Scott Ruggels

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

Yes, exactly. Thank you for this, Duke. This illustrates the problem of that legalistic mind set. Why going past 4th or even 3rd edition is getting pointless. 

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

I started out with chainmail moved on to D & D but just before Champions was released a friend and I began to create our own system. (we felt betrayed by promises made by D & D and not kept.) When champions came out we saw that it could easily adapt to other genres and we did so. Then Justice Inc. , Fantasy hero were released and I have never gone back to D & D. At this point I will never go back. 

Last weekend, we had a battlemap game where various heroes (not in any supergroup) got together at a park to protect a park statue from being stolen from villains. Among these villains is one of the campaign's most powerful bricks: Armageddon. This brick is from an old book "Trouble for HAVOC" (although he no longer has an 8 Spd!). Anyways, my detective character minifig is closest to him; I decided to have him go up against him and I say aloud, "This is nuts, but my character's going for Armageddon."  Really, one hit from this brick and my character will go down.

Here's where I pull off a few brilliant moves: my detective character has Cinematic Brawling. So, I delay until Armageddon is ready to attack, then use the Eye Gouge attack and blind him for 5 phases. He's blinded and misses. Next attack phase, I use Hoise & Heave and throw him away from me. This allows another character to use a blinding light (Darkness ) on Armageddon when he can see.
 
In the meanwhile, my detective turns on another supervillain who throws things to entangle heros. My 6's move is to make a half-phase up to him from behind and clear his throat. When the villain turns around, my detective slaps him in the face saying, "That's for attacking a woman."  Next phase, my character delays until the villain reaches for his chemical ball to entangle my detective so I use Disarm on him and he drops the ball, entangling himself.  (Every villain we fought, we found out later, had Unluck!)

Quite frankly, I thought my detective character was going to be *splat* quickly but somehow, quick thinking made him shine in the other character's eyes.

Steve Goodman gave us Bulldozer, amongst other characters.

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

Ahh the Late Steve Goodman. He was a regular at Hero games and was famous for rules hacks. He played more Fantasy Hero than Champions, but he was a member of The Guardians. Very chill guy and a font of information. I’ll raise a shot glass of Glenlivet in his memory. 

Honestly? 
 
Quite possibly right here on this board. Browse around some old threads and see how many times some build or other is disagreed with because it doesn't include Chemical X, which it must have, because it can potentially do a thing that is entirely of the wheelhouse of Chemical X. 
 
Remember the old Swinging power, before it got folded into a more annoying version of Flight?  Remember how it said 'character is assumed to have an appropriate swingline'?  Not on this board, but way back when chat rooms were still a thing, I watched a five-way argument amongst GMs as one GM was recounting something a particularly quick-witted player had done.  I don't remember all the details (just that I found the detractors really annoying), but rather than focus on the clever thing, they siezed on the part where the character cut his swingline to drop onto a trio of mooks, finished them off with some knuckles, and then proceeded to use the cut length of the swingline to tie up the mooks as he radioed his teammates. 
 
These guys argued for over an hour before I got sick of it and left- if any of those guys was one of you guys, please do tell me how it ended. 
 
The argument was that it was impossible for this character to do that because he did not have entangle. 
 
It was impossible to use a bit of rope to tie up mooks because that would be entangle, and he did not buy entangle. 
 
I believe we have all seen similar stuff here on this very board.  This is exactly the mindset that lead to the creation of the Power Skill, when you get down to it.  "well, it makes sense that his inferno cone _would_ set the hay bales on fire, but dang it, that's a Transform, and he didn't buy that.  I've got to make sure he pays _something_ to do things like this...." 
 
When you look for official answers, you are often referred to specific skills or powers-- let's face it, you can't go wrong by the book if you can find something in the book that you can specifically point towards, right? 
 
All of that reinforces the idea that every ability must be paid for, and that off-label useage is completely forbidden.  
 
In the long run, this is hurting the game: it is leading to more and more hyper-specificity and more and more "can't must never only always" in the rules. 
 
Worst of all, it is just another thing to point out from the outside as more 'proof' that this game is too complex, to precision, too demanding to be worth picking up. 
 

I have played in a 5e campaign a few years back. We had a blast. Most games can be great if you like the players around the table with you. 

I'd make an Elon Musk joke, but it turns out that Musk is over. It's all Biden now and I don't want to make Simon cross. 

From what I remember, yes it was a player centric movement, but it wasn't so much about Cruel GM's as it was a reaction against Cruel Dice, and the ubiquity of dice based resolutions. The first system I remember coming out was Amber Diceless. It seems to be a reaction against bad due rolls ruining their character's star moment.  IT was also against the disposability of characters in early D&D in low levels.  (Uncharitably, is was a reaction from whiney actor types that didn't get or like the mechanics, which led to minimalism).

Fixed.  "become”.  Autocorrect is my bane. 

Yes and no. No, in that you need another program to launch it from a Windows 3.1 emulator.  Once you have the emulator, it rung quickly in its 320x240 SVGA glory.  I did this on my old machine and it worked, but I had to print to disk, as the printer drivers bear no resemblance to what modern printers require.  But the program still produces BBB legal characters, and I much prefer the BBB 3 Collumn format for character sheets, if I could get them to print. 

I always assumed it was because some people found it easier to suck up to the game master than to learn a game system.

Sure.
 
That's the brilliance at the core of Champions - you don't buy what you do or how you do it, but what you accomplish. 
 
Flying across town, whether eagle form or jet pack or self-TK, is just flight.
 
If some other aspect of to the special effect is something you want - like rending talons or TKing someone else - you buy those things, too, or they're glossed over, ignored or explained away.
 
 
And that was, like, 1981.  Other games were all "should armor deflect or reduce damage? How can multiclassing work better?  Classes or skills? Can I play a Balrog?" And Champions just casually cracked how to do a universal system.
 

Can't speak for anyone else but I dislike rules-light systems because they're basically improv with little enforcement of PC balance, internal consistency, or physics.
 

IF you are doing street level,  some 80's Daredevil, from the Frank Miller/ Ann Nocenti run would give you an idea of what can be done to the protagonists and also how deeply they can get involved with the NPCs and villains. I second the  nomination of Marv Wolfman's run on Teen Titans, with George Perez.  Verrrry soap opera. 

IF you are doing street level,  some 80's Daredevil, from the Frank Miller/ Ann Nocenti run would give you an idea of what can be done to the protagonists and also how deeply they can get involved with the NPCs and villains. I second the  nomination of Marv Wolfman's run on Teen Titans, with George Perez.  Verrrry soap opera. 

I put some of the blame on the decline in comic-book reading. That's where all the conventions of the genre were laid down. Movies, and even TV shows, can't provide the depth and breadth of understanding that comes from growing up reading a range of superhero comics, living with the characters and their adventures.
 
Mind you, I don't think would-be supers players would benefit if they actually read the majority of dreck being published today.  😖

It seems that Hadbro’s misstep has been observed by investors:
 
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/hasbro-dilutes-magic-the-gathering-brand-stock-price-bank-america-2023-2?utm_source=reddit.com

At 48:25 comes the heavy Virtue signaling. It seems also he avoided  the whole Chris Kayo (sic) issue. I neglected to post D&D Short's  discussion of his communication with WoTC Employees. He's correct that the D&D community will have to watch WoTC's actions, rather than their words moving forward. 

Recognizing that we're talking science fiction here so you're free to ignore pieces of known physics as you choose ... it's pretty well established now that gravity propagates at the speed of light.  The gamma-ray (light) signal arrived less than two seconds following the gravity-wave signal from GW170817, which means that the two different types of waves travel at the same speed to better than 1 part in 10^14.  Given that the neutron star merger took a little bit of time to splash matter out into the surrounding space (where the debris would become large enough, and be hot enough, to make gamma rays visible across intergalactic distances), the 1.7 second interval between the two signals provides a very hard limit on how different the speeds can be.