Rich McGee

Hah, didn't realise that (and I live in Perth). I'll try and think up a different term.

That.  What qualifies is decided by GM fiat, not mechanics.  You should look at the points the Limitation granted and decide how strong is strong enough, and you probably ought to consider the character's origin and overall style as well.  A modern-day super without a ton of points invested in the Limitation shouldn't have any difficulty with the everyday EM signal levels - their powers wouldn't ever have manifested if a bit of broadcast radio blocked them completely.  OTOH, the same character might have some power with a much more strict (and valuable) EM Limiter that *is* affected by "average everyday" levels of interference, which he might not even have known he had until he encountered a circumstance where those signal were absent - time travel to the past, a shielded underground base, a "no technology works here" magical zone, etc.
 
Long-lived and temporally-displaced supers might easily justify being extremely Limited in modern-day environments due to Limitations that didn't matter as much when they were active at home.  There's a supernatural critter from ancient Babylonian times in one of the Bureau 13 novels who started out with severe Limits involving steel and iron ("star-metal") that hardly ever triggered back then, but the Bureau easily caged it with a bunch of stainless steel spatulas.   

Croweater
 
Michael Deward was probably the oldest on Timelapse"s list. At 115 he'd been a doddering, senile resident of a nursing home, forgotten by everyone, he'd even outlived his grandchildren. But once, he'd been the scourge of the Klan.
 
Back in the 1920s and 30s, a young black man with bulletproof skin, pyrokinesis, and anger issues, he'd cut a swathe across the South. Finally, a bunch of heroes decided they had to stop him, he was killing too many people, even the ones that sympathised agreed he needed to be stopped.
 
And, after a brutal fight, he did face a court. Michael was sentenced to 120 years in prison, but only because they couldn't figure out a way to execute him.
 
He broke out half a dozen times, and went right back to killing Klanners. The last time, PRIMUS took him down when none of the hero groups were willing to get involved. Croweater as just too problematic morally for most.
 
Michael was sent to a nursing home in the early 80s due to the onset of Alzheimers. Given the politics of the day, it as the equivalent of sweeping an old shame under the rug. He's been there ever since.
 
But now - well, he recognizes that the Klan ain't what it used to be. But he's still angry, and he's still out to get the people he blames for keeping the black man down - but now it's prosecutors who give preferential treatment to non-blacks. Cops who make their quotas off black neighbourhoods. Politicians who set those quotas, knowing full well what they're asking.
 
He's gonna eat the new Jim Crow just the same as the old one. It's all gonna burn.

After laying off a bunch of staff a couple of weeks before Christmas (while their CEO nets a multimillion dollar bonus), WOTC is advertising for a digital retouching artist:
 
 
Absolutely none of this is code for "we are replacing our artists with Midjourney and need someone to fix weird hands."

I think the working assumption here is that it means a strong EM field.  I caught a player with that limitation who blithely walked into a fight scene with a minor villain close to three mobile phone masts.  Each had an agent who was focussing the beam onto the combat scene.
 
He could not fly and his force field failed to come on. He was forced to rely on powers he rarely deployed and was suddenly grateful I had not allowed the limitation on his multi power.
 
Never again did he sail into combat without first assessing the risks, and his force field was soon "hardened" against EM interference.
 
Doc

The other significant appeal to AS is that people with gigantic collections of minis can hope to play games that actually use a company or three of them without having to commit an entire day or more to the project.  Classic BT's still my preference as well, but pushing around more than a lance or two per side can get pretty draggy, while AS has a sweet spot that starts at a company and goes up from there once you're used to it.  I never let myself over-purchase figs for BT, but I know plenty of more dedicated fans who have multiple regiments in their collections.
 
Reminds me of the tradeoff between complexity and detail versus grand scale and abstraction that Task Force Games used to showcase with Star Fleet Battles compared to Starfire.  

The difficulty is that magazines are essentially dead (even Popular Science and National Geographic have closed down), and there's not a viable online alternative.  Particularly with modern culture where short form video is all anyone has an attention span for.

I think you see a trend in lighter rules because of people’s attention spans. A buddy went to try out the new Alpha Strike game for Battletech. I asked him how it went and he told me it was fun. 20mins 4 turns and the game was over.  Though he rather play Classic. I picked up the box set then 1)  The minis are the same for either system. 2) I can convince my kids to play AS probably more often that Classic. And really it’s another reason why Basic Fantasy has gotten played more often at my house. My youngest had a friend over, he wanted to play and in 15 mins. the dice were rolling and it wasn’t too difficult to explain. Yes, I understand how limited BF is compared to Hero but when you don’t play that often? The limitations aren’t so bad. Plus with the Advantage/Disadvantage rule imported and I as a FM feel comfortable to wing stuff. You can actually do more than what is written.

Yep; pretty much nailed it.  Though there were a lot of players who would make their move, then _carefully watch_ as their opponent(s) made their moves, _then have to study the board_ for fifteen minutes....
 
Ugh.
 
 
You know what changed!  You watched it change!  You made half if the changes!  Now play!
 
 
 
 
I can date the story, actually:  I had ordered the game from an add in the back of White Wolf (remember when that qas an actual gaming magazine and not a catalogue? Ha!) And had recieved it about three months earlier.  This campaign was our inaugural run with Daredevils.
 
 
I borrowed the term "roofie" for the telling.  I honestly don't know if rohypnol was a thing then, but there were plenty of street drugs and home-brewed concoctions floating around for that specific purpose, even back then.
 
As to getting him off the streets, etc...
 
I wish I could say it was true.  Date rape wasn't taken seriously as a "real crime" back then.  He served a few months foe possession, but not much else.
 
 

A relevant Reddit posting:
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18ibj22/hasbros_struggle_with_monetization_and_the/
Hasbro's Struggle with Monetization and the Struggle for Stable Income in the RPG Industry
    Discussion We've been seeing reports coming out from Hasbro of their mass layoffs, but buried in all the financial data is the fact that Wizards of the Coast itself is seeing its revenue go up, but the revenue increases from Magic the Gathering (20%) are larger than the revenue increase from Wizards of the Coast as a whole (3%), suggesting that Dungeons and Dragons is, yet again, in a cycle of losing money.
Large layoffs have already happened and are occurring again.
It's long been a fact of life in the TTRPG industry that it is hard to make money as an independent TTRPG creator, but spoken less often is the fact that it is hard to make money in this industry period. The reason why Dungeons and Dragons belongs to WotC (and by extension, Hasbro) is because of their financial problems in the 1990s, and we seem to be seeing yet another cycle of financial problems today.
One obvious problem is that there is a poor model for recurring income in the industry - you sell your book or core books to people (a player's handbook for playing the game as a player, a gamemaster's guide for running the game as a GM, and maybe a bestiary or something similar to provide monsters to fight) and then... well, what else can you sell? Even amongst those core three, only the player's handbook is needed by most players, meaning that you're already looking at the situation where only maybe 1 in 4 people is buying 2/3rds of your "Core books".
Adding additional content is hit and miss, as not everyone is going to be interested in buying additional "splatbooks" - sure, a book expanding on magic casters is cool if you like playing casters, but if you are more of a martial leaning character, what are you getting? If you're playing a futuristic sci-fi game, maybe you have a book expanding on spaceships and space battles and whatnot - but how many people in a typical group needs that? One, probably (again, the GM most likely).
Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs.
Selling books about new races? Not everyone feels the need to even have those, and even if they want it, again, you can generally get away with one person in the group buying the book.
And this is ignoring the fact that piracy is a common thing in the TTRPG fanbase, with people downloading books from the Internet rather than actually buying them, further dampening sales.
The result is that, after your initial set of sales, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain your game, and selling to an ever larger audience is not really a plausible business model - sure, you can expand your audience (D&D has!) but there's a limit on how many people actually want to play these kinds of games.
So what is the solution for having some sort of stable income in this industry?
We've seen WotC try the subscription model in the past - Dungeons and Dragon 4th edition did the whole D&D insider thing where DUngeon and Dragon magazine were rolled in with a bunch of virtual tabletop tools - and it worked well enough (they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers) but it also required an insane amount of content (almost a book's worth of adventures + articles every month) and it also caused 4E to become progressively more bloated and complicated - playing a character out of just the core 4E PHB is way simpler than building a character is now, because there were far fewer options.
And not every game even works like D&D, with many more narrative-focused games not having very complex character creation rules, further stymying the ability to sell content to people.
So what's the solution to this problem? How is it that a company can set itself up to be a stable entity in the RPG ecosystem, without cycles of boom and bust? Is it simply having a small team that you can afford when times are tight, and not expanding it when times are good, so as to avoid having to fire everyone again in three years when sales are back down? Is there some way of getting people to buy into a subscription system that doesn't result in the necessary output stream corroding the game you're working on?

Now I'm honestly glad I never really paid attention to it way back when.  That is some serious idiotic writing there.
 
The "use us as enslaved soldiers" thing is a moderately popular trope in scifi, and not always terminally stupid unto itself.  David Drake and some of his fellow military scifi peers wrote a pretty enjoyable set of stories about shady aliens coming to Earth throughout history and "acquiring" low-tech military formations (eg a defeated Roman Legion) for use as corporate slave troops on other primitive planets.  Their galactic civilization wouldn't let starfarers use superior tech to bully or outright conquer natives they wanted to trade with, and after some debacles with trying to train troops to fight without their usual tech the megacorps discovered it was cheaper to buy slaves, kidnap shiploads of people or "hire" mercs who became de facto slaves from other primitive cultures and use them to overthrow non-cooperative local rulers and install their own picked candidates.  If nothing else it was pleasantly cynical about how well the main government's well-intentioned anti-exploitation laws worked in practice.
 
Of course, humans being human those Romans (and in later stories others from different periods) wind up freeing themselves eventually and (in some of the expanded stuff by other authors) effectively conquering the galaxy and making Earth a stellar superpower, which is very silly but typical.  Turns the whole thing into Poul Anderson's High Crusade with an extra step in the process.

@Rich McGee, I have created many a burdensome character because I went by Hero Benchmarks. 😂 If Speed 4 is top human then I should only take 4. This was in a Dark Champions game where everyone else had Speed 5 and that’s acceptable on that game. So I learned about the “character tax” where sometimes you buy things up higher than you are “supposed” to.  To be like what Old Man said, playable. Btw I got to play in a 600 pt ish game once and yeah I felt bored. I want to be competent but I don’t need to be Silver Age powerful either.

I am willing to accept Ninja-Bear's claims for several reasons, most significantly being that historically, he's not given to flights of fantasy, and because he includes the very valid disclaimer "in my own experience."
 
It certainly doesn't hurt that his experiences with min-maxers mirrors my own. 
 
now I have no misunderstandings that these are the guys who prefer the tactical side of the game; it's just not my favorite part of them game.
 
and I also admit that to some degree, we have all bumped up "efficiency effectiveness" here and there even if it was only because we to shave points to buy "just one other thing."
 
 

@Duke Bushido, I actually wavered between most and many. I’ll even go with many. I think the issue I have with Min-Maxers is that in wargamming they ignore the spirit of the game just to win. And with that complain about suboptimal builds as being dumb. Let me say too that I can appreciate an efficient design in Hero System especially trying to fit a character concept to points.  I do agree to that having a sub-optimal character doesn’t equate to Roleplaying. 

You remind me of a wonderful session back about '88 or so that ended wonderfully and awfully at that same time, but it was ultimately a good thing:
 
When I took over as GM for my original Champiins group, one of the many things I inhereted was one of those little cheesy sand timers found packed in with various ouzzle games since time immemorial.  It was allegedly a sixty-second timer, but repeated testing (across a couple of _decades_)  had proven it to be a sixty-two sexond timer....  Yeah, not important, unless you were the guy who was waiting for your turn, in which case it was the thing you complained about most.   
 
Anyway, Jim (my predecessor) had a policy:  if you weren't ready when your turn came (everyone got a few seconds, of course, but if you werent ready after a quick "uuhhhhh....," then the timer hit the table, and you had until it ran out to complete and execute your actions.  (Newbies had exemption, of,course, for the first couple of hours of game time.)
 
The fact is (and it could have been simply the threat of it) no one ever actually needed all sixty-two seconds unless we were playing Starfleet Battles (not sure why we were all of so tediously cagey for that game).  But when the timer was put into play, whoever's turn was up suddenly became the poster child for efficiency: whatever wasn't done when the last of the sand flowed out of the top didn't get done.
 
 
And that policy had an inconsiderate corollary that bit us in the butt in the most amusing way....
 
One night, we had one player-  I don't know what her deal was: she was falling in and out of attention, constantly distracting herself with some internal thing--  I had asked after about an hour if she felt okay; if ahe wanted a break; if she would prefer her character moving onto a side-plot to be resolved later so ahe could bow out and go home--
 
It was confusing to me, because she was actually a few minutes earlier that usual, claiming she had blown off a party to come to the game.  Well, she wenr to the party, had some fun, ended up stuck talking to some creepy dude for fifteen minutes, got 'that vibe,' and left in an attempt to bail on him.  Instead, he walked her all the way to my place, said his good-byes, then beat feet back the way he came.
 
 
She kept insisting ahe was fine, and I figueed she was probably just shaking the creepy vibe off, so we kept playing.
 
We had never had to use the timer more than three or four times in any game, and frankly, it was a pretty rare game that saw it in use at all.  That night, it was used more than a dozen times, almost all of them on that same player (who was now distracted in-game; it was the only way to resolve all of this!).
 
And after waffling for a bit, the timer came out for the final time that session.  Her character had been hiding behind a column in a darkened maintenance room ( for what it's worth, we were playing Daredevils), pistol drawn (she was supposed to be covering another character as he advanced towars the villain, but had gotten distracted, etc.  Two other players were making the attempt, and were nearly,out of ammo.  Distraction Player was the only one who the villain had not yet been made aware of.
 
The timer came out, she hesitated, waffled, studied the map, asked questions that demonstrated she had lost focus about four rounds prior to now....
 
I put the timer on the table _again_.....
 
And it didn't help much.  I think it was half empty before she really registered its presence (in spite of the traditional "oh no!  It's the timer!" drama from the usual suspects).  As it got more and more empty, she just choked.
 
Then the timer did, too.
 
There was a tint bit of sand that had somehow managed to get lodged in the neck, and it just hung there.  Hoots and howls from around the table, but my Player remained... Off....
 
She turned to another player and started with "oh my God; I don't know what to do!  Do I shoot this guy?  Do I run away?  No matter what, he is going to see me, and my character isn't going to survive getting shot with his tommy gun--"
 
Helpfully, he suggested considering her motives, which degenerated into a group recap of the last four sessions-  the villain did this; the villain did that....  He framed your fiance and got him arrested, then stole his research;  
 
On and on.  "Guys...."  I started.  "She's out of time...."
 
"Oh, no!" This from my rules lawyer brother.  "She's out of time when the timer runs out!"  Everyone suddenly remembered the timer and burst out laughing again.
 
"I know it's stuck, but-"
 
"Nope!"  Quipped my brother John.  "It's in Flashback mode!"  More laughter, considering the recap underway.
 
"Yeah!" Agreed the Rules Lawyer.  "You know how it works-  every movie there's a pivotal moment where someone has like a twenty minute flashback and then we snap back to the moment and like, two seconds have gone by!  The Timer rule says (and it didn't, really; it was just an accepted interpretation, and this is how I learnes to be careful about letting that happen again) 'when the sand runs out,' which it hasn't--"
 
Distracted Player said "Okay, you're right- villain did this and this and this and this and this and it affected you this way and you that way and you this way, and it did this, this, and this to me, and he has always been this and that and the other to my fiance and his father-  this is it!
 
 
"Okay, Duke: I step out from behind the column and say "you will leave me and the French family (her fiance was Dr. Conrad French, scientist extrordinaire) alone!'  Then I shoot a couple of times to scare him back so the others can take him down."
 
Then she rolled a pretty sweet critical and he dropped, dead at her feet.
 
Howls from around the table.
 
Then she (the player) got incredibly sick on my floor, and we all freaked for a moment, and John and I loaded her into his car and we took her to the ER.
 
 
Turns out her vibe was right, and leaving was the best thing for her.  Someone had roofied her.  The only thing that saved her was her health (she was on swim team scholarship), and creepy guy not using enough to black her out, and the fact that she left.
 
We couldn't talk her in to preasing charges, but her coach did.  Creepy dude was caught with enough on him to knock out choir.
 
Sorry-  that last bit was to be left out, but in anticipation of the discussion about her 'shouldnt have shown up' or 'bad player' or whatever,  and I wanted to defend hee showing up: I suspect she felt safer in the company of her wierd friends than she would have in an empty dorm room.
 
 
We would learn later that another girl at the party had not been so fortunate.
 

I'm not sure I'd go as far as "most" but I'll give you "many" based on my experiences. 
 
On the flip side, I've seen a fair number of people who throw together characters who are just plain burdens on their fellow PCs in many circumstances (eg can't survive a fight, or can't deal with any but the narrowest social situations, or are otherwise totally lacking some capability the game engine/setting expect some competence in) and do so in the name of it making for interesting roleplaying.  It might be interesting for them, but unless at least some of the other players are okay with being crutches for them it's pretty inconsiderate.  You certainly can have a good time with it - look at Runequest Glorantha, where having a truly pacifist Chalana Arroy worshipper in the group often works out fine because they're rarely just pure healers - but it requires some group buy-in that you don't always see from...whatever the opposite of a mini-maxer is.  It's at least as Not Okay as a mini-maxed combat machine who refuses to engage with anything else but fighting is without that.

I'd call that a wargamer myself.  I suppose the term's a bit dated these days, given how few people have ever even seen one of the old hex-and-counter games from SPI or AvHill or GDW these days (to name just a few).
 
Although I suspect many video gamers would quite enjoy some of the smaller offerings from that era.  Metagaming and Task Force's microgames, for ex.  They were a nice alternative to the big multi-hour (or -day) behemoths.

One plea.
No holiday themed teams as we have done this several times in the hero and villain teams.

I'm still pissed at the Pinkertons for strongarming Deadlands into removing all mention of them back in the day.

Read it, and played it, with lead 54mm Soldiers, and these Matal cannon with spring slap fire breeches, suitable for firing a toothpick or a length of piano wire. Turns weren't quick, but it was fun turning the living room into a battlefield.  That  lead me into wanting to try Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame, but we never did.

Hot take coming in. Anyone else seen this that “Min-Maxers aren’t so bad”? Now I agree that being a Min-maxer doesn’t automatically make you a bad roleplayer. I just think that though most min-maxers I’ve come across aren’t worried about roleplaying.

It's been quite a while, so I checked Wikipedia.
 
Steal water, eat us, and use us as slave soldiers -- a trifecta of idiocy! And all on Arthur's list. Well, maybe he thought it was so bad that nobody would remember it... or he suppressed the memory as too traumatic. Hey, I hadn't thought of this excrementitious piece of sci-fi in decades.
 
Dean Shomshak

Strange, I love to put comedy, intrigue, suspense, and even sometimes horror into my Champions games. Having them just some superheroes fighting some supervillains gets pretty boring rather fast.

I'd rather take my chances playing with complete strangers than get stuck not playing at all with friends whose tastes no longer intersect with mine.  Admittedly, that's more of theoretical issue than an actual one over the last twenty years or so, I've had pretty good luck finding enough RPG table time to keep me busy as I get older.  Some of that comes from being willing to run demo games for people in the local community for systems I like, most of whom were just faces I'd seen around the FLGS prior to doing a demo with them but they've mostly turned into gaming friends even if I would ask them to help me move.