Scott Ruggels

same thig happened to me (Ischemic stroke and A-Fib), but at least the Hospital had regular TV, plus "The healing Channel" , However that Hospital stay put me off of Broadcast Channels and cable News forever. Luckily the WiFi was good, so I watched a lot of YouTube. It was mostly about the amount and stupidity of the commercials. Then 6 months later YouTube bulked up the length and number of commercials. I've gone back to buying DVDEs and Blue Rays of movies, just to I can have something entirely commercial free.

Paranormal Evaluation, Employee resources?(Not everyone is human).

Well, even normal firearms show up brightly in Thermographics if they have just been fired.

Was working up for a Solarsystem limited game, before the players decided for me, that I would be running Cyberpunk Red. The ships in the game were varied, with most ships being a "Torch Ship", but some being "rack ships" which were basically radio tower structures with a reaction engine on one end, vacuum tight shipping containers all up and down it, and the living quarters and bridge on the other (though many of them were robot * radio driven). Rack ships were the slowest and cheapest way to get from point A to Point B. , Then there were landers, and those were everything from winged shuttles, and space planes, to Space-X style up and down rockets. I didn't get too much further with this, but that was kid of the framework. IT was influenced a lot by "The Expanse", though. I also played a lot of Traveller, and Space Opera, and very briefly an FGU Offering called "Other Suns", which had incomprehensible mechanics so we dropped it. Other Suns was also the Genesis of the furry fandom.

I do have a 6e version of Felix 9 (the Puma).

They used to run Joe Bob Briggs reviews in the "Pink Section" of the San Francvisco Chronicle, and those were always a joy to read. He knew what we all wanted....

I have seen a lot of bad movies, but the worst was "Joysticks" that came out some time in the 80's. Cartoonishly bad Video Game competition movie, I walked out of it towards the end, and waited for my friend in the Lobby, and punched him in the shoulder hard, for taking me to this travesty. The Last Jedi was very close to that.

Whst I have found that works is just give a rough point total, and a flavor description of what the adventure is. For a GM what I tended to do if the fight was too easy, was to add more minions, and to keep boss fights from ending too quick, was to give the boss damage reduction and high ECV or focused high mental defenses.

I could go in at length. In college I would buy a book in the bookstore, and then read it in the bus home. I picked up a number of science fiction and fantasy novels ( all of which ended up donated to a used paperback store in 2019, when I moved). Unfortunately, I found a lot of crap. Either “Poor little Witch Girl in the woods overcomes Evil Empire”, or Wimpy Celtic Princess adventures, sometimes with her telepathic animal companions. No thank you. A friend tried to get me interested in Eric vanLustbader books, but his work was a slave to the rule of cool, and his Fantasy novels made no sense. When I got a Kindle I approached the reading pace I used to back in the 80s, but it was mostly non fiction military history. I did try to get through The Magicians, but when I got an idea of the characters, and where things were going, I dropped it like a hot rock. I am not a fan of broken characters and drug addicts (see: Shinji from Evangelion, because I won’t. ) as I don’t find them entertaining. Plenty of $2 Kindle novels I found entertaining, and wished some of those authors wrote more. Our Highschool reading was The Catcher in The Rye. It was teeth grinding to get through. Pretentious, whiny, holier than thou failure. Ran into too many of those at the local hobby shop.

Alpheus Norton, Community Organizer. Former Gang member and drug dealer, who did a long stretch in Prison, and found God. Works in the community with a city program to get kids to leave gangs. His knowledge of the streets and individuals of note. would be a big help to Player characters that do not have any street skills, and would get an idea of the movers and shakers among the gangs. He also has an uncanny area Knowledge of some very sketchy areas of the city. Associated with the New Day A.M.E. Church, and it's Reverend Charles Paul Ward. In exchange for asked for favors, He will in turn, ask appropriate heroes to come out and talk to the kids.

I watched the discussion of Elves on the other thread, and only had limited interaction. I am not a fan of the "Better in every way" Tolkeinesque Elves. Having them in games was a hold over from D&D, and everyone moving from D&D to any other Fantasy Tabletop expected the races to be included, mostly because folks moving away from D&D wanted a more "realistic" and "Less Arbitrary" rules system, but still wanted the background. At least that is how I remember it from the 70's and early 80s. Some of use got so sick of it, that we changed Genres, going to FGU's Bushido, or Traveller, or others at the time. The time was right for the launch of Champions at the time. My first Campaign in Fantasy Hero was sort of the usual N/W Europe based Fantasy, with the Tolkien races about, just because it was Tradition, but There were a few twists. The Current Campaign has no Tolkien races, and has large human empires, but low to no magic. (What magic there is is alchemical based, so no spells or spell combat. Without Magic based healing, players tend to be extremely risk averse, and take few chances and flee from foes that do not prefer diplomacy. Not a whole lot of fun for me to run.)

I would have examples, but I would not have them as NPC Heroes, but as player Pregenerateds, minumum of five maximum of 8, and like Champions Begins, just a name and a set of powers, and a male and female illo of each. Have them in the back of the book, in and index, but refer to them in the text if one needs and example. Leave it up to the GM to choose to use them or not as NPCs.

Maybe use Lord Liaden's Rule of X? criteria? Starting points, is a good baseline, but there has to be a mention about Defenses, Maximum DC, Highest allowable speed, and that sort of thing. Maybe disallow powers like Clairvoyance, or Megascale Teleport? Again, because there is no class system, power level kind of has to be back calculated. The Original Adventures were made for 250pt. Heroes and 10DC for the adventures up to 4th Edition. Agreed. to make the editing easier, we will need a set of guidelines. What structure thought? Comics? Television? Movies? Sandbox? What? In other projects I have worked on, and also the book covers I have worked on as well, has set "cover dress". They are a set size. and are usually made, and provided from The Art department, and are set up so that it makes pre-press easy for the printers, and for the artists to keep things within spec. These will usually contain the cover graphics, a space for a title, with a font specified, and a place for the ISBN Bar code, and/or the Price. These REALLY Help for layout. Inside the format should be specified. One or two column. Illustration size. illustrations border, or borderless, fonts, and numbering. In broad terms a format for presenting the material should be worked up, as well, so that authors can work from an outline, and then fill it out. I suppose follow a Paiso-like approach once again, as that seems to work. But the page count needs to be very limited, again to keep things short and expenses low. Sound good? I guess in out case was that the GM would not allow buying up attacks, or defenses. If we saved our XPs, we could buy another power, or buy off disads, but 10 dice was 10 dice.. But getting more skills was very helpful as was buying more and different defenses.

Yes, but champions characters don’t have levels. Character progression in champions usually just means adding skills.Yes, but champions characters don’t have levels. Character progression in champions usually just means adding skills, and small powers. However, if these are linked adventures, you can handle it like Paizo did. Make the first adventure for beginning heroes, 300 400 points with 12 die maximum attacks? (I am used to 10 die attacks to start). Then all you need to do, it’s total up 3 XP per combat engagement in the book, and add it to the minimum points for the next book. Lather, rinse, repeat, for the book after, and so on. You may want to add options in each encounter, for larger or smaller teams, usually between five, and eight heroes.

OK, so I’m sitting here in the dark, putting my insomnia to some sort of productive use, and reading over the massive replies to this thread. OK so we don’t need a new rule book, because champions complete still exists. However, it’s not well organized. But I guess it’s something we’ll have to live with for now. So, someone suggested Baycity, as the base background city for this endeavor. it might be to the projects advantage, if individual authors, or teams, tackle a city independently. If the authors, or teams are in a current champions campaign, they might be able to adapt things to their power levels. If it is important to offer different power levels to beginners, then why not treat the power levels, like big league baseball, with small cities being the farm teams, and the big cities being the big leagues? All in all what we need are clean professional, edited, colorful, inexpensive, and easy to understand adventures suitable for beginners. Physical product would be nice but unfortunately, the FLGS, may not be a option anymore, so PDF, organized for print on demand would still be the way to go.

Well Chris, why would you need higher power levels if these thin adventures are directed towards beginning players? Sure I guess we can have higher power levels, but I think that those would be one offs, or specific power levels with three, four, five books linked to a longer adventure. The other approach is to pile on opposition, adding combatants in response to the power levels of the player characters. This is how I used to do it but I was not afraid of large massed battles. And no I didn’t use the clay pigeon style opposition. Wargamer, remember?

It will take a very compelling IP to knock Tolkien off his pedestal. Game of Thrones almost did it, as they had a fairly popular RPG for a while, and then the disastrous 8th season killed any further interest in it and it vanished. You just need and IP without Elves, that is popular. On the other hand, they seem to be adding several waves of furries to 5e. Could that be worse?

That sounds about right. Excellent idea. So what would a “set version “ of Champions 6th look like? No toolkit, one book? I am sure sections of text from Champions Complete could be used if permitted to reduce the work load.

According to my players, I had just replaced Elves with Large, long lived, warlike Therapods with swords. They wern't really as they had their flaws, but they were long lived and tactically clever within their limits, and could take a lot of damage. I did have Elves in the campaign but they were avoided as they were so Alien.

Exactly. Besides Australia doesn't exist, right?

So, then we are agreed that we should put out thin adventure books around a loosely defined campaign background that Hero Already owns, and that is after a highly edited version of Champions Complete? so as to fill in things in small, easily digestible chunks over time? This seems plausibly achievable. Anything else? Am I missing anything?

Because I never read anything Tolkein wrote past The Hobbit, My knowledge of Middle Earth is mostly from the movie trilogy. My inspirations have always been historical at their base, usually with the serial numbers filed off, but you can tell, because of character names, what sort of culture folks are from. The Current Campaign is early Byzantium. Previous Campaigns borrowed heavily from 1400s-1500s Europe. I have wanted to do something with Persia, but I need to do a lot more reading on that Low to no magic works, but you may have to address healing rates, or the players get extremely Risk Averse, because while they won't die (It's Hero after all), spending time bed ridden, and out of the action causes players to tune out, look at their phones, or not show up. The die rolls in an epic combat eventually go against the PCs. Otherwise the games tend to be pretty engaging. Adventure construction, though becomes kind of critical. Depends on the set up, but I can see the negative attraction to set ups like that. Who's power fantasy is thos? THE GMs, or the Players? Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Pathfinder just have a mapos of Golarion, and some Kingdome names, names of capitals, and vague descriptions to start out with, and it was up to the Adventure Paths to fill out the individual kingdoms? The Mummy's Mask did a fine job of filing out Osirion, and the Emerald Spire not only filled in a fairly blank spot on the map, but also illustrated the expansionistic nature, and bureaucratic excellence of the Cheliax. Other Adventure Paths which I have not seen, have detailed out a fair amount of the globe. Again. I think this is, or should be the model for Champions Adventures moving forward. Once upon a time I was a player in Paul Gazis' 8 Worlds Campaign. [ http://paulgazis.com/EightWorlds/index.htm ] The feel of that game was a bit more 16th -17th century sociologically and their tech level was at the top, quite a bit lower than the Imperium was. The "Empire" had fallen and most places had disconnected from each other, so the game was just 8 worlds in a trading relationship, and he had a couple of alien races. I do remember that space combat was nigh unto lethal, so you would try to avoid it, because you would place your character in a section of the ship. and then you would roll to see what section of the ship got hit by successful missile or projectile attack. Then you would roll to see if you you were hit by shrapnel, or a direct hit. If hit directly. Roll a new character. It was a very unique, and somewhat blackly humorous campaign. Run by a (now retired) Engineer working for Nasa, Physics could be deadly, and without Gravetic technology, lets say Maneuvering was conservative in that Universe. So yes one could build anything from the basic three books. However that was then, and this is now, where people do not have the time, or inclination or willingness to buck authority to homebrew these days. I contemplated running Traveller lately, after our other GM ran it for about a year. If I did, to ramp up quickly, I would use the current Third Imperium, and get a couple of Adventures and Boom! ready to go. Being a bit of a Browncoat, yes, I have heard of that. and his background, much like Paul Gazis' 8 Worlds, the tech level was lower than the Third Imperium. Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller, feels like a cleaner version of Classic Traveller. It's pretty harsh, but unless you have put yourself into static Firing range conditions, it's very hard to hit anything, especially when it's moving. Using Hero for Traveller seems to work fairly well. Well.... yeah.... it happened with our recent run of Traveller. Once you purchase a ship, you kind of have to pay the mortgage on it, Sooo... In those situations Adventures happen to you rather than something the crew seeks out. You need to have the proper players for this. (generally math savvy grognards, that like to roleplay negotiations and brokerings, but it's not a game for the young and passionate. I'm sometimes the opposite. I like playing non-humans on occasion. I'll read everything about them, and try them out. I've been in games with mixed crews of Human and Vargr in Traveller. I won an old D&D contest at a convention playing Hector the Hippogryph. I just want Hero, or a similar rules set. I like a little it crunchy. I want some game in my RPG, not so much an interactive narrative.

Harn is being run on the Hero Discord Server, using Hero, 8pm Eastern, on Saturdays.

In some ways I wish I still was. But the "heart" of the group did not wish to participate in games with lethal consequences any more, and without the "heart" the rest of the group drifted away. Soon after 9-11 happened, and I became the angry emotional one. We remained in contact somewhat, but then I moved to Los Angeles. That was the end of my face to face gaming. Only since 2014 or 5 that I started gaming again on Roll20.

I don't think you are going to win this one, unless you Home brew everything. It's like the use of certain Damage rules. Like the cartoon about it shows, once you remove someone's hand at the wrist, the table may be empty the following week. Armor is part of the background, correct, but the background is part of the game, and players will try to get an advantage any way they can in the game to avoid taking debilitating damage or dying. How I handled this was l used sectional armor and hit locations, and the armor would have END penalties above a certain weight, cost money, so people would get plates to cover high stun and body multiplier area, and chain mail over the rest. People ended up looking like the Bayeux Tapestry knights, rather than the 12th century knights, who's armor really only works on horseback. anything without hit locations, then just becomes an over all X value of armour, and then why not the maximum value of X?