Search results

It doesn't hurt that the proper materials for crossbows, while more expensive over all, were much more common outside of Great Britain. There are other styles of bow that were more comparable, but they were also dependent on regional materials to one extent or another.

I don't doubt that's true, but I'll just note I've seen a number of non-IP based games that had pretty good kickstarters and then vanished without a trace. They were interesting enough to get a kickstarter through (sometimes a pretty successful one) but then just didn't propagate any further...

Though often those are toward the cheaper end, and for non-specialists are mostly melee weapons. Ranged attackers from the commoners usually were guys who had their own weapons for one reason or another (different places what this meant varied). Your typical levies were probably talking spears...

I think there's some virtues with some executions there (card decks have, in practice, "memory" in the way a die doesn't) but haven't found them practical for various reasons, even more so since I now play virtually.

I was assuming we were talking mostly about the latter; I still find it a little annoying if there's more than one or maybe two special characters because I'd have to remember what symbol was associated with what number space. I'm not actually familiar with too many games that are using...

Its been an extremely common thing since the start of the hobby, though often in more minor ways. I mean, the truth is, a lot of D&D and other sandboxy game parties are self-formed. If there's a character that's just, well, annoying to most of the group, why are they there? Because its...

Well, honestly, its not like complaining about things you don't like, even when you aren't forced to engage with them, is exactly uncommon in the world. Sometimes venting is venting.

Its hard to see to what degree that's really true, because the truth is a lot of rpgs are flashes in the pan. I'm not sure IP focused games do any worse than the hobby as a whole here.

The greater degree they do that, the more they tend to fail though; the assumptions baked into it as a superhero game tend to fail out if you're using any real scope outside a supers game, because they show their roots. This includes such basic things as the fact its far easier to knock someone...

This is entirely legit. I'd somewhat moved on a bit myself for quite some time, going over to M&M because it had a lot of Champs elements but was a bit more lightweight. Unfortunately, at one point I realized a problem from my own POV about the system, and once I did I couldn't unsee it. I...

The tendency to put up with actions from other PCs you likely wouldn't from an NPC with the same apparent personality or actions. The classic was thieves stealing from the party. If an NPC did that they'd be dead in a ditch in two minutes flat.

Your biases here aren't the problem. The fact you have to bring it up any time you see anything that smacks of it, however, a bit is. It gets pretty tedious, man, and doesn't tell anyone in the discussion likely anything they don't already know.

I tend to think a game that pretty much demands them is offloading a little too much mechanical weight on the dice (I make that distinction to contrast with games where one particular space is a special character where its only a matter of convenience)

I really do have to question how ongoing PvP approaches to things would work barring "PC Glow". And why I'd bother to keep playing with someone who habitually did this, even if I didn't know about it in-character.

Eh. That's part of a set of terms I think was flawed from the get-go (because of how simulationism was handled) so that's a terminological problem, but its still representing a fundamentally story-shape process. I agree its a largely game-convenient way of doing so, and arguably a refinement...

I also should note that the question of detail and complexity can muddy this discussion; Champions is extremely detailed and definitely on the heavy crunch side, and that's probably one of the reasons its less popular these days. But Mutants and Masterminds, while significantly less detailed...

That, of course, it absolutely is. But in the context of trying to represent the way things work in the extent superhero comics of the time of its initial design (and I don't think they've changed that radically over time). What it doesn't do is consider the expression of characters abilities...

No, its really not, and repeating it doesn't make it true. If its "simulating" something its the way superpowers and such classically work in comics, and that has remarkably little to do with physics in any sense, and using it in discussion distorts the discussion because it suggests something...

I suspect it was less a failure of imagination than conservativism about getting too far from the elements that had proven themselves to be successful in other MMOs, even though they didn't make much sense in a superhero context.

That's the gig at the end of the day; a popular IP is only going to get you so far; a game system that doesn't work for people isn't going to work just because its wedded to an IP people like. If well integrated it might push up a system that is functional but flawed.