zslane

The first Suicide Squad movie was, at least in my view, an exercise in lazy, uninspired, amateurish writing. The second one was outright unpleasant to sit through; I was so utterly put off by the beach landing and subsequent jungle infiltration scenes that I hated myself for watching even that much.

It's a meh issue for me. 
Hero is not an RPG. 
It is a system to build a custom RPG.
Every single incarnation from 1st through 6th has had "broken" or "incorrectly costed" something.  
Even the concept of "balanced" RPG is ludicrous. 
 
While some people looks at 6th as having "fixed" issues. 
Other people think that 6th just "broke" many of the central reasons that made Hero good in the first place.  
I'm one of the people that saw 6th as a revision that eliminated many of the core reasons that brought me to Champions (Hero) in the first place while hamfistedly "breaking" it.
 
But I am aware that 6th has it's cult following  
All hail the Great Sixth'thulhu

 
In the end Hero in all it's forms is a game that you do not let anyone "build a PC at home and show up to play".  At least if they are not someone that you have been gaming for years and understand intimately the parameters of the campaign.  
 
Hero cannot be "fixed" or "balanced" by the rules. 
That must be done by each GM as they build their world. 
I am positive that 99% of the posters on this board could build a character that will "break" any campaign if they have free access to the core rulebook and intent.  
 
IMO 6th Edition is every bit as "broken" as 5thR was.  It is just which flavor of "broken" do you prefer. 
 
 

Sounds like maybe it should be called "the Martial Arts bug" rather than "the STR bug"...

You are asking a lot of heavy lifting from supplements and adventures. And where are these going to come from?
 
the BBB read like fun, 6th reads like a textbook. And I’m not trying to start edition war, 6th cleans up a few things( other things cleaned up I don’t care for)

That's the implication, yes.

The STR bug was the only way to easily bdimulate Silver Age, car tossing heroes and villains and still be unber 250 points. It also kept all the defenses in line. To me it’s not a big but a feature. 

What is the concept behind this defense? What are the sfx?
 
A proper power build can't exist without knowing the concept being modeled.

Would still love to see the 6e Vehicles core book that never got published.

I recently watched a fun YouTube documentary on the black Lamborghini Countach from the first Canonball Run movie. Lots of fun facts about the real Canonball rallies held by Brock Yates in the 1970s, and of course, the car itself and its history.

I think Gunn was trying to do something really different and make Harley the star, but yeah.  The whole world has turned into Beavis and Butthead.

If you want to see another good example of character specification bloat, compare the write-up for Mechanon from 1e Champions to the write-up for Mechanon from 6e Champions. You can see the incremental growth of the bloat with each edition of the game. And while I would probably agree with the opinion that 1e Mechanon is a bit under-specified, I feel that all sanity left the building by the time of 6e.

If you want to see another good example of character specification bloat, compare the write-up for Mechanon from 1e Champions to the write-up for Mechanon from 6e Champions. You can see the incremental growth of the bloat with each edition of the game. And while I would probably agree with the opinion that 1e Mechanon is a bit under-specified, I feel that all sanity left the building by the time of 6e.

It's impossible to remake something that doesn't exist.

I started with 1st, with the typewriter-looking font, but by the time I got to play it, 2nd was out, then 3rd by the time I got to play in regular games.
By then, GMs I gamed with were mixing skills &c from the other Hero games as well, and it was messy.
 
4e, the BBB, feels like the definitive edition that brought it all together.
 
But even with the BBB, it seemed like skills were getting out of hand, and it was taking far too many points to just be generally competent at whatever throwaway background or secret id you might have.
5th seemed even worse that way,  what I've seen of 6th looks to be far beyond the pale.
 
Sometimes I think even the small handful of skills in 1st would be preferable.

My preferred edition is what I call 4e+. It is 4e with stuff cherry picked from 5eR.

My preferred edition is what I call 4e+. It is 4e with stuff cherry picked from 5eR.

Agreed. That's why I typically recommend that total newcomers to TTRPGs start with something else, like D&D. That's how it went for me; I went from AD&D (1e) to Champions 2e and the transition was very smooth. I would not wish jumping straight into Champions 6e on my worst enemy.

Actually the military was the least used path and the MI was really looked down on as a "useless" vestige of an earlier era.  Federal Service could be anything.
The "navy" was a actually mostly consisting of cargo ships to supply the colonies. 
The only reason that the book features the military is because the central character was in the MI.  In the book it pointed out that "what" you did to gain you franchise of citizenship and the vote wasn't important.  What was important was you committed and completed service period of two years.
 
“Why, the purpose is,” he answered, hauling off and hitting me in the knee with a hammer (I kicked him, but not hard), “to find out what duties you are physically able to perform. But if you came in here in a wheel chair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find something silly enough to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe. The only way you can fail is by having the psychiatrists decide that you are not able to understand the oath.”
Heinlein, Robert A.. Starship Troopers (p. 33). Penguin Publishing Group.
 
IIRC the MI only had two brigades in total and the only military starships were the Fleet Transport Corvettes used to move the MI. The entire "military" was essentially seed stock in case there ever arose a need to defend humanity. 
 
The entire first part of the book was the MC going through MI training while literally everyone he knew, including his family, thought he was throwing his future away.  And the MI was constantly trying to get them to quit and go do something else.   The after the Bug War started was humanity getting is collective a$$ kicked and having to throw its very few combat troops into hit and run raids as they lost colony after colony.  Things didn't start turning around until the last few chapters as they started cranking out actual warships as well as getting trained troops to flesh out the MI. 
 
But the big thing is that Federal Service could be military, but 99% of it wasn't.  The concept was that in order to be a full citizen and uphold the responsibility of the vote, you demonstrated a minimum ability to be reliable and complete a beneficial function.  Be it cleaning bedpans at a hospital or driving a delivery truck. 
More of a Meritocracy than anything else.
 
None of that is in any way reflected in the movie.
Instead we get bugs and a cheap image of fascism. 
By cheap I mean is makes light humor about a seriously screwed up reality. 
Extremely sad....

The actual requirement to vote or hold office in the book was to have performed Federal service--usually military, but there were other forms of service available. Mind you, it's been at least a decade since I last read it, so my details may be a bit fuzzy.

I'm sure it is to those who enjoy its style of storytelling. I am not among them, however.

My preferred edition is what I call 4e+. It is 4e with stuff cherry picked from 5eR.

My preferred edition is what I call 4e+. It is 4e with stuff cherry picked from 5eR.

Verhoeven's movie is about as accurate an adaptation of Heinlein's book as Cameron's Aliens movie is. That is to say they all have "marines" fighting aggressive aliens with a hive-like organization. And that's pretty much it. A (more) faithful adaptation of the book--and I'm not just talking about the powered armor, but also the political and social philosophy behind it all--would have far more interesting things to say and questions to pose (to audiences) than Verhoeven's movie, IMO. But somebody would have to pry the IP rights from Sony's death grip first.

I'm not sure why Paul Verhoven even decided to call that movie Starship Troopers. It deviated so wildly from the book that he could have slapped literally any other title onto it, and the Heinlein estate would have been none the wiser.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer carried this problem into the tv space in the late 1990s. Every season had to have a bigger bad with the whole world in jeopardy again. It became a joke between the characters that they actually had to use the plural of apocalypse. It probably helped that the show was part comedy and that you weren't expected to take it all that seriously in the first place. Agents of SHIELD followed in these footsteps for sure. But the Netflix Marvel shows did not, and I think there was something really refreshing about that.
 
As for Peacemaker, well, I couldn't get past the first 20 or so minutes of Gunn's Suicide Squad movie, so Cena's show will pretty much sit at the bottom of my tv watching priority list. Somewhere below catching up on the third seasons of Titans and Doom Patrol, neither of which I intend to watch at all, so there you go.