Hi Cynthia and all cartoon lovers :o)

[Slant]

I just picked up a copy of CAH after eagerly looking forward to the release for some months now.  I love this game!  You obviously have a great deal of love for the source material and it shows.  A few quick notes:

I immediately put the game to the test by having my game group create characters, and I found that it is VERY easy to min/max (ie: munchkinize) some very powerful characters if you are not careful, so when we officially start playing it, that is something I will have to look out for.

As for Eddy's comment about Snake Eyes getting so much screen time on GI Joe, it is simple: Since Snake Eyes didn't speak, the studio didn't have to pay an actor to do the voice-overs.  thus, episodes which revolved around Snake Eyes were somewhat cheaper to produce.

I greatly enjoyed your list of 80's cartoons and all the little notes.  It made me feel like a kid again.  You managed to leave out my favorite 80's style cartoon, though (although to be fair, the series might have come out in the early 90's; it's been a long time and I don't remember) The Pirates of Dark Water.

So, if Thundarr the Barbarian married Cheetara, would the resulting offspring be called Thundarr-cats?

Okay, now I'm just getting silly.  I just wanted to say "hi" to everybody on the board and to put in my two cents in saying that CAH looks like a hell of a lot of fun and I can't wait to run it.  If any of you out there are currently running a game of it, please let me know how it is turning out.

"I would have gotten away with it too, it it wasn't for those meddling kids!"  (No, wait: that's 70's.)

Slant

[Norbert]

Hello Slant!

Thanks for your kind words about the game book.
Glad you're enjoying it.  :-)
I am certain that a gamer's habit of immediately trying to min/max their character can be prevented in at least the following ways in CAH:
Establish a trait max for everybody in your series right from the start,
a trait rating of 4 for most non-superhero series, and a 4(3) for most beginning superheroes.
Like that, with a 100 CP total, you'll end up with characters who have more
evenly spread out abilities and traits, i.e., more abilities at medium range, or Great/Outstanding, instead of getting six traits at 4(5) right off the bat (that'd be 96 out of 100 points).

Make sure that a certain percentage of character's CP totals goes into animal companions, vehicles or gadgetry, to be faithful to the source material.
Remind players that a high Oomph will matter most frequently, and as
regular characters of the series, they might want to start off with Oomph 3 to Oomph 4. That takes care of a few points.

I actually see a lot less potential for min/Maxing in CAH than in the HERO System, which I even used as inspiration for some of my contributions to the CAH system. In HERO, costs for attack and defense powers are always linear, whereas in CAH, a really high-damage attack SA will have a very high price. Defenses have an even steeper increase (well, they still had one in the .pdf when I last used it).

I absolutely love Pirates of Dark Water, or what little I actually saw of it.
It's my favourite Hanna-Barbera production ever. We briefly talked about that series on a CAH playtesting mailing list last year. It did in fact come out in 1990/91. I am not sure how many series are listed in Recommended Viewing in the book now, as I do not have my copy, yet. But one thing is for sure, there really wasn't enough space, or time, to fit in everybody's favourite cartoon from that era. We noticed that people remembered a lot more shows from the early to late 1980s than we first thought, when putting the book together. Thanks for bringing it up.
Of course, Pirates of D.W. could be used as a CAH template/background very well. And, so could Dragon's Lair, in my opinion, ...