zslane

CC is already something of a throwback in terms of product presentation. It harkens back to pre-4th edition days in which the system rules were contained within each genre book and the emphasis, in terms of market push and company resources, was clearly on Champions. This probably makes a lot of sense given the incredible popularity of superheroes in our pop culture right now, but isn't the MHI line doing quite well for Hero Games? Would it be wise to bias the rules towards Champions at the expense of MHI?

The complaint wasn't that STR and DEX were too cost-effective, but that players were buying them up for no reason (and I agree that "because it is cheap to do so" does not constitute a good reason). In any decently run campaign, the GM will basically tell the players that it doesn't matter how few points STR or DEX may cost, if their character concepts don't justify the high values, they don't get to buy them that high. And if their concepts do justify the higher values, then the fact that they cost fewer points than they could (with a different cost formula) is largely irrelevent to this particular complaint. Said characters might have a few more points to spend somewhere else, but they won't have excessively high STR and DEX for no reason.

I really like this idea. I am so tired of superhero universes that choose the period(s) around the World Wars as the era in which supers break out and manifest on Earth. I think Godsend Agenda takes a similar approach whereby superpowers have been part of the world on some level since the dawn of time.

Does this Fifth Column have vampyres and warwolves too?

I am trying to reconcile the notion that a character can be built properly upon a strong concept and at the same time have inappropriately high STR or DEX (or anything, really) "for no reason." I agree, we are all drawn to the Hero System for its ability to express whatever character concepts we can think up, even the really unbalanced or ill-conceived ones. But while the system can help make that build process less blunder-prone, it ultimately rests with the GM to ensure that nothing appears on a character sheet "for no reason," especially if it is potentially unbalancing. I don't see this fundamental responsibility as in any way stifling creativity or placing "value judgments" on players or character concepts. It is just basic campaign quality control. It is always worthwhile to lobby for improvements to the system, and to celebrate them when they are implemented. But when there are perceived flaws in a system, every GM has to take up the mantle of making localized corrections to the system and never allowing system abuses to slide into their campaigns unchecked just because the system "allows it" by default, or because those abuses express the unique specialness of players.

I'm mildly shocked that anyone would regard doing essential QC on player character design as babysitting, or regard it as intrinsically adversarial. Maybe it's a gaming style thing. *shrug*

I've been a Hero System player since 2nd edition and I don't recall running into characters that had high STR and DEX and Adjustment powers "for no reason", mostly because GMs. Are we blaming the system for not doing the GM's job again?

Well, I hope you won't be similarly constrained this time around. The items that the book(s) tell you to go find elsewhere appear to the uninformed reader as utterly arbitrary and bewildering. Mind you, I expect many settings details to be left out simply due to space constraints. It sort of makes sense that "for more information" on many things you would have to turn to JTAS articles or something. At least those are actual Traveller books, out of print though they may be. But being directed to a completely unrelated setting book (like Terran Empire) feels much less sensible to me.

Maybe. But to my mind, this isn't simply a case of accidentally leaving a table out of the book. It is a case of the authors choosing by design to leave out material and make the reader consult other books they may not have (and, IMO, shouldn't need). The example I provided (the Senator template) is not an isolated case; there are other externally-referencing templates, and no doubt numerous other bits and pieces of setting content described as being part of the Traveller universe, but absent in detailed game-data form because some semblence of it exists in books like Terran Empire or Alien Wars.

The point of making Suppress Continuous is to remove the need to constantly re-roll to maintain its effects. Suppress isn't Drain.

That's the sort of exercise the game designers must go through when coming up with a power called Flight. It is not the sort of exercise players want to go through to build their characters. I remember when Hero Games was working on the 4th edition. In order to better understand the cost structures for things, they broke characters down to the point where they had 0 in every characteristic and built up a normal human from scratch, purchasing senses, the ability to move, use STR, etc. They could have made players do that in order to build any (and every) character, but they realized that was a "game" nobody wanted to play. That isn't the Hero System; it is the Hero Game Design System, and I'm sure it is fun for game designers. Not so much for game players.

If I might make a suggestion/request: remove any references to/dependencies on Terran Empire or other Star Hero sourcebooks. The Traveller universe is, or should be, its own standalone setting; the core TH6e book(s) should be self-contained enough that they make no reference to anything except, maybe, Star Hero. I don't mind books from other settings listed in the "Recommended Reading" section, but I just don't feel I should ever see a sentence like this: "For Senators and Representatives, use the Senator package in Terran Empire, page 108, but change the major contact to the appropriate leader." Followed by a conspicuously missing template box for the Senator professional template.

When Suppressing characteristics, you are turning them into Normals. That is the whole point of the cuffs.

Right. All of which is easily modelled with the Variable SFX advantage available to Adjustment powers like Suppress.

I wonder if there is a use divide along genre lines. All my experience is with Champions, where every session ended, by design, in a big fight with the villains. We broke out the vinyl battlemat and cardboard heroes (from SJG) and went to town. Theatre of the mind was used for all the "detective work" that led up to the big battle, but not the combat itself. Maybe it would have been different if we were doing a heroic-level campaign, like fantasy or something, but when it came to supers, we wanted to keep track of position and distance down to the hex. One hex of distance could make the difference between hitting or missing! Objects in the environment were key elements of the tactical situation, and knowing exactly where everything was, how big everything was, etc. was vital to victory or defeat.

When it comes to combat, I don't think I have ever played Champions theatre-of-the-mind style. I have always used vinyl battlemats covered in hexes. I see no reason why one couldn't go totally theatre of the mind (and fudging most of the tactical details), but I personally see no appeal in it either.

It seems to me that if these things suppress powers, then they should just be built with Suppress. The fact that Suppress must now be built from other constituent parts in 6e shouldn't be much of an obstacle. Just build it as the equivalent of a very large 5e Suppress with Variable Effect +2 and Variable Special Effect +2 so it affects all powers with all special effects, make it 0 End, Persistent, Continuous, yadda, yadda, and don't even worry about how many points it comes to. Just make sure there's enough of it to overcome a reasonable amount of Power Defense. This would still allow characters with unusually high Power Defense (archvillains, demi-gods, etc.) to still have some of their power available, which you might want. If not, then just make a ruling that all powers in the game have an unwritten -0 Limitation on them of "Does Not Work When In Supercuffs".

Well, let's face it, tradition kinda demands that the cover be all black with a thin horizontal stripe, some spartan text and not much else. I can't really lobby against that with any sincerity since I think a venerable brand like Traveller has earned the right to maintain its distinctive look. I just thought it would be fun to see what the cover might look like if it was a 6e Core Library volume.

Let's make it happen!

I think it depends on how these are going to be used in the campaign. If you want villains to be able to break out of them, then some sort of Suppress (or whatever the obfuscated 6e equivalent is) would probably work best. However, the need to suppress pretty much everything in the game makes it really cumbersome to build formally. I would just make them plot devices, literally, and declare that they just "work" (until the plot demands that they don't). Maybe use Unluck to give them a bit of unpredictability.

I'm excited about the prospect of a new version of Traveller Hero for 6e. At the same time, however, I'd love to be able to purchase the existing, out-of-print/out-of-license PDFs (especially the supplemental books) since I missed out on them the first time around. I'm sitting here saying "Take my money," and there are only the sounds of crickets at the moment. Let's change that, shall we? :-)

Sameness is certainly a potential issue in just about any RPG. It is something we've all coped with pretty much from the beginning of the hobby: (A)D&D characters of any given class typically looked and played identically for the first several levels in the early versions of the game (basically until magic items provided some degree of differentiation). But with Champions, that was much less of an issue simply due to the overwhelming choices in powers and character concepts. Even if you had a superhero team in which everyone had a 20 Dex and a 5 Spd, they usually looked and felt very different in actual play because one was a brick, one was a blaster, one was a mentalist (who attacked in Ego order anyway), etc. So even in the areas where sameness tended to take hold in Champions, it was mitigated significantly by the nature of the genre, at least in my experience.

I find the process of building up many of the old powers with the new, more abstract meta-powers intellectually exhausting. Back when you had to decide whether Armor or Force Field made more sense as the underlying mechanic for your paladin's Divine Aura of Protection, the game's system of abstractions seemed pretty clever. Now that you have to essentially build Armor or Force Field from even smaller meta pieces, the character creation process has become tedious, and it no longer feels clever to me. Even when you remove the heavy lifting off the shoulders of players by pre-building powers, spells, and gear, the write-ups of these things become nigh-unreadable masses of keywords and parenthesized modifier values. The first three editions of the game drifted in the direction of providing too many highly specific, monolithic powers that were less flexible than their foundational brethren. The 4th edition did an excellent job, IMO, of stepping back from that approach and finding an effective middle-ground between too concrete and too abstract. The 5th and 6th editions, I feel, have drifted in the direction of too much abstraction, as the game now, more than ever, feels as if the abstractions have abstractions.

Well, when I look in my binder full of old Champions characters, there isn't a single one that would have had any use for 100 extra points in skills. My characters operated in campaigns that resembled the comics, and you don't generally see four-color supers spending panel after panel "making skill rolls". *shrug*

(Points to self)