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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9396091" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Since you ask:Yes to the former, no to the latter but to my considerable regret I own the latter and have put time into a thorough reading of it.  Even worked with character gen a bit.  They're both BESM-related of course, and have all the strengths and weaknesses of that system along with the balance pitfalls point-buy systems experience in supers games.  I'd rate SAS as mechanically inferior to 4th ed Champions (which is where I stopped as well - I think I own about three post-4th Hero books), with poor balance and rather swingy dice mechanics.  It's still quite versatile but the results of any given build don't inspire confidence in how they compare to others in play.  The setting was deep enough that I wondered how it had changed when they updated the timeline for Absolute Power - which is the only reason why I own that game.See, I made the mistake of doing that wondering at the FLGS, and the owner took it as a request to special order a copy for me.  He'd gotten it in before I heard about it, and (owing to too many years behind other counters and knowing he's been having a rough time lately) I couldn't bring myself to leave him stuck with it.  So I spent $120 on AP, and after a good deep read I can only say that in twenty years they managed to make SAS's problems worse, if anything.  Balance is even more out the window.  The benchmark system produces some weirdness as you approach the boundaries between campaign power levels while still doing a dubious job of dealing with the "how are Green Arrow and Superman on the same team?" issue.  Even the art is weirdly off-putting, which I think is partly the color choices involved.  I'll never play this game, and I don't recommend anyone else do so either.The only remotely positive thing I have to say about AP is that it is reasonably well-divided into a crunch volume and a setting/character stat/GM advice/history of comics volume.  If you just want the engine with minimal fluff you can buy Volume One and ignore the setting.  If you just want the setting with minimal crunch, or for some reason need a rather basic history of real-world comics or a bunch of adequate but uninspired GM tips for supers roleplaying, volume two does the job without too much wasted space on stat blocks.  So you can spend "just" $60 MSRP and have one or the other - and realistically you can find it for much less, both in print or pdf.  I still wouldn't recommend it no matter the price, but YMMV. The physical copies do come with nice bound-in ribbon bookmarks.  I guess that's a consolation prize, at least.Thanks for the excuse to do some mild ranting.  I sincerely hope you don't make the mistake of buying AP.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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