Yes, and it's not even hard math. People are people I guess. {shrug}Originally Posted by steelwulf99
Excellent idea; show off the multi-genre aspect of HERO.Well no problems there. They're a good bunch, I can live with them not wanting to tackle things like how to build powers in 6E just yet... but I ended up rethinking how I wanted to approach introducing the system to them.
I've decided to run "Close Encounters of the Sixth Kind" a genre-hopping collection of short stories, with no character persistence between stories. The only link to continuity I will have will be at the start of each new story in the introduction narration. Things like a PC or major NPC turning off a television showing the highlight of the last story and muttering to himself about how far fetched modern entertainment is getting (or a wizard and a crystal ball, a dream sequence, etc). Each story will run for 4-6 sessions.
... Any tips? Suggestions? Stories?
I did something very similar with a group of players, years ago, but there was a common continuity.
I had the players tell me their ultimate favorite sort of dream character, regardless of genre.
A star wars geek wanted a straight out jedi / han solo composite. A new agey martial arts wannabee geek wanted a mystical super-Shaolin monk. A hard to explain lady geek wanted a shapeshifting amoral alien conundrum that could be literally ANYTHING and functional in whatever form. A super creative but slight crazy geek wanted to play an amalgam character that was really multiple other people trapped in a gestalt, and different ones would come in and out of play based on situational trigger conditions specific to each character...and which character emerged next was randomized.
I put aside inner contemplation of the psychological implications of what each players dream character revealed about their inner psyche, and designed each character either with or for the player. The Jedi and the random multiform player were directly involved as they both already had some familiarity with the HERO System. The other two were uninterested in the mechanics, so I did all the details and "hid" as much of the mechanics as I could from their final sheets.
The resulting game was VERY HARD to explain, but I based the central premise around the random character, the "core" personality of which turned out to be Doc Brown from Back to the Future...but one from a different dimension. Instead of the FLUX capacitor and a time travel machine, this Doc Brown invented a dimension hopping machine. But due to a "lab accident" when his cat Schrodinger jumped on the control panel while he was in the "booth" making calibrations, Doc Brown was sent hurling through the dimensions, trapped in a bubble of dimensional distortion. He initially popped in and out of many dimensions, accidentally overlaying some other people from those dimensions and trapping them in his dimensional distortion (thus, the character's other forms), but after Schrodinger the cat jumped off the control board, Doc Brown emerged on a Star Wars space vessel where the other character's rogue jedi was engaged in a deadly space battle fleeing from Imperial fighters intent on exterminating him. After a brief segue to quickly resolve the jedi's ship crashing into an asteroid, the pair were shunted through a dimensional vortex caused by Doc Brown's presence. They moved on to the next setting, a mystical China Wuxia setting, where the monk was picked up after a brief misadventure. Next dimensional warp took them to a strange kirby-esque place of irregular shapes free-floating in breathable vacuum and populated by non-humanoid amoeba like entities, where they picked up the shapeshifter.
After I had collected the PC's, I dimensionally shifted them to a variety of other settings, most memorably a dinosaur setting and a high-tech / lo-tech Barsoom-like setting. Literally anything was possible. Whenever I felt like it I would shift the game to some other genre / dimension...kind of like Sliders or Quantum Leap on steroids. The characters never knew how long they would be wherever they were, and I'd even do a shift in mid-combat or right before a plot resolution. Doc Brown kept getting / discovering more forms as they went along, and all sorts of drama / comedy ensued.
I called it the Crosstime Continuum Caper.
We played it for a couple of months, but it was a lot of work for me to manage such a complicated meta-plot and keep it fresh without losing the player's focus on a core narrative. We wrapped it up and moved on to a more traditional campaign, but it was a well remembered mini-campaign and in retrospect I always wished we had given it a bit more play. There were other dimension / genres I wanted to put them into for kicks, as I felt like more variety played to the strength of the concept.
But regardless, it served its purpose. The players were exposed to just how crazy flexible the HERO System is and that it can in fact be used to play almost anything, even in the same campaign.
On another note, I had an adventure I had written up for convention play back in 4e, and I re-wrote it for 5e later on, called Project: PREDATOR. The 4e version was in the Haymaker fanzine years ago, and the 5e version is in a Digital HERO issue. It's designed to be a) a very familiar scenario and b) playable in one setting, but also provide enough background grist to extend into a mini-campaign. It's a low-powered gritty supers game; it predates the current mainstream fascination with gritty urban supers shows such as Heroes, Misfits, and the X-Movies but it is very much in that vein. I ran that scenario for several different groups of players over the years as an introduction to the HERO System, and it was very successful.
I provided a pretty diverse selection of pre-gens and distributed a 10,000 foot summary list to the players, letting them choose whichever one sounded good. One time the group was smallish (3 players), so I had them pick 2 each and run both. The key here is to not let the players dither. Left to their own devices they will tend to not want to make a decision. One game I cut out standups of the pregen'd pcs pictures, with a capsule description on the backside and randomly distributed all of them amongst the players; I told them they had 5 minutes to either decide to keep one of the pregens they were dealt or barter amongst themselves for a different one. It was a walk up scenario where the players didn't all know each other, so it served as an effective ice breaker and gave the players an opportunity to observe and interact with each other; it became a game within the game to develop a group dynamic, which bore immediate fruit due to the competitive / confrontational nature of the scenario. I've found that the same sort of approach generally doesn't work with players who know each other however, as the alpha player(s) just get whichever character they want and the other players let them, some whining or petulance ensues, and it goes nowhere.
The PC's start as amnesiacs in a super-secure facility where they are subjected to endless tests and forced to participate in danger room training scenarios; after a short combat simulation scene to familiarize the players with their pregenerated characters....a GREAT ESCAPE scenario starts, and they find themselves fleeing from their federal government black helicopter and mirrorshade pursuers and their brainwashed super powered minions from the program the PCs are escaping from. Unusually, my goal as the GM is to re-capture or eliminate the PC's. I track "victory points" for the individual PC's based on taking out their pursuers and coming up with clever escape strategies, and for surviving to the end of the session. At the end of the session the player(s) with the highest score was declared the winner, and given a prize...such as a copy of the rulebook, some dice, a gift certificate for the gamestore I ran the game out of, etc.
Because of the time constraint of resolving the entire episode in a single (long) session, it forced me to keep things moving fast, keep the rules simple, not get bogged down in minutia. Making it a competition, and playing for keeps, forced the players to engage, and also conveniently provided a built in mechanism to eliminate any players who just weren't into it without it being a game-stopping event. For my part it was interesting seeing players work thru the prisoners dilemma, and which strategies they naturally fell into amongst themselves.
The one real "flaw" of the model was that if a PC abandoned the group and went off on their own, it put a lot of load on me to run multiple small pursuits in a timely fashion. As I got better at running the scenario, I learned when to sense when the group was fracturing, and planned timely ambushes / combat scenes to refocus the group on a common enemy and demonstrate why sticking together might be a better strategy in the immediate term. Once some of the PC's had been eliminated and running a split party was more practical, I'd let things take their course as once initial pursuit had been evaded splitting up can be a sound strategy and it provided an opportunity for clever players to employ very different escape plans.
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On that note, there are two ways to do pregens:
1) actual pregens are characters YOU the GM have conceptualized and constructed, and are likely formed out of the needs of the story, to which they may be unusually relevant or well-suited for. Often you as the GM have likely balanced the scenario around how you envision the pre-gens you created going through the adventure like characters in a novel. There are intrinsic pitfalls to this approach.
If you aren't careful it's very easy for your pregens to be Mary Sues, or to all reflect certain patterns of behavior that are intrinsic or important to you or your interests. For instance, a lot of my characters, especially the ones that I actually want to play myself, are uber-competent all-bases-covered tactically capable no-nonsense hard nosed pricks. That's a little piece of my inner nature and idealized self shining thru, and when I design all the pregens you are likely going to get a group of hard core mechanical monstrosities that are too complicated or nuanced for most players to really understand or use effectively. Either way, players generally are not receptive to you as the GM foisting off your pet characters on them, for obvious reasons. However if you are aware of your own tendencies and carefully self-police, you can avoid this trap.
If you are overly economical with the time spent developing pregens, or if you are insufficiently creative, there may be too few pregens or they may be too similar, either way offering very little actual choice to players. Inevitably, even if some players are happy with the pregens they get, some players will get stuck with whatever is left, or forced to take something in which they have no actual interest. I find that a good rule of thumb is to have at least half again as many pregens as you actually need, and ideally twice as many. I tend to identify half of the pregens as being distinctly different, and usually representing strong / common archetypes for the genre they are for. The other half -1 are hybrids, each one bridging the gap between two or maybe three of the other characters, and 1 character is a wild card, a non-archetypal unique character on the edge of genre-appropriate or alternately VERY genre appropriate but something that a GM normally wouldn't let a player ACTUALLY build if the player were doing it; as the GM I can build in checks and balances for character concepts that would be potentially abusive in the hands of a player designer.
Almost inevitably, with this sort of pregen when it comes time to choose two players will want to play the same character. Maybe they players can resolve it between them and its a non-issue, maybe they can't and it becomes a problem for you to resolve. This can be tricky, and requires a contextually relevant decision based upon your knowledge of the two players. There are various tricks to resolve this. One is to foresee a character that will be a prime pick and likely to be desired by more than one player; the overlapping hybrid approach I described addresses this somewhat by ensuring that each of the "prime" characters has one other character that is similar and often one or the other player will be content with the hybrid version...however another option is for you to have yet another similar character on hand behind the GM's screen JUST IN CASE. Another approach is "oh look, they're twins!"; if you have fast access to a printer or photocopier, you can simply change the first name and print a second copy for the other player; sometimes one of them will just outright pick a different GM at the suggestion of this as they desire individuality more than the character. Another approach is a Solomon's Baby variant; if two players both want the same character and can't work it out, you simply pull the pregen and nobody gets it; again, often one player or the other will change their mind for you with something like "fine, they can have it, I'll play this one" (don't try the Solomon stunt of giving it to the one who capitulates however; the player that doesn't capitulate will be pissed and potentially drop).
The basic theme here is VARIETY and VOLUME. If you need 5 pregens, make 10 or 15, and make sure they are different and that different common player favorite tropes are represented.
2) If the players TELL you what they want and you put it together for them, the PC's aren't really pregens they're just custom built. This scenario can be safer, and is obviously better for a campaign you expect to continue. However, it too has its own pitfalls.
For starters, particularly with a game as complex as the HERO System, your interpretation of what the players SAID they want and how you translated that into game mechanics has imperfect fidelity. Even assuming that you as the GM didn't just miss the mark or go off and design the character YOU would want if you were to play a character like the one the player described, there will likely be mismatches. Easy going / loose players wont care, passive aggressive players will care but wont say anything about it and their lack of satisfaction will show up in strange ways, picky particular players will nit pick and obsesses over trivialities, indecisive players will realize they really wanted some other abilities more than the ones they asked for or even an entirely DIFFERENT character, and so on. The players that are fully content with the character you built for them will be the exception. If you build trust over time, this becomes easier, but first characters in a new game system will be a difficult process. I recommend you go iteratively; do a rough, abstract summary of what they said they wanted and work out any ill-defined areas at a high level, then do a loose version leaving about 5-10% of the character's points on the table as a prototype, and then go over it a 3rd time to tighten the screws, smooth the edges, round things out, and pick up any last minute tweaks the player added on to the concept; some characters will fly through on one evolution, others will get stuck on the first or second step, but its much less time consuming to hash out the details on a synopsis or prototype than it is to adjust a "finished" character.
Secondly, as players come to understand the game better or realize what's really important in the HERO SYstem, they'll want to make changes. I recommend you plan to do a character overhaul after the third or fourth session to make adjustments or even replace some characters. If you can pre-plan and work it into the story so that it "makes sense" in-game, so much the better.
Some basic character design advice, in the HERO System you've basically got Attack, Defense, Utility (skills, detects, support abilities, etc), and Movement. Once you past the lowest point levels, every character should have some facility in Attack, Defense, and Utility. Movement kicks in for some genres like supers, space travel, high fantasy, and so forth. Basically, if two or more characters invest in Movement abilities it will become increasingly awkward for the characters that did not...split party and logistical issues will crop up. A character with one good attack, one solid defense, and enough utility abilities to have stuff to do as the game goes on is a basically complete character; everything else is nuance, differentiation, and minutia. A character with 10 attacks and no defense is clearly problematic, a character with many attacks, multi-layered defenses, and absolutely no utility abilities (a "combat monster") is less obviously problematic but the character is guaranteed to be irrelevant to the percentage of your campaign that is not pure combat. When players tell you what they want, make sure to double check that they are keeping their bases covered.
Finally, and this requires familiarity with the players, the genre, and the game itself, try to listen to what the players REALLY want vs what they SAY they want. An actual verbal conversation is far better than email or message posts for this. Help to elicit the underlying concept. Simultaneously, you need to remember the needs of the campaign, what is genre appropriate, and what is practical. Keeping that in mind you should lightly guide, coax or entice the player to structure their concept in a way that fits within all those competing criteria. It's a art, not a science. When you can pull it off, the resulting character will be much better than otherwise.
Hope some of that rambling helps.
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