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I've read reviews online that make Avengers of Justice sound like the worst superhero RPG ever committed to paper. I've never seen a copy so I can't confirm or deny. But my candidate for worst ever would probably be GURPS Supers 1st ed. While Superhero 2044 may be objectively worse, GURPS Supers 1st ed. still gives me apoplectic fits, so it goes straight to the bottom of my list.

Right, but when people talk about evolving the system so that it attracts new players, they're talking about players that aren't your traditional Hero gamers who like to homebrew everything. For that kind of player having a setting they are drawn to and which doesn't require a lot of prebuilding stuff, beyond perhaps the demands of the adventure plots, is crucial. These players aren't going to embrace the Hero System just because we think it is great; they'd have done that by now if the system itself were a major selling point for them. It's not, and no amount of tweaking its last 1% is going to change that, IMO. What could change that, however, is giving them a reason to use the system that has nothing to do with the system itself: i.e., an irresistable setting with lots of robust support.

Reloading times were limited by two things: mechanical constraints and the ability of the firer to remain calm and focused under combat conditions. A heroic character might very well have the latter well in hand, but even the Flash is going to be limited by the primitive mechanical design of such a weapon.

The biggest problem with time travel stories is that 99% of television writers don't know how to use the notion in a way that isn't so rife with illogic, internal inconsistency, and handwavium, that it melts my brain. The intrinsic problems of causality can not simply be swept under the dramatic rug; that is just lazy, inept writing. Yet that is pretty much all we ever get on television. Movies are a little better...sometimes. Books are even better, so long as the writer has a reasonable understanding of the narrative problems involved and makes an effort to minimize their negative impact on the foundational logic of the story's milieu. But in general, the farther away writers stay from it, the better.

I have virtually every commercially sold superhero RPG there is or was, and even the best of them had/have their faults. Of them all, I feel Champions offers the most bang for the buck, hands down. The more interesting question, to my mind, is which game deserves to be called second best (and morbid curiosity makes me wonder which one is the absolute worst). I think once you get past the top three, you are talking about systems burdened with too many compromises to really compete, except perhaps in terms of fostering nostalgia. The top candidates for second best, I think, would be: Marvel (FASERIP), DC Heroes (MEGS), and M&M (3rd). Few other systems enjoyed the level of publisher support those games did/do.

When did the Hero System ever have a strong fantasy setting? Never. When did it ever have a strong sci-fi setting? Never. Horror? Pulp? Never and never. That's fine if the only thing Hero Games ever wants the Hero System to be known (and purchased) for by the broader roleplaying audience, is superheroes. But if they ever want the system to be embraced for any other genre, they are going to have to step up and offer a setting that makes folks take notice. So far, that hasn't happened, though MHI is certainly a step in the right direction.

As the show gains viewership, Marvel may allow it to do more narrative heavy lifting for the MCU and not relegate it to strictly minor league status. Budgetary limits will keep the show from straying too far into the epic scale super action reserved for the tentpole films in any event. But there's no reason the show can't establish major pieces of lore and continuity that will then inform subsequent films.

I like Grant Gustin. I like Jesse Martin. I like Tom Cavanaugh as Wells. I really want to like this show, but I forgot that this is the Flash after all, which means it is inevitably going to involve the one sci-fi trope I can't stand: time travel. I have a sneaking suspicion I will be opting out of this show before the first season finalé episode. *sigh*

I would gladly spend myself into insolvency if Hero Games produced a sci-fi setting as deeply developed and richly supported (with product) as, say, White Wolf's World of Darkness setting. But I can't vote with my wallet when there is no such product to buy. I can't have any appreciable impact on their production decisions if they don't give me the opportunity to purchase the products I want to see. Build it and they will come (and spend), I say. Honestly, the lack of spending by Hero players in the past is not evidence of their lack of interest in game settings. It is evidence of their lack of interest in weak (and weakly supported) game setting offerings. You'll notice that WotC wouldn't dream of launching any new D&D edition without at least one major setting and a solid roadmap of support for it. They wouldn't bother if the marketplace had changed so much that it no longer cared for good published game setting material.

I think it is a little silly for that reviewer to call out a game for being, well, a game. Sure, the Hero System is a fine-grained combat simulation, but there is still a lot of simplifying abstraction underneath all its apparent complexity. Movement is quantized into 1 or 2 meter chunks, and the standard quantum of activity time, a Phase, is allowed to be split in half. That leads to issues of rounding, naturally. That is all part of it simply being a tabletop game rather than a computer-driven RTS (which can divide all player activity into much finer quanta, to the extent that it actually appears to the players as continuous, "real-time" action). Champions and SFB are/were fairly revolutionary in using a Speed Chart to evenly distribute character activity according to a speed stat; other games with far less granularity are even worse in the number of ways in which movement and attacks can be gamed by players for maximum advantage. But more importantly, not all players min-max the system. It is probably true that the ones who love the system because they can easily discern all its moving parts probably will be min-maxers. They are engineers of a sort, and part of the fun is seeing how to make the game engine really perform (for them). But there are also a lot of roleplayers out there who build for concept, not point optimization, and the Hero System is just as good a game for them as for the min-maxers. The fact that min-maxers and powergamers don't always mesh well with roleplayers is a social problem, not a system problem.

Champions Universe, along with the villain hardcovers, are exactly the kind of products I'm referring to (along with books like Millenium City). Whether or not that setting can hope to compare/compete with more deeply developed superhero settings such as the Marvel or DC universes is a subsequent conversation. But at least there's been some effort put in there (though not nearly as much as in the 4e era). But aside from MHI, we have yet to see a 6e setting of any substance for any other genre come from Hero Games, or any major third party publisher either for that matter. This is primarily due to the fact that it takes considerable resources (and access to considerable writing talent) to produce full-blown settings with ongoing support comparable with settings like Dark Sun, Dragonlance, The Third Imperium, Star Wars, etc. But those are the kinds of product lines that are going to keep a company thriving in the long run. Core system books with genre sections tacked on isn't going to cut it. In fact, it seems to me that MHI is a working example of my point. It is a richly developed setting with some decent post-core-book support. Let's see the same sort of thing for epic fantasy and sci-fi (they don't have to be licensed from books, but that approach is certainly a tremendous production shortcut). In the absence of a highly compelling literary setting, a highly compelling home-grown setting will suffice. But like I said before, that is really hard. Which is why you don't see it succeed that often in this hobby, even when it is attempted. The point is that the product strategy for the Hero System has to, IMO, get away from focusing on core rules and basic genre advice, and shift towards developing killer settings and committing to supporting them in a major way. And no, I don't feel that the 5e "Age" books were convincing examples of what I'm talking about.

If I'm not mistaken, 6e (and CC) abbreviates the Hand-to-Hand Attack power as HA. Are we opposed to this abbreviation for some reason?

When I read threads elsewhere in response to questions like, "What is a good hard sci-fi RPG to get into?", discussion inevitably focuses on settings (ala Eclispe Phase), not systems. The quality of setting material, and the prolificness of the publisher in supporting the setting is viewed as a good indication of the system's/product line's health and vitality. I don't think that CC plus a powers book (or FC plus a spells book) sends as compelling a marketplace message as a rich, vibrant setting with lots of detailed world material.

Heh. I don't think it is her capacity for suspending disbelief that would be tested, but her capacity for tolerating poor writing. I wouldn't blame her for opting out at that point...

What does HTA stand for?

Jason's post only states that customers seem to want all-in-one books, but doesn't offer any theories as to why this might be the case. Having no deeper understanding of the marketplace doesn't help target future products very effectively. My hypothesis is that all-in-one books that combine core rules with an abstract genre overview gives the buyer the feeling they are getting a complete game, ala D&D. But I feel that is something of an illusion. From reading the genre material in CC, I would argue that it is only marginally more "complete" a game than just the core rules themselves. A genre book is not the same thing as a setting book. A genre book still requires the buyer to do most of the campaign world building themselves, whereas a setting book only asks the buyer to construct adventures (and even that is optional if adventure modules are available, again, like D&D). Thus, a product like CC for FC is still really just a core rulesbook, albeit a genre-aimed one. Customers have to be curious to try the system in order to buy into the product line, which has always been a problem for the Hero System outside of the superhero genre (which enjoyed reasonable success despite not being tied to a widely recognized superhero license). But maybe there's another approach. Maybe a really compelling setting would draw people to the system. For instance, even if people weren't already playing AD&D, the Ravenloft setting would have lured a lot of players to it. Similarly, people flocked to the Storyteller system because they found the World of Darkness setting captivating. In fact, one might argue that folks merely tolerated the Storyteller system in order to enjoy access to the setting. So, produce some truly compelling settings, build product lines around them, and sell those product lines. People will have to buy the core rules as the cost of entry into the settings. But while buyers only have a one-time need for the core rules, they will have an insatiable appetite for the continuing stream of high-quality setting materials (region descriptions, creature writeups, adventures, etc,) And that's where a company gets a continuing revenue stream. Hero Games could be capitalizing far more on the success of MHI than they currently are, but they may be more hampered by lack of investment funds than by lack of market interest. I don't think the idea of game settings as a product lines became obsolete. I just think companies gave up trying to find/publish settings capable of really capturing the interest of buyers today. Why? Because it's haaaaaaard... (insert appropriate whining sounds)

The relative success of licensed game worlds (Star Wars, Monster Hunters, etc.) suggests that given good material, people will buy into a system just to play in the licensed world. Perhaps the problem isn't that setting books don't sell, but that uninteresting settings don't sell. The key, then, is to offer a setting that gamers can't resist and then sell them lots of support books. Takes the pressure off the core rules to be the only salable product a company has in its catalog. And it doesn't have to be a licensed world either (Hunger Games Hero? No thanks...). It just has to be really good and produced with quality.

I think the days are long gone when Hero Games saw the multi-genre aspect/potential of the system as deserving of official published support. Their own market research indicates that most Hero customers only play one genre (and it's either superheroes or, to a much lesser extent, fantasy). I think you are asking them to address a problem they would rather have solved by the player community itself. Which, given the experience level and passion of the community, isn't such a bad idea. But before Hero Games embarks on a 7th edition, I think they ought to finish the 6th edition core library first. But they've already abandoned 6E1/6E2 and the core library, so that's not going to happen. You might as well just get used to the idea that Champions Complete is probably as close as you're going to get to a 7th edition.

The Hero System as we know it is not for everyone. In order to make it appealing to and digestable by everyone, I believe you would have to change it in ways that make it Not the Hero System. There are plenty of systems out there already that are Not the Hero System. Please, let's not encourage Hero Games to make the Hero System one of them.

You have my unfettered support in this matter...

Maybe it depends on the book(s) in question. My copy of CC arrived in a padded manila envelope sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard. *shrug*.

It is important to understand that what we write on our character sheet is intended to represent the "norm" for the operation of focii and the behavior of powers. However, this being an RPG, the GM is free to make these things subject to The Plot every now and then. That's how you end up with a magical hammer that is Inaccessible by default, but then gets lost in an alternate dimension for a game session because thats how the session's plot gets started. A little bit of flexibility makes the rules go a long way towards capturing the sometimes unpredictable/inconsistent nature of the source material. That's why Rules Lawyers ruin the game for everyone except themselves. If you can't relax the letter of the rules now and then, and just indulge in the spirit of the genre, then I don't think you're going to get the most out of this hobby. And believe me, I am well aware of how easy it is to become fixated on the rules text. The highly logical nature of the Hero System can lure one into thinking rather too rigidly about this stuff; as such, it was always refreshing back in the day to hear Steve Peterson talk about the game system, because it served as a valuable reminder, to me anyway, of how it was meant to be used/played.

Most players, especially aspiring Hero System GMs, have little trouble establishing limits for things once they've seen them getting exploited. But few will feel comfortable changing/setting the costs of things. That is a hardcore, low-level architectural modification that few are legitimately in a position to employ without messing other things up in the process (I've played with my share of self-appointed "experts" who felt they knew better than Steve and George and freely changed costs to the detriment of the campaign). Making that a standard part of setting up a campaign and playing the game will put this system beyond the reach of even more RPGers.

Maybe it's different in 6e, but Accessible used to mean it could be taken/disabled from a character with a successful Grab manuever (i.e., during combat), whereas Inaccessible meant you could only remove it from a character out of combat. In both cases, however, you could target it in order to damage/disable it. If you didn't want anyone targetting it, then you made it Inobvious so nobody would know what to target.

That sounds like the chaos of 2nd/3rd edition, an era I would never want to go back to. But what I want to buy and what Hero Games wants to publish are two very different things these days. I guess Hero Games has determined that the typical (and therefore majority) Hero Games customer only ever plays one genre, and therefore products can be self-contained and purpose-built for that genre/audience. I am certainly not such a customer, but market trends dictate business decisions, and so it goes. Fantasy may be the dominant genre for RPGs, but it has never been the dominant genre for Hero System players. The vast majority of fantasy roleplayers will never use the Hero System, and I think a publication like Fantasy Hero Complete is nothing more than a case of grabbing at the second-lowest hanging fruit (after supers). I don't believe it reflects a feeling within Hero Games that fantasy has as large (or larger) an audience among Hero System players as superheroes does.