Scott Ruggels

Oh man, so true. Fighting in mid summer SoCal heat required constant water intake. You basically sweat out everything you take in. I would imagine fighting in a long pitched battle all day would be horrendous.

There is also the social complication that might arise from warriors wearing heavy armour within the borders of foreign powers. It might well be seen as declaring an Act of War. This was a huge thing in the various Bushido campaigns that I've played over the years, and could easily be a thing for pseudo-European settings.
 
Also, the odd sea-faring scenario thrown in should mean you wear light armours at best. 

Re: the OP question as to whether or not bows should do less damage (for the Jolrhos Player's Guide specifically) 
 
A Very Heavy longbow does 2d6+1 and has an 18 STR min. That, on average, will bounce from full plate armour's DEF of 8. An above average damage roll (or crit) I assume has just hit at "the right angle" to penetrate. 
 
There won't be many of the populace with 18 STR though so the majority of longbowmen you face are likely to be light to medium bow users; 1d6 - 1 1/2d6, meaning that only the medium bowmen can squeeze 1 pip of BODY through on full plate if they roll maximum damage (or a critical).
 
 
To me, the damage therefore seems about right?
 
 
(I'm a big fan of the optional Bows vs Crossbows rules too; HSEG: Pg 32)

Because if the mad doctor's new pet isn't fed regularly, it is going to go hunting for food on its own...

The stirge-infested darkness beyond the door reveals one main corridor, and a number of collapsed side corridors. Hopefully we won’t have to do any major excavations, because if the ceilings are that unstable it would probably be a very bad idea. Not that the floors are much more stable, since we nearly miss the first pit trap. It’s just as well that Skave has Disable Traps, because none of the rest of us do. 
 
Shev: See how useful you can be when you’re not trying to blow something up? (says the guy carrying blackpowder).
Gonno😘reluctant to point out that Skave just helped us by breaking something*
 
The corridor opens into a large natural chamber, with a somewhat noxious lake, a natural skylight, and a building built into the wall opposite. Skave checks the lake’s depth and acidity, and doesn’t get eaten by a crocodile. 
 
Miya: And there was me expecting a Dead Gazelle moment. 
 
Shev wants to ride across on his rat, but Vokk is reluctant to even enter the water - HIGHLY suspicious. The rapidly approaching ripple in the water even more so. It would appear that giant leeches as well as stirges breed down here. Maybe we're about to get a Dead Gazelle moment anyway.
 
Or possibly not - we dispatch the leech without difficulty. On the other hand, we do find a black-laquered grappling hook on the island from when the cave roof collapsed. If whoever fell off the presumably attached rope fell from a great height, there would surely be other remains, and if the grappling hook lost its grip when they’d just started climbing, why leave the hook?
 
The building built into the wall has an intact door, despite its apparent age and the humidity down here. The bronze is heavily verdigrised, however. It’s also locked. Happily, the key we were given back in Selversgard fits it, so we don’t break down the door to be immediately killed by all the traps. What they didn’t tell us is that there’d be TWO chests. The first that Arram opens contains numerous documents and letters that we politely don’t read, and the second chest impolitely tries to eat us. 
 
Arram: That does happen sometimes.
 
Unfortunately even small Mimics are a serious threat to amateur dungeon-crawlers like ourselves, even without Skave’s contributions to the fight.
 
Arram: If you hit me with one of your grenades again, rat, I’m going to set you on fire. 
Skave: I hit the Mimic too this time!
 
We’re not professionally-inclined to search the entire building, but Gonno does find a large pile of undigested gold coins under the mimic, and also spots furtive movement elsewhere in the cave that we studiously avoid. There’s no point actually looking for more trouble.

Shev: What do you think we are, adventurers?
 
At some point in the next 11 months, Arram finds a treasure map in one of his predecessor’s books.
 
Shev OoC: Save to give to an passing adventurer as a quest reward.
 
Gelvert, despite his melancholy, does survive the winter and in fact appears to be in better health than in recent days, though he continues to let his eldest son, Gelbert, proxy for him on the Council and run the mill. This is especially important as the mayorship passes to him this year.
 
The summer is a cool and wet one, resulting in a surfeit of root vegetables and fat pigs and cows, but a relatively low harvest of grain. There’s also a minor conflict between some of the woodcutters and a faction of the Druids. The Druids claim the cutters felled several trees that were marked for retention, but the cutters deny they were marked. Both sides agree to closer communication in future. This seems to be a perennial argument. Maybe the druids would be more congenial if the villagers pay them to magically enhance the farmers’ fields. 
Several Ysoki arrive to join the warren. One is a low-level witch. Hopefully that means there will be some adorable baby ratties along soon - the ratfok are too short-lived to put off starting a family, and more important Gonno has a shelf-full of alphabet blocks and wooden ducks to gift the children. 
 
Gonno OoC: Although I’ll probably hold off giving them a working trebuchet if they’re related to Skave.
 
Skave manages to blow up his lab.
 
Shev: Brother. Brother.
Miya: He can’t hear you, because of the explosion.
Skave: NOT MY FAULT THIS TIME.
Shev: SKAVE. THIS IS WHY I DO ALL MY EXPERIMENTS WITH BLACK POWDER OUT IN THE WOODS.
 
Skave is actually ecstatic about the explosion - he can now infuse a small amount of his own magical power into his creations.
 
Shev: An expensive discovery, Brother. I assume it gave you key insights into how *not* to create these infusions?
 
Gonno makes an enemy of a woodcarver that accuses the Oread of stealing his designs. Clearly the man is just looking for a fight, and Gonno has no intention of responding in kind, but it bodes ill for the future. 
 
Gonno OoC: I don't want him coming in when I'm out and throwing my tools in the river or my ham in the latrine. That would be irritating. And if he knows I've been squirreling a small fortune away under the floor... (it's not like there's room to hide it inside the anvil with metal-shaping anymore).
 
Miya, on the other hand, discovers that one of the other town founders also had a subterranean secret that bears investigation - an interest in the now flooded mine near Selversgard, and a still-standing offer of ownership of the mine to anyone that can recover the deeds to it. It probably bears more investigation as to why nobody has followed this up before now, but Miya is new in town, and like many small communities she’s going to be considered an outsider for a few more decades yet. 
 
 

*General 'Project Patton Replica' Waves his nanotech swagger stick*
"What if Primus was never formed? Well, son, I'll tell you what would have happened.  America would no longer be that bastion of freedom loved and adored by all right thinking people on this small blue marble we call Earth, NO sir! You weren't there during the Gweenie invasion of the 80s! You think the heroes just HAPPENED onto those deadly aliens? NO, it was PRIMUS that gave them the intell they needed to defeat those hideous space creatures! You think HEROES are the ones putting in the hours to track down whatever island that Nazi bastard Destroyer is setting up as a base this week... what's that? UNTIL? FFFT.. who do you think inspired UNTIL? PRIMUS! That's who! Just like we inspired the French revolutionaries with the far more manly American one! GOD I LOVE AMERICA, and PRIMUS protects AMERICA! Let me tell you something, Son! If not for PRIMUS, America would be a at best a divided slathering mess of regional super powered warlords! Each with their own tyrannical regimes promoting godlessness, and likely dictatorial Communism! You ever have to take dictation from a Commie supervillain? It's the worst! Most of them drink tea. Why tea? Because they're the sort who love a clean harbor more than they love freedom! The bastages! Created Supervillains? BAH! We create more superheroes than we ever did villains! WHat do you think the Silver Avenger program counts as! Oh, and about that registration! We've got folks wanting to protest how we keep that registry who can't remember where they left their car keys, and think 'ihatemyjob' is a good password. They're sure as hell not going to be able to track down the right hero for the right job with a google search! Don't do a search engine on 'stretching services' when you want a metamorph who can go through a narrow tunnel of a VIPER nest so he can access the open gate switch from the nest leader's mistress' powder room! Just don't. You want to know where that stretchy do gooder is for the right call? You ask PRIMUS! And if that stretcher is a real American, by gum, you ask him to stretch, and he'll say 'how far?' Why? because heroes respect PRIMUS... they may grumble and grouse, but in the end, they want us up on that forcewall! Filling out that paperwork so they don't have to. What if Primus never formed? Well then, we might as well start playing soccer and listen to that italian yodeling they call opera to entertain our Mutant Overlords! But PRIMUS did form, and that's why you live in a free America! Or Free enough for government work! Now someone get me a cup of coffee heated by a uranium rod. I've gotten a taste for the blend!!"
 
 
 

I still “think” in Hero, and have ideas for science fiction and modern campaigns in my head.  I intensely dislike minimalist systems, and I leave the table rather than playing them. 
 
The problem I have with Hero is not having any players close by.  Online, the player base skews younger, and anyone born after 1991 is going to have an aversion to crunchy mechanics, as for them, the computer handles the crunch. The dark times of when MTG sucked all the money out of the TTRPG industry broke the habit. 
 
So I do GM, but these days it’s Cyberpunk Red maybe Traveller (Mongoose), but there is only tepid interest in doing anything Hero. As a player, it’s 5e D&D, as that seems to be the only thing other people GM.  At least my Sunday DM homebrew the politics. 
 
But I am still thinking in Hero. 

Artemis will attempt a launch on the 16th of November:
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-moon-mission-go-for-launch-watch-live
 

There is a third option cropping up, with A.I. generated artwork. People using stable diffusion, installed on their desktops, we are starting to see on one of our gaming Discord servers the GMs generating NPC portraits using Stable Diffusion, by citing a few similar artists, to keep the style consistent. This had been a helper for non artistic GMs, but it also has been an impetuous for me to go whole hog into 3D art, lately*.  One of the big attractants is that A.I. art is rights free, So the user of the A.I. art generator can do what ever they want with the art.
 
(* recently I did three pages of vintage style comic art as an [expensive] art commission, and used the proceeds to pay for a new Desktop. However, completing that commission, using the old tools has completely soured me on traditional sketching and drawing. Intellectually, I have been more stimulated by diving into Blender, and getting back into 3D characters, animation, and dabbling in VFX. I am having more "fun" with 3D presently. I do admit it's a lot slower than sketching and drawing, but I would rather go bobbing for French fries, than sketch these days.)

An example of World Building I haven't seen the likes of since the 1990s.
 
 
Artist’s Tumblr: https://iguanodont.tumblr.com/
Artist’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/iguanodentist
 

Last Action Hero: A kid gets a golden ticket, and the movies really come to life for him. (Netflix)
 
Samaritan: An inner-city kid suspects that an elderly neighbor (played by Sylvester Stallone) is a superhero missing for the last 25 years.  I enjoyed it, but my bar was set fairly low. (Prime Video)
 
Land of the Lost: Very loose movie adaptation of the two Saturday-morning series. If I had watched it before, I had forgotten. I don't need to watch it again. (Netflix)
 
Megamind: What happens when a supervillain defeats his superhero counterpart? Worth a re-watch. (Netflix)
 
 

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix.  Easily one of the better cyberpunk-genre animes I've ever seen (and I've seen many--Bubblegum Crisis, Appleseed, and various Ghost in the Shells at least.  Oh, and Altered Carbon Resleeved.).  Strangely vibrant-colored for such a noir setting, though it does nail the dystopian aspects of Night City.  I only played Cyberpunk:2020 a couple of times so I can't speak to whether the game system mattered as much as the background setting, but I strongly suspect it would be easier to stat out the characters and events in Hero than it would be to use C:2020.  Especially given the power level that some of the characters achieve.
 
Anyway, if you like anime and/or cyberpunk sf and can handle subtitles (i.e., you are literate), check it out.  Note that the show is pretty violent, but I've seen worse in anime and Tarantino films.

I found this interesting. Matt Colville talks about how rules should reflect the Tone, Style and Genre of the game.

This made me tear up a bit.  .  .

Kevin Conroy was Batman the way Jeremy Brett was Sherlock Holmes and Devid Suchetg was Hercule Poirot. They became so definitive that when I think of their roles, these are the images I see and the voices I hear.
 
And I can't help but imagine Kevin having the afterlife version of a cuip of tea with Mako and Tony Jay.
 
 

Conroy was at Julliard the same time as Christopher Reeve and Robin Williams was his roommate.  Which means there was a time with Superman, Batman and Robin were altogether.

I dont know, Hugh.  For me, _a lot_ of the 80s and early 90s were spent renting low- or no-budget fantasy movies that built their entire plots around transfereing "life force" or youth or vitality or magical aptitude or souls or-  you name it, and there was C-movie fantasy that was transferring it.
 
 
 

4e was where Transfer started getting ridiculous, as I recall. 
 
AoE Transfer?  Divide the points up between all the targets.
 
Delay the return rate?  Buy it twice if you want both the Drain and Aid aspect to be delayed.
 
Pay for Range (or reduced END) on both the Drain and Aid aspect despite the fact that the Aid aspect does not benefit in the slightest from that Range. (and that Aid was 0 END by default).
 
Maxed out on what you can Aid?  The Drain aspect cuts out.
 
and on and on...
 
Drain/Aid/Transfer kind of shows Hero evolution.  We started with Supers, which had a lot of Drain and Transfer, but Aid was rare. Aid (and Healing) showed up for Fantasy Hero, as these abilities were far more common in Fantasy.
 
If we had started with  Fantasy game, there would likely have been Drain and Aid, but no Transfer.  Then someone would have combined the two in order to build a Transfer, and we would never have considered a separate Power.

More 6e stupidity. Some things should avoid the Tool kit approach and just exist, Like Transfer, and instant change. Now you know why I stuck with 4e.
 
 
Keep Instant Change because it's easier for novice players to understand it, as it's a comic book trope. 

Then again is this Champions or Fantasy Hero?

The "stab a sail and slide down" trick
 
 

There would have to be, else it is not a Limitation.
 

More 6e stupidity. Some things should avoid the Tool kit approach and just exist, Like Transfer, and instant change. Now you know why I stuck with 4e.
 
 
Keep Instant Change because it's easier for novice players to understand it, as it's a comic book trope. 

Then again is this Champions or Fantasy Hero?

Okay, from 4e:
 
Five points to change identity and one set of clothes (both elements are listed).  10 points to change into any set of clothes. Change identity is not listed separately, so my assumption has always been that you must buy the five point level to actually change identities.
 
Curiously, it is not "an additional 10 points," which suggests that a character not wishing to change his identity but simply wanting to be able to instantly change into up to ten different outfits (I have never understood and have largely ignored the 10-sets limitation) may purchase only the 10-point version.
 
I allow appropriate limitations, such as Spiderman's symbiote suit, where "all clothes must be black," and other such things.
 
 
 

I think the reason Instant Change was tossed as a power was because it is as Alton Brown calls it, a "unitasker"; that is, it only really does one thing and Hero is built as a toolkit.  What else does Instant Change do as a power?  Nothing.  So its not a tool, its a power build.  Hence, the Transform-based build, to show how to use a tool to make an interesting and useful ability.  So far so good.
 
But in my opinion stuff like that ought to be done as a quasi-talent, kind of like Transfer could be: here's a commonly-desired power with the wires and tubes all hidden away behind a curtain: Instant Change lets you change your clothes instantly to other clothes for 5 points.  Does it matter in game?  Sure, but not that much. 
 
What does Transfer do?  Take power from them and give it to you.  12 points per d6.  If you want to do something tricky with Aid (multiple powers, slower recovery time etc) then you pull back the curtain and mess with it.