zslane

Based on my experiences with Champions, he is drawing a false distinction. In the Champions campaigns I played in, all the positional and tactical elements were as vital as the differences in character builds. Anyone who relied on their powers to overcome a lack of tactical application of map position, maneuvers, and situational modifiers was just being stupid. The supervillains I faced would routinely wipe the floor with any hero who looked superior on paper, but who was run by a player who wasn't a wargamer at heart. Roleplayers usually found themselves frustrated because they thought they could "roleplay" their way to victory and not bother themselves with using Set and Brace to increase the odds of hitting with their Energy Blast. They found themselves outclassed on the battlemat every time. I would agree that heroic level campaigns are less build-dependent since characters are usually built on fewer points and have access to fewer options, homogenizing everyone who isn't a spellcaster to a certain degree. Then, yes, the "positional game" is going to be more critical to success than the "build game". But at least as far as Champions (i.e., supers) is concerned, I feel it is equal parts build-oriented and position-oriented when it comes to combat. Give either aspect short shrift at your peril...

The reasons usually given for dark, textured costumes--often with lots of pseudo-armor plating/padding--are unconvincing, IMO. Realism, as in what do soldiers wear in the real world when they go into combat, is usually irrelevent when we're talking about characters that can shrug off artillery rounds and punch holes in battleships. Changing audience tastes don't dictate fashion...it is the other way around...fashion shapes popular tastes. Make characters with brightly-colored costumes cool and audiences will accept them and their costumes quite handily. See below. The fact that comic books aren't movies (i.e., the media are different) isn't justification in and of itself to change costume aesthetics. Look at Kick Ass. The movie costumes for Kick Ass, Hit Girl, and Red Mist were either exactly the same or more "garish" than the comic book versions and they still looked great, and the movie was awesome. In fact, I would argue that the movie version of Hit Girl's costume is far more iconic at this point than the comic book version, and it is much more colorful and "silly" than the plain, dark blue onesy she wore in the comic.

Well, to my mind the issue isn't really about costume colors per se, but about respecting genre conventions and the well-known traditions of the source material. Changing the Supergirl costume because some subsegment of the internet that probably has never read a Supergirl comic book (or a superhero comic book period) will get its collective panties in a bunch over how sexy or "unrealistic" such costumes are is, IMO, misguided at best. On the other hand, changing the Supergirl costume according to its stylistic trajectory in the comics makes sense to me, and is certainly a valid way to express an "evolution" of the costume.

The internet explodes with righteous indignation over vacuous nonsense every day. Listening to and accomodating that noise may lend it a dubious credibility, but it will not lead to quality television/cinema.

I think that's definitely true. Hollywood studios are notoriously risk-averse. But it only takes one success to show the way. Disney/Marvel is sort of doing this by making huge-budget movies with a bright green monster, a bright blue and red super-patriot, and a flashy red and gold armored hero. The problem is that it isn't easy to make brightly-colored superhero costumes look like serious business. I don't believe superhero movies and shows need to be stuck in a dark, "gritty realism" to work--Marvel is proving that nicely, I think. But unless you're going for comedy, viewers do need to take the characters seriously. I think this is achievable with bright costumes, it's just that it's hard and nobody has really nailed down how to do it with consistency outside of the MCU. The fact that virtually nobody is doing it isn't proof that it can't be done; it is merely proof that nobody is trying very hard (for various reasons: lack of vision, lack of incentive, infection by misguided groupthink, etc.).

Bare midriffs are more of a college cheerleader thing, I'll grant you. But all cheerleaders are in mini-skirts or hotpants. Regardless, this new Supergirl is past college age and is old enough to be on any professional football franchise cheerleader squad where the outfits are right out of the Vegas stripper catalog. Still not child porn. Christopher Reeves wore bright red and blue and nobody I know of thought he looked silly. The Raimi Spiderman costume wasn't nearly so dark and muted either, and I don't recall audiences pointing fingers and laughing at the "ridiculous pajamas". Captain America gets to wear fairly bright blue and red, and Iron Man's armor is a pretty vibrant combination of crimson and gold. The whole "bright colors" will look silly argument doesn't hold water, IMO.

I dunno about that. That comic book costume looks no different to me than any high school cheerleader outfit in the country. Add to that the fact that this particular Supergirl is in her mid-20s--it wouldn't be child porn even if she flew around naked. The whole muted color palette for superhero costumes thing has just got to go. It is tedious in its ubiquitousness, disappointing in its creative sterility, and dismissive of its genre roots.

I can heartily endorse the Pulp Hero books. They are quite good. In fact, I liked them so much I made my own deluxe volume out of three of them.

Agent Carter was great. Genre-wise, I'd say it bridges the gap between classic pulp/golden age supers and cold war espionage/silver age supers. One foot firmly planted on each side of the divide.

The Hero System Vehicle Sourcebook and The Ultimate Vehicle are incredibly useful core books. The 6e volume that would have replaced them never got published, so the 5e versions are the ones to get.

Besides, this effort is probably of far more interest to Hero System fans specifically than to Traveller fans in general.

I think it is better to dispense with Thor's alter ego Donald Blake, skip all the OIHID nonsense and just build him as a brick with a physical blast attack in his MP/VPP/whatever. Marvel saw the light on this quite a long time ago.

How do people teach other games like D&D or Pathfinder? I'm trying to think back when I was taught how to play my first RPG. It was AD&D 1ed back in 1980 and I and a group of high school freshmen were taught by a pair of sophomores. One session and I was hooked. I was off to the local hobby store to buy my own copy of the Player's Handbook. I devoured that book in one night and rolled up my own character for the next session. I remember rolling 00 on percentile dice which qualified my character for psionics--the DMs who taught us had yet to read those rules and had no idea how to use them. Two years later I discovered Champions 2ed in a hobby shop, bought it, brought it home, devoured it and never looked back. I didn't have anyone to play the game with until a year later, but in very little time I had a bunch of characters built because building them was so much fun. No teachers, no flash cards, no simplified character sheets or tutorials "boiling down" the rules. Just me and the rulebook. I think it really helped that I had the previous experience with D&D (and experience playing wargames before that). If I had to come up with a beginner's curriculum based on my own experience, I would teach them how to play something else first, like D&D. And then I'd move on to Champions, though I'm not sure which edition I would use (I'd be tempted to start with 2e just for its relative simplicity, but 4e is my favorite). While CC represents the current state of the game, I don't think being "current" is of much importance to beginners who don't know the differences between the editions anyway.

I wasn't commenting on how they'll actually portray Skye's Quake powers. I was responding to the assertion that they (i.e., Disney) don't have the budget (i.e., the money) to make her fly or display ice powers (if they wanted that for the character).

That's hard for me to fathom. This is ABC, which is owned by Disney. They have Disney/Marvel money at their disposal, and since this show has highly synergistic franchise properties and crucial crossover duties with the MCU, it seems odd that they would skimp on the vfx budget. The vfx budget for The Flash seems sufficient to have fairly impressive flame&flight effects for Firestorm on a semi-regular basis, and that's on the CW, so it makes no sense to me that Disney can't (or won't) cough up the dough to do similar calibre effects for Agents of SHIELD.

Knowing and understanding the rules is certainly a prerequisite for creating a character. But using the power system effectively is a separate skill. It is a kind of modelling, where you take an idea you have in your mind and convert it to the corresponding powers and modifiers. We talk about how to simulate an ability with the system (e.g., "How do I build a Portal Gun?"), and there are usually many ways to build the same thing, and that's where modelling skills come in. I don't think learning the basic rules is the biggest issue for newbies, though it is definitely a substantial problem. The biggest issue is the "How do I build it?" dilemma, which is a dilemma of creative modelling. I think engineers have an easier time with this because they are accustomed to taking a box full of parts and assembling them into the thing they envision in their heads. For those where this kind of intellectual activity is not second nature, the Hero System character building process is going to be challenging no matter how digestable you make the core rules.

They'll be blowing their prosthetic make-up budget on the new Raina.

Noir always struck me as rather cynical at its core. Pulp adventure, on the other hand, is almost naively optimistic in its belief that righteousness always wins out.

If that's the sort of player that dominates the hobby today, I'm glad I'm not a publisher, that's all I got to say. I'm also glad I don't have to GM them either...

Indeed. So how did the game go from being one in which creating characters could become an addicting activity after just one read-through of the rulebook to one in which "newbies" can't even begin to wrap their heads around it? As you say, basic process hasn't changed. But what has changed is the way the rules are written/presented. And therein lies the problem, I believe. Maybe the more streamlined Complete edition(s) of the rules will help bring the presentation of the rules to something more manageable for newbies.

Immediately upon buying Champions, back in 1982, I became addicted to creating characters. And I didn't have anyone "teaching" me how to do it. Perhaps this is a good guage of just how needlessly daunting the rules presentation has become over time (especially post-4th edition).

It always seemed to me that the prevalence of the "keep rolling until you get what you want" method was direct evidence that gamers really wanted a point-build system, even if they didn't know it.

Or so you would think. Apparently it was such a big deal, everybody house-ruled death away to discharge instead, and the official rules eventually followed suit.

I think that's how most players saw it. To be honest, the Traveller career system was just the logical extension of the philosophy of randomness that determined core characteristics and other abilities in most RPGs of that era. Once I discovered Champions, I stopped pretending that randomness in any aspect of character generation was acceptible (to me) because I had finally discovered the ultimate refutation of randomness as a character build methodology. So to me, rolling dice to determine if your character dies before campaign play begins is just as silly as rolling dice to determine your character's strength. And I don't do silly.

The designers of Traveller always viewed the CT character generation system differently than players have. To the designers, it was a "solitaire RPG" game in its own right. It was meant to be a way to play Traveller in the absence of a referee, odd as that may seem.