Scott Ruggels

Hey! I got Cats! A friend of my Sister in law had a surplus of kittens,, so I took two. Meet the ne members of the family. No names, yet, but thinking about it. The Little Girl: The even smaller, but more adventurous male.

I could do art, maybe. Not a lot of time for volunteer projects at the moment. Lockdown has had me surprisingly busy.

One of my favorite characters to play. Sorry XD. Explosive AOEs. Yaaay!

Why I don’t play magic users usually. Add levels, dex, skills,and knowledge skills, so my warrior remains fresh. XD.

Well, you could, but, the GM (me) would probably disallow it.

Upload (Amazon Prime). Software developer is fatally injured in a self driving car accident, and his consciousness is uploaded, by his girlfriend, into a “digital heaven”, that like any mmo, has glitches. Humorous, but deeper than the commercials portray. Waco (Netflix), a surprisingly even handed drama about the Branch Davidian stand-off. Based on two books by participants. Avatar:The Last Airbender (Netflix). I did not see this show in first run. So on a friend’s recommendation, I have started watching it. Surprisingly dense, and balanced story for a supposed kids show. Good for ideas for FH.

My weekends are taken up with a couple of games on Roll 20.net. There was a 5e game which became Savage Worlds. The other game is 5e D&D. During the week, no games yet, but I am using the time to produce scenery assets for Brennall’s TTS module. Interestingly, there are a few Herosystem games starting up soon.

Hero Creator will work in Win 10 if you just rag it onto a drive, rather then perform an install. Have used it occasionally until I bought HD.

Correct. Heromaker.exe was what came with 4e. It produced the most beautiful 3 column character sheets. I worked on it, but it’s mostly Nicky Robinson’s work.

Star lost was shown on Sunday afternoons on KRON TV, as was pre- Tom Baker Dr. Who, they were comparable effects wise, though Starlost always had the cheap and cheesey video. The ship itself you could tell was about 14 feet long, and video cameras of the time had severe depth of field issues. Unlike Dr. Who, Starlost was slow plodding and talky. The sets had minimalist dressing and the acting was uneven. Things had an unrehearsed, live TV feeling, but at least it wasn’t sports or community service programming.

I read far too much SF, and was a Geology nerd in school ( not much math in geology, and was fascinated by the concept of rocks telling stories), so I conceptually can’t accept non naturalistic geography. Savage Earth I can. Impact craters I can, just not the Flat earth, supported by four elephants on the back of a turtle sort of abstraction. In the words of another thread it breaks the immersion for me. If that’s your thing, though, play on.

Not your fault. No worries.

Dammit!! I am a bit frosted RL about just hearing about this. Steve and I were both members of Aaron Alston’ “Rogues Gallery”, Hero system APa back in the 90’s He later became editor when Aaron stepped down. I sugared a write up in RG of my favorite Champions character after, following on of Aaron’s prompts. The he Character was a military powered armored suit named Sgt. S. M. A. S. H. It stood for Suit, Man Amplification, Standard, Heavy. A member of two Bay Area based super team. He’s free to use this, as it is just an RPG character, nothing was ever registered, but I am miffed. That’s all.

Yes, absolutely. If a campaign is just Cartoon Fantasy, then my mental involvement is minimal until combat, and even then I might have a browser tab open and have to be verbally reminded that it is now my turn. However, a good and deep piece of world building gives me enough to lace my character tightly into the background and adds immersion. Immersion sparks much better role play. There is a vast difference between glib and clever. Smug GMs often confuse the two. Look how the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin has aged so Badly. It also manifests with players giving Characters joke names. I have strict “ no joke characters” rule, when I run. Definitely agree here. Lax or lazy GM there. With D&D Beyond, one can generate a new character in less than 30 minutes, so why allow “Gary, son of Harry, brother of Larry, who just died in a pit trap in the 13th level of this dungeon the party is in”? An old time GM of mine used to rip character sheets of dead characters to prevent duplication. He got complaints and stopped, eventually. The Dunning - Kruger effect. I know at least that there is a ton of stuff I know nothing about, especially anything dealing with accounting and and financial stuff, but I still have a love of trade and commerce subjects. However, if I have a player knows something about a subject then, I draft them to write up a system for the game. Hero players seem to often do this or they did in the past , and the pre-internet gaming alas used to have lots of these systems shared among the members. One should not allow one’s self to believe their ego, and conduct their games as if they were all knowing, and infallible gods.

For me and a few of my friends this is fun. I groove on world building. With lockdown, I am playing a lot more D&D online. This has me thinking about economics, commerce, and trade for a couple of campaigns, one for FH another for Star Hero. So there is a lot of discussion about such systems, because most of my friends prefer sandbox campaigns to narrative based ones.

not 34 months, but 3-4 months. My place isn't big enough for 34 months unless I fill my office with them.

The Amazing Mary Jane comic really does get Mary Jane right, and involved Hollywood as a story element.

This may look to be something really good. Damn I hope this works out.

I wish...

I do like your cost breakdown for Transform Self. Try some builds and point costs for suggested advantages and limitations (no Fringe, is probably a good one to add.)

So, we did grow up watching the same cartoons. 😆 For those who are uninitiated: I would say this is so. A super power superseded a skill in terms of its "thoroughness" of purpose. Disguise has to be plausible. Shapeshift does not. And to continue, if the rules say you cannot perceive the shifter as shifted, with a Perception role, but figure it out by other means, well yeah Some Northern Canadian Superhero's base is going to have a bad summer. Having to buy ones "human consciousness" back after shifting is kind of against comic book precedent, but the detect by other means does play into the comic tropes. "Why did that dog run to the radio room?" "Why is that bird pecking at the morse key?" "Hey that small monkey is flipping the switch to the roll up door!" Behaving "out of character' for the animal, would be how to detect. But Dr. Brainmelter probably has psychic detectors all around his hide out, to detect invisible heroes by their brain energy, would also be able to detect a "life form" with Human Brain energy. so there are ways around it. Two final notes. Mystique first appeared in Ms. Marvel #16 in 1978. But she was a re-occurring villain in Chris Claremont's run of the X-Men for several years. She can appear as anyone, not anything, so just has a really really high disguise roll (Disguise as power). While Farique is just an Elephant )or any other animal) with obviously human intelligence. The second Point. In the future, can people please cite the rules for the power on the first page? Please?

Animation for figures is cool but not necessary. Yes you can learn it, but good figures require artistic talent. I had been working in the video game industry for 30 years, as a character artist/animator and I still have things to learn. Making a poseable character is the same procedure to make an animated character. Blender can do it all, and quite well. But then it is up to your artistic talent to make the character to look good. That you can also improve through learning, but the speed of that depends on your affinity with anatomy and proportion. Scenery is much easier, and you can use blueprints.

I used to play A Lot of systems, before I found Hero. After Hero, it was R. Talsorian Games, that I GM’d for the company. My taste for Superheroics declined precipitously after high school. But I stuck with Hero. I have played Prowlers & Paragons and it’s sort of Hero light, but the combat is far to simplified for my taste. It’s a bit too “theater of the mind”, and has a Bennies or Force Points system, so the game rarely feels like a challenge. Savage Worlds works fairly well as a narrative game, but it’s entirely theater of the mind plus dice for combat. It works great over low to no graphics conferencing systems. But because of the cascading dice mechanic, you can get killed by a baby with a butter knife. We did see a deep one instantly taken out by a .32 pocket pistol. The ebb and flow of the dice though keep things “interesting “.

Seen it a while ago, but up now on Netflix is the comedy, The Death of Stalin it’s funny, but it’s also fairly accurate to the events surrounding the death of the Soviet dictator, and the scramble for succession. Starring a lot of comedic and and character actors.

Yes! Thank you! The bit about growth momentum is why I pray there is never a 7th Edition Hero. It appears that some may have been traumatized by mini-maxers, or have fallen in love with the villains carefully planned traps, but as has been said, no plan survives contact with the enemy. As a GM, I accept I am but one brain in competition with 5-6 other brains at the table, I am going to lose, and I am okay with that. Take your game seriously, but don’t take it personally.