RDU Neil

And how is this different from a Supers game? Three different people come in with Laser Powers and three different builds come out of it.  What I would do is have a list with the break down of say Imperial Laser and Ancients Laser but the new player just has listed in game Imperial or Ancients limitation.

I disagree.  I think narrative games are often quite rules complex, just in different ways and the ones that are mechanically light can often prove difficult in delivering particular types of story - narrative games can make stories that hinge on resource management very difficult.  
 
I also think anyone can run can run a narrative game based on any ruleset, it all depends on how much the GM decides to expose to the players.  I do think that the rules heavy impression folk have about HERO could be leavened by things that encourage a story telling approach among players.
 
You brought up the question of different laser guns.  As GM the scenario you brought up would be my fault.  I do not think that it is my job (and not implying you do either...) just to allow players to have what they want simply because it is rules legal.  That is what leads to Tom’s laser, Harry’s laser and Dick’s laser.  Neil’s approach dictates a more narrative approach to the game.  As GM when the players comes to me with his idea of his laser gun, I am going to need more than OAF, six charges and beam.
 
Tom’s laser (players wants after some discussion): Player - I want a laser gun.  I see it being the usual weapon kind of thing, stored in a holster and drawn to use.  It can only fire six times before it needs to be recharged and has no ability to be modulated, it is full power or nothing and the beam cannot be widened to hit more people, or to make it easier to hit a single target.  GM - OK. I am seeing this as about 2 points worth of limitation.  I am going to call this a Standard Imperial laser gun.  Anyone else can acquire this kind of gun.  All you need to put on your character sheet is Standard Imperial laser gun. (3D6K) (-2)
 
Harry’s laser:  Player - I don’t want a standard imperial laser.  I want my laser to do more damage but have fewer shots and be a prone to breaking down.  GM - Why the differences? Player - I have jury-rigged the power pack.  GM - ok that makes sense.  You need to write Customised Standard Imperial laser gun (4D6K; only four shots and stops working on 15+) (-3)
 
Dick’s laser: Player - I want my laser gun to be different.  I don’t want to have any limits on the number of shots I can fire and I want to be able to vary how much damage I do when I fire it. GM - OK, how are you able to keep firing? Where does the power come from? Player - it is an alien technology, some kind of fusion that continually draws in atmosphere and creates plasma.  It will run for years before the power runs out. GM - do you need to fiddle with settings to reduce the damage or spread the beam? Player - not much, I know it well enough that it takes almost no time. GM - OK, I need a race, unless you are willing to come up with your own.  Or is it unknown alien tech? Player - I like the unknown idea. GM - all right, you need to write Ancients laser gun (3D6K). (-1).
 
As GM, I have now established two potential weapons folk could buy and should be part of player reference material.  I have also shown that things can be altered.  As GM, I can decide to run with the machanical notation I have noted above or I might have two or three short descriptive sentences to go on the character sheet
 
for example Standard Imperial laser gun: this weapon comes with a hip holster. It deliver 3D6 killing damage but can only fire six times before the pack needs replaced or recharged. It is a simple weapon that does not allow the user to modulate the laser in any way.
 
Ancients laser gun: no one knows how to manufacture these weapons any more. It delivers the same damage as a Standard Imperial (3D6K) but never runs out of power and intuitive controls allow users to increase and reduce power output and to spread the beam to make it easier to hit targets.
 
Doc

Inspired by my initial thought of what RDU Neil's thread was about and something that was touched on by several in that thread.
 
Stacking limitations has its issues - too much bang for the buck, it it really worth that much, clutter on the sheet, etc.  I'd like to open this discussion in a different vein than the previous one and not muddy those waters.
 
I'm not suggesting reducing limitations to one; the book's limitations are fine, but you're only allowed to use (or get points from) one limitation per power.

I would rather categorize them by type and say you can only have one per type.

Is that who all those cameos were supposed to be?  Really? God, I hated that movie and hate it even more, now.
 
Stallone looks nothing like...
 

From my POV (and YMMV) the point to having cool, regional fighting styles is as much in "who CAN'T use them" as in who can. That is much campaign rules, rather than mechanics... saying a character must have a reason to know a certain fighting style, and likely denying characters from having multiple styles. For a low level fantasy game, this makes sense, because you are involving culture and heritage and how that plays out in subtle differences of fighting style.
 
That being said, it would probably be necessary to have each style have a clear 'advantage' as well as 'disadvantage' based around play elements as much as mechanics.  The Vo-than style of the mountain people is about using rocky and sloping terrain to its advantage  The Palean fighters of the great plain states are deadly on fast horses, with sabre and bow! etc. 
 
Simplest way is to provide plusses to OCV and DCV that only apply in the terrain/distinct situation they are trained for. It could also be a matter of establishing clear, upfront guidelines on use of Environmental Movement... so the Vo-than have it in the rocky mountains, and those that don't are suffering penalties in combat.
 
I personally LOVE the martial maneuvers as ways to show different fighting styles and to provide tactical choices during play... but it really comes down to "How will I represent a skilled advantage in a certain situation over those who don't have it?"

I was thinking of posting about this game in the Champions Now thread under Kickstarter heading, but I can add a bit here in response.
 
Ron's rules in Champs Now asks the GM to do nothing more in terms of world building than create 2 sentences of a particular kind. From there, the players were to make their characters, disads, story hooks, etc. Then the world would evolve during play.
(This both worked and did not work at all for our group.)
 
My two sentences were...
 
Superhumans are a relatively new phenomena, and the first ones did very, very bad things. Weird Science and Conspiracies at the University of Michigan   Now... for our group, who have played many years together, this immediately kicked off certain people expounding on this, "Cool... that means X or Y and..." which is really cool, but I didn't want all the player's character concepts colored by the a few players. So I asked each player to come up with "one additional sentence" that built on/added to my original sentences.  (These could have been general statements on theme or whatever, but they actually were more detailed and specific to world building and creating a history.)   Storn - We four are on campus and gain our powers when villains try to rob a research facility, accidentally unleashing weird energies.   (Actually Storn started with "We all have a shared origin event" but then he got more specific.)  Rick - Decades ago in the vast salt mines beneath Detroit, space had to be cleared out for a new research facility--and an embassy. Joe - After Martial Law was declared, college attendance sky rocketed as a way to stay out of the military. Eric - The Singularity offers a path to surviving the coming darkness.   My Commentary: While Ron specifically states that none of this world building should be done until you play, and it should evolve from what players put on their sheets (Hunteds, DNPCs, etc.) these guys refused to be so loose. As a GM, I usually have a very strong idea about the world I'm creating, but wanted to let the players really shape this... and they stepped up... not in the way Ron envisioned, but with a demand for group world building during/prior to characters being built.   The world we came up with immediately veered from the expected idea Ron had of "Don't world build, just use the world outside your window and add supers!" It was clear none of the players were satisfied with that and so a rough but fascinating timeline and setting was hashed out. Relatively new superhumans became "over the past 20 years, after an unexplained event in the late 90's" A focus on 'weird science' was agreed upon, so this tossed the typical super-worlds where anything goes, magic, gods, technology, aliens, etc. We agreed that ALL super powers come from 'weird science' and accidents, with the scientific community having dozens of theories on what is going on to allow this breaking of the laws of physics by certain individuals, but there is nothing proven or even a consensus on one theory over another. The martial law statement then really shaped the world. We decided that immediately following the original 'event' the world was on the brink of war as thoughts of sneak attacks and nuclear detonations were considered... and when months later, people with powers started showing up in very destructive ways. In most places Martial Law ended after a few years as no military attacks happened, but it continued a streak of secrecy and security paranoia as more and more powered people began to appear. At some point, it was decided that a few super-powered people actually showed up and helped stop/defeat the destructive ones, and the first "heroes" were christened. The past 20 years basically happened as they have, but with the military deploying rare but useful metahumans in combat, corporations funding a few "super teams" as much as marketing ploys as real, active teams. The costumes and code names came out as a way to use tropes long established in comic books to make a terrified public more accepting of superhumans... but the paranoia and fear still runs deep. The Singularity is an even more popular and well known meme, as eschatological belief has grown... will technology bring about the end of days, or save us from it? Are superhumans the harbingers of doom or those will save us? The "coming darkness" could be many things, but it is a current that runs through society.  (Think of all the political and social fracturing and upheaval of the current real world, and turn it up to 11 by adding superhumans and "weird science conspiracies" that might actually be true. Players wanted a clear villain in terms of a certain, secret gov't agency that was hunting supers, there is a draft that on the surface is simply about maintaining the military, requiring military training for everyone of a certain age, but there is a huge social division of this as some claim that people drafted on disappear, "die mysteriously" and that the gov't is using it to search out superhumans or experiment on people, etc. (The gov't is not a monolithic entity of course... it has as many divisions and agendas as the real world.) The salt mines of Detroit will factor hugely into the initial adventures, as the player didn't want this defined before the game, and he dropped the "embassy" part (mole men?) because he felt it no longer fit the concept. The shared origin "accident" was established, establishing the "Hunted" on Flanker's sheet... a villain team called The Hack. The players then wanted an event later that brought them together as a public super-team... and this was really cool. It was established that after they had individually begun displaying powers, the secret gov't agency showed up and tried to "sweep" them, but they fell back on their connections and the resources of some influential faculty at U-M and decided to "come out as supers" in the public eye (secret IDs, but public super personas) as a defense against being "disappeared."  They've been an active super team for 8 months or so. Now we have four PCs who have a shared origin story and an established reason for working together... three have very overt and noticeable power-sets. The fourth is the shadowy, controversial member... the politics of universities, state and federal gov'ts, research funding and crazy experiments... along with shadowy crazy super-stuff... we'll be getting down to it in a week or so.
 
It is an interesting experiment in using Ron's scaled down Champions Now rules... so we'll see what happens after a few playtest sessions, whether it works and we want to continue... or it peters out. We'll see!

Storn gifted me with this poster that features the major PCs from my 30 year campaign. Always an honor to have a friend and fellow gamer who can draw great stuff for a campaign! This poster just scream George Perez-esque, and is getting framed for the Geek Cave.
 
 

Some combinations simply blend well together, so the combined limitation is really no more severe than either one separately.  To wit, quite often...Extra Time and Concentration (to activate, not throughout).  Both are "I really want a moment alone, or engage this outside combat altogether."  As long as the power has major out-of-combat utility, the limitations don't mean enough.  And the more limitations are out there, the more such combinations exist.  
 
Also, a laundry list of limitations fundamentally drives many people to thinking in the point-shave mode, IMO, to focus on the mechanics and how to get the mostest for the leastest.  And that's not trivial, IMO.
 
 

This reminds me of something I've said about Complications: That some like Unluck or Vulnerability are very mechanical (and Unluck is literally the opposite of a corresponding Power) and make sense to grant more build points, and others like Hunted or DNPC are more story focused and perhaps should be tied to something like gaining a metacurrency (like aspects gain Fate Points in Fate) rather than being tied to build points.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
I usually tie a palindromedary to a tagline

Seriously dude. A joke. Dogs get locked in hot cars all the time... a bit of a turn on that, is all.

Seriously dude. A joke. Dogs get locked in hot cars all the time... a bit of a turn on that, is all.

There is some sarcasm and hostility being directed towards this idea but I think it is simply a call for a more stripped down notation on character sheets and for GMs to be a bit more liberal and flexible in their application of the rules.
 
I think that the rulebook would have just as big a section on advantages and limitations as it already has but they would be guidance for the GM in how to come to a value.
 
I think it would make for more narrative content on character sheets and a far greater move towards HERO's claim that you can build anything you want to. 
 
In essence I am effectively doing just this every time I use the Limited Power limitation (and I make reasonably liberal use of that to get what I want).
 
Doc

Yes, and again, I think you were part of these conversations over a decade ago, where I argued that "lift" was never mechanical and purely SFX, and could easily be changed to whatever you wanted for your particular game. That seemed heresy to some, but it is true. Lift is purely subjective imaginary reality. 100 STR mechanically is 20d6 and 29- STR roll (right?). Lift, the very idea that there is stuff to be lifted and characters have an understood capacity to lift (and there is gravity to be lifted, against, etc.) is all SFX of the game world... not a mechanic of the system.
 
I'm totally fine with removing Lift as some kind of "set thing" in Hero... as I've modified the Lift chart already for my game (It stops doubling in lift after 50 STR and becomes linearly 1 ton per pt of STR for lift... so 100 STR lifts 100 tons.)  That in NO WAY affects how STR interacts mechanically, but changes the SFX of "how much can you lift" only.

It's someone's right not to appreciate Cavill as Superman. Completely misguided, but their right.
 
As for Evans not knowing Ultron in advance, the majority of people in this world aren't comic nerds like so many of us in this community. Even those who read comics typically just read the titles and characters that personally interest them, and don't buy into the whole "universe" thing. If Evans came to the character of Captain America from outside the comic experience, there's seven decades of history behind him to wade through, and five decades of Avengers history. It's not surprising if his priority is what's in the script he's being asked to perform (which often deviates from comic history anyway).

It begged for a joke...no explanation needed.  

He might be a decent J. Jonah Jameson if he wasn't dead.

The newspaper item linked from the Popular Mechanics thing you posted mentions National Solar Observatory, though the picture in the PopMech thing is of a nearby but different place, Apache Point Observatory.  I have been to APO several times over the last 20-plus years, and I was WSU's science rep on the APO governing board for the last three years they were members of the consortium.  Nothing seems to have happened at APO: there's no disruptions noted in their night logs or other operating reports.
 
NSO I do not know anywhere near as well, having been there only once and that as a tourist.  It seems to be slowly being phased out of operation as its science gets shifted to better observing sites in Hawaii.  (I haven't seen a clear, open declaration of that, but lots of functions have been moved out of New Mexico and the trend seems clear.)  Roughly a year ago they closed their visitors center, apparently for good.
 
What remains there at NSO might (I emphasize "might") include some classified military (most likely USAF) project; that has certainly happened before, and there is a half-century history of observatories making their telescopes available to secret detector/sensor development projects in exchange for some limited scientific use of the new, hot, and otherwise unavailable new tech.  If this is the situation, and if the largely depopulated observatory had some unauthorized outsider get in after hours and end up in a place they should not be, then I can imagine the feds entering immediately and not wanting to talk about it.
 
That would be my guess, but it is strictly a guess.  I probably know people who know more, and maybe I can pass on more at some future time.

So, Cancer, I don't suppose you are more "in the know" here? An observatory in New Mexico has been evacuated, and sealed off by an FBI team that arrived in a black helicopter.  I'm sure it is something banally awful, but my inner scifi nerd is dancing.
 
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/telescopes/a23107258/fbi-new-mexico-observatory/

Watched the last two episodes tonight. It was well done, and much better kept to 10 episodes. The Netflix Marvel shows are turning much more into dramas with some super-stuff going on, which is always counter to the action set-ups they imply. The ending of IF Season 2 was intriguing for its implications, using Brubaker's run, which is cool, but I doubt they would ever make an actual pulp style show. That would be fun... all action, spare the character bits!
 
Not perfect, but certainly a huge step up from Season 1.

What irks me, is that this is what the comics basically do, these days. Once a creative team is done with their stint on a character, the next one comes in and does whatever they want, and to hell with continuity, etc. The MCU has actually had better continuity than the comics for the most part (at least since Marvel's halcyon 61-86 era). Back then, a creative change of writer/artist would have still complied with the overall editorial creative direction of the larger Marvel line... but now, just do the "next cool thing" with the property. Clearly DC/WB thinks of the supers this way... "do something with the character property to make money!"... as opposed to Feige having a coherent ten year plan (and beyond) to maximize the character/actor dynamic as fully as possible.

Indeed. The main issue for DI Man or Growth Man vs Burning Man is that Burning Man's powers are likely bought using fundamental mechanics like "do damage at range" i.e. EB or RKA, while DI and Growth are really what we would now today call compound powers, but they are provided as custom powers for legacy reasons. 
 
Also, size and physicality were obviously on Steve's minds when he did 6e; he fixed the very old problem of having to buy permanent levels of Growth, Shrinking, or DI for characters that are always bigger, smaller, or heavier, and he added five pages to the appendix to talk about mass and size templates, and considerations for large / small / heavy characters. 
 
The truth is, going back into earlier editions, the HERO System dealt with these concerns as an afterthought, applying powers to address the idea of bigger, smaller, heavier...showing its superhero roots where characters like ant-man and wasp are staples of the genre. Growing and shrinking things were a staple of scifi going back into the 50's...From the perspective of a golden / silver age superhero game it makes a certain kind of sense to solve these concepts in this way. But as the HERO System turned into more of a universal simulationist game engine with a "cinematic reality" baseline, basic things like physical size, mass, etc, should have been re-couched as fundamental concepts that other rules such as size alteration powers are built upon. 
 
Its a legacy issue. I think Steve did a pretty good job of attempting to bug fix it in 6e with a rules patch. Like most bug fixes it is not perfect, but the alternative is to make significant changes to the underlying game to incorporate physical sizing into the baseline mechanics of the game and then re-express powers that interact therein. And it's a slippery slope. Once you start trying to simulate things at that level you get into other issues.
 
For instance, where in the rules does it state as a fundamental assumption that all characters must breath oxygen to live? To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't. However, there's many mentions of breathing in the Desolid power, very significantly Life Support, guidelines on underwater adventuring, obliquely in the rules for Recovery (which is actually the part that matters), and so on. Oxygen gets mentioned in conjunction with fire powers as examples of ways to deal with that particular SFX. And so on. But there is no fundamental assertion of, hey, the rules want to simulate the reality that carbon based lifeforms generally need to breath some kind of gaseous medium or else die after some period of time, we have an assumption that this is by default what we humans who play this game breath in the real world, and various other rules may interact with or alter this fundamental assertion in various ways. As it stands, it requires the GM to read between the lines and / or apply common sense and understand the unspoken intent to make sense of the various places in the rules where it starts talking about "suffocation" or "no need to breath" or "shadow cat rip off characters can't breath while hiding in a wall and will have to come out for air" and so on. 
 
The rules as written have a lot of unspoken assumptions of this nature, in some places encrusted with various rules barnacles that have been grafted on over the editions to model some concept or other. It may or may not be a problem to a given individual based upon where they sit between wanting to perfectly simulate reality on one end, vs wanting to run a collaborative social game with a small group of people with the shared purpose of having fun playing make believe together on the other.

Also, while Danny remains a bit naive, he is a good deal more mature this season.  I mention that because while I got why Danny was immature in season 1, I know that it bugged the heck out of a lot of viewers.
 
Having now made it all the way season 2 (the move from 13 episodes to 10 episodes was a good one), I must say that I didn't see that ending coming.

First few episodes of the new Jack Ryan series on Prime, starring John Krasinski. 
 
I feel sorry for John. It is like Amazon got a bunch of out work network television writers on the cheap to create this show. It is plodding and flat and clichéd and aside from the occasional f-bomb being dropped, this could have followed Walker Texas Ranger on any CBS affiliate and been considered "good TV".... 25 YEARS AGO!
 
This show is also another example of our thread on action movie clichés you hate to see... because in the first couple episodes two action set-pieces are not only just badly filmed, they require US Marines and J-SOC types, then the French Anti-Terrorist police to be idiots... just so the villains can get away/succeed. (Not to mention that bad guys are so stereotypical as to not be even remotely interesting.) There is a STOOPID stand-off scene with a grenade that should have resulted in Jack Ryan being dead by the end of the first episode if the villains weren't requisite idiots in turn.
 
I give Amazon credit for trying different types of shows that it can produce, but this show falls into "boring to badly done" which is too bad.

If -1 is "usable half the time"(logical, as it halves the cost), why is -2 "rarely usable" instead of "usable about a third of the time"?  Maybe that sliding scale needs to go further down, or the GM must downplay some of the limitations on a highly limited ability.