synthozoic

That's brilliant! That's going in my sig right now!

Excellent point this. And high speed rail systems in Europe and Asia are also highly automated. The trains move so quickly that a human pilot simply can't react fast enough to apply breaking if a faulty signal warning happens too late--a computer on the other hand can. And the US rail freight industry has been steadily and slowly increasing the amount of automation in the system, to reduce costs, increase reliability and so on.

Perhaps cars on the highways of our future will be moving at such speeds and at such close proximity to each other (Look up car platooning to see why.) that a human driver just won't be able to cope.

Which is ironic to be concerned about since you're already using the Internet. We're already doomed on that front, with or without robot cars. Just sayin'

Robot cars aren't ready yet so, in the meantime, I'll agree. But when they do come, I think they'll be a great thing.

That cat has already long since left the bag, gone off to raise a family, has seen its great grandchildren and is now buried in the ground surrounded by a massively complex cat civilization that has grown up around the long forgotten and abandoned bag.

Seriously. To really think about it, there is almost nothing most of us really know about how the world runs anymore. If civilization collapses, most of us are unavoidably dead. How many of us here now how to farm? How to bridle, train and care for a horse? When the zombies take over and after our ammo has run out, who's going to remember how to make more of it? There was a time when most of our ancestors knew most of these things.

One of the central themes of technology is delegation and automation--of removing humans from a process when they turned out to be too expensive, too unreliable or too valuable to waste there any more. This has been repeated over and over and over again for the last 50,000 years at least.

So if cars become entirely automated, I ain't really that worried.

Personally I'd rather robots drive our cars than we do. One day they will be more reliable than us. Because they optimized for the process, they won't get bored, sleepy, angry, drunk or just careless. Our roads will be much safer. People won't have to just accept 30 to 40 thousand deaths on the road every year anymore.

Can't get here soon enough I say.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Basically any game system can be badly abused and unbalanced, and many newer systems (Not facing as much playtesting.) are badly designed in the first place. But even well designed and simple rules systems can be abused if a GM is not watchful.

It is true that simulationist rules sets, by giving more options and flexibility, give more potentials for abuse, but if a GM knows her rules well and is watchful, occasionally nerfing stuff it it gets out of hand, this can be contained.

And I will grant that complex simulationist rules are much more work for a GM to get good at.

Hear, hear!

But of course I do acknowledge the reality of the game even if the fictional background is much more flexible.

That's actually the point really. Champs (And the Hero System that grew out of it in the late 1980s.) is powerful enough to model pretty much any kind of superpower, gadget, monster or genre you'd ever want. Of course that power and flexibility comes at the cost of crunch. What is a weakness in the eyes of some, is a strength in the eyes of others.

But yes, I'd agree that if someone wants simplicity and a system that many already know, thanks to TSR/WoTC, to model CoH in, Mutants and Masterminds is perfectly fine.

Really, these discussions often degenerate into Microsoft vs Apple vs Linux or open source pilpul. Really, just go with what you and your players want.

Yes, if you as a GM or if your players don't like crunch, you should probably stay way from Hero and GURPS. (Although once you get used to it, it does become second nature.)

I've had my players sometimes complain that even D&D (Or Pathfinder.) 3.5 is too crunchy.

Basically this is the problem you and your players are going to have to decide for yourselves. Do you want the huge flexibility but high crunch that GURPS or Hero offer you? Or do you want something with less flexibility but less mental overhead? I don't know, I guess the other extreme is something like Amber Diceless? Tough question.

I suppose if Paragon Studios was really going to branch into something like this (Which they probably won't given the slow downward spiral the table-top RPG game market seems to be in these days.) they'd probably make their own system or go with a smaller, newer PnP RPG company using some less well known system (To the irritation of grognards like me.).

Yep, as person, perhaps unfairly labeled as a villain, you have a chance that your master plan could succeed and somehow save the world and humanity despite all the naysayers. Probability dictates that there must be universes where you are right and vindicated.

But I wonder how that might play on the mind of the version of the villain that failed--to know that there are versions of yourself, perhaps even an infinite number of them, that succeeded. Especially if that villain knows that there is technology or magic that can take them to these universes.

Throw in time travel and it gets even more baroque. There might be villains or heroes to trying to learn from their mistakes in other histories and then going back in time in their own universe to try to correct these mistakes.

Oh believe me, I'm well aware of the butterfly effect. I know that the smallest changes in the initial conditions of any complex, dynamic, nonlinear system, as the Earth and human society certainly are, will lead to huge changes and surprises anywhere down the line of that history.

I'm just saying that in an infinitude of universes, some universes are more dramatically boring--within a set of limited criteria--than others. It may be that the "Synapse eats fish tacos on Wednesday" universe is dull for Synapses life but it might be very exciting for some person that the City of Heroes canon doesn't deal with.

Of course all universes will be interesting and surprising--even with the infinite and eternal duplication--but we have to limit ourselves somehow just the sake of telling easily digestible stories.

But the Rikti are psychic right? I suppose this is a matter for some dispute but psychic ability pretty much counts as magic in my book. Not that I object to it really, I mean here I am playing a game about superheroes scientific accuracy isn't real high on my list, I'm just trying to be clear here is all.

But never mind, this takes us off the subject of alternate universes.

Well I'm rather surprised the devs haven't given us the obligatory gender reversal universe yet. You know, with Stateswoman (Although I guess she's dead now.), Brother Brain, Electron (Positron as a gal.), Einherjar, Liberty Lord, etc., etc.

And I'm really hoping they don't go the route of a world ruled by zombies (As in the Marvel Zombies limited series.) cause I'm kinda sick of zombies now.

I've only come up with one interesting alternate Earth to explain the existence of one of my characters. It's all based around an obscure focal point in the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924. I've been meaning to write some stories about it because it really generates a lot of interesting questions and things to explore--but alas, I don't have the copious spare time yet.

If I think of some other unusual ideas, maybe I'll pop in this thread again.

I make tonnes of robots too, almost all of them are tech.

But I think it really depends on if the robot is singular. If it's a protoype using advanced, just invented technology using mysterious, poorly understood physics and is hard to duplicate, if it is, I'd say science is fine. If not, if the character comes from a world where robots are very common, definitely technology.

Then again I've seen a lot of players mix origins up, where they have magic powered robots or mutants whose ability is to convert their bodies into something robotic. And so on.

Origin also doesn't really confer any real advantage or disadvantage in the game so far as I know so just go with what you think makes the most sense.

Emperor Cole. [Sardonic villianous laughter.]