RDU Neil

I'm not a big fan of Kevin Smith... but there is something pure about this fan response... it is really long, but worth a viewing.

I agree... as I've stated before, Steve/Caps arc was that of recklessly self-sacrificing maturing to a point of enlightened self-interest. This was counterpoint to Tony's arc from hedonistic self-interest to the ultimate sacrifice. Steve realized that to deny himself what he fought for others, diminished the achievement... Tony learned to accept what was greater than himself. Parallel arcs crossing each other.

And if every single character had this same, steadfast attitude, then it wouldn't be special or interesting or dramatic or powerful when it is shown. It would diminish Capt. America and his steadfast courage, if that was just how all the heroes act.

Nebula in particular was excellently done in terms of taking her 2-dimensional character from the GotG movies and making her really move forward and grow. For the first time, I really bought the whole Nebula/Gamora rivalry sisterhood. I thought there was a ton of character development... Natasha fully fleshed out her position as the most committed Avenger of all of them... Tony's move to satisfied and willing to sacrifice, etc.

Here is the thread where my alternative END rules were discussed. Would be interested in your thoughts.

I was big into what he was doing, but the play test crashed and burned with my group. Funny that you should bring up END, but that is one area I completely disagree... I feel that mechanic does the exact opposite of engaging with story, and completely disengages as it forces this micromanaging bookkeeping that drives me nuts. "I look at my fork." "Mark off your END." "Ok, I move to pick up my fork." "Ok... big move, mark off that END." "I actually pick up my fork." "Are you sure you have enough END for that?" I mean, seriously... how much of the source material has supers constantly worrying about every little move nickel and diming away their energy? And this is in Supers... let alone you never see in even typical level action adventure. END as written actually works well for gritty level stuff, where swinging a sword for a little bit DOES exhaust you and fist fights often results in two people sagging and staggering into each other. That is NOT supers, though. Also, END cost usually simply became a default "First buy all your powers to O END" built into the cost over everything, or other gaming of the system as a work around... far from inspiring narrative play, it caused gamist power builds to be foremost at issue. Now... dramatic use of limited resources... THIS I really like. The moments when a character goes "all in" on an attack and risks being weak and vulnerable afterwards... rules that encourage this type of decision making and dramatic play I like. We through out END as written decades ago, and instead moved to a END as a governor of active point use, and a pool for "pushing"... which has worked pretty well. (There is another thread on it somewhere on here.)

Sorry... wasn't directing my comment at you at all... just that "handwaving" was kind of the old school short hand for dismissing what has come to be seen as the important stuff... how to actually make good judgments and decisions. I agree it shouldn't be an afterthought, but when you look at the page count and content comparison between "crunchy rules" and "a few mentions of facilitating play" a reader is driven to think one is way more important than the other... it just happens to be true in the other direction. I actually think there is room in an evolved HERO (very different direction than it has gone) to create some Nar rules, particularly around SFX, that could layer on the crunch. In fact, a lot of crunch is trying to quantify SFX in some areas (think Growth and Density Increase rules, etc.) that in other situations, are left unaddressed (energy blast doesn't deal with side effects of setting things on fire or whatever, so why does Growth or DI try to deal with being too big and heavy that you break things... all that is SFX so be consistent). If there were more rules around SFX in terms of "judging interactions and using SFX to storytell around power uses" that would be huge... but very much a new interpretation... not old school HERO at all.

100% agreed

My desire is more focus on this than on all the mechanical and rules. The way it is stated is that this is just basic GM advice... rather than the crucial play paradigm to make everything work. This is the difference in design that I see with modern RPGs vs. old school models like HERO is the new ones focus mostly on what HERO calls "handwaving" which can seem dismissive. More "play rules" about making these judgments, engaging the players as part of the decision, etc., these things need more focus, rather than the micro-simulationist text book aspects... again, IMO.

Agreed... and so I have a house rule for it that I use in my "more realistic" heroic level/guns and martial arts game. Blowthrough: It is possible for large and/or armor piercing attacks to pass through defenses and barriers without being reduced in damage applied to the target on the other side. To determine blowthrough, the house rule is Body rolled on attack doubles the non-hardened defense (of barrier or armor) AND Body rolled also is more than Body of barrier or target Hardened def stops any chance for blowthrough... would need double AP to have a chance to blow through hardened Blowthrough can only happen once for an attack (can't blow through multiple targets) Example: Target is wearing a Level II vest under their shirt, and is hit with a 5.56x45mm rifle round (2d6, Light AP vs. this non-hardened armor) Damage rolled is 11... 6 rPD is reduced by 11/2=6, so 0 rPD vs. 11 damage. Body of target is 10... so armor is exceeded and Body of target is exceeded, bullet blows through. target takes full damage and so does whatever is behind him. Now clearly an APDS would keep going through several people and only stop once it hit something sufficiently thick and dense, or eventually fell to earth. Such an attack scenario would be rare and likely get all kinds of GM handwavy stuff... but I did try to account for the much more common scenario of gun fights within buildings and where multiple targets may be near each other. It never requires this calculation every time, simply when the situation makes the question "Huh... is there possible blowthrough happening?" dramaticly applicable.

I agree with all of this... but now we are talking "guidelines for GM and play group SFX judgment" and not mechanics. I'm totally fine with that, but we are far from being able to mechanically define exactly how much BODY loss represents how much physical destruction vs. system disruption, etc. Again, I'm actually ok with that... dialing things back to core HERO... Mechanically deal X Body and X STun vs. their defenses. Consider the SFX of the attack vs. SFX of the target... make a story telling call that makes sense for that scenario. NOW we are playing a game... not writing simulation code. Again... my preference.

This is where we'd disagree. It is a killing attack... I'm killing the target, and the SFX is disintegration ray. That is classic Champs/HERO. To start over-engineering it to say, "Ok, that has to be this other more cumbersome build" is an example of exactly the issue I have with pushing HERO too far into complex simulation. Eventually everything is a Transform... Transform Character into Dead Character with a bullet in the heart... etc. The question is whether you want things simple " Cool... you have 3d6RKA Disintegration Pistol!" and let the story dictate the SFX interpretation, "Sure, you can zap a hole in the wall!" ... or... you begin down the road of, "Well... for all the things a Disintegration Pistol can do, you at least need a Multipower with RKA and Transform and... blah, blah blah"... which, to me, is where things can quickly go from "fun and clever build" to "over-engineered nightmare of a points kludge" The taste for that varies. I tend to the KISS side of things.

I may be mis-remembering, but I recall an anti-tank missile being something like a 6d6 double AP attack (with combined AE explosive RKA following... missile punches through, blast takes out the inside of the tank). You'd need 40-50 hardened rPD to have a chance of resisting that.

Oh, don't get me started on those rules... where shooting a wall with a .45 somehow causes a man sized gap in an interior drywall type wall. In so many ways, they need to actually remove most of the rules and bring it back to "BODY is a reflection on what is needed to break/kill something... the actual in game effect of breaking/killing is an SFX determined as what seems reasonable for the shared imaginary space being described" and just leave it at that. As soon as you start trying to define 'mechanics' to cover what is otherwised a hand-waved SFX, things get messy.

Uhm... 65 STR with haymaker is what 21d6 at most... and I don't think 21 Body would be remotely high enough to beat a tanks rPD, let alone full rPD and any extra PD. This is one of the clear problems with the linear growth of damage next to an exponential growth in lifting and force applied. Most Tanks would be at the 40-50 Hardened rPD at least. The "realistic" statting of military grade weaponry has always made supers look... un-super. Which has in turn lead to some of the increased power creep, etc. At least IMO.

Which always made me question... "How much Body do you have to do to disintegrate a character? If -10 BODY means the corpse can be "structurally whole, but had a myocardial infarction and just died"... what represents "no body, it was separated into constituent atoms?" or simply "blown to bits"? That BODY is abstracted to represent both the structural integrity, mass and systemic functioning of a person or object... it lends itself to a lot of head scratching moments. SFX generally applies in a "whatever" moment... but if my SFX is "Disintigrator Ray!" and yours is "Shotgun!" but both of us have 3d6RKA... then things start to get dicey at times. One wipes out the entire body of the target, the other leaves a bleeding corpse, which all have game implications. One makes sense to create a hole in a concrete wall to walk through, the other doesn't at all. If I shoot the engine block of a car, it no longer runs, but you might be hard pressed to even notice it was damaged without a close inspection. There are a million places that HERO breaks down, because it was originally designed to simulate "Bronze Age Supers Combat" and not "semi-realistic world of objects and weapons" etc.

Now we are getting into the classic "How do you stat a Tank?" discussion... where statting it "realistically" for heroic games makes them hideously powerful compared to traditional Champions supers... because traditional Champs had the unrealistic source material of comics, where the Hulk would casually destroy twenty tanks before breakfast, but wasn't turning people to red mist with a casual shrug. I've always said the biggest thing HERO ever did was to expose the ridiculous inconsistencies of super-hero comics source material by creating a logical, calculable simulationist system that highlighted these things.

I'm with dsatow on this one... if the thickness of an object is relatively very thin, just make an educated reduction in the normal DEF and go with it. No need to over think it. All this is too much detail for a game to really address, because it really doesn't help the game play... just the programming code for a simulation. Now, if you really WANT to overthink it, the "thickness affects defense (not just Body)" issue... the fact that HERO really doesn't handle this well... is part of the bigger issue that "relative size of attack vs. target" isn't accounted for/dealt with at all in the game. Size matters, a lot (and thickness is just a variation of size) but in HERO, size, most importantly, relative size, is not a calculable factor. They use some stat changes to sort of reflect size differences in changes to STR and Def and perception, etc., but they don't even begin to accurately reflect the significant differences size makes. Is the Energy blast a half-inch beam or a two inch wide beam or an 8 inch wide beam? That matters a lot in terms of how much damage it does. Is a larger beam more defuse, or just more power? Is a smaller beam more focused and therefore more penetrating, or simply weaker? Let's take that tin foil vs. 1/2" thick sheet. If I'm Giant Man, at full size, that 1/2" thick sheet is basically tin foil to me, so now has its DEF gone down... or is my STR just so much that I ignore it? Thus, "thickness" and all that is still just relative. There needs to be a standard that is the point of reference (let's say "relative to normal human size") or whatever, but then you have to figure out what that means. All this is supposed to be generalized in the interaction of "number of dice of attack vs. DEF and BODY"... and for the most part, that works just fine... but if you want to get more complex, for a better simulation, you might need to do something like, Attack = Xd6... you get those dice from a combination of 3 factors... raw power, size of attack, density (including shape) of attack vs. the strength, thickness and density (including shape) of the defense... and now we are just getting closer to basic physics, and doe we really want to go there? I certainly don't. Ultimately, these thought problems bring me back to, "What am I trying to do here? Oh yeah, run an entertaining action adventure game... so the answer is whatever quickly and intuitively approximates what I need in the moment." Now, if what you are trying to do is create a physics simulator..." It would be nice if HERO has some general rules on "relative size differentials" like a simple scale of Normal and One Size Level Up or Down, Two Size Levels up or down, etc. Give some generic "+d6 per size level difference" or whatever. It should probably be a lot more, but HERO has always had low, linear changes matched to large exponential changes (see STR chart) which I've never liked, but seem to keep some semblance of game balance. Something like this would be a nice general rule, good for a game, that was not resulting in physics simulator complexity.

I'm looking forward to this, but it is clear that this is the movie for "Ok... RDJ is gone, we need a new lynch-pin character to carry the MCU for the next ten years." Good luck with that Tom! Seriously, though, this is probably the most organic story telling of that kind of "pass the torch" we are likely to see in this. The relationship between Tony and Peter was cornerstone to a lot in the final storylines and it is the point of transition between the old guard and the new, clearly.

That is a powerful philosophical argument, which basically calls into question determinism vs. free will and predestination, etc. In succeeding, they actually create a timeline where Thanos never got the stones and he and his entire force would essentially vanish (they went to the future and got dusted) so is it even MORE powerful that not only did you bring everyone back, but in doing so, created a reality that had Thanos removed, thus is likely better?

I disagree up to a point, and agree up to a point. One, his assumption that they went with the "David Lewis" method is incorrect. They went with the multiple universese/quantum bubble theory instead. You can't change your own past, but you can be an event in an alternate reality that shapes it so it plays out differently. Hulk's explanation stands. The part I agree with, is that they made a mistake with the Hulk/Ancient One discussion, where Hulk says they can return the stones and that gets rid of the alternate reality. That doesn't work. Them simply showing up changes that reality and makes it different from their own, whether they take the stones or not, return them or not. Returning the stones doesn't alter the fact that their very presence in the past causes a branching reality. Also, going the quantum bubble route, every possible universe exists... so there are universes where they go back and get the stones, but lose and can't return them, as often as there are ones where they do return them. The "erasing an alternative time stream" is where they went wrong, because even that act would create branching universes where they succeeded in erasing the alternative and where they didn't. Every decision, action, thought... every quantum possibility is a different universe that exists somewhere. If they'd avoided the whole "erase the bad timeline" discussion, they've have been solid. So, I feel they did make a bit of a mistake with the time travel, but not the mistake he laid out in the article.

That certainly was getting "lower"... so good for you! 😆

Exactly. Did anyone have a problem with all three of the big guns (Cap, IM and Thor) easily finding each other and getting their "Big Three" posing moment? Same thing. It is a standard beat in these kind of comic homage splashes.

This this this! Contacts, for me, are the player spending some points to put an NPC into the world who has a generally positive impact on the PC. It is way more than simply a resource... it is an indication of something important to be part of the story.

So, I'm sure someone else must have noted this, but I just finished seeing it a second time, and one thing was very, very clear that I just missed, the first time. Bucky knew. He knew what Steve was going to do. He said, "I'm going to miss you," when supposedly Steve was only going to be gone for 5 seconds. He smiled and turned away as Hulk and Sam freaked out when Steve didn't come back. He was a bit surprised, but knew immediately who was sitting on the bench. He pushed Sam to go talk to Steve and clearly knew about the shield being passed on to him. So clearly, at some point, old Steve had come to him and told him what was what. He was prepared for it. And this goes a long way towards really establishing that Steve was around for those 70 plus years incognito.