Thoughtful Thursday #14

    As part of my trip down the rabbit hole that is Palladium games, I played the heck out of Heroes Unlimited. For the uninitiated, this is a Palladium System-based  game where you play comic book-style super heroes. Buying super powers was easier than Champions or DC Heroes, but the powers were very specific. They didn’t have a bolt power, they have flame blast, energy blast, etc. The obvious disadvantage of this is that there were loads of powers. The back cover brags about having over 240 Powers and Magic Spells. The clear advantage was that each power got its own treatment so that fire blast and ice blast had rules for catching things on fire and/or freezing them. This was the first Palladium book I bought that had rules for integrating them with other Palladium Games. I latched onto this idea immediately, My crowning achievement was a villain that was a Kung Fu Weasel with 15 attacks per turn! Again, this system suffered from having the rules and subsystems spread around and hidden. Also, it rubbed me the wrong way to have an experience level system for Super heroes. I mean, what does a 1^st level Superman™ look like in comparison to a 15^th level Superman™ (also a reason why I never tried Mutants and Masterminds)? It was good fun though, but I eventually moved on to another game. Heroes Unlimited showed me the value of a universal system and the value of a detail oriented system.