This question seem familiar. Didn't you post this exact same thread a year or so ago? Here was my answer then: I've been running a Ravenswood game for several years now. The way I've been dealing with it is by: - Getting the kids off campus (Dates, Movies, visiting parks, Music Shows) - Having adventures come to them (hunteds who know where they live, ex-students with an axe to grind, shennanigans in the science labs & library) - School Events (Rival Schools, Secret ID drama at the Spring Formal, Field Trips) - Family (One PC's father is hunted by Viper, another is the son of a Supervillain, several NPCs are the children of Heros) I've found that you have to get out of the "Mayor calls the PCs on the Red Batphone" type of adventures with teenagers. I lean into the drama of highschool. Not only do you want to get the right date for Prom, but she is being wooed by a "nontraditional" student from Von Drotte Academy (aka a mutant from Viper's school for budding supervillains). We have a whole ongoing plot about the future version of one PC's first girlfriend who keeps attacking the PCs to prevent them from doing all the evil she says they do in the future. Also: One PC paid points for a fake ID that lets them use Rideshare services to get around town. It won't help them get to a superfight, but it lets them get to interesting locations. Having another year under my belt with my Ravenswood game I will add the following: Have a couple of the staff be up to something. Let the PCs find out but make sure they never get hard evidence to prove anything and have the other teachers side with the adults. Harry Potter kept this up for like 5 books. Adventures in the city should never just be a weekend thing. Stuff going down on a school night is just the sort of thing that adds time pressure, angst, and drama to a teen heroes life. "I have to stop the Candyman, but if my RA catches me out past curfew I won't be able to take Wendy to the spring formal!" I've gotten a lot of mileage out of all the other kids at school, normal and powered. (I try to make a point of having the normal kids matter, it makes the whole "secret ID thing" an actual struggle. I'm running my game "today" so there is one normal kid who has several times gotten into internet fights with teen supervillians that the PCs had to bail him out of. The kids themselves are friends, bullies, loaners, etc. Crack out all that teen drama for some great roleplaying One NPC called his uncle Zorran the Artificer to see if "uncle Z" could fix his mind-controlled girlfriend The kids' parents got that money somewhere & kids have had viper try to kidnap them as hostages against their parents or been drawn into dynastic family stuff There is one kinda OK kid with *really* rich parents that keeps throwing his money around to try to buy a cool and interesting reputation. His parties keep getting crashed by the super kids from Viper's training school.

I think people are jumping ahead a bit talking about Desolid characters punching people inside armor. That isn't how Desolid works. Desolid affects how things interact with your body, it doesn't let you ignore defenses. To use another example: If you used desolid to simulate turning to mist, that wouldn't (by itself) let you fly. You would have to buy flight as a separate power to simulate your ability to drift away in mist formm In the same way, if you want to punch someone through metal armor you need to buy AVLD: Nonmetalic Armor (Common), All or Nothing for your Strength to simulate reaching through armor and damaging people.

Just saw "Everything Everywhere All At Once". It was... amazing! It was the most fun I've had in a movie in years. It was funny, poignant, and filled with the most creative martial arts sequences I've seen in a while. The film is a sci-fi martial arts fusion, and dives into the Multiverse. Beyond that don't spoil yourself if you can avoid it before going to see it. It stars Michelle Yeoh with a really great supporting cast. I didn't know I needed Jamie Lee Curtis in a Michelle Yeoh action movie.. but I did. I know I'm talking it up, but I was blown away. Its been a long time since a movie has blown me away. Everyone should go see it!

I always thought Doom would have taken the larger view. He would have understood why the Terrorists acted the way they did, he would have understood why the Americans would be so surprised, and I think he could have foreseen the many, many changes in US culture and foreign policy that were coming. He was always a big picture kind of guy. To him it would have been like watching a fight start two tables down from you at a restaurant. He probably did lament the loss of life, and the loss of life that was coming.. but he wouldn't have been surprised.

It isn't a question of good or bad taste, its a question of relevance. IMHO Red Doom is a love-letter to a dead comic book trope and has aged out of anything resembling usefulness. The Soviet Union hasn't been a thing for almost 30 years and most of the NPCs are references to events and institutions that are at least 40 years old. Sure, sleezy eastern European military guys are timeless, but as Assault said.. most of the characters just don't make sense anymore I mean... time travel or period games are great but a Red Doom game in 2022 makes as much sense as a CB radio based supervillain and expect him to be taken seriously or setting an Indiana Jones tomb robbing adventure in 2022.