Pattern Ghost

Had some epic moments for sure. Watched it on my older computer monitor after I got off work this morning, and the blacks were just pixelated blobs. I'll have to rewatch it on the TV to see if it at least looks better in that regard, but probably won't. Not much practical difference between blackish pixels and uniform black backgrounds anyway.
 
 

All this discussion makes me think of Wild Cards. They did a pretty good job handling this very situation.

That's an interesting note, Toxxus, but not on the topic that I was replying to, so much, which was when the extreme polarization started. My reply had nothing really to do with the Tea Party movement or its motivations or goals. In fact, I was only using the TP movement to set a time frame.
 
During the Clinton era, the Right-leaning media, the likes of Limbaugh, were starting to ramp up. During the Tea Party era, is when I think the left was starting to really ramp up. This, based solely on my own memory of the levels of rhetoric in the media and from politicians. Whenever it started, I'd say it's definitely snowballed into absurd levels on both sides by now.

I don't reel like there's even a place on the Left↔Right spectrum for my views any more. 

I hadn't heard that one yet.
 
Here's what I found, for others who may not have heard it. From Snopes:
 
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hhs-allow-doctors-to-refuse-lgbtq/
 
Pretty messed up. If you have religious objections to providing medical service to anyone, then you need to find a new line of work.
 
And Severino seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue of gender confirmation surgery (hopefully I used the current terminology this time). There are very well-established protocols leading up to GRS to ensure that it's being used on the right patients* and as far as I know there are less issues with the process than in the past. EDIT: The footnote got sucked into the quote block for some reason, but the part after the * below is not part of the quote, it's my footnote on care standards. I can't edit the quote sections of the new board as the code doesn't show.
 

Alfred  
Aquaman
Ayra Stark
Booster Gold
The Wasp
Thanos the Farmer
Matter-Eater Lad
Swamp Thing

ScarJo did it better IMO

And so it begins . . .
 

They already showed Thenns eating Night's Watchmen, so, I guess not.

Yeah, but you knew what I meant
 
That's the thing though: mechanically, building a character that can shapeshift is no longer a matter of deciding how many different shapes they can assume, it is deciding if they still look like their normal selves in infra red and sonar .  If you just want to look different to normal sight but like yourself to other senses, that's Self Only Images, to my mind.  Or if you want to look like something different to long range radar, ditto.
  
I mean, I can not think of a single example of a shapeshifter that looks like its normal self on sonar but can actually fit through a six inch hole because it is long and thin to the touch group.  That might allow you to do some interesting things but is very very unhelpful if you are trying to actually run a game with a shapeshifter whose player did not think of all that.
 
I mean, they shouldn't have to.  It is a conceit too far and an overlap too far.
 
I like 'sensical' though.  I might steal that.

So, I just want to get this straight. If someone phrases something in a way you associate with some group you have issues with, your reaction is to respond with some sort of passive aggressive spur that I was meant to interpret as an appeal to modify the topics title, plus aspersions that I'm trolling. When I respond with a clarification and invitation to converse your response is to double down on accusing me of trolling, and then inform me that you've classified me as a Nazi (of all things). 
 
I have to wonder...is everything going ok in your life? I don't remember you as being this combative.
 
If you did honestly assume that I was accidentally using phraseology that you consider to be verboten and wanted me to change it to avoid any unintended misunderstanding, a different way to handle it might be to say something like:
 
"The internet meme ', change my mind' has been appropriated, at least in my experience, by some alt-right groups, and you may want to consider rephrasing the topic to avoid any unintended associations."
 
I've not personally encountered the association you mention with the phrase and Neo-Nazism (or other similar groups). I've experienced it as a generalized internet meme. I don't have a problem changing it to something less offensive to you. However I (respectfully) suggest that you consider softening your approach a bit and not be so quick to escalate. 

Long story short, 6th edition is chasing the white whale.  Players have complained about small cost discrepancies with things like figured characteristics.  "Strength is too efficient!"  Yeah... kind of.  Buying your strength up is efficient, except unless you're a brick you're still paying for dice damage that you aren't going to use.  In a 12D6 game, buying a 30 strength isn't abusive, because a 6D6 punch isn't enough to get through anybody's defenses.
 
Buying up primary characteristics to boost figureds tends to result in a small point savings, relative to the overall cost of the character.  A 350 point hero with high primaries may end up saving 20 to 30 points versus a character with lower primaries who bought up his figured characteristics.  This is a real discrepancy, but it's less than 10% of the character's cost.  6th edition separated primaries from figureds, but then they were faced with the idea that maybe figureds were overcosted to begin with.  So Stun and End became a lot cheaper.  But then the cost structure of Endurance Reserve was all screwed up, because you could just buy regular End for really cheap.  The limitation Increased Endurance became an easy way to save points, because the price on that didn't change, but End itself is way cheaper.  Which means that the value of the Charges limitation is all screwed up now.
 
You can't change one fundamental aspect of the system without affecting the others.  And that's what they did in 6th.  Recovery became 1/2 cost, Endurance became less than 1/2 cost.  That means I can pump both those stats up higher than a 5th ed character, and take x2 End cost on all my powers for a -1/2 (or x3 for a -1) for significant savings.  You went from somebody saving 20 to 30 points (between 5-8% of total character cost)  by buying up their primaries to saving between a third and half on their primary power set.  6th edition is rife with problems like that.

I jokingly answered earlier in the thread, but now I'll answer for real.  This is going to come across as kind of rude.  Sorry.  No offense meant to anybody here.
 
 
 
6th edition is inferior because it is designed by a committee, based upon a false promise, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying system.  It's the product of endless tinkering without an achievable goal or a clear direction.  I'll try to flesh out what I mean by all that, but some of it is conceptual and may be rather hard to explain.
 
Everything up to 4th edition was led by the original designers, and there's a logic to how everything was costed.  Power X is about twice as good as Power Y, so it should cost twice as much.  There's a basic concept of balance built into it from the very beginning.  All the powers and characteristics are roughly scaled with one another.  It's not perfectly executed, but it's pretty close.  Moreover, there was a philosophy to how it was balanced.  They valued certain abilities more than others, and so those were costed higher.  These ideas were internally consistent with each other.  Combat abilities are more valuable than noncombat abilities.  Flexible powers are more valuable than those that are more limited.  Therefore these things cost more points.  If you built characters as they intended, and played the game as they intended, it had a wonderful balance.  4th edition Champions was almost perfect.  And again, it was true to its philosophy.
 
Now with a system as complex as Champions, you'll never get a perfect balance.  There are just too many moving bits and pieces, and a powergamer will find the most efficient builds possible, while a person who has never played before will waste points on things that may never come up.  That is unavoidable.  But later editions didn't understand that.  5th edition, 5th edition revised, 6th edition, Champions Complete, all of them have tried to tweak the system to achieve some perfect balance that just isn't possible.  And the biggest problem is, these changes didn't follow the original pricing structure of the system.  The changes were made by people with a different philosophy of how the system should work.  And those changes don't quite mesh with the underlying system.
 
As an example, let's go to 5th edition, written by Steve Long (somewhat prophetically named when you see the size of his manuscripts).  He had his own ideas about how the Hero System should work, and he modified it.  Adders became much more common.  The pricing structure for some powers was changed, but not for others.  And while some of these changes were arguably good, others were not so great.  It was clear that he was seeing the system in a different way from the original authors, but it was a modification of their system and not one built from the ground up with his own ideas.  Long's philosophy appeared to be based around trying to make everything fit around a certain core set of game mechanics.  Instant Change was removed as a Talent and modified to be a "My clothes only" Transform.  Shapeshift was turned into a sense-affecting power.  But one of the most glaring examples here is Damage Shield.  In 4th edition, Damage Shield was a +1/2 advantage you applied to a power.  If anybody touched you, or if you touched anybody, they were hit with that power.  When 5th edition hit, it suddenly required you to purchase the advantage Continuous (+1).  But, you didn't actually get the benefit that Continuous granted, which is that somebody hit with a Continuous power will be affected by it every single phase.  No, you had to pay a +1 advantage tax because now you've got to change your Energy Blast to a Constant power before you can apply Damage Shield.
 
Why is this a problem?  Because it's a different game philosophy stacked on top of the previous one.  While both follow the idea of "you get what you pay for", 4th edition was more focused on comparative effectiveness, whereas 5th added costs with the idea of making powers conform to a certain format.  A 10D6 Energy Blast with Damage Shield in 4th edition was 75 points.  That's the same as a 15D6 Energy Blast.  Quite expensive, but you got the benefit that you could hurt your enemy when it wasn't your phase, without an attack roll, depending on what they did.  Still might be too expensive though.  In 5th edition, you had to buy it Continuous first.  So now that power became 125 points, the same as a Twenty-five D6 Energy Blast.  No power-gamer in the world would choose a 10D6 Damage Shield over a 25D6 EB.  The two aren't remotely comparable.  There are other problems as well.  The cost of Major Transform had previously been based upon the cost of RKA, the logic being if you can kill them, you might as well be able to turn them into a frog.  5th ed wisely dropped having Cumulative be a +1/2 advantage (RKA is cumulative by default), but it added requirements that you had to pay more to affect different types of targets.  Instead of "turn target into frog" the standard Transform became "turn human into frog".  To affect any target, you had to buy another advantage. 
 
In this way, the cost structure of 5th edition became less consistent, more concerned with form than function.  Abuse wasn't eliminated at all, the nature of the abuse just changed.
 
I wasn't active on the boards during the time that they were soliciting suggestions for 6th edition.  I think I had an account here but I had wandered off.  But as I understand it there was a lot of discussion about what changes people wanted to see made.  And while I like most of you guys just fine, good lord do I disagree with a lot of you over how the game system should work.  I see questions on the Hero System Discussion page, and many of the suggestions are overly complex and extremely point inefficient.  But some people feel like they've got to dot those "i"s and cross those "t"s.  Again I wasn't involved in any of the discussions, but when I flip through the 6th edition book, I'm reminded of the adage "too many cooks spoil the broth".  6th compounds some of the mistakes of 5th edition and doesn't look back.

Interesting because I now find Shape Shift to be a pretty straightforward power, though I went through a lot of confusion before arriving at my enlightened state.
 
I really like the idea that, if bought cheaply people with different senses might 'see' the real you and that it provides for all kinds of stuff.  I can really get into the detail of that.  Whether detailing that detail means that it ends up being too expensive for what it is, is another matter completely....
 
I sometimes think that we have driven detail into the system and that has caused some inflation because differences often have to be reflected in point costs for us to believe it is 'real'.  For some powers, that makes them far more costly in points when compared to more straightforward powers.  I like to use the Blast Standard.  How useful is this power compared to an equivalent amount of points spent in Blast.  Obviously this is a relatively unsophisticated comparison but it is a beginning in thinking about costs.

Transfer 3d6 Stun.
 
IN any case, even if I were to accept the false argument that Comeliness never actually did anything in the game, you still handle it by saying "this doesn't seem to do anything so its optional" not "I'm deleting this and I'm in charge so you can all suck it"

Well if you think that I am a troll rather than a long standing supporter for the game and those who play it, and that I am trolling rather than asking people who don't like 6e to itemize the problems they have with the ruleset that cause them to express a general dislike for it at one end of the spectrum up to using terms like "detest" at that other end of the spectrum, then you misunderstand me.

I'm not attempting to troll you (or anyone else) Christopher. I've been away from these board for a while, and coming back to it I notice a trend with the posters currently active where a noticeable subgroup seem to hold 6e in poor regard. As the opening post stipulates, I want to start a friendly forum for reasonable discussion for people to put forth their talking points for why some other version of the rules is a better version of the rules.
 
You are of course free to not participate in the discussion if you don't want to, but popping in to participate by accusing me of trolling seems counterproductive on the one hand or perhaps some might say a bit trollish in and of itself on the other. Name calling has a tendency to propagate, I suppose. But if you have an opinion about why 6e is not the best mechanical version of the rules, I would like to hear it if you would take the time to type it out.

...It was always metric.  A hex was 2 meters. 

Those accusations pre-date his Presidency by many decades. Here's a Vox article on the subject. (Note: Vox leans Left, but the point here is that this isn't a new thing.)

The only reason I can see for Portman wanting back in is so that she can be Jane Foster Thor and grrl power it up. No thanks. I don't want her anywhere near the MCU. I'm fine with the female Thor storyline being done in the MCU, but they can recast Jane.

Like a charismatic lead or good fight choreography?

Those accusations pre-date his Presidency by many decades. Here's a Vox article on the subject. (Note: Vox leans Left, but the point here is that this isn't a new thing.)

Those accusations pre-date his Presidency by many decades. Here's a Vox article on the subject. (Note: Vox leans Left, but the point here is that this isn't a new thing.)

"Huh...signed off by a 'Schrodinger'..."

can do die in a fire.

I went for the Hero/Champions reference instead of the obvious.