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Oh! Gotcha. Wow, yeah, that's expensive for a book. I do see, however, that Amazon has it available for $40 right now, which is a little better.

I've used Lulu.com many, many times when I wanted hardcopies of my PDFs. The quality is very high. BTW, I'm curious where you can buy Adobe InDesign for $59.95. AFAICT, it must be bought on their monthly (or annual) CC subscription basis.

Dancing doesn't appear on the skill list, which means GMs must decide which category it falls into for their campaign. GMs might even decide to create an entirely new skill for it. Electing to not toss it under the Professional Skill umbrella might be desirable in a particular campaign/setting because, as 6E1 points out: So a GM trying to capture the spirit of an RPG like Pendragon or C&S may easily conclude that PS: Dancer is not the equivalent of a Dancing Skill, and doesn't provide any of the abilities Dancing does. Creating a new Dancing skill, based on DEX and with the 3/2 price schedule may be exactly what the campaign calls for.

That makes sense to me. Those skills serve mostly to connect PCs to the setting, which Background Skills are perfect for. Activities like performing tea ceremonies or kabuki are important to the culture of the setting, but are rarely important to an adventure.

I don't buy the Charlie Cox/Daredevil rumor just yet. I'll wait until a more reliable source confirms it.

Oh boy. Now the MCU thread has devolved into the bi-annual How To Make The HERO System Attract New Players debate. Please, god, no...

In this context, it is really no different than, say, Acrobatics. You could, I suppose, reduce that to a Background Skill such as PS: Acrobat and not bother with the existing Acrobatics DEX-skill. But why? I've never seen Acrobatics used that way...

True. But that doesn't seem to stop newcomers from watching Critical Role and then going out and buying some D&D books. Maybe it would work if a binge-able superhero series showed up in which the superhero drama/action was framed by people playing a supers TTRPG, where perhaps the action you see is a live-action depiction of what is going on in the (ongoing) game. Viewers would see what playing a TTRPG looks like, ala Critical Role, while simultaneously seeing what TTRPG game action "looks like" in the imagination. I dunno, I'm just brainstorming.

Do you feel that it is the need to actively engage our imaginations that serves as the barrier here? Because we aren't really encouraged to use our analytical minds to learn and master chess either, and yet Queen's Gambit nevertheless has driven countless people to try, or at least explore the possibility.

That video was mostly trying to dissect why comic books don't benefit from something equivalent to the "Netflix Effect" which benefitted chess (in terms of renewed interest and popularity among the general public) after the success of Queen's Gambit. The central thesis is that it mainly comes down to the fact that the core activity in Queen's Gambit is playing chess, and you can easily come away from that with an interest in that activity. The central activity in superhero movies is, well, superheroics (if the movies did things right). Now, it is extremely common for people to walk out of the theater after an Avengers movie feeling a bit juiced up and ready to fight crime, or at least drive home more assertively. But neither reading nor making comic books is the central activity of superhero movies, and so you're not going to get a Queen's Gambit-like "Netflix Effect" that boosts the popularity of comic books from them. However, along these lines, I don't quite understood why superhero RPGs have failed to find new popularity with the success of franchises like the MCU. An RPG is the closest thing you're going to get to being able to do what you see in those movies, and so if anything is going to benefit from a "Netflix Effect" it would be games like Champions. But that hasn't happened.

If the skill is only going to serve to fill out a character's background and not be terribly significant in the campaign, then a Background Skill would probably be a good way to represent it. That's why it is called a "Background" skill and is cheaper. Because it won't play that much of a role in the campaign. Also, Professional Skills typically have a profession after the "PS:", not an ability. PS: Dancer rather than PS: Dancing. The point is to convey the notion that they have a "profession" that encompasses a bunch of (minor) related skills that represent some job they perform on a daily basis. It is mostly just to let you know that in their "civilian" life (i.e., their non-adventuring life) they have a job that makes them highly familiar with a bunch of mundane skills and bits of knowledge. However, in a campaign in which an ability will have major dramatic significance, it should be a characteristic-based skill with the appropriately higher price that entails.

Yeah, this has kept me from TTRPGs in general for many, many years now. So you aren't alone in this respect. I miss the heady days of playing Champions with the guys at the Flying Buffalo game store in Tempe, AZ. The two main "house" campaigns were invitation-only affairs, and if you got to those tables it was because you thoroughly understood how the system worked, you knew how to make a balanced character that didn't violate the spirit of the genre, you knew how to play intelligently with good battlefield tactics, and you had a firm grasp on how to make excellent use of all your powers, including combining them with teammates' powers as a form of force multiplication. The two GMs I played with expected their players to know what they were doing and didn't have to "police" much of anything, neither during character creation (apart from simply approving them for the campaign) nor during play. I think a lot of why this worked was because the gatekeeping that went on guaranteed a homogeneity of (mature) attitude, experience, and purpose at the gaming table. You had the usual variety of player personalities, but everyone had a common understanding of how to play the superhero genre according to silver and bronze age comic book expectations. And everyone took the game seriously enough to become students of the system, so to speak, in order to not embarrass themselves in front of the rest of the group/team once battle was joined. And since 1 XP of each session was awarded according to a vote at the table by everyone present, there was incentive to strive to meet, if not exceed, the unspoken standards of play shown by everyone else. They just don't make players (and GMs) like they used to... 😞

In a Pendragon RPG context, such a Professional Skill would probably take the form of PS: Dance Master, and they would be qualified to take on apprentices to pass their skills and the tradition(s) of dance to. I seriously doubt, however, that any Knight of the Realm would have such a thing, seeing as how their "profession" requires dividing their time between too many disciplines--with martial disciplines taking up the majority of their time--to ever become a Dance Master. But then again, if this is a "fantasy" version of Pendragon, then I suppose you could have all kinds of silly notions like Knights who are also Dance Masters who take on dance apprentices.

Okay, sure, if the skill in question is just a mundane, narratively insignificant activity akin to a job, and never used in an adventuring (or dramatically significant) context, then I agree a Background skill like KS or PS might make sense. The white hot spotlight of dramatic focus will never be on the character's dance ability, so simply establishing that they "know how to dance" is probably sufficient to flesh out the character's background. But, as I said earlier, if dance is going to be an important courtly ability in the campaign, one in which the results of a dancing skill roll will typically have narrative significance, then I'd elevate it to the status of a full-blown DEX-based skill rather than a Background skill.

I also think that the MCU has reached such a broad audience that casual fans far outnumber the hardcore fans. For casual fans, properties like the Eternals and Shang Chi are no more obscure than Iron Man or Doctor Strange was. They will flock to theaters for these so-called C-list characters just like they did for Iron Man and Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy because it's all just awesome MCU stuff to them. I think that as long as Marvel makes it, the throngs will (still) come, regardless of what the title card says.

I don't think I really need to. Your previous post did that for me. And I don't think it is "too much credit" to recognize, as you did, all the ways that manga yields a much more fertile field of material. Manga may have its share of rehashing, but it also has a publishing model that allows for a far greater range of creative expression to find and connect with an audience.

Quite different philosophies towards monetizing the form. Even though I don't read manga, I nevertheless prefer its publishing model. I'd rather see success come as the result of creative ingenuity and fresh ideas, rather than endless rehashing--or worse, misguided re-imaginings--of iconic characters who go on forever.

I think the proper use of a shield depends on the type of shield in question. A scutum, for instance, is basically a portable wall, not a "big bracer" you move around to deflect blows. A buckler, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Most medieval shields of any real value (on a battlefield) were large and heavy and they blocked or deflected blows mostly based on the angle of the attack, not based on fancy "shield maneuvering". A soldier who spent his energy "chasing the attacks" with his shield quickly found himself too exhausted to defend himself effectively, with little left for attacks and counter-attacks. Of course, none of that matters if you're not trying to achieve historical verisimilitude. If on the other hand you're aiming for swashbuckling, Hollywood-style action instead, then it probably makes more sense to just represent shields as DCV bonuses and call it a day.

It must be a cultural thing because as far as I can tell, manga is still going strong as a medium in Japan.

Alan Moore is not the first, nor will he be the last, to have his work misinterpreted/misunderstood and become inspirational to others who take it "in the wrong direction".

Perhaps not spears, but lances deployed in charge by heavy cavalry (ala knights) were known to penetrate light and medium shields straight through to the defender behind. It wouldn't be difficult to give shields DEF and BODY just like any other object, and to have them take damage during combat, like any other object, losing effectiveness as damage is sustained. It might not be worth the bookkeeping in terms of play value, but if realism is the goal, I believe there are standard mechanics in HERO to deal with this reasonably well.

As anyone who has fought in armor in an SCA event knows, using a shield effectively takes skill and active effort. Anyone who thinks the shield is just going to protect them all on its own (in melee combat anyway) is simply going to lose a limb, if not their head just as quickly as someone without a shield at all.

Yeah, I chose not to parenthetically say "aside from the obvious exception(s)" because I figured that was rather self-evident.

I think it is important for Advantages to increase active cost in order to also increase endurance cost. I'm not a big proponent of Advantages that have no impact on endurance cost.

I guess it depends on how realistically you want shields to be portrayed in the game. As an abstraction, adding OCV/DCV and/or PD/ED works reasonably well. But in reality, a shield acts like a separate target that gets in between the attacker and the defender. It's like, "Here, hit this DCV 2 object instead of me!" That's how shields work, though really small shields (like a buckler) might just provide a bonus to the Block maneuver and little else.