zslane

Ah, yes:
 
The one where they encountered the c'thuloid and the look-tater..... 
 

The Marvel RPG license has gone through several different hands through the decades and has resulted in numerous different game systems, none of which lasted very long, with the exception of the original FASERIP system. The fact that nobody, not even Marvel, has seen fit to reintroduce a Marvel RPG into the market during the MCU era is rather telling.

That nomination came after Disney/Marvel put a lot of time, money, and effort into working the political levers of the Academy. I think they would have flipped out had it not been nominated.

It's tricky because if you aim for the most popular RPG genre, which is fantasy, then you have to compete with D&D and Pathfinder, which already puts you into a deep, deep hole in terms of mindshare and market share (and frankly, I'm not convinced that Turakian Age is up to the task). The superhero genre seems like a no-brainer given the history of the system, but if a licensed Marvel RPG can't explode with popularity in the MCU Age then what chance does the Champions Universe (or any original superhero universe) have? That leaves going into a genre which lacks a dominant alpha brand to compete against, like science fiction perhaps, but that also means having to convince potential new players to try something other than fantasy for once in their lives, which might be a tough sell.
 
Honestly, I don't see anyway out of the darkness for the Hero System. Even if it had Elon Musk investing in the effort, I'm not sure there is a winning direction to take.

Has it been six months already? I guess I'll say what I always say.
 
What is needed is a killer campaign setting that sells the system to new players. The Hero System, as good as it is, simply can't sell itself the way it did in the 80s. Properly written and presented, such a campaign product line could (should?) also serve as a "starter set" for the game system.
 
The hard part, of course, is coming up with a campaign setting that intrigues, fascinates, and attracts players the way that, say, White Wolf's World of Darkness did back in the 90s. There is also the economic challenge of producing an on-going product line. A single campaign book is insufficient.

Has it been six months already? I guess I'll say what I always say.
 
What is needed is a killer campaign setting that sells the system to new players. The Hero System, as good as it is, simply can't sell itself the way it did in the 80s. Properly written and presented, such a campaign product line could (should?) also serve as a "starter set" for the game system.
 
The hard part, of course, is coming up with a campaign setting that intrigues, fascinates, and attracts players the way that, say, White Wolf's World of Darkness did back in the 90s. There is also the economic challenge of producing an on-going product line. A single campaign book is insufficient.

As I've said before (but hey, why should I expect anyone to actually read what I write?), I believe big climactic battles against powerful solo villains have their place, and when used judiciously (and by implication, infrequently) I have absolutely no objection to them and find them quite exciting and satisfying. That sort of thing definitely belongs in a TTRPG, as it is unarguably an iconic part of the hobby.
 
What doesn't belong in a TTRPG is the "boss fight", a medium-risk/high-reward combat that punctuates every chapter of an adventure just to feed the necessary XP to the PCs to make them level-sufficient for the following chapter. This is a game design strategy that comes from MMORPGs, which need to keep players hooked on steady and predictable stream of XP and level advances in an effort to maintain player interest and, consequently, the all-important subscriber revenue.

Well, yes, coming with unique is really, really hard.  However, in this case it would need to be both unique and still have a definite "African feel" to it, and that would be even harder.  So, hey, sample like a hip-hop record.

It implies that someone out there finds Deadpool entertaining. Movie box office and comic book sales figures appear to support that assertion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My understanding is that Deadpool (the movie(s)) is beloved not just for its style and humor, but for its faithfulness to the character as presented in the comics. If Deadpool wasn't a popular character in the comics, nobody would care about him in the movies (and there would have been no outrage expressed towards his depiction in X-Men Origins: Wolverine).

It implies that someone out there finds Deadpool entertaining. Movie box office and comic book sales figures appear to support that assertion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My issue is with both, I guess.
 
My objection to the term is with what it implies: it indicates what I feel is misguided thinking applied to adventure (or game) design for TTRPGs. My objection to abundance/frequency--and worse, predictable regularity--comes down to the negative impact it has on adventure and campaign design, particularly for the fantasy genre.
 
Video games are burdened with tremendous limitations, many of which force designers into creative corners that make the video game experience a pale shadow of the TTRPG experience. In my view, dragging the TTRPG experience down by using the same creative shackles that constrain video games falls into the category of Very Bad Ideas.

That's interesting. It sounds like Hero Games took a page out of early TSR's book by making their fantasy supplements connected to their default "house" setting without explicitly saying so on the product covers.
 
I think it might have helped the Turakian Age brand if those books had the connection to TA right in their titles. Turakian Battlegrounds instead of Fantasy Hero Battlegrounds, Turakian Grimoire instead of Fantasy Hero Grimoire, and so on. I mean, I know that the Hero System is traditionally sold on its merits as a generic system, but I sorta feel that if you're going to put out a campaign setting as a product line, then don't try to straddle this line between generic and setting-specific with the support material. In trying to serve both audiences, the Turakian Age brand suffers, IMO. Thanks to the titles of those books, I never knew they were connected in any way to TA, and so I never bothered looking into them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought TA was lacking support material and dismissed it because of this.

Yeah, the indirection has muddled things a bit. I really didn't mean to make you feel like the target of my comments. I was ultimately aiming them at OpenLegend, which seems to be perpetuating a design motif that feels (to me) too heavily influenced by video game design and video game culture, rather than the design conceits and traditions of tabletop RPGs and the genre conventions of, say, comic book superheroes or epic fantasy fiction. The mere fact that they use "Boss" as a term is all the proof I need.

Sure, megavillains are single villains powerful enough to take on an entire team. That is a tried and true comic book superhero trope. But not every encounter was with such a villain. Hell, not every issue was with such a villain. The idea that each encounter should lead to a Boss Fight is a video game trope. In fact, 90s cartoons might have been influenced by arcade fighters in much the same way that TTRPGs have been influenced by MMORPGs.

Yep, totally.
 
But then, I feel that managing the balance and fairness of the campaign, whether we're talking about combat encounters or PC builds, is part of the job of the GM in any game. The fact that it requires more care and attention in Champions doesn't give the GM an excuse to be lazy on this front; rather that the game should only be run by someone willing to put in the necessary effort.

Maybe so!
 
Then again, Iron Man is totally metal, and Frodo is fairly square.

I'm waiting until Phase 12, because that's when the action really starts.

Whiny snowflakes who can't take being chided for using slang words that don't actually describe something new (or something old in a new way).

I appreciate the suggestion. MechWarrior appears to tick off most of my criteria only because I was pretty terrible at conveying the (admittedly blurry) image of the campaign setting that I had in my head, and that's entirely my fault. I read Stackpole's BattleTech novels, so I am pretty familiar with the feel, tone, and scope of the BattleTech/MechWarrior universe and it isn't what I have in mind. Think W40K meets Star Wars meets Chronicles of Riddick meets Jovian Chronicles. I have no idea what this mash-up would actually look like in practice, but I do know that MechWarrior isn't quite it.

I basically agree with this. Personally, I found GURPS to be a system of diminishing returns, while I've always found the Hero System to be one of increasing returns. And that is a fractal statement.

There was a lot of design experimentation going on in those early days, and many of those experiments led to dead ends, and for good reason. There were also plenty of cases where the designers themselves had only a modest understanding of probabilities and the combinatorial nature of the interplay between game mechanics, which often led to in-game outcomes that made little sense. Unfortunately, most GMs weren't any better at understanding these things than the designers, and so their home-brew "fixes" were usually cures that were worse than the disease. Worse still, the need for GM intervention in this manner evolved into the dubious belief that GMs should always be guiding PC action resolution towards "satisfying" outcomes, which I regard as a profound overreaction to the problems posed by the "era of badly designed game systems".

That may describe the proto-D&D of the Chainmail miniatures days of the early 1970s, but by the 1980s roleplaying had evolved quite further than that, even the "old school" style. Just because PCs can die--fairly easily if players are not smart and cautious--doesn't mean they are disposable characters that should be treated like nameless figures on a mass battlefield. It just means the campaign is more of a sandbox simulation of a world in the given genre, rather than a story-driven collaborative experience where every PC is a precious snowflake that must not die unless it serves a satisfying dramatic purpose.

Not really. The Last Alliance of Men and Elves at the end of the Second Age is called that for a reason. Peter Jackson may think he knows how to write the story of The Lord of the Rings better than Tolkien did, but I simply don't agree. It reminds me of a letter that Tolkien wrote to Forrest Ackerman (#210) about a fan who seemed to think he was more of an expert on Middle-Earth lore than Tolkien himself: "...[he] may think he knows more about Balrogs than I do, but he cannot expect me to agree with him."

I watched season 1 of Man in the High Castle, and while it had an interesting tone, I found it to be a bit of a slow burn, and then I just lost track of it when it took so long to get season 2 out. I also have a bit of a problem whenever a story that is structured and paced as a short novel gets expanded far beyond its original scope and intent just so some entertainment conglomerate can extract as much revenue from it as possible.