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Balance and mechanics-wise, they seem to mix OK. AU characters are a little stronger at lower levels and probably a bit weaker in the mid-to-high level range (since they don't have access to easy cures to some common conditions - ability damage is a surprisingly big deal in AU), but nothing is...

The more important question is what sort of roleplay do the players want to participate in(1)? If you pick up a few issues of just about any team-based comic book, you'll find a ton of non-combat stuff going on that can easily fit into a campaign - most comic books have a lot of soap opera in...

I'm working from memory here, but as I recall the hooks are relatively straightforward. One way to do it: Initially, the PCs are first level rubes, they show up in Hommlet by whatever means the DM likes, hear about the bandits in the moathouse, and head off to get rich/smite evil/whatever. When...

Cyclone's skills aren't useless, they're just purchased in an inefficient manner. As swrushing notes, if a character has those skills, they should certainly come up in a campaign - that's a good rule of thumb for every game and genre, not just M&M or superheroics. But it's easy to get Cyclone's...

... or they're using feats and super-attributes to bump up their skill checks, putting a bare minimum of points into the skills themselves. That gives them decently high skill checks while wasting as few points as possible on the skills themselves. One of the first signs that a character has...

Hmm, lots of people seem to hate this. I still have mine, and use it a decent amount. Ah well, one DM's trash... My nomination for worst product was Dwarves' Deep, 2E FR product. It revealed that the great secret of the Dwarves was that they were having fertility troubles, so they were secretly...

I wonder if some of the extra stuff in Arcana Evolved will be all those spell conversions? I've already got the Book of Eldritch Might hardcover with the converted spells, so I'm not really wild about buying a PDF with many of the same conversions, but having them all in one list along with the...

Mid-late 20s for me. But I took a bit of ribbing from the rest of the gaming group (who average about five years younger than me - I'm 36 now). So I started playing elves and dwarves :cool: .

Sure, but it's still a bit of a shock in the first session. I was just noting it as an example of how a small difference in PL can have a large effect on a game. I've since learned that a PL difference of +1 is more than enough for a single villain to give two heroes a tough fight and adjusted...

I'm not much of a GURPS fan - Hero is my point-based system of choice - but this sort of criticism bugs me. GURPS requires the same simple arithmetic you learned in primary school or use when you're figuring out if you can afford to buy stuff at your FLGS. It ain't rocket science, or Advanced...

I believe Midnight is low-deity intervention (well, for the good guys at least), isn't it? Haven't picked up a copy yet myself. For one I do know, Skull and Bones (pirate setting) tends to put the gods well into the background, though it is possible to play something like a cleric.

Yeah, that's an example of how game mechanics can be balanced statistically and yet not lead to "fun balance" in play. The first time I ran an M&M game, I had two players with straight-from-the-book PL 10 characters (one used the Superman-style template, the other was a Battlesuit) and put them...

Sure, but "more complicated" and "requires a spreadsheet to successfully accomplish" are two different standards of difficulty. I responded to a post suggesting MT falls into the latter category rather than simply the former.

Unless you're planning on a reasonably cinematic campaign (which could be a lot of fun, most of those old war movies are a hoot), I'd look at something like GURPS or Hero rather than a d20 game. Seems to me those systems better capture the character power curve, and they both have fairly robust...

Let's see. Way back when during 1E and 2E, I never really linked Krynn to other worlds, nor did we allow much in the way of plane-hopping in our DragonLance games - just didn't fit the feel. The exception is when we very first started the DL modules, we played our own characters rather than the...

I picked up S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire yesterday, and am about halfway through - it's a pretty quick read. Good gaming fodder, like a lot of Stirling's work. I also have Mark Budz' Clade on the go, and for non-fiction Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival.

It is indeed, and you picked two very cinematic characters to build your example. In effect, you have Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian charging Jesse "the Body" Ventura as whatever his guy was called in Predator. You shouldn't expect anything like a realistic result when you set up...

Not really - I used to design MegaTraveller ships without a spreadsheet, and didn't find it any harder than High Guard. Fire, Fusion, and Steel for Traveller: New Era was the one that looked to me like a spreadsheet would be good, but I never really played around with it. Nowadays, I've gone...

2300 AD (which I believe got its start as Traveller: 2300) also had a really nice near-star map, and is probably easier to find, if you're looking to replace it. Of course, both maps are sadly out of date - IIRC they were both based on the same dataset of late 1960s star data, and astronomers...

I have the ancient first edition of the Traveller game, and it's one of the better-written rules sets on my shelf - it certainly compares favourably with most d20 products. Like a lot of older RPGs, it's written for a college-level audience where today's target audience is about ten years...