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Whatever its mechanics deficiencies might be, I feel that Savage Worlds does do one thing particularly well: as a brand, it focuses primarily on game settings, not generic genre books. Savage Worlds has a core rulebook and four genre supplements (the Companions). Beyond that, nearly every single SW product is a setting book or a supplement for a specific setting. This, I feel, is how an RPG sustains itself in the long run in today's marketplace. I also like its general approach to published adventures: the Plot Point Campaign and its Side Quests. This concept integrates a major story arc into the very fabric of the setting, with lots of room for GMs to slip in custom-built sub-plots and adventures that hook into the main plotline. I think this idea strikes a good balance between giving casual players material to run with minimal preparation, and giving dedicated players room to craft their own stories within the broader scope of the campaign world and its epic struggles. As a fan of the Hero System, I'd love to see it adopt the SW approach: stop with the generic supplements and focus exclusively on campaign settings with rich "plot point" style adventure structures upon which experienced groups can hang their own stories. The Hero System already has the mechanics side of things nailed down, and the 6e core library provides all the general purpose optional rules you could want (sort of detailed mecha rules, perhaps). What it lacks is the cornucopia of settings like SW has spawned. Campaign settings are like fishing nets: the more you have, the more fish you can catch... (fish, in this analogy, are newcomers to the system, in case that wasn't obvious.)

If so then I think they are making a serious strategic error. The same error that movie producers make when they take a movie that could easily appeal to all ages, and turn it into a kid's movie. For instance, the original Star Wars (i.e., A New Hope, prior to the special edition changes) was a movie that appealed to all ages. Every Star Wars movie after Empire progressively lost this quality, and increasingly leaned on elements too juvenile for adults to enjoy or relate to. The equivalent for Supergirl, I think, would be to "target" women and girls, almost to the exclusion of men (who would ordinarily tune into any superhero show you put on the air) rather than making it appeal to viewers of both genders. It seems that only a tiny handful of creators in Hollywood understand that you can make a show that women/girls will enjoy without having to pander to them.

Joss Whedon both employed and subverted common chick-flick tropes on the Buffy tv series to good effect. He proved that you can have a perky, kick-ass female superhero who deals with relatable "girl" issues without also driving away 90% of your potential male audience. It remains to be seen if Supergirl has figured out how to do that.

You know that, and I know that. But they do not. And they have convinced themselves that the Hero System can't be made as fast and streamlined as Savage Worlds, or whatever system they are pushing for. Now, either you possess magical powers of persuasion that CT does not, or you underestimate how deeply entrenched the simple/fast/anti-HeroSystem bias is in the hearts and minds of players like those CT is faced with. Like I said, you would probably have a much easier time getting such players to try the Hero System--including the streamlined experience you describe where the GM does the bulk of the "heavy lifting" during character building--if you first disabuse them of the notion that fantasy has to be ultra-fast and streamlined in the first place. The problem isn't really a misperception of the Hero System, but a dubious set of assumptions about how fantasy RPGs "ought to be". I think it is necessary to re-align those genre-based assumptions prior to recalibrating their perception of the Hero System.

Sure, the Hero System is great for fantasy, and almost anyone intimately familiar with the Hero System already knows this. Moreover, for anyone moving to fantasy from a superhero RPG background, they are not only used to the detail and complexity of the Hero System, they probably like it because of the multitude of benefits that come with all that detail and complexity. But for everyone else, its likely to be off-putting on the face of it. So from what I can tell, the issue isn't whether or not Fantasy Hero can be made to work for a particular style of play, the issue is the bias towards simpler, less-detailed systems that is common in the broader fantasy RPG culture. Players aren't necessarily looking for "D&D style", which implies a Vancian magic system and a rigid class-based character progression. Even the ones who are fed up with D&D's singular notions still believe that "simple and fast-playing" is the only way to go for a fantasy RPG, and won't often tolerate the sort of detail and complexity that the Hero System brings to the table, regardless of all the flexibility it buys. At the end of the day, it seems to me that before you can really sell such players on the Hero System for fantasy, you first have to move them away from their "simple and fast-playing" bias. Once their minds are open to "complex but flexible", then you can offer up the best in the biz: the Hero System.

I think the fact that there's any whiff whatsoever of a Devil Wears Prada vibe in a Supergirl show turns off a lot of fans just on general principle. I dunno. I think I sorta expected a Supergirl show today to be influenced more by Carrie Bradshaw than by Xena. *shrug*

They managed to pull off Grodd, so maybe they can figure out a good way to introduce a galactic peacekepper with a magic ring too. But I'm not holding my breath.

I liked almost every main character on the show, even when the writers failed them. Except for Eddie. I never really warmed up to him. I never had a problem with Iris, per se, I just felt like she had no meaningful role to play. She was little more than a dramatic accessory. Hopefully they'll fix that for season two. Barry, Joe, and Wells were the standouts, for sure. I liked Caitlin, and I even grew to really like Cisco. The villains tended to be a bit lame, but Snart was the best of them all, and of course Grodd was simply awesome. Overall I give the show a B, and if it wasn't for the atrocious time travel stuff, I would probably give it a solid A-.

It was hard enough forgiviing the show for its neanderthal treatment of Iris ("we kept secrets to protect you, dear"). It was impossible for me to forgive the time travel nonsense, especially when they piled it on so thick in the finale. Mach 2? One hydrogen atom? One minute and 52 seconds? They were spinning out so many random nonsensical numbers it was dizzying (and mildly nauseating). The only good thing to come from the stoo-hoo-pid resolution to the Reverse Flash conflict is the implications it has for season two.

Most GMs I played with allowed the environment to provide all kinds of "free powers" to any character, hero or villain, that thought to (and could) take advantage of them. For example, if a fight takes place around barrels of kerosene and a flame blaster thinks to ignite one with his Fireball power, then guess what...an ad hoc continuous AoE attack (burning pool of kerosene) suddenly appears on the battlefield "for free". Much of the fun of Champions combat comes from figuring out how to gain advantages through creative use of the environment. It's a good habit to get into because you can be sure that any GM worth his salt is going to have his villains taking advantage of it...

All I will say about the finale is that it confirmed my worst fear regarding this show: that it would embrace the very worst time travel tropes Hollywood can (and typically does) muster. I pretty much knew going in that The Flash would involve time travel, but I held out hope it might actually try to treat it smartly. But no, it pulled out every mind-numbingly stupid bit they could steal from every other mind-numbingly stupid time travel story ever told.

In the Hero System, the Telekinesis power is simply STR at Range at its most fundamental. The problem with using it to cause an aneurism is that the target blood vessels aren't visible to the attacker, nor are they really "reachable" in a conventional sense. Consequently, something other than vanilla TK has to be used to represent this power. It would probably make more sense to use basic TK to simply crush someone's skull, as that's mostly just a called shot to the head. I don't imagine that a bunch of CSLs "Only with TK to offset called shot to the head" would add much to the cost of this power. Of course, it doesn't exactly match the prescribed effect, but maybe a charitable GM would allow the SFX to be "aneurism" instead of "crushed skull".

While Age of Ultron didn't explicitly mention it, I think we are intended to understand that it was Coulson's intel that led the Avengers to Strucker's lair in Sokovia. I have to believe that by now the Avengers know Coulson is alive. As for the shapeshifting material that swallowed up Simmons, I don't think it is in any way related to Graviton. That stuff was described as "alien"...

You make some valid points. However, in the specific case of Supergirl's costume, while I applaud the brighter colors, I am nevertheless disappointed by the general style of the outfit. Its conservativeness feels more suited to the 1950s than to the superhero aesthetics of the last couple decades. That's not a knock on their creative vision, merely me pointing out that their particular vision is not going to make me eager to tune in, that's all. As for The Flash, I think you may be giving them too much credit. I suspect that the dark-to-bright red transition is their timid attempt to appeal to the hardcore fans while simultaneously placating the clueless suits who control the money (and who have an outdated and misguided view of the general, non-comic-savvy audience). I can only imagine the kind of wheeling and dealing that had to occur to give Reverse Flash a bright yellow suit and to have Grodd in the show at all. (Though honestly, I don't think anyone at Warners would have ever loosened their sphincters enough to approve Grodd had Marvel not shouldered all the so-called risk with Rocket Raccoon in GotG).

The thing is, Hollywood (and its apologists) aren't advocating "going dark" because they are "open to new looks" as you are. They are convinced that brightly colored costumes can never work in live action, period. It's natural to have a personal preference, say, towards darker tones. It's something else altogether to idiomatically rule out other aesthetics merely because one lacks the necesary creative vision to (figure out how to) make them look good. Now if I were a film or television producer, I wouldn't listen too closely to anyone who thought any aspect of comic book superheroes was "ridiculous" (to the point of dismissing it out of hand). It's all part and parcel of the genre, and when you reject any of its most prominent elements you end up with a nice, hot, steaming mess that isn't really a member of the genre it purports to be (*cough*Heroes*cough*TimKring*cough*). Oh, and a memo to Hollywood: you've used "re-imagining" a genre to "make it fresh" as code for "we don't understand or appreciate the genre so we're going to butcher it for what we perceive as the lowest-common-denom, er, widest possible audience" for long enough. We're onto you. You can't fake it anymore and get away with it like you used to.

I probably wasn't explicit enough in describing the approach I'd like to see. I don't think Hero Games should bother with genre books anymore. We don't need them. We have all the genre books we can use already, IMO. What we don't have are product lines built around strong settings. I've harped about this in other threads around here, but in my view, setting is king. You can build a viable, sustainable product line around one. You can't really do that with a genre book, and decades of Hero Games publishing campaigns have proven that. Champions was a genre book that would have gone nowhere had it not expanded to become the "Champions Universe", with all its (officially/commercially) published villains, organizations, and adventures (the "Ultimate" splatbooks were an attractive product category back when splatbooks were all the rage, but I'm not sure the marketplace has the appetite for those anymore). I can't think of a Hero System genre that expanded beyond a book or two of further generic stuff (again, superhero splatbooks notwithstanding). Fantasy Hero provided a bestiary and a grimoire, but that's about as far as it was ever going to go without providing a setting (which it eventually did). We don't need more generic Pulp Hero material. What we need, IMO, is a specific setting with a very particular tone and a focused style of adventure/play. The whole point of a product line like Relic Hunters would be to bring a narrow focus to one genre from the pulp era and make a detailed campaign setting out of it, sort of the way Call of Cthulhu did with pulp-era horror. That's not to say that Relic Hunters couldn't borrow heavily from many genre-appropriate sources like Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Doc Savage or what-have-you. But the idea wouldn't be to toss a bunch of loosely related ideas on the table and make players build a campaign out of them on their own. The idea would be to create a compelling world of play with all those details already worked out so that readers would have a usable framework to jump into the moment they put the core Relic Hunters book down. Of course there should also be plenty of wide open space for customers to insert their own ideas and expand the campaign setting in directions they like, but I'd rather give them a full-blown setting (ala Forgotten Realms) than Yet Another Genre Book (ala Pulp Hero World Traveller).

Maybe, sorta. I mean, I can be apathetic about any specific show and still be passionate about how its genre gets portrayed by Hollywood as a whole. Even if I never care to watch a single episode of Supergirl, I can still value it as a springboard for discussion of larger issues with regard to how superheroes are depicted in movies and on television. But I probably will watch at least the first episode, despite the disappointing costume design...

From what I gather, CT isn't trying to sell his players on the idea of playing a superhero game; he's trying to sell them on the idea of playing a fantasy campaign using a system originally designed for superheroes, and he's meeting resistance because of his choice of system. While you're right that fantasy players aren't going to want to play superheroes, they might nevertheless benefit from trying superheroes, even if only briefly, so as to help them appreciate the Hero System's strengths as a system for any genre including fantasy.

Costumes should match the tone of the show. The Arrow should be in dark green tones since that show is dark in tone. The Flash should be in bright red since the character and the show are, by and large, bright and cheerful (the fact that they are "building towards" the brighter red costume is sort of a lame compromise, IMO...Reverse Flash looks suitably menacing in his dayglo yellow costume and bright red glowy eyes). If this Supergirl is going to be perky and bright, then her costume can be perky and bright as well. Going against tone is misguided and unsupportable aesthetically, in my view.

Pulp Hero probably shouldn't be a "brand" per se. Let's pick a genre, say, globe-spanning adventure, a catchy brand title like Relic Hunters, and fill it out as an Indiana Jones style campaign setting with lost civilizations, evil cults, competing Nazi artifact collectors, and so on. The goal would be to create and sell a specific setting, with all the usual support material (adventures, organization books, books full of gear and wild inventions, ancient artifacts and supernatural relics, etc.) building up a complete product line like Monster Hunter International. Now, I'm not saying that Relic Hunters is the product line we all want. It's just a hypothetical example of the form of product I would like to see going forward.

1) I think part of CT's problem is that he's dealing with a group of players who want to play a fantasy campaign. As I mentioned, the perceived complexity of the Hero System typically looks appealing only to fans of superhero gaming. As long as his players lean towards playing fantasy, they will likely prefer simpler systems like d20 or Savage Worlds. 2) Requiring XP to be spent according to a GM-derived list of choices is definitely heavy-handed. However, it is no more tyrannical than every other RPG out there that stipulates in the rules themselves what abilities your class provides with each level you advance. Sure, it's a bit contrary to the Hero System ethos of giving players control over character concept and design. However, most Champions GMs I know insist that XP be spent in ways that are consistent with what the characters do (or what happens to them) in-game. And if players want something radical, then they work with the GM to contrive a plotline that results in a classic "radiation accident". The only GMs that I've met who allow players to spend XPs totally unsupervised are the lazy ones. Note that even in this case, the GM provides a way to spend XP that is completely off-menu, it just costs twice as much (XP) to do so. Heavy-handed, to be sure, but we don't know the kind of players this GM is dealing with, and maybe they need a strong hand guiding their choices...

Are they insisting on Savage Worlds for a supers campaign?

Kang isn't very interesting as a villain unless he has the power to mess with the past, and thus alter the present "reality" as viewers understand it. If he is just a far-future dude with immense physical power trying to take down the Avengers (so they can't take him down millenia from now), he's really just another boss fight. But screwing with timelines is the very plot device that nobody in Hollywood gets right. They are better off just avoiding it altogether IMO.

Huh? Did somebody advocate for GM tyranny when I wasn't looking? Maybe I've lost the continuity of this discussion, but I can't figure out whose point you are refuting. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you 100%, but that's because what you said should, well, go without saying. Who in their right mind would argue otherwise?

Kang is pretty awesome as villains go. My only problems with Kang are: (1) you have to add time travel to the MCU, which I would hate, and (2) Thanos is a very tough act to follow unless your name is Galactus.