Brian Stanfield

Just out of curiosity, have you seen Champions in 3-D for 4e, or Book of the Empress for 6e? They cover this idea with some "alternate Earth" and/or multiverse campaign ideas so you can do just what you suggest. The rules pretty much beg for this! They just give some suggestions for how to pull it off.

I don't think the errata are included. I haven't bought the POD copies to check. 6e1 & 6e2 were put on hold for a while because of a color problem, which was corrected, but I don't think anyone put in the effort to completely reformat the pages to include the corrected mistakes.

I looked this up. All I could find was a web page for Adamant Entertainment, who produce Thrilling Tales, and claim that the Brian K. Hamilton image is used under license from Steve Peterson. The page is from 2019, so it seems that the license is fairly current, but I don't know any of the details behind it. I tried to find out if the image existed outside of Justice, Inc. before it was used for the cover, but it appears to be original work designed specifically for Justice, Inc. Just FYI.

I’m not sure about the specifics of your character, but if this were to happen with every strike, couldn’t you define a trigger condition for the flash?

I noticed that too, and got really confused, and vowed to get to the bottom of this problem. Then I forgot to look it up. . .

So here are a couple of observation from Origins this week, where I was in a couple of sessions with complete beginners: They can’t understand the character sheets. Don’t try to sell them on HERO with the character sheets! I actually liked the layout of a couple of the HD templates, but I knew what I was looking at. What really helped was a separate page that explained, in plain language, what their powers could do. Emphasize this kind of simplicity. Sell them on the ease of the skill system. It’s wide open, and one set of skills is not dependent on another set of skills, so none of those meta-gamey skill trees are needed, thank you very much. Totally emphasize he flexibility of combat! It’s way cool, as long as you help them understand the core concepts (OCV, DCV, and the effects of maneuvers to these). One dice roll resolves most of it. But please, Please, PLEASE do not teach them this: 11 + OCV - dice roll= DCV you can hit. NOBODY understood what the hell this means! Seriously. I watched it happen in real time. They were able to calculate stuff and make the dice roll, but they didn’t intuitively understand why they were doing it. Teach them the pre-6th way: 11 + OCV - DCV = the roll you need to make. People get it when you are subtracting the opponent’s DCV from your OCV. It makes intuitive sense. Who cares if they know the opponent’s DCV while they are learning the game. That sort of meta-game knowledge may actually help them understand the interaction of the parts better. You can always unload the 6e formula on hem later if you want to hide the DCV. I can’t emphasize this enough. It was a deal breaker for a couple of the new folks, who never quite got the math. When players simply sit back while you calculate everything for their roll, it’s a good indicator that they’ve pretty much tuned out. While it may take getting used to, it’s exciting to roll a handful of dice for damage! People often cheer at a good die roll, but they go nuts for a good 10d6 roll! Just a few observations from the field. God bless all you GMs who run these convention games! I couldn’t do it.

If the players balk at a different system being too different, I’m not sure that introducing them to another new system would solve anything. Not trying to be argumentative, Chris, so maybe I’m missing your point here . . . ?

Hooray!!!!!!

Do you know where the Rogue Cthulhu room is? And do we need to reserve a spot with you?

Yes, but splitting infinitives is to boldly go where . . . Wait a minute. . . .

This pretty much aligns with how the Charisma/Comeliness debate went with AD&D back in the ‘80s. People were confused by Charisma, and mistook it for “attractiveness” in terms of looks, which it was not (at least exclusively). I was thinking the same thing, which could really go sideways if you had to start specifying, for instance, different COM scores for different kinds of interactions (COM: male, COM:female, or COM:muscular, COM:curvey, etc. etc.). It gets out of hand pretty quickly, and while it offers a great deal of granularity, it is only nominally useful even in roleplaying.

Ah yes, Unearthed Arcana. I’d forgotten what it was called. There was also stuff like Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, which introduced skills for the first time, and things like Oriental Adventures which added new classes, and the race was on. I bought them all, hungrily, and still enjoy looking at them occasionally for nostalgic purposes, but they’re also the reason I fell in love with Fantasy HERO. It was all already in one book, plus a small creatures book (because I was too lazy to create my own monsters, but could have done it all without the extra book). As as for the Comeliness score in AD&D, I was initially intrigued because I wanted to not only be a dark and daring thief (before they started calling them “rogues”!), but a dark, daring, and handsome thief at a time when I was self-conscious about my looks. But then so did everyone else, so we all had silly Comeliness scores that really did nothing but boost our teenage egos a little bit. In all honesty, it didn’t do me much good to be good looking when my job was to go unnoticed as a thief! I always understood the COM score in Champions because superheroes are almost always incredibly, archetypally good looking. But again, it became a stat that we only really used to make ourselves feel better. The actual number had an effect on our egos, but nothing much more than that. Maybe a little one-upmanship because, you know, we were awkward teenagers. Now I look at it as something that should be role played as part of the character conception, just like having a backstory and a professional skill. They shouldn’t be payed for since they are mostly accounted for in the narrative of a game. As per RAW, if we actually wanted to have more proficiency than a “background” skills, we had to pay for them, but nobody ever did because it rarely came up. As the rules suggest, if my character conception wants me to be a concert pianist, but that won’t come up in game play more than once or twice, then I shouldn’t pay for it. But I should role play the heck out of it. Likewise, we all just assumed we were archetypally attractive and fit and such as part of our characters. If I played a concert pianist-turned crime fighter, I’d be an attractive concert-pianist-turned crime fighter. We didn’t role play it too much because we would have had to spend all our time sitting around admiring each others’ good looks and never getting anything else done! 🤪 Ok, that last part maybe not so much, but you get my point. Just like we did with the AD&D characteristic, COM was something we didn’t bother wasting points on when in the end it was something that we didn’t even really bother role playing. I mean seriously, who wants to play James Bond, but only average looking who gets rejected by women all the time? If someone did have that concept, it would be a Complication anyway. We just assumed our appearances in our character conceptions and descriptions. It didn’t do anything in our playing from a mechanics point of view. I’ll go on record as saying I’m in favor of dumping it as a Characteristic that doesn’t come into play very often (especially for supers) and introducing it as a Perk for the few individuals who have a character concept that is out of the ordinary from the campaign assumptions (such as “all super-powered characters tend to be super-hot as well”). I have a new Pulp HERO campaign in 6e right now with a couple of players who made a specific comment about how striking their appearances were. I gave them the Perk. But all the players described their appearances in their character conceptions, and expect to role play their appearances in the ways they want/expect them to play in the game. No Characteristic needed. I will I’ll add one caveat, though: I jumped from Champions 3e to HERO System 6e, so I never went through all the edition changes, nor participated in the Great COM Debate (nor do I want to: it seems to have resulted in more of a scorched earth policy on each side of the debate). I appreciate how people are attached to different editions and their concurrent rules, and they should play those editions, or home brew what they want. No skin off my nose either way. I only offer my COM observations from an autobiographical place to explain why I don’t miss COM. Please (please, please, please) don’t misconstrue it as a judgment on anyone’s preference for or against COM.

I didn’t realize that was an option. Thanks for the clarification.

Unless I’m doing something wrong (which is highly likely) custom multipliers won’t get a cost to zero. A multiplier of half of 1 point is still 1 point.

I’m teaching new players in the same way: a very basic Pulp Hero campaign is a good way to teach basic gameplay without all the powers rules. As for rules bloat, this is not unique to HERO. I quit D&D when 2nd edition came out because I had spent the ‘80s collecting all of their crazy books with alternate rules and stuff, and gave TSR all of my allowance in the process. They started 2e with the same basic three books, but immediately followed up with all of the other books with all of the other irreplaceable rules, etc., which is when my naive eyes were opened to how their money scheme worked. I switched exclusively to Fantasy HERO at that point when I realized I could make anything that D&D had with only one book. That’s changed since 4e, where all their supplements came out at a regular pace, but I don’t really mind. Where D&D’s new books add new rules, HERO’s books are truly optional and don’t change the rule set at all. By the way, just to bring this back around to COM, AD&D tried to make sure Comeliness a characteristic that was different than Charisma. It’s gone now, and I’m not sure when they nixed it, but the debates in the ‘80s were pretty much exactly as this discussion is going. I think they decided that Comeliness was a roleplaying description and not a measurable characteristic with worthwhile effect.

I can’t tell if the Game of Thrones fans are having an orgy or a battle royale. I guess it doesn’t matter, since GoT is pretty much both of those.

I like your discussion. Hugh really pushes it, but I like what everyone came up with. I prefer heroic games, so I'll probably never be able to apply what you're doing with END, except perhaps for Fantasy HERO. I've been trying to come up with a way to balance spells, AP caps, and END for a long time, and haven't come up with anything yet that doesn't seem arbitrary. Your ideas on END usage gives me something to work with. I'd like to have AP caps and END usage that is integrated into the campaign rules in a way similar to what you do with the Pushing cap. This gives me a lot to think about.

Samwell also bragged about being one of the only people to kill a white walker, and then pooped his pants when their minions showed up. As for Bronn, I think his purpose was to show how crappy Winterfell’s security is: “Oh, hello stranger with a loaded crossbow. Come right on in. Jaime and Tyrion are in that room over there getting drunk. Don’t bother knocking.”

Weird. I use PayPal for my purchases, so I can’t help you much. Try going to the “Support” tab and the “Contact Us” item, and check with (most likely) Jason Walters. He may have some idea of what’s wrong.

This will take me some time to digest. I’ll let you know.

I thought of the same verse!

Oh right. Sorry, I forgot about that. The D&D and X-Men in the same comment threw me. Sorta like https://images.app.goo.gl/Bh74V99grKLQAiCJA

(duplicate post)

Heh, I’ll have what he’s having.

So, nobody got to kill Cersei?! Didn’t see that coming. Nobody won that bet. My pool was ruined! And I got shouted down for being a misogynist when I said Danaeris went crazy. Everyone saw that coming. . .