Jhamin

Well, I don't know about best ever. I'm 2 episodes in, which makes me current at the moment. It's... fine. They are playing up the mystery and surreal perspectives so its pretty atmospheric but we still haven't really seen what Moon Knight can do. I'm enjoying the multiple-personality stuff but it feels like that will only sustain the story for so long. On the up side, by about 2/3 the way through episode 2 they are starting to move away from that as the central aspect of the story. I'm willing to give it more time. I remember liking WandaVision but feeling like the "trapped in TVland" thing wasn't going to hold them for the whole series... right before the episode dropped that veered things in a new direction, so I'm willing to be surprised. The political thing you may have heard about the show is how it is getting review-bombed online... which is kind of weird. At one point in episode 1, Oscar Isaac's character and Ethen Hawkes' are discussing human atrocities during a motive speech and Oscar Isaac's character mentions the Armenian Genocide which according to Turkey was just a really big deportation and the whole Genocide thing is all a whole lie perpetuated by.. pretty much everyone else.. to smear the good names of their ancestors. It is like one line of dialogue that lists it as an example of terrible things people do.. but it has been getting Moon Knight a lot of flack online.

Wow guys.. this is super anti-useful. The original ask is for some example power levels that can be used in published settings. "my group and I eyeball it" doesn't work for published works. I've posed this before but this is what I use for my Ravenswood games: _______________________________________ Teen Heros: Base Points 300 Matching Complications: 60 Characteristics 10-30 Spd 4-7 (5 is average) Combat Value 4-8 ( 10 including Skill Levels) Standard Damage 6-14 DC (8 DC standard) Active Points 40-60 Typical Skill Rolls 8-12 Def/rDef 10-18/4-8 In this Game all characters should take Social Complication: Secret Identity with values depending on who would care (Frequent/Major is the common value) Everyone effectively has Social Limit: Minor, Under age 16 but gets no points for it (it’s a campaign standard) Most characters should have 1 "main" power with any other powers being related. The Main power should have a total of -1 in limits associated with it, at least for any power at or above 40 Active Points Most characters should be capable of a main attack in the 7-8 DC range In some cases a particular power that is unreliable or dangerous can go as high as 14 DC Skill levels (combat or otherwise) require special character concepts Teen Heroes do not get TF: Common Ground Vehicles or PS: Hobby as everyman skills Otherwise Teen Hero Everyman Skills are as follows: Acting 8- AK: Home Area 8- Climbing 8- Concealment 8- Conversation 8- Deduction 8- Language: Native Idiomatic, Everyman, Literate Persuasion 8- Shadowing 8- Stealth 8- The Power skill represents a familiarity with the characters power that is usually not appropriate for Teen characters _______________________________________ Adult Heroes in the game (were any available as PCs would use the following: _______________________________________ Teen Heroes: Base Points 400 Matching Complications: 75 Characteristics 10-40 Spd 5-8 (6 is average) Combat Value 6-10 Standard Damage 10-14 DC (12 DC standard) Active Points 60-70 Typical Skill Rolls 11-14 Def/rDef 20-28/8-20 (Def 24 standard) Characters with High speed and/or high Combat values should have lower attacks & defenses, conversely powerful attacks & defenses should be associated with lower speeds. Everyman Skills are as follows: Acting 8- AK: Home Area 8- Climbing 8- Concealment 8- Conversation 8- Deduction 8- Language: Native Idiomatic, Everyman, Literate Persuasion 8- PS: Hobby Shadowing 8- TF: Common Ground Vehicles Stealth 8- _______________________________________

This is a very important thing. Back in the 3e & 4e "good old days" B/W line art was the state of the art for the industry and the 4e big blue book stacked up pretty well against the D&D books of the era. That isn't true anymore... and Hero hasn't had a cutting edge looking game by the standards of it's era for a couple of editions now. Compare Champions Complete with (say) Mutants & Masterminds 3e.

I once ended a session by having the PCs find a letter that contained vital information. They had spent the whole session looking for it, felt good they had found it, and one Player transcribed the letter as they were certain it had more clues than were obvious. The next session they formed a plan to act on their new information & I had a NPC interject to remind them of an important thing they were overlooking (I didn't want to waste a session with them going down a blind alley). They insisted that *wasn't* info that they had. I insisted it was in the letter they had just worked so hard to get. The players all looked at me in silence & the one who had transcribed that letter held up her notebook page & proved that info *wasn't* among the info they had gotten from the letter last session. Knowing I had screwed up & left out a vital point, I (rather lamely) had the NPC declare there was "a hidden fold" in the letter that contained the information. The Players all laughed for about 10 min at my weak save & from that point on if I ever tacked something on to an ongoing info dump someone would mention that "there must have been a fold". This has been a running joke now for 25 years. I married one of them. The woman with the notebook was our Maid of Honor. In the years since I've gotten christmas cards that say "Merry Christmas! and a >obvious fold in the card< "Happy New Year". I texted my wife 4 things to pick up at the store a couple weeks ago, then remembered something else 10 min later & got a text back "was there a fold?" I try to take it with good humor......

Interesting that 12 of their top 15 products for 2022 are Munchkin, and two of the others are Zombie Dice. That aligns with rumors I've heard over the years that SJG is basically in the business of printing Munchkin and everything else is because Steve Jackson likes to make a new edition of his favorite 80s products every few years. Man, it's rough selling RPGs......

I don't think we need to roll adventures into the main campaign book. If you look at D&D, the king of RPGs and the thing that sets expectations for many newer gamers you have books for rules & character creation, a DM book, books of monsters, and adventures. The Adventures require that you own the core rules, refers to stuff in the DM book & character creation book & the monster book and include writeups for any new monsters or items that are added. I think it's fine to use Champions Complete to lay out the rules & basics of the Supers Genre, then have adventures that say "requires Champions Complete and Enemies Books 1 & 3", then dive into the adventure. If you want to roll the whole thing into a super product you can.. but why reinvent the wheel?

When I started my Ravenswood game I heavily cribbed from the recommended guidelines in Teen Champions and gave all my players this: Teen Superhero Base Points 300 Matching Complications: 60 In this Game all characters should take Social Complication: Secret Identity with values depending on who would care (Frequent/Major is the common value) Everyone effectively has Social Limit: Minor, Under age 16 but gets no points for it (it’s a campaign standard) Teen Characters should have: Characteristics 10-30 average, exceptions if that high stat *is* your power. Spd 4-7 (5 is average) Combat Value 4-8 Standard Damage 6-14 DC (8 DC standard, anything over 10 DC should be a "special" that has barriers to use) Active Points 40-60 Typical Skill Rolls 8-12 Def/rDef 10-18/4-8 Most characters should have 1 "main" power with any other powers being related. The Main power should have a minimum of -1 in limits associated with it, at least for any power at or above 40 Active Points Most characters should be capable of a main attack in the 7-8 DC range In some cases a particular power that is unreliable or dangerous can go as high as 14 DC Skill levels (combat or otherwise) require special character concepts Teen Heroes do not get TF: Common Ground Vehicles or PS: Hobby as everyman skills but may buy them normally if their concept permits Otherwise Teen Hero Everyman Skills are as follows: Acting 8- AK: Home Area 8- Climbing 8- Concealment 8- Conversation 8- Deduction 8- Language: Native Idiomatic, Everyman, Literate Persuasion 8- Shadowing 8- Stealth 8- The Power skill represents a familiarity with the characters power that is usually not appropriate for Teen characters In my mind, a discussion of this sort of Campaign Guidelines should be in the core rules and specific versions of it should be at the front of any setting. There should be a set of guidelines like this for the Champions Universe "default" of PCs living on Earth and dealing with Viper, baddies from the Enemies books, etc and any adventures that come out for the system that use "Champions" as the defaults need to be built around those guidelines. (As opposed to "Dark Champions, Cosmic Champion, etc, that would also have sets of guidelines and might appear as the default on other adventures) I know there sort of are guidelines like this now but they aren't explicit enough IMHO and way too many sample characters and "basic" supervillians ignore them

I would go further and say that there should be 3-4 well defined campaign rule sets (Street Hero, Superhero, Cosmic Hero, etc) defined in the rules. Not guides, not suggestions, Hero endorsed benchmarks, and that adventures should say something like "For Comic Hero Characters" Points are a bit arbitrary. Its way more important that PCs don't bring 10d6 attacks into a game with enemies that average 35 PD/ED

Its an officially licensed adventure. It was up on the front page when it came out a year or so ago.

Just to set a counterexample: I maintain a subscription to Paizo's Pathfinder adventure path because it's just so damn useful to anyone running Pathfinder games, and outside of that the last $100 I spent on gaming related stuff was all toward buying Superhero RPG adventures. Green Ronin publishing has a dozen or so 20 page adventures and I've bought all of them. Fainting Goat games has several big collections of mini-adventures, which I have also bought a ton of. I basically either create Hero Stats for the characters that appear or I substitute a Champions Universe equivalent. Settings I got. Genres I got. Even Villains I got. Stuff to do with them is the eternal need. The Champions Universe is vast and pretty well detailed. I don't need more, and rebooting a new universe is great and all but so what? There are a zillion of them and a new unified theory for where super powers come from doesn't help anyone actually play. I play every week, and I homebrew a ton, but man it's nice to just have an adventure to slot in. I just ran a Mutants & Masterminds adventure where an evil plant guy starts using energy drinks to turn local college athletes into berserkers, changed it to Highschool for my Ravenswood PCs & substituted Thorn for the M&M guy & away I went. I can come up with my own adventure, I do all the time, but the money this one cost me was well worth the price when work ran long & I didn't get time to do it all myself. It would be *amazing* to have some official Hero games adventures. I've mined out the classic ones. I bought Red Cobra (which is tonally all over the place & comes of as contemptuous of it's own story but maybe can be salvaged), I've looked at the revamp of the Isle of Dr Destroyer but I own the old one and was never convinced it was worth buying again (the old one is way too grim for my playstyle anyway). My group played the heck out of everything that came out for 5e (Sharper than a Serpent's tooth, Battlegrounds & so on) If Hero Games put out a series of adventures that actually took place in the Champions Universe that would be 100x more useful to me than a book about what is going on in Australia or a deep dive into Until's space station.

I'm not sure he was ever Sorcerer Supreme. The Ancient One didn't hand it off or anything. She actually told him he and Mordo would need each other to face the trials ahead, implying she didn't think either one was up to the challenge on their own. It is a Title so associated with Strange in the comics I think everyone is just assuming he has it in the MCU. Not that it really matters, Unlike Mystic Masters there isn't any indication that the title comes with a big Variable Power Pool or anything. It appears to just be a title.

Regarding Doctor Strange, I always love a villian who has a point, and last time we saw Mordo he had decided that Wizards were causing way too much trouble with all the constant mucking with reality & he needed to de-power them. Given the events of that movie, it didn't seem like the most obvious thing to take away from Strange saving the universe from Dormommu. Now that we had the events of No Way Home & the multiversal shenanigans in this movie are apparently Doctor Strange's fault... well, I'm suddenly way more intrigued with Mordo as a bad guy.

It really seems like those hundreds of people could have been better sports about being brutalized by her as she lived out her childhood fantasies of an I Love Lucy life with them as extras who only mattered when they were "on screen" Seriously, how selfish were they?

A semi-related comment, Reading through the old thread there are several comments around how Naked Ego must be able to resist him because Doctor Doom is able to ignore his powers. I would argue that Doctor Doom has some kind of "stealth" power & mental defense that prevents him from being subservient to anyone. So Purple Man's powers didn't fail against Doom because they don't work on High Egos, he ran into some kind of "Doom is a slave to noone!" type defense.

I would say there are are a few things that need to happen on the presentation side of the fence. Art, production values, ongoing support for various product lines, etc. But we are talking bout the game system. I *do* agree we need a rulebook that more actively engages readers and really shows them the possibilities of Hero. People need to *want* to play after reading the powers system, not fall asleep. I disagree that "Theatre of the Mind" is in any way bad. I haven't ever played Hero on a Hex mat and I've been doing this since 1992. I think it is time for a new edition to break backward compatibility but keep a focus on what the core Hero experience is. Don't get me wrong, I have a long list of small things that bug me that I'd love to tweak, but most of it amounts to doing stupid math tricks with a character build that would have been just as well accomplished by the Big Blue Book in 1990. If that is all a new edition is, what's the point? My thoughts about what makes Hero what it is are: - Point based character creation - Reasoning from effects - 3d6 "bell curve" math - A universal system My IMHO, the basic framework of (power cost*advantage)/disadvantage is super core to the game and can't be removed while still calling the game "Hero System". The Costs of characteristics or the ins and outs of specific powers and the value of specific advantages/disadvantages can be argued, but those lead, at best, to minor "playing the margins" kind of revisions. I'm all for that as part of a major revision to the game but changing the cost of Killing attacks or bringing back Figureds does not a seventh edition make. The two things that IMHO need fundamental work: Skills. The single target number, roll under system feels antiquated. I'd like to see a fairly heavy revision to the system. I'd like to see different success/failure criteria that involve task difficulty vs skill and degrees of success. In an ideal world I'd love to see skills vs task difficulty interact the same way OCV/DCV does and fallout from just missing, just making, or making a skill roll by a lot. I'd like to see broad and narrow skills. Having 6 different fields of study bought separately vs SCIENCE GUY 12- are both valid constructs for different games. I'd like to see the system support both, probably at different point costs, especially if they exist together. In conjunction with the above bullet point I'd like to see broad/narrow skills brought into the campaign limits settings along with Active Point limits, does everyone have Normal Characteristics Max, does equipment have to be paid for, etc. Drama Systems. Right now Hero is an elaborate character generation system and a mid-weight Combat system that turns into "roll for success and its' all gm Fiat" once you are out of combat. Other games have been building "meta systems" into their games for decades. Hero is all about reasoning from effect. I want a "combat luck" style meta rule for always cutting the correct wire on the bomb because you are the hero. I'd love to see things like manipulating dice rolls (rerolls, "rolling with advantage", auto success, etc) built into the system, and this being Hero allowing character builds to affect it I would like to see campaign "ethos" stuff built into Genres and Campaigns that can be interacted with by the PCs. Stuff like "unlikely coincidences are pretty likely", "The good guys always win", "The Cavalry always rides over the hill in the nick of time" is currently GM advice in the various Genre books. I'd like to see a list of them per campaign that set the tone and can in fact be invoked and rolled against when things threaten to not go that way. Once again, I'd like to see come character stats or perks that would interact with this system. With the above couple bullet points, I would entirely scrap the current Luck/Unluck system and replace it with whatever mechanics allow metagame manipulation. The unfortunate thing about this is that I also don't think Hero Games can do this in 2022. A new edition needs to make Hero relevant again. Tweaking the Math so the guys who already play Hero like it is a way to remain a livingroom game. A modern relaunch For the game that breaks backward compatibility needs to draw in a large new audience. I think there is a trend toward "rules light" but I don't think there are any fewer players that like "cruncy games" than there always were. They would need to be reached. Unfortunately a new edition that would Hero to return to relevance would require a fairly flashy re-launch accompanied by a product with all-new, modern art and layout. I don't think the company has the finances to support that. I think it would be important to actually support the people playing the game with adventures and setting info instead of just having more genre books that will never be supported again. Something like this would also require writer(s) and editor that could make the rules accessible as well as engaging. I know *I'm* not that guy.

My take on the Edition wars is that they are usually fairly meaningless in most systems and *especially* so in Hero. Over the last couple months when the Bundle of Holding stuff for 6e and then 5e was available several places I hang out on the internet had people popping up to ask how big a deal it was to use 5e books with the 6e stuff they had bought a few weeks earlier. I answered at least a dozen times in several locations... it's super easy, barely an inconvenience. As long as you don't sweat the exact point totals virtually nothing has changed since 4e. The stuff we are arguing about is some real "inside baseball" stuff rules-wise. I would argue that since 4th edition every subsequent pass at the rules has tweaked the edges but not in a way that is meaningful for anyone except we few Grognards who still hang out on this board. We can talk about how big a deal figured characteristics or elemental controls or the Megascale advantage are but that is nothing compared to how D&D changed from 3e to 4e to 5e. If people aren't flocking to Hero it isn't because figured characteristics are gone and putting out a rules revision that restores the Martial Arts rules from the 80s isn't going to make anyone re-evaluate the system. When I talk about Hero in game design forums 90% of the people there have never heard of it. If Hero does need a revision (and I think it does) it is to bring it into the 2020s, not to return it to 2001.

As someone actually running a Ravenswood academy game... all we got was 5E Teen Champions and 2 3/4 pages of additional info in the 5E News of the World. (Mostly how the sample characters are doing as they age) That said, I felt that Teen Champions did a pretty good job of outlining the basics. What are you looking for?

Moon Knight was always just a little too high-concept for me to really get into the comic, we will see what they do with the show.

That invites the question: If you are just going to scale up everything.. why run at high power in the first place?

CW superhero shows are often really great for a season, OK for like 2 more, then get stupid. (Legends of Tomorrow being the Bizarro) I am really hoping this one can buck the trend!

mages usually get a pass to have a couple of weird defense bypassing attacks in their multipower (like unless you have a magic force field you will be taking full effect). Other than that I can't argue.

I noticed that paid services seem to have much better audio than free ones. My theory is that both the audio and video quality is much lower on the free services to both save money and give you a reason to upgrade. When my group started gaming online during Covid we tried all the free services: Google Meet, Zoom (free), Skype, and one more I'm not thinking of. I kept noticing that the quality of the experience was much worse than the Microsoft Teams and Paid Zoom meetings I was participating in for work during the day. Because I'm a computer guy for a living I actually pay for a bundle of Microsoft products for my own education. This comes with an Office 365 tenant and I realized that I actually had Teams licenses I wasn't using. So my Wife and I became licensed Teams users and after setting it up correctly I could invite the rest of the group as guests. As long as a licensed user starts the meeting we get the better audio and video quality. Our audio issues almost immediately went away. We also now have a teams channel with it's own Wiki, File Storage, and Chat dedicated to each of our campaigns. Not really practical for a normal group but it's working pretty well for us.

I see where you are going but I want this NPC to be able to hang with my PCs, only one of whom is supernatural Making too much of his stuff only apply vs supernatural opponents is going to depower him too much when he needs to vie with "regular" Supervillians.

Looking over him, I might need to make his abilities a bit less reliable. He is about 80% as skilled as the original El Espectro but isn't old enough to drive. I may put an activation roll on his bonus Presense to reflect that the "El Espectro confidence" comes and goes. Any other suggestions?