Scott Ruggels

From out Sunday D&D 5e game.
We solve the puzzle and walk through a portal into what appears to the the plane of law.  Around us are Monodrones, a few duodrones, and a couple of tri-drones. They bid us to halt, and because of the helmet, Caira was wearing, she hears, that Until the agreement is set, none shall pass. We hand them a notepad and a pencil. The agreement was that a follower of Bahamut and a follower of Tiamat had to walk through this area together.  Arjahn is a 17th level Paladin of Bahamut, and Caira is a follower, almost a priestess of Bahamut (but took sorceress instead).  The two of them walking in the lead, look at each other and shrug.  Next in line, Kotulich our ranger and Keros,  our Rogue, simultaneously pull out  Tiamat holy symbols that they have kept since the third session of this campaign, when we fought Tiamat cultists in Baldur's gate,  back in their first level. They have been hiding and keeping these for just such an emergency for more than a couple of years real time.  Arjahn and Caira look back at them in shock, and the Monodrones form up into ranks on either side, and the Tri-drones command them to escort us to the second portal, when is activated. Arjahn and Caira are quite wroth, but will not cause a scene until we get home. Keros and Kotulich just smile and march behind The two Bahamut followers. 

From the Pathfinder demo game at GhenghisCon, where I was playing a combination of the Muppet Mad Bommber and a drug dealer - i.e., a Goblin Alchemist. We'd been secretly hired by a dwarf's mother to ensure he didn't get killed while going on an Adventure. 
 
Dwarf: Welcome, welcome, I'm glad to see you all here, answering the Call to Adventure!
Fumbus the Goblin: Pay double or we tell mum what you doing
 
The party trudges off into the swamps of Mwangi, where among other things are Grippli horticulturists, panthers, and giant leechs mutated by the aforementioned Grippli's alchemical fertilzer. But at least we rescued the amphibious fellow, even if his experiments aren't volatile enough for Fumbus' tastes. 
 
Fumbus: pulls out a glass bottle that's glowing orange and vibrating slightly Alchemical Fire.... verrrrry unstable. aHAahahahahahah!!!!! throws it into melee
 
Fumbus: prodding the Grippli in the vest Frogboy owes Fumbus big time 
 
Fumbus: Fruit not explode. Meh. Frogboy SOFT.
 
Fumbus: Fumbus make dinner. holds up the fistful of footlong venomous chilopds he's been collecting as the day progressed Centiiipeeeeedes.
 
The party Monk need a Perception boost. 
 
Fumbus: psst. Come here. holds the monks' wrist out horizontally and taps out a line of white powder Snort this. 
Monk: does so, suspiciously
Fumbus: Mwangian Marching Powder. Good stuff. First dose free.
 
The group's halfling bard attempts to inspire us.
 
Bard: singing, supposedly be corAAaEgous
Monk: What the hell are you singing??
Bard: Attempts to loom intimidatingly  EVeryONES a Criiitiiiiic
 
Fumbus also kills one of the giant mutant leeches with a flask of slow-acting acid. 
 
Fumbus: the leechs screams and thrashes and dies AHAAhahaHAAHAHAAHA. And now dinnertime - leech ceviche!

The  presence of the Wizard(s) makes it necessary for some specialized craftsmen.

Book Binders will be busy making folios for the Wizards, and binding notes, and such.
 
A Blacksmith is a given, but tool makers, Glass Blowers and lens grinders will be needed for the instrumentation for the wizard's  experimentation, same with white smiths making small instruments. Tinsmiths for containers, and the like. 

You may see a  specialist trade company, trading in refined materials for these craftsmen, and then trading back refined tinctures and the bulk biproducts that the Wizard(s), plus a side industry in surplus production. 
 
This would make for a very "middle class" sort of  population in the town with a large population of professionals, and a very happy group of farmers that can charge up their produce in the markets.
 
masons would consult with the Apprentices to line the roadways and arrange the buildings in such a way to make the town more defensible with the methods that the Wizard uses.

Depending on the game, I will take, or avoid the leadership situations, and in most cases, it's the character I have created. in D&D if I am playing a Paladin, of course I will take a leadership role.  If playing a rogue, I wont, and just sort of fade back into the scenery. 
 
Being 0nline often removes a lot of the crosstalk that used to be prevalent in face to face games. This can be both a blessing and a curse.

Sidekick.
 
I know there is HSBRB for 6e (really wish we'd kept the name Sidekick, though), but the company itself has proven that you can publish a workabke rules set in far, far fewer pages than the current edition- or any editiin since 3e, really.

I've been noodling around with Champions Lite for a while. It's missing a lot of the more complicated Powers (no Adjustment or Mental Powers, for one thing), but it's definitely shows the power of the full system.

Skip back to Justice Inc or DI for that; update to the current mechanics where there are changes. 
 
though I also get that something like that, published currently, would be ideal....
 
 

That is a game that was completely false advertising.  They claimed it was a sea going adventure, but the sea part and the ship part was ludicrous.  Pure false flag. 
 
I haven't opened my Kickstarter book since the crushing disappointment of the lie.
 
it may be a fantastic Three Musketeers type political intrigue game, but a half dozen pages graced with a half a$$ed list of ship names is not even close to a seafaring swashbuckling RPG.
 
I hate being scammed.

I kinda like the "Kyser Soure" option. Murte is truly dead, but everyone acts like he is alive for reasons.

Here's a sample of a few pages

I saw CNM as "Image". I had no issue making characters though a little one dimensional since normally the Hero powers were really there. Th idea of a universal plug and play system is nice, heck we play Hero - the problem was like the WinModem. More fiddle to get it to work. I remember one big issue with CNM is it had v5 on the front so many thought it was 5th Edition.
 
Next year (83-23) will be my 40 years of playing Hero, IN July as well.

I I recall correctly the outrage was 5th Ed was promised and this wasn’t true Champions but a hybrid. I don’t think the Internet would’ve helped it.

I seem to remember something about that.  But I can clearly remember among the gamers in my area the big thing was the game was incomplete.
Physically. 
You actually could not play.  At all.
You could not actually make a character.  At all.
Take Champions Complete.  Cut the binding, remove pages 42 to 129.  Throw them away and rebind what is left. Sell. 
 
And there you have what happened with Fuzion. 
 
I can remember several games from board games to RPGs to wargames that were put out in the late 90's that were unplayable because they were simply incomplete. 
 
For Fuzion we would hear people talking as if they had played the game and we always thought they were lying because we could open the rulebook and there was no actual way to make a character.  
 
I personally believe that it would have had more of a chance if there had been a way to communicate directly with the publisher in real time.

Humm...
 
I'm wondering if they would allow for making Enimie books again? I have a few ideas in my brain (Here They Be Serpents for a batch of new VIPER Dragon Branch members, etc...)

The Hero System will not survive a 2020's revision. Either that or it won't be The Hero System.

The problem of 2020s is the lack of patience to the screen addicted audience. The usual response to this is mechanical minimalism, usually accompanied with a more shared narrative control systems.  Putting these in, will break the backwards compatibility of the system, due to differences in the mechanics, and the assumptions. Focusing the next edition to the younger audience means making things more performative, due to the outsized influence of Matt Mercer.

For many of us, these high Narrative, minimal mechanical systems, aren't "games", they are "shared storytelling" which, again, for some of us are highly unattractive, and bear no relationship to classic Hero. The 6th Edition may be too far into the crunch, but it's still The Hero System, and backwards compatible mostly.  Even a modest push in the "modern" direction, like Champions Now, broke backwards compatibility, especially with it's narrative emphasis, and taking the game off the boards and moving combat into "Theater of The Mind". 
 
The Problem also with a 7th Edition, is "Who is going to write it?"  We would need someone to keep the system fun. Fun to read, and fun to play (like 4th Edition).

Personally, I am thinking that the Chimera project is not a wise expenditure of funds, when what Champions, or any of the sub rules need is something "big", that has almost a campaign sized adventure, a spray of adventure seeds, and a stack of written up villains, and monsters, for the adventure. Duke Bushido had something like this with an adventure  in one of the threads here.  What needs to be done is to produce more adventures with villains, and equipment.  We can't assume that all the GMs are Home Brewers like they have in the past. Because it's in the past, it's not in the way GMs do things now.

The sad thing is, Dean, that you are one of our few authors who could create a "well-designed" setting. And of course you know how much work and how thankless (and non-financially lucrative!) that is.

Michael Surbrook has other things to do. Scott Bennie has his horrible health issues. And of course, Aaron Allston is no longer with us.

I'll acknowledge Christopher Taylor and others who are still in there plugging away. We need more of that. (Looks in mirror, guiltily. Where's my stuff?)

There's no special sauce that will bring HERO into the big leagues, of course, but something that really grips and inspires people would help.

The standard Hero fantasy settings are a bit too generic for my tastes. There's a contradiction between providing "what people expect" (Elves and Orcs and Dwarves, Oh My!) and providing something that isn't just yet another version of the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk or Fill-in-the-blank.

Hmm. I wonder if there isn't something lurking in Aaron Allston's notes on his Mythic Greece game(s). Bronze weapons and chariots are probably a bit specialized - steel and horses are probably a bit more accessible - but an Age of Heroes, city-states, and buttinski deities could be interesting.

It would need adventures though, and lots of them.

That's one thing D&D has - the dungeon conceit. It makes no sense, but going down a hole in the ground, killing monsters and taking their stuff is really basic, understandable and fun. I find it a bit dull these days - I'm a bit old for it, probably - but what else is there that has the same appeal? Sitting around pretending to talk to cardboard cutouts doesn't do it either.

Simplifying character creation isn't too hard once you have a setting, and thus a finite number of options. There's a point at which something like the Champions Character Creation Cards would become possible.

Oh, don't get me wrong, D&D was always a bad game - it's saved from being the worst TTRPG of all time by the existence of things like Spawn of Fshawn and FATAL - it's just that, out of that load of fetid dingos' kidneys, its 4th edition was the least fetid.
 
I'm never dismayed at the range of experiences people report having with RPGs, from treasured experiences playing terrible games like D&D, to hellish experiences playing good ones like Hero. 
A good enough GM can salvage anything, and a bad enough one (or a single malicious player, or even just a bad day) can ruin anything.

LOL
The gaming world never ceases to amaze me.  One persons treasure is anothers garbage.  For me 4e D&D was easily the worst experience in TTRPG I was ever exposed to since I played my first game in the late 70s. 
 
And yet for some it is their favored game. 
 
And the world turns 🤔

Heh, Hero was so far ahead of its time there's no difference.
 
Not entirely joking.  Like, 4e D&D was the most flexible, most-nearly-balanced, version of D&D ever, and it did it by dipping it's toes in powers with special effects. 
 
I suppose it's also worth noting that 5e D&D achieved great success by reaching all the way back to its earlier forms and ditching all the best stuff from 3e & 4e.

The Hero System will not survive a 2020's revision. Either that or it won't be The Hero System.

The problem of 2020s is the lack of patience to the screen addicted audience. The usual response to this is mechanical minimalism, usually accompanied with a more shared narrative control systems.  Putting these in, will break the backwards compatibility of the system, due to differences in the mechanics, and the assumptions. Focusing the next edition to the younger audience means making things more performative, due to the outsized influence of Matt Mercer.

For many of us, these high Narrative, minimal mechanical systems, aren't "games", they are "shared storytelling" which, again, for some of us are highly unattractive, and bear no relationship to classic Hero. The 6th Edition may be too far into the crunch, but it's still The Hero System, and backwards compatible mostly.  Even a modest push in the "modern" direction, like Champions Now, broke backwards compatibility, especially with it's narrative emphasis, and taking the game off the boards and moving combat into "Theater of The Mind". 
 
The Problem also with a 7th Edition, is "Who is going to write it?"  We would need someone to keep the system fun. Fun to read, and fun to play (like 4th Edition).

I have three books covering the history of central Asia that are almost indistinguishable from fantasy novels.  There's two millennia of dynasties, war, intrigue, trade, and religion that in U.S. popular culture gets watered down to "Mongols and Genghis Khan". 

I would love to see a Silver and Iron age set for Champions - on the ground of Strike Force where it shows the genre and how to adapt Hero to it (and not the other way around).
 
Several things I'd enjoy seeing even if it broke some things into multiple books.

I'm on the other end of all that.
 
I'd just like to see one of the older editions re-published with a note that says "okay; our bad.  That was a bit much.  Sorry about that."   
 
Clean up a couple of inconsistencies, and some stuff for mapping and tracking large-scale combats, in case that's your thing (it's not mine, but my players are about 50/50 on it, and I admit that it lets you simulate a lot of things like naval battles, etc).
 
 
 
Now up-front, I'm going to say that I am so tired of this conversation (we're at a point where it rolls around every eight to ten weeks, it seems) that I'm not going to go into any defense or detail to the following statement:
 
 
My biggest reason for my lack of interest in the "fixes" offered by the last two editions is that I have yet to find anything that proves to me there was something that was actually broken.
 
"Points value" and "but he gets X or Y without A and I can't if I B" don't specify there is a problem with the system.  Because one thing has an advantage over another doesn't mean that the game is broken or that it is not "perfectly universal."  "Everything should cost the same when it effects the same" or whatever the arguments are that now all Characteristics cost the same--
 
it's all nonsense.  There is absolutely no amount of STR that perfectly equates to a given amount of SPD; there is no amount of DEX that can substitute for 22" of teleport; no FLT is equivalent to X Mind Control---
 
Yes; there are numbers involved, and costs involved, and that's that.  The fact that they can be made to cost the same or to cost different does not imply that any of them should, or that they are more or less "fair" or "equal" at given cost points.  It's a fantasy pipe dream that these different things have a point of equivalence somewhere, and everyone was so taken with the math itself that the actual _need_ was never considered.
 
Just like the cost of STR / cost of HTH attack debate.  There.  We have it "perfectly even" now, somehow, I guess.  Until someone buys STR with two limitations on it.  Uh-oh!  He's getting his damage cheaper!  Back to the revision board!
 
It's---
 
no.  I really have lost interest in even continuing the conversation.  It's too late to stop the ever-expending rules in their quest for a fictitious perfection, but I would really like to just scrap the whole thing and back up to when it was still fast, light, and fun.
 
Good night.

These should help. 
https://www.liquisearch.com/music_of_detroit/hardcore/1980s_-_1990s
 
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/michigan/articles/from-motown-to-8-mile-the-music-of-detroit-michigan/
 
https://glass.hfcc.edu/2016/03-06/evolution-electronic-music-detroit
 
And my mistake, Prince was from Minneapolis.