zslane

I imagine demand is incredibly low overall. It's just that supply is even lower.

One could buy the PDFs of both FH and FHC, extract the system rules from FHC and combine them with FH. Take the resulting PDF and POD it as a b&w softcover. Best of both worlds!

If you already have the system rules in some form, e.g., Champions Complete, then I think you would get more value out of the Fantasy Hero PDF than Fantasy Hero Complete.

For an interesting exercise in point/power inflation, compare the write-ups for Mechanon from each edition of Champions.

Okay, here's my $0.02: In terms of dependencies, it can be safely assumed that players will have some form of the system rules. Which set you choose to base this product line upon is up to you, but since 6E1/6E2 is deprecated and space opera != fantasy, I would go with Champions Complete. I can see why you might want to assume players should also have Star Hero, but IMO that is a builder's book that is more necessary for you while you create this setting than for players when they use your setting. Ideally, all I should really need is CC and your book(s). Now, when I hear the phrase "space opera", I think of Lensman and Star Wars. I don't think of Star Trek or Dr. Who or Galactica. I think of huge empires with impossibly powerful space fleets, lots of rubber science, alien species everywhere, and a swashbuckling tone. One thing I do not want in my space opera, though, is time travel.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. I recommend buying the PDFs and have them printed for you by a POD service.

Is this expected to be a single book, or a product line with ongoing support? And by support I mean expanding upon areas touched upon in the main source book, fleshing out the races, their armies and navies, their native flora/fauna, etc. providing pre-made adventures, alien bestiaries, and so on.

Something that gets glossed over when people talk about RPGs is that once the action enters combat, the game becomes a wargame. And as wargames go, the Hero System is one of the best out there (for what it is simulating). I agree whole-heartedly that the mechanics are very intuitive and elegant on the whole. But the complexity of superhero characters makes playing the wargame well non-trivial. By way of analogy, the rules/mechanics for a game like PanzerBlitz are quite simple and straightforward, but playing it well is another matter entirely. I've played in a lot of Champions games, and the vast majority of players did not really play their characters that well once combat began. That's because I've found that most roleplayers aren't wargamers at heart. Some are, but most of them fall into one of Allston's categories that isn't the Simulationist or Wargamer. Those of us at the table who cut our teeth on Squad Leader, Napoleonics miniatures, Star Fleet Battles, and BattleTech could see just how daunting the Champions character sheet was for everyone else once it came time to put all that data into action on the battlemat. Running a full-blown superhero character well is hard, just like playing chess well is hard. Playing a coordinated team of villains well is hard times five or six (or however many villains there are). Being good at playing the combat game with one character is just one requirement; that talent has to extend to multiple characters with often widely varying abilities used in a coordinated fashion, to say nothing of playing them "in character" the whole time. In my experience, it is a rare individual who can pull it off with Champions, much much rarer than with D&D, d20, or any other commonly played system out there.

The names of a number of things were changed, categorized skills have become optional, and the Absolute Effect Rule has been eliminated. Am I missing anything?

I think that's somewhat problematic. Players by nature like to know that they are playing according to the "official" rules, even/especially when they base their house rules upon them. Giving official answers out of an obsolete set of rules is bound to lead to needless confusion.

My position applies to any game system with the same level of depth and detail as the Hero System powers and combat mechanics. There really aren't any others. Every other system out there, especially every other superhero game out there, is substantially simpler (though M&M comes close). That makes the Hero System--and Champions in particular--unique in the degree of effort required to GM it optimally.

I guess it comes down to what sort of roleplaying experience you and your players want. Most RPGers I know, incuding myself, play to escape into a more cinematic world of heightened reality and epic heroism. Every morning I wake into a world of mundane realism where too often the consequences of trying to be a hero is a trip to the ER or the morgue. Obviously, as players, we all want to feel we have agency within the game world, but at the same time, we want the game world to reward us for heroic action in a way the real world rarely ever does. That means the system has to be skewed towards the cinematic, or the GM has to impose a sense of the cinematic on the system.

I would advise new players to stick with CC and just pretend that 6E1/6E2 doesn't exist. Those older books may be more exhaustive (making the Champions Complete name rather ironic), but they are exhaustive with regard to a body of rules that are no longer totally correct. Navigating the discrepencies is not something a new player should have to be faced with.

I'm not perpetuating some stereotype, incorrect or otherwise. I am only speaking from my own 30+ year experience. The complexity of Hero System characters, superheroes in particular, makes running the game as a GM very difficult. The only way to make it easy is to not utilize every power on the villain sheets, to ignore lots of rules, and not think deeply about what action each villain/thug is going to take to give the heroes a real challenge. "Good" Champions GMs do all the work necessary to make it look easy despite the fact that is most certainly is not.

Pointing out all the loony characterizations of superheroes only proves that the winner of these hypothetical fights is whomever the writer wants to win. There is no objective way to determine a victor. If everyone is going to pull from the entire histories of these characters, you might as well not even start the thread. If you can pick a standard of comparison that actually makes this thread work, by all means, offer it up. Otherwise, we might as well just pin it and move on.

I haven't seen FC yet, so I'm curious how much it has in common with CC in terms of the writeup for the core rules (not the genre-specific stuff). Do they have an identical set of opening chapters? If not, then there truly is no such thing as a single "core system rules" text anymore.

And being trained doesn't automatically make the trainee a master. Sometimes a student just isn't master material, and never will be no matter how good the teacher is. I seriously doubt that Jennifer is supposed to be on par with Cap just because he trained her for a little while. WW, on the other hand, is supposed to virtually be "Athena on Earth" in terms of combat skill, no?

Maybe it is a bit easier when you're running a Heroic level game where the range of character/monster options is somewhat limited compared to a supers campaign. But there are still plenty of ways a GM can stumble and faceplant if they aren't experts with the system and/or are unwilling to put in the time to fully prepare for each session. Champions in particular has been hard to run since I started playing with the 2nd edition. Running a single superhero effectively is challenging enough as it is. Running an entire team of supervillains, plus their thugs, to their maximum effectiveness against the heroes is not for the faint of heart. Every single GM I ever met who said it was no big deal pretty much sucked (compared to the few really talented GMs I had the pleasure of playing with back in the day). Downplay the duties of proper Hero System GMing at your own peril... I think it is smart to give them pre-made characters to start with. That guarantees right off the bat that they are playing with non-abusive characters which properly match the genre and fit into the game world. You'll still need to carefully police how they use their XP though. It also means you'll have strong familiarity with what is on each character sheet and make effective use of things like Danger Sense, Hunteds, etc.

Makes one wonder just how complete Champions Complete is after all...

My heart goes out to you. The Hero System is not an easy system to GM well. Your job is a bit easier because you aren't dealing with superheroes, but it will still be challenging nonetheless. Good luck!

Too many conflicting sources, no? That's why I prefer sources that provide actual numeric values. Numbers can be compared. Everything else is speculative estimation (read: next to useless).

That chart doesn't match the Weight Intensity table in the Marvel Superheroes Advanced Player's Book. According to the advanced rules, MN is up to 80 tons, UN is up to 100 tons, and Shift Z is up to 1000 tons. Where did the far-out values in the classicmarvelforever web page come from?

And make the most of the fact that XP can be used for whatever they want, and they don't have to wait until a "level" is gained in order to make improvements to their characters. Because I guarantee you that after the very first session, they are going to have a list of things they want to add or change about their characters (add mostly, I'm betting). And that's where the beauty of Hero System XP comes in. Any time they complain that their character can't do something (yet) that they want to do, make it clear that they can add it to their character as soon as they've earned the XP to do it, which doesn't usually take very long in Heroic level games where almost everything is a Skill or a Talent or in a VPP.

I fantasize about Marvel getting the FF back from Fox and doing their own proper take on them. And I like the idea of making Namor the villain for two reasons: first, they could pull an Apollo Creed and have him become a powerful ally in a future film, and second it would give Marvel yet another opportunity to show up DC who can't figure out how to get Aquaman into a movie.

What is your source for that? I could never find a definitive chart for the lifting capacity of Marvel Strength past UN (100).