My GM is preparing to convert to 7th edition. The one thing I’ve heard about the new rules that puts me off a bit is that they add a Luck statistic. I don’t generally care for Luck as a game stat. On one hand, if it’s intended to represent actual luck, the representation I prefer is that character luck is represented as player luck: If you get good dice rolls your character is lucky. On the other hand, if the idea is that there’s some sort of mystical attunement to the universe (I’m not sure that works in CofC, where attunement to true reality seems like an easy road to madness), the game already has Power as a stat, and I don’t see why there should be two. On the third hand, if it’s a narrative device, like drama points in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or FUDGE points in FUDGE, I think I like it better as a pool of spendable points than as a stat.
Hey, a trilemma! How much experience are they worth?
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That’s one way to look at it, sure. For me, though, the intellectual puzzle of trying to figure out how to use the Chainmail mechanics to run combat was what added enough interest to plain old dungeon crawls to make me look at D&D again. (I also have ideas about how to reinterpret the mechanics of Superhero 2044 in a way that owes nothing to Wayne Shaw’s house rules [which later inspired Champions]. It’s sort of like linguists coming up with * forms of words.)
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CoC 7th Luck works just like the old POW×5 roll. If the GM allows the spending of Luck, which is explicitly an optional rule, it becomes detached from POW: it goes down when you spend points after a skill roll, and goes up with start-of-session recovery rolls.
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I think I prefer that my GM not use the optional rule. It’s not at the “not willing to play” level; there’s just something about it that bothers me.
For me, the Mentzer/Cyclopedia version of D&D is still a very satisfying “go down the dungeon and bash” system with options to hex crawl and argue with npcs. The Mentzer red box player book may be the best “how-to rpg” versus “what is an rpg” intro available. At least from a “what practical motions will I make with my hands and what kind of notes should I expect to write down” standpoint.
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God I really want to play these two now, sadly I do not own them anymore 8(
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9364.phtml
Animonde was such a different vibe to everything else at the time, a lot more gentle discussions during the session, everything in harmony…
but I still have this one
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I’ve been amusing myself of late by writing up early DC superheroes in Villains and Vigilantes, 2nd ed. This is before the massive power inflation that took Superman from lifting an automobile to lifting 100 tons to shoving the Moon out of its orbit, for example. I came up with a Kal-L who could lift 6693 pounds, run at 86 mph (faster than an express train), inflict more damage with his fist than a shotgun, and withstand anything smaller than a medium bomb uninjured: that is, he was faster than a locomotive and more powerful than a speeding bullet. The only thing that didn’t fit well was his jumping range, which came out to either 330 feet (too short) or 2.4 miles (way too long), but the jumping rules look to be an add-on and produce odd results overall; if I were actually running this I would probably go with 330 feet, which is good enough for “leaping tall buildings.”
(I really can’t be bothered with keeping up with DC’s much-revised continuity any more, even though I like one or two new characters—I’m a fan of Miss Martian, for one. But I kind of like looking back to their early days and wondering about simpler forward progressions.)
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The one benefit of DC’s horrendously tangled and endlessly revised continuity is that you can probably find a version of most major characters to suit your tastes and preferred system. Mix and match, make changes to suit… When it comes to DC the Continuity Police have largely surrendered their jurisdiction.
Back in the nineties a fellow gamer and I did that in “DC Realtime.” Our theory was that the Crisis on Infinite Earths ended with a timeline where characters appeared in the years when they were first published and aged year for year after that. So Batman (1939) had died some years ago, Superman (1938) had some distinguished gray at the temples and was doing research in condensed matter physics, and Wonder Woman (1941) hadn’t aged a day and was still as beautiful as Aphrodite (but she was married to Steve Trevor, who was in a wheelchair).
I’ve thought for some time that the original idea of the Crisis on Infinite Earths was a good one, but it had two failure points: the majority of DC’s writers and editors weren’t smart enough to figure out its implications; and it set a precedent that timelines could mutate, which has been used since then to expand out into multiple timelines or collapse back into single ones, to the confusion of readers such as me. Of course DC would never have published our timeline, which would have required setting Batman stories in the thirties and forties, cutting down the potential readership.
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But Superman was supposed to be “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a locomotive”?
Yes, that was the traditional phrase, though I think from somewhat later than the 1930s. Reversing it was a joke, which I thought of after seeing the original description of his abilities in Action Comics, which had him outrunning an express train (hence “faster than a locomotive”).
Biomechanically the performance shown in that issue is actually fairly consistent if you postulate that he has about 100x the mechanical power output of a human being (and the structural strength to withstand the resulting forces). But I think that was a lucky gues on the part of Siegel and Shuster . . .
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