TheDarkness

Are the two even dating?

Didn't I know before I went mad, or after?

I could do that!* Do you think there should be one?

 

*{For example:

Did I really just go mad reading that quote you put up?

You teach a class on internet babble?

Bazza routinely sneaks into company parties with his trained snake, makes photocopies, and leaves the copies in the copier tray just so he can giggle once more when the boss asks who photocopied their asp.

Poker chips are about the ideal counter one can use. They are easily recognizable from a glance as to their value, and they come in a box one could roll dice in.

I think another very important issue is the belief that the GM exists to serve every whim of the players.

 

I literally get angry and walk away when I hear some idiot say "railroad".  99.999999999999999999% have no clue of what the concept even means, they are just upset because there is a story that is not just 100% them. 

 

Essentially anything not a sandbox game is "railroading" to them.  

 

It is like the players that agree to play in a high chivalric campaign and then want to make a thief and whine about being railroad.  

 

I run games with actual plots and villainous plots by Master Villains.   Things to be deciphered and explored, not a string battles so "Bob" can be cool and everyone else can be bored. 

 

Did I say I really hate the mental midgets that whine about "railroading" every time a different player gets the spot light.

What, you mean NPC actions are supposed to have some bearing on the events?

I mean, there is such a thing as railroading. And there's also such a thing as, 'I literally couldn't find any other believable result to you ignoring all the warning signs and doing what you did, so maybe, really, you railroaded your group being in this situation?'

It hit me recently that Donald Trump is cinematic Tony Stark, before his origin as Iron Man. Well, minus the genius, wit, and charisma. But his self-centeredness, sense of entitlement, and disregard for the consequences of his actions, are pretty much the same. Although I'll give one other point to pre-hero Tony over the Donald: Stark didn't give a damn what anyone thought of him.

I actually think that would be a great mock twitter account. Tony Stark, just constantly attempting to give Trump lessons on witty.

#notalltrustfunders

I generally practice a "Do Unto Others" policy in my Champions games.  If the players pound an unconscious foe to make sure he stays down, that's their choice.  Not everyone is a Boy Scout in Blue.  However, the players shouldn't be surprised (and yet invariably are both surprised and offended) when the bad guys hit their characters again when they're down.  If their mentalist tiptoes through the bad guy's brain, they shouldn't be shocked when the same is done to them.  (And I make sure to point this out to the players when they protest.)

 

Sometimes they learn.  Sometimes they don't.

 

As to GMin'g superheroes, I refuse to do it.  I'm afraid they'll use their x-ray vision to read my game notes, or telepathy to probe my mind and figure out the loopholes in my plots.  Then you get that darn shapeshifter who mimics the NPCs you're trying to portray.  Or the brick who "accidentally" crushes the dice, just because they're not rolling well.  And that's to say nothing about the game disruptions when all the players have to fly off at a moment's notice to stop a bank robbery.  It's just not worth the bother. 

Never mind the person who absorbs your powers and memories, and then still insists they'd rather play than GM.

The song is beautiful, Michael. I think that what is happening to me is an intense activation of the flight/freeze response in reaction to a situation I feel at an utter loss to fight...that is, the degeneration of the US into a monstrously corrupt terror state comparable to those it sponsored throughout Latin America in the late 20th Century, and the effect that will have on Canada. If I can figure out how to soothe that prefrontal cortex-bypassing, amygdala-level response, I may be able to survive this.

 

I have been away from this forum for far too long. It's nice to be on a discussion board that hasn't been targeted by Russian Agitprop trolls. If you want to get a sense of what I mean, go to the site I'm about to link to. It's Canada's premiere progressive discussion board. Look for the thread "The New Russophobia". It will creep the hell out of you. http://rabble.ca/babble/active-topics

It's funny, in a sad way. There's a forum that a friend of mine runs, I have no idea why he still keeps it up, but it used to be well frequented. Anyway, it's turned into about eight guys spouting alt-right nonsense(there used to be hundreds on there at any one time, long ago). I know of three such forums, the common denominator in those was a dead forum gets taken over by these folk, the few remaining members are generally assuming these people are mentally ill, usually they were members before, but now feel that they must speak out, speaking out largely involving posting a lot of youtube videos that make Alex Jones look perfectly reasonable.

These sorts of forums had their heyday some years back. Taking them over is high effort with little reward.

That said, that forum you posted did reveal this gold in the conversation about the 'new Russophobia':

"New Russophobia has 12% more antioxidants."

As someone who lives in China, I will say one thing. Propaganda, used blatantly for long enough, works perfectly against itself, and makes the general populace exceedingly able to mock it mercilessly in ways the propagandists can't understand. The Chinese have turned it into high art.

Everyone pictures propaganda in the form of Germany in WWII, but the reality is, that's not how it looks later. Later, it becomes a sad affair that no one believes anymore, and cannot directly mock, and so you end up with a million in jokes that the whole country knows.

I think the key to this forum is actual moderation to keep the key focus alive. Light moderation is a fool's paradise when there are actually people seeking to disrupt a forum.

I think you could attract fantasy players to Champions.  You just have to give them something they can't get in fantasy.  Huge action pieces and true-blue heroism have a lot of appeal.  But you have to GM it right.  You shouldn't screw over the players for doing the right thing.

 

Generally the hero shouldn't bash an already unconscious villain into the land of GM's discretion.  That's not heroic.  But if you want the players to behave that way, don't give the villains recoveries once they're at negative stun.  Because as soon as you have a villain who was laying there at -3 Stun, and he jumps up after a recovery and blasts the hero in the back, the players are not going to trust that any of these guys are really out.  And they'll be right to react that way, because the villain is still in the fight and is still dangerous to them.

 

Let the characters perform spectacular acts of heroism, even if its not on their character sheet.  If Bob has fire powers, and he just bought Flight, Force Field, and Energy Blast, go ahead and let him extinguish a burning building if he wants to.  Let him save a bunch of people with his power.  He controls fire, after all.  Let him do it, and then tell him that next time, he should think about adding Dispel vs fire to his power list.  But don't have the people burn to death because Bob didn't have the right power construct written on his character sheet.

 

When villains endanger civilians to distract the hero, they don't use the distraction to blast the hero in the back as he flies off to save the schoolkids.  They use the distraction to gloat, or to try to get away.  Have them continue to attack the hero, and you'll get players who quite correctly decide that their #1 goal is to curb-stomp this villain, and if they let themselves get distracted rescuing people then the villain will win the fight, producing more casualties in the long run.

 

If GMs want players to follow the comic book genre, then they have to do it themselves.

You could, concievably, give the group a limited use item at the beginning that is no use against conscious foes, but, applied against an unconscious foe, acts as an entangle. That way, they have an idea that the bigger villains do wake up, but have a grace period in which they get used to the idea that pounding an unconscious person tends to cross some lines...

You really can't teach ethics. Your either a mostly moral person, or your not a mostly moral person. Mortality can not be enforced into others via punishment (or they would never be criminals), nor by rewards. Beyond that, each and every person has a different definition of 'right' and 'wrong'.

 

But in fiction, we love to pretend that there is a constant 'right' and 'wrong'. It gives us a piece of mind. But add people with different views on such things and having different goles, and we shouldn't be surprised if we are not reading the same book, let alone on the same page.

 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to run superhero games. It just means we shouldn't be surprised if people have the wrong idea about superheroes.

I won't derail this thread further, but I actually think that an experiential approach to teaching ethics, over lectures, is fairly useful, and this is something I've seen play out in some games.

In short, doing the right thing does tend to feel good, having the kinds of relationships that develop from trust makes it easier, and, given the opportunity to do it again, most would do it again and do it better with practice, like anything else.

As for why no one wants to run it, I actually suspect that a great many people running games are also daunted by or have somehow spent a lot of time doing workarounds to having large sections that involve non-combat skills.

For the feel of most comics, especially the detective comics, those sections are very necessary.

I actually think this also another reason why it can often be hard to find sci-fi games, especially hard sci-fi.

Moral superiority as a reward in an rpg is as real as imaginary gold or imaginary experience. There is absolutely murder-hoboing for exactly that wish fulfillment.

Not at all more real.

Now, actually reasoning through a real ethical conundrum in an rpg has a value, which is something that was argued 2500 years ago and is the basis for Confucian ritual.

Said conundrum does not have to be too deep for children, something else argued that long ago. In fact, most would say it was best started as children, actually practicing ethical decision making as practice for real scenarios.

This is not to say that a game needs to be that, but to claim to teach ethics, that is the ONLY way it can do so.

This is always my issue with the claim to value of clear good guys and clear bad guys. It teaches none of this, it is, quite frankly, to ethical thinking the same relationship as nationalism to true patriotism.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of books and stories for children that recognize the difference, so children can clearly concieve of this.

And again, this is only in relation to claims that there is a merit to black and white in such stories, and that merit is a sense of real ethics.

Comic book ethics are pretty much identical to action movie ethics, and only differed when better storytelling jumped in at various points, and mostly differed in the same ways some action movies differed.

Clear good guys and inherently bad guys could describe many Superman comics as easily as it could describe Birth of a Nation. And the uses, sadly, were not always different, and the differences were not because using that tool ever produces ethical sense, but because the writers did not use black and white thinking for the ethics of that story, since ethics is not germane to that sort of black and white thinking. Those other ethics trumped black and white thinking and trumped its very basis over time.

There are still comics that are not grimdark, there simply is also grimdark now. Moore laments his works' influence, but I think that is a bit silly, Watchmen and V for Vendetta were never meant to be the same kind of story, and anyone who finds any of the characters more amazing-cool-tough without simultaneously noting they are also sad and stunted by it, are completely not reading for comprehension. Grimdark as a market tries to get rid of the sad and stunted, and fall way short, but there is absolutely no doubt, it was the black and white thinking's logical conclusion that justified Moore's work, he largely presented exactly what was already there, everyone knew it was already there, he just put it in ink.

The comic's code made ethics a central piece of the comics, while, ironically, bleaching comics of ethical content they did have before. The comic's code awarded stand-ins for ethics, like inately bad guys* attacking inerrantly good guys and gettting punched out for their efforts, for actual ethical content. As the code became less enforceable, and the market grew, fan epectations and sensationalism ended up enforcing the same norms in a lopsided way. Now, inherently bad guys could be cut to ribbons to the joy of teen boys.

This is not to say these teen boys are ethically stunted. It is to say that, if they have ethics, they, like everyone else ever, learned them from good examples, and seeing the results of bad examples, in life, in fiction, in movies, wherever they took it from.

I've met murder hobos who, in life, were really, really good people. I've met ethical philosophers who were the lowest scum I can imagine.

It's notable that the most common place to see a placard telling people never to do violence except to protect the innocent is in martial arts schools. I would not recommend actually learning your ethics from most martial artists, though I know some very fine ones(who would also warn you against doing so). Some activities attract our desire for feelings of power. Any such activity will attract many people who have no interest in ethics beyond a tool to claim superiority. And I've never known one such person who did not live on the idea of clear good guys and clear bad guys.

But most just want to feel the rush, and don't turn that into a philosophical justification for their goodness.

Actually, I rather like the post above about Batman waiting in line. That is showing and teaching ethics, even in the context of humor. You really couldn't watch that show and think that he was not a nice person.

I think one big issue is that, to simplify Hero is naturally complex.

Cancer lives in daily fear that others will discover that he falsified the research data in his master's thesis, The Uncomplicated Death Tribble.

I think we've now hit on the real problem for newbs.

What's that?

Can you point me to that thread?

A big part of it is in the last four or five pages of this thread, including the build ideas for dispel:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94228-the-myth-of-hero/page-9

There are other bits of discussion of built by hero ideas on this thread:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94262-hero-system-lucky-7th-edition/page-8

And some more here, towards the end:

http://www.herogames.com/forums/topic/94331-new-powers-that-you-think-would-simplify-hero/page-7

Example of a low point NPC mentat.

Alwin13 is never sure where she parked her boat, but she knows it is at one of a paradox in Shroedinger's Bay.

I would say that the pacing needs a little. Each of them are giving a little speech and then the other, a little speech. It's not really a back and forth, though that's hard to do by yourself.

There needs to be a sort of call and response BETWEEN the speeches. Something one says that the other responds to, maybe even one interrupts the other. Otherwise, one might ask, why are these bitter enemies giving each other so much time to finish every speech?

Just my thoughts.

 

 

 

 

I think you're still missing the point on what we're talking about here.  The idea is to let a player start rolling dice without understanding how the system works.  Just let them start playing,  While you can cram in more information into a chart ("Hey guys, it doesn't take that much more space to put the active points and the real cost in here, let's just make the font a little smaller...") this sort of thing confuses the new player.  He doesn't need to know what those numbers mean.  Not yet.

 

A lot of people on this board seem to have their own sacred cows as far as the system goes.  "Oh we can't leave out XYZ.  It's not the Hero System without that!"  But this isn't the full Hero System, and it's not intended to be.  It's not even full Fantasy Hero Complete.  This is Fantasy Hero Incomplete.  This isn't a genre book, or a setting, or anything like that.  It isn't detailing a world.  This is a tutorial for the most basic aspects of the game.  That's it. 

 

During one of the editions of D&D, I think maybe 20 years ago towards the end of 2nd edition, TSR released a boxed set that was "Learn how to play D&D!"  And somebody bought it and we opened it up (we all had been playing for years, we were just curious what was in it).  It had some pregenerated characters, and a little mini-character sheet that had only the information you'd need to start playing a 1st level character.  I think they may have been printed on cards or something.  And they had rules for going all the way up to level 5.  There were like two or three little dungeons, and a monster manual.  I think the toughest enemy in it was like an Ogre or something.  Maybe there was a hatchling dragon at the end of the last dungeon, I don't remember.

 

That is what I think this game needs.  You don't need to know what abilities a druid gets at 12th level when you start playing the game.  You just need to know that he carries a staff and can talk to birds or whatever.  And at level 5 you can turn into a wolf twice a day.  That's all you really need to know when you begin.  And how to hit people.

 

In the Hero discussion page, there is a thread about what a new edition needs in which a number of us brainstormed on the concept of a powered by hero approach in which the system was used to make games, and in which descriptions would follow the sort of format the steriaca posted above for the lightning spell.

Within, a member actually came up with a fairly effective way to work dispels in when we were talking about spell levels and dispels. We favored making dispels for different levels and assume that they were bought at standard effect, so that all rolls would be assumed to be threes(5D6 being 5 threes).

Part of our rationale for 'powered by hero' was that purchases were all packages, prebuilt powers whose constructs were hidden, but could be found in supplementary material or online. The counter to the argument 'but they aren't learning the full hero system' was that it would be made clear that, if one understood the full system, one could build NEW things that would still be balanced within the sub-system.

Thus, players who did not immediately want the build complexity of Hero in their lives could be attracted to the game, given a taste, first a little lightning, then, when lightning no longer got them off, some knockback, and soon enough, they find themselves shaking if too long goes by without building a change environment.

We felt this was a better way than trying to convince people to play something they don't want to play or devote time they don't want to devote. Give the choice to play a game that does not take any longer than making simple characters in other systems, but the awareness that much more is possible, an option that is naturally attractive to GMs and players who want to mess with those GMs worlds.

The belief that convincing people to spend time they don't want to spend is an effective marketing strategy and then digging in one's heels and refusing to accept that what a significant portion of the market wants is entirely buildable by using the system to build a sub-system has not worked. It's not zero sum, it's not either or, both the die hard Hero building maniacs and the rank and file gamer can be drawn into the same fold.

I would say gold for experience, being the biggest difference, had greater ties to murder hoboism in D&D than almost anything. You generally got experience for beating, but not killing, other things, at least as far as I recall.

And most players always ostensibly played good guys. That the enemies were inherently evil and unredeemable structurally didn't help.

Thus, since most people in both games felt they were fighting for good, and D&D players had structural reasons within the game world to have confidence they were, the inborn ethics of Champions was simply nerf magic. They could punch people through three buildings and have confidence they wouldn't die. This did not stop our teenage selves from aiming for punching them through FOUR buildings, nor did it make any deep ethical statement about the virtues of the actions, nor did it teach a different lesson in protecting others over a system where what you were fighting was evil by nature and incapable of good.

You could also simply go on to described mundain events which would occur all around the player. Nothing says the power would be exciting to use.

This and the last few posts goes a bit to the crux of my original post, of how the power lacking a mechanic might be problematic at times.

And Steriaca, your post is actually not something I'm in contention with, just using it as an example of what could and should be a possible result of using that power, but that how one comes to that result may affect how fair it is. My main point being, lacking a mechanic for doing a vision, how likely is a fair result?

If I buy 8D6 energy blast, and I attack a baddie, and I roll all sixes, good for me. If I roll all 1s, so sad. If I roll all threes, then okay, I suppose. If I roll well, and the GM actually wanted the villain to last a little longer, well, he can't change my roll, he can decide that the villains stun is actually higher than he initially wrote down, or he can accept that the villain is down. But changing my awesome roll would be wrong.

BUT, say I buy 40 pts. of EB, but in this ruleset, my EB has a well defined range, and, if I hit, the GM decides how much it damages with no absolute limit on either end. I could do 0 damage, or 100. I have absolutely no way of knowing.

AND, I know the GM views the EB power as a way to further story.

It would be very hard, even for the most fair GM, to not find themselves often assigning the upper or lower end of damage on that energy blast, depending on which serves the story better, and assigning the middle to be fair when the power doesn't matter in the least, or at least adding up to an average in such cases.

That is what precognition without a mechanic will tend to be. It will tend to be very difficult for the GM to not look at content in terms of the story, except even the most accomplished GM doesn't know the future of the story, only likelihood. It will be almost impossible to make the expenditure on the player's part to have the power fair at all.

So, building on your post, let's say that the GM is trying to decide between two visions of the future, one that he views as the usuful vision, one he views as useless.

One shows the villain group making a plan.

One shows the villain group just doing boring daily stuff.

The fact is, the GM has no way to judge which is the useful one, and which is the useless one. None. And so, there will be a tendency to make the latter vision, if he sees it as useless, useless. A group of villains vacuuming, doing the dishes, dusting, all in the same place but saying absolutely nothing of use to each other, just grim house cleaning villains. Bereft of the kind of characterization and relations that the heroes would normally NEVER HAVE THE CHANCE OTHERWISE TO KNOW in exactly the only time they actually should get to know them.

Like the EB, it will be very difficult for even the fair GM not to give useful visions where it helps the stories, useless ones where it helps the story, and almost no mechanism to actually make middle range results. There will be less tendency to actually change the planned story in response to the vision, since the vision is designed around the GMs idea of the story that day.

It will be very difficult for the GM to actually make this, like other powers, something that has the instant capacity to change the GM's plans. After all, this is basically the power to create future relations between people and events that include, but should not be limited to, what the GM previously thought about what their story was, since that will all change every game, and so the power includes what could be.

Otherwise, it is, whether the GM wants it that way or not, player bought GM fiat with a range.

Which is harder to find information, the villain's social life, or the villain's plans? Which will lead me more immediately to the villain? These totally depend in each case, but the former is a semi-permanent set of habits, the latter is only useful for that one plan. If I look in on the villain's base at a certain time, hoping to find out something about them, and no one's home, I HAVE JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT THE MOST ADVANTAGEOUS THING I POSSIBLY COULD KNOW ABOUT THEM.

Without a mechanic, it would be incredibly unlikely to produce a vision that you can reliably say represented the point expenditure on the power. Impossible to do it consistently.

If I’m wrong in my assumptions I would dearly, dearly love for someone to demonstrate my errors to me. I desperately want to be grossly mistaken, but at this point I don’t see how I can be.

The error is that you are assuming that your vision of the future is what will be.

Your error is that, even in a bad future, your life will not have good.

Everyone is selling fear. Don't buy it. No one can sell you the future. No one can package it and define it, and correct predictions usually are, at best, partially correct, or extremely narrow in what they predicted.

There is a world to live in now. It makes no sense to not live in it over the specter of what future might be, but isn't.