Scott Ruggels

An M1!Garand.shot fast and accurately. Courtesy of Gerry Mickulek

This is why Spence brought up the alternative licensing tasks. Any good product is better than no product.

Not entitled sure I agree with you. I think the moribund state was caused by the publishing breaks, and s lack of monthly new material. As others have said, few people have the time to home brew any more, and the law school tome that the core rules have become is also too intimidating to the new player. Kids these days are different than we were 35 years ago. The now have less time and less patience We want the system to continue, and ready to run adventures might be the RPG equivalent of McDonalds, compared to home brew, barbecue steaks, but the kids, they gotta eat, before they learn to cook for themselves.

On another issue,I will discuss is art. First, without color, few will pick it up. Even the interior art of the Pathfinder 2 playtest, though sketches, is tinted reddish brown, on a fake parchment colored paper. The PHB, is lush with color. The comics, that which inspired Champions in the first place, have color that is improving year by year. Now color, good color is expensive to print, and requires Glossy paper, which adds to the shipping weight. But color is compelling. In the current market color Illustrations are mandatory for shelf space. Black and white in 2019, looks halfassed and amateurish. That say not to judge a book.by its cover, because everyone does. The next thing is the art itself The art style must match the subject matter. The Champions line needs to have somewhat contemporary comic style art with precise inks, and digital colors. The artists chosen should represent a Champions house style, or consistency within the project (s). Standards should be as high as practicable, but Some veteran comic book artists are approachable and charge reasonable prices. The politics wave coursing through Marvel right now, has rendered several comics pros unemployed due to not being politically correct by word or deed or tweet, and might be available for work. Hey, if Champions rule book featured George Perez artwork, back then, who would be good now? Like it or not, WOTC, and Paizo have set the bar fairly high in terms of interior art in their respective products. In general the expected art is a high key,, dynamically posed, topic illustration, averaging two illustrations per spread (facing pages), in quarter or half page increments. The advantage of this is it decisively breaks op the otherwise intimidating wall of text and pads the page count nicely. Art for fantasy games may be more important than for superheroes, because the art defines the height and weight of monsters, what The sword of Giant Slaying looks like, what the fashionable people wear in the cities of Caskardan, and inspire ideas of adventure and heroism. Here though the publisher is at an advantage, as there are thousands of artists all over the world honing their skills as game illustrators, and video game concept artists, who are available for commission, with their art and contact information spear across web sites like Art Station, Deviant Art, and Polycount. It’s that sort of art that attracts the eye of the neophyte gamer. As was stated above, perception may be more important, because this is a commercial product, and it must seduce the consumer for them to part with their cash. We we know the words are good. The editing and proof reading has been mostly done. It’s time to pour that into a new , Art rich layout. Paying artists, colorists, and page designers may be hard, but in a PDF, color is free.

Bravo, Spence! You said what I meant earlier than I did. All your points about the utility of the OGL keeping the systems in the public eye. All these old farts here could earn a couple of bucks reformatting thematically linked pieces of their old campaigns. One thing that I will keep flogging, is that the game needs to be exposed to new players. Either at conventions, or more efficiently on virtual table tops.

You had one of those, too? Mine was a 1969 Olds 98 two door, my aunt gave me. The other was “The Rolling Living Room”.

On this date 140 years ago, was the battle of Roarke's Drift.

The DC FIlm Rennaissance, after they canned Zack Snyder

I know nothing of 6th edition and I will need help with the conversions from 4/5th on the book.

I don't like them either. They are a tool, and i have used them on a couple of occasions, but in general They don't offer a lot of tactical finesse and problem solving. (which is what i game for as a player and as a GM. It ain't the story, bro.)

Awwwww, but the "grim Vigilantism is the best part! XD. ... and the guns! Woooo!?

I wish I could go. Maybe next year? Was my favorite con for years. I just need to find my character binder for next year, then XD.

On Autocorrect? Or your game? XD. Yeah the Decreasing rewards thing was the reasons I moved so heavily into Package deals.

Hey, I liked Deadpool, and Deadpool 2.

Well, I am "The Art Snob".

Auto correct on my iPhone is brutal.

Which comics, and which Deadpool?

I am feeling like I walked out of the Amazon after 20 years. Well I think I played Champions last in 1989, and switched to Fantasy Hero full time, until all table top ceased for me in 1996-7. And 9-11 still feels like it happened 5-6years ago, rather than the nearly 20 it has been. I have “heard” about Millennium City but this is the first time I knew why it existed . (Sixty thousand Democrat voters. No wonder that treaty was ratified so quickly.??). [This post edited heavily, because my super advanced iPhone 8 made hash of the formatting, sorry] On the the subject of tech, it looks as if the influence is 10-15 years ahead of current year on the whole. Elon gets his Mars colony a few years early, and the supersonic airliner has returned. My second ever Champions character was a semi-prototype Military Powered Armor Suit, back in 1982. What would 30 years of progress on that look like? ? probably VIPER. <__<. All in all, a good response, but I still feel like I stumbled out of the Amazon.

Agreed.

I'm an 8

As to your initial question. I think either removing or scaling UNTIL back would work. Having a UN organization operating within the United States, with the capability of capturing and detaining supers, would have folks in the Militia movement in a tizzy, and passing around files on how to build anti-tank weapons from common hardware store items. I have always had a problem with VIPER, as to what their actual focus and goals were. Even Daesh (ISIS) has a clear goal of restoring the Caliphate, and smiting the unbelievers. The organization is a useful piece for GMs, though. As to tech, with all of the mad tech around How come the US Army hasn't gone with Micro-nuclear technology to arm tanks with? Why hasn't the Navy converted over to rail guns completely now? what about the Air Force putting beam weapons on fighters? Either Aliens or the Gadgeteer down the street would bump up the tech levels. Look at what Elon Musk is doing. he's single handedly lifting parts of large, heavy technologies, previously ignored for the introspective pursuit of small Microprocessor based technologies. Not a fan of electric cars, myself, but even i can see that once they get the utility equal to gasoline engines (450 mile range per charge with a 5-10 minute recharge time), their use will be inevitable. I think that the CU would have a certain ubiquity of supers, and as such, like pop bands, their rise and subsequent invisibility as their popularity fades, would be the reason that the Heroes from the 50's and 60's would fade from memory, except for a few standouts, and unlike Music acts, their fame would generally be local only. Make sense?

I think a lot of this, may be because the CU kind of "acreted" due to differences between creators that preferred Marvel, or DC. In the obituaries of Stan Lee, they often mentioned that the differences between marvel and Dc was that DC tended to invent fictional cities at the drop of a hat, whereas Marvel was based on "The world outside your door", which is why with Spiderman, New York, is also a character in his stories stories. Even the Kree- Skrull war was something below the surface, and Earth was a backwater to them, usually. Even in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they tried to make the Alien Invasion led by Loki something Remeniscent of 9-11, with echoes of it "realistically" reverberating through the Marvel Netflix (RIP) shows, and Agents of Shield on regular Television. You tend not to see that sort of effect in the DC shows, and they feel "Elsewhere" rather than grounded on Earth. How many times has Earth been invaded by hostile aliens in the DC universe? (Including the opening episodes of the Animated version of The Justice League ? I think what you are seeing is that conflict between Marvel fans and DC fans played out by creators working in The Champions Universe. It's also playing out generationally. The original HERO Games members were in college in the late 1970's and early 1980's. The next wave of creators were in college in the late 80's and early 1990's, and the tastes in comics have been a reflection of those. Myself, I had friends who had father that served in WW2. Mine was too young, but did serve in the cold war, and was a comics fan during the golden age. (Sadly my Grandma tossed out the superman comics, but kept the Donald Duck Comics and Stories, which we found as children and considered them an entertaining read when we were young). I had a brief time working in comics, concurrent with my work in Table Top Game art, before I moved on (following a few of the original "Heroes") into video games, but I still pick up the occasional comic book. I would expect the current Hero Creators have read comics, but according to another thread, most have not read anything recently, and got out of the habit in the late 90's, early 2000's when things became either too self referential, or too grimdark for them, so even the recent creators seem to have a fairly silver age mentality. (And Marvel since 2014, has been mostly unreadably bad.) So I think there are a lot of factors leading to a lot of the cruft and baggage that you find in the Champions Universe, but I think that because they are "game rules" it's all optional as to what you want to use. I think what you have is a fairly good start to keep to Stan Lee's vision of "the world outside your door", then, there is also a lot of history there, the one should be careful about pruning, or one might lose the flavor.

Ray Greer, said of him, while he negotiated the cover for the Champions book, that George was a very nice gut to work with. And those issues of Teen Titans were some of the few DC titles we picked up back in high school. His positive attitude will be missed.

Which is why I like the old style package deals, where, you get a whole raft of items, all at a discount, because like the old days of buying albums, you got some stuff you didn't need, but on the whole, it was a good shortcut for a character build.

The the earliest D$D campaigns used the hex based board from the board game Wilderness Survival as its campaign map.