Christopher R Taylor

Ultimately the idea of the Hated Mutants campaign works great if you think the world is made up of oppressors and oppressed and want to play that out in your game. Otherwise, its just an interesting one-time campaign or Convention game. Stan Lee leaned on it pretty hard, but the most acclaimed run by Claremont it only came up on occasion and was always balanced out by people who were fine with mutants. He had some stories about mutant hate brigades, but every time he made sure there was at least one guy in a hardhat or passerby that was fine with them to show the whole world wasn't stupid like this.

Well, the first thing you have to consider is whether or not this is the kind of game you want. Do you want to be like LOTR where the main characters run for several days straight, then fight a huge battle with an Uruk Hai band, without any signs of fatigue? Or do you want it to be Ben Affleck Daredevil where he's gasping and wheezing from a single fight and collapse in bed? It reads like you want a more gritty campaign, which is fine as long as the players enjoy that kind of thing, too. The second thing to consider is whether or not this idea will ever really come into play. Is there ever going to be a situation where characters force march so much they become exhausted and started to suffer fatigue at this level? Will they, if they start to suffer, just stop and say "OK we camp for a day and rest" then hit the fast forward button? Will the Cleric come up with a spell to heal exhaustion and skip the entire process? Will they refuse to travel much or at any speed, riding on caravans and such just to avoid the hassle, or just stay home? "Sorry Princess Pinafore, we'd save you from the dragon but that's too far to travel." Third, if you do end up using it, how much paperwork and detail do you want to put into it? The Long Term END system in Fantasy Hero covers this pretty well, but you can get even grittier, assigning impairing wounds to characters who overexert. You can get super crunchy like you mention having the environment use drain effects on characters that represents fatigue, etc. The bottom line is, how much work is it worth to you as the GM, and how much will your players enjoy or take advantage of such a system?

I don't know what it is, I just cannot seem to hit that area, I'm always WAY off!! The funny thing is, it would work and you could build that: Usable as an attack on all nearby (the hexes can't volunteer to have more DCV).

There are several ways to do this. 1 - One is Reflection: it instantly is fired back at them 2 - Another is just blast with the Variable Special Effect advantage with a limitation that they can only use it after they have been exposed to that special effect (within x time period) (probably a -¼ at most) 3 - You can do a variant with that gives them absorption that gives them END which they can only use to fire off the #2 option, so that they literally are only able to use it with an absorb. This would negate the limitation (since they already cannot use it without the absorb) and I'd build with an END Reserve that has no recovery, just a potential power source for the blast. 4 - You could build a multipower with various blasts in it with the "only after having been exposed to a special effect" limitation on it, with each slot a different kind of attack. This gives you options that the #2 does not such as a KA, a drain, etc. This could work the same way as #3, drawing only from the non-recovering END Reserve. There are others, I'm sure

There is a good reason why so few healer characters exist in the comics and its because of all the ethical concerns as well as making a lot of dramatic concerns trivial.

Bozo the Robot sounds very manga, I could easily see that from Japan or Korea.

For me, this kind of thing is good for background: why things are the way they are now, and now the heroes fight against this setting to fix it.

That's where I am headed as well. I can be crunchy with the best of them, if not more so, but I am leaning more these days toward "easy to play"

Yeah if you wanted to do a really gritty, grim sort of game you would have that kind of thing happen. Hospital administrators fearing lawsuits and angry at the loss of revenue. Doctors upset that the healer makes them look bad and isn't using "proper medicine". Insurance companies suing because they fear liability when some healer fixes a problem and it goes wrong. Patients suing healers and attacking them because while you healed their broken leg, they later got the flu and its your fault, somehow. All reasons not to have that kind of thing in a game that's allegedly about having fun.

The best way to use healing (and similar powers) in a game is to utterly disregard the ethical and broader implications. Otherwise it ends up a miserable guilt fest with the hero spending all day healing everyone at a hospital and wandering the world 23 hours a day using their powers on everyone. In order for superhero stuff to work, you have to disregard a lot of the "how could I use this power best and most nobly" stuff for "how can I have fun adventures using this power".

I always thought of Mages and Psionics as the interchangeable ones. They feel the same in play but in terms of build there's a tremendous amount of similarity between an energy projector and a mage. Blast is blast as Mr Incredible would say whether its Ion Bolt or Czardo's Ineffable Strike of the Cosmos

I like your order of wording, I'll work something up tomorrow if I can find time based on that.

I could see a series of "ripped from the headlines" short adventures for like $1.99 each or something but not a big book.

I believe the first half.

Well you trolled as hard as you can, I'll give you credit for that.

Cripple a tank's treads and they are pretty helpless and you can do that with small explosives.

I didn't do, it but I considered a talent that made guns never run out for a character. It just felt a bit too much to offer, since its more a genre thing. Guns either run out for everyone (realistic/gritty) or no one in movies and other source material. So its a campaign feature. Having one dude who pays points to just never run out would feel less western and more fantasy, to me at least.

I have used the mass battle rules from FH a few times with meh success, this looks like it might be an interesting variant

Got word: Champions Begins is greenlit for a 1st quarter 2022 release! I'll get more info to you as I learn more.

I haven't seen that for ages but I remember it being funny

LeMat made some really nice guns, but they were usually over complicated.

Yeah you can't call any of them failures, by any definition but all four were released in the same "pandemic" (it ended last year, its just an epidemic now) and only one made big time money. What's the difference? That's what I was looking at. Black Widow didn't make a lot of money (in Hollywood terms), Shang Chi similar. I'm not sure Eternals made any money. That shows a problem with the approach and characters. Whether anyone enjoyed any of them or not, well that's subjective. I liked the first Hulk movie quite a bit but it was a bit of a bomb.

Chris is a really nice guy, it was great gaming with him whenever I could.

Did you genuflect to his highness?

Big time martial artists are they? Lots of combat training?