massey

Summon Giant Eagles is also one of those campaign breakers.  Gandalf's player tried to use it, and the GM flipped the table over and started ranting about how much time he'd spent prepping the game.  "I even wrote a damn language for the elves!" he said.
 
Finally he was like "you can't do that!"
"I can too!  I paid the points for it!"
"No you can't!  Because.... because... because the Nazgul have these like, big ass flying dinosaur things!"
 
Then the GM reminded Gandalf that he hadn't chipped in for pizza for the last couple months, and Gandalf decided they'd just walk to Mordor.

I think that's just a Distinctive Features.
 

Summon Giant Eagles is also one of those campaign breakers.  Gandalf's player tried to use it, and the GM flipped the table over and started ranting about how much time he'd spent prepping the game.  "I even wrote a damn language for the elves!" he said.
 
Finally he was like "you can't do that!"
"I can too!  I paid the points for it!"
"No you can't!  Because.... because... because the Nazgul have these like, big ass flying dinosaur things!"
 
Then the GM reminded Gandalf that he hadn't chipped in for pizza for the last couple months, and Gandalf decided they'd just walk to Mordor.

Eventually you just run out of things to spend points on.  A 5000 point cosmic VPP, every skill at 25-, 500 PD and ED resistant triple hardened with 75% Damage Reduction...
 
You just end up flipping through the book trying to justify things.

Totally off topic, but I always hated this "dig" at LotR because it was very obvious that the Giant Eagles or any openly moving force, could not make any headway into Mordor while THE EYE was still blazing. The entire trilogy is rife with examples of "any time we do anything open and obvious the Eye sees it and plans are crushed, we must sneak and hide and ultimately distract the Eye if we have any chance."
 
The Eagle assault would have never worked, or even been considered under these clearly known circumstances. It was a bad internet meme that became a bad critique.

We've had a guy play a Martian Manhunter ripoff in a game before without it being a problem.  Of course, there were also Kryptonians in that game, so it was pretty high powered.  When you're looking at balancing a game, you've got several things to consider.
 
1)  Is it thematically appropriate?  No matter the power level, it's probably not cool to bring in a knock off from your favorite anime, Super Fluffy Bunny Power Team Go! when everyone else is making characters for Call of Cthulhu.
2)  Is it outside of accepted campaign norms?  There's nothing particularly wrong with having a 9 OCV.  But if the group average OCV/DCV is a 4, then it could easily cause problems.
3)  Do any of the powers provide shortcuts that the GM did not anticipate?  "Detect Bad Guy" could be fine in some games, but unbalancing in others.
 
There's nothing wrong with the Martian Manhunter, and nothing wrong with playing him.  There are plenty of characters with a broad set of different powers.  But it's worth pointing out that it may not work for some GMs, some campaigns, and some storylines.  The Lord of the Rings doesn't work as an adventure if you've got a long range teleport.  A Multipower potentially lets you have several of these abilities, the better to find the thing the GM didn't anticipate.

See this thread on Danger Sense as another example of where 6th Edition (and 5th) went too far in the "internal consistency over playability" issue.
 
 

Thanks for the kind words.  Oh and I'm definitely a male.
 
In ages past I spent a lot of time trying to break the system.  I was basically king of the powergamers at our local store.  GMs from other games would tell their players that they were prohibited from asking me to help build characters.  But what I found was that 4th edition was really solidly put together.  Primary characteristics were good, and Elemental Controls needed to be watched like a hawk, but the basic cost structure of everything was great.  With 5th edition, a lot of potential abuses opened up.  It got really easy to break the game really fast.  6th went over like a lead balloon at our store, and when I looked at it I just saw the problems of 5th compounded.
 
Now, I don't have the free time that I did when I was in college, and I haven't really torn the system apart like I did with 4th and 5th edition.  But I see things that used to work that have been changed significantly, and prices changed for no real reason.
 
Regarding heroic games, a game master can balance them.  But a game designer can't balance it when he doesn't know if you're going to be playing Call of Cthulhu or Car Wars.  Changes to the game were made for presumably Fantasy Hero, but that's a genre specific thing.  Balance it for that and you unbalance it for something else.
 

It isn't the fault of the game mechanics.  It's the fault of the game designers for believing that one system can balance heroics without regard to setting.  Some of the cost changes in 6th edition appear to be in response to complaints from people in heroic games.  I think either Killer Shrike or Hugh Neilson mentioned earlier that the cost of old Strength was a bigger problem in heroics than superheroics.  But even in heroics that's only going to apply in certain genres.
 
In a superheroic game, basically everything costs points.  Want to be strong?  Points.  Want to be able to fly?  Points.  Want to have a laser gun?  Points.  And since everything costs points, you can balance between everything.  But in a heroic game, you get free equipment.  Often that equipment negates the value of something you paid points for, or at least makes it less useful.  The mistake of the game designers is in not recognizing that fact.
 
Hero is a "build your own world" system.  Remember that awesome Sylvester Stallone movie, Over the Top, where he plays the arm wrestling truck driver?  Strength is a very important stat in Arm Wrestler Hero.  Strength and TF: 18 Wheeler are basically the only things that matter in that game.  But in Ghostbusters Hero, Strength is never used.  You just need a 10 to lug that equipment around.  Hero can be a universal system, but as soon as you get free equipment, the basic cost structure is thrown out the window.  And there's nothing that can be done about it because the system is marketed as being able to do any genre.  Strength is vitally important for Conan, not so much for Picard.
 
As far as ridiculous guns and ammo, yeah I'm talking about stuff that is available to the players.  As in, Bob the player went to the gun show last week and bought the ammo that he wants his character to use.  And he's prepared to pull out charts of ballistic tests that show why this ammo has three times the muzzle velocity and so he thinks he should get +1/2 D6 damage.

Summon Giant Eagles is also one of those campaign breakers.  Gandalf's player tried to use it, and the GM flipped the table over and started ranting about how much time he'd spent prepping the game.  "I even wrote a damn language for the elves!" he said.
 
Finally he was like "you can't do that!"
"I can too!  I paid the points for it!"
"No you can't!  Because.... because... because the Nazgul have these like, big ass flying dinosaur things!"
 
Then the GM reminded Gandalf that he hadn't chipped in for pizza for the last couple months, and Gandalf decided they'd just walk to Mordor.

Aerial dogfights over Mount Doom would have been pretty cool.

They also don't know what Germany and Italy have in the way of super-assets to stop them. Sending Superman in might have been a great idea. But the original version of Superman didn't fly and no one knew for sure whether Germany might have had twelve of their own Ubermen to stop him. Though I think in the DC comics universe (in at least one of the reboots) that the war in Europe ended in 1943 because of superhero intervention.
 
And much of the time the Allies didn't have a good idea where Hitler was. He was recording his radio broadcasts which were airing at a later time and were announced as being given in some random city while Hitler was really someplace else (or later just hiding in a bunker someplace else). Recording stuff for the radio then rebroadcasting it was such as new technology that it didn't occur to many people that it existed, much less that Hitler was using it frequently. The History Channel had an interesting show talking about that but I can't for the life of me remember the name of it.

There is a third type of Multipower that I've seen, and that's the Martian Manhunter "grab bag of awesome abilities" method.  He's got Invisibility, Desolidification, a 20/20 Force Field, Teleportation, Retrocognition, and as many other "ruin the GM's scenario" type powers as he can cram in.  The problem here isn't with the Multipower though.  It's with the specific powers and how they interact with the game.  Something like Desolid or Invisibility can be extremely powerful, or sometimes not that important at all depending on how the campaign is set up.
 
Just like Telepathy can be either totally useless or a complete campaign wrecker, depending on what the GM lets you pull from Lowly Agent's mind.  A whodunit mystery will probably be pretty boring unless the GM remembered the Telepathy and accounted for it.  Cramming lots of those powers into one character increases the chances that the GM isn't prepared for one of them.  But again, that's a problem with how they interact with the campaign, not a problem with the construct itself.

Well, Gondor didn't have any particular concept of the idea of air superiority.

We've had a guy play a Martian Manhunter ripoff in a game before without it being a problem.  Of course, there were also Kryptonians in that game, so it was pretty high powered.  When you're looking at balancing a game, you've got several things to consider.
 
1)  Is it thematically appropriate?  No matter the power level, it's probably not cool to bring in a knock off from your favorite anime, Super Fluffy Bunny Power Team Go! when everyone else is making characters for Call of Cthulhu.
2)  Is it outside of accepted campaign norms?  There's nothing particularly wrong with having a 9 OCV.  But if the group average OCV/DCV is a 4, then it could easily cause problems.
3)  Do any of the powers provide shortcuts that the GM did not anticipate?  "Detect Bad Guy" could be fine in some games, but unbalancing in others.
 
There's nothing wrong with the Martian Manhunter, and nothing wrong with playing him.  There are plenty of characters with a broad set of different powers.  But it's worth pointing out that it may not work for some GMs, some campaigns, and some storylines.  The Lord of the Rings doesn't work as an adventure if you've got a long range teleport.  A Multipower potentially lets you have several of these abilities, the better to find the thing the GM didn't anticipate.

There is a third type of Multipower that I've seen, and that's the Martian Manhunter "grab bag of awesome abilities" method.  He's got Invisibility, Desolidification, a 20/20 Force Field, Teleportation, Retrocognition, and as many other "ruin the GM's scenario" type powers as he can cram in.  The problem here isn't with the Multipower though.  It's with the specific powers and how they interact with the game.  Something like Desolid or Invisibility can be extremely powerful, or sometimes not that important at all depending on how the campaign is set up.
 
Just like Telepathy can be either totally useless or a complete campaign wrecker, depending on what the GM lets you pull from Lowly Agent's mind.  A whodunit mystery will probably be pretty boring unless the GM remembered the Telepathy and accounted for it.  Cramming lots of those powers into one character increases the chances that the GM isn't prepared for one of them.  But again, that's a problem with how they interact with the campaign, not a problem with the construct itself.

I don't recall anyone deliberately starting out characters at less than the maximum allowed starting point of a campaign. I've seen people showing up for the first session having spent points on random things because they have no idea how to build a character and no one knew to offer to help. But not deliberately starting off less than the maximum allowed.
 
For Champions, I've most often played 4e. When putting together my idea for a 250 point character, my first pass at building a new one would generally end up somewhere around 325 points. Then the rest of character building is making a seemingly unending series of agonizing cuts and compromises in an attempt to get the character to 250 points...or whatever additional points from disadvantages I could talk the GM into allowing me at the beginning.
 
I don't think I've ever had any extra points lying around to throw into a "point sink". Ever.
 
But I've had characters who were colorblind, young, overconfident, or a large variety of other disadvantages which have provided some wonderful moments of gaming. I don't recall anything other than a momentary regret over a character having any disadvantage (though I admit I don't build characters who could die from simple exposure to Krytonite).
 
I have had GM's who were more generous in allowing things in the initial build than they were about spending earned experience later. So I'd always prefer to spend some points in the initial build to establish that a character has some ability in a certain area (whether power or skill) rather than counting on the GM allowing me to purchase what he might judge to be "an unrelated power or skill" later on.
 
As for spending earned experience, I try to not get in too much of a hurry to do that. My characters generally are competitive in damage output and defense either through the build or through use of combat maneuvers so I usually don't feel pressure to spend points to catch up there. And there's always the chance we'll end up doing something odd like spending months of real time on an outer space adventure and spending a large wad of points while the starship is in hyperspace on things like WF: Lightsaber, Starship Operations, KS: Alien Technology, and Combat Piloting along with getting an OIF Life Support belt would seem like a good time to quit being a cheapskate.
 
 
Having said all of that, I don't philosophically have anything against another player deliberately spending less than the maximum allowed points for a starting character as long as the character isn't going to be a burden to everyone else. If we have to carry him to the battle then shield him in the battle because he can't do anything at all in a fight, his character is probably in the wrong genre. But if he's a contributing character to the team, great, regardless of point totals.
 
I do think a new player might be robbing himself of some roleplaying opportunities by skimping on the disadvantages. They're there to give the GM a hook so he can interact with the character, immerse the player into the game, and give the player a unique moment in the spotlight from time to time. If a player isn't familiar with all the comic book tropes and doesn't have disadvantages, it could be difficult for him, from my perspective at least.

I just want to point out that Build to Concept can be a very nebulous concept.

Something as simple as building a "not very tough" concept who is stunned by an average attack (and lacks compensations like high DCV so he is  not often hit) or ignoring PRE because he's pretty nondescript, then discovering that most combats in this game/group start with a 6d6+ PRE attack, can crater a character pretty easily.
 
The build needs to meet group standards to be effective, and stay within them to not be inordinately effective.
 
Different groups also have different tolerances for variance in power level.  I see comments on line about "PC X has ability Y and the other players are griping that he is 'too effective".  In my group, the players would more likely look at Player X and note "ability Y is really effective - what can the rest of us do to help Player X do that more often, and synergise with it?", as they tend to play a team game, not a bunch of little solo games.  Simple example - first 3e d20 game, it took a bit to realize that new Sneak Attack was pretty effective.  At about L5 or L6, the fighter realized his job was to move around, suck up some hits if needed, but get the Rogue into flanking position.  Those "character tax" combat expertise, mobility and spring attack feats on the way to Whirlwind Attack were actually way more useful than expected...

I'm going to tell a little tale of whimsy...it's the 1980's, fantasy roleplaying games have sprung from nowhere and become a craze sweeping the nation. That seems cool and all, but me and my pals are way more into comic books than Bored of the Rings knockoffs. If only there were a roleplaying game where me and my pals could roleplay as superheroes!
 
Turns out there are a few. One of them is called Champions! The Superheroic Roleplaying Game. Me and my pals acquire that game. I'll be the GM, my pals will make up their very own superheroes.
 
One of my pals wants to play a superhumanly strong and tough superhero like the Thing or the Hulk. Now, we know our comics and thus are aware that a superstrong character in the same "weight class" as one of them must be able to lift around 100 tons and maybe more. Oh look, there's a characteristic called "STRENGTH" and how much a given amount of Strength can lift is indicated by a handy dandy chart. Literally NONE of the other characteristics get a chart with specific quantifiable values for a given amount of that characteristic, only Strength does. But whatever. According to this chart, to lift 100 tons requires 60 STR. We're also helpfully informed that 60 STR allows a character to do 12D6 damage in hth. Ok, cool.
 
Now one of my other pals wants to make a fire based character like the Human Torch. We eventually figure out that this is probably either a Energy Blast or a Ranged Killing Attack, or maybe both for the sake of variety. We have a little group pow wow and decide that our characters are true blue superheroes and wouldn't kill, so we agree Energy Blast seems best for this guy. How much damage should he do? Well obviously if the brick is doing 12D6, the blaster should be competitive with that. We go with 12D6 for now.
 
Finally my last pal wants to make a gun guy, like the Punisher. The rest of us groan and point out we just all agreed that these characters aren't killers, and proceed to have the same "its unrealistic, the bad guys will just escape and come back" vs "yeah no kidding that's part of the tropes of the genre" argument that silver age and bronze age enthusiasts were starting to have in that era and have continued to have...except we're teenagers and have a limited vocabulary and life experience and thus the argument soon degrades into "well, if you want me to play this stupid game with you jerks, that's what I want to make" and we let him. So, we already figured out that Ranged Killing Attack can be used for guns, so we start there. We learn enough about DC's to figure out that 12D6 normal damage is equivalent to 4D6 killing attack, so the Punisher-wannabe gets a 4D6 gun to compete with the blaster and the brick. We notice there's a chapter on weapons and armor so we page to that because it might be relevant. We find a section for Ranged Weapons, which includes Assault Rifles...which only do 1 1/2 D6 to 2D6 + 1 killing damage?!?!? Huh? What gives? Paging down a bit we see that an Anti-tank Weapon does 4D6K damage. 
 
We all stop and kind of look at each other. Something doesn't make sense. Did we make a mistake? We go back to first principles. The brick is definitely as strong as a first class brick in the comics, and that definitely grants 12D6 damage. The provenance of how we got to a 4D6 K attack for the anti-hero seems to make sense. So why then is that so out of line with the weapons list printed in the book?
 
I as the GM get the bright idea to see if there are rules for destroying stuff, and find a Breaking Things chapter. A chart in which informs us that the front door of a house has 4 DEF and 3 BODY. We do some math. A 2D6 assault rifle would shred that door on an average roll but would mostly bounce off of a 10 DEF 9 BODY safe door. We collectively agree that this seems more or less legit. 
 
So...if the Assault Rifle is 6 DC and the brick punch is 12 DC, is the game trying to tell us that a punch from a brick is supposed to be twice as dangerous as getting shot with an assault rifle? After some discussion we agree that this doesn't make sense to us; in most comics characters that aren't invulnerable generally must at least respect the presence of a gun even if the writer never allows them to get shot.
 
We eventually just decide to roll with it in the interests of playing the game, and let Punisher-wannabe have a 4D6 KA to quell the whinging. But something is clearly a bit fishy vis a vis definition of real world / mundane structures and weapons vs superheroic powers and "weapons" bought as powers.

Sure. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition speaks to this tendency. In that model the move from Competent to Proficient to Expert is characterized by a shift in explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge. Other competing theories of skill acquisition have different spins, but it is fairly well accepted that intuition, chunking, and understanding of nuance are common characteristics of mastery in many fields.

 
 
I started playing in 4e, but I self-bootstrapped and spread the game to others. I didn't encounter another person who already played the Hero System for a handful of years. I proceeded from what the rulebook said and made things with it. What I found later when I began to interact with other players outside the circle of those I introduced the system to is that a large part of how many other people used the game was apocryphal or based on tradition rather than rules based.
 
I noticed a tendency towards a certain cookie-cutter approach for character and campaign designs, a self-gimping of the systems capabilities, a straightjacket of convention restraining creativity.  
 
I speak of course largely of campaign caps. 
 
Initially, I thought...well...maybe the way I've been doing it was wrong. Maybe these people know something I don't know. So I gave it a go. I used "recommended" point caps, tried various versions, DC and DEF, or AP, or RC, or some combination, or various "Rule of X" schemes.
 
No matter what approach is used, there will be at least one number and as soon as there is a hard number, it becomes the defacto minimum value for most players, and ways to sneakily exceed that number begin to creep into character builds. Character design stopped being about modeling a cool character, and started becoming an exercise of building to the allowed maximums and bending a character around whatever is left. Characteristics inflated across the board. Players sat down to make a new character, and just started assigning values to well known characteristics sweet spots, resistant defenses, an attack of XD6 where X is the max, and oh yeah what was this character's shtick again? Add some stuff for that. Good to go.
 
The definition of what's appropriate to a campaign as expressed entirely in combat effective values for attack and defense immediately puts players into the mode of metagaming for combat effectiveness instead of character concept mode.
 
Hard limits on AP or RC cause defining abilities with powers to become a metagame exercise to work within the caps rather than an attempt to model the character's concept as accurately as possible.
 
Rules of X vary, but whatever characteristics or values are used within a given Rule of X become the target of min maxing to work within.
 
Just, meh, no thank you.
 
After a bit I just went back to doing it the way I started out doing it, holistically. All was well and character building returned to being about expressing the character first, and the cookie-cutterness effect diminished quickly.
 
 
Agreed. 
 
 
This is the sort of "cookie cutter" narrow approach to the game that I refer to on occasion. Gamist and unimaginative and uninteresting, in my opinion.
 
 
Yes. And that brings me to a point that I've raised in the past, only to get mostly blank looks and crickets.
 
The Hero System naturally has a hard cap on character abilities, and that is character points themselves.
 
As soon as the GM chooses the number to determine how many cp characters will get in an upcoming campaign, they have put a hard cap on all of those character's capabilities. It is a very effective cap unto itself. 
 
Furthermore (in my opinion, obviously), the wonderfulness of the Hero System is its nearly boundless capabilities, its flexibility, its open endedness. I have been made to realize over the years that many people are uncomfortable with that sort of open sandboxy freedom and prefer to limit and restrict and confine their options to something they feel more comfortable dealing with. And that's fine, I guess, for people who prefer smaller surface areas of possibility. However, there is much to be gained by unclenching a little and allowing more diversity in character capabilities within a campaign. The game is robust; it can handle it.

This is one of the more challenging issues in setting a range.  The D&D character who does 1d6 or 1d8, with no bonuses, still does some damage, even when that 1d10 + 5 warrior does quite a bit more.  A Hero character with low DC may get nothing past defenses on enemies built to stand up to much higher DCs.
 
With 20 defenses, an 8d6 attack will average 8 STUN past defenses.  That seems a reasonable low.  12d6 passes 22 points past defenses, and 14d6 would average 29.  That's a pretty big range - how useful will the 8dc character feel?  Bump defenses up to 25 and 12d6 passes 17 damage through, while 8d6 is only doing 3 stun (**plink**).
 
I am thinking a 4 DC range is probably where we settle in.  That might mean a typical attack is 12d6, 14d6 is the top and 10d6 is the bottom we would expext, and we expect defenses of 25 on average, maybe 20 - 30.
 
But if you want 14 DCs damage, you should expect little or no versatility, and should be below campaign average in some other respect.

False.  It suffers from a distinct lack of George Perez cover art.

Then again, in the military, people either have to do what you say you you have to do what they say, and hard feelings be damned.  I am unlikely to get upset about anything you say about me or my opinions or, if I do, I'll calm down before posting a reply: we have known each other for a very long time through these boards and I am definitely older and in some ways wiser.  It may not be a coincidence that Hero does not have a skill that is directly analogous to 'Diplomacy'.  I feel I ought to put a smiley face in there, but I'm not going to.

That was my question.  Rewatched it a couple times and I guess it's because there are numerous (4 by my count) tweaks that, for some reason, make Luke look foolish and/or in need of rescuing which didn't occur in the movies.
 
Weirdly unnecessary IMO since Leia has many strong and heroic moments throughout the movies.
 
Perhaps it speaks to the feminization and diversification issues many fans seem to have with Disney's and Kathleen Kennedy's vision of SW.
 
Myself I just think they're subpar movies with mostly dull characters.
 
Force Awakens - ok, unoriginal and bland
Last Jedi - all around bad movie
Rogue One - good movie, strong story and characters, unfortunately it's a prequel where everybody dies so it can't go anywhere
Solo - decent movie, bad ending, plagued by the massive problem of:  sorry, that guy is NOT Han Solo and will never be Han Solo so this was a stupid idea
 
ymmv, of course.