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Converting Nemesis (ORE by Arc Dream) to HERO


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Hi All

I've been playing HERO since 1st Ed. currently running a Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green game using the Nemesis rule set (see title) onto which I've bolted the Investigative Skill system from Gumshoe. I now want to convert the whole thing to HERO. Could do this myself if I had time, so just wondering if anybody has some quick conversion notes (particularly for the Madness Meter rules and the more 'unusual' dice types eg Trump Dice and Expert dice)

Thanks in advance

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If only I knew what all that meant. ;)

 

Well I truly have no experience with the Madness Meter, Trump Dice, and Expert Dice. I am so totally going to take some stabs in the dark though. Maybe I'll hit something.

 

Madness Meter sounds like a progression from Sanity to Madness. There are two essential ways that I can see you doing this. The first is to use a Sanity stat that works much like Stun or Body. As the character encounters whatever causes sanity damage, the Sanity stat is damaged. I'm not sure how often the Madness Meter slides back from Madness to Sane. You might make a sort of Sanity Recovery stat that heals back Sanity per Week, Month, between adventures, etc. The other way is to literally track the Body damage of a cumulative Transform. In the end, both ways would work.

 

Trump Dice and Expert Dice sound to me like the system uses a Dice Pool system. In Hero, the best way that I would simulate that is with Skill levels. Trump Dice sound like Overall Skill Levels and Expert Dice sound like Skill Levels to a more narrowly defined set of skills that the "Expertise" can be assigned to. Looking at the Wiki, I see that the face value of the dice can be assigned either ahead of time or after (with Trump/Wiggle dice). As Hero has no compatible mechanic, I am going to double down on Skill Levels.

 

I hope that helps. I have never looked at the ORE rules before my interpretations may be far off.

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Madness Meter is basically a multi-axis sanity system (Violence, Supernatural etc.), each tracking both your current state and your general resistance -- you can become "hardened". The latter is where I see some conflict with the way HERO handles things, as you don't just get better at something by making your rolls, you have to pay for it.

 

Other than that, it's certainly possible to introduce several new stats for each axis, and have some kind of limited Power Defense for each of them. On the other hand, HERO already requires you to track and roll more than the "One Roll Engine", so I wonder whether that's really worth emulating. Maybe a single stat to track, but different resistances. Or a general resistance that is frequently bought aspected ("Sanity Defense, only vs. Violence").

 

As for the funky ORE dice, I don't really see the point there. They're basically aspects of ORE's dice system, which really has no direct equivalent in HERO. Generally speaking, they make you better at something, so as Nolgroth pointed out, skill levels would be the obvious replacement. If you really care about special mechanics, make them limited skill levels, e.g. "only to save failed roll" or "only to counteract penalties to skill roll". Whether that makes sense with the regular HERO skill costs is another issue. Maybe you have to restrict normal levels and require everything beyond that to be "special skill levels" or something like that. Otherwise the cost savings from limited skill boosts are often not worth it.

 

(For those who don't know the rules here: "One Roll Engine" is a dice pool mechanic, where you look for matching die. And both the "width", i.e. the amount of matching dice and the "height -- the dice value -- are important and used for resolution, e.g. one might determine whether you hit, the other how hard you hit. Expert dice let you set the dice beforehand, trump dice after you rolled. So they're quite important, but statistically not that easy to translate in a more straight-forward roll-under/-over mechanic)

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We tried it a bit, but the group didn't really grow fond of it (similar to Savage Worlds' step dice system). And in general I like it better if you do more rolls where each is quickly interpreted and tallied instead of one roll that takes care of everything, but takes longer to resolve (e.g. ORE, RoleMaster). Although to be fair, HERO wouldn't be my prime example for the former, either.

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Just read the Madness Meter mechanics. I didn't realize that Nemesis was freely available from RPGNow. As I interpret it, Madness Meter is basically a Humanity stat that is divided up into four sub-characteristics. It could be done in Hero using Characteristic rolls, GM awarded exp assigned to bonuses, etc. but it would be a kludge.  The simplest way to handle Madness is, again, a Humanity stat that works much like Stun. As you buy it up, you become more resistant to mental trauma.

 

You could emulate the Mental Collapse mechanic with a "Stunned" inspired mechanic. If the amount of Humanity damage exceeds the character's Ego score, some debilitating effect happens as described in Nemesis (temporary mental paralysis, Berserk/Enraged, etc.) Mental Defense could thus be bought to further increase the Hardening.

 

It is ironic, from my perspective, because I was working on a revamped combat system for Hero that lessened the Hit Location rolls but added a penalty for people who were not hardened combatants. I could just never decide on a satisfactory way to deal with the progression from "Stop 'n' Sip" neophyte to Super Duper Advanced Trained Ninja of Ultimate Destruction. I like this Madness Meter mechanic because that is truly in the spirit of what I was trying to do. For my own needs, I just realized that PSLs are probably the way to go to represent the growing callousness and thus reduced desperation in combat.

 

I love it when a thread that I had no real business jumping into helps me out.

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If you like that part, Burning Wheel had a "combat paralysis" mechanic, too. Pretty harsh, where you basically have to skip a few actions.

 

Personally, I've never been fond of telling players how they feel, whether that's afraid or mad. Part of why CoC never quite hooked me way back when (plus a general disinterest in the 1920s and failing to see what's so scary about the Old Ones).

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If you like that part, Burning Wheel had a "combat paralysis" mechanic, too. Pretty harsh, where you basically have to skip a few actions.

 

Personally, I've never been fond of telling players how they feel, whether that's afraid or mad. Part of why CoC never quite hooked me way back when (plus a general disinterest in the 1920s and failing to see what's so scary about the Old Ones).

 

I'm not looking for a mechanic to control character's actions. I'm looking for a mechanic to represent the fact that the average person, without combat training and experience, is not going to have the cool-headedness to hit their target as well as a combatant. Non-familiarity penalties can cover the training aspect, but most people have an innate hesitation to kill somebody/something else. This, I think, would translate into another scale of penalties.Inversely, once you have the combat hardening, shooting somebody becomes easier. Targeting specific hit locations is not anywhere as hard as Hero makes it out to be, so that is why I'm looking at cutting them in half. Now, when you are a neophyte, it is just as difficult to get that "head shot" as normal hero. When you get used to handling a weapon for the purpose of killing an enemy, it becomes easier. Starting characters off with an extra -2 OCV penalty and then allowing them to buy PSLs, as they get more callous about killing other people, seems a perfect way to represent that. 

 

For the vast majority of campaigns that I might run, I would never use this mechanic. It was an idea for what I call my Epic Everyman campaigns, wherein normal people like tavernkeepers or truck drivers get called to action. They might have some range time that accounts for a Weapon Familiarity, but they don't have the grit of being a seasoned combatant. 

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Ah, so this is not about keeping your cool under fire (which seems pretty central to any non-hobby weapon skill) but about Grossman's "On Killing" hypothesis?

 

I actually think it is a little bit of both. Part of combat training is mental. Adrenaline comes knocking on the proverbial door and, again, there is an instinctual hesitation in killing other people. Both of these can be overcome with training and acclimation. And again, this isn't for seasoned combat vets or even cops that have been on the beat for years. This idea is for Sally Mae Parker, librarian, or Tommy Jones the Ice Cream Truck Driver, or even Bobbie Goldstein, rookie cop, and all of those like them, that get shoved into extraordinary events and have to take an active role in their own survival. 

 

In that list, at least Bobbie has at least some familiarity with a sidearm and probably a shotgun, making him that much further ahead of the others.

 

It was (maybe is) a project that I want(ed) to develop and run. I'm not even sure a lot of players would want to play in such a setting and under such rules. There is definitely a curtailing of the power fantasy with such a setup. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks everybody for the ideas. I like mhd's idea of a sanity 'stat' that takes damage and can recover (As per body). As Nolgtroth mentioned it looks easier to replace Trump and Expert dice with a variety of skill levels. We are now in the process of doing the character conversions (and introducing Hermetic Magic eg Ars Magica) into the game (Which was a surprisingly easy conversion lol)

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