d20 Super Heroes --- coming in July '06 from WOTC

Vigilance said:
Well as long as you're not biased or anything. :p

I listen to the first three albums, in their entirety, of an artist. They are in roughly the same style, and fairly consistent from song to song. I like one song, but not badly enough to buy the album it's on, and really don't care for any of the rest. I hear a 3rd album is being produced, and nobody is saying it will be any different than the previous ones. Is it bias to presume i probably won't like it, or simple prediction of taste?

Is it really "bias" to note an 8-yr-long unbroken trend in a company's products, and begin to presume future products will conform to it? Or simple observation?
 

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buzz said:
No, I think there's sufficient evidence to show that you do, indeed, agree with yourself. Well done! :D

Point is, as silly as it may be to judge a book before it even exists, it seems just as silly to say that one cannot make any meaningful predictive statements about a book produced by a known quantity, before it exists. Now, if you think that WotC's products are all over the map--some awesome, some horrid--then, yes, pre-judging D20 Superheroes is futile and silly. But if you see a consistent trend, then it is not at all unreasonable to extend that trend to a future book. It may not be accurate, but it is reasonable. And, at some point, everyone has to make some pre-judgements of that sort to weed out some of the stuff out there and get to what they like. Even if it's as simple as "i don't like supers RPGs". And, in the process, we all risk missing something we would like. Which is part of why we seek others' opinions.
 

woodelf said:
Is it really "bias" to note an 8-yr-long unbroken trend in a company's products, and begin to presume future products will conform to it? Or simple observation?
It's opinion. You stated as much in your post, but only after a lengthy number of "is" statements ("d20Supes will be inferior...", "D&D3e is inferior...", "d20 Modern is inferior...", "the WotC version is inferior...").

I don't particularly agree with any of your assertions (I like all of the games in question save for Spycraft, which I do not own, and likely never will), and no amount of "backup" is going to change my mind, short of your being able to demostrate catastrophic mechanical flaws. This doesn't make me right or you wrong. All of the RPGs in question are, in fact, excellent products.

woodelf said:
Point is, as silly as it may be to judge a book before it even exists, it seems just as silly to say that one cannot make any meaningful predictive statements about a book produced by a known quantity, before it exists.
Well, there's "meaningful predictive statements" and then there's, "It's being produced by WotC, so obviously it will suck. I can prove it!" :D

IMO, WotC generally produces some great stuff. Not the near-perfect record, IMO, of a Malhavoc, but then agian, they put out a lot more product, with a greater number of authors, so there will be more variation. On the whole, their track record, IMO, is far better than most other d20 companies. I'll buy their stuff far more readily than I will certain other publishers.

IMO, the only WotC d20M product I have found genuinely disappointing was Urban Arcana. I also did not buy Weapons Locker becasue the subject simply didn't interest me. Otherwise, I think they've been doing great. IMO, d20M is one of the best d20 designs in print (I love basic classes). Ergo, I look forward to this new book, though I will keep my eyes peeled for reviews.
 

JoeGKushner said:
Karma to improve your character? Man, maybe I'm misremembering but it took thousands of karma points to raise an ability score, much less a power.

Depended on what level the stat or power was before raising it.

Raising something from Feeble to Typical didn't take thousands of Karma, for instance, but raising something from Monstrous to Unearthly... well... Yeah.
And I don't see anything wrong with that. ;)
 

arcady said:
I think we -CAN- presume that d20 Supers will be based on and perhaps require ownership of the d20 Modern rules.

Therefore, if that presumption is to be accepted, one could make judgments on it even now on the basis of an opinion of d20 Modern.

I imagine for example that we could assume it will have classes, feats, levels, hit points, and d20 modern combat as a core. If one finds those things counter to one's tastes in a game, particularly a supers game, one could probably guess d20 supers will not be satisfactory to one's tastes.

Works for me.
I can't wait to see what I can steal from it for my B&V game.
 

JoeGKushner said:
Karma to improve your character? Man, maybe I'm misremembering but it took thousands of karma points to raise an ability score, much less a power.

And as far as modelling the source material, to a point, it did this well, but it did it often times at the cost of a player's enjoyment. "Gee Mr. Shield Agent, I'm sorry that the hulk like brick is the only one standing again..."

Sure, MSH had some problems as a game system. So did AD&D ;)

Still, its a game I can best describe as charming.

Having played AD&D with its weird (yet important) tables stuck away in the middle of the DMG for no apparent organizational reason, and Champions which was very well organized but requiring a calculator and t-square to run effectively, my group attacked MSH with enthusiasm.

Characters were modeled, not randomly generated, and the character you started with progressed very slowly.

But since all that modeled comics, the players weren't upset by the slow pace of character advancement.

Heck, my players also enjoyed Gamma World 1E which had *NO* character advancement.

You found better stuff. Your character never improved in any other way.

It was an age of innocence :cool:

Chuck
 

buzz said:
It's opinion. You stated as much in your post, but only after a lengthy number of "is" statements ("d20Supes will be inferior...", "D&D3e is inferior...", "d20 Modern is inferior...", "the WotC version is inferior...").

So, if i'd said "The following is opinion: 'X'", rather than "'X'; the preceding is opinion", you'd be satisfied? It really matters which order i write it in? Or would you really prefer that i saddle every single sentence with an 'IMHO'? Isn't that a given for most statements in this sort of forum, and it's the non-opinion statement that needs to be flagged?

All of the RPGs in question are, in fact, excellent products.

See, you do it, too: make blanket statements of opinion as though they were fact. It isn't necessary to disclaim every single opinion as such.

I fully recognize that, at best, my opinion is supportable opinion, not fact; i can give some specific, objective reasons why i think the other porducts are better, at least in many of the cases, but many of those reasons are in turn subject to taste (frex, i like Spycraft's action dice over D20M's action points in large part because the former have more impact on the game; but if you want them to have less impact, then it won't satisfy you, even if you agree). A few are pretty darn objective, i'd say--such as the fact that much of the art in the WotC monster books fails to match the written descriptions, occasionally in major ways [at least, i've never heard anyone put forth a reason why it's bad to have accurate pictures in a monster book].

Nonetheless, i see nothing unreasonable about using a consistent track record to predict future performance. I see a very consistent track record from WotC: lots of middling-to-good products and a few poor products; no awesome products, and no really bad products. You see a different track record--slightly less consistent, but also noticably more positive. Based on your experiences, i'd be surprised if you could accurately predict your response to a new WotC product. But this all goes back to someone's claim that it was ridiculous to discount this new WotC book without even seeing it. I claim it is perfectly reasonable to do so--or any other creative work--provided you have sufficient experience with related works, and there is some reason and mechanism for the various related works to be similar in meaningful ways.
 

JPL said:
I dunno. It was fast, it was simple, it was my first game, and I loved it.

I'm not arguging these things.

It was my first RPG and I played the original yellow boxed and the Advanced version latter on.

An even game system though? No, it certainly was not.

And man, the book had it in for you if you wanted to be like the Punisher or Wolverine. You either banked that karma, making it unusualbe, or if you killed someone, you lost it all.

Not saying it didn't have it's place or that I'd object to playing it today, but it had many flaws.
 

JoeGKushner said:
I'm not arguging these things.

It was my first RPG and I played the original yellow boxed and the Advanced version latter on.

An even game system though? No, it certainly was not.

And man, the book had it in for you if you wanted to be like the Punisher or Wolverine. You either banked that karma, making it unusualbe, or if you killed someone, you lost it all.

Not saying it didn't have it's place or that I'd object to playing it today, but it had many flaws.

Again, I don't really know what you mean by "even."

The original FASERIP ox hit just before grim-n-gritty became widespread. Wolverine was the only hero I can think of who killed, and even that wasn't terribly frequent. The Punisher wasn't even a "hero" at that point --- in the Lone Wolves adventure, he was just another bad guy for Daredevil and Luke Cage to fight]. The superhero as antihero hadn't really caught on. Reenforcing traditional Silver Age superhero values made sense, and certainly modeled the prevailing morality in comics of that era.

Wolverine, at least, could sock most of that Karma away in the X-Men Karma pool, or burn it off being The Best There Is. I kinda like the idea that even Wolverine loses all his Karma when he kills --- it means that even to him, this is a serious matter, not something he does lightly. This is the guy who stabbed Rachel Summers in the chest to prevent her from murdering the Black Queen. Like the man said...what he does isn't pretty.
 

JPL said:
Well, if you have a SHIELD agent and a Hulk-like brick as PCs, you need to have them fight a Hydra agent and an Abomination-like brick. Then it evens out.

Not in any useful way, because if you remove either of the agents, the fight turns out the same - they're pretty much baggage. Superhero RPGs are a bad place to make somebody feel like baggage, IMHO. Comic books get away with the power disparity because the author can stage manage things to make the lesser powered folks useful to the story, in an RPG context that's usually considered a brand of railroading.

Fantasy fiction has just as much of a disparity in protagonist power, and yet the most successful fantasy games aim for some kind of balance. I wouldn't consider buying a superhero RPG nowadays unless it did the same thing.
 

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