Christopher R Taylor

If they had not done this scene, and killed him, the X-men would have really suffered

This was the exact moment that Wolverine became cool. Before that he was just some tough guy nobody knew much about, barely in the comic.

Most excellent Golden Age character name generator!

I don't think its necessary to make Hero's products simpler than every other game published to attract players. All role playing games by their very nature involve a certain minimum level of complexity. D&D is hardly a super simple game to run or play and is stil the most popular RPG in the world.

A name generator could be fun too, based on actual golden age character names from the comics and pulps.

Active points are fine, they are a level system, a point level. They are great to include just in case the game includes some mystical elements or something that can dispel. It also gives a rough feel for raw power as well, an easy rating to look at items with.

Maybe cheating and conniving and manipulating to get the one person who couldn't beat Donald Trump as the nominee wasn't such a great plan after all for the Democrats.

If I can get my books published, I'll fire you over an Oregon beer with the proceeds, Darkness

I think a line of "Powered by Hero" products is a terrific idea, and that's going to be my path from now on. All my books so far have been the background, setup stuff for a GM to build a campaign with, and the next one will be as well, but once those are done, the campaign setting will come out, God willing, and I'll be using that concept. Hero is powerful and amazing, but its like the programming language for a game. So we should approach it like that: its like Redneck Rampage, which took the Duke Nukem engine and built a hilarious hillbilly shooter with it. Or a Skyrim mod that replaces the entire game with a new one. This uses the Hero Engine. Here's how it plays.

I used to buy skill monsters like Batman with an elemental control -- Detective Skills. It didn't save a lot of points, but when you have 25 skills, they start to add up and yet aren't a tremendous impact on most games. It makes sense that Batman can speak some Mandarin and knows the layout of most major cities, but it comes up so rarely the points are hardly worth it.

Well it wouldn't have to always be necessarily in order of purchase, but could instead be a required purchase minimum: you cannot buy fewer than 3 maneuvers or abilities, for example.

Yeah I'd just treat it as a poison and use life support.

Yeah its pretty well connected and follows a thread, but if anything its way too simplistic and direct. It would take a bit of work to add in role playing and character story elements. With pre-made characters, a deliberately designed structure of adding more and more to the story as a tutorial, and a book meant to be an intro it wouldn't be a problem. We tried this summer, but it ended up with just 3 of us doing anything and I have too much on my plate already to write the whole thing up.

Yeah I'm leaning heavily toward that with my "Player's Handbook" for my campaign setting. Stripped down, not crunchy, just the results, and the "DM Guide" has all the numbers. I like the "Powered by Hero" concept and term, it feels good and gives the information needed: this is a product based on Hero rules without all the math.

We'll see. It could be fun, or it could be misery. They're sticking to the same palate, from the trailer: grays and sepia. I'm personally not super fond of the "this character has always been around but just suddenly showed up" trick. Oh yeah, Wonder Woman. She was in WWI totally slipped my mind she existed.

Yeah actually that came to me as I was typing that post, do a build in Hero Designer and release that for people that want crunchy numbers, and just put the results in the book. I might do that with the Fantasy Codex as well in a second edition -- it would make the book considerably slimmer -- but people like stats on stuff like spells.

I have a fantasy treasure book coming out eventually and I decided that the last thing anyone needs is the background build for every potion and magic sword. Frankly nobody cares but Hero builders, who would build their own. Active cost listed, sure. But the builds can be hidden and nobody will care. Further all those blocks of numbers are intimidating and discouraging. I'm even reconsidering having the numbers for spells in the Fantasy Codex.

I did one LFR raid for the Suramar quest line, but it was't a very impressive raid. The gear was all lower level than what I already had as well, but at least I got artifact point items off each boss.

I remember that and thought it was a good idea, something that could be used for darkness as well as light. After all, darkness doesn't necessarily have to be absolute; maybe its just really really dark and some people can see a little through it.

That brings up an interesting question; is teleport indirect? I've always assumed because of its nature and ability to move beyond enclosed barriers it was.

A couple of quick thoughts. Maybe an "effect" power that's super cheap and does nothing except special effects would handle a ton of little odd gadgets and devices like lights... or instant change. Say, 3 points for a fixed effect and 5 for a variety, at most 10 for any? The ideas about knocking people over and doing velocity damage etc all seem to play into the thread that sort of petered out where we were trying to build a power framework that actually let people build martial arts from powers (or other similar structures, even spell systems, skill trees, etc). If we had powers that did what martial arts did -- or at least modifiers -- that would make that framework more viable and let us balance martial arts a bit more closely.

Not really. It involves a very wide range of different powers each one tailored for one specific aspect of gravity control. And for some effects it doesn't really give you the results. High gravity field, that should make everything more tiring, slow people, reduce leaping, hinder attacks, etc. Just a couple of G would be a huge change environment or expensive tons of related, linked Area effect powers for the fairly annoying but actually not enormous effect. Or reversing gravity, now everything is exactly what it was, but you're on the ceiling. What's that? Clinging, usable against others after a telekinetic throw?

Knockback resistance should work, just prevents a certain level of "being knocked over" from a power. You can also buy 1m of flight or teleport with Position shift and instantly get up without requiring the half move, but only on your phase. But it would depend on how the power was built. For example if it was "roll dice and count the body" then kb resist works. If its "telekinesis throw only to knock down" its going to be strength to resist, and so on. If a brand new power was created to incapacitate targets temporarily, then it would probably involve designing what prevents the power from working as well.

And everyone hates it because? It doesn't have any structure to build in resistance, probably doesn't belong in Change Environment, and the cost is questionable. So again a power that let you do things like knock someone down, stun them, tie them up for one phase, etc -- temporary, specific incapacitating effects -- that has a resistance or avoidance system designed in, and is independent of Change Environment could be the answer. Gravity effects are difficult to simulate with Hero, it gets kind of complicated to get them to work the way you want. That's an area that could be addressed.

Sure, its the comic books. If you're Leg Sweep Man, who can knock anyone over, then that's your signature power. And with the "way to resist" caveat, then you get a way to stop the effect that can be built into the power and into defenses against it. Kind of like flash, or any other power that normal people don't defend against now. ARRG HULK BLIND!!!! The discussion here is "stuff that could be added to simplify some builds." Something that does effects like knocking someone over is too complicated for the results (and has a really high active point cost to be remotely reliable for the results as well).